• Search

    Day 19 Transcript: Holocaust Denial on Trial

    Part I: Initial Proceedings (1.1 to 4.6)

      1  IN THE HIGH COURT OF JUSTICE
        1996 I. No. 113
        QUEEN’S BENCH DIVISION
      2  Royal Courts of Justice
      3  Strand, London
      4  Monday, 14th 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  PROCEEDINGS – DAY NINETEEN
    25
    26

    .           P-1


      1  <Day 19) Monday, 14th February 2000
      2  MR JUSTICE GRAY:  Yes, Mr Irving.
      3  MR IRVING:  May it please the court. I have given your
      4  Lordship a little bundle of documents. That is a bundle
      5  of translations, my Lord, is that right, which your
      6  Lordship asked for, the Kommissar order and various other
      7  documents. I do not think your Lordship needs to look at
      8  it now, but your Lordship did ask for the translations.
      9  MR JUSTICE GRAY:  That is very kind of you. Thank you. The
    10  usual question, where should it go?
    11  MR RAMPTON:  We do not have them.
    12  MR JUSTICE GRAY:  Where is the Kommissar order in German?
    13  MR IRVING:  I have a set of copies for the Defence, but
    14  I forgot to bring them.
    15  MR JUSTICE GRAY:  Could somebody look out where the Kommissar
    16  order is in German?
    17  MR RAMPTON:  We do not have the translations, so I do not know
    18  what document it is.
    19  MR JUSTICE GRAY:  Do you remember the Kommissar order being
    20  referred to? I am not actually sure we have it in German
    21  either. Anyway, can I leave it with you?
    22  MR IRVING:  Yes, guidelines and Kommissar order.
    23  MR JUSTICE GRAY:  Yes.
    24  MR RAMPTON:  The one of May 1941, is that the one?
    25  MR IRVING:  That is correct, yes.
    26  MR JUSTICE GRAY:  June, I think.

    .           P-2


      1  MR IRVING:  My Lord, I have also given you a little bundle
      2  which I have called temporarily bundle F, Professor
      3  Evans. These are documents which, in the course of
      4  cross-examination, I intend to put to Professor Evans.
      5  MR JUSTICE GRAY:  It is very helpful to have them all in one
      6  place.
      7  MR IRVING:  I have provided the defence with four or five sets.
      8  MR JUSTICE GRAY:  Thank you.
      9  MR RAMPTON:  My Lord, there is something I should wish to
    10  mention, if I may. I do it now because time is getting
    11  short.
    12  MR JUSTICE GRAY:  Yes.
    13  MR RAMPTON:  I received on Sunday, yesterday, what purports to
    14  be a further witness statement of Dr Fox.
    15  MR JUSTICE GRAY:  Yes.
    16  MR RAMPTON:  Has your Lordship been sent that?
    17  MR JUSTICE GRAY:  I do not think so, no.
    18  MR RAMPTON:  I think your Lordship should be given a copy.
    19  MR IRVING:  I have a copy but in fact I decided not to call
    20  that witness. I should say that now in fact.
    21  MR RAMPTON:  That is helpful. I can sit down and be quiet.
    22  MR IRVING:  Quite simply, the witness was going to testify on
    23  two matters. One was what Mr Rampton referred to as
    24  freedom of speech matters, and I was also going to add to
    25  that the police decodes, but I decided on balance that
    26  I know as much about the police decodes as he does. We

    .           P-3


      1  have both worked on the same body, so I think it would
      2  help to save the court’s time if we do not call him and
      3  just rely on his written statement.
      4  MR JUSTICE GRAY:  It is a matter for you, obviously.
      5  MR IRVING:  My Lord, I now wish to continue the
      6  cross-examination of Professor Evans.

    Part II: Professor Evans Cross-Examined by Irving (4.7 to 113.22)

    Section 4.7 to 20.16

      7  < PROFESSOR EVANS, Recalled
      8  < Cross-examined by MR IRVING, continued.
      9  MR JUSTICE GRAY:  Yes. Professor Evans, come back into the
    10  witness box. I wondered before you start, Mr Irving, if
    11  I might ask one question that is in my mind of Professor
    12  Evans. It is this. You were asked, you remember, on
    13  Thursday what material of Mr Irving’s you had been
    14  studying in order to arrive at the conclusions you arrived
    15  at in your written report.
    16  A. [Professor Richard John Evans]: Yes.
    17  Q. [Mr Justice Gray]: Your answer was that you had focused, at any rate, on what
    18  Mr Irving described as the chain of documents on which he
    19  relies for his contention that Hitler was relatively
    20  friendly towards the Jews. I should know myself the
    21  answer to this, but where does Mr Irving make his
    22  reference to the chain of documents? I think it is his
    23  phrase, is it not?
    24  A. [Professor Richard John Evans]: Yes, it is.
    25  Q. [Mr Justice Gray]: I simply cannot remember where and when he made that
    26  reference.

    .           P-4


      1  MR IRVING:  My Lord, perhaps I can help? I have made reference
      2  in various speeches to the chain of documents of course,
      3  and talks, and probably in the introduction to —-
      4  MR RAMPTON:  Your Lordship will find it on page 220 of
      5  Professor Evans’s report at paragraph 4.3A(1).
      6  MR JUSTICE GRAY:  Now that is on the transcript, that may
      7  really be enough, but can I go to it?
      8  MR RAMPTON:  BBC Television in June 1977.
      9  MR JUSTICE GRAY:  I think that is sufficient, Professor Evans.
    10  Thank you. Yes, Mr Irving. Do you want to pause and find
    11  it? It will be quicker if you have it, I suspect.
    12  MR IRVING:  I made a number of sets for the gentlemen of the
    13  press this morning so that they can follow what we are
    14  doing, because there were complaints about that, my Lord.
    15  Today I intend to continue to explore in general, if I can
    16  just in two lines tell you what I am going to be doing,
    17  the credibility of the witness with special reference to
    18  the remarks that he has made about my methodology in the
    19  introductory parts of his report. We will certainly cover
    20  the first 100 to 150 pages of the report today, my Lord.
    21  MR JUSTICE GRAY:  You must take your own course, but bear in
    22  mind in the end I am anxious to look at the individual
    23  criticisms as well as the general comments.
    24  MR IRVING:  Yes.(To the witness): Professor Evans, today is
    25  the 55th anniversary of the air raid on Dresden. Would
    26  you have described that as a Holocaust?

    .           P-5


      1  A. [Professor Richard John Evans]: Yes, I could have described that as “a” Holocaust, but
      2  I would, of course, make a distinction between that and
      3  “the” Holocaust as it has come to be known. One can use
      4  the term “Holocaust”. It is, I believe, used for any
      5  event which involves large scale fire or burnings commonly
      6  used in every day reporting. That is a distinct thing
      7  from “the” Holocaust which I think has a special meaning.
      8  Q. [Mr Irving]: That is the etymology of the word. It means “consumed by
      9  fire” or “sacrificed by fire”. Are you aware that in your
    10  report the phrase “Holocaust denier” occurs 261 times?
    11  A. [Professor Richard John Evans]: I have to confess I did not count.
    12  Q. [Mr Irving]: In fact, the words “denier” or “denial” occur 352 times,
    13  which is a degree of repetition, would you agree? Are you
    14  obsessed with Holocaust deniers?
    15  A. [Professor Richard John Evans]: I most certainly am not. I have to say I have not really
    16  confronted the phenomenon until this case but, of course,
    17  it is at the centre. It is perhaps the central issue in
    18  this case and so I think, since I was asked to write about
    19  it in my report, it is inevitable that that phrase occurs
    20  many times.
    21  Q. [Mr Irving]: You say you were not confronted with it until this trial.
    22  Do you normally write about things you have not studied in
    23  any kind of depth?
    24  A. [Professor Richard John Evans]: I think that historians always need to move on to new
    25  subjects, face a new challenge, otherwise they would be
    26  endlessly repeating themselves.

    .           P-6


      1  Q. [Mr Irving]: Can I draw your attention to page 206 of the book which
      2  you wrote? Do you recognize the book that you wrote?
      3  This is the American edition?
      4  A. [Professor Richard John Evans]: Yes, indeed.
      5  Q. [Mr Irving]: I will just read out a passage, if I may, of your own
      6  words from page 206: “Holocaust denier literature which
      7  declares that six million Jews were never murdered by the
      8  Nazis and that Auschwitz and similar extermination camps
      9  are fabrications of a postwar anti-German proJewish
    10  political lobby” — is the way you still define Holocaust
    11  denial, the statement that Auschwitz and the other camps
    12  did not exist?
    13  A. [Professor Richard John Evans]: Could I have a look at that passage, please?
    14  Q. [Mr Irving]: Yes. It is on page 206 of the book.
    15  A. [Professor Richard John Evans]: Thank you very much.
    16  Q. [Mr Irving]: What I am asking you is has your position changed in view
    17  of the —-
    18  A. [Professor Richard John Evans]: Page and what?
    19  Q. [Mr Irving]: 206. It is the paragraph beginning “Extreme relativism”
    20  and towards the end of that paragraph, I repeat: “Thus
    21  ‘Holocaust denial literature’ which declares that six
    22  million Jews were never murdered by the Nazis and that
    23  Auschwitz and similar extermination camps are fabrications
    24  of a postwar anti-German proJewish political lobby”. My
    25  question is this. Is this the way you define Holocaust
    26  denial now or have you changed?

    .           P-7


      1  A. [Professor Richard John Evans]: Yes. That is rather carelessly phrased, I am afraid.
      2  I think I was trying to say there — “extermination” is
      3  the central word there, that such camps were used mainly
      4  or exclusively for extermination. I can see what you
      5  mean. It is slightly carelessly phrased, I have to admit.
      6  Q. [Mr Irving]: Is it possible to accept that the Nazis murdered in the
      7  most brutal manner very large numbers of Jews by whatever
      8  means and still be a Holocaust denier, in your view?
      9  A. [Professor Richard John Evans]: That depends on what you mean by “very large numbers”.
    10  I think I defined in my report what I mean by Holocaust
    11  denial.
    12  Q. [Mr Irving]: Like one or two million people. Would that be acceptable?
    13  A. [Professor Richard John Evans]: I think you have to take the different — I have listed
    14  four what I think are central elements of the Holocaust
    15  denial.
    16  Q. [Mr Irving]: Yes.
    17  A. [Professor Richard John Evans]: And those four elements I think go together, they do
    18  include a minimisation of numbers.
    19  Q. [Mr Irving]: So any reduction of the numbers, whatever, is a denial?
    20  A. [Professor Richard John Evans]: I think it is difficult to be very precise about this.
    21  I say in my report that the generally accepted number by
    22  historians is between 5 and 6 million, and there are a
    23  number of disputes about that, but it does go together
    24  with the three other conditions of Holocaust denial which
    25  I lay out in my report. Of course, I think I do say in my
    26  report that some people would, as it were, fall into one

    .           P-8


      1  category of the four, but not into the others.
      2  Q. [Mr Irving]: Yes. Were these four categories arbitrarily set up by
      3  you, like to make them fit like a shoe the Claimant in
      4  this present case, or did you always have these categories
      5  in mind long you before you were commissioned to be an
      6  expert witness in this case?
      7  A. [Professor Richard John Evans]: Neither, to be honest. When I was commissioned to be an
      8  expert witness, of course the first thing I did was to
      9  study the literature on Holocaust denial, and from that
    10  literature, as you can see from my report, I go through it
    11  at some length. There are varying different definitions
    12  of conditions by the different political scientists and
    13  historians who have written about it, but those four
    14  I think are common to all of the definitions that I looked
    15  at in the course of preparing this report.
    16  Q. [Mr Irving]: Yes. They do vary, though, do they not, these four sets
    17  of definitions by the different authors?
    18  A. [Professor Richard John Evans]: I do not think these four sets really vary. Of course
    19  they are put in slightly different ways and different
    20  authors add on other conditions, some of them peculiar to
    21  the time at which they were writing.
    22  Q. [Mr Irving]: So, if somebody was to knock off two or three million
    23  arbitrarily from the figures, that would be Holocaust
    24  denial?
    25  A. [Professor Richard John Evans]: If it is arbitrary, then I think it involves an element
    26  therefore of falsification of history, which then I think

    .           P-9


      1  falls into that category, but I do want to stress that
      2  these four conditions should be taken together.
      3  MR JUSTICE GRAY:  It is not all or nothing, is it? You can get
      4  somebody who is an outright 100 per cent denier and
      5  somebody who perhaps does not deny it to the same full
      6  blooded extent?
      7  A. [Professor Richard John Evans]: Exactly, my Lord, it is not a hard and —-
      8  Q. [Mr Justice Gray]: I think arguing about definitions is not hugely
      9  productive?
    10  MR IRVING:  I agree, my Lord. We should not really be asking
    11  an expert witness about meanings of words, I appreciate
    12  that, my Lord, but I am working towards something. You
    13  have a little bundle of documents in front of you, a loose
    14  bundle called F?
    15  A. [Professor Richard John Evans]: I do not, actually.
    16  Q. [Mr Irving]: Will you turn to page (it should be) 37, which is a
    17  photograph?
    18  A. [Professor Richard John Evans]: They are numbered on the bottom?
    19  Q. [Mr Irving]: They are numbered on the bottom, the one after that
    20  please?
    21  A. [Professor Richard John Evans]: Yes.
    22  Q. [Mr Irving]: Do you agree that that says it is a plaque, is that
    23  correct, a memorial plaque?
    24  A. [Professor Richard John Evans]: That is right, yes.
    25  Q. [Mr Irving]: Do you recognize that plaque?
    26  A. [Professor Richard John Evans]: I do not, to be honest, no.

    .           P-10


      1  Q. [Mr Irving]: Will you agree that it says: “4 million people suffered
      2  and died here at the hands of the Nazi murderers between
      3  the years 1940 and 1945″?
      4  A. [Professor Richard John Evans]: Yes, that is what it says.
      5  Q. [Mr Irving]: Will you now turn the page please? Is that another
      6  plaque?
      7  A. [Professor Richard John Evans]: Yes, that is right.
      8  Q. [Mr Irving]: Do you recognize that plaque?
      9  A. [Professor Richard John Evans]: I do not now that I can see what it is.
    10  Q. [Mr Irving]: Does it appear to be in the same place as where the
    11  previous plaque was?
    12  A. [Professor Richard John Evans]: I will take your word for it.
    13  Q. [Mr Irving]: Do you agree this one says: “Never let this place be a
    14  cry of despair and a warning to humanity where the Nazis
    15  murdered about one and a half million men, women and
    16  children, namely Jews from various countries of Europe”?
    17  A. [Professor Richard John Evans]: That is right.
    18  Q. [Mr Irving]: Is this also Auschwitz?
    19  A. [Professor Richard John Evans]: They are both in Auschwitz, yes.
    20  Q. [Mr Irving]: So somebody has arbitrarily reduced the figure from 4
    21  million to about 1.5 million? Is that Holocaust denial?
    22  A. [Professor Richard John Evans]: No, I do not agree that the reduction was arbitrary.
    23  I think inevitably in the immediate aftermath of the war
    24  there was an enormous amount of uncertainty about the
    25  numbers who had died. This does not have a date on it,
    26  but I think the 4 million is a plaque which was erected

    .           P-11


      1  very shortly after the war and, as research progressed,
      2  then the true number of people who died in Auschwitz was
      3  more closely approached, so it is an arbitrary reduction.
      4  Q. [Mr Irving]: Is the first figure, which is the figure of 4 million, in
      5  any way associated with the figure of 4 million that was
      6  propagated by the Soviet Union in the first postwar years
      7  for the victims in Auschwitz, in your opinion?
      8  A. [Professor Richard John Evans]: I have to say I do not know enough about Auschwitz. I am
      9  not an expert on Auschwitz. You had an expert on
    10  Auschwitz here.
    11  Q. [Mr Irving]: We will keep it in general terms. If you were told (as we
    12  have heard) that Dr Piper, the director of the Auschwitz
    13  State Museum at the time that first plaque was in
    14  existence, and who arranged for it to be removed and
    15  replaced by the second plaque, has stated that the first
    16  plaque was purely propaganda, would you accept that this
    17  is evidence of politicization of the Holocaust and the
    18  figures connected with it?
    19  A. [Professor Richard John Evans]: I think, well, I would have to see Dr Piper’s statement
    20  before I could accept that is what he said, of course. I
    21  mean —-
    22  Q. [Mr Irving]: Can I draw your attention back we — will leave that
    23  subject. Can I now take you back to your book, please?
    24  MR JUSTICE GRAY:  You have not got your answer yet. I think
    25  the object of the exercise is to get the answer to the
    26  question, Mr Irving.

