Shofar FTP Archive File: people/i/irving.david/libel.suit/transcripts/Closing_Address.Irving
MR IRVING: May it please the court. The Defendants in this
action, the publisher Penguin Books Limited and the
American scholar Deborah Lipstadt, have sought to cast
this trial as being about the reputation of the Holocaust. It is not.
The world's press have also reported it in this way.
Again, it is not.
This trial is about my reputation as a human
being, as an historian of integrity, and - thanks to the
remarks made by Mr Rampton - as a father. The Defendants
are saying, and have so convinced many people, that I am
not entitled to continue to earn a living in the way that
I have earned it for nearly 40 years. A judgment in my
favour is no more than that judgment that disputed points
which I have made about some aspect of the narrative are
not so absurd, given the evidence, as to disqualify me
from the ranks of historians. Under the laws of
defamation as they exist in this country, it could not be
anything else, and nor must the defence team, no matter
how powerful, how moneyed, or eloquent, or numerous, be
allowed by their tactics to skew it in any other way.
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I may add that the points I have made do not
necessarily lessen the horror or the burden of guilt.
I have always accepted that Adolf Hitler, as Head of State
and government in Germany, was responsible for the
Holocaust. I said, in the Introduction to my flagship
biography, Hitler's War (this is a reference to the 1991
edition):
If this biography were simply a history of the
rise and fall of Hitler's Reich, it would be legitimate to
conclude: "Hitler killed the Jews". But my years of
investigations suggested that many others were
responsible, that the chain of responsibility was not as
clear cut as that. Nothing that I have heard in this
Court since January 11th has persuaded me that I was wrong
on this account.
These latter points lead to another
consideration. Your Lordship will have heard of the -
largely successful - effort to drive me out of business as
an historian. This Court has seen the timidity, in my
submission, with which historians have already been
fraught once Holocaust is questioned, not denied,
questioned. One notable historian, whose name has been
mentioned this morning, ordered by summons by myself to
attend, showed himself reluctant even to confirm what he
had written in my favour, repeatedly, over the last 20 years.
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A judgment rendered against me will make this
paralysis in the writing of history definitive; from then
on, no one will dare to discuss who exactly was involved
in each stage of the Holocaust -- rather like in Germany
now, you cannot do it any more -- or how extensive it
was. From then on, discussion will revolve around "safe"
subjects, like sacred texts in the Middle Ages, or Marx in
the old Soviet Union, or the Koran in some fundamentalist
state today. Every historian will know that his critique
needs to stop sharply at the boundaries defined by certain
authorities. He will have a choice; accept the official
version, holus-bolus; or stop being an historian.
A judgment in my favour does not mean that the
Holocaust never happened; it means only that in England
today discussion is still permitted. My opponents would
still be able to say, just as now, would still be able,
just as now, to produce other documents if they can; to
expound alternative interpretations. They would be as
free as ever to declare that they think that I am wrong
and all the other things that have been said about me
today. They would be impeded in one way only: they would
not be able to say in a loud and authoritative voice that
I am not an historian, and that my books must be banned.
As a result of my work (and of this case) the Holocaust,
in fact, has been researched more, not less. Those who
(rightly) believe that these crimes should never be
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forgotten (and I stress the word "rightly"), these crimes
should never be forgotten, should ask whether their case
is better served by a compulsory - and dead - text imposed
by law and intimidation, or by a live and on-going
discussion.
Our Common Law has at its kernel an
"adversarial" procedure whereby, it is believed, truth is
best elicited by each side putting their case as strongly
as possible. We have heard some pretty strong things said
today. I agree with English Common Law.
I read in The Independent, a newspaper in this
country, in a lengthy and deeply libellous article
published only last week about me, these words: "But if
he wins, it will open the door for revisionists to rewrite
any event in history without the requirement to consider
evidence that does not suit them and without fear that
they will be publicly denounced for their distortion".
My Lord, in bygone days, I venture to submit,
such an article, published while an action was literally
sub judice, would have been a clear contempt. Your
Lordship will have noticed that I wearied, after a few
days, of drawing attention to the coverage of this trial
in the media. Allow me, however, to introduce one
cautionary statistic: not including the fuss about the
Eichmann manuscript, the British press have published no
fewer than 167 reports during the seven days that I was on
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the witness stand, that is 24 per day; but just 58 reports
during the 20 days when the boot was on the other foot and
I was cross-examining Mr Rampton's fine witnesses, that is
roughly three per day. That is a disparity of about eight
to one. I make no complaint about that. If your Lordship
has noticed any of these items, you will perhaps have
observed that the reporting in both cases is almost
exclusively devoted to the defence statements, or their
questions to me, and not to the product of the
examination. That is the way things are in a free
society. The Court, however, operates by different
standards, and it will not allow public sentiment, I hope,
to guide its verdict.
I believe it was Churchill who once said, "There
is such thing as public opinion, there is only published
opinion". Given such a baleful glare from the press
gallery, my Lord, I am glad that her Majesty has such a
resolute officer presiding over this case. The outcome is
in your Lordship's hands and yours alone, and I am glad,
I am confident that nothing that the press has written, or
may yet write, will deflect your Lordship from arriving at
a just conclusion.
The Defendants have sold around the world a
book, "Denying the Holocaust". May I say here that I see
Penguin Books among the Defendants to my sorrow, as they
have published my own works in the past. They continuing
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even today, however, and I stress this fact, to sell this
book for profit, in the knowledge that it contains very
defamatory allegations and that those allegations are held
to be untrue. It is a reckless, even foolhardy, gesture
which I submit, my Lord, goes to the question of
aggravated damages when the time comes.
Neither of these Defendants evidently bothered
even to have the manuscript professionally read for
libel. I say "evidently" because we do not know: they
have not deigned to enter the witness box themselves, no
executive of Penguin Books, not the author who has, I must
say, sat in this room for the two months that the trial
has continued, neither of them has deigned to enter the
witness box to answer even that most straightforward and
elementary of questions, was there a libel reading of this
book? Nor have they answered this question when it was
put to them in writing. Such a report, a libel report,
is, in my submission, not privileged, and I would have
been well prepared to argue the point; had they claimed
that privilege, I would have asked, "On what grounds?" If
a report was written, it should and no doubt would have
been disclosed, and it was not disclosed. So we are
entitled to assume that they did not bother to have the
book read. It does not exist, the report.
Whatever other limited excuses - whether of
sheer ignorance, or of innocent dissemination - that the
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publisher might have (quite wrongfully) deployed for
publishing this malicious and deeply flawed work were
destroyed from the moment when they received my writ in
September 1996, and were thus informed, if they did not
know in fact already, of the nature and scope of the
libels it contains. And, as said, they have continued to
sell it, hoping no doubt to cash in on, to profit from,
the notoriety gained by these libel proceedings, which is
a textbook case of Rookes v. Barnard if there ever was
one, since the book they are selling still contains even
the several libels which they have made no attempt here to
justify. They have to justify their allegations - - I am
referring, of course, my Lord, to the ----
MR JUSTICE GRAY: Yes.
MR IRVING: --- matters they have pleaded section 5 on
originally. They have made no attempt to justify their
allegations or their defence fails -- I am sorry. They
have to justify their allegations, or their defence fails;
and as your Lordship is aware, where the defamations are
particularly grave, a higher burden of proof falls upon
them than the mere balance of probabilities that is
normally acceptable. In both Defendants, moreover, there
is clear evidence of malice, both in those few documents
which the author of this work has disclosed -- I stress
the word "few"; pitifully few documents have been placed
in my hands -- and in the fact that the same firm of
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publishers had previously distributed a work, a book, in
which I was variously caricatured as Adolf Hitler and
wearing swastika eyeglasses.
The very worst of the libels are so blatant that
neither Defendant has insulted the intelligence of this
Court by offering any justification to them. They hope
instead to divert the court's attention by reference to
distant and notorious matters of history and by calling me
a racist. In consequence, for 30 days or more of this
Court's time, we have had to rake over the embers of what
may be one of the greatest crimes known to Mankind: a
harrowing, time-wasting, needless effort, which has
yielded even now few answers to great questions and
mysteries which even the world's finest academics have so
far not managed to unravel.
I come now to one of the first of these
unanswered and unjustified libels which will come as a
surprise to many people in this courtroom because there is
no reference to it in Mr Rampton's summary. On page 14 of
the book, the Defendants published one of the gravest
libels that can be imagined for a respectable English
citizen who lives a very public life, namely that I
consort with the extremist anti-Semitic Russian group
Pamyat, with violent anti-Israeli murderers, with
extremist terrorists, and with Louis Farrakhan, a Black
Power agitator who is known to be acting in the pay of a
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foreign power, namely the Libyan dictator. This is not
just the simple allegation of associating with
"extremists", the kind of people who use fountain pens to
deliver their extremism, about which they have made so
much. The words on page 14 are as follows - and I make no
apology, my Lord, for reminding the Court of them, the
Second Defendant wrote:
"The confluence between anti-Israel,
anti-Semitic, and Holocaust denial forces was exemplified
by a world anti-Zionist conference scheduled for Sweden in
November 1992. Though cancelled at the last minute by the
Swedish government, scheduled speakers included black
Muslim leader, Louis Farrakhan, Faurrison, Irving", that
is me, "and Leuchter. Also scheduled to participate were
representatives of a variety of anti-Semetic and
anti-Israel organisations, including the Russian group
Pamyat, the Iranian-backed Hizbollah and the
fundamentalist Islamic organization Hamas".
Now, that whole statement was a reckless lie.
It appears from their discovery to have been based on a
press release issued by the jewish Telegraph Agency in New
York which neither that agency or the Defendants made any
attempt to verify. The Court will have noticed in one of
my bundles the letter which I sent to every Scandinavian
Embassy at the time, anxiously denying this allegation. I
have pleaded, as your Lordship is aware, that the innuendo
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was that I was "thereby agreeing to appear in public in
support of and alongside violent and extremist speakers,
including representatives of the violent and extremist
anti-Semitic Russian group Pamyat ... the Hizbollah ...
the Hamas ... Farrakhan ... who is known as a Jew-baiting
black agitator ... and he is known as an admirer of Hitler
and who is in the pay of Colonel Gaddafi".
And "that the true or legal innuendo of the word
'Hizbollah' is that used to refer to and describe a known
international terrorist organization ... in the Lebanon,
also known as Hizbollah whose guerrillas kill Israel
citizens and soldiers ... provoking retaliation, and which
organization has been determined by President Clinton ...
as being among the enemies of peace and, whose officials
and armed activists are now being hunted down by the ...
Israeli army".
As for the Hamas, much the same, I set out in
paragraph 12 of my statement of claim that "the true or
legal unnuendo of the words 'Hammas' is that of an Islamic
fundamentalist terrorist organization similar in nature to
the Hizbollah".
I submitted to your Lordship at the beginning of
this trial a representative selection of news reports from
reputable, reliable outlets, including the BBC, on the
murderous nature of the organizations involved, concerned.
In my pleadings I also argued that by these
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allegations I had "been brought into hatred, ridicule,
contempt, risk of personal injury and/or assassination".
I know, my Lord, the law of defamation has no concern for
people's personal safety, but it certainly has concern for
their reputation; and the allegation that I was consorting
with the violent extremist body who goes around with
machine guns and bombs and bullets is substantially more
serious, in my view, than the allegation that I consort
with people who use their fountain pens to disseminate
crack pot ideas.
In my pleadings -- the nature of the libel, and
the damage that it caused, hardly needed arguing in detail
here. Put in into domestic context, if the Defendants, if
the Defendants, had equally untruthfully stated, for
example, in a Channel 4 television documentary (and there
is a reason why I say that) that I had consorted with
Ulster loyalist death squads who were part of a conspiracy
to murder Roman Catholic nationalists, itself a grave
accusation which would also put me at risk of
assassination, and if the Defendants made no attempt to
justify that libel, then I respectfully submit that your
Lordship would have no hesitation giving judgment in my
favour. I submit there is no difference fundamentally
between these examples.
Now, I was going to say that the Defendants have
relied on section 5 of the Defamation Act, but
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I understand from what Mr Rampton said yesterday that they
are not relying on that section 5 at all, my Lord.
MR JUSTICE GRAY: No, I do not think that is quite right. I
think what he said was that they say they do not need
section 5, that is their primary position, but that if
they do need it, then, indeed, they rely on it. So do not
assume that it has disappeared out of the picture because it has not.
MR IRVING: In that case, I will leave it as I originally
wrote. I am aware that your Lordship is also capable, of
course, of putting something in section 5 if you consider
it to come under section 5.
MR JUSTICE GRAY: I probably would be, but that I believe to
Mr Rampton's position.
MR IRVING: This is not the place to make a submission, but my
position is that there is no common sting between those
allegations. They are totally different kinds of extremism.
MR JUSTICE GRAY: Elaborate on that later.
MR IRVING: In other words, they accuse a respectable
Englishman of consorting with terrorists and murderers,
and then plead the relative insignificance of the
accusation when it turns out to be a reckless lie. And
there are other incendiary lies which they have stuffed
into that particular sand-bucket, section 5 of the
Defamation Act, in the hope that they will sputter out:
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the Defendants repeated the story in that book - first
published in Izvestia - that I placed a portrait of Adolf
Hitler over my desk. For that lie -- I have had hundreds
of journalists visiting me over the 30 years and never
once has that picture occurred to any of them for there is
no such picture. For that lie too they have offered no
justification. I read incidentally recently in Literary
Review that Lloyd George had signed photographs of both
Hitler and Mussolini on display, and that was a British
Prime Minister. The only signed paragraph in my
apartment, as many journalists have observed, is one of
Sir Winston Churchill.
So I submit that your Lordship should not accept
the Defendants' contention, if they wish to stand by it,
that these allegations should be disregarded on the basis
of section 5. Even if they could sufficiently justify
their claim that I deliberately bent history in favour of
Hitler, and I do not believe they can, I submit that they
have not, it would still "materially injure the
plaintiff's reputation", which is the word of the Act,
section 5, to say that I had a portrait of Hitler above my
desk. The claims which they do seek to justify suggest
that I am culpably careless and (perhaps unconsciously)
sympathetic to Hitler; bad enough, bad enough, but having
a portrait of that man -- I am sorry, having a portrait of
that man above my desk implies a full-hearted 100 per cent
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conscious commitment to that man, which is very
different.
I have provided your Lordship on an earlier
occasion in one bundle a number of passages quoted from
AJP Taylor's works, a very famous English historian and
writer. Taylor himself accepted that they inevitably
improved Hitler's image -- the words that Taylor had
written -- maybe he did not originate the actual mass
murders himself, wrote Taylor; maybe he did slip into war
with Britain rather than planning it; maybe the Anschluss
with Austria was more a stroke of good fortune, which he
grasped, rather than long planned as a take-over; maybe
the Nazis did not burn down the Reichstag building in
1933. These views of Taylor have been criticised as being
wrong, even as being too sympathetic to Hitler. But
everybody would accept that to suggest that Taylor had a
portrait of Hitler "over his desk" would suggest something
far worse. So it should be for me too.
Again, for the purpose of section 5, the
allegation that I bend history in favour of Hitler because
I am said to admire him, and that I consort with other
people holding such views, is a very different kettle of
fish from stating, as the Defendants do, that I consort
with people who are widely regarded as violent and
murderous terrorists.
I continue now from the bottom of the page:
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My Lord, the Court will be aware from the very
outset I argued that this hearing should not, effectively,
leave the four walls of my study, where I wrote my books;
and that what actually happened 50 or 60 years ago was of
less moment to the issues as pleaded. The matter at
issue, as pleaded by the Defendants, is not what happened,
but what I knew of it, and what I made of it, at the time
I put pen to paper. We had some argument on that matter,
my Lord. To take crude example: neglecting to use the
Eichmann memoirs, releases to us only a few days ago, had
they contained startling revelations - which they did not
- could not have been held against me because they were
not available to me in the 1960s, 1970s or 1980s. But
your Lordship took a different view and I respectfully
submit that it was wrong.
MR JUSTICE GRAY: May I interrupt you again? I do not think
that is right. I think everybody agrees that the Eichmann
memoirs, because they have surfaced so late, really have
no bearing on this trial at all.
MR IRVING: I gave that as a particularly crude example of why
what mattered was what happened in the walls of my study
as I wrote, what was on my desk, so to speak, and not what
actually happened.
MR JUSTICE GRAY: I see.
MR IRVING: Your Lordship took a different view, and
I respectfully submit that it was wrong. The Defendants
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have invested a sizeable fortune in reresearching the
Holocaust, and possibly for that reason we have all been
dragged through that vast and inhuman tragedy yet again,
because of the money spent on it now, and again quite
needlessly, in my submission. It would have sufficed for
their purposes if they could have proved, on the basis of
the total disclose of my files which I made to them and
their experts, that I had indeed "distorted, misstated,
misquoted and falsified", their words. Fearing or
finding, however, that they were unable to prove wilful
fraud, in effect, in my submission, they have fallen back
on the alternative plea in the tort of negligence: that
"Mr Irving ought to have known". I respectfully submit
that this unsettle change of defence should not have been
allowed to them, it should not have been available to
them, as it was not pleaded at the outset. It has to be
specifically pleaded, in my submission, my Lord, at the time.
If my submission on the law is, however, wrong,
then your Lordship must ask what effort would have been
reasonable on the part of an individual historian, acting
without institutional support like that of Yad Vashem, and
with the doors of the archives increasingly being slammed
against him because of the activities of the bodies to
which I shall shortly refer. What it would have been
reasonable to expect me to do to find out what happened?
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These Defendants have reportedly spent some $6 million,
and 20 man-years or more, in researching this case: this
blinding and expensive spotlight has been focused on the
narrowest of issues, yet it has still generated more noise
than illumination. I heard the expert witnesses who were
paraded before us use phrases like the "consensus of
expert opinion" as their source so often - in fact, I did
a check, the word "consensus" occurs 40 times in the daily
transcripts of this trial - that I began to wonder what
the archives were for. I suggest that these experts were
more expert in reporting each other's opinions and those
of people who agree with them than in what the archives
actually contain and what they do not contain which is
equally important.
The phrase "Holocaust denier", which the Second
Defendant boasts of having invented, is an Orwellian
stigma. It is not a very helpful phrase. It does not
diminish or extend thought or knowledge on this tragic
subject. Its universal adoption within the space of a few
years by media, academia government and even academics
seems to indicate something of the international endeavour
of which I shall shortly make brief mention. It is, in my
submission, a key to the whole case. Perhaps this court
should raise its gaze briefly from the red and blue files
and bundles that are around the court room of documents
for a brief moment, and re-read George Orwell's appendix
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to "1984", which seems very relevant to this case.
From the witness box, with its revelations of
the "consensus of opinion", and "moral certainty", and the
mass male voice choir of the "social sciences" that we
heard about from Professor Funke, on which the Defendant's
German expert, Professor Hajo Funke, relies for his
certainty, his certainty, as to what is right-wing
extremism, we seem hear more than a vague echo of
Orwellian Newspeak -- a language that moulds minds, and
destroys reputations and livelihoods.
Orwell was wrong in one point: he thought it
would take the forces of the State to impose Newspeak:
Professor Lipstadt and her reckless publishers Penguin
Books Limited -- I shall justify that adjective -- have
sought to impose it through the machinery of the literary
and media establishments. Only the Royal Courts of
Justice here in London, independent and proud, can protect
the rights of the individual from now on. And those
rights include the right, as Lord Justice Sedley recently
put it in another Court in this building, of any person to
hold to, and to preach, unpopular views, perhaps even
views that many might find repellent.
