Day 5 Transcript: Holocaust Denial on Trial
Part I: Initial Proceedings (1.1 to 17.18)
1 IN THE HIGH COURT OF JUSTICE
1996 I. No. 113
QUEEN’S BENCH DIVISION
2 Royal Courts of Justice
3 Strand, London
4 Tuesday, 18th 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 FIVE
24
25
26
. P-1
1 <DAY FIVE Tuesday, 18th January 2000
2 (10.30 a.m.)
3 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Yes, Mr Irving, I have been provided with a
4 document that you, I understand, want to make some mention
5 of.
6 MR IRVING: Yes, if I may address the court on this. The only
7 important one I want to draw your attention to is page 10.
8 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Before you do, can I just mention two things
9 which will take a few minutes? Do sit down. The first is
10 the transcription which, once they have been edited, are
11 extremely useful and I think it is extraordinary that it
12 can be done so well.
13 MR RAMPTON So do I.
14 MR JUSTICE GRAY: But it did strike me, reading yesterday’s
15 transcript, that the first 20 minutes of yesterday was
16 what you might call administrative discussion, and I think
17 it is a waste of energy to have that transcribed.
18 MR RAMPTON Yes.
19 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Unless either of you disagree, I was going to
20 suggest that in future when we have that kind of
21 discussion we can just, as it were, stand down the lady
22 who is doing the transcribing, and save her energy.
23 MR IRVING: Except, my Lord, for any conclusions that are
24 reached.
25 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Of course, and any what you might call
26 substantive discussion about the issues.
. P-2
1 MR RAMPTON Can I also suggest this? If at any stage your
2 Lordship makes rulings which you may have to — I hope not
3 but it does happen — they be transcribed separately as a
4 separate document.
5 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Yes, if and when we come to that, that is a
6 very good idea.
7 MR RAMPTON It worked very well last time that this lady was
8 in charge of one of my cases.
9 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Can I also, before Mr Irving deals with this
10 document, ask you, Mr Rampton, to help me as to where we
11 are at the moment.
12 MR RAMPTON Where are we going?
13 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Yes. Can I just tell you what my concern
14 is. It is that I should know at every stage, if possible,
15 to what issue the evidence is directed. Your
16 cross-examination started out with the topic of the
17 killing of the Jews from Berlin.
18 MR RAMPTON Yes.
19 MR JUSTICE GRAY: But it has now moved on to the shootings on
20 the Eastern Front.
21 MR RAMPTON Yes.
22 MR JUSTICE GRAY: I am just trying to tie it in with your
23 summary of case. I want to make sure I have understood
24 correctly, because the section on shootings on the Eastern
25 Front is in the part of your summary of case which deals
26 with Auschwitz, whereas, as I understand it, the evidence
. P-3
1 that you are eliciting from Mr Irving at the moment is
2 really directed mainly to the issue of Hitler’s knowledge.
3 MR RAMPTON The trouble is, of course, that it has both sides
4 to it, as does gassing.
5 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Because your case is, just so that
6 I understand, that the mass shootings, were a prelude to
7 an alternative way of killing Jews, namely gassing.
8 MR RAMPTON Largely speaking but by no means entirely, gassing
9 took over from shooting. Both are features of what is
10 called the Holocaust and both happened on such a scale,
11 logistically speaking and military speaking, that they
12 must have come from headquarters, so the whole thing locks
13 together.
14 MR JUSTICE GRAY: That has helped me understand how the case is
15 put.
16 MR RAMPTON Apart from one or two fiddly things which always
17 happen arising from yesterday, I am going to deal with the
18 table talks such as remain, not many. Then I am going to
19 go on to what happened next, as it were, 42 onwards to
20 about September 42.
21 MR JUSTICE GRAY: It will, I think, sometimes help me if one
22 can see the big picture, perhaps by way of a few prefatory
23 questions, and then go to the individual documents.
24 MR RAMPTON One of the fiddly but necessary features in all of
25 this is that one repeatedly has to make reference to what
26 Mr Irving himself has said about these things —-
. P-4
1 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Yes, of course.
2 MR RAMPTON — which clouds the picture, but is unavoidable.
3 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Of course. I quite understand that. Yes,
4 thank you. Mr Irving, do you want to say anything about
5 that exchange? It was really to clarify my own
6 understanding of where exactly we are going to and getting
7 to with the evidence.
8 MR IRVING: I agree, my Lord. What we in Riding call a topic
9 paragraph would be useful.
10 MR JUSTICE GRAY: It would certainly help me and it might even
11 be that it will help you. It might be that it is right
12 that you should have the opportunity to comment on the
13 general proposition as well as the particular proposition.
14 MR IRVING: Very well.
15 MR JUSTICE GRAY: You want to say something about this
16 document?
17 MR IRVING: My Lord, I referred yesterday to the fact that
18 I relied on the Weidenfeld translation of Hitler’s table
19 talk. It is completely proper that I should produce that
20 translation to you, which is page 2. You will see it from
21 the rostrum at the Reichstag, and so on.
22 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Yes.
23 MR IRVING: I do not attach anything in particular but, for
24 reasons of procedure, I should have shown that to you,
25 having averred that I had used that translation.
26 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Yes, I see. Thank you very much.
. P-5
1 MR IRVING: My Lord, on page 3 I referred to a document in the
2 December 1942 time frame, which is so important because
3 that is when this meldung, this report, was allegedly
4 shown to Hitler at the end of December, but here is Hitler
5 at the same time ordering that Jews should be released if
6 foreign currency could be provided to barter for them.
7 MR JUSTICE GRAY: They are not mutually exclusive, those two
8 policies, are they?
9 MR IRVING: I appreciate that, my Lord, but, if the contention
10 of the Defence is that Adolf Hitler was hell bent on
11 exterminating every Jew that came into his possession, for
12 some reason of weltanschauung or a deeper philosophy or a
13 deeper streak of human nature, there are several documents
14 of this nature which of course go through to the famous
15 trucks for Jews deal at the end of 1944, which indicates
16 that he was not all that pragmatic.
17 MR JUSTICE GRAY: I do not understand the Defendants to put the
18 case, as it were, at that extreme level.
19 MR RAMPTON Not at all.
20 MR IRVING: Well, it just is not watertight either way. My
21 Lord, I keep trying to drive breaches into the damages of
22 defence. We have a much more serious breach coming on
23 page 10, my Lord.
24 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Shall I go straight to 10?
25 MR IRVING: Except to have a quick glance at pages 8 and 9
26 which is another meldung in that series. It shows Hitler
. P-6
1 was being bombarded with meldungen. This is a much more
2 routine one which relates to Operation Hamburg, as it was
3 called, an anti-partisan sweep resulting in 6,000 enemy
4 dead, and a certain amount of equipment taken, and so on.
5 I am not going to rely particularly on that, just to show
6 that these meldungen cannot be taken in vacuo.
7 MR JUSTICE GRAY: That is not Hitler vorgelegt, is it, as it
8 happens?
9 MR IRVING: I believe it is, my Lord. If you look at my page
10 8, you can see “vorgelegt 25 December PF”.
11 MR JUSTICE GRAY: I see.
12 MR IRVING: SS Hauptstungfuhrer Fuhrer, who was Hitler’s
13 personal adjutant, who happened to have an SS rank. That
14 is quite important, my Lord, because we now come to the
15 page 10 which I think is going to blow their December 28th
16 document, not out of water but it is going to cripple it.
17 To a certain degree, my Lord, I myself am crippled
18 because, as your Lordship knows, I donated my entire
19 archives to the German Institute of History many years ago
20 with a rather sad result that I alone in this room am not
21 allowed to see them.
22 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Can you say that again?
23 MR IRVING: I donated my entire archives of research which I
24 had collected for Adolf Hitler —-
25 MR JUSTICE GRAY: I follow, yes. Now you are banned from going
26 into that museum?
. P-7
1 MR IRVING: I am banned from going into Germany. I cannot set
2 foot in that museum and I cannot see my own archives,
3 whereas Professor Evans, as I understand it, has had teams
4 of researchers clawing over these files, where they would
5 undoubtedly have found these very documents to which I am
6 now going to refer.
7 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Can you take me through them if you rely on
8 them?
9 MR IRVING: On the following page you will see the photocopies
10 of index cards which is all that remains in my collection,
11 the index cards relating to these documents. I have
12 translated the index cards into English on page 10. The
13 first item is 28th December 1942, a report coming from —
14 the other way round this time — Hitler’s adjutant to
15 Himmler. The only significance of that is that that is
16 feed back. That is an indication that that document to
17 which this document, this card, this reply refers was
18 clearly shown to Hitler, because there was feed back
19 coming back from Hitler’s adjutant saying, “Well, Hitler
20 wants to know how many of our own troops are being killed
21 in these operations”.
22 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Report No. 49 would be two reports before
23 No. 51.
24 MR IRVING: Yes. It is not the one that is significant in this
25 case, my Lord. I am just saying that it is a pity we do
26 not have a similar kind of feed back on the crucial one.
. P-8
1 MR JUSTICE GRAY: This rather suggests that Hitler was paying
2 attention to what was being laid before him.
3 MR IRVING: I disagree, my Lord. Look at the next card down.
4 We now have December 30th 1942, which is another report by
5 Himmler to Hitler, signed by Muller this time, the Chief
6 of Gestapo. It is dated December 29th, exactly the same
7 day as the incriminating one.
8 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Sorry, you have lost me.
9 MR IRVING: This is the second card down on page 10, my Lord.
10 MR JUSTICE GRAY: I see, December 29th.
11 MR IRVING: The reason it is dated December 30th is because my
12 card index is organized according to the date that
13 something was allegedly shown to Hitler, not the date of
14 the document. It is a telegram from Muller, the Chief of
15 the Gestapo, back to Himmler on combating the high level
16 achievement in Serbia, and it has been sent by Himmler to
17 Hitler to have a look at. It is in the big Fuhrer
18 typeface, and you will notice, my Lord, that on this
19 occasion Fiefer has endorsed the document twice, laid
20 before December 30th, laid before December 31st. In other
21 words, twice he has put it on Hitler’s breakfast tray
22 outside his door. He is not looking at it. Is this not,
23 my Lord, precisely the point I made yesterday, that Hitler
24 had other things on his plate? He was fighting the battle
25 of Stalingrad. He had a quarter of a million men trapped
26 in Stalingrad. He was waiting for it to break through.
. P-9
1 He had the battle crews out in the Arctic. He had all
2 these things going on. Here is Himmler’s message lying
3 outside his breakfast room door twice, and the adjutant
4 putting a note on it, saying he has twice put it out
5 there, twice he has laid it before him. He would not have
6 had to do it twice if it was read the first time, my
7 Lord,.
8 I suggest this casts serious doubt on the
9 proposition that we can accept that the other document was
10 necessarily shown to Hitler. I would not put it any
11 stronger than that.
12 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Just let us keep an eye on the reality. You
13 did accept yesterday, as I understand it, that the
14 shooting of Jews and others on the Eastern Front was a
15 programme which was systematic and co-ordinated by Berlin,
16 and Hitler was aware and approved of what was going on.
17 MR IRVING: The shootings of Russian Jews, my Lord, yes.
18 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Yes. So, in a sense the issue whether a
19 document was laid before Hitler and read by him becomes
20 relatively speaking insignificant, in this context.
21 MR IRVING: I disagree, with respect. I think that this shows
22 how flaky the whole system was. What Mr Rampton would
23 like to describe as being a cast iron, watertight
24 bureaucratic system with reports going this way and
25 messages coming back, it breaks down at the very top level
26 when you are dealing with a man, the head of state
. P-10
1 himself, who has other things on his plate. I would
2 suggest that there is a very strong reason to suspect that
3 this is precisely the reason why Himmler slid that figure
4 in, because he apprehended quite likely that the boss was
5 not going to read it.
6 That may possibly be going too far to impute
7 that to him, but certainly this indication that on this
8 very day documents were being put to Hitler twice and not
9 being read can indicate that that 29th December document
10 cannot, therefore, necessarily have been taken as having
11 been read and submitted no doubt to Adolf Hitler or taken
12 cognisance of it. That is the only point I want to make,
13 my Lord.
14 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Thank you very much. Is that it?
15 MR IRVING: That is it.
16 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Would you like to go back into the witness
17 box?
18 MR RAMPTON Can I say two things before that happens? We
19 would very much like to see the German version of the
20 Kovno train message, if it exists, if Mr Irving has it?
21 That was page 6 of the first of these.
22 MR IRVING: My Lord, it was actually mailed to the instructing
23 solicitors, about three weeks ago.
24 MR RAMPTON What, the German?
25 MR IRVING: In a bundle.
26 MR JUSTICE GRAY: The German version of what? Did you say page
. P-11
1 6?
2 MR RAMPTON Page 5 I meant.
3 MR IRVING: I will certainly supply it again.
4 MR RAMPTON That would be very kind. If we have had it and it
5 has not got to me, that is entirely our fault.
6 MR JUSTICE GRAY: I am still puzzled. Page 5 is in German.
7 MR RAMPTON Oh, 5?
8 MR JUSTICE GRAY: You said 6 and then I thought you said 5.
9 MR RAMPTON I did say 5.
10 MR JUSTICE GRAY: That is in German.
11 MR RAMPTON I say no, I am looking at a different document
12 with “05” at the bottom.
13 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Are you not looking at the clip?
14 MR RAMPTON No, to this previous one.
15 MR IRVING: The little bundle probably.
16 MR RAMPTON Does your Lordship remember the train load of
17 Berlin Jews to Kovno?
18 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Yes, I do.
19 MR RAMPTON J3.
20 MR JUSTICE GRAY: I am putting this latest clip into the back
21 of J. I know Miss Rogers is keeping track.
22 MR RAMPTON Tab 5, my Lord.
23 MR JUSTICE GRAY: I have something in tab 5 already anyway.
24 They are all going in there.
25 MR JUSTICE GRAY: I am sorry, Mr Rampton. You are back on
26 what?
. P-12
1 MR RAMPTON I raised the question whether or not the German of
2 this report, or message No. 35 on page 5, exists and, if
3 it does, whether I can see it. If we already have it,
4 then enquiries are perhaps futile.
5 MR IRVING: I will certainly produce another copy tomorrow.
6 MR RAMPTON That is very kind. The other thing I should
7 mention because I said I would and your Lordship asked me
8 to is this. We spoke to Professor van Pelt yesterday. He
9 says at this late stage it would be extremely difficult
10 for him to alter his arrangements and come later on in the
11 case. So, with your Lordship’s permission, I will adhere,
12 if I may, to my schedule, which is to start
13 cross-examination about Auschwitz on Monday when he will
14 be here.
15 MR JUSTICE GRAY: I must ask Mr Irving whether that is going to
16 cause him problems.
17 MR IRVING: I shall just burn the candle at both ends which is
18 nothing new.
19 MR JUSTICE GRAY: No, but I am conscious that you have a fair
20 old burden, being effectively, as it appears, on your
21 own. You say if things are getting on top of you.
22 MR IRVING: It is proper that we should continue with
23 Auschwitz.
24 MR RAMPTON I am very grateful for that. The other thing
25 which arises out of that is that Mr Irving said, I think
26 yesterday, that at some stage he would like to have an
. P-13
1 argument about the significance and relevance of Auschwitz
2 so far as this case is concerned. Plainly, if I am going
3 to start cross-examining on Monday, we ought to have that
4 argument this week and the question is when. I understand
5 Professor Watt is coming on Thursday. Have I got that
6 right?
7 MR IRVING: That is correct, but I think he will be relatively
8 brief.
9 MR RAMPTON He will, at least, as far as I am concerned. We
10 might perhaps do that on Thursday also, because then we
11 will know what the framework is before Monday.
12 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Yes. Can you just, so I can think about it,
13 give me in a couple of sentences what you understand the
14 argument to be about?
15 MR RAMPTON It has been our case all along — the book is
16 about Holocaust denial. Auschwitz in Mr Irving’s
17 utterances and certainly in our eyes is at the centre of
18 Holocaust belief. It is therefore at the centre of
19 Holocaust denial. Mr Irving has flatly denied that there
20 were any gas chambers for killing human beings at
21 Auschwitz. We say he has done that on the basis of really
22 no evidence whatsoever. It illustrates two things: First
23 of all, his casual attitude to an important matter of
24 history and, secondly, his political attitudes and
25 sympathies. That has been in our case from the very
26 beginning and still is.
. P-14
1 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Yes, I understand all of that, but what might
2 be going to disappear from the case?
3 MR RAMPTON Only this, that Mr Irving may be going to
4 concede — this is what I do not know because for one
5 reason he never answered our Auschwitz questions — as we
6 contended and as I have already said in open court, that
7 the Liechter report is bunk. If he is, then I cut a great
8 swathe through my cross-examination. I throw three
9 quarters of it out of the window. I do not need it. That
10 why it is important to know what he says.
11 MR JUSTICE GRAY: It does not sound to me like a terribly long
12 argument I am not going to ask you, Mr Irving, to answer
13 it now.
14 MR IRVING: I would just draw attention to the fact that this
15 court is seized only with the issues as pleaded and not
16 with the issues as portrayed by Mr Rampton.
17 MR JUSTICE GRAY: I am not going to pursue this now but the
18 fact is that, on the proceedings as I understand them at
19 the moment, you rely quite heavily on the Liechter report
20 for your proposition that there were no gas chambers at
21 Auschwitz.
22 MR IRVING: I think that your Lordship will realize the error
23 of that statement, if I may respectfully put it like that,
24 when we come to the cross-examination both of myself and
25 of the expert witnesses.
26 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Then we obviously do need to have an argument
. P-15
1 about this, because I have, to an extent anyway,
2 misunderstood the position. Let us carry on. Would you
3 like to come back?
4 <Mr David Irving, recalled.
5 <Cross-Examined by Mr Rampton QC.
6 A. [Mr Irving]: My Lord, I did produce also the Himmler diary so that you
7 could see the actual page I worked from, if you wish to
8 see the quality of the photocopy.
9 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Does it carry the matter much further?
10 A. [Mr Irving]: Only if your Lordship intends to attach much weight to
11 Mr Rampton’s suggestion that I deliberately and wilfully
12 misread that word.
13 MR JUSTICE GRAY: I am not saying I am not so, if you want me
14 to have a look at it, I will. I doubt whether it will be
15 significantly different from the photocopy I have in the
16 file.
17 A. [Mr Irving]: Well, we will leave it.
18 MR RAMPTON Mr Irving, you have left behind, I am sorry, your
19 little clip that you brought with you this morning.
20 A. [Mr Irving]: Yes.
21 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Somebody will give it to you. The only page I am
22 interested in at the present is page 3.
23 A. [Mr Irving]: Page 3, yes.
24 Q. [Mr Rampton]: I have only two questions, three questions possibly. Did
25 any such cases occur in practice?
26 A. [Mr Irving]: We have a document which we can produce to the court
. P-16
Part II: David Irving’s Cross-Examination by Richard Rampton, continued (17.19 to 99.10)
1 showing that the Germans were instructed actually to build
2 special camps for these special category — I am sorry,
3 this is not an answer to that particular question. Were
4 any actually sold?
5 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Yes.
6 A. [Mr Irving]: No, not to my knowledge.
7 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Do you know what sort of cases were envisaged?
8 A. [Mr Irving]: Not on the basis of this document which I produced, no.
9 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Do you know what the scale of this proposal was meant to
10 be?
11 A. [Mr Irving]: This document does not show that.
12 Q. [Mr Rampton]: No. You do not know from extraneous sources the answers
13 to any of my questions?
14 A. [Mr Irving]: The answer is?
15 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Those two last two questions: Do you know not the answer
16 from other evidence?
17 A. [Mr Irving]: Not that I wish to repeat just from memory, which may be
18 uncertain on oath.
Section details 17.19 to 33.9
19 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Thank you very much. Now I would like to return, if
20 I may, to something that cropped up yesterday. It is in
21 fact the only topic that cropped up yesterday that I am
22 going to return to, save for continuing with the table
23 talk but that is not really a repetition. Could you,
24 please, be given Hitler’s War 1977, the first volume. My
25 Lord that is D 1 (i).
26 A. [Mr Irving]: I have it here.
. P-17
1 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Would you please turn to page 341?
2 A. [Mr Irving]: Yes.
3 Q. [Mr Rampton]: The left hand page that is. Here again you are purporting
4 to give a translation of the table talk of 25th October
5 1941, are you not, in the second paragraph?
6 A. [Mr Irving]: On the right hand page, you mean?
7 Q. [Mr Rampton]: No, 331?
8 A. [Mr Irving]: Yes, 331.
9 Q. [Mr Rampton]: In my copy it is the left hand page.
10 A. [Mr Irving]: Odd numbers are always right hand pages in books.
11 Q. [Mr Rampton]: That may be so. Here you purport, do you not, to give a
12 translation of the table talk of 25th October 1941. Is
13 that right?
14 A. [Mr Irving]: I have just reproduced the remarks noted by the adjutant,
15 yes.
16 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Take it slowly. The answer to my question I think is yes,
17 is it not?
18 A. [Mr Irving]: I cannot see the word “translation” in that paragraph.
19 Q. [Mr Rampton]: You have put it in quotes in English. The quotes start at
20 “from the rostrum” and end at “terror is a salutary
21 thing”, do they not?
22 A. [Mr Irving]: Yes, but the word “translation” does not occur there. You
23 are saying that I am purporting that this is a
24 translation.
25 MR JUSTICE GRAY: It obviously is. Let us move on.
26 A. [Mr Irving]: I apprehend that he intends to attach importance to the
. P-18
1 word “translation”. This is why.
2 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Let us wait and see.
3 MR RAMPTON That version, let us call it, was — for this
4 fact on its own I make no criticism — taken straight
5 from the Weidenfeld and Nicholson?
6 A. [Mr Irving]: It was an accurate transcript of the original official,
7 shall we say, translation of the Hitler’s table talk that
8 I produced to his Lordship this morning.
9 Q. [Mr Rampton]: At that date you did not have the Genoud original?
10 A. [Mr Irving]: In 1977 nobody had them except Mr Genoud.
11 Q. [Mr Rampton]: You got it very shortly after that, did you not?
12 A. [Mr Irving]: About 1982, if I remember correctly.
13 Q. [Mr Rampton]: I think it was earlier, but it does not really matter.
14 The last sentence in the quotes reads: “Terror is a
15 salutary thing”.
16 A. [Mr Irving]: That is correct.
17 Q. [Mr Rampton]: When you came to write about this in the 1991 edition, as
18 you confirmed yesterday, you did at that date have the
19 original?
20 A. [Mr Irving]: Yes.
21 Q. [Mr Rampton]: It is also right, is it not, that you omitted the single
22 sentence “terror is a salutary thing”?
23 A. [Mr Irving]: Yes, because I discovered that it was not in the original
24 German, so I quite properly cut it out.
25 Q. [Mr Rampton]: But you maintain, do you, still — I am not going over
26 old ground, I just want to be sure that I have understood
. P-19
1 what your case is — that, save for that sentence, it is
2 an accurate account of what was reported to have been said
3 by Hitler?
4 A. [Mr Irving]: Had I made a version account from the German original,
5 starting from scratch, I would have translated it
6 differently. As I had an existing English translation,
7 rather than rework it into a different form, then
8 I preferred to leave it as it was, rather than incur the
9 wrath of historians who were familiar only at that time
10 with the English text. Professor Martin Bourchard, in his
11 very famous attack on my book, had commented extensively
12 on the fact that my translations of documents differed
13 from the official English versions, I wanted to avoid that
14 kind of ill informed attack.
15 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Could Mr Irving please be given file D3 (i)? Would you
16 turn, please, to tab 20? Does your Lordship have that?
17 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Yes.
18 MR RAMPTON At tab 20 this is a document headed On
19 Contemporary History and Historiography. I think it comes
20 from the journal of the International Revisionists body,
21 and the sub-heading is “David Irving, remarks delivered at
22 the 1983 International Revisionists Conference”. Do you
23 recognize it, Mr Irving?
24 A. [Mr Irving]: Yes.
25 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Is this one of those things that you approve before it is
26 printed for publication?
. P-20
1 A. [Mr Irving]: Quite possibly. I cannot say off the top of my head.
2 Q. [Mr Rampton]: The easiest way of doing it is to look for a stamp 101 at
3 the bottom of the page.
4 A. [Mr Irving]: Yes.
5 Q. [Mr Rampton]: And look at the right hand column. I will start, if
6 I may, for context at the bottom of the left hand page,
7 which in fact in the document is page 280, though it has
8 been cut off. “The will of the Fuhrer that the Jews are
9 shipped stage by stage from west to east again and again
10 and again even in his table talk, you have all heard of
11 Hitler’s table talk or tichgesprache, written down by
12 Martin Hein and Martin Bormann’s secretary. Long before
13 anybody got those these things, I got the actual
14 transcripts from the Swiss lawyer who controls these
15 documents. Here you see the actual wording used by Hitler
16 in German, which is completely different from the
17 published English translation.”
18 You said that and then you had it published, did
19 you not?
20 A. [Mr Irving]: If you read the next sentence, you will see what I am
21 referring to, the interpolator’s sentence.
22 Q. [Mr Rampton]: In fact, in the English translation sentences (plural)
23 have been interposed which do not exist in the original
24 German at all.
25 A. [Mr Irving]: Yes.
26 Q. [Mr Rampton]: In that original you see Hitler saying things like: “It
. P-21
1 is a good thing that this legend is being spread about
2 that the Jews are perishing. It is a good thing that this
3 terror story” —-
4 A. [Mr Irving]: “Terror story”.
5 Q. [Mr Rampton]: — “is being spread about us”. Then you go on to make a
6 comment of your own. I am not going to argue with you
7 about that because it speaks for itself. You say he
8 regards it altogether as being a legend.
9 A. [Mr Irving]: Who regards it as being a legend?
10 Q. [Mr Rampton]: You say that Hitler regards it altogether as being a
11 legend, do you not?
12 A. [Mr Irving]: He says it is a good thing that this legend is being
13 spread about that the Jews are perishing.
14 Q. [Mr Rampton]: That is you translation of the word “schreck”, is it?
15 A. [Mr Irving]: Mr Rampton, I do not have the document in front of me when
16 I am delivering an extemporary speech. Is this fact
17 plain?
18 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Pardon?
19 A. [Mr Irving]: Is this fact plain? I do not have thousands of documents
20 stacked in front of me when I am making an extemporary
21 speech to an audience.
22 Q. [Mr Rampton]: You must know that part of the table talk absolutely
23 backwards, do you not?
24 A. [Mr Irving]: Know something backwards? I am familiar with certain
25 documents on which I have relied.
26 Q. [Mr Rampton]: You must have known ever since you got the Genoud version
. P-22
1 that the key word in that particular sentence — there are
2 two key words — the first one is the word “schreck”?
3 A. [Mr Irving]: This is your submission that that is the key word, but it
4 is a loose word that has been put in there by Heinrich
5 Heime who transcribed it and we then have to try to make
6 some sense of it.
7 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Is there any sense in German — you are the expert — in
8 which it can be read be read as meaning legend?
9 A. [Mr Irving]: Coupled with the next sentence which I put in, this terror
10 story, I think that legend terror story is an extremely
11 good translation of the one word “schrecken”. I am giving
12 precisely the sense of it.
13 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Mr Rampton, I think I have really the point.
14 We went through this yesterday and “schreck” means what it
15 means.
16 MR RAMPTON Yes, it is merely Mr Irving’s observation, my
17 Lord, or acknowledgment, if you like.
18 A. [Mr Irving]: But we also have the problem, Mr Rampton, we are writing a
19 work of literature and, undoubtedly, you could translate
20 that document in a very wooden form, putting precise
21 literal translations and you would end up with a ghastly
22 book of the kind that academics and scholars write. You
23 have to write a work of literature which is legible,
24 giving the sense of the word while at the same time having
25 it readable in a literary sense.
26 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Yes, but, Mr Irving, when you are dealing
. P-23
1 with source material, which you are here, is it not
2 important to convey the proper translation?
3 A. [Mr Irving]: I appreciate that, my Lord, but you have to take into
4 account the fact that we also have what Mr Rampton calls
5 extraneous knowledge, knowledge from other sources than
6 just this one document, which we use when putting the
7 proper construction on those words.
8 Q. [Mr Justice Gray]: That will, with respect, Mr Irving, will no do, will it?
9 You cannot translate a document differently because you
10 are aware of other material which may point in a
11 particular direction.
12 A. [Mr Irving]: My Lord, once again I would have to draw your attention to
13 the fact, and I think it is cruel and unnecessary to try
14 to suggest that I have done wrong by taking the original,
15 official translation published by people who are far
16 better qualified than I, professional translators.
17 Q. [Mr Justice Gray]: No, I have that point. I understand it. I was
18 questioning you about what you then went on to say which
19 is that you were anxious to avoid what you have described,
20 I think, as a “wooden” translation. I was putting to you
21 that an historian really has to take what he finds when he
22 is dealing with source material?
23 A. [Mr Irving]: This is right, which is why scholars’ books are published
24 in such small, limited editions, my Lord, because they are
25 so illegible, that they are wooden translations of
26 documents. You have to try to make the text flow when you
. P-24
1 are writing a book. Perhaps this is why my books are more
2 successful than theirs or more readable than theirs
3 because I put a lot of extra effort in to making my works
4 literary.
5 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Mr Rampton, I tried to cut it short and
6 I have lengthened it. I am sorry.
7 MR RAMPTON With my gratitude is all I will say about that.
8 Thank you. It saves me from asking any more questions
9 about that which I now will not do. But I am going to go
10 on to what I contend must be another piece of deliberate
11 mistranslation. My Lord, this appears on page 338 of
12 Professor Evans’ report.
13 A. [Mr Irving]: My Lord, if I could just add to that point? Of course,
14 the motive there for changing the words or giving a
15 different meaning is nothing to do with the motives of
16 Holocaust deniers; it is purely an intention of producing
17 a more readable book which is possibly an important
18 distinction to make.
19 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Well, that is what you are saying?
20 A. [Mr Irving]: Yes.
21 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Yes.
22 A. [Mr Irving]: It has nothing to do with trying to minimise anything or
23 trying to …
24 MR RAMPTON Yes, now, Mr Irving, have you got your Goebbels’
25 book there?
26 A. [Mr Irving]: Yes, indeed.
. P-25
1 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Could you please turn to page 379?
2 A. [Mr Irving]: A vivid description of the Holocaust, if I may say so.
3 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Pardon?
4 A. [Mr Irving]: A vivid description of the Holocaust, if I may say so.
5 Q. [Mr Rampton]: What is that?
6 A. [Mr Irving]: On page 379.
7 Q. [Mr Rampton]: That is as may be.
8 A. [Mr Irving]: You say “that is as may be”, but that is what this trial
9 is about, Mr Rampton.
