The Unpersuadables: Adventures with the Enemies of Science (36 page)

‘Why Germany?’ I asked.

Irving looked at me.

‘This will be your last question,’ he said. ‘To learn the language. And I thought being a steelworker would be nice and tough.’

‘Maybe I’m seeing patterns where there aren’t any,’ I said. ‘But as a boy you were suspicious that you were being misled about Hitler. Then there was the
Mein Kampf
thing. Then the Hitler thing at university. Then the decision to go to Germany …’

‘I don’t think there’s any particular sort of …’

‘There seems to be a gravitation …’

‘You begin to carve a rut, like a wheel running backwards and forwards in the slime. Eventually it becomes easier and easier to go in that direction. That’s probably what happened.’

‘Was there any interest in history at school?’

‘History was the one O-level I failed. Now,’ he said, pushing himself painfully to his feet, ‘I’ve got to go and do some things.’

Evening

At noon, we left for Mragowo, a small town on the edge of a lake in what was once East Prussia, which was to be our base for the next few days. It was a long journey in a small bus. They pored over maps as Mark said, ‘I’m always interested in signs and roads and markers and
boundaries.’ He told a story about his childhood au pair, whose family had been sent to Kazakhstan from Russia by Stalin only for them to move later to Germany. ‘She told me, ‘The Germans call us Russian and the Russians call us German. I have no identity. I have nothing.”’ Mark’s voice was desolate with pity as he recounted this tale. It was as if it was the saddest thing that he had ever heard.

I sat with Alex over lunch. ‘You know the Queensland floods?’ he told me. ‘Did you know that the Queensland government was negotiating with Thailand to buy weather-controlling equipment just before it happened?’

‘No!’

‘Oh yeah. Have you seen the EU Parliament House? Have a good look at it.’ He leaned forward menacingly over his chips. ‘It’s based on the Tower of Babel.’

On the journey’s second leg, I asked the lorry driver from Maidstone about his childhood. ‘My dad beat the shit out of me with his belt when I got done for shoplifting in Lewisham.’

‘God, what a bastard,’ I said.

‘No!’ he said, apparently surprised by my reaction. ‘It was the best thing he ever did.’

I asked how he came to his political beliefs.

‘I saw a National Front party political broadcast,’ he said.

‘What did it say? Was it about jobs? Immigrants?’

He thought for a moment.

‘I don’t know,’ he said, still slightly emotional after all these years. ‘Everything made sense. It
just fitted
.’

He told me he was worried about the possibility of spies infiltrating the group. Apparently, Irving once accused
him
of being a spy and made him account for his life all the way back to school. Overhearing us, Mark said not to worry. ‘Jaenelle has a special piece of software she can check names against to ensure no journalists get in.’

As the bus turned into the hotel, the men who had been on last year’s tour recalled bathing in the lake. Some began to tease Jaenelle, inviting her to join them for a ‘skinny dip’. ‘I’m not putting my hair in lake water!’ she cooed. ‘That’s icky!’

Once we had checked in, I asked Irving when we could recommence
our interview. ‘I don’t know,’ he said tetchily, and stalked off down a gloomy corridor.

Night

I said to Jaenelle, ‘I’m a bit worried that David might not give me any more time. We didn’t cover much ground before.’

‘I think he might be a little suspicious over your line of questioning,’ she told me. ‘I can try to have a word with him, but I should give you fair warning, there is only so much that I can do.’

We gathered in an upstairs conference room for a lecture. Irving told a story about his schooldays. ‘I had a teacher who on the first day of term found the weakest, palest little pansy in the class and hit him hard across the face, and said, “If you get that for doing nothing, just imagine what you get if I catch you doing something wrong.”’ Everyone chuckled. ‘Of course,’ he added ruefully, ‘you’d be imprisoned if you did that these days.’

As Irving’s lecture rolled on, I realised that his knowledge of the war is truly staggering. Locations, dates, names, documents,
I’ve met him
,
I interviewed his wife
,
I’ve read his diaries
. At one point, he claimed to have read two million messages to German soldiers, each one delivering news of destroyed houses or dead family members. He uses his command of history like a shield, a baton and a very large hat, to defend and to intimidate and to impress.

