Denial [Movie Tie-in] Read online

  DEDICATION

  Dedicated

  to the victims of the Shoah,

  and

  To those who enabled me—in so many different ways—to

  fight the attempt to ravage their history and memory

  EPIGRAPH

  But take utmost care, so that you do not forget the things that you saw with your own eyes and so that they do not fade from your mind as long as you live. And teach them to your children and your children’s children.

  —Deuteronomy 4:9

  Forsan et haec olim meminisse iuvabit.

  Someday, perhaps, it will bring pleasure to remember all this.

  —The Aeneid I: 203

  CONTENTS

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Foreword by David Hare

  Note to the Reader

  Prologue: The Letter

  THE PRELUDE 1. A Personal and Scholarly Odyssey

  2. The Defense Strategy

  3. Auschwitz: A Forensic Tour

  4. Our Objective Changes

  THE TRIAL 5. “All Rise!”

  6. Irving in the Box: Not a Denier but a Victim

  7. The Chain of Documents

  8. The Holocaust: Random Killings or Systematic Genocide?

  9. Queues and Gas Chamber Controversies

  10. An American Professor

  11. Exonerating Hitler, Excoriating the Allies

  12. Fighting Words

  13. Revolting Calculations

  14. Lying about Hitler

  15. The Diary of Anne Frank: A Novel?

  16. Our German Contingent

  17. Cavorting with Thugs or Guilt by Association?

  18. One-Person Gas Chambers and White People’s Polkas

  19. The Final Scene

  THE AFTERMATH 20. Judgment Day: Phone Chains, Psalms, and Sleepless Survivors

  21. Enormous Thanks

  22. The “Jester’s Costume”

  Afterword by Alan Dershowitz

  Acknowledgments

  Notes

  Index

  P.S. Insights, Interviews & More . . .* About the author

  About the book

  Read on

  Praise

  Also by Deborah E. Lipstadt

  Credits

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  FOREWORD

  By David Hare

  In 2010 I was first approached by the BBC and Participant Films to adapt Deborah Lipstadt’s book History on Trial for the screen. My first reaction was one of extreme reluctance. I have no taste for Holocaust movies. It seems both offensive and clumsy to add an extra layer of fiction to suffering which demands no gratuitous intervention. It jars. Faced with the immensity of what happened, sober reportage and direct testimony has nearly always been the most powerful approach. In the Yad Vashem Museum in Jerusalem, I had noticed that all the photography, however marginal and however inevitably incomplete, had a shock and impact lacking in the rather contrived and uninteresting art.

  It was a considerable relief on reading History on Trial to find that, although the Holocaust was its governing subject, there was no need for it to be visually re-created. In 2000 the British historian David Irving, whose writing had frequently offered a sympathetic account of World War II from the Nazi point of view, had sued Deborah Lipstadt in the High Court in London, claiming that her description of him as a denier in her previous book, Denying the Holocaust, had done damage to his reputation. In English courts at the time, the burden of proof in any libel case lay not with the accuser but with the defendant, compared to the United States where it was the litigant’s job to prove the untruth of the alleged libel. It was for that very reason that London was Irving’s chosen venue. He had thought it would make his legal action easier. All at once, an Atlanta academic found herself with the unenviable task of marshalling conclusive scientific proof for the attempted extermination of the European Jews over fifty years earlier.

  There were many interesting features to the case—not least the condescension of some dubious parts of the British academic community to an upstart American—but three aspects appealed to me above all. First, there was a technical script-writing challenge. In conventional American pictures, the role of the individual is wholeheartedly celebrated. In a typical studio film, even one as good as Erin Brockovich, there is always an obvious injustice which is corrected by an inarticulate person suddenly being given the chance to find their voice. The tradition goes back to Jimmy Stewart, Henry Fonda, and beyond. But what was unusual about Lipstadt’s experience was that she was an already articulate and powerfully intelligent woman who was ordered by her own defence team not to take the stand. The decision was made that her testimony would give David Irving, conducting his own prosecution, the opportunity to switch the focus of the trial from what it should properly be about—the examination of how his anti-Semitism infected his honesty—to an attack on something entirely irrelevant: the reliability in the witness box of Lipstadt’s instant capacity to command every scattergun detail of history.