10 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Mr Irving, you will have plenty of opportunity when this
11 case is at an end or before if you want to re-examine
12 yourself — do you understand what that means? Do you
13 understand that means? At the end of the
14 cross-examination you have a chance to go back to
15 questions that I have asked you by reference to the
16 transcript and give further evidence?
17 A. [Mr Irving]: Notwithstanding what you say, Mr Rampton, I think it is
18 helpful that I remind the court that this case is about
19 Holocaust denials, and there is on this page you intend to
20 quote from a vivid description of the Holocaust in action.
21 MR JUSTICE GRAY: This last three or four minutes has been a
22 complete waste of time. I know what the case is about, so
23 let us get on.
24 MR RAMPTON You write in the middle paragraph of that page, a
25 short little paragraph, “The article”, that is Goebbels’
26 article in Das Reich on 16th November 1941, “displayed a
. P-26
1 far more uncompromising face than Hitler’s towards the
2 Jews”. Then can I understand, you are going to back that
3 up in the next sentence. You explained how you work
4 yesterday, did you not?
5 A. [Mr Irving]: I explained how I work?
6 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Yes. You put in —-
7 A. [Mr Irving]: Yes, that is the topic sentence.
8 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Topic sentence, so the topic is —-
9 A. [Mr Irving]: That is a good example of a topic sentence.
10 Q. [Mr Rampton]: The topic is now a comparison between the anti-Semitic
11 faces of Hitler and Goebbels, is it not?
12 A. [Mr Irving]: Between the evil genius, Dr Goebbels, and Adolf Hitler who
13 has been caused immense difficulties by this kind of
14 genius.
15 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Now you are going to explain why it is that Hitler’s face
16 was far less uncompromising than Goebbels’, are you not?
17 A. [Mr Irving]: That is what that sentence says.
18 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Then we get this evidence, as it were, for your first
19 sentence in the next sentence: “When the Fuhrer came to
20 Berlin for Luftwaffe General Ernst Udet’s funeral, he
21 again instructed Goebbels to pursue a policy against the
22 Jews that does not cause us endless difficulties and told
23 him to go easy on mixed marriages in the future.”
24 So, as you have written it, the reader would be
25 inclined to agree with you, would he not, Mr Irving, that
26 Hitler’s face was less uncompromising than Goebbels’,
. P-27
1 would he not?
2 A. [Mr Irving]: Yes.
3 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Now can you turn, please, to page 645 —-
4 A. [Mr Irving]: I am just doing it at this moment.
5 Q. [Mr Rampton]: — where we find footnote 39?
6 A. [Mr Irving]: Yes.
7 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Obviously, a reference to the Gottschalt tragedy. That
8 must be something to do with Ernst Udet, I dare say?
9 A. [Mr Irving]: I will explain it, if you wish.
10 Q. [Mr Rampton]: No, I do not.
11 A. [Mr Irving]: Well, it is important in this context.
12 Q. [Mr Rampton]: It is important in this context?
13 A. [Mr Irving]: Yes. But if you do not wish me to explain it, I will not.
14 Q. [Mr Rampton]: If you wish to explain it, better get it over now.
15 A. [Mr Irving]: Mr Gottschalt was a German actor who was married to a
16 Jewish wife. Goebbels being in charge of the German film
17 industry had demanded that Mr Gottschalt divorce his wife,
18 because otherwise he would get no more roles in Berlin.
19 The actor had refused to divorce his wife because he loved
20 her and, instead, the whole family committed suicide.
21 That is the Gottschalt tragedy that I have described in
22 this book, Mr Rampton, and you know it.
23 Q. [Mr Rampton]: I do not know it actually. It is very interesting, but
24 I do not understand what it has to do with an answer to my
25 question.
26 A. [Mr Irving]: Because it was typical of the tragedies that were being
. P-28
1 caused by the evil genius, Dr Goebbels, in his ^^ doktrene
2 insistence on the execution of these anti-Jewish measures.
3 MR JUSTICE GRAY: I think we are sliding away, are we not, from
4 is what is going to be put.
5 MR RAMPTON I am completely baffled why it is obvious that
6 that diary entry is a reference to the Gottschalt
7 tragedy.
8 A. [Mr Irving]: Because the previous diary has been full of the Gottschalt
9 tragedy and we happen to know what happened to Mr
10 Gottschalt and his family.
11 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Shall we have a look see what the “evil genius
12 Dr Goebbels” actually wrote in his diary. Keep what you
13 said he wrote open, if you please, and turn to page 338 of
14 Professor Evans’ report. I remind you you wrote only
15 this: “The Fuhrer again instructed Goebbels to pursue a
16 policy against the Jews ‘that does not cause us endless
17 difficulties’ and told him to go easy on mixed marriages
18 in the future.”
19 Now, please, look at paragraph 1 under (D) in
20 brackets on page 338 of Professor Evans’ report. I read
21 the English first:
22 “The Fuhrer also completely agrees with my views
23 with reference to the Jewish question.” According to
24 Dr Goebbels, there was no water between them in relation
25 to how the Jews should be treated.
26 A. [Mr Irving]: I put my comment on that in my foot note saying, well,
. P-29
1 clearly there was because here is Hitler saying, “Do not
2 keep causing me problems”.
3 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Let us see what he reports Hitler as actually having
4 said:
5 “He”, the Fuhrer, that is, “wants an energetic
6 policy against the Jews which, however, does not cause us
7 unnecessary difficulties”. Three things about that,
8 Mr Irving. The word “energetic” has been omitted by you.
9 You have omitted the word “however”, “alladings” in
10 German, and you have mistranslated “unnecessary”,
11 “unnotige”, as “endless”?
12 A. [Mr Irving]: The latter one I accept.
13 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Where is the —-
14 A. [Mr Irving]: But that is not — that does not really seriously change
15 the burden of what I have said.
16 Q. [Mr Rampton]: You have altered the whole sense of that sentence, have
17 you not?
18 A. [Mr Irving]: May I just comment? The word “alladings” is a much
19 stronger form of “however”. The normal word for “however”
20 is “aber”. “Alladings” is a much stronger word than
21 “however”. It implies a much stronger contrast.
22 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Where is the word “enagische” in your translation?
23 A. [Mr Irving]: I have not omitted that from the quoted passage.
24 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Oh, you have just ignored it.
25 A. [Mr Irving]: No. On the contrary, Mr Rampton, you are not obliged to
26 put in every single word from a sentence unless you put it
. P-30
1 in quotation marks, and I will have a word or two to say
2 about that with Mr Evans when the time comes. In one
3 quotation he left out 86 words, three sentences, five full
4 stops and two semi-colons.
5 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Well, well, Mr Irving, I have sufficient confidence in
6 Mr Evans to think that he may be able to deal with that.
7 A. [Mr Irving]: I may be able to shake your confidence when the time
8 comes.
9 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Don’t let us — it not fair — this is the
10 point that is being put to you — the way you represent
11 this in your book on Goebbels suggests that a wholly
12 passive policy towards the Jews is what Hitler is telling
13 Goebbels should be followed?
14 A. [Mr Irving]: My Lord —-
15 Q. [Mr Justice Gray]: And, in fact, the word “energetic” is the opposite
16 of “passive”, is that a fair way of putting the point?
17 MR RAMPTON It is another complete perversion of the —-
18 A. [Mr Irving]: I have not used the word “passive”. I have not used the
19 word “energetic”, my Lord. I have left it neutral. We
20 have to bear in mind that we are not dealing with a
21 transcript of what Hitler said by court reporters. We are
22 dealing with a passage that had been filtered through the
23 evil brain of Dr Goebbels who I have shown in the rest of
24 the book has a track record of doing things first and then
25 claiming in his diary afterwards that he had the Fuhrer’s
26 sanction for it. For example, when he made Hitler stand
. P-31
1 as Vice President which was a disaster for him in 1932,
2 events like that.
3 The Goebbels’ diary again and again and again
4 and the Kristallnacht, the Reich, the Night of Broken
5 Glass, is another example of Goebbels doing something
6 first and subsequently claiming in his diary that he had
7 Hitler’s sanctions.
8 So you have to be very careful before you use
9 the Goebbels’ diary as pure gold source material. You
10 have to refilter it out of that evil brain.
11 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Mr Irving, can we please take this in two stages? Do you
12 agree that the version which you have given in the book is
13 completely contrary in sense to that which Dr Goebbels put
14 in his diary?
15 A. [Mr Irving]: On the contrary, it is quite plain from the Goebbels’
16 diaries that the suicide of the Gottschalt family had
17 caused uproar in Berlin life. This is, undoubtedly, what
18 they are referring to, the fact that the onset of the
19 Holocaust in Berlin, if I can put it that way, the
20 deportation of train loads of Jews beginning at this time
21 is leading to these human tragedies. It is precisely what
22 Hitler does not want. He is now fighting a desperate war
23 on the Eastern Front, things are turning nasty, the rains
24 have begun, the frost is setting in, and here is this evil
25 little man in Berlin who is causing him totally needless
26 problems, and Hitler saying, “By all means go ahead with
. P-32
1 your doktriner programmes but stop causing me
2 difficulties”. And this is the meaning of that sentence.
3 Goebbels has written it down in the diary and you have to
4 refilter it back into the correct sense because, you
5 remember, it has been given negative spin by Goebbels and
6 you have to give it the right spin again.
7 Goebbels, remember, is an arch liar. He is a
8 minister of propaganda. The diaries show this again and
9 again — an extremely dangerous weapon to use.
Section details 33.10 to 47.8
10 Q. [Mr Rampton]: He is always telling the truth when he says something
11 which in your mind is favourable to him, but whenever he
12 says anything which is unfavourable to Hitler, he in your
13 mind is a liar and, therefore, you feel justified in
14 obliterating that from the text of your books, do you not?
15 A. [Mr Irving]: Mr Rampton, I do not want to labour the point, but I am
16 sure you are familiar with witnesses and you know how to
17 sort out the evidence they provide which is evidence in
18 their own self-interest and evidence against their
19 self-interest. If you apply that kind of criterion to the
20 statements and diaries — for example, what he writes
21 about himself, you have to be mistrustful about, even when
22 he writes about Hitler you have to be mistrustful because
23 there is the element of the hero worship; but, on the
24 other hand, what he writes about two or three, C or D,
25 shall we say, in the alphabet, persons is more likely to
26 be accurate because he would have no axe to grind one way
. P-33
1 or the other. You have to apply these kinds of filters.
2 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Yes, Mr Irving. I will put it once more in order to get
3 the reader to think that Hitler’s policy towards the Jews
4 or the policy that he wanted was really quite kind,
5 gentle, much less ferocious and severe than Dr Goebbels,
6 you have actually doctored the words which Dr Goebbels
7 reports Hitler having said to him?
8 A. [Mr Irving]: What is the essence of this quotation, Mr Rampton? The
9 essence of this quotation is not all the rest of those
10 eight lines quoted by your Mr Evans. Yesterday the
11 quotation to the words does not cause us unnecessary
12 difficulties. That is Adolf Hitler saying to Goebbels,
13 “Don’t cause us unnecessary difficulties” and there is no
14 way you can talk yourself out of that particular
15 quotation, Mr Rampton.
16 Q. [Mr Rampton]: We can echo that with what General Bruns reported and what
17 Wisliceny reported. “Do not let us make a stink about it,
18 but let us be very energetic in this persecution, discreet
19 cautious, careful, concealed”?
20 A. [Mr Irving]: Well, no doubt you will advance documents and lead
21 evidence in that direction, but those very words, Adolf
22 Hitler, quoted even by the victim himself, Goebbels
23 himself, at whom the criticism is being directed, saying,
24 “Do not cause us unnecessary difficulties”. There is no
25 way that your Mr Evans or you yourself, Mr Rampton, can
26 talk yourself out of those five words. Whatever else you
. P-34
1 want to say about the rest of that quotation and what use
2 is made of it mind. Do you want me to have two or three
3 times as much quoted from the diary? If I did that, the
4 book would have been 2,000 pages long.
5 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Do you not see a difference between “unnecessary” and
6 “endless”?
7 A. [Mr Irving]: No, not in burden, not in weight, not in thrust, not in
8 push, not in emphasis.
9 Q. [Mr Rampton]: “An energetic policy will cause some difficulties, but let
10 us do it in a way that does not cause difficulties which
11 are not necessary to the carrying out of the energetic
12 policy”?
13 A. [Mr Irving]: Well, the energetic policy, of course, we have accepted;
14 people were being roused in the middle of the night by the
15 Gestapo and given half an hour to pack their goods and
16 packed on trains to Riga and Minsk. That is an energetic
17 policy and there is no denial of that in this book.
18 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Now, I want to, if I may, go back to these table talks?
19 A. [Mr Irving]: Hitler is saying, “For God’s sake, do not take it too
20 far. You are causing us a problem.
21 Q. [Mr Rampton]: For which you will still need Professor Evans in a
22 moment. Am I right that you gave us — I am not going to
23 go to the transcript; it is too time consuming — the
24 impression — you will tell me if I am wrong — yesterday
25 that these table talks were little private gatherings
26 between often, not always of course, Hitler and, say,
. P-35
1 Himmler or Goebbels, the Nazi high ups, perhaps Heydrich
2 might be there as a particular honour, and, therefore,
3 there was absolutely no bar, inhibition or restraint on
4 the use of direct language about what was happening, for
5 example, in the East?
6 A. [Mr Irving]: Not completely right, Mr Rampton, because certain subjects
7 were taboo. That I do grant.
8 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Yes.
9 A. [Mr Irving]: The Schierak ^^ family at the end of June 1943, when
10 Henrietta von Schierak ^^ said to Hitler that she had seen
11 Jews being loaded on tucks in Amsterdam and was this kind
12 of inhumanity necessary? There was a lot of glaring went
13 on and the family was banished from Hitler’s house for the
14 rest of the war.
15 MR JUSTICE GRAY: All right, but the fact is I think you were
16 suggesting there was a degree of candour because Hitler
17 was amongst friends?
18 A. [Mr Irving]: Well, he is talking to people whom we know were actually
19 the mass murderers, but I was asked a question, Mr Rampton
20 asked, I tried to answer honestly that, in fact, they were
21 taboo subjects.
22 MR RAMPTON There will have been at many of these lunches, or
23 I do not know whether they were really lunches or dinners
24 or whatever, a whole lot of people who were not Himmler or
25 Goebbels, but much lower down the scale, were there not?
26 A. [Mr Irving]: People like Heinreich Heim who was Martin Bormann’s
. P-36
1 private adjutant and took the initial record. He was
2 present.
3 Q. [Mr Rampton]: And secretaries and, what are they called, orderlies?
4 A. [Mr Irving]: Yes.
5 Q. [Mr Rampton]: People like Schmunet, Schau?
6 A. [Mr Irving]: Yes.
7 Q. [Mr Rampton]: The secretary, Krista Schroeder — people like that?
8 A. [Mr Irving]: Yes.
9 Q. [Mr Rampton]: So it is hardly surprising that in that company, as
10 opposed to direct face, one-to-one discussion with Himmler
11 or Goebbels, Hitler’s language should be somewhat cloaked?
12 A. [Mr Irving]: That is possible, yes.
13 Q. [Mr Rampton]: I am going to deal with it now because I do not want to
14 have to come back to it. Do you remember, you have
15 published this information (and as information certainly
16 not disputed by us) there was a report, I think, in March
17 1943, by Himmler’s statistician, a man called ^^ Korheir?
18 A. [Mr Irving]: Dr Richard Korheir.
19 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Yes. Dr Korheir in which at I think about page, what was
20 it, 20 — I cannot remember the page number — a long
21 report, he gave a total for the number of Jews that had
22 been killed up to that date, and he separated the Wartige
23 from the General Government, and I think the total comes
24 to about 1.4 million, does it not?
25 A. [Mr Irving]: I am going to have to take issue with the way you describe
26 the report.
. P-37
1 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Well —-
2 A. [Mr Irving]: Because this is going into the record, you said “had been
3 killed”.
4 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Well the word actually used was “zondebehandlung”?
5 A. [Mr Irving]: Yes, but Dr Korheir, not many years ago, wrote a letter to
6 Das Spiegel which is published in which he said that at
7 the time he wrote the report he had no notion that is what
8 that word means. He was a straightforward statistician,
9 just doing a job on the basis of documents shown to him.
10 Q. [Mr Rampton]: That is exactly my point.
11 A. [Mr Irving]: But you said “killed”. Can we be precise about the use of
12 words.
13 MR JUSTICE GRAY: “Disposed of”?
14 A. [Mr Irving]: Disposed of.
15 MR RAMPTON You see, you must be patient because my questions
16 build on each other — at least they usually do?
17 A. [Mr Irving]: But that goes into the transcript of me agreeing to you
18 that you are saying that it said that.
19 Q. [Mr Rampton]: No, but perhaps you will agree in just a moment the word
20 actually used was “zondebehandlung”?
21 A. [Mr Irving]: “Zondebehandlung zugefuhrt”.
22 Q. [Mr Rampton]: I do not have the document.
23 A. [Mr Irving]: That is the actual phrase that he uses.
24 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Himmler had the report typed up in the large Fuhrer type
25 so that Hitler could read it; whether he did or not is
26 another matter, but he did, did he not?
. P-38
1 A. [Mr Irving]: It was not typed in the large Fuhrer type. It was typed
2 in the small regular German office typewriter. I have
3 never seen a version in the large Fuhrer type of that
4 report.
5 Q. [Mr Rampton]: I forget which of your books it is that I read it in, but
6 the assertion by you is that there was a copy prepared for
7 Hitler to read by Himmler?
8 A. [Mr Irving]: An abridged version for Hitler.
9 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Just be patient, but is what you tell us in your book, is
10 it not?
11 A. [Mr Irving]: You were speaking about the 20 page version.
12 Q. [Mr Rampton]: The which?
13 A. [Mr Irving]: You were speaking originally about the 20 page version.
14 Q. [Mr Rampton]: You had better give me a moment to find it. The trouble
15 is that your books, like many books, are not as well
16 indexed as they might be.
17 A. [Mr Irving]: Blame the index now.
18 Q. [Mr Rampton]: I think it is in Hitler’s War 1977. You do not remember
19 the page reference, do you?
20 A. [Mr Irving]: 503 to 504.
21 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Well done, Mr Irving.
22 A. [Mr Irving]: From the index.
23 MR RAMPTON My Lord, it is part 2.
24 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Yes. Is this point raised anywhere in the
25 pleadings, as a matter of interest?
26 MR RAMPTON No, it is not. Actually, I noticed it sometime
. P-39
1 ago, but this arises not as an example of distortion by
2 Mr Irving because it is not. This is a true story. It
3 arises for the reason that I will make clear in a moment
4 which is directly relevant to the way in which we would
5 suggest that the table talks, the language used at the
6 table talks was in some sense sanitized. Perhaps I should
7 start at the second paragraph on page 503? “Nor did
8 Himmler evidently raise with Hitler the progress made on
9 the Jewish problem during their two hour mountain stroll
10 on March 30th”. This is 1943, is it not?
11 A. [Mr Irving]: 1943.
12 Q. [Mr Rampton]: I did say that. “Hitler wearing a soft peek cap to shade
13 his eyes against the alpine glare. Earlier in 1943,
14 Himmler had submitted to him”, that is Hitler, is it, I do
15 not know, “a statistical report on a similar
16 topic… (reading to the words) … he had sponsored since
17 Hitler’s written order of October 1939. The report was
18 typed on a special large face typewriter and clearly went
19 to the Fuhrer”?
20 A. [Mr Irving]: That one. In other words, the earlier report was.
21 Q. [Mr Rampton]: I follow you. That is all right. “But did Hitler ever
22 see the statistical report that the Reichsfuhrer had
23 commissioned at the same time on the Final Solution to the
24 Jewish problem in Europe”. That is what the report is
25 called, is it?
26 A. [Mr Irving]: Yes, that is correct.
. P-40
1 Q. [Mr Rampton]: “In dry tones Hitler’s chief statistician, Dr Richard
2 Korheir, had analysed the fate of the world’s estimated 17
3 million Jews. Europe’s 10 million had dwindled by 45 per
4 cent since 1937 owing to emigration and a high natural
5 mortality rate and the enforced”, and these are your
6 quotes, are they, “evacuation”?
7 A. [Mr Irving]: Yes.
8 Q. [Mr Rampton]: That is not taken from Korheir?
9 A. [Mr Irving]: He uses “evakierung” but, of course, I think we are agreed
10 that “evakierung” often has an ugly connotation.
11 Q. [Mr Rampton]: In 1977 you believed it had the ugliest of all
12 connotations, did you not?
13 A. [Mr Irving]: I repeat what I said. It often has the ugliest, almost
14 sinister, connotation.
15 Q. [Mr Rampton]: “The evacuation that had begun with the prohibition of
16 emigration … (reading to the words) … To Himmler’s
17 annoyance, on reading the 16 page document on March 23rd,
18 he found that it stated expressis ^^ verbage”, that is in
19 actual words explicitly, “on page 9 that of the 1,449,692
20 Jews deported from the Eastern provinces, 1,274,166 had
21 been subjected to ‘special treatment'” — now, that is
22 zondebehandlung, is it not —-
23 A. [Mr Irving]: Yes.
24 Q. [Mr Rampton]: — “at camps in the General Government and a further
25 145,301 similarly dealt with in the Warthegau. Himmler
26 knew too well that the Fuhrer had in November 1941 ordered
. P-41
1 that the Jews”, general, “were”, italics, “not to be
2 liquidated. On April 1st he had the report edited ‘for
3 submission to the Fuhrer’ and a few days later, lest he
4 had not made himself plain, instructed that in version for
5 the Fuhrer he ‘did not want there to be any mention of
6 special treatment of Jews’ whatever”.
7 According to the new text the Jews would have
8 been ‘channelled through’ the camps to Russia
9 not ‘subjected to special treatment’ at the camps. As he
10 wrote on April 9th, the report would serve magnificently
11 for ‘camouflage purposes’ in later years. Camouflage from
12 whom, Mr Irving?
13 A. [Mr Irving]: It does not say but, of course, this passage has remained
14 the same in all versions of my book. I think it is an
15 eminently satisfactory description of the kind of things
16 that were going on at the highest level. People were
17 withholding things from people.
18 Q. [Mr Rampton]: I am not going to reengage on the argument about the
19 so-called Fuhrer order of 30th November 1941. We have
20 been down that road.
21 A. [Mr Irving]: That passage was removed from the subsequent editions.
22 MR JUSTICE GRAY: We know all about that. What is the
23 relevance to table talk?
24 MR RAMPTON We have had all that. The relevance of this is
25 the words unterbehandlung. You see, I suggest to you,
26 Mr Irving, that the reason why that was taken out had
. P-42
1 nothing whatever to do with the Fuhrer learning of
2 something which he did not ought to know, because the fact
3 is, if the word unterbehandlung had been in there, he
4 would have known exactly what was being talked about,
5 would he not?
6 A. [Mr Irving]: I do not think so. The word unterbehandlung was a very
7 common German word, frequently used by even Himmler in
8 totally different —-
9 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Then why did Himmler have it edited?
10 A. [Mr Irving]: He wanted the report cut down from 16 pages to 9 pages
11 which is one thing that is quite plain, but he also wanted
12 the explicitness, and I have made this quite plain in
13 this, that ugly things are happening in the East, and he
14 does not want Hitler being told, he does not want his nose
15 being rubbed in it. Let us put it like that.
16 Q. [Mr Rampton]: I do not know what the German says but, “subjected to
17 special treatment” is a good deal shorter than “channelled
18 through to camps in Russia”.
19 A. [Mr Irving]: If you subject people to special treatment at camps, then
20 this has a very sinister connotation indeed. “Channelled
21 through those camps to the east” has a less sinister
22 connotation. My primitive reading of this document, and
23 maybe you will educate the court differently, is that this
24 is being withheld from Hitler. Himmler is saying to the
25 statistician, “Write a different version for submission to
26 Fuhrer”. These words do not occur.
. P-43
1 Q. [Mr Rampton]: No, Mr Irving.
2 A. [Mr Irving]: You keep interrupting me.
3 Q. [Mr Rampton]: No, Mr Irving, I do not accept that. What Himmler has
4 done is precisely what he said he did. He has camouflaged
5 it so that, when Hitler reads it, he is not going to go
6 through the roof and say, you cannot have a document
7 talking about zonderbehandlung. We all know what that
8 means.
9 A. [Mr Irving]: Unless you are going to lead evidence which actually bears
10 that out, I do not think there is any sustainability
11 whatsoever.
12 Q. [Mr Rampton]: I am offering you another perfectly natural —-
13 A. [Mr Irving]: I think it is a perverse interpretation. If Himmler is
14 saying this is an excellent document for camouflage
15 purposes, and says “I want a short version for submission
16 to the Fuhrer which does not mention these sinister
17 words”, I think that my interpretation is the most obvious
18 interpretation, and in fact I think it bears out
19 everything I have said all along, that there is monkey
20 work going on along here, and either it is the Richard
21 Nixon complex, as I call it, where Hitler may admittedly
22 have said, “Do what you want, Mr Himmler, but do not let
23 me be told”, which I am perfectly prepared to accept may
24 have happened.
25 Q. [Mr Rampton]: I suggest to you that precisely the same sort of exercise
26 took place at the table talks. In other words, camouflage
. P-44
1 language, slightly more delicate language was used than
2 would have been used between, say Hitler and Himmler when
3 discussing these matters.
4 A. [Mr Irving]: Mr Rampton, I have had the advantage — you are familiar
5 with the table talks, you are also familiar with the
6 German version which has more recently been published.
7 The table talk was written by Martin Bormann’s adjutant,
8 Heinreich Heim. Heinrich Heim was a person that
9 I interviewed at great depth personally while he was still
10 alive. He was a very educated, cultivated man, an art
11 collector, oddly enough, in private life. I questioned
12 him in great deal as to how much about the final solution
13 was discussed. You are not listening to what I say so
14 there is no point in my continuing.
15 MR JUSTICE GRAY: I am.
16 A. [Mr Irving]: Perhaps Mr Rampton is just pretending he is not
17 listening. I questioned Mr Heim and the other Adjutants
18 in great detail as to how much was discussed in these kind
19 of circles, and there was no discussion whatsoever of any
20 kind of mass extermination of the Jews at Hitler’s table
21 or in private or else where at Hitler’s headquarters,
22 which is what I find very disturbing because I satisfied
23 myself, possibly not the court but I satisfied myself,
24 that I had won these people’s confidence.
25 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Can you turn to page 426 of the Professor Evans report
26 please?
. P-45
1 A. [Mr Irving]: We are moving on to a new topic now, are we?
2 Q. [Mr Rampton]: No. We are still on table talk. Henry — was he called
3 Henry — was one of those two people who wrote down what
4 Hitler said at these table talks, was he not?
5 A. [Mr Irving]: Not strictly accurate.
6 Q. [Mr Rampton]: You tell me, then.
7 A. [Mr Irving]: The primary scribe was Mr Heim, the gentleman I have just
8 mentioned. When he was relieved by Henry Picker, Henry
9 Picker found in the desk a large number of Heim’s original
10 transcripts, and he published them under his own name in
11 the third person. So he was not always the person who was
12 himself present in the case of Mr Picker.
13 Q. [Mr Rampton]: But Mr Picker would have been there on a number of these
14 occasions, would he?
15 A. [Mr Irving]: Yes, particularly from 1942 onwards.
16 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Can I read from the second sentence on 426? You tell me
17 whether this is right or not. “Henry Picker, who took the
18 notes at the table talk of 24th July 1942, which I promise
19 you we are coming to, claimed that Hitler, even in his
20 private circle, had ‘never forgotten to keep silent about
21 things for which there was no resonance among his table
22 companions as amongst the broad mass of out people”‘ — it
23 must be “our people”, unsere volkes. “Only take the
24 persecution of the Jews, which he obscured before his
25 table companions with references to preparations for the
26 establishment of a Jewish national state on the island of
. P-46
1 Madagascar, or alternatively in central Africa.” That was
2 published in, I think, Berlin in 1997 but also in London
3 in 1994?
4 A. [Mr Irving]: 1977.
5 Q. [Mr Rampton]: What?
6 A. [Mr Irving]: Can we be quite plain that this is not actually wartime
7 writing there?
8 Q. [Mr Rampton]: I realise that.
Section details 47.9-62.20
9 A. [Mr Irving]: This is writing by Mr Picker 32 years after the war was
10 over and the climate in German where people were put in
11 prison for having the wrong opinions. He wanted to
12 publish a volume of Hitler’s sayings, so he wrote a
13 suitably politically correct introduction.
14 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Can you tell me because I have missed it?
15 Picker was what? A secretary or something more senior?
16 A. [Mr Irving]: He replaced Henry Heim as Martin Bormann’s adjutant at
17 Hitler’s table talk, and from 1942 he took over the task
18 of writing down Hitler’s table conversations in this
19 summary form. He died a few years ago. This was
20 published in 1977, at the time when this persecution in
21 Germany had already begun.
22 MR RAMPTON You see, this is perhaps reflected, is it not, in
23 something — do you remember Kurt Engel?
24 A. [Mr Irving]: Gebhardt Engel, Hitler’s army adjutant.
25 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Yes. You interviewed him, I think, in 1971 on several
26 occasions?
. P-47
1 A. [Mr Irving]: On several occasions.
2 Q. [Mr Rampton]: This is the only version I have of it at the moment. Do
3 you have Professor Evans’ supplementary or amendment
4 pages?
5 A. [Mr Irving]: I have received them, but I have not even had time to look
6 at them yet. That is the 18 pages that I referred to.
7 Q. [Mr Rampton]: You have not got it here?
8 A. [Mr Irving]: I can comment on.
9 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Put the point, Mr Rampton. I think Mr Irving
10 is saying he can cope.
11 MR RAMPTON Well, I think he should have it.
12 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Can he have a copy?
13 MR RAMPTON I have a copy.
14 A. [Mr Irving]: Thank you very much.
15 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Paragraph 12 on page 16, Mr Irving.
16 A. [Mr Irving]: Yes. This is the written transcript that I made after the
17 interview with Engel.
18 Q. [Mr Rampton]: That is what I understand. I think I have the original
19 here.
20 A. [Mr Irving]: Yes.
21 Q. [Mr Rampton]: I do not know your handwriting but this must be you. Your
22 handwriting is legible, so I can read the handwriting.
23 A. [Mr Irving]: I can explain. After every interview with one of these
24 gentleman I sat down and wrote a formal protocol on what
25 had been discussed between us.
26 Q. [Mr Rampton]: I think it is best if you just look at this document that
. P-48
1 I have, so that in the transcript you have identified it
2 as your document.
