Archive/File: people/i/irving.david/libel.suit/transcripts/day027.17
Last-Modified: 2000/07/25

   MR IRVING:  Professor Funke, would you look at paragraph 2.2.5, please?
   MR JUSTICE GRAY:  If I may say so, Mr Irving, whilst I am
        interrupting again and apologies for doing so.
   MR IRVING:  Slow progress?
   MR JUSTICE GRAY:  It is all very -- not much, I am bound to
        say.  Again we are spending a lot of time on what we might
        call the preliminaries, whereas I read this report when he
        really is getting down to make the case he seeks to make
        against you and your connections with these various
        right-wing extremists, that really comes a good deal
        further on and ----
   MR IRVING:  Well, he is throwing in names the whole time.
   MR JUSTICE GRAY:  I know he is and we have had this sort of

.          P-150



        problem before, but what I would find helpful is if you
        could cross-examine about the specific instances that are
        relied on of your being associated with individuals who he
        treats as right-wing extremists or with organizations, and
        that comes really from my reading as from about 38 onwards.
   MR IRVING:  Well, I would say it comes from 19 onwards, my
        Lord, which is the right-wing extremist DVU.
   MR JUSTICE GRAY:  I do not think I can stop you because all of
        this material is there.
   MR IRVING:  At 3.1.1 you say that Mr Irving had spoken to
        bodies and organizations like banks, bookshops, student
        fraternities, the US Army Corps and so on.  You are aware
        that I also spoke at universities like Harvard, Cambridge,
        Oxford and Bonn and Geeson and Marburg, are you?
   A.   I recall Bonn, yes.
   Q.   At 3.1.2 you criticise publishers that I deal with as
        publishing former NS, in other words National Socialist
        figures, and suggest that makes them right-wing
        extremists.  Are you not familiar with the publishers who
        publish the memoirs of Albert Spear, who is another top
        Nazi?  Does that make them right wing extremists?  What is
        the special chemical element that turns a publisher into a
        right-wing extremist?
   A.   Good question.  It is again that they did it by a special
        purpose, to present the right-wing extremist cause, as the

.          P-151



        GFP, the Society for Free Communication.  That is part of
        the network after 45, after the ban of the clear cut
        neo-national Socialist party of Remer.  Then this
        networking was a kind of replacement in the early 60s with
        Gert Sudholt and the Deutsche Kulturwerk and all this
        groupings Dietmar Munier of the Arndt-Verlag.  So they
        tried to make the cause, although the whole political
        scenery is not fostering these kinds of groupings.
   Q.   Would they not have been prosecuted if they had been
        publishing politically incorrect materials or illegal
        materials?
   A.   Yes, and this is the case for some of them at least.
        I value it.  It is the case, if the things are very, very
        intense, repeatedly, and going to the direction of
        hardcore right-wing extremist or neo-Nazi extremism or are
        related to violence, and of course the Holocaust denial,
        you know, groupings.  These are the four dimensions in
        which official institutions intervene more than in other cases.
   Q.   The Germans clamp down quite a bit on publishing, do they
        not?  They burn a lot of books in Germany even now, do
        they not?
   A.   Say it again.
   Q.   The Germans burn a lot of books in Germany even now, do
        they not?
   A.   I cannot answer this question.  You allude to the burning

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        of the books in 33.
   Q.   You have an index, do you not, of banned books in Germany?
   MR JUSTICE GRAY:  Well Mr Irving ----.
   MR IRVING:  The follow up question was, to your knowledge, have
        any of my books ever been banned in Germany on any of the
        indexes or lists?  The answer is no, right?
   A.   I do not know.
   Q.   Yes.  At paragraph 3.2.1 you now bring in the Socialist
        Reich Party.  Do you allege that I had any contacts with
        this Socialist Reich Party?
   A.   No.
   Q.   Then why do you mention it?
   A.   No.  If I may say so, you misread it.  I just wanted to
        give an overview for the court that there was something,
        as I did now to the court verbatim, that there are groups
        in the early 50s of a special importance.  Then it went
        down to a degree and it came in the mid or late 80s more
        to the fore and even was perceived as the danger for some
        liberal democracy basics.  So this was an overview, and it
        does not mean, and I did not say, that you are related to
        these groups.  You are were 14 years old when the group
        was banned, so there is no way.
   Q.   This is a report on my extremist activities so-called.
   A.   This is a misreading.  If it is mistaken, then I have to
        say, no, you as a 14 years old boy was not interacting
        with the then banned SRP.

.          P-153



   MR JUSTICE GRAY:  Mr Irving, we must get on.  We are really
        make no progress at all.
   MR IRVING:  Am going to ask a general question.  In other
        words, you do mention an awful lot of names in this report
        without my having had any contact with them whatsoever, is
        that right?  It is a total kaleidoscope of German politics
        of the last half century and I have had no contact with
        any of those names.
   A.   I need not defend my report.
   MR JUSTICE GRAY:  I think the answer to that is yes.  When
        I read it, which was a long time ago now, I got the
        impression that there was an awful lot of initials and
        names of organisations that I am not in the end going to
        have to be concerned with.  Is that fair?
   A.   I disagree.
   MR JUSTICE GRAY:  I was hoping you would agree.
   Q.   But to make a point.
   MR RAMPTON:  Your Lordship might like to look at it, or think
        about looking at it, in the way that I do.  I am
        principally concerned obviously with Mr Irving's immediate
        and intimate contacts, who organizes the meeting, what is
        said at those meetings in particular by Mr Irving and
        those immediate contacts.  However, those immediate
        contacts do have a genealogy, and that, it seems to
        me, having read the report again, is how the names, what
        I might call the outer circle of names, come into the

