How come, Rampton wondered, Irving never described this “scandalous manipulation of the justice system” in his book? Irving claimed that to have done so would have filled the book “with 8 pages of sludge.” Rampton saw it differently: “If you cannot find enough space to put in the truth, leave it out.” Though Irving kept protesting that his rendition was “the truth,” Rampton moved to another topic.16
DRESDEN: DEATH TOLL DISTORTIONS
When we first planned our defense strategy, we thought it would be useful to compare Irving’s treatment of Holocaust-related topics with a non-Holocaust topic. Evans chose to examine the Allied bombing of Dresden in February 1945. This was the topic of Irving’s first book, The Destruction of Dresden. Many historians believe the bombing lacked a military objective and was designed to break the German people’s morale. Irving, taking one of the more extreme positions in this regard, declared in a 1990 speech: “The holocaust of Germans in Dresden really happened. That of the Jews in the gas chambers of Auschwitz is an invention. I am ashamed to be an Englishman.”17
But we did not challenge Irving’s sentiments about whether the bombing of Dresden was necessary. We did challenge his claims about the death toll. We were convinced that Irving had significantly inflated the death toll in order to enhance the severity of the Allied bombing. Irving’s estimate of the Dresden death toll had gone through various permutations. Initially, Irving believed that approximately 40,000 had been killed. This corresponded to most official postwar estimates. However, over the years Irving gravitated to a far higher figure, sometimes contending that it was as high as 250,000.
Irving attributed his change to his having come into possession of a copy of a March 1945 document known as “Tagesbefehl,” or “Order of the Day,” 47 (TB-47). It supposedly was a “brief extract” from a statement by the police president of Dresden, which listed a provisional death toll of 202,000 as of March 20, 1945. TB-47 predicted that the toll would reach 250,000. Irving first saw a copy of the statement in 1964 during a visit to the home of Dresden photographer Walter Hahn. Hahn had a copy that he obtained in a rather convoluted way. He had seen a copy of it in the home of a Dresden doctor, Max Funfack, and had surreptitiously made a handwritten copy from Funfack’s copy, which he subsequently typed up. When Irving saw Hahn’s copy, he asked for a copy. Hahn’s wife typed up additional copies and Irving took one. Richard Evans wryly observed that, based on this carbon copy of a typed copy of a typed copy of a surreptitiously handwritten copy of an unsigned document that was an “extract” from an official police report, Irving changed his conclusion about the death toll.18
But even this change was not without its fits and starts. Upon returning from Dresden, with his copy of Hahn’s copy of the copy of TB-47 in hand, Irving wrote the editor of the Sunday Times announcing his discovery, yet expressing some hesitation about its figures. “It remains to be established whether the 200,000 number it contains is . . . genuine.” A few days later, Irving’s hesitation seemed to have evaporated and he told his German publisher that he was convinced that the death toll was 202,000. He justified his claim by explaining that the “number came” from the then Deputy Chief Medical Officer, “Dr Max Funfack, [therefore] there could be no doubt as to the authenticity” of the document. Three days after telling his publisher the document was genuine, Irving again demonstrated some doubts when he asked the German federal archives to establish the document’s authenticity.19
Five days after asking the German archives to authenticate TB-47, Irving’s doubts seemed to have evaporated yet again. The historic Coventry Cathedral, which had been severely bombed by the Germans during the war, was preparing to mount an exhibit on Dresden. Irving advised the cathedral’s provost that he had “no doubt” about TB-47’s authenticity and suggested that in order “to drive home the impact of the exhibition. . . . the Police President’s Report on the Dresden raid [TB-47] [be] printed in large type. . . . The casualties . . . it mentions have a shattering impact.” He assured the churchman that the document was obtained “indirectly from the Dresden Deputy Chief Medical Officer responsible for the disposing of the victims [who] still live in Dresden.”20 Irving apparently did not mention that this figure of 202,000 had first come from Goebbels, who wanted to arouse the German people into taking a stand against the Allies.
