Day 3 Transcript: Holocaust Denial on Trial
Part I: Initial Proceedings (1.1 to 27.8)
Section 1.1 to 13.3
1 IN THE HIGH COURT OF JUSTICE
1996 I. No. 113
QUEEN’S BENCH DIVISION
2 Royal Courts of Justice
3 Strand, London
4 Thursday, 13th January 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 PROCEEDINGS – DAY THREE
24
25
26
. P-1
1 < DAY 3 Thursday, 13th January 2000
2 MR DAVID IRVING, Recalled.
3 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Yes, Mr Irving?
4 MR IRVING: May it please the court, with your Lordship’s
5 permission, I have brought the bundle of the documents
6 that we were referring to last night. Unless your
7 Lordship would see any reason against, I propose rapidly
8 stepping through these documents, pausing at the ones
9 which are significant as far as we can determine so far
10 from the direction and thrust of the cross-examination.
11 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Yes. You are in the middle of your
12 cross-examination. So, in the ordinary way, we will wait
13 and see when the documents became relevant to Mr Rampton’s
14 questions.
15 MR IRVING: They have been in discovery throughout, my Lord.
16 MR JUSTICE GRAY: I follow that. But I suspect most of them
17 are going to become relevant to the answers you are going
18 to be giving to some of the questions Mr Rampton
19 is asking.
20 MR IRVING: I do apprehend it will be useful to the court, I
21 appreciate that it is your Lordship’s court, but I believe
22 it will be useful.
23 MR JUSTICE GRAY: You may well be right. I cannot really tell,
24 I have only glanced at it. Shall I ask Mr Rampton —
25 because he is cross-examining, so, on the face of it, he
26 has the right to continue to cross-examine.
. P-2
1 MR RAMPTON: I have no objection. In a sense, it is either
2 evidence-in-chief in anticipation of cross-examination, or
3 it is what
one might call “premature re-examination”.
4 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Yes.
5 MR RAMPTON: One way or the other it is going to make no
6 difference.
7 MR JUSTICE GRAY: If you are happy I will not stand in the way.
8 Before that happens I wonder if I could mention
9 one or two administrative points? The first is, I think
10 we are all agreed through nobody’s fault, this is not a
11 very suitable court and I am very concerned that there are
12 members of the public who, I think, are not able to get in
13 and listen and want to. Having made enquiries, as I said
14 I would, I think there are two possible courts to which we
15 could move which were not available or were not thought to
16 be available when we started. One is court 73, which
17 I have looked at and looks to me to be much better than
18 this in almost every respect. There is, apparently,
19 another one, which is in Chichester Rents in Chancery
20 Lane, which is even bigger. I think I would have some
21 slight personal preference for 73, but what I wanted to
22 ask you is that I think we should move anyway, because
23 this is not satisfactory and it seems to me, unless you
24 are going to tell me there are insuperable problems,
25 tomorrow is the day to do the move. Are you in agreement
26 that that is the right thing to do?
. P-3
1 MR IRVING: I would have suggested doing it over the weekend
2 although I have no logistical problems myself —
3 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Well, I think they have a lot of problems
4 ahead of them, but I think it is better to do it now than
5 to struggle on and regret it every day from hereon.
6 MR RAMPTON: That would suit us awfully well, if we could make
7 a fresh start in what I call a “proper big court” on
8 Monday morning.
9 MR IRVING: Not a fresh start.
10 MR JUSTICE GRAY: We will decide — not a fresh start.
11 MR RAMPTON: No, thank you.
12 MR JUSTICE GRAY: We will decide during the course of today
13 which it is going to be and, obviously, let you know. We
14 will take it that on Monday we will be in a different
15 court.
16 MR RAMPTON: May I ask where exactly 73 is?
17 MR JUSTICE GRAY: It is where all those new Court of Appeals
18 are.
19 MR RAMPTON: In the East Building.
20 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Yes.
21 MR RAMPTON: In the end I would have to say, my Lord, it is a
22 matter for you.
23 MR JUSTICE GRAY: I think it is, if you have strong feelings.
24 MR RAMPTON: No, I do not know Chancery Lane much at all
25 anyway.
26 MR JUSTICE GRAY: That is point one.
. P-4
1 The next relates to the TA Law Transcripts which
2 are being done. Really, I think I am saying this on
3 behalf of the lady who is doing the transcribing. She is
4 having the most appalling task. She is here all day, and
5 she is by herself, as it were. It would help her if we
6 could slightly slow down. Mr Irving, you speak fairly
7 rapidly anyway. That is not a criticism at all.
8 MR IRVING: I thought I was speaking slowly.
9 MR JUSTICE GRAY: If you can bear in mind there is somebody
10 trying to take down what you say, if we can try to
11 remember to spell out the German names when they crop up
12 for the first time. That is going to make everybody’s
13 life much easier.
14 There is one other point on the transcripts.
15 The Day 2 transcript starts at page 104. My own feeling
16 (and I do not know whether you share it, Mr Rampton) is
17 that it would be better if every day started at 1, so you
18 have Day 2, page 1, rather than page 104. I am told that
19 is physically possible. So that is what I think we will
20 have in the future.
21 That is all that I wanted to raise except that,
22 Mr Irving, I have seen (and I do not know whether
23 Mr Rampton has) your letter about the letter to me about
24 the article in the Stuttgart press. Do you know about
25 it?
26 MR RAMPTON: No.
. P-5
1 MR IRVING: I was going to ask, my Lord, I might, having given
2 the Defendants time to consider it, if I might address the
3 court briefly on the matter after the lunch adjournment?
4 MR JUSTICE GRAY: If you would like to do that, that is fine.
5 Mr Rampton?
6 MR RAMPTON: I have no comment until I have seen it.
7 MR JUSTICE GRAY: I do not suppose you will, even when you
8 have.
9 MR RAMPTON: I see. My Lord, the only thing I would mention
10 about the transcript, I do not know what the cure is. Is
11 that, normally speaking, of course, one can deduce what it
12 was, but here and there — this is not a criticism of the
13 transcriber, far from it — one sees in square brackets
14 the word “German” which represents something that has been
15 said in German. That is going to repeat itself
16 indefinitely in that case. I do not know what cure is.
17 Whether the word should be spelt out each time. It is a
18 terribly laborious way of dealing it, or whether we supply
19 at some stage when it is important a list of what we
20 suppose was the word used. As I say, most of the time one
21 can deduce it.
22 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Is it actually going to be all that much of a
23 burden to spell it out or, at any rate, spell out the key
24 words in the document? I am thinking yesterday
25 “liquidierung”. One can spell that out.
26 MR RAMPTON: There is going to be more of that today.
. P-6
1 MR JUSTICE GRAY: I follow.
2 MR RAMPTON: Perhaps spell it out?
3 MR JUSTICE GRAY: I am inclined to think so. I think that is
4 the best way. It is going to slow things down. Would you
5 prefer it, both of you?
6 MR RAMPTON: Yes.
7 MR JUSTICE GRAY: It is going to slow things down, but it needs
8 to be done that way. So, Mr Irving, would you like to
9 take me through the…
10 MR IRVING: Page 1, my Lord, this is a letter — the sole
11 purpose of this letter is that it indicates the date when
12 I really made use of the Himmler telephone notes, being
13 1974; some 25 years ago, 26 years ago.
14 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Can I just ask you this? You there
15 transcribe judentransport, J-U-D-E-N-T-R-A-N-S-P-O-R-T, in
16 the singular, and that is in 1974.
17 MR IRVING: We have check the original in the German. You are
18 absolutely right, my Lord. You are absolutely right.
19 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Right.
20 MR IRVING: In a very vague, and, of course, I am still
21 considering myself to be under oath as I make these
22 remarks, in a very vague way my recollection is that time
23 I regarded the word “transport” as not just meaning like a
24 transport train or one consignment, or a transport ship in
25 the way that you would talk about a convoy of 26
26 transports but also in the sense that transportation.
. P-7
1 I consider that the words judenstransport meant
2 “transportation of Jews”.
3 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Yes, I note that you make that point.
4 MR IRVING: This is an alternative inference but now I am quite
5 happy to accept that this particular discussion from
6 external evidence only referred to one particular
7 transport of Jews, and I am indebted to your Lordship for
8 having reminded, or took me back into the mind set of 26
9 years ago.
10 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Yes.
11 MR IRVING: As you know, my presumption is, I will just read
12 the middle paragraph that Hitler had become an active
13 knowledge bearer or accomplice in the destruction of the
14 Jews only in 1943. This is of course a translation of the
15 following page, my Lord. From the attached page, which is
16 a facsimile, which we will see in a minute, it is evident
17 that Himmler, arriving at midday on November 30th, 1941,
18 in the Wolf’s Lair, which I explain was Hitler’s
19 headquarters in East Prussia, after a brief conversation
20 with Hitler immediately had to telephone Heydrich in
21 Prague, and then comes the phrase, “judentransportest aust
22 Berlin keine liquidierung”, which I believe the shorthand
23 writer already had from us.
24 If you take this in conjunction with various
25 other entries, e.g. that of 17th November 1941, in which
26 Heydrich informs the Reich Fuhrer, that is Himmler, on
. P-8
1 conditions in the general Uberman, Poland.
2 MR JUSTICE GRAY: That is SS Reich Fuhrer.
3 MR IRVING: Well, Reich Fuhrer SS would be the full title.
4 There was only one Reich Fuhrer in German — conditions in
5 the general government Poland-geting rid of the Jews,
6 Beseitigung, this can only indicate that Himmler has been
7 rapped across the knuckles by Hitler. This conversation
8 note has until now evidently slipped through the fingers
9 of the historical research community, as you might call
10 it.
11 Then the other two lines at the bottom are not
12 without interest in the chain of documents I refer to, my
13 Lord. Himmler had to issue a similar “holt” order in
14 April 1942 on account of the liquidation of the gypsies,
15 again after a brief visit to Hitler. “I thought this
16 might be of interest to you.” You will see that document
17 too, my Lord, in this bundle. Because it is false to try
18 and draw inferences from one document without looking at
19 other documents in the series. I appreciate in court it
20 is difficult to do this.
21 My Lord, the next document I am going to draw
22 your Lordship’s attention to is 03 at the foot of the
23 page. This is another document that was in discovery.
24 MR JUSTICE GRAY: I have read that. That is you asking
25 Professor Hinsley whether he has any more information.
26 MR IRVING: Yes, my Lord, except that at that time it does
. P-9
1 indicate at that time he did not have the German
2 originals.
3 MR RAMPTON: I am sorry, Mr Irving. I beg your pardon. May
4 I intervene to ask your Lordship to insert it in that
5 bundle? It comes from Mr Irving’s discovery. There is no
6 mystery about it. Professor Hinsley’s reply.
7 MR JUSTICE GRAY: It was not there.
8 MR RAMPTON: Yes, we have it now.
9 MR IRVING: I could not find it last night, my Lord. In is
10 Professor Hinsley indicates that he has obviously not yet
11 seen himself the German originals of the British
12 intercepts.
13 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Yes.
14 MR IRVING: It is quite interesting.
15 MR JUSTICE GRAY: The postscript is perhaps of some
16 significance.
17 MR IRVING: It is interesting the British Official Historian
18 and British Secret Service had either not been allowed to
19 see or had not found in general chaos the documentation,
20 these are the originals, which are now in the Public
21 Record Office. But the German originals are very, very
22 informative in their scope, breadth and depth.
23 That, my Lord, is 04. This is the first of the
24 notes of the telephone conversations from Himmler’s
25 telephone log to the Chief of the SS, and the one on which
26 I rely is the one timed 12.15. It is the fourth
. P-10
1 conversation. I am afraid I have not attached a
2 translation of it, but I will do a translation on reply on
3 the one or two lines that matter. It is a 15 minute
4 conversation with Heydrich who on that day was in Berlin.
5 We do not know who initiated the conversation, my Lord,
6 but Heydrich phoned Himmler or Himmler phoned Heydrich.
7 We never see them. We have to infer. Conference with
8 Rosenberg, conditions in the government general, getting
9 rid of the Jews, beseitigung of the Jews, and then the
10 third line — the fourth line rather, juristen
11 nuralseerater, roughly lawyers just as advisers.
12 Nothing else on that page to which I will
13 refer. Merely it shows there were conversations going on
14 between these two gentlemen on liquidation or getting rid
15 of the Jews.
16 MR JUSTICE GRAY: What is the significance for my purpose of
17 that?
18 MR IRVING: It is the context in which the principal document
19 is embedded, my Lord. The inference that has been drawn
20 against me is that I have one cardinal document and
21 I would go around the world waving this document and
22 saying “here it the proof”. It is, in fact, showing that
23 they were constantly talking about getting rid of the
24 Jews, using —
25 MR JUSTICE GRAY: There is no issue, is there, that that was
26 something that both Himmler and Heydrich were intent upon
. P-11
1 doing.
2 MR RAMPTON: Yes. The word ” beseitigung” is interesting. You
3 can look at it either this way or that way, literally as
4 getting rid of, which can be sweeping under the carpet or
5 liquidation. I am quite happy to accept that here they
6 were talking about liquidation, these two gentlemen. It
7 now becomes more interesting, my Lord, on page 5.
8 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Can you just let me highlight?
9 MR IRVING: We come to the intercepts and Mr Rampton does not
10 wish me at this point to bring in this material. I am
11 quite happy to turn the page, but I think it is useful to
12 bring it in all in chronological sequence.
13 MR JUSTICE GRAY: When you “intercept” —
14 MR IRVING: This is the Bletchley Park intercept of the —
15 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Messages to Berlin.
16 MR IRVING: Messages between Berlin and the Eastern Front for
17 police commanders, and also a whole number of other SS
18 units, but these are the ones I rely on.
19 No. 35 is a message addressed from Berlin on
20 November 17th, that same day as the previous conversation,
21 to the commander of security police, Dr Lange, L-A-N-G-E,
22 in Riga, concerning, and I use the next word in original
23 German — these are my translations, concerning the
24 evakierung of the Jews. “Evakierung”, my Lord, is one of
25 those words we will probably tussle over. The literal
26 translation is “evacuation”, but I am perfectly ready to
. P-12
1 accept for the purposes of this action that “evakierung”
2 is occasionally used by the SS as a euphemism for a more
3 ugly means of disposing.
Section 13.4 to 27.8
4 But in this particular case what is significant
5 is that the man in Berlin is telling the recipient in
6 Riga, on November 17th, in other words, that same day, at
7 6.25 p.m., transport train No. DO 26 has left Berlin for
8 Kovno or Kornas, with 940 more Jews on board. That was
9 usually the rough size of each train load of Jews, about
10 1,000 Jews. Transport escorted by two Gestapo and 15
11 police officers. Transport commander is Criminal
12 Overassessor Exner, the man’s name, who was two copies of
13 the transport list with him. Transport provided with
14 following provisions, and this is interesting part, my
15 Lord, 3,000 kilogrammes of bread, three tonnes of bread
16 for a two or three day journey. 27 kilogrammes of flour,
17 nearly three tonnes of flour; 200 kilogrammes of peas; 200
18 kilogrammes of nutriments; 300 kilogrammes of corn flakes;
19 18 bottles of soup spices. They continue in the next
20 message; 52 kilogrammes soup powders, 10 packets of
21 something or other, we do not know; 50 kilogrammes of
22 salt; 47,200 Reich Marks in crates. Signed Gestapo
23 Headquarters, Berlin. Quite an interesting document, my
24 Lord. It is the first kind of thing we come across in my
25 view to show that these trains were actually
26 well-provisioned. It is a bit of a dent, a tiny dent in
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1 the image that we have, the perception, as Mr Rampton
2 calls it, of the Holocaust today.
3 The next one, page 6, is a message intercepted
4 on 20th November. It is unimportant for our purposes on
5 what day it was decoded. It was decoded 10 days. It
6 takes 10 days to decode it. The actual message is dated
7 three days later, 20th November 1941, again, dressed do
8 commander of order police and the SS in Riga, concerning
9 evacuation of Jews. The same kind of thing, transport
10 train No. DO56. Has left Bremen, destination Minsk with
11 971 Jews on 18th November. Escort command regular police
12 Bremen, transport commander Police Meister Bockhorn,
13 B-O-C-K-H-O-R-N, is in possession of two lists of names
14 and 48,700 Reich Marks in cashiers’ credits. Jews are
15 well-provisioned with food and appliances.
16 My Lord, on the next page you will see the
17 actual intercept, page 7 is what the actual intercept
18 looked like. They are headed “Most Secret”. It is the
19 second paragraph, my Lord.
20 MR JUSTICE GRAY: “Most secret” is put on at Bletchley, is it
21 not?
22 MR IRVING: Indeed, of course. There is no indication on the
23 intercepts themselves, as intercepted here, what security
24 classification they have. But I want to draw attention
25 only to the word “gerat” in the fifth or sixth line of the
26 intercept, which means appliances. Any German speakers in
. P-14
1 the room I am sure would agree the word “gerat” is the
2 tools of the trade, roughly, they are being sent to the
3 East with food, with provisions, and with the tools of
4 their trade.
5 MR JUSTICE GRAY: You have translated that as what?
6 MR IRVING: Appliances. It is a rough cover all, tools of the
7 trade would be a little bit too specific, I am sure
8 Mr Rampton will probably eventually object. But the sense
9 of gerat, if a cameraman comes into this room he would
10 bring his gerat with him, his appliances with him.
11 The next one is No. 15, I rely on this because
12 it shows in the first line, I am sorry I am still on page
13 6, my Lord, the second message on page 6 SS Obergruppen
14 Fuhrer Jeckelm, transferred from Kiev to Riga. So that
15 was the day this criminal was transferred to Riga, round
16 about November 20th, and in fact it is a pretty low level
17 message. They are worried about what happened to motor
18 cars and things like that if I remember correctly.
19 If we can now turn straight over to page 9, my
20 Lord, I took the trouble during the night to dig out of my
21 files, the war diary of Hitler’s headquarters, which
22 I have. These are all my documents. All my documents
23 when I obtained them for the book, I had bound in these
24 volumes because I anticipated perhaps Mr Rampton would
25 say, well, we have no proof that Hitler was in his
26 headquarters, that he was at home on the day of crucial
. P-15
1 message November 30th.
2 MR RAMPTON: No, he would not say that, my Lord, because
3 Himmler recalls that he had lunch with Hitler on that day.
4 MR IRVING: Well, I am just dotting the Is and crossing the Ts.
5 MR JUSTICE GRAY: The point is not made, so we need not trouble
6 with that.
7 MR IRVING: It also talks about the arrival of the Fuhrer’s
8 train that very morning. On the following day is the
9 photocopy from the page of war diary at Hitler’s
10 headquarters. We then come to the crucial document we
11 were talking about yesterday evening, which I …
12 MR JUSTICE GRAY: I still have your copy of that.
13 MR IRVING: I put it in the bundles for sake of completeness.
14 It is referred to in the third conversation. I draw
15 attention only to the first lines, which says: “Telephone
16 conversation on November 30th 1941″. The next line “Wolf
17 stanche” means Wolf’s Lair. The next line “ausdemzung” it
18 means from the train. Himmler is still in the train going
19 to Hitler’s headquarters.
20 Three lines down, ausdembunker, from the bunker,
21 he is at the bunker now, in the Wolf’s Lair, 13.30 he
22 telephones Heydrich, as we know only the third and fourth
23 line of the notes are important, “Jew transport from
24 Berlin, no liquidation”.
25 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Yes.
26 MR IRVING: If I may proceed now to page 13, my Lord. This is
. P-16
1 the one that I am alleged mysteriously to have misread and
2 the implication being I deliberately misread it or
3 deliberately changed word the Gerhartens Fuhrer (?) into
4 “juden”, which would be quite a feat.
5 My Lord on the page 13 the question of the line,
6 the contentious line is third from the bottom, haben
7 zubleiben.
8 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Have to remain.
9 MR IRVING: You will notice, my Lord, the word “haben” has
10 obviously been retyped, a bit of squeeze getting it in.
11 It was retyped by my when I realized my error in
12 transcription. That typewriter was disposed of some or
13 ten or 15 years ago. That is how early I realized my
14 error. I do not know if it is significant one way or the
15 other, it may count against me. I do not know.
16 It is also significant to see in the following
17 line, my Lord, I have written the words “truppenschuhe”,
18 and this is another misreading by me.
19 MR JUSTICE GRAY: It does not really matter, does it.
20 MR IRVING: My Lord, I am just trying to say as you will see
21 from the next page, which I now ask you to turn.
22 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Before you leave that, I thought there was
23 another point made on this document, which is your
24 translation of the words —
25 MR IRVING: That is Verwallueys Fuhrer.
26 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Am I not right about that?
. P-17
1 MR IRVING: This was the point Mr Rampton sought to make, and
2 I corrected him, my Lord, and said that was not the word
3 that I misread. It was the word on the following line
4 haben, which I misread as Juden, and this is why I was
5 going to ask your Lordship, respectfully, to turn to the
6 next page, page 14, where you will see the words in
7 question, three lines from the bottom on the right, that
8 is the quality of the original I was working from. I do
9 not know if your copy is highlighted, the crucial word is
10 not perhaps…
11 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Yes, it is. What did you originally
12 transcribe that as?
13 MR IRVING: Juden, I would submit this is a perfectly
14 reasonable kind of mistake to make. If I was to labour
15 the point I would draw your Lordship’s attention to all
16 the other versions of the word “Juden” that are correct,
17 you will see they are very similar indeed in the German
18 Gothic handwriting.
19 So what we have, my Lord, to recap at this
20 point, November 30th Himmler for some reason in a
21 telephone conversation with Heydrich saying that train
22 load of Jews from Berlin is not to be liquidated.
23 I believe that is a fair expansion of that sentence.
24 On the following day he has that telephone
25 conversation with SS Gruppen Fuhrer Poll, I am back on
26 page 13, at 4.45 p.m. They touch on Depervartens (?)
. P-18
1 Fuhrer, but more important now is the conversation, again,
2 with Heydrich about the same time as the previous one, on
3 the previous day, 13.15 on that page 13. He has a
4 conversation with Prague first of all about his scribes,
5 the female scribes and, secondly, “executionen”, like
6 “executions”, in Riga. I am sure I do not have to
7 translate that. So it is now very much in the air that
8 something has gone on in Riga, my Lord.
9 On page 15, that same day, we are well in the
10 chronology, my Lord, this is a telephone conversation at
11 7.15 a.m. on that Monday morning, December 1st, 1941.
12 This is coming from Jeckelm to Berlin. This is a very
13 ugly one indeed, my Lord. He is saying in English:
14 “I need by next available air courier 10 Finnish”,
15 Finland, in other words, “military pistols with two drum
16 magazines each. Execution of sonder aktionen”, special
17 actions, S-O-N-D-E-R A-K-T-I-O-A-N, “request radio
18 telegramme reply. Senior SS and Police Command, North
19 Russia”.
20 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Who is this addressed to in Berlin then?
21 MR IRVING: The main leadership Hauptamt, would be the body
22 concerned with the procurement of such armaments. The
23 significance of this, my Lord, if you remember the
24 harrowing description by General Bruns of the shootings on
25 the edge of the pit where the men were using machine guns,
26 tommy-guns, and he has run, he has not enough tommy-guns,
. P-19
1 he needs more. You can see the actual intercept of that,
2 my Lord, on the next page.
3 What is the answer he gets? Page 17, again my
4 translation my Lord, Himmler himself contacts him, either
5 in person, that is the second message, or through his
6 Adjutant, Grothmann (who is still alive in Germany now).
7 He sends this message to that same criminal, Jeckelm, at
8 7.30 p.m. on December 1st: To SS Obergruppenfuhrer
9 Jeckelm, Senior SS and Police Commander, Osla, Riga.
10 Reichfuhrer SS Himmler summons you to him for a conference
11 on December 4th. Please state when you will arrive here
12 and by what means you will be travelling”. In other
13 words, he had been summoned urgently to the Headquarters.
14 The very next message explains what is going to happen.
15 “SS Obergruppenfuhrer Jeckelm” — this is the message we
16 dealt with yesterday, my Lord — “The Jews being outplaced
17 to Osland”, to the Baltic, “are to be dealt with only in
18 accordance with the guidelines laid down by myself and/or
19 by the … (reading to the words) … on my orders.
20 I would punish arbitrary and disobedient acts”, signed
21 Himmler. A most incredibly important message, I think,
22 for many reasons. He is not talking about a Hitler order
23 here. He is saying: “The guidelines issued by me”, by
24 Himmler, “or by the Reichssicherheits Hauptamt” who is
25 Heydrich”, his telephone conversation partner. Jeckelm,
26 out on the Eastern front, has overstepped the guidelines.
. P-20
1 He started shooting thousands of Germans. He had been
2 summoned to Himmler’s headquarters, to Rastenburg, in East
3 Prussia to account for himself.
4 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Where do we find the guideline?
5 MR IRVING: My Lord, we will hear in the course of this trial
6 that these intercepts are not wall to wall. We do not
7 have everything that they sent. There is an enormous mass
8 of trivia, people whose cars have been towed and that kind
9 of thing, people whose wives have died. Occasionally
10 embedded in the trivia, like in a goldmine, in the slurry,
11 there are diamonds like this.
12 The incredible thing is, although this document
13 has now been in the public domain for about five or six
14 years, the historians and the world have not leapt on this
15 document and said,”Irving was right. This proves that the
16 Fuhrer’s headquarters were not only indignant, but were
17 calling people to account. In the way that the wars are,
18 although he is brought back from the Front and he is
19 wrapped on the knuckles, he is sent back to the Front to
20 carry on with his job. He is not dismissed from service;
21 in rather the same way as I know General Patten, for
22 example, went to the Front when General Patten had been
23 liquidating prisoners. He was called before Eisenhauer
24 and called to account. He was put on ice for two or three
25 months and then he was given command of one of the best
26 armies, the 3rd American Army, because good men are hard
. P-21
1 to come by in a war. That is, undoubtedly, the way the
2 Nazis viewed this criminal.
3 May I proceed, my Lord?
4 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Yes, thank you.
5 MR IRVING: We can see on page 21 the arrival of the
6 unfortunate criminal, the arrival of the unfortunate
7 criminal, SS Obbergruppenfuhrer Jeckelm in Himmler’s
8 appointment book, in other words, at Hitler’s
9 headquarters. One notices at 1300 they are driving over
10 Hitler’s headquarters. Then Himmler visits the barber and
11 the dentist. He sees Hitler at 5 p.m. and at 7 p.m. he
12 sees other SS Generals. At 8 p.m. he has dinner in part
13 of Hitler’s headquarters with Jeckelm and at 9.30 he hauls
14 Jeckelm over the carpet, the Jewish question, the SS
15 brigade, economic business. So that is the actual visit.
16 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Would it be a fair interpretation of this
17 document that the original plan was that Jeckelm should be
18 present with Hitler and Himmler at 5 o’clock in the
19 afternoon?
20 MR IRVING: I cannot be specific on that, my Lord.
21 MR JUSTICE GRAY: It looks like it, does it not?
22 MR IRVING: I do not want to speculate, but these are grey
23 areas. The documents do not tell us everything we would
24 dearly love to know. What we do know is the final two
25 pages I put in the bundle. My Lord, you will see that the
26 last page has some red print on the bottom, the very last
. P-22
1 page. This is the German, I would say, official
2 transcript of Himmler’s diary which, my Lord, the
3 Defendants also have on the desk in front of them. It is
4 published this year. It is enormously expensive. It is a
5 very good and highly dependable transcription of Himmler’s
6 diaries and appointment book.
7 They put that in as a footnote at 104,
8 I believe, in which they say: “After these signals were
9 exchanged”, which, oddly enough, they do not elucidate to
10 the degree that I have, “the killings of German Jews
11 stopped for many months”. I have no further submissions
12 to make about these documents.
13 MR JUSTICE GRAY: You have lost me a little. Where do I find
14 after these messages —-
15 MR IRVING: The very last line of the red text. This is the
16 comments by the editors, who are a team of German
17 historians, on the Himmler diaries which they have
18 annotated most expertly, and they too have drawn finally
19 on these two mysterious messages that we intercepted.
20 MR JUSTICE GRAY: But the point that may be made, I do not
21 know, on this is that it is the mass shootings of German
22 Jews that ceased.
23 MR IRVING: I agree, my Lord. This is why I have been very
24 careful to make a distinction in my evidence and, indeed,
25 in my books.
26 MR JUSTICE GRAY: That suggests to me — tell me if I am wrong
. P-23
1 about this — that the guidelines mentioned in the earlier
2 message were guidelines relating to German Jews.
3 MR IRVING: This is quite possible, my Lord. I would only ask
4 you in reading, as undoubtedly you will, and re-reading
5 passages from my books on which the Defendants seek to
6 rely, you ask yourself this question, has Mr Irving, the
7 so-called Holocaust denier, at any time implied that this
8 kind of massacre did not go on, and that it was systematic
9 and it was carried out on guidelines from above?
10 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Yes.
11 MR IRVING: But you will notice that Mr Himmler talks about
12 “orders that I have issued and the Reichssicherheits
13 Hauptamt”. He never says, “On the Fuhrer’s instructions”
14 which, obviously, there would be a strong temptation in a
15 message like this to say, “You have not only upset me, but
16 you have put Adolf’s nose really out of joint”.
17 So, I mean, obviously, I am going to submit that
18 if documents like this exist of a quality like that, to
19 imply that I was speaking off the wall in some way with no
20 kind of documentary basis for the submissions that I make
21 in my books, it would be unfair, unjust and perverse.
22 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Yes. You have taken me through, and thank
23 you for that —-
24 MR IRVING: I —-
25 MR JUSTICE GRAY: — this little bundle. I am making this
26 point at this stage because it is going to crop up time
. P-24
1 and again. I am rather anxious not to have little one
2 issue bundles cropping up at odd stages because, frankly,
3 in a case of this length, it is all going to get lost and
4 tangled. I imagine that all these documents are in one or
5 other of the existing files.
6 MR IRVING: They are in this cover, my Lord, but not in such
7 pristine condition as that. I want to very great trouble
8 last night to prepare this particular bundle in the hope
9 that you would say to yourself, well, if he was able to
10 come up with evidence like this on this matter, no doubt
11 he will be able on any other matter —-
12 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Do not misunderstand me. I am not critical.
13 I think it is helpful to have a bundle prepared like this,
14 but what I need to be sure of is that I know where these
15 documents can be found in the existing files. What I will
16 ask somebody on the Defendants’ side to do, if they would
17 be good enough, if they can do this, is to provide me with
18 the cross-reference. Could you ask somebody to do that?
19 MR RAMPTON: We will think about that. The trouble is at the
20 moment that our files are ordered according to the
21 experts’ reports.
22 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Yes, but most of these documents would be
23 relatively easily traced?
24 MR RAMPTON: Most of them, I think, are referred to in the
25 expert reports anyway. Whether they are copied in quite
26 that form, I am not sure; I think probably not.
. P-25
1 MR JUSTICE GRAY: You see why I need to have what I am asking
2 for.
3 MR RAMPTON: Yes, I do. My immediate idea is just to put them
4 with a separate numeration at the back of Professor
5 Browning or that report. It is apparently —-
6 MR JUSTICE GRAY: I think that is not a bad idea, to put them
7 into J, otherwise there is going to be proliferation of…
8 MR IRVING: My Lord, I am using an alphabetical system which
9 requires that there are going to be less than 26 such
10 files over the entire case that I would anticipate putting
11 in of this nature. If you will bear with me, the reason
12 I called this just “Himmler” is that I was intending to
13 produce further documents, for example, the Schlegelberger
14 series (which I am sure your Lordship is familiar with).
15 I would also put that into that binder. So there will
16 just be an Irving series, Irving A, Irving B, Irving C.
17 This is, after all, my case, my Lord, and I do not want my
18 structure to be subsumed into the case for the Defendants.
19 MR JUSTICE GRAY: I entirely agree with that. This may all
20 seem very boring, but, believe me, in a case like this you
21 —-
22 MR IRVING: “Boring” is not a word I would use.
23 MR JUSTICE GRAY: — really do have to watch the sort of
24 housekeeping. Just so that everybody knows where I have
25 it, I am putting it into J.
26 MR RAMPTON: Tab C.
. P-26
Part II: David Irving’s Cross-Examination by Richard Rampton, continued (27.9 to 107.21)
1 MR JUSTICE GRAY: I have not got a tab C.
2 MR IRVING: My Lord, I would propose that we now continue where
3 we left off last night.
4 MR JUSTICE GRAY: I am going to treat what you have told me in
5 the last 20 minutes or so as being part of your evidence,
6 although you told me from counsel’s bench. It is up to
7 you; I think you probably ought to go back, if you would
8 be good enough, into the witness box.
Section 27.9 to 43.13
9 Cross-examined by MR RAMPTON, QC, continued.
10 THE WITNESS [Mr Irving]: My Lord, there is just one other document there
11 that I forgot to refer to and this is No. 23. I will just
12 read it out to you. There is no need for your Lordship to
13 see it.
14 MR JUSTICE GRAY: I had better follow it.
15 A. [Mr Irving]: A telephone conversation of exactly the same kind from
16 Himmler’s telephone log: On Hitler’s birthday, at midday
17 with Heydrich, again that is H-E-Y-D-I-C-H, a
18 conversation with Heydrich in which the last line reads:
19 “Kindly”, “Keine vernichtungd. Zigeuner”, K-E-I-N-E
20 V-E-R-N-I-C-H-T-U-N-G-D. Z-I-G-E-U-N-E-R.
21 Q. [Mr Justice Gray]: That is “gypsies”, is it not?
22 A. [Mr Irving]: That is right, my Lord.
23 Q. [Mr Rampton]: How would you translate “vernichtungd”?
24 A. [Mr Irving]: Literally “destruction” and that is how I will leave it.
25 “No destruction of the gypsies”; the significance being
26 that on this day at mid-day, Himmler is with Hitler
. P-27
1 celebrating a birthday party. It was Hitler’s birthday,
2 April 20th. Once again he has had to telephone his chief
3 executioner, so to speak, Heydrich, and say, “The gypsies
4 are not to be liquidated” and yet they were liquidated.
