"Appreciating the Triumph of Truth"

In the November 3 issue of Harvard Law School's The Record, Amos Jones cites Prof. Lipstadt, Simon Wiesenthal and Rosa Parks as examples of people who have made "bold enemies on their righteous missions to reconcile the human family". Here are some excerpts:

Amos's Sermon: Appreciating the Triumph of Truth

By Amos Jones

BERLIN, October 29, 2005 - It all started with a lie. The annexation of Austria. The invasion of Poland. The foray into Russia. The genocide of six million Jews and elimination of six million others, and the abuse of millions more who survived long enough for the Allies' liberation of the concentration camps and the countries occupied by Adolph Hitler's Germany sixty years ago this year. This is the city from which the villains of the Third Reich ruled. Fifty million people died in World War II, and it all happened because of the lie that is racism.

[...]

The demise of fact

Before shuttling to Berlin on the cheap for three days during our annual fly-out week, I attended a lecture across campus titled "The Demise of Fact in Political Discussion." Delivered on Tuesday by the highly regarded communications expert Kathleen Hall Jamieson of the University of Pennsylvania and sponsored by the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, it presented her argument that today's political partisans are challenging what once would have been considered fact, molding their readings of fact to political goals and preventing real deliberation from taking place. [...]

Jamieson lamented adherence to facts "as convenient to ideology" and questioned the media's "split-the-difference relativism," which lazily reports as though certain facts are disputed simply because one side says that they are.

[...]

The costs of correcting

We can thank a number of dedicated journalists and historians for ensuring that the truth has come out. In many cases, it has taken them years to correct distorted records. Sometimes chroniclers of fact have found it necessary to confront and fight liars publicly. Exposing these most intransigent wretches rarely goes unpunished.

The cover of the current Emory Magazine features a triumphant Deborah Lipstadt, that Southern university's Dorot Professor of Modern Jewish History and Holocaust Studies, who in February released "History on Trial: My Day in Court with David Irving." In this book, she recounts the landmark libel trial in the United Kingdom that resulted five years ago in her being cleared of charges brought by a famous Holocaust denier who claimed that she defamed him inasmuch as the Holocaust never occurred. The British legal system essentially required Professor Lipstadt, an unimpeachable authority on the Holocaust, to prove in court that the Holocaust happened. The trial was five years ago. She won.

A recent obituary in The Economist pays tribute to Simon Wiesenthal, a famed Nazi hunter who died on September 20 at the age of 96. The article began: "One of the stranger conversations in Simon Wiesenthal's life occurred in September 1944. He was being taken by SS guards, in his faded striped uniform, away from the advancing Russians. Somewhere in the middle of Poland, he and an SS corporal scavenged together for potatoes. What, the corporal asked him mockingly, would he tell someone in America about the death camps? Mr. Wiesenthal said he would tell the truth. 'They wouldn't believe you,' the corporal replied." We know the rest of the story. [...] Wiesenthal's concurrent pursuit was to remind the world about the dangers of Nazism and to warn on the lecture circuit and in books about motivating trends in far-right politics. Insisting that world leaders had a duty to combat racism, he faced constant threats. In 1982 neo-Nazis blew up his house. Yet Wiesenthal pressed on, because, according to The Economist, "his survival of the Holocaust gave him a duty to seek justice for the millions who died."

On Monday, our own country paid tribute to Rosa Parks, the civil-rights pioneer who rejected white racism fifty years ago, December 1, when she refused to leave her seat for a white man on an Alabama bus. As E.R. Shipp of the New York Times wrote last week, black Americans had been arrested and killed for disobeying bus drivers. [...] As the cradle of the movement, nearly ten of Montgomery's black churches were firebombed the evening the court order forcing desegregation of the buses was announced. Once integrated, many buses were shot at terrorism-style. Within weeks of the integration, the Parks family had to leave Montgomery for good because of white people's violent retaliation against them. The family would settle in Detroit, where Rosa Parks died at the age of 92, on October 24.

Respecting honesty

It was predictable that Lipstadt, Wiesenthal, and Parks would make bold enemies on their righteous missions to reconcile the human family. History reveals that liars hate the truth and the people who tell it. Recall that prophets tend to be murdered. Yet ordinary people, the backbones of mass social movements, often understand the challenge and appreciate the response.

[...]

Bill Pretzer, a curator of political history at the Ford museum, revealed how student visitors today often are in disbelief that what happened on the bus could have occurred in America: "They say, 'What do you mean can't sit there? That's impossible,'" he told a reporter. "Which is why we need to keep looking at this. There is a danger that if we don't spark peoples' imaginations as to what in fact happened, we risk it one day happening again."

Lipstadt at Cleveland "Festival of Jewish Books and Authors" (Nov. 17)

Prof. Lipstadt will be one of the featured authors at the Jewish Community Center of Cleveland's seventh annual "book fest". Here is a review of History on Trial from the Cleveland Jewish News:

All you can read buffet

[…]

Debunking the lies of a Holocaust denier

By: MARILYN H. KARFELD Senior Staff Reporter

History on Trial: My Day in Court with David Irving. By Deborah E. Lipstadt. New York. HarperCollins Publishers. 2005. 346 pp. $25.95.

It seems hard to believe today that David Irving, whose name is almost automatically followed by the phrase Holocaust denier, would sue Emory University historian Deborah Lipstadt for libel for calling him just that.

But in 1993, when Lipstadt, a professor of Jewish studies, published her groundbreaking book Denying the Holocaust: The Growing Assault on Truth and Memory, Irving, a British citizen, was a World War II historian and Hitler biographer of some repute. Holocaust denial was still the province of fringe right-wing extremists, yet to emerge as a significant tenet of a global anti-Semitism movement.

In just a few paragraphs in her book, Lipstadt calls Irving one of the most dangerous proponents of Holocaust denial, who distorted and manipulated documents and historical evidence.

In his books and speeches and in the trial, held in London, Irving insisted that Hitler did not order the mass extermination of Jews and that he even tried to halt some of the killings. Among his many outrageous statements: The murder of six million Jews was a myth; most of the Jews who died in the Holocaust were the victims of typhus and unauthorized shootings by rogue soldiers at the front; and “more people died in the back seat of Edward Kennedy’s car at Chappaquiddick than ever died in a gas chamber at Auschwitz.”

Two years after the publication of her book on Holocaust denial, Irving sued Lipstadt and her British publisher Penguin UK for libel. He chose a British courtroom rather than an American one because the libel laws in Great Britain favor the person bringing the suit. The defendant must prove that what he or she wrote was the truth.

In America, the burden of proof falls on the plaintiff, not the defendant. And a public figure like Irving has to show that these statements were written with reckless disregard for the truth.

After five years of legal jockeying and $1.5 million in research expenses and legal costs, the case against Lipstadt finally went to trial in 2000.

During her 10 weeks in court, her attorneys refused to put her on the stand or allow her to talk to the press. The articulate professor chafed against the restrictions. In her latest book, History on Trial, Lipstadt finally has her chance to speak about the trial, which was heard by a judge, not a jury. She does so in absorbing, well-paced prose, and her personal memoir reads more like a novel than a nonfiction account.

Although most readers probably know the trial’s outcome, Lipstadt still provides a sense of drama, recording in vivid detail her misgivings and feelings and those of her legal team. The testimony of historians debunking Irving and his many distortions and lies makes for riveting reading.

Knowing that Holocaust survivors were counting on her to stand up for them, Lipstadt frequently worries that the case isn’t going well. She fears that the judge, who often appears to support Irving in his comments and questions, might rule in her favor but in such an even-handed way that she won’t be truly vindicated.

