The Unpersuadables: Adventures with the Enemies of Science (38 page)

‘But the word he uses for annihilation is “
ausrotten
”,’ he said. ‘That’s a word in German which
came to mean
liquidation.’

According to Irving, the meaning of ‘
ausrotten
’ has changed since 1939. He knows this, because he has studied its use in a number of Hitler’s speeches, and amassed several period dictionaries in preparation for the Lipstadt trial. Back then, he says, it meant ‘extirpation’, a word with a Latin origin whose literal definition was ‘pulling the roots out.’ Compared to today, its implication to Hitler’s audience would have been mild. ‘He was, at that time, using the word effectively to mean “emasculation”.’

‘And that also goes for the later speech when he said the annihilation had begun?’

‘He never said that.’

I looked down at my notes.

‘December the twelfth 1941, in a speech that recalled his prophecy of 1939, he said, “The world war is here. The annihilation of the Jewry must be a necessary consequence.”’

‘He’s now saying the world war is going to lead to the destruction of the “Judentung”, which is this vague concept of the Jewish entity.’

‘For an outsider,’ I said, ‘it’s hard to square that quote with the idea that Hitler somehow wasn’t up for the annihilation of the Jews.’

‘There’s a great temptation here to extrapolate backwards from history and say, “Well, this happened, therefore he was saying it.” I’ve been more selective.’

‘It sounds to me like he’s up for an annihilation.’

‘That’s because you’re prejudiced by the history that has been propagated since the end of World War II. I can’t do that. I’ve got to go back to the meaning of the words at the time. What you’re doing is reading between the lines.’

‘It’s not between the line. It’s on the line.’

‘It depends how you translate the words.’

I found myself once more in the dilemma that is often faced when debating experts, no matter how controversial. Any argument can be closed down by an appeal to any evidence at all, as long as you are unfamiliar with it. Without immediate access to a 1939 English– German dictionary, I realised, there was nothing I could do.

I could, however, explore his more general feelings about the Jews. For a man who is so easily infuriated by accusations of anti-Semitism, he is remarkably anti-Semitic.

‘The Jews like being talked about,’ he told me. ‘They’re not happy if they’re not being talked about. I always say if you want to be the bride at every wedding you run the risk of ending up being the corpse at every funeral. But I try to keep out of it.’

For Irving, many Jews share a common weakness, in which they cannot critically examine their actions. ‘I can look at my own misfortune and say, “Well, I had it coming.” But they will never look at their own misfortune and say, “Perhaps we as a people had it coming.” They then say, “Well, we’re hated because we’re so financially successful.” And I say, “Well, that’s a racist remark that implies there is something in your genes that makes you good with money.”’

‘What do you think it is?’

He shrugged. ‘Probably something different in their brains.’

For me, I told him, it is because humans are by nature tribal and the Jews’ historical statelessness has probably made them unusually vulnerable to prejudice. To my astonishment, he nodded in agreement.

‘It’s in our microchip,’ he said. ‘We all have this glitch in our microchip. I could never fancy a black woman the way I fancy Jaenelle. It’s my microchip.’

‘So do you not accept, then, that psychological processes are behind anti-Semitism, rather than the Jews being especially “badly behaved”?’

‘I think it’s very likely,’ he agreed. ‘I try not to be anti-Semitic.’ I grinned helplessly, convinced for one ridiculous moment that I might have made a breakthrough. ‘But they don’t make it easy for me.’

The great mystery, for me, is in the emotions that ferment wordlessly beneath Irving’s stubborn defence of Hitler. So many of the tour group had parents who had either served in the war or who saw it from
Germany. Powerful adult beliefs rarely grow in rational, reasonable isolation. But Irving’s was a patriotic family. He didn’t rebel against his parents or siblings – he looked up to his father, idolised his RAF-serving elder brother. I began to wonder if I might have glimpsed a truth about the source of Irving’s mission, however, when I challenged him on the moral relativity that he believes exists between the Nazis and the Allies.

‘We wanted to stop the war,’ I said. ‘Whereas they wanted to take over Europe.’