3 A. [Mr Irving]: Notes on the second interview with General Gerhardt Engel
4 at his office, WAH, which is an arms dealers, Dusseldorf
5 and so on, 9th December 1970. Then it is the second one
6 that you are relying on? Notes on the interview of General
7 Gerhardt Engel at his home Dusseldorf, April 5, 1971, in
8 handwriting.
9 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Could I have it back?
10 A. [Mr Irving]: I just want to make sure that nothing has been omitted.
11 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Do check it against the typescript in case of error.
12 Thank you. I will read from your manuscript:”When I asked
13 his views on Hitler’s association with Juden Hausroten (?)
14 he confirmed broadly Carl Wolf’s statements, and added
15 that the Fuhrerbefallen,” that means Fuhrer orders.
16 A. [Mr Irving]: Is it? Can I check that?
17 MR JUSTICE GRAY: It must be, from the sense. It is in the
18 singular but it must really be the plural.
19 MR RAMPTON There is not just one Fuhrer order throughout the
20 war, is there? It has an E on the end.
21 MR JUSTICE GRAY: It has not in Professor Evans?
22 A. [Mr Irving]: I accept that it should have an E on the end.
23 MR RAMPTON It has in the manuscript. That is why I am glad I
24 have the manuscript. “Frequently resulted from remarks F,
25 that is Fuhrer, made at his late discussions, vo ‘Hitler
26 dutzierte stundenlang’ (?). That should have a small S,
. P-49
1 should it? Yes, it is an adverb. He referred to the
2 Hewell tagerbruf (?) as proof.” That means Hitler just
3 rattled on for a long time. That is all that means, is it
4 not? “He never summarized the conclusions of these
5 discussions. Each was left to pick his own meat from the
6 talk, Himmler in his way quiet but efficient, (that was
7 how the three quarters of a million strong Waffen (?) SS
8 had been born and Bormann more crudely issuing edicts on
9 party notepaper beginning der Fuhrer hat befallen” etc.
10 That is exactly what would have happened?
11 A. [Mr Irving]: Yes. You note incidentally that this is part of my
12 collection in Munich which I no longer have access to.
13 Q. [Mr Rampton]: We must have got this from Munich I suppose?
14 A. [Mr Irving]: It has come from the Institute in Munich as part of the
15 early collection which is now denied to me.
16 Q. [Mr Rampton]: If you would like copies of these, we can certainly give
17 them to you.
18 A. [Mr Irving]: Very generous of you.
19 MR JUSTICE GRAY: What is the point on this?
20 MR RAMPTON The point on this is that what Engel is saying
21 there reflects what Picker has said in 19 whenever it was
22 after the war, that if there are a lot of people, or even
23 a few people, unless they are the two or three high
24 ranking people alone, Hitler would use euphemism. He
25 would use a sort of a thought process. To Himmler, for
26 example, Siberia would mean extermination. To somebody
. P-50
1 else who was not in the know it might mean Siberia. Do
2 you follow me?
3 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Is that really right? Picker is talking
4 about euphemisms, but Engel is talking about something
5 rather different. That is how a Hitler order emerges. Is
6 that not a different point?
7 MR RAMPTON It is part of the same process.
8 A. [Mr Irving]: It is a very clear picture, in fact, those two lines, of
9 how these Himmler orders emerged, that Bormann would be
10 hanging around in the background with a note pad writing
11 things down, and eventually an order would be drafted,
12 sent out as the Fuhrer has ordered, and sometimes it was
13 not what Hitler had ordered at all. There are famous
14 examples where Hitler learned of these orders months later
15 and said,”Who ordered this?”
16 Q. [Mr Rampton]: I am sure that from time to time people got the wrong end
17 of the stick but, if Hitler is talking about evacuation of
18 the Jews at one of these table talks and is saying, “we
19 must get on with it” for example, then Himmler will know
20 exactly what Hitler is talking about, and Hitler does not
21 have to talk about extermination, does he?
22 A. [Mr Irving]: Mr Rampton, it is precisely why not only I question but
23 also the allied interrogators questioned all these
24 surviving members of Hitler’s staff very closely on this
25 very point. How much discussion was there, whether veiled
26 or otherwise? I have to say that I am not saying there
. P-51
1 was no discussion. There is one famous episode, if I can
2 just relate for two minute, where Hitler’s film camera man
3 personally witnessed a mass shooting of the Jews outside
4 Minsk in August 1941. He had been there with Himmler. He
5 is still alive. I am the one who weedled this story out
6 of him. He came back to Hitler’s headquarters with the
7 photographs in his camera. He showed the photographs to
8 General Schmundt, Hitler’s wehrmacht adjutant, and
9 Schmundt said to him, “If you know what is good for you,
10 you will destroy these photographs”, which is what I put
11 in my book also. What do you make of a statement like
12 that?
13 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Can I go back to where we started and ask you
14 whether you do or not accept that Picker is giving an
15 accurate portrayal of talk within Hitler’s private circle
16 when he says that there is an element of camouflaging
17 about the language that was used.
18 Q. [Mr Rampton]: I do not accept that, my Lord. I fully accept his
19 transcripts that are published as transcripts in his
20 volume, which is very similar to the table talks but in
21 the third person instead of being in the first person.
22 Q. [Mr Justice Gray]: That is not really answering my point.
23 A. [Mr Irving]: I am just about to answer, my Lord. What has been quoted
24 from, the passage you are asking me about, is not written
25 during the war. It is written in 1977, when the climate
26 of fear in Germany has grown to such an extent that
. P-52
1 everybody who wants to write a book about Adolf Hitler has
2 to put in a politically correct introduction to make sure
3 it gets past the census. In Germany they have a book
4 censorship body which burns books and closes down
5 bookstores and arrests authors. In order to make sure you
6 get past this book censorship body in modern Germany, you
7 put in politically correct statements in order to avoid
8 trouble. This is a typical example of the kind of
9 politically correct statement to which I would attach no
10 evidentiary weight whatsoever without supporting material.
11 MR JUSTICE GRAY: That is clear answer. Thank you very much.
12 MR RAMPTON I am still on table talks Mr Irving. In Hitler’s
13 War 1991, there is a reference on page The gulf between
14 the actual atrocities in the east, and what Hitler knew or
15 said about them, widened. Over lunch on May 15 Hitler
16 again merely spoke to staff about transporting the Jews
17 eastward; her referred indignantly to the misplaced
18 sympathies of the bourgeoisie. How well the Jews were
19 faring, he remarked, compared with the German emigrants of
20 the nineteenth century – many of whom had even died on
21 route to Australia! Goebbels, unhappy that forty thousand
22 Jews still remained in’his’ Berlin, raised the subject at
23 lunch with Hitler on the twenty-ninth. (‘I once again
24 inform the Fuhrer on my plan to evacuate every single Jew
25 from Berlin…’) Hitler merely expatiated on the best
26 post-war homeland for the Jews. Siberia was out- that
. P-53
1 would just produce an even tougher baccilus strain of
2 Jews; Palestine was out too- the Arabs did not want them;
3 perhaps central Africa? At all events, he summed up,
4 western Europe must be liberated of its Jews – there could
5 be no homeland for them there. As late as July 24 Hitler
6 was still referring at table to his plan to transport the
7 Jews to Madagascar – by now already in British hands- or
8 some other Jewish national home after the war was over.”
9 So you there, as it were, made use of four different
10 records?
11 A. [Mr Irving]: Yes.
12 Q. [Mr Rampton]: The table talk of the 15th May, Goebbels’ diary of 30th
13 May?
14 A. [Mr Irving]: Yes.
15 Q. [Mr Rampton]: The table talk of 29th May?
16 A. [Mr Irving]: Yes.
17 Q. [Mr Rampton]: And the table talk of 24th July?
18 A. [Mr Irving]: Yes. The Goebbels’ diary of May 30th would refer of
19 course to the events of May 29th.
20 Q. [Mr Rampton]: That is absolutely right. I would like you again, if you
21 will, to look at the supplement to Professor Evans’ report
22 where you will see I think on page 8, starting under the
23 cross line, a rather fuller translation of Goebbels’ diary
24 entry for 30th May 1942. To save my voice and with his
25 Lordship’s permission, it is quite a long passage, I would
26 ask you to read the English. If you have any problems
. P-54
1 with it, the German is printed underneath. Starting with
2 the small type on page 8 and ending with the words “here
3 they will not be allowed to have any home any more” on
4 page 9.
5 A. [Mr Irving]: (Pause for reading) Acres of sludge, is it not? If I had
6 to put all that into a book, the book would sink under its
7 own weight.
8 Q. [Mr Rampton]: You have read that?
9 A. [Mr Irving]: Yes.
10 Q. [Mr Rampton]: On the next page, page 10 at paragraph 3, Professor Evans
11 has set out a translation of the table talk for the 29th
12 May 1942, and again I ask you to read that.
13 A. [Mr Irving]: (Pause for reading) He is suggesting that it is two
14 separate conversations.
15 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Yes. He is suggesting that it is two separate
16 conversations. What he is suggesting, and I think you may
17 agree with him, is that it is only the last part of the
18 Goebbels diary entry, from the middle of second paragraph
19 on page 9, that is in fact a report of the table talk
20 because there there is a degree of congruence. The words
21 are not identical but there is a great deal of similarity
22 in the subject matter between what Goebbels wrote in that
23 short passage and what we find in the table talk on pages
24 10 and 11.
25 A. [Mr Irving]: These two records are created in totally different ways,
26 of course. Henry Picker would sit at a side table with a
. P-55
1 note pad, writing down things as they were said on which
2 he would then base his subsequent dictation. Dr Goebbels
3 would wait until the following morning, the first hour in
4 his working day, to summon his stenographer, and he would
5 dictate a diary on the previous days events.
6 Q. [Mr Rampton]: But the point might be this, might it not, Mr Irving?
7 Dr Goebbels will have recorded a whole day’s events, as
8 you say, over many pages.
9 A. [Mr Irving]: Yes, but, if there were two or three separate
10 conversations, it is quite possible that he would have
11 coalesced them.
12 Q. [Mr Rampton]: You see, what I am suggesting is that the first part, down
13 to the middle of the second paragraph on page 9,
14 starting “How little the Jews can assimilate themselves”,
15 the first part which ends “Therefore, one must liquidate
16 the Jewish danger, cost what it will”, I think in German ,
17 “Deshalb, muss man die jedische Gefall-Liquidierung Koste
18 es was es wollen”. That is not table talk.
19 A. [Mr Irving]: I cannot find it.
20 Q. [Mr Rampton]: If you want to have a little time?
21 A. [Mr Irving]: No. I think I can cope with it.
22 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Mr Rampton, I hesitate to say this and it is
23 my fault. I am afraid you have lost me. I am not
24 following the point that is being made which is presumably
25 eventually a criticism of 465?
26 A. [Mr Irving]: I will do it more precisely.
. P-56
1 A. [Mr Irving]: It is a problem that authors frequently have. When
2 material comes in late, you attach far more significance
3 to it than it really deserves.
4 MR RAMPTON You must leave judgments about significance to me
5 and his Lordship, Mr Irving. You will make your own, no
6 doubt.
7 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Mr Rampton, it is my fault, I am sure, but I
8 am just not quite following what we are on at the moment.
9 MR RAMPTON I have tried to take it quickly because this sort
10 of exercise is tedious. What happens in the end of course
11 is that, if you do it too quickly, it gets into a muddle.
12 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Fill me in.
13 MR RAMPTON On page 9 there is a sentence which begins, “How
14 little the Jews can assimilate themselves to Western
15 european life in reality can be seen from the fact”, and
16 so on, and there is a good deal —-
17 A. [Mr Irving]: Halfway down the second paragraph.
18 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Halfway down the second paragraph on page 9.
19 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Yes, I have that.
20 MR RAMPTON They get put into a ghetto, they become very
21 quickly ghetto-ised again, then there is talk about
22 Siberia and then about central Africa.
23 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Yes.
24 MR RAMPTON That is reflected in the table talk on page 10,
25 starting with the words in the third line “The whole
26 prudity of the Jewish people really finds expression” and
. P-57
1 so on and so forth. Then there is a reference to the
2 ghetto, and then on the next page there is a reference to
3 Siberia, and on the next page the reference to Africa, and
4 probably one can stop there so far as the Goebbels’ diary
5 entry is concerned.
6 MR JUSTICE GRAY: That much I follow. What is the
7 significance?
8 MR RAMPTON The significance is this. What I am putting to
9 Mr Irving is that the earlier part of the Goebbels’ diary
10 entry, certainly down to the end of the first paragraph on
11 page 9, has nothing to do with the table talk at all, but
12 represents a private conversation between Hitler and
13 Goebbels.
14 A. [Mr Irving]: Well, that is an adventurous presumption, I think. If you
15 look at the Weidenfeld edition of the table talk, there is
16 yet again a totally different version of that table talk,
17 and Professor Evans has ignored that completely.
18 Q. [Mr Rampton]: I am not worrying about that.
19 A. [Mr Irving]: It worries me. It should worry. It should have worried
20 Professor Evans too, the fact that there are three
21 different versions of the same thing.
22 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Mr Irving, please, can we stick to the point? If you read
23 the first two paragraphs on pages 8 and 9, what you see is
24 something a very great deal blunter about the fate of the
25 Jews from both sides to the conversation, if it be
26 Goebbels and Hitler, than you ever find in the table
. P-58
1 talks.
2 A. [Mr Irving]: (Pause for reading) You mean the argument about the need
3 to keep the equilibrium?
4 Q. [Mr Rampton]: And the suggestion, perhaps more than a suggestion, the
5 proposal, that it is probably going to be necessary to
6 kill all the people in the prisons as well, because the
7 sentence about the prisoners starts with the little German
8 word “auch”.
9 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Where are you, Mr Rampton?
10 A. [Mr Irving]: I cannot see any plan to kill people in the prisons.
11 MR RAMPTON Page 8, my Lord, in indent in small type, there is
12 some talk about the Jews. “Thus I plead once again for a
13 more radical Jewish policy”, this is middle of the page,
14 “whereby I am just pushing at an open door with the
15 Fuhrer”. This has been quoted by a number of people but
16 without the context. “The Fuhrer is of the opinion that
17 the danger will become greater for us personally the more
18 critical the war situation becomes. We find ourselves in
19 a similar situation to that of the second half of 1932
20 where bashing and stabbing were the order of the day and
21 one had to take all possible security measures to escape
22 from such a development in one piece. The extermination
23 of criminals”, and there is no ambiguity about this, “is
24 also a necessity of state policy”, but the German sentence
25 which you find on page 9, when he goes on to say: “Auch
26 die ausmerzung ist ein stattspolitische notwendigkeit”,
. P-59
1 necessity. What I am suggesting is that Goebbels and
2 Hitler had a fairly frank conversation about the fate of
3 the Jews and indeed of the prisoners but, when you get to
4 the table, the larger audience. That all goes up into the
5 air into airy talk about central Africa and Siberia.
6 A. [Mr Irving]: May I just comment that to translate “ausmerzung” as
7 uniquely as “extermination” is either showing the
8 bankruptcy of Professor Evans’ vocabulary. Ausmerzung has
9 a very wide range of meanings. It is very similar to
10 “ausschlossung”. It is rubbing out, wiping out,
11 disposing of.
12 Q. [Mr Rampton]: You can argue with Professor Evans about that, Mr Irving.
13 A. [Mr Irving]: I certainly shall.
14 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Mr Rampton, am I wrong in thinking, if this
15 is important, I do not know, that the first paragraph of
16 this extract from the diary entry is dealing with the
17 particular problem in Berlin and the dilemma whether you
18 keep the Jews there, because they are better working in
19 armaments factory than having in potentially criminal
20 elements from the East, or wherever. Then it seems to go
21 on to the rather wider question what will happen to people
22 in prison if the war situation gets much worse.
23 MR RAMPTON Yes.
24 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Is that fair?
25 MR RAMPTON Yes. What I am suggesting is that the use of the
26 word “also” or “auch” may be tending to suggest that the
. P-60
1 more radical solution of which Dr Goebbels spoke was the
2 same as that which was going to befall the criminals.
3 After all, if it had by this time already been decided, as
4 undoubtedly it had, that the German Jews were going to be
5 deported, and lot of Berlin Jews had already gone by May
6 1942, it could hardly be, could it, Mr Irving, that Joseph
7 Goebbels would have been pleading for a more radical
8 policy in that regard? That is right, is it not?
9 A. [Mr Irving]: I am just totally baffled that you are hanging your entire
10 case on one little German word “auch” and, if I was in
11 that position, I think I would deserve to be hanged, drawn
12 and quartered. You have been bedazzled by this recent
13 acquisition rather like a new toy. You are trying to make
14 something out of it, but I am afraid that it escapes me
15 and I think may very well have escaped the court. What
16 point are you trying to make out of it? What is
17 significant in the quotation is that Hitler is saying once
18 again, “There is no point sending them to Siberia because
19 that will just toughen them. Let us send them to Africa.
20 That is a more reasonable solution.” Once again, he is
21 not talking about killing.
22 Q. [Mr Rampton]: In May 1942 send them to Africa?
23 A. [Mr Irving]: I am just repeating what is in the documents.
24 MR JUSTICE GRAY: That is what the document says.
25 MR RAMPTON Yes, it is what the document says but it was not a
26 realistic possibility.
. P-61
1 A. [Mr Irving]: Hitler was hoping to win the war, I remind you of that
2 fact. He was an optimist. He was an incurable optimist.
3 People, when they get in that position, hope to win, the
4 same as the defendants in this action. They do not
5 necessarily paint a worse case scenario.
6 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Mr Rampton, just so that I try and understand
7 the point that we have been spending a little time on, and
8 looking at it in terms of where you say the manipulation
9 or the distortion occurs in volume 2 of Hitler’s War 1991,
10 you would criticise Mr Irving’s sentence which reads: “But
11 he evidently never discussed these realities with Hitler”.
12 MR RAMPTON Yes, indeed.
13 MR JUSTICE GRAY: That is the point, is it?
14 MR RAMPTON Yes.
15 A. [Mr Irving]: I am not going to respond to that, my Lord, because
16 I think that that is not a fair conclusion from this
17 material. I think the real allegation is that Mr Rampton
18 would have liked that I ladled acres of sludge into my
19 manuscript, rather the way Professor Evans has, which
20 would have sunken without trace.
Section details 62.21-78.1
21 MR RAMPTON There it is. Now finally on table talks for the
22 moment at least, your favourite one, Mr Irving, which
23 I think is 24th July 1942.
24 A. [Mr Irving]: Only favourite because in a sense it brings this
25 particular phase to a end. It is the bottom line.
26 Q. [Mr Rampton]: It does what?
. P-62
1 A. [Mr Irving]: It brings this particular table talk phase to an end and
2 after that there is nothing more useful to be dug out of
3 them one way or another.
4 Q. [Mr Rampton]: The relevant part of it is very short, and I do not know
5 whether or not there is any way one can get more out of
6 it, but it is on page 422 of Professor Evans’ report.
7 A. [Mr Irving]: Interestingly, yet again, this is a passage which is in
8 the Picker version of the table talk, but not in the
9 original Heinich Heim version, so it may well be something
10 that can be attached to that.
11 MR JUSTICE GRAY: It may be that Picker was there and Heim was
12 not?
13 A. [Mr Irving]: Heim also wrote a version of the table talk that day, my
14 Lord, in the first person, so it is possible that Picker
15 added to the original from his own notes.
16 MR RAMPTON Let us look at 466 in your 1991 edition of
17 Hitler’s War, to start with?
18 A. [Mr Irving]: It is the first paragraph, about lines 6 and 7.
19 Q. [Mr Rampton]: “As late as July 24th”, this is the last part of the first
20 paragraph, “Hitler was still referring at table to his
21 plan to transport the Jews to Madagascar, by now already
22 in British hands, or some other Jewish national home after
23 the war was over.” Yes? Is that, do you think, a fair
24 rendering of that part of the table talk?
25 A. [Mr Irving]: I am sorry, did you read the table talk?
26 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Yes.
. P-63
1 MR RAMPTON I think we are maybe at cross purposes. That is a
2 fair rendering of the table for that day, is it, what you
3 wrote there?
4 A. [Mr Irving]: The table talk says, “After the war was over, he would
5 rigorously take the standpoint”, this is Hitler, “that he
6 would smash after city to pieces if the Jews did not come
7 out and emigrate to Madagascar or some other Jewish
8 national state”.
9 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Then it finishes up, I do not know how far down —-
10 A. [Mr Irving]: My reference I can quote “As late as July 24th”, this is
11 now me in my book, “Hitler was still referring at table to
12 his plan to transport the Jews to Madagascar by now
13 already in British hands or to some other Jewish national
14 home after the war was over”.
15 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Where in the table talk does the last piece in evidence
16 come?
17 A. [Mr Irving]: Which last piece?
18 MR JUSTICE GRAY: “Therefore significant”.
19 MR RAMPTON When it was reported to him that Lithuania was
20 also Jew free today, that was, therefore, significant?
21 A. [Mr Irving]: Well, first of all, we do not know what those three little
22 dots stand for in the case of Professor Evans. Those
23 little dots sometimes stand for two or three paragraphs or
24 even pages of text.
25 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Of course they can. Are you not familiar with this table
26 talk?
. P-64
1 A. [Mr Irving]: I have not got it with me.
2 MR JUSTICE GRAY: What is the significance of that last
3 sentence you have just read out, Mr Rampton? It makes no
4 sense to me at all.
5 MR RAMPTON What it means is that Hitler already knew that it
6 had happened in Lithuania.
7 A. [Mr Irving]: What had happened?
8 Q. [Mr Rampton]: The Jews had been removed from Lithuania?
9 A. [Mr Irving]: Yes.
10 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Why is that significant?
11 MR RAMPTON Because of what happened next and, of course, with
12 what had happened before.
13 A. [Mr Irving]: So you accuse me of a sin of omission yet again, in other
14 words, the book should have been 2,000 pages long instead
15 of 1,000.
16 Q. [Mr Rampton]: If his plan was to transport everybody to Madagascar after
17 the war, why should he think it is significant that
18 Lithuania was now Jew free?
19 A. [Mr Irving]: I do not know. We do not know what the preceding
20 sentences say, and I hesitate to express opinion there. It
21 looks like the corollary of something that he said in the
22 previous sentence which Professor Evans has not vouchsafed
23 to us.
24 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Is not the real point on this it was obvious,
25 or should have been obvious — this is Professor Evans to
26 Mr Irving — that this was a classic example of camouflage
. P-65
1 in Federation
2 MR RAMPTON Yes, absolutely.
3 A. [Mr Irving]: He could well argue that, but I would argue on the
4 contrary.
5 MR JUSTICE GRAY: That, as I understand it, is the way the case
6 is put on this particular table talk.
7 A. [Mr Irving]: Your Lordship will certainly attach whatever weight you
8 wish to to that, but the evidence is that Adolf Hitler,
9 certainly since June 1938, had adumbrated the Madagascar
10 plan, and he repeatedly referred to it in a rather wistful
11 kind of way. He discussed it with the German Navy. The
12 German Admiralty actually became involved in a detailed
13 plan, so did the German Foreign Office, so did various
14 subordinate departments. All I am saying in this sentence
15 is that as late as July 1942 in this rather madcap way he
16 is still talking of Madagascar.
17 MR RAMPTON Yes, but it is a question of whether you take him
18 seriously or not, is it not? That is what matters, from
19 history’s point of view.
20 A. [Mr Irving]: Should I have suppressed this sentence? Should I
21 have dropped it on the floor, the same way as your
22 historians have dropped the other documents on the floor
23 that do not fit into their arguments?
24 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Would you please turn over the page in Professor Evans’
25 report to page 423, you will see why it is that I suggest
26 that when Hitler talks of Madagascar in July 1942 at his
. P-66
1 table talk it is mere fanciful waffle. Look at paragraph
2 3 in Richard Evans’s report, please?
3 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Not just waffle, euphemism.
4 MR RAMPTON Yes, euphemism, yes. “By early 1942, it had thus
5 been made official that Hitler was no longer aiming at
6 driving Jews out of Europe to Africa. The Madagascar
7 plan, which had already been postponed indefinitely in the
8 Autumn of 1940, was now officially shelved. It is totally
9 misleading to speculate, as Irving does, that Hitler in
10 July 1942 ‘might still be dreaming of Madagascar’. On
11 10th February 1942 the Foreign Office official who had
12 first proposed the plan for deporting the Jews to
13 Madagascar in 1940 wrote that:
14 ‘Gruppenfuhrer Heydrich has been charged by the
15 Fuhrer with carrying out the solution of the Jewish
16 question in Europe. In the meantime, the war against the
17 Soviet Union has opened up the possibility of placing
18 other territories at our disposal for the Final Solution.
19 Accordingly, the Fuhrer has decided that the Jews should
20 be pushed off not to Madagascar but to the East.
21 Madagascar, therefore, does not need to be foreseen for
22 the final solution any more”?
23 A. [Mr Irving]: Are you implying that Heydrich was the one who called the
24 shots and not Hitler?
25 Q. [Mr Rampton]: This appears to be a report at secondhand, admittedly —-
26 A. [Mr Irving]: I am afraid this point rather operates against yourself.
. P-67
1 You are implying that Heydrich is the one who made the
2 decisions and not Hitler who is talking here still about
3 Madagascar. I am perfectly —-
4 MR JUSTICE GRAY: No, because it goes on to say that the Fuhrer
5 has made the decision that it should not be Madagascar.
6 MR RAMPTON The Fuhrer has decided.
7 A. [Mr Irving]: But here, quite clearly, the Fuhrer is still talking about
8 Madagascar in the way that Heads of State do.
9 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Yes, it is camouflage; it no longer means anything?
10 A. [Mr Irving]: May I remind you, why the Madagascar plan was dropped was
11 because Germany was not in a position to ship the stuff,
12 to get the shipping and to transport these emigres
13 overseas any more without the ships being torpedoed. He
14 is talking about after the war it would be nice if we
15 could resume the Madagascar plan.
16 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Maybe, so we can lay our hands on the remaining 4 million
17 Jews, perhaps?
18 A. [Mr Irving]: That is not exactly what he says, Mr Rampton. I have
19 adhered very closely to what is in the sources. It would
20 have been irresponsible of me to have ignored this remark
21 in the way that the historians have ignored the other
22 documents that do not fit in with their schemes.
23 I am writing a biography of Adolf Hitler, and
24 this is very clearly a germane document to include, but to
25 give it no more weight than I assigned to it.
26 Q. [Mr Rampton]: So is the Foreign Office document, is it not?
. P-68
1 A. [Mr Irving]: I have mentioned that at the appropriate place in this
2 very volume too.
3 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Well, the appropriate place, do you say that place — if
4 you do, I am wrong?
5 A. [Mr Irving]: I shall certainly look it out overnight and bring it
6 before the court so we do not have to waste more time.
7 Q. [Mr Rampton]: But, of course, Hitler had, in fact, already ordered
8 Madagascar to be taken off the menu back in February, so
9 this cannot be taken at face value. Did you write that
10 anywhere?
11 A. [Mr Irving]: Mr Rampton, these are your suppositions for which you have
12 no evidence. I can only work on the evidence which is in
13 the documents. The table talk, as I have always said, are
14 documents of a very high category of authenticity and
15 integrity.
16 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Is that Foreign Office document of, is it, 10th February,
17 is that an authentic document, do you think?
18 A. [Mr Irving]: Indeed, yes, but you will accept the planning undergoes
19 swings and changes as the climate of the war changes, as
20 the advance proceeds on the Eastern Front or as one has
21 set backs, then one adapts one’s plans.
22 MR JUSTICE GRAY: It is page 423, if you want to cross-refer.
23 A. [Mr Irving]: I am indebted to your Lordship, yes. This very document
24 was quoted by me in full on page 423, the relevant part,
25 which is what, no doubt, brought it to Professor Evans’
26 attention in the first place.
. P-69
1 MR RAMPTON My Lord, may I say what I propose to do next?
2 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Yes.
3 MR RAMPTON That ends that little exercise with the table
4 talks and very little it was, I took too long. It ends on
5 24th July. I now propose to lay out as quickly as I can
6 (but it is necessary to look at some original German
7 documents) what was going on, so far as anybody knows from
8 the German documents, from 28th or earlier about this
9 time, end of July 1942, and then I make no secret of it,
10 I am going to then end up with Himmler’s note of 22nd
11 September 1942. That is not quite my terminus.
12 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Which is that?
13 A. [Mr Irving]: We have not had that yet.
14 MR RAMPTON That is the next topic, but it does require some
15 background. It may be best to lay the ground by referring
16 to what Mr Irving wrote about it in his book.
17 A. [Mr Irving]: Mr Rampton, you say you are going to be producing to the
18 court German documents. Will you make it plain on each
19 occasion whether they were documents that were before me
20 at the time I wrote the books or not.
21 MR JUSTICE GRAY: That is a fair point.
22 MR RAMPTON I may not know the answer to that — it is a fair
23 point, but it is not the whole of the point by any means
24 because you have said something about the Himmler log
25 entry of 22nd September 1942, and what I want to do is to
26 see whether you adhere to what you there said. It is also
. P-70
1 evidence of system, of course, and scale. So it does
2 several jobs at the same time. Can we look, please, first
3 of all, at page 467 of Hitler’s War 1991?
4 A. [Mr Irving]: The closing words of the paragraph — of the chapter?
5 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Yes, they are. It is right to point out that this half
6 page which ends at a half page on page 467 starts with a
7 reference to Himmler on page 466. Perhaps your Lordship
8 might just read that? I have some questions about that
9 also.
10 MR JUSTICE GRAY: From where?
11 MR RAMPTON From “Himmler kept his own counsels”.
12 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Can I just read it? I have read it before,
13 but I have to remind myself.
14 MR RAMPTON Yes.
15 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Yes.
16 MR RAMPTON Now, Mr Irving, if you would just look at that for
17 a moment, just 467 for the moment? At the end of the
18 paragraph you write: “Himmler meanwhile continued to pull
19 the wool over Hitler’s eyes. On September 17th he calmly
20 jotted in his notes for that day’s Fuhrer conference:
21 ‘(1) Jewish immigration; how is it to be handled
22 in future? (2) Settlement of Lublin’, and noted next to
23 these points ‘Conditions in general government and
24 Globas'” which is Globocnik’s nickname. Yet, at the top
25 of the page, at the end of the first little paragraph you
26 write this: “The Fuhrer himself”, and this is a
. P-71
1 translation of Himmler’s letter to Berger of that
2 date, “The Fuhrer himself has entrusted me with the
3 execution of this arduous order and nobody can deprive me
4 of this responsibility.”
5 A. [Mr Irving]: You did not read out the first part which is to say what
6 the order was.
