The Holocaust as Normal?

Yesterday I was interviewed by Corriere della Sera, a major Italian newspaper. [Once the article is published I will create a link to it for you Italian reading folks.]

The reporter asked me if I ever thought there would come a time when the Holocaust would be treated as a "normal" event. I told him that I hoped never. Because for something to be considered "normal" it would have had to have happened a number of times.

For example, it is so hard to get people to respond to the current tragedy in the Sudan, even when you tell them it is genocide. I assume it's because genocide seems sort of run-of-the-mill today.....

David Duke Visits Syria to support Syrian Government and Attack Jews and Israel

According to a Special Dispatch [November 29, 2005, No. 1035] issued by Memri, the organization which translates materials from the Arab and Moslem Middle East which relate to Israel, David Duke, the former KKK leader and an overt Holocaust denier, recently visited Syria to express his support for Bashar al-Assad.

During his visit, Duke, who is also a former U.S. State Representative from Louisiana, spoke at a rally in support of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, appeared at a Damascus press conference, met with Syrian Grand Mufti Ahmed Hassoun, and gave an interview to speech Duke charged that the U.S. and Syria were both occupied by the Zionists and that the Zionists also occupied "Washington D.C., and New York, and London, and many other capitals.

He charged that "Israel makes the Nazi state look very moderate in terms of its views" and declared that "all over the world you see the same pattern of control over the media, the same pattern of influence."

When David Irving visited the US in the 1990s, he spent time with Duke, playing tennis and editing Duke's book, My Awakening, which can only be described as an antisemitic and racist tirade.

During the course of discovery on my trial, we learned from Irving's diaries, that the two men exchanged fund raising lists. Apparently they assumed a person who would support one would want to support the other.

Birds of a feather..........

Desperate Times call for Desperate Measures or Hitler Diaries Redux?

If, as the Stuttgarter Zeitung speculates [see previous post], Irving wanted to be arrested in order to generate publicity and funding then this would remind me of what he did in 1983 in connection with the Hitler Diaries. As I recount in History on Trial:

In 1983 Der Stern, the German weekly, announced that it had purchased for 3.8 million dollars, 62 previously unknown volumes of “Hitler’s Diaries.” For a brief moment it was the world’s biggest news story. Irving, who had previously purchased documents -- which turned out to be bogus -- from the man who was selling the diaries, was sure they too were bogus.

At a sensational press conference, Stern editors heralded the publication of the diaries and predicted that there would certainly be those who would challenge the diaries, including historians with “no reputation to lose, like David Irving.”

Unbeknownst to Stern, their rival, Bild Zeitung, had snuck Irving into the press conference. A few minutes later, when it was time for questions from the horde of journalists, Irving rushed to the microphone clutching documents which, he said, proved that the diaries were fake.

Dramatically raising them above his head, he demanded that the Stern executives, who had anticipated this as a triumphant moment, to explain how Hitler could have written about the July bomb plot in his diary on the day it happened if, as the film they had just screened demonstrated, his right hand was badly injured. Stern quickly ended the press conference.

Reporters and paparazzi made a beeline for Irving. NBC immediately put him on a live hookup with the Today show, which was then on the air. Irving found this “exhilarating” and marveled at the trail of chaos” he left behind. After spending the rest of the day giving interviews, Irving rose at 3:30 a.m. to appear on ABC’s Nightline. According to his diary he was paid 700 Mark for the appearance. The German publication, Der Spiegel, paid him 20,000 Mark for his story.

Irving was pleased not only by the attention but by the fact that he earned about ,15,000 in three days.

Within a few days, the diaries were becoming yesterday’s news. Suddenly, Irving changed his mind and announced that he now believed the diaries were genuine. Robert Harris, author of Selling Hitler (New York, 1986, p. 359), a study of the diaries incident, believed Irving’s reversal was motivated, in part, by the fact that the diaries “did not contain any evidence to suggest that Hitler was aware of the Holocaust,” thereby supporting the thesis of Hitler’s War.

If Irving was hoping this move would win him publicity, he calculated correctly. The Times (London) immediately put it on its front page. But within a few days the highly respected Bundesarchiv, Germany’s National Archives, concluded, based on careful forensic tests, that the diaries were a forgery and a bad one at that.

When the results were announced Irving quickly composed a press release, accepting the Bundesarchiv’s ruling but stressing that he had been the first person to declare the diaries fakes. “Yes,” a reporter from The Times added when he heard the release, “and the last person to declare them authentic.”