After reviewing this rather convoluted sequence of events, Rampton asked how Irving could urge the provost to include these figures in the exhibit if he was not sure they were reliable? Judge Gray was also puzzled: “Did it not cross your mind that it was a bit suspicious that the figure of 200,040 in TB-47 was . . . the very same figure which Goebbels was putting into circulation for propaganda purposes?”
Irving insisted the figures in the TB-47 were accurate because the document came “from somebody who during the war was the Chief Medical Officer of Dresden.” Rampton, speaking in a somewhat nonchalant tone, as if he just wanted to ascertain a relatively unimportant fact, asked, This “Dresden Deputy Chief Medical Officer [who] was responsible for disposing of the victims . . . was a Dr Funfack?” Irving answered, “Yes.” As soon as Irving said yes, I knew that he had again ensnared himself in his own trap. In Irving’s discovery we had found a letter from Funfack to Irving that was written in 1965. Funfack had just read reviews of the German edition of The Destruction of Dresden as well as a letter by Irving’s German publisher to a German newspaper. Both the reviews and the letter credited Irving with having used information he received from the “then Deputy Chief Medical Officer, Dr Max Funfack” to resolve the question of the Dresden death toll. In his letter, Funfack insisted that he had never been deputy chief medical officer and had, in fact, been working as a urologist. He had no special information about the death toll. He was “completely uninvolved” in the disposal of the bodies, had “only heard the numbers third-hand” and was “only once present” when bodies were being cremated in Altmarkt square. This letter, with its most explicit denials, should have laid to rest any claims about Funfack’s knowledge.
Thirty-five years later, in a courtroom while under oath, here was Irving asserting his information came from the deputy chief medical officer who was responsible for supervising the disposal and cremation of all the air-raid victims. When Rampton reminded Irving of Funfack’s denials, Irving discounted them, arguing that Funfack’s denials could not be trusted because the doctor, an East German, was probably lying in order not to anger Communist authorities who, for reasons Irving failed to explain, wanted a lower figure. (One would have thought that the Communists would have been happy with a higher figure because it made the British and Americans, rather than the Soviets who were not involved in the bombing, look bad in the eyes of East Germans.)
Irving had also ignored other information that should have made him doubt the 200,000 figure. In his discovery, we found three letters from a Theo Miller, a Dresdener whose job it had been to collect bodies after the bombing. Miller soberly and in great detail delineated how the bodies were collected and counted. He concluded that the highest possible toll was 30,000. Trying to demonstrate that Irving’s far higher toll was completely far-fetched, Miller asked Irving whether he thought it feasible to “burn in about three weeks 110,000 corpses on a fire-grate of railway rails with a dimension of about 70 X 10 meters?”21 Irving had failed to include mention of Miller’s letters in any of the subsequent editions of his Dresden book. Rampton wondered why “an honest, upright, careful, meticulous, open minded historian does not mention . . . alternative sources?” Irving, discounting Miller’s letters, asserted that he could not mention all the information witnesses sent him. Judge Gray was also disturbed by Irving’s failure to take account of Miller’s letters. He observed that Miller’s job was to “record the numbers of deaths at the time. Does that not make him rather a specially valuable witness?”
