Denial [Movie Tie-in]

by Deborah E. Lipstadt

  Rampton estimated that we had presented close to thirty examples of Irving’s historical malfeasance. They could not be inadvertent mistakes because they all moved in the same direction: exculpation of Hitler and denial of the Holocaust. Rampton, in his typical economy of style, illustrated his charge with just two examples. Irving’s version of Kristallnacht—particularly his claim that Hitler, unaware of the event, was “livid” when he learned of it and tried to “halt the madness”—was completely bogus. In fact, Rampton continued, arson—and only arson—against Jewish owned shops was halted. “Synagogues, houses, apartments, cemeteries, and, in particular, Jewish people were left to the mercy of the continuing violence.”

  Irving’s claim that the perpetrators were punished was equally false. In fact, Rampton stressed, “nothing could be further from the truth.” The authorities exonerated all those who damaged Jewish property and treated with a “rap on the knuckles” those guilty of assault and murder. Only those guilty of sexual offenses—“race defilement”—were prosecuted. Murdering Jews was acceptable. Raping them was not. Irving knew this. He had cited the documents that contained this information. However, he never mentioned it to his readers.3

  Rampton’s second example of falsification of history concerned Hitler’s two-day April 1943 meeting with Admiral Horthy of Hungary. Irving’s attempt to link Hitler’s concerns about Jews in Budapest to the Warsaw Ghetto uprising was a total distortion, given that the meeting occurred two days before the uprising. Irving had skewed the tenor of the meeting by saying it concluded with Hitler’s declaration that there was “no need for that [the murder of the Jews],” when it actually ended with “Hitler’s chilling observation about the need to kill the Jewish ‘beasts.’”

  These two examples were “but the tip of a large iceberg of numbers of other equally egregious falsifications by Mr Irving.” With a bit of rhetorical flourish, he echoed his opening statement delivered ten weeks earlier: “‘Mr Irving is a liar.’ The Defendants say, on this part of the case: ‘Case proved.’”4

  GAS CHAMBER MANIPULATIONS

  Irving, Rampton continued, had engaged in the same manipulation and falsification of sources regarding the gas chambers. During the trial, however, he had been forced to retreat. “Mr Irving has been driven, in the face of overwhelming evidence . . . to concede that there were indeed mass murders on a huge scale by means of gassing at Chelmno . . . [and] the camps of Belzec, Treblinka, and Sobibor, and even that there were ‘some gassings’ at Auschwitz.” Irving had also made a “slippery concession” that the gas chambers at Birkenau were used for gassing “objects and cadavers.” Rampton declared that “if this were not such a serious matter, it would be hilarious.” Why, Rampton wondered, would a room for gassing objects and cadavers have a spyhole in the door? Why would that spyhole be covered with a heavy metal grille on the inside? Why, when the crematoria buildings were transformed in 1942 to gas chambers, were the chutes for sliding bodies to the morgue replaced with steps? Were the “objects and cadavers” supposed to walk down the steps?

  Irving’s claim that the gas chamber was an air-raid shelter was “equally absurd.” The notion of SS personnel running from their barracks one and a half miles to the crematoria, under a hail of bombs, was “just plain daft.”5 Irving had tried to argue that there was not enough fuel at Auschwitz to incinerate all the corpses. When we produced a letter from Bischoff, the head of Auschwitz’s building program, demonstrating that the potential incineration capacity was more than sufficient, how, Rampton asked, did Irving react? “Mr Irving’s only . . . response was—as ever—to challenge [its] authenticity.” When confronted with the information that this letter had been found in the Moscow archives right after the war and had been introduced at war crimes trials in 1948 and in 1971, Irving had posited that the letter was a Communist forgery. That claim was also contradicted by the evidence that the incineration capacity stated in the letter was “significantly lower” than the Soviet’s postwar estimates. Why would the Communists create a forgery that was at odds with their own theory about the number of people killed? Rampton closed this section of his summation by dismissing these claims—cadavers and objects, air-raid shelters, insufficient coke, forged letters—as “fragile conjectures based on no significant research at all.”6

  Irving, Rampton declared, was a “right-wing extremist, a racist, and, in particular, a rabid antisemite.” Irving had described his own speech at the neo-Nazi rally in Halle, where he had been greeted with chants of “Sieg Heil” as “rabble rousing.” Rampton quickened the tempo of his words. “Why Mr Irving should have engaged so actively in the promotion of these historical falsehoods? . . . Mr Irving is an antisemite. Holocaust denial . . . is music to the ears of the neo-Nazis and other right-wing extremists to whom he purveys it.”

