Archive/File: people/i/irving.david/libel.suit/transcripts/day032.10
Last-Modified: 2000/07/25

                  I know very little about these bodies, but I am
        aware that the anti-defamation league of the B'nai Brith,
        which is an American body, has a 50 million dollar annual
        budget, substantially greater than an author commands
        whose livelihood has been destroyed by their activities.
        When your Lordship comes to consider such things as costs
        and damages, I would respectfully submit that you bear
        these things in mind.

                  We have them to thank for the spectacle that has
        been presented in this court room since January.  Without
        their financial assistance, it is unlikely that Mr Rampton
        and this defence team and his instructing solicitors could
        have mounted this colossal onslaught on my name.

                  Further down, for over three years this

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        well-funded team sitting opposite me, next to me, has
        drilled down deep into my private papers, burrowed on a
        broad front into the archives of the world and a
        multi-pronged attack trying to establish that what I have
        written over the last 35 or more years is distorted or
        mistranslated in pursuance of an agenda, namely the
        exoneration of Adolf Hitler, trying to dig up every little
        morsel of dirt on me that that can.

                  My book Hitler's War was published by the Viking
        Press in New York and by Hodder and Stoughton in this
        country in 1977.  That is when what can be seen as the
        coordinated attack on the book began.  The Viking Press
        was and is one of that nation's most reputable publishers
        and in fact I believe they are owner of the first
        Defendant company in this case.

                  Turning the page now, the Anti-defamation League
        issued a report with more fervour than accuracy, saying:

        "David Irving is the nom de plume of John Cawdell" --
        this not true, I hasten to say, do not get it wrong, it is
        totally untrue -- "a revisionist historiographer of Adolf
        Hitler, particularly regarding Hitler's role in and
        knowledge of the mass extermination of European Jewry.
        His major premise", says the Anti-defamation League, "is
        that Hitler was largely oblivious to the large scale
        killings of Jews in the death camps".

                  I carry on:  The agent's report -- this is a

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        report put out in 1977.

   MR JUSTICE GRAY:  I wonder, Mr Irving, really whether one might
        just go to the middle of page 35 without doing any
        injustice to your case.

   MR IRVING:  Yes.  When I then began my lecturing activities
        around the United States in the early 1980s, speaking at
        private functions, schools and universities, the
        headquarters of the ADL sent out a secret circular, a
        "Backgrounder", in 1983, to all their local agents.  The
        backgrounder, dated July 6th 1983, began with the words,
        "British author David Irving has been of concern to ADL,
        as well as to the Jewish community generally, since the
        1977 publication of his book Hitler's War", and it
        indicated that it was the controversy over Hitler and the
        Jews that was the reason.  We have heard of similar such
        circulars being generated by them on other famous names.
        In my case the ADL instructed its"regional offices":

                  "Should he surface in your region, please
        notify the Fact Finding Department and your Civil Rights Co-ordinator".

                  It is quite plain that the ADL were not
        concerned with promoting civil rights.  I am mentioning
        them because of course that collaborated very closely with
        the Second Defendant in the preparation of the book that
        is the subject of this trial.

                  It is quite plain that the Anti-defamation

.          P-117

        League were not concerned with promoting civil rights, but
        in abrogating one of the most basic rights of all, the
        right to freedom of speech.

                  Further down, correspondence with my literary
        agent showed by 1984 that already the international smear
        campaign was inflicting substantial financial damage on
        me.  It was at precisely this time, 1984 -- I will not
        comment on the year -- that the Second Defendant, then
        teaching in the Near Eastern Languages Centre of the
        University of California at Los Angeles, Professor
        Lipstadt, offered her services to Yehuda Bauer in
        Jerusalem, a very well known Israeli Professor.  She
        attached "A proposal for research:  The Historical and
        Historiographic Methodology of the Holocaust
        revisionists".  This was the genesis of the book that we
        are complaining about.  I ask your Lordship to note that
        on page 38 of the synopsis prepared by the Second
        Defendant, which is in my bundle E at page 38, The Second
        Defendant, Professor Lipstadt, mentioned my name in the
        following words:  "They [the deniers] also find it
        expedient to associate themselves with those such as David
        Irving who do not deny that the Holocaust took place but
        seek to shift the blame to others."

                  To conclude this, on the matter of her
        employment:  on May 31, 1988 Professor Lipstadt was
        awarded and additional agreement for research on this

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        topic by the Vidal Sassoon Centre for the study of
        Anti-Semitism at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.  So
        at all material times, the book was being commissioned by
        that University in Jerusalem.  This research, it should be
        added, was what finally bore fruit as the book complained
        of, "Denying the Holocaust".  The publisher at that time
        was to be Mr Robert Maxwell, who was liaising with
        Professor Yehuda Bauer.

                  Briefly summarizing the next page: During this
        period the international campaign against me achieved some
        ugly successes.  I was illegally deported from Austria.
        The Austrian government had to pay me compensation when it
        was overturned.