My Lord, I have not hesitated myself to stand
here in the witness box and to answer questions.
Mr Rampton rose to the occasion, and he, or indeed I, may
yet regret it. Your Lordship will recall that, when
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I brought a somewhat reluctant and even curmudgeonly
Professor Donald Watt, who is not the Professor
I mentioned earlier incidentally, doyen of the diplomatic
historians, into the witness box, he used these words:
"I must say, I hope that I am never subjected
to the kind of examination that Mr Irving's books have
been subjected to by the defence witnesses. I have a very
strong feeling that there are other senior historical
figures, including some to whom I owed a great deal of my
own career, whose work would not stand up, or not all of
whose work would stand up, to this kind of examination".
I am not throwing myself on the charity of this
court, my Lord, but I am asking that the court should be
reasonable in the standards that it sets. That
effectively is a line that Professor Watt has supported me
in. It is fair to say, of course, that I had to subpoena
Donald Watt.
MR JUSTICE GRAY: Yes, I am aware.
MR IRVING: When I invited him to mention some names, of
course, he declined. What he was saying was that whatever
mistakes or whatever unconventional interpretations of
mine, the Defendants have revealed with their
multi-million dollar research, and I am going to admit
some mistakes that I have made, not many, this does not
invalidate me as an historian, or my historical methods
and conclusions.
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Your Lordship will find that Professor Watt
continued by suggesting that simply by facing the
challenge of the views that I had put forward, "and basing
them on historical research rather than idealogical
conviction," this had resulted in other historians
devoting an "enormous burst of research" to the Nazi
massacres of the Jews, an area which can now in
consequence support journals and conferences. He said,
"This, I think, is a direct result of the challenge which
Mr Irving's work posed and the consistency and the effort
which he has put into maintaining it in public". In other
words, I forced the others to do their homework finally at
last. In other words, Watt stated that, far from being a
Holocaust denier, my work has directly increased
historical research into, and the understanding of, the
Holocaust.
The German Professor Eberhard Jaeckel made the
same controversial -- and he is no friend of mine, of
course -- point in his essay in the book published by the
Us Holocaust Memorial Museum a year or two ago, namely
that before my book Hitler's War was published in 1977,
the first edition, there had been virtually no meaningful
research into the tragedy at all. Professor Hans Mommsen,
Professor Raul Hilberg, Professor Gordon C Craig, these
and many others have more or less supported my claim to be
regarded as a serious historian. I of course say things
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like that with the utmost personal distaste. I do not
believe in blowing my own trumpet. The outcome of my
research, my books, and my speaking is therefore that
people in general are more, and not less, aware of the
horrors of the Holocaust, and they are certainly better informed.
One of the most damaging accusations which Mr
Rampton has repeated again this morning, is that I, the
plaintiff, driven by my obsession with Hitler, distort,
manipulate and falsify history in order to put Hitler in a
more favourable light, thereby demonstrating a lack of the
detachment, rationality and judgment necessary for an historian.
I submit that, in assessing whether I am an
historian who "distorts, manipulates and falsifies" your
Lordship should give most weight to my avowedly historical
written works. Your Lordship will be thoroughly aware of
why I am saying this. I suggested my speeches, very
occasional lapses of taste in them, lapses of taste
Mr Rampton has identified and mentioned repeatedly,
I think three altogether, are relevant purely as
background material. Of those written historical works,
I submit that your Lordship give most weight to my
flagship work Hitler's War. I ask that your Lordship read
(again, if your Lordship has already done so) the
introduction to the 1991 edition. This was published well
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after the year when the Defendants (wrongly) assert that
I "flipped over" to become what they call a Holocaust denier.
I have always differed from my colleagues in my
profession in insisting on using original documents,
including where possible the authors' drafts of books or
memoirs rather than the heavily edited West German
editions, later rewritings, or posthumous adaptations. I
also make use of many more unpublished original documents
than my historian colleagues, in my belief. In the 1960s
and 1970s, I must add, of course, that was much more
difficult than it is today.
I differ too from others, in making copies -- and
I am going to emphasise this quite a lot- of the original
documents which I unearth freely available to others
as soon as my own works are complete, and in fact often
before that time, as the panne, the accident, the mishap
which Professor Harold Deutsch's book showed. Your
Lordship will remember that Harold Deutsch got there first
and used it before me, and I was accused of plageurising
his book, because I gave him the materials before I used
them. As page 14 of Hitler's War shows, I donate these
records regularly to publicly accessible archives and
I also make them available on microfilm. There are nearly
200 such microfilms in my records, nearly half a million
pages. I also devote time to corresponding with and
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assisting other historians and researchers. If,
therefore -- this is the important point -- some of my
interpretations are controversial, I also do all that is
possible to let other people judge for themselves. This
speaks strongly against the accusation, levelled against
me again today by Mr Rampton, that I distort, manipulate
and falsify history.
On Hitler and the Holocaust I wrote these words,
and this is in the 1991 edition, after the time when
I supposedly became a denier obsessed with Hitler and with
exonerating him.
Page 2: My conclusions ... startled even me.
Hitler was a far less omnipotent Fuhrer than had been
believed, his methods and tactics were profoundly
opportunistic.
Page 4: ... the more hermetically Hitler locked
himself away behind the barbed wire and mine fields of his
remote military headquarters, the more his Germany became
a Fuhrer Staat without a Fuhrer. Domestic policy was
controlled by whoever was most powerful in each sector -
by Goring, Lammers, Bormann, Himmler.
Page 17: If this biography were simply a
history of the rise and fall of Hitler's Reich, it would
be legitimate to conclude "Hitler killed the Jews". He
had after all created the atmosphere of hatred with his
speeches in the 1930s; he and Himmler had created the SS;
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his speeches, though never explicit, left the clear
impression that "liquidate" what was he meant.
At pages 17 to 18: For a full length war
biography, I wrote, I felt that a more analytical approach
to the key questions of initiative, complicity and
execution would be necessary. Remarkably, I found that
Hitler's own role in the "Final Solution", whatever that
was, had never been examined.
At page 38: Every document actually linking
Hitler with the treatment of the Jews invariably takes the
form of an embargo, and I maintain that position, despite
everything we have heard for the last two months.
This is the famous "chain of documents", of
course, notwithstanding everything we have heard in court,
I still adhere to this position.
At page 19 it is plausible to impute to him, to
Hitler, that not uncommon characteristic of heads of
state, a conscious desire "not to know", what the
Americans now call, I believe, plausible deniability. But
the proof of this of course is beyond the powers of a historian.
At page 21 I write: ... dictatorships are
fundamentally weak ... I concluded, the burden of guilt
for the bloody and mindless massacres of the Jews rests on
a large number of Germans (and non-Germans), many of them
alive today and not just on one "mad dictator", whose
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order had to be obeyed without question.
The similarity with the thesis propagated by
Dr Daniel Goldhagen of the University of Harvard in his
worldwide best seller book, "Hitler's Willing
Executioners", will surely strike everybody in this
court. I am saying the burden falls on a large number of
Germans and not just on that one madman's. Note the word
"just". I do not say "not on the madman", I say not just on him.
Allow me to rub this point in: What I actually
wrote and printed and published in my flagship study
Hitler's War was that Hitler was clearly responsible for
the Holocaust both by virtue of being head of state and by
having done so much by his speeches and organisation to start it off.
Where I differed from many historians was in
denying that there was any documentary proof of detailed
direction and initiation of the mass murders by Hitler,
and I am glad to say two months in that respect has not
brought us any closer. The view was considered to be
heretical at the time. But this lack of wartime
documentary evidence for Hitler's involvement is now
widely accepted. Indeed, on the narrower matter of the
lack of wartime documentary evidence on the gas chambers,
your Lordship was already good enough to grant as follows
in an exchange between your Lordship and myself and
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Professor Evans.
I said: If his Lordship is led to believe by a
careless statement of the witnesses that there is a vast
body of wartime documents, namely about gas chambers, this
would be unfair, would it not, because you, Professor
Evans, are not referring to wartime documents, you are
referring to postwar documents?
Professor Evans at this point replies: I am
referring to all kinds of documents.
I insist, this is me: You are not referring to wartime documents?
Evans says: I am referring to documents
including wartime documents, the totality of the written
evidence for the Holocaust which you deny.
Irving then says: Are you saying there is a
vast quantity of wartime documents?
You see, I am a bit persistent on this matter.
Evans says: What I am saying is that there is a
vast quantity of documents and material for all aspects of the Holocaust.
At this point your Lordship was good enough to
say: I expect you would accept, Professor Evans, just to
move on, the number of overtly incriminating documents,
wartime documents, as regarding gas chambers is actually
pretty few and far between?
That is how it was left.
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To summarise, in Hitler's War I differed from
the other historians in suggesting that the actual mass
murders were not all or mainly initiated by Hitler.
I pointed out that my sources were consistent with another
explanation: A conscious desire "not to know" (a kind of
Richard Nixon kind of complex) to which I referred, I
believe, on three occasions during the hearings here.
I submit that I have not distorted, manipulated
and falsified. I have put all the cards on table; I made
the documents available to all comers, on microfilm and in
the archives, and I have pointed to various possible explanations.
I further submit that, while certainly "selling"
my views, I have been much less manipulated that those
historians, including some whom you heard in this court,
my Lord, whose argument has an important part been simply
this -- that I ought not to be heard, because my views are
too outlandish or extreme. Disgracefully, these scholars
cleared from the sidelines as I have outlawed, arrested
harassed, and all but "vernichtet" destroyed as a
professional historian; and they have put pressure on
British publishers to destroy my works. This is a
reference to MacMillan Limited, to which we will come later.
To assist your Lordship in deciding how
outlandish and extreme these views of mine are, I allow
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myself to quote from AJP Taylor's The War Lords, published
by Penguin -- the First Defendants in this action -- in
London in 1978. Of Adolf Hitler Taylor wrote.
"... it was at this time that he became really a
recluse, settling down in an underground bunker, running the
war from the front. (at pages 55-57).
Precisely same kind of image I generated from my
own sources.
"He was a solitary man, though he sometimes
accepted, of course, advice from others, sometimes decisions
[my emphasis]. [he accepted decisions from others] It is, I think,
true, for instance, that the terrible massacre of the Jews".
This is AJP Taylor who "was inspired more by
Himmler than by Hitler, though Hitler took it up". (At
pages 68-70).
These quotations are from the foreword of AJP
Taylor's own flagship work, The Origins of the Second
World War, published in 1963:
"Little can be discovered so long as we
go on attributing everything that happened to Hitler. He supplied
a powerful dynamic element, but it was fuel to an existing machine...
[later on he writes] He have counted for nothing without the
support and co-operation of the German people. It seems to be believed
nowadays that Hitler did everything himself, even driving the trains
and filling the gas chambers unaided. This
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was not so. Hitler was a sounding-board for the German nation.
Thousands. Many hundred thousand, Germans carried out his evil orders
without qualm or question."
What I wrote, with less felicity of style than
Professor Taylor, was a reasonable interpretation of the
information available to me at the time. I might add that
my words are often accepted, quoted, and echoed by other
historians far more eminent than me. (including the
government's Official Historians like Professor Frank
Hinsley, in his volumes on British intelligence) who
specifically footnotes and references my works. Some may
regard my interpretations as not the most probable. But
they are never perverse. For the Defendants to describe me
as one who manipulates, distorts, and falsifies it would
be necessary for them to satisfy your Lordship that
I wilfully adopted perverse and ridiculous
interpretations. But I have not and they have not
satisfied your Lordship either, I submit.
The Defendants' historiographical criticisms
I now turn to some of the particular matters
which exercised your Lordship, in the list of points at issue.
As a preamble I would say that I trust your
Lordship will be bear in mind that the task facing an
historian of my type -- what I refer to as a "shirtsleeve
historian", a shirtsleeve historian working in the field,
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from original records -- is very different from the task
facing the scholar or academic who sits in a book-lined
study, plucking handy works of reference from his shelves,
printed in large type, translated into English, provided
with easy indices and often with nice illustrations too.
Your Lordship will recall that while researching
the Goebbels Diaries in Moscow for the first week in June
1992 I had to read those wartime Nazi glass microfiches
plates through a magnifier the size of a nailclipper, with
a lens smaller than a pea. The Court will appreciate that
reading even post-war microfilm of often poorly reproduced
original documents on a mechanical reader is tedious, time
consuming, and an unrewarding business. Your Lordship
will be familiar with the reason why I saying this. There
were certain matters which we dealt with. Notes have to be
taken in handwriting when are you sitting at a reader.
There are no "pages" to be xeroxed. In the 1960s xerox
copies were nothing like as good as they are now, as your
Lordship will have noticed from the blue-bound volumes
brought in here from my own document archives. Mistakes
undoubtedly occur: the mis-transcription of difficult
German words pencilled in Gothic or Sutterlin-style
handwriting, a script which most modern German scholars
find unreadable anyway; mistakes of copying are made;
mistakes of omission (i.e. a passage is not transcribed
when you are sitting at the screen because at the time it
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appears of no moment). These are innocent mistakes, and
with a book the size of Hitler's War which currently runs
to 393,000 words, they are not surprising.
Your Lordship may recall another exchange I had
with Professor Evans: may I emphasise here that there is
no personal animus from me towards Professor Evans at all.
I thought he gave his evidence admirably.
IRVING: Professor Evans, when your researchers
were researching in my files at the Institute of History
in Munich, did they come across a file there which was
about 1,000 pages long, consisting of the original
annotated footnotes of Hitler's War which were referenced
by a number to a every single sentence in that book?
ANSWER: No.
IRVING: It was not part of the original corpus,
it was part of the original manuscript, but it was chopped
out because of the length.
EVANS: No, we did not see that.
IRVING: Have you seen isolated pages of that in
my diary (sic) in so far as it relates to episodes which
were of interest, like the Reichskristallnacht?
EVANS: No, I do not to be honest, recall, but
that does not mean to say that we have not seen them.
IRVING: You say my footnotes are opaque
because they do not always give the page reference. Do you
agree that, on a page which we are going to come across in
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the course of this morning, of your own expert report, you
put a footnote in just saying "see Van Pelt's report", and
that expert report is 769 pages long, is it not?
So from this exchange it is plain that I was not
just a conjurer producing quotations in my books,
producing quotations and documents out of a hat; I made my
sources and references available in their totality to
historians, even when they were not printed in the book.
The allegation that the mistakes are
deliberate -- that they are manipulations, or
distortions -- is a foul one to make, and easily disposed
of by general considerations, which I ask your Lordship to
pay particular attention to. If I intended deliberately
to mistranscribe a handwritten word or text on which the
defence places such reliance, I would hardly on the
deliberate nature of the mistranscription, I would hardly
have furnished copies of the original text to my critics,
or published the text of the handwritten document as a
facsimile in the same work (for example, the famous
November 30th 1941 note, which is illustrated as a
facsimile in all editions of Hitler's War); nor would
I have placed the entire collection of such documents
without restriction in archives commonly frequented by my criticism.
If I intended to mistranslate a document, would
I have encouraged the publication of the resulting book,
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with the correct original quotation in the German
language, where my perversion of the text would easily
have been discovered? Yet like all my other works both,
Hitler and Goebbels have appeared in German language
editions with a full and correct transcription of the
controversial texts. Is that the action of a deliberate mistranslator.
As for the general allegation that the errors of
exaggeration or distortions that were made were "all" of a
common alignment, designed to exonerate or exculpate Adolf
Hitler, the test which I submit your Lordship must apply
should surely be this: if the sentence that is complained
of be removed from the surrounding paragraph or text (and
in each book there are only one or two such sentences of
which this wounding claim is made) does this in any way
alter the book's general thrust, or the weight of the
argument that is made?
An example of this test is the wrong weight
which I gave to the contents of the 1.20 am telegram
issued by SS-Gruppenfuhrer Reinhard Heydrich on
Kristallnacht. I think Mr Rampton referred to that this
morning. It is a famous telegram, printed in the Nuremberg
volumes, five pages long or so. Would such an error have
been committed wilfully by me, given the risk that it
would inevitably be exposed? Is it not far more likely on
the balance of probabilities that in the process of
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writing and rewriting, and of cutting and of cutting and
condensing, the Goebbels manuscript, the author, that is
me, gradually over the eight years lost sight of the full
content and the thrust of the original document? Your
Lordship should know, if not then I say so now, that that
book witness through five successive drafts and retypes
over eight years, filling eventually four archives boxes,
a total of eight cubic feet of manuscript, all of which I
disclosed to the Defendants by way of discovery. St
Martin's Press, my American publishers, particularly asked
that these early chapters of the book should be trimmed
back in length.
These general considerations disposed of the
defence arguments on the "Policeman Hoffman" evidence as
rendered in the 1924 Hitler treason trial. For the
limited purposes of writing a biography of -- my Lord,
these are points you have asked me to address specifically
in your list of issues. I say that because those who
listen to Mr Rampton's speech will not have heard them
referred to and may be puzzled as to why I am addressing
them. For the limited purposes of writing a biography of
Hermann Goring -- not of Hitler -- I relied on the
thousands of typescript microfilmed pages of the
transcript of this trial. So far as I know, nobody had
ever used them before me at that time. Now the handy,
printed, bound, indexed, cross-referenced edition, which
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Professor Evans drew upon had not appeared at that time.
The printed edition appeared in 1988, two years ago.
Eleven years after my Goring biography was published. In
other words, even more years after I wrote it by Macmillan
Limited. I extracted -- with difficulty -- from the
microfilmed pages of the original transcript the material
I needed relating to Hitler and Goring and I was not
otherwise interested in that man Hofmann at all. I do not
consider the printed volume on the trial which is now
available shows that I made meaningful errors, if so, they
certainly were not deliberate.
The Kristallnacht in November 1938 is a more
difficult episode in every way. I do not mean in that
sense, my Lord, that it is difficult for me personally.
It is a difficult episode to reconstruct from the material
available to us. As said, I clearly made an error over
the content (and reference number) of the 1.20 a.m.
telegram from Heydrich. It was an innocent error. It was
a glitch of the kind that occurs in the process of
redrafting a manuscript several times over the years. The
Court must not overlook that by the time was completed in
1994 and 1995 and as I described in the introduction to
that book, Goebbels, the Mastermind of the Third Reich, by
that time I had been forcefully severed from both my own
collection of documents in German institutions and from
the German Federal archives in Koblenz. On July 1st 1993,
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my Lord when I attended the latter archives in Koblenz
explicitly for the purpose of tidying up loose ends on the
Goebbels manuscript, I was formally banned from the
building in the interests of the German people I was told,
for ever on orders of the minister of the interior -- that
is one of the gravest blows that has been struck at me in
my submission by this international endeavour to which
I shall shortly refer.
The allegation of the Defendants in connection
with the Kristallnacht is that in order to "exonerate
Hitler" I effectively concocted or invented, a false
version of events on that night, namely that Adolf Hitler
intervened between 1 and 2 a.m. in order to halt the
madness. I think that is a fair summary of the charge
against me. I submit that their refusal to accept this,
my version, is ingrained in their own political
attitudes. There is evidence both in the archives and in
the reliable contemporary records like Ulrich von Hassell,
the diaries of von Hassell, Alfred Rosenberg and Hellmuth
Groscurth, and in the independent testimonies. By which I
mean independent from each other, testimonies of those
participants whom I myself carefully questioned, or whose
private papers I obtained -- I mention here Nicolaus von
Below, Hitler's adjutant. Another adjutant, Bruckner,
Julius Schaub, Karl Wolff and others -- which the Court
has seen, to justify the versions which I rendered. It
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therefore was not an invented story. It may well be that
my critics were unfamiliar with the sources that I used
before they made their criticisms. The dishonesty lies
not with me, for printing the "inside" story of Hitler's
actions that night, as far as we can reconstruct them
using these and other sources; but with those scholars who
have studiously ignored them, and in particular the Rudolf
Hess "stop arson" telegram of 2.56 am, which was
issued "on orders from the highest level", which the
Defendants' scholars are agreed or testified is a
reference to Hitler.
