Now came a verbal battle over another Himmler document. The file clerk supreme, Reichsfuehrer Himmler was obsessed with documents, filing cabinets, and their contents thereof.
This document was Himmler’s diary entry for December 18, 1941. Irving complained that he didn’t have access to it when he was writing his books. Judge Gray said that was a problem of Irving’s own making: if he rejected documents that proved him wrong, he proved Professor Lipstadt correct, namely that he discounted evidence that disputed his preexisting conclusions. If he accepted these documents, he would have to admit that he was wrong about the Holocaust.
Irving was now boxed between his lies and the truth.
In came the diary entry. Next to the word “Judefrage,” for “Jewish Question,” Himmler wrote Hitler’s order: “Liquidate as partisans.” The SS obediently went out and killed 363,000 Jews in the affected area of Russia.
Rampton commented, “Then, lo and behold…just over a year later, comes along a report from the East saying that just that has happened.” Irving agreed.
Rampton continued, “The probability that Hitler saw that report was, therefore, what shall we say, implicated in the murder of all those 363,000 Eastern Jewish is confirmed, is it not?”
Irving had to agree again. “Yes, there is no contention between us on that point.” But then, Irving said the deaths were part of efforts to defeat Russian partisans.
Once again, Rampton was ready. He noted that the report separated out murdered Jews and 14,000 “partisan accomplices.”
Rampton added, “This is put coldly and bluntly, a record of the number of Jews deliberately executed for the reason that they are Jews.”
All Irving could do was say that this was a “reasonable supposition.”
Rampton then contrasted Irving’s courtroom answer with a 1986 Australian press conference statement he made, saying that Jews were the victims of a large number of “rather run-of-the-mill criminal elements which exist in Central Europe.” They had “acted on their own impulse, their own initiatve.”
Irving said there was no difference: the “mindless criminals” in the East went on butchering people “even when they were told by Hitler’s headquarters to stop.”
Gray was baffled. “That is not really the point, is it?”
Irving apologized. “Oh, I am sorry. I must have missed the point that Mr. Rampton is asking about.”
The judge told Irving, “Just focus on the question. What is being put is that what you said in 1986 about these men on the Eastern front having acted on their own impulse is at any rate now known by you not to be right, because in fact it was authorized at the highest level, namely by Hitler?”
Irving was stuck again. Finally he conceded, “Certainly Hitler sanctioned the killings of the Jews on the Eastern Front…the non-German Jews, and that has never been a matter of contention for me.” He tried to pass off his other statements as a way to “explain the mentality of the people who were doing the killing on the Eastern Front.”
Rampton pressed further, “My suggestion is this, that the words you used in Australia…suggested to the audience that this killing of the Eastern Jews on a vast scale went on without the knowledge of Hitler and his cronies.”
Irving had to yield yet again. “If that impression is given, it is the wrong impression,” he said.
After lunch, Irving told Judge Gray that his Australian remarks had been made 14 years earlier, so it was unfair to hold him to those views.
Rampton jumped on that: Irving had said in 1992, to the California-based Institute for Historical Review, “My position remains unchanged, that there were certain My Lai-type atrocities by troops in Russia, that the gas chambers and factories of death were Hollywood legends.”
The Institute for Historical Review (IHR) is an interesting organization, but not for any positive reasons. It was founded in 1978 in California by David McCalden and Willis Carto, and published a magazine until 2002, when it moved to the internet. Carto was head of the anti-Semitic (and now, thankfully, defunct) Liberty Lobby. McCalden was a former member of the neo-Nazi British National Front. The organization’s purpose in life has been to denounce Jews in general and deny the Holocaust in particular.
In 1979, the IHR offered a reward of $50,000 for verifiable “proof that gas chambers for the purpose of killing human beings existed at or in Auschwitz.”
A Czech-born Holocaust survivor named Mel Mermelstein, now living in California, and the sole living member of a family gassed at Auschwitz, took up the challenge. Mermelstein wrote a notarized letter to the IHR, saying that he had seen Nazi guards ushering his mother, two sisters and others into Gas Chamber Number 5.
The IHR refused to pay the reward, saying that a notarized letter was “not sufficient proof.” Mermelstein hired public interest attorney William John Cox and sued the IHR in Los Angeles for breach of contract, anticipatory repudiation, libel, injurious denial of established fact, intentional infliction of emotional distress, and declaratory relief.
