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    Day 32 Transcript: Holocaust Denial on Trial

    Part I: Initial Proceedings (1.1 to 5.19)

      1  IN THE HIGH COURT OF JUSTICE
        1996 I. No. 113
        QUEEN’S BENCH DIVISION
      2  Royal Courts of Justice
      3  Strand, London
      4  Wednesday, 15th March 2000
      5
      6  Before:
      7  MR JUSTICE GRAY
      8
      9  B E T W E E N: DAVID JOHN CAWDELL IRVING
    10  Claimant -and-
    11  (1) PENGUIN BOOKS LIMITED
    12  (2) DEBORAH E. LIPSTADT
    13  Defendants
    14  The Claimant appeared in person
    15  MR RICHARD RAMPTON Q.C. (instructed by Messrs Davenport Lyons and Mishcon de Reya) appeared on behalf of the First and
    16  Second Defendants
    17  MISS HEATHER ROGERS (instructed by Davenport Lyons) appeared on behalf of the First Defendant Penguin Books Limited
    18  MR ANTHONY JULIUS (of Mishcon de Reya) appeared on behalf of
    19  the Second Defendant Deborah Lipstadt
    20
    21  (Transcribed from the stenographic notes of Harry Counsell
        & Company, Clifford’s Inn, Fetter Lane, London EC4
    22  Telephone: 020-7242-9346)
    23  (This transcript is not to be reproduced without the written permission of Harry
        Counsell & Company)
    24
    25  PROCEEDINGS – DAY THIRTY-TWO
    26
    .           P-1


      1  <(Day 32)
      2
      3  (10.30 a.m.)
      4  MR JUSTICE GRAY:  Mr Irving, before you say what you want to
      5  say and before Mr Rampton starts, can I just say this.
      6  I certainly do not intend to have a sort of inquest about
      7  why yesterday was abortive. I was a bit surprised, as you
      8  may have gathered. I have looked at the transcript of day
      9  30 and I can see how the misunderstanding arose. I think
    10  it was then contemplated we would have two days of closing
    11  submissions and it has not worked out like that. The
    12  reason I mention it is simply this. Having looked again
    13  at both sets of written closing submissions — for which
    14  I am very grateful, a lot of work has gone into them
    15  obviously — there are one or two points that I think
    16  I ought to put really to both sides. I will do that
    17  whenever it is convenient to you both. I will either do
    18  it before or during or after, whichever you find
    19  convenient — probably after, I suspect.
    20  MR RAMPTON:  After, I would suggest.
    21  MR JUSTICE GRAY:  After your public statement, but I do not
    22  want to do it. That is what I am really telling you.
    23  MR RAMPTON:  I would also suggest, perhaps, because they are
    24  not things in which the majority of people in this room
    25  are going to be closely interested, we could also deal
    26  with these five points after.
    .           P-2


      1  MR JUSTICE GRAY:  Which five?
      2  MR RAMPTON:  Mr Irving’s five points.
      3  MR JUSTICE GRAY:  The Muller document standard of proof,
      4  section 5 etc.
      5  MR RAMPTON:  They are partly matters of law and partly matters
      6  of detail.
      7  MR JUSTICE GRAY:  Subject to Mr Irving, I entirely agree about
      8  that. Mr Irving, these are the nitty-gritty, are they
      9  not?
    10  MR IRVING:  I did not want to be wrong-footed by leaving them
    11  out. I want to draw your Lordship’s attention to the fact
    12  that there are these final loose ends that need to be tied
    13  up.
    14  MR JUSTICE GRAY:  I certainly agree. We ought to spend a few
    15  minutes on the Muller document.
    16  MR IRVING:  Except for the one point, my Lord, point 4 on that
    17  list. Having reconsidered the matter, I do consider I am
    18  entitled to make slightly broader use of the material
    19  which was in the bundle E matters on the basis that I have
    20  set out there, that they might go to aggravated damages
    21  and they certainly go to explaining my state of mind when
    22  I am alleged to have made certain remarks about the bodies
    23  or persons concerned.
    24  MR JUSTICE GRAY:  What I will do — I know the Defendants are
    25  not very happy about this but I think I am going to do it
    26  anyway unless Mr Rampton wants to try and dissuade me —
    .           P-3


      1  is to let you make your closing submissions along the
      2  lines of the written document. I am bound to say that
      3  I think a lot of it goes beyond what the evidence
      4  establishes, and also goes beyond what you are really
      5  entitled in any event to rely on by way of aggravated
      6  damages against the Defendants because, of course, you
      7  have to prove the Defendants’ involvement in the
      8  conspiracy. But I am going to let you do it, unless
      9  Mr Rampton continue tries to dissuade me.
    10  MR RAMPTON:  No, I have no objection.
    11  MR JUSTICE GRAY:  I think it is the right thing to do in this
    12  particular case.
    13  MR RAMPTON:  I agree. Miss Rogers has dealt with it very
    14  succinctly and, in my submission, very effectively on
    15  paper. It is in your Lordship’s hands at the end of all
    16  this. If this were a Jury case, it would be entirely
    17  different, but it is not. We are confident that we can
    18  leave it happily to your Lordship. I would also add
    19  this. It does seem to me, and I will say this, that the
    20  more of that kind of speculative fantasy Mr Irving spins
    21  in a public court in this country, the more harm he does
    22  his own cause. I only say that at this stage.
    23  MR JUSTICE GRAY:  That is as may be.
    24  MR IRVING:  Be that as may be, my Lord, of course, I would be
    25  perfectly entitled in my closing speech to put to the
    26  court the matters that I would have put to the Defendants
    .           P-4


      1  had they had the courage to go into the witness box. That
      2  is the kind of material that I would have put to them.
      3  MR JUSTICE GRAY:  Well, I am not sure that is actually right,
      4  as a matter of law, but I am taking a liberal approach.
      5  Say what you have indicated you intend to say in due
      6  course.
      7  MR IRVING:  I will certainly tighten it up. I shall not go to
      8  such lengths.
      9  MR RAMPTON:  My Lord, I will then read, if I may, what your
    10  Lordship has in writing. I start by observing that your
    11  Lordship will notice, as I read it, that there are one or
    12  two stylistic changes that I have made overnight. They
    13  are merely stylistic. They do not touch the substance of
    14  what I have to say.
    15  MR JUSTICE GRAY:  I will keep my mouth shut and I will not
    16  interrupt you, but there are the points that I want to
    17  raise with you at the end of your statement.
    18  MR RAMPTON:  If your Lordship would rather do it now?
    19  MR JUSTICE GRAY:  No, it is better at the end.

    Part II: Rampton’s Closing Argument (5.20-49.23))

    20  MR RAMPTON:  My Lord, I start with this, that if one had read
    21  some of the media reports of this trial, which I realize
    22  that your Lordship probably has not, one might have
    23  supposed that Mr Irving had been dragged into this court
    24  to defend his freedom of expression as an historian.
    25  In fact, of course, that is not so. The history
    26  of the matter is quite the reverse. Professor Deborah
    .           P-5


      1  Lipstadt, an America academic, wrote a book called
      2  “Denying the Holocaust”, which was first published in the
      3  United States in 1993. It was then republished by Penguin
      4  Books in this country in 1994. The book contained
      5  trenchant criticisms of Mr Irving’s historiographical
      6  methods and his political views and associations.
      7  Mr Irving then issued legal proceedings claiming
      8  aggravated damages for libel and an injunction against
      9  Professor Lipstadt and Penguin. This trial has taken
    10  place only because they decided to defend their right to
    11  publish the truth.
    12  The principal accusations made against Mr Irving
    13  by Professor Lipstadt in her book were, in summary:
    14  first, that Mr Irving deliberately falsified history in
    15  order to make it conform with his ideological leanings and
    16  political agenda, and, in particular, in order to
    17  exonerate Adolf Hitler of responsibility for the Nazi
    18  persecution of the Jews.
    19  Second, that in order to achieve his objective,
    20  Mr Irving distorted historical evidence and manipulated
    21  historical documents.
    22  Third, that Mr Irving had become one of the most
    23  dangerous spokespersons for Holocaust denial.
    24  Last, that he himself held extremist views and
    25  allied himself, with other right-wing extremists, in
    26  particular Holocaust deniers and anti-Semites.
    .           P-6


      1  My Lord, those were undoubtedly serious charges
      2  and, had they been untrue, Mr Irving would clearly have
      3  been entitled to a large sum of money and an order of the
      4  court preventing the Defendants from repeating their
      5  accusations. But, as it turns out on the evidence before
      6  this court, the accusations are true, in every significant
      7  respect.
      8  Mr Irving had in the past claimed that there was
      9  a chain or series of documents which showed that Hitler
    10  was innocent of the persecution of the Jews, and in
    11  particular their mass-murder during the War; indeed, that
    12  he was, in fact, “the best friend the Jews ever had in the
    13  Third Reich.
    14  ” The Defendants decided to put that claim to
    15  the test. They asked a professional historian, Professor
    16  Richard Evans of Cambridge University, to investigate it.
    17  His findings were astonishing. Upon
    18  examination, virtually every single one of the links in
    19  Mr Irving’s chain crumbled in his hands, revealing a
    20  falsification of history on massive scale. Equally
    21  revealing was the discovery that each of Mr Irving’s
    22  falsifications led to the same end: the exculpation of
    23  Hitler.
    24  In addition, in order to test Mr Irving’s
    25  historiography by reference to his work on a topic other
    26  than Hitler — in a sense, a control sample — Professor
    .           P-7


      1  Evans examined a number of successive editions of one of
      2  Mr Irving’s most successful works, his book on the Allied
      3  bombing of Dresden in February 1945. Here again Professor
      4  Evans found deliberate falsification on a grand scale, all
      5  of it tending to the same result: a gross inflation of
      6  the numbers of German civilians killed in those raids.
      7  The long written submission of the Defendants
      8  which is before your Lordship contains a detailed account
      9  of Professor Evans’ findings and the evidence which
    10  supports them. By the Defendants’ estimate, there are, in
    11  relation to Hitler alone, as many as 25 major
    12  falsifications of history, as well as numerous subsidiary
    13  inventions, suppressions, manipulations and
    14  mistranslations employed to support the major
    15  falsifications. If those relating to Auschwitz, Dresden
    16  and other matters are added in, the number goes well over
    17  thirty.
    18  My Lord, in order to illustrate the
    19  extraordinary nature and extent of these falsifications,
    20  I will give but two examples.
    21  On the evening of 9th November 1938, and through
    22  the night until the following morning, there was an orgy
    23  of violence and destruction against Jews and Jewish
    24  property throughout Germany. This was
    25  Reichskristallnacht.
    26  It had been prompted by the assassination in
    .           P-8


      1  Paris of a German diplomat by a young Polish Jew. The
      2  Nazi leadership in Berlin exploited it to the full. It
      3  was orchestrated by the SA and the SS, and the police were
      4  ordered, by Hitler, not to intervene.
      5  Mr Irving has described this pogrom in various
      6  places, but most particularly in his book “Goebbels:
      7  Mastermind of Third Reich”, which was published in 1996,
      8  where he devotes a whole chapter to it. In summary, his
      9  account of it is that the whole thing was initiated and
    10  orchestrated by Goebbels, without Hitler’s knowledge or
    11  participation; and that when, in the early hours of 10th
    12  November 1938, Hitler found out what Goebbels had done, he
    13  was “livid with rage” and took immediate steps to put a
    14  stop to it. This account purports to be based partly on
    15  the postwar testimony of former Nazis, but principally on
    16  the contemporary documents. On examination of those
    17  documents, Mr Irving’s account turns out to be
    18  completely bogus. His use of two of those documents will
    19  suffice to illustrate the point.
    20  On page 276 of his Goebbels book, Mr Irving
    21  writes this:
    22  “What of Himmler and Hitler? Both were totally
    23  unaware of what Goebbels had done until the synagogue next
    24  to Munich’s Four Seasons Hotel was set on fire around 1
    25  am. Heydrich, Himmler’s national chief of police, was
    26  relaxing down in the hotel bar; he hurried up to Himmler’s
    .           P-9


      1  room, then telexed instructions to all police authorities
      2  to restore law and order,; protect Jews, and Jewish
      3  property, and halt any ongoing incidents. I emphasise the
      4  last part of that sentence, to restore law and order,
      5  protect Jews, and Jewish property, and halt any ongoing
      6  incidents.
      7  The reference given by Mr Irving in his book as
      8  his source for this is a telex sent by Heydrich at 1.20 am
      9  on 10th November 1938. In fact, so far from ordering “all
    10  police authorities to restore law and order, protect Jews
    11  and Jewish property, and halt any ongoing incidents”, it
    12  read as follows:
    13  “(a) Only such measures may be taken as do not
    14  involve any endangering of German life or property (e.g.
    15  synagogue fires only if there is no danger of the fire
    16  spreading to the surrounding buildings).
    17  (b) The shops and dwellings of Jews may only be
    18  destroyed, not looted. The police are instructed to
    19  supervise the implementation of this order and to arrest
    20  looters.
    21  (c) Care is to be taken that non-Jewish shops in
    22  shopping streets are unconditionally secured against
    23  damage.
    24  (d) Foreign nationals may not be assaulted even
    25  if they are Jews.”
    26  That was what Heydrich stayed at 1.20 a.m. on
    .           P-10


      1  10th November 1938.
      2  Then, on page 277 of his book, after a colourful
      3  account of Hitler’s supposedly furious intervention,
      4  Mr Irving writes this: “At 2.56 am Rudolf Hess’s staff
      5  also began cabling, telephoning, and radioing instructions
      6  to gauleiters and police authorities around the nation to
      7  halt the madness”, and I emphasise those words.
      8  The source given by Mr Irving for this is a
      9  report made by the Nazi Party Court about the pogrom in
    10  February 1939. It records this order from Hess’s office,
    11  made on Hitler’s authority. This shows that, in truth,
    12  all that the order forbade was the continuing of arson
    13  attacks on Jewish shops. Synagogues, houses, apartments,
    14  cemeteries, and, in particular, Jewish people were left to
    15  the mercy of the continuing violence.
    16  As your Lordship knows, there was an aftermath
    17  of Reichskristallnacht. Mr Irving describes one aspect on
    18  page 281 of Goebbels in these terms:
    19  “Hess … ordered the Gestapo and the party
    20  courts to delve into the origins of the night of violence
    21  and turn the culprits over to the public prosecutors”.
    22  Thus Mr Irving gives the impression that those
    23  who had perpetrated the violence were to be brought to
    24  justice and properly punished.
    25  Nothing could be further from the truth. As the
    26  contemporary documents, and in particular the Party Court
    .           P-11


      1  report of February 1939, which Mr Irving himself used as a
      2  principal source for his account of Reichskristallnacht,
      3  reveal:
      4  First, the Ministry of Justice ruled, on 10th
      5  November 1938, that those who had “merely” caused damage
      6  to Jewish shops, synagogues and the like should not be
      7  prosecuted at all.
      8  Second, other more serious offences, such as
      9  looting, rape, assault, murder and the destruction of
    10  Jewish homes for selfish motives were to be referred to
    11  the Party Court, which would first decide whether any of
    12  the offenders should be referred to the ordinary criminal
    13  courts or acquitted by order of the Fuhrer.
    14  Third, in the event, as was no doubt intended,
    15  the proceedings of the Party Court were a farce. Of 16
    16  cases dealt with in the report of February 1939, 14 were
    17  disposed of with little more than a rap on the knuckles
    18  for the culprits, including 13 cases of murder involving
    19  the deaths of 21 Jews. The two cases which were referred
    20  to the criminal courts were sexual offences against Jewish
    21  women – not because of their gravity, however, but because
    22  the offenders had been guilty of “racial defilement”
    23  (Rassenschande)!
    24  Finally, the reason the Party Court gave for its
    25  leniency in the other 14 cases was that the criminals were
    26  in fact “only carrying out the unclearly expressed but
    .           P-12


      1  properly recognized will of the leadership” – that is,
      2  Hitler.
      3  Mr Irving knows all of this, but suppresses it
      4  entirely in his book.
      5  The second striking example, amongst many, of
      6  Mr Irving’s shocking falsification of history relates to
      7  1943.
      8  By the beginning of 1943, many of Europe’s Jews
      9  had already been murdered. Hungarian Jews, however, of
    10  whom there were perhaps 600 to 700,000, had, so far,
    11  escaped the destruction. The reason was that the ruler of
    12  Hungary, Admiral Horthy, although Hitler’s ally, had
    13  steadfastly refused to deliver up Hungary’s Jews. There
    14  was much agitation about this in Berlin. Eventually, on
    15  16th and 17th April 1943, Hitler and his Foreign Minister,
    16  Ribbentrop, summoned Admiral Horthy to Klessheim, near
    17  Salzburg, in order to put pressure on him to surrender the
    18  Hungarian Jews into Nazi hands. The notes of the meetings
    19  were taken by a man called Paul Schmidt and are agreed by
    20  Mr Irving, who used them for his own accounts of these
    21  meetings, to be very reliable.
    22  According to Schmidt’s notes at the first
    23  meeting on 16th April, Horthy protested at the Nazi
    24  leader’s demands. “But they” (the Jews) “can hardly be
    25  murdered or otherwise eliminated”, he said. Hitler’s
    26  response was palliative: “There is no need for that”, he
    .           P-13


      1  said, and added that they could be sent to remote work
      2  camps or down the mines.”
      3  The next day, 17th April 1943, Hitler’s and
      4  Ribbentrop’s demands became a good deal cruder. Horthy
      5  again protested that he “surely couldn’t beat the Jews to
      6  death”. Ribbentrop replied that they “must either be
      7  annihilated or taken to concentration camps. There is no
      8  other way”. Hitler then followed up with this:
      9  “Where the Jews are were left to themselves, as
    10  for example in Poland, gruesome poverty and degeneracy had
    11  ruled. There were just pure parasites. One had
    12  fundamentally cleared up this state of affairs in Poland.
    13  If the Jews there didn’t want to work, they were shot. If
    14  they couldn’t work, they had to perish. They had to be
    15  treated like tuberculosis bacilli, from which a healthy
    16  body could be infected. That was not cruel”, said Hitler,
    17  “if one remembered that even innocent natural creatures
    18  like hares and deer had to be killed so that no harm was
    19  caused. Why should one spare the beasts who wanted to
    20  bring us Bolshevism once more? Nations who did not rid
    21  themselves of Jews perished”.
    22  Mr Irving’s account of this exchange in his 1977
    23  edition of “Hitler’s War” (at page 509) is extraordinary.
    24  First, as an invented pretext for Hitler’s remarks, he
    25  introduces the Warsaw Ghetto uprising, which did not in
    26  fact begin until two days later. Then, immediately
    .           P-14


      1  following Hitler’s brutal assertion of the need to kill
      2  the Jewish “beasts”, Mr Irving adds this:
      3  “Horthy apologetically noted that he had done
      4  all he decently could against the Jews: ‘But they can
      5  hardly be murdered or otherwise eliminated’, he
      6  protested. Hitler reassured him: ‘There is no need for
      7  that’. But just as in Slovakia, they ought to be isolated
      8  in remote camps where they could no longer affect the
      9  healthy body of the public; or they could be put to work
    10  in the mines, for example. He himself did not mind being
    11  temporarily excoriated for his Jewish policies, if they
    12  brought him tranquillity. Horthy left unconvinced.”
    13  As, my Lord, will immediately be apparent, this
    14  was a quite brazen piece of manipulation: as Mr Irving
    15  knew perfectly well, because he was familiar with
    16  Schmidt’s notes, this exchange had, in fact, occurred on
    17  the previous day (16th April), not 17th. It is apparent,
    18  therefore, that Mr Irving quite deliberately transferred
    19  it to 17th April in order to mitigate the chilling impact
    20  of Hitler’s stark observation about the need to kill the
    21  Jewish “beasts”.
    22  The account given in the 1991 edition of
    23  “Hitler’s War” (at pages 541 to 542) is no better. True,
    24  the spurious reference to the Warsaw uprising has been
    25  removed. But so, too, has Hitler’s repellant analogy
    26  between the need to kill animals which cause damage and
    .           P-15


      1  the need to kill the Jewish “beasts”. And the brazen
      2  transfer that Hitler’s palliative remark on 16th April to
      3  this meeting on 17th is perpetuated.
      4  My Lord, these two examples are but the tip of a
      5  large iceberg imposed of numbers of other equally
      6  egregious falsifications by Mr Irving in his written work
      7  and in his public utterances.
      8  I conclude here, my Lord, with this, that the
      9  Defendants say, on this part of the case: “Case proved:
    10  Mr Irving is, as was proposed at the outset of this trial,
    11  a liar”.
    12  My Lord, it might be thought that that would be
    13  enough to dispose of Mr Irving’s claim, given the emphasis
    14  he places on the damage to his reputation as an historian
    15  which he says was caused by Professor Lipstadt’s book.
    16  But the evidence in the case has covered a lot of other
    17  topics as well, and I shall, therefore, briefly mention
    18  them too.
    19  Until 1988, Mr Irving had accepted the
    20  historical reality of Holocaust, but denied that Hitler
    21  authorized it or, until late on in the War, knew anything
    22  much about it. This position, for an historian, was
    23  described by Sir John Keegan, the well-known military
    24  historian, who was called on subpoena to give evidence in
    25  this court by Mr Irving, it was described as “perverse”
    26  and as “defying reason.” Dr Peter Longerich, a
    .           P-16


      1  distinguished historian of the period, who gave expert
      2  evidence for the Defendants, called it “absolutely
      3  absurd”.
      4  And so it was, for reasons which can be stated
      5  quite shortly.
      6  The Holocaust – that is the systematic mass
      7  murder of millions of Jews, gypsies and others – took
      8  place in stages.
      9  The first stage, beginning in the autumn of
    10  1941, after Hitler’s invasion of the Soviet Union,
    11  consisted of mass shootings carried out specially-formed
    12  SS groups and their local allies. This continued through
    13  into 1942 and resulted in the deaths of up to 1.5 million
    14  Jews living in Russia and the Baltic states.
    15  The second stage, which began in December 1941
    16  and continued through into 1943 or later, consisted of the
    17  gassing of the Jews of the Warthegau and Poland. This
    18  resulted in the deaths of probably as many as 2.6 million
    19  Jews (300,000 in the Warthegau and 2.3 million in
    20  Poland).
    21  The third stage, beginning with mass
    22  deportations to the East in the autumn of 1941, culminated
    23  in the deaths by gassing, mostly at Auschwitz, of Jews
    24  from Central, Western and Southern Europe. This stage
    25  lasted until late 1944. Reliable recent estimates of the
    26  numbers gassed at Auschwitz/Birkenhau give a figure of
    .           P-17


      1  about 1.12 million.
      2  Thus the total achievement of this horrendous
      3  exercise in systematic mass murder was probably somewhere
      4  between five and six million innocent lives.
      5  The whole of this gigantic operation was
      6  orchestrated by Heinrich Himmler, the Reichsfuhrer SS, and
      7  his able subordinates, such as Heydrich, Globocnik and
      8  Eichmann.
      9  As Dr Longerich explained in court, Hitler and
    10  Himmler were long-time intimate associates. Himmler had
    11  been with Hitler during the 1923 putsch and Hitler
    12  appointed him Reichsfuhrer SS in 1929. Throughout the
    13  War, and certainly while the Holocaust was underway, they
    14  met frequently, sometimes two or three times a week, often
    15  for hours at a time and often alone together. It is,
    16  therefore, wholly inconceivable that during the whole
    17  three and a half years for which the killing lasted,
    18  Himmler could, or indeed would, have concealed from Hitler
    19  the enormous, systematic operation that he was directing.
    20  This becomes all the less credible when it is
    21  remembered, as the documents show, that Hitler was the
    22  mainspring and driving force of Nazi anti-Jewish policy
    23  from 1923 onwards and that his anti-Semitism became
    24  noticeably more radical, if that were possible, from the
    25  date that he declared war on America (11th December 1941).
    26  Thus, leaving aside all the specific evidence to
    .           P-18


      1  be found in the contemporary documents, including
      2  documents written by Himmler himself, which, fairly read
      3  by an open-minded, careful historian, plainly implicate
      4  Hitler, the overall picture is compelling: the Holocaust
      5  could not possibly have happened without Hitler’s
      6  knowledge and authority. It takes only a moment’s light
      7  reflection to realize that the contrary idea is both
      8  absurd and perverse: suppose, say, in July 1942, when
      9  Himmler went to Lublin and Auschwitz to review and advance
    10  the mass killing in Poland, and on his return had lunch
    11  with Hitler (as he did) that Hitler, previously in a state
    12  of complete ignorance, and in any case opposed to any
    13  Final Solution that involved any more than deportation of
    14  the Jews to Siberia or Central Africa after the War, had
    15  suddenly found out what Himmler was doing. What, one
    16  wonders, would have happened to Himmler? Well, of course,
    17  it didn’t, not then or at any time thereafter.
    18  In 1988 Mr Irving’s position changed
    19  dramatically. Not only did Hitler not know about the
    20  Holocaust, the Holocaust did not happen (which is why, of
    21  course, Hitler did not know about it).
    22  The question is why? Why this change in
    23  Mr Irving’s position? The one-word answer is: Leuchter.
    24  In April 1988, Mr Irving went to Canada, for reasons best
    25  known to himself, to give expert evidence at the trial in
    26  Toronto of a man called Ernst Zundel, a dedicated
    .           P-19


      1  Holocaust denier, and since 1988, one of Mr Irving’s
      2  staunchest allies and promoters. While he was in Toronto,
      3  he met a man called Fred Leuchter, also proffered by
      4  Zundel, but rejected by the Canadian court, as an expert
      5  witness. Leuchter was, it seems, some kind
      6  of consultant on execution facilities in the USA. He’d
      7  been to Auschwitz and Birkenau to seek “scientific”
      8  evidence of the existence of homicidal gas chambers. He
      9  made a report on his findings.
    10  Mr Irving gave this report a cursory reading.
    11  His conversion was instantaneous. Even as he gave
    12  evidence to the Canadian court, the Holocaust had suddenly
    13  never happened.
    14  In June 1989, Mr Irving gave a press conference
    15  in London, triumphantly announcing the English publication
    16  of the Leuchter Report, with a foreword written by
    17  himself. In his foreword, Mr Irving trumpeted the virtues
    18  of the Report, with particular emphasis on the chemical
    19  analysis of the samples which Leuchter had brought back
    20  from Auschwitz/Birkenau. “Forensic chemistry” proclaimed
    21  Mr Irving, “is an exact science”.
    22  And, my Lord, indeed so it is. Fred Leuchter
    23  had taken samples from the remains of the gas chambers and
    24  one sample from the delousing facility in the women’s camp
    25  at Birkenau. The samples from the gas chambers showed
    26  small, but significant, traces of cyanide, the active
    .           P-20


      1  element in the Zyklon-B pellets used for the gassings, the
      2  sample from the delousing facility, relatively high
      3  traces. Therefore, concluded Leuchter, the “gas chambers”
      4  could never have been gas chambers, because, according to
      5  Leuchter, the concentration of hydrogen cyanide needed to
      6  kill humans was higher than that needed to kill lice.
      7  The Leuchter report (as Mr Irving has accepted
      8  during this trial) was riddled with numerous errors of
      9  various kinds, but this error was colossal. As the
    10  material contained in the Leuchter report itself showed,
    11  the concentration of hydrogen cyanide required to kill
    12  humans is, in fact, some 22 times lower than that required
    13  to kill lice. Thus, so far from disproving the existence
    14  of homicidal gas chambers at Auschwitz, the Leuchter
    15  Report actually succeeded in proving the opposite.
    16  Despite this, Mr Irving continued to cling, and
    17  still clings, to Leuchter’s “forensic chemistry” as the
    18  flagship of his Holocaust denial. In consequence,
    19  Mr Irving has, ever since 1988, used the Leuchter Report
    20  as the foundation not only for his denial of the existence
    21  of any homicidal gas chambers at Auschwitz, but also,
    22  quite illogically, for the existence of any gas chambers
    23  anywhere.
    24  In the end, at the trial of this action,
    25  Mr Irving has been driven, in the face of overwhelming
    26  evidence presented by Professor Robert Jan van Pelt,
    .           P-21


      1  Professor Christopher Browning and Dr Longerich, to
      2  concede that there were indeed mass murders on a huge
      3  scale by means of gassing at Chelmno in the Warthegau and
      4  at the Reinhardt camps of Belzec, Treblinka and Sobibor;
      5  and even that there were “some gassings” at Auschwitz.
      6  His last remaining defence against the evidence
      7  showing that the crematoria at Birkenau were used to
      8  murder vast numbers of Jews by means of Zyklon B was to
      9  make the slippery concession that the gas chambers —
    10  known as Leichenkeller I at crematoria II and III at
    11  Birkenau — were, indeed, gas chambers, but for gassing
    12  only (I quote Mr Irving’s words) “objects and cadavers”.
    13  This last proposition is ludicrous. If this
    14  were not such a serious matter, it would be hilarious.
    15  For the evidence, clearly explained by Professor van Pelt,
    16  is that the gas-tight doors in Leichenkeller I at both
    17  those crematoria were equipped with thick glass spyholes,
    18  protected by metal grilles. Why, it was asked of
    19  Mr Irving, should these be required for the observation of
    20  the gassing of lice-infested “objects” and corpses? Faced
    21  with this, Mr Irving retreated to the position that
    22  Leichenkeller I had been intended to serve an alternative
    23  purpose as an air-raid shelter. This last refuge will be
    24  dealt with shortly below. Meanwhile, Professor van Pelt
    25  also explained that when the plans of crematoria II and
    26  III were redesigned in late 1942 and early 1943, the
    .           P-22


      1  corpse-slides or chutes appearing on the original plans
      2  were removed, and the entrance to the basement moved to
      3  the other side of the building. Thus, if the re-design
      4  was intended to facilitate the gassing of corpses, people
      5  who are already dead, it had only succeeded in compelling
      6  those who were carrying the corpses to negotiate a series
      7  of small rooms, narrow passages, and staircases to reach
      8  the gassing-space. Moreover, the plans were re-designed
      9  at that time so as to change the way in which the doors of
    10  the gassing-space opened from inwards to outwards, thus
    11  further impeding the carrying of corpses into the space.
    12  Mr Irving’s air-raid shelter proposal is equally
    13  absurd. It is obvious that the Leichenkellers could never
    14  have served as air-raid shelters for an inmate population
    15  of 100,000 or more, even if it thought likely that the SS
    16  should have wanted to protect the inmates against
    17  air-raids. Therefore, if the Leichenkellers were ever
    18  intended to be used as air-raid shelters, they must have
    19  been intended for the SS. In fact, crematoria II and III
    20  are about one and a half miles from the nearest SS
    21  barracks. The picture of SS personnel running from their
    22  barracks, round the perimeter wire, in full gear, one and
    23  a half miles to the crematoria, under a hail of bombs, is
    24  just plain daft.
    25  Mr Irving’s concession that Leichenkeller I was
    26  indeed a gas chamber is, of course, entirely inconsistent
    .           P-23


      1  with his continued adherence to Leuchter’s chemical
      2  analysis as being conclusive evidence that Leichenkeller I
      3  never was a gas chamber. It is also wholly inconsistent
      4  with his final line of defence, which is
      5  that Leichenkeller I could never have been a gas chamber
      6  because the remains of the roof that can be seen at
      7  Birkenau do not show the holes through which the gas
      8  pellets were thrown.
      9  This last line of defence, which emerged at a
    10  very late stage in Mr Irving’s Holocaust denial, is, in
    11  any case, easily demolished. In the first place,
    12  Professor van Pelt, who has subjected the remains of the
    13  roof of Leichenkeller I at crematorium II to careful
    14  examination (which Mr Irving has never done), told the
    15  court that the remains are so fragmentary that they do not
    16  allow any firm conclusions to be drawn as to the existence
    17  or non-existence of the holes. Second, if, as Mr Irving
    18  accepts, Leichenkeller I was a gas chamber (for whatever
    19  purpose) it would always have needed apertures for
    20  inserting the Zyklon-B, since it never had any windows and
    21  only one gas-tight door. Third, even if Mr Irving were
    22  right that it was used for gassing objects and corpses,
    23  the concentration of hydrogen cyanide required for this
    24  would have been comparatively high, with the consequence
    25  that the need for tight fitting apertures which could be
    26  opened and closed quickly and easily, would, for the
    .           P-24


      1  protection of those throwing in the pellets, have been all
      2  the greater. Finally, leaving aside all the mass of
      3  eyewitness testimony, there is a coincidence between two
      4  pieces of independent evidence which demonstrates
      5  conclusively the existence of these holes or apertures.
      6  In 1945, a former inmate of Auschwitz, David Olere, an
      7  artist, drew the ground plan of Leichenkeller I in
      8  crematorium III. This drawing shows a zigzag alignment of
      9  the gassing columns in Leichenkeller I. These are the
    10  columns which would have ended in the apertures through
    11  which the gas pellets were inserted. It happens that that
    12  zigzag alignment is precisely matched by an aerial
    13  photograph taken by the Allies in 1944, which was not
    14  released to the world until 1979. There can, therefore,
    15  be no possibility of any cross-contamination
    16  between Olere’s drawing and the aerial photograph. No
    17  doubt recognizing this, Mr Irving sought to suggest at
    18  this trial that the aerial photograph had been faked by
    19  the CIA. Professor van Pelt, however, explained to the
    20  court that he had had the photograph tested by Dr Nevin
    21  Bryant at NASA and that the result of those tests showed
    22  conclusively that the photograph was authentic.
    23  In the light of Mr Irving’s concession that
    24  Leichenkeller I was indeed a gas chamber and of the fact
    25  that it is clear that it was never intended for the
    26  gassing of corpses or other inanimate objects, or for use
    .           P-25


      1  as an air-raid shelter, the stark conclusion can only be
      2  this: It must have been used for gassing people, live
      3  people.
      4  One residual shred of this aspect of Mr Irving’s
      5  Holocaust denial remains. He disputes the numbers of
      6  people murdered at Auschwitz/Birkenau. This last
      7  barricade of Mr Irving’s is based on three
      8  distinctly unstable legs.
      9  The first leg is the so-called “death books”
    10  released in recent years from the archive in Moscow.
    11  These are incomplete. They show a total of some 74,000
    12  recorded deaths from various causes. They relate,
    13  however, and could only ever relate, to the deaths of
    14  prisoners registered upon arrival at Auschwitz, that is to
    15  say, those destined to be accommodated in the camps at
    16  Auschwitz and, more particularly, Birkenau, as workers
    17  (for a time at least).
    18  There was, however, a preliminary process at
    19  Auschwitz, which involved separating those deemed to be
    20  fit for work from the rest. This was called “selection”.
    21  The vast majority, including the old, young children, and
    22  mothers with small children, were “the rest”. They were
    23  gassed immediately without ever being registered; their
    24  deaths were never recorded.
    25  There is a great deal of eyewitness evidence
    26  about this from both sides, perpetrators and surviving
    .           P-26


      1  victims. This evidence is confirmed by photographs taken
      2  by the SS during the so-called “Hungarian action” in the
      3  course of which, over a matter of months, some 400,000
      4  Hungarian Jews were gassed, in the summer of 1944. Thus,
      5  once again, eyewitness evidence is corroborated by
      6  contemporary documentary evidence.
      7  In the result, the fact that the “death books”
      8  fail to record the deaths of perhaps 1 million people
      9  killed on arrival is unsurprising and inconsequential.
    10  The second leg of Mr Irving’s last barricade
    11  consists of German police radio messages decoded by the
    12  British during the war. Some of these came from
    13  Auschwitz, and of course none mentioned gassings. For
    14  exactly the same reasons as the death books make no
    15  reference to those murdered on arrival, it is not
    16  reasonable to expect that the radio messages from
    17  Auschwitz would: people who were not registered on
    18  arrival at Auschwitz because they were not destined for
    19  work in the camp but, instead, for immediate death in the
    20  gas chambers, would obviously not be mentioned in messages
    21  about recorded deaths.
    22  The last leg in the barricade is Mr Irving’s
    23  contention that Auschwitz did not have sufficient
    24  incineration capacity for all the corpses of those whom it
    25  is generally held by historians were killed there. As
    26  Professor van Pelt convincingly demonstrated, by reference
    .           P-27


