Branding Irving and Leuchter “Hitler’s heirs,” the British House of Commons denounced the former as a “Nazi propagandist and longtime Hitler apologist” and the latter’s report as a “fascist publication.”{109} One might have assumed that would have marked the end of Irving’s reputation in England, but it did not. Condemned in the Times of London in 1989 as a “man for whom Hitler is something of a hero and almost everything of an innocent and for whom Auschwitz is a Jewish deception,” Irving may have had his reputation revived in 1992 by the London Sunday Times.{110} The paper hired Irving to translate the Goebbels diaries, which had been discovered in a Russian archive and, it was assumed, would shed light on the conduct of the Final Solution. The paper paid Irving a significant sum plus a percentage of the syndication fees.[8]
Journalists and scholars alike were shocked that the Times chose such a discredited figure to do this work. Showered with criticism, the editor of the Sunday Times, Andrew Neil, denounced Irving’s views as “reprehensible” but defended engaging Irving because he was only being used as a “transcribing technician.” Peter Pulzer, a professor of politics at Oxford and an expert on the Third Reich, observed that it was ludicrous for Neil to refer to Irving as a “mere technician,” arguing that when you hired someone to edit a “set of documents others had not seen, you took on the whole man.”{111}
However the matter is ultimately resolved, the Sunday Times has rescued Irving’s reputation from the ignominy to which it had been consigned by the House of Commons. In the interest of a journalistic scoop, this British paper was willing to throw its task as a gatekeeper of the truth and of journalistic ethics to the winds. By resuscitating Irving’s reputation, it also gave new life to the Leuchter Report.
Leuchter has also had his reputation resurrected by a recent book and documentary film about America’s capital punishment industry. The Execution Protocol, by Stephen Trombley, examines the steps between the imposition of the death sentence and the actual execution.{112} A major focus of both Trombley’s book and film is Fred Leuchter. Trombley draws a sympathetic portrait of Leuchter, depicting him as a slightly bizarre and unconventional, myopic craftsman and entrepreneur who filled a need in the execution industry in a creative fashion. Trombley does address Leuchter’s denial activities but represents them as simply another aspect of this iconoclastic man. In contrast to his portrayal of Leuchter, he presents the ADL, Shapiro, Klarsfeld, and others who protested Leuchter’s denial activities as unfairly harassing this committed craftsman who may harbor some bizarre notions but, in truth, only wants to make killing more humane.
As a result of Trombley’s book and film Leuchter has once again been invited to appear on various talk shows as an expert on gas chambers. He has been interviewed on German, French, and British television. Most of these segments fail to mention his association with the Holocaust deniers. A similar attitude is evident in the media reviews of David Irving’s books: Most rarely address his neofascist or denial connections.{113}
Irving is one of the most dangerous spokespersons for Holocaust denial. Familiar with historical evidence, he bends it until it conforms with his ideological leanings and political agenda. A man who is convinced that Britain’s great decline was accelerated by its decision to go to war with Germany, he is most facile at taking accurate information and shaping it to confirm his conclusions. A review of his recent book, Churchill’s War, which appeared in New York Review of Books, accurately analyzed his practice of applying a double standard to evidence. He demands “absolute documentary proof’ when it comes to proving the Germans guilty, but he relies on highly circumstantial evidence to condemn the Allies.{114} This is an accurate description not only of Irving’s tactics, but of those of deniers in general.
The impact of Leuchter’s work is difficult to assess. Rationally one would like to assume that, since Leuchter has been exposed as a man without the qualifications necessary to perform this analysis, and since his work has been demonstrated to be scientifically and methodologically fallacious, the destiny of the Leuchter Report would be the dustbin of history. But the Holocaust and, to only a slightly lesser degree, Holocaust denial itself remind us that the irrational has a fatal attraction even to people of goodwill. It can overwhelm masses of evidence and persuade people to regard the most outrageous and untenable notions as fact. This is easier to accomplish when the public does not have the historical and technical knowledge necessary to refute these irrational and inherently fantastic claims. Ultimately the deniers’ ability to keep repeating Leuchters conclusions even though they have been discredited is another indication that truth is far more fragile than fiction and that reason alone cannot protect it.
CHAPTER TEN
The Battle for the Campus
This is not a public stagecoach that has to take everyone who buys a ticket.
In the early 1990s American college campuses became loci of intensive activity by a small group of Holocaust deniers. Relying on creative tactics and assisted by a fuzzy kind of reasoning often evident in academic circles, the deniers achieved millions of dollars of free publicity and significantly furthered their cause. Their strategy was profoundly simple. Bradley Smith, a Californian who has been involved in a variety of Holocaust denial activities since the early 1980s, attempted to place a full-page ad claiming that the Holocaust was a hoax in college newspapers throughout the United States. The ad was published by papers at some of the more prestigious institutions of higher learning in the United States.
Entitled “The Holocaust Story: How Much Is False? The Case for Open Debate,” the ad provoked a fierce debate on many of the campuses approached by Smith. His strategy was quite straightforward: He generally called a paper’s advertising department to ascertain the charge for publication of a full-page ad and then submitted camera-ready copy and a certified check in the proper amount. On occasion he inquired in advance whether a paper would be willing to run this particular ad.[1] Even when he was rejected, the attempt to place the ad won him significant media attention.{2} Campus newspapers began to use his name in headlines without identifying him, assuming readers would know who he was. Articles, letters, and op-ed pieces defended Holocaust denial’s right to make its “views” known. But not all the results were necessarily what Smith would have wanted. On some campuses there was a backlash against him and Holocaust denial. Courses on the Holocaust that had languished on the back burner for an extended period materialized in the next semester’s offerings. Campus administrators admitted that the ad constituted the final push necessary to move these courses from the planning stage to the schedule books.{3} Professors from a wide variety of disciplines included discussion of the Holocaust in their courses. Movies, speakers, photographic exhibits, and other presentations relating to the Holocaust were brought to campus. Students participated in rallies, teach-ins, and protests.
8
The Russian archives granted Irving permission to copy two microfiche plates, each of which held about forty-five pages of the diaries. Irving immediately violated his agreement, took many plates, transported them abroad, and had them copied without archival permission. There is serious concern in archival circles that he may have significantly damaged the plates when he did so, rendering them of limited use to subsequent researchers.
Irving believes Jews are “very foolish not to abandon the gas chamber theory while they still have time.” He “foresees [a] new wave of antisemitism” due to Jews’ exploitation of the Holocaust “myth.” C. C. Aronsfeld, “Holocaust ‘Revisionists’ Are Busy in Britain,”
1
Among the papers that accepted it, either as an ad or an op-ed column, were the University of Arizona, Cornell, Duke, the University of Georgia, Howard, the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Louisiana State, the University of Michigan, the University of Montana, Northwestern, Ohio State, Rutgers, Vanderbilt, Washington University, and the University of Washington.
Among those colleges rejecting the ad were Berkeley, Brown, the University of California at Santa Barbara, the University of Chicago, Dartmouth, Emory, Georgetown, Harvard, the University of Minnesota, the University of North Carolina, the University of Pennsylvania, Purdue, Rice, the University of Southern California, the University of Tennessee, the University of Texas (Austin), UCLA, the University of Virginia, the University of Wisconsin (Madison), and Yale.