England's black cricketers left Irving 'queasy' http://www.the-times.co.uk/news/pages/Times/frontpage.html BY MICHAEL HORSNELL TIMES London 02.04.00 DAVID IRVING'S lament for an "old England", in which the national cricket team was white to a man and Jack Warner gave avuncular advice from the steps of Dock Green police station, was played to a rapt High Court yesterday. The last thing that Anglo-Saxon Englishmen returning from abroad expected to greet them at Heathrow was an immigration officer of Pakistani descent. When did it all go wrong? who was to blame? Mr Irving wondered. The answers came thick and fast from the controversial Hitler historian at the end of his cross-examination from the witness box, where he has spent most of the past four weeks of his libel action. Describing the start of mass immigration as a "body wound" to Britain, he said: "At the end of the war in 1945 the British Empire was at its greatest ever extent. Our armies straddled the globe. We were beginning to get back the territories that we had lost in the Far East through Churchill's foolish military and naval strategy . . . And suddenly the Empire went." His words, quoted back at him, were delivered in a speech that he made to a gathering of the right-wing Clarendon Club in 1990. At that time, "groping around in the darkness" of an unrecognisable country in which a handful of true English, as well as Irish, Scots and Welsh, furtively exchanged shared sensations and sorrows, he searched for what he called the "guilty men" who had betrayed the land of their fathers. He said that "Traitor No 1 to the British cause" was Lord Hailsham of St Marylebone. The deputy leader of the House of Lords and chairman of the Conservative Party, as he then was, was said to have told the Cabinet in 1958: "I don't think this coloured immigration is going to be much of a problem in Britain. We only have 100,000 of these immigrants so far, and I don't think the numbers are likely to grow much beyond that. So on chance I am against having any restrictions imposed." Mr Irving said that in the search for culprits in his changed England, he would like to think that there was "somebody, somewhere, doing what Gilbert and Sullivan would have had the Mikado do: which is making up a little list of names of people . . . ". Even if the clock were turned back, however, most of the guilty would have passed on, commemorated only by the bronze plaques, statues and memorials scattered around the capital. Not even Mrs Thatcher, he thought in 1990, would be able to put Britain back where it was, and certainly not the Socialist Party. Mr Irving went on to tell the Clarendon Club: "Nothing makes me shudder more than two or three months, working on a new manuscript, and I arrive back at Heathrow airport - where of course my passport is checked by a Pakistani immigration officer. Isn't that a humiliation for us English?" Mr Irving is suing Deborah Lipstadt, an American academic, and Penguin Books for libel over a book in which she describes him as a holocaust denier. He was questioned by Richard Rampton, QC, for the defence, about his remarks to the club and a speech that he made at Bow Town Hall, East London, in 1992. In that speech, he spoke of feeling "queasy about the immigration disaster that's happened to Britain" and the infiltration of the England cricket team by black players. "Why queasy?" Mr Rampton asked. Mr Irving, the author of Hitler's War, relied: "I was speaking about what a pity it is we have to have blacks on the team and they are better than our whites. I say it's a pity because I am English." The England he was born in in 1938 was different, he said, and he was imbued with all its values. In a clash over Mr Rampton's allegations of racism and his own preference to be described as a patriot, Mr Irving said: "Patriotism is respecting the country handed down to you by your fathers. I don't think there is anything despicable or disreputable about patriotism." He said that blacks were not inferior to whites but were different from them. "I wish I could go to Heathrow airport, take a 747 and fly back ten hours later to find England as it used to be. "In the 1950s, Britain was a country at peace. We had defeated a major world power, we were licking our wounds and recovering, and for no perceptible reason we then, through the folly and negligence of the Government we had voted into power, inflicted on this country a body wound which only began at that time." The hearing was adjourned until Monday. GUARDIAN 02.04.00 http://www.newsunlimited.co.uk/uk_news/story/0,3604,132286,00.html Blacks are different, Irving tells libel court Friday February 4, 2000 Historian David Irving yesterday denied that it was racist to say that it made him feel "queasy" to see black people playing cricket for England. "Blacks are different from us but not inferior," the 62-year-old author of Hitler's War told the high court in London. Mr Irving added that, in an interview with an Australian journalist, he also said that it was a pity that England had to have blacks in the team and that they were better than "we whites". "I say it's a pity because I am English," he told Richard Rampton QC, defending American academic Deborah Lipstadt and Penguin Books in a libel action brought by Mr Irving over claims that he is a "Holocaust denier". Asked by Mr Rampton when the Irvings first arrived in Britain, the author put them as far back as Robert the Bruce in the 14th century. Mr Rampton said that the Irvings were then Normans - "beastly foreigners". Asked if origins really mattered, Mr Irving said that someone like him, born in the England of 1938 and imbued with all its values, regretted what had happened to "our country". He said that he felt sorry that "my England" was unable to produce enough good cricketers. "I am saying it is regrettable that blacks and people of certain races are superior athletes to whites. If this is a racist attitude, then so be it. It is a recognition that some people are different at different things. You may wish to legislate it away or describe it as despicable but it is a recognition of how things are." Mr Rampton said: "You would like it if this country was a pure white Aryan race of people who went back as far as Robert the Bruce." Mr Irving said it was "just an old-fashioned attitude" to want to go back to the England of "Jack Warner and no chewing gum on the pavement". He added that 90% of Englishmen of his vintage probably thought much the same. Mr Irving is seeking damages over a 1994 book, Denying the Holocaust: The Growing Assault on Truth and Memory, which he says has generated waves of hatred against him. The defendants, who deny libel, claim that Mr Irving is a "liar and falsifier of history". Referring to a speech he made at the Clarendon Club in 1990, Mr Irving agreed that he described Lord Hailsham as "Traitor No 1 to the British cause" because he had told a 1958 cabinet meeting that immigration was not going to cause a problem. "Patriotism is pride in the country that has been handed down to you by your parents and their parents before them." He added: "This country was existing in a relative state of peace. If you ask the family of Stephen Lawrence, you will see the kind of tragedy that has been inflicted on an individual because of the mass immigration into this country." He went on: "In the 1950s, Britain was a country at peace. We ... then inflicted on this country a body wound which only began at that time ... which led to 100,000 cases of the Stephen Lawrence tragedy occurring ... and it could have been avoided - the tragedy in immigrants who we imported as slaves, cheap labour to this country - and the tragedy to this country." The hearing was adjourned until Monday. === UK: INTERVIEW-Hitler historian refuses to tame views. By Kate Kelland 02/04/2000 Reuters English News Service (C) Reuters Limited 2000. LONDON, Feb 4 (Reuters) - He has been branded a "Holocaust denier" and a racist and is accused of