Denial [Movie Tie-in] Read online

  As I left the courtroom for lunch, I found Ursula sitting on a bench with Professor Sussman. He was weeping. Ursula motioned for me to come over. Shaking my head no, I pointed at my watch to indicate that we only had an hour for lunch. The other members of the legal team were already rushing toward Rampton’s chambers. I was anxious to hear their assessment of what had happened in court. I also knew that I didn’t feel like becoming entangled in what was obviously, for some reason, an emotional moment for Professor Sussman. Ursula, however, was persistent and when she wants something even the most resolute of people tend to crumble. I approached, intending to talk for just a moment. Sussman apologized profusely for his public display of emotions. He explained that listening to Irving had aroused in him personal and difficult memories. He had been sent as a young child to England from his native Germany. Many of his relatives had not survived. His parents had managed to reach England. Aware that I was in a rush, he said he had just one question. “When my mother, a native of Hamburg, used to recall her life in Germany she would speak of a Gustav Lipstadt. Was he a relative?”

  Now I was overcome by emotion. Gustav Lipstadt was my grandfather. I never knew him. My father, who had died when I was in my early twenties, had not told me much about him. He would have gladly told me more had I shown a greater interest. To my everlasting regret, I had not. Suddenly, the legal analysis taking place in Richard Rampton’s chambers paled in significance. The only picture we had of my grandfather showed a man with a round full face, goatee, slight wry smile, exceptionally kind eyes, and a very bushy mustache. I had learned that he was a gracious man with a keen sense of humor and a willingness to do the outrageous, or, at the least, what bourgeois German Jews considered outrageous. He used to cross a park each morning on his way to work. A monkey grinder generally situated himself next to the entrance of the park. My grandfather noticed that few people were dropping coins in his can. One morning, on his way to work, he told the man to give him the little organ. He stood there playing it with the monkey at his side. The man’s business skyrocketed. I wanted to ask Mr. Sussman all sorts of questions. He, however, insisted that I go off with the lawyers. “That,” he said, “is more important.” I was no longer sure, but I went.

  As we returned from Rampton’s office, I saw my friend Grace. When she had been a graduate student at Columbia University in the late 1960s, she had often visited my parents on Manhattan’s Upper West Side. She quietly said, “Your father would have been proud of you.” Despite my father’s German roots and formal demeanor, he too enjoyed doing the outrageous. Every morning he would walk our cocker spaniel, Brandy, for about fifteen minutes. At one point, these walks began to last a half hour or longer. At the end of about two weeks my father explained why. An elderly couple ran the newspaper stand on the corner of Eighty-sixth Street and Broadway, which was on his dog walking route. One morning, my father learned that the wife was ill. My father asked, “How do you take a break in order to go to the bathroom?” When the man explained that he could not leave the stand, my father volunteered to watch the stand for a few minutes each morning. And so this distinguished-looking gentleman with his impeccably trimmed red Vandyke beard, dressed in his business suit, gray homburg, and overcoat, with a dog at the leash, stood on Broadway selling newspapers.

  Sussman had provided one link to my family and Grace another. As I waited for the proceedings to resume, I reflected on how my father, who had died too young, and a grandfather, whom I never knew, had so unexpectedly come into this setting. I had expected the trial to expose me to personal stories. I never anticipated that they would be my own.

  IRVING ON HITLER AND HATRED

  After lunch Irving returned to the stand. He insisted that he did not “manipulate his sources to his own political and ideological desire to exculpate Mr Hitler.” In fact, Irving declared, he “bent over backwards” to mention Hitler’s crimes. “He issued the euthanasia order for the killing of the mentally disabled. . . . He ordered the killing of the British commandos who fell into German captivity. He ordered the liquidation of the male population of Stalingrad and Leningrad.” But Hitler, Irving added, had also done some things worthy of praise. “He did pick his nation up from out of the mire after World War II [sic] and reunify it and gave it a sense of direction and a sense of pride again which, from the German point of view . . . was something commendable.”17

