I was also disturbed by the ambiguous response to them in certain quarters. During the 1990s, student newspapers on many American campuses accepted advertisements denying the Holocaust. They did so, despite the fact that these papers had a policy to reject ads that were hostile to an ethnic or religious group. When criticized by other students on their campuses, the editors of these papers—some of whom were Jews—protested that these ads were not antisemitic; they simply denied the Holocaust. I was more concerned by their inability to recognize Holocaust denial as a form of antisemitism than by the deniers themselves. These editorial boards argued that their papers were obliged to be forums for “diverse opinions” and to “tell all sides of the issue.” I was struck by their elevation of denial to an “opinion” and wondered what “issue”?
The general media was equally blindsided by denial. Radio and television talk show hosts treated denial as an intriguing idea. When I received invitations to debate deniers, I consistently declined, explaining that while many things about the Holocaust are open to debate, the existence of the event is not. One producer, anxious to get me to reconsider, said, “Shouldn’t our listeners hear the other side?” Their conception of denial as an “other” side convinced me that it was essential to expose the illusion of reasoned inquiry that concealed deniers’ claims.6
My concern about deniers further escalated when I learned in 1988 that David Irving, the well-known author of an array of books dealing with various aspects of World War II and Nazi Germany, was now publicly denying the Holocaust. Born in 1938, Irving was the son of a book illustrator and a British naval officer, whose boat was torpedoed in 1942. According to Irving, his father survived but did not return home, leaving his wife and four children in what Irving claims was a state of “very reduced circumstances.” Irving studied at London University but never completed his degree. He left the university and found employment in Germany’s Ruhr Valley as a steelworker. While there he perfected his German. Upon his return to England in the early 1960s, he supported himself by writing articles about Germany. According to Irving, within a few months he was earning so much money that he abandoned his attempt to get a degree and devoted himself to a career of writing about history.
His first book, The Destruction of Dresden, appeared when he was only twenty-five. A scathing attack on the Allies for having bombed this German medieval city in the final months of the war, the book was a critical and commercial success. Irving wrote a number of other books in quick succession. In 1967, he published Accident: The Death of General Sikorski, in which he suggested that Sikorski, Poland’s exiled leader, had been murdered on Winston Churchill’s orders. The book aroused great controversy upon publication, particularly since there exists no documentary evidence of a Churchill assassination order. When another author attacked Irving’s claims about Churchill and Sikorski, Irving unsuccessfully sued. He was compelled to pay the legal costs.
That same year, he published The Destruction of Convoy PQ17. It too provoked a legal battle. The convoy, composed of thirty-three American and British ships, carrying supplies for the Soviets, suffered devastating losses on its way to the Soviet Union. Irving charged that the negligent actions of the British commander of the twenty-ship escort, Captain Jack Broome, were at fault. Broome sued both Irving and his publisher, Cassell and Company, for libel. Irving lost and was forced to pay £40,000, then one of Great Britain’s largest libel awards. Irving appealed and lost again. In 1968, Irving was sued for libel by Jillian Page, who had written a critical newspaper article about him. Irving had charged that the article was the result of her “fertile brain.” In return for her withdrawing the action, Irving apologized and paid her expenses. As a result of these provocative books and legal entanglements, Irving gained, within a decade, a certain notoriety.