5 Q. [Mr Rampton]: You say Himmler was with Hitler at 12 o’clock?
6 A. [Mr Irving]: Quite definitely. It was Hitler’s birthday and I would be
7 happy to lead evidence to prove that, but I am sure
8 Mr Rampton will not dispute that the head of the SS —-
9 Q. [Mr Rampton]: And this is a phone call to Heydrich from Himmler?
10 A. [Mr Irving]: It is a telephone conversation between them.
11 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Yes, I take that point.
12 A. [Mr Irving]: Of significance, it is one more document in that chain
13 that I occasionally refer to.
14 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Thank you.
15 MR RAMPTON: Yes, as to that, Mr Irving, the “no liquidation of
16 the gypsies”, again that was before there was any meeting
17 between them, was it not, on that day, which is 20th April
18 1942, Himmler’s log said that he met Fuhrer at 12.30?
19 A. [Mr Irving]: This may well be. It may well be what his log says.
20 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Whereas the telephone call is at noon, I think.
21 A. [Mr Irving]: Yes.
22 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Rather like 30th November?
23 A. [Mr Irving]: Yes.
24 Q. [Mr Rampton]: 1941?
25 A. [Mr Irving]: Yes.
26 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Can we go back to 30th November 1941, please? Did you get
. P-28
1 a transcript of your evidence of the proceedings
2 yesterday — have you got a copy that looks like this,
3 Mr Irving?
4 A. [Mr Irving]: Yes I have.
5 Q. [Mr Rampton]: With a quarter page like that?
6 A. [Mr Irving]: Yes.
7 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Could you turn, please, to the page numbered 289? It is
8 the top left-hand block on one of the pages.
9 A. [Mr Irving]: Yes.
10 Q. [Mr Rampton]: I was asking you if you remember why it was that you had
11 translated “Judentransport”, a singular word, as Jews in
12 general?
13 A. [Mr Irving]: Yes.
14 Q. [Mr Rampton]: You had said, you can see it there, can you not, that it
15 was a silly misreading of the word. You said at line 19:
16 “I admit I made a mistake in the transcription”?
17 A. [Mr Irving]: Yes.
18 Q. [Mr Rampton]: This was your sworn evidence on oath yesterday?
19 A. [Mr Irving]: Yes.
20 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Now would you please turn to the first page of your new
21 bundle?
22 A. [Mr Irving]: Yes.
23 Q. [Mr Rampton]: The translation you have made for us kindly —-
24 A. [Mr Irving]: Yes.
25 Q. [Mr Rampton]: — 23rd January 1974, where you have transcribed it
26 correctly?
. P-29
1 A. [Mr Irving]: Yes.
2 Q. [Mr Rampton]: The answer you gave yesterday was wrong, was it not?
3 A. [Mr Irving]: That is correct.
4 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Why was it wrong, Mr Irving?
5 A. [Mr Irving]: Because we are talking about events almost 30 years ago.
6 I was writing this book 32 years ago. I received these
7 documents 35 years ago. I probably transcribed it, as you
8 can see from the letter, round about 1974. It is very
9 difficult to put myself back into my mind set of 25 or 26
10 years ago.
11 You asked me what the reason for that was and
12 my first presumption was that I misread the word, but ably
13 challenged by his Lordship, questioned by his Lordship, on
14 this matter, I recalled also that at the time I looked at
15 it, the word “transport”, “Judentransport”, to me also
16 could be translated as “transportation of Jews”. Indeed,
17 it can be translated that way and I refined it later on
18 when I was informed by Dr Flemming, as he then was, who is
19 an expert on the Holocaust, that there was one very clear
20 train load of Jews to which reference was being made.
21 That is so, I think, an accurate answer which should
22 really replace yesterday’s answer.
23 Q. [Mr Rampton]: I dare say it should, Mr Irving. Whether I accept it, of
24 course, is quite another question, even in its remodelled
25 form.
26 A. [Mr Irving]: Yes.
. P-30
1 Q. [Mr Rampton]: The answer is, of course, that I do not. Mr Irving,
2 I would like you to think a little bit about what you have
3 just said. You heard me open this case on Tuesday
4 afternoon, did you not?
5 A. [Mr Irving]: Yes.
6 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Yes. You have to say “yes” just for the recording. That
7 is all. Nodding or so will not do. You had a copy of the
8 written document that I read out, did you not?
9 A. [Mr Irving]: Which document are you referring to?
10 Q. [Mr Rampton]: My opening statement in this case?
11 A. [Mr Irving]: Yes.
12 Q. [Mr Rampton]: That was on Tuesday afternoon.
13 A. [Mr Irving]: Yes.
14 Q. [Mr Rampton]: You realized then —-
15 A. [Mr Irving]: Yes.
16 Q. [Mr Rampton]: — that this is one of the points that I was going to
17 make against you, did you not?
18 A. [Mr Irving]: Yes, that has been repeatedly made, yes.
19 Q. [Mr Rampton]: It has been repeatedly made, has it not? Yet, when you
20 come into the witness box to answer questions on oath, you
21 simply pluck an explanation out of the air, do you not?
22 A. [Mr Irving]: Mr Rampton, may I explain to you that in the last four
23 days I have had six hours sleep? Is this a satisfactory
24 answer to why one occasionally makes slips of the memory
25 in the witness box? If not, then I will go into it in
26 greater detail.
. P-31
1 Q. [Mr Rampton]: What is the truth, Mr Irving? You did not misread it,
2 that is clear.
3 A. [Mr Irving]: Yes — not this particular word.
4 Q. [Mr Rampton]: No. So yesterday’s answer was a false answer.
5 A. [Mr Irving]: Misinterpreted.
6 Q. [Mr Rampton]: You now say, “Well, I may have mistranslated it, but my
7 translation was, on the face of it, legitimate”?
8 A. [Mr Irving]: Well, in this case it is not a translation that is needed,
9 it is an interpretation because it is a cryptic word.
10 “Transport” can mean several different things. There are
11 many words that can mean several different things, and you
12 have to look at the context and you have to take other
13 documents and possibly later information into account in
14 arriving at which of those words is the correct
15 translation. None of the words would be a wrong
16 translation at the time you first make it. You then
17 refine the translation on the basis of external evidence.
18 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Would not a more natural way of putting it in German to be
19 to put it in the plural “Judentransporte” with an “e” on
20 the end?
21 A. [Mr Irving]: It can also be done that way, yes.
22 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Would part of the context be that there did
23 happen at this time to be a train load of Jews setting out
24 from Berlin to Riga?
25 A. [Mr Irving]: There were many train loads sitting out. By this time, by
26 November 30th, there had been five trainloads of Jews
. P-32
1 heading for Riga or Minsk.
2 Q. [Mr Justice Gray]: Over what sort of period?
3 A. [Mr Irving]: One week, round about that time — no, I am sorry, two
4 weeks would be a closer approximation. They were given
5 numbers, “D” for Germany, “O” for East or German, rather,
6 and “O” for East. That is what the numbers in the
7 intercepts are.
8 MR RAMPTON: Mr Irving, another of the things that you and
9 I disagreed about yesterday was your unequivocal
10 categorical assertion in your various publications that
11 that order from Himmler to Heydrich on that day was given
12 at the instigation of Hitler. You say it was, or at least
13 that is a reasonable inference; you called it a “judgment
14 call”, I think, did you not?
15 A. [Mr Irving]: I called that, the reason I used it, or referred to it in
16 that — I think we ought to see the actual wording
17 I used. If you say that I said it on a number of
18 occasions, it would be helpful to see the actual wording
19 that I used.
20 Q. [Mr Rampton]: For example, let us just look at how you put it in
21 “Hitler’s War 1991”. My Lord, that is bundle D1(v). It
22 is in two halves. This is the second half. At page 427,
23 Mr Irving, if you are using the published edition?
24 A. [Mr Irving]: I am just looking at the 1977 one to pre-empt you.
25 Q. [Mr Rampton]: We will look at that first, if you will. I think there it
26 is round about 300 and something.
. P-33
1 A. [Mr Irving]: At 1.30 p.m.
2 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Well, his Lordship may not have it.
3 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Yes, I have.
4 MR RAMPTON: Have you got 1977, my Lord? 332.
5 A. [Mr Irving]: Yes. I think, with respect, it makes more sense to take
6 it from the chronology that I wrote the various editions.
7 Q. [Mr Rampton]: I was not actually going to look at all the references,
8 but if you wish me to do so, I do not mind in the
9 slightest.
10 A. [Mr Irving]: Well, it is like a building, the way a building changes
11 over the years, that tells us something also.
12 Q. [Mr Rampton]: “Himmler’s personal role is ambivalent. On November 30th
13 1941, he was summoned to the Wolf’s Lair for a secret
14 conference with Hitler in which the fate of Berlin’s Jews
15 was clearly raised”. Pause there. What evidence that
16 Himmler was summoned to the Wolfsschanze the Wolf’s Lair?
17 A. [Mr Irving]: My very great expertise on this matter.
18 Q. [Mr Rampton]: What?
19 A. [Mr Irving]: My very great expertise on this matter. Do you wish me to
20 elaborate?
21 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Yes, I think you had better; I am not quite
22 sure I understand the answer.
23 MR RAMPTON: I asked for evidence, not expertise.
24 A. [Mr Irving]: Well, the evidence is that if you go to the archives and
25 work through the files of Hitler’s Chancellory, you will
26 find every year, two or three times, the head of his
. P-34
1 Chancellory, Hans Lammers, issued an edict to all the
2 Reich ministers and all the senior Nazi officials
3 informing them that nobody was permitted to visit Hitler,
4 just ringing the door bell and saying, “Mein Fuhrer, can
5 I drop in and see you for a moment?” They had to have a
6 specific summons and invitation because Hitler was
7 constantly being beseiged by junior and senior officials
8 who were ringing his doorbell in that way and asking to
9 see him. Eventually, it had to be forbidden, first of all,
10 by Lammers and then by an edit of Martin Bormann. So you
11 could not visit Hitler unless you were summoned.
12 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Mr Irving, I am not going away from that topic, believe
13 me, I am not, but it may be we had better get this sorted
14 out earlier rather than later in this case. Where do you
15 place Himmler in the Nazi hierarchy?
16 A. [Mr Irving]: Nowhere in the hierarchy that it would just turn up on
17 Hitler’s doorstep.
18 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Please, we will come to that I promise I not leaving the
19 topic, where do you put him?
20 A. [Mr Irving]: He had the rank of a Reichsminister, the rank of
21 Reischminister was equivalent to a field marshal, so it
22 would be the equivalent rank of four star general. He had
23 Hitler’s ear, he took orders directly from Hitler, there
24 was no intermediary, is that sufficient?
25 Q. [Mr Rampton]: — yes, I am going to go a little bit further. This is
26 not hostile interrogation, Mr Irving, this is an attempt
. P-35
1 to see if we can agree on some broad general facts which
2 may be of use in this case. Himmler was, was he not, one
3 of the original putschists of 1923?
4 A. [Mr Irving]: He is there to be seen marching in the ranks.
5 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Wearing Nazi uniform.
6 A. [Mr Irving]: One of the old guard.
7 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Have you read Ian Kershaw’s book?
8 A. [Mr Irving]: Whose?
9 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Ian Kershaw’s book?
10 A. [Mr Irving]: I do not read books.
11 Q. [Mr Rampton]: You do not read books. Of course not. He is one of old
12 guard, is he not?
13 A. [Mr Irving]: Yes.
14 Q. [Mr Rampton]: So was Goring?
15 A. [Mr Irving]: Yes.
16 Q. [Mr Rampton]: And so was Goebbels?
17 A. [Mr Irving]: On and off, if you see what I mean.
18 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Yes, I do see what you mean. Is there anything which
19 leads you to suppose —
20 A. [Mr Irving]: In connection with Goebbels, of course, he was not one of
21 the putschists, he came in several years later.
22 Q. [Mr Rampton]: — Rosenberg was perhaps, I do not know. Is there
23 anything you know of that prevents one from supposing that
24 Hitler might have telephoned as he apparently was able to
25 use the telephone on the train, was he not?
26 A. [Mr Irving]: Himmler, you are talking about?
. P-36
1 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Himmler I mean, telephoned the Wolf’s Lair and said “can
2 I come and talk to you about something”?
3 A. [Mr Irving]: No reason to suppose that at all, yes.
4 Q. [Mr Rampton]: So why you do use the word “summon”?
5 A. [Mr Irving]: Because then Hitler would have said “all right, come and
6 see me”.
7 Q. [Mr Rampton]: You see in the context, do you agree, the word “summoned”?
8 A. [Mr Irving]: Yes.
9 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Means that he is being summoned in order to discuss the
10 fate of the Berlin Jews?
11 A. [Mr Irving]: In the context.
12 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Yes. Amongst other things, perhaps?
13 A. [Mr Irving]: No, I disagree with you Mr Rampton, on November 30th, he,
14 Himmler was summoned to the Wolf’s Lair for a secret
15 conference with Hitler at which the fate of Berlin’s Jews
16 was clearly raised.
17 Q. [Mr Rampton]: By whom?
18 A. [Mr Irving]: We do not know.
19 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Then you go on, at 1.30 p.m. Himmler was obliged to
20 telephone from Hitler’s bunker?
21 A. [Mr Irving]: Yes.
22 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Who could have obliged, that is to say compel, Himmler to
23 do such a thing?
24 A. [Mr Irving]: His own inner conscience.
25 Q. [Mr Rampton]: That is what it was, was it?
26 A. [Mr Irving]: That is why I used word “obliged” otherwise I would have
. P-37
1 said “ordered”.
2 MR JUSTICE GRAY: The reality of the way, would you not
3 accept, Mr Irving, of the way it is put in your book is
4 that the reader is going to infer that that was an order
5 from Hitler to him?
6 A. [Mr Irving]: My Lord, I use my words with utmost care when I write
7 passages like that. I will go backwards and forwards over
8 them looking for a word which I considered to be justified
9 by the evidence but not implying or imputing or inferring
10 too much. If I used the word “obliged” then it was
11 because I hesitated to use the word “order” but for some
12 reason he made the telephone conversation. He did not
13 wait until he got back to his own headquarters, he
14 immediately phoned Heydrich from Hitler’s bunker without
15 even getting over to the local phone box, he phoned
16 Heydrich with these instructions saying “stop the
17 killing”.
18 MR RAMPTON: That is what you intended to convey in that
19 passage of that page of Hitler’s War 1977?
20 A. [Mr Irving]: That is all that I felt it was safe to convey on the basis
21 of the very skimpy evidence I had at that time. At that
22 time, of course, I did not even have the decodes, but now
23 the decodes confirm me.
24 Q. [Mr Rampton]: So you say. Let us turn to page (xiv) of the introduction
25 to this book, may we?
26 A. [Mr Irving]: Yes.
. P-38
1 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Perhaps for completeness start at the bottom of page
2 13: “Many people, particularly in Germany and Austria had
3 an interest in propagating the accepted version of the
4 order of one mad man originated the entire massacre.” We
5 are talking here about Holocaust in the old sense, old, in
6 the Irving history.
7 MR JUSTICE GRAY: I am so sorry, Mr Rampton, I am lost, page
8 13.
9 MR RAMPTON: (Xiii) of the introduction.
10 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Thank you.
11 MR RAMPTON: I will start again. Last two lines bottom of page
12 13: “Many people, particularly in Germany and Austria had
13 an interest in propagating the accepted version that the
14 order of one mad man originated the entire massacre.” That
15 is to say the massacre of the Jews, those are my words, my
16 Lord. “Precisely when the order was given in what form
17 has admittedly never been established. In 1939? But the
18 secret extermination did not begin operating until
19 December 1941. At the January 1942 Bunzig conference?
20 But the incontrovertible evidence is”, note those words,
21 Mr Irving, in the light of your recent answers, “the
22 incontrovertible evidence is that Hitler ordered on
23 November 30th 1941 that there was to be ‘no liquidation’
24 of the Jews (without much difficulty I found in Himmler’s
25 private files his own handwritten note on this).” In the
26 light of that, Mr Irving, would you care to revise the
. P-39
1 answers you gave a moment ago?
2 A. [Mr Irving]: No.
3 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Well, what do those words mean? Do they speak for
4 themselves or do they not, that I have just read?
5 A. [Mr Irving]: I have done exactly what any normal editor would do, you
6 present the evidence and then you draw conclusions.
7 I present the evidence in the body of the book. I even in
8 this one case print a facsimile of the document which is
9 pivotal to this particular argument and then in the
10 introduction (as a good author should) I put my principal
11 conclusions. Here I am putting my principal conclusion as
12 the author, David Irving, that I draw the conclusion from
13 this episode that Hitler had intervened to stop — and
14 here is the error, the liquidation of the Jews. What
15 I should have written is “the liquidation of a transport
16 of Jews”. That was the state of my knowledge at the time
17 I wrote this version of this book. Subsequently of course
18 I amended it.
19 Q. [Mr Rampton]: I think you told me yesterday that the only evidence you
20 had for the order of Hitler was that Himmler was there at
21 the time?
22 A. [Mr Irving]: The only evidence that I had for an order of Hitler?
23 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Yes, was that Himmler was at the Wolfsschanze at the time?
24 A. [Mr Irving]: I think we would have to see exactly what I testified
25 before I would agree to that brief summary.
26 MR JUSTICE GRAY: I think it is right, but if you want to be
. P-40
1 referred to it then no doubt you should be.
2 MR RAMPTON: A summary?
3 A. [Mr Irving]: I hate to agree with vulgarised versions of what I
4 testified.
5 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Let us have a look and see what you did say.
6 MR RAMPTON: My Lord, one could start at line 20 on page 285
7 perhaps?
8 A. [Mr Irving]: 285?
9 Q. [Mr Rampton]: 285, line 20, I am trying not to take too much of it.
10 I suppose it really begins at line five on page 285, but
11 I hope I summarized it fairly?
12 A. [Mr Irving]: I do not think you did, but I will certainly stand by what
13 I stated on those two pages.
14 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Look at line 286, line 3 and onwards.
15 MR RAMPTON: Yes, please.
16 A. [Mr Irving]: This is the question, of course, and not the answer.
17 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Yes, but there is an answer after the
18 question.
19 MR RAMPTON: At line nine there is an answer.
20 A. [Mr Irving]: Yes.
21 Q. [Mr Rampton]: My summary was a fair one. There is no evidence beyond
22 the fact that Himmler was at the bunker that day and had
23 lunch with Hitler an hour later, is there?
24 A. [Mr Irving]: Evidence for what?
25 Q. [Mr Rampton]: For an order from Hitler that Jews — that the train load
26 of Jews, let us stick with that for the moment?
. P-41
1 A. [Mr Irving]: This is —
2 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Should be not liquidated?
3 A. [Mr Irving]: — I do not mean this offensively, but this is the common
4 sense interpretation of the evidence lying before us,
5 rather the perverse interpretation. We will always has
6 versions or two interpretations, one is the obvious one,
7 which is — and the other is the perverse one. The
8 obvious one is if Himmler goes to Hitler’s headquarters
9 and is handed a phone at some time on his way out and he
10 then has to make phone call to Heydrich saying, “stop
11 killing the Berlin Jews”, then there is some close
12 connection between that and the fact he has seen Hitler
13 that day.
14 Q. [Mr Rampton]: That is a possible interpretation, we in this court, and
15 I do not know about the court of history, we in this court
16 when we say “evidence” we mean “evidence” not “inference”.
17 A. [Mr Irving]: The issues that are being pleaded are mistranslation, or
18 distortion, deliberately mistranslation, distortion,
19 manipulation and I do not think that the particular avenue
20 we are going down leads in the —
21 Q. [Mr Rampton]: I will put it bluntly to you and then I will leave it, you
22 can deny it, because you will deny it, I am sure; (a) you
23 deliberately mistranslated it, you inflated from one train
24 load into Jews generally, that is number one; and (b) you
25 inserted an order from Hitler for which there was no
26 evidence?
. P-42
1 A. [Mr Irving]: — I will take those two allegations seriatim; that
2 I inflated it deliberately, there is not a shred of
3 evidence for that. The evidence is quite clear, that as
4 soon as Dr General Flemming brought to me the evidence
5 there was one train load of Jews which was in trouble that
6 day, I immediately and in subsequent editions of the book
7 revised it to the narrow interpretation of the word
8 “transport” rather than the wider interpretation.
9 Q. [Mr Rampton]: And you are sticking with the Hitler order answer?
10 A. [Mr Irving]: As being the reasonable rather than perverse analysis of
11 the documents at that time before us. I emphasise of
12 course it has now been very amply confirmed by the
13 intercepts I read out in my bundle this morning.
Section 43.14 to 60.23
14 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Very well, then, we must look at another document. This
15 is one of your documents?
16 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Before you do can I ask one rather mundane
17 question.
18 MR RAMPTON: Yes, of course.
19 MR JUSTICE GRAY: But I think you will understand why I ask it,
20 Hitler’s headquarters or the Wolf’s Lair, how big a
21 building or collection of buildings was that?
22 A. [Mr Irving]: At that time it was not a big formidable complex which
23 exists today, huge concrete bunkers. There were one or two
24 air raid shelters, but it was mostly in the form of wooden
25 barracks scattered around in a compound of a 2 or 3
26 kilometres area with minefields and forests.
. P-43
1 Q. [Mr Justice Gray]: How many people would work there?
2 A. [Mr Irving]: Probably in the order of one thousand people including all
3 the escorts and security. It had various inner areas and
4 so called “sperrkreise”, which were the security zones and
5 he was in security zone A. But if it is ausdembunker,
6 from the bunker, then it is from Hitler’s bunker.
7 MR JUSTICE GRAY: By which you mean an office or —
8 A. [Mr Irving]: No, Hitler —
9 Q. [Mr Justice Gray]: — a part of the compound where Hitler was himself based?
10 A. [Mr Irving]: — in the security zone A there was the bunker in which
11 Hitler resided, lived and conducted his conferences.
12 Later on it was massively reinforced after the Allied air
13 raids started.
14 MR RAMPTON: This is all on the same topic, Mr Irving, so that
15 the document you are will next need is to be found in
16 bundle D8(iii), somebody will give it to you (same
17 handed).
18 A. [Mr Irving]: Very well.
19 Q. [Mr Rampton]: The page I want is 1042.
20 A. [Mr Irving]: Yes.
21 Q. [Mr Rampton]: At the same time could I give you and his Lordship —
22 I have composed a page of the reprinted Himmler logs for
23 Sunday 30th November 1941 and Monday 1st December 1941,
24 I have taken from that Witte book. I have taken out the
25 footnotes because I wanted the text. I wanted the text to
26 appear unvarnished. First of all would like you to look
. P-44
1 at the page in D8(iii) page in D8(iii), 1042. This is
2 taken from your website; do you recognize it?
3 A. [Mr Irving]: Yes.
4 Q. [Mr Rampton]: You do, Mr Irving. At the bottom of the page the last
5 entry starts: Meanwhile another page from the Himmler file
6 in the Moscow archives obtained by David Irving on Sunday
7 May 17th 1998, reveals the Reischsfuhrer’s appointments
8 for November 30th 1941, see above. The day of the
9 telephone call with Heydrich”.
10 Turn over now to page 1043.
11 “This suggests that Mr Irving’s original theory
12 that Himmler discussed the matter with Hitler before
13 phoning Heydrich is wrong. Himmler saw SS Sturmbannfuhrer
14 Gunther d’Alquen, a journalist, from 12 to 1 p.m.
15 (Reisebericht uber SS Pol Division [that is short for
16 politzei] u. [that is an abbreviated U stop]
17 Totenkopfdivision) then worked for an hour
18 (‘gearbeitet’) during which he made the phone call,
19 received General Dietl from 2 to 2.30 p.m.” I will not
20 bother to read the next bit.
21 “And only then, at 2.30 p.m., went for lunch
22 until 4 p.m. with Hitler (‘Mittagessen b. Fuhrer’) that is
23 short for bei, yes ?
24 A. [Mr Irving]: Yes.
25 Q. [Mr Rampton]: That is your account, must postdate the 17th May 1998,
26 must it not? According to that entry anyway it does, if
. P-45
1 you look at the first page?
2 A. [Mr Irving]: Yes. I did not understand the question, last question, it
3 was what?
4 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Well, if you say that you arrive at this conclusion in
5 consequence of the discovery of a Himmler, a file page on
6 17th May 1998, this, what shall we say, “confession” must
7 postdate that, must it not?
8 A. [Mr Irving]: Perhaps I should explain to his Lordship, if your Lordship
9 is wondering why it is written in the third person. This
10 is a page.
11 MR JUSTICE GRAY: I do not think that matters at all.
12 A. [Mr Irving]: No, right. But in other words I wrote that. This is what
13 is important.
14 Q. [Mr Justice Gray]: I follow you wrote it.
15 MR RAMPTON: I had assumed you wrote that. This is why I called
16 it a confession.
17 A. [Mr Irving]: Confession implies that something is wrong.
18 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Put the substance, Mr Rampton.
19 MR RAMPTON: It is quite inconsistent with the version you have
20 been giving us in this court?
21 A. [Mr Irving]: It is absolutely consistent with my methods as an
22 historian as saying here is one version, but the audience
23 should know there is an alternative version. This is
24 absolutely consistent with — you remember how I sent that
25 letter to The Times in 1966 saying there are other figures
26 on Dresden and it is right that the public knows this.
. P-46
1 I know it is unusual for historians to do this, but I do
2 that kind of thing.
3 Q. [Mr Rampton]: But you did not say, but on reflection I think this
4 suggestion that I was mistaken is probably wrong, and
5 I adhere to my original thesis that it was a Hitler order?
6 A. [Mr Irving]: I draw attention to the first two words on page 1043 “this
7 suggests”.
8 Q. [Mr Rampton]: I know that?
9 A. [Mr Irving]: It does not say “this confirms” or “proves”.
10 MR JUSTICE GRAY: But to be blunt about it, Mr Irving, what
11 I think is the suggestion made on the basis of your
12 website entry is that it was because a journalist tipped
13 off Himmler what had been going on that the message went
14 out to Riga; have I understood it correctly?
15 A. [Mr Irving]: I think I would be reading very much between the lines, my
16 Lord.
17 Q. [Mr Justice Gray]: That is what you are saying here, is it not, Mr Irving?
18 A. [Mr Irving]: No, not at all. I am saying exactly what happened. What
19 his timetable was.
20 MR RAMPTON: Mr Irving, the position is this, you quite
21 properly in this website entry recognize the possibility,
22 I would say the probability, it does not matter, that your
23 original thesis, that it was an order from Hitler was
24 wrong, do you not?
25 A. [Mr Irving]: Well, you say “probability” and “possibility”; I would say
26 what I am saying here is it is important that the learned
. P-47
1 public, academics and others who are accessing this
2 website realize there are documents which indicate a
3 discrepancies in The Times. However, we should not lay
4 every word on the gold balance, as the Germans say,
5 because it is quite possible and indeed highly probable
6 that as soon as Himmler arrived at Hitler’s headquarters
7 he did not go and have a shower or something, he went
8 straight in to see the boss, and said “boss I am here,
9 what time shall I come past” and the boss said “oh by the
10 way Heydrich I will have to tear a strip off you because
11 of what is happening at the Eastern Front”.
12 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Mr Irving, who reads these books of yours? Do not take
13 that as a suggestion that nobody does, at all, I do not
14 mean that, but who are they aimed at?
15 A. [Mr Irving]: How would I know.
16 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Who do you write your books for? When are you writing a
17 book, if I write something to my wife I do not use the
18 kind of pompous language I use in court, I hope. So you
19 know, you have an audience?
20 A. [Mr Irving]: Obviously, I am trying to write for as wide an audience as
21 possible so that it is both learned enough for the
22 academics to use as a source book, in the case of the
23 Goebbels biography but also entertaining enough for the
24 general public to look at and read from end to end without
25 putting it down at the end of a chapter.
26 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Exactly. It is meant to be readable and it is also
. P-48
1 scholarly and authoritative, is it not?
2 A. [Mr Irving]: Yes.
3 Q. [Mr Rampton]: All three of those things. Do you not think, Mr Irving,
4 that the respectable approach to this problem of the
5 Himmler telephone call, for problem it is, historically?
6 A. [Mr Irving]: Yes.
7 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Would have been to put both possible “theories”, as you
8 call them, in this website into your book?
9 A. [Mr Irving]: Well, here you have another time discrepancy, Mr Rampton,
10 because the book was delivered to the publishers in 1995,
11 and this Moscow diary came to my hands in 1998, three
12 years, so it would have been quite a feat of imagination
13 to imagine what was in the archives and I had not at that
14 time seen.
15 Q. [Mr Rampton]: No, but you had assumed without more, had you not?
16 A. [Mr Irving]: This is not the point you were just trying to make, you
17 were trying to imply I concealed what I knew, which would
18 fall within the grounds of manipulation and
19 mistranslation.
20 Q. [Mr Rampton]: What I put to you is this, that you inserted an order from
21 Hitler without evidence?
22 A. [Mr Irving]: I inferred an order from Hitler with very strong evidence.
23 Q. [Mr Rampton]: You state it as a categorical fact?
24 A. [Mr Irving]: In my introduction to the book, yes, I draw conclusions.
25 Q. [Mr Rampton]: And also in the text, if I may say so.
26 A. [Mr Irving]: No, in the text I state exactly what the documents say.
. P-49
1 Q. [Mr Rampton]: And you mistranscribe the word Judentransport so as to
2 make Hitler appear the more merciful because that is what
3 it is about?
4 A. [Mr Irving]: No, I applied the wider interpretation of the “transport”
5 rather than the narrow interpretation, which one could
6 subsequently apply once one knew more about the history of
7 that particular train load.
8 Q. [Mr Rampton]: You do not agree now that you have been caught out by the
9 full entry in the Hitler log?
10 A. [Mr Irving]: Mr Rampton, historians are constantly being caught out by
11 fresh documents that come into their purview and one is —
12 I am personally very satisfied how infrequently I am
13 caught out. I the entire Goebbels biography initially,
14 for example, without access to the diaries in Moscow.
15 I was pleased to find out how much I managed to work out
16 correctly from secondary sources. So it is with
17 particular episode, the decodes only came into our
18 possession within the last four or five years and yet they
19 confirmed exactly what I inferred 20 years, 25 years ago.
20 I do not think it is a question of being caught out. If
21 one revises and updates information it is not because one
22 has been caught out, with all pejorative implications.
23 Q. [Mr Rampton]: I am afraid they are pejorative. I would like to know why
24 you say that the decodes (we will go it now, I will come
25 back to where I was in a moment) why the decodes confirm
26 your account?
. P-50
1 A. [Mr Irving]: I think I have gone through the little bundle this morning
2 in some detail, I am glad I did.
3 Q. [Mr Rampton]: You show me the decode, I suppose mean the one on page 17?
4 A. [Mr Irving]: December 1st.
5 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Mr Rampton, you are moving to a slightly
6 different topic, may I ask one more question?
7 MR RAMPTON: Yes.
8 MR JUSTICE GRAY: It is back to your website, looking at it
9 now, forget what you have written in the past, but looking
10 at it now, it is obvious that there was some sort of
11 discussion or meeting between Himmler and the journalists;
12 is that not right?
13 A. [Mr Irving]: My Lord, I regard this meeting between Himmler and the
14 journalist as being a matter of very low priority, I just
15 put it in purely because it shows what he was doing that
16 morning. It never occurred to me that Gunther d’Alquen
17 who is in fact still alive, I believe — no, he died three
18 or four months ago in fact, that he would brought to
19 Himmler any kind of serious information about was going
20 on. I have never heard that implied or inferred.
21 D’Alquen has been questioned on very many occasions, both
22 by the courts and by journalists, and I am sure that that
23 kind of information would have come into my possession, if
24 it had had I would have immediately used it.
25 Q. [Mr Justice Gray]: The entry does suggest that this journalist did have some
26 news to give to Himmler, does it not?
. P-51
1 A. [Mr Irving]: I shall go straight home and change the wording of the
2 entry, my Lord, because was that not what I intended as
3 the author of this passage.
4 Q. [Mr Justice Gray]: What is Reisebericht?
5 A. [Mr Irving]: It is a travel report. He has been travelling around,
6 presumably on the Eastern Front and he comes back to
7 Himmler. He reports back to Himmler, tells him what he
8 has seen, when he visited the SS police divisions and
9 whatever —
10 Q. [Mr Justice Gray]: How would you translate Totenkopfdivision?
11 A. [Mr Irving]: — Death’s Head Division, which is a division on the
12 Eastern Front which was not connected, as I understand it,
13 with the killing operations, it was actually operating on
14 the Eastern Front. I am prepared to be corrected on this
15 but I believe that the Death’s Head Division was one of
16 the elite SS divisions which was fighting on the Eastern
17 Front at Moscow at this time of course in severe
18 difficulties.
19 Q. [Mr Justice Gray]: Yes, thank you very much. I am sorry, Mr Rampton.
20 MR RAMPTON: It is of no matter, my Lord.
21 THE WITNESS [Mr Irving]: I would be very willing to write material in
22 between the lines here if I thought it assisted the
23 evidence that on this particular case, on the balance of
24 probabilities beyond putting the name in, that is all one
25 can safely do. But your Lordship will notice that I do
26 not hesitate to publicise information which is possibly
. P-52
1 hostile to my own interests.
2 MR JUSTICE GRAY: I see that.
3 MR RAMPTON: The original of I imagine the two documents that
4 you are talking about when you are talking about the — is
5 on page 20 of your little bundle; do you have the little
6 bundle there?
7 A. [Mr Irving]: Yes.
8 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Items 24 and 25; is that right?
9 A. [Mr Irving]: 24 and?
10 Q. [Mr Rampton]: 25, items 24 and 25 on page 20?
11 A. [Mr Irving]: Is this April 20th, you are talking about?
12 Q. [Mr Rampton]: No, I am sorry, this is the summons to Jeckeln?
13 A. [Mr Irving]: Would you give me the page number.
14 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Page 20.
15 A. [Mr Irving]: Yes.
16 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Items 24 and 25.
