The Unpersuadables: Adventures with the Enemies of Science (37 page)

‘We all put a major word in for you with Jaenelle this morning,’ he told me. ‘We told her you’re getting a raw deal. David says he’s interested in personalities and so are you – what’s wrong with that? She said, “Well, David is suspicious of his questions.” So I said, “Well, he’s proved himself, you know?”’

‘That’s really kind,’ I said. ‘Thank you.’

And in that moment, I cannot deny it, I liked Mark a lot.

Night

I sat down with Jaenelle for an interview before our screening of
Downfall
. She told me that she first met Irving in August 2008, on a speaking engagement in the US. When I asked if there was ‘an instant kinship’ between the two of them, the idea of it seemed to destabilise her slightly.

‘Er, he was, er, no, I don’t know,’ she said. ‘I guess something about me interested him because he started emailing me several times a day.’

Irving invited her to London. Curious, she agreed. She now runs his online bookstore. Close proximity to the historian, she told me, is
not easy. ‘If someone frustrates him during the day and he gets in a bad mood, I’m the only one who’s there for him to take it out on. And believe me, he does. He’ll sulk for days at a time.’

I wondered if his touchiness might have anything to do with his childhood.

‘I don’t know, because David is the kind of person who tries to present things in his life as maybe being more positive than they actually are,’ she said. ‘I don’t think he had any hard feelings for his father, though. And he looked up to his brother John like a father figure. He revered John until the day he died, which was recently. I’ve never seen him so upset about anything as when John died.’

‘He doesn’t seem to be a very happy man in general,’ I said.

‘Well, his happiness is his own choice. He goes out of his way to be miserable. That’s just the kind of person he is.’

‘I wonder if it’s an anger thing,’ I said. ‘I’ll have to ask him.’

She looked at me with a kind of speechless horror, as if I had just plucked out an eyeball.

‘I would not ask him or even
suggest
that he’s an angry person,’ she said. ‘He does sincerely believe that he’s perfect in every way. I’m not even exaggerating about that.’

‘Really?’

‘Of course. Suggest that there’s anything about him that needs changing – he won’t even consider the possibility.’

‘Wow.’

She shook her head, still apparently not quite believing what I had been planning.

‘You’d get more than your head bitten off. He’d screw you up like a Polish slave.’

‘He’s a fascinating character.’

‘Fascinating in small doses.’

‘He seems keen on you.’

‘He thinks he adores me and who am I to argue? But obviously he doesn’t or he wouldn’t blow his top at me every five minutes. Like, he has been known to scream at me because I didn’t tie my hair back when he thought it should be tied back. I kid you not.’

‘Does he think he’s got a chance with you?’

‘Yes. And even if he realises that maybe he doesn’t, he definitely doesn’t want to see that anybody else might. He gets awfully jealous. He has this image in his head that he is still a young, handsome, well-to-do fellow. And he has never been able to wrap his head around the idea that he is seventy-three years old, crippled and cantankerous.’

When I asked her for advice about what to do if I am granted a final interview, she told me that I should, under no circumstances, mention the incident from school, when he requested a copy of
Mein Kampf
.

‘David is a prankster,’ she explained. ‘He also got in trouble for hoisting the hammer-and-sickle flag when he was at school, so it was not a political thing. It’s whatever will get the biggest reaction. The further their jaws will drop the better job he thinks he’s done. That’s not to say that when he writes his books that that’s the aim he’s going for. But you would be setting yourself up for him stomping off if you asked how he got interested in Hitler. I would suggest you go over your questions and ask yourself, “Could this in any way possibly be construed by him as trying to get him to admit to being a neo-Nazi?”’

‘This is really good advice,’ I said.

‘I’m doing all I can. The others are too. Did you know, they’ve all agreed to a pact to help you? They’ve been asking questions during the discussions that they think might be useful.’

Following my chat with Jaenelle, we all sat around a conference room table to watch
Downfall
. When we reached the part that we had seen the other night, re-subtitled to show Hitler raging about Ryanair, the room filled with the cough, spurt and snort of desperately suppressed sniggering. At the end, as we filed out, I asked Irving if there might be a suitable time to meet tomorrow. ‘Oh Jesus, you keep going on about that,’ he snapped. ‘In the lobby, at eleven.’

