Yes, It Really Happened...Part 8
Two anti-Semites and a great historian walk into a courtroom...
Irving now brought up his only witness who was not summoned by subpoena, an American psychology professor from California’s Long Beach State U niversity.
Kevin McDonald had a Ph.D. in bio-behavioral sciences from the University of Connecticut and billed himself as an evolutionary psychologist. He had written three books that said in $5 words the 50-cent concept that “Jews stink.”
His view was that “Judaism developed a conscious program of eugenics to improve scholarly ability…with the result that Ashkenazi Jewish IQ is at least one standard deviation above the whole mean.” He added that Jews opposed intermarriage because they wanted to keep their group closed from gentile gene pools. He added that several “very influential intellectual and political movements have been spearheaded by Jews.”
He said that to restore “parity” between Jews and other ethnic groups, universities and other institutions would discriminate against Jews in admissions and governments would impose special taxation on Jews.
He also said that Jews, rather than being victims, had provoked anti-Semitism. The Nazis were a “mirror image of Judaism, with its emphasis on creating a master race.”
Professor Lipstadt read his oeuvre, and said his ideas “reminded me of a scene in the infamous 1938 Nazi propaganda film ‘The Eternal Jew,’ in which a Jew’s beard, earlocks, caftan, and skullcap, are progressively removed until he become relative nondescript. He still has beady eyes and an oversized nose – man in a standard business suit, while the narrator says, ‘Hair, beard, skullcap, and caftan make the Eastern Jew recognizable to all. If he appears without his trademarks, only the sharp-eyed can recognize his racial origins. It is an intrinsic trait of the Jew that he always tries to hide his origins when he is among non-Jews.’”
When McDonald showed up in court, Irving told Judge Gray that he anticipated three days of testimony. As it turned out, McDonald’s direct examination was over by lunch.
He didn’t have much to say. Judge Gray started off by asking how McDonald’s testimony was relevant to the case.
Irving told the judge that McDonald’s testimony would prove he had “been the victim of an international endeavor to destroy his legitimacy as a historian.
Judge Gray cautioned Irving: “Remember the defendant is Professor Lipstadt and, therefore, it is her activities for which she can be held accountable.”
Irving said he would prove that Professor Lipstadt was “part of a broader endeavor.”
“Let us see how the evidence turns out,” Judge Gray said.
McDonald, under oath, described Judaism as a “group evolutionary strategy” and how he had studied the tactics Jewish organizations used to combat views with which they disagreed.
An example was how the Anti-Defamation League had complained about Irving’s biography of Joseph Goebbels. Reviewers trashed it, too, but McDonald blamed the Jewish community.
Judge Gray came down on that, saying this was only relevant if Professor Lipstadt had silenced the book.
Irving told the court that the publishers had “quoted Professor Lipstadt as an authority for their decision” and this cancellation was “part of a group strategy?”
MacDonald pulled out an article from the Washington Post on this subject, along with a Canadian college student’s paper on Irving as a Holocaust denier. The student had sent it to Professor Lipstadt, unsolicited.
Judge Gray was unimpressed. “How does this establish that Professor Lipstadt is part of this conspiracy to discredit Mr. Irving?”
McDonald said the only linkage was the newspaper story.
Well, what did the student paper have to do with the newspaper or Professor Lipstadt?
McDonald said, at last, “My impression was that David Irving has a general complaint about persecution about Jewish organizations and that is what I thought we were addressing here.”
McDonald clearly had no grasp of what was going on.
Irving asked McDonald if he thought Irving was an anti-Semite. “I do not consider you to be an anti-Semite,” McDonald said. I wondered how that was all defined, but never mind.
With that, Irving turned McDonald over to Rampton. Without even looking up, Rampton mumbled, “I do not think I have any further questions,” not even saying “Your Lordship.”
Professor Lipstadt was stunned by Rampton’s unwillingness to expose McDonald’s anti-Semitism and general lunacy, but Libson explained to her: “We did not have to explain (his anti-Semitism). McDonald did that to himself.”
Irving’s next witness did not come by way subpoena. Peter Millar was a Sunday Times reporter, who testified on a minor issue: whether or not Irving had permission to take plates from Moscow of Goebbels’ secret diary. Professor Lipstadt said that Irving smuggled the plates out. Doing so violated his agreement with the Russian archives. Irving did not deny this in his archives, calling his behavior “illicit.”
