Of course,
David Irving’s career was born in controversy, with the publication
of his Destruction of Dresden in 1963, one of the first
books in English that dwelled on the magnitude of destruction
wrought by the Anglo-American bombing campaign against German
cities. The graphic descriptions of the fire bombings that killed
perhaps 150,000 people, mostly women and children and the elderly,
were so shocking that the book was prefaced with two forewords
that basically tried to absolve the Western allies of any responsibility
in these atrocities.
Since then, Irving has written
some 30 books, usually on World War II and Third Reich themes,
including authoritative biographies of Hitler, Goering, Goebbels,
and Rommel, as well as special studies on the German atom bomb
and rocket programs, the catastrophic destruction of an English
convoy (PQ 17), the mysterious death of General Sikorsky,
and several other themes.
At this point it is probably
a good idea to identify some features of Irving’s style that
have made him such a successful and widely read historian.
The first is that Irving is
a relentless and indefatigable researcher: he has probably spent
more time in more archives than any of his peers. Most historians
rely on the writings of other historians as a kind of shorthand
for the drudgery of research, but Irving hardly ever references
secondary sources, preferring to cite the actual documents,
diaries, and personal recollections of participants. As a result,
he not only has uncovered vast quantities of previously unknown
documents, he is able to read them and interpret them with an
originality and openness that eludes most of his colleagues.
A second quality is related
to the first. Irving does not write within the context of the
conventional and lazy dialogue of modern history, encrusted
as it is with dozens of untested assumptions and political agendas.
He is better able to approach the Third Reich on its own terms,
and acquire a level of insight and empathy that give his works
a unique German’s-eye view of the Second World War.
Finally, David Irving is not
afraid of a fight. The two fathers of modern academic historiography,
Leopold Ranke and Wilhelm Dilthey, would doubtless approve of
Irving’s objective handling of documents and his attempts to
achieve empathy with his subjects. But it is his willingness
to take unconventional positions, based on solid research, that
has caused him the most trouble with the orthodox interpretation
of the Third Reich.
Irving’s problems began with
the publication of Hitler’s War in 1978, which has been
widely hailed by many leading historians as a definitive study.
While that book discussed the travail of the European Jews in
strictly conventional terms, there was one conclusion that seemed
unavoidable to Irving: since there was no documentary evidence
linking Adolf Hitler to the gas chambers or the extermination
camps, the Holocaust must have taken place without Hitler’s
knowledge or approval.
It would be hard to recreate
the indignation which greeted the questioning of that shibboleth.
Lucy Dawidowicz, in a book on Holocaust historiography, went
so far as to accuse Irving of being a Hitler apologist, while
a transplanted German Jew living in England used his position
at the University of Surrey to crank out an opus specifically
designed to refute Irving’s claim: Gerald Fleming’s Hitler
and the Final Solution.
In 1988, Irving was called as
an expert witness at the second trial of Canadian activist Ernst
Zündel, who was being prosecuted under a "false news" law. Among
other things, Zündel denied the use of gas chambers at Auschwitz.
To prove his point, Zündel, in coordination with Robert Faurisson
of France, hired Fred Leuchter, an American expert on execution
technologies, to travel to Auschwitz, take samples from the
alleged gas chambers, and write an expert opinion. The resulting
Leuchter Report, in spite of some defects, has become world
famous, and Irving, encountering the Report for the first time
at the trial, drew what he felt was an appropriate conclusion.
If the reaction to Hitler’s
War was sharp criticism, the reaction to Irving’s work after
the second Zündel trial has amounted to nothing less than an
attempt to destroy his career. In 1991, his books were peremptorily
destroyed by his publisher Macmillan UK, Ltd. In 1993, he was
showcased as a "Holocaust Denier" by Deborah Lipstadt of Emory
University in her Denying the Holocaust. Finally, in
1996, Irving’s painstaking biography of Joseph Goebbels was
rejected for publication by St. Martin's in the United States,
after having been initially praised and accepted for publication.
It was sunk by a massive media campaign and by other pressure
placed on his American publisher by those who felt that Irving’s
interpretations, particularly about Auschwitz, were intolerable.
Apparently, to acknowledge that many people died or were killed
at Auschwitz was not a sufficient endorsement of the Holocaust:
one had to also pay tribute to the gas chambers.
The attempts to shut down Irving’s
voice seem odd in one respect: although characterized as a "Hitler
apologist" and as a "denier," nowhere in his works does Irving
deny, or aggressively discount, the standard Holocaust story,
which insists that six million Jews were killed according to
plan and mostly in gas chambers. On the contrary, his skepticism
about gassing has usually been conveyed by discreet omission
of the subject. In other words, there is no evidence that Irving
has attempted to antagonize or provoke on the issue.
It is also surprising that Irving
would be characterized as a "Holocaust Denier" since Goebbels
contains some of the most shocking—and well-documented —descriptions
of the mass shootings of Jews that one will find anywhere in
Holocaust writings. It is evident then that Irving is characterized
as a "denier" not because of what he says, but because of what
he does not say. That is, he fails to recite the obligatory
narrative of mass gassings. In effect, this means that the gas
chambers are a necessary attribute of the Holocaust, in the
same way that roundness is a necessary attribute of a ball.
A False Linkage
To claim
that the Holocaust and the gas chambers are synonymous is a
completely artificial equation: it would be like insisting that
the reality of the Spanish-American war hinged on the explosion
of the USS Maine by a Spanish mine (as a matter of fact, the
current consensus holds that the ship exploded from spontaneous
combustion of coal dust in the bunkers). As argued elsewhere,
the Holocaust is simply a name, meant to tie together the entirety
of the Jewish experience in World War II, and came into common
use only in the 1960’s—twenty years after the events which it
is supposed to encapsulate. To question the veracity of some
of these events cannot reasonably be construed as questioning
the veracity of all of them, and yet that is precisely what
the term "Holocaust Denier" implies.
