As
it stands, with the genuine
victors in this case, Penguin,
still £2 million out of
pocket in legal fees, and
Evans without a publisher
prepared to touch his inspired
and watertight research, it
would be hard to dispute
Irving's own
verdict.
|
[Images added
by this website]
Magazine Section
(London) Sunday, February 24,
2002
Memories
are made of this
David
Irving lost the libel trial that saw
him branded a racist. But, as the winners
take him back to court to claim their due,
Irving seems to have forgotten his defeat.
It wouldn't be the first time his memory
has been shown to be
selective...
Tim Adams
The Observer
ON Valentine's Day
David Irving offered his no doubt lonely
and troubled supporters a little love
story. Like all the best love stories, it
seems to have been conceived when the
whole wide world was fast asleep. Irving
posted
the tale on his
website, a distinctly odd chatroom in
which, typically, he converses entirely
with his private obsessions, the
unappealing voices in his head.
He had, he suggested, the previous
night, been at work until 2.30am, 'as
usual', pausing only at two 'to pray
quietly for the souls of the hundred
thousand [sic] innocents we
British burned alive at this moment in
Dresden, 57 years ago', when he heard the
news that Adolf Hitler's last
private secretary, Traudl Junge,
had died.
The fact of the secretary's demise
seems to have set off in Irving a sense of
wistful romance. In particular, it
triggered a memory of an encounter with
another of the Führer's doting
assistants, Christa Schroeder, whom
Irving met in the early Seventies, while
researching his book, Hitler's
War.
His reminiscence, relayed with a
bodice-ripper's sense of titillation and
suspense, relates how Schroeder once took
him back to her apartment in Munich and
allowed him to peep behind a curtain
'which she opened only for a few
privileged friends'. Behind it hung her
little gallery of photos and relics of her
beloved Führer.
Buoyed by this intimate recollection,
Irving goes on to recall for his online
audience how Schroeder told him that once,
while in hospital, 'A.H.' had brought her
flowers: '[at this] a smile of
half-remembered pleasures flickered across
her face, and she added with a wistful
chuckle, "He said, 'People are going to
think I am visiting a secret
lover!'".'
David Irving comments:
It is a pity. The Observer
and its daily sister newspaper
The Guardian represent all
that is the finest in British
journalism. They offer writing of
a quality that is comparable with
the best in the United States --
the Knight-Ridder newspapers, or
The Washington Post and
The Los Angeles Times.
It is all the more
regrettable that their fact
checkers should have nodded, in
1996, when they came to publish
the article by Gitta
Sereny which forced me to
start proceedings
against them for defamation
(inter alia, she alleged that I
cheated a friend and colleague
out of the credit for finding the
Goebbels
diaries, that I deliberately
faked and manipulated documents,
that I stole the Goebbels diaries
from the KGB archives in Moscow,
and much of the same genre).
That High Court
action, which was paused by
mutual consent to enable me to
pursue the parallel action
against Penguin
Books and Lipstadt, will now
be resumed with full fury:
Guardian Newspapers Ltd might
well ponder the truth that
Penguin Books Ltd could have
avoided altogether their massive
burden of legal costs if they had
made the quiet £500 pound
donation to a charity for the
limbless which I twice
offered them as a painless
way out.
I DON'T know the journalist
Tim Adams who wrote this
libellous article on the left. He
made no attempt to contact me,
and apart from what he distilled
from my website he appears to
have conjured much of the rest
out of thin air.
I do not owe Penguin Books Ltd
two million pounds, and even the
smaller amount is open to
question, as the High Court will
hear in March.
There is no "country house".
I made no approach whatever to
William Heinemann Ltd before they
abandoned plans to publish the
Lying book by Prof.
Richard Evans; they reached
that painful decision on their
own initiative. In many ways I
regret it, as I will relish any
attempt by Evans to peddle those
defamatory untruths about me in
the UK.
The UK publishers of the John
Lukacs book very wisely cut
out of their edition (or he did)
passages which had appeared in
the US edition which suggested
that I had manufactured wartime
documents and quotations, e.g.
about the Nazi Forschungsamt
(wiretap agency); Lukacs never
bothered to contact me, and
appeared to be unaware that I
wrote the only existing history
of that agency.
As for "bullying," it is rich for
the mighty and wealthy London
national newspaper industry to
talk of a solitary writer
bullying, when he uses what
humble means he can to ensure
that they do not trample all over
him. The money, the newsprint,
the influence is all on their
side. The Observer could
have avoided the Sereny action if
they had published my letter
correcting just two of her lies;
they arrogantly refused, and it
has cost them £800,000 in
legal costs so far, they say,
with much, much more to come.