      1  to a letter of 28th June 1943, from Karl Bischoff, the
      2  head of the building programme at Auschwitz, to Berlin,
      3  the potential incineration capacity at Auschwitz/Birkenau
      4  at that time far exceeded any possible mortality rate
      5  amongst the registered inmates from “natural”
      6  causes, including the possibility of a repeat of the
      7  typhus epidemic which had struck the camp in 1942. This
      8  means that the incineration capacity must have been
      9  calculated and built, as it was in due course, to
    10  accommodate the mortal remains of the hundreds of
    11  thousands of people who were gassed on arrival.
    12  Faced with this, Mr Irving’s only possible
    13  response was (as ever) to challenge the authenticity of
    14  the Bischoff letter. This challenge, in the end, turned
    15  out to be based on nothing more than the fact that the
    16  administrative reference on the letter did not contain the
    17  year date. In fact, copies of this document have been
    18  retained in the archive at Moscow since 1945, when the
    19  Soviets liberated Auschwitz and acquired the documents
    20  which the SS had forgotten to destroy. Moreover, the
    21  document was used at the trial of the Auschwitz
    22  commandant, Rudolf Hoess, in 1948, and again at the trial
    23  of the Auschwitz architects, Dejaco and Ertl, in 1971.
    24  Not unnaturally, Professor van Pelt saw no reason
    25  whatsoever to doubt the authenticity of the document.
    26  Amongst other reasons for rejecting Mr Irving’s proposal
    .           P-28


      1  that the document might be a postwar communist forgery, is
      2  the fact that the incineration capacity shown in the
      3  document — that is 4,756 corpses per 24 hours — is
      4  very significantly lower than that estimated by the
      5  Soviets and the Poles (both communist regimes) shortly
      6  after the War. It follows that if the document were a
      7  communist forgery, it would be a very strange one.
      8  Mr Irving’s last challenge to the incineration
      9  capacity was that the amount of coke delivered to
    10  Auschwitz at the relevant time would not, in the ordinary
    11  way, have been sufficient to meet the required rate of
    12  incineration. As Professor van Pelt demonstrated, this
    13  challenge is demolished by two considerations which
    14  Mr Irving had evidently ignored: first, the procedure for
    15  incineration at Auschwitz involved the simultaneous
    16  incineration of up to four or five corpses even in every
    17  muffle of the ovens; and, second, in consequence, the
    18  corpses themselves served as fuel for the ovens, the more
    19  particularly so if, as they generally did, they included
    20  the comparatively well fed corpses of people recently
    21  arrived on the trains and gassed on arrival.
    22  Mr Irving’s Holocaust denial is thus exposed as
    23  a fraud. It originated with a piece so-called scientific
    24  research which, on analysis, turns out, if it has any
    25  value at all, to support the overwhelming historical
    26  evidence that Auschwitz was indeed a gigantic death
    .           P-29


      1  factory. Mr Irving’s later adornments to his gas chamber
      2  denial also turn out to be fragile conjectures based on no
      3  significant research at all: it should be noted that
      4  Mr Irving has never himself been to Auschwitz to examine
      5  the archeological remains or the documentary evidence
      6  contained in the archive. It follows that some other
      7  reason must be sought to explain his devotion, over many
      8  years, and even in this court, though his case has changed
      9  and changed back again throughout the trial, to the
    10  bizarre idea that no significant numbers of people were
    11  murdered in the homicidal gas chambers at
    12  Auschwitz/Birkenau. The reasons are not far to seek.
    13  As the evidence in this court has shown,
    14  Mr Irving is a right-wing extremist, a racist and, in
    15  particular, a rabid anti-Semite.
    16  Two examples, again, amongst many, will suffice
    17  to illustrate this proposition.
    18  In a speech which he made at Tampa, Florida, on
    19  6th October 1995 to the National Alliance, a white
    20  supremacist and profoundly anti-Semitic group, Mr Irving
    21  said this about the Jews:
    22  “You have been disliked for 3,000 years. You
    23  have been disliked so much that you have hounded from
    24  country to country, from pogrom to purge, from purge back
    25  to pogrom. And yet you never ask yourselves why you are
    26  disliked, that’s the difference between you and me. It
    .           P-30


      1  would never occur to you to look in the mirror and say
      2  “Why am I disliked, what is it the rest of humanity
      3  doesn’t like about the Jewish people, to such an extent
      4  that they repeatedly put us through the grinder?” And he
      5  (a heckler whom Mr Irving said he had perceived to be
      6  Jewish) went beserk, said Mr Irving. He said (the
      7  heckler), “Are you trying to say that we are responsible
      8  for Auschwitz ourselves”? And I, that is Mr Irving, said,
      9  “Well, the short answer is yes”. The short answer I have
    10  to say is yes … If you (the Jews) had behaved
    11  differently over the intervening 3,000 years, the Germans
    12  would have gone about their business and would not have
    13  found it necessary to go around doing whatever they did to
    14  you. Nor would the Russians, nor the Ukranians, nor the
    15  Lithuanians, Estonians, Latvians, and all the other
    16  countries where you’ve had a rough time. So why have you
    17  never asked yourselves that question?” So much for the
    18  Jews.
    19  As to the blacks (and homosexuals), Mr Irving,
    20  in an entry in his private diary on 10th November 1987, on
    21  the occasion of a visit to South Africa, recorded his own
    22  thoughts:
    23  “God works in mysterious ways, but here (that is
    24  South Africa) we agree he appears to be working
    25  remorselessly towards a Final Solution which may cruelly
    26  wipe out not only blacks and homosexuals, but a large part
    .           P-31


      1  of the drug addicts and sexually promiscuous and
      2  indiscriminate heterosexual population as well.”
      3  These examples, again the tip of, I am afraid, a
      4  very large iceberg, demonstrate, beyond doubt, that
      5  Mr Irving is a profound racist and a radical anti-Semite.
      6  But this is not the end of the story. For many years,
      7  Mr Irving has travelled about the world giving vent to his
      8  views at gatherings composed of, and organized by, others
      9  of similar opinion.
    10  Until he was banned in 1993. Mr Irving’s
    11  energies were particularly devoted to the propagation of
    12  his ideology in Germany, where pro-Nazi sentiment has not
    13  only persisted but alas, since reunification, undergone a
    14  significant revival, particularly in the East.
    15  This is chilling exposed by a demonstration of
    16  neo-Nazi boot boys, waving Nazi flags and chanting racist
    17  slogans, which was addressed by Mr Irving at Halle in East
    18  Germany in November 1991. In his diary Mr Irving
    19  described his speech at this rally as “rabble rousing”, no
    20  doubt for good reason. The speech was greeted with
    21  enthusiasm, not least, perhaps, because he predicted the
    22  recreation of a greater Germany, by the reconquest,
    23  through economic power, of the former Third Reich
    24  territories in the East. This speech was greeted with
    25  enthusiasm and, unsurprisingly, shouts of “Sieg Heil!”.
    26  Holocaust denial is forbidden in Germany
    .           P-32


      1  (notwithstanding which Mr Irving has, from time to time,
      2  managed to slip in direct statements that there were never
      3  any gas chambers). Elsewhere, however, it has been a
      4  constant theme of Mr Irving’s public utterances. He has
      5  expressed it, on numerous occasions, in terms which
      6  variously attribute the blame for the Holocaust on the
      7  Jews themselves, accuse Holocaust survivors of lying in
      8  order to extort money from the German Government, and pour
      9  scorn on the suffering of Holocaust victims, both alive
    10  and dead. These utterances are often greeted with warm
    11  applause and loud laughter by his audiences.
    12  Given that Mr Irving has repeatedly falsified
    13  history in pursuit of his obsessive desire to exonerate
    14  Hitler of responsibility for the Nazi persecution of the
    15  Jews and, in particular, of responsibility for the
    16  Holocaust, and given that he has repeatedly denied the
    17  Holocaust, without any historical foundation, and in the
    18  face of overwhelming evidence that the Holocaust took
    19  place on the scale and in the manner generally described
    20  by reputable historians, the question now arises why
    21  Mr Irving should have engaged so actively in the promotion
    22  of these historical falsehoods.
    23  The answers suggested by the evidence are:
    24  Mr Irving is an anti-Semite; Holocaust denial, in the form
    25  in which it is purveyed by Mr Irving, is an obvious
    26  expression of anti-Semitism, and is music to the ears of
    .           P-33


      1  the neo-Nazis and other right-wing extremists to whom he
      2  purveys it; Mr Irving is a Hitler partisan, who has
      3  falsified history on a staggering scale in order to
      4  “prove” Hitler’s innocence; this, like Holocaust denial,
      5  is obviously very appealing to his fellow travellers —
      6  after all, if the Holocaust were a “myth”, then,
      7  obviously, Hitler could have no responsibility for it.
      8  How far, if at all, Mr Irving’s anti-Semitism is
      9  a cause of his Hitler apology, or vice versa, is quite
    10  unimportant. Whether they are taken together, or
    11  individually, it is clear that they have led him to
    12  prostitute his reputation as a serious historian (spurious
    13  though it can now be seen to have been) for the sake of a
    14  bogus rehabilitation of Hitler and the dissemination of
    15  virulent anti-Semitic propaganda.
    16  MR JUSTICE GRAY:  Mr Rampton, can I raise with you now the
    17  points I think I need to clarify?
    18  MR RAMPTON:  Yes.
    19  MR JUSTICE GRAY:  I do not think it will take very long. There
    20  is just one point that occurred to me as you were reading
    21  out the statement, and it relates to paragraph 41, where
    22  you are dealing with incineration capacity.
    23  MR RAMPTON:  Yes.
    24  MR JUSTICE GRAY:  The point you are making is that it is
    25  strange to suggest that the Bischoff document is a
    26  communist forgery, since it shows a rate of incineration
    .           P-34


      1  lower than was estimated by the Soviets and the Poles. Am
      2  I right in thinking that the estimate you are there
      3  talking about by the Soviets and the Poles is the estimate
      4  of the total numbers killed, rather than of incineration
      5  capacity or rate of incineration?
      6  MR RAMPTON:  No, my Lord. Well, I think that is partly right,
      7  if I may say so. But also on page 207 of Professor van
      8  Pelt’s report, there is rather a dense paragraph.
      9  I cannot remember now off the top of my head how the
    10  answers come out. There is rather dense paragraph from
    11  which one can certainly work out, and I know Professor van
    12  Pelt told me what the totals were by but I have forgotten
    13  them. One can certainly work out that the 4,756 corpses
    14  per 24 hours was significantly lower than the Russian and
    15  Polish estimates for incineration. I think the Russian
    16  figure was 50 per cent higher and the Polish figure about
    17  30 per cent higher.
    18  MR JUSTICE GRAY:  Thank you very much. I did not know that.
    19  You have given me the reference so that has dealt with
    20  that. The other questions are really all rather broader
    21  ones. Can I take them in what I hope is the sensible
    22  order? The first one relates to deportation, and I will
    23  ask Mr Irving the same question in due course. It is not
    24  really clear to me what, if any, is the issue between the
    25  parties as to that particular phase.
    26  MR RAMPTON:  No. I have never understood that there was.
    .           P-35


      1  MR JUSTICE GRAY:  No.
      2  MR RAMPTON:  Dr Longerich told your Lordship, and we accept, we
      3  have to, he knows a lot more about it than we do, that in
      4  the beginning the transportation of the German and other
      5  central European, French and Greek, Italian Jews was just
      6  to the East, where they were put into ghettoes which had
      7  been vacated by the murder of the Polish Jews.
      8  MR JUSTICE GRAY:  A sort of two phase deportation exercise?
      9  MR RAMPTON:  Yes. Then eventually, probably sometime in 1942,
    10  they started killing the arrivals. There is a notable
    11  document your Lordship will remember from the Gestapo at
    12  Lodz, explaining how they cleared one lot and made room
    13  for the other lot.
    14  MR JUSTICE GRAY:  Yes. Leaving aside the extermination, which
    15  is a separate issue and I understand what Mr Irving says
    16  about that, you do not understand there to be any argument
    17  or dispute between the Defendants and Mr Irving as to the
    18  fact that the deportation took place, and indeed also as
    19  to the fact that Hitler knew about it, because it is
    20  Mr Irving’s case that that was all that was involved.
    21  MR RAMPTON:  No question. Hitler gave the order for it. As
    22  your Lordship will have seen, in one of the passages in
    23  our long submission, we draw attention, I forget which
    24  book it is, to a statement by Mr Irving where he says
    25  Hitler was neither consulted nor knew anything about the
    26  deportations. Why he should say that, I have absolutely
    .           P-36


      1  no idea, but the fact is that Hitler gave the order.
      2  MR JUSTICE GRAY:  That was Hitler’s preferred solution, as
      3  opposed to extermination, according to Mr Irving’s
      4  argument.
      5  MR RAMPTON:  In 1941 it may or may not be so, so far as the
      6  German Jews are concerned.
      7  MR JUSTICE GRAY:  Yes.
      8  MR RAMPTON:  So far as the rest, anyway.
      9  MR JUSTICE GRAY:  I noticed something this morning which I had
    10  not noticed before, which is that — have you got your
    11  more detailed written submissions?
    12  MR RAMPTON:  Yes, I have.
    13  MR JUSTICE GRAY:  Would you go to Tab 5 (i)?
    14  MR RAMPTON:  Yes.
    15  MR JUSTICE GRAY:  There is at page 56, paragraph 4, which seems
    16  to continue over the page on page 57.
    17  MR RAMPTON:  Yes, it does.
    18  MR JUSTICE GRAY:  The next paragraph is 12. I see what I have
    19  done. Yes, there is an 11 somewhere lurking way back.
    20  MR RAMPTON:  Paragraph 11 is on page 53. It has a large number
    21  of subparagraphs.
    22  MR JUSTICE GRAY:  Yes. The next broad question is this. I am
    23  really asking for perhaps a bit of assistance on this. It
    24  is what we have called the genesis of the gassing
    25  programme, or the extermination programme.
    26  MR RAMPTON:  Yes.
    .           P-37


      1  MR JUSTICE GRAY:  And what you have done, and this is your
      2  (ii), is very helpfully to set out what you say are
      3  gathered together from various files the various
      4  documentary references which demonstrate the setting up of
      5  the gassing in the Reinhardt camps and so on.
      6  The slight problem I have with this way of
      7  dealing with it is that one has to try to confine the
      8  judgment within some sort reasonable bounds — it is going
      9  to be horrifically long anyway — and I do not think it is
    10  feasible to even begin to try to incorporate all those
    11  references. It would just overload it.
    12  MR RAMPTON:  No, we were not expecting that your Lordship
    13  would, of course not. It seemed to us, though, that now
    14  that one — I mean, I am only a lawyer too — had the
    15  chance to look at the thing with some considerable care,
    16  that that table led the eye through the stages really
    17  quite well; but if that is not so, then all I perhaps need
    18  to do is to refer your Lordship back to the little summary
    19  that I have given in this latest statement starting on
    20  page 10.
    21  MR JUSTICE GRAY:  Yes, but I think the problem is what I would
    22  really ideally want to aim at myself in order to give
    23  anyone reading the judgment a sufficient but not
    24  overextended view of what the documents show to have
    25  happened is something in between the two.
    26  MR RAMPTON:  I think what I am being asked —-
    .           P-38


      1  MR JUSTICE GRAY:  You will think I am by very awkward.
      2  MR RAMPTON:  No, of course not. I do not know how much time I
      3  have, that is all. What I think I am being asked for and
      4  will willingly supply — I might even get Dr Longerich to
      5  write it actually — is really a chronological summary
      6  with a bit more detail than I have put in here and a bit
      7  less than I have put into the main submission.
      8  MR JUSTICE GRAY:  I think that is probably right. Really in a
      9  way it perhaps will highlight the most significant
    10  documents. I think it is right, I mean, as you realize,
    11  I have been trying to sort of keep a tag on what the
    12  evidence has revealed as it has gone on, so I think I have
    13  quite a lot of them, but I suspect I am missing some of
    14  the important ones and I would like to —-
    15  MR RAMPTON:  Yes, I mean, I do not say I have covered
    16  everything either.
    17  MR JUSTICE GRAY:  Can I invite you to do that? Not at enormous
    18  length, but I think it would be helpful.
    19  MR RAMPTON:  We will do it in the course of the rest of this
    20  week.
    21  MR JUSTICE GRAY:  And bearing in mind, if I may suggest it, the
    22  issues that arise on the genesis of the gassing as opposed
    23  to Auschwitz, which I will deal with separately, seem to
    24  me to be, firstly, on what scale the extermination took
    25  place, and that is not really much of an issue now, as I
    26  understand Mr Irving’s case.
    .           P-39


      1  MR RAMPTON:  Not an issue at all.
      2  MR JUSTICE GRAY:  But also Hitler’s knowledge. So that is the
      3  thing to concentrate on, and I appreciate to some extent
      4  that may not any longer be as stark an issue as it was.
      5  MR RAMPTON:  That is covered specifically, not only with what
      6  I said today in general terms, but there was an exercise
      7  that I did in re-examination with Professor Longerich
      8  which is referred back to in here, just that really the
      9  month of July and into August 1942, which demonstrates in
    10  Professor Longerich’s view, which we obviously adopt, that
    11  it is inconceivable that while Himmler was supervising the
    12  mass extermination of goodness knows how many people in
    13  the General Government Hitler did not know about it.
    14  MR JUSTICE GRAY:  Yes. One of the things I was going to ask
    15  Mr Irving is whether he accepts the concessions that you
    16  attribute to him at various stages of your submission.
    17  MR RAMPTON:  I have given the reference to it somewhere in
    18  here.
    19  MR JUSTICE GRAY:  You have, indeed, but I think it is right it
    20  should be put to him.
    21  MR RAMPTON:  I mean, what he says now, his position has changed
    22  throughout the case, but really the concessions, if I may
    23  say this now, which we have listed in various places in
    24  this long submission are those which were first driven out
    25  of him by cross-examination, no cleverness on my part, but
    26  by the evidence which was presented to him, and it was not
    .           P-40


      1  selective, in cross-examination. His first reaction,
      2  eventually in some case, sometimes quite quickly, was to
      3  say, “Yes, are you right, it did happen”.
      4  MR JUSTICE GRAY:  Yes, but I must find out what the up-to-date
      5  position is because I think it is fair to say that
      6  sometimes Mr Irving has fluctuated.
      7  MR RAMPTON:  As I say, I do not attach much weight to what
      8  I might call back tracking.
      9  MR JUSTICE GRAY:  Right. If Professor Longerich can perform
    10  that exercise, but also focus, if he would, on the extent
    11  of Hitler’s knowledge and the reason for saying that he
    12  knew about the gassing at Chelmno and all the rest.
    13  The next question is a very short one and
    14  I think I know what your answer is, but I will ask it all
    15  the same: part of your case against Mr Irving is that he
    16  is a racist, leaving aside anti-Semitism, that he is a
    17  racist and you have a number of quotations from his
    18  speeches.
    19  MR RAMPTON:  Yes.
    20  MR JUSTICE GRAY:  How does that bear on (a) the words
    21  complained of, and (b) the meanings that you seek to
    22  justify?
    23  MR RAMPTON:  I suppose we seek to justify simply that he holds
    24  extremist views in the written bit. In the statement of
    25  case, I cannot remember. It says something —-
    26  MR JUSTICE GRAY:  There is a bit right at the back.
    .           P-41


      1  MR RAMPTON:  — rather more specific than that.
      2  MR JUSTICE GRAY:  Perhaps my question really is, there is
      3  nothing about racism, is there, in —-
      4  MR RAMPTON:  No.
      5  MR JUSTICE GRAY:  — Professor Lipstadt’s book?
      6  MR RAMPTON:  Perhaps I should ask her. There is some allusion
      7  to it, she says.
      8  MR JUSTICE GRAY:  I am not sure there is; if there is, I would
      9  like to know what it is.
    10  MR RAMPTON:  But, maybe your Lordship is right, there is this
    11  to be said, perhaps, if a man is and out and out racist
    12  which we would propose that it is obvious from his own
    13  private jottings, never mind what he says publicly, that
    14  Mr Irving is, and if anti-Semitism is a form of racism,
    15  which it plainly is, then it is a bit like a case where
    16  you accuse a man of grievous bodily harm and at trial
    17  succeed in proving that he is a murderer.
    18  MR JUSTICE GRAY:  Yes. I thought that would be your answer,
    19  that anti-Semitism is just one form of racism.
    20  MR RAMPTON:  Yes, indeed.
    21  MR JUSTICE GRAY:  And, therefore, it is relevant, you would
    22  say, by way of justification of an anti-Semitic allegation
    23  that there is a general streak of racism to be perceived
    24  in what Mr Irving has said and done.
    25  MR RAMPTON:  It is evidence of his general disposition to
    26  disparage and be hostile towards people of different
    .           P-42


      1  colours, ethnic backgrounds and cultures.
      2  MR JUSTICE GRAY:  Yes. Now perhaps, for me, at any rate, the
      3  most important question is to be absolutely clear about
      4  what you are saying in the section which is section 9,
      5  I think, or (ix) towards the back of your written
      6  submission about assessing Mr Irving as an historian.
      7  MR RAMPTON:  Yes.
      8  MR JUSTICE GRAY:  Do you mind turning it up because I just want
      9  to be absolutely clear about it this because I think it is
    10  exceedingly important. You first refer back to your
    11  historiographical criticisms, and I am right in taking it,
    12  am I not, it is pretty obvious from what you there say by
    13  way of criticism of Mr Irving that a number of the
    14  criticisms are criticisms that he has deliberately
    15  falsified the record.
    16  MR RAMPTON:  Every single one.
    17  MR JUSTICE GRAY:  All right, every single one. Now, you do not
    18  expressly say so, but you may tell me it is implicit, that
    19  when you deal with his partisanship for Hitler which is
    20  (ii), you do not expressly say that that is all deliberate
    21  distortion and manipulation and so on.
    22  MR RAMPTON:  No.
    23  MR JUSTICE GRAY:  But that I understand to be your case, am
    24  I right?
    25  MR RAMPTON:  No, what I say is that he has sought to exculpate
    26  Hitler; that he has done that by a massive falsification
    .           P-43


      1  of the underlying historical record on a large number of
      2  occasions.
      3  MR JUSTICE GRAY:  But going beyond what you have selected or
      4  Professor Evans has selected as the historical
      5  criticisms?
      6  MR RAMPTON:  Then I say if one looks at the general evidence as
      7  an objective, open-minded, careful, dispassionate
      8  historian, that Hitler was, indeed, responsible, knew all
      9  about it, and authorized it, the conclusion is
    10  irresistible that he did. Mr Irving has shut that window,
    11  as it were, and has got on with the shut window behind him
    12  with the falsification of history so as to exculpate
    13  Hitler.
    14  MR JUSTICE GRAY:  Yes, so this is again another instance of
    15  deliberate manipulation which kind of runs through —-
    16  MR RAMPTON:  It is a kind of deliberate blindness to the
    17  evidence. What he does not like, he ignores.
    18  MR JUSTICE GRAY:  Deliberate blindness?
    19  MR RAMPTON:  Yes, it is deliberate blindness. He knows about,
    20  he has known for years, about report No. 51, for example.
    21  MR JUSTICE GRAY:  So it is telescope to the wrong eye?
    22  MR RAMPTON:  Yes, and for years, despite report No. 51, until
    23  we got him into this court, until he got us into this
    24  court, he did not accept that Hitler sanctioned the mass
    25  shootings in the East. It is that kind of phenomenon.
    26  MR JUSTICE GRAY:  So that the partisanship. Then Auschwitz,
    .           P-44


      1  well I think it is pretty clear what your case is about
      2  that.
      3  MR RAMPTON:  Yes.
      4  MR JUSTICE GRAY:  You do not specifically rely on the denials
      5  of the Holocaust, but, presumably, you say in relation to
      6  those that they are denials which Mr Irving must have
      7  known were false when he made them.
      8  MR RAMPTON:  No, again this is a bit like the sort of general
      9  refusal to accept Hitler’s knowledge. What I say about
    10  that is that his denials of the Holocaust have been made
    11  without any reference whatsoever to any reliable evidence.
    12  They started to be made on Leichter which is an obviously
    13  completely hopeless position for any kind of
    14  self-respecting historian or, indeed, anybody else for
    15  that matter. Then much later on down the road he adds in
    16  one or two other things like the death books and the
    17  decrypts. Finally, just before this trial or a year or so
    18  before this trial, he comes to the runes. He has never
    19  been to Auschwitz. He has never looked at any o the
    20  documents or the plans. Such evidence as he knows about
    21  he dismisses out of hand as being mere eyewitness
    22  testimony. When he comes to see an aerial photograph
    23  showing the holes in the roof, he says it is a forgery;
    24  the incineration capacity document is also a forgery, and
    25  so on and so forth. This means that his denial must have
    26  another agenda because it cannot be the product of genuine
    .           P-45


      1  bona fide historical research and contemplation.
      2  MR JUSTICE GRAY:  So his state of mind which is — and it is
      3  important that I am absolutely clear what it is that is
      4  being suggested in relation to the various issues that
      5  have arisen in the case — this is an area where you put
      6  it as being deliberately perverse blindness and acting in
      7  pursuance of what is, effectively, a neoNazi agenda, is
      8  that right?
      9  MR RAMPTON:  Yes, I put it in two ways and I will say it as
    10  shortly as I can. I put it forward as evidence of
    11  somebody who cannot be regarded as a serious historian,
    12  because what he has done is to allow his historical
    13  apparatus to be distorted by something beyond — extrinsic
    14  or ulterior. Looking at the way in which he expresses
    15  Holocaust denial and the audiences to whom he expresses
    16  that denial and the things that he says on those
    17  occasions, one is driven to the conclusion that the hidden
    18  agenda, the reason for the historical incompetence, if I
    19  can I call it that (though there is a much stronger word
    20  that I could think of) is that he is at root deeply
    21  anti-Semitic and a neo-Nazi, as your Lordship just said.
    22  MR JUSTICE GRAY:  Well, that raises the last question that
    23  I wanted to canvass with you, and it is anti-Semitism and,
    24  indeed, the racism and the extremism and all the rest of
    25  it. I find it a little, and I find it throughout the
    26  case, bit difficult to see how, if at all, those
    .           P-46


      1  allegations against Mr Irving dovetail with the general
      2  allegation that he falsifies to an extent deliberately the
      3  historical record because it seems to me, and I just want
      4  to know how you put it, that if somebody is anti-Semitic,
      5  and leave aside racism, but anti-Semitic and extremist, he
      6  is perfectly capable of being, as it were, honestly
      7  anti-Semitic and honestly extremist in the sense that he
      8  is holding those views and expressing those views because
      9  they are, indeed, his views.
    10  MR RAMPTON:  Yes.
    11  MR JUSTICE GRAY:  Now, it seems to me that probably, if you
    12  come down to it, that the anti-Semitism is a completely
    13  separate allegation which really has precious little
    14  bearing on your broader and perhaps more important case
    15  that Mr Irving has manipulated the data and falsified the
    16  record, or do you say that they are corrected in some way
    17  and, if so, how?
    18  MR RAMPTON:  I propose that they probably are connected. I do
    19  not have to do that, but I propose that they are
    20  connected, and that the link between them, I have no doubt
    21  at all he is genuinely anti-Semitic and all the more
    22  defamatory it is of him to say so, and it is true.
    23  I propose that certainly, that he is genuinely profoundly
    24  anti-Semitic. But the bridge between the Holocaust denial
    25  and the Hitler apology from anti-Semitism is a very easy
    26  one to build, because what more would an historian who is
    .           P-47


      1  an anti-Semite want to do in exculpation of Hitler which
      2  he has been trying to do by telling lies about history for
      3  years, what more would he want to do than to deny the
      4  Holocaust?
      5  MR JUSTICE GRAY:  Yes, but he might believe what he is saying.
      6  That is the point. That is why it is important.
      7  MR RAMPTON:  Believe what he is saying about what?
      8  MR JUSTICE GRAY:  About the Holocaust.
      9  MR RAMPTON:  There is no way he could believe what he is saying
    10  about the Holocaust if it —-
    11  MR JUSTICE GRAY:  I understand that, but that has nothing to do
    12  with his anti-Semitism. I am not sure I am making my
    13  point clear to you that —-
    14  MR RAMPTON:  No, I take a profound anti-Semite, I see that he
    15  has denied the Holocaust without any historical
    16  justification whatsoever.
    17  MR JUSTICE GRAY:  But I understand all of that.
    18  MR RAMPTON:  Then I ask myself, what is his reason for denying
    19  the Holocaust because he has not got a good historical
    20  one, there must be another one? And the most obvious
    21  thing for a profound and genuine anti-Semite to do because
    22  it suits his book is to leap into Holocaust denial without
    23  any proper evidence at all, any evidence at all, and cart
    24  it around the world in front of him and to audiences at
    25  other anti-Semites and neofascists.
    26  MR JUSTICE GRAY:  That is another agenda, you would say?
    .           P-48


      1  MR RAMPTON:  Yes, that is the other agenda; the promotion of
      2  anti-Semitism.
      3  MR JUSTICE GRAY:  Yes.
      4  MR RAMPTON:  And given that there is, as I say, absolutely no
      5  historical foundation, no proper historical foundation,
      6  for Holocaust denial, and given that there is evidence
      7  that Mr Irving is an anti-Semite, as I say, the bridge
      8  between the one and the other is very easy to build
      9  indeed.
    10  MR JUSTICE GRAY:  Yes, thank you.
    11  MR RAMPTON:  And the same goes for Hitler exculpation.
    12  MR JUSTICE GRAY:  Thank you very much. Now, Mr Irving, it is
    13  your turn.
    14  MR IRVING:  My Lord, it might be proper, perhaps, to have a
    15  five-minute adjournment as the Defendants have provided to
    16  me a list of objections they make to my closing statement
    17  and, indeed, I think it would be fair to them if I
    18  were just to review those objections and see if I ought to
    19  take them on board.
    20  MR JUSTICE GRAY:  I do not have any difficulty with that. Will
    21  five minutes be enough?
    22  MR IRVING:  Five minutes will be enough.
    23  (Short Adjournment)

    Part III: Irving’s Closing Argument (49.24-209.6)

    Section 49.24 to 108.7

    24  MR JUSTICE GRAY:  Yes, Mr Irving?
    25  MR IRVING:  My Lord, rather like going over the top in
    26  Gallipoli, but my father was in that battle so I know what
    .           P-49


      1  it is like. I will be making omissions from the text that
      2  I gave your Lordship and I will indicate by saying that
      3  I am omitting a sentence or a paragraph so that your
      4  Lordship can follow.
      5  MR JUSTICE GRAY:  That is very kind.
      6  MR IRVING:  May it please the court. The Defendants in this
      7  action, the publisher Penguin Books Limited and the
      8  American scholar Deborah Lipstadt, have sought to cast
      9  this trial as being about the reputation of the Holocaust.
    10  It is not.
    11  The world’s press have also reported it in this
    12  way. Again, it is not.
    13  This trial is about my reputation as a human
    14  being, as an historian of integrity, and – thanks to the
    15  remarks made by Mr Rampton – as a father. The Defendants
    16  are saying, and have so convinced many people, that I am
    17  not entitled to continue to earn a living in the way that
    18  I have earned it for nearly 40 years. A judgment in my
    19  favour is no more than that judgment that disputed points
    20  which I have made about some aspect of the narrative are
    21  not so absurd, given the evidence, as to disqualify me
    22  from the ranks of historians. Under the laws of
    23  defamation as they exist in this country, it could not be
    24  anything else, and nor must the defence team, no matter
    25  how powerful, how moneyed, or eloquent, or numerous, be
    26  allowed by their tactics to skew it in any other way.
    .           P-50


      1  I may add that the points I have made do not
      2  necessarily lessen the horror or the burden of guilt.
      3  I have always accepted that Adolf Hitler, as Head of State
      4  and government in Germany, was responsible for the
      5  Holocaust. I said, in the Introduction to my flagship
      6  biography, Hitler’s War (this is a reference to the 1991
      7  edition):
      8  If this biography were simply a history of the
      9  rise and fall of Hitler’s Reich, it would be legitimate to
    10  conclude: “Hitler killed the Jews”. But my years of
    11  investigations suggested that many others were
    12  responsible, that the chain of responsibility was not as
    13  clear cut as that. Nothing that I have heard in this
    14  Court since January 11th has persuaded me that I was wrong
    15  on this account.
    16  These latter points lead to another
    17  consideration. Your Lordship will have heard of the –
    18  largely successful – effort to drive me out of business as
    19  an historian. This Court has seen the timidity, in my
    20  submission, with which historians have already been
    21  fraught once Holocaust is questioned, not denied,
    22  questioned. One notable historian, whose name has been
    23  mentioned this morning, ordered by summons by myself to
    24  attend, showed himself reluctant even to confirm what he
    25  had written in my favour, repeatedly, over the last 20
    26  years.
    .           P-51


      1  A judgment rendered against me will make this
      2  paralysis in the writing of history definitive; from then
      3  on, no one will dare to discuss who exactly was involved
      4  in each stage of the Holocaust — rather like in Germany
      5  now, you cannot do it any more — or how extensive it
      6  was. From then on, discussion will revolve around “safe”
      7  subjects, like sacred texts in the Middle Ages, or Marx in
      8  the old Soviet Union, or the Koran in some fundamentalist
      9  state today. Every historian will know that his critique
    10  needs to stop sharply at the boundaries defined by certain
    11  authorities. He will have a choice; accept the official
    12  version, holus-bolus; or stop being an historian.
    13  A judgment in my favour does not mean that the
    14  Holocaust never happened; it means only that in England
    15  today discussion is still permitted. My opponents would
    16  still be able to say, just as now, would still be able,
    17  just as now, to produce other documents if they can; to
    18  expound alternative interpretations. They would be as
    19  free as ever to declare that they think that I am wrong
    20  and all the other things that have been said about me
    21  today. They would be impeded in one way only: they would
    22  not be able to say in a loud and authoritative voice that
    23  I am not an historian, and that my books must be banned.
    24  As a result of my work (and of this case) the Holocaust,
    25  in fact, has been researched more, not less. Those who
    26  (rightly) believe that these crimes should never be
    .           P-52


      1  forgotten (and I stress the word “rightly”), these crimes
      2  should never be forgotten, should ask whether their case
      3  is better served by a compulsory – and dead – text imposed
      4  by law and intimidation, or by a live and on-going
      5  discussion.
      6  Our Common Law has at its kernel an
      7  “adversCourier” procedure whereby, it is believed, truth is
      8  best elicited by each side putting their case as strongly
      9  as possible. We have heard some pretty strong things said
    10  today. I agree with English Common Law.
    11  I read in The Independent, a newspaper in this
    12  country, in a lengthy and deeply libellous article
    13  published only last week about me, these words: “But if
    14  he wins, it will open the door for revisionists to rewrite
    15  any event in history without the requirement to consider
    16  evidence that does not suit them and without fear that
    17  they will be publicly denounced for their distortion”.
    18  My Lord, in bygone days, I venture to submit,
    19  such an article, published while an action was literally
    20  sub judice, would have been a clear contempt. Your
    21  Lordship will have noticed that I wearied, after a few
    22  days, of drawing attention to the coverage of this trial
    23  in the media. Allow me, however, to introduce one
    24  cautionary statistic: not including the fuss about the
    25  Eichmann manuscript, the British press have published no
    26  fewer than 167 reports during the seven days that I was on
    .           P-53


      1  the witness stand, that is 24 per day; but just 58 reports
      2  during the 20 days when the boot was on the other foot and
      3  I was cross-examining Mr Rampton’s fine witnesses, that is
      4  roughly three per day. That is a disparity of about eight
      5  to one. I make no complaint about that. If your Lordship
      6  has noticed any of these items, you will perhaps have
      7  observed that the reporting in both cases is almost
      8  exclusively devoted to the defence statements, or their
      9  questions to me, and not to the product of the
    10  examination. That is the way things are in a free
    11  society. The Court, however, operates by different
    12  standards, and it will not allow public sentiment, I hope,
    13  to guide its verdict.
    14  I believe it was Churchill who once said, “There
    15  is such thing as public opinion, there is only published
    16  opinion”. Given such a baleful glare from the press
    17  gallery, my Lord, I am glad that her Majesty has such a
    18  resolute officer presiding over this case. The outcome is
    19  in your Lordship’s hands and yours alone, and I am glad,
    20  I am confident that nothing that the press has written, or
    21  may yet write, will deflect your Lordship from arriving at
    22  a just conclusion.
    23  The Defendants have sold around the world a
    24  book, “Denying the Holocaust”. May I say here that I see
    25  Penguin Books among the Defendants to my sorrow, as they
    26  have published my own works in the past. They continuing
    .           P-54


      1  even today, however, and I stress this fact, to sell this
      2  book for profit, in the knowledge that it contains very
      3  defamatory allegations and that those allegations are held
      4  to be untrue. It is a reckless, even foolhardy, gesture
      5  which I submit, my Lord, goes to the question of
      6  aggravated damages when the time comes.
      7  Neither of these Defendants evidently bothered
      8  even to have the manuscript professionally read for
      9  libel. I say “evidently” because we do not know: they
    10  have not deigned to enter the witness box themselves, no
    11  executive of Penguin Books, not the author who has, I must
    12  say, sat in this room for the two months that the trial
    13  has continued, neither of them has deigned to enter the
    14  witness box to answer even that most straightforward and
    15  elementary of questions, was there a libel reading of this
    16  book? Nor have they answered this question when it was
    17  put to them in writing. Such a report, a libel report,
    18  is, in my submission, not privileged, and I would have
    19  been well prepared to argue the point; had they claimed
    20  that privilege, I would have asked, “On what grounds?” If
    21  a report was written, it should and no doubt would have
    22  been disclosed, and it was not disclosed. So we are
    23  entitled to assume that they did not bother to have the
    24  book read. It does not exist, the report.
    25  Whatever other limited excuses – whether of
    26  sheer ignorance, or of innocent dissemination – that the
    .           P-55