To a certain extent, revisionists
have been responsible for this false linkage. When Arthur Butz
wrote his Hoax of the Twentieth Century in the mid-70’s,
he focused almost all of his critical energies on the gas chambers
at Auschwitz, not examining the other claims of massacre and
persecution in detail. Similarly, Robert Faurisson, also active
since the 1970’s, has tended to reduce significant facts to
simple phrases: thus the absence of holes in the roof of one
gas chamber leads to the slogan "No Holes, No Holocaust."
It is hard to blame either Butz
or Faurisson when we reflect how the gas chambers, as an idea,
are routinely exploited. Whenever any non-Jewish group talks
about its own suffering, the gas chambers, either explicitly,
or implicitly by use of the key words "systematic" and "technological,"
are invoked. The net effect is that other massacres and crimes
against humanity must stand in silent awe before the absolute
singularity of the Holocaust. In the same way, whenever
Germans make a modest plea for some recognition of their own
suffering either during or after World War II, the rejoinder
is invariably something along the lines of "Well, at least you
weren’t gassed."
So it isn’t that surprising
that the linkage of the Holocaust and the gas chambers exists,
although to any thinking person it is a linkage designed to
make the Holocaust incommensurable, and nothing more. Indeed,
the New York Times article accepts the linkage of the
gas chambers and the term "Holocaust," which makes the even
handedness of the article all the more surprising.
The New York
Times Article
The connection
of gas chambers and the Holocaust is implicit in the article’s
title, "Taking a Holocaust Skeptic Seriously," and explicit
in D. D. Guttenplan’s opening sentence: "Can a writer who thinks
the Holocaust was a hoax still be a great historian?" The article
then moves on to discuss the praise that Irving has received
from academic historians, including Craig, Keegan, and Eric
Hobbawm, but the real meat of the article comes when the author
interviews several American historians in order to get them
to answer the article’s opening question.
Mark Mazower, the Princeton-based
author of a recent idea-driven version of 20t -century
European history, equivocates, and ultimately fails to answer
the question as to whether Irving "deserves" to be characterized
as a historian. Michael Geyer, a specialist in military history
at the University of Chicago, takes the emotional approach,
criticizing Irving for overlooking the humanity of the victims.
The biggest surprise comes from
Raul Hilberg, probably the most thorough of all Holocaust historians,
and widely recognized as the supreme authority in the field.
Hilberg gives a remarkably tepid response in defending the traditional
view of gas chambers, describing them as "not a subject of legitimate
controversy" because "such a claim ignores evidence that points
to certain conclusions." To anyone familiar with the Holocaust
historiography, to have the existence of gas chambers morphed
from "an irrefutable fact based on mountains of evidence" to
"evidence that points to certain conclusions" is one massive
comedown.
Guttenplan, an English free-lancer
for the Times, goes on to recapitulate some of Irving’s
recent legal battles—among other things, he is suing Deborah
Lipstadt for slander-before winding down. But nowhere in the
article do we find a strong positive endorsement of the gas
chambers commensurate with Irving’s denial of their existence
in the Auschwitz base camp in the second paragraph. Of course,
it is likely that Guttenplan didn’t wish to pursue that theme.
If he had, he would have had to deal with the writing of Robert
Jan van Pelt, whose 1996 study on Auschwitz conceded that the
very gas chamber Irving referred to was in fact built for tourists
by the Polish communist government after the war. Of course,
Van Pelt makes the point elliptically with lots of curlicues,
and the reader is advised to read the passage for him- or herself.
When Auschwitz was transformed into
a museum after the war, the decision was taken to concentrate
the history of the whole complex into one of its component
parts. The infamous crematoria where the mass murders had
taken place lay in ruins in Birkenau, two miles away. The
committee felt that a crematorium was required at the end
of the memorial journey and Crematorium I was reconstructed
to speak for the history of the incinerators at Birkenau.
This program of usurpation was rather detailed.
A chimney, the ultimate symbol of Birkenau, was re-created;
four hatched openings in the roof, as if for pouring Zyklon
B into the gas chamber below, were installed, and two of
the three furnaces were rebuilt using original parts. There
are no signs to explain these restitutions, they were not
marked at the time, and the guides remain silent about it
when they take visitors through this building that is presumed
by the tourist to be the place where it happened. (Robert
Jan van Pelt and Deborah Dwork, Auschwitz: 1270 to the
Present [London: Yale University Press, 1996], p. 364)
There was a time not too long
ago when to discuss revisionists and their beliefs was a complicated
affair. Rather like religious prohibitions that forbade the
appearance of Jesus on stage, or the image of the Prophet, or
the pronunciation of God’s name, revisionists had to be discussed
while not saying anything meaningful about what they wrote or
said. Yet this article, along with Gordon Craig’s courageous
review of Goebbels in the New York Review of Books
in October, 1996, have started to change that. David Irving
has given revisionists a human face, and real, concrete opinions.
This is a task that would be
beyond the scope of most other revisionists. Going public, sacrificing
one’s livelihood, fearlessly declaiming one’s opinions to the
media, would not suit the majority of revisionists who are unknown,
or are not credentialed, and who are, therefore, all too easy
to ignore. An historian of David Irving’s stature, however,
cannot be ignored, and while he has paid a stiff price for his
honesty, it must be said he is the only one who could have paid
it. After all, new approaches require authority, experience,
and stature. Only a Nixon, so they say, could have gone to China.
Bradley R. Smith, Publisher 
