Today and tomorrow you get treated to a two-part interview pertaining to the Irving trial. It's self-explanatory - and utterly fascinating!
Without ado:
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Transcript: CBC Radio interviews Don Guttenplan
On Tuesday, February 8, between 7:05 and 7:25 host Mary Lou Finlay of the CBC Radio program As It Happens <aih@toronto.cbc.ca> interviewed journalist D. D. Guttenplan <letters@theatlantic.com> about the British historian David Irving's libel suit against the American professor, Deborah Lipstadt.
The transcipt follows; the interviewing host is AIH, the interviewee DDG.
AIH: In a libel suit like no other, David Irving has filed suit against Deborah Lipstadt and Penguin Books. Mr. Irving is the controversial British historian, a man who believes the death toll in the Holocaust is grossly exaggerated. Deborah Lipstadt is an American Holocaust scholar. She's been sued for calling Irving a "Holocaust denier." Those are the bare bones of the case. But observers say that what's unfolding in a London courtroom is nothing less than a trial of the Holocaust itself.
D. D. Guttenplan has been following the trial and his report on the case is the cover story in the current Atlantic Monthly magazine. He joined us from our London studio.
Mr. Guttenplan, what is exactly the issue here? What did Deborah Lipstadt say about David Irving in her book?
DDG: Well, in her book, which is called Denying the Holocaust, she calls Irving "one of the most dangerous spokespersons for Holocaust denial." Now, Irving says that those words are libellous and he's filed suit against Deborah Lipstadt and against her publisher in England, Penguin Books.
AIH: And of course in England the burden of proof is on her in a libel case, is it? How does that work?
DDG: That's right. Unlike some of your listening audience in the United States will be used to hearing the burden of proof being on the ...
AIH: The plaintiff!
DDG: ...The plaintiff in a libel trial. In England and, I believe, in Canada as well, the burden of proof is on the defendant. So. She has to prove, essentially, three things. She has to prove that certain events happened; that the evidence existed that Irving should have been aware of that these things happened; and that he distorted or suppressed evidence. I mean, that's essentially insofar as the Holocaust itself is an issue, and it is an issue in this trial -- that is why it's an issue.
AIH: That's a pretty heavy burden, isn't it?
DDG: Well, it is a pretty heavy burden and, in a sense, a British libel court is a pretty bad place to try and prove these things because the record of British libel courts on matters of history is not fantastic. On the other hand, so far her team has been doing a very good job.
AIH: All right. Tell us a little about David Irving. What does he believe about the Holocaust -- if you know?
DDG: Well [laughs]. I'm glad you put it like that. His statements on the Holocaust have a kind of quicksilver quality. He's perfectly capable of saying -- as he has to me -- 90 percent of what they're, meaning the defence experts, are going to say I'm going to agree with. Just this afternoon [February 8], at the trial, they were taking evidence from a Professor Christopher Browning, who's a professor of history at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. And they were talking about two of the Nazi death camps -- Belzec and Treblinka. And Irving was saying... Well, first he was appearing to say that he didn't deny that Jews were killed in large numbers, in other words, hundreds of thousands, at these camps. But then he appeared to suggest that, well, actually, he himself wasn't convinced, but for the sake of making the trial quicker he'd concede that it was true. I mean, even under oath, even in a trial, it's still very difficult to get him to be specific about what it is he believes. He has been specific about what he doesn't believe. What he doesn't believe is that Jews were murdered at Auschwitz in gas chambers in large numbers.
AIH: But he has been, I mean, he began ... he's not a historian by training, I gather. But ...
DDG: He's not a historian by training, but, although, as he frequently says, neither was Herodotus or Thucydides. So. You don't have to have a PhD to be a historian.
AIH: And, in fact, some noted historians, as you point out in your article, like Hugh Trevor-Roper, have called him ... Was he the one who said, "He's not only a Fascist historian, but a great historian of Fascism?"
DDG: No, that was Christopher Hitchens in Vanity Fair.
AIH: OK. Oh, all right.
DDG: But Gordon Craig of Stanford says that... he pays tribute to Irving's energy as a researcher and to the scope and vigour of his publications. And John Keegan, who's the author of The Face of Battle, and other books on military history, has said that Irving's work is "indispensable to understanding the Second World War in the round."
AIH: So. How much weight is to be given to his historical research?
DDG: Well. That's one of the questions at issue in the trial, in a way. I mean, up until now Irving has had a kind of an interesting ride, facing two ways. In other words, facing to the community of historians, he's been regarded as a documents man, industrious, somebody who likes to winkle things out of archives. And, meanwhile, his growing sort of camp of fellow ... they call themselves "revisionists" -- Lipstadt calls them "Holocaust deniers" -- he's been their most respectable spokesperson. And one of the questions that the trial will address, and does address directly, is whether you can face both ways at once like that. In other words, the defence isn't just saying David Irving is wrong about the Holocaust, although they are saying that, they're also saying -- and next week they'll be hearing evidence on this -- that he has distorted or suppressed or misused evidence all the way along through his career. In other words, from his first book, The Destruction of Dresden, which was published in the early 60s, up until now, he's always been, as they say in Britain, "bent."
