Springtime for Hitler-and Stalin

...I don't...

...In Goebbels Irving not only avoids defending mass murder...

...To Thurston, it is not the targets that are important but the fact that many officials chose to exceed them...

...The Nazis and the Bolsheviks did not triumph because the state failed to make a serious effort to control them...

...Indeed, Goebbels had already been released in Britain, albeit under the author's own imprint...

...Irving himself published and wrote the Foreword to Tlte Leuchter Report: An Engineering Report on the Alleged Gas Chambers at Auschwitz, Birkenau, andMajdanek, Poland...

...To be sure, they should have exercised more self-restraint...

...Martin's or Yale or any other house to give us anything it doesn't want to: In a world of limited means, publishing decisions are inherently decisions to exclude as well as include...

...Irving also declares: "The corrupt Nazi upper echelons were interested only in their own well-being...

...So on April 24 Life and Terror in Stalin s Russia, 1934-1941, by Robert W. Thurston (Yale, 296 pp., $30.00), made its official appearance...

...Thurston, a professor of history at the University of Miami, in Ohio, has the right to take revisionism to new heights, or depths...

...At times, Irving does make an effort to justify his subtitle: Mastermind of the Third Reich...

...IN the main, the author has kept obviously extreme views out of Goebbels—by skirting around rather than rejecting them...

...Moreover, 10 of his titles are currently available in the United States...

...Mostly on the strength of his very low estimate of the number of victims of the 1937-38 cataclysm—2.5 million arrested, of whom about 680,000 were executed—Thurston insists that "Extensive fear did not exist in the USSR at any time in the late 1930s...

...In the first place, this does not exculpate Stalin...

...Irving has the right to produce even thoroughly mendacious books inspired by fascism...

...Martin's Press was scheduled to issue a controversial new biography of Hitler's propaganda chief, Joseph Goebbels...

...That is common enough among academics, though, and would not ensure rejection from a university press...

...He further argued that in 1939 Hitler was entitled to fear and "intern" the Jews because Chaim Weizmann, then president of the Jewish Agency for Palestine and later Israel's first president, had "declared war" on the Third Reich...

...he at one point refers to the Jews of Berlin as the "innocent victims of his [Goebbels'] obsession...

...Yet we should not imagine that something of basic importance has been achieved by suppressing the publication of Irving's dishonest work...

...As to Thurston, what he has written is less a book than a collection of index cards...

...In 1988, Irving and such Holocaust revisionists as Robert Faurisson arranged a critical inquiry into the gas chambers by Fred A. Leuchter, who then specialized in building equipment for executions...

...Thurston minimizes Stalin's role in Soviet political life and contends that Stalinism not only had its constructive as well as its murderous side but did not discredit the whole of Soviet-style socialism...

...Most important, writing of any kind should be an honest statement of the author's opinions, not the public face of a man with a private agenda, as Goebbels manifestly is...

...Even so, the author must concede that Winston Churchill was "every inch a match" for Goebbels as a propagandist, and that the Jews in America made better movies than he did: Goebbels admired many Hollywood productions and, writes Irving, "pandered to Hitler's lowbrow film tastes, giving him 18 Mickey Mouse cartoons for Christmas 1937...

...Neither estimate includes deaths in the Gulag...

...This contemptuous treatment of his ideological fellow travelers recalls Castle to Castle, Celine's bitter novel about the quarreling among French Fascist leaders, including Celine himself, in the German stronghold where their retreating protectors had brought them to temporary safety in 1944...

...As it happens, while no known document authorizing the genocide has Hitler's signature on it, Himmler said on several occasions, including one immediately after watching the gas chambers in operation at Auschwitz in 1943, that the crime was committed at Hitler's behest...

...Freedom of expression was not what made it possible for the Nazis to seize power...

...In that book he announced that the Fiihrer never planned the Holocaust and did not learn about it until October 1943, when he ordered the closing of the gas chambers...

...Early this year, too, there were reports that a major university press was bringing out a work which systematically minimizes the crimes of Joseph Stalin and Stalinism...

...Second, the zeal of his underlings probably shows fear of the dictator, not of the so-called Opposition...

...Whatever one may think about the folly of William Bennett and similar conservatives who seem to feel that media companies have a unique moral responsibility, at least they are correct in asserting that Time Warner et al...

...Martin's (until it dropped the book) and the Sunday Times in effect played the very same role...

...The point was not that no mass murder took place...

...For instance: "The NK.VD [the state security service] did not always fabricate evidence...

...He now proposed that they were a hoax invented by British intelligence in World War II and exploited by Israel to obtain German reparations...

...The publicity surrounding his unsavory political connections cost him his unsavory business...

...Thurston, by contrast, gives us no reason to suspect that we don't have his full and real opinions in Life and Terror...

