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 IX
106. Guttenplan: More delicate still is the question of survivor testimony. According to Elie Wiesel, "Any survivor has more to say than all the historians combined about what happened." Would Wiesel censure Deborah Lipstadt for saying "Lots of survivors who arrived at Auschwitz will tell you they were examined by [Dr. Josef] Mengele. Then you ask them the date of their arrival, and you say, 'Well, Mengele wasn't in Auschwitz yet at that point.' There were lots of doctors ... [somehow] they all become Mengele"? Would he censure her - or any other historian - for daring to ask for evidence, documents, corroborating testimony? That, after all, is what historians do.
ANSWER TO 106. Survivor testimony: Here is what Samuel Gringauz had to say in the January, 1950 issue of the Jewish magazine, Social Studies.
"This hyperhistorical complex may be described as judeocentric, lococentric and egocentric. It concentrates historical relevance on Jewish problems of local events under the aspects of personal experience. This is the reason why most of the memoirs and reports are full of preposterous verbosity, graphomanic exaggeration, dramatic effects, overestimated self-inflation, dilletante philosophizing, would-be lyricism, unchecked rumors, bias, partisan attacks and apologies."
Professor Michael de Bouard: "The record is rotten to the core."
Professor Krystztof Dunin-Wasowicz: "...too many myths, legends, and fictional transformations...considerable tendency to give free reign to fantasy..."
And Shmul Krakowski of the Yad Vashem: Over half of testimonies "unreliable...inaccurate."
Asking for evidence, documents, corroborating testimony of Holocaust survivors and their fanciful claims - Lipstadt, Wiesel and the ADL would call that "anti-Semitism". Guttenplan realizes they have a problem and face a dilemma of major proportions, now that they have painted themselves into a corner with all their false claims and outright lies. How to escape the day of public exposure and historic reckoning? D-Day - "Decision Day - is here, even for Jewish historians, academics and writers like Guttenplan.
Continue to lie - or come clean? What a dilemma!
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107. Guttenplan: And when they are prevented from doing it, either by Jewish groups who feel that the Holocaust belongs to them alone or by Zionists seeking to preserve Israel's "moral capital," the result is a blurring of distinctions between memory and propaganda that serves only the interests of the Nazi perpetrators and their political legatees.
ANSWER TO 107. No, Mr. Guttenplan! Exposing the Jewish-Israeli Holocaust misuse and abuse will serve the world. Decent Jews and decent Gentiles the world over are waiting for this liberation from this "Hoax of the 20th Century", as Professor Butz of Northwestern University called it. The Holocaust has spiritually sickened the globe!
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108. Guttenplan: Yet time and again those who insist on the truth in all its "complex, unsentimental," paradoxical, and ambiguous detail are shouted down. Norman Finkelstein and Ruth Birn, whose book A Nation on Trial (1998) pointed out the many scholarly defects of Goldhagen's Hitler's Willing Executioners, were subjected to a sustained campaign of personal abuse. Finkelstein and Birn were no more extreme in their condemnation than Raul Hilberg, whose essay deploring "The Goldhagen Phenomenon," in Les Temps Modernes, described the Harvard professor's work as "lacking in factual content and logical rigor" and casting a "cloud ... over the academic landscape." That didn't keep Abraham Foxman, the head of the Anti-Defamation League, from trying to discourage the publication of A Nation on Trial.
It isn't only anti-Semites who, in T. S. Eliot's infamous phrase, find a "large number of free-thinking Jews undesirable."
ANSWER TO 108. It amazes me that Guttenplan cannot take that one more step needed to appreciate that it is more often than not Gentile Revisionists such as Dr. Robert Faurisson, Dr. Arthur Butz, Mark Weber, Udo Walendy and David Irving as well as the Ernst Zündels of the world who are being shouted down, bombed, beaten, jailed, fined and burned out by arsonists - not Jews like Arno Mayer or even Norman Finkelstein.
