OCTOBER
27, 1998
London
I TAKE A CAB
at 5 p.m. to the German
Historical Institute in Bloomsbury
Square to hear a lecture by Dr Peter
Longerich, Reader in German at the
Royal Holloway College in London. His
latest book, Politik der
Vernichtung, is on display behind
glass in the lobby. Electronic security
doors control the intake into the
building. As I quietly take a seat in
the most distant corner of the elegant
upstairs salon, along with about fifty
or sixty other listeners, I notice one
or two heads nod in my direction.
Shortly, a burly man in a turtleneck
sweater stands up, and calls out to the
chairman in an East-End barrowboy
voice, "I don't know if you know this,
but there is in our midst a Holocaust
Denier and Nazi, and I don't think he
should be allowed to stay." At this,
heads turn in my direction. I sit tight
in my corner. The man next to me gets
up and also shouts something.
The chairman, embarrassed, stutters
that nobody is frightened of debate,
and he, as a German, is proud to be
representative of a new Germany where
freedom of speech is encouraged, unlike
the dark days of the past.
Unfortunately Mr Günter
Deckert and several hundred other
German citizens currently in jail are
in no position to hear this encouraging
gloss on Germany's
current policies.
Since it is obvious that I am not
going to respond to the provocations,
the two interrupters do the only thing
open to them: they stalk out with as
much dignity as barrowboys can muster.
A gentleman calls out that he feels it
is quite proper that I should be
there.
Short, dark-haired and fortyish, Dr
Longerich begins a lengthy, ramshackle,
aimless lecture, reading monotonously
from a paper, about the decision-making
process in the Holocaust -- except that
there is nothing he can tell us
whatsoever, since he admits there is a
total absence of documents ("the Nazis
took care that no documents survived,"
he hisses meaningfully). He does offer
the innovative notion that "because
these things happened," therefore
"somebody somewhere must have made a
decision." This is proof enough for
him. The Decision had itself decided,
evidently: cogito ergo sum.
He admits from the start that
Hans Mommsen and Martin
Broszat adopted the position in
"the 1970s" (in fact in 1978 in
consequence of the publication of my
Hitler
biography, which Broszat was
reviewing), that there was indeed
probably "no Führer decision."
Other researchers, says Longerich,
trying to identify and isolate The
Decision, concentrate on the year
1941.
Dismissing the Wannsee
Conference in this context,
Longerich himself sets out at length
four different stages in the
development of what he calls "the
policy of extermination."
- October 1939, the resettlement
programme;
- Summer 1941, the resettlement in
the occupied Soviet Union, the
transition from terrorism to ethnic
cleansing;
- September 1941, Hitler's
decision to deport Jews from the
Reich, first to occupied Poland,
then further east in the spring of
1942;
- End of April 1942 or early May
1942, The Decision to murder all
Jews regardless.
It is this specific allegation --
that Hitler at this time took the
definitive decision to kill all the
Jews during the war, rather than just
deport them or wait until the war was
over -- that obliges me to speak. I
wait first for a dozen other
questioners to make their points, and
as they run out of steam I then make my
question.
Longerich
may be an expert on the Final Solution,
I flatter him, but having spent twenty
years or more researching the actual
decision making process at the very
highest level, I find myself troubled
by the way he has skipped around the
issue of The Decision. Why has he
ignored the existence of documents of
that very period, April/May 1942, which
show Hitler actively intervening in a
negative sense? I read out the brief
Reichs Ministry of Justice [Franz
Schlegelberger was acting minister]
memorandum
of the spring of 1942, in which
Hans Lammers, head of the Reich
Chancellery, tells the ministry that
the Führer has repeatedly ordained
that he wants the Final Solution
postponed until after the war is
over.
How can the speaker possibly square
that with his theory of an April/May
1942 decision? It may be that he has
quoted and dealt with the document in
his book, I purr (though he obviously
has not). But these documents cannot
just be ignored. They have to be
properly, and academically,
addressed.
The audience looks to Longerich with
curiosity for his answer. Instead, the
chairman speaks:
"Dr
Longerich has asked me to state that
he is not prepared to answer
questions from you, Mr Irving. We
have freedom to speak here," he
adds, "but he has the freedom to
refuse to reply." "Are there any
other questions..?"
There
is a little gasp from the audience. I
say simply, "Eine grosse Feigheit," --
in German so that he can understand it:
then translate for the rest of the
audience, "A rotten coward."
True: what moral cowards infest the
German world of Academe. Afterwards
several members of the audience come up
to me, asking to have a look at the
document I mentioned. For Longerich --
it does not exist. There is no debate.
He wants to preach only to believers. A
true and pious follower of the
Deborah Lipstadt School of
History: a belief in the ability of
what should have happened to replace
what probably did. Nietzsche
said something similar, but modern
German academics are probably ignorant
of that too.
PICTURE:
David
Irving (centre) and Spanish
publisher Pedro Varela demonstrating
outside the Sender Freies Berlin
radio building against cowardly
German historians, October 3,
1989.
THE
Chairman stutters, 'Nobody is frightened
of debate ...'
write
to David Irving