Your Lordship may well have marvelled to hear
the Defendants' witnesses dismiss this message from Rudolf
Hess -- like the Schlegelberger Document, referred to
later -- as being of no consequence.
The Kristallnacht diaries of Dr Goebbels, which
I obtained in Moscow in 1992, some years after I first
drafted the episode for my biography, substantially bore
out my version of events, in my submission, namely that he
and not Hitler was the prime instigator, and that Hitler
was largely unaware and displeased by what came about, or
by the scale of what came about, would be a fairer way to
put that. Your Lordship will recall that Professor
Phillippe Burrin, a Swiss Holocaust historian for whom all
the witnesses expressed respect when questioned by me,
comes to the same conclusion independently of me. Now he
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(and I have given the quotation at the foot of page).
Now, he is manifestly not a "Holocaust denier" either.
The Court will also recall that the witness Professor
Evans admitted that unlike myself he had not read all
through the available Goebbels Diaries. It is a massive
task. A mammoth task. He had not had the time, he said,
and we must confess a certain sympathy with that
position -- for an academic, time is certainly at a
premium. But reading all of the available Goebbels
Diaries is however necessary, in order to establish and
recognize the subterfuges which this Nazi minister used
throughout his career as diarist, in order to conceal when
he was creating what I call alibis for his own wayward and
evil behaviour.
I drew attention to this historiographical
conundrum several times in the book, my Goebbels
biography, the fact that Goebbels Diaries were not
trustworthy. I discussed both in my scientific annotated
German language edition of the 1938 diaries and in my full
Goebbels biography which your Lordship has read, a
characteristic example from this same year, 1938, although
the one episode which most deeply harrowed and unsettled
him that year was his affair with the Czech actress, Lida
Baarova, an affair which drove him to the brink of
resignation, divorce, and even suicide, neither her name
nor any of those events figures explicitly in the diary at
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all, unless the pages be read particularly closely, when
certain clues can be seen. That is an example ...
The Goebbels diary is sometimes a very deceitful
document; it must be recognized as such and treated very
gingerly indeed. It is the diary of a liar, a
propagandist. The fact that it was evidently written up
not one, but two or even three days later, after the
Kristallnacht episode, calls for additional caution in
relying on it for chronology and content.
My Lord, your Lordship will notice that I have
not dealt specifically with the number of the issues you
put in your list. I hope your Lordship does not take
umbrage with that, but I felt that I dealt with them
adequately in my cross-examination.
MR JUSTICE GRAY: It is entirely a matter for you.
MR IRVING: If this was wrong of me then all I can say is
culpa mea (sic) but I now continue with the various
narratives of the Nazi shooting of the Jews in the East.
There is little dispute between the parties on
what actually happened in my view. This is the shootings
of the Jews in the East by the Nazis and their
collaborators. There is little dispute between the
parties on what actually happened in my view, and your
Lordship is aware that I have given these atrocities due
and proper attention in the various biographies I have
written; I however add the one caveat, that they are not
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intended to be reference works on the Holocaust, but just
orthodox biographies.
I believe that I was the first historian
anywhere in the world to discover and make use of the
CSDIC reports relating further details to these killings,
particularly the Bruns Report, and I made these reports
available to many other historians. I should explain to
the people who are not familiar with them that these CSDIC
reports are eavesdropping reports on Nazi prisoners that
we British made using hidden microphones. It took -- it
takes many days to read them. There are thousands and
thousands of pages in these files. Over the last twenty
years I have read these horrifying narratives out
repeatedly to public audiences, they describe the killings
of the Jews in the most horrifying detail, including
"right-wing" audiences. This fact alone entitles me to
express my contempt at those who would describe me as a
"Holocaust denier".
We have seen the Defendants scrabbling around at
the end of the Bruns Report for its seizing on its
third-hand reference by this SS murderer and braggart in
Riga, Altemeyer, to an "order" that he claimed to have
received to carry out such mass shootings more
circumspectly in future. But we know from the late 1941
police decodes -- we British were reading the SS and
police messages passing between Berlin and the front. We
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know from the late 1941 police decodes, which is a much
firmer source-document in my view than a snatch of
conversation remembered years later, in April 1945, we
know precisely what orders had gone from Hitler's
headquarters, radioed by Himmler himself to the SS mass
murderer, SS Obergruppenfuhrer Friedrich Jeckeln, stating
explicitly that these killings exceeded the authority that
had been given by himself, Himmler, and by the
Reichsssicherheitshauptamp (the RSHA). We know that the
killing of all German Jews stopped at once, for many
months upon the receipt of that message. When I first
translated the word "Judentransport" a word which I
emphasise again can mean "transportation of the Jews", as
"transports of Jews", in the plural, in the 1970s, being
unaware of the surrounding context of data which helps now
to narrow down the purport to the one Riga-bound trainload
from Berlin. I was thus inadvertently coming closer to
the truth, not further from it; because the liquidation of
all the trainloads from Germany was halted next day,
December 1st 1941, by the order radioed from Hitler's
headquarters (whether initiated by Himmler or Hitler seems
hair-splitting in this context).
As I stated under cross-examination, I did not
see the Schulz-Dubois document when I wrote my books and
I have not seen it since; having now read Professor Gerald
Fleming tells us about it, I confess that I would be
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unlikely to attach the same importance as does learned
counsel for the Defendants, to what the famously anti-Nazi
Abwehr Chief Wilhelm Canaris allegedly told Lieutenant
Schulz-Dubois of Hitler's reaction. The British decodes of
the SS signals, to which I introduced the Court, and the
subsequent events (the actual cessation for many months of
the liquidation of German Jews) in my submission speak louder.
Your Lordship asked in your list of questions
for my comments on the reference in Hitler's table talk of
October 25th 1941. Well, your Lordship is familiar with
the Defendants' argument and with mine. My extract from
this document which I used was based originally on the
original Weidenfeld translation, in fact, I used the
original Weidenfeld translation into English, as is well
known, in disagreement with the Defendants' experts I
still maintain and others have followed me in this
(notably Professor Phillippe Burrin, who translates
Schrecken as "the ominous reputation") in that context,
that the appropriate translation here for the word
"schrecken" is indeed "rumour" and not "terror", a word
which makes for a wooden and uncouth translation anyway.
Ladies and gentlemen, it will make no sense,
unfortunately, this passage, unless you see the document.
A relevant passage from the SS Event Report from
activities in the rear of the eastern front, dated
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September 11, 1941 front (provided by the Defendants),
shows that this is precisely what was meant: "The rumour
that all Jews are being shot by the Germans had a salutary
effect". The Jews were now fleeing before the Germans
arrived. The rumour! To accuse me of wilful
mistranslation and even worse distortion when (a) I used
the original (sic) Weidenfeld translation, not at that
time having received the original German from Switzerland,
and (b) the word "rumour" gives precisely the nuance, the
correct nuance that the surrounding history shows the word
was meant to have, this accusation seems to me an
excessively harsh judgment on my expertise.
The next in line is the Goebbels diary entry for
November 22nd, 194: Again, I just pick out what seems to
matter to me in that particular entry here, for the
purposes of today's submissions.
This diary entry, my Lord, includes a fair
example of how dishonest the reporting by Goebbels was
when it comes to his meetings with Hitler. He records
"the exceptional praise" of Hitler for the weekly
newsreel produced by his ministry, the propaganda
ministry; in fact Hitler was forever criticising this very
product of the Goebbels ministry, as the diary of
Rosenberg shows. Goebbels then continues, here is the
quote: "With regard to the Jewish problem too the Fuhrer
completely agrees with my views. He wants an energetic
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policy against the Jews, but one however that does not
cause us needless difficulties." Goebbels diary entry
continues: "The evacuation of the Jews is to be done city
by city". So it is still not fixed when Berlin's turn
comes; but when it does, "the evacuation should be carried
out as fast as possible". In other words, he had not got
his way. He had been agitating once again that the
evacuation should start but Hitler had not come into line.
"Still not fixed when Berlin's time comes". Hitler then
expressed the need for "a somewhat reserved approach" in
question of mixed marriages -- that is marriages between
Jews and non-Jews. What do you do with them? Are you going
to keep them in Germany or deport them? Hitler's view was
the marriages would die out anyway by and by, and they
should not go grey worrying about it.
Now I have suggested that on the balance of
probabilities Hitler was alluding to the public unrest
when he said he wanted a policy that does not cause us
needless difficulties. I have suggested on a balance of
probabilities Hitler was alluding to the public unrest
caused by the suicide a few days earlier of the popular
actor Joachim Gottschalk and his family. Apart from
"needless" becoming "endless", in an irritating typo
which hardly amounts to manipulation, in other words, in
the original German, the original translation started off
as "causing us needless difficulties", which is correct,
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and somehow it became "endless difficulties" is an
irritating typo which hardly amounts to "manipulation".
This passage bears out what I have always said of Hitler.
While Goebbels was the eternal agitator, as witness his
anti-Semitic leading article published in Das Reich only a
few days before, November 16th 1941, Hitler was (even by
Goebbels own account) for a reserved approach towards the
Jewish problems; and he was doing so, even as the
trainloads of Jews were heading eastwards from Bremen and
Berlin, for example to the conquered Russian territories
and the Baltic states. Your Lordship will not need
reminding of the curious British decodes, which revealed
the provisioning of the deportation trains with tonnes of
foods for the journey. These are messages which we
British decoded, which reveal the provisioning of the
deportation trainloads of Jews with tonnes of food for the
journey, stocks of many weeks food for after they arrived
and even deportees' appliances, "Gerat", appliances. So
the evacuation at this time evidently meant just that to
very many Reich officials, and no more.
My Lord ----
MR JUSTICE GRAY: Press on. Let us get as far as the
Schlegelberger document, shall we, on the next page.
MR IRVING: Jolly good, yes, good point.
Mr Rampton went to some effort and expense to
suggest that I suppressed vital information from the newly
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discovered Goebbels diary, December 13th 1941. In this
day's entry Goebbels reported on various things and he
reported on Hitler's rhetoric to the Gauleiters, speaking
on December 12th 1941 in Berlin, the Nazi governors.
Anybody who is as familiar as I am with Hitler's speeches,
and with Goebbels' diary entries relating to be them will
effortlessly recognize this entire passage as being usual
the Hitler gramophone record about his famous 1939
"prophecy". It was part of his stock repertoire when
speaking to the Party old guard -- they had carried him
into power, the Party old guard had carried him into power
and they expected to hear from him that he had not
abandoned the hallowed Party programme. I can understand
the temptation for the younger generation of scholars,
unfamiliar with Hitler's rhetoric, to fall greedily upon
such freshly discovered morsels as though they were the
answer to the great Holocaust mystery: None of the
witnesses to whom this item was put by myself, or by
counsel for the Defendants, was able to identify any part
of this passage which was out of the ordinary for Hitler.
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
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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
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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.
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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
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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
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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.
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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
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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
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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.
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
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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
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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
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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).
This campaign had been coordinated. In some of
its members, it seems that the illiberal spirit of
Dr Goebbels lived on behind the Board of Deputies'
facade. Meeting behind locked doors at their headquarters
in December 1991, December 12, a body identified as the
"Education and Academic Committee of the Holocaust
Educational Trust, registered as a charitable body, held a
conference, including point 6:
"David Irving: Concern was voiced over the
publication of the second edition of Hitler's War". This
is 1991, 14 years after the first edition. "There was
debate over how to approach Macmillan publishers over
Goebbels Diary". That was the other book they were going
to publish of mine. "It was agreed to await new[s] from
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Jeremy Coleman before deciding what action to take."
We know more of this meeting from the statement
to this Court by my witness Dr John Fox, who was present
at this cabal in his capacity as editor of The British
Journal of Holocaust Education. He testifies as follows:
"As an independently-minded historian, I was
affronted by the suggestion concerning Mr David Irving
[...] At a certain point in the meeting, attention turned"
-- do you wish to suggest I move on?
MR JUSTICE GRAY: No. I am reading around what you are reading out to me.
MR IRVING: Yes. "At certain point in the meeting, attention
turned to the subject of Mr Irving and reports that the
publishing company of Macmillan would be publishing his
biography of Goebbels. Mr Ben Helfgott ... turned to me,
the only non-Jew present at the meeting, and suggested
that 'John'", John Fox, "'could approach Macmillan to get
them to stop publication'. I refused point-blank to accede
to that suggestion, arguing that in a democracy such as
ours one simply could not do such a thing. That amounted
to censorship ...
Nevertheless, as the Committee minutes make
plain, it was planned by some to consider further action
about how best to scupper Mr Irving's publishing plans
with Macmillan".
The clandestine pressure on Macmillan's began at
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once. My editor at Macmillan's, Roland Philipps, noted in
an internal memorandum of January 2nd 1992 that they
should reassure prospective authors that they had turned
down many other book proposals from me, and had no plans
to continue publishing me after Goebbels. It was not the
bravest of postures to adopt, you might think. The
memorandum continues: "If this helps you to reassure any
prospective authors we are happy for you to say it
(although not too publicly if possible)". The desire of
Macmillan's to stab in the back, for this stab in the back
to be secret from their own highly successful author,
myself, is understandable. In fact, their ultimate stab
in the back was to come in the summer of 1992.
In May 1992, meanwhile, we find Deborah Lipstadt
providing a list of her personal targets, victims,
including now myself to the US Holocaust Memorial Museum
in Washington; she advised the Museum to contact Gail Gans
at the Research Department of the ADL (about whom we have
heard) in New York City for additional names, and to "tell
her I told you to call her". This establishes that the
Defendants consider that that museum, which is a US
taxpayer-funded body, was actively participating in their
network, and the museum duly provided press clippings from
London newspapers relating to me, which have now turned up
in the Defendants' files.
The attempts to suffocate my publishing career
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continued. I mention a second arm of this attack. Since
my own imprint, my own publishing imprint, which I had set
up myself some years earlier, would not be intimidated as
easily as Macmillan's, or indeed at all, the hostile
groups applied pressure to major bookselling chains
throughout Britain to burn or destroy my books and in
particular the new edition of Hitler's War. Some of the
press clippings reporting this nasty campaign are in my
discovery. They include reports of a sustained campaign
of window smashing of the branches of Waterstone's
bookstores in the biggest Midlands cities, after
complaints were made by local groups.
Waterstones informed one Newcastle newspaper
that they were taking books off public shelves "following
a number of vandal attacks on book stores across the
country". The Nottingham Waterstones took the book off
display after a brick was thrown through its window. The
campaign clearly coordinated from London. None of this
was reported in the national press, but one would have
thought that these groups would have recognized the bad
karma in any campaign of smashing windows or burning books.
I wrote privately to Tim Waterstone, the head at
that time of Waterstones, guaranteeing to indemnify his
chain for their costs of any uninsured claims. But he
refused to be intimidated by the campaign and, my Lord,
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that is one reason why I took the names of four
Waterstones branches off the list of Defendants in this
action at a very early stage.
I am turning the page now, my Lord:
Demonstrations organized outside by property, violent
demonstrations, police were frequently called. The same
newspaper reported -- this is halfway down that following
page -- that the Anti-Nazi League and its parent body, the
Board of Deputies, were applying pressure to The Sunday
Times to violate its contract with me which was the
contract to obtain the Goebbels diaries from the Moscow
archives. Again, the reason why I mention all of this may
be apparent, it is when I make remarks about by my
critics, occasionally using vivid language, I sometimes
had reason. As an indication of the pressure ----
MR JUSTICE GRAY: Mr Irving, I am just wondering, and I am
sorry to interrupt you and I am not going to stop you at
all, but reading on to about page 54, you describe, do you
not, the continuation of what you see as being this really
worldwide attempt to close you down as an historian and
attacks on your house and pressure of various kinds being
brought to bear all over the world. I just wonder whether
there is any particular benefit -- tell me if you there is
-- in reading out the next seven or so pages? If there
is any particular point you want to make, do, but I feel
myself we could probably move on to the middle of page
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54.
MR IRVING: I will move on to 51, my Lord. When I found out -
too late - that this fake evidence had been planted on
Canadian files, which resulted in my being deported from
Canada in handcuffs on November 13th 1992, I was angered
and astounded that a British organisation could be
secretly doing this to British citizens. It turned out
from these files that academics with whom I had freely
corresponded and exchanged information, including Gerald
Fleming, had been acting as agents and informants for this
body. I submit (which is why I am reading this out) that
these are the bodies that collaborated directly or
indirectly with the Defendants in the preparation of the
book and that the Defendants, knowing of the obvious
fantasy in some of what they said, should have shown
greater caution in accepting their materials as true.
There was an immediate consequence of this fake
data planted on Canadian files. One data report recorded
the "fact" that I had written 78 books denying the
Holocaust which, of course, is totally untrue. In August
1992 a docket was placed on Canadian immigration files
about me saying, among other things, this is a secret
file, "Subject David Irving is Holocaust denier, may be
inadmissible" to Canada with the result, of course, that
precisely that happened. I was arrested on October 28th
at Vancouver, making a speech on freedom of speech,
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deported permanently from Canada on November 13th causing
me great financial damage and loss. Access to the Public
Archives of Canada was as essential for my future research
as access to the PRO in Kew or to those archives in Italy.
My Lord, this goes, of course, to the damage that has been
caused to me by this general libel at being called a
Holocaust denier. That is one proof of the direct and
immediate cost of the pernicious label "Holocaust
denier". And the same thing, they made the same attempt
to get me banned from the United States but failed.
Page 54, my Lord. I now come to Macmillan's
final stab in the back. The hand on the blade was
Macmillan's but the blade hade been forged and
fashioned by all the Defendants in this courtroom, and by
their hidden collaborators overseas.
On July 4th 1992, as this Court knows, I had
returned Moscow with the missing entries of the Goebbels
Diaries exclusively in my possession, having gone there on
behalf of The Sunday Times. This hard-earned triumph
caught my opponents unawares. Newspapers revealed that
the Anti-Defamation League and its Canadian collaborator,
the League of Human Rights, sent immediate secret letters
to Andrew Neil at The Sunday Times demanding that he
repudiate their contract. On Sunday, 5th, the London
Sunday newspapers were full of the scoop - and also with
hostile comment. On Monday, July 6th, The Independent
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newspaper reported under the headlines "Jews attack
publisher of Irving book", that a UK body which it
identified as "the Yad Vashim Trust" with which we, of
course, were we familiar, was piling pressure on to
Macmillan's to abandon its contract with me to publish
Goebbels, failing which they would urge booksellers not to
stock or promote it.
Macmillans finally took fright that same day, as
I only now know. After their directors inquired, July 6th
1992, in an internal memo, how many of my books were still
in their stocks, and having been given totals of several
thousand copies of all three volumes of my Hitler
biography, representing a value of several hundred
thousand pounds, my own editor, Roland Philipps, on July
6th issued the secret order reading: "Please arrange for
the remaining stock of [David Irving's Hitler biographies]
to be destroyed. Many thanks". Book burning. They
prepared a "draft announcement", but it was not released.
Although still a Macmillan author, I was not told. The
royalties due to me on the sale of those books were books
were lost and destroyed with them. The Defendants'
campaign to destroy my legitimacy as an historian, of
which the book published by the Defendants became an
integral part, had thus reached its climax.
