I am repeating the introduction in each of this 11-part ZGram series. Read it until you know it by heart!
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A mainstream Jewish writer, giving his readers the standard Jewish slant on well-worn Holocaust orthodoxy in response to the then upcoming Irving/Lipstadt-Penguin Trial, made amazing and telling pre-emptive admissions in an article published in the February 2000 Atlantic Monthly. This 19 page article, significantly titled "The Holocaust on Trial" by D.D. Guttenplan, is so far the most comprehensive and extensive write-up on the subject of Revisionism and the Holocaust that has appeared in the global mainstream press.
The choice of the title itself speaks volumes. It is an open acknowledgement - long overdue! - that Revisionism, far from being a fringe movement run by a few crackpots and "Hitler lovers", is in fact a vibrant, legitimate historical discipline of far greater spiritual depth and political importance than has been admitted by those who would like us to listen to the B'nai Brith and Anti-Defamation League type smearmongering just a little bit longer.
Holocaust orthodoxy is not yet a sacred religious dogma of Judaism. It is, in fact, the central core of the Zionist political agenda. This agenda has had diabolical, monstrous results. It gave us World War II, the Morgenthau Plan, Operation Keelhaul, the Nuremberg Trials, an Israeli state, German reparations to maintain that state, more than half a century of Bolshevic occupation of the heartland of Europe, deliberately media-induced, all-permeating "Holocaust thinking" and, as a by-produce, permanent, bloody wars and upheaval in the Middle East. It is also the backbone of the New World Order.
Understanding this Zionist agenda is of crucial relevance to every person on this earth who prefers truth over lies, unfettered scientific and historical inquiry to back up that truth and demolish those lies, and freedom over slavery for future generations.
Leuchter's findings, Irving's adoption of these findings, and the subsequent Errol Morris documentary film about Leuchter played a central role in the lengthy Irving-Lipstadt/Penguin litigation, as the court transcripts reveal. This illustrates the crucially important role played by the much-maligned Fred Leuchter in the demolition of this edifice and relic of World War II propaganda lies.
Guttenplan's choice of the Title, "The Holocaust on Trial" - was borrowed from a Zundel publication - the 1988 'consumerized" version by Reporter Robert Lenski of the 1988 Zündel trial, reviewable on the Zundelsite. (Use the Zundelsite-specific search engine for topics of specific interest!) The title signifies acknowledgment by the back door of the importance of the two Zundel Trials and their seminal impact on Holocaust historiography.
It is only fitting that Ernst Zundel should review the Atlantic Monthly article. In this article, Guttenplan is continuing the traditional modus operandi of the "in-elite" by talking about us, around us, past us and against us. Who better than a German to respond to the continued blood libel against the Germans - and to assure more balance, sanity and honesty?
Who better than Ernst Zundel, battle-scarred veteran of this herculean struggle and originator/catalyst of the all-important Leuchter Report?
I yield my ZGrams to Ernst Zundel. The Internet allows this veteran of Holocaust Revisionism to have his say - his way!
(Paragraph pairs are numbered and separated by a line. )
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Part IV
23. Guttenplan: The "Scamp"
David John Cawdell Irving was born on March 24, 1938, the youngest of four children. His father was a naval officer, and in some interviews Irving strives to give an impression of Country Life. "My mother," he says, "was an artist." Then he catches himself. "A commercial artist. She did pen-and-ink drawings for Nursery World." For an Englishman with Irving's keen sense of social distinctions, the difference is considerable. The Irvings lived in Ongar, "the end of the Central Line," a dreary suburb made drearier by a lack of money.
ANSWER TO 23. It seems that Irving has smarted a whole lifetime about his less-than-aristocratic birth. What does that prove?
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24. Guttenplan: When Irving was four years old, his father's ship, the HMS Edinburgh, was torpedoed by the Germans. His father survived, but never returned to his wife and family. "I saw my father about twice in my whole life, "Irving says. "During the war years we had a motorcar which was up on blocks. It was a Ford, and I remember as a child climbing through the door. Underneath the car I found a battered old board suitcase, which my mother had obviously thrown there, and it was full of a very musty naval uniform, which was beginning to rot."
