Denial [Movie Tie-in]

by Deborah E. Lipstadt

  Despite Browning’s answer, Irving seemed pleased by it: “Is it not right, Professor, that our statistical database for arriving at any kind of conclusions for the numbers of people . . . killed in the Holocaust by whatever means, we are really floundering around in the dark, are we not?” Irving, looking very satisfied by his question, proudly glanced in Rampton’s direction. Browning, somewhat didactically, explained why Irving’s theory was wrong.

  We have very accurate lists of the deportation trains from Germany. In many cases we have the entire roster name by name. . . . In terms again of France, the Netherlands, the countries from which there were deportations from Western Europe, we can do a very close approximation by trains, the number of people per train. In the area of Poland there were at least statistics in terms of ghetto populations and these ghettoes were liquidated completely, so we can come to a fairly good rough figure of Polish Jews. We also have a fairly reliable prewar census and postwar calculations so that one can do a subtraction.

  He pointed out, that with the exception of the Soviet Union—there was no record of how many Jews fled there—historians could provide fairly accurate estimates. Regarding numbers, he continued, there may be differences of opinion, but no “floundering.”16

  Judge Gray asked Browning to estimate the number of people gassed at the smaller death camps. Browning told him that at postwar trials in the 1960s, German prosecutors concluded that approximately two million Jews had been killed at Treblinka, Belzec, Sobibor, and Chelmno. Irving belittled these estimates, suggesting that they were cavalierly made. Browning contended that this was hardly the case. The German prosecutors had, in fact, used the most conservative estimates so that they would not be contested by the defense. The estimates had been made by German historians who had testified at the trial.

  Irving kept insisting that the estimates could not be trusted. Finally, Browning turned to the judge and explained precisely how the death tolls at these camps were calculated.

  We have a very accurate reduction of the Lodz population, which trains went to Chelmno, when, and we can come very accurately to the number of people deported from Lodz to Chelmno, then one is on a little bit less secure grounds for the various other surrounding towns where we do not have a day by day deduction or a train by train calculation, but we do have statistics of what the populations were there before the whole operation began. . . . We know how many Dutch transports went to Sobibor. We know which regions were cleared that were directed to Sobibor. We had the figures of the Jewish populations in those ghettoes before the liquidation and the number of workers that were shifted to some of the work camps.

  When Browning finished, Judge Gray thanked him: “That is very helpful.” Irving, looking a bit deflated, agreed: “Yes.”17

  HOW MANY PEOPLE CAN A GAS VAN KILL?

  Still trying to cast doubt on the death tolls, Irving began to question Browning about Chelmno’s gas vans. A few days earlier, Irving had conceded that 97,000 Jews had been killed in three vans between December 1941 and June 1942. Irving seemed to be ignoring that concession when he asked if the number 97,000 was not “wrong by a factor of two or three?” Irving suggested that, if each truck had to drive twenty kilometers, the amount of time as well as petrol for such trips would have rendered them expensive and impractical. Browning pointed out that the vans only drove three, not twenty, kilometers. The distance was so short that the drivers started the motor before they left the courtyard where the passengers were loaded. Otherwise, they would not be dead when they arrived at the site where the bodies were dumped. According to eyewitnesses, different drivers took turns behind the wheel. The trucks, which accommodated, depending on the model, anywhere from 30 to 80 people, could, therefore, have run on a continuous basis.18 As Browning was explaining this, I noticed Rampton doing some calculations. When he finished, he peered at the sheet and quietly said to himself, “Yes, that’s exactly right.” He sounded satisfied but looked revolted. When he saw me watching, he pushed the paper across the table in my direction. He seemed to be glad to be rid of it.

  Gassings at Chelmno

  97,000 people killed between December and June [172 days]

  97,000 / 172 = 564 people a day

  564 / 3 trucks = 188 people per truck per day

  188 / 4 [assuming 4 trips a day] = 47 people a trip

  4 trips every 24 hours = 6 hours between trips

  With simple arithmetic Rampton had shown that there was no logistical problem to gassing 97,000 people in six months.