The highly publicized trial resulted in a huge victory for Lipstadt. The judge declared it “incontrovertible that Irving qualifies as a Holocaust denier.” His statements, the judge said, confirm that he was an anti-Semite and a racist who “deliberately skewed the evidence to bring it in line with his political beliefs.”

In Britain, the loser has to pay the defense costs. But after losing his appeals, Irving declared bankruptcy. Lipstadt decided that it wasn’t worth her time and energy, not to mention huge sums, to go after any of his assets.

The trial to her had not been about documents and money. It was, she writes, about “historical - as well as my personal - integrity.”

Deborah Lipstadt speaks on Thurs., Nov. 17, at 7:30 p.m. at Siegal College of Judaic Studies in Beachwood. Free, but limited space. Reservations required. 216-454-4050 or rsvp@siegal college.edu

Lipstadt at Houston Jewish Book & Arts Fair (Nov. 3)

Prof. Lipstadt will be discussing History on Trial on Thursday, November 3, at the Houston JCC's Jewish Book and Arts Fair:

Deborah Lipstadt
8:00 P.M.
History on Trial: My Day in Court with David Irving

Deborah Lipstadt, an acclaimed author, professor, and media commentator on Jewish matters, is also an expert on the Holocaust denial movement. When she called David Irving, a well-known writer on World War II, a Holocaust denier, he sued her and her publisher, Penguin UK, for libel in a London courtroom. Five years later, Lipstadt won a resounding victory. This book, a riveting chronicle of that legal battle, is also an inspiring personal story of perseverance and the definitive account of the trial that tested the standards of historical and judicial truths.

Other Venues for Nov. 8 "Conversation with Deborah Lipstadt"

As noted in the previous post, New York's 92nd Street Y will be broadcasting this event to other venues. Here is the full list of locations and participating organizations:

Abington, Pennsylvania: Old York Road Temple - Beth Am
Albuquerque, New Mexico: JCC of Greater Albuquerque
Dayton, Ohio: Dayton Jewish Community Center
Irvine, California: Merage Jewish Community Center of Orange County
Madison, Wisconsin: University of Wisconsin-Madison
Naples, Florida: Temple Shalom
New York, New York: Jewish Home and Hospital Life Care System
Omaha, Nebraska: Jewish Community Center of Omaha
Reading, Pennsylvania: Jewish Community Center of Reading
Utica, New York: Jewish Community Federation of the Mohawk Valley
Winnipeg, Manitoba: Rose & Max Rady JCC

If you plan to be at the 92nd Street Y for this event, you may purchase your tickets online.

"Conversation with Deborah Lipstadt" Satellite Broadcast (Nov. 8)

Prof. Lipstadt will be discussing History on Trial at New York's 92nd Street YMHA on Tuesday, Nov. 8:

HISTORY — HISTORY ON TRIAL: A CONVERSATION WITH DEBORAH LIPSTADT

History on Trial is Deborah Lipstadt's chronicle of her legal battle with Holocaust denier David Irving, a sensational libel case that The Daily Telegraph of London proclaimed did "for the new century what the Nuremberg tribunals or the Eichmann trial did for earlier generations." Deborah E. Lipstadt is Dorot Professor of Modern Jewish and Holocaust Studies and director of the Institute for Jewish Studies at Emory University. She is also the author of Denying the Holocaust: The Growing Assault on Truth and Memory. DR. MARGOT KREBS, chair of the English department at the Frisch School in Paramus, New Jersey, facilitates the discussion.

This event will be broadcast via Live from NY's 92nd Street Y, the Y's satellite broadcast program, to other participating venues, including Naples, FL. Temple Shalom.

Irving touts "brilliance of his failed defense" to atheists

In July of this year, Irving was invited to address a small group of atheists in Alabama. The Southern Poverty Law Center's Fall 2005 Intelligence Report notes:

Strange Bedfellows
Disgraced Holocaust denier hosted by Alabama atheist

David Irving, a writer whose Holocaust denial activities caused a British judge to label him "a right-wing, pro-Nazi polemicist," has been repeatedly hosted by the largest neo-Nazi group in America. David Duke, the famous former Klan leader, has organized talks and book sales for him. Others who've tried to help Irving sell his wares — the judge called them "deliberate" falsifications designed to slander Jews and hold Hitler up as a hero — include a host of other white supremacists.

And then there is Larry Darby.

Darby is not your typical host for Holocaust deniers. He is president of the Alabama-based, nonprofit Atheist Law Center. The bespectacled Darby is normally a lonely voice in supremely conservative Alabama, arguing against religion in all forms.

But in early July, Darby hosted Irving — who he described as "an expert on World War Two, the Nazi era and the erosion ... of free speech" — and about a dozen atheists at a meeting in the Holiday Inn of Prattville, Ala. Most of those who attended seemed to know little about Irving's background. Others, who heard about the appearance by e-mail, expressed their shock privately.

[...]

For his part, Irving told those who assembled in Prattville of the case that ruined his career as a purported historian. Irving had sued Deborah Lipstadt, a well-known Holocaust scholar who had accused him of pro-Nazi sympathies and false reporting in his books. At the conclusion of a hugely publicized libel trial in London, the court found that Lipstadt was justified in her published criticisms.

In Prattville, Irving emphasized the brilliance of his failed defense, and complained about how he'd been ordered to pay some $5 million in court costs for Lipstadt and her publisher, Penguin Books. Darby — whose ad for the Irving event said that Lipstadt's defense was funded "by the usual enemies of Free Speech" (Jewish groups helped pay for the defense) — listened without comment.

[...]

Christopher Browning to speak on Holocaust Denial in the Courtroom

Prof. Christopher Browning, who was one of the expert witnesses for the defense during the trial, will deliver the Holocaust Memorial Lecture at Washington University in St. Louis on Nov. 9:

Scholar Christopher Browning talks on Holocaust Denial in the Courtroom for the Assembly Series

By Mary Kastens

Oct. 17, 2005 — Considered by many to be the preeminent scholar on the Holocaust, Christopher Browning will present the Holocaust Memorial Lecture titled "Holocaust Denial in the Courtroom: The Historian as Expert Witness" at 11 a.m., Nov. 9 in Graham Chapel as part of the Assembly Series. His talk will touch on his experience as an expert witness in recent famous court cases involving Holocaust deniers.

How ordinary Germans came to accept the wholesale massacre of Jews is a central theme in Browning's pioneering scholarship of the Holocaust. The exhaustive research he conducted is evident in his definitive account, The Origins of the Final Solution: September 1939 to March 1942. This research was sponsored by Israel's Holocaust Museum as part of a multi-volume series about the Nazi era and the development of the Final Solution.

Browning's approach sets him apart because he does not see the Final Solution as a master plan established by Hitler alone at the beginning of the Nazi era, but rather as a series of decisions made by many people that evolved over a period of time. In a February 2004 interview in The Atlantic Monthly, he said, "The various perpetrators who became involved in the Final Solution and their decision-making processes were not unique." He says the Holocaust was not a mystical event that we cannot understand. It was a coming together of common factors and ordinary people.

He is the Frank Porter Graham Professor of History at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He earned a Ph.D. from the University of Wisconsin at Madison. He has been an expert witness at various trials of accused Nazi criminals in Australia, Canada, and the United Kingdom, as well as in the "Holocaust Denial" trials of Ernst Zundel in Toronto (1988) and Irving vs. Lipstadt in London (2000).

The event is free and open to the public. Graham Chapel is located north of Mallinckrodt Center on the Washington University Hilltop campus.

For more information, call (314) 935-4620 or visit the Assembly Series Web page (http://assemblyseries.wustl.edu).