    .           P-12


      1  MR IRVING:  My Lord, his answer was the now familiar one that
      2  he has not seen the document.
      3  MR JUSTICE GRAY:  No, well, he was actually going on to say
      4  something else. Would you like to complete it?
      5  A. [Professor Richard John Evans]: Yes. Obviously, I accept that there is an element of
      6  propaganda in the official memorialization by the Soviet
      7  Union and its satellites in the period of Communism. That
      8  is particularly evident, for example, in the absence of
      9  any mention of Jews in this first plaque, whereas in the
    10  second one it does say mainly Jews. I think it is the
    11  case that in the postwar years the Soviet Union and the
    12  authorities in Communist Eastern Europe did want to
    13  minimise the element of Jewish dead amongst the —-
    14  MR IRVING:  As evidence of general Polish anti-semitism or?
    15  A. [Professor Richard John Evans]: No, I do not think that is true. I think it is a number
    16  of different things. It is not that.
    17  Q. [Mr Irving]: While you have your book in front of you, Professor Evans,
    18  will you remain on page 206 and look at the next paragraph
    19  briefly, which begins with the words: “A leading
    20  authority”. I am sorry, my Lord, that I should have
    21  provided your Lordship with the lines I am going to refer
    22  to, but it is very brief.
    23  A. [Professor Richard John Evans]: Yes.
    24  Q. [Mr Irving]: I will read it out: “A leading authority on this
    25  literature, which is Holocaust denial literature,
    26  Professor Deborah E. Lipstadt”, that is the Second

    .           P-13


      1  Defendant in this case?
      2  A. [Professor Richard John Evans]: That is right.
      3  Q. [Mr Irving]: “… of Emery University, Atlanta, Georgia, consistently
      4  refuses to take part in public debates with the deniers on
      5  the ground ‘to do so would give them a legitimacy and a
      6  stature that they in no way deserve”?
      7  A. [Professor Richard John Evans]: Yes.
      8  Q. [Mr Irving]: Have you any comment on this refusal to debate? Is it a
      9  position of strength or a position of weakness, do you
    10  think?
    11  A. [Professor Richard John Evans]: I think it is a position of principle.
    12  Q. [Mr Irving]: A position of principle?
    13  A. [Professor Richard John Evans]: I do not think it is a tactical consideration, in my
    14  understanding of it.
    15  Q. [Mr Irving]: Is it a principle that you, as an academic, would
    16  willingly adopt?
    17  A. [Professor Richard John Evans]: I think, yes, I do not think that Holocaust deniers are
    18  academics or scholars or academically or scholarly
    19  respectable, and I would not take part in seminars or
    20  discussions with them on that basis.
    21  Q. [Mr Irving]: So Holocaust deniers, as you once again use this favourite
    22  phrase of yours, are a form of low academic life or low
    23  life, in fact, because most of them who have not been
    24  academics find themselves cast out? Is that your
    25  opinion?
    26  A. [Professor Richard John Evans]: I do not agree with any of those statements. First of

    .           P-14


      1  all, it is not a favourite phrase of mine. It is a phrase
      2  which I have to use because it is at the centre of this
      3  case, as I make no apology for that. I do not like using
      4  phrases like “low life” or “low form of life” and, to my
      5  knowledge, I have never used those phrases. The problem
      6  is not that they are not academic; the problem is what
      7  they are engaging in, in my view, is a politically
      8  motivated falsification of history, and that is why
      9  I think, on the whole, I would endorse and accept
    10  Professor Lipstadt’s position.
    11  Q. [Mr Irving]: But is it not equally arguable that the use that is made
    12  of the Holocaust and that immense tragedy inflicted on the
    13  Jews during World War II has just been equally politicized
    14  for other purposes, whether good or bad?
    15  A. [Professor Richard John Evans]: I think there is, obviously, a political element in a
    16  great deal of historical writing, if not all historical
    17  writing, to some measure or other, but I would distinguish
    18  between the historians’, as it were, control of that
    19  through reference to the documents and through the attempt
    20  to arrive at an objective interpretation which is in
    21  accordance with the documents, on the one hand, and
    22  deliberate falsification and invention on the other.
    23  I think the Holocaust deniers belong to the latter
    24  category.
    25  Q. [Mr Irving]: Would you consider —-
    26  A. [Professor Richard John Evans]: And, of course, in academic and scholarly discussions, one

    .           P-15


      1  puts aside political aspects and concentrates on the
      2  issues.
      3  Q. [Mr Irving]: But it is a commonly held view, even among Jewish
      4  academics, that the Holocaust is being abused for
      5  political purposes now. Are you aware of the writings of
      6  Norman Finglestein, for example? Do you have any opinion
      7  about his qualifications as an academic or as a writer?
      8  A. [Professor Richard John Evans]: I have — I am eagerly awaiting his book. He has written
      9  an article and a couple of reviews which I think give some
    10  foretaste, but I would not want to make a judgment on
    11  these views.
    12  Q. [Mr Irving]: Have you, by any chance, read what he wrote in The Times
    13  Literary Supplement, I believe it was, in January,
    14  suggesting that the whole of the Holocaust propaganda
    15  campaign started around about the time of the 1967 June
    16  war?
    17  A. [Professor Richard John Evans]: I think that both Finglestein and Peter Novic, whose book
    18  I have read with great interest, and Tim Cole.
    19  Q. [Mr Irving]: Would you identify Peter Novic, University of —-
    20  A. [Professor Richard John Evans]: The University of Chicago, yes, and another similar book
    21  by Tim Cole of the University of Bristol, I think — are
    22  talking about the public presentation of the
    23  Holocaust —-
    24  Q. [Mr Irving]: Are they —-
    25  A. [Professor Richard John Evans]: — and the political —-
    26  Q. [Mr Irving]: — Holocaust deniers in your book?

    .           P-16


      1  A. [Professor Richard John Evans]: No, they are not because they are not, they are certainly
      2  not denying that i happened in the terms in which
      3  I described it in my report. They are talking about the
      4  public presentation of history, as in these memorial
      5  plaques that you have illustrated. That, I think, is a
      6  different thing from the scholarly working up of history.
      7  None of them would fall into any of the four, or satisfy
      8  any of four, conditions that I have laid down for
      9  Holocaust denial. They do not minimise the numbers. They
    10  do not deny the use of gassing to kill large numbers of
    11  Jews. They do not deny that is systematic, and they do
    12  not claim that the evidence was invented or fabricated.
    13  They are talking about something quite different which is
    14  the public presentation and use which, indeed, of course,
    15  by its very nature is going to be subject to political
    16  influences.
    17  Q. [Mr Irving]: Yes. They are all American academics, are they?
    18  A. [Professor Richard John Evans]: No. Tim Cole is a British academic. Finglestein, I am
    19  not sure, I think he is American.
    20  Q. [Mr Irving]: Yes. Would they be able to propagate their views safely
    21  in this country or in France or in Germany, do you think,
    22  without fear of either losing their academic privileges or
    23  even arrest and prosecution?
    24  MR JUSTICE GRAY:  Mr Irving, I do not think that is a question
    25  that is really going to help in this case, if I may say
    26  so.

    .           P-17


      1  MR IRVING:  My Lord, I am just trying to establish that
      2  Holocaust deniers, if I can adopt the witness’s phrase, do
      3  not have it easy to propagate their views, and if the
      4  debate seems lopsided, it is because, on the one hand,
      5  people refused to debate and, on the other hand, the
      6  people are arrested and locked away.
      7  MR JUSTICE GRAY:  Yes, but you had rather veered off Holocaust
      8  deniers to the historians who take the view that there has
      9  been some politicization of the Holocaust from 1967
    10  onwards.
    11  MR IRVING:  In that case, may I just revert very briefly to
    12  Professor —-
    13  A. [Professor Richard John Evans]: I mean, my answer is yes, if that helps. I mean, Dr Cole
    14  has not suffered at all from his book and Professor
    15  Novic’s book is about to be published in this country.
    16  MR IRVING:  You have expressed words of distaste for Professor
    17  Faurisson who, of course, is no longer a Professor?
    18  A. [Professor Richard John Evans]: Where do I do this?
    19  Q. [Mr Irving]: When you were last standing and the witness box on
    20  Thursday. I mentioned his name. You said you did not
    21  consider him to be an academic and you —-
    22  A. [Professor Richard John Evans]: I think — I am not sure I said that. I would have to see
    23  the transcript.
    24  Q. [Mr Irving]: Yes. Are you aware of the damage that was inflicted on
    25  Professor Faurisson for holding his principles and views,
    26  for holding to his principles as a Holocaust denier?

    .           P-18


      1  A. [Professor Richard John Evans]: I am aware that he was deprived of his university post,
      2  most certainly, yes.
      3  Q. [Mr Irving]: Would you turn, please, to page 57 of the bundle, the
      4  little bundle? I am very sorry, it is at bundle E, my
      5  Lord.
      6  MR JUSTICE GRAY:  Yes, I know.
      7  MR IRVING:  The global bundle. I am afraid that you may not
      8  have the photographs there.
      9  A. [Professor Richard John Evans]: I only have 55 pages, I am afraid.
    10  MR JUSTICE GRAY:  So have I.
    11  MR IRVING:  In that case I will produce two pages to you. That
    12  is Professor Faurisson after he was taught a lesson for
    13  his principles and views. Is this the way you think
    14  academics should be dealt with?
    15  A. [Professor Richard John Evans]: Most certainly not, no.
    16  Q. [Mr Irving]: Thank you very much. The reason I am asking that, my
    17  Lord, is evident because I wish to bring to the attention
    18  of the court the dangers that befall somebody in public
    19  life who is accused of being a Holocaust denier.
    20  MR JUSTICE GRAY:  Do it, by all means. I am not quite sure
    21  that I see how that advances your case here.
    22  MR IRVING:  Oh, very definitely, my Lord, I submit. I have
    23  already suggested it in connection with the Hamas and
    24  Hisbollah allegation; I have been exposed to very severe
    25  risks. In connection with being accused of being a
    26  Holocaust denier, I have been exposed to the risk of what

    .           P-19


      1  happened to Professor Faurisson. His jaw was smashed so
      2  badly, it was wired together for six weeks and he had acid
      3  poured in his eyes, and he was a man slightly older than
      4  myself.
      5  MR JUSTICE GRAY:  I think I have tried to explain to you
      6  earlier that all this sort of thing can be relevant to
      7  damage, but it has to be linked to the Defendants.
      8  MR IRVING:  I shall be making a submission on damages later on.
      9  MR JUSTICE GRAY:  Just bear in mind that that is the way I am
    10  seeing it.
    11  MR IRVING:  As this witness did refer to Professor Faurisson in
    12  terms of rebuke, I thought it appropriate to show him
    13  photographs of what happened to people who stick to their
    14  principle at the other end of the scale.
    15  A. [Professor Richard John Evans]: I do not think you can make me responsible for what
    16  happened to Professor Faurisson.

    Section 20.17 to 32.15

    17  Q. [Mr Irving]: No. Witness, you have read or your researchers have read
    18  very large parts of my diaries and private papers and
    19  lectures and speeches?
    20  A. [Professor Richard John Evans]: Yes.
    21  Q. [Mr Irving]: Have you at any time in any of those readings come across
    22  any evidence whatsoever that I was associated with the
    23  Hamas or the Hisbollah terrorist leaders or with Lewis
    24  Farakan, the notorious black American anti-semite?
    25  A. [Professor Richard John Evans]: Well, that was not what I was asked to do, so we did not
    26  read them for that purpose.

    .           P-20


      1  MR JUSTICE GRAY:  Even so, can you answer?
      2  A. [Professor Richard John Evans]: We read the material in order to, well, I am trying to
      3  explain that my expertise may be not very good at that
      4  particular level, there were other expert witnesses who
      5  were asked to do that. I did collect information which is
      6  on page 174 and afterwards of my report, which is about
      7  your connections with Holocaust deniers, and I did find —
      8  I am trying to find it in my report — connections with
      9  Ahmed Rami, page 198.
    10  Q. [Mr Irving]: Can you tell the court what these alleged connections
    11  were?
    12  A. [Professor Richard John Evans]: Yes. You appeared on the same platform as him in the
    13  so-called Leuchter Congress, 23rd March 1991.
    14  Q. [Mr Irving]: Is there any reason why I should have recognized Mr Rami,
    15  in your opinion?
    16  A. [Professor Richard John Evans]: I think if one appears on a platform with other speakers,
    17  one knows who they are.
    18  Q. [Mr Irving]: Is there any connection at all between this Mr Rami and
    19  the gentleman, Mr Farakan that I mentioned, or the
    20  Hisbollah and the Hamas?
    21  A. [Professor Richard John Evans]: I have to claim that I do not have any direct expertise on
    22  that. I cannot say.
    23  Q. [Mr Irving]: Have you found any kind of correspondence between myself
    24  and Mr Rami? Has any been shown to you?
    25  A. [Professor Richard John Evans]: Not to my recollection.
    26  Q. [Mr Irving]: So apart from this —-

    .           P-21


      1  A. [Professor Richard John Evans]: But, as I say, that is not what I was really looking for.
      2  I am really concerned with looking at connections between
      3  you and people whose main business is Holocaust deniers.
      4  MR JUSTICE GRAY:  So the answer to the original question,
      5  whether you have discovered any links, as it were, is no?
      6  A. [Professor Richard John Evans]: Is no, that is right. That is not to say that there is
      7  not any but…
      8  Q. [Mr Justice Gray]: No, but you have not come across it?
      9  A. [Professor Richard John Evans]: I have not come across it, no. I mean, he, Rami, occupies
    10  about four lines of my report.
    11  MR IRVING:  Yes. Is there any particular reason why you
    12  mentioned Rami in this connection? Is he a terrorist or
    13  an extremist? I mean, to me, he unknown. I know nothing
    14  at all about him.
    15  A. [Professor Richard John Evans]: Well, I find that difficult to believe since you appeared
    16  on the same platform as him in a meeting, a public
    17  meeting. He is an extremist who runs an extreme
    18  anti-semitic website which I have looked at.
    19  Q. [Mr Irving]: When you say that he appeared on the same platform, do you
    20  have photographs of him standing shoulder to shoulder with
    21  me or are you just saying that he was there one day and I
    22  was there the next day?
    23  MR JUSTICE GRAY:  Do you challenge having been on the same
    24  platform as him?
    25  MR IRVING:  I want to know what he means by this, my Lord.
    26  MR JUSTICE GRAY:  No, I am asking am asking you because you

    .           P-22


      1  have to put your case, Mr Irving. I mentioned that on
      2  Thursday. Is it your case that you have never appeared on
      3  a platform with Mr Rami?
      4  MR IRVING:  Never knowingly appeared.
      5  MR JUSTICE GRAY:  Never?
      6  MR IRVING:  If I can put it like that, my Lord.
      7  A. [Professor Richard John Evans]: I footnote video tape 201.
      8  MR JUSTICE GRAY:  Never knowingly appeared? I see.
      9  MR IRVING:  Well, quite simply, because when is this video
    10  taped alleged to have been?
    11  A. [Professor Richard John Evans]: 23rd March 1991.
    12  MR IRVING:  1991. So it is nine years ago and this is somebody
    13  who has, apparently, stood near me on a platform and this
    14  is good as the connection gets?
    15  A. [Professor Richard John Evans]: Well, you were both speakers. As I say, this is not a
    16  very important part of my report; it only occupies a few
    17  lines.
    18  Q. [Mr Irving]: Will you turn to page 37 of your report, please? We are
    19  now moving on, my Lord. Paragraph 244. You talk about
    20  the unreliability of Hitler’s former aids as a source?
    21  A. [Professor Richard John Evans]: Yes.
    22  Q. [Mr Irving]: And, effectively, my gullibility in falling for everything
    23  they said?
    24  A. [Professor Richard John Evans]: No. I would not accuse you of being gullible, Mr Irving.
    25  Q. [Mr Irving]: My lack of critical nous, shall we say, in accepting what
    26  Hitler’s Adjutants and secretaries and people have told me

    .           P-23


      1  — is that the burden of that paragraph 244?
      2  A. [Professor Richard John Evans]: Critical intention, I think.
      3  Q. [Mr Irving]: Do you accept, however, that on numerous occasions I have
      4  persuaded Hitler’s private staff and the Adjutants and
      5  their juniors to reveal to me matters which were against
      6  their interest, or against the interest of Adolf Hitler
      7  which is probably more significant? Do you accept this is
      8  true? Do you remember from The War Path where Hitler’s
      9  private secretary, Krista Schroeder, describes to me on
    10  the night of the long knives, June 30th 1934, when they
    11  returned to the Chancellery afterwards Hitler vanished and
    12  had a shower?
    13  A. [Professor Richard John Evans]: Yes, I remember that.
    14  Q. [Mr Irving]: Do you remember what Hitler said to her when he
    15  reappeared, roughly?
    16  A. [Professor Richard John Evans]: Very vaguely. You would have to remind me of the exact
    17  words.
    18  Q. [Mr Irving]: “So Fraulein Schroeder, now I have had a shower and I feel
    19  as clean as a new born babe”?
    20  A. [Professor Richard John Evans]: That is right.
    21  Q. [Mr Irving]: Do you feel that speaks highly for Adolf Hitler, that he
    22  murders his closest compatriots and has a shower and
    23  washes himself clean?
    24  A. [Professor Richard John Evans]: No, I do not. But you do say in a document which I quote
    25  on page 604 that, once the former members of Hitler’s
    26  staff, once you had won their confidence I think you mean,

    .           P-24


      1  they thought well now at last they were doing their chief
      2  a service. So it seem to be your view that you persuade
      3  them that they were doing Hitler a service by talking to
      4  you.
      5  Q. [Mr Irving]: I think the sense is that they were doing history a
      6  service.
      7  A. [Professor Richard John Evans]: That is not what you said.
      8  Q. [Mr Irving]: They were telling the story — what are the exact words
      9  that I used?
    10  A. [Professor Richard John Evans]: The exact words were, and I think you have reversed the
    11  sense here a bit, once they had won your confidence —
    12  I think you mean once you had won their confidence — and
    13  they knew you were not going to go and report them to the
    14  State Prosecutor, they trusted you and they thought well,
    15  now at last they were doing their chief a service.
    16  Q. [Mr Irving]: Yes. How would they be doing their chief a service if
    17  they told me details of how Hitler had ordered the
    18  liquidation of the inmates of a concentration camp?
    19  A. [Professor Richard John Evans]: That is not what Krista Schroeder said, was it, to you?
    20  Q. [Mr Irving]: I am giving specific examples now. You said that
    21  I persuaded these people to talk, but that I then fell for
    22  them, so to speak, and that I did not manage to use my
    23  methods, my oily greasy methods, shall I put it like, in
    24  fact to get from them information against their self-
    25  interest which is what I contend I did.
    26  A. [Professor Richard John Evans]: Oily and greasy are not my words.

    .           P-25


      1  Q. [Mr Irving]: They are words I put in — I oiled these remarks out of
      2  them, shall I put it like that? If I put this one example
      3  to you, that I persuaded an SS officer who was on Hitler’s
      4  staff to describe to me the meeting between Hitler and
      5  Himmler in April 1945, where Hitler gave the order to
      6  liquidate all the inmates of Buchenwald if they could not
      7  be evacuated in time, do you remember that episode?
      8  A. [Professor Richard John Evans]: Yes, I do.
      9  Q. [Mr Irving]: Was that in any way — did it reflect well on Adolf
    10  Hitler, do you think?
    11  A. [Professor Richard John Evans]: No, it certainly did not, but obviously there are some
    12  places in which they do reveal things, at which some of
    13  them reveal things, which are not —-
    14  Q. [Mr Irving]: I will give you only one further example because I do not
    15  wish to test his Lordship’s patience but it is important
    16  here because I am accused of having exonerated Hitler and
    17  fallen for the Adjutants’ wiles. You are familiar with
    18  the colour photographs that are in some of my books of
    19  Adolf Hitler’s staff, are you?
    20  A. [Professor Richard John Evans]: Yes.
    21  Q. [Mr Irving]: Will you accept that these photographs were taken by
    22  Hitler’s film cameraman whose name was Walter Frentz?
    23  A. [Professor Richard John Evans]: Yes.
    24  Q. [Mr Irving]: He described to me, did he not, a visit to the Eastern
    25  Front with Heinrich Himmler in August 1941 where they
    26  witnessed a mass shooting outside Minsk, to which shooting

    .           P-26


      1  you also refer of course, do you not?
      2  A. [Professor Richard John Evans]: Yes.
      3  Q. [Mr Irving]: This man Walter Frentz was present. Are you aware that he
      4  described to me in great deal at 2 o’clock one morning the
      5  whole episode, including how Himmler told him to take
      6  photographs of the shootings, and other very vivid
      7  details?
      8  A. [Professor Richard John Evans]: Yes.
      9  Q. [Mr Irving]: Was that in any way in his own interest to tell me that
    10  story?
    11  A. [Professor Richard John Evans]: We are moving slightly away here. What we are talking
    12  about, of course, is their attitudes to, or what they
    13  report of, Hitler and Hitler’s views, and in that case it
    14  really does not apply to that.
    15  Q. [Mr Irving]: We will move on to Hitler’s views in this connection in a
    16  minute, but will you just answer my question? If Walter
    17  Frentz told me this story, how he was with Himmler and
    18  witnessed a mass shooting, and took photographs of it, did
    19  that in any way reflect well on either himself, the
    20  witness, or on Adolf Hitler, for that matter?
    21  A. [Professor Richard John Evans]: I would think no, but then he might have thought something
    22  different.
    23  Q. [Mr Irving]: If I now tell you that Frentz took photographs back to
    24  Hitler’s headquarters and showed them to Hitler’s Chief
    25  Adjutant, and the Chief Adjutant said, “If you know what
    26  is good for you, you will destroy these photographs,

    .           P-27


      1  Mr Frentz”, is this a significant contribution to a
      2  historical debate which I, with my methods, obtained, do
      3  you think?
      4  A. [Professor Richard John Evans]: The answer is, if that is the case, then yes. I am not
      5  denying, Mr Irving, that your interviews with Hitler’s
      6  former staff have contributed in some ways to historical
      7  knowledge, not at all.
      8  Q. [Mr Irving]: So your judgment against me in that paragraph is
      9  overhasty, would you agree?
    10  A. [Professor Richard John Evans]: No, I do not agree. I think, taken as a whole, your
    11  interviews with Hitler’s staff, as I show in a chapter of
    12  the report, are uncritical, and in some cases also involve
    13  elements of falsification of what they actually said, or
    14  of the nature of their sources that you used.
    15  Q. [Mr Irving]: I will come to those particular episodes later on, but in
    16  general?
    17  A. [Professor Richard John Evans]: This is a general statement which is a conclusion drawn
    18  from the detailed cases that I look at later on in the
    19  report.
    20  Q. [Mr Irving]: You have said that I used these statements only in the
    21  service of their chief, so to speak, and I did not put in
    22  material from the Adjutants or the secretaries which was
    23  unfavourable, and that I was uncritical in my assessment
    24  of these sources, and I have given you three episodes
    25  where quite clearly I persuaded members of Hitler’s staff
    26  to reveal from their innermost memory things that they

    .           P-28


      1  probably told nobody else.
      2  A. [Professor Richard John Evans]: Where do I say the things that you say I say?
      3  MR JUSTICE GRAY:  I do not think the word “always” is to be
      4  found, Mr Irving. I think that is the difference between
      5  you.
      6  MR IRVING:  That is why I suggested that the phrase overhasty
      7  was probably justified, and overhastily rushed a judgment
      8  on me, which is not borne out by all the evidence my Lord.
      9  MR JUSTICE GRAY:  The evidence I think I am hearing from
    10  Professor Evans is that usually — that may be an under
    11  statement — you are portraying these Adjutants as having
    12  told you things which are in Hitler’s favour, but
    13  sometimes not. Is that a broad summary?
    14  MR IRVING:  To use one of Mr Rampton’s favourite phrases,
    15  I would say “so what”? Quite clearly, if these Adjutants
    16  have sat for many hours talking to me, I have used all the
    17  information they have given me, and some of it has been in
    18  favour and some of it has not. What I have not done, and
    19  this is my question now to the witness, did I make
    20  appropriate use of the information that I obtained from
    21  these various witnesses, in your opinion?
    22  A. [Professor Richard John Evans]: It depends what you mean by “appropriate”.
    23  Q. [Mr Irving]: Did I make appropriate use? In other words, did I rely on
    24  them solely, shall we say, for important episodes of
    25  history when I could not find any documentary
    26  substantiation?