                  The Second Defendant's discovery -- lower down
        that page -- which included such correspondence with, and
        items from, the Anti-Defamation League as she has seen fit
        to provide, throws some interesting lights on the ADL.
        When a local newspaper, The Daily Pilot, published in
        Orange County, south of Los Angeles, a report on a
        function of the Institute of Historical Review, about
        which we have heard much from the Defence in the last few
        weeks.  The anti-Defamation League was horrified as the
        regional office reported, to find that the reporter in the
        newspaper, and I quote "seems to find an air of legitimacy
        surrounding the group".  That word "legitimacy" again;
        remember they were going to destroy my legitimacy?  The

.          P-119

        reporter, Mr Bob Van Eyken, who had evidently not got the
        message, even described the IHR members as "neatly dressed
         ... evoking a sense of reasoned dignity".  This clearly
        clashed with the skinheaded, jackbooted extremist
        stereotype that the ADL, like the expert witnesses in this
        case, wished to promote for the IHR and other "right-wing"
        groups.  This material, though clearly discoverable in
        this action, was withheld from discovery by the Second
        Defendant until a summons was issued to produce all her
        correspondence with the ADL.

                  We know that the Second Defendant has had
        extensive dealings with the Anti-Defamation League, the
        ADL, this American body.  Even from her own limited
        discovery, about the deficiencies in which I still have
        more to say, we know that Professor Lipstadt was provided
        with smear dossiers by them.  She thanks them in her
        Introduction.  She made not attempt to verify the contents
        of this material with me as the victim (or, so far as this
        court knows, with any others), but she recklessly
        published it raw and unchecked.  A 25-cent phone call to
        me would have saved her endless trouble.  Instead she
        preferred to rely on these sheets like the "confidential"
        and defamatory four-page item dated October 23rd 1986,
        headed:  "Profile on Dave Irving", evidently coming from
        another Canadian body.  Characteristically, the "profile"
        was disclosed to me by her solicitors without any covering

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        letter from its author or custodian and shorn of any
        identifying material; I wrote more than once in vain
        asking for the missing pages to be provided.

                  It is quite evident that the Anti-Defamation
        League, who were in cahoots with the Second Defendant, set
        itself the task of destroying my career, in consort with
        other similar organisations around the world, many of
        whom, if not all, collaborated with the Second Defendant
        in writing her book.  The pinnacle of their achievement
        came in 1996, when the Second Defendant, as she herself
        boasted to The Washington Post, was among those who put
        pressure on St Martin's Press Incorporated, who had been
        one of my United States publishers for some 15 years, to
        violate their publishing agreement with me and abandon
        publication of Goebbels, my Goebbels biography, "Goebbels,
        Mastermind of the Third Reich".

                  For a few days, these enemies of free speech
        stepped up the pressure.  They publicised the private home
        addresses of St Martin's Press executives on the
        Internet.  They staged street addresses in Manhattan.
        They organised a walkout by the publisher's staff.  When
        SMP refused to be intimidated, Professor Lipstadt wheeled
        out the rhetoric:  to Frank Rich, a syndicated columnist
        of The New York Times, she accused me of being a repeat
        killer, if I can put it like that: "What David Irving is
        doing ... is not the destruction of live people, but the

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        destruction of people who already died.  It's killing them
        a second time.  It's killing history".  This was not far
        distance from the outrageous claim on page 213 of her
        book, to which no justification has been pleaded to my
        knowledge, that I justified the incarceration of Jews in
        Nazi concentration camps.  Quoted by The Washington Post
        on April 3rd 1996, Professor Lipstadt stated:

                   "They ... don't publish reputations, they
        publish books", referring to St Martin's Press.  "But
        would they publish a book by Jeffrey Dahmer on man-boy
        relations?  Of course the reputation of the author
        counts.  And no legitimate historian takes David Irving's
        work seriously."

                  We have heard quoted in this Court two tasteless
        remarks I am recorded as having made, about Chappaquiddick
        and about the Association of Spurious Survivors, and I do
        not deny that those words were tasteless.  But bad taste
        is not what is in the pleadings, while express malice is:
        and the odiousness of Professor Lipstadt's comparison, in
        a mass circulation newspaper of record, of a British
        author with Jeffrey Dahmer, a madman who had recently
        murdered and cannibalised a dozen homosexuals in the
        mid-West of the USA, in surely compounded by the fact that
        Lipstadt had at that time not read a single book that
        I had written, let alone the manuscript of Dr Goebbels
        that she had joined in trying to suppress.  It is clear

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        that neither she nor the ADL was concerned with the
        merits, or otherwise, of the Goebbels biography.  They
        wanted it put down, suppressed, ausgerottet:  and me with it.