7 Q. [Mr Rampton]: I am so sorry. The task is making the occupied Eastern
8 territories —-
9 A. [Mr Irving]: The full text is: “The occupied Eastern territories are
10 to be liberated of Jews. The Fuhrer himself has entrusted
11 me with the execution of this arduous order. Nobody can
12 deprive me of this responsibility.”
13 Q. [Mr Rampton]: I am just getting out the original which is “Die besetzen
14 osgebete werden Judenfrage”, “The occupied East
15 territories will be Jew-free”, correct?
16 A. [Mr Irving]: Well…
17 Q. [Mr Rampton]: It must be?
18 A. [Mr Irving]: That is what I would refer to as a wooden translation,
19 yes.
20 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Oh, yes. I do not make any apology for it being wooden?
21 A. [Mr Irving]: It is me being defensive.
22 Q. [Mr Rampton]: “Die durchfuhrung dieses sehr schweren gefalls” — the
23 carrying out of this very hard order — “hat der Fuhrer
24 auf mein schuntten gelecht” — has the Fuhrer placed on my
25 shoulders, is that right?
26 A. [Mr Irving]: Yes, yes.
. P-72
1 Q. [Mr Rampton]: So Himmler has been given the very hard, sehr schwer, task
2 of clearing the Eastern territories, occupied Eastern
3 territories, of all the Jews, has he not?
4 A. [Mr Irving]: Rendering the Eastern territories free of the Jews, yes.
5 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Yes. So about what was it, if Himmler is telling the
6 truth about that, that Himmler on, in fact, I think the
7 dates are 22nd and not 17th, but it matters not.
8 MR JUSTICE GRAY: You accept that, do you not, Mr Irving?
9 A. [Mr Irving]: That I do not know, but it is not important.
10 MR JUSTICE GRAY: It is not important, I agree.
11 MR RAMPTON On 22nd September, about what was it that Himmler
12 was pulling the wool over Hitler’s eyes?
13 A. [Mr Irving]: At this time a killing operation had begun, that the
14 killings were going on.
15 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Surely not. By what means?
16 A. [Mr Irving]: I do not know. It is not important for the purposes of
17 that answer.
18 Q. [Mr Rampton]: I am afraid I think it is. You see, Mr Irving, your
19 position is that the gas chambers of Belzec, Sobibor,
20 Treblinka and Auschwitz did not exist, so how do you think
21 Himmler and his bods were carrying out the killings on a
22 massive scale which they did not want Hitler to know
23 about?
24 A. [Mr Irving]: I am just checking on the date. Well, my position on that
25 really is that on the basis of the documents, I am not in
26 a position at this time of writing that to be specific
. P-73
1 about what kind of camouflage is going on; but it did seem
2 plain to me on reading this agenda that Himmler had
3 written for his talk with Hitler, dated either September
4 17th or 22nd, that if he just jotted down conditions in
5 the government general and Globus there was possibly
6 something sinister being discussed between them, but that
7 Himmler was not going into detail about it. More than
8 that, I could not say on the basis of what I had.
9 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Well. We will have a look at the wording of the Himmler
10 note.
11 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Mr Rampton, it strikes me this is quite
12 important. Could we — this is for my benefit and, bear
13 in mind, you have the advantage of me — I just ask about
14 the reference made in Himmler’s gentle rebuke of 28th July
15 what, Mr Irving, you understand the liberation of the Jews
16 entrusted to Himmler by the Fuhrer really means?
17 A. [Mr Irving]: The territories are to be liberated of Jews.
18 Q. [Mr Justice Gray]: By the physical deportation or continued shooting or by
19 gassing?
20 A. [Mr Irving]: My contention here is that Hitler has clearly ordered the
21 Jews turfed out of all these countries and I have always
22 said this.
23 Q. [Mr Justice Gray]: So it means that and no more than that?
24 A. [Mr Irving]: There is no evidence for anything uglier than that, and
25 I would be surprised if Professor Evans has found any
26 evidence that there was and certainly that there was any
. P-74
1 evidence that was before me at the time I wrote the book.
2 I have been very careful not to go over what the evidence
3 actually bears out when I write this. When I quote a
4 document like this, I put in what the document says and
5 I try to let the reader draw their own conclusions.
6 Q. [Mr Justice Gray]: But even now you would take that view, in the light of
7 your present knowledge?
8 A. [Mr Irving]: With the utmost respect, what I think now is immaterial
9 for the purposes of the issues pleaded.
10 Q. [Mr Justice Gray]: Well, I do not agree for the reason I think I explained
11 yesterday, namely that if one is judging your approach as
12 an historian, how you interpret fresh information is
13 something that we can legitimately ask you about; do you
14 remember I made that point to you?
15 A. [Mr Irving]: I appreciate that point, my Lord. But in that case I
16 would then have to devote time to looking at the documents
17 all over again and reevaluating them in order to be able
18 to give a balanced answer to that now.
19 Q. [Mr Justice Gray]: If you feel that you would need to do that, I understand.
20 A. [Mr Irving]: I think I would have to do that.
21 MR RAMPTON As I am about to embark on the documents, my Lord,
22 I will ask the question I was going to ask about the entry
23 in the Himmler log, but then maybe Mr Irving could spend a
24 little bit of time between the end of that and 2 o’clock
25 looking at the documents?
26 A. [Mr Irving]: And having lunch.
. P-75
1 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Well, it is a problem that faces everybody in the
2 profession, Mr Irving.
3 A. [Mr Irving]: Mr Rampton, in this volume which you also have, which is
4 the Himmler diary, it is on page 566, and my date reading
5 is correct. It is September 17th. You rather worried me
6 on that.
7 MR JUSTICE GRAY: I think you are right there in saying it does
8 not in the end matter.
9 A. [Mr Irving]: Except that once again, it is only detail, you are quite
10 right, my Lord. I will save my triumph in private. It is
11 on the left-hand page.
12 MR RAMPTON I agree with you.
13 A. [Mr Irving]: It does not matter, Mr Rampton.
14 Q. [Mr Rampton]: I am going to keep this open.
15 A. [Mr Irving]: His Lordship has ruled it does not matter.
16 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Can you turn, please, to page 432 of Professor Evans’
17 report? There you see the English set out more or less as
18 it is in German. Is that not right?
19 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Could you give me the reference in the
20 documents as to where one finds that note?
21 MR RAMPTON One does not. One has to look in this book. Can
22 I hand it up?
23 MR JUSTICE GRAY: I am sorry. I assumed it was somewhere.
24 MR RAMPTON I cannot find it in —-
25 MR JUSTICE GRAY: I am sorry. I did not realize there was a
26 problem. I am sorry. I have wasted a certain amount of
. P-76
1 time.
2 MR RAMPTON It is quite all right. I think we should have
3 it. My Lord, in H1(ix).
4 MR JUSTICE GRAY: I probably have not got it here anyway.
5 MR RAMPTON As I have the Witte version, I suggest we give
6 this to your Lordship.
7 MR JUSTICE GRAY: It is just so I have the reference really.
8 MR RAMPTON It is at page 364 of the file. Have you got one,
9 Mr Irving?
10 A. [Mr Irving]: No, but I am very familiar with the document. I am the
11 one who found it. I am the one who found it and first
12 used it.
13 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Yes. It says in English, well, in German first,
14 “volkstung und ziedlung” which means?
15 A. [Mr Irving]: Volkstung und ziedlung.
16 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Yes.
17 A. [Mr Irving]: Well, “volkstung” is one of those very difficult words to
18 translate. It means nationality or ethnicity.
19 Q. [Mr Rampton]: And “sietlung” just mean “settlement”?
20 A. [Mr Irving]: “And settlement”, yes.
21 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Then it says: “Judensauswanderung”?
22 A. [Mr Irving]: “Jew emigration”.
23 Q. [Mr Rampton]: “Wiezelweitr verfahren werden”?
24 A. [Mr Irving]: “How should we carry on? “How should it be carried on?”
25 There is a tick next to it so they discussed it.
26 Q. [Mr Rampton]: And then “Besiedlung” Lublin?
. P-77
1 A. [Mr Irving]: “Resettlement of Lublin” in that sense, really, once it
2 was empty, then settlement.
3 Q. [Mr Rampton]: And a line against it?
4 A. [Mr Irving]: The sense is that they are going to use people, citizens
5 from Lorraine, the Germans from Bosnia and ethnic Germans
6 from Bessarabia which is a province of Romania.
7 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Which suggests, does it not, that the Jews who have been
8 sent on an auswanderung will make room — the Jews of
9 Lublin — will make room for these people from Loraine,
10 Bosnia and Bessarabia?
Section details 78.11-99.10
11 A. [Mr Irving]: That is a reasonable assumption that the two facts are
12 interdependent.
13 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Then the right-hand column matters not, but
14 “verhaltnisse”, circumstances, general governor or, no,
15 General Government it must be, must it not, Globus?
16 A. [Mr Irving]: It could be either, but the likelihood is it is government
17 general.
18 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Globus, if I may use a wrong word, is the Czar of Lublin
19 is he not?
20 A. [Mr Irving]: He is the chief of police.
21 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Yes, and Lublin is in the General Government?
22 A. [Mr Irving]: Yes.
23 Q. [Mr Rampton]: So it would fall to Globus — he is an SS man, is he not?
24 A. [Mr Irving]: He was one of the mass murderers.
25 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Yes, he was. He was under Himmler’s, he is in
26 Himmler’s —-
. P-78
1 A. [Mr Irving]: He is the senior SS and police chief, Hohere SS und
2 Polizei.
3 Q. [Mr Rampton]: So he has been given, or is going to get, the
4 responsibility for the further processing or procedure of
5 the auswanderung and replacement with Germans, ethnic
6 Germans. That is right, is it not?
7 A. [Mr Irving]: Mr Rampton, you are beginning to join dots in a very
8 adventurous way which is not supported by any of the words
9 actually on the paper in front of me.
10 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Globus, Lublin is in the General Government?
11 A. [Mr Irving]: Yes.
12 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Globus is head of police, or whatever it is, and, as you
13 rightly say, one of the mass murderers in Lublin. The
14 proposal is that Lublin shall be settled with people of
15 German origin from different parts of Europe, and that
16 comes immediately under the heading “Emigration of Jews,
17 how to be further proceeded”?
18 A. [Mr Irving]: Right, but you are missing the first word in that line
19 which is “verhaltnisse” which is circumstances,
20 conditions, and although, of course, we are now Holocaust
21 obsessed in this world at present, other things were
22 happening in the government general than just killing Jews
23 which is what you would maintain.
24 Q. [Mr Rampton]: No, the —-
25 A. [Mr Irving]: The resettlement programme, the deportation of large
26 numbers of innocent people to uncertain areas in the East
. P-79
1 was causing great civilian unrest. There were posters
2 appearing overnight saying, “This week it is the Jews,
3 next week it may be you, Poles”. There were major
4 problems of civilian moral problems in the government
5 general and, if you look at my Goebbels’ biography, you
6 will see references to this when telegrammes come from the
7 propaganda offices in these regions, back to the Berlin
8 Ministry saying, “We are having major problems caused by
9 this”.
10 So, this is just one example of the dangers of
11 leaping from mountain peak to mountain peek. There are
12 things happening in between of which this document gives
13 us no cognisance, but of which I have cognisance. So that
14 why it is very dangerous, I think, to leap to conclusions.
15 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Well, I am not leaping to conclusions, Mr Irving. Though
16 I may not have your enormous wisdom and knowledge on this
17 topic, I have learned a certain amount. After you have
18 had a chance to think about the documents which come up to
19 and beyond this point, ending with the conference in
20 Berlin on 26th and 28th September — that is the only that
21 comes after this point —-
22 A. [Mr Irving]: The conference in Berlin between whom?
23 Q. [Mr Rampton]: — we are going to let everybody take cognisance of the
24 surrounding material. We can start now if you want.
25 A. [Mr Irving]: Yes, but, of course, these reports I referred to were in
26 my discovery for your experts to see relating to the
. P-80
1 severe moral problems and internal unrest caused by the
2 Nazi methods in Poland.
3 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Mr Irving, I am not saying that there is any certainty
4 about what this document means, but one of its most
5 natural interpretation, surely, is this, that the
6 emigration of the Jews from wherever needed to be further
7 proceeded, if that is the right translation, and Himmler
8 wanted Hitler’s views about that. As a subtopic of that,
9 it was proposed that Lublin should be settled with German
10 speakers from different parts of Europe. That might
11 depend upon the verhaltnisse and the responsibility would
12 be that of Globus within the General Government. It does
13 not say any more than that on its face, does it?
14 A. [Mr Irving]: It says a lot less than that, Mr Rampton, with respect.
15 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Why does it say less?
16 A. [Mr Irving]: He is filling in the dots, my Lord, in an overdangerous
17 way. First of all, this passage in the right-hand column,
18 if I am familiar with these Himmler’s notes, is something
19 that has been added either after or during the actual
20 talk. It is not something which is primarily on the
21 agenda, but something which has come up. So this is the
22 first reason why it is dangerous to hang too much on
23 that. I can only respectfully submit that I made the
24 proper use of that by referring only to the content of
25 what the note tells us and not being too adventurous about
26 speculating to my own advantage or against —-
. P-81
1 MR JUSTICE GRAY: What I am not following at the moment is why
2 you say Mr Rampton is being adventurous. He is simply
3 saying that this means, on a sensible interpretation,
4 Lublin is going to have to be resettled?
5 A. [Mr Irving]: That I accept.
6 Q. [Mr Justice Gray]: These are the people we intend to resettle there?
7 A. [Mr Irving]: That I entirely accept, my Lord.
8 Q. [Mr Justice Gray]: The circumstances need to be discussed and Globus is going
9 to have something to do with it. That is all Mr Rampton,
10 I think, was suggesting that paragraph to mean.
11 A. [Mr Irving]: I accept the first two parts of that, my Lord, but when he
12 continues to say that when they are talking about
13 circumstances and the government general and Globus, this
14 can only refer to killing Jews. I think this is a very
15 —-
16 MR JUSTICE GRAY: He did not say that.
17 MR RAMPTON I did not say that. I have never said it. I will
18 say it.
19 A. [Mr Irving]: If Mr Rampton does not say that, then we are totally in
20 accord.
21 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Let us take it in stages.
22 MR RAMPTON I will say it, but I will not say it yet because I
23 have not laid the ground for it, but be sure as eggs
24 I will say it, yes, of course.
25 A. [Mr Irving]: Well, then I was right to pre-empt.
26 Q. [Mr Rampton]: No, you were not. What, Mr Irving, this document also
. P-82
1 talks about is how to further the emigration of the Jews,
2 does it not?
3 A. [Mr Irving]: How we are to proceed, yes.
4 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Well, yes, how are we to proceed. It has already been
5 taking place on a large scale from all different parts of
6 Europe by September 1942, has it not?
7 A. [Mr Irving]: There are all sorts of train movements going hither and…
8 Q. [Mr Rampton]: All over the place, both within the general government and
9 out of the Reich, and I do not know what the date of the
10 first Slovakian transport was, and so on and so forth.
11 That is something which is already well underway. This
12 document is silent about what is to happen to those Jews
13 or has happened to those. It is completely silent about
14 it, is it not?
15 A. [Mr Irving]: That is why I made the reference about wool being pulled
16 over people’s eyes.
17 Q. [Mr Rampton]: No, Mr Irving. It is you who has built a huge mountain
18 out of a tiny little mole hill. Assume two completely
19 contrary hypotheses either of which could be right:
20 Hitler does know what happens to the Jews when they
21 arrive, and when they will arrive they are going to be
22 killed. That is one hypothesis. He and Himmler would
23 very well still need to talk about how to get the process
24 continuing and continuing and continuing, until they had
25 all gone. That is hypothesis one.
26 A. [Mr Irving]: Hypothesis two, Hitler does not know, but, of course, he
. P-83
1 knows about the deportations because he has authorised it.
2 Q. [Mr Rampton]: So on either hypothesis this is a neutral document?
3 A. [Mr Irving]: If your first hypothesis is correct, if these two men are
4 in cahoots, if I can use gangster slang, why would Himmler
5 need to use euphemisms?
6 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Because they are actually talking about how to do the
7 evacuations, the emigrations. You cannot kill somebody in
8 a gas chamber or a pit somewhere near Lublin unless you
9 have them there in the first place. You have to evacuate
10 them emigrate them from, say, Berlin or Vienna or Rome or
11 wherever it may be and you have to do that. It is a matter
12 of logistics. It costs money. The trains are needed by
13 the army. It is a necessary stage in the process, and
14 there is no reason on earth why Himmler and Hitler should
15 not have a conversation about that, is there?
16 A. [Mr Irving]: But if they are in cahoots why do we find nowhere in all
17 these hundreds of sheets these agenda, telephone notes and
18 all the rest of it anything specific to bear out the
19 notion that Hitler had ordered the killing of the European
20 Jews?
21 Q. [Mr Rampton]: But you have constructed out of this perfectly natural,
22 normal, neutral document and discussion, if you do not
23 know the background, a discussion about how to continue
24 the deportations, and how to make this into German
25 “labensround”, this area of Poland, Lublin, you have
26 erected on the basis of that flimsy platform, this
. P-84
1 sentence “Himmler meanwhile continued to pull the wool
2 over Hitler’s eyes”?
3 A. [Mr Irving]: Because there no reference in this —
4 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Why should there be?
5 A. [Mr Irving]: — to any of the sinister things that had happening,
6 whatever they are.
7 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Why should there be? This is not a deceptive document.
8 A. [Mr Irving]: It is. He is using the euphemisms, which your own experts
9 agree are the euphemisms for the extermination operation
10 going on.
11 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Do you accept that, so far as Himmler is
12 concerned that when he said “ausvanderung” he was really
13 in his own mind visualizing what was going on in the —
14 A. [Mr Irving]: We have a terrible problem with these euphemisms, my Lord,
15 and this is that the word, the same word can mean
16 different things used by the same person at different
17 times.
18 Q. [Mr Justice Gray]: — well, take this note, do you regard “ausvanderung”
19 meaning —
20 A. [Mr Irving]: It could quite possibly mean that, that in his own mind he
21 is referring to that, because he knows perfectly well what
22 is going on.
23 Q. [Mr Justice Gray]: — namely?
24 A. [Mr Irving]: Shall we just leave it in vague terms, that something ugly
25 is happening?
26 Q. [Mr Justice Gray]: No. You are the historian; what do you think that Himmler
. P-85
1 in his own mind had in —
2 A. [Mr Irving]: He knows that the Jews —
3 Q. [Mr Justice Gray]: — contemplation when he used the word “ausvanderung”?
4 A. [Mr Irving]: — he knows that the Jews are being liquidated and that
5 very few of them are surviving, as we know from the entry
6 in Goebbels’ diaries of March 1942 which is quite
7 definitely an SS. In other words, the Himmler document. It
8 has gone to Goebbels and has told Goebbels that of those
9 who are deported and I think Goebbels actually mentions
10 Lublin, 60 per cent may be fit for work, but 40 per cent
11 had to be liquidated or the other way round.
12 Q. [Mr Justice Gray]: But there is no reason to suppose that Hitler would ever
13 have seen this note of 22nd September 1942?
14 A. [Mr Irving]: No, but unfortunately we are confronted with a problem, we
15 can only write history safely on the basis of the paper
16 before us. But it may well be that two or three pages
17 later we come across a document which gives one more clue
18 in the direction that I am trying to lead the readers.
19 I think it is dishonest just to pick on one fragment and
20 say, “Mr Irving has only mentioned this”. I have found
21 this document. I have mentioned. I have put it on the
22 slate for people to read it, and later on we will find
23 another document and we will refer to it just the same as
24 your Lordship quite rightly pointed out that I had
25 mentioned that 10th February 1942 document earlier on. It
26 is there somewhere buried in the book and anyone can play
. P-86
1 this exercise of yanking one pebble out of the wall and
2 saying “Mr Irving has only painted this one pebble”, when
3 the whole picture is there in the book at the end of it.
4 Q. [Mr Rampton]: I am not being critical at the moment, I am simply trying
5 to understand your thought processes when you approach
6 this document and as I understand it, correct me if I am
7 wrong, I am sorry, Mr Rampton, to go on, you accept that
8 Himmler had it mind that there was mass extermination of
9 Jews going on?
10 A. [Mr Irving]: My Lord —
11 Q. [Mr Justice Gray]: And that that is what he was referring to when he writes
12 “ausvanderung” of the Jews?
13 A. [Mr Irving]: — I have to be careful, my Lord , because–
14 Q. [Mr Justice Gray]: In paragraph 1?
15 A. [Mr Irving]: — I am constantly aware that I am under oath here and
16 I am also relating something that happened 35 years ago
17 when I wrote this manuscript for the first time. These
18 particular words you are looking at were written by me
19 probably at the end of the 1960s, so I have to be very
20 careful when you ask me what my thought processes were.
21 I can reconstruct them, but that is probably not a very
22 useful exercise. I have to say that I would have been
23 aware that later on we have what is called the Korheir
24 Report, which is referred to earlier today, where Himmler
25 has said: “Redraft this report in a form that we can show
26 it to the Fuhrer”, which strongly suggests that there is
. P-87
1 wool pulling going on. That is why I feel safe in
2 asserting a sentence like that here, because I regard this
3 document as being evidence that quite probably what
4 happened on this occasion was a certain amount of wool
5 pulling. That somebody was being “horn swaggled”, as the
6 Americans say.
7 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Sorry, Mr Rampton, I interrupted.
8 MR RAMPTON It is all right. I do not think I have many more
9 to ask about that particular sentence. I have made my
10 suggestion. I would like you to look, however, at
11 something I said I would ask you some questions about, the
12 earlier part of this passage which begins on page 466,.
13 Himmler kept his own counsel. From his papers
14 it emerges that on 9th July his SS Police Chief
15 Kruger… already briefed him on the solution of the
16 Jewish problem. On the 16th he visited Hitler.
17 Photographs in the modern Polish archives”; do you
18 remember, this is not a memory test, I just wonder whether
19 you remember where you got the information, Mr Irving,
20 that Himmler visited Hitler on the 16th?
21 A. [Mr Irving]: I would have to go back to my card index to check. It
22 could have been from a number of sources.
23 Q. [Mr Rampton]: There is an entry in Witte which says that he had lunch
24 with Hitler on the 14th, but that is something you could
25 not have had, because that is one of the entries that has
26 only recently emerged from Moscow?
. P-88
1 A. [Mr Irving]: I would not have had that one.
2 Q. [Mr Rampton]: No.
3 A. [Mr Irving]: Except, no, I had Himmler’s — I have Himmler’s diary
4 here. I will just check it.
5 Q. [Mr Rampton]: You see if you can find anything for the 14th July. What
6 have you put, the 16th?
7 A. [Mr Irving]: The 16th July we only have the telephone notes.
8 Q. [Mr Rampton]: What, you have put the 16th?
9 A. [Mr Irving]: No, the 16th July we only have the telephone notes.
10 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Yes. I think that is what I have here, yes. Certain, it
11 is he saw Hitler either the day before, or a couple of
12 days before he went to Auschwitz, is it not?
13 A. [Mr Irving]: Yes.
14 Q. [Mr Rampton]: “Photographs in the modern Polish archives show him
15 [indeed they do] visiting the immense synthetic rubber
16 plant. They also show him at the camp itself, on the 17th
17 and touring the concentration camp itself on the 18th in
18 the company of his Chief Engineer, SS General Hans Cammler
19 and Fritz Bracht, the gaulieter of Upper Silesia. Whatever
20 later historians would claim Hitler himself never visited
21 any concentration camp, let alone Auschwitz. Historians
22 would also claim that Himmler witnessed the liquidation of
23 a train load of Jews on this occasion. This is
24 apocryphal”. Blah-blah-blah I will not bother to read
25 this.
26 Can I go down to the history again? Starting it
. P-89
1 on July 19th 1942: “On July 19th 1942, the day after
2 Himmler’s tour of Auschwitz, he issued a written order to
3 Kruger ‘I decree that the transfer of the entire Jewish
4 population of the General Government is to be carried out
5 and completed by December 31st 1942′.” That is a document
6 we will have to look at a bit later, Mr Irving.
7 A. [Mr Irving]: Yes.
8 Q. [Mr Rampton]: “Hitler might still be dreaming of Madagascar, but the
9 head office of the Eastern Railroad at Krakow reported
10 since July 22nd one train load of 5,000 Jews –”
11 A. [Mr Irving]: Can I just interrupt there and point to the word “dreaming
12 of Madagascar”, I think that adequately sums up the
13 earlier passage.
14 Q. [Mr Rampton]: You say “dreaming”, I say talking in a camouflage way, but
15 perhaps it really does not matter. It is not a
16 reality. “Since July 22nd one train load of 5,000 Jews
17 has been running from Warsaw… to Treblinka every day and
18 in addition a train load of 5,000 Jews leaves Przemysl
19 twice a week for Belsec”. Can I stop there. Mr Irving?
20 A. [Mr Irving]: Yes.
21 Q. [Mr Rampton]: We will look at some more documents in relation to those
22 transports this afternoon. Why was it — in fact, I think
23 the figures are not quite right, but suppose they are for
24 the minute, why was it that one train load a day of 5,000
25 Jews was going from Warsaw to Treblinka and one twice a
26 week of 5,000 Jews to Belsec from the place which begins
. P-90
1 with P?
2 A. [Mr Irving]: The documents do not tell us, but perhaps it might be
3 useful if we had a look at a map which will show us
4 exactly.
5 Q. [Mr Rampton]: I am going to, with his Lordship’s permission, I am going
6 to give you — this is new to me, I got it last night, so
7 I have not been hiding it away, it is an original German
8 army I think military railway map?
9 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Is it one of the ones you —
10 MR RAMPTON No, your Lordship, has not got it. I had not it
11 until last night.
12 THE WITNESS: [Mr Irving]: I certainly have not had it.
13 MR RAMPTON Mr Irving has not had it and so everyone can have
14 it now, and there is one for the witness (same handed).
15 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Mr Rampton, we are moving on to another issue
16 really now.
17 MR RAMPTON Yes, we are. I was actually going to suggest that
18 I stopped there because I was going to ask just one
19 question, and then I could give Mr Irving time to have a
20 bit of lunch and perhaps look forward at some of the
21 documents which he has referred to here.
22 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Only if he feels he has time to do it over
23 lunch.
24 MR RAMPTON But I am now going to do what I said I would do
25 this morning, which is to look at the true scale and
26 nature of what actually happened. This is awkward, I am
. P-91
1 sorry, I should have had sellotaped together, but I did
2 not have time. If you just hold them roughly on top of
3 the other because that is how it works, my Lord.
4 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Yes, I follow.
5 MR RAMPTON We see Warsaw at the top of the map, then you if
6 go out the key tells us that a double line is a two track
7 railway, and a single line is a single track railway,
8 which is logical enough, is it not? The key is in the
9 bottom right hand corner.
10 A. [Mr Irving]: Yes.
11 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Then there is that another marking, which we do not have
12 to bother about, which is the actual, I think, German
13 railway as opposed to the Russian one or the Polish one.
14 A different gauge, I think. The line runs north/east or
15 east/north/east out of Warsaw to a place called Malkinia;
16 do you see that?
17 A. [Mr Irving]: Yes.
18 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Just on the border with White Russia?
19 A. [Mr Irving]: Yes.
20 Q. [Mr Rampton]: And there is a sharp right turn and the first dot down
21 that single line is Treblinka.
22 A. [Mr Irving]: Yes.
23 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Then if you go to Lublin and you go east/south/east
24 towards the Russian border you come to a place Kelm or
25 Khelm.
26 A. [Mr Irving]: First of all Treblinka and then Kelm, yes.
. P-92
1 Q. [Mr Rampton]: And you go sharp left northwards to Sobibor?
2 A. [Mr Irving]: Yes.
3 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Which is just again next to the border. If on the other
4 hand you turn right before you get to Kelm or Khelm and go
5 to Savadar, again, travelling right down to the border on
6 a single line you get to Belsec?
7 A. [Mr Irving]: Yes.
8 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Those, Mr Irving, were little villages in the middle of
9 nowhere, and from the 22nd July 1942, if these figures you
10 have given in your book are right, which they are not
11 quite, but the volume, if you multiply, must be hundreds
12 of thousands of Jews transported from Lublin and Warsaw
13 and as I shall show you after the adjournment also from
14 the East; what were those Jews going to do in these three
15 villages on the Russian border?
16 A. [Mr Irving]: The documents before me did not tell me.
17 Q. [Mr Rampton]: No, but try and construct in your own mind, as an
18 historian, a convincing explanation.
19 A. [Mr Irving]: There would be any number of convincing explanations, from
20 the most sinister to the most innocent. What is the
21 object of that exercise? It is irrelevant to the issues
22 pleaded here, I shall strongly argue that, it would have
23 been —
24 MR JUSTICE GRAY: If you want to take that point, can you —
25 A. [Mr Irving]: — it would have been irresponsible of me to have
26 speculated in this book, which is already overweight, and
. P-93
1 start adding in my own totally amateurish speculation.
2 MR RAMPTON No, you mistake me, Mr Irving, it is probably not
3 your fault I, as his Lordship spotted what I have done,
4 I have taken what you have wrote in the book as a stepping
5 stone to my next exercise, which is to show the scale of
6 the operation, and in due course, and I give you fair
7 warning, to demonstrate that anybody who supposes that
8 those hundreds of thousands of Jews were sent to these
9 tiny little villages, what shall we say, in order to
10 restore their health, is either mad or a liar.
11 A. [Mr Irving]: — Mr Rampton, can I just draw one parallel and say during
12 World War II large numbers of people were sent to
13 Aldershot, which is also a tiny village, but I do not
14 think anybody is alleging there were gas chambers at
15 Aldershot.
16 MR JUSTICE GRAY: I think actually the problem Mr Irving has is
17 we moved on a different phase of the case. We are no
18 longer dealing with allegations of manipulating the
19 historical records which we were when we were going
20 through “Hitler’s War” and so on. I think really Mr
21 Rampton is now on the issue of Holocaust denial, where the
22 defence case is that what you have said flies in the face
23 of evidence, but it is not an allegation of manipulating
24 the record. Do you follow what we are on now?
25 A. [Mr Irving]: The evidence he has adduced so far apart from that is from
26 my own books.
. P-94
1 MR JUSTICE GRAY: You objected to the question, I am trying to
2 explain what I perceive at the moment to be its relevance.
3 MR RAMPTON Your Lordship is absolutely right.
4 A. [Mr Irving]: Mr Rampton knows which way he is going, but of course
5 I have to prepare little minefields all the way round just
6 in case.
7 MR JUSTICE GRAY: It is important you know where he is going
8 and that is why I was trying to help you. Anyway I think
9 the question perhaps needs to be put again, does it,
10 because I am not sure there has been an answer yet.
