A David Irving Interview

[zgrams at zgrams.zundelsite.org]

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>Mainstream article
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>'Hitler? He was good in parts'
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>  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
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>  The Observer
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>  Sunday January 22, 2006
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>  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.
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>  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.
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>  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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