The TIMES of London Copyright 2000 Times Newspapers Limited The Times (London) January 21, 2000, Friday http://www.the-times.co.uk/news/pages/Times/frontpage.html Historian accused of right-wing extremism BY: Tim Jones David Irving, the historian, was accused yesterday of being a right-wing extremist who made statements deliberately designed to feed virulent anti-Semitism still prevalent in the world. During highly charged exchanges in the High Court, Richard Rampton, QC, accused Mr Irving of being a holocaust denier who based statements on the flimsiest evidence. Mr Irving is suing Deborah Lipstadt, an American academic, and Penguin Books for claiming in her book Denying the Holocaust: the growing assault on truth and memory that he is a "Hitler partisan" who has twisted history. Wounded by Mr Rampton's allegation, Mr Irving, conducting his own case, accused him of playing to the press by making slurs. Ignoring Mr Irving's protest that the allegation was serious, Mr Rampton continued: "Our case against you is that you consort with deeply anti-Semitic people." Mr Irving, he said, had dignified himself as an historian who had lent his considerable weight to making statements denying that the Holocaust had taken place. "He has done so," he said, "because of his sympathies and attitudes. He is a right-wing extremist." The hearing continues. http://www.the-times.co.uk/news/pages/Times/frontpage.html Copyright 2000 Times Newspapers Limited The Times (London) January 21, 2000, Friday David Irving and Andrew Roberts BY: Mark Inglefield David Irving, the eccentric historian, gave Andrew Roberts, his more thoughtful peer, a public dressing-down yesterday. Spying Roberts in the Royal Courts of Justice - where Irving is fighting the claim of Deborah Lipstadt, the American academic, that he is a "Hitler partisan" - Irving offered a few damning thoughts on an article Roberts wrote in last week's Sunday Telegraph. "I'm writing a letter about your stinking article," screamed Irving, before he was interrupted by the clerk's "All rise". "Luckily the judge turned up," breathes a relieved Roberts. "Irving is an enormous bear of a man. He could hide a plate in one hand. He looks like a grizzly from behind. I will compose a reply." http://www.the-times.co.uk/news/pages/Times/frontpage.html Copyright 2000 Times Newspapers Limited The Times (London) January 19, 2000, Wednesday Irving insists that Hitler did not order the Holocaust BY: Tim Jones THE historian David Irving refused to accept yesterday that hundreds of thousands of Jews had been sent to concentration camps as part of Hitler's plan to exterminate them. His denial that the liquidation of Jews was part of a plan personally approved by the Fuhrer came during a sharp exchange with Richard Rampton, QC, during a libel case at the High Court in London. Referring to the transportation of Jews from Warsaw and other towns and cities to the villages of Treblinka, Sobibor and Belzec, near the Russian border, Mr Rampton suggested that "only a fool and a liar" would suggest that they were being sent there for their health. No sensible person, Mr Rampton said, would conclude from all the evidence that thousands of Jews were being shipped to the three villages close to the Russian border for benign purposes. Mr Irving, 62, who is conducting his own case, replied: "There could be any number of convincing explanations, from the most innocent to the most sinister." He added: "During World War II large numbers of people were sent to Aldershot but no one believes that there they were put into gas chambers." In another exchange, Mr Irving said he could not accept that 1.2 million Jews had been deliberately murdered at the Auschwitz concentration camp. Mr Irving, who maintains that the gas chamber at Auschwitz was built by the Poles after the war as a tourist attraction, said: "I don't accept that and I have good reason not to." He indicated that he would justify his belief about what occurred at the infamous camp when he cross-examines Holocaust experts who are to appear in court during the course of the trial, which is expected to last for more than two months. Speaking from the witness box in Court 73, in front of a packed public gallery in which there were many Jewish people, Mr Irving maintained that Hitler had not been aware of the mass slaughter of the Jews. He said that in the records of the so-called "table talks" between Hitler, Heinrich Himmler, the head of the SS, and Joseph Goebbels, his Propaganda Minister, there was no evidence that the Fuhrer knew of the "Final Solution". Even in 1942, Mr Irving said, Hitler was talking in terms of shipping the Jews to the island of Madagascar to begin new lives but that operation could not be carried out because of the naval war. Hitler, he said, did not want the Jews transported to Siberia, which would merely toughen up the strain of the Jewish "bacillus". He wished them to be removed totally from the Greater Reich. Mr Irving said that during the conversations, at which Hitler and his henchmen had discussed the course of the war, there was no suggestion that the Jews should be systematically killed. Mr Irving, who accepts that hundreds of thousands of Jews were murdered but denies that the killings were part of a systematic programme of extermination, accused Mr Rampton of disregarding evidence which did not concur with his case. During