Despite this journalistic record, the glossy magazine Australian Style commissioned her to cover my trial. Comparing Irving to Churchill, she portrayed him as a prodigy, who “frequently trips up the Defence,” and me as a vacuous American who wears her heart on her sleeve. She bemoaned his “ill-fate,” which included—should he lose the case—financial ruin.10 The Sydney Morning Herald was so disturbed by this imbroglio that, breaking standard journalistic practice, it published a critique of her article on Irving before it appeared in the magazine.11 The whole thing was, admittedly, a sideshow but it provided me with a much welcomed diversion from events in the courtroom.
COATS IN WINTER AND RATIONALIZED KILLINGS
The next morning Irving challenged Peter’s contention that the shootings in the East demonstrated the SS’s homicidal intent toward the Jews by introducing an April 1943 memo in which the SS boasted that Auschwitz’s monthly mortality rate had dropped from 10 to 8 percent. In an accompanying letter Oswald Pohl, chief of the concentration camps, attributed the reduction in death rate to “better feeding [and] better clothing.” If the Germans intended to kill the inmates, Irving asked, why would it reduce the death rate? Peter argued that, rather than indicate a benevolent attitude toward the camp inmates, the memo showed that the Germans were content with the unnaturally high rate of 8 percent.
Furthermore, Peter added, this report concerned Auschwitz’s function as a slave labor—not an extermination—camp. The Nazi principle for slave labor was “extermination through work.” Prisoners’ life expectancy was, Peter estimated, at most a couple of months. This presented the SS with a potential problem. If prisoners died too rapidly, they would lack laborers for the work they had contracted to do for German corporations. The letter reported that prisoners are now allowed to wear a coat, sweaters, and socks—if they are available—something that had, apparently, previously been forbidden. To depict this, Peter dryly noted, as a system that cared about prisoners’ welfare was farcical.12
Irving asked Peter if he was suggesting that people who died because of difficult conditions were victims of “homicidal killings.” Peter refused to be drawn into this dialectic. “A killing is a killing,” he quietly said. When Irving kept insisting that these people died from “bad conditions,” rather than from a planned killing program, Peter’s face grew red; turning away from Irving, he said in a clipped tone, “The purpose of the concentration camp was not to keep prisoners alive . . . the purpose of the concentration camp here was, clearly, to put people to death. . . . You cannot compare it with a prison or anything in a civilized country.” I was struck by Peter’s last statement. The country and the people responsible for creating these uncivilized places was his own, Germany.
Irving argued that Peter’s claims were irrational: “It does not make sense, does it, to have a slave labourer who is working for you and work him to death so you then have to replace him with somebody else because, presumably, his output drops off as he is dying?” This time, Irving was right. It made no sense unless one was fighting, as Peter described it, a “war of racist extermination. . . . They worked on the assumption that . . . there was an endless number of slave labourers who they could force to work for them.” This irrational and completely wrong assumption was the one upon which the Nazis based the Final Solution.13
In his analysis of the Einsatzgruppen’s activities, Peter observed that some of the reports “justified” their killings of Jews by describing them as “retribution.” For instance, in July 1941, seven thousand Jews were murdered in Lvov. The Einsatzgruppen report said these shootings were “retribution” for the “inhuman atrocities” committed by Soviet authorities against Ukrainian nationals.14 Irving complained that Peter had omitted something significant from this particular Einsatzgruppen report. The report included a four-page description of the Soviet atrocities. This description would have explained why the Germans went “berserk” and murdered the Lvov Jews. Peter insisted that there was no connection between what the Soviets did prior to retreating from Lvov and German “retaliation” against the Jews. The Germans did not single out the Jews who might have had some hand in these atrocities. They simply massacred all of them. Rather than constituting an act of retaliation, the massacre of the Jews was “part of the war of racist extermination.” To buttress his point, Peter cited another Einsatzgruppen report that described how Jewish women had “shown impudent and arrogant behaviour. . . . They tore their own and their children’s clothes off their bodies. As provisional retribution the [Einsatzgruppen]Kommando . . . shot 50 male Jews.” After hesitating for a moment, he then added, “So I think you get a very good insight into this kind of retribution or retaliation.”