Millar accompanied Irving to Moscow on this journey, and Irving wrapped them in cardboard, and took them to Munich, where he made copies. Then he had forensic tests in London. Irving didn’t bother to get Russian permission.
Millar confirmed all this, but said there was no written contract on the subject.
Rampton had no questions for Millar on this chicanery, but he did for Irving. He admitted that his behavior was “illicit and rather shabby.” However, he defended by saying that the chaotic situation did a “valuable service” to historians.
Yeah, and if I stole documents from the US or British National Archives, I’d go to prison.
Irving’s next and last witness also came by way of subpoena, and he was a show for the judge and the audience: one of Britain’s, if not the world’s foremost military historians, Sir John Keegan.
For those of you who do not know, Sir John Keegan was one of the great military historians of the 20th century. He overcame childhood tuberculosis to become a lecturer at Sandhurst (Britain’s West Point), and defense correspondent and editor of the Daily Telegraph. He wrote 30 books on war, several of them, like “The Face of Battle,” “A History of Warfare,” “The Mask of Command,” being among the greatest in their field. The first book was one of my college textbooks in a class called “The Anatomy of War.” I still have my copy.
When he died in 2012, The New York Times called him “the pre-eminent military historian of his era.”
Irving was trotting this titan out on the witness stand to show that the most serious military historian in the world took Irving seriously.
It didn’t go well from the start. Keegan began by saying he had never met Irving, never spoken to him, and never corresponded with him.
Irving noted that Keegan had written that the two best books on World War II in Europe were Australian war correspondent Chester Wilmot’s “The Struggle for Europe” and Irving’s own “Hitler’s War.” Was that still true?
Keegan agreed, but noted that he had written, “Some controversies are entirely bogus, like David Irving’s contention that Hitler’s subordinates kept from him the fact of the Final Solution.”
“That is, of course, still your opinion, is it not?” Irving asked. “That I am wrong on the Holocaust, or that my opinion on that is flawed?”
“Well, I read ‘Hitler’s War,’ the appropriate passages, very carefully over the weekend,” Keegan answered, “and I continue to think it perverse of you to propose that Hitler could not have known until as late as October 1943 what was going on to the Jewish population of Europe, and indeed many other minority groups as well, not only minority groups.”
Judge Gray asked Keegan “Is it perverse to say that Hitler did not know about the Final Solution?”
Keegan’s answer was unambiguous. “It defies common sense.”
That torqued off Irving. He asked why, if Keegan admired Irving’s work, “I had to coerce you into the witness box?”
Keegan had a ready answer. “Just because I admire Hitler’s War, that does not mean to say that I can go further in following you. It seemed to me that this was to be a very contentious case. I did not wish to put myself in a position where I might be misunderstood.”
Irving asked, “Would it be fair to say that you were apprehensive about the repercussions of giving evidence on my behalf?” Irving was clearly trying to suggest that the “great Jewish conspiracy” was trying to hammer or threaten Keegan for saying something bad about him.
Keegan pointed out that he was not giving evidence on Irving’s behalf…he was there under subpoena.
Judge Gray was not happy. “This is a slightly meaningless debate. Sir John is right. He is here compulsorily, not voluntarily. He has no choice but to answer your questions.”
Irving was reluctant to badger Keegan, who stood miles above him as a historian, and apologetically explained that there were “professional repercussions” to those who advocated historical positions like himself.
When Irving turned Keegan over to Rampton for cross-examination, Rampton’s behavior was different to his contemptuous dismissal of MacDonald earlier.
Rampton rose, nodded respectfully to Keegan, and said he had no questions.
Keegan left the stand. He had done pretty well – but not for Irving, calling his theories “bogus,” “perverse,” and “defying common sense.”
With Irving’s witnesses and their odd performances done, it was time to return to the “battleship Auschwitz.”
First, Rampton showed Irving’s correspondence on the Leuchter report, which showed that Irving became a supporter of Holocaust denial, even though the report wasn’t worth the paper it was printed on.
Doing so added to Irving being a liar. Irving’s response was to use another report, from a German chemist named Germar Scheerer who had changed his name to Germar Rudolf to show his support for imprisoned Nazi war criminal and wartime Deputy Fuehrer Rudolf Hess.
Scheerer was born in 1964 in Hesse – as in the Hessians of the American Revolution – and was a member of right-wing Catholic fraternities in university. He edited a far-right newspaper, wrote for far-right journals, did his time in the West German Luftwaffe, and went back to school, trying to earn his Ph.D. at the Max Planck Institute for Solid State Research.