17 A. [Mr Irving]: I see, this is actual the intercepts.
18 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Yes, we go back to page 17 for the English.
19 A. [Mr Irving]: Yes.
20 Q. [Mr Rampton]: It is quite clear, is it not, I mean I agree with you,
21 that Himmler was very cross with Jeckeln for what had
22 happened?
23 A. [Mr Irving]: For overstepping the guidelines.
24 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Sure. We do not know what guidelines are you tell us?
25 A. [Mr Irving]: I do not know what the guidelines are, no.
26 Q. [Mr Rampton]: It is common ground for once between you and me and the
. P-53
1 people who inform me, teach me, educate me, that following
2 that incident because no doubt the meeting took place
3 between Himmler and Jeckeln on 4th December 1941, yes?
4 A. [Mr Irving]: Yes.
5 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Probably following receipt of the telegram or whatever it
6 was on the 1st December.
7 A. [Mr Irving]: Mr Rampton, may I remind you of the very lengthy Bruns
8 Report I read out.
9 Q. [Mr Rampton]: I am coming to that.
10 A. [Mr Irving]: Can I answer.
11 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Certainly remind me of that if you wish, yes.
12 A. [Mr Irving]: Yes. In which there is talk in the Bruns Report of Bruns
13 saying we sent an urgent message to Hitler’s Headquarters,
14 how could we do it, then the word comes back to the Riga
15 front to the young SS man, he said, we received orders,
16 this kind of thing has to stop. This is the kind of
17 extraneous information one takes on board when one draws
18 inferences from documents.
19 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Mr Irving, I think sometimes you set traps for yourself.
20 A. [Mr Irving]: I try not to.
21 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Actually what Bruns said was mass shootings on this scale
22 have got to stop, this has to be done more discreetly?
23 A. [Mr Irving]: Yes.
24 Q. [Mr Rampton]: That is quite different?
25 A. [Mr Irving]: That is what the local SS officers said to him.
26 Q. [Mr Rampton]: It is quite different, is it not, it is not the same thing
. P-54
1 at all?
2 A. [Mr Irving]: They wanted to carry on, yes, they wanted to carry.
3 Q. [Mr Rampton]: No, no, Bruns’s report of the order through the mouth of
4 Altemeyer was that the order which had come from Berlin
5 was that mass shootings of this kind on the scale have to
6 stop, that has to be done more discreetly?
7 A. [Mr Irving]: This is Bruns’ version four years later of what the 22
8 year old SS officer who wanted to carry on killing Jews
9 told him. He said, we have gone been told by East Prussia
10 we have to stop, however, the way he phrased it was, they
11 have to stop on this scale and we are going to carry on
12 doing it in a more discreet way because that is what they
13 wanted to do. But of course they did not, they did not
14 carry on, they stopped, as that footnote shows.
15 Q. [Mr Rampton]: We will come to it in a moment. They did stop for a
16 time. They stopped doing what Himmler did not like that
17 Jeckeln had done which was mass, if you like, semi public
18 shootings of people as they go off the trains?
19 A. [Mr Irving]: The footnote which I printed at the end of bundle says
20 “the killing of German Jews stopped for several months
21 after this exchange”.
22 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Yes, that is common ground between you and me, the killing
23 of German Jews by this method. Maybe it stopped —
24 A. [Mr Irving]: Mr Rampton, you are putting words in which do not exist —
25 Q. [Mr Rampton]: — we are coming to your use, I add, your use of the Bruns
26 evidence in a moment, but before we do that, I want you to
. P-55
1 look at these two messages, these two intercepts. There
2 is no evidence in that of any intervention or
3 participation by Hitler, is there?
4 A. [Mr Irving]: — no.
5 Q. [Mr Rampton]: It is all between Himmler and Jeckeln?
6 A. [Mr Irving]: Yes.
7 Q. [Mr Rampton]: If you look at the log for the 1st December 1941, I have
8 given you the composite version, having lost —
9 A. [Mr Irving]: Composite version, yes. This is a composite because it is
10 made up from three or four different sources by the
11 editors.
12 Q. [Mr Rampton]: — by “composite” I meant composed from different pages in
13 the book.
14 A. [Mr Irving]: Yes, December 1st.
15 Q. [Mr Rampton]: December 1st. We see when he is making a telephone call
16 he puts “T” is that the editors or is that Himmler?
17 A. [Mr Irving]: That is the editors who put that.
18 Q. [Mr Rampton]: That is the editors. At quarter past one on the 1st there
19 is an entry, it must be a telephone call because Heydrich
20 is in Prag?
21 A. [Mr Irving]: It is in my bundle two.
22 Q. [Mr Rampton]: The German for Prague is P-R-A-G I take it; is that right?
23 A. [Mr Irving]: Yes.
24 Q. [Mr Rampton]: At quarter past 1 he rings SS Obergruppenfuhrer Heydrich
25 in Prag?
26 A. [Mr Irving]: If I may interrupt, we do not know he rang Heydrich, all
. P-56
1 we can say is there was a conversation.
2 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Heydrich might have rung him, of course?
3 A. [Mr Irving]: Yes.
4 Q. [Mr Rampton]: The first word is scribedamen; is that secretaries?
5 A. [Mr Irving]: That is correct.
6 Q. [Mr Rampton]: They have a talk about secretaries, it seems, then they
7 talk about the executions in Riga?
8 A. [Mr Irving]: Yes.
9 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Is there any inconsistency in that entry and the
10 suggestion that what they actually talked about was the
11 fact that Jeckeln had not followed the guidelines because
12 he was doing it too publicly?
13 A. [Mr Irving]: That is perfectly consistent. I might add this is the
14 document 24 in — I am sorry, document No. 14 in my
15 bundle, the original.
16 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Yes. You see there is no evidence in that that that phone
17 call to Heydrich, or from Heydrich, is in any way involved
18 or prompted by Hitler, is there?
19 A. [Mr Irving]: No, none at all, but you are setting a trap for yourself
20 I am afraid.
21 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Why?
22 A. [Mr Irving]: Because if I may refer back to the second of the messages,
23 page 17 in my bundle, one in which Himmler contacts
24 Jeckeln on December 1st and reads the riot act to him.
25 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Yes, we looked at that.
26 A. [Mr Irving]: It says: “The Jews being outplaced to the Ostland are to
. P-57
1 be dealt with only in accordance with the guidelines laid
2 down by myself and/or by the Reichssicherheitshauptamt on
3 my orders.” No mention of Hitler here.
4 Q. [Mr Rampton]: No.
5 A. [Mr Irving]: So this is vitally important to me. I rely on that to
6 prove that Hitler was not involved in this order. The
7 ordering procedure was not Hitler’s. The guidelines were
8 not Hitler’s.
9 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Mr Irving, one would not expect, given the way in which
10 Hitler’s so-called orders and, they are very rarely
11 orders, they are more often just an airy speech at some
12 dinner table, the words “Hitler’s orders” in quotes, were,
13 as it were, dispersed down the hierarchical column of the
14 Nazis, you would not expect Hitler to issue precise
15 guidelines about how the Jews were to be treated on
16 arrival or how they were to be killed, would you?
17 A. [Mr Irving]: This is your, evidence you are leading or a question?
18 Q. [Mr Rampton]: I am putting it to you that that is right, is it not?
19 A. [Mr Irving]: I rely only on my interpretation of this document that
20 Himmler in a secret message says, they are my order and my
21 guidelines and you have contravened them. When the
22 temptation would surely have been to say you have
23 contravened the Fuhrer’s orders and the Fuhrer’s
24 guidelines, which is a very strong point I would make
25 because this is the centre point of my own contention.
26 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Do you not think that in light of Bruns’s evidence the
. P-58
1 guidelines were whatever you do you must make sure it does
2 not come to public attention because public opinion in
3 Germany will not stand for it if it does, and that that is
4 precisely what was discussed between Himmler and the
5 journalist on the train or wherever it was on the 30th
6 November?
7 A. [Mr Irving]: I think that public opinion in Germany would have stood
8 from it from what I know of the Germans — most Germans
9 would not have batted a eyelash at the knowledge that
10 these mass killings of the Jews were going on.
11 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Well, they were German Jews, I think you
12 agreed earlier on?
13 A. [Mr Irving]: German Jews.
14 MR RAMPTON: They were Berlin Jews.
15 A. [Mr Irving]: Yes, there was certainly nothing that would have caused
16 the Germans problems on the scale that the euthanasia
17 killings were causing in public morale problems. Maybe my
18 interpretation of the morale in Germany is wrong, you will
19 lead evidence later on to contradict me.
20 Q. [Mr Rampton]: I think that probably is right.
21 MR JUSTICE GRAY: I am not sure I follow the logic of that, the
22 euthanasia programme did cause unrest to use a neutral
23 term?
24 A. [Mr Irving]: It caused so much unrest, my Lord, that Hitler had to
25 intervene and stop it.
26 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Would not the shooting of large numbers of, to put it
. P-59
1 bluntly, healthy Jews, have caused even more unrest, or at
2 any rate as much unrest?
3 A. [Mr Irving]: They are very — they are parallel programmes and in very
4 many senses. A lot of the killing operations were
5 conducted by the same organizations and the same experts,
6 but the campaign of Dr Goebbels against the Jews,
7 propaganda campaign had, been conducted with very much
8 more vehemence and personal commitment by Dr Goebbels and
9 it had converted a large element of the German, population
10 in my opinion, to anti-Semitism of a vicious and poisonous
11 degree. Whereas his attempt to achieve the same results
12 against the crippled and disabled had been limited just to
13 one or two films and articles. There a film called “Ich
14 Klagean”, which was a film about the — it was a film in
15 which the mentally disabled and crippled were portrayed in
16 a repulsive manner so the public would accustom themselves
17 to idea of putting them out of the way, and this kind of
18 propaganda totally failed with the German public. The
19 doctors went along with it but the general public when
20 they found out about it resisted very strongly euthanasia
21 killings. Whereas the Jews were considered to be,
22 I think, in Germany fair game as a result largely of
23 Dr Goebbels’ propaganda.
Section 60.24 to 77.8
24 Q. [Mr Rampton]: How good is your facility with Heinrich Himmler’s spidery
25 Gothic handwriting?
26 A. [Mr Irving]: The handwriting on these pages is not only Himmler, it is
. P-60
1 also his Adjutant who still alive in Munich.
2 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Never mind. Let us be precise then and put impersonally,
3 with the spidery handwriting, Gothic handwriting on these
4 pages?
5 A. [Mr Irving]: On these pages, I will have a shot at it, Mr Rampton.
6 Q. [Mr Rampton]: No, I just wonder how used you are to looking at it.
7 A. [Mr Irving]: Not recently, but over the last few nights I have had to
8 strain my eyes once again, thanks to your imputations.
9 Q. [Mr Rampton]: When did you first see these pages which, apparently, you
10 did not see the whole of the page for 30th November 1941
11 until 17th May 1998, is that right?
12 A. [Mr Irving]: He maintained three separate continuous records. He kept
13 the pocket diary. Those pocket diaries are scattered
14 around the world. Some are in Israel now, some are in
15 Russia. I found two in the United States and gave them to
16 the German government.
17 He also maintained a telephone log which was a
18 sheet of paper on his disk, like the ones in front of us,
19 on which he would write down on one side the name of the
20 person he was talking to and on other side what they were
21 talking about. Either he or his adjutant would also keep
22 a daily agenda of whom he was to see and when and what
23 they would talk about or what they had talked about.
24 The fourth series of documents by Himmler you
25 will also run into is when he went to see Hitler, he would
26 write down on a sheet of paper his discussion points.
. P-61
1 Q. [Mr Rampton]: We are coming to one of those later on today, Mr Irving.
2 Can you turn to page 12?
3 A. [Mr Irving]: I should also explain that these are on microfilm
4 originally in the United States which is the way I used
5 them and accessed them originally in the 1970s.
6 Q. [Mr Rampton]: I wan to be clear what it was you had seen when you wrote
7 your books. Can you turn to page 12 in your little
8 bundle?
9 A. [Mr Irving]: Right. This is the telephone conversations of November
10 30th.
11 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Bear with me, if you do not mind, just allow me to ask
12 some questions. What is this a page a copy of? Page 12?
13 A. [Mr Irving]: I just stated that he would have on his desk a sheet of
14 paper on which he would either type or insert in
15 handwriting the words “telephon gesprach” which is
16 T-E-L-E-P-H-O-N G-E-S-P-R-A-C-H.
17 Q. [Mr Rampton]: So that is his what we can —-
18 A. [Mr Irving]: This is his telephone log.
19 Q. [Mr Rampton]: What we could perhaps imprecisely call his telephone log?
20 A. [Mr Irving]: Yes.
21 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Would you turn over then to —-
22 A. [Mr Irving]: I was the first person to find and make use of these.
23 Q. [Mr Rampton]: That is as may be.
24 A. [Mr Irving]: Well, it is important.
25 Q. [Mr Rampton]: On page 14?
26 A. [Mr Irving]: Page 14, yes.
. P-62
1 Q. [Mr Rampton]: I ask the same question: is that the same document? It
2 looks different.
3 A. [Mr Irving]: It looks different because that is a photocopy from my
4 blue volume of these which is on the desk at the other end
5 of your bench.
6 Q. [Mr Rampton]: I see.
7 A. [Mr Irving]: Whereas the page previously, when I used it as a facsimile
8 in my book “Hitler’s War”, I had it rephotographed by the
9 German Government from the original in their archives as a
10 photograph rather than as a photocopy.
11 Q. [Mr Rampton]: So, looking at page 14, somebody has typed “telephon
12 gesprach Reichsfuhrer SS” from 1st December 1941?
13 A. [Mr Irving]: Yes.
14 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Who typed that?
15 A. [Mr Irving]: That was typed by his adjutant. A blank sheet of paper
16 would be typed for him and laid before him with that
17 heading already prepared.
18 Q. [Mr Rampton]: But the other one, the earlier one, has not got that?
19 A. [Mr Irving]: He did not have it, no. That is taken straight off the
20 microfilm. I can show that to you on the bound volume.
21 Q. [Mr Rampton]: I follow that. Let us understand it. The second one is
22 the thing that he probably keeps in his office?
23 A. [Mr Irving]: I do not think so. He would sometimes use a presheet —
24 pretyped sheet that his adjutant had typed and sometimes
25 he would just a take a blank sheet of paper if he was in a
26 hurry and write the headings himself.
. P-63
1 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Which may be something of the character of the first one.
2 A. [Mr Irving]: That is correct. They are all in the same file, those
3 ones.
4 Q. [Mr Rampton]: What I want to know is what you had when you wrote your
5 books. Was it this these two sheets of paper?
6 A. [Mr Irving]: I had those two sheets.
7 Q. [Mr Rampton]: You did not have the fuller version which we can now
8 compose?
9 A. [Mr Irving]: It is not a question of the fuller version. The other
10 page that you are referring to was not his telephone log,
11 but his daily agenda, his appointment book, which is in
12 Moscow and which only became available in 1998.
13 Q. [Mr Rampton]: We really would get on quicker if you would let me finish
14 the question. I said the fuller version which we can now
15 compose from different sources. As the editors of the
16 Witte book have done, they have used a number of different
17 sources to make a diary for the day.
18 A. [Mr Irving]: Well, they have. They have constructed an artificial
19 diary, yes, a calendar.
20 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Exactly, but in the days when you were writing your books,
21 the books which we are talking about, this is all you had,
22 was it?
23 A. [Mr Irving]: Yes. The Witte book, which is the one to the left of your
24 box —-
25 Q. [Mr Rampton]: That is new, that one?
26 A. [Mr Irving]: Yes. It costs about £70 — not as much as law books, of
. P-64
1 course, but still quite expensive.
2 Q. [Mr Rampton]: I did not buy it.
3 A. [Mr Irving]: It was only published last year. I only obtained it about
4 four months ago.
5 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Well, now this is not in any sense a trick or an
6 examination question or anything. Can you look at page
7 12?
8 A. [Mr Irving]: Yes.
9 Q. [Mr Rampton]: And the last entry which I think is probably quarter past
10 6 — it might be anyway, might it not?
11 A. [Mr Irving]: The last line or the last entry?
12 Q. [Mr Rampton]: No, the last entry.
13 A. [Mr Irving]: 6.15.
14 Q. [Mr Rampton]: It looks like it, does it not? Then across the line?
15 A. [Mr Irving]: “SS Gruppenfuhrer … Berlin”.
16 Q. [Mr Rampton]: What is the first word of the entry in the right-hand
17 column?
18 A. [Mr Irving]: “Transport Nachersatz”.
19 Q. [Mr Rampton]: It is the “a” of transport which I ask you to look at.
20 A. [Mr Irving]: Yes, that is the real problem.
21 Q. [Mr Rampton]: No, it is not.
22 A. [Mr Irving]: It is because the “a” looks exactly like the “e” in Gothic
23 handwriting.
24 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Exactly. In fact, you might think to an English eye it
25 looks like a “u”?
26 A. [Mr Irving]: No.
. P-65
1 Q. [Mr Rampton]: “Trunsport”?
2 A. [Mr Irving]: I will explain why it does not.
3 Q. [Mr Rampton]: No, no.
4 A. [Mr Irving]: Well, no, please.
5 Q. [Mr Rampton]: It might be thought to an English person — just bear with
6 me, answer my person — it might be thought to look like a
7 “u”, might it not?
8 A. [Mr Irving]: Yes. My Lord, do you have the facsimile in front of you?
9 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Yes. I am following.
10 MR RAMPTON: Now could you turn to page 14, please?
11 A. [Mr Irving]: 14, yes.
12 Q. [Mr Rampton]: In fact, that thing that looks like a “u” to an English
13 person in “transport” is an “a”, is it not?
14 A. [Mr Irving]: Yes.
15 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Now look at the word which you say you mistranscribed as
16 “Juden” which is three lines up from the bottom of the
17 right-hand column —-
18 A. [Mr Irving]: Yes.
19 Q. [Mr Rampton]: — on page 14.
20 A. [Mr Irving]: Yes, I have it.
21 Q. [Mr Rampton]: It is plainly “haben”; it is the same thing, it is an “a”,
22 is it not?
23 A. [Mr Irving]: That is what we call Monday morning quarter back ring. It
24 is somebody who knows what the answer is. If I had given
25 this page to you, say, six months ago, Mr Rampton, and
26 said, “Would you mind reading that word?”
. P-66
1 Q. [Mr Rampton]: I would not have had a clue. I cannot read hardly any of
2 it.
3 A. [Mr Irving]: That was the position I was in 34 years ago when I looked
4 at this.
5 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Why? But you have never gone back to it?
6 A. [Mr Irving]: I must have gone back to it in the 1970s because I retyped
7 it on my transcript.
8 Q. [Mr Rampton]: The third letter, you think that is a “d” or you thought
9 it was a “d”?
10 A. [Mr Irving]: If you look at the word “Juden” which I would ask you to
11 look at variously, for example —-
12 Q. [Mr Rampton]: We will look at it on page 12, if you want?
13 A. [Mr Irving]: Yes. About eight lines from the bottom. In the third
14 line of that entry you have “Judentransport”, admittedly,
15 it is a bit —-
16 Q. [Mr Rampton]: It is obscured?
17 A. [Mr Irving]: — obscured by the word above it.
18 Q. [Mr Rampton]: I agree.
19 A. [Mr Irving]: But you can already begin to see that there are distinct
20 similarities in the outline.
21 Q. [Mr Rampton]: I am afraid I cannot accept that. Anyway, the point is
22 this, is it not —-
23 A. [Mr Irving]: Yes, you hasten on, yes.
24 Q. [Mr Rampton]: — you say, you tell us, that you read that word, that
25 entry as reading: “Verwaltungsfuhrer der SS Juden zu
26 bleiben”?
. P-67
1 A. [Mr Irving]: Yes, and I can produce my contemporary index card on which
2 I made that transcription which shows at that time as
3 “Juden zu bleiben”.
4 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Turn, please, to page 13 of this bundle and there you have
5 it correctly?
6 A. [Mr Irving]: I have corrected it, yes.
7 Q. [Mr Rampton]: You tell us to look at the word “haben”. One can see if
8 one looks that the letters are squashed?
9 A. [Mr Irving]: It has been typed in subsequently with tippex, yes.
10 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Yes, or whatever was existing then because you say that
11 was retyped on a typewriter which you threw away more than
12 15 years ago?
13 A. [Mr Irving]: Well, between 10 and 15 years ago — an old IBM typewriter
14 I had.
15 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Yes, but before 1991?
16 A. [Mr Irving]: Yes.
17 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Now can you take “Hitler’s War 1991”, please?
18 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Can I just ask you this, Mr Irving? You are
19 fluent in German. If you are trying to write that
20 somebody has to stay somewhere, whether it is Jews or
21 whoever, you would not say “haben zu bleiben”, would you?
22 A. [Mr Irving]: They have to stay, “haben zu bleiben” would be the German.
23 Just the same as in English, has to stay, has to remain.
24 Q. [Mr Justice Gray]: Is that right?
25 A. [Mr Irving]: Yes. But, on the other hand, the line “Juden zu bleiben”
26 would be also grammatically correct.
. P-68
1 Q. [Mr Justice Gray]: That is abbreviation, but if you are using a verb at all,
2 you would say “haben” would be appropriate?
3 A. [Mr Irving]: Yes, and you could equally well say the word above it
4 which is “Verwaltungsfuhrer” was a line by itself and a
5 topic by itself which is what I assumed it was in the
6 original transcript.
7 MR RAMPTON: Can you turn now to Hitler’s War on page 427, 1991
8 edition?
9 A. [Mr Irving]: I do not have it in front of me, but if you would just
10 read out the passage.
11 Q. [Mr Rampton]: D1(v). I do not have to read very much. My Lord, page
12 427.
13 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Thank you.
14 MR RAMPTON: At the end of the last complete paragraph on page
15 427 — is that 1991 you have there?
16 A. [Mr Irving]: You will not believe this, but I am only person who does
17 not have a copy of that book. People visit my house and
18 they think, “Well, that is nice”. It has gone!
19 Q. [Mr Rampton]: 1991, volume 2, it is D1(v).
20 A. [Mr Irving]: I would be quite ready to concede what you are about to
21 say. We do not really need to go into this.
22 MR JUSTICE GRAY: I probably ought to know what you are about
23 to concede.
24 MR RAMPTON: Yes. I do not think we should communicate by
25 telepathy, Mr Irving!
26 A. [Mr Irving]: Very well.
. P-69
1 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Now, we have read the first part of this earlier this
2 morning about “Hitler being obliged to telephone from
3 Hitler’s bunker to Heydrich the explicit order that these
4 Jews were ‘not to be liquidated'”. Then you go on after
5 the semi-colon —-
6 A. [Mr Irving]: Can you tell me what page you are on?
7 Q. [Mr Rampton]: I am sorry, 427. I beg your pardon.
8 A. [Mr Irving]: Yes.
9 Q. [Mr Rampton]: “… and the next day Himmler telephoned SS Oswohl Pohl,
10 overall chief of the concentration camp system, with the
11 order ‘Jews are to stay where they are’.” When that was
12 published, you knew it was wrong, did you not?
13 A. [Mr Irving]: Published what.
14 Q. [Mr Rampton]: When that was published, you knew it was wrong?
15 A. [Mr Irving]: No.
16 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Why not?
17 A. [Mr Irving]: When it was published, yes. You must appreciate this text
18 you are looking at here was set by the Americans, by the
19 American publisher, A1 Books Limited, in probably 1985 or
20 1986. They published it round about that time, and two or
21 three years later, round about 1990, we approached the
22 English publishers and had this American edition
23 photographed and what is called offset, and reprinted in
24 our own edition which Mr Bateman is holding there, what
25 you call the 1991 edition.
26 So there is very little connection between the
. P-70
1 actual year given as the year of publication and the date
2 when text goes into its final cast in stone form.
3 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Tell me that chronology again, Mr Irving. It is rather
4 interesting. When was the American edition of this work
5 written?
6 A. [Mr Irving]: Written or?
7 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Written.
8 A. [Mr Irving]: I have to piece it together from extraneous information.
9 I was in Quay West, I was in Florida. It would have been
10 1985 and 1986 because I did it before I wrote the Rudolf
11 Hess book which was 1987 published, so it was 1985.
12 Q. [Mr Rampton]: So when were the references to the Holocaust removed from
13 it?
14 A. [Mr Irving]: The references to the Holocaust?
15 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Yes.
16 A. [Mr Irving]: That is a good question. That is a good question because
17 that would, in fact, bring it forward to 1988.
18 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Oh, really?
19 A. [Mr Irving]: Yes.
20 Q. [Mr Rampton]: You see, Mr Irving, let me put my cards on the table, as
21 I habitually do, your Holocaust conversion, if I can call
22 it that, happened as a result, largely speaking, perhaps,
23 of your encounter with Mr Leuchter and his laboratory
24 analyses?
25 A. [Mr Irving]: Reading the laboratory reports, yes, which was April 6th
26 1988.
. P-71
1 Q. [Mr Rampton]: 1988?
2 A. [Mr Irving]: Yes.
3 Q. [Mr Rampton]: As a consequence of that, we have been told by you, not in
4 this court but elsewhere and you will, no doubt, confirm
5 it in due course, this book in that respect —-
6 A. [Mr Irving]: So the sequence of books is different. I wrote the Rudolf
7 Hess book first and then I went to revise this.
8 Q. [Mr Rampton]: If you say so.
9 A. [Mr Irving]: Yes.
10 Q. [Mr Rampton]: It was radically altered in that respect as compared with
11 the 1977 edition?
12 A. [Mr Irving]: Taking out the word “Holocaust”, yes.
13 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Now, here you have an entry, also as you know accept —-
14 A. [Mr Irving]: Yes.
15 Q. [Mr Rampton]: — completely wrong, but it does not —-
16 A. [Mr Irving]: Yes, but is it not exactly the same wording?
17 Q. [Mr Rampton]: It does not get changed. It is exactly the same wording.
18 A. [Mr Irving]: In other words, I have not actually actively put in
19 something; I have just left something to stand.
20 Q. [Mr Rampton]: No, you could have taken it out?
21 A. [Mr Irving]: I could have taken it out, yes. If somebody had come to
22 me and had said at the time, “Oh, Mr Irving, by the way,
23 do you not remember you misread that word and we have now
24 got a better reading”, then, believe me, I would have
25 taken it out and I would have contacted the Americans and
26 changed it. But that is not what happens in real life.
. P-72
1 Q. [Mr Rampton]: You came to believe in 1988 that the so-called Holocaust,
2 as you call it, so-called, did not happen?
3 A. [Mr Irving]: I have never used the phrase “so-called Holocaust”,
4 Mr Rampton.
5 Q. [Mr Rampton]: No, no. I am in the difficulty, as you perfectly well
6 understand, Mr Irving, there is no way in the world that
7 I am going to concede that it did not happen. That is not
8 what this case is about. I call it “so-called” because in
9 your eyes by then it was the “so-called Holocaust”?
10 A. [Mr Irving]: You said the “so-called Holocaust, as you call it”.
11 Q. [Mr Rampton]: No. As you characterize it?
12 A. [Mr Irving]: Yes.
13 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Yes — had not happened so you took steps to have the book
14 altered for its second edition to remove the references to
15 that —-
16 A. [Mr Irving]: Yes.
17 Q. [Mr Rampton]: — alleged event?
18 A. [Mr Irving]: Yes.
19 Q. [Mr Rampton]: You did not bother to remove something which was, first of
20 all, important and, secondly, completely wrong?
21 A. [Mr Irving]: This is a very subordinate matter in the book. It is a
22 piece of secondary information which adds very little to
23 the principal argument. The argument turns out now to
24 have been correct on the basis of the decodes. This is a
25 book of probably half a million words. One word,
26 admittedly, I should have changed because I had some years
. P-73
1 earlier realized that I had misread it. In all the
2 500,000 words it never occurred to me that there may be
3 words which I still had not actually changed yet. You are
4 absolutely right.
5 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Yes. Then I suggest that your failure to remove it, as
6 you could easily have done, it now appears —-
7 A. [Mr Irving]: Yes.
8 Q. [Mr Rampton]: — was deliberate because you wanted to keep this picture
9 of benign, magnanimous Adolf Hitler holding up his arm to
10 save the Jews before the public?
11 A. [Mr Irving]: I do not think so, and I do not think you can suggest that
12 just on the basis of that one line. The Jews have to
13 remain, have to remain where? Have to remain in
14 concentration camps.
15 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Where they are?
16 A. [Mr Irving]: Have to remain in the East, have to remain in the west.
17 It is a pretty meaningless sentence as it is.
18 Q. [Mr Rampton]: In that paragraph it is by no means meaningless, is it?
19 A. [Mr Irving]: Yes, but now I would certainly replace it with the decodes
20 instead and, in fact, in the latest edition I have. That
21 sentence is out and is replaced by absolute diamond
22 evidence, the decodes, showing that I am right all the way
23 down the line.
24 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Am I right in thinking that the entry in the
25 log was one of what you have described as the “chain of
26 documents”?
. P-74
1 A. [Mr Irving]: This particular one, I never referred to, not the “haben
2 zu bleiben”. It is totally immaterial and unimportant.
3 My Lord, people imagine that books are written in a very
4 precise, military kind of way, but they are written in an
5 extraordinarily ramshackle way. They go back and forth
6 across the Atlantic with all sorts of different people
7 setting their hands to them, including lawyers and readers
8 and experts and sub-editors and publicity people, and it
9 is a miracle that anything finally comes off the end of
10 the line.
11 MR RAMPTON: Mr Irving, you thought it sufficiently important
12 an event, and it is in the context of an order from
13 Hitler, according to you, the Jews are to stay where they
14 are, it is a coder showing, not only did Hitler say that
15 they are not to be killed, not to be liquidated, an
16 explicit order, but they are actually to stay where they
17 are, they are not to be shunted around from one place to
18 another and they are certainly not to be brought to places
19 of execution. That is why it is there, is it not?
20 A. [Mr Irving]: No. It is there purely because it was the next entry in
21 the Himmler telephone log as I had misread it at the time.
22 Q. [Mr Rampton]: And is sufficiently important in your mind for you to put
23 an asterisk footnote, is it not?
24 A. [Mr Irving]: Saying that the facsimile of November 30 telephone
25 conversation is reproduced as a facsimile.
26 Q. [Mr Rampton]: I imagine the reason you did not — I do not know what the
. P-75
1 verb is from “facsimile” — you did not reproduce a
2 facsimile of the note of 1st December is that you will say
3 that is because it was not sufficiently legible on the
4 copy?
5 A. [Mr Irving]: This is what you imagine, is it? Is your imagination what
6 you are leading as evidence now?
7 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Yes. I am asking you, what is the reason why — you had a
8 lot of pictures in the second edition, did you not?
9 A. [Mr Irving]: In the 1991 edition?
10 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Yes.
11 A. [Mr Irving]: Yes.
12 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Why did you not put a facsimile of this message in?
13 A. [Mr Irving]: I had something like 3,000 pictures to draw upon,
14 Mr Rampton, and it is a judgment call which photographs
15 you use. One facsimile of a first line document where an
16 order is going out, “the transport of Jews not to be
17 liquidated” is for more important than a meaningless
18 sentence like “had to remain”.
19 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Now, I want to go to, if I may —-
20 A. [Mr Irving]: But I would like just to round up that argument between us
21 by saying that I do not think that you have established
22 that I have deliberately manipulated or deliberately
23 distorted or deliberately mistranslated anything. It is a
24 sin of omission. The sin of omission is that I should
25 sometime five years down the road, having realized the
26 misreading, it should have occurred to me that one word
. P-76
1 had been misinterpreted or misread and that I should take
2 that out of the 500,000 other words.
3 Q. [Mr Rampton]: I will be clear about it, Mr Irving, I will lay it out for
4 you. You can deny it. It is not my function at this
5 stage to persuade his Lordship that I am right. That
6 comes later on. You invented a Hitler order. You
7 deliberately inflated it into an order to protect the
8 whole of the Jews?
9 A. [Mr Irving]: I have not invented a Hitler order, Mr Rampton. I have
10 hypothesized the Hitler order in the way that a scientist
11 should and I have then supported the hypothesis with
12 evidence.
13 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Mr Irving, this is one occasion on which a “yes” or “no”
14 will do. You invented it in the sense that you made an
15 hypothesis (and I do not say it is an unreasonable
16 hypothesis) you made it into a categorical assertion of
17 fact. Now, do you agree with that or not?
18 A. [Mr Irving]: Yes, in the introduction.
19 Q. [Mr Rampton]: And do you agree with that as being an irresponsible,
20 deliberately deceptive manner for a historian to proceed?
21 A. [Mr Irving]: Quite the contrary on the basis of evidence that I have
22 led this morning from my little bundle.
23 Q. [Mr Rampton]: When did you have those Jeckhelm messages?
24 A. [Mr Irving]: The intercepts?
25 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Yes.
26 A. [Mr Irving]: Within the last four weeks I have seen the originals.
. P-77
1 Q. [Mr Rampton]: You did not have them at the time when you wrote this
2 book?
3 A. [Mr Irving]: No, but if you have a clean mind when you set out to write
4 a book, untrammelled by what you have seen on the TVs and
5 on the movies or read in other people’s book like that by
6 Mr Kershaw, if you start out with a clean mind and you
7 read documents that meet your criteria, you are probably
8 going to be nudged in the correct path that you arrive at
9 the right conclusions.
10 Q. [Mr Rampton]: It may happen, Mr Irving, from time to time in life that
11 you tell what you intend to be a lie and subsequent
12 events, that wonderful friend hindsight shows that you
13 were telling the truth all along. Mr Irving, we are not
14 using hindsight. I am concerned with your state of mind
15 when you wrote these books.
16 A. [Mr Irving]: You a tell a lie and it turns out to be the truth all
17 along?
18 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Tell what you intend to be a lie.
19 MR RAMPTON: Yes, you tell what you intend to be a lie and it
20 turns out to be the truth.