  It was quite a professional undertaking to make drama out of such a complete and painful act of self-denial. One thing was for sure: we would not be offering a boilerplate Hollywood narrative. At great expense to her own peace of mind, Deborah Lipstadt had agreed to be silenced. The fascination of the film would lie with the personal cost of that choice. What were the implications for someone who, having been brought up to believe in the unique power of the individual, discovered instead the far subtler joys of teamwork? The book she had written turned out to be her complete defence, and the verdict vindicated that book in almost every detail. But in order to effect that defence, she had to trust the judgment of two other people from a country and a bizarre legal system different from her own—her Scottish barrister, Richard Rampton, and her English solicitor, Anthony Julius.

  Second, it was clear from the start that this film would be a defence of historical truth. It would be arguing that although historians have the right to differently interpret facts, they do not have the right to knowingly misrepresent those facts. But if such integrity was necessary for historians, then it surely had to apply to screenwriters too. If I planned to offer an account of the trial and of David Irving’s behaviour, I would enjoy none of the film writer’s usual licence to speculate or invent. From the trial itself there were thirty-two days of transcript, which took me weeks to read thoroughly. Not only would I refuse to write scenes which offered any hokey psychological explanation for Irving’s character outside the court, I would also be bound to stick rigidly to the exact words used inside it. I could not allow any neo-Fascist critic later to claim that I had rewritten the testimony. Nor did I want to. The trial scenes are verbatim. To say that such fidelity represented an almost impossible dramatic difficulty—this trial, like any other, was often extremely boring—would be to understate. At times, I would beat my head, wondering why real-life characters couldn’t put things in ways which more pithily expressed their purposes.

  But it was for a third overriding reason that I came to feel that a film of Deborah’s fascinating book cried out to be made. In an Internet age it is, at first glance, democratic to say that everyone is entitled to their own opinion. That is surely true. It is however a fatal step to then claim that all opinions are equal. Some opinions are backed by fact. Others are not. And those which are not backed by fact are worth considerably less than those which are. A few clubby English historians had always indulged David Irving on the grounds that although he was evidently soft on Hitler, he was nevertheless a master of his documents. These admirers were ready to step forward and attack Lipstadt’s character and her success in the courts on the grounds that it was likely to make other histori
ans more cautious, and thereby to inhibit freedom of speech. But far from being an attack on freedom of speech, Lipstadt’s defence turned out to be its powerful triumph. Freedom of speech may include freedom deliberately to lie, but it also includes the right to be called out on your lying.

  During the early days of the Renaissance, Copernicus and Galileo would have scoffed at the idea that there was any such thing as authority. A sceptical approach to life is a fine thing and one which has powered revolutionary change and high ideals. But a sceptical approach to scientific fact is rather less admirable. It is dangerous. As Lipstadt says in my screenplay, certain things are true. Elvis is dead. The ice caps are melting. And the Holocaust did happen. Millions of Jews went to their deaths in camps and open pits in a brutal genocide which was sanctioned and operated by the leaders of the Third Reich. There are some subjects about which two points of view are not equally valid. We are entering, in politics especially, a post-factual era in which it is apparently permissible for public figures to assert things without evidence, and then to justify their assertions by adding “Well, that’s my opinion,” as though that in itself is some kind of justification. It isn’t. And such charlatans need to learn it isn’t. Contemplating the Lipstadt/Irving trial may help them to that end.

