Shilling for Hitler

It isn't Lipstadt who drives you nuts -- it's Irving. The man comes off as something dreamed up in a collaboration between the Monty Python crew, George Orwell and P.G. Wodehouse (who might well have been forecasting the arrival of David Irving when he concocted the homegrown fascist Sir Roderick Spode). To sit in a court for weeks on end and listen to Irving's endless insistence that black is white and up is down would be enough to make the most patient among us feel as if we'd slipped into Bizarro world, and Lipstadt is clearly not a woman blessed with patience. (Having a similar temperament, I find that one of the most likable things about her.)

Due, I'm guessing, to her discipline as a historian -- an ability to follow an argument, to provide evidence along the way, to quickly seize upon contradiction and prevarication -- Lipstadt gives a detailed account of the trial that never loses its suspense, readability or momentum. Or humor. Lipstadt feels guilty when some absurdity of the trial causes her to laugh. But how else do you react to a moment like the one that occurred during Irving's closing statement, when he addressed Judge Gray as "mein Führer"?

Long before she landed across the aisle from him in a British court, Lipstadt was fighting not only Irving's reputation as a reputable historian, but also the people who simply wanted to dismiss him as a crackpot. David Irving is surely that, but he is not just that. And Lipstadt's deepest accomplishment in "History on Trial" is in the doggedness with which she drives home the danger of David Irving.

I have to admit to losing patience with Lipstadt at times. When the documentary filmmaker Errol Morris shows her his film "Mr. Death," about Holocaust denier Fred Leuchter, Lipstadt says that Morris' amusement with Leuchter's cracked theories "was, however inadvertently, helping Irving make his case." Morris certainly has a penchant for treating the people who come before his camera as freaks, and he often milks their oddities for laughter, but that's far from helping Irving to make his case. It's more likely that Morris finds Leuchter's claims so outrageous he can't conceive of how anyone can take them seriously. But you understand how Lipstadt's experience keeps her from laughing: She is all too familiar with people, and not just fools, willing to take Holocaust deniers seriously.

Sooner or later, every Jew who perceives anti-Semitism as an encroaching danger gets described as hysterical or paranoid. The flattering self-deception at the root of that reaction is a way of consigning anti-Semitism to the past, of saying, "Surely we've become more civilized than that." "History on Trial" makes the case, as did "Lying About Hitler," that we have not become so civilized we are above tolerating David Irving.

Irving's supporters -- and I include in that group not just the pathetic fools who greet with laughter his comments about "Auschwitz Survivors, Survivors of the Holocaust, and Other Liars," or "ASSHOLS," at the white-supremacy rallies and conferences he often addresses, but the more upscale fools who are not Holocaust deniers but who continue to believe in his efficacy as a historian -- have long tried to cast those who oppose Irving as enemies of free speech.

This is the tack Christopher Hitchens has long taken when writing about David Irving, and it is worth dwelling on him, as his writing provides a useful compendium of Irving apologias. In a June 1996 Vanity Fair column after St. Martin's Press canceled its contract with Irving to publish his biography of Joseph Goebbels, Hitchens, styling himself the macho defender of the First Amendment, called the anti-Irving articles that led to St. Martin's actions "hysterical and old-maidish." Of the historians condemning Irving he wrote, "These are supposedly experienced historians who claim to have looked mass death in the face, without flinching. And they can't take the idea of a debate with David Irving?"

The sly implication of those lines is that Irving's opponents are afraid to confront him. What Hitchens ignores is the position that Deborah Lipstadt has taken for years: that to debate Holocaust deniers implies they are expressing a fact-based vision of history. Shilling for Hitler, Irving is expressing no such thing.

To see this you need look no further than the Goebbels biography that Hitchens is so hot about. In a May 2001 review of the Evans and Guttenplan books for the Los Angeles Times Book Review, Hitchens wrote, of St. Martin's decision, "St. Martin's gave no reason of historical accuracy for its about-face." The implication being that none exists.

What Hitchens perhaps did not know in 1996, and seemingly chose not to mention in 2001, are the falsifications in the Goebbels bio that Richard Evans discovered in his examination of Irving's work. An example: In the book, Irving cited a statistic on the number of cases of fraud perpetrated by Jews in 1933 Germany. Irving's rather insalubrious source for this claim was Kurt Daluege, the head of the German Order Police in the early '30s, and later in charge of the extermination of Jews on the Eastern Front. But having decided to quote a Nazi, Irving apparently decided that he himself could do a better job of making the Nazi case. Daluege had claimed that, under the Nazis, the number of fraud cases dropped from 31,000 in 1933, to 18,000, a majority of which he claimed were committed by Jews. In Irving's book these statistics were twisted into the following sentence: "In 1932 [sic] no fewer than thirty thousand cases of fraud, mainly insurance swindles, would be committed by Jews."

Giving Hitchens the benefit of the doubt about the lies of the Goebbels book still does not excuse this claim from his 1996 Vanity Fair article: "And, incidentally, [Irving] has never and not once described the Holocaust as a 'hoax'." Restricting ourselves just to what Hitchens could have known before writing that, we find that, testifying at the 1988 trial of a Canadian Holocaust denier, Irving said, "No documents whatever show that a Holocaust had ever happened." What's the defense of this? That Irving doesn't use the word "hoax"? OK then. How about these?

In a 1991 speech, Irving said, "Until 1988, I believed that there had been something like a Holocaust ... but [in] 1988 ... I met people who knew differently and could prove to me that story was just a legend."

In 1990: "The holocaust of Germans in Dresden really happened. That of the Jews in the gas chambers of Auschwitz is an invention."

And, again, in 1991: "More women died on the back seat of Senator Edward Kennedy's car at Chappaquiddick than died in the gas chambers of Auschwitz."

Remember, Hitchens' defenses of Irving did not appear on, to use his own phrase, "some ghastly Brownshirt Web site," but in Vanity Fair and the Los Angeles Times Book Review. Inevitably, in the L.A. Times piece, Hitchens brings up the totem of Irving enablers, "the censorship of Irving." What is he referring to? St. Martin's Press did not censor Irving; it chose not to publish his book because its chairman, Thomas J. McCormack, was sickened by the thought of publishing a book whose subtext, he said, was "the Jews brought this onto themselves." St. Martin's did not prevent the book from appearing elsewhere, and in fact, the Goebbels bio was published in Britain, from where the faithful could order it.

Next Page: What seems to bother Irving's defenders is the very notion of professional and intellectual accountability

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