 At
this point I finally decided that anyone joining a Fair
Play for Irving Committee was up against a man with some
kind of death wish.
--
Washington-based
British writer Christopher Hitchens
Sunday, May 20, 2001
[images added by this
website]The Strange Case of David
Irving  THE
HOLOCAUST ON TRIAL
By D.D. Guttenplan;
W.W. Norton: 328 pp., $24.95
By CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS
WHEN the first news of the Nazi camps was published in 1945,
there were those who thought the facts might be exaggerated
either by Allied war propaganda or by the human tendency to
relish "atrocity stories." In his column in the London
magazine Tribune, George Orwell wrote that though
this might be so, the speculation was not exactly occurring
in a vacuum. If you remember what the Nazis did to the Jews
before the war, he said, it isn't that difficult to imagine
what they might do to them during one.
In one sense, the argument
over "Holocaust denial" ends right there. The National
Socialist Party seized power in 1933, proclaiming as its
theoretical and organizing principle the proposition that
the Jews were responsible for all the world's ills, from
capitalist profiteering to subversive Bolshevism. By means
of oppressive legislation, they began to make all of Germany
Judenrein, or "Jew-free." Jewish businesses were
first boycotted and then confiscated. Jewish places of
worship were first vandalized and then closed. Wherever Nazi
power could be extended -- to the Rhineland, to Austria and
to Sudeten Czechoslovakia -- this pattern of cruelty and
bigotry was repeated. (And, noticed by few, the state
killing of the mentally and physically "unfit," whether
Jewish or "Aryan," was tentatively inaugurated.) After the
war broke out, Hitler was able to install puppet
governments or occupation regimes in numerous countries,
each of which was compelled to pass its own version of the
anti-Semitic "Nuremberg Laws." Most ominous of all -- and
this in plain sight and on camera, and in full view of the
neighbors -- Jewish populations as distant as Salonika were
rounded up and put on trains, to be deported to the eastern
provinces of conquered Poland.
None of this is, even in the
remotest sense of the word, "deniable." Nor is the fact
that, once the war was over, surviving Jews found that they
had very few family members left. The argument only begins
here, and it takes two forms. First, what exactly happened
to the missing ones? Second, why did it occur? The first
argument is chiefly forensic and concerns numbers and
methods: the physical engineering of shooting, gassing,
burial and cremation. The second argument is a debate among
historians and is known as the "intentionalist versus
functionalist" dispute. The "intentionalists" say that
Hitler and his gang were determined from the start to
extirpate all Jews and that everything from 1933 to 1945 is
a vindication of certain passages in "Mein Kampf." The
"functionalists" point out (correctly) that the Nazis
actually killed almost no Jews until after 1941 and that the
Endlosung, or "Final Solution," was a semi-secret
plan evolved after Germany began to lose the war on the
Eastern front. On this continuum, Daniel
Jonah Goldhagen, with his view that Germans had a
cultural gene of anti-Semitism, is an extreme
"intentionalist"; Yehudah Bauer, of the Yad Vashem
museum in Jerusalem, is a moderate "functionalist."
Differences of opinion between
these two schools, and discrepancies in the evidence, have
recently permitted the emergence of something that is more
of a phenomenon than a "school," by which I mean the
movement of "Holocaust denial" or (because it consists of
two contrasting tendencies) "Holocaust revisionism." This
movement contains some Nazi revivalists in Germany and
elsewhere, some crackpots and conspiracy theorists and one
practicing historian, an Englishman named David
Irving. Among revisionist forces there is even more
confusion; they either argue that nothing much happened at
all and that the whole thing is a fabrication or they
maintain that the unforgettable piles of corpses were the
result of epidemics, to be blamed on the disruption of food
and medical supplies by Allied bombing. (It will be seen at
once that this latter faction has no good explanation for
why the Jews of Europe were packed into remote camps in the
first place.)
