Judge Gray’s entreaty notwithstanding, matters only got worse. Declaring his next point “pure gold,” Irving warned Evans, “You are going to dislike me over this. . . .” In one of the multitudinous footnotes, Evans had listed a source as the 1977 edition of Hitler’s War. Irving triumphantly announced that the correct reference for that particular source was pages from the 1991 edition, pages 6 to 7. Evans bent over the desk in front of him and began to ruffle through the book. After a few moments, he looked up and with a bit of “gotcha” in his voice, said to Irving, “It is in fact, I think, 7 to 8, not 6 to 7, so you are wrong there too.” Judge Gray, rather plaintively, said: “Come on.”8 I silently echoed his plea.
As we left at the end of the day, Anthony looked perturbed. I assumed he was upset at the glacial pace of the questioning—Irving had covered a mere 35 pages of Evans’s 700-page report. But that wasn’t what was bothering him. “This was awful. Evans is a professor at Cambridge. He shouldn’t come down to Irving’s level and let himself be provoked by Irving’s cheap jibes.”
I set aside my worries about Evans because close friends had arrived from Houston with their three children, one of whom had been my student at Emory. The weekend was a wonderful respite from the tedium of the preceding week. I invited some of the “younger” members of the defense team to join us for dinner. During dinner, our researchers, Thomas and Tobias, began to delineate for Seth, my former student, some of the various documents they had reviewed while conducting research on the trial. They bemoaned the fact that the manuscript Adolf Eichmann wrote in his cell during his trial in Jerusalem was unavailable. Eichmann had visited the death camps. Had he made reference to gassings in the manuscript? Historians did not know what was in it because after Eichmann’s trial, Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion agreed, at the insistence of the prosecuting attorney, Gideon Hausner, that the manuscript be sealed. Given that Eichmann had been in the witness box for thirty sessions, Hausner felt that Israel had no further obligation to publicize his version of history. Recently, Eichmann’s son had requested the manuscript, prompting a debate in Israel over what to do with it. Some Israeli historians believed that a German research institute should annotate the manuscript prior to publication, to counter any of Eichmann’s false assertions. Other historians argued that it should be released as is and the normal scholarly process should be allowed to occur. Not surprisingly, nothing happened. Seth, rather matter-of-factly, asked Thomas and Tobias, “Well, why don’t you ask Israel to release the manuscript?” From the look on our intrepid researchers’ faces, it was clear that, despite having unearthed documents in a myriad of unexpected places, they had never considered this option. Seth, the quintessential optimist, said, “I’m sure you’ll get it.” Tobias jumped up from his chair, ran into my postage-size kitchen, where I was preparing dessert, and said, “Can you ask Israel for the Eichmann manuscript?” Notwithstanding their youthful enthusiasm, I was skeptical that anything would come of the idea. I decided I would make some attempt to get the material, so I could tell them I tried. Then I served dessert.
NOT SO SELECTIVE QUOTATIONS
On Monday morning, when Evans returned to the stand, I immediately noticed that he had shifted his body so that he was now facing Judge Gray. Irving wasted no time in needling him: “So Holocaust deniers . . . [to] use this favorite phrase of yours, are a form of low academic life or low life . . . ?” Betraying no emotions, Evans said to Judge Gray: “I do not like using phrases like ‘low life’ or ‘low form of life’ and, to my knowledge, I have never used those phrases. The problem is not that they are not academic . . . what they are engaging in . . . is a politically motivated falsification of history.”9 Not once during his entire answer did Evans even look at Irving.