Lipstadt at University of Maine (Oct. 16)

On Sunday, Oct. 16, Prof. Lipstadt will address the participants at the groundbreaking ceremony for a Holocaust Education Resource Center at the University of Maine:

Groundbreaking set for Holocaust center

By DAN McGILLVRAY
Staff Writer

AUGUSTA -- A scholar who has researched the Holocaust and human rights issues will speak Sunday at the University of Maine at Augusta.

Deborah Lipstadt is director of an institute in Emory University that is devoted to Jewish studies. Earlier this year her book, History on Trial: My Day in Court with David Irving was published.

"She will probably talk for about 45 minutes and then have a question and answer (period)," said Sharon Nichols, executive director of the Holocaust and Human Rights Center of Maine.

Lipstadt, who teaches at Emory University in Atlanta, will be the featured speaker at a groundbreaking ceremony for the Michael Klahr Holocaust Education Resource Center that will be built on the University of Maine at Augusta campus.

Work on the building will start next spring, said Nichols.
[...]

The ceremony Sunday begins at 1 p.m. with a lecture in Jewett Hall Auditorium by Professor Phillip Silver of the University of Maine. From 2 to 4 p.m., Silver and his wife, Professor Noreen Silver, who also teaches music at UMaine, will conduct a cello-piano duo in the auditorium. The price is $10 and tickets are available at the door.

The outdoor groundbreaking begins at 4:15 p.m.

Lipstadt begins her speech at 5 p.m. She is expected to talk about her 6-year legal battle in London with David Irving. He had accused Lipstadt of saying that he denied the Holocaust in Europe. In the end, a judge concluded that Irving was a Holocaust denier, a falsifier of history, and a racist.

Historians estimate that approximately 6 million Jews were killed by the Nazi regime and collaborators

After Lipstadt concludes her address at 6 p.m., a social reception hour will be held until 7 p.m.

Lipstadt is Atlanta's "Best Local Intellectual"

The critics at Creative Loafing, an Atlanta weekly which featured History on Trial and Prof. Lipstadt on the cover of their April 6/05 issue, have declared Prof. Lipstadt to be Atlanta's "Best Local Intellectual":

Best Local Intellectual: Deborah Lipstadt

DEBORAH LIPSTADT, a professor of modern Jewish and Holocaust studies, is one of the most popular faculty members at Emory. But what really sets her apart is a book written a dozen years ago in which she lambastes one of the world’s most infamous Holocaust deniers, David Irving. Irving turned around and sued Lipstadt for libel in British court, but the judge found in favor of Lipstadt, calling Irving a racist and anti-Semite. Sweet. Lipstadt was back in the news last spring when she refused to allow C-Span to tape a lecture she was giving. Why? The network wanted to air it back-to-back with one by Irving. Seems the battle against Holocaust deniers isn’t over yet.
www.lipstadt.blogspot.com. www.hdot.org.

Lipstadt Interviewed on Radio "WHYY"

Prof. Lipstadt was interviewed by Marty Moss-Coane this morning on Philadelphia's WHYY program "Radio Times". In addition to addressing questions from Coane, and callers to the program, about the life and times of the late Simon Wiesenthal, Prof. Lipstadt also discussed Holocaust denial, the Irving trial and her book, History on Trial. The interview can be heard here.

Lipstadt in Des Moines (Sept. 21)

Prof. Lipstadt will present a lecture in Des Moines, on Wednesday, Sept. 21:

Professor to speak about Holocaust

Deborah Lipstadt, a professor of Holocaust studies at Emory University, will present "History on Trial: Holocaust Denial and False History" at 7:30 p.m. Wednesday at the Embassy Suites, 101 E. Locust St. in Des Moines. Advance tickets are $10 and available at the Jewish Federation of Greater Des Moines, 910 Polk Blvd. in Des Moines. Tickets are $15 at the door.

Lipstadt to speak at Kansas University

Professor Lipstadt will be speaking at the University of Kansas, (Lawrence, Kansas) on Sept. 14:

Author Lipstadt to Speak at KU About Winning Libel Suit by Holocaust Denier

Humanities Lecture Series is the oldest continuing series at KU

Lawrence, Kan. - infoZine - The University of Kansas' Hall Center for the Humanities will open its 2005-2006 Humanities Lecture Series with professor and author Deborah Lipstadt, who will speak on "History on Trial: My Day in Court with David Irving," at 7:30 p.m., Sept. 14 in the Woodruff Auditorium of the Kansas Union. The event is free and open to the public.

Lipstadt, professor of Modern Jewish and Holocaust Studies at Emory University, will expound on her book "History on Trial," which details her 2000 libel trial in London when Irving sued her for calling him a Holocaust denier and right wing extremist. The judge handed down a stongly worded decision declaring Irving to be a Holocaust denier, a falsifier of history, a racist, an anti-Semite and a liar.

The libel trial was described by London's Daily Telegraph as having "done for the new century what the Nuremberg trial did for earlier generations." Lipstadt's lecture will analyze the major issues involved in her lawsuit in London and link them to the rise of the "new anti-Semitism."

Lipstadt is also the author of Denying the Holocaust: The Growing Assault on Truth and Memory and Beyond Belief: The American Press and The Coming of the Holocaust.

Founded in 1947, the Humanities Lecture Series is the oldest continuing series at KU. More than 150 eminent scholars from around the world have participated in the program, including author Vladimir Nabokov, painter Thomas Hart Benton and author Aldous Huxley. Recent scholars have included Edward Said, Dava Sobel, Sherman Alexie and E.O. Wilson. Shortly after the program's inception, a lecture by one outstanding KU faculty member each year was added to the schedule.

Upcoming speakers in the 2005-2006 series include author Salman Rushdie, human rights scholar Samantha Power, and attorney and author Scott Turow.

For more information, please contact the Hall Center at hallcenter@kuedu or call (785) 864-7822

Australia's Law Society Journal Interviews Lipstadt

The August 2005 issue (Vol 43 No. 7 Pages 28-29) of the Australian Law Society Journal contains an interview with Prof. Lipstadt. Here is the text of the article:

Defamation ruling: The Holocaust is undeniable

Discriminating between good, bad, and totally unacceptable historical method

POST-MODERNISM, WITH its emphasis on point of view and the relativity of truth, has its limits.

These limits emerged in the trial of David Irving v Penguin Books and Another, a six-year legal marathon triggered in 1996 by a British author of well-received books on the Nazi regime, David Irving, who asserted that American historian and teacher of modern Jewish and Holocaust studies at Emory University, Professor Deborah Lipstadt, had libelled him in her book, “Denying the Holocaust: The growing assault on truth and memory” (1993). Irving protested Lipstadt had called him “a denier, a Hitler partisan and a right-wing ideologue”. (She agrees she did).

Lipstadt was in Sydney recently to give lectures on the Holocaust during Limmud Oz, the Festival of Jewish Learning and Culture, and between times to discuss her newly released account of the trial, History on Trial: My day in court with David Irving. Anyone seeing her interviewed by the ABC’s Lateline presenter, Tony Jones, will sympathise with her protest to her Scottish QC Richard Rampton that she be allowed to talk to the media in London during the preparation for the trial, because “I do media well”.

She does indeed, as LSJ can also testify. But she reports having been unable to deflect some radio and television talkshow hosts elsewhere from taking what she considers an alarming line on David Irving’s stance.

For some in the media, denial is an intriguing idea. They conceive denial as a possible ‘other side’ of the Holocaust story.

To anyone conversant with the vast post-war writings on the Nazi regime there is nothing ‘intriguing’ about claiming Hitler never gave an order to annihilate the Jews of Europe, that the Jews who died in concentration camps had died of typhus or some other illness, or that there were no gas chambers in Auschwitz.