Though I was aware of Irving, I did not pay him close attention. He first appeared on my radar screen in 1977 when he published Hitler’s War, in which he argued that Hitler did not know about the Final Solution and that when he learned of it, he tried to stop it. I believed that Irving’s conclusions could only have been the result of willful distortions. My suspicions were confirmed when a number of scholars wrote extensive critiques documenting how Irving skewed the historical evidence.7
In 1983, Irving again found himself in the media spotlight. Stern, the German weekly, announced that it had purchased for $3.8 million, sixty-two previously unknown volumes of “Hitler’s Diaries.” For a brief moment it was the world’s biggest news story. Irving, who had previously purchased documents—which turned out to be bogus—from the man who was selling the diaries, was sure they too were bogus. At a sensational press conference, Stern editors heralded the publication of the diaries, screened a film about them, and predicted that there would certainly be those who would challenge the diaries, including historians such as David Irving, who had “no reputation to lose.” Unbeknownst to Stern, their rival, Bild-Zeitung, had snuck Irving into the press conference. A few minutes later, when it was time for questions from the horde of journalists, Irving rushed to the microphone clutching documents which, he said, proved that the diaries were fake. Dramatically raising them above his head, he demanded that the Stern executives, who had anticipated this as a triumphant moment, explain how Hitler could have written about the July bomb plot in his diary on the day it happened if, as the film they had just screened demonstrated, his right hand was badly injured. Stern quickly ended the press conference. Reporters and paparazzi made a beeline for Irving. NBC immediately put him on a live hookup with the Today show, which was then on the air. Irving found this “exhilarating” and marveled at the “trail of chaos” he left behind. After spending the rest of the day giving interviews, Irving rose at 3:30 A.M. to appear on ABC’s Nightline. According to his diary he was paid 700 marks for the appearance. The German publication, Der Spiegel, paid him 20,000 marks for his story. Irving was pleased not only by the attention but by the fact that he earned about 15,000 marks in three days.
Within a few days, the diaries were becoming yesterday’s news. Suddenly, Irving changed his mind and announced that he now believed the diaries were genuine. Robert Harris, author of Selling Hitler, a study of the diaries incident, believed Irving’s reversal was motivated, in part, by the fact that the diaries “did not contain any evidence to suggest that Hitler was aware of the Holocaust,” thereby supporting the thesis of Hitler’s War. If Irving was hoping this move would win him publicity, he calculated correctly. The London Times immediately ran a story about it on its front page. But within a few days the highly respected Bundesarchiv, Germany’s National Archives, concluded, based on careful forensic tests, that the diaries were a forgery and a bad one at that. When the results were announced, Irving quickly composed a press release, accepting the Bundesarchiv’s ruling but stressing that he had been the first person to declare the diaries fakes. “Yes,” a reporter from the Times added when he heard the release, “and the last person to declare them authentic.”
NBC dispatched a television crew to interview Irving, who was in Germany on a speaking tour sponsored by the Deutsche Volksunion, a right-wing group that advocates an ethnically pure Germany. As the cameras were rolling, the audience walked out of the room. Several people were wearing the uniform of the Wiking-Jugend, an extremist group of young neo-Nazis. “Fortunately,” Irving wrote in his diary, “NBC did not observe them.”8
DAVID IRVING: FROM FELLOW TRAVELER TO HOLOCAUST DENIER
Well before becoming a denier, Irving had argued that Nazi wrongdoings were equaled, if not surpassed, by Allied evils. In 1984, he declared that Winston Churchill’s underhanded warmongering policy caused the death of millions. In 1986, he told a South African audience, “We [British] went in and we bombed the Belgians, and the Poles, and the French, and the Dutch. We did appalling damage. We killed millions of people in Europe in the most bestial way, in defiance of all conventions.” Eventually, he predicted, Britain’s name would be “damned with infamy.”9 But Irving remained on the
periphery of Holocaust deniers, attending their gatherings and publishing in their journal, but not explicitly denying the Holocaust.
Then came the 1988 trial of Ernst Zündel, the Canadian Holocaust denier and author of The Hitler We Loved and Why (White Power Publications). Zündel commissioned Fred Leuchter, an American whose company marketed a lethal injection system which, it claimed, was more humane, to conduct a forensic analysis of the gas chambers in Auschwitz, Birkenau, and Maidanek.
Upon his return, Leuchter reported that, in his opinion, it was technically impossible for the gas chambers to have been used to kill humans. Irving, who had come to testify on Zündel’s behalf, read the report the night he arrived in Toronto. By the next morning he declared himself much impressed with Leuchter’s findings. Two days later he took the stand and announced, “My mind has now changed because I understand that the whole of the Holocaust mythology is, after all, open to doubt.”10 After the Zündel trial Irving told an interviewer, “[U]ntil quite recently, I believed the story, but I want to be the first one out there in front now saying I was tricked and it’s time to stop this particular piece of propaganda.” According to Irving, there were financial reasons for the creation and dissemination of the “myth” of the Holocaust.
