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Click Here: <A HREF="aol://5863:126/alt.conspiracy:594530">Lipstadt trial:
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Subject: Lipstadt trial: Denier admits Jews were gassed
From: <A HREF="mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]">[EMAIL PROTECTED]</A>
Date: Thu, Feb 10, 2000 5:28 PM
Message-id: <87vok5$8pa$[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
<A HREF="http://www.jewishsf.com/bk000128/ilipstadt.shtml">http://www.jewishsf
.com/bk000128/ilipstadt.shtml</A>
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Lipstadt trial: Denier admits Jews were gassed
LONDON (JTA) -- In his trial against an American writer,
Holocaust revisionist David Irving said last week he was
"willing to eat humble pie" on at least one issue.
The British citizen, who is suing U.S. Holocaust scholar Deborah
Lipstadt in a London court, admitted under cross-examination
that the Nazis "systematically" gassed some 97,000 Jews in
trucks. Irving acknowledged he had been "quite plainly wrong"
in earlier statements that the Nazis used gassing trucks "on a
very limited scale to experiment."
Irving is suing Lipstadt, a professor at Emory University in
Atlanta, and her British publisher, Penguin Books, over passages
in her book "Denying the Holocaust: The Growing Assault on Truth
and Memory."
He maintains that by labeling him a denier of the Holocaust and
accusing him of distorting historical data to suit his own
ideological goals, Lipstadt has ruined his career as a writer
and historian.
Irving told the High Court that what he had said in the past
about the scale and number of the gas truck deaths was based on
his knowledge at the time.
But under cross-examination by Richard Rampton, Irving admitted
he was mistaken after being shown a document specifying that
97,000 Jews were gassed in three trucks in a period of five
weeks.
When the judge asked Irving if he would describe that as "very
limited and experimental," Irving replied: "No, this is
systematic."
In another exchange, Rampton said Irving must be "mad or a liar"
to suggest that Jews who were deported during the war were not
being sent to their deaths.
He was responding to a claim by Irving that messages intercepted
by British wartime intelligence indicated trains transporting
Jews to the camps were equipped with a "very substantial amount
of food" and "tools of the trade" for their occupants.
Rampton inquired why Irving thought the Jews were being sent to
"little villages in the middle of nowhere" in eastern Poland in
1942.
"The documents do not tell me," replied Irving, adding that
"there could be any number of convincing explanations."
The trial entered its third week Monday.
For more JTA stories, go to <A HREF="http://www.jta.org">http://www.jta.
org</A>
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Inc., dba Jewish Bulletin of Northern California. All rights reserved.
This material may not be reproduced in any form without permission.
===============================================================
<A HREF="http://www.jewishjournal.com/davidirving.1.28.0.htm">http://www.jewis
hjournal.com/davidirving.1.28.0.htm</A>
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Undeniable Truth JANUARY 28, 2000 21 SHEVAT, 5760
In Court, Holocaust Revisionist Admits That Nazis
'Systematically' Gassed Jews
By Douglas Davis, Jewish Telegraphic Agency
A British Holocaust revisionist who is suing a U.S. Holocaust
scholar in a London court has admitted that the Nazis
"systematically" gassed 97,000 Jews in trucks.
David Irving, whose trial against Deborah Lipstadt, a professor
of Emory University in Atlanta, is now entering its third week,
said last week that he was "willing to eat humble pie" after he
admitted that he had been "quite plainly wrong" for statements
in which he said the Nazis used gassing trucks "on a very
limited scale to experiment."
Irving is suing Lipstadt and her British publisher, Penguin
Books, over passages in her book, "Denying the Holocaust: The
Growing Assault on Truth and Memory."
He says that by labeling him a denier of the Holocaust and
accusing him of distorting historical data to suit his own
ideological goals, Lipstadt has ruined his career as a writer
and historian.
Irving told the High Court that what he had said in the past
about the scale and number of the gas truck deaths was based on
his knowledge at the time.
But under cross-examination by Richard Rampton, Irving admitted
he was mistaken after he was shown a document that specified
that 97,000 Jews were gassed in three trucks in a period of just
five weeks.
When the judge, Justice Charles Gray, asked Irving if he would
describe that as "very limited and experimental," Irving
replied: "No, this is systematic."
In another exchange, Rampton said Irving must be "mad or a liar"
to suggest that Jews who were deported to the East during the
war were not being sent to their deaths.
He was responding to a claim by Irving that messages intercepted
by British wartime intelligence indicated trains transporting
Jews to the camps were equipped with a "very substantial amount
of food" and "tools of the trade" for their occupants.
Irving said this indicated "the system that was sending them was
apprehending that they would be doing something when they got
there." Rampton asked why he thought the Jews were being sent to
"little villages in the middle of nowhere" in eastern Poland in
1942.
"The documents do not tell me," replied Irving, adding that
"there could be any number of convincing explanations.''