That’s kind of a whopper, and the whole ugly mess landed on the desk of Judge Thomas T. Johnson, who wrote in a pre-trial determination: “This court does take judicial notice of the fact that Jews were gassed to death at Auschwitz Concentration Camp in Poland during the summer of 1944. It is not reasonably subject to dispute. And it is capable of immediate and accurate determination by resort to sources of reasonably indisputable accuracy. It is simply a fact.”
Another reason why Irving didn’t sue Professor Lipstadt in America, as I said.
Mermelstein won the $50,000 payment from the IHR and $40,000 in damages. The IHR also had to issue a letter of apology to Mermelstein, reading: “Each of the answering defendants do hereby officially and formally apologize to Mr. Mel Mermelstein, a survivor of Auschwitz-Birkenau and Buchenwald, and all other survivors of Auschwitz for the pain, anguish and suffering he and all other Auschwitz survivors have sustained relating to the $50,000 reward offer for proof that ‘Jews were gassed in gas chambers at Auschwitz.’”
There is no honor among Holocaust deniers, and after the trial, McCalden and Carto had a falling out and McCalden left the IHR. In 1993, Carto lost control of his organization in an internal power struggle. Like all dictatorships. The IHR then sued Carto, accusing him of embezzling $7.5 million, and winning $6.4 million.
In 2009, the IHR’s magazine’s editor, Mark Weber, suggested that Holocaust denial was less important than opposing “Jewish-Zionist power.” He noted that Holocaust denial had attracted little support over the years. Weber lost his job when the magazine shut down due to lack of staff and funding in 2002.
Anyway, Irving spoke to their conventions, and now Rampton presented a letter to them that read, “My position remains unchanged, that there were certain My Lai-type atrocities by troops in Russia, that the gas chambers and factories of death are Hollywood legends.”
Irving told convention attendees – I’d like to see a photo of these folks – that “We have to accept that there were My Lai-type massacres, where SS officers machine-gunned hundreds if not thousands of Jews.”
So Irving had NOT changed his tone since 1986.
Irving declared, “So I am being accused of being consistent, am I?”
Rampton retorted, “Yes, you are. You are accused of consistently and knowingly reducing the extent of the responsibility of these massacres…the words ‘My Lai massacres,’ mean…these massacres were done by criminal gangsters, unauthorized in the East, without the approval, consent, or knowledge of the people in Berlin.”
With all bravado out of his face, Irving conceded, “That is correct.”
Rampton admonished Irving that if he had done the level of research accomplished by other historians, he could have known he was wrong.
Irving gave a bizarre answer. “I am not a Holocaust historian,” he said.
“Then why,” demanded Rampton, “are you making a categorical assertion that they were simply unauthorized gangster killings?”
Irving insisted he was only answering an audience question. Rampton ignored the answer, looking through his papers, showing the judge that he did not accept that answer.
Irving’s answers were doubly stupid to me. He spends vast amounts of time and energy denying the Holocaust and denigrating Jews. However, when confronted on his lack of research and understanding the subject, he pleaded that he was not a historian of it. So why in the bowels of Christ was he claiming such knowledge of something he claimed to deny and be ignorant of?
I was also annoyed by the references to My Lai. While the incident was a ghastly horror, it was not part of a United States plan to wipe out the entire Vietnamese people. Agent Orange came close. However, it backfired on its own makers, poisoning young GIs in the jungles. Among the victims of Agent Orange was a young Navy lieutenant named Elmo Zumwalt III. His father was Adm. Elmo Zumwalt, Jr. The elder Zumwalt ordered the use of Agent Orange. Zumwalt III developed bone cancer and died at age 42. The father killed the son.
Nevertheless, US political and military leaders never met in some Beltway conference facility to address their “storage problem” with the Vietnamese people, by “resettling” them all. The Nazis did.
When Saigon fell in 1975, the American version of “resettling” South Vietnamese fleeing the North’s advancing T-54 tanks was to fly them on helicopters to US Navy ships offshore and thence to California, where they were not gassed, or forced to do slave labor, or starved.
They just began the long process of becoming American citizens.
