Great is this truth.
Pryce-Jones, David
An underworld exists of people who believe that we are deceived
about the nature of much recent history in general and the Second World
War in particular. To them, Hitler was a great man and Churchill was
evil. To bypass the objection that Hitler launched not only war but also
mass murder on a continental scale, these people have to deny that there
ever was a Holocaust, that nothing much happened to the Jews in the war,
or if it did then they deserved it and more. They sec themselves as
"revisionists," which is a fancy way of saying that they are
defying the usual processes of fact-finding and reasoning whereby the
rest of us know our history.
Plenty of academics and critics in other fields today argue that
there is no such thing as truth, and every assertion of objective
knowledge is therefore in need of deconstruction. It follows that there
are no moral absolutes or intellectual standards. That is the ride which
carries within it these "revisionists" and Holocaust deniers.
Their cause of postwar Nazism and anti-Semitism can only be pursued
through their specific variety of deconstruction, involving the denial
of some facts and the invention of others. So they have spawned a
variety of institutions and associations, such as the misleadingly named
Institute for Historical Review in California. The common purpose is to
degrade everybody else's facts as prejudices and to glorify their
own prejudices as facts.
In this underworld, David Irving has long been an acknowledged
star, earning himself a wide reputation as "controversial,"
that euphemism for anything and everything which goes against common
sense, reason, and humanity. He is familiar with German, has read in the
archives, interviewed a good many Nazis, and written some thirty books.
His admiration for Hitler and Nazism, his Jew-baiting, his detestation
of Churchill have left behind him a persistent trail of outrage. Nobody
has tried harder or with more success to deconstruct facts on these
topics and to replace them with his personal animosities and prejudices.
He has argued that the British bombing of Dresden in 1945 was a war
crime comparable to any committed by the Germans. He libelled a British
naval officer about his conduct during an Atlantic convoy (and had to
pay damages). He accused Churchill of ordering the destruction of an
aircraft flying the Polish General Sikorski home from Gibraltar in 1943
(with the death of all on board, including Victor Cazalet, a close
friend of Churchill's and a fellow Conservative Member of
Parliament). The Hungarian uprising of 1956 was in his view a Jewish
conspiracy, and as such the Soviets were right to suppress it.
Hitler, Irving has maintained, was neither aware of the Holocaust
until about 1943, nor responsible for it. If anyone, Goebbels was to
blame. Irving concedes that rogue S.S. men killed some Jews, but the
majority had died of disease and starvation. To a woman who told him to
his face that her grandparents had died in Auschwitz, he replied,
"You can be comforted in the knowledge that they most likely died
of typhus, like Anne Frank." In his opinion, Auschwitz had no gas
chambers, there was no systematic mass murder, and the Jews themselves
put about this talc in order to receive financial compensation to which
they had no right. To an audience of sympathetic listeners in Canada in
1990, he hit upon the acronym ASSHOLS, standing for "The Auschwitz
Survivors, Survivors of the Holocaust, and Other Liars."
Confronted with his work, writers who ought to have known better
have bent over backwards to find merit in it. In tones of dismay,
Richard J. Evans, in his new book, Lying About Hitler,(1) quotes Michael
Howard, formerly Regius Professor of Modern History at Oxford, declaring
that Irving was "at his best as a professional historian demanding
documentary proof for popularly-held beliefs"--the very opposite of
Irving's procedure. Or again Gordon A. Craig, who asserted that
Irving "knows more about National Socialism than most professional
scholars in the field," following this up with the preposterous
(and condescending) sentence, "It is always difficult for the
non-historian to remember that there is nothing absolute about
historical truth." Another prolific writer on military affairs,
John Keegan, believes that Irving has "many of the qualifies of the
most creative historians." If these men were indeed familiar with
Irving's sources, plainly none of them had taken the trouble to
verify Irving's use or abuse of them. Slapdash opinions of this
kind reflect the decline of standards in historiography and book
reviewing.
Honorable exceptions of course exist. The authoritative Martin
Broszat showed how Irving had manipulated documents to build a case.
Peter Hoffmann, no less authoritative an historian, called him "a
great obfuscator." Wolfgang Benz dismissed such new evidence as
Irving uncovered as coming from "the perspective of the
keyhole." In the United States, John Lukacs pointed out the
unreliability of Irving's documentation, and in a long review
Charles W. Sydnor, Jr., concluded that Irving's research was
"pretentious twaddle."