the trial, Mr Irving has been branded a "falsifier of history and a liar" for questioning the massacre of six million Jews by the Nazis. He has been accused of denying the Holocaust and Hitler's role in it. Mr Irving is suing Deborah Lipstadt, an American academic, and Penguin Books for claiming in her book Denying the Holocaust: the growing assault on truth and memory that he was a "Hitler partisan" who had twisted history. http://www.the-times.co.uk/news/pages/Times/frontpage.html Copyright 2000 Times Newspapers Limited The Times (London) January 18, 2000, Tuesday Nazis sent Jews to new life, says Irving BY: Tim Jones THOUSANDS of German Jews were provided with food and equipment by the Nazis to begin new lives in the East only to be murdered at their destination, David Irving claimed yesterday. The historian, who has been branded a "falsifier of history and a liar" for questioning the massacre of six million Jews in the Holocaust, told a High Court judge that the crimes had been committed without the knowledge or approval of planners in Berlin. He maintained that the enduring image of the Holocaust had been dented by evidence that showed that trains carrying Jews out of Germany had been well stocked with food and materials. The evidence, he said, went against the accepted picture of Jews being herded on board cattle trucks without food and water to arrive half dead days later at concentration camps. The perception, he said, had been questioned by a telegram message about the transportation of 944 Jews from Berlin to Lithuania on November 17, 1941, which had been decoded by British intelligence. It had revealed that for the three-day journey the train was carrying enough food for 24 days. Mr Irving said: "It is a bit of a dent, a tiny dent we have in the image of the Holocaust. The food and equipment was to enable them to set up their own camps and workshops and to start a new life in the East, anywhere from Germany." He added: "The system that was sending them there was apprehending that they would be doing something when they got there. But once they arrived on the spot, the system broke down and the murderers stepped in." Mr Irving, 62, is suing Deborah Lipstadt, an American academic, and Penguin Books for claiming in her book, Denying the Holocaust: the growing assault on truth and memory, that he is a "Hitler partisan" who has twisted history. Questioning Mr Irving, Richard Rampton, QC, for the defence, said that he was concerned with the historian's readiness "to leap to conclusions in favour of the SS and the Nazis". Mr Irving told Mr Justice Gray, who is hearing the case in the absence of a jury, that he strongly objected to the suggestion. He said: "Here is a British intelligence intercept of an SS telegram which has not been quoted by any of Mr Rampton's experts because it doesn't fit into the picture they are trying to create." Mr Irving said it was possible that the food provided on the train had been paid for by the Jews themselves. "If you were going to exterminate Jews, you don't send them on trains provided with food and appliances". He agreed with Mr Rampton that the Jews in question could have been among 2,934 Jewish deportees from Berlin, including women and children, who, records show, had been shot on November 25, 1941. The author said that the telegram painted a subtly different picture of how the deportation programme was carried out, "brutal and cruel though it was". He did not doubt that there was much barbarism but questioned the impartiality of defence experts who paid no attention to documents that "go against the notion that it was a systematic programme to exterminate the Jews". The case continues. http://www.the-times.co.uk/news/pages/Times/frontpage.html Copyright 2000 Times Newspapers Limited The Times (London) January 13, 2000, Thursday Irving says Holocaust 'logistically impossible' BY: Michael Horsnell The Hitler historian, David Irving, denied yesterday that the Nazis killed millions of Jews in concentration-camp gas chambers. The SS may have had gassing experiments, he said, but such mass murder was logistically impossible. Mr Irving, 62, said that the massacre of Jews - as occurred in the East when Germany invaded Russia - was by shooting, but was without the knowledge of Adolf Hitler and was not part of any systematic extermination by the Third Reich. On the second day of his libel trial at the High Court, he said that he had never done anything to exculpate Hitler and in his book, Hitler's War, he gave a list of crimes committed by the Fuhrer. "There was a time when he was on the right course and then went off the rails," he said. "You can't praise his racial programme or penal methods. But he did pick up his nation out of the mire after World War I, reunified it and gave it a sense of pride again." Mr Irving is suing Deborah Lipstadt, the American academic, and Penguin Books, who published her book, Denying the Holocaust, which claimed that he is a "Hitler partisan" who has twisted history by denying the Holocaust occurred. In the windowless Court 37, the judge, Mr Justice Gray, who is sitting without a jury, listened as Mr Irving tangled with defence counsel Richard Rampton, QC, over the vast numbers of Jews who died at the hands of the Nazis. Was it six million who died in one of the blackest chapters of 20th-century history? "A lot of the numbers are