    .           P-29


      1  A. [Professor Richard John Evans]: Well, they form an important part of your case that Hitler
      2  did not know about the extermination of the Jews, at least
      3  before the autumn of 1943, because what you argue about
      4  the Adjutants is that they all say that Hitler never
      5  actually discussed the extermination of the Jews with
      6  them, and in the sense that, if you look at their
      7  statements carefully, and I detail some of these later on
      8  in the report, you will see that they do not infer from
      9  the fact that this was not discussed as they claim, the
    10  fact that Hitler did not know about it. That is your
    11  inference. Indeed, a number of them explicitly stated
    12  that they were pretty sure that Hitler did know.
    13  Q. [Mr Irving]: There is a typical example of that, Albert Speer. Did
    14  Albert Speer say to me it was never discussed in front of
    15  him, but did he then go on to say that in his opinion
    16  Hitler must have known, roughly?
    17  A. [Professor Richard John Evans]: As I recall, yes.
    18  Q. [Mr Irving]: Is that not an illogical kind of position for an
    19  intelligent man like Speer to adopt, that it was never
    20  discussed but somebody must have known? If it was never
    21  discussed, how could he guess?
    22  A. [Professor Richard John Evans]: As I recall, Speer argued at some length, and there is a
    23  degree of self-exculpation here, I think, in Speer, that
    24  Hitler simply did not want this to be talked about in his
    25  inner circle.
    26  Q. [Mr Irving]: My final question on this particular angle is this. When

    .           P-30


      1  you have read, as you or your researchers have, my
      2  interview notes on all these ladies and gentleman on
      3  Hitler’s private staff, did I conceal anything detrimental
      4  that they told me? In other words, the Walter Frentz
      5  episode, the shootings at Minsk, Hitler’s remark to Krista
      6  Schroeder, “now I have had a shower and I feel as clean as
      7  a new born babe”, did I conceal that or did I properly use
      8  it in my books?
      9  A. [Professor Richard John Evans]: You did not conceal either of those two things, no.
    10  Q. [Mr Irving]: So what I found I used?
    11  A. [Professor Richard John Evans]: Not in every case. There is an example in detail later on
    12  which we can discuss.
    13  Q. [Mr Irving]: Can you tell us what that example is from memory?
    14  A. [Professor Richard John Evans]: Not from memory, I am afraid.
    15  Q. [Mr Irving]: Yes. Perhaps we can wait until we get to it. There is
    16  one further question. Has any other writer apart from me
    17  got as close to these members of Hitler’s private staff?
    18  A. [Professor Richard John Evans]: No, I think that is quite right.
    19  Q. [Mr Irving]: So, if I had not done it, then a body of information would
    20  have been lost for the world of academics and scholars?
    21  A. [Professor Richard John Evans]: We have discussed this before. I do not dispute the fact
    22  that you have obtained a great deal of material, not just
    23  interview material but also documentary material, which
    24  other historians have not obtained.
    25  Q. [Mr Irving]: Were any of these Adjutants interrogated at Nuremberg?
    26  A. [Professor Richard John Evans]: There is an awful lot of them, there is about 25 of them.

    .           P-31


      1  I am sure you know more than I do about their
      2  interrogations at Nuremberg. Some of them of course were
      3  put on trial or were witnesses in subsequent trials.
      4  Q. [Mr Irving]: Very few of them.
      5  A. [Professor Richard John Evans]: Karl Wolff is the obvious one.
      6  Q. [Mr Irving]: Is it not right that Karl Wolff was not put on trial until
      7  the 60s because a secret deal had been reached between him
      8  and the Americans?
      9  A. [Professor Richard John Evans]: I do not know about the secret deal but he was not put on
    10  trial until 1964, I think.
    11  Q. [Mr Irving]: Have you not heard of Operation Crossword in which Karl
    12  Wolff was engaged in Italy at the end of the war, his
    13  negotiations with the OSS?
    14  A. [Professor Richard John Evans]: You would have to provide me with documentary evidence for
    15  a deal, I think.

    Section 32.16 to 62.16

    16  Q. [Mr Irving]: I am going to go on to page 38, my Lord. Now we are
    17  dealing with the Hitler’s diaries forgeries, paragraph
    18  246.
    19  A. [Professor Richard John Evans]: Yes.
    20  Q. [Mr Irving]: Do you accept that once again I came into early possession
    21  of unusual materials? In this case they turned out to be
    22  fake.
    23  A. [Professor Richard John Evans]: Yes. Were these the materials which you purchased in
    24  October 1982 and were intending to sell to McMillans?
    25  Q. [Mr Irving]: What is your evidence for the word “purchased”?
    26  A. [Professor Richard John Evans]: This is in audio cassette 75, where you said you bought

    .           P-32


      1  them from the forger and then you recognized them as
      2  forgeries after examining them.
      3  MR JUSTICE GRAY:  Mr Irving, can I interrupt and make this
      4  enquiry of you, really? . I realize that Professor Evans
      5  refers to the Hitler diaries in his report. I am just
      6  wondering what relevance they have to the issues in this
      7  action. Can you help me? I am sorry to interrupt you but
      8  are obviously starting on a fresh point.
      9  MR IRVING:  If I am familiar with Professor Evans’ arguments of
    10  having flipflopped, changed my position on them, and ipso
    11  facto being unserious, is that right, Professor Evans?
    12  A. [Professor Richard John Evans]: I do not use the word “unserious”, but I derive from
    13  Robert Harris’s book, which seems to me to be a reliable
    14  book, written I think partly in co-operation with you,
    15  certainly with use of materials you supplied to him, the
    16  fact that having declared that the diaries, quite rightly,
    17  were forgeries, you then subsequently declared that they
    18  were genuine. If you tell me that that is not true, of
    19  course I would have to accept it.
    20  MR JUSTICE GRAY:  Let us see where we are going with this.
    21  This is not, I do not think, any part of the pleaded
    22  case. Mr Rampton, that is right, is it not?
    23  MR RAMPTON:  That is right, my Lord.
    24  MR JUSTICE GRAY:  You are in the difficult position, Mr Irving,
    25  because here is the principal expert witness for the
    26  Defendants making this criticism of you and it is a

    .           P-33


      1  serious criticism, but it is not one that in the end plays
      2  any part in the Defendants case.
      3  MR IRVING:  I read your Lordship’s mind as being that you will
      4  pay no attention to this. In that case I will move on.
      5  MR JUSTICE GRAY:  I will not.
      6  MR IRVING:  In the next paragraph 247 you mention Gerhardt
      7  Weinberg.
      8  A. [Professor Richard John Evans]: Yes.
      9  Q. [Mr Irving]: Is he one of the historians whose views you accept?
    10  A. [Professor Richard John Evans]: On what?
    11  Q. [Mr Irving]: Is he an eminent historian? He is not a Holocaust denier,
    12  is he?
    13  A. [Professor Richard John Evans]: He is an eminent historian.
    14  Q. [Mr Irving]: In fact, he is now retired and his chair is occupied by
    15  Christopher Browning, is it not?
    16  A. [Professor Richard John Evans]: That is the case, yes.
    17  Q. [Mr Irving]: I am going to be looking at Professor Jackeln, my Lord,
    18  Professor Aberhard Jackeln, who is a historian whose name
    19  will come up I think more than once over the next few
    20  days. He played a part in the Hitler diaries. I am not
    21  going to look at the Hitler diaries as such but I am going
    22  to ask questions which I think have relevance to
    23  establishing the reliability of Professor Jackeln. Is it
    24  right that Professor Aberhard Jackeln very early on came
    25  into possession of one of the diaries, the 1935 Hitler
    26  diary?

    .           P-34


      1  A. [Professor Richard John Evans]: From what I remember of Mr Harris’s book, which is the
      2  source of my information, yes. That is to say, I do not
      3  rely on Professor Jackeln in my report.
      4  Q. [Mr Irving]: Really I am trying through you to find out what we know
      5  about Professor Jackeln as far as reliability goes, as far
      6  as his credentials go.
      7  A. [Professor Richard John Evans]: Yes. It does not really play a role in my report. That
      8  is to say, I am not writing about Professor Jackeln’s
      9  reliability.
    10  Q. [Mr Irving]: Did you write that Jackeln authenticated some of the
    11  Hitler materials?
    12  A. [Professor Richard John Evans]: I did not, no. It is my understanding from Mr Harris’s
    13  book that he had doubts about him. Of course I am aware
    14  of the fact that Professor Jackeln did include some forged
    15  material in a book that he edited of Hitler’s writings.
    16  Q. [Mr Irving]: You are not familiar with the fact that he authenticated
    17  the 1935 Hitler diary on behalf of a Stuttgart
    18  millionaire?
    19  A. [Professor Richard John Evans]: I am not, but if that is in Mr Harris’s book —-
    20  Q. [Mr Irving]: You mentioned the other materials. He believed that a
    21  very large number of poems and handwritings apparently by
    22  Hitler were genuine, is that correct?
    23  MR JUSTICE GRAY:  We seem to be back on the Hitler diaries. I
    24  thought we had agreed —-
    25  MR IRVING:  No we are now off that. We are now on Jackeln,
    26  very firmly on Jackeln, my Lord.

    .           P-35


      1  A. [Professor Richard John Evans]: That is correct.
      2  Q. [Mr Irving]: Did he publish these in a semi-official volume called
      3  Hitler’s Entire Manuscripts?
      4  A. [Professor Richard John Evans]: Indeed he did.
      5  Q. [Mr Irving]: Did it take him a substantial length of time to confess
      6  that these were from the same source, the forger Konrad
      7  Kujau?
      8  A. [Professor Richard John Evans]: If you tell me it did, then yes. He certainly in the end
      9  I think recognized that they were forgeries.
    10  Q. [Mr Irving]: In fact he wrote a report, did he not, in the Journal of
    11  Contemporary History in which he admitted that 4 per cent
    12  of that volume was fake, only 4 per cent? Is that
    13  correct?
    14  A. [Professor Richard John Evans]: Well, I do not recall it but I will accept your word for
    15  it.
    16  Q. [Mr Irving]: In your little bundle of documents which I gave you this
    17  morning, would you just turn rapidly to page 41, which is
    18  a photograph of a train?
    19  A. [Professor Richard John Evans]: Yes.
    20  Q. [Mr Irving]: The large endless train of wagons with people stuffed in
    21  like cattle, is it not?
    22  A. [Professor Richard John Evans]: They do not appear to be —-
    23  Q. [Mr Irving]: Several hundred people to each coal wagon?
    24  A. [Professor Richard John Evans]: I would not say like cattle. They do not appear to be
    25  grossly overcrowded. They are full.
    26  Q. [Mr Irving]: Are you aware Professor Jackeln used this photograph as an

    .           P-36


      1  illustration for Rumanian Jews being shipped to the gas
      2  chambers at Auschwitz?
      3  A. [Professor Richard John Evans]: I am not.
      4  Q. [Mr Irving]: On a television programme. Can you confirm that that is
      5  fact Hamburg railway Station after the war?
      6  A. [Professor Richard John Evans]: Very difficult to say.
      7  Q. [Mr Irving]: If I tell that the rubber stamp on the back of the
      8  original photograph says Hamburg — it is in the Hamburg
      9  Railway Station archives now, in their picture archives.
    10  A. [Professor Richard John Evans]: Right.
    11  Q. [Mr Irving]: What would your opinion be of a historian who uses
    12  photographs in that manner, photographs of a postwar
    13  scene, and says that it is a photograph of Jews being
    14  shipped off to Auschwitz?
    15  MR JUSTICE GRAY:  I am a bit bewildered by this, Mr Irving.
    16  You said “so what?” to me not very long, “so what?” to
    17  you. Why does whether Professor Jackeln mistook Hamburg
    18  Railway Station for a convoy taking Romanian Jews to a
    19  concentration camp matter? It is your reliability, not
    20  Professor Jackeln’s that is in question.
    21  MR IRVING:  If Jackeln’s words are going to be used against me,
    22  as they will be, in expert reports, then I am entitled, in
    23  my view, to put to the court the qualifications that
    24  Professor Jackeln has.
    25  MR JUSTICE GRAY:  Again, you are in the difficulty that
    26  Professor Evans has relied on other historians in his

    .           P-37


      1  report, but in the end it must be Professor Evans’ view,
      2  whether I accept it or not, that counts.
      3  MR IRVING:  Yes.
      4  MR JUSTICE GRAY:  I am not actually going to stop you, but
      5  I really do not think at the moment, until we get to a
      6  point where Professor Evans says, “Jackeln says this, ergo
      7  it must be right”, that this is really helpful. There is
      8  an awful lot of material to be covered in Professor Evans’
      9  report, but we have not really begun to grapple with it
    10  yet.
    11  A. [Professor Richard John Evans]: Let me answer the question. Of course, what I think of
    12  him depends in this instance on whether he knew that that
    13  was a picture of Germans in Hamburg on a shopping trip to
    14  the Ruhr in 1946 and then deliberately presented it, and
    15  falsely presented it, as Rumanian Jews being shipped off
    16  to Auschwitz, or whether it was a genuine mistake. You
    17  yourself have said in the course of this trial that
    18  historians make many errors, and that one wants to correct
    19  them, and one attempts to do so. You pointed out an error
    20  in your own 1991 edition of Hitler’s War, the absence of
    21  your name on the title page, so we all make mistakes.
    22  There is a distinction which I drew on Thursday, which I
    23  would hold to, between, as it were, genuine mistakes and
    24  errors, which unfortunately historians are all prone to,
    25  on the one hand, and deliberate falsification on the
    26  other.

    .           P-38


      1  MR IRVING:  I have to let you get away with that, because I am
      2  not allowed now to ask any further questions about the
      3  photograph or about —-
      4  MR JUSTICE GRAY:  I did say I was not stopping you, but I was
      5  telling you that at the moment I do not find it very
      6  helpful. Do not say you are not allowed to; you are
      7  allowed to.
      8  MR IRVING:  Is Professor Jackeln a recognized authority on
      9  Hitler and the Holocaust? Has he written books and
    10  articles about it?
    11  A. [Professor Richard John Evans]: Yes, he has written books and articles about Hitler in
    12  particular, Hitler’s views.
    13  Q. [Mr Irving]: Does it diminish him in your esteem that he has fallen
    14  repeatedly for forgeries produced by a notorious forger,
    15  that he has he published them, that he did not willingly
    16  confess that they were forgeries or where they came from,
    17  and that he has relied on a dubious photograph?
    18  A. [Professor Richard John Evans]: Well, you mentioned one instance in which he fell for
    19  material from a notorious forger. If you can show me
    20  there are many others, then I will accept the word
    21  “repeatedly”.
    22  Q. [Mr Irving]: Do you agree that, in dealing with your treatment of the
    23  Hitler diaries, you accused me of liking the Hitler
    24  diaries and believing they were genuine because they gave
    25  a favourable impression of Hitler?
    26  A. [Professor Richard John Evans]: Again, I am following Mr Harris there. Let me quote him

    .           P-39


      1  in explaining why you endorsed them at a late stage,
      2  “Finally there was the fact that the diaries did not
      3  contain any evidence to suggest that Hitler was aware of
      4  the Holocaust”. Really I am following Mr Harris’s
      5  argument there.
      6  Q. [Mr Irving]: On what basis do you say —-
      7  A. [Professor Richard John Evans]: That was one of a number of reasons which he puts forward
      8  for your having endorsed them at a late stage.
      9  Q. [Mr Irving]: On what basis do you say that these fake diaries showed
    10  Hitler ordered a stop to the Reichskristallnacht?
    11  MR JUSTICE GRAY:  Mr Irving, I did say quite a long time ago
    12  that I am not going to pay any attention to the Hitler
    13  diaries because it is not any part of the Defendants’
    14  case. Really these questions are directly focused on the
    15  Hitler diaries, so I do now say you must move on.
    16  MR IRVING:  In paragraph 2.4.9, lines 5 and 6, there is a
    17  sentence there beginning, “If an obvious forgery like the
    18  Hitler diaries gives credence to my views, I will use
    19  it”. Is that not a reflection — am I allowed to say
    20  that, my Lord?
    21  MR JUSTICE GRAY:  I have already told you in the clearest
    22  possible way that I am not going to place any reliance in
    23  forming my judgment on what did or did not happen in the
    24  case of the Hitler diaries, so questions about it can only
    25  do you harm.
    26  MR IRVING:  Three lines from the bottom of that page 40 you

    .           P-40


      1  accuse me of rendering my footnotes deliberately opaque.
      2  A. [Professor Richard John Evans]: Yes.
      3  Q. [Mr Irving]: Can you think of any reason why a researcher or writer who
      4  has spent a lot of his private funds, who is not a tenured
      5  professor, who is entirely reliant on his professional
      6  income, obtaining access to sources, might wish to leave
      7  his footnotes opaque?
      8  A. [Professor Richard John Evans]: Yes. Either in the case of your extremely vague
      9  references to the author Ingrid Weckert in your account of
    10  the Reichskristallnacht, because that source is
    11  discreditable, because she is an anti-semitic politically
    12  motivated falsifier of history upon whom you rely in part
    13  of your account —-
    14  MR IRVING:  Do you consider that anti-semitic —-
    15  MR JUSTICE GRAY:  Let him finish his answer and then ask you
    16  next question.
    17  A. [Professor Richard John Evans]: Or that the sources do in fact, if anybody goes to the
    18  immense trouble of tracking them down as in the instance
    19  we already mentioned on Thursday, the evidence of the
    20  policeman Hoffmann at the 1924 trial of Hitler, if that
    21  source in fact contains things which you do not want to
    22  appear and you do not want people to know about. So it is
    23  a kind of judgment call on your part that you need to give
    24  a source, but you do not want people to find out too
    25  easily what is there.
    26  MR IRVING:  Can you think of no innocent explanation why the

    .           P-41


      1  aforementioned author might leave his sources opaque?
      2  A. [Professor Richard John Evans]: No.
      3  Q. [Mr Irving]: Are you familiar with the kind of scholar and academic who
      4  will pretend that he has done the research, who will
      5  pretend that he too has been to Canberra and Ottowa and
      6  Washington and Moscow, he will quite the file and he will
      7  quote the document number and even the page number in that
      8  file to give the impression that he has been there and
      9  done the work?
    10  A. [Professor Richard John Evans]: Give me an example.
    11  Q. [Mr Irving]: I am just asking you if are familiar with that kind of
    12  scholar?
    13  A. [Professor Richard John Evans]: I cannot think of any examples. Try and give me one.
    14  MR JUSTICE GRAY:  Is that legitimate, I really do not know as a
    15  matter of a historian’s proper approach? If you have seen
    16  some other historian give a reference for a
    17  particular proposition as being File X in the Washington
    18  archive or wherever, is it then illegitimate for the next
    19  historian simply to cite that as being the authority
    20  without actually going to the Washington archive and
    21  looking for himself?
    22  A. [Professor Richard John Evans]: Well, it is normal, my Lord, to say file so and so in the
    23  archive as cited in such and such a book. If you simply
    24  say file so and so in the archive, that does suggest you
    25  have been there. It is what I would call slightly sharp
    26  practice.