When Irving continued to pursue this point, Judge Gray interrupted him with a more fundamental question: “I am at a total loss to understand why we are going through the detail of the shooting when you accept that hundreds of thousands of Jews were killed by the Einsatzgruppen.” Irving protested that he was doing so because “the witness has left out a four-page description in the most hideous and ghastly detail” of the Soviet crimes that Germans discovered when they arrived in Lvov. Judge Gray, rather uncharacteristically, snapped, “So it served the 7,000 Jews right, did it?” He then pointedly told Irving, “You are not serving your own cause well by taking up time quite pointlessly on these sorts of questions.”15
Despite Judge Gray’s admonitions, most of Irving’s subsequent questions to Longerich consisted of small points. Peter, drawing on a meticulous knowledge of the period, had no trouble with them. When Peter finished testifying, Rampton approached to thank him. Peter looked at him and said, not without some bitterness, “The Nazis stole our political identity. And now people like Irving are attempting to steal it again.”
SEVENTEEN
CAVORTING WITH THUGS OR GUILT BY ASSOCIATION?
In anticipation of Hajo Funke’s testimony about Irving’s association with various political extremists, we had compiled two large binders from Irving’s own diaries, correspondence, and speeches. Irving protested that most of this information concerned nonviolent extremists and, since there was nothing “reprehensible” about that, such material should be excluded. Judge Gray reminded Irving that in our pretrial Summary of Case we promised to demonstrate that Irving was a right-wing ideologue who “associated with right-wing extremists and right wing extremist groups in Germany, Britain and North America. You have regularly spoken at events organized by [them].” Irving dismissed our charges as guilt by association, something that was not a crime. Rampton, not surprisingly, disagreed. This was not a matter of Irving’s sitting “in a waiting room in a railway station with whoever might happen to be there but leading a banner-waving bunch of neo-Nazi thugs.” Irving more than associated with them. He had “prostituted his skills . . . in the service of . . . a restoration of a kind of Nazi antisemitic ideology.”1
Judge Gray ruled that we could introduce evidence that Irving had either associated with groups that were themselves right-wing, antisemitic, anti-Israel, or involved with Holocaust denial. Having lost on this point, Irving complained that we were turning the trial into the “most random sort” of shooting gallery by presenting names of neo-Nazis who happened to be in the same room as he. Rampton stressed that he intended to do no such thing. He would show Irving’s “intimate relationships over periods of time” with these individuals.2
THE RELEASE OF THE EICHMANN MEMOIRS
That evening, when I returned to my apartment, as I was fishing my key out of my briefcase, I heard my phone ringing. When I opened the door, I had to step over a mountain of pink message slips that the hotel staff had put under my door. Before I could look at them or get to the phone, my computer began to intone: “You’ve got mail.” I checked my email and quickly learned that Israel had just announced that it would release the Eichmann manuscript to us. Suddenly the phone rang again. I picked it up and someone identified himself as Gabriel Bach. While Bach had recently retired as a justice of the Supreme Court o
f Israel, I also knew his name as an assistant prosecutor at the Eichmann trial. Attorney General Rubenstein had consulted with him about the release of the Eichmann manuscript. “The Eichmann manuscript is on its way to London. Express mail.”
The next morning, the release of the diaries was front-page news. I had barely set foot in the courtroom when Tobias accosted me. He excitedly blurted out, “The email version is here. Rampton’s clerks are downloading it.” I reflected on what Seth’s question had produced. I took out my cell phone to let him know that his question had propelled us onto the front page of many papers. When I realized that it was four in the morning for him, I decided this news could wait.
As soon as Judge Gray entered, Irving commented on the release of the manuscript. In a tone of voice that, no matter how often I heard it, irked me, Irving said that, according to the morning papers, the defense was “going to bring in the Battleship Eichmann in a frantic attempt to rescue their position.”3 Irving demanded that Rampton be instructed to give him a copy as soon as possible. Rampton, ignoring Irving’s hyperbole, agreed.
