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Holocaust on Trial

Holocaust on Trial: A Controversial British Writer, David Irving, Has Instigated a Libel Suit against an American Historian (for Denying the Holocaust).

by D.D. Guttenplan

"FIRST they came for the Jews ..."

Of all the "lessons" of the Holocaust, Pastor Martin Niemoller's unsparing account of his own complicity in the escalating brutality of life in Nazi Germany is probably the best known. When Americans talk about the Holocaust--from Vice President Al Gore speaking at a Holocaust remembrance ceremony in Washington, D.C., to the AIDS activist Mary Fisher at the 1992 Republican Convention--Niemoller's litany of indifference, "but I was not a Jew ...," almost always comes up. It is one of the things everybody knows about the Holocaust, along with the bars of soap made from the fat of murdered Jews, and the gas chambers at Dachau and Belsen.

The problem is, what everybody knows about the Holocaust isn't always true. Although the grisly tale of human beings rendered into soap figured in some of the earliest accounts of events inside Nazi-occupied Europe, it is now universally rejected by historians as a fabrication--similar to the atrocity stories that were a staple of Allied propaganda during the First World War. The concentration camp at Dachau did have a gas chamber, but it was never used. There were no gas chambers at Belsen.

Nor, as it happens, did the Nazis come first for the Jews. In fact, as Peter Novick explains in his brilliant and provocative new book, The Holocaust in American Life, "First they came for the Communists"--a circumstance acknowledged by Niemoller, who continued,

but I was not a Communist--so I said nothing. Then they came for the Social Democrats, but I was not a Social Democrat--so I did nothing. Then came the trade unionists, but I was not a trade unionist. And then they came for the Jews, but I was not a Jew--so I did little. Then when they came for me, there was no one left who could stand up for me.

Novick describes Gore, Fisher, and the Holocaust Museum in Washington, D.C., as "prudently omitting Communists" from their versions of Niemoller's homily. But as Novick makes clear, prudence and political calculation have influenced our knowledge of the Holocaust from the very beginning.

Even the word itself--from the Greek holos, for "whole," and kaustos, for "burnt"--is contested. In some circles the Hebrew word Shoah, meaning "destruction" is preferred. The Princeton historian Arno Mayer coined the term "Judeocide" to describe the subject of his controversial study Why Did the Heavens Not Darken? (1988).

For a long time after the war the fate of European Jewry was hardly mentioned, partly because, as the cartoonist Art Spiegelman's father says in Maus, his "survivor's tale" in cartoon format, "No one wants anyway to hear such stories," and partly because in the camps liberated by American GIs--Dachau and Buchenwald, for example--only about a fifth of the prisoners were Jews. In Edward R. Murrow's famous 1945 broadcast from Buchenwald the words "Jew" and "Jewish" are never spoken. Deborah Lipstadt, the author of Beyond Belief (1986), a study of American press coverage of the Holocaust at the time, says that even when confronted by the evidence, many correspondents were reluctant to admit "to themselves--and to their readers" the reality of genocide. Lipstadt attributes a portion of this reluctance to anti-Semitism.

Novick, who teaches history at the University of Chicago, suggests a different reason for postwar American reticence: with the realignment brought about by the Cold War, talk of the Holocaust was positively inimical to U.S. interests. "In 1945," he writes, "Americans had cheered as Soviet forces pounded Berlin into rubble; in 1948, Americans organized the Airlift to defend `gallant Berliners' from Soviet threat." The accompanying ideological retooling took place at breathtaking speed, but in 1950s America few besides Communists shouted, "Remember the six million!" For most Americans, including American Jews, the Holocaust was "the wrong atrocity"---mention of it was at best an embarrassment, at worst a cause for suspicion.

Today the Holocaust is ubiquitous. Films such as Schindler's List and Sophie's Choice, television programs, novels, memoirs, and works of history all add to the sum of what we know--or think we know--about what Raul Hilberg, the pre-eminent scholar in the field, called "The Destruction of the European Jews" Hilberg's opus by that title was first published in 1961, but only after having been sat on by academic presses at Columbia and the University of Oklahoma, and rejected outright by Princeton, and only after a Czech refugee donated $15,000 toward the cost of publication. The first reviews were mostly hostile, and it would be years before Hilberg won any prizes.

We need merely consider the reception of Binjamin Wilkomirski's Fragments (1995) to see how much has changed. Decorated with endorsements by famous academics, Fragments won the National Jewish Book Award for autobiography/memoir, beating out works by Elie Wiesel and Alfred Kazin. Even after evidence mounted that "Wilkomirski" was really Bruno Dossekker, a Swiss musician whose account of a childhood in the concentration camps is completely fictional, Fragments continued to attract readers. Such is the public appetite for Holocaust literature.

How did this change come about? Peter Novick mentions various factors: a gradual easing of the Cold War, outbreaks of neo-Nazism in Germany and the United States, the 1952 publication of Anne Frank: The Diary of A Young Girl, later adapted to stage and screen. But the single greatest catalyst, he says, was the kidnapping and trial of the Nazi war criminal Adolf Eichmann. Here, too, much of the initial response was negative: The New Republic said that Israel should "confess error and hand Eichmann back" to Argentina. The Wall Street Journal worded that the proceedings would only benefit the Russians. But as the trial wore on, the sheer mass of detail evidently overcame such skepticism. The trial was televised, and for the first time the American public was confronted with the Holocaust as an event distinct from the general carnage of war. The controversy over Hannah Arendt's Eichmann in Jerusalem (1963)--Arendt's focus on Eichmann's ordinariness, on what she called "the banality of evil" struck some commentators as overly sympathetic--further piqued public interest.

Now, nearly forty years after Eichmann's capture, the Holocaust is once again on trial. This time the venue is London, Courtroom 37 of the Royal Courts of Justice, where for the next few months Charles Gray, a judge of the Queen's Bench, will preside over the matter of David Irving v. Penguin Books Ltd. and Deborah Lipstadt. To Irving, the author of numerous books on the Third Reich, the Holocaust is "an ill-fitting legend." Irving doesn't deny that many Jews died. Instead he denies that any of them were killed in gas chambers, that Hitler directly ordered the annihilation of European Jewry, and that the killings were in any significant way different from the other atrocities of the Second World War. Of course, many right-wing cranks have argued along similar lines. What makes Irving different is that his views on the Holocaust appear in the context of work that has been respected, even admired, by some of the leading historians in Britain and the United States.

In her book Denying the Holocaust (1993), Deborah Lipstadt argues that it is precisely Irving's considerable reputation that makes him "one of the most dangerous spokespersons for Holocaust denial" "Familiar with historical evidence" she writes, "he bends it until it conforms with his ideological leanings and political agenda."

Irving claims that those words are libelous. He cheerfully admits to having said "There were never any gas chambers at Auschwitz" and "The structures which you can now see as a tourist at Auschwitz were erected by the authorities in Poland after World War Two" and are "a fake." That doesn't make him a Holocaust denier, he argues, because his comments "are true" In effect Irving is seeking to put not just Lipstadt but the Holocaust itself on trial--an effort in which he will receive considerable help from British libel law.

In the United States the burden of proof in a libel case is on the plaintiff--and in an American trial, Irving, as a public figure, would have to prove not just that Lipstadt's criticisms were untrue but also that they were made with "knowledge of falsity or with reckless disregard" of the truth. In Britain the burden of proof is on the defendant. It will not be enough for Lipstadt to point out that even historians who "always learn something from" Irving--among them Gordon Craig, of Stanford, who pays tribute to Irving's "energy as a researcher and to the scope and vigor' of his publications"--find his views on the Holocaust, in Craig's words, "obtuse and quickly discredited" Lipstadt will actually have to discredit them. She will also have to show that the evidence is so clear-cut that only a willful misreading or conscious distortion of the facts could account for Irving's positions. This will not be easy.

The problem is not a lack of evidence. The destruction of European Jewry was, in Hilberg's central insight, essentially a bureaucratic process, the result of "a series of administrative measures" In their pursuit of the Endlosung--the Final Solution to the Jewish question--the Nazis left all the detritus of any large organization: memoranda, requisition forms, purchase orders, files, and blueprints. Approximately one million Jews were murdered at Auschwitz, for example, and all of them had to be taken there by train from somewhere else, in the middle of a war in which the railways were the lifelines of the German army. The gas to kill them--Zyklon B--had to be paid for. And the ovens that disposed of the bodies had to be specially built--by Topf and Sons, a German firm that patented the design. Finally, for each Stuck--"piece," as the Nazis referred to a Jew--processed, certain items had to be accounted for: money, jewelry, personal effects, dental gold, hair.

Hilberg's mapping of this bureaucracy fills three volumes, but the essential facts of the Holocaust are contained in a series of tables at the end. "Deaths by Cause" for example, shows that more than 800,000 Jews died as a result of "ghettoization and general privation," more than 1.3 million were killed by "open-air shootings" and up to three million were murdered in camps--as many as 2.7 million of these in death camps: specialized extermination centers such as Sobibor, Treblinka, and Belzec. By comparison, 150,000 died in other camps, including concentration camps such as Dachau and Buchenwald. In "Deaths by Country," Hilberg's list ranges from the up to three million Jews of Poland to the fewer than 1,000 from Luxembourg, and in "Deaths by Year" he charts the genocide's rise and fall. But in all three tables the total is the same: 5.1 million Jews.