twisting history to fit his right-wing sympathies, but Hitler historian David Irving is not backing down. The man often described as Britain's most disliked historian, whose name inspires disgust in Jewish communities, is in the middle of fighting a London High Court libel action to defend his reputation. With the international community watching anxiously as Austria lets a far-right party into its national government, Irving believes that support for neo-Nazi groups is rising in Europe and the United States. "It's a backlash...by the white minority against the positive discrimination...It's inevitable," he told Reuters in an interview. Irving, 61, shows no sign of taming his views under the barrage of criticism that has rained down on him. Breaking off from eating lunch at an Italian restaurant opposite his home in London's posh Mayfair district, he recites a poem he once wrote for his daughter which pulls no punches. "I'm a baby Aryan, not Jewish or sectarian, I have no wish to marry an ape or Rastafarian," he chants. He talks of his friendship with David Duke, once national director of the extremist Ku Klux Klan, he says the world is gripped by an "obsession with race", and he explodes into expletives and rage when a gypsy child asks him for money. Irving, author of more than 20 controversial books including "Hitler's War", has brought one of the most bizarre libel cases London's High Court has seen. He is suing Deborah Lipstadt , professor of modern Jewish and Holocaust studies at Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia, after she charged that he was a "Holocaust denier". Lipstadt 's lawyers have condemned Irving as a "falsifier of history and a liar" in the case, now in its third week and expected to last at least three months. AUSCHWITZ IS "DISNEYLAND FOR TOURISTS" Irving claims he alone is telling the historical truth when he questions whether six million Jews were killed in the Holocaust. "There were no gas chambers - certainly not on the scale that is now propagated," he told Reuters. "What I wrote was the historical truth...I alone have been getting it right." He says all the buildings now at the notorious Auschwitz death camp - including the giant chimney stack and the iron gate carrying the slogan "Work Makes Free" - are fakes built by Polish communists after the end of the World War Two. "In 1948 they built this kind of Disneyland for tourists as a money spinner. Everything they show the tourists is fake." And what does he think happened in the Holocaust? "A lot of it did happen but on a far smaller scale than we have been led to believe. Every individual episode you look at you find that you can divide by four, which reduces it very much to the scale of the other atrocities in World War Two," he said. "That, unfortunately, is what the Jewish community do not like. They want their atrocity to be unique." THREE-YEAR FIGHT TO BRING CASE "The English march to the sound of gunfire, and if people try to stop us doing something, then we keep marching," Irving said of his three-year-long fight to bring his libel case. Lamenting the passing of "old England" when policemen rode bicycles and "pavements weren't polluted with chewing gum", Irving strays into talking in a nationalistic vein. He told the High Court judges he does not look down on any section of humanity, but adds: "I can't say I applaud uncontrolled coloured immigration." He defends himself against any personal charge of racism, claiming his "domestic staff" over the years have included a Barbadian, a Punjabi, a Sri Lankan and a Pakistani, who, he adds, were "all very attractive girls with very nice breasts". Unshaven and dressed in training shoes and light blue shirt which hangs messily over the top of his baggy trousers, Irving cuts a figure many would describe either as eccentric or shabby. As he says: "It's not a historian's job to be liked." == News Historian blames Lawrence death on immigration Kim Sengupta 02/04/2000 The Independent - London http://www.independent.co.uk/ (Copyright 2000 Newspaper Publishing PLC) THE MURDER of Stephen Lawrence was the result of mass immigration into this country, David Irving told the High Court yesterday. The historian said that before the arrival of migrants "this country was existing in a relative state of peace". He added: "If you ask the family of Stephen Lawrence, you will see the kind of tragedy that has been inflicted on an individual because of the mass immigration into this country." Giving evidence in a libel action in which he is suing Deborah Lipstadt , an American academic, and Penguin Books over claims that he is a "Holocaust denier", Mr Irving agreed that he described Lord Hailsham as "Traitor No 1 to the British cause" because he had told a 1958 cabinet meeting that immigration was not going to cause a problem. Mr Irving said that it was the duty of the Government to try to ward off any "misfortunes which may befall this country". Richard Rampton QC, for Ms Lipstadt and Penguin Books, asked if it was the Government's over-riding obligation to preserve the racial purity. "Some people, leaving aside yourself and some of your friends from the Third Reich, don't mind having mixed ancestry," he said. "Does that baffle you? Do you find it shocking?" Mr Irving responded that he was simply being patriotic. Earlier Mr Irving, the author of Hitler's War, agreed he had said that he felt "queasy" watching a black man play cricket for England and that "it was a pity that England had to have blacks in the team". Expanding on why it was "a pity", Mr Irving said: "I say it's a pity because I am English. I'm saying it's regrettable that blacks and people of certain races are superior athletes to whites." Mr Rampton asked Mr Irving about his comment that it was a "humiliation for us English" when, on returning to Heathrow from abroad, his passport was checked by a Pakistani immigration officer. Mr Irving said that a Pakistani had less right to check his passport than an Englishman. Mr Irving is seeking damages over a 1994 book, Denying the Holocaust: The Growing Assault on Truth and Memory. The defendants deny libel. The case continues. Caption: Irving: Agreed decribing Lord Hailsham as a traitor == NEWS HISTORIAN'S WORDS USED AGAINST HIM IN COURT DIARY AND SPEECHES QUOTED AT TRIAL PAINT ANTI-SEMITIC PORTRAIT Ray Moseley, Tribune Foreign Correspondent 02/04/2000 Chicago Tribune CHICAGO SPORTS FINAL Copyright 2000 by the Chicago Tribune http://www.chicagotribune.com/ Historian David Irving, who has denied being anti-Semitic, once wrote a ditty describing his daughter as "a Baby Aryan," mused about why Jews are disliked, and suggested that a black newscaster should be confined to reporting on muggings and drug raids. All this emerged in a London courtroom, where Irving is suing American academic Deborah Lipstadt for libel for calling him a Holocaust denier and a defender of Adolf Hitler. Irving denied that any of those comments showed he was a racist. The ditty about his daughter was contained in Irving's diary, which defense attorneys obtained in an exchange of documents before the trial. The trial began last month and is expected to run three months. In the diary he tells of taking his baby daughter Jessica for a walk in 1994 and singing her a ditty that begins: "My name is Baby Jessica." The diary goes on to say that when "half-breed" children were wheeled past them in their baby carriages, he changed the words as follows: "I am a Baby Aryan Not Jewish or Sectarian I have no plans to marry an Ape or Rastafarian." Irving denied this was racist and said it was a private response to an article in a London magazine that referred sarcastically to his "perfect Aryan family." Defense lawyer Richard Rampton also asked Irving, who has denied Jews were exterminated in Nazi gas chambers, about an interview he gave to a journalist in 1998 in which he analyzed anti-Semitism. In the interview Irving said: "The question which would concern me, if I was a Jew, is