Day 7 Transcript: Holocaust Denial on Trial
Part I: Initial Proceedings (1.1 to 22.26)
1 IN THE HIGH COURT OF JUSTICE
1996 I. No. 113
QUEEN’S BENCH DIVISION
2 Royal Courts of Justice
3 Strand, London
4 Thursday, 20th 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 SEVEN
24
25
26
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1 <Day 7 Thursday, 20th January 2000.
2 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Yes, Mr Irving?
3 MR IRVING: This morning we are going to be dealing, as
4 I apprehend, may it please the court, with the
5 Schlegelberger document which I brought, as I indicated
6 yesterday evening, with one or two of the surrounding
7 documents. [Document not provided].
8 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Yes. I have only just received this clip, so
9 I am afraid I have not had a chance to go through it.
10 MR IRVING: I appreciate that, my Lord. I do not think it will
11 be a very painful exercise. We will also take on board
12 this argument, and I have taken the liberty of submitting
13 to your Lordship a two-page skeleton, which again you will
14 not have had time to reflect upon but I thought it would
15 be of assistance to your Lordship.
16 I have also excised the first paragraph of that
17 and put it on a separate sheet for your Lordship, in case
18 you wish to mark it up and say,”Yes I thoroughly approve
19 of this, this is a jolly good idea, I think Irving has it
20 right”.
21 MR JUSTICE GRAY: We will come to whether that is going to be
22 my conclusion in a moment, shall we? Can we just have open
23 the Schlegelberger note, unless it is in your clip?
24 MR IRVING: It is in the clip, my Lord. It is little bundle D
25 which you have just received, and you will find it on page
9.
26 MR JUSTICE GRAY: I am going to put this into J. We
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1 must keep an eye on not having stray bits of paper
2 knocking around.
3 MR IRVING: This is a bundle called Schlegelberger, a 25 page
4 document relating to the context and provenance of the
5 Schlegelberger document which I have loosely dated as
6 spring 1942. The document concerned is on page 9, my
7 Lord, Tab 7.
8 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Yes.
9 MR IRVING: The first document is page 1 which your Lordship
10 will see is the folder cover of the Reich Ministry of the
11 Justice, and I will read the words to you which are rather
12 illegible. We have had problems with the German text
13 before. Behandlung der Juden, “treatment of the Jews”.
14 My only gloss on that is to say it is not treatment of the
15 mixed race questions. It is a Ministry of Justice file on
16 the treatment of the Jews. I have taken the liberty, my
17 Lord, of highlighting one or two sentences in the bundle
18 I gave you.
19 MR JUSTICE GRAY: That is helpful.
20 MR IRVING: Somebody has my highlighted copy. I do not.
21 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Can you date the cover to the file or the
22 cover top sheet?
23 MR IRVING: Only inasmuch as the earliest document in the file
24 is early 1942, my Lord. It is a very slim file, the way
25 sometimes these governmental jackets, I think they are
26 called in English parlance, go.
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1 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Yes.
2 MR IRVING: Page No. 2, my Lord, is the translation into
3 English of the following page. Unless Mr Rampton has any
4 objection, I will just deal with the English text.
5 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Yes.
6 MR IRVING: We read it out yesterday but I will read it out
7 again. It is from Schlegelberger, who is acting Minister
8 of Justice after the death of the Minister, and he is
9 writing to the Reich Minister, Hans Lammers: My personal
10 assistant has just briefed me on the result of the session
11 of March 6th on the treatment of Jews and mixed races”.
12 Your Lordship will probably see that I have highlighted
13 the fact that it is both A and B, so to speak, not just
14 the mixed race.
15 MR JUSTICE GRAY: That is your gloss, anyway.
16 MR IRVING: I am now still awaiting the official minutes. My
17 Lord, of course, I will argue that it is not unreasonable
18 — we will be dealing later in the argument with what is
19 reasonable and what is not reasonable, what would be
20 perverse and what would not perverse. I am now still
21 waiting the official minutes. From the briefing by my
22 personal assistant there seem to be decisions in
23 preparation which I have to consider for the most part to
24 be completely impossible. As the outcome of the talks in
25 which a personal assistant of your department took part is
26 to form the basis for the decision of the Fuhrer, it would
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1 be urgently desirable for me to have a personal talk with
2 you in good time about the affair. As soon as the minutes
3 of the session are before me, I shall permit myself to
4 phone you and to ask you whether and when a discussion
5 between us might take place.”
6 Lammers replies, my Lord, and this is on page 4,
7 that he is very ready to conform. He suggests an
8 appointment at the end of the month; in other words, at
9 the end of March. I do not think it is perverse then to
10 say that the conversation which is referred to in the
11 memorandum is therefore at the end of March 1942. I may
12 be wrong. I allow that I may be wrong. It is always
13 possible to be wrong, but we are looking for a deliberate
14 or wilful distortion.
15 MR JUSTICE GRAY: You rely presumably also on the heading to
16 that letter which is “overall solution to the Jewish
17 problem”.
18 MR IRVING: “Overall solution to the Jewish problem”, yes, my
19 Lord, I am indebted to your Lordship for pointing that
20 out, the overall solution of the Jewish problem.
21 The next letter, my Lord, pages 6 to 8, I do not
22 propose to read out. They do not take us very much
23 further. If your Lordship is interested in their content,
24 then there is a British summary.
25 MR JUSTICE GRAY: If are you not going to rely on anything
26 there, I am not going to take time on it.
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1 MR IRVING: Very well, my Lord. Mr Rampton may very well wish
2 to point to one or two things in it.
3 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Let us see.
4 MR IRVING: The next document, page 9, is the actual
5 memorandum. Page 10 is something that I did not have
6 before me yesterday, my Lord. It is a translation of the
7 following page, page 11 or part of it. If your Lordship
8 were just to turn to page 11, I draw your attention to two
9 things: first of all, the number at the top, 2653, where,
10 at the beginning of the notes or near the beginning of the
11 notes to the second volume of my Hitler biography, namely
12 Hitler’s War, and we are already on manuscript page
13 2,653. This will give your Lordship an idea of the
14 magnitude of the task and I would therefore pray your
15 Lordship’s indulgence if I have occasionally got a word
16 wrong or mistyped a word.
17 MR JUSTICE GRAY: I do not underrate the magnitude of the task
18 at all.
19 MR IRVING: I am indebted to you. I have translated note 63.
20 Your Lordship will notice that the notes are not in the
21 book in this form. Quite simply, the publisher said,
22 “Mr Irving, that would add an extra 500 pages on to the
23 text”, so it went. It is helpful because note 53 refers,
24 in this context, to the Schlegelberger document. The staff
25 evidence analysis sheet, which is also in this bundle, we
26 referred to yesterday. The copies were notarised by
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1 Dr Robert Kempner, which is not really important, unless
2 we get on to the question of who found it first and when
3 should he have used it.
4 Then I continue: ” Before the International
5 Military Tribunal (at Nuremberg) Lammers testified that
6 Himmler had told him that he had received from the Fuhrer
7 the task of bringing about a Final Solution of the Jewish
8 problem, i.e. that ‘the Jews were to be evacuated out of
9 Germany'”. That part is in quotation marks. “Lammers
10 wanted to find out for himself, he said, and fixed an
11 appointment with Fuhrer whereupon the Fuhrer told me that,
12 yes, it was quite right that he had given the evacuation
13 order to Himmler, but he did not want to hear any more
14 briefings about this Jewish problem during the war”.
15 MR JUSTICE GRAY: That is undated.
16 MR IRVING: This is from the transcript of the international
17 military tribunal.
18 MR JUSTICE GRAY: No. What I mean is there is no indication in
19 the document as to when that was said by Hitler. For all
20 we know, it may have been said in 1940 or ’41.
21 MR IRVING: I will deal with that point very shortly, my Lord,
22 when we skip a page, and we now come to page 12. Your
23 Lordship or Mr Rampton might quite well object that it is
24 unsatisfactory, that I should produce the quotation from
25 the transcript in that form, of course, the Military
26 Tribunal transcript. I objected, of course, in exactly
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1 the same terms yesterday but, if your Lordship is
2 interested, I am sure we can obtain the precise page from
3 the transcript.
4 Page 12. Two or three years ago, I went to the
5 national archives in Washington and looked at the detailed
6 verbatim interrogations of the number of people who were
7 present at the Wannsee Conference and at the subsequent
8 conference, my Lord, which your Lordship will remember was
9 on March 6th 1942.
10 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Do you mean Wannsee?
11 MR IRVING: Wannsee on January 20th 1942 — W-A-N-N-S-E-E
12 — and the subsequent conference, which was held at the
13 headquarters of Heydrich on March 6th 1942. I wanted to
14 find out what the participants said, what they recalled
15 immediately afterwards, after the war. They were
16 interrogated in detail by the Americans. We have the
17 verbatim transcripts in German and English. I did not
18 copy the transcripts, but I typed extracts on the filing
19 cards which you will see on pages 13 and 14, my Lord, the
20 relevant parts. I have translated them on page 12 which
21 I think is all we need to look at today.
22 Cabinet counseller, Dr Hans Ficher of the Reich
23 Chancellery (Lammers department) stated that from the
24 invitation it was evident that evacuation or sterilisation
25 were on the agenda.” I skip on to the next
26 sentence: “Lammers took this minute to the Fuhrer and
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1 returned with a memorandum. The discussion of the whole
2 affair is to be postponed until after the end of the
3 war”. That must have been in March 1942. That is the
4 opinion of Bohle. “To our horror”, and I rely on this
5 sentence, my Lord, “we learned that that then continued
6 behind the scenes. We learned that that then continued
7 behind the scenes”.
8 Although Hitler had given this order, leave
9 everything until the end of the war, to our horror, they
10 learned that it went on behind the scenes, rather like the
11 Bruns business, your Lordship will remember. The order
12 comes down from Hitler’s headquarters.
13 What we are looking for, I would submit, is any
14 indication that I have been perverse in putting on this
15 kind of document the meaning that I did in my various
16 writings and utterances. If I continue now to the next
17 statement by Mr Gottfried Bohle, who is also at the Reichs
18 Chancellory Department, he testified that he had been
19 interrogated about this on more than one occasion. The
20 conference, he recalled, was at the headquarters of
21 Heydrich’s department, the RSHA. Eichmann opened, and
22 I am relying on this purely to show that it was not just a
23 discussion about the mixed race, my Lord. It was a
24 discussion about the Jews as a whole.
25 Eichmann opened with the need for a quick
26 solution of the Jewish Question. Bohle told his wife
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1 afterwards that they had talked of Jews being supplied
2 like cattle. One man had objected, one cannot proceed
3 against Jews who had behaved correctly, Eichmann’s No. 2,
4 that was SS van Fuhrer Gunter, said “that comes under our
5 police judgment”.
6 MR JUSTICE GRAY: I do not at the moment see what bearing that
7 has on the issue we are concerned with.
8 MR IRVING: It is an indication where the kind of decisions are
9 being taken, my Lord.
10 MR JUSTICE GRAY: I see. Anyway Bohle again?
11 MR IRVING: Bohle in another interrogation said, and I draw
12 attention only to the second two sentences, Hitler wanted
13 postponement until after the war. “Whether the security
14 police knew about the different orders from Hitler,
15 I cannot say.” In other words, different to what they
16 were doing.
17 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Yes.
18 MR IRVING: My Lord, your Lordship may attach no significance
19 whatsoever to these documents. I am a historian looking
20 at these documents. I submit that it is perfectly proper
21 for me to pay attention to them, and it is not perverse
22 for me to attach the significance to them that I did and
23 the meanings that I did.
24 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Yes.
25 MR IRVING: That is all that I have to submit on this
26 Schlegelberger memorandum, my Lord.
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1 MR JUSTICE GRAY: You did that very, if I may say so,
2 effectively and briefly.
3 MR IRVING: Your Lordship will have apprehended that I attach
4 importance to the Schlegelberger memorandum. I have
5 quoted it frequently, I have illustrated it in my books,
6 and I wish to make sure that it stayed upright without
7 being sunk.
8 MR JUSTICE GRAY: It would not be exaggerating to say that it
9 is something of a linchpin for your thesis about the
10 extent to which Hitler knew about what was going on.
11 MR IRVING: One of the chain of document to which we
12 occasionally refer, my Lord.
13 MR JUSTICE GRAY: That is Schlegelberger.
14 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Mr Rampton, do you want to add anything?
15 MR RAMPTON: I have some questions remaining about
16 Schlegelberger, particularly in the light of these
17 documents.
18 MR IRVING: Do you wish me to go into the box?
19 MR JUSTICE GRAY: We have to keep an eye on the time.
20 MR RAMPTON: Your Lordship need not fear; we have enough
21 material for today.
22 MR JUSTICE GRAY: I am not worrying about having enough.
23 Mr Irving, perhaps you would go back into the box?
24 < MR DAVID IRVING, recalled.
25 < Cross-Examined by MR RAMPTON QC, continued.
26 MR RAMPTON: Mr Irving, there is one document which you have
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1 not included in that little clip, is there not?
2 A. [Mr Irving]: Mr Rampton, I spent a large part of the night in looking
3 for my Schlegelberger file, but the documents came back
4 from solicitors for the Defendants in such disarray that
5 it was in vain. I had to reconstruct it from other
6 sources.
7 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Curiously enough, I did the same exercise myself last
8 night, and the document that I have included in my little
9 clip which I will hand in—- (Document not provided) .
10 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Where are we going to put these?
11 MR RAMPTON: For the moment they can go together. Perhaps they
12 can both go in whatever the J number is.
13 MR JUSTICE GRAY: J7.
14 MR RAMPTON: Some of them may in due course be filed away into
15 the core file.
16 A. [Mr Irving]: May I express incidentally my amazement that this bundle
17 of documents did not turn up in the bundles that were put
18 to the court?
19 MR JUSTICE GRAY: I know. I understand the point. Let us get
20 on.
21 MR RAMPTON: There is a document, Mr Irving, that you did not
22 include — I am not saying it is deliberate, at least not
23 at the moment — in the little clip and that is the
24 actual minute of the meeting on 6th March 1942, is it not?
25 A. [Mr Irving]: That is correct. The reason for that being that it did
26 not come from that Ministry of Justice file. This comes
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1 from, as the serial numbers at the foot of it clearly
2 show, the Foreign Ministry files.
3 Q. [Mr Rampton]: It did not, but it is one of the footnotes to your
4 Goebbels book, is it not?
5 A. [Mr Irving]: I am sorry, the footnote is referred to in the Goebbels
6 book? It is indeed, yes.
7 Q. [Mr Rampton]: It is footnote 36 to page 388, and one knows it is the
8 same document for two reasons: First because the
9 personnel mentioned at as being at the meeting include
10 Karssonsen and Schmidtburg?
11 A. [Mr Irving]: Yes.
12 Q. [Mr Rampton]: And because the film roll number at the bottom right hand
13 corner of the page that you have got there is the one
14 which you give in your footnote. So we are looking now at
15 the right document, are we? It is 371962?
16 A. [Mr Irving]: Yes. Can you show me again the page reference in the
17 Goebbels?
18 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Yes I have copied it for convenience. It is page 388, and
19 it is note 36 in the upper half of the page, the big
20 paragraph before the word Eichmann. My Lord, I have copied
21 for your Lordship note 36 which is on page 647, where
22 Mr Irving said — perhaps I will read the Goebbels text
23 first so that it will become a little clearer what it is
24 that I am driving at. I will start if I may on 388. “On
25 the following day” — that is he and one can see from the
26 previous page that that is Goebbels and the following day
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1 is 6th March — “Goebbels took note of an extensive
2 report prepared by Heydrich’s office, probably on the
3 Wannsee conference. There were still eleven million Jews
4 in Europe, he dictated, summarizing the document. ‘For the
5 time being they are to be concentrated in the east [until]
6 Later; possibly an island like Madagascar can be assigned
7 to them after the war.’ ‘Undoubtedly there will be a
8 multitude of personal tragedies,’ he added airily,’But
9 this is unavoidable. The situation now is ripe for a
10 final settlement of the Jewish question.’ In a covering
11 letter Heydrich invited Goebbels to a second conference,
12 on March 6. Goebbels sent two of his junior staff.”
13 Then one goes to note 36, and one sees that it
14 says they, that is the two junior members of staff, were
15 Karssonsen and Schmidtburg of its Eastern territory
16 subsection. Minutes of conference, March 6th 1942, on
17 Final Solution of Jewish problem. Then your Lordship sees
18 inside the bracket right at the end is the same film roll
19 number, whatever it is, reference number 371962.
20 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Right?
21 A. [Mr Irving]: “Eichmann talked crudely at this meeting”– that is the
22 meeting of 6th March attended by Karssonsen and
23 Schmidtburg – “of ‘forwarding’ the Jews to the east, like
24 so many head of cattle. The ministry of justice handled
25 the report on this new discussion like a hot potato.” —
26 That is note 38. That is the letter of 12th March, which
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1 your Lordship has, to Herr Lammers in the Reichkanzlei
2 “The Reich Chancellery referred it all to Hitler.”
3 That is an is interrogation of Hans Ficher, that
4 footnote. I ask you to note the words “it all”,
5 Mr Irving. “Hitler wearily told Hans Lammers that he
6 wanted the solution of the Jewish problem postponed until
7 after the war was over – a ruling that remarkably few
8 historians now seem disposed to quote.”
9 That suggests, does it not, to the reader,
10 Mr Irving, that the conference on 6th March was about the
11 overall solution of the Jewish question?
12 A. [Mr Irving]: The final solution of the Jewish question is the title
13 given on the minutes.
14 MR JUSTICE GRAY: But that was not the question. The question
15 is you are conveying to the readers there that it is the
16 final solution which is postponed.
17 MR RAMPTON: That was what that conference discussed, is what
18 you are telling the reader.
19 A. [Mr Irving]: Yes.
20 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Now would you please look at the minute of the conference,
21 the one you footnoted?
22 A. [Mr Irving]: Yes.
23 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Please read it yourself. Tell me when you have finished
24 and I will ask you a question.
25 A. [Mr Irving]: I think I am familiar enough with the document. My
26 Lord, can I mention the fact that we have one of my
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1 witnesses present. Is he allowed to be in court?
2 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Yes. It is only in criminal trials that
3 generally speaking you do not.
4 A. [Mr Irving]: Yes. I think I am sufficiently familiar with the content
5 of this memorandum to answer questions.
6 MR RAMPTON: The only topics that were discussed at that
7 meeting on 6th March 1942 are the fate of the mischlinge,
8 that is to say the children of mixed marriages, and their
9 parents, the mischehen. There are two items, there are
10 not?
11 A. [Mr Irving]: Yes.
12 Q. [Mr Rampton]: The first is the mischlinge on page 478 at the bottom?
13 A. [Mr Irving]: Yes.
14 Q. [Mr Rampton]: And the second, on page 483 at the bottom, is the
15 mischehen, that is to say mixed marriages?
16 A. [Mr Irving]: Yes.
17 Q. [Mr Rampton]: There is not a word in that memorandum of that conference
18 about the solution in general, apart from the heading
19 which was a general heading always used for these
20 documents. Am I right?
21 A. [Mr Irving]: You can say that about this document, yes.
22 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Then, if you will, turn to the next page in my little
23 file.
24 A. [Mr Irving]: 371?
25 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Yes. I will use yours because you have translated it and
26 I have not.
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1 A. [Mr Irving]: This refers clearly to the conference concerning the Jews
2 and the mixed races.
3 Q. [Mr Rampton]: I will just find your English first. I am going to read
4 it again.
5 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Do not, because we have been through it once
6 before.
7 MR RAMPTON: “My personal assistant has just briefed me on the
8 result of the session on March 6th, meeting might be a
9 better word, on the treatment of Jews and mixed races”.
10 That personal assistant was a man called Masfelder, was it
11 not?
12 A. [Mr Irving]: That I do not know.
13 Q. [Mr Rampton]: If you look at the protocol, you can see Masfelder,
14 sorry. The front sheet of the protocol, which is one of
15 your own documents.
16 MR JUSTICE GRAY: We can short circuit this. Mr Irving, this
17 must be a reference to the conference of which we have
18 just seen the record, is it not?
19 A. [Mr Irving]: Yes indeed.
20 MR RAMPTON: That conference had nothing whatever to do with
21 what was to happen to the Jews overall. It was under that
22 general heading, but it was specifically about mischlinge
23 and mischehen, was it not?
24 A. [Mr Irving]: The minutes of the conference record only those parts
25 dealing with the mischehen, the mixed marriages.
26 Q. [Mr Rampton]: So, in effect, you have totally distorted what was
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1 discussed at that meeting. You have totally distorted
2 therefore the reason why Schlegelberger wrote to Lammers
3 and therefore, if the Schlegelberger has a place in this
4 chronology, you have distorted the effect of that, too,
5 have you not?
6 A. [Mr Irving]: This omission that you repeatedly make, and I beg to
7 differ on that because of course I am looking at the other
8 documents in the file and also looking at the
9 interrogations of the people who were at the meeting.
10 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Let us look at the interrogations, shall we?
11 A. [Mr Irving]: If you remember, the business about Jews being supplied
12 like cattle and so on. Quite clearly that is not in the
13 minutes either. There is a lot of stuff that happened at
14 that conference which is not recorded in the minutes.
15 I think it is a mistake to adhere slavishly to the Nazi
16 memoranda taken by these gentlemen, the minutes, which as
17 you yourself have said frequently were written for
18 camouflage purposes.
19 Q. [Mr Rampton]: It is page 12 my Lord. Let us look at your extract from
20 the postwar interrogation, shall we?
21 A. [Mr Irving]: Yes.
22 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Whether or not Hans Ficher is talking about this meeting
23 one does not know because one has not got the full text,
24 but assume that he is, then what he said was: From the
25 invitation, whatever that means, it was evident that
26 evacuation or sterilization were on the agenda. What was
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1 discussed at that meeting was to how to deal with the
2 mischlinge and their parents the mischehen, and the
3 question arose should they be sterilized, should they be
4 evacuated, should they be allowed to stay where they are?
5 That is what was discussed, was it not?
6 A. [Mr Irving]: Well we have of course two different versions of the same
7 meeting. We have several different versions of the same
8 meeting. We have the wartime minute taken by the one that
9 you referred to us from the Foreign Ministry files, which
10 of course was before me, but we also have the other
11 sources of that meeting.
12 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Mr Irving, the document that you referred to and relied on
13 in the account that you gave in your book Goebbels is this
14 document.
15 A. [Mr Irving]: I specifically refer also to these interrogations of
16 Ficher and Bohle and the rest in this paragraph.
17 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Do not move the goal posts please, Mr Irving. It is no
18 good talking about some other memorandum. This is the
19 memorandum which you footnoted in Goebbels, is it not?
20 A. [Mr Irving]: These gentlemen are clearly referring to this conference
21 in their interrogations because they say it was at the
22 headquarters of Heydrich, which pins it down as being this
23 conference where the talk is about Jews being supplied
24 like cattle.
25 MR JUSTICE GRAY: You are missing, I think, Mr Rampton’s point
26 on this, and I do not think we want to spend very long on
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1 it. It is that the evacuation and sterilisation that were
2 on the agenda may have been the evacuation or
3 sterilisation of mischlinge?
4 A. [Mr Irving]: It may be.
5 MR RAMPTON: You do not tell your readers that, do you? You do
6 not tell your readers that the discussion at this
7 conference was confined to the fate of the mischlinge and
8 the mischehen.
9 A. [Mr Irving]: I am sure that Professor Evans would have spent eight
10 pages on this one detail, but I am writing a book which
11 has to be kept into the confines of one bound volume.
12 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Unless you will answer my questions, we are going to have
13 a bad day. Will you answer my question? You do not tell
14 the readers that the discussion at this conference was
15 confined to the fate of the mischlinge and mischehen, do
16 you?
17 A. [Mr Irving]: Will you allow me to read again what I have written?
18 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Yes, indeed.
19 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Do not take long because really the answer to
20 that question must be yes, that you are conveying to the
21 reader that it is the whole question that is being
22 postponed until the end of the war?
23 A. [Mr Irving]: I think, My Lord, that I have stated on several occasions
24 in the Goebbels’ book, and your Lordship will remember the
25 case of Gottschalt having caused Hitler particular agony,
26 in my submission; that I have repeatedly referred to the
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1 fact, to the question of the mixed marriages and mixed
2 races was a thorn in the side of the Nazis because they
3 did not know how to treat them, which side of the line to
4 put them.
5 I cannot keep on, in a book which is for
6 publication, coming back and reminding readers of things
7 that the intelligent reader will be carrying in his brain
8 anyway.
9 MR JUSTICE GRAY: No, Mr Rampton was asking you about the
10 passage at page 388, I think.
11 MR RAMPTON: I was, yes.
12 A. [Mr Irving]: Well, I think that the lines, about 10 lines down, where
13 Goebbels is quoted as saying: “For the time being that it
14 be concentrated in the East, undoubtedly, there will be a
15 multitude of personal tragedies, but this is
16 unavoidable”. We then go straight on to talk about the
17 March 6th conference.
18 I am making it in a way that a responsible
19 writer should. I did not want to put the whole contents
20 of this 10 page memorandum into a book at this point.
21 That would have been acres of sludge again.
22 MR RAMPTON: Mr Irving, I am going to put it once more and
23 I cannot go on making speeches through questions which are
24 never answered. The fact is you that you led the reader
25 in this passage to believe that what was discussed at the
26 conference on 6th March was the fate of the Jews
. P-21
1 generally, that that then went to Hitler, via Lammers, and
2 Hitler made a ruling that the fate of the Jews generally
3 was not to be considered or discussed at that time. That
4 is a total distortion of the evidence which you had before
5 you when you wrote that.
6 A. [Mr Irving]: I totally disagree with you, Mr Rampton. The evidence of
7 Bohle, that there was talk there of delivering the Jews to
8 the East like so many head of cattle, that is no longer
9 talking about the mixed marriage problem. They are
10 talking about the overall Holocaust in the way that I have
11 accepted it can be defined and perceived.
12 Q. [Mr Rampton]: If you can find in this memorandum which you have cited in
13 your book reference to the general question, please show
14 it to us, otherwise that is my last question.
15 A. [Mr Irving]: Mr Rampton, I have referred to the fact that I do not just
16 rely on one document. I do not jump from mountain peek to
17 mountain peek. I look at all the surrounding hills as
18 well.
19 MR JUSTICE GRAY: There we are. That is the Schlegelberger
20 note.
21 MR RAMPTON: I think, my Lord, that will do.
22 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Thank you very much.
23 MR RAMPTON: My Lord, I was not intending to embark on anything
24 new at the moment.
25 MR JUSTICE GRAY: I think the plan is we have your witness so
26 he is not kept waiting.
. P-22
Part II: Professor Cameron Watt Examined by Mr. Irving (23.1 to 54.18)
1 MR RAMPTON: As Professor Cameron Watt is here, he had better
2 give evidence.
3 MR JUSTICE GRAY: That is what I think so, Mr Irving, if you
4 would like to revert to your role as counsel?
5 < (The witness stood down)
6 MR IRVING: Can Professor Cameron Watt be called?
7 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Yes, of course.
Section 23.1 to 40.8
8 < PROFESSOR CAMERON WATT, sworn.
9 < Examined by MR IRVING.
10 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Professor Watt, would you be more comfortable
11 sitting down? You are welcome to sit down.
12 MR IRVING: I was going to make precisely the same suggestion,
13 my Lord. (To the witness):nbsp;Professor Watt, thank you
14 very much for coming today. You are appearing, of course,
15 under a witness summons. I want to make that quite plain
16 to the court and you are not appearing voluntarily, so no
17 odium can attach to you for coming and being called for
18 the defence, for my defence, in other words, for the
19 Plaintiff in this action.
20 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Shall we introduce Professor Watt and ask him
21 about his background?
22 MR IRVING: Yes. Professor Watt, your name is Donald Cameron
23 Watt?
24 A. [Professor Cameron Watt]: It is.
25 Q. [Mr Irving]: You are Emeritus Professor of International History at the
26 London School of Economics and Political Science?
. P-23
1 A. [Professor Cameron Watt]: Yes.
2 Q. [Mr Irving]: How long were you teaching at the London School of
3 Economics?
4 A. [Professor Cameron Watt]: From 1954 to 1993. 39 years altogether.
5 Q. [Mr Irving]: 39 years a Professor of History at the London School of
6 Economics?
7 A. [Professor Cameron Watt]: I did not have the rank of Professor until 1971, but I was
8 on the staff.
9 Q. [Mr Irving]: You enjoy the reputation of being something of a grand
10 gentleman, a doyen, of the historical profession in this
11 country?
12 A. [Professor Cameron Watt]: I think it is very difficult for an individual to say what
13 their reputation is in the minds of other people.
14 I certainly can only say that I have held a number of
15 senior positions in international organizations devoted to
16 historical research.
17 Q. [Mr Irving]: Thank you. You describe yourself as an historian, writer
18 and broadcaster. You are all three things?
19 A. [Professor Cameron Watt]: These are the various sources of my income, yes.
20 Q. [Mr Irving]: You were educated at Rugby and at Oriel College in Oxford;
21 is that correct?
22 A. [Professor Cameron Watt]: Yes.
23 Q. [Mr Irving]: You served in the Army in the Intelligence Corp.?
24 A. [Professor Cameron Watt]: I did.
25 Q. [Mr Irving]: And that you were with the British troops in Austria in
26 the occupation forces after World War II?
. P-24
1 A. [Professor Cameron Watt]: From 1947 to ’48, yes.
2 Q. [Mr Irving]: 1947 to ’48. Would you tell the court, Professor Watt,
3 what you were engaged with in the years following your
4 Army service?
5 A. [Professor Cameron Watt]: Following my Army service, I had three years reading
6 politics, philosophy and economics at Oxford because only
7 that way could you deal with 20th century history at that
8 time; and I indulged myself in the usual activities of
9 undergraduate. That is to say, I wrote, I played opera, I
10 ran the Poetry Society — I had a number of activities of
11 that kind.
12 Q. [Mr Irving]: And you became a member of the Foreign Office Research
13 Department?
14 A. [Professor Cameron Watt]: I was attached to it, yes — I do not think I was ever a
15 full member — from 1951 to 1954, and then again on a
16 part-time basis from 1957 to 1960.
17 Q. [Mr Irving]: Yes. Interesting. So you are quite familiar in a way
18 with the kinds of documents, Foreign Office, diplomatic
19 documents, that we have been looking at in this court this
20 morning, for example. The ones with the serial numbers,
21 the six digit serial numbers stamped on the bottom?
22 A. [Professor Cameron Watt]: The ones with the serial numbers are the ones — those
23 serial numbers are the way we recorded them on our index
24 cards. They represent the serial number of the individual
25 film and the frame number of the particular page.
26 Q. [Mr Irving]: The British, in fact, captured all the German Foreign
. P-25
1 Office records?
2 A. [Professor Cameron Watt]: They fell into the hands mainly of the British and
3 Americans, were collected in Berlin and were evacuated.
4 The whole project for editing them and publishing them was
5 evacuated from Berlin at the time of the Berlin airlift.
6 Q. [Mr Irving]: Did they go to a place called Waddon Hall?
7 A. [Professor Cameron Watt]: Waddon Hall near Bletchley, yes.
8 Q. [Mr Irving]: Near Bletchley, near the code breaking establishment?
9 A. [Professor Cameron Watt]: Yes. We had no relationship with them at all.
10 Q. [Mr Irving]: Nobody knew about them?
11 A. [Professor Cameron Watt]: Well, we knew they were there. There wee too many of them
12 to be concealed and some of them played their part in
13 ordinary social activities, but what they were actually
14 doing, no, we did not know.
15 Q. [Mr Irving]: Would you give the court, in most general terms, one or
16 two lines, a picture of the scale and scope of the
17 captured German documentation? Was it small or large?
18 A. [Professor Cameron Watt]: Well, at Waddon itself, we had 400 tonnes —-
19 Q. [Mr Irving]: 400 tonnes?
20 A. [Professor Cameron Watt]: — of documents covering the records of the German
21 Foreign Ministry and of its Prussian predecessor from 1860
22 onwards. We also had access to those files of the German
23 Navy, the Reichsmarines, had fallen into British hands at
24 Blenzburg and we had an odd collection of documents from
25 the Nazi leaders, from the offices of the adjutantur of
26 the Fuhrer, for example —-
. P-26
1 Q. [Mr Irving]: Hitler’s Adjutants?
2 A. [Professor Cameron Watt]: — and a number of private, collections of private papers
3 that were found with the Foreign Ministry archives.
