The Unpersuadables: Adventures with the Enemies of Science

by Will Storr

  This observation was also made by Richard Evans, the Professor of Modern History at Cambridge University who was hired by the defence to critically examine Irving’s oeuvre. An edited version of his dossier was published in 2002, under the title Telling Lies About Hitler. In the book, Evans considers Irving’s motives for bringing the case. He believed that ego played a part, writing that Irving ‘was clearly incensed by a reference to him on page 180 of Lipstadt’s book as “discredited”.’ He also questioned the position of the defendant, saying, ‘Whether or not Lipstadt was correct to claim that these people posed a serious threat to historical knowledge and memory was debatable.’

  2 SEPTEMBER

  Early afternoon

  We stopped for a light lunch on our way to the concentration camp. I sat with Irving and Jaenelle, watching as the historian sprinkled salt on the table – an apparently superstitious ritual. ‘He used to delight in finding pennies and saying, “See a penny pick it up, then all day you’ll have good luck,”’ Jaenelle said. ‘He’d smile for a good ten seconds every time, then give them to me for safe keeping. It was some time before he realised that it was me, dropping the same penny over and over just to keep him in a good mood.’

  ‘When I realised,’ Irving mused gloomily, ‘it was like the moment you discover that Father Christmas isn’t real.’

  Throughout the remainder of our journey to Lublin, I kept to myself, reading. At one point, I looked up to see the posh Englishman staring at me coldly.

  As our silver minibus bumped down the access road that leads to the Majdanek concentration camp, I noticed two parked vehicles, whose occupants watched us pass – one a police car, the other not. A man in a polo shirt and wraparound sunglasses stood at an open door, holding a radio handset. Another had binoculars. Last year, when the media discovered that David Irving was hosting a recreational tour of Second World War sites, he was ambushed by journalists. The Daily Mail quoted a spokesman for the Polish embassy in London as saying, ‘The secret service in Poland and in the UK are aware … The visit will be under strict observation.’

  We made halting progress through the empty camp. Martin had a camera on a tripod that he kept carefully setting up before running out in front of the lens, as the electronic timer beeps rang out. He would then act nonchalant in the vicinity of David Irving until the photograph was taken. But Irving seemed to move out of the shot, at the last possible moment, every single time. It was hard to know whether he was doing this on purpose.

  ‘I wonder how fertile the land is with all the ashes they dumped here,’ mused Mark idly as we walked towards the long, low wooden barracks.

  Irving pointed to a hatch in the base of a guard’s tower.

  ‘That’s the box office.’

  We entered a building that had been converted into a museum. Two nuns in brown habits silently read a display.

  ‘David?’ asked Martin, eyes shining upwards, the eager schoolboy. ‘What do you think of the swimming pool in Auschwitz?’

  ‘I don’t care,’ he said.

  Minutes later, Aldrich the German asked Irving a question about gas chambers.

  ‘You’ve got gas chambers on the brain,’ snapped Irving.

  The historian browsed the exhibits alone, paying close attention to a period photograph of the Nazi headquarters in Warsaw. I approached him gingerly.

  ‘Is that building still there, David?’

  ‘I’m reading something,’ he growled.

  Mark shot me a sympathetic look. We walked together, into the safety of the shadow of an SS sentry booth. ‘Don’t take it personally,’ he whispered. ‘A couple of weeks ago, I sent him an SMS with some information that he’d requested and he shot back, “I haven’t got time for this. I’m in the archives.”’

  Mark’s impression of Irving was so accurate, and so unexpected, that I couldn’t help but let out a snort of laughter. I stopped myself with my hand and glanced fearfully at the nuns.

  We rejoined Irving. ‘No more than fifty thousand people died here,’ he announced to the group. ‘A lot, but no more than was killed in a single bombing raid by British Bomber Command.’ Behind him was a sign that read, in large English letters, ‘Some 78,000 died in the camp’.

  Further along the wall was a grainy photograph of Hitler saluting some guards. When he saw it, Irving snapped, ‘Adolf Hitler never, in his whole career, visited a death camp. I am convinced that the decisions involved with the Holocaust were made on the periphery and then filtered up to the Führer’s office who were by then too weak to say, “Stop this.”’

