GUARDIAN OBSERVER Irving 'should not be deemed a historian' http://www.newsunlimited.co.uk/irving/article/0,2763,135468,00.html The David Irving libel trial: special report Friday February 11, 2000 David Irving did not deserve to be called a historian, a leading academic told the high court yesterday. Richard Evans, professor of modern history at Cambridge University, said that he was not prepared for the "sheer depth of duplicity" which he encountered in Mr Irving's treatment of historical sources relating to the Holocaust. Mr Irving, the 62-year-old author of Hitler's War, who is suing for libel over claims that he is a "Holocaust denier", said that Professor Evans's "sweeping and rather brutal" dismissal of his career stemmed from personal animosity. "I think you dislike what I write and stand for and what you perceive my views to be," he told Prof Evans, who has been called as an expert for the defence by author Deborah Lipstadt and Penguin Books. Prof Evans, who has produced a 740-page report on Mr Irving's historical method, said he had no personal feelings towards him and had tried to be as objective as possible. He said he previously had little knowledge of Mr Irving's work - although he knew of his reputation as someone who was in many areas a sound historian - and was "shocked" at what he found. He said that the proceedings had reinforced his view in the report that Mr Irving "has fallen so far short of the stan dards of scholarship customary among historians that he doesn't deserve to be called a historian at all". Mr Irving said that he was "scrupulously fair" in everything he did in public life - "the total opposite of being unscrupulous and manipulative and deceptive as you say in your report". Prof Evans said he agreed that Mr Irving had a very wide knowledge of the source material for the third reich and had discovered many new documents. "The problem for me is what you do with them when you interpret them and write them up." Prof Evans said that Mr Irving's published writings and speeches contained numerous statements which he regarded as "anti-Semitic" - to the extent that he blamed the Jews for the Holocaust. He dismissed the theory that there was a "worldwide Jewish conspiracy" to suppress Mr Irving's works - or undermine Germany in the 1930s - as "a fantastic belief which has no grounds in fact". Prof Evans said that he had examined a sufficient selection of Mr Irving's output to justify his view that he did not use acceptable methods of historical research. In his report, he said that Mr Irving had relied in the past, and continued to do so, on the fact that readers, listeners and reviewers lacked "either the time or the expertise" to probe deeply enough in the sources he used to discover the "distortions and manipulations". He accepted that people should be allowed to challenge the "general consensus" of history but asserted that there was a duty to conform to academic standards in the evaluation of evidence. Mr Irving, who is representing himself, is claiming damages over the 1994 Book, Denying the Holocaust: The Growing Assault on Truth and Memory, which he says has generated waves of hatred against him. The defendants have accused him of being a liar and a falsifier of history. The hearing continues. INDEPENDENT http://www.independent.co.uk/ News Irving's study of Holocaust `not factual' Ian Burrell Home Affairs Correspondent 02/11/2000 (Copyright 2000 Newspaper Publishing PLC) A CAMBRIDGE university professor told the High Court yesterday that the right-wing author David Irving "doesn't deserve to be called a historian at all". Richard Evans, a professor of modern history, said that he was not prepared for the "sheer depth of duplicity" which he encountered in Mr Irving's treatment of historical sources relating to the Holocaust. Mr Irving, the 62-year-old author of Hitler's War who is suing for libel over claims that he is a "Holocaust denier", said that Professor Evans's "sweeping and rather brutal" dismissal of his career stemmed from personal animosity. "I think you dislike what I write and stand for and what you perceive my views to be," he told Professor Evans, who has been called as an expert witness for the defence by the author Deborah Lipstadt and Penguin Books. Professor Evans, who has produced a 740-page report on Mr Irving's historical method, said he had no personal feelings towards him and had tried to be as objective as possible. He said he previously had little knowledge of Mr Irving's work - although he knew of his reputation as someone who was in many areas a sound historian - and was "shocked" at what he found. The proceedings, Professor Evans said, had reinforced his view given in the report that Mr Irving "has fallen so far short of the standards of scholarship customary among historians that he doesn't deserve to be called a historian at all". Professor Evans agreed that Mr Irving had a very wide knowledge of the source material for the Third Reich and had discovered many new documents, but said his problem was "what you do with them when you