ANSWER TO 24. There are millions of Russian, German, French and British as well as American kids who never saw their fathers return from the war, or who had fathers who took up with other women. They did not all become Irvings. So the key to his psyche can hardly be found there.
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25. Guttenplan: The war dominated Irving's childhood. "I remember standing on the beach at Southsea," he says, "and watching the invasion fleet sail in June, 1944. My mother said that most of them probably wouldn't be coming home." Sent as a day boy to "a minor public school," Irving was "beaten repeatedly." He says, "The final beating came when I'd hung a twelve-foot hammer-and-sickle flag over the main entrance to the school. They had to call the fire brigade to come and bring it down .... I was a scamp."
ANSWER TO 25. Corporal punishment was the norm in those days, not only in England but in Canada, America and Germany as well. What does that prove? Childhood pranks? Does that make famous writers - or "Holocaust Deniers"?
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26. Guttenplan: A year earlier Irving had won the school prize for art appreciation. The award was a book of his choice - to be presented by the deputy prime minister. "I filled in the form saying the prize I wanted to receive was Mein Kampf. I arranged for the local press to be there en masse to take a photograph of the deputy prime minister giving me a copy of Mein Kampf. I went up on stage and picked up this prize - and it was a German-Russian technical dictionary! I've never read Mein Kampf from that day to this."
ANSWER TO 26. Any reader, including the otherwise rather suspicious-of-motives Guttenplan, must wonder if a man with Irving's obvious curiosity and interest in the Führer and his Reich - not to call it an obsession - would not be interested in the intellectual underpinnings, the very foundation, of his Reich. The primary document, the virtual beginning of the beginning of the Hitler era is Mein Kampf. For Irving to claim that he never read it is to stretch the credulity of the reader. More "quicksilver," I suspect. Fear of getting caught in the quicksand of his mindset is the more likely explanation.
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27. Guttenplan: Irving's desire to shock also got him into trouble at Imperial College, where he'd been given a one-year scholarship. The student magazine "ran a headline in 1956 that I'd said that seventeen percent of London university students were extreme left-wing or Communists," he says. "The figure of seventeen percent was straight off the top of my head. I just picked a prime number." Irving lost his scholarship after failing his math examination - a failure for which he blames his professor, "a known Communist."
ANSWER TO 27. That ideologically twisted-out-of-shape Communist professors would fail a student who makes politically incorrect noises is nothing new or unusual. Try to write a Revisionist version of the Holocaust in any American, Canadian or German school or university with a Jewish professor in our supposedly enlightened and tolerant times - and you will quickly find out the limits of "academic freedom and inquiry." Young Irving's non-scientifically based 17% student figure - which Guttenplan introduces, I suppose, to cast doubt on his present-day Holocaust arithmetic or calculations - is just a cheap, but typical, rhetorical devise used by the people with D. D. Guttenplan's mindset.
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28. Guttenplan: To finance his second year of studies, Irving took a job on a concrete gang. He also became fascinated with Oswald Mosley, the former head of the British Union of Fascists, who was running for Parliament. An attempt to join the Royal Air Force was turned down on medical grounds. If Mosley was an odd inspiration for the son of a Second World War veteran, Irving's response to his rejection by the RAF was odder still. He wrote a letter to Krupp, the former Nazi armaments manufacturer, asking for a job in its steel mill. Seized by the Allies after the war, the firm was unable to oblige. But its rival Thyssen, whose owners had fallen out with Hitler after helping him to power, offered Irving a year's work. His fellow steelworkers added a rough-hewn fluency to Irving's high school German; one of them, a native of Dresden, gave him the subject of his first book.
