Day 14 Transcript: Holocaust Denial on Trial
Part I: Expert Witness Professor van Pelt (1.1 to 24.26)
1 IN THE HIGH COURT OF JUSTICE
1996 I. No. 113
QUEEN’S BENCH DIVISION
2 Royal Courts of Justice
3 Strand, London
4 Wednesday, 2nd February 2000
5
6 Before:
7 MR JUSTICE GRAY
8
9 B E T W E E N: DAVID JOHN CAWDELL IRVING
10 Claimant -and-
11 (1) PENGUIN BOOKS LIMITED
12 (2) DEBORAH E. LIPSTADT
13 Defendants
14 The Claimant appeared in person
15 MR RICHARD RAMPTON Q.C. (instructed by Messrs Davenport Lyons and Mishcon de Reya) appeared on behalf of the First and
16 Second Defendants
17 MISS HEATHER ROGERS (instructed by Davenport Lyons) appeared on behalf of the First Defendant Penguin Books Limited
18 MR ANTHONY JULIUS (of Mishcon de Reya) appeared on behalf of
19 the Second Defendant Deborah Lipstadt
20
21 (Transcribed from the stenographic notes of Harry Counsell &Company, Clifford’s Inn, Fetter Lane, London EC4
22 Telephone: 020-7242-9346)
23 (This transcript is not to be reproduced without the written permission of Harry Counsell &Company)
24
25 PROCEEDINGS – DAY FOURTEEN
26
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1 <Day 14 Wednesday, 2nd February 2000.
2 (10.30 a.m.)
3 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Yes?
4 MR IRVING: My Lord, may it please the court. Mr Rampton
5 wishes to put the witness van Pelt back in the witness box
6 (and I have no objections) to take further submissions in
7 connection with the challenged document.
8 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Right.
9 MR RAMPTON: My Lord —-
10 MR JUSTICE GRAY: The incineration capacity?
11 MR RAMPTON: Yes, he has done his homework and I am just going
12 to let him tell your Lordship —-
13 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Whilst we remember what the point is, it is a
14 good idea.
15 MR RAMPTON: Can I, first of all, pass up to your Lordship, as
16 requested, he has given your Lordship a nomenclature guide
17 for Auschwitz and also he has done a hand drawn sketch
18 plan of the whole site. I suggest your Lordship puts that
19 in the front of the Auschwitz file, probably the second
20 Auschwitz file.
21 MR JUSTICE GRAY: K2?
22 MR RAMPTON: Yes, K2. The documents which he will produce in a
23 moment will go in tab 4 of K2, I suggest.
24 MR JUSTICE GRAY: You have had these documents, Mr Irving, have
25 you?
26 MR IRVING: Yes, my Lord, I have just received them.
. P-2
1 MR RAMPTON: Yes.
2 MR JUSTICE GRAY: I see, this is what I asked for.
3 MR RAMPTON: It is, my Lord.
4 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Thank you very much. I had not realized what
5 it was.
6 < PROFESSOR VAN PELT, recalled.
7 < Further re-examined by MR RAMPTON, QC.
8 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Professor, thank you very much for doing
9 that. Yes, Mr Rampton?
10 MR RAMPTON: Professor van Pelt, just one question. Have you
11 taken up his Lordship’s request or invitation to study
12 this document, which is the one we had which is the
13 document of 28th June 1943, which relates to incineration
14 capacity, to study the question whether or not it is
15 authentic —-
16 A. [Professor Van Pelt]: Yes, I have.
17 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Its having been challenged. Will you then please tell his
18 Lordship what conclusions you have reached by reference to
19 this document and any others in this little clip? Can you
20 give that to the judge?
21 A. [Professor Van Pelt]: I have last night with what was still available to me,
22 because I only carry a small bundle of documents I carried
23 with me to London and even some already had been packed
24 I did not want to open the box, but whatever I had, I was
25 going to look at a couple of the challenges which had been
26 made yesterday by Mr Irving.
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1 Before I go into that, I would like to present,
2 first of all, my copy, my marked copy, which is No. 1 of
3 the document which comes from Moscow. There are some
4 calculations on the back, on the side, which are
5 irrelevant. I have indicated on this, this is page No. 1,
6 on what were the particular issues Mr Irving found
7 important which is the way the date was typed in as 28th
8 June 1943 without a location, without Auschwitz,
9 Achtundzwanzigte Juni Neunhundertdreiundvierzig.
10 The second thing which was challenged yesterday
11 was the code which indicates the Brieftage Buchnumber
12 which is 31550, and then Jahrling, or Jahrling, and then
13 the secretary.
14 The third one was the title of SS Brigadefuhrer
15 Generalmayor der Waffen SS Kammler.
16 On the last point, I did not have find any
17 document where the same mistake had happened. So I cannot
18 explain that or I cannot give any second document, but
19 then I only had one other document with me which was the
20 Vergasungskeller letter of 29th June 1943 where Kammler
21 has got on the right and the correct title.
22 The first document I would like to present which
23 is a new document is No. 2, which is the copy which is in
24 the Domburg archive in the DDR — the former DDR now —
25 and which was made available to the Auswenzin archive.
26 This was the document, the copy which actually has been
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1 published in the 50s, and I have here the original.
2 I have given you a copy of my copy, but I have here the
3 original copy from the Auschwitz archive with the original
4 stamp on it, so I do not know.
5 MR RAMPTON: I do believe his Lordship ought to see that partly
6 because our copy —-
7 MR JUSTICE GRAY: It is not a very good copy.
8 MR RAMPTON: It is not a very good copy. There are some colour
9 on that, original colour on that.
10 A. [Professor Van Pelt]: This copy is not much better, but at least it shows the
11 original stamp of the archive.
12 MR IRVING: Just so we can be plain, this one went, in other
13 words, to East Germany and Auschwitz, not the other way
14 round?
15 A. [Professor Van Pelt]: Yes, probably.
16 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Where it was stamped?
17 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Just to make sure I am following, the one
18 that we have previously been looking at, I thought you
19 said came originally from the Moscow archives?
20 A. [Professor Van Pelt]: That is the Moscow copy, yes.
21 Q. [Mr Justice Gray]: This is DDR?
22 A. [Professor Van Pelt]: Domburg, yes, the Domburg archive, which has been
23 available in Poland since at least — this was published
24 in the 50s and this is also the document which went to
25 Vienna, this particular copy. A copy of that was made
26 available to Vienna.
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1 Now, what is important in this second copy, and
2 it is not a very clear copy, but I think the essential
3 information is the same. I mean, the information is the
4 same but the formatting is different. We see when we look
5 at this particular copy, we see at the top it says
6 “Abschrift” which means this is a typed copy. There was
7 no photocopy machine in it. So while the original, the
8 Moscow copy No. 1 is a carbon copy of the original, the
9 second one is actually a newly typed copy, and with all
10 these newly typed copies there would always have been a
11 note at the bottom. It should be signed. It says: “Fur
12 Die Richtigkeit der Abschrift which means for the correct
13 —-
14 Q. [Mr Justice Gray]: Accuracy?
15 A. [Professor Van Pelt]: — the correctness of this copy and then there is an
16 initial there. It is very difficult even in my copy to
17 see who actually signed this.
18 The reason that I think this is quite important
19 is that this is a different copy of the Moscow one which
20 is in a different archive. So we have now two different
21 objects, both talking about an incineration capacity of
22 4,756 persons in the camp. If, indeed, the Moscow —
23 I mean, I think it is very, very unlikely that somebody
24 who would have falsified this document, made it up
25 afterwards, would have created both a carbon copy of one
26 and then have made a new kind of Abschrift of that same
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1 document, and then placed it into two different archives.
2 Q. [Mr Justice Gray]: Well, on the contrary, I thought that might have been what
3 a determined forger might have done.
4 A. [Professor Van Pelt]: So that he actually make two different versions of the
5 same copy?
6 Q. [Mr Justice Gray]: I understand your point.
7 A. [Professor Van Pelt]: I disagree with your Lordship on that, but your opinion in
8 the end is more important than mine on this, I think.
9 Q. [Mr Justice Gray]: Your are rather better informed than me.
10 A. [Professor Van Pelt]: This very much takes the format of a typed copy as you
11 find in the Auschwitz archive. So I think that in this
12 case there is a convergence of two different objects,
13 showing in two different archives, that, indeed, we have
14 here, you know, as far as I say with absolute certainty in
15 the original document. But there were other challenges
16 made and, in order to deal with the other challenges,
17 I would like to go to a very short review of the way
18 documents in the Auschwitz archive, both letters and also
19 copies, are dated, and the way the code which shows which
20 file it has to go in is done.
21 So when I go to No. 3, which is a letter from
22 Bischoff, the chief architect to the chief doctor in
23 Auschwitz, of 30th June 1944, about the building of small
24 morgues in Birkenhau, they were built in the existing
25 barracks — every camp in Birkenhau would get one morgue
26 — we see basically that the heading says Auschwitz, 30th
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1 June, “den 30.Juni 1944”. It would be the normal accepted
2 way of dating a letter, and then we see the brief type of
3 book number. We see there two numbers and then we see
4 “Jo” which is for Jotam who was at that moment the chief
5 architect, and “Go” without dots, without periods.
6 If we go to No. 4, this is a record of a
7 meeting. We see that the date is again Auschwitz, 30th
8 January 1943, but we see that the secretary who typed this
9 letter in this case has a period behind the initial.
10 If we go to No. 5, which is a letter to Topf u.
11 Sohne, a carbon copy of a letter to Topf u. Sohne, which
12 was done on letter head, we see that there is no place.
13 It says simply 28th February 1943. In this case there are
14 no periods behind the initials of both Jahrling and the
15 secretary.
16 Q. [Mr Justice Gray]: When you say “no place” do you mean no “den” —-
17 A. [Professor Van Pelt]: No period. It does not say Auschwitz den 28th February.
18 Mr Irving yesterday challenged the authenticity of the
19 Moscow document because there was no place. So this one
20 does not have a place given.
21 Then we have No. 6 which is one of these typed
22 copies, Abschrift, which does not have a place which
23 probably would be, you know, probably would also not have
24 been in the original. But what we see here is that the
25 secretary has again a period behind her name, but the
26 Jahrling thing, we see in this case Jahrling is typed JA
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1 umlaut H, while in other ones he is only typed as JAH,
2 umlaut, which means now they have added an H. So there
3 seemed to be at least also the way the name has been
4 shortened, there seems to be no kind of agreement on it.
5 Then we go to No. 8 because No. 7 is the —-
6 Q. [Mr Justice Gray]: Second page?
7 A. [Professor Van Pelt]: — the second page of that letter. We see that again the
8 secretary has a period and then Dr E has a period. He is
9 one of the doctors in the camp. No. 9 we see again, no
10 place. This is a letter to Hoess from Bischoff and one
11 would have expected this to be probably correct, following
12 the correct format. We see that there is no place
13 indicated. It says 12th February 1943. Again, the
14 secretary has a period but not the Sturmbannfuhrer Pollok,
15 who dictated the letter. But, when we go to No. 10 and
16 No. 11 —-
17 Q. [Mr Justice Gray]: There is a point on 6. I just wonder whether it is a good
18 point or a bad point? Tell me. The tagebuch number is in
19 typescript, not manuscript.
20 A. [Professor Van Pelt]: Sometimes it is typescript, sometimes manuscript.
21 Q. [Mr Justice Gray]: That was another point Mr Irving made, I think.
22 A. [Professor Van Pelt]: Yes, I am sorry, I had forgotten that. We see again that
23 sometimes it is handwritten and sometimes it is typed.
24 Q. [Mr Justice Gray]: Yes. Sorry, that was taking you back.
25 A. [Professor Van Pelt]: Yes. Now we come to No. 10 and there we see that in fact
26 both the person who dictated the letter and the person who
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1 typed the letter in this case have a period behind their
2 initials, and in fact behind the person who typed it there
3 is even a dash. No. 11, the letter of 19th July 1944, we
4 see that this is a letter dictated by Steilv.Bauleiter
5 Teichmann. We see there is a period behind the shortened
6 form of his name and a period behind the letter indicating
7 the secretary.
8 So I think that the only conclusion one can draw
9 out of this is that there was no standard procedure in the
10 Zentralbauleitung.
11 I have added two other documents and this has to
12 do really with a challenge Mr Irving gave in his letter to
13 me which was posted on the web. I do not know if I can
14 address that, but it is an alternative way of dating a
15 letter, which says “am” instead of “den”. So sometimes it
16 says “Auschwitz den” and then the date comes, but
17 sometimes it also says “Auschwitz am” 14th May 1943.
18 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Mr Irving, I do not think that was
19 Mr Irving’s, if he will forgive me, best point. They are
20 both used, are they not?
21 MR IRVING: I accept his point on that.
22 MR JUSTICE GRAY: I think you did.
23 A. [Professor Van Pelt]: Then there was one other thing which came up yesterday and
24 I do not know if I am allowed to give testimony on that,
25 which was the number of 2.5 million and 1.1 million which
26 were given by Hoess.
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1 MR IRVING: Yes.
2 A. [Professor Van Pelt]: I have re-read that passage.
3 MR JUSTICE GRAY: You do not object to this? You introduced it
4 Mr Irving, so I think it is right.
5 A. [Professor Van Pelt]: I would like to go back to the point in my report which is
6 at page 306 where the actual quotation is. I have
7 repeated it in a few other places but I think 306 is a
8 good point to do that.
9 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Yes.
10 A. [Professor Van Pelt]: It starts in the second paragraph: “On the basis of the
11 figure of 2.5 million”, and I do not know if you want me
12 to read it?
13 Q. [Mr Justice Gray]: Shall I just cast my eye down it? (Pause for reading)
14 Yes, I have looked at quickly. I have read it before.
15 A. [Professor Van Pelt]: OK. So the point is that what Hoess says — I will
16 summarize it — is that there is this figure of two and a
17 half million which is mentioned by Eichmann. This is the
18 only figure we have because Eichmann mentions it. But
19 then he says that I have only kept to this figure because
20 Eichmann has given it, but I myself think it is too high.
21 Then he makes his own calculation on the basis of
22 transports coming into Auschwitz. So he actually
23 challenges that figure. After he has first mentioned it
24 he challenges this figure and he comes then to a total
25 number of deportations of 1,125,000 Jews going to
26 Auschwitz at the bottom of that paragraph.
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1 So that I think will in some way resolve the
2 confusion about these two numbers.
3 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Thank you. That is helpful.
4 MR RAMPTON: My Lord, there are a couple of other points —
5 I have seen these documents for the first time myself —
6 which I just draw attention to, perhaps through the
7 witness. Can we go back to page 10, Professor van Pelt?
8 I do not know that you did draw attention to this, it
9 really is obvious. There is underneath the Kommandantur
10 KL there is an AZ and a colon.
11 A. [Professor Van Pelt]: Yes.
12 Q. [Mr Rampton]: And then a number. Do you see that that number is
13 somewhat typed? It may have been altered in hand, I
14 cannot see.
15 A. [Professor Van Pelt]: Yes.
16 Q. [Mr Rampton]: You notice also that the reference is underlined?
17 A. [Professor Van Pelt]: Yes.
18 Q. [Mr Rampton]: If you turn over the page,, this one is coming from
19 Birkenhau apparently and, unlike the previous one, the
20 reference is handwritten and there is no underline.
21 MR JUSTICE GRAY: What is the significance of the underlining,
22 do you suggest?
23 MR RAMPTON: I am not suggesting any significance at all. All
24 I am suggesting is that this is a medley.
25 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Another variation?
26 MR RAMPTON: It depends who is typing it, it depends how fussy
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1 the boss is, all that kind of thing. There is nothing to
2 be told from these documents except that, like all
3 offices, they vary in their practices. Look, will you
4 please, Professor, at page 12, again at the reference,
5 there is no underline. We see that it is apparently typed
6 by a secretary called Lm, whatever gender that may have
7 been. If you turn over to the last page, again we find
8 the reference both typed and underlined. And we find that
9 Lm is typing for somebody else called Eg. Do you see
10 that?
11 A. [Professor Van Pelt]: Yes.
12 Q. [Mr Rampton]: You do not happen to know who Eg was, do you?
13 A. [Professor Van Pelt]: Egelich.
14 Q. [Mr Rampton]: It does not particularly arise out of this, I think, or
15 indirectly — do you happen to know how many secretaries
16 there were at any one time?
17 A. [Professor Van Pelt]: That changed. There are documents which have actually
18 been signed by people who also had other functions.
19 Normally I think there were one or two German secretaries
20 and there were a number of Polish secretaries also. For
21 example, P is a Polish worker named Pluskurer. It seems
22 to be that there was no regular typing pool in the
23 Zentralbauleitung. Also the Zentralbauleitung, if you
24 look at the personnel lists, changes very rapidly, with
25 people moving in and people moving out.
26 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Thank you.
. P-13
1 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Mr Irving, if the authenticity of the
2 incineration capacity is still in issue, you might want to
3 cross-examine further? I do not know.
4 MR IRVING: I think I am entitled on the points he has made, my
5 Lord.
6 MR JUSTICE GRAY: You are certainly entitled to, yes.
7 MR IRVING: I will be as brief as I possibly can.
8 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Do not hurry
9 < Further cross-examined by Mr Irving
10 MR IRVING: Firstly, I will abandon relying on the full stops.
11 That will probably ease your Lordship’s task in assessing
12 the matter, but the other matters, I am afraid, are just
13 reinforced by what I have seen here.
14 First of all, reverting to what you said about
15 the witness Hoess, the Kommandant of Auschwitz, have you
16 seen a handwritten confession by Hoess made in British
17 captivity at the request of Colonel Draper, the British
18 public prosecutor?
19 A. [Professor Van Pelt]: No, I have not seen that.
20 Q. [Mr Irving]: It was one of the very first statements he made, in which
21 he admitted — it is just five or six lines long —
22 having killed 2.8 million people in Auschwitz.
23 A. [Professor Van Pelt]: No, I have not seen that one.
24 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Killing by gas?
25 MR IRVING: Just killing, my Lord. He does not actually say.
26 I rely on that purely to indicate the vacillating nature
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1 of the figures that the witness Hoess gave.
2 Reverting now to these documents that you
3 very kindly produce for the court, I will take up first of
4 all the point that his Lordship very astutely made about
5 page 6, where you pointed out that the letter book number
6 was typed. Witness, what does the first word on that page
7 mean, “Abschrift”?
8 A. [Professor Van Pelt]: That means it is a copy.
9 Q. [Mr Irving]: In other words, it has been copied from the original?
10 A. [Professor Van Pelt]: Yes.
11 Q. [Mr Irving]: Would there have been any reason why somebody copying an
12 original document would have then left a space there and
13 handwritten in the letter book number, which was
14 presumably handwritten in on the original? He would have
15 typed a copy of the whole document, would he not?
16 A. [Professor Van Pelt]: I presume so, yes.
17 Q. [Mr Irving]: So it would be wrong to draw any significance from the
18 fact that that one is typed. Stepping through the
19 documents, I would just ask in general, have you seen, in
20 all the documents that you have worked on in the Auschwitz
21 archives, any other document in which the year 43 or 44 is
22 missing from the letter register line?
23 A. [Professor Van Pelt]: Are we referring back to the original Moscow document?
24 Q. [Mr Irving]: Any document at all. Have you seen any document at all?
25 I am not referring to the date of the document. I am
26 referring to the letter register line.
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1 A. [Professor Van Pelt]: The 31550 and no year.
2 Q. [Mr Irving]: That is correct, which has no year. Have you seen any
3 document at all which omits the year?
4 A. [Professor Van Pelt]: I do not remember.
5 Q. [Mr Irving]: Very well. Have you seen any document at all which has a
6 secretary with the initials Ne?
7 A. [Professor Van Pelt]: As I said, I do not remember. I could reconstruct who the
8 secretary was, but that is at the moment not available to
9 me. The point I thought I made was that many different
10 people are typing these letters. We have seen, I think,
11 not one time the same person typing any of these letters
12 in this very small collection.
13 Q. [Mr Irving]: Is it correct that there are about 50,000 such letters now
14 extant, now in the archives, in Moscow and in Auschwitz?
15 A. [Professor Van Pelt]: Something like that, yes.
16 Q. [Mr Irving]: Yes. Would it surprise you that other researchers
17 investigating specifically this document have looked for
18 any other letter at all in all the thousands of letters
19 available signed by a secretary Ne, or with the
20 secretary’s initials Ne on them, and there is no such
21 letter?
22 A. [Professor Van Pelt]: This is a big problem, of course, how to make a proof, how
23 to make a negative proof. I can imagine that people have
24 been looking for this. What I can say is that I have not
25 investigated the secretary who wrote this letter. The
26 only thing I can say is that there seems to have been no
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1 consistent policy. I must also remark that, if I were to
2 be a forger —-
3 MR JUSTICE GRAY: This is not really a policy point, is it?
4 MR IRVING: It is the only way I can phrase the question.
5 A. [Professor Van Pelt]: OK.
6 MR JUSTICE GRAY: It is not a policy point. It is was there a
7 secretary whose name started ne? It is nothing to do with
8 policy.
9 A. [Professor Van Pelt]: When I am back in Canada I can look that up, but I think
10 the important point is, if I were to be forger, I would of
11 course not invent a new name.
12 MR JUSTICE GRAY: That is a different point.
13 A. [Professor Van Pelt]: I would take one of the existing initials.
14 MR IRVING: This is clear. So you would not be surprised if we
15 found another letter with the secretary’s initials Ne on
16 it? I am afraid I cannot give evidence in my
17 questioning. I can only say would you be surprised to
18 hear that there is not one?
19 A. [Professor Van Pelt]: If this were to be a forgery, the forger would have been a
20 very, very dumb person.
21 Q. [Mr Irving]: In all the letters that you have seen, Professor van Pelt,
22 including these ten you provided this morning, have
23 you seen any in which the rank of the Brigadier General
24 Kammler is wrong? They have left out the words
25 “Generalmayor der Waffen SS”. My Lord, I will draw your
26 attention to the way it should have been.
. P-17
1 MR JUSTICE GRAY: I have noticed Kammler is the recipient of
2 one of the other documents.
3 MR IRVING: It is, on page 13, my Lord. That is the correct
4 way it should have been written.
5 MR JUSTICE GRAY: You have the answer, that this is the only
6 occasion on which the Professor has seen that happen.
7 A. [Professor Van Pelt]: Yes.
8 Q. [Mr Justice Gray]: There is one final point, my Lord, which is a fourth
9 question, which is possibly new and I would certainly be
10 willing to let Mr Rampton come back on this one. The
11 serial number of the document 31550, is that in sequence
12 with the other documents of those days?
13 A. [Professor Van Pelt]: In the file, you mean?
14 Q. [Mr Justice Gray]: Yes.
15 A. [Professor Van Pelt]: I do not remember. I looked at the document in the file
16 originally in relationship to the contents and not in
17 relationship to the serial number. I am happy to go back,
18 when I am back in North America, and have the whole file
19 printed out, and then this thing could be reconsidered.
20 Q. [Mr Justice Gray]: Again, I have to ask the question this way. Would it
21 surprise you to hear that the number is way out of
22 sequence by several weeks?
23 A. [Professor Van Pelt]: In general, if you look at the files — I am not
24 completely surprised but the thing is, the way the files
25 were created, the files quite often have things not in
26 sequence, even in the Auschwitz archive. So it is very
. P-18
1 difficult sometimes to see. Normally what happens is a
2 file is built up, that the earliest documents are at the
3 back and then, of course, as new documents come in, the
4 documents ultimately get their final order.
5 Q. [Mr Justice Gray]: But you agree that all the other documents, in these ten
6 you have provided, the numbers are in serial sequence?
7 A. [Professor Van Pelt]: In serial sequence?
8 Q. [Mr Justice Gray]: I have just checked them and they are, in so far as they
9 are part of the same series?
10 MR JUSTICE GRAY: They are put together for the purposes of
11 this clip.
12 MR IRVING: I appreciate that, my Lord.
13 A. [Professor Van Pelt]: I just picked up some things from a pack I had last
14 night. I just was going through what I had in my hand.
15 Q. [Mr Irving]: The very last question is this. Was Jahrling an SS
16 Sturmbannfuhrer?
17 A. [Professor Van Pelt]: I think Jahrling was actually a Zivilarbeiter.
18 Q. [Mr Irving]: Why is he on the second page of this document signing as
19 an SS Sturmbannfuhrer, the one that has been provided?
20 A. [Professor Van Pelt]: It seems that the original document was obviously meant to
21 be signed by Jahrling, but this is an abschrift and he
22 initialled this thing. Whatever the abschrift was made
23 of, whatever copy the abschrift was made of, had his
24 initials on it and this happens quite often. Since the
25 original signed copy went to Kammler, which was signed by
26 Bischoff, then quite often there would be a little — one
. P-19
1 of the other people would just —-
2 Q. [Mr Irving]: Professor van Pelt, I think you have misunderstood my
3 question. Would you look at page 2, please?
4 A. [Professor Van Pelt]: Yes. I see Jahrling, yes.
5 Q. [Mr Irving]: It appears to have been signed three lines from the bottom
6 Gezeichnet Jahrling SS Sturmbannfuhrer.
7 A. [Professor Van Pelt]: It says “Zentralbauleitung der Waffen SS und Polizei” on
8 the top, which means this is signed by the leader, the
9 chief architect which was SS Sturmbannfuhrer Bischoff at
10 the time, but the copy which was available to the person
11 who wrote the Asbchrift must have had Jahrling’s signature
12 on it, which is something which happens quite often, that
13 you see another signature than Bischoff’s in actually the
14 copies which are in the archive.
15 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Does “gezeichnet” actually mean “signed”.
16 MR IRVING: Yes.
17 A. [Professor Van Pelt]: If means “signed” here, but I presume that this person who
18 was writing this Asbchrift had in some way —-
19 MR JUSTICE GRAY: I follow what you are saying.
20 MR IRVING: Is it not correct civil service procedure to put
21 the letters “iA” if you are signing on behalf of someone?
22 A. [Professor Van Pelt]: Yes, bit I do not think we are here in a kind of typical
23 Civil Service condition. We have seen that people are all
24 over the place in the way they are actually formatting
25 these documents.
26 MR IRVING: My Lord, I have no further questions.
. P-20
1 MR RAMPTON: Well, sorry, I do have some by way of
2 re-examination.
3 MR JUSTICE GRAY: You may want some re-examination.
4 < Re-examined by MR RAMPTON, QC
5 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Can we take that last point first? Can you take page 1,
6 please? In the bottom left-hand corner of the page is a
7 column what looks a bit like names?
8 MR IRVING: It is a distribution list.
9 MR RAMPTON: Thank you, Mr Irving, but I am asking the witness
10 questions. “Verteiler”, do you see that?
11 A. [Professor Van Pelt]: Yes.
12 Q. [Mr Rampton]: And the last name on that might be “Jahrling”, might it?
13 A. [Professor Van Pelt]: Yes, that is Jahrling. So Jahrling got a copy of this
14 letter.
15 MR JUSTICE GRAY: That is the point you have made, that is the
16 only indication of who signed it available to the person
17 who did the Auschwitz. So they put “gezeichnet” by
18 Jahrling?
19 A. [Professor Van Pelt]: Yes.
20 MR RAMPTON: Yes. Do you notice, please on page 4 a signature
21 over a Sturmbannfuhrer?
22 A. [Professor Van Pelt]: Yes.
23 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Whose signature is that?
24 A. [Professor Van Pelt]: That is Bischoff’s signature.
25 Q. [Mr Rampton]: What about page 7 over the same word Sturmbannfuhrer?
26 A. [Professor Van Pelt]: That is not Bischoff’s signature, but it was —-
. P-21
1 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Somebody has written “signed Bischoff”?
2 A. [Professor Van Pelt]: Yes, what we see here is we see that there is a little
3 note on the lower corner, the lower on page 7, it says Fur
4 die Richtigkeit der Asbchrift, which says, this is
5 Pollock, I think it is Pollock, SS Untersturmfuhrer, and
6 so Pollock now has put the name of Bischoff, signed in his
7 own handwriting Bischoff’s name, since we are dealing here
8 with an Asbchrift. So in some way Pollock has done by
9 hand what in some way occurred in page No. 2 which is
10 typed.
11 Q. [Mr Rampton]: There is only one other thing I need to ask you about and
12 it is this. Mr Irving seems to take the point, if I have
13 understood it, that if the reference number is typed
14 rather than handwritten, one must expect to find the word
15 “Abschrift” on top of the document. Can you look at page
16 3? Is there “Abschrift” on top of the document?
17 A. [Professor Van Pelt]: No, that not Abschrift.
18 Q. [Mr Rampton]: And is the reference number typed or handwritten?
19 A. [Professor Van Pelt]: The reference number is typed.
20 Q. [Mr Rampton]: And at page 6 we see Abschrift and a typed reference
21 number, but what about page 10?
22 A. [Professor Van Pelt]: Page 10, it was typed and it was corrected by hand.
23 Q. [Mr Rampton]: And there is no Abschrift on top of it?
24 A. [Professor Van Pelt]: No, there is no Abschrift.
25 MR IRVING: It is not actually a letter register number there;
26 it is the file number.
. P-22
1 A. [Professor Van Pelt]: [German].
2 MR RAMPTON: Well, this is the third or fourth example so
3 perhaps the point is made. What about page 13?
