THE Hitler historian David Irving was accused in the High Court yesterday of using a fake Nazi document to exaggerate the number of civilians killed by the Allied bombing of Dresden in February 1945.
The exercise was allegedly carried out to make a "false equivalence" between the number of victims and the number of Jews killed at Auschwitz. Richard Rampton, QC, told Mr Irving, 62, that he had exaggerated the Dresden death toll by tenfold "for your own base political purposes".
Mr Rampton is counsel for Deborah Lipstadt, an American academic. Mr Irving is suing Ms Lipstadt and Penguin Books, for libel over a claim in her book Denying the Holocaust: the growing assault on truth and memory, that he is a Holocaust denier.
Mr Irving, the author of Hitler's War, rejected Mr Rampton's assertion. He said of the bombing of Dresden: "It was a war crime. There is no way round it. I am deeply ashamed of what we did."
Mr Rampton told him that his cross-examination was to question his bona fides as an historian, not to establish what happened at Dresden. Mr Irving was questioned about a document he obtained during a visit to the city in November 1964, which showed the death roll to have been estimated on March 20, 1945, to be 202,040 with an assumption that the final figure would be 250,000, while official estimates were 25,000 to 35,000.
Mr Irving, whose first book was The Destruction of Dresden, said he accepted that while the document - which he attributed to Max Funfack, deputy chief medical officer in Dresden, who was responsible for the mass disposal of victims - was authentic, the figures could have been falsified at the time and needed to be authenticated.
Mr Rampton said Mr Irving's doubt had evaporated by the time he wrote to the provost of Coventry Cathedral in 1964 suggesting he use the document in an exhibition planned to raise funds for links between Dresden and Coventry.
Mr Rampton said he accepted that at the time Mr Irving did not know the document was a fake but he emphasised the doubts he had expressed about the reliability. Mr Irving told Mr Justice Grey that he now estimates the death toll at 60,000 to 100,000.
PACING back and forth across the court, often bouncing slightly on his heels, the historian David Irving looked like a man who could not wait to unleash another devastating point in service of his theories concerning the Holocaust. And when the witness he was cross-examining finally fell silent for a moment, he practically lunged like a swordsman delivering a fatal blow.
"If there were no holes in the roof, there was no gas chamber," he barked, looking around the courtroom as if waiting for signs of approval. And the whole story of 500,000 people being gassed in this one place rises and falls on those holes, does it not?" The witness before him, Robert Van Pelt, a Dutch historian who has spent years combing through the ruins of the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp, which was the subject under debate, paused for a moment, considering his answer."That roof has weathered badly over 50 years," he said dismissively. "It is impossible to examine it..."
It wasn't a very strong answer, and Irving seemed satisfied that he had won this round. During the previous hour, the two men had discussed some large black and white photographs of one of the Birkenau crematoriums which showed what looked like small chimneys being placed in the roof of part of the complex during its construction. These were Van Pelt's exhibits, aimed to prove that holes had existed and that cyanide gas pellets could be dropped into the underground chamber, where up to 2,000 Jewish prisoners had been herded for slaughter
But Irving, without a lawyer in sight and conducting his own case, seems to be well prepared to challenge any expert thrown at him, no matter how illustrious. He is one of the world's great discoverers of lost and overlooked documents, one of the best diggers in the archival business. Before him, on a 20ft-long table, he has piles of documents, photographs, archival mate-rial and textbooks. He even has a manual of German building regulations, which he plans to put to good use. He had other photographs, he said, showing the same roof, and there was not a chimney in sight.
He also claimed that the roof, now collapsed, rotting and lying on the ground, has been examined by "experts" who could not find not a single hole. Back and forth it went. Hour after hour. There were no holes, said Irving. Indeed there were holes, contradicted the witness. The cut and thrust of polite legal argument, just two learned historians examining the evidence and drawing different conclusions. But still managing to behave like gentlemen and experts.
I sat packed in with about 50 others, in the rear of room 73 in the London Law Courts, listening to this and more. At the lunchtime interval, wandering around the court building and trying to come to terms with what I was seeing and hearing, I felt like a man in some kind of Kafkaesque dream. What was going on here? Was this some kind of grotesque Monty Python episode? Everybody seemed to be in such good spirits. As if they weren't taking part in some kind of historical parlour game. Spot the gas chamber for 20 points.
ANOTHER day, another pile of large retainers for the lawyers and some good copy for the hacks. Irving, once hailed as the brightest young historian of the Second World War, is now claiming that he has been falsely discredited and is thus unable to find a reputable publisher for his books and is effectively ruined financially. He is suing Dr Deborah Lipstadt, also a historian, and her publishers Penguin Books, for allegations within her book Denying the Holocaust that Irving was a right-wing fanatic who had "distorted, manipulated and falsified" history to show that there were no gas chambers for humans in Auschwitz.