My readers might like to compare
Adams's digest of my diary
reminiscences about Hitler's
secretary, Christa Schroeder,
with the actual
text.
As
for Mr Adams's envious comments
about my "lavish" website and its
readers, one thing is certain:
more and more journalists like
him are evidently being drawn to
its
pages. . .
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Irving can't conceal his vicarious
delight in this unconsummated passion,
'which remained a crush, at room's length,
no more'. There is a payoff, too. Toward
the end of her life, Schroeder produced,
Irving claims, a stack of 20 or 30
yellowed postcards from behind her secret
curtain: 'From his bunker, Hitler told
Christa to go through his private papers
and destroy everything,' he writes. 'She
had salvaged these postcards, sketches by
A.H., as mementos: there was Charlie
Chaplin as the Tramp, sketched by
Adolf Hitler, and a Wandering Jew; a vast
suspension bridge he was planning to build
after the war... and a deft pencil
self-portrait...'
For some reason, Schroeder wanted
Irving to have one of the cards and 'of
course' he chose the self-portrait. She
wondered if she should sign it to
authenticate it, but Irving, never much of
a stickler for authenticity, replied,
apparently, 'that she knew who drew it,
and so did I, and that was good
enough'.
Hitler's childlike sketch of himself,
in shaky profile, is thus reproduced on
the website, along with a final footnote
to the story. 'Later,' Irving adds,
'Christa must have regretted her kindness,
and I was told she had remarked that she
could have sold the postcard to pay for an
expensive operation that she needed. I
gave the person who conveyed this message
to me an envelope with cash for Christa
(in those days, before the enemy onslaught
on Real History began, I was comfortably
able to make such donations).'
For those familiar with his work, or
who followed the libel
trial he brought against Penguin Books
and the American academic Deborah
Lipstadt at the High Court, this is
all a classic piece of Irving propaganda.
It mixes a sense of intimacy with the
thrill of discovery; it is full of
provocative detail that is impossible to
verify -- Hitler doodling a 'Wandering
Jew'? -- but which is designed to humanise
the dictator in the minds of readers (and,
as such, is part of Irving's somewhat
thankless lifelong project). The final
acceptance of the postcard is classic
Irving, too, (like the Oi! boys with their
swastikas, he revels in Nazi memorabilia,
treasures these little love tokens); and,
pointedly, it ends by planting in his
reader's mind an example both of his
'benevolence' and his outrageous sense of
himself as a victim. (Elsewhere on his
curiously lavish site -- all pop-up
windows and Adobe Acrobats -- Irving makes
this subliminal plea
for hard cash to his sad band of
international devotees more explicit,
offering credit card hotlines and PO Box
numbers, and promising that bank
statements will record their donation to
his lifestyle simply as 'World War Two
Books'.) It is all, in other words, very
much business as usual.
THERE was a time when David Irving used to
content himself with denying the Final
Solution in general and Hitler's knowledge
of it in particular. (He then went to
court to argue that he was in denial that
he was in denial.) But these days his
selective memory also seems to extend to
the recent history of his judicial
humiliation. It does not seem to have
registered with him that after his
three-month libel suit, in which he
claimed that Penguin and Lipstadt had
defamed him by calling him a
'disreputable' historian, he was told
by Justice Gray that he had been
proved 'an active Holocaust denier', that
he is 'anti-Semitic'
and 'racist', and that 'he associates with
right-wing extremists who promote
neo-Nazism'.
At the time of this verdict, a series
of cartoons appeared in newspapers
picturing Irving denying that the trial,
and its damning verdict, had ever actually
occurred. These caricatures were, it
seems, prescient.
Despite having lost
leave to appeal against the
Penguin/Lipstadt verdict last summer, and
though he still owes in the region of
£2 million costs, of which, nearly
two years on, not a penny has been paid,
Irving insists on telling his acolytes and
donors that the action against the
publisher is 'ongoing'. It is one of
half-a-dozen cases that Irving claims
still to be involved in, and that he
apparently requires funds to fight.
On 5 March, Penguin will press a
bankruptcy claim on him, in an attempt to
recover at least a long overdue 'interim
payment' of £125,000. They despair a
little of ever seeing the balance.
Worse, despite his defeat, Irving
continues to behave as if he still has a
reputation to defend, and unfortunately,
this idea seems infectious. In the years
before the Penguin trial, Irving attempted
to bully and intimidate publishers and
newspapers from criticising his work by
threatening pre-emptive legal action. Even
after being destroyed in court he has
continued in this practice, and publishers
continue to be cowed, presumably in the
knowledge that even if they won a court
battle with Irving, they would still,
given his record of non-payment, have to
foot the bill.
