Finally, Evans’s long week in the box ended. The weekend promised an escape from the trial. In a Leicester Square theater every weekend there was a sing-along screening of the Rodgers and Hammerstein classic The Sound of Music. People came dressed as their favorite character or object. There were brides, Austrian peasants, yodelers, nuns, and brown paper packages tied up with string. My favorite was a man covered in bright yellow lycra: “Ray, a drop of golden sun.” The lyrics appeared on the screen so the audience could sing along. When a particular character appeared in the movie, everyone dressed in that role would rise, face the audience, and recite the character’s lines. All this was enough to take my mind completely off the trial.
Then, two-thirds of the way through the movie, the Nazis, who had just “annexed” Austria, appeared. Though these Nazis were more like Keystone Cops than the genuine article, I was quickly brought back to my reality. As I walked through Piccadilly to my apartment, I thought about my experiences with Copenhagen, The Merchant of Venice, and, now, Sound of Music. I wondered, was I unconsciously choosing entertainment that kept me on focus?
HITLER’S FINAL WORDS
On the last day of Evans’s testimony tempers began to fray. The judge asked Irving, who was moving quickly from one historical topic to the next, to “set the scene . . . [because] I have not spent 30 or 40 years on this.” Irving looked up at the judge and, with a smile, said, “I will do it in two lines rather than allow the witness to do it in 25.” That brought a strong objection from Rampton: “Mr Irving should stop being so offensive. It does not improve the climate in court and this is a distinguished scholar. . . . Mr Irving ought to mind his tongue, if I may respectfully say so.” Judge Gray intervened, “I know tempers run high and they inevitably do, but I think, if one can try and keep it civil on all sides, that does help.” Fuming, Irving pulled off his glasses and, looking at Rampton and then at Judge Gray, said, “For seven days and in 750 pages of this report, I have had to listen to the most defamatory utterances poured over my head by witnesses who speak in the knowledge that their remarks are privileged.” Judge Gray repeated himself: “Lack of civility is not the way to deal with an attack of the kind that is mounted on you in Professor Evans’ report.”12
Toward the end of the day, Irving questioned Evans about Hitler’s Last Will and Testament, which the Nazi leader wrote as the Soviets assaulted Berlin. In it Hitler described Jews as “the race which is the real criminal in this murderous struggle.” Despite Hitler’s unambiguous comments about Jews, in 1977 Irving wrote the Sunday Times that the wording of the will was as “ambiguous as every other document that has ever been produced purporting to prove Hitler’s guilt.”13 Evans thought this simply not true and responded by reading the portion of the will in which Hitler predicted that, unlike World War I, this time “millions of Europe’s Aryan peoples . . . would not suffer death, nor would hundreds of thousands of women and children be allowed to be burnt and bombed to death in the towns, without the real criminal having to atone for his guilt, even if by more humane means.” Evans observed that for Hitler the real criminals were the Jews and the “more humane means” were shooting and gassing. Irving asked whether “the Holocaust was humane which is what you are proposing?” Evans protested: “I am not proposing it. It is Hitler who is proposing it.” Irving repeated, “You are accepting that the Holocaust was more humane?”14 Evans again protested this was Hitler’s view. Irving again insisted it was Evans’s. Suddenly, I heard a loud: “Jeesus!!” from the public gallery. I spun around to see my colleague Barbara DeConcini with her hand over her mouth. Her face was beet-red. She seemed to be trying to retract her words by pushing them back into her mouth. Barbara, executive director of the American Academy of Religion, a twenty-thousand-member scholarly organization, had come to the trial with her husband, Walt, my colleague at Emory. I chuckled at her use of this particular expletive since she was a former nun.