very suspect," the historian said. The judge put it to him: "It's said against you that you tried to blame what was done against the Jews by the Third Reich on Jews themselves." Mr Irving replied: "I have said on a number of occasions that if I was a Jew, I would be far more concerned not at who pulled the trigger, but why. Anti-Semitism is a recurring malaise in society. There must be some reason why anti-Semitic groups break out like some kind of epidemic." Mr Rampton asked him: "Do you accept that the Nazis killed by one means or another - murdered, hanged, put to death - millions of people during World War II?" "Yes," Mr Irving said. "I hesitate to speculate. It was certainly more than one million, certainly less than four million." Mr Rampton: "Do you deny the Nazis killed millions of Jews in gas chambers in purpose-built establishments?" Mr Irving: "Yes, it's logistically impossible." He added: "One million people weigh 100,000 tonnes - it's a major logistical problem. I deny that it was possible to liquidate millions of people in gas chambers as presented by historians so far." Asked about the Holocaust, the historian said: "I find the word is misleading and unhelpful. It's too vague, imprecise and unscientific and should be avoided like the plague." Pressed on his own definition of the Holocaust, he said that although tragedy befell the Jews "it was the whole of the Second World War and the people who died were not just Jews but Gypsies and homosexuals, the people of Coventry and the people of Hiroshima". Asked how many innocent Jewish people he thought the Germans had killed deliberately, Mr Irving brought up the name of Anne Frank, who died of disease in a camp at the age of 15. "She was a Jew who died in the Holocaust and she wasn't murdered unless you take it in the broadest sense." At the start of five hours in the witness box, Mr Irving, who claims to be the victim of an international conspiracy to ruin him as an historian, described himself as a "laissez-faire liberal". He said: "I don't care about political parties as long as they spend the money on hospitals and not the Millennium Dome. I don't look down on any section of humanity, coloured immigrant or females. But I can't say I applaud uncontrolled coloured immigration. I regret the passing of old England. "I sometimes think if sailors and soldiers who stormed the Normandy beaches could see what has happened since, they wouldn't have got 50 yards up the beach. They would have given up in disgust." He said that he paid no attention to Professor Lipstadt's book until 1996 - three years after it was published - when his own new work, Goebbels: Mastermind of the Third Reich, was being marketed. He found that bookshops began to show an aversion and refused to stock his work. He accused the defendants of blackening his reputation by labelling him a spokesman for the forces of Holocaust denial, who spent his time with anti-Semitic groups. Mr Irving claims that word was put about that he was an ardent admirer of the German dictator who "conceived himself as carrying on Hitler's criminal legacy". Extolling his virtue as an historian who excelled at recovering original documents - from archives to collections of letters retained by the widows of German officers - he said that his opponents and rivals were jealous of the fact that he got to them first. He maintained that he had never knowingly or wilfully misrepresented any document nor suppressed information that did not support his case and said that he always passed the information he gathered to other historians. The case continues. http://www.the-times.co.uk/news/pages/Times/frontpage.html Copyright 2000 Times Newspapers Limited The Times (London) January 13, 2000, Thursday BY: Tim Reid THE CLAIMANT: NOT A HOLOCAUST DENIER The main plank of David Irving's case rests on Deborah Lipstadt's claim that he is a "Holocaust denier". Mr Irving says that he has never claimed that the Holocaust did not take place, although he has questioned the number of Jewish dead and the system by which the victims were killed (Tim Reid writes). A Germanophile since his teens, Mr Irving won many plaudits with a string of Second World War books. But his 1977 book, Hitler's War, provoked a storm of controversy when he alleged that Hitler had not known about the mass murder of Europe's Jews until 1943. In 1979 his German publisher apologised for printing in Hitler's War that Anne Frank's diary was a forgery. From the mid-1980s Mr Irving regularly addressed right-wing groups in Austria and Germany. In 1988 he testified on behalf of Ernst Zundel, a Canadian on trial for spreading "false news" about the Holocaust. Zundel also called Fred Leuchter, who claimed that Zyklon B cyanide gas was never used at Auschwitz. The judge dismissed the evidence, but Mr Irving published a version of the Leuchter report, writing in the foreword that British intelligence had spread the "propaganda story that the Germans were using 'gas chambers' to kill millions of Jews and other undesirables". When he repeated the claim at a meeting in Munich he was charged by the German authorities, found guilty in May 1992 and heavily fined. Mr Irving says he is a victim of a "global conspiracy", led by Jews, of which Professor Lepstadt is a major part. Her claim that he "denies" the Holocaust threaten to destroy his reputation and leave him penniless, he