It is largely Gentile Revisionists who for 50 years have insisted on the truth in all its complex, unsentimental, paradoxical and ambiguous detail, like Leuchter chiseling away samples of rocks and bricks in Auschwitz - the 'holiest of holies", according to that hypocrite van Pelt! - and Irving talking about "45,000 tonnes of dead meat" or Zündel lawyer, Doug Christie, fearlessly cross-examining self-proclaimed Holocaust survivors and eye-witnesses. It also includes people like me, the son of Germany, who dared ask the unambiguous question: "Did Six Million Really Die?" Was I merely shouted down? I was mercilessly harassed by a never-ending campaign of terror, vilification, law suits, beatings, bombings, arsons, jailings, crippling fines and horrendous legal fees. Did Arno Mayer, Finkelstein, Hilberg et al have to endure this? Of course not. They were Jews.
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109. Guttenplan: Diana's Lawyer
Though the desk in Anthony Julius's Bloomsbury office is a lawyerly clutter of files and documents, some of them belonging to his client Deborah Lipstadt, every other surface is piled high with mounds of art books that tumble from tables and chairs onto the carpet, forming drifts around our feet. Julius is writing a book on modern art.
The oldest of four sons, Julius eventually graduated from Cambridge with first-class honors and could easily have taken a Ph.D. Then his father, a men's-wear retailer, suddenly died of a brain tumor, so, Julius says, "I stuck with law."
When Diana, Princess of Wales, decided she'd had enough of Prince Charles, she needed an outsider, someone whom the British establishment would regard as "unclubbable," someone who couldn't be "gotten to." A Jewish partner in a prominent London firm, Anthony Julius, got Diana a settlement worth roughly $25 million. By way of a thank you, Diana sent him a silver blotter from Asprey's. Her patronage made him the most famous lawyer in Britain. She also made him an executor of her will.
ANSWER TO 109. Interesting! Very interesting! So Anthony Julius is an "unclubbable" lawyer, somebody who couldn't be "gotten to"? These are Guttenplans own words. It's logical to infer that he at least knows of cases where lawyers could be "clubbed" and "gotten to"! Does it seem far-fetched to assume that prosecutors and even judges who try Holocaust Revisionists can be "gotten to..." and "clubbed"? I think to believe otherwise would be a trifle naive.
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110. Guttenplan: Anthony Julius eventually got his Ph.D. His thesis, on T. S. Eliot, anti-Semitism, and literary form, begins,
Anti-Semites are not all the same. Some break Jewish bones, others wound Jewish sensibilities. Eliot falls into the second category. He was civil to Jews he knew, offensive to those who merely knew him through his work. He wounded his Jewish readers, if not the Jews of his acquaintance, to whom, apparently, he was 'not disagreeable.' Though worth noting, this is not a distinction that yields a defence to the charge of anti-Semitism. If the work, or some notable part of it, is anti-Semitic, it is the work of an anti-Semite. With his large, close-cropped head, ambling gait, and slightly stooped posture, Julius looks a bit like a bear in a pinstripe suit - that is, if you can imagine a bear who, though capable of tearing you apart, would much rather simply persuade you of the error of your views. When I ask him, with my tape recorder running, why this case matters, his response is guarded, almost offhand: "Does this case matter? To whom? It matters to Deborah Lipstadt because she's being sued." When I turn the tape recorder off, his words are equally careful, but there is a flash of anger in his manner that is actually frightening in a man otherwise so perfectly contained. Julius has tangled with Irving before. In 1992 Irving was expelled from Canada, and one of the documents he later obtained under Canada's Access to Information Law was a dossier compiled, he says, by the Board of Deputies of British Jews which had been sent to the Canadian authorities. Irving wanted to sue for libel, but Julius, who acted for the board at the time, said that Irving was "sadly too late" in filing the proper papers.
ANSWER TO 110. Substitute the word "anti-Gentile" instead of "anti-Semite". In the case of the Germans, substitute ". . . anti-Germans are not all the same" or "anti-Nazis are not all the same..." and you will get a feel for what is going down here. Somebody is once again parading his mindset around for all the world to see.
Compiling dossiers on historians, and secretly transmitting them to governments of countries 5000 miles away does not disturb Guttenplan at all. Not a word of admonition. No outrage. Just smug satisfaction that a shyster was able to finagle a way for his Jewish client to get away with what was most likely a crime in England.