Irving protested that he received many letters from all “sorts of people who claim to have been on the spot.” Rampton wondered, “So he is a liar, then?” “No,” Irving sa
id, but “I think he is fantasizing slightly.” The judge sounded surprised: “He is fantasizing?” Irving insisted that he was, but offered no proof.22
I found it striking that Irving still insisted that the copy of the TB-47 in his possession was genuine, since in 1977 a man who had been a member of the Dresden police produced a copy of the original TB-47. It listed a death toll of 20,000 with an expected toll of 25,000. Evidently someone in Goebbels’s Propaganda Ministry added a zero to each number: hence, the estimate of 200,000 and 250,000. Nonetheless, Irving continued to adhere to a higher death toll. In 1986, Irving told a South African audience that 100,000 were killed in one night. At the Leuchter Report press conference he told reporters, “We burned Dresden . . . killing between 100,000 and 250,000.” Only in 1995 did Irving reveal to his English-language readers that TB-47 was a product of Goebbels’s Propaganda Ministry.23
Rampton observed that virtually all historians had, after studying the number of burials, certified deaths, lists of missing persons, and other official sources, estimated a toll of between 25,000 and 35,000. The claims about death tolls of 100,000 and 200,000 had “lost touch with the reality.” As the discussion drew to an end, Irving angrily told Rampton, “I am deeply ashamed of what we did.” Irving did not know that Rampton was also troubled by the bombing of Dresden, which he believed was not militarily necessary. As the discussion drew to an end, I recalled Evans’s observation of how Irving’s German publishers resolved the situation. When they republished his book in 1985, on the title page they placed the following description: “a novel.”24
TWELVE
FIGHTING WORDS
“They clamor ‘Ours! Ours! Ours!’ when hoards of gold are uncovered. And then when antisemitism increases and the inevitable mindless pogroms occur, they ask with genuine surprise: ‘Why us?’”1
When Rampton read this from Irving’s July 1997 Action Report, I recalled how a few months earlier, Thomas had come to me one day at the Mishcon offices. With an uncharacteristically serious look on his face, he handed me a file and said, “I’ve just finished compiling this. You ought to read it.” Intrigued, I began to peruse it. It was a compendium of Irving’s antisemitic and racist comments and was drawn from Irving’s diary entries, letters, speeches, and tapes. I had seen some of them before, but reading them as one corpus was terribly sobering. When I returned the file to Thomas, I told him that I believed that there was no separating between Irving’s antisemitism and Holocaust denial. The two were inexorably linked. During the fourth week of the trial it became Rampton’s job to prove that to Charles Gray.
A MAN FROM MARS
Rampton asked Irving if his 1997 statement about Jews clamoring “Ours!” about hoards of gold was not the equivalent of him “saying antisemitism is justified on account of the fact that the Jews are greedy?” Irving, insisting Rampton had it wrong, said he was not justifying; he was explaining. Ramp ton proceeded to read an excerpt from an interview Irving had given Errol Morris for his film on Leuchter. Here too Irving engaged in “explaining.”
“You people . . . have been disliked for 3,000 years. . . . No sooner do you arrive . . . in a new country, then [sic] within 50 years you are already being disliked all over again. Now what is it? . . . Is it built into our microchip? When a people arrive who call themselves the Jews, you will dislike them? . . . Is it envy because they are more successful than us? I do not know the answer, but if I was a Jew, I would want to know what the reason is. . . . [T]hat no sooner do we arrive than we are being massacred and beaten and brutalized and imprisoned.”
Irving had told Morris that he was speaking as an “outsider” who was trying to understand the situation. “I come from Mars and I would say they are clever people. . . . I would say that, as a race, they are better at making money than I am.” Rampton looked at Irving with contempt: “That is a racist remark, of course, Mr Irving.” Irving, again insisting that he was explaining, not justifying, told Rampton that these statements were his way of
investigating the reasons why people may become antisemitic in my own rather clumsy and incoherent way. . . . Is it because the Jews are better than us? Is it because they play the violin or the piano better than us, better at making money than us?
Hearing these words roll off Irving’s tongue, so extemporaneously, was chilling. Rarely, if ever, had I encountered it face-to-face in such a “civilized” setting and in such an unfettered fashion. Judge Gray interrupted Irving and, sounding like he too wanted to ensure he was understanding matters, asked, “That sentence . . . you say: ‘If I was going to be crude, I would say not only are they better at making money but they are greedy.’ That is you, Mr Irving, saying the Jews are greedy, is that right?” Vigorously shaking his head, Irving insisted that he was putting himself “into the skin of a person who is asking questions about those clever people.” Judge Gray pushed further.