ANSWER TO 28. It is interesting that Guttenplan does not mention what the medical grounds were on which Irving was turned down by the Royal Air Force. That's a pity! Could it be that this would have meant that Guttenplan and his friends might not have been able to use Irving as such a convenient straw man. built up as the world's greatest "Holocaust Denier" for the purposes of this trial - to be knocked down with an adverse verdict? That whole paragraph has a Yeshiva School feel to it in its subliminal casting of allusions and aspersions coupled with innuendo.
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29. Guttenplan: The man had lived through the Allied fire-bombing of the city in February of 1945; his harrowing account of the raid came as a revelation to Irving, who set to work interviewing survivors and combing through German and Allied archival material. Published in 1963, The Destruction of Dresden was an immediate best seller. The book's gruesome photographs of Germans burning their dead, which Irving secured from one of his new contacts, ensured maximum press attention for his claim that the bombing raid had killed 135,000 people - a figure that was more than twice the official estimates.
ANSWER TO 29. The Dresden book is a monument to the young Irving, even though it is quite anti-German in tone.
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30. Guttenplan: "I imported Dresden into the vocabulary of horror," Irving says proudly. "People now say 'Dresden' in the same breath as they say 'Auschwitz' and 'Hiroshima.' That's my small contribution to the vernacular."
ANSWER TO 30. Irving can justly claim this a credit, a fruit of his labor and pen.
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31. Guttenplan: In later years Irving's estimates of the Dresden death toll would fall as low as 35,000 and rise as high as 250,000. And in later years he would sometimes make direct comparisons between Dresden and Auschwitz. "About a hundred thousand people died in Auschwitz," he told an interviewer in 1991. "So even if we're generous and say one quarter of them, twenty-five thousand, were killed by hanging or shooting - twenty-five thousand is a crime, that's true .... But we killed that many people burning them alive in one night, not in three years, in a city like Pforzheim. We killed five times that number in Dresden in one night."
ANSWER TO 31. His pirouetting through the minefield of the numbers simply reveals Irving's "quicksilvery" style of argumentation, which allows him to agree with the off-the-wall calculations of "...97,000 gas van victims in five weeks..." - if one can believe the press reports!
He is right, however, about comparing Dresden to Auschwitz and Pforzheim. Absolutely right!
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32. Guttenplan: At the time, however, The Destruction of Dresden was important to Irving for other reasons. The book's financial success allowed him to abandon efforts to complete his degree. He immediately began work on two more books: a history of the German rocket program and a biography of Adolf Hitler. "I'd translated the memoirs of [Field Marshal] Wilhelm Keitel, who was hanged at Nuremberg," Irving says. "Keitel's son introduced me to Otto Günsche - the man who burned Hitler's body. He was Hitler's SS adjutant. And Günsche decided he would talk to me, because I was the Englishman who had written about Dresden. That gave me an edge."
ANSWER TO 32. In other words, it took an Englishman to give at least some voice to the defeated German side, while Germans were being cowed and gagged by a vicious, Allied-imposed censorship campaign in "democratic" Germany proper.
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33. Guttenplan: Günsche became Irving's passport into "the inner circle of all Hitler devotees, the servants and the adjutants and the colonels and the secondaries, who would meet around the graveside when one of their number died," he says. "And the word was passed: 'He's okay.' And after a while they started producing their diaries and private papers." The result was Hitler's War, published in 1977.
ANSWER TO 33. So what? He got leads and used them. That's the way it is done in the journalism, the film, even the police business. Sources are the life blood of any writer - Irving and Guttenplan included.
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34. Guttenplan: Writing in Time magazine, Lance Morrow found Irving's portrait of "the Führer as a somewhat harried business executive, too preoccupied to know exactly what was happening in his branch offices at Auschwitz and Treblinka," difficult to credit. The historian Hugh Trevor-Roper's review in the London Sunday Times referred to Irving's "consistent bias" but went on to say, "No praise can be too high for Irving's indefatigable scholarly industry.... I have enjoyed reading his long work from beginning to end." The military historian John Keegan called Hitler's War Irving's "greatest achievement ... indispensable to anyone seeking to understand the war in the round." Fueled by such notices, the book reached No. 8 on British best-seller lists.