21 A. [Mr Irving]: Why would I intend something to be a lie?
22 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Because you are trying to exonerate, exculpate Adolf
23 Hitler.
24 A. [Mr Irving]: Well, this is your opinion, Mr Rampton, and I do not think
25 that this can be sustained on the evidence.
26 Q. [Mr Rampton]: No. There are four limbs to this which you can say, “Yes,
. P-78
1 it is right” (which you will not) or “No, it is not right”
2 (which you will). The second limb to this is that you
3 deliberately distorted the original German so as to
4 inflate one transport of Jews from Berlin into the whole
5 of the German Jews?
6 A. [Mr Irving]: I am not going to respond to that because I have made a
7 response to that argument.
Section 77.9 to 94.3
8 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Exactly. The third step is that you did not misread by
9 accident the word “haben” as “Juden”; you knew all along
10 that it was “haben” but you wrote it in as “Jews”?
11 A. [Mr Irving]: I am not going to respond to that because I have stated my
12 position very fully on that too.
13 Q. [Mr Rampton]: The fourth proposition is that in any event, on your own
14 account, by the time this version of the book, the 1991
15 edition, comes out, you know for a certainty, even if you
16 did not before, that it was wrong and you deliberately
17 chose not to change it?
18 A. [Mr Irving]: On the contrary, you could use the word “deliberate” if
19 I put it in at this time. A failure to take something out
20 is an omission, a sin of omission, and not a sin of
21 commission, if I may put it that way. I respectfully
22 suggest that it was a sin of omission and a failure to
23 take a word out of 500,000 words is —-
24 Q. [Mr Rampton]: I do not think it matters what words one uses.
25 A. [Mr Irving]: — it would be improperly and unjustly described as being
26 the kind of distortion that you are trying to impute.
. P-79
1 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Indeed I do. To allow a falsehood once told to remain on
2 the record is just as reprehensible as to have invented it
3 in the first place, is it not?
4 A. [Mr Irving]: I object to the word “falsehood”.
5 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Well, it is a false statement.
6 A. [Mr Irving]: A misreading of a word which is a perfectly legitimate
7 misreading of a word which, I suppose, every person in
8 this room would have read that way if they had been in
9 exactly the same situation.
10 Q. [Mr Rampton]: These books, Mr Irving, are in some sense, are they not,
11 history books?
12 A. [Mr Irving]: Which books?
13 Q. [Mr Rampton]: These, the Hitler’s War books?
14 A. [Mr Irving]: They are —-
15 Q. [Mr Rampton]: They are meant to be?
16 A. [Mr Irving]: — works of history, yes.
17 Q. [Mr Rampton]: — meant to be history books. They are meant to be a
18 history of the Second World War seen not through Hitler’s
19 eyes, I do not mean that, but with an angle on it that
20 perhaps others have not treated before, that is to say,
21 the Hitler angle. Hitler is at the centre of these books,
22 is he not?
23 A. [Mr Irving]: Yes.
24 Q. [Mr Rampton]: You use what in the second edition it appears by the time
25 it appears you know to be a false statement of fact about
26 history?
. P-80
1 A. [Mr Irving]: By the time the second edition appears, it is true that
2 five years earlier I had known that a word had been
3 wrongly read. If you know — when one publishes
4 successive editions of the book, if one is in the
5 fortunate position that I am, you are in the position that
6 you can, if you have the chance, constantly upgrade and
7 update and polish and refine. The latest edition that we
8 put out, before it goes to the printers, I have had it on
9 the Internet for the last six weeks, and I have invited
10 people around the world to spot errors precisely like
11 that, and I have increased the reward to a present $8 per
12 error. I have had to shell out 2 or $3,000 already. I am
13 not in the least bit ashamed because one wants to turn out
14 a work that is as perfect and as error free as possible;
15 but even so, errors go in. There is a very famous case
16 where a man did exactly the same and he offered a very
17 large reward if anybody could spot a typographical error
18 in a book that he had produced, and it turned out that the
19 very title on the title page had been — can I point out,
20 Mr Rampton, another very serious error?
21 Q. [Mr Rampton]: I am listening; it is just that I have to get ready for my
22 next question. Do continue, yes.
23 A. [Mr Irving]: I will continue rambling on. There is a very serious
24 error in the book “Hitler’s War” which is before you, the
25 1991 edition, and this is that my name does not appear on
26 it. That you would consider is a most serious error that
. P-81
1 an author can face, that his name does not appear on his
2 own book.
3 Q. [Mr Rampton]: It depends, rather, on one’s point of view, Mr Irving,
4 I would have said. Mr Irving, can we turn please to —
5 what is that? That seems to have your name on it but maybe
6 this is the wrong edition.
7 A. [Mr Irving]: Not on the jacket, but actually in the book, Mr Rampton,
8 you will not find it.
9 Q. [Mr Rampton]: I have not, I confess, looked, nor do I think I —-
10 A. [Mr Irving]: I mean, I confess that I am the author for the purposes of
11 this action.
12 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Nor do I think that I will spend the court’s time doing it
13 now. Thank you very much. Mr Irving, I want to return to
14 General Bruns. How do you pronounce it, in fact?
15 A. [Mr Irving]: Bruns, B-R-U-N-S.
16 Q. [Mr Rampton]: With no umlaut though?
17 A. [Mr Irving]: No umlaut.
18 Q. [Mr Rampton]: If that is the right word. Do you have your two-page
19 English translation?
20 A. [Mr Irving]: I think I know it virtually off by heart.
21 Q. [Mr Rampton]: I would rather you had it.
22 A. [Mr Irving]: It is in my opening statement. I have it, yes, I have the
23 opening statement version.
24 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Maybe I should use that. It will make it easier for
25 everybody. I have the TRO version.
26 A. [Mr Irving]: It is on page 22. You say that Bruns’ account has
. P-82
1 verisimilitude?
2 A. [Mr Irving]: Yes.
3 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Account of what he said he saw?
4 A. [Mr Irving]: I marked that because later on under oath in the witness
5 box in Nuremberg he said he had not been there, I find
6 that hard to believe.
7 Q. [Mr Rampton]: I agree with you, I think it has verisimilitude for what
8 it matters. It is an horrendous account of an
9 unpleasant — more than an unpleasant event in human
10 history. That is not what I am interested in. Given that
11 it has verisimilitude, if you look in the middle of page
12 22, one of the things that Bruns was overheard saying to
13 whoever he was speaking to was this, middle of the
14 page: “I told that fellow Altemeyer?” In fact, Altemeyer,
15 whose name I shall always remember and who will be added
16 to the list of war criminals, listen to me they [that is
17 Jews] represent valuable manpower. Altemeyer: Do you call
18 Jews valuable human beings, sir? I [that is Bruns said]
19 Listen to me properly, I said valuable manpower, I did not
20 mention their value as human beings. He said [Altemeyer
21 said] Well, they are to be shot in accordance with
22 the Fuhrer’s orders! I said: Fuhrer’s orders? He said,
23 yes, whereupon he showed me his orders.”
24 Now that has never appeared in any of your
25 books, has it?
26 A. [Mr Irving]: Too true, yes, absolutely right.
. P-83
1 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Why not?
2 A. [Mr Irving]: I discounted it.
3 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Why?
4 A. [Mr Irving]: Because I am familiar with other sources where people
5 claim to be acting on Hitler’s orders because it was the
6 ready answer to shut anybody up if somebody came and
7 complained then the senior officer or the other officer
8 would say: “Do not start criticising me, this is the
9 Fuhrer’s orders”, and I discounted the subsequent sentence
10 about “then he showed it to me” for exactly the same
11 reason that I discounted the statement at Nuremberg that
12 Eichmann claimed that the — rather Wisliceny claimed that
13 Eichmann had showed him the orders. There are no orders.
14 They have not been found. We have now been in the
15 archives, in and out of the archives of the world for the
16 last 50 years, since the end of World War II, 55 years and
17 no primary or secondary or tertiary evidence of the
18 existence of these orders has been found as regards the
19 war years.
20 I concede that in interrogations and in War
21 Crimes Trials and elsewhere everyone else is happy to talk
22 about Fuhrer’s orders but the fact remains had there been
23 any such order or any such document, and you are tapping
24 this one, this is what I will put in the category of
25 “interrogations”, had there been any such order, it would
26 have surfaced by now.
. P-84
1 MR JUSTICE GRAY: You put this in the category of
2 “interrogations”, did you say?
3 A. [Mr Irving]: It is at the end of war, my Lord, he is in the enemy
4 hands.
5 Q. [Mr Justice Gray]: He is being surreptitiously…
6 A. [Mr Irving]: I appreciate that, my Lord, but it is in a grey area. He
7 is in the enemy’s power and custody and I draw attention
8 to the line a bit earlier up where he says: “His name
9 I shall always also remember and who will be added to the
10 list of war criminals”. That is a gentle hint to me that
11 perhaps he is not entirely unaware that somebody may be
12 listening.
13 MR RAMPTON: What do you know —
14 A. [Mr Irving]: You must appreciate that, my Lord.
15 MR RAMPTON: What do you know General Bruns?
16 A. [Mr Irving]: — what do I know of him?
17 Q. [Mr Rampton]: What do you know of him, yes.
18 A. [Mr Irving]: Only what I know from this document and from the writings
19 of Gerald Fleming. I suppose we would describe him now as
20 been an anti-Nazi by the time the war ended, but then a
21 lot of people were anti-Nazi by the time the war ended.
22 Q. [Mr Rampton]: — what if they happened to be an anti-Nazi all along,
23 there were such people in German during the 1940s, were
24 there not.
25 A. [Mr Irving]: Undoubtedly, yes.
26 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Quite a lot of the ordinary army, I am not talking about
. P-85
1 the SS, who are not army at all, really, were anti-Nazi?
2 A. [Mr Irving]: Is this the evidence that you are leading, I am not
3 familiar with any statistical basis for that.
4 Q. [Mr Rampton]: I am suggesting you could give me the answer “yes”?
5 A. [Mr Irving]: I have not seen any documentary evidence of that. I do
6 not think GALLUP Polls are conducted among the Wehrmacht
7 soldiers who still support Adolf. I always want to see
8 this kind of evidence and if I can just — if I can just
9 add here we have got very high quality evidence of the
10 morale and opinions of the Germans. We have the SD
11 stinnungsberichge, which were the morale reports where
12 Gestapo agents would hang around in bars listening to what
13 people said. We have sacks and sacks of captured mail,
14 captured by the Allies when a troop ship were caught or
15 when positions were overrun. We know exactly what these
16 people were writing. So we are very well informed about
17 what was going on. I have never seen any kind of
18 statistical analysis.
19 Q. [Mr Rampton]: If this is not an interrogation, which it plainly is not?
20 A. [Mr Irving]: Yes.
21 Q. [Mr Rampton]: And if General Bruns does not know that he is being
22 recorded, and if it be the case that he simply is chatting
23 to his fellow prisoners in German, which he is, am
24 I right?
25 A. [Mr Irving]: While you just read that, may I just add a further point,
26 we are dealing here with a 22 year old young man called
. P-86
1 Altemeyer who has been put in SS uniform.
2 Q. [Mr Rampton]: I am sorry, Mr Irving, there are times when you may make
3 speeches and times when you must answer my questions, this
4 is one of them; you said yesterday, no, I think this is on
5 Day One?
6 A. [Mr Irving]: I will come back to what I was about to say when you have
7 finished.
8 Q. [Mr Rampton]: “This document has, in my submission, considerable
9 evidentiary values… it is not self-serving, the General
10 is not testifying in his own interest, he is merely
11 talking, probably in a muffled whisper to fellow prisoners
12 at a British interrogation centre and he has no idea that
13 in another room British experts are listening to and
14 recording every word. We also have the original German
15 text of this document. I might add my, Lord … ”
16 MR JUSTICE GRAY: That, I think, was Mr Irving’s speech.
17 MR RAMPTON: That is Mr Irving’s speech. That is on page 46 —
18 A. [Mr Irving]: Can I make it easy for you, Mr Rampton, and say I accept
19 Altemeyer did say those words.
20 Q. [Mr Rampton]: — right.
21 A. [Mr Irving]: Or as best as Bruns recalls them.
22 Q. [Mr Rampton]: The whole of Bruns’ account in this regard has the ring of
23 truth then?
24 A. [Mr Irving]: Yes.
25 Q. [Mr Rampton]: So it is likely also then, is it, one cannot be certain,
26 one was not there.
. P-87
1 A. [Mr Irving]: It is very likely that the SS officer concerned used those
2 words.
3 Q. [Mr Rampton]: It is likely also he used the words at the end of this
4 extract on the bottom of page 24 of your opening: “Here
5 is an order, just issued, prohibiting mass shootings on
6 that scale from taking place in future” —
7 A. [Mr Irving]: Have we now left that previous passage, if so —
8 Q. [Mr Rampton]: — I am coming back to it, but I want to try and be
9 consistent, if you are saying that we can believe that
10 Altemeyer used the words in the first passage, can we also
11 believe that Altemeyer said this: “Here is an order, just
12 used, prohibiting mass shootings on that scale from taking
13 place in future”?
14 A. [Mr Irving]: — that I believe.
15 Q. [Mr Rampton]: “They are to be carried out more discreetly.”
16 A. [Mr Irving]: That I attach less credibility to.
17 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Why?
18 A. [Mr Irving]: It is the kind of throw away line that soldiers would use,
19 particularly in captivity, adding a gag, looking for a bit
20 of a snigger from someone, saying not to be done on a mass
21 shooting, of course, has to be done a bit more
22 discreetly. If I can draw a comparison, you very rightly
23 read out a passage of a speech I made in Calgary where
24 I protested that I had been called a mild fascist by the
25 newspapers and I said I do not like that word “mild” it is
26 a throw away line, you are looking for a laugh.
. P-88
1 Q. [Mr Rampton]: I do not —
2 A. [Mr Irving]: You then attach great weight to the fact Mr Irving
3 obviously accepts he is fascist, which is untrue. But
4 these things happen in conversation, Mr Rampton. It calls
5 for judgment and integrity before you use any particular
6 part of a sentence.
7 Q. [Mr Rampton]: — no, you misjudge me, Mr Irving, you should re-read what
8 I actually said and you will find what you just said is a
9 misrecollection. However, that matters not in the
10 slightest.
11 A. [Mr Irving]: Can I now go back to the previous part you are relying on
12 in that, where he says “here are the Fuhrer’s orders” and
13 he showed it to me.
14 Q. [Mr Rampton]: He did not say that. He said “whereupon –” this is
15 important, Mr Irving, you must be accurate, this is an
16 important distinction: “Whereupon he showed me his
17 orders”?
18 MR JUSTICE GRAY: That is Bruns speaking, not Bruns quoting
19 Altemeyer?
20 A. [Mr Irving]: Altemeyer says, well, they are to be shot in accordance
21 with the Fuhrer’s orders, Bruns said: Fuhrer’s orders?
22 Yes, says Altemeyer, whereupon he showed me his orders.
23 MR RAMPTON: His orders?
24 A. [Mr Irving]: Yes.
25 Q. [Mr Rampton]: That does not mean the Fuhrer’s orders, that means
26 Altemeyer’s orders?
. P-89
1 A. [Mr Irving]: I am grateful to you for drawing that to my attention. If
2 you wish to infer from that that he showed to Bruns orders
3 from Hitler, or orders quoting orders from Hitler, because
4 he later on talks about the Fuhrer’s orders, can I now
5 comment on that?
6 Q. [Mr Rampton]: I am not going to comment on a suggestion I have not —
7 I am not going to invite you to comment on a suggestion
8 I have not made.
9 A. [Mr Irving]: May I nevertheless comment?
10 Q. [Mr Rampton]: No, Mr Irving, you may not. If his Lordship permits it,
11 why, yes. My question is a completely different one; my
12 question is this, it is credible that Altemeyer said what
13 he is here reported as having said?
14 A. [Mr Irving]: Yes.
15 Q. [Mr Rampton]: It is also credible, is it not, that he showed Bruns a
16 written order saying that these people were to be shot?
17 A. [Mr Irving]: Yes.
18 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Good, thank you very much. Put those two things together,
19 and there is evidence here which needs to be taken into
20 account; do you agree?
21 A. [Mr Irving]: Discounted or taken into account, yes.
22 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Take into account, brought to the attention of the public
23 or the historians so that they can make up their own minds
24 whether or not this is evidence of a Fuhrer order for
25 these shootings?
26 A. [Mr Irving]: You are absolutely right .
. P-90
1 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Thank you.
2 A. [Mr Irving]: Can I continue?
3 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Yes.
4 A. [Mr Irving]: I have done precisely that.
5 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Where?
6 A. [Mr Irving]: On my website.
7 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Yes, but what about your books?
8 A. [Mr Irving]: I am not writing books about the Holocaust, Mr Rampton,
9 I am writing books about Adolf Hitler. The book is already
10 1,000 pages long. If I was to start going into that
11 detail then I would be sternly reprimanded by the editors
12 saying, Mr Irving, when I wrote the Hermann Goring
13 biography, the American publishers came to me and said
14 Mr Irving will you please cut out 2,000 lines from the
15 printed text. This happens. We do not have a problem
16 that our books are too short, we have the problem that our
17 books are too long.
18 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Yes. Mr Irving —
19 A. [Mr Irving]: But the entire document is on the Internet and I am the
20 one who placed it there.
21 Q. [Mr Rampton]: — Mr Irving, you have made reference to this Bruns
22 testimony in your published books?
23 A. [Mr Irving]: As I said in my opening speech, again and again, it is the
24 most harrowing account and element of the Holocaust.
25 Q. [Mr Rampton]: But without ever mentioning either of these verbal
26 exchanges in their entirety?
. P-91
1 A. [Mr Irving]: Absolutely right.
2 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Why not?
3 A. [Mr Irving]: Because this is descending into a level of textual
4 analysis which would bore the pant off an audience, which
5 would be totally out of place in a book about Adolf Hitler
6 for which I am perfectly prepared to discuss here in court
7 if you attach importance to you, but you do not want me to
8 discuss it.
9 Q. [Mr Rampton]: I am not trying to prove a case about Adolf Hitler one way
10 or the other?
11 A. [Mr Irving]: But you will not allow me to discuss it here.
12 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Of course I allow you discuss it here.
13 A. [Mr Irving]: You stopped me.
14 Q. [Mr Rampton]: I interested in why it makes no appearance —
15 A. [Mr Irving]: Because I have reasons for discounting it.
16 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Discounting bits of it I suppose would be
17 more accurate.
18 A. [Mr Irving]: — I am discounting the bit about being shown the Fuhrer’s
19 order, or being shown orders implicating Hitler.
20 MR RAMPTON: Why do you discount it?
21 A. [Mr Irving]: Ah, at last. Because other evidence shows that Hitler had
22 not issued the order; firstly I said that nowhere in all
23 the documentation of all the world’s archives has any such
24 order turned up.
25 Q. [Mr Rampton]: That not evidence, that is an absence of evidence?
26 A. [Mr Irving]: It is evidence in a very powerful sense.
. P-92
1 Q. [Mr Rampton]: It is a negative piece of evidence?
2 A. [Mr Irving]: I hate to remind you of the basic principle of English law
3 that a man is innocent until proven guilty; am I right?
4 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Hitler is not on trial, alas.
5 A. [Mr Irving]: Is Hitler somehow excluded from this general rule of fair
6 play?
7 MR JUSTICE GRAY: I think that is a slightly —
8 THE WITNESS [Mr Irving]: Mr Rampton talks about absence of evidence not
9 counting, all the world’s archive are effectively now open
10 to us, there has not come forward any collateral evidence
11 and as for a 22 year-old SS man’s word being believed when
12 he has the power of life and death over thousands of Jews
13 who have just been ordered shot, this SS man obviously has
14 more front than Selfridges, he is going around saying,
15 yes, we have orders, I have orders, do not come critising
16 me, that is what is going on here. That is the way I read
17 that and that is the way any responsible historian should
18 read it.
19 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Let us move on. You accept a lot what is in
20 here?
21 A. [Mr Irving]: — I do indeed.
22 Q. [Mr Justice Gray]: But you do not accept that particular —
23 A. [Mr Irving]: Certainly not to the degree —
24 Q. [Mr Justice Gray]: As it was reflecting the reality?
25 A. [Mr Irving]: — that one general’s recollection of what a 22 year old
26 SS man told him in Riga should be taken discounting the
. P-93
1 negative evidence as Mr Rampton calls it of all the
2 world’s archives.
Section 94.4 to 107.21
3 MR RAMPTON: Mr Irving, I am not going to take you up on that;
4 you can argue with my experts about that if you like.
5 I am interested in the way you write your books. Both in
6 the Nuremberg book, and we will not need to look at them,
7 because we are looking for a black hole, both in the
8 Nuremberg book and in the Goebbels book you mention,
9 either in the text or in a footnote, or both, the Bruns,
10 call it what you like?
11 A. [Mr Irving]: Yes, I consider my duty to draw everyone’s attention to
12 this report.
13 Q. [Mr Rampton]: But nowhere in either of those books do you mention either
14 of these exchanges that Bruns reported he had with
15 Altemeyer?
16 A. [Mr Irving]: You are repeating yourself, I will repeat the answer.
17 Q. [Mr Rampton]: You repeat your answer, yes, please.
18 A. [Mr Irving]: No, I did not.
19 Q. [Mr Rampton]: No, you did not. You actually have done this with the
20 Altemeyer passages; may I show you? Can you find, please,
21 file D3(i), I think it is tab 27 that I want. I will tell
22 you where to look in a moment, Mr Irving, I just want to
23 remind you and his Lordship of what Bruns actually said on
24 Altemeyer’s return with an order from Berlin after the
25 shootings had been reported. “Here is an order, just
26 issued, prohibiting mass shootings on that scale from
. P-94
1 taking place in the future.” That is your translation of
2 the German.
3 A. [Mr Irving]: Yes.
4 Q. [Mr Rampton]: It is one that I agree with.
5 A. [Mr Irving]: This is from my introduction?
6 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Yes, but then it goes on, does the sentence reported by
7 General Bruns: “They are to be carried out more
8 discreetly.” That is the full text of General Bruns’
9 words as a report of what he was told by Altemeyer. Will
10 you please look at page 415 of the document which is at
11 tab 27 which is a written introduction by you in the
12 Journal of Historical Review, to your new edition of
13 “Hitler’s War”. At the end of that article there are
14 some footnotes on page 415.
15 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Why are we looking at it there as opposed to
16 in the copy?
17 A. [Mr Irving]: That is what I am wondering.
18 MR RAMPTON: Copy of which book?
19 MR JUSTICE GRAY: We have the whole of “Hitler’s War”.
20 MR RAMPTON: It is not in the book.
21 MR JUSTICE GRAY: I thought you said it was.
22 MR RAMPTON: No.
23 MR JUSTICE GRAY: I thought this was the introduction to the
24 1991 edition.
25 MR RAMPTON: Well, I do not think it is. It is an edition
26 I have not got, that is why. That is why we have it
. P-95
1 separately.
2 MR JUSTICE GRAY: I follow.
3 THE WITNESS [Mr Irving]: We also have a date on that, January 1989.
4 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Two dates ’76 and ’89.
5 A. [Mr Irving]: That answers the point.
6 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Two editions.
7 MR RAMPTON: Anyhow, if you look at the footnotes in the right
8 hand column on page 415, footnote 7 says this: “The most
9 spine chilling account of… methodical mass murder of
10 these Jews [that is the Berlin Jews] at Riga is
11 in … 1158 in file etc. in the Public Record Office,
12 Major General Bruns, an eyewitness, describes it to fellow
13 generals in British captivity in April 25th 1945 unaware
14 that hidden micro phones are recording every word. Of
15 particular significance his qualms about bringing what he
16 had seen to the Fuhrer’s attention and the latter’s [that
17 is Hitler’s] renewed orders that such mass murders were to
18 stop forthwith”?
19 A. [Mr Irving]: Yes.
20 Q. [Mr Rampton]: As an account of what Bruns is recorded as having said
21 that is completely dishonest, is it not?
22 A. [Mr Irving]: Does it say that the Bruns account is the only source for
23 that final paragraph, that final sentence?
24 Q. [Mr Rampton]: It purports to be an account of what Bruns said, does it
25 not, Mr Irving?
26 A. [Mr Irving]: It references the Bruns’ file as the source of that
. P-96
1 material in the main text, and it adds the comment: “Of
2 particular significance his qualms about bringing about
3 what he has seen to the Fuhrer’s attention and the
4 latter’s renewed orders that such mass murders were to
5 stop forthwith”. In other words, that was of particular
6 significance.
7 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Of particular significance in the Bruns’s eyewitness
8 testimony.
9 A. [Mr Irving]: I do not say that.
10 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Read it through to yourself again.
11 MR RAMPTON: Read it through.
12 MR JUSTICE GRAY: And consider that answer, Mr Irving.
13 A. [Mr Irving]: Of the particular significance his qualms about bringing
14 what he had seen to the Fuhrer’s attention and the
15 latter’s renewed orders that such mass murders were to
16 stop forthwith. I see no objection to that as being an
17 encapsulated version of Bruns’s report — may I read out
18 from the Bruns’ report the sentences on which I would
19 rely?
20 MR RAMPTON: No, you may not, Mr Irving. I would like you to
21 read the whole of that footnote and I shall repeat my
22 question, and we will have a “yes” or “no” if you please.
23 A. [Mr Irving]: You will not let me read out these sentences in the Bruns
24 report on which I rely?
25 MR JUSTICE GRAY: In a moment. Just do what Mr Rampton is
26 asking at the moment.
. P-97
1 A. [Mr Irving]: Very well. “The most spine killing account –”
2 MR JUSTICE GRAY: No, read it to yourself.
3 MR RAMPTON: Yes, I did not mean.
4 A. [Mr Irving]: Well, because I am accused of being a Holocaust denier it
5 is interesting that I am repeatedly saying this kind of
6 thing, including in journals like this. You do not me
7 read it out loud?
8 Q. [Mr Rampton]: I would like you to read it yourself.
9 A. [Mr Irving]: You do not want public to hear what I wrote.
10 MR JUSTICE GRAY: It has just been read out.
11 A. [Mr Irving]: Yes, I have read it.
12 MR RAMPTON: You have read it. Now I will repeat my question;
13 do you not agree that read as a whole, as one most read it
14 as a whole, not selecting those little bits which one
15 would rather ignore, and you are relying on the ones you
16 want to be heard, reading that as whole, do you not agree
17 that that is a singularly dishonest account of what Bruns
18 was recorded as having said?
19 A. [Mr Irving]: I do not agree.
20 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Why?
21 A. [Mr Irving]: Can I now draw attention to the sentences in the Bruns
22 Report on which I rely?
23 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Whatever you wish in answer to my question.
24 A. [Mr Irving]: I will summarize them and you can tell me if it is a false
25 summary. They had difficulty, he did not want to write
26 the report himself, he persuaded a junior army officer to
. P-98
1 go down the road and have a look and come back and write
2 up what he had seen. The question then was who is going
3 to bring it to the Fuhrer’s attention; they work out a way
4 to bring to the Fuhrer’s attention involving Vice-Admiral
5 Canaris, shortly the orders come back, such mass murders
6 have to stop. Am I totally wrong in drawing the perfectly
7 justified inference that as a result of this army
8 officer’s report being drawn to the Fuhrer’s attention the
9 orders come, which we have seen in the intercepts that
10 such mass murders have to stop.
11 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Mr Irving, can I put it to you straight, as
12 it were, because this is the suggestion.
13 A. [Mr Irving]: Yes.
14 Q. [Mr Justice Gray]: That what you have said as being of particular
15 significance, namely the renewed orders that such mass
16 murders were to stop forthwith, totally perverts the sense
17 of Bruns’ conversation in captivity because Bruns makes
18 clear that Altemeyer said that the killings were to
19 continue?
20 A. [Mr Irving]: I think I have explained the reason why I discounted that
21 part of his remark, my Lord, this was the…
22 Q. [Mr Justice Gray]: Yes, but are you giving particular significance to a
23 proposition which is the opposite of what one finds in the
24 document?
25 A. [Mr Irving]: The decision of the little man on the spot in Riga is of
26 no significance to the argument that Hitler had given the
. P-99
1 order quite clearly that such killings had to stop.
2 Q. [Mr Justice Gray]: Yes.
3 A. [Mr Irving]: Have I made it plain, my Lord.
4 Q. [Mr Justice Gray]: Yes, you have.
5 A. [Mr Irving]: Thank you. I think that —
6 MR RAMPTON: Do you think, Mr Irving, that if General Bruns
7 were here today he would think what you have done with
8 what he said was fair and honest?
9 A. [Mr Irving]: — taken in elements, stage by stage, yes.
10 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Do you? I see. You said it again in that same file you
11 have got there, I think it is at — it is at tab 30, this
12 is a paper, I think, presented by you at the Institute of
13 Historical Review, a talk given by you?
14 A. [Mr Irving]: A talk?
15 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Yes, a talk, in October 1992, and the passage which
16 matters is again an account of the Bruns evidence on page
17 24, ignore the stamped number at the bottom of page, 24 of
18 the article. I think this is an answer to a question very
19 likely. Yes, it is. It is in the bottom part of the
20 left-hand column on that page’ does your Lordship have it?
21 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Yes, I have.
22 MR RAMPTON: This is the last thing, my Lord, I do before the
23 adjournment if that is convenient.
24 “But other reports unfortunately have the ring
25 of authenticity. Most of these SS officers, the gangsters
26 that carried out the mass shootings were I think acting
. P-100
1 from the meanest of motives. There was a particular SS
2 officer in Riga who is described in the report by Bruns in
3 which Bruns said the difficulty for us was how to decide
4 to draw what he had seen what we had seen to the Fuhrer’s
5 attention, and eventually they sent a lieutenant down the
6 road and got him to write what he saw and they sent this
7 report signed by the lieutenant up to the Fuhrer’s
8 headquarters through Canaris. Two days later the order
9 comes back from Hitler ‘these mass shootings’ [in quotes
10 notice, Mr Irving] these mass shootings have to stop at
11 once so [and this is now you again] Hitler intervened to
12 stop it.”
13 As a quotation from the evidence of General
14 Bruns those words in quotes: “These mass shootings have
15 got to stop at once”, is a complete perversion, is it not,
16 of what Bruns actually said?
17 A. [Mr Irving]: What is the difference?
18 Q. [Mr Rampton]: He said these mass shootings have got to stop at once,
19 they have to be done more discreetly?
20 A. [Mr Irving]: The 22 year old SS man allegedly said that to Bruns —
21 Q. [Mr Rampton]: That is what Bruns is reported as having told his fellow
22 officers?
23 A. [Mr Irving]: — yes.
24 Q. [Mr Rampton]: He did not say this, did he, that you have written here?
25 A. [Mr Irving]: I gave the essential part of the information, which was
26 that the orders — we are talking about here the chain of
. P-101
1 command from Hitler downwards and that the killings were
2 carried out there, the SS officers on the spot and I make
3 this very clear distinction, the gangsters were in the SS
4 who did the killings on the Eastern Front and for that
5 there is any amount of evidence, a lot of which you have
6 in your own files but the evidence of Hitler’s involvement
7 is very tenuous and goes in the direction which I
8 indicated from my small bundle. My I also draw your
9 attention to the fact this is a question and answer
10 session, Mr Rampton.
11 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Yes, I follow that.
12 A. [Mr Irving]: So there is no script. I am not reading out from a
13 document.
14 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Yes, I think the point on the quotation marks
15 is not a fair one given that this is which you said in a
16 speech because whoever transcribed it may well have just
17 added the quotation marks?
18 A. [Mr Irving]: Not just but obviously when one is answering questions
19 from the floor one is giving an encapsulated version of
20 the essence of a document as one recalls it.
21 Q. [Mr Rampton]: I follow that.
22 MR RAMPTON: My Lord, there are two minutes, so it might help.
23 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Yes, why not use them.
24 MR RAMPTON: If might help if we looked at the original German
25 of Bruns said that Altemeyer had said.
26 A. [Mr Irving]: It does sometimes vary from the translation.
. P-102
1 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Where do we find that?
2 MR RAMPTON: It is bundle H1(vii), some of Professor Evans
3 documents?
4 A. [Mr Irving]: It is actually from my discovery.
5 Q. [Mr Rampton]: No, I do not know where it comes from.
6 A. [Mr Irving]: If it has a number written on the top right hand corner.
7 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Unfortunately, I have not brought that
8 particular file.
9 THE WITNESS [Mr Irving]: I was the person who discovered this document.
10 MR RAMPTON: The page, have you got that?
11 A. [Mr Irving]: Not in front of me.
12 Q. [Mr Rampton]: You do not have the German?
13 A. [Mr Irving]: No.
14 Q. [Mr Rampton]: It is 233, which looks to me like the British transcript
15 it is the transcript of Bruns’ actual words — before
16 I ask the question I must look in the dictionary because
17 I have not got my own.
18 MR JUSTICE GRAY: “Massen” is underlined, is it underlined in
19 the translation?
20 MR RAMPTON: Yes, I do not know who did that.
21 MR JUSTICE GRAY: No, it looks original.
22 A. [Mr Irving]: It is original.
23 MR RAMPTON: Shows how important it is, Mr Irving, to go back
24 to source, does it not.
25 A. [Mr Irving]: That is a “yes”.
26 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Do you know how those transcripts were made? They were
. P-103
1 secretly recorded, presumably by some hidden microphone.
2 A. [Mr Irving]: It is still very secret but in the next door room
3 everything was taken down outsize large disks like the old
4 fashioned 78s.
5 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Now can we assume that this is an accurate transcript;
6 there is no reason to doubt it, is there?
7 A. [Mr Irving]: They are normally very accurate transcripts. They had
8 research teams who would have extensive catalogues and
9 indices to check on words and names.
10 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Let us look at the German, you will help me when my German
11 strays off course as it very likely will, the relevant
12 passage is at the bottom of page 233. It is line
13 beginning der Altemeyer something triumphantly said
14 quotes: “Hier ist eine Vorgugung” that is an order?
15 A. [Mr Irving]: Not necessarily, that is a strange kind of order. It is
16 more of an ordinance.
17 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Yes. Here is an ordinance come, just come?