4 Q. [Mr Irving]: Interrupting here at this moment, Professor Watt. Can I
5 just ask you, when did we last meet — 30 years ago?
6 A. [Professor Cameron Watt]: 30 years ago, I think it was, yes.
7 Q. [Mr Irving]: Have we had any discussion about what you are going to be
8 saying today beyond just the invitation and my saying that
9 it would just be very painful and very short?
10 A. [Professor Cameron Watt]: No.
11 Q. [Mr Irving]: I have not rehearsed you in any way as to what to say?
12 A. [Professor Cameron Watt]: No.
13 Q. [Mr Irving]: In your knowledge, in your time going through the German
14 diplomatic documents, and I appreciate you did not read
15 the entire 400 tonnes — nor can I claim to have read the
16 400 tonnes of German documents — were any documents there
17 which came to your attention which showed a Hitler order
18 for what we can call the Holocaust in the sense of the
19 extermination of the Jews?
20 A. [Professor Cameron Watt]: I would not come across them because my work was confined,
21 where the original documents were concerned, to the years
22 1933/1937, and where the editorial work was concerned, to
23 the documents from 1939 to 1940. I never had occasion to
24 go in and look individually at the later documents. We
25 worked with the Nuremberg files and, of course, I was
26 familiar with the evidence that was produced at Nuremberg
. P-27
1 which dealt with war crimes and I have been consulted
2 about this from time to time.
3 Q. [Mr Irving]: Did you have discussions with your colleagues at the
4 Research Department about the progress of their work when
5 they were working on different periods?
6 A. [Professor Cameron Watt]: No, because the whole project was concerned in the years
7 I was attached to it to completing series D of the
8 documents which ended with Pearl Harbour, and to
9 completing or doing the whole of the work on the years
10 1933, 1937, which were published as Series C in the
11 documents. I never had any direct dealings with documents
12 dealing with the —-
13 Q. [Mr Irving]: War years?
14 A. [Professor Cameron Watt]: — war years beyond that, no.
15 Q. [Mr Irving]: You never heard from one of your colleagues there that
16 they had found, stumbled across, a document of the sort
17 that I mentioned, that Hitler had given some extraordinary
18 orders about killing the Jews or any other ethnic minority
19 or persecuted people directly involving Hitler?
20 A. [Professor Cameron Watt]: No, but I cannot think, see why that would have arisen in
21 our discussions. We were working eight to nine hours a
22 day on the very large quantities of documents. Each
23 document was read by members of two countries.
24 I collaborated mainly with the Frenchmen.
25 Q. [Mr Irving]: You are familiar, Professor, also with some of the other
26 document collections outside your own area of expertise
. P-28
1 because of research at that time for the Foreign Office
2 because, of course, you have written a number of
3 distinguished works where you have had to draw on
4 collections outside the Waddon Hall collection?
5 A. [Professor Cameron Watt]: Oh, I have worked in the archives, in the American
6 archives, for the ’30s. I worked in the Public Record
7 Office. I have worked in British private collections and
8 I have worked on published documents from all those
9 European countries I had direct access to and those which
10 were translated into languages I could read.
11 Q. [Mr Irving]: Professor Watt, from your knowledge of these archives that
12 you worked in, the Public Record Office in London, the
13 national archives in the United States, the Foreign Office
14 collection in this country and elsewhere, would you say
15 that the records of the Third Reich, one way and another,
16 either in original ribbon copy or in carbon copy, are
17 largely intact, give or take a few holes of what the
18 Russians took?
19 A. [Professor Cameron Watt]: No, there are very substantial gaps in the later period.
20 Q. [Mr Irving]: In the later period?
21 A. [Professor Cameron Watt]: From 1941 onwards.
22 Q. [Mr Irving]: In specific departments, like the SS or the Army or the
23 Air Force?
24 A. [Professor Cameron Watt]: I think that the gaps are consistent with the files not
25 ending up in an archive and where they did to destruction
26 by one means or another, and to their falling into hands
. P-29
1 of people who wanted to hang on them.
2 Q. [Mr Irving]: For example, when the Germany archives at Potsdam was
3 burned down in an air raid, that kind of thing?
4 A. [Professor Cameron Watt]: That kind of thing and, in fact, some of the, one of the
5 worst accidents was when a couple of trucks carrying
6 German Foreign Ministry records in the Secret
7 classification collided with one another and caught fire,
8 and we had only fragments, burnt fragments, and the more
9 you touched them, the more they disintegrated.
10 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Professor Watt, may I ask you, you may not
11 know the answer, but was there evidence that documents had
12 systematically had gone missing in the sense that somebody
13 had said, “We must take out a particular category of
14 documents” or not?
15 A. [Professor Cameron Watt]: Not in the Foreign Ministry, sir, because, my Lord, the
16 German Foreign Ministry practice, as we found out when we
17 were looking at the documents dealing with the origins of
18 the First World War, was either to deny the existence of
19 files which were relevant or, in a number of cases, to
20 unstitch the backs of them and to remove the documents so
21 that the researcher was presented with what he understood
22 to be a complete file but was not. Since in no case were
23 the researchers allowed access to the registries where all
24 these documents were and that one had noted, this kind of
25 gap misled a number of very prominent American scholars.
26 MR IRVING: Professor Watt, can I ask, when was this
. P-30
1 unstitching done? Are you suggesting after the war or
2 during the war?
3 A. [Professor Cameron Watt]: No, no. It was done by the political archive in the late
4 20s and 30s.
5 Q. [Mr Irving]: But not relating to the Third Reich records?
6 A. [Professor Cameron Watt]: No, because the issue of anybody looking at them from
7 outside would not have arisen at that stage.
8 Q. [Mr Irving]: Thank you. So, by and large, the records of entire
9 departments are there, but sometimes there are gaps where
10 individual accidents happen, trucks colliding, buildings
11 burned down, but then there would have been copies
12 elsewhere?
13 A. [Professor Cameron Watt]: Not necessarily, no. We were helped by the gentleman
14 called Leursche who had filmed a great many of the
15 important documents before the originals were destroyed
16 and, indeed, there was a great deal of dispute over the
17 genuineness of the text of the Nazis in 1939 discovered
18 that this was photostat.
19 Q. [Mr Irving]: How safe is it to draw negative conclusions in the way
20 that I sometimes do (if I may ask a leading question) on
21 the basis of the fact that there is in the body of
22 documents now existing 55 years later, after we have
23 access to just about everything, including the Bletchley
24 Park intercepts which are enormous, how safely can one say
25 because there is not a document there, in your expert
26 view, Professor Watt, would it be perverse to say the fact
. P-31
1 that there is no such document after 55 years, it would be
2 perverse to say that, therefore, this document probably
3 did not exist?
4 A. [Professor Cameron Watt]: I think there are two problems with that argument. One is
5 that the range of the destruction is something which we
6 cannot know because Nazi principles of registration of
7 documents were, to put it mildly, somewhat amateurish.
8 Secondly, the distribution of documents within the offices
9 over which the Nazi amateurs had taken control was very
10 peculiar; and, thirdly, as with other major leaders of
11 other countries at that time, there are periods in which
12 they did not confide their thoughts to anybody else, or to
13 anybody else who might have recorded them.
14 That was, I think, the reason why the first
15 sight or the first news about the Hitler diaries, alleged
16 Hitler diaries, was for a moment so uplifting a piece of
17 information. I came to hear about it when I had just come
18 back from Finland and I had missed all the previous
19 kerfuffle about it. My first reaction was at last
20 something is going to fill in the gaps, but then, of
21 course, I realized that it was not.
22 Q. [Mr Irving]: Professor Watt, you are familiar with the way the German
23 documents look, Civil Servant documents. They had a kind
24 of standard layout, did they not?
25 A. [Professor Cameron Watt]: Those that came from professional offices, yes.
26 Q. [Mr Irving]: How would you classify the SS in this respect? Would the
. P-32
1 documents of the SS that came into Abteilung in
2 Langswei —-
3 A. [Professor Cameron Watt]: I think there it depended very largely whether the SS man
4 concerned was a trained bureaucrat or not.
5 Q. [Mr Irving]: There was actually a Civil Service regulation, a manual,
6 I believe, on how documents had to be laid out, the
7 reference number, the address, the location of the address
8 list, and so on?
9 A. [Professor Cameron Watt]: That is true, but there was also a very, the sort of macho
10 SS type who says, “Do not bother me with all this
11 nonsense”. So that one cannot, I think, read anything out
12 of this one way or another.
13 Q. [Mr Irving]: Are you familiar with German security classifications?
14 A. [Professor Cameron Watt]: Yes, up to Top Secret and so on, yes.
15 Q. [Mr Irving]: If a document is marked “Vertraulich”, is that round about
16 the lowest security classification, “Confidential”?
17 A. [Professor Cameron Watt]: I suppose so, yes. It is somewhere between “Restricted”
18 and “Confidential” in the British classification.
19 Q. [Mr Irving]: We will stick to the British classification because the
20 American classifications are different, are they not?
21 A. [Professor Cameron Watt]: Yes.
22 Q. [Mr Irving]: For example, American “Top Secret” is our Most Secret. If
23 we go up the next rung in the ladder “Geheim”?
24 A. [Professor Cameron Watt]: “Geheim” is” Secret.
25 Q. [Mr Irving]: The one above that, we then divide?
26 A. [Professor Cameron Watt]: “Streng geheim”, “hochts geheim”. The problem with that
. P-33
1 kind of document is exactly the same as one has in the
2 British system, that there is a tendency to overclassify
3 simply to emphasise the importance of the individual and
4 of the post that he has occupied. It is not a very good
5 guide.
6 Q. [Mr Irving]: If you were to be shown a document in which the
7 classification “Geheim” had been upgraded manually to
8 “Geheim Kommandosache”?
9 A. [Professor Cameron Watt]: Yes.
10 Q. [Mr Irving]: Then that would apply that somebody attached importance to
11 the increased security rating?
12 A. [Professor Cameron Watt]: It would certainly imply that somebody did, yes.
13 Whether —-
14 Q. [Mr Irving]: Conversely, if somebody had crossed out the
15 “Kommandosache” and left it just as “Geheim”, that would
16 imply that they thought it was overclassified?
17 A. [Professor Cameron Watt]: That is certainly true.
18 Q. [Mr Irving]: And this would indicate that the person who wrote that
19 document did attach importance to security
20 classifications; he was being pernickety?
21 A. [Professor Cameron Watt]: Either that or he was engaged in a feud with the person
22 who had first put the original grade on. I do not think
23 you could arrive at any distinct generalization without
24 looking at the document concerned.
25 Q. [Mr Irving]: There is a parting of the ways, is there not, in this top
26 security classification of Geheim Kommandosache on the
. P-34
1 Army documents, roughly speaking, and Geheim Reichsache on
2 the political documents?
3 A. [Professor Cameron Watt]: Those were classifications which go back before the Nazi
4 period, yes.
5 Q. [Mr Irving]: But normally you find Geheim Reichsache —
6 R-E-I-C-H-S-A-C-H-E —-
7 A. [Professor Cameron Watt]: Yes, that would be — certainly if one found that from the
8 Wehrmacht(?) period, one would regard that as the top
9 classification.
10 Q. [Mr Irving]: Then there another one on top of that which is “Nur durch
11 offizier”, “Only by officer’s hand”?
12 A. [Professor Cameron Watt]: No. That is an instruction as to how the documents should
13 be handled. It is a bit like the — there are very
14 similar classifications in the British and it has to do
15 with the handling of the document in transition, not with
16 the actual — I would have expected to find “Nur durch
17 offizierhande” on a document which was already classified
18 as “Geheim” or “Hochstgeheim” or “Sprengheim” or one of
19 the classifications of …
20 Q. [Mr Irving]: One of the highest — “hochstgeheim” is H-O-C-H-S-T?
21 A. [Professor Cameron Watt]: Yes, that means “Highest Secret”.
22 Q. [Mr Irving]: Very rare. I have to admit, I have not seen that. To our
23 surprise, we found another secret classification,
24 Professor Watt, in the last day or two, on some of the
25 documents, “AR”. We have come to the conclusion, I think,
26 although this speaks against me, that this is the
. P-35
1 classification “Aktion Reinhard”. That is a possible or
2 probable interpretation.
3 A. [Professor Cameron Watt]: I never came across anything like that. I had a look at
4 the document.
5 Q. [Mr Irving]: Professor Watt, just remaining on that topic for one more
6 question: if you were an historian, as indeed you are, or
7 you were teaching historians how to become an historian,
8 would you advise them to use the original document or
9 facsimile, if possible, rather than use the printed text?
10 A. [Professor Cameron Watt]: Always, and, indeed, I used to urge my graduate students
11 when using secondary works always to check the original
12 reference if this was at all possible. The geographical
13 distribution of the documents used to meant very often
14 that there was not, but where you have to look at the
15 original, I mean, where an original document has been
16 cited by another author and that seems to play an
17 important part in the argument you are using yourself,
18 then it is of extreme importance to check the original.
19 I would add that, in my experience and in the
20 advice I gave to my students, I always recommended that
21 they should take most seriously those documents which
22 seemed to support the views that they were in the process
23 of supporting. After all, if you are in the process of
24 being sold a pup by somebody, the man who is trying to
25 deceive you will come as close as possible to what you
26 know to be the truth before slipping in the element of
. P-36
1 falseness; and the conflict between the historian’s desire
2 to arrive at a decision and the insubstantiality of any
3 written evidence, or any other evidence, particularly oral
4 evidence, or of the kind of man who comes up and says,
5 “Never mind what the documents say, I was there and this
6 is the real truth”, is one which is a constant pitfall in
7 our paths and which has mislead a great many people,
8 including some extremely important and senior historians
9 in the past.
10 Q. [Mr Irving]: Professor, I was not going to ask you about eyewitness
11 evidence but where would you rank eyewitness evidence on
12 the scale, if you had, for example, aerial photographs, if
13 you had prisoner of war intelligence, contemporary
14 prisoner of war intelligence, if you had intercepts from
15 Bletchley Park, if you had captured documents, either
16 captured during the war or after the war, and eyewitness
17 evidence, in other words, anecdotal evidence and, finally,
18 interrogations, whether under oath or not in court, how
19 would you classify those in order of reliability, starting
20 with the least reliable?
21 A. [Professor Cameron Watt]: I do not know that there is any way of classifying those,
22 because it depends so much on the individual. I did a
23 great deal of interviews, particularly in the period
24 before the 1967 Public Records Act released documents of
25 30 years of age, and in my experience the kind of evidence
26 I got differed according to the personality of the person
. P-37
1 giving it.
2 In some cases I found that the man I was
3 interviewing had his own documentary record and was
4 consulting it, and that what he said was confirmed later.
5 In other cases, including at least one Minister of the
6 Crown, I was given a very plausible and, for all I know, a
7 very true story of a meeting at which he was supposed to
8 have been present; and when the records of that meeting
9 subsequently became available, it was clear that he was
10 not. He should have been, but he just was not that day,
11 and he must have heard the story from one of the people
12 there and then repeated it.
13 Q. [Mr Irving]: But he seriously believed that he had been there?
14 A. [Professor Cameron Watt]: Well —-
15 Q. [Mr Irving]: By he came to tell the story?
16 A. [Professor Cameron Watt]: If a gentleman who holds the rank of Admiral of the Fleet
17 and is a junior Minister in the Cabinet tells you that he
18 is there, one’s reaction is not to question him and,
19 indeed, it was one of these confirmatory details.
20 Q. [Mr Irving]: But —-
21 A. [Professor Cameron Watt]: For all I know, the story was true; it is just that the
22 man who gave it me alleged that he was present and was
23 not.
24 Q. [Mr Irving]: My question was, Professor, if you remember, at the time
25 he told the story he believed that he had been there?
26 A. [Professor Cameron Watt]: He may have come to believe it. Memory is a very tricky
. P-38
1 element.
2 Q. [Mr Irving]: So to repeat my original question, where you would rank on
3 that scale of material that is lying before you, at one
4 end of the bench you have the eyewitnesses and at the
5 other end of the bench you have, for example, the
6 Bletchley Park intercepts?
7 A. [Professor Cameron Watt]: The Bletchley Park intercepts, in so far as they are
8 complete, are always regarded as the most reliable because
9 there is no evidence that the dispatcher was aware that
10 his messages could be decoded and, therefore, he would put
11 truth in them. There are cases, of course, in which
12 messages were sent in a code that was expected to broken
13 in order to mislead.
14 Q. [Mr Irving]: The Japanese Purple Code, for example, the Japanese were
15 aware that we were breaking it, is that not so?
16 A. [Professor Cameron Watt]: That is not my information.
17 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Professor Watt, I do not know whether you
18 know the answer to this question but —-
19 A. [Professor Cameron Watt]: That is not my information, no.
20 Q. [Mr Justice Gray]: The Bletchley Park intercepts, we have heard of messages
21 about the shootings on the Eastern Front going back to
22 Berlin and those having been intercepted by Bletchley
23 Park, but how wide did it go? What other kind of topics,
24 do you know, were intercepted at Bletchley?
25 A. [Professor Cameron Watt]: We were reading at different times a very large proportion
26 of the Naval codes. We were reading the Abwehr codes. We
. P-39
1 were reading some of the German Army codes. Not all the
2 Bletchley Park intercepts have as yet been released, my
3 Lord.
4 Q. [Mr Justice Gray]: But, on the whole, they were military?
5 A. [Professor Cameron Watt]: This is not an area in which I have particular expertise.
6 MR IRVING: We have another expert who we will be calling on
7 precisely this, my Lord.
8 MR JUSTICE GRAY: All right. I need not trouble you further.
Section 40.9 to 54.18
9 MR IRVING: Professor Watt, I only intend to detain you for
10 another five or 10 minutes at most. Moving away from the
11 documentation that you yourself worked with, you have had
12 occasion on a number of times to read books that I have
13 written on the commission of newspapers who have given the
14 job to you to read them or possibly even out of
15 entertainment or possibly even because you wanted to use
16 them yourself as a source, have you a general comment to
17 make on the quality of the research or the writing?
18 A. [Professor Cameron Watt]: I find your version of Hitler’s personality and knowledge
19 of the Holocaust, a knowledge of the mass murder of the
20 Jews, a very difficult one to accept. That, of course, is
21 a view that I have expressed in the reviews I wrote of
22 your Hitler’s War, in the review I wrote of the Goring and
23 the Goebbels’ biographies.
24 I find in other areas where your particular
25 political convictions are not involved, I am most
26 impressed by the scholarship. There is a book, my Lord,
. P-40
1 which I have brought me which is a second version of the
2 book in which I collaborated with Mr Irving back in the
3 60s which is an edited version of possibly the only
4 surviving document of the German research office,
5 so-called, which was one of the agencies involved in
6 listening to telephone conversations, in decoding
7 diplomatic and other ciphers and so on. There were also
8 agencies — there was one run by the Foreign Ministry and
9 there was one run by the German armed forces, but this was
10 most —-
11 Q. [Mr Irving]: Pioneering?
12 A. [Professor Cameron Watt]: — high level one and it was one which, although it had
13 people, both of convinced Nazis and those who were
14 unconvinced, on its ranks, it certainly enjoyed the
15 highest reputation. The document itself is a lengthy
16 summary of British policy in the year 1938, 1939.
17 MR IRVING: Professor Watt, have you any comment on the way in
18 which I handled the document?
19 A. [Professor Cameron Watt]: Yes, this is what I am about to come to. When
20 I collaborated with Mr Irving on this —-
21 Q. [Mr Irving]: You wrote the introduction to the book.
22 A. [Professor Cameron Watt]: — after my discovery of it, I only had one basic
23 document on the subject of the [German] which was the
24 evidence of a man who was then unnamed which was provided
25 me by a German organization. Mr Irving’s second version
26 of this is, I think, a major contribution to our knowledge
. P-41
1 on the subject. He has worked very effectively. He has
2 interviewed large numbers of people. He has identified
3 the British and American reports on the organization. The
4 British ones, I may say, I am in the process of trying to
5 persuade the authorities to release because they are
6 available in America but not here.
7 I find it — invaluable is perhaps too strong a
8 word, but a very, very effective piece of historical
9 scholarship, and it is one which does not deal with the
10 issues on which Mr Irving is complaining.
11 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Can I just ask this, as a military historian,
12 and I underline the word “military”, how do you rate
13 Mr Irving?
14 A. [Professor Cameron Watt]: I think Mr Irving is not in the top class, but as a
15 historian of Hitler’s war seems to —-
16 Q. [Mr Justice Gray]: That is what I meant.
17 A. [Professor Cameron Watt]: — I think his is a view which, even if one disagrees
18 with it, has to be taken seriously. He is, after all, the
19 only man of standing, on the basis of his other research,
20 who puts the case for Hitler forward and it seems to me
21 that it is mistaken to dismiss it. It requires the most
22 careful examination, though, I must say, I hope that I am
23 never subjected to the kind of examination that
24 Mr Irving’s books have been suggested to by the Defence
25 witnesses. I have a very strong feeling that there are
26 other senior historical figures, including some to whom
. P-42
1 I owed a great deal of my own career, whose work would not
2 stand up, or not all of whose work would stand up, to this
3 kind of examination —–
4 MR IRVING: Would you like to mention some names?
5 A. [Professor Cameron Watt]: — and I think that would be a —-
6 Q. [Mr Irving]: Selous ^^ Namier, perhaps, would you?
7 A. [Professor Cameron Watt]: Well, Namier ^^ I would mention because it was the first
8 article I ever published — the rash youth that I was, my
9 Lord — was an attack upon him and I am told that it was
10 passed around Baliol College in plain brown wrappers
11 because it caused such a sensation.
12 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Professor Watt, when you said what you have
13 just said about Hitler (sic) as a military historian, you
14 are talking —-
15 MR IRVING: Irving.
16 MR JUSTICE GRAY: — not really of what he has written about
17 the Jewish problem; is that right?
18 A. [Professor Cameron Watt]: I am talking about his whole case for Hitler. I think it
19 is difficult to divide this man’s personality. I do not
20 think he has solved what to me is the mystery which is the
21 extraordinary third rate nature of Hitler’s mind from
22 personality and thoughts. How he could have managed to
23 suck into his own private fantasy world the whole of
24 Europe and the major powers and so on is one of the
25 historical mysteries which I yet to see anyone tackle.
26 I am waiting for the second volume of the latest
. P-43
1 biography.
2 MR JUSTICE GRAY: It is one of the few issues we do not have to
3 tackle here either, so…
4 A. [Professor Cameron Watt]: But it is a case, I think, of whether one is arguing about
5 the key or the lock.
6 MR IRVING: Professor Watt, can I put this to you? I will read
7 it out as that is the simplest way of doing it. It is
8 attached to the back of the little sheaf of documents
9 I gave my Lord. (Document not provided) Professor Watt,
10 it is the review in the Daily Telegraph. It is the only
11 review I am going to put to you. “On June 16th 1977, when
12 you were invited to review my book Hitler’s War, which was
13 the first edition, am only going to read one paragraph.
14 Mr Irving’s views on Hitler’s position in relation to the
15 massacre of European Jewry are well known. He believes
16 the massacre was organized by Himmler and Heydrich without
17 Hitler’s knowledge, a belief he rests on the absence of
18 any direct evidence of Hitler’s knowledge and the
19 existence of certain specific orders in specific cases
20 that there was to be no liquidation. From these negatives
21 he deduces the positive, backed by evidence from the
22 survivors of Hitler’s immediate entourage that the matter
23 was never mentioned in their presence at all”. This is
24 yourself writing, Professor Watt?
25 A. [Professor Cameron Watt]: Yes.
26 Q. [Mr Irving]: “To this argument each historian would have apply his own
. P-44
1 judgment.” You do not say straightaway what an absurd
2 idea, what a perverse kind of reading of the documents.
3 You carry on by saying, Professor Watt, “For myself
4 I found it initially not unpersuasive, having read the
5 book, until I reflected on the character of Himmler”. At
6 that point I propose to stop. In other words, that was
7 your position at the time you had freshly read the book?
8 MR RAMPTON: May I interrupt? Could Mr Irving please complete
9 the paragraph?
10 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Yes, because I do not have that document in
11 front of me.
12 MR IRVING: “I found it unimaginable”, yes, why not, “I found
13 it unimaginable that he could proceed on so vast an
14 enterprise without obtaining his master’s approval”. To
15 put it the other way round, you imagined that he did
16 obtain his master’s approval, Professor Watt? Is that
17 so? Is that what you are saying? You imagined that he
18 must have obtained Hitler’s approval?
19 A. [Professor Cameron Watt]: I assumed that, given his character, he would have at
20 least thought he had Hitler’s approval.
21 Q. [Mr Irving]: Yes.
22 A. [Professor Cameron Watt]: The difficulty in dealing with Hitler is that he himself
23 defines secrecy in four different categories, the top one
24 being ideas that I have not myself finally resolved, and
25 the next one being ideas that I do not communicate to
26 anybody. Then there is the James bond like category, for
. P-45
1 your eyes only, or, as Germans say, between four eyes, and
2 then there is the normal category. It is in that area
3 where the absence of evidence to my mind, it is a
4 historical challenge but I do not think that it is
5 conclusive in the way other people have assumed it is.
6 Q. [Mr Irving]: Professor Watt, I do not to labour the point too much
7 because, of course, it is well known that in my
8 biographies of Hitler I have accepted that after October
9 1943, after Himmler’s famous speech at Posun, the way
10 I put it is that Hitler had no excuse for not knowing.
11 Would this be a perverse reading of the situation, that he
12 had no excuse for not knowing from that time on? He could
13 not really get away with saying, I did not know what was
14 going on? Am I wrong in suggesting that?
15 A. [Professor Cameron Watt]: The difficulty is that Hitler’s theory of the state,
16 anything that was done in the state was done in his name.
17 He would justify it retrospectively if he did not know
18 about it. This is an area, I am talking here not having
19 done the kind of detailed work which is in front of the
20 court on this, and I am simply producing a judgment based
21 on the work I have done on Hitler —-
22 Q. [Mr Irving]: Professor Watt, if I was William Showler writing a book
23 about the rise and fall of the Third Reich, then quite
24 clearly this was Hitler’s fault, this was Hitler’s
25 responsibility. But, if you have a student who is writing
26 an examination of Adolf Hitler’s personal responsibility,
. P-46
1 which is germane to the issues before the court, then you
2 do come up against a bit of brick wall as far as
3 acceptable evidence goes. You really have to start using
4 what you yourself call your imagination. You imagine that
5 Hitler probably, you cannot imagine that he did not, and
6 this kind of thing, and that is very dangerous, would you
7 not agree? It is a dangerous kind of basis. Imagination
8 is a picking on a particular word I used here because
9 I was trying very hard to present a review of your book,
10 which did not descend into denouncing it as being contrary
11 to what everybody knows.
12 Q. [Mr Irving]: Mr Rampton, do you wish me to read any more of that
13 paragraph?
14 MR RAMPTON: Yes. It would save me from doing so.
15 MR IRVING: “For myself, I found it initially not unpersuasive
16 until I reflected on the character of Himmler”- this is
17 yourself writing, Professor Watt. “I found it unimaginable
18 that he could proceed on so vast an enterprise without
19 obtaining his master’s approval. Heydrich would have been
20 another matter. There are very large areas in which we
21 have only the slenderest of indications as to what was
22 going on in Hitler’s mind. Like Roosevelt, he said
23 different things to different audiences but, like
24 Roosevelt, he committed nothing of his own thoughts to
25 paper. In such circumstances inference is a legitimate
26 historical method.” Is that enough, Mr Rampton?
. P-47
1 A. [Professor Cameron Watt]: Then I go on to say “But to infer Hitler’s ignorance, to
2 assume that Himmler and his minions went beyond the limits
3 of what Hitler had approved, seems to assume something
4 inherently improbable and out of keeping with all we know
5 of Himmler’s relationship to Hitler”. What I am getting
6 at there is that again, as in so much of this biographical
7 approach, there is a kind of build your own Hitler, build
8 your own Roosevelt, build your own Himmler, out of kits
9 which are supplied.
10 Q. [Mr Irving]: There are different images. There is the Madison Avenue
11 image.
12 A. [Professor Cameron Watt]: My feeling about Himmler was that he was a man who was
13 almost incapable of originating anything himself unless he
14 had what he thought was approval from above, that he was a
15 man who was dependent on approval of those whom he
16 idolised.
17 Q. [Mr Irving]: Professor Watt, Himmler’s brother actually told me the
18 same. He said, I cannot imagine Heinny would have done
19 this on his own. He said he was a bit of a coward. I
20 think I mentioned this also in my books.
21 A. [Professor Cameron Watt]: Towards the end, he began to lose confidence in Hitler and
22 he became open to the sort of arguments that were advanced
23 by senior SS officers, the belief that the Allies would
24 make a separate peace with him and so on, and he reached a
25 point where Hitler believed that he was being betrayed,
26 and there is an expression of his disbelief at this.
. P-48
1 Q. [Mr Irving]: But that is another story, as they say. Can I draw
2 attention to the fact that the passages we read out were
3 written by you in June 1977, in view of the fact that 23
4 years have passed and still no document has come to light
5 to shake the notion which you considered at that time
6 inherently improbable, would you consider that my notion
7 has become slightly more sustainable?
8 A. [Professor Cameron Watt]: I think I would be reluctant to change my mind about
9 that. What I should say, however, is that the challenge
10 that you then raise to the historical profession.
11 Q. [Mr Irving]: The thousand pound offer?
12 A. [Professor Cameron Watt]: I was not thinking of money. I was thinking simply of the
13 challenge of putting forward the sort of views you did and
14 basing them on historical research, rather than
15 ideological conviction, or at least seemingly so, has
16 directly resulted in an enormous outburst of research into
17 the —-
18 Q. [Mr Irving]: Holocaust?
19 A. [Professor Cameron Watt]: – into the massacres of the Jews, into the Holocaust and so
20 on, which is now so large an area of historical research
21 that it can support journals, it can support conferences.
22 I see that there are three scheduled in Britain this
23 coming year and that I myself am appearing in one in
24 America in March. This, I think, is a direct result of
25 the challenge which Mr Irving’s work and the consistency
26 and the effort which he has put into maintaining it in
. P-49
1 public, has resulted in somewhat similar —-
2 Q. [Mr Irving]: Would you describe my notion as being perverse? Would you
3 use that kind of word to describe it?
4 A. [Professor Cameron Watt]: This is an argument about nominalism. I think that it is
5 perverse in relation to the values of western society, as
6 I understand them. I do not think it is perverse,
7 speaking as a historian. I have seen more perverse
8 arguments put forward, for example the gentleman who
9 maintained that Stalin hardly killed anybody, who held an
10 academic post of some importance in an American
11 university. I gather that he has now changed his mind as
12 a result of being shown the KGB records and is editing a
13 book which is hastily changing his position.
14 I think to maintain that America entered the
15 Second World War as a result of the machinations of
16 British security authorities in New York is perverse.
17 I think that the views that Stalin was about to attack
18 Hitler when Hitler attacked Stalin, which is a view that
19 apparently commands a certain amount of support in America
20 and Germany and Israel, is perverse.
21 There are areas of perversity and indeed the
22 late Alan Clark’s support for an eminent British
23 historian’s views that Chamberlain could have made peace
24 with Hitler in 1937, and that somebody else besides
25 Churchill have made piece with Hitler in 1940, I regard
26 these as perverse. There is a lot of perversity about, if
. P-50
1 one is to use that word in historical terms.
2 Q. [Mr Irving]: I hasten to say that those are not the issues that are
3 before the court, Professor Watt?
4 A. [Professor Cameron Watt]: I know, but one has to put this kind of argument, it seems
5 to me, in the general context of what historians, I think
6 Professor Evans and I share views on the responsibilities
7 of historians to tell the truth as we see it, and to be
8 extremely careful and professional in our use of evidence,
9 but I cannot say that the evidence that we both confront
10 in the writing of history generally altogether lives up to
11 those expectations.
12 Q. [Mr Irving]: Professor Watt, from what you know of my writings, do you
13 believe that, if a document were now to be presented to me
14 tomorrow morning in one of your plain brown envelopes,
15 utterly confounding me in the issues that are before the
16 court, I would hesitate for one moment to bring them to
17 the attention my readers and that I would in some way
18 suppress them, or do you believe, on the contrary, that in
19 fact I would make them known immediately?