  ATTACKING THE WITNESSES—AGAIN

  Irving, still trying to raise questions about the documentary evidence, said he had the “dubious fortune some time ago of coming into possession” of Eichmann’s personal copy of the memoirs of Rudolf Höss, the Auschwitz commandant. In it, Höss described his reaction to the initial gassings in Auschwitz. “It had a calming effect on me, as in the near future we had to begin with mass destruction of the Jews too, and neither Eichmann nor I was clear about how we were to deal with these masses.” In the margin of the book Eichmann had written: “Ich war gar nicht zuständig,” which could be translated, “This was not at all my jurisdiction.” Next to the footnote about these gassings Eichmann had written: “falsch,” “false.” Irving rather triumphantly told Browning, “In other words, Eichmann, who ought to have known . . . disputes the version given by Rudolf Höss.” Browning said Irving was misinterpreting Eichmann’s statement: “He does not deny the existence of gas chambers but confirms Auschwitz, but he says that was not my thing.”19

  Irving, who had just been using Höss’s memoirs to prove his point, now changed tacks and questioned their credibility. Höss wrote them while in captivity. “When somebody is in captivity on trial for one’s life, one might write things, either deliberately or inadvertently, that were not true.” Browning observed that Höss had been sentenced to death when he wrote his memoirs. “There is nothing further they can threaten you with.”20

  Midway through the second day, Irving pointed out that Browning had made a mistake in his report. An October 1941 document referred to Jews being deported to “reception camps in the east.” Browning had translated camp in the singular rather than the plural. Irving contended that Browning made this mistake because he had “a certain mind-set” and he wanted to depict the Jews’ destination as “some kind of sinister place . . . [where] they are going to be bumped off.” Browning, once again, skillfully turned Irving’s question back on him. His mistake, rather than paint the Nazis in the worst possible light, in fact, made them look better by limiting the document’s scope. One sinister camp was not as bad as a series of sinister camps. Rather than pursue this point, Irving posited that Browning’s mistranslation proved that researchers often make inadvertent mistakes without intending to do anything perverse. Browning observed that if an author’s mistakes were truly inadvertent, they would go 50 percent one way and 50 percent the other. There would not be “a consistent pattern where all mistakes tended to support the position of the man making the mistake.” Though Browning did not mention Irving by name, I was certain Judge Gray grasped the allusion. I assumed that Irving, recognizing that Browning had once again entrapped him, would leave the matter. I was wrong. “You mean it is like a waiter who always gives the wrong change in his own favor?”21 I looked up in surprise. Irving, whose “wrong” explanations tended to always exculpate Hitler and his cronies, had just implicated himself.

  Not surprisingly, by this point, all remnants of collegiality were gone. Instead of addressing Browning as “Professor,” Irving called him “Witness”—if he called him anything at all. Matters hit a low point when Irving asked Browning whether his book contract with Yad Vashem, the Israeli Holocaust memorial, did not make him a “paid agent . . . of the State of Israel.” Browning smiled broadly, “If that was the case, then since I had been at the Holocaust Museum, I would also have been an agent of the American Government [sic] and since I have received scholarships in Germany, I would be an agent for the German
government, so I must be a very duplicitous fellow to be able to follow these regimes.”22 By the time he finished, virtually everyone—excluding Irving—was smiling.

  As the second day of Browning’s testimony drew to a close, Irving continued his assault on eyewitness testimony. Referring to testimony given at the West German trial about Belzec, Sobibor, and Treblinka, he complained that it could not be trusted because it was given thirty years after the fact. Browning acknowledged that testimony given long after an event might have “less specificity.” However, he added, “if somebody had [sic] spent six months or twelve months in a death camp, he does not forget the existence of gas chambers.” Judge Gray interrupted to ascertain if Irving was challenging the existence of these three camps as killing centers where people were killed by gas. Irving told him, “I accept they were killed at these three camps.” He was challenging the “reliability of eyewitnesses.”