Other historians dispute Hilberg's arithmetic, arguing for a figure closer to six million. Scholars also remain divided on exactly when and why the Nazis shifted from a policy of encouraging Jewish emigration (which saved half of Germany's Jews) to a policy of extermination (which murdered perhaps 90 percent of Greece's Jews). And they argue about the role of the camps in the German economy. David Irving uses these divisions--just as he uses ambiguities about the Auschwitz complex, where factories run by Siemens and Krupp, an IG Farben plant for making synthetic rubber, and several coal mines all co-existed with Birkenau, a highly specialized killing center where nearly a million people were gassed to death. But his argument is something different.

What David Irving actually believes about the Holocaust remains mysterious. He can appear the soul of reason, eager to concede common ground to his adversaries. "I'm not going to dispute most of what they say about the Holocaust," he told me recently, "most of which--or ninety percent of which--I agree with wholeheartedly." But he has also referred to "the absurd legends" of the Holocaust, especially the "myth" of the gas chambers, as a "blood libel on the German people" Irving claims that Hilberg's arithmetic is not just mistaken but off by an order of magnitude, and that Jewish victims of the Nazis number in the hundreds of thousands, not millions. He is, as he told a BBC interviewer, "a gas-chamber denier" Finally, he dismisses evidence refuting his claims as postwar fabrication.

Irving's arguments have a quicksilver quality, and over time he has occupied a number of contradictory positions. But his aim is consistent: "Cutting the Holocaust down to its true size," he said on Australian television in 1996, "makes it comparable with the other crimes of World War Two."

To Deborah Lipstadt, David Irving is "an ardent admirer" of Adolf Hitler who skews documents and misrepresents data "to reach historically untenable conclusions." The sum of his arguments, she says, equals Holocaust denial--a position that in her view has no more credibility than the claim that the earth is flat. To Irving the label "Holocaust denier" is itself libelous, a tool to silence his inconvenient truths. The two sides have agreed that the issues involved are too complex, the questions of evidence and interpretation too subtle, to be argued in front of a jury. Instead it will be up to Judge Charles Gray to decide who is telling the truth. But the whole world will be watching.

The "Scamp"

DAVID John Cawdell Irving was born on March 24, 1938, the youngest of four children. His father was a naval officer, and in some interviews Irving strives to give an impression of Country Life. "My mother," he says, "was an artist." Then he catches himself. "A commercial artist. She did pen-and-ink drawings for Nursery World." For an Englishman with Irving's keen sense of social distinctions, the difference is considerable. The Irvings lived in Ongar, "the end of the Central Line," a dreary suburb made drearier by a lack of money.

When Irving was four years old, his father's ship, the HMS Edinburgh, was torpedoed by the Germans. His father survived, but never returned to his wife and family. "I saw my father about twice in my whole life" Irving says. "During the war years we had a motorcar which was up on blocks. It was a Ford, and I remember as a child climbing through the door. Underneath the car I found a battered old board suitcase, which my mother had obviously thrown there, and it was full of a very musty naval uniform, which was beginning to rot."

The war dominated Irving's childhood. "I remember standing on the beach at Southsea," he says, "and watching the invasion fleet sail in June, 1944. My mother said that most of them probably wouldn't be coming home" Sent as a day boy to "a minor public school," Irving was "beaten repeatedly" He says, "The final beating came when I'd hung a twelve-foot hammer-and-sickle flag over the main entrance to the school. They had to call the fire brigade to come and bring it down.... I was a scamp."

A year earlier Irving had won the school prize for art appreciation. The award was a book of his choice--to be presented by the deputy prime minister. "I filled in the form saying the prize I wanted to receive was Mein Kampf. I arranged for the local press to be there en masse to take a photograph of the deputy prime minister giving me a copy of Mein Kampf. I went up on stage and picked up this prize--and it was a German-Russian technical dictionary! I've never read Mein Kampf from that day to this."

Irving's desire to shock also got him into trouble at Imperial College, where he'd been given a one-year scholarship. The student magazine "ran a headline in 1956 that I'd said that seventeen percent of London university students were extreme left-wing or Communists," he says. "The figure of seventeen percent was straight off the top of my head. I just picked a prime number." Irving lost his scholarship after failing his math examination--a failure for which he blames his professor, "a known Communist."

To finance his second year of studies, Irving took a job on a concrete gang. He also became fascinated with Oswald Mosley, the former head of the British Union of Fascists, who was running for Parliament. An attempt to join the Royal Air Force was turned down on medical grounds. If Mosley was an odd inspiration for the son of a Second World War veteran, Irving's response to his rejection by the RAF was odder still. He wrote a letter to Krupp, the former Nazi armaments manufacturer, asking for a job in its steel mill. Seized by the Allies after the war, the firm was unable to oblige. But its rival Thyssen, whose owners had fallen out with Hitler after helping him to power, offered Irving a year's work. His fellow steelworkers added a rough-hewn fluency to Irving's high school German; one of them, a native of Dresden, gave him the subject of his first book.

The man had lived through the Allied fire-bombing of the city in February of 1945; his harrowing account of the raid came as a revelation to Irving, who set to work interviewing survivors and combing through German and Allied archival material. Published in 1963, The Destruction of Dresden was an immediate best seller. The book's gruesome photographs of Germans burning their dead, which Irving secured from one of his new contacts, ensured maximum press attention for his claim that the bombing raid had killed 135,000 people--a figure that was more than twice the official estimates.

"I imported Dresden into the vocabulary of horror," Irving says proudly. "People now say `Dresden' in the same breath as they say `Auschwitz' and `Hiroshima.' That's my small contribution to the vernacular."

In later years Irving's estimates of the Dresden death toll would fall as low as 35,000 and rise as high as 250,000. And in later years he would sometimes make direct comparisons between Dresden and Auschwitz. "About a hundred thousand people died in Auschwitz," he told an interviewer in 1991. "So even if we're generous and say one quarter of them, twenty-five thousand, were killed by hanging or shooting--twenty-five thousand is a crime, that's true.... But we killed that many people burning them alive in one night, not in three years, in a city like Pforzheim. We killed five times that number in Dresden in one night."

At the time, however, The Destruction of Dresden was important to Irving for other reasons. The book's financial success allowed him to abandon efforts to complete his degree. He immediately began work on two more books: a history of the German rocket program and a biography of Adolf Hitler. "I'd translated the memoirs of [Field Marshal] Wilhelm Keitel, who was hanged at Nuremberg," Irving says. "Keitel's son introduced me to Otto Gunsche--the man who burned Hitler's body. He was Hitler's SS adjutant. And Gunsche decided he would talk to me, because I was the Englishman who had written about Dresden. That gave me an edge."

Gunsche became Irving's passport into "the inner circle of all Hitler devotees, the servants and the adjutants and the colonels and the secondaries, who would meet around the graveside when one of their number died," he says. "And the word was passed: `He's okay.' And after a while they started producing their diaries and private papers." The result was Hitler's War, published in 1977.

Writing in Time magazine, Lance Morrow found Irving's portrait of "the Fuhrer as a somewhat harried business executive, too preoccupied to know exactly what was happening in his branch offices at Auschwitz and Treblinka," difficult to credit. The historian Hugh Trevor-Roper's review in the London Sunday Times referred to Irving's "consistent bias" but went on to say, "No praise can be too high for Irving's indefatigable scholarly industry. ... I have enjoyed reading his long work from beginning to end." The military historian John Keegan called Hitler's War Irving's "greatest achievement ... indispensable to anyone seeking to understand the war in the round." Fueled by such notices, the book reached No. 8 on British best-seller lists.

The only appreciable dent in Irving's public credibility came when the writer Gitta Sereny and the reporter Lewis Chester checked Irving's documents and re-interviewed his sources, including Otto Gunsche, on assignment for the Sunday Times. Less than the sum of its parts, their article contained some damaging details--among them Gunsche's admission that "one must assume that [Hitler] did know" about the extermination of the Jews--but ultimately posed little obstacle to Irving's continued prominence.

One reason for this was the authors' focus on the narrow question of Hitler's personal culpability--doubtless a response to Irving's much-publicized standing offer of $1,000 to anyone who could provide documentary evidence of Hitler's guilt. And because Sereny is a fellow writer on Nazi themes, Irving could--and does--simply dismiss her as a jealous competitor. Finally, and perhaps most important, although his account of Hitler's role was hard to swallow (not even Keegan and Trevor-Roper took his behind-Hitler's-back thesis seriously), in 1977 David Irving's views on the Holocaust were fairly unexceptionable. Under "Jews: extermination of," the index to Hitler's War lists seventeen entries. There are references to "the extermination camp at Chelmno" and "the extermination center at Treblinka." And Irving's argument that "the burden of guilt for the bloody and mindless massacre of the Jews rests on a large number of Germans, many of them alive today, and not just on one `mad dictator,' whose order had to be obeyed without question," while debatable, is not very far from the thesis of Daniel Goldhagen's Hitler's Willing Executioners (1996), another book whose dismissal by knowledgeable specialists has done little to hinder its success with the public.

