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Unless correspondents ask us not to, this Website will post selected letters that it receives and invite open debate. |
Jennifer L of Lipstadt's home town Atlanta asks questions (Friday, October 17, 2003) about the Lipstadt trial, and gets answers
Q & A on the Lipstadt Trial
I'M A HISTORY MAJOR at a local Atlanta university. I'm currently writing my senior thesis and have decided to evaluate the trial that you were involved with in 2000 with Dr. [Deborah] Lipstadt. I would like to present my thesis as unbiased as I possibly can; therefore, I would like to ask you a few questions with regards to the trial. I would greatly appreciate your time and answers.
Why Dr. Lipstadt when other authors have clearly written
about your style of historiography?
Don Guttenplan wrote in The New York Times that I told him that "It may be unfortunate for Professor Lipstadt that she is the one who finds herself dragged out of the line and shot," but it was not quite as random as that; she had led the campaign in 1996 to bludgeon my New York Publishers, St Martins' press, into halting publication of my biography of Dr Joseph Goebbels, which had also been selected as History Book of the Month (May 1996) by Doubleday Inc.
I don't have to tell you that this capitulation by St
Martins Press (SMP) to weeks of blackmail, threats, street
demonstrations, threatened walkouts by their Jewish
editorial staff, etc., caused me much worry, and it was at a
time of great personal grief in our family. It also led to
considerable financial loss. It turned out that she had
never even read the book she was protesting about.
When we got her private papers, through the legal discovery process, we found she had not even included my name in her original manuscript of her turgid book Denying the Holocaust, but had been put up to it, I am sorry to say, by the otherwise respectable historian Prof Yehuda Bauer of Jerusalem.
Her papers also revealed that the first publisher who commissioned this muck-bucket task from Lipstadt, was none other than the infamous Czech-born embezzler and mega-fraudster "Robert Maxwell" (born Jan Hoch).
To have the product of eight years' very hard work and research, in archives around the world including the KGB archives in Moscow, brought to nothing by this jumped-up and ignorant high-school teacher at Emory, using her network of Jewish friends, might not have provoked a response from many writers, but she got what she deserved when I sued her for defamation. It certainly came as a terrible shock to her. She is not accustomed to people answering back.
She
fears debate: when she held a public lecture at Emory some
years back, at which she invited questions, I rose toward
the end of the question time and asked one question -- since
she had smeared me in her talk, not knowing that I was
present among her listeners: she called in armed police to
have me removed from the lecture theater!
So much for the First Amendment: but she also shows that she holds that in equal contempt, regularly advising her listeners that it is binding only on Governments, not on individuals or other bodies. Words of encouragement to bigots and tinpot Hitlers everywhere.
You will find from her many talks around the world that she and her huge legal team had little confidence in the legal process as such, and that her lawyers, as she boasts, did what they could to "destabilize" me as their sole opponent in the months ahead of the hearing, trying to bury me in an avalanche of paper and using other less tasteful methods.
On
the day of my daughter's funeral, a few days ahead of the
trial, a local flowershop sent
an expensive wreath with a concealed message of hatred,
mocking her death (my daughter had no legs and was
permanently disabled). And, yes, it did destabilize me.
After the Trial judgment, she added to her stock speech when visiting Israeli settlements the suggestion that I was Amalek, which is understood among orthodox Jewish populations to be a veiled incitement to murder. I am still standing however, and I know how to protect myself -- among other things, by bringing actions in defamation. The wearying legal process does have its advantages.
WHAT communities supported you during the trial?
None. There is no global Irvingite conspiracy. But I have
built up a worldwide circle of several thousand friends who
help me defend myself against the international network of
the traditional enemies of free speech and their ugly,
violent methods.
WERE you surprised with the verdict?
-- Until then, I confess, I had always assumed, being
English, that the English legal system was incapable of
intimidation or purchase. I now know better (my late father
once warned me, around 1966, that it is the best that money
can buy). Lipstadt and her friends (see my answer above)
poured Six Million Dollars into court, all of which they
have lost. They will have poured similar amounts into the
grubby hands of their neutral expert
witnesses and those of the world's media.
You will find if you read the Trial diary on my website (which even the trial judge, Mr Justice Gray, praised for its even-handedness, in a private letter via his Clerk to an American during the trial) that on the day the infamous Judgment was read out, a rented mob of leftist thugs outside the Courthouse in London pelted me with missiles as I entered (most of them hit The Washington Post correspondent, above, whom I had providently stationed to my left when I saw them); and that the Israeli ambassador himself was in court, flanked by gun-toting armed guards -- unheard of in English court history -- and that your President Clinton and the president of the state of Israel sent letters of commendation to the judge and Lipstadt.
HAVE you continued writing or do you have a plans for
authoring more on WWII history? -- Let me put it this way: I
have not stopped writing. I have pursued this life of crime
ever since I clocked out for the last time from the Thyssen
steelworks in the Ruhr, Germany, in 1960. As work on my
Hitler biography ran down ten years ago, I started work on a
major biography of Churchill, also written only from primary
sources, in 1972, and published the second thousand-page
volume in the year of the Lipstadt Trial! The third volume
will appear in 2005. I am also working on a definitive
account of the life and motivations of Heinrich Himmler,
chief of the SS, based again entirely on original sources.
Most of his papers were seized by the Americans, and there
are many of his private papers and albums in private
American hands.
WHAT was your motivating factor to present WWII history
in your style of historiography? What was the contributing
factor to evaluating WWII and Holocaust history in your
style of historiography (i.e. What caused you to dispute the
way the Holocaust has been portrayed in history)?
I
am not interested in the Holocaust per se, being neither
Jewish nor in my estimation anti-Jewish. (I don't like some
Jews: Lipstadt is a prime example. That does not make me
anti-Jewish).
As a steelworker in 1959/60, when I first began to learn of the sufferings of innocent people on both sides during the war, I decided to write about them and those responsible for inflicting such suffering. This interest has continued into the era of the Iraq war, which shows that that the world's statesmen have learned nothing from the Nuremberg trials.
HAVE you suffered any backlash from the community that
supported Dr. Lipstadt? If so, any action taken against the
community? -- I keep my powder dry, and know what to do
when occasion arises.
WHEN did you decide to sue Dr. Lipstadt?
When
I first obtained a copy of her book, some time in 1995 or
early in 1996. I had to wait until the book had been
published within the jurisdiction of the British courts. Had
she been less greedy for royalties, and kept the book's
publication to her own terrain, there would have been
nothing that I could do, as the New York Times vs. Sullivan
renders libel actions in the USA virtually impossible.
Without that legal precedent, your Kmart and other magazine
shelves would be empty: no National Enquirer, and none of
the rest!
Even in England, it took some time to get the libel
action off the ground. Among other things, she hid, she
hunkered down, she refused to accept service of the court
documents, etc -- she did all the things an errant husband
would do, to avoid being served with court papers. To outfox
her on that I had to take out a separate action in the High
Court -- working all the time without lawyers, unlike her
and her wealthy Hintermänner, Spielberg
(right), Bronfman, Abe Foxman, and the
rest of that gang -- to get official sanction to have her
served out of the jurisdiction by officials of the British
Foreign Office and the local consulate in Atlanta. When
permission for that was granted, she finally came out of her
funkhole and appointed lawyers in London.
I thank you for your time and any efforts that you can take to answer these questions as promptly as you can.
Jennifer L
[full name provided to us]
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