  A perplexed Judge Gray asked Irving to explain what was to be gained by challenging the credibility of the eyewitnesses who reported on these camps if he wasn’t challenging what happened at the camps? This was, Irving explained, part of a “general attack on eyewitness evidence which is important for the main plank of my case which is Auschwitz, where we have established . . . from Professor van Pelt that the only evidence one can really rely on is the eyewitness evidence. . . . Rather like Rommel, I am coming round from the rear and attacking . . . the eyewitnesses.” A few minutes later he repeated this charge: “I am just alarmed at the notion of building such a major part of World War II history just on the testimony of half a dozen eye witnesses as far as Auschwitz is concerned.” At that point, a visibly annoyed Rampton rose: “It is the second time we have had that today. It [the findings on Auschwitz] is built on a mass of evidence, documentary, archeological, eyewitness . . . all of which, as Professor van Pelt puts it, converged to the same conclusion.” Irving responded to Rampton by declaring that the “transcript will show what position we reached.” Rampton said nothing but as he took his seat, I heard him say to himself, “It will show you are dead wrong.”23

  Irving, still trying to raise doubts about the gassings at these other camps, asked Browning whether his findings about these camps “depend[ed] entirely on eyewitness evidence or is there any documentary basis whatsoever for what you have just told his Lordship?” Browning acknowledged that, while there was documentary evidence for the use of gas vans at Chelmno, there was only eyewitness testimony for the gas chambers in these three camps. Irving, rather triumphantly, declared, “So there is no documentary evidence relating to scale then?” Browning explained that while there was not documentary evidence on the scale or the mode of killing, there was evidence concerning the emptying of the Jewish population of Poland to these three camps, which are located in “teeny little villages which do not accommodate one and a half million people.” Irving told Browning that during World War II many British citizens were transported to the small village of Aldershot. The transfer, therefore, of large populations to small villages was no proof of something untoward. Browning forcefully dismissed Irving’s analogy. If the people sent to Aldershot had been “deprived of their rights and property, if they had been rounded up with all of the brutality that left bodies lying all the way to the train station, and if they had been sent there and never came back, and if a hundred witnesses from Aldershot said they had been gassed, we would, I think, say something happened at Aldershot.”24 With that Irving ended his cross-examination of Browning.

  FOURTEEN

  LYING ABOUT HITLER

  I was bewildered when Judge Gray commenced the fifth week of the trial by complimenting Irving for his questions, which were, he said, “clear [and] almost always to the point.”1 I wondered if Gray had somehow been beguiled by Irving. James, who saw me grimace, leaned over to tell me I was overreacting. I was not so easily comforted, suspecting that Gray did not say something unless he believed it. When I turned and saw how distressed Heather looked, I was even more concerned.

  As per usual, I did not have time to dwell on this because it was time for Richard Evans, a graduate of Oxford and distinguished professor of history at Cambridge University, to enter the witness box. An author of numerous books on Germany, particularly its social and cultural history from the mid-nineteenth century to the present, Evans placed special emphasis on historiography, which made him a particularly valuable expert witness for us. He was a man of decided opinions about many things, including other historians. When I first met him two years before the trial, he seemed skeptical about my assessment of Irving as “the most dangerous” denier. Now, as he was about to take the stand, I asked if he still felt the same way. Evans, reflecting on the meeting, which now seemed so long ago, explained that at that time he really knew next to nothing about Irving’s work and was influenced by the respect in which he was held by some colleagues in the field. He had been, he acknowledged, somewhat ill at ease because he did not want to compromise his independence and impartiality by being overfriendly with the defendant. Then he paused and, after a moment, added, “Deborah, you were far too kind to him. The historical wrongdoings we have found are more extreme than anything I ever imagined.”

  IRVING V. EVANS: AN ANGRY ENGAGEMENT

  I anticipated that the Irving/Evans encounter would not be friendly. The other expert reports dealt with specific aspects of the history of the Holocaust. In contrast, Evans had studied David Irving’s work itself. By citing numerous examples of Irving’s misstatements—if not outright falsifications—of history regarding the Holocaust and the bombing of Dresden, Evans’s report called into question the corpus of his writings. Evans’s testimony would constitute a direct assault on him as an historian.