  David Hare, July 2016

  NOTE TO THE READER

  Long before I knew that David Irving’s legal threats would evolve into a major lawsuit, I began to keep a detailed record of all my conversations with my lawyers and others involved in the case. Eventually, I decided to keep a journal in which I recorded conversations and my own thoughts. Virtually all the quotations in this book are drawn from those notes and journals. In a few rare instances I have re-created an exchange from memory. I have tried to be as faithful as possible—well aware that memory can be capricious—to my conversation partners. All quotes from the court transcripts appear as the transcriber recorded them. For the sake of consistency I have standardized the spelling of certain words, for example, antisemitism. I have periodically emphasized certain words because this is how I, according to my notes and memory, heard them. At any given trial, particularly a nonjury trial, a topic may be raised, put aside, and returned to at odd intervals. In order to make it easier for the reader to follow the discussion, I have occasionally collapsed a courtroom exchange that stretched out over two or more days. The endnotes indicate the source of the quotes.

  PROLOGUE

  THE LETTER

  It started on a perfect fall day. The 1995 academic year at Emory University had just begun. The summer heat had broken, the campus was resplendent, the foliage was turning autumnal colors, and the students were responding in kind. They poured out of the Italian Renaissance–style buildings surrounding the grassy quadrangle, the unofficial center of campus. This expanse of lawn was filled with people tossing frisbees, studying, playing ball, or just enjoying the last days before “winter,” such as it is in Georgia, would drive them inside. I delighted in this scene as I crossed the quad to my office. I had come to Atlanta from Los Angeles a few years earlier to accept an endowed chair in Modern Jewish and Holocaust Studies and, though I missed my friends, I now considered Atlanta home.

  I had just finished teaching a class on the history of the Holocaust. Relaxed and upbeat, I was scheduled to talk to a student about her graduate work and then spend the afternoon finishing a book proposal on my new research project—a study of how the Holocaust was represented in post–World War II America. As I came into my office, my secretary told me that an express letter had just arrived from Penguin, the British publisher of my book, Denying the Holocaust: The Growing Assault on Truth and Memory, a scholarly study of Holocaust denial. Intrigued, I asked the waiting student if she would mind if I quickly glanced at the letter. After reading but a few lines, I laughed aloud. The student, who was reviewing her notes, looked up as I said, still chuckling, “This is really nuts.” I explained that David Irving, the world’s most prominent Holocaust denier, was threatening to sue me for libel for calling him a denier.

  In my book I had devoted a couple of hundred words to Irving, describing him as a “Hitler partisan wearing blinkers” who “distort[ed] evidence . . . manipulat[ed] documents, [and] skew[ed] . . . and misrepresent[ed] data in order to reach historically untenable conclusions.” I wrote that “on some level Irving seems to conceive himself as carrying on Hitler’s legacy.” I considered him the most dangerous of Holocaust deniers because unlike other deniers, who were known only for being deniers, Irving was the author of numerous books about World War II and the Third Reich, some of which were well regarded. Virtually all aficionados of World War II history knew his name, even if they found his work a bit too sympathetic to the Third Reich. His books were reviewed in major periodicals and, consequently, his Holocaust-denial activities garnered far more attention than those of other deniers.

  My words were admittedly harsh, but I considered them noncontroversial because Irving had so publicly expressed his Holocaust denial. In 1988, when the Canadian government charged a German émigré, Ernst Zündel, with promoting Holocaust denial, Irving testified on Zündel’s behalf. He told the court that there was no “overall Reich policy to kill the Jews”; “no documents whatsoever show that a Holocaust had ever happened,” and the gas chambers for mass killings were an impossibility.1 Since then Irving had repeatedly denied the Holocaust. When asked by a reporter why all mention of the Holocaust had disappeared from a new edition of one of his books, he responded, “If something didn’t happen, then you don’t even dignify it with a footnote.”2 He denied the use of gas chambers to systematically kill Jews, argued that there was no officially sanctioned Third Reich plan to annihilate European Jewry, and contended that Hitler was “probably the biggest friend the Jews had in the ‘Third Reich.’ He was the one doing everything he could to prevent nasty things happening to them.”3 Irving considered survivors, who asserted that they had seen gas chambers, to be liars or charlatans. Given Irving’s record, his threat seemed absurd. How, I wondered, could someone who had called the Holocaust a “legend” argue that he wasn’t a denier?