4 A. [Professor Van Pelt]: Page 13, it is typed.
5 Q. [Mr Rampton]: It is typed and there is no “Abschrift” on top of it?
6 A. [Professor Van Pelt]: Yes.
7 MR RAMPTON: Yes, thank you.
8 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Can I ask you the same question, Professor,
9 that I asked you when you gave evidence yesterday which is
10 whether the points that have been put to you this morning
11 raise something of a doubt in your mind about the
12 authenticity of this document?
13 A. [Professor Van Pelt]: No, it does not.
14 Q. [Mr Justice Gray]: The point about the year not being included, is there
15 anything in that?
16 A. [Professor Van Pelt]: I think it is a good observation, but what we see also
17 here, you see if we look at this Moscow, this Moscow
18 document, what we see that the numbers were actually typed
19 in later. It seems to be that there is a — it is a
20 slightly different – also when we look at the persons, it
21 seems they may made up first the letter and that
22 ultimately they were — this letter was drafted and the
23 numbers were put in after some kind of final
24 consultation. It is a very marked difference with the
25 second copy with Domburg. It seems to be that the final
26 numbering, the number, was brought in later and I can
. P-23
1 quite imagine that there was a slip occurred at that
2 moment.
3 MR IRVING: May I enquire on what basis you say that the
4 numbers were typed in later?
5 A. [Professor Van Pelt]: It seems that if we look at the way, if we look at, for
6 example, No. 340 personen, the 340 seems to be almost done
7 slightly sharper than “persona”. If we can compare that
8 to 1943 on top, I do not know, I mean, but it seems to be
9 that it is — that my sense would be that they were added
10 later, that there was a first draft made, and especially
11 if we look at the “31550/” in the brieftagebuch number,
12 again the slash seems to come very close to the zero,
13 almost as if they put it back in the typewriter and put in
14 the numbers.
15 Now, it is also possible, of course, that they
16 had cleaned their numbers. You know, these typewriters,
17 these manual typewriters, they would get very messy at a
18 certain moment and especially as in Auschwitz they were
19 reusing the same, how do you call it, ribbon constantly
20 because there was a great lack of it. They get very
21 smudgy at a certain moment, and also the letters get very
22 smudgy, so maybe they had cleaned the numbers to be
23 absolutely certain that these numbers would be clear.
24 I cannot say. But my sense would be, if you look at the
25 brieftagebuch number, that it is possible that they were,
26 that it was added later, also because it goes left of the
. P-24
1 original, how do you call it —-
2 MR IRVING: The margin.
3 A. [Professor Van Pelt]: The margin, and in the other things it seems to be in
4 generally on the margin. So that also indicates that it
5 was generally added later. So, you know, you cannot be
6 absolutely sure about it. But, it seems to be that it was
7 not regular that the person was typing that heading and at
8 that moment was actually putting on all the information.
9 So since the information was put in later, maybe it is
10 simply the 43 slipped.
11 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Yes?
12 A. [Professor Van Pelt]: But it is speculation. We cannot be certain about it.
13 Q. [Mr Justice Gray]: Thank you very much. Can I give you back your original?
14 I am ashamed to say I have made a slight mark on it, not
15 realising.
16 A. [Professor Van Pelt]: You can keep it if you want because I have a copy now.
17 Q. [Mr Justice Gray]: But this is the original?
18 A. [Professor Van Pelt]: This is the original copy from Auschwitz. That is why it
19 is stamped. If you want to keep it, since it has a stamp
20 on it?
21 Q. [Mr Justice Gray]: All right. Thank you. Can I say one or more thing? On
22 the back of it, of that copy you have, actually has the
23 actual file in which it is. It says BW34. It is on the
24 back, so that is the actual file in which that document
25 can be found.
26 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Thank you very much.
. P-25
1 < (The witness stood down)
Part II: Rampton examines Irving on Almeyer notes and Muller letter (26.1-78.2)
Section 26.1-54.26
2 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Mr Rampton, where shall I put this clip?
3 MR RAMPTON: In tab 4 of K2, the second Auschwitz file.
4 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Immediately after page 49?
5 MR RAMPTON: I would think so. In due course I am going to
6 sort mine into chronological order.
7 MR JUSTICE GRAY: So further cross-examination of Mr Irving
8 now?
9 MR RAMPTON: Yes.
10 < MR DAVID IRVING, recalled.
11 Cross-Examined by MR RAMPTON, QC, continued.
12 A. [Mr Irving]: I have two things which I wish to say here from the box,
13 my Lord, if I may?
14 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Yes.
15 A. [Mr Irving]: One goes to yesterday, the letter, you remember, from the
16 man who had been in an Aufraumungs Kommando, do you
17 remember, and who had had knowledge of 30,000 records of
18 30,000 in Dresden.
19 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Dresden, yes?
20 A. [Mr Irving]: Back on Dresden. I just want to draw attention to the
21 fact that the letter was dated sometime in 1965, four
22 years after the book was written. That is a reference to
23 page 538 of the Evans report.
24 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Yes, thank you.
25 A. [Mr Irving]: My Lord, I provided to your Lordship a copy of the actual
26 order of the day which was missing from the bundle,
. P-26
1 and —-
2 Q. [Mr Justice Gray]: The Tagesbefehl?
3 A. [Mr Irving]: That is right, and I have provided you with an English
4 translation of it.
5 Q. [Mr Justice Gray]: Thank you very much.
6 A. [Mr Irving]: And in view of the fact that the Defence, at least in
7 their catalogue, relied on a letter that Mr Kimber wrote
8 to me, which I complained of as being prejudicial, I
9 have put in the clip for your Lordship the reply that
10 I sent to him.
11 Q. [Mr Justice Gray]: Just pause a moment. The Tagesbefehl we ought to put
12 into…
13 A. [Mr Irving]: It does not really add or subtract anything from the case,
14 but your Lordship should really have a copy of the
15 document we spent most of yesterday talking about.
16 Q. [Mr Justice Gray]: I quite agree. Mr Rampton, where would it go?
17 MR RAMPTON: This …
18 MR JUSTICE GRAY: This is the genuine one?
19 A. [Mr Irving]: No, my Lord. This was the fake one.
20 MR RAMPTON: If you look on the second page, my Lord, you will
21 see it has the —-
22 A. [Mr Irving]: I do not know whether there actually ever was a genuine
23 one. I telephoned with Mr Bergander in Berlin this
24 morning, and he said that the man who gave him the
25 so-called genuine one had copies of both.
26 MR JUSTICE GRAY: I think page 14A, is that right?
. P-27
1 A. [Mr Irving]: The other only little bundle I have gave your Lordship
2 this morning was —-
3 Q. [Mr Justice Gray]: Just pause a moment, and let us get this into the right
4 place. Is that right? It is a question of where it goes
5 in the chronological sequence otherwise it gets lost.
6 Come on, we are wasting time.
7 MR RAMPTON: My Lord, I have not got my Dresden file here so I
8 am afraid I cannot help.
9 MR JUSTICE GRAY: No, can Miss Rogers find out where it should
10 go?
11 MR RAMPTON: Can we sort it out?
12 A. [Mr Irving]: The only other thing I gave your Lordship was just five
13 photographs of the Goebbels diary so you know what we are
14 talking about when we come on to the Goebbels matter.
15 That is the boxes and so on that they came in.
16 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Thank you very much.
17 MR RAMPTON: (To the witness): Mr Irving, Hans Almeyer, I think
18 you first discovered him in June 1992?
19 A. [Mr Irving]: I think it was June 2nd 1992, yes.
20 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Your diary entry —-
21 A. [Mr Irving]: June 3rd.
22 Q. [Mr Rampton]: — is 3rd, so it would be yesterday, would it not?
23 A. [Mr Irving]: Yes.
24 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Your diary entry reads — you can see it if you like, we
25 have it here — “Later at PRO all day”. This is what
26 happened on 2nd. “Finished reading file of interrogations
. P-28
1 and MS manuscript by one SS officer, Hans Almeyer, a high
2 Auschwitz official. Once again, like Gerstein, his
3 reports grow more lurid as the months progress. I wonder
4 why? Beaten like Hoess or was he finally telling the
5 truth? A disturbing two hours anyway.” Do you remember
6 that entry?
7 A. [Mr Irving]: Very clearly, yes.
8 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Then I think there is a document you should look at. I am
9 afraid, my Lord, I have no idea which file it comes from.
10 It is a letter written by Mr Irving on 4th June to
11 Mr Marcellus?
12 A. [Mr Irving]: “Dear Tom”.
13 Q. [Mr Rampton]: The whole clump should go into L1 at tab 5, if it is empty
14 which it should be.
15 MR JUSTICE GRAY: L1, this is nothing to do with Dresden, is
16 it?
17 MR RAMPTON: No, this is to do with Auschwitz actually, but it
18 has much more to do — I mean, it is indirectly to do with
19 Auschwitz because Almeyer was there for a time. I do not
20 remember how long, about nine months, I think, perhaps a
21 bit longer. No, it is the way in which Mr Irving handles
22 this information that may be of importance. So that is
23 why L1 is a what file?
24 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Dresden.
25 MR RAMPTON: It has “Hungary” in front, so it can have Almeyer
26 at the back. So long as they go where Miss Rogers says,
. P-29
1 my Lord, then the index will be of use, otherwise it will
2 not.
3 (To the witness): Have you got that letter you
4 wrote on 4th June 1992 to Mr Marcellus and Mr Weber?
5 A. [Mr Irving]: Yes, I was looking at them last night.
6 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Oh good. That is all right. It is a fax, in fact.
7 A. [Mr Irving]: Yes.
8 Q. [Mr Rampton]: They both would have received the whole text, is that
9 right, although the first part is addressed to
10 Mr Marcellus and the second part to —-
11 A. [Mr Irving]: I think they worked in same warehouse, yes.
12 Q. [Mr Rampton]: I am only going to read the part that is addressed to Mark
13 Weber or does he calls himself “Weber”?
14 A. [Mr Irving]: “Weber”, I think.
15 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Who as Marcellus?
16 A. [Mr Irving]: He was the Director of the Institute.
17 Q. [Mr Justice Gray]: So he is IHR as well?
18 A. [Mr Irving]: IHR, yes and Mark Weber was some functionary there.
19 MR RAMPTON: You write to Mark Weber: “Working in the Public
20 Record Office yesterday, I came across the 200 page
21 handwritten memoirs, very similar in sequence to the
22 Gurstein report versions of an SS officer, Almeyer, who
23 was virtually Hoess’s deputy. They have just been opened
24 for research. He was held in a most brutal British prison
25 camp, the London Cave (the notorious Lieutenant Colonel A
26 Scotland)”. Then you write: “These manuscripts are going
. P-30
1 to be a problem for revisionists and need analysing now in
2 advance of our enemies and answering. I attach my
3 transcript of a few pages and you will see why. It
4 becomes more lurid with each subsequent version. At first
5 no gassings, then 50, then 15,000 total. Brute force by
6 interrogators perhaps”.
7 Now, I have a number of questions about that
8 little message, Mr Irving.
9 A. [Mr Irving]: Yes.
10 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Why are the manuscript notes, or whatever they are,
11 memoirs of Almeyer going to be a problem for revisionists?
12 A. [Mr Irving]: I think because they refute a number of the tenets of the
13 revisionist Bible, if I can put it like that.
14 Q. [Mr Rampton]: What is the revisionist Bible?
15 A. [Mr Irving]: Well, the revisionist credo.
16 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Which is?
17 A. [Mr Irving]: Oh, at its most extreme, it is that not a hair was harmed
18 on the head of the Jews which was the most extreme and
19 indefensible position.
20 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Does that include Mr Marcellus and Mr Weber?
21 A. [Mr Irving]: Obviously not, otherwise I would not be writing this kind
22 of letter to them, but the Almeyer manuscript, as I would
23 call them, just like the Adolf Eichmann manuscripts that I
24 had found the previous October in Argentina, raised
25 serious questions. They helped to do somewhat more than
26 dot i’s and cross t’s.
. P-31
1 Q. [Mr Rampton]: “… and need analysing now in advance of our enemies”?
2 A. [Mr Irving]: Yes.
3 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Who is the “our” referred to there?
4 A. [Mr Irving]: Well, the enemies of myself and Mr Weber and, presumably,
5 Tom Marcellus.
6 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Who are those enemies?
7 A. [Mr Irving]: Irresponsible historians who will leap on any document and
8 use it to inflate the untenable position at the other end
9 of the spectrum.
10 Q. [Mr Rampton]: What you were worried about, Almeyer tells a tale,
11 accurate in parts, inaccurate in other parts, according to
12 the traditional or the orthodox view of these matters,
13 about his time at Auschwitz, does he not?
14 A. [Mr Irving]: It is a very inaccurate tale which is, presumably, one
15 reason why — which is, presumably, one reason why the
16 Defence has not relied on him so far.
17 Q. [Mr Rampton]: You will find him in extenso in Professor van Pelt’s
18 report. You will also find precise observations about
19 what is accurate and what is not.
20 A. [Mr Irving]: Well, you remember when we asked the witness van Pelt who
21 his important eyewitnesses were, there was no mention of
22 Almeyer.
23 Q. [Mr Rampton]: No, there is not because Almeyer is, in certain respects,
24 plainly wrong.
25 A. [Mr Irving]: Yes, exactly what I said.
26 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Yes, it may be what you said. What I am wondering about,
. P-32
1 Mr Irving, is why you were so frightened of Hans Almeyer’s
2 handwritten notes?
3 A. [Mr Irving]: I do not think I am frightened about him. I am just
4 concerned for several reasons. Let me explain. As an
5 independent historian, with no tenure Professorship to
6 fall back on and, as I explained in my opening statement
7 to this court, no pension to rely on, I have to rely on
8 what find in the archives to sustain myself and my young
9 family. In order to do that, I rely on finding what might
10 be commonly called scoops, and when you have found a
11 scoop, it would be very foolish if you put it straight in
12 the shop window and say, “Come on and help yourself”.
13 This was clearly a scoop.
14 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Mr Irving, that is not what you mean by the little phrase
15 “our enemies”, is it? What you are frightened of is that
16 somebody will find it or see it and will say: “Well, here
17 is another little piece of information. It does not fit
18 in every respect, but the bits which are consistent with
19 what we have already got fit neatly into the Auschwitz
20 jigsaw”. That is what you are afraid of, is it not?
21 A. [Mr Irving]: They do not fit neatly into Auschwitz jigsaw. It is quite
22 plain. If he only refers to 15,000 dead or 15,000 gassed,
23 then that fitted more into our jigsaw than into the jigsaw
24 of our opponents.
25 MR RAMPTON: I will not ask you to look at it now, my Lord.
26 I give in the reference a very full account of Almeyer,
. P-33
1 warts and all —-
2 A. [Mr Irving]: Well, let me just draw your attention to that letter.
3 MR RAMPTON: I am sorry, I am speaking to his Lordship.
4 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Let Mr Rampton finish. Then you say what you
5 want to say. Mr Rampton, yes, where do we find it?
6 MR RAMPTON: May I finish what I am saying to his Lordship?
7 A. [Mr Irving]: His Lordship has just said the same.
8 MR RAMPTON: On pages 260 to 266.
9 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Of Professor van Pelt?
10 MR RAMPTON: Not the whole of it, I am sure it is not the whole
11 of it, but a good deal of what he said is set out there.
12 At various points in the footnotes, my Lord, Professor van
13 Pelt, and probably also in the text, though I do not have
14 the whole of it here, Professor van Pelt draws attention
15 to passages in Almeyer which cannot be right.
16 MR JUSTICE GRAY: But the point on Almeyer was not really so
17 much the number of Jewish prisoners who were gassed, but,
18 rather, the detailed nature of the description of the gas
19 chambers.
20 MR RAMPTON: Precisely, my Lord.
21 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Is that fair?
22 MR RAMPTON: Absolutely right.
23 A. [Mr Irving]: Right.
24 Q. [Mr Rampton]: That is what you and your revisionist friends were afraid
25 of, was it not, Mr Irving?
26 A. [Mr Irving]: Let me explain. I saw the Almeyer file on three
. P-34
1 occasions, as you now know, because I went to the Public
2 Record Office and asked if they would give me a print out
3 of all the occasions on which I saw the file. I saw it
4 once for afternoon on June 3rd 1992, and I saw it
5 subsequently four years later — I have the actual print
6 out here which will tell you the precise days when I saw
7 it — on May 29th 1996, and again probably in connection
8 with preparation of this action on 6th September 1997. So
9 I have seen it three times.
10 I am not a Holocaust historian. My time in the
11 archives is limited. If I am not writing about the
12 Holocaust in 1992, I am not going to spend the entire
13 afternoon analysing a file of what looks like 200 pages.
14 I skimmed through it, looked at the various versions,
15 spotted the obvious discrepancies and immediately sent
16 this, what you quite rightly described, I suppose, as an
17 alarm signal to other people saying, “There is this report
18 in the archives which is going to cause problems, and we
19 are going to have to face up to it and it is better that
20 we are the ones who publish it, rather than the people at
21 the other end of the extreme, of either end of the two
22 extremes, who will put spins on it which are quite
23 unacceptable.
24 Q. [Mr Rampton]: But, you see, Mr Irving, before ever having analysed it,
25 thought about it, compared it with the rest of the great
26 corpus of evidence about Auschwitz, you are already
. P-35
1 suggesting in this letter that Almeyer’s account was
2 beaten out of him by the British under the charge of the
3 notorious Lieutenant Colonel Scotland, are you not?
4 A. [Mr Irving]: I take it you have never heard of Lieutenant Colonel
5 Scotland.
6 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Mr Irving, will you answer my question?
7 A. [Mr Irving]: Well, I have. I know who Lieutenant Colonel Scotland is
8 and I know all about the Kensington Cage in which the
9 prisoners were tortured.
10 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Mr Irving, I dare say you have. I am not the least bit
11 interested in Colonel Scotland. Please answer my
12 question. Before you have analysed these notes or
13 compared them with the corpus of evidence on Auschwitz,
14 you have already begun to suggest that they were beaten
15 out of it?
16 A. [Mr Irving]: The papers are found in the files of Lieutenant Colonel A
17 Scotland which were seized from him by the British
18 Government after the war. Almeyer was held finally in the
19 London prison cage, which was Colonel Scotland’s outfit,
20 before he was turned over to the Nuremberg authorities.
21 As his questioning proceeded, starting in Norway and then
22 ending up in England because he was captured in Norway,
23 his accounts became more lurid. The final accounts in his
24 file are written in British Army style with all place
25 names and proper nouns written in capital letters with all
26 that that implies, in handwriting, in pencil.
. P-36
1 MR JUSTICE GRAY: But Mr Rampton’s question, I think, was
2 suggesting this to you — I am just going to ask it, if I
3 may — that in a way you are putting the cart before the
4 horse jumping to the conclusion — this is the
5 question —-
6 A. [Mr Irving]: Yes.
7 Q. [Mr Justice Gray]: — that because the Almeyer account was found in what you
8 describe as the London Cage, it, therefore, followed that
9 the account that he gives is worthless?
10 A. [Mr Irving]: No, my Lord. What I am saying is because it gets
11 progressively more lurid, because the numbers increase
12 from report to report, and because it ends up written in
13 traditional British Army style on British Army notepaper,
14 in pencil with all the place names and proper nouns
15 written in capital letters, one is entitled to draw
16 certain conclusions from the physical appearance of this
17 file, particularly when one associates it with the name of
18 the notorious Colonel Scotland.
19 MR RAMPTON: Have you ever seen a police interview with a
20 witness, Mr Irving — a record, a handwritten record, of a
21 police interview with a witness, Mr Irving?
22 A. [Mr Irving]: I think there have been references to them in various
23 Courts of Appeal, yes.
24 Q. [Mr Rampton]: No, Mr Irving. Have you ever actually seen the record of
25 a police interview? I am talking about the days before
26 they were tape recorded and later typed, transcribed.
. P-37
1 Have you ever seen a record of an interview in a Police
2 Station?
3 A. [Mr Irving]: Yes.
4 Q. [Mr Rampton]: You know perfectly well it is common form that poor old
5 officer Bobby laboriously writes out what the witness is
6 saying, and then when he comes to a name he always puts it
7 in capital letters?
8 A. [Mr Irving]: But is he writing out what the witness is saying or is he
9 writing down something and saying to the witness, “No sign
10 here, please. This is what you said”?
11 Q. [Mr Rampton]: So it is not just the notorious Colonel Scotland, it is
12 the notorious Scotland Yard, is it?
13 A. [Mr Irving]: Well, you dragged them in. I did not mention them.
14 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Come on, Mr Irving, the fact that it is written in pencil
15 with the names in capitals tells us nothing.
16 A. [Mr Irving]: On the contrary, it indicates clearly that he is doing
17 precisely what he is told to at the dictate of the British
18 Army officers who, undoubtedly, had ways of doing their
19 job, they had ways of making people talk, and I have no
20 criticism whatsoever of that. We won the war and these
21 are the methods we used to win the war. But to use these
22 same documents that we won the war with to write history
23 from is, I think, indicative of the problems that we are
24 having in the courtroom today. Because you yourself have
25 admitted, your expert witnesses have admitted, that
26 Almeyer frequently made wrong statements in his report.
. P-38
1 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Yes, he did. In fact, he gave his first account in
2 Norway, did he not?
3 A. [Mr Irving]: Yes.
4 Q. [Mr Rampton]: I am told, and you probably will not know because you have
5 never studied it, but in fact I am told that his most
6 explicit and detailed account was given in Norway.
7 A. [Mr Irving]: Not with these numbers, as I said in my letters to
8 Mr Weber and also Mr Philip on the same day.
9 Q. [Mr Rampton]: His significance is not numbers, is it? His significance
10 is procedure at Auschwitz, is it not?
11 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Is that right, Mr Irving?
12 A. [Mr Irving]: I am sorry, I was not listening. I was just checking this
13 other letter I wrote on that day. I am not sure if it is
14 in the file or not.
15 MR RAMPTON: If there is one in German, I am going to ask you
16 about it. It is Karl Philip.
17 A. [Mr Irving]: Yes.
18 Q. [Mr Rampton]: I will ask you about that in a moment. The significance
19 of Almeyer for the record in so far as he has significance
20 is not the numbers that he gives, but the description that
21 he gives of how they killed the people at Auschwitz, is it
22 not?
23 A. [Mr Irving]: Even there, if my memory is correct, he gets it wrong.
24 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Well, what is the answer to the question and
25 then carry on about whether he gets it right or wrong.
26 A. [Mr Irving]: He describes gassing procedures, this is true, but, of
. P-39
1 course —–
2 Q. [Mr Justice Gray]: But the question, Mr Irving — do focus on the question —
3 is that the significant thing about Almeyer’s account is
4 not the number that he gives of the Jewish prisoners who
5 were gassed, but the description he gives of the way in
6 which they were grassed. That is the question.
7 MR RAMPTON: It is the question.
8 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Can you say whether you agree or disagree
9 with it?
10 A. [Mr Irving]: If you tell me what the description is that he gave?
11 MR RAMPTON: Let me tan an example, the middle of page 262 of
12 the transcript, as it where, that appears in van Pelt. It
13 corresponds very roughly with what SS Untersturmfuhrer
14 Broad tells us:
15 “In the time that followed some three to four
16 gassing were undertaken in the old crematorium. These
17 always occurred in evening hours. In the morgue were two
18 or three air vents and medical orderlies wearing gas masks
19 should blue cyanide gas into these” —-
20 A. [Mr Irving]: Now, which crematorium are we talking about? Crematorium
21 number —-
22 Q. [Mr Rampton]: That is crematorium (i) at Auschwitz 1 at the stammlager.
23 A. [Mr Irving]: About which, unfortunately, we have not asked the
24 Professor very much in his evidence.
25 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Well, you did not.
26 A. [Mr Irving]: Yes, indeed, but I tried to bring this up and his Lord
. P-40
1 said, “We are not interested in whether this building has
2 been faked after the war or not”.
3 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Mr Irving, do you never answer an overt question?
4 MR JUSTICE GRAY: That is a total misrepresentation of what
5 I said, but let us move on..
6 A. [Mr Irving]: Well, I tried to bring up crematorium No. (i) in order to
7 get the admission from the witness that it has been built
8 in 1948 by the Poles and at this point your Lordship
9 intervened, you will remember, and said, “This is of” —-
10 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Well, I am not going to go through that again
11 because the transcript is there, but let us get back to
12 Almeyer.
13 MR RAMPTON: We will just read on, and this is where Almeyer is
14 a real killer for you revisionists, is it not, Mr Irving?
15 A. [Mr Irving]: I do not know. I will have to see what it says.
16 Q. [Mr Rampton]: “We were not allowed to come close and only the next day
17 the bunker, gas chamber, was opened. The doctor told that
18 the people died within half a minute to a minute. In the
19 meantime, in Birkenhau, close to the burial sites, two
20 empty houses were equipped by the construction office with
21 gas chambers. One house had two chambers, the other
22 four. These houses were designed as bunkers 1 and 2.
23 Each chamber accommodated about 50 to 150 people.
24 “At the end of January or February, the first
25 gassings were undertaken. The Commando was called “SK”
26 and the camp commander had put it under the direct
. P-41
1 authority of Untersturmfuhrer Grabner and was again led
2 and brought into action by Hoessler”. That is different
3 from Hoess. “The area was surrounded by notices and
4 marked as a security zone and, moreover, encircled by
5 eight guardposts from the Commando.
6 “From that moment onwards the camp doctor sorted
7 from the arriving transports immediately the inmates and
8 those who were destined to be gassed. They had
9 instructions to select for gassing those crippled by
10 illness, those over 55 years of age who could not work and
11 children up to 11 or 12 years”. From a revisionist point
12 of view, that is a catastrophic account, is it not?
13 A. [Mr Irving]: But I also draw attention to the frequent footnotes that
14 Professor van Pelt has quite rightly written in saying
15 this is wrong, that is wrong, the following is wrong, this
16 is an incorrect account, the time was longer, the time was
17 shorter. If one knows that, what kind of credence can you
18 attach to a report like that?
19 MR JUSTICE GRAY: In relation to the passage Mr Rampton has
20 just read, is that not an accurate account of, I do not
21 know, is it crematoria (iv) and (v), or (iii) and (iv)?
22 MR RAMPTON: No. In that passage it is bunkers 1 and 2.
23 A. [Mr Irving]: It is talking about the bunkers 1 and 2, which we have not
24 talked about and which, as far as I am concerned, actually
25 existed.
26 MR JUSTICE GRAY: My question really is this. Is there
. P-42
1 anything wrong with that as an account, so far as you see
2 it?
3 A. [Mr Irving]: I see nothing wrong with that as an account, my Lord, but
4 then, of course, as I have to keep reminding the court,
5 I am not a Holocaust historian. I have never set myself
6 up as a Holocaust historian. I have not written about the
7 Holocaust in books or otherwise. All I know is that this
8 is a flawed account, if I can use that word. Professor
9 van Pelt himself describes it as being inaccurate in very
10 many respects, and this is the kind of problems which
11 would no doubt have been brought out, had I ever sat down
12 and read the whole file and start comparing it with all
13 the others.
14 MR RAMPTON: Before suggesting that this flawed account, put
15 into his mouth by the brutal British interrogators, was
16 tortured out of him by Colonel Scotland?
17 A. [Mr Irving]: I am talking about the figures of course, both in the
18 English letter and in the German letter, June 4th. I said
19 it becomes more lurid with each subsequent version, first
20 no gassings, then 50, then 15,000 in all. I suggest brute
21 force by interrogators perhaps.
22 Q. [Mr Rampton]: So you are quite prepared to accept that these accounts,
23 he goes on on a subsequent page to give an account of
24 gassings of crematorium (ii) in Berkenhau?
25 A. [Mr Irving]: We have exactly same problem with Rudolf Hoess. We know
26 Rudolf Hoess was badly manhandled and no doubt he richly
. P-43
1 deserved it, but his account also became more lurid with
2 each successive interrogation.
3 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Mr Irving, your answers are in danger of becoming
4 characteristically inconsistent, if I may say so. You
5 were worried that Colonel Scotland may have tortured these
6 numbers, or threatened to do so, out of Almeyer, is that
7 right?
8 A. [Mr Irving]: That is not actually what I said. I said his account
9 becomes more lurid with each successive interrogation.
10 That is all one can safely say, looking at them, on the
11 basis of a first blush look at the entire file.
12 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Let us start again, Mr Irving. If this is a flawed
13 account, and an obviously flawed account —-
14 A. [Mr Irving]: In the opinion of your own expert witness.
15 Q. [Mr Rampton]: No. If you only have to compare it with the rest of the
16 evidence. I know you have never done that, but it is, let
17 me tell you, in certain respects unclear, confused and
18 inaccurate. The guts of it, however, I put to you a
19 moment ago, are dangerous to revisionists. If this
20 account had been beaten or threatened out of this man by
21 the brutal British interrogators, would you not think that
22 they would have made it consistent with what else they
23 knew?
24 A. [Mr Irving]: That is perhaps what they were doing.
25 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Would you not think —-
26 A. [Mr Irving]: Perhaps that is why it is marginally consistent with other
. P-44
1 accounts known at this time. By this time, you have to
2 remember, they already knew quite a lot from other
3 interrogations.
