WASHINGTON TIMES 03.19.00 http://www.washtimes.com/ LETTER FROM LONDON An English court, a Holocaust denier and an American professor sued Clive Davis BODY: Amidst the minutiae of a libel case as complicated as Irving v. Penguin Books & Deborah Lipstadt, even a High Court judge can sometimes find himself wrong-footed. Mr. Justice Grey's turn came as the historian David Irving cross-examined an expert witness, Hajo Funke, professor of Politics and Culture at the Free University of Berlin, about an after-dinner toast that took place in a Munich hotel on April 20, 1990. What day, asked Mr. Irving, is April 20th in the German calendar? Before the witness could reply, the judge answered that it was a Friday, his words prompting a genteel flutter of laughter around the courtroom. The reason? April 20th, as Mr. Irving was quick to point out, is Adolf Hitler's birthday. David Irving knows all about these things, of course. The author of the bestseller "Hitler's War," and a maverick who once described himself as a "moderate fascist," Mr. Irving has spent much of his controversial career wading through documents and memorabilia from the Third Reich. He has had plenty of opportunities to indulge that passion over the last several weeks as the main protagonist in a case which puts so-called Holocaust "revisionism" on trial. As readers will know by now, Mr. Irving is suing Deborah Lipstadt, professor of Modern Jewish and Holocaust Studies at Emory University in Atlanta, Ga., for comments made in her 1993 book "Denying The Holocaust." The writer prefers not to use the term revisionist because she feels it confers respectability on an extremist conspiracy. In her book she describes Mr. Irving as "one of the most dangerous spokespersons for Holocaust denial." Mr. Irving, for his part, claims that the accusations have left his career in ruins, since he can no longer find a reputable publisher for his work. On the elaborate website where he documents every stage of the trial, he pours scorn on the professor and her "Israeli paymasters." Now the duo face each other in court. Court 73 of the High Courts of Justice forms a bland, anonymous stage for these dramatic proceedings. The cramped, modern room has no air of grandeur nor even Bleak House mustiness about it. Laptop PCs easily outnumber the traditional lawyers' wigs. The gold royal crest on the wall behind Mr. Justice Grey supplies one of the few touches of decoration. Dull fluorescent lighting casts a yellow pallor over the lawyers, press and members of the public. And there is no jury to respond to the cut and thrust of the proceedings. Both sides in this historic case have agreed that the issues at stake are so detailed that the judge alone should deliver a verdict. The defendant is surrounded by her ample team of lawyers, who include the crusty, bewigged barrister Richard Rampton QC and the solicitor Anthony Julius - best known in Britain as Princess Diana's divorce lawyer. Mr. Irving, 62, stands alone. During this session four Jewish youths in yarmulkas, clearly no part of his team, are seated close behind him, their eyes fixed on his pinstriped back. Mr. Irving is alone because he is representing himself in court, groping his way through the finer points of cross-examination. Voluminous files rest on the desk in front of him, next to a dozen or so books, among them "Hitler's War" and his biography of Joseph Goebbels. It is a typically convoluted day in a confrontation which has been rumbling along since January. Once again a "Court Full" sign hangs on the door outside. Today's expert witness is Mr. Funke, who has assembled a bulky report outlining Mr. Irving's alleged links with neo-Nazi groups. Slowly, laboriously, Mr. Irving attempts to undermine his credibility, pointing to inconsistencies in the report. There is much cross-referencing with his diary which is, curiously enough, one of the major sources of evidence in the trial. (Disclosure of the contents were requested in the pretrial phase.) Mr. Funke looks weary, as he has every right to, considering the many hours he has spent replying to the questions. Mr. Irving pores over footnotes; every now and then he makes theatrically scornful references to the social scientists whom he clearly regards as ill-qualified to judge his work. The cross-examination is a painfully slow process of claim and counterclaim, but there is a logic to Mr. Irving's approach. Under British law the burden of proof rests not on the plaintiff, but the defendant. She is the one who has to prove her case decisively. Mr. Irving's sense of humor never quite deserts him. When, not for the first time, the judge rebukes him for asking irrelevant questions ("You're missing the wood for the trees again . . ."), the historian responds with all the