      1  publisher might have (quite wrongfully) deployed for
      2  publishing this malicious and deeply flawed work were
      3  destroyed from the moment when they received my writ in
      4  September 1996, and were thus informed, if they did not
      5  know in fact already, of the nature and scope of the
      6  libels it contains. And, as said, they have continued to
      7  sell it, hoping no doubt to cash in on, to profit from,
      8  the notoriety gained by these libel proceedings, which is
      9  a textbook case of Rookes v. Barnard if there ever was
    10  one, since the book they are selling still contains even
    11  the several libels which they have made no attempt here to
    12  justify. They have to justify their allegations — I am
    13  referring, of course, my Lord, to the —-
    14  MR JUSTICE GRAY:  Yes.
    15  MR IRVING:  — matters they have pleaded section 5 on
    16  originally. They have made no attempt to justify their
    17  allegations or their defence fails — I am sorry. They
    18  have to justify their allegations, or their defence fails;
    19  and as your Lordship is aware, where the defamations are
    20  particularly grave, a higher burden of proof falls upon
    21  them than the mere balance of probabilities that is
    22  normally acceptable. In both Defendants, moreover, there
    23  is clear evidence of malice, both in those few documents
    24  which the author of this work has disclosed — I stress
    25  the word “few”; pitifully few documents have been placed
    26  in my hands — and in the fact that the same firm of
    .           P-56


      1  publishers had previously distributed a work, a book, in
      2  which I was variously caricatured as Adolf Hitler and
      3  wearing swastika eyeglasses.
      4  The very worst of the libels are so blatant that
      5  neither Defendant has insulted the intelligence of this
      6  Court by offering any justification to them. They hope
      7  instead to divert the court’s attention by reference to
      8  distant and notorious matters of history and by calling me
      9  a racist. In consequence, for 30 days or more of this
    10  Court’s time, we have had to rake over the embers of what
    11  may be one of the greatest crimes known to Mankind: a
    12  harrowing, time-wasting, needless effort, which has
    13  yielded even now few answers to great questions and
    14  mysteries which even the world’s finest academics have so
    15  far not managed to unravel.
    16  I come now to one of the first of these
    17  unanswered and unjustified libels which will come as a
    18  surprise to many people in this courtroom because there is
    19  no reference to it in Mr Rampton’s summary. On page 14 of
    20  the book, the Defendants published one of the gravest
    21  libels that can be imagined for a respectable English
    22  citizen who lives a very public life, namely that I
    23  consort with the extremist anti-Semitic Russian group
    24  Pamyat, with violent anti-Israeli murderers, with
    25  extremist terrorists, and with Louis Farrakhan, a Black
    26  Power agitator who is known to be acting in the pay of a
    .           P-57


      1  foreign power, namely the Libyan dictator. This is not
      2  just the simple allegation of associating with
      3  “extremists”, the kind of people who use fountain pens to
      4  deliver their extremism, about which they have made so
      5  much. The words on page 14 are as follows – and I make no
      6  apology, my Lord, for reminding the Court of them, the
      7  Second Defendant wrote:
      8  “The confluence between anti-Israel,
      9  anti-Semitic, and Holocaust denial forces was exemplified
    10  by a world anti-Zionist conference scheduled for Sweden in
    11  November 1992. Though cancelled at the last minute by the
    12  Swedish government, scheduled speakers included black
    13  Muslim leader, Louis Farrakhan, Faurrison, Irving”, that
    14  is me, “and Leuchter. Also scheduled to participate were
    15  representatives of a variety of anti-Semetic and
    16  anti-Israel organisations, including the Russian group
    17  Pamyat, the Iranian-backed Hizbollah and the
    18  fundamentalist Islamic organization Hamas”.
    19  Now, that whole statement was a reckless lie.
    20  It appears from their discovery to have been based on a
    21  press release issued by the jewish Telegraph Agency in New
    22  York which neither that agency or the Defendants made any
    23  attempt to verify. The Court will have noticed in one of
    24  my bundles the letter which I sent to every Scandinavian
    25  Embassy at the time, anxiously denying this allegation. I
    26  have pleaded, as your Lordship is aware, that the innuendo
    .           P-58


      1  was that I was “thereby agreeing to appear in public in
      2  support of and alongside violent and extremist speakers,
      3  including representatives of the violent and extremist
      4  anti-Semitic Russian group Pamyat … the Hizbollah …
      5  the Hamas … Farrakhan … who is known as a Jew-baiting
      6  black agitator … and he is known as an admirer of Hitler
      7  and who is in the pay of Colonel Gaddafi”.
      8  And “that the true or legal innuendo of the word
      9  ‘Hizbollah’ is that used to refer to and describe a known
    10  international terrorist organization … in the Lebanon,
    11  also known as Hizbollah whose guerrillas kill Israel
    12  citizens and soldiers … provoking retaliation, and which
    13  organization has been determined by President Clinton …
    14  as being among the enemies of peace and, whose officials
    15  and armed activists are now being hunted down by the …
    16  Israeli army”.
    17  As for the Hamas, much the same, I set out in
    18  paragraph 12 of my statement of claim that “the true or
    19  legal unnuendo of the words ‘Hammas’ is that of an Islamic
    20  fundamentalist terrorist organization similar in nature to
    21  the Hizbollah”.
    22  I submitted to your Lordship at the beginning of
    23  this trial a representative selection of news reports from
    24  reputable, reliable outlets, including the BBC, on the
    25  murderous nature of the organizations involved, concerned.
    26  In my pleadings I also argued that by these
    .           P-59


      1  allegations I had “been brought into hatred, ridicule,
      2  contempt, risk of personal injury and/or assassination”.
      3  I know, my Lord, the law of defamation has no concern for
      4  people’s personal safety, but it certainly has concern for
      5  their reputation; and the allegation that I was consorting
      6  with the violent extremist body who goes around with
      7  machine guns and bombs and bullets is substantially more
      8  serious, in my view, than the allegation that I consort
      9  with people who use their fountain pens to disseminate
    10  crack pot ideas.
    11  In my pleadings — the nature of the libel, and
    12  the damage that it caused, hardly needed arguing in detail
    13  here. Put in into domestic context, if the Defendants, if
    14  the Defendants, had equally untruthfully stated, for
    15  example, in a Channel 4 television documentary (and there
    16  is a reason why I say that) that I had consorted with
    17  Ulster loyalist death squads who were part of a conspiracy
    18  to murder Roman Catholic nationalists, itself a grave
    19  accusation which would also put me at risk of
    20  assassination, and if the Defendants made no attempt to
    21  justify that libel, then I respectfully submit that your
    22  Lordship would have no hesitation giving judgment in my
    23  favour. I submit there is no difference fundamentally
    24  between these examples.
    25  Now, I was going to say that the Defendants have
    26  relied on section 5 of the Defamation Act, but
    .           P-60


      1  I understand from what Mr Rampton said yesterday that they
      2  are not relying on that section 5 at all, my Lord.
      3  MR JUSTICE GRAY:  No, I do not think that is quite right. I
      4  think what he said was that they say they do not need
      5  section 5, that is their primary position, but that if
      6  they do need it, then, indeed, they rely on it. So do not
      7  assume that it has disappeared out of the picture because
      8  it has not.
      9  MR IRVING:  In that case, I will leave it as I originally
    10  wrote. I am aware that your Lordship is also capable, of
    11  course, of putting something in section 5 if you consider
    12  it to come under section 5.
    13  MR JUSTICE GRAY:  I probably would be, but that I believe to
    14  Mr Rampton’s position.
    15  MR IRVING:  This is not the place to make a submission, but my
    16  position is that there is no common sting between those
    17  allegations. They are totally different kinds of
    18  extremism.
    19  MR JUSTICE GRAY:  Elaborate on that later.
    20  MR IRVING:  In other words, they accuse a respectable
    21  Englishman of consorting with terrorists and murderers,
    22  and then plead the relative insignificance of the
    23  accusation when it turns out to be a reckless lie. And
    24  there are other incendiary lies which they have stuffed
    25  into that particular sand-bucket, section 5 of the
    26  Defamation Act, in the hope that they will sputter out:
    .           P-61


      1  the Defendants repeated the story in that book – first
      2  published in Izvestia – that I placed a portrait of Adolf
      3  Hitler over my desk. For that lie — I have had hundreds
      4  of journalists visiting me over the 30 years and never
      5  once has that picture occurred to any of them for there is
      6  no such picture. For that lie too they have offered no
      7  justification. I read incidentally recently in Literary
      8  Review that Lloyd George had signed photographs of both
      9  Hitler and Mussolini on display, and that was a British
    10  Prime Minister. The only signed paragraph in my
    11  apartment, as many journalists have observed, is one of
    12  Sir Winston Churchill.
    13  So I submit that your Lordship should not accept
    14  the Defendants’ contention, if they wish to stand by it,
    15  that these allegations should be disregarded on the basis
    16  of section 5. Even if they could sufficiently justify
    17  their claim that I deliberately bent history in favour of
    18  Hitler, and I do not believe they can, I submit that they
    19  have not, it would still “materially injure the
    20  plaintiff’s reputation”, which is the word of the Act,
    21  section 5, to say that I had a portrait of Hitler above my
    22  desk. The claims which they do seek to justify suggest
    23  that I am culpably careless and (perhaps unconsciously)
    24  sympathetic to Hitler; bad enough, bad enough, but having
    25  a portrait of that man — I am sorry, having a portrait of
    26  that man above my desk implies a full-hearted 100 per cent
    .           P-62


      1  conscious commitment to that man, which is very
      2  different.
      3  I have provided your Lordship on an earlier
      4  occasion in one bundle a number of passages quoted from
      5  AJP Taylor’s works, a very famous English historian and
      6  writer. Taylor himself accepted that they inevitably
      7  improved Hitler’s image — the words that Taylor had
      8  written — maybe he did not originate the actual mass
      9  murders himself, wrote Taylor; maybe he did slip into war
    10  with Britain rather than planning it; maybe the Anschluss
    11  with Austria was more a stroke of good fortune, which he
    12  grasped, rather than long planned as a take-over; maybe
    13  the Nazis did not burn down the Reichstag building in
    14  1933. These views of Taylor have been criticised as being
    15  wrong, even as being too sympathetic to Hitler. But
    16  everybody would accept that to suggest that Taylor had a
    17  portrait of Hitler “over his desk” would suggest something
    18  far worse. So it should be for me to0.
    19  Again, for the purpose of section 5, the
    20  allegation that I bend history in favour of Hitler because
    21  I am said to admire him, and that I consort with other
    22  people holding such views, is a very different kettle of
    23  fish from stating, as the Defendants do, that I consort
    24  with people who are widely regarded as violent and
    25  murderous terrorists.
    26  I continue now from the bottom of the page:
    .           P-63


      1  My Lord, the Court will be aware from the very
      2  outset I argued that this hearing should not, effectively,
      3  leave the four walls of my study, where I wrote my books;
      4  and that what actually happened 50 or 60 years ago was of
      5  less moment to the issues as pleaded. The matter at
      6  issue, as pleaded by the Defendants, is not what happened,
      7  but what I knew of it, and what I made of it, at the time
      8  I put pen to paper. We had some argument on that matter,
      9  my Lord. To take crude example: neglecting to use the
    10  Eichmann memoirs, releases to us only a few days ago, had
    11  they contained startling revelations – which they did not
    12  – could not have been held against me because they were
    13  not available to me in the 1960s, 1970s or 1980s. But
    14  your Lordship took a different view and I respectfully
    15  submit that it was wrong.
    16  MR JUSTICE GRAY:  May I interrupt you again? I do not think
    17  that is right. I think everybody agrees that the Eichmann
    18  memoirs, because they have surfaced so late, really have
    19  no bearing on this trial at all.
    20  MR IRVING:  I gave that as a particularly crude example of why
    21  what mattered was what happened in the walls of my study
    22  as I wrote, what was on my desk, so to speak, and not what
    23  actually happened.
    24  MR JUSTICE GRAY:  I see.
    25  MR IRVING:  Your Lordship took a different view, and
    26  I respectfully submit that it was wrong. The Defendants
    .           P-64


      1  have invested a sizeable fortune in reresearching the
      2  Holocaust, and possibly for that reason we have all been
      3  dragged through that vast and inhuman tragedy yet again,
      4  because of the money spent on it now, and again quite
      5  needlessly, in my submission. It would have sufficed for
      6  their purposes if they could have proved, on the basis of
      7  the total disclose of my files which I made to them and
      8  their experts, that I had indeed “distorted, misstated,
      9  misquoted and falsified”, their words. Fearing or
    10  finding, however, that they were unable to prove wilful
    11  fraud, in effect, in my submission, they have fallen back
    12  on the alternative plea in the tort of negligence: that
    13  “Mr Irving ought to have known”. I respectfully submit
    14  that this unsettle change of defence should not have been
    15  allowed to them, it should not have been available to
    16  them, as it was not pleaded at the outset. It has to be
    17  specifically pleaded, in my submission, my Lord, at the
    18  time.
    19  If my submission on the law is, however, wrong,
    20  then your Lordship must ask what effort would have been
    21  reasonable on the part of an individual historian, acting
    22  without institutional support like that of Yad Vashem, and
    23  with the doors of the archives increasingly being slammed
    24  against him because of the activities of the bodies to
    25  which I shall shortly refer. What it would have been
    26  reasonable to expect me to do to find out what happened?
    .           P-65


      1  These Defendants have reportedly spent some $6 million,
      2  and 20 man-years or more, in researching this case: this
      3  blinding and expensive spotlight has been focused on the
      4  narrowest of issues, yet it has still generated more noise
      5  than illumination. I heard the expert witnesses who were
      6  paraded before us use phrases like the “consensus of
      7  expert opinion” as their source so often – in fact, I did
      8  a check, the word “consensus” occurs 40 times in the daily
      9  transcripts of this trial – that I began to wonder what
    10  the archives were for. I suggest that these experts were
    11  more expert in reporting each other’s opinions and those
    12  of people who agree with them than in what the archives
    13  actually contain and what they do not contain which is
    14  equally important.
    15  The phrase “Holocaust denier”, which the Second
    16  Defendant boasts of having invented, is an Orwellian
    17  stigma. It is not a very helpful phrase. It does not
    18  diminish or extend thought or knowledge on this tragic
    19  subject. Its universal adoption within the space of a few
    20  years by media, academia government and even academics
    21  seems to indicate something of the international endeavour
    22  of which I shall shortly make brief mention. It is, in my
    23  submission, a key to the whole case. Perhaps this court
    24  should raise its gaze briefly from the red and blue files
    25  and bundles that are around the court room of documents
    26  for a brief moment, and re-read George Orwell’s appendix
    .           P-66


      1  to “1984”, which seems very relevant to this case.
      2  From the witness box, with its revelations of
      3  the “consensus of opinion”, and “moral certainty”, and the
      4  mass male voice choir of the “social sciences” that we
      5  heard about from Professor Funke, on which the Defendant’s
      6  German expert, Professor Hajo Funke, relies for his
      7  certainty, his certainty, as to what is right-wing
      8  extremism, we seem hear more than a vague echo of
      9  Orwellian Newspeak — a language that moulds minds, and
    10  destroys reputations and livelihoods.
    11  Orwell was wrong in one point: he thought it
    12  would take the forces of the State to impose Newspeak:
    13  Professor Lipstadt and her reckless publishers Penguin
    14  Books Limited — I shall justify that adjective — have
    15  sought to impose it through the machinery of the literary
    16  and media establishments. Only the Royal Courts of
    17  Justice here in London, independent and proud, can protect
    18  the rights of the individual from now on. And those
    19  rights include the right, as Lord Justice Sedley recently
    20  put it in another Court in this building, of any person to
    21  hold to, and to preach, unpopular views, perhaps even
    22  views that many might find repellent.
    23  My Lord, I have not hesitated myself to stand
    24  here in the witness box and to answer questions.
    25  Mr Rampton rose to the occasion, and he, or indeed I, may
    26  yet regret it. Your Lordship will recall that, when
    .           P-67


      1  I brought a somewhat reluctant and even curmudgeonly
      2  Professor Donald Watt, who is not the Professor
      3  I mentioned earlier incidentally, doyen of the diplomatic
      4  historians, into the witness box, he used these words:
      5  “I must say, I hope that I am never subjected
      6  to the kind of examination that Mr Irving’s books have
      7  been subjected to by the defence witnesses. I have a very
      8  strong feeling that there are other senior historical
      9  figures, including some to whom I owed a great deal of my
    10  own career, whose work would not stand up, or not all of
    11  whose work would stand up, to this kind of examination”.
    12  I am not throwing myself on the charity of this
    13  court, my Lord, but I am asking that the court should be
    14  reasonable in the standards that it sets. That
    15  effectively is a line that Professor Watt has supported me
    16  in. It is fair to say, of course, that I had to subpoena
    17  Donald Watt.
    18  MR JUSTICE GRAY:  Yes, I am aware.
    19  MR IRVING:  When I invited him to mention some names, of
    20  course, he declined. What he was saying was that whatever
    21  mistakes or whatever unconventional interpretations of
    22  mine, the Defendants have revealed with their
    23  multi-million dollar research, and I am going to admit
    24  some mistakes that I have made, not many, this does not
    25  invalidate me as an historian, or my historical methods
    26  and conclusions.
    .           P-68


      1  Your Lordship will find that Professor Watt
      2  continued by suggesting that simply by facing the
      3  challenge of the views that I had put forward, “and basing
      4  them on historical research rather than idealogical
      5  conviction,” this had resulted in other historians
      6  devoting an “enormous burst of research” to the Nazi
      7  massacres of the Jews, an area which can now in
      8  consequence support journals and conferences. He said,
      9  “This, I think, is a direct result of the challenge which
    10  Mr Irving’s work posed and the consistency and the effort
    11  which he has put into maintaining it in public”. In other
    12  words, I forced the others to do their homework finally at
    13  last. In other words, Watt stated that, far from being a
    14  Holocaust denier, my work has directly increased
    15  historical research into, and the understanding of, the
    16  Holocaust.
    17  The German Professor Eberhard Jaeckel made the
    18  same controversial — and he is no friend of mine, of
    19  course — point in his essay in the book published by the
    20  Us Holocaust Memorial Museum a year or two ago, namely
    21  that before my book Hitler’s War was published in 1977,
    22  the first edition, there had been virtually no meaningful
    23  research into the tragedy at all. Professor Hans Mommsen,
    24  Professor Raul Hilberg, Professor Gordon C Craig, these
    25  and many others have more or less supported my claim to be
    26  regarded as a serious historian. I of course say things
    .           P-69


      1  like that with the utmost personal distaste. I do not
      2  believe in blowing my own trumpet. The outcome of my
      3  research, my books, and my speaking is therefore that
      4  people in general are more, and not less, aware of the
      5  horrors of the Holocaust, and they are certainly better
      6  informed.
      7  One of the most damaging accusations which Mr
      8  Rampton has repeated again this morning, is that I, the
      9  plaintiff, driven by my obsession with Hitler, distort,
    10  manipulate and falsify history in order to put Hitler in a
    11  more favourable light, thereby demonstrating a lack of the
    12  detachment, rationality and judgment necessary for an
    13  historian.
    14  I submit that, in assessing whether I am an
    15  historian who “distorts, manipulates and falsifies” your
    16  Lordship should give most weight to my avowedly historical
    17  written works. Your Lordship will be thoroughly aware of
    18  why I am saying this. I suggested my speeches, very
    19  occasional lapses of taste in them, lapses of taste
    20  Mr Rampton has identified and mentioned repeatedly,
    21  I think three altogether, are relevant purely as
    22  background material. Of those written historical works,
    23  I submit that your Lordship give most weight to my
    24  flagship work Hitler’s War. I ask that your Lordship read
    25  (again, if your Lordship has already done so) the
    26  introduction to the 1991 edition. This was published well
    .           P-70


      1  after the year when the Defendants (wrongly) assert that
      2  I “flipped over” to become what they call a Holocaust
      3  denier.
      4  I have always differed from my colleagues in my
      5  profession in insisting on using original documents,
      6  including where possible the authors’ drafts of books or
      7  memoirs rather than the heavily edited West German
      8  editions, later rewritings, or posthumous adaptations. I
      9  also make use of many more unpublished original documents
    10  than my historian colleagues, in my belief. In the 1960s
    11  and 1970s, I must add, of course, that was much more
    12  difficult than it is today.
    13  I differ too from others, in making copies- and
    14  I am going to emphasise this quite a lot- of the original
    15  documents which I unearth freely available to others
    16  as soon as my own works are complete, and in fact often
    17  before that time, as the panne, the accident, the mishap
    18  which Professor Harold Deutsch’s book showed. Your
    19  Lordship will remember that Harold Deutsch got there first
    20  and used it before me, and I was accused of plageurising
    21  his book, because I gave him the materials before I used
    22  them. As page 14 of Hitler’s War shows, I donate these
    23  records regularly to publicly accessible archives and
    24  I also make them available on microfilm. There are nearly
    25  200 such microfilms in my records, nearly half a million
    26  pages. I also devote time to corresponding with and
    .           P-71


      1  assisting other historians and researchers. If,
      2  therefore — this is the important point — some of my
      3  interpretations are controversial, I also do all that is
      4  possible to let other people judge for themselves. This
      5  speaks strongly against the accusation, levelled against
      6  me again today by Mr Rampton, that I distort, manipulate
      7  and falsify history.
      8  On Hitler and the Holocaust I wrote these words,
      9  and this is in the 1991 edition, after the time when
    10  I supposedly became a denier obsessed with Hitler and with
    11  exonerating him.
    12  Page 2: My conclusions … startled even me.
    13  Hitler was a far less omnipotent Fuhrer than had been
    14  believed, his methods and tactics were profoundly
    15  opportunistic.
    16  Page 4: … the more hermetically Hitler locked
    17  himself away behind the barbed wire and mine fields of his
    18  remote military headquarters, the more his Germany became
    19  a Fuhrer Staat without a Fuhrer. Domestic policy was
    20  controlled by whoever was most powerful in each sector –
    21  by Goring, Lammers, Bormann, Himmler.
    22  Page 17: If this biography were simply a
    23  history of the rise and fall of Hitler’s Reich, it would
    24  be legitimate to conclude “Hitler killed the Jews”. He
    25  had after all created the atmosphere of hatred with his
    26  speeches in the 1930s; he and Himmler had created the SS;
    .           P-72


      1  his speeches, though never explicit, left the clear
      2  impression that “liquidate” what was he meant.
      3  At pages 17 to 18: For a full length war
      4  biography, I wrote, I felt that a more analytical approach
      5  to the key questions of initiative, complicity and
      6  execution would be necessary. Remarkably, I found that
      7  Hitler’s own role in the “Final Solution”, whatever that
      8  was, had never been examined.
      9  At page 38: Every document actually linking
    10  Hitler with the treatment of the Jews invariably takes the
    11  form of an embargo, and I maintain that position, despite
    12  everything we have heard for the last two months.
    13  This is the famous “chain of documents”, of
    14  course, notwithstanding everything we have heard in court,
    15  I still adhere to this position.
    16  At page 19 it is plausible to impute to him, to
    17  Hitler, that not uncommon characteristic of heads of
    18  state, a conscious desire “not to know”, what the
    19  Americans now call, I believe, plausible deniability. But
    20  the proof of this of course is beyond the powers of a
    21  historian.
    22  At page 21 I write: … dictatorships are
    23  fundamentally weak … I concluded, the burden of guilt
    24  for the bloody and mindless massacres of the Jews rests on
    25  a large number of Germans (and non-Germans), many of them
    26  alive today and not just on one “mad dictator”, whose
    .           P-73


      1  order had to be obeyed without question.
      2  The similarity with the thesis propagated by
      3  Dr Daniel Goldhagen of the University of Harvard in his
      4  worldwide best seller book, “Hitler’s Willing
      5  Executioners”, will surely strike everybody in this
      6  court. I am saying the burden falls on a large number of
      7  Germans and not just on that one madman’s. Note the word
      8  “just”. I do not say “not on the madman”, I say not just
      9  on him.
    10  Allow me to rub this point in: What I actually
    11  wrote and printed and published in my flagship study
    12  Hitler’s War was that Hitler was clearly responsible for
    13  the Holocaust both by virtue of being head of state and by
    14  having done so much by his speeches and organisation to
    15  start it off.
    16  Where I differed from many historians was in
    17  denying that there was any documentary proof of detailed
    18  direction and initiation of the mass murders by Hitler,
    19  and I am glad to say two months in that respect has not
    20  brought us any closer. The view was considered to be
    21  heretical at the time. But this lack of wartime
    22  documentary evidence for Hitler’s involvement is now
    23  widely accepted. Indeed, on the narrower matter of the
    24  lack of wartime documentary evidence on the gas chambers,
    25  your Lordship was already good enough to grant as follows
    26  in an exchange between your Lordship and myself and
    .           P-74


      1  Professor Evans.
      2  I said: If his Lordship is led to believe by a
      3  careless statement of the witnesses that there is a vast
      4  body of wartime documents, namely about gas chambers, this
      5  would be unfair, would it not, because you, Professor
      6  Evans, are not referring to wartime documents, you are
      7  referring to postwar documents?
      8  Professor Evans at this point replies: I am
      9  referring to all kinds of documents.
    10  I insist, this is me: You are not referring to
    11  wartime documents?
    12  Evans says: I am referring to documents
    13  including wartime documents, the totality of the written
    14  evidence for the Holocaust which you deny.
    15  Irving then says: Are you saying there is a
    16  vast quantity of wartime documents?
    17  You see, I am a bit persistent on this matter.
    18  Evans says: What I am saying is that there is a
    19  vast quantity of documents and material for all aspects of
    20  the Holocaust.
    21  At this point your Lordship was good enough to
    22  say: I expect you would accept, Professor Evans, just to
    23  move on, the number of overtly incriminating documents,
    24  wartime documents, as regarding gas chambers is actually
    25  pretty few and far between?
    26  That is how it was left.
    .           P-75


      1  To summarise, in Hitler’s War I differed from
      2  the other historians in suggesting that the actual mass
      3  murders were not all or mainly initiated by Hitler.
      4  I pointed out that my sources were consistent with another
      5  explanation: A conscious desire “not to know” (a kind of
      6  Richard Nixon kind of complex) to which I referred, I
      7  believe, on three occasions during the hearings here.
      8  I submit that I have not distorted, manipulated
      9  and falsified. I have put all the cards on table; I made
    10  the documents available to all comers, on microfilm and in
    11  the archives, and I have pointed to various possible
    12  explanations.
    13  I further submit that, while certainly “selling”
    14  my views, I have been much less manipulated that those
    15  historians, including some whom you heard in this court,
    16  my Lord, whose argument has an important part been simply
    17  this — that I ought not to be heard, because my views are
    18  too outlandish or extreme. Disgracefully, these scholars
    19  cleared from the sidelines as I have outlawed, arrested
    20  harassed, and all but “vernichtet” destroyed as a
    21  professional historian; and they have put pressure on
    22  British publishers to destroy my works. This is a
    23  reference to MacMillan Limited, to which we will come
    24  later.
    25  To assist your Lordship in deciding how
    26  outlandish and extreme these views of mine are, I allow
    .           P-76


      1  myself to quote from AJP Taylor’s The War Lords, published
      2  by Penguin — the First Defendants in this action — in
      3  London in 1978. Of Adolf Hitler Taylor wrote.
      4
      5  “… it was at this time that he became really a recluse, settling down in an
      6  underground bunker, running the war from the front. (at pages 55-57).
      7
      8  Precisely same kind of image I generated from my
      9  own sources.
    10
    11  “He was a solitary man, though he sometimes accepted, of course, advice from
    12  others, sometimes decisions [my emphasis]. [he accepted decisions from others] It is,
    13  I think, true, for instance, that the terrible massacre of the Jews”.
    14
    15  This is AJP Taylor who “was inspired more by
    16  Himmler than by Hitler, though Hitler took it up”. (At
    17  pages 68-70).
    18  These quotations are from the foreword of AJP
    19  Taylor’s own flagship work, The Origins of the Second
    20  World War, published in 1963:
    21
    22  “Little can be discovered so long as we go on attributing everything that happened
    23  to Hitler. He supplied a powerful dynamic element, but it was fuel to an existing
    24  machine… [later on he writes] He have counted for nothing without the support and
    25  co-operation of the German people. It seems to be believed nowadays that Hitler did
    26  everything himself, even driving the trains and filling the gas chambers unaided. This
    .           P-77


      1  was not so. Hitler was a sounding-board for the German nation. Thousands. Many hundred
      2  thousand, Germans carried out his evil orders without qualm or question.”
      3
      4  What I wrote, with less felicity of style than
      5  Professor Taylor, was a reasonable interpretation of the
      6  information available to me at the time. I might add that
      7  my words are often accepted, quoted, and echoed by other
      8  historians far more eminent than me. (including the
      9  government’s Official Historians like Professor Frank
    10  Hinsley, in his volumes on British intelligence) who
    11  specifically footnotes and references my works. Some may
    12  regard my interpretations as not the most probable. But
    13  they are never perverse. For the Defendants to describe me
    14  as one who manipulates, distorts, and falsifies it would
    15  be necessary for them to satisfy your Lordship that
    16  I wilfully adopted perverse and ridiculous
    17  interpretations. But I have not and they have not
    18  satisfied your Lordship either, I submit.
    19  The Defendants’ historiographical criticisms
    20  I now turn to some of the particular matters
    21  which exercised your Lordship, in the list of points at
    22  issue.
    23  As a preamble I would say that I trust your
    24  Lordship will be bear in mind that the task facing an
    25  historian of my type — what I refer to as a “shirtsleeve
    26  historian”, a shirtsleeve historian working in the field,
    .           P-78


      1  from original records — is very different from the task
      2  facing the scholar or academic who sits in a book-lined
      3  study, plucking handy works of reference from his shelves,
      4  printed in large type, translated into English, provided
      5  with easy indices and often with nice illustrations too.
      6  Your Lordship will recall that while researching
      7  the Goebbels Diaries in Moscow for the first week in June
      8  1992 I had to read those wartime Nazi glass microfiches
      9  plates through a magnifier the size of a nailclipper, with
    10  a lens smaller than a pea. The Court will appreciate that
    11  reading even post-war microfilm of often poorly reproduced
    12  original documents on a mechanical reader is tedious, time
    13  consuming, and an unrewarding business. Your Lordship
    14  will be familiar with the reason why I saying this. There
    15  were certain matters which we dealt with. Notes have to be
    16  taken in handwriting when are you sitting at a reader.
    17  There are no “pages” to be xeroxed. In the 1960s xerox
    18  copies were nothing like as good as they are now, as your
    19  Lordship will have noticed from the blue-bound volumes
    20  brought in here from my own document archives. Mistakes
    21  undoubtedly occur: the mis-transcription of difficult
    22  German words pencilled in Gothic or Sutterlin-style
    23  handwriting, a script which most modern German scholars
    24  find unreadable anyway; mistakes of copying are made;
    25  mistakes of omission (i.e. a passage is not transcribed
    26  when you are sitting at the screen because at the time it
    .           P-79


      1  appears of no moment). These are innocent mistakes, and
      2  with a book the size of Hitler’s War which currently runs
      3  to 393,000 words, they are not surprising.
      4  Your Lordship may recall another exchange I had
      5  with Professor Evans: may I emphasise here that there is
      6  no personal animus from me towards Professor Evans at all.
      7  I thought he gave his evidence admirably.
      8  IRVING: Professor Evans, when your researchers
      9  were researching in my files at the Institute of History
    10  in Munich, did they come across a file there which was
    11  about 1,000 pages long, consisting of the original
    12  annotated footnotes of Hitler’s War which were referenced
    13  by a number to a every single sentence in that book?
    14  ANSWER: No.
    15  IRVING: It was not part of the original corpus,
    16  it was part of the original manuscript, but it was chopped
    17  out because of the length.
    18  EVANS: No, we did not see that.
    19  IRVING: Have you seen isolated pages of that in
    20  my diary (sic) in so far as it relates to episodes which
    21  were of interest, like the Reichskristallnacht?
    22  EVANS: No, I do not to be honest, recall, but
    23  that does not mean to say that we have not seen them.
    24  IRVING: You say my footnotes are opaque
    25  because they do not always give the page reference. Do you
    26  agree that, on a page which we are going to come across in
    .           P-80


      1  the course of this morning, of your own expert report, you
      2  put a footnote in just saying “see Van Pelt’s report”, and
      3  that expert report is 769 pages long, is it not?
      4  So from this exchange it is plain that I was not
      5  just a conjurer producing quotations in my books,
      6  producing quotations and documents out of a hat; I made my
      7  sources and references available in their totality to
      8  historians, even when they were not printed in the book.
      9  The allegation that the mistakes are
    10  deliberate — that they are manipulations, or
    11  distortions — is a foul one to make, and easily disposed
    12  of by general considerations, which I ask your Lordship to
    13  pay particular attention to. If I intended deliberately
    14  to mistranscribe a handwritten word or text on which the
    15  defence places such reliance, I would hardly on the
    16  deliberate nature of the mistranscription, I would hardly
    17  have furnished copies of the original text to my critics,
    18  or published the text of the handwritten document as a
    19  facsimile in the same work (for example, the famous
    20  November 30th 1941 note, which is illustrated as a
    21  facsimile in all editions of Hitler’s War); nor would
    22  I have placed the entire collection of such documents
    23  without restriction in archives commonly frequented by my
    24  criticism.
    25  If I intended to mistranslate a document, would
    26  I have encouraged the publication of the resulting book,
    .           P-81


      1  with the correct original quotation in the German
      2  language, where my perversion of the text would easily
      3  have been discovered? Yet like all my other works both,
      4  Hitler and Goebbels have appeared in German language
      5  editions with a full and correct transcription of the
      6  controversial texts. Is that the action of a deliberate
      7  mistranslator.
      8  As for the general allegation that the errors of
      9  exaggeration or distortions that were made were “all” of a
    10  common alignment, designed to exonerate or exculpate Adolf
    11  Hitler, the test which I submit your Lordship must apply
    12  should surely be this: if the sentence that is complained
    13  of be removed from the surrounding paragraph or text (and
    14  in each book there are only one or two such sentences of
    15  which this wounding claim is made) does this in any way
    16  alter the book’s general thrust, or the weight of the
    17  argument that is made?
    18  An example of this test is the wrong weight
    19  which I gave to the contents of the 1.20 am telegram
    20  issued by SS-Gruppenfuhrer Reinhard Heydrich on
    21  Kristallnacht. I think Mr Rampton referred to that this
    22  morning. It is a famous telegram, printed in the Nuremberg
    23  volumes, five pages long or so. Would such an error have
    24  been committed wilfully by me, given the risk that it
    25  would inevitably be exposed? Is it not far more likely on
    26  the balance of probabilities that in the process of
    .           P-82


      1  writing and rewriting, and of cutting and of cutting and
      2  condensing, the Goebbels manuscript, the author, that is
      3  me, gradually over the eight years lost sight of the full
      4  content and the thrust of the original document? Your
      5  Lordship should know, if not then I say so now, that that
      6  book witness through five successive drafts and retypes
      7  over eight years, filling eventually four archives boxes,
      8  a total of eight cubic feet of manuscript, all of which I
      9  disclosed to the Defendants by way of discovery. St
    10  Martin’s Press, my American publishers, particularly asked
    11  that these early chapters of the book should be trimmed
    12  back in length.
    13  These general considerations disposed of the
    14  defence arguments on the “Policeman Hoffman” evidence as
    15  rendered in the 1924 Hitler treason trial. For the
    16  limited purposes of writing a biography of — my Lord,
    17  these are points you have asked me to address specifically
    18  in your list of issues. I say that because those who
    19  listen to Mr Rampton’s speech will not have heard them
    20  referred to and may be puzzled as to why I am addressing
    21  them. For the limited purposes of writing a biography of
    22  Hermann Goring — not of Hitler — I relied on the
    23  thousands of typescript microfilmed pages of the
    24  transcript of this trial. So far as I know, nobody had
    25  ever used them before me at that time. Now the handy,
    26  printed, bound, indexed, cross-referenced edition, which
    .           P-83


