The Unpersuadables: Adventures with the Enemies of Science

by Will Storr

  ‘Wow.’

  She shook her head, still apparently not quite believing what I had been planning.

  ‘You’d get more than your head bitten off. He’d screw you up like a Polish slave.’

  ‘He’s a fascinating character.’

  ‘Fascinating in small doses.’

  ‘He seems keen on you.’

  ‘He thinks he adores me and who am I to argue? But obviously he doesn’t or he wouldn’t blow his top at me every five minutes. Like, he has been known to scream at me because I didn’t tie my hair back when he thought it should be tied back. I kid you not.’

  ‘Does he think he’s got a chance with you?’

  ‘Yes. And even if he realises that maybe he doesn’t, he definitely doesn’t want to see that anybody else might. He gets awfully jealous. He has this image in his head that he is still a young, handsome, well-to-do fellow. And he has never been able to wrap his head around the idea that he is seventy-three years old, crippled and cantankerous.’

  When I asked her for advice about what to do if I am granted a final interview, she told me that I should, under no circumstances, mention the incident from school, when he requested a copy of Mein Kampf.

  ‘David is a prankster,’ she explained. ‘He also got in trouble for hoisting the hammer-and-sickle flag when he was at school, so it was not a political thing. It’s whatever will get the biggest reaction. The further their jaws will drop the better job he thinks he’s done. That’s not to say that when he writes his books that that’s the aim he’s going for. But you would be setting yourself up for him stomping off if you asked how he got interested in Hitler. I would suggest you go over your questions and ask yourself, “Could this in any way possibly be construed by him as trying to get him to admit to being a neo-Nazi?”’

  ‘This is really good advice,’ I said.

  ‘I’m doing all I can. The others are too. Did you know, they’ve all agreed to a pact to help you? They’ve been asking questions during the discussions that they think might be useful.’

  Following my chat with Jaenelle, we all sat around a conference room table to watch Downfall. When we reached the part that we had seen the other night, re-subtitled to show Hitler raging about Ryanair, the room filled with the cough, spurt and snort of desperately suppressed sniggering. At the end, as we filed out, I asked Irving if there might be a suitable time to meet tomorrow. ‘Oh Jesus, you keep going on about that,’ he snapped. ‘In the lobby, at eleven.’

  Relieved, I joined the others. As they drank, Alex told me that when the active ingredient in marijuana is purified in a rice cooker, it becomes the cure for cancer. ‘Big pharma,’ he explained, which is ‘owned by the Jews,’ is behind the drug’s prohibition. As he was talking, Jaenelle’s voice cut through, bouncing accidentally on the top of the hubbub. She said his name, and then something like ‘… believes everything he reads on the Internet.’ There was a horrible silence. Alex’s eyes emptied. ‘What did you say?’ he demanded.

  ‘Nothing,’ said Jaenelle.

  His face was bloodless. Utterly still.

  ‘Repeat the last few words you said.’

  ‘I was just …’

  Mark broke the tension.

  ‘Have you noticed how he’s just got angrier and angrier since the trip’s gone on?’ he said. ‘The headline will be, “‘Ten Holocaust Deniers Killed by Conspiracy Theorist”.’

  And somehow the nervous laughter was just enough to lift Alex away from whatever it was that was about to happen.

  *

  Liar or deluded? Evil or mistaken? This is what I still don’t understand.

  Irving’s insistence that Hitler was unaware of the Holocaust has, as its holiest artefact, the fact that no direct order from the Nazi leader has ever been found. But in her book History on Trial, Irving’s libel defendant, Professor Lipstadt, wrote that historians ‘do not, as Irving kept demanding, seek a “smoking gun”, one document that will prove the existence of the gas chambers. They seek a nexus or convergence of evidence.’ I am reminded of the observation that social psychologists Carol Tavris and Elliot Aronson make in Mistakes Were Made: ‘Confirmation bias even sees to it that no evidence – the absence of evidence – is evidence for what we believe.’