    .           P-42


      1  MR IRVING:  If, for example, you found in a book by David
      2  Irving on Winston Churchill unusual sources and you were
      3  an academic and a scholar, if you did not want to be
      4  associated with him, would there be a temptation just to
      5  use that file in the French National Archives or whatever
      6  it is and pretend you had seen it yourself, but not of
      7  course that you had it from David Irving’s book? Would
      8  there be that temptation?
      9  A. [Professor Richard John Evans]: I would not be tempted. I can only answer for myself.
    10  Q. [Mr Irving]: You would not be tempted to use the source?
    11  A. [Professor Richard John Evans]: I would want to go, if that was the work I was doing, to
    12  the archive and check the source. I would not take it on
    13  trust as it appears in your work.
    14  Q. [Mr Irving]: Even if you could go to some archives like the Institute
    15  of History where I did in the meantime deposit all the
    16  records so that you could check it out? Do you appreciate
    17  that there might be an innocent reason on the basis of
    18  what I have said, on the basis of my questions, why an
    19  author might sometimes wish to make it slightly less easy
    20  for a crooked scholar to steal his brain work?
    21  A. [Professor Richard John Evans]: You would have to show that there were crooked scholars
    22  around who are all desperate to steal your brain work.
    23  I do not believe that that is the case, so I do not really
    24  accept that there are innocent reasons. It is quite
    25  straightforward. If you cite an original or any source,
    26  if you use a source in your work, you footnote it in order

    .           P-43


      1  to enable other historians to go and find it and you are
      2  as helpful as possible to them. It is part of the kind of
      3  checks and controls which historians have, and this
      4  curious way we have to enable other people to challenge
      5  our own work and to falsify it and say that we are wrong.
      6  It is part of what I would call being an objective
      7  historian is.
      8  Q. [Mr Irving]: Do you agree that there are two kinds of books? There are
      9  the super academic works as submitted for PhDs or for some
    10  other kind of academic qualifications where everything has
    11  to be rigorously footnoted according to a standard scheme,
    12  and books which are sold in Books Etc. and Waterstones
    13  where books have to fit in within a reasonable size,
    14  number of pages, and that, if you put all the footnotes in
    15  to that scheme, you are going to end up with an
    16  uncommercial book. Do you agree with that proposition?
    17  A. [Professor Richard John Evans]: Not really, no. I think there is a large kind of scale of
    18  books, or a spectrum of books, from the academic PhD
    19  theses which is not really publishable as a book in many
    20  cases and has to be rewritten, where everything has to be
    21  all the Is dotted and all the Ts crossed all the way down
    22  to very general non-fiction books which do not have any
    23  footnotes in at all and everything in between. So I think
    24  there is a very wide spectrum. In respect of your works,
    25  Mr Irving, Hitler’s War is over 800 pages long. It is a
    26  very long book, and the claim that you make for it is that

    .           P-44


      1  it is based on an enormous mass of research and there are
      2  a lot of footnotes in it. It does give the appearance, as
      3  your other books do, of being a scholarly work. You make
      4  a great deal of the fact that you use a large number of
      5  source.
      6  Q. [Mr Irving]: Professor Evans, when your researchers were researching in
      7  my files at the Institute of History in Munich, did they
      8  come across a thick file there which was about 1,000 pages
      9  long, consisting of the original annotated footnotes of
    10  Hitler’s War which were referenced by number to every
    11  single sentence in that book?
    12  A. [Professor Richard John Evans]: No.
    13  Q. [Mr Irving]: It was not part of the published corpus, it was part of
    14  the original manuscript, but it was chopped out because of
    15  the length.
    16  A. [Professor Richard John Evans]: No, we did not see that.
    17  Q. [Mr Irving]: Have you seen isolated pages of that in my discovery in so
    18  far as it related to episodes which were of interest, like
    19  the Reichskristallnacht?
    20  A. [Professor Richard John Evans]: I do not, to be honest, recall, but that does not mean to
    21  say that we have not seen them.
    22  Q. [Mr Irving]: You said that my footnotes are opaque because they do not
    23  always give the page reference. Do you agree that, on a
    24  page which we are going to come across in the course of
    25  this morning, of your own expert report, you put a
    26  footnote in just saying “see van Pelt’s report”, see

    .           P-45


      1  expert report by Robert van Pelt, and that expert report
      2  is about 769 pages long, is it not?
      3  A. [Professor Richard John Evans]: Yes.
      4  Q. [Mr Irving]: That is not an opaque footnote?
      5  A. [Professor Richard John Evans]: No, because, when one says see this or see that, that
      6  means that you are not relying on that for what you say.
      7  It is simply a further reference directing the reader, if
      8  the reader wants to gain further information about that
      9  particular topic, to go there. If I were relying on
    10  Professor van Pelt’s report for anything I say in my own,
    11  which I am not, then I would footnote it as precisely as
    12  I could.
    13  MR JUSTICE GRAY:  Why are you not?
    14  A. [Professor Richard John Evans]: Why am I not relying on Professor van Pelt?
    15  Q. [Mr Justice Gray]: Is there a reason?
    16  A. [Professor Richard John Evans]: Well, his report is about something different from mine
    17  and I thought I should reach my own conclusions on the
    18  basis of my own work, but I do cross-reference other
    19  expert reports in so far as I think it is useful.
    20  MR IRVING:  It is a strange kind of cross-reference that just
    21  says “See expert report” by somebody.
    22  A. [Professor Richard John Evans]: Well, can you point me to the page?
    23  Q. [Mr Irving]: We will come to it later on. I am just looking for it and
    24  I do not want to hold up the court. If you would you go
    25  now to page 41 of the expert report, please, paragraph
    26  251? Can I ask that you be given bundle H1(i), please, so

    .           P-46


      1  we can see what you have omitted from the quotations? It
      2  is a passage where you say: “They are not lies, what I
      3  have published, they are true. At any rate, the truth as
      4  I perceive it”. Then you omit bits.
      5  A. [Professor Richard John Evans]: Where is this — yes.
      6  Q. [Mr Irving]: That should be H1(i) at page 94?
      7  A. [Professor Richard John Evans]: Page 94. Yes.
      8  MR JUSTICE GRAY:  Whereabouts on the page, bottom of the page,
      9  is it?
    10  A. [Professor Richard John Evans]: It is near the bottom of the page.
    11  MR JUSTICE GRAY:  Yes.
    12  MR IRVING:  Do you not admit a passage there about how it gets
    13  far more expensive the closer you approximate towards the
    14  truth, that it is quite easy to find out 90 per cent of
    15  the truth, and then it gets a bit more expensive to get 95
    16  per cent of the truth, and to get absolute truth is
    17  impossible, but it gets more and more and more expensive?
    18  That is roughly the sense of it. I do not have it in
    19  front of me, but I am familiar with the speech.
    20  A. [Professor Richard John Evans]: That is where you say it is a shame that we lost the
    21  United States.
    22  Q. [Mr Irving]: Yes. “They are not out lies, what I have published, they
    23  are true, at any rate, the truth as I perceive it”?
    24  A. [Professor Richard John Evans]: Yes.
    25  Q. [Mr Irving]: Then you left out the explanatory bit?
    26  A. [Professor Richard John Evans]: No. “Even the most erudite and hard working historian”, I

    .           P-47


      1  say, “is never going to obtain 100 per cent truth. He is
      2  only going to approximate it”, and that, I think, gives
      3  the sense of what you are saying. I come back to the
      4  point, I echo the point that you have made about your own
      5  work, this report is already 740 pages long, and in this
      6  quotation, I think I give the essence of what you are
      7  saying there.
      8  Moreover, of course, I do put the ellipse in,
      9  three dots, to tell the reader that I am leaving something
    10  out there so the reader can do, as you have done, go back
    11  and cheek the speech and see if I have left anything out
    12  that I should not have left out. That is not the case in
    13  quite a number of the cases in which you abbreviate
    14  quotations from the original sources, as I have shown in
    15  my report.
    16  Q. [Mr Irving]: Yes, but —-
    17  MR JUSTICE GRAY:  But it is fair to say Mr Irving does go on
    18  really to say he is one of those writers who does try to
    19  get the extra 10 per cent and get 100 per cent accuracy?
    20  I think that is the burden of the passage as a whole.
    21  A. [Professor Richard John Evans]: Yes, indeed, yes.
    22  MR IRVING:  Unfortunately, not everyone has our patience to go
    23  and look up the original document to see what has been
    24  replaced by the three dots. There is another passage,
    25  while you still have that H1 in front of you, please, can
    26  I ask you to go to page 106 of H1(i)? This has a rather

    .           P-48


      1  more important kind of material that has been left out of
      2  the indented paragraph?
      3  A. [Professor Richard John Evans]: Yes.
      4  Q. [Mr Irving]: In the middle of page 41 of the expert report, my Lord.
      5  MR JUSTICE GRAY:  Yes, I have it.
      6  MR IRVING:  Your Lordship will see that the witness has omitted
      7  all the reference to the organized campaign of window
      8  smashing and so on that went on around this country to
      9  persuade Waterstones not to stock my books and other
    10  booksellers. He then goes on to mock me for suggesting
    11  that there is a campaign, having cut out the material
    12  relating to it out of the quotation.
    13  A. [Professor Richard John Evans]: Sorry, where do I mock you?
    14  Q. [Mr Irving]: Page 42 at 254: “Irving does not appear to believe that
    15  other historians can rise to the challenge; rather he
    16  believes that there is an international campaign organized
    17  by the Jewish community in many countries to stop him from
    18  speaking and selling his books”?
    19  A. [Professor Richard John Evans]: Well, that is my sense of what you believe. I do not see
    20  anything mocking in that. I am trying to convey your own
    21  point of view there. Once again, of course, in this
    22  passage that you mention, there are ellipses to denote
    23  that I have omitted some material, and really what I am
    24  trying to do here is to describe your view of history.
    25  I am not really concerned with all the details that you
    26  give here about the campaign which you allege is being

    .           P-49


      1  conducted against your work. That is not what I am
      2  concerned with.
      3  Q. [Mr Irving]: Here you go on about the campaign I allege has been
      4  conducted against my work, but you have deprived his
      5  Lordship of knowing details of what that campaign is; the
      6  fact that there was an organized campaign of window
      7  smashing in the big book stores to persuade them not to
      8  stock my books.
      9  A. [Professor Richard John Evans]: How is that relevant to my report? I really do not see
    10  it.
    11  Q. [Mr Irving]: Because you say (as you have just said) that I allege
    12  there is a campaign and you say in paragraph 2.5.4 that
    13  I seem to believe that there is a campaign to stop me
    14  selling my books, and yet you have cut out of that
    15  quotation concrete evidence of the campaign that has been
    16  going on?
    17  A. [Professor Richard John Evans]: But it is not my concern in this report to deal with the
    18  campaign. I have given your view here that there is a
    19  campaign, and I think in the context of a report which is
    20  about your treatment of historical subjects, that that is
    21  enough. If I went, if I had gone in this report into
    22  every issue like that, it would have been enormously long
    23  and I really do not think that is relevant to what was
    24  asked to do.
    25  MR RAMPTON:  I should intervene. Mr Irving actually misread
    26  the report. It is only so that it gets on the

    .           P-50


      1  transcript. The report actually did not say “he seems to
      2  believe”.
      3  MR JUSTICE GRAY:  “He believes”.
      4  MR RAMPTON:  It says “he believes”.
      5  MR JUSTICE GRAY:  I did notice that.
      6  MR IRVING:  If had omitted any reference to book burning from a
      7  passage about the Nazi activities in 1933, that would have
      8  been duplicitous, would it not?
      9  A. [Professor Richard John Evans]: It depends what you are trying to write about the Nazi
    10  activities in 1933.
    11  Q. [Mr Irving]: They were suppressing books that they disapproved of.
    12  A. [Professor Richard John Evans]: If you are writing a dissertation about the Nazi policy
    13  towards the Civil Service or the Nazi policy towards the
    14  Bau(?) in 1933, then I do not think book burning would
    15  necessarily have been a relevant consideration.
    16  Q. [Mr Irving]: If I had omitted the book burning in Berlin in March 1933
    17  from my Goebbels’ biography, then this would have been
    18  duplicitous, would it not, and if I had just said, “Well,
    19  that did not really belong”?
    20  A. [Professor Richard John Evans]: That is certainly true since Goebbels was centrally
    21  concerned with it.
    22  Q. [Mr Irving]: If I had omitted the window smashing, which is very
    23  apposite, from the Kristallnacht, that would also have
    24  been duplicitous, would it not?
    25  A. [Professor Richard John Evans]: Absolutely, yes.
    26  Q. [Mr Irving]: So why is it not duplicitous that you omitted that passage

    .           P-51


      1  from that passage you quoted?
      2  MR JUSTICE GRAY:  I understand your point, but the fact is in
      3  paragraph 254 Professor Evans does refer to your belief
      4  that there is an international campaign to prevent you
      5  from speaking and selling your books. So he is not
      6  actually concealing it, is he, in his report? Anyway,
      7  I understand the point, but let us go on to the next
      8  point.
      9  MR IRVING:  Many paranoid people have beliefs which are not
    10  supported by evidence, my Lord, but if there is a campaign
    11  of window smashing which is in the discovery, which is in
    12  the documents before the court, the witness should not
    13  have cut it out of the part that he quotes.
    14  MR JUSTICE GRAY:  I understand that is the criticism you make
    15  of him, yes.
    16  MR IRVING:  That is my submission. That I regard as earning
    17  all the adjectives that have been heaped on me by this
    18  witness.
    19  (To the witness): In that same paragraph, 254,
    20  we are back to your report, Professor. You say: “Irving
    21  does not appear to believe that other historians can rise
    22  to this challenge, rather he believes there is an
    23  international campaign ordered by the ‘Jewish community
    24  (our traditional enemies)'”?
    25  A. [Professor Richard John Evans]: Yes.
    26  Q. [Mr Irving]: What entitles you to equate those two as though I had said

    .           P-52


      1  that the traditional enemies of the truth or free speech
      2  are the Jewish community?
      3  A. [Professor Richard John Evans]: Well, on your website you list, you have a section where
      4  you list the traditional enemies of free speech.
      5  Q. [Mr Irving]: Which includes the Jewish community leaders, yes.
      6  A. [Professor Richard John Evans]: Nearly all of them. I think there is only one
      7  organization there which is not a Jewish organization.
      8  Q. [Mr Irving]: But you put the words “Jewish community” in quotation
      9  marks as though you are taking it out of some document of
    10  mine?
    11  A. [Professor Richard John Evans]: I did not want to imply that there was a Jewish community
    12  in that sense. That is why I put it in inverted commas.
    13  Q. [Mr Irving]: You refer quite correctly to my website where I have a
    14  menu of traditional enemies of free speech, some of whom
    15  are specific organizations which are Jewish in character?
    16  That is correct?
    17  A. [Professor Richard John Evans]: Nearly all of whom — all apart from one.
    18  MR JUSTICE GRAY:  Have you got the reference for this either in
    19  your own report or in the website file because I would
    20  quite like to see it if the point is being taken. It is
    21  difficult —-
    22  MR RAMPTON:  My Lord, I —-
    23  A. [Professor Richard John Evans]: It is page 168 of my report, my Lord, where I detail a
    24  number of cases where Mr Irving has equated — I quote
    25  here a speech in 1992: “‘Our old traditional enemies …
    26  (are) the great international merchant banks are

    .           P-53


      1  controlled by people who are no friends of yours and
      2  mine’, who were ‘annoyed’ friend by” —-
      3  MR IRVING:  What paragraph is that?
      4  A. [Professor Richard John Evans]: 168, paragraph 50.
      5  Q. [Mr Irving]: Is there an ellipsis in the middle of that?
      6  A. [Professor Richard John Evans]: Yes.
      7  Q. [Mr Irving]: Will you please look at the document and see the four
      8  sentences, three fullstops, four semi-colons and 86 words
      9  that those three dots represent?
    10  A. [Professor Richard John Evans]: Could you direct me to —-
    11  Q. [Mr Irving]: And see if that is a genuine quote?
    12  A. [Professor Richard John Evans]: — the document, please?
    13  MR JUSTICE GRAY:  Yes. That is fair.
    14  MR IRVING:  That is the document, I am very familiar with that
    15  quotation.
    16  A. [Professor Richard John Evans]: Could you direct me to it, please?
    17  MR IRVING:  This is highly illuminative and illustrative of
    18  this witness’s methods.
    19  MR RAMPTON:  I think it is the Clarendon Club. I think your
    20  Lordship has probably already seen that, in fact.
    21  Unfortunately, mine is not here.
    22  MR JUSTICE GRAY:  D2(ii).
    23  MR RAMPTON:  Yes. It is K4, tab 5, Clarendon Club.
    24  MR JUSTICE GRAY:  I am not sure this is actually going to be
    25  the answer to the question, but that may be wrong.
    26  MR IRVING:  The question is what do those three dots represent?

