21/03/2006: Lipstadt, Deborah
Appreciation
The Torah commands that you must care for the stranger in your midst “kee gerim hayitem b’Mitzrayim,” “because you were strangers in the land of Egypt,” Jewish tradition, building on that commandment, mandates that welcoming the stranger is one of the central expressions of gemilut hasadim, the acts of loving-kindness Jews are expected to perform. I would like to begin by expressing my appreciation to the Pontificia Universita Gregoriana and specifically the Cardinal Bea Centre for Judaic Studies for, not only naming me the Richard and Susan Master Visiting Professor, but for the exceptional way in which they have fulfilled the commandment of hachnasat orchim, welcoming the stranger. Everyone I have encountered at this august institution has observed this mitzvah, this deed, with such fastidiousness that I no longer feel like a stranger. In fact, I feel very much at home here. And for that I am very grateful.
An Obstacle to Holocaust Documentation: The Destruction of Evidence
My topic today is Evidence for the Holocaust.* Let me begin by stating that the Holocaust has the dubious distinction of being the best documented genocide of which we know. I should parenthetically note that it is possible that there may be as large a cache of documents about the Armenian genocide. We cannot make that judgment because many of the documents about this tragedy are not available to historians.
The evidence for the Holocaust falls into a multiplicity of categories: documents, material evidence, testimonies, scientific studies and memoirs. Often our best understanding of events comes when we juxtapose and cross-reference two or more categories of evidence, as I shall demonstrate today. It is striking that any documentation from the perpetrators exists at all. In 1942, Berlin ordered that all evidence of the murders was to be erased. SS officer Paul Blobel detailed after the war how he was dispatched by Eichmann to Auschwitz in summer 1942 with the order that officials there were to “eliminate traces of the mass graves.” Auschwitz Commandant Rudolf Höss also wrote about receiving the orders that the ashes be dispersed so “that in the future it will be impossible to establish how many people had been burnt.” This work was done, Höss later recalled, by Jewish prisoners who were then shot to prevent them from speaking about it.
In late 1944 when the Soviets were nearing Auschwitz, the Germans blew up the gas chambers and murdered most of the Sonderkommandos, those inmates of Birkenau who worked at the gas chambers. The burned all the records in the headquarters that pertained to the killings process.
An Existential Obstacle to Holocaust Documentation: Beyond Belief
The German attempt to destroy the documents was not the only obstacle with which the evidence for the Holocaust had to contend. There was – and to some degree still is -- a more existential obstacle that had to be overcome. How could people who had not been part of this whirlwind really grasp what happened? How was it possible that Germany, considered one of the most civilized nations, could do this?
Primo Levi expressed this sentiment in his magnum opus, SE QUESTO È UN UOMO:
[There] are free words, created and used by free men who lived in comfort and suffering in their homes. If Lagers [Concentration and death camps] had lasted longer, a new, harsh language would have been born; and only this language could express what it means to toil the whole day in the wind, with the temperature below freezing, wearing only a shirt, underpants, cloth jacket and trousers, and in one’s body nothing but weakness, hunger and knowledge of the end drawing nearer.”
[Sono parole libere, create e usate da uomini liberi che vivevano, godendo e soffrendo, nelle loro case. Se i Lager fossero durati più a lungo, un nuovo aspro linguaggio sarebbe nato; e di questo si sente il bisogno per spiegare cosa è faticare l’intera giornata nel vento, sotto zero, con solo indosso camicia, mutande, giacca e brache di tela, e in corpo debolezza e fame e consapevolezza della fine che viene.]
While Levi is right -- the reality of the Lager cannot be fully grasped by those who were not there – there is still a great deal that the evidence can teach us.
The Inability to Wipe the Record Clear
But this effort to destroy the historical record did not succeed. In certain instances, the failure was caused by simple oversight. For example, at Auschwitz officials forgot about a long abandoned construction shed adjacent to the gas chambers. In it plans, architectural drawings, work orders, reports and a wide variety of other documents relating to the design and building of the gas chambers were stored.
In yet other cases the documentary record was spread out in so many different locations, it could not be fully destroyed. For example, the Einsatzgruppen, the mobile killing units who murdered approximately a million Jews in areas belonging to the Soviet Union, prepared detailed reports on the killings which they sent to Berlin as well as to their colleagues in the field. The reports, which contained precise death tolls, broken down into men, women, and children, were distributed to high-ranking army, police, and SS officers, as well as diplomats, Foreign Office officials, and even prominent industrialists.
A myriad of eyewitnesses remained. They came from the ranks of the perpetrators, victims, and bystanders. Their recollections can often be corroborated with the documentary record. In short, one cannot simply annihilate an entire people from one end of the continent to the other, with the participation of hundreds of thousands of people – for there were hundreds of thousands who had some hand in these murders – and expect to be able to obliterate the historical record.