Rather, the claims can only be dismissed as lies, while Irving’s libel suits recall Goebbels’ observation that the big “impudent” lies Hitler talks about in Mein Kampf will succeed only for as long as dissent is squashed by the state. Pursuing Lipstadt in a six year trial process and filing suit against others who have challenged his writing can only be seen as an attempt by Irving to use a state institution to protect his lies from exposure.

Had he been an American writer, says Lipstadt in her book, the guarantees and freedom of the press which have evolved over centuries out of the First Amendment to the USA Constitution, would have scuttled any attempts by him to harass critics of his work. It would have been up to him to prove the critics wrote falsely, not Lipstadt’s responsibility to prove that what she wrote was true: as the Brits have it, words written are untrue until proven true.

“Absurd,” Lipstadt told one of her American interviewers.

She was even more flabbergasted to discover that under English law, if she failed to respond to Irving’s charge, she would give him the decision by default, a point largely overlooked by those members of the Jewish community who advised her to ignore the complaint.

Lipstadt’s regret over the differences between English and US laws on defamation is heartfelt. Little wonder: six years of her life, huge resources of intellectual, emotional and physical stamina, not to mention considerable sums of her own money as well as large amounts donated by others, were consumed by the trial – with more having to be raised to fund Irving’s appeal, even though he eventually withdrew it. Attempts to secure costs from him have had to be abandoned.

However, without the trial, there would have been no book, and that would be a loss to both the legal profession and the lay person.

History on Trial is a unique record, fascinating on multiple levels: as an inquiry into historiography – discriminating between good, bad and totally unacceptable historical method; as a detailed account of a long, complex legal process, and, through Lipstadt’s American perspective, an interesting commentary on the differences between US and English legal systems.

It works very well for the reader that Lipstadt is a nonlawyer with formidable research, analysis and recording skills, and that she had powerful motivations to produce the fullest record possible of a trial whose outcomes were of concern not only to the Jewish community with which she identifies, but for anyone familiar with the Nazi story. An energetic fusion of intellect and passion drives the narrative, while Lipstadt in her role as the innocent abroad, unfamiliar with the English legal ambiance and its practitioners, creates scope for candid snapshots of legal representatives and their support staff, and for comprehensive expositions of procedures that leave few questions unanswered.

Her voice is strong and everpresent in the story, questioning herself, her legal representatives and the English system, protesting at its weirdness: why is she known as “Another”? – “I’ve got a name”. Why can’t she be called to the witness box and speak for herself? Why shouldn’t she talk to the media? Why do her lawyers get to know the judge’s decision before she does? Why does her QC grill her aggressively as if he were supporting Irving instead of her? And Judge Gray, why does he bend over backwards to encourage Irving (a self-representing plaintiff), and then come down with a ruling that unequivocally declares Irving’s “falsification of the historical record was deliberate ... motivated by a desire to present events in a manner consistent with his own ideological beliefs even if that involved distortion and manipulation of historical evidence”. It was “incontrovertible” said Judge Gray, “that Irving qualifies as a Holocaust denier”.

Occasionally there’s an impression Lipstadt is directly addressing Americans, or the Jewish community.

In “a note to the Reader” she says that from the time Irving issued his threats, she had kept a detailed record of all her conversations with her lawyers and others involved in the case. Then she decided to start a journal where she recorded conversations and her own thoughts.

LSJ put the question of readership to her when we met up at the serviced apartments which were her Sydney base.

“It did change over time,” she said. “Initially lawyers and academics were the only ones I thought would be interested, but then so many different kinds of people contacted me to offer support and encouragement. The staff of the hotel where I was staying, for instance, kept a close watch on the progress of the trial. All kinds of people turned up to the hearing. I realised that a lot of ordinary people were perturbed by the idea that Irving wanted to suppress the right of people to challenge his distorted representation of the Holocaust and Hitler’s role in it.”

Lipstadt’s research into denials of the Holocaust came on the heels of an inquiry she had conducted into US press reports in the years that the Nazis began systematically persecuting the Jews. Her findings on that subject were published in the book Beyond Belief: The American press and the coming of the Holocaust.

This work had been prompted by questions from some of her students as to what their parents could have known during the period. Could more have been done to save the Jews of Europe? And how could a repeat Holocaust be prevented in the future?

The Jewish press in the US had a very clear picture of what was happening in the earlier stages of Nazi persecution, Lipstadt told LSJ, because many of the people being persecuted or observing attacks on others were their own relatives who were writing letters at least up to the time that the Nazis were fully organised. But later, getting news out became more difficult.

“The time to prevent a genocide is before it happens,” she said. “Once it’s really under way, it’s hard to stop. You have to be alert to the early signs.”

In the mainstream press, Lipstadt discovered “small articles in obscure places” (like the comics or the weather reports), and found a report of the murder of a million Jews placed at the bottom of page six next to an ad for ‘Lava’ soap.

“The more horrible the reports became, the more incredulity they tended to arouse.”

Lipstadt inherited the Holocaust at a remove. Her father left Germany before the Nazis came to power and her mother was born in Canada. She grew up in New York in an Orthodox home, attending Jewish schools, but raised with “an appreciation of surrounding secular society”.

“We were never formally taught about what took place in the Hitler period, but there were passing references at school and from the rabbi –“Hitler, may his name be erased”.

Her parents were “autodidacts”, left-wing, civil-rights workers and opposed to the Vietnam war. They had books on the Holocaust at home, says Lipstadt, but these were only part of a collection that canvassed the “tapestry of our Jewish lives”.

Summer camps and, later, a visit to Israel, brought her to a fuller understanding of the “deep imprint of both the Holocaust and Israel on the psyche of the Jewish people”.

Thereafter she studied for a doctorate in modern Jewish history, eventually focusing on the Holocaust, especially the question of how the bystanders, Jews and non-Jews, reacted.

Her account of the preparation for the defence against Irving’s suit, including a visit by the legal team to Auschwitz, makes for riveting reading: discussions of the various stratagems employed by notorious deniers other than Irving, the details of the documents sought and offered as part of discovery, the interaction with Irving before and during the trial, and descriptions of the buzz of activity that goes on in legal offices, the to-ing and froing between solicitors and counsel, all offer a unique insight into the workings of the legal system, through an approach not quite novelettish, but at that level of superior historical writing which can almost compete with a novel for narrative power, character interest, period and place, not to mention high drama and a thrilling denouement.

But Lipstadt is wasting no time resting on her laurels. Holocaust denial will go on, she says. That denial is based on a new anti-semitism, a phenomenon she is currently researching and which is the subject of her next book.

For sure, Deborah was well named.

MARY ROSE LIVERANI

History on Trial reviewed in SPLC Intelligence Report

The Southern Poverty Law Center's Summer issue of their Intelligence Report features a review of History on Trial:

Defending Truth
A scholar recounts her titanic legal battle with Holocaust denier David Irving

By Heidi Beirich

History on Trial: My Day in Court with David Irving
By Deborah Lipstadt
New York: HarperCollins Publishers, 2005, $25.95 (hardback)

In her new memoir History on Trial, Deborah Lipstadt, a renowned Emory University professor of Modern Jewish and Holocaust Studies, tells a captivating tale of the British libel trial that she was forced into when the English Holocaust denier and Third Reich "historian" David Irving foolishly sued her. Irving claimed Lipstadt had ruined his reputation by describing him as a Holocaust denier and Nazi admirer in her 1994 work, Denying the Holocaust: The Growing Assault on Truth and Memory. The trial, which began in January 2000, proved Irving was indeed as Lipstadt had written, and that he was a mean-spirited, racist buffoon and shoddy historian to boot.

