THE yard was a kaleidoscope of strange faces at 11:30 each
morning that summer, as new prisoners arrived, and others
fled outside from the heat of their cells. That same month
as I was shuffling anti-clockwise round the crowded yard in
the sunshine, and occasionally pausing to read another
chapter of a Graham Greene novel in my favorite spot along
the sunshine wall, a prisoner came over the baked mud and
grass patch in the centre, and rather shyly asked if I was
the English writer.I nodded cautiously. "There is somebody over there who'd
like to speak with you," he said, and beckoned over a slim,
educated looking young man in his thirties hovering in the
far corner.
His name, he said, was Gitan W.; I won't write his
full name as he is still a prisoner; and it may not even
have been his real name, as two searches of the Austrian
prison computer database on my behalf by friendly officers
failed to raise any trace of him. Prison is full of
mysteries.
He had been passing through Vienna a few days ago, his
pockets full of euros, he described, when police arrested
him -- and then the whole story came tumbling out.
"I am a Sinti, a gypsy," he said. "We are not like the
Romas. They are just lazy layabouts; we are a hard working,
educated clan, with careers and professions like teachers
and lawyers. The Romas come originally from India," he
continued. "They are crooks, thieves, and cheats, they do
nothing but thieve all day, and sing all night."
At the mention of the late-night lullabies I nodded with
a weariness born of familiarity.
"We live on a housing estate, a project, outside
Stuttgart," he continued his tale, "we are awarded 500 euros
a month by the German Federal Republic, and we pay no taxes
-- these concessions are a recognition of our suffering as
Sintis under the Nazis. My father and grandfather were in
Auschwitz," he
explained. As a court- and newspaper-nominated "denier," I
stiffened slightly, still not guessing where his story was
heading.
Shortly he began to pour out his whole extraordinary
case: he had been driving through Vienna to Bulgaria a few
days before, carrying a large sum of euros in cash, to buy
oil paintings. He was a dealer -- "We buy up unwanted family
junk, and sell antiques." (I still do not know
whether to put quotation marks around that latter word or
not.) He had checked into the Intercontinental Hotel and
paid cash in advance for the night, but in completing the
registration form which the Austrian police still require of
their country's hotels, he had entered himself simply with
his family name "W." -- omitting the first name, Gitan.
I understood why, I said. They don't like gypsies in
Austria, whether Roma or Sinti in origin. I motioned him to
go on, and he did. At two a.m. the police had rousted him
out of his room, at the instance of the hotel management,
and searched his property.
Here the story took a totally unexpected turn: In his
wallet they had found, carefully folded, the fading and
yellowing original death warrant which Rudolf
Höss, the commandant of Auschwitz,
had pronounced in July 1942, sixty-five years before, on his
grandfather and a dozen other Sintis who had staged a mutiny
in the camp that month, killing a number of SS
guards.[*]
Going into a degree of detail that again made me briefly
suspicious, Gitan described the document -- it carried the
swastika emblem, rubber stamps, the commandant's signature,
and the names of the other unfortunates sentenced to death
by hanging. Before his execution, Gitan's grandfather had
given it to his father; the father let Gitan carry it with
him as a memento, which is why the Viennese police had found
it, a few days before, in his wallet.
And? I looked at him quizzically, waiting for an
explanation why he was here in prison. At five a.m. that
night, he continued, he was formally arrested, charged with
concealment of a genocide, and brought here to Josefstadt
prison.
I gasped, but the young man's story grew even wilder: the
investigating magistrate had been as perplexed as I was, and
had promised a swift hearing in five days' time, and
indicated he would be released. He had phoned his wife back
in Stuttgart with the good news. Instead, he was taken to
Stein prison, which I knew from yard talk was one of the
nastier prisons in the Austrian system. Here plain-clothes
investigators had visited him from, he was told, the Israeli
embassy.
The lady judge presiding over the subsequent hearing in
Vienna would not hear of a swift release. In Austria all
prisoners are guilty until they prove their innocence. In
Austria all accused must always show remorse. "Do you regret
your deed?" she had challenged the prisoner, as is the
Austrian custom.
Deed? Gitan W. protested that he was innocent -- the
document was his family property, he had nothing to show
regret for. His court-appointed lawyer shifted uneasily and
went red.
The judge repeated her qurestion, more sharply: "Do you
regret your deed?" Gitan could see his lawyer nodding
fervently as a signal to him. So he shrugged and agreed that
he did feel remorse.