Ironically, the existential barrier to belief still exists. Maybe it is – on some level – a good thing, indicating our inability to fully grasp that something this terrible could happen [even though we continue to see reflections of it today, as in Darfur].
Holocaust Evidence: A Personal Perspective
In discussing the question of evidence for the Holocaust, I recognize that I bring to this topic a unique or extra-ordinary set of experiences. One cannot, separate the historian’s personal experience from the weltanschauung she brings to her topic.** It would be disingenuous, therefore, for me to talk about the nature of evidence for the Holocaust without acknowledging that I was forced to spend over six years engaged in a legal battle to defend myself and my work from attacks on it by those who would deny and distort the evidence.
I was sued, as many of you know, by Holocaust denier David Irving, who has received so much attention since his arrest and jailing in Austria. Irving claimed I had libeled him in my book, Denying the Holocaust: The Growing Assault on Truth and memory, by calling him a Holocaust denier. I felt that I had good grounds for doing so. He had testified at the trial of Ernst Zundel in Canada that the Holocaust was a legend. He told a journalist that he had eliminated all mention of the Holocaust from one of his books because “if something did not happen you don’t even dignify it with a footnote.” He declared that he was going to found an organization called “Auschwitz Survivors, Survivors of the Holocaust, and other liars” and call it by its acronym: ASSHOLES.
He waited until my book was published in the UK where the burden of proof is on the defendant to prove the truth of what she wrote and not, as it would be in the United States on the plaintiff or claimant to prove the falsehood. Given the nature of this legal system, had I not defended myself, Irving would have won by default and I would have been found guilty of libel. Had I been found guilty, Irving could then have said he was not a Holocaust denier and, ipso facto, his version of the Holocaust was valid. And what is that version? There was no plan to kill the Jews. Some Jews may have died as a result of starvation and disease but none were consciously murdered in death camps. Those Jews who were shot on the eastern front in places such as Babi Yar and Ponary were killed not by Germans acting on orders from Berlin, but by out of control soldiers mainly from Estonia, Latvia, and other countries allied with the Germans. Finally, Irving contends, the gas chambers are a myth and any survivor who claims they existed is either a psychopath, liar, or doing so for financial gain.
Since David Irving’s ideas have been adopted in their entirety by deniers and since many of his ideas originated with other deniers, one can speak of deniers in general and of Irving interchangeably and so I shall do in this talk.
Deniers have found themselves in court as defendants for violating laws against Holocaust denial, about which I have mixed feelings. Irving v. Penguin and Lipstadt, however, was the only time a Holocaust historian was the defendant and the denier the plaintiff. I won a sweeping victory, not due to any Perry Mason legal maneuvers. I won by turning to the evidence and showing that deniers claims are based on fabrications, distortions, and inventions of what the evidence actually says. Ironically, had there been Holocaust denial laws in the UK, I might never had exposed the degree to which David Irving plays fast and furious with the evidence. I plan this afternoon to delineate some of the ways in which we relied on that evidence. When I say “we,” I am referring to a magnificent team of lawyers and historians, including attorneys Anthony Julius, James Libson, and Richard Rampton, and historical experts, Richard Evans, Robert Jan van Pelt, Crhristopher Browning, Peter Longerich, and Hajo Funke.
Before I turn to the heart of the matter, I wish to add one caveat. The efforts by historians to document the Shoah should not be considered solely or even primarily an effort to respond to deniers. In fact, I should restate that in the affirmative. The collecting of evidence and the documenting the course of these terrible events exists in complete independence from the deniers. I stress this point because for some people the two areas – the evidence for the Holocaust and the response to denial – have morphed into one. It is not uncommon to hear people say: “We need this documentation, or courses on the Holocaust [or Holocaust museums] in order to answer the deniers.”
My response to that is a resounding: “No.” Even if we had never heard of deniers we would need such courses, memorial institutions and historical research. Our need for such courses and/or museums exists in complete independence from deniers. Deniers are not that important. They are not historians. They are distorians. Their relationship to the historians’ quest is the same as the relationship between the medical quacks who claims AIDS can be cured by swallowing cherry pits and the doctors and researchers involved in a quest to cure this terrible disease. No one would ask the latter to spend their time and resources proving quacks wrong. While historians had long known that deniers’ claims were false, until my case no one had stopped to examine in a systematic fashion how they distort the evidence. Yet, given the nature of the British legal system, I had no choice but to do so.
