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February, 2000 The Holocaust on Trial [concluded, part iv]
Diana's Lawyer THOUGH the desk in Anthony Julius's Bloomsbury office is a lawyerly clutter of files and documents, some of them belonging to his client Deborah Lipstadt, every other surface is piled high with mounds of art books that tumble from tables and chairs onto the carpet, forming drifts around our feet. Julius is writing a book on modern art. The oldest of four sons, Julius eventually graduated from Cambridge with first-class honors and could easily have taken a Ph.D. Then his father, a men's-wear retailer, suddenly died of a brain tumor, so, Julius says, "I stuck with law." When Diana, Princess of Wales, decided she'd had enough of Prince Charles, she needed an outsider, someone whom the British establishment would regard as "unclubbable," someone who couldn't be "gotten to." A Jewish partner in a prominent London firm, Anthony Julius got Diana a settlement worth roughly $25 million. By way of a thank you, Diana sent him a silver blotter from Asprey's. Her patronage made him the most famous lawyer in Britain. She also made him an executor of her will. Anthony Julius eventually got his Ph.D. His thesis, on T. S. Eliot, anti-Semitism, and literary form, begins, Anti-Semites are not all the same. Some break Jewish bones, others wound Jewish sensibilities. Eliot falls into the second category. He was civil to Jews he knew, offensive to those who merely knew him through his work. He wounded his Jewish readers, if not the Jews of his acquaintance, to whom, apparently, he was 'not disagreeable.' Though worth noting, this is not a distinction that yields a defence to the charge of anti-Semitism. If the work, or some notable part of it, is anti-Semitic, it is the work of an anti-Semite. With his large, close-cropped head, ambling gait, and slightly stooped posture, Julius looks a bit like a bear in a pinstripe suit -- that is, if you can imagine a bear who, though capable of tearing you apart, would much rather simply persuade you of the error of your views. When I ask him, with my tape recorder running, why this case matters, his response is guarded, almost offhand: "Does this case matter? To whom? It matters to Deborah Lipstadt because she's being sued." When I turn the tape recorder off, his words are equally careful, but there is a flash of anger in his manner that is actually frightening in a man otherwise so perfectly contained. Julius has tangled with Irving before. In 1992 Irving was expelled from Canada, and one of the documents he later obtained under Canada's Access to Information Law was a dossier compiled, he says, by the Board of Deputies of British Jews which had been sent to the Canadian authorities. Irving wanted to sue for libel, but Julius, who acted for the board at the time, said that Irving was "sadly too late" in filing the proper papers. Julius knows that this time there will be no such reprieve. He won't discuss the trial in any detail even off the record. But the English rules of procedure allow for very few surprises. Both sides have had to reveal in advance not only what documents they want to cite and what witnesses and experts (scholars or other specialists) they are going to call but also what those witnesses and experts are likely to say.
Irving's second expert, John Fox, formerly the editor of The British Journal of Holocaust Education, will testify about an attempt by a group of British Jews to get him to discourage publication of Irving's Goebbels biography in Great Britain, and will give his own assessment of what he sees as Lipstadt's role in enforcing a kind of orthodoxy in discussions of the Holocaust. Fox's battles with British Jewry, although perhaps relevant in his mind, have little bearing on Lipstadt's case. But his claim that attempts to discredit David Irving do not spring from communal self-defense or a concern for the truth but are, rather, part of a broader campaign to proscribe discussion of the Holocaust will need to be met head on. Of course, if Julius can prove that every word Lipstadt wrote about Irving is true, the question of her motives may not matter. Lipstadt's witness statements cover everything from extremism in the Pacific Northwest to Irving's dealings with the Russian archivists who control access to the Goebbels material. But it is her experts and their testimony that will make up the heart of this case. Judging by the experts he has assembled, it is obvious that Anthony Julius is perfectly aware this is no simple case of libel. From Christopher Browning, the author of Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland (1992), to Robert John Van Pelt, a co-author of Auschwitz: 1270 to the Present (1996), Lipstadt's experts are for the most part the standard authorities in their field. Yet several of them have submitted expert reports that are the equivalent, in both scope and scholarly apparatus, of full-scale books, but with a single subject: David Irving.
