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 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 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, 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 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 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, 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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.

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 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 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?

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 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, rvery 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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.

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 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 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 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, 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, 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 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 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 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 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 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 co MRades 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 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 co MRades? 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 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 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.