ANSWER TO 34. Western academia should be careful when trotting out such phrases as "consistent bias" in historians - especially Hugh-Trevor Roper, the former British intelligence officer, whose writings are replete with only a thinly veiled anti-German bias, disguised by the cowardly "anti-Nazi" tactic.
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35. Guttenplan: The only appreciable dent in Irving's public credibility came when the writer Gitta Sereny and the reporter Lewis Chester checked Irving's documents and re-interviewed his sources, including Otto Günsche, on assignment for the Sunday Times. Less than the sum of its parts, their article contained some damaging details - among them Günsche's admission that "one must assume that [Hitler] did know" about the extermination of the Jews - but ultimately posed little obstacle to Irving's continued prominence.
ANSWER TO 35. ". . . one must assume that [Hitler] did know" - that's the level of scientific historical scholarship, when one blackens the reputation of a nation of 80 Million Germans? After 55 years of incessant brain bombardment, Günsche "assumes"? What threshold of proof is that?
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36. Guttenplan: One reason for this was the authors' focus on the narrow question of Hitler's personal culpability - doubtless a response to Irving's much-publicized standing offer of $1,000 to anyone who could provide documentary evidence of Hitler's guilt.
ANSWER TO 36. Not one of the Jewish critics has taken Irving up on his $1,000 offer - certainly not his severest critic, Deborah Lipstadt. Hilberg changed his footnotes about the so recklessly claimed "Führer Order" for the extermination of the Jews when asked to provide the proof for his audacious claim.
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37. Guttenplan: And because Sereny is a fellow writer on Nazi themes, Irving could - and does - simply dismiss her as a jealous competitor. Finally, and perhaps most important, although his account of Hitler's role was hard to swallow (not even Keegan and Trevor-Roper took his behind-Hitler's-back thesis seriously), in 1977 David Irving's views on the Holocaust were fairly unexceptionable. Under "Jews: extermination of," the index to Hitler's War lists seventeen entries. There are references to "the extermination camp at Chelmno" and "the extermination center at Treblinka." And Irving's argument that "the burden of guilt for the bloody and mindless massacre of the Jews rests on a large number of Germans, many of them alive today, and not just on one mad dictator,' whose order had to be obeyed without question," while debatable, is not very far from the thesis of Daniel Goldhagen's Hitler's Willing Executioners (1996), another book whose dismissal by knowledgeable specialists has done little to hinder its success with the public.
ANSWER TO 37. The difference between Irving and people like Goldhagen and Guttenplan is this:
When Irving was confronted with the results of Fred Leuchter's 1988 forensic examination of Auschwitz, Birkenau and Maidanek, and realized that these facilities were not gas chambers as he, too, had been conned into believing by clever Holocaust promoters - Irving publicly admitted his error of judgment under oath in the witness stand in Toronto. Goldhagen, Hilberg, Lipstadt and Guttenplan - all of them Jewish! - continued on as if there was nothing to be re-examined. They stuck to their story of German fiendishness and Jewish innocence, holiness or victimhood.
There is a concept in British-Canadian Anglo-Saxon law. It's called "willful blindness." The Goldhagens, Hilbergs, Lipstadts and Guttenplans - and not the Irvings, Faurissons and Zündels of this world - close their eyes to important new facts or disturbing new findings. As Guttenplan reveals in the very first paragraph of this article - "as if the Holocaust as a historical fact was open to debate" - here you have dogmatism writ large! Here you have Eastern European shtetl mentality revealed! Witches cavort with the devil! The sun revolves around the earth! And, of course, the earth is flat! My mind is made up; don't confuse me with the facts, especially not new, scientific facts!