18 A. [Mr Irving]: Yes.
19 Q. [Mr Rampton]: That says, yes?
20 A. [Mr Irving]: Yes.
21 Q. [Mr Rampton]: To the effect that, let us say, shall we, dass?
22 A. [Mr Irving]: Yes.
23 Q. [Mr Rampton]: This kind of or these kinds of “derartige”?
24 A. [Mr Irving]: That kind of, yes.
25 Q. [Mr Rampton]: These kind of?
26 A. [Mr Irving]: Mass shootings.
. P-104
1 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Mass shootings, do you hear how I read it, mass shootings?
2 A. [Mr Irving]: Yes.
3 Q. [Mr Rampton]: In future, in Zukunft… which means must not take place
4 any more, does it not?
5 A. [Mr Irving]: Yes.
6 Q. [Mr Rampton]: “Das soll vorsichtiger gomacht worden”; that means this
7 shall in future be more cautiously or discreetly done?
8 Yes?
9 A. [Mr Irving]: Very good, Mr Rampton, yes.
10 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Well, not very good, but it is not very difficult, is it,
11 two things about it?
12 A. [Mr Irving]: Yes.
13 Q. [Mr Rampton]: It translates not as “shootings on this scale”, it
14 translates as “shootings of this kind”?
15 A. [Mr Irving]: Yes.
16 Q. [Mr Rampton]: And the word “mass”?
17 A. [Mr Irving]: Yes.
18 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Is underlined. Do you agree that that is likely to
19 reflect the transcriber’s impression of the emphasis which
20 Bruns placed upon that word when he spoke it?
21 A. [Mr Irving]: Yes.
22 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Good. It is a very significantly different version from
23 the one you have, if I may use a colloquialism “been
24 punting”?
25 A. [Mr Irving]: You mean by leaving off the corollary?
26 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Yes, it fits in with the last part of the sentence, “it
. P-105
1 must be done more discreetly”?
2 A. [Mr Irving]: Yes.
3 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Does it not?
4 A. [Mr Irving]: Yes.
5 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Now why do you reject the second half of that message and
6 embrace the first half?
7 A. [Mr Irving]: We have been over this, but we will attack it from a
8 different angle. We are dealing not with a verbatim
9 transcript of what Altemeyer said, we are dealing with the
10 recollection by a German army general four years later of
11 what Altemeyer had said. We are dealing with a triumphant
12 SS young officer, triumphantly he declaims this. The SS
13 were eager to kill Jews. They were very indignant when
14 orders had come down from whoever that this killing had to
15 stop. They were eager to carry on somehow and so they
16 were eager to find some kind of loophole that they allowed
17 them to go on bumping off their enemies. So he tells the
18 army officer, well, we have the orders but we are going to
19 carry on doing it anyway.
20 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Nudge nudge, wink wink, we are going to do it more
21 quietly.
22 A. [Mr Irving]: Yes.
23 Q. [Mr Rampton]: It is perfectly plausible.
24 A. [Mr Irving]: I am glad you accept this.
25 Q. [Mr Rampton]: That is quite a different thing from suppressing it
26 entirely and perverting its meaning into something
. P-106
Part III: David Irving’s Cross-Examination by Richard Rampton, continued, Afternoon Session (107.22 to 204.25)
1 different.
2 A. [Mr Irving]: I do not accept that I have done that.
3 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Which is what you have done.
4 A. [Mr Irving]: I do not accept that.
5 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Very well.
6 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Whatever it means, it is not Altemeyer
7 saying, well, we are going, as it were, off our own bat,
8 carry on as before, because the words make it plain it is
9 part of the order that the mass shootings shall be carried
10 out more discreetly in the future.
11 A. [Mr Irving]: When I am writing this up, and also when I am talking
12 about it, I am not just taking this document into account,
13 I am taking into account what we know at both other ends
14 and also the killing of the Germans thereupon stopped.
15 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Yes. Right.
16 A. [Mr Irving]: Thank you.
17 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Will you show Mr Rampton if you want to
18 pursue the Stuttgart business.
19 A. [Mr Irving]: After lunch.
20 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Provide it to him. 5 past 2.
21 (Luncheon adjournment)
Section 107.22 to 123.22
22 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Mr Irving and Mr Rampton, it is court 73 as
23 from Monday. There were problems about Chichester Rents
24 that made it unsuitable.
25 MR IRVING: Thank you very much, my Lord. My Lord, first, one
26 minor matter. I have one minor application to make which
. P-107
1 I would make about this time tomorrow concerning the date
2 of one of the witnesses who is appearing on summons that
3 it would be proper to make to your Lordship.
4 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Yes, I know.
5 MR RAMPTON: He may mean Monday, may he not, my Lord?
6 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Yes, Monday.
7 MR IRVING: Thank you very much, Mr Rampton.
8 MR JUSTICE GRAY: We are going to review whether we sit on
9 Fridays, but for the moment I think it probably is, in
10 everybody’s interests to have, not least yours, Mr Irving,
11 actually.
12 MR IRVING: Thank you very much, my Lord. My Lord, you will
13 have seen the press clipping which I put to you this
14 morning —-
15 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Yes, I did.
16 MR IRVING: — from the German newspaper. I will not read it
17 out.
18 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Have you seen it, Mr Rampton?
19 MR RAMPTON: Yes, I have.
20 MR IRVING: It refers to the year 1996. According to this
21 press clipping, the German government have asked for my
22 extradition to Germany on an allegation, an alleged
23 offence that I committed in 1990. The substance of the
24 allegation is neither here nor there. I am only concerned
25 with the coincidence of time; the fact that after 10 years
26 suddenly this should have occurred now, just as our action
. P-108
1 here is being heard.
2 MR JUSTICE GRAY: I do not want to cut you short, but I rather
3 sympathise with your view that it is unlikely to be a pure
4 coincidence, but what on earth can I do about it?
5 MR IRVING: Put my mind at rest, my Lord. If we could ask the
6 Defendants whether they have had any advance or prior
7 knowledge in any way at all of this or whether they were
8 contacted at all with the prosecuting authorities in
9 Stuttgart, or whether they contacted the prosecuting
10 authorities.
11 The reason I have to say this, my Lord, is
12 because, as my discovery shows, one of the bodies which
13 I mentioned in my opening statement has corresponded in
14 the past with both the German Embassy and the Austrian
15 Embassy asking for my arrest.
16 MR JUSTICE GRAY: I am not going to compel Mr Rampton to stand
17 up and give an answer to that question. There are two
18 ways in which you can deal with it if you want to pursue
19 it, and I do not myself feel that you would be well
20 advised to do so, but if you want to pursue it, you can
21 either lay the foundations in your own evidence for me
22 to draw the inference that it must have had something to
23 do with the Defendants — that is one way of dealing with
24 it — or you can cross-examine whichever of the
25 Defendants’ witnesses you think would be able to answer
26 your questions on this topic.
. P-109
1 I appreciate you understand that Professor
2 Lipstadt will not be being called to give evidence so you
3 will not be able to ask her, but there may be other
4 witnesses, I do not know, who are going to be called by
5 the Defendants whom you could ask. But, to be candid, my
6 feeling is that we have quite enough to gnaw on this in
7 this case without really going down what are effectively
8 side alleys.
9 MR IRVING: Very well. I did wish to draw it to your
10 Lordship’s attention in case the morning should arrive
11 when this end of the bench was suddenly empty.
12 MR JUSTICE GRAY: If that were to happen (which I think is
13 unlikely) I will do my best to prevent it. Does that
14 help?
15 MR RAMPTON: So indeed would I. Although your Lordship said
16 you are not going to compel me to answer, but if I may
17 respectfully say so, rightly, Mr Irving did ask me to
18 ask. I did ask and the answer is no.
19 MR JUSTICE GRAY: There you are. You do not have to accept
20 that, but that is what you are told.
21 MR IRVING: Quite clearly, I am sure that Mr Rampton would not
22 have made that statement if it was in any way ^^– I will
23 accept that assurance, but I will also advance this
24 particular episode as an instance of the kind of hatred
25 that I have faced and the problems that I have faced in
26 view of the allegations and the repugnant suggestions made
. P-110
1 by this Defendant and others.
2 MR JUSTICE GRAY: You have dealt with that very clearly in your
3 evidence and, of course, I have that well in mind.
4 MR IRVING: It has a certain actuality about it which is quite
5 impressive.
6 MR JUSTICE GRAY: That is true. Yes, if you would like to go
7 back?
8 MR DAVID IRVING, continued.
9 Cross-Examined by MR RAMPTON, QC, continued.
10 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Mr Rampton, have we finished, at any rate for
11 the time being, with H17, because if so I will hand it
12 back because I have your copy. That is the German version
13 of Bruns’ statement.
14 MR RAMPTON: Yes. I am afraid I have not quite finished with
15 Bruns. I thought I had, but, as usual, that is the
16 trouble with adjournments; things occur to one that one
17 might have asked and did not. But, for completeness,
18 I will ask. (To the witness): Mr Irving, do you still
19 have there the file D3(i) which is the file of published
20 articles or talks by you?
21 A. [Mr Irving]: D3(i), yes.
22 Q. [Mr Rampton]: I am looking at tab 30 which is the print of your speech,
23 the JHR conference in October ’92.
24 A. [Mr Irving]: Yes.
25 Q. [Mr Rampton]: And the questions which followed it. You remember — you
26 need not look it up, but it is on page 24, if you want of
. P-111
1 tab 30, internal page 24, not final page 24 — I drew your
2 attention towards the bottom of the left-hand column to
3 the words in quotes as a report of what Bruns had said
4 that Altemeyer had said: “These mass shootings have got
5 to stop at once”. Do you remember that this morning?
6 A. [Mr Irving]: Yes.
7 Q. [Mr Rampton]: And I think your answer was to this effect, that it was
8 justified anyway but you could not rely on a transcript of
9 an extemporary answer to a question. I am summarizing.
10 I am not quoting your words directly.
11 A. [Mr Irving]: On this transcript of my extemporary answer?
12 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Yes, on this example?
13 A. [Mr Irving]: Yes, that it would be — yes, continue.
14 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Is it right, Mr Irving, that, in fact, before this version
15 of your words as printed in this way, you went through
16 them and approved them?
17 A. [Mr Irving]: Occasionally I did.
18 Q. [Mr Rampton]: This particular article?
19 A. [Mr Irving]: I am sure, Mr Rampton, you will be able to refresh my
20 memory; if I did, then I did.
21 Q. [Mr Rampton]: You have recently told us so in your answers to our
22 requests for information.
23 A. [Mr Irving]: I do not want to be specific about this one, and I am not
24 being clever, but frequently they would send me a
25 transcript to read, and sometimes I would proof read it
26 and send it back and sometimes I would not.
. P-112
1 Q. [Mr Rampton]: You are right to be cautious, Mr Irving, not because I am
2 setting traps, but because memory is fallible. You served
3 on us, that is to say, our side, something called —
4 A. [Mr Irving]: “Answers to requests for information”.
5 Q. [Mr Rampton]: “Some answers”.
6 A. [Mr Irving]: Yes.
7 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Fair enough because there were only some answers, on 27th
8 December of last year?
9 A. [Mr Irving]: Yes.
10 Q. [Mr Rampton]: And one of the answers was this. This is No. 13 on page
11 5, my Lord. It is tab 9 of the main pleadings bundle,
12 A1.
13 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Yes, I do not think I have it.
14 MR RAMPTON: No, but it does not matter; it is very short. Is
15 very short. (To the witness): “In October 1992 I spoke
16 at an IHR conference”?
17 A. [Mr Irving]: Is that this one?
18 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Yes. It is the only one I know of in October 1992. “As
19 on previous occasions, I attended my booked table and paid
20 no attention to the other speakers. Once again
21 I corrected the text of my talk before it was published.”
22 A. [Mr Irving]: Very well, yes.
23 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Also it is right to say, is it not, that the whole of
24 that, including the questions and answers, appears on your
25 web site?
26 A. [Mr Irving]: The whole of this?
. P-113
1 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Yes.
2 A. [Mr Irving]: No, it is not correct to say that.
3 Q. [Mr Rampton]: It is not?
4 A. [Mr Irving]: No, it is not correct.
5 Q. [Mr Rampton]: That particular passage does, does it not?
6 A. [Mr Irving]: Will you give me the web site address?
7 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Yes, I will. In fact, I had better you see the hard copy.
8 A. [Mr Irving]: Www.
9 Q. [Mr Rampton]: File D2(iii). It is HTP.www.fpp.co.uk.speeches.
10 Speech —-
11 A. [Mr Irving]: Yes.
12 Q. [Mr Rampton]: — 111092 HTML?
13 A. [Mr Irving]: In that case, that is correct, but does this particular
14 passage also appear on that or just the speech?
15 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Yes, it does. I have the page here. By all means, I will
16 pass it up.
17 MR JUSTICE GRAY: I think you will take that on trust, I
18 suspect, will you not?
19 MR RAMPTON: You can trust me if I say something like that.
20 A. [Mr Irving]: No, the reason I say that is because in some of the
21 witness reports things have been said to be on my web site
22 whereas, in fact, they are just links on my we site
23 somewhere else.
24 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Anyway, do not let us take more time on this.
25 I think it is accepted it is on the web site.
26 MR RAMPTON: I think the answer is yes.
. P-114
1 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Yes, it is.
2 MR RAMPTON: So, first of all, you corrected the transcript of
3 the talk before —-
4 A. [Mr Irving]: Yes.
5 Q. [Mr Rampton]: — it was published and, secondly, you put the whole
6 thing in that form on to the web site?
7 A. [Mr Irving]: Without in any way reviewing it.
8 Q. [Mr Rampton]: No, I understand that, but the fact is we can then take it
9 that you have no quibble with the quotation marks around
10 the words “These mass shootings have to stop at once”?
11 A. [Mr Irving]: Not the kind of thing I would quibble about, I do not
12 think, no.
13 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Quite, good, I an glad to hear. There is one more,
14 slightly more substantial point that I want to go back to
15 which I apologise for having missed this morning. I am
16 grateful it has been drawn to my attention. Have you got
17 your 1977 “Hitler’s War” with you there?
18 A. [Mr Irving]: 1997?
19 Q. [Mr Rampton]: In 1977?
20 A. [Mr Irving]: Yes, I have.
21 Q. [Mr Rampton]: I am apt to ’97 when I mean 1977, excuse me.
22 A. [Mr Irving]: This is the English edition of it, yes.
23 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Yes. I think the words are probably the same though, are
24 they not?
25 A. [Mr Irving]: The English and American, yes.
26 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Page 332?
. P-115
1 A. [Mr Irving]: Yes.
2 Q. [Mr Rampton]: I am not going to read it again. We have heard it too
3 often. In the middle of the page, there is the passage
4 dealing with the Berlin Jews, is there not?
5 A. [Mr Irving]: Yes.
6 Q. [Mr Rampton]: You have written: “The fate of Berlin’s Jews was clearly
7 raised”. So the context of that passage is, at any rate,
8 foreshadowed as being Berlin’s Jews, is it not?
9 A. [Mr Irving]: The context of the paragraph is the prior responsibility
10 of the SS for the murders and not Hitler.
11 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Sure.
12 A. [Mr Irving]: Yes.
13 Q. [Mr Rampton]: But we are talking here in this little bit about a
14 discussion about Berlin’s Jews between Hitler and Himmler?
15 A. [Mr Irving]: Yes, in that sentence.
16 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Yes. Then you say in the next sentence: “At 1.30 p.m.
17 Himmler was obliged to telephone from Hitler’s bunker to
18 Heydrich the explicit order that Jews were not to be
19 liquidated”?
20 A. [Mr Irving]: Yes.
21 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Let me ask you this. You remember what you put in the
22 introduction?
23 A. [Mr Irving]: Yes.
24 Q. [Mr Rampton]: When you wrote that, did you mean to say that these Berlin
25 Jews or Berlin’s Jews in general were were not to be
26 liquidated, or that Hitler had made a general prohibition
. P-116
1 against the slaughter or murder of Jews anywhere?
2 A. [Mr Irving]: It is nit-picking.
3 Q. [Mr Rampton]: It is not.
4 A. [Mr Irving]: What I am about to say is nit-picking.
5 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Oh, I see.
6 A. [Mr Irving]: But there is a period after the word “Judentransport aus
7 Berlin”, Jew transport from Berlin. In other words, there
8 is a full stop at the end of that and a new line. Then
9 comes the phrase “Keine Liquidierung” as a separate
10 phrase. Operating as we were at that time, 1977, totally
11 in the darkness about this particular — we now know a lot
12 more, but at that time we were operating totally in the
13 darkness. I was going through a jungle of new documents
14 that no other historian had set foot in. It was perfectly
15 rational to say, is the “Keiner Liquidierung” a phrase
16 which is attached to the line above, or is it a separate
17 subject; just in the same way, if you look, there are four
18 lines in that facsimile. The first one is — I will say
19 it in English so we have no problem — arrest of
20 Dr Jakelius. The next line after a period is “Apparently
21 son of Molotoff” or “apparent son of Molotoff”. The next
22 line is “Jews transport from Berlin”, full stop. The next
23 line is “No liquidation”.
24 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Yes.
25 A. [Mr Irving]: I appreciate that in the light of our present knowledge
26 the fourth line clearly refers to the third line. Are you
. P-117
1 with me, Mr Rampton?
2 Q. [Mr Rampton]: I am absolutely with you, Mr Irving. Carry on.
3 A. [Mr Irving]: But in the state of my knowledge in 1977, when I am still
4 in darkest jungle of new documents, it was perfectly
5 reasonable to accept the fourth line as being as detached
6 from the third line line as were the first and second
7 lines from each other and from the rest.
8 MR JUSTICE GRAY: So answer to Mr Rampton’s question is that
9 you were conveying in that passage what you thought was an
10 explicit order relating to Jews generally, not just Berlin
11 Jews?
12 A. [Mr Irving]: Based solely on the fourth line with Jews being the topic
13 of conversation, my Lord, yes.
14 MR RAMPTON: I am coming back to that.
15 A. [Mr Irving]: That is why the full stop is so important.
16 Q. [Mr Rampton]: You say that, but it has this possible effect as well
17 which is something evidently you did not even pause to
18 think about; it might not have had anything to do with
19 Jews at all, might it?
20 A. [Mr Irving]: You are absolutely right.
21 Q. [Mr Rampton]: You inflated it on the basis of what one might call a
22 speculative inference into a general order against the
23 liquidation of Jews in general, did you not?
24 A. [Mr Irving]: I object to the word “inflated”. I said that
25 I interpreted that line from the clear evidence that the
26 previous topic of conversation had been Jews.
. P-118
1 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Berlin’s Jews?
2 A. [Mr Irving]: Yes, Jews all the same. I interpreted the fourth line as
3 being a reference to “no liquidation”. We now know that
4 this was, in all probability, a reference purely to that
5 train load.
6 Q. [Mr Rampton]: We do not want to get ahead of ourselves, at least I do
7 not want to get ahead of myself, Mr Irving, though you
8 should not feel sorry for me.
9 A. [Mr Irving]: Right, but please do not forget that full stop in the line
10 above.
11 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Of course I do not forget it. I can see it in the
12 original.
13 A. [Mr Irving]: We had a lot of discussion about whether the “K” of
14 “Keine” was actually a large “K” or a little “k” among
15 historians, believe it or not.
16 MR JUSTICE GRAY: If you have a full stop, it does not matter?
17 A. [Mr Irving]: Well, people wondered if that was a full stop or a
18 blemish, my Lord. This is the kind of level to which one
19 sinks.
20 MR RAMPTON: The fact is, Mr Irving, that full stop or no, the
21 first line of those two lines concerns Jews from Berlin,
22 as it happens, one transport?
23 A. [Mr Irving]: Well, it concerns Jew transport or transportation from
24 Berlin.
25 Q. [Mr Rampton]: The second line, if it is to be read disjunctively from
26 the first line, refers to “no liquidation”. No
. P-119
1 liquidation of what? Businesses, gypsies?
2 A. [Mr Irving]: It would have to be a very perverse mind indeed which
3 accepted there was no connection between the fourth and
4 the third lines, general topic.
5 Q. [Mr Rampton]: The natural meaning of those two lines taken together,
6 whether you insert the full stop or not, is that there is
7 to be no liquidation of the Jews from Berlin?
8 A. [Mr Irving]: You say whether you accept the full stop or not; the full
9 stop is there.
10 Q. [Mr Rampton]: No difference. It might have been a —-
11 A. [Mr Irving]: Pardon?
12 Q. [Mr Rampton]: There might have been nothing. It is a note in a man’s
13 handwritten telephone log.
14 A. [Mr Irving]: I agree. One cannot put it on the gold balance.
15 Q. [Mr Rampton]: If you say, Mr Irving, the “liquidieren” refers to Jews at
16 all, then it is most probable, most probable — I do not
17 have to deal in certainties, you see, Mr Irving — that it
18 refers to the Jews referred to in the previous line, is it
19 not?
20 A. [Mr Irving]: Yes.
21 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Yes. So why, what was the warrant for your inflating this
22 (and I use that word advisedly because it is an inflation,
23 objectively regarded) into a prohibition against the
24 liquidation of all Jews anywhere?
25 A. [Mr Irving]: I remind you of your previous question; you are saying it
26 is most likely that it was, and you are talking in the
. P-120
1 present tense, but was it most likely in 1977 when I wrote
2 the book or published the book?
3 Q. [Mr Rampton]: I am looking at the German as it was written in 1941.
4 A. [Mr Irving]: No, are you asking me was it most probable that the fourth
5 line referred to the third line in the 1960s when I wrote
6 the book? The answer to that is it not so likely, it is
7 not so evident because at that time we did not have the
8 documents that we do now.
9 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Ignore the extraneous material completely, if you will,
10 Mr Irving.
11 A. [Mr Irving]: You cannot when you are writing books.
12 Q. [Mr Rampton]: I will. I am trying to get back to your state of mind in
13 1970 something when you first wrote this passage which got
14 replicated in 1991. I look at what you had in front which
15 you told us this morning was just the sheet. You did not
16 have the surrounding material. German is an ordinary,
17 Western European language. They think like us, they speak
18 somewhat like us, and the entry is: “Jew transport from
19 Berlin”, full stop, “no liquidation”. Now, if the
20 “liquidation” refers to Jews, it refers to those Jews and
21 no other Jews?
22 A. [Mr Irving]: Mr Rampton, you have four topics referred to in that
23 conversation, one, two, three and four. One, two and
24 three are all totally different topics from each other,
25 and it is very reasonable to assume that the fourth topic
26 is probably also yet another fourth topic.
. P-121
1 Q. [Mr Rampton]: That is interesting.
2 A. [Mr Irving]: But you say there was no other document before me at that
3 time. Of course, there were the rest of these telephone
4 logs. For example, the reference to “no destruction of
5 the gypsies” which clearly shows the way which decisions
6 are going at the top.
7 Q. [Mr Rampton]: So you mean the fourth line, “Keine Liquidierung” could
8 refer to the verhaftung of Dr Jakelius?
9 A. [Mr Irving]: Equally.
10 Q. [Mr Rampton]: What is the verhaftung of Dr Jakelius?
11 A. [Mr Irving]: The arrest of Dr Jakelius. Dr Jakelius, my research has
12 established, was an euthanasia doctor in Vienna who had
13 been arrested for some reason.
14 Q. [Mr Rampton]: OK. He has been arrested. What is the Angleblich
15 Molotoff?
16 A. [Mr Irving]: Somebody who was, apparently, claiming to be a son of
17 Molotoff. Molotoff, the Foreign Minister, had no sons.
18 Q. [Mr Rampton]: And then there is the “Judentransport aus Berlin”?
19 A. [Mr Irving]: Then come — yes.
20 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Then the fourth line is “Keine Liquidierung”, so this
21 could mean that none of those three groups, categories, is
22 to be liquidated. Is that what you are telling us?
23 A. [Mr Irving]: I do not think I said that. I am saying that all four
24 lines can be taken separately because the first three
25 lines are quite clearly separate topics from each other.
26 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Let us go through it. Plainly, it is an utter nonsense to
. P-122
1 talk about the “angeblich sohn Molotoff” as being subject
2 to an injunction against liquidation, is it not?
3 A. [Mr Irving]: Subject to?
4 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Being subject to an injunction against liquidation?
5 A. [Mr Irving]: Well, very clearly it is. If somebody was the son of a
6 prominent Soviet leader, they would definitely be kept in
7 a very special confinement.
8 MR JUSTICE GRAY: He was thought at one time to have been on
9 that train.
10 A. [Mr Irving]: The usual trick was that a prisoner would be taken and he
11 would claim to be Churchill’s son or nephew or cousin or
12 something like, and knowing that they would not be able to
13 kill him. But it would be dangerous to read too much just
14 into three words. All we know is that Molotoff had no
15 sons and that, obviously, there is no connection between
16 the Jakelius and Molotoff.
17 MR RAMPTON: No, but, of course, there is no full stop after
18 “Jakelius” either, is there, so it might be asserted that
19 he was arrested because he was pretending to be the son of
20 Molotoff, might he not?
21 A. [Mr Irving]: I am not sure how much time the court wishes to…
22 MR RAMPTON: Well, this is fanciful.
Section 123.22 to 140.18
23 MR JUSTICE GRAY: I am wondering whether we have not thrashed
24 through this document sufficiently.
25 MR RAMPTON: Is it not? The “Keine Liquidierung” refers to the
26 “Judentransport aus Berlin” whether there is a full stop
. P-123
1 or not.
2 A. [Mr Irving]: This is your opinion, but it is not mine, Mr Rampton, when
3 I am writing my book in early 1970s and —-
4 MR JUSTICE GRAY: It comes to this. In the early 1970s you
5 took that, as you now accept wrongly, to have been a
6 reference to Jews generally?
7 A. [Mr Irving]: At large or at larger than is justified. I took it to be
8 transportation, the transporetation of the Jews as —-
9 MR RAMPTON: No, in the introduction it is “at large”, not “at
10 larger”. In the introduction it is all Jews.
11 A. [Mr Irving]: Yes. This was the inference that I drew —-
12 Q. [Mr Rampton]: This is the incontrovertible evidence that Hitler had
13 ordered, no liquidation of any Jews anywhere.
14 A. [Mr Irving]: Into account I take when writing that sentence my entire
15 expertise based on all the other documents that we have by
16 that time already collected, and, of course, now we know a
17 great deal more which proves I was absolutely right to
18 write what I wrote at that time.
19 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Mr Irving, we are not here to find out whether you were
20 right or wrong; if we were, we would be here until the
21 next Millennium.
22 A. [Mr Irving]: I doubt it.
23 Q. [Mr Rampton]: No doubt. We are here to test your credentials, your
24 honesty and your integrity, as an historian, a chronicler
25 of these events. The proposition which I put to you for
26 you to deny is that you deliberately distorted the sense
. P-124
1 of these two lines so as to make the reference to “Keine
2 Liquidierung” without any warrant whatsoever appear to be
3 a reference to Jews everywhere?
4 A. [Mr Irving]: This sentence would only stand up in court, in my view, if
5 you were able to establish that at the time I wrote those
6 sentences I knew different and better. I think it would
7 be very difficult to make that stand. To show that one
8 makes a mistake in interpreting a translation of the word
9 “transport”, that one chooses the wider interpretation
10 rather than the narrow narrower definition that we now
11 know to be correct from the other documentation, this is
12 not a deliberate wilful and perverse distortion or
13 manipulation or translation of a document.
14 Q. [Mr Rampton]: I put it to you, Mr Irving, that, on the contrary, it
15 quite plainly is — shall we leave it there — which you
16 deny? Just while we are on the question of full stops,
17 since you have raised it, if we go to page 14 in your
18 little bundle, we see the rather worse photograph,
19 I agree, of the same sort of document that the log for the
20 beginning of December, the first day of December?
21 A. [Mr Irving]: Precisely, yes.
22 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Yes, and I do not know, this is not a very good copy, are
23 you certain whether or not there is a full full stop after
24 word —-
25 A. [Mr Irving]: “SS”?
26 Q. [Mr Rampton]: — “Verwaltung”, yes, “SS”?
. P-125
1 A. [Mr Irving]: The second rune, you know what I mean by the rune, the
2 lightening flash that the SS —-
3 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Yes, SS thing.
4 A. [Mr Irving]: — the second rune is right off the photocopy.
5 Q. [Mr Rampton]: I know.
6 A. [Mr Irving]: So we cannot tell if there is a full stop or not.
7 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Have you got the original?
8 A. [Mr Irving]: I have got it in my volume at the end — the blue volume
9 marked “Himmler Diary”.
10 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Have you got that printed transcript of these documents?
11 MR JUSTICE GRAY: It is in this file, is it not?
12 A. [Mr Irving]: Well, I am afraid that I do not trust this —-
13 Q. [Mr Rampton]: OK.
14 A. [Mr Irving]: — to that degree. Let me just explain why I will not
15 trust this for being that kind of evidence. On two or
16 three occasions I spotted instead of writing “u.” for
17 “und”, they have written out “Und” in full.
18 Q. [Mr Rampton]: My fault entirely. I used the wrong document. One does
19 make mistakes. I quite agree. Turn back to page 13 of
20 your own documents, will you? This is your carefully
21 retranscribed version of the Himmler log?
22 A. [Mr Irving]: Yes.
23 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Where you correct the mistake “Juden” to read properly
24 “haben”?
25 A. [Mr Irving]: “Haben” with a small “h”.
26 Q. [Mr Rampton]: And there is no full stop after “SS”, is there?
. P-126
1 A. [Mr Irving]: It would have been highly improper of me to have put a
2 full stop in if there was not one visible on the
3 photocopy.
4 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Exactly. What would in German the sentence or phrase
5 (because is not really a sentence) “VerwaltungsFuhrer der
6 SS haben zu bleiden” mean — I mean “Juden zu bleiden”,
7 I beg your pardon. What would it mean?
8 A. [Mr Irving]: Jews to remain.
9 Q. [Mr Rampton]: No, no. I will read it in English: “Administrative
10 officers, leaders, of the SS Jews to remain”?
11 A. [Mr Irving]: Read like that, it would mean nothing at all. It would be
12 quite meaningless.
13 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Exactly. It would be a complete nonsense, would it not?
14 A. [Mr Irving]: Yes.
15 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Thank you. Be patient with me, Mr Irving. I am just
16 going to a new topic now. Mr Irving, you are conscious,
17 I suppose and, in fact, I know you are, that Adolf Hitler
18 made a speech I think to Reich and Gauleiters in Berlin on
19 12th December 1941. I am still in the same period of
20 short period of history.
21 A. [Mr Irving]: 4th December?
22 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Yes, 12/12/41.
23 A. [Mr Irving]: Yes.
24 Q. [Mr Rampton]: We know that because there is a report of it in Goebbels’
25 diary for 13th December, is there not?
26 A. [Mr Irving]: There is a reference to it.
. P-127
1 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Yes. Well, there is rather more than that, I think. Have
2 you got — have you got your Goebbels book there?
3 MR JUSTICE GRAY: The answer is “no” can he be provided with a
4 copy?
5 MR RAMPTON: Yes, please somebody give him a Goebbels.
6 A. [Mr Irving]: It is here. I have it here.
7 Q. [Mr Rampton]: If you turn to page 383 you see in the first complete
8 paragraph you start like this: “Addressing the… whilst
9 still in Berlin Hitler opted for greater candour. He
10 confessed that he had spent sleepless nights… whether he
11 was doing the right thing in declaring war on Roosevelt.”
12 Then you quote Goebbels: “The Fuhrer” Goebbels
13 reported to his diary “is convinced that he would have had
14 to declare war on the Americans sooner or later. Now the
15 conflict in the Far East drops into our laps as an added
16 bonus”. “He viewed the battle of the Atlantic” etc. etc.
17 down to the end of paragraph “an unavoidable hitch”.
18 Footnote 72. In footnote 72, which is on page 646, you
19 explain that those references are taken from Goebbels
20 diary on 13th December.
21 A. [Mr Irving]: That is correct, and that is true.
22 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Yes.
23 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Mr Rampton, I am sorry, what page?
24 MR RAMPTON: 646, the footnote.
25 MR JUSTICE GRAY: No, what page in the text?
26 MR RAMPTON: 383, I am so sorry.
. P-128
1 A. [Mr Irving]: The second paragraph.
2 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Then I ask you to note, I will wait until his Lordship has
3 it, I ask you to note on the same page in the second part
4 of the next paragraph these words, because I am coming
5 back to this: “Returning by train on December 16th to the
6 Wolf’s Lair” yes?
7 A. [Mr Irving]: Yes.
8 Q. [Mr Rampton]: So that you are saying means that — I take it what are
9 you saying means that Hitler having addressed the
10 Gauleiters on the 12th went back to the Wolf’s Lair in
11 East Prussia on the 16th?
12 A. [Mr Irving]: Yes, I can easily check it from the war diary.
13 Q. [Mr Rampton]: No. I am sure you are right about that, I am not about to
14 dispute it, you will be surprised to hear.
15 Could you now please be provided with a copy of
16 Professor Evans’ report? No, I am sorry that is the wrong
17 reference I beg your pardon. Can somebody retrieve that
18 mistake by me, and give Mr Irving Professor Longerich.
19 MR JUSTICE GRAY: This point is dealt with by Evans?
20 MR RAMPTON: I know it is, but I have not got the reference in
21 Evans.
22 MR JUSTICE GRAY: I think it is page 320.
23 MR RAMPTON: I have put it away.
24 A. [Mr Irving]: I am looking forward to it actually.
25 MR JUSTICE GRAY: What?
26 A. [Mr Irving]: I am looking forward to it.
. P-129
1 MR RAMPTON: It is very well known passage in Goebbels diary,
2 or seems to be. Thanks perhaps in part to Mr Irving,
3 I know not. If you have got Dr Longerich’s report now,
4 could you turn to page 61 of the first part?
5 A. [Mr Irving]: Yes, I have it.
6 Q. [Mr Rampton]: We are on 12th December still. His report reads as
7 follows, at the bottom of page 61, paragraph 17.3: “One
8 day after the declaration of war on the USA on 12th
9 December Hitler addressed the… of the party”; so far is
10 that correct, Mr Irving?