  Convinced that this was nothing more than sound and fury, I rather deliberately tossed the letter onto one of the perennial piles on my desk and turned my attention to the student. A few days later I dug the letter out—by this point it was nesting under other mail—gave it to my research assistant, and asked her to provide Penguin’s lawyers with the sources on which I had built my critique of Irving. Given that virtually everything I said about him could be traced to a reliable source, I was certain that this would be the end of the matter. I cautioned my assistant not to expend too much time on it and to return as quickly as possible to collecting the material I needed for my new project.

  Ironically, twenty-five years earlier, when I first learned of Holocaust denial, I had reacted in a similar fashion, brushing it off as insignificant. In the mid-1970s, Professor Yehuda Bauer, one of the leading scholars on the history of the Holocaust, told me that a California-based group, the Institute for Historical Review (IHR), was distributing a journal denying the Holocaust. I scoffed at the idea that someone would take them seriously. Now, sitting in my Emory office, I wondered who could possibly take David Irving’s claims that he was not a denier seriously. Certainly this had to be just a ploy to intimidate me. Over coffee, I told some colleagues about the letter and predicted it would go nowhere.

  As it turned out, I was wrong on all counts. Irving would take this very seriously as would the British courts. The fact that my sources were all documented did not protect me in the United Kingdom, as it would have in the United States. In fact, I was at a decided disadvantage. British law placed the burden of proof on me as the defendant. It was a mirror image of American law. In the United States Irving would have to prove I lied. In the United Kingdom I had to prove I told the truth.

  As different people were galvanized into helping this campaign, I kept thinking how Irving, in his accusations against me, depicted me as pa
rt of a global conspiracy. According to Irving, I had “pursued a sustained malicious, vigorous, well-funded, and reckless worldwide campaign of personal defamation” against him.4 Nothing could have been further from the truth. Denying the Holocaust was my individual project, carried out with the help of a modest research grant that enabled me to hire a research assistant, copy reams of material, and travel to a number of archives. Some Jewish organizations had collections of newspaper clippings on deniers and publications by deniers that they shared with me. Most of the time, I sat alone in my study trying to explicate for my readers the history of Holocaust denial. It was a solitary effort until Irving decided to pursue me. Then, and only then, did a group of people galvanize around me and help provide the funds that made it possible for me to stave off Irving’s attacks. If my supporters constituted some sort of conspiracy—as Irving repeatedly charged was the case—it was one that was determined to ensure that history not be trampled for nefarious purposes.

  On a number of occasions, I had been approached by people who wanted to bring legal action against deniers. I always cautioned them against doing so, because in the United States the First Amendment practically guaranteed their failure. Even in countries where it was legally possible to pass laws outlawing Holocaust denial, I opposed such efforts. Those laws would render denial “forbidden fruit,” making it more—not less—alluring. In addition, I did not believe that courtrooms were the proper venue for historical inquiry. Deniers, I argued, should be stopped with reasoned inquiry, not with the blunt edge of the law. Courts, it seemed to me, dispensed justice by having parties present what they consider compelling evidence, such as physical proof and hard facts, to convince a jury or judge beyond a high standard of proof. Historians try to establish historical “truth” by objectively determining what happened. They consider the context and circumstance of an event or a document. They interpret evidence and offer their opinions, all the while aware that other historians may look at the same material and, without engaging in any deception, reach differing conclusions. Historians also know that as new sources and documents come to light, their “truths” may be set aside. Simply put, historical truths cannot be measured like smog that pollutes a town’s air.5