Denial [Movie Tie-in]

by Deborah E. Lipstadt

  Rampton returned to the NA’s statement. “We must have White schools, White residential neighborhoods, and recreational areas, White workplaces, White farms and countryside.” Again Irving protested, “But what has it [to] do with me?” Rampton angrily insisted, “It has everything to do with you.” Before Irving could respond, Judge Gray interrupted: “You say that this is . . . news to you? . . . How [then] do you react to this sort of stuff?” Irving declared, “It is a most appallingly badly written piece of propaganda.” Even the unflappable Charles Gray seemed caught off guard. Unable—or possibly unwilling—to camouflage his surprise, he repeated, “Badly written?” The statement, Irving continued, did not “interest me in the slightest . . . and I do not intend to retain it in my memory quite frankly.”10 Rampton stared at Irving for a moment and then rather deliberately laid the NA’s manifesto down. He seemed glad to be rid of it.

  While questioning Irving, Rampton suddenly asked him if he had been reading the Eichmann manuscript. When Irving said he had not, Rampton suggested that he do a word search for the word Vergasungslager (gas camps).11 That alone would demolish deniers’ arguments. Though the manuscript had really come too late to be of much help to us, I knew how grateful Rampton was to the Israelis for releasing it to us. Rampton knew how pleased I was that historians would now have free access to this material. This was, I assumed, his way of signaling our appreciation.

  Moving on to a new topic, Rampton asked Irving what he knew of the British National Party (BNP), which opposed nonwhite immigration into the United Kingdom and endorsed repatriation of blacks and Asians already living there. It had links to the National Front, a group with a reputation for ruthless violence against immigrants. The leader of the BNP used to be photographed in jackboots and armband in front of pictures of Adolf Hitler.12 Irving told Rampton that he knew no more about the BNP than he did about the NA. Rampton asked Irving, “You speak to them, do you not?” Irving responded, “No.” Rampton continued, “Or you have done?” Again, Irving responded, “No.” Once again Irving walked into a trap of his own making. We had found his correspondence with the BNP in his files. After Irving’s second—very unqualified—“No,” Rampton asked him to look at a letter that was written on BNP stationery. “British National Party, Yorkshire region. Dear Mr Irving, further to our telephone conversation today, I am writing to confirm that we would be very happy for you to come up to Leeds on Friday 14th September to address a special northern regional meeting.”

  When Rampton finished reading, Irving protested that this was just like functions in America where a “local functionary of some political group is inviting me to come and address an umbrella body.” Judge Gray, who sounded more than a touch annoyed, interrupted Irving’s answer: “Mr Irving, come on, that is letter [sic] on the stationery of the British National Party.”

  This back-and-forth was followed by one of the stranger and more revealing non sequiturs by Irving. Earlier, in his diary, we had found an entry made while he was in Key West, Florida. “12 midday. Kirk Lyons phoned. Going to London . . . for BNP meeting.” Rampton asked Irving about Lyons and his connection with the BNP. After identifying Lyons as an American lawyer and insisting he had no idea of his connection with the BNP, Irving said, “Speaking of my first lawyer, who was Michael Rubenstein who was my lawyer for 25 years . . . and may be familiar to this court.” Rampton, looking rather disgusted, responded, “Many of my best friends are Jews too, Mr Irving.”13

  JEWS AND CRIME

  Rampton now turned to the section of Irving’s book Goebbels that attributed the Nazi propaganda chief’s antisemitism to his encounter with Jewish criminals in Berlin in the late 1920s. From then on, Irving wrote, Goebbels “would highlight every malfeasance of the criminal demi-monde and identify it as Jewish.” Irving had then told his readers that Goebbels “was unfortunately not always wrong,” Jews were heavily involved in crime:

  In 1930 Jews would be convicted in forty-two of 210 known narcotics smuggling cases; in 1932 sixty-nine of the 272 known international narcotics dealers were Jewish. Jews were arrested in over sixty percent of the cases concerning the running of illegal gambling dens; 193 of the 411 pickpockets arrested in 1932 were Jews.