‘But it was no business of ours,’ he snapped. ‘We had no business getting involved with it. And because we did, we lost the empire, which was a huge force for civilisation around the world. What the empire was doing was worth everything and we should not have risked it. We were fighting somebody else’s war because Churchill had been bribed by the Jews. He had been hired by them in 1936.’

‘So it all comes back to the Jews?’

‘In this case it does.’

‘You would have preferred us to keep our empire …’

‘I’m very proud of the empire.’

‘… and for Hitler to have Europe?’

‘I don’t mind who has Europe.’

‘You don’t care.’

‘I don’t care. Why should I care? I’m not Jewish, I’m not a Communist, I’m not a faggot. Hitler had this
ambition
. He was going to build motorways everywhere. He was going to build great cities.’

‘Don’t you have any compassion for them? They were going to be slaughtered.’

‘Well, that’s what they were planning to do to us. Well, maybe not the homosexuals, but the Communists certainly didn’t have any good plans for us.’

‘That’s not my question,’ I said. ‘Don’t you have any compassion for them?’

‘Why should I? What kind of compassion?’

‘You seem to have a worldview in which caring about people that aren’t just like you is pointless.’

‘We used to have a Communist Party in England—’

‘I’m not saying we should all be Communists. The Communists were awful.’

‘I know,’ he said, mystified. ‘I can’t understand why you’re sticking up for them.’

For the first time in the three hours that we had been speaking, Irving had lost his usual composure. Gone was the snippy, careful, lawyerly, narrow-eyed academic’s pose. Suddenly, there it was: emotion. It made me wonder. Was
that
it? Perhaps he identified his family as one of
empire
. And he blames Churchill and the Jews for its loss. Could that be the wound that seeps beneath all of this?

I asked Irving if any of his relatives served the empire. He smiled proudly. ‘Oh, yes. My uncles were with the Indian Army. One was a Bengal Lancer. They had a very good imperial life in India. And the other uncle was in Malaya and then on my mother’s side of the family, her sister married Peter, who was on the same ship as my father. My uncle Peter was on the ship
Discovery
. They made several trips to the Antarctic on that. In fact, there are two islands, one named after my father and one after my Uncle Peter …’

This went on for some time.

Just before I stood to leave, I asked him a question of a different nature.

‘Are you happy?’

‘Very happy,’ he replied.

‘You don’t strike me as a happy man,’ I said. ‘A lot of the people around you feel you are rude.’

‘Well, let me explain,’ he said. ‘I’ve got an extremely painful right leg. Every day it fills my waking thoughts. It has crowded my horizon for the last four years. I find it very difficult indeed to be pleasant and jovial to people. I’ve been grumpy to you too and I’m sorry for that.’

And he surprised me, in that moment, did David Irving. He surprised me because he is one of life’s devils. And when those who you demonise show a glimpse of vulnerability it can be shocking, because you were under the illusion that they weren’t human.

EIGHT WEEKS LATER

Finally, it has arrived. From a second-hand book dealer in America – my Cassell’s German–English dictionary. I can now know how listeners would have interpreted Hitler’s ‘prophecy’ about the ‘
ausrotten
’ of the Jews in 1939, because that is the year in which this dictionary was published. So what did the word imply back then? Emasculation? Or extermination?

Ausrott -en
,
v.a
. extirpate, exterminate, root out.

Comp
.
-ungs-krieg
,
m
. war of extermination.

He saw the handle, but he didn’t see the bolts. He saw ‘extirpate’, but he didn’t see ‘exterminate’. In the gas chamber and in the dictionary, David Irving appeared to suffer from an eerie and mysterious mode of cognitive blindness. He has been judged a liar, a historian who knowingly misleads. But to me, his behaviour suggests that he is genuinely and sincerely convinced of Hitler’s innocence. That is where his thinking begins. And so any information that seems to dispute his thesis
cannot
be true. He sees it, but he
knows
his eyes are wrong. He reads it, but there
must
be an honest reason, somewhere, to justify its dismissal. Instead of new unwelcome information, he trusts his feelings, just like the paralysed stroke victim who believed that she was in bed with an old man. Just like all of us.