My Lord, I now pass over the next pages to page 57.
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The same thing happened in Australia. I spoke
in the Munich. Final paragraph: Opponents released --
I am sorry, yes. Opponents released to Australia
television the heavily edited version of Michael Schmidt's
1991 video tape of me addressing the crowd at Halle about
which we have heard from Mr Rampton this morning, the Sieg
Haels and the rest of it. As edited, it omitted my
visible and audible rebuke to a section of the crowd for
chanting Hitler slogans. Grotesque libels about me
swamped the Australian press, printed by various
organisations including the New South Wales Board of
Deputies and various newspapers. One example was an
article by a lecturer in politics. He wrote: "Irving has
a history of exciting neoNazi and skinhead groups in
Germany which had burned migrant hostels and killed people
... Irving has frequently spoken in Germany at rallies...
under the swastika flag ... himself screaming the Nazi
salute..." This is how these stories begin.
Unsurprisingly, Australia then banned me too. I was t6 be
refused a visa, they announced, on February 8th 1993 as
I was a "Holocaust denier". They had thus adopted the
phrase that the Second Defendant, Professor Lipstadt,
prides herself in having invented.
This new and very damaging ban on visiting
Australia made it impossible for me to work again in the
National Library of Australia in Canberra. At great
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personal expense I appealed to the Australian Federal
Court. The Court declared the Minister's refusal of a
visa illegal. The government in Canberra therefore
changed the law in February 1994 to keep me out. We note
from Professor Lipstadt's own discovery that the
immigration minister faxed the decision to keep me out
direct to one of her source agencies that same afternoon.
The same kind of thing happened.
In July 1994, as the resulting fresh legal
actions which I started against the Australian government
still raged, the Second Defendant was invited by
Australian organisations, all expenses paid to visit their
country; she was hired to tour Australia, and to slander
my name and my reputation and add her voice to the
campaign to have me refused entry. The court, my Lord,
you will probably remember the Australian TV video which
I showed entitled "The Big Lie" in the early days.
MR JUSTICE GRAY: Yes.
MR IRVING: Broadcast in July 1994, it showed both the expert
witness, Professor van Pelt, and Mr Fred Leuchter. It
showed Fred Leuchter standing on the roof of crematorium
No. II, about which we are going to hear more, crematorium
No. II at Auschwitz which van Pelt declared to be the
centre of the Nazi genocide, and the Second Defendant
being interviewed while still in Australia (and refusing
once again to debate with the revisionists, just as she
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has obstinately refused to go into the witness stand here
and be questioned). Thus I found myself excluded from
Australia. We have had now Germany, Canada, South Africa,
Australia, New Zealand as well, I lost the ability to
visit my hundreds of friends down under and my own
daughter too, who is an Australian citizen; and I lost all
the bookshop sales that this ban implied in Australia -
where my Churchill biography had hit the No. 1 spot in the
best seller lists earlier.
Over the page: My lecturing engagements in the
British Isles came under similar attack. I had often
spoken to universities and debating societies, including
the Oxford and Cambridge Unions, in the past, but now in
one month, in October 1993, when I was invited to speak to
prestigious bodes at three major Irish universities, I
found all three invitations cancelled under pressure and
threat of local Jewish and anti-fascist organisations.
The irony will not elude the court that these Defendants,
on the one hand, have claimed by way of defence that
I speak only to the far right and neo-Nazi element, as
they describe it, and yet it turns out that their own
associates are the people who have done their damnedest to
make it impossible for many others to invite me.
The Second Defendant, Deborah Lipstadt, had
meanwhile made progress with her book. She told her
publisher that she had written a certain statement with
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the marketing people in mind. In other words, sometimes
money mattered more than content, in my submission.
She had revealed in September 1991 in a letter:
"I have also spoken to people in England who have a large
cache of material on David Irving's conversion to denial".
We do not know who the people are, but we can, of course,
readily suspect who in this case those people were. She
is once again not presenting herself for
cross-examination, so there are many things we cannot ask
her about, including and I would have asked her, in fact,
most tactfully the reasons why she was refused tenure at
the University of California and moved downstream to the
lesser university, in my submission, in Atlanta where she
now teaches religion.
In the light of Mr Rampton's strictures on my
now famous little ditty -- your Lordship will remember the
little ditty which I am supposed to have hummed to my nine
month old daughter, the racist ditty, which went around
the press because Mr Rampton issued a press release --
supposedly urging my nine month old little girl not to
marry outside her own people, I should also have wanted to
ask questions of Professor Lipstadt's views on race had
she gone into the witness box. We know that she has
written papers, and delivered many fervent lectures, on
the vital importance of people marrying only within their
own race. Quotation: ("We know what we fight
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against...", she wrote, "intermarriage and Israel-bashing,
but what is it we fight for?") She has attracted, in
fact, much criticism from many in her own community for
her implacable stance against mixed marriages, marrying
outside their own race. In one book Professor Lipstad
quotes a Wall Street Journal interview with a Conservative
rabbi, Jack Moline, whom she called "very brave" for
listing 10 things that Jewish parents should say to their
children: "No. 1 on his list", she wrote (in fact it was
No. 3) "was 'I expect you to marry Jews'." She considered
that to be very brave. My one little ditty which I hummed
to my nine month old daughter, Jessica, was a perhaps
tasteless joke. Professor Lipstadt's repeated
denunciation of mixed marriages addressed to adults was
deadly serious.
Professor Lipstad accuses me of error or
falsification, but is apparently unable to spot a fake
even at a relatively close range. She admitted (in a
recent interview with Forward) that she used memoirs of
the spurious Auschwitz survivor Benjamin Wilkomirski in
her teaching of the Holocaust to her defenceless students,
according to Professor Peter Novick who has written a book
on this. Those "memoirs" have now been exposed,
worldwide, as fraudulent. Wilkomirski was never anywhere
near Auschwitz. In fact, he was in Switzerland. When it
turned out that Wilkomirski have never been near the camp
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or in Poland for that matter, but had spent the war years
in comfort living with his adopted Swiss family, she
acknowledged that this "might complicate matters
somewhat", but she insisted that the Wilkomirski "memoirs"
would still be "powerful" as a novel. It may seem unjust
to your Lordship that it is I who have had to answer this
person's allegation that I distort and manipulate
historical sources.
We have Professor Lipstadt's handwritten notes,
however, in the rather meagre discovery, evidently
prepared for a talk delivered to the Anti-Defamation
League in Palm Beach, Florida, in early 1994, which again
is meagre but substantive evidence of her connection with
the Anti-Defamation League. In these, if I read her
handwriting correctly - and she appears to be relying on
something Lord Bullock had just said - she states that my
aim seems to be to de-demonize Hitler; and that I had said
that Roosevelt, Hitler and Churchill were all equally
criminal. This is hardly "exonerating" any of them.
Summarising Hitler's War (the 1977 edition) she calls me
merely an "historian with a revisionist bent" which is
rather like AJP Taylor - and she adds, and this seems
significant - "Irving denies that Hitler was responsible
for the murder of European Jewry. Rather, he claims that
Himmler was responsible. But he does not deny its
occurrence. Had she stuck with that view, of course, of
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my writings, which is a very fair summary of my views,
both then and now, she and we would not find ourselves
here today.
But she was led astray, my Lord. She fell in
with bad company, or associates. These things happen. We
know that, in conducting her research for the book, she
spoke with the Board of Deputies, the Institute of Jewish
Affairs, the Anti-defamation League and other such worthy
bodies, since she thanks all of them in her introduction.
My Lord, I have given a list of the bodies she
thanks in an affidavit which is contained in my bundle
based on the introduction to her book.
Some time in 1992 her book was complete in its
first draft, and Professor Lipstadt sent it to the people
who were paying her, the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.
We do not know what was in the book, since I cannot
question the second Defendant and she has not disclosed
the early draft, with Professor Yehuda Bauer's scribbles
on it, as he said, in her sworn list of documents. The
early draft was clearly discoverable but it has not been
provided to us. We do know however what was not in it.
We know that there was no mention of his Hizbollah and
Hamas and Louis Farrakhan and the November 1992 terrorists
in Stockholm, or of the lie about my speaking on the same
platform with them. In fact, we also know that in this
first draft I was merely mentioned in passing. This is a
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book about denying Holocaust and I am only mentioned in
passing. This is evident from the letter which Professor
Yehuda Bauer wrote back to her, congratulating her on
November 27th 1992. Bauer complained that the book lacked
the "worldwide perspective" and said, "Irving is
mentioned, but not that he is the mainstay of Holocaust
denial today in Western Europe" which is where all the
misery then began of course.
Somehow therefore I had to be shoe horned into
the text before publication. Professor Bauer urged her
too not to write things inadvertently that might convince
the reader that there was something to what revisionists
or deniers said, although that is hardly a true scholar's
method, to suppress mention of opposing arguments. In a
letter to Anthony Lerman, of the Institute of Jewish
Jewish Affairs, (the same Mr Lerman who would spread later
the lying word that I had supplied the trigger mechanism
for the Oklahoma City bomb) Lipstadt revealed that there
was an earlier incarnation of the book.
Now, that earlier incarnation, to use her words,
has also not been disclosed in her sworn list of
documents. She had been ordered to swear an affidavit on
her list, my Lord, which is why there is a sworn list,
because of discrepancies previously. When I made a
subsequent complaint about deficient discovery, her
solicitors reminded me that I could not go behind her
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affidavit under the rules until she presented herself for
cross-examination, which I think is, if I may say so, my
Lord, deceptive. Had they intended not calling this
witness to the witness stand, they should not have written
that to me. This chance of cross-examining the witness
has been denied to me.
Professors Lipstadt spent of that last month of
1992 therefore putting me into the book, whereas I had
only previously been mentioned, and thus putting herself
into this court room today. They were the weeks after the
spectacular success of the global campaign to destroy my
legitimacy, which culminated with getting me deported in
manacles from Canada on November 13th, 1992.
"I am just finishing up the book" she wrote to
Lerman on December 18th "and, as you can well imagine,
David Irving figures into it quite prominently". She
pleaded with Lerman to provide, indeed to fax to her
urgently, materials from "your files". Your Lordship may
think that this haste to wield the hatchet compares poorly
with the kind of in-depth years long shirt sleeved
research which I conducted on my biographical subjects.
"I think that he (in other words Irving) is one of the
most dangerous figures around", she added, pleading the
urgency. It was a spectacular epiphany, this court might
think, given that only three weeks earlier the manuscript
barely mentioned me, as Bauer himself had complained.
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From being barely mentioned to being one of the most
dangerous figures around.
Lerman faxed his materials to her from London a
few days later. We do not know precisely what, and it is
a complete extent, as here too the defendants' discovery
is only fragmentary, and these items were provided to me,
again only in response to a summons.
That is an outline of the damage, and the
people, including specifically the Defendants in this
action, who were behind it. Mr Rampton suggested at a
very early stage that I had brought all of this on my
myself, that I even deserved it. He was talking about the
hate wreath that was sent to me upon the death of my
oldest daughter. We shall see.
My Lord, I now come to Auschwitz Concentration Camp.
Auschwitz has been a football of politicians and
statesmen ever since World War II. The site has become,
like the Holocaust itself, an industry, a big business in
the most tasteless way, the Auschwitz site. The area,
I am informed, is overgrown with fast food restaurants,
souvenir and trinket shops, motels and the like. As
Mr Rampton rightly says, I have never been to Auschwitz
and Mr Rampton knows the reason why. The Auschwitz
authorities said they would not allow me to visit the site
and they would not allow me into their archives, and they
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have every reason to know why they do not want to allow a
David Irving to get his hands on their papers. Under
Prime Minister Josef Cyrankiewicz (who had been prisoner
number 62,993) it was known at its opening in 1948 as a
monument to the martyrdom of the Polish and other
peoples.
Auschwitz was overrun by the Red Army in January
1945. The last prisoner had received the tattooed
number 202,499. Informed by Colonel General Heinz
Guderian, the chief of the German Army general staff, that
the Russians had captured Auschwitz, Hitler is recorded by
the stenographers as saying merely "yes". The court might
find it significant that he did not prick up his ears and
say something like, "Herr Himmler, I hope you made sure
the Russians will not find the slightest trace of what we
have been up to". (Or even, "I hope you managed to get
those holes in the roof slab of crematoria No. II cemented
over before you blew it up".) I will shortly explain the
significance of that. When the name of SS General Hans
Kammler, the architect of the concentration camps, was
mentioned to him a few days later by Goebbels, it was
evident that even Kammler's name meant little to Hitler
because Goebbels commented on the fact.
How many had died at Auschwitz? We still do not
know with certainty, because the tragic figure has become
an object of politics, too. Professor Arno Mayer, the
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Professor of European history at the University of
Princeton, a scholar of considerably greater renommee than
Professor Evans, and himself a Jew, expressed the view in
one book that most of the victims of the camp died of
exhaustion and epidemics. He said: "From 1942 to 1945
more Jews died, at least in Auschwitz and probably
everywhere else, of 'natural' causes of death than of
'unnatural'.
The Russians who captured the camp did not at
first make any mention in their news reports of gas
chambers. There is a famous report published in the first
day or two in February 1945 in Pravda. Moreover, as we
saw on the newsreel, which I showed on the first day of
this trial, even the Poles, with access to all the
records, claimed only that "altogether nearly 300,000
people from the most different nations died in the
Auschwitz concentration camp". This is the news reel
trial of the trial of the Auschwitz officials. "300,000
people from the most different nations died in the
Auschwitz concentration camp". It concluded that the camp
now stood as a monument of shame to the lasting memory of
its 300,000 victims. In both cases gassing was not
mentioned. The New York Times quoted the same figure
300,000 when the trial began in 1947. The figure
gradually grew however. The Russians set up an inquiry
including some very well-known names, including the
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experts who had examined the Nazi mass graves at Katyn,
and even the notorious Lysenko. They announced that 4
million had been murdered at Auschwitz. Under the Polish
communists, a monument to "4 million dead", with those
words on it, was duly erected, a number which was adhered
to until the 1990s even under Franciszek Piper, one of the
later (but still communist) directors of the Auschwitz
State Archives. After the communist regime ended that
figure was brought down to 1.5 million, and then to
750,000 by the acknowledged expert Jean-Claude Pressac.
The Defendants' own expert Peter Longerich spoke of one
million deaths there from all causes, and then in response
to cross-examination by myself and to your Lordship's
enquiries, Dr Longerich confirmed that he included all non
homicidal deaths, deaths "from other causes", including
epidemics and exhaustion in that overall figure of 1
million.
Perhaps I should pause there and say that these
figures seem appalling figures but, if it is one million
or 300,000 or whatever the figure is, each of them means
that many multiples of one individual. I never forget in
anything I have said or written or done the appalling
suffering that has been inflicted on people in the camps
like Auschwitz. I am on the side of the innocents of this world.
As for the overall death roll of the Holocaust,
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what meaning can one attach to the figures? The
International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg found that
the policy pursued resulted in the killing of 6 million
Jews, of which 4 million were killed in the extermination
institutions, but the 6 million figure derives, as the
American chief prosecutor Jackson recorded in his diary in
June 1945, from a back of the envelope calculation by the
American Jewish leaders with whom he met in New York at
that time. Professor Raul Hilberg puts the overall
Holocaust figure at one million or less. Gerald
Reitlinger had the figure at 4.6 million, of which he said
about 3 million were conjectural, as it was not known how
many Jews had escaped into the unoccupied part of the
Soviet Union. The Israeli prime minister's office, we are
told by Norman Finkelstein, recently stated that there
were still nearly one million living survivors.
There are doubts not only about the precise
figures but about specific events. The same Nuremberg
tribunal ruled on October 1st 1946 that the Nazis had
attempted to utilise the fat from bodies of victims in the
commercial manufacture of soap. In 1990 historian Shmuel
Krakowski of Yad Vashem announced to the world's press
that that too had been a Nazi propaganda lie. Gradually
the wartime stories have been dismantled. As more
documents have been found, widely stated propositions have
been found to be doubtful. For a long time the confident
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public perception was that the Wannsee protocol of the
January 20th 1942 meeting at the Interpol headquarters in
Berlin, Wannsee, recorded the actual order to exterminate
the European Jews. Yehuda Bauer, the director now of Yad
Vashem, the world's premier Holocaust research institution
in Israel -- one of the correspondents of the second
Defendant you remember -- has stated quite clearly: "The
public still repeats time after time the silly story that
at Wannsee the extermination of the Jews was arrived at".
In his opinion Wannsee was a meeting but "hardly a
conference", and he even said: "Little of what was said
there was executed in detail". Despite this, your
Lordship has had to listen to this "silly story" all over
again from the expert witnesses.
Surely, my critics say, there must now be some
evidence of a Hitler order.
Back in 1961 Professor Raul Hilberg, one of
Yehuda Bauer's great rivals for the laureate, one of my
correspondents, asserted in "The Destruction of the
European Jews", his book, that there had been two such
orders, one in the spring of 1941, and the other soon
after. By 1985, after I had corresponded with him and I
had begun voicing my own doubts, Hilberg was back
pedalling. Hilberg went methodically through his new
edition of his book, excising the allegation of a Hitler
order. It is not as though he did not mention the Hitler
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order. He actually went through a book, taking every
reference to it out. "In the new edition", as Professor
Christopher Browning, another of our expert witnesses here
for the defence, who testified before this court, said,
"all references in the text to a Hitler decision or
Hitler order for the Final Solution had been
systematically excised. Buried at the bottom of a single
footnote stands the solitary reference: 'Chronology and
circumstances point to a Hitler decision before the summer
ended (1941)'". "In the new edition", Browning repeats,
scandalized, "decisions were not made and orders were not
given". Your Lordship will find my exchange with
Professor Browning as to whether he had indeed written
those words in 1986 on day 17. You will find too that he
regretted that he could not recall the events clearly of
15 years ago, which invited a rather obvious riposte from
me about the probably similar memory deficiencies in the
eyewitnesses on whom he had on occasions relied.
The director of the Yad Vashem archives has
stated that most survivors' testimonies are unreliable.
There is a quotation from him. "Many", he writes, "were
never in the places where they claim to have witnessed
atrocities, while others relied on second-hand information
given them by friends or passing strangers". It is the
phenomenon that I have referred to as cross-pollination.
Your Lordship may have been as startled as I, I confess,
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was, upon learning the degree to which the case for the
mass gassings at Auschwitz relies on eyewitness evidence,
rather than on any firmer sources. Your Lordship will
remember perhaps the exchange I had with Professor Donald
Watt, professor emeritus at the London School of
Economics, a distinguished diplomatic historian, early on
in the trial, about the value of different categories of
evidence. I will just summarize that. I asked him, I
said, Professor I was not going to ask you about-- --
MR JUSTICE GRAY: He said it all depends, did he not, really?
Is that unfair as a summary?
MR IRVING: Well, my Lord, I draw your eyes straight down to
the second line from the bottom. Professor Watt answers
all of that, saying:
The Bletchley Park intercepts, in so far as they
are complete, are always regarded as the most reliable
because there is no evidence that the dispatcher was aware
that his messages could be decoded by us (by the British),
and therefore he would put truth in them".
This supports my view, my Lord, that eyewitness
evidence is less credible than forensic evidence and the
Bletchley Park intercepts. I do not completely ignore
eyewitness evidence, but I feel entitled to discount it
when it is contradicted by the more reliable evidence
which should then prevail.
I mention the forensic evidence and that brings
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us seamlessly to the Leuchter report.
I am criticised by the Defendants for having
relied initially on what is called the Leuchter report,
1988. At the time they levelled their criticism at me the
Defendants appeared to have been unaware that subsequent
and more able investigations were conducted by both
American and Polish researchers. The tests were in other
words replicated.