GERMANY: DAVID IRVING’S “POLITICAL PLAYGROUND”
Hajo Funke is a lanky fellow whose long arms and legs seem to be out of proportion to his body. With his sparkling green eyes, Funke often looks like he has just heard a joke and is looking for someone with whom to share it. He arrived in court on this brisk winter morning sporting a ski cap pulled down to his eyebrows and grinning broadly. Born in Silesia in 1945, he looked more like a schoolchild braving the winter weather than one of Germany’s leading experts on the sociological and political roots of Germany’s hate scene. Hajo’s work in this field was far more than an academic pursuit. I discovered that the previous summer when, on my way to Auschwitz, I visited him in Berlin. On a spectacular June afternoon, over coffee in a café on Unter den Linden, the magnificent boulevard leading to the Brandenburg Gate, Hajo railed against foreigners, such as Irving, who come to Germany to forge common ground with the haters. “They wreak havoc with German democracy. We have to deal with their aftermath. Germany serves as their political playground.”
As I watched Hajo chitchat with other members of the defense team, I worried about his less than perfect English. He sometimes translated directly from the German leaving the verb dangling at the far end of the sentence. When he got excited about something, he interchanged subjects and objects and dispensed with any consistency of tenses. Hajo, well aware of his linguistic limits, had asked to testify in German. Anthony and Richard were convinced that using a translator would be cumbersome and would lessen the impact of his testimony. They prevailed upon him to use English and agreed to have an interpreter present, just in case. After taking the oath, Hajo sat down. He arranged his papers in front of him, glanced in the defense’s direction, and then, turning to Irving, smiled. He was clearly telegraphing his message: “I’m ready.”
In his report, Hajo had noted that when Irving visited Germany prior to unification, he avoided explicit Holocaust denial. Instead he condemned the Allied bombing of Dresden, decried the “unatoned Holocaust” of the postwar expulsion of Germans from former Reich territories, castigated Winston Churchill’s policies, questioned German war guilt, and denounced the Nuremberg trials as a sham. In the late 1980s, after adopting the Leuchter Report, Irving began to chart a course further to the right and moving to explicit Holocaust denial. He declared that there had never been a gassing of Jews, that six million murdered Jews was a “Lebenslüge” (“life lie”) by Israel, and that the Holocaust was a means for Jews to financially and politically blackmail Germany.4 By 1990, Irving was speaking of the gas chamber “dummies” the Poles built for the “damnation and defamation of the German people.”5
According to Hajo, Irving’s new course coincided with the emergence in Germany of more violent extremism, which included frequent verbal and physical attacks on foreigners and guest workers. This extremism, which was rooted in a loose alliance between national conservatives and radical extremists, was hostile to multiracial societies and depicted ethnic minorities as criminals and parasites.6 Holocaust denial was useful to this alliance because it rehabilitated the Third Reich’s reputation, rendered Nazism a viable political alternative, and inculcated anger toward Jews. Extremists believed that if the Holocaust, which was being used to cast an indelible stain on Nazism, could be exposed as a sham, Nazism could be resurrected. Irving’s status as an independent historian served the alliance’s needs by elevating it above the image of rabble-rousing, firebomb-throwing, thugs. Christian Worch, one of the more prominent functionaries of the neo-Nazi scene in Germany, believed Irving could help bring “more reserved moderate” elements into the radical sphere. Funke considered Irving a catalyst in the alliance between neo-Nazis and other radical extremists.7
During Irving’s repeated visits to Germany in the period following unification, his expressions of denial became increasingly explicit. Finally, German authorities petitioned the courts to bar him from lecturing in the country. Irving defended his activities by arguing that his speeches were scholarly, not political, and were protected by civil codes safeguarding freedom of research and teaching. In May 1992 the court ruled against him and noted that he had not only called the “racial murder by the National Socialists a lie,” but his speeches stimulated his audience to “express Nazi opinions in public [and] vociferously repeat slogans for a revival of Nazi rule.” His “pseudo-scientific” arguments, the court ruled, were designed to help extremists attract people who, while disposed to right-wing theses, were troubled by National Socialist crimes.8
Hajo had brought some videotape to illustrate his charges. One tape showed Irving and other deniers at a rally in the Alsatian town of Hagenau. Ernst Zündel, who was also present, had told the audience that “we decent Germans [are] wallowing in the pigsty” of this “base lie against our people which this Jewish rabble [Judenpack] has been spreading.” Irving then regaled his audience by poking fun at survivors. He claimed that survivors had described a “one-man gas chamber” carried around through the Polish countryside by two soldiers who were looking for the individual Jew who might have escaped deportation.
