Jchron Article 191007B

nemies of Free Speech origins of anti-semitism I famously once said in Canada that more women died on the back seat of Senator Edward Kennedy’s car at Chappaquiddick than were ever gassed in that building. London, Friday, October 19, 2007 Feature article Why Irving regretted his days in court By Simon Rocker, Rachel Fletcher and Bernard Josephs IT was in an English courtroom eight years ago that David Irving ‘s reputation was comprehensively shredded.

His attempt to sue American academic Professor Deborah Lipstadt for calling him a Holocaust denier ended in spectacular failure with a damning verdict on his character and professional credibility from the judge . Even then, Irving had come to court claiming that he was no denier but simply a dissident historian who quibbled over minutiae. But under forensic cross-examination from Professor Lipstadt’s QC, Richard Rampton , right , Irving’s case unravelled.

At one point, Mr Rampton recalled a speech given by Irving in 1991 on the publication of his revised book, Hitler’s War , in which he had boasted: “You will not find the Holocaust mentioned in one line, not even a footnote. Why should we? If something didn’t happen, then you don’t even dignify it with a footnote.” At his trial, Irving conceded that “certainly more than a million, certainly less than four million” Jews died at the hands of the Nazis.

But he also referred to the gas chambers as an invention of “British propaganda” and refused to accept that there had been a planned mass extermination programme at Auschwitz-Birkenau . “You have come to believe… that the Nazis did not use gas chambers for the extermination of Jews — let alone millions of Jews?” Mr Rampton asked. Irving replied: “Yes, I have become very sceptical of that element of the story.”

While it was likely that there had been “some kind of gassing” at Birkenau, Irving told the judge, it was on an experimental basis. When confronted with evidence that traces of cyanide had been found in ventilator grating taken from a crematorium at the camp, Irving argued that the particular room had been used as a “gassing cellar for fumigating objects or cadavers”.

As he continued along this line, Mr Justice Gray interjected: “I am sorry, this seems a crude question, but what is the point of gassing a corpse?” To disinfect the bodies of “the typhus-bearing lice that killed them”, Irving contended. But his plausibility began to vanish as Mr Rampton queried: “What would be the point of gassing a corpse that was shortly going to be incinerated?”

Since his courtroom humiliation, Irving has tried to maintain his “campaign for real history” on his voluble website. It does not give the impression of a penitent.

Only this month, Irving confides in his online diary, after being interviewed by the American Jewish newspaper, The Forward : “Basically, I am not saying anything I have not been saying for years: something did happen: it was at other, less commercially exploitable, sites than at Auschwitz [I mentioned the hot-dog stand there] where the killings were on a lesser scale.” His website still offers a $1,000 reward for “proof that Hitler knew of The Holocaust”.

When one reader three years ago raised the question of the Wannsee conference of 1942 — to decide the Nazis’ final solution to the Jewish question — Irving wrote: “Nobody at that conference talked about killing Jews, let alone about a Hitler Order to that effect.” A year later, in answer to an inquiry from a schoolgirl, Irving said: “Lots of Jews were killed. In wartime lots of people get killed — see Iraq — sometimes the ones who were guilty for the war, sometimes the innocent.

See the air raid on Dresden . That was a holocaust. I am on the side of the innocents.” In his account of his visit to Poland in March this year, Irving refers to the “alleged gas chambers or chamber” at Treblinka and “the alleged gas chamber” at Majdanek.

Auschwitz fakery One of the fake watch towers installed by the Polish authorities; see enlargement also The crematorium at Auschwitz I, “rebuilt” in 1948: the chimney is not even connected to the building, there are no stains, and the doors don’t fit. At the site of the small crematorium at Auschwitz , he writes: “I famously once said in Canada that more women died on the back seat of Senator Edward Kennedy’s car at Chappaquiddick than were ever gassed in that building.”

In fact, a videotaped version of the remark was produced at the libel trial, where Irving had alluded not to the particular building, but “the gas chambers of Auschwitz”. At the end of the entries on his Polish visit, Irving’s website offers links to “related stories”, including one described as “a well-produced revisionist film on problems with the Holocaust controversy”.

Click on the link and you come to a video by an unidentified maker that proclaims itself: “A holocaust denial movie, in 30 episodes, on the subject of Treblinka, Sobibor and Belzec.” An excerpt from one episode says: “This young black man might be thinking that the slavery that happened to his ancestors is nothing compared to the holocaust. Except what happened to his ancestors really happened.” Trial extracts taken from The Holocaust on Trial by DD Guttenplan | [ Click for the actual ]