20 A. [Professor Cameron Watt]: I have no knowledge myself of times when you have
21 suppressed evidence. But then our paths have not lain
22 together very often.
23 Q. [Mr Irving]: We are nearly at the end of this examination-in-chief,
24 Professor. You wrote a review, you may remember, some
25 years ago of my biography of Herman Goring for the Sunday
26 Times?
. P-51
1 A. [Professor Cameron Watt]: Yes.
2 Q. [Mr Irving]: It was the principal review in the review section that
3 week as indeed most of my books were reviewed very
4 prominently in my hey day. You began the review with the
5 words which I shall never forget, “David Irving is one of
6 Britain’s most disliked historians but …” Do you
7 remember writing those words?
8 A. [Professor Cameron Watt]: I have not looked at that cutting recently, but I find it
9 quite likely that I wrote it.
10 Q. [Mr Irving]: Quite likely that you wrote it! You did not of course
11 stand in Oxford Street with a clip board asking the
12 passers-by who their most disliked historian was, so this
13 was just a subjective value judgment?
14 A. [Professor Cameron Watt]: I think so. That would be fair comment.
15 Q. [Mr Irving]: It is not, of course, a historian’s job to be liked, is
16 it?
17 A. [Professor Cameron Watt]: I do not regard the public’s general view of historical
18 facts as something against which one cannot appeal.
19 Q. [Mr Irving]: Professor Watt, would I be wrong in suggesting that the
20 reason you used that sentence was because, on balance, you
21 proposed to write a very favourable review of the book,
22 which in fact it was, but you needed to purchase the right
23 to so by saying something wicked?
24 MR JUSTICE GRAY: We have the review. I think it will speak
25 for itself. I do not think that is a helpful question.
26 MR IRVING: It is in connection with the next point, which is
. P-52
1 why I have had to issue a witness summons. I see your
2 Lordship wagging your Lordship’s head.
3 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Professor Watt was not anxious to come
4 voluntarily. That must be the reason. There is so much
5 we have to deal with, I just wonder whether those points
6 are worth struggling with.
7 MR IRVING: In that case I will end the examination at that
8 point. Professor Watt, thank you very much indeed.
9 MR RAMPTON: I have no questions.
10 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Professor Watt, thank you very much indeed
11 for coming.
12 <(The witness withdrew)
13 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Do you want to pause to collect your
14 thoughts, Mr Irving? If you did, I would understand.
15 MR IRVING: I think a five-minute pause might be acceptable.
16 MR JUSTICE GRAY: I think the transcriber would welcome that.
17 MR IRVING: Then how are we going to proceed, my Lord? With
18 the argument or continue with the cross-examination?
19 I would propose, if I may be so humble as to submit, that
20 we should have the argument after lunch.
21 MR JUSTICE GRAY: I am prepared to fit in with whatever you
22 would prefer, unless Mr Rampton tells me that is going to
23 be very inconvenient.
24 MR RAMPTON: I have only one more evidence point that I want to
25 deal with before I start on Auschwitz. I was going to
26 start on Auschwitz today, not unless your Lordship tells
. P-53
1 me I must, on the technical stuff, but on Mr Irving’s own
2 utterances about it.
3 MR JUSTICE GRAY: So Holocaust denial rather than Auschwitz.
4 MR RAMPTON: Auschwitz denial plus Holocaust denial. That is
5 where I propose to start. Professor van Pelt has only
6 just got here. I do not have the technical stuff in court
7 with me, but I do have one more question in relation to
8 Hitler’s knowledge, Hitler’s orders, which I could not ask
9 yesterday because I did not have the document, but I have
10 it now.
11 MR JUSTICE GRAY: How long will that take?
12 MR RAMPTON: Well, unpredictable, but it is about two
13 questions. That is not fair.
14 MR JUSTICE GRAY: About half an hour. Shall we dispose of that
15 and then have the argument and, if it is after lunch, it
16 is after lunch. If it is slightly before lunch, so be
17 it. We will have a five-minute break.
18 (Short Adjournment)
Part III: David Irving’s Cross-Examination by Richard Rampton, Morning Session (54.19-106.18)
Section 54.19 to 71.8
19 < MR DAVID IRVING, recalled.
20 < Cross-Examined by Mr Rampton QC, continued.
21 MR RAMPTON: May Mr Irving be supplied with the Dr Longerich
22 report, please?
23 A. [Mr Irving]: Yes.
24 MR JUSTICE GRAY: I am sorry, Mr Rampton. For some reason
25 which I do not understand, my Longerich has gone
26 missing. We were looking at it this morning so it must
. P-54
1 have got left behind.
2 MR RAMPTON: It may be that we can manage without it, but
3 I rather think not.
4 MR JUSTICE GRAY: If there is a spare, I would be grateful.
5 Otherwise I will do my best.
6 MR RAMPTON: Mr Irving, could you please turn to page 71 of the
7 first part of this report? I will start on page 70. As
8 usual, I always forget the context. I would like to start
9 at 19.6 on page 70, my Lord. Now we are at the end of
10 1942: “For a report to Hitler on 10 December 1942 Himmler
11 set up a handwritten list of the points which he wanted to
12 bring up. Under ‘II. SD and police affairs’ Himmler
13 specified as point 4 the following key words” — I have
14 added the S — “Jews in France, — 6-700,000, other
15 enemies”.
16 Then on page 71 Dr Longerich writes this: “Next
17 to these key words can be found a tick and in Himmler’s
18 own handwriting the word ‘abolished’ (abschaffen): Himmler
19 had thus brought up these points with Hitler and received
20 permission from him to ‘abolish’ ie to liquidate (says Dr
21 Longerich) the estimated 600,000 to 700,000 Jews in France
22 as well as ‘other enemies’.”
23 I am going to read on, if I may: “After the
24 meeting, Himmler sent a note to Muller, head of the
25 Gestapo, in which he stated: The Fuhrer gave orders that
26 the Jews and other enemies in France should be arrested
. P-55
1 and deported. This should take place, however, only once
2 he has spoken with Laval about it. It is a matter of
3 6-700,000 Jews.
4 “Two months later, in February 1943, Eichmann,
5 on a brief visit to Paris visited submitted a maximum
6 programme for the deportation of all Jews living in France
7 including those with French citizenship.
8 “At the meeting on 10 December 1942 Himmler
9 presented Hitler with a proposal to set up a work camp for
10 Jewish hostages from France, Hungary and Romania, for
11 altogether 10,000 people. According to a handwritten note
12 by Himmler, Hitler accepted this proposal. After the
13 meeting, Himmler sent an order to Muller to concentrate
14 these 10,000 people in a ‘special camp’ (Sonderlager). He
15 stated: ‘Certainly they should work there, but under
16 conditions whereby they remain healthy and alive'”.
17 So far as the documentary references there are
18 concerned, or citations are concerned, Mr Irving, do you
19 quarrel with anything that Dr Longerich has written?
20 A. [Mr Irving]: With very many things, yes. First of all, the figure of
21 600,000 to 700,000 is completely improper. I am not
22 saying it is not a genuine document, but it is
23 characteristic of the gross exaggeration that SS indulged
24 in. There were not 6 or 700,000 Jews in France. There
25 were a total of 240,000 Jews, of whom about 40,000 had
26 already been deported by the time this conference took
. P-56
1 place, so it is an exaggeration by a factor of three or
2 four. It is characteristic of what goes on. We were
3 talking yesterday about this bus in Serbia with 90,000
4 people or 70,000 people being gassed in the space of 35
5 days. That would have meant 38 people being gassed every
6 hour in each bus. That kind of figure is completely
7 impractical.
8 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Pause there. That is the first thing you do not like
9 about this, but it is not a criticism of Dr Longerich’s
10 account of the document, is it?
11 A. [Mr Irving]: You asked me if I had any comments and you gave a very
12 pertinent comment, that this is characteristic of the
13 exaggeration which goes on when we come to numbers.
14 Q. [Mr Rampton]: I follow that. That is a criticism of Himmler, not of
15 Longerich?
16 A. [Mr Irving]: I do have criticisms of Longerich, of course.
17 Q. [Mr Rampton]: We will come to those in a moment. Let us deal with one
18 thing at a time, otherwise we are going to be shadow
19 boxing and I do not like that, Mr Irving.
20 A. [Mr Irving]: You are relying here on the handwritten note. Of course,
21 Himmler typed up a memorandum in which he used different
22 words after this.
23 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Mr Irving, please do not second guess. Do not jump your
24 fences until you get to them, please?
25 A. [Mr Irving]: You asked me for comments, Mr Rampton. I am sure you do
26 not like the comments I give you.
. P-57
1 Q. [Mr Rampton]: I asked you for your first comment. I am now going to deal
2 with your first comment, and I am going to deal with your
3 comments, to use your word, seriatim. Could Mr Irving and
4 his Lordship please be given these documents? This has a
5 marking on it. The other document your Lordship can just
6 throw away afterwards. It is only in case there is
7 anything in it which Mr Irving wants to refer to.
8 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Where shall we put them?
9 MR RAMPTON: The first one is probably going to go eventually
10 into the core file, but it is a Longerich document which
11 was, until last night, not there. I now have a copy of
12 it. It could, my Lord, at the moment just go perhaps at
13 the front or back of Longerich, part one, or, as I have
14 done, hole punched on the other side opposite the passage
15 in the text. The other two pieces of paper, my Lord,
16 which I have stapled together so that it is clear they are
17 separate are two pages from the Himmler dienstkalender?
18 A. [Mr Irving]: From this book?
19 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Yes, that is right, by Witte and others, the version of
20 it. One reason to give your Lordship the dienstkalender
21 extract is that the way in which the words are printed in
22 the dienstkalender shows that this is a document which
23 comes from the Berlin archive and not from the recently
24 discovered Moscow archive?
25 A. [Mr Irving]: I have had this one for a long time. I have had this one
26 for 30 years.
. P-58
1 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Yes, exactly. That is point number one. Point number 2,
2 if one looks at the Himmler manuscript, at the very top
3 right hand corner, somebody has written 10.12.42. Your
4 Lordship need not look at it, but it is to be noted,
5 I expect Mr Irving knows this, that the editors of the
6 dienstkalender say that that has been written in by an
7 unknown hand?
8 A. [Mr Irving]: It was not on it when I had it because that is not on my
9 photocopy.
10 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Exactly, so I am not asking anybody to accept that that is
11 Himmler’s dating.
12 A. [Mr Irving]: No, the date is 10th December. I had a lot of
13 trouble — these are all loose pages in the original file
14 but, using internal evidence, you can put them back into
15 the correct sequence.
16 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Do not let us get into the minutia if we do
17 not need to be.
18 MR RAMPTON: No. I do not need to know the history. I just
19 need to know whether the date —-
20 MR JUSTICE GRAY: The figure of 600 to 700,000 Jews is
21 challenged as being a wild exaggeration.
22 MR RAMPTON: Against that entry, on the manuscript “Juden in
23 Frankreich 6-700,000 zunstiger Finde”, is the word, is it
24 not, in Himmler’s spidery Gothic, “Abschaffen”?
25 A. [Mr Irving]: Yes, in green crayon actually – “Abschaffen”. Can we look
26 in your Langenscheit dictionary?
. P-59
1 MR JUSTICE GRAY: No, because if we are agreed that is what it
2 says, let us move on.
3 MR RAMPTON: No, will you stop asking me questions, please,
4 Mr Irving.
5 A. [Mr Irving]: I am not asking questions. I am stating that it is the
6 wrong translation by Longerich. He said quite happily
7 “Abschaffen” means “abolish” which he then by a quantum
8 leap says “exterminate”.
9 Q. [Mr Rampton]: You must give me credit for having had some foresight
10 about what you are going to say. Give us, please, your
11 version of the word “Abschaffen”?
12 A. [Mr Irving]: Well, why don’t we just see what Langenscheidt, the
13 dictionary, says?
14 Q. [Mr Rampton]: No, tell me what you think it means.
15 A. [Mr Irving]: “Abschaffen” means —-
16 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Get rid of?
17 A. [Mr Irving]: Well, I mean, even “get rid of” in this kind of context is
18 difficult, but we are aided by the fact that there is
19 another version of this document which you have not put
20 before the court, Mr Rampton.
21 Q. [Mr Rampton]: I have not got it.
22 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Let us do one thing at a time. What do you
23 say “Abschaffen” signifies? Do not worry about the
24 translation of it, but what do you say that Himmler had in
25 mind when he wrote “Abschaffen” against the French Jews?
26 A. [Mr Irving]: “Remove”.
. P-60
1 Q. [Mr Justice Gray]: “Remove”, right.
2 A. [Mr Irving]: It is a neutral word, in other words, my Lord, with no
3 kind of — yes, you have.
4 MR RAMPTON: The root of the word — I am doing a little bit of
5 etymology myself, Mr Irving, if you will forgive me —-
6 A. [Mr Irving]: I thought that was butterfly clothing.
7 Q. [Mr Rampton]: — the root of the word is “create”. So the word means
8 literally “discreate”, does it not?
9 A. [Mr Irving]: I disagree. “Schaffen” is one of those words like “get”.
10 It is a word which has any number of different meanings,
11 like get in, get out, get up, get hot, and so on. It is a
12 multi-purpose word, a multi-purpose root.
13 Q. [Mr Rampton]: You quite like my little schoolboy — it is not mine, it
14 is my son’s — Langenscheit, do you not?
15 A. [Mr Irving]: You are going to ambush me, I can sense it.
16 Q. [Mr Rampton]: You actually put your head in the noose yourself,
17 Mr Irving. You asked for it literally. “Abschaffen”,
18 verb transitive, abolish, discontinue, repeal, abrogate,
19 redress, suppress, do away with, get rid of, give up
20 keeping, end of definitions?
21 A. [Mr Irving]: I like the tenth meaning there, “do away with”. But we
22 are helped, fortunately, as I have mentioned, by the fact
23 that we have a typed version of this document also.
24 Q. [Mr Rampton]: And?
25 A. [Mr Irving]: On that it says “Abtransportieren” which means “transport
26 away”.
. P-61
1 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Yes. That is exactly my point, as you probably
2 understood, Mr Irving. When Himmler is sitting in private
3 with Hitler, in response to his request for information or
4 instructions what to do with these French Jews, and I am
5 coming to the number in a moment, these 6 to 700,000
6 French Jews, he writes down, not the word
7 “Abtransportieren”, or whatever it is, he writes down the
8 word “Abschaffen”.
9 A. [Mr Irving]: Yes.
10 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Now, when it comes to the point about what is to go into
11 the official record and how the orders are to be
12 transmitted onwards via Muller, it translates itself as a
13 necessary first step towards extermination, “arrest and
14 deportation”?
15 A. [Mr Irving]: Well, if we leave out the bit about “as a necessary first
16 step towards deportation”, yes, that is absolutely what it
17 says, but the rest was your personal interpolation.
18 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Of course, but, you see, Mr Irving, do we find this
19 anywhere in your books, this —-
20 A. [Mr Irving]: Yes.
21 Q. [Mr Rampton]: — Himmler log entry?
22 A. [Mr Irving]: Yes.
23 Q. [Mr Rampton]: And you —-
24 A. [Mr Irving]: I am the first person to have found it and have used it,
25 if I can keep on making that point.
26 Q. [Mr Rampton]: I have not the references so maybe you will tell me and
. P-62
1 I will look at them later. How in those books do you
2 translate the word “Abschaffen”.
3 A. [Mr Irving]: Bear with me for a moment.
4 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Where is it, “Hitler’s War”?
5 A. [Mr Irving]: It will be in “Hitler’s War” in all the editions.
6 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Let us look at 1991, shall we? Are you on
7 ’91?
8 A. [Mr Irving]: Well, I only have the bound volume of the original
9 edition.
10 Q. [Mr Justice Gray]: No, all right. Let us use ’77.
11 MR RAMPTON: My Lord, I think in 1991 it is likely to be in
12 part 2 because the book is written more or less —-
13 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Yes, but Mr Irving has the 1977 version, so
14 shall we use that? It will be part 2 of that too, will it
15 not?
16 MR RAMPTON: Yes. (To the witness): Can you tell us, roughly
17 speaking, where 1943 starts in Hitler’s War 1977?
18 A. [Mr Irving]: About page 450.
19 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Thank you. So it will be volume 2 of that, my Lord.
20 MR JUSTICE GRAY: If we are looking for it, we will take a lot
21 of time. Do you think we might come back to this?
22 A. [Mr Irving]: My Lord, I will come back to it.
23 MR RAMPTON: I would be grateful. It is my fault, but the
24 index does not help.
25 A. [Mr Irving]: So your point is that Himmler writes down the word that
26 may actually have been used between the two of them.
. P-63
1 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Yes.
2 A. [Mr Irving]: Yes.
3 Q. [Mr Rampton]: May have been. I quite agree it may not be verbatim
4 Hitler’s word, but Himmler has certainly written down, has
5 he not, what he thinks Hitler’s intention is, has he not?
6 A. [Mr Irving]: Yes.
7 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Then when we get what one might call the bureaucratic type
8 version, that word is transformed —-
9 A. [Mr Irving]: Unambiguously.
10 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Well, as you say — into another form which is deport?
11 A. [Mr Irving]: Yes.
12 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Yes?
13 A. [Mr Irving]: Yes.
14 Q. [Mr Rampton]: And, of course, as one must expect, there is then an order
15 from Himmler to Muller that they should be deported?
16 A. [Mr Irving]: Yes.
17 Q. [Mr Rampton]: You grumble about Himmler’s exaggeration of the numbers.
18 Have you noticed a suggestion — it is in that Witte —
19 that in that figure he was including all the Jews in the
20 French colonies, particularly those in North Africa?
21 A. [Mr Irving]: That is not what the document actually says. It says Jews
22 in —-
23 Q. [Mr Rampton]: You will find that in note 44.
24 A. [Mr Irving]: — Jews in France. I know that the French consider those
25 colonies, or some of them, to be part of the metropolitan
26 in France, but I think that in this document that would be
. P-64
1 stretching the point. I am not going to quibble about
2 that. I just wanted to draw attention to the tendency to
3 exaggerate figures.
4 Q. [Mr Rampton]: It might not be an intentional exaggeration, might it? It
5 might be — I am not saying whether it was or not —
6 I quite agree with you there were never 600,000 Jews
7 living in France at this time.
8 A. [Mr Irving]: Let alone 700,000.
9 MR JUSTICE GRAY: I am not sure it really matters very much.
10 MR RAMPTON: It does not matter at all. But then what happened
11 next, leave out paragraph 19.8 of Longerich, apparently on
12 the same day (and I am afraid I do not have this document)
13 “Himmler made a suggestion or proposal to Hitler that
14 there should be a work camp set up for Jewish hostages
15 from France, Hungary and Rumania”, three different
16 countries, “for a total 10,000 people”?
17 A. [Mr Irving]: Yes, except we are not be given the actual quotation or
18 document or it is just —-
19 Q. [Mr Rampton]: No.
20 A. [Mr Irving]: — summarized.
21 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Do you know of that document?
22 A. [Mr Irving]: This is an important point, because there are other
23 documents that he does not refer to.
24 Q. [Mr Rampton]: This is in the IFZ, this document.
25 A. [Mr Irving]: It, presumably, comes from one of the Himmler microfilms.
26 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Yes. You do not recall seeing this document?
. P-65
1 A. [Mr Irving]: Yes.
2 Q. [Mr Rampton]: You do. After the meeting, he goes on, Dr Longerich:
3 “Himmler sent an order to Muller to concentrate these
4 10,000 in a ‘special camp’ (Sonderlager). He stated:
5 ‘Certainly they should work there but under conditions
6 whereby they remain healthy and alive.” You notice the
7 way I read it?
8 A. [Mr Irving]: we are moving ahead at very great speed on this.
9 Q. [Mr Rampton]: We are still on 10th December 1942.
10 A. [Mr Irving]: Yes, but we have already gone past the paragraph 19.7 at
11 the top of page 71 of Longerich and I did want to draw the
12 court’s attention to this very bold and adventurous leap
13 from the word “Abschaffen” with the neutral connotations
14 in only one line’s length to using the word “liquidate”
15 which is certainly not used between these two top Nazis.
16 Q. [Mr Rampton]: “Dispose of” is what you use, I think?
17 A. [Mr Irving]: Thank you very much, yes.
18 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Yes. That is not a very benign word, is it, “disposal”?
19 A. [Mr Irving]: No, but —-
20 Q. [Mr Rampton]: This is on page 462 of 1977.
21 A. [Mr Irving]: One has this terrible problem when translating German,
22 when you have these multi-purpose words, to strike the
23 right nuance without leaning too far in one direction or
24 the other.
25 Q. [Mr Rampton]: You see, in 1977, for want of a better word, you believed
26 still in the Holocaust, did you not?
. P-66
1 A. [Mr Irving]: I believed in the factories of death element of the
2 Holocaust.
3 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Yes. You had no difficulty in 1977 in reading the word
4 “Abschaffen” as Fuhrerwunsch, if that is the right thing,
5 that these 6 to 700,000 Jews should be disposed of, not
6 removed from France, that has to happen first, obviously?
7 A. [Mr Irving]: Well, “disposed of” also does not necessarily imply
8 killing, but contains — it is one nuance in that
9 direction from the dead centre neutral meaning of the
10 word, and I believe Miss Rogers will be able to establish
11 that I then continued by stating immediately afterwards
12 what the typed version of the document says which is
13 “transport away”.
14 Q. [Mr Rampton]: That may be so. I do not know. She is trying to find the
15 reference in 1991.
16 A. [Mr Irving]: Yes.
17 MR JUSTICE GRAY: It may not be there at all?
18 A. [Mr Irving]: Well, it certainly is, my Lord.
19 MR RAMPTON: It is there, but in a footnote.
20 MR JUSTICE GRAY: She will find it eventually. Let us press on
21 in the meantime.
22 MR RAMPTON: But do you agree that the translation “disposed
23 of”, I accept that that is a fair translation of
24 “Abschaffen”?
25 A. [Mr Irving]: Yes, I think it is exactly the right nuance.
26 Q. [Mr Rampton]: And the nuance — construct for me, Mr Irving, if you can,
. P-67
1 an English sentence in which, according to natural,
2 ordinary meaning, “dispose of” as applied to a person or
3 people does not have a connotation of fatality in it?
4 A. [Mr Irving]: Oh, yes, it happens in large companies the whole time,
5 downsizing. Additional staff are disposed of. That does
6 not mean to say they are sent to the gas chambers.
7 Q. [Mr Rampton]: No. Disposed of?
8 A. [Mr Irving]: Yes. It is exactly the right nuance that I applied to
9 that word. That is my submission.
10 Q. [Mr Rampton]: So, “These Jews are merely redundant and we have to let
11 them go”?
12 A. [Mr Irving]: That is right.
13 Q. [Mr Rampton]: I see. Probably with some nice payment or other?
14 A. [Mr Irving]: That is a rather cheap remark, if I may say so.
15 Q. [Mr Rampton]: I know, but, really, Mr Irving, do you really think that
16 is what Himmler meant when wrote “Abschaffen”?
17 A. [Mr Irving]: I remind you that this is a private note being written by
18 Himmler for his own private files.
19 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Precisely.
20 A. [Mr Irving]: He had no reason to use euphemisms. If they had said
21 “liquidate”, as we have seen on other occasions, they
22 quite frankly talked about “keine liquiderung”, did he
23 not? So why would he use a euphemism here?
24 Q. [Mr Rampton]: I am suggesting there is absolutely no difference between
25 “dispose of” and “liquidate”.
26 A. [Mr Irving]: Well, why would he have used —-
. P-68
1 MR JUSTICE GRAY: I think, in a way, I have the point. I
2 understand the basis.
3 A. [Mr Irving]: That is an important point. Why would he use a euphemism
4 here when he is quite happy to use the plain, blunt
5 language elsewhere in his own handwritten notes,
6 particularly in view of the fact that when he dictated the
7 actual memorandum to Muller, so there could be no dispute,
8 he then used “Abtransportieren”, to transport away.
9 MR RAMPTON: Yes, of course, and to the East, no doubt?
10 A. [Mr Irving]: No, indeed. They were being transported away to barrack
11 encampments being built in the Reich. We have the
12 documents on that which your Professor Longerich has not
13 shown the court.
14 Q. [Mr Rampton]: What happened to them next?
15 A. [Mr Irving]: We do not know, but, unfortunately, Longerich has not
16 introduced into his report the evidence that there are
17 encampments actually being built for them, reception
18 centres.
19 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Sorry, where was the Sonderlager which is referred to in
20 paragraph 19—-
21 A. [Mr Irving]: Those were the special camps being set up for them.
22 MR JUSTICE GRAY: But when you say “they” were being
23 transported to the Reich, are you talking about the 10,000
24 or are you talking about — whether it was 60,000 or
25 600,000 does not matter for present purposes?
26 A. [Mr Irving]: Off the top of my head, I cannot say, my Lord.
. P-69
1 Q. [Mr Justice Gray]: It may be quite important —-
2 A. [Mr Irving]: I agree.
3 Q. [Mr Justice Gray]: — because one interpretation — let me put this to you
4 and see if you agree — is that the 10,000 people for one
5 reason or another were valuable to the Reich, maybe
6 because they whether qualified in some way?
7 A. [Mr Irving]: Yes.
8 Q. [Mr Justice Gray]: Whereas the rest were not and that was why they were going
9 to be “Abgeschaft” or whatever the word would be?
10 A. [Mr Irving]: I will remind your Lordship of the fact that on this very
11 same day, Himmler and Hitler on another page which is not
12 before the court in this passage were discussing selling
13 off Jews for hard currency. That may very well be what is
14 going to happen to the 10,000 in the Sonderlager.
15 But the French Jews, in fact, ended up to a very
16 large degree working in underground aircraft factories and
17 so on inside the Reich. From my extraneous knowledge,
18 I know that from the biographies I have written of Field
19 Marshal Milsche, and so on. I have read the records of
20 the Air Ministry conferences so we know what happened.
21 Q. [Mr Justice Gray]: Is it or is it not a legitimate inference that if that was
22 what was going to happen to the 10,000, something more
23 sinister was going to happen to the other French Jews?
24 A. [Mr Irving]: No, it is not, my Lord. It could be they were going to be
25 sent to work, as I say, in the German arms industry or
26 building fortifications or whatever which I happen to know
. P-70
1 actually happened. A very large number of these French
2 Jews from my own work that I have done previously on the
3 biography of Field Marshal Milsche who, on Goring’s death,
4 would be in charge of German armaments, in charge of the
5 aircraft factory, construction industry.
6 It cannot be ignored that I have a lot of
7 expertise, if I can call it like that, from other records
8 and other books that I have written.
Section 71.9 to 82.6
9 MR RAMPTON: Mr Irving, I have found one of these documents,
10 but I do not at the moment know which one it is. My Lord,
11 it is in H4 (ii) at footnote 183. I think it is at 182
12 that I do not have. Have you got that, Mr Irving?
13 A. [Mr Irving]: Yes.
14 Q. [Mr Rampton]: It is a typed document. Again it looks as if it has been
15 taken from a microfilm, does it not?
16 A. [Mr Irving]: Yes.
17 Q. [Mr Rampton]: It is from Himmler because it says so at the top left-hand
18 side and there are his initials at the bottom of the page,
19 are there not?
20 A. [Mr Irving]: Yes.
21 Q. [Mr Rampton]: On the right-hand side it says “Feld-Kommandostelle”, what
22 does that mean?
23 A. [Mr Irving]: “Field Headquarters”.
24 Q. [Mr Rampton]: 12th December 1942.
25 A. [Mr Irving]: I am sorry. It just says “December 1942”.
26 Q. [Mr Rampton]: You are quite right. I am sorry. I misread that.
. P-71
1 A. [Mr Irving]: I would draw attention to that because this was Himmler’s
2 way of doing things, that he would always handwrite the
3 day in. In other words, this is an authentic document. We
4 are not challenging that. But there is a reason to draw
5 attention to that because of something that comes up in
6 later documents.
7 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Yes, I follow, and it has the top security classification?
8 A. [Mr Irving]: “Geheime Reichssache”, yes.
9 Q. [Mr Rampton]: For an SS document?
10 A. [Mr Irving]: Yes.
11 Q. [Mr Rampton]: It is written to Muller. Now I need your help — you are
12 very good at this — can you please translate the text for
13 us?
14 A. [Mr Irving]: You are too kind. “I ordain that from now on the Jews
15 that are still on hand in France and also of the Hungarian
16 and Rumanian Jews, all those who have influential
17 relatives in America, are to be concentrated in a special
18 camp. There they are, indeed, to work but under
19 conditions that they remain sound and alive. This kind of
20 Jews are valuable hostages for us. I am thinking of a
21 figure of around 10,000″ —-
22 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Yes.
23 A. [Mr Irving]: — “in this connection”.
24 Q. [Mr Rampton]: 10,000 from all three countries?
25 A. [Mr Irving]: Yes.
26 Q. [Mr Rampton]: There are special Jews who are preserved because they have
. P-72
1 skills?
2 A. [Mr Irving]: That is right, yes.
3 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Or because they have influential relatives in
4 America?
5 A. [Mr Irving]: That is right.
6 MR RAMPTON: Even suppose we divide 10,000 in three equal parts
7 and subtract it from 600,000, we have the best part of
8 600,000 still left who have nothing whatever to do with
9 this piece of paper, do they?
10 A. [Mr Irving]: Yes.
11 Q. [Mr Rampton]: This is one camp?
12 A. [Mr Irving]: Yes.
13 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Einem sonderlager?
14 A. [Mr Irving]: Yes? The hostages’ camp.
15 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Tell me about the other camps which you say in
16 Germany —-
17 A. [Mr Irving]: Yes.
18 Q. [Mr Rampton]: — which is the destination for the remaining whatever it
19 is, 597,000?
20 MR JUSTICE GRAY: I am not sure he did say that.
21 A. [Mr Irving]: Well, I certainly did not say those figures. I do not
22 think we accept the figures.
23 MR RAMPTON: I said I was challenging the proposition that
24 “Abschaffen” meant “transported” and I think Mr Irving
25 said, “And, what is more, we know where they were being
26 transported to, camps being built in Germany”.
. P-73
1 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Did we not then ask when French Jews he was
2 talking about was going to Germany?
3 MR RAMPTON: Perhaps he would answer that question?
4 A. [Mr Irving]: The balance —-
5 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Can you elucidate because we are really
6 concerned with the other French Jews and I think I have
7 put the question already.
8 MR RAMPTON: The balance were to be departed to Germany, but
9 that is not a reference to those other Jews, that
10 document, is it?
11 A. [Mr Irving]: Well, Professor Longerich has given us a rather thin gruel
12 of documents on which to draw our conclusions, but I am
13 familiar with the documents that I have read and I am
14 quite happy to bring them to the court on Monday, that
15 special camps were being erected at this time to receive
16 these French Jews who were being deported, not just one
17 camp, but more than one camp. Eichmann is involved in
18 the construction, if my memory is correct — it is about
19 two or three months sine I read these documents — and
20 from my own personal knowledge, large numbers of French
21 Jews were put to work in the German Arms industry.
22 MR JUSTICE GRAY: So they all went to camps in Germany, these
23 other, balance of the French Jews?
24 A. [Mr Irving]: My Lord, I am not going to say “all”.
25 Q. [Mr Justice Gray]: The vast part?
26 A. [Mr Irving]: That would be something I could not swear to.
. P-74
1 Q. [Mr Justice Gray]: The vast part?
2 MR RAMPTON: I would be very grateful and I am going to leave
3 it there for the moment.
4 A. [Mr Irving]: I shall bring the documents and I will make a note to.
5 Q. [Mr Rampton]: If you bring the documents, then it is no good my pouring
6 over documents; may I copy them and given them to my
7 experts to look at?
8 A. [Mr Irving]: Yes. I will fax them over the weekend, the ones that we
9 intend to rely on.
10 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Would your Lordship forgive me for one moment? Mr Irving,
11 could you find page 462 of Hitler’s War 1977?
12 A. [Mr Irving]: Yes.
13 Q. [Mr Rampton]: And page 511 of Hitler’s War 1991. If you would look,
14 page 462 of 1977 falls neatly into two halves. I do not
15 need you to read it out and I am not going to either.