4 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Exactly. So they would have made Almeyer get it right.
5 They have not only got all the details right, they would
6 have got the numbers right, would they not, Mr Irving?
7 A. [Mr Irving]: What you mean? Put in 2.8 million or some —-
8 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Whatever. But 15,000? That is pathetic, is it not? That
9 is not a very good answer to a threat of torture or
10 torture itself, is it?
11 A. [Mr Irving]: Maybe that was going to be in a later stage. Maybe there
12 was going to be an interrogation 5 or 6 when he came to
13 Nuremberg into the shadow of the gallows. This is a
14 rather threadbare kind of argument. We do not know what
15 stage they reached in their coercion.
16 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Mr Irving, you have made a suggestion in this letter to
17 your chums in the revisionist movement to the effect that
18 this man gave a fallacious account because he was tortured
19 or threatened with torture by the Brits. You have
20 absolutely no basis for that whatsoever.
21 A. [Mr Irving]: Mr Rampton, when the time comes to cross-examine your
22 expert witnesses, I shall be putting to them documents
23 which show very clearly what methods were used to extract
24 information from witnesses, including some of the most
25 brutal and horrifying descriptions of what happened to the
26 witnesses in the Malmedy trial. I shall invite them to
. P-45
1 state whether they consider this kind of evidence is
2 dependable.
3 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Mr Irving,, I am tempted myself to resort such methods to
4 get a straight answer to my question, I have to say. You
5 have no evidential —-
6 A. [Mr Irving]: It included, for example, crushing the testicles of 165
7 out of 167 witnesses. Is that what you are proposing to
8 do to me?
9 Q. [Mr Rampton]: We cannot fit that many witnesses into your witness box up
10 there, Mr Irving, I am afraid. Can you turn to the next
11 page, 92, please? It has a 92 in the right hand corner,
12 so that you can identify it. It is a letter from you,
13 London, 4th June 1992 — it is a facsimile — to Karl
14 Philip. Just tell me, does it say more or less the same
15 as what your letter to Mark Weber said?
16 A. [Mr Irving]: Yes. I do not know what file I am supposed to be looking
17 at.
18 MR JUSTICE GRAY: I think the answer is yes, having read
19 through it.
20 MR RAMPTON: It looks like it. My German is rotten but it
21 looks much the same.
22 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Who is Philip?
23 MR RAMPTON: That is my next question. Who is Karl Philip?
24 A. [Mr Irving]: He is a German friend of mine.
25 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Why would he want to have this information?
26 A. [Mr Irving]: I would have to think back. In 1992 he was publishing a
. P-46
1 newsletter.
2 Q. [Mr Rampton]: He is another revisionist, is he not?
3 A. [Mr Irving]: Oh yes. He is a wicked revisionist.
4 Q. [Mr Rampton]: No, he is another revisionist?
5 A. [Mr Irving]: But I said yes, he is a revisionist.
6 Q. [Mr Rampton]: You said he was a wicked revisionist. Would you like to
7 expand on why he is wicked?
8 A. [Mr Irving]: Apparently all revisionists are wicked. This is a piece
9 of sarcasm on my part which obviously totally escaped you.
10 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Mr Irving, revisionists are wicked if they tell deliberate
11 falsehoods about the past.
12 A. [Mr Irving]: Let us hear if you can catch me out in telling deliberate
13 falsehoods on oath, which is of course a serious matter.
14 MR JUSTICE GRAY: On we go, I think.
15 MR RAMPTON: I quite agree. The last three pages in this
16 little clip should be some pages from your book
17 Nuremberg. Do you recognize them? Starting with the page
18 number 245.
19 A. [Mr Irving]: Yes.
20 Q. [Mr Rampton]: There is a paragraph at the bottom of page 245 which
21 begins, “in fact Eichmann”.
22 A. [Mr Irving]: Yes. I just have the notes here. I have 245, yes, page
23 6.
24 Q. [Mr Rampton]: “In fact Eichmann had no authority to issue orders to
25 Hoess, as they were in different branches…” I will not
26 bother to read that. You are talking about the material
. P-47
1 presented by the Allies at Nuremberg, I suppose, are you?
2 “There is no trace on the Allied aerial photographs
3 either of such burning operations or of the pits
4 themselves. Perhaps for security reasons, the Allies made
5 no attempt to introduce these highly detailed aerial
6 photographs of Auschwitz in this or the later war crimes
7 trial”.
8 Those are probably including some of the
9 photographs we looked at earlier in this trial, are they
10 not, Mr Irving?
11 A. [Mr Irving]: Yes. The aerial photographs helped in particular with
12 secrecy by the Americans and the British after the war.
13 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Now, the footnote there is 34, and you will find that
14 footnote on the next following page in this little clip of
15 documents. At the bottom of the page, I am afraid the
16 page has lost its number.
17 A. [Mr Irving]: Pages 4 and 5.
18 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Yes. It is page 353 of the book. You write: “Nor did
19 they (that is Allies) introduce other compelling evidence
20 about Auschwitz, for example, the testimony of SS
21 Sturmbannfuhrer Kurt Almeyer”. In fact I think he is
22 called Hans Almeyer, is he not?
23 A. [Mr Irving]: That I do not know.
24 Q. [Mr Rampton]: — “who had for several weeks acted as deputy Kommandant
25 of Auschwitz. Almeyer was initially as incoherent as
26 Hoess under interrogation by the British in Norway and
. P-48
1 England. The memoirs and manuscripts which he pencilled
2 in the Kensington Interrogation centre commanded by
3 Lieutenant Colonel Scotland also displayed an increasing
4 precision with each week that passed. The final
5 manuscript (or fair copy) signed by Almeyer was pencilled
6 in British Army style with all proper names in block
7 letters. Almeyer was extradited by the British to
8 Poland and hanged.”
9 If you write the words “compelling evidence”,
10 are you being sarcastic?
11 A. [Mr Irving]: It is compelling. It is very important. I have always
12 been puzzled why that evidence was not introduced at
13 Nuremberg, unless perhaps the experts at Nuremberg said
14 this will harm us more than it helps us because of the
15 figures.
16 Q. [Mr Rampton]: How many people were tried at Nuremberg for the sorts of
17 crimes alleged to have been committed at Auschwitz and
18 Birkenhau?
19 A. [Mr Irving]: At the principal trial there were 22 Defendants and in the
20 subsequent actions, there were 12 subsequent actions with
21 the United States, people of the United States against
22 individual groups.
23 Q. [Mr Rampton]: How many of the 22 pleaded guilty?
24 A. [Mr Irving]: None of them.
25 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Were they all convicted?
26 A. [Mr Irving]: Two were acquitted.
. P-49
1 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Was the evidence of, for example, Heinrich Tauber used at
2 Nuremberg?
3 A. [Mr Irving]: I do not think so. I do not know, is the answer to that.
4 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Right. I just want to come back to one thing on this.
5 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Before you leave that, I am a bit puzzled,
6 Mr Irving. Can you help me? I had got the impression
7 that you really thought that Almeyer’s account was not
8 worthless but really not worth a great deal because of the
9 inaccuracy.
10 A. [Mr Irving]: It is questionable material, but obviously, if you read
11 the whole file, this was a man who was in a position to
12 know. He is an important character, and I am surprised
13 that they did not introduce either his statements or call
14 him as a witness.
15 Q. [Mr Justice Gray]: If it is questionable, why do you describe it in your
16 Nuremberg book as compelling?
17 A. [Mr Irving]: It is compelling evidence which needs to be examined. It
18 is compelling evidence that should have been before the
19 court if they were looking at these atrocities. It is one
20 of the oddities of the Nuremberg War Crimes trial that
21 Auschwitz was hardly mentioned. The prosecution of crimes
22 against humanity was left to the French and the Russian
23 prosecutors, and the actual events in Auschwitz were very
24 skimpily touched upon. The purpose of this footnote, my
25 Lord, is to bring the attention of the Almeyer file to the
26 historical community, to say there is this material, here
. P-50
1 is the file number, it is important stuff, go for it.
2 MR RAMPTON: When was book published? 1996?
3 A. [Mr Irving]: It was written in 1994, yes.
4 Q. [Mr Rampton]: When was the first time you went public on Almeyer? You
5 discovered it in the beginning of June 92.
6 A. [Mr Irving]: I drew attention of the fellow historians to it and other
7 writers from 1992 onwards immediately. I found one letter
8 in October 1992 to a Mr Paul Gifford, to whom I sent the
9 entire file on the Holocaust, including the Almeyer
10 material.
11 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Who is he?
12 A. [Mr Irving]: He is a British writer. If you are interested in this
13 letter, it was in the discovery. I sent it to him on
14 October 7th, saying this file must be returned within four
15 weeks please. I sent him a reminder on 29th 1992, that is
16 the same year as I found it, saying please now return the
17 file. So it went on. I sent it to Gerald Fleming. I
18 believe I drew Sir Martin Guildford’s attention to it, but
19 on that I cannot be certain without looking at my papers.
20 Q. [Mr Rampton]: I cannot challenge that. I am in no position to do that.
21 A. [Mr Irving]: I certainly drew the attention of, I would say, half a
22 dozen or a dozen other writers around the world over these
23 years to the Almeyer file.
24 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Finally this, Mr Irving, I am reading now —-.
25 A. [Mr Irving]: Quite simply because I was not an expert on it and they
26 were better placed than I was to evaluate it.
. P-51
1 Q. [Mr Rampton]: I am reading now from the report of Professor Funker,
2 which you may or may not yet have read, who will be giving
3 evidence, I hope, in about a fortnight’s time, about
4 political movements and figures in modern Germany. You
5 know who I mean, do you not? Hyo Funker?
6 A. [Mr Irving]: Yes.
7 Q. [Mr Rampton]: I think he is a Professor in Berlin. He tells us this
8 about Karl Philip and I want you to comment on it.
9 A. [Mr Irving]: Yes.
10 Q. [Mr Rampton]: You will obviously get the chance to cross-examine him if
11 he is going to be a witness, I mean Professor Funker.
12 Karl Philip NPD: What is NPD?
13 A. [Mr Irving]: It is national something or other.
14 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Party Deutschland?
15 A. [Mr Irving]: Yes.
16 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Is that a legal political party in Germany?
17 A. [Mr Irving]: What are you suggesting, that he was a member or an
18 official of it? I do not know.
19 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Functionary?
20 A. [Mr Irving]: I do not know. That is news to me.
21 Q. [Mr Rampton]: You do not know that? In the 1970s and 1980s?
22 A. [Mr Irving]: No.
23 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Did you know that in 1990 he received a fine of about
24 3,600 deutschemark for incitement of the people and
25 defamation?
26 A. [Mr Irving]: I know the expression give a dog bad name and hang them,
. P-52
1 yes.
2 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Is it correct that he received a fine, to your
3 knowledge — if you do not know, say so — of 3,600
4 deutschemarks for incitement of the people and defamation?
5 A. [Mr Irving]: This is not known to me, no.
6 Q. [Mr Rampton]: It is not known to you?
7 A. [Mr Irving]: When was this?
8 Q. [Mr Rampton]: 1990.
9 A. [Mr Irving]: No.
10 Q. [Mr Rampton]: When did you first meet Mr Philip?
11 A. [Mr Irving]: 1989, October 23rd or thereabouts.
12 Q. [Mr Rampton]: How often do you correspond, speak to or meet Mr Philip,
13 Herr Philip?
14 A. [Mr Irving]: I suppose 1989, for about two years. He was in
15 correspondence with me for those two years. He
16 occasionally sends me emails now.
17 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Do you know a newspaper called Die Barenschaft?
18 A. [Mr Irving]: The little magazine, yes.
19 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Is a neo-Nazi magazine?
20 A. [Mr Irving]: I do not know. I never opened it. It was sent to me and
21 it went straight into the trash can.
22 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Do you know Ahmed Rami of Radio Islam in Stockholm?
23 A. [Mr Irving]: I have had no dealings with him whatsoever.
24 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Are you leaving Almeyer?
25 MR RAMPTON: Yes, I am.
26 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Mr Rampton, is the allegation pursued that
. P-53
1 Mr Irving sat on the Almeyer material until it was
2 discovered by the defendants’ solicitors?
3 MR RAMPTON: Since I am in no position to challenge that he
4 wrote to these various people when he says that he did, it
5 obviously is not. He did not go into public print on
6 until the Nuremberg book but he did mention it there.
7 A. [Mr Irving]: The reason I did not go in public with it is because it
8 was my scoop, and although I am known for my generosity in
9 giving my files away to other writers, this particular one
10 —-
11 Q. [Mr Rampton]: What would be the value of a scoop, Mr Irving, when, as
12 soon as you have made the scoop, according to you, you
13 have to throw it away because it has been devalued by
14 being tortured out of the man who provided it?
15 A. [Mr Irving]: No. What would happened, you see, is just the same as the
16 Institute of History in Munich published the Hoess
17 memoirs. I would have contemplated publishing the Almeyer
18 memoirs with suitable surrounding material and documents
19 from the archives, but from 1993 of course this became
20 impossible when I was banned from the German archives on
21 July 1st and banned from German soil on November 9th.
22 Q. [Mr Rampton]: It would be a bit like publishing the Hitler diaries and
23 saying, look at this, it not terrific, it is a forgery?
24 It would be absolutely worthless, would it not, according
25 to you?
26 A. [Mr Irving]: I can see no comparison whatsoever.
. P-54
Section 55.1-78.2
1 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Now I want to move to something else, if I may. Again it
2 is only a little point. My Lord, what I am going to do,
3 if I may, is spend a little time just clearing up some
4 loose ends. Loose ends do happen in the course of
5 litigation.
6 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Of course they do. Can you explain to me, as
7 you do so, where the loose ends fit in?
8 MR RAMPTON: I am now going to deal with three documents which
9 Mr Irving Denied in evidence that he had ever seen.
10 A. [Mr Irving]: Can I come back on the Almeyer thing by way of
11 re-examination, so to speak?
12 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Yes.
13 A. [Mr Irving]: Your Lordship very rightly asked if they were upholding
14 that allegation that I sat on it. There is the specific
15 allegation in the van Pelt report that I did not let it be
16 known until I heard that Mishcon de Reya —-
17 MR JUSTICE GRAY: That was what I was asking Mr Rampton about.
18 A. [Mr Irving]: You did not specifically mention that footnote, my Lord.
19 I think I have established that I put it in the public
20 domain long before Mishcon de Reya started scrabbling
21 around in the archives.
22 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Mr Rampton is not pursuing that allegation.
23 MR RAMPTON: I am not pursuing it, subject to this, that
24 I would quite like to see the letters which he said that
25 he wrote to the various historians.
26 A. [Mr Irving]: Certainly. I will try to find them. I have seven copies
. P-55
1 of it here, if you would like to have this.
2 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Being a suspicious bloke, I like to see the chapter and
3 verse.
4 A. [Mr Irving]: This is dated October 7th 1992 and there are seven copies
5 of it which I did at 4 o’clock this morning.
6 Q. [Mr Rampton]: My Lord, what I am going to do now is refer to three
7 documents — they are different documents — which Mr
8 Irving told us in evidence that he had never seen. The
9 first one is the letter from Muller, the head of the
10 Gestapo, the order rather, to the Einsatzgruppen, all four
11 of them, of 1st August 1941, which says, in effect, that
12 the Fuhrer will be getting continuous reports about the
13 work of the Einsatzgruppen in the East.
14 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Where is it, just in case it is necessary to
15 look at it?
16 MR RAMPTON: My Lord, it is in Professor Browning’s documents.
17 It is referred to by him.
18 MR JUSTICE GRAY: That will do.
19 MR RAMPTON: On page 7 of his report. I think my memory is
20 that he has written it out in translation. Unfortunately,
21 I do not have it here. It is actually in H4 (ii).
22 MR JUSTICE GRAY: I think that, unless Mr Irving wants it dug
23 out, this will probably do.
24 MR RAMPTON: I have given a sort of a translation.
25 A. [Mr Irving]: I am not normally very picky, my Lord, but in this
26 particular case it would be nice sometime to see the
. P-56
1 original or a facsimile of it.
2 MR RAMPTON: I agree. I do believe that Mr Irving should be
3 given H4 (ii). That is actually Dr Longerich’s documents
4 but it is the same document.
5 A. [Mr Irving]: It is a document from the Russian archives?
6 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Yes, and it is the first sentence of the writing which
7 I am interested in. It is footnote 143, in handwriting at
8 the bottom right hand corner of the page. Do you see it?
9 It is a copy.
10 A. [Mr Irving]: Yes.
11 Q. [Mr Rampton]: It says so. Did I more or less translate the first
12 sentence correctly?
13 A. [Mr Irving]: Oh dear. I can only say “oh dear” about this document.
14 Where does it come from?
15 Q. [Mr Rampton]: I can tell you that, Mr Irving. It has been available in
16 the Munich Institute of Contemporary History IFZ with the
17 reference number FA 213/3 since before 1982.
18 A. [Mr Irving]: That does not tell us so much about the provenance though,
19 does it?
20 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Why? What is the matter with it?
21 A. [Mr Irving]: Well, I mean, normally you would have either a Nuremberg
22 document number in the top right hand corner or some
23 indication of provenance and it would not contain German
24 spelling mistakes.
25 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Why not? Do soldiers not make mistakes when they write,
26 or civil servants? Goodness me. We have spotted several
. P-57
1 already in the original documents in this case, have we
2 not?
3 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Are you saying that this not an authentic
4 document?
5 MR RAMPTON: Another fake, I think. He does not like it so it
6 is another fake.
7 A. [Mr Irving]: I am seeing this for the first time, of course, but
8 I noticed straightaway at the bottom line that
9 interestingly it does use the SS runes after the word
10 “Muller”, which implies that it is a wartime document.
11 MR JUSTICE GRAY: I think I am looking at the wrong document.
12 A. [Mr Irving]: My Lord, it is footnote 143.
13 MR JUSTICE GRAY: I see. There are two 143s.
14 MR RAMPTON: I am sorry, it is a copy.
15 MR JUSTICE GRAY: It is page 295?
16 MR RAMPTON: That is right, yes.
17 MR JUSTICE GRAY: There is another footnote 143.
18 MR RAMPTON: I am sorry about that. Both Dr Longerich and
19 Professor Browning make reference to this.
20 A. [Mr Irving]: It may be that I am more picky than they are when I am
21 dealing with what looks like a duplicated copy of a
22 document.
23 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Never mind. It is a what?
24 A. [Mr Irving]: It looks like a duplicated copy of a document, in other
25 words on an old fashioned Gestetner duplicator, so to
26 speak, but it has the SS runes on it after the name
. P-58
1 Muller, which implies, or should be taken to imply, that
2 it is a wartime document rather than a postwar one.
3 Q. [Mr Rampton]: I would guess that it is. Why not?
4 A. [Mr Irving]: What worries me is the word “verschlussel” in the fifth
5 line, which is neither fish nor fowl in German. It is
6 “verschlussel”. It is not “verschlusselt,” it is not
7 “verschlusselung”. It is a word that does not exist by
8 itself.
9 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Well tell me what it means.
10 A. [Mr Irving]: If it was completed it could be to be coded or cyphered,
11 encyphered, but it is just, as I said, wrong.
12 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Mr Irving, suppose that there was an N instead of an L,
13 would that make a difference?
14 A. [Mr Irving]: It would have to be after the L. It is a strange error,
15 I would say that. If it is genuine, then the next thing
16 I would point to, of course, is the fact that it has a
17 very low classification, just G, secret.
18 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Mr Irving, I am not asking you about the document.
19 A. [Mr Irving]: All right.
20 Q. [Mr Rampton]: When I asked you about this document before, it was ages
21 ago, you denied ever having seen it.
22 A. [Mr Irving]: Now I am seeing it for the first time, yes.
23 Q. [Mr Rampton]: So you say.
24 A. [Mr Irving]: I beg your pardon. I am on oath and, if I say I am seeing
25 this for the first time, then I am seeing it for the first
26 time.
. P-59
1 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Mr Irving, you have said many things on oath which
2 I simply do not accept, so we can get past that childish
3 stage of this interrogation.
4 A. [Mr Irving]: I think this is probably the time to have it out. Where
5 you think I am lying on oath, then you should say so.
6 MR JUSTICE GRAY: He is saying so.
7 MR RAMPTON: I am doubting it, Mr Irving.
8 A. [Mr Irving]: My Lord, he is not saying when. He is just alleging in
9 broad terms.
10 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Mr Irving, that is not right. Let me make it
11 clear to you.
12 MR RAMPTON: Will you please wait. I do not do that.
13 MR JUSTICE GRAY: We are all talking at once. Mr Rampton, I
14 was talking.
15 MR RAMPTON: I am sorry. It might be valuable if your Lordship
16 reminded Mr Irving of my duty.
17 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Yes, I am going to. I think it is fair to
18 say that every time Mr Rampton is challenging the truth or
19 credibility of what you are saying, he has made that clear
20 in his questions.
21 A. [Mr Irving]: He is saying that he does not believe —-
22 Q. [Mr Justice Gray]: Please wait. If you think that he is not making his case
23 clear at any point, then you are entitled to say, what are
24 you asking me, Mr Rampton? What are you putting to me?
25 But on this particular document, I would like to know
26 whether you do or do not challenge its authenticity.
. P-60
1 A. [Mr Irving]: I think for the purpose of today I will accept that it is
2 genuine, but it has these blemishes to which I may refer
3 later on. But to suggest that I have seen this document
4 before is inaccurate and untrue.
5 MR RAMPTON: I have not said that yet, Mr Irving.
6 A. [Mr Irving]: You said “so you say” and the record shows that.
7 Q. [Mr Rampton]: I do say “so you say” because I doubt your answer, and
8 I will tell you precisely now why I doubt it, as I always
9 do, because I am not allowed to make that suggestion
10 unless I have a basis for doing so. It has been in Gerald
11 Fleming’s book “Hitler und die endlosung” ever since
12 1982.
13 A. [Mr Irving]: I have not read that book.
14 Q. [Mr Rampton]: You have not read that book?
15 A. [Mr Irving]: It has been sent to me twice by Gerald Fleming, once in
16 English and once in German, and I have not read that book.
17 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Are you not interested in books which contain references
18 to documents which focus on your very field of historical
19 activity, that is to say the connection between Adolf
20 Hitler and the endlosung?
21 A. [Mr Irving]: The reason why is because Gerald Fleming and I had a very
22 lively correspondence and he was constantly sending me
23 copies of his latest documents. It is was unlikely there
24 were going to be documents in the book which he had not
25 already sent me months earlier.
26 Q. [Mr Rampton]: You told us near the beginning of the case that Gerald
. P-61
1 Fleming has done some very good work on one particular
2 episode, not this. That was Bruns and Altemeyer.
3 A. [Mr Irving]: Yes he corresponded with me about it. You have seen my
4 entire file of correspondence with Gerald Fleming and you
5 know exactly how detailed that correspondence is. It is
6 about 4 inches thick.
7 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Do you possess a copy of “Hitler und die endlosung”?
8 A. [Mr Irving]: Yes, two copies.
9 Q. [Mr Rampton]: And you have never looked at them?
10 A. [Mr Irving]: I may have looked for a specific document in it. I seem
11 to remember looking to see — that is right. When I wrote
12 my web site page on General Bruns, I checked up on the
13 spellings of the names and the correct identification of
14 Altemeyer and people like that, and I used it as a
15 reference work. I looked in the index, in other words,
16 for Bruns and Altemeyer and got the data out of that, one
17 or other of the editions.
18 Q. [Mr Rampton]: How much time have you spent in the Munich archive, the
19 IFZ if that is what it is?
20 A. [Mr Irving]: Until I was banned in 1993? I was there from 1963 for 30
21 years.
22 Q. [Mr Rampton]: If Gerald Fleming found it in the Munich archive before
23 his book was published while he was writing it, it was
24 published in 1982 and you spent time in that archive,
25 I know not how many days or hours or weeks, looking for
26 documents about Hitler. Do you expect us to believe that
. P-62
1 you did not come across this document?
2 A. [Mr Irving]: Both. I looked for documents back in 1964 and 1965 and
3 I hired a lady whose name almost certainly will be
4 mentioned later on in today’s hearing to do the research
5 for me, to re-research the files for me, looking for
6 material on Adolf Hitler and the final solution, and
7 certainly neither of us came across that document.
8 However, your researchers could have established if I saw
9 that particular file, because the IFZ keeps a detailed log
10 of who sees each file, just as the Public Record Office
11 does.
12 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Down the line that may happen, Mr Irving. Now I want to
13 turn to another document, which I find even more puzzling,
14 if I may say so.
15 A. [Mr Irving]: You are implying that the IFZ has a record of my having
16 seen that document, which is untrue.
17 Q. [Mr Rampton]: No, I am not implying that at all. I have absolutely no
18 idea. All I would say, if you want me—-
19 A. [Mr Irving]: That was the innuendo of “down the line this may happen”,
20 was it not?
21 Q. [Mr Rampton]: It may do if we look. That is all that means. All I will
22 say at the moment, if you want me comment, is this, that
23 I do not find your answer very convincing. But that is
24 not my task, it is his Lordship’s task.
25 A. [Mr Irving]: I am sorry I do not convince you but it is your duty to
26 come forward with plausible evidence to the court that I
. P-63
1 am lying, and you cannot because I have not seen this
2 document before.
3 Q. [Mr Rampton]: You have two copies of Gerald Fleming’s book.
4 A. [Mr Irving]: I have two copies of Fleming’s book, one in German and one
5 in English.
6 Q. [Mr Rampton]: You write about Hitler and his connection with the
7 endlosung. You spent hours in the Munich archive and this
8 is a key document which you have missed.
9 A. [Mr Irving]: I read the reviews by Tom Bower and by Gordon Craig of
10 Gerald Fleming’s book. Tom Bower said that Gerald Fleming
11 has failed to destroy David Irving’s central hypothesis,
12 and Gordon Craig said exactly the same. That being so,
13 why should I waste my time reading that book, apart from
14 looking up specific references, because undoubtedly
15 Fleming has done very detailed research, but I am not a
16 Holocaust historian. If I was writing a book about the
17 Holocaust, then no doubt I would consult Fleming.
18 MR JUSTICE GRAY: This does not really go to the Holocaust,
19 does it? It goes to Hitler’s knowledge of the shooting by
20 the Einsatzgruppen.
21 A. [Mr Irving]: Yes, but I can only repeat that my attention was never
22 drawn to this document, I never saw it in that book, there
23 is no reason why I should have done.
24 MR JUSTICE GRAY: It has not yet been established there is any
25 evidence you actually saw this although I think the
26 evidence does suggest you had an opportunity to find it.
. P-64
1 MR RAMPTON: I make it quite clear I shall invite—-
2 A. [Mr Irving]: I had an opportunity to find very large numbers of
3 documents, my Lord.
4 MR JUSTICE GRAY: It is a different thing, I accept that.
5 A. [Mr Irving]: But I am very well known for not consulting other people’s
6 books. If Gerald Fleming had sent me the document as a
7 copy, which I would have expected him to have done, then
8 I would of course have taken it into account.
9 MR RAMPTON: I am sorry, I am a little bit at sea, Mr Irving,
10 because this has only just been brought to my attention.
11 You were asked some questions in an IHR conference on 4th
12 September 1983 — I am telling you this as a fact because
13 I have the printed version in front of me — and the
14 question was: Could you give your reaction to the recent
15 book by Gerald Fleming, “Hitler und die endlosung”, so we
16 are talking about the same thing, are we not?
17 A. [Mr Irving]: Yes.
18 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Then you say this. I have not been able to edit it
19 because I have only just been shown it. “Yes, Gerald
20 Fleming, frightfully nice, he and I were face to face once
21 on the David Frost programme” — again it does not seem
22 to be much of an answer to the question — “for an hour
23 and a half in England on television. He was not able to
24 prove me wrong then. He has ever since felt mortally
25 wounded by the fact that he was not able to prove me wrong
26 in front of” — goodness me, this is all about the
. P-65
1 television audience.
2 A. [Mr Irving]: I am failing to answer a question, am I?
3 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Yes, you are.
4 A. [Mr Irving]: Yet again.
5 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Because you were asked the question, what do you think of
6 the book?
7 A. [Mr Irving]: Well, I probably did not want to admit that I had not read
8 it.
9 Q. [Mr Rampton]: The reviewers admit in reviewing his book that he has not
10 found the evidence that I am wrong, that he has not found
11 documentary proof.
12 A. [Mr Irving]: That is exactly what I just said 17 years later. My
13 memory is not all that bad.
14 Q. [Mr Rampton]: “His book in fact is a lie”?
15 A. [Mr Irving]: Yes.
16 Q. [Mr Rampton]: How on earth can you say that about a book you have not
17 read?
18 A. [Mr Irving]: I have read the reviews. The book was written as an
19 attempt — the book has been written specifically, it says
20 in the introduction, this is an attempt to answer David
21 Irving. The whole reason he wrote the book was to answer
22 my book “Hitler’s War”. I read the reviews by Tom Bower
23 and numerous other people and they say this book has
24 failed to refute David Irving.
25 MR JUSTICE GRAY: I am sorry, I am going to come back to what
26 seems to be perhaps more important. I had the impression,
. P-66
1 and it is a long time ago now that we had evidence about
2 it, that you accepted that Hitler was kept informed about
3 the shootings by the Einsatzgruppen?