"That is just as well," said the judge, "otherwise the
sentence would have been ten years. You will serve two
years."
As he was led out in a daze, he stopped and called out to
the Judge: "You'll go home tonight to your own bed, and I
won't see mine, or my wife and kids for two years. . ."
She ordered him to be silent, and motioned dismissively
to the guards.
The Viennese prosecutor smirked. "Auf Wiederseh'n,
Zigeuner! Farewell, Gypsy!"
"My name is not Gypsy, it's Gitan W--," he retorted, as
he was escorted out.
"Z'gainer bleebt Z'gainer," sneered the
prosecutor, lapsing into the Viennese dialect. Once a gypsy,
always a gypsy.
I asked if he would appeal, and he bitterly said he would
not: he could just about handle the two years, and sentences
on appeal were often increased -- half a dozen words I did
not really want to hear.
I wrote a six-page note on what he had told me, and
tested him during the exercise period the next day for more
details, just as I had the "noble" trickster earlier. His
account remained identical, with one piquant added detail:
"The Judge was a Jewess," he recalled, as an afterthought,
and he gave me her name. "Sonja Allyes."
I wanted to ask him the next day for his court file
number and his lawyer's name, but they had already removed
him in the Krokodil to Stein. I mailed my six-page
note to Rolf
Hochhuth in Berlin -- I knew that the playwright
could make a fine two-act drama out of this real life human
story. Act 1: 1942 Mutiny in Auschwitz; Act 2, 2006 Trial in
Vienna. The letter never reached Rolf.
Everything is monitored here, I wrote in a
letter later that broiling hot summer. An Italian
nobleman is paying Jessica's next school fees. The world
is full of Irving-lovers (and Austria-haters).I'm still reading Evelyn
Waugh's Decline and Fall (his son
Auberon Waugh was a good friend of
mine, who once wrote in The Daily Telegraph, "I cannot
help asking myself what sort of truth it is" that
requires the protection of fines and prison sentences to
survive.)
After I replaced Dr Elmar Kresbach with Dr
Schaller, the prison officers searched me only once more.
This time they subjected me to a very different treatment:
the door was flung open without warning, and I was curtly
ordered to stand up and stop writing in mid-sentence -- it
reminded me of Hungary's
1956 revolutionary prime minister, the luckless "Reform
Communist" Imre Nagy, dragged away from his own
writings in mid-sentence to be hanged -- and I was escorted
to an empty cell, ordered to strip naked and searched.
This time their search of my cell, No. 19, lasted over an
hour, and when I was finally escorted back to it, the scene
defied all the usual hurricane-aftermath clichés.
Every tin and packet had been torn open, papers strewn
around, and much of my property had drifted down to the
floor (a level I was now finding more difficult to
reach).
Again the officers left my cell empty-handed, and this
time there were no smiles. Two other cells were also
searched, but given only the briefest once-over. The next
day a trusty told me that the Block chief, the same
Inspector J., had confided to him that Judge Liebetreu had
ordered this special search, as the prison had been informed
that Dr Schaller had smuggled an item of contraband into me
at his last visit. The two other cells had been searched as
a blind.
In fact Schaller was not just korrekt, but
over-scrupulous: the Austria judiciary had disbarred him
some years back for five years for his nationalist views,
and even now it allowed him to act only as a
Strafverteidiger, defence counsel, and not as a
Rechtsanwalt, attorney, like young Dr Kresbach.
I picked up my pen and resumed writing where I had left
off, and I wondered who had wrongly fingered Schaller, and
why.
I HAD been imprisoned for eight months, most of the time
locked down alone for twenty-three or twenty-four hours a
day. I now had a small new television in my cell (when I
eventually left, I donated it to the prison wing for other
needy prisoners to borrow). I tried not to think of the
disasters that had befallen us in London. "Tip," I wrote
sardonically to friends in Chicago on their national
holiday, July 4: "Become a controversial historian. Assemble
forty-five years of stuff. Watch it
ALL being seized and destroyed.
Simplifies subsequent moves, evictions, removals, etc., no
end."
I envied the Americans the freedom of speech that they
still enjoy, protected by their Constitution. It used to
exist in Britain too. In that letter, I added:
I HAVE hung that excellent copy of the Magna
Carta on my wall. I just hope the turnkeys can read it
when they search the cell, as they often do. The TV is about two feet from my nose, so it takes
minimum effort to adjust it. It's off all day, however,
except for the Russian-language channel's "Novosti"
(News) at midday and CNN in the evening. Oh, and C.S.I.