During the morning session, Irving repeatedly made the point that he was not denying the existence of the Holocaust. He had never denied it. On the contrary, he agreed fully at one point with Van Pelt's description of how some 180,000 people had been murdered in gas vans further north at a place called Chelmno.
However, when it came to the gigantic Auschwitz-Birkenau complex -- the twin concentration camps in the southern Polish swamps that lie at the very heart of the Holocaust -- he was not prepared, either as a man or a historian, to accept myth and folklore in the face of provable evidence to the contrary.
For much of the time, Irving was not so much cross-examining his witness as making one statement after another about a place that he believes to be partly a fraud, at worst, and a Polish state-run tourist attraction, at best. He attacked the accepted narrative of Auschwitz as the premier Nazi killing ground, and the home of the gas chambers, without the slightest mercy.
There were hospitals full of sick Jewish people still alive when the Red Army arrived in 1945, weren't there? Why were they being fed and medically treated, and why did so many survive when the Germans were killing them at such a rate? Wasn't it a fact that the 12 tons of Zyklon-B gas, allegedly used in the gas chambers, was simply an industrial delousing agent used in the fight against the epidemics that repeatedly swept the camp, killing thousands of slave workers? Why bother cleaning the clothes and beds of people you intended to kill?
His allegations came in a great torrent of words. Van Pelt tried to give as good as he got. For each question he gave a considered answer. He knows this terrible place as no other human being knows it, and the previous day he had produced an awesome phrase to sum up his years of investigative labour. "In a map of human suffering," he said, "Auschwitz would be at the centre."
He was "absolutely certain" that at least one million people had died there between 1942 and 1944. And he was "absolutely certain" that the gas chambers were used to kill them.
BUT Irving gave him little leeway, and by late afternoon, with another verbal flourish, he suddenly produced what might be the main witness for his case. Not a human being -- but something as mundane as the single lift-shaft con-necting the "alleged" gas chamber with the crematorium ovens above. He called in the bottleneck, or, as he put it, the bottleneck in the glass timing jar, The bottleneck that would blow holes in the Auschwitz story.
Irving knows the value of a strong phrase and the silence in Court 73 seemed to deepen as he said it. We all knew what was coming. Even the judge murmured that he could see where this was leading. How could 500,000 bodies -- the number estimated to have died in that one crematorium -- be transported up a single lift-shaft, only about 9ft square. Irving demanded that Van Pelt now do the arithmetic of nightmares. How much could the lift carry? 750 kilos, 1,500 kilos, 3,000 kilos? How many bodies would that be at, say 60 kilos a body? Were they in gurneys or were they just squeezed in, like people squashed into a telephone box? How long to take each batch up to the ovens? Ten minutes, or more, each batch? Twenty corpses at a time, or 25?
Van Pelt entered into the exercise reluctantly, and his answers were unclear. It was not helpful to count the numbers of lift journeys, but rather the time it took to burn each batch. In the end, no conclusion was reached on this point. Nobody came up with a pat figure that would make such a logistics exercise possible or impossible during the years the crematorium was operational, But Irving repeated his phrase over and over again. The Bottleneck.
And on the way home in the train that night, to my shame, I took out a pocket calculator and began to do some sums. Ten, minutes for each batch of 25. I tapped in. That makes 150 an hour. Which gives 3,600 for each 24-hour period. Which gives 1,314,000 in a year. So that's fine. It could be done. Thank God, the numbers add up.
When I realised what I was doing, I almost threw the little machine across the compartment in rage. I remembered I had felt the same compulsive curiosity when I saw the first "investigative" reports that said that the Diary of Anne Frank may have been a fake. And I remembered the same relief I felt when I did the necessary and simple research and found that every word of this, perhaps the most famous book of the 20th century, was indeed true. [Note de l'AAARGH: this is the most extaordinary statement of the decade. See our file on Anne Frank]
What is happening in Court 73 is more than just another libel action. And David Irving is entitled to challenge those who he claims have defamed him. But the case he has brought has meant something else. For the first time, in a major British arena, we have been forced to enter the strange and flourishing landscape that has come to be known as historical revisionism. It is an area of study with only one subject. The Holocaust. And it is a place where tiny flaws can be found -- and magnified -- in large structures, where great truths can be tainted and wounded by small discrepancies, where millions of dead people can be turned into a chimera. And where doubt can be planted like seed in the wind, to grow and fester as the screams of history grow fainter with the years.
A dark and dangerous place where
even reasonable people start to do furtive sums on pocket calculators.
Those who would deny
it twist testimony, disbelieve evidence and dismiss the obvious.
In a London courtroom, British
writer David Irving is suing Deborah Lipstadt,
author of "Denying
the Holocaust The Growing Assault on Truth and Memory,"
for calling him a Holocaust denier.
