Denial [Movie Tie-in]

by Deborah E. Lipstadt

  THREE

  AUSCHWITZ: A FORENSIC TOUR

  “Don’t worry, he’s very good. He’ll do an excellent job. Believe me the system works,” Anthony said as we sat in a Mishcon conference room in the fall of 1998. He was trying to calm my nerves, but it wasn’t doing much good. “If your legal system worked so well, I wouldn’t be in this mess,” I snapped in response. “And how’s a newcomer going to get up to speed?”

  Anthony had just explained that he and James, despite having served as the architects of much of my case, could not present it in court. The British legal system is divided between solicitors, who prepare a case up to trial, and barristers, who present it in court. Only barristers have the right of audience in the High Court. Solicitors may not, except in rare circumstances, speak. I was thunderstruck. Anthony and James knew this case inside and out. Anthony assured me that it was akin to preparing a case and then turning it over to a litigator to argue it in court. His reassurances did not allay my concerns. This case had a moral dimension that distinguished it, I believed, from other “normal” cases. Someone else might bring the legal knowledge, but would they have the same passion and commitment?

  RICHARD RAMPTON, QC

  Anthony and Penguin’s solicitors had selected Richard Rampton, one of England’s leading barristers in the field of defamation and libel to present my case. Anthony described Rampton as someone with “a first-rate mind,” no small compliment from a man who did not suffer lesser minds gladly. Rampton was a queen’s counsel or QC, a designation conferred upon the most accomplished barristers. Also known as “silks” because of the ornate silken robes they wear, QCs appear in court with a “junior,” a barrister whose job it is to assist them in preparing the case.1 Penguin chose Heather Rogers as its junior barrister. Anthony, having received “rights of audience” under the new Civil Procedure rules, giving him permission to speak in court, would be mine. I had asked some lawyers whose firms had offices in London to check out Rampton. They quickly reported back that he was a pillar of the London legal establishment. One said, “Whoever picked him, picked the best.”

  On a cold January morning in 1999, Anthony, James, and I went to meet Rampton. As we walked through Lincoln’s Inn Fields, the largest square in London, I remembered it as the site of the “Old Curiosity Shop,” a putative legacy from Charles Dickens. We crossed Fleet Street and entered The Temple, a vast enclave of Georgian buildings and gardens where barristers have their “chambers,” British parlance for a barrister’s office. One Brick Court, the site of Rampton’s chambers, had specialized in libel and media law since the 1880s. We pushed open the heavy wood door and entered the dimly lit hallway. The stone staircase was well worn with age. We walked up to the receptionist on the second floor. After a short wait, she told us that Rampton was ready and directed us back down the stairs to his office on the first floor. Given his reputation and the stature of the cases he handled, I expected a formal, buttoned-up person. A man of medium build, with thinning white wavy hair, a gentle face, and rimless glasses, emerged to greet us. He was wearing a slightly rumpled corduroy suit, soft cotton shirt, and narrow yellow knit tie. I estimated that he was in his late fifties. I knew that he had studied classics and philosophy at Oxford. He had a soft, kindly voice with just a bit of a Scottish brogue: “Oh, hello, welcome, please do come in.” His natural graciousness immediately put me at ease.

  I remarked that Brick Court reminded me of the Pickwick Papers. “I feel as if I am entering the Dickensian to discuss the Kafkaesque.” He laughed and told me my analogy was not off the mark. “Charles Dickens worked as a law clerk not far from here. About the Kafkaesque. . . . Well, we’ll see to that.”

  Rampton’s book-lined office was spacious enough to accommodate a large conference table that extended out from his heavy wooden desk. A roaring fire kept the space warm. On the floor near his desk were piles of books on the Holocaust. I spotted books by our experts as well as Raul Hilberg’s classic, The Destruction of European Jewry. There were also a number of books by Irving. A horsehair powdered wig festooned with rows of curls sat on a wooden, skull-shaped stand. A black silk robe with immensely wide sleeves hung on the back of the door. The pungent odor of stale cigarette smoke left no doubt that Rampton was a smoker. He offered us tea and scurried about to brew it himself. While he did so, I quickly studied some of the photos on the fireplace mantle. He seemed to have children and grandchildren. In addition to family photos, there was a picture of a man who clearly resembled Rampton in fishing gear. When Rampton saw me studying it, he told me it was of his father, from whom he had gained a love of the sport.