In his report, Evans had accused Irving of selectively quoting from documents in order to skew their meaning. With Evans on the stand, Irving turned the tables and accused the Cambridge professor of doing precisely that to him. In 1992, when it became public that the Times had hired Irving to go to Moscow to determine the authenticity of the Goebbels diary, the paper faced tremendous criticism. In his report Evans had quoted from one of Irving’s speeches in which Irving described the protests as coming from “our old traditional enemies . . . the great international merchant banks are controlled by people who are not friends of yours and mine.”10 Evans considered this comment emblematic of Irving’s vituperative language when speaking of the Jewish community. Irving complained that the ellipses Evans had used represented “four sentences, three full stops, four semi-colons and 86 words. . . .” He told the judge that this kind of editing was “highly illuminative and illustrative of this witness’s methods.”11 Evans, looking a bit taken aback by the suggestion that he might have manipulated Irving’s words, began to flip through his papers in order to find the transcript of the entire speech. After a few moments, Evans looked up from his papers. He seemed to be trying to suppress a smile as he offered to read the omitted words. Judge Gray nodded for him to proceed. According to Irving the editor of the Times had faced pressure from
our old traditional enemies, pressure not just from the advertising industry, pressure not just from the self-appointed, ugly, greasy nasty perverted representatives of that community, he came under pressure from the international community too because the Sunday Times, like many other newspapers, needs international capital to survive and the international capital is provided by the great international merchant banks.12
The words Evans had omitted were more extreme than that which he quoted. Irving could not have been pleased when Judge Gray observed that Evans “might have made his point more strongly, if he put in what he had left out.”13
A SURPRISING SETBACK
When I read the beginning of Evans’s report, which consisted of a selection of other historians’ critiques of Irving’s work, I had felt validated—probably unnecessarily so. They made me feel that I was not a lone voice criticizing this man. Irving now began to question Evans in great detail about each of these statements. Judge Gray, concerned about the slow pace at which Irving was moving through the report, urged Irving to proceed to the portions of Evans’s report that addressed substantive historical issues. This would help determine his final decision. What other historians said would have little, if any, impact on him. Irving did not move on.
Finally, speaking in a sympathetic voice, Judge Gray acknowledged Irving’s legitimate desire to contest this portion of the report as a means of deflecting these attacks on him. The judge, however, assured Irving that he was not going to pay it heed because he was interested in what Evans—not other historians—had to say. Then he added something disturbing:
Mr Irving . . . I do see your problem and I am actually sympathetic with it. . . . [T]hese opening . . . pages, where the views of other historians about your work are recited at length and in a very critical vein . . . count for virtually nothing . . . and it is . . . unfortunate that they are there because they could be taken to indicate a preconception about the validity of the criticisms.14
Judge Gray’s warning that these opening pages might cause him to consider the remainder of the report as tainted made my heart sink. Suddenly this section of the report, which provided the judge with a broader context within which to consider my critique, could just as likely harm us.
PHOTOGRAPHIC DISTORTIONS
Deniers often portray Allied actions against Germans as equal to—if not worse than—German war crimes. This is one of the reasons that they emphasize the bombing of Dresden. Evans had argued that Irving engaged in this kind of imbalance in Hitler’s War (1991). The book contained three photographs of German victims of Allied bombings—including one of a child clutching an adult’s body. There were, however, no pictures of victims of death camps or mass shootings. Irving had also included six photographs of Allied bombing raids on Dresden and Pforzheim, but no photographs of anyone killed by Nazis. There was only one picture of Germany’s victims: Jews on a passenger car handing their luggage out of t
he train windows. The caption read: “Their escorts were all elderly German police officers, with two Latvian police.” Irving compounded this imbalance by failing to inform his readers that shortly after arrival, the Jews on the passenger train were shot.