4 A. [Mr Irving]: You are absolutely right, my Lord. Certainly as far as
5 the Russians Jews were concerned, and the non-German Jews
6 were concerned.
7 MR RAMPTON: My Lord, I am on the question whether Mr Irving
8 was telling the truth when he said first time around that
9 he had never seen this document.
10 A. [Mr Irving]: I can tell you I have never seen this document before in
11 my life.
12 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Mr Irving, laughing will not help. I am going to read on
13 what you said at this IHR conference shortly after the
14 book was published. “The book is a lie because the book’s
15 title is ‘Hitler and the Final Solution’ when underneath
16 is a subtitle in quotes, ‘it is the Fuhrer’s wish…'”.
17 A. [Mr Irving]: It is the Fuhrer’s order, yes.
18 Q. [Mr Rampton]: “As though this is from some document. In fact it is
19 not. This is just what some Nazi big wig after the war,
20 sweating and pleading for his life in the dock at
21 Nuremberg or somewhere else, tried to claim that it was
22 the Fuhrer’s wish that this should be done. This is
23 precisely the kind of evidence which I am not prepared to
24 accept. It is a well-written book. He has done a lot of
25 research but he constantly mixes first, second and third
26 order evidence in a completely reprehensible way”.
. P-67
1 A. [Mr Irving]: Yes.
2 Q. [Mr Rampton]: You did not read the book?
3 A. [Mr Irving]: This is precisely what the reviewer said. Actually,
4 exactly what the reviewer said about the book. I can
5 produce to you tomorrow the reviews by Tom Bauer and
6 Gordon Craig and the other reviewers of the Gerald
7 Flemming book.
8 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Mr Irving, was there in your discovery —-
9 A. [Mr Irving]: And also in correspondent with me he told me what he was
10 going to base his subtitle on, namely a particular
11 statement by a particular General. Every time he found a
12 new document, he would write me a triumphant letter.
13 I remember that one particularly.
14 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Mr Irving, was there in your third supplemental list of
15 documents two editions, one in German — no, sorry, an
16 edition of a German book by a man called Koegon and
17 others?
18 A. [Mr Irving]: Eugene Koegon, yes — a murderer.
19 Q. [Mr Rampton]: And you know that its German edition is called “National
20 Sozialistische Massentugenturm Durch Giftgas”?
21 A. [Mr Irving]: That is right. Koegon is on the United Nations “Wanted”
22 list for mass murder.
23 Q. [Mr Rampton]: What is the point of that remark?
24 A. [Mr Irving]: Well, I am just trying to, shall we say, equalify the
25 author of this work so that you know what kind of
26 credentials he has.
. P-68
1 Q. [Mr Rampton]: I am not interested in the very least in Mr Koegon’s
2 credentials. He has not brought an action for damages for
3 libel against my clients.
4 A. [Mr Irving]: Well, just in case you rely on anything Mr Koegon wrote.
5 Q. [Mr Rampton]: No. Have you a copy of the English edition published in
6 New Haven in 1993?
7 A. [Mr Irving]: That I do not know offhand, probably not.
8 Q. [Mr Rampton]: It has been disclosed in your supplemental list of
9 documents.
10 A. [Mr Irving]: Well, then, it is probably on my book shelf, yes.
11 I certainly would not have purchased it. Somebody must
12 have handed it to me.
13 Q. [Mr Rampton]: You what?
14 A. [Mr Irving]: I would not have purchased it. Somebody must have sent it
15 to me.
16 Q. [Mr Rampton]: You would not have purchased it? So that is another book
17 you will never have read?
18 A. [Mr Irving]: Oh, yes.
19 Q. [Mr Rampton]: You mean you will not have read it?
20 A. [Mr Irving]: Highly unlikely that I would have read it and I can say
21 for certain I have not read his book.
22 Q. [Mr Rampton]: You see, it contains printed out in full — if you are
23 interested in this subject, of course —-
24 A. [Mr Irving]: Yes.
25 Q. [Mr Rampton]: — what the people were doing to the Jews in that part of
26 Eastern Europe during 1941, ’42 and’43, if you are
. P-69
1 interested in that subject, it contains printed out in
2 full the RSHA letter of 5th June 1942 which recites that
3 they have managed to process 97,000 people in gas vans at
4 Chelmo. Do you remember that document?
5 A. [Mr Irving]: Yes, the incredible — 97,000 people in how many weeks,
6 five weeks?
7 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Five weeks.
8 A. [Mr Irving]: That is approximately 40 people her hour per van.
9 Q. [Mr Rampton]: You accepted it. I am not going back to that, Mr Irving.
10 A. [Mr Irving]: Well, we are going to be questioning your experts about
11 those figures when the time comes.
12 Q. [Mr Rampton]: You may do whatever you like with my experts —-
13 A. [Mr Irving]: I remember the document clearly.
14 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Provided, Mr Irving, you let them finish their answers.
15 Mr Irving, that document, you accepted when I was
16 cross-examining you earlier in this case —-
17 A. [Mr Irving]: It is a genuine document.
18 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Yes, and you accepted that it showed that, so far from
19 being an experiment on a small scale, this was a
20 systematic and large scale operation?
21 A. [Mr Irving]: Well, we are going to be looking at the figures later on,
22 as I say.
23 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Mr Irving, you have already accepted that.
24 A. [Mr Irving]: Do not start brow beating me about the figures. I have
25 accepted the document is genuine, but we are going to be
26 looking at the figures when your experts are standing
. P-70
1 here.
2 Q. [Mr Rampton]: If we need to go back, Mr Irving, to see what you actually
3 said, we will, but that is not the point. You denied ever
4 having seen that document before?
5 A. [Mr Irving]: Yes.
6 Q. [Mr Rampton]: But you have a copy of the book in which this document is
7 actually printed?
8 A. [Mr Irving]: And?
9 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Are you interested in this period of history or not?
10 A. [Mr Irving]: I am not interested in that aspect of the history, no.
11 I am interested in Adolf Hitler’s personal role in
12 decisions taken during World War II.
13 Q. [Mr Rampton]: And you do not think the question whether or not these
14 gassings and shootings in the East were large scale and
15 systematic has anything to do with Hitler’s role, is that
16 is right?
17 A. [Mr Irving]: Mr Rampton, I do not know if you have ever written a book
18 in your life. You probably have.
19 Q. [Mr Rampton]: As a matter of fact, I have.
20 MR JUSTICE GRAY: We have had this before, yes.
21 MR RAMPTON: It is a very small book and not a very good one,
22 but it does exist, yes.
23 A. [Mr Irving]: Well, I can believe that.
24 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Come on, it is —-
25 A. [Mr Irving]: But the time comes when you have —-
26 MR JUSTICE GRAY: — degenerating.
. P-71
1 A. [Mr Irving]: Well, that was well deserved modesty on his part. The
2 time when you are writing a book when you have to decide
3 what to leave in and what to keep out if the book is not
4 going to be 2,000 pages long with 8,000 pages of sludge in
5 the middle. If you are writing a book about Adolf
6 Hitler’s command of the war and his command decisions,
7 then really what happens in detail, the crimes committed
8 by these gangs of gangsters on the Eastern Front, you have
9 to decide to leave the detail out otherwise your readers
10 will not see the wood for the trees.
11 MR RAMPTON: So we have now two books in your possession, one
12 was sent to you by the kindly — is he Professor Fleming?
13 A. [Mr Irving]: I think he probably sent it to me himself. Yes, I think
14 he actually dedicated it to me.
15 Q. [Mr Rampton]: And one which either somebody sent you, you certainly
16 would not have bought a book by the mass murderer
17 Mr Koegon?
18 A. [Mr Irving]: That is what surprises me. You say it is in my book shelf
19 and I am sure nobody planted it there, but —-
20 Q. [Mr Rampton]: It is in your discovery, Mr Irving.
21 A. [Mr Irving]: But, for the life of me, I never knew I had that book in
22 my book shelf.
23 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Can we just go back to Professor Fleming’s
24 book for a while? Correct me if have this wrong,
25 Mr Irving, you are saying that what you said at IHR press
26 conference was derived from the reviews, not from your
. P-72
1 reading of the book. One of the things that you said was
2 that Professor Fleming is given to citing second and
3 third-hand documents?
4 A. [Mr Irving]: Yes.
5 Q. [Mr Justice Gray]: So your evidence is that that also would have come from
6 one or other of those two reviews?
7 A. [Mr Irving]: Well, and from the fact that he and I were in almost daily
8 correspondence at that time and also on the telephone, he
9 would be constantly on the telephone to me, telling me
10 about his latest discoveries and latest finds and what he
11 was doing and what he was writing.
12 Q. [Mr Justice Gray]: I thought your evidence earlier on was that what you had
13 said came from the reviews.
14 A. [Mr Irving]: Well, and from the reviews, yes, but you asked me, my
15 Lord, if I have understood correctly, whether my statement
16 to the IHR was based only on the reviews, and I was saying
17 that those and the personal communications I had with him
18 on a daily basis and, indeed, a very, very thick file of
19 correspondence with him indeed, mostly handwritten on his
20 part.
21 MR RAMPTON: There is one more book I am going to ask you
22 about, Mr Irving. Do not take it from my silence that
23 I accept a word of what you say. The coincidence is too
24 great, if I may say so. There is another book. Do you
25 remember Gertz Bergander’s book about Dresden?
26 A. [Mr Irving]: Indeed, yes.
. P-73
1 Q. [Mr Rampton]: You told us yesterday you have never read that either, did
2 you not?
3 A. [Mr Irving]: Certainly I never read it from cover to cover, no.
4 Q. [Mr Rampton]: I asked you twice.
5 A. [Mr Irving]: Yes.
6 Q. [Mr Rampton]: I asked you, “Have you read this 1977 book of his?”
7 Answer,”No, I have not”.
8 A. [Mr Irving]: Can I enquire what you mean by “read”? Do you mean
9 sitting down and opening at page 1 and reading through or
10 dipping into it to look for a fact or item?
11 Q. [Mr Rampton]: The context was that you had not read it in such a way as
12 to be able to evaluate the figures he gave.
13 A. [Mr Irving]: I want to be precise about the answer I give here, so I
14 know what you mean by “read”.
15 Q. [Mr Rampton]: You actually interrupted a question — not for the first
16 time — that I was asking. I will read the whole
17 passage. My Lord —-
18 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Page.
19 MR RAMPTON: — page 75 of yesterday’s transcript, line 9.
20 “If you turn to page 11”, my Lord, I said, “of the
21 table”, that is Miss Rogers’ table, “it says, basing
22 herself on Professor Evans … this: ‘1977, the real TB
23 47 comes to light. It is discovered by Bergander who
24 found a reservist Ehrlich who had a copy cited at page 261
25 of Bergander. Evans describes Bergander as the most
26 authoritative work’, and so on”. Then I turn to
. P-74
1 Mr Irving:”I dare say if you have not read Bergander,
2 Mr Irving … you will not be conscious of” —- And you
3 interrupted, Mr Irving, and said this: “Well, Gutz
4 Bergander was a very good friend of mine — he still is a
5 very good friend of mine”. Question: “Have you read this
6 1977 book of his?” “I have not, no.”
7 Then, my Lord, on page 178 also in yesterday’s
8 transcript: Question: “Look at Bergander’s book. Have
9 you not read that?” Answer: “No”.
10 A. [Mr Irving]: This is a reference to the Order of the Day, the
11 Tagesbefehl?
12 Q. [Mr Rampton]: No, no.
13 A. [Mr Irving]: Well, that was the page you —-
14 Q. [Mr Rampton]: 35,000 was the question.
15 A. [Mr Irving]: Well —-
16 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Then you said: “I know Bergander very well as a human
17 being and I respect him as a friend and he is a jolly
18 decent chap, but I do not put his book in the same
19 category I put Reichart’s book having read Reichart book”.
20 A. [Mr Irving]: I assume that I had read Reichart’s book at that time,
21 yes.
22 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Now, was it true or not — people make mistakes; you might
23 have forgotten — when you told me that you had not read
24 Bergander’s book?
25 A. [Mr Irving]: I have never read Bergander’s book.
26 Q. [Mr Rampton]: You have never read it?
. P-75
1 A. [Mr Irving]: Yes. I may have dipped into it. I may have looked at the
2 photographs or looked to see what his sources were.
3 Q. [Mr Rampton]: What do we understand when on page 281 of your Dresden
4 1995 edition, at footnote 10, you tell us that Bergander
5 — this is about the ACK-ACK gunners, saying that
6 Bergander was one of them — then you say this:
7 “Bergander subsequently published his own well researched
8 account of the raids, Dresden, in Luftrieg, Cologne and
9 Vienna 1977″?
10 A. [Mr Irving]: Yes.
11 Q. [Mr Rampton]: If you had not read it, how do you know it was well
12 researched?
13 A. [Mr Irving]: Because he asked me to help him with the research. That
14 is why it was well researched. He is a very good friend
15 of mine. He asked me where he should go to, what
16 archives. He got all my archives. I give him 8,000 pages
17 of my paper. It was a well researched book he wrote. He
18 went beyond what I had done and did further research as I
19 know.
20 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Is it unreasonable for me to suggest on the basis of this
21 morning’s discussions, Mr Irving, that everything you do
22 not like is either a forgery or you have never seen it
23 before?
24 A. [Mr Irving]: Well, you put to me specific example of books and said,
25 “Have you read this?” to which my answer has always been
26 accurately on oath, “No, I have not read it”. We have
. P-76
1 looked at two documents today in detail, one of which is
2 the crematorium capacity document which I insist is not
3 genuine, and nothing that I heard this morning has changed
4 my mind on that, and that is the only document I intend
5 impugning in this entire legal action. We have looked at
6 another document now —-
7 Q. [Mr Rampton]: You have just been having a go at the Muller order of 1st
8 August.
9 A. [Mr Irving]: Well, that is because I have seen it for the first time,
10 and every time I look at a document for the first time, my
11 first instinct, particularly when it is not an original,
12 but a Gestatnat duplicated copy which comes from an
13 uncertain provenance with no kind of markings whatsoever,
14 is it say, “Hello, what is this then?” If my eye
15 immediately alights on German words that have been spelt
16 wrong and, as I say, are neither fish nor foul, then that
17 makes me slightly more nervous about it.
18 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Well, you backed off that in relation to the
19 Muller document, did you not?
20 A. [Mr Irving]: I did not want to waste the court’s time, my Lord.
21 Q. [Mr Justice Gray]: Well, do not worry about that.
22 A. [Mr Irving]: Well, I appreciate your Lordship’s impatience when I start
23 looking at documents in detail.
24 Q. [Mr Justice Gray]: No, no, I am not in the least bit impatient. I am
25 interested to know.
26 A. [Mr Irving]: No, the reason why I backed off it, my Lord, is because
. P-77
1 I accepted that Hitler knew about these actions and there
2 not much point going into that one.
Part III: Irving’s racism (78.3-175.26)
Section 78.3-96.8
3 MR RAMPTON: My Lord, I now pass on to something rather more
4 central which is Mr Irving’s utterances on the subject of
5 Jews, blacks, etc. etc., both public and private.
6 A. [Mr Irving]: Are we not dealing with Dr Goebbels today then? The
7 Goebbels diaries?
8 Q. [Mr Rampton]: What has Goebbels got to do with it?
9 MR JUSTICE GRAY: No, the Goebbels diaries. I think the
10 answer is yes if we have time.
11 MR RAMPTON: We will get to Moscow along down the road if we
12 have time.
13 A. [Mr Irving]: Well, we have my witness coming tomorrow, Mr Peter Millar.
14 Q. [Mr Rampton]: That is fine. I do not mind. You can interpose him if
15 I have not finished. I am not troubled about that.
16 I will certainly finish tomorrow to make room for
17 Professor Browning on Monday.
18 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Mr Rampton, may I enquire when these bundles
19 that have just been handed up were generated, as it were?
20 MR RAMPTON: I think they came into court at about 29 minutes
21 past 10.
22 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Have they caused you a problem, Mr Irving,
23 these new bundles?
24 MR RAMPTON: My Lord, they are not new.
25 MR JUSTICE GRAY: I appreciate that they are somewhere in some
26 bundle, but I am just asking Mr Irving if he has found it
. P-78
1 a problem dealing with two new bundles.
2 A. [Mr Irving]: Well, are they new? To what degree are they new?
3 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Well, I think the documents are not new in
4 the sense that they are probably in one of the other
5 files, but I am concerned that you are being presented
6 with newly arranged documents and that may cause you a
7 problem.
8 A. [Mr Irving]: My Lord, my concern is not being presented with the big
9 bundles. I am very concerned about these little
10 catalogues of excerpts that they are presenting your
11 Lordship with, which appear to look to me not so much like
12 case management as case manipulation.
13 MR RAMPTON: It is perfectly all right, Mr Irving. Everybody
14 has the full text. You are perfectly free to refer to the
15 full text or ask the judge to read the full text if you
16 should be suspicious.
17 A. [Mr Irving]: Well, I think —-
18 Q. [Mr Rampton]: If we had not — Mr Irving, please — had done this bundle
19 of extracts, we shall be here until next Christmas.
20 A. [Mr Irving]: Yes, but we have seen the kind of policy that the Defence
21 uses when it makes their extracts and excerpts. There is
22 one passage by Professor Evans where “…” stands for 86
23 words and four sentences and three full stops and two or
24 three semicolons.
25 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Well, as we go through, Mr Irving, will you
26 say when you think the context —-
. P-79
1 A. [Mr Irving]: Well, it is very difficult —-
2 Q. [Mr Justice Gray]: — puts a different gloss on what you are recorded as
3 having said.
4 A. [Mr Irving]: It is very difficult just on the basis of the catalogue
5 that they are going to leave your Lordship with.
6 MR JUSTICE GRAY: I have not yet digested what I am being
7 presented with because I have not seen these.
8 MR RAMPTON: What your Lordship is being presented with is, in
9 effect, our selection of those passages all from
10 Mr Irving’s own documents and his own words — nobody
11 else’s words, just his own words — of those passages
12 which best represent — they are by no means exhaustive —
13 what we say is Mr Irving’s underlying frame of mind. This
14 is the only neat way we could think of doing it without
15 scuttling about from one file to another and from one page
16 within the file to another.
17 Mr Irving is a very wordy person and many of
18 these transcripts are very long.
19 MR JUSTICE GRAY: I think I did ask at an earlier stage for a
20 marked up version and I have now got that.
21 MR RAMPTON: You did, and your Lordship has three things.
22 First of all, the original unvarnished speeches, etc. etc.
23 in the various D files. Then your Lordship has what your
24 Lordship first asked for which is a marked up copy of the
25 important passages in those files, but those have now been
26 transferred into the other two files. Finally, what has
. P-80
1 happened is that for ease of reference and to make
2 everybody’s life simple, we have extracted those passages
3 on which we rely. It is as simple as that.
4 MR JUSTICE GRAY: And that is that, is it?
5 MR RAMPTON: And that is that. This is going to be a long job
6 anyway.
7 A. [Mr Irving]: Well, let us see how we proceed, my Lord, is probably the
8 answer, but I have waved a little red flag.
9 MR JUSTICE GRAY: If you find yourself in difficulties, then
10 just say so.
11 A. [Mr Irving]: It is not the difficulties, my Lord, it is the little
12 catalogue of excerpts, the manipulation that is going on,
13 that concerns me.
14 Q. [Mr Justice Gray]: Well, let us wait and see whether that is right or wrong.
15 A. [Mr Irving]: If I were to do this with my books, I would be in deep
16 trouble and justifiably so.
17 MR RAMPTON: Can I start on the first page of the text of this,
18 please, under the heading “Anti-Semitism, the Holocaust”,
19 subheading — these are our headings, I hasten to add, not
20 yours. “Jewish responsibility for anti-Semitism pogroms,
21 Holocaust”.
22 On 12th July 1997, your action report, “A
23 Radical’s Diary” is recorded as having expressed this
24 thought —-
25 A. [Mr Irving]: What page are we on?
26 Q. [Mr Rampton]: It is page 3 at the bottom of the page. Every single one
. P-81
1 of these passages is referenced. Top of the page, I think
2 it has a 11/A in square brackets.
3 A. [Mr Irving]: What bundle am I supposed to be looking at?
4 MR JUSTICE GRAY: This little one, I think.
5 MR RAMPTON: It is a small quote. Some of them, I am afraid,
6 are much longer. If you would not mind looking at the
7 little bundle?
8 MR JUSTICE GRAY: I am sure he has it. Have you got this,
9 Mr Irving?
10 A. [Mr Irving]: I do not think so.
11 MR RAMPTON: My Lord, Mr Irving was given one.
12 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Was he? Anyway, he has another one.
13 A. [Mr Irving]: I strongly object to this kind of excerpting. You are
14 taking a sentence out of, I do not know what, a long
15 article or a speech or something.
16 MR JUSTICE GRAY: We can look at them. We have them here. But
17 let Mr Rampton ask his question and then we will look at
18 the context.
19 MR RAMPTON: Mr Irving, can I suggest that every time you think
20 we have tried to distort the record —-
21 A. [Mr Irving]: “Manipulate” is the word I used.
22 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Yes, great, “manipulate the record” — I must remember
23 that — for the purposes of presenting a skewed picture to
24 the court, please mark beside whichever quote I refer to
25 “check” because then when you reexamine yourself you can
26 show his Lordship how bad our manipulation has been.
. P-82
1 A. [Mr Irving]: Can I ask that each time we open the full speech first and
2 then find what you are taking the excerpt from?
3 MR JUSTICE GRAY: No, Mr Evans, but what we can do is have
4 Mr Rampton ask his question and if part of your answer is,
5 “Oh, well, you have taken it out of context, then we will
6 look”. I think that is the right way of proceeding.
7 MR RAMPTON: But you have plenty of time to check whether we
8 have taken it out of context, Mr Irving. The full
9 speeches are in those two files.
10 A. [Mr Irving]: Well, this is going to be a very long procedure.
11 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Right. Let us make a start.
12 MR RAMPTON: Yes, but I would rather you did not do it. Let me
13 say this, I take it that every single extract that I ask
14 you about you will preface your answer (and so let us take
15 it as pregnant preface) with the answer, “Ah, yes, but
16 you must look at the context”, all right? Can we proceed
17 on that basis because if you reply in that way every
18 single time, we really are going to be here until the cows
19 come home.
20 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Mr Rampton, I am bound to say — I am sorry,
21 this debate is going on and on — I do think if he says in
22 relation to any of your questions, “Well, yes, that is
23 what I said but look at what I said immediately
24 afterwards”, he must be entitled to make that part of his
25 answer to you.
26 MR RAMPTON: Of course, if he wishes to do so.
. P-83
1 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Yes, right.
2 MR RAMPTON: Let me take the first one on this page 3, may I,
3 Mr Irving? This is your action report No. 12, I think, of
4 July 1997. The reference is given if you want to look at
5 it. “Why are they [the Jews] so blind that they cannot
6 see the linkage between cause and effect? They protest,
7 what, us? when people accuse them of international
8 conspiracy. They clamour, ‘Ours, ours, ours’ when hoards
9 of gold are uncovered and then when anti-Semitism
10 increases and the inevitable mindless pogroms occur, they
11 ask with genuine surprise, why us?”
12 Mr Irving, is that a fair quote in the context
13 from —-
14 A. [Mr Irving]: Can I read the two paragraphs before that?
15 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Yes, please do.
16 A. [Mr Irving]: To set it in context: “Three hours work today on
17 discovery”, that is for this action two years ago already,
18 “compiling exhaustive files for my papers for my libel
19 actions, my archive files on the Judenfrage, the Jewish
20 problem. Depressing.
21 “There is an item in today’s Jewish Chronicle
22 which reports that, according to a study by the University
23 of Tel Aviv, anti-Semitic incidents everywhere are on the
24 decline. There has been an 8.1 per cent decline in
25 Britain over the 12 month period to the end of 1996.
26 “There are two significant exceptions, however.
. P-84
1 An increase in anti-Semitic propaganda in Switzerland
2 during 1996 was generated by ‘Jewish claims for the return
3 of money and of the property of Holocaust victims or their
4 heirs’. The other exception is Australia ‘where there was
5 a 12 per cent rise over the previous year’.”
6 I then continue with the passage that you have
7 put before his Lordship which is the conclusion to be
8 drawn from this fact, that in Australia — “In fact,
9 Australia today is on fire about me again, about my not
10 being allowed into the country. The Prime Minister of
11 Australia this morning has criticised me. This kind of
12 thing generates the anti-Semitism in countries”, and this
13 is precisely what this is about.
14 Q. [Mr Rampton]: You do not see anything in what I have just read which
15 might account for the Australians’ unwillingness to have
16 you on their shores?
17 A. [Mr Irving]: On the contrary, this is saying cause and effect. Why is
18 there increasing anti-Semitism in Switzerland today when
19 it is going down everywhere else in the world? Answer, we
20 know why. Why is there anti-Semitism today in Australia
21 today? Answer, we know why.
22 Q. [Mr Rampton]: But you are adopting it, are you not? You are saying the
23 anti-Semitism is justified on account of the fact that the
24 Jews are greedy?
25 A. [Mr Irving]: Did I say justified or explicable? Is there a subtle
26 difference there, do you think?
. P-85
1 Q. [Mr Rampton]: We will read the next passage, Mr Irving.
2 MR JUSTICE GRAY: I cannot find the reference. K4, tab 10,
3 page 60.
4 MR RAMPTON: At 1.
5 A. [Mr Irving]: This is a typical example of something being taken out of
6 context and the word “explicable” being changed into
7 “justifiable”. This is a typical manipulation.
8 Q. [Mr Rampton]: If you say so, Mr Irving. It is going to get worse, I am
9 afraid. Can we read the next passage? This is rather a
10 long passage so perhaps you would like to have a look?
11 This is taken from your interview with Errol Morris on 8th
12 November 1998.
13 My Lord, the passage in the file is at page 60
14 of tab 10. 60 is written in the round circle. It is at
15 the bottom of the left-hand column of page 22 of the
16 action report.
17 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Is this your second one?
18 MR RAMPTON: No, that is first one your Lordship was asking
19 after.
20 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Yes, I did find it. I am sorry. I have it
21 now.
22 MR RAMPTON: This comes from, if you want the reference,
23 Mr Irving, pages 25 to 27.
24 A. [Mr Irving]: I have it. I have the full text in front of me. Once
25 again you left off the opening passage which explains what
26 I am saying.
. P-86
1 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Which opening passage?
2 A. [Mr Irving]: You begun half way down the paragraph of what I said.
3 Q. [Mr Rampton]: I will read the whole thing if it bothers you.
4 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Mr Irving, I have just read the opening part
5 of that paragraph. It makes no difference at all to what
6 is relied on, I do not think, does it?
7 A. [Mr Irving]: No, what I am saying is if somebody calls me a liar, which
8 frequently happens, especially in this courtroom, even
9 when I am on oath, I shrug my shoulders.
10 Q. [Mr Justice Gray]: And then you contrast that with the Jewish reaction?
11 A. [Mr Irving]: And I contrast that with the sensitivity of the Jewish
12 community. When they are called liars, then suddenly all
13 the force and majesty of the law is called in and you are
14 invited to go before the Magistrate and all the rest of
15 it, and this generates anti-Semitism, in my view.
16 MR RAMPTON: Well, Mr Irving, I am going look at something
17 which I suggest is a massive exercise in the generation of
18 anti-Semitism. It is you speaking at line 39 on page 25
19 of the file.
20 You see: “It is certainly is inexcusable.
21 Every country, every people, particularly the Jewish
22 people, I think are robust enough to survive the knocks,
23 to survive the insults, to survive the impugning of their
24 integrity”. So far so good.
25 “If somebody says to me, ‘David Irving, I think
26 you are a liar’, I shrug my shoulders and say, ‘So, so
. P-87
1 what? You are entitled to your opinion’. But if somebody
2 says to the Jewish community, ‘Jewish community, we think
3 you are a liar’, suddenly the jail doors are swung open
4 and people say, ‘This way, come on, you have called them a
5 liar'” —-
6 A. [Mr Irving]: Like Karl Philip, for example, fined 3,000 deutschemarks
7 for some utterance. That is precisely the example, and
8 that generates anti-Semitism, in my view.
9 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Yes, “… and this I think does harm to the Jewish people
10 in the long run because the non-Jewish people will say,
11 ‘What is it about these people?’ Irving: I am deeply
12 concerned about this and I have said this to people
13 like Daniel Goldhagen who I challenged to the debate at a
14 meeting in New Orleans a few months ago. I said, ‘You
15 have written a book called Hitler’s Willing Executioners.
16 You have talked to us this evening at great length about
17 who pulled the trigger, but the question which would
18 concern me if I was a Jew is not who'” —-
19 A. [Mr Irving]: “If I were a Jew”.
20 Q. [Mr Rampton]: — “‘pulled the trigger, but why? Why are we disliked?
21 Is it something we are doing? I am disliked. Dave Irving
22 is disliked. I know that because of the books I write.
23 I could be instantly disliked by writing. I could become
24 instantly liked by writing other books. You people'”, by
25 which, of course, you mean the Jews, “‘are disliked on a
26 global scale. You have been disliked for 3,0000 years and
. P-88
1 yet you never to seem to ask what is at the root'”,
2 misspelt, “‘of this dislike. You pretend that you are not
3 disliked but you are disliked. No sooner do you arrive as
4 a people in a new country, then within 50 years you are
5 already being disliked all over again. Now what is it?