History on Trial is peopled with somewhat eccentric characters whose dedication to defending the truth about the Holocaust is inspiring. And Irving — who, in one of the greatest Freudian slips of all time, actually referred to the judge as "Mein Fuhrer"— adds troubling color to the story. The book is a real page-turner, holding the reader until the end, even when the outcome of the trial is already known.

The book has some interesting tidbits about Irving. He comes across as a truly vile human being who likes to mock Holocaust survivors and hang out with neo-Nazis. The most telling anecdote describes how Irving approached former Nuremburg prosecutor Robert Kempner in 1969 to say that he intended to go to Washington to prove that the official record of the Nuremburg trial was falsified. Kempner noted at the time in a recently unearthed memo to J. Edgar Hoover that Irving made "anti-American and anti-Jewish statements." It seems Irving dedicated himself to Nazi views long, long ago.

Memory, Scholarship and the Law
There is a disturbing aspect to the memoir. Although the trial ended in a total legal victory for Lipstadt — and Irving will forever be tagged, as he was by Judge Charles Gray, as a slipshod researcher, a "racist" and an "anti-Semite" — the victory outside the courtroom was less than complete.

This is partly due to the nature of British libel law, which puts the burden of proof on the defendant, rather than on the plaintiff who is claiming to have been libeled (which is how the American system works). As a result, publishers are often reluctant to release controversial books in Britain. Indeed, as Harvard University law professor Alan Dershowitz points out in his afterword to Lipstadt's book, British libel law has led to a "chilling of free speech" and a stifling of academic inquiry. A case in point: The publication in Britain of John Lukac's The Hitler of History was delayed three years because of threats from Irving. When it was finally distributed — even though that wasn't until after the absolutely decisive verdict in Lipstadt's favor — Lukac's publisher, Weidenfeld & Nicholson, had toned down the sections on Irving for the British market.

Another result of the British system is that defending even a flawless book can cost a fortune in legal fees. Indeed, the Lipstadt case might not even have seen the inside of a courtroom if it hadn't been for the willingness of Penguin Books, Lipstadt's publisher, and several donors to absorb the enormous costs of a drawn-out trial. Up to that time, Irving's skillful employment of libel threats had allowed him to maintain a reputation as a serious historian for far longer than he should have been able to. The trial was necessary for the truth about Irving to come out.

Another distressing aspect of this tale is the considerable academic cowardice that Lipstadt had to contend with when Irving sued. Lipstadt writes that a leading Holocaust historian suggested that she simply let Irving win. When she replied that that would effectively validate Irving's denial of the Holocaust, the reply was, "So what?" Others thought that going to court would transform Irving into a celebrity or free-speech martyr, as if that unlikely possibility mattered more than proving that his writings on the Holocaust are deeply flawed and animated by virulent anti-Semitism. And still others warned that Lipstadt was cheapening herself by becoming a media personality. It is unsettling that prominent historians would find defending the truth about the Holocaust so unimportant.

Truth and 'Fairness'
It is downright scandalous that a Hitler apologist like Irving could be taken seriously for so long by so many distinguished historians. For decades, Irving was publishing works on World War II to great applause, even though many falsified parts of the Nazi record. As the historical research presented at the trial made clear, Irving's obvious aim was to cleanse Hitler of his crimes. Irving was intent on dismissing the reality of the Holocaust, thereby relieving the Nazis of responsibility for their crimes, and he also used his research to legitimate Nazis lies about Jews.

The celebrated British military historian, Sir John Keegan, is Exhibit No. 1 of this problem. He praised Irving's book Hitler's War even though it falsely argued that Hitler did not know about the Final Solution — and Keegan was not alone in his praise. Even after Irving lost his libel case, Keegan criticized Lipstadt in an editorial, writing that the trial "will send a tremor" of fear through historical circles. Keegan also wrote that Irving's denial of the Holocaust was only "a small but disabling element of his work." Historians like Keegan have protected Irving's reputation over the years — even though Irving's work is sub par, something revealed by the in-depth examinations of his work and documentation undertaken by the defense team's assemblage of leading experts. Those studies, compiled by notable Holocaust historians such as Christopher Browning, will now stand permanently as a rebuttal to the disturbing farce that Holocaust denial "research" represents.

But the idea that Holocaust denial is merely the "other side of the story" persists in sometimes remarkable quarters. Just this March, the American cable channel C-SPAN was planning to televise a speech by Lipstadt about her memoir. In the interests of what a C-SPAN producer described to Lipstadt as "fairness and balance," C-SPAN decided to air a presentation by David Irving as well that would represent "the opposing view." C-SPAN apparently thought there was some kind of legitimate historical debate over the existence of the gas chambers and Hitler's knowledge of the Final Solution — a complete and utter misreading of contemporary historical scholarship. In fact, C-SPAN's bizarre position drew an angry letter of protest signed by more than 200 historians from around the world.

Lipstadt's memoir is a powerful reminder that truth needs to be vigilantly defended. If Irving and his ilk had their way, the largest state-ordered mass murder in history would actually disappear from the record.

Intelligence Report
Summer 2005

Lipstadt cited on Darfur genocide

In an article about Darfur in today's (July 21) issue of the Philadelphia Inquirer, columnist Jane Eisner cites Prof. Lipstadt. Here are some excerpts:

American Rhythms | Each of us can help Darfur: Just let the horror seep in
By Jane Eisner

I had, until now, shied away from writing about the genocide in the Darfur region of Sudan, on the weak but justifiable grounds that my job is to opine about national issues, and this was something happening on a distant continent.

Now I feel too guilty to stay silent.

[...]

Guilt might even have motivated some of the nation's clergy to remind congregants that if we are all, indeed, God's children, then we can scarcely sit by as 300,000 people or more are slaughtered and nearly two million displaced.

I can attest: Guilt works. I heard this very message from my rabbi Saturday, and my conscience hasn't left me alone since. I can no longer pretend it's not in my job description to express outrage and demand action against what is being called the worst genocide since World War II.

That historical analogy weighs heavily on Jewish people, and on Monday, they responded in kind. Just about every major religious and communal Jewish group in the nation signed a document calling upon President Bush to promote immediate and comprehensive international intervention in Darfur.

"What excuse do we have?" asks Deborah E. Lipstadt, the Emory University historian who has detailed how the Holocaust was downplayed and denied as millions of Jews and others were murdered in Europe.

"If we're going to talk about the Holocaust, about what was, then we have to be concerned about what is or we lose all moral credibility."

[...]

The truth on trial

Prof. Lipstadt was recently interviewed by David Marr, of the Sidney Morning Herald:

The truth on trial
DAVID MARR

Sydney Morning Herald
Saturday 09th of July 2005

David Irving is on the road in Florida and Alabama, flogging his books to the faithful. He calls his tour "Hurricane David" but there's barely a breeze behind the disgraced historian as he swings through the southern United States this week. The venues of his talks in Montgomery, Orlando and West Palm Beach are secret to all but his followers. Entry: 10 bucks at the door and satisfactory ID.

This is a man who has fallen a long, long way. Gone are the Rolls and the flat in Mayfair. The praise of great historians has dried up. Universities that matter no longer invite him to lecture. Newspapers all but ignore him. For 30 years, his books on Nazi Germany and World War II were published by the leading houses of the world. Now he self-publishes. The belligerence that made him a feared adversary in the courts is now confined to his brawling website, where he pursues his grudges against Australia, Jews, Israel and his nemesis, Deborah Lipstadt.