    .           P-54


      1  A. [Professor Richard John Evans]: K4?
      2  MR RAMPTON:  K4, tab 5.
      3  A. [Professor Richard John Evans]: Yes, 5, I have that.
      4  MR RAMPTON:  This is the Clarendon Club in September 1992 which
      5  I think is the reference we have here?
      6  A. [Professor Richard John Evans]: “Our old traditional enemies”.
      7  MR JUSTICE GRAY:  Bottom of page 3 of 13.
      8  A. [Professor Richard John Evans]: Yes. Right, shall I read that out, if you would not
      9  mind?
    10  MR JUSTICE GRAY:  Yes.
    11  MR IRVING:  My first question is —-
    12  A. [Professor Richard John Evans]: May I read that out then?
    13  MR JUSTICE GRAY:  He is just going to read it first and then
    14  ask the question.
    15  A. [Professor Richard John Evans]: It is about Andrew Neil, the Editor of the Sunday Times,
    16  and the Goebbels’ diaries which he was publishing in your
    17  — from you, and that he had come under pressure “‘from
    18  our traditional enemies, pressure not just from the
    19  advertising industry, pressure not just from the
    20  self-appointed, ugly, greasy nasty, perverted
    21  representatives of that community, he came under pressure
    22  from the international community too because the Sunday
    23  Times, like many other newspapers, needs international
    24  capital to survive and the international capital is
    25  provided by the great international merchant banks, and
    26  the great international banks are controlled by people who

    .           P-55


      1  are no friends of yours and mine'”.
      2  MR JUSTICE GRAY:  That appears to be Andrew Neil speaking.
      3  MR IRVING:  What I am looking at is what those three dots
      4  represent which is not just —-
      5  MR JUSTICE GRAY:  Pause a moment. We will get to that in a
      6  second.
      7  A. [Professor Richard John Evans]: I take that to be Mr Irving’s paraphrase and version and
      8  gloss on what Mr Neil was saying.
      9  MR JUSTICE GRAY:  So the answer is yes, but it is a gloss?
    10  A. [Professor Richard John Evans]: A very heavy gloss, my Lord, I think, and it goes on to
    11  say, “And Andrew Neil found that these 60 foot long
    12  posters had annoyed these people, and they put immense
    13  pressure on him, and we know this because from all over
    14  the world I have been getting press clippings”, and so on
    15  and so forth.
    16  MR IRVING:  Where do the three dots end and the sentence
    17  resume?
    18  A. [Professor Richard John Evans]: “‘… are the great international'” — “our old
    19  traditional enemies are”, it is three lines up from the
    20  bottom of page 3 and the sentence resumes four lines down
    21  from the top of page 4, so that is, five lines are omitted
    22  there.
    23  Q. [Mr Irving]: My point is, my Lord, that when you see three dots in the
    24  middle of a sentence like that, you are entitled to assume
    25  that a few words have been left out of a sentence, not
    26  that two words have been taken from one sentence and then

    .           P-56


      1  sentences later they have been glued on to.
      2  MR JUSTICE GRAY:  Well, I think the point, and bear in mind we
      3  are not really concerned with your criticisms of Professor
      4  Evans, rather the other way round, but the point is
      5  whether anything has been left out that materially affects
      6  what is quoted. It seems to me that in this particular
      7  instance what has been left out by Professor Evans really
      8  makes no difference. Indeed, in many ways he might have
      9  made his point more strongly if he had put in what he had
    10  left out, the reference to “the self-appointed, ugly,
    11  greasy, nasty, perverted representatives of that
    12  community”.
    13  MR IRVING:  I agree, my Lord, but my point is that if I had
    14  adopted that kind of abbreviation in a paragraph, and I
    15  had cut out three or four sentences, full stops,
    16  semi-colons and 86 words and replaced them by three dots,
    17  it would have been completely reprehensible and it would
    18  have been rightly pounced on by all the witnesses in this
    19  case.
    20  MR JUSTICE GRAY:  I would not have thought it was reprehensible
    21  unless it did some injustice to what remains quoted.
    22  MR IRVING:  If I can put it another way? If I were an editor
    23  in a reputable publishing house and I caught one of my
    24  authors doing that, then I would sit on him like a tonne
    25  of bricks and say, “You cannot do this”.
    26  MR JUSTICE GRAY:  Anyway, let us move on.

    .           P-57


      1  A. [Professor Richard John Evans]: Yes. If I can just say, my Lord, the point that I make
      2  repeatedly in my report is that the three dots, as it
      3  were, are missing from Mr Irving’s manipulation of
      4  quotations. He does not —-
      5  MR IRVING:  Have you found one instance where I have not
      6  replaced missing materials with the appropriate ellipses,
      7  I ask you, Professor.
      8  A. [Professor Richard John Evans]: Plenty, yes.
      9  Q. [Mr Irving]: And you have referred to them actually in your report?
    10  A. [Professor Richard John Evans]: Yes, yes.
    11  Q. [Mr Irving]: We shall take that when we come. Can you give one example
    12  from memory?
    13  A. [Professor Richard John Evans]: For example, in your — yes, from memory, your account of
    14  the discussions between Admiral Horthy and Hitler and
    15  Ribbentrop in 1943, when you actually mix up, when you
    16  transpose a phrase from Hitler from one day to the other
    17  in order to make him look better without any indication
    18  that you have actually done this.
    19  Q. [Mr Irving]: This is totally different from the question I asked you.
    20  Have you found one instance where I left words or a
    21  passage out of a document and did not replace it with
    22  ellipses?
    23  A. [Professor Richard John Evans]: Exactly, then that is exactly my answer.
    24  Q. [Mr Irving]: No.
    25  A. [Professor Richard John Evans]: I am afraid it is, Mr Irving. Shall we turn to the
    26  pages —-

    .           P-58


      1  Q. [Mr Irving]: Please do, yes.
      2  A. [Professor Richard John Evans]: — in question?
      3  MR JUSTICE GRAY:  It is around page 440. I think it is 444,
      4  but I may be wrong.
      5  A. [Professor Richard John Evans]: The point here is that you transpose the sentence
      6  from —-
      7  MR IRVING:  We are not talking about transposition here.
      8  A. [Professor Richard John Evans]: Well, what we are doing is that you leave out the entire
      9  gap, the entire enormous passages, between the discussions
    10  of 16th and discussions of 17th of April 1943, and
    11  you —-
    12  Q. [Mr Irving]: I think you are deliberately obscuring the issue. This is
    13  not the answer to my question.
    14  A. [Professor Richard John Evans]: I am sorry, I am not deliberately obscuring —-
    15  MR JUSTICE GRAY:  Well, let him give it and then you can, of
    16  course, make the point that it is not an answer to the
    17  question. Sorry, Professor Evans, carry on.
    18  A. [Professor Richard John Evans]: Here is your — you simply go straight on, what you said,
    19  “‘They can hardly be murdered or otherwise eliminated’,
    20  he protested. Hitler reassured him there is no need for
    21  that”.
    22  MR IRVING:  Are you suggesting I left material out of that
    23  sentence?
    24  A. [Professor Richard John Evans]: That implied, that implies, that there was no gap at all
    25  between these two sentences.
    26  Q. [Mr Irving]: You know as well as I do, Professor, what the etiquette

    .           P-59


      1  for use of ellipses is. Is that correct?
      2  A. [Professor Richard John Evans]: Indeed, yes.
      3  Q. [Mr Irving]: That is not an appropriate place for the insertion of
      4  ellipses. One has not left material out.
      5  A. [Professor Richard John Evans]: You have taken a Hitler statement from one day and
      6  transposed it to another.
      7  Q. [Mr Irving]: We are not talking about transposition.
      8  A. [Professor Richard John Evans]: You have an left enormous amount of material out there and
      9  given a completely misleading impression of the
    10  discussions which took place.
    11  Q. [Mr Irving]: Professor, would you accept that if you quote one sentence
    12  from a report, by definition, you are leaving out the
    13  whole of the rest of the report, and you do not replace
    14  the rest of the report with ellipses, is that correct?
    15  A. [Professor Richard John Evans]: It depends how you do it. I mean, for example, I could
    16  have done in my report, instead of having and indented
    17  quote with ellipses in, I could have had a number of
    18  separate quotes as you do here, separated by your own or
    19  my own commentary, but the effect is the same.
    20  Q. [Mr Irving]: In the case instanced here it would not have worked, would
    21  it, because you said “the merchant banks …” and then you
    22  go on using the verb of another sentence.
    23  A. [Professor Richard John Evans]: Yes, I do not think that what I have left out, had it been
    24  put in, would have given what you said, another
    25  impression, a different meaning.
    26  Q. [Mr Irving]: Why do you say that I equate the traditional enemies of

    .           P-60


      1  free speech with the “Jewish community”, in quotation
      2  marks, when it is quite plain from everything that I have
      3  written that they are part of the bundle of people who try
      4  to suppress free speech, either by refusing to debate, or
      5  by smashing windows, or by putting pressure on publishers,
      6  or by inserting filters in the Internet or whatever?
      7  A. [Professor Richard John Evans]: I have already given my answer to that, the fact that on
      8  your website your list of the traditional enemies of free
      9  speech includes —-
    10  Q. [Mr Irving]: Is entirely Jewish, is entirely Jewish community, is it?
    11  A. [Professor Richard John Evans]: 90 per cent, I think.
    12  MR JUSTICE GRAY:  I wish we could find it because, if Professor
    13  Evans is right, it is an answer to the question and it is
    14  quite an illuminating answer.
    15  MR IRVING:  I agree, it is. Would you agree that the
    16  Australian Government is one of the people listed on that
    17  pull down menu?
    18  A. [Professor Richard John Evans]: I would have to see the list.
    19  Q. [Mr Irving]: Would you agree that Cyber Patrol which is a filtering
    20  system for the Internet Surf Watch?
    21  MR JUSTICE GRAY:  Until and until we find it, Mr Irving, this
    22  is a bit difficult, is it not?
    23  MR IRVING:  I am trying to put some ideas in your Lordship’s
    24  mind, that this witness is not accurate when he says 90
    25  per cent of the representatives on there are. Obviously
    26  and finally one further question on this, would you agree

    .           P-61


      1  that in view of the fact that these particular bodies are
      2  the ones who have inflicted most damage on me over the
      3  last 10 years —-
      4  A. [Professor Richard John Evans]: Let me just quote, Mr Irving, another quote from page 168
      5  from a speech you made in the Clarendon Club again, 29th
      6  May 1992 —-
      7  Q. [Mr Irving]: Is this relevant to the questions that we have asked?
      8  A. [Professor Richard John Evans]: “I never used to believe in the existence of an
      9  international Jewish conspiracy”, you said, “I’m not even
    10  sure now if there’s an international Jewish conspiracy.
    11  All I know is that people are conspiring internationally
    12  against me, and they do mostly turn out to be”.
    13  Q. [Mr Irving]: …
    14  A. [Professor Richard John Evans]: “… (drowned out by laughter and applause) which I think
    15  it is fairly clear that the next word was going to be
    16  “Jews”.

    Section 62.17 to 96.18

    17  MR IRVING:  My Lord, I am not able to put bundle E to this
    18  witness and ask him questions on the documents which will
    19  substantiate what I just said in that speech, but
    20  certainly when we come to submissions which I am going to
    21  make, then I will justify that particular element.
    22  MR JUSTICE GRAY:  I am not sure why you say you are not —-
    23  MR IRVING:  Because your Lordship has said that this is not the
    24  appropriate time to introduce bundle E with the documents
    25  on the global endeavour to suppress my rights to publish
    26  and write.

    .           P-62


      1  MR JUSTICE GRAY:  No, and the reason I said was that it seemed
      2  to me that the point went to the damage that you say you
      3  suffered as a result of what you say are libels. That is
      4  something you can deal with in your evidence or in
      5  submissions. But if you are challenging — but, you see,
      6  it is coming in a slightly different context. I think
      7  really, and when one gets to the bottom of it, it is
      8  further evidence — I think this is the thrust of what
      9  Professor Evans is saying at the moment — of an
    10  anti-semitic attitude.
    11  MR IRVING:  I agree, if left alone.
    12  MR JUSTICE GRAY:  On that, you are entitled to cross-examine.
    13  I hope you do not understand that one document may be
    14  relevant on two issues. On one issue —-
    15  MR IRVING:  I will not use the licence that your Lordship has
    16  given me.
    17  MR JUSTICE GRAY:  On any reliance that Professor Evans places
    18  on particular documents as showing your anti-Semitism, you
    19  are perfectly entitled — I make this absolutely clear —
    20  to cross-examine. So if you want to show him that
    21  document from your bundle E, then please do, or your clip
    22  E. It has not become a bundle yet, has it?
    23  MR IRVING:  It is quite substantial. Do you have bundle a
    24  bundle E in front of you? That is how big it is. It has
    25  been quite a major conspiracy. This is only a part of it.
    26  MR JUSTICE GRAY:  I am not encouraging you to go right the way

    .           P-63


      1  through it. It is simply that if there is any —-
      2  MR IRVING:  No, my Lord, but I think, firstly, one or two
      3  general questions.
      4  MR JUSTICE GRAY:  Page, Mr Irving?
      5  MR IRVING:  I am going to ask him one or two general questions
      6  first to set the scenery. (To the witness): Witness, is
      7  it your opinion that that remark you just quoted is
      8  evidence of an anti-semitic state of mind?
      9  A. [Professor Richard John Evans]: Sorry, which remark was this?
    10  Q. [Mr Irving]: You one that you decided to read out about the
    11  international conspiracy.
    12  A. [Professor Richard John Evans]: Conspiracy, yes.
    13  Q. [Mr Irving]: Is criticism of Jewish people or community permitted for
    14  whatever reason?
    15  MR JUSTICE GRAY:  We had this yesterday. I do not think we
    16  need to traverse that ground again.
    17  A. [Professor Richard John Evans]: Of course.
    18  MR JUSTICE GRAY:  When I say “yesterday”, I mean Thursday.
    19  MR IRVING:  If you are shown scattered evidence of a concerted
    20  endeavour by representatives of that community to abrogate
    21  my rights to write and publish, over a period of, say, 25
    22  years, around the world, would you be satisfied that that
    23  was a justified comment to make in those conditions?
    24  A. [Professor Richard John Evans]: Well, that is a very hypothetical question. In order to
    25  be — I mean, I am constitutionally disinclined to believe
    26  in international conspiracies, and it would take a very

    .           P-64


      1  great deal to persuade me that there was an
      2  internationally orchestrated conspiracy of this kind. It
      3  is the belief in an international Jewish conspiracy is a
      4  central element, in my view, of the most extreme forms of
      5  anti-Semitism.
      6  Q. [Mr Irving]: You talk about an international Jewish conspiracy, you are
      7  just talking about the kind of protocols of a Zion
      8  conspiracy, are you, or is one entitled to believe in a
      9  specific endeavour to achieve a certain aim, namely to
    10  silence David Irving as being a particularly dangerous
    11  historian? Is that an acceptable concept in your mind?
    12  Can you believe there is such an endeavour —-
    13  A. [Professor Richard John Evans]: I do not myself believe there is such an endeavour, no.
    14  Q. [Mr Irving]: If —-
    15  A. [Professor Richard John Evans]: But I have to say that it has not been a part of my task
    16  to investigate whether there has or not. I am not
    17  speaking, in other words, as an expert when I say that.
    18  Q. [Mr Irving]: My Lord, I am wondering what use it is going to be to put
    19  these documents piecemeal to this witness. I do not think
    20  it is at this point.
    21  MR JUSTICE GRAY:  None at all. I mean, his position is very
    22  clear. He does not believe that there is an international
    23  Jewish conspiracy. Therefore, he thinks that when you
    24  talk of one, you are displaying evidence of anti-semitism.
    25  That is the end of it as far as this witness goes, I
    26  think.

    .           P-65


      1  MR IRVING:  Yes. As long as your Lordship appreciates that the
      2  time will come when I will justify whatever remarks
      3  I made.
      4  MR JUSTICE GRAY:  Absolutely.
      5  MR IRVING:  The only problem is we have a rather unruly
      6  witness, I think, who —-
      7  MR JUSTICE GRAY:  No, that is not an appropriate comment at
      8  all.
      9  MR IRVING:  Well, I think it was not necessary really for him
    10  to have read out that passage if he was not prepared
    11  really to be cross-examined on it in depth on his own
    12  knowledge.
    13  MR JUSTICE GRAY:  Well, it happened. It was not unruly
    14  behaviour.
    15  A. [Professor Richard John Evans]: Thank, my Lord.
    16  MR IRVING:  Do you accept that this phrase “the enemies of free
    17  speech” to which the full phrase applies, “the traditional
    18  enemies” includes governments, political groups, trades
    19  unions and others as well the Jewish community leaders and
    20  other organizations?
    21  A. [Professor Richard John Evans]: Sorry, where is the passage then where you say that? Are
    22  we back to the website again?
    23  Q. [Mr Irving]: No, I am back to your reference in that paragraph, to
    24  paragraph 2.5.4 to “the Jewish community” which you now
    25  admit is a phrase that I do not use.
    26  MR JUSTICE GRAY:  Have we got the reference in the website?