  Heather Rogers, Penguin’s junior barrister, soon arrived. In her mid-thirties, she had short, dirty-blond hair that framed her face. She wore glasses, a dark gray lawyer’s suit, plain white blouse, and no makeup or jewelry. She had a down-to-earth, no-nonsense quality about her. After we settled around the table, Rampton started off by saying, “We must discredit this man as a historian. He is a clever opponent, but he is more clever than he is wise. We cannot afford to underestimate him or to lose this case. It’s too important.”

  It quickly became clear that Rampton was already conversant with the basic historical data. He had obviously spent time reading the Holocaust books piled on the floor. Rampton turned to me: “If we go to trial, I will probably not put you in the witness box. You are being sued for what you wrote. Having you give testimony will not advance our case. It will only divert the judge’s attention from the main focus, David Irving.” According to British law, Irving could not compel me to give testimony. I listened to Rampton with mixed emotions. I was relieved that I would not have to be cross-examined by a man whose views I abhorred and who certainly would use the opportunity to cross-examine me as a way of “settling scores” for the wrongs he felt he had suffered. At the same time, I was disappointed that I would not be able to openly express my contempt for him. I feared that people would think that I was frightened of facing him.

  As the lawyers reviewed various legal details and parceled out assignments—some of which were so technical I felt as if I was listening to a conversation in a language I did not understand—I realized that everybody had a job in this diligently orchestrated effort. Expert witnesses would write reports. Our researchers, Nik and Thomas, would comb through the thousands of pages of documentation we had received from Irving and look for relevant information. Lawyers would oversee this work, prepare the various official documents that had to be submitted to the court, and begin to draft the interrogatories that Irving would be asked to answer. By now, I was accustomed to the fact that I was not leading the charge. But, for a moment I felt that I was a spectator—observing but not participating—in a drama where my work and reputation were on the line. It was all very disconcerting. Afraid that I was impeding the lawyers’ progress, I stopped asking to have things explained and sat, rather uncharacteristically, silently by.

  Over the next few months I returned to London, the frequent trips quickly becoming a routine. After settling into my hotel, I would go to Mishcon’s offices to consult with Anthony and James, read documents, and watch videotapes of Irving’s speeches. The expert witnesses and researchers would brief me on their work. In the evening I would pick up take-out food and eat it in my room as I reviewed additional trial-related materials. Then, a day or two later, I would fly back to the United States, where I would disabuse my friends and colleagues of the notion that there was anything high-powered or exciting about these journeys.

  In June 1999, I returned to London for a few days. I then flew to Berlin to attend an academic conference. From there I was to continue on to Auschwitz to meet Richard Rampton, Heather Rogers, Robert Jan van Pelt, and solicitors from both Davenport Lyons and Mishcon. The trip was designed to give the lawyers—Rampton in particular—a firsthand encounter with the site. A few months earlier the AJC’s Ken Stern, who had become an ex officio member of the legal team, told Rampton that a trip to Auschwitz was a must. Ken, a lawyer who had a
rgued before the Supreme Court, said that he would never consider doing a murder case without having a three-dimensional image of the scene. This, in some way, was a very large murder case. Hearing this, Rampton became terribly pale. “I know it’s important,” he told Ken, “but I just don’t know how I will endure it.”

  Though I had visited Auschwitz a number of times, I anticipated that this would be a different kind of visit. We would inspect the physical and documentary evidence which demonstrated that Irving’s claims about the camp were bogus. I hated being in Auschwitz, but was glad this visit would give me the chance to get to know Rampton a bit better.