not who pulled the trigger, but why? Why are we disliked? "I would say that they're a clever race. I would say that as a race they are better at making money than I am. That's a racist remark, of course. . . . If I was going to be crude, I would say not only are they better at making money, but they are greedy." Pressed by Rampton to explain those remarks, Irving said, "It's a very coherent expression of the anti-Semitic tragedy. I am putting myself in the skin of a person asking questions about a clever people." Rampton asked: "Every time there is a pogrom or gassing or machine- gunning into a pit, it's entirely the Jews' fault because some of them are very good at playing the piano and making money?" Irving replied: "That's a childish oversimplification. I am not a racist. I haven't seen a single colored person on your team behind you." Irving, who admits Jews were killed in large numbers but denies the Nazis murdered 6 million, has challenged Lipstadt 's charge that he denies the Holocaust took place. Rampton produced a video of Irving addressing the extreme right- wing National Alliance in Tampa in October 1995 in which he spoke of "the legend of the Holocaust." Asked why he said in the speech that the Holocaust story was "boring," Irving replied: "I think 95 percent of the thinking public find the Holocaust boring by now but don't say it because it's politically incorrect. What other expression is there for the fact that it's all the Jews go on about now? There have been the most incredible episodes in Jewish history, but all you hear of in films and so on of late is the Holocaust." Rampton asked Irving about a speech he made to a London club in which he said he yearned for the old days when BBC newscasters wore dinner jackets on the air. In the speech he said: "For a transitional period, I'd 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." McDonald is black. Irving denied that the reference to him was racist. ### == Top News Defense in Irving libel case presents a host of racist remarks Sharon Sadeh, Ha'aretz Correspondent 02/04/2000 Ha'aretz Copyright (C) 2000 Ha'aretz Daily Newspaper Ltd. Tel Aviv, Israel; LONDON - The defense in the libel suit submitted by British historian David Irving against American historian Deborah Lipstadt , who accused him of denying the Holocaust, yesterday presented a host of statements Irving made in the past, in an attempt to prove his racist positions. Among the statements quoted was an anti-black statement Irving made in an interview with an Australian television network. In the interview, Irving expressed his aversion to the participation of black players on Britain's cricket team. Asked to explain his statement, Irving said that looking at what happened to Britain in the last few decades sickens him and that he sometimes dreams of returning to the Britain of his childhood. "Britain has sadly changed," Irving commented, and now "we have all these blacks." Asked for his opinions on inter-racial marriages, Irving said that he believes God wishes to keep the races separate, as he created them. In another instance, Irving described a senior British official, who in the 1950s made light of the ramifications of immigration to Britain, as a "traitor." Irving defended his remark by saying that senior officials have a responsibility to protect British interests, and that because of their stupidity, neglect and ignorance they did not put the state's best interests at the top of their priorities, and failed to identify the tragedies that multitudes of immigrants would bring on Britain. Irving added that if those in charge had been on their guard, hundreds of thousands of tragedies would have been prevented "such as the murder of black youth Steven Lawrence," in 1993. Lawrence was murdered by a gang of white racists. In another statement presented yesterday by the defense, Irving said that he feels "humiliated" when required to show his passport to a British immigration officer of Pakistani descent. "He is a Pakistani and has less of a right than a real Englishman to check my passport," Irving said, defining it as a "paradoxical situation" in which a non-Englishman must authorize the entrance of an Englishman to Britain. Asked how he knows that the immigration officer in question was not born as a full-fledged English citizen, Irving replied that he assumes so on the basis of "the laws of probability." In the second part of yesterday's court hearing, Irving brought a witness on his behalf, who had accompanied him on a visit to the KGB archives in Moscow in 1992. Irving thus tried to prove that he had not stolen copies of Geobbles' diaries from the archives, as claimed by the defense, but only "borrowed" them for a day in order to copy them and check their authenticity, at the request of the Sunday Times which wished to publish them. "I'm ashamed of what I did," Irving said, but explained that he did so because there was no photocopying machine or microfiche on the premises, and he knew that a German official was set to take the diaries out of Russia several days later. "I feared that if that happens there would be no access to them for many years. This was a desperate situation that required desperate measures," Irving said. Features 'I find the Holocaust endlessly boring' http://www3.haaretz.co.il/eng/htmls/kat9_2.htm Tom Segev, Ha'aretz Correspondent 02/04/2000 Ha'aretz Copyright (C) 2000 Ha'aretz Daily Newspaper Ltd. Tel Aviv, Israel; Source: World Reporter (TM) British historian David Irving says that, had the Jews not been allowed to set up a state in Palestine but were sent to Madagascar instead, as proposed in the plan he attributes to Nazi Germany, "the world would be a happier place." In an interview with Ha'aretz, Irving claims that during the 1956 Sinai Campaign he took part in a demonstration supporting Israel, but today he sees no big difference between Israelis and Nazis. The interview was held in Irving's home in London's Mayfair district, as he sat under a large portrait of U.S. President Franklin Roosevelt, whom he praised for extricating his country from a deep crisis, commenting: "like Hitler." The interview with Irving came at the end of a long day of hearings in the libel case he filed against American historian Deborah Lipstadt over a book she wrote describing him as a Holocaust denier. Irving does not deny that the Nazis murdered Jews, but claims that they did not systematically murder millions in gas chambers. Asked where all the Jews that he claims the Nazis did not murder disappeared to, Irving said: "The fact is there are Jews everywhere. That's how they are. They always pop up again, everywhere. Maybe they changed their names to Israeli names." But he's not too interested in that. He finds the Holocaust endlessly boring, he says. Irving added that the Jews should ask themselves why they are hated so much, and always have been, everywhere. "What is it in them that generates this hatred? They would do well to think about that." "There is no doubt that they are hated today in part because of all the 'Holocaust propaganda' they are constantly spreading. It's become impossible to open a newspaper or see a television program these days without coming across the Holocaust. Holocaust, Holocaust, everywhere Holocaust. The Holocaust has 'hijacked' all the media, all of Western culture. The world is fed up with it. People are losing their patience and are liable to resort to acts of violence against Jews. If the Jews don't stop, they can expect a genuine Holocaust.". Week's End Where are all their holes? David Irving, a British historian, aims to prove that Deborah Lipstadt , an American historian, libeled him when she accused him of denying the Holocaust. He argues that there is no evidence for the destruction of millions of Jews; she must prove there is. Tom Segev 02/04/2000 Ha'aretz Copyright (C) 2000 Ha'aretz Daily Newspaper Ltd. Tel Aviv, Israel; One day David Irving hosted several acquaintances for dinner at