11 MR RAMPTON No. I suggest, Mr Irving, that anybody — any
12 sane, sensible person would deduce from all the evidence,
13 all the available evidence, including, if you like, the
14 shootings in the East which you have accepted, would
15 conclude that these hundreds of thousands of Jews were not
16 being shipped to these tiny little places on the Russian
17 border in Eastern Poland for a benign purpose?
18 A. [Mr Irving]: Mr Rampton, what possible other conclusion could somebody
19 have drawn from reading that page in my book? You are
20 implying that the reader is being invited to draw a
21 different conclusion.
22 Q. [Mr Rampton]: No, I am wondering what your position is, you see,
23 Mr Irving, because if it is simply this; I accept that the
24 Germans systematically murdered Jews in vast numbers
25 throughout 1941, accelerating through 1942 1943 and
26 reaching a crescendo in 1944, but I simply do not accept
. P-95
1 there were any gas chambers, then I am not bothered
2 because it does not matter how it is done, the fact is it
3 is a systematic genocide. I want to know whether you
4 accept that; if you do accept it, then we can forget the
5 Professor van Pelt and all his works and everything else
6 beside in relation to Holocaust denial.
7 A. [Mr Irving]: It is my belief that Professor van Pelt’s purpose in
8 coming here is prove to us that the gas chambers at
9 Auschwitz existed.
10 Q. [Mr Rampton]: He is not. He is coming here to demolish the basis of
11 your Holocaust denial, which is the Leuchter Report,
12 amongst other things?
13 A. [Mr Irving]: But the Leuchter Report relies solely on the gas chambers
14 in Auschwitz. So there seems to be a contradiction in
15 what you said.
16 Q. [Mr Rampton]: So if, for example, Franjiseck Piper, the custodian of the
17 museum as he was, at Auschwitz, now proposes a figure of
18 1.whatever it is, 2 million Jews murdered, I do not mean
19 worked to death or killed by types, murdered in Auschwitz,
20 you are going to accept that, are you?
21 A. [Mr Irving]: No. I have a good reason not to and —
22 Q. [Mr Rampton]: I think in that case we are back to where we are, alas.
23 I thought I saw a chink of daylight, but it is not there.
24 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Right, well, I am not clear in my mind what
25 it is that it is suggested Mr Irving may need to look at
26 over the luncheon adjournment. I have no idea whether it
. P-96
1 is practical to ask him to do that or whether it is not.
2 MR RAMPTON It is probably not, because they are spread all
3 over the bundles and that would be quite unreasonable
4 because he would have to stay here and I would have spend
5 at any rate 40 minutes giving him a list of documents and
6 that would not be sensible either. I will go as
7 cautiously as I can in the afternoon and I will try and
8 make sure if I do not remember, perhaps your Lordship
9 will, to find out as I ask the questions whether the
10 documents in question is one that he has seen before or
11 not.
12 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Yes. Mr Irving, do you have any problems
13 with that? You are going to be asked about documents
14 which I suspect you know about now, but you may well say
15 in relation to it some of them, well, I see that now and
16 I saw that last summer, but I did not know about it when
17 I was writing “Hitler’s War”?
18 A. [Mr Irving]: I am in your Lordship’s hand on that matter but where
19 possible I shall state which ones I have seen for the
20 first time.
21 Q. [Mr Justice Gray]: That will not cause you a problem, will it?
22 A. [Mr Irving]: No. Your Lordship will decide later on whether it is
23 relevant or not.
24 MR RAMPTON I will give your Lordship a copy too. I am not
25 saying it is exhaustive, complete, or comprehensive —
26 what Miss Rogers and I have done is to produce a
. P-97
1 chronological list of the relevant events. I am not going
2 to start at the beginning of this in my cross-examination,
3 but it does give Mr Irving an idea of what I will be
4 asking about this afternoon.
5 MR JUSTICE GRAY: The topic is what?
6 MR RAMPTON The topic is the scale of what happened during the
7 summer and early autumn of 1942, from which one can make
8 quite obvious deductions, both about system and knowledge,
9 and also about the intent.
10 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Your case is these are deaths in the gas
11 chambers?
12 MR RAMPTON Oh, there is no question.
13 MR JUSTICE GRAY: They started operating in November 1941.
14 MR RAMPTON The first gassings start systematically in
15 December 1941 at Chelmo, I am not going to deal with
16 Chelmo this afternoon, except at the tail end if I get
17 there. There is the three Reinhardt camps; Belsec,
18 Sobibor and Treblinka. They used a different system of
19 gassing. They used a vehicle exhaust —
20 A. [Mr Irving]: Carbon?
21 Q. [Mr Rampton]: — carbon monoxide. You can also suffocate someone with
22 carbon dioxide, can you not?
23 A. [Mr Irving]: You can suffocate someone by locking them into a closed
24 room.
25 Q. [Mr Rampton]: And by hydrogen cyanide at Auschwitz. I do not say there
26 were not some random murders as well by kicking, shooting,
. P-98
Part III: David Irving’s Cross-Examination by Richard Rampton, continued, Afternoon Session (99.11 to 187.3)
1 but the system was gas?
2 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Yes, so Mr Irving is going to get a copy of
3 this, so at any rate he will have some; is that right?
4 MR RAMPTON Yes.
5 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Mr Irving, that will at any rate give you
6 some foretaste of what is to come this afternoon.
7 MR RAMPTON I am not saying he must read it. But it might be
8 helpful if he did.
9 MR JUSTICE GRAY: We will adjourn now and resume at 2.00 pm.
10 (Luncheon Adjournment)
Section details 99.11-126.4
11 MR DAVID IRVING, continued.
12 Cross-Examined by MR RAMPTON QC, continued.
13 THE WITNESS: [Mr Irving]: My Lord, before he begins his cross-examination
14 on this, can I make a few general observations on these
15 documents?
16 MR JUSTICE GRAY: What difficulties you are going to have
17 dealing with them, or what?
18 A. [Mr Irving]: I would draw attention to three general observations which
19 I may not have a chance to make when we go through them
20 document by document.
21 MR JUSTICE GRAY: I think that is fair, Mr Rampton.
22 MR RAMPTON It is what?
23 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Fair that he should do so now before going
24 through these various documents.
25 MR RAMPTON I did not hear, I was looking for documents.
26 MR JUSTICE GRAY: He going to make three points and I am going
. P-99
1 to allow that to happen?
2 A. [Mr Irving]: General observations, and please interrupt me if you think
3 they are wrong. Obviously, some of them I am familiar
4 with because they come from my own records, some of them
5 I am not. I am unhappy about the elipses, the passages
6 that have been left out. I do hope we will have a chance
7 to see the whole document rather than just these
8 abbreviated versions.
9 MR RAMPTON Oh, yes, carry on.
10 A. [Mr Irving]: In general, of course, there are much larger elipses which
11 are the material surrounding the documents, if I could put
12 it like that, which are not represented here.
13 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Yes.
14 A. [Mr Irving]: The second observation I would make, my Lord, is this.
15 Bear in mind all along that we are now 55 years down the
16 road since the end of World War Two and we are entitled to
17 expect a better quality of evidence and documentation from
18 the archives than would have been accepted, say, in 1945
19 or 1946. This is the standard I have always held in front
20 of myself. I say to myself if, even now, there are no
21 better documents than this, therefore we have to be much
22 more careful about how we assess these documents that are
23 put to us. We are no longer entitled to jump across from
24 mountain peak to mountain peak. We have to say that, if
25 there are no other documents, then there is probably a
26 reason why there are no other documents. That is the sum
. P-100
1 total of the observation I wish to make.
2 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Thank you very much.
3 MR RAMPTON As to that last point, Mr Irving, jumping from
4 mountain peak to mountain peak may sometimes be
5 necessary. Sometimes one can do it because one knows what
6 is lying on the ground in between, and there is nothing
7 the matter with that, is there?
8 A. [Mr Irving]: Yes, from one’s general expertise.
9 Q. [Mr Rampton]: No, no, the general array of evidence. Mr Irving, never
10 mind that for the moment. It is the fact, is it not,
11 perhaps I am wrong but I do not think so, I think you said
12 it several times in this court, what I might call the
13 residue of German wartime documents that we have got,
14 whether from the bottom fighting units, police units or
15 whatever, right up to the top, is fragmentary?
16 A. [Mr Irving]: I would say on the contrary, it is there in embarrassing
17 superabundance.
18 Q. [Mr Rampton]: We have everything, have we?
19 A. [Mr Irving]: There is such a volume of documentation that in the United
20 States they still have not finished cataloguing it. They
21 are still working on it and usually the Germans create
22 multiple copies of the documents that they are dealing
23 with. So, if they had destroyed in one place, they would
24 exist in another.
25 Q. [Mr Rampton]: So, unless a document has been deliberately destroyed,
26 which it might well have been, one could expect to find it
. P-101
1 somewhere at some stage in the future near or far? Is
2 that right?
3 A. [Mr Irving]: I would have expected to have found it in the past,
4 frankly, at least one copy of it.
5 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Well, the possibility remains that there are certain kinds
6 of documents which certain kinds of people at certain
7 times in history will set out deliberately to destroy?
8 A. [Mr Irving]: I think this is a useful discussion. Yes, I think that
9 with certain kind of documents one would have expected
10 people to attach priority to their destruction but, even
11 if that is the case, there will always be somebody
12 slightly lower down in that chain of hierarchy between the
13 person who gives the orders and the person who executes
14 them who has felt a qualm of conscience or a pang of
15 conscience, and who has written to his wife, saying we
16 have to carry out orders that are too ghastly even to
17 think of, and I found documents just like that, too.
18 Q. [Mr Rampton]: You found a letter that the officer Dr Otto Schutz Duval
19 wrote to his wife, did you not?
20 A. [Mr Irving]: I did not find that, no.
21 Q. [Mr Rampton]: You did not, but that is such an example, is it not?
22 A. [Mr Irving]: I am afraid I am not familiar with that document unless
23 you remind me of it.
24 Q. [Mr Rampton]: You refer to it on your web site.
25 A. [Mr Irving]: Somebody else found it, obviously posted it and put it on
26 the web site. I am talking about around Hitler’s level
. P-102
1 there with generals who wrote letters of precisely that
2 content, saying they are doing things in Poland that I do
3 not even like to tell you about.
4 Q. [Mr Rampton]: That process, what one might call the workings of
5 conscience or anything else, might account for what you
6 have called the occasional orphan document, might it not?
7 A. [Mr Irving]: Yes indeed, but also there could be an uglier process,
8 namely a document created like the identity card of Mr
9 Ivan Demjanjuk, which turns out to have been generated by
10 the KGB for whatever purpose. We have to be constantly on
11 the look out, particularly for documents coming from
12 Russian or KGB archives. It is a remote possibility, but
13 we have to be alert to that possibility.
14 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Yes. Of course that is absolutely right. Can we start
15 please — I know you will think or may think initially
16 that this is somewhat anachronistic out of our chronology
17 but it is not really as you will see in a moment — a
18 document which I am sure you are familiar with. My Lord,
19 it is in bundle H4 (v).
20 MR JUSTICE GRAY: I am afraid that is one I do not have here.
21 MR RAMPTON We seem to have quite a lot of spares here.
22 Footnote 187. These are Dr Longerich’s documents?
23 A. [Mr Irving]: Yes. I think I am the first person to have quoted this
24 document in fact ever.
25 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Again, I am afraid it is a document which is sideways in
26 the file. This is a reprint of the original. It is very
. P-103
1 short. It is document No. 54 at the top of page 157 on
2 the right-hand side: “Schreiben Himmlers an den Gauleiter
3 im Wartheland Geiser: Ankundigung von Judentransporten
4 aus dem Reich nach Lodz, 18.9.1941″, which means, being
5 translated, Mr Irving?
6 A. [Mr Irving]: Which sentence are you reading?
7 Q. [Mr Rampton]: I read the heading at 54?
8 A. [Mr Irving]: Letter from Himmler to Gauleiter in the Wartheland
9 Greiser, forewarning of the arrival of Jewish transports
10 from the Reich in Lodz or Lodsch in Litzmannstatt, as the
11 Germans call it, on September 18th, 1941.
12 Q. [Mr Rampton]: I will not read the German. Does it say: The Fuhrer
13 wishes that, as quickly as possible, the Altreich and the
14 Protectorate, that Bohemia and Moravia, is it not, shall
15 be cleared and free of Jews from West to East?
16 A. [Mr Irving]: Yes.
17 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Do you accept that as evidence of, I do not know what the
18 word is but it does not matter, something that Hitler has
19 told Himmler he wants done?
20 A. [Mr Irving]: Yes, Hitler has taken the initiative and has ordered the
21 emptying out.
22 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Yes.
23 A. [Mr Irving]: Which is made quite plain in all my books also, of course.
24 Q. [Mr Rampton]: If mere deportation from central and Western Europe is
25 Hitler’s idea of a losung, maybe even an endlosung, until
26 Madagascar is free, this is the date at which it takes
. P-104
1 effect?
2 A. [Mr Irving]: Not precisely on this date. It would have been any date
3 up to this date.
4 Q. [Mr Rampton]: From this date?
5 A. [Mr Irving]: Yes. It takes effect from this date.
6 Q. [Mr Rampton]: From this date. Well, can we then leap forward in time
7 please, in this file?
8 A. [Mr Irving]: Can I just express a certain amount of dismay that we are
9 having printed versions of these telegrams shown us to and
10 not the originals? The reason for that is that the
11 originals have certain paraphernalia attached to them,
12 which are not without significance. I am referring
13 specifically to their security classification, because
14 I intend later on to draw conclusions from documents which
15 have security classifications and documents which do not,
16 what you call janitorial level, or what I call janitorial
17 level documents, and we do not know what classification
18 this document has. That does help us — I am sorry to
19 speak so quickly — to classify in the other sense a
20 document into its degree of importance, whether it has the
21 very highest security grading or no security
22 classification. We cannot tell from this of course
23 because the editor has taken it off.
24 Q. [Mr Rampton]: I fear Mr Irving, I am naked in this regard. I have no
25 originals.
26 A. [Mr Irving]: Well, you do. It was in my discovery, and it should have
. P-105
1 been put in the bundles rather than this printed version.
2 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Mr Irving, please do not let’s get on to that again.
3 I was trying to explain yesterday that, by oversight or
4 whatever, I think you were away for quite a long time in
5 the autumn, there was no discussion about what documents
6 you wanted included in the bundles and that is the sole
7 reason?
8 A. [Mr Irving]: It is regrettable because we are robbed or deprived of
9 that possibility.
10 MR JUSTICE GRAY: There we are. We have to make the best we
11 can of what we have got.
12 MR RAMPTON My Lord, if this is something which is troubling
13 Mr Irving, which it obviously has been for some time, if
14 he has any time in the three day weekend which is coming
15 up, because we shall be going on to Auschwitz the week
16 after, therefore there will not be much need to refer to
17 this kind of document, he should make a list of those
18 documents in his discovery, he will know very well which
19 they are, which he would like us to copy as originals and
20 put into these bundles.
21 MR JUSTICE GRAY: I am sure he will do it if he has the time.
22 MR RAMPTON That is what I mean.
23 A. [Mr Irving]: My Lord, they were all copied for them originally. They
24 have copies of the entire discovery.
25 MR JUSTICE GRAY: The point is to make a selection of the ones
26 that you regard as being important. Anyway, we have this
. P-106
1 document, we have seen what it says, it has never really
2 been in doubt, but it is a start, you say, Mr Rampton.
3 MR RAMPTON Can we now turn, please, forward and also forward
4 in the bundle, to footnote 245. It is in the same file.
5 Again, I apologise profusely for the fact that I do not
6 think I have the original of it. Footnote, 1st May 1942,
7 tab 25 if it helps anybody find it.
8 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Are all these documents going to be in German
9 without a translation?
10 MR RAMPTON There is a translation of this one, my Lord. I am
11 just looking for it, because it is annoying.
12 MR JUSTICE GRAY: It just takes longer.
13 MR RAMPTON I did observe that I think Mr Irving said he did
14 not want just to look at summaries of translations. He
15 wanted to look, so far as he could, at the original
16 document. I am respecting that until such time as your
17 Lordship tells me to ignore it.
18 My Lord, there is a summary, in part a
19 translation on page 53.
20 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Of what?
21 MR RAMPTON Of Dr Longerich’s report, part 2, page 53,
22 paragraph 1.3. Have you got that too, Mr Irving?
23 A. [Mr Irving]: Very shortly, yes. Document September 18th, by the way,
24 was on page 326 of Hitler’s War translated in full.
25 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Yes.
26 A. [Mr Irving]: This one is presumably on page 330. The one we are
. P-107
1 looking at now is on page 330 of Hitler’s War, the
2 original edition.
3 Q. [Mr Rampton]: I do not suppose much of what I am going to put to you is
4 going to be controversial, save in point of
5 interpretation, not translation. There may be some things
6 you have not seen before, in which case then you must say
7 so.
8 A. [Mr Irving]: I have seen this document.
9 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Obviously you have. It would not be in the book,
10 otherwise. It says, does it not, in effect this: Greiser
11 is writing to Himmler, and he says that the “special
12 treatment” — the word is Sonderbehandlung — “of about
13 100,000 Jews in my district was authorized by you in
14 agreement with Heydrich, and that it could be completed
15 within the next two to three months”?
16 A. [Mr Irving]: “You” in this case is of course Himmler, not Hitler.
17 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Oh sure.
18 A. [Mr Irving]: Yes.
19 Q. [Mr Rampton]: I said it is a letter from Greiser to Himmler.
20 A. [Mr Irving]: Yes, but it is an important point to make. It shows where
21 this particular system link ends.
22 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Well, you say that. That is assuming that Himmler never
23 communicated any of this sort of stuff to Hitler.
24 A. [Mr Irving]: I am just drawing attention to what this actual document
25 says, Mr Rampton.
26 Q. [Mr Rampton]: I follow that.
. P-108
1 A. [Mr Irving]: The special treatment which you, Mr Himmler, and Heydrich
2 have both authorized.
3 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Can we just leave Adolf Hitler out of this for the
4 moment? I am not actually on Adolf Hitler. I will have
5 to come back him, no doubt. I am dealing now with the
6 scale and systematic nature of this operation, whatever
7 this operation may turn out to be.
8 A. [Mr Irving]: Very well.
9 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Here in May of 1942, following an order or whatever you
10 like to call it from Hitler, that the OutReich and the
11 Protectorate are to be cleared of their Jews, Himmler gets
12 a letter from Greiser saying that he can clear out, no,
13 specially handle, whatever that may mean, about 100,000
14 Jews in his gaugebiet, which is the Warthegau, in the next
15 two to three months.
16 A. [Mr Irving]: Yes.
17 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Mr Irving, is that the first reference to
18 sonderbehandlung that one finds in the documents?
19 A. [Mr Irving]: My Lord, we have had it once or twice up to this point, I
20 believe.
21 Q. [Mr Rampton]: I mean chronologically?
22 MR RAMPTON My Lord, that is a very good question, if I may
23 say so. I do mean it is a good question because I do not
24 know the answer.
25 A. [Mr Irving]: With this sinister meaning, yes.
26 Q. [Mr Rampton]: There may be something in Professor Browning, I do not
. P-109
1 know. This means killing, does it not?
2 A. [Mr Irving]: In the light of what subsequently happened, yes, but it is
3 not evident from this particular document.
4 MR JUSTICE GRAY: But not in gas chambers?
5 A. [Mr Irving]: Not necessarily, no, not evident from this particular
6 document.
7 MR RAMPTON Where were the Jews of the Warthegau killed,
8 Mr Irving?
9 A. [Mr Irving]: I do not know, and I suspect that you cannot tell from
10 this document either.
11 Q. [Mr Rampton]: No, but I know what went on at Chelmno, as indeed do you,
12 do you not?
13 A. [Mr Irving]: We know that there was a killing operation started there,
14 yes.
15 Q. [Mr Rampton]: With the use of gas trucks?
16 A. [Mr Irving]: That is possible, yes.
17 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Yes. Well, let us look at another document in the same
18 file. This is one you may not have seen before but, as
19 I say, I am doing two things at once so, notwithstanding
20 that you have not seen them before if you have not, could
21 you look at footnote 247? It is just a couple of pages on
22 from the one we looked at. This is a reprint from a book
23 call Faschismus, I do not know who wrote it, which I am
24 sure is German for “fascism”. Have you seen this before?
25 A. [Mr Irving]: I have not, no. It is a translation into German from the
26 Polish, presumably.
. P-110
1 Q. [Mr Rampton]: No, I think probably not. If you look at item 218, Auszug
2 aus einem Lagebericht…
3 A. [Mr Irving]: Yes, but that comes from a totally different provenance,
4 according to the following page. It come from AIM,
5 Gestapo Lodsch.
6 Q. [Mr Rampton]: How do you know what document it is that I am talking
7 about?
8 A. [Mr Irving]: You are talking about document 217.
9 Q. [Mr Rampton]: No, 218.
10 A. [Mr Irving]: I am sorry.
11 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Would you read the part of 218 that is printed on that
12 page, and the first part down to the words ” geschaffen
13 worden ist” on the next page in German. I am certainly
14 not going to do that.
15 A. [Mr Irving]: You wish me to read it out in German?
16 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Yes.
17 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Is there not an English version? This is not
18 a very happy way of doing it, is it? It is terribly
19 laborious.
20 MR RAMPTON I have not got a translation of this particular
21 book.
22 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Not even in Longerich?
23 MR RAMPTON It is noted in Longerich, as you can see. The
24 document is 9th June 1942.
25 MR JUSTICE GRAY: It is not in your schedule, is it?
26 MR RAMPTON It is footnoted. It is not in my schedule, no.
. P-111
1 It is a document I found quite late.
2 MR JUSTICE GRAY: If there is no alternative, we will have to
3 do that way.
4 MR RAMPTON Right, I only want to ask one question really
5 about this. That is a report from the Gestapo in Lodsch
6 about movement of Jews, is it not?
7 A. [Mr Irving]: Yes.
8 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Yes. What it is saying is, we make space for Jews coming
9 — I am paraphrasing — in from the Outreich and the
10 Ostmark by, I do not know whether the word is displacing,
11 resettling, the Jews that are already in the ghetto at
12 Lodsch?
13 A. [Mr Irving]: Yes. This was always the policy. There would be a stage
14 by stage ripple, shall we say.
15 Q. [Mr Rampton]: What does the last phrase in the fifth line and sixth
16 lines of 247 mean? “… So das nunmehr fur zirka 55000
17 Juden Platz im Ghetto geschaffen worden ist”?
18 A. [Mr Irving]: So that we have now generated enough space for about
19 55,000 Jews in the ghetto.
20 Q. [Mr Rampton]: That must mean that about 55,000 Jews more or less have
21 been moved out somewhere?
22 A. [Mr Irving]: Yes, assuming that the ghetto had not been expanded at
23 that time.
24 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Sure, but, if you look at the table above, which may
25 indeed have a different source, it may have been
26 translated from the Polish, I do not know, 217, do you see
. P-112
1 the right hand column “Abgang”?
2 A. [Mr Irving]: Yes.
3 Q. [Mr Rampton]: And the subheading “Ausgesiedelt”?
4 A. [Mr Irving]: Yes.
5 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Which means settled, taken away?
6 A. [Mr Irving]: Yes.
7 Q. [Mr Rampton]: The first of the two columns in the middle says nach
8 Kulmhof, does it not?
9 A. [Mr Irving]: To Chelmno, yes.
10 MR JUSTICE GRAY: That is the same as Chelmno, is it?
11 A. [Mr Irving]: Yes.
12 MR RAMPTON That is Chelmno. If you total up the figures in
13 that column, they come, I can tell you, to 54,990.
14 A. [Mr Irving]: Yes.
15 Q. [Mr Rampton]: So that is where, using a reasonable degree of
16 intelligence and interpretive wisdom, Mr Irving, those
17 55,000 Jews in this Gestapo report have gone, is it not?
18 A. [Mr Irving]: Effectively, from January to May.
19 Q. [Mr Rampton]: That is right, in five months?
20 A. [Mr Irving]: In five months, yes. You are confronting me with these
21 documents. I am seeing it for the first time. I think we
22 are learning together. We are reading them together and
23 I will accept that as an interpretation, yes.
24 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Thank you. Are you prepared to say what you think might
25 have happened to those 55,000 Jews that were sent to
26 Chelmno in the first months of 1942?
. P-113
1 A. [Mr Irving]: Not on the basis of just those two documents, no. I think
2 it would be highly irresponsible to do so. I am just
3 looking at where Chelmno is on the map.
4 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Do you know anything about what was at Chelmno?
5 A. [Mr Irving]: We know something about what was at Chelmno. There were
6 these gas trucks that were disposing of people at some
7 time during the war, but whether they were operating in
8 these five months, I do not know. I notice that Chelmno
9 is on the border to the East, and an equally plausible
10 interpretation would be that they had been sent there as
11 the first stepping stage to go somewhere East. I am not
12 saying this is what happened.
13 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Chelmno?
14 A. [Mr Irving]: Yes.
15 Q. [Mr Rampton]: No, no, Chelmno, you are quite mistaken. Chelmno is in
16 the Warthegau. It is about 40 kilometres west-north-west
17 of Lublin.
18 A. [Mr Irving]: It is off this map?
19 Q. [Mr Rampton]: No, it is not on the map but I can tell you that it is on
20 every map I have ever looked at. Chelmno is in the
21 Warthegau.
22 A. [Mr Irving]: Of Lublin?
23 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Sorry, Lodsch. Did I say Lublin?
24 A. [Mr Irving]: Yes.
25 Q. [Mr Rampton]: It will not be on this map then.
26 MR JUSTICE GRAY: I thought Chelmno was the same as Chelm.
. P-114
1 MR RAMPTON No, it is not.
2 MR JUSTICE GRAY: I thought that is what I was told this
3 morning.
4 MR RAMPTON No, it is not.
5 MR JUSTICE GRAY: So Chelmno is not here at all.
6 MR RAMPTON Unless I can find it. I think this is Eastern
7 Poland. I think this is a general Government map. It is
8 not a map of the Warthegau at all. Your Lordship does
9 have some coloured maps.
10 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Yes, I do. I have found Chelmno on one of
11 them.
12 MR RAMPTON You will find Chelmno, as I say, about 40
13 kilometres West.
14 A. [Mr Irving]: Whatever. The precise answer is that, on the basis of
15 these two documents, we can say that that is on the
16 balance of probabilities the identical 55,000 people.
17 Q. [Mr Rampton]: I agree.
18 A. [Mr Irving]: But we cannot say on the basis of those two documents what
19 happened to those.
20 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Chelmno is in fact some distance West of
21 Warsaw.
22 MR RAMPTON Yes, but also West of Lodsch.
23 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Yes.
24 MR RAMPTON This is a different grouping, if I may call it
25 that, of Jews in some sense. These are the Jews of the
26 Warthegau that no doubt form part of the figure given by
. P-115
1 Dr Korheir in March 1943.
2 A. [Mr Irving]: This is the kind of statistical basis that would have been
3 provided to that statistician, yes.
4 Q. [Mr Rampton]: In that document he said that the Jews of the Warthegau,
5 I forget how many, 145,000 I think, had undergone
6 Sonderbehandlung, did he not?
7 A. [Mr Irving]: I am not going to answer that without seeing the document.
8 Q. [Mr Rampton]: You remember, we discussed it this morning. You agreed
9 with me. The Korheir report that Himmler had edited?
10 A. [Mr Irving]: Yes, but whether those specific ones — I know the phrase
11 Sonderbehandlung … comes into the document but whether
12 it is specifically the Warthegau Jews he is referring to.
13 Q. [Mr Rampton]: He referred to 145,000 Warthegau Jews and some whatever
14 million Polish Jews.
15 A. [Mr Irving]: Yes, if that is what the document says.
16 Q. [Mr Rampton]: As far as I recall, it does. It is something like that.
17 A. [Mr Irving]: Yes.
18 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Was Chelmno a village like Sobibor?
19 A. [Mr Irving]: I am as ill informed as your Lordship is on this. I am
20 not an expert on these matter but I am prepared to blunder
21 around in the darkness along with Mr Rampton.
22 MR RAMPTON I think Professor Van Pelt may have something to
23 say about that if asked, and so would, no doubt, Professor
24 Browning.
25 MR JUSTICE GRAY: The odd thing about it is that they are going
26 West rather than East.
. P-116
1 A. [Mr Irving]: That point obviously does stand out.
2 MR RAMPTON If you are going to kill large numbers of people,
3 it does not matter how you do it or where you do it,
4 provided you do it with a degree of concealment or
5 discretion, does it, Mr Irving?
6 A. [Mr Irving]: You are absolutely right. But I repeat, of course, that
7 the conclusions you are drawing are not actually included
8 in the two documents you have so far put to us.
9 Q. [Mr Rampton]: No it is a little piece of evidence along the way,
10 Mr Irving.
11 A. [Mr Irving]: After 55 years we are entitled to more than just little
12 bits of evidence, particularly now that the Polish
13 archives and the Russian archives are open to us.
14 Q. [Mr Rampton]: We go over this again and again and again, you see. I am
15 not looking for a single document as you are, Mr Irving.
16 I am looking at a jigsaw puzzle and I am trying to fit the
17 pieces together. When I have done that, I look at the
18 picture and I say, as an intelligent historian with an
19 open mind, what does this tell me?
20 A. [Mr Irving]: I think you are absolutely right. I do exactly the same
21 exercise but I think I am applying possibly slightly
22 stricter criteria, because one is always liable to be
23 ambushed ten years down the road by a document which
24 produces a completely different conclusion. The closer
25 you adhere to the original documents, if you possibly can,
26 the less likely you are to be ambushed. For example, when
. P-117
1 the entire Goebbels’ diaries came out about 15/20 years
2 ago, I contacted the editors and I said is there any
3 document that proves me wrong because I am quite happy to
4 be proven wrong. That is exactly the kind of nightmare
5 that awaits you, that suddenly some new huge archive may
6 open up like the entire Auschwitz archive, as happened
7 quite recently, and the documents may be there to prove
8 that you made irresponsible conclusions.
9 MR JUSTICE GRAY: But does the responsible historian take
10 account also of the fact that we do know that quite a lot
11 of what you might call the compromising documents were
12 destroyed deliberately as the Russian army advanced
13 westward?
14 A. [Mr Irving]: My Lord, the entire Auschwitz archives were captured by
15 the Russians, as we shall be hearing from the expert
16 witnesses, which is a very substantial trove. It was not
17 just any archives, it was the entire Auschwitz
18 construction archives. The same happened in Mydonek when
19 the Russians captured Mydonek.
