The Unpersuadables: Adventures with the Enemies of Science (34 page)

‘Did you come straight from Australia?’ I asked Alex.

‘No, I’ve been having a bit of a holiday,’ he said.

‘Anywhere nice?’

‘Dresden.’

‘Right. Wow. Is that, wow. Dresden. And is Dresden nice?’

‘Good, yes, good. Very pure,’ he nodded, earnestly. ‘I only saw two blacks and one Chinese.’

I had thought of this trip as an opportunity to test everything that I had learned so far on one of the twentieth century’s most famous heretics. It would be interesting, I imagined. I had looked forward to it. But when I returned to my room, I realised what I actually had in front of me. Seven days, among these men. Seven days, being forced to suffer a gavage of fascism while giving the appearance of accepting every word. If there was some version of defecation or regurgitation or bloodletting that you could use to cleanse your mind of things that you have heard – of purging the thoughts of others from your neurons – then that is what I needed to do.

But there is no such thing. So I sat on my bed and I ate a mini-Toblerone.

Evening

I saw him at 7 p.m. in the lobby where our party were meeting. He was wearing loose corduroy trousers with a grey jumper and was carrying, in his right hand, a plastic Marks and Spencer’s bag. His grey hair was brushed and parted, his flushed, bagged and obviously once-handsome face was set off with impressive eagle’s-wing eyebrows. He glared emptily downwards, a couple of steps behind the fringe of the group, his gaze distant and forbidding and narrow. You could tell, even in his stillness, that he had a limp. One leg rested slightly too high, its corresponding arm lifting up and back a little, presumably to take some of the painful weight.

Irving’s bad joint is a legacy of the thirteen months that he spent incarcerated in
Vienna’s Josefstadt prison
. He was arrested on 11 November 2005 and convicted of ‘glorifying and identifying with the German Nazi Party’ on account of two lectures that he had given in 1989 in which he claimed that Nazi concentration camps contained no
gas chambers and denied that six million Jews died in the Holocaust. During the trial, Irving pointed out that since making those speeches, he had changed his position. But even on its final day, as the then-sixty-seven-year-old was pleading for his freedom, he stubbornly insisted to the court that ‘the figure of six million is just symbolic.’ The prosecutor, Michael Klackl, called for his imprisonment, arguing that Irving was ‘dangerous.’ When his three-year sentence was passed down, the historian is said to have looked bewildered. The judge asked him, ‘Do you understand your sentence, Mr Irving?’

‘I’m not sure I do,’ he replied.

In 1993 the American historian Professor Deborah Lipstadt wrote
that David Irving is ‘one of the most dangerous spokespersons for Holocaust denial’ and accused him of distorting evidence, manipulating documents and misrepresenting data in order to suit his ideological beliefs. Irving sued her for libel. He represented himself,
at one point accidentally calling the judge ‘Mein Führer’
. Things didn’t go well.

The court’s verdict was delivered on 11 April 2000. The Honourable Mr Justice Gray said that
‘Irving has misstated historical evidence
; adopted positions which run counter to the weight of the evidence; given credence to unreliable evidence and disregarded or dismissed credible evidence.’ He judged that Irving did this ‘persistently and deliberately … for his own ideological reasons … and for the same reasons he has portrayed Hitler in an unwarrantedly favourable light, principally in relation to his attitude towards and responsibility for the treatment of the Jews.’ He concluded that ‘he is an active Holocaust denier; that he is anti-semitic and racist and that he associates with right wing extremists who promote neo-Nazism.’ He then ordered Irving to pay costs of nearly £2 million, plus £150,000 to Lipstadt’s publisher.

Irving called the verdict ‘indescribable’ and ‘perverse.’

I have been wondering about David Irving, and what we know about the effect of genes and emotions on belief, and the processes of confirmation bias and the ‘makes sense stopping rule’. The court ruled that Irving was a conscious and deliberate liar. But aspects of his behaviour contradict this. In bringing his case against Professor Lipstadt
(and
a similar one against the
Observer
), he was inviting an overwhelming forensic and public examination of his work. If his distortions were conscious, it would be a kind of suicide. Why would he do this? If he was the kind of person who would dishonestly alter his beliefs just to suit his dastardly purposes, why did he persist in disputing the ‘six million’ figure even as he was beseeching a court for mercy?