the large, red-brick London home in which he has lived for more than 30 years. Although he shares the building with a ground-floor laundromat and sandwich bar, his Duke Street address in West London, not far from Grosvenor Square on the outskirts of Mayfair, is considered very posh. In the course of conversation, the diners talked about their work. David Irving happened to mention a book he had written about Adolf Hitler. All at once Irving got up and brought in a drawing about the size of a postcard, which he claimed to have received from one of Hitler's secretaries. It was a self-portrait of the Fuehrer, sketched in simple lines with a crayon. One of the men who was present that evening shuddered this week as he recalled how Irving showed Hitler's drawing to each guest in turn, full of pride and awe, as if he himself had done it. When I visited David Irving at his home this week, accompanied by Ha'aretz correspondent Sharon Sadeh, we asked to see the drawing. "Later on," Irving said. "Later on." In her book, "Denying the Holocaust," Deborah Lipstadt writes that Irving had a portrait of Hitler hanging in his office. This is one of the items in the book that prompted Irving to press a libel suit against Lipstadt and her publisher, Penguin. When we visited this week, a large portrait of President Roosevelt was hanging in his study. We asked why, and Irving explained that Roosevelt was the greatest American leader of all. That he extricated himself and his country from a deep crisis. "Like Hitler," Irving said. I asked if that was what led him to admire Roosevelt so, but Irving replied that we would not be able to trick him into making such a statement. He assumed that we were there in order to get him to say terrible things. "I'm talking with the enemy now," he said - in German - to someone on the phone, while we were with him. In fact, there is no need to trick Irving into saying anything; that which he says intentionally is quite enough. On Friday morning Irving and Lipstadt found themselves in a narrow corridor on the second floor of the east bloc of the High Court of Justice in London. The door to Chamber No. 73 was locked. An embarrassing moment for both. Irving is representing himself, but brought along one of his admirers, a fellow named Rae West, who was in need of a shave. West is responsible for maintaining Irving's Internet site, and also serves tea in his home. (Irving, later that afternoon: "He looks a little Jewish, doesn't he?") Lipstadt is aided by a sizable team of attorneys that includes Anthony Julius, who also handled Princess Diana's divorce. His law firm is headed by Lord Victor Mishcon, 85, a Jew who represents, among other clients, the Board of Deputies, an umbrella organization of Jewish communities in Britain. Lipstadt 's barrister, the behind-the-scenes attorney who actually prepares the case, is James Libson, a brilliant young man who is also a graduate of Netzer, the Zionist youth movement. Libson himself never addresses the court. That job is left to Richard Rampton, who bears the title of Queen's Counsel ("Q.C."). A congenial man with an easygoing manner, pink cheeks, white hair and round spectacles, he exhudes a dignified tranquility and looks just like one of the lawyers you might see on a BBC television series. No mere twist of fate, this: The court oftentimes provide the best theater to be had in London. We stood there in the corridor, shoulder to shoulder, waiting for the door to open; Irving and Lipstadt ignored one another. She is a professor of Jewish studies at Atlanta's Emory University, and speaks Hebrew, but in deference to her attorneys' instructions, she is not granting any interviews; nor, it seems, will she be testifying in court. She seems to be a kindly woman, but looks tense. The case is important to her: It has occupied her thoughts and energies for over two years, and has disrupted her normal academic routine. Preparing the defense is no simple task; it has required a great deal of time and expense, ranging into the millions of dollars. Jewish organizations in America are helping out. They consider the lawsuit a challenge for the Jewish people. Lipstadt believes that denial of the Holocaust is dangerous, and more increasingly so as the generation of Holocaust survivors dies. She explains her belief in part by a personal story: Lipstadt has relatives who used to employ a black servant named Charles Washington. He was born a slave. There is a great deal of difference between what her relatives know about the Civil War and what she knows: for her, it is only history; for her relatives, it is someone's life story. That is what will happen to the Holocaust, she fears. Soon there will be no more survivors left, and then, when the Holocaust is only history, the influence of the Holocaust deniers is liable to increase. As she sees it, they and the Nazis are cut of the same cloth: one group murdered Jews in gas chambers, the other wants to expunge their memory and in so doing murder them a second time. She exaggerates the significance of the phenomenon. Irving is a large, square-jawed, broad-shouldered man of 62 who wears an elegant, striped three-piece suit. He has an impressive head of thick hair, silver threads running through it. (That afternoon at his home, Irving explains to his young daughter Jessica that my baldness is characteristic of the Jews. I raise my eyebrow. "Yes, yes," Irving insists, patting the sides of his head with both hands. "The Jews have a problem of hair loss. That's well known. But it's not something that speaks against them - they also happen to be good at playing the violin.") While we are standing in front of the closed courtroom door, I ask Irving about his website. It features pictures from his family album and a poster of Hitler and his generals. The poster is available for sale. Several of Irving's books, on the other hand, can be downloaded from the site for free. Each day he provides the full transcript of the court hearings, as well as a personal diary he has been writing. He writes well. Irving claims that the site is intended to provide a balance to the media reports. I ask if he is unhappy with the coverage. He looks at me with a combination of disdain and pity. "If you're trying to get a statement out of me that I am a victim of a conspiracy against me by world Jewry, by means of its domination of the international media," he says, "don't bother. It's true." At this point, the door to the chamber is opened. @CROSStom:2. Cat and dog.Above one of the doorways to the High Court of Justice is a rendering of Moses the Lawgiver inscribed in stone; King Solomon appears on a nearby frieze. Inscribed above the judges' entrance are a cat and a dog, as symbols of the goings-on in the courtrooms. The architect of the building, which stands not far from the Thames River, specialized in designing churches. The High Court of Justice looks like a house of prayer. Queen Victoria dedicated the building 118 years ago, and although it has gone through structural changes since then, with the addition of new wings, the building is rather shabby. The court secretariat offers an information pamphlet to visitors that includes an enlightening explanation about the wigs that judges, attorneys and some officers of the court wear on their heads. Three hundred years ago, the wigs were made of human hair, and had to be combed each day. However, since 1834, the wigs have been made from horses' manes, relieving their owners of the need to comb them. Wigs of different types are used by different members of the judicial system on different occasions. The wig that barrister Richard Rampton wears has two slender pigtails in back. The one worn by the judge is a little different. The judge is Charles Gray, a man of about 50. He wears a black robe with a scarlet tippet across one shoulder. His robe has wide cuffs, which from afar look to be white fur. He is seated on a red armchair and is addressed as "My Lord." In this trial