The key defence witness in the Penguin
trial, Richard
J. Evans, professor of modern
history at Cambridge, spent nearly three
years tracking down Irving's original
sources, to prove his concerted and
deliberate efforts to pervert the
historical record and to bend fact to his
own political ends. This paperchase, which
led Evans around the libraries and
research institutes of Europe, was
collated in a 750-page dossier, the basis
of the defence against Irving: a catalogue
of instances of his deliberate
mistranslation and selective quotation
that proved beyond any doubt the assertion
that Irving's historical method was
directed, as his detractors claimed, by
his obsessive mission to 'rehabilitate'
Hitler.
In the weeks after the trial, Evans
turned this dossier, and his astute
reflections on the case and its
implications, into a compelling book,
Lying About Hitler, one of the most
exhaustive and important pieces of
scholarly investigation in modern
times.
The book immediately found a publisher
in America, won dazzling reviews and sold
10,000 hardback copies. Nearly two years
on, however, it remains unpublished in
Britain, and, though it can be ordered
from Amazon, Irving continues to use the
anomalies of the British libel laws --
which place the burden of proof on the
defendant rather than the litigant -- to
keep it from bookshops.
Evans's manuscript was first bought by
Heinemann, part of the Random House
conglomerate, who despite describing it in
their blurb as 'a major contribution to
our understanding of the Holocaust',
opted
to pulp it, apparently after receiving
threats of writs from the already
discredited Irving. Other publishers --
with the notable exception of Granta
Books, who were happy to accept the
negligible risk but could not reach an
agreement with Evans for other books --
have refused to touch it, even though
lawyers are offering to defend the book
pro bono, and despite the fact it contains
little that was not in the High Court
judgment.
Evans's experience was not unique. In
terms similar to those Jeffrey
Archer or Robert Maxwell were
apt to use, Irving also wrote
to potential publishers of the
American academic John Lukacs's
book The Hitler of History, which
contained a devastating attack on his
methods, telling them:
'A major British Sunday
newspaper [the Sunday Times
] was [once] obliged to pay
me very substantial damages for similar
libels... I put you, and through your
agency any such publisher, herewith on
notice that I shall immediately
commence libel proceedings against any
publisher who is foolish enough to
repeat these libels within the
jurisdiction of our courts.'
In January 2001, nine months after
Irving was demolished in one such court,
Weidenfeld & Nicolson published
Lukacs's book -- but not without
significant emendations to the Irving
section. Irving's website still suggests
that a writ is pending.
At the time of Justice Gray's ruling,
solicitor Anthony Julius, who had
run Penguin's case, claimed the verdict
was 'a sparkling vindication of the libel
laws' and one which 'softens one's
attitude to the courts and the litigation
process... everything looks rosy'.
While Julius was crowing, however,
Irving, as Evans points out in his book,
was celebrating what he saw as a PR
victory, too. In the week after the trial,
he was
listing the international media who
wanted to interview him -- 'BBC Radio 3...
Italian Radio... Los Angeles radio...Radio
Tehran... how very satisfying it has all
been' -- and claiming 'I have managed to
win' because 'two days after the judgment,
name recognition becomes enormous, and
gradually the plus or minus in front of
the name fades'.
As it stands, with the genuine victors
in this case, Penguin, still £2
million out of pocket in legal fees, and
Evans without a publisher prepared to
touch his inspired and watertight
research, it would be hard to dispute
Irving's own verdict. Particularly as he
continues to divide his time between his
country house and his Mayfair flat, when
the donations keep coming in for his
self-inflicted 'freedom fight', and while
he keeps on peddling his prejudices to all
those disturbed enough to listen.
AND, of course, in Irving's mind, he is
not finished yet. The pattern of his writs
, increasingly desperate over his career,
is that he has always sought to silence
those who he believes can damage him most.
In
this sense, the Lipstadt suit was a
prelude to an assault on his most
long-standing adversary, the indefatigable
journalist Gitta Sereny, now 76,
who[m] he is suing along with
The Observer, where her article
about him and others with a 'kind of
obsession for the Third Reich' appeared in
1996.
In advance of the Penguin/Lipstadt case
coming to court, The Observer
sought, with Sereny, to fight Irving's
claims that the article had libelled him.
To date, in preparing an initial defence
for this case, which covers much of the
same ground as the Penguin trial -- how
Irving has deliberately falsified
historical record -- this newspaper has
had to spend £800,000 in legal fees.
