A snarling feature about David Irving

[zgrams at zgrams.zundelsite.org]

  'Hitler? He was good in parts'

  The discredited right-wing historian David Irving was arrested in 
Austria last year for denying the Holocaust and faces trial next 
month. From his Viennese prison, he gives his first interview to 
German author and academic Malte Herwig, who asks if arrogance is at 
the heart of Irving's desire for outrage - or something more sinister

  The Observer

  Sunday January 22, 2006

  http://observer.guardian.co.uk/review/story/0,,1692086,00.html

  As darkness descends upon the thick walls of Vienna's ancient 
Josefstadt courthouse, the adjacent prison compound comes to life. 
Shouts and cries echo across the inner courtyard as the inmates talk 
to each other in a plethora of languages. The elderly Englishman in 
Block C looks up briefly from the stack of papers that is lying on 
the small wooden table in front of him and listens before he resumes 
his writing.

  'I'm writing my memoirs - about 20 pages each day,' David Irving 
tells me the next morning when I visit him in the Viennese prison 
that has been his home since the Austrian police arrested him in 
November last year on charges of denying the Holocaust.

  I had been sitting in a squalid little waiting room for an hour 
together with large families arguing with each other and teenage 
mothers pushing prams around. One of their relatives is behind bars 
for threatening to kill his wife, another has been arrested for drug 
offences. 'If only all the inmates were as well behaved as he is,' a 
prison guard sighed when I asked him about Irving. No, I think, as my 
number comes up and I enter the high security meeting room, you 
wouldn't normally expect an historian and writer among the thieves, 
pimps and drug dealers held here.

  But there he is, sitting behind a thick pane of bulletproof glass, 
smartly dressed in a dark blue suit and tie, telephone in hand. 'It's 
nonsense to put someone in prison for his views,' he says in 
impeccable, accent-free German. 'It's like having a law that 
prohibits wearing yellow collars.'

  Irving is referring to Austria's Verbotsgesetz, a constitutional law 
dating back to 1945 which not only bans National Socialist or 
neo-Nazi organisations but makes incitement to neo-Nazi activity and 
the glorification or praise of National Socialist ideology illegal. 
It also prohibits public denial, belittlement, approval, or 
justification of National Socialist crimes, including the Holocaust. 
While other countries such as Germany and Poland have anti-Nazi laws 
too, Austria's Verbotsgesetz is particularly strict, carrying a 
maximum sentence of 20 years. With an average of 25 convictions each 
year, it is also enforced vigorously by the judiciary.

  In 1989 the Austrian public prosecutor issued an arrest warrant for 
Irving, who had claimed during lectures in Vienna and Leoben that the 
'gas chambers in Auschwitz never existed'. Austria's then Federal 
Chancellor Franz Vranitzky publicly warned the British historian that 
'if he should ever turn up here again, he'll be locked up 
immediately'.

  When I ask Irving why he still accepted the invitation to speak 
before a right-wing Viennese student fraternity, he feigns surprise. 
He has been to Austria twice since 1989, he says, to visit Goebbels's 
ex-lover, Lída Baarová, and there were never any problems. 'Helsinki 
Sanomat ran an article on it with pictures. You can look it up 
there,' Irving adds, ever fond of citing obscure  sources to bolster 
his claims.

  They treat him well in prison, but, Irving confides, he lacks money 
and equipment: 'Thank God someone sent me some ink.' Then again, when 
he doesn't show himself off as an innocent victim pursued by the 
powerful forces of what he calls the 'enemies of truth', Irving likes 
to show off his wealth. He may have had to sell his spacious Mayfair 
townhouse after losing the case against Deborah Lipstadt and Penguin 
in 2000, but now, he boasts, he has something even better. 'We just 
moved into a enormous luxury flat near Downing Street. I did that 
deliberately in order to provoke.' Irving, it becomes abundantly 
clear, hates Blair, New Labour, and the multi-coloured society of 
today's Britain.

  'My little daughter,' he adds with a sheepish grin, 'of course 
thinks it's cool that daddy is in prison'; and somehow one cannot 
help feeling that daddy himself relishes having another big fight on 
his hands. Irving loves to cast himself as an innocent maverick 
single-handedly taking on powerful governments, the mighty press and 
influential lobby organisations. He signed 60 blank cheques before 
leaving London, and packed six shirts for what was supposed to be a 
two-day trip.

  'The boy scouts, you know,' he says, solemnly. 'Always be prepared, 
that's my motto.' It is as if his lifelong 'revisionist' mission has 
been nothing but a Boys' Own-style adventure for an eccentric who 
never quite grew up. In fact, Irving once praised his fellow 
revisionists as 'staunch and unflinching soldiers in what our brave 
comrade [fellow revisionist historian] Robert Faurisson has called 
"this great adventure".'