    .           P-66


      1  MR IRVING:  Paragraph 2.5.4, my Lord, of his report: “Irving
      2  believes that there is an international campaign
      3  orchestrated by the ‘Jewish community’ (‘our traditional
      4  enemies’)” as though there is an equation between the two,
      5  an equation, shall we say?
      6  A. [Professor Richard John Evans]: Well, Mr Irving, you do in your speeches repeatedly refer
      7  to “our traditional enemies”, and I think it is clear, in
      8  my judgment, that by “our traditional enemies” you mean,
      9  essentially, the Jews.
    10  Q. [Mr Irving]: Is it not true that the phrase that I use is “the
    11  traditional enemies of free speech”?
    12  A. [Professor Richard John Evans]: Not always, no. You refer to “our traditional enemies” on
    13  a number of occasions.
    14  Q. [Mr Irving]: Is it not obvious that one is the short form of the other?
    15  A. [Professor Richard John Evans]: No.
    16  Q. [Mr Irving]: “Our traditional enemies” is three words and “the
    17  traditional enemies of free speech” is five or six words.
    18  One is the short form of the other?
    19  A. [Professor Richard John Evans]: I quote on page 168 “our traditional enemies”, “our old
    20  traditional enemies”, and so on.
    21  Q. [Mr Irving]: Yes, but you appreciate that when you are speaking you do
    22  not use again and again and again exactly the same phrase,
    23  you modify it slightly. Sometimes you use the long form
    24  and sometimes you use the short form?
    25  A. [Professor Richard John Evans]: Well, I have gone through a number of your speeches,
    26  Mr Irving, and you do use exactly the same phrases on a

    .           P-67


      1  number of —-
      2  Q. [Mr Irving]: “The traditional enemies of free speech”?
      3  A. [Professor Richard John Evans]: — because you speak in a number of different places,
      4  “our traditional enemies”.
      5  Q. [Mr Irving]: And “the traditional enemies of free speech”.
      6  A. [Professor Richard John Evans]: You have used both of those formulations.
      7  Q. [Mr Irving]: Yes, and “the traditional enemies of free speech”, as I
      8  formulated them both in public and on my website, include
      9  the people who are trying to censor the Internet, is that
    10  correct?
    11  A. [Professor Richard John Evans]: I think, Mr Irving — correct me if I am wrong — you have
    12  taken to talking about the traditional enemies of free
    13  speech more recently. In the early 1990s, it was — you
    14  were much more inclined to talk about our traditional
    15  enemies.
    16  Q. [Mr Irving]: Do you have any evidence, any kind of statistical
    17  evidence, for that or that just a gut feeling you have
    18  that makes you say that?
    19  A. [Professor Richard John Evans]: That is just an impression I have on looking at and
    20  reading your speeches and your writings.
    21  Q. [Mr Irving]: But you have no evidentiary basis for that apart from your
    22  recollection?
    23  A. [Professor Richard John Evans]: That is my impression from having read your material.
    24  Q. [Mr Irving]: Will you now answer my question and say, is it true that
    25  on my website and elsewhere I have listed as the
    26  traditional enemies of free speech, governments, trades

    .           P-68


      1  unions and people who are censoring the Internet?
      2  A. [Professor Richard John Evans]: Again, Mr Irving, we are back to the problem —-
      3  Q. [Mr Irving]: And there are separate dossiers on each of those people?
      4  A. [Professor Richard John Evans]: — that we need to look at that page of your website
      5  where you —-
      6  MR JUSTICE GRAY:  We are going to have to pause until somebody
      7  has been able to find it. I do not mean pause altogether,
      8  I mean come back to it.
      9  MR IRVING:  I have one more question.
    10  A. [Professor Richard John Evans]: All I can say is that when I checked out, the list
    11  provided of some traditional enemies of free speech, there
    12  were virtually all Jewish.
    13  MR RAMPTON:  Can I intervene because it involves a technical
    14  problem which is beyond me. Could I ask Miss Rogers to
    15  explain it?
    16  MR JUSTICE GRAY:  Would you mind, Miss Rogers?
    17  MS ROGERS:  My Lord, what happens is if you click on the
    18  website, there is what is called down a pull down menu
    19  which lists the organizations under a heading, but I am
    20  told — I cannot do it– by others as well it is not
    21  possible to print the pull down menu.
    22  MR IRVING:  On Mackintosh it is.
    23  MS ROGERS:  What one could do, one could either type out the
    24  list, or perhaps your Lordship, with assistance, could go
    25  on Mr Irving’s website and have a look and see the list.
    26  MR JUSTICE GRAY:  I will do that. Is it possible to give me a

    .           P-69


      1  reference to where I will find it on the website?
      2  MR IRVING:  Www.fpp.co.uk/trial.
      3  A. [Professor Richard John Evans]: It is very easy, my Lord, to find it on the website. It
      4  is a very clearly organised website.
      5  MR JUSTICE GRAY:  Right, thank you very much, Miss Rogers. I
      6  am not surprised you —-
      7  MR IRVING:  So that each of these particular things has a
      8  dossier, right? Each of these organisations, the
      9  Anti-Defamation League, the Board of Deputies, each of
    10  them has a dossier?
    11  A. [Professor Richard John Evans]: Right.
    12  MR JUSTICE GRAY:  Mr Irving, shall we leave it that I will have
    13  a look, and I know what the question is, whether they are
    14  mostly Jewish organizations or whether they are not.
    15  MR IRVING:  My Lord, you are just going to have a look at the
    16  menu, are you not, is that correct?
    17  MR JUSTICE GRAY:  I am not going to browse generally through
    18  the Internet. No, I did not mean that in any way
    19  critically of it. I just am not going to; there is plenty
    20  else to be doing.
    21  MR IRVING:  Because there are 53 megabytes of information on
    22  that and I have idea which particular part of the forest
    23  you are going to get lost in.
    24  (To the witness):  Do you accept that there is
    25  concerted campaign by the traditional enemies of free
    26  speech to refuse to debate with people like me?

    .           P-70


      1  A. [Professor Richard John Evans]: I do not accept the concept of traditional enemies of free
      2  speech, to start with. I do not accept that there is a
      3  concerted campaign. No, I have not seen evidence for
      4  that.
      5  Q. [Mr Irving]: Are you familiar with the number of times I have been
      6  invited to speak at universities over the last 10 years
      7  and the university has then come under pressure to cancel
      8  the invitation?
      9  A. [Professor Richard John Evans]: I am not, no, but I can quite believe that that is the
    10  case.
    11  Q. [Mr Irving]: Has this happened to other historians like John Charmley?
    12  A. [Professor Richard John Evans]: I do not regard you as an historian, Mr Irving. Let me
    13  make a distinction between universities and other venues.
    14  By appearing at a university and speaking in a university,
    15  I think you lay a claim to being an academic or being a
    16  scholarly historian which you receive an endorsement from
    17  by the fact that you appear at a university.
    18  Q. [Mr Irving]: I am careful not to create the impression that I am a
    19  scholar. Nothing would frighten me more.
    20  A. [Professor Richard John Evans]: I think you try and give that impression in your books.
    21  You may have a different definition of “scholarship” from
    22  the one that I have. There is a distinction to be made,
    23  surely, if you take United States of America where nobody
    24  stops you from going around making speeches wherever you
    25  want to apart from universities.
    26  Q. [Mr Irving]: Are you familiar that I have lectured at the National

    .           P-71


      1  Archives in Washington?
      2  A. [Professor Richard John Evans]: On what occasion?
      3  Q. [Mr Irving]: About five years ago on Hermann Goring.
      4  A. [Professor Richard John Evans]: I am not familiar, no.
      5  Q. [Mr Irving]: Are you familiar with the fact that I have lectured at
      6  Harvard on Adolf Hitler at the invitation of the Master of
      7  Harvard, Dr Richard Hunt?
      8  A. [Professor Richard John Evans]: On what occasion was that?
      9  Q. [Mr Irving]: This was 1977, I lectured on Hitler’s War.
    10  A. [Professor Richard John Evans]: Yes, I am familiar with the fact that you have talked to
    11  many academic institutions in the 1970s, including my own
    12  college in Cambridge, I believe.
    13  Q. [Mr Irving]: Indeed. I have spoken at Caius and I have spoken at
    14  various other colleges around the world until the problems
    15  arose. Are you familiar with the fact that these problems
    16  were generated by outside organisations?
    17  A. [Professor Richard John Evans]: I would have to be provided with evidence of that,
    18  I think.
    19  Q. [Mr Irving]: Are you familiar with the fact that I was in the
    20  University of Cork in Southern Ireland?
    21  MR JUSTICE GRAY:  Mr Irving, how is it going to help me that
    22  you were addressing the University of Cork? We really
    23  must keep an eye on the ball. We have spent a very long
    24  time deal with these preliminary passages and I can
    25  understand why, for forensic purposes you are
    26  concentrating on those earlier passages, but in the end we

    .           P-72


      1  must get to the specific criticisms because on that really
      2  Professor Evans is hanging his case against you. It
      3  stands or falls by that.
      4  MR IRVING:  I agree, but we have just this witness say, “I do
      5  not consider you to be a historian”, and then it turns out
      6  that large numbers of academic bodies consider me to be a
      7  historian whom they would willingly hear, were it not for
      8  the violence that is threatened if I do attend. This is
      9  the reason that I mentioned that fact, my Lord.
    10  MR JUSTICE GRAY:  Yes.
    11  MR IRVING:  Go to page 44 of your report, please, 2.5.6. Do
    12  you accept that the Board of Deputies of British Jews in
    13  1919 acknowledge that I am “one of the world’s most
    14  thorough researchers and an exciting and readable
    15  historian”? You put it in quotation marks.
    16  A. [Professor Richard John Evans]: I think I can accept that, yes.
    17  Q. [Mr Irving]: So you did —-
    18  A. [Professor Richard John Evans]: I would not dispute the fact that you are a thorough
    19  researcher. I have not disputed that in this case.
    20  Q. [Mr Irving]: You agree that that report does exist?
    21  A. [Professor Richard John Evans]: I accept your word for it. I have not seen it myself.
    22  Q. [Mr Irving]: Would you accept that the report is currently lodged in
    23  the files of the Canadian government where it was placed
    24  by an organization with the intention of getting me denied
    25  access to Canada?
    26  A. [Professor Richard John Evans]: That I would require evidence, I think particularly with

    .           P-73


      1  the intention. Since I have not seen the report, I am
      2  only citing it second hand here, for the purposes of
      3  talking about your reputation as an historian, as
      4  a researcher, I am not concerned with any other aspects of
      5  the report which, as I say, I have not read myself.
      6  Q. [Mr Irving]: On paragraph 2.5.8 on the same page, once again you are
      7  coming down pretty heavily on the historical profession,
      8  are you not? I wonder sometimes what your colleagues say
      9  in your common room when you go back to Caius about the
    10  way you are blackening the name of historians whom you
    11  disagree with.
    12  A. [Professor Richard John Evans]: Could you point out to me the blackening of historians’
    13  names?
    14  Q. [Mr Irving]: You are saying that those with the general knowledge have
    15  been kind to me, whereas those who are experts like
    16  yourself are rightly rude — is that the burden of that?
    17  A. [Professor Richard John Evans]: No. Let me read you the sentence. I am making a
    18  distinction between different kinds of historians with
    19  difference kinds of expertise in reviewing and commenting
    20  on your work. I quote here: “Those with a general
    21  knowledge have mostly been quite generous to Irving, even
    22  where they have found reason to criticise him or disagree
    23  with his views; but they have also seldom been entirely
    24  uncritical of Irving’s work and his methods”. Is that
    25  blackening their name?
    26  Q. [Mr Irving]: Can I draw your attention to footnote 34?

    .           P-74


      1  A. [Professor Richard John Evans]: Yes.
      2  Q. [Mr Irving]: That is the New Statesman 1977. Is that not ten years
      3  before I published my biography on Winston Churchill?
      4  A. [Professor Richard John Evans]: That, I take it, is a review of your book on Hitler.
      5  Q. [Mr Irving]: Yes, so my views on Churchill are neither here nor there
      6  in such context.
      7  A. [Professor Richard John Evans]: They appear in your work on Hitler.
      8  Q. [Mr Irving]: Can I ask you now to turn to page 45, where there is once
      9  again reference to my attempt to show that Hitler urged
    10  restraint in the Reichskristallnacht?
    11  A. [Professor Richard John Evans]: Yes.
    12  Q. [Mr Irving]: Do you consider this to be a completely ludicrous version
    13  of history, that Hitler was the restraining influence that
    14  night? Is this your conclusion?
    15  A. [Professor Richard John Evans]: Yes. It depends exactly what you mean by “restraint” but
    16  I think I am summarizing what Hinton Thomas says in that
    17  review there. I think that is probably his phrase.
    18  Q. [Mr Irving]: But you devoted quite a lot of this report — my Lord, I
    19  think this is something we can dwell on for a moment or
    20  two, which is the Kristallnacht?
    21  MR JUSTICE GRAY:  We are certainly going to have to spend some
    22  time on Kristallnacht. Whether this is the right context
    23  to do it I do not know, because in the end, as I say quite
    24  often, it is Professor Evans’ views and his criticisms
    25  that matter, not what other historians may have felt.
    26  MR IRVING:  Oh dear. I will see how far I get with this one

    .           P-75


      1  then.
      2  MR JUSTICE GRAY:  It is for me to make up my mind, when I know
      3  what the criticisms are and I know what your answer is,
      4  whether I think it is well founded.
      5  MR IRVING:  The allegation is that I have been perverse, if I
      6  may put it like that, in suggesting that Hitler was a
      7  restraining influence that night of all nights. It turns
      8  out — would you turn to page 48 of your little bundle
      9  please, which is F?
    10  A. [Professor Richard John Evans]: Is that the one with the pictures?
    11  Q. [Mr Irving]: That is the one with the pictures. On Thursday we found
    12  out that you knew who Professor Burrin, a Frenchman, was.
    13  A. [Professor Richard John Evans]: Burrin, a Swiss, I believe.
    14  Q. [Mr Irving]: You said that yes, he is an academic, an acceptable
    15  historian with the highest credentials. Is it right that
    16  he is Professor of International History at the Graduate
    17  Institute of International Studies in Geneva?
    18  A. [Professor Richard John Evans]: I will accept your word for it.
    19  Q. [Mr Irving]: Yes. If we go to page 57 of his work, which I have
    20  extracted in that bundle for your Lordship, do we not find
    21  there that he expresses precisely the same view as I do?
    22  In fact, two years before I did in my Goebbels biography,
    23  so it cannot be derivative in the slightest way, he seems
    24  to have been surprised by the extent of the destruction,
    25  Hitler?
    26  MR JUSTICE GRAY:  Page 57? Do you mean that?

    .           P-76


      1  A. [Professor Richard John Evans]: Page 48 of the bundle, my Lord, which is page 57 of the
      2  book Hitler and the Jews, the Genesis of the Holocaust.
      3  By Philip Burrin, who is an intentionalist historian.
      4  Would you explain what an intentionalist historian is in
      5  the great debate?
      6  MR JUSTICE GRAY:  It is not a functionalist historian. I think
      7  I know the answer.
      8  MR IRVING:  Very good.
      9  MR JUSTICE GRAY:  Thank you.
    10  MR IRVING:  Your Lordship has grasped it quicker than I ever
    11  did.
    12  MR JUSTICE GRAY:  Let us get on.
    13  MR IRVING:  Page 57 on this book?
    14  A. [Professor Richard John Evans]: I am not sure I would describe Burrin as an out and out
    15  intentionalist in his book on Hitler and the Jews.
    16  Q. [Mr Irving]: “Whilst Hitler could only have endorsed the concept of
    17  exacting reprisals, namely on the Jews, he seems to have
    18  been surprised by the extent of the destruction . Soon he
    19  will be able to gauge its impact. (Jump a sentence) In
    20  each case Hitler covered for Goebbels who did not derive
    21  the hoped for benefits from the affair.” Is this
    22  Professor perverse, do you think, for adopting that on the
    23  basis of—-
    24  A. [Professor Richard John Evans]: I have to say I do not agree with that interpretation.
    25  I do not agree at all.
    26  Q. [Mr Irving]: Yes, but you would not describe him as perverse?

    .           P-77


      1  A. [Professor Richard John Evans]: It really comes down to how he has arrived at that, the
      2  methods he has used to arrive at that conclusion.
      3  Q. [Mr Irving]: Of course, he did not have the Goebbels diaries then.
      4  A. [Professor Richard John Evans]: Without looking at this in detail, it is very difficult to
      5  say.
      6  Q. [Mr Irving]: Yes.
      7  A. [Professor Richard John Evans]: My criticisms of what you have to say about the
      8  Reichskristallnacht depend to a large extent on the
      9  methods you have used to arrive at the conclusions you
    10  arrive at. I think this is only a brief — if I recall
    11  rightly and I may be wrong — paragraph in a work which
    12  is almost entirely devoted to the wartime. It is part of
    13  a very brief broad summary.
    14  Q. [Mr Irving]: So what are you saying is that this view that Hitler was
    15  taken by surprise by it and that he covered for Goebbels
    16  but did nothing else, it is not perverse when it is stated
    17  by a professor of international history, but it is
    18  perverse when it is stated by David Irving?
    19  A. [Professor Richard John Evans]: First of all, he does say that Hitler authorized the
    20  holding of spontaneous demonstrations, whatever that
    21  means. He was surprised by the extent of the
    22  destruction. I do not accept either of those points of
    23  view but, as I say, I do not know to what extent this
    24  rests on his own research, or to what extent this is just
    25  a very brief summary. I suspect this is just a single
    26  paragraph. Knowing what I recall of the book, it is

    .           P-78


      1  nearly all about the years 1939, 1940, particularly 41 and
      2  42.
      3  Q. [Mr Irving]: It is a pretty revolutionary statement for a Professor to
      4  make though, is it not, at that time, to come out you and
      5  say that he thought that Hitler was not behind the
      6  Kristallnacht?
      7  A. [Professor Richard John Evans]: I do not think he says that.
      8  Q. [Mr Irving]: It is not exactly a throw away line, is it?
      9  A. [Professor Richard John Evans]: He says that — it is speculative , is it not — he could
    10  only have endorsed the concept of exacting reprisals. I
    11  have to say simply I do not agree with that point of view.
    12  It really comes down to how you arrive at that and the
    13  documentary basis for it.
    14  Q. [Mr Irving]: Moving on to the next paragraph in the middle of that page
    15  45 back in your report, you refer to my omitting key
    16  passages of this kind from his discussion of documents
    17  such as Hitler’s Political Testament. Is this Hitler’s
    18  Political Testament that I am holding in my hand?
    19  A. [Professor Richard John Evans]: Let me say I do not refer to that. I am referring to Sir
    20  Martin Gilbert review and I am saying what he says. In
    21  all this passage I am simply trying to summarise what
    22  other historians have said.
    23  MR JUSTICE GRAY:  I know.
    24  A. [Professor Richard John Evans]: I do not necessarily endorse every single point they have
    25  made. I am trying to establish reputation.
    26  MR JUSTICE GRAY:  You have created a problem. You understand

    .           P-79


      1  that, Professor Evans?
      2  A. [Professor Richard John Evans]: Yes.
      3  Q. [Mr Irving]: And I am trying to find the way through it without any
      4  unfairness to Mr Irving. Obviously the views of Sir
      5  Martin Gilbert command enormous respect, but I say again
      6  in the end it is for me to look at the evidence in huge
      7  detail, as we are going to have to, and then look at the
      8  criticisms, look at your answer and make up my own mind.
      9  Obviously it is of importance to note what Sir Martin
    10  Gilbert and these others say, but in the end it cannot
    11  impact very much on my decision.
    12  MR IRVING:  In my submission, this witness has relied very
    13  heavily on sources of a particular colour, if I can put it
    14  like that, and the reliability which I would challenge,
    15  then surely I am entitled seriatim to take these sources
    16  until your Lordship has really run out of patience.
    17  MR JUSTICE GRAY:  I do not see why you have to take it that
    18  far, in a way. I have made my view pretty clear.
    19  I understand why you are doing this. Professor Evans
    20  possibly regrets one or two sections of his report for
    21  that reason. Maybe he does not, I do not know. What I am
    22  anxious to do, I make no secret of this, is to get on to
    23  the specific criticisms and see how much there is in
    24  them. Take it rapidly, if you would, Mr Irving.
    25  MR IRVING:  I will put on seven league boots. Did Sir Martin
    26  Gilbert rely on this book, Hitler’s Political Testament?

    .           P-80


      1  A. [Professor Richard John Evans]: I really cannot say. I cannot answer for Sir Martin
      2  Gilbert.
      3  Q. [Mr Irving]: You have criticised me through him for not relying on
      4  Hitler’s Political Testament?
      5  A. [Professor Richard John Evans]: I thought it necessary, since you made a great deal of
      6  this in your reply to the Defence initially at the
      7  beginning of this whole case a couple of years ago, of
      8  your reputation as a historian, to go into that, and that
      9  is what I am talking about here.
    10  Q. [Mr Irving]: Are you familiar that Hitler’s Political Testament is a
    11  forged document, and I know the Swiss gentleman who forged
    12  it in his own handwriting? There is every reason
    13  therefore why I should not have relied on that document.
    14  A. [Professor Richard John Evans]: That is not really relevant to what I am saying here.
    15  What I am saying here is that you have been criticised by
    16  other historians.
    17  Q. [Mr Irving]: 2.5.10, please. I am sorry, the last lines of 2.5.9. Do
    18  you remember you are quoting Michael Howard criticising me
    19  for not crediting other historians where they had done the
    20  work?
    21  A. [Professor Richard John Evans]: Yes.
    22  Q. [Mr Irving]: Can I, in view of the fact that you have not done so, call
    23  the court’s attention to the review that Michael Howard
    24  wrote, which is in the little bundle at page 33? Does
    25  your Lordship have it?
    26  MR JUSTICE GRAY:  Yes.