There he did a paper entitled “Report on the formation and verifiability of cyanide compounds in the Auschwitz ‘gas chambers,’” which said that the Auschwitz gas chambers could not kill people, which “completely shattered his world view.” Scheerer did not discriminate against the formation of iron-based cyanide compounds, which are not a reliable indicator of the presence of cyanide, so his experiment was flawed. Oops.
The beneficiary of this idiocy was Hajo Herrmann, a former Luftwaffe pilot, now an attorney, defending Holocaust deniers in German criminal cases. Scheerer’s doing so irritated the Planck people, who told him not to re-enter their buildings without permission. He did anyway. So they fired him.
The University of Stuttgart then asked Scheerer to withdraw his application for a Ph.D. as German law allows universities to deny or withdraw academic degrees where the candidate has used his academic credential or knowledge to commit a crime.
That crime, as said, was Herrmann using Scheerer’s report to defend Holocaust deniers. One of them was Otto Ernst Remer, a former Wehrmacht officer who had put down the July 20, 1944, coup against Hitler with his troops in Berlin. After the war, Remer spent his time defending Hitler as a member of the “Socialist Reich Party,” fled to Egypt to advise Gamel Abdel Nasser, and then went back to Germany to support neo-Nazism. He was sentenced to 22 months for inciting racial hatred with his political newsletter, so he fled to Spain to avoid doing time in German clack. There he died in 1997. No loss.
Meanwhile, Scheerer also drew German jail time – 14 months for his writings. He avoided jail by fleeing to Spain, England, and finally the United States, landing in Chicago with an American wife. He applied for political asylum, but the US Federal Court didn’t buy that. He was shipped back to Germany, and did two years and six months in prison. This time Scheerer – I refuse to call him “Rudolf” – accepted the decision. His “Lectures on the Holocaust” copies were confiscated and destroyed, his profits seized by the German government.
After he did his time, Scheerer went back to the states, and his second wife, and lived in Red Lion, Pennsylvania. He was arrested there in July 2019, for “open lewdness.” To be precise, he was exercising at 4:06 a.m. in a public park “naked from the waist down.” He was convicted and sentenced to two years’ probation.
I had a good laugh over that, because Scheerer was merely imitating top Nazi war criminal, the ghastly Julius Streicher. He spent most of his time in his Nuremberg cell, while awaiting trial, exercising in the nude. The American MPs told him to cut that out, particularly when female cleaning staff showed up.
Anyway, Irving now introduced the Scheerer Report. Rampton said that it should have been presented in discovery. Irving said he did. Rampton said the document Irving his handing over is only 20 pages long, while the full report (120 pages in German) is for sale on Irving’s web page.
I am not going to include that address (or Scheerer’s), because I don’t feel like giving any publicity to neo-Nazis and Holocaust deniers.
Irving admitted that his 20 pages was not the full report, but promised to deliver the full report later in the trial. He never did.
Instead, it was time for a verbal battle over the ventilator gratings of Morgue 1 of Crematorium 2. They had cyanide traces on them.
“I will concede that they found in the ventilator grating taken from Morgue 1 on Crematorium 2 remains of cyanide.”
Rampton demanded to know how Irving accounted for that.
“Because that particular room was used as a gassing cellar,” Irving said.
“Yes. Gassing what?”
“I think the evidence is clear that it was used as a gassing cellar for fumigating cadavers.”
“Fumigating cadavers?” Rampton asked.
“Yes.”
Rampton could not believe that. “What makes you say that?” he asked.
“That is what that room was for,” Irving replied blandly. “That is what mortuaries are for. In mortuaries you put cadavers.”
“That is news to me, Mr. Irving. What is the evidence for that?”
“I beg your pardon?”
“What is the evidence that they used that room for gassing corpses?”
“That is what it was built for.”
Judge Gray interrupted, asking, “I am sorry. This seems a crude question, but what is the point of gassing a corpse?”
Irving retorted, “Because they came in heavily invested with the typhus-bearing lice that had killed them.”
“So why,” Rampton asked, “would it need a gas-tight door with a peep hole with double eight-millimeter-thick glass and a metal grill on it?”
Time for a new Irving theory, if we hadn’t had enough already.