bravado of a schoolboy in the headmaster's study. Mr. Hanke holds his own too. When Mr. Irving claims not to have heard of a book attacking his work, the witness breaks into a wry smile: "It's wonderful. I'll give it to you." Humor has its limits, though. Amidst the theater, and the cut and thrust, it is easy to forget that there are real issues and real lives at the center of all this. At the end of January the court had heard a Dutch historian, Robert Jan Van Pelt describing in detail the technology that made mass murder possible at Auschwitz. In a map of human suffering, he said, Auschwitz would be at the center. Mr. Irving argues that Auschwitz's supplies of Zyklon-B gas were used merely as an industrial delousing agent. Extracts of a speech Mr. Irving gave in 1991 in Alberta, Canada, have also surfaced in court. A different brand of wit raises its head here:. . . "There are so many Auschwitz survivors going around, in fact the number increases as the years go past, which is biologically very, very odd to say the least. I'm going to form an association of Auschwitz Survivors, Survivors of the Holocaust and Other Liars, . . ." There was nothing so dramatic in the closing session with Mr. Funke. But, to return to the start of this column, what exactly did happen on April 20, 1990? Well, Mr. Irving was in Munich as the main speaker at a "revisionist" conference organized by an alleged neo-Nazi Ewald Althans. That evening Mr. Irving attended a dinner where the 16 other guests drank a toast to Hitler's 101st birthday. Mr. Irving's diary, not for the first time, had the last word: "All rose, toasted; I had no glass as I don't drink." If he loses the case, Mr. Irving could always consider a career in the law. The two sides made their concluding arguments this week. The judge is expected to return his verdict in about three weeks. Clive Davis writes for the Times and Sunday Times, London. He lives in Berkshire. SUNDAY TIMES LONDON 03.19.00 http://www.the-times.co.uk/ Sympathy for the Devil? Peter Millar on the perils of appearing as a witness for a controversial historian A question of history: Millar was called by Irving to give evidence after working with him on the diaries of Goebbels, left Why I spoke up for David Irving Playing the devil's advocate is something most writers can cope with. It is another thing entirely getting an e-mail from him asking you to be his witness in court. David Irving, of course, is not the devil. Or so he maintains. He has, he says, been demonised by a global conspiracy determined to ruin him and enforce his silence. That has been the essence of his libel case now awaiting judgment in the High Court. As Joseph Goebbels's biographer, he does not quite echo the man he considers the real architect of the Third Reich's crimes, and say it is a "Jewish-Communist conspiracy". But he comes close. Such is Irving's ogre status that I had some trepidation even appearing in the witness stand - called by a man who says the greatest crime in human history is largely a myth - in a capacity that shocked friends, described (wholly mistakenly) as "for the defence". Mistakenly, because Irving is the claimant. I was doing something even more apparently outrageous: appearing, in a loose and non-legalistic manner of speaking, "for the prosecution". Unlike me, Sir John Keegan, defence editor of The Daily Telegraph and an eminent historian who praised Irving's book Hitler's War for its research, had to be subpoenaed into the witness box. Under oath, he admitted that his refusal to give evidence was based on fears of being "misunderstood". Irving said that was proof of the strength of the conspiracy against him. I have been to Auschwitz and have no doubt about what happened there. And as the author of a novel that, while nothing to do with the Holocaust, is based on the premise that winners of wars manipulate history to their own designs, I agreed to take the stand voluntarily, rather than be dragged there. My contribution to the case related to his conduct as a historian. In 1992, Andrew Neil, then editor of this newspaper, did a deal with Irving to publish extracts of Goebbels's diaries, newly uncovered in a hitherto secret Moscow archive. My job, as a freelance writer fluent in Russian and German and with a knowledge of the period, was to "oversee" Irving. That he had the potential to be a "wild card" was never in doubt, at least to me. It was like trying to play nanny to a mischievous grown-up schoolboy. At one stage he misappropriated - "pinched" was the word used by the opposition in court - an original, fragile, 1945 glass microfilm plate from a Soviet archive and hid it for several hours, concealed in cardboard postcards, on waste ground. I was outraged, and told him so. He thought me a "wimp" and