First, the Leuchter report. In 1988 I was
introduced by defence counsel at the Canadian trial of
Ernst Zundel to the findings made by a reputable firm of
American forensic analysts of samples extracted from the
fabric of various buildings at Auschwitz and Birkenau by
Fred Leuchter, who was at that time a professional
American execution technology consultant. These and his
investigations at the Maidanek site formed the backbone of
his engineering report. Since there have been tendentious
statements about why the Leuchter report was not admitted
in evidence at that trial in Canada I have studied the
transcripts of that trial. It emerges that engineering
reports are not generally admissible under Canadian rules
of evidence unless both parties consent. In this case the
Crown did not consent. As Mr Justice Thomas explained,
"I get engineering reports all the time (that is in civil
cases). That does not make them admissible, because they
have prepared reports. They (the witnesses) go in the
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box, they are qualified experts and they testify". So the
non-admission of the report by Mr Justice Thomas was no
reflection on the worth of the report or on the
qualifications of the witness.
My Lord, I have to go in some detail into the
Leuchter report because of the criticisms levelled at me
for having been swayed by it.
MR JUSTICE GRAY: Yes. I do not disagree with that.
MR IRVING: Mr Leuchter testified on April 20th and 21st 1988
as an expert in gas chamber technology. He had inspected
the three sites (Auschwitz/Birkenau and Maidanek) in
February 1988 and he had taken samples which were
subsequent sent for analysis by a qualified analytical
chemist in the United States, a Dr James Roth of Cornell
University, who was not told where the samples had come
from. His firm Alpha Laboratories, were told on the test
certificates only that the samples were from brickwork.
Mr Justice Thomas ruled that Leuchter would give oral
evidence but that the report itself should not be filed.
He held further that Mr Leuchter was not a chemist or a
toxicologist, which are findings, of course, that he is
quite entitled to make, but he agreed that Mr Leuchter was
an engineer because he had made himself an engineer in a
very limited field.
A summary of the rest of the judge's findings
was that Leuchter was not capable in law of giving the
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expert opinion that there were never any gassings or
exterminations carried on in the facilities from which he
took the samples. For the same reasons he was not capable
of testifying regarding the results of the analysis,
because he was not a toxicologist in other words. He was
restricted to testifying as to the actual extraction of
the samples from the buildings and his own observations on
the feasibility of the buildings that he had examined
being used as gas chambers.
So the Defendant was wrong to write on page 164
of her book, "The judge ruled that Leuchter could not
serve as an expert witness on the construction and
function of the gas chambers". To give evidence in a
criminal trial Mr Leuchter must have been accepted as an
expert witness. Further, Professor Lipstadt stated on
pages 164 of her book, and 165, "The judge's finding as to
Leuchter's suitability to comment on questions of
engineering was unequivocal". In fact, the judge's
findings referred only to his lack of qualifications to
testify on the results of the laboratory tests for cyanide
and iron, because that was Dr Roth's area, and he himself
(Roth) gave testimony on those matters. On page 169
Professor Lipstadt insists: "The exposure to the elements
lessen the presence of the hydrogen cyanide ... Nor did
Leuchter seem to consider that the building had been
exposed to the elements for more than 40 years so that
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cyanide gas residue could have been obliterated. He also
took samples from a floor that had been washed regularly
by museum staff". Dr Roth however testified under oath
that the formation of Prussian blue, which is a cyanide
compound, was an accumulative reaction, that it augmented
with each exposure to the gas, and that it did not
normally disappear -- in other words, could not be just
washed away -- unless physically removed by sand blasting
or grinding down.
Roth seems then to have changed his mind, to
judge by the television film "MR DEATH" which I believe is
shortly to be shown on Channel 4, and upon which film both
I and learned counsel in the current action partially
rely. Zundel's counsel comments, "He (Roth) obviously is
frightened now", and no wonder, considering what
subsequently was inflicted on Mr Leuchter. Your Lordship
will remember that, in order to destroy Roth's absurd
argument, which was quoted to the court by Mr Rampton,
learned counsel, that the Prussian blue stain would have
penetrated only a few microns into the brickwork.
I showed a photograph of the stain penetrating right
through the brick work to the outside face of one of the
cyanide fumigation chambers, where it has been exposed to
sun, wind and rain for over 50 years, and where it is
still visible, as deep and blue as ever today.
Crematorium II has been protected from these outside
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elements. It is possible to crawl beneath the famous
roof, the one we were hearing about, the one with the no
holes. You can crawl beneath it even now -- about which
roof I shall have more to say -- but neither Jan Sehn,
nor Fred Leuchter, nor James Roth nor Germar Rudolf, nor
any of the subsequent investigations have found any
significant traces of cyanide compounds present in the
fabric of this building, despite the eyewitness accounts
of that same chamber having been used for the gassing of
half a million people with cyanide. Moreover, the wood
grain of the original wooden formwork (or moulds) can
still be seen on the face of the concrete, which is
evidence that it has not been sandblasted or grounded down.
Now, my Lord, this takes us to the famous roof
of Leichenkeller No. 1 of crematorium No. II at Auschwitz.
I referred earlier to the expert witness on
Auschwitz and Birkenau in this case, Professor Robert van
Pelt. He has made unequivocal statements both here and
elsewhere about crematorium II at Birkenau. To him it was
the factory of death, the mass gassing chamber of
Birkenau. He did not mince his language. In the new
television film MR DEATH we saw him and we heard him, as
the film camera showed Fred Leuchter descending into the
hole which was broken post-war through the collapsed
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concrete roof slab and reinforcing bars of Leichenkeller I
(morgue No. 1) of crematorium II and we heard him uttering
these words, quoting off the sound track:
"Crematorium II is the most lethal building of
Auschwitz. In the 2,500 square feet of this one room,
more people lost their lives than any other place on this
planet. 500,000 people were killed. If you would draw a
map of human suffering, if you created a geography of
atrocity, this would be the absolute centre."
The court will recall that on ninth day of this
action I cross-examined this witness most closely about
this statement and I offered him a chance to change his
mind about the pivotal importance of crematorium II and
its underground Leichenkeller No. I (morgue No. 1) the
chamber which van Pelt alleged had been a mass gassing
chamber.
IRVING: Very well. You say: This is quoting
him from his report ----
MR JUSTICE GRAY: You need not read the whole of it. He
confirms that it is Leichenkeller I at crematorium II
where he says the 500,000 were killed.
MR IRVING: Thank you, my Lord. The expert witness could
hardly have been clearer in his answer.
At page 53, I then asked him to identify the
buildings referred to on the aerial photographs of
Birkenau and crematorium II, so that there could later be
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no doubt as to which precise building he had just agreed
was the factory of death at Auschwitz, Auschwitz/Birkenau.
The great problem about accepting that this
building was an instrument for mass murder is that the
evidence produced by Professor van Pelt relies on three
"legs", if I can borrow Mr Rampton's word, a handful of
eyewitnesses, a few architectural drawings, and a slim
file of documents.
The eyewitnesses, in my submission, have turned out ----
MR RAMPTON: No, I am sorry, that is one error that cannot be
allowed to pass. There is a fourth leg, forensic chemical
analysis both in 1945, 1988 and 1994.
MR JUSTICE GRAY: Just to elaborate that, of Leichenkeller I
and crematorium II?
MR RAMPTON: Yes, Leichenkeller I at crematorium II by the
Krakov forensic laboratory in December 1945, which found
traces of cyanide on the ventilation covers by
Mr Leuchter's analysts.
MR JUSTICE GRAY: Ventilation covers from where?
MR RAMPTON: From Leichenkeller I in crematorium II. If one
looks at the report, it is as clear as anything. Leuchter
himself, of course, in 1988, and Professor Markowitz at
Krakov in 1994.
MR JUSTICE GRAY: Thank you.
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MR RAMPTON: They are all in the evidence.
MR IRVING: My Lord, I will ask your Lordship when the time
comes to look at that forensic evidence and to ask
yourself the obvious question, what is the proof that
these items came from that building?
MR RAMPTON: Leuchter is certainly proof, because Mr Irving relies on him.
MR IRVING: Then we have to look at the actual figures and the
concentrations. If I can now continue with my three legs,
my three-legged argument?
MR JUSTICE GRAY: Yes, do. Eyewitnesses?
MR IRVING: The eyewitnesses have turned out to be liars,
particularly those who testified to the SS guards opening
manhole covers on top of the flat roof of Leichenkeller
No. I (mortuary No. 1), and tipping tins of Zyklon B
pellets in through the holes. One witness was David
Olere, an artist who drew sketches years later in Paris,
to which Mr Rampton has also referred, obviously intending
to sell them. His sketches show flames and smoke belching
from the crematorium chimney of crematorium No. II, which
goes purely to the credibility of the witness, which was
quite impossible. He portrays the victims. Your Lordship
will remember that I asked Professor van Pelt to calculate
the length, the path, from the furnace doors to the top of
the chimney, and how long that flame would have had to
be. He portrays the victims of the Nazi killers mostly as
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nubile young females, all naked and sketched in a
pornographic way, often clutching naked teenaged children
to their breasts. It was Olere I invite the court to
remember, who told Jean-Claude Pressac that the SS made
sausage in the crematoria out of human flesh (a passage
which Mr Van Pelt did not inform us of in his expert
report). Another witness is Ada Bimko, who proved at the
Belsen trial that she too had lied. Entering another gas
chamber building at Auschwitz she said she had "noticed
two pipes which I was told contained the gas. There were
two huge metal containers containing gas". She evidently
did not know that the "gas" supposed to have been used,
Zyklon-B, was actually in pellet form, not cylinders.
Distorting her account too, van Pelt omitted also this
part of her testimony. Dr Bendel, another of van Pelt's
eyewitnesses, stated that at crematorium IV the people
crowded into the gas chamber found the ceilings so low
that the impression was given that the roof was falling on
their heads. This too was untrue, as the court has seen
how high these ceilings were in the computer-generated
"walk through". The court will find that in my
cross-examination of van Pelt I destroyed the worth of
each supposed eyewitness after eyewitness in the same way,
if I can summarize it like that.
Let us first look for those holes that they
talked about. My Lord, your Lordship will remember that
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I had the big photograph of that roof photographed from a
helicopter quite recently, standing here for some days or
weeks. The roof pillars beneath the roof were blown up in
1945, and the reinforced concrete slab pancaked downwards
into the morgue basement, starred but otherwise intact.
By the word "starred" I mean what happens to a pane of
reinforced glass that has been hit by a stone.
Van Pelt suggested that the Zyklon-B
introduction holes in the roof of Leichenkeller I were not
much larger in diameter than tennis balls, but the
evidence of his eyewitnesses, Henry Tauber and Michal
Kula, was that they were closer to the size of manholes --
"70 centimetres square". Kula testified that the wire
mesh columns that he had made were of that cross section
and three metres (ten feet) tall. One witness said that
the concrete covers on top of the roof above these holes
had to be lifted off "with both hands," with two hands.
As the ceiling height in Leichenkeller I was 2.40 metres,
60 centimetres of each column, which is 3 metres tall,
would have had to extend through the holes in the concrete
ceiling with about six inches poking up outside. As
Professor van Pelt admits in his report, the part I was
about to read out when your Lordship stopped me, there is
no trace of those holes in the roof today. I am sorry, I
was wrong. He did say that. He says it later on.
MR JUSTICE GRAY: What did I stop you reading?
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MR IRVING: You did not. I made a mistake, my Lord. As he
admits in his report, there is no trace of those holes in
the roof today. The underside of that roof, which can be
inspected and photographed from beneath even today, is
intact. Even if one could lose sight of the much smaller
three inch diameter holes in the pancaked concrete roof of
which van Pelt spoke, and I do not accept that they were
that small, one could not possibly have lost sight of four
holes as large as manholes. Those holes would be
perfectly obvious today on the ground that Auschwitz to
any observer using the naked eye, without the slightest
possible doubt as to their location, because, of course,
Professor van Pelt told us where each hole was supposed to
be. It was right next to the supporting columns.
Professor van Pelt accepts that those holes are
not in that roof slab now.
MR JUSTICE GRAY: I am not sure that is right, is it? I think
what he says was that the state of the collapsed roof is
so poor now that you simply cannot see where those holes
would have been if they were there, which is a slightly
different thing.
MR RAMPTON: Not only that, my Lord. I sit here, I listen to,
quite frankly, a continuous misrepresentation of the
evidence of my witness.
MR JUSTICE GRAY: Let us concentrate on this one.
MR RAMPTON: I will, but this is serious. Van Pelt said a
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number of things. He said, first of all, the fragmentary
condition of the roof prevents any kind of assessment one
way or the other. Then he says, anyway, even if it did
not, it is the wrong part of the roof. The third, of
course, is that there is no evidence on Mr Irving's side
of the court one way or the other. Mr Irving has not been there.
MR IRVING: May I now continue with preferably fewer interruptions?
MR JUSTICE GRAY: No, I think that is not fair. Mr Rampton
I think has been restrained.
MR IRVING: My Lord, restraint is what I showed.
MR JUSTICE GRAY: There are the odd things which I have noticed
which I do not think are quite borne out. I think the
best thing is not to interrupt you, but that is quite an
important misstatement of van Pelt's evidence.
MR IRVING: I will come to the alleged misstatement in a
moment. Of course, I sat with the utmost restraint this morning ----
MR JUSTICE GRAY: You did.
MR IRVING: -- while numerous things were said. My Lord, I put
to your Lordship at the time photographs of the underside
of that roof. To say that the underside of that roof is
fragmented is a gross distortion of what one could see
with one's own eyes. The underside of that roof was as
pristine as the concrete which is in this room today,
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every inch of the underside of that roof which can be accessed.
MR JUSTICE GRAY: Yes, I remember the photograph quite well and
quite how much of the roof it shows and which bit of the
roof, it is impossible, I think, on the evidence to say.
MR IRVING: I did, as your Lordship will know, make one very
grand offer and very generous offer to the Defendants in
this case saying, "Come back with photographs of those
holes and I will stop the case within 24 hours because my
position will be indefensible". I made that offer, not
once, but twice. It is in the transcript. They did not
take it up, and that would have saved ----
MR JUSTICE GRAY: Press on.
MR IRVING: It reminds me of the early days in this action when
every time I was making a killer point, Mr Rampton was up
and it is happening again. Professor van Pelt: In his
expert report, and for this honesty I give him full
credit, he writes: "Today, these four small holes" --
this is his expert report which he provided in this case
-- he did not have to write this, my Lord, but he put it
in and it is a great testimony to his honesty, I think -
"that connected the wire-mesh columns and the chimneys
cannot be observed in the ruined remains of the concrete
slab. Yet does this mean they were never there? We know
that after the cessation of the gassings in the fall of
1944 all the gassing equipment was removed, which implies
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both the wire-mesh columns and the chimneys. What would
have remained would have been the four narrow holes and
the slab. What would have remained would have been the
four narrow holes and the slab. While there is no
certainty in this matter, it would have been logical to
attach at the location where the columns had been some
formwork at the bottom of the gas chamber ceiling, and
pour some concrete in the hole and thus restore the slab".
That is why I listened with relative patience,
my Lord, to Mr Rampton's interruption because it very
largely bears out what I said. The point at which he rose
to his feet was when I said van Pelt accepted those holes
are not in that roof slab now. I think that his
interruption was ill-called for.
Professor van Pelt thus asserts, without any
evidence at all, that late in 1944, with the Russian Army
winding up to launch their colossal final invasion only a
few miles away on the River Vistula, the Nazi-mass
murderers would remove the "Zyklon introduction columns"
and then fill in the holes in the ceiling, as he says, to
"restore the slab" (before dynamiting the pillars
supporting it anyway). He again asserted when
I cross-examined him on January 25th as follows: "It would
have been logical to attach", he then reads out what he
said, "pour some concrete in the hole and thus restore the
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slab".
How would this have been more logical than
completely removing the roof of Leichenkeller 1 just as
the Nazis had removed the roof of Leichenkeller 2,
identified by Professor van Pelt as the "undressing
rooms", as shown in the aerial photographs taken on
December 21st 1944 that one can see on page 15 of this
book "The Holocaust Revisited", the book published by the
CIA. The originals of this photograph were shown to
Professor van Pelt in court. I showed them to him. To
believe his version, we would have to believe that the
Nazis deliberately created relics, architectural relics,
of Leichenkeller No. 1 to confound later generations of
tourists and Holocaust researchers.
The fact is that the holes are not there - at
least they are not visible from a distance of 0 to 4 feet
or when photographed from the underside of that slab.
Unable to point them out to us in close up at ground
level, the Defendants invited us to consider instead
either their vertical aerial photographs taken from 35,000
feet up, or a horizontal photograph taken from several
hundred yards away, past a locomotive, where three (not
four) unidentified objects are placed irregularly on the
rooftop (the fourth "object" turns out to be a window on
the wall behind). The Court will recall what my response
was to the not unexpected discovery that during building
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works such subjects as barrels of tar were placed on a
large flat slab, and I will not repeat it here. The
notion that the high flying plane could have photographed
an object of 27 centimetres, let alone of tennis ball
size, protruding from six inches above the ground from
that roof is quite absurd. The four smudges seen on one
photograph are evidently many feet long, nothing to do
with these so-called holes.
Your Lordship will remember that on day 11
I brought into the Court half a dozen very large vertical
aerial photographs, black and white photographs, taken by
the Americans or the South African Air Force during 1944,
and invited Professor van Pelt to find those same smudges
on that roof, the same dots.
Where until this moment he had seen dots on
another photograph with no difficulty, the witness van
Pelt now pleaded poor eyesight: ("I have now reached the
age I need reading glasses", he said, "and I do not have
them with me. I did not expect this kind of challenge".
Precisely). Had he used even a microscope, he would not
have found the dots in the 1944 pictures I showed him.
Because the holes were not there and are not there, and he
and the Defendants know it.
Even if the Nazi architects who designed the
building had willingly agreed to the weakening of the roof
by having makeshift holes cut that size right through the
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slab next to the supporting pillars - I say "makeshift"
because there is no provision for them in any of the
architectural drawings that were shown to us - we should
certainly expect to see those holes now. My Lord, the
court will recall two things:
Firstly, I asked the witness van Pelt if he was
familiar (in view of the fact that he is not qualified
architecturally, as it turned out) with the expression
"fair faced concrete finish". He confirmed that it is
concrete that has been left untreated. In other words, it
is not covered with cement or pebble dash or tiling. He
confirmed also that it is the most expensive such finish
that an architect can specify because the concrete has to
be poured right first time because blemishes like holes
and cavities can never be retouched afterwards. Filling
in the holes with cement, as van Pelt suggested in an
extraordinary piece of naivete, would have been evident in
the concrete face for ever after by differences in general
appearance, colouring, wear and fracturing; there would
have been a visible "drying line" as a ring around the
patch, and the wood grain pattern left by the wooden
formwork would have been interrupted. Common sense tells
us all of this as well.
The second point is, of course, we photographed
the underside of that slab and there is no trace of any
such blemish on the concrete roof's underside, and there
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are supposed to have been four of those filling holes.
Those holes are a major problem for this entire case.
On two occasions I stated a challenge in Court,
including to the witness van Pelt, as I said earlier.
I challenged the Defendants to send somebody to Auschwitz
even now, to scrape the thin layer of gravel and dirt off
the topside of the roof slab where they "know" the holes
must be because they know where the pillars - because the
eyewitnesses agreed they were next to the main columns -
and bring back a photograph of one of the holes or
evidence that it had been filled in.