      1  Professor Evans drew upon had not appeared at that time.
      2  The printed edition appeared in 1988, two years ago.
      3  Eleven years after my Goring biography was published. In
      4  other words, even more years after I wrote it by Macmillan
      5  Limited. I extracted — with difficulty — from the
      6  microfilmed pages of the original transcript the material
      7  I needed relating to Hitler and Goring and I was not
      8  otherwise interested in that man Hofmann at all. I do not
      9  consider the printed volume on the trial which is now
    10  available shows that I made meaningful errors, if so, they
    11  certainly were not deliberate.
    12  The Kristallnacht in November 1938 is a more
    13  difficult episode in every way. I do not mean in that
    14  sense, my Lord, that it is difficult for me personally.
    15  It is a difficult episode to reconstruct from the material
    16  available to us. As said, I clearly made an error over
    17  the content (and reference number) of the 1.20 a.m.
    18  telegram from Heydrich. It was an innocent error. It was
    19  a glitch of the kind that occurs in the process of
    20  redrafting a manuscript several times over the years. The
    21  Court must not overlook that by the time was completed in
    22  1994 and 1995 and as I described in the introduction to
    23  that book, Goebbels, the Mastermind of the Third Reich, by
    24  that time I had been forcefully severed from both my own
    25  collection of documents in German institutions and from
    26  the German Federal archives in Koblenz. On July 1st 1993,
    .           P-84


      1  my Lord when I attended the latter archives in Koblenz
      2  explicitly for the purpose of tidying up loose ends on the
      3  Goebbels manuscript, I was formally banned from the
      4  building in the interests of the German people I was told,
      5  for ever on orders of the minister of the interior — that
      6  is one of the gravest blows that has been struck at me in
      7  my submission by this international endeavour to which
      8  I shall shortly refer.
      9  The allegation of the Defendants in connection
    10  with the Kristallnacht is that in order to “exonerate
    11  Hitler” I effectively concocted or invented, a false
    12  version of events on that night, namely that Adolf Hitler
    13  intervened between 1 and 2 a.m. in order to halt the
    14  madness. I think that is a fair summary of the charge
    15  against me. I submit that their refusal to accept this,
    16  my version, is ingrained in their own political
    17  attitudes. There is evidence both in the archives and in
    18  the reliable contemporary records like Ulrich von Hassell,
    19  the diaries of von Hassell, Alfred Rosenberg and Hellmuth
    20  Groscurth, and in the independent testimonies. By which I
    21  mean independent from each other, testimonies of those
    22  participants whom I myself carefully questioned, or whose
    23  private papers I obtained — I mention here Nicolaus von
    24  Below, Hitler’s adjutant. Another adjutant, Bruckner,
    25  Julius Schaub, Karl Wolff and others — which the Court
    26  has seen, to justify the versions which I rendered. It
    .           P-85


      1  therefore was not an invented story. It may well be that
      2  my critics were unfamiliar with the sources that I used
      3  before they made their criticisms. The dishonesty lies
      4  not with me, for printing the “inside” story of Hitler’s
      5  actions that night, as far as we can reconstruct them
      6  using these and other sources; but with those scholars who
      7  have studiously ignored them, and in particular the Rudolf
      8  Hess “stop arson” telegram of 2.56 am, which was
      9  issued “on orders from the highest level”, which the
    10  Defendants’ scholars are agreed or testified is a
    11  reference to Hitler.
    12  Your Lordship may well have marvelled to hear
    13  the Defendants’ witnesses dismiss this message from Rudolf
    14  Hess — like the Schlegelberger Document, referred to
    15  later — as being of no consequence.
    16  The Kristallnacht diaries of Dr Goebbels, which
    17  I obtained in Moscow in 1992, some years after I first
    18  drafted the episode for my biography, substantially bore
    19  out my version of events, in my submission, namely that he
    20  and not Hitler was the prime instigator, and that Hitler
    21  was largely unaware and displeased by what came about, or
    22  by the scale of what came about, would be a fairer way to
    23  put that. Your Lordship will recall that Professor
    24  Phillippe Burrin, a Swiss Holocaust historian for whom all
    25  the witnesses expressed respect when questioned by me,
    26  comes to the same conclusion independently of me. Now he
    .           P-86


      1  (and I have given the quotation at the foot of page).
      2  Now, he is manifestly not a “Holocaust denier” either.
      3  The Court will also recall that the witness Professor
      4  Evans admitted that unlike myself he had not read all
      5  through the available Goebbels Diaries. It is a massive
      6  task. A mammoth task. He had not had the time, he said,
      7  and we must confess a certain sympathy with that
      8  position — for an academic, time is certainly at a
      9  premium. But reading all of the available Goebbels
    10  Diaries is however necessary, in order to establish and
    11  recognize the subterfuges which this Nazi minister used
    12  throughout his career as diarist, in order to conceal when
    13  he was creating what I call alibis for his own wayward and
    14  evil behaviour.
    15  I drew attention to this historiographical
    16  conundrum several times in the book, my Goebbels
    17  biography, the fact that Goebbels Diaries were not
    18  trustworthy. I discussed both in my scientific annotated
    19  German language edition of the 1938 diaries and in my full
    20  Goebbels biography which your Lordship has read, a
    21  characteristic example from this same year, 1938, although
    22  the one episode which most deeply harrowed and unsettled
    23  him that year was his affair with the Czech actress, Lida
    24  Baarova, an affair which drove him to the brink of
    25  resignation, divorce, and even suicide, neither her name
    26  nor any of those events figures explicitly in the diary at
    .           P-87


      1  all, unless the pages be read particularly closely, when
      2  certain clues can be seen. That is an example …
      3  The Goebbels diary is sometimes a very deceitful
      4  document; it must be recognized as such and treated very
      5  gingerly indeed. It is the diary of a liar, a
      6  propagandist. The fact that it was evidently written up
      7  not one, but two or even three days later, after the
      8  Kristallnacht episode, calls for additional caution in
      9  relying on it for chronology and content.
    10  My Lord, your Lordship will notice that I have
    11  not dealt specifically with the number of the issues you
    12  put in your list. I hope your Lordship does not take
    13  umbrage with that, but I felt that I dealt with them
    14  adequately in my cross-examination.
    15  MR JUSTICE GRAY:  It is entirely a matter for you.
    16  MR IRVING:  If this was wrong of me then all I can say is
    17  culpa mea (sic) but I now continue with the various
    18  narratives of the Nazi shooting of the Jews in the East.
    19  There is little dispute between the parties on
    20  what actually happened in my view. This is the shootings
    21  of the Jews in the East by the Nazis and their
    22  collaborators. There is little dispute between the
    23  parties on what actually happened in my view, and your
    24  Lordship is aware that I have given these atrocities due
    25  and proper attention in the various biographies I have
    26  written; I however add the one caveat, that they are not
    .           P-88


      1  intended to be reference works on the Holocaust, but just
      2  orthodox biographies.
      3  I believe that I was the first historian
      4  anywhere in the world to discover and make use of the
      5  CSDIC reports relating further details to these killings,
      6  particularly the Bruns Report, and I made these reports
      7  available to many other historians. I should explain to
      8  the people who are not familiar with them that these CSDIC
      9  reports are eavesdropping reports on Nazi prisoners that
    10  we British made using hidden microphones. It took — it
    11  takes many days to read them. There are thousands and
    12  thousands of pages in these files. Over the last twenty
    13  years I have read these horrifying narratives out
    14  repeatedly to public audiences, they describe the killings
    15  of the Jews in the most horrifying detail, including
    16  “right-wing” audiences. This fact alone entitles me to
    17  express my contempt at those who would describe me as a
    18  “Holocaust denier”.
    19  We have seen the Defendants scrabbling around at
    20  the end of the Bruns Report for its seizing on its
    21  third-hand reference by this SS murderer and braggart in
    22  Riga, Altemeyer, to an “order” that he claimed to have
    23  received to carry out such mass shootings more
    24  circumspectly in future. But we know from the late 1941
    25  police decodes — we British were reading the SS and
    26  police messages passing between Berlin and the front. We
    .           P-89


      1  know from the late 1941 police decodes, which is a much
      2  firmer source-document in my view than a snatch of
      3  conversation remembered years later, in April 1945, we
      4  know precisely what orders had gone from Hitler’s
      5  headquarters, radioed by Himmler himself to the SS mass
      6  murderer, SS Obergruppenfuhrer Friedrich Jeckeln, stating
      7  explicitly that these killings exceeded the authority that
      8  had been given by himself, Himmler, and by the
      9  Reichsssicherheitshauptamp (the RSHA). We know that the
    10  killing of all German Jews stopped at once, for many
    11  months upon the receipt of that message. When I first
    12  translated the word “Judentransport” a word which I
    13  emphasise again can mean “transportation of the Jews”, as
    14  “transports of Jews”, in the plural, in the 1970s, being
    15  unaware of the surrounding context of data which helps now
    16  to narrow down the purport to the one Riga-bound trainload
    17  from Berlin. I was thus inadvertently coming closer to
    18  the truth, not further from it; because the liquidation of
    19  all the trainloads from Germany was halted next day,
    20  December 1st 1941, by the order radioed from Hitler’s
    21  headquarters (whether initiated by Himmler or Hitler seems
    22  hair-splitting in this context).
    23  As I stated under cross-examination, I did not
    24  see the Schulz-Dubois document when I wrote my books and
    25  I have not seen it since; having now read Professor Gerald
    26  Fleming tells us about it, I confess that I would be
    .           P-90


      1  unlikely to attach the same importance as does learned
      2  counsel for the Defendants, to what the famously anti-Nazi
      3  Abwehr Chief Wilhelm Canaris allegedly told Lieutenant
      4  Schulz-Dubois of Hitler’s reaction. The British decodes of
      5  the SS signals, to which I introduced the Court, and the
      6  subsequent events (the actual cessation for many months of
      7  the liquidation of German Jews) in my submission speak
      8  louder.
      9  Your Lordship asked in your list of questions
    10  for my comments on the reference in Hitler’s table talk of
    11  October 25th 1941. Well, your Lordship is familiar with
    12  the Defendants’ argument and with mine. My extract from
    13  this document which I used was based originally on the
    14  original Weidenfeld translation, in fact, I used the
    15  original Weidenfeld translation into English, as is well
    16  known, in disagreement with the Defendants’ experts I
    17  still maintain and others have followed me in this
    18  (notably Professor Phillippe Burrin, who translates
    19  Schrecken as “the ominous reputation”) in that context,
    20  that the appropriate translation here for the word
    21  “schrecken” is indeed “rumour” and not “terror”, a word
    22  which makes for a wooden and uncouth translation anyway.
    23  Ladies and gentlemen, it will make no sense,
    24  unfortunately, this passage, unless you see the document.
    25  A relevant passage from the SS Event Report from
    26  activities in the rear of the eastern front, dated
    .           P-91


      1  September 11, 1941 front (provided by the Defendants),
      2  shows that this is precisely what was meant: “The rumour
      3  that all Jews are being shot by the Germans had a salutary
      4  effect”. The Jews were now fleeing before the Germans
      5  arrived. The rumour! To accuse me of wilful
      6  mistranslation and even worse distortion when (a) I used
      7  the original (sic) Weidenfeld translation, not at that
      8  time having received the original German from Switzerland,
      9  and (b) the word “rumour” gives precisely the nuance, the
    10  correct nuance that the surrounding history shows the word
    11  was meant to have, this accusation seems to me an
    12  excessively harsh judgment on my expertise.
    13  The next in line is the Goebbels diary entry for
    14  November 22nd, 194: Again, I just pick out what seems to
    15  matter to me in that particular entry here, for the
    16  purposes of today’s submissions.
    17  This diary entry, my Lord, includes a fair
    18  example of how dishonest the reporting by Goebbels was
    19  when it comes to his meetings with Hitler. He records
    20  “the exceptional praise” of Hitler for the weekly
    21  newsreel produced by his ministry, the propaganda
    22  ministry; in fact Hitler was forever criticising this very
    23  product of the Goebbels ministry, as the diary of
    24  Rosenberg shows. Goebbels then continues, here is the
    25  quote: “With regard to the Jewish problem too the Fuhrer
    26  completely agrees with my views. He wants an energetic
    .           P-92


      1  policy against the Jews, but one however that does not
      2  cause us needless difficulties.” Goebbels diary entry
      3  continues: “The evacuation of the Jews is to be done city
      4  by city”. So it is still not fixed when Berlin’s turn
      5  comes; but when it does, “the evacuation should be carried
      6  out as fast as possible”. In other words, he had not got
      7  his way. He had been agitating once again that the
      8  evacuation should start but Hitler had not come into line.
      9  “Still not fixed when Berlin’s time comes”. Hitler then
    10  expressed the need for “a somewhat reserved approach” in
    11  question of mixed marriages — that is marriages between
    12  Jews and non-Jews. What do you do with them? Are you going
    13  to keep them in Germany or deport them? Hitler’s view was
    14  the marriages would die out anyway by and by, and they
    15  should not go grey worrying about it.
    16  Now I have suggested that on the balance of
    17  probabilities Hitler was alluding to the public unrest
    18  when he said he wanted a policy that does not cause us
    19  needless difficulties. I have suggested on a balance of
    20  probabilities Hitler was alluding to the public unrest
    21  caused by the suicide a few days earlier of the popular
    22  actor Joachim Gottschalk and his family. Apart from
    23  “needless” becoming “endless”, in an irritating typo
    24  which hardly amounts to manipulation, in other words, in
    25  the original German, the original translation started off
    26  as “causing us needless difficulties”, which is correct,
    .           P-93


      1  and somehow it became “endless difficulties” is an
      2  irritating typo which hardly amounts to “manipulation”.
      3  This passage bears out what I have always said of Hitler.
      4  While Goebbels was the eternal agitator, as witness his
      5  anti-Semitic leading article published in Das Reich only a
      6  few days before, November 16th 1941, Hitler was (even by
      7  Goebbels own account) for a reserved approach towards the
      8  Jewish problems; and he was doing so, even as the
      9  trainloads of Jews were heading eastwards from Bremen and
    10  Berlin, for example to the conquered Russian territories
    11  and the Baltic states. Your Lordship will not need
    12  reminding of the curious British decodes, which revealed
    13  the provisioning of the deportation trains with tonnes of
    14  foods for the journey. These are messages which we
    15  British decoded, which reveal the provisioning of the
    16  deportation trainloads of Jews with tonnes of food for the
    17  journey, stocks of many weeks food for after they arrived
    18  and even deportees’ appliances, “Gerat”, appliances. So
    19  the evacuation at this time evidently meant just that to
    20  very many Reich officials, and no more.
    21  My Lord —-
    22  MR JUSTICE GRAY:  Press on. Let us get as far as the
    23  Schlegelberger document, shall we, on the next page.
    24  MR IRVING:  Jolly good, yes, good point.
    25  Mr Rampton went to some effort and expense to
    26  suggest that I suppressed vital information from the newly
    .           P-94


      1  discovered Goebbels diary, December 13th 1941. In this
      2  day’s entry Goebbels reported on various things and he
      3  reported on Hitler’s rhetoric to the Gauleiters, speaking
      4  on December 12th 1941 in Berlin, the Nazi governors.
      5  Anybody who is as familiar as I am with Hitler’s speeches,
      6  and with Goebbels’ diary entries relating to be them will
      7  effortlessly recognize this entire passage as being usual
      8  the Hitler gramophone record about his famous 1939
      9  “prophecy”. It was part of his stock repertoire when
    10  speaking to the Party old guard — they had carried him
    11  into power, the Party old guard had carried him into power
    12  and they expected to hear from him that he had not
    13  abandoned the hallowed Party programme. I can understand
    14  the temptation for the younger generation of scholars,
    15  unfamiliar with Hitler’s rhetoric, to fall greedily upon
    16  such freshly discovered morsels as though they were the
    17  answer to the great Holocaust mystery: None of the
    18  witnesses to whom this item was put by myself, or by
    19  counsel for the Defendants, was able to identify any part
    20  of this passage which was out of the ordinary for Hitler.
    21  Even if I had read that far on that day’s glass
    22  plate in the Moscow archives, and even if I had seen those
    23  lines of diary entries, some 20 pages after the page where
    24  I in fact stopped reading for that that day — and I must
    25  emphasise again that I did not read that far on that day
    26  because that did not come within my remit, I doubt that
    .           P-95


      1  I would have attached any significance to them other than
      2  adding this list to the occasions — adding this entry to
      3  the list of occasions on which Hitler harked back, for
      4  whatever reason, to his famous “prophecy” of 1939.
      5  I have read again the printed version of the
      6  meeting of the generalgouvernenent, the Polish
      7  authorities, the German occupation authorities in Poland,
      8  Hans Frank, on December 16th 1941. It is significant to
      9  see the amount of space taken, even in this abridged
    10  published version, by the typhus epidemic sweeping through
    11  the region, the climax of which was expected to come in
    12  April 1942. Hans Frank states that he has begun
    13  negotiation with the purpose of deporting the Jews to the
    14  East, and he mentions the big Heydrich conference which is
    15  set down for January 1942 on this topic in Berlin. Then
    16  comes the sentence which pulls the rug out from beneath
    17  the Defendant’s feet, in my submission: Hans Frank
    18  says: “For us the Jews are exceptionally damaging mouths
    19  to feed. We’ve got an estimated 2.5 million here in the
    20  Generalgouvernement, perhaps 3.5 million Jews now, what
    21  with all their kinfolk and hangers-on. We cannot shoot
    22  these 3.5 million Jews, we cannot poison them, but we will
    23  be able to do something with them which somehow or other
    24  will have the result of destroying them, in fact, in
    25  conjunction with the grander measures still to be
    26  discussed at Reich level”. I think that is a fair
    .           P-96


      1  translation of that passage.
      2  MR JUSTICE GRAY:  It is not complete, but it is fair.
      3  MR IRVING:  Ah, your Lordship says it is not complete. This is
      4  an extract taken from a seven or eight page printed
      5  volume.
      6  MR JUSTICE GRAY:  Yes, it is what Frank says he was told in
      7  Berlin that I think perhaps is not there, but, anyway,
      8  press on.
      9  MR IRVING:  I would — well, I will press on. The December
    10  18th 1941 diary entry by Himmler reads, this is the diary
    11  entry made by Himmler, it is an agenda for his meeting
    12  with Hitler on December 18th 1941, Himmler jotted down the
    13  words “Judenfrage”, Jewish question, and next to that in
    14  German the words “als partisanen auszurotten”, Himmler
    15  had, as I pointed out to the Court, repeatedly referred in
    16  earlier documents to the phrase “Juden als Partisanen”.
    17  This was nothing new or sensational therefore, and the
    18  words he was recording were, in my submission, not
    19  necessarily Hitler’s but more probably his own stereotype
    20  phrase. The correct pedantic translation, is in any
    21  case “Jewish problem, to be wiped out as being
    22  partisans”. Not “like partisans”, which would have been
    23  “wie partisanen”. There can be no equivocating about
    24  this translation of “als”. Wie is a comparison, als is an
    25  equivalent.
    26  MR JUSTICE GRAY:  I think that probably is a convenient
    .           P-97


      1  moment. 2 o’clock.
      2  (Luncheon adjournment)
      3  MR JUSTICE GRAY:  Schlegelberger, Mr Irving.
      4  MR IRVING:  Before Schlegelberger, my Lord, on December 16th
      5  1941, there was a meeting in Poland which Hans Frank
      6  referred to discussions he had in Berlin, in the course of
      7  which he said in Berlin the people asked us —-
      8  MR JUSTICE GRAY:  Liquidate them yourselves, something like
      9  that, was it not?
    10  MR IRVING:  He said to the people in Berlin: “Imagine that we
    11  are housing these people in nice little housing estates
    12  here in the Baltic, in the Eastern territories. We tell
    13  them we cannot handle it here, liquidate them yourselves.
    14  My submission on that is that this is a reference to the
    15  Gauleiters from the Ostland whom he had met in Berlin, on
    16  whom the Jews being deported were going to be dumped, and
    17  they had made that remark to him, it is remiss of me not
    18  to have put that in this closing submission. I looked at
    19  that text again actually three or four days ago and my
    20  attention was drawn to the sentence before the remark
    21  about “liquidate them yourselves”, in which it becomes
    22  quite plain he is referring to the Gauleiters of the
    23  Eastern territories by inference on whom these people are
    24  going to be dumped.
    25  MR JUSTICE GRAY:  Yes, thank you very much.
    26  MR IRVING:  I now come to the Schlegelberger document, which is
    .           P-98


      1  another most difficult piece of historical paper for my
      2  opponents. It is a document — I would explain for the
      3  benefit of those who do not know it — which comes in a
      4  file of the German Ministry of Justice.
      5  In late March or early April 1942, after seeing
      6  Germany’s top civil servant who reported only to Hitler,
      7  Franz Schlegelberger, who was acting as Minister of
      8  Justice, dictated this famous memorandum, the
      9  Schlegelberger Document as we call it here in this
    10  courtroom, upon which all Holocaust historians, and the
    11  Defendants’ experts witnesses in this case have hitherto
    12  turned enough blind eyes to have won several battles of
    13  Trafalgar. For many years after the war it vanished, this
    14  document, but that is another story. Asked about this
    15  specific document after a lecture in the German Institute,
    16  here in London in November 1998, Dr Longerich, who is now
    17  the Defendants’ expert witness, who had the function of
    18  chairman, rose to inform the audience at that meeting that
    19  the speaker was not prepared to answer questions from
    20  David Irving. It is a genuine document, the one I was
    21  going to ask him about, the Schlegelberger Document, and
    22  he refers in one breath both to Hitler and the Solution of
    23  Jewish Problem. Confronted with it in the witness box,
    24  he, Longerich, and his fellow experts have argued either
    25  that it was totally unimportant, notwithstanding its
    26  content, or that it concerned only the Mischlinge, the
    .           P-99


      1  mixed race Jews, and not the Final Solution in any broader
      2  sense. Ingeniously in fact, Dr Longerich even tried to
      3  suggest it may have originated in 1940 or 1941 and not in
      4  1942 at all. The document has them, in other words, in a
      5  breathless panic.
      6  The document’s own contents, and this is the
      7  wording of the actual document, it is only very short, the
      8  document’s own contents destroys their latter argument.
      9  In the first sentence, it says: “Mr Reich Minister
    10  Lammers informed me that the Fuhrer had repeatedly
    11  declared to him that he wants to hear that the Solution of
    12  the Jewish Problem has been adjourned (or postponed) until
    13  after the war”. That that is the broader Final Solution
    14  is plain from the second sentence which follows. It
    15  shows, namely the Mischling question, the mixed race
    16  question, was something totally different: “Accordingly”,
    17  the memorandum continues, “the current deliberations have
    18  in the opinion of Mr Lammers purely theoretical value”.
    19  Those deliberations were, as my opponents themselves have
    20  argued, solely concerned with what to do with the
    21  Mischlinge and the like. The document is quite plain. It
    22  was dictated by a lawyer, so presumably he knew what he
    23  was writing. There is no room for argument. My opponents
    24  have pretended for years that the document effectively
    25  does not exist. So much for the Schlegelberger Document.
    26  I have dealt at length in my statements in the
    .           P-100


      1  witness box, my Lord, again, and while cross-examining the
      2  witnesses with the other contentious items or issues,
      3  namely the Goebbels Diary entries for March 27th and May
      4  30th 1942, the Himmler minute of September 22, 1942 and
      5  this note, Himmler’s note, for this meeting with Hitler on
      6  December 10th 1942.
      7  My Lord, I have nothing to add to what I said in
      8  the witness box under cross-examination on that matter,
      9  and your Lordship may find it unsatisfactory that I do not
    10  specifically summarize it in a neat and handy index for
    11  your Lordship in my closing speech, and once again may I
    12  mea culpa . Also the meetings with Antonescu and with
    13  Horthy in April 1943, the deportation and murder of the
    14  Jews in Rome in October 1943, Himmler’s speeches on
    15  October 4th and 6th, 1943, and May 15th and 24th, 1944,
    16  Hitler’s speech on May 26th, 1944 and Ribbentrop’s
    17  testimony and evidence from his cell in Nuremberg.
    18  I contend, in each case, that my use of these items is
    19  quite proper.
    20  The only mistake which I do admit is that in the
    21  conference between Hitler and Horthy in April 1943,
    22  I transposed two dates from April 16th to April 17th,
    23  1943. I do not agree that the Defendants are entitled to
    24  make the kind of capital out of that error which they have
    25  sought to do.
    26  I must mention one document and that is the
    .           P-101


      1  report, or Meldung, No. 51, which Mr Rampton has referred
      2  also to this morning, submitted by Himmler to Hitler
      3  through their respective adjutants, and dated December
      4  29th, 1942. The Defendants, quite properly, have made
      5  great play with this document, claiming that it is clear
      6  proof that Hitler was apprised by Himmler, by virtue of
      7  this document, of the murder of over 300,000 Jews on a
      8  transparent pretext in Russia in the previous three
      9  months. The document was submitted to Hitler according to
    10  the notation on it. Your Lordship will remember that
    11  I established from the same files — that is why the
    12  context of the document is so important to know what else
    13  is in the same files — that Hitler’s was apprised by,
    14  I am sorry, your Lordship will remember that I established
    15  that on the same day, December 1942, which was at the
    16  height of the Battle of Stalingrad, and in exactly the
    17  same manner as this document, a document of precisely the
    18  same general character, namely Meldung No. 49, had to be
    19  vorgelegt or submitted to Hitler not once but twice. In
    20  other words, there were two such notations on it, which is
    21  a clear indication he was not reading them on the first
    22  occasion, on that occasion at least, if at all. If I may
    23  draw an analogy, which I used before with which the Court
    24  may well be familiar, sometimes if a series of briefs put
    25  to a fashionable and expensive Counsel he is obliged to
    26  read them fully and properly, normally, and he draws a
    .           P-102


      1  hefty fee for doing so; but in fact he does not read
      2  them.
      3  MR RAMPTON:  I never heard that.
      4  MR IRVING:  In fact, in law, as in history, the fact that a
      5  document — I am not referring, of course, to Mr Rampton,
      6  it is to somebody else — in law, as in history, the fact
      7  that a document has been “put to” somebody does not mean
      8  that somebody has read it, unless there is a collateral
      9  evidence of feedback, and in this case there was no such
    10  evidence.
    11  Another issue of interest to your Lordship is my
    12  references to Marie Valliant-Couturier. My references to
    13  her seem to have been quite justified — I know that is
    14  not of issue — from what we know of her and her full
    15  testimony in the Nuremberg tribunal in 1946. She had
    16  married the editor of l’Humanite, she and her father were
    17  bosom friends of Willi Munzenberg, author of the
    18  propaganda about the Reichstag Fire — a founder member
    19  and of one the most accomplished progagandists of the
    20  Comintern. It is evident from the way, and this is what is
    21  relevant, it is evident from the way that the hard-pressed
    22  defence counsel Marx conducted this cross-examination of
    23  her at Nuremberg that he was implying to the tribunal that
    24  she had never even been at Auschwitz. Your Lordship will
    25  remember that she described to the tribunal a
    26  beating-machine used by the SS to administer corporal
    .           P-103


      1  punishment. Her testimony is riddled with such
      2  absurdities.
      3  MR JUSTICE GRAY:  Can you just help me about this? You say
      4  that hard-pressed defence counsel conducted his
      5  cross-examination on her, implying she had not even been
      6  in Auschwitz. I have no recollection of seeing anything
      7  about that at all. Is that my memory playing me false?
      8  MR IRVING:  Under cross-examination, I put this to a witness,
      9  well one of the witnesses, my Lord, I put this to the
    10  witness that Marx had asked her about her literary career,
    11  that she had been a journalist in a previous existence.
    12  He asked the questions in a certain way, that counsel do
    13  ask if they are asking, trying to elicit from her the fact
    14  that it was purely fantasy in that she had never been
    15  there, and this is in the transcripts, my Lord.
    16  MR JUSTICE GRAY:  Perhaps we could just dig out the reference,
    17  not you whilst you are on your feet; Miss Rogers may be
    18  willing to. Thank you very much.
    19  MR IRVING:  Your Lordship will remember that she described to
    20  the IMT, to the tribunal, a beating-machine. I am sure
    21  you Lordship remembers that.
    22  MR JUSTICE GRAY:  Yes, I do remember that.
    23  MR IRVING:  All of us who have been to public schools have fond
    24  recollections of beating-machines and beatings — used by
    25  the SS to administer corporal punishment. Her testimony
    26  is riddled with such absurdities, and when the experienced
    .           P-104


      1  American Judge Biddle jotted down his sceptical comment on
      2  this witness in his notes, which I used, even as she was
      3  still speaking, he meant it — and I certainly took it
      4  that way — to be a reference to all that he had heard
      5  (and largely disbelieved) up to that point. That is the
      6  way I took it.
      7  Kurt Aumeier dossier: Kurt Aumeier was like
      8  Rudolf Hoess, a very high-ranking official at Auschwitz
      9  concentration camp. I found the Kurt Aumeier dossier by
    10  conducting a systematic, “shirtsleeve” examination of the
    11  Public Records office files in 1992. Any one of the
    12  scholars introduced by the Defendants as witnesses could
    13  have found it equally readily. At first I intended to
    14  transcribe and publish the document myself, as a bit of a
    15  scoop, properly annotated, like the 1938 Goebbels
    16  Diaries. Instead I drew the attention of several scholars
    17  to it, including, to the best my recollection, both Sir
    18  Martin Gilbert and Dr Gerald Fleming. I had often sent
    19  them both documents which I had found which I knew would
    20  interest them, documents relating to the Holocaust. When
    21  I abandoned the publication idea, I drew the attention of
    22  other scholars to it, including Professor Robert Van Pelt,
    23  the expert witness in this case, in a very lengthy letter
    24  written to him in May 1997. In his letter I identified to
    25  him numerous archival references of interest to his
    26  special subject, including the Aumeier dossier. Not
    .           P-105


      1  receiving from Van Pelt a reply, I published that letter
      2  in full in a 1997 newsletter, and I posted it on my
      3  website. Numerous correspondents utilized an e-mail link
      4  to Professor Van Pelt on that page, and the Defendants’
      5  solicitors eventually asked me to “deactivate” the link.
      6  My long letter to him in May 1997 had been mailed to
      7  Professor Van Pelt from Chicago with proper postage,
      8  addressed to his correct postal address at the university,
      9  and it was never returned to me. Professor Van Pelt
    10  claimed here not to have received it, and he suggested in
    11  his report that I told people about it only when the
    12  Defendants’ legal team of researchers found the file in
    13  the PRO quite recently. This is absurd. They found the
    14  Aumeier file not least because it was included in my
    15  Discovery (both in the general Judenfrage archive box, and
    16  as item No. 2066). I did not know until two years later
    17  that he was to be a witness in this case.
    18  As for the Aumeier dossier’s content, his
    19  manuscripts suggest, or confirm, the extent, or the
    20  existence rather, of limited-scale gassings at Auschwitz.
    21  The figures are unreliable, and many of the other details
    22  conflict with those provided by the equally flawed
    23  writings of the Auschwitz commandant Rudolf Heoss. This
    24  is, in my submission, the most likely reason why the
    25  Defendants have not relied heavily on either the source
    26  nature of the defence, because I would have cross-examined
    .           P-106


      1  them on the flaws, my Lord, nor, for that matter, have
      2  they made any use of the loudly trumpeted Eichmann memoirs
      3  prised out of the Israeli Government archives. I submit
      4  that the reason that they have not made any use of it is
      5  because in the entire document, which of course only
      6  recently came into our hands, although this former
      7  SS-Obersturmbannfuhrer is writing with brutal frankness,
      8  he describes the most appalling spectacles that he has
      9  seen, including one instance where a child’s brains that
    10  have been blown out by a bullet are splattered on his
    11  coat, he does not refer even once to being shown a gas
    12  chamber during the official guided tours as
    13  executioner-in-chief, so to speak, of the Auschwitz and
    14  Birkenau camps. So the Eichmann’s memoirs are interesting
    15  not so much for what they do say as to what is not in
    16  them.
    17  I heard what Professor Evans and learned counsel
    18  had to state about General Kurt Daluege, the chief of
    19  police in Germany, as a source for the criminal statistics
    20  of 1932. The Defendants have been unable to locate the
    21  figures that I quoted in the Daluege lecture which I used
    22  as one source. Nor did they appear to notice that it was
    23  in fact a lecture to the recently formed Interpol.
    24  Professor Evans not to have looked in the other three
    25  sources listed for that one sentence in my book, which
    26  included two reputable works of history, and so his
    .           P-107


      1  strictures are really quite meaningless. For reasons
      2  known to the court, since 1993 I have no longer had access
      3  to the German Institute from which those sources are
      4  housed. I do not invent statistics, and it is clear by
      5  inference at least that the data which I gave came from
      6  one of the other three sources and not from the lecture.
      7  That is the best that I can say on that matter.

