Irving's War

From January 11, 2000, through March 16, 2000, an extraordinary trial captioned "Irving v. Penguin Books and Lipstadt" took place in London. The Holocaust was not on trial in London. Neither was this case merely about whether statements made in Prof. Lipstadt's book "Denying the Holocaust" (1993) about David Irving were false and defamatory. This trial was about the freedom to criticize bigotry masquerading as scholarship. This case was nothing other than a single battle in a war waged by David Irving to silence his critics.

In the sense that a historical event like the Holocaust can be put "on trial," the Holocaust has been in that position since the IMT trial at Nuremberg and it has withstood all challenges. The fact that the Third Reich engaged in the planned genocide known as the Holocaust has been established in hundreds of civil and criminal trials under American, British, French, Canadian, German and Israeli law in the half century since the end of World War II. None of the fraudulent allegations of the lunatic fringe which denies the Holocaust has even been established as worthy of belief in any of those trials.

We have a series of articles entitled Irving's War  by Yale F. Edeiken.  These articles do not deal with the issues, direct or indirect, of that trial. They are about the legal realities of the trial and reasons why David Irving failed to prove his case.

An Introduction to the Einsatzgruppen

Like every historical event, the Holocaust evokes certain specific images. When the Holocaust is mentioned most people immediately think of the concentration camps. They immediately envision emaciated victims in dirty striped uniforms staring incomprehensibly at their liberators or piles of corpses, too numerous to bury individually, being bulldozed into mass graves.

Those are accurate images. Those horrific scenes are real. They happened. But they are not all of the Holocaust. They are merely the end product of the systematization of the genocide committed by the Third Reich. The reality of that genocide began not in the camps or in the gas chambers but with four small groups of murderers known as the Einsatzgruppen formed by Himmler and Heydrich immediately before the invasion of the Soviet Union. They operated in the territories captured by the German armies during the invasion of the Soviet Union and, with the cooperation of German army units and local militias, murdered over a million men, women, and children. It was a story that did not end until 1952 when Otto Ohlendorf, the last surviving commander of an Einsatzgruppe (Einsatzgruppe D), climbed the steps of the gallows to pay for the more than 90,000 murders his command committed.

An article at the Holocaust History Project by Yale F. Edeiken introduces the Einsatzgruppen.

The IHR at the Cross Roads

From its beginning in 1978 the Institute for Historical Review (IHR ) was in the forefront of the intellectual fraud of Holocaust denial.  Under the control its co-founder, Willis Carto, the IHR prospered as part of a complex of organizations with the common goal of propagating anti-Semitism in theUnited States.  "Liberty Lobby v. Dow-Jones Co." 838 F.2d 1287 (D.C. Cir.;1987) After Carto was ousted from his position, the IHR has been through a financial crisis caused by the loss of old followers and its failure or inability to recruit new ones.  As a result the current management of the IHR has evidently attempted to obtain new financing from the Arab states of the Middle East.


In an article at the Holocaust History Project, Yale F. Edeiken examines some recent history of this intellectual fraud:


http://www.holocaust-history.org/ihr/

The Forensic Sins of Carlos Porter

Among the staple texts of those who deny the Holocaust are the writings of Carlos Porter. One of his articles "War Crimes Trials" can be found on the CODOH website. It claims to discuss the 1907 Annex to the Hague Convention dealing with the laws of war, and this essay is so highly regarded in the denier community that it has been cited by deniers as authoritative on the subject of the Hague Convention. A close examination of Porter's work, however, demonstrates that it is inaccurate both as to the text of the Convention and the conclusions that are derived from the distorted citations. This analysis will deal with both of those issues.


In an essay on the Holocaust History Project website Yale F. Eideken analyzes these inaccuracies.  The essay can be found at: 


http://www.holocaust-history.org/forensic-sins/

April 2000

April 30, 2000. Updated questions and answers.
April 11, 2000. Added information and links about Irving's failed libel suit to the front page; added Yale Edeiken's essay series Irving's War.