This one-man gas chamber looked somewhat like a sadan [sic] chair, I believe, but it was camouflaged as a telephone box, and one asks oneself: How did they get the poor soul of a victim to enter this one-man gas chamber voluntarily? Answer: There was probably a telephone bell inside of it and it rang and the soldiers told him: “I think that’s for you.”9
Other leading deniers who appeared at these rallies included Robert Faurisson, the French denier, and Wilhelm Stäglich, author of The Auschwitz Myth. The most chilling of the tapes was of the Halle rally at which the assembled crowd had responded to Irving’s speech with chants of “Sieg Heil! Sieg Heil!” It was after watching this speech many months earlier that I had felt compelled to go see the Assyrian exhibit at the British Museum.
The videotape of a 1990 Munich conference showed a large banner with the slogan “Wahrheit macht frei” (“The Truth Makes You Free”). Rampton stopped the tape and asked Funke whether the phrase had “any resonance with some language used during the Nazi period?” Before Funke could answer, Judge Gray interrupted: “I think we all know.” I thought back to the gates to Auschwitz with its slogan, “Arbeit macht frei” (“Work Makes You Free”). A bit later, when cross-examining Hajo, Irving contended that this phrase had no connection with Nazism but was actually a quote from John 8:32 and dismissed the attempt to link it to the Holocaust as a product of Rampton’s “private obsessions.”10
Irving was particularly annoyed by Hajo’s contention that right-wing extremism was often connected with a tendency toward “violence, militancy and terror.” He asked Hajo, “Are you saying that I am a violent, militant and terrorizing person?” Hajo conceded that Irving had not explicitly called for or directly instigated violence. This was not his modus operandi. He had, however, joined forces with groups who “are utterly for violent acts.”11 Hearing this, I was remin
ded of Hajo’s comment the previous summer. “People like David Irving do not throw firebombs. They throw the words that can cause others to throw those firebombs.”
HISTORY ON YELLOW PLASTIC
When Hajo’s first day of testimony ended, Rampton rose and, holding aloft a bright yellow computer disk, announced, “I now have the disk of the Eichmann memoirs.” All eyes in the courtroom were momentarily fixed on Rampton’s hand. He was obligated, he acknowledged, to hand it over to Irving, however, he continued, he had an obligation to the Israeli government, which had not yet released it to the general public. The Israelis wanted it only used, in the interim, for trial-related purposes. Therefore, Rampton insisted, it “cannot go on Mr Irving’s website.” He refused to hand it over until Irving committed that he would not use it for other purposes or place it on “anybody’s website.”
Irving argued that the manuscript was in the public domain and he could do with it as he wished. Judge Gray asked Irving if he was prepared to give his “undertaking” not to make collateral use of it. Irving, sounding very unenthusiastic and a bit annoyed, agreed: “I will give the undertaking not to make any untoward use of it.” The judge gravely shook his head: “No, not good enough.” He then asked again, this time using very explicit language: “Are you prepared to give me your undertaking . . . that you will not make use of this tape you are being handed otherwise than for the purposes of these proceedings and, in particular, will not put it on your website?”12 Irving, sounding rather deflated, agreed. Rampton then leaned across the courtroom. In his outstretched hand was a little yellow plastic disk containing a forty-year-old unpublished and unexamined memoir by a man responsible for coordinating the death of millions. I watched in fascination as he presented it to a man who denied that many of those murders occurred.
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