Miami (for glimpses of favorite haunts) and, of course,
Monk with Tony Shaloub.
Most of the time I have my small radio on, tuned to
the St. Stephen's Cathedral radio station nearby, which
provides wall-to-wall (in my case a distance of five
feet) classical music.
As for this continued incarceration, I regard it
now as an Oscars-style "Lifetime Achievement Award", made
in recognition of writing forty years of inconvenient
history.
On July 24, the Procurator General informed Dr Herbert
Schaller that he would recommend that my application to set
aside the February 20 judgment should not go before the
Supreme Court, the OGH. It had taken three months to get
this far. I wrote to a correspondent in London, that
day:
Schaller will now demand an oral hearing of
the application by the OGH, to which he is entitled. If
that fails [it did], the main appeal will
be heard by the lower appeal court, the OLG. Either way,
it is expected that the appeal will be heard in September
[in fact late December].I have been in solitary confinement on political
charges since November 11. I am continuing to write, and
thank the hundreds who write me from all over the world
every month, especially those writing anonymously from
Germany and Austria -- evidence, in my view, that these
citizens still fear that they are living in Nazi-like
police states.
As the autumn approached I followed outside events with
more than usual curiosity, especially the tragic and
needlessly prolonged fighting in the Middle East. Like
hundreds of millions of fathers around the world, I wept for
the little Palestinian daughter running scared and frantic
hither and thither about that Mediterranean beach, after all
seven members of her family had been killed by an Israeli
artillery shell, and sensed impotent fury as the
Süddeutsche Zeitung, like all the hidebound
German media, tried to mitigate and expiate and reason and
exonerate the government which had committed this
atrocity.
A week later full-scale war broke out -- the Palestinians
were held to blame, of course. To writers on history it all
seemed so familiar -- particularly the propaganda from both
sides, and the lies.
I have been very intrigued by the media
coverage of this Israel-Hizbollah conflict, I wrote to
one friend. I get the Süddeutsche Zeitung every day
and Die Zeit brought regularly to my cell by helpful
prison officers, and I follow the news bulletins on my
tiny TV -- we get Moscow Channel One, Turkish TV, CNN,
two Austrian, one German and a scattering of other
channels.The main German government channels were scolded
yesterday by former president Richard von Weizsäcker
for showing too much of the carnage inflicted on Lebanese
civilians by those nice folks next door [Israel],
whose ambassador to the U.N., the racist Dan Gillerman,
actually called the Lebanese "just animals" in one live
broadcast; I have seen only one newspaper reference, in
the SZ, to that Freudian slip.
I am more robust. In one speech to a Passau
audience I said that I had heard that people sometimes
wrote letters to "Richard von Speichellecker" -- Richard
von Lickspittle -- and that German postal workers knew
who that was and delivered them to his palace too! And
there has been no mention that Germany supplied many of
the tanks, guns, shells and bombs used against Lebanon,
free of charge!
But I digress. The war bulletins. Unlike other
recent wars, we have seen nothing of any actual ground
fighting between Israeli troops and Hizbollah guerrillas.
(Perhaps, as with Schindler's List, Mr. Spielberg will
later oblige). Correspondents were "embedded" -- i.e. in
bed with -- the IDF forces, but I never saw them step
outside that compound of artillery howitzers, whose
mission was to create a holocaust among the Lebanese
villages, a clear war crime, by the way.
The fighting stopped four days ago. We have still
not been told how many IDF tanks and armored vehicles
were destroyed by rocket-propelled grenades
[RPGs] -- and those tanks don't come cheap.
Other battlefield incidents have just vanished as
though they never happened. Hizbollah claimed to have
shot down an aircraft. Israel denied it. I saw with my
own eyes on the Turkish news bulletin a large flaming
object brought down over Beirut. Israel suggested it was
"a container". Robert Fisk saw the wreckage, mostly
unidentifiable but including what looked to him like a
helicopter rotor blade. Hizbollah claimed to have
attacked a warship. Israel muttered that a "Colombian
freighter" had been sunk. Again, nobody followed up.
As for the tank casualties, the wrecks were pushed
into the famous media Memory Hole, like in that popular
TV series where the losing robot warrior is toppled into
the pit.
