History on trial

Check out scholar Deborah Lipstadt's History on Trial blog. It is a online companion to her book History on Trial: My Day in Court with David Irving. Lipstadt, an expert on the Holocaust, was sued in London (libel capital of the world) for calling Irving a holocaust denier. As the Boston Globe review reminds readers,  Irving has called Auschwitz ''a legend" and once said: ''More women died on the back seat of Edward Kennedy's car at Chappaquiddick than ever died in a gas chamber in Auschwitz." Because of the absurd UK laws governing such cases the burden of proof rests on the defendant to prove he/she has not defamed someone. In this case, the legal requirement was tantamount to proving the Holocaust happened, millions died, there were gas chambers and so on, as if it had never been proven before.

An excellent article in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette here.

So how did it turn out? As the P-G notes,

"David Irving set out to demolish Deborah Lipstadt. One year after the trial, Irving's wife and daughter wept on a curbside as liquidators seized their house, its contents, Irving's library. By the time Irving got home, he discovered that the suit he was wearing was the only one he now owned.

"They took everything. They took my entire research archive of 35 years," Irving said. "I find it increasingly difficult to be good-humored about it."

On separate but related note, I wonder how many people know that playwright Rolf Hochhuth was apparently very good friends with Irving for decades. Hochhuth's play The Representative, or The Deputy (Der Stellvertreter), created a sensation in the early 1960's for its depiction of Pope Pius XII as having done little to help Jews during Hitler's reign. Scholars trace the flurry of anti-Pius books to this play.  Hochhuth was known as a leftwing writer and ironically, former member of the Hitler Youth. (Acclaimed historian Michael Burleigh claims that Hochhuth was “influenced heavily by KGB malignancy towards the pope of the Cold War." For more on a recent discovery of a Vatican document on the issue see my column here. Note: It is not the position of AIM to defend either the 'pro' or 'anti' Vatican position, but to promote a higher standard in the mainstream media. Thus AIM is not assessing every argument made against Pius XII, but is arguing against the idea of presenting an unauthenicated document to the public, then vouching for authenticity by pointing to correlation between the content of the document and views that predated the discovery of the document.)

From Mr. Irving's website: "Hochhuth shares a birthday with David Irving's oldest daughter Josephine, and they are Dutzfreunde. Mr Hochhuth had first approached Mr Irving after reading his 1963 best-seller The Destruction of Dresden; soon after, the German had written his sensational play The Representative (Der Stellvertreter), critical of Pope Pious' WW.II tolerance of Nazi persecution of the Jews. The two writers' friendship began when they met in the Hamburg offices of Der Stern magazine in January 1965; Rolf Hochhuth stayed with the Irvings in their London flat (then in Paddington), and Mr Irving often stayed with the Hochhuths - Rolf, his first wife Marianne and second, Dana, in Switzerland. They remained the closest of friends until circumstances drove them geographically apart - Hochhuth no longer able to travel to Britain, and Mr Irving banned from Germany in 1993 "