11 A. [Mr Irving]: That is correct, yes.
12 Q. [Mr Rampton]: “In this speech he returned once again to prophecy of 30th
13 January 1939″, that is the one in the Reichstarget about
14 the fate of Jews, is it not?
15 A. [Mr Irving]: Yes.
16 Q. [Mr Rampton]: “And now announced the approaching extermination of the
17 Jews living under German domination, as we can read in the
18 Goebbels diaries.”
19 Now please look at footnote 156, and I am not
20 going to read it out because that is a strain for me and
21 worst still for the transcribers. It is the original
22 German. Tell me if it is accurate, your German is very
23 good.
24 A. [Mr Irving]: The German text is accurate apart from the fact it has
25 transcribed some of the diacriticals incorrectly.
26 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Fair enough.
. P-130
1 A. [Mr Irving]: German SZ, things like that.
2 Q. [Mr Rampton]: You have read it now, have you?
3 A. [Mr Irving]: I read it and I disapprove of the translation, but we will
4 reach that moment.
5 Q. [Mr Rampton]: We will come to that because that is over the page, but —
6 A. [Mr Irving]: It is a tendentious translation.
7 MR JUSTICE GRAY: But nothing wrong with the German?
8 A. [Mr Irving]: — nothing wrong with German —
9 MR RAMPTON: I will come back, because the translation will be
10 important many times during in the course of the case.
11 Dr Longerich translates it at the top page 62.
12 A. [Mr Irving]: — he is, of course, German translating into English.
13 Q. [Mr Rampton]: I know he is, but it may be, I know not, you can ask him
14 when he comes to court. He had some help. His English is
15 pretty good, but not perfect: “As concerns the Jewish
16 question the Fuhrer is determined to make a clean sweep”;
17 what I suggest we do, Mr Irving, is to take out page 61
18 and fortunately the German text is on a separate page.
19 A. [Mr Irving]: Right.
20 Q. [Mr Rampton]: As we go through the English you can tell me in answer to
21 my questions where you think Dr Longerich has gone wrong
22 in his translation.
23 A. [Mr Irving]: Yes.
24 Q. [Mr Rampton]: “As concerns the Jewish question the Fuhrer is determined
25 to make a clean sweep” (German spoken)?
26 A. [Mr Irving]: Tabula rasa they say in Latin.
. P-131
1 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Maybe, but this is fortunately in these courts we do not
2 speak much Latin any more.
3 MR JUSTICE GRAY: No, but it is closer actually, the Latin than
4 the English.
5 MR RAMPTON: Probably.
6 MR JUSTICE GRAY: That is the point are you making.
7 A. [Mr Irving]: Yes.
8 MR RAMPTON: Yes, a tabular rasa is a blank surface.
9 A. [Mr Irving]: So I am more accurate than yourself —
10 MR JUSTICE GRAY: There is no distinction in terms of the sense
11 of it, is there.
12 MR RAMPTON: I do not know.
13 A. [Mr Irving]: — does the word tabula rasa exist in English?
14 MR RAMPTON: Yes. It is frequently used by people who do not
15 know what it means, as so much Latin is. But if you wish
16 tabula rasa is rather a perhaps stronger word than “clean
17 sweep”.
18 A. [Mr Irving]: Cleansing.
19 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Do you dispute clean sweep gives sense?
20 A. [Mr Irving]: Not at all, perfectly good line.
21 MR RAMPTON: “He had prophesied to the Jews that if they once
22 again brought about a world war they would experience
23 their own extermination.” The words in German are (German
24 spoken); what do those words mean?
25 A. [Mr Irving]: Well, of course, to translate “vernichtung” as
26 extermination is highly tendentious.
. P-132
1 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Why?
2 A. [Mr Irving]: If you look in your yellow dictionary, see what
3 “vernichtung” says.
4 Q. [Mr Rampton]: I think I will.
5 A. [Mr Irving]: I have no idea. I am prepared to say meaning No. one is
6 extermination.
7 Q. [Mr Rampton]: You do not have to say that, Mr Irving. The root of the
8 word is “making to nothing” annihilating, is it not? Let
9 us see what that says. I have very little knowledge of
10 German, but it seems to me obvious, but it means,
11 according to Langscheidt, annihilate, destroy,
12 exterminate, eradicate-shatter.
13 A. [Mr Irving]: It is the third possible meaning and he has chosen the
14 third meaning rather than the first.
15 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Did you see a distinction —
16 A. [Mr Irving]: Yes —
17 Q. [Mr Rampton]: In this context — weight between annihilate and
18 exterminate?
19 A. [Mr Irving]: — I am not going to put the words on the gold balance
20 because this is not Hitler speaking, this is Goebbels
21 reporting, am I correct?
22 MR JUSTICE GRAY: No.
23 MR RAMPTON: Apparently —
24 A. [Mr Irving]: On the following day.
25 MR RAMPTON: Unless it come from Goebbels diary?
26 A. [Mr Irving]: — this is Goebbels diary. This is a third person report
. P-133
1 by Goebbels of what Hitler said the previous day.
2 MR JUSTICE GRAY: He is reporting what he recalls him having
3 said.
4 A. [Mr Irving]: Yes, so it is rather meaningless to attach too much
5 importance to the actual words contained in the diary.
6 MR RAMPTON: On the contrary, Mr Irving, often enough in the
7 course of your books you attach a kind of uncritical
8 credulity to the utterances of Dr Goebbels.
9 A. [Mr Irving]: Yes.
10 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Notwithstanding he is merely reporting what somebody else
11 has said. Furthermore why should — Dr Goebbels in
12 December 1941 misreport what his leader had said?
13 A. [Mr Irving]: Because if you had read my book with the assiduity that
14 I am sure you have you will remember that Dr Goebbels is
15 an evil little genius who is capable of lying in the most
16 malicious and perverse verse way and he will translate
17 every single statement through his own distorted brain.
18 MR JUSTICE GRAY: In his own diaries?
19 A. [Mr Irving]: Yes.
20 MR RAMPTON: Why?
21 A. [Mr Irving]: This is the way people do things. They have a tendency to
22 write down things they wished they had heard. If he
23 wished to heard Hitler talking about the extermination of
24 the Jews, then he would prefer to use that word when for
25 all we know Hitler may have used a different one. I have
26 no objection at all, Mr Rampton, when you bring to me the
. P-134
1 verbatim transcripts of which there are any number of
2 Hitler actually said when he says things that are very
3 similar.
4 Q. [Mr Rampton]: We do not have —
5 A. [Mr Irving]: We should not rely on this kind of second order evidence
6 on matter of this importance.
7 Q. [Mr Rampton]: — you do it repeatedly when it suits your book,
8 Mr Irving.
9 A. [Mr Irving]: You are accusing me of double standards.
10 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Yes, I am most roundly.
11 A. [Mr Irving]: I disagree. I am very careful with the criteria I apply.
12 In a matter like this of such importance I look at the
13 actual translations with greatest detail and if they are,
14 I mean in law too you have to give somebody the benefit of
15 the doubt when they are ambiguities. You certainly do not
16 go for the third meaning of the word rather than first
17 meaning.
18 Q. [Mr Rampton]: You see, you continually assume that I am using one
19 document, one utterance, to prove the guilt of Adolf
20 Hitler. In fact I am trying to do neither, Mr Irving.
21 What I am trying to do is to suggest to you that the
22 convergence of the evidence of which this is just one
23 small example.
24 A. [Mr Irving]: Yes.
25 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Is that on the balance of probabilities, as though it were
26 a civil case at court, the reasonable historian would say:
. P-135
1 on the balance of probabilities the evidence is that Adolf
2 Hitler was at the heart of all of this? Do you follow me?
3 A. [Mr Irving]: It is a rather vague sentence, that Hitler was at the
4 heart of all this.
5 MR JUSTICE GRAY: I think it probably clear what Mr Rampton is
6 getting at, can I put a related question, I would be
7 interested to know what your answer is; do you
8 “vernichtung” would be a word that would be likely to be
9 used if what was being talked of was deportation to
10 Madagascar or anywhere else?
11 A. [Mr Irving]: I agree it would not and there are definitely cases where
12 word “vernichtung” is used in the sense of murder. For
13 example, in the German phrase ( German spoken), the
14 destruction of people who are not entitled or should not
15 be allowed to live. It is quite definitely a killing
16 operation, but there are so much better sources where you
17 have the actual transcript of what people are speaking
18 that I hesitate to waste the court’s time looking at the
19 kind of document when undoubtedly you have the verbatim
20 transcript of what Hitler said where he uses similar words
21 or the same words.
22 MR RAMPTON: Fortunately for everybody, Mr Irving, it is not in
23 your hands whether the court’s time is wasted. If I try
24 to waste the court’s time I will be told not to, if I am
25 thought not to be wasting the court’s I will not be told.
26 A. [Mr Irving]: If I was sitting there wearing a wig I would have jumped
. P-136
1 to my feet and made this point.
2 Q. [Mr Rampton]: You have made it.
3 A. [Mr Irving]: I am wearing my other hat if I say that.
4 Q. [Mr Rampton]: If you want to invite his Lordship to stop this line of
5 cross-examination please do so.
6 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Come on, I think you are not asking me to and
7 if you did, I would not.
8 MR RAMPTON: Thank you. Now then you do not like Dr Goebbels
9 use of the word “vernichtung”. You are not certain that
10 that is a word Adolf Hitler would have used on that
11 occasion.
12 A. [Mr Irving]: Well, we know exactly what speech Hitler made on January
13 30th 1939, there we have the verbatim text.
14 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Turn back to page 38 of the same report.
15 A. [Mr Irving]: We know exactly what Hitler said there, so why we are
16 using a second hand version of a version of it repeated
17 four years later.
18 Q. [Mr Rampton]: For the very fact that it was repeated on 12th December —
19 A. [Mr Irving]: Hitler constantly repeated this speech.
20 Q. [Mr Rampton]: — please, Mr Irving, be patient and listen to my
21 questions. Its importance you may agree is that it occurs
22 again on 12th December 1941 at the time when the German
23 Jews were being transported in large numbers to the East?
24 A. [Mr Irving]: Yes.
25 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Right. If you go back to 811 of Dr Longerich’s report you
26 find the relevant English of the Reichstag speech on 30
. P-137
1 January 1939?
2 A. [Mr Irving]: I know the speech off by heart.
3 Q. [Mr Rampton]: In that case you will agree that the last words in
4 citation are: (German spoken); which means the
5 annihilation, extermination or eradication of the Jewish
6 race in Europe, does it not?
7 A. [Mr Irving]: Can we just be absolutely certain what German words he
8 uses.
9 MR JUSTICE GRAY: It is same word, take it from me.
10 A. [Mr Irving]: In German, very well, my Lord, yes.
11 MR RAMPTON: It is at the bottom of the page in German (German
12 spoken)?
13 A. [Mr Irving]: In this case I would say that the word “race” implies that
14 he is not talking about an actual killing operation and
15 certainly January 1939 nobody was talking about killing
16 Jews.
17 Q. [Mr Rampton]: What does word “genocide” mean, Mr Irving?
18 A. [Mr Irving]: Genocide?
19 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Yes, genocide.
20 A. [Mr Irving]: An English word genocide?
21 Q. [Mr Rampton]: No, it is not English, it is Latin.
22 A. [Mr Irving]: It is not a Latin word, you mean Latin origin?
23 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Yes. What does it mean?
24 A. [Mr Irving]: You explain to the court.
25 Q. [Mr Rampton]: No, you tell me if you know what it means.
26 A. [Mr Irving]: Killing of people by virtue of their race.
. P-138
1 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Yes, it means killing of a race of people.
2 A. [Mr Irving]: Yes.
3 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Is it any different from the “vernichtung” of a “rasa”?
4 A. [Mr Irving]: You destroy races in other ways than killing them. Nobody
5 in January 1939 and I would be very surprised if you can
6 establish the opposite was talking about killing Jews.
7 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Yes. I am going to go on with this little comparison
8 between —
9 A. [Mr Irving]: Yes.
10 Q. [Mr Rampton]: — if you forgive me and as long as I am not told by his
11 Lordship it is waste of the court’s time, but there is
12 little comparison between what Dr Longerich has written in
13 English and what the original German of Dr Goebbels diary
14 was. We have finished with the word “vernichtung erleben
15 geben”, which means “they would experience”, this was not
16 just an empty phrase. The German is: “Das is keine frazig
17 vasen”?
18 A. [Mr Irving]: That is correct.
19 Q. [Mr Rampton]: What does that convey to you? This was —
20 A. [Mr Irving]: Dr Goebbels is saying that is not an empty phrase. This
21 is not Hitler saying this is an empty phrase, this is
22 Goebbels saying it is an empty phrase.
23 Q. [Mr Rampton]: — so you say.
24 A. [Mr Irving]: Well, this is Goebbels diary.
25 Q. [Mr Rampton]: How do you know it is not a report what Hitler said?
26 A. [Mr Irving]: Let me educate you in the German language. If this was
. P-139
1 Goebbels saying this is Hitler saying it would have been
2 in the subjunctive. German language reports reported
3 speech in the subjunctive. It would be (German spoken)
4 not (German spoken) I am sure every German in this room
5 would agree with me.
6 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Everything in the rest of this quotation is not
7 attributable to Hitler; is that your position?
8 A. [Mr Irving]: We are taking this sentence by sentence; is that correct?
9 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Let go on, the world war is there, the extermination and
10 again the words are (German spoken) that is of Jewry, Jews
11 in general if you like, must be the necessary
12 consequence. (German spoken)?
13 A. [Mr Irving]: Here he has the same word, vernichtung, but he has given
14 it a totally different translation, extermination, am
15 I right?
16 Q. [Mr Rampton]: What do you mean?
17 MR JUSTICE GRAY: No.
Section 140.19 to 172.26
18 MR RAMPTON: I see the two words “extermination” one on top of
19 other.
20 MR JUSTICE GRAY: I think you mean different from the 1939
21 translation.
22 A. [Mr Irving]: Yes, but the word that is different of course is Judentums
23 what does your Langscheidt tell us about that?
24 MR RAMPTON: I doubt it has it in, I am not going to bother
25 with it.
26 A. [Mr Irving]: Can I ask that you look in Langscheidt because I do not
. P-140
1 have a copy here.
2 MR JUSTICE GRAY: You accept “Jewry” is the right translation?
3 A. [Mr Irving]: Jewry, Judaism, but not Jews. If somebody talks about
4 wiping out Christianity that would be the parallel, my
5 Lord.
6 MR RAMPTON: This is only Dr Goebbels speaking, does it matter?
7 A. [Mr Irving]: What is the standard dictionary?
8 Q. [Mr Rampton]: You cannot — we cannot believe a word Dr Goebbels says,
9 can we?
10 A. [Mr Irving]: This is your Judentums.
11 Q. [Mr Rampton]: I am just looking to see if it is in, it may be Jewry
12 collective… there is a choice Mr Irving, which would you
13 like to choose?
14 A. [Mr Irving]: Wiping out Jewry, wiping out Judaism, it is not the same
15 as exterminating the Jews this is a manipulated
16 translation.
17 Q. [Mr Rampton]: It has Jewry?
18 A. [Mr Irving]: He is saying that this is evidence of the wiping out of
19 the Jews.
20 Q. [Mr Rampton]: No, look at it “Jewry” big letters, extermination of
21 Jewry?
22 A. [Mr Irving]: Extermination of Jewry.
23 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Yes.
24 A. [Mr Irving]: Is not the same as annihilating Judaism.
25 Q. [Mr Rampton]: No, but the two meanings are both there?
26 A. [Mr Irving]: He has chosen once again the tendentious meaning, which
. P-141
1 highly is disreputable for an historian to do.
2 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Perhaps that is because it is consistent with the rest of
3 the text?
4 A. [Mr Irving]: No, it is incumbent upon an historian, just as a lawyer to
5 give the benefit of the doubt to the person you are
6 impugning; am I correct?
7 Q. [Mr Rampton]: No, you are not correct. Not in this case.
8 A. [Mr Irving]: In an ambiguity.
9 Q. [Mr Rampton]: No, there is not ambiguity here —
10 A. [Mr Irving]: There is a total ambiguity.
11 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Mr Irving, I go back: “He had prophecised to the Jews that
12 if they”, nothing to do with Judaism, “once again brought
13 about a world war they would experience their own” that is
14 to say the Jews own extermination “vernichtung”, the same
15 word in the next sentence.
16 A. [Mr Irving]: This is Dr Goebbels, right?
17 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Yes, yes.
18 A. [Mr Irving]: OK.
19 Q. [Mr Rampton]: No, that is Hitler.
20 A. [Mr Irving]: Hitler as reported four years later by Dr Goebbels.
21 Q. [Mr Rampton]: By Dr Goebbels. The world war is there. The
22 extermination of Jewry must be the necessary consequence.
23 The one flows quite naturally and logically from the
24 other.
25 A. [Mr Irving]: In the first case he has taken the third meaning of the
26 word. In the second case he has taken the second meaning
. P-142
1 of the word. In neither case has he taken the primary
2 meaning of the word, primary translation. If I was to do
3 that I think I would be hearing about it shortly in this
4 court.
5 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Eradication, extermination, annihilation all mean the same
6 thing —
7 A. [Mr Irving]: I do not think so. I gave an example if one talked about
8 eradicating Christianity, drug addiction, you do not go
9 about wiping out the drug addicts.
10 MR JUSTICE GRAY: I think I have the point.
11 A. [Mr Irving]: — I think there is room for manoeuvre on something like
12 this and it is incumbent on people not to take the evil
13 meaning of a word when there are much better sources.
14 MR RAMPTON: There is only room for manoeuvre for those who
15 want to find room to manoeuvre?
16 A. [Mr Irving]: Like people who pay witnesses for expert cases like this.
17 Q. [Mr Rampton]: I must make a note to prompt you to put that allegation to
18 Dr Longerich —
19 A. [Mr Irving]: I shall, to all the witnesses.
20 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Let us press on with the translation.
21 MR RAMPTON: This question must be seen without sentimentality
22 “die frage ist ohne jede sentimentalat so
23 betrachten” correct?
24 A. [Mr Irving]: — that is a fair translation.
25 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Good. We are not here in order to have sympathy with the
26 Jews, “wir sind nicht dasu da, mitlied mit den juden”
. P-143
1 correct so far?
2 A. [Mr Irving]: Yes.
3 Q. [Mr Rampton]: “Sondern nur mitleid mit unserem deutschen volk so haben”?
4 A. [Mr Irving]: Just to have sympathy.
5 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Rather we should sympathise with our own German people?
6 A. [Mr Irving]: A loose translation, but I am not tendentious.
7 Q. [Mr Rampton]: If the German people have now once again sacrificed as
8 many as 160,000 dead in the eastern campaign, then the
9 authors of this bloody conflict must pay with their
10 lives (German spoken) authors?
11 A. [Mr Irving]: Yes.
12 Q. [Mr Rampton]: (German spoken) of this bloody conflict, therefore — with
13 their lives — account for, must account for or pay for?
14 A. [Mr Irving]: Yes, this is Dr Goebbels.
15 Q. [Mr Rampton]: It may be?
16 A. [Mr Irving]: I am sorry it is, because it is not in the subjunctive.
17 If it is not in reported speech. If he was reporting what
18 Hitler had said, it would be not “hat” but “ete”, that is
19 the way reported speech is done in German.
20 Q. [Mr Rampton]: You see no ground for thinking that Hitler said anything
21 like this?
22 A. [Mr Irving]: This is Dr. Goebbels’ gloss on what Hitler had said.
23 Q. [Mr Rampton]: You think it is just a gloss on what Hitler said. Do you
24 think it is a invention?
25 A. [Mr Irving]: That is what the language tells us Mr Rampton it is not in
26 subjunctive, so it is not him reporting what somebody else
. P-144
1 said.
2 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Could you answer my question.
3 A. [Mr Irving]: I have given you the answer.
4 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Do you think it is an invention?
5 A. [Mr Irving]: Is what an invention? He is writing down his own
6 opinions. Goebbels —
7 Q. [Mr Rampton]: None of this is attributable to what Hitler said on this
8 occasion when he addressed the Reich and Gau leaders on
9 12th December —
10 A. [Mr Irving]: — Mr Rampton, you do not know and I do not know because
11 we do not have a transcript of that speech.
12 MR JUSTICE GRAY: How much do you say Mr Irving of this little
13 snippet is a report of what Hitler said to the gaulieter?
14 A. [Mr Irving]: — as I say, in all my editions of Hitler’s War, Hitler
15 made the original speech on January 30th 1939 and he
16 repeatedly and ominously repeated and recorded what he had
17 said on that occasion, saying I prophecised then and
18 I will say it again and those who laughed then they are
19 laughing on the other side of their faces now. This kind
20 of thing. He said it something like eight or nine times
21 during the war on 8th November 1942 and so on.
22 Q. [Mr Justice Gray]: Answer my question.
23 A. [Mr Irving]: It was one of his stock speeches. So I know with a pretty
24 fair degree of certainty how much of this quotation Hitler
25 actually said because Hitler was always saying the same
26 thing and how much is probably Goebbels adding his own
. P-145
1 private gloss.
2 MR JUSTICE GRAY: But this is something, this is in part at any
3 rate a report by Goebbels of what Hitler said in 1941 to
4 the gaulieter?
5 A. [Mr Irving]: I appreciate that, yes.
6 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Nothing to do with 1939. My question, if I can ask you
7 for an answer, is how much do you say of this snippet from
8 Goebbels’ diary is a report of what Hitler said to the
9 gaulieter?
10 A. [Mr Irving]: I would say half is.
11 Q. [Mr Justice Gray]: Which half? Half in reported speech and half where he
12 repeats exactly the kind of sentence that Hitler had said
13 so many times before, but what I will not accept is that
14 he necessarily used the word vernichtung, when Hitler
15 frequently used other equally vague and ambiguous words
16 and indeed euphemisms. I am quite happy to accept that.
17 And personally I would consider it deeply shocking if an
18 historian was to pin any kind of hypothesis just on this
19 third order information which is what this actually is.
20 I know it has been done quite recently by Dr Christian
21 Gerlach who is a young Hungarian historian. He has tried
22 to pin a major hypothesis on it, but he is on the wooden
23 path as the Germans says, and the fact that the sentences
24 are not in the subjunctive makes it quite plain that
25 Goebbels is not reporting what Hitler said. We can ask
26 Dr Longerich this on the question of language if I am
. P-146
1 right about the subjunctive.
2 MR RAMPTON: You will have the opportunity to do that and you
3 can ask Professor Evans too whose German is probably as
4 good as yours.
5 A. [Mr Irving]: I doubt it but I would prefer to ask Dr Longerich.
6 Q. [Mr Rampton]: He wrote it. Tell me this, is it your belief that Hans
7 Frank, Governor General, was a Poland, Eastern Poland, at
8 this meeting on 12th December?
9 A. [Mr Irving]: He was a Reichsleiter. This was a speech to the
10 Garleiters and the Reichsleiter, so the likelihood is that
11 he was present.
12 Q. [Mr Rampton]: And the word “vernichtung” is not really capable of what
13 we might call being characterized as a Goebbels’ invention
14 or exaggeration because it was after all the word that
15 Hitler used in his speech in the Reichstager in 1939?
16 A. [Mr Irving]: Yes.
17 Q. [Mr Rampton]: So it would not be the least bit surprising if Hitler had
18 used the same word on this occasion, would it?
19 A. [Mr Irving]: Yes.
20 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Why?
21 A. [Mr Irving]: The word “vernichtung” is not killing. It is not
22 unambiguously killing. It is destruction.
23 Q. [Mr Rampton]: So you say. You say that. I do not know accept that
24 answer?
25 A. [Mr Irving]: It is the primary meaning of the word.
26 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Whether you call it extermination or annihilation, which
. P-147
1 are his two primary senses, it is a literal —-
2 A. [Mr Irving]: Excuse me, extermination was not the primary sense.
3 Q. [Mr Rampton]: No annihilation was?
4 A. [Mr Irving]: It was the third sense. You said extermination or
5 annihilation which are its primary senses. Extermination
6 is not. It is number 3.
7 Q. [Mr Rampton]: What difference do you see between annihilation and
8 extermination?
9 A. [Mr Irving]: Can you read out the three meanings?
10 Q. [Mr Rampton]: No, I ask you in English. What difference do you see?
11 A. [Mr Irving]: I have been annihilated by these books but I have not been
12 exterminated. Is that sufficient for you?
13 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Yes, and I annihilate you in cross-examination but I do
14 not exterminate you, I hope! Of course I see the
15 difference. Seriously, Mr Irving, please, annihilation of
16 the Jewish race, come, it is not difficult. German is not
17 a mystery language any more than English. What does it
18 mean, be honest?
19 A. [Mr Irving]: If Adolf Hitler was considering annihilation to be the
20 biological liquidation of the Jewish race, why would he
21 have been talking the entire time about the Madagascar?
22 Plan.
23 Q. [Mr Rampton]: He talked about the Madagascar plan I think as late as
24 sometime in 1942 by which time he had already issued an
25 order that the Madagascar plan was to be put to sleep?
26 A. [Mr Irving]: He talked about it on July 24th 1942.
. P-148
1 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Yes, and it was a dead duck?
2 A. [Mr Irving]: This is your word, but why would Hitler talk about even in
3 private with his staff?
4 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Because Hitler it would appears, if one reads his table
5 talk —-
6 A. [Mr Irving]: He is talking about it in a conversation with Bormann and
7 Himmler, the people who we know were the actual murderers.
8 Q. [Mr Rampton]: It is not to be taken seriously. It cannot be. The Brits
9 had occupied Madagascar in May of 1942?
10 A. [Mr Irving]: The British had occupied large parts of the world which
11 the Germans subsequently reoccupied.
12 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Like Crete. So your thesis is that Hitler had it in mind
13 the German Navy would travel all the way to the East Coast
14 of Africa, that huge island, and spend a lot of ships and
15 men capturing the island so they could put the Jews on it
16 in 1942?
17 A. [Mr Irving]: I know I am not supposed to ask you questions, but you are
18 not suggesting that the table talks are fake, are you?
19 Q. [Mr Rampton]: No, no that they are fake, no, far from it. On the
20 contrary, the table talks are very good evidence of a man
21 who sometimes waffles, sometimes deceives, sometimes talks
22 at endless length about nothing very much?
23 A. [Mr Irving]: Rather like counsel in this case!
24 Q. [Mr Rampton]: If you say so.
25 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Do not let us let it descend into…
26 A. [Mr Irving]: Mr Rampton — my Lord, I am not sure if I can say this,
. P-149
1 but Mr Rampton rather left the innuendo in the air — I am
2 not sure if you are returning to this — but I had this
3 diary passage in front of me and ignored it when I wrote
4 the book.
5 MR RAMPTON: Indeed.
6 A. [Mr Irving]: Are you going to state that?
7 Q. [Mr Rampton]: I was going to ask you. You can be personal about it if
8 you like, I do not mind, but I am going to ask you whether
9 you knew about this at the time you wrote these books.
10 A. [Mr Irving]: Thank you very much indeed. The answer is no.
11 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Why?
12 A. [Mr Irving]: I did not have it.
13 Q. [Mr Rampton]: You did not have it?
14 A. [Mr Irving]: No. This was part of the diaries that were in Moscow. A
15 Goebbels’, typical Goebbels’ diary entry would run to 70
16 or 50 or 100 pages. One Goebbels’ diary entry in
17 September 1943 is 143 pages of typescript for one day. In
18 Moscow, we were extremely limited for our time, the days
19 we were allowed to view these pages. I did, by chance,
20 look at these pages around the German declaration of war
21 on the United States as it was a matter of interest. My
22 commission from The Sunday Times was to obtain the
23 material relating to Germany’s declaration of war on the
24 United States, obviously for commercial reasons. I read
25 those passages, those pages, copied them down.
26 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Mr Irving, I just want to make sure I am
. P-150
1 understanding what the question is directed to. Are you
2 saying that you did not have the passage quoted —-
3 A. [Mr Irving]: By Longerich.
4 Q. [Mr Justice Gray]: — in Longerich —-
5 A. [Mr Irving]: That is correct.
6 Q. [Mr Justice Gray]: — at page 61, 62, when you wrote Goebbels?
7 A. [Mr Irving]: Indeed, my Lord, yes. I did not have it. It has only
8 recently been published by the Institute of History in
9 Munich. They obtained the diaries in 1992, shortly after
10 I obtained take them, and it has taken them six or seven
11 years to make them available to the general public.
12 I still have not received the volumes that I ordered from
13 the publishers.
14 MR RAMPTON: I am not sure what you did have.
15 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Can I just pursue this? I am still a little
16 bit puzzled. You do make reference though in Goebbels to
17 the speech that Hitler made to the Gauleiter?
18 A. [Mr Irving]: Purely because we know that there was a speech from Martin
19 Bormann’s diary.
20 MR RAMPTON: You quote from it?
21 A. [Mr Irving]: And because Goebbels being a typical diarist, he kept on
22 rambling back and forth as he dictated the diary to his
23 Private Secretary, and he kept on coming back to the
24 previous day’s speech, but not the passage there.
25 MR JUSTICE GRAY: So what are you saying — just bear with me
26 — I am trying to follow.
. P-151
1 MR RAMPTON: I am sorry, my Lord. I will shut up!
2 MR JUSTICE GRAY: If I can just speak for a minute? Are you
3 saying that what you say about Hitler’s speech to the
4 Gauleiters in your book, Goebbels, comes from Bormann’s
5 diary?
6 A. [Mr Irving]: No, my Lord. It comes from a previous passages of the
7 Goebbels’ diary. Had I read all 100 pages, I would have
8 stumbled across this paragraph too; but I can make it very
9 easy for your Lordship and for the Defendants by drawing
10 their attention to the fact that in my discovery were the
11 entire Goebbels’ diaries that I obtained from Moscow.
12 They could have come to court producing the pages which
13 they had found in my discovery, proving that I had had
14 them at the time I wrote both Goebbels and Hitler, and
15 saying, “Here, he had them here, and yet he ignored them
16 when he wrote that”, and the answer is they have not done
17 so because those pages are not in my documents because
18 I did not get them.
19 Q. [Mr Justice Gray]: I am still puzzled. What exactly did you base what you
20 write in Goebbels about the Gauleiters speech upon?
21 A. [Mr Irving]: I read the Goebbels’ diary for December 13th 1941, just a
22 few pages. On each page there would be about 200 pages in
23 a big typeface. I read all the pages relating to the
24 German declaration of war on the United States which had
25 just been made that day; and then Goebbels mentions the
26 fact that the previous day Hitler had delivered a speech
. P-152
1 to the Gauleiters, and he mentions it in the terms that
2 I have quoted in full — believe me, I quoted everything
3 that I had in my hands when I came back from Moscow
4 because it was interesting material. Had I read on
5 another 30 or 40 pages in the diary for that day, I
6 would probably have come across the full length
7 description, the report of the Gauleiters’ speech on which
8 Longerich is relying. But I have not seen it from the
9 Moscow day in 1992 to about the middle of last year when
10 it was finally made available and quoted by Christian
11 Gerlach in his book and elsewhere. I am still not very
12 impressed by it, but I do wish to make the point in case
13 it was going to be inferred that I had had the material
14 and not made use of it.
15 MR JUSTICE GRAY: I think I understand.
16 A. [Mr Irving]: It would have been in my discovery and it was not.
17 MR RAMPTON: How long are these daily entries in Goebbels’
18 diary? I have not understood it.
19 A. [Mr Irving]: They vary in length depending on what is happening.
20 Q. [Mr Rampton]: How long is this entry for 13th December? It reports the
21 previous day’s events. How long is the entry for the
22 speech of Hitler?
23 A. [Mr Irving]: I have no idea. I have not seen it.
24 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Well, you quoted from it.
25 A. [Mr Irving]: The previous entry?
26 Q. [Mr Rampton]: No, you quoted from it on page 383 of Goebbels. This is
. P-153
1 what I find baffling.
2 A. [Mr Irving]: Yes, but, you see, he kept on coming back to it, something
3 like that he would keep on coming back to as things
4 occurred to him. He is sitting in the room with his
5 Private Secretary, Dr Richard Otte, his chief
6 stenographer, dictating the following morning the events
7 of the previous day and he would keep coming back to
8 something. The diaries were not really intended for
9 publication in that form; they would have been edited.
10 I came across an earlier reference to it in the diaries
11 which I then have used here; but to this day I have not
12 seen any full length description of the Gauleiters’
13 speech.
14 MR JUSTICE GRAY: How do you know it is 30 or 40 pages further
15 on?
16 A. [Mr Irving]: Well, presumably it was because, anyway, it was not on the
17 glass plate that I had, my Lord. The glass plate would
18 have had 45 pages on it. The glass plate was either five
19 times five or six times eight, depending on when it was
20 made, pages per glass plate, and they were in complete
21 disarray. So I would have had the plate which contained
22 the bits I used, but not the bits which contained the
23 speech on it. I had no commission from The Sunday Times
24 to look into this kind of thing.
25 MR RAMPTON: My Lord, may I take some instructions because
26 I have just been given a rather important document?
. P-154
1 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Do you want to have five minutes?
2 MR RAMPTON: Yes, I think I need five minutes actually because
3 it is not a document I am not aware of.
4 MR JUSTICE GRAY: I think, bearing in mind the transcribers’
5 task, but shall we say quarter past?
6 (Short Adjournment)
7 MR RAMPTON: I am grateful to your Lordship. Can I say this?
8 I will say it to Mr Irving, if I may? Mr Irving, I say
9 two things now and I undertake to come back to it on
10 Monday, not more this afternoon because I am not clued up
11 enough yet, but I will be. First, I do not accept that
12 the failure to use a subjunctive is necessarily a bar to
13 the written material being a report of what somebody else
14 says in German. You do not have to comment on this.
15 I tell you this so that you will know what is coming.
16 Second, that the Goebbels’ diary entry which you quoted in
17 the book is not as long as you said that it was. All
18 right?