Once, an early news bulletin showed telephoto
footage of a short column of tanks, and the lead tank
receiving an RPG [Panzerfaust] smack in the mouth
and blowing up. It vanished from all subsequent
bulletins; as did a later picture of RPG damage done to
the tracks of a main battle tank. Toward the end there
was another brief glimpse of an attack on three tanks --
the rear tank going into reverse, either also hit or
billowing out a white smoke screen. This clip also
vanished from later bulletins. It had not happened; and
they are all just animals.
We conspiracy-theorists and incorrigible extremists
all know Who Controls the Media. … The media have
served us poorly so far, and they have some explaining to
do.
THERE was another juicy media scandal that summer, which
gave me much cause for belated enjoyment. Back in 1977, my
main publisher in Germany, Hoffmann & Campe, who had
just published my Rommel
biography as a huge best-seller, told me privately that
leading leftwing novelist Günter Grass had
written them threatening that unless they refused to publish
any more books by "the Nazi" David Irving, he would publish
no books with them, and would put pressure on others too.
HoCa of course cravenly complied.
"This week, Oh Joy!," I wrote to a friend:
. . . the German press revealed that
Günter Grass had a "dirty little secret". He had
fought for the Waffen SS as a volunteer, 1944-1945. In a
letter to the Süddeutsche Zeitung I criticize him --
not for that, but for his hypocrisy.
The SZ of course did not publish it. They have their own
smear-priorities.
On September 5, a prison escort took me up to Dr Schaller
in an interview room. He was wearying, I could see, from his
strenuous eight-hour commute to and from Mannheim, Germany,
where he was acting in the endless trial of Zündel. He
told me he had heard that morning on radio and TV that the
Supreme Court (OGH) had, as recommended by the Procurator
General, refused to hear my appeal against the February 20
verdict; so the remaining appeal (against sentence) would
now go to the lower appeal court, the OLG.
It seemed odd to Schaller that he had had to read this in
the morning newspapers before the Court had actually
notified him.
It did not seem a good sign to me of the way things were
going, although he remained forcefully optimistic about the
outcome. I have had a lifetime, indeed a bellyful, of
optimistic lawyers. The light at the tunnel's end was
visibly receding. A new period of official foot-dragging now
began, but we now expected the appeal against the three-year
sentence to be heard by the OLG in November.
As the months trickled past, my health also went into
decline. The prison had recently promised me an exercise
bike for my cell, but it never came.
I confided to a friend in London, September 27, 2006:
My cash is now down to around 150 euros,
which will last two weeks -- mostly spent on stamps and
phone cards. I am getting a hundred letters a week, half
from strangers; I answer them all, and letters to the USA
cost 1.30 ¤ (around $2.00. . .)Still waiting for the appeal hearing, presumably in
November. Writing is going well, tho' today I am stricken
by a Great Lethargy, to which the detergent
[which I had accidentally swallowed one night in
mistake for lemon juice] may have contributed. At
least it wasn't bleach. That might have had the Coroner
guessing.
My writing was making good progress, so the new delay
made little difference to me. It was harder on Bente and
Jessica, now 12, in London, although I don't think they had
expected any different either. "We all know who is really
calling the shots here," I wrote to friends in London. To a
supporter in Chicago, a few days later, September 29, 2006 I
revealed that I knew from my brother that Bente, never well,
was in fact now becoming very ill, and she had undergone
several operations in London that summer.
I have given five instructions to Jessica on
comportment while Mummy's ill. No. 3 reads, "Cars run on
gasoline; Mummies run on hugs. So fill her with gallons
and gallons of hugs to keep her running smoothly till I
am free."
I was deeply concerned by this news from London. Under
Tony Blair's Labour Government the British health
service has collapsed. Twelve thousand people died last year
of infections caught while in British hospitals, the
so-called "super bug". I now had to fear for Benté's
life.
Because of this developing emergency I angrily persuaded
Dr Schaller to make an emergency application to the Courts
for my temporary release from this prison on parole, or
word-of-honor, an Austrian procedure evidently. I recalled
the romantic ballad "Die Burgschaft" in that big illustrated
volume of Schillers Gedichte, which I had found in a
second-hand booksellers in Essex and bought for two pennies
while a child.
The application -- at 2:30 p.m. that day, September 29 --
was of course swiftly dismissed in a ten-minute hearing. The
Judge was a Reichsleiter Martin Bormann look-alike --
paunchy, scowling, bull-necked, poorly-shaved.