  Finally, Rampton addressed a question that still perplexed some of us who had spent too much time and too many years trolling through Irving’s words. “How far . . . Mr Irving’s antisemitism is a cause of his Hitler apology or vice versa, is quite unimportant. . . . [T]hey have led him to prostitute his reputation as a serious historian—spurious though it can now be seen to have been—for the sake of a bogus rehabilitation of Hitler and the dissemination of virulent antisemitic propaganda.”7

  With that Rampton, who had spoken for less than an hour, ended. As he was about to sit down, he paused and once again slowly scanned the public gallery as if he was looking for someone.

  SOME VERY STRANGE QUESTIONS

  Charles Gray spoke next. He noted that in approximately twenty-five different instances, we had charged that Irving engaged in a deliberate distortion of the historical record. Did we believe, Judge Gray asked Rampton, that in the other instances where we had challenged Irving’s conclusions, he had also deliberately falsified the record? Rampton responded by describing what Irving did as a deliberate blindness to the evidence. “What he does not like, he ignores.” Judge Gray mused for a moment before responding: “So it is a telescope to the wrong eye?” Rampton, pleased with the judge’s metaphor, agreed. Any evidence, he pointed out, that contradicts Irving’s preexisting conclusions—an aerial photograph showing the holes in the roof or Bischoff’s letter on incineration capacity—he dismisses as a forgery. “His denial must have another agenda,” Rampton continued, “because it cannot be the product of genuine bona fide historical research and contemplation.”8

  Judge Gray introduced his next question with a comment: “It is important that I am absolutely clear what it is that is being suggested. . . . You put it as being deliberately perverse blindness and acting in pursuance of what is, effectively a neo-Nazi agenda. Is that right?” Rampton, who nodded again in affirmation, answered, “He is, at root, deeply antisemitic and a neo-Nazi.” Judge Gray pursed his lips and waited for a moment as he seemed to reflect on Rampton’s response.

  He then posed what he described as his “last question”: “If somebody is antisemitic . . . and extremist, [is] he perfectly capable of being, as it were, honestly antisemitic and honestly extremist in the sense that he is holding those views and expressing those views because they are, indeed, his views?” I quickly checked the computer monitor to make sure I had heard right. Was Judge Gray suggesting that, if Irving honestly believed his antisemitic and racist statements, they were acceptable? I looked at James expecting him to reassure me, as he so frequently did, and to tell me I was overreacting. Instead, he was shaking his head in dismay. He turned around and locked eyes with Anthony, who looked equally bewildered.

  Judge Gray continued. “It seems to me that . . . the antisemitism is a completely separate allegation which really has precious little bearing on your broader and, perhaps, more important case that Mr Irving has manipulated the data and falsified the record or do you say that they are connected in some way?” Judge Gray’s suggestion that Irving’s antisemitism had “precious little bearing” on our case was stupefying. Irving’s antisemitism, we had repeatedly argued, was inexorably linked to his denial. Rampton
seemed equally rattled. His initial response was uncharacteristically tentative. “I propose that they probably are connected.” After a moment’s hesitation, he spoke slightly less tentatively: “I propose that they are connected.” Then, regaining his verbal footing, he became quite deliberate. “The bridge between Holocaust denial and the Hitler apology from antisemitism is very easy to build, because what more would an historian who is an antisemite want to do in exculpation of Hitler, which he has been trying to do by telling lies about history for years, what more would he want to do than to deny the Holocaust?”

