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David Irving vs. Deborah Lipstadt Libel Trial in London England
January 11--January 17, 2000
Dates and sources are listed at the end of each respective report
Day One
David Irving, the controversial, right-wing historian, was branded a "falsifier of history and a liar" before a High Court judge yesterday (Jan. 11) for questioning the massacre of six million Jews by the Nazis....The accusations were made by Richard Rampton...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...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...These defendants have done very real damage to my professional existence...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, and refusing to accept new commissions..."
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 the past century."
Source: Times of London, Jan. 12, 2000
Day Two
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.
Source: Times of London, Jan. 13, 2000
Germans Want Irving to Face Incitement Trial
The German Government has requested the extradition of the Hitler historian David Irving on charges of alleged racial incitement.
The move was disclosed yesterday by Mr Irving, 62, at the High Court on the third day of his libel action over what he claims is an international conspiracy to ruin his reputation as an historian. If extradited and found guilty, he could be jailed for three years.
The request to the Home Office concerns a lecture he gave in Weinheim, near Stuttgart, at the invitation of the right-wing NPD, at which he allegedly challenged Hitler's blame for the Second World War and maintained that the Holocaust had not happened.
After the lecture, made nearly ten years ago, the NPD chairman Günter Deckert was jailed, but a trial of Mr Irving was cancelled when he failed to appear. A subsequent attempt to summon him via the German Embassy failed after Mr Irving left for the United States.
Mr Irving revealed the extradition request to Mr Justice Gray as an example of the "hatred" and problems he faced because of "repugnant allegations" against him. He said that the court could find "his end of the bench empty" one day if extradition proceedings interrupted his libel action. The judge, sitting without a jury, said that he would not intervene.[*] Mr Irving said that he believed disclosure in the German press 24 hours earlier of the extradition proceedings was "not just coincidence". The paper suggested it would have to be dealt with quickly before the issue "ran out of time". In Germany it is illegal to question the Holocaust.
Outside court, Mr Irving said: "I have written to the Home Secretary warning him that if they tried to serve the warrant on me I will prosecute the Home Office for assault."
Of the Weinheim meeting, he said: "I was talking about history and somebody asked me questions. Police were there and made a record of what I said." In 1992, he said, he had been fined £15,000 for views he aired at a subsequent meeting in Munich, and was banned from Germany.
Mr Irving is suing Deborah Lipstadt, the American historian, and Penguin Books, which published her Denying the Holocaust. In the book she claimed that he was a "Hitler partisan" who had twisted history by denying the Holocaust occurred.
Mr Irving says that he has never claimed that the Holocaust did not take place. He does, however, question the number of Jewish dead and denies there was a systematic extermination of Jews in concentration camp gas chambers.
Yesterday he rejected an accusation that he had rewritten history by portraying Hitler as a "merciful and benign" dictator who wanted to save the Jews, and allegations that he had deliberately mistranslated or suppressed documentary evidence. The case continues on Monday.
As he left court Mr Irving was approached by a woman who said that her grandparents had died at Auschwitz in gas ovens - said by Mr Irving to have been built after the war by the Poles. He told her: "You may be pleased to know that they almost certainly died of typhus, as did Anne Frank."
A German court confirmed last night that the British Government was formally asked to help in extraditing Mr Irving five months ago on charges of incitement to racial unrest after a speech in 1990 to a far-Right rally of the National Party of Germany on the Holocaust.
Source: Times of London, January 14, 2000
Neo-Nazi accused of 'racial hatred' goes on the run
Germany has issued an international arrest warrant for a Holocaust revisionist who fled to Britain to escape a prison sentence for inciting racial hatred. Police here have joined the hunt for Germar Rudolf, who has been on the run from his home in Stuttgart since 1995. If he is arrested on British soil, he faces extradition or deportation.
One source close to the case said: "Concern about this man's presence in Britain has been raised at the very highest level. The Home Secretary is likely to want to do all he can to help the Germans bring this man to justice."
The warrant was issued three months after Rudolf was traced to the south coast by The Telegraph. He has not been seen at his home for some time and police have not ruled out the possibility that he may have left the country.
An internet site which he runs from a PO box address in Hastings was still being updated last week. It carried the message: "Germar Rudolf is alive and still free." The site also carries an appeal for funds and volunteers to help with the revisionist cause.