Irving's Arrest: A ploy to solve his financial difficulties?

Did Irving want to be arrested? Some people think, as I suggested in my very first post on this topic [November 18th], that this whole thing may have been contrived for financial and pr motives.

According to a report in the Austrian print magazine, News , the Austrian authorities may well have been told by the student group Irving was going to visit that he was on his way. Why, one has to wonder, would they have done this? They do, after all, sympathize with Irving's views.

A columnist for the "Stuttgarter Zeitung", a daily newspaper from Stuttgart, Germany has a theory. He wonders whether Irving, who had racked up such debts from Irving v. Penguin and Lipstadt, was not courting another trial. A trial in Austria would certainly generate donations from Irving’s sympathizers.

And, I might add, it will also probably prompt donations from those who don’t sympathize with him but see him as the poster child for free speech.
And of course, it would -- as it already has -- generate tremendous publicity.

"Holocaust denier Irving turns to friends in US"

The Independent has an interesting article today on Irving's sources of support in the United States:

Holocaust denier Irving turns to friends in US

By Andrew Gumbel
Published: 27 November 2005

David Irving's recent life has made him look more like an outlaw than an historian. Broke, shunned and declared "persona non grata" across half the planet, it's been quite a comedown for the world's most notorious Holocaust denier.

His latest comeuppance has been an episode as shabby as any and may force him to spend years in prison.

[...]

Denying the existence of the Nazi Holocaust is serious business in the country of Hitler's birth, and what was initially intended as a below-the-radar visit to a far-right student group in Vienna has turned into a legal nightmare.

[....]

In the past, Mr Irving railed against any limitation on his activities as an infringement of free speech - not an unreasonable argument, although he has been known to lard it with dark hints about Jewish conspirators being out to get him.

But in Austria, perhaps in recognition of the gravity of the charges he faces, he has taken a different tack. His Viennese lawyer, Elmar Kresbach, insists he has changed his mind about "the views he is so famous for" after an examination of Soviet archives led him to accept the Nazi gas chambers existed.

That line of argument may surprise Mr Irving's white supremacist friends in the United States, more accustomed to his view that "more women died on the back seat of Edward Kennedy's car at Chappaquiddick than ever died in a gas chamber in Auschwitz". They have extended numerous invitations and organised frequent books sales for him in the past few years.

Among his Stateside sponsors, according to the anti-racist Southern Poverty Law Center, have been the former Ku Klux Klan leader and one-time candidate for the Louisiana governor's office, David Duke, as well as the leading US neo-Nazi organisation, the National Alliance.

Mr Irving's US friends have been a lifeline since he brought a ruinous libel suit in 2000 against Deborah Lipstadt. She had characterised him as anti-Semitic and racist; the High Court found that the criticism was just and ordered Mr Irving to pay court costs estimated to be about £3 million.

[....]

Even his trips to the States have been less than comfortable. In 2003, a restaurant in rural Idaho chose to cancel an event of his and close down for the day after finding out who he was and what sort of people his local fans might be. This summer he received a rare invitation to address a left-wing group in Alabama, the Atheist Law Center, only to provoke outrage among the membership and, this week, the resignation of the group president, Larry Darby.

Mr Darby described Mr Irving to his membership only as "an expert on World War Two, the Nazi era and the erosion... of free speech". In an interview with the Southern Poverty Law Center, Mr Darby made some pointed remarks about Jews and suggested that attacking them was consistent with his general anti-religious worldview. "I think it's easy in this country to speak out on Christianity and even Islam," he said. "I think it's more difficult to speak out on things of a Jewish nature."

Mr Daby now plans to run as a candidate for attorney general of Alabama.

"Irving ordered to pay court costs of about £3 million": A correction, lest you get the wrong impression

Many papers have reported on the fact that Irving was bankrupted by his case against me and was ordered to pay Penguin and me our court costs. The fact is that I never pursued him for my portion of the costs and never received a penny from him.

I explain this all in the final chapter of History on Trial.

Irving "recants": a prediction

To those of you who have been asking me why he recanted, my guess is that he will plead guilty, claim he is no longer a denier, and tell the court that he has "seen the light." I would not be surprised if he then left Austria, returned to London, and claimed that the only reason he "recanted" was to avoid ending up in an Austrian jail.

Irving plans to plead guilty....