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111. Guttenplan: Julius knows that this time there will be no such reprieve. He won't discuss the trial in any detail even off the record. But the English rules of procedure allow for very few surprises. Both sides have had to reveal in advance not only what documents they want to cite and what witnesses and experts (scholars or other specialists) they are going to call but also what those witnesses and experts are likely to say.
ANSWER TO 111. So what is all this moaning by Lipstadt about? Does she know she libeled Irving, and is about to face the music?
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112. Guttenplan: Irving's few witnesses relate to the question of how he obtained the Goebbels diaries that formed the basis for his biography. Although a side issue for Lipstadt, this dispute is at the center of Irving's suit against Gitta Sereny. Irving's experts - a separate category - address two areas. Like Julius, Kevin MacDonald, a professor of psychology at California State University at Long Beach, believes that not all anti-Semites are the same. In his view, though, the distinction is between simple prejudice and the hatred that he feels is to be expected given certain aspects of what he regards as typically Jewish behavior.
ANSWER TO 112. Irving's strategy in this trial, if he has one, is not easily discernible - for friend or foe!
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113. Guttenplan: Irving's second expert, John Fox, formerly the editor of The British Journal of Holocaust Education, will testify about an attempt by a group of British Jews to get him to discourage publication of Irving's Goebbels biography in Great Britain, and will give his own assessment of what he sees as Lipstadt's role in enforcing a kind of orthodoxy in discussions of the Holocaust. Fox's battles with British Jewry, although perhaps relevant in his mind, have little bearing on Lipstadt's case. But his claim that attempts to discredit David Irving do not spring from communal self-defense or a concern for the truth but are, rather, part of a broader campaign to proscribe discussion of the Holocaust will need to be met head on.
ANSWER TO 113. That ought to be an interesting encounter!
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114. Guttenplan: Of course, if Julius can prove that every word Lipstadt wrote about Irving is true, the question of her motives may not matter. Lipstadt's witness statements cover everything from extremism in the Pacific Northwest to Irving's dealings with the Russian archivists who control access to the Goebbels material. But it is her experts and their testimony that will make up the heart of this case. Judging by the experts he has assembled, it is obvious that Anthony Julius is perfectly aware this is no simple case of libel. From Christopher Browning, the author of Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland (1992), to Robert John Van Pelt, a co-author of Auschwitz: 1270 to the Present (1996), Lipstadt's experts are for the most part the standard authorities in their field. Yet several of them have submitted expert reports that are the equivalent, in both scope and scholarly apparatus, of full-scale books, but with a single subject: David Irving.
ANSWER TO 114. Aha! Julius is perfectly aware this is no simple case of libel!? At least that is now out in the open!
Admissions that the Lipstadt experts submitted book-length studies as witness statements, all with a single subject, namely David Irving, is also revealing. The bearer of bad tidings is to be stoned, publicly crucified - to save their agenda, their Holocaust, to keep the gravy train rolling! They do not want to be deprived of the shield behind which they hide, much less the Auschwitz club they swing so recklessly to subdue their enemies.
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115. Guttenplan: The shortest of Lipstadt's expert reports is Browning's "Evidence for the Implementation of the Final Solution" - a sixty-three-page summary of the documentation that Lipstadt's lawyers will argue Irving has had to either ignore or distort to maintain his views on the gas chambers. Next in length comes the ninety-page treatise "David Irving and Right-Wing Extremism," by Roger Eatwell, a professor of politics at the University of Bath. Hajo Funke, a professor of political science at the Free University of Berlin, spends 157 pages detailing Irving's connections with German neo-Nazis and Holocaust deniers. A seventeen-year chronology of Irving's dealings with North American "hate groups," prepared by Brian Levin, then at Stockton College, is similarly extensive, and contains, among other details, an account of Irving's long acquaintance with David Duke. According to Levin, the ex-Klansman's musings on the Holocaust and other topics in his book My Awakening (1998) were shaped by Irving's editorial advice. Peter Longerich, the author of Policy of Annihilation (1998) and a history of Nazi storm troopers (both in German), and a co-editor of the German edition of the Encyclopedia of the Holocaust, has contributed a seventy-seven-page summary of the evidence for Hitler's responsibility and a ninety-three-page exposition of the planned, systematic nature of the Nazi genocide.