Irving defended his choice of photographs by asking if there were photographs of Einsatzgruppen shootings with the same “unimpeachable quality and integrity” as the passenger train photograph? Evans argued that, while quality was important, historians had to give readers a balanced view of the identity of the victims. Irving responded, “Are you suggesting that I should have . . . looked for a more hackneyed stereotyped photograph, Professor?” I inwardly cringed at his use of these adjectives to describe pictures of mass shootings. Demonstrating his newfound restraint, Evans ignored the comment and explained that the photograph suggested “how jolly nice this train is at Riga, what a nice time they are having.” Irving countered that it demonstrated the “utter banality of this kind of atrocity.” Evans, sounding like he was stating the obvious, dismissed Irving’s explanation: “Sorry, there is no mention of any atrocity there in the caption at all.” Judge Gray, who seemed intrigued by Irving’s argument, asked Evans, “How do you react to the suggestion that the reason for not including the sort of pictures you have just been describing is the[ir] utter banality . . . ?” Evans responded, “I find [it] very hard to accept that pictures of . . . people about to be shot by the Einsatzgruppen lining up in front of a ditch are banal pictures. It does not matter how many times they are reproduced, they still remain, I think, very shocking.”15 Having seen such photographs many times, I was struck by Evans’s observation that, no matter how often he saw them, they remained shocking.
Evans had charged that Irving engaged in the same kind of photographic manipulation in Nuremberg: The Last Battle. He placed a caption, under pictures of mutilated German soldiers in the Balkans and of Allied raids on Japan and Dresden, that read in part: “No Allied general is ever called to account . . .” When Irving defended his choice of captions, Evans dismissed this as an attempt to “set up an equivalence between the two sides in order to diminish the importance of the Nazi extermination of the Jews” and to suggest “that what the Allies did was worse than what the Germans did.” Irving sounded perplexed: “Worse?” Judge Gray, taking the initiative, answered Irving’s question: “Because they got away with it scott-free.”16
Irving asked Evans if, in his report, he had written that on one night during the war the Allies “only killed 17,600 people by burning them alive in 20 minutes?” Evans who resolutely refused to answer any question unless the citation in question was in front of him, bent over to check the pertinent section of his report. While Evans was still reading, Irving, in a rather accusatory tone, elaborated on his previous question: “You are suggesting that killing 17,600 people by burning them alive in the space of twenty minutes is in some way, I do not know, not a crime?” Still bent over the desk, Evans lifted up his head and gave Irving a look of contempt. For a moment, I feared he was ready to verbally pounce on Irving. Instead, he stood up straight, faced Judge Gray, and explained the context of his statement. His report contained a section from a 1992 speech Irving had given. In it Irving had estimated that 100,000 had died at Auschwitz, “most of them from epidemics,” and then added that about 25,000 were killed by “shooting or hanging.” Irving compared this death toll to the suffering of the Germans in the town of Pforzheim.
Twenty-five thousand killed, if we take this grossly inflated figure to be on the safe side: That is a crime; there is no doubt. Killing twenty-five thousand in four years . . . that is a crime. . . . Let me show you . . . in my book, a vivid picture of twenty-five thousand people being killed in twenty-five minutes by us British [in February 1945] in Pforzheim, a little town where they make jewelry and watches. . . . Twenty-five thousand civilians are being burned alive in twenty-five minutes. . . . You don’t get it spelled out . . . like that. Except by us, their opponents. . . . When you put things in perspective . . . it diminishes their Holocaust—that word with a capital letter.17
This statement, Evans said to Judge Gray, gave the impression “that the Allied bombing of German cities was as bad as or worse than the Nazi killing of Jews in Auschwitz.” Moreover, he observed, Irving had compounded this minimization of the Auschwitz death toll by inflating the Pforzheim death toll—as calculated by the city’s Statistical Office—by 40 percent. Hence, Evans’s comment that the actual death toll was “only” 17,600, not the 25,000, as Irving had claimed.18
Evans had posited that Irving’s claims about the small number of Jewish victims had originated with one of the earliest Holocaust deniers, Paul Rassinier. Irving challenged Evans, “Have you any evidence at all that I have ever read the words of Paul Rassinier?” Evans dryly responded, “You did write an afterword to one of his books, which I find it difficult to believe you wrote without having read it.” Irving stared at Evans intently: “Professor, believe. That is all I can say.” While looking out at the gallery—and decidedly not at Irving—Evans observed, “It does not say much for your responsibility as a historian, Mr Irving.”19
BLAME IT ON THE ALLIES
Deniers face a conundrum. They must somehow find a way of explaining—without blaming Germany—the multitude of cadaver-like victims found in the concentration camps at the end of the war. They resolve this by arguing that the Allies—not the Germans—were responsible for this suffering. Evans illustrated how Irving had tried to do this in a speech in 1986. He had said: The Allies “bomb[ed] the transportation networks . . . pharmaceutical industry, medicine factories . . . deliberately creat[ing] the epidemics and the outbreaks of typhus and other diseases which . . . were found . . . [in the] concentration camps.” As Evans read this quote, I happened to glance at the gallery. A white-haired man in the gallery was wincing. He looked to be in pain.