“At this time in the war, most of Germany was coming under the – it was feeling the weight of Royal Air Force Bomber Command forays. We were bombing all over Eastern Europe. Our bombing raids were extending further and further into Central Europe. You will see from the Auschwitz construction department files an increasing concern about the need to build bomb-tight shelters and gas-tight shelters because of the danger of gas attack.”
“Now it is an air raid shelter, is it?” Rampton asked sarcastically.
“I beg your pardon?” Irving asked.
“In early 1943, Mr. Irving? The first bombing raid anywhere Auschwitz was not until late 1944?”
In point of fact, Auschwitz was out of range of RAF Lancasters and American B-17 Flying Fortresses until the US 15th Army Air Force established its complex at Foggia in Italy, in early 1944.
The first time the USAAF flew over Auschwitz was on April 5, 1944, when a photo-reconnaissance plane did so. The shots it brought back showed lines of people debarking from freight trains. The American photo-interpreters marked them as “chow lines,” unaware of their true intent.
On August 20, a squadron of 127 B-17s flew to nearby Monowitz to paste the synthetic-rubber plant. Three more raids in September and December added an additional 2,000 lbs. of high explosives and incendiaries to the destruction. However, despite pleas from the Polish government-in-exile and American and British Jewish groups, the Allies did not bomb Auschwitz itself.
From my study of history, that might not have amounted to much. Back then, “precision bombing” did not exist, despite the claims of Giulio Douhet, “Victory Through Airpower,” and the Norden bombsight. It still doesn’t. Had Bomber Command or the 15th USAAF attacked Auschwitz, they would have killed more prisoners than guards. They certainly would not have enabled mass escapes or shut down the camp. The prisoners were in no shape and ill-equipped to imitate the inmates of Colditz and Stalag Luft III in their well-remembered escapes.
More importantly, such attacks would have provided today’s neo-Nazis with a fabulous defense of Auschwitz and other camps. The Nazis didn’t kill any Jews – it was the Allied bombing. The Nazis tried to keep them alive. It was those evil, deceitful, Allies – that drunken Churchill and cripple Roosevelt, both Jewish puppets – who bombed Auschwitz. They did so to defame the good name of Germany in general and Hitler in particular and squeeze reparations out of Christians, create the state of Israel, and cement Jewish control of the world.
Yeah, right.
Anyway, the bottom line in the courtroom was a simple one: neither Bomber Command nor the USAAF could hit Auschwitz in 1943, when the gas chambers were built.
Irving promised to provide documentation on them being built as air raid shelters the following day. He never did.
Rampton then asked, “If they were used for gassing corpses, I wonder if you can help me understand the point, because shortly after they were in the mortuary they went to be incinerated?”
“Yes.”
Rampton moved in for another kill. “What would be the point of gassing a corpse that was shortly going to be incinerated?”
“The corpses arrived…fully clothed. Before they were cremated they were undressed, and various other bestialities were performed on them. I believe the gold teeth were taken out and other functions were performed. As the corpses cooled, the lice that may have been on the body crawled off the body because lice were seeking heat.”
“Where?” Rampton asked.
“I am not sure, saying this off the top of my head. Mr. Rampton, I have taken advice on this.”
That answer did not satisfy Rampton. It doesn’t satisfy me. “Where would the infestation problem arise, Mr. Irving,” Rampton repeated.
“Anywhere between the place of death and the cellar.”
“No. You were talking about gassing corpses in cellar No. 1, beside which is a lift straight up to the incineration chamber?”
“Yes.”
Rampton kept pushing. “Think about it. Why would you gas a corpse that was going straight up to be cremated?”
“I thought I gave the explanation,” Irving said.
Judge Gray was not impressed, saying, “I do not understand the explanation, because, as I understood it, the undressing took place before the gassing.”
Rampton was baffled, too. “The undressing took place before the gassing?”
“That is not the evidence I gave, my Lord,” Irving said.
“I thought it was,” the judge answered. “Tell me if I am wrong.”
“We have not had any evidence as to that, my Lord,” Irving said.
“No, but I have read (the defense’s expert) report,” said Judge Gray. “Am I wrong about that?”
Irving said he would be questioning that, but Rampton was tired of Irving’s hedging. “You are absolutely right, my Lord. On the evidence, if one can look at the evidence rather than some bizarre version of it, the bigger room is the undressing room. They are then shepherded through into the smaller room where they are gassed. When they are dead, they are taken out through double doors that open outwards on to the lift and up into the crematorium, to put it crudely.”