To apply to have the case struck off,
because the allegations have already been
heard and proven, would, with the prospect
of a counter appeal by Irving, cost a
further £50,000.
In theory, The Observer might,
if this application was successful, claim
costs against Irving, (who, by defending
himself, incurs none), but it would have
to stand in line with Penguin and others,
with little hope of receiving a penny.
Sereny, speaking from Vienna, believes
that for Irving to continue to pursue the
case would 'of course be a monumental
waste of everyone's, particularly the
court's, time and money', but she is aware
that this has not stopped him in the past,
and that his animosity towards her runs
deep.
In part, this animosity seems to be a
result of her gender. It is no coincidence
that the two major suits Irving has
brought have both been against women, who
he believes, have been put on earth to
bear men's children: 'They haven't got the
capacity to produce something creative
themselves...'
He reserves a particular loathing for
Sereny, however, because he knows she
beats him at his own game. Like him (and,
as he says, 'like Tacitus, like
Thucydides, and like
Pliny'), Sereny is not a
professional historian, in that she does
not have a history degree and is not
attached to a university.
For a long time, Irving used his
streetwise independence to dazzle career
academics with the arcane quality of his
research. He could unearth the unlikeliest
documents to support his claims. Even
Sereny was initially impressed by his
methods -- 'He's so good at
cross-searching,' she once observed. 'Take
the Kommissarbefehl [the order
to kill captured Soviet party cadres].
He would go in 12 different directions; he
would check through what everyone was
doing on the day it was issued, on who
Hitler saw or phoned that day and where.'
Even so, she was deeply suspicious of his
findings and she had the skill and courage
to deconstruct them.
The pair's direct history goes back to
1977, when Sereny took it upon herself to
examine the sources of Hitler's
War. In doing so, she tracked down the
document that up till then perhaps most
embarrassed Irving.
In support of his contention that
Hitler knew nothing of the Final Solution,
Irving had dwelt on a diary note he had
discovered written by Ribbentrop in
his prison cell about Hitler. The note
read: 'How things came to the destruction
of the Jews I just don't know, but that he
ordered it I refuse to believe, because
such an act would be wholly incompatible
with the picture I always had of him.'
The quotation seemed a direct support
of Irving's fiction of Hitler's
'innocence'. However, when Sereny dug
through the obscure archive and found the
original source, she discovered that
Ribbentrop went on to write that: 'On the
other hand, judging from Hitler's Last
Will, one must suppose that he at least
knew about it, if, in his fanaticism
against the Jews, he didn't also order
it.'
Irving said he did not use this caveat
because he 'didn't want to confuse the
reader' but such revelations by Sereny
began the process of dismantling Irving's
reputation, which finally folded for good
at the Penguin trial.
Irving, ever attempting to make his
fanaticism seem urbane, would like you to
believe that his continued antipathy to
Sereny is simply a matter of authorial
rivalry: 'I often get bigger notices than
her. I end up getting better sources than
she does,' he suggested in 1997. In fact,
his loathing is far more visceral.
While Sereny is often generous to
Irving's intelligence -- 'He does
wonderful research and has a talent for
writing. The tragedy is that he has
misused these talents' -- Irving, when
cornered, like all bullies, resorts to
vicious personal attacks. He refers to
Sereny in letters as 'that shrivelled
prune' or 'that shrivelled Nazi hunter'
(the latter, in his grotesque world, a
pejorative).
When he interviewed Irving on Radio 4,
the psychologist Oliver James
suggested Irving's hatreds and arrogance
derived from the fact that he was
'actually very short of self-esteem,' and
suffered great feelings of 'inferiority'
which made him 'far more anxious about who
[he was] and far more in need of
kicking everyone and trying to make a big
fuss and being the centre of attention
than [he] actually realised'.
In a profile for the New Yorker,
Ian Buruma argued that Irving's
insecurity was rooted in class, and 'a
very English sense of feeling excluded'.
D.D.
Guttenplan's wonderful book The
Holocaust on Trial traces this sense of
betrayal back to Irving's dull childhood
in Ongar, Essex, where he grew up in
thrall to the Boy's Own exploits of his
family in the colonies: 'A maternal uncle
was in the Bengal Lancers. A
great-great-uncle on his father's side
followed Livingstone to Africa...
where he was supposedly eaten by his
bearer.' More telling, perhaps, was the
story of Irving's father, whose ship,
HMS
Edinburgh, was torpedoed in the war. He
survived, but he did not return home to
his wife and young son, and Irving
subsequently saw him only twice more.