If they did, I said, I would abandon my action
forthwith because my position would have become quite
indefensible. To my knowledge, the Defendants have not
attempted this exercise. They know and they knew from the
outset that I was right about that roof. Their entire
case on crematorium No. II - the untruth that it was used
as a factory of death, with SS guards tipping canisters of
cyanide-soaked pellets into the building through those
four (non-existent) manholes - has caved in, as surely as
that flat roof.
Accordingly, the eyewitnesses who spoke of those
holes also lied, or bluffed, and I have called their
bluff. In the absence of the holes themselves, and minus
his "eyewitnesses", Professor van Pelt's only remaining
proofs that Leichenkeller 1 of Crematorium No.II was an
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instrument of mass murder - a factory of death, as he
said, in which 500,000 Jews were gassed and cremated - are
these: architectural drawings (rather oddly for a
"professor of architecture" he calls them blueprints) and
wartime documents. He confirmed this to your Lordship
when your Lordship asked.
As for the wartime documents, to take them
first, he referred, for instance, to the - to him,
sinister requirement that the morgue should be vorgewarmt,
prewarmed, by a central heating plant.
In cross-examination I drew his attention to the relevant
section of the wartime Neufert, which is the architect's
handbook or building code which was standard for the SS
architects, which specifies that morgues, mortuaries, must
have both cooling and central heating facilities to avoid
damage to the corpses in the kinds of extremes of
temperature which exist in Central Europe. Document after
document fell by the wayside in this manner. Mr Rampton
introduced the timesheet of one humble workman in March
1943, showing him actually concreting "the floor in the
Gaskammer", the gas chamber. But Birkenau camp was full
of gas chambers. In his fine facsimile building of the
camp documents, Jean-Claude Pressac has printed drawing
No. 801 of November 8th, 1941, for an Entlausungsanlage
(delousing installation) for the prison camp, right in the
middle of which is a Gaskammer. He also reproduces
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drawing No. 1293, dated May 9th 1942, of the drainage and
water supply of the delousing barracks, building BW5b.
Here too there is a Gaskammer smack in the middle of the
drawing. So there goes that one too.
The real handling capacity -- my Lord, of
course, we did look at other documents and I am sure your
Lordship will attend to that particular part of the
transcript in detail, but I just wanted to give the
flavour of the problem. The real handling capacity of the
crematoria is also surprisingly difficult to establish,
notwithstanding what Mr Rampton said this morning.
Professor van Pelt produced a histogram on an easel for us
which showed truly staggering protections of cadavers to
be cremated in coming years; but on cross-examination the
witness admitted that the projection was based solely on
one document, the questionable "crematorium capacities"
document of June 28th, 1943, and that all else was
extrapolated backwards from that sheet of paper.
Mr Rampton said that, as ever, I challenge that document,
as though I had challenged many other documents. My Lord,
to my knowledge, I have challenged ----
MR JUSTICE GRAY: Yes. If I may just intervene and say that
I would find it easier if there were not such an overt
reaction to what you are saying on the other side of the court.
MR RAMPTON: I am sorry.
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MR JUSTICE GRAY: Yes, sorry, you got to the Bischoff document?
MR IRVING: The Bischoff document. Professor van Pelt relies
heavily on this document. My Lord, you will notice that I
have given all the appropriate footnote references to
assist you in navigating through the transcripts, and so on.
MR JUSTICE GRAY: Yes, thank you.
MR IRVING: Even if genuine, even if the actual paper itself is
genuine, the handling figures which this document gives
for the furnace installation in Crematorium No. II do not
tally with any of the figures in the specifications
provided by the manufacturers, the Topf Company, for this
type of equipment. Furthermore, the document refers to
some crematoria which were at that time shut down, and to
others that were due to be taken out of commission, which
is again a mystifying business.
I had shown the Court on the previous day that
this one page of paper contained not just one or two, but
four or five, four or even five, bureaucratic
discrepancies which indicated to me that the document is
not authentic. It was not just that the year date was
wrong. Any one of those flaws would normally be enough to
call its integrity into question: but five such flaws in
one document, including the wrong rank for the highest man
in the SS site-construction system, SS Gruppenfuhrer Hans
. P-172
Kammler? Professor van Pelt was unable to explain these
flaws; he had not noticed them. The document was first
published in East Berlin in the 1950s, and it is now to be
found in the Auschwitz archives, because it was sent there
from East Berlin in 1981. That alone is why it now bears
an Auschwitz archival stamp. It did not originate there,
but elsewhere. Even if the flaws can be explained, and
the figures were genuine, there is no indication of how
such huge numbers of bodies were to be handled within 24
hours; nor of where the coke was to come from. There is
no -- logistic problems defeat the document. (There is
no acceptable evidence that the Auschwitz staff found any
way of improving on the average coke consumption of 30 kg
per cadaver achieved by other camps).
The bottleneck in the entire crematorium II
"factory of death" story is however that little freight
elevator that was installed between that morgue, the
underground mortuary, Leichenkeller No. 1, as in any such
state-of-the-art crematorium, to haul the bodies up from
the basement-level morgue up to the crematorium furnaces
on the ground floor. We are told by the Defendants that
this elevator was never anything more sophisticated than
something like a builder's hoist. The real elevator was
never delivered. It had no door, no cage, no walls - it
was just a platform jolting up and down that elevator
shaft. We do know that as finally installed it had a
. P-173
specified load bearing capacity of 1,500 kilograms.
Professor van Pelt suggested that the hoist could,
therefore, have hauled 25 cadavers at a time. In
practice, as there was just a flat platform with no walls
or door, jolting up and down that narrow concrete elevator
shaft, I submit that it would have been impossible to
stack on to one small platform 25 naked cadavers in the
conditions of filth and slime, the horror, that had been
described by the eyewitnesses.
It does not bear thinking about, I agree, and
that is why I am not going to dwell on it. We cannot
produce hard figures for this part of the exercise, but
one thing is plain: that one elevator in crematorium II
was the inescapable bottleneck, and it makes plain that,
whatever was happening downstairs in the mortuary,
Leichenkeller No. 1, it was not on the huge scale, on the
huge scale that history now suggests.
In response to your Lordship's helpful
questioning, Professor van Pelt stated that the wartime
documents to interpreted if they were to be relied on for
this proof. These interpretations are quite tenuous. He
produced to us a document referring to the special secrecy
to be attached to the crematorium drawings. I am sure
your Lordship remembers that document. It was at first
blush quite an interesting document. He suggested that
this was because of the mass gassings being carried on in
. P-174
the buildings, in the crematorium. It stressed that this
was because -- the document stressed that this was because
of the wehrwirtschaftlich importance [the importance to
the military economy] of the work being conducted in that
building or those buildings. But van Pelt confirmed under
my cross-examination that the homicidal Final Solution,
the genocide, was never regarded as being
wehrwirtschaftlich important, important to the economy.
I submitted that the reference was clearly to keeping
secret the ugly business of the looting by the SS of the
gold and valuables from the corpses being processed by the
building, a system which was undoubtedly of economic
importance to the SS.
Similarly, the architectural drawings seemed to
provide the required "proof" only when one was compared
with another. That was one of the other problems. As
Professor van Pelt said: "... we can look now at two or
three drawings together and ... We start to observe some
very weird things and some modifications made between one
drawing and the other drawing..." Those were his words, to
which my comment is, is that the best level of proof that
is available now, even after 55 years?
During his slide-show, Professor van Pelt told
us that one cardinal piece of evidence in this drawings
was the relocation of an internal double-door which sealed
off Leichenkeller No. 1 from the interior of the building,
. P-175
from the inside of the Leichenkeller doorframe to the
outside. The door was moved in the drawings from the
inside of the wall to the outside. I pointed out that in
the new layout, the doors were shown as being actually
rebated into the doorframe and I suggested to the witness
that this was indicative of a gas-tight door being fitted
as in any standard air raid shelter design. Air raid
shelter doors are routinely fitted outside the shelter, to
open outwards, so as to withstand blast. Neufert, which
is the wartime architects' handbook, bears this out.
The witness seems not to have considered this
possibility. As Mr Rampton again mentioned, the doors
allegedly found around the Birkenhau and Auschwitz sites
subsequently are fitted with peep holes. But I say that
that is the standard air raid shelter design complete with
the obligatory peep hole that is fitted to air raid
shelter doors. The amendment of the drawings to provide
for an external door, leading from the far end of the
subterrranean morgue to the open air, Leichenkeller No. 1,
was also consonant with its dual use as an air raid
shelter, and I put this to the witness on Day 11, as was
the relocation of the main entrance staircase from the
back of the building to the street-side. Among the
architectural drawings provided to us from the Auschwitz
archives is one entitled "Modification of the old
Crematorium", namely crematorium No. 1 in Auschwitz,
. P-176
subtitled: "Air Raid Bunker for SS Station HQ with an
Operating Theatre". So such modifications of the morgues
to provide air raid shelter capacity were clearly nothing
extraordinary. Mr Rampton made a lot of the order for the
doors with peep holes both during the hearings and this
morning, but peep holes were standard fittings, not only
on the gas-tight air raid shelter doors, but also on the
delousing facilities. Jean-Claude Pressac prints
photographs of two such doors on the "Canada" delousing
chamber at Birkenhau.
Looking specifically at the possible use of
crematorium No. II and the underground basement area as
being adapted for future air raid shelter use:
Crematorium No. II, like its mirror image Crematorium
No. III on the other side of the road, was originally
designed as a state-of-the-art crematorium, possibly not
just for the camp but for the whole catchment area of
Auschwitz which had for centuries been an area of
pestilence and plague. No expense was spared in its
design. This was German tax-payer money and they did not
care. The best equipment and architects were used on what
was clearly a permanent facility. Building the morgue,
the mortuary, underground, instead of above ground,
increased construction costs by several times, but
provided for keeping the morgue cool during the baking hot
Central European summers. Had the building been designed
. P-177
from the start as a human slaughterhouse, it would
certainly not have been designed on several levels with
resultant handling problems. Slaughterhouses are normally
built on one level.
We saw in Professor van Pelt's slide- show the
pouring of the concrete roof, the roof slab, of the
subterranean Leichenkeller No. II; the roof was
undoubtedly much the same as Leichenkeller No. 1 with a
six inch reinforced steel mesh. This undoubtedly made the
new building one of the most robust on the site:
certainly more robust and fireproof in an air raid than
the flimsy wooden horse-barracks in which the prisoners
and slave labour were housed.
We were told by Mr Rampton this morning this
seemed improbable to establish an air raid shelter
facility for the SS who were 1.5 miles away. Well, the
early warning posts were in Holland, and they were
probably 1,500 miles away. So they would provide more
than adequate time for the SS to gallop that 1.5 miles to
this building with the concrete roof.
The captured Bauleitung records of Auschwitz
housed in Moscow confirm that from mid 1942 onwards they
began to consider the construction at the camp of
shelters, splinter trenches, and other ARP, Air Raid
Precaution, measures. To be fair to the witness, when
these Moscow catalogue entries were put to Professor van
. P-178
Pelt he seemed unfamiliar with them. After the air raids,
our British air raids, on Cologne, Rostock and Lubeck -
that was in March/April 1942 - the German High Command
recognized the likelihood that air raids would spread
across Poland and Central Europe, and they ordered the
construction of extended ARP facilities throughout the
occupied Eastern territories insofar as they can within
bomber range. Existing basements, this document said,
were to be converted into shelters, and anti-gas equipment
provided, and personnel trained in anti-gas warfare, as
gas attack was widely expected. I have given your
Lordship the reference. I put the document to Professor
Longerich and on Day 10 I said to him: "[...] the Defence
rely on a number of photographs of doors found scattered
around the compound of Auschwitz and Birkenhau, and we
will show that these are standard German air raid shelter
doors complete with peep holes". And, my Lord, I
have provided photographs of such air raid shelter doors
in various bundles.
These precautions were not in vain. In May
1943, there was an air raid on the nearby Auschwitz Buna
plant. This is reflected in the Auschwitz documents. At
least one of the American aerial photographs that I
produced to the Court, the black and white photographs,
the big ones, and to the witness, Professor van Pelt,
shows a stick of heavy bombs just released by the plane
. P-179
that took the photograph descending over the camp. By the
end of the war, there was also an anti-aircraft unit
assigned to defending the region, as shown by the
reference in Judge Staglich's membership of the Flak unit
that manned it.
Your Lordship will also remember that during his
slide-show, van Pelt showed the court a series of most
interesting computer-generated "walk-through"
reconstructions of the interiors of Crematorium IV and V.
Your Lordship had actually memorized the dimensions of the
shutter, the wooden shutter, of 30 centimetres by 40
centimetres. There were also said to be steps leading up
to the openings. The wartime civil defence journal
Luftschutz shows precisely this arrangement of gas type
shutters and steps as a standard air raid shelter feature
designed for the event of gas warfare.
I put this fact to the witness van Pelt: "Would
you agree that those shutters that have been found in the
Auschwitz camp are, in fact, standard German air-raid
shutters supplied by manufacturers to a standard design?"
The eyewitnesses stated that thousands of
victims were gassed in these rooms, however, and their
bodies burned in large pits to the building's rear. But
the contemporary air photographs taken by the Americans
show no such pits, nor are they evident today. Confronted
with what your Lordship has yourself referred to as the
. P-180
lack of documentary evidence for the gassings, Professor
van Pelt could only offer the suggestion that the use of
gas chambers at Auschwitz and Birkenhau was a "moral
certainty". Three times in his report, three times in his
report, he fell back upon that semi-religious phrase. The
available proofs certainly do not support the belief that
gassings there occurred on a mass scale.
If I can just fill in what I have not said
there? Of course, I do accept that there were gassings on
a small scale at Auschwitz in the buildings identified as
bunkers I and II which were houses which have since been
torn down.
I will not dwell long on the uniformly poor
evidentiary basis on the other extermination camps, known
to the Court as the Operation Reinhard camps - Belzec,
Sobibor and Treblinka. Here we do not have even the
"moral certainty" which comforted Professor van Pelt.
I can only challenge here the scale and the systematic
nature of the alleged gassing of more than one million
people in these centres. The Defendants' own witness,
Professor Browning, admits that the documentation for
these camps is "scant", that is his word, and I place
great weight on that admission. Here, the expert cannot
find even one contemporaneous document. He relies upon
the eyewitnesses - men of the ilk of Kurt Gerstein, Jan
Karski, Adolf Eichmann and Rudolf Hoss. The fictional
. P-181
elements in their statements - your Lordship will remember
the "130 foot high mountain of clothes" which Professor
Browning in his first draft skipped over, the
"electrocution chambers" and the "steam chambers", the
deliberately inflated death rolls which would otherwise
shriek their warnings to critical researchers - are either
ignored or suppressed in order to maintain appearances.
My Lord, there is an impressive (and we are both
agreed on this, all parties) level of documentation which
demonstrates that the liquidation by shooting of hundreds
of thousands of Jews, probably over a million, by the
Einsatzgruppen, but there is nothing of equivalent value
for the Operation Reinhard camps. One word, Why?
justifies the revisionist's scepticism.
The Walter Fohl letter produces a similar
response from the experts. Found in his Berlin Document
Centre personnel file, this man, who is in charge of a
resettlement office at Krakow, is seen writing on June
21st 1942 to his SS comrades as follows:
"Every day, trains are arriving with over 1,000
Jews each from throughout Europe", in Krakow, passing
through. "We provide first aid here, give them more or
less provisional accommodation, and usually deport them
further towards the White Sea or to the White Ruthenian
marshlands, where they all - if they survive (and the Jews
from Kurfurstendamm or Vienna or Pressburg certainly
. P-182
won't) - will be gathered by the end of the war, but not
without first having built a few roads. (But we're not
supposed to talk about it)." An extraordinary document.
The expert witnesses, unable otherwise to
explain this document, dismissed it as obvious
"camouflage" talk. But why should Fohl use camouflage
when writing to his SS comrades? As I pointed out to
Dr Longerich, Reinhard Heydrich himself had spoken of the
White Sea option a few days later, on February 4th 1942 in Prague.
It was noticeable elsewhere that none of the
experts was willing to give documents their natural
meanings when they did not accord with their views. It is
a clear case of manipulation, in my view. The Ahnert
document, recording a meeting at the RSHA in Berlin, under
Eichmann, on August 28th, 1942, was another example.
There was talk of the need for the deportees, August 1942,
to be provided with blankets, shoes, eating utensils
before dispatch to Auschwitz. Eichmann requested the
purchases of barracks for a Jewish deportee camp to be
erected in Russia, with three to five such barracks being
loaded aboard every transport train. In each case,
because the document did not accord with their
"exterminationist" views, the expert had failed to pursue
it. Dr Longerich, who included it as an appendix in one
of his books, had forgotten it even existed when
. P-183
I cross-examined him about it.
Coming now towards the end of my submission, my
Lord, the allegations of racism and anti-Semitism. I have
to address the allegations of racism, although I have the
feeling that your Lordship is not over-impressed by them.
MR JUSTICE GRAY: Do not get feelings one way or the other
about any part of the case, Mr Irving. It is a trap.
MR IRVING: It was a good try.
MR JUSTICE GRAY: On the other hand, it is a matter for you
because I am letting you say pretty much what you want to
say, I know because I have them now provided very
conveniently, exactly what it is that is relied on by way
of anti-Semitic statements, racist statements and so on.
MR IRVING: I shall definitely make some response therefore.
MR JUSTICE GRAY: Yes. I mean you can deal with them
generally, if you like, rather than going through them, as
it were, one by way. I appreciate you do not go through them all.
MR IRVING: I have not gone through them one by one, my Lord.
In fact I have not even read them.
MR JUSTICE GRAY: I offer you the opportunity of making general
answers to those submissions rather than by reading it all
out. It is entirely up to you.
MR IRVING: I do not read them all out, but I shall certainly
deal with my arguments. The Defendants have resorted to
the allegations that I am anti-Semitic and racist. It may
. P-184
be that they are going to pay dearly for those remarks.
Mr Rampton's highly paid experts have found one 1963 entry
in my diary, four lines written 37 years ago, about a
visit to my lawyer Mr Michael Rubenstein to discuss a
satirical magazine article which I had written, after
which visit I commented: "Thick skinned these Jews are".
This is all that they could find from the millions of
words in my diaries available to them by way of
anti-Semitism. Twenty million words of diaries and they
found "Thick skinned these Jews are". When I remarked on
March 2nd in court, my Lord, upon the obvious paradox that
an alleged anti-Semite would have retained Michael
Rubenstein as his solicitor and respected advisor for 20
years, Mr Rampton's comment, which your Lordship may well
remember, was: "Many of my best friends are Jews too,
Mr Irving". This stock line does not disguise the paucity
of his evidence against me.
In further support of this contention they have
taken isolated remarks made in lectures and speeches for
which they have transcribed around half a million words.
My Lord, I trust that your Lordship will in each case
consider the context in which the remarks are made.
MR JUSTICE GRAY: Of course.
MR IRVING: And also the broader surrounding countryside, if
I may put it like that. What I would ask your Lordship to
do is to take the ugliest example, whichever your Lordship
. P-185
deems that to be, reach up for the full transcript of
whatever that speech was, and ask yourself why I have put
that remark in and see what else is in that speech. Then
I submit that the alleged anti-Semitic remark fails into
insignificance, if it is even taken to be anti-Semitic at
all.
For 30 years, as I set out earlier in this room
this afternoon, I have found myself subjected to vicious
attack by bodies, acting, as they freely admit, as Jews.