It is as if no evidence could ever be good enough to persuade Irving that the idea of his life has been a terrible mistake. That it is a mistake is proved by the facts, but that other sign is also loitering in the background, squinting nervously from one eye, hoping that nobody notices it. There is too much coherence; too much certainty. There has been a telling
ausrotten
of doubt.

Irving is proud of the empire and of his family who served it. He shares this admiration with Hitler. And so the fight of his life becomes one of defending the man who recognised the achievements and moral eminence of his ancestors, of battling those whom he battled. He identifies with Hitler emotionally. He is his ambassador, and more.

Irving denies being anti-Semitic because that implies mistake and he, presumably, feels blameless. That is the illusion, and we all fall
for it. We believe that we are not prejudiced, that we have arrived at our conclusions through a rational process of objective thought. Our biases disguise themselves as truth. We cannot see them, because the trick takes place behind our eyes. When he thinks of empire, he feels joy. When he thinks of Jews, he feels … well,
something else
. All the rest is confabulation.

This is, to be sure, a speculative and simplistic theory of the origins of one man’s journey into forbidden beliefs. Even Irving himself does not have access to causes of the emotional impulses that unconsciously drive him. But in considering it, I believe we are closer to the truth than those who suggest that he is an evil and straightforwardly calculating liar.

Above all of this, though, what remains with me about my time with Irving are the moods and manners of the man. The ego, the stubbornness, the hunt for puddles to stamp in. ‘The further their jaws will drop, the better job he thinks he’s done,’ Jaenelle told me, before hurriedly adding that that wasn’t the aim of his work. But how can she know? How can any of us know? In that strange, chemical and alchemical moment when an unconscious decision is made about what to believe, how much is genetic, how much is rational, how much is concerned solely with reinforcing our dearly held models of the world? And how does personality collide with all of this? How does the character of the decider – all that complex emotionality, the calculation of possible outcomes, the current state of mind, the kaleidoscope of motives, the autobiographical hero-mission – pollute the process?

With these questions, we have struck rock. There is no answer. We cannot examine the neurons and synaptic patterns of David Irving and discover why or how he has made the decisions that he has. The mind remains, to a tantalising degree, a realm of secrets and wonder. Precisely how mysterious it is, though, is the matter of much dispute. It is, in fact, the schism that lies beneath a fight that has been taking place between two famous scientists for more than twenty years now, and it is one that I have travelled to an upstairs room on the fringes of London’s Hampstead Heath to hear all about – just as soon as I have had my psychic powers tested.

*

I sit in a wooden chair, facing a wall of books, on subjects such as the nature of time, Chinese medicine, cosmology, quantum theory and the philosophy of mind. Behind me, a large sash window looks out on to a huge and glorious tree, its branches and leaves a triumphal fountain of green and shimmering sunlight that fills the panes. The tree is a living portrait of nature and its energies and personality flood the room. On the sill beneath it sits a tray of sprouting fungi and a porcelain brain on a stem.

A man in his late sixties wearing corduroy trousers, a loose shirt and black socks and sandals walks up behind me and passes me a blindfold, which I place over my eyes.

‘I’m going to either stare at the back of your neck or look away at something else,’ he says. ‘There are twenty trials in all, and the beginning of each trial is indicated by a mechanical click. Thus.’
Click.
‘And after a few seconds you tell me whether you think I’m looking at you or not.’

‘Okay,’ I say. ‘Great.’

‘This works best if you just rely on feelings. The more you think about it, the less well you’ll do.’

And so, we begin.

Click.

‘Yes.’

Click.

‘Yes.’

Click.

‘No.’

It is surprisingly difficult not to think about your emotions. Despite the fact that I am getting no feedback on my success or failure, I quickly become convinced that I am getting it all wrong, and that starts me worrying, analysing even where there is nothing to analyse, gnashing on thin air.

When it is finally over I remove my blindfold and approach the scientist nervously. He has been marking me on a strip of white paper. And I can hardly
believe
the number of ticks.