Archive/File: people/i/irving.david/libel.suit/transcripts/day029.02
Last-Modified: 2000/07/25

   MR IRVING:  I appreciate that point, my Lord, but the other
        point is my truthfulness.  If I state something which is
        then disbelieved by the Defence and they maintain their
        position despite my several invitations to accept that

.          P-9



        they are wrong, and here are the documents that clearly
        show from the police files that I am right, namely what
        time it was, the fact that it was an hour after the
        function in the Lowenbraukeller ended that I was
        apprehended, the fact that we were heading northwards, so
        to speak ----
   MR JUSTICE GRAY:  What I am going to do, subject to Mr Rampton,
        is -- I do not know whether he is going to cross-examine
        you about this?
   MR RAMPTON:  No.
   MR JUSTICE GRAY:  I do not think there is any reason -- I do
        not think it has anything do with Professor Funke.  He was
        not there.  I do not see any reason why you should not
        very shortly, as it were, put this in evidence through
        your own mouth, as it were, or indeed by way of
        submission, I do not mind.
   MR IRVING:  Very well.
   MR JUSTICE GRAY:  That can be done either straightaway or it
        can be done later on.  Mr Rampton, I do not know whether
        you are going to touch on this in cross-examination?
   MR RAMPTON:  No.  For the most part, right-wing extremism to my
        way of thing, has been done and dusted.  I have very
        little cross-examination left on that, and it certainly
        does not concern Germany.  As to these new document, I am
        completely neutral because I do not know what they say.
   MR JUSTICE GRAY:  That suggests to me that probably this ought

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        to be done at a later stage.
   MR IRVING:  By way of submission.
   MR JUSTICE GRAY:  Perhaps first thing tomorrow or at the end of
        cross-examination tomorrow, if we go into tomorrow.
   MR RAMPTON:  I will need to have them looked at by German
        speakers in the usual way.
   MR IRVING:  There are two or three more letters from me to
        German Embassies and people like that, which show that
        I went about things in a perfectly proper way, asking
        whether the bodies that invited me to speak were legal and
        lawful and constitutional and so on.
   MR JUSTICE GRAY:  We do not want to get disproportionate about it.
   MR RAMPTON:  I would only say this about that kind of material,
        whether it advances the matter one way or another, I
        rather doubt, but self-serving protests by Mr Irving are
        not evidence that it did not happen.
   MR JUSTICE GRAY:  I appreciate that.
   MR IRVING:  I did not catch that, but it is my veracity which
        I am concerned about that.
   MR JUSTICE GRAY:  Yes. You are obviously concerned about that.
        I have indicated the way I think we ought to deal with it
        so we will leave it until tomorrow.  That concludes the
        points you wanted to raise?
   MR IRVING:  Yes.
   MR JUSTICE GRAY:  I think the next step is for you to go into

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        the witness box, please.  You are obviously still under oath.
   MR RAMPTON:  My Lord, before I start, I announce the first
        thing, if I may, that I am going to do.  Your Lordship
        will remember the short sequence we had from the
        negationists, or whatever you call it, meeting at Hagenau
        in Azas in November 1989, and the reference to the sedan
        chair and the telephone box.  What I am now going to do,
        with your Lordship's leave, is show a short section from a
        speech that Mr Irving made at Milton, Ontario, on 5th
        October 1991, that is to say almost two years after the
        Hagenau event.  Its transcript is at K3, tab 10.
   MR JUSTICE GRAY:  Is this what is called the Moers speech?
   MR RAMPTON:  No, it is not Moers.  This is Milton, Ontario,
        which I think is in Canada.  It is more of the same.  Then
        I shall ask Mr Irving some questions about it in the light
        of the questions he asked Professor Funke yesterday.

(Mr Irving, recalled. Cross-Examined by Mr Rampton QC continued.)

   MR RAMPTON:  My Lord, I think the relevant part of the
        transcript is pages 17 and 18.  Have I got that right?
        The television seems to be defunct.
   MR JUSTICE GRAY:  Do we need to start with this, Mr Rampton?
   MR RAMPTON:  It is a question of continuity, and it is fresh in
        everybody's mind from yesterday.  I find it difficult to
        cross-examine with the witness box overrun by

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        technicians!

                            (Video played)

   MR RAMPTON:  Stop there, thank you.  Mr Irving, that is the
        same story in a rather more expanded version that you told
        to your audience at Hagenau in November 1989, is it not?
   A.   Yes.
   Q.   Where does it come from?
   A.   There are -- which ones are you talking about?  The
        conveyor belts, the swimming pool, the electric shock that
        comes from Pravda, February 1945?
   Q.   No, Mr Irving.
   A.   There is a whole bundle of these, there is a whole series
        of these eyewitness accounts which have been given in
        various postwar trials, 1945, 1946, 1947.  These are the
        accounts that are not quoted by the Holocaust historians
        for obvious reasons.
   Q.   Where did the telephone box come from?
   A.   Which part of the story are you asking for, about the box,
        the one man ----
   MR JUSTICE GRAY:  Telephone box.
   MR RAMPTON:  The telephone box?
   A.   The telephone box?
   Q.   The telephone box.  "Well, the answer is", says Irving,
         "it is disguised as a telephone box, this one man gas
        chamber.  This is the mentality of the people who invent
        these eyewitness stories.  It is a disguised as a

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        telephone and if I am a man who has escaped from
        Auschwitz, a harrowing experience, and I am standing
        around in the Polish countryside and suddenly a telephone
        box" ----
   A.   Appears from nowhere, yes.
   Q.   --- "where there was not one a few minutes ago and two
        German soldiers standing around looking like nothing,
        nothing is going to get me inside that phone box.  The
        eyewitnesses, plural, say they got you to get inside by
        having the phone inside ringing".  Where does that little
        anecdote come from?  How many sources?
   A.   The phone ringing is an embellishment.  But the disguised
        as a telephone box is in the eyewitness account.
   Q.   How many eyewitness accounts and who were the people that
        told those stories?
   A.   Alleged survivors of Auschwitz.
   Q.   How many?
   A.   Certainly one account.
   Q.   Eyewitnesses, plural?
   A.   That, obviously, is a slip of the tongue.
   Q.   Yes, it is not.  It is a deliberate exaggeration, is it?
        You got some good laughs with this little story?
   A.   I think it is such a ludicrous story and it so clearly
        exaggerates the problem, it so clearly illustrates the
        problem with the eyewitness accounts of Auschwitz ----
   Q.   Oh, really?