  Irving concluded this section of his book with a startling assertion: “In 1932 no fewer than thirty-one thousand cases of fraud, mainly insurance swindles, would be committed by Jews.” Irving accompanied this sweeping indictment of Jews’ criminal actions with a footnote containing four different sources.

  Interpol figures, in Deutsches Nachrichten-Büro (DNB), July 20, 1935; and see Kurt Daluege, ‘Judenfrage als Grundsatz’ in Angriff, Aug 3, 1935 . . . ; on the criminal demi-monde of 1920s Berlin, see Paul Weiglin, Unverwüstliches Berlin . . . and Walther Kiaulehn, Berlin: Schicksal einer Weltstadt.14

  Rampton began by asking Irving to identify Kurt Daluege, whose article Irving had cited in the footnote. Irving responded, “He was the head of the Ordnungspolizei which is the Order Police in Germany.” Rampton’s Scottish brogue sounded a bit more pronounced than usual, as he rather casually added, “Yes, Mr Irving. Tell us a wee bit more about him.” Irving responded so matter-of-factly that he could have been recounting the man’s university activities: “Oh, he was a mass murderer later on. He was in charge of all the killing on the Eastern Front.” Daluege had joined the SS in the late 1920s. In 1935 he became chief of police in the Interior Ministry and eventually was in charge of the Order Police, the reserve police units that participated in the murder of Jews in the East. After Heydrich’s assassination in 1942, he became acting Reichsprotektor of Bohemia and Moravia. It was under his watch that the infamous Lidice massacre occurred. In 1946, he was executed by a Czech court for these and other crimes.

  Rampton, rather drolly, observed, “One should be rather cautious, perhaps, about what one is told by Mr Daluege.”15 Rampton noted that Irving’s statistics about Jewish criminal activities came from Daluege’s July 1935 press conference at which the Nazi leader told foreign reporters that Jews were criminals. In a subsequent article in Der Angriff, a major Nazi propaganda outlet, Daluege reiterated his accusations about Jews and posited that the “number of cases of fraud in the Reich’s capital . . . [were] 31,000 in 1933.” Under the Nazis, Daluege wrote, this number had dropped to eighteen thousand but “a considerable part, if not the largest of these fraudulent manipulations are still committed by Jews.”16

  When Evans and his team compared Daluege’s statement with Irving’s rendition in Goebbels, they found dramatic discrepancies. Whereas Daluege had blamed a portion of the eighteen thousand cases of fraud on Jews, Irving wrote: “In 1932 no fewer than thirty-one thousand cases of fraud, mainly insurance swindles, would be committed by Jews.” Dismissing Irving’s mix-up of 1932 and 1933 as irrelevant, Rampton observed that Irving had almost doubled the number of fraud cases Daluege attributed to Jews. Furthermore, Daluege had not mentioned “insurance fraud.” Irving, apparently, had invented that. Rampton did not stop there. Though Irving’s footnote cited the authoritative-sounding “Interpol figures,” this too, apparently, was an Irving creation. There was no reference to Interpol in the DNB press release. Irving also failed to inform his readers that the DNB was not a traditional press agency, but was an arm of Goebbels’s Propaganda Ministry.*

  “Even assuming, which I do not,” Rampton continued, “that this was an innocent mistake on your part to double the number of offences attributable to Jews, do you think it right, when your source is this man Daluege, [to] uncritically simply to take his figures as being right?” Ignoring the fact that Daluege, as a leading Nazi, was not the most unbiased source on Jews, Irving defended him as a reliable source. “He was the head of the German police system. He was in a position to know.” Rampton dismissed Irving’s explanation. “This is a case of deliberate distortion by you so as to inflate the number of wicked, dishonest Jews in Berlin in 1932. . . . You double Daluege’s numbers . . . you have relied on an unreliable source, you have attributed his figures to Interpol
and you have spoken about insurance swindles which are not mentioned in Daluege’s document.”17

  Irving now insisted that the information on Jewish criminal activities came from the two books cited in the footnote. Nik scribbled a note and passed it to Rampton. Rampton quickly read it and announced, “All the figures, I am told, come from Daluege.” Irving, abandoning the two books, now insisted that he had relied on the German Federal Statistical Office for his figures of Jewish criminal activity. Rampton took a quick look at the clock on the side of the room. It was 12:50. He seemed anxious to make his point before we broke for lunch. He handed Irving a copy of a page from the official German Criminal Statistics. He directed Irving to a line on the ledger that showed there had been, in fact, a total of seventy-four cases of insurance fraud in all of Germany in 1932. The thousands of cases of insurance fraud by Berlin Jews alone was clearly a figment of Irving’s imagination. Holding this page out in front of him, Rampton said, “Any reputable historian would have gone to this document, as opposed to some rabid Nazi’s utterance, to find out what the truth was.”