At an earlier hearing, Irving told the judge that his
extradition was being sought by a German court for telling a
meeting in Germany that the gas chambers at Auschwitz were
erected as a tourist attraction by Poland's postwar Communist
regime.
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<A HREF="http://www.nationalpost.com/commentary.asp?f=000205/196410.html">http
://www.nationalpost.com/commentary.asp?f=000205/196410.html</A>
---------------------------------------------------------------
National Post Online - commentary
Saturday, February 05, 2000
David Irving v. the dead
Geoffrey Wheatcroft
Associated Press Photo
A historian who denies the presence of gas chambers
at Auschwitz is suing a writer who describes him as
a Holocaust denier. It only gets weirder from there
(David Irving)
LONDON - As if the greatest and most horrible act of
murder in history weren't bad enough, the National
Socialists' "Final Solution of the Jewish Question" has
become the subject of agonizing and odious controversy. It
seems we can't leave the dead in peace.
One of the nastiest such feuds is being fought out at
present in the High Court here. David Irving is
habitually, and justifiably, if meiotically, described as
a controversial historian, the author of a series of books
reinterpreting the Second World War, from The Destruction
of Dresden to Hitler's War.
He has brought a libel action against Deborah Lipstadt, an
American historian, and her publishers, Penguin Books. She
is the author of Denying the Holocaust, in which, Irving
claims, he was depicted as someone who had denied the
reality of the extermination of the Jews.
It looks like a strange case for Irving to bring. He has
publicly denied Hitler ever ordered the extermination, and
has added insult by offering to pay anyone who can produce
evidence he did. He has claimed that there were no gas
chambers at Auschwitz, and that to say there were is -- in
his deliberately and peculiarly offensive choice of phrase
-- "a blood libel on the German people." He concedes that
many Jews died during the war of 1939-45, but that these
deaths were largely caused by disease or overwork.
Not that he is always easy to pin down. Like Joerg Haider,
Irving has a knack of making outrageous statements and
then sliding away from them with slippery equivocations.
But his words are on the record, and it is not disputed
either that Irving has associated himself over the years
with fascist groups.
As the case has progressed (if that's the word), it has
become weirder and weirder. Quite apart from his
long-established and truly strange view of the death
camps, placing him at odds with almost all serious
historians, Irving has been digging himself into an ever
deeper hole in the courtroom. Last week he called an
obscure American academic to the stand, who said, "I do
not consider you to be an anti-Semite."
On the next day, counsel for the defence quoted sundry
examples of Irving's wit and wisdom. He had sung a "ditty"
to his small daughter:
"I am a baby Aryan/Not Jewish or Sectarian/I have no plans
to marry an/Ape or Rastafarian."
When this was read out, Irving denied it was racist or
anti-Semitic. It's just his idiosyncratic kind of humour.
Without trying to anticipate the outcome, one has to say
that Irving has said things in court that evidently
justify "the words complained of," as lawyers say. Because
the case is expected to last months, a jury couldn't be
expected to last the course, and it is being heard by a
judge alone. Even given the notorious perversity of the
English judiciary, it is hard to see Ms. Lipstadt losing.
All this might indeed be almost funny, in a macabre way,
if it weren't so grim. As journalists know all too well,
"Holocaust denial" is a reality. It is the speciality of
crackpots who for years have written letters in green ink
or sent out smudgy pamphlets called Did Six Million Really
Die? and have now added a new terror to life through
Internet Web sites.
It seemed at one time that Irving did not quite belong in
that galere. He has been defended by genuinely eminent
scholars, on the ground that, however eccentric or
repellent his opinions, he is an astonishingly industrious
scholar who has greatly added to our knowledge of the
Third Reich, and never mind that he writes about it with
ill-disguised admiration.
Hence Hugh Trevor-Roper recognized Irving's "consistent
bias," but showered praise on his "indefatigable scholarly
industry," and John Keegan said that Hitler's War was
"indispensable for anyone seeking to understand the war."
Another of Irving's defenders is Christopher Hitchens, a
witty journalist and engaging rascal, for whom some of us
have a soft spot and who certainly got President Clinton
bang to rights, as we Londoners say, who has insisted that
Irving is not only a Fascist historian but "a great
historian of fascism."
But these defences may be wearing thin, and not just
because of Irving's bizarre behaviour in court. It could
yet turn out that this quaint chronicler of mass-murder
has got away with murder intellectually speaking.
Professor Richard J. Evans of Cambridge has devoted much
time and energy, which he might well feel he had better
uses for, examining the same archives as Irving, and
concluding that his use of them had been slapdash or even
mischievous. Trevor-Roper hasn't seen the same archives,
or Keegan, and Hitchens couldn't have read them in German
even if he had wanted to.
As his defenders drop away, there is little sympathy left
for Irving, though perhaps a touch of pity. He had a grim
childhood -- his mother was abandoned by her husband, and
Irving met his father just twice -- and his eldest
daughter killed herself last year. Behind the cockiness
and bluster and eagerness to give offence is a gravely
maimed personality.