ANSWER TO 115. Poor Judge Gray! They obviously hope that pages and pages of verbal diarrhea, camouflaged as "Holocaust scholarship" will baffle brains!
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116. Guttenplan: These reports, all of which were at one point posted on Irving's Web site, rebut, with varying degrees of pedantry but with uniform attention to detail, different aspects of either Irving's claim against Lipstadt or what might be called Irving's "case" against the Holocaust. But the centerpiece of Lipstadt's defense will undoubtedly be the 726-page examination of Irving's entire oeuvre by Richard Evans, a professor of modern history at Cambridge and a Fellow of the British Academy. Among his twenty books are Rereading German History: From Unification to Reunification, 1800-1996 (1997) and In Hitler's Shadow: West German Historians and the Attempt to Escape From the Nazi Past (1989). Evans is, as they say, familiar with the literature - hardly surprising, considering that he wrote much of it, including standard works on German feminism, the German underworld, and the history of capital punishment in Germany.
ANSWER TO 116. It will be interesting to see what this "clash of the titans" will produce. Those court transcripts will be worth their weight in gold for researchers for years to come.
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117. Guttenplan: Aside from reading Irving's books (both the English and the German editions), Evans, thanks to the pretrial "discovery" process that is routine in such cases, had access to videotapes and audiocassettes of Irving's speeches, tens of thousands of pages of documents, Irving's complete private diaries, thousands of letters, and a great deal of other material. Evans looked at the totality of Irving's career, from the Dresden book to the Goebbels biography. What he found shocked him deeply.
ANSWER TO 117. I would not be surprised that what the world will find out about Richard Evans and the other "Holocaust scholars" with the help of this trial might be shocking as well, if Irving can survive the strain and pressure.
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118. Guttenplan: (Evans speaking): Penetrating beneath the confident surface of his prose quickly revealed a mass of distortion and manipulation ... so tangled that detailing it sometimes took up many more words than ... Irving's original account. Unpicking the eleven-page narrative of the anti-Jewish pogrom of the so-called Reichskristallnacht in Irving's book Goebbels: Mastermind of the 'Third Reich' and tracing back every part of it to the documentation on which it purports to rest takes up over seventy pages of the present Report. A similar knotted web of distortions, suppressions and manipulations became evident in every single instance which we examined. I was not prepared for the sheer depths of duplicity which I encountered in Irving's treatment of the historical sources, nor for the way in which this dishonesty permeated his entire written and spoken output. It is as all-pervasive in his early work as it is in his later publications .... It is clear ... that Irving's claim to have a very good and thorough knowledge of the evidence on the basis of which the history of Nazi Germany has to be written is completely justified. His numerous mistakes and egregious errors are not, therefore, due to mere ignorance or sloppiness; on the contrary, it is obvious that they are calculated and deliberate. That is precisely why they are so shocking.
ANSWER to 118. Having gone through years of litigation, and having helped prepare for the cross-examination of Raul Hilberg, Christopher Browning, and many "survivors" certainly revealed "a similar knotted web of distortions, suppressions and manipulations." In plain English, never have so many lied so brazenly for so long about so little - as these people did about the so-called "Holocaust" in their writings and testimony. I remember how Christie heroically decimated people like Vrba, Friedman, Urstein, Hilberg, Browning and others. Unfortunately Irving, although brilliant, is no law-school-trained, experienced cross-examiner like Doug Christie.
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119. Guttenplan: Evans's findings, though doubtless unwelcome to Irving, ought also to cause a certain amount of discomfort among Irving's defenders in journalism and the academy. Irving has relied in the past, and continues to rely in the present, on the fact that his readers and listeners, reviewers and interviewers lack either the time, or the expertise, to probe deeply enough into the sources he uses for his work to uncover the distortions, suppressions and manipulations to which he has subjected them. How Do We Know?
ANSWER TO 119. The same can be said for Guttenplan and, certainly, for Deborah Lipstadt, Christopher Browning and most likely the other witnesses as well. Otherwise, Wilkimorski could not have conned the literary world, and the so-called "Hitler Diaries" would have been recognized as a forgery early on.
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Tomorrow: Part X