SIXTEEN
OUR GERMAN CONTINGENT
Once Evans had finished his marathon testimony, I slowly began to fathom that the end of the trial was in sight. Our “German contingent,” as I had taken to calling Peter Longerich and Hajo Funke, would be the last experts to testify. Common sense told me that I should have felt unadulterated relief that this five-year ordeal was coming to an end. Yet, I was beset by a gnawing anxiety. It took me a while to sort out my feelings. When I did, I recognized that, though I was increasingly expecting a victory, at least as far as the history was concerned, I was worried that Judge Gray might reach a tentative or even-handed judgment. He might somehow decide that Irving’s historical distortions were not deliberate and that Irving was an iconoclastic historian who simply had views that diverged from the mainstream. He might think that Irving’s expressions of racism and antisemitism were unconnected to his Holocaust denial. I wanted Judge Gray to unequivocally condemn Irving as a Holocaust denier, antisemite, and racist and to explicitly state that Irving’s “mistakes” were premeditated distortions. I wanted it to be clear that my critique of Irving was not about varying historical interpretations—of which there are many—but of truth and lies. Anything less than that would leave Irving free to snatch victory from the jaws of defeat. I wanted a lot.
ALL ABOUT CONTEXT
Peter Longerich, our next witness and our final historical expert to take the stand, would play a critical role in obtaining the ruling I so wanted. Peter, who was in his mid-forties, wore his hair in a sort of Beatles-like style and tended to speak quietly. Though his English is flawless, he sometimes hesitates while speaking, as if he is pondering his choice of words. He has a rather shy, gentle persona and I worried that his reserved style would not withstand Irving’s badgering. He would have to give measure for measure, without being dragged into a verbal sparring match.
A professor at the University of London, with an expertise in the structure of the Nazi system and its decision making process, Longerich had worked for several years at the Institut für Zeitgeschichte in Munich, one of the leading German institutes doing research on the Third Reich. While there, he helped reconstruct the lost original files from the Nazi Party chancellery, the central office of the Nazi Party, which controlled the state bureaucracy. He also wrote both a history of the Nazi Storm Troopers (SA) and an organizational history of the party chancellery. Over the last ten years, his work had increasingly focused on the persecution and murder of European Jews. His most recent work, Politik der Vernichtung (The Politics of Extermination), was the first study of the annihilation process that integrated the archival windfall that had become available to scholars after the fall of communism. Browning, whose research was in the same area, considered it “monumental.” Peter’s report analyzed Hitler’s antisemitism and his role in the Final Solution.
He arrived in court on the morning he was scheduled to take the stand, in a stylishly tailored, black, heavy wool, four-button suit that—he proudly informed me when I complimented him on it—he had bought in London’s West End. “End of the season sale,” he added quietly, as if to justify his extravagance. Peter exchanged pleasantries with other members of the defense team. There was a steely calm about him.
Peter had prepared a report on the term “Ausrottung” (“extirpation”). Virtually all Holocaust historians agree that Nazi leaders’ use of this term in conjunction with Jews from the summer of 1941 on must be interpreted as an unambiguous euphemism for “physical annihilation.” Not surprisingly, Irving took a different view. He contended it meant to literally uproot, as in the enforced emigration—but certainly not the murder—of the Jewish community. To prove his point, he read a speech Hitler gave immediately after Kristallnacht. “I look at the intellectual classes amongst us . . . you could ausrotten them . . . but unfortunately you need them.” Hitler, Irving argued, could not have been referring to actual killings when he used “ausrotten,” because the speech was made in “1938 when nobody is liquidating anybody.” Before he finished his sentence Peter interjected, “Except the 90 people who just d
ied the night before.”* Peter, in a rush of words, which seemed to be designed to prevent Irving from interrupting, added, “This is the most brutal killing which happened in Germany since, I think, the Middle Ages. There are more than 90 people, I would say several hundred people possibly were killed the last night, and in this atmosphere Hitler is giving a press conference and speaks about the Ausrottung of intellectuals. . . . Look again at the historical context . . . this is an atmosphere which is dominated by brutality and a kind of absence of public order and law.” Judge Gray mused, “It always comes back to context?” Peter vigorously agreed.
Irving offered his own context: “Would [it] not be a parallel if Tony Blair said he wanted to . . . wipe out the House of Lords, would he not say ‘ausrotten’ there and would that mean that he wanted to stand them against a wall [and shoot them]?” Peter observed: “[If] Tony Blair just killed 91 Conservative Members of Parliament . . . [and] if he would use . . . the next day the term ‘Ausrottung,’ I would look at it and say, ‘Well, [that’s] a dangerous man.’”