16 Could you read that last paragraph on 462?
17 A. [Mr Irving]: “When Heinreich Himmler came to headquarters” —-
18 MR JUSTICE GRAY: I think to yourself.
19 MR RAMPTON: No, just to yourself. The people in this
20 courtroom are going to get tired of hearing our voices,
21 I would imagine, Mr Irving.
22 A. [Mr Irving]: Yes.
23 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Thank you. Now would you read to yourself in the same way
24 the middle paragraph on page 511?
25 A. [Mr Irving]: I am not happy with reading these things to myself because
26 the court transcript does not know what I am reading to
. P-75
1 myself.
2 MR RAMPTON: I see.
3 MR JUSTICE GRAY: It can be determined later what was being
4 read. So can we proceed in this way for the time being?
5 It just saves time.
6 A. [Mr Irving]: Yes.
7 MR RAMPTON: Yes. It is the middle paragraph on 511.
8 A. [Mr Irving]: Yes.
9 Q. [Mr Rampton]: It does save time.
10 A. [Mr Irving]: The parenthesis in brackets you are looking at which has
11 vanished between the two volumes.
12 Q. [Mr Rampton]: I am looking at two things. In the text of 462 the word
13 “Abschaffen” is translated by you as “remove”?
14 A. [Mr Irving]: Yes.
15 Q. [Mr Rampton]: In the footnote it is “dispose of”?
16 A. [Mr Irving]: 462, you mean the end note?
17 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Sorry, I call them footnotes. That is very clumsy of me.
18 Yes, the end note.
19 A. [Mr Irving]: I have given the German and the translation that
20 I propose, yes, in each case.
21 Q. [Mr Rampton]: But in the text you have, what shall I say, edged away
22 from “disposed of” and replaced it with “removed”?
23 A. [Mr Irving]: I have not edged away from anything, Mr Rampton. I have
24 just used the word “removed” and in the scientific end
25 note I have then given the original German in both
26 versions, once “Abschaffen” which I have translated as
. P-76
1 “disposed of” and I have said: “In his subsequent memo
2 to the Gestapo Chief Muller, however, he used the milder
3 words ‘Verhaftet und abtransportieren’ “arrested and
4 transported away”.
5 Q. [Mr Rampton]: But, Mr Irving, you see the word has now been through two
6 processes. It starts off in German. Fair enough, it has
7 to be translated. When that happens in the end note, it
8 is “disposed of”. Now it has become “remove”?
9 A. [Mr Irving]: Mr Rampton, are you familiar with the concept that
10 sometimes one word in one language can only be given, you
11 can only get the meaning by giving its three alternative
12 meanings in another language if you do not have an exact
13 synonym between the two languages.
14 Q. [Mr Rampton]: But you do not want to go back to the Langenscheit, to my
15 primary meanings; you have been into that trap once
16 already this morning.
17 A. [Mr Irving]: Well, Langenscheit is probably not concentrating on the
18 fact we are talking about people. They are probably
19 talking about Abschaffen of a government or Abschaffen of
20 a condition or a situation.
21 MR JUSTICE GRAY: 511 of what? I am so sorry. I am lost.
22 MR RAMPTON: Of 1991 Hitler’s War, my Lord. I was just going
23 to compare the two versions. Then at the bottom, still on
24 1977, Mr Irving, 462, at the bottom of the page, you have
25 got a parenthesis which you have already spotted, in
26 brackets, “Hitler’s notes do not indicate that he
. P-77
1 mentioned to Hitler the alternative fate of the others”.
2 You and I can disagree about that, but my question is
3 this, or first question is this. What did you mean by
4 “the alternative fate of the others”?
5 A. [Mr Irving]: We do not know because he did not mention it.
6 Q. [Mr Rampton]: I see.
7 A. [Mr Irving]: That is not a weasel answer. I am just saying that there
8 was an alternative fate clearly adumbrated, but we are not
9 told what it was, whether it was being sent for slave
10 labour or sent to the gas chambers or what.
11 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Notwithstanding that at this date you still believed in
12 the mass murder of the Jews, including a lot of French
13 Jews?
14 A. [Mr Irving]: I am being very cautious the way I write. This was a very
15 sensitive subject, as you yourself said. I am extremely
16 cautions the way I proceed phase by phase when I write
17 these narratives.
18 Q. [Mr Rampton]: When we have got to 1991 on page 511, by which time, on
19 your own admission, you have become a hard core
20 disbeliever so far as the Holocaust is concerned, that
21 little parenthesis has gone, has it not?
22 A. [Mr Irving]: Yes.
23 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Why?
24 A. [Mr Irving]: Very simple. First of all, the 1991 edition is an
25 abridged edition. I do not know if you have ever abridged
26 a book, but you go through it cutting out lines which are
. P-78
1 superfluous. My editor, Tom Congden, as I mentioned on a
2 previous day, taught me the basic or retaught me the basic
3 principles of bookwriting. One of them is, don’t say what
4 somebody didn’t do; say what they did do. This is a
5 classic example of me saying what somebody did not do
6 which is totally superfluous to our knowledge.
7 Q. [Mr Rampton]: No, no, Mr Irving.
8 A. [Mr Irving]: So I cut out the reference to what somebody did not do. A
9 classic example of what somebody did not do being cut out
10 because the book has to be shortened by one-third.
11 Q. [Mr Rampton]: The truth of the matter, Mr Irving — it must be really
12 pretty obvious — is this, is it not? 1977, you still
13 believe in the Holocaust. I use that as shorthand because
14 I do not like to use a whole lot of words where two will
15 do.
16 A. [Mr Irving]: Well, the factories of death.
17 Q. [Mr Rampton]: In 1977 you believed in the factories of death. That is
18 four words, I think?
19 A. [Mr Irving]: Yes.
20 Q. [Mr Rampton]: In 1991 you do not. You have removed the parenthesis
21 because you fearful that your readers might think that you
22 meant, as indeed you did in that parenthesis, that the
23 fate of the other Jews, the alternative fate of the other
24 Jews, was going to be death?
25 A. [Mr Irving]: You have no basis for making that suggestion other than
26 the purposes of this action which is you are looking,
. P-79
1 I think, I will not say desperately, but you are looking
2 for everything you can seize upon —-
3 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Anyway, the answer is no.
4 MR RAMPTON: The answer is no.
5 A. [Mr Irving]: The equally and far more plausible suggestion is that we
6 are cutting out what we possibly can out of the book to
7 trim it down to make room for fresh material.
8 MR RAMPTON: Mr Irving, it will not be for either you or I to
9 say whether your answers are plausible at the end of this
10 case.
11 A. [Mr Irving]: Well, I venture to suggest that this is the least perverse
12 explanation. You are trying find room to put in an extra
13 200 pages of material into a book that we were already
14 tying to shorten. So if we put in a paragraph here, a
15 parenthesis, which says something did not happen, then
16 that is an obvious candidate for the chop.
17 There are very many sentences cut out on every
18 page if you compare the pages. I would also add the fact
19 that much of the editing was not done by me; it was done
20 by the American publishers or by an assistant who I hired
21 specifically for the job.
22 Q. [Mr Rampton]: I am sorry. I have been given something, Mr Irving. I am
23 not being discourteous. I am trying to read it very
24 quickly to find out if I need to ask anything about it.
25 I think not.
26 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Mr Rampton, can I just ask you this,
. P-80
1 “Abschaffen”, you say, is relevant to Hitler’s
2 knowledge?
3 MR RAMPTON: Yes.
4 MR JUSTICE GRAY: And is also an example of distortion?
5 MR RAMPTON: Oh, yes, it is three things. It is relevance, not
6 just of Hitler’s knowledge, but probably of a Hitler, some
7 kind of a, one of these utterances — well, it is more
8 than that.
9 MR JUSTICE GRAY: I understand how you put it.
10 MR RAMPTON: It is an instruction. That is No. 1. 2, it is
11 evidence of a developing distortion. The distortion is
12 already there in 1977 with the word “remove”. We can see
13 that, in fact, from the footnote which uses “dispose” and
14 the parenthesis. In 1991, in the eighth line down in the
15 middle paragraph the word “remove” has been “extract” and
16 the parenthesis has gone.
17 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Yes, thank you.
18 A. [Mr Irving]: To which my response is, of course, that I have given no
19 fewer than three different translations for the word
20 “Abschaffen” in the one volume so the reader can pick his
21 own way, my Lord.
22 MR RAMPTON: My Lord, for the moment, until I see Mr Irving’s
23 other documents on Monday, that is as far as I need take
24 that question today.
25 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Shall we have a discussion about Auschwitz
26 now rather than?
. P-81
1 A. [Mr Irving]: We could try to — I think we will dispose of it before
2 lunch.
3 MR JUSTICE GRAY: If you found that a problem and you want more
4 time, just say so, but why do you not go back to your
5 seat?
6 < (The witness stood down)
Section 82.7 to 96.23
7 MR RAMPTON: My Lord, I will sit down because I would like
8 Mr Irving to take this argument.
9 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Yes, Mr Irving?
10 MR IRVING: My Lord, if I can get to the legal precedents out
11 of the way first, it is Edgington v. Fitzmorris with which
12 I am sure your Lord is familiar, the statement by Bowen LJ
13 that the state of a man’s mind is as much a fact of the
14 matter as the state of his digestion. What is very
15 material in this case is the state of my mind when I am
16 writing the books.
17 We are partially examining in that, in the
18 materials that we have been going over over the last few
19 days in the proper manner, but I do not think that the
20 state of Auschwitz or the state of what happened during
21 the war years is nearly as material to the issues as
22 pleaded as the state of my mind, if I can put it like
23 that.
24 The issues as pleaded, in my view, bear a strong
25 resemblance to the law in tort, the distinction with which
26 your Lordship will be familiar between deceit and
. P-82
1 negligence. The defence that the Defendants have pleaded
2 is, basically, one of deceit, that I have had documents
3 before me at the time I wrote the books, that wilfully or
4 perversely attached to those documents meanings that no
5 reasonable man could say they could bear.
6 MR JUSTICE GRAY: That is part of the Defendants’ case.
7 MR IRVING: That is part of the defence. But they go beyond
8 that, my Lord, in a manner which I would aver a Plaintiff
9 would be tempted to do if he has pleaded initially the
10 case in deceit and, in finding that he is not making that
11 case, he then ventures to throw in negligence as well,
12 although he has not pleaded it. He is not allowed to do
13 that without amending his pleadings and this is a very
14 serious matter for the court to consider. If you find, my
15 Lord, that the Defendants in this action are trying to
16 plead negligence, if I can put it like that, as they have
17 been saying.
18 MR RAMPTON: No.
19 MR IRVING: Mr Rampton —
20 MR RAMPTON: We are not.
21 MR IRVING: If they are saying, in effect, Mr Irving is a
22 rotten historian, he did not do his job properly. He
23 spoke about Auschwitz, he wrote about Auschwitz and the
24 Holocaust. He ought to have known better, then this is a
25 plea of negligence. They have not pleaded negligence in
26 the pleadings as yet before the court, my Lord, and, of
. P-83
1 course, it is perfectly open to them to go to your
2 Lordship at any time and seek your Lordship’s leave to
3 amend their pleadings. It would be a very grave step for
4 them to take because I would immediately ask your Lordship
5 order that all the costs up to that point should be borne
6 by the Defendants.
7 MR JUSTICE GRAY: They have not done it yet, so…
8 MR IRVING: No, my Lord, they are still attempting to plead,
9 effectively, deceit, and I suggest that they have not yet
10 established a substantial case in deceit, but that is
11 outside the realm of this argument. What is far more
12 important is; what is the purpose of looking at what
13 happened in Auschwitz and in the camps of Belzec,
14 Treblinka and elsewhere if it was not known to me at the
15 time I wrote the book. It may be of the utmost interest
16 to history and for the purposes of historiography and it
17 has not escaped me and I am sure it has not escaped your
18 Lordship reading, as you say you do, the press accounts
19 that people hope that this will draw a line under the
20 Holocaust and we shall establish what happened at
21 Auschwitz and so on. That is not the purpose of this
22 case.
23 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Well, at the moment I am with you to this
24 extent, that it seems to me that if you are able to say of
25 any particular piece of evidence relating to Auschwitz,
26 well, it was not available to me at the time, I find it
. P-84
1 difficult at the moment to see how that really is going to
2 assist the Defendant’s case. Because their case, as
3 I understand it, is that what you have said about
4 Auschwitz flies in the face of the evidence, and that the
5 inference they ask me to draw is that you must have known
6 that it flew in the face of the evidence.
7 MR IRVING: I ought to have known. There is a subtle
8 difference, my Lord. Must have known — if they wish to
9 prove I must have known it, I submit that they had to
10 establish that that material was at some material time
11 before me when I wrote either or any of the editions —
12 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Well, I think “available to you”. I think it
13 is not just a matter of whether it was, in fact, before
14 you, because if you knew it was there and you, as it were,
15 put your telescope to your blind eye and ignored it, then
16 that is as good as having seen it, and decided to suppress
17 it, as they would put it.
18 MR IRVING: My Lord, material may very well be there in Moscow
19 or on the far side of the Fiji Islands for all I know but
20 there is a limit to what a reasonable person can expect
21 one historian in my position to do by way of research into
22 a subject which is beyond the purview of the books which
23 he is know to write.
24 MR JUSTICE GRAY: I agree with you, it is a question of degree.
25 MR IRVING: It is a question of degree, my Lord. It is quite
26 possible that the very capable researchers (and I have to
. P-85
1 admire the effort they have put into this case) who are
2 backing learned counsel in this matter for the defence,
3 would have found documents after the expenditure of very
4 consider sums of money, as they have, in the defence of
5 this matter. But no reasonable person can hold that
6 against me that I did not find these documents or come to
7 those conclusions based on those documents and certainly
8 not 30 years ago at a time when none of these documents
9 were available.
10 So it is an argument in negligence which they
11 are trying to make, my Lord, and I am asking that you bear
12 that firmly in mind at the very least. And I have drawn
13 up — your Lordship will see three guidelines that I would
14 ask your Lordship possibly to accept, possibly with
15 amendments. They are on the first page.
16 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Yes.
17 MR IRVING: Does it go to the proof of wilful deceit, the
18 evidence that the Defendants are adducing? What materials
19 were before the claimant, myself, at the time I wrote the
20 book or books referred to because, of course, we are not
21 just going to refer to Hitler’s War. I understand other
22 books are going to be the topic of discussion by the
23 defendants. I respectfully submit that ephemeral spoken
24 utterances particularly extempore, unscripted talks are
25 less material to this action than books and I would like
26 to hear your Lordship’s view on that.
. P-86
1 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Well, you are talking about eyewitness
2 evidence here?
3 MR IRVING: No, my Lord, no, I am sorry, you misunderstood me
4 there, that if they are holding to me a talk I have given
5 in Los Angeles or something like that, or an answer
6 I given at a press conference, this should be given less
7 weight than what I have written in the books. The talks
8 are ephemeral, they are here today and gone tomorrow.
9 MR JUSTICE GRAY: That is a comment you can make, but supposing
10 you went on on the record at an IHR conference.
11 MR IRVING: Yes. Does that become a book?
12 MR JUSTICE GRAY: With some extreme remarks about Auschwitz,
13 let us assume that, it seems to me that they entitled to
14 rely on that as an instance of Holocaust denial as they
15 would label it.
16 MR IRVING: It is a matter of weighting, my Lord. That I would
17 ask you to weight each of these utterances and say, well,
18 here he is writing a book which is going to go in
19 libraries and used as a reference work by other
20 historians. Clearly, far more weight should be attached
21 to these than off the cuff remarks he makes at an press
22 conference. I am not thinking of any specific remark.
23 I am not saying that is my own defence pre-emptively, I am
24 just saying that I would just ask your Lordship to weight
25 them accordingly.
26 MR JUSTICE GRAY: I hear what you say.
. P-87
1 MR IRVING: Yes. Have they established — the second point —
2 beyond the balance of probabilities, as I understand it,
3 it is in a civil action like this, that the Claimant faced
4 with various alternative interpretations and following as
5 the Defendants wrongly represent an agenda to exonerate
6 Adolf Hitler put fraudulent meanings on these materials
7 before him, i.e. meanings that were so perverse that no
8 reasonable and unbiased man informed by the same materials
9 and expertise could have arrived at those meanings.
10 MR JUSTICE GRAY: No, I think that is putting the case, or
11 asserting that the case against you has to be established
12 at a far higher level than it seems to me that it actually
13 does have to be established. I think what they have to
14 show, or what they may have to show, I have not heard
15 Mr Rampton yet, is that you have misrepresented the facts
16 and that you have done so because you are working to your
17 own ideological agenda.
18 MR IRVING: Wilfully represented, not accidently or
19 negligently.
20 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Not accidently, yes, I am cautious about the
21 “wilfully” because that may not help.
22 MR IRVING: They will have to establish the element of
23 deliberation in that, my Lord, otherwise it does fall
24 under the ambit of “negligence”, which they are not
25 pleading.
26 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Yes, and No. 3.
. P-88
1 MR IRVING: What about the element of reasonable doubt, my
2 Lord? Or the balance of probabilities? You say you are
3 not prepared to accept that.
4 MR JUSTICE GRAY: No, I have not said that.
5 MR IRVING: But which is the part of paragraph 2 which you find
6 difficult to accept then?
7 MR JUSTICE GRAY: It is you asserting that the Defendants have
8 to show that you put as you described it “fraudulent
9 meanings” on the materials —
10 MR IRVING: As opposed to negligently doing it.
11 MR JUSTICE GRAY: What I was — I accept the point you make on
12 negligence — suggesting to you is that they may not have
13 to establish quite that, but I am inclined to accept that
14 they will have to establish that this was a
15 non-accidental, false interpretation placed on documents
16 for the reason that you had your own political agenda, and
17 that I think —
18 MR IRVING: My Lord, for example, the word “haben” and “Juden”
19 is a typical example; was this a deliberate misleading of
20 the word or was it an —
21 MR JUSTICE GRAY: That is a very good example.
22 MR IRVING: A negligent —
23 MR JUSTICE GRAY: A very good example, yes.
24 MR IRVING: Thirdly; have they established — have the
25 Defendants established beyond the balance of probabilities
26 that I wilfully and following that political agenda
. P-89
1 mistranslated or distorted such materials.
2 MR JUSTICE GRAY: I do not find much to disagree with about
3 that.
4 MR IRVING: Yes.
5 MR JUSTICE GRAY: But, Mr Irving, this is all helpful in a way,
6 but I understood we were going to be having an argument
7 about the Auschwitz evidence I am not sure I understand —
8 MR IRVING: This comes up —
9 MR JUSTICE GRAY: How this impacts on that.
10 MR IRVING: If they are going to be introducing a lot of
11 evidence about Auschwitz which will no doubt be of the
12 utmost interest to everybody in this court, and at the
13 expense of the person who pays the costs of this action,
14 or persons, I think that your Lordship should rule
15 repeatedly on what falls within the issues as pleaded and
16 pleaded under the ambit of “deceit” rather than of
17 “negligence”.
18 MR JUSTICE GRAY: But thinking of the evidence, which is not at
19 the top of my mind at the moment, but thinking of the
20 evidence that the defendants have adduced in relation to
21 Auschwitz, one could put it into various categories, as
22 indeed the Defendants do in their summary of case, it
23 seems to me that most of what they are relying on was
24 probably known to you, but if not known to you was
25 certainly readily available to you; was it not?
26 MR IRVING: I think that is very bold perception, my Lord.
. P-90
1 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Well, you tell me, what —
2 MR IRVING: I would certainly challenge that.
3 MR JUSTICE GRAY: — categories of evidence you say you really
4 have no knowledge of?
5 MR IRVING: For example, the entire records in Moscow. I am not
6 an Holocaust historian, my Lord. I thought I had brought
7 this matter across to your Lordship satisfactorily that I
8 am know as an historian and a biographer of the top Nazis
9 and that the Holocaust is very much a section of that
10 material. But one cannot, after all because one is
11 writing about the atomic bomb learn nuclear physics. One
12 would not be considered to be negligent that one had not
13 become a Nobel Prize winning nuclear physicist before
14 writing about the history of the atomic bomb, if I may say
15 so. I am asking your Lordship to keep this negligent
16 element before yourself and you say to yourself, this does
17 not go to issues as pleaded, and this is just an attempt
18 to bring in material for the newspapers, put it like that.
19 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Let me ask you this question, and do not
20 answer if you do not want to, but if I were to come to the
21 conclusion that there is a whole range of formidable
22 evidence of one kind and another.
23 MR IRVING: Yes.
24 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Camp officials, eyewitnesses, scientific
25 evidence, evidence of construction at the gas chambers and
26 the like; all of which was there, but you paid no
. P-91
1 attention to it, is that something you would accept? Is
2 that the way you put your case? That you went for broke
3 on the Liechter Report.
4 MR IRVING: It depends upon the degree of intensity which would
5 have been appropriate. If I was intending to go on, for
6 example, a BBC talk show and I was likely to be asked
7 about Auschwitz should I therefore spend $5 million on
8 sending researchers into the archives around the world?
9 It is a degree of proportionality which comes into it, my
10 Lord. I am sure your Lordship appreciates that point and
11 bear it constantly before yourself.
12 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Yes, but I am not sure you have really quite
13 grasped the nettle of the question; is it your position
14 that the Defendants really are not entitled to rely on the
15 body of evidence that I have just listed for you because,
16 although it was available you did not refer to it; you did
17 not familiarize yourself with it?
18 MR IRVING: I am not interested to hear Mr Rampton justify
19 doing precisely that.
20 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Well, I think he will find it difficult to do
21 so unless you have made clear what your position in
22 relation to these various categories of evidence is. If
23 you are saying, “yes, I accept it is there and I simply
24 did not attach any weight to it”; then he may say, “well,
25 what is the point of calling the evidence?” That may not
26 be right, but he may say that. That is why I am asking
. P-92
1 you. I am trying to get you to come clean, as it were,
2 what your stance is in relation to this evidence.
3 MR IRVING: I am mortally wounded by the suggestion that I am
4 not coming clean on this.
5 MR JUSTICE GRAY: I did not mean that in any pejorative sense.
6 You see because this is really what the argument is, is
7 this evidence relevant? If you say, “well, I do not
8 quarrel with it, I hear what you say about it all being
9 there, but it just did not feature in my thinking about
10 Auschwitz”, well and good.
11 MR IRVING: My Lord, what I have had to do, because Auschwitz
12 has bulked so large in the Defendants’ case I have to
13 become something of an expert. I have had to get involved
14 with consultants and discussed the issues with them and
15 learn all sorts of things that I had no need to or desire
16 to learn at the time I wrote these books, or at the time I
17 made the utterances. I do not think that should have been
18 necessary. I would have hoped that your Lordship would
19 have ruled at a relatively early date in this trial — and
20 we are still at an early date in this trial that you will
21 not hear evidence, my Lord, I would ask you to bear this
22 in mind, that you will not hear evidence that goes only to
23 the imputation of negligence and that you will only hear
24 evidence that goes to the imputation of deceit.
25 MR JUSTICE GRAY: But you see, you say it comes only into
26 the category of negligence, but if you are making
. P-93
1 pronouncements about Auschwitz in what the Defendants say
2 are offensive terms of denying the gassing happened; are
3 not the Defendants entitled to say, well, that really
4 flies in the face of the evidence and anyone who is
5 prepared to make those pronouncements is not just
6 negligent, he is deliberately deceiving himself.
7 MR IRVING: Very well.
8 MR JUSTICE GRAY: I do not know whether that is the way they
9 put the case or whether it is not. I think it may be.
10 MR IRVING: I accept that but then the element of
11 proportionality comes into it.
12 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Yes.
13 MR IRVING: To make that kind of pronouncement one is not then
14 required to spend $5 million research, one is required to
15 inform oneself to an adequate degree. But I still ask
16 your Lordship to be on the alert every time that
17 Mr Rampton either implies or actually says he ought to
18 have known this, to say to yourself, yes, but on the basis
19 of proportionality should he really have gone to that
20 degree? Should he really have done that depth of
21 research? Was he really expected to fly to Moscow and
22 bang on the door and say “let me in”?
23 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Yes, do not think I am not taking the point
24 you are making.
25 MR IRVING: Because that goes purely to the negligence issue
26 and not the deceit issue, which is the only one they have
. P-94
1 pleaded. My Lord, I must emphasise the fact they have not
2 pleaded negligence. It was open to them to plead
3 negligence at the time that they drew up their pleadings.
4 I am not criticising learned counsel at all for the way
5 they have drawn their pleadings, but if they intended to
6 plead negligence the way that they have been hinting at
7 throughout the first six days of this trial, then they
8 should have pleaded it.
9 MR JUSTICE GRAY: I want to take a bit of time on this because
10 I think this may be really quite important to try and see
11 where we are actually going, but just on Auschwitz and
12 tell me if you are not able to deal with this, but just
13 take the category of “Camp Officials” I cannot immediately
14 put my …
15 MR IRVING: The eyewitnesses?
16 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Well, I was thinking more of the camp
17 official eyewitnesses, but take them, and I think there
18 are probably about ten or maybe a dozen of them, something
19 like that.
20 MR IRVING: My Lord, we shall be —
21 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Now, the last thing we want to do is plough
22 through each individual account if that really is not
23 being to be necessary. Are you saying in relation to
24 them, by way of an example, well, I appreciate that they
25 have said what they are recorded as having said, but I did
26 not know about it when I said what I said in Australia in
. P-95
1 the 1980s or the States in the 1990s, and, therefore, the
2 worst you can say is that I was negligent; is that the
3 line you take in relation to that particular category of
4 evidence?
5 MR IRVING: Finely couched though your Lordship’s words are
6 I would not use them in precisely that form. I would say
7 that at the time I made the utterances or wrote the books
8 I was not informed to the degree that I am now am by
9 virtue of having had to prepare for this case. In 1988
10 I saw certain evidence which you will be discussing later
11 on, which obliged to me to change my mind about what I had
12 accepted without having gone into it in any detail up to
13 that point. As a result of this case I have now gone in
14 much greater detail into the eyewitness statements by the
15 camp officials to which your Lordship alluded. I still
16 have less reason to accept them as being reliable than has
17 the defence, and we shall go through these statements with
18 forensic methods when the time comes to cross-examine
19 Professor van Pelt.
20 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Yes, well, I have certainly got your point.
21 Shall I invite Mr Rampton to tell me —
22 MR IRVING: That may be useful.
23 MR JUSTICE GRAY: What his position is.
Section 96.23 to 106.18
24 MR RAMPTON: Yes, my Lord, it is really very simple. We had
25 these last days been dealing with the way in which
26 Mr Irving on our case, distorts history, deliberately,
. P-96
1 wilfully distorts history. In 1988, as your Lordship
2 remembers, there was on trial in Canada a man called
3 Zundel. He was on trial for something like inciting
4 racial hatred by publishing an Holocaust denial book.
5 Mr Irving went to Toronto to give evidence for Mr Zundell,
6 in the course of that exercise he got to read — I think
7 he met Mr Liechter either then or earlier that year — and
8 he got to read the Liechter report. He came home and he
9 held a press conference the following year, in which he
10 said: “The buildings which we now identify as gas chambers
11 in Auschwitz were not. I cannot accept that they had gas
12 chambers there. There was no equipment there for killing
13 people en masse. I am quite happy to nail my colours to
14 the mast … Jews cannot have been killed in gas chambers
15 at Auschwitz”.
16 From there on, until 1993, which is the relevant
17 date, he goes into public, into the public arena, and
18 repeatedly makes utterances of that kind. Had he not done
19 so he would not have appeared in the book which forms the
20 subject of this libel action. One of the meanings which
21 Mr Irving complains of, my Lord, this is paragraph (vii)
22 on page 6 of the Statement of Claim: “That the plaintiff
23 after attending Zundell’s trial in 1988 in Toronto, having
24 previously hovered on the brink now denies the murder by
25 the Nazis of the Jews.”
26 That is Mr Irving’s — this is the most
. P-97
1 elementary stage of the whole thing — that in Mr Irving’s
2 case is a defamatory statement by Professor Lipstadt and
3 Penguin Books, who published the book. That alone would
4 allow as the defence — the Lucas-Box particulars of the
5 defence indicate that they will do — that alone would
6 allow the Defendants if they wished to do so to prove that
7 he was wrong as a matter of fact. That is paragraph 6.1
8 of the Lucas-Box on page 2 of the defence, that the
9 plaintiff has on numerous occasions denied the Holocaust,
10 the deliberate planned extermination of Europe’s Jewish
11 population by the Nazis and denied —
12 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Well, I have thought about that, because I do
13 not think either the meaning you have just cited from the
14 statement of claim, or paragraph 6.1 of the Lucas-Box,
15 really are defamatory meanings at all.
16 MR RAMPTON: That may well be, but as I say that is the
17 elementary — that is stage one. As the pleadings stand
18 I could do it. I do not, as your Lordship knows, put the
19 case like that.
20 MR JUSTICE GRAY: No.
21 MR RAMPTON: What I say is this: it is not negligent,
22 negligence is no part of this case, I am not the least
23 interested in the qualities or efficiency of Mr Irving’s
24 research or anything like that; what I am concerned about
25 is two things. He dignifies himself, and Professor Watt,
26 for example, was no doubt called for this purpose, perhaps
. P-98
1 by some others, as an historian. He then lends his
2 considerable weight, if that be right, to repeated and
3 I have to say from time to time very offensive Holocaust
4 denial statements. He does that, not as he would if it
5 were Hitler that he was interested in researching, he does
6 that upon the basis, the flimsiest possible basis, the
7 Liechter Report. Along down the road as your Lordship
8 will hear, he thinks of other reasons why there were no
9 gas chambers at Auschwitz. But Liechter is the foundation
10 of his denial. For a man to do that, who glorifies
11 himself as an serious historian, is morally wrong. Now
12 that is defamatory. One of the aspects of this case is
13 that he has done it because of his political “with a small
14 P” sympathies and attitudes. He is, we have pleaded, a
15 right-wing extremist, and he feeds this Holocaust denial
16 into audiences of right wing extremists.
17 MR JUSTICE GRAY: And he done it deliberately, in other words,
18 it is not negligent.
19 MR RAMPTON: He has deliberately not been to Auschwitz and
20 looked at the archive, never mind Moscow. I have been to
21 Auschwitz, I have not been to Moscow. I have seen many of
22 the documents in the archive and they are — well, they
23 are what they are. Professor van Pelt deals with them.
24 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Go back to the camp officials, that does
25 mean, does it not, that if your case is that Mr Irving
26 deliberately shut his eyes to that corpus of evidence.
. P-99
1 MR RAMPTON: He did not even care about it.
2 MR JUSTICE GRAY: And his case is, well, I was not an Holocaust
3 historian, maybe I knew that some of that evidence was
4 there, but I did not think it was any part of my function
5 to go and trawl through it.
6 MR RAMPTON: Then he should have —
7 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Then we do not need to trawl through it in
8 this trial, do we?
9 MR RAMPTON: My Lord, if he will accept that his denial is
10 false. If he will accept that it happened as described by
11 Professor van Pelt and dozens of other people; that the
12 eyewitnesses are telling the truth, those reports of
13 Hoess, the commandant, are perfectly well-known to
14 Mr Irving, for example. He knows all about the Weber and
15 Weisler Report that came out during the War. No doubt he
16 knows all about Jean-Claude Pressack’s (?) ^^ book. They
17 are there for anybody to read.
18 MR JUSTICE GRAY: I am not sure whether I see why you are now
19 saying, rather contrary to what you have been saying
20 before, that we have to make a finding of fact as to what
21 happened in Auschwitz.
22 MR RAMPTON: No, absolutely, I have never said that. I am not
23 saying that.
24 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Why should he accept that those camp
25 officials are telling the truth when they say they saw
26 what they say they saw.
. P-100
1 MR RAMPTON: Because then, my Lord, it is very easy, if you
2 will not accept then that I have to lay out the evidence
3 which would have been accessible to him if he had bothered
4 to look before opening his mouth.
5 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Yes, but only in the sort of general sense
6 of, let us put it as you might cross-examine, Mr Irving,
7 are you aware that there are statements made by … and
8 then we can list them and name them and give them
9 positions within Auschwitz, Hoess and all the rest of
10 them; did you read a word of their evidence?