6 And I do not know the answer to this. Is it built into
7 our microchip? When a people arrive who call themselves
8 the Jews, you will dislike them? Is there something in
9 our microchip? Is it in our microchip that we do not like
10 the way they look? Is it envy because they are more
11 successful than us? I do not know the answer, but if
12 I was a Jew, I would want to know what the reason is why
13 I am being disliked, and not just disliked in a kind of
14 nudge, nudge, wink, wink, he is not very nice kind of sort
15 of way, but we are being disliked on a visceral, gut
16 wrenching, murderous level, that no sooner do we arrive
17 than we are being massacred and beaten and brutalized and
18 imprisoned until we have to move on somewhere else. What
19 is the reason? I would want to know the answer to that,
20 and nobody carries out an investigation about that”.
21 Then I have to go on: “(Interviewer) What would
22 you say the reason is? (Irving) I am just looking at this
23 as an outsider; I come from Mars and I would say they are
24 clever people. I am a racist, I would say they are a
25 clever race. I would say that, as a race, they are better
26 at making money than I am”. That is a racist remark, of
. P-89
1 course, Mr Irving. It is worthy of Dr Joseph Goebbels, is
2 it not?
3 A. [Mr Irving]: Now then, you are taking words here and you are putting
4 your own intonation on them: “If I am a racist, then
5 I would say these things, I say things in a racist kind of
6 way — there are better people than us, they play the
7 violin better, they make money better than us and this
8 would generate my envy”.
9 Q. [Mr Rampton]: “But they appear to be better at making money”, you repeat
10 yourself, “than I am”.
11 A. [Mr Irving]: That is right, I am putting myself in a position of the
12 critics. I am trying to find reasons why people are
13 anti-Semetic. I am talking here to a television
14 interviewer. We are investigating the reasons why people
15 may become anti-Semetic in my own rather clumsy and
16 incoherent way. We are trying to find what makes people
17 anti-Semetic. Is it because the Jews are better than us?
18 Is it because they play the violin or the piano better
19 than us, better at making money than us or is there
20 something built into our microchip?
21 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Yes, Mr Irving.
22 A. [Mr Irving]: I think this is a very coherent expression of the whole
23 anti-Semitic tragedy, that nobody knows what it is that
24 makes people dislike foreigners, the xenophobia that is
25 inside every human being.
26 MR JUSTICE GRAY: That sentence (I do not know whether
. P-90
1 Mr Rampton has read it yet or not), you say: “If I was
2 going to be crude, I would say not only are they better at
3 making money but they are greedy”, that is you, Mr Irving,
4 saying the Jews are greedy, is that right, or have I
5 misunderstood?
6 A. [Mr Irving]: No, this is the two or three levels down in the argument,
7 my Lord; this is putting myself into the skin of a person
8 who is asking questions about those clever people. There
9 should be triple quotation marks around this.
10 MR RAMPTON: Oh, no, Mr Irving, that will not do; that is
11 another rash and hasty —-
12 A. [Mr Irving]: If you read on, you will see exactly why we are talking
13 about the Swiss gold business.
14 Q. [Mr Rampton]: I am going to read on, Mr Irving. That is exactly why
15 I said it was a rather rash answer.
16 A. [Mr Irving]: This is precisely the moment when Abraham Foxman and the
17 Jewish newspaper ‘Forward’ have said: “Sure, we
18 bludgeoned them until they had parted with the money”.
19 That was his headline: “Yes, we bludgeoned them”. This
20 is the kind of thing that generates anti-Semitism as
21 witnessed what happened in Switzerland.
22 Q. [Mr Rampton]: So every time there is a pogrom or a machine gunning into
23 a pit, or a mass gassing, it is entirely the Jews’ fault
24 because some of them make money and some of them are good
25 at the piano, is that right, and some of them are clever?
26 A. [Mr Irving]: I regard that a very childish oversimplification of what
. P-91
1 I have tried to set out in two paragraphs there.
2 Q. [Mr Rampton]: It is just exactly what you have been telling —-
3 A. [Mr Irving]: It is a childish oversimplification. I am confronting
4 Daniel Goldhagen who is a very clever writer and who has
5 written a whole book on Hitler’s willing executioners
6 asking the question: “Who pulled the trigger?”, and I am
7 attending a meeting, in fact, in a synagogue in New
8 Orleans, November two years ago. I am the first person
9 who is allowed to ask him a question and I say to him —
10 these are the questions I asked him and I am repeating the
11 questions I have actually said to him and you will also
12 find that in my Radical’s diary; the whole of this episode
13 is also there — Professor Goldhagen, a very interesting
14 book you have written. Of course, it caused a great
15 sensation around the world in May 1996, but the question
16 you have asked is the wrong question. If I were a Jew,
17 the question that would interest me is not who pulled the
18 trigger but why, and why does it keep on happening again
19 and again and again and why does nobody investigate that
20 phenomenon, the phenomenon of where does anti-Semitism
21 come from?
22 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Your thesis, Mr Irving, is perfectly clear and will become
23 clearer and clearer as we go through these extracts.
24 A. [Mr Irving]: So what is my thesis?
25 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Your thesis is that the Jews have deserved everything that
26 has been coming to them?
. P-92
1 A. [Mr Irving]: That is totally different; the difference between
2 justification and explanation, already made once earlier
3 this afternoon, to say that something is explicable is
4 totally different from what I am saying, that it is
5 justifiable. Nowhere have I ever (and I would find it
6 repugnant if anyone suggested this) heard suggested that
7 what happened to the Jewish people, that that tragedy is
8 justifiable; it is not justifiable. But anti-Semitism, as
9 a different phenomenon, you can begin to explain it; you
10 can say that if somebody acts like Abraham Foxman and
11 bludgeons the country like the Swiss in departing with
12 billions of pounds of money, then it must not be
13 surprising if it turns out that Switzerland is one of the
14 few countries in the world where anti-Semitism increases.
15 There is, surely, a cause-and-effect connection between
16 those two facts.
17 If I were Daniel Goldhagen, or his father, the
18 famous Professor Goldhagen, I would want to investigate
19 that phenomenon rather than the rather more mundane
20 phenomenon of which gangsters actually pulled the
21 trigger on those sub-machine guns.
22 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Does one swallow, or to use something more akin to your
23 terminology, one vulture, does one swallow or vulture make
24 a summer, Mr Irving?
25 A. [Mr Irving]: I do not understand that question.
26 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Mr Irving, you have used one case to characterize the
. P-93
1 whole of the Jewish people, wherever in the world, as
2 greedy and, therefore, as having brought anti-Semitism on
3 themselves.
4 A. [Mr Irving]: Did I say this was the only instance?
5 Q. [Mr Rampton]: I have your words in black and white in front of me.
6 A. [Mr Irving]: I do not think so; I think this is a pattern,
7 unfortunately, which is repeated again and again. These
8 whole page advertisements around the world which you
9 yourself have undoubtedly seen, and which I can certainly
10 introduce if you have not seen them, where it states:
11 “You can get money, too; you do not have to have been in
12 a concentration camp, you did not even have to have been a
13 slave labourer. It suffices if you are a member of a
14 minority persecuted by the Nazis living within the Third
15 Reich, you can get money out of it”. This generates
16 anti-Semitism, in my view. I may be totally wrong; maybe
17 anti-Semitism comes from somewhere else.
18 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Mr Irving, may I just ask you a question
19 about the interview you gave in November 1998?
20 A. [Mr Irving]: November 1998?
21 Q. [Mr Justice Gray]: The one you have just been asked about?
22 A. [Mr Irving]: This actually was August 1998, I think.
23 Q. [Mr Justice Gray]: Right. It may be wrongly dated. But I just want to get
24 the sort of structure of what you are conveying to your
25 interviewer. You are saying of the Jews, well, they have
26 been disliked for 3,000 years, they are disliked wherever
. P-94
1 they go?
2 A. [Mr Irving]: Yes.
3 Q. [Mr Justice Gray]: Then you say: “Well, I do not know the answer”.
4 A. [Mr Irving]: Well, I do not — I am not —-
5 Q. [Mr Justice Gray]: Pause. Am I right so far?
6 A. [Mr Irving]: You are absolutely right, yes.
7 Q. [Mr Justice Gray]: But then do you not go on to say —-
8 A. [Mr Irving]: I venture a suggestion.
9 Q. [Mr Justice Gray]: Well, look at it at as if I came from Mars”?
10 A. [Mr Irving]: I tried to stand right back from the planet Earth and look
11 down on these people.
12 Q. [Mr Justice Gray]: “And it appears to me that the reason why they are
13 disliked is because they are greedy”; is that not what you
14 are saying?
15 A. [Mr Irving]: I go on to a whole series of different reasons.
16 Q. [Mr Justice Gray]: All right, but that is the first one you come up with?
17 A. [Mr Irving]: I say globally I do not know what the reason is.
18 Effectively, I am not a sociologist, I am not an expert on
19 this, but possible reasons are — what is the connection
20 between the rise in Swiss anti-Semitism and the gold bank
21 business?
22 Q. [Mr Justice Gray]: But you are putting that forward as the reason why there
23 is this dislike of Jews?
24 A. [Mr Irving]: My Lord, with respect, not the reason.
25 Q. [Mr Justice Gray]: All right.
26 A. [Mr Irving]: One contributing reason — one contributing reason at this
. P-95
1 moment in time.
2 Q. [Mr Justice Gray]: I see. I just want to get it clear.
3 A. [Mr Irving]: But I also suggest very strongly it may be built into our
4 microchip, as I put it. It may be part of the endemic
5 human xenophobia which exists in all of us and which
6 civilized people like your Lordship and myself manage to
7 suppress, and other people like the gentleman on the
8 Eastern Front with the submachine guns cannot suppress.
Section 96.9-116.10
9 MR RAMPTON: Mr Irving, before we proceed any further, I think
10 you might be advised to have a look at your own diary, if
11 you would not mind?
12 A. [Mr Irving]: Well, you have had 50 million words of my diaries to look
13 at.
14 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Yes. Aren’t we fortunate?
15 A. [Mr Irving]: Well, I think discovery on a scale like this contrasts
16 very severely with the discovery that your own instructing
17 clients have made.
18 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Yes, Mr Irving, good point.
19 A. [Mr Irving]: Sarcasm is, perhaps, not called for.
20 Q. [Mr Rampton]: 38, please, Mr Irving — no, indeed not, when you look at
21 this.
22 MR JUSTICE GRAY: 38?
23 MR RAMPTON: 38 of tab 10 of the bundle K4, my Lord. It is
24 page 36 of the extract bundle. This is Irving speaking to
25 Irving. This is not Irving punting some thesis about
26 Jewish culpability to the television audience. I want you
. P-96
1 to look at the last part of the entry for September 17th
2 1994 which was a Saturday.
3 A. [Mr Irving]: I am looking at the wrong page.
4 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Page 38 of the bundle, tab 10.
5 A. [Mr Irving]: Tab 10?
6 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Of K4?
7 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Is it in your —-
8 A. [Mr Irving]: Yes.
9 MR JUSTICE GRAY: — selection?
10 MR RAMPTON: This is a typed or printed page.
11 A. [Mr Irving]: Yes.
12 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Some of it has underlines and italics?
13 A. [Mr Irving]: The underlinings are not from me.
14 Q. [Mr Rampton]: “A quiet evening at home”, etc, “Jessica”, who is Jessica?
15 A. [Mr Irving]: My little infant child.
16 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Yes.
17 A. [Mr Irving]: At this time she was nine months old at this time.
18 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Nine months old in September 1994. “Jessica is turning
19 into a fine little lady. She sits very upright on an
20 ordinary chair. Her strong back muscles, a product of our
21 regular walks in my arms to the bank, etc., I am sure. On
22 those walks we sing the binkety-bankety-bong song. There
23 are two other poems in which she stars: ‘My name is baby
24 Jessica. I have got a pretty dressica, but now it is in a
25 messica’ and, more scurrilously, when half breed children
26 are wheeled past” and then you go into italics, “‘I am a
. P-97
1 baby Aryan, not Jewish or sectarian. I have no plans to
2 marry an ape or a Rastafarian”?
3 A. [Mr Irving]: Yes.
4 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Racist, Mr Irving? Anti-Semitic Mr Irving, yes?
5 A. [Mr Irving]: I do not think so.
6 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Teaching your little child this kind of poison?
7 A. [Mr Irving]: Do you think that a nine month old can understand words
8 spoken in English or any other language?
9 Q. [Mr Rampton]: I will tell you something, Mr Irving, when I was
10 six-months old, I said, “Pussy sits in the apple tree
11 until she thinks it is time for tea”?
12 MR JUSTICE GRAY: You were very precocious!
13 MR RAMPTON: I was, but then I burned out at two!
14 A. [Mr Irving]: Yes. Perhaps I should set this in its context. The
15 scurrilous magazine “Searchlight” (about which we will, no
16 doubt, hear more) had just published a photograph of
17 myself and Jessica and her mother, who is very blond and
18 very beautiful, and it had sneered at us as being the
19 “perfect Aryan family”.
20 Q. [Mr Rampton]: They did not write this, you did?
21 A. [Mr Irving]: Yes, but this is my little private response to this rather
22 nasty sneer —-
23 Q. [Mr Rampton]: You wrote this on 17th September.
24 A. [Mr Irving]: Please do not interrupt me. This is my private response
25 to this rather nasty smear by this magazine which has been
26 giving me trouble ever since I had the man arrested for
. P-98
1 breaking into my house 30 years earlier when he called my
2 family a “perfect Aryan family” in a public magazine. So
3 I sit with my infant child on my lap, humming a little
4 song to her about us being a perfect Aryan. Do any other
5 words upset you?
6 Q. [Mr Rampton]: What?
7 A. [Mr Irving]: Do any other words in the poem upset you apart from the
8 “Aryan”.
9 Q. [Mr Rampton]: No, no. It is the contrast. The poor little child has
10 been taught a racist —-
11 A. [Mr Irving]: Poor little child! She is a very happy child.
12 Q. [Mr Rampton]: — ditty by her perverted racist father.
13 A. [Mr Irving]: Have you ever read Edward Lear or Hilliard Belloch?
14 Q. [Mr Rampton]: They have not brought a libel action complaining of being
15 called a racist, Mr Irving. You have —-
16 A. [Mr Irving]: I do not know if they have brought libel actions or not.
17 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Mr Irving, you sued because you said we called you a
18 racist and an extremist?
19 A. [Mr Irving]: Yes, but I am not a racist.
20 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Mr Irving, look at the words on the page.
21 A. [Mr Irving]: Mr Rampton, are you accusing me of racism, in other words,
22 looking down on ethnic minorities?
23 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Oh, yes.
24 A. [Mr Irving]: Well, how is it behind you in the entire four weeks we
25 have been here today I have not seen a single coloured
26 member on the team behind you, when I have employed
. P-99
1 coloured people of ethnic minorities on my staff and, so
2 far as I can see, not you or your instructing solicitor
3 have employed one such person.
4 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Now, shall we have a little pause? I do not
5 think that is a very helpful intervention.
6 A. [Mr Irving]: I think it is very important to say that. It is the point
7 where hypocrisy begins and dudgeon ends.
8 MR RAMPTON: Mr Irving, you are condemned out of your own
9 mouth, you see. That is the trouble.
10 A. [Mr Irving]: Well, I am condemned by what I say and you are condemned
11 by what I see. Not once have you had a member of the
12 ethnic minority working on your side.
13 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Mr Irving, I just suggested that was not a
14 very helpful intervention. Do not just repeat it.
15 MR RAMPTON: I expect you are hoping the newspaper reporters
16 are going to write it down, are you not, Mr Irving?
17 A. [Mr Irving]: I do not place much trust in the newspaper reporters. I
18 can recognize hypocrisy when I see it.
19 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Let us go back in this same tab of the file to a diary
20 entry for 10th November. That is a long way back. If you
21 want to turn to page 17, you are in South Africa,
22 Johannesburg, on November 10th 1987?
23 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Page 17 of your extracts.
24 MR RAMPTON: No, my Lord, I am trying to avoid accusations of
25 manipulation.
26 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Can you give me the references if they are
. P-100
1 there?
2 MR RAMPTON: Yes, it is page 41, I think of, I hope, the
3 extracts bundle, my Lord.
4 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Page 41.
5 MR RAMPTON: Yes, it is the last entry on page 41 in my copy.
6 I will read the whole of it because I do not want — the
7 entry on page 19, please, Mr Irving?
8 A. [Mr Irving]: What page am I supposed to be looking at?
9 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Page 4, tab 10, page 19.
10 A. [Mr Irving]: Yes.
11 MR RAMPTON: “Stayed in hotel all evening apart from a short
12 walk down the street. Worked revising Goring in the
13 foyer. The conservative newspapers of Johannesburg and
14 Pretoria are full of my coming. Unfortunately, I have not
15 left all my blue sheets and media and personal contacts in
16 London. Around 8 p.m. … (reading to the words) … She
17 is bristling a bit about some of my more blatant
18 chauvinism; he talking most interestingly about the AIDS
19 epidemic in black Africa. He says he thinks that the
20 black population in all Africa will die out within a very
21 short space of time”. That was in 1987 — poor man will
22 have been disappointed. “He attributes the incredibly
23 high AIDS” —-
24 A. [Mr Irving]: On what do you base the conclusion he is going to be
25 disappointed?
26 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Let us read on. I think the trouble is with
. P-101
1 interpolations, they —-
2 MR RAMPTON: “He attributes the incredibly high AIDS incidence
3 among blacks to their sexual activity, few blacks,
4 apparently, engaging in less than five sexual acts per
5 night”. Whose underline is that?
6 A. [Mr Irving]: It looks like mine.
7 Q. [Mr Rampton]: It does, does it not? “He says the astonishing sexual
8 activity among black men accounts for why a large number
9 of white female intellectuals and students like having
10 black boyfriends which now, of course, they will regret.
11 God works in mysterious ways, but here we agree he”, that
12 is God, not your mate Burridge, “appears to be working
13 remorselessly towards a Final Solution which may cruelly
14 wipe out, not only the blacks and homosexuals, but a large
15 part of the drug addicts and sexually promiscuous and
16 indiscriminate heterosexual population as well.”
17 Not racist, Mr Irving?
18 A. [Mr Irving]: What is racist about that?
19 Q. [Mr Rampton]: You are hoping that God is going to complete his long term
20 plan, his Endlosung, his Final Solution, and wipe outline
21 all the blacks as well as the homosexuals and everybody
22 else?
23 A. [Mr Irving]: What a totally perverse spin you have put on that diary
24 passage. I am a religious man. When I see things
25 happening, I see God’s hand in everything that is
26 happening. When I see God inflicting a plague like this
. P-102
1 on Africa, I ask myself what the possible explanation for
2 it can be. I am talking to a medical expert, who is a
3 medical expert from Swaziland, who is describing to me
4 what I did not know, I had never heard of at that time.
5 I know a great deal more about the AIDS, the incidence of
6 AIDS, among the native population of Africa. At this time
7 it was total news to me and he told me, and it undoubtedly
8 is true, that it is cutting a swathe right through the
9 native populations of the whole of the African Continent,
10 and we are musing about the strange way that God works in.
11 Q. [Mr Rampton]: So God, like you, would have used capital F, Final,
12 capital S, Solution, would he, just as Hitler, no doubt,
13 was God’s instrument in applying that to the Jews? Is
14 that right, capital F —-
15 A. [Mr Irving]: It is obvious I am referring to the Final Solution in the
16 Aryan sense there, yes.
17 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Do you think God —-
18 A. [Mr Irving]: But you will not find in that sentence the slightest trace
19 of approval of what is going on there. I think this is
20 another of these enormous human tragedies.
21 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Do you think, and I do not want —-
22 A. [Mr Irving]: And to suggest that I approved of what was done to the
23 Jews or to suggest that I am approving here of what is
24 happening to the wretched black population of Africa is
25 perverse and repugnant.
26 Q. [Mr Rampton]: It is God working remorselessly towards his capital F,
. P-103
1 Final, capital S, Solution, so far as the blacks etc. are
2 concerned —-
3 A. [Mr Irving]: You cannot find in any of that passage any hint of
4 approval from me of what is happening.
5 Q. [Mr Rampton]: I see.
6 A. [Mr Irving]: It is — I am listening aghast to what the doctor is
7 telling me about what I had never heard of before, namely
8 the incidence of AIDS in the black population of Uganda
9 and Swaziland and the southern African Continent.
10 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Now I would like to look at something else, please. Tab 5
11 of this file, pages 10 to 11. This is your talk to the
12 Clarendon Club —-
13 A. [Mr Irving]: While we were on that previous African tour, it is a pity
14 you did not leave in the pages of the diary which referred
15 to my visit to Soweto township where we picked up several
16 black people in our car — this was at the height of the
17 troubles — and drove around Soweto with these five blacks
18 sitting in our car allowing — to show us around the whole
19 of their township because I was very interested in their
20 problems, but, unfortunately, you took those pages out.
21 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Do you agree with me, Mr Irving, that one sometimes gets a
22 better insight into a person’s true thoughts and feelings
23 when one reads them written in his private diary than in a
24 speech, for example?
25 A. [Mr Irving]: Oh, yes. These diaries are not intended for publication
26 and you have been very fortunate to have them. 50 million
. P-104
1 words have been placed at your disposal.
2 Q. [Mr Rampton]: No, thank you, Mr Irving. People who bring libel actions
3 have to make discovery. It is as simple as that.
4 A. [Mr Irving]: And I have had no objection whatsoever. I attach the
5 proper conditions to it and I said you can have access to
6 my entire private diaries and telephone logs and
7 everything. So far this is all you have found.
8 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Can we turn to tab 5 in this one? This is something, my
9 Lord, that is not copied into the extract.
10 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Is not?
11 MR RAMPTON: It is in your Lordship’s but not in mine.
12 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Can you give me the reference in mine?
13 MR RAMPTON: I cannot, no, because I have not got it — page
14 35, 2/D.
15 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Thank you.
16 MR RAMPTON: Mr Irving, I am going to read the full entry in
17 this which is a talk I think you gave to the Clarendon
18 Club, whatever that may be, on 19th September 1992, as you
19 can see from the beginning of the tab. After some
20 applause you say this: “For the last four weeks just for
21 once I have gone away from London, where I have been
22 sitting, down in Torquay, which is a white community. We
23 saw perhaps one black man and one coloured family in the
24 whole time I was down there. I am not anti-coloured, take
25 it from me; nothing pleases me more than when I arrive at
26 an airport, or a station, or a seaport” —-
. P-105
1 A. [Mr Irving]: Can you tell me what page you are, please?
2 MR JUSTICE GRAY: I am lost too.
3 MR RAMPTON: 10 of 13 at the top of the page. I will start the
4 paragraph again.
5 A. [Mr Irving]: The bit about I am not anti-coloured, right?
6 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Yes. I read the previous paragraph. “I am not
7 anti-coloured, take it from me; nothing pleases me more
8 than when I arrive at an airport, or a station, or a
9 seaport, and I see a coloured family there – the black
10 father, the black wife and the black children. I think it
11 is just as handsome a spectacle as the English family, or
12 the French family, or the German family, or the South
13 African family … (reading to the words)… I think that
14 is the way that God planned it and that is the way it
15 should be. When I see these families arriving at the
16 airport I am happy (and when I see them leaving at London
17 airport I am happy)”. Well, Mr Irving, well, Mr Irving?
18 A. [Mr Irving]: It reminds me of a bumper sticker I saw in a car in Durban
19 which said, “Welcome to Durban, now go away”. I think we
20 all dislike tourists of any colour.
21 MR JUSTICE GRAY: These are black tourists though, that is the
22 point.
23 MR RAMPTON: Tourists? These are black people —-
24 A. [Mr Irving]: Yes.
25 Q. [Mr Rampton]: — you are talking about, and your statement, “i am not
26 an anti-coloured, take it from me”, was a cynical little
. P-106
1 joke?
2 A. [Mr Irving]: I do not agree. I am not anti-coloured. This was the
3 cynical little joke at the end because you will notice
4 that the first bit did not get the laughter. It was the
5 cynical little joke at the end that got the laughter.
6 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Yes, “… and when I see them leaving” —-
7 A. [Mr Irving]: Right, so that was recognized as being the joke.
8 Q. [Mr Rampton]: “When I see them leaving at London airport I am happy.
9 [Cheers and Laughter]”. You were speaking to a bunch of
10 fellow racists who would like to clear these islands of
11 all their black people?
12 A. [Mr Irving]: On what information do you base the knowledge of what the
13 audience was —-
14 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Otherwise you would not have got cheers and laughter; you
15 would have been bundled out —-
16 MR JUSTICE GRAY: I think it is a question. It is a question.
17 Were you speaking to a bunch of racists?
18 A. [Mr Irving]: Was I — no, I was not. No, they were perfectly
19 ordinary —-
20 MR RAMPTON: Why were there cheers?
21 A. [Mr Irving]: Well, they obviously liked the jokes that I said. They
22 liked the way that I told the joke at the end.
23 Q. [Mr Rampton]: If you had been speaking to a normal audience of
24 non-racist people and you had said something like that,
25 you would have been chucked out on your ear, Mr Irving.
26 A. [Mr Irving]: Mr Rampton, you can take it from me, I am less racist than
. P-107
1 yourself probably as witnessed the people that I employ.
2 Q. [Mr Rampton]: All right. I am going to read on. “But if there is one
3 thing that gets up my nose, I must admit, it is this —
4 the way … the thing is when I am down in Torquay and
5 I switch on my television set and I see one of them” —
6 “one of them” — “reading our news to us”. Now, who is
7 the “them” and who is the “us”?
8 A. [Mr Irving]: Trevor McDonald.
9 Q. [Mr Rampton]: No, “one of them”?
10 A. [Mr Irving]: Well, in fact, this is a stock speech I used to make.
11 I used to — it was a debating speech I would deliver to
12 university audiences. I would start off by talking about
13 having our people, the God old days, Lord Reith, the
14 announcer wearing his dinner jack, you knew the people
15 behind the camera were actually wearing dinner jackets too
16 on Royal occasions, but now in the gradual drumming down
17 of television, they have women reading the news and they
18 have — it is part of a general speech I used to deliver
19 and I used to say —-
20 MR JUSTICE GRAY: The question, I think before you go
21 further —-
22 A. [Mr Irving]: I am trying to set the —-
23 Q. [Mr Justice Gray]: — was what did you mean — listen to the question —-
24 A. [Mr Irving]: Yes.
25 Q. [Mr Justice Gray]: — what did you mean by “them”, not what did you mean by
26 “one”. What did you mean by “them” and “us”? What is
. P-108
1 the answer to that?
2 A. [Mr Irving]: As you say, I go on straightaway, I talk about women.
3 MR RAMPTON: Right. Wait a minute. We are coming on,
4 Mr Irving. You have rambled on without reading the text,
5 unfortunately.
6 A. [Mr Irving]: Well, that is the clear answer. The very next sentence
7 says —-
8 Q. [Mr Rampton]: No, Mr Irving, we are going to read on.
9 A. [Mr Irving]: I do admit to chauvinism.
10 Q. [Mr Rampton]: “It is our news and they’re reading it to me”?
11 A. [Mr Irving]: That is right.
12 Q. [Mr Rampton]: If I was —-
13 A. [Mr Irving]: It is male news and it should be read to us by men
14 wearing —-
15 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Mr Irving, will you please be patient?
16 A. [Mr Irving]: — dinner jackets and —-
17 Q. [Mr Rampton]: We are going to read quite a lot of this. Please.
18 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Mr Irving, please. Can I just ask one other
19 question because I am puzzled, and I want to make sure
20 I understand what you are conveying. When you were asked
21 what was meant by that passage, you said the “one” was
22 Trevor McDonald —-
23 A. [Mr Irving]: Yes, because —-
24 Q. [Mr Justice Gray]: — but you then said that the “them” was women.
25 A. [Mr Irving]: Well, we come to —-
26 Q. [Mr Justice Gray]: Well, I do not understand.
. P-109
1 A. [Mr Irving]: — oh, we come to Trevor McDonald over the page, I see,
2 my Lord. I was jumping ahead of myself. He is three
3 paragraphs on.
4 MR RAMPTON: Trevor McDonald is one of us because, like me, he
5 wears glasses, is that right — one of them, rather?
6 A. [Mr Irving]: I am afraid I do not follow that.
7 Q. [Mr Rampton]: You said initially without thinking of your clever, clever
8 “woman” answer, you said, “That is Trevor McDonald”?
9 A. [Mr Irving]: Well, this is a standard speech that I used to give as
10 a standard gramaphone record.
11 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Why did you say that Trevor McDonald was one of them?
12 A. [Mr Irving]: Because I know what is coming. I know what is coming in
13 the speech.
14 Q. [Mr Rampton]: What “them” is Trevor McDonald one of?
15 A. [Mr Irving]: Well, he is someone who is different from us.
16 Q. [Mr Rampton]: In what sense? He wears glasses?
17 A. [Mr Irving]: No, he speaks English better than you and I do —-
18 Q. [Mr Rampton]: That is what you meant, is it?
19 A. [Mr Irving]: — for example — yes.
20 Q. [Mr Rampton]: He is one of them very good English speakers?
21 A. [Mr Irving]: This is a witty speech being delivered after dinner to an
22 audience in a private club.