Over scrambled eggs in a Sydney cafe last week, she puzzles over his latest web attack. "Nature Alert: Slab-throated Dip coming to Australia. Lipstadt will continue her lucrative and well-financed global Smearfest against British historian David Irving." And so on. The abuse defeats us both: what on Earth is a "slab-throated dip"?

Nothing much about Irving surprises this fiery woman after so many years spent grappling with him. On a long list of his faults she includes: "Hatred. A visceral hatred for Jews and other minorities and an adoration of the Third Reich and Adolf Hitler. He's also a bully." Lipstadt reckons he's one of those people who love to be hated. "Otherwise, he wouldn't say the things he says."

She has in mind remarks such as this, delivered to a gathering in Calgary in 1991: "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 ... I am going to form an Association of Auschwitz Survivors, Survivors of the Holocaust and Other Liars. A.S.S.H.O.L.S."

Irving made Lipstadt famous by suing her and losing. For some time, he had combined a career as an iconoclastic historian - demanding the right to tell uncomfortable truths - with a penchant for suing his detractors. Most folded. Lipstadt and the publisher Penguin Books did not. "I hope this doesn't sound self-serving," she says, buttering her last piece of toast. "But David Irving underestimated me."

At the time, 1995, she was a youngish, rather obscure professor of Holocaust studies at Emory University in Atlanta with a great deal to learn about the quirky way libel is handled in the British legal world. She could not be sued in the US for what she said about Irving in her book Denying the Holocaust. But in Britain, the onus was on her and Penguin to justify the remarks she made about Irving in those pages: that he was a Holocaust denier, an anti-Semite, a racist and a falsifier of history. "My impression is that he sued me because he's been waiting to get me," Lipstadt says. "He saw me as a representative of the Jewish community, I don't know why. I'm a Jew. I'm an active Jew. I live a Jewish life. But he thought that by going after me he could go after the Jewish world."

Penguin was insured. Lipstadt's backers in America raised $US1.75 million ($2.3 million) for the fight. Together they assembled a team of forensic scholars to re-research Irving's books. By the time the trial opened in London, they had honed their counter-attack to 19 examples of lies and fakery - from Irving's wild guesstimates of the death toll in Dresden to his slippery claims that Hitler was a friend of the Jews. In April 2000, a London court delivered a crushing victory to Lipstadt that would leave Irving's reputation as a scholar in ruins.

This battle is the subject of a riveting new book by Lipstadt: History on Trial: My Day in Court with David Irving. No one who loves history can fail to be fascinated by the unpeeling of Irving's lies by Lipstadt's team of academic sleuths. They shred the man's scholarship and conclude: "This is not how a historian works."

It's a courtroom drama that reached its comic depths on the last day of the trial, when Irving addressed the judge as "Mein Fuhrer". Lipstadt writes: "There was a moment of intense silence as the entire courtroom - Judge Gray included - seemed frozen. Then everyone erupted in laughter ... Irving, who seemed not to have grasped what had happened, marched on."

Lipstadt's interest in the phenomenon of denial goes beyond the Holocaust. She is pleased that Edgar Ray Killen has finally been convicted for the Mississippi Burning murders. "They did it but it took 40 years." And while she is in Sydney she will join Professor Ronald Suny of the University of Chicago to discuss the first great race slaughter of the 20th century. "That Turkey turns itself into a pretzel to deny the Armenian genocide is a mark of shame," Lipstadt says. "And it does Turkey no good because they know it happened."

On her fourth visit to Australia, Lipstadt is well aware we have a denial industry of our own - denying Aboriginal massacres and denying the stolen generations. As she talks about the general principles and purposes of denial, she moves back and forth between denials of the Holocaust, Aboriginal slaughter and even the moon landing, which some believe was filmed on a sound stage in Nevada. Lipstadt sees even these strange souls illustrating an important truth: "Scratch a lie like that and you'll find some political motive." What's theirs? "You can't trust the government."

And these lies make life easier for us. "If someone said to you, 'You know, we've found out the Aborigines really weren't murdered and that they very happily gave up their land,' you'd say, 'Oh my God, I live in a better place, I live in a better society. I don't have this society that has this terrible shame and legacy."' And what's wrong with living under this delusion? "When you grapple with the past you rise above it."

The work of deniers is oddly easy. They don't have to prove much. All they have to do is cast doubt. But this requires they have public reputations as scholars. Lipstadt saw Irving as "the most dangerous of deniers" because he had built a reputation as a serious, if rather quirky, historian. "He was fresh. He had a vibrant way of writing." But Lipstadt believes the problems with Irving were always underestimated.

Right from the beginning, there were historians contesting his facts. When his first book, The Destruction of Dresden, appeared in 1963, they queried Irving's controversial death count: up from about 40,000 to 135,000. Each book that followed over the next 30 years provoked similar academic brawls over the facts. But somehow none of this really dented Irving's standing as a scholar.

Lipstadt says the public looks at historians slugging it out in this way as "two little boys having a pissing match". So were we lazy all those years not checking Irving's footnotes for ourselves? "No. There is an unspoken element of trust that if a historian sits down and writes this and a serious publisher publishes it, then I can, by and large, believe that it's the truth."

How high on the list of sins does Lipstadt place the sheer invention of sources: "The highest. For all historians. It doesn't matter what you're writing about, if you're writing the history of cooking or the history of fashion or the history of the Iraq war - if you invent a source, I can trust nothing you say."

Of course, all sides in these familiar historical brawls claim to be the genuine article, fearlessly devoted to accuracy. On his website, Irving boasts he is spearheading "the international campaign for real history". For Lipstadt, what distinguishes real historians is the way they deal with evidence that contradicts their own conclusions. Real historians acknowledge this difficult material and give their reasons for dismissing it. Fakes like Irving, simply ignore it.

The to-and-fro of contending historians might have continued for eternity, unresolved. But Irving sued.

Early in History on Trial, Lipstadt writes: "I did not believe that courtrooms were the proper place for historical inquiry." The American was amazed by the rituals of English law. She was appalled to be ordered by her legal team to shut up - no evidence in court and no interviews with the press - until the whole thing was over. But she discovered an English courtroom could be "a pretty damn good place" to settle great questions of history.

There was no jury. The judge spoke German. There was lots of time. The plaintiff could no longer bluster his way through. "In court we said: 'Mr Irving, show us the document.' He was compelled to show us the document and when you look at the document it showed he was completely lying about what happened there, or he's making it up, or he's reversed the dates, or he's put someone at a meeting who wasn't there, or he quotes half a speech. What we show is that you can't trust anything the man says unless you go and document it and prove it. And that's what's led in part to his downfall - that and his bizarre comments and bizarre behaviour."

Bankrupt and yet to pay a ££2 million ($4.7 million) bill for court costs, Irving has only one public asset these days: his claim to be a martyr for free speech. It is a claim Australia has done much to bolster by banning him from these shores six times since 1992. That this is the result of intense lobbying by the Jewish community is no secret. And Irving's travel plans have now been frustrated by the Hawke, Keating and Howard governments. But each time this happens the Australian press gives - as it must - a thumbnail account of Irving's Holocaust-denying views. It's great publicity.

Lipstadt does not believe in making Holocaust denial a crime. In History on Trial, she writes: "Those laws would render denial 'forbidden fruit', making it more - not less - alluring." She acknowledges that preventing Irving from entering this country draws attention to his views. But when asked if she therefore disapproves of Australia's ban, she ducks the question. "I don't think any good would come from having him come here."

So should he be banned from America? "There's no grounds on which he can be banned from the United States. No. I think it's pathetic. He comes to the United States now, he travels around the country, he talks to his most ardent followers - he talks to them in diners."