For 30 years I endeavoured to turn the other cheek and did
nothing about it. I hope I succeeded. Mr Rampton drew
attention to the fun I poked at Simon Wiesenthal. I made
a joke in a public meeting about his, an explicit joke
I made about his other than good looks, if I can put it
like that. Mr Rampton called that remark "anti- Semitic".
It was not. It was a joke about the man's looks, of the
same genre that Mr Rampton made when he enquired
rhetorically of Professor Funke whether a certain
outer-fringe Swedish revisionist seen in one video shown
to the court with long blonde hair was a man or woman. It
is exactly the same kind of throw-away remark.
In view of the manner in which the two Simon
Wiesenthal centres have been abusing my name in their fund
rasing leaflets, and endeavouring to destroy my own
livelihood, the court might think that my fun-making,
while tasteless, remark was not undeserved, possibly it
. P-186
was even rather reserved. It was not anti- Semitic.
Mr Wiesenthal is no more immune from criticism either as a
person or as a public figure than I am.
Searching hopefully for evidence of
"anti-Semitism" in me, the investigation by he Board of
Deputies in 1992 came up empty handed in their secret
report which they planted on Canadian government files.
They confirmed that I had dealings with my Jews in my
professional life, and they added that I "used this as an
excuse" to say that I am not an anti-Semite. These people
are hard to please. "He is far too clever an opponent"
the Board wrote in this secret report, "to openly admit to
being an anti-Semite". "We endorse all condemnation of
anti-Semitism", they quote me as writing in my newsletter
back in 1982. All of these things, including the actual
1992 secret intelligence report filed by he Board of
Deputies, were disclosed to these Defendants in my
discovery. The Defendants quoted a passage from a speech
delivered, they said, in May 1992. In fact, as my diary
confirms, it was delivered in May 1993. So it may be that
the year was not accidental, because by that time my
family and I had been subjected to a catalogue of insults
by the leaders of these various bodies. If a writer's
books are banned and burnt, his bookshops are smashed, his
hands are manacled, his person insulted, his printers are
burnt down, his access to the world's archives is denied,
. P-187
his family's livelihood is destroyed, his phone lines are
jammed with obscene and threatening phone calls, death
threats, his house is beset by violent, angry mobs, the
walls and posts around his address are plastered with
stickers inciting the public to violence against him, and
a wreath is sent to him with a foul and taunting message
on the death of his oldest daughter, then it ill-behoves
people to offer cheap criticism if the writer finally
commits the occasional indiscretion and lapse in referring
to the people who are doing it to him.
I singled out in this -- well, I am not going to
comment at length on these evil allegations and slurs.
They lend fire and fury to the original libel complained
of, that is my view. I submit that the word "racism" in
the ears of the man in the Clapham Omnibus is about
Stephen Lawrence and cone heads in the Ku Klux Klan. It
conjures up images of murder and thuggery and violence and
foul-mouthed graffiti. In deliberating on the conduct of
the case and on the appropriate scale of damages, your
Lordship will no doubt bear them in mind, these
allegations made against me.
I voluntarily provided all my entire private
diaries to the Defendants in this action. They asked to
see a few pages and I said "take the lot". Fifty-nine
volumes of private diaries, 20 million words on paper and
on disk. Mr Rampton produced from them one nineteen-word
. P-188
ditty attached to another quite harmless one about the
"messica dressica" of my daughter Jessica. To find in
all those diaries and telephone conversations written
since 1959 just one nineteen-word ditty that you could
trot out for the media, does not suggest that I am as
obsessed with race and racism as learned counsel and, for
that matter, the newspapers that report this case too.
I repeat, this multi-million dollar Defence team
has found one nineteen-word nonsense poem, recorded in my
diary with other Lear- or Belloc-type rhythmic verses as
having been recited to my own nine-month old infant who
has, I am glad to say, grown into a delightful girl of six
now, bearing none of the traces of the poison that
Mr Rampton recklessly suggested that I had fed to her.
Fortunately, I did not sing to her "Three Blind Mice".
Similarly, from my hundreds of lectures and
talks these very proper spaniels have sniffed out a few
lines of music-hall whit of the type that a Dave Allen
might indulge in, with Mr Trevor McDonald as one of the
butts. That in Mr Rampton's words is racism. One wonders
which well-shielded part of the modern world is inhabited
by learned counsel. Can anyone go and live there?
The references that I have made to what is now
formally called the Instrumentalization of the Holocaust,
have also been adduced as evidence of anti-Semitism. Are
non-Jews disbarred from making a criticism that is made
. P-189
increasing vocally now by others like Professor Peter
Novak or by Leon Weiseltier, the literary editor of the
New Republic who wrote on May 3rd 1993: "It is a sad
fact, said the principal philanthropist of the grotesque
Simon Wiesenthal Centre of Los Angeles, that Israel and
Jewish education and all the other familiar buzz words no
longer seem to rally Jews behind the community, the
Holocaust though works every time."
I turn to page 89, my Lord, the third
paragraph. In general, I would invite your Lordship to
pick out one such utterance as a sample, to reach then for
the transcript of the entire speech, to take note of the
rest of its content, its clear reference to the very real
sufferings of the Jews, the liquidations, the Bruns report
and the rest, and then ask: Was the remark true? Was it
explicable? Was it rhetorically justified as part of the
skilled lecturer's armoury?
Your Lordship has been told of my remarks that
more women died on Kennedy's back seat than in the gas
chamber at Auschwitz, the one shown to the tourists. It
is a tasteless but quite literally true. It is, as I have
shown in this court, even true if the main gas chamber at
Birkenau is brought into the equation, crematorium (ii),
the factory of death, because the eyewitnesses lied about
that one too. The Poles have admitted that the Auschwitz
building and its chimney are a post-1948 fake. My
. P-190
colourful language, my tasteless language, was a
rhetorical way of bringing that extraordinary revelation
home to audiences.
The audiences, I am told, are extreme audiences,
of extreme people, although the photographs suggest rather
differently. They appear rather boring middle-age kind of
people.
My files confirm that I occasionally addressed
audiences of the Association for Free Journalism in
Germany, the National Democratic Party in Germany and the
German Peoples Union. My Lord, those four documents which
I have disclosed to the Defendants, they are English
translations of the policy leaflets, the manifestos of
these bodies, and in my submission they do not show them
to be extreme in any way. These were, furthermore, bodies
that were accepted at that time under Germany's very
strict laws as being legal and constitutional. But the
court is more concerned, I believe, with have individual
personages than with bodies, than with the actual
organizations. I have not the slightest doubt that this
court will find that I had no meaningful contact with the
ugly rag-bag neo-Nazi extremists mentioned by Professor
Funke, people with whom, to make the point quite clearly,
the Defendants, their experts and their legal team seem
more familiar than I. Most of the names were completely
unknown to me and the Defence have sought, in vein, for
. P-191
them in my diaries and papers, to which I emphasise yet
again I gave them complete and unlimited privileged
access. This has not stopped them from bringing these
names forward and mentioning these alleged links in the
open court in an attempt to smear me still further with an
eye particularly on the German media. I urge that this,
their conduct of the case, be held against them.
Characteristically of the weakness of their
case, Professor Funke listed one entry in a diary where
I noted "road journey with a Thomas" whose second name
I never learned; Funke entered the name "Dienel?" So for
as I know, I have never met a Dienel, but it illustrates
the kind of evidence that the Defence were hoping to rely
upon.
As for Michael Kuhnen, the documentary evidence
before both Professor Funke when he wrote his report and
before this court, is that I explicitly said I would not
attend any function at which he was even present. I never
did and I never met him.
By way of evidence the court has been shown a
number of videos. Shorn of their commercial packaging,
they do not amount to very much, in my submission. In
view of the weight attached to it by learned counsel and
by his witness Professor Funke, my Lord, I have
re-examined the raw video of Halle function of November
9th 1991 at which I briefly spoke, and I have timed and
. P-192
listed the scenes that it shows. My Lord, you will see in
the footnote on that page that I have given the
appropriate breakdown referring to the time on the video.
Your Lordship may wish at sometime to have the
video back to check that these times are correct, or the
Defendants' solicitors may wish to submit any corrections
they feel are needed.
MR JUSTICE GRAY: No. I will assume your time is correct
unless I am told otherwise.
MR IRVING: Yes, unless otherwise informed. The raw details
are, when the when camera's meter shows 170021 I am first
seen arriving at an unnamed hotel restaurant in Halle,
accompanied by Mrs Worch and by David Leigh of he Sunday
Observer. At 17:14:40 I am again glimpsed, 14 minutes
later, still at the hotel speaking to a reporter. The
cameraman and David Leigh then go off to film the rival
processions during which I am at no time seen on film. In
fact I remained lunching at the hotel. At 18:11:00 a
truck is seen being rigged as an open-air platform, and at
18:14:26 I am seen with two reporters watching from the
edge of the square. In my submission, my Lord, I do not
have a particularly happy look on my face at all at what
I am seeing.
At 18:16 I walk over to the platform, hands in
pockets and mount it. The man whom Professor Funke tells
us is Dienel, and I have no way of checking it one way or
. P-193
the other, is seen to get off to the left and there is no
contact whatever between him and me. Mr Worch briefly
introduces me to the audience. I begin speaking at
18:16:39 and the filmed portion of my speech ends less
than three and a half minutes later.
When the off-screen chanting of slogans begins
at 18:18:59 I am clearly seen to interrupt my speech,
shake my head at them and gesticulate with my left hand to
them to stop, and I am clearly heard to say, "You must
not", because they are shouting the "Siegheil" slogans,
Mein Fuhrer, and things like, "you must not always be
thinking of the past". I am heard clearly to say: "You
must always be thinking of the past. You must not keep
coming out with the slogans of the past. We are thinking
of the future [voice emphasised] of Germany. We are
thinking of the future of the German people. As an
Englishman I have to say ...", and so on. So I am quite
clearly expressing extreme anger at these people who have
come along with their Nazi slogans.
Six seconds after ending my brief speech I am
seen to leave the platform without further contact with
anybody. My diary notes that I at once left by car and
drove back to the Rhur in Western Germany.
Heavily edited, for example to remove my rebuke
to these slogan-shouting people, whom I took and take to
have been agents provocateurs, this sequence was shown on
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November 28th and 29th to British TV audiences in a "This
Week" programme entitled "Hitler's Children, the New
Nazis", directed by the German Michael Schmidt, Professor
Funke's star witness, and with none other than Gerald
Gable of Searchlight listed as the consultant, and in
Despatches on the other channel. This indicates whose
hands were behind the editing. Again, heavily edited the
film has been shown around the world against me. This was
the thrice edited film to which I drew your Lordship's
attention in suggesting there was evidence of dubious
admissibility.
May I again remind your Lordship of my basic
principle on lecturing. Unlike the Defendants who have
proudly stated that they refuse to debate with opponents,
I have expressed a readiness to attend, to address all and
any who are willing to listen. Your Lordship will
remember my letter of June 24th 1988 to my editor William
Morrow, Connie Roosevelt, to whom I wrote:
"I have been invited to speak as a guest
speaker at a right-wing function in Los Angeles next
February. They have offered a substantial fee and all my
expenses, and until now I have adopted a policy of never
refusing an invitation if the speakers meet my terms,
namely a free speech and a fat fee. On this occasion
I intend to give the audience a piece of mind about some
of their lunatic views."
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I may secondly point out that were it not for
the clandestine activities of the violent and extremist
bodies dedicated to destroy my right to free speech and
the rights of all audiences in the United States and
elsewhere, at Berkley, at Dublin, Pretoria or wherever, to
hear my opponents and equally dedicated to intimidating my
publishers and smashing bookstall windows, where it not
for their hate campaign I would have been able to continue
in the normal manner with my exemplary professional
career. It rings hollow that the same shabby bodies who
have generated the hatred against me now point their
crooked finger at my and abuse me using the very
considerable privileges afforded to them by this court, to
continuing to make my voice heard whenever I can. When
I use words to describe them in detail, which they well
deserve, they ring their hands lament about extremism.
I have pointed out that so far as Germany is
concerned, none of the German bodies who invited me to
speak was illegal or banned. In fact when first invited
to address the German Peoples Union I wrote to and
telephoned the Germany Embassy, as the documents in my
discovery show, and asked them specifically whether this
was a legal and constitutional body. The Embassy
confirmed in writing on July 25th 1984 that was. The
extremism was in the eye of beholder. The further to the
left the beholder squinted from, the more distant these
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bodies may have seem from him.
We have heard a lot from Professor Funke, the
sociologist of the Free University in Berlin. My Lord,
I am now going to pass over the next two pages and
continue from the bottom of page 94. As for his
allegation, the allegation by Professor Funke, here in
court, my Lord, I also ask you to disregard those two pages.
MR JUSTICE GRAY: Yes, I think I know why, and I think that is
very right and proper.
MR IRVING: As for his allegation here in court that I should
have known that various allegations were going to be
banned in years ahead, it is difficult for an Englishmen
coming from a country with deeper democratic traditions
than Professor Funke's, to implant himself into the brain
or mindset of the authoritarian German mould where book
burning is now once again de rigueur, where a German
academic like Funke does not bat an eyelid upon hearing
that a teacher is still serving a seven-year jail sentence
imposed for chairing a lecture at which I spoke, where two
District Court judges who acquitted that teacher were
reprimanded and finally retired in disgrace by order of
the Minister of Justice, and where governments recently
have begun routinely banning fringe opposition parties and
circumscribing even their legal activities.
My general response to this attempt at "guilt by
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association" which we have seen a lot over the last few
weeks, is to compare it with the worst accesses of the
inquisitions conducted by Senator Joseph McCarthy. In
Britain the courts have always viewed it as repugnant;
most recently I believe Morland J in another court in the
same building. Hollywood's finest scriptwriters, many of
them Jewish, had their careers vernichtet, to use that
word again, by the reckless allegation that they had
associated with known communists. Now come these
Defendants levelling the mirror image of these same
charges at me. McCarthyism was rightly exposed for what
it was in more recent years and more enlightened years,
and these Defendants for their own purposes are seeking to
turn the clock back.
As far as the United States are concerned, apart
from the Institute of Historical Review, which I shall
deal with separately, the one organization identified by
learned counsel for the Defence, as I understand it, is
the National Alliance. First let me point out that, no
doubt with good reason, the Defendants have decided not to
call their expert on political extremism in the United
States, Professor Levin, and they have withdrawn his
expert report. I think "junked" was the word. Mr Rampton
used the word "junked" or "dumped" I believe. Had they
not I would have "debunked" it I think. We have,
therefore, no general expert evidence as to the nature of
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he National Alliance, and I think I ought to emphasise
that matter. The court is probably as much in the dark
about this group as anybody else.
The Defence invites the court to study the
leaflets put about by that body at one meeting, but could
offer to the court not the slightest evidence that I was
aware of such leaflets or, for that matter, if they are
once again falling back on negligence, that I ought to
have been aware of them.
If, as I submit, the meetings were organized by
individual friends of mine acting outside whatever their
capacity, if any, within the National Alliance may have
been, there is no reason why I should have read such
leaflets if they were indeed on offer.
As for the IHR, the Institute of Historical
Review, I have little to add to what I have stated in my
various written replies and on the witness stand. It is
clearly unsatisfactory, though not surprising, that
establishment scholars feel the need to dismiss any rival
body of scholars or historians as extremists, merely on
the basis that these others propagate a different version
of history from their own consensus versions.
The officials of the IHR nearly all hold
academic qualifications. True they are not trained
historians, but then neither are some of the most famous
names of historians in both ancient and contemporary
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times. It is clear from correspondence before the court
that I recognize he short-comings in the old IHR, and
I was keen to introduce them to new speakers, including
mainline scholars, historians like John Toland who did in
fact speak there, Professor Ernst Nolte and Michael
Beschloss. I am not and never have been an official of
the IHR. At most, one of many friendly advisers. As for
speaking engagements, my association with the IHR has been
the same as my association with (I use the word
"association" again), for example, Cambridge University
Fabian Society because I spoke there too, or the Trinity
College Dublin Lit. & Debc., or any other body of
enlightened people keen to hear alternative views.
Professor Evans in his odious attempts to smear
and defile my name which I hope will long haunt him in the
common rooms at Cambridge, called me a frequent speaker at
the IHR, and may I say "so what?" None of my lectures had
a Holocaust denial or anti-Semitic or extremist theme.
I spoke on Churchill, on Pearl Harbour, on Rommel, on the
Goebbels' Diaries, on my Eichmann papers find, and on
general problems of writing history. The court has
learned that I have in fact addressed functions of the IHR
only five times in seventeen years, one lecture each
time. No amount of squirming by this expert witness could
increase that figure. It is true that I socialized before
or after the event with the IHR officials and their
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wives. So what? It is true that I use their warehousing
facilities. So what? It is true that the IHR, along with
thousands of other retail outlets sell my books. So what?
It is true that I introduced them to subjects which some
members of their audience found deeply uncomfortable, for
example, the confessions of Adolf Eichmann, the harrowing
Bruns report and the Kristallnacht. I would willingly
read out the relevant extracts of my lectures to the IHR,
but my Lord, through the courtesy and industry of the
Defendants' solicitors, which I have already had cause to
praise, your Lordship is already funded with extensive
transcripts of precisely those talks, and I would ask that
your Lordship read them or look at them with this
paragraph in mind.
I am accused of telling audiences what they want
to hear, and that may be partially true, but, by Jove,
having done so, then I used the goodwill generated like
that to tell them a lot of things they very much did not
want to hear. The Defendants would willingly overlook
that aspect of my association with the IHR, and I trust
that the court will not.
As for the National Alliance, an organization of
which the Defence makes much, once again, as an Englishman ----
MR JUSTICE GRAY: You have dealt with that already.
MR IRVING: We have had it, but I am back again, my Lord. It
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must have been quite late at night when I wrote this
part. As an Englishman I am completely unfamiliar with he
nature the National Alliance, its logo and its name. It
may be that the name means more to the Defendants and to
those who are financing the efforts than it means to me.
It certainly meant nothing to the English members of the
gallery on the day that it was mentioned here.
I have no meaningful contacts with the
organization as such. One or at most two of its
individuals members who were already on my mailing list
volunteered, like scores of other Americans, to organize
lectures for me. One was Erich Gliebe who has always
organized my lectures Cleveland in Ohio. On the evidence
of his notepaper from the year 1990 (that is ten years ago
now) he is also a National Alliance member. I ask the
court to accept that when asked about it ten years later
I had long forgotten receiving that one letter from him
with its heading and its logo. Before each lecture date
I mailed an invitation letter to my entire mailing list of
friends in each State. The audience was, therefore,
largely my own people, if I can put it like that. That is
why Mr Breeding rather superfluously welcomes the
strangers in his opening remarks on the Florida video tape
as seen. Had he told me he would also claim to do so on
behalf of his organization, I would have told him not to.
It was my function and the audience were my guests and not
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his.
The photographs taken at this meeting shows, as
the Defendants' own agents have warranted, no formal
National Alliance presence, flags, arm bands or whatever.
The witness statement of Rebecca Gutmann has confirmed this.
Learned counsel for the Defendants has drawn
attention to one 18-inch wide pennant, that is my
estimate, displayed at the function on a side wall with
what they state is the National Alliance logo on it
visible on the video film. Its logo appears to be based
on the CND design. I did not notice it at the time nor
would I have had the faintest idea what it was if I did.
Evidently Mr Gliebe told me that his pals at the National
Alliance had had a hand in organizing my successful
Cleveland function, and that is why I noted in my diary
with a hint of surprise that it turns out that the
National Alliance had organized the other meeting too.