23 Q. [Mr Rampton]: “Wicked”, Mr Irving?
24 A. [Mr Irving]: “Witty”, not wicked.
25 Q. [Mr Rampton]: “Witty”, did you say?
26 A. [Mr Irving]: Well, it got laughter.
. P-110
1 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Oh, yes — just, no doubt, as Dr Goebbels’ audience would
2 have laughed at him.
3 A. [Mr Irving]: I used to deliver exactly the same speech to the
4 University of Durham, Cambridge University Union Society
5 — no complaints from anyone. The women laughed loudest
6 of all.
7 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Can we turn over the page to page 11 of 13. Can?
8 A. [Mr Irving]: But, of course, you are missing out the bits that help to
9 set the tone of the kind of mood of the evening.
10 Q. [Mr Rampton]: I do not mind, Mr Irving. I want to finish this
11 question before the adjournment. You do not like what is
12 coming, I know, but I am going to do it very, very quickly
13 so that I get my question in: “Because basically
14 international news is a serious thing and I yearn for the
15 old days of Lord Reith when the news reader on the BBC,
16 which was the only channel in those times, wore a dinner
17 jacket and bow tie and rose to the occasion. On great
18 State occasions, one had the satisfaction of knowing not
19 only that the news reader wearing the dinner jacket and
20 the bow tie — on great State occasions I think it was
21 even a white tie that was called for — but you had the
22 satisfaction of knowing that the gentleman behind the
23 camera was also wearing a dinner jacket. It gave a
24 certain solid sense of satisfaction that all was well in
25 the best”, you should have said “all possible worlds” but
26 it has got missed out, “but now we have women reading out
. P-111
1 news to us”?
2 A. [Mr Irving]: “Now we have women reading out the news to us”.
3 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Wait, Mr Irving, the good bit is coming. “If they could
4 perhaps have their” —-
5 A. [Mr Irving]: But this is setting the whole tone of it, you know, you
6 are not enjoying this speech.
7 Q. [Mr Rampton]: “If they could perhaps have their own news which they were
8 reading to us I suppose [Laughter], it would be very
9 interesting. [Good-natured female heckling]”. So far,
10 Mr Irving, so good. “For the time being, for a
11 transitional period, I would be prepared to accept that
12 the BBC should have a dinner-jacketed gentleman reading
13 the important news to us, followed by a lady reading all
14 the less important news, followed by Trevor McDonald
15 giving us all the latest news about the muggings and the
16 drug busts – [rest lost in loud Laughter and Applause]”.
17 Are you not appalled by that?
18 A. [Mr Irving]: Not in the least. This is a funny after dinner speech in
19 the spirit of any stand up comedian on the BBC. We have
20 heard exactly the same comedy from the end of the pier in
21 Brighton. It is exactly the same kind of speech, and if
22 you find that — even the black audience would not find
23 something like offensive, believe me; and as for which of
24 us two is the racist, I can only refer to the fact that I,
25 unlike the members of the Defence team, employ ethnic
26 minorities without the slightest hesitation —-
. P-112
1 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Mr Irving, how many times do I need to tell
2 you not to make that comment? It is inappropriate,
3 futile —-
4 A. [Mr Irving]: Well, if I am being accused of racism, my Lord, I
5 think —-
6 Q. [Mr Justice Gray]: — and is doing your cause no good, I can assure you.
7 A. [Mr Irving]: If I am being accused or racism, I think it is highly
8 relevant to find out that I employ ethnic minorities
9 without the slightest hesitation.
10 Q. [Mr Justice Gray]: Well, it is my view that counts and I do not think it is
11 says, so please do not say it again?
12 MR RAMPTON: My Lord, what I would like to do with your
13 Lordship’s permission — there is an awful lot of this —
14 I have got a very little way, and your Lordship can
15 understand one reason why that is so — what I would like
16 to do is at 2 o’clock — it will take a little bit of time
17 to set up — is show a video of one of Mr Irving’s
18 speeches at Tampa, Florida, on 6th October 1995 at a
19 gathering of something called the National Alliance.
20 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Right. We will do that at 2 o’clock.
21 (Luncheon adjournment)
22 (2.00 p.m.)
23 A. [Mr Irving]: May I first apologise for my unruly behaviour on the race
24 matter. I should not have kept making that point.
25 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Do not worry. I do appreciate that it is
26 quite stressful. You have been being cross-examined for
. P-113
1 quite a long time, but I think it is better unsaid.
2 A. [Mr Irving]: Secondly, in view of the fact that I was broadcasting to
3 Australia at five this morning, may I sit during the
4 film?
5 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Of course. Sit any time during your
6 evidence.
7 MR RAMPTON: I hope that goes for me too so far as the film is
8 concerned. My Lord, this is a video tape recording of a
9 speech or talk, call it what one likes, by Mr Irving at
10 Tampa, Florida, on 6th October 1995. The transcript,
11 I think, is K3, tab 20. The plan is to do the beginning,
12 and there is a specific reason for that, and then go to
13 the section which your Lordship has in the extract at page
14 page 14.
15 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Thank you very much.
16 A. [Mr Irving]: My Lord, is there any reason why they are just showing
17 this section and not the whole tape?
18 MR RAMPTON: I do not mind. It takes an hour. I have
19 absolutely no views about that at all, my Lord.
20 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Why not watch the extract and then we can go
21 on the written page to any other passage you want.
22 A. [Mr Irving]: Very well.
23 MR RAMPTON: If it makes Mr Irving uncomfortable, I would much
24 rather —-
25 MR JUSTICE GRAY: I am just concerned about time, Mr Irving.
26 Explain to me why you want the whole thing shown.
. P-114
1 A. [Mr Irving]: Your Lordship will probably have glanced through it and
2 you will have seen that—-
3 Q. [Mr Rampton]: No, I have not, actually.
4 A. [Mr Irving]: I am sorry. In fact, I remarked to one of Mr Rampton’s
5 instructing solicitors as I came upstairs in the elevator
6 that I was astonished that they had chosen this particular
7 video tape because that is precisely the one that I would
8 have wanted shown. I had apprehended they were going to
9 show the whole tape and not just a fragment.
10 MR JUSTICE GRAY: I see. You think this in a way gives the
11 flavour of the sort of speeches you were making?
12 A. [Mr Irving]: Unless they are intending showing lots of extracts from
13 lots of speeches, then I would prefer one entire to be
14 shown rather than just one fragment taken out of context.
15 MR JUSTICE GRAY: If Mr Irving puts it like that, that in a way
16 this would be a good sample speech, I am inclined to think
17 he is entitled to have the whole thing played.
18 MR RAMPTON: I quite agree. I have no feelings about that.
19 Video is shown.
20
21 Break in video at this point.
22 A. [Mr Irving]: I then leave the room so there is not much point in
23 showing the rest of it.
24 MR JUSTICE GRAY: I think there may be.
25 MR RAMPTON: Yes.
26 (Video continued).
. P-115
1 MR RAMPTON: There is a small break.
2 A. [Mr Irving]: That is when I then leave the room.
3 MR JUSTICE GRAY: I think I know what the point is.
4 MR RAMPTON: If your Lordship has the point in the transcript,
5 then we do not need to see the tape because it is at the
6 beginning of the transcript as well as the end.
7 MR JUSTICE GRAY: We are stopping?
8 MR RAMPTON: That will do, if your Lordship is satisfied that
9 what I need is in the transcript.
10 MR JUSTICE GRAY: You have laid the ground for a question.
Section 116.11-142.2
11 MR RAMPTON: Yes. Mr Irving, do you remember that earlier on
12 in this case we asked you some written questions, or we
13 requested some information?
14 A. [Mr Irving]: Yes.
15 Q. [Mr Rampton]: And do you remember that we asked you questions about the
16 national alliance?
17 A. [Mr Irving]: Very clearly. I remember very clearly what answer I gave
18 too.
19 Q. [Mr Rampton]: I asked you a number of questions, general and specific,
20 about the national alliance. You gave some replies. My
21 Lord, these are in bundle A, tab 8. Mr Irving should be
22 handed bundle A, and he should turn to tab 8 where he gave
23 some answers. If turn it to the seventh page — have you
24 got your answers, Mr Irving — it is a document which
25 calls itself “some answers”.
26 A. [Mr Irving]: Yes.
. P-116
1 Q. [Mr Rampton]: If you turn to page 7 of those answers, you will find a
2 page which begins with the answer number —-
3 A. [Mr Irving]: Tab 9, that is correct.
4 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Yes.
5 MR RAMPTON: Tab 9. That is my fault. 23 and 25 are the
6 relevant answers. You said this, Mr Irving: “I have no
7 association with the body known to the Defendants as the
8 National Alliance as such or whatsoever.”
9 A. [Mr Irving]: What number are you?
10 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Number 23. “I have no association with the body known to
11 the Defendants as the National Alliance as such or
12 whatsoever”.
13 A. [Mr Irving]: Yes.
14 Q. [Mr Rampton]: “I cannot rule out the members of that organization which
15 I take to be a legal organization in the United States.
16 They have attended functions at which I spoke.
17 Accordingly I have no knowledge of, and I take no interest
18 in what materials it publishes or distributes. I have no
19 knowledge whatsoever of the character of the National
20 Alliance other than what is now claimed by the witnesses
21 for the Defendants nor of the publications which it is
22 alleged to publish or advertise”?
23 A. [Mr Irving]: Yes.
24 Q. [Mr Rampton]: “I do not agree that I have spoken at any National
25 Alliance meetings. It might be that on occasions a
26 gentleman who was a member of the National Alliance
. P-117
1 offered to organize a lecture for me. In other words he
2 undertook to find a suitable room but I then circulated my
3 entire local mailing list to provide an audience. No
4 doubt he brought his friends as well. It will be seen
5 that in all these photographs of these events which were
6 produced at trial there is no kind of National Alliance
7 presence”?
8 A. [Mr Irving]: Yes.
9 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Mr Irving, that was a false answer, was it not?
10 A. [Mr Irving]: Both answers are absolutely true. I draw your attention
11 to the fact that your expert witness, Professor Evans,
12 having read my entire diaries from start to finish, has
13 lamented the fact that he has found not one single
14 reference to the National Alliance. Am I correct?
15 Q. [Mr Rampton]: I have no idea what Professor Evans —-
16 A. [Mr Irving]: I am telling you. That is the answer to your question.
17 Q. [Mr Rampton]: It is not the answer to my question by any manner of
18 means, Mr Irving. We are going to show a film of you in a
19 moment wearing a National Alliance — never mind that.
20 Look at the beginning of the tab?
21 A. [Mr Irving]: Do you wish to have that part struck off the record?
22 Q. [Mr Rampton]: No. It is a misunderstanding by me. I do not have things
23 struck off the record. That happens in the United States,
24 Mr Irving.
25 A. [Mr Irving]: There is a fragment of a sentence there about my wearing
26 something.
. P-118
1 MR JUSTICE GRAY: On we go. On we go.
2 MR RAMPTON: On we go, Mr Irving. Tab 20, please, of K3, which
3 is the transcript of this last film we have been
4 watching.
5 A. [Mr Irving]: Oh, yes.
6 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Right at the beginning. Look at the beginning of it
7 please, Mr Irving.
8 A. [Mr Irving]: Yes.
9 Q. [Mr Rampton]: “The first transcribed speech. Ladies and gentlemen, on
10 behalf of the National Alliance and National Vanguard
11 Books, I would like to proudly welcome Mr David Irving”.
12 A. [Mr Irving]: Yes.
13 Q. [Mr Rampton]: You were not in the room at the time, of course?
14 A. [Mr Irving]: I was there at the time.
15 Q. [Mr Rampton]: On behalf of the National Alliance?
16 A. [Mr Irving]: It would have meant nothing whatsoever to me. There is no
17 reason at all why I should have remembered that phrase.
18 I have no idea what the National Alliance is. I still do
19 not know what it is. If somebody introducing me says I am
20 here on behalf of some legion of something or some
21 alliance of something, it is instantly forgotten by me two
22 minutes later. I was there at a meeting which had been
23 organized with my mailing list and the evidence for that
24 is in the following paragraph: “Ladies and gentlemen,
25 there are few familiar faces here this evening”. In other
26 words, all my own friends off my own mailing list.
. P-119
1 Q. [Mr Rampton]: It would not be right to suggest that, including this
2 meeting, you have attended no less than eight National
3 Alliance events between 1990 and 1998?
4 A. [Mr Irving]: I have attended no events that have been organized, to my
5 knowledge, as National Alliance events and, had I attended
6 such events, then it would have been described as such in
7 my private diaries, quite clearly.
8 Q. [Mr Rampton]: What do you think that was?
9 A. [Mr Irving]: This was a function which had been organized by an
10 individual for me to attend and to which I had invited my
11 entire Florida mailing list.
12 Q. [Mr Rampton]: “On behalf of the National Alliance and National Vanguard
13 Books I would like to proudly welcome Mr David Irving”?
14 A. [Mr Irving]: He had a table there no doubt on which he was selling
15 books. That was no doubt the return that he got. But
16 I have no idea what the National Alliance is and
17 I supposed 90 per cent of the people in this audience also
18 have no idea what the National Alliance is.
19 Q. [Mr Rampton]: You were the ham in the sandwich between that man
20 introducing you proudly on behalf of the National Alliance
21 and another man after you spoke, who also spoke out on
22 behalf of the National Alliance, Mr Irving.
23 A. [Mr Irving]: That may well be, but I repeat what I say. 99 per cent of
24 the English public, of which I am a member, has not the
25 slightest idea what the National Alliance is in the United
26 States, and that is the position I am in, and what I am
. P-120
1 still in. This is no doubt the reason why your expert was
2 unable to find the slightest reference to this
3 organisation in my private diaries.
4 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Do you remember speaking at the Best Western Hotel in
5 Tampa on July 25th 1998?
6 A. [Mr Irving]: I remember speaking at the Best Western Hotel in Tampa,
7 yes, but I do not know what the date was.
8 Q. [Mr Rampton]: I am just going to hold it up. This is a flier, poster or
9 leaflet for your talk. Do you recognize it?
10 A. [Mr Irving]: No. I have not seen that. It would not have been sent to
11 me for obvious reasons.
12 Q. [Mr Rampton]: It says: “Banned. World famous British historian banned
13 for publishing politically incorrect views about the
14 Holocaust”.
15 A. [Mr Irving]: Can you tell me where I find it in the bundle, please?
16 Q. [Mr Rampton]: It is one of these files, trial bundle C, tab 2, page 78.
17 Mr Irving, there is a witness statement in tab 2 which is
18 that of the Defendants’ witness Rebecca Gutman.
19 A. [Mr Irving]: Who we are not going to be able to cross-examine, I take
20 it?
21 Q. [Mr Rampton]: No, you are certainly not. I am only interested in
22 pictures of you, Mr Irving, and the stuff that you know
23 about?
24 A. [Mr Irving]: I am talking about my coming back. If this witness is not
25 presenting herself for cross-examination, then the court
26 is entitled to take what view of her evidence it wishes.
. P-121
1 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Of course we know that, Mr Irving. Not only that, you
2 should know that you are entitled to introduce by the same
3 method material which might be apt to discredit her
4 testimony.
5 A. [Mr Irving]: I am not the one who is defending this case. You are the
6 one defending this case. I remind you that I am the
7 Claimant in this action and you are the Defendants, not
8 other way round.
9 MR JUSTICE GRAY: On we go.
10 MR RAMPTON: Thank you, Mr Irving. I think his Lordship
11 probably knows that. You can be sure that I do.
12 Mr Irving, will you look at that poster?
13 A. [Mr Irving]: Tab 2.
14 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Page 78 on the right-hand side of the page in the stamp.
15 A. [Mr Irving]: C2.
16 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Mine has just got C on it.
17 A. [Mr Irving]: This appears to be a leaflet handed out in the University
18 of Southern Florida, University of Tampa.
19 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Best Western Hotel, 820 East Bush Boulevard, Tampa. That
20 is a regular venue for your attendances at the National
21 Alliances meetings, is it not, Mr Irving?
22 A. [Mr Irving]: I do not think I have ever spoken there again. I may be
23 wrong.
24 Q. [Mr Rampton]: This is 1998.
25 A. [Mr Irving]: There is no year on this document.
26 Q. [Mr Rampton]: No, no, but there is in Miss Gutman’s statement. This is
. P-122
1 where she picked it up, and when she picked it up she
2 reads in paragraph 3 as follows: “On or around mid July
3 1998 the AJC (whatever that is) South West Florida
4 Chapter, received a flier … advertising a lecture to be
5 given by Mr Irving on 25th July 1998 at the Best Western
6 Hotel (address), this flier is attached”.
7 A. [Mr Irving]: The AJC is the American Jewish Committee, is that
8 correct?
9 Q. [Mr Rampton]: I hope so, yes. Anyhow, it turns out it is another
10 National Alliance meeting.
11 A. [Mr Irving]: She says, “Although the flier made no mention of the
12 National Alliance, the contact telephone number given was
13 the number listed for the national office and the National
14 Alliance”, and I of course would have known that, would I?
15 Q. [Mr Rampton]: You would, Mr Irving, would you not, if you were pictured
16 on the rostrum, podium or platform with a National
17 Alliance banner beside you?
18 A. [Mr Irving]: How on earth I would not what National Alliance banner
19 looks like.
20 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Let us have a look at it. Tell us where it
21 is.
22 A. [Mr Irving]: Does it say National Alliance or something?
23 MR RAMPTON: As far as I am told. I have never seen it. Let
24 us look at it.
25 (Video was played)?
26 A. [Mr Irving]: It has also got David Irving posters behind.
. P-123
1 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Yes.
2 A. [Mr Irving]: So what is the significance of the CND banner?
3 Q. [Mr Rampton]: CND? I thought you said National Alliance.
4 (Video played)?
5 A. [Mr Irving]: It looked like the CND emblem to me.
6 Q. [Mr Rampton]: No, they are not?
7 A. [Mr Irving]: Is that not the CND emblem?
8 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Mr Irving, if you would stop speaking for a moment,
9 I could try and watch the picture.
10 Q. [Mr Rampton]: I see. That is what Mr Irving calls a CND banner.
11 A. [Mr Irving]: If I could see it from where I was standing, which is
12 highly unlikely, if you look at the way the hall is laid
13 out, I would have seen it sideways and I would have
14 thought either that is a tree or a CND banner or
15 something, but certainly the words and the banner would
16 have meant nothing whatsoever to me. There is no reason
17 why they should have.
18 Q. [Mr Rampton]: This is the eighth of eight meetings of this body that you
19 had been to.
20 A. [Mr Irving]: What is the evidence for that.
21 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Is it true?
22 A. [Mr Irving]: What?
23 Q. [Mr Justice Gray]: Have you been to eight meetings of the National Alliance?
24 A. [Mr Irving]: No, my Lord. Of the National Alliance, not. I have
25 spoken across the United States possibly 50 or 60 times a
26 year.
. P-124
1 MR RAMPTON: That is one of them, is it not?
2 A. [Mr Irving]: Well, you have yet to produce any evidence that I have
3 known that I am speaking in a National Alliance meeting
4 and, if it is not in my private diary, which is the
5 obvious place to look for that evidence, at a time when no
6 legal action was contemplated, then quite clearly I had
7 not the slightest notion what the National Alliance was.
8 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Mr Irving, in 1995 the man introduces you proudly on
9 behalf of the National Alliance and National Vanguard
10 Books.
11 A. [Mr Irving]: Why should that have stuck in my memory, do you think?
12 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Because you are tailed by another man who speaks about the
13 National Alliance. You go back again at least in 1998.
14 A. [Mr Irving]: Excuse me.
15 Q. [Mr Rampton]: You go back again in 1998 and you speak from a rostrum
16 with a prominent National Alliance banner beside you.
17 A. [Mr Irving]: If you could see where this prominent banner is, it is
18 either on a back wall or on a side wall where no doubt
19 I cannot see it.
20 Q. [Mr Rampton]: How did you get into the room, Mr Irving? Did somebody
21 let you in?
22 A. [Mr Irving]: So you imagine I go into a room as the speaker and I say,
23 before I just go up to the rostrum I am just going to have
24 a look around all the walls to see what is on display here
25 and oh, by the way, what is that banner over there?
26 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Who put up the pictures of you behind you?
. P-125
1 A. [Mr Irving]: No doubt the organizers did.
2 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Yes, the organizers, Mr Irving. Really!
3 A. [Mr Irving]: The people who had invited me there.
4 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Yes, the National Alliance.
5 A. [Mr Irving]: This is what you say but, unfortunately, you are
6 introducing no evidence and your witness you are
7 frightened to put on the cross-examination stand.
8 Q. [Mr Rampton]: We have seen the evidence on two tapes, Mr Irving.
9 A. [Mr Irving]: I am sorry, that is not sufficient. You have somebody, a
10 member of the American Jewish Committee, who makes a
11 written statement, who is not prepared to subject herself
12 to cross-examination. I am prepared to subject myself to
13 cross-examination week after week after week by you and
14 none of your witnesses are prepared.
15 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Very kind of you considering that you brought this action,
16 Mr Irving. We are all very grateful to you.
17 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Mr Rampton, if I may say so, that sort of
18 comment is going to prolong matters.
19 MR RAMPTON: I pass on to the actual text.
20 A. [Mr Irving]: I think it is a very fair statement to make, to draw
21 attention to the fact that they are not presenting their
22 witnesses for cross-examination.
23 MR JUSTICE GRAY: That is a perfectly fair point to make and
24 I will bear it in mind with all the witnesses who are not
25 actually going into the witness box to be cross-examined,
26 I can assure you.
. P-126
1 A. [Mr Irving]: In the circumstances I think Mr Rampton’s sarcasm is not
2 called for.
3 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Let us stop the comments and get on with the
4 questions and answers.
5 MR RAMPTON: Yes. I quite agree. I am sorry about that. Will
6 you turn, please, to the text of what we have just seen?
7 I have only a couple of questions about this. It has to
8 do with some of the things that you have said.
9 A. [Mr Irving]: I draw attention first of all to the fact that there were
10 familiar faces there, in other words people off my own
11 mailing list are there. That is what the nature of the
12 audience is.
13 Q. [Mr Rampton]: There was a lot of laughter, was there not, at your
14 tasteless jokes?
15 A. [Mr Irving]: My what?
16 Q. [Mr Rampton]: A lot of laughter at your tasteless jokes, Mr Irving.
17 A. [Mr Irving]: I flatter myself that I am an accomplished speaker.
18 Q. [Mr Rampton]: I will not say what I was going to say. It would have
19 been too obvious and rather cheap. Now, would you like to
20 use the full text?
21 A. [Mr Irving]: You mean there was laughter at the point where I said, “if
22 it does not fit you must acquit”?
23 Q. [Mr Rampton]: No. There was laughter —-
24 A. [Mr Irving]: I am drawing attention to where the laughter comes and of
25 course the reference there is to the O J Simpson case.
26 Q. [Mr Rampton]: No, no, Mr Irving—-
. P-127
1 Q. [Mr Rampton]: You are interrupting me. The reference was to the O J
2 Simpson case which had just ended two days earlier where
3 Johnny Cochrand had won the case by saying, “If it does
4 not fit, you must acquit.”
5 Q. [Mr Rampton]: There was the first laughter. There was laughter all the
6 way through and I am going to draw attention to some of
7 the laughter. Some of it is noted not in that transcript,
8 in my transcript. I made some notes as I was going
9 through it. In particular, when you are dealing with the
10 plan from Colindale, I think your page number is probably
11 18.
12 A. [Mr Irving]: Yes.
13 Q. [Mr Rampton]: And over the page please.
14 A. [Mr Irving]: These opponents had tried the usual tactic of taking over
15 half the audience and then rioting throughout my entire
16 lecture.
17 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Please be patient. In the top half of page 19, the man
18 from Colindale — I do not know how you knew he came from
19 Colindale, I am bound to say.
20 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Let us leave that on one side.
21 MR RAMPTON: Yes. You said to your affable audience in Tampa,
22 “And he went berserk”. Yes?
23 A. [Mr Irving]: Yes.
24 Q. [Mr Rampton]: He said: “Are you trying to say that we are responsible
25 for Auschwitz ourselves”?
26 A. [Mr Irving]: Yes.
. P-128
1 Q. [Mr Rampton]: And I said: “Well, the short answer is yes”, and at that
2 point I made a note on my transcript that there was really
3 quite loud laughter.
4 A. [Mr Irving]: Well, it is funny that it is not on the transcript in
5 front of us when all the other laughter has been noted.
6 Q. [Mr Rampton]: We can go back to it, Mr Irving. I assure you it is
7 right.
8 A. [Mr Irving]: I do not see quite what the point is that you are trying
9 to make.
10 Q. [Mr Rampton]: What is funny about —-
11 A. [Mr Irving]: I am repeating an actual exchange that happened in
12 Shrieveport, Louisiana, between these hecklers who had
13 decided to disrupt a lecture which I was delivering and
14 then the heckling subsided and their ring leader stood up
15 and I engaged him in this debate. He said precisely the
16 words that I quoted there, and I could have dodged the
17 issue and said I do not want to get into that, but instead
18 I met it head on and I said, “Well, the short answer would
19 be yes, but there is a long answer. The short answer
20 misses out everything between the alpha and the omega, all
21 the intervening stages”. It may be that it is an
22 uncomfortable answer, it may be that it was not the answer
23 they wanted to hear, but it is a question I had been
24 wrestling with ever since I first became engaged with the
25 Holocaust, how do crimes like this happen, and why do they
26 happen.
. P-129
1 Q. [Mr Rampton]: I am asking you a completely different question,
2 Mr Irving. You know that I was. Again you dodge because
3 you do not like it. I asked you —-
4 A. [Mr Irving]: I am sorry, you did not get to the question then.
5 Q. [Mr Rampton]: What was funny about what you said?
6 A. [Mr Irving]: I disagree. I did not hear any laughter and, if there had
7 been laughter —-
8 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Assume for the sake of argument, because
9 I remember the laughter, assume there was laughter, what
10 is funny about saying that the Jews are responsible for
11 Auschwitz?
12 A. [Mr Irving]: It is not the least bit funny.
13 MR RAMPTON: No.
14 A. [Mr Irving]: It is not the least bit funny and, if the audience laughs,
15 you saw precisely what my answer was, I do not see what
16 relevance it has to me.
17 Q. [Mr Rampton]: All right. Let us go up to the top of page 18.
18 A. [Mr Irving]: I think probably it would be called nervous laughter
19 perhaps.
20 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Oh no, Mr Irving.
21 A. [Mr Irving]: Nervous laughter, because they had never heard an answer
22 as blunt as that followed then by the corollary which was
23 to explain precisely what you mean between the yes —-
24 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Now Mr Irving —-
25 A. [Mr Irving]: Between the alpha and the omega there is a whole series of
26 intervening stages.
. P-130
1 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Would you like a rest? You seem very enerve, if I can use
2 the French word.
3 A. [Mr Irving]: I can carry on if you can.
4 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Mr Irving, it occurred to me actually whilst
5 watching the film that you said you were up till 4 or 5
6 this morning. I am very concerned that it is a huge
7 physical strain on you and I would be perfectly happy if
8 you said you had had enough.
9 A. [Mr Irving]: I can go as many rounds with Mr Rampton as he wishes.
10 MR RAMPTON: You do not have to worry going rounds with me,
11 Mr Irving. I have been doing this for 35 years. I am
12 asking you genuinely. You seem rather rattled. Would you
13 like a rest?
14 A. [Mr Irving]: Mr Rampton, I am not rattled.
15 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Rattled is the wrong word.
16 MR RAMPTON: Whatever?
17 A. [Mr Irving]: You have to accept the answers I give you in the spirit in
18 which they are given.
19 MR JUSTICE GRAY: We are going to carry on.
20 MR RAMPTON: Go to the top of page 18, Mr Irving.
21 A. [Mr Irving]: If you are just trying to score cheap points from—-
22 Q. [Mr Rampton]: No, I am not.
23 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Mr Irving, please, there is a lot of point
24 scoring going on. Let us get on with the question and
25 answers.
26 MR RAMPTON: Mr Irving, what I am concerned about is that today
. P-131
1 of all days you seem quite incapable of answering my
2 questions. That is a waste of his Lordship’s time and my
3 client’s money.
4 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Ask another one.
5 MR RAMPTON: Yes, I will.
6 A. [Mr Irving]: These are comments for his Lordship to make rather than
7 for leading counsel, in my view. Can I draw your
8 attention to the final sentence of that paragraph that you
9 objected to?
10 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Yes.
11 A. [Mr Irving]: It is an interesting point. They go round the other way
12 and they make life unbearable for those who try to analyse
13 whatever happened, whatever it was. That is what I try to
14 do. I try to analyse whatever happened, whatever it was.
15 It is not an easy task, because you are constantly being
16 accused of wrong motives.
17 MR RAMPTON: Now, can we please go to the top of page 18 in the
18 version you have there?
19 A. [Mr Irving]: Yes.
20 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Here you cannot argue about laughter because it is written
21 in.
