The Holocaust, the systematic extermination of approximately six million Jewish people and many other victims by Nazi Germany during the second world war, has cast a long shadow over Western History for the last sixty years. Its cultural, political and social ramifications are difficult to overestimate. The Holocaust has seen an unparalleled amount of academic literature devoted to it; with a wealth of evidence to draw upon. Concentration camp survivors' autobiographies, the written testaments from the Nuremberg war crime trials, eye-witness accounts from allied liberators and a plethora of documented minutiae of camp life itself survive. How then has there developed a school of thought that claims the Holocaust did not actually happen? Furthermore, how did the once respected British Historian David Irving journey from a revisionist stance to one of outright Holocaust denial?
The Road To The Holocaust
The deaths of between five and six million Jewish men, women and children
was the result of an undertaking by Nazi Germany and its collaborators to find
a "final solution to the "Jewish question". Hitler's thoughts
on Jewish settlers can be seen as part of a long term anti-Semitic strand in
German political thinking. The Third Reich put this anti-Semitism into practice-with
the subsequent erosion of Jewish liberties-this was plainly in evidence before
the second world war took place.
In 1935 the Nuremberg Laws were passed making Jews subjects, not citizens, and
prohibiting intermarriage and sexual relations between Jews and Aryans. In 1938
the first step was taken to appropriate Jewish property. In the same year their
schools were segregated, their passports specially demarcated with a "J"
for "Juden" and all manner of businesses forcibly "aryanized".
Hitler made many speeches which showed unequivocally how he saw the Jewish people. Nine months before war was declared, Hitler stated that if the world was plunged into war by the "international finance Jewry" the consequence would be the "annihilation of the Jewish race in Europe".
Until 1941 the Nazi plan for solving the Jewish question had ostensibly been to force emigration. In 1940 one major proposal had been to transport all Jews under Nazi jurisdiction to Madagascar, in the Indian Ocean. The following year however, the Final solution (Gesamtlsung) was being discussed in terms of genocide as opposed to emigration. The process for mass killings became more mechanised, from mobile killing squads (Einsatzgruppen), mass transportation of Jews from ghettos to labour camps and later in the war, to death camps.
The Roots of Holocaust Denial
The actual events of the Holocaust is a subject which continues to be rigorously debated by academics today. Revisionism in its original and broadest terms is a necessary part of historical analysis and accurate representation of past events.
Juxtaposing this considered revisionism has been a minority theory that the Holocaust itself did not actually take place. The term “revisionism” has been hijacked by extremists to lend an academic credence to their Holocaust denial claims.
Holocaust denial can be broadly defined as a movement which denies the three main Holocaust facts: that between 5-6 million Jews were killed; that this was carried out as part of a Nazi “final Solution”; that many were killed in gas chambers. Its origins can be traced back to just after the war, when there was some dissent in Germany that the Nuremberg trials had been “victors’ trials”. More specific early dissent was quite isolated, with one notable first example being Maurice Bardèche, a French fascist, who stated that the concentration camps had been used for disinfection purposes. Notable revisionist literature of the seventies included Emil Aretz’s “The Six Million Lie” and Arthur Butz’s “The Hoax of the Twentieth Century”, the latter book being held in particularly high esteem by subsequent deniers.
It was not until 1978 however that Holocaust denial gathered momentum. The Institute for Historical Review was formed, with a mission to be a "research, educational and publishing center devoted to truth and accuracy in history". It is interesting to note that in its quest for the above it has never sought to question the central issues around the Holocaust and look at issues such as the erosion of Jewish rights, the growth of anti-Semitism and the moral legitimacy of persecution and scientific experimentation-but instead showed its real aims with a focus on playing down numbers murdered and hijacking the scientific method to attempt to reflect its own largely anti-Semitic prejudices.
In 1983, the British Historian David Irving was invited to the institute's conference in California. Irving's background as an academic authority on Hitler was well documented. The author of "Hitler's War", Irving was a self-styled "independent historian", with a reputation for thorough research; even if his view of Hitler as being a weak leader has not been shared by other British authorities such as Allen Bullock, Hugh Trevor-Roper and Martin Gilbert.