Following the Footnotes
Many of their claims can be exposed by simply following the footnotes. For example, in his book Hitler’s War, which was published before he began to espouse denial, Irving tried to exonerate Hitler from responsibility for atrocities against Jews. He made the patently false claim in the book that Hitler did not know about the Holocaust and when he found out he tried to stop it. In the introduction, Irving promised his readers that the book contained “incontrovertible evidence” that as early as November 30, 1941, Hitler had explicitly ordered that there was to be ‘no liquidation’ of the Jews.” In the book itself, Irving writes that
Himmler was summoned to the Wolf’s Lair [Hitler’s private bunker] for a secret conference with Hitler, at which the fate of Berlin’s Jews was clearly raised. At 1:30 p.m. Himmler was obliged to telephone from Hitler’s bunker to Heydrich the explicit order that Jews were not to be liquidated...
What is Irving’s proof for this startling claim? He cites Himmler’s phone log entry for November 30, 1941. The phone log reveals that Himmler indeed did call his subordinate Reinhardt Heydrich at 1:30 p.m. That, however, is where Irving’s rendition of the facts and the facts as they are end. Himmler summarized that conversation in five words
Judentransport aus Berlin. [Jew-transport from Berlin.]
Keine Liquidierung [No liquidation.]
What the words reveal is that Irving’s claim that Himmler was stopping the liquidation of the Jews was simply false. What Himmler was doing was ordering that one specific trainload of Berlin Jews not be liquidated. In Irving’s hands this had morphed from instructions about one train into an order concerning all Jews.
But his fabrications did not stop there. His claim that this order came from Hitler was also pure invention. There was no evidence that Hitler had summoned Himmler or that he had obliged him to call Heydrich. In fact, according to Himmler’s log, he first saw Hitler an hour after the call was made. Hitler may have ordered Himmler to stop the liquidation of one trainload of Jews, but there is no evidence that he did that.
But Irving’s distortion of the evidence continued. In the book, after claiming that Hitler had ordered Himmler to stop the liquidation, Irving went on to assert that on the next day Himmler called SS General Pohl, overall chief of the concentration camp system, “with the order ‘Jews are to stay where they are.’” Irving based his claim that Himmler had ordered that the Jews were not to be deported on HImmler’s December 1st diary entry. But, examination of the log reveals that Himmler did not even mention Jews. It reads:
Verwaltungsführer der SS [Administrative leaders of the SS]
haben zu bleiben. [are to remain where they are.]
It was not Jews who were to remain where they were, but administrative leaders of the SS. Irving had replaced ‘haben’ with 'Juden,' enabling him to invent the claim that Jews were to stay where they are. When Hitler’s War, the book in which he made this extraordinary claims, was republished in 1991, Irving corrected his mistake regarding “Keine Liquidierung,” acknowledging that it referred to only one trainload. However, he left the other assertions -- that the order came from Hitler and that Himmler instructed Pohl to leave Jews were they were – as they were.
Irving’s treatment of events surrounding Kristalnacht provides yet another example of how, simply by following the footnotes, we can expose deniers’ lies. Irving, in his effort to wipe Hitler’s record clean, argues that Hitler had no role in Kristalnacht, the 1938 nation-wide pogrom in which thousands of synagogues, Jewish institutions, stores, and homes were trashed and burned. It was a frenzy of looting, and beatings that left even some ordinary Germans embarrassed. Hitler and Himmler – who were both in Munich on the night of Kristalnacht – were, Irving claims, totally unaware that anything untoward was happening until 1 a.m. when the synagogue next to their hotel began to burn. According to Irving, Hitler was “livid with rage” and Himmler began “telex[ing] instructions to all the police authorities to restore law and order, protect Jews and Jewish property, and halt any ongoing incidents.” Hitler was intent on “halt[ing] the madness.”
Irving’s rendition of events is at odds with the documentary evidence. Early in the evening, when addressing the veteran Nazi party members at the Town Hall, Goebbels had spoken about the attacks which were already underway: “The Führer had decided ... [that] demonstrations were not to be prepared... [nor] organized by the party. In so far as they occurred spontaneously, there were, however not to be opposed or stopped.” Would Goebbels have made a statement that “the Furhrer had decided” if Hitler did not know about what was going on?
How could Irving argue that Hitler and Himmler were ignorant when Himmler’ s subordinate, Heinrich Müller, sent a telex at 11:55 p.m. to German police officials informing them that: “Actions against Jews, in particular against their synagogues, will very shortly take place across the whole of Germany. They are not to be interrupted.” About an hour-and-a-half after this telex, Himmler and Heydrich sent another telex which, Irving claimed, called on Germans to “restore law and order, protect Jews and Jewish property, and halt any ongoing incidents.” In fact, the telex ordered that demonstrations against the Jews were “not to be hindered by the police.”
