After a moment’s pause, Rampton continued reading from Irving’s speech: “But if there is one thing that gets up my nose, I must admit, it is this . . . [when] I switch on my television set and I see one of them . . . reading our news to us.” Rampton insisted that Irving explain: “Now who is the ‘them’ and who is the ‘us’?” Without a moment’s pause, Irving said the “one of them” was Trevor McDonald, a venerated British newscaster. A native of Trinidad, McDonald had received an OBE from Queen Elizabeth and was now Sir Trevor McDonald. Irving turned to the bench to explain that this was one of his “stock speeches” in which he would start off by talking about how “our people” used to read the news, “but now in the gradual drumming [sic] down on television, they have women reading the news.” Judge Gray, whose rather delicate features seem to be pulled taut, demanded more precision: “What did you mean by ‘them’ and ‘us’?” Irving, rather matter-of-factly, said he was talking about women. “It is male news and it should be read to us by men.” Shaking his head back and forth as if to indicate that Irving’s answer would not do, Judge Gray declared himself puzzled: “You said the ‘one’ was Trevor McDonald . . . but you then said that the ‘them’ was women. . . . Well, I do not understand.”
Irving said he had mentioned McDonald because he subsequently spoke about him in the speech. Rampton kept pushing, demanding to know why do “you say that Trevor McDonald was one of them?” Irving, in a tone that suggested that the answer was self-evident, said, “Well, he is someone who is different from us.” And then, sounding like he was trying to defuse the entire matter, Irving again described this as a “witty” speech designed to set the “mood of the evening.” Rampton was “not enjoying” it. Rampton, who appeared revolted by the suggestion that he should enjoy it, returned to Irving’s comments about “them,” “us,” and McDonald. He read from Irving’s speech: “For the time being, for a transitional period, I would be prepared to accept that the BBC should have a dinner-jacketed gentleman reading the important news to us, followed by a lady reading all the less important news, followed by Trevor McDonald giving us all the latest news about the muggings and the drug busts—[rest lost in loud laughter and applause].”6
A few days earlier, when Rampton was reviewing this material, he came across this quote in the documents Heather had prepared. His face grew red: “I did not think that man could still shock me. I was wrong.” Now Irving insisted that Rampton was missing the point. “This is a funny after dinner speech in the spirit of any stand-up comedian on the BBC.” Then, having forgotten—or chosen to ignore—the judge’s admonition, he continued: “And as for which of us two is the racist, I can only refer to the fact that I, unlike the members of the Defence team, employ ethnic minorities without the slightest hesitation.” Judge Gray, who had been following Irving’s words on his computer screen, looked up and quickly swiveled his chair toward the witness box. Scowling, he looked decidedly unhappy. “How many times do I need to tell you not to make that comment? It is inappropriate, futile . . . and is doing your cause no good.”7 With that we broke for lunch.
In light of the ugly sentiments that had just aired, it seemed inappropriate to revel in the moment. Nonetheless, I felt a sense of satisfaction that these expressions of racism were now “out of the closet.” The conversation at lunch seemed particularly muted. Even the researchers, who usually injected a tone of youthful joviality into our gatherings, were subdued. Everyone seemed a bit shell-shocked.
When we returned to the courtroom, I noticed “Brunhilda” and some other people who had been sitting near Irving in intense conversation with him. As soon as we reconvened, Irving rose and asked to address the court. He apologized for his “unruly behavior on the race matter.” Judge Gray, rather kindly, acknowledged that this was all “quite stressful” for Irving, who had been cross-examined for a long time, but—in what I was coming to recognize as British understatement—suggested that such comments were better left “unsaid.”8
TATTOOED NUMBERS AND “THE SCUM OF HUMANITY”
During the break a VCR had been set up so Rampton could show a 1992 speech Irving had delivered in Tampa. In the speech Irving had described for his Tampa audience what happened when he spoke in Freeport, Louisiana, about six months earlier. There were a number of Jews in the Louisiana audience. Irving proceeded to lecture them: “You have been disliked for three thousand years. You have been disliked so much that you have been hounded from country to country from pogrom to purge. . . . And yet you never ask yourselves why you are disliked.” At that point, Irving told his Tampa audience, a Jew at the Louisiana gathering “went berserk, [and] said, ‘Are you trying to say that we are responsible for Auschwitz ourselves?’ and I said, ‘Well the short answer is “yes.”’ I mean he really got my gander up.” Again his audience laughed.