Relieved, I joined the others. As they drank, Alex told me that when the active ingredient in marijuana is purified in a rice cooker, it becomes the cure for cancer. ‘Big pharma,’ he explained, which is ‘owned by the Jews,’ is behind the drug’s prohibition. As he was talking, Jaenelle’s voice cut through, bouncing accidentally on the top of the hubbub. She said his name, and then something like ‘… believes everything he reads on the Internet.’ There was a horrible silence. Alex’s eyes emptied. ‘What did you say?’ he demanded.

‘Nothing,’ said Jaenelle.

His face was bloodless. Utterly still.

‘Repeat the last few words you said.’

‘I was just …’

Mark broke the tension.

‘Have you noticed how he’s just got angrier and angrier since the trip’s gone on?’ he said. ‘The headline will be, “‘Ten Holocaust Deniers Killed by Conspiracy Theorist”.’

And somehow the nervous laughter was just enough to lift Alex away from whatever it was that was about to happen.

*

Liar or deluded? Evil or mistaken? This is what I still don’t understand.

Irving’s insistence that Hitler was unaware of the Holocaust has, as its holiest artefact, the fact that no direct order from the Nazi leader has ever been found. But in her book
History on Trial
, Irving’s libel defendant, Professor Lipstadt, wrote that
historians ‘do not, as Irving kept demanding, seek a “smoking gun”
, one document that will prove the existence of the gas chambers. They seek a nexus or convergence of evidence.’ I am reminded of the observation that social psychologists Carol Tavris and Elliot Aronson make in
Mistakes Were Made
:
‘Confirmation bias even sees to it that no evidence
– the absence of evidence – is evidence for what we believe.’

An interview with Irving’s brother Nicholas
that was published in 2006 seems to add detail to the nature of the ‘wheel’ he describes running ‘backwards and forwards in the slime.’ David has denied all that Nicholas has said, of course, but his twin told the
Daily Telegraph
that, ‘As children, he was always trying to drag me into his devilment.’ He recalled an incident in which a German bomber destroyed a nearby house and the six-year-old David gave it a ‘Heil Hitler’ salute. ‘[But] there was nothing unpatriotic about David’s views then,’ he added. ‘Like now, he liked to shock, to scandalise.’

During the Lipstadt trial, Irving issued a subpoena to Sir John Keegan, a noted historian who had declined an initial request to testify.
‘Earlier experiences had persuaded me
that nothing but trouble comes of taking sides over Irving,’ Keegan wrote, in a subsequent
account of his experience in the
Daily Telegraph
. ‘I have written complimentary reviews of Irving’s work as a military historian to find myself posted on the internet as a Nazi sympathiser.’

Many of Irving’s enemies acknowledge his intelligence. They imply what I now know – that intelligence is no inoculation against bias. But researchers in the US have gone even further than this. They have found startling evidence that suggests that intelligence simply
does not work
in the service of truth.
Psychologist David Perkins conducted a simple study
in which he asked a range of participants to think of as many for-and-against reasons as they could for a number of socio-political issues. Naturally, people tended to come up with far more points that backed up their own opinions than ran counter to them – and the better educated people with the higher IQs came up with the most ways to conclude that their positions were correct. The surprise came when he discovered that their higher levels of intelligence only enabled them to think of arguments for why they might be right. Remarkably, the superior minds were
no better
at imagining why they might be wrong than those of weaker intelligence.

In his account of the Lipstadt trial, Sir John Keegan recounts a courtroom exchange in which he stated that Irving’s view, that Hitler did not know about the Holocaust until 1943, ‘defied reason, or common sense.’ Irving challenged him, asking whether it would not be ‘the most extraordinary historical revelation of the war’ if it could be proved true? ‘This was a very curious moment,’ wrote Keegan. ‘I suddenly recognised that Irving believed that Hitler’s ignorance could be demonstrated.’

7 SEPTEMBER

Some time in the early 1970s, David Irving had a remarkable idea.
What if Hitler hadn’t known about the Holocaust?
What if he was actually a simple man, who was easily manipulated by others? And what if the industrial killing of the Jews was secretly organised by his immediate subordinates, who deliberately kept it from him? He
recruited a German historian to find proof that he was mistaken. ‘I’m hiring you because you’re sceptical,’ he told her. ‘You’re going to find the evidence to prove me wrong.’