suggested any real investigative journalist would have done the same. He had a point, though not necessarily a good one. The plate was put back. And therefore not "pinched". And undamaged. That was, for him, the crux of my evidence: to counter any charge that he was reckless. I thought it was a dubious point, but then it is to Irving's credit (and the basis of his early reputation) that he unearthed and worked from original sources. His German is fluent, learnt the hard way from working in a steelworks in the Ruhr. In the witness box, Irving asked me to confirm that I had, on my two or three visits to his Duke Street flat, never seen a portrait of Hitler. I had not. The defence QC, Richard Rampton, did not ask what I had seen. So there was no occasion to mention the cocktail sticks with their little paper swastikas. Irving regarded them, he said, as a joke. It all depends on your sense of humour. Few Jews - or modern Germans - would have been amused. Irving's accusations against Deborah Lipstadt, an American academic, and Penguin centre on her 1993 book Denying the Holocaust: The Growing Assault on Truth and Memory, which he says was the climax of a campaign designed to deny him his livelihood by scaring off publishers. Lipstadt pleads justification. The decision will be made by Mr Justice Gray, sitting, by mutual agreement, without a jury, both sides apparently feeling that the arguments require more than "common" sense. In court, clearly nervous about the complex business of conducting his own case, Irving was by turns pompous and deferential. Out of it, he still appears an all-too-familiar crusty-uncle type, the sort you wouldn't mind having round to tea at Christmas as long as nobody talked politics or played rap music. But his views are undoubtedly what would be described in the buzzword of the moment as "institutionally racist". "I have never been politically correct and I am not ashamed of it," Irving declared when his diary was found to include a now-infamous ditty he sang to his youngest daughter Jessica in her pram: "I am a baby Aryan, not Jewish or Sectarian, I have no wish to marry an ape or Rastafarian." Wickedly clever doggerel worthy of Spitting Image, but quoted in court it was an own goal that even his direst detractors would not have dared dream up. But these attitudes, it can be argued - and was - are not germane to the case. Irving insists that the case is not about deciding the truth of history, but the historian's right to dispute it. His vast website (www.fpp.co.uk) includes daily transcripts of the case and the full text of the mostly hostile press comment. Irving declares himself the champion of free speech and, in so doing, raises the dark issue of where its boundaries lie. In Germany, where "Holocaust denial" is a crime, he has a criminal record. Irving, the Germanophile, cites this as proof that Germans have still not learnt to cope with some attributes of democracy. When, back in 1992, the inevitable row erupted over Irving's opinions and his status as a historian, for the sake of my own conscience, I put the big question to him direct, on the telephone. "David," I said, "do you really deny the Holocaust ever happened?" "Of course not," he said. And a wave of relief swept me. Prematurely, I soon realised. "I accept that thousands," (how many?) "even tens of thousands of Jews died in the concentration camps." Not millions. And not, he went on to add, in the gas chambers. According to Irving, the greatest cause of Jewish mortality was typhus, though he accepts that vast numbers were also executed, usually shot in the head. He insists that Hitler was unaware of any mass extermination programme until at least October 1943. And, most controversially of all, that most of those who claim to be Auschwitz survivors are liars. If even half of Irving's claims were true, it would - as he insists - be evidence of a massive conspiracy of lies and distortion. A conspiracy that, except to Irving and a few others, defies belief. It would be sad if we allowed political correctness to condemn Irving for thinking (or even saying) the unsayable. Nor is it our affair if he believes the unbelievable. But what if he preaches it . . .? In the end, it is hard to see David Irving in any other role than the latest in a line of libel litigants that stretches back - without implying any moral equivalence - from Neil Hamilton via Jonathan Aitken to Oscar Wilde. Is it not the great clich=E9 lesson of history that we never learn from it? ### GUARDIAN LONDON 03.19.00 http://www.newsunlimited.co.uk/irving/article/0,2763,148654,00.html The world according to David Irving The judge will soon give his verdict on one of the most bitter libel trials in recent memory. Last week David Irving took time off to give this revealing and forthright interview to celebrated American author Gerald Posner. He remains defiant, unapologetic and more outspoken than ever The David Irving libel trial: special report Sunday March 19, 2000 'Those are Adolf Eichmann's personal papers and diaries, the ones the Israelis didn't find when they kidnapped him,' says David Irving, casually pointing to a stack of papers strewn on his kitchen table. His flat is overflowing with books, documents, files, as well as World War II memorabilia. 