  An interview with Irving’s brother Nicholas that was published in 2006 seems to add detail to the nature of the ‘wheel’ he describes running ‘backwards and forwards in the slime.’ David has denied all that Nicholas has said, of course, but his twin told the Daily Telegraph that, ‘As children, he was always trying to drag me into his devilment.’ He recalled an incident in which a German bomber destroyed a nearby house and the six-year-old David gave it a ‘Heil Hitler’ salute. ‘[But] there was nothing unpatriotic about David’s views then,’ he added. ‘Like now, he liked to shock, to scandalise.’

  During the Lipstadt trial, Irving issued a subpoena to Sir John Keegan, a noted historian who had declined an initial request to testify. ‘Earlier experiences had persuaded me that nothing but trouble comes of taking sides over Irving,’ Keegan wrote, in a subsequent account of his experience in the Daily Telegraph. ‘I have written complimentary reviews of Irving’s work as a military historian to find myself posted on the internet as a Nazi sympathiser.’

  Many of Irving’s enemies acknowledge his intelligence. They imply what I now know – that intelligence is no inoculation against bias. But researchers in the US have gone even further than this. They have found startling evidence that suggests that intelligence simply does not work in the service of truth. Psychologist David Perkins conducted a simple study in which he asked a range of participants to think of as many for-and-against reasons as they could for a number of socio-political issues. Naturally, people tended to come up with far more points that backed up their own opinions than ran counter to them – and the better educated people with the higher IQs came up with the most ways to conclude that their positions were correct. The surprise came when he discovered that their higher levels of intelligence only enabled them to think of arguments for why they might be right. Remarkably, the superior minds were no better at imagining why they might be wrong than those of weaker intelligence.

  In his account of the Lipstadt trial, Sir John Keegan recounts a courtroom exchange in which he stated that Irving’s view, that Hitler did not know about the Holocaust until 1943, ‘defied reason, or common sense.’ Irving challenged him, asking whether it would not be ‘the most extraordinary historical revelation of the war’ if it could be proved true? ‘This was a very curious moment,’ wrote Keegan. ‘I suddenly recognised that Irving believed that Hitler’s ignorance could be demonstrated.’

  7 SEPTEMBER

  Some time in the early 1970s, David Irving had a remarkable idea. What if Hitler hadn’t known about the Holocaust? What if he was actually a simple man, who was easily manipulated by others? And what if the industrial killing of the Jews was secretly organised by his immediate subordinates, who deliberately kept it from him? He recruited a German historian to find proof that he was mistaken. ‘I’m hiring you because you’re sceptical,’ he told her. ‘You’re going to find the evidence to prove me wrong.’

  Every argument that she produced was rejected by Irving. Some, he will admit, ‘came close,’ such as the entry in Goebbels’s diary from March 1942 which tells of deportations in which no more than 5 per cent of people survived.

  ‘There’s a whole page or two in his diary which describes this in very vivid terms, and said, “The Führer too is in favour of a radical solution,”’ Irving remembered. ‘I said, “I’m sorry no. This is evidence against Goebbels. It shows that Goebbels would like to believe that Hitler was involved.”’

  In 1991 more diaries emerged, this time those of Adolf Eichmann, who had responsibility for the transportation of Jews to concentration camps. His journals report a conversation with Reinhard Heydrich. ‘“I came from the Reichsführer [Himmler],” said Heydrich. “He has received orders from the Führer for the physical destruction of t
he Jews.”’ Around the period in which Irving was considering this find, the writer Ron Rosenbaum interviewed him for his book Explaining Hitler. The author described finding Irving ‘tormented’ by this discovery. He told Rosenbaum, ‘It rocked me back on my heels, frankly.’ He admitted that he had thought, Oops! How do you explain this one away? and that he had to tell himself, ‘Don’t be knocked off your feet by this one.’

  This is how he explained it away: even though Eichmann composed his memoirs before he was captured, Irving dismissed them as being concocted for use as evidence during an imagined future trial. ‘I’m not saying Eichmann does it consciously,’ he told me. ‘But eventually he will begin saying to himself, “What would have been my only excuse in mitigation? That it was the Führer’s orders.”’

  ‘You’re using any excuse,’ I said. ‘Any way you can think around the problem of exonerating Hitler.’