.          P-154



        picture.  Whether they matter very much at the end of it
        all is a separate question.
   A.   Your Lordship, can I say something to you both?
   MR RAMPTON:  Include me as well.
   MR JUSTICE GRAY:  Yes.  Please do.
   A.   I thought I did a favour to the court and to the debate to
        try to bring this genealogy, to get a sense of this
        different political culture after 45.  They have to renew
        a democracy, then they have to fight those who tried to go
        back.  So I have to at least mention them, and especially
        then these persons often are the same that came to the
        fore in the late 80s, in the case of the SNP with respect
        to the founder Remer.  Then I thought, OK, it is too many
        names for all of you, for all three of you, so to speak,
        and I did a short paper of 22 pages.  I delivered it the
        other week to the solicitors, and I hope you will get it
        and you have it.
   MR JUSTICE GRAY:  As a matter of fact, I have not got it.
   MR RAMPTON:  Sorry, I did mention it.
   MR JUSTICE GRAY:  Yes, you did.
   MR RAMPTON:  I have got it.  If, when this evidence is
        finished, your Lordship would like it, it is a convenient
        summary, but we frankly took the view that your Lordship
        is so already burdened with paper that, if we gave another
        23 pages summarizing what is already in the report, it
        might not go down all that well.

.          P-155



   MR JUSTICE GRAY:  Shall we see when the evidence is finished?
   A.   Your Lordship I tried to minimize the names to a degree
        that I, from my social science perspective, said it is
        unbearable, just to make the point.
   MR JUSTICE GRAY:  Yes.
   A.   So it is a kind of ----
   MR JUSTICE GRAY:  Let us try and be practical about it.
        Mr Irving, I think what Professor Funke is saying is that
        he is a social scientist.  He therefore felt that he had
        an obligation in a way to explain really the political
        pressures and counter pressures that have been operating
        in Germany really ever since the end of the war.
   MR IRVING:  It is frightfully interesting, and I read it with
        great interest.
   MR JUSTICE GRAY:  It is all very interesting and it is
        extremely scholarly, but in the end what I am concerned
        with, and he is not really implicating you specifically in
        that, save to the extent that the background of the
        organizations may have some bearing on your willingness to
        associate with them, but in the end what I am concerned
        with is your contacts with this quite limited number of
        organisations.
   MR IRVING:  I agree.
   MR JUSTICE GRAY:  What I was saying to you a while back is that
        I think you should concentrate on that, not get, if I may
        say so, bogged down in the social science aspects of

.          P-156



        Professor Funke's report.
   MR IRVING:  I agree.
   MR JUSTICE GRAY:  I do not think you lose anything by taking
        that course.
   MR IRVING:  The risk we have, my Lord, is that we spoke
        yesterday of the rogues gallery that we were going to
        enter.  We find ourselves in the rogues gallery with
        thousands of little photographs and now we are being told,
        well, ignore all these photographs, just pay attention to
        the six down in the bottom right hand corner.  I am quite
        happy to do that as long as Mr Rampton does not later on
        say that Mr Irving has ignored all these other gangsters.
   MR JUSTICE GRAY:  I am going to take the Defendants' case as
        really in the end coming down to maybe a dozen individuals.
   MR IRVING:  Six.
   MR JUSTICE GRAY:  Who have been identified by Mr Rampton this morning.
   MR RAMPTON:  It may be rather more than six.
   MR JUSTICE GRAY:  I said a dozen.  It may be more but they have
        been identified and their organizations have been
        identified, and I think, with due respect of course to
        Professor Funke, that that is what I am concerned with and
        that is all I am concerned with.
   MR RAMPTON:  To be fair, it is actually what the guts of the
        report is concerned with.  It is a chronological account

.          P-157



        of Mr Irving's neo-fascist contacts in Germany.
   MR JUSTICE GRAY:  Yes.  I am not criticising Professor Funke at
        all, or indeed Mr Irving, but I just think that we all
        need to focus on what matters, and not get sidetracked.
   MR IRVING:  Of course, the serious problem there for me is that
        I do not know what dozen names Mr Rampton is thinking about.
   MR JUSTICE GRAY:  I do.  We heard them this morning.  Indeed
        overnight, if it would help, I suspect it would take five
        minutes for Mr Rampton or Miss Rogers to write them out on
        a piece of paper.
   MR IRVING:  That would be extremely helpful.
   MR RAMPTON:  I do not know whether Mr Irving is still getting
        the daily transcript.  If he is, they will be in there.
   MR JUSTICE GRAY:  Whether he is or he is not, I think it is
        something that would not be unreasonable to invite you to do.
   MR RAMPTON:  I will do, but I will have to see the transcript
        myself first because my memory is fallible.
   MR JUSTICE GRAY:  I have actually been highlighting the ones
        that I think have been mentioned.
   MR IRVING:  Some are obvious but some are less obvious, if I
        can put it like that.
   MR RAMPTON:  Most of them are in the index to the two bundles
        apart from Rami and Verala that I mentioned.
   MR JUSTICE GRAY:  You are not relying on all the ones in the

.          P-158



        index.  There are an awful lot who have not been featured at all.
   MR RAMPTON: I do not know about that.  Is that right?
   MR IRVING:  If we can strike out all but a dozen, then I am
        sure that your Lordship would be very happy and so would
        I.  I am prepared to carry on with what I am doing at
        present, if your Lordship would indicate where I should
        resume the cross-examination from.
   MR RAMPTON:  Would Mr Irving just restrain his youthful
        enthusiasm for a moment.
   MR JUSTICE GRAY:  Why do we not do it now? Can I tell you what
        my impression is?  Tell me if I have it wrong, Mr
        Rampton.  If we start at the appendix, page 140?
   MR RAMPTON:  I am probably in the wrong page.

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