The Guardian's report that Irving was convinced by the 1990s of the existence of gas chambers and believes that "the discussion on Auschwitz, the gas chambers and the Holocaust is finished ... it's useless to dispute it'" raises the question:

If he felt this way in the 1990s, then why was he arguing to the contrary in the High Court in 2000??

He really looks ridiculous to me. The Court Jester for sure....

Irving plans to plead guilty and declare his "remorse" at trial

As noted in an earlier post, after the trial, Irving declared he would continue denying the Holocaust. His lawyer has evidently expanded on the extent of his apparent "change of views". The U.K. Guardian reports:

'Repentant' Irving to plead guilty but must stay in jail

Ian Traynor in Vienna
Saturday November 26, 2005
The Guardian

David Irving, the discredited British historian of the Nazis, will spend Christmas and New Year in a Viennese jail after yesterday being refused bail and being remanded for four weeks pending trial for allegedly lying about the Holocaust.

[...]

At yesterday's custody hearing the magistrate dismissed Mr Irving's lawyer's request for bail on the grounds that he might disappear or that Britain would refuse to extradite him back to Austria for trial because the alleged crime is not an offence in the UK.

[...]

Mr Irving has 10 days to appeal against the indictment but is not likely to lodge an appeal. His strategy is to plead guilty before a jury trial, but to declare his remorse and insist that he has revised his views on the Third Reich in the years since he made the Austrian speeches in 1989. "This might be a big case, but it's not very difficult," his lawyer, Elmar Kresbach, told the Guardian yesterday. "There are the transcripts of his speeches, there is a newspaper interview that he gave [in 1989]. It's pretty black and white.

"But Irving told me that he has changed his views after researching in the Russian archives in the 1990s. He said, 'I've repented. I've no intention of repeating these views. That would be historically stupid and I'm not a stupid man.'

"He said, 'I fully accept this, it's a fact. The discussion on Auschwitz, the gas chambers and the Holocaust is finished ... it's useless to dispute it'."

According to Mr Irving and his lawyer, the 67-year-old historian, who lost a major libel case against Penguin Books and the US historian Deborah Lipstadt in the high court in London five years ago, entered Austria this month via Switzerland and drove to Vienna to meet student radicals renowned for their pro-Nazi views.

[...]

Mr Kresbach argued that his client was elderly, no threat to Austria, and had promised to return for the trial if released on bail of up to €20,000.

"It's not really necessary to keep him here," said Mr Kresbach. "He promised to come back." The magistrate dismissed the argument, however, declaring there was a "flight risk."

Bail denied: court fears Irving might "abscond"

The BBC has reported:

Austrians refuse bail for Irving

Austrian authorities have refused bail for British historian David Irving, who is facing Holocaust denial charges.

Mr Irving, 67, was arrested on 11 November in connection with two speeches he gave in Austria in 1989.

Mr Irving's lawyer has said the historian now no longer denies that gas chambers existed in Nazi death camps.

[...]

A court in Vienna ruled on Friday that Mr Irving must stay in custody as there was a risk he could abscond.

His lawyer Elmar Kresbach had offered to post bail.

[...]

Mr Irving sued US historian Deborah Lipstadt in London in 2000 for labelling him a Holocaust denier. He lost in a comprehensive verdict.

Despite the mortal blow to his reputation in 2000, he remains a showman and may well relish the opportunity to grandstand before a wider audience if put on trial, BBC legal affairs analyst Jon Silverman says.

In his books, Mr Irving has argued that the scale of the extermination of the Jews by the Nazis in World War II has been exaggerated.

He has also claimed that Nazi leader Adolf Hitler knew nothing of the Holocaust.

Mr Irving was previously arrested in Austria in 1984.

Irving's About-face: We should not be rejoicing. Irving's followers should be worrying.

People seem to want to know more about Irving's about-face regarding the gas chambers. Many of those who have contacted me think his 180 turn around is really significant. They treat it as a victory of sorts. I don't, not because I am not glad Irving has abandoned this particularly calumny. The fact is that I just don't think what he does is significant.... certainly not to people who care about truth.

First of all, let me point out as late as two months ago Irving's was lauding the Leuchter Report and claiming that it was the report that convinced that gas chambers were a scientific impossibility. Now he says that it was evidence he saw in the Moscow archives which convinced him.

[Check it out on his website in his correspondence with Sara Salzman of Denver on September 21, 2005. He wrote to her again on September 23, 2005. In both cases he left no doubt that he did not believe there were gas chambers. What happened in the interim to cause this sudden volte-face? Seems strange to me that he suddenly discovered this information. Was he even in Moscow and if so what evidence did he find there to cause this great reversal? Did his lawyer "misspeak"? Did he take Irving at his word? Hmm....]