When the video was turned off, Rampton asked Irving what was so funny about saying that the Jews are responsible for Auschwitz? Irving described it as “nervous laughter, because they [his audience] had never heard an answer as blunt as that.” Rampton noted that the Tampa audience had also laughed when Irving had declared, “I find the whole Holocaust story utterly boring. . . . The Jews keep going on about the Holocaust because it is the only interesting thing that has happened to them in the last three thousand years.” Rampton observed, “Very funny, isn’t it Mr Irving?” Irving turned to Judge Gray: “95 percent of the thinking public find the Holocaust endlessly boring by now, but they dare not say it because they know it is politically incorrect.”9
As Rampton prepared to continue reading from the Tampa speech, I spotted the survivor who had rolled up his sleeve so that his number would be showing. Knowing what was coming, I turned away from him. It seemed wrong to watch.
In Australia there are professional survivors, a woman called Mrs Altman, who will roll up her sleeve and show the tattoo to prove that yes, she was in Auschwitz. . . . And I’ll say “Mrs Altman, you have suffered undoubtedly, and I’m sure that life in a Nazi concentration camp, where you say you were, . . . was probably not very nice. And life in Dresden probably wasn’t very nice. . . . But tell me one thing,” and this is why I’m going to get tasteless with her, because you’ve got to get tasteless. “Mrs Altman, how much money have you made out of that tattoo since 1945?”
Rampton noted that Irving’s comment had been met, once again, with a “jolly laugh.” Feeling as if I had abandoned the man with the number on his arm, I turned back toward the gallery. His head was lowered. Again, I turned away. It was easier to look at Irving.
Irving insisted that his criticism of Mrs. Altman, an individual Jew, was not antisemitic. He was not attacking all Jews or even all survivors. Then, seeming to forget that he was not delivering one of his after-dinner speeches, he said, “The burden of my criticism of the Mrs Altmans of this world is that the ones who have been coining the money are the ones who suffered least. . . . Survivors . . . have been turning their suffering into profit whereas people who suffered in other circumstances, like the air raid victims or the Australian soldiers building the Burmese railway have never sought to make money of their suffering.”10
Rampton next asked Irving about a description he had recorded in his diary when a group of protestors gathered outside his home. “The whole rabble, all the scum of humanity stand outside. The homosexuals, the gypsies, the lesbians, the Jews, the criminals, the communists, the left-wing extremists, the whole commune stands there and has to be held back behind steel barricades for two days.” When Rampton declared this a reflection of “Mr Irving’s true mind,” Irving angrily insisted that his words were a “literal description” of the protestors and offered to show Rampton the photographs so “we can identify who they are.”11 I wondered how one identified homosexuals or, for that matter, criminals, Jews, and Gypsies from a photograph. I regretted that Rampton did not take him up on the offer. Instead, we ended for the day.
I left the courtroom pleased by our progress but dispirited by the day’s exchange. From a forensic pe
rspective I believed we had demonstrated for Judge Gray that Irving’s comments about Jews, people of color, and other minorities were an essential part of who this man really was. But Irving’s expressions of prejudice and the glee with which he seemed to make them dispelled any feelings of victory.
The events of the day soon faded into the background. I had managed to get tickets to Trevor Nunn’s Royal National Theatre production of The Merchant of Venice and invited James, Heather, and some friends who had come from Israel to join me. I had made reservations for supper after the play in the theater restaurant. Excited about this break from the tedium of long days in court, I rushed home to get ready. The play was stunning. Nunn remaining true to the text, was sympathetic to Shylock and attributed his vengeance to persecution by the ruling class. By the second act, however, I was finding it increasingly difficult to listen to language that reviled Jews. “Currish Jew.” I cringed when Gratiano cursed Shylock as “thou damned, inexecrable dog!” But it was during the infamous third act—“Hath not a Jew eyes . . . If you prick us do we not bleed”—that I began to wonder why was I subjecting myself to two trials, one real and one theatrical, both with antisemitism at their core, on the same day? Worse, this production was set in 1930s Venice, when fascism and antisemitism were on the rise. Reminiscent of Cabaret’s Kit Kat Klub, the cast seemed to be primed to break into “Willkommen.” Of course, Shakespeare’s defendant is gone by the final act; I was determined to last until the bitter end.