  Why did he risk going on a journey that he knew might get him into 
trouble? 'I'm from a family of officers, and I'm an Englishman. We 
march toward the gunfire,' he snarls into the receiver. Now that he 
is doing his rounds in a prison yard, however, he finds that he 
didn't pack the right marching equipment. 'I have very expensive 
shoes,' he sighs, 'but they are coming apart from walking outside in 
the yard.'

  On 20 February, the day of his trial, Irving tells me, he will wear 
his blue pinstripe suit. It's the same £2,700 suit tailored at Savile 
Row for his London trial six years ago, the costume he uses when he 
plays his other stock role, that of the serious historian and 
successful businessman, for whom travel bans and anti-Nazi laws are 
nothing but an infringement of free trade and competition.

  'I'm only responsible for my books,' Irving exclaims. 'But I even 
found a copy of my Hitler biography here in the prison library.' It 
is a classic Irving manoeuvre. He is a master conjurer of red 
herrings. By pointing to an apparent inconsistency in the 
authorities' behaviour, he elegantly glosses over the question of 
whether he isn't also responsible for the things he says in seedy 
backrooms and provincial diners. The trouble with him is that, often, 
three out of four things he says are right. There are few others as 
adept as Irving at harvesting lies from seeds of truth. The prison 
library did stock one of his books, the governor tells me later, but 
it is the one on the Hungarian uprising.

  'They burnt my books,' Irving sighs. He knows only too well that 
book burning is taboo and swiftly slips into the victim's role. When 
I remind him that some of his books were pulped by the publishers 
because of legal actions, which isn't quite the same as 'burning 
books', Irving swiftly moves on to another topic. After all, he has 
never been reluctant himself to drag his critics to court. He admits 
that if he is not released in February, things will get difficult for 
him. But then he feels he's not alone. 'I have received many letters 
of support already,' Irving claims, proudly.

  In the afternoon, I meet his lawyer, Elmar Kresbach, who produces a 
bundle of letters from his briefcase. Kresbach, a smartly dressed, 
formidable barrister who normally represents murderers and Mafia 
members, shakes his head at the incoherent and confused hate mail 
that has clogged his letterbox since he took over Irving's mandate. 
'He doesn't understand that himself,' Kresbach says of his client. 'I 
think he is becoming fed up with these nutty people, too.' Kresbach 
maintains that his British client cannot be expected to be familiar 
enough with the Austrian political scene to know where the groups and 
societies that invited him stand politically. Irving himself claims 
to be ignorant of the extreme right-wing ideology of his hosts.

  It is a claim that is hard to believe when you visit Willi Lasek in 
the Documentation Centre of Austrian Resistance. A balding and softly 
spoken middle-aged man, the archivist looks every inch the opposite 
of the bullish Irving as he sits behind his desk in an office crammed 
to the ceiling with files. And Lasek, unlike Irving, is 
extraordinarily cautious with his statements. 'I cannot tell you 
whether Irving actively denied the holocaust recently,' he says as he 
picks up two bulging files labelled "David Irving" from the shelf, 
'but this will show you that his contacts to the Austrian and German 
neo-Nazi scene go back all the way to the early 1980s.' The boxes 
reveal a stack of yellowed flyers announcing a 1984 Irving lecture, 
in which 'the courageous taboo-breaker of history' would reveal 
'sensational secrets' about the Third Reich. At the bottom of the 
page there is a rallying call for 'solidarity with Rudolf Hess', 
Hitler's one-time deputy.

  In 1984, Irving had been invited to Austria by the convicted 
right-wing extremist Norbert Burger, an honoured alumnus of the 
Olympia student fraternity, the same society that Irving was supposed 
to address last year. But then as now, his lecture never took place. 
As Irving tried to give a press conference in Vienna's Cafe 
Landtmann, he was arrested and thrown out of the country. 'This 
gentleman is not welcome here,' a police spokesman told the public. 
Irving successfully appealed against the decision, but when he 
returned to Austria in 1989 for a lecture series, his notoriety was 
already such that all but two of the talks had to be cancelled 
because of -public protests.

  At around that time, Irving notoriously asked why it never occurred 
to Jews 'to look into the mirror and say, why am I disliked?' Did he 
ever look into the mirror, I inquire, and ask himself the same 
question? 'I know what I'd have to do in order to be liked again,' he 
replies with a grim look, 'but they're not going to get it.' Irving 
is as obsessed with detail as he is with being right. Then again, he 
sometimes throws all pretence of being a serious scholar away for a 
publicity stunt.