Irving contended that yet another telex sent at 2.56 a.m. on November 10 further demonstrated Hitler’s intent on “halt[ing] the madness.” What did that telex say? “Arson or the laying of fire in Jewish shops or the like may not ... take place under any circumstances....” Rather than calling for an end to the destruction, the telex was simply calling for an end to the setting afire of Jewish shops and the like. It did not call for an end to the smashing of their shops, institutions, and homes or for an end to the terrorizing and murder of individual Jews. The telex was sent because entire blocks were going up in smoke due to the fact that fires, once set, do not adhere to racial boundaries.
Gas Chamber Windows: A Stunning Example of the Confluence of Material and Documentary Evidence
As I mentioned earlier, when the Germans were destroying the documentary record at Auschwitz, they forgot about the materials in the long abandoned construction shed. Stored there were various architectural drawings of the gas chambers. They tell us a lot about the murder process. There were two different kinds of gas chambers at Birkenau. Two of them were initially morgues that were redesigned as gas chambers and two were built specifically as gas chambers.
There are certain telling anomalies evident in the architectural drawings for these facilities, anomalies which point to a sinister purpose. In Auschwitz most architectural drawings were prepared by prisoners who signed them, not with their names, but with their prison numbers. In contrast, SS architect Walther Dejaco, chief of the drawing room, prepared the drawings of the alterations for Crema 2 and 3 -- when gas chambers were introduced into these buildings – and for the two additional gas chambers. Since Dejaco rarely prepared drawings, this already signaled that there was something unique about these installations.
We can also learn things from the changes to Crema 2 and 3. Doors on the room that became the gas chamber that used to open inward were made to open outward. SS officials knew, from their experience at Chelmno with the gassing busses, that victims pile up against the door. Concrete slides, designed to slide stretchers with corpses on them down to the morgue, were replaced by steps. As Professor Robert Jan van Pelt observed, dead bodies can be slid down a chute. Live people walk to their death.
Most fascinating to me was when we triangulated the architectural plans, documents, and material evidence. For example, the plans for the two gas chambers that were built as gas chamber called for twelve 30 by 40 centimeter windows. The Zyklon B was to be thrown in through them. When I visited Auschwitz with my defense team to prepare for the trial, Professor Robert Jan van Pelt showed us how drawings for these gas chambers called for these windows. He then showed us a February, 1943 order from the Auschwitz Construction Office for the “production of 12 gas-tight doors [window shutters] approximately 30/40 cm.” We then went from the archives to a small storeroom in which there were three decrepit 30 by 40 centimeter window shutters. The remnants of a gas-tight seal were visible around their edges.
Deniers claim that this window was gas tight because the room was actually a morgue and/ or a place for delousing objects. There are multiple problems with such theories. Why would architects design a morgue with a heating system [one is shown on the drawings]? Why would there be twelve windows in a room for delousing clothes? More importantly, why would the handle for opening and closing a window be on the outside. Placing the handle for the window on the outside is a decidedly impractical arrangement for any room, unless one wants to ensure that those inside can not open them. The drawings, the work order, and remaining windows constituted a simple but stunning example of the confluence of different forms and sources of evidence.
We also saw the door from one of the gas chambers. Deniers claim the underground gas chambers were actually air raid shelters. The problem is that the door opened and closed from the outside, not a very practical arrangement for an air raid shelter. Moreover, the door had a peephole with a metal grid over it, which is – at first glance typical for an air raid shelter. However, in this case the grid was on the inside not on the outside, indicating that the danger to the glass came from those inside the room not flying debris or the like on the outside.
Some of the most devastating evidence, in this regard, comes from perpetrators themselves. Hans Stark, a member of the camp “Gestapo,” testified at a war crimes trial about the gassing process:
As early as autumn 1941 gassings were carried out in a room...[which] held 200 to 250 people, had a higher than average ceiling, no windows, only a specially insulated door with bolts like those of an airtight door [Luftschutzer]. The room had a flat roof, which allowed daylight in through the openings. It was through these openings that Zyklon B in granular form would be poured.
Stark had told the court that, because the Zyklon B “was in granular form, it trickled down over the people as it was being poured in. They then started to cry out terribly for they now knew what was happening to them.”
The Witness Gets it Wrong or Does She?: The Testimony of Ada Bimko
Sometimes evidence can be deduced from information that, on its surface, seems completely wrong. Deniers attack the credibility and motives of eyewitness who testified at war crimes trials about the gas chambers. One of their targets is Ada Bimko (later known as Hadassah Rosensaft), a Polish-Jewish doctor who had been imprisoned at Birkenau, where she worked at the medical block. At a 1945 war crimes trial, Bimko testified about how women who were marched from their barracks to the gas chambers were stripped of their clothes. In winter they were allowed to wrap themselves in blankets for this death march.