  Judge Gray asked Irving to respond to our accusation that he blamed what was done during the Third Reich against Jews “upon the Jews themselves.” Irving dismissed this as a “gross oversimplification,” though he acknowledged that, on a number of occasions, he had said, “If I was a Jew I would be far more concerned, not by the question of who pulled the trigger, but why.” Why, Irving asked, did Josef Goebbels, who, he claimed, had not been an antisemite in his early years, become one of the “most criminal antisemites of all times? . . . Is it something in the water? Something must have caused him to change.” Judge Gray wanted clarification. “Can I just be clear what you are meaning when you say ‘something must have caused him to change,’ something done by Jews themselves?” Suddenly Irving seemed to back down a bit. He told Judge Gray he would leave that for someone else to investigate “because I am in trouble as it is, my Lord, and I do not think that one would earn any great kudos for investigating that.”18

  When Judge Gray asked Irving about our allegation that he associated with neo-Nazis, Irving emphatically dismissed it as “guilt by association.” At the most, he may have associated with someone who was associated with someone who was an extremist. He compared it to the song with the lyrics: “I danced with a man who danced with a girl who danced with the Prince of Wales.” Judge Gray replied, “I understand what you are saying and, indeed, it may well be that this does not turn out to be one of the most important issues in the case.” Judge Gray’s sympathetic comments were worrisome as I was convinced that Irving’s association with neo-Nazis and antisemites was directly linked to his Holocaust denial and was an important aspect of the case.

  Judge Gray asked Irving about his connection with Zündel. Irving said that he testified at Zündel’s trial because he thought it was “my duty as an historian, as a public citizen, to give evidence . . . it was a mistake, because . . . that has been used as a reason to destroy me.”19

  Judge Gray, having given Irving a chance to respond to our allegations, asked if he had anything to add. Irving said that he had already spoken of the pecuniary consequences of my book on his life. However, “there has also been a more intangible consequence, that I have found myself subjected to a burden of hatred which you cannot quantify, but which is quite definitely there.” He offered two illustrations of those burdens. A few weeks earlier at a Los Angeles book fair, a “very notorious member of the Jewish community, one of the most extreme members in the United States with a long criminal record—came up to the stand and screamed that he was going to . . . kill me. ‘You’re a Holocaust denier,’ he screamed as he was led away by the police.”20 Having lived in Los Angeles for many years, I did not doubt that this incident was possible and made a calculated guess about the identity of the culprit. I hated such tactics. They give those who practice them a false sense of bravado and those who are subjected to them—in this case Irving—a chance to play the victim. When a Jewish student in London told me that he was organizing a group to stand outside the courthouse and shout epithets at Irving, I implored him not to. I planned to fight with facts, not taunts.

  Irving’s second example was more disconcerting. A few months before the trial his disabled thirty-eight-year-old daughter had died. Press reports described it as suicide. After the burial he said the family received an elaborate wreath of white roses and lilies with a card attached that said, “Truly a merciful death.” The card was signed “Philip Bouhler and friends.” Bouhler had been the Nazi doctor in charge of the program for euthanizing mentally and physically disabled Germans.21

  His story about Jewish thugs seemed plausible. This one, however, beg
gared the imagination. I wondered if he had concocted it. As soon as I entertained that thought, I felt guilty for having doubted a man whose daughter had just died in such tragic circumstances. I recalled a meeting a small group of Emory faculty had with the Dalai Lama a few years earlier. When he learned that I teach about the Holocaust, he spoke about how important it was for a people who had been oppressed not to allow themselves to be beset with hatred for their oppressors. I would have to work to keep my anger toward Irving from evolving into hate. David Irving was not worth it.