Nobody likes to be swindled, still less where considerable sums of money are involved. (Since 1949 the State of Israel has received over 90 billion Deutschmark in voluntary reparations from West Germany, essentially in atonement for the “gas chambers of Auschwitz.”) . . . Too many hundreds of millions of honest, intelligent people have been duped by the well-financed and brilliantly successful post-war publicity campaign.11
In 1991, Irving reissued Hitler’s War. I sat with the two editions before me, tracing Irving’s migration to hard-core denial. In the 1991 edition, he eliminated any mention of the Holocaust, replacing “extermination of the Jews” with vague references to the “Jewish tragedy” and “Nazi maltreatment of the Jews.” The 1977 edition referred to gas chambers. In the 1991 edition these had been replaced with “unsubstantiated, lurid rumors about ‘factories of death.’” Both editions contained an account of a May 1944 speech by Hitler to a group of German generals in which he promised that Hungary’s Jewish “problem” would shortly be resolved. In the 1977 edition, Irving had written that, after Hitler’s speech, “in Auschwitz, the defunct paraphernalia of death—idle since 1943—began to clank again as the first trainloads from Hungary arrived.” In the 1991 edition that sentence was replaced with: “Four hundred thousand Jews were being rounded up in Hungary; the first trainloads arrived in Auschwitz as slave labor for the now completed I.G. Farben plant.” In 1977, these Jews were going to their death. In 1991, they were to be slave laborers. Readers of the second edition would never have known that they ended up in the gas chambers.12
In 1992, Irving told the Guardian that “one year from now the Holocaust will have been discredited.” He warned, “No one’s going to like it when they find out that for 50 years they have been believing a legend based on baloney.”13 Irving also blamed Jews for Britain’s wartime policies. Asked by an interviewer whether he believed Churchill was “paid by the Jews [and] that the Jews dragged Britain into the war,” Irving replied that these were “facts which happen to be true, in my considered opinion as a historian.”14
After the publication of Hitler’s War in 1977, increasing numbers of historians conceded that Irving’s ideology compromised his work. Some of them bifurcated between his work on the Holocaust and his other research. A. J. P. Taylor, one of the best-known British historians of the twentieth century and author of The Origins of the Second World War, believed Irving a master of “unrivaled industry” and “good scholarship” where it concerned research. Hugh Trevor-Roper, who received a life peerage from Queen Elizabeth for his contributions to the writing of history, believed that “no praise can be too high for his indefatigable scholarly industry.” But he questioned Irving’s use of sources: “How reliable is his historical method? How sound is his judgment? We ask these questions particularly of a man who, like Mr. Irving, makes a virtue—almost a profession—of using arcane sources to affront established opinions.” World War II historian Paul Addison found Irving a “colossus of research” but castigated him for his notion that “Churchill was as wicked as Hitler.” He believed Irving “a schoolboy in judgment.”15 Similarly, John Charmley, whose book Churchill: The End of Glory is a right-wing critique of Churchill’s policies, observed that “Irving’s sources, unlike the conclusions which he draws from them, are usually sound.” Nonetheless, Charmley complained that Irving “has been unjustly ignored.”16 Rainer Zitelmann, a conservative German historian, praised Irving’s research on Hitler. In 1989, after Irving declared the Holocaust a “legend,” Zitelmann wrote in Die Zeit that Irving’s argument that Hitler had not ordered the Final Solution and may not even have been aware of it, had “struck a nerve” among historians. Irving, Zitelmann argued, “must not be ignored. He has weaknesses, . . . [but he has] contributed much to research.”17 Sir John Keegan, the noted military historian, contended—long after Irving became a denier—that Hitler’s War was one of the two best books on the Second World War.18
John Lukacs took a different tone. Troubled that these historians not only praised Irving, but relied on his research, Lukacs challenged them to check his sources. Had they done so, Lukacs wrote, they would have found that many of the “references and quotations are not verifiable. In his Hitler’s War . . . unverifiable and unconvincing assertions abound.”19 Charles Sydnor carefully checked Irving’s sources and, in a scathing critique, eviscerated Irving’s research, accusing him of seriously misrepresenting and distorting the record of Hitler and the Third Reich and dismissing as “pretentious twaddle,” Irving’s claim to be a more careful and thorough historian than the others who have researched Hitler.20
HOLOCAUST HISTORIOGRAPHY: DIFFERING VIEWS
My book was not arguing for historical orthodoxy. In fact, highly respected Holocaust historians have markedly different conclusions about many aspects of the Holocaust. For example, intentionalists contend that Hitler came to power intending to murder the Jews and instituted an unbroken and coherent set of policies directed at realizing that goal. In contrast, functionalists argue that the Nazi decision to murder the Jews did not originate with a single Hitler decision, but evolved in an incremental and improvised fashion. According to the functionalists, in 1941, Nazi officers in the east, saddled with so many Jews and no place to “park” them, initiated the murders themselves. Only after the killings began did Hitler subsequently approve of their actions.21
Other historians differ about the Jews’ responses to the persecution. Some argue that Judenräte, the Nazi-appointed Jewish councils, which administered life in the ghettoes, were too compliant with Nazi demands. These critics believe the Judenräte’s failure to warn the ghetto population about their fate was an act of betrayal. Others argue that council members found themselves, or, more accurately, were placed by the Germans, in an untenable and unprecedented situation and were attempting to ease the victims’ mental anguish during their final days.