there is no jury: The two sides agreed that the issue was too complicated. Gray was made a judge only one year ago. Previously, he was a renowned and skillful attorney who specialized in libel suits. This is the second time that Gray is involved in a trial that has its roots in World War II. About ten years ago, Gray represented Lord Aldington, a British army officer who brought a suit against a historian who described him as a war criminal. It is a fascinating story that appears in a new book on libel trials in England, by David Hooper ("Reputations Under Fire," Little, Brown and Company, U.K.). Gray won the case. The court awarded his client damages of 1.5 million pounds sterling, but the Lord never received the money. His legal expenses alone came to about one million pounds. Meaning that in many cases it isn't worth embarking on a libel suit, even when there is a great chance of success. The historian who lost the Aldington case was Count Nikolai Tolstoy, a descendent of the author. Tolstoy's attorney was none other than Richard Rampton, who is now Lipstadt 's attorney. He and Justice Gray battled one another, but remained good friends. Count Tolstoy, a somewhat eccentric man, also appeared as a defense witness at the trial of John Demjanjuk in Jerusalem. Demjanjuk's name was also mentioned at the Irving- Lipstadt trial this week. "Ask Demjanjuk what he thinks of eyewitnesses," Irving said to one of the defense witnesses, an expert in the history of Auschwitz, who among other things bases his statements on eyewitness accounts. Only "the brave Israeli judges," Irving said, saved Demjanjuk from hanging, after he was at first convicted primarily on the basis of eyewitness testimony. Irving is backed up by a team of 25 associates, including a few historians. Several lawyers are also advising him, gratis. A well-known architect from New York, Irving claimed this week, helped him decipher the blueprints for the gas chambers at Auschwitz, which were submitted by defense counsel. He receives money from supporters abroad - organizations and individuals - everywhere from Canada to Australia. He has spent three years preparing for this trial, neglecting all other work. This week, Irving received a letter of encouragement from the son of Hitler's aide Rudolf Hess. Hess sent him an article about the Wilkomirsky affair, in which a Swiss music teacher pretending to be a Holocaust survivor wrote a bestseller. "A typical example of the representatives of the Holocaust industry," Hess wrote Irving, who wasted no time in uploading the letter to his Internet site. David Irving is well prepared. He wears a scowl most of the time, even though he seems to be enjoying every moment. This is also evident in his body language, which looks as if it were borrowed from a typical BBC series. When he sits, he tilts his head to one side, narrows his eyes as if in concentration, sticks one of the temples of his glasses in his mouth, writes notes with his right hand, using a fountain pen. Sometimes he stands, left fist on his hip. At other times his arm dangles along the length of his body, fingers rubbing against one another in a nervous tick, up and down, up and down. He effects a slight stutter of hesitation when he begins to talk, a not uncommon practice among members of the English upper class, including the defense attorney and the judge in this trial. The courtroom atmosphere is very civilized, seemingly devoid of emotional involvement. Everyone maintains a veneer of good manners and consideration; at times the legal representatives of the opposing sides help one another to find documents, which amount to hundreds of thousands of pages arranged in boxes on shelves that run the entire length of one of the courtroom walls. It is a relatively new and spacious hall. The initial sessions were held in a courtroom that lacked sufficient room for all those who wanted to follow the proceedings - journalists and curious onlookers, Irving supporters and Lipstadt supporters. Now there is room for about 50 spectators, and most of the seats are taken most of the time. A taciturn woman is responsible for order in the courtroom; every whisper draws her furious glance, a cellular phone that dares to ring brings a bloodcurdling smile to her lips. The stenographers who take down the protocol employ an incredible system. They type in syllables, the computer assembles them into words, and the words appear on the screens of laptops on the attorneys' tables. While the attorney is talking, the words appear on the screen before him, split seconds after he has uttered them. The contrast between the high-tech notation system and the piles of horsehair worn by the judge and the attorneys lends a somewhat grotesque effect to the proceedings. @CROSStom:3. So what? Lipstadt wrote that Irving denies the Holocaust, that he is friendly with neo-Nazi organizations and that he knowingly distorted the historic truth. Irving does not deny that the Nazis murdered hundreds of thousands of Jews; he does deny that they murdered millions. He claims that Hitler did not know about it, that the murder was not carried out in any systematic fashion, that gas chambers and other extermination facilities were not built for this purpose. Irving claims that Lipstadt 's book and a series of actions taken by Jewish organizations in England and in the United States have destroyed his reputation as a historian. An individual who is highly familiar with the publishing world assessed this week that Irving is indeed finished, that no one will publish his books, but that he finished himself off. Years ago there were historians who admired his work, but the more he associated with neo-Nazi organizations and downplayed the Holocaust - the more they ostracized him from proper society. This occurred even before Lipstadt published her book. The judge seems more inclined to focus on the question of whether Lipstadt harmed Irving's reputation as a historian and less so on the question of whether the Holocaust happened or not. But in order to prove that Irving disregarded historical evidence that proves the mass murder of the Jews, in other words that he "denied the Holocaust," the defense must prove in court that this evidence is reliable and that the destruction of millions of Jews, and not the more limited killing of Jews that Irving is prepared to confirm, informs the term "Holocaust" with its true meaning. The two sides, then, are arguing over the meaning of the term. Essentially, Lipstadt must prove that the Nazis systematically murdered millions of Jews in gas chambers in Auschwitz and the other death camps. This isn't hard to prove; there is a plethora of solid evidence, both written and oral. Nor is there any danger that the Holocaust will be forgotten. On the contrary: from year to year, Holocaust consciousness reinforces its position as an international code for absolute evil - though films, books, curricula, museums, memorials and countless other ways, in nearly every country of the world. Active, strident "denial of the Holocaust" is primarily found on the Internet, and is for the most part characterized by lunatic-fringe groups that are not really worth the prodigious research effort invested by Lipstadt in her book. Ironically, Holocaust denial is practiced primarily among neo-Nazi groups which, one would think, should be proud of and pleased by the extermination of Jews, and not deny that it happened. At times, Holocaust denial also fuels anti-Israel arguments. Lipstadt 's book began as a research project at the Vidal Sassoon International Center for the Study of Anti-Semitism at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem. Apparently, her basic premise is that anyone who denies the Holocaust denies Israel's right to exist. This in fact happened this week in a semi-official Syrian newspaper, but that was more of a case of foolish and abhorrent name-calling than a genuine threat. Therefore, it may not make sense to pass laws against