  We followed as he lurched out towards building number 42 – the fumigation plant, showers and gas chambers.

  As soon as we entered the cold, concrete structure, the mood of the group changed. There was an uplift, a surge, a dangerous volt of activity. There were flashes of cameras and raised voices and people bunching in corners and pointing, running this way and that, tugging arms, explain that, check this out …

  ‘This is a mock-up of a gas chamber,’ announced Irving.

  We were joined by a crowd of visitors. Dozens of them, young and female, many swollen-cheeked and teary. And yet, among our group, there was still that fever, still that flap and chatter and heat.

  ‘You’ve got to be very sceptical about what you see in here,’ Irving told the schoolgirls, interrupting their guide. ‘The gas cylinders and pipes are quite clearly of recent provenance. This is an air-raid shelter. These are standard air-raid blast doors.’

  Members of the girls’ group exchanged glances of alarm.

  ‘You’re fighting a losing battle here,’ said Martin.

  ‘I don’t care,’ said Irving. He pointed at some metal canisters that were strapped to the wall. ‘Those cylinders are carbon dioxide not carbon monoxide. A typical Polish botch job. There are handles on the inside of these doors. If this was a homicidal gas chamber, you wouldn’t be going, “Excuse me, I’m just going to let myself out now.”’

  He barracked the guide again, this time in Russian. I could not stand it any more. I left discreetly and headed for a building that was kept in darkness as a memorial. Hiding myself in a corner I did something that I am uneasy about admitting, and that I still cannot explain. I stood in the shadows and I crossed myself and prayed.

  Returning to building 42, I examined the doors. Yes, there was a rudimentary U-shaped handle on the inside, but it had no opening mechanism. And there were bolts on the outside, two of them, huge ones, each attached to clasps that would have locked the door closed over airtight seals. He saw the handle and he used it to angrily damn the manifest truth. He kept talking about it as we drove back to Warsaw. He saw the handle. What happened in his mind when he saw the bolts?

  Night

  There was a terrifying episode in the minibus. I have been secretly documenting the conversations around me by typing them into my iPhone and by writing notes in the margins of my book. I was scribbling away surreptitiously when the posh Englishman turned to me and said, ‘What’s that you’re reading?’

  He held out his hand. I glanced down at the open page, on which I had recorded something I’d heard earlier. ‘MARK, V RACIST JOKE, “WORLD’S FIVE SHORTEST BOOKS: JEWISH BUSINESS ETHICS, ITALIAN WAR HEROES, THE POLISH WHO’S WHO, NEGROES I’VE MET WHILST YACHTING, FRIENDS OF DAVID IRVING.”’ If he saw that, I would be exposed, right here and now, in front of them all. I flashed him the cover and made as if to continue reading.

  His hand did not move.

  ‘Let’s have a look.’

  Nobody spoke.

  ‘Just let me finish this chapter,’ I said.

  ‘Come on, let’s see.’

  ‘Sure,’ I said. ‘Just let me finish this chapter.’

  I dipped my head and stared at the page. When I was sure he had given up, I began using the nib of my pen to very slowly tear out the incriminating pages, which I pushed into the bottom of my bag.

  Back at the hotel, I was walking through the lobby when I overheard Mark complaining to Jaen
elle. ‘The way he’s acting, it’s rude, the guys are getting pretty upset about it.’

  ‘You’re not telling me anything I don’t already know,’ said Jaenelle. ‘He has no conception of good manners even in their most basic form.’

  ‘Well, you can tell him I’m going to call the local faction of [antifascists] Antifa just to create some fun if he doesn’t cheer the fuck up.’

  ‘Why don’t you tell him?’ said Jaenelle, smiling.

  ‘Umm, because he hates me?’

  ‘Did he tell you that?’

  ‘He doesn’t have to,’ said Mark sadly.

  Even though he had a large tattoo of the insignia of the 1st SS Panzer Division Leibstandarte Adolf Hitler on his neck, I couldn’t help but feel a bit sorry for Mark. He was being crushed, over and over again, by the disdain of his hero.