Rudolf, a former German air force pilot, was sentenced to 14 months in prison in 1995 for three counts of inciting racial hatred. He was found guilty of breaching Germany's Holocaust denial legislation after he produced a study claiming that Jews did not die in gas chambers at Auschwitz.
Rudolf escaped to Spain were he stayed with a former Nazi general who had been a close friend of Adolf Hitler. But in 1996, fearing that the German authorities were catching up with him, he moved to England.
David Irving, the Right-wing historian who is currently involved in a High Court libel action against Prof Deborah Lipstadt, one of his fiercest critics, was one of the first people Rudolf contacted when he arrived in Britain and both men have been supportive of each other.
Source: Sunday Telegraph, January 16, 2000
Putting the Holocaust on Trial
It is a libel case with stakes far higher than mere reputation or monetary damages. The Holocaust itself is on trial.
In a packed courtroom in the Royal Courts of Justice, as author David Irving seeks to convince a judge that he has been libeled by another writer, the evidence will center on whether some of the most horrible events of modern history actually happened.
The case pits Irving, 62, the controversial British author of such books as "Hitler's War" and a biography of Nazi propagandist Joseph Goebbels, against Deborah Lipstadt, a professor in Jewish studies at Emory University in Atlanta.
Her book, "Denying the Holocaust: The Growing Assault on Truth and Memory," slams Irving as a twister of facts and a dangerous spokesman for those who deny that the Holocaust occurred.
The affair is attracting intense media interest in Britain, the U.S. and Israel as one of the most important court cases in years about the Holocaust. Robert Rozett of Yad Vashem, the Holocaust memorial in Jerusalem, said: "It's important for people to be aware that people like David Irving are out there. It's a trend that's disturbing enough that we have to pay attention to it."
Irving, Rozett said, is "not a maverick and not alone," but is the "darling" of a larger movement led by the Institute of Holocaust Review, a Los Angeles-based center of the Holocaust denial movement.
The Irving case also has sparked debate about whether there are some areas of Holocaust history about which reputable historians disagree, and whether some revisionist approaches to the period are legitimate.
Christopher Hitchens, who writes about politics for U.S. publications, argued in a London paper that "meticulous separation of fact and record, not just from propaganda but also from sentimental exploitation, will be a clarifying and reaffirming thing."
"In the history of the Holocaust, there are disagreements on the levels of interpretation and on the precise facts at times," Rozett said. But he said Irving's claims "are really beyond the pale" and are refuted by stacks of evidence and documentation.
The genesis of the suit against Lipstadt and her British publisher, Penguin Books, was a 1996 decision by St. Martin's Press in New York to kill publication of Irving's "Goebbels: Mastermind of the Third Reich." The book argued that Goebbels, not Adolf Hitler, was responsible for the murders of Jews during World War II.
St. Martin's chairman Thomas McCormack said at the time that he hated the book: "It seemed to me the subtext was the ugly one that Jews brought it on themselves."
The trial, which is expected to last three months and involve many expert witnesses, is taking place before Justice Charles Taylor [sic. Gray] &emdash a renowned former libel lawyer &emdash without a jury. Both sides agreed the case was too complex for a jury to digest.
Lipstadt [right] and Penguin are represented by Anthony Julius, Princess Diana's divorce lawyer and the author of a book exposing poet T.S. Eliot's anti-Semitism. Arguing their case in court is Richard Rampton, an eminent barrister who has been unflappable in his cross-examination.
The essence of Irving's argument -- made in his opening statement, as he is representing himself -- is that Lipstadt's book ruined his reputation and shriveled his income of $150,000 a year. Irving says he is now pinned with the label "Holocaust denier," which he calls "a verbal yellow star," &emdash a reference to the yellow Star of David that Jews were forced to wear by the Nazis.
As a result, Irving claims, publishers refuse to print his books -- even though he contends that privately, those same editors "invite me to lunch in expensive New York restaurants." He has been attacked in cafes, expelled from Canada and is now the subject of an extradition request over a lecture he gave 10 years ago in Germany, where it is illegal to question the Holocaust.
"Mr. Irving calls himself a historian," Rampton said in his opening remarks for the defense. "The truth is ... to put it bluntly, he is a liar." He said Irving is not only a denier of the Holocaust, but an apologist for the far right linked to neo-Nazi groups in the U.S., Germany and Britain.
As an example of Irving's extremism, Rampton quoted a 1991 speech in Calgary, Alberta, in which Irving said he saw no reason to be tasteful about Auschwitz, adding, "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."