    Section 108.8 to 209.6

      8  I now come to the thorny matter of Hitler’s
      9  knowledge of the Final Solution. This became the most
    10  controversial issue, both in this courtroom and stretching
    11  far back into my writing career, and I wish, just because
    12  of this, that I picked upon a different biographical
    13  subject. It certainly was not of my choice that this
    14  controversy arose. Your Lordship will remember that, when
    15  I wrote my first book, the Air Ministry advised me in
    16  future to write about the Zulu wars, because of the
    17  controversies that would arise.
    18  Because of the inescapable conclusion that
    19  Hitler had probably not ordered, or been aware of until
    20  relatively late, of the ultimate fate of the European
    21  Jews, the ones who had been deported, I forfeited, as my
    22  US agent predicted, in that book Hitler’s War, perhaps
    23  half a million dollars, or more, of lucrative sublicencing
    24  deals with major corporations, the Reader’s Digest,
    25  paperback houses, reprints, the Sunday Times in this
    26  country and so on.
    .           P-108


      1  After I completed — and this is important —
      2  a first draft of that book in about 1969 or 1970,
      3  I realized that there was this totally inexplicable and
      4  unexpected gap in the archives, namely no evidence showing
      5  Hitler’s personal involvement. I hired a trusted friend,
      6  a historian, well known to this court, Dr Elke Frohlich of
      7  the Institute of History in Munich, to go through all the
      8  then available German archives again, with the specific
      9  task of looking for documents linking Hitler with the
    10  Final Solution. She did a conscientious and excellent
    11  job, working for me in the files of the Nuremberg State
    12  Archives, the Institut fur Zeitgeschichte, the Berlin
    13  Document Centre, the Bundesarchives and the military
    14  archives in Freiburg – in this connection I should have
    15  added, of course. Her resulting research materials, my
    16  correspondence with her, the index cards and photocopies,
    17  form a part of my Discovery in this action. It was she,
    18  for example, who produced for me the then unpublished
    19  diary entry of the Governor-General Hans Frank, the one
    20  that I just dealt with, it was actually a meeting
    21  transcript of December 13th, 1941. It was currently being
    22  edited by her colleagues at the Institute and she provided
    23  me with a privileged copy of that.
    24  I would incidentally, my Lord, rely on this
    25  episode, namely hiring a historian to prove that I had got
    26  it wrong at my own expense as one further instance of my
    .           P-109


      1  integrity as an independent historian. Inherently
      2  dissatisfied with the results of my own research, I hired
      3  and paid out of my own pocket for this second opinion,
      4  acting as an avocatus diaboli, to trawl once more, and
      5  with a net of finer mesh, across the same fishing grounds
      6  for documents that might in fact destroy me, destroy my
      7  then still tentative hypothesis. In a similar step, which
      8  I think I took to appease the now worried American
      9  publishers, I wrote in December 1975 to four or five of
    10  the major international Jewish historical research
    11  institutions — I remember writing to the Institute in
    12  New York, and to the Wiener library in this country and to
    13  the equivalent bodies — appealing for “evidence proving
    14  Hitler’s guilt in the extermination of Jews”. That is
    15  from the actual letter I sent. All of these enquiries by
    16  me drew a blank, except for one. As I summarised in a
    17  letter to the Sunday Telegraph on June 19th 1977, “all
    18  offered their apologies except Professor Raul Hilberg, who
    19  is the author of the standard history on the subject, who
    20  honourably conceded that he too has come to the view that
    21  Hitler may not have known”. This actual letter is my
    22  discovery and was available to the Defendants. This
    23  letter to me was December 12th, 1975.
    24  The other institutions stated that that too had
    25  no such evidence, or that did not reply.
    26  So I did what I could to establish the truth of
    .           P-110


      1  that particular allegation.
      2  My Lord, I now come to what I call the
      3  international endeavour to destroy my legitimacy as an
      4  historian, and the participation, in my submission, of the
      5  Defendants in that particular endeavour. I have
      6  abbreviated it and much of what I have put in the pages
      7  which I supplied to your Lordship I shall not read out.
      8  I shall say when I am not going to read out what follows,
      9  not because it is not true but because your Lordship has
    10  probably quite rightly questioned the strict relevance of
    11  it to the matter before the court.
    12  MR JUSTICE GRAY:  Yes, I think that is sensible, if I may say
    13  so.
    14  MR IRVING:  If it does not appear to be immediately relevant,
    15  then it is because I shall rely on it in the other matters
    16  that I put, namely the aggravated damages aspect and the
    17  fact that, if I am accused of certain postures or uttering
    18  certain tasteless remarks, these momentary lapses are not
    19  justified, but explicable on the basis of what I had been
    20  through, if I can put it like that.
    21  Before I proceed to the problems with the
    22  accepted version of the history of Auschwitz, I turn first
    23  to the submission that your Lordship will allow me to make
    24  on the 30 year international endeavour by a group of
    25  organizations to destroy my legitimacy as an historian.
    26  I use that phrase for a reason. I submit that I am
    .           P-111


      1  entitled to draw these documents to your Lordship’s
      2  attention, because these bodies, acting with that secret
      3  and common purpose, compiled dossiers and reports on me
      4  with the intention of destroying me. That did so,
      5  exercising no proper care for accuracy, and, as is evident
      6  from the second Defendant’s, discovery, Professor
      7  Lipstadt’s discovery, and from the introduction to her
      8  book, in which she explicitly acknowledges the assistance
      9  provided by many of these bodies, she drew upon these
    10  tainted well springs as the source for much of the poison
    11  that she wrote about me. We shall hear that, buried in
    12  the files of the Simon Wiesenthal Centre in Toronto, is a
    13  document now also in Mrs Lipstadt’s files — that sent it
    14  to her — which forms something of a blueprint for the
    15  attempt to destroy my name. A researcher for the Centre,
    16  an anonymous researcher for the Centre, commissioned to
    17  investigate — why was a person in Toronto commissioned to
    18  investigate my life? I do not know — to investigate my
    19  life in detail, recommended in that compilation after
    20  referring to my thorough archival research and general
    21  historical insight as follows:
    22  “Given this accurate version of reality, it is
    23  all the more clear why this activities must be curtailed,
    24  and why this alleged legitimacy must be eradicated”.
    25  This document is from Professor Lipstadt’s own
    26  papers.
    .           P-112


      1  I have been subjected, since at least 1973 and
      2  probably before then, to what would be called in warfare a
      3  campaign of interdiction. I know of no other historian or
      4  writer who has been subjected to a campaign of
      5  vilification even 1/10th as intense. The book “Denying the
      6  Holocaust” was the climax of this campaign. There exist,
      7  as I have said in my opening speech, various bodies in
      8  this country, and around the world, who have at heart the
      9  interests of special groups. I make no protest about that
    10  but many other Englishmen have noticed, or found out,
    11  usually by chance, that these bodies keep files on us,
    12  which that use to our disadvantage if that believe we are
    13  a danger to their interests. To give one particularly
    14  gross example, under the cover provided by the United
    15  States First Amendment, the Jewish Telegraph Agency
    16  accused me in 1995 of having supplied the trigger
    17  mechanism for the Oklahoma City bomb. That item was
    18  picked up by the American press and then faintly echoed by
    19  the British press. It was only months later that I found
    20  out who started that particular lie.
    21  But regrettably this has become a campaign to
    22  defame people whom they regard as a danger. A number of
    23  special bodies exist solely for this purpose. Professor
    24  Kevin MacDonald, of the University of California at Long
    25  Beach, a sociologist who is the world’s leading expert on
    26  these things, expressed forceful opinions to this court in
    .           P-113


      1  this expert report, on which he offered himself for
      2  cross-examination, it has to be said, and I urge your
      3  Lordship not to disregard the substance of what he had to
      4  say.
      5  These bodies will not endear themselves, if
      6  found out, to the victims of their campaigns.
      7  Mr Rampton made much of Mr Ernest Zundel’s gross
      8  and ill considered reference to the Judenpack, as
      9  anti-Semitic a word as one might wish to hear. Mr Rampton
    10  labels this man as an extremist, and anti-Semitic in
    11  consequence. This court, of course, has been told nothing
    12  by Mr Rampton of what, if any, remarks or incidents
    13  preceded the outburst by Mr Zundel that was very briefly
    14  quoted. We do know, and I can so inform this court, that
    15  his home has been torched and burnt to the ground. Such
    16  violent incidents certainly cannot excuse the violent
    17  remarks but that can explain them — a difference.
    18  Because that do not like what he writes or publishes,
    19  these bodies have attempted to destroy this life with
    20  criminal prosecution in an attempt to have him deported or
    21  jailed.
    22  Going on down the page, my own experience at the
    23  hands of these self-appointed censors has not been so very
    24  different. It began in 1963 when agents of Searchlight
    25  raided my home and were caught red handed in this criminal
    26  attempt. Ever since then that publication has tweaked my
    .           P-114


      1  tail with a stream of defamatory articles, a 37 year
      2  onslaught to which, as a good Christian, I turned the
      3  other cheek. In fact, the man who runs that magazine
      4  turns out to have been one of the producers of the film
      5  which has been put to the court, one of the editors.
      6  It might be said, and I have turned the page
      7  now, my Lord, that the real Defendants in this case are
      8  not represented in this court but their presence has been
      9  with us throughout like Banquo’s ghost. These are the
    10  people who commissioned the work complained of and
    11  provided much of the materials used in it. I understand
    12  that provided considerable funds for the defence.
    13  I know very little about these bodies, but I am
    14  aware that the anti-defamation league of the B’nai Brith,
    15  which is an American body, has a 50 million dollar annual
    16  budget, substantially greater than an author commands
    17  whose livelihood has been destroyed by their activities.
    18  When your Lordship comes to consider such things as costs
    19  and damages, I would respectfully submit that you bear
    20  these things in mind.
    21  We have them to thank for the spectacle that has
    22  been presented in this court room since January. Without
    23  their financial assistance, it is unlikely that Mr Rampton
    24  and this defence team and his instructing solicitors could
    25  have mounted this colossal onslaught on my name.
    26  Further down, for over three years this
    .           P-115


      1  well-funded team sitting opposite me, next to me, has
      2  drilled down deep into my private papers, burrowed on a
      3  broad front into the archives of the world and a
      4  multi-pronged attack trying to establish that what I have
      5  written over the last 35 or more years is distorted or
      6  mistranslated in pursuance of an agenda, namely the
      7  exoneration of Adolf Hitler, trying to dig up every little
      8  morsel of dirt on me that that can.
      9  My book Hitler’s War was published by the Viking
    10  Press in New York and by Hodder and Stoughton in this
    11  country in 1977. That is when what can be seen as the
    12  coordinated attack on the book began. The Viking Press
    13  was and is one of that nation’s most reputable publishers
    14  and in fact I believe they are owner of the first
    15  Defendant company in this case.
    16  Turning the page now, the Anti-defamation League
    17  issued a report with more fervour than accuracy, saying:
    18  “David Irving is the nom de plume of John Cawdell” —
    19  this not true, I hasten to say, do not get it wrong, it is
    20  totally untrue — “a revisionist historiographer of Adolf
    21  Hitler, particularly regarding Hitler’s role in and
    22  knowledge of the mass extermination of European Jewry.
    23  His major premise”, says the Anti-defamation League, “is
    24  that Hitler was largely oblivious to the large scale
    25  killings of Jews in the death camps”.
    26  I carry on: The agent’s report — this is a
    .           P-116


      1  report put out in 1977.
      2  MR JUSTICE GRAY:  I wonder, Mr Irving, really whether one might
      3  just go to the middle of page 35 without doing any
      4  injustice to your case.
      5  MR IRVING:  Yes. When I then began my lecturing activities
      6  around the United States in the early 1980s, speaking at
      7  private functions, schools and universities, the
      8  headquarters of the ADL sent out a secret circular, a
      9  “Backgrounder”, in 1983, to all their local agents. The
    10  backgrounder, dated July 6th 1983, began with the words,
    11  “British author David Irving has been of concern to ADL,
    12  as well as to the Jewish community generally, since the
    13  1977 publication of his book Hitler’s War”, and it
    14  indicated that it was the controversy over Hitler and the
    15  Jews that was the reason. We have heard of similar such
    16  circulars being generated by them on other famous names.
    17  In my case the ADL instructed its”regional offices”:
    18  “Should he surface in your region, please
    19  notify the Fact Finding Department and your Civil Rights
    20  Co-ordinator”.
    21  It is quite plain that the ADL were not
    22  concerned with promoting civil rights. I am mentioning
    23  them because of course that collaborated very closely with
    24  the Second Defendant in the preparation of the book that
    25  is the subject of this trial.
    26  It is quite plain that the Anti-defamation
    .           P-117


      1  League were not concerned with promoting civil rights, but
      2  in abrogating one of the most basic rights of all, the
      3  right to freedom of speech.
      4  Further down, correspondence with my literary
      5  agent showed by 1984 that already the international smear
      6  campaign was inflicting substantial financial damage on
      7  me. It was at precisely this time, 1984 — I will not
      8  comment on the year — that the Second Defendant, then
      9  teaching in the Near Eastern Languages Centre of the
    10  University of California at Los Angeles, Professor
    11  Lipstadt, offered her services to Yehuda Bauer in
    12  Jerusalem, a very well known Israeli Professor. She
    13  attached “A proposal for research: The Historical and
    14  Historiographic Methodology of the Holocaust
    15  revisionists”. This was the genesis of the book that we
    16  are complaining about. I ask your Lordship to note that
    17  on page 38 of the synopsis prepared by the Second
    18  Defendant, which is in my bundle E at page 38, The Second
    19  Defendant, Professor Lipstadt, mentioned my name in the
    20  following words: “They [the deniers] also find it
    21  expedient to associate themselves with those such as David
    22  Irving who do not deny that the Holocaust took place but
    23  seek to shift the blame to others.”
    24  To conclude this, on the matter of her
    25  employment: on May 31, 1988 Professor Lipstadt was
    26  awarded and additional agreement for research on this
    .           P-118


      1  topic by the Vidal Sassoon Centre for the study of
      2  Anti-Semitism at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. So
      3  at all material times, the book was being commissioned by
      4  that University in Jerusalem. This research, it should be
      5  added, was what finally bore fruit as the book complained
      6  of, “Denying the Holocaust”. The publisher at that time
      7  was to be Mr Robert Maxwell, who was liaising with
      8  Professor Yehuda Bauer.
      9  Briefly summarizing the next page: During this
    10  period the international campaign against me achieved some
    11  ugly successes. I was illegally deported from Austria.
    12  The Austrian government had to pay me compensation when it
    13  was overturned.
    14  The Second Defendant’s discovery — lower down
    15  that page — which included such correspondence with, and
    16  items from, the Anti-Defamation League as she has seen fit
    17  to provide, throws some interesting lights on the ADL.
    18  When a local newspaper, The Daily Pilot, published in
    19  Orange County, south of Los Angeles, a report on a
    20  function of the Institute of Historical Review, about
    21  which we have heard much from the Defence in the last few
    22  weeks. The anti-Defamation League was horrified as the
    23  regional office reported, to find that the reporter in the
    24  newspaper, and I quote “seems to find an air of legitimacy
    25  surrounding the group”. That word “legitimacy” again;
    26  remember they were going to destroy my legitimacy? The
    .           P-119


      1  reporter, Mr Bob Van Eyken, who had evidently not got the
      2  message, even described the IHR members as “neatly dressed
      3  … evoking a sense of reasoned dignity”. This clearly
      4  clashed with the skinheaded, jackbooted extremist
      5  stereotype that the ADL, like the expert witnesses in this
      6  case, wished to promote for the IHR and other “right-wing”
      7  groups. This material, though clearly discoverable in
      8  this action, was withheld from discovery by the Second
      9  Defendant until a summons was issued to produce all her
    10  correspondence with the ADL.
    11  We know that the Second Defendant has had
    12  extensive dealings with the Anti-Defamation League, the
    13  ADL, this American body. Even from her own limited
    14  discovery, about the deficiencies in which I still have
    15  more to say, we know that Professor Lipstadt was provided
    16  with smear dossiers by them. She thanks them in her
    17  Introduction. She made not attempt to verify the contents
    18  of this material with me as the victim (or, so far as this
    19  court knows, with any others), but she recklessly
    20  published it raw and unchecked. A 25-cent phone call to
    21  me would have saved her endless trouble. Instead she
    22  preferred to rely on these sheets like the “confidential”
    23  and defamatory four-page item dated October 23rd 1986,
    24  headed: “Profile on Dave Irving”, evidently coming from
    25  another Canadian body. Characteristically, the “profile”
    26  was disclosed to me by her solicitors without any covering
    .           P-120


      1  letter from its author or custodian and shorn of any
      2  identifying material; I wrote more than once in vain
      3  asking for the missing pages to be provided.
      4  It is quite evident that the Anti-Defamation
      5  League, who were in cahoots with the Second Defendant, set
      6  itself the task of destroying my career, in consort with
      7  other similar organisations around the world, many of
      8  whom, if not all, collaborated with the Second Defendant
      9  in writing her book. The pinnacle of their achievement
    10  came in 1996, when the Second Defendant, as she herself
    11  boasted to The Washington Post, was among those who put
    12  pressure on St Martin’s Press Incorporated, who had been
    13  one of my United States publishers for some 15 years, to
    14  violate their publishing agreement with me and abandon
    15  publication of Goebbels, my Goebbels biography, “Goebbels,
    16  Mastermind of the Third Reich”.
    17  For a few days, these enemies of free speech
    18  stepped up the pressure. They publicised the private home
    19  addresses of St Martin’s Press executives on the
    20  Internet. They staged street addresses in Manhattan.
    21  They organised a walkout by the publisher’s staff. When
    22  SMP refused to be intimidated, Professor Lipstadt wheeled
    23  out the rhetoric: to Frank Rich, a syndicated columnist
    24  of The New York Times, she accused me of being a repeat
    25  killer, if I can put it like that: “What David Irving is
    26  doing … is not the destruction of live people, but the
    .           P-121


      1  destruction of people who already died. It’s killing them
      2  a second time. It’s killing history”. This was not far
      3  distance from the outrageous claim on page 213 of her
      4  book, to which no justification has been pleaded to my
      5  knowledge, that I justified the incarceration of Jews in
      6  Nazi concentration camps. Quoted by The Washington Post
      7  on April 3rd 1996, Professor Lipstadt stated:
      8  “They … don’t publish reputations, they
      9  publish books”, referring to St Martin’s Press. “But
    10  would they publish a book by Jeffrey Dahmer on man-boy
    11  relations? Of course the reputation of the author
    12  counts. And no legitimate historian takes David Irving’s
    13  work seriously.”
    14  We have heard quoted in this Court two tasteless
    15  remarks I am recorded as having made, about Chappaquiddick
    16  and about the Association of Spurious Survivors, and I do
    17  not deny that those words were tasteless. But bad taste
    18  is not what is in the pleadings, while express malice is:
    19  and the odiousness of Professor Lipstadt’s comparison, in
    20  a mass circulation newspaper of record, of a British
    21  author with Jeffrey Dahmer, a madman who had recently
    22  murdered and cannibalised a dozen homosexuals in the
    23  mid-West of the USA, in surely compounded by the fact that
    24  Lipstadt had at that time not read a single book that
    25  I had written, let alone the manuscript of Dr Goebbels
    26  that she had joined in trying to suppress. It is clear
    .           P-122


      1  that neither she nor the ADL was concerned with the
      2  merits, or otherwise, of the Goebbels biography. They
      3  wanted it put down, suppressed, ausgerottet: and me with
      4  it.
      5  Having, like St Martin’s Press, thoroughly read
      6  it, the major US publisher Doubleday Inc. had selected
      7  this book as their May 1996 choice for History Book of the
      8  Month. But that deal depended on the SMP contract, and
      9  thus it too collapsed. The financial losses inflicted on
    10  me by this one episode in April 1996 were of the order of
    11  half a million dollars, which might seen proper reward for
    12  the eight years’ hard work that I had invested in writing
    13  this box, and hauling it through its five draft versions.
    14  The book never appeared in the United States.
    15  From the publication of Hitler’s War onwards,
    16  the attitude of the print media to me changed. A
    17  strategically placed review written in one afternoon, by
    18  one man furnished with the appropriate dossier on me,
    19  could go a long way to destroy the product of six or eight
    20  years’ research, as we have just seen. That was why these
    21  dossiers had been created.
    22  To the right journalists or writers, such as the
    23  Second Defendant, these dossiers were on tap. A fax from
    24  Professor Lipstadt to the Institute of Jewish Affairs in
    25  London, or to the ADL in New York, or to the Simon
    26  Wiesenthal Centre in Toronto, and we have got these faxes
    .           P-123


      1  from her discovery, released to her a cornucopia of filth,
      2  which she had no need to check or verify, because in the
      3  United States such writings are protected by the authority
      4  of the First Amendment to the US Constitution, the
      5  laudable name of the freedom of speech, or by the
      6  authority of New York Times v. Sullivan, which
      7  effectively declares to libellers that it is open season
      8  on any public figure.
      9  I turn the page, my Lord.
    10  This Court will surely not take amiss of me that
    11  I refused to be intimidated by these truly “Nazi” methods,
    12  and that I have on a few occasions used perhaps tasteless
    13  language around the world about perpetrators. The
    14  violence against me spread around the world, and always it
    15  was orchestrated by the same organizations.
    16  Turn the page.
    17  In England, a parallel campaign was launched by
    18  the Board of Deputies, and by other organizations which we
    19  know to have collaborated with the Defendants in producing
    20  this libellous book. This kicked into high gear after my
    21  own imprint published an abridged edition of the Leuchter
    22  report in 1989. Pressure was put on the World Trade
    23  Centre in the City of London to repudiate our contract for
    24  the press conference. A picket, a muscle man picket, was
    25  staged outside our own front door to prevent journalists
    26  from attending when the conference was switched to my own
    .           P-124


      1  harm. The Board arranged an early day motion in the House
      2  of Commons, as a privileged way of smearing my name —
      3  publishing a smear on my name. On June 30th of that year
      4  the Jewish Chronicle, which is one of the newspapers that
      5  has reported this entire proceedings most fairly, in my
      6  view (and I wish to put that on record) revealed that
      7  representations had been made to my principal British and
      8  Commonwealth publisher, Macmillan Limited, to drop me as
      9  an author.
    10  Macmillan had already published several of my
    11  books and they were under contract to publish several
    12  more. I had no fears that they would succumb to this
    13  intimidation. They had informed me that Hitler’s War was
    14  running so successfully that they intended to keep it
    15  permanently in print. I am entitled to mention this
    16  background, as I have mentioned the Board’s other
    17  clandestine activities against me, because it was said by
    18  Mr Rampton that I later made one tasteless remark in
    19  public about the Board of Deputies. If somebody attacks,
    20  using secret and furtive means, the very basis of the
    21  existence of my family then it may be at least
    22  understandable that I speak ill of them.
    23  Lower down the next paragraph: Secretly, on
    24  July 17th 1991, the Board of Deputies wrote to the
    25  President of the German Office for the Protection of the
    26  Constitution (which is their MI5), a body of which we
    .           P-125


      1  heard greatly admiring words from Professor Funke in the
      2  witness box; this English board urged that they take steps
      3  to stop me, a British citizen like no doubt the members of
      4  the Board, from entering Germany.
      5  Germany is a country on whose publishers and
      6  archives I have been heavily dependent, as this Court is
      7  aware. We have only the BfV’s reply, dated August 9th
      8  1991, to the Board of deputies. I retrieved a copy of
      9  this letter. If your Lordship is wondering how I come
    10  into possession of documents like that, I retrieved a copy
    11  of this letter from the files of the Prime Minister of
    12  Australia; so the same Board in London had evidently also
    13  sent its dossiers to its collaborators in Canberra and, no
    14  doubt, other countries, in its efforts to gag me
    15  worldwide. That is an indication of the worldwide
    16  networking that went on, this secret common enterprise, of
    17  which the Second Defendant is a party, to destroy my
    18  legitimacy as an historian and to deprive me of free
    19  speech, of which the Defendants have made themselves the
    20  willing executioners.
    21  As is evident from a letter from the Austrian
    22  Ambassador dated June 22nd 1992, the Board also applied
    23  pressure on that country to ensure that I did not enter,
    24  or that if I did I would be arrested. The same kind of
    25  thing happened in Argentina.
    26  Lower down the page towards the end: On
    .           P-126


      1  December 6th 1991, an Internal Office Memo from
      2  Macmillan’s files — my own publisher in London — records
      3  that “quite a number of people” had commented unfavourably
      4  to Macmillan’s about them publishing my books, and one
      5  person, who was an unnamed Professor of Politics at
      6  Oxford, who had evidently learned nothing from the book
      7  burning episodes of Nazi Germany, stated “that they would
      8  be more inclined to publish with us [Macmillan] if we were
      9  not publishing Irving”. (The Oxford professor of politics
    10  was probably, in my view, Professor Peter Pulzer,
    11  identified by Professor Lipstadt in her books as such and
    12  quoted by The Independent at the time).
    13  This campaign had been coordinated. In some of
    14  its members, it seems that the illiberal spirit of
    15  Dr Goebbels lived on behind the Board of Deputies’
    16  facade. Meeting behind locked doors at their headquarters
    17  in December 1991, December 12, a body identified as the
    18  “Education and Academic Committee of the Holocaust
    19  Educational Trust, registered as a charitable body, held a
    20  conference, including point 6:
    21  “David Irving: Concern was voiced over the
    22  publication of the second edition of Hitler’s War”. This
    23  is 1991, 14 years after the first edition. “There was
    24  debate over how to approach Macmillan publishers over
    25  Goebbels Diary”. That was the other book they were going
    26  to publish of mine. “It was agreed to await new[s] from
    .           P-127


      1  Jeremy Coleman before deciding what action to take.”
      2  We know more of this meeting from the statement
      3  to this Court by my witness Dr John Fox, who was present
      4  at this cabal in his capacity as editor of The British
      5  Journal of Holocaust Education. He testifies as follows:
      6  “As an independently-minded historian, I was
      7  affronted by the suggestion concerning Mr David Irving
      8  […] At a certain point in the meeting, attention turned”
      9  — do you wish to suggest I move on?
    10  MR JUSTICE GRAY:  No. I am reading around what you are reading
    11  out to me.
    12  MR IRVING:  Yes. “At certain point in the meeting, attention
    13  turned to the subject of Mr Irving and reports that the
    14  publishing company of Macmillan would be publishing his
    15  biography of Goebbels. Mr Ben Helfgott … turned to me,
    16  the only non-Jew present at the meeting, and suggested
    17  that ‘John'”, John Fox, “‘could approach Macmillan to get
    18  them to stop publication’. I refused point-blank to accede
    19  to that suggestion, arguing that in a democracy such as
    20  ours one simply could not do such a thing. That amounted
    21  to censorship …
    22  Nevertheless, as the Committee minutes make
    23  plain, it was planned by some to consider further action
    24  about how best to scupper Mr Irving’s publishing plans
    25  with Macmillan”.
    26  The clandestine pressure on Macmillan’s began at
    .           P-128


      1  once. My editor at Macmillan’s, Roland Philipps, noted in
      2  an internal memorandum of January 2nd 1992 that they
      3  should reassure prospective authors that they had turned
      4  down many other book proposals from me, and had no plans
      5  to continue publishing me after Goebbels. It was not the
      6  bravest of postures to adopt, you might think. The
      7  memorandum continues: “If this helps you to reassure any
      8  prospective authors we are happy for you to say it
      9  (although not too publicly if possible)”. The desire of
    10  Macmillan’s to stab in the back, for this stab in the back
    11  to be secret from their own highly successful author,
    12  myself, is understandable. In fact, their ultimate stab
    13  in the back was to come in the summer of 1992.
    14  In May 1992, meanwhile, we find Deborah Lipstadt
    15  providing a list of her personal targets, victims,
    16  including now myself to the US Holocaust Memorial Museum
    17  in Washington; she advised the Museum to contact Gail Gans
    18  at the Research Department of the ADL (about whom we have
    19  heard) in New York City for additional names, and to “tell
    20  her I told you to call her”. This establishes that the
    21  Defendants consider that that museum, which is a US
    22  taxpayer-funded body, was actively participating in their
    23  network, and the museum duly provided press clippings from
    24  London newspapers relating to me, which have now turned up
    25  in the Defendants’ files.
    26  The attempts to suffocate my publishing career
    .           P-129


      1  continued. I mention a second arm of this attack. Since
      2  my own imprint, my own publishing imprint, which I had set
      3  up myself some years earlier, would not be intimidated as
      4  easily as Macmillan’s, or indeed at all, the hostile
      5  groups applied pressure to major bookselling chains
      6  throughout Britain to burn or destroy my books and in
      7  particular the new edition of Hitler’s War. Some of the
      8  press clippings reporting this nasty campaign are in my
      9  discovery. They include reports of a sustained campaign
    10  of window smashing of the branches of Waterstone’s
    11  bookstores in the biggest Midlands cities, after
    12  complaints were made by local groups.
    13  Waterstones informed one Newcastle newspaper
    14  that they were taking books off public shelves “following
    15  a number of vandal attacks on book stores across the
    16  country”. The Nottingham Waterstones took the book off
    17  display after a brick was thrown through its window. The
    18  campaign clearly coordinated from London. None of this
    19  was reported in the national press, but one would have
    20  thought that these groups would have recognized the bad
    21  karma in any campaign of smashing windows or burning
    22  books.
    23  I wrote privately to Tim Waterstone, the head at
    24  that time of Waterstones, guaranteeing to indemnify his
    25  chain for their costs of any uninsured claims. But he
    26  refused to be intimidated by the campaign and, my Lord,
    .           P-130


      1  that is one reason why I took the names of four
      2  Waterstones branches off the list of Defendants in this
      3  action at a very early stage.
      4  I am turning the page now, my Lord:
      5  Demonstrations organized outside by property, violent
      6  demonstrations, police were frequently called. The same
      7  newspaper reported — this is halfway down that following
      8  page — that the Anti-Nazi League and its parent body, the
      9  Board of Deputies, were applying pressure to The Sunday
    10  Times to violate its contract with me which was the
    11  contract to obtain the Goebbels diaries from the Moscow
    12  archives. Again, the reason why I mention all of this may
    13  be apparent, it is when I make remarks about by my
    14  critics, occasionally using vivid language, I sometimes
    15  had reason. As an indication of the pressure —-
    16  MR JUSTICE GRAY:  Mr Irving, I am just wondering, and I am
    17  sorry to interrupt you and I am not going to stop you at
    18  all, but reading on to about page 54, you describe, do you
    19  not, the continuation of what you see as being this really
    20  worldwide attempt to close you down as an historian and
    21  attacks on your house and pressure of various kinds being
    22  brought to bear all over the world. I just wonder whether
    23  there is any particular benefit — tell me if you there is
    24  — in reading out the next seven or so pages? If there
    25  is any particular point you want to make, do, but I feel
    26  myself we could probably move on to the middle of page
    .           P-131


      1  54.
      2  MR IRVING:  I will move on to 51, my Lord. When I found out –
      3  too late – that this fake evidence had been planted on
      4  Canadian files, which resulted in my being deported from
      5  Canada in handcuffs on November 13th 1992, I was angered
      6  and astounded that a British organisation could be
      7  secretly doing this to British citizens. It turned out
      8  from these files that academics with whom I had freely
      9  corresponded and exchanged information, including Gerald
    10  Fleming, had been acting as agents and informants for this
    11  body. I submit (which is why I am reading this out) that
    12  these are the bodies that collaborated directly or
    13  indirectly with the Defendants in the preparation of the
    14  book and that the Defendants, knowing of the obvious
    15  fantasy in some of what they said, should have shown
    16  greater caution in accepting their materials as true.
    17  There was an immediate consequence of this fake
    18  data planted on Canadian files. One data report recorded
    19  the “fact” that I had written 78 books denying the
    20  Holocaust which, of course, is totally untrue. In August
    21  1992 a docket was placed on Canadian immigration files
    22  about me saying, among other things, this is a secret
    23  file, “Subject David Irving is Holocaust denier, may be
    24  inadmissible” to Canada with the result, of course, that
    25  precisely that happened. I was arrested on October 28th
    26  at Vancouver, making a speech on freedom of speech,
    .           P-132


      1  deported permanently from Canada on November 13th causing
      2  me great financial damage and loss. Access to the Public
      3  Archives of Canada was as essential for my future research
      4  as access to the PRO in Kew or to those archives in Italy.
      5  My Lord, this goes, of course, to the damage that has been
      6  caused to me by this general libel at being called a
      7  Holocaust denier. That is one proof of the direct and
      8  immediate cost of the pernicious label “Holocaust
      9  denier”. And the same thing, they made the same attempt
    10  to get me banned from the United States but failed.
    11  Page 54, my Lord. I now come to Macmillan’s
    12  final stab in the back. The hand on the blade was
    13  Macmillan’s but the blade hade been forged and
    14  fashioned by all the Defendants in this courtroom, and by
    15  their hidden collaborators overseas.
    16  On July 4th 1992, as this Court knows, I had
    17  returned Moscow with the missing entries of the Goebbels
    18  Diaries exclusively in my possession, having gone there on
    19  behalf of The Sunday Times. This hard-earned triumph
    20  caught my opponents unawares. Newspapers revealed that
    21  the Anti-Defamation League and its Canadian collaborator,
    22  the League of Human Rights, sent immediate secret letters
    23  to Andrew Neil at The Sunday Times demanding that he
    24  repudiate their contract. On Sunday, 5th, the London
    25  Sunday newspapers were full of the scoop – and also with
    26  hostile comment. On Monday, July 6th, The Independent
    .           P-133


      1  newspaper reported under the headlines “Jews attack
      2  publisher of Irving book”, that a UK body which it
      3  identified as “the Yad Vashim Trust” with which we, of
      4  course, were we familiar, was piling pressure on to
      5  Macmillan’s to abandon its contract with me to publish
      6  Goebbels, failing which they would urge booksellers not to
      7  stock or promote it.
      8  Macmillans finally took fright that same day, as
      9  I only now know. After their directors inquired, July 6th
    10  1992, in an internal memo, how many of my books were still
    11  in their stocks, and having been given totals of several
    12  thousand copies of all three volumes of my Hitler
    13  biography, representing a value of several hundred
    14  thousand pounds, my own editor, Roland Philipps, on July
    15  6th issued the secret order reading: “Please arrange for
    16  the remaining stock of [David Irving’s Hitler biographies]
    17  to be destroyed. Many thanks”. Book burning. They
    18  prepared a “draft announcement”, but it was not released.
    19  Although still a Macmillan author, I was not told. The
    20  royalties due to me on the sale of those books were books
    21  were lost and destroyed with them. The Defendants’
    22  campaign to destroy my legitimacy as an historian, of
    23  which the book published by the Defendants became an
    24  integral part, had thus reached its climax.
    25  My Lord, I now pass over the next pages to page
    26  57.
    .           P-134


      1  The same thing happened in Australia. I spoke
      2  in the Munich. Final paragraph: Opponents released —
      3  I am sorry, yes. Opponents released to Australia
      4  television the heavily edited version of Michael Schmidt’s
      5  1991 video tape of me addressing the crowd at Halle about
      6  which we have heard from Mr Rampton this morning, the Sieg
      7  Haels and the rest of it. As edited, it omitted my
      8  visible and audible rebuke to a section of the crowd for
      9  chanting Hitler slogans. Grotesque libels about me
    10  swamped the Australian press, printed by various
    11  organisations including the New South Wales Board of
    12  Deputies and various newspapers. One example was an
    13  article by a lecturer in politics. He wrote: “Irving has
    14  a history of exciting neoNazi and skinhead groups in
    15  Germany which had burned migrant hostels and killed people
    16  … Irving has frequently spoken in Germany at rallies…
    17  under the swastika flag … himself screaming the Nazi
    18  salute…” This is how these stories begin.
    19  Unsurprisingly, Australia then banned me too. I was t6 be
    20  refused a visa, they announced, on February 8th 1993 as
    21  I was a “Holocaust denier”. They had thus adopted the
    22  phrase that the Second Defendant, Professor Lipstadt,
    23  prides herself in having invented.
    24  This new and very damaging ban on visiting
    25  Australia made it impossible for me to work again in the
    26  National Library of Australia in Canberra. At great
    .           P-135


      1  personal expense I appealed to the Australian Federal
      2  Court. The Court declared the Minister’s refusal of a
      3  visa illegal. The government in Canberra therefore
      4  changed the law in February 1994 to keep me out. We note
      5  from Professor Lipstadt’s own discovery that the
      6  immigration minister faxed the decision to keep me out
      7  direct to one of her source agencies that same afternoon.
      8  The same kind of thing happened.
      9  In July 1994, as the resulting fresh legal
    10  actions which I started against the Australian government
    11  still raged, the Second Defendant was invited by
    12  Australian organisations, all expenses paid to visit their
    13  country; she was hired to tour Australia, and to slander
    14  my name and my reputation and add her voice to the
    15  campaign to have me refused entry. The court, my Lord,
    16  you will probably remember the Australian TV video which
    17  I showed entitled “The Big Lie” in the early days.
    18  MR JUSTICE GRAY:  Yes.
    19  MR IRVING:  Broadcast in July 1994, it showed both the expert
    20  witness, Professor van Pelt, and Mr Fred Leuchter. It
    21  showed Fred Leuchter standing on the roof of crematorium
    22  No. II, about which we are going to hear more, crematorium
    23  No. II at Auschwitz which van Pelt declared to be the
    24  centre of the Nazi genocide, and the Second Defendant
    25  being interviewed while still in Australia (and refusing
    26  once again to debate with the revisionists, just as she
    .           P-136


      1  has obstinately refused to go into the witness stand here
      2  and be questioned). Thus I found myself excluded from
      3  Australia. We have had now Germany, Canada, South Africa,
      4  Australia, New Zealand as well, I lost the ability to
      5  visit my hundreds of friends down under and my own
      6  daughter too, who is an Australian citizen; and I lost all
      7  the bookshop sales that this ban implied in Australia –
      8  where my Churchill biography had hit the No. 1 spot in the
      9  best seller lists earlier.
    10  Over the page: My lecturing engagements in the
    11  British Isles came under similar attack. I had often
    12  spoken to universities and debating societies, including
    13  the Oxford and Cambridge Unions, in the past, but now in
    14  one month, in October 1993, when I was invited to speak to
    15  prestigious bodes at three major Irish universities, I
    16  found all three invitations cancelled under pressure and
    17  threat of local Jewish and anti-fascist organisations.
    18  The irony will not elude the court that these Defendants,
    19  on the one hand, have claimed by way of defence that
    20  I speak only to the far right and neo-Nazi element, as
    21  they describe it, and yet it turns out that their own
    22  associates are the people who have done their damnedest to
    23  make it impossible for many others to invite me.
    24  The Second Defendant, Deborah Lipstadt, had
    25  meanwhile made progress with her book. She told her
    26  publisher that she had written a certain statement with
    .           P-137


      1  the marketing people in mind. In other words, sometimes
      2  money mattered more than content, in my submission.
      3  She had revealed in September 1991 in a letter:
      4  “I have also spoken to people in England who have a large
      5  cache of material on David Irving’s conversion to denial”.
      6  We do not know who the people are, but we can, of course,
      7  readily suspect who in this case those people were. She
      8  is once again not presenting herself for
      9  cross-examination, so there are many things we cannot ask
    10  her about, including and I would have asked her, in fact,
    11  most tactfully the reasons why she was refused tenure at
    12  the University of California and moved downstream to the
    13  lesser university, in my submission, in Atlanta where she
    14  now teaches religion.
    15  In the light of Mr Rampton’s strictures on my
    16  now famous little ditty — your Lordship will remember the
    17  little ditty which I am supposed to have hummed to my nine
    18  month old daughter, the racist ditty, which went around
    19  the press because Mr Rampton issued a press release —
    20  supposedly urging my nine month old little girl not to
    21  marry outside her own people, I should also have wanted to
    22  ask questions of Professor Lipstadt’s views on race had
    23  she gone into the witness box. We know that she has
    24  written papers, and delivered many fervent lectures, on
    25  the vital importance of people marrying only within their
    26  own race. Quotation: (“We know what we fight
    .           P-138


      1  against…”, she wrote, “intermarriage and Israel-bashing,
      2  but what is it we fight for?”) She has attracted, in
      3  fact, much criticism from many in her own community for
      4  her implacable stance against mixed marriages, marrying
      5  outside their own race. In one book Professor Lipstad
      6  quotes a Wall Street Journal interview with a Conservative
      7  rabbi, Jack Moline, whom she called “very brave” for
      8  listing 10 things that Jewish parents should say to their
      9  children: “No. 1 on his list”, she wrote (in fact it was
    10  No. 3) “was ‘I expect you to marry Jews’.” She considered
    11  that to be very brave. My one little ditty which I hummed
    12  to my nine month old daughter, Jessica, was a perhaps
    13  tasteless joke. Professor Lipstadt’s repeated
    14  denunciation of mixed marriages addressed to adults was
    15  deadly serious.
    16  Professor Lipstad accuses me of error or
    17  falsification, but is apparently unable to spot a fake
    18  even at a relatively close range. She admitted (in a
    19  recent interview with Forward) that she used memoirs of
    20  the spurious Auschwitz survivor Benjamin Wilkomirski in
    21  her teaching of the Holocaust to her defenceless students,
    22  according to Professor Peter Novick who has written a book
    23  on this. Those “memoirs” have now been exposed,
    24  worldwide, as fraudulent. Wilkomirski was never anywhere
    25  near Auschwitz. In fact, he was in Switzerland. When it
    26  turned out that Wilkomirski have never been near the camp
    .           P-139


