Archive/File: people/i/irving.david/libel.suit/transcripts/day032.09
Last-Modified: 2000/07/25

                  Even if I had read that far on that day's glass
        plate in the Moscow archives, and even if I had seen those
        lines of diary entries, some 20 pages after the page where
        I in fact stopped reading for that that day -- and I must
        emphasise again that I did not read that far on that day
        because that did not come within my remit, I doubt that

.          P-95

        I would have attached any significance to them other than
        adding this list to the occasions -- adding this entry to
        the list of occasions on which Hitler harked back, for
        whatever reason, to his famous "prophecy" of 1939.

                  I have read again the printed version of the
        meeting of the generalgouvernenent, the Polish
        authorities, the German occupation authorities in Poland,
        Hans Frank, on December 16th 1941. It is significant to
        see the amount of space taken, even in this abridged
        published version, by the typhus epidemic sweeping through
        the region, the climax of which was expected to come in
        April 1942.  Hans Frank states that he has begun
        negotiation with the purpose of deporting the Jews to the
        East, and he mentions the big Heydrich conference which is
        set down for January 1942 on this topic in Berlin.  Then
        comes the sentence which pulls the rug out from beneath
        the Defendant's feet, in my submission: Hans Frank
        says:  "For us the Jews are exceptionally damaging mouths
        to feed. We've got an estimated 2.5 million here in the
        Generalgouvernement, perhaps 3.5 million Jews now, what
        with all their kinfolk and hangers-on. We cannot shoot
        these 3.5 million Jews, we cannot poison them, but we will
        be able to do something with them which somehow or other
        will have the result of destroying them, in fact, in
        conjunction with the grander measures still to be
        discussed at Reich level".  I think that is a fair

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        translation of that passage.

   MR JUSTICE GRAY:  It is not complete, but it is fair.

   MR IRVING:  Ah, your Lordship says it is not complete.  This is
        an extract taken from a seven or eight page printed volume.

   MR JUSTICE GRAY:  Yes, it is what Frank says he was told in
        Berlin that I think perhaps is not there, but, anyway, press on.

   MR IRVING:  I would -- well, I will press on.  The December
        18th 1941 diary entry by Himmler reads, this is the diary
        entry made by Himmler, it is an agenda for his meeting
        with Hitler on December 18th 1941, Himmler jotted down the
        words "Judenfrage", Jewish question, and next to that in
        German the words "als partisanen auszurotten", Himmler
        had, as I pointed out to the Court, repeatedly referred in
        earlier documents to the phrase "Juden als Partisanen".
        This was nothing new or sensational therefore, and the
        words he was recording were, in my submission, not
        necessarily Hitler's but more probably his own stereotype
        phrase.  The correct pedantic translation, is in any
        case "Jewish problem, to be wiped out as being
        partisans".  Not "like partisans", which would have been
        "wie partisanen".  There can be no equivocating about
        this translation of "als".  Wie is a comparison, als is an equivalent.

   MR JUSTICE GRAY:  I think that probably is a convenient

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        moment.  2 o'clock.

                        (Luncheon adjournment)

   MR JUSTICE GRAY:  Schlegelberger, Mr Irving.

   MR IRVING:  Before Schlegelberger, my Lord, on December 16th
        1941, there was a meeting in Poland which Hans Frank
        referred to discussions he had in Berlin, in the course of
        which he said in Berlin the people asked us ----

   MR JUSTICE GRAY:  Liquidate them yourselves, something like that, was it not?

   MR IRVING:  He said to the people in Berlin: "Imagine that we
        are housing these people in nice little housing estates
        here in the Baltic, in the Eastern territories.  We tell
        them we cannot handle it here, liquidate them yourselves.
        My submission on that is that this is a reference to the
        Gauleiters from the Ostland whom he had met in Berlin, on
        whom the Jews being deported were going to be dumped, and
        they had made that remark to him, it is remiss of me not
        to have put that in this closing submission.  I looked at
        that text again actually three or four days ago and my
        attention was drawn to the sentence before the remark
        about "liquidate them yourselves", in which it becomes
        quite plain he is referring to the Gauleiters of the
        Eastern territories by inference on whom these people are
        going to be dumped.

   MR JUSTICE GRAY:  Yes, thank you very much.

   MR IRVING:  I now come to the Schlegelberger document, which is

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        another most difficult piece of historical paper for my
        opponents.  It is a document -- I would explain for the
        benefit of those who do not know it -- which comes in a
        file of the German Ministry of Justice.