The shortest of Lipstadt's expert reports is Browning's "Evidence for the Implementation of the Final Solution" -- a sixty-three-page summary of the documentation that Lipstadt's lawyers will argue Irving has had to either ignore or distort to maintain his views on the gas chambers. Next in length comes the ninety-page treatise "David Irving and Right-Wing Extremism," by Roger Eatwell, a professor of politics at the University of Bath. Hajo Funke, a professor of political science at the Free University of Berlin, spends 157 pages detailing Irving's connections with German neo-Nazis and Holocaust deniers. A seventeen-year chronology of Irving's dealings with North American "hate groups," prepared by Brian Levin, then at Stockton College, is similarly extensive, and contains, among other details, an account of Irving's long acquaintance with David Duke. According to Levin, the ex-Klansman's musings on the Holocaust and other topics in his book My Awakening (1998) were shaped by Irving's editorial advice. Peter Longerich, the author of Policy of Annihilation (1998) and a history of Nazi storm troopers (both in German), and a co-editor of the German edition of the Encyclopedia of the Holocaust, has contributed a seventy-seven-page summary of the evidence for Hitler's responsibility and a ninety-three-page exposition of the planned, systematic nature of the Nazi genocide. These reports, all of which were [and still are] at one point posted on Irving's Web site, rebut, with varying degrees of pedantry but with uniform attention to detail, different aspects of either Irving's claim against Lipstadt or what might be called Irving's "case" against the Holocaust. But the centerpiece of Lipstadt's defense will undoubtedly be the 726-page examination of Irving's entire oeuvre by Richard Evans, a professor of modern history at Cambridge and a Fellow of the British Academy. Among his twenty books are Rereading German History: From Unification to Reunification, 1800-1996 (1997) and In Hitler's Shadow: West German Historians and the Attempt to Escape From the Nazi Past (1989). Evans is, as they say, familiar with the literature -- hardly surprising, considering that he wrote much of it, including standard works on German feminism, the German underworld, and the history of capital punishment in Germany. Aside from reading Irving's books (both the English and the German editions), Evans, thanks to the pretrial "discovery" process that is routine in such cases, had access to videotapes and audiocassettes of Irving's speeches, tens of thousands of pages of documents, Irving's complete private diaries, thousands of letters, and a great deal of other material. Evans looked at the totality of Irving's career, from the Dresden book to the Goebbels biography. What he found shocked him deeply. Penetrating beneath the confident surface of his prose quickly revealed a mass of distortion and manipulation ... so tangled that detailing it sometimes took up many more words than ... Irving's original account. Unpicking the eleven-page narrative of the anti-Jewish pogrom of the so-called Reichskristallnacht in Irving's book Goebbels: Mastermind of the 'Third Reich' and tracing back every part of it to the documentation on which it purports to rest takes up over seventy pages of the present Report. A similar knotted web of distortions, suppressions and manipulations became evident in every single instance which we examined. I was not prepared for the sheer depths of duplicity which I encountered in Irving's treatment of the historical sources, nor for the way in which this dishonesty permeated his entire written and spoken output. It is as all-pervasive in his early work as it is in his later publications.... It is clear ... that Irving's claim to have a very good and thorough knowledge of the evidence on the basis of which the history of Nazi Germany has to be written is completely justified. His numerous mistakes and egregious errors are not, therefore, due to mere ignorance or sloppiness; on the contrary, it is obvious that they are calculated and deliberate. That is precisely why they are so shocking. Evans's findings, though doubtless unwelcome to Irving, ought also to cause a certain amount of discomfort among Irving's defenders in journalism and the academy. Irving has relied in the past, and continues to rely in the present, on the fact that his readers and listeners, reviewers and interviewers lack either the time, or the expertise, to probe deeply enough into the sources he uses for his work to uncover the distortions, suppressions and manipulations to which he has subjected them.
How Do We Know?