Irving added, "There are so many Auschwitz survivors going around, in fact, the number increases as the years go past. ... 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-E-S."
Despite such language, Irving is not a stereotypical, wild-eyed hatemonger. A Germanophile since his teens -- he asked for Hitler's "Mein Kampf" when he won a book prize at school, a request vetoed by the headmaster -- he is fluent in German and a skilled reader of original historical sources.
"David Irving poses as a real historian and has all the accoutrements of a real historian," Rozett said. "He uses footnotes, documentation. He uses sources to make points that aren't true."
Irving's basic points are that while huge numbers of Jews -- he puts the figure at between 1 million and 4 million, rather than the widely accepted 6 million -- were killed by the Nazis, they were not the victims of a systematic liquidation.
He specifically rejects the existence of gas chambers at concentration camps such as Auschwitz and Dachau, saying the gas chambers tourists now see were built by American and Polish propagandists after the war. The Jews, along with Gypsies, Communists and other victims of the Nazis, were victims of shootings, disease and overwork in slave labor camps like Auschwitz, he says.
At the trial, he was approached outside court by a woman who said her grandparents were gassed at Auschwitz.
"You may be pleased to know that they almost certainly died of typhus, as did Anne Frank," he told her.
Irving denies he is an anti-Semite, insisting in court that he has had Jewish friends, but -- using phrases that are often anti-Semitic code words-- that he is the target of "an organized international endeavor" to destroy him.
Source: New York Daily News, January 16, 2000
Last battle of Hitler's historians
ARMAGEDDON in Courtroom 37? Some older people on the public benches hope for that. As David Irving begins his libel action against Penguin Books and Deborah Lipstadt, author of Denying the Holocaust, they sit there with faces stiffened by the memory of pain.
Some of them hope this trial will be a sort of Last Judgment, the breaking of the Seventh Seal to reward the righteous and drown the wicked, and flood the Earth with truth too blinding to deny.
But there is nothing apocalyptic about the old Queen's Bench Division, off the Strand in London. Last Tues day, it was just another libel case that began. The usher carefully writes out COURT FULL on a scrap of paper and hangs it on the door. The wind moans and wails in the double-glazing. The scholar with the appalling cough is barking to death on a diet of Strepsils; the ginger-haired lad who stenotypes the record glares at him without sympathy. And three upper-class Englishmen - a judge, a barrister and David Irving - are having a civilised conversation about the darkness at the end of the world.
Once, in a bout with Rampton over whether the Führer had ordered the extermination of the Jews, David Irving reminded him that no signed order had been found. That, said Rampton, was just negative evidence. Noisily, Irving retorted: 'I have to remind you of the basic principle of English law that a man is innocent until he is proved guilty: am I right?'
All the same, there are invisible last chances in the room. The first is about handing on truth. It is 55 years this month since Soviet troops entered what was left of Auschwitz: the Nazis had dynamited the gas chambers and the Russians now set fire to the typhus-infested huts. Those who saw what happened there and elsewhere, to Jews and to the other human categories redefined as vermin, are today few and near the end of their lives.
Idealists, like some of those vigilant old people on the public benches, dream that this trial will culminate in a mighty rite of transmission. It will lay out one last time the evidence about what was done in the Holocaust (to how many, by whom, in what manner and why). The young generations will lose the voice of the witnesses. But they will be armed instead with a judgment.
The other last chance, more convincing, is Irving's. For something like 40 years, this strange figure - historian or chronicler or propagandist - has laboured at a single gigantic project which could be called (begging some questions) the rehabilitation of Adolf Hitler. Book after book, lecture after lecture and libel action after libel action, Irving has slogged on with the world's most unpopular historical enterprise. His skill at sniffing out unknown Third Reich documents is a legend. But the way he chooses to interpret them has so far condemned him to failure.
This trial may be his last throw, although he has a similar action pending against this paper. Last week in Court 37, Irving hurled himself at those he regards as his real foes. In the person of Professor Deborah Lipstadt, he is trying to defeat a new generation of Jewish-American intellectuals, who have spread their own version of 'Holocaust Studies' and defined 'Holocaust Denial' as an offence - in some places, as a crime.
The declared purpose of Irving's libel suit is to punish them for calling him a 'Holocaust Denier', and thereby allegedly wrecking his career. Irving accepts that an enormous slaughter of European Jews took place. What he disputes is its scale, circumstances and authorship. He will bring witnesses to 'prove' the Auschwitz gas chambers were mostly mythical. He refuses to accept the killing as 'systematic'. And he insists Hitler didn't know and wouldn't have approved.