Any damage to Irving's reputation was more than recouped by his involvement in the 1983 debacle over the "Hitler diaries," when Newsweek, the London Sunday Times, and the German magazine Der Stern, which had rushed to publish the diaries in a fanfare of publicity, were forced to admit they'd been conned--or, in the case of Newsweek, which sidestepped the question of the diaries' authenticity, at least deeply embarrassed. Chief among the victims was Hugh Trevor-Roper, ennobled as Lord Dacre, who had authenticated the volumes for the Times. Irving crashed Der Stern's April, 1983, Hamburg press conference; his comments casting doubt on the diaries' provenance were repeated on the Today show. It was his finest hour, recalled with glee by his defenders--most recently Christopher Hitchens, in Vanity Fair, who cited the incident in support of his view that "David Irving is not just a Fascist historian. He is also a great historian of Fascism."

A gratifying example of the amateur besting the academic, this account, which turns up in most profiles of Irving, omits a few details. For one thing, it was Irving who first approached the Times in 1982 with an offer to go to Germany and inspect the diaries for the paper. And although he did denounce the diaries at Der Stern's press conference, so did Trevor-Roper. A week later Irving changed his mind--a dizzying sequence that shed little light on the fake diaries but generated a great deal of publicity for his The Secret Diaries of Hitler's Doctor, an anodyne collection of notes by the Fuhrer's physician, Theodor Morell, which just happened to be published that week.

Whatever his merits as a historian, as a self-publicist Irving has few peers. Journalists across the political spectrum testify to his unfailing helpfulness, his willingness to make archives, clipping files, and documents available without preconditions. On two occasions I have been left alone in Irving's study for more than an hour. If Irving has anything to hide, it is hidden in plain sight.

The Defendant

DEBORAH Lipstadt has a bad back. Her condition, she knows, hasn't been helped by the amount of time she's had to spend sleeping on airplanes between her home in Atlanta, where she is the Dorot Professor of Modern Jewish and Holocaust Studies at Emory University, and her lawyer's office in London. But as we sit talking in the coffee shop attached to her London hotel, she also gives the impression of being metaphysically wrenched out of her orbit.

"I'd much rather be hanging out in the fall foliage in Georgia, hiking the Appalachian trail," she says. The author of two books, and a veteran of hundreds of interviews and dozens of television appearances, Lipstadt is perfectly at ease with the press, slipping on and off the record with the agility of a politician. A large woman with reddish-brown hair, strong features, and a gravelly New Yorker's voice (think Bette Midler rather than Bess Myerson), she describes herself as "always fighting" She says, "I'm a great dinner-party guest if you want a lively dinner party. If you want peace and quiet, don't invite me."

But Irving v. Lipstadt is no dinner party, and Lipstadt is not in London to see the sights. "Hello! I'm the defendant here," she says. "If I hadn't fought this, he would have won by default. He could have said--it would have been said--the High Court in London recognizes his definition of the Holocaust. Now, some people would say, `Oh, that's ludicrous. Who would believe that anyway?' But it's naive to think you can just say, `I'm going to ignore this.'"

Deborah Lipstadt was not brought up to be naive--or to walk away from a fight. Her father came to the United States from Germany in the 1920s. "Because of the economic situation--nothing to do with anti-Semitism," she offers before being asked. Her mother was born in Canada. Lipstadt herself was born in Manhattan, in 1947, but the family moved to Queens soon afterward. "I went to Jewish day schools there," she says, "and got an intensive Jewish education, both at home and in school."

The Lipstadts considered themselves "modem Orthodox"--partly to distinguish themselves from the black-hatted, caftan-wearing Hasidim, and partly to signify that although they observed Jewish dietary laws and regulated their lives by the Hebrew rather than the secular calendar, they did not set their faces against modern life. "We were very much of this world," Lipstadt says. "Theater, opera, books, journals, museums"

Lipstadt grew up in a mixed neighborhood, but her interactions with non-Jews were limited. "When you're an observant family, you go to day schools, you keep kosher--just technically you march to the beat of a different drummer" she says. Class may also have been a factor. The comfortable, parochial, culturally voracious, slightly smug yet socially conscious world of German Jews is difficult to convey to outsiders, though the fiction of Isaac Bashevis Singer provides a wry introduction.

After her family moved back to Manhattan, in the mid-1960s, Lipstadt says, Singer lived next door. But she is just as proud of the fact that the civil-rights worker Andy Goodman's family also lived on her street. When Goodman's body was found in Mississippi, along with those of his murdered comrades, James Chaney and Michael Schwerner, Lipstadt's father, who had a small headstone business, was commissioned to make his monument. "In the summer of the freedom rides," Lipstadt says, "I was too young to go down to the South, but I knew that if I had been older, I would have. I remember going with my mother--this was 1964 or 1965--up to Harlem on a Sunday to participate in a march. It was my mother's idea."

At City College, Lipstadt says ruefully, she was part of "the last generation where you could get a really good education." She majored in political science and history, spending her junior year in Israel. "I took a couple of courses on the Holocaust, met more survivors than I'd met before" she says. "Though I'd met survivors growing up, I didn't know they were survivors. My parents had lots of German Jewish friends, but I didn't know them as survivors, I just knew them as the Peisers or the Ullmans."

Just as the academic year was ending, the Six-Day War broke out. Lipstadt decided to remain in Israel another year: "If I'd been there in June of '67, to go home in July '67 made no sense." When she returned to America, she enrolled in the graduate program in Judaic studies at Brandeis. Her priorities were shifting.

"I remember showing up at the synagogue my parents went to on the Upper West Side," she says, "wearing my SNCC [Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee] button, and somebody yelling at me, `They're leftists, anti-Semites, and terrible people!' I went berserk!"

Like many other Jews of her generation, Lipstadt felt herself pushed from civil rights to Jewish causes by the bitter 1968 struggle between the mostly black parents of Ocean Hill and Brownsville in Brooklyn and the largely Jewish teachers' union over community control of the schools. Neither side had a monopoly on racism--and there were Jews on both sides of the picket lines once the union went out on strike rather than cede power to the parents. But what Lipstadt saw was "overt anti-Semitism coming from people whose struggle you had always thought ... cut to the core of America."

Despite her upbringing, Lipstadt describes herself as "not Orthodox." The exclusion of even the mention of women from so much of Orthodox ritual disturbs her. "I want them to at least acknowledge that you're only talking about the men. Because if the rabbi stands up and says, `We need as many people as possible to come tomorrow morning,' I'll come." But her discomfort with organized religion--"I'm equally unhappy in any synagogue I go to," she says, half joking--does not extend to estrangement from organized Judaism. "So much of my personal life is tied up with being Jewish. Being a Jew and being Jewish, culturally, religiously, intellectually--it's what I know best."

"A Paper Eichmann"

WHEN David Irving and Deborah Lipstadt come face to face in a London courtroom, it will not be their first meeting. That took place in November of 1994, in Atlanta, when Irving turned up at a talk Lipstadt was giving on the danger of legitimizing Holocaust deniers as "the other side" in some historical debate--a theme of Denying the Holocaust, which had been published the previous year. Irving described the encounter in his diary, which he later posted on his Web site.

I then politely put up my hand. Invited to speak, I boomed in my very English, very loud voice to her: "Professor Lipstadt, I am right in believing you are not a historian, you are a professor of religion?" She answered that she was a professor of religion but (something special else) in history too. I then waded in with verbal fists flying: "I am the David Irving to whom you have made such disparaging reference in your speech...."

Brandishing a wad of $20 bills, Irving repeated his standing often Lipstadt attempted to take other questions, but, in Irving's account, "several times I wagged the bundle of $20 bills aloft, as she was speaking, and hissed: `One thousand dollars ...!'"

Irving's diary goes on to recount his success in giving away free copies of his books to the students in attendance, who duly lined up afterward for his autograph: "Sweet victory. Then students came to me with copies of the printed invitation to autograph: I did so--they were blank, which meant that either they had not asked Lipstadt for her autograph, or she would have to sign after me. Total Victory! Revenge!"

Three observations immediately suggest themselves: 1) by November of 1994 Irving was clearly aware that Lipstadt had repeatedly and publicly attacked his work; 2) Denying the Holocaust had come out in Britain in 1994, yet 3) far from seeming aggrieved or on the point of seeking redress in a court of law, Irving showed every sign of enjoying playing the "scamp" in his jousts with Lipstadt, and clearly felt that in this contest the advantage was his.

David Irving didn't file suit for libel until September of 1996. The previous spring St. Martin's Press had canceled the publication of his Goebbels: Mastermind of the Third Reich. Given Irving's history, available to anyone with a modem or a library card, a certain amount of controversy was to be expected, perhaps even courted. So when Publishers Weekly pronounced Irving's book "repellent," and Jewish organizations expressed outrage, and Deborah Lipstadt was quoted as saying that St. Martin's Press would hardly sign up the Louisiana white supremacist David Duke for a book on race relations, St. Martin's stood firm. For about two weeks.