argues. THE JUDGE:CASE TOO HARD FOR A JURY Unlike most libel trials, this case is not being heard by a jury but by a sole judge: Mr Justice Gray, one of the most senior High Court libel judges. Under the Civil Procedure Rules, the judge in charge of a case has the power to dispense with a jury if the case's length and the volume and complexity of evidence appear to be too onerous for a jury. This libel trial, dealing with one of the most controversial and complex episodes of the past century, is expected to take at least three months. Both sides will call a host of eminent historians. "The documentary evidence will be enormous," one lawyer said. Neither side opposed the judge's suggestion, made before the trial, to dispense with a jury. A good example of a judge- only trial was the marathon "McLibel" case, when the hamburger giant McDonald's sued two environmental activists over claims about its business practices. Mr Justice Gray, a former top libel silk, said recently that the balance of success in British libel actions has shifted to defendants - unlike the past, when plaintiffs could expect big rewards. THE DEFENDANT: CHALLENGING REVISIONIST CLAIMS The libel case was triggered in 1995 when Deborah Lipstadt published Denying the Holocaust: The Growing Assault on Truth and Memory. The book grew from her concern about the worldwide proliferation of claims that there was no systematic mass murder of Europe's Jews during the Second World War. The book is the first full-length study of the history of those who attempt to deny the Holocaust. Postwar attacks on the veracity of the Holocaust began in 1948 with the publication in France of Le Passage de la Ligne (Crossing the Line), by Paul Rassinier, who had been sent to Buchenwald as a member of the Resistance. He argued that there was no extermination policy towards the Jews, only an emigration policy. In 1965, Austin App, an American professor, published the Six Million Swindle, arguing that no more than 1.5 million Jews had been killed, and that the Nazis had not planned to kill all Jews; and in 1973, Thies Christopherson, a former Wehrmacht officer, published Die Auschwitz Luge (The Auschwitz Lie), which claimed that no more than 200,000 Jews were killed. Many more "denials" have followed, but in her book Professor Lipstadt referred extensively to Mr Irving, whom she considered one of the most vehement exponents of Holocaust denial. His mastery of historical documents made him a particularly dangerous exponent of the claim, she said. She asserted that he was associated with well-known Holocaust deniers - she deliberately rejects their preferred term of "revisionist" - and distorted, suppressed and manipulated history for a noxious ideology. She said that he had denied the Holocaust as an historical fact. http://www.ft.com/ Copyright 2000 The Financial Times Limited Financial Times (London) January 12, 2000, Wednesday London Edition 2 NATIONAL NEWS: Writer's action raises thorny questions LIBEL HEARING HISTORIAN SUES PUBLISHER AND US PROFESSOR OVER CLAIMS OF DENYING HOLOCAUST: BY: By JOHN MASON The long-awaited libel action between Penguin Books, the international publishers, and David Irving, the controversial second world war historian, over his version of the Holocaust, began yesterday in the High Court. The case will raise thorny issues such as: when are the ideas of historians or academics so appalling their work should be forever banned? Other issues include whether, or where, one limits free speech. And what makes a good historian anyway, especially when their subject is the most emotive in 20th century history? These apparently intractable ethical issues will, to some extent, now be decided by a single judge, Mr Justice Gray. The international publishing industry, with its commercial interests, will be watching attentively. David Irving, the historian of Hitler and other Nazi-related subjects, accused Penguin Books and US author Prof Deborah Lipstadt, of being part of an "organised international endeavour" to destroy his reputation as a historian by accusing him of distorting history and denying the Holocaust took place. "The word denyer is particularly evil because no person in full command of their faculties with even the slightest understanding of what happened in world war two can deny that the tragedy actually happened, however much we dissident historians may wish to quibble about the means, the scale, the dates and other minutiae," he said. Mr Irving is suing both Prof Lipstadt and Penguin (a subsidiary of Pearson, the media group that also owns the Financial Times), for damages over their claims. He is also seeking an injunction to prevent further publication of the allegations in Prof Lipstadt's book Denying the Holocaust. Representing himself in court, Mr Irving claimed both Penguin and Prof Lipstadt were "villains" who were part of an internationally organised attempt to ruin his reputation. Mr Irving said his books had been previously published by a number of reputable publishers, including Penguin itself, Macmillan and Simon and Schuster. However, as a result of Penguin's allegations, leading publishers such as St Martin's Press now refused to publish his work. Richard Rampton QC, for Penguin, said: "Mr Irving calls himself a historian. The truth is, however, that he is not a historian at all, but a falsifier of history. To put