  And my curiosity about Irving’s relationship with Jaenelle was building. It seemed so odd and complex – defiant, affectionate, motherly and, at times, even flirty. Back in my room, I typed her name into an Internet search engine and found a 2009 article from the Daily Mail, which concerned a cache of Irving’s emails that somehow happened to fall into their possession. The headline was ‘Hitler historian David Irving and the beautiful blonde …’ and the lead photograph was of Jaenelle in a red bathing costume. It said that she had become ‘a neo-Nazi pinup’ after ‘posting pictures of herself on Stormfront, an Internet discussion site for “pro-White activists,”’ adding that, ‘in an email to a friend, Irving reveals he has been asked about the “blonde bombshell” by a journalist and writes: “I emphasise … that there is nothing going on between us.”’

  On the website of an obscure publishing group, I found a long interview with her, in which she discussed her intellectual interests (Edmund Burke, Alexis de Tocqueville, Rousseau), her black metal preferences (‘Nokturnal Mortum, Emperor, Deathspell Omega, just to name a few’) and her love for her grandmother (‘I would be happy if I could do at least half as much good as she has’).

  She also spoke about life with Irving.

  ‘For a long time, David had only one pair of trousers which he had loved to death and I remember mending those on a regular basis. He still has them, but now he fixes them himself with staples because I told him they aren’t worth mending any more and I won’t do it. I’ve also done some rudimentary dental work on him.’

  3 SEPTEMBER

  Morning

  Three months ago, before I paid my $2,500 fee (not including flights) for this trip, I requested interview time with Irving, for a project about people who have stood up to the orthodoxy. Irving replied, ‘Jaenelle thinks I only like chatting with pretty girls, but that is a monstrous exaggeration; go ahead and book, and if I don’t give you all the time you need, demand a refund. But I will, Will.’

  But I had been becoming anxious. The other day, when I tried to arrange a sit-down, he appeared confused, as if he had no idea what I was talking about. Yesterday, when I broached it again, he seemed cross. Nevertheless, we agreed a time to meet and I was relieved to find him waiting for me in the hotel lobby in his usual outfit of corduroy trousers and polo shirt. As I sat down, he began to speak at length about the Lipstadt trial.

  ‘They said, “Mr Irving is an anti-Semite, he’s a racist, he’s a pro-Nazi, he has an agenda, he consorts with Palestinians, he has Nazi associates.” All these things were untrue.’

  As he was talking, Aldrich walked past and politely bid us good morning.

  ‘Good morning,’ I said.

  Irving failed to respond, apparently not noticing the German. As soon as I was able to wrench an opportunity between his words, I asked about his changing opinions regarding the Holocaust. Until 1988 he said that he ‘believed that there had been something like a Holocaust. I believed that millions of people had been killed in factories of death. I believed in the gas chamber.’ His denial came in 1989, and followed the publication of a flawed study by a man named Fred Leuchter, who had brick samples from Auschwitz-Birkenau and Majdanek tested for hydrogen cyanide and used the results to argue that only ‘lice’ were killed there.

  Irving described Leuchter’s report as ‘the biggest calibre shell that has yet hit the battleship Auschwitz’ and claimed that it ‘totally exploded the legend.’ In 1991 he reissued his most lauded book, Hitler’s War, saying, ‘You won’t find the Holocaust mentioned in one line, not even in a footnote. Why should you? If something didn’t happen, then you don’t even dignify it with a footnote.’ He had some advice for the Jewish people too, telling the Jewish Chronicle that they ‘are very foolish not to abandon the gas chamber theory while they still have time.’ The year after that, he was fined three thousand marks in Germany for ‘defaming the memory of the dead’. During the appeal, Irving declared, ‘there were no gas chambers at Auschwitz. I will not change my opinion.’ The judge multiplied his penalty by ten.

  Then Irving’s views appeared to waver. In 1994 he said that he was glad that he ‘never adopted the narrow-minded approach that there was no Holocaust.’ The following year he told an Australian radio host that ‘four million’ were killed in concentration camps, mostly of disease. In 1996 he admitted some Jews were systematically killed, but blamed Goebbels. Over the same period, he was banned from Germany and Australia, deported from Canada, spent a short period in a Munich prison and was dropped by his publishers in Britain and the US. In 1993 he complained that his ‘life has come under a gradually mounting attack: I find myself the worldwide victim of mass demonstrations, violence, vituperation and persecution.’