  This was not the first time I had wrestled with these emotions. Recently, when I had been ranting about the turmoil Irving was causing in my life, Anthony had counseled me to take a different perspective. “Relate to fighting Irving as you might to shit you step in on the street. It has no value and is intrinsically unimportant. However, if you fail to completely clean it off your shoes and track it into your home, it can cause great damage.” This legal battle was a means of cleaning the shit off my shoes.

  I had just finished berating myself for doubting Irving when my sympathies were tested by his concluding remarks. “The kind of hatred that this book has subjected me to [is] something intolerable, something unspeakable and which I would wish no other person to be subjected to.”22 Even though I should have been inured to Irving’s tactics, I still marveled at the fact that he seemed utterly convinced that it was my book—and not his words and actions—that were the cause of his troubles.

  SEVEN

  THE CHAIN OF DOCUMENTS

  I expected Rampton to begin his cross-examination with an eloquent opening question. He rose, straightened his wig, gathered up his robes around him, took a deep breath, and then said, “This is the most ghastly inconvenient and uncomfortable court I have ever been in. . . . I can hardly stand up. I cannot get at my documents. . . . The witness is miles away from the files that he needs. I can hardly see him because of this pillar and my learned junior cannot see him.” The chuckling in the room turned into laughter when Judge Gray responded, “Otherwise you are pretty happy?” In fact, Rampton was not, as he told Judge Gray. “Except for the feeling that I am being boiled alive. . . . Perhaps the authorities at least might pretend that it was mid-summer instead of Siberia.”1 Judge Gray promised to urge the authorities—obviously his control over the Law Courts’ engineering staff was limited—to lower the heat.

  Rampton, turning to Irving, wove the story of the funeral wreath into his opening question. “Mr Irving . . . [that was] an elegiac story that you told us just now—I do not mean that sarcastically at all; it is perfectly true it is—you blame that appalling note on the wreath on Deborah Lipstadt’s book, is that right?” When Irving said yes, Rampton observed that if what I had written was true, Irving’s misfortunes were his responsibility. I understood why Rampton couldn’t ignore the story about the wreath, yet it made me uncomfortable. I was relieved when he moved on.2

  Rampton, noting that Irving had denied being a Holocaust denier, read from a 1991 speech Irving gave in Canada:

  Until 1988, I believed that there had been something like a Holocaust. I believed the millions of people had been killed in factories of death. I believed in the gas chamber. I believed in all the paraphernalia of the modern Holocaust, but [in] 1988, when I . . . gave evidence in the trial of Ernst Zündel . . . I met people who knew differently and could prove to me that story was just a legend.3

  In 1991 in London, Irving had labeled the charge that the Germans had “factories of death with gas chambers in which they liquidated millions of their opponents,” as a “blood libel on the German people.”4 Rampton wondered how Irving could say these things, while claiming that he was not a denier. Irving explained that he did not mean that the whole “story of the Holocaust” was a legend. The legend was about the “paraphernalia, the equipment, the factories of death, and the gas chambers” in which millions died. Most people, he continued, thought of the Holocaust as “people being made to walk to the edge of a pit and being bumped off by soldiers holding rifles.” Since he did not deny that such shootings occurred, he should not be branded a denier. Irving failed to mention that, since he claimed these shootings were rogue actions that had not been ordered by Hitler or sanctioned by the Third Reich, he was effectively redefining the Holocaust.

  When Rampton asked why he had removed all references to the Holocaust from the 1991 edition of Hitler’s War, Irving insisted that the word was “offensive, . . . vague . . . imprecise, . . . and . . . should be avoided like the plague.” His acceptance in Hitler’s War (1977), he continued, that Auschwitz was an extermination center was a “lazy acceptance which I now regret.” Though he rejected the notion of a “gas chamber Holocaust,” he insisted he was not a denier because he believed in the “rest of the Holocaust story, namely the shootings on the Eastern front.”5 Though we had only begun, Irving’s courtroom tactics were already trying my patience. A simple question elicited long, meandering responses.