Meanwhile, Irving had to deal with a report of 363,000 dead Jews being given to Der Fuehrer. Irving called it an inconsequential “footnote.”
Judge Gray was startled. “It is a simple document, and it is referring to the killing by shooting of 300,000 Jews. Well, you have to be quite a man to just pass over that?”
Irving’s response was that Hitler was more worried about General Friedrich Paulus – contrary to many books, there was never a “von” in his name – and his 6th Army being surrounded at Stalingrad.
Actually, Hitler wasn’t. He believed that Fatso Goering’s Luftwaffe could ensure that the 6th Army would still be in position in Stalingrad at Easter, regardless of cold, Soviet fighters, and the lack of transport aircraft.
Gray said, “He is not going to notice a document telling him 300,000 innocent civilians were being shot by his army?”
More importantly, as Irving would not admit and Gray likely did not know, Hitler was a micro-manager, who took an overly detailed interest in every report that came to him. The transcripts of his interminable Fuehrer conferences show him asking questions about whether an infantry division’s anti-tank battalion had 75mm guns or 88mm guns, and if they were truck-drawn or horse-drawn. The staff officers knew to bring the heavy briefing books and folders with them to the conferences.
There’s no way Hitler would have ignored a report on 300,000 dead Jews.
Next day, Rampton reminded Irving of a letter he wrote in 1989 to West German historian Rainer Zittelman, contending that no serious historian can now believe that Auschwitz, Treblinka, and Maidanek were factories of death, “all the experts in scientific forensic reports to the contrary.”
Rampton accused Irving of having no evidence to “contradict the probability” that these camps were extermination centers.
“I have no evidence to contradict the probability,” Irving said.
Judge Gray interrupted, “Does that mean you now resile from the view that you expressed in your letter?”
“No, my Lord. I am just confirming the way he put the statement. I have no evidence to contradict his statement because I have no evidence, period,” Irving answered.
Rampton moved in: “Then you will accept that it is a probability, then?”
“No, that is a different thing entirely. I do not want to sound as though I am a bit of an eel about this but…I do not want to sound slippery; I just do not want to be nailed down in one corner where later on you will hold it up dripping and slithering next day and say, ‘Look what you said yesterday.’”
Judge Gray responded, “But, you see, you said to Dr. Zitelmann that it was clear to you that no serious historian can now believe that Treblinka and some other camps were death factories.”
Irving answered, “Quite. They were purpose-built factories of death; in other words, they had no other purpose than that.”
“Oh, I see,” said Judge Gray.
However, Rampton said, “This is getting a bit like a fourth form debating society. I fear – a moment ago you said to me that you had no evidence to contradict the probability that these were purpose-built extermination facilities.”
“Yes, because I have no evidence, period,” Irving said.
Rampton didn’t miss a beat. “No, but you write in this letter: ‘All the experts in scientific evidence is to the contrary.’ What is the expert and scientific forensic evidence that contradicts the probability that Treblinka was a purpose-built extermination facility?”
Rampton was pressing Irving on what was in the letter. Irving said he could not remember the details of a letter he’d written 11 years ago. Judge Gray asked Irving if his statement on Treblinka was an extrapolation on his statement on Auschwitz.
Rampton jumped on that one. “But how could you extrapolate from Auschwitz, Mr. Irving? It has never been proposed by anybody, so far as I know, that the Nazis used hydrogen cyanide anywhere outside Auschwitz to kill people with, has it?”
Irving lifted his arm in the air in a large arc, and angrily proclaimed, “This is what I find so puzzling. We were told that this is part of a system…and yet, apparently they used cyanide here, petrol gas there, diesel fumes there, bullets in yet another place, bulldozers, hangings, shootings – it appears to have been a totally ramshackle and haphazard operation. A total lack of system.”
To Professor Lipstadt, Irving “seemed almost insulted that we would ascribe to the Third Reich – a supposed bastion of organizational efficiency – such an imprecise operation.”
I think the same…Irving showed massive admiration for the Third Reich from its top leadership down to the front-line Landsers. He was delighted to be admitted to the inner circle of Hitler’s butlers, valets, secretaries, and maids. He learned his German when he worked there as a young adult in their steel industry. Doubtless, he was impressed by their engineering skill in their factories.
However, once again, Irving could not look at the facts straight on, being fascinated purely with their stream of paperwork, directives, and ideology.