Gray's disclaimer is slightly misleading. Appointed to the bench only eighteen months ago, Gray spent ten years as a Queen's counsel, or QC -- the elite among trial lawyers. He represented the Tory Cabinet Minister Jonathan Aitken in his suit against The Guardian and defended the Daily Mirror journalist Alistair Campbell -- now Prime Minister Tony Blair's spokesman -- when he was sued by a Tory member of Parliament. His most famous case, however, came when Lord Aldington sued the writer Nikolai Tolstoy over charges that at the end of the Second World War, Aldington had been responsible for handing over to the Soviets -- and certain death -- Cossacks who'd fought in the German army and been taken prisoner by the British. Gray's pleadings, which, as he told me, "did involve history," resulted in an award to his client of a record £1.5 million ($2.4 million) in damages. If Gray seems unduly modest about his command of history, his concern to ensure not just the reality but also the appearance of a fair trial makes more sense. Anthony Julius will be joined at the defense table by Richard Rampton QC, the lawyer representing Penguin Books. David Irving will represent himself. Libel cases cost thousands of dollars a day, and under British law any attorney who took on Irving's case might be liable for the other side's costs if he lost. As a "litigant in person," when David Irving appears in court, he will be on his own. "It makes the judge's task more difficult," Gray says. "One has to ensure that he's not disadvantaged by not having the legal expertise available to the other side." This disparity in means may be good news for Deborah Lipstadt and her supporters, though Richard Rampton, who acted for McDonald's in its recent Pyrrhic victory over a pair of penniless vegetarian anarchists, also litigants in person, which cost the corporation $15 million and gained nothing but bad publicity, is well aware of the perils of overkill. David Irving has had decades of practice at playing the lone iconoclast whose devotion to truth puts establishment noses out of joint. This pose is, I suspect, what accounts for his unlikelier supporters. Certainly it was one he adopted with relish during our interview, whether by inviting me to share his belief that "the Conservative Party is largely financed by the CIA" or by jauntily acknowledging a desire "to see egg on faces." A desire we all share. At times the contrarian impulse is almost enough to make us forget that Irving brought this on himself. He is the plaintiff, Lipstadt the defendant. Irving's odd fascination, though, has little to do with the urge to see authority get its comeuppance -- and even less with some hidden vein of nostalgia for the Third Reich. It is rooted instead in something far more basic, something that mere facts can never completely banish: doubt. How do we know that there really were gas chambers at Auschwitz? Or that millions of Jews were killed? What if, as Irving says, we are off by an order of magnitude? Even if the Nazis killed only hundreds of thousand of Jews, isn't that bad enough? Do the numbers really matter? Last May, just as I started reading about this trial, the London Review of Books ran an account by a reporter for The Guardian of her attempts to corroborate accounts of atrocities in Kosovo. Her tale was inconclusive, honorably so. But her final words made me deeply angry. Maybe the truth here is not one thing: but I don't want to be an accomplice to a lie.... Nobody much wants to return to Jean Cocteau, but there was something soothing in the words my friend quoted. 'History is a combination of reality and lies,' he said. 'The reality of history becomes a lie. The reality of the fable becomes the truth.' That seemed to me a fancy argument for letting herself off the hook. Maybe she couldn't find out what happened. Maybe she should have tried harder. And if she believes that reporting the facts makes no difference to whether the fable becomes the truth, and even finds the prospect "soothing," then maybe she should find another line of work. All the same, I understood the temptation.
The Atheist IT wasn't that I thought Irving might be right -- more that I allowed myself to wonder, with a little shudder, "But does it matter?" It wasn't, in other words, exactly that I doubted the facts; rather, I was curious about what would happen if the facts somehow made no difference. What pulled me back was a memory: I am six years old, and my father has brought his best friend home for dinner. After we eat, the friend takes the back off our television and shows me the tubes lighting up inside. One is burned out, and as he replaces it, I notice a line of numbers on his arm, just below the wrist. "What are those, Uncle Mike?" He tells me that the Germans put them there when he was a little boy, "so I wouldn't get lost." My Uncle Mike was never a little boy. When he was twelve or thirteen, the Germans occupied Hungary, and his entire family was put on a train to Auschwitz. Big for his age, and claiming to be older, he was sent to work in the mines. This was 1944, and Auschwitz was liberated by the Red Army in January of 1945. By then the rest of his family had been gassed. The truth is, I can't be certain of all these details, and my Uncle Mike has been dead for some time. I was reminded of him while reading Irving's response to the obvious questions: What happened to the missing Jews? If they didn't die in the camps, where were they? Irving talks about "the large number that turned up in the state of Palestine, what's now the state of Israel," and sometimes, as if acknowledging that this number isn't nearly large enough, claims