      1  or in Poland for that matter, but had spent the war years
      2  in comfort living with his adopted Swiss family, she
      3  acknowledged that this “might complicate matters
      4  somewhat”, but she insisted that the Wilkomirski “memoirs”
      5  would still be “powerful” as a novel. It may seem unjust
      6  to your Lordship that it is I who have had to answer this
      7  person’s allegation that I distort and manipulate
      8  historical sources.
      9  We have Professor Lipstadt’s handwritten notes,
    10  however, in the rather meagre discovery, evidently
    11  prepared for a talk delivered to the Anti-Defamation
    12  League in Palm Beach, Florida, in early 1994, which again
    13  is meagre but substantive evidence of her connection with
    14  the Anti-Defamation League. In these, if I read her
    15  handwriting correctly – and she appears to be relying on
    16  something Lord Bullock had just said – she states that my
    17  aim seems to be to de-demonize Hitler; and that I had said
    18  that Roosevelt, Hitler and Churchill were all equally
    19  criminal. This is hardly “exonerating” any of them.
    20  Summarising Hitler’s War (the 1977 edition) she calls me
    21  merely an “historian with a revisionist bent” which is
    22  rather like AJP Taylor – and she adds, and this seems
    23  significant – “Irving denies that Hitler was responsible
    24  for the murder of European Jewry. Rather, he claims that
    25  Himmler was responsible. But he does not deny its
    26  occurrence. Had she stuck with that view, of course, of
    .           P-140


      1  my writings, which is a very fair summary of my views,
      2  both then and now, she and we would not find ourselves
      3  here today.
      4  But she was led astray, my Lord. She fell in
      5  with bad company, or associates. These things happen. We
      6  know that, in conducting her research for the book, she
      7  spoke with the Board of Deputies, the Institute of Jewish
      8  Affairs, the Anti-defamation League and other such worthy
      9  bodies, since she thanks all of them in her introduction.
    10  My Lord, I have given a list of the bodies she
    11  thanks in an affidavit which is contained in my bundle
    12  based on the introduction to her book.
    13  Some time in 1992 her book was complete in its
    14  first draft, and Professor Lipstadt sent it to the people
    15  who were paying her, the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.
    16  We do not know what was in the book, since I cannot
    17  question the second Defendant and she has not disclosed
    18  the early draft, with Professor Yehuda Bauer’s scribbles
    19  on it, as he said, in her sworn list of documents. The
    20  early draft was clearly discoverable but it has not been
    21  provided to us. We do know however what was not in it.
    22  We know that there was no mention of his Hizbollah and
    23  Hamas and Louis Farrakhan and the November 1992 terrorists
    24  in Stockholm, or of the lie about my speaking on the same
    25  platform with them. In fact, we also know that in this
    26  first draft I was merely mentioned in passing. This is a
    .           P-141


      1  book about denying Holocaust and I am only mentioned in
      2  passing. This is evident from the letter which Professor
      3  Yehuda Bauer wrote back to her, congratulating her on
      4  November 27th 1992. Bauer complained that the book lacked
      5  the “worldwide perspective” and said, “Irving is
      6  mentioned, but not that he is the mainstay of Holocaust
      7  denial today in Western Europe” which is where all the
      8  misery then began of course.
      9  Somehow therefore I had to be shoe horned into
    10  the text before publication. Professor Bauer urged her
    11  too not to write things inadvertently that might convince
    12  the reader that there was something to what revisionists
    13  or deniers said, although that is hardly a true scholar’s
    14  method, to suppress mention of opposing arguments. In a
    15  letter to Anthony Lerman, of the Institute of Jewish
    16  Jewish Affairs, (the same Mr Lerman who would spread later
    17  the lying word that I had supplied the trigger mechanism
    18  for the Oklahoma City bomb) Lipstadt revealed that there
    19  was an earlier incarnation of the book.
    20  Now, that earlier incarnation, to use her words,
    21  has also not been disclosed in her sworn list of
    22  documents. She had been ordered to swear an affidavit on
    23  her list, my Lord, which is why there is a sworn list,
    24  because of discrepancies previously. When I made a
    25  subsequent complaint about deficient discovery, her
    26  solicitors reminded me that I could not go behind her
    .           P-142


      1  affidavit under the rules until she presented herself for
      2  cross-examination, which I think is, if I may say so, my
      3  Lord, deceptive. Had they intended not calling this
      4  witness to the witness stand, they should not have written
      5  that to me. This chance of cross-examining the witness
      6  has been denied to me.
      7  Professors Lipstadt spent of that last month of
      8  1992 therefore putting me into the book, whereas I had
      9  only previously been mentioned, and thus putting herself
    10  into this court room today. They were the weeks after the
    11  spectacular success of the global campaign to destroy my
    12  legitimacy, which culminated with getting me deported in
    13  manacles from Canada on November 13th, 1992.
    14  “I am just finishing up the book” she wrote to
    15  Lerman on December 18th “and, as you can well imagine,
    16  David Irving figures into it quite prominently”. She
    17  pleaded with Lerman to provide, indeed to fax to her
    18  urgently, materials from “your files”. Your Lordship may
    19  think that this haste to wield the hatchet compares poorly
    20  with the kind of in-depth years long shirt sleeved
    21  research which I conducted on my biographical subjects.
    22  “I think that he (in other words Irving) is one of the
    23  most dangerous figures around”, she added, pleading the
    24  urgency. It was a spectacular epiphany, this court might
    25  think, given that only three weeks earlier the manuscript
    26  barely mentioned me, as Bauer himself had complained.
    .           P-143


      1  From being barely mentioned to being one of the most
      2  dangerous figures around.
      3  Lerman faxed his materials to her from London a
      4  few days later. We do not know precisely what, and it is
      5  a complete extent, as here too the defendants’ discovery
      6  is only fragmentary, and these items were provided to me,
      7  again only in response to a summons.
      8  That is an outline of the damage, and the
      9  people, including specifically the Defendants in this
    10  action, who were behind it. Mr Rampton suggested at a
    11  very early stage that I had brought all of this on my
    12  myself, that I even deserved it. He was talking about the
    13  hate wreath that was sent to me upon the death of my
    14  oldest daughter. We shall see.
    15  My Lord, I now come to Auschwitz Concentration
    16  Camp.
    17  Auschwitz has been a football of politicians and
    18  statesmen ever since World War II. The site has become,
    19  like the Holocaust itself, an industry, a big business in
    20  the most tasteless way, the Auschwitz site. The area,
    21  I am informed, is overgrown with fast food restaurants,
    22  souvenir and trinket shops, motels and the like. As
    23  Mr Rampton rightly says, I have never been to Auschwitz
    24  and Mr Rampton knows the reason why. The Auschwitz
    25  authorities said they would not allow me to visit the site
    26  and they would not allow me into their archives, and they
    .           P-144


      1  have every reason to know why they do not want to allow a
      2  David Irving to get his hands on their papers. Under
      3  Prime Minister Josef Cyrankiewicz (who had been prisoner
      4  number 62,993) it was known at its opening in 1948 as a
      5  monument to the martyrdom of the Polish and other
      6  peoples.
      7  Auschwitz was overrun by the Red Army in January
      8  1945. The last prisoner had received the tattooed
      9  number 202,499. Informed by Colonel General Heinz
    10  Guderian, the chief of the German Army general staff, that
    11  the Russians had captured Auschwitz, Hitler is recorded by
    12  the stenographers as saying merely “yes”. The court might
    13  find it significant that he did not prick up his ears and
    14  say something like, “Herr Himmler, I hope you made sure
    15  the Russians will not find the slightest trace of what we
    16  have been up to”. (Or even, “I hope you managed to get
    17  those holes in the roof slab of crematoria No. II cemented
    18  over before you blew it up”.) I will shortly explain the
    19  significance of that. When the name of SS General Hans
    20  Kammler, the architect of the concentration camps, was
    21  mentioned to him a few days later by Goebbels, it was
    22  evident that even Kammler’s name meant little to Hitler
    23  because Goebbels commented on the fact.
    24  How many had died at Auschwitz? We still do not
    25  know with certainty, because the tragic figure has become
    26  an object of politics, too. Professor Arno Mayer, the
    .           P-145


      1  Professor of European history at the University of
      2  Princeton, a scholar of considerably greater renommee than
      3  Professor Evans, and himself a Jew, expressed the view in
      4  one book that most of the victims of the camp died of
      5  exhaustion and epidemics. He said: “From 1942 to 1945
      6  more Jews died, at least in Auschwitz and probably
      7  everywhere else, of ‘natural’ causes of death than of
      8  ‘unnatural’.
      9  The Russians who captured the camp did not at
    10  first make any mention in their news reports of gas
    11  chambers. There is a famous report published in the first
    12  day or two in February 1945 in Pravda. Moreover, as we
    13  saw on the newsreel, which I showed on the first day of
    14  this trial, even the Poles, with access to all the
    15  records, claimed only that “altogether nearly 300,000
    16  people from the most different nations died in the
    17  Auschwitz concentration camp”. This is the news reel
    18  trial of the trial of the Auschwitz officials. “300,000
    19  people from the most different nations died in the
    20  Auschwitz concentration camp”. It concluded that the camp
    21  now stood as a monument of shame to the lasting memory of
    22  its 300,000 victims. In both cases gassing was not
    23  mentioned. The New York Times quoted the same figure
    24  300,000 when the trial began in 1947. The figure
    25  gradually grew however. The Russians set up an inquiry
    26  including some very well-known names, including the
    .           P-146


      1  experts who had examined the Nazi mass graves at Katyn,
      2  and even the notorious Lysenko. They announced that 4
      3  million had been murdered at Auschwitz. Under the Polish
      4  communists, a monument to “4 million dead”, with those
      5  words on it, was duly erected, a number which was adhered
      6  to until the 1990s even under Franciszek Piper, one of the
      7  later (but still communist) directors of the Auschwitz
      8  State Archives. After the communist regime ended that
      9  figure was brought down to 1.5 million, and then to
    10  750,000 by the acknowledged expert Jean-Claude Pressac.
    11  The Defendants’ own expert Peter Longerich spoke of one
    12  million deaths there from all causes, and then in response
    13  to cross-examination by myself and to your Lordship’s
    14  enquiries, Dr Longerich confirmed that he included all non
    15  homicidal deaths, deaths “from other causes”, including
    16  epidemics and exhaustion in that overall figure of 1
    17  million.
    18  Perhaps I should pause there and say that these
    19  figures seem appalling figures but, if it is one million
    20  or 300,000 or whatever the figure is, each of them means
    21  that many multiples of one individual. I never forget in
    22  anything I have said or written or done the appalling
    23  suffering that has been inflicted on people in the camps
    24  like Auschwitz. I am on the side of the innocents of this
    25  world.
    26  As for the overall death roll of the Holocaust,
    .           P-147


      1  what meaning can one attach to the figures? The
      2  International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg found that
      3  the policy pursued resulted in the killing of 6 million
      4  Jews, of which 4 million were killed in the extermination
      5  institutions, but the 6 million figure derives, as the
      6  American chief prosecutor Jackson recorded in his diary in
      7  June 1945, from a back of the envelope calculation by the
      8  American Jewish leaders with whom he met in New York at
      9  that time. Professor Raul Hilberg puts the overall
    10  Holocaust figure at one million or less. Gerald
    11  Reitlinger had the figure at 4.6 million, of which he said
    12  about 3 million were conjectural, as it was not known how
    13  many Jews had escaped into the unoccupied part of the
    14  Soviet Union. The Israeli prime minister’s office, we are
    15  told by Norman Finkelstein, recently stated that there
    16  were still nearly one million living survivors.
    17  There are doubts not only about the precise
    18  figures but about specific events. The same Nuremberg
    19  tribunal ruled on October 1st 1946 that the Nazis had
    20  attempted to utilise the fat from bodies of victims in the
    21  commercial manufacture of soap. In 1990 historian Shmuel
    22  Krakowski of Yad Vashem announced to the world’s press
    23  that that too had been a Nazi propaganda lie. Gradually
    24  the wartime stories have been dismantled. As more
    25  documents have been found, widely stated propositions have
    26  been found to be doubtful. For a long time the confident
    .           P-148


      1  public perception was that the Wannsee protocol of the
      2  January 20th 1942 meeting at the Interpol headquarters in
      3  Berlin, Wannsee, recorded the actual order to exterminate
      4  the European Jews. Yehuda Bauer, the director now of Yad
      5  Vashem, the world’s premier Holocaust research institution
      6  in Israel — one of the correspondents of the second
      7  Defendant you remember — has stated quite clearly: “The
      8  public still repeats time after time the silly story that
      9  at Wannsee the extermination of the Jews was arrived at”.
    10  In his opinion Wannsee was a meeting but “hardly a
    11  conference”, and he even said: “Little of what was said
    12  there was executed in detail”. Despite this, your
    13  Lordship has had to listen to this “silly story” all over
    14  again from the expert witnesses.
    15  Surely, my critics say, there must now be some
    16  evidence of a Hitler order.
    17  Back in 1961 Professor Raul Hilberg, one of
    18  Yehuda Bauer’s great rivals for the laureate, one of my
    19  correspondents, asserted in “The Destruction of the
    20  European Jews”, his book, that there had been two such
    21  orders, one in the spring of 1941, and the other soon
    22  after. By 1985, after I had corresponded with him and I
    23  had begun voicing my own doubts, Hilberg was back
    24  pedalling. Hilberg went methodically through his new
    25  edition of his book, excising the allegation of a Hitler
    26  order. It is not as though he did not mention the Hitler
    .           P-149


      1  order. He actually went through a book, taking every
      2  reference to it out. “In the new edition”, as Professor
      3  Christopher Browning, another of our expert witnesses here
      4  for the defence, who testified before this court, said,
      5  “all references in the text to a Hitler decision or
      6  Hitler order for the Final Solution had been
      7  systematically excised. Buried at the bottom of a single
      8  footnote stands the solitary reference: ‘Chronology and
      9  circumstances point to a Hitler decision before the summer
    10  ended (1941)'”. “In the new edition”, Browning repeats,
    11  scandalized, “decisions were not made and orders were not
    12  given”. Your Lordship will find my exchange with
    13  Professor Browning as to whether he had indeed written
    14  those words in 1986 on day 17. You will find too that he
    15  regretted that he could not recall the events clearly of
    16  15 years ago, which invited a rather obvious riposte from
    17  me about the probably similar memory deficiencies in the
    18  eyewitnesses on whom he had on occasions relied.
    19  The director of the Yad Vashem archives has
    20  stated that most survivors’ testimonies are unreliable.
    21  There is a quotation from him. “Many”, he writes, “were
    22  never in the places where they claim to have witnessed
    23  atrocities, while others relied on second-hand information
    24  given them by friends or passing strangers”. It is the
    25  phenomenon that I have referred to as cross-pollination.
    26  Your Lordship may have been as startled as I, I confess,
    .           P-150


      1  was, upon learning the degree to which the case for the
      2  mass gassings at Auschwitz relies on eyewitness evidence,
      3  rather than on any firmer sources. Your Lordship will
      4  remember perhaps the exchange I had with Professor Donald
      5  Watt, professor emeritus at the London School of
      6  Economics, a distinguished diplomatic historian, early on
      7  in the trial, about the value of different categories of
      8  evidence. I will just summarize that. I asked him, I
      9  said, Professor I was not going to ask you about—-
    10  MR JUSTICE GRAY:  He said it all depends, did he not, really?
    11  Is that unfair as a summary?
    12  MR IRVING:  Well, my Lord, I draw your eyes straight down to
    13  the second line from the bottom. Professor Watt answers
    14  all of that, saying:
    15  The Bletchley Park intercepts, in so far as they
    16  are complete, are always regarded as the most reliable
    17  because there is no evidence that the dispatcher was aware
    18  that his messages could be decoded by us (by the British),
    19  and therefore he would put truth in them”.
    20  This supports my view, my Lord, that eyewitness
    21  evidence is less credible than forensic evidence and the
    22  Bletchley Park intercepts. I do not completely ignore
    23  eyewitness evidence, but I feel entitled to discount it
    24  when it is contradicted by the more reliable evidence
    25  which should then prevail.
    26  I mention the forensic evidence and that brings
    .           P-151


      1  us seamlessly to the Leuchter report.
      2  I am criticised by the Defendants for having
      3  relied initially on what is called the Leuchter report,
      4  1988. At the time they levelled their criticism at me the
      5  Defendants appeared to have been unaware that subsequent
      6  and more able investigations were conducted by both
      7  American and Polish researchers. The tests were in other
      8  words replicated.
      9  First, the Leuchter report. In 1988 I was
    10  introduced by defence counsel at the Canadian trial of
    11  Ernst Zundel to the findings made by a reputable firm of
    12  American forensic analysts of samples extracted from the
    13  fabric of various buildings at Auschwitz and Birkenau by
    14  Fred Leuchter, who was at that time a professional
    15  American execution technology consultant. These and his
    16  investigations at the Maidanek site formed the backbone of
    17  his engineering report. Since there have been tendentious
    18  statements about why the Leuchter report was not admitted
    19  in evidence at that trial in Canada I have studied the
    20  transcripts of that trial. It emerges that engineering
    21  reports are not generally admissible under Canadian rules
    22  of evidence unless both parties consent. In this case the
    23  Crown did not consent. As Mr Justice Thomas explained,
    24  “I get engineering reports all the time (that is in civil
    25  cases). That does not make them admissible, because they
    26  have prepared reports. They (the witnesses) go in the
    .           P-152


      1  box, they are qualified experts and they testify”. So the
      2  non-admission of the report by Mr Justice Thomas was no
      3  reflection on the worth of the report or on the
      4  qualifications of the witness.
      5  My Lord, I have to go in some detail into the
      6  Leuchter report because of the criticisms levelled at me
      7  for having been swayed by it.
      8  MR JUSTICE GRAY:  Yes. I do not disagree with that.
      9  MR IRVING:  Mr Leuchter testified on April 20th and 21st 1988
    10  as an expert in gas chamber technology. He had inspected
    11  the three sites (Auschwitz/Birkenau and Maidanek) in
    12  February 1988 and he had taken samples which were
    13  subsequent sent for analysis by a qualified analytical
    14  chemist in the United States, a Dr James Roth of Cornell
    15  University, who was not told where the samples had come
    16  from. His firm Alpha Laboratories, were told on the test
    17  certificates only that the samples were from brickwork.
    18  Mr Justice Thomas ruled that Leuchter would give oral
    19  evidence but that the report itself should not be filed.
    20  He held further that Mr Leuchter was not a chemist or a
    21  toxicologist, which are findings, of course, that he is
    22  quite entitled to make, but he agreed that Mr Leuchter was
    23  an engineer because he had made himself an engineer in a
    24  very limited field.
    25  A summary of the rest of the judge’s findings
    26  was that Leuchter was not capable in law of giving the
    .           P-153


      1  expert opinion that there were never any gassings or
      2  exterminations carried on in the facilities from which he
      3  took the samples. For the same reasons he was not capable
      4  of testifying regarding the results of the analysis,
      5  because he was not a toxicologist in other words. He was
      6  restricted to testifying as to the actual extraction of
      7  the samples from the buildings and his own observations on
      8  the feasibility of the buildings that he had examined
      9  being used as gas chambers.
    10  So the Defendant was wrong to write on page 164
    11  of her book, “The judge ruled that Leuchter could not
    12  serve as an expert witness on the construction and
    13  function of the gas chambers”. To give evidence in a
    14  criminal trial Mr Leuchter must have been accepted as an
    15  expert witness. Further, Professor Lipstadt stated on
    16  pages 164 of her book, and 165, “The judge’s finding as to
    17  Leuchter’s suitability to comment on questions of
    18  engineering was unequivocal”. In fact, the judge’s
    19  findings referred only to his lack of qualifications to
    20  testify on the results of the laboratory tests for cyanide
    21  and iron, because that was Dr Roth’s area, and he himself
    22  (Roth) gave testimony on those matters. On page 169
    23  Professor Lipstadt insists: “The exposure to the elements
    24  lessen the presence of the hydrogen cyanide … Nor did
    25  Leuchter seem to consider that the building had been
    26  exposed to the elements for more than 40 years so that
    .           P-154


      1  cyanide gas residue could have been obliterated. He also
      2  took samples from a floor that had been washed regularly
      3  by museum staff”. Dr Roth however testified under oath
      4  that the formation of Prussian blue, which is a cyanide
      5  compound, was an accumulative reaction, that it augmented
      6  with each exposure to the gas, and that it did not
      7  normally disappear — in other words, could not be just
      8  washed away — unless physically removed by sand blasting
      9  or grinding down.
    10  Roth seems then to have changed his mind, to
    11  judge by the television film “MR DEATH” which I believe is
    12  shortly to be shown on Channel 4, and upon which film both
    13  I and learned counsel in the current action partially
    14  rely. Zundel’s counsel comments, “He (Roth) obviously is
    15  frightened now”, and no wonder, considering what
    16  subsequently was inflicted on Mr Leuchter. Your Lordship
    17  will remember that, in order to destroy Roth’s absurd
    18  argument, which was quoted to the court by Mr Rampton,
    19  learned counsel, that the Prussian blue stain would have
    20  penetrated only a few microns into the brickwork.
    21  I showed a photograph of the stain penetrating right
    22  through the brick work to the outside face of one of the
    23  cyanide fumigation chambers, where it has been exposed to
    24  sun, wind and rain for over 50 years, and where it is
    25  still visible, as deep and blue as ever today.
    26  Crematorium II has been protected from these outside
    .           P-155


      1  elements. It is possible to crawl beneath the famous
      2  roof, the one we were hearing about, the one with the no
      3  holes. You can crawl beneath it even now — about which
      4  roof I shall have more to say — but neither Jan Sehn,
      5  nor Fred Leuchter, nor James Roth nor Germar Rudolf, nor
      6  any of the subsequent investigations have found any
      7  significant traces of cyanide compounds present in the
      8  fabric of this building, despite the eyewitness accounts
      9  of that same chamber having been used for the gassing of
    10  half a million people with cyanide. Moreover, the wood
    11  grain of the original wooden formwork (or moulds) can
    12  still be seen on the face of the concrete, which is
    13  evidence that it has not been sandblasted or grounded
    14  down.
    15  Now, my Lord, this takes us to the famous roof
    16  of Leichenkeller No. 1 of crematorium No. II at
    17  Auschwitz.
    18  I referred earlier to the expert witness on
    19  Auschwitz and Birkenau in this case, Professor Robert van
    20  Pelt. He has made unequivocal statements both here and
    21  elsewhere about crematorium II at Birkenau. To him it was
    22  the factory of death, the mass gassing chamber of
    23  Birkenau. He did not mince his language. In the new
    24  television film MR DEATH we saw him and we heard him, as
    25  the film camera showed Fred Leuchter descending into the
    26  hole which was broken post-war through the collapsed
    .           P-156


      1  concrete roof slab and reinforcing bars of Leichenkeller I
      2  (morgue No. 1) of crematorium II and we heard him uttering
      3  these words, quoting off the sound track:
      4  “Crematorium II is the most lethal building of
      5  Auschwitz. In the 2,500 square feet of this one room,
      6  more people lost their lives than any other place on this
      7  planet. 500,000 people were killed. If you would draw a
      8  map of human suffering, if you created a geography of
      9  atrocity, this would be the absolute centre.”
    10  The court will recall that on ninth day of this
    11  action I cross-examined this witness most closely about
    12  this statement and I offered him a chance to change his
    13  mind about the pivotal importance of crematorium II and
    14  its underground Leichenkeller No. I (morgue No. 1) the
    15  chamber which van Pelt alleged had been a mass gassing
    16  chamber.
    17  IRVING: Very well. You say: This is quoting
    18  him from his report —-
    19  MR JUSTICE GRAY:  You need not read the whole of it. He
    20  confirms that it is Leichenkeller I at crematorium II
    21  where he says the 500,000 were killed.
    22  MR IRVING:  Thank you, my Lord. The expert witness could
    23  hardly have been clearer in his answer.
    24  At page 53, I then asked him to identify the
    25  buildings referred to on the aerial photographs of
    26  Birkenau and crematorium II, so that there could later be
    .           P-157


      1  no doubt as to which precise building he had just agreed
      2  was the factory of death at Auschwitz,
      3  Auschwitz/Birkenau.
      4  The great problem about accepting that this
      5  building was an instrument for mass murder is that the
      6  evidence produced by Professor van Pelt relies on three
      7  “legs”, if I can borrow Mr Rampton’s word, a handful of
      8  eyewitnesses, a few architectural drawings, and a slim
      9  file of documents.
    10  The eyewitnesses, in my submission, have turned
    11  out —-
    12  MR RAMPTON:  No, I am sorry, that is one error that cannot be
    13  allowed to pass. There is a fourth leg, forensic chemical
    14  analysis both in 1945, 1988 and 1994.
    15  MR JUSTICE GRAY:  Just to elaborate that, of Leichenkeller I
    16  and crematorium II?
    17  MR RAMPTON:  Yes, Leichenkeller I at crematorium II by the
    18  Krakov forensic laboratory in December 1945, which found
    19  traces of cyanide on the ventilation covers by
    20  Mr Leuchter’s analysts.
    21  MR JUSTICE GRAY:  Ventilation covers from where?
    22  MR RAMPTON:  From Leichenkeller I in crematorium II. If one
    23  looks at the report, it is as clear as anything. Leuchter
    24  himself, of course, in 1988, and Professor Markowitz at
    25  Krakov in 1994.
    26  MR JUSTICE GRAY:  Thank you.
    .           P-158


      1  MR RAMPTON:  They are all in the evidence.
      2  MR IRVING:  My Lord, I will ask your Lordship when the time
      3  comes to look at that forensic evidence and to ask
      4  yourself the obvious question, what is the proof that
      5  these items came from that building?
      6  MR RAMPTON:  Leuchter is certainly proof, because Mr Irving
      7  relies on him.
      8  MR IRVING:  Then we have to look at the actual figures and the
      9  concentrations. If I can now continue with my three legs,
    10  my three-legged argument?
    11  MR JUSTICE GRAY:  Yes, do. Eyewitnesses?
    12  MR IRVING:  The eyewitnesses have turned out to be liars,
    13  particularly those who testified to the SS guards opening
    14  manhole covers on top of the flat roof of Leichenkeller
    15  No. I (mortuary No. 1), and tipping tins of Zyklon B
    16  pellets in through the holes. One witness was David
    17  Olere, an artist who drew sketches years later in Paris,
    18  to which Mr Rampton has also referred, obviously intending
    19  to sell them. His sketches show flames and smoke belching
    20  from the crematorium chimney of crematorium No. II, which
    21  goes purely to the credibility of the witness, which was
    22  quite impossible. He portrays the victims. Your Lordship
    23  will remember that I asked Professor van Pelt to calculate
    24  the length, the path, from the furnace doors to the top of
    25  the chimney, and how long that flame would have had to
    26  be. He portrays the victims of the Nazi killers mostly as
    .           P-159


      1  nubile young females, all naked and sketched in a
      2  pornographic way, often clutching naked teenaged children
      3  to their breasts. It was Olere I invite the court to
      4  remember, who told Jean-Claude Pressac that the SS made
      5  sausage in the crematoria out of human flesh (a passage
      6  which Mr Van Pelt did not inform us of in his expert
      7  report). Another witness is Ada Bimko, who proved at the
      8  Belsen trial that she too had lied. Entering another gas
      9  chamber building at Auschwitz she said she had “noticed
    10  two pipes which I was told contained the gas. There were
    11  two huge metal containers containing gas”. She evidently
    12  did not know that the “gas” supposed to have been used,
    13  Zyklon-B, was actually in pellet form, not cylinders.
    14  Distorting her account too, van Pelt omitted also this
    15  part of her testimony. Dr Bendel, another of van Pelt’s
    16  eyewitnesses, stated that at crematorium IV the people
    17  crowded into the gas chamber found the ceilings so low
    18  that the impression was given that the roof was falling on
    19  their heads. This too was untrue, as the court has seen
    20  how high these ceilings were in the computer-generated
    21  “walk through”. The court will find that in my
    22  cross-examination of van Pelt I destroyed the worth of
    23  each supposed eyewitness after eyewitness in the same way,
    24  if I can summarize it like that.
    25  Let us first look for those holes that they
    26  talked about. My Lord, your Lordship will remember that
    .           P-160


      1  I had the big photograph of that roof photographed from a
      2  helicopter quite recently, standing here for some days or
      3  weeks. The roof pillars beneath the roof were blown up in
      4  1945, and the reinforced concrete slab pancaked downwards
      5  into the morgue basement, starred but otherwise intact.
      6  By the word “starred” I mean what happens to a pane of
      7  reinforced glass that has been hit by a stone.
      8  Van Pelt suggested that the Zyklon-B
      9  introduction holes in the roof of Leichenkeller I were not
    10  much larger in diameter than tennis balls, but the
    11  evidence of his eyewitnesses, Henry Tauber and Michal
    12  Kula, was that they were closer to the size of manholes —
    13  “70 centimetres square”. Kula testified that the wire
    14  mesh columns that he had made were of that cross section
    15  and three metres (ten feet) tall. One witness said that
    16  the concrete covers on top of the roof above these holes
    17  had to be lifted off “with both hands,” with two hands.
    18  As the ceiling height in Leichenkeller I was 2.40 metres,
    19  60 centimetres of each column, which is 3 metres tall,
    20  would have had to extend through the holes in the concrete
    21  ceiling with about six inches poking up outside. As
    22  Professor van Pelt admits in his report, the part I was
    23  about to read out when your Lordship stopped me, there is
    24  no trace of those holes in the roof today. I am sorry, I
    25  was wrong. He did say that. He says it later on.
    26  MR JUSTICE GRAY:  What did I stop you reading?
    .           P-161


      1  MR IRVING:  You did not. I made a mistake, my Lord. As he
      2  admits in his report, there is no trace of those holes in
      3  the roof today. The underside of that roof, which can be
      4  inspected and photographed from beneath even today, is
      5  intact. Even if one could lose sight of the much smaller
      6  three inch diameter holes in the pancaked concrete roof of
      7  which van Pelt spoke, and I do not accept that they were
      8  that small, one could not possibly have lost sight of four
      9  holes as large as manholes. Those holes would be
    10  perfectly obvious today on the ground that Auschwitz to
    11  any observer using the naked eye, without the slightest
    12  possible doubt as to their location, because, of course,
    13  Professor van Pelt told us where each hole was supposed to
    14  be. It was right next to the supporting columns.
    15  Professor van Pelt accepts that those holes are
    16  not in that roof slab now.
    17  MR JUSTICE GRAY:  I am not sure that is right, is it? I think
    18  what he says was that the state of the collapsed roof is
    19  so poor now that you simply cannot see where those holes
    20  would have been if they were there, which is a slightly
    21  different thing.
    22  MR RAMPTON:  Not only that, my Lord. I sit here, I listen to,
    23  quite frankly, a continuous misrepresentation of the
    24  evidence of my witness.
    25  MR JUSTICE GRAY:  Let us concentrate on this one.
    26  MR RAMPTON:  I will, but this is serious. Van Pelt said a
    .           P-162


      1  number of things. He said, first of all, the fragmentary
      2  condition of the roof prevents any kind of assessment one
      3  way or the other. Then he says, anyway, even if it did
      4  not, it is the wrong part of the roof. The third, of
      5  course, is that there is no evidence on Mr Irving’s side
      6  of the court one way or the other. Mr Irving has not been
      7  there.
      8  MR IRVING:  May I now continue with preferably fewer
      9  interruptions?
    10  MR JUSTICE GRAY:  No, I think that is not fair. Mr Rampton
    11  I think has been restrained.
    12  MR IRVING:  My Lord, restraint is what I showed.
    13  MR JUSTICE GRAY:  There are the odd things which I have noticed
    14  which I do not think are quite borne out. I think the
    15  best thing is not to interrupt you, but that is quite an
    16  important misstatement of van Pelt’s evidence.
    17  MR IRVING:  I will come to the alleged misstatement in a
    18  moment. Of course, I sat with the utmost restraint this
    19  morning —-
    20  MR JUSTICE GRAY:  You did.
    21  MR IRVING:  — while numerous things were said. My Lord, I put
    22  to your Lordship at the time photographs of the underside
    23  of that roof. To say that the underside of that roof is
    24  fragmented is a gross distortion of what one could see
    25  with one’s own eyes. The underside of that roof was as
    26  pristine as the concrete which is in this room today,
    .           P-163


      1  every inch of the underside of that roof which can be
      2  accessed.
      3  MR JUSTICE GRAY:  Yes, I remember the photograph quite well and
      4  quite how much of the roof it shows and which bit of the
      5  roof, it is impossible, I think, on the evidence to say.
      6  MR IRVING:  I did, as your Lordship will know, make one very
      7  grand offer and very generous offer to the Defendants in
      8  this case saying, “Come back with photographs of those
      9  holes and I will stop the case within 24 hours because my
    10  position will be indefensible”. I made that offer, not
    11  once, but twice. It is in the transcript. They did not
    12  take it up, and that would have saved —-
    13  MR JUSTICE GRAY:  Press on.
    14  MR IRVING:  It reminds me of the early days in this action when
    15  every time I was making a killer point, Mr Rampton was up
    16  and it is happening again. Professor van Pelt: In his
    17  expert report, and for this honesty I give him full
    18  credit, he writes: “Today, these four small holes” —
    19  this is his expert report which he provided in this case
    20  — he did not have to write this, my Lord, but he put it
    21  in and it is a great testimony to his honesty, I think –
    22  “that connected the wire-mesh columns and the chimneys
    23  cannot be observed in the ruined remains of the concrete
    24  slab. Yet does this mean they were never there? We know
    25  that after the cessation of the gassings in the fall of
    26  1944 all the gassing equipment was removed, which implies
    .           P-164


      1  both the wire-mesh columns and the chimneys. What would
      2  have remained would have been the four narrow holes and
      3  the slab. What would have remained would have been the
      4  four narrow holes and the slab. While there is no
      5  certainty in this matter, it would have been logical to
      6  attach at the location where the columns had been some
      7  formwork at the bottom of the gas chamber ceiling, and
      8  pour some concrete in the hole and thus restore the
      9  slab”.
    10  That is why I listened with relative patience,
    11  my Lord, to Mr Rampton’s interruption because it very
    12  largely bears out what I said. The point at which he rose
    13  to his feet was when I said van Pelt accepted those holes
    14  are not in that roof slab now. I think that his
    15  interruption was ill-called for.
    16  Professor van Pelt thus asserts, without any
    17  evidence at all, that late in 1944, with the Russian Army
    18  winding up to launch their colossal final invasion only a
    19  few miles away on the River Vistula, the Nazi-mass
    20  murderers would remove the “Zyklon introduction columns”
    21  and then fill in the holes in the ceiling, as he says, to
    22  “restore the slab” (before dynamiting the pillars
    23  supporting it anyway). He again asserted when
    24  I cross-examined him on January 25th as follows: “It would
    25  have been logical to attach”, he then reads out what he
    26  said, “pour some concrete in the hole and thus restore the
    .           P-165


      1  slab”.
      2  How would this have been more logical than
      3  completely removing the roof of Leichenkeller 1 just as
      4  the Nazis had removed the roof of Leichenkeller 2,
      5  identified by Professor van Pelt as the “undressing
      6  rooms”, as shown in the aerial photographs taken on
      7  December 21st 1944 that one can see on page 15 of this
      8  book “The Holocaust Revisited”, the book published by the
      9  CIA. The originals of this photograph were shown to
    10  Professor van Pelt in court. I showed them to him. To
    11  believe his version, we would have to believe that the
    12  Nazis deliberately created relics, architectural relics,
    13  of Leichenkeller No. 1 to confound later generations of
    14  tourists and Holocaust researchers.
    15  The fact is that the holes are not there – at
    16  least they are not visible from a distance of 0 to 4 feet
    17  or when photographed from the underside of that slab.
    18  Unable to point them out to us in close up at ground
    19  level, the Defendants invited us to consider instead
    20  either their vertical aerial photographs taken from 35,000
    21  feet up, or a horizontal photograph taken from several
    22  hundred yards away, past a locomotive, where three (not
    23  four) unidentified objects are placed irregularly on the
    24  rooftop (the fourth “object” turns out to be a window on
    25  the wall behind). The Court will recall what my response
    26  was to the not unexpected discovery that during building
    .           P-166


