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March 3, 2006
Justice at long last served
ALEX GROBMAN
British Holocaust denier David Irving has been sentenced to three
years in prison in Austria for denying that the Holocaust occurred.
As the author of a number of books on the military history of the
Second World War, Irving is the most historically sophisticated
of the deniers, yet he is not a trained professional historian.
The trial raises the question of whether Irving has recanted and
whether jail time is justified for this violation. Fabricating history
is a threat to the way all groups pass on their history from one
generation to the next. That is why it is so pernicious. The Jews
of Europe went to great lengths to ensure that what happened would
not be forgotten, not only for the sake of the Jewish people, but
for the world.
At his trial, Irving acknowledged that the Nazis had attempted to
systematically murder the Jews of Europe and that there were homicidal
gas chambers at Auschwitz. This is an important admission. At the
David Irving v. Deborah Lipstadt trial in London in 2000, Irving
asserted that the chambers were used to gas “objects and cadavers.”
(In that trial, Irving tried unsuccessfully to sue Lipstadt, an
American Holocaust historian, and her publisher, Penguin Books,
for libel. He also claimed there had been no substantial research
into the Holocaust until the appearance of his book, Hitler’s
War, in 1977.)
After Irving concluded that there were no homicidal gas chambers
at Auschwitz in 1988, he did not visit the archives or the archeological
remnants at Auschwitz to determine if this was true. He could not
go, he said, because Poland was under communist rule. Yet this did
not stop others from doing research in the country during that period.
Later, Irving argued that Auschwitz authorities would not allow
him access to the camp for fear of what he might find.
Was his guilty plea to this criminal offence in Austria a ploy to
preclude being imprisoned for the maximum of 10 years, as the law
allowed, or did it signal a change in Irving’s thinking?
According to a report in Ha’aretz, after pronouncing
the sentence, Peter Liebetreu, the presiding judge at the trial,
said, “The court did not consider the defendant to have genuinely
changed his mind. The regret he showed was considered to be mere
lip service to the law.”
Irving’s willingness to concede historical errors he once held
when confronted by a prosecutor in a courtroom is not new. In the
Irving v. Lipstadt trial, Justice Charles Grey found that “a
striking feature of the case” was that “Irving made, or
appeared to make, concessions about major issues” that were
different to those he alleged prior to the trial. Previously, he
claimed, for example, that the mass shooting of Jews in the former
Soviet Union and elsewhere in Eastern Europe had not been officially
authorized, but were the actions of small groups of criminals and
that Hitler had limited information about the killings. At the trial,
Irving agreed that conceivably 1.5 million Jews were systematically
killed under orders from Reinhard Heydrich.
Robert Jan van Pelt, a key expert on Auschwitz and a witness for
the defence, also noted that Irving was forced to change his claim
“on the basis of probabilities” that Belzec, Sobibor and
Treblinka were extermination camps.
Grey concluded that he was “unable to accept Irving’s
contention that his falsification of the historical record is the
product of innocent error or misinterpretation or incompetence on
his part.” It appeared that “for the most part the falsification
of the historical record was deliberate and that Irving was motivated
by a desire to present events consistent with his own ideological
beliefs, even if that involved [the] distortion and manipulation
of historical evidence.”
Should Irving be incarcerated for this transgression or should his
views be seen as an act of free speech? In Austria and Germany,
the situation is different than in the United States. In these two
European countries, Holocaust denial, Nazi symbols, literature and
music are banned.
Hans-Ulrich Wehler, one of Germany’s most esteemed historians,
is quoted in Der Spiegel magazine as being in favor of Irving’s
incarceration. “The Holocaust,” he said, “is a matter
of the industrially organized mass murder of six million human beings.
And to brazenly deny this, in the peculiar manner of the current
Iranian government, is unbearable, at least in the German public
sphere.”
Those who fear that this will make Irving a martyr should know that
after the trial in London, his followers greeted him as a hero.
To the true believers, he will remain their champion.
At the end of the London trial, Richard Rampton, the British defence
lawyer, bemoaned that the victory did not make a difference: “The
judgment doesn’t bring the dead back,” he said.
That was never the point, as James Dalrymple, a reporter for the
Independent in London, observed. “Historical revisionism,”
he observed, “has only one subject – the Holocaust. Here
doubt can be planted like seed in the wind, to grow and fester as
the screams of history grow fainter with the years.”
The trial exposed Irving as a falsifier of history. It is imperative
that we not allow those who wish to distort our history be given
free reign to do so. Our ancestors urged that we “know how
to respond.” That is our task.
Dr. Alex Grobman is co-author of Denying History:
Who Says The Holocaust Never Happened and Why Do They Say It? (University
of California Press, 2000).
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