22 A. [Mr Irving]: Yes.
23 Q. [Mr Rampton]: You said, “I find the whole Holocaust story utterly
24 boring. It goes on and on and on and they, that is the
25 Jews, keep going on about the Holocaust because it is the
26 only interesting thing that has happened to them in the
. P-132
1 last 3,000 years”. Funny, isn’t it?
2 A. [Mr Irving]: I think that 95 per cent of the thinking public find the
3 Holocaust endlessly boring by now but they dare not say it
4 because they know it is politically incorrect.
5 Q. [Mr Rampton]: The joke is in the sting in the tail. “It is the only
6 interesting thing that has happened to the Jews in the
7 last 3,000 years”. Very funny, isn’t it, Mr Irving?
8 A. [Mr Irving]: Well, what other explanation is there for the fact that
9 that is all they ever go on about now?
10 Q. [Mr Rampton]: It might very well be that—-
11 A. [Mr Irving]: Lots of wonderful things have happened to them in their
12 3,000 years. There have been the most incredible episodes
13 in the Jewish history and yet all we hear from the movies,
14 the television and the newspapers of late is the
15 Holocaust, and people are thoroughly bored of it.
16 Q. [Mr Rampton]: You are, Mr Irving, no doubt, and you do not speak for
17 anybody but yourself, I am sorry.
18 A. [Mr Irving]: Maybe you stood in Oxford Street with a clip board taking
19 a poll saying, “are you bored with the Holocaust yet?” My
20 own perception, which is what I am giving here from this
21 box, is that the people I speak to, who are intelligent
22 people from academic and ordinary walks of life, say they
23 are thoroughly fed up with it.
24 Q. [Mr Rampton]: You do not know anything about it and you have managed to
25 lecture for an hour about the detail of it.
26 A. [Mr Irving]: What, now?
. P-133
1 Q. [Mr Rampton]: No, in this transcript. You went on for an hour.
2 A. [Mr Irving]: It has been interesting to this audience because I had put
3 to them facts they did not know about, the code breaking,
4 about the aerial photographs, everything they have not
5 heard about on the established media I have been putting
6 to them. That is how I have held their attention.
7 MR JUSTICE GRAY: What I think may have been being put to you
8 and, if it was not, I will put it —-
9 A. [Mr Irving]: Question of taste.
10 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Listen to my question.
11 MR RAMPTON: It is not a question of taste.
12 MR JUSTICE GRAY: You said many times that you are not a
13 Holocaust historian, and I understand that.
14 A. [Mr Irving]: Yes.
15 Q. [Mr Justice Gray]: But you said you had to become one. I cannot remember and
16 I have not got the reference, but when was it you told me
17 that you decided you had to become a Holocaust historian?
18 A. [Mr Irving]: I had to become one for this trial, my Lord, which means
19 for the last three years I have wading around knee deep in
20 matter and in files and in documents that I would never
21 willingly and voluntarily have occupied myself with.
22 Q. [Mr Justice Gray]: Was the speech in Tampa, Florida, in 1995?
23 A. [Mr Irving]: Yes.
24 Q. [Mr Justice Gray]: It appears to me that you knew an awful lot about the
25 Holocaust then.
26 A. [Mr Irving]: This is true because by that time there had been a lot of
. P-134
1 discussion about it in the newspapers, and material had
2 come my way. If people send you things about the decodes,
3 if people send you things about the aerial photographs, if
4 you are the Hitler historian that I was and people send
5 you material indicating, for example, the police decodes,
6 which have obviously now come to play a very important
7 part in the Hitler history, for example the episode around
8 November 30, December 1st 1941, you pick up this material
9 as you go along. But I certainly never knew as much then
10 as I have learned in the course of this trial, and
11 particularly from the very interesting remarks made by
12 Professor van Pelt. When I read Professor van Pelt’s book
13 for the first time “In 1270” I wrote both to him and to
14 Trevor Roper in fact in May 1997, saying the most
15 extraordinary book on Auschwitz had been published, which
16 was one of the first books I have read from cover to
17 cover. That was the kind of interest I had, general
18 interest.
19 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Thank you very much. Mr Rampton, that was my
20 interruption.
21 MR RAMPTON: I find that helpful. Looking back on it now,
22 Mr Irving, in the light of what you actually know as
23 opposed to what you purported to know in October 1995,
24 would you accept that almost everything that you told this
25 audience about the facts of the Holocaust was wrong?
26 A. [Mr Irving]: Some figures are wrong, I think.
. P-135
1 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Leuchter was wrong?
2 A. [Mr Irving]: I do not agree. Can we just turn to the passage where
3 I refer to Leuchter?
4 Q. [Mr Rampton]: I am not starting that cross-examination all over again.
5 A. [Mr Irving]: If you look at the top of page 19, that is the passage you
6 are referring to. I looked at that in some alarm, I must
7 admit, in view of what we have been discussing here in
8 these last few days. I refer specifically to the cyanide
9 findings — which is what Leuchter was good on, in my
10 view.
11 Q. [Mr Rampton]: You mentioned Hinsley?
12 A. [Mr Irving]: Yes.
13 Q. [Mr Rampton]: I cannot remember whether you mentioned the death books in
14 this speech or not.
15 A. [Mr Irving]: I did, yes.
16 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Without even pausing to consider the evidence to the
17 effect that those who were immediately gassed were never
18 registered?
19 A. [Mr Irving]: That the burden of the eyewitness testimony, yes.
20 Q. [Mr Rampton]: It is also what a number of the Germans said too, for
21 example General Oswald Pohl, but never mind that.
22 A. [Mr Irving]: In what way is General Oswald Pohl not eyewitness
23 testimony?
24 Q. [Mr Rampton]: It is. It is post war eyewitness testimony from the
25 German side.
26 A. [Mr Irving]: I shall be introducing a document to Professor Browning
. P-136
1 which suggests precisely the opposite when the time comes.
2 Q. [Mr Rampton]: You go on about people faking their tattoos, in effect
3 Mrs Altmann’s tattoo is a fake, is it not?
4 A. [Mr Irving]: On the contrary, I said that she no doubt suffered.
5 Q. [Mr Rampton]: No. I will take you to the passage. We cannot leave that
6 answer where it is, I am afraid. What page is it in the
7 transcript?
8 A. [Mr Irving]: You have to remember I have had the benefit of seeing Mrs
9 Altmann in action on television and you have not.
10 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Page 17, last quarter of the page. Tell me one thing.
11 You are reporting in what one might think rather tasteless
12 terms, that is your own word, your conversation with
13 Mrs Altmann. Tell me one thing, and this is why I am
14 going to get tasteless with her, because you have got to
15 get tasteless. “Mrs Altmann, how much money have you made
16 out of that tattoo since 1945? Laughter again. Jolly
17 funny. How much money have you coined for that bit of ink
18 on your arm, which may indeed be real tattooed ink”?
19 A. [Mr Irving]: Yes.
20 Q. [Mr Rampton]: The suggestion is she has had it put on after the war.
21 A. [Mr Irving]: You can take that one either way. As a general matter, in
22 my view, expressing a criticism of the way that a Jew or
23 the Jewish people are behaving or acting cannot be taken
24 per se as anti-Semitism. They are not a people or a race
25 who are immune from criticism, am I right?
26 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Mr Irving, the suggestion is that Mrs Altman had that
. P-137
1 tattoo put on her and pretty damned quick after the war so
2 as to get money out the German Government, is it not? Be
3 honest for once, that is what you are trying to suggest
4 and that is why you got a jolly laugh?
5 A. [Mr Irving]: I said it may be genuine; it may not.
6 Q. [Mr Rampton]: That is why you got a laugh for your tasteless joke?
7 A. [Mr Irving]: Whether it got a laugh or not is neither here nor there.
8 I am concerned only with the words I have uttered, which
9 is that may be genuine or it not may not. We cannot tell.
10 Q. [Mr Rampton]: The fact is that those which were gassed without going
11 into the camp to work were never tattooed, were they?
12 A. [Mr Irving]: That is the eyewitness evidence, yes.
13 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Yes, and it would not be in the least bit surprising, as
14 in fact happened, if a lot of those who were registered
15 tattooed and set to work, particularly towards the end of
16 the war, actually survived, would it?
17 A. [Mr Irving]: I think that the burden of my criticism of the Mrs Altmans
18 of this world is that the ones who have been coining the
19 money are the ones who suffered least. The ones who
20 suffered most are the ones died under the most hideous
21 circumstances in these camps, and they did not get a bent
22 nickel out of it of course. It is survivors, whatever
23 degree they suffered or otherwise, who have been turning
24 their suffering into profit, whereas people who suffered
25 in other circumstances, like the air raid victims or the
26 Australians soldiers building the Burmese railway, have
. P-138
1 never sought to make money of their suffering. This is a
2 criticism of the Jewish survivors that it cannot be taken
3 as anti-Semitism. The reason I say it is a criticism is
4 because I perceive that as being a possible source later
5 of anti-Semitism.
6 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Very nicely put in a nice academic way, Mr Irving.
7 A. [Mr Irving]: Thank you very much.
8 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Yes, but I am not your audience in Tampa in October 1995,
9 that is the difference.
10 A. [Mr Irving]: In other words, I should tailor my utterances to the
11 audience I am speaking to? This I think would be
12 repugnant. I have never tailored my utterances to the
13 audience. I have always given every audience exactly the
14 same speech.
15 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Yes, exactly, and in exactly the same terms with the same
16 sneer in your voice.
17 A. [Mr Irving]: I disagree.
18 Q. [Mr Rampton]: We all heard it.
19 A. [Mr Irving]: I disagree. I am not accustomed to sneer. I do not stoop
20 to the hypocrisy or sarcasm when I speak.
21 Q. [Mr Rampton]: The same sarcastic jokes which evoked laughter from you
22 sympathetic audience about the suffering of the Jews at
23 Auschwitz?
24 A. [Mr Irving]: I am prepared to take lessons in sarcasm from you,
25 Mr Rampton.
26 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Mr Irving, I have no interest in a sober academic argument
. P-139
1 which I believe to be hopelessly ill-conceived any, but
2 that is completely beside the point, about whether or not
3 the Jews are in some sense to blame for what has happened
4 to them through the pages of history. I am interested in
5 your motivation, your attitude and nobody else’s. You
6 notice I did not cross-examine your nice Mr McDonald.
7 That is the reason, Mr Irving.
8 A. [Mr Irving]: Well, I think we know the reasons why you did not
9 cross-examine Professor McDonald.
10 Q. [Mr Rampton]: If you would look, please, at page 19, it is the last
11 reference I want to make to this transcript. Towards the
12 end of the big paragraph at the top of the page there is a
13 sentence which begins: “If you”, that is Jews: “If you
14 [Jews] had behaved differently over the intervening 3,000
15 years, the Germans would have gone about their business
16 and would not have found it necessary to go around doing
17 whatever they did to them, nor would the Russians, the
18 Ukranians, the Lithuanians, Estonians, Latvians and all
19 the other countries where you have had a rough time.”
20 Why do you propose that in any sense, whatever
21 the Jews might have done or not done, differently or
22 otherwise, made it necessary for them to be exterminated
23 by these other central Europeans?
24 A. [Mr Irving]: I agree “necessary” is the wrong word. The point I am
25 trying to make there, it is exactly the same question as
26 I put to Goldhagen in New Orleans. I said to him, not
. P-140
1 just the question that why have all these nations found it
2 so easy to kill the Jews, why have all these nations found
3 it so easy to unburden themselves for their Jewish
4 population, for example the Slovaks and the Dutch and the
5 Hungarians and Romanians and so on, when the Nazis said
6 “Give us your Jews”, all these surrounding countries
7 said, “Take them off us”, that would have worried me if
8 I was a Jew. Also why the British and the Americans and
9 the other nations refused to accept the boat loads of
10 Jews, like the famous episode with the St Louis, the ship
11 laden with Jews, these kinds of things would have
12 concerned me as a Jew. I would have wanted to know what
13 is it, why do people not want to accept us, why do people
14 not want to rescue us. I would have wanted to know that
15 far more than I would have wanted to know the sordid story
16 of who pulled the triggers. But maybe I am different from
17 Goldhagen in that respect. He wants to look at the
18 immediate effect and I would have wanted to look at the
19 cause.
20 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Thank you, Mr Irving.
21 A. [Mr Irving]: I agree that the word “necessary” is totally misplaced
22 there.
23 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Indeed so. You used it, nonetheless, to a different
24 audience?
25 A. [Mr Irving]: I am not speaking, as you will have noticed, from the
26 film, I am not speaking from a prepared script.
. P-141
1 Q. [Mr Rampton]: No.
2 A. [Mr Irving]: Any more than I am speaking from a prepared script now.
Section 142.3-157.22
3 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Mr Irving, do you have, only because I do not have a
4 transcript in the file, that clip of extracts which
5 I handed in this morning?
6 A. [Mr Irving]: Do I have that clip of extracts?
7 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Yes, this little clip of extracts? If you do, could you
8 please turn to page 24 of it, to the extract marked 1.7/A
9 in a square bracket.
10 A. [Mr Irving]: Yes.
11 Q. [Mr Rampton]: I want you to look at the top of the page. There are some
12 words in German in a square bracket which are said to come
13 from a video cassette of your having said something
14 entitled the: “Ich Komme Wieder” about 1994.
15 A. [Mr Irving]: Yes, rioters standing outside my home against whom the
16 West End Police had to put up steel barricades, yes, very
17 nice people.
18 Q. [Mr Rampton]: I am sure you were not feeling in the best of moods
19 because you had just lost your contract with the Sunday
20 Times for the serialization of the Goebbels’ Diary, had
21 you not?
22 A. [Mr Irving]: Not true. This is two years before that.
23 Q. [Mr Rampton]: So it is not 1994?
24 A. [Mr Irving]: No. The contract with St Martins — I am sorry, the St
25 Martins Press contract was lost in April 1996.
26 MR JUSTICE GRAY: No, this is the Sunday Times contract.
. P-142
1 A. [Mr Irving]: The Sunday Times episode was, if this is referring to July
2 1992, yes, the “Gas Irving” posters and so on.
3 MR RAMPTON: I am sure you were under pressure, as you are now,
4 reasons for stress.
5 A. [Mr Irving]: On the contrary, I would use exactly the same phrase now.
6 Anybody who comes —-
7 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Let us see what the phrase was because I have
8 not seen this before.
9 MR RAMPTON: Let us see what you said: “The whole rabble”, you
10 read the German and then you can correct the translation
11 if it is wrong: “The whole rabble, all the scum of
12 humanities stand outside. Homosexuals, the gypsies the
13 lesbians” —-
14 A. [Mr Irving]: This is a typical example of how objectionable it is to
15 produce something out of context. Outside what? The
16 answer is outside my family home at 3 a.m. in the morning
17 we hear the police bringing the barricades. I get phone
18 calls from the police say, “Mr Irving, if your home is
19 invaded this is the emergency number you have to phone”.
20 I get a phone call from Scotland Yard saying, “Mr Irving,
21 we need to come and photograph the inside of your apparent
22 in case we have to come rescue because we have had secret
23 intelligence about what they are going to do to you.”
24 This is the kind of nightmare I went through in July 1992,
25 when I see the barricades going up outside my house during
26 the middle of the night and my family says, “What’s the
. P-143
1 sound?”, and I say: “It’s lorries unloading barricades
2 again. Tomorrow the scum are going to be outside again”,
3 and here they are described.
4 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Now under stress, a perhaps little frightened, certainly
5 angry?
6 A. [Mr Irving]: I am not easily frightened but I get angry at this kind of
7 thing.
8 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Right, angry when under stress. Do you know the
9 expression, I am sure you do, which is sometimes used, it
10 is Latin but it is not legal Latin so I can use it, in
11 vino veritas?
12 A. [Mr Irving]: Are you accusing me of drinking?
13 Q. [Mr Rampton]: No. Please do not always try to fifth guess me. In vino
14 veritas, what does it mean? It means that we sometimes
15 get better truth from people when they are pickled.
16 A. [Mr Irving]: When they are drunk.
17 Q. [Mr Rampton]: No, in wine it means, in their cups.
18 A. [Mr Irving]: Yes.
19 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Do you not agree sometimes when a man is angry or under
20 stress the mask may slip?
21 A. [Mr Irving]: That is precisely why I prefer to carry on talking this
22 evening so that his Lordship knows that I am talking from
23 the heart.
24 Q. [Mr Rampton]: I suggest this came directly from the heart, Mr Irving.
25 This is when the mask slips. Mr Irving is under stress.
26 He is angry. He thinks people are getting at him. He is
. P-144
1 feeling persecuted.
2 A. [Mr Irving]: I think people are getting at me?
3 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Yes.
4 A. [Mr Irving]: Well, what evidence does one need before one stops
5 thinking and starts realising?
6 Q. [Mr Rampton]: He has got a grudge against the Sunday Times and some
7 people are causing a nuisance, and so what he says is
8 this: “The whole rabble, all the scum of humanity, stand
9 outside. The homosexuals, the gypsies, the lesbians”, and
10 now this is where you interrupted me, “the Jews, the
11 criminals, the communists, the left-wring extremists, the
12 whole commune stands there and has to be held back behind
13 steel barricades for two days.”
14 That is Mr Irving’s true mind, is it not?
15 A. [Mr Irving]: This is a literal description of who was visible on the
16 other side of those barricades. Shall I show you the
17 photographs? We can identify who they are, the banners
18 they are holding, the placards, the leaflets they are
19 holding out, the stickers they are putting on all the
20 lampposts: Irving speaks Rostock burns. That is what
21 I had to put with day after day.
22 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Are we going to see gypsies?
23 A. [Mr Irving]: They were there. They were there in the photographs. They
24 were holding up placards saying “Gas Irving”.
25 Q. [Mr Rampton]: What, the sort of “Gay liberation wants Irving gassed”?
26 A. [Mr Irving]: I will bring the photographs in and you can satisfy
. P-145
1 yourself. I have quite a folder of them.
2 Q. [Mr Rampton]: This is the plain language of a plain unvarnished racist?
3 A. [Mr Irving]: On the contrary. This is the language of somebody who can
4 see the evidence with his own eyes, the people who he has
5 got to put up with, the people who are harassing everybody
6 in that street for two days, being held back by the forces
7 of law and order.
8 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Right.
9 A. [Mr Irving]: I will give you one clue as to the conditions of terror we
10 were living in, my family.
11 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Do not.
12 A. [Mr Irving]: I am sorry, I am going to tell it to you. We had basket,
13 a Moses basket in the corner of my drawing room with a
14 length of wire rope so I could lower my child out of the
15 window in case my house was set on fire. That is the
16 conditions we were living under at the time I made that
17 speech.
18 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Of course. I understand that.
19 A. [Mr Irving]: It cannot be very nice. I am sure this very seldom
20 happens to leading counsel.
21 Q. [Mr Rampton]: I will not respond to that either. Mr Irving, I want to
22 look at some other little things that you said, if I may.
23 Page tab 10 of this file, please. Page, I hope this is
24 going to be right, page 57.
25 MR JUSTICE GRAY: I am in the wrong file. Which file are you
26 in?
. P-146
1 MR RAMPTON: It is K4, my Lord. You are in the right file, my
2 Lord. I am in the wrong one. I meant K4.
3 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Is this in the clip?
4 MR RAMPTON: Yes, it is my Lord.
5 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Give me the reference?
6 MR RAMPTON: It is the bottom of page 24 and the top of page 25
7 of the clip. This is from your publication Action Report,
8 Mr Irving, is it not, for July 1997?
9 A. [Mr Irving]: What page are we looking at, 24?
10 Q. [Mr Rampton]: 57.
11 A. [Mr Irving]: Page 57.
12 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Tab 10, page 57. It is the column: “Going for Gold”.
13 A. [Mr Irving]: Yes.
14 Q. [Mr Rampton]: I will read the first paragraph as your Lordship has not
15 got that in the clip, but it does no matter. It is very
16 short:
17 “Mr Winston Churchill is rumoured to have
18 observed that he could listen to arguments about the
19 merits of different breeds of tea with complete
20 disinterest. Action Report finds it can view any dispute
21 between New York politicians, lawyers, wealthy Swiss
22 bankers and the international Jewish community with the
23 same lack of passion. What is remarkable is that this
24 community have considered it worth taking such a long-term
25 risk, possibly evening sowing the seeds of future
26 Holocaust in the name of short-term gain in gold. All the
. P-147
1 elements of anti-Semitic stereotype are there. The
2 cosmopolitan, rootless millionaire, bereft of any local
3 patriotism, flinging his unpopular perception, ill-gotten
4 gains outer head as he escapes from the country where he
5 has briefly rested. The demand for ‘unclaimed Gold’
6 regardless of whose it is”, note those words, Mr Irving,
7 “regardless of whose it is, whether wedding rings eased
8 off the lifeless fingers of Hamburg or Dresden air raid
9 casualties for identification purposes and stored by the
10 bucket in the Reichsbank vaults or dental fillings ripped
11 out of the bodies of gas chamber victims by SS dentists,
12 somehow immune to the Zyklon fumes which had dispatched
13 the others.” That is July 1997.
14 A. [Mr Irving]: Yes.
15 Q. [Mr Rampton]: What is this reference then to the gas chamber victims and
16 the Zyklon-B fumes?
17 A. [Mr Irving]: Well —-
18 Q. [Mr Rampton]: The mask slipped again, has it?
19 A. [Mr Irving]: No, but we saw in the drawings that have been shown to us
20 by Professor van Pelt the gold aubeit, the rooms where the
21 smelting furnace was contained.
22 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Sure.
23 A. [Mr Irving]: It is well-known that in the mortuaries they ripped the
24 gold teeth out of the victims.
25 Q. [Mr Rampton]: But, Mr Irving, “these gold teeth”, according to you,
26 “came from the bodies of gas chamber victims taken by SS
. P-148
1 dentists somehow immune to the Zyklon fumes which had
2 dispatched the victims.”
3 A. [Mr Irving]: Yes, this is one of the eyewitness statements that is
4 obviously baloney because they could not have gone in
5 there.
6 Q. [Mr Rampton]: What is it doing in this article, Mr Irving, by you in
7 1997?
8 A. [Mr Irving]: I cannot quite understand the point you are making or the
9 question you are asking.
10 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Why are you making reference to this if you do not believe
11 it to be true?
12 A. [Mr Irving]: Why am I making reference to this if I do not believe to
13 be true.
14 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Yes. Why are you, a Holocaust denier in full fledged
15 condition in 1997, making reference to dead people from
16 the gas chambers having their teeth, gold teeth ripped out
17 by the SS dentists?
18 A. [Mr Irving]: But I have just said, it is accepted by all parties that
19 the Nazis gangsters stole the gold teeth from their
20 victims.
21 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Again you are dodging the point.
22 MR JUSTICE GRAY: You are dodging the gas chamber element.
23 A. [Mr Irving]: Your Lordship, can you rephrase the question for me so I
24 can understand it?
25 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Yes. What Mr Rampton is putting to is that
26 it sounds as if you are accepting in what you there say
. P-149
1 that there were indeed gas chamber victims who had their
2 gold fillings removed by SS dentists.
3 A. [Mr Irving]: I do not think so, my Lord.
4 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Why not?
5 A. [Mr Irving]: The whole tenor of that is supposed to be disbelieving to
6 the point of mockery, and the reason I say that is they
7 are helping to regenerate the ill-gotten stereotype of the
8 ugly greedy Jew. If you will carry on to the next
9 paragraph but one, you will see the source of that
10 particular criticism by me. I freely admit to having
11 stolen the criticism from Heim Bermont who is a very wise
12 English writer indeed who wrote for the Jewish Chronicle
13 and who interviewed me once. He made precisely the same
14 criticism, that by helping to create or recreate this
15 public perception, this public image, of the grab-all
16 rich, wealthy Jew, they were generating fresh
17 anti-Semitism with this gold campaign.
18 MR RAMPTON: Mr Irving —-
19 A. [Mr Irving]: And Heim Bermont went on to say that the truth is, as
20 everybody knows, that most Jews are in fact not rich and
21 wealthy.
22 Q. [Mr Rampton]: We see in the middle of that, you draw our attention to
23 it —-
24 A. [Mr Irving]: Yes.
25 Q. [Mr Rampton]: — in middle of that paragraph, two on, on the other side
26 of the column —-
. P-150
1 A. [Mr Irving]: Yes.
2 Q. [Mr Rampton]: — after you have quoted Heim Burman, you say:
3 “Commenting on the squabbles that had already broken out
4 between rival factions … and the anti-defamation league,
5 all of whom want their pound of Swiss flesh.” Whose words
6 are those?
7 A. [Mr Irving]: Probably Bermont. I have quoted Bermont.
8 Q. [Mr Rampton]: It is not in quotes.
9 A. [Mr Irving]: Bermont wrote a savage leading article in the Jewish
10 Chronicle. I have never seen an article written — if a
11 non-Jew had written that he would be described as being
12 viciously anti-Semitic.
13 Q. [Mr Rampton]: It is a reference to the unsympathetic portrait of Jewish
14 nature presented by William Shakespeare in the Merchant of
15 Venice, is it not?
16 A. [Mr Irving]: Yes.
17 Q. [Mr Rampton]: It is your reference and not Mr Bermont’s, is it not?
18 A. [Mr Irving]: Whether it is mine or Mr Bermont’s I do not know, but
19 placed where that it is in a paragraph which starts with
20 Bermont and ends with Bermont, I am pretty certain it
21 comes from Bermont.
22 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Can we go back to the paragraph on the left-hand side of
23 the page?
24 A. [Mr Irving]: Yes.
25 Q. [Mr Rampton]: You say: “All the elements of anti-Semitic stereotype are
26 there”?
. P-151
1 A. [Mr Irving]: The stereotype.
2 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Yes.
3 A. [Mr Irving]: Yes.
4 Q. [Mr Rampton]: I know. I have heard what you said about it. What I want
5 to know is why the rest of it is there: “The cosmopolitan
6 rootless millionaire bereft of any local patriotism”.
7 Where does that stereotype come from?
8 A. [Mr Irving]: That is part of the stereotype.
9 Q. [Mr Rampton]: It is, is it?
10 A. [Mr Irving]: Yes.
11 Q. [Mr Rampton]: In whose mind?
12 A. [Mr Irving]: It is part of the general anti-Semitic stereotype of the
13 Jew.
14 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Which is you are busy promoting here, are you not?
15 A. [Mr Irving]: No. I am not quoting in fact — shall I bring in the
16 article that Bermont wrote? I am pretty sure I can find
17 it or get it from his web site.
18 Q. [Mr Rampton]: It has all this stuff, does it, about —-
19 A. [Mr Irving]: The only thing I admit which Bermont did not write was
20 where I said that the weddings rings may have come off the
21 lifeless fingers of the Hamburg victims or the Dresden air
22 raid victims, because I happen to know that our witness
23 Hans Voight collected three buckets of wedding rings off
24 the fingers of lifeless victims of the Dresden air raids,
25 and they went to the Reichsbank and they were filmed in
26 the Reichsbank subsequently for the Nuremberg trial.
. P-152
1 I have the record of the Nuremberg trial officers who
2 said: “Unfortunately we cannot use that film of the gold
3 rings found in the Reichsbank because we have no evidence
4 it came from concentration camps”.
5 MR JUSTICE GRAY: So you are saying part of the stereotype is
6 true and part is not?
7 A. [Mr Irving]: Well, most of the stereotype is untrue, but this is what
8 the Jewish people, the community, rightly objected, that
9 they have gained this stereotype somehow and Bermont has
10 written this warning editorial in the Jewish Chronicle
11 saying: Here we go again, we are just helping create it
12 again because a few self-appointed leaders of the Jewish
13 community, whether they are Abraham Foxman or Charles
14 Edgar Bronson, or whoever it is, are going about this
15 ill-advised campaign against the Swiss, which is just
16 helping to reinforce the ugly stereotype.
17 MR RAMPTON: While we are in this volume, Mr Irving can we just
18 pick up that reference to the pound of flesh, please?
19 A. [Mr Irving]: Yes.
20 Q. [Mr Rampton]: It seems to be one of your themes, if I may say so. Page
21 50 of the same volume, my Lord. This is page 23 at the
22 top of the clip. I am going to read from the clip,
23 because my copy of the article has been sliced off by the
24 machine. There is a paragraph on the right-hand side
25 beside the box in the middle which begins “Finally”. Do
26 you have that?
. P-153
1 A. [Mr Irving]: Yes.
2 Q. [Mr Rampton]: “Will Jon Dem Janjung now sue his tormentors” and it is
3 all about —-
4 A. [Mr Irving]: Yes.
5 Q. [Mr Rampton]: — that man.
6 A. [Mr Irving]: Yes, the most shocking episode in American judicial
7 history I think.
8 MR JUSTICE GRAY: What, that he got acquitted?
9 A. [Mr Irving]: He was finally acquitted on the orders of the Israeli
10 judges, except he had been framed and set up by eleven
11 false eyewitnesses, as one man identified him, and the
12 Israeli Supreme Court set him free.
13 MR RAMPTON: Mr Irving, I am tempted to say “so what” but if I
14 do you will produce a life size portrait of Mr Dem Janjung
15 I dare say. Really, Mr Irving, you did not mean that.
16 Page 23, my Lord.
17 A. [Mr Irving]: You do not always get the answers you need, Mr Rampton.
18 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Page 23 of the little clip.
19 MR RAMPTON: I did not ask you about Mr Dem Janjung. That was
20 one of your offerings, Mr Irving.