      1  works such subjects as barrels of tar were placed on a
      2  large flat slab, and I will not repeat it here. The
      3  notion that the high flying plane could have photographed
      4  an object of 27 centimetres, let alone of tennis ball
      5  size, protruding from six inches above the ground from
      6  that roof is quite absurd. The four smudges seen on one
      7  photograph are evidently many feet long, nothing to do
      8  with these so-called holes.
      9  Your Lordship will remember that on day 11
    10  I brought into the Court half a dozen very large vertical
    11  aerial photographs, black and white photographs, taken by
    12  the Americans or the South African Air Force during 1944,
    13  and invited Professor van Pelt to find those same smudges
    14  on that roof, the same dots.
    15  Where until this moment he had seen dots on
    16  another photograph with no difficulty, the witness van
    17  Pelt now pleaded poor eyesight: (“I have now reached the
    18  age I need reading glasses”, he said, “and I do not have
    19  them with me. I did not expect this kind of challenge”.
    20  Precisely). Had he used even a microscope, he would not
    21  have found the dots in the 1944 pictures I showed him.
    22  Because the holes were not there and are not there, and he
    23  and the Defendants know it.
    24  Even if the Nazi architects who designed the
    25  building had willingly agreed to the weakening of the roof
    26  by having makeshift holes cut that size right through the
    .           P-167


      1  slab next to the supporting pillars – I say “makeshift”
      2  because there is no provision for them in any of the
      3  architectural drawings that were shown to us – we should
      4  certainly expect to see those holes now. My Lord, the
      5  court will recall two things:
      6  Firstly, I asked the witness van Pelt if he was
      7  familiar (in view of the fact that he is not qualified
      8  architecturally, as it turned out) with the expression
      9  “fair faced concrete finish”. He confirmed that it is
    10  concrete that has been left untreated. In other words, it
    11  is not covered with cement or pebble dash or tiling. He
    12  confirmed also that it is the most expensive such finish
    13  that an architect can specify because the concrete has to
    14  be poured right first time because blemishes like holes
    15  and cavities can never be retouched afterwards. Filling
    16  in the holes with cement, as van Pelt suggested in an
    17  extraordinary piece of naivete, would have been evident in
    18  the concrete face for ever after by differences in general
    19  appearance, colouring, wear and fracturing; there would
    20  have been a visible “drying line” as a ring around the
    21  patch, and the wood grain pattern left by the wooden
    22  formwork would have been interrupted. Common sense tells
    23  us all of this as well.
    24  The second point is, of course, we photographed
    25  the underside of that slab and there is no trace of any
    26  such blemish on the concrete roof’s underside, and there
    .           P-168


      1  are supposed to have been four of those filling holes.
      2  Those holes are a major problem for this entire case.
      3  On two occasions I stated a challenge in Court,
      4  including to the witness van Pelt, as I said earlier.
      5  I challenged the Defendants to send somebody to Auschwitz
      6  even now, to scrape the thin layer of gravel and dirt off
      7  the topside of the roof slab where they “know” the holes
      8  must be because they know where the pillars – because the
      9  eyewitnesses agreed they were next to the main columns –
    10  and bring back a photograph of one of the holes or
    11  evidence that it had been filled in.
    12  If they did, I said, I would abandon my action
    13  forthwith because my position would have become quite
    14  indefensible. To my knowledge, the Defendants have not
    15  attempted this exercise. They know and they knew from the
    16  outset that I was right about that roof. Their entire
    17  case on crematorium No. II – the untruth that it was used
    18  as a factory of death, with SS guards tipping canisters of
    19  cyanide-soaked pellets into the building through those
    20  four (non-existent) manholes – has caved in, as surely as
    21  that flat roof.
    22  Accordingly, the eyewitnesses who spoke of those
    23  holes also lied, or bluffed, and I have called their
    24  bluff. In the absence of the holes themselves, and minus
    25  his “eyewitnesses”, Professor van Pelt’s only remaining
    26  proofs that Leichenkeller 1 of Crematorium No.II was an
    .           P-169


      1  instrument of mass murder – a factory of death, as he
      2  said, in which 500,000 Jews were gassed and cremated – are
      3  these: architectural drawings (rather oddly for a
      4  “professor of architecture” he calls them blueprints) and
      5  wartime documents. He confirmed this to your Lordship
      6  when your Lordship asked.
      7  As for the wartime documents, to take them
      8  first, he referred, for instance, to the – to him,
      9  sinister requirement that the morgue should be vorgewarmt,
    10  prewarmed, by a central heating plant.
    11  In cross-examination I drew his attention to the relevant
    12  section of the wartime Neufert, which is the architect’s
    13  handbook or building code which was standard for the SS
    14  architects, which specifies that morgues, mortuaries, must
    15  have both cooling and central heating facilities to avoid
    16  damage to the corpses in the kinds of extremes of
    17  temperature which exist in Central Europe. Document after
    18  document fell by the wayside in this manner. Mr Rampton
    19  introduced the timesheet of one humble workman in March
    20  1943, showing him actually concreting “the floor in the
    21  Gaskammer”, the gas chamber. But Birkenau camp was full
    22  of gas chambers. In his fine facsimile building of the
    23  camp documents, Jean-Claude Pressac has printed drawing
    24  No. 801 of November 8th, 1941, for an Entlausungsanlage
    25  (delousing installation) for the prison camp, right in the
    26  middle of which is a Gaskammer. He also reproduces
    .           P-170


      1  drawing No. 1293, dated May 9th 1942, of the drainage and
      2  water supply of the delousing barracks, building BW5b.
      3  Here too there is a Gaskammer smack in the middle of the
      4  drawing. So there goes that one too.
      5  The real handling capacity — my Lord, of
      6  course, we did look at other documents and I am sure your
      7  Lordship will attend to that particular part of the
      8  transcript in detail, but I just wanted to give the
      9  flavour of the problem. The real handling capacity of the
    10  crematoria is also surprisingly difficult to establish,
    11  notwithstanding what Mr Rampton said this morning.
    12  Professor van Pelt produced a histogram on an easel for us
    13  which showed truly staggering protections of cadavers to
    14  be cremated in coming years; but on cross-examination the
    15  witness admitted that the projection was based solely on
    16  one document, the questionable “crematorium capacities”
    17  document of June 28th, 1943, and that all else was
    18  extrapolated backwards from that sheet of paper.
    19  Mr Rampton said that, as ever, I challenge that document,
    20  as though I had challenged many other documents. My Lord,
    21  to my knowledge, I have challenged —-
    22  MR JUSTICE GRAY:  Yes. If I may just intervene and say that
    23  I would find it easier if there were not such an overt
    24  reaction to what you are saying on the other side of the
    25  court.
    26  MR RAMPTON:  I am sorry.
    .           P-171


      1  MR JUSTICE GRAY:  Yes, sorry, you got to the Bischoff
      2  document?
      3  MR IRVING:  The Bischoff document. Professor van Pelt relies
      4  heavily on this document. My Lord, you will notice that I
      5  have given all the appropriate footnote references to
      6  assist you in navigating through the transcripts, and so
      7  on.
      8  MR JUSTICE GRAY:  Yes, thank you.
      9  MR IRVING:  Even if genuine, even if the actual paper itself is
    10  genuine, the handling figures which this document gives
    11  for the furnace installation in Crematorium No. II do not
    12  tally with any of the figures in the specifications
    13  provided by the manufacturers, the Topf Company, for this
    14  type of equipment. Furthermore, the document refers to
    15  some crematoria which were at that time shut down, and to
    16  others that were due to be taken out of commission, which
    17  is again a mystifying business.
    18  I had shown the Court on the previous day that
    19  this one page of paper contained not just one or two, but
    20  four or five, four or even five, bureaucratic
    21  discrepancies which indicated to me that the document is
    22  not authentic. It was not just that the year date was
    23  wrong. Any one of those flaws would normally be enough to
    24  call its integrity into question: but five such flaws in
    25  one document, including the wrong rank for the highest man
    26  in the SS site-construction system, SS Gruppenfuhrer Hans
    .           P-172


      1  Kammler? Professor van Pelt was unable to explain these
      2  flaws; he had not noticed them. The document was first
      3  published in East Berlin in the 1950s, and it is now to be
      4  found in the Auschwitz archives, because it was sent there
      5  from East Berlin in 1981. That alone is why it now bears
      6  an Auschwitz archival stamp. It did not originate there,
      7  but elsewhere. Even if the flaws can be explained, and
      8  the figures were genuine, there is no indication of how
      9  such huge numbers of bodies were to be handled within 24
    10  hours; nor of where the coke was to come from. There is
    11  no — logistic problems defeat the document. (There is
    12  no acceptable evidence that the Auschwitz staff found any
    13  way of improving on the average coke consumption of 30 kg
    14  per cadaver achieved by other camps).
    15  The bottleneck in the entire crematorium II
    16  “factory of death” story is however that little freight
    17  elevator that was installed between that morgue, the
    18  underground mortuary, Leichenkeller No. 1, as in any such
    19  state-of-the-art crematorium, to haul the bodies up from
    20  the basement-level morgue up to the crematorium furnaces
    21  on the ground floor. We are told by the Defendants that
    22  this elevator was never anything more sophisticated than
    23  something like a builder’s hoist. The real elevator was
    24  never delivered. It had no door, no cage, no walls – it
    25  was just a platform jolting up and down that elevator
    26  shaft. We do know that as finally installed it had a
    .           P-173


      1  specified load bearing capacity of 1,500 kilograms.
      2  Professor van Pelt suggested that the hoist could,
      3  therefore, have hauled 25 cadavers at a time. In
      4  practice, as there was just a flat platform with no walls
      5  or door, jolting up and down that narrow concrete elevator
      6  shaft, I submit that it would have been impossible to
      7  stack on to one small platform 25 naked cadavers in the
      8  conditions of filth and slime, the horror, that had been
      9  described by the eyewitnesses.
    10  It does not bear thinking about, I agree, and
    11  that is why I am not going to dwell on it. We cannot
    12  produce hard figures for this part of the exercise, but
    13  one thing is plain: that one elevator in crematorium II
    14  was the inescapable bottleneck, and it makes plain that,
    15  whatever was happening downstairs in the mortuary,
    16  Leichenkeller No. 1, it was not on the huge scale, on the
    17  huge scale that history now suggests.
    18  In response to your Lordship’s helpful
    19  questioning, Professor van Pelt stated that the wartime
    20  documents to interpreted if they were to be relied on for
    21  this proof. These interpretations are quite tenuous. He
    22  produced to us a document referring to the special secrecy
    23  to be attached to the crematorium drawings. I am sure
    24  your Lordship remembers that document. It was at first
    25  blush quite an interesting document. He suggested that
    26  this was because of the mass gassings being carried on in
    .           P-174


      1  the buildings, in the crematorium. It stressed that this
      2  was because — the document stressed that this was because
      3  of the wehrwirtschaftlich importance [the importance to
      4  the military economy] of the work being conducted in that
      5  building or those buildings. But van Pelt confirmed under
      6  my cross-examination that the homicidal Final Solution,
      7  the genocide, was never regarded as being
      8  wehrwirtschaftlich important, important to the economy.
      9  I submitted that the reference was clearly to keeping
    10  secret the ugly business of the looting by the SS of the
    11  gold and valuables from the corpses being processed by the
    12  building, a system which was undoubtedly of economic
    13  importance to the SS.
    14  Similarly, the architectural drawings seemed to
    15  provide the required “proof” only when one was compared
    16  with another. That was one of the other problems. As
    17  Professor van Pelt said: “… we can look now at two or
    18  three drawings together and … We start to observe some
    19  very weird things and some modifications made between one
    20  drawing and the other drawing…” Those were his words, to
    21  which my comment is, is that the best level of proof that
    22  is available now, even after 55 years?
    23  During his slide-show, Professor van Pelt told
    24  us that one cardinal piece of evidence in this drawings
    25  was the relocation of an internal double-door which sealed
    26  off Leichenkeller No. 1 from the interior of the building,
    .           P-175


      1  from the inside of the Leichenkeller doorframe to the
      2  outside. The door was moved in the drawings from the
      3  inside of the wall to the outside. I pointed out that in
      4  the new layout, the doors were shown as being actually
      5  rebated into the doorframe and I suggested to the witness
      6  that this was indicative of a gas-tight door being fitted
      7  as in any standard air raid shelter design. Air raid
      8  shelter doors are routinely fitted outside the shelter, to
      9  open outwards, so as to withstand blast. Neufert, which
    10  is the wartime architects’ handbook, bears this out.
    11  The witness seems not to have considered this
    12  possibility. As Mr Rampton again mentioned, the doors
    13  allegedly found around the Birkenhau and Auschwitz sites
    14  subsequently are fitted with peep holes. But I say that
    15  that is the standard air raid shelter design complete with
    16  the obligatory peep hole that is fitted to air raid
    17  shelter doors. The amendment of the drawings to provide
    18  for an external door, leading from the far end of the
    19  subterrranean morgue to the open air, Leichenkeller No. 1,
    20  was also consonant with its dual use as an air raid
    21  shelter, and I put this to the witness on Day 11, as was
    22  the relocation of the main entrance staircase from the
    23  back of the building to the street-side. Among the
    24  architectural drawings provided to us from the Auschwitz
    25  archives is one entitled “Modification of the old
    26  Crematorium”, namely crematorium No. 1 in Auschwitz,
    .           P-176


      1  subtitled: “Air Raid Bunker for SS Station HQ with an
      2  Operating Theatre”. So such modifications of the morgues
      3  to provide air raid shelter capacity were clearly nothing
      4  extraordinary. Mr Rampton made a lot of the order for the
      5  doors with peep holes both during the hearings and this
      6  morning, but peep holes were standard fittings, not only
      7  on the gas-tight air raid shelter doors, but also on the
      8  delousing facilities. Jean-Claude Pressac prints
      9  photographs of two such doors on the “Canada” delousing
    10  chamber at Birkenhau.
    11  Looking specifically at the possible use of
    12  crematorium No. II and the underground basement area as
    13  being adapted for future air raid shelter use:
    14  Crematorium No. II, like its mirror image Crematorium
    15  No. III on the other side of the road, was originally
    16  designed as a state-of-the-art crematorium, possibly not
    17  just for the camp but for the whole catchment area of
    18  Auschwitz which had for centuries been an area of
    19  pestilence and plague. No expense was spared in its
    20  design. This was German tax-payer money and they did not
    21  care. The best equipment and architects were used on what
    22  was clearly a permanent facility. Building the morgue,
    23  the mortuary, underground, instead of above ground,
    24  increased construction costs by several times, but
    25  provided for keeping the morgue cool during the baking hot
    26  Central European summers. Had the building been designed
    .           P-177


      1  from the start as a human slaughterhouse, it would
      2  certainly not have been designed on several levels with
      3  resultant handling problems. Slaughterhouses are normally
      4  built on one level.
      5  We saw in Professor van Pelt’s slide-show the
      6  pouring of the concrete roof, the roof slab, of the
      7  subterranean Leichenkeller No. II; the roof was
      8  undoubtedly much the same as Leichenkeller No. 1 with a
      9  six inch reinforced steel mesh. This undoubtedly made the
    10  new building one of the most robust on the site:
    11  certainly more robust and fireproof in an air raid than
    12  the flimsy wooden horse-barracks in which the prisoners
    13  and slave labour were housed.
    14  We were told by Mr Rampton this morning this
    15  seemed improbable to establish an air raid shelter
    16  facility for the SS who were 1.5 miles away. Well, the
    17  early warning posts were in Holland, and they were
    18  probably 1,500 miles away. So they would provide more
    19  than adequate time for the SS to gallop that 1.5 miles to
    20  this building with the concrete roof.
    21  The captured Bauleitung records of Auschwitz
    22  housed in Moscow confirm that from mid 1942 onwards they
    23  began to consider the construction at the camp of
    24  shelters, splinter trenches, and other ARP, Air Raid
    25  Precaution, measures. To be fair to the witness, when
    26  these Moscow catalogue entries were put to Professor van
    .           P-178


      1  Pelt he seemed unfamiliar with them. After the air raids,
      2  our British air raids, on Cologne, Rostock and Lubeck –
      3  that was in March/April 1942 – the German High Command
      4  recognized the likelihood that air raids would spread
      5  across Poland and Central Europe, and they ordered the
      6  construction of extended ARP facilities throughout the
      7  occupied Eastern territories insofar as they can within
      8  bomber range. Existing basements, this document said,
      9  were to be converted into shelters, and anti-gas equipment
    10  provided, and personnel trained in anti-gas warfare, as
    11  gas attack was widely expected. I have given your
    12  Lordship the reference. I put the document to Professor
    13  Longerich and on Day 10 I said to him: “[…] the Defence
    14  rely on a number of photographs of doors found scattered
    15  around the compound of Auschwitz and Birkenhau, and we
    16  will show that these are standard German air raid shelter
    17  doors complete with peep holes”. And, my Lord, I
    18  have provided photographs of such air raid shelter doors
    19  in various bundles.
    20  These precautions were not in vain. In May
    21  1943, there was an air raid on the nearby Auschwitz Buna
    22  plant. This is reflected in the Auschwitz documents. At
    23  least one of the American aerial photographs that I
    24  produced to the Court, the black and white photographs,
    25  the big ones, and to the witness, Professor van Pelt,
    26  shows a stick of heavy bombs just released by the plane
    .           P-179


      1  that took the photograph descending over the camp. By the
      2  end of the war, there was also an anti-aircraft unit
      3  assigned to defending the region, as shown by the
      4  reference in Judge Staglich’s membership of the Flak unit
      5  that manned it.
      6  Your Lordship will also remember that during his
      7  slide-show, van Pelt showed the court a series of most
      8  interesting computer-generated “walk-through”
      9  reconstructions of the interiors of Crematorium IV and V.
    10  Your Lordship had actually memorized the dimensions of the
    11  shutter, the wooden shutter, of 30 centimetres by 40
    12  centimetres. There were also said to be steps leading up
    13  to the openings. The wartime civil defence journal
    14  Luftschutz shows precisely this arrangement of gas type
    15  shutters and steps as a standard air raid shelter feature
    16  designed for the event of gas warfare.
    17  I put this fact to the witness van Pelt: “Would
    18  you agree that those shutters that have been found in the
    19  Auschwitz camp are, in fact, standard German air-raid
    20  shutters supplied by manufacturers to a standard design?”
    21  The eyewitnesses stated that thousands of
    22  victims were gassed in these rooms, however, and their
    23  bodies burned in large pits to the building’s rear. But
    24  the contemporary air photographs taken by the Americans
    25  show no such pits, nor are they evident today. Confronted
    26  with what your Lordship has yourself referred to as the
    .           P-180


      1  lack of documentary evidence for the gassings, Professor
      2  van Pelt could only offer the suggestion that the use of
      3  gas chambers at Auschwitz and Birkenhau was a “moral
      4  certainty”. Three times in his report, three times in his
      5  report, he fell back upon that semi-religious phrase. The
      6  available proofs certainly do not support the belief that
      7  gassings there occurred on a mass scale.
      8  If I can just fill in what I have not said
      9  there? Of course, I do accept that there were gassings on
    10  a small scale at Auschwitz in the buildings identified as
    11  bunkers I and II which were houses which have since been
    12  torn down.
    13  I will not dwell long on the uniformly poor
    14  evidentiary basis on the other extermination camps, known
    15  to the Court as the Operation Reinhard camps – Belzec,
    16  Sobibor and Treblinka. Here we do not have even the
    17  “moral certainty” which comforted Professor van Pelt.
    18  I can only challenge here the scale and the systematic
    19  nature of the alleged gassing of more than one million
    20  people in these centres. The Defendants’ own witness,
    21  Professor Browning, admits that the documentation for
    22  these camps is “scant”, that is his word, and I place
    23  great weight on that admission. Here, the expert cannot
    24  find even one contemporaneous document. He relies upon
    25  the eyewitnesses – men of the ilk of Kurt Gerstein, Jan
    26  Karski, Adolf Eichmann and Rudolf Hoss. The fictional
    .           P-181


      1  elements in their statements – your Lordship will remember
      2  the “130 foot high mountain of clothes” which Professor
      3  Browning in his first draft skipped over, the
      4  “electrocution chambers” and the “steam chambers”, the
      5  deliberately inflated death rolls which would otherwise
      6  shriek their warnings to critical researchers – are either
      7  ignored or suppressed in order to maintain appearances.
      8  My Lord, there is an impressive (and we are both
      9  agreed on this, all parties) level of documentation which
    10  demonstrates that the liquidation by shooting of hundreds
    11  of thousands of Jews, probably over a million, by the
    12  Einsatzgruppen, but there is nothing of equivalent value
    13  for the Operation Reinhard camps. One word, Why?
    14  justifies the revisionist’s scepticism.
    15  The Walter Fohl letter produces a similar
    16  response from the experts. Found in his Berlin Document
    17  Centre personnel file, this man, who is in charge of a
    18  resettlement office at Krakow, is seen writing on June
    19  21st 1942 to his SS comrades as follows:
    20  “Every day, trains are arriving with over 1,000
    21  Jews each from throughout Europe”, in Krakow, passing
    22  through. “We provide first aid here, give them more or
    23  less provisional accommodation, and usually deport them
    24  further towards the White Sea or to the White Ruthenian
    25  marshlands, where they all – if they survive (and the Jews
    26  from Kurfurstendamm or Vienna or Pressburg certainly
    .           P-182


      1  won’t) – will be gathered by the end of the war, but not
      2  without first having built a few roads. (But we’re not
      3  supposed to talk about it).” An extraordinary document.
      4  The expert witnesses, unable otherwise to
      5  explain this document, dismissed it as obvious
      6  “camouflage” talk. But why should Fohl use camouflage
      7  when writing to his SS comrades? As I pointed out to
      8  Dr Longerich, Reinhard Heydrich himself had spoken of the
      9  White Sea option a few days later, on February 4th 1942 in
    10  Prague.
    11  It was noticeable elsewhere that none of the
    12  experts was willing to give documents their natural
    13  meanings when they did not accord with their views. It is
    14  a clear case of manipulation, in my view. The Ahnert
    15  document, recording a meeting at the RSHA in Berlin, under
    16  Eichmann, on August 28th, 1942, was another example.
    17  There was talk of the need for the deportees, August 1942,
    18  to be provided with blankets, shoes, eating utensils
    19  before dispatch to Auschwitz. Eichmann requested the
    20  purchases of barracks for a Jewish deportee camp to be
    21  erected in Russia, with three to five such barracks being
    22  loaded aboard every transport train. In each case,
    23  because the document did not accord with their
    24  “exterminationist” views, the expert had failed to pursue
    25  it. Dr Longerich, who included it as an appendix in one
    26  of his books, had forgotten it even existed when
    .           P-183


      1  I cross-examined him about it.
      2  Coming now towards the end of my submission, my
      3  Lord, the allegations of racism and anti-Semitism. I have
      4  to address the allegations of racism, although I have the
      5  feeling that your Lordship is not over-impressed by them.
      6  MR JUSTICE GRAY:  Do not get feelings one way or the other
      7  about any part of the case, Mr Irving. It is a trap.
      8  MR IRVING:  It was a good try.
      9  MR JUSTICE GRAY:  On the other hand, it is a matter for you
    10  because I am letting you say pretty much what you want to
    11  say, I know because I have them now provided very
    12  conveniently, exactly what it is that is relied on by way
    13  of anti-Semitic statements, racist statements and so on.
    14  MR IRVING:  I shall definitely make some response therefore.
    15  MR JUSTICE GRAY:  Yes. I mean you can deal with them
    16  generally, if you like, rather than going through them, as
    17  it were, one by way. I appreciate you do not go through
    18  them all.
    19  MR IRVING:  I have not gone through them one by one, my Lord.
    20  In fact I have not even read them.
    21  MR JUSTICE GRAY:  I offer you the opportunity of making general
    22  answers to those submissions rather than by reading it all
    23  out. It is entirely up to you.
    24  MR IRVING:  I do not read them all out, but I shall certainly
    25  deal with my arguments. The Defendants have resorted to
    26  the allegations that I am anti-Semitic and racist. It may
    .           P-184


      1  be that they are going to pay dearly for those remarks.
      2  Mr Rampton’s highly paid experts have found one 1963 entry
      3  in my diary, four lines written 37 years ago, about a
      4  visit to my lawyer Mr Michael Rubenstein to discuss a
      5  satirical magazine article which I had written, after
      6  which visit I commented: “Thick skinned these Jews are”.
      7  This is all that they could find from the millions of
      8  words in my diaries available to them by way of
      9  anti-Semitism. Twenty million words of diaries and they
    10  found “Thick skinned these Jews are”. When I remarked on
    11  March 2nd in court, my Lord, upon the obvious paradox that
    12  an alleged anti-Semite would have retained Michael
    13  Rubenstein as his solicitor and respected advisor for 20
    14  years, Mr Rampton’s comment, which your Lordship may well
    15  remember, was: “Many of my best friends are Jews too,
    16  Mr Irving”. This stock line does not disguise the paucity
    17  of his evidence against me.
    18  In further support of this contention they have
    19  taken isolated remarks made in lectures and speeches for
    20  which they have transcribed around half a million words.
    21  My Lord, I trust that your Lordship will in each case
    22  consider the context in which the remarks are made.
    23  MR JUSTICE GRAY:  Of course.
    24  MR IRVING:  And also the broader surrounding countryside, if
    25  I may put it like that. What I would ask your Lordship to
    26  do is to take the ugliest example, whichever your Lordship
    .           P-185


      1  deems that to be, reach up for the full transcript of
      2  whatever that speech was, and ask yourself why I have put
      3  that remark in and see what else is in that speech. Then
      4  I submit that the alleged anti-Semitic remark fails into
      5  insignificance, if it is even taken to be anti-Semitic at
      6  all.
      7  For 30 years, as I set out earlier in this room
      8  this afternoon, I have found myself subjected to vicious
      9  attack by bodies, acting, as they freely admit, as Jews.
    10  For 30 years I endeavoured to turn the other cheek and did
    11  nothing about it. I hope I succeeded. Mr Rampton drew
    12  attention to the fun I poked at Simon Wiesenthal. I made
    13  a joke in a public meeting about his, an explicit joke
    14  I made about his other than good looks, if I can put it
    15  like that. Mr Rampton called that remark “anti-Semitic”.
    16  It was not. It was a joke about the man’s looks, of the
    17  same genre that Mr Rampton made when he enquired
    18  rhetorically of Professor Funke whether a certain
    19  outer-fringe Swedish revisionist seen in one video shown
    20  to the court with long blonde hair was a man or woman. It
    21  is exactly the same kind of throw-away remark.
    22  In view of the manner in which the two Simon
    23  Wiesenthal centres have been abusing my name in their fund
    24  rasing leaflets, and endeavouring to destroy my own
    25  livelihood, the court might think that my fun-making,
    26  while tasteless, remark was not undeserved, possibly it
    .           P-186


      1  was even rather reserved. It was not anti-Semitic.
      2  Mr Wiesenthal is no more immune from criticism either as a
      3  person or as a public figure than I am.
      4  Searching hopefully for evidence of
      5  “anti-Semitism” in me, the investigation by he Board of
      6  Deputies in 1992 came up empty handed in their secret
      7  report which they planted on Canadian government files.
      8  They confirmed that I had dealings with my Jews in my
      9  professional life, and they added that I “used this as an
    10  excuse” to say that I am not an anti-Semite. These people
    11  are hard to please. “He is far too clever an opponent”
    12  the Board wrote in this secret report, “to openly admit to
    13  being an anti-Semite”. “We endorse all condemnation of
    14  anti-Semitism”, they quote me as writing in my newsletter
    15  back in 1982. All of these things, including the actual
    16  1992 secret intelligence report filed by he Board of
    17  Deputies, were disclosed to these Defendants in my
    18  discovery. The Defendants quoted a passage from a speech
    19  delivered, they said, in May 1992. In fact, as my diary
    20  confirms, it was delivered in May 1993. So it may be that
    21  the year was not accidental, because by that time my
    22  family and I had been subjected to a catalogue of insults
    23  by the leaders of these various bodies. If a writer’s
    24  books are banned and burnt, his bookshops are smashed, his
    25  hands are manacled, his person insulted, his printers are
    26  burnt down, his access to the world’s archives is denied,
    .           P-187


      1  his family’s livelihood is destroyed, his phone lines are
      2  jammed with obscene and threatening phone calls, death
      3  threats, his house is beset by violent, angry mobs, the
      4  walls and posts around his address are plastered with
      5  stickers inciting the public to violence against him, and
      6  a wreath is sent to him with a foul and taunting message
      7  on the death of his oldest daughter, then it ill-behoves
      8  people to offer cheap criticism if the writer finally
      9  commits the occasional indiscretion and lapse in referring
    10  to the people who are doing it to him.
    11  I singled out in this — well, I am not going to
    12  comment at length on these evil allegations and slurs.
    13  They lend fire and fury to the original libel complained
    14  of, that is my view. I submit that the word “racism” in
    15  the ears of the man in the Clapham Omnibus is about
    16  Stephen Lawrence and cone heads in the Ku Klux Klan. It
    17  conjures up images of murder and thuggery and violence and
    18  foul-mouthed graffiti. In deliberating on the conduct of
    19  the case and on the appropriate scale of damages, your
    20  Lordship will no doubt bear them in mind, these
    21  allegations made against me.
    22  I voluntarily provided all my entire private
    23  diaries to the Defendants in this action. They asked to
    24  see a few pages and I said “take the lot”. Fifty-nine
    25  volumes of private diaries, 20 million words on paper and
    26  on disk. Mr Rampton produced from them one nineteen-word
    .           P-188


      1  ditty attached to another quite harmless one about the
      2  “messica dressica” of my daughter Jessica. To find in
      3  all those diaries and telephone conversations written
      4  since 1959 just one nineteen-word ditty that you could
      5  trot out for the media, does not suggest that I am as
      6  obsessed with race and racism as learned counsel and, for
      7  that matter, the newspapers that report this case too.
      8  I repeat, this multi-million dollar Defence team
      9  has found one nineteen-word nonsense poem, recorded in my
    10  diary with other Lear- or Belloc-type rhythmic verses as
    11  having been recited to my own nine-month old infant who
    12  has, I am glad to say, grown into a delightful girl of six
    13  now, bearing none of the traces of the poison that
    14  Mr Rampton recklessly suggested that I had fed to her.
    15  Fortunately, I did not sing to her “Three Blind Mice”.
    16  Similarly, from my hundreds of lectures and
    17  talks these very proper spaniels have sniffed out a few
    18  lines of music-hall whit of the type that a Dave Allen
    19  might indulge in, with Mr Trevor McDonald as one of the
    20  butts. That in Mr Rampton’s words is racism. One wonders
    21  which well-shielded part of the modern world is inhabited
    22  by learned counsel. Can anyone go and live there?
    23  The references that I have made to what is now
    24  formally called the Instrumentalization of the Holocaust,
    25  have also been adduced as evidence of anti-Semitism. Are
    26  non-Jews disbarred from making a criticism that is made
    .           P-189


      1  increasing vocally now by others like Professor Peter
      2  Novak or by Leon Weiseltier, the literary editor of the
      3  New Republic who wrote on May 3rd 1993: “It is a sad
      4  fact, said the principal philanthropist of the grotesque
      5  Simon Wiesenthal Centre of Los Angeles, that Israel and
      6  Jewish education and all the other familiar buzz words no
      7  longer seem to rally Jews behind the community, the
      8  Holocaust though works every time.”
      9  I turn to page 89, my Lord, the third
    10  paragraph. In general, I would invite your Lordship to
    11  pick out one such utterance as a sample, to reach then for
    12  the transcript of the entire speech, to take note of the
    13  rest of its content, its clear reference to the very real
    14  sufferings of the Jews, the liquidations, the Bruns report
    15  and the rest, and then ask: Was the remark true? Was it
    16  explicable? Was it rhetorically justified as part of the
    17  skilled lecturer’s armoury?
    18  Your Lordship has been told of my remarks that
    19  more women died on Kennedy’s back seat than in the gas
    20  chamber at Auschwitz, the one shown to the tourists. It
    21  is a tasteless but quite literally true. It is, as I have
    22  shown in this court, even true if the main gas chamber at
    23  Birkenau is brought into the equation, crematorium (ii),
    24  the factory of death, because the eyewitnesses lied about
    25  that one too. The Poles have admitted that the Auschwitz
    26  building and its chimney are a post-1948 fake. My
    .           P-190


      1  colourful language, my tasteless language, was a
      2  rhetorical way of bringing that extraordinary revelation
      3  home to audiences.
      4  The audiences, I am told, are extreme audiences,
      5  of extreme people, although the photographs suggest rather
      6  differently. They appear rather boring middle-age kind of
      7  people.
      8  My files confirm that I occasionally addressed
      9  audiences of the Association for Free Journalism in
    10  Germany, the National Democratic Party in Germany and the
    11  German Peoples Union. My Lord, those four documents which
    12  I have disclosed to the Defendants, they are English
    13  translations of the policy leaflets, the manifestos of
    14  these bodies, and in my submission they do not show them
    15  to be extreme in any way. These were, furthermore, bodies
    16  that were accepted at that time under Germany’s very
    17  strict laws as being legal and constitutional. But the
    18  court is more concerned, I believe, with have individual
    19  personages than with bodies, than with the actual
    20  organizations. I have not the slightest doubt that this
    21  court will find that I had no meaningful contact with the
    22  ugly rag-bag neo-Nazi extremists mentioned by Professor
    23  Funke, people with whom, to make the point quite clearly,
    24  the Defendants, their experts and their legal team seem
    25  more familiar than I. Most of the names were completely
    26  unknown to me and the Defence have sought, in vein, for
    .           P-191


      1  them in my diaries and papers, to which I emphasise yet
      2  again I gave them complete and unlimited privileged
      3  access. This has not stopped them from bringing these
      4  names forward and mentioning these alleged links in the
      5  open court in an attempt to smear me still further with an
      6  eye particularly on the German media. I urge that this,
      7  their conduct of the case, be held against them.
      8  Characteristically of the weakness of their
      9  case, Professor Funke listed one entry in a diary where
    10  I noted “road journey with a Thomas” whose second name
    11  I never learned; Funke entered the name “Dienel?” So for
    12  as I know, I have never met a Dienel, but it illustrates
    13  the kind of evidence that the Defence were hoping to rely
    14  upon.
    15  As for Michael Kuhnen, the documentary evidence
    16  before both Professor Funke when he wrote his report and
    17  before this court, is that I explicitly said I would not
    18  attend any function at which he was even present. I never
    19  did and I never met him.
    20  By way of evidence the court has been shown a
    21  number of videos. Shorn of their commercial packaging,
    22  they do not amount to very much, in my submission. In
    23  view of the weight attached to it by learned counsel and
    24  by his witness Professor Funke, my Lord, I have
    25  re-examined the raw video of Halle function of November
    26  9th 1991 at which I briefly spoke, and I have timed and
    .           P-192


      1  listed the scenes that it shows. My Lord, you will see in
      2  the footnote on that page that I have given the
      3  appropriate breakdown referring to the time on the video.
      4  Your Lordship may wish at sometime to have the
      5  video back to check that these times are correct, or the
      6  Defendants’ solicitors may wish to submit any corrections
      7  they feel are needed.
      8  MR JUSTICE GRAY:  No. I will assume your time is correct
      9  unless I am told otherwise.
    10  MR IRVING:  Yes, unless otherwise informed. The raw details
    11  are, when the when camera’s meter shows 170021 I am first
    12  seen arriving at an unnamed hotel restaurant in Halle,
    13  accompanied by Mrs Worch and by David Leigh of he Sunday
    14  Observer. At 17:14:40 I am again glimpsed, 14 minutes
    15  later, still at the hotel speaking to a reporter. The
    16  cameraman and David Leigh then go off to film the rival
    17  processions during which I am at no time seen on film. In
    18  fact I remained lunching at the hotel. At 18:11:00 a
    19  truck is seen being rigged as an open-air platform, and at
    20  18:14:26 I am seen with two reporters watching from the
    21  edge of the square. In my submission, my Lord, I do not
    22  have a particularly happy look on my face at all at what
    23  I am seeing.
    24  At 18:16 I walk over to the platform, hands in
    25  pockets and mount it. The man whom Professor Funke tells
    26  us is Dienel, and I have no way of checking it one way or
    .           P-193