11 MR RAMPTON: That is right, the answer will be “no”, what you
12 did do, Mr Irving — one has to know that this is his
13 position.
14 MR JUSTICE GRAY: I know, that is why I tried to —
15 MR RAMPTON: I know, well, he has not come clean, to use your
16 Lordship —
17 MR JUSTICE GRAY: No, I disavow that expression now.
18 MR RAMPTON: If that is the position, that is fine, Professor
19 van Pelt can go back to Canada, specifically though
20 Mr Irving has to accept, before that can happen, that the
21 Liechter Report is indeed bunk and very easily detected
22 bunk, because what a responsible historian cannot do,
23 unless he is motivated by some sinister ulterior motive,
24 is nail his colours to the mast, as he said he did,
25 without critical review of the mast to which he is nailing
26 his colours, namely the Liechter Report. And that is
. P-101
1 exactly what he did.
2 If he will concede that that was, to put it
3 neutrally, a complete mistake, because Liechter is bunk,
4 if he will concede first that a lot of the other evidence
5 is freely available to anybody who bothers go and look at
6 it; a lot has been published in books. But that he did
7 not care to look at it. But nonetheless went about his
8 Holocaust denial in these various forums, why then we can
9 close down the evidence, apart from what he said in these
10 various places.
11 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Yes, thank you very much, Mr Rampton.
12 Mr Irving, I do not think we will be able to quite
13 conclude this argument, but I think the ball is in your
14 court, because the admissibility of this evidence and how
15 much detail we need to go into in regard to it seems to me
16 to depend, to an extent, what you are going to say about
17 it.
18 MR IRVING: Which your Lordship does not know yet, of course.
19 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Which I do not know yet and you do not really
20 have to tell me, we can deal with this on the hoof as we
21 go through your cross-examination. It may have to come to
22 that. But I have to have an eye on how long this trial is
23 going to last and it seems to me —
24 MR IRVING: Well, I threw a lifeline to your Lordship.
25 MR JUSTICE GRAY: That is not the predominant consideration, it
26 has to be a feature of my thinking, it seems to me there
. P-102
1 may well be sense in dealing with the — I have used the
2 camp official’s eyewitness accounts as an example, dealing
3 with that body of evidence in a rather broad way because
4 if you say, “well, I was not familiar with the detail of
5 it”, then Mr Rampton may achieve what he needs for his
6 purpose by putting to you, in effect, you shut your eyes
7 to it deliberately.
8 MR IRVING: I can say in two lines if that will assist you what
9 my position on the four or five camp officials will be;
10 that I was not familiar with the evidence of the lower
11 camp officials. I was partially familiar with the
12 evidence of Camp Commandant Hoess. I have reasons to
13 discount that evidence, which I will bring out during
14 cross-examination of the experts. But the reasons have
15 only become apparent to me now I have done the research
16 for the trial. But at the time , of course, I had this
17 gut instinct against eyewitnesses in the first place.
18 I have always preferred to use concrete documents rather
19 than statements of people, for whatever reason. My Lord
20 that does not help your Lordship very much at this stage.
21 MR JUSTICE GRAY: It does not help us in the sense that it does
22 not enable me to make a ruling which will …
23 MR IRVING: I am hoping that your Lordship will be able to
24 make —
25 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Direct which evidence we can safely exclude
26 and which we admit, I am afraid.
. P-103
1 MR IRVING: Your Lordship is now aware of my arguments as
2 against fraudulence in this action. I am hoping your
3 Lordship will make determinations from time to time as to
4 what is admissible and what is not on the issues as
5 pleaded, and possibly at a later date, once you have heard
6 my remarks about the eyewitness, or went a bit further
7 down the road we have had a chance to cross-examine
8 Professor van Pelt, then you can possibly even make a
9 ruling on the basic issue as to the admissibility of what
10 happened at Auschwitz or not, if I can put it like that.
11 MR RAMPTON: My Lord, can I add one thing, I know it is a
12 little irregular, but it may help. Mr Irving says that
13 now with hindsight he sees reasons to doubt what, for
14 example, Hoess said, I believe that that is an irrelevant
15 observation. What he now sees as being flaws in Hoess’
16 evidence is quite beside the point, we are not concerned
17 with what he now sees; what we are concerned with is with
18 Mr Irving’s state of mind, his bona fides, at the time
19 when he made these denial statements.
20 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Yes, but that really is having the best of
21 both worlds, is it not? You are wanting me to see what
22 Hoess said and to be satisfied that he is correct in what
23 he says.
24 MR RAMPTON: No.
25 MR JUSTICE GRAY: But you seek to prevent Mr Irving from
26 showing why he does not accept Hoess.
. P-104
1 MR RAMPTON: No, my Lord, that it is perhaps a slight
2 misapprehension, it is probably my fault, on your
3 Lordship’s part. I do want you to see what Mr Hoess says,
4 in just the same way as Mr Irving could have seen it
5 before he spoke in public. I do not need your Lordship to
6 accept what Hoess said is true.
7 MR JUSTICE GRAY: That is where I think I joined issue with you
8 earlier on.
9 MR RAMPTON: I need your Lordship simply to say this —
10 MR JUSTICE GRAY: The evidence was there.
11 MR RAMPTON: This evidence is suggestive of a strong
12 probability it was there, and it is not such obviously
13 rubbish evidence that one would join immediately with
14 Mr Irving and say, “no, there were no gas chambers at
15 Auschwitz”; quite the contrary. That is all I need to do
16 because all I am doing by looking at the evidence is
17 suggesting what an open-minded, careful historian would
18 have found if he had looked at the evidence.
19 MR JUSTICE GRAY: But you see open-minded, careful —
20 MR RAMPTON: Open-minded, leave the “careful” out of it.
21 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Yes, “careful” is not the …
22 MR IRVING: Open-minded historian without an ulterior motive,
23 beyond informing the public of the truth would have found
24 if he had looked.
25 MR JUSTICE GRAY: That is the right formulation, yes. I will,
26 if you would find it helpful, both of you, make a ruling,
. P-105
1 but I think, really, we are going to have to deal with
2 this on a bit of a piecemeal basis. Would it help if
3 I gave an indication maybe at 2 o’clock what I think
4 the —
5 MR RAMPTON: Well, it would —
6 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Guidelines should be.
7 MR RAMPTON: I am sorry, I did not mean to interrupt. It would
8 very much help, because it will put Mr Irving in the
9 position of deciding whether or not, in order to save time
10 and everybody’s labours, whether or not there are not some
11 concessions that he ought to make.
12 MR IRVING: That rather implies that I can answer under oath in
13 any way that is not true.
14 MR JUSTICE GRAY: No, it does not imply anything of the sort.
15 MR RAMPTON: No, I meant before he gives evidence.
16 MR JUSTICE GRAY: I will try and say something which helps at 5
17 past 2.
18 (Luncheon Adjournment)
19 (Please see separate transcript for Ruling)
Part IV: David Irving’s Cross-Examination by Richard Rampton, continued, Afternoon Session (106.19-199.26)
Section 106.19 to 116.23
20 MR IRVING: My Lord, I think that admirably clarifies the
21 situation. I hope that you will agree that it was a
22 useful exercise to conduct at this point in the trial.
23 MR JUSTICE GRAY: I most certainly do because I think it may
24 keep the case in slightly more reasonable bounds than
25 might otherwise have been so.
26 MR IRVING: I think that this was the right time to conduct
. P-106
1 that exercise, being several days into the trial. Thank
2 you very much, my Lord.
3 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Are you both happy to proceed with
4 cross-examination on the topic of Auschwitz?
5 MR RAMPTON: Indeed I am. I have not of course got a
6 transcript yet. We have been trying to follow it on the
7 screen. May I see if I have understood the last part of
8 your Lordship’s ruling correctly?
9 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Yes.
10 MR RAMPTON: If and in so far as Mr Irving should contend that
11 he was entitled to rely on the Leuchter report in the way
12 that he did, then I have a gate open, as it were — not
13 that I want it to, I would much rather it did not — for
14 me to go through the detail, in effect. Is that right or
15 not?
16 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Sorry, I am not quite sure. The detail of
17 what?
18 MR RAMPTON: If he said should say, I maintain that I was
19 entitled to rely on the Leuchter report, then the detailed
20 criticisms of the Leuchter report may become relevant.
21 MR JUSTICE GRAY: I totally agree. What I was intending to say
22 right at the end of my little ruling was that that is
23 really open season, the whole of the Leuchter report.
24 MR RAMPTON: That, apart from some parts of the eyewitness
25 testimony, this was my fear, and some parts of Professor
26 van Pelt’s report about other evidence, it is, I am
. P-107
1 afraid, two thirds of the evidence on Auschwitz.
2 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Yes. I am a bit doubtful of that, but
3 I appreciate there is an enormous amount left.
4 MR RAMPTON: Maybe that is a wrong estimate, but it is a large
5 lump of the actual factual evidence about Auschwitz, what
6 can be known of what happened there by reference to what
7 Mr Leuchter said.
8 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Yes, but there is no reason why you should
9 not cross-examine on the totality of that.
10 MR RAMPTON: I just wanted to be clear. I do not want to put
11 my foot in the wrong —-
12 MR JUSTICE GRAY: That is without prejudice to Mr Irving’s
13 entitlement at any point to say that that question is not
14 relevant to the issues for whatever reason he may suggest.
15 MR RAMPTON: Your Lordship may say it without being prompted by
16 Mr Irving, I dare say.
17 MR JUSTICE GRAY: I might even do so, yes. Mr Irving, would you
18 like to come back?
19 < Mr Irving, recalled.
20 < Cross-Examined by Mr Rampton QC, continued.
21 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Mr Rampton, may I say this before you start?
22 It would help me if one could, perhaps by some initial
23 questions to Mr Irving, put into the context of your case.
24 MR RAMPTON: A little bit of history?
25 MR JUSTICE GRAY: A little bit of history and where one pigeon
26 holes it, if you like.
. P-108
1 MR RAMPTON: Not wartime history. This is Mr Irving’s history.
2 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Eighties/nineties.
3 MR RAMPTON: That is right. Mr Irving, when did you first meet
4 Mr Fred Leuchter?
5 A. [Mr Irving]: On a day in April 1988 in Toronto, Canada.
6 Q. [Mr Rampton]: You went, and I do not think there is controversy about
7 this, to Toronto, Canada, in order to give expert evidence
8 at the trial of Mr Hans Zundel. Is that right?
9 A. [Mr Irving]: I was residing in Florida at that time, writing. They
10 invited me to give evidence as an expert witness on the
11 general history of the Third Reich, I do emphasise not on
12 Auschwitz, and on Adolf Hitler’s involvement in what is
13 referred to as the Holocaust. I flew to Toronto on the
14 day before I was due to give evidence.
15 Q. [Mr Rampton]: So the answer to my question is yes, I think, is it not?
16 A. [Mr Irving]: Yes.
17 Q. [Mr Rampton]: What was it, in case I have got it wrong, that Mr Zundel
18 was charged with?
19 A. [Mr Irving]: There was a mediaeval law in Canada which made the
20 spreading of false information a criminal offence. That
21 law has now been struck down by the Canadian Supreme
22 Court.
23 Q. [Mr Rampton]: In respect of what statements under that mediaeval law, as
24 you call it, in what form was Mr Zundel charged?
25 A. [Mr Irving]: If I remember correctly, he was charged with having
26 published or disseminated a brochure called, “Did 6
. P-109
1 million really die”?
2 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Yes. What was the topic of that pamphlet or whatever it
3 was?
4 A. [Mr Irving]: As its title implies, it was questioning the fundamental
5 aspects of the Holocaust.
6 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Yes?
7 A. [Mr Irving]: I had not, up to the time I arrived in Toronto, read that
8 brochure, but I was given a copy to read shortly before
9 the trial began, because I was going to be asked questions
10 about it.
11 Q. [Mr Rampton]: You did not give evidence, I expect, immediately upon
12 arrival? You did not get off the plane and into the
13 witness box?
14 A. [Mr Irving]: I gave evidence on the following day if I remember
15 correctly.
16 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Does this mean that you had the opportunity to read
17 Mr Leuchter report before you gave evidence?
18 A. [Mr Irving]: Either on the evening I arrived, or the following morning
19 before I went into the witness box, defence counsel for Mr
20 Zundel gave me a one inch thick affidavit which was the
21 engineering report produced by Mr Fred Leuchter, and he
22 said, if you read this, you will find this very
23 interesting. Of course, I could not read a one inch thick
24 affidavit in the remaining hours, but I glanced at the
25 summary at the beginning and I looked at the principal
26 conclusions. They may even have told me in outline what
. P-110
1 the affidavit purported to conclude.
2 Q. [Mr Rampton]: For how many days did you give evidence?
3 A. [Mr Irving]: It was over a weekend. I think I was in the box for three
4 or four days, possibly three days.
5 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Over the weekend while were you were in the box — I am
6 not suggesting there is anything in the least bit improper
7 in this because there plainly is not — did you get a
8 chance to read the inch thick affidavit?
9 A. [Mr Irving]: I would have had a chance to, but I do not think I did. I
10 think we went on an outing to the Niagara Falls, which is
11 close to Toronto.
12 Q. [Mr Rampton]: If I may say so, a good deal more edifying than the
13 Leuchter report.
14 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Can I ask you this? You were asked to give
15 evidence as an expert on the Holocaust?
16 A. [Mr Irving]: On Adolf Hitler basically, and his involvement, the kind
17 of thing we have been discussing until now, my Lord.
18 Q. [Mr Justice Gray]: That is not what I am getting at. You were giving
19 evidence about extermination, of whether there were really
20 6 million Jewish deaths?
21 A. [Mr Irving]: Not on the extermination, my Lord. They were purely
22 interested in hearing what Adolf Hitler’s part in this was
23 or was not. I could not give expert evidence on the
24 Holocaust and I would not have been accepted by the court
25 as an expert.
26 MR JUSTICE GRAY: I understand.
. P-111
1 A. [Mr Irving]: I was very closely questioned before the trial began,
2 before my hearing began, as to my qualifications by the
3 court.
4 MR RAMPTON: May Mr Irving please be given a file? Your
5 Lordship may not have this in court. I have the reference
6 here, D 9 (i). (Document not provided) If your Lordship
7 has not got it, which I do not expect you have, I will try
8 and find one.
9 MR JUSTICE GRAY: I should have thought to bring it.
10 MR RAMPTON: It is a transcript of Mr Irving’s evidence in the
11 court.
12 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Yes, I have it.
13 MR RAMPTON: My Lord, the page numbers are the original. There
14 are two page numbers. I intend to use the original
15 transcript page numbers, which are at the top left hand
16 corner of the page. The page I am looking for is 9473.
17 I think it must be that the Canadians numbered the whole
18 trial with consecutive page numbers.
19 A. [Mr Irving]: Is this examination in chief?
20 Q. [Mr Rampton]: No, this is cross-examination by Mr Pearson?
21 A. [Mr Irving]: Yes.
22 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Have you got it, Mr Irving?
23 A. [Mr Irving]: I have it in front of me.
24 Q. [Mr Rampton]: 9473. It has the helpful heading “Irving CREX Pearson”.
25 At the bottom of the page it says 327. It is a recent
26 file number. Mr Pearson has put to you something — I do
. P-112
1 not think it probably matters what much except that it
2 will have to do with the Holocaust — about which you say
3 this. I am reading from the top of the page: “At the time
4 that I wrote that in the 1960s, 1974 or thereabouts, when
5 I wrote that introduction, I believed, I believed
6 everything I had heard about the extermination camps”.
7 A. [Mr Irving]: I think there should be a comma after the first “believed”
8 probably.
9 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Yes.
10 MR RAMPTON: There is in my copy. There should not be?
11 A. [Mr Irving]: I think there should be a comma after the first
12 “believed”.
13 MR JUSTICE GRAY: It does not matter.
14 A. [Mr Irving]: It sounds a little bit obsessive, otherwise.
15 MR RAMPTON: (Document not provided) “I believed everything
16 I heard about the extermination camps. I was not
17 investigating the extermination camps. I was
18 investigating Hitler. Question: But you told us that you
19 did ten years of extensive research on the national
20 socialist regime? Answer: Yes. Question: And you had no
21 problem making that statement, did you? Answer: Because I
22 believed. Question: Right. Answer: I believed what I had
23 read up to that point. I had not gone to the sites at
24 Auschwitz and Treblinka, and Mydonek and brought back
25 samples and carried out an analysis. I had not done any
26 research into what is called the Holocaust. I researched
. P-113
1 Hitler and his staff. Question: You have done that, have
2 you, since? Answer: I have not. Question: You have not
3 done those things? Answer: I have carried out no
4 investigation in equivalent depth of the Holocaust.
5 Question: But your mind changed? Answer: My mind has now
6 changed. Question: You no longer believe it? Answer:
7 I have now begun to challenge that. I understand it is
8 now a subject open to debate. Question: But your belief
9 changed, even though you did not do any research? Is that
10 what you are saying? Answer: My belief has now changed
11 because I understand that the whole of the Holocaust
12 mythology is after all open to doubt, and certainly in the
13 course of what I have read in the last few days, in fact
14 in this trial, I am now becoming more and more hardened in
15 this view”.
16 Mr Irving, what had you read that led to such a
17 volte-face during those last few days?
18 A. [Mr Irving]: A few figures in a column of chemical tests. Percentages.
19 Q. [Mr Rampton]: You had read a few figures in a column in Mr Leuchter
20 report. Is that right?
21 A. [Mr Irving]: In the laboratory analysis appended to the Leuchter
22 report.
23 Q. [Mr Rampton]: That evidence, I think I am right in saying, was given on
24 25th April, 1988?
25 A. [Mr Irving]: Yes.
26 Q. [Mr Rampton]: I think your diary entry for the 22nd, which is a Friday,
. P-114
1 tells us this. I will just read it: “Breakfast in the
2 Carven Inn. Hans Zundel and defence lawyer Douglas
3 Christie came around 8.30 am for a briefing session.
4 I told them I had read Leuchter’s report on Auschwitz and
5 am much impressed”. What is the truth of this?
6 A. [Mr Irving]: Yes.
7 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Which?
8 A. [Mr Irving]: I beg your pardon?
9 Q. [Mr Rampton]: The two things are not the same.
10 A. [Mr Irving]: Well, obviously, if the report is one inch thick and has
11 only been given to me either that morning or the previous
12 evening, I have not read the entire report one inch
13 thick. But I have read the relevant part they are
14 interested in.
15 Q. [Mr Rampton]: The last entry for the previous day, which is 21 April,
16 which is a Thursday, you said this in your diary. I do
17 not know whether you are intending to publish your diaries
18 but you say this: “Zundel says I give evidence tomorrow.
19 Read their lab reports on Auschwitz until late. Bed
20 around 11″ p.m.
21 A. [Mr Irving]: I do emphasis that I have not read those diaries since
22 I wrote them 12 years ago, but that precisely confirms my
23 memory. I read the lab reports, the percentages, until 12
24 A. [Mr Irving]: m. There are quite a few pages of them.
25 Q. [Mr Rampton]: When you tell them next morning at breakfast time that you
26 had read Leichter’s report on Auschwitz “and am much
. P-115
1 impressed”, that is a shorthand way of saying “I have read
2 some small part of the Leichter report”. Is that right?
3 A. [Mr Irving]: I think so, the relevant part.
4 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Because that is the guts of it, really, the
5 lab reports? Is what you are saying?
6 A. [Mr Irving]: They may have drawn my attention specifically to the lab
7 reports, but the answer to your question is yes.
8 MR RAMPTON: I am not suggesting that what you said in answer
9 to those questions on 25th April in the court in Toronto
10 were false answers. What I question is this. Do you
11 think it sensible — I will use a neutral word to begin
12 with Mr Irving — for a man in your position, who has
13 gone all the way to Canada to give expert evidence on a
14 different aspect of the case, to arrive at so certain a
15 conclusion on the basis of one part evening’s reading of
16 one part of a report made by a man — we will come to his
17 qualifications in a moment — who, so far as you were
18 aware at that date, was not known to history?
19 A. [Mr Irving]: Was not known to —-
20 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Was not known to history as a scholarly discipline?
21 A. [Mr Irving]: There are several questions contained in that question.
22 MR JUSTICE GRAY: It is all one question. It is a long
23 question, but I think it is an important question.
Section 116.23 to 137.1
24 A. [Mr Irving]: It is, but there are several questions contained within a
25 question there. Would you break it up into fragmentary
26 questions, one question at a time?
. P-116
1 MR JUSTICE GRAY: I am not sure I agree about that. Do you want
2 it asked in parts?
3 MR RAMPTON: My eyes are just not the right focal length for
4 the screen.
5 MR JUSTICE GRAY: I will read it. Do you think it is sensible
6 I — am going to skip the interpolations — Mr Irving,
7 for a man in your position, who has gone all the way to
8 Canada to give expert evidence on a different aspect of
9 the case, to arrive at so certain a conclusion on the
10 basis of one part evening’s reading of one part of a
11 report made by a man like Leuchter? I am slightly fudging
12 the end of the question, but I think it is fair?
13 A. [Mr Irving]: All right. So there are several parts in that question.
14 The question is, what is my value judgment on
15 Mr Leichter? We can deal with that separately, my Lord.
16 This part of the report was of course not produced by
17 Mr Leichter. It was produced by a qualified forensic
18 laboratory, and that I would emphasise at this point.
19 For whatever value it is worth, I would point
20 out the fact that I spent three years at London University
21 unsuccessfully trying to get a degree in physics and
22 chemistry. One thing that I did excel in was quantitative
23 and qualitative chemical analysis. In fact, in the
24 examination which I took I got the correct amount to six
25 decimal points, which was an embarrassment because it
26 looked as though I had been cheating.
. P-117
1 So I am aware of the fact that, unlike the
2 writing of history, where there is a lot of reading
3 between the lines, chemical analysis is an exact science.
4 When I looked at that document, and I probably said it on
5 subsequent occasions, I said that no matter how much
6 historians can interpret documents, as they do one way or
7 the other, perversely or honestly or genuinely, you cannot
8 interpret percentages in any different way than the
9 figures actually speak. We will come to what the figures
10 actually said, I am sure, later on, but, when I looked at
11 those columns of figures, I said to myself, and I accepted
12 of course that I was not being taken in, I was not being
13 given fraudulent figures because they would be very
14 rapidly exposed by the court, I accept that I was being
15 given genuine forensic analysis figures. I would go
16 straight ahead and say to this day I have no reason to
17 doubt that those percentages are correct, and I state that
18 the figures that I saw at that time, spoken in
19 unmistakable language, so unmistakable that any person
20 with even a smattering of knowledge of chemical analysis,
21 quantitative and qualitative, would have to accept that
22 the story, as it had been preached so far, was untenable.
23 MR RAMPTON: Mr Irving, have you read the Leuchter report with
24 any care since that date?
25 A. [Mr Irving]: The report or the chemical analyses?
26 Q. [Mr Rampton]: The report. You have to read the report to understand
. P-118
1 what the chemical analysis is referring to, do you not?
2 A. [Mr Irving]: It is referring to a number of samples taken from the
3 fabric of Auschwitz and Birkenau, various buildings.
4 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Did you notice, Mr Irving, before you started making these
5 statements, or indeed since, that the chemical analysis
6 gave a much higher reading of hydrogen cyanide residues
7 for the parts of the camp, whether Birkenau or Auschwitz,
8 which were known to have been used as delousing facilities
9 than it did for those parts which were said to have been
10 gas chambers? Did you notice that?
11 A. [Mr Irving]: It would probably be useful if you were to give us the
12 actual figures, but this was my general impression from
13 memory, that this was the conclusion based —-
14 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Did you notice, Mr Irving, that Mr Leuchter conclusion was
15 based upon the assumption that higher concentrations of
16 hydrogen cyanide would have been needed to have been used
17 in the gas chambers than in the delousing facilities?
18 A. [Mr Irving]: Mr Leuchter was an expert in homicidal gas chambers.
19 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Please. This is very important. I wish you would answer
20 my question. Did you notice that Mr Leuchter’s conclusion
21 that there were no homicidal gas chambers at Auschwitz was
22 based in part upon the assumption that higher
23 concentrations would have been needed to kill people than
24 were needed to kill lice?
25 A. [Mr Irving]: As this appears to be an important point, can we see the
26 precise passage in the report where he states this and the
. P-119
1 language he uses?
2 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Mr Rampton, so that there is no
3 misunderstanding because it puzzled me for a while, kill
4 lice in clothing? That is right, is it not?
5 MR RAMPTON: Yes. If you try and do it while the clothes are
6 still on in a concentration of 6,666 parts per million,
7 you are going to kill your people about 22 times over.
8 MR JUSTICE GRAY: You understand why, if that is not made
9 clear, it can be a bit puzzling?
10 A. [Mr Irving]: I think we ought to see what the report actually says.
11 MR RAMPTON: Yes. Perhaps you would like to take your coloured
12 copy and I will use my weary old photocopy.
13 A. [Mr Irving]: I have a colour copy here. This is an abridged version.
14 It is not the one inch thick one that was shown to me.
15 MR RAMPTON: I do not know if your Lordship has the file copy?
16 A. [Mr Irving]: This was the actual discovery copy I want them all back
17 because they are very rare now.
18 Q. [Mr Rampton]: You would like them back at the end of the case?
19 A. [Mr Irving]: Yes, please.
20 Q. [Mr Rampton]: You will be welcome to them, as far as I am concerned.
21 Page 15 of this glossy — this is not its original form.
22 This is the Irving publication form?
23 A. [Mr Irving]: This is no doubt an abridged version, certainly much
24 slimmer than the one inch affidavit I was given in the
25 courtroom.
26 Q. [Mr Rampton]: But what about the use of ordinary type, bold type and
. P-120
1 bold italic type.
2 A. [Mr Irving]: Mr Rampton, the original version was in my discovery and
3 was available to your instructing solicitors. They could
4 have drawn this kind of comparison.
5 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Mr Irving, please listen. In this document, as we see if
6 we look at page 15, leaving the capitals on one side, we
7 see four different kinds of type that are used. There is
8 first of all what you might call ordinary Roman, then
9 there is bold Roman, then there are ordinary italics which
10 we see at the little words “table 3”, and then there is
11 bold italics, which is the paragraph fortunately that I
12 want to read.
13 A. [Mr Irving]: Yes.
14 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Who made the decision to use those different kinds of
15 type?
16 A. [Mr Irving]: Not I.
17 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Not you?
18 A. [Mr Irving]: No.
19 Q. [Mr Rampton]: So in the affidavit they have used these sorts of type,
20 have they?
21 A. [Mr Irving]: I do not know. You have in the discovery the original
22 affidavit.
23 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Anyway, it was not you?
24 A. [Mr Irving]: No.
25 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Do you see the paragraph in bold italics?
26 A. [Mr Irving]: In the second column, the controlled sample.
. P-121
1 Q. [Mr Rampton]: That is right. “One would have expected higher” — do you
2 see that?
3 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Do you agree that whoever put that in bold italics thought
4 that it was an important paragraph?
5 A. [Mr Irving]: I cannot see “one would have expected higher”.
6 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Paragraph, not half sentence. I will read it.
7 A. [Mr Irving]: Yes.
8 Q. [Mr Rampton]: “One would have expected higher cyanide detection in the
9 samples taken from the alleged gas chambers, because of
10 the greater amount of gas allegedly utilized there than
11 that found in the control sample. Since the contrary is
12 true, one must conclude that these facilities were not
13 execution gas chambers when coupled with all the other
14 evidence gained on inspection.
15 A. [Mr Irving]: Yes.
16 Q. [Mr Rampton]: You must have read that?
17 A. [Mr Irving]: No.
18 Q. [Mr Rampton]: You did not read that?
19 A. [Mr Irving]: Not to my knowledge I looked just at the laboratory
20 tables.
21 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Does it not occur to you, Mr Irving, that, if in fact, as
22 it is the case, Mr Leuchter has got history completely the
23 wrong way round, then you can reverse the figures in the
24 table?
25 A. [Mr Irving]: If you exclude extraneous factors, which you can talk
26 about later on, the factors which you are not talking
. P-122
1 about, about the fact that the “gas chambers” have been
2 freshly built, they were freshly poured concrete, they
3 sweat, there is a pronounced interaction between humanity
4 and hydrogen cyanide gas which would have led one to
5 conclude there should have been more in the so-called gas
6 chambers, but this was a degree of research that
7 Mr Leuchter did not go into. It has been done since the
8 Leuchter report. This is where I am in difficulty, my
9 Lord, because of course there had been ongoing research
10 into this kind of controversy since then.
11 Q. [Mr Rampton]: This is my point, Mr Irving.
12 A. [Mr Irving]: Not by myself, I hasten to add.
13 MR JUSTICE GRAY: I follow that.
14 MR RAMPTON: This is one of a one of a large number of
15 absolutely basic school boy errors from an historical
16 point of view, as well as some scientific ones as well.
17 But from the historical and archeological point of view,
18 this is one of the basic school boy errors in the Leuchter
19 report. Fair enough, you are not Mr Leuchter and you did
20 not write the report, but you made the decision to change
21 your mind about the Holocaust, or whatever you like to
22 call it about gas chambers at Auschwitz.
23 A. [Mr Irving]: On the basis of the forensic percentages.
24 Q. [Mr Rampton]: On the basis of absolutely no research whatsoever.
25 A. [Mr Irving]: On the basis of no research whatsoever; you are absolutely
26 right. I made the decision to change my mind on the
. P-123
1 percentages of hydrogen cyanide residues, the compounds
2 which were missing from the chambers where they should
3 quite clearly have been present.
4 Q. [Mr Rampton]: No, they were not; they were present in smaller quantities
5 which is exactly what you would expect.
6 A. [Mr Irving]: They were present in quantities that are familiar to
7 people doing the laboratory analyses. You guess
8 statistically meaningless numbers. The figures are so low
9 that they are statistically meaningless. They may be
10 there from any external sources. They may be there from
11 the cleaning lady. They may be there from there having
12 been a regular fumigation. The quantities are so low that
13 they are statistically meaningless; whereas in the
14 fumigation chamber, you get a figure that is 1,050
15 milograms per kilogram of cement, starting with the high
16 figure.
17 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Yes, Mr Irving, precisely, which is exactly what, if you
18 know the very slightest thing about this topic, you would
19 expect to find.
20 A. [Mr Irving]: I now know quite a lot about this topic, Mr Rampton, which
21 I was not aware of at the time, and I am not prepared to
22 change my position.
23 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Then, Mr Irving, it behoved you, as an historian, brought
24 over as an expert witness, to keep your trap shut until
25 you had done some proper research, I suggest.
26 A. [Mr Irving]: This is the negligence argument again, is it not?
. P-124
1 Q. [Mr Rampton]: No, it is not.
2 A. [Mr Irving]: It very clearly is; you are saying I ought to have done it
3 and I did not.
4 Q. [Mr Rampton]: No responsible person in your position would give that
5 kind of evidence to a court on the kind of research you
6 had, I should say, not conducted.
7 A. [Mr Irving]: Mr Rampton, I did not give this evidence to court.
8 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Let me finish question.
9 A. [Mr Irving]: You just said I gave this evidence to the court — this
10 court or the court in Toronto?
11 Q. [Mr Rampton]: The court in Toronto.
12 A. [Mr Irving]: I not give this evidence to the court in Toronto.
13 Q. [Mr Rampton]: That is the starting point, Mr Irving.
14 A. [Mr Irving]: This was the evidence that Mr Leuchter gave.
15 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Let me finish my question, Mr Irving, please — unless
16 that so-called historian had an ulterior motive for diving
17 into a sea on which he had no knowledge, is that right?
18 A. [Mr Irving]: Diving into a sea is rather literally. Can you state
19 specifically what you are trying to say?
20 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Venturing on to a territory of history, an area of
21 history, of which he had absolutely no knowledge whatever,
22 making world-shattering statements from the witness box in
23 Canada without having done any research suggests, does it
24 not, Mr Irving, that you had an ulterior motive for doing
25 it?
26 A. [Mr Irving]: Let me give you an analogy, Mr Rampton — it just occurs
. P-125
1 to me. Suppose just before you are going to go into the
2 witness box, the barrister for the Defence comes up to you
3 and says, well, the man is alleged to have been shot by a
4 nine-milimetre automatic, but, unfortunately, we now find
5 out that the bullet that was found in the body was a 38;
6 would not this be sufficient grounds, even for a person
7 who is not versed in ballistics, to say, “Well, I am
8 beginning to change my mind”?