Along the way, he mentioned that he had three unpublished books in note form – his memoirs, volume three of a work on Churchill and a biography of Himmler. ‘I’m interested in personalities,’ he told us. ‘I want to find out how Himmler changed from pious schoolboy to mass murderer. I’m going with the Himmler book next. It stands the best chance of restoring my tattered reputation. It’ll still upset a few people, though. I’ve still got a few puddles to stamp in. I’m always looking for puddles to stamp in.’

After he’d finished, the party fell into general chatter. One told a story about a talk he once gave during which he said that it was a ‘well-known fact that eighty-three per cent of Jewish monuments are desecrated by Jews themselves. I completely made it up.’

4 SEPTEMBER

‘You know that monument to fucking Stephen Lawrence?’ the Maidstone lorry driver said to me, en route to the Himmler bunker. ‘You know it was splashed with paint? My mate’s a copper down in Eltham. He said it was the Afric-wog-niggers that did it. It’s like the Zionists are behind eighty per cent of Jewish desecrations.’

After we had scrambled around the Himmler bunker for half an hour or so, we stopped off at another hidden network of old Nazi bases in the woods. Aldrich the German became uncommonly excited at the mud-caked display of found Nazi objects. He knelt in the dirt staring through the sights of a machine gun, before picking it up and demonstrating all the different ways it could be held, then leapt off in the direction of an enormous anti-aircraft weapon, desperately trying to explain, in his frayed English, how it worked. Even passing tourists were pulled into his berserk atmosphere.

‘Speak English?’ he demanded of one bemused couple.

‘No.’

‘Sprechen sie Deutsch?’

‘No.’

He pointed anyway.

‘Machine gun! Machine gun!’

I followed him through the maze of bunkers. He kept gripping his hands and shuddering with the thrill of it all.

‘Amazing to think that Hitler was here,’ I said.

‘For me?’ He mimed his forehead exploding. ‘Just the power! The sheer power! The world will never see anything like it again. Just to walk in this place where such powerful people walked!’ He thumped his chest. ‘I am shaking.’ He took a couple of paces, then began goose-stepping up and down, cursing himself for not going in a straight enough line.

When we were all back on the bus, there was a moment of silence. I heard Mark mutter from the back, ‘Thank
God
Aldrich has gone back to normal.’

Earlier, when I asked Irving yet again about our interview, he brushed me off, saying. ‘You keep bothering me about that.’ I had another word with Jaenelle. ‘I’m really worried he’s going to shut me down,’ I told her.

‘He has done that before.’

When I reminded her that I had been offered a refund if I didn’t get enough time, she promised, once again, that she would speak with him.

Back in my room, I telephoned my fiancée, Farrah. We are due to be married the day after I return from my Nazi holiday. The timing, I have to admit, has not gone down well.

‘Are you safe?’ she asked.

I decided not to mention the incident with the book.

‘And do they know we’re getting married?’

‘Jaenelle has asked about it,’ I said. ‘She wanted to know why I proposed and I said, you know, it felt like the right time, and we want to have children and all that.’

‘I wonder what they’d make of me,’ said Farrah, who is of mixed English-Pakistani parentage.

‘I could never introduce you to this lot,’ I said. ‘They spent about half an hour going on about “fucking mongrel people”.’

‘Mongrel people?’ She giggled. ‘Yeah, I’d take that.’

At dinner, Jaenelle sat down with a side-dish of salad heaped with raw chopped garlic and onion. ‘It might stop me being gang-raped by the lake later,’ she explained.

When we had finished our meal, she made an announcement to the group.

‘You gentlemen might be interested to know that Will, here, is getting married because he doesn’t want his children to be bastards.’ She smiled and gave a gracious and approving nod. ‘Do you have a photograph of your fiancée you can show us?’

Everyone was looking. Everyone was waiting.

‘Uh,’ I said. ‘Ah. Not on me.’

Jaenelle gave me a quizzical look.

‘That’s odd,’ she said. ‘You don’t carry a photograph of your fiancée?’

‘Oh, you know,’ I said. ‘We’ve been together for years.’

And somehow the moment passed.

5 SEPTEMBER

Evening

While we waited for our guide at Hitler’s bunker, I had a coffee with the posh Englishman. He told me, ‘Do you know, Africans have no sense of past or future? They live entirely in the present. That is why, if they steal a flatscreen television, they won’t think, “Will I get into trouble?” or, “Do I have room for this in my home?” They have no sense of compassion either. They’ll think nothing of slashing a baby. Cutting a baby in half.’