On one occasion, when Bimko was sent to retrieve these blankets, a SS officer, who had accompanied her, offered to give her a “tour” of the gas chambers. After showing her the chamber, he took her to the area above it, which housed the ventilation system for extracting the poison gas. He explained that the two large cylinders in the corner contained the poison. The gas, he continued, passed through the pipes into the gas chamber below.
This explanation made and makes no sense. In the crematorium she visited [we know which one she went to because of her description of a crawl space above the gas chamber], Zyklon B was thrown through the windows, not piped in from above. Irving rather flamboyantly dismissed her testimony as pure invention motivated by a desire to please the British who needed her testimony “to hang these criminals.” My defense team and particularly our expert on the history of Auschwitz, Professor Robert Jan van Pelt, argued that while Bimko’s explanation was indeed absolutely wrong, her description of what she saw corresponded precisely to the ventilation system that was in the crawl space above. Pipes in the attic floor extracted the gas from the chambers below. The large cylinder probably contained the ventilator. Her explanation was based on what the SS man had told her. [We don’t know why he gave this totally invalid explanation.] Bimko’s testimony becomes even stronger when we take into account the fact that she had described a system which was only visible from inside the attic. Given Bimko’s precise description, Van Pelt declared her “a very reliable witness, even if she did not know what [the pipe] was used for.”
During the testimony about Bimko, Irving who was cross examining van Pelt, bemoaned the “unfortunates” who were hanged on the basis of her testimony. I reflected that among those “unfortunates” was the Commandant of Bergen-Belsen, Josef Kramer, who had been in charge of the crematoria in Birkenau during the murder of Hungarian Jewry and, in that capacity, had selected people for the gas chambers. Another “unfortunate” convicted at that trial was Birkenau doctor, Fritz Klein, who, when asked how he could reconcile his Hippocratic oath with sending people to the gas chamber, had replied: “I am a doctor and I want to preserve life. And out of respect for human life, I would remove a gangrenous appendix from a diseased body. The Jew is the gangrenous appendix in the body of mankind.”
These are the “unfortunates” whose punishment deniers bemoan.
The Confluence of Evidence: Witness Testimony and German Documents
A tactic, typical of deniers, is to try to make survivors testimony seem ludicrous. For example, Heynrik Tauber a Sonderkommando, one of those the inmates who worked in the gas chambers, survived to give testimony. Irving, relying on traditional antisemitic imagery, accused him of having given testimony that was so bizarre, it sounded “almost Talmudic....” According to Irving, Tauber had testified that he had seen a prisoner “chased into a pool of boiling human fat.” In fact, examination of what Tabuer said, reveals something quite different:
[T]he SS chased a prisoner who was not working fast enough into a pit near the crematorium that was full of boiling human fat. At that time the corpses were incinerated in open air pits, from which the fat flowed into a separate reservoir, dug in the ground. This fat was poured over the corpses to accelerate their combustion. This poor devil was pulled out of the fat still alive and then shot.
Once again, Irving’s claim about what something says and what it actually does say are entirely at odds one with the other.
In his testimony, Tauber described how the Sonderkommandos used to burn emaciated bodies with unemaciated bodies because this allowed them to use less fuel, a very precious commodity. Tauber’s description can be cross-referenced with the patent submitted in 1942 to the Berlin patent office by Topf, the company which built the crematoria. The patent was for the specially-designed ovens in Auschwitz. These ovens consumed multiple bodies with limited expenditure of fuel. The design called for the simultaneous introduction of both emaciated and unemaciated corpses in order to guarantee continuous high temperatures through the emission of human fat. This was precisely the procedure that Tauber had testified the Sonderkommandos followed. Topf’s 1942 patent application provided the thermo-dynamic explanation for the Sonderkommandos’s decision to bring different size corpses to the ovens. The application also demolished deniers’ assertion that vast amounts of fuel were needed to burn the bodies. But it did something else: It exemplified why the “convergence of evidence” was such a useful historical method. Prisoner Henryk Tauber would not have had access to Topf’s patent application, which was filed in Berlin in 1942. Yet the procedure he and his colleagues followed was exactly what the design stipulated. Furthermore, Tauber’s testimony matched point for point information in the blueprint of a very technical and specialized nature.
Rates of Incineration: Deducing a Sinister Purpose
In 1942, when Auschwitz/ Birkenau was given its new role as a death camp, the authorities there ordered a dramatic increase in the crematoria’s incineration capacity. There would soon be more corpses to burn and, if the rate of incineration were not adequate, the backlog of bodies would prevent the smooth functioning of the killing process. Historians point at this as one additional example of the camp’s nefarious purpose.