There’s a myth among those who don’t know history that Nazi Germany was Earth’s “most efficient” state. In an episode of “Star Trek” called “Patterns of Force,” Jim Kirk and his crew meet up with a planet named “Ekos,” looking for a missing Federation cultural observer and historian named John Gill, who was sent there to see what was going on.
The Ekosians fire an “old-style thermonuclear warhead” at the Enterprise, which bounces off its deflector shields. The Ekosians shouldn’t be that advanced. So Kirk and Spock theorize that Gill violated the Prime Directive and gave them help. They beam down and find out that the planet is now a Nazi state, down to the Brownshirts and Swastikas. Worse, a public TV broadcast shows the newscaster saying, “Everywhere, preparations go forward toward the Final Decision. Death to Zeon. Long live the Fatherland. Long live the Führer,” facing a photograph of Gill, wearing his SA uniform.
After various adventures – I don’t feel like narrating a “Star Trek” plot here, Kirk, Spock, and McCoy find that Gill is a drugged-out puppet dominated by his deputy, Deputy Fuehrer Melakon, who is mobilizing Ekos’ war of extermination. After a Vulcan mind-meld, Gill explains that he found Ekos fragmented and disunited, and thought he could rebuild the planet by using the best parts of the Nazi regime to do it, without the brutality. Melakon had other ideas.
The dialogue is as follows, from IMDB:
Capt. Kirk: Gill. Gill, why did you abandon your mission? Why did you interfere with this culture?
John Gill: Planet... fragmented... divided. Took lesson from... Earth history.
Capt. Kirk: But why Nazi Germany? You studied history. You knew what the Nazis were.
John Gill: Most efficient state... Earth ever knew.
Spock: Quite true, Captain. That tiny country, beaten, bankrupt, defeated; rose in a few years to stand only one step away from global domination.
Capt. Kirk: But it was brutal, perverted; had to be destroyed at a terrible cost. Why that example?
Spock: Perhaps Gill felt that such a state, run benignly, could accomplish its efficiency without sadism.
Some trivia, for those who care: Leonard Nimoy was off to Hanukkah services later that month and refused to do publicity pictures in his Nazi uniform. The obligatory blonde female guest star’s parents had fled Hitler, so they objected to her wearing a swastika, and she quit acting after this episode. The Germans wouldn’t air the episode until the 1990s. The planet “Zeon” comes from “Zion.”
Of course, screenwriter John Meredyth Lucas didn’t know the history behind the Third Reich. He was exploring the idea how a party of street brawlers and thugs could take power and conquer most of Europe.
For those who care, “Star Trek” following fiction says that once free of Nazism, Ekos – and Zeon – became Federation protectorates, despite Klingon interference.
The idea that the Nazis were super-efficient also turned up in a plotline in “Battlestar Galactica,” where Lorne Greene and the outer space version of Ponderosa Ranch finally reaches Earth. After various plot twists, they find themselves amid World War II, and decide to support the side that is more technically advanced.
So the renegade Dr. Fabian goes down to Peenemünde to help Dr. von Braun perfect his V-2. After all, the Nazis are more technically advanced. At that point, I turned off the TV.
The truth is, the Nazi state was a mess. Being a lazy dilettante who lived and ran Germany as if he had won a magnificent lottery, he let his vassals fight among themselves to “work toward the Fuehrer” and put his orders and statements into action. Nazi Germany did everything wrong except operational warfare.
It had 14 intelligence agencies. Fatso Goering hated Josef Goebbels. Rudolph Hess flipped out and flew to England, thinking he could make peace. His replacement, the crawling Martin Bormann, took a good chunk of power in his own hands, and used it to undermine his rivals, to the very end. Finance Minister Walther Funk was an incompetent drunk. Economics Minister Hjalmar Horace Greeley Schacht, his rival, rebuilt the German economy for war by committing forms of embezzlement.
Education and Science Minister Bernhard Rust sneered at the secret rocket program and the atomic bomb program, when not drinking himself into insensibility. He told audiences that a scientist spent his whole life isolating one germ, while a street sweeper got rid of millions in the course of a day.
