Next day, Rampton brought up the question of gassings at camps besides Auschwitz. Irving protested that he was not an “expert on that” and did not know.
This time, Rampton did not let Irving off the hook. “A man in your position does not enter the arena waving flags and blowing trumpets unless he has taken the trouble to verify in advance what it is that he is proposing to say,” Rampton said.
Irving repeated his refrain, “I am not a Holocaust historian.”
“Then why do you not keep your mouth shut about the Holocaust?” Rampton exploded.”
“Because I am asked about it,” Irving said. He added a half-smile. “It apparently obsesses people.”
I found that answer sneering and disgusting…there’s a vital reason it obsesses people: it is one of the great genocidal acts of history, it was done in a highly bureaucratic manner, with modern technical means, by a highly industrialized and nominally civilized state.
Rampton placed before the court statements by Irving that opposed his evidence, from 1989: “I am prepared to accept that local Nazis tried bizarre methods of liquidating Jews…They may have experimented using gas trucks… (which was) a very inefficient way of killing people.” Rampton added the emphasis.
Rampton asked how that description could be used for an extermination effort that the SS reported in 1942 as killing 97,000 Jews.
Irving showed his contempt for Jews with his response: “It is a very substantial achievement when you work it out with a pocket calculator.”
Judge Gray responded, “Is it very limited and experimental?”
Irving insisted he could not answer that question: he did not have access to the report when he made that statement.
Gray did not forget that Irving was required to answer questions about historic documents. He instructed the plaintiff: “Answer the question, even so.”
“Not on this scale,” Irving said quietly. “This is systematic.”
It was a major concession. No more “My Lai” and undisciplined SS men running around Ukraine without oversight.
Irving called his first witness, a British historian, Donald Cameron Watt, who has written some good stuff. Watt had refused Irving’s invitation to testify, so Irving slapped Watt with a subpoena. That says a lot.
Watt said that Irving had to be taken seriously for his research and added that he hoped that “I am never subjected to the kind of examination that Mr. Irving’s books have been (given) by the defense witnesses…there are senior historical figures…whose work would not stand up…to this kind of examination.” Professor Lipstadt wondered what Watt was saying.
Then Watt switched tacks: he said that Irving’s claim that Himmler conducted the killings without Hitler’s knowledge was not supported by any historical information. “To assume that Himmler and his minions went beyond the limits of what Hitler had approved, seems to assume something inherently improbably and out of keeping with all we know of Himmler’s relationship to Hitler.”
Irving smile, leaned forward, and said, “Himmler’s brother actually told me the same. He said, I cannot imagine Heiny would have done this on his own.” The comment said more about Irving’s intimacy with Hitler’s inner circle than his abilities as a historian.
Rampton did not bother to cross-examine Cameron Watt. Irving returned to the stand. Rampton reviewed Irving’s conversion to Holocaust denial, using the man’s own diaries as evidence. “The whole of the Holocaust mythology is…open to doubt,” Irving wrote after reading Leuchter’s report.
Rampton roared, did it not behoove Irving “to keep your trap shut” until he had fully investigated the report? Had Irving done his research, he would have found out that Leuchter made mistaken assumptions. He believed that it took 3,200 parts of HCN per million to kill humans, when it took far less. The guards would have had to throw so much Zyklon B into the chamber they would have been poisoned. Finally, the Sonderkommandos who removed the corpses would have needed 24 hours before they could remove the corpses, which all went against the face of documented facts.
However, as I mentioned, Leuchter was NOT a certified engineer. Oops.
Irving, who had never served in anybody’s armed forces, straightened up to full height, stood at attention, and declared, “I am banned from visiting Auschwitz or the archives. I am the only historian in the world who is not allowed to set foot in the Auschwitz archives.” He seemed to wear this like a Distinguished Service Cross.
Rampton, who was well-prepared, reminded Irving that the ban had not been issued until eight years after Irving had testified for the Leuchter report. Why, in those eight years, hadn’t Irving bothered to visit Auschwitz and peruse the archives?
Irving chuckled, and said he would have been banned earlier. “It is like the big casinos in Las Vegas. They do not want the big winners to come,” he said.
That was a weird response: big casinos in Las Vegas, Atlantic City, London, and the Chickasaw reservation welcome the “whales” who win big, lose big, and spend big at their establishments.
Anyway, the audience, to whom Irving was really playing to, was stunned. Someone gasped.