9 Q. [Mr Rampton]: It is a rotten analogy which I do not want to pick up,
10 Mr Irving, because it will just waste time.
11 A. [Mr Irving]: You have to remember, I have just been going into the
12 witness stand in Toronto to pontificate, if you can put it
13 like that, about Hitler and the decision-making at the top
14 level, and I have been shown by the barrister laboratory
15 reports produced by a qualified laboratory in New England,
16 suggesting very strongly that there is no significant
17 residue of cyanide compounds to be found in the fabric of
18 the so-called gas chambers at Auschwitz where millions of
19 people have been gassed, or hundreds of thousands of
20 people have been gassed.
21 MR JUSTICE GRAY: What was the relevance, as you saw it, of
22 that to your own evidence? Why did they come to your
23 hotel and talk about the Leuchter report?
24 A. [Mr Irving]: I think probably because they were trying to get the
25 Leuchter report before the judge.
26 Q. [Mr Justice Gray]: Not through you?
. P-126
1 A. [Mr Irving]: They were having difficulties, my Lord, because the judge
2 had taken judicial notice of the Holocaust in Canada and
3 they were in legal difficulties. My Lord, I am not a
4 legal expert and I can only begin —-
5 Q. [Mr Justice Gray]: No, the answer is you do not really know?
6 A. [Mr Irving]: The answer is I do not know, but if you ask me the reason
7 why I suspect they were trying to get me to make reference
8 to it and to try to bring it before the jury, before his
9 Lordship, in that case Lock J could intervene to say this
10 matter has been ruled inadmissible.
11 Q. [Mr Justice Gray]: I was puzzled.
12 MR RAMPTON: Mr Irving, you just given what you know to be an
13 untrue answer to his Lordship. The Leuchter report was
14 ruled out of court because the judge held that Mr Leuchter
15 had no relevant expertise that would justify his report
16 going before the jury.
17 A. [Mr Irving]: I would be grateful if you would lead that evidence
18 actually on a documentary basis.
19 Q. [Mr Rampton]: I will. I do not have the file here. You will see it on
20 Monday.
21 A. [Mr Irving]: Yes, but you remember I questioned that before when you
22 said that.
23 Q. [Mr Rampton]: It is in the transcript. I cannot give you the page
24 number.
25 A. [Mr Irving]: That was not my understanding of the reason why the
26 document was ruled inadmissible.
. P-127
1 MR JUSTICE GRAY: We will wait until we have the transcript,
2 shall we?
3 A. [Mr Irving]: And certainly, if that is the reason why, then it was not
4 to my knowledge.
5 MR RAMPTON: It was quite clear from the answer — I am not
6 suggesting you gave an answer to the judge in Canada which
7 was untrue at all?
8 A. [Mr Irving]: You are saying I gave an answer just now which was untrue
9 and I am on oath.
10 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Yes, I believe that it is and we will come back to it.
11 Mr Irving, you said to the Judge in Canada, truthfully
12 I believe, that you had never been to Auschwitz to look at
13 the archive?
14 A. [Mr Irving]: It was true then and it is true today.
15 Q. [Mr Rampton]: It is true today?
16 A. [Mr Irving]: And you know the reason why.
17 Q. [Mr Rampton]: I have no idea what the reason why is?
18 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Does it matter?
19 MR RAMPTON: It does not matter.
20 A. [Mr Irving]: Because I am banned from visiting Auschwitz or the
21 archives. I am the only historian in the world who is not
22 allowed to set foot in the Auschwitz archives.
23 Q. [Mr Rampton]: When did that happen?
24 A. [Mr Irving]: Last summer — summer 1996.
25 Q. [Mr Rampton]: But between this trial in 1988, yes, and whenever the ban
26 was imposed recently, you have had every opportunity to
. P-128
1 visit the archives in Auschwitz, have you not?
2 A. [Mr Irving]: I do not think so. I think the ban would have been
3 imposed even then. I think it is like the big casinos in
4 Los Vegas. They do not want the big winners to come.
5 They said, “For God’s sake, don’t let David Irving come
6 and look in our archives”.
7 Q. [Mr Rampton]: What is the reason for the ban in the Czech Republic —
8 no, Poland, sorry, as it is still is, Mr Irving?
9 A. [Mr Irving]: They did not state. In their letter to me, they said:
10 “Mr Irving, you will not be permitted to set foot on the
11 territory of the Auschwitz camp nor will you be allowed to
12 enter the archives”.
13 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Do you not think it virtually certain that the reason for
14 that is that ever since the Zundel trial in 1988, you have
15 been up on your hind legs denying that Auschwitz served
16 the purpose which everybody knows that it did?
17 A. [Mr Irving]: Well, in that case they have taken precisely the wrong
18 attitude with me. They should have said, “Mr Irving, do
19 come round. We have some very interesting documents here
20 which will change your mind”. They know perfectly well
21 that had they produced one document to me of quality,
22 I would immediately have changed my mind because I have no
23 axe whatever to grind on this. I have repeatedly said
24 that. But they took the opposite attitude. They said,
25 “Don’t let him anywhere near our archives. That is David
26 Irving who exposed the Hitler diaries and all these other
. P-129
1 frauds”.
2 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Does it matter what these various governments
3 have said and done?
4 MR RAMPTON: Yes, it does.
5 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Why?
6 MR RAMPTON: Because the reason for the ban has likely been
7 Mr Irving’s denial of the Holocaust without any evidence.
8 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Yes, sure, and I want to see the denials, but
9 I do not think I am really interested in knowing what the
10 Polish government did about it.
11 MR RAMPTON: It is only a passing suggestion that he has
12 brought the ban on himself.
13 MR JUSTICE GRAY: So what if he has?
14 A. [Mr Irving]: In which case this is one more example of the damage
15 done to me by the book that the Defendants have published.
16 MR RAMPTON: Did you make any attempt to go to Auschwitz,
17 following your first receipt of the — I cannot remember
18 the man’s name — Leuchter report and your publication of
19 it in this country in 1989?
20 A. [Mr Irving]: Why should I have done so, if I may ask the question?
21 What possible reason would I have had to go to Auschwitz?
22 MR JUSTICE GRAY: But the answer is no?
23 A. [Mr Irving]: The answer is no because I am not a holocaust historian,
24 my Lord.
25 MR RAMPTON: The answer is no. Did you take any steps before
26 you published it with a press conference in London in May
. P-130
1 or June — June, I think it was — 1989, did you have any
2 steps to have its logic and its science and Mr Leuchter’s
3 methodology verified?
4 A. [Mr Irving]: The whole point of publishing a document like this is in
5 order to test the hypothesis. You put it up on the wall
6 and you invite people then to contact you and say, “This
7 is wrong, that is wrong, this is flawed”, and this is
8 precisely what happened.
9 In fact, Mr Rampton, you will notice in my
10 introduction to the report, as you are aware, I described
11 this report as being flawed. One would have wished to see
12 it written differently and the investigations carried out
13 differently. So it was published with reservations by
14 myself as a publisher.
15 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Mr Irving, the answer to my question is no, is it not?
16 A. [Mr Irving]: The answer is just as I gave it.
17 Q. [Mr Rampton]: The answer is you did not take any steps to have the
18 contents of the Leuchter report, and Mr Fred Leuchter’s
19 shattering conclusions, as you describe them, you did not
20 do anything at all to have them verified by an independent
21 expert or experts, did you?
22 A. [Mr Irving]: The very act of publishing the report was the attempt to
23 get it verified.
24 MR JUSTICE GRAY: The answer is no.
25 MR RAMPTON: The answer is no?
26 A. [Mr Irving]: I beg your pardon?
. P-131
1 MR JUSTICE GRAY: The answer is no. It is helpful to — you
2 add things, but, you know, answer the question and then
3 elaborate if you feel you must.
4 A. [Mr Irving]: Is a publisher bound to take steps to verify in detail the
5 scientific basis of every book that he publishes?
6 MR RAMPTON: Mr Irving, if he adds the weight of his own
7 authority as a noted historian on this period in human
8 history, then the answer must be yes, must it not?
9 A. [Mr Irving]: Mr Rampton, then I would draw your attention to the
10 language in which my introduction was couched which was
11 clearly with reservations.
12 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Some small reservations?
13 A. [Mr Irving]: And it says the ball is now in their court which makes
14 quite clearly the trial nature of the publication of this
15 document.
16 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Did you have a press conference on 23rd June 1989 to
17 announce the publication of the Leuchter report?
18 A. [Mr Irving]: Yes.
19 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Did you say at that press conference: “The buildings which
20 we now identify as gas chambers in Auschwitz were not”?
21 A. [Mr Irving]: Yes.
22 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Had you had any research done beyond what appeared in the
23 Leuchter report to verify that statement before you made
24 it?
25 A. [Mr Irving]: No.
26 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Thank you. “I cannot accept”, you said, “that they had
. P-132
1 gas chambers there. There was no equipment there for
2 killing people en masse.” You went on: “And hydrogen
3 cyanide is wonderful for killing lice, but not so good for
4 killing people unless in colossal concentrations”.
5 A. [Mr Irving]: Yes.
6 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Did you take any steps to verify the scientific and
7 biological correctness of that statement —-
8 A. [Mr Irving]: No.
9 Q. [Mr Rampton]: — before you made it. Do you know now that it is
10 complete rubbish?
11 A. [Mr Irving]: No, I would not agree.
12 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Have you read the appendices to Mr Leuchter’s report?
13 A. [Mr Irving]: Which appendices?
14 Q. [Mr Rampton]: The ones appended to his report?
15 A. [Mr Irving]: There are several appendices.
16 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Yes. They are all here. I have got them.
17 A. [Mr Irving]: Yes, but I am saying that I have read some of them and
18 I have not read the others.
19 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Shall we just have a quick look at them? Are they
20 attached to your version?
21 A. [Mr Irving]: Well, they are not in the slim line version, as you might
22 call it.
23 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Unless somebody can find me the reference in court, this
24 also will have to go back to Monday.
25 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Well, it must be somewhere, surely.
26 MR RAMPTON: Well, I know.
. P-133
1 MR JUSTICE GRAY: It is probably the most important single
2 document in the case.
3 MR RAMPTON: I am sorry, I did not do the files.
4 MR JUSTICE GRAY: No, I am not casting blame anywhere.
5 MR RAMPTON: No, I am not trying to cast blame. I am trying to
6 find the report.
7 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Professor van Pelt might know where it is.
8 MR RAMPTON: He has his own copy, I expect, and he did not do
9 the filing either. I will send out some messages, to put
10 it politely, at the end of today and make sure that
11 everybody has the same copy as I have.
12 MR JUSTICE GRAY: You did say you were going to deal with the
13 denials.
14 MR RAMPTON: I am.
15 MR JUSTICE GRAY: So that is something one can deal with
16 without the Leuchter report.
17 MR RAMPTON: My Lord, there is a problem about this, not from
18 my point of view, but from your Lordship’s point of view.
19 Miss Rogers and I have not been arguing about it, but we
20 are thinking the best way of dealing with it. There are
21 so many of them and the transcripts are so long that my
22 voice could conk out and your Lordship would die of
23 boredom if I went through them all.
24 The fact that I select some passages in some of
25 them over a period of time should not allow anybody to
26 think that this is not a topic which Mr Irving has
. P-134
1 returned to again and again and again over a period of
2 years from 1988 onwards.
3 A. [Mr Irving]: We will not have difficulty with the denials because I
4 denied at that time and I deny now that the buildings
5 shown to the tourists at Auschwitz are gas chambers or
6 ever were.
7 Q. [Mr Rampton]: That is easy. In case, I can give your Lordship the
8 references simply, can I not?
9 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Yes. Can we just spend a few minutes on this
10 because it is really a sort of methodological kind of
11 problem, is it not?
12 MR RAMPTON: It is.
13 MR JUSTICE GRAY: The difficulty that I see is I have all those
14 articles and I do not want to plough through them
15 particularly, and I would have no problem, unless
16 Mr Irving tells me he does not like this idea, in your
17 sidelining, or somebody on your team, the passages on
18 which you rely. The problem arises because, as I
19 understand Mr Irving, he says that in a number of the
20 statements you rely on he has been taken out of context.
21 MR RAMPTON: Then I will have to do it.
22 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Well, heaven forbid, but that is right,
23 Mr Irving, is it not?
24 A. [Mr Irving]: If it is relevant, my Lord, yes, then we ought to look at
25 it, but I thought that the statement that I just made
26 would have helped your Lordship, if I make a crystal clear
. P-135
1 statement of denial there of an element of the Holocaust.
2 MR JUSTICE GRAY: No, I had better just highlight it whilst I
3 am thinking of it. Sorry.
4 A. [Mr Irving]: One could have operated with that statement in lieu of
5 looking at all the passages.
6 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Yes, I think, well, I will not say that. I
7 think it is up to Mr Rampton to decide what course he
8 takes.
9 MR RAMPTON: No. I am open to guidance, if not actually of
10 being told what to do. I want to save time. At the same
11 time I must make absolutely sure (a) that your Lordship
12 has the relevant parts of the evidence and, quite frankly,
13 I cannot ask you to sit down and read all these
14 transcripts; (b) that Mr Irving is given a fair chance of
15 dealing with what I shall say about his conduct in this
16 regard at the end of the case.
17 MR JUSTICE GRAY: My feeling is it probably can be dealt with
18 without actually ploughing through the individual
19 transcripts. You might want to take some what you would
20 describe as prime examples. Beyond that, I think it may
21 be down to me to read them.
22 MR RAMPTON: I will do that. I will need help from my learned
23 junior who is the master of these, if I can call her that,
24 mistress, if you like, of these transcripts.
25 A. [Mr Irving]: I think they are very similar. It is always the same
26 gramophone record. It may just be embedded in a different
. P-136
1 amount of verbiage.
Section 137.2 to 164.11
2 MR RAMPTON: Could your Lordship and Mr Irving be provided,
3 please, with file D2(i)?
4 MR JUSTICE GRAY: I hope I have it. What I am going to try to
5 do, my Lord, is to take what your Lordship calls a prime
6 example from each year to start with and see how we get
7 on.
8 MR JUSTICE GRAY: That would be very helpful.
9 MR RAMPTON: Could your Lordship and Mr Irving please turn to
10 tab 4 in this file? This, Mr Irving, is a speech made in
11 Toronto, I know not on what date, but in August, 13th
12 August 1988. My Lord, this file has an index, not an
13 index, a contents page, two contents pages, at the
14 beginning from which one can see that tab 4 is an audio
15 cassette marked “Toronto”. But I do not know, therefore,
16 what the audience was. I will ask Mr Irving. (To the
17 witness): Could you tell us, please, Mr Irving, who the
18 audience was on this date?
19 A. [Mr Irving]: Human beings.
20 MR JUSTICE GRAY: That is not a conspicuously helpful answer?
21 A. [Mr Irving]: Well, my Lord, I have no idea who was in the audience,
22 without wishing to be disrespectful.
23 MR RAMPTON: Was it an event arranged by somebody else?
24 A. [Mr Irving]: Without looking at my diary, I cannot tell you who was
25 there. Sometimes I spoke 150 times a year.
26 Q. [Mr Rampton]: 40 to 50 — who lives at Kentville?
. P-137
1 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Mr & Mrs Weisner?
2 A. [Mr Irving]: Mr & Mrs Weisner, I think it was a private soiree in their
3 home probably.
4 MR RAMPTON: 255, I am reading from your diary for that day:
5 “3.00 p.m. function, audience of 40 to 50, in stiflingly
6 humid basement room, no air conditioning”?
7 A. [Mr Irving]: I remember and there was a colossal thunder storm that
8 evening.
9 Q. [Mr Rampton]: I do sympathise. Also there are some remarks about the
10 gate of $350 and Ernst, that is Ernst Zundel’s, book sales
11 $600. Our book sales $180.” Who is the “we” in “our”?
12 Whose book is that?
13 A. [Mr Irving]: I think Mr Zundel bought a number of books off me as
14 I sold books all around the world, and he runs a
15 bookshop. So I divided it up between this bulk sale of
16 books to him and bulk and books that we sold. That was
17 myself and my assistant.
18 Q. [Mr Rampton]: So in this stiflingly hot basement in August in Toronto,
19 if you turn to page 6 —-
20 A. [Mr Irving]: I think it was probably Ottawa rather than Toronto.
21 Q. [Mr Rampton]: I cannot help about that. It has “Toronto” on the front.
22 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Canada anyway?
23 A. [Mr Irving]: It was Ottawa.
24 MR RAMPTON: It is Miss Rogers fault. I will scratch out
25 “Toronto” and put — sorry about that — “Ottawa”?
26 A. [Mr Irving]: Manipulate the place back to Ottawa, shall we?
. P-138
1 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Just negligence, I think.
2 MR RAMPTON: We will sort this out later. It is just a waste
3 of time. It does not matter. It is the words that
4 matter. Whether it is an audience of 130 or an audience
5 of 50, it is still quite a lot of people?
6 A. [Mr Irving]: Well, you asked me who the audience was and that is why
7 you, obviously, attached importance to it.
8 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Yes, I wondered what the occasion was. Some friends of
9 Mr Zundel’s who paid at the door to come in, is that
10 right?
11 A. [Mr Irving]: No, it was the friends of the Weisners.
12 Q. [Mr Rampton]: The Weisners?
13 A. [Mr Irving]: The Weisners who live in Ottawa, and they invited me to go
14 and address their family and friends, basically.
15 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Yes. Were these family and friends mostly German
16 speakers?
17 A. [Mr Irving]: I am not anti-German. I dislike this kind of ethnic
18 slur.
19 Q. [Mr Rampton]: No, no, no, Mr Irving, nor am I.
20 A. [Mr Irving]: Anti-Germanism is as bad as anti-Semitism, I think.
21 Q. [Mr Rampton]: That is a matter of opinion. Can you please turn to page
22 6 of this document?
23 A. [Mr Irving]: Page 6?
24 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Yes.
25 A. [Mr Irving]: Yes.
26 Q. [Mr Rampton]: There is a parenthetical note, (286). That must be some
. P-139
1 kind of mark on the recording. You say this: “But just
2 imagine the omelette on their faces”, they are the
3 orthodox historians, are they, or who?
4 A. [Mr Irving]: Well, probably like saying I like seeing egg on the
5 historians’ faces. The court may have gained that
6 impression also over the last few days.
7 Q. [Mr Rampton]: I would have to trace it a way back and I really —-
8 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Do not let us worry.
9 MR RAMPTON: “Imagine the omelette on their faces if we managed
10 to unmask the other six milliion lie”. What do you mean
11 by the words “the other 6 million lie”? “This is the
12 prospect that is now opening up in front of me”?
13 A. [Mr Irving]: Oh, because the previous day I had been talking about
14 Derstern spending $6 million on buying the Adolf Hitler
15 diaries.
16 Q. [Mr Rampton]: So this is what you call the Holocaust lie, is it not?
17 A. [Mr Irving]: Well, it is obviously a play on words between $6 million
18 and 6 million people, yes.
19 Q. [Mr Rampton]: But you frequently referred to what you might call the
20 received view about Auschwitz and the Holocaust generally
21 as a lie, have you not?
22 A. [Mr Irving]: I do not think you will find many occasions, Mr Rampton.
23 This is not being spoken from a script. This is an
24 extemporary talk to a group of fans and friends in the
25 south.
26 Q. [Mr Rampton]: And, rather like Heinreich Himmler — I mean no offence by
. P-140
1 that, but we looked at something this morning — the more
2 apt, I suggest, to portray your true inner thoughts than a
3 carefully crafted script?
4 MR JUSTICE GRAY: That is what he says in the next sentence.
5 MR RAMPTON: “And I am glad, in fact, that we are such a small
6 circle” — indeed so, my Lord — “today because I can
7 talk, I think, in a small audience like this more frankly
8 than I would in a large audience about what I am doing and
9 what I am proposing to do. Because, of course, an
10 historian who now stands up and says, ‘I do not believe it
11 happened’ is putting his name on the line. He’s risking
12 his reputation and his career and his prospects and his
13 profession”.
14 A. [Mr Irving]: Precisely what we have seen over the last few years, of
15 course.
16 Q. [Mr Rampton]: “In Germany, of course, if you say it you’re risking a
17 jail sentence, because that particular lie has become a
18 lie anchored in law and it is now a criminal offence to
19 challenge that six million lie. And I think that alone is
20 prove sufficient that there is not documentary evidence to
21 back the lie up”.
22 A. [Mr Irving]: Can I point to the word “challenge” rather than “deny”?
23 “Challenge” implies you are looking at aspects of it.
24 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Please do not be impatient, Mr Irving. The more time goes
25 by, the more emphatic you become about this.
26 A. [Mr Irving]: No, these are quite important points — small though they
. P-141
1 may seem.
2 Q. [Mr Rampton]: “And I think that alone is proof sufficient that there is
3 not documentary evidence to back the lie up. So they
4 anchor it in law and this is one particular reason why
5 I am even keener to demolish the lie. Yet, to find myself
6 speaking like this to you now, in August 1988, until would
7 have astonished me”, “until now”, I do not know, “would
8 have astonished me had I thought about it at the beginning
9 of this year, because at the beginning of this year I was
10 among the believers. You can find that if you look at a
11 number of my books, the Adolf Hitler biography I wrote or
12 a book that I wrote called ‘von Guernica bis Vietnam’. A
13 number of books I accept quite happily that Auschwitz
14 existed and that Auschwitz did exist as an extermination
15 camp, among other extermination camps. What I did write,
16 which upset a lot of people in my Hitler biography, was”,
17 and then you go on about upsetting people by denying that
18 Hitler knew anything about it.
19 Then you say: “This was the kind of halfway
20 house in my conversion”.
21 A. [Mr Irving]: Yes, and then if I can just draw attention to three lines
22 from the bottom: “… not the slightest evidence of
23 Hitler knowing about Auschwitz, Auschwitz as we are now
24 taught to regard it”. When we are talking about
25 Auschwitz, I was being quite specific there. “Auschwitz
26 as we are now taught to regard it”. That is what I am
. P-142
1 trying to demolish.
2 Q. [Mr Rampton]: I know exactly what are you talking about, Mr Irving.
3 That is why you say it was a halfway house in your
4 conversion. You were saying to yourself, were you not,
5 whether honestly or not is not today’s work, “Well, if
6 Hitler did not know about the fact that Auschwitz was a
7 massive extermination camp, very likely or perhaps it was
8 not”, then you get Mr Leuchter’s little report put in your
9 hand and you said, “Oh, well, I am right after all.
10 Hitler cannot have known about it because it never
11 happened”?
12 A. [Mr Irving]: What never happened?
13 Q. [Mr Rampton]: That is the whole house in your conversion, is it not?
14 A. [Mr Irving]: What never happened?
15 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Auschwitz use as an extermination camp by the use of
16 homicidal gas chambers?
17 A. [Mr Irving]: As a factory of death, yes.
18 Q. [Mr Rampton]: A factory of death. It was never built — we know this —
19 we have been over this a dozen times already in this court
20 — everybody knows who knows anything about it at all
21 that Auschwitz did not start life as a totas fabrik , as
22 you call it?
23 A. [Mr Irving]: There is no point getting testy about it, Mr Rampton.
24 I think it is appropriate if I remind the court at this
25 point that if it turns out that I am right, then truth is
26 an absolute defence to this kind of position. And I am
. P-143
1 quite happy to stand here and be subjected to this
2 grilling, but if it turns out that I am right at the end
3 of this trial on this particular matter, then this been a
4 lot of water under the bridge that we could have spared
5 our time over.
6 Q. [Mr Rampton]: With respect, Mr Irving, I believe you might have
7 misconceived the nature of this case. This case is not,
8 as I have repeatedly said, about who is right and who is
9 wrong?
10 A. [Mr Irving]: Oh!
11 Q. [Mr Rampton]: It is not indeed. It is about your qualities as an
12 exponent of the truth.
13 A. [Mr Irving]: So, in other words, “OK, he propagated the truth, but he
14 did it in a tasteless manner and an offensive manner and
15 an insensitive manner”?
16 MR JUSTICE GRAY: I think this is a debate that may need to
17 take place at some stage, but I think it is not productive
18 at this stage.
19 A. [Mr Irving]: I am astonished to hear Mr Rampton say that it is not
20 about —-
21 MR JUSTICE GRAY: I think I know what he means and I know your
22 response to it, but let us postpone this.
23 MR RAMPTON: Mr Irving, we are dealing here, as you yourself
24 said this morning, you opened with some reference to a
25 state of a man’s mind taken from a legal case, what we are
26 dealing here with, Mr Irving, is your state of mind at the
. P-144
1 time when you made these statements?
2 A. [Mr Irving]: In August.
3 Q. [Mr Rampton]: And subsequently.
4 A. [Mr Irving]: Yes.
5 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Not about whether you were right or wrong, as a matter of
6 objective fact. Do you understand?
7 A. [Mr Irving]: But it is about both matters together taken in tandem.
8 Q. [Mr Rampton]: No, no, we are not. In this part of the cross-examination
9 we are simply dealing with what you said, why you said it
10 and what basis you had for saying it — you had.
11 A. [Mr Irving]: So the allegation is David Irving was right, but how
12 tasteless the way he put it?
13 MR RAMPTON: No.
14 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Let us press on. For what it is worth,
15 I think the way Mr Rampton puts it just now is precisely
16 right, but please let us not prolong the debate.
17 MR RAMPTON: Keep in the front of your mind what the Judge
18 said, lest you go down some other routes or you may get a
19 ticking off from the bench, Mr Irving?
20 A. [Mr Irving]: That is a risk when one is under cross-examination for
21 several days.
22 MR RAMPTON: Please turn to page 12, Mr Irving.
23 A. [Mr Irving]: Yes.
24 Q. [Mr Rampton]: I will start at 549. I am not at all sure what you are
25 talking about but I do not think it matters. Towards the
26 top of the page: “I do not like the historian writers who
. P-145
1 have been going around for last the 20 years saying this.
2 I do not like them because they have not been using
3 scientific methods”. You know their names because they
4 frequently appear in the newspapers under attack and they
5 have done our cause quite a lot harm I think.”
6 Can I pause there? What do you mean by the
7 words “our cause”? Whose cause?
8 A. [Mr Irving]: Do you mind if I read these few lines again to try to work
9 out what I am talking about?
10 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Please do.
11 MR RAMPTON: And back if you want as well for the content.
12 A. [Mr Irving]: It is a problem. You leap forward ten pages and then say
13 who are we talking about? I do not know. I do not know
14 who we are talking about there.
15 Q. [Mr Rampton]: These people, whoever they are, have been blundering about
16 in the room, saying things or doing things you do not
17 like?
18 A. [Mr Irving]: Yes.
19 Q. [Mr Rampton]: You say:”These people have done our cause quite a lot of
20 harm”. Whose cause, Mr Irving?
21 A. [Mr Irving]: I do not know. I do not know who I am talking about.
22 Q. [Mr Rampton]: You are talking about the cause of like minded
23 anti-Semitic Holocaust deniers, are you not?
24 A. [Mr Irving]: I do not think there is the slight hint of that in those
25 lines.
26 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Who else’s cause would you be talking of?
. P-146
1 A. [Mr Irving]: Obviously I am going to have to read the previous page to
2 see who we are talking about then. (Pause for reading)
3 One interpretation is that it is the defence team of
4 Mr Zundel, who was at that time under appeal, or I think
5 the case was ongoing against him. Or historians like
6 myself. To try and put in words like anti-Semitic and
7 things like that I think is not very helpful.
8 Q. [Mr Rampton]: You may as well have them now, Mr Irving. You will get at
9 the end anyway.
10 A. [Mr Irving]: Are you going to imply that I am anti-Semitic, are you, or
11 my friends are anti-Semitic?
12 Q. [Mr Rampton]: I have said it in opening and I will say it again now if
13 it pleases you so that you will have it in mind —-
14 A. [Mr Irving]: So the newspapers will have it tomorrow, yes.
15 Q. [Mr Rampton]: You may or may not do, but you will certainly get it at
16 the end of case when we have looked at all the evidence.
17 Our case is that you consort with people who are deeply
18 anti-Semitic, and you do it quite frequently, not all the
19 time.
20 A. [Mr Irving]: So did Winston Churchill. Most of his Cabinet ministers
21 were anti-Semitic but does it make Winston Churchill
22 anti-Semitic?
23 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Two blacks do not make a white?
24 A. [Mr Irving]: I am not calling Mr Winston Churchill black. I am just
25 giving that as an example that that is not so far very
26 good evidence.
. P-147
1 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Mr Rampton was putting his case to you.
2 Perhaps wait until you have the whole of it and then
3 comment.
4 MR RAMPTON: What is more, Mr Irving —-
5 A. [Mr Irving]: This is a very serious charge to make, of course.
6 MR RAMPTON: Of course it is. It is a charge I made in opening
7 the case and I intend to make it good.
8 A. [Mr Irving]: You did not make the anti-Semitic charge in opening the
9 case.
10 Q. [Mr Rampton]: I made the charge that you made statements, and I now add
11 the word “deliberately”, which are deliberately designed
12 to feed the virulent anti-Semitism which alas today in the
13 world is still alive and kicking, and you know perfectly
14 well that that is what you are doing. I further say, and
15 we will look at some of this down the line, that some of
16 the observations you make on these occasions are
17 themselves greatly anti-Semitic.
18 A. [Mr Irving]: Well, no doubt we can take each of these seriatim when we
19 come to them.
20 Q. [Mr Rampton]: We will. You will remember the one that I read out in
21 opening, will you not?
22 A. [Mr Irving]: Mr Rampton, your instructing solicitors may not have told
23 you but we had correspondence on this matter, and
24 I invited the solicitors to say to me whether they were
25 going to level at me the allegation that I am anti-Semitic
26 so that I would have the opportunity to lead evidence on
. P-148
1 that. They refused to state at that time that that was
2 their intention. You are now coming totally against the
3 principles of the new rules with this fresh allegation
4 that I am in some way anti-Semitic.
5 Q. [Mr Rampton]: No, I did not say that.
6 A. [Mr Irving]: I think it is highly improper.
7 Q. [Mr Rampton]: If you will read the transcript of what I said I chose my
8 words very carefully.
9 A. [Mr Irving]: I am sure you did, Mr Rampton, so that they get in the
10 newspapers in that form tomorrow. I am sure you know
11 exactly how carefully to choose your words to make a slur
12 like that.
13 Q. [Mr Rampton]: I do. That is why they pay me, Mr Irving. Precision is
14 everything, I find. You make observations — I am trying
15 to repeat myself without looking at the screen — which
16 can fairly characterised — I am not sure that I have it
17 verbatim — as grossly anti-Semitic on these occasions.
18 A. [Mr Irving]: I am not going to dignify that with an answer, Mr Rampton,
19 unless his Lord invites me to.
20 MR JUSTICE GRAY: No, you do not have to. I will invite
21 Mr Rampton in due course to make that good by reference to
22 what you said. That is elementary fairness to you.
23 A. [Mr Irving]: To lead appropriate evidence.
24 MR RAMPTON: Thank you. I could not possibly say it if I did
25 not have that intention, Mr Irving.
26 A. [Mr Irving]: It would have been nice if your solicitors had informed me
. P-149
1 in good time that this was going to be your intention,
2 which would have given us time over the months to build up
3 the appropriate dossier of counter material.
4 MR JUSTICE GRAY: That is a fair point because I am not sure
5 this is spelled out quite as clearly as you did just now,
6 Mr Rampton.
7 A. [Mr Irving]: Very clearly indeed in the correspondence between the
8 parties.
9 MR RAMPTON: It is not spelled out clearly in the original
10 defence, my Lord, I accept.
11 MR JUSTICE GRAY: I have just been looking at the way it is put
12 —-
13 MR RAMPTON: I think it is spelled out very clearly in the
14 statement of case. I think it is. I think I read it the
15 other day.
16 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Tab 6, not so clearly as all that.
17 A. [Mr Irving]: But this is clearly playing to the gallery in the form of
18 the press gallery.
19 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Mr Irving, really, I must be the judge of
20 that, must I not?
21 A. [Mr Irving]: It goes to the conduct by the Defendants of the case when
22 the time comes, my Lord.
23 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Of course it does.
24 MR RAMPTON: Do you know anything at all about life at the Bar,
25 Mr Irving? Do you know anything about the rules under
26 which we operate?