The court may agree that this phrase alone is
evidence that their involvement was (A) not manifest, and
(B) not known to me before. Given that the audience was
largely my own making, it does not seem worthy of much
note. I submit that this kind of defence evidence really
does not meet the enhanced standard of proof required by
law on defamation for justification of the more serious charges.
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MR JUSTICE GRAY: I do not think you need bother with the next
paragraph frankly.
MR IRVING: In general, it is also to be stated that at
material times, namely when associated with those
individuals, they were not extremists -- I take it that
your Lordship accepts what I said in that paragraph?
MR JUSTICE GRAY: I do not think, frankly, that the evidence of
your contacts with the BNP amounts to anything.
MR IRVING: Thank you very much. In general, it is also to be
stated that at material times, namely when I was
associated with those individuals, they were not
extremists; nor has it been shown to the court that at
that time they were. Thus at the time I first met this
young man Ewald Althans in Germany late in October 1989,
he seemed full of promise and eager to learn. I later
learned that he had been to Israel for six months on a
German Government voluntary scheme for young Germans who
wished to atone. Over the two or three years that our
orbits occasionally intercepted I could see that he was
growing more extreme and provocative in his actions. He
also became undependable and wayward in a number of
non-political ways that I mentioned in court.
According to Der Spiegel at his 1995 trial in
Berlin, Althans had acted for the Bavarian security
authorities as a top agent until 1994 when they ended the
liaison. The German security authorities had, as
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Professor Funke agreed, a record of hiring agents
provocateurs.
I now come to Ernst Zundel, the next paragraph.
Ernst Zundel is a German born Canadian [sic] for whose own
particular views I hold no brief. I later learned that he
had apparently written some provocatively-themed books
with tongue-in-cheek titles on flying saucers in
Antarctica, and on the "Adolf Hitler that I knew and
loved", which is said to be worst than outre; wild horses
would not make me read such books myself. I had met him
in 1986 and found that as a personality he was not as dark
as had been painted in the media. I was asked to give
expert evidence at his trial in Toronto in 1988 relating
to the Third Reich and Hitler's own involvement in the
Holocaust. I did so to the best of my professional
abilities, and I was told that I had earned the
commendation of the court in doing so.
It is plain to me from what I know that
Mr Zundel has been subjected to 20-year onslaught by the
Canadian organizations dedicated to combatting what they
regard as Holocaust denial because of his dissident views,
which are certainly more extreme than mine. My own
relationship with Mr Zundel has been proper throughout,
and the court has not been given any evidence to the
contrary. At times it has even been strained because of
the misfortune inflicted on me in retribution for having
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spoken at his trial.
My Lord, there remain one or two minor matters,
in my view. The Defendants alleged that I wilfully
exaggerated the Dresden death roll in my 1963 book "The
Destruction of Dresden", and that I had no basis for my
figures. I have satisfied this court, I believe, that at
all times (A) I set and published the proper upper and
lower limits for estimates that I gave, giving a wide
range of figures which necessarily decreased overall over
the years as our state of information improved, and that
(B) I had an adequate basis for the various figures which
I provided in my works at the material times. It has to
be said that authors have little or no control over the
content of books that are sub-licensed by their main
publisher to other publishers. Revisions are not
encouraged for costs reasons.
I have always been aware of the highly charged
political nature of the figures quote for this event, the
bombing of Dresden. The highest figure of 250,000, which
I mentioned in my books only as the maximum ever alleged,
was given, for example, by the German Chancellor
Dr Comrade Ardenau in a West German official government
publication which I showed the court. The lowest figures
only became available in a book published in 1994 by
Fredrich Reichardt. A copy of this book was provided to
me in 1997. By that time I had already published the
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latest updated version of my book which is now called
"Apocalypse 1945, The Destruction of Dresden", in which
I had lowered the death roll still further on the basis of
my on investigations and considerations. This was the
first edition over which I, not the publisher, had total
control, as it appeared under my own imprint.
In 1965, as the court is aware, I received
written estimates of 140,000 and 180,000 dead from a
rather anxious Soviet zone citizen, Dr Max Funfack, who
claimed to have received them about nine days after the
raid from the City Commandant and the Chief Civil Defence
Officer respectively, both of them his personal friends.
That being so, there was no reason why I should have
revised the 135,000 estimate which I had earlier received
from Hans Voigt, a city official charged with drawing up
death lists when I was researching my first book in 1961.
In 1966 I received the police final report of
March 1945. While still remaining sceptical about it for
the reasons stated, for example, the officer was
responsible for Dresden's ARP and it was too early to
achieve any kind of overall final figure, the number of
refugees killed was also an imponderable. I took the
correct action, however. I sent to letter to The Times
within a few days of finding the new documents, that is
July 1996, within a few days of finding the new documents
in the mail on my return from a trip to the United
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States. Not only that, but at my own expense I had the
letter reprinted and sent to hundreds of historians and
the like. One hopes that the expert witnesses whom we saw
in the witness stand on behalf of the Defence would have
had the same integrity to do the same kind of thing.
As for the Goebbels diaries, the Defendants, as
I understand it, do not now seek to justify their claim
that I broke an agreement with the Moscow archives in 1992.
MR JUSTICE GRAY: I do not think that is right, but do not take
time on it because I think I know what the case is.
MR IRVING: They have withdrawn witness reports of the Russian
archivists and will provide me no opportunity to
cross-examine them. I was prepared to pursue those
cross-examinations most vigorously. I produced a witness
statement from Mr Peter Millar of the Sunday Times, my
colleague in Moscow, and I made him available for
cross-examination. He confirmed that there was no verbal
or written agreement, as I had also stated in my various
replies, so therefore I could not have broken it. The
Defendants have left no satisfactory evidence before the
court that refutes this, in my submission.
Mr Millar also confirmed to the court that he
did not agree that my conduct gave rise to significant
risk of damage to the plates. The plates had been
withheld from historians by the Russians for 55 years or
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more. That figure of course is wrong. It is 48 years at
that time, I am sorry. The plates have been withheld from
historians for 48 years or more. By my actions I made
this historically very important materials available to
the world, and I placed copies of them in the appropriate
German archives at my own expense.
My Lord, I make submission now on the Heinrich Muller document.
MR JUSTICE GRAY: I do not think I would read that out if
I were you. I think that is not the best way of dealing with it.
MR IRVING: No. I will leave it as a written submission.
MR JUSTICE GRAY: Have you seen what -- I am sure you have seen
it because I have a copy of a letter to you with attachments.
MR IRVING: I have seen it, my Lord, yes.
MR JUSTICE GRAY: In the light of those attachments and
including Professor Longerich's really quite helpful
account of his investigations, what is your submission?
MR IRVING: I am not challenging the authenticity of the
document, my Lord, but I am asking that attention be paid
to the fact that it is highly unsatisfactory that I am not
provided in good time, in a timeous manner, with the file
dated that I needed in order to go behind the document and
establish whether there was anything which would undermine
the purport that the defendants were seeking to attach to
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that document.
MR JUSTICE GRAY: You mean the other documents in the same file?
MR IRVING: Like in the case of the Schlegelberger document,
which enabled the Defendants to attack the meaning of the
Schlegelberger document, because they had documents
relating to it in the same file which enabled them to
narrow it down and say this is clearly a reference to the Mischlinge.
MR JUSTICE GRAY: Sorry, we are talking about the Muller
document, are we not?
MR IRVING: We are talking about the Muller document. I am
saying that, had I had the other documents in the same file ----
MR JUSTICE GRAY: What has it got to do with Mischlinge?
MR IRVING: I could have gone behind the Muller document, using
the other documents in the same file.
MR JUSTICE GRAY: You mean as you did with Schlegelberger?
MR IRVING: As they did with Schlegelberger.
MR JUSTICE GRAY: Yes, I follow. I am not quite sure,
Dr Longerich wrote to Dr Aaron Reich, as I understand it,
to see what other documents there were in the file, but
I do not know what the result was, or indeed when the
question was asked. You do not know either?
MR IRVING: I asked the question and I was given a totally
fictitious file number in the German Federal archives.
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MR RAMPTON: Not by us.
MR IRVING: It was given by you because it was in the footnote
of one of your expert reports as being the source.
MR JUSTICE GRAY: As I understand it, and do not let us talk
over each other too much, my understanding is that first
time around the wrong file number was given, but then
later the correct file number is thought to have been
discovered, which then prompted Dr Longerich to write to
or to fax Dr Aaron Reich, asking if he could say what the
other documents in this file are.
MR IRVING: The correct file number was then notified to me
this last weekend, which of course gave me no time
whatsoever to do the kind of research that I would have
had to do.
MR JUSTICE GRAY: Anyway, your position is you do not deny its
authenticity, but you do say that the provenance is
unsatisfactory.
MR IRVING: I do say it has been improperly produced to me in a
manner which has made it impossible for me to attack its
meaning, but I have attacked its meaning nevertheless in
my submission.
MR JUSTICE GRAY: I know you have.
MR IRVING: I am not seriously worried about it because I am
sure that your Lordship will accept what I said about the meaning.
MR JUSTICE GRAY: Do you mind if I ask Mr Rampton what the
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explanation of----
MR RAMPTON: I do not see it that any criticism at all can be made ----
MR JUSTICE GRAY: When was Dr Aaron Reich asked the question?
MR RAMPTON: Where is that, my Lord?
MR JUSTICE GRAY: It is paragraph numbered 4 on the second page.
MR RAMPTON: I think that, unless I have completely
misunderstood this clip of papers, I confess I have not
paid it a terrific lot of attention recently, there is,
I think, actually a page of the little clip showing that a
fax was sent or received -- I can see. It has my own fax
number right at the top of it so I think it is what
Dr Longerich says he sent from my chambers. It looks like
16.48 on Friday, but unfortunately I cannot read it.
MR JUSTICE GRAY: That was the problem I had which is why
I asked when it had been sent. Leave aside when it was
sent. What was the answer?
MR RAMPTON: I do not know when it was sent.
MR JUSTICE GRAY: Sorry, what was the answer from Aaron Reich?
MR RAMPTON: There was one in the Washington archive as well.
The reply says, whatever its date may be -- I can see it
is 10th March. It is from somebody called Anna Row. She
is writing to both Aaron Reich, who I think might be in
New York, I really do not know, and to Dr Longerich. What
she says is: "After some searching and help from Jurgen,
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we were able to find a copy of the document in question.
The citation in Moscow is, according to the two records"
etc. etc., and gives the reference. "If a fax copy is
desired we can send it along".
MR JUSTICE GRAY: I follow all that and, as I understand it,
not making too much of a meal of it all, there are two
copies of this document, one in Moscow and another in
Germany, the German copy having been provided from
Moscow. That may or may not be satisfactory, but what
I was really concerned to know is what attempts, if any,
have been made to discover what other documents were in
the same file, because I think the request was not an
unreasonable one, that the other documents in the file
might cast some light on the significance of Muller.
MR RAMPTON: I simply do not know. If that is not addressed in
Dr Longerich's note, I cannot give an answer about it
because I was not a party to it.
MR JUSTICE GRAY: That was one of the things that I think
I suggested on day 30 or day 31, I cannot remember,
Mr Irving should be given an answer to.
MR RAMPTON: Plainly, I would submit, the position must be
this. The reason why, not including the November 1941
document, Mr Irving tendered the other Schlegelberger
documents is that, on one view of its dating, the other
documents might be of some relevance. I assume -- this
is an assumption -- that a distinguished and respectable
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historian like Dr Longerich would not produce a single
document from a file if there were other surrounding
documents which, to his knowledge, had a bearing on its
interpretation.
MR JUSTICE GRAY: Yes, but he does not say so, that is the
problem. He does not say that he has looked, or tried to
look and failed.
MR RAMPTON: In any event, since Mr Irving accepts the
authenticity of the document, the fact that there are not
any other documents around it leads nowhere.
MR JUSTICE GRAY: We do not even know that, do we? We do not
know whether there are other documents in the same file.
MR RAMPTON: There might be a source, I do not know. In fact,
I think I may have been guilty of not reading the message
carefully enough. I read paragraph 1 of Dr Longerich's
note which was prepared yesterday: "I am familiar with
this document. A copy is available in the archival
collection of the Zentralstelle in Ludwigsburg. This is a
collection of documents which was handed over by the
Soviet authorities in 1969 to the Federal Republic". It
begs the question, I interpose there, how on earth it is
that Mr Irving has never seen it. It has been there since
1969. "The document is accompanied by a covering page
with an archival reference to the file where the original
is kept 500.1.25. This is an archival reference from the
Soviet archive in Moscow. Fons" -- whatever that
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means -- "security police and SD, part 1 of the
collection, file 25. I was in Moscow", says Dr Longerich
"in 1992 for four weeks, and I looked at documents from
this fons extensively. At the moment I cannot remember
whether I saw the original of this document during my stay
in Moscow, but I kept notes about this day and could
reconstruct what I saw there. The notes are at the moment
in Munich". That plainly does not suggest that he
believes that there are any other relevant documents in that file.
MR JUSTICE GRAY: It does not say one way or the other. He
says he cannot remember. It probably is a point of
absolutely no significance but, since it is something that
Mr Irving has raised and I did indicate that I thought he
ought to have an answer, I would still like such
information as can be obtained from Dr Longerich to be
communicated to him and to me.
MR RAMPTON: I will try again. Given that it is accepted to be
an authentic document, and given also that it is not
perhaps a document that lies at the heart of the case
though it has some significance obviously, I will do
it. That leads me to make an enquiry, if I may, of your Lordship.
MR IRVING: Can I just finish?
MR JUSTICE GRAY: Yes. You have some other points?
MR RAMPTON: My Lord, I am sorry, this is a connected enquiry,
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if I may. That may take time. I do not know myself at
the moment what date judgment is likely to be because
obviously, if your Lordship is going to consider any
additional documents, they will need to be got sooner
rather than later.
MR JUSTICE GRAY: I do not know either. I hope it will not be
as long as you might fear. That does not tell you very
much, does it. That is not intended to be delphic,
but think in terms of a small number of weeks rather than
a large number of months.
MR RAMPTON: I was not trying to put any pressure on at all.
For the sake of this exercise, I obviously need to know.
If it is going to be in three or four days time,
I probably will not be able to achieve it.
MR JUSTICE GRAY: I think that will be unlikely. That is all I
can do. If you can obtain it as soon as possible -- if
you cannot, so be it. We will have to manage without.
MR RAMPTON: We will do what we can.
MR JUSTICE GRAY: Mr Irving, you have listed some other matters.
MR IRVING: I wish to conclude on page 104, if I may.
MR JUSTICE GRAY: I am so sorry. Hang on, why are you telling me about that now?
MR IRVING: Okay, then it is wrong that I should let your Lordship know.
MR JUSTICE GRAY: Is that not relevant only to costs? Tell me
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if I am wrong, but that would be the way I would see it.
MR IRVING: Not only the costs, my Lord, there are other features of part 36.
MR JUSTICE GRAY: Let me just read it.
MR IRVING: My understanding is that your Lordship was not
informed of what was in the offer, but that offer was made
under the new rules.
MR JUSTICE GRAY: I do not see the relevance of telling me that
unless and until it comes to the question of costs.
MR IRVING: Yes. The question of costs is covered by the next
paragraph, which is that I do not propose asking for my
costs in this action.
MR JUSTICE GRAY: It is premature to be telling me that.
MR IRVING: Not at all, my Lord. This is surely the place when
I can put this into your Lordship's mind and that deals
with it, puts it out of the way.
MR JUSTICE GRAY: It is true, but I would only address that
question once judgment had been given.
MR IRVING: But I do ask your Lordship to give judgment in the
terms and premises set out in my writ and statement of
claim, namely damages, including aggravated damages for
libel and an injunction restraining the Defendants and
each of them, whether by themselves or agents or otherwise
from further publishing or causing to be published the
said or similar words defamatory of myself as claimant.
MR JUSTICE GRAY: Yes. You gave me that little list of other
. P-217
things you were going to raise today. Standard of proof
in graver libels, I think you know that I believe I know
what the law is on that so you need not trouble with it,
unless you want to. Is there anything you wanted to say
particularly, Mr Irving? I am not stopping you, I just do
not think it is really necessary.
MR IRVING: It is trite law, is it not, my Lord?
MR JUSTICE GRAY: It is.
MR IRVING: We had this discussion earlier and I thought it
important -- in fact it is obviously very impertinent of
me to draw it your Lordship's attention.
MR JUSTICE GRAY: It is not at all, no. I have it in mind
anyway. Section 5, I think we have resolved that in an
earlier discussion today.
MR IRVING: We have dealt with 4 because I have now done it.
MR JUSTICE GRAY: Yes. Costs we have decided it is premature.
Now I realize time is passing but it is obviously sensible
to conclude everything today, and I hope I can perhaps do
it in this comprehensive way. You have seen that in the
Defendants' detailed written submissions they recite
various concessions -- you may not like the term but they
call them concessions which they say you have made about
such matters as shootings in the East, numbers killed,
whether it was systematic, whether Hitler knew about it,
and also in relation to deaths at the Reinhardt death
camps. Do you accept you did make those concessions?
. P-218
MR IRVING: The answer is I have not seen them, but I know of
them. I have not had any time at all to read that big
thick thing.
MR JUSTICE GRAY: Then I do not think it is fair to ask you to
give answers on the hoof. What I will ask you to do
though is this. If you either dispute that you ever made
the concessions that the Defendants say you made, or you
want now to reconsider ----
MR IRVING: Resile.
MR JUSTICE GRAY: Well, I was trying not to use that word
actually -- to reconsider, then would you write to me and
to the Defendants, shortly setting out what you say you
said, or what you now say?
MR IRVING: Yes.
MR JUSTICE GRAY: Because I do not want to be under any misapprehension.
MR IRVING: Purely on the matter of concession?
MR JUSTICE GRAY: Yes.
MR IRVING: I will certainly do that within the next two or three days.
MR JUSTICE GRAY: Good. Is there anything else, Mr Rampton?
MR RAMPTON: Yes, there is. I should like to apologise
personally -- I dare say I am right in thinking it was
directed at me -- for not being able in one moment to
restrain my frustration. I apologise for that.
MR JUSTICE GRAY: There is no need for that.
. P-219
MR RAMPTON: Yes. I should at my age know better. But, as
your Lordship will remember, it is sometimes extremely
difficult to restrain oneself when one can actually hear
the evidence of one's own witnesses being misrepresented.
I am not going to do a trawl through what Mr Irving has
said. Your Lordship has the evidence.
But there is one thing which he said which
I really do think needs to be corrected. If this is a
case without this kind of high profile, I might say
nothing at all. Mr Irving said that Professor van Pelt
had no explanation for the many oddities in Bischoff's
letter of 29th June 1943. That is an important document.
In fact, when I re-examined on 2nd February, that is day
14, page 3 to page 13 at the end, by reference to the
little clip of documents by which Mr Irving sought to show
the uniquely ----
MR JUSTICE GRAY: Yes, I remember that quite well, all the
oddities, as it were.
MR RAMPTON: In fact, he explained every single oddity, except
the missing year date in the reference.
MR JUSTICE GRAY: Yes, I remember that quite well, but thank
you for reminding me what the reference is.
MR IRVING: My Lord, in view of my traditional right to the
last word, I would reserve the right to write your
Lordship a letter setting out the oddities in that
Bischoff letter, with a copy to the Defendants.
. P-220
MR JUSTICE GRAY: No. I do not think I am going to invite
that. I feel fairly deluged anyway with paper. I really
do. I have in mind both what you said were the reasons
why you at that stage disputed the authenticity, and
I know you still question the authenticity of that
document, but I also have in mind, in a general sense, the
explanations that were given by Professor van Pelt. Now,
anything else?
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