  ‘No. You have to be very precise. If Heydrich said that, why does it not exist in any document that followed? Why is there no paper trail?’

  ‘Is it possible that you’re being this forensic only with evidence that doesn’t fit your thesis?’

  ‘No, you’re extra-careful because of this huge muck heap of world opinion that has been built up over the last sixty years. They’ve been piling more and more muck on top of it. It doesn’t mean to say it’s any righter. They’re just quoting each other.’

  I wondered if the Lipstadt trial had shaken his faith in his beliefs.

  ‘They had a team of twenty historians,’ he said. ‘They spent twenty-nine months going through my thirty books and they found twelve errors. Half an error per book. Less than. Not bad going.’

  It is a claim that Professor Lipstadt’s defence team would surely be enraged to hear, and it is a stunning thing to observe: confirmation bias in action.

  ‘So the trial actually added to your sense of self-esteem?’ I asked.

  He leaned back, smiling.

  ‘And those twelve errors are greatly inflated.’

  I moved on to further evidence that Hitler not only knew about the annihilation of the Jews, but predicted it. In a speech that he gave on 30 January 1939, Hitler said, ‘Today I want to be a prophet once more: if the international finance Jewry inside and outside of Europe should succeed once more in plunging nations into another world war, the consequence will not be the Boleshevisation of the earth and thereby the victory of the Jewry, but the annihilation of the Jewish race in Europe.’

  ‘Unfortunately you’ve got a problem with language,’ said Irving. ‘At no point does Hitler anywhere say, “We’re going to liquidate the Jews.”’

  ‘He says “annihilate”.’

  ‘He uses a very common word in Germany, which is “ausrotten”. Then he says it’s a “prophetic warning for the Jews.” That’s a weird phrase.’

  ‘But he’s saying …’

  Irving shook his head dismissively.

  ‘You’re not, you’re not, you’re not, fine tuned.’

  I thought for a moment. I tried to tune myself up.

  ‘It means he’s looking into the future,’ I said. ‘Predicting.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Irving. ‘That’s right.’

  ‘Predicting the annihilation of the Jews.’

  ‘But you would say “warning” to the Jews. You wouldn’t say “prophetic warning”. The speech itself is six pages, single spaced. The actual reference to the Jews is three lines long. Only three lines in one column. Only that.’

  They were three lines. They were in one column. And they prophesied the annihilation of the Jews.

  ‘But the word he uses for annihilation is “ausrotten”,’ he said. ‘That’s a word in German which came to mean liquidation.’

  According to Irving, the meaning of ‘ausrotten’ has changed since 1939. He knows this, because he has studied its use in a number of Hitler’s speeches, and amassed several period dictionaries in preparation for the Lipstadt trial. Back then, he says, it meant ‘extirpation’, a word with a Latin origin whose literal definition was ‘pulling the roots out.’ Compared to today, its implication to Hitler’s audience would have been mild. ‘He was, at that time, using the word effectively to mean “emasculation”.’

  ‘And that also goes for the later speech when he said the annihilation had begun?’

  ‘He never said that.’

  I looked down at my notes.

  ‘December the twelfth 1941, in a speech that recalled his prophecy of 1939, he said, “The world war is here. The annihilation of the Jewry must be a necessary consequence.”’

  ‘He’s now saying the world war is going to lead to the destruction of the “Judentung”, which is this vague concept of the Jewish entity.’

  ‘For an outsider,’ I said, ‘it’s hard to square that quote with the idea that Hitler somehow wasn’t up for the annihilation of the Jews.’

  ‘There’s a great temptation here to extrapolate backwards from history and say, “Well, this happened, therefore he was saying it.” I’ve been more selective.’

  ‘It sounds to me like he’s up for an annihilation.’

  ‘That’s because you’re prejudiced by the history that has been propagated since the end of World War II. I can’t do that. I’ve got to go back to the meaning of the words at the time. What you’re doing is reading between the lines.’

  ‘It’s not between the line. It’s on the line.’

  ‘It depends how you translate the words.’