20 MR RAMPTON Can we try to speed up a bit, Mr Irving, because
21 this is uncontroversial. Have you still got that tabular
22 sort of chronology summary document we gave you before the
23 adjournment?
24 A. [Mr Irving]: Yes.
25 Q. [Mr Rampton]: We put at the bottom of page 6 that Himmler had lunch with
26 Hitler on 14th July. We took that from the Witte book.
. P-118
1 A. [Mr Irving]: Yes.
2 Q. [Mr Rampton]: You in your books say he saw him on 16th. It does not
3 probably matter, does it?.
4 A. [Mr Irving]: It may well be that — he was constantly in and out. It
5 may well be that I had a letter that Himmler wrote to
6 Berger, for example, in which he said, “Yesterday I had
7 lunch with the Fuhrer”. This is the kind of source that
8 you would extract that information from. I have now
9 obtained access to all the private letters that Himmler
10 wrote to his mistress where he describes this very trip to
11 Auschwitz, that kind of material. You are constantly
12 coming across new material.
13 Q. [Mr Rampton]: At all events, either one day or three days after meeting
14 Hitler, Himmler goes to Eastern Europe, he goes to
15 Auschwitz first?
16 A. [Mr Irving]: He goes on quite a swing around the occupied territories.
17 Q. [Mr Rampton]: On 19th he is in Lublin?
18 A. [Mr Irving]: Yes.
19 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Eventually, I think, he winds up in Finland or somewhere
20 like that, but never mind that. He goes to Auschwitz.
21 A. [Mr Irving]: We have, of course, the private shorthand diary of
22 Himmler’s personal assistant, Rudolph Brant, for this
23 entire period, about a 300 page shorthand diary, which
24 I had transcribed and to which you have made no reference
25 in this, I see.
26 Q. [Mr Rampton]: I did not know about it and I know not whether it has any
. P-119
1 relevance or significance?
2 A. [Mr Irving]: It has been in my discovery and your instructing
3 solicitors have photocopied the entire document.
4 Q. [Mr Rampton]: I have no knowledge whether it has any significance or
5 relevance for this case.
6 A. [Mr Irving]: It has negative significance in as much as it is
7 shorthand, it is kept by Himmler’s personal assistant, and
8 yet it contains none of the kind of evidence that one
9 would have liked to have found.
10 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Now there is a document which I think we need to look at,
11 which is having been to Auschwitz on 17th and 18th July
12 1942 — if anybody wants to see it, there is a photograph
13 of the visit in the Witte book.
14 A. [Mr Irving]: Gerald Fleming also publishes it.
15 MR JUSTICE GRAY: We do not really need to look at it, do we?
16 MR RAMPTON I do not think you need to look at it, no,
17 I agree.
18 A. [Mr Irving]: Well, it shows who went. Kamla was there, the man who
19 built Auschwitz.
20 Q. [Mr Rampton]: The architect, Bischoff, was there?
21 A. [Mr Irving]: Bischoff was there. Presumably, Dejaco was also there —
22 all the local notables. Mr Dejaco is D-E-J-A-C-O.
23 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Now Mr Irving will need file H3 (ii).
24 MR RAMPTON My Lord, this is a document referred to on pages
25 63 to 64 of, so I am told — can I just — you perhaps
26 would like to have it open in front of you, page 63, my
. P-120
1 Lord?
2 A. [Mr Irving]: Of?
3 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Of Browning.
4 MR RAMPTON Of Browning. Could you turn to page 63, please?
5 I will just read out what Professor Browning says: “An
6 earlier document mentioning Einsatz Reinhard”. We can
7 translate that as “Operation Reinhard”, can we?
8 A. [Mr Irving]: Not spelt that way though.
9 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Well, I am sorry you will have to look at the document in
10 a moment. It dates from July 18th 1942. “It is a form on
11 which the personnel specially authorized ‘for the carrying
12 out of the work of the Jewish resettlement within the
13 framework of Operation Reinhard” by the SS and police
14 leader in the Lublin district’ acknowledged having been
15 orientated to specific rules of secrecy by SS Amtstung
16 Fuhrer Hofle on Globocnik’s staff. They were forbidden to
17 make any communication, verbal or in writing, concerning
18 the Jewish resettlement, Juden umsiedlung, under any
19 circumstances to anyone outside of Operation Reinhard.
20 Moreover, there was ‘an explicit prohibition against
21 photography in the camps of Operation Reinhard'”.
22 Would you just glance, please, or more than
23 glance, at the document which is in footnote 154 in volume
24 H3(ii).
25 MR JUSTICE GRAY: 154.
26 MR RAMPTON 154, my Lord, behind tab 16 in H3(ii).
. P-121
1 MR JUSTICE GRAY: 153.
2 MR RAMPTON This document is the right way up. Again it looks
3 to me like a reprint?
4 A. [Mr Irving]: Again it is a printed document.
5 Q. [Mr Rampton]: What? It looks like a reproduction, this, does it not?
6 A. [Mr Irving]: 154, document 228 you are talking about?
7 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Yes, document 228.
8 A. [Mr Irving]: Yes, it is a print.
9 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Yes. Have you seen the original of this?
10 A. [Mr Irving]: I have not, no.
11 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Did you know of its existence?
12 A. [Mr Irving]: No.
13 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Has Professor Browning — I will give you a moment in a
14 minute — is my question summarized its effect correctly?
15 A. [Mr Irving]: Yes, and I am familiar with the security, the secrecy
16 declarations. I have seen several of them, particularly
17 in connection with Auschwitz itself.
18 Q. [Mr Rampton]: You see how, at any rate, in this version —-
19 A. [Mr Irving]: Yes.
20 Q. [Mr Rampton]: — in July 1942, Reinhard is spelt?
21 A. [Mr Irving]: Yes, in this printed version.
22 Q. [Mr Rampton]: In this printed version.
23 A. [Mr Irving]: Yes.
24 Q. [Mr Rampton]: The spelling that you prefer, Mr Irving, has a “T” on the
25 end, does it not?
26 A. [Mr Irving]: You are rather presuming, but, in fact, there are disputes
. P-122
1 about how it should be spelt and perhaps I should explain
2 to his Lordship the reason for the…
3 MR JUSTICE GRAY: It is Heydrich?
4 A. [Mr Irving]: Obviously, the diminuendo is named in honour of Reinhart
5 Heydrich who had been assassinated a month earlier. But,
6 in fact, Operation Reinhard in its documentation, and I
7 can produce other documents which very much go in this
8 direction, there is an operation run by State Secretary,
9 Fritz Reinhart, of the German Ministry of Finance who is a
10 leading Nazi in that ministry who was in charge of the
11 expropriation and looting of stolen Jewish property. This
12 was a primary concern of these SS gangsters on the Eastern
13 Front to round up the Jews and rob them blind and take
14 their gold and everything else. Then it want to the
15 Ministry of Finance literally. It was appropriated by the
16 Reich. That is how it became known as Operation Reinhart,
17 but I do agree that sometimes the documents leave out the
18 “T” because of confusion.
19 MR RAMPTON Professor Browning, Mr Irving, only a few pages on
20 at page 66, at the bottom of page 66 —-
21 A. [Mr Irving]: Yes.
22 Q. [Mr Rampton]: — you may dispute it, but this is what he says, tells us
23 that the spelling of “Operation Reinhart” with a “T”
24 begins only in late 1943?
25 A. [Mr Irving]: There are documents prior to that, and only two months ago
26 I was sitting in the Hoover Library in California going
. P-123
1 through a whole file on Operation Reinhart from Himmler’s
2 files which details in very great degree the financial
3 expropriation that went on, the gold rings, the watches,
4 the whole of the business of recycling the stolen
5 property.
6 Q. [Mr Rampton]: And is your thesis this then, I do not know, perhaps I had
7 better ask you an open question, what is your thesis as to
8 the nature of Operation Reinhard?
9 A. [Mr Irving]: I am not setting up a rival thesis, Mr Rampton. I am just
10 rattling slightly at yours and saying it is not quite as
11 concrete and cast in stone as possibly you would like
12 people to believe.
13 Q. [Mr Rampton]: You will find when you question Professor Browning that he
14 does not say either that it is certain that it is named
15 after Reinhart Heydrich. All he notices is that the
16 spelling undergoes a change. What he is perfectly certain
17 about, and this is what matters in this case, is that it
18 was a killing operation as an adjunct of which the Nazis
19 stole the property of the dead people?
20 A. [Mr Irving]: Well, without wishing to reveal too much about what
21 I intend to cross-examine Professor Browning on, I can say
22 I that I shall be putting to him certain documents on the
23 letter head of Heinreich Himmler, the Chief of the SS,
24 which in the typical German Civil Service then have the
25 sub-departments and the sub-departs indicated in the
26 reference number, and you come to “Verwaltung” which is
. P-124
1 administration, “Reinhard” and so on and the document is
2 purely connected with the expropriation and the stolen
3 watches and the remanufacture of the fountain pens and
4 everything else that has been stolen from the victims of
5 what they called the Holocaust. So the Operation
6 Reinhard, it has a far stronger element of the
7 expropriation than of the liquidation, if I can put it
8 that way.
9 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Can I ask you because sometimes we seem to be
10 proceeding without, as it were, starting with the general
11 proposition. Do you accept that Operation Reinhard,
12 whoever it was called after, did have an aspect to it
13 which involved the wholesale killing of Jews by whatever
14 means?
15 A. [Mr Irving]: Operation Reinhard was a subsection of the Holocaust which
16 was partly the deportation element, partly the killing
17 element, whatever it happened, it had the for the SS the
18 pleasant side effect, the large numbers of fountain pens,
19 watches, gold, gold rings, jewellery and so on, came into
20 their hands which were then processed in a ruthlessly
21 methodical manner by the technicians of Operation
22 Reinhard.
23 Now, in the way that these things happen, it may
24 happen, it may have come about that people will then
25 regard Operation Reinhard as being the whole rather than
26 as being part of the whole, if I can put like that.
. P-125
1 Q. [Mr Justice Gray]: So the answer to my question is, yes, that was an
2 operation and it did have the wholesale killing of
3 Jews —-
4 A. [Mr Irving]: It was an element.
Section details 126.5-141.18
5 Q. [Mr Justice Gray]: — as part of its objective?
6 A. [Mr Irving]: It was a part of the whole, my Lord, which possibly later
7 on may then have become regarded as the whole.
8 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Right. Sorry, Mr Rampton, just to get the
9 general position.
10 MR RAMPTON No, your Lordship, as so often, and I do not say
11 this in any sycophantic way, just bad luck on me, has
12 asked a question that I am about to ask and it has several
13 times and, in a sense —-
14 MR JUSTICE GRAY: I am sorry.
15 MR RAMPTON — I am grateful, no, because —-
16 MR JUSTICE GRAY: It saves your voice.
17 MR RAMPTON — for (1) it has the reassuring effect that one
18 knows the judge is up to speed with the case.
19 MR JUSTICE GRAY: It happens occasionally.
20 A. [Mr Irving]: Mr Rampton, please do not hesitate to ask it again
21 yourself and you will probably get the same answer.
22 Q. [Mr Rampton]: No, I will ask you a much, much simpler question, not that
23 his Lordship’s question was in the very slightest bit
24 complicated. Do you accept or do you not accept because
25 if you do we can go on to something else, Mr Irving, that
26 hundreds upon thousands of Jews were from, let us say, the
. P-126
1 spring of 1942 and in Chelmno earlier and probably Belzec,
2 deliberately killed in Sobibor, Treblinka and Belzec?
3 A. [Mr Irving]: I think, on the balance of probabilities, the answer is
4 yes. But I have to say on the balance of probabilities
5 because the evidentiary basis for that statement is
6 extremely weak, even now, 55 years later. The Russians
7 captured the camps, they captured the documentation of
8 many of these camps, and we are still short of the actual
9 smoking gun, shall I say.
10 Q. [Mr Rampton]: We are also short of factory buildings and such like, are
11 we not?
12 A. [Mr Irving]: What kind of factory buildings?
13 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Well, Sobibor, let us take them north to south, Treblinka,
14 Sobibor and Belzec were not factory or work camps, were
15 they, whatever they were?
16 A. [Mr Irving]: My understand and, once again, I have to keep on
17 emphasising I am not an expert on the Holocaust and I do
18 not intend to become one for the purposes of this trial.
19 My understanding is that those camps also had a transit
20 camps aspect, that people would arrive there and they
21 would be shipped elsewhere.
22 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Where?
23 A. [Mr Irving]: For example, from Mydonek — from Treblinka they were
24 shipped to Mydonek, for example. There is a —-
25 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Maybe somewhere?
26 A. [Mr Irving]: I beg your pardon?
. P-127
1 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Maybe somewhere.
2 A. [Mr Irving]: 60,000.
3 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Very late on, I recollect, is that right?
4 A. [Mr Irving]: May 1943, my Lord, the Jews from the Warsaw ghetto,
5 according to the standard work by the Soviet historian,
6 Grossmann, published very early in the war, they had the
7 access to the records in Mydonek. They traced 60,000 Jews
8 from the Warsaw ghetto who had been sent to Treblinka and
9 then sent off to Mydonek. This kind of thing happened and
10 one wonders how often where we do not have the records of
11 it.
12 But I have to state that I am not an expert on
13 this, and I am willing to go along with any hypothesis
14 that Mr Rampton can —-
15 MR RAMPTON No, not an hypothesis. I want to know what you
16 accept and what you do not accept. If you accept, on a
17 balance of probabilities, that Operation Reinhard, whether
18 it had other aspects to it or not, was a killing operation
19 in the course of which hundreds of thousands of Jews were
20 deliberately killed by the Nazis, we can close this
21 chapter and go on to something else.
22 A. [Mr Irving]: No, I do not accept that. I say the that Operation
23 Reinhard was frequently something very definitely only a
24 sub-operation. It was the looting part, the looting
25 element, and the recycling element, which is where the
26 name originally came from.
. P-128
1 Q. [Mr Rampton]: I am getting terribly confused. I sometimes feel that
2 either I am not asking the right question or —-
3 A. [Mr Irving]: This is partially the reason for the secrecy that was
4 attached to the people operating in it. They were
5 required to sign these forms saying they had not seen the
6 looting going on and the stealing going on.
7 Q. [Mr Rampton]: I am confused. I had asked you a couple of minutes ago
8 whether you accepted, on the balance of probabilities,
9 that in Treblinka, Sobibor and Belzec whether you accepted
10 that hundreds of thousands of Jews were deliberately
11 killed by the Nazis and I thought you said yes.
12 A. [Mr Irving]: Yes, but then you tried to say this was Operation Reinhard
13 and that I do not go along with.
14 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Does the label matter in the end, really?
15 A. [Mr Irving]: I do not think so.
16 MR RAMPTON No, of course it does not. One sees a document
17 saying whatever it is, 100,000, it does not matter what it
18 is, and then one sees a document saying “greater secrecy”
19 and then one has the concession from the witness, that is
20 the end of that story, so it seems to me?
21 A. [Mr Irving]: It is not a concession, Mr Rampton. It is a simple
22 statement of fact on the balance of the evidence, balance
23 of possibilities.
24 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Does it matter what the means of killing were?
25 A. [Mr Irving]: Well, apparently it does because apparently we are going
26 to waste a lot of our time over the coming weeks looking
. P-129
1 at certain buildings.
2 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Can I read something that you said — you can look at it
3 in a moment — on 21st May 1989 in a letter to somebody
4 called Zitelmann?
5 A. [Mr Irving]: Dr Reine Zitelmann, a West German historian, yes.
6 Q. [Mr Rampton]: You wrote this: “As for what did unquestionably happen to
7 the Jews, the CSDIC report, of which I also enclose a
8 copy, shows with reliability beyond question the manner in
9 which the killings occurred, that is to say, shooting”?
10 A. [Mr Irving]: That is, of course, the Bruns Report which I have just
11 sent to yet another historian.
12 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Exactly. “Random, haphazard, criminal in nature,
13 occurring without Hitler’s knowledge and immediately
14 forbidden by him when he learned of them but going
15 unpunished by him too.”
16 A. [Mr Irving]: I still stand by that statement today.
17 Q. [Mr Rampton]: So, although it was hundreds of thousands of people that
18 were killed in these three small villages in Eastern
19 Poland, it was wholly random; is that right?
20 A. [Mr Irving]: If it had been systematic to the degree that you are
21 hoping to establish, industrialised, shall we say, it
22 would have been done by far more ruthlessly efficient
23 means with all that efficiency we come to associate with
24 the German name.
25 Q. [Mr Rampton]: That means we will have to look at some of the documents.
26 I had hoped to avoid that.
. P-130
1 MR JUSTICE GRAY: But so that we are clear what the issue
2 actually really is that we are trying to resolve, it is
3 not so much the numbers — I think you said you do not
4 like playing the numbers game — it is whether it was
5 systematic in the sense of having been organized from
6 Berlin and, perhaps, a higher level of Hitler?
7 A. [Mr Irving]: Well, in view of the fact that the court proposes to
8 attach significance to the word “systematic”, I shall have
9 to resist the suggestion that what happened in those camps
10 was systematic, and I am sure that Mr Rampton is aware
11 that on occasion even the SS headquarters sent out
12 travelling judges who established that unauthorised
13 killings had been going on and, in fact, on one or two
14 occasions the camp commandants were hanged before their
15 prisoners.
16 Q. [Mr Justice Gray]: You are quite right to pick up the word “systematic”. We
17 have been using it, I think, Mr Rampton, have we not, to
18 mean policy and policy adopted, laid down at a high level?
19 MR RAMPTON Yes, I do and I draw the — inference is too weak
20 a word — conclusions about system from both ends of the
21 documentation.
22 MR JUSTICE GRAY: But that is the issue. We need not bother
23 about numbers, it seems to me, in the light of what
24 Mr Irving has said.
25 MR RAMPTON Nor, I guess, about “deliberate” either?
26 A. [Mr Irving]: Deliberate?
. P-131
1 Q. [Mr Rampton]: “Deliberate killing”?
2 A. [Mr Irving]: Have we had an argument about “deliberate” yet?
3 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Murder?
4 A. [Mr Irving]: You would need to then specify who is deliberating.
5 MR JUSTICE GRAY: That is a …
6 MR RAMPTON Intentional killing.
7 MR JUSTICE GRAY: By whoever it was, the killing was not —-
8 A. [Mr Irving]: It certainly was not accidental.
9 MR JUSTICE GRAY: — not accidental.
10 MR RAMPTON But the people who did it were criminals who were
11 acting in a random, haphazard way; is that right?
12 A. [Mr Irving]: Yes. At whatever level. I mean, you could equally well
13 say that the middle level SS officers, the SS officials,
14 who were acting in a random and haphazard way.
15 MR RAMPTON My Lord, the reference to this document which, if
16 Mr Irving does not trust me, he should have is file D8(i),
17 page 222.
18 MR JUSTICE GRAY: That is what you have just read out.
19 MR RAMPTON Yes, but I am going to read another bit, an
20 earlier bit?
21 A. [Mr Irving]: Which document is that, the Hofle document?
22 Q. [Mr Rampton]: It is your letter to Zitelmann.
23 A. [Mr Irving]: Zitelmann, I am familiar with that. I was looking at it a
24 few days ago.
25 Q. [Mr Rampton]: OK. Well then it is not necessary.
26 A. [Mr Irving]: May I just pause at that point and say, my Lord, you
. P-132
1 remember that I said that I sent the Bruns’ document to a
2 very large number of historians. That is exactly the way
3 I would work. I would send documents like that and later
4 on the Aumeir document as well.
5 Q. [Mr Rampton]: I am going to read the paragraph above the one I just
6 read?
7 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Whereabouts in 8(ii)?
8 MR RAMPTON I am sorry, 8(i), my Lord, 222. Am I waiting for
9 something, Mr Irving?
10 A. [Mr Irving]: I am ready, yes.
11 Q. [Mr Rampton]: The third paragraph of the letter reads as follows. This
12 is May 21, 1989, so it may be your views have changed
13 since then, I know not. “On the… (reading to the
14 words)… my own view has crystallized a lot since 1975
15 when I delivered Hitler’s War to the publishers. It is
16 clear to me that no serious historian can now believe that
17 Auschwitz”, which is for some reason underlined?
18 A. [Mr Irving]: It is a link, it is a hyperlink.
19 Q. [Mr Rampton]: I follow you, yes. “… Treblinka, Mydonek, were totas
20 fabriken”?
21 A. [Mr Irving]: “Factories of death”.
22 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Factories of death, precisely. “All the expert and
23 scientific (forensic) evidence is to the contrary.” We
24 are going to have an argument about Auschwitz. We can
25 agree that Auschwitz did not start out as a totas fabrike,
26 or whatever the singular is. Mydonek, I can agree, was
. P-133
1 only partly used for that purpose, but you have just
2 agreed with me that, so far as you know, Treblinka did not
3 serve any other purpose or am I wrong?
4 A. [Mr Irving]: I did not say that.
5 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Right. What purpose did it serve?
6 A. [Mr Irving]: You asked if it was true that large numbers of people and
7 you said hundreds of thousands —-
8 Q. [Mr Rampton]: I said hundreds of thousands.
9 A. [Mr Irving]: — were killed at these places to which I agreed that
10 they were killed at those places, which included
11 Treblinka, but this does not mean to say that Treblinka
12 was a factory of death existing solely for that purpose.
13 Q. [Mr Rampton]: I see. Something special about the word “factory of
14 death”, is there?
15 A. [Mr Irving]: Well, it is. It is a quantum leap, if I can put it like
16 that.
17 Q. [Mr Rampton]: What does it mean?
18 A. [Mr Irving]: A factory of death is a purpose built ad hoc establishment
19 for killing the people who arrive. That is the way
20 I understand — maybe I am wrong. Maybe you interpret it
21 somewhat differently.
22 Q. [Mr Rampton]: No, it is your word. It is not my word.
23 A. [Mr Irving]: Because I just pointed out the 60,000 Warsaw Jews who
24 arrived there from the Warsaw Ghetto in May 1943 were then
25 sent from Treblinka to Mydonek. So, clearly, it was not a
26 factory of death. It had other purposes too.
. P-134
1 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Well, a transit camp for some small number of people?
2 A. [Mr Irving]: Yes.
3 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Later on, shortly after which I believe it was closed
4 down, was it not?
5 A. [Mr Irving]: That I do not know.
6 Q. [Mr Rampton]: That is, no doubt, why they were moved on to Mydonek, is
7 it not? It was the nearest place.
8 A. [Mr Irving]: I do not know. I do not know if you have any evidence for
9 that.
10 Q. [Mr Rampton]: We have a map.
11 A. [Mr Irving]: I am not talking about the proximity. I am talking about
12 the —-
13 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Do not worry about it.
14 MR JUSTICE GRAY: We need not trouble with Mydonek, need we?
15 MR RAMPTON Well, it was a place at which large numbers of
16 Jews were killed. There was a gas chamber there — this
17 is our evidence — which has been reconstructed since the
18 war, but it was also —-
19 A. [Mr Irving]: In other words, faked since the war.
20 Q. [Mr Rampton]: It was also in some sense a work camp?
21 MR JUSTICE GRAY: It is not a pleading point, but I think it is
22 not one of the camps that you actually specifically rely
23 on.
24 MR RAMPTON No, it is not. This is just for information. It
25 was liberated, I think, in late ’44.
26 THE WITNESS: [Mr Irving]: September 1944.
. P-135
1 MR JUSTICE GRAY: It was the first to be liberated, was it not?
2 MR RAMPTON Yes, it was, by the Russians. This is, as I say,
3 what the experts will tell your Lordship, I think. It was
4 such a shock in Berlin that everything was stopped.
5 A. [Mr Irving]: The Russians, of course, captured the entire camp records.
6 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Yes.
7 MR RAMPTON Yes. Well, then, Mr Irving, you have accepted
8 that an awful lot of people were killed in these little
9 places on the borders. You do not know one way or the
10 other whether there were any remains there, do you?
11 A. [Mr Irving]: Were there any?
12 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Remains there of buildings?
13 A. [Mr Irving]: I have not been to see it.
14 Q. [Mr Rampton]: You have not?
15 A. [Mr Irving]: I think that there is relatively little. You can go to
16 these places and search in vain for any kind of
17 foundations or anything. I am sure there were buildings
18 of some kind there, but I think the Polish people
19 descended on them like locusts after the war looking for
20 anything they could reuse.
21 Q. [Mr Rampton]: You have not been there. Have you read about whether
22 there are remains of factories or large barbed wire
23 encampments with huts for workers and that kind of thing?
24 A. [Mr Irving]: What, still there or whether they were there?
25 Q. [Mr Rampton]: No, still there. Have you been to Auschwitz?
26 A. [Mr Irving]: No.
. P-136
1 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Have you seen photographs of Auschwitz?
2 A. [Mr Irving]: Yes.
3 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Now, that has a lot of remains, has it not, comparatively
4 speaking?
5 A. [Mr Irving]: Quite a high percentage of remains still left there.
6 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Even in that part which is alleged to have been the —-
7 A. [Mr Irving]: Are we talking about Auschwitz or Birkenhau?
8 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Well, I call the whole thing in the usual way Auschwitz,
9 but let us talk about —-
10 A. [Mr Irving]: Let us be more precise.
11 Q. [Mr Rampton]: — have you been to Birkenhau?
12 A. [Mr Irving]: I have not been to either camp.
13 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Have you seen photographs of Birkenhau?
14 A. [Mr Irving]: Yes.
15 Q. [Mr Rampton]: There are in Birkenhau quite lot of ruins and huts and
16 bits and pieces, are there not?
17 A. [Mr Irving]: Yes.
18 Q. [Mr Rampton]: And the remains of the IG Faven(?) factory are still
19 there, are they not, outside the camp?
20 A. [Mr Irving]: At Monovitz, yes.
21 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Yes, Monovitz. Is there anything like that, so far as you
22 know, at Treblinka, Sobibor or Belzec?
23 A. [Mr Irving]: I am not informed one way or the other on that.
24 Q. [Mr Rampton]: The short point is this, Mr Irving, you have no evidence
25 to contradict the probability that these camps, these
26 three, I call them Reinhard camps (and I do not want to
. P-137
1 have an argument about that) were purpose-built
2 extermination facilities?
3 A. [Mr Irving]: I have no evidence to contradict the probability. It is a
4 very fair statement.
5 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Is that right?
6 A. [Mr Irving]: It is a very fair statement, yes.
7 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Does that mean that you do now resile from
8 the view you expressed in your letter?
9 A. [Mr Irving]: No, my Lord. I am just confirming the way he put the
10 statement. I have no evidence to contradict his statement
11 because I have no evidence, period.
12 MR RAMPTON Then will you accept it is a probability then?
13 A. [Mr Irving]: No. That is a different thing entirely. I do not want to
14 sound as though I am a bit of an eel on this but…
15 Q. [Mr Rampton]: My word entirely, Mr Irving!
16 A. [Mr Irving]: I do not want to sound slippery; I just do not want to be
17 nailed down in one corner where later on you will hold it
18 up dripping and slithering next day and say, “Look what
19 you said yesterday”.
20 MR JUSTICE GRAY: But, you see, you said to Dr Zitelmann that
21 it was clear to you that no serious historian can now
22 believe that Treblinka and some other camps were “totas
23 fabriken”.
24 A. [Mr Irving]: Quite. They were purpose-built factories of death; in
25 other words, had no other purpose than that.
26 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Oh, I see.
. P-138
1 MR RAMPTON But you told me — I am sorry about this; this is
2 getting a bit like a fourth form debating society, I fear
3 — a moment ago you said to me that you had no evidence
4 to contradict the probability that these were
5 purpose-built extermination facilities.
6 A. [Mr Irving]: Yes, because I have no evidence, period.
7 Q. [Mr Rampton]: No, but you write in this letter: “All the experts in
8 scientific forensic evidence is to the contrary”?
9 A. [Mr Irving]: Yes.
10 Q. [Mr Rampton]: So what is that scientific and forensic evidence and
11 expert evidence to the contrary?
12 A. [Mr Irving]: Do you wish now already to get into the cyanide tests and
13 that kind of thing?
14 Q. [Mr Rampton]: No, I am talking about Treblinka.
15 A. [Mr Irving]: Yes.
16 Q. [Mr Rampton]: What is the expert and scientific (forensic) evidence that
17 contradicts the probability that Treblinka was a
18 purpose-built extermination facility?
19 A. [Mr Irving]: Well, I am now looking at a letter which I wrote 11 years
20 ago. I would have to try to put myself back into the
21 mindset at that time when I wrote that letter, and try to
22 recall the actual documents I had been pouring over and
23 the air photographs and the interrogation reports and
24 things like that, if I was to explain why I wrote that
25 particular sentence.
26 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Were you extrapolating from Auschwitz?
. P-139
1 A. [Mr Irving]: I was extrapolating backwards from Auschwitz, if I can put
2 it like that, but certainly tests were also carried out
3 equally on at least one of those other two locations, the
4 same kind of forensic tests. We also had material of the
5 kind I mentioned, like air photos and prisoner of war
6 reports and things like that, but it is not the kind of
7 evidence that puts me in a position to say, “I can,
8 therefore, challenge the probability or whatever it was
9 that Mr Rampton was saying”.
10 MR RAMPTON But how could you extrapolate from Auschwitz,
11 Mr Irving? It has never been proposed by anybody, so far
12 as I know, that the Nazis used hydrogen cyanide anywhere
13 outside Auschwitz to kill people with, has it?
14 A. [Mr Irving]: Well, exactly. This is what I find so puzzling. We were
15 told that this is part of system by learned counsel and
16 yet, apparently, they used cyanide here, petrol gas there,
17 diesel fumes there, bullets in yet another place,
18 bulldozers, hangings, shootings — it appears to have been
19 a totally ramshackle and haphazard operation. A total
20 lack of system.
21 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Would you please answer my question, Mr Irving? You said
22 you extrapolated the conclusion that there was expert and
23 scientific evidence that Treblinka was not a totas
24 fabrike. You extrapolated that from Auschwitz?
25 A. [Mr Irving]: I very foolishly used the word suggested by his Lordship,
26 “extrapolated”. Perhaps I should have — without
. P-140
1 realising that the word was going to be seized upon by
2 counsel.
3 Q. [Mr Rampton]: That is what I am paid for, Mr Irving. I am sorry if you
4 say things —-
5 A. [Mr Irving]: Yes.
6 Q. [Mr Rampton]: — you readily accept a suggestion from the Judge and
7 make it part of your evidence and it seems to me to be
8 idiotic, then I am going to seize on it, am I not?
9 A. [Mr Irving]: I do not think his Lordship suggested an idiotic word but
10 in this particular case —-
11 Q. [Mr Rampton]: No, the process would be idiotic, though, would it not, to
12 extrapolate a denial about Treblinka from the evidence
13 about Auschwitz, would it not?