it bluntly, he is a liar." Accusing Mr Irving of using disreputable methods, Mr Rampton insisted he was a "Holocaust denyer", saying: "By this I mean that he denies that the Nazis planned and carried out the systematic murder or millions of Jews, in particular - though by no means exclusively - by the use of homicidal gas chambers and in particular at Auschwitz in southern Poland." The case is due to last three months. http://www.the-times.co.uk/news/pages/Times/frontpage.html Copyright 2000 Times Newspapers Limited The Times (London) January 12, 2000, Wednesday Irving a liar not an historian, court told Right-wing author accused in libel battle of casting doubts on Holocaust, reports Michael Horsnell David Irving, the controversial, right-wing historian, was branded a "falsifier of history and a liar" before a High Court judge yesterday for questioning the massacre of six million Jews by the Nazis. At the start of a libel battle expected to last three months, he was accused of denying the Holocaust and Hitler's role in the Final Solution. The accusations were made by Richard Rampton, QC, who is representing Deborah Lipstadt, an American academic, and Penguin Books who published her work, Denying the Holocaust: the Growing Assault on Truth and Memory. Mr Irving, 62, is suing both for damages for claiming that he is a "Hitler partisan" who has twisted history. In a two-hour opening address he claimed to be the victim of an international conspiracy to ruin him and make him a pariah. Mr Irving, representing himself, said: "Such is the nature of the odium that has been generated by the waves of hatred recklessly propagated against me by the defendants." He went on to claim that the gas chamber shown to tourists at Auschwitz was a fake built by the Poles after the war. But in an opening statement in reply, Mr Rampton told Mr Justice Gray: "Mr Irving calls himself an historian. The truth is, however, that he is not an historian at all, but a falsifier of history. To put it bluntly, he is a liar." He accused the author of suppression of evidence, falsehoods and inventions, distortion and manipulation to wilfully mislead. "The lies which the defendants in this case will show that Mr Irving has told concern an area of history in which, perhaps, it behoves any writer or researcher to be particularly careful of the truth: the destruction of the Jews by the Nazis during the Second World War, the Holocaust, and Adolf Hitler's role in that human catastrophe. "Or, as Mr Irving would have it, alleged catastrophe. For Mr Irving is nowadays a Holocaust denier. By this I mean that he denies that the Nazis planned and carried out the systematic murder of millions of Jews, in particular, though by no means exclusively, by the use of homicidal gas-chambers, and in particular, though by no means exclusively, at Auschwitz." He said that Mr Irving, who has had more than 30 books published including Hitler's War and a biography of Goebbels, went to great lengths and employed "disreputable methods" to achieve his exoneration of the Nazi dictator. In one monstrous distortion of the evidence, he alleged, Mr Irving had falsely used a "not to be liquidated" order, about a particular trainload of 1,000 Jews being deported from Berlin to Latvia in November 1941, to claim that Hitler had generally ordered Heinrich Himmler, the head of the SS, that there should be no liquidation of Jews at all. Mr Rampton went on to say that between the first edition of Hitler's War in 1977 and its second edition in 1991 Mr Irving's views about the Holocaust had undergone a sea change. In the latter edition all traces of the Holocaust as an historical truth had disappeared. Auschwitz had been "transformed from a monstrous killing machine into a mere slave-labour camp". This volte-face was based on "bunk" scientific evidence about traces of the killing agent hydrogen cyanide, used by the SS at Auschwitz. It was part of Mr Irving's campaign to "sink the battleship Auschwitz", Mr Rampton said. "The essence of this campaign is that the Holocaust, symbolised by Auschwitz, is a myth, legend or lie deployed by Jews to blackmail the German people into paying vast sums in reparations to supposed victims of the Holocaust." Mr Irving, he said, had frequently addressed neo-Fascist, neo-Nazi groups of people. In September 1991 he spoke to an audience in Calgary, Alberta, at which he complained about pressure from Jews to prevent him speaking. He alleged that Mr Irving told the meeting: "I don't see any reason to be tasteful about Auschwitz. It's baloney, it's a legend. Once we admit the fact that it was a brutal slave-labour camp and large numbers of people did die, as large numbers of innocent people died elsewhere in the war, why believe the rest of the baloney? "I say quite tastelessly, in fact, that more women died on the back seat of Edward Kennedy's car at Chappaquiddick than ever died in a gas chamber in Auschwitz. Oh, you think that's tasteless, how about this? There are so many Auschwitz survivors going around, in fact the number increases as the years go past, which is biologically very odd to say the least. Because I'm going to form an Association of Auschwitz Survivors, Survivors of the Holocaust and Other Liars, or the A-S-S-H-O-L-S." In his statement, Mr Irving rebutted allegations that he was a "Holocaust denier" as described by Ms Lipstadt, 52, Professor