  Judge Gray returned to his original point. “Yes, but he might believe what he is saying. That is the point. That is why it is important.” Shaking his head back and forth, Rampton insisted that since there were no good historical reasons for denying the Holocaust, Irving had to have another one. “The most obvious thing for a profound and genuine antisemite to do . . . is to leap into Holocaust denial . . . and to cart it around the world . . . to audiences of other antisemities and neofascists.” Judge Gray, seeming to mull Rampton’s words over in his mind, mused, “That is another agenda, you would say?” All traces of tentativeness on Rampton’s part were gone: “Yes, that is the other agenda . . . the promotion of antisemitism. . . . Given that there is . . . absolutely no proper historical foundation for Holocaust denial, and given that there is evidence that Mr Irving is an antisemite . . . the bridge between the one and the other is very easy to build indeed.”9

  With that Judge Gray called a five-minute recess. Irving’s closing statement would follow. I swung around to Anthony and Rampton. Rampton looked perturbed. Anthony, for the first time in the five years I had known him, was speechless. Ken Stern, who specialized in the study of extremists and antisemites, looked like a deer in headlights. I was scared. How could Judge Gray suggest that Irving’s antisemitism had precious little bearing on our case? Rampton, sounding more concerned than at any time during the trial, declared, “I fear Charles Gray sees the trees but not the pattern they make.” I wondered if he even saw the trees.

  As we prepared to resume, I asked Rampton if he had been looking for someone when he scanned the gallery. “No,” he replied, “I just wanted the survivors and their offspring to know that I was aware that they were there. This trial has caused them much pain. I wanted to pay them tribute.”

  BANQUO’S GHOST, LIARS, AND PORNOGRAPHERS

  Irving rose. “This trial is about my reputation as a human being, as an historian of integrity, and—thanks to the remarks made by Mr Rampton—as a father.” Penguin and I had tried to drive him “out of business as an historian.” This case, he proclaimed, was about free speech. Should he lose, historians would fear asking tough questions about the Holocaust.10

  He denied that he falsified sources. His interpretation of events might not be the “most probable. But they are never perverse.” Our accusation that he deliberately manipulated the evidence was “a foul one.” At worst he had made some “innocent mistakes.” Some resulted from the many drafts through which he had put his manuscripts.11 Irving acknowledged having transposed the dates of the Hitler-Horthy meeting but accused us of making far too much out of that error. He declared the testimony of Marie Vaillant-Couturier, who had testified at Nuremberg about brothels at the camps, to be so riddled with “absurdities” that Judge Biddle had dismissed her entire testimony. Our charge that he had falsified Daluege’s Jewish criminal statistics was “meaningless.”12 Had we checked all of his sources we would have found the statistics he had cited. Not surprisingly, Irving did not provide the court with the sources. He just declared us wrong.

  Well into the second hour of his presentation Irving turned to the “international endeavor” against him. His more egregious statements were a response to this effort to destroy him. “[I]f I am accused of certain postures or uttering certain tasteless remarks, these momentary lapses are . . . explicable on the basis of . . . [a] 30 year international endeavor by a group of organizations to destroy my legitimacy as an historian.” They were the real defendants, Irving thundered, they had not been in court “but their presence has been with us throughout like Banquo’s ghost.” I may have started my research with honest intentions, but they led me astray by providing me with a “cornucopia of filth.” Raising his long arm and pointing his index finger in my direction, he declared, “She fell in with bad company.”13 My friend Rela, who had come from Philadelphia for the closing, passed me a note: “He can’t seem to decide whether you are the powerful queen bee manipulating drones all over the world or a little lamb who was led astray.”

  Auschwitz, he charged, had “become, like the Holocaust itself, an industry, a big business in the most tasteless way.” No one knew the number of victims who had died there or the specific events associated with their death. Suddenly Irving paused, lowered his head, and, in a somber voice, said, “I never forget in anything I have said or written or done the appalling suffering that has been inflicted on people in the camps like Auschwitz.” Then, all traces of empathy having disappeared from his voice, he attacked the eyewitnesses who testified to the existence of gas chambers. French Sonderkommando David Olère was a pornographer who had portrayed the “victims of the Nazi killers mostly as nubile young females, all naked.”14 Heather winced.