    .           P-81


      1  MR IRVING:  I think in your Lordship’s copy I may have
      2  highlighted a few sentences in yellow.
      3  MR JUSTICE GRAY:  Page 33 of your E?
      4  MR IRVING:  Of F.
      5  MR JUSTICE GRAY:  I am sure you have, and it is very helpful
      6  when you do. I will read out the passages you have
      7  highlighted in my copy if you like.
      8  A. [Professor Richard John Evans]: May I read out the passage in my report in full? The
      9  military historian Michael Howard … praised the ‘very
    10  considerable merits’ of The War Path and declared that
    11  Irving was ‘at his best as a professional historian
    12  demanding documentary proof for popularly held beliefs'”.
    13  That is very positive and I am trying to convey there the
    14  positive impression that Howard gives. Then I go on to his
    15  criticisms: “Howard pointed out that Irving’s account of
    16  an episode such as the enforced resignation of Generals
    17  Blomberg and Fritsch before the outbreak of the Second
    18  World War was not as original as he claimed and added
    19  nothing to the story already told by other historians.
    20  ‘It would be nice’, he wrote, ‘if Mr Irving occasionally
    21  recognised that other men had been there before him and
    22  done a competent job of work'”. This is not a damning
    23  review. I am not trying to convey the impression that it
    24  is. Of course, since, Mr Irving, you say you never read
    25  other historians’ work, that last criticism of Sir
    26  Michael’s is really not very surprising.

    .           P-82


      1  MR IRVING:  Oh dear. I wish you had not said that. Can I now
      2  draw your attention to the next item in that bundle, which
      3  is page 34? That is a letter from me to the newspaper
      4  that published that review.
      5  A. [Professor Richard John Evans]: Can you direct me to the bundle?
      6  MR JUSTICE GRAY:  Page 34 of the slim F.
      7  MR IRVING:  Now you will see what has happened, will you not?
      8  Can I show you the book? First of all, is this the book?
      9  MR JUSTICE GRAY:  Yes, I have the point.
    10  A. [Professor Richard John Evans]: Yes I have the point too. That is one historian. Many
    11  other historians —-
    12  MR JUSTICE GRAY:  I think climb down on that one.
    13  A. [Professor Richard John Evans]: I will climb down on Professor Deutsch, but he is not the
    14  only historian who has written about this subject.
    15  MR IRVING:  Just so that the people behind me know what has
    16  happened, is this the book to which you were referring by
    17  Professor Harold Deutsch?
    18  A. [Professor Richard John Evans]: What you say in that letter, as you point out, Professor
    19  Deutsch in his book had based his account on material that
    20  you had supplied to him.
    21  Q. [Mr Irving]: Let me get a lot mileage out of this. First of all, is
    22  Professor Deutsch Jewish?
    23  A. [Professor Richard John Evans]: I have no idea.
    24  Q. [Mr Irving]: Take it from me that he is a very good old Jewish friend
    25  of mine who is one of the United States old guard of
    26  historians?

    .           P-83


      1  MR RAMPTON:  There comes a time, even when it is a litigant in
      2  person, where we cannot have continually, we have had it
      3  all the time, evidence from counsel’s row. I do not
      4  really mind. I am really standing up for rather a
      5  different reason. We have done 45 pages in a day and a
      6  half. At that rate Professor Evans will be in the box for
      7  another three weeks.
      8  MR JUSTICE GRAY:  I am very conscious of that. I do not know
      9  the shape of what is to come. I have not counted my
    10  interventions, but they have pretty numerous. The
    11  difficulty, Mr Rampton, if I may explain, is that
    12  Professor Evans has made reference to these other
    13  historians and their views. That does rather open up
    14  cross-examination.
    15  MR RAMPTON:  It only does if those references are (a) likely to
    16  be relied on by me, which is not very likely, and (b) and
    17  much more important, if they are likely to influence your
    18  Lordship. This is not a jury trial. If your Lordship
    19  were to make it clear, if it be the case, that this part
    20  of the report is not an important part —-
    21  MR JUSTICE GRAY:  I think I have made that clear effectively on
    22  a large number of occasions.
    23  MR RAMPTON:  I had thought so, and it does seem to me that this
    24  is a rather futile game of ping pong that is going on at
    25  the moment, and far better to get on to the detailed
    26  criticisms. Professor Evans has said a number of times

    .           P-84


      1  why he does not regard Mr Irving as a reputable
      2  historian. It is because of the way he treats his
      3  material. Then we ought to be looking at that, in my
      4  submission.
      5  MR JUSTICE GRAY:  Mr Irving, that really is very much what I
      6  think I have been trying to say to you very often. I am
      7  giving you, as I have said many times before also, as much
      8  latitude as I reasonably can, but I do think you really
      9  must get on to the specific criticisms. We are going
    10  very, very slowly and this morning I really have not found
    11  hugely helpful in terms of the task that I am eventually
    12  going to have to perform. That is my problem.
    13  MR IRVING:  I am trying to undermine your Lordship’s confidence
    14  in this witnesses as being somebody who has the ability
    15  and the impartiality and the historical background to pass
    16  judgment on myself.
    17  MR JUSTICE GRAY:  If I may say so, that is a perfectly
    18  legitimate thing to do, but in the end you cannot just
    19  attack credibility. You have to get on to the nuts and
    20  bolts of the report and show why they are not credible, as
    21  opposed to attacking Professor Evans’ credibility on a
    22  more broad brush basis. Do you see what I mean?
    23  MR IRVING:  In that case it would have been well if Professor
    24  Evans had not written the initial 100 pages in his report.
    25  MR JUSTICE GRAY:  I think I said that myself and I do rather
    26  take that view. He did. You know my view of it. You are

    .           P-85


      1  a litigant in person and you are, if I may say so,
      2  handling your task extremely well, but one of the things
      3  that you do learn is to take hints if you are doing it
      4  professionally . I understand how difficult it is for you
      5  because there is stuff in those first 150 pages which you
      6  understandably take fierce objection to.
      7  MR IRVING:  It sets my teeth on edge, a lot of it.
      8  MR JUSTICE GRAY:  It is not going to bulk very large in my
      9  thinking.
    10  MR IRVING:  Your Lordship knows how your Lordship is thinking
    11  but, with respect, I do not. You have a poker face and a
    12  complete mask like demeanour which keeps me totally in the
    13  dark. People ask me when I go home how have you done and
    14  I say I not know.
    15  MR JUSTICE GRAY:  That is probably best. Anyway, I have given
    16  the hint yet again. Mr Rampton is going shortly to ask me
    17  to make a ruling about it and, if I have to make a ruling,
    18  you know the way I am thinking at the moment, so let us
    19  get on.
    20  MR IRVING:  Can we leap forward to page 47 of your report,
    21  please? Harsh words on John Charmley now, a right wing
    22  historian at the University of East Anglia.
    23  A. [Professor Richard John Evans]: What is harsh about that? He is right-wing. I do not
    24  think he makes any secret of that. He is a former
    25  colleague of mine.
    26  Q. [Mr Irving]: Does that disqualify somebody if they are right-wing?

    .           P-86


      1  A. [Professor Richard John Evans]: No, certainly not.
      2  MR JUSTICE GRAY:  That is enough about Mr Charmley. On to your
      3  next point. I am not being flippant at all, but there is
      4  nothing there for you, Mr Irving, I do not think, so come
      5  on.
      6  MR IRVING:  Can I ask your Lordship to go to page 26 of the
      7  little bundle, please? Recently received, but if your
      8  Lordship feels it is irrelevant, then I shall move on.
      9  MR JUSTICE GRAY:  He pays you a warm tribute and wishes you
    10  well in your libel action.
    11  MR IRVING:  Can I take you to page 49, please?
    12  A. [Professor Richard John Evans]: I am just saying that I quote Professor Charmley and
    13  saying that he admires Mr Irving in my report.
    14  MR IRVING:  My Lord, if I am referred to as some kind of pariah
    15  in the academic community whose views are worth nothing,
    16  I find myself —-
    17  MR JUSTICE GRAY:  That is not the way I approach it. I am
    18  trying to find a way round this problem because I can see
    19  you are not going to take my hint. I have seen plenty of
    20  evidence, you have shown me a lot of evidence, from very
    21  distinguished people like Lord Trevor-Roper paying you
    22  tributes and, as a military historian, I certainly accept
    23  the evidence that I have heard about the number of people
    24  who have a very high regard for you. But in the end it is
    25  not as a military historian that you are appearing really
    26  in this trial. You are appearing for the very specific

    .           P-87


      1  detailed criticisms of your approach made by Professor
      2  Evans, and those are what matter.
      3  MR IRVING:  You are talking about assassinations, is this right
      4  Professor?
      5  A. [Professor Richard John Evans]: Sorry, where is this.
      6  Q. [Mr Irving]: On page 49, and the suggestion which is implicit in that
      7  paragraph that the British did not carry out
      8  assassinations, that I should not have hinted that we did,
      9  and Irving’s claim that the democracies had no hesitation
    10  about killing their foreign opponents. Do you accept that
    11  the British did carry out assassinations in World War II?
    12  A. [Professor Richard John Evans]: I am describing Trevor-Roper’s view of your work, and I am
    13  recounting what he says in a section that is about your
    14  reputation as an historian, where I try and lay out what
    15  your reputation amongst professional historians has been
    16  and is. I am not responsible for justifying every last
    17  detail of what every historian I quote has written about
    18  your work.
    19  Q. [Mr Irving]: Do you reference the assassination of Chancellor Dollfuss
    20  in 1934?
    21  MR JUSTICE GRAY:  I am sorry, I am not going to go into the
    22  assassination of the Austrian Chancellor in 1934. It has
    23  nothing to do with this case at all. You have to move on,
    24  Mr Irving. I really am not going to let this case grind
    25  almost to a halt on peripheral material.
    26  MR IRVING:  I am moving on. A 700 page report has been dumped

    .           P-88


      1  on me by this expert witness in which he has used this
      2  material to blacken my name and set my teeth on edge. It
      3  has been very widely quoted and I do not know what your
      4  Lordship is attending to or not.
      5  MR JUSTICE GRAY:  I am not attending to other historians’ views
      6  about the issues I have to decide. In the end they are
      7  for me to decide, apart from those who have provided
      8  reports.
      9  MR IRVING:  Move to page 57, please. I have leapt 20 questions
    10  there, my Lord.
    11  MR JUSTICE GRAY:  I do realize you have. I recognize that.
    12  MR IRVING:  2.5.29, please. The allegation that I invented
    13  sources by Mr Charles Sydnor.
    14  A. [Professor Richard John Evans]: Once again, this is still in a section that is discussing
    15  your reputation amongst other historians.
    16  Q. [Mr Irving]: So you feel quite comfortable in throwing these kinds of
    17  reports or allegations or opinions of other historians at
    18  me to criticise my reputation without investigating how
    19  true they were?
    20  A. [Professor Richard John Evans]: It is not a central part of my report, Mr Irving. I am
    21  simply trying to establish that some historians have been
    22  extremely critical of your methods. That includes
    23  particularly Sydnor and Brozsat. I am aware of the fact
    24  that you replied to Sydnor and I dealt with that in my
    25  response to the written questions which you submitted.
    26  MR JUSTICE GRAY:  Do you adopt Sydnor’s criticism? This is

    .           P-89


      1  Mr Irving’s problem and I am not unsympathetic towards
      2  it. You recite the criticisms that Sydnor makes and then
      3  you in some way seem to rather disavow them when you come
      4  to give evidence. Are you saying that what Sydnor said is
      5  a justified criticism? Or are you simply giving it as
      6  background, as it were, to your own criticisms? That is
      7  his problem as you, I am sure, understand.
      8  A. [Professor Richard John Evans]: I can see the problem.
      9  Q. [Mr Justice Gray]: If you say well, no, I am not making that any part of my
    10  case, then it may be that Mr Irving will feel we can
    11  forget about Mr Sydnor.
    12  MR IRVING:  Yes. We could do that with a whole number of my
    13  critics.
    14  A. [Professor Richard John Evans]: What I am saying, trying to be as precise about it as
    15  possible, is that it seems to me that Sydnor is an
    16  authoritative critic, but of course I cannot say that
    17  every one of his criticisms is justified. It is not in
    18  the end part of my case at all. I am not taking up these
    19  points and making them in my own treatment of your work.
    20  I make a whole set of separate points about your work.
    21  This is to do with your reputation amongst historians.
    22  MR IRVING:  Can I draw your attention to the middle sentence
    23  where you say: “In his efforts to present Hitler in a
    24  humane light”, which is one of the allegations against me,
    25  “Irving, wrote Sydnor, manipulated sources, invented
    26  incidents” — that is a pretty serious allegation —

    .           P-90


      1  “(such as Hitler’s supposed rebuke of the Judge Freisler
      2  at the conspirators’ trial) and once more, as so often,
      3  failed to give proper documentary references”.
      4  Professor, in your work at the Institute of
      5  History in Munich though my papers, did you not find the
      6  papers of Hitler’s Adjutant Schaub?
      7  A. [Professor Richard John Evans]: Mr Irving, you did not respond to that criticism in your
      8  reply to Professor Sydnor in Central European History.
      9  MR JUSTICE GRAY:  No, but, I think, Mr Irving, you may not have
    10  heard or digested what Mr Irving said. He said: “It is
    11  not in the end part of my case at all. I am not taking up
    12  these points and making them in my own treatment of your
    13  work. I make a whole set of separate points about your
    14  work”.
    15  I understand that really to mean that it is what
    16  appears from about page, I do not know, 120 onwards which
    17  Professor Evans relies on and he does not rely, unless
    18  they happen to be in both, on the criticisms by Syndor.
    19  I would have thought that that is sufficient for you to be
    20  able to say, “Well, right, I can forget about the
    21  recitations of other historians’ views and get on to what
    22  matters”.
    23  MR IRVING:  Except that I would have submitted, my Lord, that
    24  in every single instance where he has produced such an
    25  episode, I am able to justify myself, as, for example, and
    26  this is not without significance as far as his credibility

    .           P-91


      1  as a witness is concerned and his credit worthiness.
      2  I will take him to one further episode and then we will
      3  skip another 20 pages. (To the witness): Page 59. You
      4  applaud, shall we say, John Lukacs’ attack on me, is that
      5  right, for having invented sources and all the usual
      6  allegations?
      7  A. [Professor Richard John Evans]: No, I do not applaud it. I am summarizing it as part of a
      8  discussion of your reputation amongst historians.
      9  Q. [Mr Irving]: Right. He writes: “Mr Irving’s factual errors are beyond
    10  belief. He says that ’40 per cent of the prisoners in
    11  southern France turned out to be Russians” as one example
    12  of how erroneous and factually erroneous I am?
    13  A. [Professor Richard John Evans]: Yes.
    14  Q. [Mr Irving]: Can we go very rapidly to make progress, not just to the
    15  review which we will have a look at, but to page 23 of
    16  bundle F?
    17  A. [Professor Richard John Evans]: Yes.
    18  Q. [Mr Irving]: Is that a telegram from General Devers to General Marshal
    19  and General Eisenhower?
    20  A. [Professor Richard John Evans]: Yes.
    21  Q. [Mr Irving]: Does the sentence that has been ringed on it say:
    22  “Prisoners captured are between 1,500 and 2,000 of which
    23  about 40 per cent are Russians”?
    24  A. [Professor Richard John Evans]: Yes, if I just explain that this telegram was issued on
    25  17th August. It notes that the 6th Army Corp. were ashore
    26  by 1800 hours. “They occupied all small towns in this

    .           P-92


      1  area which they say delineated by map references, and they
      2  are advancing on Toulon which the 3rd Division expects to
      3  reach by the morning and landing operations were
      4  continuing. The prisoners captured are between 1500 and
      5  2,000 of which about 40 per cent are Russians”.
      6  So the first point is that — well, there are
      7  many points — the document does not say that 40 per cent
      8  of the prisoners in southern France turned out to be
      9  Russians. It just says that 40 per cent of the prisoners
    10  taken in a small area of southern France, Near Toulon, in
    11  the first few hours of an American landing were Russians.
    12  It does not say the Russians were volunteers. So it seems
    13  to me that this is an egregious misinterpretation of this
    14  document. You are blowing up a small report into a large
    15  generalization.
    16  Q. [Mr Irving]: This is the report by the Commanding General in command of
    17  the entire sector, the entire landing operation, in
    18  southern France. I do not really want to spend more time
    19  on this than to say that, quite clearly, the reference in
    20  my book depended solely on this telegram from Eisenhower’s
    21  personal papers.
    22  MR JUSTICE GRAY:  Professor Evans, it is right, is it not? I
    23  mean, this is from the Advanced Detachment of Allied
    24  Forces Headquarters for the attention, for his eyes only,
    25  to Generals Marshall and Eisenhower. It can hardly be a
    26  reference to some little skirmish. I mean, it must be a

    .           P-93


      1  global report. Is Mr Irving not entitled to make the
      2  point?
      3  A. [Professor Richard John Evans]: My Lord, he is talking about a few hours of a landing in a
      4  relatively small area with 1500 and 2,000 captured
      5  prisoners which is really a very small number. I do think
      6  it is a manipulation of this source to generalize about 40
      7  per cent of the prisoners in southern France which must
      8  refer, surely, to the whole of the southern half of France
      9  over the whole period in which the fighting was going on.
    10  MR IRVING:  No I think you will find —-
    11  A. [Professor Richard John Evans]: I think this is a classic example of —-
    12  Q. [Mr Irving]: — before the words —-
    13  A. [Professor Richard John Evans]: — of Mr Irving’s blowing up a small source into a large
    14  generalization.
    15  Q. [Mr Irving]: I think you will find that before the words “40 per cent”
    16  the phrase is “in the initial phase of the attack 40 per
    17  cent”, but he has cut those words out?
    18  A. [Professor Richard John Evans]: If you present me with the document, I would be happy to
    19  concede that if he has manipulated that.
    20  MR JUSTICE GRAY:  That is a very good illustration of the
    21  problems we run into. You have not got the war between
    22  the Generals here, have we?
    23  MR IRVING:  No, I have not got it here with me, my Lord, but we
    24  have a much more serious problem with this witness, and
    25  this is that he has repeatedly relied on documents which
    26  are not in the H1 series —-

    .           P-94


      1  A. [Professor Richard John Evans]: I am sorry, but the fact remains they were not
      2  volunteers. Russians who joined the German armies were in
      3  many cases, effectively, forced to do so.
      4  Q. [Mr Irving]: They were called Hilsswillige, were they not?
      5  A. [Professor Richard John Evans]: They were not volunteers.
      6  Q. [Mr Irving]: “Hiwis”, is that right?
      7  A. [Professor Richard John Evans]: That, of course, is a classic piece of Nazi rhetoric.
      8  Q. [Mr Irving]: Is it not true that they joined with the intention of
      9  fighting the Bolsheviks and then found they had been sent
    10  to another front?
    11  A. [Professor Richard John Evans]: Not in all cases, not at all, no. They were — Russian
    12  prisoners of war in Germany were in extremely difficult
    13  conditions. Some 3 million were, effectively,
    14  deliberately left to starve and die by the Germans in the
    15  course of war, and the alternative to being pressed into
    16  the German Army was quite clear to many of them.
    17  Q. [Mr Irving]: John Lukacs has published a book recently, has he not?
    18  MR JUSTICE GRAY:  Mr Irving, may I just try to help you because
    19  I do see your problem and I am actually sympathetic with
    20  it. If I tell you that my approach to these opening
    21  paragraphs, pages, where the views of other historians
    22  about your work are recited at length and in a very
    23  critical vein, if I tell you my attitude to them is going
    24  to be that they count for virtually nothing, so far as
    25  I am concerned, when I come to judge the criticisms made
    26  of you by Professor Evans, and I go a little bit further

    .           P-95


      1  than that, and say it is my view that it is in every way
      2  — this is not a criticism of Professor Evans personally
      3  — unfortunate that they are there because they could be
      4  taken to indicate a preconception about the validity of
      5  the criticisms.
      6  MR IRVING:  I think they are grossly prejudicial, my Lord.
      7  MR JUSTICE GRAY:  Does that satisfy you that you really are not
      8  going to lose by not spending long, in fact I hope no
      9  longer, on these other historians’ views?
    10  MR IRVING:  But you do accept my belief that they are grossly
    11  prejudicial —-
    12  MR JUSTICE GRAY:  I chose my words with a certain amount of
    13  care. They are capable of giving rise to the impression
    14  that there was a preconception that there were justified
    15  criticisms about you. In the end, I think Professor Evans
    16  accepts that he has justify his own criticisms in his own
    17  terms and as a matter of his own beliefs.
    18  A. [Professor Richard John Evans]: Yes.