interpret them and write them up". He added that Mr Irving's published writings and speeches contained numerous statements which he regarded as "anti-Semitic" - to the extent that he blamed the Jews for the Holocaust. Professor Evans dismissed the theory that there was a "worldwide Jewish conspiracy" to suppress Mr Irving's works as "a fantastic belief which has no grounds in fact". Mr Irving said that he was "scrupulously fair" in everything he did in public life - "the total opposite of being unscrupulous and manipulative and deceptive as you say in your report". Mr Irving, who is representing himself, is claiming damages over Ms Lipstadt 's 1994 book, Denying the Holocaust: The Growing Assault on Truth and Memory, which he says has generated "waves of hatred" against him. The hearing was adjourned until Monday. Caption: David Irving: Describes himself as extremely fair p == EVENING STANDARD, UK http://www.thisislondon.com/ AUSCHWITZ COMES TO COURT NO 73 02/11/2000 Copyright (C) 2000 Evening Standard; Source: World Reporter (TM) Hitler, the Holocaust and the minutiae of mass murder are being re-examined daily in a libel action brought by controversial historian David Irving. CAL McCRYSTAL reports In the visitors' book at Auschwitz, the Jewish Nazi-hunter Simon Wiesenthal has written: 'Information ist Verteidigung' - 'Information is defence'. According to his biographer Hella Pick, what he meant was that 'historical truth becomes an essential deterrent to the practice of evil'. Wiesenthal's words might aptly be chalked on the door of Court No 73 in the Royal Courts of Justice, where, for the past four weeks, Auschwitz and other Holocaust horrors have been revisited daily and where arguments about their malevolent originators and expositions as to their motives fume and flare discordantly. Yet, for many of us squeezed into the court, there are times when the sheer volume of information being exchanged seems almost a barrier to historical truth, as the Hitler historian David Irving pursues his libel action against American academic Deborah Lipstadt and Penguin Books. Having claimed that Irving is 'a liar and falsifier of history', they deny libel and plead justification. To settle the argument - without the help of jurors, it being thought the intricacies would daunt them - Mr Justice Gray is obliged to graze upon the communal pastures of recorded history and scraps of paper that are capable of misleading as well as informing. He will look out for ideological partisanship as much as for scientific errancy, and be reminded from time to time that the continued influence of the past upon the present is inexorably manifested in all our destinies. Irving, asserts Richard Rampton QC, for the defendants, has made statements deliberately 'designed to feed the virulent anti-Semitism still alive and kicking throughout the world'. The judge may give thought to Heinrich von Treitschke's advice: 'The historian must candidly explain the moral significance of the confused facts with which he is dealing, and this is why the compelling force of a historical work subsists ever in the strong personality of the narrator.' And he will have to decide whether David Irving, 62, has been stigmatised as a mere contrarian, or may be regarded as a panegyrist of Adolf Hitler. So stupefying is the information overload that nerves occasionally fray, and the usually unflappable judge vents his distress. 'Really, this is most irritating,' he exclaims on failing to locate a document concerning an order to liquidate Jews. And later: 'I am still trying to find this ...' Later still: 'I have tracked down the document, and there appear to be two versions in German. It is not for me to plough through these with my inadequate German. What I'm looking for is an English translation, which I think is not an unreasonable request for a document that is quite important.' Rampton gazes pinkly around him and jiggles his knee. David Irving, conducting his own case, drops his spectacles on the floor. The courtroom lapses into a three-minute reverie. 'Well,' says the judge, breaking the silence and startling his interlocutors. 'Am I going to be supplied with it or not?' Irving: 'My lord, I will prepare a translation of that document overnight.' Stacked in teak bookshelves around the walls are nearly 400 files of information. Teak tables groan beneath the weight of further boxes, books and laptops. A large number of Jews are in the public gallery - a veritable yarmulka archipelago in a teak sea - listening intently to every word, many of them Holocaust information repositories in their own right. This trial is stuffed with the minutiae of mass murder: Zyklon B pellets, racism, the operations of the Einsatzgruppe, the Nazi military mission in the Ukraine and Crimea, and the geography of a war which for many of us still seems recent, even though time has already consigned it to the last century. Irving insists he never has claimed that the Holocaust did not occur, but he questions the number of Jewish dead (usually estimated at six million) and the