  The most outrageous of the liars were those who claimed to have seen holes in the gas chamber roof. Even van Pelt, he claimed, “accepts that those holes are not in that roof slab now.” As soon as he said that, Judge Gray interrupted: “I am not sure that is right, is it? I think what he says was that the state of the collapsed roof is so poor now you simply cannot see where those holes would have been if they were there.” Rampton, who had developed a close personal relationship with van Pelt, was already on his feet. His eyes were glowering as he charged Irving with a “continuous misrepresentation of the evidence of my witness.” Irving, looking at Rampton with annoyance, if not contempt, asked, “May I now continue with preferably fewer interruptions?” Judge Gray admonished him: “No, I think that is not fair. Mr Rampton I think has been restrained. . . . that is quite an important misstatement of van Pelt’s evidence.”15 Irving looked annoyed as he continued with a defense of his theories about the gas chambers. They could have been air-raid shelters. That would explain the peepholes, which were “standard fittings” on gas-tight air-raid shelter doors. Hearing this, Rampton emitted a cross between an angry sigh and a mumble of discontent. Judge Gray stopped Irving mid-sentence and looked at Rampton: “I would find it easier if there were not such an overt reaction to what you are saying on the other side of the court.” Rampton, looking very embarrassed, apologized.16

  “MEIN FÜHRER”: A SURREALISTIC SLIP

  Irving began to address our allegations about his “racism and antisemitism” by glancing at the bench with a somewhat conspiratorial smile: “I have the feeling that your Lordship is not overly-impressed by them.” Judge Gray quickly disabused him: “Do not get feelings one way or the other about any part of the case, Mr Irving.” Smiling a bit sheepishly, Irving shrugged his shoulders: “It was a good try.”17 Irving’s comment struck me as a metaphor for his modus operandi. He made a “good try” to prove Hitler innocent, Berlin Jews criminals, gas chambers “Disneyland” creations, and so much else. Until this trial, most of his “tries” had gone unchallenged.

  As his speech moved into the third hour, I began to shift in my seat. I was beset by frustration and deep exhaustion. Anthony, who over the past two months had become quite adept at watching my back—in more ways than one—passed me a note: “I fear if he goes on much longer I will have to restrain you from jumping up and saying ‘I surrender! I surrender! Please, just stop speaking.’”

  The evidence we cited regarding his contacts with German extremists was naught but an attempt to smear him. Such was the case with the 1991 Halle rally. He had arrived shortly before his speech and had spoken for only a few moments when the crowd began to chant “Sieg Heil! Sieg Heil!” The defense, he charged, had made much o
f these chants, but had ignored the fact that he tried to stop them. “I am clearly heard to say, ‘You must not,’ because they are shouting the ‘Sieg Heil’ slogans.”

  Irving was anxious to distance himself from these chants. That may explain what happened next. After repeating that he tried to stop the chants, he looked at Judge Gray and, instead of punctuating his remarks with “my Lord,” as he commonly did, he addressed him as “mein Führer.”18 There was a moment of intense silence as the entire courtroom—Judge Gray included—seemed frozen. Then everyone erupted in laughter. Ken Stern turned to James and said, “This is out of Dr. Strangelove.” From behind me I heard someone humming the Twilight Zone theme. Irving, who seemed not to have grasped what had happened, marched on, accusing us of having used “guilt by association” to link him with extremist elements. Our tactics were reminiscent of the “inquisitions conducted by Senator Joseph McCarthy.” He attacked Evans’s “odious attempts to smear and defile my name which, I hope, will long haunt him in the common rooms at Cambridge.” He dismissed his lectures for the IHR or the National Alliance with a “so what?” His spoke before any audience that wished to hear him. He defended his Dresden death tolls. Then, after almost four hours, he requested that Judge Gray award him “aggravated damages for libel and an injunction restraining the Defendants . . . from further publishing or causing to be published the said or similar words defamatory of myself as claimant.”19 With that he ended his speech.