                  In late March or early April 1942, after seeing
        Germany's top civil servant who reported only to Hitler,
        Franz Schlegelberger, who was acting as Minister of
        Justice, dictated this famous memorandum, the
        Schlegelberger Document as we call it here in this
        courtroom, upon which all Holocaust historians, and the
        Defendants' experts witnesses in this case have hitherto
        turned enough blind eyes to have won several battles of
        Trafalgar.  For many years after the war it vanished, this
        document, but that is another story.  Asked about this
        specific document after a lecture in the German Institute,
        here in London in November 1998, Dr Longerich, who is now
        the Defendants' expert witness, who had the function of
        chairman, rose to inform the audience at that meeting that
        the speaker was not prepared to answer questions from
        David Irving.  It is a genuine document, the one I was
        going to ask him about, the Schlegelberger Document, and
        he refers in one breath both to Hitler and the Solution of
        Jewish Problem.  Confronted with it in the witness box,
        he, Longerich, and his fellow experts have argued either
        that it was totally unimportant, notwithstanding its
        content, or that it concerned only the Mischlinge, the

.          P-99

        mixed race Jews, and not the Final Solution in any broader
        sense.  Ingeniously in fact, Dr Longerich even tried to
        suggest it may have originated in 1940 or 1941 and not in
        1942 at all.  The document has them, in other words, in a breathless panic.

                  The document's own contents, and this is the
        wording of the actual document, it is only very short, the
        document's own contents destroys their latter argument.
        In the first sentence, it says: "Mr Reich Minister
        Lammers informed me that the Fuhrer had repeatedly
        declared to him that he wants to hear that the Solution of
        the Jewish Problem has been adjourned (or postponed) until
        after the war".  That that is the broader Final Solution
        is plain from the second sentence which follows.  It
        shows, namely the Mischling question, the mixed race
        question, was something totally different: "Accordingly",
        the memorandum continues, "the current deliberations have
        in the opinion of Mr Lammers purely theoretical value".
        Those deliberations were, as my opponents themselves have
        argued, solely concerned with what to do with the
        Mischlinge and the like.  The document is quite plain.  It
        was dictated by a lawyer, so presumably he knew what he
        was writing.  There is no room for argument.  My opponents
        have pretended for years that the document effectively
        does not exist.  So much for the Schlegelberger Document.

                  I have dealt at length in my statements in the

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        witness box, my Lord, again, and while cross-examining the
        witnesses with the other contentious items or issues,
        namely the Goebbels Diary entries for March 27th in
        future to write about the Zulu wars, because of the
        controversies that would arise.

                  Because of the inescapable conclusion that
        Hitler had probably not ordered, or been aware of until
        relatively late, of the ultimate fate of the European
        Jews, the ones who had been deported, I forfeited, as my
        US agent predicted, in that book Hitler's War, perhaps
        half a million dollars, or more, of lucrative sublicencing
        deals with major corporations, the Reader's Digest,
        paperback houses, reprints, the Sunday Times in this
        country and so on.


.          P-108

                  After I completed -- and this is important --
        a first draft of that book in about 1969 or 1970,
        I realized that there was this totally inexplicable and
        unexpected gap in the archives, namely no evidence showing
        Hitler's personal involvement.  I hired a trusted friend,
        a historian, well known to this court, Dr Elke Frohlich of
        the Institute of History in Munich, to go through all the
        then available German archives again, with the specific
        task of looking for documents linking Hitler with the
        Final Solution.  She did a conscientious and excellent
        job, working for me in the files of the Nuremberg State
        Archives, the Institut fur Zeitgeschichte, the Berlin
        Document Centre, the Bundesarchives and the military
        archives in Freiburg -  in this connection I should have
        added, of course.  Her resulting research materials, my
        correspondence with her, the index cards and photocopies,
        form a part of my Discovery in this action.  It was she,
        for example, who produced for me the then unpublished
        diary entry of the Governor-General Hans Frank, the one
        that I just dealt with, it was actually a meeting
        transcript of December 13th, 1941.  It was currently being
        edited by her colleagues at the Institute and she provided
        me with a privileged copy of that.

                  I would incidentally, my Lord, rely on this
        episode, namely hiring a historian to prove that I had got
        it wrong at my own expense as one further instance of my

.          P-109

        integrity as an independent historian.  Inherently
        dissatisfied with the results of my own research, I hired
        and paid out of my own pocket for this second opinion,
        acting as an avocatus diaboli, to trawl once more, and
        with a net of finer mesh, across the same fishing grounds
        for documents that might in fact destroy me, destroy my
        then still tentative hypothesis.  In a similar step, which
        I think I took to appease the now worried American
        publishers, I wrote in December 1975 to four or five of
        the major international Jewish historical research
        institutions -- I remember writing to the Institute in
        New York, and to the Wiener library in this country and to
        the equivalent bodies -- appealing for "evidence proving
        Hitler's guilt in the extermination of Jews".  That is
        from the actual letter I sent.  All of these enquiries by
        me drew a blank, except for one.  As I summarised in a
        letter to the Sunday Telegraph on June 19th 1977, "all
        offered their apologies except Professor Raul Hilberg, who
        is the author of the standard history on the subject, who
        honourably conceded that he too has come to the view that
        Hitler may not have known".  This actual letter is my
        discovery and was available to the Defendants.  This
        letter to me was December 12th, 1975.

                  The other institutions stated that that too had
        no such evidence, or that did not reply.

                  So I did what I could to establish the truth of

.          P-110

        that particular allegation.