There the matter might have rested, with Irving always
"controversial," if Deborah Lipstadt had not published in 1993
her book Denying the Holocaust. Exposing the pullulating underworld of
Hitler admirers and anti-Semites, she singled out Irving as one of the
leading falsifiers of the history of the Nazis. His real political
agenda was clearly to exonerate Hitler and Nazism, and denial of the
Holocaust was one of the chief means to that end. Irving duly sued for
libel, and the case came to court in 2000 in London.
British libel laws are admitted on all sides to be antiquated and
unfair, weighted towards the plaintiff. The defendants, Deborah Lipstadt
and her publishers Penguin Books, had to establish justification, namely
that the charges were true and that Irving was indeed a Holocaust denier and Hitler admirer, as stated in the book. Irving may have thought that
this was virtually unprovable, in which event he could expect
considerable damages. There is also a quaint British precedent for a
judgment of guilty but with damages placed at a farthing, but even that
would have done wonders for Irving and Holocaust denial. Finally, he may
have calculated that the publicity, national and international, would be
great enough to cancel any damage done to him.
Pleading justification, the defense lawyers called on expert
witnesses, and among these were Robert Jan Van Pelt, the historian of
Auschwitz, and Christopher Browning, who has made a special study of
Nazi killers. But Richard J. Evans, Professor of Modern History at
Cambridge, had the most important task of all, which was to compare the
original sources and documentation to the uses which Irving had put
them. With the help of research assistants, he wrote a
seven-hundred-page report, to be presented to the judge, Charles Gray,
who would study it at leisure.
To Irving's open delight, the trial received daily coverage in
the press in several countries. In its opening stages, a number of
journalists and commentators expressed a fear that the Holocaust itself
might be on trial, and a courtroom was not the appropriate place to
settle an issue of historical truth. By mutual consent, as the law
allows, there was no jury., and everything therefore turned on what Mr.
Justice Gray made of the expert witnesses and their evidence. For
whatever reason, Irving chose to conduct his case himself, as "a
litigant in person" in the lawyer's phrase.
The court itself was unremarkable and crowded. My seat was almost
directly behind Irving. He proved to be physically large, a little
ungainly but a definite presence, with an energetic brutality about him.
He wore a dark three-piece pinstripe suit, somewhat crumpled. The type
was familiar: the man endlessly articulating the grievance that consumes
him, the overbearing member of the clubhouse, the middle manager with no
time for the lesser fry on the staff, the self-professed victim of
aliens and ill-wishers. Yes, the Jews ganged up on him, there was indeed
a Jewish conspiracy, and he referred repeatedly to its power and its
gold. Christopher Browning, for example, had once published an essay in
Israel, and no doubt had been paid for it.
John Keegan and the eminent Professor Donald Cameron Watt of the
London School of Economics (once co-editor of a book with Irving) were
two expert witnesses who had refused to appear for Irving, but were
served with a subpoena by him obliging them to do so. Neither could be
remotely considered sympathetic to Nazism, and both criticized
Irving's presentation of Hitler and the Holocaust. At the same
time, they praised his skills as an historian. "Depressing" is
the mild word that Evans reserves for these examples of trahison des
clercs, and there seems no good explanation of it. (Even more
inexplicably, Keegan was later to write an article in which he defended
Irving as "never dull," in contrast to Deborah Lipstadt, whose
insistence on telling the truth about the Holocaust he characterized as
"self-righteously politically correct.") Listening to the
exchanges between Irving and the expert witnesses, Mr. Justice
Gray's expression gave nothing away. Once he advised, "If I
may say so, Mr. Irving, we must do better than that," but more
gently and frequently it was, "Mr. Irving, please help me with
this." Whether by accident or design, Irving was to repay him at a
critical point by addressing him as "Mein Fuhrer."
Evans by contrast is physically slight, modest, and quiet-spoken.
In the witness box, he evidently shrank from Irving and reveals now that
he deliberately avoided eye contact. The repeated thrust of his argument
was that Irving could not be considered an historian in any sense of the
word, but had shown himself a mere propagandist for Nazism and
anti-Semitism. In reply, Irving read out the tributes which historians
had so heedlessly proferred.
