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 trial transcripts] -
Our
dossier on the Lipstadt Trial
-
-
David
Irving issues a warning letter: "I shall without
further notice issue a Claim in
Defamation"
-
Jewish
Chronicle editorial, "Irving and the
JC"
-
What
David Irving really thinks about the Holocaust -
Hitler's
apologist
-
A
Radical's Diary: The Jewish Chronicle is
becoming Irving-obsessed
-
-
Jewish
Chronicle expresses Outrage of Traditional
Enemies of Free Speech at David Irving's UK
tour:
pulling out all the stops to get the meetings
banned and
cancelled
| Its
leader-writer gets tangled in a twist: "Freedom
of speech is one of the principles our society
holds most dear. ...
That
is why we urge any public-hall booking clerk,
university administrator or private landlord to
refuse to give Irving a platform"
-
-
David
Irving's Books
The
Deborah Lipstadt Libel action-
-
Divided
loyalties -
Board
of Deputies of "British Jews" demanded of the
Austrian ambassador in 1992 that his country
imprison British historian David
Irving
-
David
Irving: A Radical's Diary: On
The Forward interview on the Holocaust, and the
interesting "Mel Gibson" theory that Jews have
been behind many of last century's
wars
| Jewish Telegraph Agency blurts out:
George
W Bush's Pro-'surge' group in Iraq is almost all
Jewish
- Coincidence, says one, "half of the donors
contributing to its $15 million ad campaign are
not Jewish" - and most of the GIs,
too
-
David
Irving: A Radical's Diary: Hysterical
efforts by the don't-debate-them, anti-free
speech gang meet some success
-
A
November 2001 article by Bruce Hyman for the
London Evening Standard
-
Jewish Chronicle: Barrister-journalist
who smeared David Irving after Lipstadt Trial is
jailed for
fraud
-
Vernon
Bogdanor reviewed David Irving's "Churchill's
War", vol. ii: "Triumph in Adversity" --
and got it wrong.
[Tip:
also
use our search engine and
search
for "Bogdanor"]
-
-
Front
Page magazine sneers- The
Passion of Norman
Finkelstein
| Playing hardball - Finkelstein
deal ends DePaul University
tiff
| AWPOW: Are we powerful or what?
DePaul
University pulls the plug on Professor Norman
Finkelstein's final
year
| Norman
Finkelstein's fine Eulogy on a Real Historian,
Raul Hilberg:
he settles some scores too | Hilberg,
the Holocaust scholar who was hard on the
Jews
-
|