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38. Guttenplan: Any damage to Irving's reputation was more than recouped by his involvement in the 1983 debacle over the "Hitler diaries," when Newsweek, the London Sunday Times, and the German magazine Der Stern, which had rushed to publish the diaries in a fanfare of publicity, were forced to admit they'd been conned - or, in the case of Newsweek, which sidestepped the question of the diaries' authenticity, at least deeply embarrassed. Chief among the victims was Hugh Trevor-Roper, ennobled as Lord Dacre, who had authenticated the volumes for the Times. Irving crashed Der Stern's April, 1983, Hamburg press conference; his comments casting doubt on the diaries' provenance were repeated on the Today show. It was his finest hour, recalled with glee by his defenders - most recently Christopher Hitchens, in Vanity Fair, who cited the incident in support of his view that "David Irving is not just a Fascist historian. He is also a great historian of Fascism."
ANSWER TO 38. The willingness of all those important media outlets to believe such a crude forgery as the "Hitler Diaries" - and again evident in the recent Wilkimorski deception! - should convince the readers not to uncritically trust anything else that appears about the Third Reich in those papers or magazines.
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39. Guttenplan: A gratifying example of the amateur besting the academic, this account, which turns up in most profiles of Irving, omits a few details. For one thing, it was Irving who first approached the Times in 1982 with an offer to go to Germany and inspect the diaries for the paper. And although he did denounce the diaries at Der Stern's press conference, so did Trevor-Roper. A week later Irving changed his mind - a dizzying sequence that shed little light on the fake diaries but generated a great deal of publicity for his The Secret Diaries of Hitler's Doctor, an anodyne collection of notes by the Führer's physician, Theodor Morell, which just happened to be published that week.
ANSWER TO 39. More "quicksilvery" David Irving behavior!
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40. Guttenplan: Whatever his merits as a historian, as a self-publicist Irving has few peers. Journalists across the political spectrum testify to his unfailing helpfulness, his willingness to make archives, clipping files, and documents available without preconditions. On two occasions I have been left alone in Irving's study for more than an hour. If Irving has anything to hide, it is hidden in plain sight.
ANSWER TO 40. That's a good summation of David Irving on one of his good days!
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41. Guttenplan: The Defendant
Deborah Lipstadt has a bad back. Her condition, she knows, hasn't been helped by the amount of time she's had to spend sleeping on airplanes between her home in Atlanta, where she is the Dorot Professor of Modern Jewish and Holocaust Studies at Emory University, and her lawyer's office in London. But as we sit talking in the coffee shop attached to her London hotel, she also gives the impression of being metaphysically wrenched out of her orbit.
ANSWER TO 41. Those of us who have been persecuted in the courts for decades by the Jewish and Israel lobbies' pimps and minions cannot avoid a bit of glee that Ms. Lipstadt finally gets to taste a bit of the treatment she and her Talmudic coterie and network of character assassins have been inflicting on Zion's detractors for the last 60 years!
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42. Guttenplan: "I'd much rather be hanging out in the fall foliage in Georgia, hiking the Appalachian trail," she says. The author of two books, and a veteran of hundreds of interviews and dozens of television appearances, Lipstadt is perfectly at ease with the press, slipping on and off the record with the agility of a politician. A large woman with reddish-brown hair, strong features, and a gravelly New Yorker's voice (think Bette Midler rather than Bess Myerson), she describes herself as "always fighting." She says, "I'm a great dinner-party guest if you want a lively dinner party. If you want peace and quiet, don't invite me."
ANSWER TO 42. Poor Professor Lipstadt, deprived of seeing the fall foliage and instead having to settle for the proverbial London fog! This "lively dinner party guest" has not uttered one word in the courtroom in her own defense, or given an explanation of her motives. Ms. Lipstadt counseled all who would listen to her not to debate the "Holocaust Deniers." She insisted there was nothing to debate. Yet she has kicked off the greatest avalanche of media discussion about the Holocaust down to the minutest detail - like how many pounds of coke (coal) it takes to cremate a body! Week-in and week-out, the Internet is full of Irving chipping away at their edifice of lies. This is truly Karma at work!
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Tomorrow: Part V