. P-150
1 A. [Mr Irving]: I am totally ignorant, as you are now well aware,
2 Mr Rampton.
3 Q. [Mr Rampton]: If you did, you might not say something like that?
4 A. [Mr Irving]: I am aware you are not supposed to lead evidence you
5 cannot justify.
6 Q. [Mr Rampton]: I am never supposed to say anything that I do not think
7 can be justified, that is right.
8 MR JUSTICE GRAY: In the summary of case, which is quite short
9 and that is to its credit, I think you will see the
10 observation I just made is perhaps not an unfair one.
11 MR RAMPTON: I did not sorry, I did not catch your Lordship’s
12 observation.
13 MR JUSTICE GRAY: I think I said that I did not read the
14 summary of case as putting the Defendants’ case as clearly
15 and in quite the terms that you put just now.
16 MR RAMPTON: My Lord, I do not think I can do better, and I do
17 not think I did better just now, than what appears in box
18 80 on page 27.
19 MR JUSTICE GRAY: I was looking at the front. You are looking
20 at the end.
21 MR RAMPTON: I am looking at the summary we give of what we say
22 is to be drawn from the content of Mr Irving’s speeches.
23 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Do you want to have a look at that,
24 Mr Irving?
25 A. [Mr Irving]: I think your Lordship sees my objection to this particular
26 kind of thrust.
. P-151
1 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Yes.
2 MR RAMPTON: Shall I read it, Mr Irving?
3 MR JUSTICE GRAY: I think you ought to, Mr Rampton, because
4 I think you have corrected me rightly, if I may say so.
5 MR RAMPTON: “P – that is P for plaintiff as he then was –
6 Mr Irving, is a right-wing pro Nazi ideologue, as is
7 demonstrated by the views he has expressed in his speeches
8 and publications. The Defendants will refer to the
9 anti-Semitic racist and misogynistic tone and contents of
10 Mr Irving’s speeches and publications, including those
11 referred to above and in sections 1-5″.
12 A. [Mr Irving]: Very well. If you are going to lead evidence about that
13 topic, then you ought to do so earlier, sooner rather than
14 later.
15 MR JUSTICE GRAY: That is a fair point. The evidence must be
16 led. But that is the case. It is spelled out clearly.
17 A. [Mr Irving]: Sooner rather than later, rather than leaving this
18 allegation in suspense.
19 MR RAMPTON: That is what I am starting on now. I have just
20 started on your speeches and publication.
21 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Shall we press on?
22 MR RAMPTON: Where am I now? I am still in 1988.
23 MR JUSTICE GRAY: We are still in Ottawa.
24 MR RAMPTON: Or was it Toronto? That is what I am going to try
25 and prove, Mr Irving, over the next few hours or days or
26 however long it may take.
. P-152
1 A. [Mr Irving]: Would your Lordship allow me then to lead evidence to
2 refute these allegation? S.
3 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Yes of course.
4 A. [Mr Irving]: I am not sure how we can do it.
5 MR JUSTICE GRAY: You can do it yourself.
6 A. [Mr Irving]: Or I can put it to one of the experts, Professor Levin or
7 Professor Eatwell. It is an easy slur to make, but it
8 sticks.
9 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Let us concentrate on the evidence that is
10 going to be put now.
11 MR RAMPTON: The only thing which is going to stick in this
12 case, Mr Irving, is his Lordship’s judgment. At least,
13 I hope so.
14 A. [Mr Irving]: Shall we proceed with the questioning, Mr Rampton.
15 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Yes, Mr Irving. We will continue, shall we? I think
16 I was at the words: “But Mr Zundel has used the scientific
17 methods and, taking this as a starting point, I have now
18 begun over the last few months going round the archives,
19 with a completely open mind, looking for the evidence
20 myself because, if Auschwitz, just to take that
21 one cardinal tent pole of the case, itself was not an
22 extermination factory, then what is the evidence that it
23 was?” I do not understand that sentence but I understand
24 the sense of it. “This is one thing I have to look at.
25 How did all the evidence come into existence? It is an
26 interesting case because we all now accept that the media
. P-153
1 knows, everybody knows, it has become a matter of common
2 experience, judicial notice has been taken of the fact
3 that Auschwitz was an extermination camp. So what is the
4 evidence that it was? If you then start going all your way
5 back down the pipeline to find out where this evidence
6 comes from, you come up with one or two or three documents
7 and eyewitness accounts and that is all.”
8 Now, that was your account of the state of the
9 evidence regarding the proposition that Auschwitz was a
10 totas fabrik in August 1988, some five months after the
11 end of the Zundel trial.
12 A. [Mr Irving]: Yes.
13 Q. [Mr Rampton]: You had not even bothered going to look at the archive in
14 Auschwitz, had you?
15 A. [Mr Irving]: I think I did not say here that I went to the Auschwitz
16 archives.
17 Q. [Mr Rampton]: You said you had been round the archives with a completely
18 open mind looking for the evidence.
19 A. [Mr Irving]: Yes.
20 Q. [Mr Rampton]: You tell your audience that all you come up with is one or
21 two or three documents and eyewitnesses accounts and that
22 is all.
23 A. [Mr Irving]: Let me explain to you the situation at the time as
24 I understand it, archively speaking. The Soviet archives
25 were not opened until 1990, I believe I am correct in
26 saying.
. P-154
1 Q. [Mr Rampton]: I am listening. Please continue.
2 A. [Mr Irving]: I do not like talking to the back of counsel.
3 MR JUSTICE GRAY: It happens all time in court. It has to. It
4 is not rudeness or anything else. It is just the way of
5 the world.
6 A. [Mr Irving]: I promise I will not turn my back on people when they are
7 speaking to me.
8 Q. [Mr Justice Gray]: Just carry on with your answer, please.
9 A. [Mr Irving]: Soviet archives had not been opened at that time. Poland
10 was still behind the iron curtain. The wall had not come
11 done. Am I making my point?
12 MR RAMPTON: No, not in the least bit.
13 A. [Mr Irving]: Which of those sentences did you not understand?
14 Q. [Mr Rampton]: I understood the first sentence, which was completely
15 irrelevant because we are in 1988. I am not interested in
16 Moscow. I asked you about the archive at Auschwitz so
17 leave Moscow out of it.
18 A. [Mr Irving]: Our present state of information about Auschwitz, the
19 superior information we now have about Auschwitz, comes
20 primarily from the fact that the Russians, when they
21 arrived in Auschwitz, captured the records of the camp
22 intact, particularly the construction records of the camp,
23 which therefore went to the Moscow archives. Poland,
24 where Auschwitz is situated, was behind the iron curtain.
25 Q. [Mr Rampton]: I am getting some information. Continue. Yes?
26 A. [Mr Irving]: Principal archives which were being used by historians at
. P-155
1 this time were in the national archives in Washington, and
2 the German Federal archives, to which I at that time still
3 had access, not having been banned from them by the German
4 government in the interests of German people.
5 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Are you familiar with the work which you disparagingly
6 call the French country chemist, Jon-Claude Presac?
7 A. [Mr Irving]: I am not familiar with his work, no.
8 Q. [Mr Rampton]: You know who he is, do you not?
9 A. [Mr Irving]: Yes. He wrote this being volume on the desk.
10 Q. [Mr Rampton]: He did indeed. Do you know that he went to the archive in
11 Auschwitz in 1982 and 1983?
12 A. [Mr Irving]: Maybe they found favour in him which they did not find in
13 me.
14 Q. [Mr Rampton]: You never asked?
15 A. [Mr Irving]: I am not a Holocaust historian, Mr Rampton. At this time
16 in 1988 I was writing, if I remember correctly, the latest
17 edition of the Hermann Goring biography or I was working
18 on the second volume of my Winston Churchill biography,
19 neither of which would have required me to go to
20 Auschwitz.
21 Q. [Mr Rampton]: You cannot have it both ways. You cannot have it that
22 Auschwitz did not exist and you cannot have it that there
23 is no evidence in the archive if you have never looked.
24 A. [Mr Irving]: If I say I have been round the archives, I am not saying
25 I have been round all available archives, including those
26 had Poland and elsewhere. I am saying I have been round
. P-156
1 the archives, which at that time is perfectly true. I
2 might even have gone to the Public Records Office to see
3 what they had.
4 Q. [Mr Rampton]: You might have been round the archives of the Royal
5 Botanical Gardens in Kew, for all I know.
6 A. [Mr Irving]: I find that a cheap remark.
7 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Of course it is cheap, but this is a very cheap—-
8 A. [Mr Irving]: Which you say is a matter of great sensitivity to the
9 Jewish people.
10 Q. [Mr Rampton]: This is a very cheap fraud that you have perpetrated on
11 the 50 or so people in this room because what you are
12 telling me is that you have looked everywhere and all
13 anybody can come up with is two or three documents.
14 A. [Mr Irving]: I have not said I have looked everywhere. This is again
15 your manipulation of the sentence, your rather superfluous
16 gloss. To look everywhere you need to spend the kind of
17 money that your team has spent.
18 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Can I put it a different way round? Which
19 were the archives that you had spent a few months going
20 round?
21 A. [Mr Irving]: I do not want to be ambushed by references from my own
22 diary, but I would suspect, from the way I put that
23 sentence, that I went to the German Federal Archives and I
24 went to the national archives in Washington, and possibly
25 to the Hoover library in California where they also have a
26 certain amount of material relating to this.
. P-157
1 Q. [Mr Justice Gray]: So you have done a fair amount of research into the
2 Holocaust, or into Auschwitz?
3 A. [Mr Irving]: Yes, but not specifically for that. I would have gone
4 there for other purposes and I would then have called up
5 roles of microfilm of Heinreich Himmler’s papers which are
6 in great abundance in the national archives and I would
7 have looked at some of the Nuremberg documents. But I had
8 not travelled there specifically to research the
9 Holocaust. At this time I was researching probably
10 Winston Churchill Volume 2.
11 MR RAMPTON: So, when you said on page 6 that in relation to
12 Hitler you had been round the archives of the entire
13 world, we have to exclude Auschwitz from that, do we not?
14 A. [Mr Irving]: Can I see the exact reference?
15 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Yes, of course you can. You are talking about Hitler and
16 his knowledge of whatever, I do not know, Auschwitz
17 I suppose, five lines up from the bottom?
18 A. [Mr Irving]: Because I worked in the archives of the entire world,
19 including the public archives here in Wellington Street.
20 That shows as Ottawa, by the way.
21 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Please do not give us a list. The entire world is the
22 entire world, but apparently does not have Auschwitz in
23 it.
24 A. [Mr Irving]: It did not have anything behind the iron curtain and the
25 people who were in the audience at that time would have
26 realized that.
. P-158
1 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Oh, I see. So they would not have been in the least bit
2 deceived?
3 A. [Mr Irving]: Mr Rampton, you have to put yourself back to 1988 before
4 the wall came down.
5 Q. [Mr Rampton]: I do not think so, because I am told that the archive at
6 Auschwitz was readily accessible to anybody with the
7 proper credentials, that is to say I am an historian,
8 please may I have a look because I intend to write a
9 serious piece of research about this, before I go public
10 on what it was or was not.
11 A. [Mr Irving]: So we are coming back on to the negligence argument
12 again?
13 MR RAMPTON: No.
14 MR JUSTICE GRAY: The picture I have, and I think we probably
15 need to press on a little bit, is that Auschwitz may or
16 may not have been accessible to somebody like yourself,
17 but you never in fact enquired about getting access to the
18 Auschwitz archive?
19 A. [Mr Irving]: I ought to have but did not. If I was going to write
20 about Auschwitz and the Holocaust then I ought to have but
21 did not.
22 Q. [Mr Justice Gray]: That is a fair summary of factual position?
23 A. [Mr Irving]: Yes, with the rider that I added, my Lord, that if I
24 intended to write about the Holocaust, then I would have
25 done that and ought to have done it.
26 MR RAMPTON: I add to this, and you not only deliberately
. P-159
1 decided not to go to Auschwitz because you were not
2 interested in finding the truth before making these
3 statements —-
4 A. [Mr Irving]: Deliberately decided not to?
5 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Yes, deliberately decided not to. You made a deliberate
6 decision. If you were the slightest bit interested in the
7 truth about Auschwitz, you would have gone there.
8 A. [Mr Irving]: If I was writing a book about Auschwitz and the Holocaust,
9 then I would have gone there. When I became deeply
10 involved in it, thanks to this litigation, and I tried to
11 go to Auschwitz, then I was banned from entry, the only
12 person in the world who has so far been banned,
13 apparently.
14 Q. [Mr Rampton]: That was recently, Mr Irving.
15 MR JUSTICE GRAY: There we are.
16 MR RAMPTON: What is more, Mr Irving, what is important about
17 this very early speech in your Holocaust denial career, is
18 that you actually deliberately misled your audience in
19 Toronto or Ottawa or wherever it is into believing that
20 you had done the research and had found that there was no
21 evidence.
22 A. [Mr Irving]: I can only repeat what I previously said, Mr Rampton, that
23 my audience were not stupid and they knew that the iron
24 curtain was still standing at that time, even if you have
25 forgotten it.
26 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Is that the lot from that speech?
. P-160
1 MR RAMPTON: That is all I want from Toronto/Ottawa, whichever
2 it be.
3 A. [Mr Irving]: There is, of course, a great deal more in that speech, my
4 Lord, which your Lordship may well read later on. The
5 reasons why one is sceptical about the report by the two
6 Slovac Jews, for example, and so on. I am not just
7 speaking off the top of my head. It is quite clear, I
8 think, by that time that I went to the Reisaltz Library
9 and had a look at the origins of the war refugee board and
10 its entire file on that report and so on. It is a bit
11 deceptive really just to take these single paragraphs out
12 and hold them up.
13 MR JUSTICE GRAY: We may have to have more discussion about the
14 mechanics of dealing with the contextual points that you
15 want to take.
16 MR RAMPTON: I quite agree about that and, as I think I have
17 already said at some time in this case if not just now,
18 one of the problems with this sort of an exercise is that
19 there is a danger that the most innocent selectivity can
20 lead to distortion. I do not want that to happen. I do
21 not want to skin this cat by a false case, if you see what
22 I mean.
23 MR JUSTICE GRAY: I follow that. This is not a criticism and
24 please do not think it is, but we have taken, I do not
25 know, three quarters of an hour on one relatively
26 unimportant speech, and I do not think we can do that with
. P-161
1 all of them, can we? It really is not a criticism. This
2 is very difficult.
3 MR RAMPTON: I realize that. I would make the complaint, if
4 I had to, that I never get an answer to my question.
5 MR JUSTICE GRAY: I am not being critical either way.
6 MR RAMPTON: I get a speech, and that is one of the reasons why
7 it takes such a long time.
8 MR JUSTICE GRAY: I did suggest prime examples.
9 MR RAMPTON: That is quite a prime example, in our submission.
10 MR JUSTICE GRAY: I think the answer is a selection of prime
11 examples, followed by a marked up list of those that are
12 relied on, and then and then we will work out how best to
13 allow Mr Irving to take the context.
14 MR RAMPTON: My Lord, I think I already read some of the most
15 important parts of the press conference announcing the
16 publication of the Leuchter report.
17 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Can you give me the reference?
18 MR RAMPTON: That is tab 5 of same file.
19 A. [Mr Irving]: If you had listened, with respect, to what I said about
20 weighting the verbal utterances less heavily in the
21 written books and so on, perhaps we would have avoided
22 part of this misery.
23 MR JUSTICE GRAY: That is not fair. I am anxious not to have
24 a sort of running commentary about the evidence, but the
25 fact is, it seems to me on what I have heard so far, that
26 you have been far more unrestrained in your assertions
. P-162
1 about Auschwitz when speaking at these various talks that
2 you gave.
3 A. [Mr Irving]: Private gatherings, yes.
4 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Gatherings. Well, I do not know that it
5 matters very much that they are private gatherings.
6 I think the Defendants are perfectly entitled to put that
7 to you.
8 A. [Mr Irving]: Yes.
9 MR JUSTICE GRAY: I bear in mind what you said about these
10 being, relatively speaking, unconsidered remarks, but the
11 fact is you made them, so I am not going to stop
12 Mr Rampton. Indeed, I think it is very important that we
13 do see some of the things that have been said. We are on
14 now to the press conference. That is Tab 5.
15 MR RAMPTON: Mr Irving was about to say provided your Lordship
16 does not attach too much weight. On the contrary, Mr
17 Irving—-
18 A. [Mr Irving]: I was not. I was about to say provided he bears in mind
19 they are extempore, not scripted.
20 Q. [Mr Rampton]: On the contrary, Mr Irving, what you say in private to
21 what I might call people of like mind is, in our
22 submission, likely to be far more revealing of your true
23 thoughts and motives than what you carefully craft for
24 publication to the world at large. Do you follow me?
25 A. [Mr Irving]: I do not follow where you get people of like mind from.
26 What is the evidence for that?
. P-163
1 Q. [Mr Rampton]: We are coming to that when we look at some of your
2 remarks, for example, to the national alliance.
3 A. [Mr Irving]: We have just been looking at this particular meeting.
4 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Let us get on. I really think we are spending
5 an awful lot of time debating and fencing. The thing is,
6 I need to be shown what it is the Defendants rely on that
7 you said and to hear what you say about it now, Mr Irving.
8 MR RAMPTON: In answering your Lordship’s request I am only
9 showing your Lordship a fragment of what we rely on.
10 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Yes. I follow that. Prime example. So
11 press conference.
Section 164.12 to 185.22
12 MR RAMPTON: Can we turn next, please, to page 35 of tab 5?
13 Before I do that, Mr Julius has drawn to my attention
14 something which your Lordship may actually think really
15 rather important. Mr Irving challenges me to justify my
16 observation, proposition, that these remarks, these, what
17 shall I say, unclothed naked remarks, are to people of
18 like mind. I do that by reference, if I may, before
19 I leave tab 4, to page 16, and we see this again when we
20 get, for example, to Calgary in 1991.
21 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Whereabouts on the page?
22 MR RAMPTON: In the middle of the page there is a sentence
23 which starts: “The Auschwitz propaganda lie that was
24 starting to run in 1944 is now out of control and it is
25 going to take he men of the kind of stature of Ernst
26 Zundel to kill that particular hare. Applause.”
. P-164
1 That is not the only such example.
2 A. [Mr Irving]: Of what?
3 MR JUSTICE GRAY: I think the question, because it was not
4 quite put as a question, is does that not show that you
5 were addressing a bunch of supporters of Zundel?
6 A. [Mr Irving]: I think they were just people who appreciated the fact
7 that I had compassion for a man who had had his house
8 burned down and been subjected to repeated physical
9 violence and that he was still standing up to this kind of
10 intimidation.
11 MR JUSTICE GRAY: That is the answer. On to the press
12 conference, page 35.
13 MR RAMPTON: Page 35. You are answering questions at the press
14 conference. Just under halfway down the page somebody
15 asks: “Everybody who has written about their camp
16 experiences —-” You do not allow them to finish what
17 they were going to say, Mr Irving. You butt in: “Anybody
18 who has described gas chambers in slave labour camps at
19 Auschwitz or anywhere else is to my mind making it up.”
20 A. [Mr Irving]: Yes.
21 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Did you mean to say that?
22 A. [Mr Irving]: Well, I think that, if I had written this sentence out
23 logically and not in this incoherent scramble, it would
24 have been anybody who has described gas chambers in the
25 slave labour camp at Auschwitz is to my mind making it up
26 and it has probably come out a bit garbled, for which of
. P-165
1 course I accept full responsibility.
2 Q. [Mr Rampton]: What do you mean, garbled? It is a perfectly good English
3 sentence. Garble: It is as clear as a shaft of
4 sunlight.
5 A. [Mr Irving]: In slave labour camps at Auschwitz or elsewhere.
6 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Yes, exactly. Or elsewhere. That is why you have used the
7 plural, slave labour camps.
8 A. [Mr Irving]: That is why I am talking about garbled. You cannot have
9 camps at Auschwitz, when Auschwitz was just one of two
10 camps. It is garbled.
11 MR JUSTICE GRAY: “All” should be “and” really.
12 A. [Mr Irving]: Yes, but the sense of that is saying anybody who describes
13 gas chambers in the slave labour camp at Auschwitz is to
14 my mind making it up.
15 MR RAMPTON: Or elsewhere, gas chambers elsewhere, is making it
16 up too, are they not?
17 A. [Mr Irving]: Well, I might have to be pernickety and say I would like
18 to see me actually saying that and hear what emphasis is
19 attached to the words verbatim. This is the problem
20 with transcripts, particularly when it is an incoherent
21 passage.
22 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Questioner: Not at slave labour camps either? Is that
23 what you are saying?
24 A. [Mr Irving]: They have obviously got hold of the wrong end of stick
25 straightaway.
26 Q. [Mr Rampton]: You repeated, no gas chambers at slave labour camps
. P-166
1 plural.
2 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Mr Rampton, is that really fair? Over the
3 page, “Question: What do you think happened at Treblinka
4 and Sobibor? I do not know”.
5 MR RAMPTON: Fair enough, my Lord, yes. Let us concentrate on
6 Auschwitz. That is danger of taking these plums —-
7 A. [Mr Irving]: Springing them on me like this, that is the danger.
8 Q. [Mr Rampton]: What did you say?
9 A. [Mr Irving]: One springs just fragments on me and on the court like
10 this, but his Lordship has quite wisely read ahead.
11 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Mr Irving, you have for a very long time, I mean months,
12 had a whole list of the speeches, the transcripts of
13 speeches etc. on which we rely. You have had copies of
14 them. And you made them in the first place. How can you
15 say I am springing it on you? What shall I do? Give you
16 a marked up copy Is that the best thing? I do not know
17 what your Lordship thinks?
18 A. [Mr Irving]: Sarcasm apart.
19 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Shall we press on and find the other passages
20 relied on? I just think we have to get to the passages
21 that are relied on.
22 MR RAMPTON: I am looking, my Lord, yes?
23 A. [Mr Irving]: My Lord, these are not my transcripts. These are
24 transcripts made by —
25 MR RAMPTON: I am looking for a way round two problems, one
26 that this is taking far too much time.
. P-167
1 MR JUSTICE GRAY: If you went direct to the passages, as it
2 were, one after another, would that not help?
3 MR RAMPTON: I just did that.
4 MR JUSTICE GRAY: I know.
5 MR RAMPTON: I do not want to be disobedient but this is
6 cross-examination and I cannot just stand in
7 cross-examination and read out passages without the
8 witness being given a chance to speak about them.
9 MR JUSTICE GRAY: No, he has to have a chance to comment but
10 I just wonder whether we do not want to go from one to
11 another with a minimum of intervening exchanges.
12 MR RAMPTON: I will do what I can. I am not going to get the
13 file out for this one because it will take too much time.
14 Do you remember you made a speech at Dresden in February
15 1990?
16 A. [Mr Irving]: On the anniversary of the air raid, yes.
17 Q. [Mr Rampton]: So what?
18 A. [Mr Irving]: So what?
19 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Let us concentrate on what was said.
20 MR RAMPTON: Yes. Did you say something like this: The
21 Holocaust of Germans in Dresden really happened. That of
22 the Jews in the gas chambers at Auschwitz is an
23 invention. I am ashamed to be an Englishman?
24 A. [Mr Irving]: Could I just have that?
25 Q. [Mr Rampton]: By all means, so far as I am concerned.
26 A. [Mr Irving]: There is what happened in Dresden and of that I am
. P-168
1 ashamed. I am sorry, my Lord, I have only got one copy
2 with me but it is a picture of the old market in Dresden,
3 thousands of bodies, victims of the air raid. Mr Rampton,
4 you mentioned it.
5 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Yes but I am going to ask you to put it
6 down. We are going to spend no doubt a lot of time on
7 Dresden. The reasons, as you must appreciate, that
8 Mr Rampton put that alleged quote was nothing to do with
9 Dresden but what you said by way of comparison between
10 Dresden and Auschwitz. Did you make that comparison?
11 A. [Mr Irving]: Perfectly entitled to I think.
12 MR RAMPTON: Did you say: I am not at present interested in
13 Dresden. We can argue moral and historical questions
14 about Dresden until the cows come home. At the moment
15 Mr Irving we are dealing with your statements about
16 Auschwitz.
17 A. [Mr Irving]: Can I see the passages you are relying on?
18 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Which is why I said so what?
19 A. [Mr Irving]: Can I see the actual passage you are relying on?
20 MR JUSTICE GRAY: That you are perfectly entitled to do.
21 MR RAMPTON: You have to get out another file, D3(i)?
22 A. [Mr Irving]: I am afraid, when somebody says so what about Dresden,—-
23 Q. [Mr Rampton]: No.
24 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Please. There is going to have to be a
25 ruling before long. This is just absurd, this back and
26 forth exchanging. Dresden is, I am sure, where is it in
. P-169
1 the index?
2 MR RAMPTON: D3(i) 25, page 493.
3 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Do you know the internal pagination
4 Mr Rampton?
5 MR RAMPTON: No. I do not have a copy of it here. I have only
6 got an extract.
7 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Have you found the passage, Mr Irving?
8 A. [Mr Irving]: I am sorry I have not.
9 MR JUSTICE GRAY: I think, if things are being put, they really
10 have to be available in documentary form in case Mr Irving
11 wants, as he has in this case, to see the context.
12 MR RAMPTON: I agree with that. All that follows from this is
13 that the reference I have been given is not the right
14 one. It is entirely my fault. I am using the wrong
15 idiot’s guide to those transcripts. Can we forget Dresden
16 for the moment, Mr Irving?
17 A. [Mr Irving]: I can never forget Dresden.
18 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Not Dresden what happened, what you said about Auschwitz
19 at Dresden, and then come back to it at some later stage
20 if we have to? In D3(i), page 25, tab 25, may I please
21 have a copy of that file? There should be, my Lord, a
22 speech at an IHR conference on 14th October 1990.
23 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Was that where we were just now, D3(i)?
24 MR RAMPTON: Yes, I think it was because what I am told by
25 Miss Rogers is that in that speech one finds a reference
26 back to what Mr Irving said at Dresden. That, I think, is
. P-170
1 the point, which is why I was given the page reference
2 which I will now go back to. I am sorry about the
3 muddle.
4 A. [Mr Irving]: What is the section again, please, or tab?
5 MR JUSTICE GRAY: 25.
6 MR RAMPTON: Page 493 in this tab. The page numbers are at the
7 top of the page, Mr Irving.
8 A. [Mr Irving]: I have it.
9 Q. [Mr Rampton]: In the right-hand column of page 493 somebody has
10 written: “Irving concluded his address” — this is about
11 near the end of the middle paragraph — “in Dresden with
12 these words: ‘Ladies and gentlemen, survivors and
13 descendants of the holocaust of Dresden, the holocaust of
14 Germans in Dresden really happened. That of the Jews in
15 the gas chambers of Auschwitz is an invention. I am
16 ashamed to be an Englishman'”.
17 This article starts with the heading:
18 “Battleship Auschwitz, David Irving, (Remarks presented
19 to the Tenth International Revisionist Conference With an
20 Introduction by Mark Weber”. That recitation or
21 repetition of what you had said at Dresden, therefore,
22 comes, does it not, the mouth of Mr Weber?
23 A. [Mr Irving]: Did he write this or is this —
24 MR JUSTICE GRAY: It is his introduction to your talk.
25 A. [Mr Irving]: Very well.
26 Q. [Mr Justice Gray]: It looks as if he did, but the question is was he
. P-171
1 accurate, was he right, had you said that?
2 MR RAMPTON: Did you say that?
3 A. [Mr Irving]: I do not think so. There is a transcript of my speech in
4 Dresden which your researchers could have obtained.
5 Q. [Mr Rampton]: OK. So Mr Weber got it wrong?
6 A. [Mr Irving]: Well, on the evidence of this document, yes.
7 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Where is the transcript?
8 A. [Mr Irving]: They could have had the video tape transcribed.
9 MR RAMPTON: No, we have not got a tape of Dresden?
10 A. [Mr Irving]: I am sorry, but a tape was made by Mr Geiger.
11 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Maybe it was, but we have not got it.
12 A. [Mr Irving]: I am sorry but —-
13 Q. [Mr Rampton]: If you would be kind enough to retrieve it, we should very
14 much like to have it transcribed.
15 A. [Mr Irving]: I will see if I can obtain a copy for you.
16 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Which is why our only source of what you said in Dresden
17 is this document.
18 A. [Mr Irving]: Yes, it is not the kind of source that I personally would
19 have relied upon.
20 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Who is Mr Weber?
21 A. [Mr Irving]: Mr Weber is, I think he is the head of the Institute
22 Historical Review.
23 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Do you know him well?
24 A. [Mr Irving]: Yes.
25 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Is he a reliable gentleman?
26 A. [Mr Irving]: On the evidence of that, no.
. P-172
1 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Is he a friend of yours?
2 A. [Mr Irving]: Probably no longer.
3 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Probably no longer. Seriously though, how close is your
4 association with Mr Weber?
5 A. [Mr Irving]: I see him about once every two years.
6 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Do you correspond regularly?
7 A. [Mr Irving]: He occasionally telephones me. I am glad he is paying the
8 bill.
9 MR JUSTICE GRAY: I think if I were you, I would remember
10 having said that if I said it.
11 A. [Mr Irving]: Having said this? It is the precise wording that worries
12 me, my Lord. The sense is correct.
13 Q. [Mr Justice Gray]: I see. Do not worry about the precise wording. Is the
14 substance of it, did you make the points that Dresden was
15 a Holocaust or Auschwitz is a non-Holocaust because it did
16 not happen?
17 A. [Mr Irving]: I did not say that and I do not think even this says that,
18 my Lord. What I have said is that Dresden was a real
19 Holocaust. I have witnessed the pictures.
20 Q. [Mr Justice Gray]: Well, you then go on to say that of the Jews in the gas
21 chambers of Auschwitz is an invention?
22 A. [Mr Irving]: Well, it is no secret that I have said that no Jews were
23 killed in the gas chambers at Auschwitz that are shown to
24 the tourists, but that is the kind of limitation which
25 Mr Rampton would probably find unhelpful.
26 MR RAMPTON: No. That is one of your own, what I might say,
. P-173
1 self-set traps, Mr Irving. You have occasionally made
2 reference to the reconstructed gas chamber at Auschwitz 1,
3 the Stumlager. You have on numerous occasions said that
4 there were no gas chambers anywhere in the German system.
5 That must include Birkenhau; we have just looked at one
6 such remark.
7 A. [Mr Irving]: Well, I think you ought really to lead evidence to this
8 and not just summarize —-
9 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Am I right or — it will —-
10 A. [Mr Irving]: — to this effect.
11 Q. [Mr Rampton]: — save so much time, Mr Irving, if you would accept that
12 you have on numerous occasions said there were no gas
13 chambers, plural, at Auschwitz?
14 A. [Mr Irving]: Well, I am sure that if you had evidence to that effect,
15 then you would have started off the afternoon by saying
16 this.
17 Q. [Mr Rampton]: No. Well, I will try to find your Chappaquidick remark.
18 Here we are, this is in November 1990, something called
19 the Latvian Hall —-
20 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Reference?
21 MR RAMPTON: That is the wrong one. I am so sorry. There is
22 the one I read out. D2(i), my Lord, tab 9. This is 1991,
23 so I have got ahead of the chronology, so it does not
24 matter. I will start, if I may, with page 14?
25 A. [Mr Irving]: At tab 9, you say?
26 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Yes, I think so.
. P-174
1 MR RAMPTON: Page 14 of tab 9, Mr Irving?
2 A. [Mr Irving]: Yes.
3 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Which is a speech at, well, this is called Travel Lodge
4 Airport Inn, is that the same thing as Latvian Hall?
5 A. [Mr Irving]: 2,000 miles away, otherwise it is the same, yes.
6 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Oh, yes, this is Calgary, yes. Quite right. Now I am
7 going to start at —-
8 MR JUSTICE GRAY: 10 lines down.
9 MR RAMPTON: Yes, something like that. You were saying that
10 Elie Wiesel is a liar. I am not the least bit interested
11 in the answer to that question — it is not a question —
12 that observation, not the slightest bit, so please do not
13 but in with something about Eli Wiesel. “And so are the
14 other eyewitnesses in Auschwitz who claim they saw
15 gassings going on because there were no gas chambers in
16 Auschwitz, as the forensic tests show.”
17 Mr Irving, is that right?
18 A. [Mr Irving]: Yes.
19 Q. [Mr Rampton]: So when I said a moment ago that you had referred to gas
20 chambers in the plural, as you had at the Leuchter press
21 conference, I was right?