Might a more credible psychological portrait tell of a man who is faithfully convinced of his view and who is using his powers of intellect – which other historians have acknowledged to be considerable – to unconsciously thump, squash, twist and banish any threatening contradictory evidence away, just as we all do?

There can be no doubt, of course, that Irving is wrong about an awful lot. My question is, does he
know
that he is wrong? Or have his emotional hunches led him astray, marooning him in a self-made universe of error that has been erected upon the foundations of a simple mistake? And that has been built up and up, by seven decades of research – thirty books, many thousands of interviews, millions of documents – with each new ‘discovery’ gifting the illusion more power and detail and reach?

Night

Before we left for the restaurant in the evening, Jaenelle gave us a motherly briefing during which Irving suddenly came alive. With a slightly dangerous look, he said, ‘Can I interrupt?’

‘I’m speaking,’ Jaenelle said.

He looked affronted.

‘You work for me!’

‘No I don’t,’ she said, firmly. ‘You’re my client.’

He stepped back into his glowering repose, a fleeting taint of self-amusement evident about his lips.

We walked through the night, past vast Communist-built blocks that have been crowned with the neon hoardings of the conquering capitalists. My fellow holidaymakers are all men. As well as Alex and Mark there is a wealthy businessman who flew himself here in his own light aeroplane; a shorts-wearing university employee from America’s
wheat-belt with a huge rectangular bottom; a tall Australian call-centre operative with a German name; a genuine German who flew MiGs for the East German airforce; a lorry driver from Maidstone; and a man in his sixties with a sharp public school accent who was born in colonial Kenya. All of them are immaculately ironed and tucked in. Three of them have moustaches.

We drifted into pairs as we walked, and I fell into conversation with Alex, the Australian who enjoyed the purity of Dresden. ‘Where I live, we’ve got a lot of Lebanese,’ he said.

‘What’s that like?’ I asked.

‘Well, they hate the Jews,’ he said. ‘But I still can’t stomach them.’

As well as being an extravagant racist, it turned out that Alex is also a keen consumer of organic produce.

‘Oh, I go organic, yeah – all the way. I’m not putting all that supermarket crap into my system,’ he said. ‘My sister’s kids aren’t vaccinated. They never get sick. Those vaccinations give you diseases in later life, you know. They’ve got mercury in them. That’s the most toxic substance known to man.’

Behind us, the genuine German was becoming worried that the Polish restaurant would have no space for our party.

‘We have no reservation?’ he said. ‘There are twelve of us!’

‘I shouldn’t worry,’ said the posh Englishman. ‘The Poles are used to being invaded.’

During the meal, Mark, the American ex-soldier, discussed Mexican immigration.

‘They should be “ice cold” about it, as the Führer said,’ he explained, gesticulating over his beer with his meaty hands. ‘They should build a wall at the Mexican border, then take away the perks from the immigrants. No welfare, no healthcare, no right to work. Then they’ll start to self-deport. This is what everybody wants. They’re just too scared to say it.’

*

At least in part, it was suspicious coherence that trapped Irving. Mr Justice Gray said,
‘All Irving’s historiographical “errors”
converge, in the sense that they all tend to exonerate Hitler and to reflect Irving’s
partisanship for the Nazi leader. If indeed they were genuine errors or mistakes, one would not expect to find this consistency.’

This observation was also made by Richard Evans, the Professor of Modern History at Cambridge University who was hired by the defence to critically examine Irving’s oeuvre. An edited version of his dossier was published in 2002, under the title
Telling Lies About Hitler
. In the book, Evans considers Irving’s motives for bringing the case. He believed that ego played a part, writing that
Irving ‘was clearly incensed
by a reference to him on
page 180
of Lipstadt’s book as “discredited”.’ He also questioned the position of the defendant, saying,
‘Whether or not Lipstadt was correct to claim
that these people posed a serious threat to historical knowledge and memory was debatable.’