QUEASY ABOUT BLACK CRICKET PLAYERS
When we gathered in the courtroom the following morning, Rampton surprised me by declaring, “We’ve made our point about antisemitism. When the session begins, I shall ask a few more questions about racism and move on.” Distressed, I urged him not to leave the topic until he had questioned Irving about his connections to former Louisiana state legislator and Ku Klux Klan leader David Duke. Irving and Duke had met in Key West on a number of occasions. They played tennis, talked politics, and dined together. They had discussed fund-raising. Duke gave Irving the list of individuals who had contributed more than $100 to his campaign. Irving had edited portions of Duke’s book, including his chapter on the Holocaust, which he described as having “many insights” and “a real self-appraisal, and deserves success.”12
I also urged him to discuss Irving’s contacts with the far-right American extremist Willis Carto.13 Rampton refused: “Neither Duke nor Carto will mean anything to the judge. We’ve made our point. We can’t risk overdoing it.” This connection between Irving and these extremists would be relevant to an American audience. I was disappointed at Rampton’s decision but knew there was no moving him.
Rampton, turning to Irving’s comments about black people, reminded Irving about a 1992 interview he gave on Australian radio in which he said he felt “queasy about the immigration disaster” in Britain. The interviewer asked, “What do you think about Black people . . . on the British cricket team?” Irving replied, “That makes me even more queasy.” Rampton asked Irving why he felt queasy. Irving, rather proudly, declared, “Because I am English.” I heard a long, low whistle. Janet Purdue, the usher, looked up in horror. I wasn’t certain if she was shocked by the comment, the whistler, or both. When Rampton observed that the players were English too, Irving reminisced about the passing of “the England I was born into,” lamenting that it was “different from the England that exists now.” Rampton, who is Irving’s contemporary, responded, “Well, thank goodness.”
Judge Gray wanted Irving to clarify his comment about the cricket players. “Is the regret you feel about them playing for England . . . because of the colour of their skin?” Irving responded, “It is regrettable that blacks and people of certain races are superior athletes to whites.” Judge Gray did not seem satisfied. “Why is it regrettable?” “Well,” Irving answered, “it is regret table in as much as it is now described as being a racist attitude . . . to point out that there are differences between the species.”14 The minute Irving said the word “species,” Anthony sputtered, “Species?” Rampton let the moment pass.
The Australian journalist had also asked Irving about his attitude toward racial intermarriage. Irving had answered, “I believe in multi-culturalism.” Rampton, eager to pierce the ambiguity of the answer, asked, “Do you believe, Mr Irving, in intermarriage between races . . . ?” Irving proclaimed, “I have precisely the same attitude about this as the Second Defendant. . . . I believe in God keeping the races the way he built them.”15 As soon as Irving said this, I began to pulsate with anger. This was not my view. I was deeply troubled by intermarriage between Jews and non-Jews because it threatened Jewish continuity. Color or ethnicity were entirely irrelevant to me. I wanted Rampton to clarify this, but knew he would not, because these asides by Irving had no impact on the final judgment. Had this happened earlier in the trial, I might have tried to convince Rampton to say something. Now I did not even bother. There was nothing I could do yet again, to prevent another false idea about my beliefs from floating about among the press and the public. I sat there frustrated by both the false statement and my impotence to do anything about it.
Rampton next asked about a speech in which Irving described Lord Hailsham, a cabinet minister, who in 1958 opposed immigration restrictions on people of color, as “Traitor No. 1 to the British cause.” Why, Rampton wondered, did Hailsham’s failure to stop such immigration make him “Traitor No 1”? Irving, sounding as if he were stating the obvious, said, “He had failed to see ahead to the tragedy which massive immigration would inflict on this country.” Then Irving, without pausing, added an aside about Stephen Lawrence, a young black student, who had recently been brutally murdered by avowed racists. “If you ask the family of Stephen Lawrence, you will see the kind of tragedy that has been inflicted on an individual scale by massive immigration into a foreign country.”16 The victim was guilty. I was glad when Rampton’s journey through this terrible body of material finally ended.