The toxicity of the argument
is increased by four other factors. First, there are those
who maintain that the German people have been blamed enough
and that endless suggestions of collective guilt --
accompanied by incessant demands for compensation -- are an
insult and possibly a provocation. Second, there are those
who resent the exploitation of the Holocaust, or Shoah, by
extreme Israeli nationalists. Third, there is a collective
awareness that neither the international community nor
organized Jewry did much to help the victims when it could
have made a difference. Finally, in many countries,
including Germany and France, it is actually a crime to
dispute the established version of events, which means that
the "revisionist" movement now has its free-speech martyrs.
While in the United States, protected as it is by the First
Amendment, the Holocaust has become a secular religion, with
state support in the form of a national museum. Accusations
of ill will or bad faith are often made against anyone with
reservations about the elevation of this project into
something combining a cult, an entertainment resource and
an
industry, each claiming to represent the unvoiced dead.
Indeed, I myself feel constrained to state here that my
mother's family is of German and Polish Jewish provenance
and that on my wife's side we have not just an Auschwitz
"survivor" in our lineage but a man -- David
Szmulewski -- who was one of the leaders of the
communist resistance in the camps as well as one of those
who smuggled evidence out of it and later testified against
the war criminals in court. I look forward to a time when I
won't feel any need to mention this.
I was raised in two other
traditions as well, however. The first was to believe, with
the late Karl Popper, that a case has not been refuted until
it has been stated at its strongest. The second was to take
it for granted that historians have prejudices. To manifest
the first point, then, let us summarize the best case that
the revisionists can make. Would it surprise you to know
that:
1) there were no gas chambers
or extermination camps on German soil, in other words, at
Belsen
or Dachau
or Buchenwald;
2) there were no
Jews made into soap;
3) the "confession" of
Rudolf
Hoess, commandant of Auschwitz, was extracted by force
and contains his claim to have killed more Jews than was
"humanly" possible?
These are, however, the
now-undisputed findings of all historians and experts on the
subject. And if they are sound, then it means that much
"eyewitness" testimony is wrong. It necessarily changes our
attitude  toward
the everyday complicity of average Germans. It also means
that much of the evidence presented and accepted at
Nuremburg (left) was spurious.
Of course, we knew some of this already -- the Nazis were
charged by Soviet and Allied judges with the massacres at
Katyn in Poland, which had obviously been ordered by
Stalin and are now admitted to have been. And every
now and then, a bogus Holocaust merchant makes an
appearance. The most recent was the fantasist "Binjamin
Wilkomirski" whose book, "Fragments," was a
whole-cloth fabrication by someone who had spent the entire
war in Switzerland. This did not prevent him from receiving
several awards and the warm endorsement of Goldhagen.
Earlier, a high Israeli court found the evidence of
witnesses useless, ruling that John
Demjanjuk had not been at Treblinka
in the mythical shape of "Ivan the Terrible."
THE confrontation between Irving and the consensus was
therefore long overdue. He forced the confrontation himself,
by putting his own work on trial in attempting to sue the
work of another. But it was high time to have this out in
public, in the relatively objective context of an English
courtroom. And so to my second observation, about bias and
historians.
History, especially as written
by historians in the English tradition, is a literary and
idiosyncratic form. Men such as Gibbon and
Macaulay and Marx were essayists and
polemicists in the grand manner, and when I was at school,
one was simply not supposed to be prissy about the fact. We
knew that Macaulay wrote to vindicate the Whig school, just
as we knew of the prejudices of Carlyle (though there
were limits: Nobody ever let us read his "Occasional
Discourse on the Nigger Question," a robustly obscene
defense of slavery). Handing me a copy of "What Is History?"
by E.H. Carr, my Tory headmaster loftily told me that
it was required reading in spite of its "rather obvious
Marxist bias." The master of my Oxford college was
Christopher Hill, the great chronicler of
Cromwell and Milton and Winstanley and
the Puritan Revolution. Preeminent in his field, Hill had
been a member of the Communist Party and could still be
slightly embarrassed by mention of his early book, "Lenin
and the Russian Revolution," in which the name of Leon
Trotsky was conspicuous by its absence. Moving closer to
our own time, we had Sir Arthur Bryant, whose concept
of history as a pageant culminated in extreme royalism and a
strong sympathy for Franco and Mussolini and
Hitler. Then there was A.J.P. Taylor, one of
the most invigorating lecturers of all time, who believed
that the Nazis had more or less been tricked into the war.