Sometime between the March 22 Daily News report headlined "NAZI BIG'S BIO AUTHOR SPARKS UPROAR" and Frank Rich's April 3 New York Times column calling Irving "Hitler's Spin Artist" Irving's publishers lost their nerve and announced that they were shocked--shocked!--into discover that the book they were on the brink of shipping to stores had suddenly become unpublishable.

The principal effect of this decision, as Christopher Hitchens properly pointed out in a caustic resume of the scandal in the June, 1996, Vanity Fair, was to transform a man with "depraved ideas" about the Holocaust into a poster boy for free speech. One ancillary effect was to lend the Goebbels book the cachet of suppressed literature. Another was to give rise to Gordon Craig's lofty declaration, in the course of a four-page review of the biography in The New York Review of Books, that "silencing Mr. Irving would be a high price to pay for freedom from the annoyance that he causes us." Craig continued, "The fact is that he knows more about National Socialism than most professional scholars in his field, and students of the years 1933-1945 owe more than they are always willing to admit" to his research. "Such people as David Irving ... have an indispensable part in the historical enterprise, and we dare not disregard their views."

"We dare not." If Craig is right, then we are all--all of us with a stake in "the historical enterprise"--injured parties, deprived of Irving's unique contribution. But what if he's wrong? What if Irving's work is meretricious, sloppy, anti-Semitic, and dishonest? The question has a familiar ring.

In the late 1970s French intellectuals were convulsed over l'affaire Faurisson, which began when Robert Faurisson, a professor of literature at the University of Lyons, published an article in Le Monde proclaiming the "good news" that the gas chambers did not exist. "The alleged Hitlerian gas chambers," Faurisson said, "and the so-called genocide of the Jews form a single historical lie whose principal beneficiaries are the State of Israel and international Zionism and whose principal victims are the German people, but not its leaders, and the Palestinian people in its entirety."

Faurisson's public supporters were found mostly on the far left of French politics--which is what gave the affair its frisson. When the linguist and political activist Noam Chomsky lent his name to campaigners defending Faurisson's freedom of expression, the controversy became a trans-Atlantic one.

There is, Christopher Hitchens once argued, "no obligation, in defending or asserting the right to speak, to pass any comment on the truth or merit of what may be, or is being, said." Indeed, the suggestion of something rank about a speaker's views, as Hitchens gently reminded Chomsky, merely gives those who would defend his right to speak "all the more reason not to speculate" about those views. Hitchens wrote those words fifteen years ago--about five years after he'd done me the first in a long string of kindnesses, still unbroken. So I take no pleasure in pointing out that his first mistake in l'affaire Irving was to ignore his own sound advice, by describing Irving as "a great historian of Fascism."

His second mistake--and here he had lots of company--was to assume that what Irving really wanted was a debate with his critics. Because if that were Irving's objective, all he would have had to do was bide his time. "Someone," Hitchens asserted confidently, "will no doubt pick up where St. Martin's left off."

What Irving did instead was to sue Deborah Lipstadt and her publisher, Penguin Books, for libel in England (where Lipstadt's costs will amount to hundreds of thousands of pounds even if she wins). At which point it became rather more difficult to defend the proposition that what was at stake was Irving's freedom of speech.

It is one thing to argue that the cowardly reversal of St. Martin's did more harm--to the cause of free debate and to public understanding of the Holocaust--than if St. Martin's had simply published and let Irving be damned. It is another to maintain that any commercial publisher is under any obligation to publish Irving or anybody else.

The essential distinction--between the power of the state and the decisions of the market--can be pressed too far. And when Lipstadt argues, as she does in Denying the Holocaust, that "the main shortcoming of legal restraints is that they transform the deniers into martyrs," she seems to be setting aside the state's power to silence offending views on tactical grounds alone, rather than as a matter of principle. Faurisson's chief antagonist, the French classicist Pierre Vidal-Naquet, took a different view: "To live with Faurisson? Any other attitude would imply that we were imposing historical truth as legal truth, which is a dangerous attitude available to other fields of application."

A writer whose history of engagement extends from opposing his government's use of torture in Algeria to support for the rights of Palestinians, Vidal-Naquet was in many ways Chomsky's French counterpart. However, perhaps because both his parents had been deported by the Nazis (his mother died at Auschwitz), Vidal-Naquet felt it was just as important to expose Faurisson's distortions as it was to support his right to distort. His skepticism about the role of the state finds no echo in Lipstadt--unlike his argument against "debating" the Holocaust.

Vidal-Naquet wrote,

Confronting an actual Eichmann, one had to resort to armed struggle and, if need be, to ruse. Confronting a paper Eichmann, one should respond with paper.... In so doing, we are not placing ourselves on the same ground as our enemy. We do not "debate" him; we demonstrate the mechanisms of his lies and falsifications, which may be methodologically useful for the younger generations.

We need only set this passage from Assassins of Memory, Vidal-Naquet's elegant, restrained, yet devastating response to Faurisson, beside a similar passage from Denying the Holocaust to see the extent of Lipstadt's indebtedness.

Not ignoring the deniers does not mean engaging them in discussion or debate. In fact, it means not doing that. We cannot debate them for two reasons, one strategic and the other tactical. As we have repeatedly seen, the deniers long to be considered the "other" side. Engaging them in discussion makes them exactly that. Second, they are contemptuous of the very tools that shape any honest debate: truth and reason. Debating them would be like trying to nail a glob of jelly to the wall.

"Like trying to nail a glob of jelly ..." Though she relies on his arguments, Deborah Lipstadt is no Vidal-Naquet. She lacks his intellectual breadth, his clarity of thought and expression, and, most regrettably, his stature as a Jew who has never confined his political engagement to Jewish causes. Nevertheless, her book is an honest attempt to sound a warning about a phenomenon that Vidal-Naquet would be the first to agree deserves our attention.

Robert Faurisson, after all, was a nonentity, an obscure professor in a provincial university. David Irving is a celebrity--William Casey, the former director of the CIA, once wrote him a fan letter. Irving is also much, much cleverer than Faurisson.

"Not My Patch"

IRVING describes himself as a "revisionist," a writer of "real history," not a Holocaust denier. Not long ago he read me an account, from one of his lectures, of the brutal massacre of Jewish men, women, and children by the Einsatz-gruppen--the security-police units who followed the German army into Poland. "How can they claim I deny the Holocaust?" Anyway, he said, he's no expert on the Holocaust: "Not my patch." Besides, the subject bores him.

It was as an expert on German documents and the Second World War that Irving flew to Toronto in 1988 to testify in the trial of Ernst Zundel. A German immigrant to Canada, Zundel supplemented his income as a commercial artist by distributing a selection of neo-Nazi and racist literature, including two works of his own: UFOs: Nazi Secret Weapons and The Hitler We Loved and Why. In 1983 Zundel had been charged with willfully publishing "false news" that was "likely to cause injury or mischief to a public interest." Faurisson came from France to testify for the defense; Raul Hilberg testified for the prosecution. Though Zundel was convicted and sentenced to fifteen months in prison, the conviction was overturned on appeal, and in the 1988 retrial the defense team added two reinforcements.

One was David Irving. The other was Fred Leuchter, who was billed as an engineer specializing in the design and operation of execution apparatus. Engaged by Faurisson on Zundel's behalf, Leuchter had flown to Poland with a cameraman, a draftsman, and a translator. The group spent three days at Auschwitz and Birkenau and one at Majdanek, chipping off bits of brick and concrete from a number of buildings. These "forensic samples," as Leuchter described them, were taken to a lab outside of Boston, where the technician was told that the material was from a workmen's-compensation case.

Under questioning by the Crown Counsel it emerged that Leuchter's engineering training consisted of a few undergraduate science courses. His "report" purporting to demonstrate the nonexistence of gas chambers, on which the defense had spent nearly $50,000, was ruled inadmissible. Leuchter was allowed to give his opinion that it was "impossible" for the structures he had seen in Poland to have been used as gas chambers, that they "wouldn't have been efficient" and were "too dangerous," but the second jury was not convinced either. Zundel was again found guilty, though this conviction was overturned in 1992, when Canada's "false news" law was ruled unconstitutional.

Leuchter did acquire at least one convert. For David Irving, who followed him to the witness stand, Leuchter's account of his Polish field trip apparently struck with the force of a revelation. "My mind has now changed," he told the court, "... because I understand that the whole of the Holocaust mythology is, after all, open to doubt." Back in London, Irving's Focal Point Publications issued the results of Leuchter's amateur chemistry experiment as a sixty-six-page booklet--with an introduction by David Irving. Irving also removed all mention of gas chambers--except for a single reference to "lurid rumors"--from the most recent edition of Hitler's War. "If something didn't happen," he said, "then you don't even dignify it with a footnote."