that others might have been killed in Dresden. The rest, he suggests, fled to the USSR or the United States. As a simple matter of accounting, this is preposterous. As an explanation, it is also monstrous -- because the assumption behind it is that, lured by the good life to the United States, or chasing the workers' paradise in Russia, or seeking the Zionist dream in Israel, people like my Uncle Mike would simply forget that they had mothers, fathers, sisters, brothers, grandparents, children, and wouldn't bother to look for them, which is why so many Jews are still unaccounted for. In other words, it presumes that Jews are not human beings. No one knows this better than Raul Hilberg. The Politics of Memory tells the story of Hilberg's uncle Josef, interned by the Vichy French in 1940. My father, by then in New York, received Josef's frantic appeals for help, but there was no money for tickets which might have enabled Josef to escape to America. When the deportations from the Vichy-French zone began in 1942, Josef disappeared. "The blood of my brother is upon me," my father would say.... Hilberg, who spent years of his life in archives, never forgot about his uncle Josef. In 1978 he found him, on a list of deportees from France: Joseph Gaber. "He was deported on August 19, 1942, and arrived in Auschwitz two days later," Hilberg writes. "Since he was already forty-eight years old, he must have been gassed immediately." Yet when St. Martin's canceled Irving's Goebbels biography, Raul Hilberg stood up for David Irving. "If these people want to speak," he told Hitchens, "let them.... I am not for taboos and I am not for repression." Hilberg reaffirmed these views to me over the telephone last summer, with two minor modifications: "Denial hurts people. There are survivors. That should not be forgotten." And "I believe in the freedom not to be responsible. But that doesn't mean I endorse it." What Hilberg does endorse is facts: numbers, names, places, dates. When I arrived at Hilberg's house in Vermont, at the beginning of September, we began by talking about numbers. In The Destruction of the European Jews, Hilberg says one million Jews were killed at Auschwitz. His total for the Holocaust, however, is 5.1 million, not six million, a conclusion that has caused him no end of trouble. Does it really matter? I asked. "Yes, it matters," Hilberg said. "It matters on a variety of counts. When you segment these losses by country, you find that the major difference between my count and those who say six million ... is the Soviet Union. Which means, if they didn't die, they're there.... That matters, because you are talking about a substantial part of Jewish history. And you're talking about current Jewish history!" Hilberg launched into a learned and fascinating lecture on the vagaries of the Soviet census, the politics of census data, and the dangers of accepting unsourced estimates. "The German statisticians called it a house number," he said, "whenever a number like that appears [that] you can't prove." I asked about gas chambers. Irving has devoted so much energy to creating doubt about gas chambers. Why? "People are shot or hacked to death in other countries," Hilberg said, "even after World War Two -- Rwanda, for example. You built the gas chamber with a view to killing a mass of people. Once you have a gas chamber, you have a vision, and the vision is total annihilation. In a gas chamber you don't see the victim. So the gas chamber in that sense is more dangerous, the gas chamber is more criminal. The gas chamber has wider implications. So when you deny the gas chamber, you deny not just a part of the event but one of the defining concepts. Auschwitz has become the synonym for the Holocaust. And of course you deny, apart from anything else, the death of several million people." Whatever we talked about -- Goldhagen, Hitler's guilt, the parallel lives of Soviet and American Jews -- we seemed always to come back to numbers. "These numbers do matter," Hilberg said. "They also matter for a very simple reason -- call it religious, if you like." At this point he saw my gaze shift from the Teletubbies magnets on his refrigerator to the menorah on top of his television set. "I'm an atheist,"he said. "All these things belong to my wife, not me. I am an atheist. But there is ultimately, if you don't want to surrender to nihilism entirely, the matter of a record. Does the record matter? In my judgment it is not discussable. It is not arguable. It matters because it matters to me -- it's my life." The sanctity of facts. As I left Hilberg, I thought, It's
not much. After a lifetime of studying brutality,
inhumanity, murder on an industrial scale, after personal
tragedy and professional conflict, this is what he has left
to hold on to. The sanctity of facts. And yet Hilberg's
passion for detail, his police-reporter's faith in getting
it down right, stayed with me longer than any of the
conflicting sympathies aroused by my inquiries. The sanctity
of facts. It isn't much. It may not be enough. But it is all
we have.
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Berlin, Saturday, February 26, 2000
Courtesy links: Professor
Evans' witness report • click
to download
Dr Longerich's witness
report • click
to download
Prof van Pelt's witness
report • click
to download
You will need:
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Irving's
few witnesses relate to the question of how he obtained the
"THERE
is some risk," Judge Charles Gray told me in his
chambers on the day before his first hearing on the case,
"of one's being asked to become a historian. Judges aren't
historians."
write
to David Irving