'They are more interesting than the Eichmann papers Israel just released to help the defence. They are desperate and clutching at straws.' Irving, 62, relishes the limelight and tweaking his foes. He is thoroughly enjoying the fallout from his high-profile libel lawsuit against Penguin publishers and American Holocaust historian Deborah Lipstadt. After much prodding, he has agreed to a rare break in his round-the-clock trial work to see me in his sprawling Mayfair townhouse flat. 'After my closing argument in the trial,' he declares, 'I shall give no further interviews. This is probably the last one. I need to get back to my writing after a three-year hiatus.' Irving remains unrepentant. In three weeks time he will discover if his libel action will salvage his reputation or mark him as permanently ruined. Following closing arguments last week, and while the the judge considers his verdict, one might expect Irving to be circumspect and politically correct. But that is not his style. Instead he seems determined to take on his foes and to reiterate his strident views. He leads me into his study. There, he sat directly in front of a large colour overhead photograph of Crematorium Two at Auschwitz: 'That's the holy of holies,' says Irving, jabbing one of his pudgy fingers toward the photo. 'No one was gassed there. The stories from survivors where someone says they used to take off the manhole covers and then the gas poured in, it's all false.' He enjoys, as he puts it, 'deglamorising and deromanticising' the Holocaust. 'The Poles have admitted that the only gas chamber at Auschwitz is a reconstruction built by them in 1948. It's only a damn tourist attraction.' The charges start coming rapid fire. Although Irving relishes his status as a contrarian and historic mischief-maker, he desperately wants to be accepted as a serious historian. And he is anxious to demonstrate that instead of being cowed by the battery of legal talent defending Lipstadt, he is defiant and unbowed. For the next hour, he launches into a rather remarkable defence of his own conclusions as well as an extraordinary attack on the foundations of the Holocaust. In a virtual monologue, peppered occasionally with German phrases, he rattled off contentions almost faster than I could type them into my notebook computer. 'All Auschwitz survivors are now useless witnesses at any trial since they have all seen Spielberg's Schindler's List, and can recite from memory where the supposed shower heads with gas were.' When he says something he particularly likes, his yellow teeth flash as his thin lips part in a devilish grin. And he does not back away from some of the extreme statements and acts attributed to him, although he often tries to deflect their importance by casting it as prankish humour. Yes, there were swizzle sticks adorned with little swastikas at his 1991 book party, but 'those were really nothing more than copies of Hitler's personal standard that my publisher had made up for the launch of my book.' (The late Alan Clark was according to Irving, 'a great admirer of Hitler. He sat in that very chair that you are in right before my party started and told me in depth about his admiration for= Hitler.') What about a little ditty found in the voluminous personal diaries produced in the trial: 'I am a Baby Aryan, Not a Jewish or sectarian, I have no plans to marry, An Ape or Rastafarian. 'Yes, that was mine. But I wrote it because of the bounce of the words and they rhyme, not the content. They say it makes me a racist. Well, that is all they got from my diaries. There are 20 million words in those diaries, and these are 20. So that makes me what - 0.0001 per cent racist?' After a moment's hesitation, he adds, 'But I do now wish I had used vegetarian instead of Rastafarian.' He comes alive when he talks about the trial, the forces he sees arrayed against him, and what he believes he is accomplishing in courtroom 73 of the High Court. 'I have been singled out,' Irving says as he sets forth a grand conspiracy he believes operates against him. 'There has been, for years, a co-ordinated effort to demolish my legitimacy as a historian. It is an international endeavour. It is the international network of the Anti-Defamation League, the Simon Wiesenthal Center, the Board of Deputies of British Jews, the South African Jewish Board of Deputies, the Austrian Jewish Congress, the American Jewish Committee, and a number of others. 