Denial [Movie Tie-in]

by Deborah E. Lipstadt

  IRVING: Quite. They were purpose-built factories of death; in other words, [they] had no other purpose than that.

  JUSTICE GRAY: Oh, I see.

  RAMPTON: . . . This is getting a bit like a fourth form debating society, I fear—a moment ago you said to me that you had no evidence to contradict the probability that these were purpose-built extermination facilities.

  IRVING: Yes, because I have no evidence, period.

  RAMPTON: No, but you write in this letter: “All the experts in scientific forensic evidence is to the contrary.” . . . What is the expert and scientific (forensic) evidence that contradicts the probability that Treblinka was a purpose-built extermination facility?

  Rampton kept demanding that Irving explain what evidence he was referring to in the letter. Irving protested that he could not remember the exact details of a letter he wrote eleven years earlier. Judge Gray, in what seemed to be an effort to help Irving, asked if, when he made these statements about the other camps, he was “extrapolating from Auschwitz”? Irving, looking a bit like a man who had been thrown a lifeline, agreed that he indeed was doing that. Rampton immediately jumped in: “But how could you extrapolate from Auschwitz, Mr Irving? It has never been proposed by anybody, so far as I know, that the Nazis used hydrogen cyanide anywhere outside Auschwitz to kill people with, has it?” Irving lifted his arm, made a large arc in the air, as if to give added emphasis to his words, and, with evident frustration, angrily proclaimed:

  This is what I find so puzzling. We were told that this is part of [sic] system . . . and yet, apparently, they used cyanide here, petrol gas there, diesel fumes there, bullets in yet another place, bulldozers, hangings, shootings—it appears to have been a totally ramshackle and haphazard operation. A total lack of system.15

  Irving sounded almost insulted that we would ascribe to the Third Reich—a supposed bastion of organizational efficiency—such an imprecise operation.

  On the following day the question of gassings at the other camps came up again. Irving again protested that he was not an “expert on that” and did not know. This time, Rampton did not let Irving’s answer go unchallenged. “A man in your position does not enter the arena waving flags and blowing trumpets unless he has taken the trouble to verify in advance what it is that he is proposing to say.” When Irving repeated his familiar refrain, “I am not a Holocaust historian,” Rampton exploded, “Why do you not keep your mouth shut about the Holocaust?” Irving grinned, as if he were pleased to have gotten under Rampton’s skin. “Because I am asked about it.” He then shifted his gaze to the public gallery and added with a half-smile, “It apparently obsesses people.”

  Rampton, continuing to place before the court statements by Irving that were at odds with the available evidence, noted that in 1989, Irving had said, “I am prepared to accept that local Nazis tried bizarre methods of liquidating Jews. . . . They may have experimented using gas trucks . . . [which was] a very inefficient way of killing people” (emphasis added). How, Rampton wondered, could Irving have described the gassings as “local bizarre experiments”—thereby implying that the operation was on a small scale—when a June 1942 SS report stated: “Since December 1941 . . . 97,000 [Jews] were processed [gassed] by three trucks.” Irving’s response left me dumbfounded: “It’s a very substantial achievement when you work it out with a pocket calculator.” The normally unflappable James looked up in shock. Judge Gray asked, “Is it very limited and experimental?” Irving insisted he could not answer that question because he did not have access to the June 1942 report when he said the gassings were “limited and experimental.” I wondered if he had forgotten the judge’s ruling that we could ask him about a historical document, even if he did not have it at the time he made the statement. Judge Gray had clearly not forgotten. He instructed Irving, “Answer the question even so.” Irving very quietly said, “Not on this scale. This is systematic.”16

  I turned to James and, momentarily forgetting he was nursing a sore arm as a result of a bicycle accident, hit him in the shoulder with my fist as if to say, “Yes!” I then turned to scan the gallery to see if other people had grasped what a major concession this was on Irving’s part. An older woman I knew to be a survivor was watching me. The corners of her mouth lifted slightly in a sad smile.