  Has the German dictator become a surrogate father figure for Irving, 
who grew up without his father? 'I wouldn't go that far,' Irving 
answers warily. But what does he make of Hitler? 'He's like the 
curate's egg - good in parts,' comes the somewhat quaint reply. 'I'm 
not right-wing, you see,' he continues. 'I do enjoy reading The 
Guardian.'

  Perhaps what some of Irving's critics have claimed is true after 
all: that the man has no real convictions and no consistent 
ideological programme. Robert Jan van Pelt, who was a witness in the 
London trial, thinks Irving is a hysteric. 'He is a fairly good 
speaker,' van Pelt explains over the phone, 'but he gets all the 
energy from his audience, and then he says what they want to hear.' 
And over the past years, van Pelt adds, Irving's company consisted 
only of right-wing extremists and Holocaust-deniers.

  I ask Irving about his spectacular U-turn on the Hitler Diaries in 
1983, when, after first denouncing them as fakes, he changed his mind 
and endorsed them as genuine in a Sunday Times article a fortnight 
later. 'It was just a joke. It was entertainment. All that had 
nothing to do with historiography,' Irving grins. 'It's not important 
who wins, but how you play.'

  It comes as no surprise that Irving's view of history is totally 
devoid of moral considerations. He is too amoral to even comprehend 
that his statements about the Holocaust may hurt survivors. His view 
of history is not unlike that of the National Socialists. History, 
like nature, is red in tooth and claw. The stronger win, and it is 
only the strong that Irving reserves his admiration for. Someone like 
'Bomber' Harris. With his first book, the young David Irving drew 
attention to the horrors of the Allies' bombing of Dresden in 1945. 
Yet he admires Sir Arthur Harris as a 'great man'. 'I'm referring to 
him as a commander, like Dönitz,' Irving exclaims. 'If you can send 
20,000 young men to their deaths each day, then you are a great 
commander.' Small wonder that Irving admires Hitler too.

  Suddenly, it all begins to make sense: The Third Reich as a vast 
playground, his fellow 'revisionists' as brothers in arms and enough 
material for a host of adventure novels like the ones Irving enjoyed 
as a child back in the Essex of the Forties. A time when England 
wasn't a multicultural society yet, the Empire still existed and a 
small boy listened with dreamy eyes to the stories about his uncle 
who served in the Bengal Lancers.

  Irving misses the Empire and the lost sense of security offered by a 
society in which everyone knew their place. He is 'naturally, a 
monarchist' and thinks that the Austrians are 'simply jealous of our 
monarchy'.

  What about your outrageous statements, I ask, like the one about 
more people having died on the back seat of Ted Kennedy's car than in 
the gas chambers at Auschwitz? Doesn't he think that's deeply 
offensive? 'It's the English way, and it's not always polite.' Irving 
likes such tasteless jokes; he finds nothing wrong with making fun of 
Holocaust survivors and dressing it up as prankish humour. His desire 
to cause outrage seems rooted in the sort of reckless arrogance you 
find in some public school boys who think the world belongs to them. 
It may not be a coincidence that he hails from a country where jokes 
about the 'Führer' are still beloved by the tabloid press and where 
what passes for polite society enjoys cracking jokes about Hitler. 
There is no doubt that Irving has as many critics in Britain as 
elsewhere, but he also thrives on the tolerance of the liberal 
majority in Britain, who tolerate the most tasteless of statements in 
the name of free speech.

  Since Irving's arrest, Austria, too, has witnessed a new debate on 
Holocaust denial and free speech. The sociologist Christian Fleck, 
Lord Dahrendorf and others have spoken up against criminalising 
opinions even if they are as vile as those of David Irving. Even 
Deborah Lipstadt has suggested that Irving should be let go. 'If you 
had said to me a couple of months ago that I would be asking for 
David Irving's release,' she says, 'I would have said you are crazy.' 
But Lipstadt doesn't want to be on the side of censorship, she says, 
and she doesn't want Irving to become a martyr to free speech.

  The smartly-dressed prisoner behind the thick glass couldn't agree 
more. 'I would be less hopeful about the outcome of my trial if I 
didn't know that every intellectual in the world is on my side,' 
Irving exclaims triumphantly.' In an instant, Irving has changed his 
costume again and now enters the stage as the reckless gambler who, 
by deliberately risking his arrest in Austria, has confounded his 
critics. They now find themselves in the uncomfortable position of 
appealing for the release of the man whose views they detest. It's a 
high but perhaps necessary price to pay. Let Irving talk, and he will 
unravel himself. Perhaps his last costume will be that of the court 
jester.

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