21 A. [Mr Irving]: You asked me about the paragraph.
22 Q. [Mr Rampton]: And then you gave us a long lecture about something which
23 has nothing to do with this case.
24 A. [Mr Irving]: Perhaps you should not have paused.
25 Q. [Mr Rampton]: What you have actually written is this: “The world will
26 not easily forget how, even when” —-
. P-154
1 A. [Mr Irving]: “Even when acquitted after all”.
2 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Do not give me another pitiful lecture about Mr Dem
3 Janjung, please?
4 A. [Mr Irving]: You are just going to read what I wrote.
5 Q. [Mr Rampton]: “Dem Janjung was detained in custody by his enemies for
6 two more weeks while they thumbed through their sweaty
7 manuals looking for some way to crush him that they might
8 have overlooked. Nor how when they failed again these
9 shylocks cheated on their pray, frog marched him to his
10 plane home to freedom still in handcuffs like a convicted
11 criminal.”
12 I quite agree that one can take the view that it
13 was a disgraceful prosecution. The fact that the
14 prosecution was made by Israelis, who one must assume were
15 Jewish, do you think that that justifies the use of
16 language like this?
17 A. [Mr Irving]: I do not think these particular lawyers are above
18 criticism, and that was a criticism I chose to level at
19 them. I think they are below, beneath criticism, these
20 people.
21 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Why the shylocks though?
22 A. [Mr Irving]: Because they wanted — you know the Shakespearian
23 quotation?
24 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Yes, Mr Irving.
25 A. [Mr Irving]: They wanted their final pound of flesh. Although he had
26 been acquitted by the Supreme Court they kept him in jail
. P-155
1 and they frog marched him in handcuffs although he was a
2 free and innocent man. What better description of it is
3 there than that? I repeat, these people are not above
4 criticism just because they happen to be Jews, believe
5 me. They are beneath contempt for it. They tried to hang
6 him for political reasons.
7 Q. [Mr Rampton]: On the next page 51, I do not know what this issue is, May
8 1995 I think, my Lord, this is page 26 at 1.7 (c). You
9 are writing something about Wiesenthalers Zap Jap Crap,
10 whatever you mean by that. This is full of stuff about
11 Israel and Jews.
12 A. [Mr Irving]: Either read the whole article or do not make any comments
13 on it.
14 Q. [Mr Rampton]: I am not the least bit interested in, as it were, your
15 themes in your articles, Mr Irving. I am Interested in
16 your terminology. That is why I drew attention to your
17 use of the word “shylocks”.
18 A. [Mr Irving]: Zap, Jap or Crap, which is the word?
19 Q. [Mr Rampton]: I now look at the bottom of the right-hand column of this
20 article and I see this: “Overshadowed by the gloating
21 vulpine figure of Rabbi Cooper himself.”
22 A. [Mr Irving]: I cannot see this.
23 MR JUSTICE GRAY: It is right at the bottom right-hand corner.
24 MR RAMPTON: It has a 3 against it.
25 A. [Mr Irving]: A 3?
26 MR JUSTICE GRAY: The right-hand column right at the bottom.
. P-156
1 A. [Mr Irving]: Yes.
2 MR RAMPTON: “The gloating vulpine figure”, does that remind
3 you of any sort of propaganda put out at any time in
4 recent European history, Mr Irving?
5 A. [Mr Irving]: No. It sounds rather Churchillian to me.
6 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Have you got your Goebbels book there?
7 A. [Mr Irving]: Have you ever read Churchill’s speeches about Adolf
8 Hitler? Exactly the same kind of language.
9 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Neither of them is on trial here.
10 A. [Mr Irving]: August 1941, a magnificent speech that Churchill made,
11 oddly enough shortly after he had read the first police
12 decodes of the crimes on the Eastern Front. He used
13 exactly this kind of terminology.
14 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Mr Irving, you tried to lead us down that road before.
15 I tried to suggest that Mr Churchill might have had some
16 reason to be beastly about nice Mr Hitler.
17 A. [Mr Irving]: Well, you asked for an answer and you do not like the
18 answer you get.
19 Q. [Mr Rampton]: That reminds you of Churchill, does it?
20 A. [Mr Irving]: You asked me about the language.
21 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Yes, I did.
22 A. [Mr Irving]: And I am telling you that it is Churchillian language.
Section 157.23-175.26
23 Q. [Mr Rampton]: OK. Now would you get your Goebbels’ book please, if you
24 have it to hand, and turn to after page 332. Sorry,
25 I will have to count the pages. I will count them as
26 double: 1, 2, 3, 4. On the left-hand side page there is
. P-157
1 a picture of Hitler wearing what looks like a bathrobe in
2 the bottom of the picture or it might be a dust coat, I do
3 not know, with a hat on.
4 A. [Mr Irving]: Yes.
5 Q. [Mr Rampton]: On the right-hand side there are some pictures with the
6 heading “Isidor’s Torment”?
7 A. [Mr Irving]: Yes.
8 Q. [Mr Rampton]: “From the moment of his arrival in Berlin on November 28th
9 Dr Goebbels wages a remorseless war against the city’s
10 police chief, Dr Bernhard Weiss. Weiss sues him forty
11 times, mostly for calling him Isidor”, of course his name
12 was not Isidor. “Nazi caricaturist Mjolnir portrays him
13 as a donkey skating on thin ice. After a judge rules the
14 cartoon defamatory, Goebbels’ newspaper announces: Judge
15 agrees donkey does look like Isidor.”
16 I do not know what that is doing in that book.
17 Perhaps you would tell us?
18 A. [Mr Irving]: In this book?
19 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Yes. You have put a picture of Dr Weiss or whatever he
20 was.
21 A. [Mr Irving]: If you have read the book —-
22 Q. [Mr Rampton]: He was chief of police, was he not?
23 A. [Mr Irving]: I am sure his Lordship has read the book, although may not
24 have. Goebbels’ arch enemy during the years when he was
25 Gauleiters of Berlin before the Nazis came to power, was
26 in fact Bernhard Weiss who Goebbels mocked and called
. P-158
1 “Isidor”. He raged this remorseless campaign against him
2 in the newspapers he controlled resulting in no fewer than
3 40 libel actions brought against him by the police chief,
4 and this is a page devoted to that particular episode.
5 Goebbels was obviously completely incorrigible. He had
6 utter contempt for the law courts in Berlin. He repeated
7 the libels. Weiss fled to England after the Nazis came to
8 power, and I believe his daughter is still alive in North
9 London.
10 Q. [Mr Rampton]: She may still be. We knew that she was in 1994.
11 A. [Mr Irving]: Yes, I approached her to try to obtain a more flattering
12 photograph of her father.
13 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Can I just read what you wrote, it saves us getting out
14 yet another file. This is revelations from the Goebbels’
15 diary in the Historical Review for January/February — no,
16 I am reading from the wrong thing — it is 1995. My Lord,
17 the reference is K3, tab 18, pages 7 to 8. Mr Irving,
18 I expect you will want to look at the full text.
19 A. [Mr Irving]: I am sure we can take it if you just read it out.
20 Q. [Mr Rampton]: You publish a picture of Dr Weiss or Mr Weiss or
21 Superintendent Weiss or whatever he was.
22 A. [Mr Irving]: Yes, I went to some pains to try to get a better
23 photograph of him.
24 Q. [Mr Rampton]: You write this, the right-hand column on page 7: “Isidor
25 Weiss”, and you retain Goebbels’ nomenclature and you put
26 the two quotes round the name.
. P-159
1 A. [Mr Irving]: Yes.
2 Q. [Mr Rampton]: “When Goebbels arrived in Berlin as Gauleichter in 1926 he
3 was confronted by a city with 179,000 Jews, one third of
4 all Jews in Germany and he made use of this fact. The
5 Berlin population already receding because of the presence
6 of these Jews. In the coming years Goebbels repeatedly
7 explained to foreign diplomats that the problem there was
8 the usual one in which the Jewish population
9 disproportionately controlled all the lucrative
10 professions. This rankled the Berlin’s non-Jewish
11 population of course and Goebbels, whether deliberately or
12 by instinct, zeroed in on this as a wound that he could
13 work on to promote the Nazi cause.”
14 You seem to accept in that paragraph that
15 Goebbels was right in thinking that the professions were
16 disproportionately controlled by the Jews?
17 A. [Mr Irving]: Well, it was not just Goebbels; the German Federal
18 Statistical Office has provided me with the figures.
19 Q. [Mr Rampton]: I am putting a marker down because this is something which
20 you are going to have to argue with Professor Evans
21 about.
22 A. [Mr Irving]: What the German Statistical Office told me?
23 Q. [Mr Rampton]: No. About what the fact was.
24 A. [Mr Irving]: Which fact?
25 Q. [Mr Rampton]: The one you have stated here.
26 A. [Mr Irving]: In other words, the disproportionate —-
. P-160
1 Q. [Mr Rampton]: “The Jewish population disproportionately controlled all
2 the lucrative professions”. I put a marker down. I am
3 not going to argue about it now.
4 A. [Mr Irving]: We are just going to argue about the word “all”, are we?
5 Q. [Mr Rampton]: No. Read the report, Mr Irving.
6 A. [Mr Irving]: Well, can I suggest that Professor Evans also reads what
7 President Roosevelt said about precisely the same
8 situation in Germany when he said, in fact he made the
9 completely impossible statement that if he had been the
10 Germans he would have acted in exactly the same way
11 because of this disproportionate, this imbalance.
12 Q. [Mr Rampton]: I do not know about Professor Roosevelt.
13 A. [Mr Irving]: President Roosevelt.
14 Q. [Mr Rampton]: I am sorry. Everybody in this court is a professor except
15 you and me, Mr Irving. “He was aided in this endeavour by
16 the fact that his chief opponent there, Berlin’s Deputy
17 Police Chief who acted as though he was police chief, he
18 was a real police chief, referred to him as being a chief,
19 Dr Bernhard Weiss, a Jew, Weiss looked so much like a
20 Jewish character, but his photographs did not need to be
21 retouched by the Nazis. He was stereotypically semitic in
22 feature, short with rounded ears and hooked nose and
23 wearing spectacles.”
24 A. [Mr Irving]: This is a description I took out of one of the
25 contemporary Western newspapers I believe.
26 Q. [Mr Rampton]: We are not to take that as being any kind of endorsement
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1 by you, are we, Mr Irving?
2 A. [Mr Irving]: No. There is actually a very good book on Bernhard Weiss
3 written by a Professor of history Cologne University whose
4 name escapes me, and he made precisely that point, that
5 because of his appearance he was unfortunately doomed to
6 become a target of the Nazis.
7 Q. [Mr Rampton]: He deserved to be persecuted by Dr Goebbels.
8 A. [Mr Irving]: That is not the words I used, Mr Rampton. But this is
9 precisely the reason why I went to great lengths to locate
10 his daughter in London and tried to obtain a different
11 photograph of her father than the one the Nazis used.
12 Q. [Mr Rampton]: I have one more reference I think in this, maybe more than
13 one I do not know, in this file K4, tab 4, page 33 at the
14 bottom of the clip, my Lord.
15 A. [Mr Irving]: We are going to go out with a whimper.
16 Q. [Mr Rampton]: I doubt that, Mr Irving. It is not my style. We are not
17 going to go out with a whimper. Page 17 at the top. This
18 is you speaking to, and I will tell you who you are
19 speaking to, somebody or people at Bow in London on 29th
20 May 1992. You say: “I had a lot of trouble with Simon
21 Wiesenthal yesterday, and I remember that three or four
22 years ago I had the unnerving experience sitting in my
23 rental car after I had been speaking in London, not London
24 England but London Ontario, which is about 200 miles west
25 Toronto and I had driven back to Toronto that night, the
26 speaking was very exhausting and I got back in Toronto at
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1 half past 2.00 on this November morning and as I drove up
2 something street in Toronto, which is the main artery of
3 Toronto, I pulled up at the traffic lights and glaring at
4 me from the car next to me in the traffic lights was Simon
5 Wiesenthal himself, his face hideously contorted by
6 rage”. So, evidently, Mr Irving, some things make him
7 cross too. “I got a real shock because he looked into me
8 through my driver’s window and there was Mr Wiesenthal,
9 this hideous, leering, evil face glaring at me, then
10 I realised it wasn’t Simon Wiesenthal, it was a Halloween
11 mask [Applause].
12 “Now, those of who you have seen Mr Wiesenthal
13 will know what I’m talking about. Mrs Wiesenthal who has
14 seen Mr Wiesenthal many times, of course, and she says to
15 him at Halloween, ‘Simon, please keep the mask on, you
16 look so much nicer with it on'”. That is just pure racist
17 abuse, is it not, Mr Irving?
18 A. [Mr Irving]: On the contrary, the word “Jew” is not mentioned there
19 from start to finish. The racism is in your mind,
20 Mr Rampton. This is a reference to a person who is not
21 one of the world’s most attractive people. He is known
22 for not being particularly attractive. Whether he is
23 Jewish or not does not play any part at all.
24 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Mr Irving, really! Will you turn back to —-
25 A. [Mr Irving]: If I pick on any other name and put that name to this,
26 then it would never have occurred to suggest, if I pick on
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1 any other race, but because Mr Wiesenthal is apparently
2 Jewish, I do not know, but he presumably is Jewish,
3 therefore, you say it is anti-Jewish. It is not. It is
4 anti-ugly.
5 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Mr Irving, now we are going to end with a bang. Turn
6 back, please, to the top of page 16, will you?
7 A. [Mr Irving]: Yes.
8 Q. [Mr Rampton]: “I have found governments being involved in trying to
9 silence me in Canada and South Africa and Australia and
10 I never used to believe in the existence of an
11 international Jewish conspiracy”. Pause there. Who is
12 Simon or Simon Wiesenthal? Who is Simon Wiesenthal?
13 A. [Mr Irving]: He is an Austrian who has no connection at all with the
14 Simon Wiesenthal Centre.
15 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Is he Jewish?
16 A. [Mr Irving]: I presume he is, yes.
17 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Right, and so now we are going to see the context in which
18 you put his Halloween mask. “I never used to believe in
19 the existence of an international Jewish conspiracy, and
20 I am not even sure even now if there is an international
21 Jewish conspiracy. All I know is that people are
22 conspiring internationally against me and they do turn out
23 mostly to be” — in fact, the word must have been “Jews”,
24 must it not?
25 A. [Mr Irving]: I do not know. It does not say.
26 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Oh, come on. Look at the syntax of the sentence.
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1 A. [Mr Irving]: OK, let us assume it was “Jews”, yes.
2 Q. [Mr Rampton]: “Applause, applause”?
3 A. [Mr Irving]: But that is precisely what we are going to be
4 demonstrating to the court in the next few days, how much
5 this international endeavour has been, unfortunately,
6 guided by the self-appointed leaders of that community.
7 Q. [Mr Rampton]: If you are going to attempt that, you will have to give me
8 notice. It is no part of your pleading and I shall have
9 something to say about it because it has nothing to do
10 with Mrs Lipstadt.
11 A. [Mr Irving]: Well, you will see — oh, and indeed it does and that is,
12 undoubtedly, the reason why I have put in bundle E global.
13 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Well, that is a digression. We may have to
14 come back to that.
15 MR RAMPTON: A digression. But that inspiring observation,
16 Mr Irving, was greeted with applause. Do you see that?
17 A. [Mr Irving]: Yes.
18 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Do you know why?
19 A. [Mr Irving]: Probably because they thought it was funny or that they
20 were applauding the fact that I said there was no
21 international Jewish conspiracy or because — I do not
22 know. What is your theory?
23 Q. [Mr Rampton]: They are very pleased that, in fact — it is another of
24 your clever, little sarcastic racist jokes about the Jews
25 — though you do not know there is an international
26 Jewish conspiracy, it turns out most of the conspirators
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1 are Jews?
2 A. [Mr Irving]: So, in other words, I am not allowed to criticise the fact
3 that this community’s self-appointed leaders around the
4 world have set about trying to suppress freedom of speech,
5 to abrogate my right to travel freely around the world,
6 I am not allowed to criticise that because they are
7 Jewish, is that right? On the contrary, if I find any
8 person or any body of people, whether they are black or
9 yellow or Asian or French or Germans or leading counsel,
10 indeed, who are trying to abrogate my rights to freedom of
11 speech and free right to travel, then I will criticise
12 them without fear or favour. And the fact that this
13 comment happens to be Jewish is neither here nor there. It
14 cannot be construed as anti-Semitic.
15 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Shall we read on and see whether we agree with that,
16 Mr Irving? “We have one basic problem and this is, apart
17 from the literature displayed on the table over there, we
18 have no national” — I do not know who “we” are — “organ
19 that we can read to find out what is going on. I am not
20 ashamed to say that I read the Jewish Chronicle to find
21 out what they are doing because they seem pretty well
22 informed”. This is the sort of Aryan Defence League
23 against the Jews, the “we”, is it?
24 A. [Mr Irving]: Where do you get “Aryan Defence League” from?
25 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Well, who is the “we”?
26 A. [Mr Irving]: Well, I frequently find out what the Jewish organizations
. P-166
1 are planning against me because it is announced in the
2 Jewish Chronicle. They say, “Meet outside Mr Irving’s
3 flat, 81 Duke Street, 12.00 midday”. That is how I know
4 when these demonstrations are going to happen.
5 Q. [Mr Rampton]: It is not the Royal “we”, Mr Irving. “I read the Jewish
6 Chronicle to find out what we are doing”. Who are the
7 “we”?
8 A. [Mr Irving]: I have no idea.
9 Q. [Mr Rampton]: “There is an article here only a couple of weeks ago
10 called ‘Anti-Semites ask for cash in latest sophisticated
11 forgery'” — not, by any chance, the united anti-Semites
12 then, the “we”?
13 A. [Mr Irving]: I have got no idea what the article is about.
14 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Well, you must have done because you mentioned it.
15 A. [Mr Irving]: Well, it certainly was not me so I cannot see what the
16 reference is.
17 Q. [Mr Rampton]: “This is, of course, an unusual twist as it is not usually
18 anti-Semites who are asking for cash in sophisticated
19 forgeries. A man called Mr Mike Whine, the director of
20 the board of deputies of British Jews”, Mike W-H-I-N-E,
21 you spell it —-
22 A. [Mr Irving]: You will appreciate the reason why I do not like Mike
23 Whine because I discovered that he is the person who has
24 dedicated much of his life to destroying my career and
25 livelihood by now, and that those documents are also in
26 the bundle.
. P-167
1 Q. [Mr Rampton]: I might not like the black man who is my enemy, but I am
2 not likely to use the fact that he is black in order to
3 defend myself, am I, Mr Irving?
4 A. [Mr Irving]: I do not criticise anybody because of their colour,
5 Mr Rampton.
6 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Then why do you make such again with Mr Whine’s name?
7 A. [Mr Irving]: Because I am defensive about the man. The man has spent
8 many years trying to destroy me. He has maintained a
9 dossier full of the most evil and defamatory and lying
10 facts about me which he puts to foreign governments with
11 the intention of destroying my career, as we now know.
12 Q. [Mr Rampton]: You do not like Mr Whine. I understand that.
13 A. [Mr Irving]: With good reason, and because he is Jewish does not make
14 him immune from my criticism.
15 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Precisely. But the fact that he is Jewish has nothing to
16 do with your criticism either?
17 A. [Mr Irving]: I am perfectly entitled to make fun of his name among
18 other ways of getting back at him.
19 Q. [Mr Rampton]: “I am bothered by their names”. That is more people than
20 just poor Mr Mike Wine, is it not?
21 A. [Mr Irving]: We had this in another speech too and I have listed a
22 whole bunch of names, Wieseltier and so on.
23 Q. [Mr Rampton]: I am going to read on. Please be quiet. “I love them
24 dearly, I really do, believe me. I love them very dearly,
25 yet around the world they have these extraordinary names.
26 In Australia the man who has defamed me so consistently
. P-168
1 has now received from my lawyers in West Australia four
2 libel writs. His name is Mr Izzy Leibler”.
3 A. [Mr Irving]: Leibler, L E I B L E R. That has been misspelt.
4 Q. [Mr Rampton]: “Laughter”.
5 A. [Mr Irving]: Yes, if a man’s name is Leibler and he has received from
6 me four libel writs, it seems singularly apposite.
7 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Mr Irving, that is a perfectly decent joke. It is a pity
8 it is misspelt, is it not?
9 A. [Mr Irving]: It has been consider in your copy but I know how to spell
10 properly. His name is L E I B L E R and his brother, Mark
11 Leibler, spells it the same way, oddly enough. They are
12 both multi-millionaires and they have used their money to
13 try and destroy my career in Australia.
14 Q. [Mr Rampton]: I am sorry, L I E B L E R?
15 MR JUSTICE GRAY: No, it is misspelt. It is L E I. That is
16 the point.
17 MR RAMPTON: Oh I see.
18 A. [Mr Irving]: Which is pronounced by any normal person as “libeller”.
19 He is careful to pronounce it as “leebeller”.
20 MR RAMPTON: Let us pass on, Mr Irving. “If I had a name like
21 wine, W H I N E, or Leibler, it reminds me of Brentwood
22 School, where I want to school. Perhaps I ought not to
23 read out the name of the school. There was a boy in our
24 class called Bottomwetten”.
25 A. [Mr Irving]: There is another one called Jack Straw.
26 Q. [Mr Rampton]: “What bravery to carry the name of Bottomwetten, not only
. P-169
1 just through your own life, but also through generations
2 before you, passing this name proudly down. Whine,
3 Leibler. I would be inclined to change my name by deed
4 poll, not once but twice, in case anyone asked what my
5 previous name was”. I am going to pause there, Mr
6 Irving.
7 A. [Mr Irving]: You will recognize this as the old gramophone record, you
8 see.
9 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Yes. The old gramophone record, indeed I do. Mr Irving,
10 when you were being cross-examined by me some days ago,
11 there was a reference to a footnote in van Pelt’s report,
12 I think it was, it matters not, to a book edited by a lady
13 called Deborah Burnstone.
14 A. [Mr Irving]: Yes.
15 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Do you remember that, when that was drawn to your
16 attention, you pronounced that name “Bronsteen”?
17 A. [Mr Irving]: No, I do not.
18 Q. [Mr Rampton]: I will find it for you in the transcript. If I am right,
19 why?
20 A. [Mr Irving]: I have no idea. I have no recollection of that episode at
21 all.
22 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Why this interest in names? What does it matter what a
23 person is called?
24 A. [Mr Irving]: You are putting this to me and I am hearing it for the
25 first time. I am as astonished as you are. If I read it
26 like that, then that was the way I read the name.
. P-170
1 Q. [Mr Rampton]: No. You did not read it like that. You knew that she was
2 called Burnstone?
3 A. [Mr Irving]: Why would I know that she was called Burnstone?
4 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Because it is in the footnote and it was read out to you.
5 A. [Mr Irving]: If I misread it, misreadings do occur. You have been
6 misreading words—-
7 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Let us wait until we have found the docment.
8 A. [Mr Irving]: You have been repeatedly misreading words throughout the
9 last few days but I have not commented on that.
10 MR RAMPTON: “Do not worry. I will come back to it tomorrow.
11 You may have a chance to answer properly. Let me go on.
12 The problem is somebody has apparently issued a leaflet.
13 I am sure that none of us here is personally responsible.
14 The hoax, including a picture on the front cover of a
15 notorious saisai” — what is that? “Anti-Semitic forgery.
16 The protocols of the learned elders of Zion. The covers
17 cartoon which protects its serpent encircling the world
18 used to have a traditional crude character of a hideous
19 Jewish face, but it now includes instead a picture of
20 Gerry Gable. I wonder how they spotted the difference.”
21 A. [Mr Irving]: You know the connection with Gerry Gable, of course. Or
22 shall I explain it to you?
23 MR JUSTICE GRAY: I know it so you do not need to.
24 MR RAMPTON: I do not want to know.
25 A. [Mr Irving]: Gerry Gable is also no friend of mine, so I am quite happy
26 to describe him in these terms.
. P-171
1 Q. [Mr Rampton]: I see. Another of your enemies whom you insult by, as it
2 were, comparing with a hideous Jewish face – is that
3 right?
4 A. [Mr Irving]: Whether he is Jewish or not is neither here nor there. He
5 is hideous, he is immoral, he has spent the last 36 years
6 of his life trying to destroy me and my family because he
7 has a criminal conviction for breaking into my house.
8 Q. [Mr Rampton]: But the insult which you have prepared — apparently they
9 thought it was jolly funny because they laughed — for
10 Mr Gable is that he should replace the hideous Jewish
11 face, is it not?.
12 A. [Mr Irving]: Well, it certainly was not forged by me. I do know who
13 did that but obviously other people hold the same opinion
14 of Mr Gable as I do.
15 Q. [Mr Rampton]: My problems began in October of last year when I was
16 speaking in Los Angeles and I received a letter from the
17 Canadian government telling me not to come home on my
18 projected tour of Canada which was to cover 17 cities from
19 Vancouver right the way across to Ottawa. The Canadian
20 governments had been alerted by the Simon Wiesenthal
21 Institute in Los Angeles and immediately clicked their
22 heels together and said “Ja vohl, Herr Wiesenthal, we will
23 not let him in”. Now tell me about this Wiesenthal
24 again. I asked you before and you said, “Oh no, it is not
25 the well known Simon Wiesenthal”.
26 A. [Mr Irving]: Well, of course, H I E R is the director of the Wiesenthal
. P-172
1 Centre. The Wiesenthal Centre in Los Angeles has no
2 connection with Simon Wiesenthal apart from the concession
3 they pay him every year for the use of his name.
4 Q. [Mr Rampton]: But it is a Jewish organization, is it?
5 A. [Mr Irving]: I imagine that they restrict their intake of employees to
6 Jews, yes, but I have no information on that.
7 Q. [Mr Rampton]: I do not know about that, but it is some kind of Jewish
8 institute in Los Angeles, no doubt in some part concerned
9 with the history of the Holocaust?
10 A. [Mr Irving]: Yes, I have collaborated with them in the past with
11 documents and things.
12 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Then comes the stuff about the Wiesenthal facial
13 appearance and its comparison with the Halloween mask.
14 A. [Mr Irving]: I think I should explain. It may very well help his
15 Lordship. This date is wrong on this. It is not 1992, it
16 is definitely 1993, after I have had to go through the
17 harrowing episode of being deported and handcuffed on the
18 floor of an Air Canada plane, after I have been thrown out
19 of Germany. All these things have happened as the result
20 of the machinations of these people around the world,
21 after I have been banned from Australia. So I am afraid
22 you have the wrong year on this and suddenly everything
23 clicks into place. I am perfectly entitled to criticise
24 these people for what they have done to me.
25 Q. [Mr Rampton]: As we noticed before, when an anti-Semite is rattled or
26 riled, out comes the anti-Semitic language.
. P-173
1 A. [Mr Irving]: No, critical language. This is unfortunately where you
2 make a mistake, Mr Rampton. When you are critical of what
3 the Jews do to you as Jews, it is not anti-Semitism. They
4 are entitled to take their action against me as Jews but,
5 if I criticise them, it becomes anti-Semitism. Have
6 I understood correctly?
7 Q. [Mr Rampton]: No, you have not. I do not think you are trying,
8 actually.
9 A. [Mr Irving]: I am trying very hard to understand the point that you are
10 trying to make.
11 Q. [Mr Rampton]: The answer to one’s enemies is not that they are ugly Jews
12 with silly names, it is that they are acting badly, is it
13 not?
14 A. [Mr Irving]: They were doing all of it.
15 Q. [Mr Rampton]: But what relevance is it that they have ugly Jewish faces
16 and silly Jewish names?
17 A. [Mr Irving]: Well, you are talking about the ugly Jewish face. You are
18 referring to the episode with the Halloween mask in which
19 the word “Jew” does not figure. We are talking about a
20 man who is well known for not being a particularly
21 beautiful gentleman.
22 Q. [Mr Rampton]: What relevance has it to your defence against him that he
23 happens not to be beautiful?
24 A. [Mr Irving]: I am just making fun of him. If I had made fun of any
25 other person who was not Jewish, it would never have
26 occurred to them to say this is anti-Semitism or
. P-174
1 anti-Asian or anti-French. If I made fun of Monsieur
2 Mitterand, for example, or Jacques Cherac, I would not be
3 accused of being anti-French if I said that he had a
4 ridiculous face that looked like a Halloween mask. I
5 would be accused of being anti-Mitterand or anti-Cherac.
6 But, because we are talking here about Wiesenthal,
7 suddenly different rules apply.
8 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Mr Rampton, when you reach a convenient
9 moment?
10 MR RAMPTON: I have not quite finished this, I am afraid.
11 A. [Mr Irving]: He is beginning to whimper a bit and he wants to find
12 a—-
13 MR JUSTICE GRAY: No, that is unnecessary. We will be here a
14 long time if you go on.
15 MR RAMPTON: You are not going to provoke me at this time of
16 night, Mr Irving. I can do another two of these things or
17 I can stop and do them in the morning.
18 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Have you finished on this particular
19 document?
20 MR RAMPTON: I have finished on Wiesenthal.
21 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Then I think, in all the circumstances, we
22 will adjourn until 10.30 until tomorrow morning.
23 < (The witness withdrew)
24 (The court adjourned until the following day)
25
26
. P-175