We spent some time perusing a nearby display. Alex pointed at a German helmet. ‘It’s strange,’ he mused. ‘I remember asking for one of those for Christmas when I was ten. Even then I was sympathetic to the true German cause. It was intuition. I used to build models of German soldiers. My dad said, “But don’t forget what they did.” And even at that age I felt rebellion against it.’

Over the last few days I have learned that both of the quiet Australian’s parents are German (he’ll later decline to watch a screening of
Downfall
, as his father ‘was there’ and he finds it too upsetting); the university administrator has a German mother; Aldrich’s German father fought in the war, and Mark, the American, has a German mother. It is hard not to speculate: are these men on an unconscious hero quest, seeking to defend the honour of their parents against history? Are they on a mission of love?

And if so, how do we explain David Irving? If what I have learned is correct, he is likely to sincerely believe that his beliefs are influenced only by superior data, while they actually spring from some irrational, emotional core – something, quite probably, from his childhood. But Irving’s father was not sympathetic to Hitler. He
fought
the Nazis. His brothers, too, were straightforwardly patriotic. And Irving admired them all.

It doesn’t make any sense.

Night

Jaenelle was delayed and when she finally arrived, she went to the buffet and helped herself to some chocolate cake, three boiled potatoes
and a ladle of stewed pork and gravy. It was all on the same plate, a precariously narrow corridor of clean china between the sweet and the savoury. Alex nodded approvingly at the arrangement. ‘Good,’ he said. ‘Segregated.’

After dinner, we gathered in the basement bar area. Mark offered to buy me a beer and when I told him that I don’t drink, he gave me an unnervingly steady look and said, ‘I knew there was a reason that I didn’t trust you.’ I slunk away, unable to prevent visions of my being discovered, beaten-up and abandoned by twenty-first century Nazis, among the old East Prussian pines.

I was still fretting about Mark’s comment when he persuaded the barman to lend him his laptop. Alex commandeered it excitedly. On YouTube, he found some footage from
Downfall
that had been comically re-subtitled to have Hitler raging about Ryanair. As we were laughing at the clip, a group of elderly German tourists settled on a next-door table. Mark, now drunk, seemed determined to get a reaction from them, shouting, ‘We can’t let anyone overhear us talking about our
judenhasse
[Jew hate].’ Aldrich the German winced. ‘It is very dangerous, you know.’

But Mark wasn’t listening. He turned the laptop’s volume to its maximum level and played ‘The Horst Wessel Song’, the Nazi Party anthem, over and over. He kept looking my way as he did this and I made sure to laugh along and nod my head and pretend to know the music. Then, he found Joseph Goebbels’s ‘total war’ speech. He seemed familiar with all the words and kept glancing at me, checking my responses. I smiled and applauded loudly at the correct times. The elderly Germans talked among themselves, quietly, unsmilingly.

As soon as I found an opportunity, I slipped out of the garden door and walked through clouds of mosquitoes to the lake. The moon stared coldly over the black trees and the water moved softly on the shore, as if murmuring in sleep. I was startled to find somebody else there – Alex. To my surprise, he too was escaping Mark.

‘I don’t like that stuff,’ he said. ‘I mean, I might be old fashioned, but I think when you go to another country, you’re an ambassador. I know some Aussies go overseas and act like pricks, but I’m not one of them. I don’t want people thinking …’ He loses his thread momentarily.
‘Look, there’s good and bad in every society,’ he says. ‘But you know how people like to put labels on you.’

And there was nothing I could think to say to that. Absolutely nothing at all.

6 SEPTEMBER

Evening

Over dinner, some of the tour members were openly hostile towards Irving. The quiet Australian asked Mark, ‘How historically accurate is
Downfall
? Like, fifty per cent?’

‘You’ll have to ask the professor there,’ Mark said, motioning across the room to Irving. His face scowled down into his uncanny impression. ‘“
I knew his wife, I’ve read his son’s diary.
” I didn’t ask you about his fucking son’s diary, I asked you how accurate the film was.’

That evening, Mark and I took a walk along the lake. Last night, I had confided in him my worries about Irving not granting me any more time.