He was, instead, set adrift at a minor
public school where he was beaten for his
attention-seeking. ('It never,' he claims,
somewhat contentiously, on his website,
when describing
a bizarre trip this year to his alma
mater to discuss Goebbels with the senior
boys, 'did me any harm.')
It might not take too much in the way
of amateur psychology to see how Irving's
hurt at his absent father might have
become so obliquely directed at the global
events which took him away. Certainly it
made him a sort of second-hand adventurer,
forever playing up his schoolboy exploits
behind enemy lines.
What no doubt unnerves him about Sereny
is that she had no need for these kinds of
self-publicising thrills. While Irving was
still playing pranks -- unfurling a hammer
and sickle over the main entrance, asking
for Mein Kampf as a prize on speech
day -- at his stifling suburban school
(also the alma mater of Noel
Edmonds, and of Jack Straw),
Sereny, a Hungarian national, was
receiving an education of a far more
telling kind.
When war broke out, she was a teenager
studying in Paris; she volunteered as an
auxiliary nurse during the Occupation,
working with a Catholic charity. In 1945,
she joined the United Nations Relief
administration, to work as a child welfare
officer in camps for displaced persons in
southern Germany. There, she cared for
children liberated from Dachau,
and had the task of tracing 'racially
valuable' children kidnapped from Polish
families and given to childless German
ones.
Her experiences of this horror never
left her and informed every sentence of
her extraordinary and unflinching
investigations into the psychology of the
Nazis: in particular her two masterpieces,
Into That Darkness, a portrait of
Franz Stangl, the commandant of
Treblinka, and her life of Albert
Speer, Hitler's architect
[dining,
right, with David Irving at
Frankfurt Book Fair, 1980]
Sereny's
first-hand experiences of the atrocities
provided her, too, with the moral
certainty that Irving has long sought to
undermine. 'We use the same sources,' she
said at the time of Irving's original
writ. 'I know many of the same people as
he does who were of Hitler's circle. That
is scary for him. He says we jostle at the
same trough. The difference is that he
loves that trough, and I don't... There
is, I think, [for him] despair in
all of this.'
In a famous passage from The Drowned
and the Saved, Primo Levi
remembered the words of a guard at
Auschwitz:
'Even if someone were to survive, the
world would not believe him. There will be
perhaps suspicions, discussions, research
by historians, but there will be no
certainties, because we will destroy the
evidence together with you.'
The crucial importance of the work of
Evans, Sereny and Lipstadt has been to try
eliminate those 'suspicions and
discussions' that Irving, as the most
visible Holocaust denier, has been so keen
to propagate.
In trying to cast doubt on the biggest
certainties of the Final Solution -- that
it was a wilful, industrial programme of
genocide, dictated by Hitler; that around
six million died; that there were working
gas chambers at Auschwitz -- Irving had
apparently set out to to make everything
else seem open to question, and Hitler to
appear like 'an ordinary walking, talking
human,' only 'as evil as Churchill,
as evil as Roosevelt, as evil as
Truman'. In this enterprise,
Irving, who, in his sick after-dinner
tone, is still apt to dismiss witnesses
such as the late Primo Levi as 'members of
the Association of Spurious Survivors of
the Holocaust and Other Liars (Assholes)',
had fashionable academic theory on his
side.
In dissecting the minute documentation
of the Holocaust -- days of the Penguin
trial were spent discussing the precise
phrasing of a translation -- Irving sought
to present history and, in particular,
this most crucial history, as a text like
any other, freely open to interpretation,
and, as the Auschwitz guard suggested,
lacking 'certainty'. It was as if,
recalled Evans, he believed he was
'writing a book review'.
One of the triumphs of Evans's book --
and Sereny's lifelong endeavour -- lies in
the stubborn belief that there are such
things as verifiable historical truths.
Certainties that go beyond the linguistic
relativities suggested by
poststructuralists (and pressed into
service by Irving).
Sereny's Observer article
concerned itself with a kind of obsession:
'The curious and, in some cases, I think,
sad passion about Hitler and his Third
Reich which has ruled and continues to
rule the lives of a considerable number of
people who write or inspire books.' This
kind of passion, of course, will not go
away or be easily defeated. Still, one of
the saddest ironies of the outcome of the
Penguin case is that Britain's libel laws
seem, in effect, not only to favour
poststructuralists -- Evans's book still,
in this country at least, 'does not exist'
-- but also to help further the cause of
those, like Irving, who can't bear to hear
the truth about themselves.
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