19 A. [Mr Irving]: I am sorry. I do not understand the second part of that,
20 the Goebbels’ diary entry which I quoted? The original
21 entry you mean?
22 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Yes.
23 A. [Mr Irving]: The original entry from which I quoted.
24 Q. [Mr Rampton]: I do not know because I have not looked at your
25 discovery. That is one of the things I want to do, is how
26 long is the entry from which you quoted. I also want to
. P-155
1 find out for certain what proportion of that bears to the
2 whole of the entry?
3 A. [Mr Irving]: Can I suggest, therefore, that when we resume on Monday
4 I bring the entire December 1941 Goebbels’ Diary that
5 I brought back from Moscow with me and can see what I had
6 and what I did not because it was in the discovery and you
7 must have seen.
8 Q. [Mr Rampton]: I have not seen it, but I am sure we must have it.
9 A. [Mr Irving]: Well, if you did not see it, it is not my fault. It was
10 in your discovery and it was available.
11 Q. [Mr Rampton]: I am not criticising you, Mr Irving. I am quite happy to
12 take blame for negligence, idleness, whatever you like.
13 Mr Irving, I want, therefore, to pass away from
14 that, if I may, and, if his Lordship will allow me, to
15 come back to it on Monday when I have done my homework and
16 ask you about something else, which, as you said, it is
17 probable that Hans Frank as one of the Reichleiters?
18 A. [Mr Irving]: He was —-
19 Q. [Mr Rampton]: He was General —-
20 A. [Mr Irving]: — he was a Reichleiter and he would have been of the
21 rank to attend that meeting.
22 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Surely he would; he was General Governor, was he not?
23 A. [Mr Irving]: Yes. In fact, he went to Berlin for the meeting, so there
24 is no reason to dispute he was there.
25 Q. [Mr Rampton]: The odious (and it is not really meant to be a pun)
26 Globocnik was one of his subordinates?
. P-156
1 A. [Mr Irving]: Of Hans Frank? At this time he was the Police Chief in
2 Lublin, I believe.
3 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Yes.
4 A. [Mr Irving]: Yes — no, this is not true. The SS was — they conducted
5 an independent existence in the Government General.
6 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Right, OK. It does not matter. It is not important.
7 A. [Mr Irving]: Do you wish me to expand on that?
8 Q. [Mr Rampton]: No, not now.
9 A. [Mr Irving]: No? There was no hierarchy bringing the two together.
10 The name is Globocnik — G-L-O-B-O-C-N-I-K.
11 MR RAMPTON: Odilo Globocnik.
12 MR JUSTICE GRAY: I think the surname will suffice.
13 MR RAMPTON: Otherwise known as “Globos”. May Mr Irving please
14 be provided please with Professor Browning’s report?
15 A. [Mr Irving]: Have we finished with Dr Goebbels?
16 Q. [Mr Rampton]: I have finished with that for the moment. As I say, I am
17 coming back to that later on. I am trying to keep some
18 semblance of chronological order. I am still in December
19 1941. Have you got Dr Browning there?
20 A. [Mr Irving]: Page 30 and 31?
21 Q. [Mr Rampton]: 30 and 31, correct. Dr Browning also quotes the speech of
22 Hitler, but in abbreviated form, in other words, he does
23 not quote as much of the Goebbels’ diary entry as does
24 Dr Longerich.
25 A. [Mr Irving]: Yes.
26 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Do you see that?
. P-157
1 A. [Mr Irving]: Yes.
2 Q. [Mr Rampton]: He goes down as far as saying (which you agree is a
3 correct translation, well, I do not know if you do), that
4 was no figure of speech, top of 31, “The World War is
5 here. The Vernichtung”, whether it is destruction,
6 extermination, annihilation or whatever, “of the Jews must
7 be the inevitable consequence”.
8 A. [Mr Irving]: Well, that is again a contentious and tendentious
9 translation.
10 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Well, we have been through that I think
11 sufficiently.
12 MR RAMPTON: We have been through that. That is why I used the
13 word “vernichtung”?
14 A. [Mr Irving]: Well, but it is the word “Jews” also that we have to look
15 at there, is it not? Destruction of the Jews. But this
16 is —-
17 MR JUSTICE GRAY: That is quite plain because he refers to “des
18 Judens”, so there really cannot be any argument about
19 that, can there?
20 A. [Mr Irving]: No. “[German].. Judentums”, no.
21 Q. [Mr Justice Gray]: There is not reference to “Judentums”.
22 A. [Mr Irving]: It is the fifth line, so he has allowed himself a lot of
23 poetic licence in his translation. My Lord, I have to be
24 careful about what I accept here I cannot be heard to
25 accept something that is not …
26 Q. [Mr Justice Gray]: You are quite right. I think I was wrong. You are quite
. P-158
1 right?
2 MR RAMPTON: You were in that respect, my Lord, but not, in
3 fact, in the earlier part of which forms the
4 context. “Zeeda … [German] … Vuren” and “ihre” there
5 is “their” which is the Jews’ is it not?
6 MR JUSTICE GRAY: But in connection with “Vernichtung”, it is
7 “Judentum”.
8 MR RAMPTON: Both have “vernichtung” attached to them.
9 A. [Mr Irving]: But I believe it is the next part you wish to continue
10 with.
11 Q. [Mr Rampton]: It is the next part. It is what Hans frank is reported as
12 having said when he got back to the General Government on
13 16th December 1941. This is printed in what one might
14 call the official common place book, would it be right?
15 It is the Tagesbuch. That is an official record, is it
16 not, of some kind?
17 A. [Mr Irving]: It is the abridged version of the multi-volumed diaries
18 and conference records of the General Governor, Hans
19 Frank.
20 Q. [Mr Rampton]: And you have used it yourself?
21 A. [Mr Irving]: I used the original manuscript, yes. I did not use the
22 printed edition. It is in my discovery.
23 Q. [Mr Rampton]: You have used this passage?
24 A. [Mr Irving]: I have indeed and I used the original manuscript and not
25 the printed version.
26 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Maybe so. At the end of this first page, 31, in
. P-159
1 translation, perhaps here the German does not really
2 matter, perhaps you will agree. The first complete
3 paragraph at the bottom of — sorry, last paragraph on the
4 page: “What is to happen to the Jews? Do you believe
5 that they will be lodged in settlements in Osland?” That
6 is the Baltic countries, is it not, Osland?
7 A. [Mr Irving]: Yes.
8 Q. [Mr Rampton]: “In Berlin we were told, ‘Why all this trouble? We cannot
9 use them in the Osland or the Reichcommissariat either.
10 Liquidate them yourselves!'”.
11 Then goes on, apparently, Governor Frank: “We
12 must destroy the Jews wherever we encounter them and
13 wherever it is possible in order to preserve the entire
14 structure of the Reich”. I would ask you to turn over the
15 page, Mr Irving, where at the bottom of page 32 you will
16 find the German of —-
17 A. [Mr Irving]: That is what I have just been reading, yes.
18 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Yes. Has Professor Browning translated it correctly?
19 A. [Mr Irving]: Yes. I used a different translation in my own book, but
20 this is an adequate translation.
21 Q. [Mr Rampton]: That is right, is it not?
22 A. [Mr Irving]: Yes.
23 Q. [Mr Rampton]: But he has not translated the last two lines on page 32.
24 Would you please read those and tell us what they mean?
25 A. [Mr Irving]: Well, it is an incomplete fragment.
26 Q. [Mr Rampton]: He has put an ellipsis?
. P-160
1 A. [Mr Irving]: He has put what?
2 Q. [Mr Rampton]: He has put an ellipsis in, has he not, to show that —-
3 A. [Mr Irving]: Yes, but it is the second half of a sentence and, as you
4 know, in German, the Germans put their verbs at the end,
5 so it…
6 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Yes. Be kind enough just to translate what we have.
7 A. [Mr Irving]: “But if we then undertake incursions which in some way
8 lead to a destructive result or success and, indeed, in
9 connection with the measure — in connection with the
10 great measure which is to be conferred upon at the Reich”
11 — this is a reference to the coming Bunzig conference,
12 presumably.
13 Q. [Mr Rampton]: That is right.
14 A. [Mr Irving]: It is a truncated sentence it is difficult to find your
15 way into without the beginning. “Vernichtungs Erfolg” is
16 the word you want to see. V-E-R-N-I-C-H-T-U-N-G-S
17 E-R-F-O-L-G.
18 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Does it mean this, Mr Irving, at any rate the last part of
19 that first of the two bottom lines: “It will anyway come
20 to a complete or successful destruction”, “Vernichtungs
21 Erfolg”?
22 A. [Mr Irving]: That would be a rigid and unacceptable translation.
23 I would say, “If we succeed in wiping them out”.
24 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Which does “Erfolg” mean?
25 A. [Mr Irving]: “Success”, “If we succeed in wiping them out”,
26 “Vernichtung” or “If we succeed in destroying them”.
. P-161
1 MR RAMPTON: A successful wiping out?
2 A. [Mr Irving]: A successful wipe out, yes, but German sentences you
3 frequently have to break up and recast in order to make
4 them acceptable.
5 Q. [Mr Rampton]: I am not playing tricks. I will try to find the whole of
6 that.
7 A. [Mr Irving]: I am trying to help you, Mr Rampton.
8 Q. [Mr Rampton]: I am being passed —-
9 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Can I just be clear? Are you accepting that
10 what Hans Frank is recording here is what Hitler said in
11 Berlin to the Gauleiter?
12 A. [Mr Irving]: Yes — no, he has not made a reference to the Gauleiters
13 specifically.
14 Q. [Mr Rampton]: I know he has not made a reference to it —-
15 A. [Mr Irving]: No.
16 Q. [Mr Justice Gray]: — but he says: “In Berlin we were told”, and I rather
17 inferred that Mr Rampton was suggesting that that was from
18 Hitler’s speech to the Gauleiter?
19 A. [Mr Irving]: I think it would be quite a dangerous leap to make.
20 Q. [Mr Justice Gray]: Am I wrong about that?
21 A. [Mr Irving]: It is put in —-
22 MR RAMPTON: No, it is not quite what I had put because I do
23 not have the evidence to make that kind of suggestion.
24 I am suggesting that while Hans frank was in Berlin,
25 somebody told him, and he was there probably amongst other
26 reasons for the occasion of Hitler’s speech —-
. P-162
1 A. [Mr Irving]: Yes.
2 Q. [Mr Rampton]: — somebody told him, it might have been Hitler, it might
3 have been Heydrich, that they have to see to the
4 liquidation of the Jews themselves in the East. That does
5 mean that, does it not?
6 A. [Mr Irving]: I do not think the word they use is “liquidation”. He
7 says “wipe out”, “If we have a success in wiping them out,
8 destroying them”, “Vernichtung”, which can done in a
9 number of ways as I gave the instance with Christianity or
10 with drug addiction.
11 Q. [Mr Rampton]: I am not sure you are right about that. The word is
12 “liquidiet zi selbe”?
13 A. [Mr Irving]: I am sorry, I was looking at the wrong part.
14 Q. [Mr Rampton]: No the quote is: “Man hut uns in Berlin gesagt”, “We were
15 told in Berlin”?
16 A. [Mr Irving]: Oh, unquestionably, yes.
17 Q. [Mr Rampton]: “Liquidate them yourselves”?
18 A. [Mr Irving]: Yes.
19 Q. [Mr Rampton]: So —-
20 A. [Mr Irving]: And the reason that Browning knows about this is because
21 he found this quotation in my books. I am the first one
22 to have dug it out.
23 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Brownie points to you, Mr Irving, but the fact is that
24 Hans Frank is saying on this occasion when he gets back to
25 Poland — I think this took place in Krakow, did it not?
26 A. [Mr Irving]: His headquarters is in Krakow, yes.
. P-163
1 Q. [Mr Rampton]: He is saying: “When we were in Berlin” —-
2 A. [Mr Irving]: “They told us”.
3 Q. [Mr Rampton]: — “they told us, ‘We can’t solve the Jewish problem for
4 you. We can’t house them. Liquidate them yourselves”?
5 A. [Mr Irving]: Yes. Berlin, of course, was the seat of the
6 Reichssicherheits Hauptamt, of Reinhardt Heydrich.
7 Q. [Mr Rampton]: I know, that is Heydrich’s headquarters too.
8 A. [Mr Irving]: Hitler’s headquarters, well, in East Prussia, not in
9 Berlin.
10 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Certainly it is though, whether Hitler took part in those
11 discussions or not, I cannot tell you. I do not propose
12 that he did. I do not —-
13 A. [Mr Irving]: I think it is a very interesting fragment, a verbatim
14 transcript to which one can attach a great deal of
15 importance rather than reported third person subjunctive,
16 non-subjunctive stuff. This is Hans Frank’s actual words
17 taken down by a stenographer and that is why I was very
18 pleased to quote them in full.
19 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Yes, surely. We are not here necessarily, Mr Irving,
20 talking about the Jews that the Einsatzgruppen found in
21 Russia; rather the contrary, do you not think?
22 A. [Mr Irving]: The German Jews.
23 Q. [Mr Rampton]: We are talking about two groups of Jews if we are talking
24 about Hans Frank and the General Government?
25 A. [Mr Irving]: Yes.
26 Q. [Mr Rampton]: We are talking about German and other Jews, Slavakia or
. P-164
1 wherever else, French, Dutch, Belgium and so on, that were
2 shipped to East, transported I mean, but we are also
3 talking about the indigenous Jews at Poland, are we not?
4 A. [Mr Irving]: Primarily at this time the indigenous Jews. I do not
5 think that any major shipment of Jews had started from
6 Western Europe in Poland or the General Government at this
7 time.
8 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Do you agree that Eichmann said at the Bunzig conference,
9 I think it was he, it may have been somebody else, it may
10 have been somebody else who gave the figure, there were
11 roughly two and quarter, two and a half million Jews
12 living in Poland at that time in early 1942?
13 A. [Mr Irving]: That is almost certainly the right figure, but Eichmann
14 did not speak at the Bunzig conference. He just kept the
15 minutes as I understand it.
16 Q. [Mr Rampton]: But that is the figure that was given at the Bunzig
17 conference?
18 A. [Mr Irving]: I will take your word for it, Mr Rampton.
19 Q. [Mr Rampton]: You have read it. I am sure you have read the protocal,
20 the minute or whatever it is. So what Hans Frank is
21 saying here is: “The Jews that we are responsible for
22 (getting rid of) numbering roughly two and a quarter
23 million, we have been told by Berlin we have to liquidate
24 ourselves”. That is what it is saying, is it not?
25 A. [Mr Irving]: No. What he is saying is: “Do not start dumping Jews on
26 us. We have got no room for the ones we have got. Solve
. P-165
1 your own problems”.
2 Q. [Mr Rampton]: No, “in Berlin we were told”?
3 A. [Mr Irving]: Yes.
4 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Not, “I said to the people in Berlin”?
5 A. [Mr Irving]: Yes.
6 Q. [Mr Rampton]: “Man hat” is passive?
7 A. [Mr Irving]: Yes.
8 Q. [Mr Rampton]: “Uns gesagt” means “they told us in Berlin”?
9 A. [Mr Irving]: “Why all this bother? Why all this fuss and bother?”
10 Q. [Mr Rampton]: That is right.
11 A. [Mr Irving]: They are talking about what they are going to be doing
12 with the Jews that people are talking about now tossing
13 out of Western Europe, and Hans Frank has been fighting
14 hand and foot at having any dumped in his domain.
15 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Yes. He has been told he has got to do it himself?
16 A. [Mr Irving]: No, he has been you take what you are given. He is
17 saying, “I don’t want them.” I know the background to
18 this story, Mr Rampton.
19 Q. [Mr Rampton]: What do the words mean, I am sorry, Mr Irving, I thought
20 you had agreed this was an accurate translation?
21 A. [Mr Irving]: It is accurate.
22 Q. [Mr Rampton]: “In Berlin we were told, ‘Why all this trouble? We cannot
23 use them in the Osterland or Reichskomissariat either.
24 Liquidate them yourselves.'”?
25 A. [Mr Irving]: No. No one is talking about shipping Jews from the
26 Osterland or the Ukraine into Berlin. The shipment is
. P-166
1 going other way round.
2 MR JUSTICE GRAY: What Mr Rampton is putting to you is that
3 that phrase “liquidate them yourselves” is in effect a
4 direction from Berlin to the General Government.
5 A. [Mr Irving]: No, sir. I read it differently both in the original and
6 even now. This is Hans Frank recalling what he told the
7 Berliners saying, “Stop dumping your Jews on us, you solve
8 your own problems, you liquidate them yourselves”.
9 MR RAMPTON: I am going to refer you to the full text of what
10 Hans Frank said in a moment. Can you first of all read
11 your own version of this, please, on page 428 of Hitler’s
12 War 1991.
13 A. [Mr Irving]: Can we look at it in the earlier version because it is
14 totally unchanged?
15 Q. [Mr Rampton]: No, it is not in the earlier version so far as I know.
16 A. [Mr Irving]: It definitely it is. It is in every book that I have
17 written. Which page, Mr Rampton?
18 Q. [Mr Rampton]: If you want the earlier version, I am not sure it is in
19 the earlier version, but I will check that. Yes, it is.
20 If you want to use the earlier version, first, I have no
21 problem with that. Page 332.
22 A. [Mr Irving]: Yes, “Yet the blood purge continued”.
23 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Yes. I am waiting for his Lordship’s file to emerge.
24 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Hitler’s War.
25 MR RAMPTON: It is 1977 Hitler’s War, my Lord, I think the
26 first volume.
. P-167
1 MR RAMPTON: It is I think more or less identical to what is in
2 the 1991 edition.
3 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Have you got a reference for that?
4 MR RAMPTON: Yes, that is page 427 it starts, the last large
5 paragraph, the last three lines. I will read. It
6 immediately follows the reference to the Himmler telephone
7 note of 1st December. Mr Irving writes: “Yet the blood
8 purge continued”.
9 A. [Mr Irving]: Shall I read it? It is my book.
10 Q. [Mr Rampton]: No, Mr Irving. No, I will read it: “Yet the blood purge
11 continued. The extermination programme had gained a
12 momentum of its own. Hans Frank announcing to his Lublin
13 Cabinet on December 16th 1941, that Heydrich was calling a
14 big conference in January on the expulsion of Europe’s
15 Jews to the East, irritably exclaimed: Do you imagine
16 they are going to be housed in neat estates in the Baltic
17 provinces! In Berlin’ – and with Hitler in East Prussia
18 this can only be taken as a reference to Heydrich’s
19 agencies -” — I am coming back to that — “they tell us”,
20 they, the people in Berlin, “tell us”, the people in
21 charge in the General Government: Why the caviling?
22 We’ve got no use for them either … liquidate them
23 yourselves!” The “yourselves” are the people in Poland?
24 A. [Mr Irving]: Yes. Well, no, not necessarily. Of course I would just
25 like to comment. That is an odd passage for a Holocaust
26 denier to put into a book, is it not, this entire passage;
. P-168
1 somebody who is allegedly denying the Holocaust he puts in
2 this extraordinary passage?
3 Q. [Mr Rampton]: It is there, is it not?
4 A. [Mr Irving]: It is indeed, and I am accused of being a Holocaust
5 denier.
6 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Maybe. Mr Irving, the true sense of that is that Hans
7 Frank was told while he was in Berlin that it was his
8 problem how to liquidate Poland’s two or three million
9 Jews, is it not?
10 A. [Mr Irving]: Mr Rampton, I am sure you have read any number of
11 transcripts of verbatim conferences. Hans Frank is quite
12 clearly not speaking from a prepared script. He is
13 addressing a meeting, his mind darting here and there. He
14 is giving snatches of what he was told in Berlin by them.
15 He is giving snatches of what his retort was. He is not
16 telling the stenographer, “close quotes, open quotes,
17 close quotes again”, and the stenographer is taking it
18 down as it said.
19 MR JUSTICE GRAY: That may be, but you would have to accept,
20 would you not, that the way you have recorded this in
21 Hitler’s War is that Frank was talking about what Berlin
22 had told him and the General Government?
23 A. [Mr Irving]: I cannot say, my Lord. I do not know who what is talking
24 to whom in that final three words, “liquidate them
25 yourselves”. It is not evident on the transcript either.
26 So I have left it, I saw no reason to be specific in my
. P-169
1 book as to who was talking to whom. I would have
2 introduced probably an ambiguity one way or the other. So
3 I left it just as it was in the transcript which I thought
4 was the most accurate thing I could do. We do not know if
5 it is Poland talking to Berlin or Berlin talking to
6 Poland.
7 Q. [Mr Justice Gray]: But if you are disassociating Hitler from what is said, as
8 you plainly are, does that not indicate that you must be
9 seeking to conveying to readers that the instructions are
10 coming from Berlin?
11 A. [Mr Irving]: It is unimportant to me, my Lord, which way those
12 instructions are coming. It is coming all at the same
13 level. Berlin is shrieking at Krakow and Krakow is
14 shrieking at Berlin, and Hitler is somewhere else. This
15 is a biography of Adolf Hitler. It is not a book about
16 the Holocaust.
17 Q. [Mr Justice Gray]: If there were instructions going from Krakov to Berlin
18 there would be no point in disassociating Hitler from it?
19 A. [Mr Irving]: Hitler was not in Berlin, my Lord. Hitler at this time,
20 December 16th, was in his headquarters in East Prussia.
21 Q. [Mr Justice Gray]: I think you understand the question.
22 A. [Mr Irving]: That is the point I make.
23 MR RAMPTON: Mr Irving, that simply will not do. In Berlin you
24 break off to parenthesize, if I can invent that word, “and
25 with Hitler in East Prussia this can only be taken as a
26 reference to Heydrich’s agencies (in Berlin)”?
. P-170
1 A. [Mr Irving]: Yes.
2 Q. [Mr Rampton]: “They” Heydrich’s agencies “tell us: Why the caviling?
3 We” in Berlin “have no use for them either. Liquidate
4 them yourselves”, you, the people in Poland?
5 A. [Mr Irving]: These are your interpolations you are putting in of
6 course.
7 Q. [Mr Rampton]: No, I am reading your words, Mr Irving?
8 A. [Mr Irving]: No, I did not put in those interpolations.
9 Q. [Mr Rampton]: That is what it means though, is it not?
10 A. [Mr Irving]: That is what you submit.
11 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Do you disagree?
12 A. [Mr Irving]: I rest entirely on the way that I quote this very
13 ambiguous fragment of stenographic text without making any
14 interpolations one way or the other. As I explained in
15 the Hitler biography, I did not consider it to be
16 necessary really to point out or to try to work out who
17 was talking to whom. I found it such an
18 extraordinary —-
19 MR JUSTICE GRAY: So your evidence is, I am sorry to interrupt
20 you, that this is capable at any rate of meaning that
21 Krakov was telling Heydrich in Berlin “liquidate them
22 yourselves”, that is your evidence?
23 A. [Mr Irving]: This is the far more logical interpretation, because
24 I know from all the other documents at this time that Hans
25 Frank was hysterical at the mention that train loads of
26 Jews would be sent to the Governor General where he had
. P-171
1 problems housing and feeding people anyway, and he was
2 saying to Berlin: “Stop trying to shift your problems
3 into Poland. We are not just a dumping ground for your
4 Jews.” This comes up in very many of the conferences at
5 that time. There is one particular record I remember
6 taking by Martin Bormann in October 1941, and that
7 emboldens me in putting the alternative interpretation,
8 the alternative arrow direction, shall we say, on that
9 final three words, but rather than get involved in that
10 rather irrelevant discussion in this book which is about
11 Hitler, I just left this extraordinary fragment of
12 stenographic record, this transcript, as it is, because it
13 is so pregnant with hatred and brutality and total
14 callousness towards human life, and it indicates the kind
15 of level at which these decisions were taken and the kind
16 of gormless mentality of the people who took these
17 decisions who were later quite rightly hanged for it.
18 MR RAMPTON: My Lord, I am not going to push that particular
19 point any further. I am going to come back, perhaps not
20 today, to the full text of what Hans Frank said for
21 context. I am getting some clever people to translate it
22 as I speak.
23 A. [Mr Irving]: Mr Rampton, can I then in that case bring on Monday the
24 text I have, which may or not be identical with the text
25 that you have.
26 Q. [Mr Rampton]: I think you certainly should.
. P-172
Section 173.1 to 187.26
1 A. [Mr Irving]: It may be shorter or longer. This is the reason why I say
2 it.
3 Q. [Mr Rampton]: You certainly should.
4 A. [Mr Irving]: I have the pages in the original photocopy.
5 Q. [Mr Rampton]: That is absolutely fine. Bring whatever you like you feel
6 you need to defend yourself with. It is right, is it not,
7 that having written both in 1977, as I say if you want to
8 check it, on pages 427, 428 of 1991 Hitler’s War, which
9 I think is identical —-
10 A. [Mr Irving]: Yes.
11 Q. [Mr Rampton]: — having written “man hat uns gesagt” or “in Berlin” and
12 then a quote, on page 386 of Goebbels you write this.
13 A. [Mr Irving]: Yes.
14 Q. [Mr Rampton]: I will read it out: “Hans Frank’s Government General was
15 flatly refusing to accept any more”, Jews that is. “Frank
16 had exclaimed irritably at one of his cabinet meetings in
17 Krakov that Berlin was telling them they got no use for
18 the Jews either, ‘liquidate them yourselves’, was his,
19 that is Frank’s, retort?
20 A. [Mr Irving]: Yes.
21 Q. [Mr Rampton]: I notice, and perhaps you did too, as I read that there is
22 no reference there to Heydrich’s agencies or to Hitler
23 being absent, is there?
24 A. [Mr Irving]: We are talking about Berlin and we are talking about Frank
25 retorting. Having now advanced something like ten years
26 down the road of research and read a very large number of
. P-173
1 further documents relating to this particular context and
2 these questions, I am that much more certain that the
3 arrow goes from East to West rather than from West to East
4 as far as those three words are concerned.
5 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Be honest, Mr Irving, in Hitler’s War —-
6 A. [Mr Irving]: Excuse me, I am speaking here on oath, I am being honest.
7 Q. [Mr Rampton]: I do not believe you are. In Hitler’s War the arrow went
8 firmly from West to East. You changed the account for
9 Goebbels, did you not? That is why there is no reference
10 to Hitler or to Heydrich in this text?
11 A. [Mr Irving]: I do not accept that contention at all. In Hitler’s War
12 I gave the transcription exactly as it occurs in the
13 records and I left it for the reader to make up their own
14 mind. Here I am that much more certain which way the
15 arrow went.
16 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Why did you insert in Hitler’s War the parenthesis “and
17 with Hitler in East Prussia this can only be taken as a
18 reference to Heydrich’s agencies”?
19 A. [Mr Irving]: This is like an obiter from on high where the judge says
20 to the jury, “I think that you need to take account of
21 this but of course make up your own mind”, and where you
22 are telling the reader, well, make up your own mind, here
23 is what is what the transcript says, but just in case you
24 have forget it, Adolf Hitler lives in East Prussia and he
25 is not in Berlin on the day this speech is being made.
26 Q. [Mr Rampton]: He was not in Berlin on 16th December 1941, Mr Irving?
. P-174
1 A. [Mr Irving]: Yes.
2 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Because on 16th December 1941 he went to the Wolf’s lair,
3 did he not?
4 A. [Mr Irving]: He was certainly, at the time that Frank was speaking here
5 Hitler was back in East Prussia.
6 Q. [Mr Rampton]: On page 383 —-
7 A. [Mr Irving]: May I also say that if he was referring to Hitler by the
8 use of the word “man”, which is the equivalent of the
9 French “on”.
10 Q. [Mr Rampton]: I did not say that.
11 A. [Mr Irving]: If he was referring to Hitler then he would have said, “at
12 the very highest level we have been told”. He would not
13 have used the rather offensive “man”.
14 Q. [Mr Rampton]: “On” in French, I do not know any German but I have quite
15 good French, Mr Irving, “on” in French is not the least
16 bit offensive. It is merely a form of expressing a
17 passive sense.
18 A. [Mr Irving]: Yes, but he would have been specific. He would have said
19 “uns getstella(?)” or [German spoken] but more likely
20 “uns getstella(?)” at the highest level.
21 Q. [Mr Rampton]: According to your first version, “Heydrich’s agencies”.
22 A. [Mr Irving]: Had he wished to refer to Hitler by that, yes.
23 Q. [Mr Rampton]: To what?
24 A. [Mr Irving]: If by the use of the word “man” in Berlin he would not
25 have used the very impersonal version of saying “man”.
26 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Anyway, you have got Hitler away from whatever Frank was
. P-175
1 told because you have got him in East Prussia?
2 A. [Mr Irving]: Continue, yes.
3 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Yes. In fact he did not go to the Wolf’s lair until 16th
4 December, did he?
5 A. [Mr Irving]: He probably left Berlin on the night of the 15th, took the
6 overnight train back to East Prussia. I could tell you
7 from the Hitler’s War, the headquarters’ war diary which
8 I have in the blue volume there.
9 Q. [Mr Rampton]: All I can tell you is that in Goebbels Mastermind of the
10 Third Reich on page 383 you write this: “Returning by
11 train on December 16th to the Wolf’s lair”?
12 A. [Mr Irving]: Yes.
13 Q. [Mr Rampton]: “Hitler dictated a famous order”, something like that?
14 A. [Mr Irving]: Yes, but I can tell you whether he left Berlin on the
15 night of the 15th or not.
16 Q. [Mr Rampton]: So he was in Berlin when Hans Frank was in Berlin
17 receiving this instruction?
18 A. [Mr Irving]: You are now referring to 12th December?
19 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Whenever. He did not leave Berlin until the night of the
20 15th or the morning of the 16th. Hans Frank has got to go
21 further. He has got to go all the way back to Krakov
22 which is further than East Prussia?
23 A. [Mr Irving]: I am sorry to admit I am now totally at sea. Which times
24 in Berlin are we talking about?
25 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Hans Frank is reporting what he was told in Berlin. When
26 he was —-
. P-176
1 A. [Mr Irving]: Yes, by somebody whom we have not identified.
2 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Maybe, but Hitler was in Berlin at that time?
3 A. [Mr Irving]: He was in Berlin on, well, he was in Berlin on the 12th,
4 13th and 14th definitely.
5 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Yes, and probably on the 15th as well?
6 A. [Mr Irving]: Yes, but we do not know if he is referring to Hitler. He
7 says “man”. “We have been told in Berlin”. Berlin’s
8 population is two million.
9 Q. [Mr Rampton]: I wish you would not make speeches, Mr Irving, but listen
10 to my questions. Why was it relevant to observe, if it is
11 perfectly certain or more or less certain or as certain as
12 an historian would like, that Frank and Hitler were in
13 Berlin at the same time, why do you say “in Berlin” close
14 quotes, ” – and with Hitler in East Prussia this”, that is
15 to say Berlin, “can only be taken as a reference to
16 Heydrich’s agencies”?
17 A. [Mr Irving]: In Berlin people tell us — had it been Adolf Hitler who
18 had told him this, he would not have said the slightly
19 depricating “in Berlin people tell us”, certainly not in
20 the company of Reichsministers and Reichsleiters.
21 Somebody would have reported back.
22 MR JUSTICE GRAY: You are slightly at cross purposes. I think
23 all that Mr Rampton is putting at the moment is that they
24 were in Berlin at the same time?
25 A. [Mr Irving]: This I accept.
26 Q. [Mr Justice Gray]: Namely, Frank and Hitler.
. P-177
1 A. [Mr Irving]: This I accept.
2 Q. [Mr Justice Gray]: So your point on “man” and whether that is significant is
3 a different point.
4 A. [Mr Irving]: Perhaps I am jumping the gun on that, yes.
5 MR RAMPTON: You are. You are not seeing, whether deliberately
6 or not I know not, you are not seeing what I am putting to
7 you. What I am putting to you, and I will put it
8 directly, although I would have thought it was pretty
9 obvious, is that with this little phrase in Hitler’s War
10 both editions and with Hitler in East Prussia, this can
11 only be taken as a reference to Heydrich’s agency,
12 “continue, they tell us”, etc., “to liquidate them
13 yourselves”. By doing that what are you actually telling
14 the reader is that Hitler was not in Berlin at the time
15 when Hans Frank was given this instruction?
16 A. [Mr Irving]: I think probably the parenthesis should have been shifted
17 forward two or three words to include “also people tell
18 us”, “in Berlin people tell us”, so that i makes it quite
19 plain that I am relying on the parenthesis both on the “in
20 Berlin” and the rather depricatory world “people tell us”.
21 MR JUSTICE GRAY: That is not quite an answer to the question.
22 MR RAMPTON: It is not.
23 A. [Mr Irving]: Very well. Yes, I will accept the point which you make,
24 yes.
25 MR RAMPTON: Had you sought historical accuracy, that
26 parenthesis would have been attached to December 16th
. P-178
1 1941, would it not, at the top of the page: “Announcing
2 to his Lublin cabinet on December 16th 1941 Hitler was in
3 East Prussia at the time”, if it was of any interest to
4 anybody. What you have tried to do, you have distorted
5 the chronology in order to make perfectly certain that
6 Hitler cannot have anything to do with this appalling
7 instruction to Hans Frank?
8 A. [Mr Irving]: I have not distorted any chronology at all. The dates are
9 perfectly certain. On December 16th, at the time of this
10 speech by Governor Frank to his cabinet, Hitler is in the
11 Wolf’s lair in East Prussia, as I said.
12 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Mr Irving, perhaps you are tired, perhaps I am tired.
13 A. [Mr Irving]: I am not so tired that I do not remember dates that I have
14 written in books.
15 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Mr Irving, I am sorry, it is not the problem that you do
16 not remember the dates. I am afraid I think you remember
17 them only too well. I will try once again then and I am
18 going to leave it. Why do you not have the text of
19 Hitler’s War in front of you?
20 A. [Mr Irving]: I have it open, yes.
21 Q. [Mr Rampton]: 428, it does not matter which edition: “Hans Frank
22 announcing to his Lublin cabinet on December 16th 1941
23 that Heydrich was calling a big conference in January on
24 the expulsion of Europe’s Jews to the East, irritably
25 exclaimed”, blah-blah-blah “! ‘In Berlin’ and with Hitler
26 in East Prussia, this can only be taken as a reference to
. P-179
1 Heydrich’s agencies”, blah-blah-blah, “liquidate them
2 yourselves.”