'These are some of the traditional enemies of truth. These are all bodies that Lipstadt thanks in her book. They always use the slime defence against me. It is expensive for them, with so many lawyers and experts, but they mount it. In any case, Jews should be asking not who pulled the trigger, but why? When the Nazis asked the Slovaks, the Hungarians, the Czechs, and others to give over their Jews, everyone did so gladly. Why did the Americans and Roosevelt refuse to let the St. Louis dock? What is it about these people that no one wanted them?' It it vintage Irving. He deflects the query about why many respected organisations have taken such a keen interest in his handling of history and instead turns the discussion into a rhetorical question about the nature of Jews, one that he is prepared to answer. Although he is adamant that he is not a racist or anti-Semite, no sooner had he posed the question than he provided an answer that is chillingly reminiscent of the anti-Semitic themes that have persisted for centuries. 'Greed.' He pauses, letting the word virtually hang in the room. 'Fifty years from now you might well have the same problem in the United States. The Jewish =E9lite in America is filling the same positions they= held in the Weimar republic during the 1920s and 1930s - controlling the big banks, the film business, media, and the like. The Jews disproportionately held all these big positions in Germany. It's a mirror image in the US. And it will evoke howls of rage from the ordinary citizens who are kept out of the power =E9lite.' Irving's charge about the 'Jewish =E9lite in America' sounds remarkably similar to that made by the most extreme right-wing race baiters in the US, and it is surprising to hear him say it publicly, especially since his courtroom persona has been that of the measured historian who only has a difference of opinion with other historians. Although he has been forced to admit at trial that he greatly underestimated the number of Jews killed in mobile gas vans (97,000 died that way), he finds solace in his belief - which almost no courtroom observer shares - that he has made great strides in demonstrating that Auschwitz's Crematorium Two, the site of half a million deaths, is 'a mere legend'. 'It is the geocentre of the supposed death factory,' says Irving, his voice rising slightly as he becomes more excited. 'But I have pictures that show there were no holes in the ceiling, so there was no place for the gas to come from.' 'What about the large quantities of Zyklon B gas that were shipped to Auschwitz?' I ask. His answer is the classic defence of hardcore revisionists. 'Yes, huge quantities of Zyklon B were shipped there. The appropriate quantities for fumigation, especially with the camp's typhus epidemics and problems with pest control.' My expression shows my scepticism. 'Look,' he continues. 'Zyklon B may have been used against prisoners. I don't know. But I know crematorium 2 was not an enormous gas chamber.' Although he says the debate over how many were killed by the Nazis is not important, he enjoys contending that 'only 100,000 Jews may have died at Auschwitz,' most from diseases, and the rest from shootings and hangings. Then, as though his very minor concession about the possible use of gas ran against his spirit, he picked up again in a vitriolic mode. 'Jewish leaders have hijacked the word 'holocaust.' It's even spelt everywhere with a capital H. My Jewish editor in New York would not let me use the word in my book Hitler's War to describe the Allied bombing of Dresden. Another writer could not use it to describe the Irish potato famine. It's like it's a registered trademark. You can't open it or tamper with it. You either have to buy it or not, and if you don't buy it, what a headache.' Now Irving's face is flushed red. His speech is rapid. There is an anger against the forces he thinks are operating against him. Now it seems to boil over as his rhetoric hits new highs. 'The factory of death legend,' he waves his hand dismissively. 'They have hijacked the entire media with their holocaust story. Nobody suffers from it except for me on who they pour their slime.' He slumps back as though the outburst tired him. 'What if you are completely proven wrong one day?' I ask him. 'Proven wrong even to your satisfaction.' He sits quietly for a moment. 'I've said it before, and will again - with a sheepish grin, I'll admit I was wrong, but you will have to give me credit for having given them a great run for 40 years. But I certainly don't expect that to happen.' ==
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