of Modern Jewish and Holocaust Studies at Emory University, Atlanta, Georgia, whose book was published in 1993. He said that he had never held himself out to be a Holocaust expert but could be described as an expert in the role that Hitler played in the war. He said: "These defendants have done very real damage to my professional existence. May I first of all set out the very real pecuniary damage which can be done to an author by an attack on his reputation. It is not merely that he suffers injury and hurt to his feelings from unjustified attacks, whatever their nature. An author, by virtue of his trade, lives a precarious financial existence." He added: "By virtue of the activities of the defendants I have since 1996 seen one fearful publisher after another falling away from me, declining to reprint my works, refusing to accept new commissions and turning their backs on me when I approach." He said that as a result of lies told about him he had been expelled from Canada in 1992, a country which had been friendly to him for 30 years which suddenly rounded upon him "as savagely as a rottweiler". He said that "Holocaust denier" had become one of the "most potent phrases in the arsenal of insult. As a phrase it is of itself quite meaningless. The word Holocaust is an artificial label commonly attached to one of the greatest and still most unexplained tragedies of this past century. "It is a poison to which there is virtually no antidote, less lethal than a hypodermic with nerve-gas jabbed in the neck, but deadly all the same. For the chosen victim, it is like being called a paedophile. It is a verbal Yellow Star." The case continues. http://www.the-times.co.uk/news/pages/Times/frontpage.html Copyright 2000 Times Newspapers Limited The Times (London) January 12, 2000, Wednesday Academic buccaneer v bookish schoolmaster The libel trial as entertainment may have reached its apogee in Hamilton v Al Fayed, but that was pantomime farce compared with the darker matter of Irving v Penguin Books and Deborah Lipstadt. What is at stake here is not the amour-propre of individuals with grossly inflated egos. Rather it is whether one of the blackest chapters of 20th-century history actually happened, or is a figment of politically motivated Jewry. David Irving, the historian who has brought the action, has been branded in the past as a revisionist and even a neo-Nazi who has sought to diminish or even deny the Hitler regime's greatest crime. He chose to represent himself, a sign that a litigant is either exceedingly sure of his ground or that he cannot afford George Carman, QC. A burly man of 62 with dark and slightly greying hair, he appeared in a dark-blue pinstriped suit, looking like an international art dealer or possibly even a libel lawyer without his gown and wig. He had 55 pages of opening statements to deliver, which he accomplished at machine-gun speed in barely two hours, with a break for lunch. Occasionally he thumped the table, waved his hands about, and at one stage even beat his breast to emphasise his own high motives. His style would not have been entirely out of place at one of those mass rallies that a later generation knows from the newsreels. But his audience was too small for this sort of performance. In the absence of a jury, the case has been allotted one of the High Court's smaller and less imposing arenas, where every spare seat is taken by representatives of the British, US and Jewish press. Mr Irving devoted much of his opening to his own history: how he had last been before the court some 30 years ago over a spot of bother with his book The Destruction of Convoy PQ17. He spent a great deal of time explaining how he had not stolen the photographic negatives of Goebbels's diaries from the Moscow archives in 1992, but had merely borrowed them for copying and put them back. He gave the impression of being an academic front-liner, a buccaneer who fought his way into archives for a first sight of vital documents. In front of him sat one of the principal defendants. Professor Lipstadt, whose 1994 book casts severe doubts on Mr Irving's interpretation of the Holocaust, is a well-presented, 54-year-old American with ginger hair, half-moon spectacles and gold earrings, an orange silk scarf swathing her black outfit. She followed Mr Irving's address on a laptop computer, occasionally glancing round at him with what looked suspiciously like wide-eyed incredulity. Richard Rampton, opening for the defendants, said the case was about Mr Irving perverting European history. Mr Rampton is of an altogether different demeanour from Mr Irving, more of a bookish, soft-spoken schoolmaster. His opening statement required only 11 typed pages and 15 minutes. But Mr Rampton did not waste a word. "The essence of the case is Mr Irving's honesty and integrity as a character - I shy away from the word historian." There are an expected 12 more weeks of a case that has been two years in the preparation, with eminent historians lined up ready to be called by both sides. The hearing opened as Downing Street prepared to announce a National Holocaust Memorial Day. http://www.the-times.co.uk/news/pages/Times/frontpage.html Copyright 2000 Times Newspapers Limited The Times (London) January 11, 2000, Tuesday Penguin Books defends a libel action Penguin Books is in the High Court today to defend a libel action brought