JUDGE GRAY: Mr Irving, may I just ask you a question. . . . You are saying of the Jews, well, they have been disliked for 3,000 years, they are disliked wherever they go? . . . Then you say: “Well, I do not know the answer” . . . But then do you not go on to say . . . Well, look at it “as if I came from Mars”?
IRVING: I tried to stand right back from the planet Earth and look down on these people.
JUDGE GRAY: “And it appears to me that the reason why they are disliked is because they are greedy”; is that not what you are saying? . . .
IRVING: . . . I do not know what the reason is. . . . but possible reasons are—what is the connection between the rise in Swiss antisemitism and the gold bank business?
JUDGE GRAY: But you are putting that forward as the reason why there is this dislike of Jews?
IRVING: My Lord, with respect, not the reason. . . . One contributing reason at this moment in time. . . . But I also suggest very strongly it may be built into our microchip, as I put it. It may be part of the endemic human xenophobia which exists in all of us and which civilized people like your Lordship and myself manage to suppress, and other people like the gentleman [sic] on the Eastern Front with the submachine guns cannot suppress.2
I sat transfixed—not at what Irving said—but at the civility of this exchange.
BABY ARYANS, THEM, US, AND THE BBC
In Irving’s diary—which Rampton considered particularly revealing because it was “Irving speaking to Irving”—we found some ditties Irving composed to sing to his infant daughter, Jessica. The first was not unlike poems parents traditionally sing to their children—sweet, silly, and slightly inane. “My name is baby Jessica, / I have a pretty dressica, / But now it is in a messica.” When I first read this, I had thought of Irving simply as a father engaged in fatherly things. The next ditty quashed those perceptions. Irving wrote that whenever “mixed-breed” children were wheeled by, he would sing to Jessica:
“I am a Baby Aryan,
Not Jewish or Sectarian,
I have no plans to marry,
An Ape or Rastafarian.”
Rampton’s tone was completely flat. He could have been reading a weather report. The words spoke for themselves; to embellish them would be to detract. Rampton, his voice still on a perfectly even keel, said, “Racist, Mr Irving? Antisemitic, Mr Irving?” Irving accused Rampton of inflating the importance of an innocent poem. Insisting he was not a racist, he said, “I have employed coloured people of ethnic minorities on my staff.” Then, gesturing in our direction, he added, “And, so far as I can see, not you or your instructing solicitors have employed one such person.” Before Rampton could respond, Judge Gray warned Irving that his comment was not a “very helpful intervention.” Irving, ignoring the warning, said, “I am condemned by what I say and you are condemned by what I see. Not once have you had a member of the ethnic minority working on your side.” Judge Gray again admonished Irving. “Mr Irving, I just suggested that was not a very helpful intervention. Do not just repeat it.”3 While Irving kept insisting he was not a racist, I thought of his description of Nelson Mandela: a “convicted terrori
st who rightly served twenty [sic] years of a life sentence” for planning “real crimes.”4
In a 1992 speech, describing his visit to Torquay, a city in England, Irving had called it a “white community” where he had seen “perhaps one black man and one coloured family.” He had then assured his listeners: “I am not anti-coloured, take it from me: nothing pleases me more than when I arrive at an airport, or a station, or a seaport and I see a coloured family there. . . . When I see these families arriving at the airport I am happy (and when I see them leaving at London airport, I am happy).” Rampton, after reading this excerpt, observed that Irving’s comment about colored families had been met with “cheers and laughter.” Irving insisted it was just a “cynical little joke” and his audience was responding accordingly. Rampton had a less benign view. He described the audience as composed of “fellow racists who would like to clear these islands of all their black people.” Irving, returning to his earlier line of argument, declared: “Mr Rampton, you can take it from me, I am less racist than yourself probably as witnessed by the people I employ.”5 Judge Gray did not look happy.
Denial [Movie Tie-in] Page 22