  Berlin seemed a fitting place to begin this journey as the destruction process that culminated in Auschwitz had its roots there. After giving my paper and looking for relief from drawn-out academic deliberations, I went “sightseeing.” For me that entailed going to Jewish- or Holocaust-related sites. While I admire Germany’s cultural and scenic beauty, much of which is spectacular, I find it difficult to enjoy. I do, however, always make an effort to see the renowned Pergamon Museum, which contains fantastic artifacts, including the huge Altar of Zeus and the famous Ishtar Gate from Babylon. But on this trip I skipped this visit, going directly to Wannsee Haus, the site of the January 1942 conference at which Reinhard Heydrich, Himmler’s second-in-command, explained the logistics of the Final Solution to the directors of the primary government ministries. Heydrich knew that, unless the bureaucrats fully cooperated, it would be impossible to implement the Final Solution. This gathering was probably the only meeting at which the killing process was openly discussed before leaders of the ministerial bureaucracy.

  At Wannsee Haus, a villa on the shores of a crystal clear Berlin lake, various documents, including the letters of invitation to the conference and the minutes of the deliberations, are on display in the room where the meeting occurred. I had been there before, but somehow this visit felt very different. I thought of how Adolf Eichmann described this meeting at his trial. According to Eichmann, Heydrich came to Wannsee “expecting considerable stumbling blocks and difficulties.” To his surprise and delight, the ministers conveyed a sense of “agreement that . . . had not been expected.”2 The ninety-minute gathering concluded with congratulatory cognac.

  After visiting the exhibit, I walked a few hundred yards to the adjacent beach. In what must be one of the world’s most dissonant scenes, people were swimming, launching small sailboats, and sunbathing in the shadow of this villa. I bought a bottle of mineral water at the kiosk, found a spot at the water’s edge, and, needing to talk to someone who would instinctively understand how the history of this place was linked to the battle in which I was engaged, I called Anthony. I told him I was just “checking in.” Then I described my visit to the room where German bureaucrats decided on the process of the Final Solution.

  Anxious to visit a site of Jewish life—Jews as subject, not object—I headed for the Oranienburger Strasse Synagogue. Dedicated in 1866 at a ceremony attended by Prussian prime minister Bismarck, it was one of the first synagogues German authorities allowed to be built on a prestigious street rather than on a back alley. A magnificent Moorish structure with a red-striped yellow-brick-and-brown-stone facade and a gleaming bulbous dome 160 feet above the street topped by a Jewish star, its sanctuary had accommodated over three thousand people. For Berlin Jews, the building symbolized their freedom to aspire to full participation in the secular world. Set ablaze in November 1938 on Kristallnacht, when hundreds of German synagogues were destroyed, the synagogue was saved when the local police chief held off the Nazi attackers and ordered the fire department to save it. Today a plaque commemorates his bravery. Ironically, the massive sanctuary was badly damaged by British bombers in 1943 and demolished by the East Germans in 1958.

  After years of neglect, the facade and expansive vestibule had recently been repaired. An open gravel field spread out where the sanctuary once stood. Pillars marked its precise boundaries. At the far end of this field, in a style reminiscent of an archaeological site, the bits and pieces of the pulpit and the Holy Ark, which had been excavated from the rubble, had been placed in their original position. Some seemed eerily suspended in air. Standing at what once was the entrance to this magnificent sanctuary and looking out at this contemporary void, I thought of the cognac-drinking bureaucrats at Wannsee. The absence, not just of the sanctuary, but of the community whose destruction they had coordinated, was palpable.

  JESUITS, THE WHITE HOUSE, HOLLYWOOD, AND THE KILLING FIELDS

  The next day I boarded a train to Poland. I found my compartment and took out the eight-hundred-page report on Auschwitz by Robert Jan van Pelt. I used the train journey to review it in anticipation of our visit to the camp. As we approached Krakow, I interrupted my reading with reflections on my family’s history. My father left Germany in his twenties because of its terrible economic situation. Although he had no immediate family in the United States, he came anyway. My mother’s parents had left Poland shortly before World War I. What if they had not done so? Generally, I find such hypotheticals historically invalid, but as I headed east, it was hard not to engage in such reveries, if only in passing. As the train pulled into the station, I felt myself overcome by a deep determination to fight with all my heart.

  I arrived in Krakow before the rest of the group. After settling into my hotel, I called Father Stanislav Musial, a Jesuit I first met in 1989 in the cemetery behind Krakow’s sixteenth-century Rema Synagogue. The cemetery contains the remains of both great Jewish scholars and Jews whose identities have been obliterated by history. Musial was with a small group of tourists. When he saw me somberly studying one of the gravestones, he tearfully said, “I’m sorry that all there is for you to visit here are cemeteries and killing places.”