Lying about Hitler is a selection of the more significant chapters
from Evans's seven-hundred-page document. Simple, elegant, and
unemotional in style, it is devastating, a task of demolition so
complete that it is hard to think of anything comparable. Irving's
apology for Hitler and Nazism is shown to be based on selective
quotation, misrepresentation, reversal of meaning, false translation,
and sometimes outright fabrication. He has resorted habitually to double
standards, crediting or refashioning evidence that suited his case,
while denigrating and dismissing evidence that did not.
For example, at the time of the "beer hall putsch" of
1923, some of Hitler's Brown-shirts had removed their party badges
before looting Jewish shops. A policeman by the name of Hofmann
testified to this. Hitler disciplined them for it, on the grounds that
looting with party badges on was a political act, but without party
badges it became a criminal act. Irving inverted Hofmann's words to
pretend that Hitler was actually protecting Jews. At the time of
Kristallnacht, the Nazi pogrom in 1938, a Nazi propagandist and senior
policeman, Kurt Daluege, claimed that in one year in Berlin there had
been 31,000 cases of fraud, reduced to 18,000 the next year, with
"a considerable part" of the perpetrators being Jewish. By
implication, Jewish fraud was coming under control. In Irving's
account, however, this became "no fewer than 31,000 cases of fraud,
mainly insurance swindles, would be committed by Jews."
In fact Daluege nowhere claimed that all 31,000 were Jews, nor did
he mention insurance swindles. Had Irving checked the official
statistics, as Evans did, he would further have learned that the actual
number convicted of insurance fraud in the relevant year was just
seventy-four, comprising Jews and non-Jews. According to Irving, Hitler
on various occasions intervened to mitigate the rite of the Jews, but
Evans establishes that all such claims involve blatant manipulation and
deliberate misreading of the record. The bombing of Dresden left about
25,000 dead, according to those German officials in charge of the city
at the time, and Irving simply inflated the figure with an extra nought.
And so on and on and on, in this studious unpicking of lies and
subterfuges.
Towards the end of the Eighties, it appears from Evans, Irving
reached some sort of a turning point, afterwards directing all his
efforts to anti-Semitism and the obsessive defense of Hitler. He
gravitated full-time to the underworld of like-minded people,
speechifying often to the Institute for Historical Review and to drawing
attention to himself through wilder and wilder pronouncements as though
daring the authorities in one country, after another to take action
against him. No doubt he came to believe what he was spouting, for he is
indisputably the author of his own rite. He had laid a simple trap for
himself. Confronted by an expert witness of the calibre of Evans, he had
to choose between admitting to professional incompetence or to Nazi
sympathies and Holocaust denial. Either way, he tan slap into the folly
of bringing the case against Deborah Lipstadt. Cornered by the facts,
his body shook and his hard face flushed red with arrogance and anger.
His only remaining escape route was to present himself as a patriot at
bay in the toils of a giant conspiracy against him. But how could it be
patriotic to admire and exculpate Hitler and revile Churchill because he
"fought the war rive years longer than was necessary"? That
remains a mystery central to this man.
In his lengthy verdict, Mr. Justice Gray was forthright and
unsparing. The evidence provided by Evans undoubtedly had its due
influence on him. He concluded without any qualifications that Irving
has a political agenda that "disposes him, where he deems it
necessary, to manipulate the historical record"; that thereby he
"has portrayed Hitler in an unwarrantedly favorable light";
and finally that "his words are directed against Jews, either
individually or collectively, in the sense that they are by turns
hostile, critical, offensive and derisory." Irving has nowhere to
turn to, nowhere to hide. In the eyes of the Nazified underworld, his
conduct was so wrong and cowardly that he can no longer be considered a
true "revisionist." That is a comic bonus. Everywhere else,
his discrediting is now permanent, and it brings with it a gain
altogether unexpected and extraordinary. At a time of cultural disarray
and widespread moral doubts, this case marks a triumph for the concept
of historical truth as something knowable through the careful study of
facts and the application of reason. And great is this truth, and it
shall prevail.
(1) Lying About Hitler: History, Holocaust and the David Irving
Trial, by Richard J. Evans; Basic Books, 336 pages, $27.