      1  the other, is seen to get off to the left and there is no
      2  contact whatever between him and me. Mr Worch briefly
      3  introduces me to the audience. I begin speaking at
      4  18:16:39 and the filmed portion of my speech ends less
      5  than three and a half minutes later.
      6  When the off-screen chanting of slogans begins
      7  at 18:18:59 I am clearly seen to interrupt my speech,
      8  shake my head at them and gesticulate with my left hand to
      9  them to stop, and I am clearly heard to say, “You must
    10  not”, because they are shouting the “Siegheil” slogans,
    11  Mein Fuhrer, and things like, “you must not always be
    12  thinking of the past”. I am heard clearly to say: “You
    13  must always be thinking of the past. You must not keep
    14  coming out with the slogans of the past. We are thinking
    15  of the future [voice emphasised] of Germany. We are
    16  thinking of the future of the German people. As an
    17  Englishman I have to say …”, and so on. So I am quite
    18  clearly expressing extreme anger at these people who have
    19  come along with their Nazi slogans.
    20  Six seconds after ending my brief speech I am
    21  seen to leave the platform without further contact with
    22  anybody. My diary notes that I at once left by car and
    23  drove back to the Rhur in Western Germany.
    24  Heavily edited, for example to remove my rebuke
    25  to these slogan-shouting people, whom I took and take to
    26  have been agents provocateurs, this sequence was shown on
    .           P-194


      1  November 28th and 29th to British TV audiences in a “This
      2  Week” programme entitled “Hitler’s Children, the New
      3  Nazis”, directed by the German Michael Schmidt, Professor
      4  Funke’s star witness, and with none other than Gerald
      5  Gable of Searchlight listed as the consultant, and in
      6  Despatches on the other channel. This indicates whose
      7  hands were behind the editing. Again, heavily edited the
      8  film has been shown around the world against me. This was
      9  the thrice edited film to which I drew your Lordship’s
    10  attention in suggesting there was evidence of dubious
    11  admissibility.
    12  May I again remind your Lordship of my basic
    13  principle on lecturing. Unlike the Defendants who have
    14  proudly stated that they refuse to debate with opponents,
    15  I have expressed a readiness to attend, to address all and
    16  any who are willing to listen. Your Lordship will
    17  remember my letter of June 24th 1988 to my editor William
    18  Morrow, Connie Roosevelt, to whom I wrote:
    19  “I have been invited to speak as a guest
    20  speaker at a right-wing function in Los Angeles next
    21  February. They have offered a substantial fee and all my
    22  expenses, and until now I have adopted a policy of never
    23  refusing an invitation if the speakers meet my terms,
    24  namely a free speech and a fat fee. On this occasion
    25  I intend to give the audience a piece of mind about some
    26  of their lunatic views.”
    .           P-195


      1  I may secondly point out that were it not for
      2  the clandestine activities of the violent and extremist
      3  bodies dedicated to destroy my right to free speech and
      4  the rights of all audiences in the United States and
      5  elsewhere, at Berkley, at Dublin, Pretoria or wherever, to
      6  hear my opponents and equally dedicated to intimidating my
      7  publishers and smashing bookstall windows, where it not
      8  for their hate campaign I would have been able to continue
      9  in the normal manner with my exemplary professional
    10  career. It rings hollow that the same shabby bodies who
    11  have generated the hatred against me now point their
    12  crooked finger at my and abuse me using the very
    13  considerable privileges afforded to them by this court, to
    14  continuing to make my voice heard whenever I can. When
    15  I use words to describe them in detail, which they well
    16  deserve, they ring their hands lament about extremism.
    17  I have pointed out that so far as Germany is
    18  concerned, none of the German bodies who invited me to
    19  speak was illegal or banned. In fact when first invited
    20  to address the German Peoples Union I wrote to and
    21  telephoned the Germany Embassy, as the documents in my
    22  discovery show, and asked them specifically whether this
    23  was a legal and constitutional body. The Embassy
    24  confirmed in writing on July 25th 1984 that was. The
    25  extremism was in the eye of beholder. The further to the
    26  left the beholder squinted from, the more distant these
    .           P-196


      1  bodies may have seem from him.
      2  We have heard a lot from Professor Funke, the
      3  sociologist of the Free University in Berlin. My Lord,
      4  I am now going to pass over the next two pages and
      5  continue from the bottom of page 94. As for his
      6  allegation, the allegation by Professor Funke, here in
      7  court, my Lord, I also ask you to disregard those two
      8  pages.
      9  MR JUSTICE GRAY:  Yes, I think I know why, and I think that is
    10  very right and proper.
    11  MR IRVING:  As for his allegation here in court that I should
    12  have known that various allegations were going to be
    13  banned in years ahead, it is difficult for an Englishmen
    14  coming from a country with deeper democratic traditions
    15  than Professor Funke’s, to implant himself into the brain
    16  or mindset of the authoritarian German mould where book
    17  burning is now once again de rigueur, where a German
    18  academic like Funke does not bat an eyelid upon hearing
    19  that a teacher is still serving a seven-year jail sentence
    20  imposed for chairing a lecture at which I spoke, where two
    21  District Court judges who acquitted that teacher were
    22  reprimanded and finally retired in disgrace by order of
    23  the Minister of Justice, and where governments recently
    24  have begun routinely banning fringe opposition parties and
    25  circumscribing even their legal activities.
    26  My general response to this attempt at “guilt by
    .           P-197


      1  association” which we have seen a lot over the last few
      2  weeks, is to compare it with the worst accesses of the
      3  inquisitions conducted by Senator Joseph McCarthy. In
      4  Britain the courts have always viewed it as repugnant;
      5  most recently I believe Morland J in another court in the
      6  same building. Hollywood’s finest scriptwriters, many of
      7  them Jewish, had their careers vernichtet, to use that
      8  word again, by the reckless allegation that they had
      9  associated with known communists. Now come these
    10  Defendants levelling the mirror image of these same
    11  charges at me. McCarthyism was rightly exposed for what
    12  it was in more recent years and more enlightened years,
    13  and these Defendants for their own purposes are seeking to
    14  turn the clock back.
    15  As far as the United States are concerned, apart
    16  from the Institute of Historical Review, which I shall
    17  deal with separately, the one organization identified by
    18  learned counsel for the Defence, as I understand it, is
    19  the National Alliance. First let me point out that, no
    20  doubt with good reason, the Defendants have decided not to
    21  call their expert on political extremism in the United
    22  States, Professor Levin, and they have withdrawn his
    23  expert report. I think “junked” was the word. Mr Rampton
    24  used the word “junked” or “dumped” I believe. Had they
    25  not I would have “debunked” it I think. We have,
    26  therefore, no general expert evidence as to the nature of
    .           P-198


      1  he National Alliance, and I think I ought to emphasise
      2  that matter. The court is probably as much in the dark
      3  about this group as anybody else.
      4  The Defence invites the court to study the
      5  leaflets put about by that body at one meeting, but could
      6  offer to the court not the slightest evidence that I was
      7  aware of such leaflets or, for that matter, if they are
      8  once again falling back on negligence, that I ought to
      9  have been aware of them.
    10  If, as I submit, the meetings were organized by
    11  individual friends of mine acting outside whatever their
    12  capacity, if any, within the National Alliance may have
    13  been, there is no reason why I should have read such
    14  leaflets if they were indeed on offer.
    15  As for the IHR, the Institute of Historical
    16  Review, I have little to add to what I have stated in my
    17  various written replies and on the witness stand. It is
    18  clearly unsatisfactory, though not surprising, that
    19  establishment scholars feel the need to dismiss any rival
    20  body of scholars or historians as extremists, merely on
    21  the basis that these others propagate a different version
    22  of history from their own consensus versions.
    23  The officials of the IHR nearly all hold
    24  academic qualifications. True they are not trained
    25  historians, but then neither are some of the most famous
    26  names of historians in both ancient and contemporary
    .           P-199


      1  times. It is clear from correspondence before the court
      2  that I recognize he short-comings in the old IHR, and
      3  I was keen to introduce them to new speakers, including
      4  mainline scholars, historians like John Toland who did in
      5  fact speak there, Professor Ernst Nolte and Michael
      6  Beschloss. I am not and never have been an official of
      7  the IHR. At most, one of many friendly advisers. As for
      8  speaking engagements, my association with the IHR has been
      9  the same as my association with (I use the word
    10  “association” again), for example, Cambridge University
    11  Fabian Society because I spoke there too, or the Trinity
    12  College Dublin Lit. &Debc., or any other body of
    13  enlightened people keen to hear alternative views.
    14  Professor Evans in his odious attempts to smear
    15  and defile my name which I hope will long haunt him in the
    16  common rooms at Cambridge, called me a frequent speaker at
    17  the IHR, and may I say “so what?” None of my lectures had
    18  a Holocaust denial or anti-Semitic or extremist theme.
    19  I spoke on Churchill, on Pearl Harbour, on Rommel, on the
    20  Goebbels’ Diaries, on my Eichmann papers find, and on
    21  general problems of writing history. The court has
    22  learned that I have in fact addressed functions of the IHR
    23  only five times in seventeen years, one lecture each
    24  time. No amount of squirming by this expert witness could
    25  increase that figure. It is true that I socialized before
    26  or after the event with the IHR officials and their
    .           P-200


      1  wives. So what? It is true that I use their warehousing
      2  facilities. So what? It is true that the IHR, along with
      3  thousands of other retail outlets sell my books. So what?
      4  It is true that I introduced them to subjects which some
      5  members of their audience found deeply uncomfortable, for
      6  example, the confessions of Adolf Eichmann, the harrowing
      7  Bruns report and the Kristallnacht. I would willingly
      8  read out the relevant extracts of my lectures to the IHR,
      9  but my Lord, through the courtesy and industry of the
    10  Defendants’ solicitors, which I have already had cause to
    11  praise, your Lordship is already funded with extensive
    12  transcripts of precisely those talks, and I would ask that
    13  your Lordship read them or look at them with this
    14  paragraph in mind.
    15  I am accused of telling audiences what they want
    16  to hear, and that may be partially true, but, by Jove,
    17  having done so, then I used the goodwill generated like
    18  that to tell them a lot of things they very much did not
    19  want to hear. The Defendants would willingly overlook
    20  that aspect of my association with the IHR, and I trust
    21  that the court will not.
    22  As for the National Alliance, an organization of
    23  which the Defence makes much, once again, as an
    24  Englishman —-
    25  MR JUSTICE GRAY:  You have dealt with that already.
    26  MR IRVING:  We have had it, but I am back again, my Lord. It
    .           P-201


      1  must have been quite late at night when I wrote this
      2  part. As an Englishman I am completely unfamiliar with he
      3  nature the National Alliance, its logo and its name. It
      4  may be that the name means more to the Defendants and to
      5  those who are financing the efforts than it means to me.
      6  It certainly meant nothing to the English members of the
      7  gallery on the day that it was mentioned here.
      8  I have no meaningful contacts with the
      9  organization as such. One or at most two of its
    10  individuals members who were already on my mailing list
    11  volunteered, like scores of other Americans, to organize
    12  lectures for me. One was Erich Gliebe who has always
    13  organized my lectures Cleveland in Ohio. On the evidence
    14  of his notepaper from the year 1990 (that is ten years ago
    15  now) he is also a National Alliance member. I ask the
    16  court to accept that when asked about it ten years later
    17  I had long forgotten receiving that one letter from him
    18  with its heading and its logo. Before each lecture date
    19  I mailed an invitation letter to my entire mailing list of
    20  friends in each State. The audience was, therefore,
    21  largely my own people, if I can put it like that. That is
    22  why Mr Breeding rather superfluously welcomes the
    23  strangers in his opening remarks on the Florida video tape
    24  as seen. Had he told me he would also claim to do so on
    25  behalf of his organization, I would have told him not to.
    26  It was my function and the audience were my guests and not
    .           P-202


      1  his.
      2  The photographs taken at this meeting shows, as
      3  the Defendants’ own agents have warranted, no formal
      4  National Alliance presence, flags, arm bands or whatever.
      5  The witness statement of Rebecca Gutmann has confirmed
      6  this.
      7  Learned counsel for the Defendants has drawn
      8  attention to one 18-inch wide pennant, that is my
      9  estimate, displayed at the function on a side wall with
    10  what they state is the National Alliance logo on it
    11  visible on the video film. Its logo appears to be based
    12  on the CND design. I did not notice it at the time nor
    13  would I have had the faintest idea what it was if I did.
    14  Evidently Mr Gliebe told me that his pals at the National
    15  Alliance had had a hand in organizing my successful
    16  Cleveland function, and that is why I noted in my diary
    17  with a hint of surprise that it turns out that the
    18  National Alliance had organized the other meeting too.
    19  The court may agree that this phrase alone is
    20  evidence that their involvement was (A) not manifest, and
    21  (B) not known to me before. Given that the audience was
    22  largely my own making, it does not seem worthy of much
    23  note. I submit that this kind of defence evidence really
    24  does not meet the enhanced standard of proof required by
    25  law on defamation for justification of the more serious
    26  charges.
    .           P-203


      1  MR JUSTICE GRAY:  I do not think you need bother with the next
      2  paragraph frankly.
      3  MR IRVING:  In general, it is also to be stated that at
      4  material times, namely when associated with those
      5  individuals, they were not extremists — I take it that
      6  your Lordship accepts what I said in that paragraph?
      7  MR JUSTICE GRAY:  I do not think, frankly, that the evidence of
      8  your contacts with the BNP amounts to anything.
      9  MR IRVING:  Thank you very much. In general, it is also to be
    10  stated that at material times, namely when I was
    11  associated with those individuals, they were not
    12  extremists; nor has it been shown to the court that at
    13  that time they were. Thus at the time I first met this
    14  young man Ewald Althans in Germany late in October 1989,
    15  he seemed full of promise and eager to learn. I later
    16  learned that he had been to Israel for six months on a
    17  German Government voluntary scheme for young Germans who
    18  wished to atone. Over the two or three years that our
    19  orbits occasionally intercepted I could see that he was
    20  growing more extreme and provocative in his actions. He
    21  also became undependable and wayward in a number of
    22  non-political ways that I mentioned in court.
    23  According to Der Spiegel at his 1995 trial in
    24  Berlin, Althans had acted for the Bavarian security
    25  authorities as a top agent until 1994 when they ended the
    26  liaison. The German security authorities had, as
    .           P-204


      1  Professor Funke agreed, a record of hiring agents
      2  provocateurs.
      3  I now come to Ernst Zundel, the next paragraph.
      4  Ernst Zundel is a German born Canadian for whose own
      5  particular views I hold no brief. I later learned that he
      6  had apparently written some provocatively-themed books
      7  with tongue-in-cheek titles on flying saucers in
      8  Antarctica, and on the “Adolf Hitler that I knew and
      9  loved”, which is said to be worst than outre; wild horses
    10  would not make me read such books myself. I had met him
    11  in 1986 and found that as a personality he was not as dark
    12  as had been painted in the media. I was asked to give
    13  expert evidence at his trial in Toronto in 1988 relating
    14  to the Third Reich and Hitler’s own involvement in the
    15  Holocaust. I did so to the best of my professional
    16  abilities, and I was told that I had earned the
    17  commendation of the court in doing so.
    18  It is plain to me from what I know that
    19  Mr Zundel has been subjected to 20-year onslaught by the
    20  Canadian organizations dedicated to combatting what they
    21  regard as Holocaust denial because of his dissident views,
    22  which are certainly more extreme than mine. My own
    23  relationship with Mr Zundel has been proper throughout,
    24  and the court has not been given any evidence to the
    25  contrary. At times it has even been strained because of
    26  the misfortune inflicted on me in retribution for having
    .           P-205


      1  spoken at his trial.
      2  My Lord, there remain one or two minor matters,
      3  in my view. The Defendants alleged that I wilfully
      4  exaggerated the Dresden death roll in my 1963 book “The
      5  Destruction of Dresden”, and that I had no basis for my
      6  figures. I have satisfied this court, I believe, that at
      7  all times (A) I set and published the proper upper and
      8  lower limits for estimates that I gave, giving a wide
      9  range of figures which necessarily decreased overall over
    10  the years as our state of information improved, and that
    11  (B) I had an adequate basis for the various figures which
    12  I provided in my works at the material times. It has to
    13  be said that authors have little or no control over the
    14  content of books that are sub-licensed by their main
    15  publisher to other publishers. Revisions are not
    16  encouraged for costs reasons.
    17  I have always been aware of the highly charged
    18  political nature of the figures quote for this event, the
    19  bombing of Dresden. The highest figure of 250,000, which
    20  I mentioned in my books only as the maximum ever alleged,
    21  was given, for example, by the German Chancellor
    22  Dr Comrade Ardenau in a West German official government
    23  publication which I showed the court. The lowest figures
    24  only became available in a book published in 1994 by
    25  Fredrich Reichardt. A copy of this book was provided to
    26  me in 1997. By that time I had already published the
    .           P-206


      1  latest updated version of my book which is now called
      2  “Apocalypse 1945, The Destruction of Dresden”, in which
      3  I had lowered the death roll still further on the basis of
      4  my on investigations and considerations. This was the
      5  first edition over which I, not the publisher, had total
      6  control, as it appeared under my own imprint.
      7  In 1965, as the court is aware, I received
      8  written estimates of 140,000 and 180,000 dead from a
      9  rather anxious Soviet zone citizen, Dr Max Funfack, who
    10  claimed to have received them about nine days after the
    11  raid from the City Commandant and the Chief Civil Defence
    12  Officer respectively, both of them his personal friends.
    13  That being so, there was no reason why I should have
    14  revised the 135,000 estimate which I had earlier received
    15  from Hans Voigt, a city official charged with drawing up
    16  death lists when I was researching my first book in 1961.
    17  In 1966 I received the police final report of
    18  March 1945. While still remaining sceptical about it for
    19  the reasons stated, for example, the officer was
    20  responsible for Dresden’s ARP and it was too early to
    21  achieve any kind of overall final figure, the number of
    22  refugees killed was also an imponderable. I took the
    23  correct action, however. I sent to letter to The Times
    24  within a few days of finding the new documents, that is
    25  July 1996, within a few days of finding the new documents
    26  in the mail on my return from a trip to the United
    .           P-207


      1  States. Not only that, but at my own expense I had the
      2  letter reprinted and sent to hundreds of historians and
      3  the like. One hopes that the expert witnesses whom we saw
      4  in the witness stand on behalf of the Defence would have
      5  had the same integrity to do the same kind of thing.
      6  As for the Goebbels diaries, the Defendants, as
      7  I understand it, do not now seek to justify their claim
      8  that I broke an agreement with the Moscow archives in
      9  1992.
    10  MR JUSTICE GRAY:  I do not think that is right, but do not take
    11  time on it because I think I know what the case is.
    12  MR IRVING:  They have withdrawn witness reports of the Russian
    13  archivists and will provide me no opportunity to
    14  cross-examine them. I was prepared to pursue those
    15  cross-examinations most vigorously. I produced a witness
    16  statement from Mr Peter Millar of the Sunday Times, my
    17  colleague in Moscow, and I made him available for
    18  cross-examination. He confirmed that there was no verbal
    19  or written agreement, as I had also stated in my various
    20  replies, so therefore I could not have broken it. The
    21  Defendants have left no satisfactory evidence before the
    22  court that refutes this, in my submission.
    23  Mr Millar also confirmed to the court that he
    24  did not agree that my conduct gave rise to significant
    25  risk of damage to the plates. The plates had been
    26  withheld from historians by the Russians for 55 years or
    .           P-208


      1  more. That figure of course is wrong. It is 48 years at
      2  that time, I am sorry. The plates have been withheld from
      3  historians for 48 years or more. By my actions I made
      4  this historically very important materials available to
      5  the world, and I placed copies of them in the appropriate
      6  German archives at my own expense.
      7  My Lord, I make submission now on the Heinrich
      8  Muller document.

    Section 209.7 to 222.11

      9  MR JUSTICE GRAY:  I do not think I would read that out if
    10  I were you. I think that is not the best way of dealing
    11  with it.
    12  MR IRVING:  No. I will leave it as a written submission.
    13  MR JUSTICE GRAY:  Have you seen what — I am sure you have seen
    14  it because I have a copy of a letter to you with
    15  attachments.
    16  MR IRVING:  I have seen it, my Lord, yes.
    17  MR JUSTICE GRAY:  In the light of those attachments and
    18  including Professor Longerich’s really quite helpful
    19  account of his investigations, what is your submission?
    20  MR IRVING:  I am not challenging the authenticity of the
    21  document, my Lord, but I am asking that attention be paid
    22  to the fact that it is highly unsatisfactory that I am not
    23  provided in good time, in a timeous manner, with the file
    24  dated that I needed in order to go behind the document and
    25  establish whether there was anything which would undermine
    26  the purport that the defendants were seeking to attach to
    .           P-209


      1  that document.
      2  MR JUSTICE GRAY:  You mean the other documents in the same
      3  file?
      4  MR IRVING:  Like in the case of the Schlegelberger document,
      5  which enabled the Defendants to attack the meaning of the
      6  Schlegelberger document, because they had documents
      7  relating to it in the same file which enabled them to
      8  narrow it down and say this is clearly a reference to the
      9  Mischlinge.
    10  MR JUSTICE GRAY:  Sorry, we are talking about the Muller
    11  document, are we not?
    12  MR IRVING:  We are talking about the Muller document. I am
    13  saying that, had I had the other documents in the same
    14  file —-
    15  MR JUSTICE GRAY:  What has it got to do with Mischlinge?
    16  MR IRVING:  I could have gone behind the Muller document, using
    17  the other documents in the same file.
    18  MR JUSTICE GRAY:  You mean as you did with Schlegelberger?
    19  MR IRVING:  As they did with Schlegelberger.
    20  MR JUSTICE GRAY:  Yes, I follow. I am not quite sure,
    21  Dr Longerich wrote to Dr Aaron Reich, as I understand it,
    22  to see what other documents there were in the file, but
    23  I do not know what the result was, or indeed when the
    24  question was asked. You do not know either?
    25  MR IRVING:  I asked the question and I was given a totally
    26  fictitious file number in the German Federal archives.
    .           P-210


      1  MR RAMPTON:  Not by us.
      2  MR IRVING:  It was given by you because it was in the footnote
      3  of one of your expert reports as being the source.
      4  MR JUSTICE GRAY:  As I understand it, and do not let us talk
      5  over each other too much, my understanding is that first
      6  time around the wrong file number was given, but then
      7  later the correct file number is thought to have been
      8  discovered, which then prompted Dr Longerich to write to
      9  or to fax Dr Aaron Reich, asking if he could say what the
    10  other documents in this file are.
    11  MR IRVING:  The correct file number was then notified to me
    12  this last weekend, which of course gave me no time
    13  whatsoever to do the kind of research that I would have
    14  had to do.
    15  MR JUSTICE GRAY:  Anyway, your position is you do not deny its
    16  authenticity, but you do say that the provenance is
    17  unsatisfactory.
    18  MR IRVING:  I do say it has been improperly produced to me in a
    19  manner which has made it impossible for me to attack its
    20  meaning, but I have attacked its meaning nevertheless in
    21  my submission.
    22  MR JUSTICE GRAY:  I know you have.
    23  MR IRVING:  I am not seriously worried about it because I am
    24  sure that your Lordship will accept what I said about the
    25  meaning.
    26  MR JUSTICE GRAY:  Do you mind if I ask Mr Rampton what the
    .           P-211


      1  explanation of—-
      2  MR RAMPTON:  I do not see it that any criticism at all can be
      3  made —-
      4  MR JUSTICE GRAY:  When was Dr Aaron Reich asked the question?
      5  MR RAMPTON:  Where is that, my Lord?
      6  MR JUSTICE GRAY:  It is paragraph numbered 4 on the second
      7  page.
      8  MR RAMPTON:  I think that, unless I have completely
      9  misunderstood this clip of papers, I confess I have not
    10  paid it a terrific lot of attention recently, there is,
    11  I think, actually a page of the little clip showing that a
    12  fax was sent or received — I can see. It has my own fax
    13  number right at the top of it so I think it is what
    14  Dr Longerich says he sent from my chambers. It looks like
    15  16.48 on Friday, but unfortunately I cannot read it.
    16  MR JUSTICE GRAY:  That was the problem I had which is why
    17  I asked when it had been sent. Leave aside when it was
    18  sent. What was the answer?
    19  MR RAMPTON:  I do not know when it was sent.
    20  MR JUSTICE GRAY:  Sorry, what was the answer from Aaron Reich?
    21  MR RAMPTON:  There was one in the Washington archive as well.
    22  The reply says, whatever its date may be — I can see it
    23  is 10th March. It is from somebody called Anna Row. She
    24  is writing to both Aaron Reich, who I think might be in
    25  New York, I really do not know, and to Dr Longerich. What
    26  she says is: “After some searching and help from Jurgen,
    .           P-212


      1  we were able to find a copy of the document in question.
      2  The citation in Moscow is, according to the two records”
      3  etc. etc., and gives the reference. “If a fax copy is
      4  desired we can send it along”.
      5  MR JUSTICE GRAY:  I follow all that and, as I understand it,
      6  not making too much of a meal of it all, there are two
      7  copies of this document, one in Moscow and another in
      8  Germany, the German copy having been provided from
      9  Moscow. That may or may not be satisfactory, but what
    10  I was really concerned to know is what attempts, if any,
    11  have been made to discover what other documents were in
    12  the same file, because I think the request was not an
    13  unreasonable one, that the other documents in the file
    14  might cast some light on the significance of Muller.
    15  MR RAMPTON:  I simply do not know. If that is not addressed in
    16  Dr Longerich’s note, I cannot give an answer about it
    17  because I was not a party to it.
    18  MR JUSTICE GRAY:  That was one of the things that I think
    19  I suggested on day 30 or day 31, I cannot remember,
    20  Mr Irving should be given an answer to.
    21  MR RAMPTON:  Plainly, I would submit, the position must be
    22  this. The reason why, not including the November 1941
    23  document, Mr Irving tendered the other Schlegelberger
    24  documents is that, on one view of its dating, the other
    25  documents might be of some relevance. I assume — this
    26  is an assumption — that a distinguished and respectable
    .           P-213


      1  historian like Dr Longerich would not produce a single
      2  document from a file if there were other surrounding
      3  documents which, to his knowledge, had a bearing on its
      4  interpretation.
      5  MR JUSTICE GRAY:  Yes, but he does not say so, that is the
      6  problem. He does not say that he has looked, or tried to
      7  look and failed.
      8  MR RAMPTON:  In any event, since Mr Irving accepts the
      9  authenticity of the document, the fact that there are not
    10  any other documents around it leads nowhere.
    11  MR JUSTICE GRAY:  We do not even know that, do we? We do not
    12  know whether there are other documents in the same file.
    13  MR RAMPTON:  There might be a source, I do not know. In fact,
    14  I think I may have been guilty of not reading the message
    15  carefully enough. I read paragraph 1 of Dr Longerich’s
    16  note which was prepared yesterday: “I am familiar with
    17  this document. A copy is available in the archival
    18  collection of the Zentralstelle in Ludwigsburg. This is a
    19  collection of documents which was handed over by the
    20  Soviet authorities in 1969 to the Federal Republic”. It
    21  begs the question, I interpose there, how on earth it is
    22  that Mr Irving has never seen it. It has been there since
    23  1969. “The document is accompanied by a covering page
    24  with an archival reference to the file where the original
    25  is kept 500.1.25. This is an archival reference from the
    26  Soviet archive in Moscow. Fons” — whatever that
    .           P-214


      1  means — “security police and SD, part 1 of the
      2  collection, file 25. I was in Moscow”, says Dr Longerich
      3  “in 1992 for four weeks, and I looked at documents from
      4  this fons extensively. At the moment I cannot remember
      5  whether I saw the original of this document during my stay
      6  in Moscow, but I kept notes about this day and could
      7  reconstruct what I saw there. The notes are at the moment
      8  in Munich”. That plainly does not suggest that he
      9  believes that there are any other relevant documents in
    10  that file.
    11  MR JUSTICE GRAY:  It does not say one way or the other. He
    12  says he cannot remember. It probably is a point of
    13  absolutely no significance but, since it is something that
    14  Mr Irving has raised and I did indicate that I thought he
    15  ought to have an answer, I would still like such
    16  information as can be obtained from Dr Longerich to be
    17  communicated to him and to me.
    18  MR RAMPTON:  I will try again. Given that it is accepted to be
    19  an authentic document, and given also that it is not
    20  perhaps a document that lies at the heart of the case
    21  though it has some significance obviously, I will do
    22  it. That leads me to make an enquiry, if I may, of your
    23  Lordship.
    24  MR IRVING:  Can I just finish?
    25  MR JUSTICE GRAY:  Yes. You have some other points?
    26  MR RAMPTON:  My Lord, I am sorry, this is a connected enquiry,
    .           P-215


      1  if I may. That may take time. I do not know myself at
      2  the moment what date judgment is likely to be because
      3  obviously, if your Lordship is going to consider any
      4  additional documents, they will need to be got sooner
      5  rather than later.
      6  MR JUSTICE GRAY:  I do not know either. I hope it will not be
      7  as long as you might fear. That does not tell you very
      8  much, does it. That is not intended to be delphic,
      9  but think in terms of a small number of weeks rather than
    10  a large number of months.
    11  MR RAMPTON:  I was not trying to put any pressure on at all.
    12  For the sake of this exercise, I obviously need to know.
    13  If it is going to be in three or four days time,
    14  I probably will not be able to achieve it.
    15  MR JUSTICE GRAY:  I think that will be unlikely. That is all I
    16  can do. If you can obtain it as soon as possible — if
    17  you cannot, so be it. We will have to manage without.
    18  MR RAMPTON:  We will do what we can.
    19  MR JUSTICE GRAY:  Mr Irving, you have listed some other
    20  matters.
    21  MR IRVING:  I wish to conclude on page 104, if I may.
    22  MR JUSTICE GRAY:  I am so sorry. Hang on, why are you telling
    23  me about that now?
    24  MR IRVING:  Okay, then it is wrong that I should let your
    25  Lordship know.
    26  MR JUSTICE GRAY:  Is that not relevant only to costs? Tell me
    .           P-216


      1  if I am wrong, but that would be the way I would see it.
      2  MR IRVING:  Not only the costs, my Lord, there are other
      3  features of part 36.
      4  MR JUSTICE GRAY:  Let me just read it.
      5  MR IRVING:  My understanding is that your Lordship was not
      6  informed of what was in the offer, but that offer was made
      7  under the new rules.
      8  MR JUSTICE GRAY:  I do not see the relevance of telling me that
      9  unless and until it comes to the question of costs.
    10  MR IRVING:  Yes. The question of costs is covered by the next
    11  paragraph, which is that I do not propose asking for my
    12  costs in this action.
    13  MR JUSTICE GRAY:  It is premature to be telling me that.
    14  MR IRVING:  Not at all, my Lord. This is surely the place when
    15  I can put this into your Lordship’s mind and that deals
    16  with it, puts it out of the way.
    17  MR JUSTICE GRAY:  It is true, but I would only address that
    18  question once judgment had been given.
    19  MR IRVING:  But I do ask your Lordship to give judgment in the
    20  terms and premises set out in my writ and statement of
    21  claim, namely damages, including aggravated damages for
    22  libel and an injunction restraining the Defendants and
    23  each of them, whether by themselves or agents or otherwise
    24  from further publishing or causing to be published the
    25  said or similar words defamatory of myself as claimant.
    26  MR JUSTICE GRAY:  Yes. You gave me that little list of other
    .           P-217


      1  things you were going to raise today. Standard of proof
      2  in graver libels, I think you know that I believe I know
      3  what the law is on that so you need not trouble with it,
      4  unless you want to. Is there anything you wanted to say
      5  particularly, Mr Irving? I am not stopping you, I just do
      6  not think it is really necessary.
      7  MR IRVING:  It is trite law, is it not, my Lord?
      8  MR JUSTICE GRAY:  It is.
      9  MR IRVING:  We had this discussion earlier and I thought it
    10  important — in fact it is obviously very impertinent of
    11  me to draw it your Lordship’s attention.
    12  MR JUSTICE GRAY:  It is not at all, no. I have it in mind
    13  anyway. Section 5, I think we have resolved that in an
    14  earlier discussion today.
    15  MR IRVING:  We have dealt with 4 because I have now done it.
    16  MR JUSTICE GRAY:  Yes. Costs we have decided it is premature.
    17  Now I realize time is passing but it is obviously sensible
    18  to conclude everything today, and I hope I can perhaps do
    19  it in this comprehensive way. You have seen that in the
    20  Defendants’ detailed written submissions they recite
    21  various concessions — you may not like the term but they
    22  call them concessions which they say you have made about
    23  such matters as shootings in the East, numbers killed,
    24  whether it was systematic, whether Hitler knew about it,
    25  and also in relation to deaths at the Reinhardt death
    26  camps. Do you accept you did make those concessions?
    .           P-218


      1  MR IRVING:  The answer is I have not seen them, but I know of
      2  them. I have not had any time at all to read that big
      3  thick thing.
      4  MR JUSTICE GRAY:  Then I do not think it is fair to ask you to
      5  give answers on the hoof. What I will ask you to do
      6  though is this. If you either dispute that you ever made
      7  the concessions that the Defendants say you made, or you
      8  want now to reconsider —-
      9  MR IRVING:  Resile.
    10  MR JUSTICE GRAY:  Well, I was trying not to use that word
    11  actually — to reconsider, then would you write to me and
    12  to the Defendants, shortly setting out what you say you
    13  said, or what you now say?
    14  MR IRVING:  Yes.
    15  MR JUSTICE GRAY:  Because I do not want to be under any
    16  misapprehension.
    17  MR IRVING:  Purely on the matter of concession?
    18  MR JUSTICE GRAY:  Yes.
    19  MR IRVING:  I will certainly do that within the next two or
    20  three days.
    21  MR JUSTICE GRAY:  Good. Is there anything else, Mr Rampton?
    22  MR RAMPTON:  Yes, there is. I should like to apologise
    23  personally — I dare say I am right in thinking it was
    24  directed at me — for not being able in one moment to
    25  restrain my frustration. I apologise for that.
    26  MR JUSTICE GRAY:  There is no need for that.
    .           P-219


      1  MR RAMPTON:  Yes. I should at my age know better. But, as
      2  your Lordship will remember, it is sometimes extremely
      3  difficult to restrain oneself when one can actually hear
      4  the evidence of one’s own witnesses being misrepresented.
      5  I am not going to do a trawl through what Mr Irving has
      6  said. Your Lordship has the evidence.
      7  But there is one thing which he said which
      8  I really do think needs to be corrected. If this is a
      9  case without this kind of high profile, I might say
    10  nothing at all. Mr Irving said that Professor van Pelt
    11  had no explanation for the many oddities in Bischoff’s
    12  letter of 29th June 1943. That is an important document.
    13  In fact, when I re-examined on 2nd February, that is day
    14  14, page 3 to page 13 at the end, by reference to the
    15  little clip of documents by which Mr Irving sought to show
    16  the uniquely —-
    17  MR JUSTICE GRAY:  Yes, I remember that quite well, all the
    18  oddities, as it were.
    19  MR RAMPTON:  In fact, he explained every single oddity, except
    20  the missing year date in the reference.
    21  MR JUSTICE GRAY:  Yes, I remember that quite well, but thank
    22  you for reminding me what the reference is.
    23  MR IRVING:  My Lord, in view of my traditional right to the
    24  last word, I would reserve the right to write your
    25  Lordship a letter setting out the oddities in that
    26  Bischoff letter, with a copy to the Defendants.
    .           P-220


      1  MR JUSTICE GRAY:  No. I do not think I am going to invite
      2  that. I feel fairly deluged anyway with paper. I really
      3  do. I have in mind both what you said were the reasons
      4  why you at that stage disputed the authenticity, and
      5  I know you still question the authenticity of that
      6  document, but I also have in mind, in a general sense, the
      7  explanations that were given by Professor van Pelt. Now,
      8  anything else?
      9  MR RAMPTON:  I hope what I am going to say will be a joint
    10  request. Because of all, as your Lordship can see, the
    11  interest in this case, much of it from overseas, I would
    12  ask that, perhaps a bit unusually, we could have —
    13  whenever the judgment may be, that is not what I am asking
    14  — some reasonable advance notice of the date.
    15  MR JUSTICE GRAY:  Yes. I am anxious for all sorts of reasons,
    16  including the consideration you have just mentioned, that
    17  it should happen sooner rather than later, but I do not
    18  know how much notice is in practical terms really
    19  required, because I will not know until quite shortly
    20  before I actually finish that I am actually going to
    21  finish on a particular day. I mean two or three days. Is
    22  that far too short?
    23  MR RAMPTON:  The only thing perhaps, if I might gently suggest
    24  it, is your Lordship might in fact finish before the day
    25  of judgment, if you know what I mean, in other words
    26  finish writing and have a fixed day, so that, even if your
    .           P-221


      1  Lordship finished before that day is reached—-
      2  MR JUSTICE GRAY:  Yes, all right.
      3  MR RAMPTON:  I think a week actually would in all the
      4  circumstances —-
      5  MR JUSTICE GRAY:  That is what you want? Mr Irving, I do not
      6  suppose you disagree with that, do you?
      7  MR IRVING:  I have my own reasons for wanting to have a lot of
      8  advance notice please, yes.
      9  MR JUSTICE GRAY:  I will do that. I think that is sensible.
    10  You are going to forfeit the last word, are you?
    11  (The court adjourned)
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    .           P-222