  DONALD CAMERON WATT: STRANGE TESTIMONY

  Irving had asked Donald Cameron Watt, the distinguished London School of Economics Emeritus Professor of International Relations, to testify on his behalf. Watt refused and Irving subpoenaed him, leaving Watt no choice but to appear. On the day of Watt’s testimony, Anthony arrived in court wearing a big smile. Clearly pleased about something, he made a beeline for my seat. He had received a call from one of the leaders of the British Jewish community, who had counseled me not to mount a response to Irving’s charges. Suspecting that Anthony was pushing me into it, he had urged me to find some way to settle. I feared he had called Anthony with another round of complaints. I assumed Anthony had told him off with a witty but sharp bon mot and that this was the source of his satisfaction. I was wrong. The man had apologized and told Anthony he had been completely wrong to oppose what we were doing. His friends, who had shared his doubts, had also changed their opinion. I was impressed, not only by this man’s forthrightness, but by Anthony’s great pleasure at his phone call. I recalled how, at the time, Anthony had declared that he simply did not care what these people thought. He may not have cared then, but he certainly cared now.

  I saw that Robert Jan, who was scheduled to begin testifying the following week, had arrived in court. I went over to welcome him. As I was returning to my seat, I saw him go over to Irving, amicably shake his hand, and begin an animated conversation that looked, from my perspective, very friendly. I watched them closely inspect a large aerial photograph of Auschwitz that Irving had placed on an easel next to his table. Irving was pointing something out as Robert Jan nodded intently. I turned to Anthony, pointed at this confab, and said, “What’s that all about?” Anthony shrugged. He clearly was not going to waste any energy on this and, from the way he looked at me, thought that I shouldn’t either. In any case, Janet had given her customary holler, calling the court to order.

  When Watt entered the witness box, Irving resumed his role of barrister. Watt, a large, almost burly man in his seventies, spoke with a pronounced upper-crust British accent. With his somewhat rumpled suit, he looked and sounded like the prototype of the Oxbridge don in a British novel or a character in Masterpiece Theatre. He began, at Irving’s request, by describing his Oxford education: “I indulged myself in the usual activities of undergraduates. That is to say, I wrote, I played opera, I ran the Poetry Society.” I smiled at his description of these as “usual” undergraduate activities.

  Then Watt began to assess Irving’s work. I anticipated that, as an expert on World War II, he would not have kind things to say about Irving. I was wrong. Watt, speaking directly to Judge Gray, declared that, even if one disagrees with Irving’s view of history, “it has to be taken seriously. He is after all, the only man of standing, on the basis of his other research, who puts the case for Hitler forward and it seems to me that it is mistaken to dismiss it.” This endorsement startled me. I knew that in 1968 Watt had written a substantial introduction to a book Irving had edited and wondered whether he did not, therefore, feel a bit hamstrung about openly criticizing him. Nonetheless, given that Watt had been sent Evans’s report, I was surprised by his seemingly unqualified praise. It was his next comment, however, that made me sit up ramrod straight. “I hope that I am never subjected to the kind of examination that Mr Irving’s books have been suggested [sic] to by the Defence witnesses. . . . There are senior historical figures . . . whose work would not stand up . . . to this kind of examination.” Did Watt believe that these senior historians had engaged in the same distortions we had found in Irving’s work?

  I was on the verge of despair when Watt’s assessment of Irving became more critical. He told Irving that his claim that
Himmler had conducted the killings without Hitler’s knowledge was not supported by any historical information. “To assume that Himmler and his minions went beyond the limits of what Hitler had approved, seems to assume something inherently improbable and out of keeping with all we know of Himmler’s relationship to Hitler.” Seemingly untroubled by Watt’s critique and delighted to be questioning this historian, a smiling Irving leaned toward the witness box and, in a tone that was more reminiscent of chitchat at a cocktail party than courtroom testimony, said, “Himmler’s brother actually told me the same. He said, I cannot imagine Heinny would have done this on his own.” Irving’s use of Himmler’s family nickname, “Heinny,” was striking in its familiarity.17

  Watt’s criticisms left me unnerved. I would have expected him to praise, not castigate, our efforts. I wondered if I was not witnessing a certain “Old School” closing of the ranks around Irving. Watt seemed to have forgotten that Irving was trying to silence me and pull my book from circulation. Rampton, convinced that Watt had said nothing substantive that could harm us, chose not to cross-examine him.