Irving also challenged Peter about the term “Vernichtung,” which historians generally consider a euphemism for “annihilation.” Irving argued that when Hans Frank, the governor of the Generalgouvernement, used the word in a speech delivered to his cabinet upon returning to Krakow after hearing Hitler speak in Berlin, he was not referring to murder. Frank told his cabinet of the need for “Judenvernichtung” and, complaining about the massive number of Jews being deported to his region, he lamented, “We cannot execute them, we cannot poison them.” Irving compared it to a rhetorical question a German general who faced Allied forces in 1944 might have posed: “We have Eisenhower’s armies in front of us, we cannot shoot them, we cannot poison them, how are we going to destroy them? The answer is cut off their water supply, cut off the power, deprive them of the shipping lines, the oil.” There were, Irving observed, “all sorts of ways of destroying an enemy.” Peter once again pierced the cloak of sophistry with which Irving draped his arguments: “In your example you refer to an army, but here it is about the Jews. . . . If I destroy, ‘vernichte,’ human beings, and I discuss then the methods, whether I should liquidate them, execute them, or whether I should poison them, I think then the context is pretty clear. . . . [Frank] was sure they were going to ‘vernichten’ the Juden because [he] came back from Berlin [where he] heard the speech . . . [only] the method was unclear.”1 As Peter spoke Rampton leaned back in his chair. He crossed his arms across his chest and pulled his wig forward until it was almost covering his eyes. Had I not known better, I would have thought he was taking a nap.
MAKING LEMONADE
Irving, trying to dispel the notion of Hitler as an unrepentant antisemite, asked Peter if he thought it odd that “an antisemite like Hitler would . . . hav[e] a Jewish chauffeur, Emile Morris?” Peter declined to answer because he had no evidence Morris was Jewish. When Irving demanded an answer, Peter spoke directly to Judge Gray. “If you look into the history of antisemitism, the greatest antisemites had sometimes Jewish friends. They would say, well, this is my friend, he is an exception, and he is not like others. This is a typical stereotype.” Peter had taken a lemon—being forced to answer this question—and made lemonade by demonstrating its fallacious foundation. When Peter finished answering, Irving declared, “You are damned if you do and damned if you do not.” Irving next contended that Hitler’s cook was Jewish. Peter repeated his argument: “You cannot draw conclusions from these personal relationships, because the antisemite would always argue . . . this person is different.”2 When Peter finished speaking, Rampton, who had awoken from his putative nap, took out a blank piece of paper and started sketching.
In his report, Peter had discussed the plan, briefly considered by the Nazis in 1940, of relocating—some would say dumping—four million Jews in Madagascar. Himmler expected that once Germany defeated France and England, the island of Madagascar, operating as a “superghetto,” would be a feasible place to park the Jews. Though the plan did not have a killing element, it would have resulted in massive Jewish losses. Madagascar, off the east coast of Africa, was totally unequipped to support a large urban population. There were no plans for the infrastructure necessary to provide even the most minimal support for four million people. In essence it was a death warrant for the Jews who were to be moved there.
Irving, however, had a different interpretation of the Madagascar Plan. It proved that the Germans had a benign intention to resettle—not murder—European Jewry. Peter would have none of that. “What they envisaged was that the Jews . . . would perish and [be] put to death by a combination of diseases, epidemics, simply insufficient means for survival, hard labour and things like that.” Irving disagreed. The conditions would have been difficult and some Jews might have died, but this was not “quite the same as saying [the Nazis had] a homicidal intent.” Peter, speaking with the authority of an historian who had closely studied this material, said, “The difference [was] between the idea to let them perish out there and to immediately kill them by executions or gas.”