Every argument that she produced was rejected by Irving. Some, he will admit, ‘came close,’ such as the entry in Goebbels’s diary from March 1942 which tells of deportations in which no more than 5 per cent of people survived.

‘There’s a whole page or two in his diary which describes this in very vivid terms, and said, “The Führer too is in favour of a radical solution,”’ Irving remembered. ‘I said, “I’m sorry no. This is evidence against Goebbels. It shows that Goebbels
would like to believe
that Hitler was involved.”’

In 1991 more diaries emerged, this time those of Adolf Eichmann, who had responsibility for the transportation of Jews to concentration camps. His journals report a conversation with Reinhard Heydrich. ‘“I came from the Reichsführer [Himmler],” said Heydrich. “He has received orders from the Führer for the physical destruction of the Jews.”’
Around the period in which Irving was considering this find
, the writer Ron Rosenbaum interviewed him for his book
Explaining Hitler
. The author described finding Irving ‘tormented’ by this discovery. He told Rosenbaum, ‘It rocked me back on my heels, frankly.’ He admitted that he had thought,
Oops! How do you explain this one away?
and that he had to tell himself, ‘Don’t be knocked off your feet by this one.’

This is how he explained it away: even though Eichmann composed his memoirs before he was captured, Irving dismissed them as being concocted for use as evidence during an imagined future trial. ‘I’m not saying Eichmann does it consciously,’ he told me. ‘But eventually he will begin saying to himself, “What would have been my only excuse in mitigation? That it was the Führer’s orders.”’

‘You’re using any excuse,’ I said. ‘Any way you can think around the problem of exonerating Hitler.’

‘No. You have to be very precise. If Heydrich said that, why does it not exist in any document that followed? Why is there no paper trail?’

‘Is it possible that you’re being this forensic only with evidence that doesn’t fit your thesis?’

‘No, you’re extra-careful because of this huge muck heap of world opinion that has been built up over the last sixty years. They’ve been piling more and more muck on top of it. It doesn’t mean to say it’s any righter. They’re just quoting each other.’

I wondered if the Lipstadt trial had shaken his faith in his beliefs.

‘They had a team of twenty historians,’ he said. ‘They spent twenty-nine months going through my thirty books and they found twelve errors. Half an error per book. Less than. Not bad going.’

It is a claim that Professor Lipstadt’s defence team would surely be enraged to hear, and it is a stunning thing to observe: confirmation bias in action.

‘So the trial actually
added
to your sense of self-esteem?’ I asked.

He leaned back, smiling.

‘And those twelve errors are
greatly
inflated.’

I moved on to further evidence that Hitler not only knew about the annihilation of the Jews, but predicted it. In a speech that he gave on 30 January 1939, Hitler said, ‘Today I want to be a prophet once more: if the international finance Jewry inside and outside of Europe should succeed once more in plunging nations into another world war, the consequence will not be the Boleshevisation of the earth and thereby the victory of the Jewry, but the annihilation of the Jewish race in Europe.’

‘Unfortunately you’ve got a problem with language,’ said Irving. ‘At no point does Hitler anywhere say, “We’re going to liquidate the Jews.”’

‘He says “annihilate”.’

‘He uses a very common word in Germany, which is “
ausrotten
”. Then he says it’s a “prophetic
warning for the Jews.” That’s a weird phrase.’

‘But he’s saying …’

Irving shook his head dismissively.

‘You’re not, you’re not, you’re not,
fine tuned
.’

I thought for a moment. I tried to tune myself up.

‘It means he’s looking into the future,’ I said. ‘Predicting.’

‘Yes,’ said Irving. ‘That’s right.’

‘Predicting the annihilation of the Jews.’

‘But you would say “warning” to the Jews. You wouldn’t say “prophetic warning”. The speech itself is six pages, single spaced. The actual reference to the Jews is three lines long. Only three lines in one column. Only that.’

They were three lines. They were in one column. And they prophesied the annihilation of the Jews.