May 13, 2001

Bearing False Witness By GEOFFREY WHEATCROFT

THE HOLOCAUST ON TRIAL By D. D. Guttenplan. Illustrated. 328 pp. New York: W. W. Norton & Company. $24.95. LYING ABOUT HITLER History, Holocaust, and the David Irving Trial. By Richard J. Evans. 318 pp. New York: Basic Books. $27. IN the early 1960's a young British writer named David Irving began to publish books about World War II that combined apparently detailed research with highly provocative or even outrageous conclusions. Shocking as this self-taught historian could seem, he was taken at his own estimation by others like John Keegan, himself a prolific author of popular military history, and Hugh Trevor-Roper, who at the time was regius professor of modern history at Oxford. After his first book, ''The Destruction of Dresden,'' published in 1963 when he was only 25, came ''The Destruction of Convoy PQ17,'' telling the story of a disastrous wartime Arctic convoy. This led to disaster for Irving himself when he was sued in 1970 for libel by a former naval officer, who won huge damages. But Irving was unabashed -- and so were his admirers. When ''Hitler's War'' was published in 1977, Keegan called it ''Irving's greatest achievement,'' and Trevor-Roper praised his ''indefatigable scholarly industry.'' Irving was now both a best seller -- the proceeds of that book bought him a flat in Mayfair and a Rolls-Royce -- and a serious historian. Or was he? Irving was plainly a self-publicist and braggart, but reservations about him went deeper than that. Trevor-Roper warned of his ''consistent bias'' toward the Third Reich; and ''Hitler's War'' not only evinced an obvious admiration for Hitler but claimed that he hadn't instigated the murder of the European Jews, or known much about it. By the time the American scholar Deborah Lipstadt published her book ''Denying the Holocaust: The Growing Assault on Truth and Memory'' in 1994, she was prepared to name the ''discredited'' Irving as ''one of the most dangerous spokespersons for Holocaust denial,'' a man with neofascist connections who bent historical evidence to suit his purposes. Even though sales of the British edition of her book were tiny, Irving sued for libel. And so early last year another lawsuit, still more dramatic than the one 30 years before, was heard in London, with Irving conducting his own case. After several weeks Sir Charles Gray's judgment gave complete victory to Lipstadt and to her publisher, Penguin Books. The first two of at least six books promised on the case have now appeared. ''The Holocaust on Trial'' is by D. D. Guttenplan, an American who interrupted postgraduate work in London to write a long article on the case for The Atlantic Monthly and then this book. Richard J. Evans of Cambridge University, the author of ''Lying About Hitler,'' is an eminent historian of Germany with large books to his name, as well as the discursive ''In Defense of History,'' an

attack on postmodernism and deconstructionism in the name of the traditional historical virtue of objectivity. He writes as a central figure in the Irving case, someone who was enlisted by the defense to make a detailed analysis of Irving's work and then to appear as an expert witness. Even as courtroom dramas go, the Irving case was riveting. Both sides went for broke, though the defendants had more to lose. Guttenplan and Evans both explain that British libel law is heavily weighted in favor of the plaintiff, who does not have to show that what was written was either false or malicious. At one point not many years ago more than 30 successive libel actions heard in London had been won by the plaintiffs, and for any corporate defendant the temptation to settle is always strong. Not only did Penguin stand firm, they used the perilous defense of justification, insisting that what Lipstadt had written was the plain truth. As Richard Rampton, Penguin's deceptively avuncular counsel, said in his opening remarks: ''My Lord, Mr. Irving calls himself a historian. The truth is, however, that he is not a historian at all but a falsifier of history. To put it bluntly, he is a liar.'' Before the court hearing, Guttenplan met all the principal players, and he draws vivid portraits of the cast, particularly of the two heroes for the defense, Evans and Anthony Julius, Lipstadt's solicitor. Although we English aren't quite as class-obsessed as Americans sometimes think, social status played its part in the case; Evans and Julius, a Welshman and a Jew, were both outsiders. Julius was already famous for winning Princess Diana her multimillion-pound divorce settlement. In the Irving case, as then, he showed that he is a very smart, tough operator, who knew the ropes better than the cocky Irving. Defendants do have the one advantage of pretrial discovery, allowing them to gain sight of the plaintiff's personal as well as professional documents. With great adroitness and persistance, Julius gradually acquired Irving's diaries and other papers. And so a plaintiff who insisted that he wasn't a racist, a neofascist or a Holocaust denier was shown in court to have written a poem for his small daughter: ''I am a Baby Aryan / Not Jewish or Sectarian / I have no plans to marry an / Ape or Rastafarian''; to have regularly addressed far-right gatherings; and to have regaled them with a ''joke'' about a one-man gas chamber mistaken for a telephone booth. As Guttenplan tells it, Evans is a touchy, rather bumptious man whose ''intellectual confidence'' almost undid him on occasion. As Evans tells it, he was fighting the whole time in court to master his loathing of Irving, avoiding eye contact and never rising to any bait. Either way, his role was crucial to the defense. For all the praise that had been heaped on Irving, dissenting voices had long worried about his methods. He blinded the reader with lists of books and documents, but he would somehow forget to give page citations and archival reference numbers. The historian John Lukacs had said that ''almost all of Irving's references . . . must be considered with caution,'' while noting that few critics had bothered to examine his books closely enough. That was just what Evans did, combing through books and archives to demonstrate the full extent to which Irving was guilty of misquotation, mistranslation, misrepresentation and gross distortion.