In the early eighties Irving was of the opinion that Hitler did not order a "final solution"; instead he believed that Hitler had given instructions to evacuate Jews towards Russian territories. Whilst at this stage not denying that Jews were exterminated, Irving believed that this was mainly local decision making in the East, later citing Heydrich and Himmler as the initiators of the Final Solution, without Hitler’s knowledge. Irving had been invited to give talks to extreme right-wing groups in the nineteen seventies and eighties. It was not until the publishing of the subsequently discredited pseudoscientific Leuchter report in 1988 that Irving stepped across from revisionism to Holocaust denial.
The report, named after one Fred Leuchter, and published by Irving’s own Focal Point Publications, was the analysis of “forensic” evidence (illegally) taken from the Auschwitz concentration camp. The report had been commissioned by Ernst Zündel, a Canadian Holocaust denier, who financed Leuchter, an apparent expert on American execution methods, to travel to Auschwitz, Birkenhau and Majdanek. Its findings claimed that the camp conditions at Auschwitz were not conducive to mass extermination programs.
Irving was convinced of the integrity of the findings of the report, to which his introduction stated : "For myself…the laboratory reports were shattering. There could be no doubts as to their integrity”
This was a turning point for Irving with later editions of “Hitler’s war” seeing all references to extermination camps removed.
One of his main assertions was that:
A detailed analysis of the thirty-two samples taken at the Auschwitz-Birkenau
complexes showed 1,050 mg/kg of cyanide and 6,170 mg/kg of iron. Higher iron
results were found at all of the alleged gas chambers but no significant cyanide
traces. This would be impossible if these sites were exposed to hydrogen cyanide
gas, because the alleged gas chambers supposedly were exposed to much greater
quantities of gas than the delousing facility. Thus, chemical analysis supports
the fact that these facilities were never utilized as gas execution facilities.
Subsequent analysis by experts in the field have shown that what may look to the untrained observer as a scientifically irrefutable evidence, is easily countered.
Leuchter's primary mistake is his initial assumption that exposure to HCN
must result in the formation of Prussian blue. Another error is his claim that
the delousing facilities were exposed to less HCN than the homicidal chambers.
It turns out that it is more difficult to kill lice than it is to kill humans.
Leuchter's sensitivity is not good and it is doubtful that his samples were
chosen carefully in regard to being sheltered from the elements. Concentration
of cyanide in the gas chambers (at least cyanide not complexed to iron) is at
levels less than 1 mg/kg. Additionally, Leuchter should have taken as his control
an ordinary building at Auschwitz-Birkenau, such as a barracks. Do the homicidal
gas chambers contain more cyanide compounds than an ordinary barracks? The answer
is yes.
The chemistry of Auschwitz, by Richard J. Green
Leuchter, himself a member of the IHR, was later revealed to be a History graduate with no engineering qualification. He was convicted in Massachusetts in 1991 of practising engineering without a licence.
Lipstadt and the “growing assault on truth”
Five years after Irving published the Leuchter Report, Deborah Lipstadt , Professor
of Religion at Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia, published her seminal work
“Denying The Holocaust: The Growing Assault on Truth and Memory.”
A well respected Holocaust authority and chair of the academic committee of
the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, Lipstadt described Irving as being
the most “dangerous spokesman for Holocaust denial”. She questioned
his association with right wing extremists and anti-Semites and how he was driven
by his own ideological beliefs to distort what he actually knew to be the historical
truth.
David Irving subsequently sued both Lipstadt and her British publisher, Penguin
for libel. Irving filed the suit in London . English libel laws differ from
America in that the burden of truth lay with the defendant. Deborah Lipstadt
and her legal team had to prove that her claims were the truth.
The Court Case
The trial took place in the Royal High Court of Justice in London between January
and April 2000. It was not about proving the Holocaust happened; it was concerned
with establishing whether or not David Irving was a liar.
The defence was able to establish through painstaking consultations with expert
historians, scrutiny of Irving’s research and with further recourse to
world war two primary evidence, that Irving had been guilty of both ignoring
and manipulating information for his own ideological ends.