  A QUICKIE CONVERSION TO HOLOCAUST DENIAL

  When Irving returned to the stand, Rampton reviewed Irving’s conversion to Holocaust denial. In his diary, Irving recorded how, after arriving in Toronto for the Zündel trial, he spent a few hours reading Leuchter’s report and declared himself much “impressed.” The next day, he left for some sightseeing in Niagara Falls. Upon his return, he testified in court that Leuchter’s report convinced him that “the whole of the Holocaust mythology is . . . open to doubt.” In light of the importance Irving gave the report, his cursory examination of it and his failure to do any subsequent research was noteworthy. Rampton, using surprisingly blunt language, wondered if, as an historian and an expert witness, it did not behoove him “to keep your trap shut” until he had properly investigated the matter? Rampton accused Irving of venturing into an area of history “of which he had absolutely no knowledge whatever, making world-shattering statements” without having done the requisite research.18

  Had Irving done some research, he might have discovered Leuchter’s mistaken assumption that it took 3,200 parts of HCN per million to kill humans, when in fact it took far less. On the basis of this wrong calculation, Leuchter had contended that the residue from such a large amount of gas would have spread through the sewer system poisoning the entire camp; that the guards would have had to throw so much Zyklon B into the chamber that they themselves would have been poisoned; and that the Sonderkommandos—the inmates who removed the bodies—would have had to wait twenty-four hours before entering the chambers. All these claims were wrong, because it actually took only 10 percent of what Leuchter had assumed was necessary to kill humans.

  Irving pulled himself up to his full height, threw back his shoulders, and, appropriating an almost military bearing, emphatically declared, “I am banned from visiting Auschwitz or the archives. I am the only historian in the world who is not allowed to set foot in the Auschwitz archives.” Judging by the tone of his voice, he seemed to consider this ban a badge of honor. Rampton reminded Irving that the Auschwitz ban was not issued until eight years after he testified in Toronto. Why, in those eight years, did he never bother to visit the archives? Irving, chuckling, said he probably would have been banned earlier if he had tried to visit: “It is like the big casinos in Las Vegas. They do not want the big winners to come.”19 I heard someone in the gallery gasp.

  CROOKED JEWISH FINANCIERS

  The videos and other materials in the second batch of discovery materials contained a cache of Holocaust-denial statements Irving had made in private off the record gatherings. As is often the case when one is speaking to groups of followers, he spoke a bit more frankly in these settings. In fact, at a “soirée” in Kentville, Canada, right after Zündel’s trial, Irving told his audience how pleased he was that “we are such a small circle . . . today because I can talk, . . . more frankly.” Irving told Judge Gray that statements made extemporaneously at private gatherings should be given less import than his written books. Judge Gray was not persuaded. “It seems to me . . . that you have been far more unrestrained in your assertions about Auschwitz when speaking at these various talks.”20 Rampton, in an effort to illustrate that Irving’s private statements were far more revealing of his true thoughts and motives than those crafted for publication, read one of these “private” utterances:

  Hundreds of millions of innocent people have been bamboozled . . . for a purpose. . . . [E]very time a Jewish financier, a John Gutfreund, the Salomon brothers or Ivan Boesky or . . . Michael Milken . . . is caught with his hands deep in the till and he has . . . undoubtedly bilked hundreds of thousands of investors out of every penny they have got. . . . These financiers have laughed . . . because they can afford it. . . . When you . . . realize that they are Jewish, then the invitation is that the man in the street should say: Yes, but they have suffered, haven’t they? They did have the Holocaust.

  Judge Gray, with a bit of an edge in his voice, asked Irving, “So the Holocaust is a kind of a lie dreamt up in order to excuse crooked Jewish financiers?” Irving, looking somewhat uncomfortable, protested that he was “not put[ting] it like that.” “What,” a seemingly unpersuaded Judge Gray asked, “are you saying if not that?” Irving claimed he was simply repeating other people’s opinion that the Holocaust “legend” protects Jews from criticism for their “activities in the world of finance, or because of their brutality on the West Bank or whatever.”21

  It was not just what Irving said in these small gatherings that we found significant, but the way his audience responded. Rampton noted that when Irving said that “more people died on the back seat of Edward Kennedy’s car at Chappaquidick than ever died in a gas chamber in Auschwitz,” they laughed. Rampton looked up from the page in front of him: “Laughter, Mr Irving?” His audience also laughed when Irving said that Elie Wiesel did a “Cook’s tour of the different concentration camps.” Irving protested that they were laughing at the “spurious survivors . . . those trying to climb on the Holocaust bandwagon.” Why, Rampton wondered, would a serious matter such as someone falsely claiming to be an Auschwitz survivor provoke laughter? Irving explained, “Because there is something ludicrous . . . something pathetic about it.”