But if Irving were to win this case, the impact would be far greater than damages. At the last possible moment, his reputation as a credible historian would be salvaged. His version of Hitler and the Holocaust would be given a degree of plausibility.
A last chance for David Irving in Court 37 - that can be argued. But a last chance for truth and history? Watching last week, I remembered the saying that for establishing what really happened in history an English libel court is the worst place in the world.
That saying emerged, as far as I remember, from one of the most famous, spectacular and (for once) really important libel suits of the last century, the 'Cossacks Trial' of 1989 in which Lord Aldington sued Count Tolstoy. Tolstoy had blamed him for the handover of 70,000 anti-Soviet Russian soldiers to Stalin's vengeance at the end of the last war.
Aldington won: the jury awarded him £1.5 million damages. But in the process the trial churned the business of historical inquiry into a sort of Passchendaele of fear and confusion. The jury found that Aldington was not to blame but the trial actually made it far harder to find out who was really responsible for the only serious war crime committed by the British Army in World War II.
The judge lopes in with a sort of athletic impatience, and as we rise I recognise in Mr Justice Gray that Charles Gray QC who was Aldington's barrister 11 years ago. And here - ironic, relentless - comes Richard Rampton QC, counsel for Lipstadt and Penguin Books. He fits his wig on, and reveals himself as the man who was Count Tolstoy's advocate and Charles Gray's duelling opponent.
Well, there. Both men did their best for their clients, and neither is to blame for the way that trial reduced history to toxic sludge. But the tale of the Jewish Holocaust, the worst deliberate act in modern European history, is like the Cossack tragedy in two ways: it is neither entirely simple nor entirely known.
There are areas piled high with documentation - passenger lists, death lists, crematorium blueprints. But there are also huge gaps. How many died? We are less certain about that than 20 years ago. Did Hitler know, did he order it? I am certain he did. But the signed directive, even the secondary letter or phone note confirming this, has never been found. What chance is there that this trial in London will clear up mysteries and bring clarity rather than thicken the fog?
It's unfair to say an English libel trial is not about truth. It has something to do with proof, after all. But above all it is about people. It is about the personalities of libel litigants, the way they can be made to seem liars and cheats or selfless victims, their breaking-strain under interrogation, their motives for suing. This trial is unusual. Given the wall-stacks of documents, largely in German, the parties agreed that a jury would be overwhelmed, So Mr Justice Gray will decide verdict, costs and any damages on his own, without even a pair of lay judges or assessors to help him.
And David Irving has no lawyer. He is conducting his own case. This is impressive, but it means the judge has to make allowances for any amateurism and make sure Irving knows his rights. As for Lipstadt, she has decided not to testify. She sits quietly in the front row, busy with her laptop, looking unhappy.
All week, Irving has been defending his reputation, while Richard Rampton seeks to prove he is a liar and distorter. Irving, at bay, hunches giant blue-suited shoulders around his ears, his eyes glittering like a badger's. Fragments of history are snatched out of context, dried, treated and used as firelighters to scorch an adversary.
We spend hours on the timing of a scribbled Himmler phone-note about how a transport of Berlin Jews should be treated in Riga, on a bugged conversation between captured SS men in London about whether somebody said he had an order from Hitler to kill Latvian Jews, on the meanings of words such as Vernichtung (destruction) or Judentum (Jewry).
The civilised voices fence on. But they drop names too, and the shadows of human beings flit across Court 37: SS monsters from the pit such as Odilo Globocnik and Dieter Wisliceny. Or the unnamed human reality of that Judentransport steaming from Berlin towards death in Riga (whose grandfathers, whose maiden aunts?).
Once, in a bout with Rampton over whether the Führer had ordered the extermination of the Jews, David Irving reminded him that no signed order had been found. That, said Rampton, was just negative evidence. Noisily, Irving retorted: 'I have to remind you of the basic principle of English law that a man is innocent until he is proved guilty: am I right?'
And at that second there was a tiny stillness in Court 37. We were talking about Adolf Hitler.
Source: The Observer, January 16, 2000
DAY THREE
Nazis sent Jews to new life, says Irving
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 (Jan. 17).
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".
Source: Times of London, Jan. 18, 2000
Further coverage: January 18 -19, 2000
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