At the center of the stage stands Irving himself, swaggering, melodramatic or maudlin by turns, now comparing himself with his father fighting in World War I, now murmuring that he might be ''vernichtet'' (''destroyed,'' as the Nazis said of their victims). At one weird moment he even addressed the judge as ''mein Führer.'' All along he was acting out some psychodrama of his own, and playing a part he had invented for himself as officer, gentleman and scholar, although he is in truth not really any of those. His own background is shabby-genteel at best. Abandoned as a little boy by his father, he was brought up in suburban obscurity, and he later dropped out of college. Whether or not Irving is a neofascist, he comes from the sort of uneasy social twilight that so often bred fascism. If Guttenplan's narrative is excellent, his ventures into theory are less happy, and his own perspective is a little predictable. He scolds Lipstadt for lack of radicalism, and in his acknowledgments, after rounding up Eric Hobsbawm, Norman Finkelstein and the rest of the usual suspects, he also thanks Sam Tanenhaus, who ''proves you don't have to be a lefty to be a mensch.'' Evans said in court that he was a member of the Labor Party, and his history books suggest a strong distaste for rich and rulers. So he's a lefty -- but is he a mensch? Evidently someone for whom any criticism of the late Michel Foucault is lèse-majesté, Guttenplan is shocked by ''In Defense of History,'' Evans's intellectually (rather than politically) conservative assault on contemporary academic fashion, with its ''crude'' suggestion of a link between Holocaust denial and an intellectual climate in which ''scholars have increasingly denied that texts had any fixed meaning.'' But surely Evans's point is well taken in precisely this context. Once we allow the postmodernist notions that historical data are relative, that all truth is subjective and that one man's ''narrative'' is as good as another's, then Holocaust denial indeed becomes hard to deal with. It was a famous victory -- but only a lawyer like Julius could call the case ''a sparkling vindication of British libel laws.'' They remain as oppressive as ever. A book by Lukacs has just appeared in London after years of delay and with numerous changes made to its text, while the British edition of ''Lying About Hitler'' has been cravenly withdrawn by a London publisher. The changes and the withdrawal both followed legal threats from none other than David Irving. One British proponent of a law making it a crime to deny the Holocaust (as in Germany) said the Irving case showed that such a law is needed, and that free speech is an outdated luxury, suggestions Guttenplan calls ''more dangerous than anything David Irving has ever said or written.'' Jailing Irving would certainly be wrong; but I would happily see him bankrupted and living on the streets after losing the Lipstadt case. It looks as if Penguin will never recover most of its legal costs from him; why should he be in a position to sue anyone else ever again over this issue? Both books cite some truly strange British reactions to the case. ''It would be sad,'' wrote one pundit beforehand, ''if we allowed political correctness to condemn Irving for thinking (or even saying) the unsayable,'' and after the verdict the recently knighted Sir John Keegan wrote that Irving still had ''many of the qualities of the most creative historians. He is certainly never

dull,'' unlike Deborah Lipstadt, who is ''as dull as only the self-righteously politically correct can be. Few other historians had ever heard of her before this case. Most will not want to hear from her again.'' As if that weren't enough, Keegan warned that the verdict would ''send a tremor through the community of 20th-century historians.'' But why should it? Irving long benefited from indulgent admirers who lacked the scholarly equipment to know any better. He still benefits from commentators who can't even work out who was suing whom. Despite Guttenplan's title, the Holocaust was not on trial in the High Court. No court could have established the truth about Auschwitz, only the untruths of one writer. We now know for sure what Irving is like. But is it right, Evans asks, ''to claim these people posed a serious threat to historical knowledge and memory''? As he says, a professor of geography does not feel obliged regularly to confute those who believe that the earth is flat, and Lipstadt explains her refusal to meet Holocaust deniers by saying that Stephen Jay Gould doesn't debate the literal truth of Genesis with Bible Belt fundamentalists. It might have occurred to her that neither does Gould spend all his time writing books to disprove creationism. The malevolence and spite of those who would deny the Shoah is incorrigible, and they cannot be silenced -- but they can be ignored. That is as true as ever after the gripping action that we watched in London last year and that, following his own earlier titles, might have been called ''The Destruction of David Irving.'' Geoffrey Wheatcroft's most recent book is ''The Controversy of Zion: Jewish Nationalism, the Jewish State, and the Unresolved Jewish Dilemma.''