Holocaust denial, and thereby curb freedom of speech; this happens whenever and wherever Holocaust denial seems to present a significant threat. England has no law forbidding Holocaust denial, but David Irving is done for as a historian nonetheless, forevermore. With all due respect to the court, the verdict handed down by Mr. Justice Gray will contribute no more and no less than that real-life judgment. Let him decide whatever he wants. So what? Although the courtroom is not the ideal forum for historical clarification, the destruction of the Jews has been already been proven countless times to the satisfaction of judges in countries around the world. Nevertheless, Lipstadt 's attorneys have gathered abundant material to back up her claims. The material may be useful for other historians. Irving is trying to disprove the evidence submitted by the defense. He continually asks to pore over the most minute details discussed in the hearings, which often sound like lawyers negotiating a property deal, and other times like a seminar for undertakers. An expert witness for the defense, Robert van Pelt, presented the blueprints for the gas chambers and crematoria in Auschwitz. Irving's questions about the buildings made it sound like he was considering buying it for his own use: the property's location, the directions it faces, square meterage, (how much is that in real terms please, feet that is) where the elevator and the stairways are, where the dressing room is and where the sewage system is, thickness of the walls and what the door is made of. Every so often he would come closer to the slides that were shown in the courtroom so as to get a better look at the blueprints, at which time his large shadow would fall on the screen, resembling the shadow of a black vulture. He wanted to know exactly how the bodies were brought down to the crematoria, by stretcher or by sliding them, where the gold teeth were extracted from the mouths of the dead, how many kilograms, please (can you translate that into pounds?) and exactly what they did with the teeth. There was an oven for melting down the gold. "Ah," Irving said knowingly and delightedly enunciated the German term: "S-C-H-M-E-L-Z-O-F-E-N." He inquired about the ovens for burning bodies: "How many corpses can you do in a day?" he wished to know. His central argument is that, technically speaking, it was not possible to annihilate so many people in the facilities that remained. But what interested him more than anything else were the holes that were supposed to be in the ceiling of the chambers, which were ostensibly used for introducing the poison gas. No holes were marked on the plans displayed by the defense witness. Perhaps these were not suffocation chambers, but rather shelters to protect from aerial bombing, suggested Irving, and dramatically promised to withdraw his libel suit if he could only be shown the holes. Where are the holes, he asked again and again. "We had so much fun that day," he said later, because it turned out that there were no holes. But the media, of course, did not report that, Irving complained, and informed Internet surfers that Rudolf Hess' son was also infuriated about the gap between the protocols he reads and the media reports. @CROSStom:4. From Adolf to JessicaBy the time we came to his house that afternoon, by prior arrangement, Irving had a chance to change his suit vest for a green sweater. He walked us up to his study, equipped with a large copier, as well as document files and books and a colorful ball and toys belonging to his six-year-old daughter Jessica. She is the daughter of his second wife, a Danish-born woman. In all, he has had five daughters. One, who was born without any limbs, recently died at the age of 18. After the funeral he received a wreath of flowers with a condolence card signed 'Philip Bouhler,' the man who was responsible in Nazi Germany for euthanasia performed on the ill, which developed into the program for mass destruction of the Jews. Bouhler took his own life in 1945. It was a cruel joke that was very painful for him, Irving said. He claims that whoever did it was influenced by Lipstadt 's book. Irving says he receives constant death threats. Originally, he planned to appear in court with a bodyguard at his side, he says, but was afraid that it would not look good, and decided to take the risk. From behind his desk, Irving came across as full of himself, a condescending man, a consummate egocentric, an indefatigable chatterer. He drank his tea with milk, and did not offer us any. One shelf in the room is lined with the personal diaries that he has been writing since 1959. They will be his secret weapon in this case, Irving said. Fifty-five volumes, somewhere between 20 and 30 million words, of which a mere 13 words bear unmistakably clear anti-Semitic character. They were written at a time that he was in a fury, when he was arguing with his lawyer, Rubinstein. That's all. The defense requested and received all of the volumes of his diary for its perusal. They examined them under a microscope and aside from those 13 anti-Semitic words, not another word disparaging of Jews can be found. If he wins the case, Irving says, he will not ask Lipstadt for financial compensation or legal expenses. Only 500 pounds sterling, as a contribution to the charity that bears his deceased daughter's name. This is the arrangement that he claims to have offered before the trial began. If he loses, he will probably lose all his money. He permitted us to thumb through one of the diaries. June 1967: The great victory of the Jews did not provoke any comments. On the other hand, when the Sinai Campaign began, in 1956, he claimed to have taken part in a demonstration of support for Israel. He himself doesn't know why he did it; he was a student at the time. Irving does not see any great difference between the Israelis and the Nazis. He thinks that if the Jews would not have received a state in Palestine but had been sent to Madagascar instead, as proposed in the plan he attributes to Hitler, the world would be a happier place. He says that he does not have to go very far to shape his opinions on what is going on in Israel. He learns everything he needs from BBC broadcasts. He assumes that if Israel was a good and beautiful country, most of the Jews would settle there. The fact is that the majority does not want to live there. Evidently, they know why. Irving claims to be able to differentiate between the Jewish majority and the Jews from the Jewish organizations who have conspired against him in a global conspiracy, with the goal of smearing his name and getting rid of him. In his assessment, they do not represent the majority of Jews. He thinks that the Jews of the United States now wield at least as much influence as did the Jews of Weimar Germany. This is extremely dangerous. The Jews of the United States are liable to fall victim to the same fate of the Jews of Germany, he says. Irving is frequently asked if he believes the Jews of Europe were themselves to blame for what happened to them. He will not respond with a simple "yes" because the causality is more complex, but the Jews would do well to ask themselves why, really, they are hated so much, and always have been, everywhere. What is it in them that generates this hatred? They would do well to think about that, says Irving. There is no doubt that they are hated today because of all this propaganda about the Holocaust that they are constantly spreading, he says. It's become impossible to open a newspaper or see a television program these days without coming across the Holocaust. Holocaust, Holocaust, everywhere Holocaust. The Holocaust has "hijacked" all of the media, all of Western culture. The world is fed up with it. People are losing their patience and are liable to resort to acts of violence against Jews. If the Jews don't stop with this, they can expect a genuine Holocaust, Irving said. Sharon Sadeh asked him where all the