David Irving is, as I write, right now at a place where the authorities absolutely don’t want him to be.
He is shunned everywhere in Europe, and banned from several countries, including Germany, but I can reveal that he at least is not in the country that most detests him: Austria – where, if he returned, he would face a compulsory thirty year prison sentence. In December the controversial 68-year-old historian was released from 400 days in solitary confinement in a Vienna prison after serving a year of a three year sentence for holocaust denial.
Life has been hard on what the world calls holocaust deniers recently. There was the jailing of Irving in December 2005, for a speech he made to students in 1989 in which he disputed the existence of the gas chambers at Auschwitz. He had returned, incognito, across a land border, to make a speech to another group of students, the powerful Vienna Burschenschaft, one of whose members apparently tipped off the police. They arrested him, and he was convicted in February 2006 under the Verbotsgesetz law 3g, an allied wartime regulation, somewhat vague, that imposes harsh penalties for Nazi thought crimes.
Just in January , the French nationalist MEP Bruno Gollnisch was sentenced to three months of probation and fined for “verbal contestation of the crimes against humanity” in Lyon. In February, Ernst Zundel, who wrote “Did Six Million Really Die”, was sentenced to five years in a German prison. To drive the victory home, the German justice ministry has just asked its EU counterparts to ban holocaust denial throughout the EU.
When I sent Irving a first draft of this interview he asked me to leave out details of his travel plans in March. Exposing them, he said, could put him in trouble. He was going to a continental European country where, if not as hated as much as in Austria, he would certainly attract the attention of the police.
When we met at a hotel in London’s Victoria. (he has no problems with the British government) he had just experienced a double disaster. The day before, 27 January, International Holocaust Memorial Day, two bad things had happened: his website was closed down, without explanation, by his San Diego ISP; nine years of work, 150 megabytes, thousands of pages of revisionism, his and others, plus downloads of his books. On the same day his laptop hard drive broke, and this contained all the back up material for his website.
“I fear the worst, it's all gone. And, you know, it happened on Holocaust Day.”
“The website - do you think it was an international conspiracy?” I joked
“Maybe, maybe,” he said pensively as we sat down in the hotel lobby. (His Mayfair house was repossessed after the Lipstadt libel trial in 2000, where he disputed a historian's assessment of him as a denier and lost.)
He was limping slightly; still big and imposing, but his clothes, black sweater and corduroys were slightly rumpled and his eyes had a rheumy sadness.
“The four hundred days in solitary confinement ruined my health.”
“What is your take on Auschwitz these days?”
“The gas chamber at Auschwitz is a fake. I said so in 1993, was fined thirty thousand deutsche marks in absentia in Germany for doing so, in Germany you are
guilty until proven innocent – in England it is the other way round of course. Then three years later the Poles come around and admitted it was a fake, it was
built in 1948; it’s for tourist consumption. But telling this truth got me banned from Germany.”
“You're talking about the gas chamber at Auschwitz I, the army casern.”
“That's right.”
“What about the gas chamber at Auschwitz Birkenau, Auschwitz II. That was the controversial one. You have said there was no evidence that the chimneys through
which the zyklon B gas could be inducted ever existed.
I saw that bit of your trial and thought it convincing. And the Poles themselves couldn't seem to make up their minds: in a diorama at Auschwitz I,
there were two chimneys; on a sign outside the Leichenkeller, it said there were four chimneys...and the fact that as you say no one has taken up your challenge to do a X-ray analysis of the supposedly filled in hack holes in the reinforced concrete roof, next to the support columns, to pour in the cyanide
that would explain their absence in the spot suggested by photos you said were
doctored...what does that mean?”
“The Germans are serious, serious people, and they had
built this as a state-of-the-art mortuary – the project was headed by Hans Kammler, chief construction engineer of the SS. They are not suddenly going to build this and hack chimney holes; the Leuchter report established that there were no significant traces of hydrogen cyanide in the walls; in a fumigation chamber used for
delousing clothes used elsewhere at Auschwitz where the concentrations used were much lower, the walls are stained right through the brickwork with Prussian blue, or cyanide. You see no such thing at the Leichenkeller.”
“So this was the epicentre of evil, and it was fake, was just used as a mortuary. Are you saying there were no gassings at Auschwitz?”
“Yes there were, in farm houses
outside the camp perimeter. The evidence is in a little known report from the deputy commandant at Auschwitz, found at the public records office.”
“How many people died at Auschwitz? Didn't you once say that more people died at Chappaquiddick than at the gas chamber in Auschwitz?”
“That was the fake gas chamber in Auschwitz I was referring to. Three hundred thousand people were gassed at Auschwitz.”
“That's a lot short of the million currently touted.”
“Oh statistics, they have a habit of ballooning.”
“How many Jews died in the holocaust?”
“Around four million. I have always maintained that substantial numbers died.”
“Why do people call you a holocaust denier if you are not denying the holocaust?”
“This is how my enemies have me boxed in. It's impossible to escape the label; I gave an interview to Italian television where I explained the four million and what is the headline? 'Holocaust Denier.' It not only makes me look extremely stupid, as it is very obvious that there was mass murder of the Jews, but it makes me look complicit. Because ‘holocaust denier’ reminds you of ‘he denied the murder’, so it sounds as if I am denying that I carried out the holocaust myself.”
“But you did make mistakes on your assessments of Auschwitz, because you once said there were no gas chambers at all.”
“Everyone makes mistakes. The Auschwitz authorities have dug themselves into a hole over the Leichenkeller; it's too late for them to admit it. Robert Faurisson, a very nice man, is an extreme revisionist whom I don't always agree with. He has painted himself into a corner.