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   A.   --- this and the other similar accounts.  There is the
        conveyor belt, there is the swimming pool, there is the
        electric shock, there is the killed in steam chambers, all
        these stories which come out of the earlier accounts, if
        you read the account published by Pravda, I think on
        February 2nd 1945, there is the first description of the
        conveyor belt.  These are never quoted by the modern
        historians.  Even the Gerstein report that you have which
        is an alleged eyewitness account had, of course, 130 foot
        high mountain of shoes.  These details need to be brought
        to the attention of the public so they can see what the
        problem is and how selectively the historians use the
        eyewitness accounts.  They take the ones that they like
        and they ignore the ones that are obviously baloney.
   Q.   Mr Irving, do you see any purpose in a serious historian,
        I mean a serious, reputable historian, reciting simply for
        the purpose of knocking it over, a story, if it indeed is
        a story, which is quite obviously untrue?
   A.   Well, as we have heard in this court, Mr Rampton, the
        factory of death story, as far as crematorium (ii) in
        Auschwitz is concerned, relies on three legs, it is a
        stool with three legs, one is the eyewitnesses, one is the
        discrepancies between the blueprints or the architectural
        drawings and the other one is the German documentation.
   Q.   Quite a lot more than that.
   A.   Well, you will have time to say that when you make your

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        closing speech.  If the eyewitnesses turn out to be partly
        baloney, and they are a body of evidence that, in my
        opinion, should, therefore, be discounted, I am entitled
        to make this point as forcefully as I can by drawing
        attention to the ludicrous elements contained by some of
        the eyewitness accounts.
   Q.   Did you tell this audience about the evidence, the
        eyewitness testimony, of Henrich Tauber, for example?
   A.   Probably at that time it was not known to me, but I would
        certainly have done so and I would have drawn attention to
        the discrepancies in his account as well.
   Q.   Why do you think your audience in Milton, Ontario, find
        these little anecdotes, fables, if you like, so funny?
   A.   There are two ways of addressing an audience.  One is in
        an academic climate where you are enveloped in professors'
        robes and speaking to students who have no obligation but
        to sit there with their notepads on their lap, and then
        you can dictate to them all the documents and all the
        material you want until the bell rings and it is time for
        them to go out.
                  The other way is to make or deliver a talk or a
        lecture in such a manner that you capture and hold your
        audience's attention, and you do that repeatedly by
        interlacing the serious documents that you want them to
        listen to with material to keep them awake, if I can put
        it like that.

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   Q.   How long, is it, Mr Irving, since any, if ever, reputable
        historian has paid any attention whatsoever to this kind
        of material?
   A.   I would say within living memory shall we say within four
        weeks in this very courtroom we have listened to account
        after account from Professor van Pelt who relies on Ade
        Bimco, who relies on Henrich Tauber, who has relied on
        five or six eyewitness, all of whom have elements of total
        distortion.  Ludicrous elements.  For example, the
        Gerstein report.  Ludicrous elements contained in their --
        Christopher Brown, he had to put back into the Gerstein
        report the stuff that he had omitted, the mountains of
        shoes and shirts, and these ludicrous elements which
        disqualify the eyewitness from any source value
        whatsoever, just as they disqualified finally
        the allegation that there were gas chambers in Dachau.
   Q.   Like your old chum Karl Wolff, for example?
   A.   I have never met Karl Wolff in my life except once when he
        was pushed under my nose by a Sunday Times cameraman at a
        function in Schattenburg.
   Q.   An eyewitness in some sense to the events in this part of
        German history, would you agree?
   A.   Well, I do not understand.  What is the question?
   Q.   You rely on him to exculpate Hitler, so far as the
        conversation, reported conversation, between him and
        Himmler in August 1942 is concerned, do you not?

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   A.   I relied on Karl Wolff who was the adjutant of Heinrich
        Himmler for a period of about 10 or 15 years, if my memory
        serves me right, who wrote in this confidential manuscript
        an account of his own personal impressions of the
        character and nature of this rather weird man, Heinrich
        Himmler, who came from humble origins and turned into one
        of history's biggest mass killers.  He was an interesting,
        obviously a man very well placed, Karl Wolff, to describe
        Heinrich Himmler in his underpants, so to speak.
   Q.   You put that passage from Karl Wolff's interrogation in
        1952 -----
   A.   Yes.
   Q.   --- by Dr von Siegler, I think his name was, before this
        court because you wanted to rely on a single passage where
        Karl Wolff, effectively, in your eyes, exculpates Adolf
        Hitler in relation to the Holocaust, is that not what you did?
   A.   No.  I put it before the court because I am accused of
        having invented or manipulated or distorted without any
        fundamental or documentary basis whatsoever, and I cannot
        help it if your historians and experts either did not know
        of these sources or knew of them but decided not to use them.
   Q.   In your eyes, is Karl Wolff a reliable witness?
   A.   In some respects he is and in some respects he is not.
   Q.   So when he talks in unvarnished terms about the Juden

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