Shilling for Hitler

Eminent historians defended Holocaust denier David Irving in the name of free speech and scholarship. Deborah Lipstadt's account of her libel trial with Irving proves how colossally wrong they were.

By Charles Taylor

Feb 7, 2005 | Let's imagine that there was a writer who took as his subject World War II. And let's suppose that because of his ability to amass and cite journals, transcripts, paperwork and all manner of documents, he gained a reputation as a meticulous researcher. Now let's say that the conclusion the writer drew from all of his research was an unshakable conviction that World War II never happened. It was, he insists, a massive fraud, and he declares under oath, "No documents whatever show that World War II had ever happened."

Now let's allow things to get curiouser and curiouser.

Despite this writer's farcical conclusion, historians of World War II, men who have spent their professional lives studying and documenting the war, still insist on the soundness of his research. It is possible, they say, to draw faulty conclusions from solid fact-finding. They do not bother themselves with the obvious question of how good the quality of any research can be if it can be used to support what is patently false. One historian says he and his colleagues should be able to admit the view of those with whom they may not be "intellectually akin."

When journalists began writing about the work of this WWII debunker, they refer to it as an alternate interpretation or a controversial point of view. One suggests that the writer has opened a useful dialogue around the question "Who decides what 'happened' in the first place?"

Eventually, a historian, aware of the esteem in which some of his colleagues hold this writer, agrees to put the writer's famed research to an intensive examination. What he finds is a consistent pattern of deliberate misquotation, misinterpretation and outright lies designed to support the writer's conclusions. Anything that hasn't supported those conclusions has been either discarded or altered. This historian concludes that "deceptions ... had remained an integral part of his working methods across the decades." Even this does not deter other historians from continuing to profess admiration for the WWII debunker. One even writes that the debunker possesses "an all consuming knowledge of a vast body of material." And another, apparently unaware of how he is defaming his profession, announces that no one "could have withstood [the] kind of scrutiny" that the historian had subjected the debunker to.

If you change "World War II" to "Holocaust" in the above paragraphs, you have a pricis of how the Holocaust denier and fascist sympathizer David Irving has been both praised and damned. Except for that change, each of the quotes above has been made by or about Irving. The line about Irving's "all consuming knowledge" was said by British military historian Sir John Keegan. The claim that no historian could have survived the scrutiny accorded Irving was made by another acclaimed British historian, Donald Cameron Watt.

What is particularly notable about those two quotes from the leading harrumphers of the "maps and chaps" school of history is that they came after Irving's crushing defeat in a libel case that Irving himself brought against the American historian Deborah Lipstadt. (Keegan and Watt were subpoenaed by Irving to testify on his behalf.) Lipstadt, professor of modern Jewish and Holocaust studies at Atlanta's Emory University, had, in her book "Denying the Holocaust," called Irving a "Hitler partisan wearing blinkers" who distorted, skewed and manipulated evidence and documents "in order to reach historically untenable conclusions."

For this, Irving brought a libel suit against Lipstadt and her British publishers, Viking Penguin, in British courts, a suit Irving offered to settle for 500 pounds and a promise not to reprint Lipstadt's book. Lipstadt and Viking Penguin declined, even though facing off against Irving in London meant operating under the asinine British libel laws in which the burden of proof is placed on the accused. After a four-month trial adjudicated not by a jury but by Judge Charles Gray (both parties decided the material was too complex for a jury to digest), Gray handed down a decision that, to anyone sentient and breathing, ended the myth of David Irving as a historian. In his judgment, Gray not only said that Irving was an "antisemite" and a "racist" but that his "falsification of the record was deliberate and ... motivated by a desire to present events in a manner consistent with his own ideological beliefs even if that involved distortion and manipulation of historical evidence."

Two accounts of the trial followed in 2001. Richard Evans, the British historian who had undertaken a massive examination of Irving's corpus for Lipstadt's defense team (the above quote about deception being an integral part of Irving's working methods is from Evans), published the thrilling intellectual detective story "Lying About Hitler" (whose publication was delayed in the United Kingdom because Evans' original publisher was nervous that Irving might sue). And the writer D.D. Guttenplan wrote "The Holocaust on Trial," which provides a lucid narrative of the trial while playing right into Irving's hands with a sophomoric and shallow discussion of what Guttenplan believed to be the issues raised at that trial. In one passage, Guttenplan writes that taking "so much" for granted -- "so much" referring to "Adolf Hitler's murderous intentions, the horrifying efficiency of the death camps, the fatal consequences for the Jews" -- "conceals" the questions of "How do we know these things really happened?" and "How do we know [the witnesses] are telling the truth?" To which the only response is: How do some people live with themselves?

Now, five years after crushing Irving in a British court, Deborah Lipstadt has provided her own account of her ordeal in "History on Trial: My Day in Court With David Irving." Hers is the most detailed account of the trial yet, and the most crazy-making.

Next Page: Christopher Hitchens wrongly tried to cast those who oppose Irving as enemies of free speech

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