[images added by this
website]  - London, Sunday January 22, 2006
'Hitler?
He was good in parts' The
right-wing historian David Irving was arrested in
Austria last year for denying the Holocaust and
faces trial next month. From his Viennese prison,
he gives his first interview to German author and
academic Malte Herwig, who asks if arrogance
is at the heart of Irving's desire for outrage - or
something more sinister by Malte
Herwig AS darkness descends
upon the thick walls of Vienna's ancient Josefstadt
courthouse, the adjacent prison compound comes to
life. Shouts and cries echo across the inner
courtyard as the inmates talk to each other in a
plethora of languages. The Englishman in Block C
looks up briefly from the stack of papers that is
lying on the small wooden table in front of him and
listens before he resumes his writing. 'I'm writing my memoirs - about 20
pages each day,' David Irving tells me the
next morning when I visit him in the Viennese
prison that has been his home since the Austrian
police arrested him in November last year on
charges of denying the Holocaust. I had been sitting in a squalid
little waiting room for an hour together with large
families arguing with each other and teenage
mothers pushing prams around. One of their
relatives is behind bars for threatening to kill
his wife, another has been arrested for drug
offences. 'If only all the inmates were as well
behaved as he is,' a prison guard sighed when I
asked him about Irving. No, I think, as my number
comes up and I enter the high security meeting
room, you wouldn't normally expect an historian and
writer among the thieves, pimps and drug dealers
held here. But there he is, sitting behind a
thick pane of bulletproof glass, smartly dressed in
a dark blue suit and tie, telephone in hand. 'It's
nonsense to put someone in prison for his views,'
he says in impeccable, accent-free German. 'It's
like having a law that prohibits wearing yellow
collars.' Irving is referring to Austria's
Verbotsgesetz, a constitutional law dating
back to 1945 which not only bans National Socialist
or neo-Nazi organisations but makes incitement to
neo-Nazi activity and the glorification or praise
of National Socialist ideology illegal. It also
prohibits public denial, belittlement, approval, or
justification of National Socialist crimes,
including the Holocaust. While other countries such
as Germany and Poland have anti-Nazi laws too,
Austria's Verbotsgesetz is particularly strict,
carrying a maximum sentence of 20 years. With an
average of 25 convictions each year, it is also
enforced vigorously by the judiciary. In 1989 the Austrian public
prosecutor issued an arrest warrant for Irving, who
had claimed during lectures in Vienna and Leoben
that the 'gas chambers in Auschwitz never existed'.
Austria's then Federal Chancellor Franz
Vranitzky publicly warned the British historian
that 'if he should ever turn up here again, he'll
be locked up immediately'. When I ask Irving why he still
accepted the invitation to speak before a
right-wing Viennese student fraternity, he feigns
surprise.  He
has been to Austria twice since 1989, he says, to
visit Goebbels's ex-lover, Lída
Baarová, (right, on Jul 3 1993) and
there were never any problems. 'Helsinki
Sanomat ran an article on it with pictures. You
can look it up there,' Irving adds, ever fond of
citing obscure sources to bolster his claims. They treat him well in prison, but,
Irving confides, he lacks money and equipment:
'Thank God someone sent me some ink.' Then again,
when he doesn't show himself off as an innocent
victim pursued by the powerful forces of what he
calls the 'enemies of truth', Irving likes to show
off his wealth. He may have had to sell his
spacious Mayfair townhouse after losing the case
against Deborah Lipstadt and Penguin in 2000, but
now, he boasts, he has something even better. 'We
just moved into a enormous luxury flat near Downing
Street. I did that deliberately in order to
provoke.' Irving, it becomes abundantly clear,
hates Blair, New Labour, and the multi-coloured
society of today's Britain. 
'My little daughter,' he adds with a
sheepish grin, 'of course thinks it's cool that
daddy is in prison'; and somehow one cannot help
feeling that daddy himself relishes having another
big fight on his hands. Irving loves to cast
himself as an innocent maverick single-handedly
taking on powerful governments, the mighty press
and influential lobby organisations. He signed 60
blank cheques before leaving London, and packed six
shirts for what was supposed to be a two-day
trip. 'The boy scouts, you know,' he says,
solemnly. 'Always be prepared, that's my motto.' It
is as if his lifelong 'revisionist' mission has
been nothing but a Boys' Own-style adventure for an
eccentric who never quite grew up. In fact, Irving
once praised his fellow revisionists as 'staunch
and unflinching soldiers in what our brave comrade
[fellow revisionist historian] Robert
Faurisson has called "this great
adventure".' Why did he risk going on a journey
that he knew might get him into trouble? 'I'm from
a family of officers, and I'm an Englishman. We
march toward the gunfire,' he snarls into the
receiver. Now that he is doing his rounds in a
prison yard, however, he finds that he didn't pack
the right marching equipment. 'I have very
expensive shoes,' he sighs, 'but they are coming
apart from walking outside in the yard.' On 20 February, the day of his trial,
Irving tells me, he will wear his blue pinstripe
suit. It's the same £2,700 suit tailored at
Savile Row for his London trial six years ago, the
costume he uses when he plays his other stock role,
that of the serious historian and successful
businessman, for whom travel bans and anti-Nazi
laws are nothing but an infringement of free trade
and competition.  'I'm
only responsible for my books,' Irving exclaims.