There is an intense and spirited debate about the American response to the Holocaust. I came to the study of this topic with the preexisting supposition that the American Jewish community, by failing to pressure the Roosevelt administration to act, had been responsible in part for the fate of its coreligionists. I quickly realized that this view was simplistic. While American Jewish leaders expended much energy in internecine warfare, it is highly doubtful whether, even if they had raised a sustained outcry, they would have been able to move the Allies to act. Suggestions by some critics that American Jews should have broken with Roosevelt, acted on their own, and used the Jewish vote for leverage, are subject to the fallacy of “presentism”—the application of contemporary standards to the past.22 Because Jews may have political clout today, these critics believe that they had the same clout fifty years ago.
Over the years, this deb
ate had been hijacked and used for contemporary political ends. Critics from the right wing of the Orthodox movement have accused more acculturated Jewish leaders of not just inaction, but “outright interference with rescue efforts.” They believe these leaders wanted Orthodox Jews to die in Europe, rather than come to America.23 While I was deeply disturbed by these ahistorical attacks, I was equally disturbed by another phenomenon, the tendency to apply the term “Holocaust” to a broad array of injustices and tragedies including racial discrimination, AIDS, abortion, and laboratory use of animals, among other things. Such comparisons trivialize the Holocaust.
Nor did I believe that every genocide—as truly horrifying as it may be—can be labeled a Holocaust. This is not a question of the useless exercise of “comparative pain”—my people suffered more than yours—but of historiography. The Holocaust has certain unique elements that distinguish it from other genocides. However, at the same time, I disagree with those who argue for its utter uniqueness. Nothing can be utterly unique. Over many years of teaching about this topic, I have become increasingly disturbed by how Holocaust education can be more about advocacy than history and the teachers who teach this material more ideologues than pedagogues.
As intense as any of these and many other historiographic debates have become, rarely—if ever—do they falsify data. Deniers, however, distort, falsify, and pervert the historical record and, consequently, fall entirely outside the parameters of any historical debate about the Holocaust.
I had initially assumed that writing Denying the Holocaust would be a relatively noncontroversial task. Instead, I encountered unanticipated obstacles. Some scholars contended that, by taking deniers seriously, I was sounding a false alarm about the danger they posed. In fact, I did not consider Holocaust denial a “clear and present danger,” but rather a future danger. Surveys revealed that more people in the United States believed Elvis Presley was alive than believed the Holocaust was a myth. Nonetheless, I did not think deniers were simply purveyors of a “loopy” form of history. Unless their fallacious claims were exposed, they could ultimately pose a more substantial danger. More sophisticated deniers, such as David Irving, had the ability to sow seeds of real confusion about the Holocaust. The greatest obstacle I faced was the glee with which deniers twisted facts, disparaged survivors, and pilloried Jews. In a way, I found it harder to write about deniers than about the Holocaust itself. The Nazis were defeated. Deniers were alive and kicking and reveling in their efforts.
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