The judge asked Peter, “The relevant question is [whether] they thought it was feasible?” Rampton looked up from his sketch and listened carefully as Peter said, “In which sense feasible? You mean to provide a place where four million Jews could have a happy life? In this sense feasible? . . . Or feasible in the sense of an SS police state, so to say a big prison, with a high death rate? In this sense I would say, yes, it was feasible.”3
Irving moved from Madagascar to the shootings in the East. When he argued that Hitler did not know of them, Peter countered by reminding him of Gestapo chief Heinrich Müller’s 1941 order that “the Führer should be presented with continuous reports on the work of the Einsatzgruppen” and that “especially interesting” material depicting the activities of the Einsatzgruppen be sent to Hitler.4 Peter also observed that the Einsatzgruppen reports, which described the murder of hundreds of thousands of Jews, were widely circulated, sometimes to more than fifty people. Given this, Peter concluded, it was “impossible, to argue that the result of the activities of the Einsatzgruppen could be hidden before anybody. . . . It is exactly what he [Hitler] himself demanded. . . . This is what he wanted to hear.” Judge Gray summarized Peter’s response: “You say he ordered it and it happened.” Peter shook his head: “Yes.” Irving contended that the absence of Hitler’s name on the distribution list, indicated he was not informed of the shootings. Peter dismissed Irving’s argument as “inconceivable.” Behind me, Rampton, still sketching, quietly whispered, “Perfect.” He did not seem to be referring to his drawing.
Peter showed particular disdain for Irving’s contention that these killings were orchestrated by Himmler without Hitler’s knowledge: “That this whole operation, this enormous operation, killing operation of 6 million people could be started and could be carried out on a large scale with implications, you know, transportation, the building of extermination camps, the involvement of 10,000 people who had to carry out this programme . . . that this could be carried out . . . [against] Hitler’s wishes, this whole notion seems absolutely . . . absurd.” He concluded, “To argue that this was done behind Hitler’s back . . . defies reason.”5 At that point Rampton passed me his completed sketch of a smiling, almost beatific, Saint Peter—who, except for his halo and wings, bore an uncanny resemblance to Peter Longerich. At the end of the day, Anthony, Rampton, and I wended our way out of the Law Courts together. Referring to Irving’s contention that Hitler had not ordered the killings, Rampton wondered, “What’s the difference between Hitler saying, ‘Get rid of them and don’t tell me the details’ or his saying ‘Do it and tell me all about it’?” Anthony observed that Hitler’s modus operandi was akin to Henry II’s in T. S. Eliot’s Murder in the Cathedral. Henry did not need to say, “Who will kill Becket for me?” All he needed to say was “Who will rid me of him?” The king’s followers, understanding what he wanted, went ahead and murdered Becket.
AN AUSTRALIAN SIDESHOW:
LITERARY HOAXES
That night, upon checking my email, I discovered that some minor espionage had been taking place in the press gallery. A few weeks earlier, Ursula had pointed out a young blond Australian woman, who claimed to be a reporter. After hearing her extol Irving and compare him to Churchill, Ursula cautioned me, “There’s something strange about her.” I had thought Ursula’s imagination was getting the better of her—she revels in a good mystery—and had forgotten about the matter. Subsequently reporters in the press gallery also become suspicious of this woman, particularly when she made what they described as “bizarre” comments about the defense team. After a bit of Internet sleuthing some reporters determined that she was an Australian writer, Helen Darville, who herself had been involved in a major literary hoax.6 Using the name “Demidenko,” Darville had written The Hand That Signed the Paper, a fictionalized account of her Ukrainian family’s experiences during the Second World War. The book won Australia’s two most prestigious literary prizes and subsequent international recognition. One of the judges described it as “a searingly truthful account of terrible war-time deeds [with] extraordinary redemptive power.” Not everyone was pleased with the book. Some critics noted that it depicted the German atrocities against Ukrainian Jews as retribution for what the Communists—some of whom were Jews—did in the Ukraine during the Stalinist terror of the 1930s. Even some people of Ukrainian descent were not pleased. The Canadian-Ukrainian writer Janice Kulyk Keefer labeled the book, not only “viciously antisemitic,” but “profoundly anti-Ukrainian” for reinforcing the stereotype of the pro-Nazi, antisemitic, drunken peasant savage.7
But Demidenko-Darville had more serious problems than critical reviews. She told a television interviewer that she had written the book from her perspective as an ethnic Ukrainian. “I experienced as a Ukrainian-Australian person, a great deal of personal unpleasantness as a result of the war crimes trials.” A former classmate recognized her and informed the press that Darville was of British, not Ukrainian origin. Her claim to be writing from a personal perspective was a complete fabrication.8 Despite this literary scandal, Darville was subsequently hired as a columnist by the Brisbane Courier Mail. Her relationship with that paper ended rather quickly, when it turned out that her second column contained Internet material that she presented as her own.9
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