And how can one forget Hugh Trevor-Roper, author of
the definitive narrative of Hitler's final days, who had
close connections to British intelligence, who might be
overheard making faintly anti-Jewish remarks and later
pronounced the forged Hitler diaries genuine? These were men
who had been witnesses and participants as well as
archivists and chroniclers. Their accounts were essential
reading; the allowance for prejudice and inflection was part
of the fun of one's bookkeeping.
This of course doesn't license
absolute promiscuity. Eric Hobsbawm, a member of the
Communist Party (much later than Hill), may have advertised
his allegiances but retained the respect of most critics
because he had a strong sense of objectivity in his
historical work. In other words, no dirty tricks were to be
allowed.
However, what I mean to say
for now is that when I first became aware of Irving, I did
not feel it necessary to react like a virgin who is suddenly
confronted by a man in a filthy raincoat.
That he had a sneaking
sympathy for fascism was obvious enough. But his work
on the bombing of Dresden, on the inner functioning of
the Churchill government and on the mentality of the
Nazi generals was invaluable. He changed sides on the issue
of the Hitler diaries, but his intervention was crucial to
their exposure as a pro-Nazi fabrication. His knowledge of
the German language was the envy of his rivals. His
notorious flaunting of bad taste and his gallows humor were
not likely to induce cardiac arrest in anyone like myself,
who had seen many Oxford and Cambridge history dons when
they were fighting drunk.
While helping to edit the New
Statesman in 1981, I encouraged the American historian
Kai Bird, now a distinguished student of the Cold
War, to analyze Irving's work. Bird turned in a meticulous
essay, which  exposed
Irving's obvious prejudice and incidentally trashed his
least-known and worst book -- a
history of the 1956 Hungarian uprising that
characterized the revolt as a rebellion of sturdy Magyar
patriots against shifty Jewish Communists. Irving briefly
threatened to sue and then thought better of it. In the
early 1990s, he took part in a public debate with the
extreme denier Robert Faurisson, at which he
maintained that there was definite evidence of mass
extermination at least by shooting (and gratuitously added
that he thought the original Nazi plan to isolate all Jews
in Madagascar was probably a good scheme). I noted this with
interest -- there's nothing like a good faction fight
between extremists -- but had no contact with him, direct or
indirect, until he self-published in England his biography
of Josef Goebbels in 1996.
This book is still on my
shelf. I read it initially because St. Martin's Press in New
York decided not to publish it, or rather, decided
to breach its contract to do so. This action on its part
was decisive, in that it convinced Irving that his enemies
were succeeding in denying him a livelihood, and it
determined him to sue someone as soon as he could. It was
also important in that St. Martin's gave no reason of
historical accuracy for its about-face. For the publisher,
it was a simple question of avoiding unpleasantness
("Profiles in Prudence," as its senior editor Thomas
Dunne put it to me ruefully).
Well, as I say, I'm a big boy
and can bear the thought of being offended. The biography,
based largely on extracts from Goebbels' diaries, told me a
great deal I hadn't known. I'll instance a small but
suggestive example. Irving had in the past been associated
with the British fascist movement led by Sir Oswald
Mosley. In my hot youth, I'd protested at some of the
meetings of this outfit and had circulated the charge that,
before the war, it had been directly financed by the Nazis.
This charge was always hotly disputed by the Mosleyites
themselves, but here was Goebbels, in cold print, discussing
the transfer of funds from Berlin to the British Black
Shirts. On the old principle famously adumbrated by
Bertrand Russell -- of "evidence against interest" --
it seemed that Irving was capable of publishing information
that undermined his own position. He also, in his editorial
notes, gave direct testimony about the mass killing of Jews
in the East (by shooting) and of the use of an
"experimental" gas chamber in the Polish town of Chelmno.