He says no Jews died – not even in shootings in Russia. The difference is I own up to my mistakes. I am constantly learning and adapting my views."
“Where did the other Jews die?”
“The big source of deaths was gassing at the operation Reinhardt camps – Sobibor, Treblinka, Belzec. But the Germans were so efficient at removing all signs of those death camps the Poles had to erect this tourist attraction at Auschwitz.”
“You had supporters at the Lipstadt trial. Why did you have to subpoena them to get them to testify on your behalf?”
“Because people like John Keegan knew they would get in trouble, because of my reputation and his known support for me. In the 1980s he wrote: you only need to read two books on the second world war, one is Chester Wilmot, the other is Irving's Hitler's war.
Another testimony came from Donald Cameron Watt who said no historian could withstand the scrutiny I was subjected to. The opposition spent 20 man-years combing my work, and found a dozen mistakes. Kate Connolly, incidentally, of the Daily Telegraph read my book on Hitler's war and said, on reaching the end, 'I honestly
can't understand why this man is seen as a holocaust denier', since I do write extensively of atrocities.”
“The one who really ruined your reputation was Richard
Evans, the professor of history at Cambridge, who examined your work in detail for Hitler sympathies and falsifications that would favour the Nazi cause. He said you could not be trusted to tell the truth.”
“Evans was a historian I had never heard of. He has an unfortunate under bite that make him look perpetually pugnacious. He was paid 250,000 dollars by the
defence, so bear that in mind. He perjured himself because I asked him if he hated me – which in a later book he admitted doing - but of course had he admitted
that his testimony would have been thrown out. So he lied when he said he didn't hate me, because he did. He almost had his back turned to me throughout
questioning.”
“But he did say that 30,000 only were killed in the allied air raids on Dresden. You say 100,000.”
“I still say 100,000 and I can prove it.”
“What do you think of the holocaust conference in Iran?”
“I think it was a big mistake to mix up revisionism with the Middle East problem. The Iranians did a lot of harm to their reputation by holding it, as indeed I told Iranian television.”
“How are you going to salvage your reputation?”
“Not in my lifetime, but in my children's lifetime perhaps. When I am dead my books will still be out there for people to judge.”
“Are you going to write any more books?”
“William Manchester decided that he could never complete the third volume of Churchill, he was too old and it was too hard work."
We talked about how he took his 12-year-old daughter Jessica to Oxford Street (“sheer hell”). Of how awareness of the Israeli lobby’s influence on US politics has become almost mainstream in the British media. Of his friends, such as American – and Jewish - writer Norman Finkelstein who, while equally not denying the holocaust, argues that Jewish organisations have used it to extort unjustly huge reparations payments, and that the holocaust is used by Israel to deflect criticism of the treatment of the Palestinians; even Finkelstein refuses to link to Irving’s website.
Finally he told a joke about the Rudolf Hess Platz
signs he had manufactured, adhesive over normal German street signs; he handed these out to his German supporters, who caused havoc with the traffic system and got in trouble with the police. He grinned and for a moment, a younger, trouble-making Irving is back We shook hands, and I walked out into the January evening.
I liked Irving. The devil is always charming or he wouldn’t be the devil, some would say. To a talent of exposition, add a talent for projecting a weary understanding of the world-as-is. There were many other questions I would have liked to have asked him. What does he think about the EU? Could the EU have existed without the holocaust? Is the holocaust the father of European unity?
Did he think there were two Europes – the centralising, authoritarian centre group of countries which ban holocaust denial and incidentally tend to be in favour of the European project. And the peripheral, liberal oriented countries where questioning the holocaust is permitted? Is it a coincidence that the countries that have passed holocaust denial laws are also those which have ratified the European constitution? Do historians have a responsibility or are they allowed to cause all kinds of trouble? Was he able to operate alone or only as a necessary irritant in the greater endeavour of history-writing, in which he is just an obstacle who throws up minor arguments that just have to be overcome? Is holocaust denial in Europe what the abortion issue is to the United States, a polarising issue around which parties would group if there ever were a united Europe. Wouldn’t the revisionist approach be appropriate for all historiography; indeed what we know of the past is based on very shaky foundations? How is he able to combine right and intense scepticism of the holocaust – from which the theory emerges stronger - with an acceptance of other historical phenomena, most riddled by error, as the epistemological basis for all other history writing?.
These questions, which went through my mind, as they do, as I sat on the train to Brussels, basically presupposed Irving’s capacities as a proper historian – an accolade the Lipstadt judgment famously denied him.
It’s never simple with Irving, and Evans’s low opinion of him came back to me, interestingly when, afterwards, I found this line from his prison diary, available on his website:
“The British embassy had insisted I should get a cell to myself, which might be called solitary confinement, I suppose, but it suited me.” And then I thought back to the impression Irving had given, in the interview, of an involuntary and cruel incarceration in an isolation cell. This appeared to be a falsification of his own personal experience, not the uncovering of inconvenient secondary resources; this irritated me, and if I were so disposed I guess I had a scoop on my hands: part of Irving’s game is to be damagingly self revelatory (although perhaps in the greater service of self promotion), and the authorities would really be very unhappy if they found out where he is going, but it’s not worth it. The jury might be out on his reputation – and my feelings about him see-saw - but the issue as far as prison is concerned is surely determined. No cell is a pleasure to occupy, which is why it is probably a good idea for Irving to be allowed to continue to travel incognito.