'But I even found a copy of my Hitler biography
here in the prison library.' It is a classic Irving
manoeuvre. He is a master conjurer of red herrings.
By pointing to an apparent inconsistency in the
authorities' behaviour, he elegantly glosses over
the question of whether he isn't also responsible
for the things he says in seedy backrooms and
provincial diners.
The trouble with him is that, often,
three out of four things he says are right. There
are few others as adept as Irving at harvesting
lies from seeds of truth. The prison library did
stock one of his books, the governor tells me
later, but it is the one on the Hungarian uprising.
[Website comment: It
was the prison library at Graz-Jakomini that held
Mr Irving's Hitler biography, not Vienna-
Josefstadt prison]. 'They burnt my books,' Irving sighs.
He knows only too well that book burning is taboo
and swiftly slips into the victim's role. When
I remind him that some of his books were pulped by
the publishers because of legal actions
[Not quite
so], which isn't quite the same
as 'burning books', Irving swiftly moves on to
another topic. After all, he has
never been reluctant himself to drag his critics to
court. He admits that if he is not released in
February, things will get difficult for him. But
then he feels he's not alone. 'I have received many
letters of support already,' Irving claims,
proudly.  In
the afternoon, I meet his lawyer, Elmar
Kresbach, who produces a bundle of letters from
his briefcase. Kresbach, a smartly dressed,
formidable barrister who normally represents
murderers and Mafia members, shakes his head at the
incoherent and confused hate mail that has clogged
his letterbox since he took over Irving's mandate.
'He doesn't understand that himself,' Kresbach says
of his client. 'I think he is becoming fed up with
these nutty people, too.' Kresbach maintains that
his British client cannot be expected to be
familiar enough with the Austrian political scene
to know where the groups and societies that invited
him stand politically. Irving himself claims to be
ignorant of the extreme right-wing ideology of his
hosts.
It is a claim that is hard to believe
when you visit Willi Lasek in the
Documentation Centre of Austrian Resistance. A
balding and softly spoken middle-aged man, the
archivist looks every inch the opposite of the
bullish Irving as he sits behind his desk in an
office crammed to the ceiling with files. And
Lasek, unlike Irving, is extraordinarily cautious
with his statements. 'I cannot tell you whether
Irving actively denied the holocaust recently,' he
says as he picks up two bulging files labelled
"David Irving" from the shelf, 'but this will show
you that his contacts to the Austrian and German
neo-Nazi scene go back all the way to the early
1980s.'  The
boxes reveal a stack of yellowed flyers announcing
a 1984 Irving lecture, in which 'the courageous
taboo-breaker of history' would reveal 'sensational
secrets' about the Third Reich. At the bottom of
the page there is a rallying call for 'solidarity
with Rudolf
Hess', Hitler's one-time deputy (left). In 1984, Irving had been invited to
Austria by the convicted right-wing extremist
Norbert Burger, an honoured alumnus of the Olympia
student fraternity, the same society that Irving
was supposed to address last year. But then as now,
his lecture never took place. As Irving tried to
give a press conference in Vienna's Cafe Landtmann,
he was arrested and thrown out of the country.
'This gentleman is not welcome here,' a police
spokesman told the public. Irving successfully
appealed against the decision, but when he returned
to Austria in 1989 for a lecture series, his
notoriety was already such that all but two of the
talks had to be cancelled because of public
protests. At around that time, Irving
notoriously asked why it never occurred to Jews 'to
look into the mirror and say, why am I disliked?'
Did he ever look into the mirror, I inquire, and
ask himself the same question? 'I know what I'd
have to do in order to be liked again,' he replies
with a grim look, 'but they're not going to get
it.' Irving is as obsessed with detail as he is
with being right. Then again, he sometimes throws
all pretence of being a serious scholar away for a
publicity stunt. Has the German dictator become a
surrogate father figure for Irving, who grew up
without his father? 'I wouldn't go that far,'
Irving answers warily. But what does he make of
Hitler? 'He's like the curate's egg - good in
parts,' comes the somewhat quaint reply. 'I'm not
right-wing, you see,' he continues. 'I do enjoy
reading The Guardian.' [Website
comment: The Curate's Egg is a famous Punch
cartoon, Nov 9, 1895, drawn by George du Maurier:
The bishop is saying "I'm afraid you've got a bad
egg, Mr Jones", to which his guest, a curate -- a
very junior cleric -- replies: "Oh, no, my Lord, I
assure you that parts of it are
excellent!"] Perhaps what some of Irving's critics
have claimed is true after all: that the man has no
real convictions and no consistent ideological
programme. Robert
Jan van Pelt, who was a witness in the
London trial, thinks Irving is a hysteric. 'He is a
fairly good speaker,' van Pelt explains over the
phone, 'but he gets all the energy from his
audience, and then he says what they want to hear.'