Leuchter, a pathetic character who seems to be fascinated with the mechanics of killing people, is the star of Mr. Death, the new film by the investigative documentarian Errol Morris, the director of The Thin Blue Line. Morris's camera casts an unflinching eye on his star's many shortcomings. Morris also shows that some of Leuchter's "samples" may have come from structures rebuilt after the war, and he tracks down the lab technician who analyzed these samples. The technician explains that because he wasn't told what the material was for, he simply ground everything up--diluting many thousands of times any traces of cyanide that might have been on the surface. "I don't think the Leuchter results have any meaning," he told Morris.

Irving appears in the film, and audiences may well find themselves wondering how a man who proclaims himself an expert at detecting forged documents--and who dismisses the countless eyewitness accounts of the Holocaust by those who survived as "really a matter for psychiatric evaluation"--could have been so easily gulled.

How significant was Irving's conversion? Holocaust denial has been at the center of trials in Austria, Germany, France, and Canada. Some were criminal proceedings, and some, like the Zundel trial, began when survivors filed civil complaints. But in every one of those trials it has been the deniers who have had to defend themselves. When David Irving walks into Courtroom 37, it will be as the plaintiff, with the scales of British justice tipped in his favor. The defendant in this case is Deborah Lipstadt.

Irving's Preoccupations

MY sense of Irving the man was unavoidably colored by sorrow. We had spoken on the phone several times, and had been exchanging e-mails for several months, before the gray afternoon last autumn when I presented myself at his flat, in a red-brick Victorian building off Grosvenor Square, just around the corner from the American embassy. I'd read enough of his interviews to know that Irving could be provocative, truculent, or charming. But when I came to see him, he was none of those things. He seemed deeply tired (he was due to leave for a lecture tour of the United States the following day) and more than a little sad.

A few days earlier the oldest of his five daughters had committed suicide. Named Josephine Victoria (she was born, in 1963, on the anniversary of Franco's victory in Spain), she'd been schizophrenic, Irving said, for "half her life." More recently she had lost the use of both legs in a car accident. "At the hospital they said to me, `You know, she must have been very determined.' For someone who is legates to pull herself up and throw herself out of a fourth-floor window ..." Irving stopped and then continued, responding to a question I hadn't asked. "Do you ever wonder whether you are mentally unsound or not? How do we know? There is no thermometer you can stick in your mouth that will say, `Oh, today I'm a bit unbalanced.'"

I'd been to his flat once in the summer, to pick up some material, but Irving had been away. "Contact my staff (Bente) in London," he e-mailed me. Bente turned out to be the mother of Irving's youngest daughter, Jessica, who had to be collected from school, and so I was left alone, seated in Irving's study leafing through his press clippings under the gaze of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, whose portrait on the mantelpiece above Irving's desk was flanked by a pair of framed front pages from the Volkischer Beobachter, the Nazi Party daily.

One article, Irving later told me with a certain amount of malicious pleasure, was headlined "PROPHETIC WARNING TO JEWRY"--the paper's report of Hitler's famous January, 1939, speech to the Reichstag:

Today I want to be a prophet once more: If international-finance Jewry inside and outside of Europe should succeed once more in plunging nations into another world war, the consequence will not be the Bolshevization of the earth and thereby the victory of Jewry, but the annihilation of the Jewish race in Europe.

This time--perhaps in deference to his siblings, who, though embarrassed by Irving, had come to London for the funeral--the papers had been taken down. Nor was a famous self-portrait of Hitler, given to Irving by the Fuhrer's secretary, anywhere in evidence. And Irving himself, a husky, square-jawed man with a weakness for martial metaphors ("It may be unfortunate for Professor Lipstadt," he had remarked to me on the telephone, "that she is the one who finds herself dragged out of the line and shot"), was on his best behavior.

There were glimpses of the Irving I'd read about. "In crude terms, you've got a problem," he said regarding the fate of Hungarian Jews shipped to Auschwitz in 1944, "because you're talking about 45,000 tons of meat." He described "a very good friend": "Sometimes I say, `He's Jewish but ...' Jewish but very nice, very decent, and so on--from which you can see I have all the stereotypes embedded in me." But these half-hearted attempts to shock me were not very convincing--nor, I think, were they meant to be.

When he's among friends, Irving's manners are less fastidious. At a lecture in Germany a few years ago a television cameraman captured his wit: "There's the one-man gas chamber, carried by two German soldiers looking for Jews alone in the Polish countryside. This one-man gas chamber must have looked like a sedan chair, but disguised as a telephone kiosk. How did they convince the victim to step, of his own free will, into this one-man gas chamber? Apparently there was a phone in it, which would ring, and the soldier would say, `It's for you!'"

And there is his light verse, to be recited, according to Irving's diary (which he has had to make available to Lipstadt's lawyers), when out with his daughter and "half-breed children" are wheeled past: "I am a Baby Aryan / Not Jewish or Sectarian / I have no plans to marry-an / Ape or Rastafarian." But since Jessica, now six (she spent a portion of our interview sitting on my lap), was barely a year old when that entry was written, the intended audience was probably her mother, whose reaction, Irving noted with satisfaction, was "suitably shocked."

Irving is a prodigious diarist, and though the entries I've seen read more like the first drafts of a press release than like a record of his inner life, the need to fill up the pages does sometimes allow something personal to slip through. His love affairs, for example, are apparently recorded in a code based on the word "amiable," as in "Caroline came round and was amiable." But even the sections cited by the defense in various expert reports hardly reveal a passionate Jew-hater. Irving believes in a worldwide Jewish conspiracy--both to discredit him personally and to exploit the Holocaust for political and economic ends. He habitually refers to Jewish groups as "traditional enemies of the troth," and as far back as 1963, describing a speech by Oswald Mosley at Kensington Town Hall, he wrote, "Yellow Star did not make a showing." But his recurring preoccupations are money and his career, not the Jews.

Irving likes to point out that at one time both his lawyer and his publisher were Jews. The lawyer, Michael Rubinstein (who says he's not Jewish), told me that relations with Irving had been proper and professional. As for Lord Weidenfeld, the assumption of mutual utility can be gleaned from a letter he sent Irving after a newspaper article, obviously inspired by Irving, suggested that Weidenfeld had been pressured not to publish Hitler's War. "I have every reason to believe," Weidenfeld wrote, "that it was the reporter's tone and not your intention to disturb a businesslike and friendly climate of cooperation between us." The firm of Weidenfeld and Nicholson went on to publish Irving's biographies of Field Marshals Erhard Milch and Erwin Rommel.

In the end, Irving's relationships with individual Jews don't take us very far. Deborah Lipstadt is a Jew, and Irving sued her. But Gitta Sereny is not a Jew, and after she wrote an article for the London Observer accusing him of peddling a "clever mixture of truth and untruth," Irving sued her as well. In fact Lipstadt never accuses Irving of anti-Semitism. She charges him with "Holocaust denial"--an accusation that has also been leveled against some Jews.

"Judeobolshevism"

IN 1962 Commentary asked Hugh Trevor-Roper to review Raul Hilberg's The Destruction of the European Jews. Hilberg's analysis of the Nazi machinery of extermination, Trevor-Roper wrote, carded "a profound social content." The "most surprising revelation," he warned Commentary readers, would also be "the least welcome"--namely, Hilberg's depiction of the extent to which the Nazis relied on the Jews to assist in their own destruction.

The magazine, published then as now by the American Jewish Committee, hastened to counter Trevor-Roper's praise with an article by the Harvard historian Oscar Handlin, rifled "Jewish Resistance to the Nazis." Handlin accused Hilberg of "impiety" and "defaming the dead." In 1968, when Hilberg went to Israel on sabbatical, officials at Yad Vashem, the Israeli Holocaust memorial, refused to allow him into the archives (a situation anticipated by the response to his book published in Yad Vashem Studies. The review was titled "Historical Research or Slander?").

Eichmann in Jerusalem, Hannah Arendt's report on the Eichmann trial, fared no better. Writing in The New York Times Book Review, Barbara Tuchman accused Arendt of "a conscious desire to support Eichmann's defense." The Anti-Defamation League of B'nai B'rith condemned what it called an "evil book," reminding its members,

It is common knowledge that Eichmann himself deliberately planned the cold-blooded senseless liquidation of an entire people.... Eichmann personally conceived the idea of liquidating Jews as a means of "solving" the Jewish problem.... He probably could have successfully proposed mass Jewish emigration to his superiors [but] instead he selected the gas chamber, the crematorium and the soap factory.

These attacks, as Peter Novick points out, were "not just false but the reverse of the truth." Like Hilberg, Arendt was assailed for highlighting the role of the Jewish communal leadership in the tragedy--perhaps even more virulently than Hilberg, because in her view Jewish leaders had been particularly culpable. "Wherever Jews lived," she wrote,

there were recognized Jewish leaders, and this leadership, almost without exception, cooperated in one way or another, for one reason or another, with the Nazis. The whole truth was that if the Jewish people had really been unorganized and leaderless, there would have been chaos and plenty of misery but the total number of victims would hardly have been between four and a half and six million people.

Once again Commentary, the voice of the American Jewish leadership, pronounced its anathema, with the editor, Norman Podhoretz, personally declaring Arendt's reports "complex, unsentimental, riddled with paradox and ambiguity"--all, to Podhoretz, apparently, terms of abuse.

