Explaining Hitler: The Search for the Origins of His Evil, updated edition by Ron Rosenbaum

Author:Ron Rosenbaum [Rosenbaum, Ron]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780306823190
Publisher: Da Capo Press
Published: 2014-07-08T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 12

David Irving: The Big Oops

In which we explore the mind of Hitler’s “Ambassador to the Afterlife,” witness the “Hitler spell” in action, and meet, once again, Hitler as a newborn babe

Ringing the bell on the heavily fortified, high-tech-security-equipped entrance to David Irving’s living quarters on Duke Street in London, I couldn’t help recall Alan Bullock’s words on Irving. Bullock had taken great pains to make the point that his return to the polemical fray with a public lecture on Hitler’s role in the Holocaust had not been a direct or ad hominem response to David Irving’s vigorous advocacy of Hitler’s noninvolvement but was, rather, a response to Revisionists and Holocaust deniers in general. He didn’t want to dignify Irving as an opponent, as a representative of a legitimate rival school of historical explanation and interpretation.

But Bullock is fascinated or at least horrified by the phenomenon of Irving.

“He’s a real rabble-rouser,” Bullock says. “A real Hitler speaker.”

“A Hitler speaker?”

“Aye,” Bullock says, reverting to his native North Country accent in his contempt for David Irving, Hitler explainer turned Hitler defender.

“Aye, he goes over the top. He goes to Germany and whips it up.”

Bullock was referring to newspaper reports of David Irving addressing rallies of German sympathizers. I had one of those reports in my possession, a 1991 dispatch by Gitta Sereny, author of Albert Speer: His Battle with Truth. She depicts Irving telling a Hamburg audience that in two years “this myth of mass murders of Jews in the death factories of Auschwitz, Majanek and Treblinka . . . which in fact never took place” will be laid to rest. “Two days later,” Sereny reports, Irving “delivered his message to a mob of tattooed flag-waving youths in the former East German city of Halle. The crowd shouted ‘Sieg Heil’ when he extolled the heroism of ‘that great German martyr, Rudolf Hess.’”

For all his mystical contemplation of the notion of Jesus embracing Judas, Bullock seems to see Irving as an unforgivable Judas to historical truth. Clearly, he simply despises him. “Strange little rascal,” Bullock said of Irving. We’d been talking about conscious evil. “I do think he was evil. He whips it up, and he knows he’s doing it.”

Is David Irving evil? If evil is a destination, Bullock believes Irving has already arrived at the station. I’m not sure. I believe I saw him at a moment when he’d reached the last stop before the terminal and was in the process of deciding whether to step off or go the distance.

Indeed, the decision-making process seemed to be going on before my eyes. It’s rare to see the defining moment of such a process enacted out loud, but that’s what I felt I was watching as I listened to Irving struggle with a fateful dilemma over a manuscript, one he is proud of discovering and yet wants to repudiate, delegitimize. Because it contains within it a refutation of the last two decades of his work. Because it contains that which Irving had long

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