By now, it should have been clear that Irving was starting to lose the trial on his case’s merits, but he was hoping to win in the press, gain new adherents brandishing open checkbooks, respect from established historians with degrees in the subject, and not have to pay costs or damages.
Rampton was not impressed by Irving’s attempt to look like a Grenadier Guardsman. The real Grenadier Guards had defeated Hitler.
Instead Rampton moved on to Irving’s anti-Semitic statements to private groups, which the defense had in text and on tape. Irving told Judge Gray that the statements he made extemporaneously at private gatherings should be given less import than his written books.
Judge Gray responded, “It seems to me…that you have been far more unrestrained in your assertions about Auschwitz when speaking at these various talks.”
Rampton read one. “Hundreds of millions of innocent people have been bamboozled for a purpose…every time a Jewish financier, a John Gutfreund, the Salomon Brothers or Ivan Boesky…or Michael Milken...is caught with his hands deep in the till and he has…undoubtedly bilked hundreds of thousands of investors out of every penny they have got. These financiers have laughed…because they can afford it. When you…realize they are Jewish, then the invitation is that the man on the street should say: Yes, but they have suffered, haven’t they? They did have the Holocaust.”
Judge Gray did not find that remotely amusing. He asked Irving, an edge in his voice, “So the Holocaust is kind of a lie dreamt up in order to excuse crooked Jewish financiers?”
Irving looked uncomfortable in the box, and protested that he was “not putting it like that.”
Judge Gray wasn’t having it. “What are you saying it not that?”
Irving claimed he was simply repeating other people’s opinion that the Holocaust “legend” protects Jews from criticism for their “activities in the world of finance, or because of their brutality on the West Bank or wherever.”
However, given that Milken and, later, Bernie Madoff, got their addresses changed by the Federal Bureau of Prisons, from their ritzy mansions to an eight-by-12 cell. As for the West Bank – nothing like a little “what aboutism” in an argument.
Rampton pointed out that what was equally important to Irving’s verbal sallies was how his audience responded. When he said “more people died in the back seat of Edward Kennedy’s car at Chappaquiddick than ever died in a gas chamber in Auschwitz,” his audience laughed.
Rampton looked up from his page describing that event, and asked, “Laughter, Mr. Irving?”
Irving told another audience that Elie Wiesel did a “Cook’s tour of the different concentration camps.”
Irving protested that he and the audience were laughing at the “spurious survivors…those trying to climb on the Holocaust bandwagon.”
“Why would a serious matter such as someone falsely claiming to be an Auschwitz survivor provoke laughter?” Rampton wondered aloud.
“Because there is something ludicrous…something pathetic about it,” Irving answered.
I find nothing “ludicrous” or “pathetic” about Elie Wiesel’s odyssey through Hitler’s version of the Circles of Hell. It made him the representative of millions of living and millions of dead Jews who could not speak after the Holocaust ended.
For doing so, Wiesel received the Nobel Peace Prize.
Rampton had a better response to Irving’s use of “ludicrous” and “pathetic.”
Irving’s audiences were so “deeply anti-Semitic” that they loved the speech, which were “redolent of animosity, hostility, contempt, and spite…just like Dr. Goebbels’ articles.”
Irving shot back, “Just like Winston Churchill talking about Adolf Hitler.”
In the courtroom was Sir Martin Gilbert, Churchill’s official biographer, who I have met and knew the subject cold, more so than Irving ever has. Sir Martin paid close attention.
Rampton’s face flushed. “Mr. Churchill rallied this country to the flag during the war by being spiteful and beastly about Adolf Hitler. The difference is, unlike Dr. Goebbels, Winston Churchill had a very good reason to be spiteful.”
There it was again…Irving defending Hitler.
That was the end of the trial’s second week.
By now it was getting bigger audiences than West End theaters, but more diverse. White skinheads in “White Power” t-shirts sat next to Holocaust survivors who made sure the skinhead saw that Auschwitz tattoo.
Irving started off this inning by complaining about a newspaper story about a Holocaust survivor who sued an insurance company and won a settlement. That seemed to prove Irving’s point that jurors were “sympathetic to a man who has survived a Nazi concentration camp.” As this was a bench trial, that seemed a little odd.
Irving noted that while the case was in the United States, it showed how Jews could “use the Holocaust as a kind of shield against their own criminality.”
