David Irving

Telling Lies About Hitler: the Holocaust, History and the David Irving Trial

By Richard Evans

Verso, 2002

326 pages, $37 (pb)

REVIEW BY PHIL SHANNON

http://www.greenleft.org.au/node/26318

If a self-styled "geographic revisionist" should ever step up to a witness box to sue the Royal Geographical Society for libel against flat-Earthers, my money is on the court stenographer narrowly beating the judge in exclaiming: "It's been a long day. We're tired. Go home. Case dismissed!"

Yet, when the political equivalent of a flat-Earther — "Holocaust denier" David Irving — did exactly the same in 1996, bringing a libel suit against Professor Deborah Lipstadt and Penguin Books, the result was years of work and millions of dollars spent by the defence team. The three-month trial took place in the London High Court in 2000.

In her 1994 book, Denying the Holocaust, Lipstadt had called Irving an anti-Semite, a neo-fascist and a Holocaust denier (someone who denies that the Nazi regime in Germany planned and carried out the murder of 6 million Jews in World War II). Had Irving succeeded in his case, it would have been a blow to the practice and meaning of history and the right to free speech. It would also have been a victory for the poisonous ideology of fascism and the venomous politics of racism and anti-Semitism.

Richard Evans, professor of modern history at Cambridge University, was one of the expert witnesses called by the defence to examine the writings of Irving, a British writer of 30 books on WWII since 1962. Evans is an expert in the interpretation of Nazi documents and was well-placed to see what Irving was up to.

With painstaking forensic patience, Evans trawled through Irving's work — footnote by footnote, reference by reference, quote by quote — to check Irving's fealty to the documentary record. What Evans found confirmed Lipstadt's claim that Irving was a falsifier of history.

Evans showed that Irving deliberately manipulated and distorted documents by adding words, changing dates and misconstruing words. Irving suppressed evidence that ran counter to his interpretations, wilfully mistranslated documents, consciously used unreliable or discredited testimony when it suited his purpose and misrepresented testimony when it didn't. He falsified historical statistics, attributed false conclusions to reliable sources and used evidence which he knew to be unreliable or forged.

Irving was not just a sloppy historian. His errors were deliberate distortions, consciously committed "in order to minimise and trivialise the violence and destruction visited by the Nazis upon the Jewish community and above all to dissociate Hitler from these events", Evans writes. Irving was producing propaganda, not history.

For example, in arguing that Hitler was "the biggest friend the Jews had in the Third Reich", Irving absolves Hitler from responsibility for reichkristallnacht (the "Reich night of broken glass") in Berlin in November 1938, when Nazi brownshirts torched synagogues, smashed windows, vandalised Jewish-owned shops and homes, and beat up and killed their owners. Irving's uncritical reliance on untrustworthy witnesses (post-war testimony of loyal followers of Hitler who were trying to exonerate Hitler and themselves) was matched by his suppression or distortion of documentary evidence such as Goebbels' diaries.

Like all Holocaust deniers, Irving drastically minimises the number of Jews murdered and excuses Nazi policy, arguing that only a few hundred thousand died and these were either the victims of spontaneous civilian killings (especially in Eastern Europe) or of disease. For Irving, millions of Jews were not murdered in extermination camp gas chambers (which "did not exist") or by mass shooting by the Einsatzgruppen (SS task forces which followed the German Army into occupied territory in the east). In the world of Holocaust denial, a systematic and thoroughly documented genocide becomes the "Big Lie".

As a control study, to see whether Irving can be considered a basically sound military historian who just runs off the rails with Holocaust denial, Evans scrutinised the 1962 book which made Irving's name, The Destruction of Dresden, about the Allied bombing of Dresden in February 1945. All the documentary evidence has converged on a figure of 25,000 civilians slaughtered in the massive firestorm bombing but this rose as high as 250,000 in Irving's re-telling based on one document: "a carbon copy of a typed copy of a typed copy of a handwritten transcript of an extract from an unknown document".

It which turned out to be a piece of Nazi propaganda from Goebbels' propaganda ministry produced by adding an extra zero at the end of a figure of 20,204 dead from an authentic document. Irving was aware of, and ran with, this blatant forgery for 20 years.

Irving deceptively used hearsay, third-hand reports and unauthenticated copies of forged documents to make the Dresden bombing equivalent to his estimates of the number of Jews who were killed (from disease only) in Auschwitz, thus minimising the Holocaust. As Evans shows, Irving has been running a smoke and mirrors show from the very beginning.

Irving is the most dangerous of Holocaust deniers. He is no skin-head but a pseudo-academic writer who buttresses his work with extensive citations, footnotes and references to archival sources to give his views "the appearance of scholarly solidity which seems at first glance to conform to the normal canons of historical scholarship". Irving's conspicuous display of "research" is complemented by his "extravagant self-promotion as a discoverer of new historical material". As Evans shows, however, Irving's work is "a house of cards, a vast apparatus of deception and deceit". He is a fraud, albeit a sophisticated one.

The judge agreed with Evans and the defence, and threw out Irving's libel suit. Evans was, however, alarmed at the number of media commentators, and some historians, who managed to misconstrue the point of the trial. Irving tried to portray the legal scrum as an attempt to censor him, and Evans had to pinch himself at times to recall "that it was Irving who had launched the court case; Irving who was attempting to silence his critics; Irving who wanted a book withdrawn from circulation and pulped, its author and publisher ordered to pay him damages and costs, and undertakings given that the criticisms they made of his work should never be repeated".

Those who fell for Irving's ploy saw the court decision as a blow against free speech. It was nothing of the kind. An Irving victory would have left him free to spout his vile propaganda whilst stopping his critics from rebutting it. Irving lost his libel suit, not his freedom of speech. Lipstadt and other genuine historians retained theirs.

Nevertheless, in the Daily Telegraph, one right-wing journalist full of anti-socialist spleen managed to champion Irving as a victim of censorship whilst bemoaning the recognition bestowed on the Marxist historian, EJ Hobsbawm. This missed, by a wide margin, the fact that Irving lost the court case because he deliberately falsified the historical record whilst Hobsbawm, as with other real historians, never has.

Selection and interpretation of historical evidence are part of the tool-kit of genuine historians, Marxist or otherwise. Marxist historians simply make the best sense of historical facts by analysing them in terms of class interests rather than "national" interests, and in terms of social forces and material interests rather than diplomacy or the rhetoric of "great men". Marxists write radically different history but they do not lie. Irving does.

Irving was exposed in court as a neo-Nazi propagandist and liar masquerading as a historian. Irving's court defeat was a victory for history and historians. It was a victory for the 6 million Jewish victims of fascism whose murder is still a reminder of the evils of racism and anti-Semitism, especially when employed by the fascist attack dogs of capitalism like David Irving.