Far more important however, is the fact that what Irving thinks does not seem to me to be important at all. Why should we pay any mind to someone about whom a judge writes that he "perverts" the evidence, that his claims are a "travesty" of the evidence, that his findings are "unreal," and his conclusions not mistakes but "deliberate... distortions."

The people who should be worrying are the deniers and those who have hitched their wagons to David Irving's star. Their world seems to be crashing....

History on Trial among Amazon's "Best of 2005"

Amazon.com has posted the "Best Books of 2005". In the History category, the list of Top 10 Editors' Picks puts History on Trial at number 4.

Irving's Austrian lawyer: "Austrian politicians share Irving's views"

Yesterday's edition of the Austrian daily "Standard" contains an interview with Irving's attorney. Kresbach. He argued that Irving should be released because there were some Austrian politicians who publicly advocated positions similiar to those advocated by Irving and they were not in jail.

Sad to say, the lawyer seems to have gotten that one right.

"Irving now says there were gas chambers": What's going on?

Since the news "broke" today that Irving acknowledges there were gas chambers, I have once again been inundated with questions. People what to know: "What's going on?" It's late and been a long day, so just a few words on this. I guess that his lawyer may well have read the judgment in Irving v. Penguin and Lipstadt. The evidence for gas chambers [and for virtually everything else that he denied] is so overwhelming that for him to continue to stand by his earlier positions -- despite what he said to Jeremy Paxman [see previous post below] on the night of the judgment -- would guarantee that the court would find him guiltly.

He had one of two choices: stand by his position and be found guilty or claim that he has seen the light [or supposedly discovered new evidence] and now knows that he was wrong. Of course, since he misrepresented, distorted, and invented the evidence [check Judge Charles Gray's judgment in the trial], he has always known the truth. He created the lies in the first place. So this new "discovery" on his part is, once again, a lot of bunk.

My guess is that this will enable the Austrian court to slap a fine on him and hustle him out of the country. My second guess is that they will be delighted to do so....

Seems like he is once again validating my choice of titles for the final chapter of History on Trial: "The Court Jester."

Lawyer claims Irving has 'changed some of his famous views'

As Richard Evans noted in Lying About Hitler (p. 234), shortly after the trial, Irving was interviewed by Jeremy Paxman on BBC2 TV's Newsnight. When Paxman asked Irving, "Will you stop denying the Holocaust on the basis of this judgment?" Irving baldly replied, "Good Lord, no."

However, news.Scotsman.com reported today:

Irving acknowledges gas chambers

A lawyer for British historian David Irving said on the eve of a court hearing that Irving admitted past statements could be interpreted as denying the existence of Nazi gas chambers - but now acknowledges they existed.

Prosecutors charged Irving earlier this week under an Austrian law that makes denying the Holocaust a crime.

[...]

Irving has changed his views on gas chambers in recent years, his attorney, Elmar Kresbach said.

"He changed some of the views he is so famous for," Kresbach said.

[...]

A Challenge to the Austrian Authorities: Will an Irving Trial Simply be a Chance for him to Grandstand?

Many people have expressed concerns that Irving will use this trial to "grandstand" and to promote his Holocaust denial pseudo-theories. While I share some of these fears, there is a way of addressing this problem. It is precisely what my stellar legal team did in my case. In short, preparation, preparation, preparation. Irving tried to showboat [grandstand] but he was not able to because at every turn we cut him off with the facts. We did not rely on fancy legal footwork. We did rely on research who did dogged research. With the facts assembled by a dream team of researchers we were able to show that all of Irving's arguments -- and by extension those of the Holocaust denial movement -- were no more than a lot of bunk.

Now that the Austrians have arrested and appear prepared to bring him to trial, it is their responsibility to properly prepare in order to demonstrate that his claims are bluster and bravado not facts. It is not rocket science. It does call for a serious commitment to the effort.

BBC World [TV] tonight 10:10 EST

I will be on BBC World [TV] tonight around 10:10 p.m. e.s.t. [NYC] regarding Irving's arrest.

What Impact did the fact that I am a woman have on my legal case?