manner of their destruction. He has suggested that British intelligence spread the 'propaganda story' about Germans systematically using gas chambers to kill millions of Jews and other 'undesirables'. And he claims to be a victim of a 'global conspiracy', led by Jews, of which Professor Lipstadt is, he says, a major part. It is a case that should interest sociologists as much as it does historians. One finds traces of the mind-set of Middle England as well as Mittel Europe where, to this day, xenophobia determines caste and fuels politics. During the giving of evidence and in cross-examination, I pick up little sighs and gasps from the gallery and ominous pleasantries from the well of the court as adversaries rake over the smouldering past for what they call the 'smoking gun' - an order signed by Adolf Hitler himself for the liquidation of the Jews. Since this has failed to turn up - and seems unlikely to do so - the dispute revolves around 'circumstantial evidence', 'inference', 'context', 'atmosphere', Hitler's speeches, Himmler's diary, Heydrich's communications, Eichmann's testimony, Britain's intercepts, and so on. Grotesqueries are matched by bizarreries. The words 'deny' and 'denier' are uttered often. Irving says he intends to show that 'far from being a Holocaust denier', he had repeatedly drawn attention to major aspects of the Holocaust. Early in the proceedings, a line from Goethe spins into mind: Ich bin der Geist, der stets verneint - 'I am the spirit that ever denies' - as Mephistopheles declares when Faust demands his name. 'The word 'denier' is particularly evil,' Irving says, 'because no person in full command of his mental faculties, and 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 ... 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 wife-beater or a paedophile ... It is a verbal Yellow Star.' One morning Irving draws the judge's attention to a report that the German government has asked for his extradition over a statement years ago that the Auschwitz gas chambers were a fake. 'I mention this in case this end of the bench should suddenly be empty.' Judicial eyebrows lift almost imperceptibly as the historian says he has written to Jack Straw, warning him that if the Home Office tried to serve a warrant on him he would prosecute the Home Office for assault. At one point, Irving calls an American witness, Kevin MacDonald, to give evidence on his behalf. MacDonald, professor of psychology at California State University and an author of books on Judaism and anti-Semitism, is asked by Irving: 'Do you consider me to be an anti-Semite?' MacDonald: 'I do not consider you to be an anti-Semite. I have had quite a few discussions with you and you almost never mentioned Jews, never in the general negative way.' ext day, however, Rampton questions Irving on his 'utterances both in public and private on the subject of Jews, blacks, etcetera', and reads out a ditty which he says Irving sang to his nine-month-old daughter while walking past mixed-race children in 1994. The QC reads out the lines, extracted from the historian's diary: 'I am a baby Aryan, ot Jewish or sectarian. I have no plans to marry an Ape or Rastafarian.' Irving says he doesn't think it anti-Semitic or racist. Rampton: 'The poor little child is being taught a racist ditty by her perverted racist father?' Irving: 'I am not a racist.' Disclosure of the 'baby Aryan' ditty has an unexpected consequence. Four days later, an emotional Irving complains to Mr Justice Gray that sections of the media have declared open season on him. 'The principal of the school attended by my little girl - the ballet school ...' He pauses, lowers his head, does not finish the sentence. He refers to 'waves of hostility affecting this court'. The judge regards him sympathetically. 'As long as you can carry on ... The newspapers don't have the last word.' o one is likely to have the last word. As another American academic, Professor Christopher Browning, observes under Irving's questioning: 'There is no last chapter.' Irving has a dry sense of humour, which sometimes serves him well and sometimes not. In one exchange over the name of a German adjutant on a document, Browning says: 'I am not as familiar as you are with the initials of adjutants. I defer to you on the initials ...' Irving throws an amused glance at the defence table. 