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"Senior
editors at...publishing houses still welcome me warmly as
a friend, invite me to lunch in expensive New York restaurants–and
then lament that if they were to sign a contract with me
on a new book, there would always be somebody in their publishing
house who would object." Thus the English historian
David Irving, famous for his histories of Nazi Germany.
He made these remarks last week in the opening statement
to the lawsuit that he has brought against Penguin Books
and Prof. Deborah Lipstadt of Emory University.
He
claims that Lipstadt fatally damaged his career and jeopardized
his livelihood by labeling him a "Holocaust denier"
in her 1993 book Denying
the Holocaust. "Irving is one of the most dangerous
spokespersons for Holocaust denial," she wrote there.
"Familiar with historical evidence, he bends it until
it conforms with his ideological leanings and political
agenda."
Irving
refuses to accept the "Holocaust denier" label.
He does not dispute that Jews were murdered on a massive
scale by the Nazis. He does question the numbers involved
as well as the means used. "By virtue of the activities
of [Prof. Lipstadt] and of those who funded her and guided
her hand," Irving argues, "I have since 1996 seen
one fearful publisher after another falling away from me,
declining to reprint my works, refusing to accept new commissions
and turning their backs on me when I approach." To
be called a "Holocaust denier," he says, is "like
being called a wife-beater or a pedophile. It is enough
for the label to be attached, for the attachee to find himself
designated as a pariah, an outcast from normal society."
Irving
is a scholar of enormous energy and dedication. He has published
innumerable works, most of which have been praised by leading
historians of the period. He is a controversialist who refuses
to accept the orthodox doctrine on anything. To many this
makes him a hateful figure. John Keegan, however, has written
that "Irving is a historian of formidable powers, having
worked in all the major German archives, discovered important
deposits of papers himself, and interviewed many of the
survivors or their families and intimates… No historian
of the Second World War can afford to ignore Irving. His
depiction of Hitler...is a key corrective to the Anglo-Saxon
version, which relates the war’s history solely in
terms of Churchillian defiance and of the Grand Alliance."
This
cuts no ice with our cultural vigilantes who would spoon-feed
us what information they think we need. Back in March 1996,
St. Martin’s Press was looking forward to bringing
out his book, Goebbels:
Mastermind of the Third Reich. Irving had been the
first historian to get access to the 75,000 pages of Goebbels’
diaries that had been lying unread in the Red Army’s
archives in Moscow since 1945. Irving was one of the few
people in the world capable of deciphering the Nazi propaganda
minister’s handwriting, not to mention his peculiar
elliptical references.
The
book would have been a fascinating read. But it was not
to be. Abraham H. Foxman of the Anti-Defamation League led
the charge of the pious bullies. He fired off an angry letter
to St. Martin’s: "Surely you must know that Mr.
Irving is a well-known Holocaust Denier and an apologist
for the Nazi regime. A pseudo-scholar, he has no academic
credentials as a historian and his writings on Hitler, Nazis
and the Holocaust have been consistently shown to be replete
with errors, oversights, poor research and fantasy."
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