“Denial” and the Legacy of Holocaust Trials
When the film Denial opens in theaters nationwide this fall, the world will once again be reminded of the days and weeks that history came to trial. For 32 days in the winter of 2000, Dr. Deborah Lipstadt experienced the unthinkable. Her words, research, and well-respected work were picked apart by David Irving, a well-known Holocaust denier, who sued her for libel in the High Court of London for classifying his statements as Holocaust denial in her book, Denying the Holocaust.
When I first met Dr. Lipstadt, Dorot Professor of Jewish and Holocaust Studies at Emory University, as a freshman at Emory in 1997, attempting to enroll in a course on Holocaust memoirs, I had no idea that it had been two years since she had begun that fight — that would not end until the ultimate judgment on April 11, 2000. Neither one of us knew the shape and significance that the trial would take, nor the ultimate impact that it would have.
The trial has been called many things: a trial of history, an affront to honest and rigorous scholarship, and in the end, a triumph of truth and memory. But before Lipstadt entered the Royal Courts of Justice, other courtrooms, documents, and witnesses predated her trial. As her barrister Richard Rampton (depicted by Tom Wilkinson) intones in the film’s trailer, “This case is happening to you, but it is not about you.” It was also about more than the historical facts that ultimately won the day. It was equally indebted to the legacy of the hard-won Holocaust trials that came before it.
“This case is happening to you, but it is not about you.”
The famed International Military Tribunals, commonly referred to as the Nuremberg Trials, tried 22 major war criminals between October 18, 1945, and October 1, 1946, with, among other things, the newly coined charge of “crimes against humanity.” Subsequent trials took place in US occupied zones as well as other Allied zones, including Austria, France, the United Kingdom, and the Soviet Union. During the trials, American Chief Prosecutor Justice Robert Jackson famously relied almost exclusively on documents — in most cases, perpetrator documents — over and above survivor and witness testimony.
As he would write later in his memoirs, “The documents could not be accused of partiality, forgetfulness, or invention, and would make the sounder foundation, not only for the immediate guidance of the tribunal, but for the ultimate verdict of history.”
The result was that the tribunal declared, “The case, therefore, against the defendants rests in large measure on documents of their own making.” The defense was undone by their very own words.
The defense was undone by their very own words.
Another trial took place sixteen years later, 1961, in Jerusalem that owed its very different approach to Jackson’s assertions. When Adolf Eichmann, a major architect of the Nazi Final Solution, was indicted and brought to trial, he was charged not only with crimes against humanity, but also crimes against the Jewish people. Gideon Hausner, the chief prosecutor, chose to rely almost exclusively on survivor testimony in building his case against Eichmann.
His opening statement set the tone for the trial, “As I stand before you, judges of Israel, to lead the prosecution of Adolf Eichmann, I am not standing alone. With me are 6 million accusers. But they cannot rise to their feet to point an accusing finger toward the glass booth and cry out at the man sitting there, ‘I accuse.’ ” He continued, “Their blood cries out, but their voices cannot be heard. I, therefore, will be their spokesman and will pronounce, in their names, this awesome indictment.”
“Their blood cries out, but their voices cannot be heard.”
In this historic trial, it was the dead themselves — not a state actor, nor a military tribunal — who stood as the accusers and the prosecutors.
It is against this backdrop that Lipstadt’s trial emerged. Like in the Nuremberg trial, David Irving was indeed undone by his own words. As the trial transcripts show, and as the film meticulously depicts — screenwriter David Hare did not alter a single word of the trial proceedings — Irving was proven to deliberately pervert the facts of the Holocaust to fit his own antisemitic and racist aims.
Also like Nuremberg, Lipstadt’s trial did not put survivors on the stand. The historian herself did not take the stand either. Instead, her words and her research spoke for themselves. However, it would be disingenuous to say that the trial took place without survivors. Like the Eichmann trial that came before it, they were everywhere. They were there in the previous testimony of survivor Ada Bimko, whose words provided critical insights into the gas chambers as Auschwitz for one of the trial’s expert witnesses.
They were there in the words of iconic child diarist Anne Frank, whose fate and legacy would have been perverted beyond recognition if not for the meticulous efforts of the defense. And most of all, they were there in solidarity, as the accusers to a man who sought to destroy the memory of the millions murdered in the most systematic, complete, and mechanized fashion in the modern world.
Unlike what we might think of as a Holocaust trial, this trial did not bring a Nazi official or collaborator to justice. And yet, this was not, in the end, a trial without a perpetrator. Rather, its perpetrator came in the most dangerous form of all: the annihilation of history.
Its perpetrator came in the most dangerous form of all: the annihilation of history.
While audiences will see one woman’s struggle for truth and memory depicted on screen in Denial, they will also truly be seeing the many, many stories behind it. It was a fight Lipstadt did not seek, and did not need to wage. There were those who urged her to let the charges lie, who said that to give Irving the public platform for his ideas was the greater crime, but to do so would have been to ignore the voices that cry out from the ground for justice.
Instead, Lipstadt fought for those voices and those stories. They stood with her. She carried them into that London courtroom, together with the many words that they left behind, that so often form the backbone of Holocaust research. Holocaust survivor and groundbreaking poet Paul Celan famously wrote, “No one bears witness for the witnesses.”
What Lipstadt’s trial shows is how she spoke not for, but instead with those very witnesses every day of her trial and every day thereafter.
Written by Leah Wolfson, PhD, Senior Program Officer, Mandel Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies, US Holocaust Memorial Museum.
