Evil takes the stand

When Holocaust denier David Irving demanded a libel trial in England, the nature of history itself was at stake.

By Charles Taylor

May 23, 2001 | As many Monty Python sketches have pointed out, the dignity of British courtrooms is handicapped from the start by the silly, pompous powdered wigs the judges and barristers wear. But even the Monty Python boys never dreamed up a situation as ludicrous as the one that took place in a British courtroom last year when David Irving sued the American writer Deborah Lipstadt for libeling him. Irving is a British author whose romances of the Third Reich have managed to get him acclaimed as a serious historian from the likes of John Keegan ("an extraordinary ability to describe and analyse Hitler's conduct of military operations") and Christopher Hitchens ("Not just a Fascist historian, but a great historian of Fascism"). In her book "Denying the Holocaust" Lipstadt had written that Irving was "one of the most dangerous spokespersons for Holocaust denial," a man who twisted evidence "until it conforms with his ideological leanings and political propaganda." When the book appeared in Britain, Irving sued both Lipstadt and her publisher, Penguin Books.

Now comes the weird part. Under British libel law, all a plaintiff has to do to claim libel is to demonstrate that the words spoken or written about him are defamatory. As D.D. Guttenplan points out in "The Holocaust on Trial," one of two new books about the case, there is no need, as there is in the United States, for the claimant to show that the words were used "in reckless disregard" of the truth. Instead, it becomes the defense's burden to prove that the disputed words are true. What that meant in this case was that because David Irving contended that the gas chambers were a hoax, British law required that in order for Deborah Lipstadt and her publisher to prove that Irving was a Holocaust denier, they first had to prove that the Holocaust actually took place.

It's an inane premise for any thinking person, let alone a court, to entertain. Admirably, the defense turned this to its advantage. Lipstadt's lawyer, Anthony Julius (who had represented Princess Diana during her divorce), hired Richard J. Evans, a professor of modern history at Cambridge whose area of expertise is 20th century Germany. Having to prove that Lipstadt was telling the truth when she said that Irving twisted evidence to conform to his ideological views gave Evans free license to examine Irving's entire body of work. He recounts what he found in the riveting "Lying About Hitler: History, Holocaust, and the David Irving Trial."

A classic example of historical research as detective story, Evans' book must be one of the most thorough and devastating exposés ever written about any writer. The tingle of intellectual discovery runs through Evans' methodical demolition of Irving's work. He writes as if he were suspended between his excitement at catching Irving in each lie and his astonishment that the lies are so pervasive, unrelenting and bald.

The line on David Irving has long been that after establishing himself as a brilliant and tireless researcher in books like "The Destruction of Dresden" and "Hitler's War," he went off the rails, becoming more and more sympathetic to Hitler personally and to Nazism in general. As a result, he has become marginalized in the publishing community. His books are now self-published (a setup that he claims is more profitable). London's Sunday Times chose to withdraw the fee it had agreed to pay Irving to edit Goebbels' diaries for publication when news of the deal was protested by a number of groups. The pitch of the furor cost Irving both his American and British publishers. The American publisher, St. Martin's Press, finally agreed to bring out Irving's Goebbels biography in 1995 and then withdrew it just before it was to be shipped to bookstores.

The self-portrait of Hitler that hangs in Irving's study, or the swastika-embossed swizzle sticks used at his book launch parties, can be dismissed as provocations. His contention that Hitler was the best friend Jews had in the Third Reich, that typhus and other diseases were the cause of most concentration camp deaths, that there were no gas chambers at Auschwitz, cannot.

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