"I
do not deny the Holocaust,"
he said. "I
merely redefine it."
Irving's "redefinition" includes that there was no killing
of Jews in gas chambers and that Adolf Hitler did not order, and
perhaps for a time did not know of, the "Jewish problem's"
Final Solution--the Nazi name for the Holocaust.
How could this happen?
After all, documentation of the
Holocaust is vast. The killers have never denied the crime. The
Germans kept meticulous records, and massive documentation exists
in the archives of many countries. Aerial surveillance, photographic
evidence, intelligence intercepts and even the archeological remains
of the sites reinforce the documents.
They all tell the story of the evolution
of Nazi genocide, from the infamous Nuremberg laws to the introduction
of segregation, economic confiscation and apartheid, to the mobile
killing units that killed bullet by bullet, person by person,
and ultimately to the gas chambers at death camps such as Auschwitz
and Treblinka--assembly-line death factories.
Throughout the years, survivors
of the Holocaust have bore witness in memoirs, audio and video
testimony and at trials. The Survivors of the Shoah Visual
History Foundation has videotaped more than 50,000 survivors
in 33 languages in 57 countries. These eyewitnesses reiterate
the story of the Holocaust, testimony by testimony. The perpetrators,
too, have told their stories in diaries and letters, memoirs and
trial testimony.
Yet how, despite the overwhelming
evidence to the contrary, can the Holocaust be denied? A series
of techniques are employed:
* If there is any conflict in testimony,
the entire testimony is negated, not just the issue in dispute.
So, for instance, if there are discrepancies between survivors'
accounts, or minor factual errors, all testimony is discarded
as worthless. To deniers, perpetrator testimony is equally worthless,
the fruits of coercion.
* If historians dispute information,
then all positions in the debate are equally credible. Raul Hilberg,
the dean of Holocaust historians, has conservatively estimated
the Jewish dead at 5.1 million. The eminent German historian,
Wolfgang Benz, has argued that 6.1 million Jews were killed. If
two such eminent historians can be at odds, then a figure of less
than 1 million Jewish dead can also be put forward as credible.
* Documents are taken out of context,
misread, misinterpreted or mistranslated. An example from the
Lipstadt trial: Irving had claimed that he discovered irrefutable
documentary proof that Hitler had ordered a halt to the murder
of Jews. Under cross-examination it became clear that the document
in question was an order given by SS chief Heinrich Himmler to
halt the killing of one trainload of Jews from Berlin. Half-truths
are stretched to cover a myriad of falsehoods.
* Dubious experts draw conclusions
with bizarre methods. A new "definitive test" is made,
and the conclusion reduces all previous knowledge to rubble. Thus, the "definitive
scientific tests" of the gas chamber walls for the residue
of the gas Zyklon B are bandied about as proof that no gassing
took place in the gas chambers. A recent documentary film, "Mr.
Death," has exposed the test as unscientific and the expert
as a fraud.
There is soft-core and hard-core
denial.
Soft-core denial is the refusal
to face the evil of the Holocaust, the search for the happy ending
or the good that can mitigate the overwhelming evil of the what
took place and thus protect us from the difficult fact that educated,
cultured and civilized people can commit the most heinous crimes.
The Holocaust forces a confrontation
with absolute evil. It denies the consolation of triumphant goodness.
It is about atrocity, not tragedy. In the end, what we will learn
will never be equal to the price that was paid for such knowledge.
Hard-core denial is more pernicious,
more evil.
The motivation of some survivors
is political. Hitler gave fascism a bad name. If the magnitude
of the crime can be diminished, then fascism can enjoy new prominence.
Other deniers are anti-Semitic.
If the Holocaust is a hoax, then the most outrageous fantasies
of the anti-Semites are true. Jews could be seen as controlling
the archives of many countries, the judiciary, the media, the
Swiss banks and German corporations, and Italian insurance companies
that have come forward to settle past claims. The leaders of more
than a score of countries will gather in Stockholm this week to
advocate education about the Holocaust as an antidote to racism,
anti-Semitism and intolerance and as a tool for teaching the values
of human dignity, not just history. They, too, must be under Jewish
control.
How serious is the problem?
A Roper Poll that found that 20%
of Americans believe it is possible that the Holocaust did not
happen was withdrawn as unscientific. Its question was ambiguous.
A new Roper Poll indicated that 8% of all Americans are prone
to Holocaust denial, a far more marginal phenomenon but still
of considerable concern. For if the Holocaust is denied while
the eyewitnesses are among us, what will happen after they are
no longer?
Ignorance of the Holocaust is more
pervasive and the challenge of education and documentation is
more important. Thus, the outcome of the conference in Stockholm
will overshadow whatever occurs in the London courtroom.
Michael Berenbaum Is the Former President of the Survivors of
the Shoah Visual History Foundation and Director of the Research
Institute of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum
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