As international media attention focussed on Irving, a different picture of
the historian began to emerge. Sound –bites from his neo-nazi talks, such
as the assertion that “more women died on the backseat of Edward Kennedy’s
car at Chappaquiddick than ever died in a gas chamber at Auschwitz” showed
a side of him that was disturbing.
The trial lasted 32 days. Lipstadt and her defence team were able to prove the truth of her assertions. The judge ruled in Lipstadt’s favour and in his three hundred plus page report his findings on Irving were unequivocal: Irving had “misrepresented” and “perverted” evidence and had been guilty of “misconstruction”, “omission”, “mistranslation” and “double standards”. Furthermore some of Irving’s explanations in court had been “fanciful” “disingenuous” and a “travesty”. “It appears to me,” wrote Justice Gray, “that Irving qualifies as a Holocaust denier.” He further deemed Irving to be anti-Semitic, racist and a “right-wing pro-Nazi polemicist”.
His extreme right wing and racist credentials, which had been highlighted in the courtroom beyond any doubt-from singing racist chants to his own grandchild, through to calling Auschwitz survivors “assholes” –are part of a larger picture of his true motives. He believes Churchill to have been bankrolled by the Jewish financial elite, to have perpetrated crimes far worse than those carried out by the Germans.
In an interview with The Guardian , Irving said: “Having removed the appalling
crime of the deliberate and systematic murder of six million Jews, Hitler could
be viewed in a much more systematic and clinical way.”
Neglecting the immutable evidence that historians have repeatedly arrived at
a conclusion that between five and six million Jews and other minorities died
of starvation, overwork, disease and were systematically murdered by shooting,
mobile gas chambers and death camps, makes this both academically and morally
untenable.
David Irving today
The libel case was ruinous for Irving, both in monetary and academic terms. Declared bankrupt in 2002 and ostracised by the mainstream, he has found a niche within the denial market. In a similar way to the conspiracy theorist David Icke, Irving has entered a supply-demand loop which requires him to tap into the seam of alternative history to retain a high public profile and to support himself financially.
Irving has an Internet presence, with a yearly convention organised. An idiosyncratic site, Irving juxtaposes politics with personal insults, with an obvious target being Professor Lipstadt. His original 1977 offer of $1,000 reward for proof that Hitler knew about the Holocaust still stands, with the codicil “The reference must be explicit, and not depend upon clever translations, or fancy interpretations, or reading-between-the-lines”
His website; including details of his own ancestry, which can apparently be traced back to Robert the Bruce, is described by Irving as a “human rights website”.
Further reading:
Denying the Holocaust: The Growing Assault on Truth and Memory
Deborah E. Lipstadt
Denying History: Who Says The Holocaust Never Happened and Why Do They Say
It?
Michael Shermer
Lying About Hitler: History, Holocaust, and the David Irving Trial
by Richard J. Evans
Cambridge Professor and expert witness in the Irving trial
The Case for Auschwitz: Evidence from the Irving Trial
by R. J. Van Pelt
'Never Again': A History of the Holocaust
Martin Gilbert
Online resources:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/irving/
Archives from the U.K’s Guardian newspaper. Provides in-depth coverage
and analysis of the trial and Irving’s career.
http://www.courtservice.gov.uk/judgmentsfiles/j22/queen_irving.htm
The court trial in full.
http://www.holocaustdenialontrial.org/ieindex.html
Comprehensive guide to the trial, from Emory University.
http://www.tau.ac.il/Anti-Semitism/irving.html
“From Revisionism to Holocaust Denial-David Irving as a Case Study”-R.Stauber
http://www.nizkor.org/
A highly detailed site. Information on every aspect of the Holocaust.
http://www.holocaust-history.org/
A comprehensive denial counterpoint website. Currently provides an email question
and answer service.
www.skepdic.com
The Skeptic’s dictionary-Robert Todd Carroll
http://www.tau.ac.il/Anti-Semitism/
Stephen Roth Institute-Tel Aviv University
http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/Holocaust/denial.html
Jewish Virtual Library
Clear Q and As on The History of Holocaust Denial and detailed refutation of
deniers’ claims