The "deniers" don't like this book; on the strength of it
you could prove that the Nazis tried to do away with the
Jews. There was some odd stuff about Hitler's lack of
responsibility for Kristallnacht but, as I say, I
allowed for Irving's obsessions. I wrote a column
criticizing St. Martin's for its cowardice and described
Irving himself as not just a fascist historian but a great
historian of fascism. One should be allowed to read "Mein
Kampf" as well as Heidegger. Allowed? One should be
able to do so without permission from anybody.
As a result of this, Irving
contacted me when he was next in Washington, and I invited
him to my home for a cocktail. He got off to a shaky start
by refusing any alcohol or tobacco and by presenting me with
two large blue-and-white stickers. Exactly the size of a
German street sign, they were designed to be pasted over the
originals at dead of night. "Rudolf Hess Platz," they said;
a practical-joke accessory for German extremists with that
especial sense of humor. Because they were intended to
shock, I tried to look as unshocked as I could. Irving then
revealed, rather fascinatingly, that some new
documents from the Eichmann family might force
him to reconsider his view that there had been no direct
order for the annihilation of the Jews. It was a rather
vertiginous atmosphere all around. When it came time for him
to leave, my wife and daughter went down in the elevator
with him on their own way out. Later, my wife rather gravely
asked me if I would mind never inviting him again. This was
highly unlike her; we have all sorts at our place. However,
it transpired that, while in the elevator, Irving had looked
with approval at my fair-haired, blue-eyed daughter, then 5
years old, and declaimed the following doggerel about his
own little girl, Jessica, who was the same age:
I am a Baby
Aryan
Not Jewish or Sectarian;
I have no plans to marry
an
Ape or Rastafarian.
The thought of Carol and
Antonia in a small space with this large beetle-browed man
as he spouted that was, well, distinctly creepy. (He has
since posted the lines on his Web site, and they came back
to haunt him at the trial.)
The next time Irving got in
touch with me was after his utter humiliation in court, and
I thought I'd give him one last chance -- though I arranged
to meet him in a neutral restaurant this time. I wanted to
know if it was true, as I had read in the press, that he had
abruptly addressed the judge in the case as "Mein Fuhrer."
With some plausibility, he explained to me that this was a
misunderstanding; he had been quoting from the slogans
shouted at a rally he was addressing in Germany and had
glanced up at the bench at the wrong moment. The transcript
of the trial seemed to make this interpretation possible. So
when telephoned by my friend Ian Buruma, who was
writing on the case for The New Yorker, I suggested that he
might check it out. He called me back with the information
that, when he had asked Irving directly about the incident,
Irving had taken him into confidence and said, "Actually, I
did say it." At this point I finally decided that anyone
joining a Fair Play for Irving Committee was up against a
man with some kind of death wish.
"THE Holocaust on Trial" and "Lying About Hitler" make
that very point in widely differing ways. Like me, D.D.
Guttenplan is full of contempt for the censorship of
Irving and quite prepared to consider the idea that the
Holocaust has been exploited and even distorted. However,
Guttenplan became disgusted by Irving's alternately bullying
and ingratiating style and by his repeated failure to make
good on his historical claims. His account of the courtroom
confrontation, most vividly the confrontation between Irving
and the Dutch expert on the mechanics of Auschwitz,
Robert Jan van Pelt, could hardly be bettered.
 He
also provides a masterly guide to the byways of English law,
especially the grossly biased and oppressive law of libel
that Irving hoped to enlist on his side.
This in itself has led to an
intriguing subplot, with Richard J. Evans' London
publishers abandoning his book, "Lying About Hitler,"
because of their own pusillanimous fear of a libel suit and
with Evans giving Guttenplan a rather dismissive review in a
London newspaper. The issue before the court, says Evans
(left), was not whether the
Holocaust occurred but whether Irving is a fabricator. Of
course that is formally true, but to my mind, Guttenplan
rather beautifully shows it to be a distinction without a
difference. Justice Gray, presiding, expressed the
repeated hope that the case would not involve revisiting
Auschwitz, but he had to "go there" all the same before the
case was fully heard. It could not have been otherwise. As
Raul
Hilberg once phrased it, at Auschwitz history was
destroyed at the same time that history was made. The
question cannot be approached from the standpoint of truth
without accepting this contradiction.