14 A. [Mr Irving]: No, the extrapolation there would be to say that if
15 Auschwitz was not a killing station, a dedicated factory
16 of death, then, on the balance of probabilities, it is
17 likely that these two were not dedicated factories of
18 death either.
Section details 141.19-147.4
19 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Why? Auschwitz started out as a huge grandiose scheme by
20 Himmler, did it not, to provide a sort of fife for the SS
21 in central or south Poland at which there would be vast
22 factories and brilliant agricultural lands and experiments
23 of that kind, without any thought of killing anybody at
24 all except through hard work?
25 A. [Mr Irving]: You are giving evidence on my part.
26 Q. [Mr Rampton]: That is right, is it no?
. P-141
1 A. [Mr Irving]: That is absolutely right and I wish you were my counsel at
2 this moment.
3 Q. [Mr Rampton]: That is how Auschwitz started out. Its origins were quite
4 different from those of the three so-called Reinhardt
5 camps?
6 A. [Mr Irving]: It now squares up to the chronology, Mr Rampton. We are
7 told by your experts that Auschwitz had become a dedicated
8 killing station by the end of 1941 or early 1942 at the
9 latest, and yet apparently the also had found it necessary
10 to establish other places to do killings too.
11 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Mr Irving, I am sorry —-
12 A. [Mr Irving]: So that is what I mean by extrapolating. If you have a
13 super mass production factory here, then why do you build
14 these villages elsewhere?
15 Q. [Mr Rampton]: If you read Professor van Pelt’s report with any care you
16 would know that that was complete nonsense, that the
17 evolution of Auschwitz into a dedicated killing facility,
18 in fact not Auschwitz, Birkenhau, really began at the end
19 of 1942. There were some gassings by the use of a cellar
20 at Auschwitz, one, and by, two, converted farm houses
21 during 1942?
22 A. [Mr Irving]: But of there was a course huge rate of mortality at
23 Auschwitz in the middle of 1942.
24 Q. [Mr Rampton]: We will get on to Auschwitz next week, but do not
25 misrepresent what Professor van Pelt has said, unless you
26 are sure of your ground, because it is not what he said.
. P-142
1 A. [Mr Irving]: You have brought up Auschwitz now and you are talking
2 about dates and months, and when I try to pin you down on
3 the huge mortality rate in the middle of 1942 you are
4 saying let us talk about that next week.
5 Q. [Mr Rampton]: There was a typhus epidemic at Auschwitz in 1942.
6 A. [Mr Irving]: So we are saying now that all the deaths in 1942 were from
7 typhus?
8 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Mr Irving, surely you can do better than that?
9 A. [Mr Irving]: You just said it, Mr Rampton.
10 Q. [Mr Rampton]: I said there was a huge typhus epidemic in 1942?
11 A. [Mr Irving]: The killings did not start until the end of 1942.
12 Q. [Mr Rampton]: I did not say that. At the same time people were being
13 gassed in what are known as bunkers one and two, and that
14 the conversion of the two planned crematoria at Birkenhau
15 into gas chambers took place in the late part of 1942 at
16 the planning stage, and that they came into operation in
17 early 1943?
18 A. [Mr Irving]: With the cyanide being dropped in through the roof,
19 right?
20 MR JUSTICE GRAY: We have to compartmentalize to an extent. We
21 are not on that topic yet.
22 MR RAMPTON No, we are not.
23 A. [Mr Irving]: I think Mr Rampton made some useful concessions.
24 MR JUSTICE GRAY: I think it is actually party my fault. I
25 think I rater reintroduced Auschwitz. We are back on the
26 systematic nature of the killings by whatever means, is
. P-143
1 that really the broad heading for the topic we are on?
2 MR RAMPTON This is right. I am not sure where we have got in
3 relation to Treblinka, my Lord, and the other two
4 Reinhardt camps, except this. There has been an
5 acceptance by Mr Irving that hundreds of thousands of Jews
6 were intentionally killed in those three places, but not
7 as the consequence of any policy or system, I think, and
8 that he is not satisfied that that was their dedicated
9 purpose.
10 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Speaking for myself, one does not really need
11 to spend terribly much time now on what exactly was going
12 on in any of those places. The point seems now to be how
13 did it come about, was it local murderers?
14 A. [Mr Irving]: I think the way Mr Rampton summed it up is a very fair
15 summary of my position.
16 MR RAMPTON There is also, of course, an issue about the
17 method of killing, but that may in due course turn out to
18 be less significant.
19 MR JUSTICE GRAY: In relation to those camps I think it might.
20 MR RAMPTON Indeed. As to system —-
21 A. [Mr Irving]: It is only of relevance when it goes to the expertise of
22 the people who considered this whole matter, if they
23 willing accept that kind of story, if I can put it like
24 that.
25 Q. [Mr Rampton]: I agree with that. So, my Lord, what I propose is to look
26 at just some very few documents for two purposes. What
. P-144
1 I am going to do is to look at just some very documents
2 for two purposes: one to show the scale of the thing and
3 the other to show the sort of level at which it was being
4 discussed. So I am not going to look at a lot of what
5 Mr Irving calls “janitorial” documents, and I hope that
6 most of what I am going to look at is going to be common
7 ground.
8 MR JUSTICE GRAY: So far as the scale of the operation is
9 concerned, it may be that that can be, as it were,
10 disposed of as an issue by some very general questions.
11 I do not know.
12 MR RAMPTON Well, I expect so, but if one looks at, for
13 example — I would rather do it chronologically, if I am
14 allowed, I think.
15 MR JUSTICE GRAY: It was just that if the door is an open one,
16 then there is no point in pushing against it too hard.
17 MR RAMPTON I agree. Do you agree, Mr Irving, you have
18 written something of it in your own book, that daily
19 trains full of Jews, thousands of Jews, from about 22nd
20 July were going eastwards from Walsall, Radom, and
21 eventually Lublin. There is another place too, I cannot
22 remember, to these three places from about 22nd July?
23 A. [Mr Irving]: This is the correspondence between Wolff and Ganzenmuller.
24 Q. [Mr Rampton]: That is Wolff and Ganzenmuller?
25 A. [Mr Irving]: Yes, the Minister of Transport.
26 Q. [Mr Rampton]: You do accept that?
. P-145
1 A. [Mr Irving]: Large numbers, yes.
2 Q. [Mr Rampton]: We will look at what the position was in —-
3 A. [Mr Irving]: They are going via Malinka to Treblinka I think.
4 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Yes, all that, in enormous numbers. If you think about
5 it, 5,000 Jews a day is 35,000 Jews a week?
6 A. [Mr Irving]: That would be five train loads.
7 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Yes. What?
8 A. [Mr Irving]: That would have been five train loads per day.
9 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Exactly. I am comfortable without having just a quick
10 look at the document.
11 A. [Mr Irving]: It might be useful just to have a look at the documents to
12 see what the security classification was.
13 Q. [Mr Rampton]: I must say I rather agree. We will look at two documents,
14 if you do not mind. Ganzenmuller to Wolff on 29th July
15 1942, it is either 28th or 29th, anyhow I need a copy of
16 it.
17 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Is it H4(ii)?
18 MR RAMPTON It might be.
19 A. [Mr Irving]: The originals were in my discovery of course.
20 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Can we not operate off Professor Browning’s.
21 MR RAMPTON I do not know where that is.
22 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Page 45.
23 MR RAMPTON There is no copy, that is the trouble.
24 MR JUSTICE GRAY: We can do it off the report, can we not?
25 Page 45.
26 MR RAMPTON I am sorry, my Lord, where did your Lordship say?
. P-146
1 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Page 45. I think that is probably all you
2 really need. I cannot believe the context is going to
3 make much difference.
4 MR RAMPTON No, the context probably is not.
5 “Since July 22nd one train with 5,000 Jews
6 departs daily via Malinka to Treblinka. Moreover, twice
7 per week a train with 5,000 Jews departs”, a Polish word
8 for Belzec. So that is, is it not, 35,000 a week from,
9 I think that is actually from Walsall?
10 A. [Mr Irving]: Yes, my only little quibble is with the figures. I accept
11 the documents are completely authentic, but you could not
12 get 5,000 people into one train, not even with a shoe
13 horn.
14 Q. [Mr Rampton]: I agree. That is why I think the figure is exaggerated.
15 A. [Mr Irving]: There is a little bit of bragging going on here.
16 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Yes, probably.
17 A. [Mr Irving]: The normal figure is about 1,000 people per train and this
18 is, certainly at this time, I mean later on in 1944 when
19 they used more brutal methods I think they packed them
20 into more unorthodox transport.
21 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Perhaps, Mr Irving, we do better to look at a summary
22 which was made in Berlin at the end of September 1942, and
23 you may agree these figures are more reliable. It is page
24 47, my Lord, of Professor Browning and it is note 121,
25 which is H3(ii), tab 13 I am told. I apologise to your
26 Lordship for that slight delay, but when the files are
. P-147
1 open I cannot tell what they are. It is first document
2 behind tab 13.
3 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Yes.
4 MR RAMPTON We looked at this once before I think, Mr Irving.
5 A. [Mr Irving]: Yes.
6 Q. [Mr Rampton]: We have to at the moment take it from Professor Browning
7 that it is what he says it is.
8 A. [Mr Irving]: Yes.
9 Q. [Mr Rampton]: He says it is a conference in Berlin on 26th and 28th
10 September 1992. What his basis for that saying is I do
11 not know. He will tell us no doubt when he gets here.
12 Assuming that to be right, it is telling us that there was
13 discussed, one, the evacuation of 600,000 Jews from the
14 General Government?
15 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Of the General Government.
16 MR RAMPTON I am sorry, my Lord, yes, of the General
17 Government. Then item two is the forwarding of 200,000
18 Romanian Jews into the General Government.
19 A. [Mr Irving]: I can see item one, the 600,000 going.
20 Q. [Mr Rampton]: “Die Verschieckung”.
21 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Paragraph 2?
22 A. [Mr Irving]: Am I looking at the Browning or at a document?
23 Q. [Mr Justice Gray]: No, I am sorry, you should be looking at a document.
24 A. [Mr Irving]: Right. Which is where.
25 MR JUSTICE GRAY: I would do a bit of housekeeping if I were
26 you, Mr Irving.
. P-148
1 A. [Mr Irving]: Where do I find it in H3(ii)?
2 MR RAMPTON You will find it behind tab 13.
3 A. [Mr Irving]: Under tab 13?
4 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Yes.
5 A. [Mr Irving]: Yes, OK, I have it.
6 Q. [Mr Rampton]: You have that and I expect you recognize it?
7 A. [Mr Irving]: I have never seen it before. It is pages 149 and 150 of
8 some, it looks like a court document of some kind.
9 Q. [Mr Rampton]: I do not know.
10 A. [Mr Irving]: Highly unsatisfactory of course to have a document
11 presented in this form in a court transcript.
12 Q. [Mr Rampton]: If you dispute its reliability or its authenticity you can
13 take it up with Professor Browning when he gets here.
14 I have asked you to bear that in mind.
15 A. [Mr Irving]: It is just a comment I make that it is unsatisfactory to
16 have a document presented in this form.
17 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Of course, but this is not an historical enquiry,
18 Mr Irving. You brought this action against my clients
19 asking for damages and an injunction. So we have to do
20 the best we can with what we have before us. Can I just
21 ask you —-
22 A. [Mr Irving]: Mr Rampton, you have a very large staff of experts and
23 experts’ assistants and assistants to those assistants
24 behind you in this very courtroom. I am acting on this
25 action by myself.
26 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Yes, Mr Irving. Just assume for the sake of argument,
. P-149
1 will you, that this is both authentic and possibly, I do
2 not know, reliable?
3 A. [Mr Irving]: Yes.
4 Q. [Mr Rampton]: It speaks of the evacuation of 600,000 Jews of the General
5 Government?
6 A. [Mr Irving]: Yes.
7 Q. [Mr Rampton]: It speaks also of the forwarding into the General
8 Government the 200,000 Romanian Jews, does it not, the
9 second paragraph?
10 A. [Mr Irving]: Yes, it is in words, yes, “von zweihunderttausend Juden
11 Rumaniens”.
12 Q. [Mr Rampton]: It is the first heading I am interested in under point one
13 or as to point one, urgent transports, I cannot read the
14 next word, can you help me with that?
15 A. [Mr Irving]: Proposed, “polkishen”.
16 Q. [Mr Rampton]: What does it mean?
17 A. [Mr Irving]: Urgent transport proposed by the Chief of Security Police
18 and by the Security Service.
19 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Is that —-
20 A. [Mr Irving]: Heydrich.
21 Q. [Mr Rampton]: — Heydrich?
22 A. [Mr Irving]: No, at this time it would be Carleton Brunner. Heydrich
23 was killed.
24 Q. [Mr Rampton]: How high up is that?
25 A. [Mr Irving]: Directly under Himmler.
26 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Directly under Himmler. What he has ordered are —-
. P-150
1 A. [Mr Irving]: Two trains per day from the district of Walsall to
2 Treblinka; one train per day from the district of Random
3 to Treblinka; one train per day from the district of
4 Krakow to Belzec, and one train per day from the district
5 of Lemberg or the Wolff to Belzec.
6 Q. [Mr Rampton]: That makes a total, I think I am right, of 5,000 a day?
7 A. [Mr Irving]: That would be approximately 5,000.
8 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Can you for me, please, just complete the sentence because
9 it was not, after Lemberg and then the numbers there is
10 some more, is there not?
11 A. [Mr Irving]: “Could be conducted”.
12 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Yes.
13 A. [Mr Irving]: That is in the subjunctive. “Waren” with the 200 G-wagen,
14 which are presumably goods trucks, “which have already
15 been placed at our disposal for this purpose by the
16 headquarters of the Krakow Railways, as far as this can be
17 carried out or is feasible”.
18 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Thank you very much. So they are reporting, what, a
19 proposal or an event or series of events?
20 A. [Mr Irving]: It is an estimate of what we can do with the transport
21 capacity placed at our disposal.
22 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Available rolling stock, they can do 5,000 a day to two of
23 these three places in the East, except that the one train
24 a day from Lemberg which, as you say, is what I call
25 “Lavof” which is in what is now the Ukraine and then was
26 Galicia, is going eastwards if it is going to Belzec, is
. P-151
1 it not?
2 A. [Mr Irving]: One train a day is going from Lemberg to Belzec that is on
3 the frontier, yes.
4 Q. [Mr Rampton]: It is going eastwards. It is crossing —-
5 A. [Mr Irving]: Yes.
6 Q. [Mr Rampton]: — from Galicia westwards into the General Government?
7 A. [Mr Irving]: It is right on the Eastern border of the General
8 Government, about two kilometres from the edge.
9 Q. [Mr Rampton]: So the Jews of Lemberg, to give it its German name, are
10 being transported eastwards to Belzec?
11 A. [Mr Irving]: To Belzec two kilometres from the border, yes.
12 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Yes. No sense then in which Belzec can be regarded as a
13 transit camp, is there, for movement further eastwards?
14 A. [Mr Irving]: These destinations that are in this document which I am
15 seeing for the first time, Treblinka, Belzec, they are all
16 on the border, what I might say the exit door, of the
17 General Government.
18 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Yes.
19 A. [Mr Irving]: It is like standing something next to the door where they
20 are robbed. Everything is taken off them by Operation
21 Reinhardt. Then we do not know, on the basis of this
22 document, what happened to them after that.
23 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Trains converge on Belzec containing Jews in vast numbers,
24 frankly, from East and West. Belzec most likely,
25 Mr Irving, is in any sense of the word a terminus, is it
26 not?
. P-152
1 A. [Mr Irving]: Did you say they are coming from East and West?
2 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Yes. If you look down what is proposed next, the line is
3 bust at the moment, they are going to start up in
4 November, then trains are going to go from Lublin to
5 Belzec?
6 A. [Mr Irving]: Where is that?
7 Q. [Mr Rampton]: I am sorry, read the next bit then.
8 A. [Mr Irving]: After the restoration of the railway line from Lublin to
9 Chelm.
10 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Yes.
11 A. [Mr Irving]: Probably on about 1st November.
12 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Yes.
13 A. [Mr Irving]: “The” other urgent transports will also be, we can also
14 carry out the other urgent transports, namely one train
15 per day from Radom to Sobibor; one train per day from
16 Lublin.
17 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Lublin North.
18 A. [Mr Irving]: Lublin North to Belzec and one train per day from Lublin
19 centre to Sobibor.
20 Q. [Mr Rampton]: So once that is in operation, which is in about a month’s
21 time, five weeks time, Belzec will be receiving Jews both
22 from the West?
23 A. [Mr Irving]: From Lublin.
24 Q. [Mr Rampton]: From Lublin and from the East, Lavof?
25 A. [Mr Irving]: Yes.
26 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Lemberg?
. P-153
1 A. [Mr Irving]: Yes.
2 Q. [Mr Rampton]: I am sorry about this, Mr Irving, but sometimes junior
3 counsel and experts produce aid in a case like this.
4 H1(ix) I think you may already have, unless his Lordship’s
5 advice about housekeeping has been rigorously obeyed. My
6 Lord, H1(ix), page 329.
7 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Yes.
8 A. [Mr Irving]: Yes, it is one of the relevant documents. It is still
9 only a transcript, but it is it is more useful.
10 MR JUSTICE GRAY: What tab is it?
11 MR RAMPTON 329, my Lord. You will find the translations, my
12 Lord, at pages 429 to 30 of Evans.
13 A. [Mr Irving]: If your Lordship has the document, I draw attention only
14 to the security classification which is “Geheim” on page
15 329.
16 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Where do I get what the security
17 classification is?
18 A. [Mr Irving]: On about the tenth line, G-E-H-E-I-M.
19 Q. [Mr Justice Gray]: That is secret?
20 A. [Mr Irving]: Yes. It is just the lowest security classification there
21 is, apart from “vertraulich” which is confidential,
22 whereas everything to do with the killing operations, at
23 any rate anything that could be explicitly recognized as
24 killing operations, was a much higher classification.
25 I shall be making that point once or twice.
26 Q. [Mr Justice Gray]: But against that this is not in a sense a compromising
. P-154
1 document on its face. It is simply saying these trains
2 are going to Treblinka?
3 A. [Mr Irving]: I agree, my Lord, but taken in conjunction with the other
4 document in this pair where Wolff writes back saying, you
5 remember, “It’s a good thing that 5,000, a chosen few, per
6 day are going that way.” I do not know if the reply is
7 also there, is it? Here is Wolff replying in the next
8 one.
9 Q. [Mr Justice Gray]: He is W, is he?
10 A. [Mr Irving]: Yes, he is W. “Dear Comrade, Ganzenmuller”, and again this
11 document has no classification at all. This is from my
12 own files, my Lord. This is actually from Himmler’s
13 papers and it has no classification rating at all. If you
14 look at the square box, the rubber stamp at the top
15 right-hand corner, my Lord, you will have see on that
16 little bundle I have gave you this morning, I had printed
17 in red there was one such little bundle translated into
18 English and that had the security classification on it.
19 The third line of that box where it says “actung nummer”
20 which would be file number, would have afterwards G-E-H
21 oblique stroke, and then they would write in handwriting
22 the secret file number, if this was a classified
23 document. So neither of these two correspondents,
24 Ganzenmuller or Wolff, considered this matter they were
25 talking about to be secret, and I shall be leading
26 evidence, my Lord, that the SS were very pernickety about
. P-155
1 security classifications on their documents.
2 Q. [Mr Justice Gray]: But there is nothing compromising, as I say, on the face
3 of either of these documents. It is just trans going to
4 Treblinka?
5 A. [Mr Irving]: Even documents that were written as euphemisms had the
6 security classification put on them which was rather
7 self-defeating.
8 MR RAMPTON I am puzzled by that. I am puzzled for two
9 reasons, Mr Irving. The first document is not an
10 original, I think. It is a Nuremberg reprint, is it not?
11 A. [Mr Irving]: It is a transcript, yes.
12 Q. [Mr Rampton]: But that does not tell us anything about what its original
13 classification might be?
14 A. [Mr Irving]: It does, if you excuse me, it has the German
15 classification on it.
16 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Which is?
17 A. [Mr Irving]: About the tenth, Geheim, G-E-H-E-I-M, in the centre.
18 Q. [Mr Rampton]: What does that mean?
19 A. [Mr Irving]: Secret.
20 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Oh, secret?
21 A. [Mr Irving]: Yes.
22 MR JUSTICE GRAY: But that is a low security classification,
23 that is what Mr Irving has just said.
24 A. [Mr Irving]: The only one lower than that was “vertraulich” which means
25 confidential. Before that there are three or four
26 successive ranks. You have Geheimreichs,
. P-156
1 Geheimschetaffe(?) and (?)offizier which means only an
2 officer can carry it.
3 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Very learned, Mr Irving, and it is quite right you should
4 say it.
5 A. [Mr Irving]: Are you sneering at my expertise?
6 Q. [Mr Rampton]: No, I am not sneering at your expertise. Actually I am
7 complaining about the way you keep making speeches in
8 answer to questions I have not asked, if you want to
9 know.
10 A. [Mr Irving]: I think his Lordship has indicated in the view of the fact
11 that I am a litigant in person I am allowed a little bit
12 of latitude in making points which I would otherwise have
13 no opportunity to make.
14 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Yes, but may I suggest if you are going to do that, to
15 which I have no objection whatsoever, you make your
16 observations to his Lordship and not to me. We are not
17 having an argument. You are answering questions under
18 oath. Now I am trying to find the translation of this
19 document. Yes, I have found it. My Lord, it is the
20 bottom of paragraph 4 of page 430 of Evans, but I dare say
21 there are other versions.
22 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Page 430 of?
23 MR RAMPTON Of Evans, my Lord.
24 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Yes.
Section details 157.25-172.23
25 MR RAMPTON This is from Ganzenmuller whose precise position
26 is what?
. P-157
1 A. [Mr Irving]: Secretary of State, Staff Secretare, which is the
2 Permanent Under Secretary in the Ministry of Transport.
3 Q. [Mr Rampton]: In Berlin?
4 A. [Mr Irving]: In Berlin.
5 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Is he a senior Civil Servant?
6 A. [Mr Irving]: A very senior Civil Servant.
7 Q. [Mr Rampton]: A very senior Civil Servant. He writes to Wolff?
8 A. [Mr Irving]: Karl Wolff was the personal adjutant of Heydrich Himmler.
9 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Yes, and it was Karl Wolff who was quite often, am
10 I wrong, tell me if I am, as it were, seconded by Himmler
11 to Hitler, is that right, or have I got that wrong?
12 A. [Mr Irving]: It was a floating kind of relationship. Karl Wolff was
13 very close to Hitler. He fell out over a marital dispute
14 I think, a matrimonial dispute, but actually his position
15 was Chief Adjutant of Heydrich Himmler. He was never on
16 Hitler’s staff. He was on Himmler’s staff.
17 Q. [Mr Rampton]: No. What I am driving at is obvious I think, Mr Irving.
18 Karl Wolff was in a position if Adolf Hitler should say to
19 him one day, say late August or September or July 1942,,
20 “How is it going in the East?”, Wolff is in a position to
21 tell him?
22 A. [Mr Irving]: Undoubtedly, yes. He would have told him about these
23 train loads of Jews being shipped off to Treblinka.
24 Q. [Mr Rampton]: You can imagine the conversation. This is pure fancy on
25 my part of course. “Karl, how is it going in the East?
26 Well, we’ve good news from Ganzenmuller that they’re able
. P-158
1 to shift about 35,000 of the chosen people a week to these
2 camps in the East.” That is all, as simple as that.
3 A. [Mr Irving]: Yes. Hitler of course never used deprecatory phrases like
4 “the chosen people”.
5 Q. [Mr Rampton]: No. He used nice complimentary phrases like “parasites”
6 and “bacilli”, did he not?
7 A. [Mr Irving]: That is right. But of course this is just your
8 imagination which has no evidentiary value whatsoever in
9 this action.
10 Q. [Mr Rampton]: No, of course not, but Wolff was in a position, what I am
11 saying is Wolff was close to Hitler, close to the thrown,
12 was he not?
13 A. [Mr Irving]: He was close to Himmler’s thrown. He was on Himmler’s
14 personal staff.
15 Q. [Mr Rampton]: And Hitler’s too. You just old us he was close to Hitler?
16 A. [Mr Irving]: I made it quite specific. He was on Himmler’s staff, not
17 on Hitler’s staff, but he was a frequent visitor to
18 Hitler’s headquarters.
19 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Can you look at this letter and tell us what it says,
20 please. It says something about a telephone call on 16th
21 July, does it not?
22 A. [Mr Irving]: Which letter are we talking about?
23 Q. [Mr Rampton]: This one from Ganzenmuller to Wolff.
24 A. [Mr Irving]: “Referring to our telephone conversation of July 16th 1942
25 I inform you of the following report from my general
26 direction of the Eastern Railroads in Krakow for your own
. P-159
1 personal information.”
2 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Then he quotes the report, does he?
3 A. [Mr Irving]: Then he quotes the report: “Since July 27th a daily train
4 load of 5,000 Jews, each is travelling from Walsall via
5 Malkenia to Treblinka, in addition to which two are
6 running each week, a train of 5,000 Jews will run each
7 week from Eprzemysl to Belzec.”
8 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Yes.
9 A. [Mr Irving]: Do you wish me to continue?
10 Q. [Mr Rampton]: No, I do not. I am just wondering whether I was right to
11 agree with you that 5,000 per train was too many.
12 A. [Mr Irving]: If they were in goods trucks, as that September document
13 indicates they have been planning, then they may possibly
14 have packed that many in.
15 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Have you still got Professor Brownings’ report there?
16 This is inevitable, I am afraid, in a case like this.
17 A. [Mr Irving]: Page 430, is it?
18 Q. [Mr Rampton]: No, page 44 of Professor Browning.
19 A. [Mr Irving]: I am constantly marvelling at your cross-referencing.
20 Q. [Mr Rampton]: It breaks down all too often. Page 44, paragraph 5.3.11,
21 I will read it. We will look at the documents if you
22 insist, but I do not believe it is necessary:
23 “The trains deporting Jews from Galicia”. What
24 is the matter?
25 A. [Mr Irving]: I have it, 44. Yes.
26 Q. [Mr Rampton]: 5.3.11, MR IRVING:
. P-160
1 “The trains deporting the Jews from Galicia did
2 indeed go to Belzec as can be seen in the report of
3 Reserve Lieutenant Westermann of the 7th company of Police
4 Regiment 24, whose men helped round up the Jews in
5 Kolomyja”, which is, I can tell, you southeast of Lavof,
6 in other words further East than Lemberg, “and nearby
7 towns and then guarded two transports to Belzec on
8 September 7th and 10th 1942. The first contained 4,769
9 Jews in 50 train cars and went without incident. The
10 second involved 8,205 Jews. Many had been held for days
11 without food and force-marched 35-50 kilometers to the
12 train in blistering heat. They were then packed into
13 train cars, in many cases 180 to 200 per car, virtually
14 without ventilation. As Lieutenant Westermann concluded,
15 ‘The ever greater panic spreading among the Jews due to
16 the great heat, overloading of the train cars and stink of
17 the dead when unloading the train cars, some 2,000 Jews
18 were found dead in the train made the transport almost
19 unworkable.’ Nevertheless, the train that left Kolomyja at
20 8.50 p.m. on September 10th finally crawled into Belzec at
21 6.45 on September 11th”.
22 So these figures quoted by Ganzenmuller’s
23 subordinate of 5,000 Jews per train —-
24 A. [Mr Irving]: They are feasible, yes, on the basis of this evidence.
25 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Are feasible?
26 A. [Mr Irving]: Yes.
. P-161
1 Q. [Mr Rampton]: If that were so, we are talking about even greater
2 numbers, are we not?
3 A. [Mr Irving]: In what respect greater numbers?
4 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Well, greater numbers than I had originally supposed.
5 I mean we are originally talking about by the end of the
6 1943 or whenever it was that these camps were disbanded,
7 well over a million people I would guess.
8 A. [Mr Irving]: May I just remark for the record that of course this
9 Westermann document I have not seen and never had when
10 I was writing my books.
11 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Yes, but in a way that is not a particular
12 pertinent observation, because we are really at the moment
13 looking at the scale of the operation.
14 A. [Mr Irving]: My Lord, you did suggest that I should make that quite
15 plain.
16 Q. [Mr Justice Gray]: Fair enough and it is helpful for you to do so, but the
17 criticism is not of the way in which you have dealt with
18 these matters in your books, if you follow me?
19 A. [Mr Irving]: We are just trying to get the picture.
20 MR RAMPTON Can you turn, while we have it open, to page 46 of
21 Professor Browning’s report, please?
22 A. [Mr Irving]: Yes.
23 Q. [Mr Rampton]: I had pointed out to you that trains apparently went, we
24 saw it again there, westwards from Galicia to Belzec, and
25 then you see at the top of page 46 of Professor Browning’s
26 report: “Surviving fragmentary train schedules also show
. P-162
1 that Jews were deported from northern Lublin district,
2 Radom district, and the Bialystok district to Treblinka as
3 well. The deportations from Bialystok, a district East of
4 Treblinka, are of special significance for two reasons.
5 First, these deportations from Bialystok make clear that
6 Treblinka was not a transit camp for the expulsion of Jews
7 eastwards from the General Government. Rather the tiny
8 village of Treblinka, like Belzec, was a point at which
9 transports of Jews converged from East and West.
10 “Moreover, the fate of the Bialystok Jews in
11 the fall of 1942 was clearly stated in Himmler’s report to
12 Hitler of December 31st 1942″, that is either that or
13 29th, it is report No. 51, “the Jews of Bialystok were
14 among the 363,211 Jews executed.”
15 A. [Mr Irving]: There I would have to comment of course that that line
16 I would not agree there is any connection, because the
17 363,000, that report, the Himmler report, is referring
18 only to events within that region and not events within
19 the General Government.
20 Q. [Mr Rampton]: You mean that is Jews killed at or near Bialystok and its
21 area, not Jews transported?
22 A. [Mr Irving]: Transported somewhere else out of the region and dealt
23 with somewhere else.
24 Q. [Mr Rampton]: You might be right about that. You can take that up with
25 Professor Browning.
26 A. [Mr Irving]: Yes. It is nit-picking.
. P-163
1 Q. [Mr Rampton]: No. It may be a fair point and you can take it up with
2 him. It matters not the least to me. The point about
3 this is, we have another example, have we not, of Jews
4 being transported from the East to the West?