There are broader points at issue beyond one man and his
reputation. Like any other historical episode, the Shoah
-- the Hebrew word for catastrophe, which some of us
prefer to "Holocaust," the Greek word for "burnt offering"
-- is a legitimate subject for historical inquiry. Only
Nazis and nutters deny the Shoah, but there is another
serious, though sadly envenomed, debate between historians
who believe Hitler was all along determined to exterminate
the Jews and those who think it was a form of
improvisation.
Again, American Daniel Goldhagen caused a stir of his own
with his book Hitler's Willing Executioners. To say it was
written from a different perspective to Irving's would be
an understatement.
Personally (and to simplify), I find one of Goldhagen's
arguments correct, the other absurd. It is clearly the
case that far more Germans participated in, and knew
about, the great massacre than it was politically
convenient to recognize after the event.
But Goldhagen's thesis that the German people were
uniquely permeated with "exterminationist" anti-Semitism
from well before Hitler makes no sense. All the evidence
is that, a hundred years ago, anti-Semitism was far more
rampant in other European nations such as Poland and
Russia, or even the France of the Dreyfus case.
Why was it Germany and not they which perpetrated the
murder?
The sad truth is that it is almost impossible to discuss
these matters sine ira et studio. And we might all agree
the worst possible place to discuss them at all is in a
court of law. Indeed, there is one other aspect to the
Irving case that enrages some of us almost as much as the
controversy itself, and throws a most ironical light on
the whole question of Holocaust denial. It is Irving, the
supposed denier, who is suing Lipstadt, the enemy of
denial, for accusing him of denying. And he is doing so
under the dreadful English libel laws. Whatever the rights
and wrongs, it really is monstrous that Ms. Lipstadt
should have years of her life taken up with this case,
should have to give up months to preparing her defence,
and should be obliged to sit in court for many weeks on
end, simply because she wasn't prepared to grovel to
Irving.
She does this in the knowledge, moreover, that even if the
judge finds for her and her publishers, they will be faced
with huge costs. That happens regularly in defamation
cases. You can win and still lose: When "costs" are
awarded to the successful party, that by no means
necessarily covers all legal expenses incurred.
While Irving is conducting his own case, the defendants
have a full legal team, solicitors, Queen's Counsel and
junior, all costing many thousands a day. Taking part in a
case like this is catching a cab from Toronto to Vancouver
and watching the meter tick over. Since Irving cannot
possibly pay even part of the defence costs, he will
presumably go bankrupt if he loses, and the defendants can
whistle for their money.
And this case shows once again how heavily weighted in the
defendant's favour the libel law is. He doesn't have to
prove "actual damage" or financial loss, only to assert
that his feelings are hurt, as aren't ours all from time
to time. The burden of proof is effectively on the
defendant. She has no public interest defence, and the
plaintiff is not obliged to show (as in American law) that
she acted recklessly and with malice.
If this sounds like a newspaperman's grudge, I would point
out that the most successful exponents of the English
libel laws in the past 20 years have been the late Robert
Maxwell, Jeffrey Archer ("Lord Archer," Lord help us) and
the Bank of Commerce and Credit International, all of whom
who used the law to silence their critics. Should David
Irving's name be added to that roll of dishonour? At any
rate the present case is a civil action, brought by
Irving, but in some countries he himself might by now have
been prosecuted in the criminal courts. Some countries now
have Holocaust denial laws under which to say what Irving
has said is a criminal offence.
This is a most retrograde step. Three years ago, the idea
of such a law was floated in England, and greeted with
enthusiasm, I'm sorry but not surprised to say, by Tony
Blair, who can't see a bandwagon without jumping on it. At
the time, the proposal was criticized eloquently by Robert
Harris in the Sunday Times, humbly by myself in the Sunday
Telegraph, and most bravely in the Jewish Chronicle by the
late Chaim Bermant. As he said, such a law would be
unthinkable in the U.S. because of its constitution, and
ought to be unthinkable in England "because of our
traditions." The answer to lies is to tell the truth, not
to lock up the liars.
It is indeed possible to detest Holocaust deniers while
also having grave misgivings about what has been called
the Holocaust industry, or "Shoah business," about which
Hal Niedzviecki wrote in the National Post last Saturday
(Turning the Horror of History into Fun). And such
misgivings aren't confined to those who are indifferent to
the sufferings of the Jews.
That great man Isaiah Berlin was an acutely conscious Jew,
who identified passionately with his people and their
fate. And in the words of his biographer Michael
Ignatieff, "he actively despised the Holocaust industry
and kept his distance from rhetorical invocations of his
people's horrible fate. Silence seemed more truthful."
While knowing what I think about David Irving, I also know
what Isaiah Berlin meant.
Geoffrey Wheatcroft's last book, The Controversy of Zion:
Jewish Nationalism, the Jewish State and the Unresolved
Jewish Dilemma, won an American National Jewish Book
Award.
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