'Professor, I don't think Mr Rampton would wish you to defer to me on anything.' A ripple of laughter runs through the gallery. But Irving's wit assumes a blunter edge in a 1992 speech of which Rampton reminds him. In this, Irving declared: 'For the time being, 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 ... ' It was, Irving explains, the kind of speech a stand-up comic might give at the end of Brighton pier. In court, however, it has lost its hilarity. Similarly, one feels a chill in court as Rampton recalls a Canadian audience in Calgary laughing when Irving told them in 1991 that 'more people died on the back seat of Edward Kennedy's car at Chappaquiddick than ever died in a gas chamber in Auschwitz', and that he had referred to 'Auschwitz survivors, survivors of the Holocaust and other liars' as 'A-S-S-H-O-L-S'. To this the supplicant historian replies: 'I have the utmost sympathy for people who genuinely suffered the torments and horrors of Auschwitz and the other camps - But spurious survivors who tried to cash in and say they too were there - I have the greatest contempt for these people trying to climb on the Holocaust bandwagon.' Irving clearly is endowed with extraordinary critical insight. His contentious book, Hitler's War, shows a literary style that is often vivid, attractive and lucid. But even those who decline to demonise him say he lacks the power of an elementally great and continually growing individuality. In interviews he has described himself as 'stubborn'. He seems able to live with much of the obloquy surrounding him as a dissentient chronicler. In this, curiously enough, his experience resembles that of Simon Wiesenthal who, according to his biographer, was to his detractors 'an egomaniac who has lost sight of honesty and straightforward action', and whose writings had been accepted only with great reluctance by academics as 'major contributions to Holocaust literature'. However, Wiesenthal's reputation was more than buoyed up by admirers, among them an American ambassador to Austria who defined the Nazi-hunter as 'raw goodness crushing raw evil'. From the tone of some of the High Court exchanges, it is clear that the defence sees itself as embarked on defining Irving as quite the reverse. === BBC NEWS 02.10.00 Irving 'unworthy of being called historian' David Irving: Work regarded as 'anti-semitic' http://news2.thls.bbc.co.uk/hi/english/uk/newsid%5F638000/638285.stm Author David Irving is not worthy of the title "historian", a leading academic has told the High Court. Richard Evans, professor of modern history at Cambridge University, told the libel trial brought by the writer that he was not prepared for the "sheer depth of duplicity" he encountered in Mr Irving's analysis of Holocaust-related historical sources. Mr Irving, 62, the author of Hitler's War and Goebbels: Mastermind of the Third Reich, is seeking damages against academic Deborah Lipstadt and Penguin Books, over a claim that he is a "Holocaust denier". Professor Evans made his comments after being called as an expert for the defence. The academic has produced a 740-page report on Mr Irving's historical method, which he insisted was objective as he had no personal feelings towards the author. He said he had been "shocked" at what he found, adding that Mr Irving "has fallen so far short of the standards of scholarship customary among historians that he doesn't deserve to be called a historian at all". 'Brutal' assessment But his comments were challenged by Mr Irving, who said that Professor Evans' "sweeping and rather brutal" assessment of his career stemmed from personal animosity. "I think you dislike what I write and stand for and what you perceive my views to be," he said. Mr Irving said that he was "scrupulously fair " in everything he did in public life - "the total opposite of being unscrupulous and manipulative and deceptive as you say in your report". Professor Evans said that he acknowledged Mr Irving's wide knowledge of source material relating to the Third Reich, but questioned his interpretation. He said the author's published writings and speeches contained numerous statements which he regarded as "anti-Semitic" to the extent of blaming the Jews for the Holocaust. His report also concluded that Mr Irving relied on the fact his audience lacked "either the time or the expertise" to check his sources for the "distortions and manipulations" he allegedly perpetuated. Professor Evans said he accepted that people were entitled to challenge the "general consensus" of history, but asserted that there was a duty to conform to academic standards when evaluating evidence. Mr Irving, who is representing himself, refutes the defendants' claims that he was a liar and that he falsified history. The hearing, expected to last several months, was adjourned until Monday. == SKEPTIC MAGAZINE 02.11.00 http://www.skeptic.com/ Giving the Devil His Due The Holocaust Denial Trial Tests the Limits of Free Speech By Michael Shermer This week (17 January 2000) begins what could be one of the most important trials ever in the ongoing debate about the limits of free speech. British author David Irving is suing American author Deborah Lipstadt for libel. Specifically, Irving is suing Lipstadt for comments about him and his work in a book she wrote on Holocaust denial. As an Englishman Irving is taking advantage of British libel law that puts the burden on authors to prove that their statements are not libelous. The stakes are made even higher because in England loser pays, including all court and legal costs for both parties. Irving claims, among other things, that Lipstadt has damaged his reputation and thus attenuated his opportunities as an independent scholar to obtain book contracts and other income-generating