Arno Mayer's Why Did the Heavens Not Darken? is subtitled "The `Final Solution' in History." Mayer wanted to rescue the Holocaust from a "cult of remembrance" that in his view had "become overly sectarian" and thus impeded historical understanding. "Whereas the voice of memory is univocal and uncontested, that of history is polyphonic and open to debate," Mayer wrote. History "calls for revision."

To the Anti-Defamation League those were fighting words. Even worse, Mayer claimed that the Nazis were motivated not by simple anti-Semitism but by a hostility to "Judeobolshevism"--the Nazi word for the belief that Jews controlled both communism and capitalism. Mayer wrote that there was no evidence to suggest that when Adolf Hitler invaded Poland, his objective was "to capture the maximum number of Jews for slaughter." Indeed, the Nazis went to great lengths to push Jews to emigrate. Contrary to Lucy Dawidowicz's The War Against the Jews (1975), which argued that genocide was one of the Nazis' principal war aims, Mayer held that Hitler was far more concerned with his "crusade" against communism, and that only after the failure of Operation Barbarossa, the invasion of the Soviet Union, did the Nazis vent their murderous frustration on the Jews of Eastern Europe. Mayer's book jacket carried an endorsement by Pierre Vidal-Naquet, who also wrote a preface to the French edition.

Mayer's thesis that anti-communism was more important in Nazi ideology than anti-Semitism was certainly open to argument, as was his account of events leading to the Final Solution. But argument was just what Mayer didn't get from his critics, who preferred insult and innuendo. "`A mockery of memory and history,' `outrageous,' ... `bizarre,' and `perverse'" were, said the historian Richard Evans, reporting on the controversy for a London newspaper, "just some of the more printable" responses. Leading the charge was The New Republic's reviewer, a young Harvard graduate student named Daniel Goldhagen.

Hilberg, Arendt, and Mayer are all not just Jews but refugees from the Nazis. There can be no doubting their obvious, sympathetic, personal identification with the victims of the Holocaust. "By 1942, in her eighties and blind," Raul Hilberg's grandmother "lay in bed most of the time," Hilberg writes in The Politics of Memory (1996). "Apparently that is where the German raiders found her and where they shot her on the spot." Hannah Arendt had been arrested for illegal Zionist activity, and interned by the Vichy French, before escaping to the United States. Arno Mayer's book opens with "A Personal Preface" telling of his own hair-raising escape from Luxembourg and occupied France, and of the fate of his grandfather, who refused to leave Luxembourg and died in Theresienstadt. Such personal bona fides didn't prevent the Anti-Defamation League from including Mayer in its 1993 report "Hitler's Apologists: The Anti-Semitic Propaganda of Holocaust `Revisionism,'" where his work is cited as an example of "legitimate historical scholarship which relativizes the genocide of the Jews"; his crime is to "have argued, with no apparent anti-Semitic motivation"--note how the absence of evidence itself becomes incriminating--"that though millions of Jews were killed during WWII, there was actually no premeditated policy for this destruction."

Defending Raul Hilberg or Arno Mayer from the charge of anti-Semitism (or, as it is more frequently put, "self-hatred") is tedious and pointless. So why bother? Because such attacks on honorable scholarship demonstrate that the Holocaust has from the very beginning been contested ground even--perhaps especially--among Jews themselves. And because it isn't only Holocaust deniers who twist facts, obscure the truth, and, in Deborah Lipstadt's phrase, create "immoral equivalencies."

The Lever of Guilt

IN Israel, as you might expect in a country where in the 1940s the slang for "Holocaust survivor" translated as "soap," the battle over how to represent the Nazi genocide has always been bare-knuckled and out in the open. The arguments go back to the Second World War itself, when supporters of mainstream Zionism sought to discredit the Emergency Committee to Save the Jewish People of Europe--the group agitating most noisily for rescue--as a vehicle of the right-wing Zionist terrorist group Irgun. As indeed it was. David Ben-Gurion and other Zionist leaders were not thoughtlessly "writing off" European Jewry, Peter Novick says. They were just making a "chilling ... appraisal of what was and was not possible."

Still, when the dimensions of the Jewish catastrophe became clear, Ben-Gurion moved quickly to turn guilt into political capital. What is notable about this effort is that it failed. With the possible exception of Britain, where fear of being compared to the Nazis may have prevented a more forceful response by London to the Zionists' unilateral declaration of independence, countries responded to the birth of Israel on the basis of their own national interest, as Novick points out. The Soviet Union, which was eager to undercut British influence in the Middle East, supported it. Countries with ties to the Arabs--Britain among them--did not. President Harry Truman, who recognized Israel over State Department opposition, may have been motivated by domestic political considerations--or by a sincere concern for Jewish refugees. But there is no evidence that guilt played any part in his decision.

Indeed, as we have seen, the initial responses to the Eichmann trial revealed a mistrust of Israel's motives that was perhaps understandable, coming only a few years after President Dwight Eisenhower had condemned Israel's actions in the Suez crisis. Novick barely mentions Suez, which is a shame, because it gives strong support to his view that at least in the 1950s the Holocaust provided Israel with no useful "moral capital."

Novick also appears not to notice that just as the Cold War shaped American responses to the Holocaust, it also shaped responses to Israel--because until June of 1967 it was far from clear that Israel was on "our" side. After all, Ben-Gurion and his associates were socialists. In their war for independence the Israelis were armed with Czech machine guns; from 1956 to 1967 Israel bought the bulk of its weaponry from France, a country whose discontent with American power actually led it to withdraw from NATO'S military command. And it was not until after the Six-Day War that Norman Podhoretz declared that Israel was the religion of the American Jews. What support there was tended to come from the left, from places like The Nation and the newspaper PM, whose columnist I. F. Stone was an early and vocal advocate for the new state.

All that changed after 1967. Novick doesn't draw an explicit connection between Israel's debut as America's strategic asset in the Middle East and the explosion of Holocaust discourse in the United States, but what he does say is suggestive. For one thing, the image of Jews as military heroes effaced "the stereotype of weak and passive victims, which [had] inhibited Jewish discussion of the Holocaust" More important, in Cold War terms Israel was now unambiguously on America's team. And if circumstances made it easier for American Jews to talk about the Holocaust, to draw on the "moral capital" that Israel had miraculously accumulated, that was just as well. For in its determination to hold on to the territories gained in battle, Israel began to forfeit whatever sympathy it had attracted as an underdog.

The crucial point, surely, is that it was only after Israel and the United States were bound together strategically that the Holocaust and support for Israel became, in Novick's phrase, "the twin pillars of American Jewish `civil religion.'" Similarly, it was only in post-1967 America that certain aspects of the Holocaust and its aftermath--from questions of resistance and collaboration to arguments over the propriety of accepting reparation payments--became not just controversial but unmentionable. An exaggeration? In 1953 Lucy Dawidowicz, at the time the American Jewish Committee's resident expert on communism, could both criticize Israel for taking German money and invidiously contrast that willingness with Israel's refusal to take responsibility for displaced Palestinians. Thirty-five years later, when Arno Mayer merely disagreed with Dawidowicz's interpretation of Hitler's intentions, he was practically excommunicated.

Though it is considered impolite to mention them in public, there are still a number of "live questions" about the Holocaust. The dispute between intentionalists like Dawidowicz, who say that genocide was part of Hitler's plan from the beginning, and functionalists like Mayer, who argue that the Final Solution evolved in response to changing conditions and the fortunes of war, is far from settled. David Irving may seize on the arguments of the functionalists as part of his campaign to exculpate Hitler from responsibility for the Holocaust, but that hardly makes them his allies.

Another open--though stifled--question regards the number of survivors. Irving's claim that Jews inflated the number of Holocaust victims in order to extort money from Germany merely demonstrates his imperviousness to fact. The payments to Israel were for absorbing and resettling refugees, and it would thus have been in Israel's interest to exaggerate the number of survivors, not the number of victims. But that doesn't mean there weren't individual beneficiaries who, in order to qualify for payment, claimed to have spent the war hiding in Poland when they had in fact been living, in relative safety if not in comfort, deep inside the Soviet Union.

More delicate still is the question of survivor testimony. According to Elie Wiesel, "Any survivor has more to say than all the historians combined about what happened." Would Wiesel censure Deborah Lipstadt for saying "Lots of survivors who arrived at Auschwitz will tell you they were examined by [Dr. Josef] Mengele. Then you ask them the date of their arrival, and you say, `Well, Mengele wasn't in Auschwitz yet at that point.' There were lots of doctors ... [somehow] they all become Mengele"? Would he censure her--or any other historian--for daring to ask for evidence, documents, corroborating testimony? That, after all, is what historians do.

And when they are prevented from doing it, either by Jewish groups who feel that the Holocaust belongs to them alone or by Zionists seeking to preserve Israel's "moral capital," the result is a blurting of distinctions between memory and propaganda that serves only the interests of the Nazi perpetrators and their political legatees.