That night I was painfully exhausted. Rather than read transcripts and documents, as I usually did, I decided to watch British sitcoms, which, despite their silliness, I now found relaxing. James considered this a good sign: “You’ve come to appreciate the British sense of humor.” I found that I had no patience, even for them. I turned off the TV and was headed for bed when my colleague David Blumenthal called: “How are things?” I was surprised by my answer: “Horrible.” David’s concern was palpable. I quickly reassured him. “From a forensic perspective we are doing well.” A deeply empathetic man, David asked, “So what’s horrible?” I explained how debilitating it was to listen, not just to Irving’s justifications and so-called explanations of his racism and antisemitism, but also to my personal views being misrepresented. “Sometimes I feel,” I told him, “I am winning the battle, but losing the war.”
A few moments later the phone rang again. It was Ken Stern, who was back in the United States, but following the daily proceedings with a live Internet hookup to the court reporter’s computer. I told him I was exhausted and suggested we talk tomorrow. “No, you must go online. You have to read a Reuters article which was just posted.” I protested, “I’m too bushed.” Ken, an exceptionally sweet person, was uncharacteristically insistent. Half asleep, I went to my computer and found the Reuters dispatch of an interview Irving had given after that day’s session. Repeating what he had said in court, he lamented the passing of “Old England” when policemen rode bicycles and “pavements weren’t polluted with chewing gum.” I wondered why Ken thought the article so crucial. Then I reached the penultimate paragraph. Irving assured the reporter, Kate Kelland, that he could demonstrate he was not a racist by the fact that his “domestic staff” had included a Barbadian, a Punjabi, a Sri Lankan, and a Pakistani. They were “all very attractive girls with very nice breasts.”17 After reading it twice to be sure I had it right, I laughed until I cried. Maybe I laughed and then I cried.
THIRTEEN
REVOLTING CALCULATIONS
I was certa
in the next item on the agenda, though relatively small, would be a winner for us. In 1992, the Sunday Times hired Irving to go to Moscow to examine a copy of Josef Goebbels’s diary, which was stored on glass plates. The diary had been unavailable to researchers until after the fall of the Soviet Union. The Times, anxious to avoid a debacle similar to the “Hitler’s Diaries” episode, asked Irving to verify that this was truly Goebbels’s diary.
MOSCOW DIARIES: AN ILLICIT BORROWING?
In his diary, Irving described the extensive negotiations he conducted with the director of the Moscow archives to try to get permission to copy some of the plates. Irving, apparently unwilling to await the director’s decision, hid one plate outside on a desolate patch of ground during the lunch break. At the end of the day he retrieved it and had it photographed in Moscow. In his diary, he described how he “illicitly borrow[ed]” the plate. The next day he returned it and took two more, according to his diary, “by the same means.” However, instead of just keeping them overnight, Irving took them to Munich, left them in the hotel safe, traveled to Rome, returned to Munich, retrieved them, and brought them to England for forensic testing. He returned these plates to Moscow three weeks later. During Irving’s second visit the head of the archives permitted him to copy two plates. Irving described them in his diary as the “two slides we legally borrowed.”1 Irving’s actions, I had written in Denying the Holocaust, constituted a breach of archival protocol and caused archivists to fear that the plates had been damaged. Irving contended that he had broken no agreements and had not harmed the plates.
Irving began by calling Peter Millar, who had then represented the Times in Moscow, and asked him if he remembered when “I borrowed two of the glass plates from the archives without permission.” Millar recalled it well. Rampton then cross-examined Millar: Was it “clear to you that he knew he should not be taking the plates?” Millar answered, “Quite.” Rampton then read a memo Millar sent the editor of the Sunday Times. “Irving has taken liberties in our name in Moscow ‘borrowing’ two plates and taking them out of the country and will shamelessly take more.”
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