activities such as lectures. Irving told me and others at a conference sponsored by the Institute for Historical Review--a group who calls themselves "Holocaust revisionists"--that Lipstadt is part of a worldwide conspiracy of censorship to silence him. The conspiracy is being orchestrated, Irving says, by "the traditional enemy"--code phrase for "the Jews." Irving's claims that only one million Jews died in the war, that gas chambers and crematoria were not used for mass extermination, and that the Nazis never intended to exterminate European Jewry, are easily refuted. Indeed, I do so in my forthcoming book Denying History (co-authored with Alex Grobman), in which we address all of their challenges as well as demonstrate that these "revisionists" are really "deniers," because they deny these three key components that are generally accepted as defining the Holocaust. But the real controversy in this trial, for my money, is whether Irving and his ilk should be allowed to proffer their views without restraint. In America, the First Amendment protects the right of all citizens to question the existence of anything they like, including the theory of evolution, the death of Elvis, and even the Apollo moon landing. No matter how much one may dislike someone else's opinion--even if it is something as shocking as denying that the Holocaust happened--it is protected by the First Amendment. In fact, the First Amendment was written to protect the speech of the very people we dislike the most. In most countries of the world, however, this is not the case. In Canada there are "anti-hate" statutes and laws against spreading "false news" that have been applied to Holocaust deniers. In Austria it is a crime if a person "denies, grossly trivializes, approves or seeks to justify the national socialist genocide or other national socialist crimes against humanity." In France it is illegal to challenge the existence of the "crimes against humanity" as they were defined by the Military Tribunal at Nuremberg. In Germany, where the legal precedence began, the Auschwitzluge, or "Auschwitz-Lie" Law, makes it a crime to "defame the memory of the dead." This was the result of a judgment by the Federal German Supreme Court on September 18, 1979, when a student whose Jewish grandfather was killed in Auschwitz sued for an injunction against an individual who had posted signs on the fence of his house proclaiming that the Holocaust was a "Zionist swindle." The Supreme Court ruled in favor of the plaintiff: "In calling the racist murders by the Nazis an invention, the statements complained of deny the Jews the inhuman fate which they have suffered on account of their origin. This means an attack on the personality of the people who have been singled out by the anti-Jewish persecutions in the Third Reich. Whoever tried to deny the truth of past events, denies to every Jew the respect to which he is entitled." Switzerland, Belgium, Israel, Italy, New Zealand, Sweden, and Australia have similar laws and statutes on the books. These laws are all ambiguous enough to allow courts to interpret various Holocaust deniers' activities as illegal. Irving, for example, has been banned from numerous countries around the world. And while he cannot be legally prohibited from speaking in America, he can be so loudly shouted down that he is, essentially, banned. On Friday, February 3, 1995, for example, Irving was invited by the Berkeley Coalition for Free Speech to lecture at the University of California. The university allowed it but the students did not. More than 300 protesters surrounded Latimer Hall to prevent Irving, and 113 ticket holders, to enter the campus building. The police were unable to control the crowd, fistfights broke out, and Irving was forced to leave before he could speak. There are three reasons why this reaction was practically and morally problematic: 1. The Holocaust deniers have used this event as a rallying point for their claim that the establishment is censoring the truth. The last thing they want is to be ignored or debunked. 2. Lies and falsehoods are most effectively exposed when illuminated by the light of truth. Ignore or debunk David Irving, but don't censor him. 3. Let us pretend for a moment that the majority of people deny the Holocaust and that they are in positions of power. If a mechanism or precedence for censorship exists, then the believer in the Holocaust may now be censored. Would we tolerate this? Of course not. The human mind, no matter what ideas it may generate, must never be quashed. Sir Thomas More said it best in his exchange with William Roper in Robert Bolt's play A Man for All Seasons: Roper: So now you'd give the Devil benefit of law. More: Yes. What would you do? Cut a great road through the law to get after the Devil? Roper: I'd cut down every law in England to do that. More: Oh? And when the law was down--and the Devil turned round on you--where would you hide? Yes, I'd give the Devil benefit of law, for my own safety's sake. ###
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