David Irving suggested that there was a more benign explanation for this dramatic increase in the rate of incineration. Typhus had ravaged the camp in 1942. Camp officials increased the incineration capacity because they were anticipating another epidemic. My defense team dismissed Irving’s theory as “absurd,” since the increase would boost the monthly incineration rate to 120,000 bodies, while the camp’s projected population was 150,000. For Irving’s explanation to make sense, as Robert Jan van Pelt noted in his testimony, in one month an epidemic would have to kill four-fifths of Auschwitz’s population and the Germans would have to repopulate the camp with 120,000 people. This exceeded the absolute worst case epidemiological scenario.
There are a myriad of other examples of the different types of evidence for the Holocaust. They are important not because they “prove” the Holocaust – there is no need for that – because they help us understand how this unprecedented attempt to destroy an entire people unfolded. It called for the ingenuity and expertise of doctors, architects, engineers, and other well educated and well-trained people.
Personal Reflections: On Becoming Participant in rather than a Chronicler of the Story
I turn now from this of the evidence to a more personal discussion of what it was like to become ensnared in this saga. In contrast to my previous work on the Holocaust where I was chronicling different aspects of the event or reactions to the event, this time I was part of the story. This was not a role I willingly accepted. It took a long time for me to grasp that, rather than solely a chronicler, I had become an actor in this aspect of the history. It became clear when survivors came to me to tell me “We are counting on you.” “You are fighting for us.” “You must defend our story.” I thought their reactions were overstated. Even if I lost, their history would not be decimated. No one person or group of people could do that. Nonetheless, I found their comments a heavy responsibility. They kept me awake at night. All I could think of was that, because of the vagaries of the British libel system, we might lose even though the facts were on our side.
The degree to which I had become an actor in the story rather than a chronicler became clear to me on the first day of the trial. In the hall outside the courtroom, reporters surrounded Irving, who was happily expounding on his great day in court. Soon a group was also pummeling me with questions. "How had the first day gone?” “Would I be giving testimony?” “What did I think of Irving’s boast that he was going to win this case handily?” I felt uncharacteristically bewildered, not by their questions, but by the fact that I was not supposed to answer them. My lawyers did not want it to appear as if we were litigating this case in the press. They warned me that judges dislike it when participants in a legal action predict what they will ultimately decide. We did not want to do anything to upset the judge.
As I contemplated this admonition, reporters continued to besiege me with requests for comments. They had spoken to Irving -- some of them at length. From their perspective even a few words from me would give their stories some balance. I was dying to talk to them. I wanted to frame my own case. I wanted them to know I was not afraid. At the very least, I wanted my family and friends back home to hear my voice.
When my lawyer spotted these reporters crowded around me, he made a beeline to where I was standing and reminded me to keep silent. I implored him: “Can’t I give them something, maybe something inconsequential?” My lawyer, unmoved by my entreaties, replied, “Nothing you say today will be inconsequential.” I looked over at Irving enthusiastically engaging the press. Keeping my silence was becoming infuriating.
Then, someone grabbed my arm and I jumped at the unexpected contact. A small elderly woman had resolutely pushed her way through the crush. She had a heavily wrinkled face and very sad eyes. Dressed quite sensibly for a January day in London, her knitted hat was pulled tight over her gray hair. Ignoring the reporters, she thrust her arm in front of me, rolled her sleeve up to her elbow, and emphatically pointed at the number tattooed on her forearm. "You are fighting for us. You are our witness.” I heard both encouragement and admonishment in this woman’s words. It was as if she were saying: Be strong and of good courage but, what ever you do, do not fail us. Talking to reporters no longer seemed important.
Survivors sat quietly in court during the three month trial while Irving ridiculed them and claimed that they were either liars or psychotic. They kept telling me that I am their “hero.” While I appreciate being praised for what I do [who doesn’t?], I found their adulation unnerving. I felt undeserving of receiving such gratitude from Holocaust survivors.
Only after the trial did I realize that their praise had less to do with what I had done and far more to do with what had not been done sixty years earlier when they so desperately needed help. I was reminded of the verse in Exodus which describes Moses’ encounter with an Egyptian taskmaster beating an Israelite slave. “Va’yifen ko v’ko, vyaar kee ayn eish.” “And Moses looked here and there and he saw that there was no person present and he killed the Egyptian.” Rabbinic commentators, uncomfortable with the textual suggestion that Moses was checking to ensure no one would see him kill the Egyptian, rely on a verse from Yishayahu (Isaiah) to say he not checking to make sure no one was watching, but was actually looking for an “eish“ a person--someone of stature” to do justice. When he realized there was no one to dispense justice, he knew he had to act on his own.