  Father Musial had once served as the secretary of the Polish Episcopate Commission for the Dialogue with Judaism. In that capacity he had drafted statements about the role of the Church during the Holocaust. He was highly regarded by those who took part in Catholic-Jewish dialogues. All that changed during the debate over a twenty-foot cross erected by Carmelite nuns at their convent in Auschwitz. Jews strongly opposed the cross, arguing that it lent the death camp a distinctly Christian character. Musial, who participated in negotiations to try to resolve the problem, broke with many Polish-Catholic leaders when he wrote: “It can never be sufficiently emphasized that the fate of the Jews during the last war was incomparably worse than that of any other nation.” The Polish primate, Cardinal Jozef Glemp, took a markedly different stance. Falling back on traditional Jewish stereotypes, he said Jews consider themselves to be a “people raised above all others” and Jewish power lies “in the mass media which are easily at [their] disposal in many countries.”3 Other Polish clerics echoed his views. In a television appearance, Father Musial criticized Church leaders for this position and urged a dialogue with the Jews. Scholars who studied this debate describe Musial’s comments as a “notable change of tone,” particularly when one considers that they came from a Polish clergyman.4 That change of tone did not endear him to his superiors. Shortly thereafter he was reassigned to an old-age home for senile women. He wryly observed, “They will pardon you everything but not attacking the bishops.” Many of his fellow priests shunned him. The Jesuit publishing house refused to let him write the introduction to a book on Jews and Christians in Poland, even though the American professor editing it recommended him. No longer was he invited to conferences.

  We spent the afternoon walking through Kazimierz, Krakow’s former Jewish quarter, whose central square figured so prominently in Spielberg’s Schindler’s List. Members of Krakow’s Jewish community kept stopping Father Musial to wish him well. When we ordered coffee at the café in the Jewish cultural center, the manager refused to let us pay.

  Father Musial seemed to internalize the tragedy of the Shoah. Over coffee, he described his shame that in places such as France, Roman Catholic leaders felt compelled, long after the Holocaust, to apologize fo
r the Church’s failure to help Jewish victims. This Catholic priest, who had lived most of his life under communism, noted, not without a bit of irony, “French communists did not have to apologize. They had nothing to apologize for.”5 Father Musial found the Church’s failure, particularly when compared to the communists’ record, “deeply embarrassing.”

  When we parted, he said, “Be strong.” I told him that we both were fighting, but that his battle was much lonelier than mine. I was receiving support from many directions while he was shut out from participating in the very dialogue he had nurtured and was compelled to work in a nursing home for people with dementia. “No,” he assured me, “this, too, is God’s work. I am quiet with my conscience. Before, my hands were tied. Now, I am free. I can say anything.” Musial had spoken truth to power.

  After leaving Father Musial, I wandered through Krakow. It was a beautiful day, sunny and clear, the kind of day that I imagined was atmospherically impossible in a place so close to Auschwitz. The city was festooned with yellow-and-white banners, the Vatican’s colors, in honor of the forthcoming visit of the pope. I walked to the Vistula River where my grandmother, who came from Krakow, remembered folk dancing with her classmates, recalling these days as a “golden age.”

  From there I walked to Market Square, the central point of this medieval city. An immense area, it is dominated by a seventeenth-century town hall. I sat down at one of the small folding tables in the square, ordered an espresso, and began to write in my journal when my cell phone rang. The caller identified himself as a member of the White House staff. Assuming that one of my friends was playing a trick on me, I responded, “Yeah. Right.” Assuring me that he indeed worked for the White House Office of Presidential Personnel, which handles presidential appointments, the caller suggested that I call back to ascertain that he was legitimate. He then informed me that President Clinton had just reappointed me to a second term on the United States Holocaust Memorial Council. I had just returned to my journal when the phone rang again. A movie producer, who had heard about the case, wanted to know if I had assigned the rights for the film version of my story. Amazed that he thought the case worthy of a film, I told him that I thought it premature to even be thinking like that.