  How much of this wavering, I wondered, was caused by the pressure that was being applied by his growing league of enemies?

  ‘I have changed what I say because of the pressure of evidence, not because of the threats that have been applied to me,’ he replied. ‘I’ve come to my own conclusions. This makes me very unpopular with a lot of revisionists. Like the person who’s walked past us just now, the German. He’s unhappy about some of the things I said at Majdanek yesterday. He was saying, “The gas chambers! The gas chambers!” I said, “Forget about the gas chambers. There are other things to look at which are more interesting.” I’ve not set out determined to be a nuisance to historians. I’m basically so lazy, I can’t be bothered to falsify. To falsify is like lying.’

  Behind us, a Polish family were talking loudly. It echoed sharply around the marble of the white-pillared lobby. Irving turned and bellowed at them: ‘Jesus! Jesus! Jesus!’ and muttered, ‘That’s what you call “trailer trash”.’

  Because of the focus of his legal trials, it is commonly assumed that Irving is a self-declared expert on the Holocaust. This is not true. In fact, his principal interest is Adolf Hitler, and the epicentre of his controversial view is that the Führer was a friend of the Jews who would have been horrified to know that millions were being killed in his name. Once, he had a long-standing offer of $1,000, never claimed, to anyone who could prove Hitler guilty of their extermination. It is hard to understand the emotional source of Irving’s stubborn, passionate and decades-long defence of the Nazi leader. After all, he comes from a patriotic British military family. His brother, John, was an RAF officer, while his father was a naval commander who fought in the Battle of Jutland in the First World War, and had his ship, HMS Edinburgh, torpedoed by the Nazis in 1942. He survived the attack, and yet didn’t return to the Irving home, in Ongar, Essex, instead moving to Wales. I wondered if Irving was affected by this abandonment. Perhaps his need to be an ‘ambassador to Hitler’ began as an unconscious rebellion against his dad. I began carefully, by asking how his father was viewed among members of the Irving family.

  ‘My father was a hero figure,’ he said. ‘I’ve got a very nice photo of him in naval uniform on the table in our sitting room. I have a copy of it that you can use on your book. On my bedroom wall there is a photograph of him with the King.’

  ‘It must have been devastating when he left,’ I said.

  ‘Stop trying to get me to say things,’ he
snapped.

  ‘I’m not,’ I said. ‘I’m just interested in how you felt about him leaving.’

  ‘I’ve got no memory of him having left. He just was never there.’

  ‘So you didn’t experience it as a loss?’

  ‘We were a family without a father. It was just the way things were. I don’t feel particularly deprived.’

  Irving’s earliest memory of heretical thought is during the war, when he was reading a magazine that contained a comic section called ‘Ferrier’s World Searchlight’.

  ‘There was a picture of Hermann Göring with all his medals, Goebbels with his club foot, Hitler with his postman’s hat and it was just generally making fun of them. If you’re six or seven, you’re looking at that, you’re thinking, “But I’ve got no toys! It can’t be that these cartoon figures are the ones causing all this nuisance.”’

  Behind us, the Polish family’s child began screaming. Irving turned again and shouted, ‘For fuck’s sake!’

  ‘So you didn’t have toys?’

  ‘I think they’ve got the message now … Nobody had toys. I remember finding a catalogue on the floor of our garage, from a toyshop called Gamages. So that’s what toys look like. Your little juvenile brain is so innocent and pure that you begin thinking. You say to yourself, “It’s possible that I’m being sold a bill of goods by somebody here.” And this little worm begins to grow in the back of your brain. You think, When I’m older and have the means, I will investigate and find out.’

  As a boy, Irving went to public school in Brentwood where he was beaten repeatedly.

  ‘Being beaten was a ritual, good God, yes,’ he says. ‘I don’t understand how you can be a teacher without it.’

  During his time there, he won an ‘art appreciation’ contest. It was 1955, and the seventeen-year-old was told that he could choose any book he wished as a prize. It would be handed to him at a special ceremony by the Deputy Prime Minister, Rab Butler. He chose Mein Kampf.

  ‘Why did you ask for Mein Kampf?’ I asked.