During the Holocaust the victims looked “here and there” for help. There were few persons, governments, or institutions willing to respond. It was not necessarily antisemitism which motivated their inaction. Many simply did not care. In the face of evil they were neutral. Others feared to speak out publicly. Though they may have quietly helped Jews, they did not use their voices to condemn the Nazis. One cannot, in this setting, make reference to institutions which publicly kept silent about the tragedy befalling the Jews and fail to mention the Vatican. I do not have the time to fully explore that issue but it can be said that, while many Catholics, including many Church leaders and officials, assisted Jews, the public condemnation of the murder of the Jews from the highest levels of the church was lacking. This was something that caused Jews great pain. For many Jews it continues to do so. It is a source of pain to many Catholics as well. The attempt to explore and understand this history has become a central, necessary, and, sometimes quite painful – for both Catholics and Jews -- element in the contemporary dialogue. Both sides recognize that, unless it is fully addressed, the dialogue can not be an honest and productive one.
In general, all Jews heard from the rest of the world was a resounding, if not deafening, silence. For the victim, the apparent callousness of the bystander was almost as painful as the cruelty of the perpetrator.
Now, many decades later and in vastly different circumstances, survivors felt that there was someone to fight for them. This time .there was no neutrality. In defending myself against Irving, I had pierced the silence that so haunted them. It did not matter that my fight could not, in any way, be compared to the suffering they experienced. It did not matter that I faced no physical threat. It did not matter that my battle could not bring back their loved ones or mitigate their suffering. My fight became symbolic of what had been absent sixty years earlier. In dramatic contrast to the Holocaust, this time they -- for they saw themselves as standing by my side -- won.
The Judgment and the Response
Irving’s loss was complete. According to the judge in our case and the four judges from the various Courts of Appeal to which Irving subsequently turned, Irving had “significantly misrepresented what the evidence, objectively examined, reveals.” The judge’s choice of words to describe Irving’s writings about the Holocaust was unambiguous: “perverts,” “distorts,” “misleading,” “unjustified,” “travesty,” and “unreal.” The judge’s found that Irving’s “falsification of the historical record was deliberate and ... motivated by a desire to present events in a manner consistent with his own ideological beliefs even if that involved distortion and manipulation of historical evidence.”
The international media, including the Italian media, made the story front page news. That surprised me. What amazed me however was the avalanche of letters, emails, and communiqués I received many of them from people with a direct connection to the Holocaust. I would like to conclude by sharing with you some of those communiqués.
One particularly moving phone call came the night before the verdict. It was precisely one week before Pesach. Around 11 p.m. Ben Meed, President of the American Gathering of Jewish Holocaust Survivors and a survivor of the Warsaw ghetto, called. A compact white-haired man, Ben’s life was the world of Holocaust survivors. “Deborah, tonight you can sleep soundly because none of us will be sleeping.” He did not have to identify the “us.” There is a Jewish aphorism: “Things which come from the heart enter the heart.” And so it was. I found the notion of survivors unable to sleep as they awaited news of the verdict hard to fathom.
The first night of Passover is called Leil Shemurim, the “Night of Watching,” because Jewish tradition posits that God watched over the Israelites as they fled Egypt. On Seder night Jews do not recite bedtime prayers requesting that God keep them safe throughout the night because, tradition has it, God is already on guard. I doubted Ben had this in mind when he told me that survivors would not be sleeping but, when I did go to sleep, I imagined myself surrounded by a band of resolute angels, whose lives had been shaped by the Holocaust and its attendant horrors.
"Dear Professor Lipstadt
You do not know me and we will probably never meet.... My mother was killed in Auschwitz. If David Irving had won my mother would have been a victim a second time! So too would everybody else who perished there. I loved my mother very much and have not seen her since April 14, 1939 when I was 14 years old. She was killed on October 23, 1944. Gratefully yours, Anne Bertolina, [nee Hannelore Josias]"
This letter landed on my desk at a time when my 85-year-old mother was ailing. When I reached the line “I loved my mother very much,” I choked up. As a daughter who also loves her mother very much, I could only imagine what it meant to be separated from her at age 14 and then to learn of her terrible fate. I wanted to tell Anne Bertolina that even if, by some mishap, David Irving had won, her mother would not have been a victim a second time. He had the power to do great mischief, but he did not have the power to do that.
Not all the letters were from victims. Some came from people with a more ancillary connection to the tragedy.