Yet time and again those who insist on the truth in all its "complex, unsentimental," paradoxical, and ambiguous detail are shouted down. Norman Finkelstein and Ruth Birn, whose book A Nation on Trial (1998) pointed out the many scholarly defects of Goldhagen's Hitler's Willing Executioners, were subjected to a sustained campaign of personal abuse. Finkelstein and Birn were no more extreme in their condemnation than Raul Hilberg, whose essay deploring "The Goldhagen Phenomenon," in Les Temps Modernes, described the Harvard professor's work as "lacking in factual content and logical rigor" and casting a "cloud ... over the academic landscape." That didn't keep Abraham Foxman, the head of the Anti-Defamation League, from trying to discourage the publication of A Nation on Trial.

It isn't only anti-Semites who, in T. S. Eliot's infamous phrase, find a "large number of free-thinking Jews undesirable."

Diana's Lawyer

THOUGH the desk in Anthony Julius's Bloomsbury office is a lawyerly clutter of files and documents, some of them belonging to his client Deborah Lipstadt, every other surface is piled high with mounds of art books that tumble from tables and chairs onto the carpet, forming drifts around our feet. Julius is writing a book on modern art.

The oldest of four sons, Julius eventually graduated from Cambridge with first-class honors and could easily have taken a Ph.D. Then his father, a men's-wear retailer, suddenly died of a brain tumor, so, Julius says, "I stuck with law."

When Diana, Princess of Wales, decided she'd had enough of Prince Charles, she needed an outsider, someone whom the British establishment would regard as "unclubbable," someone who couldn't be "gotten to." A Jewish partner in a prominent London firm, Anthony Julius got Diana a settlement worth roughly $25 million. By way of a thank you, Diana sent him a silver blotter from Asprey's. Her patronage made him the most famous lawyer in Britain. She also made him an executor of her will.

Anthony Julius eventually got his Ph.D. His thesis, on T. S. Eliot, anti-Semitism, and literary form, begins,

Anti-Semites are not all the same. Some break Jewish bones, others wound Jewish sensibilities. Eliot falls into the second category. He was civil to Jews he knew, offensive to those who merely knew him through his work. He wounded his Jewish readers, if not the Jews of his acquaintance, to whom, apparently, he was `not disagreeable.' Though worth noting, this is not a distinction that yields a defence to the charge of anti-Semitism. If the work, or some notable part of it, is anti-Semitic, it is the work of an anti-Semite.

With his large, close-cropped head, ambling gait, and slightly stooped posture, Julius looks a bit like a bear in a pinstripe suit--that is, if you can imagine a bear who, though capable of tearing you apart, would much rather simply persuade you of the error of your views. When I ask him, with my tape recorder running, why this case matters, his response is guarded, almost offhand: "Does this case matter? To whom? It matters to Deborah Lipstadt because she's being sued." When I turn the tape recorder off, his words are equally careful, but there is a flash of anger in his manner that is actually frightening in a man otherwise so perfectly contained.

Julius has tangled with Irving before. In 1992 Irving was expelled from Canada, and one of the documents he later obtained under Canada's Access to Information Law was a dossier compiled, he says, by the Board of Deputies of British Jews which had been sent to the Canadian authorities. Irving wanted to sue for libel, but Julius, who acted for the board at the time, said that Irving was "sadly too late" in filing the proper papers.

Julius knows that this time there will be no such reprieve. He won't discuss the trial in any detail even off the record. But the English rules of procedure allow for very few surprises. Both sides have had to reveal in advance not only what documents they want to cite and what witnesses and experts (scholars or other specialists) they are going to call but also what those witnesses and experts are likely to say.

Irving's few witnesses relate to the question of how he obtained the Goebbels diaries that formed the basis for his biography. Although a side issue for Lipstadt, this dispute is at the center of Irving's suit against Gitta Sereny. Irving's experts--a separate category--address two areas. Like Julius, Kevin MacDonald, a professor of psychology at California State University at Long Beach, believes that not all anti-Semites are the same. In his view, though, the distinction is between simple prejudice and the hatred that he feels is to be expected given certain aspects of what he regards as typically Jewish behavior.

Irving's second expert, John Fox, formerly the editor of The British Journal of Holocaust Education, will testify about an attempt by a group of British Jews to get him to discourage publication of Irving's Goebbels biography in Great Britain, and will give his own assessment of what he sees as Lipstadt's role in enforcing a kind of orthodoxy in discussions of the Holocaust. Fox's battles with British Jewry, although perhaps relevant in his mind, have little bearing on Lipstadt's case. But his claim that attempts to discredit David Irving do not spring from communal self-defense or a concern for the truth but are, rather, part of a broader campaign to proscribe discussion of the Holocaust will need to be met head on.

Of course, if Julius can prove that every word Lipstadt wrote about Irving is true, the question of her motives may not matter. Lipstadt's witness statements cover everything from extremism in the Pacific Northwest to Irving's dealings with the Russian archivists who control access to the Goebbels material. But it is her experts and their testimony that will make up the heart of this case. Judging by the experts he has assembled, it is obvious that Anthony Julius is perfectly aware this is no simple case of libel. From Christopher Browning, the author of Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland (1992), to Robert John Van Pelt, a co-author of Auschwitz: 1270 to the Present (1996), Lipstadt's experts are for the most part the standard authorities in their field. Yet several of them have submitted expert reports that are the equivalent, in both scope and scholarly apparatus, of full-scale books, but with a single subject: David Irving.

The shortest of Lipstadt's expert reports is Browning's "Evidence for the Implementation of the Final Solution"--a sixty-three-page summary of the documentation that Lipstadt's lawyers will argue Irving has had to either ignore or distort to maintain his views on the gas chambers. Next in length comes the ninety-page treatise "David Irving and Right-Wing Extremism," by Roger Eatwell, a professor of politics at the University of Bath. Hajo Funke, a professor of political science at the Free University of Berlin, spends 157 pages detailing Irving's connections with German neo-Nazis and Holocaust deniers. A seventeen-year chronology of Irving's dealings with North American "hate groups," prepared by Brian Levin, then at Stockton College, is similarly extensive, and contains, among other details, an account of Irving's long acquaintance with David Duke. According to Levin, the ex-Klansman's musings on the Holocaust and other topics in his book My Awakening (1998) were shaped by Irving's editorial advice. Peter Longerich, the author of Policy of Annihilation (1998) and a history of Nazi storm troopers (both in German), and a co-editor of the German edition of the Encyclopedia of the Holocaust, has contributed a seventy-seven-page summary of the evidence for Hitler's responsibility and a ninety-three-page exposition of the planned, systematic nature of the Nazi genocide.

These reports, all of which were at one point posted on Irving's Web site, rebut, with varying degrees of pedantry but with uniform attention to detail, different aspects of either Irving's claim against Lipstadt or what might be called Irving's "case" against the Holocaust. But the centerpiece of Lipstadt's defense will undoubtedly be the 726-page examination of Irving's entire oeuvre by Richard Evans, a professor of modern history at Cambridge and a Fellow of the British Academy. Among his twenty books are Rereading German History: From Unification to Reunification, 1800-1996 (1997) and In Hitler's Shadow: West German Historians and the Attempt to Escape From the Nazi Past (1989). Evans is, as they say, familiar with the literature--hardly surprising, considering that he wrote much of it, including standard works on German feminism, the German underworld, and the history of capital punishment in Germany.

Aside from reading Irving's books (both the English and the German editions), Evans, thanks to the pretrial "discovery" process that is routine in such cases, had access to videotapes and audiocassettes of Irving's speeches, tens of thousands of pages of documents, Irving's complete private diaries, thousands of letters, and a great deal of other material. Evans looked at the totality of Irving's career, from the Dresden book to the Goebbels biography. What he found shocked him deeply.

Penetrating beneath the confident surface of his prose quickly revealed a mass of distortion and manipulation ... so tangled that detailing it sometimes took up many more words than ... Irving's original account. Unpicking the eleven-page narrative of the anti-Jewish pogrom of the so-called Reichskristallnacht in Irving's book Goebbels: Mastermind of the `Third Reich' and tracing back every part of it to the documentation on which it purports to rest takes up over seventy pages of the present Report. A similar knotted web of distortions, suppressions and manipulations became evident in every single instance which we examined.

I was not prepared for the sheer depths of duplicity which I encountered in Irving's treatment of the historical sources, nor for the way in which this dishonesty permeated his entire written and spoken output. It is as all-pervasive in his early work as it is in his later publications.... It is clear ... that Irving's claim to have a very good and thorough knowledge of the evidence on the basis of which the history of Nazi Germany has to be written is completely justified. His numerous mistakes and egregious errors are not, therefore, due to mere ignorance or sloppiness; on the contrary, it is obvious that they are calculated and deliberate. That is precisely why they are so shocking.

Evans's findings, though doubtless unwelcome to Irving, ought also to cause a certain amount of discomfort among Irving's defenders in journalism and the academy.

Irving has relied in the past, and continues to rely in the present, on the fact that his readers and listeners, reviewers and interviewers lack either the time, or the expertise, to probe deeply enough into the sources he uses for his work to uncover the distortions, suppressions and manipulations to which he has subjected them.