But wouldn't he be reduced to the same fleapits in Australia by this time? "That could well be the case. But I don't know whether there's a sense that he might give succour, give strengthening, reinforcement to people who do bad things."

Lipstadt's absolute bottom line is that she won't debate Irving - or any Holocaust denier. "First of all it suggests there are two sides to this story. Second of all, as we show in the trial, they are liars. For them to make the argument that this didn't happen, they've got to be lying about the facts. I can debate someone where we have diametrically opposed positions - abortion, death penalty, things that are very emotional and important ... But I can't debate someone who is simply making things up. That's what the deniers are all about."

History on Trial by Deborah Lipstadt is published by HarperCollins ($45). Professor Lipstadt's website is http://Lipstadt.blogspot.com. David Irving's website is www.fpp.co.uk. The judgement can be read at www.hdot.org.

Lipstadt interviewed on Australian Broadcasting Corporation TV

Australian Broadcasting Corporation's TV program Lateline's July 5 edition features Prof. Lipstadt and History on Trial in two segments:

New book details Irving Holocaust Case (Transcript)

In 2000 historian David Irving attempted to sue American author Deborah Lipstadt, claiming she had defamed him by calling him a holocaust denier. Mr Irving lost the case and historians say the result has significant implications.

[Real Video | Windows Media]

History on trial (Transcript)

Academic and historian Deborah Lipstadt discusses her latest book History on Trial which details her battle with David Irving, who was suing her over claims he was a holocaust denier.

[Real Video | Windows Media]

C-SPAN controversy still reverberates in cyberspace

Although some months have passed since the C-SPAN controversy erupted, there's an article on "Freezerbox", an e-zine that "aspires to create a forum for good thinking and good writing" in which the author, Russ Wellen, cites this issue:

"Your message did not reach some or all of the intended recipients"
BY RUSS WELLEN
MEDIA | 6.29.2005

[...]

Speaking of compromise, there are those that exceed even the Times in the precautions they take against offending their audience and the administration. Practicing something more suited to the wheels of your car in the hands of an auto mechanic, they seek to "balance." As Richard Cohen explains in his Washington Post March 15 column, "C-SPAN's Balance of the Absurd," the cable network scheduled Holocaust scholar Deborah Lipstadt to plug her new book on the plum publishing venue Book TV.

History on Trial is an account of the unsuccessful libel case which Holocaust denier David Irving, whose feet Dr. Lipstadt held to the fire in her earlier book, Denying the Holocaust, brought against her in Britain. In a surprise move, C-SPAN decided, in the words of producer Amy Roach, "to balance it [Lipstadt's lecture] by covering him [Irving]."

While on the surface, it might make sense to feature the plaintiff, even if he was defeated, along with the defendant, some charges are too spurious for words. In a self-defeating--petulant even--concession to those who advised them of this, C-SPAN decided to instead host a panel discussion of the book with neither party present.

Does the C-SPAN triplets' parent company, National Cable Satellite Corporation, actually believe that one of the cable television systems it charges for its services will insist on a Holocaust denier having his say? The day hasn't arrived--yet--where it profiteth even Fox News to adopt such a stance. One can understand taking under advisement pickets, phone calls, or letters. But what is it about a deluge of email, which can be drained out of an in-box with the flick of a finger, that makes grown media executives cringe?

As with the Times, caving in to pressure only alienates your audience by compromising your credibility. Besides, backing down makes you look weak in comparison to, say, Fox. In fact, its slogan, "Fair and Balanced," may have sparked the balancing craze. If the media in question were a car, it would be rumbling around not on balanced wheels, or even equally inflated tires, but on one of those replacement donut tires.

[...]

Lipstadt interviewed on Australia's "Radio National"

Prof. Lipstadt is currently in Australia. Shortly after her arrival, she was interviewed on Australian Broadcasting Corporation's "Late Night Live" program. You can listen to the (June 30) broadcast here.

Also on the ABC site is the transcript of a May 21/05 interview with Prof. Lipstadt on the program "Saturday Breakfast with Geraldine Dooge". Here are some excerpts:

Holocaust Denial

Deborah Lipstadt on her long, ultimately successful, legal battle with Holocaust denier, David Irving.
Transcript

Geraldine Doogue: All this year we’ve been celebrating the 60th anniversary of the end of the Second World War and of course you can’t think about that war without also having to come to terms with the Holocaust. You might have been watching the ABC series, ‘Ten Days to Victory’. Last Thursday we saw footage of the American soldiers entering the German concentration camps and their horror at what they saw there.

But as the distance from those times increases, a disturbing phenomenon’s been growing too, that of Holocaust denial, people who claim that the Nazis did not systematically set out to exterminate the Jews. They admit the Jews did die in camps, but not in gas chambers, and not as part of a deliberate policy.

David Irving is the leading Holocaust denier, and the most litigious. His most celebrated case was when he sued an American Professor of Jewish Studies, Deborah Lipstadt, for libel. Lipstadt had accused him of distorting the evidence in order to reach untenable conclusions about the Holocaust.

Deborah Lipstadt has just published a fascinating book about her long, ultimately successful legal battle with David Irving. It’s called ‘History on Trial’. Welcome now to Saturday Breakfast, Deborah.

Deborah Lipstadt: Thank you for having me.

Geraldine Doogue: What made you interested in this phenomenon of Holocaust denial?

Deborah Lipstadt: The truth of the matter is I was approached by two prominent Holocaust historians, Yehuda Bauer and Israel Goodman quite a few years ago, and they said to me, ‘Deborah, do you think you ought to take a look at this, probably do a research project on it, or maybe write a book?’ And I really sloughed it off and said, ‘Oh, I don’t think there’s anything there, I think it’s a silly phenomenon’, and I said it’s like flat earthers. And they argued rather persuasively that it was a form of anti-Semitism and possibly racism, and that it deserved to be looked at, not so much to answer the deniers, because I think don’t think there’s any point to that, but to understand what the phenomenon was all about.

Geraldine Doogue: I just wonder whether some of the people, the eminent historians who continue to support David Irving, your antagonist, because of his meticulous body of research, but who are certainly not anti-Semitic, not known to be anyway, whether you came to understand that in a way they couldn’t believe human beings were capable of such behaviour.

Deborah Lipstadt: I think the few historians, and probably John Keegan is the most prominent amongst them –

Geraldine Doogue: Sir John Keegan, whom –

Deborah Lipstadt: Yes, the military historian, the very prominent military historian who testified at the trial under subpoena, not under his own accord, I think he was subpoenaed by Irving. His approach, and those few historians who haven’t really, most of them have abandoned Irving at this point, what they do is they sort of build a little wall around this Holocaust denial and say, ‘Well that’s completely worthless, that’s completely stupid, he goes off at a tangent there, he’s lost his mind, but his other work is good.’ And that’s one of the reasons why during the trial we examined topics like Irving’s treatment of the bombing of Dresden showed that it wasn’t just in relation to the Holocaust that his historical research was not trustworthy.

[...]

Geraldine Doogue: Was the decision by your lawyers that you should not testify ultimately, was that a difficult one for you?

Deborah Lipstadt: Also exceptionally difficult. My business is talking, I’m a professor, I teach, I write, that’s the tool I have. I was dying to take the stand, I kept asking, ‘Put me on the stand, put me on the stand.’

Geraldine Doogue: Because David Irving makes a big play of that now on his website.

Deborah Lipstadt: Right, exactly. He tried to paint me as a coward, as frightened of him, as what he called ‘Taking the Fifth Amendment’, you know in the United States where you don’t have to testify against yourself. And what he didn’t know, or didn’t care to know, is that I kept saying to the lawyers, ‘Put me on the stand’, and they said, ‘You’re being sued for what you wrote. There’s nothing that you can add by putting you on the stand that is relevant to this case’

[...]