Jews that the Nazis did not murder disappeared to. Irving said he doesn't know. The fact is there are Jews everywhere. That's how they are. They always pop up again, everywhere. But what does he know, maybe they changed their names to Israeli names. He's not too interested in that, either. He finds the Holocaust endlessly boring, he said. Now he no longer wanted to show us the drawing, Hitler's alleged self-portrait. He doesn't remember exactly where he put it, he says, but if we wanted, he would send Jessica to bring her spoon, which is inscribed with the initials A.H., a relic of Hitler's personal silverware. But Jessica didn't want to bring in the spoon, and we got up to go. I'm still not sure if the historic spoon is kept in a safe place or if Jessica uses it to eat her porridge. According to the daily report provided for his Internet admirers, David Irving had a hard day. He had worked the previous night until 4 a.m., and was already up at 7:50 to take Jessica to school. However, he reported to visitors to his website, he came home from the court that afternoon, at which point two Ha'aretz correspondents showed up. He found us "considerably more fun than Eric Silver [an editor of the Jerusalem Report, with whom he had spoken the evening before], though their final report will undoubtedly express the same line. He continued: pre-empting their inevitable accusations, I said, like Dr. Samuel Johnson: "The charge of anti-Semitism is the last resort of the Jewish scoundrel." Which is indeed what he told us, but he did not tell his readers how our meeting ended. When we were already in the hall, ready to leave, he suddenly said to us, "Maybe write that I'm half Jewish. That would be quite the story for you. I can already see the headline. David Irving Circumcised. What a story." I got the feeling that he was highly amused by that comment. Report: Historian Irving finds Holocaust 'endlessly boring' 02/04/2000 Associated Press Newswires Copyright 2000. The Associated Press. All Rights Reserved. JERUSALEM (AP) - A British historian accused of denying the Holocaust finds the subject "endlessly boring" and warns that if Jews don't stop bringing it up, they can expect a real Holocaust, an Israeli newspaper reported Friday. David Irving told the Haaretz daily that Jews have flooded Western culture with exaggerated reports about the Holocaust, which has "hijacked" all the media. "If the Jews don't stop this," he said, "they can expect a genuine Holocaust." "I find the Holocaust endlessly boring," he added. Irving, 62, is suing U.S. academic Deborah Lipstadt and Penguin Books in the British High Court for libel over a 1994 book that says he denied the Holocaust. Irving says he doesn't deny that the Nazis killed Jews during World War II, but challenges the number and manner of Jewish deaths in concentration camps. An interview he gave to Haaretz about the trial, which began Jan. 11, was published Friday. During the interview, the paper said, he offered to show reporters his 6-year-old daughter's World War II-era spoon, inscribed with Adolf Hitler's initials. Irving also told the paper that he is a victim of slander by a world Jewish conspiracy that dominates international media. The trial, which is expected to last 12 weeks, will determine whether Lipstadt 's book, "Denying the Holocaust: The Growing Assault on Truth and Memory," libeled Irving by saying he distorted statistics and denied the Holocaust. Penguin and Lipstadt deny any libel. == Letters In response to Gene Lichtenstein's editorial last week, the Journal has received about 100 letters addressed to Professor Deborah Lipstadt. The paper will print excerpts from them in next week's issue [02.11.00]. LA Times retracts errors in story on Irving vrs. Lipstadt [from an editorial in the LA Jewish Journal] http://www.jewishjournal.com/gene.2.4.0.htm Finally, a written performance, this one by the Los Angeles Times. Last Monday (Jan. 31), the Times published a brief five paragraph correction to one of its Column One articles that had appeared on the newspaper's front page. That story dealt with Holocaust deniers who questioned the extermination of European Jews by Nazi Germany. Now the Times, on page three, was notifying its readers -- under the heading For the Record -- that its original story had contained a number of factual errors. These included: mistakes on the number who died; on the academic respectability of some of the deniers, who it turns out were disavowed by their universities; and on the accurate claim that victims' remains were made into lampshades -- a claim rejected by the reporter in the original story, but now affirmed by the editor. No mention was made by the Times of the alleged objectivity of the reporting, which attempted to balance two competing "equally justified" points of view, or of the reporter's slant, which emphasized the price deniers paid for their exercise of free speech. Nor was any explanation given as to why the corrections to the record had taken 24 days to assemble -- the Column One story appeared Jan. 7. For the Record tended to be spare in its account, without context or elaboration; a correction that lacked a sense of accountability. In all, I would say, not a stellar performance, not a class act. -- Gene Lichtenstein == Jews hated for their money, greed, says Holocaust denier By Douglas Davis http://www.jpost.com:80/Editions/2000/02/04/News/News.2180.html LONDON (February 4) - Holocaust revisionist David Irving was accused yesterday of being a "perverted racist" after he was confronted by "poisonous" excerpts from his private daily journal in the High Court here. The charge was levelled by Richard Rampton, leading defense counsel for American historian Prof. Deborah Lipstadt and her British publisher, Penguin Books, who are on trial for libel at the High Court in London. Irving, 62, who denies that Jews were systematically exterminated in Auschwitz, has claimed that Lipstadt wrecked his career by labelling him a Holocaust denier and accusing him of distorting historical data to suit his ideological predilections. Discussing Irving's "utterances both in public and private on the subject of Jews, blacks, etc," Rampton accused Irving of teaching his nine-month-old daughter a "racist ditty" while taking her for a walk. The senior London barrister quoted a September 1994 extract from Irving's private journal, which he was obliged to hand over as part of an exchange of documents, in which the revisionist referred to a song he had sung to his daughter when "half-breed children" were wheeled past: "I am a Baby Aryan/ Not Jewish or Sectarian/I have no plans to marry/ an Ape or Rastafarian." Rampton also referred to a September 1992 speech in which Irving suggested that leading British television news presenter Sir Trevor McDonald, who is of Afro-Caribbean origin, should be restricted to "giving us all the latest news about muggings and drug busts" - but only after a "dinner-jacketed gentleman reads the important news to us, followed by a lady reading all the less important news." Irving was also asked about a media interview he gave in November 1998 in which he suggested that money and greed were the trigger for antisemitism. "The question which would concern me if I was a Jew is not 'who pulled the trigger', but 'why... why are we disliked? Is it something we are doing?' "You people," he told his interviewer, "are disliked on a global scale. You have been disliked for 3,000 years and yet you never seem to ask what is at the root of this dislike... no sooner do you arrive as a people in a new country than, within 50 years, you are already being disliked all over again." The court was also shown a video of Irving addressing a right-wing American organization, the National Alliance, in Tampa, Florida, in October 1995, when he spoke of the "legend of the Holocaust." Irving, who had suggested that an Auschwitz survivor may have faked her tattooed number, said his comments were not intended to be