"Anything to say?" he concluded.
I replied, "I was born in 1938, two weeks after the
Austrian Anschluss" -- when his country became part
of Nazi Germany. "I have changed a lot since then," I added,
with the barest emphasis on the first-person singular.
He shrugged and scowled. History evidently wasn't his
strong point.
A FRIENDLY lawyer sent me an extraordinary document he had
found while browsing through the foot-thick Court file 409
Hv 3/05y on my arrest and trial before Judge Peter
Liebetreu. Eighteen days before the trial, Liebetreu had
written to the Austrian Staatspolizei authorities, now
fashionably renamed the "Anti-Terrorism Police," which
doesn't quite have the same cachet, the same
je-ne-sais-quoi as "Stapo" -- pleading for extra
police measures for the trial-day, because of my worldwide
fame and popularity as an historian.
It seemed, I wrote at the time, that they genuinely
feared an attempt to rescue me. "All I noticed, apart from
barricades and helicopters overhead, was that after
sentencing I was surrounded by eight special forces police
in combat gear with drawn Glock automatics, and hustled away
through a labyrinth of back passages and external staircases
to my cell. Now I know why."
"Yes," I wrote mockingly to a friend in Virginia, USA, on
November 10, 2006: "It's getting real risky to be a Real
Historian in Europe nowadays. The good news is however that
I've had around two thousand letters since I was kidnapped
and put on trial here in Vienna and all (except for two
hate-letters) were supportive, a fact which alarmed the
Judge so much that for the day of the trial he secretly
ordered massive special protection for the courtroom
(Austria's largest), no doubt in case two hidden Waffen-SS
divisions turned up in full battle gear with Otto
Skorzeny at their head to rescue me! Their paranoia here
is boundless."
Work on Himmler is benefiting from the
solitary confinement, I added; it will upset a lot
of people, I fear, including H's daughter Gudrun, who
(wrongly) predicts I will demolish her late father purely
in an attempt to rehabilitate myself.That's what I hear. I don't do things that way; and
that's probably why I am writing this letter to you in a
five feet by ten feet cell, locked-down 23 or 24 hours a
day . . .
THINGS were coming to a head. In the stillness of my cell at
night I fancied I could hear the distant rumble of
millstones somewhere, grinding trefflich fein --
fine, and finer still.
An investigating magistrate was insisting on
interrogating me about my over-bold interviews with the BBC
and Austrian Press back in February. Klackl, the very
capable prosecutor, was recommending that I be indicted
under Section 3(h) of the Banning Law. The maximum penalty
was twenty years, and even life imprisonment. Dr Schaller
warned that I would now have to answer the judge's questions
-- he cited tactical reasons why.
Schaller sent for me. The OLG would hear our appeal on
December 20. That would be my last chance of freedom -- of
escaping this unfolding nightmare.
© Copyright David Irving and
Focal Point, 2007
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David
Irving imprisoned in Austria: dossier: index
A Note on the Sinti's story
Alan
H., of Warsaw, an expert on Polish WW2
history,
comments Sunday, February 25, 2007: "There do seem some
rather odd things here. The first hangings took place in
Auschwitz in July 1942 but of two Catholic Poles for
attempted escape. I have been unable to find any
information about a rebellion by Sinti on this month.
Furthermore it seems a bit odd that he would have the death
warrant on him, where did he get this from? And carrying
the original, not a copy? Perhaps you got the month wrong
&endash; Himmler visited the camp in July 1942 and perhaps
this caused the confusion."
On
June 10 fellow prisoners smuggled in to my cell a page of
the local newspaper, Der Standard, carrying a lengthy
interview with Jewish historian 
his
German co-lawyer Klaus Göbel arrived at court
palpitating with fear -- he had that morning received a
letter from the Bavarian Bar Association which he showed
me, ordering him not to defend me, on penalty of
permanent suspension; fortunately I also had Colonel Hajo
Herrmann (right) as an attorney, a bearer of the Knight's
Cross and hence not easily intimidated -- still alive
today in Düsseldorf, 
By
the time their replies came in, this Italianate gentleman in
the yard had already begun to lose me; he was making the
familiar mistake of all tricksters. It reminded me of the
saga of one Klaus Benzing, who had offered me the
hidden diaries of Vice-Admiral Wilhelm Canaris
(right) back in the 1970s.