against it by the author David Irving in connection with Penguin's publication in the UK of Denying the Holocaust by Deborah Lipstadt. The American author, a co-defendant, is a professor at Emory University in Atlanta. The book examines the Holocaust "denial phenomenon" and names Mr Irving as a denier who, it alleges, distorts history. This allegation is the basis of his action. http://www.the-times.co.uk/news/pages/Times/frontpage.html Copyright 2000 Times Newspapers Limited Sunday Times (London) January 9, 2000, Sunday The sharp minds with a war to win BY: Margarette Driscoll The court case between David Irving and Deborah Lipstadt is expected to last three months and is bound to be phenomenally expensive. Irving, proud of his forensic mind, is to represent himself, while Lipstadt's case will be fought by Anthony Julius, the solicitor who represented the Princess of Wales during her divorce. It will be the first big test of his newly acquired skill as an advocate. He has already tried his hand at writing, authoring a book exposing TS Eliot's anti-semitism. The case is to be held without a jury, which is unusual, both sides having agreed that the complexity of the issues would drag the hearing out if a jury were to try it. The battle will be fought out in front of Charles Gray, the judge, who is himself a distinguished libel lawyer and one of the so-called "fashionable four" libel QCs headed by George Carman. Gray's biggest win - in a case that dealt with a shameful episode during the second world war, the extermination of the white Russians - was Pounds 1.5m for Lord Aldington, the Tory peer, against Count Nikolai Tolstoy. Gray also appeared for Jonathan Aitken, the former Tory MP, in his notorious libel suit against The Guardian. At stake is Irving's reputation as a historian. The Sunday Times is to play a small role in the drama. A former Sunday Times writer involved in the newspaper's serialisation of the Goebbels diaries, which Irving edited and translated, is to give evidence, along with several Holocaust experts. One of the key witnesses for the defence will be Richard Evans, professor of modern history at Cambridge, who has written on German history and is the author of a book outlining the historian's role in modern society. He has been asked to examine Irving's work and pronounce on its worth. Though both sides insist the case is about Irving's academic credibility and deny they wish to use the court to "refight" the war, it is the subject rather than the characters that gives this case such power. http://www.the-times.co.uk/news/pages/Times/frontpage.html Copyright 2000 Times Newspapers Limited Sunday Times (London) January 9, 2000, Sunday Judgment day for the Holocaust historians BY: David Cesarani David Irving will be at the centre of a marathon legal clash in the High Court over the issue of 'Holocaust denial', writes David Cesarani The battle looming in the High Court between David Irving, the most controversial of Britain's historians, and Deborah Lipstadt, an American expert on the Holocaust and anti-semitism, promises to be one of the most gripping of modern times. If the clash between Neil Hamilton and Mohamed al-Fayed provided onlookers with scenes worthy of Gilbert and Sullivan, the action for defamation brought by Irving against Lipstadt and Penguin Books this Tuesday will be more reminiscent of trench warfare. The consequences for both parties will be enormous and the shock waves will reverberate far and wide. The issue goes beyond the reputations of two individuals and a publishing house. It was triggered in 1995 when Lipstadt, a professor, published Denying the Holocaust: The Growing Assault on Truth and Memory. The book grew from her concern about the worldwide proliferation of the claim that there was no systematic mass murder of Europe's Jews during the second world war. She was also appalled by the confused response on American campuses to advertisements in college newspapers proclaiming that Auschwitz was a myth concocted by Jews to make the world feel sorry for them and pay reparations to Israel. Lipstadt sought to demonstrate the links between this denial of the Holocaust and the activity of white supremacists in America and neo-Nazis in Europe. It was, she argued, not just a distortion of history that pained the Jews, but also part of a global effort to rehabilitate Nazism and, hence, a threat to liberty itself. In the book she referred extensively to Irving, whom she considered one of the most dangerous exponents of Holocaust denial. She believed him to be a potent force because he knew how to use historical sources, wrote well and, thanks to his bestselling publications, carried considerable prestige. Yet, she asserted, he was associated with well-known Holocaust deniers and like them distorted history in the service of a noxious ideology. This was not the first time Irving had been attacked, but her assaults on his reputation presented a challenge he could not afford to ignore. Irving has been a quixotic figure on the British literary scene for more than 30 years. A Germanophile since his teens, with marked right-wing political leanings, he won attention with a string of heavily researched but controversial second world war books. In 1963 he touched the raw nerve in Britain and Germany over the bombing of Dresden. In 1970 he had to pay Pounds 40,000 in damages for