  I found myself once more in the dilemma that is often faced when debating experts, no matter how controversial. Any argument can be closed down by an appeal to any evidence at all, as long as you are unfamiliar with it. Without immediate access to a 1939 English– German dictionary, I realised, there was nothing I could do.

  I could, however, explore his more general feelings about the Jews. For a man who is so easily infuriated by accusations of anti-Semitism, he is remarkably anti-Semitic.

  ‘The Jews like being talked about,’ he told me. ‘They’re not happy if they’re not being talked about. I always say if you want to be the bride at every wedding you run the risk of ending up being the corpse at every funeral. But I try to keep out of it.’

  For Irving, many Jews share a common weakness, in which they cannot critically examine their actions. ‘I can look at my own misfortune and say, “Well, I had it coming.” But they will never look at their own misfortune and say, “Perhaps we as a people had it coming.” They then say, “Well, we’re hated because we’re so financially successful.” And I say, “Well, that’s a racist remark that implies there is something in your genes that makes you good with money.”’

  ‘What do you think it is?’

  He shrugged. ‘Probably something different in their brains.’

  For me, I told him, it is because humans are by nature tribal and the Jews’ historical statelessness has probably made them unusually vulnerable to prejudice. To my astonishment, he nodded in agreement.

  ‘It’s in our microchip,’ he said. ‘We all have this glitch in our microchip. I could never fancy a black woman the way I fancy Jaenelle. It’s my microchip.’

  ‘So do you not accept, then, that psychological processes are behind anti-Semitism, rather than the Jews being especially “badly behaved”?’

  ‘I think it’s very likely,’ he agreed. ‘I try not to be anti-Semitic.’ I grinned helplessly, convinced for one ridiculous moment that I might have made a breakthrough. ‘But they don’t make it easy for me.’

  The great mystery, for me, is in the emotions that ferment wordlessly beneath Irving’s stubborn defence of Hitler. So many of the tour group had parents who had either served in the war or who saw it from Germany. Powerful adult beliefs rarely grow in rational, reasonable isolation. But Irving’s was a patriotic family. He didn’t rebel against his parents or siblings – he looked up to his father, idolised his RAF-serving elder brother. I began to wonder if I might have glimpsed a truth about the source of Irving’s mission, however, when I ch
allenged him on the moral relativity that he believes exists between the Nazis and the Allies.

  ‘We wanted to stop the war,’ I said. ‘Whereas they wanted to take over Europe.’

  ‘But it was no business of ours,’ he snapped. ‘We had no business getting involved with it. And because we did, we lost the empire, which was a huge force for civilisation around the world. What the empire was doing was worth everything and we should not have risked it. We were fighting somebody else’s war because Churchill had been bribed by the Jews. He had been hired by them in 1936.’

  ‘So it all comes back to the Jews?’

  ‘In this case it does.’

  ‘You would have preferred us to keep our empire …’

  ‘I’m very proud of the empire.’

  ‘… and for Hitler to have Europe?’

  ‘I don’t mind who has Europe.’

  ‘You don’t care.’

  ‘I don’t care. Why should I care? I’m not Jewish, I’m not a Communist, I’m not a faggot. Hitler had this ambition. He was going to build motorways everywhere. He was going to build great cities.’

  ‘Don’t you have any compassion for them? They were going to be slaughtered.’

  ‘Well, that’s what they were planning to do to us. Well, maybe not the homosexuals, but the Communists certainly didn’t have any good plans for us.’

  ‘That’s not my question,’ I said. ‘Don’t you have any compassion for them?’

  ‘Why should I? What kind of compassion?’

  ‘You seem to have a worldview in which caring about people that aren’t just like you is pointless.’

  ‘We used to have a Communist Party in England—’

  ‘I’m not saying we should all be Communists. The Communists were awful.’

  ‘I know,’ he said, mystified. ‘I can’t understand why you’re sticking up for them.’

  For the first time in the three hours that we had been speaking, Irving had lost his usual composure. Gone was the snippy, careful, lawyerly, narrow-eyed academic’s pose. Suddenly, there it was: emotion. It made me wonder. Was that it? Perhaps he identified his family as one of empire. And he blames Churchill and the Jews for its loss. Could that be the wound that seeps beneath all of this?