AIH: But if you... you've just said that he will admit that hundreds of thousands, perhaps - we're not talking "millions" (so that's obviously a problem) of Jews were deliberately killed by Hitler or Hitler's people. Then he is by definition a Holocaust denier, isn't he?
DDG: Well [pause]. That is a good question. I mean, he would say that he concedes that, for example, I mean, as he has at the trial, probably over a million. I mean, it's hard to get him pinned down on numbers; probably over a million Jews were killed on the Eastern Front by the Einsatzgruppen, the mobile killing units that the Nazis sent in behind their troops during the invasion of the Soviet Union. And he's never disputed that vast numbers of Jews were killed by these groups, which would be hard to do because we have the groups' reports on how many they've killed. I mean, there's a very good paper trail for this. But what he's said is that these killings were not systematic and that they were not planned or ordered by Hitler. Now in the course of the trial he's appeared to backtrack on both of those assertions. But, in a sense, he's all along... what he's all along denied is the existence of large-scale homicidal gas chambers. Now, some people may say -- "Well, so what?" I mean, if somebody's killed, you know, a million people...
AIH: ... They're killed.
DDG: ...They're killed. But, you know, there is an argument, a serious argument, that says that what makes the Holocaust different from other mass murders, 'cause we've had plenty of mass murder in this century -- or the past century, unfortunately, is precisely its mechanized, industrial quality.
AIH: Why does he deny that there were gas ovens? [sic]
DDG: Why -- or what are his grounds?
AIH: What are his grounds?
DDG: I think Why is in some ways the more interesting question. I'll answer that first, if I might, even though you sort of didn't ask it. You know, if you argue in favour of Fascism, if you say that, after all, all the Germans were doing were fighting the Russians and that we know that the Russians were these evil communists and therefore the Germans were actually, in a sense, on our side -- and there's a strain of right-wing thinking that argues that way -- you have a problem. And the problem is that the most vivid association that most people have with Fascism is gas chambers and the Holocaust. So if you want to rehabilitate Fascism as an ideology, then you have to do something to attack this association. So, that, I think, is The Why. The "on what grounds" -- because there is not the same kind of paper trail for the death camps; the death camps that were solely devoted to killing Jews -- Belzec, Sobibor, Treblinka -- were destroyed by the Nazis as they retreated from the Red Army and also were liberated from the Red Army... by the Red Army. In other words, they were captured by Russian troops. The pictures that were all seen of, you know, British Tommies or American GIs handing out chocolates or strolling among the cadavers at a place like Belsen or Buchenwald or Dachau -- those were not death camps.
AIH: They did not have ovens?
DDG: They were concentration camps. They did not have gas chambers. They may have "ovens," i.e., crematoria, in some cases, but people died of typhus, they died of starvation, they died of overwork. But they were not, in the phrase that Irving disputes, "factories of death." In other words, no reputable historian now pretends that they were "factories of death." And yet, if you ask a lot of people, including -- I have to say -- myself, before I started looking at this trial, there hasn't been that sharp differentiation in the public mind. So that, when Irving says "Well, these places weren't 'factories of death,' therefore, no place was a factory of death" -- you know, for half a second, people think, "Well, how do I know this?"
AIH: What evidence is there for the gas chambers?
DDG: Well, that was last week, and the week before, the court heard from Prof. Robert Jan Van Pelt, who's a professor at the architecture faculty at the University of Waterloo, in Canada. And he's the author of a book called Auschwitz 1290 to the Present. And he presented in really staggering detail the kind of evidence that there is, that we now have. This evidence hasn't always been available. And some of it was only released by the Soviet Union who held it in their archives after, you know, the dissolution of the Soviet Union. It was only released by the Russian archivists in the last few years. But there are architectual blueprints, there are plans, there are purchase orders for Zyklon B, which is the gas that was used to kill the Jews. So, there is, in fact, a lot of evidence. But it is also true, and has to be said, some of the evidence -- now whether Irving would say most of it, most other people would say almost none of it, but nonetheless some of it, has to be conceded, can be interpreted two ways.
AIH: How else do you interpret it?
DDG: Well, he claims, for example, --or he now claims -- 'cause I should say he has said there were never any gas chambers at Auschwitz.
AIH: Yes?
DDG: Now he says, "Well, yes, I see the plans for gas chambers at Auschwitz, but they were for gassing corpses, they were for gassing cadavers. Now, so why you would want to gas a cadaver before you burn it -- as my 9-year-old son asked me [laughs] -- is a question that I can't answer.
(Tomorrow: Part II)
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Thought for the Day:
"Dear Ingrid, I am quoting you from to-day's Montreal Gazette about a demonstration outside the Austrian Embassy by Jews and other survivors:
"'I am here for my wife" said Dutch veteran John Franken, 77, who was captured and forced into slave labour in a Japanese coal mine three months before the atomic bomb was dropped Hiroshima. "She was at Auschwitz and got sent to the gas chamber three times. She survived because they kept running out of gas.'"
(Letter to the Zundelsite)