                  My Lord, I now come to what I call the
        international endeavour to destroy my legitimacy as an
        historian, and the participation, in my submission, of the
        Defendants in that particular endeavour.  I have
        abbreviated it and much of what I have put in the pages
        which I supplied to your Lordship I shall not read out.
        I shall say when I am not going to read out what follows,
        not because it is not true but because your Lordship has
        probably quite rightly questioned the strict relevance of
        it to the matter before the court.

   MR JUSTICE GRAY:  Yes, I think that is sensible, if I may say so.

   MR IRVING:  If it does not appear to be immediately relevant,
        then it is because I shall rely on it in the other matters
        that I put, namely the aggravated damages aspect and the
        fact that, if I am accused of certain postures or uttering
        certain tasteless remarks, these momentary lapses are not
        justified, but explicable on the basis of what I had been
        through, if I can put it like that.

                  Before I proceed to the problems with the
        accepted version of the history of Auschwitz, I turn first
        to the submission that your Lordship will allow me to make
        on the 30 year international endeavour by a group of
        organizations to destroy my legitimacy as an historian.
        I use that phrase for a reason.  I submit that I am

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        entitled to draw these documents to your Lordship's
        attention, because these bodies, acting with that secret
        and common purpose, compiled dossiers and reports on me
        with the intention of destroying me.  That did so,
        exercising no proper care for accuracy, and, as is evident
        from the second Defendant's, discovery, Professor
        Lipstadt's discovery, and from the introduction to her
        book, in which she explicitly acknowledges the assistance
        provided by many of these bodies, she drew upon these
        tainted well springs as the source for much of the poison
        that she wrote about me.  We shall hear that, buried in
        the files of the Simon Wiesenthal Centre in Toronto, is a
        document now also in Mrs Lipstadt's files -- that sent it
        to her -- which forms something of a blueprint for the
        attempt to destroy my name.  A researcher for the Centre,
        an anonymous researcher for the Centre, commissioned to
        investigate -- why was a person in Toronto commissioned to
        investigate my life?  I do not know -- to investigate my
        life in detail, recommended in that compilation after
        referring to my thorough archival research and general
        historical insight as follows:

                  "Given this accurate version of reality, it is
        all the more clear why this activities must be curtailed,
        and why this alleged legitimacy must be eradicated".

                  This document is from Professor Lipstadt's own papers.

.          P-112

                  I have been subjected, since at least 1973 and
        probably before then, to what would be called in warfare a
        campaign of interdiction.  I know of no other historian or
        writer who has been subjected to a campaign of
        vilification even 1/10th as intense. The book "Denying the
        Holocaust" was the climax of this campaign.  There exist,
        as I have said in my opening speech, various bodies in
        this country, and around the world, who have at heart the
        interests of special groups.  I make no protest about that
        but many other Englishmen have noticed, or found out,
        usually by chance, that these bodies keep files on us,
        which that use to our disadvantage if that believe we are
        a danger to their interests.  To give one particularly
        gross example, under the cover provided by the United
        States First Amendment, the Jewish Telegraph Agency
        accused me in 1995 of having supplied the trigger
        mechanism for the Oklahoma City bomb.  That item was
        picked up by the American press and then faintly echoed by
        the British press.  It was only months later that I found
        out who started that particular lie.

                  But regrettably this has become a campaign to
        defame people whom they regard as a danger.  A number of
        special bodies exist solely for this purpose.  Professor
        Kevin MacDonald, of the University of California at Long
        Beach, a sociologist who is the world's leading expert on
        these things, expressed forceful opinions to this court in

.          P-113

        this expert report, on which he offered himself for
        cross-examination, it has to be said, and I urge your
        Lordship not to disregard the substance of what he had to say.

                  These bodies will not endear themselves, if
        found out, to the victims of their campaigns.

                  Mr Rampton made much of Mr Ernest Zundel's gross
        and ill considered reference to the Judenpack, as
        anti-Semitic a word as one might wish to hear.  Mr Rampton
        labels this man as an extremist, and anti-Semitic in
        consequence.  This court, of course, has been told nothing
        by Mr Rampton of what, if any, remarks or incidents
        preceded the outburst by Mr Zundel that was very briefly
        quoted.  We do know, and I can so inform this court, that
        his home has been torched and burnt to the ground.  Such
        violent incidents certainly cannot excuse the violent
        remarks but that can explain them -- a difference.
        Because that do not like what he writes or publishes,
        these bodies have attempted to destroy this life with
        criminal prosecution in an attempt to have him deported or jailed.

                  Going on down the page, my own experience at the
        hands of these self-appointed censors has not been so very
        different.  It began in 1963 when agents of Searchlight
        raided my home and were caught red handed in this criminal
        attempt.  Ever since then that publication has tweaked my

.          P-114

        tail with a stream of defamatory articles, a 37 year
        onslaught to which, as a good Christian, I turned the
        other cheek.  In fact, the man who runs that magazine
        turns out to have been one of the producers of the film
        which has been put to the court, one of the editors.

                  It might be said, and I have turned the page
        now, my Lord, that the real Defendants in this case are
        not represented in this court but their presence has been
        with us throughout like Banquo's ghost.  These are the
        people who commissioned the work complained of and
        provided much of the materials used in it.  I understand
        that provided considerable funds for the defence.

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