  Irving began by asking Evans, from what “personal political standpoint . . . do you view people like myself or Margaret Thatcher or John Major?” I was amused by how he grouped himself with two former prime ministers. When Evans said he belonged to the Labor Party, Irving asked, if “the Labor Party dictate[d] your politics to you or do you have any ideas of your own?” Evans, who sounded annoyed at the suggestion that his political views might be “dictated” by Labor, assured Irving that he reached independent conclusions. Irving accused Evans of having had his “knives out in the past for right wing historians or Nazi historians.”2 Evans observed that his reviews criticized historians at both ends of the political spectrum, making him an equal opportunity critic.

  Despite the fact that Evans’s report did not deal with Irving’s racism, Irving used Evans’s presence in the witness box to challenge our accusation that he had expressed overt racist sympathies. He handed Evans a packet of pictures of female “ethnics” whom, he said, he employed since 1980 and whom he had paid a “proper salary.” Evans, deliberately dropping the packet on the desk in front of him, insisted that it had no impact on the question of whether Irving had displayed racist attitudes and then protested that he had come to answer questions on his report. “So far you have hardly asked a single one.” Irving, ignoring Evans’s protest, kept pressing him about the question of racism: “What does it take to prove that one is not racist? If one employs coloured people in exactly the same way as one employs whites, one does not prefer them or disadvantage them in any way, one pays them exactly the same amount?”3 Judge Gray, sounding rather exasperated, urged Irving to move on.

  Irving moved on but probably not in the direction the judge hoped. Whereas we had found one racist ditty in his diary, Penguin, he charged, had published entire books with grossly antisemitic passages. He cited John Buchan’s 39 Steps. How, I wondered, was this book, which I knew as a Hitchcock movie, relevant? At a table in the back row Helena Peacock, Penguin’s counsel, was studying her watch. She was probably calculating the cost of this rambling exercise. Rampton, shaking his head in great frustration, rose again. Emitting what sounded like a “Harrumph,” he protested to Judge Gray:

  My Lord this is a kind of insanity. I feel as though I was in one of Lewis Carroll’s books. Mr Irving brough
t this action in respect of words published by my clients. . . . What can it matter that there may have been some author from the distant past, who . . . might have made a remark as an antisemite?4

  Judge Gray also seemed somewhat nonplused: “I am trying to give you a lot of latitude, Mr Irving. I think I am perhaps beginning to give you too much.” Judge Gray admonished Irving. “If your odds are still on John Buchan, then that is really absolutely, if I may say so, hopeless as a point.”5 Irving, ignoring this rather pointed warning, kept pressing. “Should political correctness not have required them [Penguin] to at least excise these horrendous passages from that book?” It was ironic to hear a man who felt “queasy” about blacks on the English cricket team defend political correctness.

  CHEAP JIBES AND SCHOOLYARD BRAWLS

  Irving finally moved to the substance of Evans’s report and zeroed in on the sentence that, months earlier, I had found so reaffirming: “I was not prepared for the sheer depth of duplicity, his numerous mistakes . . . and the egregious errors. . . . [which] were not accidental.” Irving asked Evans if he began his research convinced he would find “duplicity and distortion.” Evans said he was rather surprised at the results that he found. Irving challenged Evans: “Are you going to be prepared to eat your words if we . . . find out that you were misjudging me?” Evans took his hands out of his pocket and folded them across his chest: “Let us see.”6 I was not sure if this was the schoolyard or the Royal Courts of Justice.

  Irving, referring to his own claim that no decision was ever made by the Third Reich to annihilate European Jewry, asked Evans if he was familiar with the fact that this is precisely the view espoused by the prominent Holocaust historians Professors Martin Broszat and Raul Hilberg. Evans, insisting that that was “not quite my understanding of what they say,” asked Irving for proof. Irving responded, “Well, I believed that you were an expert and this is why you were being paid a very substantial sum by the Defence to stand in the position you are in now.” Evans’s eyes narrowed, his brow furrowed, his face turned red. His voice was tight and sharp: “[I will] leave . . . aside your cheap jibe about money, which I treat with the contempt it deserves—” Before Evans could finish his sentence, Irving shot back with a reference to what Evans had earned: “It was not cheap from what I hear.” The judge pleaded: “This is degenerating and please don’t let us let it.”7