"Dear Professor Lipstadt:
My husband served with Patton and on a Sunday entered the “camps” at Dachau.... He was a hardened combat veteran as were the 3 others who went in with him. They broke down in tears. He recalled an inmate pointing at him and screaming in Yiddish. He had not realized his dog tags, on which he had a tiny Bar Mitzvah mezuzah hanging, were visible. “Du bist ein Yid?” the inmate asked. [Are you a Jew?] When my husband said, “Yes” he was Jewish, more yelling and others gathered. They couldn't believe a free Jew walked the face of the earth, let alone a Jewish soldier! It took him 28 years to tell me this (in Jerusalem at Yad Vashem). He’d buried the memories of what he’d seen that deep....Cordially, Marion Lieberman".
While many of the letters came from Jews, there were correspondents who made a point of identifying themselves as non-Jews.
"Dear Professor Lipstadt:
British justice is a bit long winded and unemotional: like the mills of god, it may grind slowly but, on occasion, it can grind exceedingly fine. I was a boy during the war, but one thing is ineradicably engraved upon my mind. Not the bombing, which had long ceased, but the memory of sitting in a cinema with my mother and sister, weeping together with the rest of the audience, as we saw the first dreadful newsreel pictures of the liberation of Belsen.
Fair-haired and light-eyed, Christian, Goy and stranger, I may be, but I cannot understand how that dreadful creature persuaded some of our children that their parents and grandparents are either liars or fools. There are still plenty of us who will remember until we died, including those who, unlike me, were there.
Sincerely, Ray Waters"
Over the next few months there was one email to which I kept returning. It came from Italy.
Friday, April 14, 2000 4:32:32 PM
From: paola.castagno@libero.it
Subject: YOU ARE THE GREAT WINNER!
To: dlipsta@emory.edu
"Dear Miss Lipstadt,
My name is Paola Castagno, I’m italian, I’m 28 years old and fortunatly i
didn’t new the II World War.(1)
I red on an italian newsparer that you won agaist David Irving.
My grandfather Aldo rimained 8 mounth in Auschwitz (like Disneyland).
When he came back in Italy he weighted 34 kilos (for 1.82 mt high).
He died 3 year ago. I remember that he cried, thinking Holocaust, after 40 years. He didn’t say me nothing about this. So I write to thank you enormously.
I know that also my Grandfather thank you for your courage and that you
speak about truth. Bey my graet hero!!!
Paola Castagno
NB: I’m sorry for my English"
[By the way, due to the vagaries of email addresses I have been unable to track Paola Castagno down. This morning at 7 a.m. I received an email from her. She is from Turin and we shall meet before my return to the States.(2)]
Paola Castagno’s words, not withstanding, I did not feel as if I was anybody’s “graet hero.” Five years earlier David Irving had “taken me out of the line to be shot.” Fully expecting me to “crack up and cop out,” as Irving predicted I would do to the New York Times, Irving may well have been surprised when I fought back as I did, ultimately giving far better than I got. I fought to defend myself, to preserve my belief in freedom of expression, and to defeat a man who lied about history and expressed deeply contemptuous views of Jews and other minorities.
For a long time after the court battle was over, I felt pain when I thought of the many people, who had watched Irving rampage their memories. I could not fathom what it felt like to have one’s experiences not just denied, but deprecated and ridiculed. However, I felt not just pain, but also a certain sense of privilege. I was reminded of the fact that Jewish tradition highly values acts of loving-kindness, including visiting the sick, sheltering the needy, feeding the hungry, and welcoming the stranger. There is, however, one act of loving-kindness which supersedes all the others because it cannot be reciprocated. Taking care of the dead is called hesed shel emet, the most genuine act of loving kindness, because it is then that we most closely emulate God’s kindness to humans, which also cannot be reciprocated. For five years I had the privilege to do hesed shel emet, to stand up for those who did not survive or who could not stand up for themselves. Being able to do that was thanks enough.
I did not choose this field of research in order to perform this act of hesed.. I did not write my book on deniers expecting to engage in this act. I did not choose this fight. But now, as I looked back I was filled with gratitude. If someone had to be taken out of the line to fight this battle, I felt gratified to have been the one.
Thank you very much.
*Portions of this talk are drawn from my recent book, History on Trial: My Day in Court with David Irving (Ecco, 2005).
**The question of the relationship of the historian to their memoir in conjunction with the Holocaust has been explored by Jeremy Popkin,
History, Historians, and Autobiography (Chicago, 2005).
(1) Spelling as in original
(2) On March 28th Paola Castagno and her mother Anna attended my class at the Gregorian. On that day, as per a schedule established many months earlier, the class discussed Primo Levi’s SE QUESTO È UN UOMO. I was struck by the fact that, while the class was discussing the book in analytical/ academic terms and using the “third person,” for Paola and her mother it was a possible rendition of what happened to her grandfather. They have few, if any, details of his experience. Anna brought a photograph of Aldo, taken a few months after his return to Turin. He was a strikingly handsome man.