antisemitic, but critical of Jewish survivors who turned "their suffering into profit." The trial continues. Wrestling with the past New debates over old horrors: the Holocaust and the writing of history http://www.usnews.com:80/usnews/issue/000214/holocaust.htm By Jay Tolson As the proceedings of David Irving v. Penguin Books Ltd. and Deborah Lipstadt enter their fourth week in a London court, many observers are at odds about what is really at stake. Legally the issue is clear: Did an Emory University professor libel a British writer by calling him a "Holocaust denier" who distorts historical evidence to suit "his ideological leanings and political agenda"? But there are greater questions at hand=96including whether the general public cares about, or even recognizes, reasonable standards of historical accuracy. Irving, 61, a Hitler apologist and author of numerous World War II-era histories and biographies (The Destruction of Dresden, Hitler's War), prides himself on the detailed research that has earned some of his books the qualified praise of John Keegan, Hugh Trevor-Roper, and other respected historians. He charges that Lipstadt's Denying the Holocaust: The Growing Assault on Truth and Memory impugns his work and threatens his livelihood. Part of that livelihood was derived from speeches he gave to neo-Nazi audiences in Germany and Austria, where, among other things, he dismissed the crematoriums at Auschwitz as tourist attractions built by the Polish communist regime after World War II. Now banned from Austria, Italy, and Canada for violating laws against denying the Nazi genocide, he claims he is not a denier but only one who challenges the scope and means of Jewish killings and the fact of Hitler's involvement in the Final Solution. How to argue. Some who are following the case have asserted that the Holocaust itself is on trial=96or at least its scope and means. Alan Gold, a novelist who has written about the denial phenomenon, says it is nothing less than "a case that will test the facts upon which the deniers stake their claim to history." Yet others say that the trial raises questions about whether or how reputable historians should argue with deniers. "I used to wonder why you even dignify such an absurd position," says historian Eric A. Johnson. But given the influence of deniers, Johnson suspects they can no longer be ignored. The danger, as many scholars acknowledge, is in creating the impression that deniers represent merely another side of a reasonable debate=96like the one over global warming, for example. Still, Lipstadt and her English publisher felt they had to fight Irving, even though the plaintiff would have accepted a settlement of 500 pounds (about $800). "If we settled, we would be agreeing that we libeled him," says Helena Peacock, head of the legal department at Penguin Books. "It would have been a win for him." It's tempting to say that the outcome of the trial will have nothing to do with the reality of the Holocaust. "It's more about the silliness of English libel law," says Walter Reich, a professor at George Washington University and former director of the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum. (Compared with U.S. law, British libel law puts a much greater burden on the defendant.) Yet some historians maintain that the trial may have serious ramifications for how the Nazi genocide is talked about, studied, and represented. One concern that is often raised regards the burgeoning "Holocaust industry," by which is meant everything from museums and memorials to Steven Spielberg's film projects to Holocaust-studies programs. David Cesarani, a professor of Jewish history at Southampton University in England, vigorously defends "opposing neo-Nazism and the Holocaust denial that is associated with it." But he cites respectable academics who argue that memorializing efforts are "being used wrongly or simply getting out of hand," in some cases triggering a backlash that benefits deniers such as Irving. In his recent Holocaust in American Life, University of Chicago historian Peter Novick argues that American Jewish leaders have used the Holocaust to advance a range of agendas, including bolstering ethnic identity and galvanizing support for Israel. And while he acknowledges the anxiety many people feel as survivors pass away and the Holocaust "recedes into the past, into 'mere' history," he is concerned that too much emphasis on memorializing can lead to a corrupted understanding of what history is. "For the most part, deniers are crazed positivists," Novick says. "They think one fact can prove or disprove everything, which is why they all seize on the fact that there is no written document in which Hitler orders the Final Solution and ignore all other evidence." These battles come at a time when historians are presenting compelling new evidence and analysis of how the genocide was carried out. Eric Johnson's new book, Nazi Terror: The Gestapo, Jews, and Ordinary Germans, for instance, presents a very different understanding of everyday German involvement from the one set out in Daniel Goldhagen's controversial=96and bestselling=96Hitler's Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust. Goldhagen drew heavily on the behavior of police battalions in Poland to demonstrate that "eliminationist anti-Semitism" extended far beyond Hitler and the Nazi Party elite to include most ordinary Germans. Johnson, concentrating on Gestapo interactions with citizens in three German towns, sees a far greater range of citizen reaction, from direct participation (spying on neighbors) to silent acceptance of the Final Solution, which most knew was going on. "Silent complicity is horrible," Johnson explains, "but we have to see it in a more nuanced light than Goldhagen's blanket condemnation." Finding the "local Eichmanns" more culpable than most ordinary citizens, Johnson shows how the Nazi regime shaped social psychology from 1933 on. Fine line. Maybe what is most at stake in the Irving trial is the ability of the public to distinguish between this kind of nuanced historical revisionism (and honest disagreements among revisionists) and the outright distortions that are found not only in books but in neo-Nazi and antisemitic Web sites throughout the Internet. Writing in February's Atlantic Monthly, D. D. Guttenplan sees the case as testing a fine but important line between revisionists, who re-examine the policies and perpetrators of the Final Solution, and deniers, who resort to half-truths or shoddy proof to deny or minimize the Holocaust. Complicating the issue, Guttenplan writes, is that even reputable scholars sometimes get attacked for questioning any of the supposedly established facts about the Holocaust. And when these scholars are blocked from doing their work, "the result is a blurring of distinctions between memory and propaganda that serves only the interests of the Nazi perpetrators and their political legatees." There is a world of difference, he writes, between Raul Hilberg, whose monumental Destruction of the Jews (1961) drew fire merely by lowering the estimated number of Jewish deaths from 6 million to 5.1 million, and, say, Fred Leuchter, a designer of execution devices who used questionable experiments to "prove" that there were no gas chambers at the Auschwitz and Birkenau death camps. (Leuchter, whose findings have been endorsed and used by Irving, is the subject of a current documentary, Mr. Death.) Because such distinctions have been blurred, Irving and similar deniers have been able to wrap themselves in the respectable mantle of revisionism=96and sow doubt among the general public. Signs of their success should give pause. A 1993 Roper Organization poll found that 22 percent of Americans thought it possible that the Holocaust never occurred. Unfortunately, a victory by Irving might win more converts to that muddled skepticism. With Thomas K. Grose in London
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