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March 3, 2000/26 Adar 1, 5760, Vol. 52, No.26
Eichmann memoirs released for libel trial
NAOMI SEGAL
and DOUGLAS DAVIS
Jewish Telegraphic Agency
Israel has decided to release the memoirs Nazi war criminal Adolf Eichmann wrote prior to his execution in Israel in 1962.
The decision followed consultations in the Justice Ministry on whether to make the document available for American scholar Deborah Lipstadt in the ongoing London defamation suit brought against her by Holocaust revisionist David Irving. Attorney General Elyakim Rubinstein said Monday that the decision reflected Israel's "historic sense of responsibility" to do "everything possible to fight Holocaust denial."
Before Monday's decision, the Justice Ministry had been discussing how to release the memoirs, which have been in the state archives for nearly four decades and have been viewed by only a few researchers.
Rubinstein said the request to use them in the Holocaust-denial suit expedited the process.
Irving is suing Lipstadt, a professor at Emory University in Atlanta, and her publisher, Penguin Books, charging they libeled him in Lipstadt's 1994 book "Denying the Holocaust: The Growing Assault on Truth and Memory."
Irving, who denies that Jews were systematically exterminated at Auschwitz, is claiming that Lipstadt ruined his career by labeling him a Holocaust denier and accusing him of distorting historical data to suit his ideological predilections.
Under British libel law, the onus of proof is on Lipstadt to show that her contentions are accurate: She has to prove that Irving possessed information about the Holocaust that he deliberately distorted, selected or suppressed to suit his own purposes.
Irving is making full use of this advantage in the courtroom by simply claiming that he is not an expert on the Holocaust, a subject that he told the judge he found boring. By asserting his relative ignorance of the subject, Irving increases the burden of proof on Lipstadt.
While the memoir has been kept under lock and key in Jerusalem for the past 40 years, it has been available to a handful of scholars. And Irving, crucially, is among the few who are believed to have acquired a detailed knowledge of the memoir.
He has used parts of the Eichmann account to support his contention that there was no systematic genocide.
Irving also has claimed that Hitler did not know until the final stages of World War II about the Nazis' "Final Solution" to exterminate European Jewry.
During the Justice Ministry deliberations regarding the release of the memoirs, it was pointed out that Eichmann wrote several times that Hitler was aware of the plan.
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