THE HOLOCAUST ON TRIAL

From The Atlantic Monthly

Brandishing a wad of $20 bills, Irving repeated his standing offer. 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..!'"

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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.

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[The debate was about shutting Irving down and thereby possibly shutting down intellectual curiosity. But the bigger question in many minds was] But what if he's wrong? What if Irving's work is meretricious, sloppy, anti-Semitic, and dishonest? The question has a similar ring.

In the late 1 970s 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."

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A writer whose history of engagement extends from opposing his government's use of torture in Algeria to support for the rights of Palestinians, [French classicist Pierre] 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.

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"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 Einsatzgruppen---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 Zündel. A German immigrant to Canada, Zündel 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 Zündel 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 Zündel 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 Zündel'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. Zündel 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.

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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.

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When he's among friends, Irving's manners are less [than] 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!'"

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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 business-like 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.

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, carried "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, titled "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 liqui-

dating 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."

.... 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."

...David Ben-Guiron [The Israeli zionist leader who more than anyone else was responsible for the creation of the state of Israel] , when the dimensions of the Jewish catastrophe became clear ... 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 Amo Mayer merely disagreed with Dawidowicz's interpretation of Hitler's intentions, he was practically excommunicated.

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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 blurring 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 understand."

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The sanctity of facts. ....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 [I have] 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.