And over the past years, van Pelt adds, Irving's
company consisted only of right-wing extremists and
Holocaust-deniers.  I
ask Irving about his
spectacular U-turn on the Hitler Diaries in
1983, when, after first denouncing them as
fakes, he changed his mind and endorsed them as
genuine in a Sunday Times article a
fortnight later. 'It was just a joke. It was
entertainment. All that had nothing to do with
historiography,' Irving grins. 'It's not important
who wins, but how you play.'
It comes as no surprise that Irving's
view of history is totally devoid of moral
considerations. He is too amoral to even comprehend
[sic]
that his statements about the Holocaust may hurt
survivors. His view of history is not unlike that
of the National Socialists. History, like nature,
is red in tooth and claw. The stronger win, and it
is only the strong that Irving reserves his
admiration for. Someone like 'Bomber'
Harris. With his first book, the young David
Irving drew attention to the horrors of the Allies'
bombing of Dresden in 1945. Yet he admires Sir
Arthur Harris [below,
with Irving, 1962] as a 'great man'. 'I'm
referring to him as a commander, like
Dönitz,' Irving exclaims. 'If you can
send 20,000 young men to their deaths each day,
then you are a great commander.' Small wonder that
Irving admires Hitler too.  Suddenly,
it all begins to make sense: The Third Reich as a
vast playground, his fellow 'revisionists' as
brothers in arms and enough material for a host of
adventure novels like the ones Irving enjoyed as a
child back in the Essex of the Forties. A time when
England wasn't a multicultural society yet, the
Empire still existed and a small boy listened with
dreamy eyes to the stories about his uncle who
served in the Bengal Lancers.
Irving misses the Empire and the lost
sense of security offered by a society in which
everyone knew their place. He is 'naturally, a
monarchist' and thinks that the Austrians are
'simply jealous of our monarchy'. What about your outrageous
statements, I ask, like the one about more people
having died on the back seat of Ted
Kennedy's car than in the gas chambers at
Auschwitz? [Website:
the correct statement is: "More women died on the
back seat of Senator Kennedy's car at
Chappaquiddick than in that gas chamber at
Auschwitz" - i.e., the one they show the tourists,
built in 1948.] Doesn't he think
that's deeply offensive? 'It's the English way, and
it's not always polite.' Irving likes such tasteless jokes; he
finds nothing wrong with making fun of Holocaust
survivors and dressing it up as prankish humour.
His desire to cause outrage seems rooted in the
sort of reckless arrogance you find in some public
school boys who think the world belongs to them. It
may not be a coincidence that he hails from a
country where jokes about the 'Führer' are
still beloved by the tabloid press and where what
passes for polite society enjoys cracking jokes
about Hitler. There is no doubt that Irving has as
many critics in Britain as elsewhere, but he also
thrives on the tolerance of the liberal majority in
Britain, who tolerate the most tasteless of
statements in the name of free speech. Since Irving's arrest, Austria, too,
has witnessed a new debate on Holocaust denial and
free speech. The sociologist Christian
Fleck, Lord Dahrendorf and others have
spoken up against criminalising opinions even if
they are as vile as those of David Irving. Even
Deborah
Lipstadt has suggested that Irving should
be let go. 'If you had said to me a couple of
months ago that I would be asking for David
Irving's release,' she says, 'I would have said you
are crazy.' But Lipstadt doesn't want to be on the
side of censorship, she says, and she doesn't want
Irving to become a martyr to free speech. The smartly-dressed prisoner behind
the thick glass couldn't agree more. 'I would be
less hopeful about the outcome of my trial if I
didn't know that every intellectual in the world is
on my side,' Irving exclaims triumphantly.' In an
instant, Irving has changed his costume again and
now enters the stage as the reckless gambler who,
by deliberately risking his arrest in Austria, has
confounded his critics. They now find themselves in
the uncomfortable position of appealing for the
release of the man whose views they detest. It's a
high but perhaps necessary price to pay. Let Irving
talk, and he will unravel himself. Perhaps his last
costume will be that of the court jester. Guardian
Unlimited © Guardian News and Media Limited
2006  Donate
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