  Irving, no longer insisting his figures were correct, now argued that, if he had committed errors about Jewish criminals, they were not deliberate. “You do not establish a reputation by making deliberate errors.” Rampton, shaking his head in great—and somewhat theatrical—dismay, said, “Well, I think I have about 25 in my pocket by now Mr Irving and that is the 26th.”18 With that we broke for lunch.

  During lunch, Rampton and Anthony got into a debate over deconstructionism, the literary theory that challenges attempts to ascribe an ultimate meaning to a text. Using linguistic analysis, it “deconstructs” the ideological biases that shape literary, historical, and philosophical texts. Rampton challenged Anthony to explain why deconstructionism was not just another version of skepticism and, therefore, was not of particular interest or importance. Anthony argued that, while it may be a form of skepticism, it was also a disciplined method of reading. Though I thought deconstructionism, taken at its most simplistic level, had fostered an attitude of “the text can mean whatever I think it means,” I did not participate in the debate. I just sat back, sipped a glass of 1992 Clos de La Roche, Dujac, and reflected on the delicious irony of this conversation, of these two men who had spent innumerable amounts of time on this case, only to devote its final moments to a debate about literary theory. Happy that the trial was nearing its end, I knew that I’d miss, not only the legal team, but moments such as these with their fine wines and clever repartee.

  After lunch, Rampton asked a few follow-up questions and then, with no fanfare, announced that he was done. Judge Gray reminded Irving that he could reexamine himself. Irving declined. The substantive part of the trial was effectively over. We would gather in two weeks for closing speeches but the nine-week daily court routine was done.

  The next day a few of us gathered for a celebratory lunch. Rampton chose Livebait, a fish restaurant in Waterloo, which, with its tiled floors and waiters in big white aprons, was a nice change from London’s trendy minimalist restaurants. Over a lunch of Dover sole and carefully chosen white wine, we analyzed the preceding weeks. Rampton praised Hajo for having put Irving on the defensive. “I did not have to cross-examine Irving on his German right-wing connections. You did it for me.” He then handed Peter the sketch he had made while he testified. Peter smiled when he saw himself depicted as Saint Peter standing in the witness box. As we talked, drank, and laughed, I could feel the tension dissipating. We were emerging, Hajo said, from a “cosmos of death.”

  JUDICIAL RESTRAINT AND LIMITED EXPECTATIONS

  I looked forward to continuing this celebratory atmosphere that evening at Shabbat dinner. Generally, I declined invitations because at the end of each week I felt exhausted. This time, I had made an exception in part because the hostess mentioned that one of the guests was a judge at the High Court. “Though he has nothing to do with your case he had to obtain permission from the Lord Justice to attend because you are coming.” I thought he might help me deconstruct—in the nonliterary sense—some of the events of the previous weeks.

  The judge was affable and the evening informal and relaxed. As dinner drew to an end and the Fortnum and Masons chocolates I had brought were making the rounds, he turned to me and said, “The perception at the Law Courts is that your defense team is doing well. Everyone seems to think you will win.” Thinking he might have some inside information, I asked as dispassionately as I could, “What’s your source?” Understanding my drift, he chuckled and said, “Oh, no one knows what Charles Gray is thinking. This is strictly the impression of the many people who have attended the sessions.” Even his clerks, he added with a wry smile, had found time to attend.