...The footnotes for these numbers direct us to a newspaper published by Goebbels...

...Later that year, according to Tina Rosenberg in the New York Times Book Review, Irving induced the London Sunday Times to pay him to translate the diaries by pretending to have found them himself...

...There are additional claims, some really reprehensible, of a moral equivalency between Soviet evils and American shortcomings, such as McCarthyism...

...Publishers have the right to put such efforts into print, and booksellers to sell them...

...Thurston's main line of argument in Life and Terror inevitably brings to mind the academic revisionist defenders of the U.S...

...McCormick, in explaining the cancellation of Goebbels, charged that Irving attempts to show that the "Jews brought it onto themselves...

...Hein-rich Himmler, the SS chief, and Reinhard Heydrich, the head of the Security Police, were fingered as the prime movers of the Final Solution...

...Despite its doubly suspect provenance, this is an important point: Far Rightists often assume that their loathing of Jews is not the attractive part of their message...

...Robert Conquest, the author of The Great Terror, forcefully proposes a figure as high as 1.7 million executions in his Times Literary Supplement review...

...In Goebbels he notes that the credit belongs to a German researcher named Elke Frolich...

...Goebbels is based on its subject's private diaries, mostly stored in a Moscow vault until their discovery in 1992...

...He believes, for example, that the periodic variations in Communist proclamations—sometimes calling for murderous vigilance against enemies, sometimes for closer attention to evidence—should be taken seriously as efforts to "liberalize" or tighten up the political climate of the 1930s...

...Communist Party of the 1930s...

...This is true—if we are very clear that "it" means anti-Semitism and not genocide...

...Nor did a far worse kind of repression stop Lenin...

...At this stage of Irving's evolution, he morally compared the mass murder of the Jews to the catastrophically destructive British and American bombing of German cities in the latter years of the War...

...elsewhere, he speaks of "the Final Solution, in all its heathen criminality...

...During the early part of Goebbels' career, before the Nazi triumph of 1933, the future propaganda minister himself made an observation of great relevance to this problem: "If we succeed in planting in the Reichstag [the German national legislature] 60 or 70 of our own agitators and organizers, then the [Weimar] state itself will equip and pay for our fighting machine...

...We never find out why...

...and its willingness to serve tyrannical foreign masters didn't deprive the movement itself of legitimacy...

...Can it be done without expensive editorial help...

...When the gas chambers come up it is in connection with a British newspaper report, a BBC "propaganda" broadcast, and allegations at a Soviet trial...

...Where the diaries reveal Goebbels' fanatical racism and encouragement of "excess" (such as Kristallnacht, for which Irving holds him solely answerable), we are told to accept them...

...In 1930, Jews would be convicted in 42 of 210 known narcotics smuggling cases...

...The news raised more than a few eyebrows, but no one protested...

...By working hand in glove with Irving, St...

...Or: "Some [Soviet] people actually enjoyed life during the late 1930s, something the 'total fear' theory, and indeed most Western accounts of the period, cannot admit...

...Lithuanian collaboration in the Holocaust is likewise attributed to the belief that the Jews had supported the Soviet Union during its first occupation of that country (1939-41...

...The only crematoria Irving notices are located in a Soviet diplomatic building in Paris...

...This is among Irving's strongest criticisms of his idol Hitler...

...Nevertheless, in specific circumstances, Irving is quite prepared to intimate that hatred of Jews is, alas, only too understandable...

...are accountable for the content of their offerings...

...She told Rosenberg that Irving "tells lie after lie...

...In 1941, by Irving's account, the propaganda chief issued an anti-Semitic diatribe—actually one of thousands—that was taken by the SS as "a sign from above" and therefore constituted "a watershed in the Final Solution of the Jewish problem...

...In this sense, its publication by a major firm was considerably less objectionable than Dunne's original decision to put the resources of St...

...they bear the colophon not only of a far Right publisher in California but also of firms like Avon, Macmillan and (two of them) St...

...IRVING'S REAL OBJECT in Goebbels, however, is not to claim that the Jews deserved the Holocaust but, as in the earlier part of his career, to proclaim Hitler's innocence...

...It is acceptable among Nazi apologists to denounce Himmler, since he deserted the Fiihrer in the closing days of the War...

...If you believe commercial considerations are the sole relevant criteria for publication, stop here...

...Unfortunately, in Irving's case the answer to both questions was yes...

...Much of the company's staff was infuriated, and on April 4 Chairman Thomas J. McCormick canceled the deal for Goebbels: Mastermind of the Third Reich...

...Hitler, we are told repeatedly, was much less extreme in his prejudices than Goebbels was...

...Thus, in considering a manuscript an acquiring editor starts by subjecting it to fairly standard tests: Is there a market for it...