I was in LA this weekend and was asked a question I had not been asked before. What impact did the fact that I am a woman have on the response to my legal travails? I think there are two aspects to this. First of all, it seems to me that Irving was particularly excited about going after a woman. It was easier for him to make the case that I was simply the puppet of the "enemies of truth," i.e. the Jewish community. After all, women could never lead a conspiracy but they certainly can be its puppets.

In terms of the response to the trial, it is possible that after four months of watching Irving try to tear me down and my willingness to remain silent in the face of his, sometimes quite personal, attacks, people's sympathies towards me were enhanced because I am a woman.

It is all speculative... so treat this post as that.

Lipstadt in Denver December 4th

I will be participating in the Denver Jewish Book Fair which is sponsored by Mizel Center for Arts and Culture at the Denver Jewish Community Center.

My talk is on Sunday, December 4th at 7 p.m. For information check out the program of the Mizel Center .

I would be delighted to see you there.

The New Criminologist on Irving's arrest

The New Criminologist has an interesting comment about Irving's arrest. At the end of the post there is a cautionary comment about the dangers of deniers:

This is not usually done on the TNC news desk, but on a personal note, I have spent the last 14 months researching historical revisionism and holocaust denial for a major upcoming project, and as a result have seen the destructive results denying the Holocaust can do.

The rabid anti-Semitism and manipulation of evidence used by these “historians” to prove their ludicrous beliefs is an affront to all people with even a basic grip on reality. The idea that the Holocaust was an invention of “a worldwide Jewish conspiracy” is not only laughable, but also sickening.

Revisionists claim that these laws are a threat to their freedom of speech. They are not. They are stopping the spread of hysterical hate propaganda. Would these same people think it would be justified to allow an open debate encouraging pro-extremist opinions, such as those shared by al-Qaeda, to impressionable students?"

While I don't agree that Holocaust denial should be outlawed, I recognize that some people, such as the author of the New Criminologist, do.

People often ask me, given that I am against these laws, just how dangerous deniers are. Right now I think they pose a relatively limited danger. My trial, together with other reversals they suffered, have left deniers in the Western world on the ropes. [The case is quite different in the Arab/Moslem world.]

However, even if deniers do not present a clear and present danger, we must remain aware of the insidious ways in which misinformation can creep into the historical record.

If anyone doubts how deniers could potentially skew the historical record, I urge them to compare the commonly held perception of the bombing of Dresden with the historical reality.

Most people think of the bombing as something that is well nigh an Allied war crime that caused 100s of thousands of deaths. They are convinced that Dresden had no military significance and the city was bombed just to humble the German people. [Even if this were indeed so, I find it strange that no one considers the Nazi bombing of London a war crime....]

In fact the facts about the bombing are quite different:

1. Dresden had military significance. There were numerous factories in the city which made equipment for the German army and airforce. The city was a railway hub and thousands [probably over 10,000] German soldiers and officers passed through the city on a daily basis.

2. The war, from the perspective of the soldier on the ground, was hardly over. The Battle of the Bulge, which had ended but two weeks earlier, had hardly been an Allied victory and it was very fresh in the Allied memory. For the soldier on the ground the war was certainly NOT almost over.

3. There is no documentary evidence of strafing. Frederick Taylor, the British historian, points out in his study of the bombing that on other occasions when British and American pilots engaged in strafing, they wrote about it in their reports. That was not the case in Dresden. [Yet David Irving claims it is.]

4. The death toll was, according to the Nazi era Dresden Police, between 25-30,000. While not a small number, this is nowhere near the 100s of thousands people, such as Irving claim, it was.

How did we come to have such a different perception of the bombing of Dresden? Taylor identifies 3 sources:

1. Goebbels who believed that frightening the German people was the way to make the fight to the finish. He took the Dresden police’s death toll and added a zero. Hence 25,000 became 250,000.

2. Communist East Germany which used the bombing as a means of demonstrating the compassion of the USSR [which did not participate in the bombing] and mendacity of the USA and UK [which did].

3. David Irving, whose book on Dresden makes false claims about death tolls of up to 250, 000. Irving's influence was greatly inflated when his version of the bombing was relied upon by Kurt Vonnegut, the author of Slaughterhouse 5.

For more details on the bombing of Dresden – both the reality and perception – see Hdot.org, the website on Irving v. Lipstadt and Penguin UK. Click on evidence and read the section of Richard Evan’s report on the topic. See also Frederick Taylor’s book, February 13, 1945: The Bombing of Dresden. For how this played out in the trial itself see History on Trial: My Day in Court with David Irving.

As you will see the historical record can be changed.