The Peenemünde gang only got Hitler’s support when they showed the film of a successful launch to Der Fuehrer in 1943. Adolf apologized to the rocket team – he said it was only the second time in his life he had ever done that – and added that if he had been shown that film in 1939, the war could have been avoided. Then he turned the program over to the SS, and the rockets were built and fired at London.
As for the atomic bomb program, Rust turned that over to the Post Office. They failed to deliver.
A German joke had it that a “Rust” was the time between the promulgation of a decree and its rescinding.
A “Goeb” was the sound of millions of German radios being turned off when the Minister of Propaganda and Public Enlightenment took to the airwaves, by the way.
The only German official who put everybody on the same page was Foreign Minister Joachim von Ribbentrop. All the bigshots hated the stupid, vain, incompetent Foreign Minister, whose treaties ended in disaster.
The Reichstag was an even bigger joke. It had no powers, but its members, all Nazis, convened twice a year. They sang “Deutschland Uber Alles” and the “Horst Wessel Lied,” rubber-stamped Hitler’s decrees, and then picked up their paychecks.
They were called “Germany’s highest-paid choral society.”
The economy was a mess, too, despite Albert Speer putting factories underground and synthesizing oil from coal – a wasteful process. The Nazis figured that slave labor would produce outstanding weapons, vehicles, and supplies. Instead, shells arrived at the front filled with newspapers, fuel lines were filled with sugar, and boots fell apart.
Germany tried to fight a mechanized war while lacking oil. Their population’s food was based on pork, which required additional meat. The British ate lamb, which feasted on grass.
All this didn’t matter…German generals dreamed up brilliant plans that called for slashing drives across the map, handed them to the quartermasters, and wondered why the supply officers passed out in shock from the ideas. German troops on the offensive ran short of everything, particularly food and medicine. They stormed Moscow in summer uniforms. Goebbels asked the German people to donate their ski clothes. The German people did. It got stuck in Warsaw and never made it to the front, because the railroad officials were inept, and the train tracks were wrecked by partisans.
Ninety percent of the German transport was horse-drawn throughout the war. The British began the war with 100 percent of their transport motorized. That’s the way it stayed.
Germany had dozens of vehicle manufacturers. The Americans standardized military production. The Germans tried to fight the war with weapons of the 1950s, like rocket fighters, jets, and cruise missiles. The jet engines had lifespans of 100 hours. The rocket fighter fuel had a cute trick of exploding. Same with the cruise missiles.
The Tiger tanks packed an 88 mm gun and had thick armor. However, they guzzled gasoline, couldn’t cross bridges, and suffered from hand-operated turrets.
The Allies just kept on perfecting 1930s technology, making Spitfires and P-51s better and better. They used 100-octane gasoline and had it in great numbers.
It even included such trivial things as uniforms. James Holland points out in “The Rise of Germany” that the German kit, while impressive, was inferior to the British Army battledress.
The Germans showed inefficiency and stupidity in many other ways. They chased off their best scientists and creative minds – dictatorships always do that. The Allies used those minds to make big things (the atomic bomb) and small ones (“The Man Who Never Was”), all of which won the war.
Their campaigns and plans were often stupid. The invasion of England called for a single tug to drag dozens of unpowered barges across the English Channel in its horrible weather, by night, through British destroyers, and unload them on the shore, complete with horses in the first wave.
Hitler seriously believed the Luftwaffe could supply the besieged defenders at Stalingrad, even though his generals said they couldn’t. Goering said they could. That was enough. He thought the Battle of the Bulge would split the Allies and win the war. It didn’t. He thought the counterattack in Hungary would “light a blaze seen around the world.” It didn’t. He thought the Soviets would be defeated in the streets of Berlin. They weren’t. He thought that the death of President Roosevelt would take America out of the war. It didn’t.
Even the Holocaust’s “shadow war” inflicted damage on Germany’s open war. Wehrmacht supply trains sat in stations and marshalling yards while the SS rounded up Jews and sent them to their deaths. Vital resources went to mass murder instead of battlefronts.
Irving was wrong.
I suggest this not be read before going to sleep. It is amazing but not exactly a bed-time story. Hope you enjoy your week-end Kiwi...
Wow! Thank you!
I just encountered this 6th part, will have to find and read he beginning.
But want to say that the last part about not really educated politicians, dictators and stupid but loyal henchmen they have to have to seize and stay in power, is universal. USSR was the same story.