3 A. [Mr Irving]: Yes.
4 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Now that is apt to suggest to any person who is even
5 marginally literate that Hitler was not in Berlin at the
6 time when Hans Frank was and was given that instruction?
7 MR JUSTICE GRAY: You have got a “yes” to that already, Mr
8 Rampton.
9 MR RAMPTON: I have, have I?
10 A. [Mr Irving]: I fully understand the point you are trying to make and
11 that is a narrow interpretation of those words which you
12 are trying t slant or guy rope in the direction you want
13 them. The point I am making is that Hitler’s headquarters
14 is historically in East Prussia. The seat of the
15 Reichssicherheitshauptamt under the SS is in Berlin, and
16 Governor Frank making his speech is in Krakow. When he
17 talks about Berlin he is talking about the SS. When he
18 wants to talk about Hitler he will say “East Prussia”.
19 When he says, “in Berlin they tell us this or tell us
20 that”, he is not talking about a specific meeting or a
21 specific event where they have been given these
22 instructions. He is just talking about these block heads,
23 these mutton heads in Berlin who imagine that life can be
24 made so easy that they just put the people on trains and
25 send them to Poland.
26 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Yes, Mr Irving. Then why insert the reference to Hitler
. P-180
1 at all in relation to what Frank was told in Berlin?
2 A. [Mr Irving]: Because I was trying to put into one terse line of text
3 given the constraints of writing a book that is going to
4 be less than 1,000 pages what I just set out to you in
5 probably ten lines of text.
6 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Why? What has Hitler got to do with this?
7 A. [Mr Irving]: This is his Hitler’s biography. This is about Adolf
8 Hitler.
9 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Unless there is evidence that Hitler said this to Frank
10 himself, you would not bother even to mention Hitler?
11 A. [Mr Irving]: It may be that ignorant people will assume that because
12 Adolf Hitler is the Reichschancellor and his capital is
13 Berlin, therefore, the reference to “people” is Adolf
14 Hitler. I am trying to make sure that ignorant people do
15 not draw the wrong reference.
16 Q. [Mr Rampton]: In order that ignorant people should not have to have it
17 explained why it is not likely this order came from
18 Hitler, I beg to differ with you about that, but in order
19 that ignorant people, as you call them, should have that
20 explained to them neatly, you actually tell a neat little
21 fib. You get Hitler out of Berlin when in fact he was
22 there?
23 A. [Mr Irving]: But there is nothing that is the least bit wrong about the
24 sentence I put in there. With Hitler in East Prussia, his
25 headquarters were in East Prussia, the references to
26 Berlin can only be taken as references to the SS, the
. P-181
1 Heydrich’s agencies, who were in fact wholly responsible
2 for these operations. As we know from other sources,
3 Hitler was intervening constantly to stop these things
4 being done.
5 MR JUSTICE GRAY: I have got the point anyway.
6 MR RAMPTON: Yes, I am not going on.
7 A. [Mr Irving]: It is the reference to general geography; not to specific
8 meetings or conferences that you have only recently heard
9 about, no matter how dramatic these discoveries may be or
10 made to seem.
11 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Will your Lordship forgive me a moment? May Mr Irving
12 please be given bundle H3 (ii). I think these are
13 Professor Browning’s documents.
14 MR JUSTICE GRAY: That is one I have not got here I am afraid.
15 A. [Mr Irving]: This is the actual conference.
16 MR RAMPTON: At tab 11, no sorry.
17 A. [Mr Irving]: 10.
18 Q. [Mr Rampton]: It is open at the right place but I just want to identify
19 the document.
20 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Tab 9, page 458.
21 MR RAMPTON: It is called “Footnote 88” which is the Hans Frank
22 extract which is printed in Professor Browning’s report at
23 paragraph 5.1.13 on pages 31 and 32. He has quoted some
24 of that diary, but there is another passage here which
25 I would like you to look at in the German, please,
26 Mr Irving, while I read slowly a translation.
. P-182
1 A. [Mr Irving]: Presumably the second paragraph?
2 Q. [Mr Rampton]: The first complete paragraph on page 458. This is the
3 Hans Frank so-called “diary”. Correct me as soon as I go
4 wrong. No, I will read it once and then when we go
5 through it again you tell me how this translation is in
6 error, if it is.
7 “For us the Jews are also particularly useless,
8 might be damaging, consumers of food, mouths. We have
9 approximately 2.5, perhaps with those related to Jews and
10 all that belongs to that 3.5 million Jews. We can’t shoot
11 these 3.5 million Jews. We can’t poison them. But we
12 will, however, be able to undertake interventions which in
13 some way lead to a successful annihilation, and indeed in
14 connection with the large scale measures to be undertaken
15 from the Reich and to be discussed. The General
16 Government must become just as free of Jews as the Reich
17 is. Where and how that happens is a matter for the
18 institutions which we must put into action and create here
19 and the effectiveness of which I will report on to you in
20 good time.”
21 Is that roughly an accurate translation of that
22 paragraph?
23 A. [Mr Irving]: Just two minor beefs, as I would call them. I would say
24 in connection with, where he says “in connection with the
25 measures to be discussed from the Reich”, I would say “in
26 the context of” is probably a more apposite description.
. P-183
1 When he talks about “the institutions”, “is a matter for
2 the institutions”, “instansun(?)” would be more accurately
3 translated as “departments” in the sense of government
4 departments.
5 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Yes. I am happy to wear that correction for the moment.
6 I do not know whether the translator is. I will find that
7 out later. Does that not, Mr Irving, completely demolish
8 the idea that in Berlin it was Frank who was telling the
9 people in Berlin “liquidate the Jews yourselves”? Is he
10 not here expanding on the instruction from Berlin,
11 “liquidate them yourselves”?
12 A. [Mr Irving]: May I first of all make plain that I had not seen this
13 passage at the time I wrote the book. So this is not
14 something that lay before me when I wrote my books. Can
15 I make that quite plain on oath?
16 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Yes.
17 A. [Mr Irving]: You will find this when I produce the materials that I had
18 that were given to me by the Institute from the Hans Frank
19 diaries. Secondly, it confirms what I said about them
20 already having more Jews in the Government General than
21 they could handle. They could not feed and house the ones
22 they did have and they were very indignant at any more
23 being dumped on them given the problems they had of
24 feeding the mouths they already had.
25 Q. [Mr Rampton]: He is saying: “We have got two and a half, maybe three
26 and a half million Jews in this part of the Reich occupied
. P-184
1 territories, we cannot shoot them all, we cannot poison
2 them.”
3 A. [Mr Irving]: He says “we can’t shoot them”. He does not say “all”.
4 There is a subtle difference there.
5 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Is it?
6 A. [Mr Irving]: Yes.
7 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Oh.
8 A. [Mr Irving]: Yes, otherwise it implies they can shoot some. If I am
9 saying I cannot shoot all the people in this room, that
10 implies half the people in this room have a rather bleak
11 lookout.
12 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Yes, but making the place phrase “Judenfrage”
13 is pretty unambiguous.
14 A. [Mr Irving]: No, the actual phrase that has been translated here, he
15 says: “These 3.5 million, we can’t shoot them. We can’t
16 poison them”, and Mr Rampton just slid in the word “all”.
17 MR RAMPTON: Oh, no. I am paraphrasing. Be kind to me,
18 Mr Irving.
19 A. [Mr Irving]: You put in the word “all”. We all heard you say it.
20 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Of course it does, but that is what it means?
21 A. [Mr Irving]: No. What it means is quite plain. “We can’t shoot them”.
22 Q. [Mr Rampton]: How do you make the General Government “Judenfrage” if you
23 do not get rid of all the Jews, if you do not achieve a
24 vernichtung serfolg?
25 A. [Mr Irving]: I do not want to labour the point. If you say that we
26 cannot shoot them all, that implies we can shoot some of
. P-185
1 them. If he says we cannot shoot the Jews that implies we
2 cannot shoot any of them.
3 Q. [Mr Rampton]: That will do. We cannot poison them. We cannot shoot 3.5
4 million. We cannot poison 3.5 million?
5 A. [Mr Irving]: But we will be able to do something, he goes on to say,
6 which will lead to wiping them out, getting rid of them,
7 vernichtung.
8 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Getting rid of?
9 A. [Mr Irving]: Vernichtung.
10 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Vernichtung is to get rid of?
11 A. [Mr Irving]: I am just saying the sense of this sentence is, “we can’t
12 kill them, we can do something that will get rid of them.”
13 Q. [Mr Rampton]: It is not.
14 A. [Mr Irving]: He just said, “We can’t poison, we can’t shoot them”.
15 Whatever ways would you suggest?
16 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Gas, Mr Irving, gas?
17 A. [Mr Irving]: Vergeltung? It sounds like poisoning to me, poison gas.
18 Q. [Mr Rampton]: “Gift gas” is poison gas. Vergeltung is poison?
19 A. [Mr Irving]: That is right, he says “we can’t do it”.
20 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Yes. He does not say anything about gassing. This is an
21 evolutionary document.
22 A. [Mr Irving]: No point using gas if it is not poison gas.
23 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Mr Irving, I am not sure I got your answer to
24 the initial question which was, does this or does it not
25 show that the instructions were from Berlin to the General
26 Government as to what was to be done in the General
. P-186
1 Government?
2 A. [Mr Irving]: I am sorry, my Lord, if I did not make myself plain. I
3 thought that this in fact supported my version that Hans
4 Frank was saying that they already had all the Jews they
5 could handle. They could not even feed the ones they had
6 got: “So please don’t send us any more, get rid of them
7 yourself”.
8 MR RAMPTON: So the word “vernichtung serfolg” is not talking
9 about a liquidation?
10 A. [Mr Irving]: If you want to wipe out Christianity you do not have to
11 liquidate the Christians.
12 Q. [Mr Rampton]: I do not see anything about Judaism in this passage. It
13 is all about Jews, numbers of Jews, 3.5 million?
14 A. [Mr Irving]: He says here explicitly, “We can’t kill”, he says, I will
15 translate it for you and it is exactly the same as your
16 translation there. “These 3.5 million Jews, we can’t
17 shoot them, we can’t poison them, but we will be able to
18 do something which will one way or another lead to a
19 successful wipe out, destruction”.
20 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Annihilation?
21 A. [Mr Irving]: “We will get rid of them”. We are back on that word
22 vernichtung again, which Germans who like using these
23 words in the knowledge they are going to be providing
24 endless humour for lawyers 50 years down the road.
25 Q. [Mr Rampton]: I do not think it is very humorous, Mr Irving, I am bound
26 to say, not humorous at all.
. P-187
1 A. [Mr Irving]: That is why I prefer to sit on documents where it is
2 absolutely unambiguous where we do not have to waste time
3 about the meanings of words.
Section 188.1 to 204.26
4 Q. [Mr Rampton]: You mentioned I think, whether it was this morning or
5 yesterday I am afraid I cannot remember, somebody called
6 Wisliceny?
7 A. [Mr Irving]: Wisliceny, W-I-S-L-I-C-E-N-Y.
8 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Yes. He was I think on Eichmann’s staff, was he not?
9 A. [Mr Irving]: A member of Eichmann’s staff who was responsible for the
10 Final Solution in Slovakia and other countries.
11 Q. [Mr Rampton]: He made some statements after the war, did he not?
12 A. [Mr Irving]: Under duress, yes.
13 Q. [Mr Rampton]: What do you mean by duress?
14 A. [Mr Irving]: In Allied captivity, inside the gallows, which is about as
15 much duress as you can imagine.
16 Q. [Mr Rampton]: You are not saying he was tortured?
17 A. [Mr Irving]: Good Lord no.
18 Q. [Mr Rampton]: You say that Rudolf Hess was tortured, do you not?
19 A. [Mr Irving]: I say that he was maltreated. He had a torch rammed into
20 his mouth.
21 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Let us stick with Wisliceny for the moment
22 otherwise we are going to get confused.
23 MR RAMPTON: That is my fault, my Lord.
24 A. [Mr Irving]: He richly deserved it, people like that.
25 Q. [Mr Rampton]: No, I do not agree with that as it happens, Mr Irving.
26 Can you see if you still have Professor Evans’ report
. P-188
1 there? It was handed to you in error earlier.
2 A. [Mr Irving]: Yes.
3 Q. [Mr Rampton]: I am sorry. Let us turn to page 344, will you?
4 A. [Mr Irving]: Yes.
5 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Evans’ report. It is at letter G and Professor Evans
6 writes this, Mr Irving. I will not read the heading
7 except to say it says “Testimony of Dieter Wisliceny”.
8 A. [Mr Irving]: It also says: “Manipulation and Suppression of Evidence”.
9 Q. [Mr Rampton]: I was going to save your blushes. Yes, it does, does it
10 not?
11 A. [Mr Irving]: Yes.
12 Q. [Mr Rampton]: “As described above, Irving claims that Dieter Wisliceny,
13 one of Eichmann’s top officials, described Goebbels’
14 article in Das Reich as a watershed in the Final Solution
15 of the Jewish problem. Once more Irving makes it very
16 difficult to verify claims. According to his footnotes,
17 Wisliceny’s postwar report of 18th November 1946 can be
18 found in the IFZ file F71/8. However, this file does not
19 exist and Wisliceny’s report has to be located elsewhere.”
20 It is a minor point, Mr Irving. Do you accept
21 that you gave a wrong reference?
22 A. [Mr Irving]: No. I saw this file probably 30 years ago, probably
23 before Professor Longerich was born.
24 Q. [Mr Rampton]: This is not Professor Longerich. This is Professor
25 Evans.
26 A. [Mr Irving]: Well, even more to the point. That being so, it is
. P-189
1 extremely likely that they changed the reference number
2 since the archives are constantly changing reference
3 numbers.
4 Q. [Mr Rampton]: It is a small point. “In his report Wisliceny states that
5 after the invasion of the USSR in June 1941 Nazi policy
6 against the Jews was transformed dramatically in a
7 step-by-step process, completed in the Spring of 1942.
8 One these radicalisng steps was taken in late 1941. As
9 Wisliceny reported: ‘The second wave of radicalization
10 began after the USA entered the war. This could clearly
11 be felt in the internal German propaganda too. Externally
12 it was expressed in the introduction of the yellow star as
13 a mark of the Jews. Reference in this connection also to
14 the Goebbels’ article that ‘Jews are guilty’ in an edition
15 of the magazine Das Reich’.
16 “In this period of time, after the beginning of
17 the war with the USA, I am convinced must fall the
18 decision of Hitler which ordered the biological
19 annihilation of European Jewry” — biologische vernichtung
20 des europaischen Judentums befahl.
21 A. [Mr Irving]: Yes.
22 Q. [Mr Rampton]: You are well aware of that passage?
23 A. [Mr Irving]: Yes, and I draw attention to the fact that in order to
24 emphasis that the word “vernichtung” here means killing he
25 adds the adjective “biologische”, biological, because
26 without that it does not mean it with sufficient emphasis.
. P-190
1 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Do not let us go back on that.
2 MR RAMPTON: You can argue about it. Eventually, you see,
3 Mr Irving, whatever you may think and whatever I may put
4 to you, his Lordship will make a decision about what the
5 natural meaning of the word is in these various contexts.
6 A. [Mr Irving]: But without input from me he will only hear input from
7 you.
8 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Of course you must say what you think it means. Whether I
9 or anybody else accepts what you say is quite another
10 matter.
11 A. [Mr Irving]: But I think it is quite useful to say it here in view of
12 the fact that this man obviously thought that
13 “vernichtung” does not mean killing unless he adds the
14 word “biologische” in front of it.
15 MR JUSTICE GRAY: I do not think that is right actually, but
16 I have the point. It is obvious what it means if it has
17 “biological” attached to it. If it has not, you say it
18 does not mean extermination. Mr Rampton says it does.
19 I think we really have thrashed that one.
20 MR RAMPTON: I am afraid I am going to take up, argumentative
21 person that I am, one little point on this. You notice,
22 do you not, that although you stress the use of the word
23 “biologische” to qualify “vernichtung”, what is it that
24 is being biologically annihilated?
25 A. [Mr Irving]: Judentums.
26 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Judentums?
. P-191
1 A. [Mr Irving]: Yes.
2 Q. [Mr Rampton]: European Judentums?
3 A. [Mr Irving]: Yes.
4 Q. [Mr Rampton]: What is “Judentums”?
5 A. [Mr Irving]: In this case quite clearly he is talking about the Jews
6 because he has added the word “biological in advance” and
7 you cannot have biological in reference to provision.
8 Q. [Mr Rampton]: There is no rule of German which says that the word must
9 mean Judaism. It can easily mean Jewish people or Jewry
10 as a collective, can it not?
11 A. [Mr Irving]: I do not want to labour the point, but this is why
12 dictionaries give orders of priority for the meanings of
13 words, the first meaning, second meaning and third meaning
14 and so on.
15 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Wisliceny thinks or says that he things, is reported as
16 saying that he thinks, that the order for the biological
17 annihilation of the European Jews came from Hitler. He is
18 saying that, is he not?
19 A. [Mr Irving]: He could set that conviction of his to music and play it
20 to the mass bands of the Cold Stream Guards, but it does
21 not make it proof.
22 Q. [Mr Rampton]: He says it again and again. Is it right that you have
23 consistently ignored what he said?
24 A. [Mr Irving]: What is the date of this report, Mr Rampton?
25 Q. [Mr Rampton]: It is 1946, 18th November 1946.
26 A. [Mr Irving]: Just two or three weeks after the unfortunate Nazi
. P-192
1 gangsters have been hanged at Nuremberg. Where is he
2 writing this report?
3 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Is the answer to my question, yes? Give the explanation
4 afterwards, please, Mr Irving. The answer to my question
5 is, yes, you have ignored it. Now the reason —-
6 A. [Mr Irving]: No. The answer to the question is that I have discounted
7 that kind of evidence as being the fact that he does not
8 say he saw an order. He is saying it is his opinion. He
9 thinks that, yes, there must surely have been some such
10 kind of order. What kind of evidence is that given by a
11 man sitting in the face of the gallows just after the Nazi
12 leaders have been hanged at Nuremberg, and he is sitting
13 in Czech Slovac prison knowing that he is going to be
14 hanged as well, and he is sitting down there writing the
15 first thing that comes into his head, and he says: “Well,
16 surely Hitler must have given an order.” What kind of
17 evidence is that? What kind of historian would I be who
18 in the absence of any kind of documentation whatsoever of
19 any concrete diamond value of the war archives then
20 decides to pollute his work with relying on this kind of
21 documentation? Material that Wisliceny himself is an
22 expert on — I remind you of the Trevor Roper criteria,
23 something that he himself has experienced, something that
24 he is in a position to know. That I would accept, but for
25 him to speculate, as he clearly is here, that is neither
26 here nor there. It is information of janitorial level.
. P-193
1 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Yes. Janitorial, this is to anticipate something we are
2 going to come to perhaps next week or the week after, Mr
3 Irving, but “janitorial level” is a phrase you often use.
4 Is not “janitorial level” very often the place you expect
5 to find the diamonds?
6 A. [Mr Irving]: Janitorial level is not the kind of place that
7 I frequently inhabit, Mr Rampton.
8 Q. [Mr Rampton]: That is very patrician of you, Mr Irving. If you are an
9 historian you must look even in the basement, the sewer,
10 if you want to find the gems, must you not sometimes?
11 A. [Mr Irving]: If one fails to find the gems, my opponents and my jealous
12 rivals they have gone down among the sewers looking for
13 things, but I found the gems because I have done the work.
14 Q. [Mr Rampton]: You saw some of them, did you not, in Professor van Pelt’s
15 report, “janitorial gems”?
16 A. [Mr Irving]: We shall have great enjoyment discussing this with van
17 Pelt when the time comes.
18 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Can I just understand why Wisliceny is being
19 put into the janitorial category at all? He is one of
20 Eichmann’s top officials.
21 A. [Mr Irving]: He is one of Eichmann’s top officials.
22 Q. [Mr Justice Gray]: And Eichmann was one of the senior officials within the
23 Reich carrying out the extermination programme.
24 A. [Mr Irving]: Mr Wisliceny is a man who is in deep trouble. First of
25 all he is facing —-
26 Q. [Mr Justice Gray]: That is a different point, if I may say so. He is not a
. P-194
1 janitor.
2 A. [Mr Irving]: He is also a man of very dubious character. He is a man
3 who has been not an officer in the SS, but he has been
4 involved in corrupt schemes, in stealing and robbing and
5 disposing of stolen Jewish property and all sorts of
6 things that got him in trouble even with the SS. He is a
7 man whose character I would not give a fig for. He is
8 sitting in a prison cell in a Slovac prison knowing that
9 he is going to be put on trial for his life.
10 Q. [Mr Justice Gray]: That is a different point.
11 A. [Mr Irving]: I am sorry, let me cut to the bottom line and say what he
12 is actually saying here, I have lost it, he is not saying
13 “I know this for a fact”; he is just saying, “I speculate
14 that probably this happened.” I have lost it totally, the
15 actual reference.
16 Q. [Mr Justice Gray]: “I am convinced it must fall the decision of Hitler”.
17 A. [Mr Irving]: Yes, but his conviction that something must fall within, I
18 mean, that is not evidence of any kind at all, my Lord,
19 and I am sure no court would accept that kind of evidence
20 in a matter of great seriousness, somebody’s conviction
21 that something must surely have happened, not in the total
22 absence of any kind of qualifying documents.
23 MR RAMPTON: I am sorry, Mr Irving. Sometimes my questions
24 involve quite a lot of paper chasing. You are quite
25 content to use Dieter Wisliceny when it suits your
26 purposes, are you not?
. P-195
1 A. [Mr Irving]: If it fits the criteria which I mentioned earlier.
2 Q. [Mr Rampton]: If it fits the bill, I would suggest, Mr Irving.
3 A. [Mr Irving]: That is not what I said. I said if it fits the criteriA.
4 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Have you got your Goebbels’ book there?
5 A. [Mr Irving]: Yes.
6 Q. [Mr Rampton]: You say on page 379 — has your Lordship got one?
7 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Yes, I have. 379, you say?
8 MR RAMPTON: Yes.
9 A. [Mr Irving]: Yes, I have that.
10 Q. [Mr Rampton]: We are talking here about an article written by, or
11 probably written by, Dr Goebbels?
12 A. [Mr Irving]: It is one of the two most important articles he wrote.
13 Q. [Mr Rampton]: You say that; it was written and published, I think, on
14 16th December?
15 A. [Mr Irving]: November.
16 Q. [Mr Rampton]: I am sorry, November?
17 A. [Mr Irving]: 1941.
18 Q. [Mr Rampton]: 1941, as virulently anti-Semitic as anything that Hitler
19 ever said?
20 A. [Mr Irving]: Far more so.
21 Q. [Mr Rampton]: You say that, do you?
22 A. [Mr Irving]: Far more so.
23 Q. [Mr Rampton]: You say here on page 379 in the last paragraph, the
24 complete paragraph, on the page: “Dieter Wisliceny, one
25 of Eichmann’s closest associates, would describe the
26 Goebbels’ article in Das Reiche”, that is the one I
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1 have just mentioned, as a watershed in the Final Solution
2 of the Jewish problem”. Then footnote 40 is a reference
3 to the Wisliceny Report, date November 18th 1946. That is
4 to be found on page 645. You go on in the text —-
5 A. [Mr Irving]: I also reference his interrogations I see.
6 Q. [Mr Rampton]: You did.
7 A. [Mr Irving]: Yes.
8 Q. [Mr Rampton]: “The SS took it as a sign from above Adolf Eichmann would
9 admit in his unpublished memoirs it is quite possible that
10 I got orders to direct this or that railroad to Riga”, and
11 I don’t know where we go from there quite. Yes, I will
12 read the whole paragraph. “On the last day of November,
13 on the orders of the local SS Commander, Friedrich
14 Jeckelm, 4,000 of Riga’s unwanted Jews were trucked five
15 miles down” — the Germans called that Dinoberg, I think,
16 did they not?
17 A. [Mr Irving]: Dunoberg, yes.
18 Q. [Mr Rampton]: — “a highway to Skiaturbe plundered and machine-gunned
19 into two or three pits. According to one army colonel”,
20 this is Bruns, is it not—-
22 Q. [Mr Rampton]: — who witnessed it, a trainload of Jews from Berlin,
23 those expelled three days before, arrived in the midst
24 of this aktion. Its passengers were taken straight out to
25 the pits and shot. This happened”, and here we go again,
26 even has Hitler’s hundreds of miles away, “Hitler”, I
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1 emphasise, hundreds of miles away in the Wolf’s Lair, “was
2 instructing Himmler that these Berlin Jews were not to be
3 liquidated. I am not going back to that hoary old
4 chestnut, you will be glad to hear, but I do want to take
5 you back to the beginning of this paragraph.
6 A. [Mr Irving]: It is a remarkable paragraph for a Holocaust denier to
7 write, is it not?
8 Q. [Mr Rampton]: I have no idea, Mr Irving, and anyway I am not going to
9 answer your question. “Dieter Wisliceny, one
10 of Eichmann’s closest associates, would describe the
11 Goebbels’ article in Das Reich as a watershed in the Final
12 Solution of the Jewish problem”?
13 A. [Mr Irving]: Yes.
14 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Where did he give that description?
15 A. [Mr Irving]: What, whether he actually used the word watershed?
16 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Yes.
17 A. [Mr Irving]: You see that I reference his manuscript written in
18 Bratislava or Presburg and I also reference the
19 interrogations in the associated footnote.
20 Q. [Mr Rampton]: But if you read what we find here in Professor Evans’
21 report which is an English translation of some part of the
22 Wisliceny report, what you immediately realize, you do not
23 learn it from Mr Irving’s books, you learn it
24 from Professor Evans’ report, what you immediately realize
25 is that Dieter Wisliceny did not see the Reich article as
26 a watershed. He saw the watershed as being an order from
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1 Adolf Hitler?
2 A. [Mr Irving]: Can we have a look at the passage you are relying on,
3 please?
4 Q. [Mr Rampton]: The which?
5 A. [Mr Irving]: The passage of the Wisliceny report you are relying upon
6 in the Evans…
7 Q. [Mr Rampton]: One would have to go back now to —-
8 A. [Mr Irving]: I no longer trust your paraphrases, you see, Mr Rampton.
9 Q. [Mr Rampton]: — where I was.
10 MR JUSTICE GRAY: It is page 340, I think.
11 MR RAMPTON: Yes. 345, sorry, my Lord. The passage — I am
12 not going to read it again, I have read it once already.
13 Read what is said there. The German is at the bottom of
14 the page, so if you are going to criticise Professor
15 Evans’ translation, say so now.
16 A. [Mr Irving]: The English is a slightly vague translation. I am looking
17 at the paragraph at the top of page 345, where he says
18 this is just simply “reference in this connection also to
19 the Goebbels-article” —-
20 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Yes?
21 A. [Mr Irving]: — “‘The Jews are guilty'”.
22 Q. [Mr Rampton]: What does the German say?
23 A. [Mr Irving]: The German says: “In this connection, I draw attention
24 also to the Goebbels-article ‘The Jews are to blame’ in an
25 edition of the newspaper Das Reich” which is possibly a
26 slightly more coherent way of translating it.
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1 Q. [Mr Rampton]: But he is talking about German propaganda, that is to say,
2 domestic propaganda, is he not?
3 A. [Mr Irving]: Yes.
4 Q. [Mr Rampton]: After 11th December when Hitler, perhaps rather stupidly,
5 declared war on the United States?
6 A. [Mr Irving]: Yes.
7 Q. [Mr Rampton]: He is talking about the Yellow Star and he is talking
8 about the article in Das Reich as examples. He then
9 said: “In this period of time, after the beginning of the
10 war with the USA, I am convinced must fall the decision of
11 Hitler which ordered the biological annihilation of
12 European Jews”. So how is it, if that is the piece you
13 were referring to, that that gets converted into Dieter
14 Wisliceny saying that the article by Goebbels in Das Reich
15 was a watershed?
16 A. [Mr Irving]: I beg to differ with you. I think that even this source
17 bears me out. He said the words you omitted in your
18 summary, he says: “The second wave of radicalization
19 began” and the instance of this he gives is the
20 publication of the article. This is what triggered off
21 the off the second wave of radicalization. But you have
22 also overlooked, and I am sorry I tripped you up on this
23 when you referred to the Goebbels’ Diaries, would you like
24 to read out the reference for the passage that I gave
25 you? You implied that it relies only on the Wisliceny
26 report.
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1 Q. [Mr Rampton]: No, you refer to something else, but so what? Sorry, I am
2 not following you.
3 A. [Mr Irving]: If you look in the source reference, it clearly says:
4 “Wisliceny report and interrogations of Wisliceny in the
5 national archives” which Professor Evans has obviously not
6 bothered to look at.
7 Q. [Mr Rampton]: I am quite open-minded, Mr Irving. If you tell me that in
8 the interrogations, as opposed to the report, there is a
9 positive statement by Wisliceny to the effect that
10 Goebbels’ article was the watershed or a watershed, then
11 I will accept it, if you tell me to find it?
12 A. [Mr Irving]: Mr Rampton, I am under oath and I am not going to make a
13 statement from memory for something that I cannot back up
14 without going home and checking the files. All that I do
15 say is that Professor Evans has made no reference to the
16 fact that I used other sources to justify that one
17 sentence and that he, apparently, has not bothered to go
18 and have a look at those interrogations of Wisliceny
19 because they are so many thousands of miles away.
20 Q. [Mr Rampton]: We may just have time to go over to the other side of this
21 page in Evans’ Report, 346 at paragraph 4. This is a
22 further extract, says Professor Evans — of course, you
23 may prove that he is wrong about it — this is an extract
24 from the same document, apparently, where Wisliceny says
25 this:
26 “According to Eichmann’s own report, which he
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1 made to me, Globocnig (sic) was the first to use gas
2 chambers for the mass extermination of humans. Globocnig
3 had set up big labour camps for Jews in his area of
4 command, and he got rid of those who were unable to work
5 in the manner described. As Eichmann explained,
6 this ‘procedure’ was ‘less conspicuous’ than the mass
7 shootings”. The German is “Massenerschiessungen”. Do you
8 remember those words? Do they ring a bell?
9 A. [Mr Irving]: Yes, indeed.
10 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Something to do with General Bruns? Does that ring a
11 bell?
12 A. [Mr Irving]: Well, there were mass shootings occurring all over the
13 Eastern Front. It is not specifically a reference just to
14 that one. There were mass shootings at Riga, there were
15 mass shootings at Minsk, mass shootings elsewhere in the
16 Ukraine. So it would be specious just to say this is a
17 reference to the Bruns Report.
18 Q. [Mr Rampton]: My point is a slightly different one. Indeed, it is not a
19 reference to the Bruns Report.
20 A. [Mr Irving]: Well, you mentioned the Bruns.
21 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Exactly, and I will tell you why. What Bruns said he was
22 told by Altemeyer was to precisely the same effect, “These
23 mass shootings, or mass shootings of this kind, mass
24 shootings, must stop. That must be done more discreetly”?
25 A. [Mr Irving]: Yes.
26 Q. [Mr Rampton]: It is almost a mirror image of what Wisliceny reports
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1 Eichmann having said, this procedure, gassing, was less
2 conspicuous, “unauffalliger” —-
3 A. [Mr Irving]: Yes.
4 Q. [Mr Rampton]: — than the “Massenerschiessungen”?
5 A. [Mr Irving]: This was the tendency in the SS; they did not like
6 shooting people. Shooting took it out of them.
7 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Sure.
8 A. [Mr Irving]: Yes.
9 Q. [Mr Rampton]: And that is why they took to gassing people, is it not?
10 MR JUSTICE GRAY: But you accept, do you, Mr Irving, that —-
11 A. [Mr Irving]: Gassing did occur, yes.
12 Q. [Mr Justice Gray]: — the Bruns Report corresponds with what is, apparently,
13 recorded in Eichmann’s report?
14 MR RAMPTON: In Wisliceny’s report, my Lord.
15 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Sorry, in Wisliceny’s report.
16 MR RAMPTON: It is double hearsay, if you like, but so what if
17 you are an historian.
18 A. [Mr Irving]: It is indeed and the word “report”, of course, is slightly
19 sharpening it up. He is actually just saying, “According
20 to what Eichmann said”, he is saying.
21 MR RAMPTON: Do they not echo one another?
22 A. [Mr Irving]: Yes.
23 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Bruns is talking about shootings in the Osland in Latvia?
24 A. [Mr Irving]: Yes.
25 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Here Wisliceny is talking much more generally, is he not?
26 A. [Mr Irving]: Indeed, yes, and we do not know about what period he is
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1 talking about, we do not know about what region he is
2 talking about.
3 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Do you not detect in the convergence of those two
4 completely otherwise unrelated pieces of evidence —-
5 A. [Mr Irving]: Yes.
6 Q. [Mr Rampton]: — even a hint of a suggestion that the reality was that
7 mass shootings were embarrassing because they could get
8 out because it upset the soldiers too much, because it was
9 expensive in bullets, a shift in policy from shooting to a
10 more discreet means of disposal, that is to say, gassing?
11 A. [Mr Irving]: I am afraid that was such a long question that I had lost
12 you halfway through again.
13 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Well, I think it is the end of a longish day
14 for Mr Irving and I think we will…
15 MR RAMPTON: I will repeat the question first thing on Monday
16 morning.
17 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Will you?
18 MR RAMPTON: It will be on the transcript.
19 A. [Mr Irving]: Can you put it in two halves so that —-
20 MR JUSTICE GRAY: It was a long question. Anyway, we are
21 adjourning now.
22 A. [Mr Irving]: — a bear of limited brain can follow it, but I lost it.
23 MR JUSTICE GRAY: So it is 10.30 on Monday in court 73.
24 (The court adjourned until 10.30 p.m. on Monday, 17th
25 January 2000)
26
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