  Buoyed by his words, I declared, “I want an unequivocal victory. I want to beat this guy. Bad.” The judge suddenly grew serious and, in a cautionary tone, added, “Allow me to give you fair warning: Do not anticipate a rousing condemnation of Irving from Charles Gray. British judges practice judicial restraint. A judge who believes a witness lied will say: ‘I did not find this witness helpful.’ Everyone at the Law Courts knows this is judicial shorthand for ‘He’s a liar.’ The judge, however, is not going to say so.”

  My heart sank. I heard the voices of those who had predicted that, irrespective of the outcome, this would be a lose/lose situation. “You might win the battle,” they had said, “but lose the war. Even if he loses, he will reinterpret the verdict to make it sound as if the judge found for him.” They had warned that Irving would take any ambiguity in the judge’s decision and twist it to his advantage. My feelings of an imminent victory evaporated. A restrained judgment would be the equivalent of a defeat.

  NINETEEN

  THE FINAL SCENE

  It was with the fear of winning the battle and losing the war that I arrived at the Law Courts for closing arguments. The courtroom was packed. Reporters and paparazzi, whose interest had waned during the closing weeks of the trial, were waiting. The Blumenthals and Ken Stern had returned. They were joined by my sister, niece, close friends from Atlanta and other places. All the regulars—from both sides of the aisle—were present. Once again survivors of the Holocaust were sitting cheek by jowl with Irving’s supporters. Extra chairs had been set up. I felt as if I was in a theater where the curtain was about to rise on the last performance of a long-running show. Janet Purdue was happily exerting control. Apparently, having decided that this occasion warranted breaking her rules, she was instructing people where they could stand. She even let some people sit on the steps of the public gallery. One of the paralegals arrived and excitedly announced, “It’s bedlam out there. The queue goes out the hall, around the corner, and down the steps.”

  At 10:25, Janet hurriedly and very purposefully walked to the front of the room—her black gown flowing behind her as if it were trying to keep up with her. She ascended to the top step of the judge’s bench and turned to survey the room. The crowd immediately jumped to its feet. She looked at us with a surprised smile: “But I didn’t say anything yet.” People laughed at their own Pavlovian response and sat down. A few minutes later she reappeared. This time her decided sense of authority left no doubt that it was time to rise. As she emitted her familiar call, she let each syllable linger in the air for an added moment, effectively rendering the one word into three: “SI-LEN-CE.” As Judge Gray entered and walked to his seat, his stride bespoke a particular purposefulness. After taking his seat, he looked all around the room, as if he too was assessing the assembled crowd.

  The session began, as it always did, with housekeeping. Irving told Judge Gray that he wished to include in his closing arguments comments on the global conspiracy against him. Judge Gray had previously declared the topic irrelevant, unless linked directly to me or to Penguin Books. Irving asked for permission, arguing that it would explain “my state of mind when I am alleged to have made certain remarks about the bodies or the persons concerned.” He seemed to recognize that he had not helped his cause
with his comments about crooked Jewish financiers, description of the Board of Deputies as “cockroaches,” and accusation that survivors tattooed numbers on their arms to make money. This time Judge Gray agreed to Irving’s request. “I know the Defendants are not very happy about this but I think I am going to do it anyway.”1

  Judge Gray was right. I was not happy. I did not think his decision would materially impact the judgment, but I worried that we would be subjected to a long excursion through material that would make extreme assertions about my involvement in various diabolical schemes to destroy David Irving. I knew that Rampton, convinced that the judge considered the issue irrelevant, would not respond to these charges about a global conspiracy. Forensically, that was a wise decision, but it would leave Irving’s baseless accusations about me to once again go unchallenged.

  RAMPTON: IRVING’S BOGUS HISTORY

  It was time to begin. Rampton rose, laid his text on the small podium in front of him, took a deep breath, and slowly scanned the public gallery. He seemed to be looking for someone. Then he began. “If one had read some of the media reports of this trial . . . one might have supposed that Mr Irving had been dragged into this court to defend his freedom of expression as an historian. In fact, of course, that is not so. The history of the matter is quite the reverse.” Rampton acknowledged that I had leveled serious accusations against Irving. These charges were so serious that, had they “been untrue, Mr Irving would clearly have been entitled to a large sum of money and an order of the court preventing the Defendants from repeating their accusations. But, the[y] are true in every significant respect.”2