At that moment, he probably realized he was in public relations trouble – if not legal trouble – for his behavior, which was in front of the very Holocaust survivors he had been trashing for two weeks. Irving turned his back to Judge Gray, faced the gallery, and said, “We all have the utmost sympathy with victims of the Holocaust and that includes myself, and I want to say that here.”
The man with the tattoo on his arm glared. Given that Irving had been denying the Holocaust for a fortnight, so would I.
That act of hypocrisy completed, Rampton grilled Irving on the Nuremberg evidence. Irving had written a book defending the 21 defendants, saying the evidence against their crimes had been fabricated. “Oh, we fabricated a lot of evidence,” he said, under oath.
He used an example: Marie Vaillant-Couturier, whose name means, “Brave Clothes Designer.” She was brave: she was a French resistance fighter who landed in Nazi concentration camps. She described for the War Crimes Tribunal horrors she had witnessed: inmates dying of thirst, starvation, beatings, illness, and gassings.
She added that when SS officers needed a servant, they followed the top-ranking SS female into the women’s camp to pick out an inmate. The men did that usually while the women were naked, being disinfected. Vaillant-Couturier also described how her camp had a brothel for the SS, using female prisoners as the staff. If the women got pregnant, they got the gas. The SS man got in trouble for race defilation. Of themselves. Not the woman.
The top American judge, Francis Biddle, a sharp Philadelphian, former US Attorney General under President Franklin D. Roosevelt, and a firm believer in fair play at the trial, wrote in his diary, “This I doubt,” referring to the brothel account.
In a press conference about his book, Irving told reporters that Biddle was so appalled by Vaillant-Couturier’s testimony that he wrote, “I don’t believe a word of what she is saying. I think she is a bloody liar.”
Rampton asked if Biddle had really written that. Irving admitted that this was his “gloss,” but insisted that it was a legitimate gloss because Biddle was “fed up” with the “implausible” testimony.
Rampton displayed a copy of the relevant pages of the diary and repeated what it said: her claim that “all the other camps used the same system.” Biddle had written, “This I doubt.”
That’s a fur piece from Irving’s statement, and certainly not an insult to a brave woman. Irving was saying that Biddle was rejecting Vaillant-Couturier’s entire testimony.
Irving turned to Judge Gray and said he was willing to “concede, for what it is worth,” that his comments came “four or five…or possibly even 10 years” after he examined the judge’s diary.
Except for one thing. Rampton had inspected Biddle’s diary in 1988. He made the nasty comment in 1989.
Furthermore, after reading that diary, Irving had made yet another speech in Toronto, where he said that Biddle had written “All this I doubt.”
Irving tried more tap-dancing, saying that Biddle denied Vaillant-Couturier’s testimony.
It didn’t matter…Irving was not only lying, he was manipulating his fictions to suit his fascism and politics.
Reading over this trial years later, both in books and the actual testimony – and I’ll give a link to that later – I was astonished at Irving’s poor preparation. I have read about real court cases, civil and criminal, including libel cases.
A journalist has to know libel law pretty well, because it’s easy to commit libel. You can’t avoid it by just throwing around the word “alleged” like Jack Palance tossing hand grenades in a re-run of “Combat.”
“The alleged police found the alleged body in the alleged alley” won’t fly. Neither will the “regret the error” story the next day. Libel lawsuits run into the millions. So I have read about how they are pleaded and defended.
The critical work is not done in the courtroom…it’s done long before witnesses take their oaths in front of judge and jury. Lawyers do their preparation with their staff and paralegals, racking up the billable hours. Plaintiff, defendant, and witnesses testify in discovery and depositions. Both sides develop their “theory of the case,” which is critical.
Studying the testimony, it was clear that Irving had not gone over his material and prepared himself for cross-examination. He was used to his courtroom opponents, fearing the expense of a British libel trial, simply rolling over and offering a settlement. As I said earlier, he expected to confront Professor Lipstadt and imitate Clarence Darrow.
He never dreamed he would be on the stand for days on end, having his own written and spoken words turned against him.
After two weeks of court action, reading this case, I began to wonder if Irving was realizing he could not win a favorable verdict from the judge, so he was now simply playing to the galleries.
I was wrong. There was more to come.
Interesting look at a huge case of genocide
Government oversight:
https://www.fbi.gov/news/stories/investigations-and-oversight-director-wray-discusses-fbi-s-commitment-to-government-accountability