As an expert witness at the
trial, however, Evans was quite devastating. "Lying About
Hitler" is essentially an expanded version of his affidavit,
and it redraws the whole terrain of the argument. No longer
are we faced merely with the question of Irving's elementary
right to speak or be published. We are invited to see if he
deserves the title of historian at all. Evans' method is
quite a simple one. He shows, first, that there are a number
of errors, omissions and unsupported assertions in Irving's
work. Now, this might be true of any historian, and there
were indeed some distinguished academic practitioners in the
witness box who maintained that no narrative is or can be
free from error. However, what if, as Evans said under
cross-examination: "There is a
difference between, as it were, negligence, which is
random in its effects, i.e. if you are a sloppy or bad
historian, the mistakes you make will be all over the
place. They will not actually support any particular
point of view .... On the other hand, if all the mistakes
are in the same direction in the support of a particular
thesis, then I do not think that is mere negligence. I
think that is a deliberate manipulation and deception." Evans' knowledge, both of
the period and of the German language, are of an order to
rival Irving's. He has little difficulty in showing that
there are suspicious mistranslations, suggestive ellipses
and, worst of all, some tampering with figures: in other
words, that Irving knowingly inflates the death toll in the
Allied bombing of Dresden while deflating it in the camps
and pits to the East. And, yes, all the "mistakes" have the
same tendency. In a crucial moment, Irving "forgot" what he
had said about Nazi Gen. Walter Bruns, who had
confessed
to witnessing mass killing of Jews and had been taped by
British intelligence while doing so. When it suited Irving
to claim that Bruns didn't know he was being recorded, he
claimed as much. When it didn't, he suggested that Bruns was
trying to please his hearers. Having listened myself to
Irving discuss this fascinating episode, I mentally closed
the book when I reached this stage in it. It was a QED.
Irving has long been notorious
for his view that Hitler never gave any order for the Final
Solution and that there is no irrefutable document
authorizing it. In court, he was unpardonably flippant on
this point, saying airily that perhaps, like some of
Richard Nixon's subordinates, a few of the rougher
types imagined they knew what would please the boss. This
argument has always struck me as absurd on its face in both
cases, but Evans simply reduces it to powder. It's not too
much to say that by the end of the trial, the core evidence
for the Holocaust had been tested and found to be solid. The
matter of Irving's reputation as scholar and researcher --
which was the ostensible subject of the hearing -- was so
much "collateral damage."
It would be tempting to
summarize this as a near morality tale, in which the truth
emerges as the stainless winner over bigotry and
falsification. However, the conflict is not conducted in
quite such hygienic conditions. Irving did not publish a
series of books on the Nazi era that were exposed as
propaganda by a magisterial review from Evans. That's the
way things are supposed to happen but rarely do. Instead,
the efforts of a few obsessive outsiders have sharpened the
orthodox debate between intentionalists and functionalists
and also provoked a grand crisis in the "Holocaust denial"
milieu, which now subdivides yet again between those who see
Irving as a martyr and those who see him as a conscious,
dedicated agent of Zionism who let down the team.
I myself learned a good deal,
about both the subject and the author, by becoming involved
on the periphery of this debate. I still regard it as
ridiculous that Irving's books are almost impossible to
obtain in the homeland of the First Amendment. This culture
has assumed several great responsibilities. It sponsored the
Nuremberg trials, with all their peaks and troughs of
evidence. It has elevated the Holocaust into a universal
moral example. It is the chief international guarantor of
the state of Israel, at whatever proper size of territory or
jurisdiction over others that that state turns out to
possess. And it is the home -- on the basis of equality --
of the most flourishing Jewish community in history. Given
this quadrilateral of historical commitments, there can be
no prohibition of any voice whatever. One asks only, as one
must ask with all morally serious arguments, that those
entering the arena be transparent as regards motive and
scrupulous as regards evidence. Irving's contribution to
this very outcome is an amazing instance of the workings of
unintended consequence. Christopher
Hitchens is a Columnist for Vanity Fair and the Nation
and the Author most recently of "The Trial of Henry
Kissinger." |
write to
David Irving