  RAMPTON: How many people do you think—I mean innocent people, I am not talking about bombing raids, Mr Irving, I mean innocent Jewish people do you think the Germans killed deliberately?

  IRVING: You mean like Anne Frank?

  RAMPTON: I do not mind whether they are like Anne Frank or not. How many innocent Jewish people—

  IRVING: Well, I mean, she is a typical example and a very useful example to take because everybody has heard of Anne Frank. She was innocent. I have daughters of my own and if what happened to her happened to one of my daughters, I would be extremely angry.

  RAMPTON: Oh, I see, so Mr or Mrs Frank might not have been innocent, is that what you are trying to say?

  IRVING: But I asked you about Anne Frank; I did not ask about her parents.

  RAMPTON: No, I am sorry, Mr Irving. The procedure in this court is that you do not ask questions, I do. I asked you how many—

  IRVING: I did not ask a question. I just said, I mean, shall we talk about Anne Frank.

  RAMPTON: No, I do not want to talk about Anne Frank.

  IRVING: You want to talk about nameless, unspecified Jews so that later on we can say, “Well, I was not meaning those ones, I meant those ones”? The reason you do not want to talk about Anne Frank, of course, is because she is a Jew who died in the Holocaust and yet she was not murdered, unless you take the broadest possible definition of murder.

  In the midst of this theatrical absurdity, I couldn’t help but recall the Abbott and Costello comic routine, “Who’s on First.” I started to laugh but Rampton’s next comment made me quickly refocus.

  RAMPTON: We will get to Anne Frank along down the road, I assure you. . . . I said “deliberately killed.” How many innocent Jewish people do you say that the Nazis deliberately killed during the course of World War II? That was my question.

  Irving shrugged and told Rampton that he was not an expert on the Holocaust, therefore his answer would have no value.6

  “INCONTROVERTIBLE EVIDENCE”?

  Rampton reminded Irving that Hitler regularly received detailed reports on the shootings from the Einsatzgruppen, the special killing squads. How then, he continued, could Irving contend that Hitler did not approve of the killings? For example, the December 1942 Report to the Führer on Combating Partisans (No. 51) listed the number of “Jews Executed” as 363,211. Rampton argued that there was little doubt that Hitler had seen it. The report had been typed in a large font known as the “Führer typeface,” which Hitler could read without glasses. It was initialed by those who prepared documents for Hitler and marked “shown to the Führer.”

  Irving responded that, if Hitler saw the document he probably paid no attention to it. His concerns were elsewhere. “This is the height of the Stalingrad crisis. Every waking moment he is waiting for news that the fourth army that he sent to rescue the sixth army has broken through . . . the battleship Scharnhorst is out on the high seas . . . about to be sunk that same day as it [Report No. 51] is shown to him. He has an awful lot of things on his plate.” Irving posited tha
t Himmler might have “slip[ped] a document into a heap to be shown to the Führer” so he could later claim that he had told Hitler what was being done to the Jews. After posing this theory, Irving warned Judge Gray, “Attach no evidentiary value to what I just said . . . , because it is literally speculating on the basis of very thin evidence.”7

  Irving’s comments about the insignificance of this evidence gave Rampton a chance to bring this excursion back to our objective. “Mr Irving, we are not on this side of the court setting out to prove what did happen, we are only interested in the evidence which a reputable historian would put into the scales and weigh before arrival at a conclusion.” Someone in Berlin had retyped this report in the “Führer type.” Someone had put it in front of Himmler, who signed it. Someone had included it in the select documents placed before Hitler. Someone had marked it: “Shown to the Führer.” Why, Rampton wondered, if these shootings were merely criminal acts by maverick SS commanders, as Irving claimed, would those closest to Hitler have placed the document before him? Irving, in turn, offered that if Hitler did, indeed, see the report, he “did not care about” these victims. They were Eastern European Jews, whom he looked upon as “a man might look on an ant heap.”8 For once, I thought, Irving had got it just right.