2 SEPTEMBER

Early afternoon

We stopped for a light lunch on our way to the concentration camp. I sat with Irving and Jaenelle, watching as the historian sprinkled salt on the table – an apparently superstitious ritual. ‘He used to delight in finding pennies and saying, “See a penny pick it up, then all day you’ll have good luck,”’ Jaenelle said. ‘He’d smile for a good ten seconds every time, then give them to me for safe keeping. It was some time before he realised that it was me, dropping the same penny over and over just to keep him in a good mood.’

‘When I realised,’ Irving mused gloomily, ‘it was like the moment you discover that Father Christmas isn’t real.’

Throughout the remainder of our journey to Lublin, I kept to myself, reading. At one point, I looked up to see the posh Englishman staring at me coldly.

As our silver minibus bumped down the access road that leads to the Majdanek concentration camp, I noticed two parked vehicles, whose occupants watched us pass – one a police car, the other not. A man in a polo shirt and wraparound sunglasses stood at an open door, holding a radio handset. Another had binoculars. Last year, when the media discovered that David Irving was hosting a recreational tour of
Second World War sites, he was ambushed by journalists.
The
Daily Mail
quoted a spokesman for the Polish embassy
in London as saying, ‘The secret service in Poland and in the UK are aware … The visit will be under strict observation.’

We made halting progress through the empty camp. Martin had a camera on a tripod that he kept carefully setting up before running out in front of the lens, as the electronic timer beeps rang out. He would then act nonchalant in the vicinity of David Irving until the photograph was taken. But Irving seemed to move out of the shot, at the last possible moment, every single time. It was hard to know whether he was doing this on purpose.

‘I wonder how fertile the land is with all the ashes they dumped here,’ mused Mark idly as we walked towards the long, low wooden barracks.

Irving pointed to a hatch in the base of a guard’s tower.

‘That’s the box office.’

We entered a building that had been converted into a museum. Two nuns in brown habits silently read a display.

‘David?’ asked Martin, eyes shining upwards, the eager schoolboy. ‘What do you think of the swimming pool in Auschwitz?’

‘I don’t care,’ he said.

Minutes later, Aldrich the German asked Irving a question about gas chambers.

‘You’ve got gas chambers on the brain,’ snapped Irving.

The historian browsed the exhibits alone, paying close attention to a period photograph of the Nazi headquarters in Warsaw. I approached him gingerly.

‘Is that building still there, David?’

‘I’m reading something,’ he growled.

Mark shot me a sympathetic look. We walked together, into the safety of the shadow of an SS sentry booth. ‘Don’t take it personally,’ he whispered. ‘A couple of weeks ago, I sent him an SMS with some information that he’d requested and he shot back, “I haven’t got time for this. I’m in the archives.”’

Mark’s impression of Irving was so accurate, and so unexpected, that I couldn’t help but let out a snort of laughter. I stopped myself with my hand and glanced fearfully at the nuns.

We rejoined Irving. ‘No more than fifty thousand people died here,’ he announced to the group. ‘A lot, but no more than was killed in a single bombing raid by British Bomber Command.’ Behind him was a sign that read, in large English letters, ‘Some 78,000 died in the camp’.

Further along the wall was a grainy photograph of Hitler saluting some guards. When he saw it, Irving snapped, ‘Adolf Hitler never, in his whole career, visited a death camp. I am convinced that the decisions involved with the Holocaust were made on the periphery and then filtered up to the Führer’s office who were by then too weak to say, “Stop this.”’

We followed as he lurched out towards building number 42 – the fumigation plant, showers and gas chambers.

As soon as we entered the cold, concrete structure, the mood of the group changed. There was an uplift, a surge, a dangerous volt of activity. There were flashes of cameras and raised voices and people bunching in corners and pointing, running this way and that, tugging arms,
explain that, check this out
…

‘This is a mock-up of a gas chamber,’ announced Irving.

We were joined by a crowd of visitors. Dozens of them, young and female, many swollen-cheeked and teary. And yet, among our group, there was still that fever, still that flap and chatter and heat.

‘You’ve got to be very sceptical about what you see in here,’ Irving told the schoolgirls, interrupting their guide. ‘The gas cylinders and pipes are quite clearly of recent provenance. This is an air-raid shelter. These are standard air-raid blast doors.’

Members of the girls’ group exchanged glances of alarm.

‘You’re fighting a losing battle here,’ said Martin.