5 A. [Mr Irving]: Yes.
6 Q. [Mr Rampton]: To a different camp, Treblinka, the one in the North?
7 A. [Mr Irving]: Where we do not know for certain what happens to them.
8 Q. [Mr Rampton]: No, but these do not look very much like transit camps, do
9 they?
10 A. [Mr Irving]: I do not know. Let us just leap ahead a bit and say
11 suppose these enormous numbers of Jews had been liquidated
12 in some way, we come up against that familiar word
13 “logistics”, what happened to the remains?
14 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Well, I suppose what happened to the remains, upwards of
15 whatever I do not know —-
16 A. [Mr Irving]: We have to think this right through, you see.
17 Q. [Mr Rampton]: It is partly a question of evidence and it is partly a
18 question of constructive thinking. It could be that many
19 of them were burnt, the corpses I mean. There is some
20 evidence of that, is there not? It may be that many of
21 them were buried. There is also some evidence of that
22 too, is there not, I mean contemporary evidence?
23 A. [Mr Irving]: Yes, that is as much as we can say.
24 Q. [Mr Rampton]: I agree.
25 A. [Mr Irving]: I take that kind of answer, that is as much as we can say,
26 one stage further back in the sequence to say, this is as
. P-164
1 much as we can say: They went there where they then
2 vanished from our general sight.
3 MR JUSTICE GRAY: I thought we had reached the point where we
4 were agreed that it does not really, in a sense, matter
5 terribly much exactly how many, but huge numbers —-
6 A. [Mr Irving]: Huge numbers were killed.
7 Q. [Mr Justice Gray]: — were killed in one way or another. In a sense, the
8 Court’s problem is only a problem if you are disputing the
9 numbers.
10 A. [Mr Irving]: Precisely, my Lord. The logistical problem is one that we
11 will keep on coming up against. It is a distasteful
12 subject but one you cannot overlook.
13 MR RAMPTON Just for completeness and for his Lordship’s note,
14 in effect so his Lordship really knows where to find it,
15 if you turn over the page two pages from Ganzenmuller —-
16 A. [Mr Irving]: My Lord, if I could just interrupt, it is one reason why
17 I was entitled to extrapolate, if you remember, from
18 Auschwitz to the other two camps, and we have precisely
19 those logistical reasons which make it improbable that
20 they were factories of death.
21 MR RAMPTON Your Lordship will see Wolff’s nauseating reply,
22 if I can call it that —-
23 A. [Mr Irving]: Which he never expected one day to have read out in open
24 court, I am sure.
25 Q. [Mr Rampton]: No, but then he would have been a hypocrite if he had
26 edited it, would he not? On page 331 at the bottom of the
. P-165
1 Evans’ document bundle, this is not a retype by the
2 Nuremberg people, I think, is it, Mr Irving?
3 A. [Mr Irving]: No.
4 Q. [Mr Rampton]: This is a copy of some sort of original, whether a carbon
5 or not I do not know.
6 A. [Mr Irving]: It is off the microfilm number T175/54, page 620.
7 MR JUSTICE GRAY: 331 of Evans?
8 MR RAMPTON 331, my Lord, no of H1(ix).
9 A. [Mr Irving]: Can I make a remark against myself?
10 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Yes. I am sure Mr Rampton will not want
11 to —-
12 A. [Mr Irving]: Looking back at that rubber stamp, my Lord, on that
13 document where there is no secret classification, it has
14 in its place the two letters AR.
15 MR RAMPTON Yes.
16 A. [Mr Irving]: It also has the letters AR on the top left-hand corner at
17 the beginning of the handwritten reference number.
18 MR JUSTICE GRAY: What does that mean?
19 A. [Mr Irving]: “Aktion Reinhardt” I would suspect. I would suspect, it
20 is a degree of probability that this was given a separate
21 file for Aktion Reinhardt.
22 MR JUSTICE GRAY: But not Geheim?
23 A. [Mr Irving]: But not Geheim. It is a reasonable presumption, although
24 it may be held against me.
25 MR RAMPTON Tell me this. I think that is an English word.
26 You see the bottom of 331?
. P-166
1 A. [Mr Irving]: Yes.
2 Q. [Mr Rampton]: The bottom left-hand corner in a box somebody has
3 written “index”. That would be people at Nuremberg?
4 A. [Mr Irving]: No, it would be me.
5 Q. [Mr Rampton]: That is you?
6 A. [Mr Irving]: All documents that passed through my possession when I was
7 writing the Hitler book went into a 20,000 card index, and
8 once it had been indexed I would rubber stamp the index so
9 that I did not index it again.
10 Q. [Mr Rampton]: I see. The reference to “the chosen people” is in the
11 fifth line, is it not?
12 A. [Mr Irving]: “For your letter of July 28th 1942 I thank you, also in
13 the name of the Reichsfuhrer SS, most heartfelt. With
14 particular joy I have taken cognisance of your information
15 that for 14 days now already every day one train with
16 5,000 members of the chosen people are going to Treblinka,
17 and that in this way we are being put in the position that
18 we can accelerate the speed of this population movement.”
19 MR JUSTICE GRAY: I think it probably is really more selective
20 than “chosen”, is it not? Is it not just saying these are
21 people who have been selected for the transport?
22 A. [Mr Irving]: My Lord, that is the German for “chosen”.
23 MR RAMPTON My Lord, I think it is a sarcastic reference to,
24 I would guess.
25 A. [Mr Irving]: It is the correct German for “the chosen people”.
26 MR RAMPTON “For the chosen people”. Mr Irving actually put
. P-167
1 it in his book in that form, did you not?
2 A. [Mr Irving]: As an accurate translation, yes.
3 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Why did it cause him, Mr Irving, why did it cause him,
4 Wolff, especial joy?
5 A. [Mr Irving]: I am sure that is just a way of dictating letters. Wolff
6 in particular is an SS Officer.
7 Q. [Mr Rampton]: “A rabid anti-Semite is very pleased to be told that 5,000
8 a day are going off to be massacred.” Surely that is the
9 natural interpretation?
10 A. [Mr Irving]: 57,000 are getting their comeuppance, I suppose that is
11 the way he is looking at it, as a good Nazi.
12 MR JUSTICE GRAY: “Comeuppance” meaning?
13 A. [Mr Irving]: Well, just they are meeting their well-deserved fait,
14 whatever it is. They are not specific.
15 Q. [Mr Justice Gray]: Death?
16 A. [Mr Irving]: I beg your pardon.
17 Q. [Mr Justice Gray]: Death?
18 A. [Mr Irving]: He does not actually say it, my Lord.
19 Q. [Mr Justice Gray]: That is what he means?
20 A. [Mr Irving]: Well, I am not going to pin Karl Wolff down on this on
21 there.
22 Q. [Mr Justice Gray]: No, but you are an historian looking at the document,
23 Mr Rampton has put a perfectly fair question to you, is he
24 right?
25 A. [Mr Irving]: I cannot say from this document, my Lord, and I do not
26 think anybody could just looking at this document
. P-168
1 in vacuo. In hindsight we can say that they were going to
2 that place, they never turned up again, obviously
3 something ugly happened to them.
4 MR RAMPTON Karl Wolff, who I have to correct you I think
5 about in a moment, but never mind, Karl Wolff on receipt
6 of Ganzenmuller’s information is overcome with joy that
7 these 5,000 a day are going to their deaths, is he not?
8 A. [Mr Irving]: He does not say that, but that may very well be the reason
9 why. I accept there is the degree of probability. That
10 may be the reason why.
11 Q. [Mr Rampton]: This is my second point. I am told, I am not an
12 historian, that Wolff was not simply a visitor or even a
13 frequent visitor to Hitler’s headquarters, but was
14 Himmler’s liaison officer at Hitler’s headquarters?
15 A. [Mr Irving]: For a time he may have been, but I am not sure whether it
16 was at this time.
17 Q. [Mr Rampton]: That is a fair point. I will accept that.
18 A. [Mr Irving]: He fell out of favour after contracting an unsuitable
19 marriage and for a long time he was out of favour.
20 Q. [Mr Rampton]: But if he is Himmler’s liaison officer at the Fuhrer
21 headquarters, whether it is in Berlin or in East Prussia,
22 wherever it might be, his formal role is to pass
23 information and instructions backwards and forwards —-
24 A. [Mr Irving]: As a conduit.
25 Q. [Mr Rampton]: — between Himmler and Hitler, is it not?
26 A. [Mr Irving]: He would have acted as a conduit between the two.
. P-169
1 Q. [Mr Rampton]: A conduit pipe. So if Hitler was at all interested in
2 reports of what was going on in the East, he could expect
3 to get them for Wolff, could he not?
4 A. [Mr Irving]: Yes. This letter is, of course, actually written from the
5 Fuhrer’s headquarters.
6 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Yes.
7 A. [Mr Irving]: That is the address at the top.
8 Q. [Mr Rampton]: I quite agree with you. In case you should have missed
9 the point, it does not say, “and I have brought your glad
10 tidings to the Fuhrer today at lunch and we all had a
11 glass of champagne”?
12 A. [Mr Irving]: I think I treated the document responsibly. I gave you
13 the full text of it or whatever was relevant in my books,
14 and once again I leave the readers to draw their own
15 conclusions. I may say that your Lordship and yourself
16 have also drawn the right conclusions from this document
17 or the appropriate conclusions.
18 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Could you please turn, Mr Irving, to page 143 of Evans’
19 report, paragraph 5, no, I had better start actually a bit
20 earlier. This is all, my Lord, embedded in a discussion
21 of the suggestion that the gas chambers were an invention
22 of British propaganda. Mr Irving, I am right, am I not
23 that, Riegner was some kind of figure in the Jewish
24 community in the West?
25 A. [Mr Irving]: In Switzerland.
26 Q. [Mr Rampton]: In Geneva.
. P-170
1 A. [Mr Irving]: Or in Bern, one or the other, yes. He was a young man
2 with contacts inside Nazi Germany.
3 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Can we, please, start at the top of page 142. It is your
4 position, is it not, or has been at any rate, that the gas
5 chambers were a very cleaver piece of propaganda that we
6 British very cunningly connived at and contrived during
7 World War II, is that right?
8 A. [Mr Irving]: I do not think I would use child adjectives like “clever
9 and cunningly connived”.
10 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Look at the bottom of page 141 of the Evans’ report.
11 A. [Mr Irving]: There is a great deal of evidence that the British
12 propaganda agents is propagated in the gas chamber motive,
13 for example.
14 Q. [Mr Rampton]: This is taken from an interview given by you to This Week
15 on 28th November 1991.
16 A. [Mr Irving]: In the broadcast of Thomas Mann but I will come to that in
17 due course. Thomas Mann operated for the British and
18 American Intelligence Agencies.
19 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Stripping out “clever and cunning” for the
20 sake of argument, do you contend, Mr Irving, that gas
21 chambers at Auschwitz were an invention by British
22 Intelligence during the war?
23 A. [Mr Irving]: British Intelligence broadcast repeatedly through the BBC
24 and through other information channels into Nazi Germany
25 information about gas chambers in occupied Nazi, Nazi
26 occupied Europe at a time when they were not in
. P-171
1 operation. In other words, the information was premature
2 information, shall we say.
3 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Well, premature begs the question rather, does it not?
4 A. [Mr Irving]: Yes, in other words the information came forward.
5 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Are you suggesting it was an invention?
6 A. [Mr Irving]: To degree the it must have been an invention because at
7 the time the British propaganda was talking of them they
8 did not exist.
9 Q. [Mr Rampton]: So it was an invention by British propaganda?
10 A. [Mr Irving]: British propaganda invented the story of the gas chambers
11 or invented stories of gas chambers which were broadcast
12 into Nazis Germany during the war years. There is any
13 amount of evidence of this in the BBC monitoring reports,
14 in the German radio monitoring reports, in the memoirs of
15 people like Thomas Mann, the famous German novelist, who
16 worked for British propaganda agencies in their private
17 diaries and so on.
18 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Yes, well, I am sure it was broadcast; it is a question of
19 whether it was an invention by the British propaganda
20 machine?
21 A. [Mr Irving]: Well, if the Allies, as we know from the Foreign Office
22 files, had no knowledge of any gas chambers, then,
23 clearly, it was an invention.
Section details 172.24-187.26
24 MR RAMPTON I wonder about that. Can you just look at the
25 middle of page 143? We may have to come back in due
26 course to what you said about this, but that is a
. P-172
1 different question. Paragraph 5. Professor Evans has
2 recited your rather complicated account of this in your
3 forthcoming Churchill book. Then he says: “What is the
4 real documentary evidence for this account? Gerhard
5 Riegner was director of the Geneva Office of the World
6 Jewish Congress from 1939 until 1945. On 8th August 1942
7 Riegner handed an identical telegram to Howard Etling,
8 American Vice-Counsel in Geneva, and to HB Livingston, the
9 British Consul. Riegner asked that a telegram be conveyed
10 to the World Jewish Congress leaders in London (Sydney
11 Silverman, MP) and New York (Rabbi Steven Wise). The
12 telegram stated:
13 ‘Received alarming report stating that, in the
14 Fuhrer’s Headquarters, a plan has been discussed, and is
15 under consideration, according to which all Jews in
16 countries occupied or controlled by Germany numbering 3
17 and-a-half to 4 million, should, after deportation and
18 concentration in the East, be at one blow exterminated, in
19 order to resolve, once and for all the Jewish question’.”
20 Then there is a reference to a document which
21 I think I can show you in a moment.
22 Then Professor Evans goes on: “Although the
23 message the put the as ‘under consideration’, there was an
24 additional detail: ‘Ways of execution are still being
25 discussed, including the use of prussic acid’. Riegner
26 himself said, ‘We transmit this information with all the
. P-173
1 necessary reservation as exactitude cannot be confirmed by
2 us’. But he added, ‘Our informant is reported to have
3 close connections with the highest German authorities, and
4 his reports are generally reliable'”.
5 That should be footnote 90 in this part of
6 Professor Evans’ report.
7 A. [Mr Irving]: The actual document is in my discovery, of course — the
8 Riegner telegrams.
9 Q. [Mr Rampton]: I am sorry, my Lord. The way that the Evans’ documents
10 have been indexed makes them rather difficult to find.
11 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Do we need the original for this purpose?
12 MR RAMPTON Well, if it has come from Mr Irving’s
13 discovery, I think we do not actually because he would be
14 well familiar with it.
15 A. [Mr Irving]: I am very familiar indeed with the document and with the
16 associated minutes by the Foreign Office officials on it.
17 Q. [Mr Rampton]: That is an accurate account, is it, in Professor Evans’
18 report of what the telegram says?
19 A. [Mr Irving]: Those three lines are accurately transcribed from the
20 telegram, to the best of my recollection.
21 Q. [Mr Rampton]: So there are four lines in the body of paragraph 5 and
22 then there are some further references to things like
23 prussic acid in paragraph 6?
24 A. [Mr Irving]: Yes, but, of course, the actual telegram is longer than
25 that.
26 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Yes.
. P-174
1 A. [Mr Irving]: We know a great deal also about the origins of the
2 telegram, whether this informant existed, and so on.
3 Q. [Mr Rampton]: I can see that it is much longer; I am certainly not going
4 to bend the court’s ear by reading it out.
5 A. [Mr Irving]: What is significant, of course, is the associated
6 memoranda on the Foreign Office file, the treating of its
7 credibility and of what to do with it, and so on.
8 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Yes, sure, but if this is the source of the information —
9 call it that, no more — it is hardly an invention of
10 British propaganda, is it?
11 A. [Mr Irving]: Which information?
12 Q. [Mr Rampton]: This information here, in the Evans’ report. If Riegner
13 is the source of the information —-
14 A. [Mr Irving]: Yes.
15 Q. [Mr Rampton]: — then it is not an invention of British propaganda, is
16 it?
17 A. [Mr Irving]: Not at this stage, no, but, of course, there had been
18 references by British propaganda to alleged hydrogen
19 and cyanide gas chambers before this August 1942 telegram.
20 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Let me take it slowly. If Riegner’s information is not
21 something that he has been put up to by British
22 propaganda —-
23 A. [Mr Irving]: Yes.
24 Q. [Mr Rampton]: — true, you may say, though, I am not going accept it,
25 that the British propaganda then built on that idea, maybe
26 you do say that, maybe you do not, I do not know, but the
. P-175
1 fact is that information is an important piece of
2 evidence, not a huge piece of evidence, an important piece
3 of evidence, when one comes to consider what I call the
4 Final Solution and the means by which it was achieved, is
5 it not?
6 A. [Mr Irving]: I am not quite sure what question — are you asking
7 whether this was the origin of the British, or whether it
8 was just a —-
9 Q. [Mr Rampton]: No, no.
10 A. [Mr Irving]: — link in your system chain.
11 Q. [Mr Rampton]: It is just a link in my chain of documents. It is said
12 that Riegner had the ear of somebody —-
13 A. [Mr Irving]: Yes.
14 Q. [Mr Rampton]: — high up in the Nazi —-
15 A. [Mr Irving]: And, therefore, the British did not invent the story
16 because Riegner brought it to them.
17 Q. [Mr Rampton]: No, no. Therefore, it is quite important evidence that
18 the use of hydrogen cyanide was intended from quite a long
19 way back as a killing agent for Jews?
20 A. [Mr Irving]: If this is an authentic account by Riegner, but, of
21 course, if we subsequently find out, as has been
22 established by people of the calibre of Walter La Coeur,
23 that Riegner’s source did not exist as a source of
24 integrity, shall we say, a man who was not in a position
25 to know what he was talking about, then that tells us
26 absolutely nothing whatsoever. It is a fluke. But if we
. P-176
1 can just have five or six lines reproduced from one
2 document here, that is not the way to go about things. We
3 need to know all the surrounding material and, in
4 particular, if you want to say this is evidence the
5 British did not invent because they built the story on
6 this, then I have to say that British files, Foreign
7 Office minutes show that it was totally dismissed. They
8 said, “We cannot believe this. We cannot believe stories
9 of this type. We have no supporting evidence at all.
10 There is not a shred of evidence that this story is true”.
11 MR JUSTICE GRAY: That is on the original of this Riegner
12 document?
13 A. [Mr Irving]: It is in the typical Foreign Office folder with all the
14 minutes attached to it with what are called treasury ties.
15 Q. [Mr Justice Gray]: Is that the document Mr Rampton was looking for a moment
16 ago?
17 A. [Mr Irving]: Well, it is in my discovery, my Lord, and I can produce it
18 in court tomorrow as one of these dreaded little bundles.
19 MR RAMPTON Well, it is there, my Lord. I really do not
20 think at this time of the day I would ask your Lordship to
21 look at it. It is difficult to read. It is bitty and the
22 essence, for my purposes, is in the Evans’ report anyway.
23 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Yes?
24 A. [Mr Irving]: Well, the essence as extracted by Professor Evans, of
25 course, not the essence which I would extract, but I will
26 do that under cross-examination, my Lord, when the time
. P-177
1 comes, I think.
2 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Well, yes, but, I mean, Mr Rampton will
3 appreciate, obviously, that your case is that the
4 annotations on the document show that it was not given any
5 credence at the time by those who subsequently used it.
6 That is your point, is it not?
7 A. [Mr Irving]: Quite, and that should have been drawn out by the experts.
8 MR RAMPTON Oh, yes, but an historian, Mr Irving, has the
9 wonderful benefit of hindsight, does he not?
10 A. [Mr Irving]: Yes. I think I have used that word once or twice myself.
11 Q. [Mr Rampton]: He can fit a document like that which the poor bods in
12 London and Washington could not do. He can fit a document
13 like that into a vast weft or weave, call it what you
14 will, tapestry, of other information, can he not?
15 A. [Mr Irving]: Yes.
16 Q. [Mr Rampton]: That is what, perhaps, gives it more significance now?
17 A. [Mr Irving]: There is a great temptation to do precisely that.
18 Q. [Mr Rampton]: One must be careful that one does not give more weight to
19 it than it deserves, but any document must always be
20 placed in the context of all the rest of the relevant
21 information.
22 A. [Mr Irving]: This is quite right, and this is why this particular
23 document I did investigate in some detail, and I made an
24 exception. I read what Professor La Coeur (?) had written
25 about it who carried out an examination of the origins of
26 the document and the alleged source.
. P-178
1 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Can we go north, please, because I am still engaged on the
2 same exercise? My Lord, I have finished pre Auschwitz.
3 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Can I interrupt you when you say you have
4 finished pre Auschwitz? I quite understand what the case
5 is and to a large extent it is accepted on the scale of
6 the operations.
7 MR RAMPTON Yes.
8 MR JUSTICE GRAY: But I am really talking about the post
9 shooting phase, one calls it the gassing phase. It is a
10 bit tendentious but it may not matter in the end. What
11 I have not at the movement got clear in my mind is how you
12 put the case that this was known by and authorized by
13 Hitler.
14 MR RAMPTON Authorized by I do not know, the case is not that
15 there is a piece of paper from Himmler to Hitler, saying
16 here, Adolf, are the statistics, at least not until we get
17 to December 1942 and that may concern Einsatzgruppen
18 shootings rather than gassings in these places. The case
19 is simply this. The scale of the operation is vast. It
20 involves what must have been very considerable disruption
21 to military operations amongst other things. It involves
22 a lot of economic and manpower resources. It certainly
23 goes all the way up to Heydrich and Wolf who is Himmler’s
24 adjutant, seconded as liaison officer at some time at
25 least to Hitler. In the light of what we do know that
26 Hitler did know, in the light of all the other information
. P-179
1 we have about Hitler’s anti-Semitism and, as in due course
2 one will see, as one of the foundations of Nazi ideology,
3 it would be amazing if Hitler did not know, in broad
4 terms, I am not saying he was interested in numbers or
5 anything like that, what was going on. It is as simple as
6 that.
7 MR JUSTICE GRAY: It is extremely helpful to have you put it
8 clearly in that way. Thank you very much.
9 MR RAMPTON It is an inference which any lawyer, never mind
10 historian, would be willing to draw, I would suggest, on
11 the balance of probabilities.
12 MR JUSTICE GRAY: May I suggest that we just invite Mr Irving,
13 if he wants to, to comment on that, because that is part
14 of your case.
15 MR RAMPTON It certainly is.
16 MR JUSTICE GRAY: He is entitled to have his say.
17 MR RAMPTON I would only add this negative sentence, I think.
18 The fact that there is not a piece of paper, as the denier
19 said, there is not just a single proof with Adolf’s name
20 on it, is neither here nor there?
21 A. [Mr Irving]: Well, my Lord, let him fight his own battles. The
22 proposition that learned counsel has put is entirely
23 acceptable. It is monstrous to assume that Adolf Hitler
24 would not have known, and I have said precisely the same,
25 my Lord. In my books I have said that after October 1943,
26 which is the kind of watershed time that I put, he had no
. P-180
1 excuse for not knowing, which is as far as I would go. Of
2 course, it is not a smoking gun. It is not the kind of
3 balance of probabilities, or even evidence beyond all
4 reasonable doubt that would be required in a criminal
5 case. But he had no excuse for not having known because
6 he then came into very close proximity with a large number
7 of people who had been briefed in the most nauseating
8 detail by Himmler himself as to what he was doing. I have
9 made no secret about that in my books. I would be
10 interested to hear how learned counsel gets round that
11 particular problem when the time comes.
12 MR JUSTICE GRAY: That again is extremely helpful to have you
13 say that, but can I ask you one question arising out of
14 it? I quite follow why you take October 1943 as the date
15 from which you accept Hitler was in the know.
16 A. [Mr Irving]: Had no excuse not to know.
17 Q. [Mr Justice Gray]: Or had no excuse not to know, but what about the period
18 with I think Mr Rampton has really been dealing with this
19 afternoon between November/December 1941 and October 1943?
20 A. [Mr Irving]: We are very ill-advised by the documents that are
21 available even now. We are ill informed by the documents
22 that are available even now after 55 years, my Lord, and
23 this is where you begin having to say that, I forget what
24 the legal term is, there may be a legal term for it, but
25 in any case of ambiguity then the balance of doubt has to
26 be given to the accused rather than to the incriminated.
. P-181
1 Q. [Mr Justice Gray]: Can that really be right when you have a situation where
2 Hitler was at any rate not objecting as from October 1943
3 to what most people would regard as thoroughly abhorrent?
4 A. [Mr Irving]: Yes.
5 Q. [Mr Justice Gray]: Can you not infer from that that, assuming the evidence
6 was available for him, he would not have put up any
7 objection before October 1943?
8 A. [Mr Irving]: That is precisely the way that I would be inclined to put
9 it, my Lord. I have even said on occasion that there is
10 no evidence that he would have objected even if he had
11 been told the most brutal detail of what was going on.
12 But we just do not have that evidence. My literary agent
13 in America said, “For God’s sake, if you have not got the
14 evidence, invent it”. I thought my ten years spent in
15 researching the book were too precious for that.
16 MR RAMPTON So it really comes to this, does it, Mr Irving?
17 If you were sitting on a jury in a criminal court, whereas
18 I might very easily convict Hitler, you would not, but, if
19 you are looking for proof positive that he did not know,
20 you are swimming very hard against the tide, are you not?
21 A. [Mr Irving]: No. You talk about in a criminal court and in a criminal
22 court of course the standards of evidence required,
23 particularly where a man’s life is at stake, are much
24 sterner than in a civil action. Am I right?
25 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Never mind civil actions or criminal actions. This is a
26 rotten analogy, anyway. You are an historian.
. P-182
1 A. [Mr Irving]: Mr Rampton, you started the analogy.
2 Q. [Mr Rampton]: No, you did, with your references to the standard of proof
3 in a criminal court when you were answering his Lordship.
4 It is a rotten analogy.
5 A. [Mr Irving]: I think it is a very useful analogy.
6 Q. [Mr Rampton]: What are you looking at as an historian is not a question
7 whether a man is guilty or not of law, whether he is
8 liable to pay damages. You are looking at the evidence
9 with an open and objective mind to see what is the degree
10 of probability that it suggests as to what happened. That
11 is what are you doing, is it not?
12 A. [Mr Irving]: This is right, but then at this point different historians
13 operate in different ways, and it may be that I make
14 myself culpable by just putting the evidence in the pages
15 and not joining up the dots and allowing the reader to do
16 the dot joining for himself. I assume that my readers
17 have a certain degree of intellectual honesty and ability,
18 that they are capable of forming their own conclusions
19 provided I present the evidence to them with as much
20 integrity as possible. Other historians, like no doubt
21 some of the experts in this case, like to join up the dots
22 for you and that is where the mistakes I think creep in.
23 It is possible that my way of writing history is wrong.
24 It is possible their way of writing history is right.
25 They have been taught in universities how to write, I have
26 not, but this is not Holocaust denial, Mr Rampton.
. P-183
1 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Well, Mr Irving, we will come to that next week, but your
2 method of writing history, whether one approves of it
3 academically or not is quite beside the point, is
4 perfectly all right provided that you do not distort and
5 manipulate the evidence, is it not?
6 A. [Mr Irving]: You are absolutely right.
7 Q. [Mr Rampton]: If we should succeed in proving that that is exactly what
8 you have done on a number of occasions, then you do not
9 deserve the name historian, do you?
10 A. [Mr Irving]: I take you do not consider that you have succeeded so far.
11 Q. [Mr Rampton]: What privately I should think, Mr Irving, I certainly am
12 not going to tell you.
13 A. [Mr Irving]: From the way you couched the question.
14 Q. [Mr Rampton]: I could be standing here thinking why am I going through
15 all this, I have already cooked —-
16 A. [Mr Irving]: You know why you are going through this, and I do. It is
17 connected with a very substantial fee you are paid for
18 this.
19 MR JUSTICE GRAY: That is cheap. Let us get on.
20 MR RAMPTON It is not only cheap, it is complete rubbish. My
21 Lord, I would pass now, if I may —-
22 MR JUSTICE GRAY: I think we will probably stop now.
23 MR RAMPTON I tell you where I am going next. I am going
24 briefly to Dr Brach in the autumn of 1941, which relates
25 to gassings in the Warthegau and possibly also in Riga.
26 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Is that vans?
. P-184
1 MR RAMPTON Vans yes, and then I am going to go to what
2 Mr Irving calls the Schlegelberger memorandum, and then
3 probably to the Roman Jews, unless your Lordship would
4 prefer, which equally well we can do, to have a look at
5 Hitler’s earlier utterances.
6 MR JUSTICE GRAY: No. All I think is that sometime that is
7 relevant.
8 MR RAMPTON It is obviously important.
9 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Both to the manipulation and also to
10 Auschwitz.
11 MR RAMPTON Yes. I am thinking that the subject of Hitler’s
12 Adjutants is a long one with, I am afraid, probably quite
13 a lot of documents to look at because of the records of
14 what they said. That may take more than one day, which
15 I do not have, so I was going to leave that until after
16 Auschwitz.
17 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Yes, that is fine. It does occur to me that
18 sometimes there is scope for exploring before one gets
19 into the detail.
20 MR RAMPTON I know.
21 MR JUSTICE GRAY: We had an example just a moment ago. It is
22 not remotely intended to be a reproof.
23 MR RAMPTON It is amazing what answers one can get. I have
24 made the assumption, perhaps wrongly, that any general
25 question I ask is either going to get no answer —-
26 MR JUSTICE GRAY: I can see there may be forensic reasons for
. P-185
1 doing it the other way too, but I just wonder in this case
2 whether the desirability of short cuts does not suggest
3 one sacrifices —-
4 MR RAMPTON I see the attraction, but I do think it essential,
5 and the only forensic reason, apart from wanting answers
6 to my questions, is that I do want your Lordship to have
7 as full a picture as possible, because all these things
8 are contextually linked.
9 MR JUSTICE GRAY: I have the reports, remember.
10 MR RAMPTON I know.
11 MR JUSTICE GRAY: What about the argument about Auschwitz? It
12 seems to me that we are nipping at that topic from time to
13 time, inevitably. I think in many ways the sooner we have
14 the argument the better?
15 A. [Mr Irving]: It is Tuesday now, possibly on Thursday.
16 MR JUSTICE GRAY: If would you like go for Thursday, yes?
17 A. [Mr Irving]: If you would limit us both to half an hour each on that.
18 MR JUSTICE GRAY: I am all in favour of doing that.
19 MR RAMPTON I have said my two minutes already.
20 A. [Mr Irving]: You may have more to say after you have heard me.
21 MR RAMPTON We will let Mr Irving go first since essentially
22 I believe it to be an objection really.
23 MR JUSTICE GRAY: I do not think it matters who goes first.
24 Would you like to go first, Mr Irving?
25 A. [Mr Irving]: It makes no difference to me either.
26 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Good, so 10.30 tomorrow?
. P-186
1 A. [Mr Irving]: Thank you.
2 span class=”stage”><(The witness stood down)
3 (The court adjourned until the following day)
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. P-187