allegations he made in a book on the ill-fated Arctic wartime convoy PQ17. Hitler's War, his 1977 book, took him into a different realm of controversy when he alleged that Hitler had not known about the mass murder of Europe's Jews until 1943. According to Irving, "the incontrovertible evidence is that Hitler ordered that there was to be 'no liquidation' of the Jews." This caused consternation and provoked Martin Broszat, the leading German historian of the Third Reich, to write a minutely documented critique of Irving's methods and his thesis. But Irving responded to the furore by offering a cash reward to anyone who could find a document directly linking Hitler to the Final Solution. At this stage he was taken seriously by many historians, but in the 1980s what was excused as eccentricity or provocation for the sake of publicity took the form of something more disturbing. In 1979 Irving's German publisher apologised for printing in Hitler's War that Anne Frank's diary was a forgery and paid compensation to her family. Irving now became a presence in extreme right-wing circles in Britain and attended conferences of the Institute of Historical Review in the United States, the leading forum for those who deny the Holocaust ever happened. From the mid-1980s he regularly addressed neo-Nazi groups in Austria and Germany, where he assumed almost heroic status among them. But did they warm to him because he was "one of them" or because he attacked existing orthodoxy? In 1988 he went to Toronto to testify on behalf of Ernst Zundel, a Canadian on trial for spreading "false news", denying that the holocaust had taken place. Zundel also called as a witness Fred Leuchter, an American expert on execution techniques, who claimed as a result of scientific tests that Zyklon B cyanide gas was never used at Auschwitz-Birkenau. The judge dismissed the scientific evidence, but Irving went on to publish a version of the Leuchter report under his own imprint. In the foreward he wrote that British intelligence had spread the "propaganda story that the Germans were using 'gas chambers' to kill millions of Jews and other Undesirables". When he spun this line to a far-right meeting in Munich he was charged by the German authorities, found guilty in May 1992 and heavily fined. Yet in Britain and America, Irving was still widely regarded as a scholar of substance, wayward but not beyond the pale. His biography of Goebbels, the Nazi propaganda chief, won plaudits from the likes of Hugh Trevor-Roper, Donald Cameron Watt and Bruce Anderson. But his comeback only spurred on the efforts of those determined to stigmatise him. In 1997 a Munich court upped the earlier fine and barred him from entering Germany, cutting Irving off from his archives and contacts. Then he was banned from Canada and Australia where he had conducted lecture tours and promoted his books. Finally, St Martin's Press in New York ditched his book on Goebbels: for American publishers Irving had become too hot to handle. One of his most important markets was in jeopardy. It was probably a combination of these developments that prompted Irving to sue Lipstadt. The label of "Holocaust denier" that hung around his neck was strangling him. Irving rejects the accusation that he denies the Holocaust took place, but he defines it to mean the slaughter of millions of civilians and not just Jews. He can point to references in his books to the mass murder of Jews by shooting or at the Chelmno death camp, but he insists that if gas chambers existed at Auschwitz or other extermination camps it was for "experimental" purposes. He insists that all his findings can be sustained by the legitimate interpretation of original sources. It will be crucial for him to prove this in court, because the outcome will determine his credibility as a historian. Win or lose he will be a hero or a martyr for the far right, but if he loses his stock will fall. Irving sees himself pitted against what he calls a "global conspiracy" led by Jews that is devoted to leaving him boycotted and broke. For those on the far right such as Jean-Marie Le Pen, who regard the Final Solution as a "detail" of history, or Jorg Haider, who would like the world to take a more relaxed view of Hitler, the trial has considerable political significance. If, as Lipstadt believes, the record of Nazi atrocities is indeed a barrier which constrains the far right, a heavy burden rests on her defence. Yet the historians will know that its ramifications for them are no less profound. Implicit in the issue of individual reputations will be the larger question: who can be trusted with the past? David Cesarani is professor of Jewish history at Southampton University ###
Home ·
Site Map ·
What's New? ·
Search
Nizkor
© The Nizkor Project, 1991-2012
This site is intended for educational purposes to teach about the Holocaust and
to combat hatred.
Any statements or excerpts found on this site are for educational purposes only.
As part of these educational purposes, Nizkor may
include on this website materials, such as excerpts from the writings of racists and antisemites. Far from approving these writings, Nizkor condemns them and
provides them so that its readers can learn the nature and extent of hate and antisemitic discourse. Nizkor urges the readers of these pages to condemn racist
and hate speech in all of its forms and manifestations.