                  Having, like St Martin's Press, thoroughly read
        it, the major US publisher Doubleday Inc. had selected
        this book as their May 1996 choice for History Book of the
        Month.  But that deal depended on the SMP contract, and
        thus it too collapsed.  The financial losses inflicted on
        me by this one episode in April 1996 were of the order of
        half a million dollars, which might seen proper reward for
        the eight years' hard work that I had invested in writing
        this box, and hauling it through its five draft versions.
        The book never appeared in the United States.

                  From the publication of Hitler's War onwards,
        the attitude of the print media to me changed.  A
        strategically placed review written in one afternoon, by
        one man furnished with the appropriate dossier on me,
        could go a long way to destroy the product of six or eight
        years' research, as we have just seen.  That was why these
        dossiers had been created.

                  To the right journalists or writers, such as the
        Second Defendant, these dossiers were on tap.  A fax from
        Professor Lipstadt to the Institute of Jewish Affairs in
        London, or to the ADL in New York, or to the Simon
        Wiesenthal Centre in Toronto, and we have got these faxes

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        from her discovery, released to her a cornucopia of filth,
        which she had no need to check or verify, because in the
        United States such writings are protected by the authority
        of the First Amendment to the US Constitution, the
        laudable name of the freedom of speech, or by the
        authority of New York Times v. Sullivan, which
        effectively declares to libellers that it is open season
        on any public figure.

                  I turn the page, my Lord.

                  This Court will surely not take amiss of me that
        I refused to be intimidated by these truly "Nazi" methods,
        and that I have on a few occasions used perhaps tasteless
        language around the world about perpetrators.  The
        violence against me spread around the world, and always it
        was orchestrated by the same organizations.

                  Turn the page.

                  In England, a parallel campaign was launched by
        the Board of Deputies, and by other organizations which we
        know to have collaborated with the Defendants in producing
        this libellous book.  This kicked into high gear after my
        own imprint published an abridged edition of the Leuchter
        report in 1989.  Pressure was put on the World Trade
        Centre in the City of London to repudiate our contract for
        the press conference.  A picket, a muscle man picket, was
        staged outside our own front door to prevent journalists
        from attending when the conference was switched to my own

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        harm.  The Board arranged an early day motion in the House
        of Commons, as a privileged way of smearing my name --
        publishing a smear on my name.  On June 30th of that year
        the Jewish Chronicle, which is one of the newspapers that
        has reported this entire proceedings most fairly, in my
        view (and I wish to put that on record) revealed that
        representations had been made to my principal British and
        Commonwealth publisher, Macmillan Limited, to drop me as
        an author.

                  Macmillan had already published several of my
        books and they were under contract to publish several
        more.  I had no fears that they would succumb to this
        intimidation.  They had informed me that Hitler's War was
        running so successfully that they intended to keep it
        permanently in print.  I am entitled to mention this
        background, as I have mentioned the Board's other
        clandestine activities against me, because it was said by
        Mr Rampton that I later made one tasteless remark in
        public about the Board of Deputies.  If somebody attacks,
        using secret and furtive means, the very basis of the
        existence of my family then it may be at least
        understandable that I speak ill of them.

                  Lower down the next paragraph: Secretly, on
        July 17th 1991, the Board of Deputies wrote to the
        President of the German Office for the Protection of the
        Constitution (which is their MI5), a body of which we

.          P-125

        heard greatly admiring words from Professor Funke in the
        witness box; this English board urged that they take steps
        to stop me, a British citizen like no doubt the members of
        the Board, from entering Germany.

                  Germany is a country on whose publishers and
        archives I have been heavily dependent, as this Court is
        aware.  We have only the BfV's reply, dated August 9th
        1991, to the Board of deputies.  I retrieved a copy of
        this letter.  If your Lordship is wondering how I come
        into possession of documents like that, I retrieved a copy
        of this letter from the files of the Prime Minister of
        Australia; so the same Board in London had evidently also
        sent its dossiers to its collaborators in Canberra and, no
        doubt, other countries, in its efforts to gag me
        worldwide.  That is an indication of the worldwide
        networking that went on, this secret common enterprise, of
        which the Second Defendant is a party, to destroy my
        legitimacy as an historian and to deprive me of free
        speech, of which the Defendants have made themselves the
        willing executioners.

                  As is evident from a letter from the Austrian
        Ambassador dated June 22nd 1992, the Board also applied
        pressure on that country to ensure that I did not enter,
        or that if I did I would be arrested.  The same kind of
        thing happened in Argentina.

                  Lower down the page towards the end:  On

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        December 6th 1991, an Internal Office Memo from
        Macmillan's files -- my own publisher in London -- records
        that "quite a number of people" had commented unfavourably
        to Macmillan's about them publishing my books, and one
        person, who was an unnamed Professor of Politics at
        Oxford, who had evidently learned nothing from the book
        burning episodes of Nazi Germany, stated "that they would
        be more inclined to publish with us [Macmillan] if we were
        not publishing Irving".  (The Oxford professor of politics
        was probably, in my view, Professor Peter Pulzer,
        identified by Professor Lipstadt in her books as such and
        quoted by The Independent at the time).

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