  Rampton had another explanation: Irving’s audience were so “deeply antisemitic” that they reveled in Irving’s words, which were “redolent of animosity, hostility, contempt, spite . . . just like Dr Goebbels [sic] articles.” Irving quickly shot back, “Just like Winston Churchill talking about Adolf Hitler.” Irving’s equation of Goebbels with Churchill brought this British courtroom to attention. In the gallery, I saw Churchill’s official biographer, Sir Martin Gilbert, paying rapt attention. Rampton’s face grew flushed. Sounding for a moment like his client was Prime Minister Churchill—not Penguin or Lipstadt—he said, “Mr Churchill rallied this country to the flag during the war by being spiteful and beastly about Adolf Hitler. The difference is, unlike Dr Goebbels, Winston Churchill had a very good reason to be spiteful.”22 With that the second week of the trial ended.

  As I left the courtroom, I reflected on the fact that in my many years of studying antisemitism, I had encountered people like Irving. I knew them, however, more in theory than practice. I did not anticipate—though I probably should have—the world of difference between reading about antisemitism and hearing it up close and personal. My inability publicly to denounce his statements was growing more and more frustrating.

  Relieved that there were no paparazzi outside the building, I headed toward the underground when a distressed Ursula caught up with me to breathlessly tell me about an Australian reporter who had been sitting near her in the gallery. “She has exceptionally blond hair and gold wire-rimmed glasses. She’s in her thirties. I overheard her extolling Irving to a group of reporters, comparing him to Churchill and bemoaning how he had been wronged by you.” Feeling as if I could not deal with another issue, I shrugged my sho
ulders and reassured her, “It’s probably nothing.”

  That night, I gained, quite unexpectedly, another perspective on the trial. I went to see Michael Frayn’s Copenhagen, a play about the mysterious 1941 visit of Werner Heisenberg, the head of Germany’s nuclear fission research project and originator of the “uncertainty principle,” to his mentor, the Danish physicist Niels Bohr. Some historians assume that Heisenberg was trying to extract information from Bohr about the hydrogen atom. Frayn, who has a more sympathetic theory about Heisenberg’s trip, posits that he was trying to make a deal with Bohr. Germany would not build a bomb if Bohr promised that the Allies would not build one either. Frayn also suggested that Heisenberg sweetened the deal by offering to help Bohr, the son of a Jewish mother, escape the deportations that would inevitably occur in Denmark.23

  I was troubled by Frayn’s suggestion that there was a moral equivalency between Bohr’s research and Heisenberg’s work for the Nazis. Interested in learning more about the play and the playwright, I bought a book with the text of the play and an essay by Frayn. When I returned home, I brewed a cup of tea and settled in to read it. I started by flipping to the bibliography to see the sources upon which Frayn had relied. Among those listed was Irving’s book on the German bomb program.24 Suddenly the playwright’s approach to the incident—both sides were equally guilty—made more sense. As I prepared for bed, I realized how insidious Irving’s influence is, even when it was not direct or obvious.

  NINE

  QUEUES AND GAS CHAMBER CONTROVERSIES

  The crowd that gathered each morning outside Courtroom 73 included a mix of Holocaust survivors and their children, history buffs, retirees, lawyers, courtroom junkies, teachers, and students. Intermingling with them were a contingent of Irving supporters. My friends also came to root for me, some intentionally, others on the spur of the moment, and their number increased as the trial progressed. One morning I spotted Betty, a friend and a child of survivors, who had just arrived from Milwaukee. “I read a news report a few days ago about Irving’s supporters being present. It made me nuts. So I decided I’ll be there too.” Her friend, Sarah, having had the same reaction, planned to arrive that afternoon from Israel. Anthony, impressed by this growing stream of visitors, took to greeting me each morning with the question “And what country do your friends represent today?”