off Irving ; turning the tables so that the claimant becomes in effect the defendant and the original defamatory statements are amplified , repeated and backed up by overwhelming amounts of evidence , was the central objective of the defence . Moreover , the judge had ruled inadmissible Irving ’ s argument , to which he clearly attached considerable weight , that Lipstadt was part of a global Jewish conspiracy to discredit him , and allowing him to cross-examine her would also have allowed him to bring that argument back into play .
By relying on expert testimony , the defence hoped to overwhelm Irving with evidence that proved he was a Holocaust denier and a falsifier of historical evidence , and the film sticks fairly close to the actual events in court when it shows Robert Jan Van Pelt stumbling in the fact of Irving ’ s assault on the evidence he has assembled , when it appeared that the holes in the Auschwitz crematorium roof through which canisters of Zyklon-B were dropped into the room below , where the body heat generated by the crowded Jewish victims would turn it into a deadly gas , killing them all , could not be seen in the photographs taken from above . The film shows Lipstadt in despair at this turn of events , and indeed everyone in the defence was taken aback and wondering what to do . In the film it is only with difficulty that Lipstadt is persuaded that the experts will win out in the end .
And so the next day ’ s proceedings in the movie open as I step into the witness box and proceed to rescue the situation with a detailed demonstration of how Irving falsified and deliberately misinterpreted a crucial document , which is cleverly projected in large lettering onto the wall behind me ( it was not in the actual trial , of course ), to show how it was written in the old German script , known as Sütterlin , indecipherable to anyone who does not know , as Irving and I do , how to read it . This makes dramatic sense , and of course is very flattering to me , but it is grossly unfair to Van Pelt , who in further days of testimony redeemed himself and showed with absolute clarity and conviction that the holes in the crematorium roof were there even after the SS had blown the building up .
Where Van Pelt , an expert on the architecture , construction and operation of Auschwitz , presented testimony on these aspects of the Holocaust , and on Irving ’ s distortion and manipulation of the evidence for them , my role , as I have indicated , was to go through Irving ’ s writings and speeches to see whether they were falsifying the evidence in order to deny the Holocaust . Lipstadt ’ s memoir History on Trial accurately presents me at the outset , along with my researchers , as undecided : none of us had in fact read Irving ’ s work , which was popular history of a very empirical , or perhaps one should say supposedly empirical narrative kind – he was uninterested in the arguments and theories which are the stuff of undergraduate teaching , and so we had not even considered using them . But the movie presents us as ‘ out to get ’ Irving from the very beginning , which we were not . We simply did not know what we would find .
We decided to take the evidence for 19 events or groups of events which according to Irving presented the only reliable and proven instances of Hitler ’ s attitude to , and role in , the Holocaust ; every one of them , he claimed , showed Hitler was ‘ probably the best friend the Jews had in the Third Reich ’. We parceled them out amongst ourselves and set to work . Every couple of weeks we would have a meeting to discuss our findings . These were truly exciting occasions , as Nik or Tom would come in waving some papers and saying ‘ you ’ ll never believe what he ’ s done here !’ As we went steadily through the evidence , we uncovered case after case of sometimes quite subtle manipulation of the evidence , all adding up to an overwhelming indictment of his methods . The movie chooses not to convey this sense of excitement and to a degree misrepresents our attitude , worryingly conveying the misleading impression that we were already biased against Irving even before we started work on the case . We were not .
My own task also included assessments of whether Irving had a good reputation as an historian , a point which formed a significant part of his case , though in the end , for reasons I found hard to fathom , the judge ruled this irrelevant to
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Observing Memories Issue 5