22 A. [Mr Irving]: Well, I could quite simply say this is a matter of English
23 grammar.
24 Q. [Mr Rampton]: No.
25 A. [Mr Irving]: I could say there is no Chinaman sitting in your team, and
26 I could equally well say there are no Chinamen sitting in
. P-175
1 your team. Both facts are equally correct if there is not
2 one.
3 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Yes, Mr Irving, that is, I am afraid, a rather poor
4 answer.
5 A. [Mr Irving]: It is an exact parallel.
6 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Mr Irving, you said at the Chelsea Press Conference, the
7 Leuchter Press Conference, that there were no gas chambers
8 at Auschwitz or elsewhere?
9 A. [Mr Irving]: Mr Rampton, you are showing us one speech in Calgary and
10 suddenly you switch to Chelsea.
11 Q. [Mr Rampton]: I am going to show you a dozen references.
12 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Well, shall we deal with this one first?
13 MR RAMPTON: When you made that remark, am I right, am I
14 not —-
15 A. [Mr Irving]: If there was no gas chamber at Auschwitz, then there were
16 no gas chambers at Auschwitz.
17 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Mr Irving, please try to focus on the question.
18 A. [Mr Irving]: It is precisely the question you asked me and I am saying
19 yes.
20 Q. [Mr Rampton]: No, you had said no gas chambers, plural, at Auschwitz;
21 what it means we can argue about later on. You knew when
22 you made that observation, did you not, Mr Irving, that
23 Mr Leuchter had purported to sample the ruins of the
24 supposed gas chambers at Birkenhau, did you not?
25 A. [Mr Irving]: Also, yes.
26 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Yes. So your assertion was meant to mean there were no
. P-176
1 gas chambers at what people generally think of as
2 Auschwitz, that is to say Auschwitz 1 which is relatively
3 unimportant, and also at Birkenhau?
4 A. [Mr Irving]: Oh, we are slopping over the whole thing into Birkenhau
5 too now, are we?
6 Q. [Mr Rampton]: What do you mean? Every time —-
7 A. [Mr Irving]: I am clearly talking about Auschwitz here and you want to
8 drag Birkenhau under that umbrella as well.
9 Q. [Mr Rampton]: You meant to refer to Birkenhau, you meant people to
10 understand Birkenhau, did you not, Mr Irving, because you
11 knew that Mr Leuchter’s forensic tests related to
12 Birkenhau as well as Auschwitz? You also know that
13 everybody thinks when they think of Auschwitz of the
14 massive extermination facility at Birkenhau?
15 A. [Mr Irving]: Well, Mr Rampton, you say “everybody thinks” this, this is
16 another of those wild assertions you make, rather like you
17 previously said everybody says the Holocaust is the gas
18 chambers.
19 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Mr Irving —-
20 MR JUSTICE GRAY: But it is true, Mr Irving, is it not?
21 A. [Mr Irving]: It is not, my Lord. It is a very important point.
22 Q. [Mr Justice Gray]: Just speaking for myself, I had never heard of Birkenhau,
23 but I had heard of Auschwitz.
24 A. [Mr Irving]: Well, you have heard of Auschwitz, but, unfortunately,
25 there are two camps. One is called Auschwitz, one is
26 called Birkenhau and there is a third camp called Monovitz
. P-177
1 which is where the plant was, and experts, the historians,
2 are very careful to distinguish between them.
3 Q. [Mr Justice Gray]: Yes, but in terms of lay reaction and understanding,
4 almost everybody regards the whole complex as being
5 properly called “Auschwitz”?
6 A. [Mr Irving]: I was not talking down to an audience here, my Lord.
7 I was speaking —-
8 Q. [Mr Justice Gray]: They were all experts?
9 A. [Mr Irving]: — in terms of what I could justify. It would be talking
10 down to them —-
11 Q. [Mr Justice Gray]: Anyway, you accept you said what is recorded as having
12 been said here?
13 A. [Mr Irving]: Quite definitely, yes.
14 Q. [Mr Justice Gray]: Do you also accept that you said that the existence of
15 hundreds of thousands of eyewitnesses at Auschwitz, from
16 Auschwitz, is evidence that Auschwitz did not have a
17 dedicated programme to kill the Jews there?
18 A. [Mr Irving]: Yes, and I think that is a very fair comment to make. If
19 we are told that the Nazi programme was one of
20 extermination of every Jew that Hitler could get his hands
21 on, the fact that very large numbers evidently survived
22 this programme, they were in the jaws of death at
23 Auschwitz, and at Birkenhau —-
24 Q. [Mr Justice Gray]: Hundreds of thousands?
25 A. [Mr Irving]: Indeed. The figures are very large indeed if we look at
26 the figures of those who survived the camps. Anne Frank
. P-178
1 was one example, my Lord. She was in Auschwitz. She
2 survived Auschwitz. She was evacuated to Begen-Belsen and
3 died of typhus there with her family.
4 MR RAMPTON: Mr Irving, the public perception, or what you call
5 the legend, is that upwards of a million people were
6 deliberately murdered in gas chambers at what people call
7 Auschwitz. Do you know that the actual number of people
8 murdered by that method at Auschwitz 1 was between 10 and
9 15,000?
10 A. [Mr Irving]: No, I do not know that.
11 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Where did Mr Leuchter do his forensic tests precisely?
12 Tell me that.
13 A. [Mr Irving]: Can we look at the report?
14 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Sorry, take the samples for the forensic tests.
15 A. [Mr Irving]: Can we look at the report and see?
16 Q. [Mr Rampton]: No, no. I want to know what you know about this.
17 I really do not want you to deflect my questions by
18 forever trying to refer to something else. Tell me, if
19 will, whether you know as a fact or you knew as a fact,
20 rather, at the time when you were speaking here that he
21 had taken samples from the ruins of crematoria 2, 3, 4 and
22 5 at Birkenhau?
23 A. [Mr Irving]: I am certainly not going to answer a detailed question
24 like that from memory of a document I saw 12 years ago.
25 Q. [Mr Rampton]: You knew he had taken samples from Birkenhau, did you not?
26 A. [Mr Irving]: Yes.
. P-179
1 Q. [Mr Rampton]: You knew that those samples had been subjected to forensic
2 chemical tests, did you not?
3 A. [Mr Irving]: Yes.
4 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Right. Please turn to page 11 of this transcript that we
5 are presently looking at. About halfway, just under
6 halfway, I would say two thirds of the way down, there is
7 a sentence which begins: “And it was the forensic tests”.
8 A. [Mr Irving]: Yes.
9 Q. [Mr Rampton]: “And it was the forensic tests”, those, Mr Irving, in your
10 mind are the Liechter tests at Auschwitz One and at
11 Birkenhau?
12 A. [Mr Irving]: Yes.
13 Q. [Mr Rampton]: As you have just told us: “On the gas chambers” plural “in
14 Auschwitz which has totally exploded the legend”, now what
15 is “the legend”?
16 A. [Mr Irving]: The legend of Auschwitz as a factory of death,
17 purpose-built with gas chambers that clanked into
18 operation and killed upwards, as you say, of a million
19 people.
20 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Of which the major component, as I have just suggested to
21 you, by a very long way was Birkenhau?
22 A. [Mr Irving]: Yes.
23 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Thank you. Now can we please go to —-
24 A. [Mr Irving]: A major component of a legend, yes.
25 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Of course, Mr Irving. Page 22. I am going to read from
26 the beginning actually of this is in connection with that
. P-180
1 piece of pleading that I read out to you, from the
2 beginning of the big paragraph about a quarter of the way
3 down the page: “There is more to come. ‘Irving has been
4 welcomed in Ottawa. Less publicized but no less
5 disgusting are Irving’s on women. He argues that women’s
6 brains are 10 per cent smaller than men’s”. This is now
7 Mr Irving speaking:
8 “You see they are scraping, it is true, they
9 are scraping the bottom of the barrel now. They are
10 trying to appeal to all the organizations in Ottawa who
11 are being called together under a mass demonstration
12 against the gays, the lesbians, the communists, the trade
13 unions, all these people”.
14 A. [Mr Irving]: You will notice I do not mention the Jews there even in
15 this audience, is that not surprising for an
16 anti-Semitic?
17 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Let us read it through.
18 MR RAMPTON: “All these people are being called out to
19 demonstrate against me on October 6th.” Was that true?
20 A. [Mr Irving]: Yes, we had rented the biggest hall in Ottawa for me to
21 speak in and massive attempts were being made to shut me
22 up.
23 Q. [Mr Rampton]: “It brings us back to the fact that what they are really
24 after is to try to stop me speaking, because when I speak
25 audiences go away worried about whether the gas chambers”
26 plural “and death camps” plural “and the factories of
. P-181
1 death” plural “really did exist or is this really the
2 biggest lie of the 20th Century?”
3 I will stop there. Do not comment. Please
4 listen to my question. The answer you gave me a moment
5 ago to the effect that when you referred to the Auschwitz
6 legend and there being no gas chambers, was in fact
7 intended and never intended to refer to anything but the
8 single reconstructed gas chamber at Auschwitz one. That
9 answer was complete tosh, was it not, Mr Irving?
10 A. [Mr Irving]: We would have to go back and look at the precise wording
11 I used. I think both statements are entirely
12 supportable. The fact that audiences go away worried that
13 if this is true about this site, what about the other
14 sites, it is quite a natural reaction.
15 Q. [Mr Rampton]: We will pass now to page 31. You say with some pride,
16 I think, Mr Irving, and I am afraid I do have to take this
17 up now because it is part of my case, I am sorry I did not
18 spot it earlier, proudly as though you scored some kind of
19 wizard point, there is no reference to the Jews amongst
20 all that stuff about the gays, the lesbians, the
21 communists and the trade unions. Let me read on.
22 A. [Mr Irving]: What page are we on?
23 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Page 22. Let me read on. This is one of some of the
24 remarks which I shall rely on at the end of the case.
25 “Is this really the biggest lie of the 20th
26 Century, because if it is the biggest lie, then it has a
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1 corollary, and that is that hundreds of millions of
2 innocent people who have been bamboozled”, I will miss out
3 the “who” I think, “hundreds of millions of innocent
4 people have been bamboozled, and they have been bamboozled
5 for a purpose. And the purpose I think we can all say on
6 reflection, looking over our own perception of the media,
7 is that every time a Jewish financier, a John Guttfreund,
8 the Salomon brothers or Ivan Boesky or Ernest Saunders or
9 one of these, or Michael Milken, everyone time one of them
10 is caught with his hands deep in the till and he has, yes,
11 that’s true, he has undoubtedly bilked hundreds of
12 thousands of investors out of every penny they have
13 got” —-
14 A. [Mr Irving]: That was Mr Michael Milken. He went to prison for it.
15 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Please let Mr Rampton continue.
16 MR RAMPTON: Mr Irving. “Michael Milken and the rest of them,
17 people have gone to the wall, they have put all their
18 money into junk bonds and the rest of it, and these
19 financiers have laughed like Ivan Boesky paid $100 million
20 fine on the instruction of the American Government and
21 they still laughed because they can afford it”.
22 Now what is that passage?
23 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Can you read the next three or four lines.
24 A. [Mr Irving]: Precisely.
25 MR RAMPTON: “When you read this kind of story and if you
26 realize that they are Jewish, then the invitation is that
. P-183
1 the man in the street should say: Yes, but they have
2 suffered, haven’t they? They did the have Holocaust.”
3 MR JUSTICE GRAY: That is it.
4 A. [Mr Irving]: Yes.
5 MR RAMPTON: What is the point of putting that glorious purple
6 prose passage into this speech about Auschwitz, tell me?
7 A. [Mr Irving]: Because first of all may I say this is not only my
8 opinion, even leading Jewish experts like Professor Peter
9 Novac of the University Chicago quite recently within the
10 last two or three months —-
11 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Answer for yourself, Mr Irving.
12 A. [Mr Irving]: — has stated precisely the same point. They have said
13 that the whole of the Holocaust industry has been
14 generated in order to prevent, to create a kind of safety
15 curtain, a fire wall which protects, for example, as
16 Professor Peter Novic says, the activities of the Israeli
17 Government on the West Bank, which protects, for example,
18 the entire Jewish population in the United States from
19 criticism to which they might otherwise be subjected.
20 I think this is a perfectly reasonable statement and
21 I would not have made it if I did not know that I was
22 buttressed by leading Jewish authorities who are equally
23 aware of precisely the same origins or possible origins of
24 part of the present promotion of the Holocaust story. We
25 will be listening to one of my own experts on this,
26 Professor McDonald, on precisely this matter when the time
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1 comes.
2 MR JUSTICE GRAY: So the Holocaust is a kind of a lie dreamt up
3 in order to excuse crooked Jewish financiers?
4 A. [Mr Irving]: I would like to endorse your Lordship’s wording but
5 I cannot. I did not put it like that.
6 Q. [Mr Rampton]: What are you saying if you are not saying that?
7 A. [Mr Irving]: I have said here that there is a body of opinion which
8 says that one possible cause for the promotion of this
9 particular legend is the fact they find it serves a
10 purpose to protect their community from criticism which
11 might otherwise be levelled against them because of their
12 activities in the world of finance, or because of their
13 brutality on the West Bank or whatever. I certainly would
14 not have made that kind of statement had I not known that
15 senior members of their own community are worried on
16 precisely the same score. I mentioned the name of
17 Professor Peter Novic of the University of Chicago whose
18 book is about to be published in this country too
19 I believe. They cannot be insulated from criticism just
20 because of the Holocaust, and I think most members of the
21 Jewish community would find it repugnant to suggest that
22 they were or they should be.
Section 185.23 to 199.26
23 MR RAMPTON: Can we move on in this transcript, please,
24 Mr Irving, to page 31, bottom of the page.
25 A. [Mr Irving]: This is transcript No. 9.
26 Q. [Mr Rampton]: I am still in transcript No. 9. “I don’t see any reason
. P-185
1 to be tasteful about Auschwitz.” You have heard this
2 before of course. “It’s baloney. It’s a legend. Once we
3 admit the fact that it was a brutal slave labour camp and
4 large numbers of people did die, as large numbers of
5 innocent people died elsewhere in the war. Why believe
6 the rest of the baloney? I say quite tastelessly in fact
7 that more people died on the back seat of Edward Kennedy’s
8 car at Chappaquidick than ever died in gas chamber”, note
9 you do not say “the gas chamber”, “a gas chamber in
10 Auschwitz. Laughter.” Laughter, Mr Irving?
11 A. [Mr Irving]: No laughter is just once there, Mr Rampton.
12 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Laughter. That is three times.
13 A. [Mr Irving]: That is three times, Mr Rampton. Now you are getting
14 appreciative laughter from your audience.
15 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Why should your audience think that what you yourself
16 describe as “tasteless”, why should they think that is
17 funny?
18 A. [Mr Irving]: Possibly because you omitted the beginning of that
19 paragraph, Mr Rampton. Can I read it? “Why did Gorbochov
20 release the Auschwitz records? A very interesting
21 question. This was in September 21st 1989. Tass, the
22 Soviet News Agency, announced that they had ‘now
23 found’ all the death books of Auschwitz which sent a
24 shudder through every Jewish so-called refugee around the
25 world notice word so-called around the world.” Notice the
26 word “so-called” around the world. “Every so-called
. P-186
1 survivor of the Holocaust or survivor of Auschwitz, people
2 who claimed they had been in Auschwitz. When they heard
3 that the Russians announced that they had found all the
4 death books and the entire filing cards of every prisoner
5 who had been in Auschwitz, suddenly there was a lot
6 reshuffling went on. Ely Weasel, for example, no longer
7 claimed to be a survivor of Auschwitz. He suddenly
8 decided he was a survivor of Dachau or Vukenvau. He was
9 not even quite sure about that.”
10 We are talking here about the spurious survivors
11 of the Holocaust which is the second S in that word you
12 are just going to come to which has been left out of the
13 transcript.
14 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Will you read on the next sentence, please, about
15 Mr Wiesel. “In fact he seems to have done quite a cook’s
16 tour of the different concentration camps. Laughter.”
17 A. [Mr Irving]: Yes.
18 Q. [Mr Rampton]: What is it, do you think, that you your audience is
19 laughing about?
20 A. [Mr Irving]: Because they know that Ely Wiesel is a particularly
21 unpopular character. Even the Jewish community holds him
22 as being particularly unpopular because of his posturing.
23 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Sorry, posturing, what is the posturing?
24 A. [Mr Irving]: He is a poser. He is on all the presidential committees.
25 He is on all the Holocaust memorial museum committees. He
26 has made a lot of money out of the Holocaust, and yet he
. P-187
1 cannot quite remember which camp he was in, my Lord.
2 Q. [Mr Justice Gray]: Is that so surprising?
3 A. [Mr Irving]: If I was in Auschwitz —-
4 Q. [Mr Justice Gray]: Tell me. I would like to know your answer.
5 A. [Mr Irving]: My Lord, if I was in Auschwitz I would remember it was
6 Auschwitz and not Vukenvau or Bergen Belsen or Dachau.
7 That is what his problem is, my Lord. The world is full
8 of people come forward and claim to have been survivors of
9 Auschwitz, most recently the notorious case of Benjamin
10 Wilkomersky who was recently exposed by the BBC. I find
11 these spurious — I have the utmost sympathy for people
12 genuinely suffered the torments and horrors of Auschwitz
13 and these other camps, and let there be no doubt
14 whatsoever about that, but the spurious survivors who are
15 trying to cash in now by saying they too were there, that
16 is the people I reserve this association of spurious
17 survivors of the Holocaust, “the arseholes” as they
18 referred to here. I agree that is a frightfully tasteless
19 word to use and I would not normally use it in public.
20 But I have the greatest contempt for these people who are
21 trying to climb on the Holocaust bandwagon.
22 MR RAMPTON: And it is not a laughing matter if they should do
23 so, is it, Mr Irving?
24 A. [Mr Irving]: These unfortunates who claim they were there and never
25 been anywhere near Auschwitz, yes.
26 Q. [Mr Rampton]: People who fraudulently, if there are any such people,
. P-188
1 people who fraudulently —-
2 A. [Mr Irving]: You do not believe the case of Mr Wilkomersky who said he
3 had been there?
4 Q. [Mr Rampton]: I know well about the case of Mr Wilkomersky and I am not
5 going to discuss —-
6 A. [Mr Irving]: So the word “if” is misplaced.
7 Q. [Mr Rampton]: It is not misplaced necessarily, Mr Irving. We are not
8 going to, unless his Lordship tells us we are, going to
9 examine the case of Mr Benjamin Wilkomersky, the Swiss
10 orchestral musician, in this court, if you do not mind.
11 Mr Irving, you will not answer my questions, I know,
12 because you do not like them, but please answer: Why
13 should such a serious matter as fraudulent Holocaust or
14 Auschwitz pretence or posturing provoke laughter from your
15 audience?
16 A. [Mr Irving]: Because there is something ludicrous about it, something
17 pathetic about it, and the notion that a lot of these
18 spurious survivors had been found out by the Russians of
19 all people who were publishing the index cards, made known
20 that they had found the index cards of everyone who was a
21 genuine survivor which promoted the scurrying that went on
22 for the few weeks after that. That is what provoked the
23 laughter I am afraid.
24 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Can I suggest something completely different, and perhaps
25 a little nearer to the truth of the matter. That remark,
26 those remarks about spurious survivors, the remark about
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1 Edward Kennedy’s car at Chappaquidick, the remark over the
2 page about arseholes, as we call them in this country,
3 provoked the laughter they did because you were amongst an
4 audience of anti-Semitics, these remarks were intended to
5 provoke that kind of laughter. You can see that, if you
6 like, from the very way in which they are phrased?
7 A. [Mr Irving]: I do not think so. I think I was amongst an audience of
8 antiphonies.
9 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Did not you notice anything when you were talking about
10 the way in which the Holocaust is used to protect
11 frightful Jewish criminals like Boesky, did you not detect
12 anything in the wording of that passage reminiscent of
13 Dr Goebbels in it, in the way you relish the dishonesty of
14 these Jewish people?
15 A. [Mr Irving]: I relish the dishonesty of the Jews?
16 Q. [Mr Rampton]: So it seems to me, Mr Irving, please comment on that?
17 A. [Mr Irving]: Now I am stuck here with a bit of a problem, because
18 Jewish historians have made precisely the same comment
19 I have. The Jewish community have made precisely the same
20 comment that I have. Jewish sociologists have made
21 precisely the same comment that I have. Are suggesting
22 that only Jewish sociologists are entitled to make this
23 kind of hostile comment about the reasons for the
24 propagation of the Holocaust story, and that non-Jewish
25 historians are to be excluded from this kind of comment?
26 Q. [Mr Rampton]: I did not ask you about the sober sentiment.
. P-190
1 A. [Mr Irving]: And that they are at risk of being of compared with
2 Dr Goebbels if they do?
3 Q. [Mr Rampton]: You never ever answer my question, Mr Irving.
4 A. [Mr Irving]: That was a very good answer, I believe.
5 Q. [Mr Rampton]: No, Mr Irving, because you do not listen or because you do
6 not want to listen. My question was not about sober
7 sentiment, ill-conceived though it may be. My question
8 was about the wording, the language, of that passage that
9 I read.
10 A. [Mr Irving]: Which particular words are we looking at here? Can you
11 pick on any particular inflammatory words?
12 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Please go back to page 22. I am not going to read it out
13 again.
14 A. [Mr Irving]: Just the Goebbels type of words.
15 Q. [Mr Rampton]: “Because if it is” down to the bottom of the page ending
16 with the word “Jewish comment”.
17 A. [Mr Irving]: Is the word “Jewish” a Goebbels word perhaps?
18 Q. [Mr Rampton]: No. Please just quietly re-read that section of what you
19 said to yourself and tell me when you have got to the
20 bottom of the page.
21 A. [Mr Irving]: I think I am entitled to know which words you consider are
22 typical of Dr Goebbels.
23 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Will you please read it and then I will tell you.
24 A. [Mr Irving]: My Lord, will you direct him to identify the words he
25 considers —-
26 MR JUSTICE GRAY: If you know it by heart then you do not need
. P-191
1 to read it.
2 A. [Mr Irving]: I do not know it by heart.
3 MR RAMPTON: The whole passage.
4 A. [Mr Irving]: Yes.
5 Q. [Mr Rampton]: It is redolent of animosity, hostility, contempt, spite,
6 malignantly, just like Dr Goebbels articles in Das Reich?
7 A. [Mr Irving]: Just like Winston Churchill talking about Adolf Hitler if
8 you want to put it like that. Any number of people who
9 are capable speakers are capable of using language.
10 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Absolutely, you have got it in one, Mr Irving.
11 Mr Churchill rallied this country to the flag during the
12 war by being spiteful and beastly about Adolf Hitler. The
13 difference is, unlikely Dr Goebbels, Winston Churchill had
14 a very good reason to be spiteful.
15 A. [Mr Irving]: But do not these particular gentleman who I have
16 identified by name deserve our contempt, or are you
17 supporter of these gentlemen who bilked ordinary people
18 out of thousands pounds and their entire life savings as
19 well.
20 Q. [Mr Rampton]: You do not have to give a list of names. All you need to
21 say is the sober sentiment, if you believe it. The
22 trouble is or one of the problems with the Holocaust is
23 that it is sometimes apt to protect some Jewish people who
24 have broken the law?
25 A. [Mr Irving]: No, I gave chapter and verse. These are specific
26 instances which were probably in the news at the time, I
. P-192
1 think Ivan Boesky was in the news at that time, Mr
2 Gutfreund, Mr Milken was certainly in the news at that
3 that time.
4 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Let us move on.
5 MR RAMPTON: Yes I am trying to.
6 A. [Mr Irving]: If you cannot identify which particular words you are
7 identifying with Dr. Goebbels —-
8 Q. [Mr Rampton]: I am looking at the flavour of the whole passages.
9 A. [Mr Irving]: Anybody can play that game, Mr Rampton can.
10 MR JUSTICE GRAY: So am I. We are moving on.
11 MR RAMPTON: And so is his Lordship. I am grateful.
12 A. [Mr Irving]: Would you accuse Professor Peter Novac also using the
13 language of Dr Goebbels in his —-
14 Q. [Mr Rampton]: No, because he does not write like that.
15 A. [Mr Irving]: He is a Professor and he is Jewish, so he is allowed to do
16 it but non-Jews are excluded.
17 MR JUSTICE GRAY: You can deal with this in your own evidence,
18 if you wish.
19 A. [Mr Irving]: I certainly shall, my Lord.
20 MR RAMPTON: My Lord, this is Chelsea Town Hall. This is tab
21 11 of the same file.
22 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Page 2.
23 MR RAMPTON: Page 2, yes. A couple of a very short passages on
24 this page.
25 MR JUSTICE GRAY: The first one is by the upper hole punch.
26 MR RAMPTON: Yes, that is right. Say you, MR IRVING:
. P-193
1 “If you look at my great Adolf Hitler biography
2 here, this bumper Adolf Hitler biography that we have only
3 just published, in fact it literally arrived off the
4 printing presses today, you won’t find the Holocaust
5 mentioned in one line, not even a footnote. Why should we
6 if something did not happen and you don’t even dignify it
7 with a footnote”. That is in plain terms an assertion by
8 you that the Holocaust did not happen?
9 A. [Mr Irving]: We have not even heard the word “Holocaust”.
10 MR JUSTICE GRAY: This is a speech you made, is it not?
11 MR RAMPTON: I am so sorry, Mr Irving, look at the penultimate
12 line of the passage I have just read..
13 A. [Mr Irving]: Am I looking at the wrong passage?
14 MR JUSTICE GRAY: I think I it must, because it starts, “if You
15 look at my great Adolf Hitler biography”, which sounds as
16 if it could be you speaking.
17 A. [Mr Irving]: I see right, yes.
18 Q. [Mr Justice Gray]: Did you say that?
19 A. [Mr Irving]: Well, obviously the reference, as we have now found out,
20 the word “Holocaust” has been taken out of the second
21 volume, yes. You will not find “Holocaust” mentioned in
22 this book.
23 Q. [Mr Justice Gray]: Because it did not happen, that is what you are saying?
24 A. [Mr Irving]: Well, I do not want to quibble about this too much, but we
25 do not really know what we are talking about when we are
26 saying if something did not happen. I know his Lordship
. P-194
1 will interrupt and say straightaway you are referring to
2 the Holocaust, but we do not know how much of a pause
3 there is there. We do not know what emphasis is made
4 here. We have to look at the whole speech. The
5 references later on you will see to the bars of soap and
6 so on, which clearly did not happen because that has now
7 been admitted. I mean that is what we are building up
8 to. This is a topic sentence.
9 MR RAMPTON: I know it is late but I really do not think you
10 are doing yourself justice. Look down to the bottom page
11 at 001425.
12 A. [Mr Irving]: Yes.
13 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Read it out loud, will you?
14 A. [Mr Irving]: Well, I am looking at a paragraph which you want skipped.
15 Q. [Mr Rampton]: No.
16 MR JUSTICE GRAY: What is there in there that you really derive
17 any assistance from?
18 A. [Mr Irving]: “Two years from now nobody in the world will believe in
19 these absurd legends any longer. They already don’t
20 believe in the absurd legends of Jewish concentration camp
21 prisoners being turned into bars of soap, because Jad
22 Vaschen has now formally admitted that that was a lie.”
23 So this is what I am talking about, if things do not
24 happen they do not deserve a footnote. So I am being
25 specific in what follows by what I mean.
26 MR RAMPTON: Mr Irving, I know you like your platform and I am
. P-195
1 sure you want to get into the newspapers.
2 A. [Mr Irving]: Can I now interrupt with the utmost respect, Mr Rampton,
3 if you move that sentence “if something didn’t happen and
4 you don’t even dignify it with a footnote”, the beginning
5 of the following paragraph, then it becomes the famous
6 topic sentence of which I have spoken earlier giving the
7 topic of what follows in the following paragraph and that
8 is what it is. It has been put deliberately into the
9 paragraph above to make it look as though it is applying
10 to the word “Holocaust”.
11 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Now look, Mr Irving, we can go a lot quicker if you just
12 occasionally —-
13 A. [Mr Irving]: I know you do not like these answers because of course it
14 is a total answer to what you just said, Mr Rampton.
15 Q. [Mr Rampton]: That is a matter for his Lordship.
16 MR JUSTICE GRAY: I heard the answer.
17 MR RAMPTON: I think it is one of the worst answers you have
18 given and that is saying something, Mr Irving.
19 MR JUSTICE GRAY: That is comment and I think we will move on
20 to the lower quote.
21 A. [Mr Irving]: Maybe his Lordship thinks differently but his Lordship has
22 heard from me about topic sentences and that is a clear
23 example of a topic.
24 MR RAMPTON: If you will please stop talking for one minute I
25 will show —-
26 A. [Mr Irving]: I was about to say the same to you.
. P-196
1 Q. [Mr Rampton]: — I will show you why it is such a rotten answer. Read
2 the first sentence of the last paragraph out loud.
3 A. [Mr Irving]: “The biggest lie of the lot, the blood libel on the German
4 people, because people were hanged for this, as I call it,
5 is the lie that the Germans had factories of death with
6 gas chambers in which they liquidated millions of their
7 opponents.”
8 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Thank you very much, Mr Irving.
9 MR JUSTICE GRAY: I think that is a convenient point at which
10 to break off.
11 MR RAMPTON: I just want to take one more —-
12 A. [Mr Irving]: Truth is an absolute justification of that remark of
13 course.
14 MR RAMPTON: — little line from this transcript.
15 MR JUSTICE GRAY: I did not know there was any more. I am
16 sorry.
17 MR RAMPTON: There is one line on page 4.
18 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Yes, page 6. Page 4. I think there is also
19 something on page 6.
20 MR RAMPTON: There is. I will just tell your Lordship which it
21 is. I do not need to read that out yet again.
22 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Page 4.
23 MR RAMPTON: Page 4, the last line of the second paragraph, the
24 last sentence: “So Fred Leuchter is poisoned for the whole
25 of the Holocaust legend.” The whole of the Holocaust
26 legend. “The whole of the Holocaust legend” includes all
. P-197
1 alleged gas chambers anywhere in Nazi occupied Europe,
2 does it not?
3 A. [Mr Irving]: He is bad news in the sense, as I said in the earlier
4 speech, once people have heard the data that Fred Leuchter
5 brought back, the forensic laboratory results, they go
6 away thinking, they begin asking awkward questions. That
7 is what is meant by that sentence and certainly no more.
8 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Yes.
9 MR RAMPTON: My Lord, if that is convenient, there is one
10 matter I wish to raise.
11 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Yes. I think it is. I am just looking to
12 see whether we ought to deal with the passage I have
13 marked on page 6.
14 MR RAMPTON: Yes, very well.
15 MR JUSTICE GRAY: It is about just below the lower hole punch.
16 I have marked it presumably because you relied on it in
17 your Summary of Case.
18 MR RAMPTON: Yes. Page 6, last paragraph, Mr Irving. You say
19 about five lines down: “If I can just dot the i’s cross
20 the t’s to some of these details of details of details.
21 He mentioned that after Fred Leuchter did his truly epoch
22 making investigation of the gas chambers” plural “at
23 Auschwitz, the forensic laboratory tests which yielded the
24 extraordinary result which converted me, made me into a
25 hardcore disbeliever.”
26 Yes? I will read on if you like.
. P-198
1 MR JUSTICE GRAY: It does not affect the context, the sense of
2 it.
3 MR RAMPTON: It does not affect the context?
4 A. [Mr Irving]: I do not think it takes it very much further, that
5 sentence, my Lord.
6 MR RAMPTON: You are by this date, are you not, November 28th
7 1991, a hardcore disbeliever in the whole of the Holocaust
8 proposition?
9 A. [Mr Irving]: You are incorrigible, Mr Rampton. We have just been
10 talking about the gas chambers.
11 MR JUSTICE GRAY: I think we will leave the evidence there
12 because there may be some more
13 (Administrative Discussion)
14 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Monday 10.30.
15 < (The witness stood down)
16 (The Court adjourned until Monday, 24th January 2000)
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23
24
25
26
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