In 1995, when I opened a letter informing me that David Irving was suing me for libel for calling him a Holocaust denier, I had precisely the same reaction that I had 20 years earlier when I first learned there were people who denied the Holocaust: I laughed.
Why, I wondered, should I take this seriously? Holocaust deniers reminded me of flat-earth theorists. Their idea was preposterous.
Irving’s charges seemed equally preposterous. He had repeatedly denied the Holocaust. At the trial of Ernst Zundel, the Canadian Holocaust denier, Irving said there was no “Reich policy to kill the Jews” and that “no documents whatsoever show that a Holocaust had ever happened.”
In Germany, Irving declared the Holocaust a “blood lie [which] has been pronounced on the German people.” In 1991, he dropped mention of the Holocaust from his new edition of Hitler’s biography, remarking, “if something didn’t happen then you don’t even dignify it with a footnote.”
That same year he declared it his own goal to “sink the Battleship Auschwitz.”
Given this record, how could he possibly claim that I libeled him by referring to him as a denier? This was, I presumed, a nuisance lawsuit, full of sound and fury — but signifying nothing.
A couple of letters from my lawyers, I naively assumed, would resolve this. But Irving was doing this in England, where laws favor the plaintiff. I had to prove the truth of what I said; he did not have to prove the falsehood.
His lectures are replete with references to being persecuted by the Jewish community. In 1992, he told an audience that “our old traditional enemies” are “the great international merchant banks [that] are controlled by people who are no friends of yours and mine.”
In Baton Rouge, La., he told a critic in the audience that he assumed was a Jew: “You people aren’t liked either. You are not just disliked in the way that I am disliked in that you get bad reviews from the newspapers. You’re disliked in the way that people put you in concentration camps and line you up on the edge of tank pits and machine gun you into them.”
He offers not only his version of what has been done to Jews, but what will be done to them. In 1984, he blamed the cancellation of his book contract on Jewish organizations and cautioned that “they will live long to regret it.”
In 1998, he compared American Jews’ professional success to Jews in Weimar, Germany, and warned that such success might give “rise to the… same dire consequences as happened in Nazi Germany.”
Regarding a Holocaust memorial in Baltimore, Md., Irving questioned its necessity, asserting, “We haven’t done anything to the Jews yet.”
In the past, I have consistently refused to debate deniers. I have declined appearances on talk shows and news programs because they entailed appearing with a denier, giving the notion that there are two sides to this issue. Though I would never have placed myself in the arena with him, once dragged in, I had no option but to fight.
I fought Irving because I could not run from evil. Even when that evil is rooted in nonsense, it can still cause significant damage. Anti-Semitic documents denying the Holocaust are based on a ludicrous premise, and often are forgeries. Nonetheless, they continue to circulate. The Holocaust demonstrates that evildoers must be stopped early, before they can inflict injury.
So too, deniers must be stopped now.
Irving once described what happens to defendants in libel actions: “There comes a very expensive stage for both parties known as discovery…discovery is an ugly phase, for plaintiff and defendant, when you face each across a lawyer’s table…and you say, ‘I want to see your documents and you can see mine.’ And at that stage usually the defendants crack up and cop out.”
This lawsuit, that he himself instigated, allowed my lawyers to obtain reams of Irving’s personal papers documenting his activities. We know far more about him today than ever before. So much so that at the post-verdict news conference when I was asked, given all that had happened, would I write the same things about Irving, my answer was “No.” Were I completing my book now, I would write even more harshly about him.
We hoisted him on his own petard.
I have not yet fully unpacked what it meant to be a defendant in a libel suit that brought together the Holocaust, free speech and historiography. I shall never forget as I entered the court on the first day being told by survivors: “We are counting on you.”
Nor shall I forget being enveloped after the trial by a man outside the courtroom who said: “My parents died in Auschwitz. In their name, thank you.”
I was wrong to laugh 20 years ago when I first heard about deniers. I was wrong to laugh when I opened the letter informing me that Irving was considering a suit. And I was entirely wrong to assume that it was just a nuisance. It was far more than that.
But Irving was far more wrong than I if he thought that I would “crack up and cop out.” I did neither. I fought this charge with all my strength. It was a demanding battle. Yet, on some level, it has also been a surprisingly rewarding endeavor. It taught me much about evil, but it also taught me about goodness, friendship and about doing the right thing.
That, too, is a huge part of this story.