How Do We

"THERE is some risk," Judge Charles Gray told me in his chambers on the day before his first hearing on the case, "of one's being asked to become a historian. Judges aren't historians."

Gray's disclaimer is slightly misleading. Appointed to the bench only eighteen months ago, Gray spent ten years as a Queen's counsel, or QC--the elite among trial lawyers. He represented the Tory Cabinet Minister Jonathan Aitken in his suit against The Guardian and defended the Daily Mirror journalist Alistair Campbell--now Prime Minister Tony Blair's spokesman--when he was sued by a Tory member of Parliament. His most famous case, however, came when Lord Aldington sued the writer Nikolai Tolstoy over charges that at the end of the Second World War, Aldington had been responsible for handing over to the Soviets--and certain death--Cossacks who'd fought in the German army and been taken prisoner by the British. Gray's pleadings, which, as he told me, "did involve history," resulted in an award to his client of a record [pounds sterling] 1.5 million ($2.4 million) in damages.

If Gray seems unduly modest about his command of history, his concern to ensure not just the reality but also the appearance of a fair trial makes more sense. Anthony Julius will be joined at the defense table by Richard Rampton QC, the lawyer representing Penguin Books. David Irving will represent himself. Libel cases cost thousands of dollars a day, and under British law any attorney who took on Irving's case might be liable for the other side's costs if he lost. As a "litigant in person," when David Irving appears in court, he will be on his own.

"It makes the judge's task more difficult," Gray says. "One has to ensure that he's not disadvantaged by not having the legal expertise available to the other side." This disparity in means may be good news for Deborah Lipstadt and her supporters, though Richard Rampton, who acted for McDonald's in its recent Pyrrhic victory over a pair of penniless vegetarian anarchists, also litigants in person, which cost the corporation $15 million and gained nothing but bad publicity, is well aware of the perils of overkill.

David Irving has had decades of practice at playing the lone iconoclast whose devotion to troth puts establishment noses out of joint. This pose is, I suspect, what accounts for his unlikelier supporters. Certainly it was one he adopted with relish during our interview, whether by inviting me to share his belief that "the Conservative Party is largely financed by the CIA" or by jauntily acknowledging a desire "to see egg on faces."

A desire we all share. At times the contrarian impulse is almost enough to make us forget that Irving brought this on himself. He is the plaintiff, Lipstadt the defendant.

Irving's odd fascination, though, has little to do with the urge to see authority get its comeuppance--and even less with some hidden vein of nostalgia for the Third Reich. It is rooted instead in something far more basic, something that mere facts can never completely banish: doubt. How do we know that there really were gas chambers at Auschwitz? Or that millions of Jews were killed? What if, as Irving says, we are off by an order of magnitude? Even if the Nazis killed only hundreds of thousand of Jews, isn't that bad enough? Do the numbers really matter?

Last May, just as I started reading about this trial, the London Review of Books ran an account by a reporter for The Guardian of her attempts to corroborate accounts of atrocities in Kosovo. Her tale was inconclusive, honorably so. But her final words made me deeply angry.

Maybe the truth here is not one thing: but I don't want to be an accomplice to a lie.... Nobody much wants to return to Jean Cocteau, but there was something soothing in the words my friend quoted. `History is a combination of reality and lies,' he said. `The reality of history becomes a lie. The reality of the fable becomes the truth.'

That seemed to me a fancy argument for letting herself off the hook. Maybe she couldn't find out what happened. Maybe she should have tried harder. And if she believes that reporting the facts makes no difference to whether the fable becomes the truth, and even finds the prospect "soothing," then maybe she should find another line of work. All the same, I understood the temptation.

The Atheist

IT wasn't that I thought Irving might be right--more that I allowed myself to wonder, with a little shudder, "But does it matter?" It wasn't, in other words, exactly that I doubted the facts; rather, I was curious about what would happen if the facts somehow made no difference.

What pulled me back was a memory: I am six years old, and my father has brought his best friend home for dinner. After we eat, the friend takes the back off our television and shows me the tubes lighting up inside. One is burned out, and as he replaces it, I notice a line of numbers on his arm, just below the wrist. "What are those, Uncle Mike?" He tells me that the Germans put them there when he was a little boy, "so I wouldn't get lost."

My Uncle Mike was never a little boy. When he was twelve or thirteen, the Germans occupied Hungary, and his entire family was put on a train to Auschwitz. Big for his age, and claiming to be older, he was sent to work in the mines. This was 1944, and Auschwitz was liberated by the Red Army in January of 1945. By then the rest of his family had been gassed.

The truth is, I can't be certain of all these details, and my Uncle Mike has been dead for some time. I was reminded of him while reading Irving's response to the obvious questions: What happened to the missing Jews? If they didn't die in the camps, where were they? Irving talks about "the large number that turned up in the state of Palestine, what's now the state of Israel," and sometimes, as if acknowledging that this number isn't nearly large enough, claims that others might have been killed in Dresden. The rest, he suggests, fled to the USSR or the United States. As a simple matter of accounting, this is preposterous. As an explanation, it is also monstrous--because the assumption behind it is that, lured by the good life to the United States, or chasing the workers' paradise in Russia, or seeking the Zionist dream in Israel, people like my Uncle Mike would simply forget that they had mothers, fathers, sisters, brothers, grandparents, children, and wouldn't bother to look for them, which is why so many Jews are still unaccounted for. In other words, it presumes that Jews are not human beings.

No one knows this better than Raul Hilberg. The Politics of Memory tells the story of Hilberg's uncle Josef, interned by the Vichy French in 1940.

My father, by then in New York, received Josef's frantic appeals for help, but there was no money for tickets which might have enabled Josef to escape to America. When the deportations from the Vichy-French zone began in 1942, Josef disappeared. "The blood of my brother is upon me," my father would say....

Hilberg, who spent years of his life in archives, never forgot about his uncle Josef. In 1978 he found him, on a list of deportees from France: Joseph Gaber. "He was deported on August 19, 1942, and arrived in Auschwitz two days later," Hilberg writes. "Since he was already forty-eight years old, he must have been gassed immediately."

Yet when St. Martin's canceled Irving's Goebbels biography, Raul Hilberg stood up for David Irving. "If these people want to speak," he told Hitchens, "let them.... I am not for taboos and I am not for repression." Hilberg reaffirmed these views to me over the telephone last summer, with two minor modifications: "Denial hurts people. There are survivors. That should not be forgotten." And "I believe in the freedom not to be responsible. But that doesn't mean I endorse it."

What Hilberg does endorse is facts: numbers, names, places, dates. When I arrived at Hilberg's house in Vermont, at the beginning of September, we began by talking about numbers. In The Destruction of the European Jews, Hilberg says one million Jews were killed at Auschwitz. His total for the Holocaust, however, is 5.1 million, not six million, a conclusion that has caused him no end of trouble. Does it really matter? I asked.

"Yes, it matters," Hilberg said. "It matters on a variety of counts. When you segment these losses by country, you find that the major difference between my count and those who say six million ... is the Soviet Union. Which means, if they didn't die, they're there.... That matters, because you are talking about a substantial part of Jewish history. And you're talking about current Jewish history!"

Hilberg launched into a learned and fascinating lecture on the vagaries of the Soviet census, the politics of census data, and the dangers of accepting unsourced estimates. "The German statisticians called it a house number," he said, "whenever a number like that appears [that] you can't prove."

I asked about gas chambers. Irving has devoted so much energy to creating doubt about gas chambers. Why? "People are shot or hacked to death in other countries," Hilberg said, "even after World War Two--Rwanda, for example. You built the gas chamber with a view to killing a mass of people. Once you have a gas chamber, you have a vision, and the vision is total annihilation. In a gas chamber you don't see the victim. So the gas chamber in that sense is more dangerous, the gas chamber is more criminal. The gas chamber has wider implications. So when you deny the gas chamber, you deny not just a part of the event but one of the defining concepts. Auschwitz has become the synonym for the Holocaust. And of course you deny, apart from anything else, the death of several million people."

Whatever we talked about--Goldhagen, Hitler's guilt, the parallel lives of Soviet and American Jews--we seemed always to come back to numbers. "These numbers do matter," Hilberg said. "They also matter for a very simple reason--call it religious, if you like." At this point he saw my gaze shift from the Teletubbies magnets on his refrigerator to the menorah on top of his television set.

"I'm an atheist," he said. "All these things belong to my wife, not me. I am an atheist. But there is ultimately, if you don't want to surrender to nihilism entirely, the matter of a record. Does the record matter? In my judgment it is not discussable. It is not arguable. It matters because it matters to me--it's my life."

The sanctity of facts. As I left Hilberg, I thought, It's not much. After a lifetime of studying brutality, inhumanity, murder on an industrial scale, after personal tragedy and professional conflict, this is what he has left to hold on to. The sanctity of facts. And yet Hilberg's passion for detail, his police-reporter's faith in getting it down right, stayed with me longer than any of the conflicting sympathies aroused by my inquiries. The sanctity of facts. It isn't much. It may not be enough. But it is all we have.

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