...Besides being variously painted as the "hater of mankind," a "poisonous dwarf," the "little doctor," an "inkpot hero," a "little cripple" (he had a clubfoot), and the "cynical propaganda minister," Goebbels is described in this biography as "more corrupt than the most gluttonous Jewish magnates of his popular invective...

...Irving's massive documentation often generates distrust on close examination...

...Nazi newspapers were closed for libels against the Jews...

...For what it is worth in the light of the controversy over Daniel Jonah Goldhagen's Hitler s Willing Executioners, one of Goebbels' officials told him in August 1943 that "anti-Semitism is as unpopular as ever among the mass of the people"— the usual tenor of reports on the subject, Irving indicates...

...To save him, Irving throws Goebbels to the dogs...

...They triumphed because it failed to prevent the disasters that gave them their chance...

...Of Goebbels' decision, as Nazi leader in Berlin during the early 1930s, to publicize all crimes committed by Jews, Irving comments unctuously: "In these closing years of the Weimar Republic, he was unfortunately not always wrong...

...Thurston submits, too, that Stalin's allegedly genuine dread of "wreckers," "Trotskyists" and so forth propelled what in the hands of others (notably the 1936-38 NKVD chief Nikolai I. Yezhov) became the Terror...

...Where they state explicitly and repeatedly that Hitler fully embraced Goebbels' views and suggestions on racial policy, we are urged to skepticism...

...Martin's itself...

...More plausibly, he stresses that the intensity of political persecution varied during the decade...

...The term "Holocaust" is applied exclusively to the Allied bombing of Hamburg...

...In addition, Irving claimed The Diary of Anne Frank had been concocted by her father and popular novelist Meyer Levin...

...On the Holocaust revisionist lecture circuit, Irving has become a leading speaker...

...At just one point does Irving forget himself in Goebbels...

...No—just as often as it had to...

...The diaries, says Irving, are "acceptable as evidence against Goebbels, but not necessarily against third parties...

...Stalin, they say, didn't make all of the CPUSA's decisions...

...ONE VITAL PART of Robert Thurston's agenda resembles Irving's: his insistence on exculpating Stalin by maintaining that he did not plan the Terror—the climactic period of political persecution in 1937 and 1938—and was not responsible for many of its horrors...

...Still, terror did not (as he suggests) end in 1938—only the Terror did...

...it was simply that there were no gas chambers...

...Of course, neither volume could—or should—have been proscribed by the government...

...in 1932,69 of the 210 known international narcotics dealers were Jewish...

...Weimar Germany wasn't a liberal society in the American sense: Its police could and frequently did ban speeches by Hitler, Goebbels and other Nazis...

...Although its author, a well-known professional writer named David Irving, describes himself as a "moderate Fascist," the acquiring editor, Thomas Dunne, knew nothing at all about his political background...

...Herschel Grynszpan, whose assassination of a German diplomat in 1938 supplied the pretext for the anti-Semitic orgy of Kristallnacht, somehow managed to survive the War and lived to see the trial of one of Goebbels' lieutenants...

...its membership wasn't tainted by the leaders' sins...

...Another of Thurston's techniques is to accept Soviet propaganda statements at face value...

...Martin's Press at Irving's disposal...

...The author calls this "one of the ultimate ironies of the Final Solution which the young Jew's pistol shots in 1938 had helped to unleash...

...Auschwitz figures merely as "the most brutal of all Himmler's slave labor camps and the one with the highest mortality rate"—from unidentified causes...

...IRVING'S PRIVATE AGEND makes it clear that Goebbels is a sort of Trojan horse filled with as much fascism as the author dared put in...

...If Stalin had really feared a concrete conspiracy, he would have demanded the execution of the conspirators, not of an arbitrary number of "enemies of the people...

...In reality, as Thurston is forced to admit, documents clearly show that in July 1937 Stalin and the Politburo ordered every branch of the NKVD throughout the USSR to arrest and shoot a specific number of "anti-Soviet elements"—72,950 executions in all, with an additional 177,500 individuals to be sent to the camps...

...Thurston's mode of argument typically involves presenting the "orthodox approach" in an artificially extreme form and then spuriously refuting it...

...No such accounts are identified...

...David Irving came to the world's attention in 1977 with Hitler's War...

...An acquiring editor should give some thought to whether a book raises the standard of debate or—like the wholly manufactured controversy about the existence of gas chambers at Auschwitz and other death camps—lowers it...

...and Nazi meetings deemed threats to public order were prohibited...

...On the other hand, the First Amendment does not oblige St...

...Yet, even granting Thurston's figure, 680,000 political murders in two years would surely be more than enough to generate "extensive fear...

...Irving's strategy, again, is not to deny the killing of large numbers of Jewish civilians but to avoid contradicting specific beliefs that he expresses openly in Fascist publications and in interviews...