Geraldine Doogue: But also I suppose the challenge to one’s own humanity as an observer, and you actually quote James Dalrymple, writing in The Independent after that day, when he was sitting in the Tube on the way home from sitting through the court case, doing his own calculations until he realised with disgust what he was doing. So I wonder about the challenge to, well, at any point, did you find yourself being drawn in, even though you were the defendant, thinking, Oh yes, I understand what David Irving’s on about there?

Deborah Lipstadt: That didn’t happen, because by the time we went to trial, I had seen so many examples of his egregious lies and distortions, but every once in a while I would say, ‘We’ve got to make sure that the press, that the public, understands what he’s doing here, because if you don’t know, it can sound logical. If you don’t know, it can sound like it makes sense.’ At some level the Holocaust itself is beyond belief, and on that same level we would like David Irving to be right, we would like the deniers to be correct, and say ‘This didn’t happen, we don’t live in a world that has this legacy.’ The problem is, it did happen. But there’s a desire to say ‘It could never have happened’, you think, ‘Oh my God, thank God, I really was upset that it might have happened.’

So I wasn’t drawn in but I was always listening with a third ear, thinking, are other people being drawn in?

Geraldine Doogue: Sociologically. Look, part of the case relied on proving that his denial of the Holocaust came not from his research as an historian but as someone who was inherently anti-Semitic and racist. How was that done?

Deborah Lipstadt: Well, first of all, we had access through the process of discovery, to his diaries and his videotapes and his private speeches that he gave that had been videotaped etc., and it revealed to us things that we never imagined we would find. In his diary we found that he describes singing a little ditty he had written to his nine-month old daughter when he’s taking her for walks and whenever he’d quote, as he describes them, half-breed children are wheeled by, he sings to her,

I am a baby Aryan,
Not a Jew or a Sectarian,
I shall not marry an ape
Or Rastafarian.

Or things like, once I think it was in fact on Australian radio, he was being interviewed, and the interviewer said to him, they were talking about black people, blacks, or people’s colour, playing for the English cricket team, and Irving said, ‘I feel queasy when I see blacks playing for the English cricket team’, and in fact when Richard Rampton, my barrister, my QC, asked Irving about this in court, Irving said, ‘Oh Mr Rampton, you’re trying to paint me as a racist, I am not a racist, I think God just made this species different.’ Well that’s pretty revealing.

Geraldine Doogue: Yes.

Deborah Lipstadt: This is a man who gives a speech to an audience, and the audience laughs when he says these things. He says, ‘I was on vacation and I turned on the television, and the BBC, and I saw one of them reading our news to us.’

[...]

Geraldine Doogue: The big question is, which is what some people like Christopher Hitchens say, in effect if he is so mad or so distorted, and there’s personal quirks there, that would have been exposed. Why did it need this type of campaign?

Deborah Lipstadt: Well it didn’t need it. I mean, he sued me, I never would have sued him, I never would have dragged him into court. He sued me, so I was forced to put up a defence, I had no choice. If I hadn’t put up a defence, as your listeners know, the onus was on me to prove the truth of what I said. I don’t believe history belongs in the court room. I was dragged in there and had no choice but to fight. So I wouldn’t say he’s mad. I’ll tell you what I think he is, I think he is pathetic, I think he’s a pathetic figure. And I think in fact he’s not alone, I think all racists and anti-Semites and misogynists, are pathetic, and the challenge is to fight them and not to build them up and say they’re so important, but to defeat, utterly defeat them, and at the same time to show what pathetic kinds of characters they are.

[...]

History on Trial reviewed in Australian Jewish News

The June 24 (print) edition of the Australian Jewish News has a review of History on Trial:

Triumph over Holocaust denier Irving
Book Review
Chemi Shalev

HISTORY ON TRIAL: MY DAY IN
COURT WITH DAVID IRVING
Deborah Lipstadt
HarperCollins, $25.95

The comfort of modern Diaspora life, especially in countries such as Australia and the United States, is not conducive to the creation of genuine heroes; these are usually the product of difficult times or dire circumstance.

One exception to this rule, however, is Deborah Lipstadt, professor of modern Jewish and Holocaust studies at Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia.

Like her namesake from the Book of Judges, Lipstadt can rightly be considered a latter-day Jewish heroine of truly biblical proportions.

Lipstadt did not seek this greatness; it was thrust upon her by Holocaust denier David Irving, who in 1995 sued her in a London court for libel and defamation.

In her relatively-unheralded 1993 book Denying the Holocaust: The growing assault on truth and memory, Lipstadt had lambasted Irving as a Hitler-loving and history-distorting Holocaust denier.

Rather than being a legitimate and respected historian, as many considered him, Lipstadt described Irving as a Nazi sympathiser and a habitual distorter and contortionist of the facts at his disposal who consistently diminished the Holocaust and glorified its perpetrators.

Lipstadt's new book History on Trial is her gripping account of the five harrowing years that culminated on April 11, 2000, as Justice Charles Gray ruled against Irving, demolished whatever historical credentials he may have had and, by ordering him to pay court costs of close to £2 million ($A4.7 million), drove him to bankruptcy.

Lipstadt's book is based on the personal records that she kept throughout the gruelling ordeal, from the day she received a letter from her publisher, Penguin, about Irving's suit and mistakenly laughed it off as inconsequential, or "really nuts".

Lipstadt was unaware at the time that contrary to American law, British defamation practice places the burden of proof on the defendant, rather than the plaintiff. It was a formidable and, at times, seemingly-insurmountable task.

Her account of the trial itself is as riveting as only judicial high dramas can be, but horrifying as well in its dissection of the otherwise abhorrent.

Following the wise decision made by her counsel, Richard Rampton QC, to tackle Irving on forensic grounds rather than eyewitness testimonies, the court was subjected to many hours of debate on the exact number of Jewish bodies that could be buried in a ditch after being shot by the Einsatzgruppen death squads in Russia, the extermination capacity of the gas vans that operated at Chelmo and the intricate mathematics involved in calculating the number of cadavers that could have been moved from the gas chamber to the crematoria at Auschwitz.

Throughout the book one cannot but identify with Lipstadt's academic and personal revulsion at Irving, a man who under the cloak of a respected historian was allowed to continue publishing books while publicly claiming that "more women died on the back seat of Edward Kennedy's car at Chappaquiddick than in the gas chambers at Auschwitz.".

The trial only deepened the impression of his malicious and infantile inner world, as revealed, for example, in his private diary entry of the song he would sing to his daughter: "I am a baby Aryan, not Jewish or Sectarian; I have no plans to marry, an Ape or Rastafarian."

And one can only empathise with Lipstadt's dismay at the fact that prominent historians, including the notable World War II expert John Keegan, testified on Irving's behalf, belittling his adulation of Hitler and his astonishing claim that the Nazi leader had little knowledge, if any, of the "unsystematic" killing of Jews while still extolling his "superb" research.

Ultimately, it was Irving who did himself in, by bringing the suit against Lipstadt in the first place, by repeatedly walking into the traps laid for him by the talented Rampton, and by his barely-concealed antisemitism and Hitler adulation, to the point that before his closing argument, in the ultimate Freudian slip, he referred to Justice Gray as "mein fūhrer".

By utterly destroying the credibility of Irving, the most prominent and well respected of Holocaust "revisionists", Lipstadt may not have crushed the Holocaust-denial movement completely, but she certainly dealt it a devastating blow. Her book is a sensational read.

Chemi Shalev is the AJN's associate editor.