Irving protested, “I am having difficulty, my Lore. I have not been given a chance to comment on this rather global presentation of what Mr. Rampton alleges to have happened.”
“Comment now,” the judge said, “This is your chance.”
“Now is your chance,” Rampton added.
“My Lord, we need to know what basis the evidence is put on.” He added that this evidence was based on testimony to be given the next day by architectural expert Robert Jan van Pelt, who we met in the Auschwitz forensics tour.
So Rampton went back to the gas-tight doors. The Leuchter report said there was no provision for gas-fitted doors, windows, or vents. “That as a matter of history is just wrong, is it not, Mr. Irving?”
“I do not know,” Irving answered. “I have never been to Auschwitz.”
Rampton pointed out that there were repeated references in the actual contemporary documents to just such fittings.
Irving admitted such was the case, saying, “Yes. In the Auschwitz documents there are repeated references to this, yes.”
“So that is a piece of Leuchter which has no foundation in history?”
“I think what he is saying,” Irving answered, “is that nothing was to be seen when they inspected on-site.”
However, Leuchter had never seen the Auschwitz blueprints. He had just claimed the doors opened inwards. Rampton showed the doors opened outwards.
Anybody who read Purnell’s Illustrated History of the Second World War magazine series, first published under the auspices of the Imperial war Museum, in the UK in 1967, re-issued there and in the United States in 1973, would have seen those blueprints. They are the first page of an article on Auschwitz, along with the front-page articles on the Dieppe Raid, the destruction of Lidice, and the ghastly German medical experiments. A depressing issue all the way around, from the dead Canadians to the mutilated concentration camp prisoners. But the blueprint is right there. Outward-opening doors.
“All doors opened outwards,” Rampton said.
Irving had another answer. It was a standard air-raid shelter door. That explained the peep-hole, as well. “It is rather like the ATM machines which have a little Braille pad on them, whether or not it is even a drive-by ATM machine. Obviously drivers are not blind, because that is the cheapest way to make ATM machines.”
The problem with that shallow explanation was that the doors were not punched out on an assembly line in China or Japan in the 2000s, but specially ordered by the SS from Topf & Sons.
Well, Irving had another theory. The doors opened outward because the room was an air-raid shelter.
Rampton snapped, “Now it is an air-raid shelter, is it? It is either a cellar for gassing corpses, Mr. Irving, or is it an air raid shelter?”
Irving quipped, “Did I say either or?”
Rampton said the shelter, if that was what it was, was too small to accommodate the inmates.
Irving suggested it was for the SS.
At this point, Professor Lipstadt saw live and up front, why Rampton had been late to their tour of the Auschwitz crematoria, and had been walking around the camp. He asked, “And the placing of this supposed air-raid shelter? If it was for the SS, then it was a terribly long way from the SS barracks, wasn’t it? Have you thought about that? Two and a half miles, isn’t it? They would all be dead before they got there if there was a bombing raid.
“Do you really see a whole lot of heavily armed soldiers running two and a half miles from the SS barracks to these cellars at the far end of Birkenau camp?”
Irving had no answer.
“Why the urgency of it if it is a mere air raid shelter or a delousing chamber?” Rampton continued.
Irving had some hypotheses. There was a typhus epidemic. The building inspector would not approve the construction without a ventilation system. The “most urgently” words in the request were just bureaucratic hyperbole.
Rampton had the hard answer. “We want to start the big extermination program in March, get on with it.”
“You see I’m trying to understand this dual function, if you can help me, if the corpses were also gassed in there, then as I understand it, they were then sent to be incinerated?”
“Yes,” Irving replied.
“Mr. Irving, what would be the point of gassing a corpse which was shortly going to be burnt?”
Irving was stuck on that one. “I am not sure, saying this off the top of my head, Mr. Rampton. I’m not a Holocaust historian, I’m a Hitler historian.”
“Then why don’t you keep your mouth shut about the Holocaust?” Rampton snarled back, contemptuously. “The truth is, as usual, Mr. Irving, you dive in off the board, saying whatever rubbish comes into your head in order to avoid drawing the obvious conclusion. This is not because you’re a rotten historian. It’s because you’re a bent one, as well.”
Incredible taken down of a nutjob
I have been saving these and reading them sparingly because my rage gets so high, and I need to be watchful of my blood pressure as a heart attack survivor.
Thanks for writing these, I will read them all, and it will make me mad, but it is important to not look away.