When Evans finished, Judge Gray asked him, “how do you feel about a historian who says that the person who deliberately created the epidemics was the person who bombed the pharmaceutical factories which might have been able to provide the distribution which might have limited the typhus epidemic?” Evans minced no words: “That is extremely perverse.” The epidemics, he argued, were created by the Nazis, who ran the camps in extremely unhygienic fashion.
Irving challenged Evans to explain why, if the Nazis wanted these people to die, they built a whole “system” in the camps to combat the epidemic. Evans explained that these measures were to protect the SS, not the inmates. Suddenly, Judge Gray interrupted Irving. Referring back to Irving’s repeated claims that most of the victims died of disease, he cautioned Irving to keep “a slight grip on reality” and asked, “Is it your case that the typhus killed a very large proportion of the Jews who lost their lives?” Irving said, “Yes.” Judge Gray continued, “It is difficult in the next breath to say how wonderful the system of fumigating clothes and the like was.”20 I was pleased that Judge Gray had called Irving to account for his mutually exclusive positions. As I left the courtroom, the older gentleman I had noticed wincing, cautiously approached me: “I’m not Jewish. I entered Bergen-Belsen with the British forces in 1945. It galls me to hear him claim that we Allies caused the terrible deprivation we found there.” He said nothing for a moment but stood there looking angry. He then pulled himself up, stood almost at attention, and declared, “Get this bastard, madam.” With that he marched off, a bit of the old soldier still evident in his gait.
FIFTEEN
THE DIARY OF ANNE FRANK: A NOVEL?
Deniers have, over the years, concentrated great energy on attacking the authenticity of The Diary of Anne Frank because they believe that by creating doubts about this popular book, which is often young people’s first encounter with the literature of the Holocaust, they can generate broader doubts about the Holocaust itself. There are multiple versions of the Diary, which, deniers claim, proves it is a fraud. Actually, there are, indeed, a number of versions of the Diary. Anne herself had given a reason for this
. In 1944, over the radio, she heard a Dutch government official broadcasting from London, urging the population to save letters, memorabilia, and diaries as eyewitness accounts. Anne’s response was to rewrite some of her diary entries. She also used the diary as a basis for a novel, The Annex. Hence, the different versions.
Deniers also claim that the diary is written in green ballpoint pen, something that was not readily available during the war. In this case, the deniers are seriously bending the truth. There are some minor stylistic marginal notes in green ink. The only ballpoint writing was on two loose scraps of paper included among the loose leaves and have no significance whatsoever in terms of content. Moreover, the handwriting on the scraps of paper differ markedly from those in the diary, indicating that they were written by someone else, an editor perhaps.
By the 1980s, these attacks on the Diary had become so widespread that the Netherlands State Institute for War Documentation and the Bundeskriminalamt, the German criminal laboratories, tested the diary’s glue, paper, and ink. They found them all to be from the 1940s. They compared Anne’s handwriting in the diary to other samples of her writing and found it to be genuine. Every test proved this was a genuine World War II–era work by a teenage girl in hiding.1
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