    Section 96.19 to 113.22

    19  MR IRVING:  Can you turn to page 63? We are now moving on to
    20  publishers. I will not deal with any more historians
    21  then. 2.5.38, can you accept that, in fact, my main
    22  publishers in that era were Macmillan and Hutchinsons and
    23  not Penguin? They were my major hard back publishers.
    24  A. [Professor Richard John Evans]: Yes, I mention publishing house — your books are
    25  published by a variety of mainstream publishing houses,
    26  including Penguin Books, Macmillan, Hodder and Stoughton,

    .           P-96


      1  HarperCollins, Grafton Books and Corgi paperbacks.
      2  Q. [Mr Irving]: But they ceased publishing me, did they not?
      3  A. [Professor Richard John Evans]: I think that is correct, yes.
      4  Q. [Mr Irving]: Are you implying they ceased publishing me because of
      5  inherent faults in my works or because of some other
      6  reason? Do you have any knowledge one way or the other?
      7  A. [Professor Richard John Evans]: I am trying to see where I describe this. You have no
      8  longer been published — since the late 1980s you have no
      9  longer been published by major houses, but instead you
    10  have brought out your books under your own imprint.
    11  Q. [Mr Irving]: You are aware, in fact, that Macmillans continued
    12  publishing me until 1992?
    13  A. [Professor Richard John Evans]: Yes.
    14  Q. [Mr Irving]: Are you suggesting that Macmillans and Hutchinsons and the
    15  other major hard back publishers ceased publishing because
    16  they found faults in my work?
    17  A. [Professor Richard John Evans]: I mean, one has to kind of guess really, I think, because
    18  I have not had access to any documentation which they
    19  have, but, as you know, the normal process among
    20  publishers of non-fiction is to have manuscripts and books
    21  submitted to referees for comment, and it may well be that
    22  that is the reason why they did not. I mean, your views
    23  have changed on a number of matters.
    24  Q. [Mr Irving]: Have you any reason to —-
    25  A. [Professor Richard John Evans]: Or did change in a number of matters, particularly on the
    26  Holocaust in the late 1980s, and I think it is not

    .           P-97


      1  unreasonable to see a connection between the change of
      2  your views that took place in 1988 when I think you became
      3  a Holocaust denier, and the fact that within four years
      4  major publishing houses were not publishing your work any
      5  longer.
      6  Q. [Mr Irving]: Is it in your knowledge of the publishing industry normal
      7  for publishers to come under outside pressure?
      8  A. [Professor Richard John Evans]: It depends what you mean by “outside pressure”. As
      9  I said, publishers commonly send manuscripts and books out
    10  to a variety of referees who report on them. In a sense,
    11  if they get adverse reports from those referees, I guess
    12  that is outside, that is some kind of outside
    13  contribution.
    14  Q. [Mr Irving]: You have no knowledge of Macmillan ever having sent any of
    15  my recent and final books out to outside referees, do you?
    16  A. [Professor Richard John Evans]: I do not know whether you have submitted your manuscripts
    17  to them or not. This is only a very brief reference here
    18  in a few lines.
    19  Q. [Mr Irving]: Have you ever heard of a major publisher ordering the
    20  total destruction of an author’s works under the effect of
    21  outside pressure?
    22  A. [Professor Richard John Evans]: Under the threat of legal action.
    23  Q. [Mr Irving]: No, not under threat of legal action?
    24  A. [Professor Richard John Evans]: That is outside pressure.
    25  Q. [Mr Irving]: Under threat of political pressure?
    26  A. [Professor Richard John Evans]: Not to my knowledge, no. That is not to say it has not

    .           P-98


      1  happened.
      2  Q. [Mr Irving]: On page 63 you refer to the fact that reputable historians
      3  do not get themselves arrested and deported and all the
      4  rest of it. Is that correct?
      5  A. [Professor Richard John Evans]: Yes, I think so. Yes.
      6  Q. [Mr Irving]: Is Salman Rushdie a reputable historian?
      7  A. [Professor Richard John Evans]: No, he is a novelist.
      8  Q. [Mr Irving]: Is he reputable?
      9  A. [Professor Richard John Evans]: He is a novelist.
    10  Q. [Mr Irving]: Blamed for his own misfortune?
    11  A. [Professor Richard John Evans]: He is a novelist. I am not talking about novelists. I am
    12  talking about reputable historians.
    13  Q. [Mr Irving]: Is it reputable to abandon your principles in order not to
    14  get arrested and deported?
    15  A. [Professor Richard John Evans]: I find that a difficult question. I mean, that is so
    16  hypothetical. I am not quite sure who you are referring
    17  to.
    18  Q. [Mr Irving]: Well, you used the word “reputable”.
    19  A. [Professor Richard John Evans]: All I am saying here —-
    20  MR JUSTICE GRAY:  Mr Irving, this is getting you nowhere.
    21  A. [Professor Richard John Evans]: All I am saying here is that, as I say: “It is impossible
    22  to think of any historian of any standing at all who has
    23  been subjected to so many adverse legal judgments”, and
    24  also who has —-
    25  Q. [Mr Irving]: Are you aware there has been only one adverse —-
    26  A. [Professor Richard John Evans]: — experienced so many difficulties.

    .           P-99


      1  Q. [Mr Irving]: — legal judgment against me, and that this was in
      2  Germany in January 1993? Are you aware what that judgment
      3  was for?
      4  A. [Professor Richard John Evans]: I thought you had an adverse legal judgment against you in
      5  the case of your book on the Convoy of PQ17, I think it
      6  was called.
      7  MR JUSTICE GRAY:  Well, we are certainly not going to go into
      8  that.
      9  MR IRVING:  Are you aware of what the adverse legal judgment in
    10  Germany in January 1993 was for?
    11  A. [Professor Richard John Evans]: Yes.
    12  Q. [Mr Irving]: Would you tell the court?
    13  A. [Professor Richard John Evans]: I think it was for Holocaust denial, was it not?
    14  Q. [Mr Irving]: No, it was not for Holocaust denial. It was for saying
    15  that the gas chamber at Auschwitz (i) which is shown to
    16  the tourists is a fake.
    17  A. [Professor Richard John Evans]: Without seeing a copy of the judgment, I could not confirm
    18  that. That is not my understanding of what the judgment
    19  was.
    20  Q. [Mr Irving]: Those are the words complained of and that is what I was
    21  fined on. Will you comment —-
    22  A. [Professor Richard John Evans]: Well, if I have copy of judgment in front of me, then
    23  I will, then I will be prepared to comment on that.
    24  Q. [Mr Irving]: Would you go to page 66 of your report? We now come to
    25  Irving and Holocaust denial.
    26  A. [Professor Richard John Evans]: Yes.

    .           P-100


      1  MR JUSTICE GRAY:  On that issue, Mr Irving, can I just before
      2  we embark on it so that we do not misunderstand one
      3  another, I have got now a definition from the Defendants
      4  of what they mean by “Holocaust denial” and you have
      5  cross-examined about that and I bear in mind the points
      6  you have made. I have all the statements that the
      7  Defendants say you made which they rely on as amounting to
      8  Holocaust denial. I have the context of the denials so
      9  that I can see any points you have to make on context, you
    10  have given your evidence about what you meant.
    11  I am just wondering where we go with the
    12  evidence on it. Is it not in the end a question for me to
    13  look at what you have said or you are reported as having
    14  said and making up my mind whether you constitute a
    15  Holocaust denier in the sense the Defendants define that
    16  term?
    17  MR IRVING:  This is true, but I am trying to organize that word
    18  in the order of things. This is a useful paragraph to
    19  look at because in this paragraph, my Lord, he states that
    20  Holocaust denier is the central allegation against me in
    21  Lipstadt’s book, in the book by the Second Defendant.
    22  I was going to ask whether he does not agree that the
    23  allegations about manipulation, distortion and deliberate
    24  mistranslation are far more serious for a professional
    25  historian.
    26  MR JUSTICE GRAY:  Well, that is a perfectly fair question.

    .           P-101


      1  A. [Professor Richard John Evans]: Well, the answer is I say a central allegation, not the
      2  central allegation.
      3  MR IRVING:  Well, nit-picking aside, will you now answer the
      4  question? Would you not agree that the allegation about
      5  manipulation, distortion and deliberate mistranslation of
      6  original records are far more serious to be slapped on a
      7  professional historian like myself or a professional
      8  writer like myself, if you do not like the word
      9  “historian”?
    10  A. [Professor Richard John Evans]: Well, I describe it as a central allegation because it is
    11  not the only one. It does, to my mind, as it were,
    12  contain within it the allegation that you manipulated,
    13  falsified history, and it is an allegation to which in
    14  your plea to the court, your written submission to the
    15  court initially, you take extremely strong exception, so
    16  I felt it necessary to go into it.
    17  Q. [Mr Irving]: By what — I cannot really question —-
    18  MR JUSTICE GRAY:  I am not sure you have answered the question
    19  quite.
    20  MR IRVING:  I beg your Lordship’s pardon?
    21  MR JUSTICE GRAY:  I do not think that the Professor has
    22  answered your question quite.
    23  MR IRVING:  It is important.
    24  MR JUSTICE GRAY:  I think it is an important question and I
    25  think it is worth spending a few moments on.
    26  MR IRVING:  Because they have not exactly put these ones in

    .           P-102


      1  section 5, so I am entitled to ask how serious these
      2  allegations are as seen by an acknowledged historian who
      3  is an expert witness on the matter.
      4  MR JUSTICE GRAY:  Professor Evans, it is an fair question.
      5  A. [Professor Richard John Evans]: Yes.
      6  Q. [Mr Justice Gray]: In the end, the sting or the main sting, as it is
      7  sometimes called, against Mr Irving is that he has
      8  manipulated data and so come to deny the Holocaust in the
      9  sense —-
    10  A. [Professor Richard John Evans]: Or the other way round, that he is denying the Holocaust
    11  and, therefore, manipulated data.
    12  Q. [Mr Justice Gray]: Yes, I follow that.
    13  A. [Professor Richard John Evans]: The two are bound up together, my Lord, and I am trying to
    14  unpack them here. So certainly, of course, the allegation
    15  that he has manipulated data is in that sense the crucial
    16  allegation in Lipstadt’s book.
    17  MR IRVING:  Professor, are they not separate allegations? They
    18  are four separate allegations, are they not? He
    19  manipulates, he distorts, he mistranslates and, on top of
    20  all that, he denies the Holocaust?
    21  A. [Professor Richard John Evans]: No, I think they are bound — I mean, you can separate
    22  them out, and they are also very closely connected.
    23  I think the burden of the charges put forward in Professor
    24  Lipstad’s book is that Holocaust deniers, by definition,
    25  as it were, manipulate and falsify history, falsify the
    26  data.

    .           P-103


      1  Q. [Mr Irving]: But if you were to take for a moment —-
      2  MR JUSTICE GRAY:  Let the Professor finish his answer.
      3  A. [Professor Richard John Evans]: Well, I had, my Lord.
      4  MR JUSTICE GRAY:  You had finished?
      5  A. [Professor Richard John Evans]: Yes.
      6  MR IRVING:  If you were to wrench the Holocaust denial
      7  allegation out of the book and just leave the rest of it,
      8  the manipulation, the distortion and the mistranslation,
      9  that would still be a pretty serious allegation to make of
    10  an historian, would it not?
    11  A. [Professor Richard John Evans]: Indeed, yes.
    12  Q. [Mr Irving]: You could not say, “Well, it is OK because we do not
    13  accuse him of Holocaust denial which is the big one”?
    14  A. [Professor Richard John Evans]: Indeed, yes.
    15  Q. [Mr Irving]: Yes, it would be a very serious allegation if it were made
    16  against any historian —-
    17  A. [Professor Richard John Evans]: Yes.
    18  Q. [Mr Irving]: — in order to prettify the image of Adolf Hitler in
    19  history he deliberately distorted. These are serious
    20  allegations —-
    21  A. [Professor Richard John Evans]: Yes, absolutely. I agree.
    22  Q. [Mr Irving]: — to make? Yes. It would render him virtually
    23  unpublishable in the world of serious writers?
    24  A. [Professor Richard John Evans]: Yes.
    25  Q. [Mr Irving]: What do you think the Second Defendant meant and the First
    26  Defendant in publishing it when they describe me as being

    .           P-104


      1  the most dangerous spokesman for Holocaust denial, the
      2  word “dangerous”?
      3  A. [Professor Richard John Evans]: Yes, I think what was meant by that was that you more than
      4  people like, well, I think it is because you had a
      5  reputation for being a serious historian in the 1970s,
      6  1980s, and that, therefore, that gives you a certain
      7  authority which is not the case with, say, Professor
      8  Faurisson, exProfessor Faurisson, or the other Holocaust
      9  deniers, Arthur Butts, and so on.
    10  Q. [Mr Irving]: So did I suddenly go mad or something that changed me from
    11  being a translator who did not distort and did not
    12  manipulate, and I suddenly abandoned all my principles and
    13  methods and everything I had taught myself and I suddenly
    14  went wrong in some way? Is this what the allegation is?
    15  A. [Professor Richard John Evans]: No, I have just described what I think the allegation is.
    16  Q. [Mr Irving]: Apparently, you say that until the 1970s or 1980s I was
    17  OK?
    18  A. [Professor Richard John Evans]: No, I did not say that. I was talking about your
    19  reputation.
    20  Q. [Mr Irving]: Reputation?
    21  A. [Professor Richard John Evans]: Even in that case, and when one goes into it (as I did)
    22  and we have been over that, there are some historians who
    23  had pointed out in the 1970s and 80s that you did engage
    24  in distortion and manipulation. Nevertheless, I think,
    25  and I have tried to convey this in talking about your
    26  reputation, that you did have quite a widespread

    .           P-105


      1  reputation as an expert historian of the Second World War,
      2  and that is I think what Professor Lipstadt meant by
      3  saying that you were a dangerous spokesperson for
      4  Holocaust denial. You did change your views — you
      5  describe yourself how you changed your views as a result
      6  of the Leuchter report at the end of the 80s and the court
      7  has been into that over the past few weeks.
      8  Q. [Mr Irving]: Yes, but the word “dangerous” is what I am looking at.
      9  Why is the word “dangerous” used instead of “formidable”
    10  or “one to be taken seriously”? The word “dangerous”
    11  implies that I am a danger to something, does it not? It
    12  presupposes that I am a danger — would you say I am a
    13  danger to somebody’s interests? Is this what is implied
    14  by that?
    15  A. [Professor Richard John Evans]: No, I do not think that is what that means. It is
    16  difficult to second guess why the word “dangerous” is used
    17  here rather than, as you say, “persuasive” or
    18  “formidable”, but I think, in the context of Professor
    19  Lipstadt’s book, that means that you are more likely,
    20  indeed, to be persuasive than some of the other figures in
    21  this scene.
    22  Q. [Mr Irving]: I am dangerous to the whole of existing history of the
    23  Holocaust? Is that what is implied by that?
    24  MR JUSTICE GRAY:  Well, that is, in the end, a matter for me,
    25  what Professor Lipstadt would have been understood to
    26  mean, but it seems to me it is pretty clear that the

    .           P-106


      1  danger is that a lot of people will — I was going to use
      2  the word “swallow”, that is a bit offensive — accept the
      3  denial case.
      4  MR IRVING:  Yes, or take it seriously and start asking awkward
      5  questions, my Lord.
      6  MR JUSTICE GRAY:  Let us proceed on that footing.
      7  MR IRVING:  If you would now turn the page, my Lord, we now
      8  come to page 67, and this is where I have to ask your
      9  Lordship’s guidance. The expert witness is here giving an
    10  opinion on the meaning of words, and all the authorities
    11  that I have consulted suggest that this should not be.
    12  MR JUSTICE GRAY:  Well, I am not sure I really agree with
    13  that. On the other hand —-
    14  MR IRVING:  Your Lordship agrees there are authorities that say
    15  that expert witnesses cannot give evidence on the meaning
    16  of words?
    17  MR JUSTICE GRAY:  Yes, there are, but, I mean, not in this
    18  context. I think Professor Evans is perfectly entitled to
    19  say what he understands the Holocaust to be referring to,
    20  but is it going to help me because, in a sort of broad
    21  sense, everybody knows perfectly well what is referred to
    22  by the Holocaust.
    23  MR IRVING:  I strongly disagree, my Lord, with the utmost
    24  respect. We were asked this very early on by Mr Rampton,
    25  your Lordship will remember. Your Lordship will remember
    26  that I said that, to my mind, the Holocaust is the visual

    .           P-107


      1  image that people have. I, first of all, defined it as
      2  being the immense tragedy inflicted on the Jewish people
      3  by the Nazis and their collaborators during World War II
      4  which I think is a very fine definition, but there are
      5  countless other definitions.
      6  MR JUSTICE GRAY:  What I would suggest to you is that time in
      7  cross-examination of Professor Evans is not going to be
      8  well spent by discussing various meanings —-
      9  MR IRVING:  Meanings of words.
    10  MR JUSTICE GRAY:  — or definitions of the Holocaust. You can
    11  do that in submission, and I think it would be much more
    12  sensible to deal with it in that way.
    13  MR IRVING:  Yes. On page 71, my Lord, you will find the vague
    14  footnote that I referred to earlier.
    15  MR JUSTICE GRAY:  Yes.
    16  A. [Professor Richard John Evans]: That simply says: “If you want to know more about
    17  Auschwitz read Professor Robert Jan van Pelt’s report”.
    18  MR IRVING:  All 770 pages of it?
    19  MR RAMPTON:  My Lord, it is only fair to point out that this
    20  report is directed at the court and the author of this
    21  report, Professor Evans, is entitled to assume that the
    22  court will read the whole of van Pelt’s report.
    23  MR IRVING:  It is a rather superfluous kind of footnote, is it
    24  not?
    25  MR JUSTICE GRAY:  Well, I understand it is a general reference
    26  to van Pelt.

    .           P-108


      1  A. [Professor Richard John Evans]: I am simply trying to say there I really am not —
      2  I really do not, I want to save space, I do not want to
      3  say too much about Auschwitz because that is a subject
      4  dealt with by another report. That is really all that
      5  footnote is trying to say.
      6  MR IRVING:  Page 74 — are we making fast enough progress, my
      7  Lord, now?
      8  MR JUSTICE GRAY:  Faster.
      9  MR IRVING:  3.1.14, line 2, you say: “The essential point is
    10  that there is wide agreement that there was a systematic
    11  attempt”.
    12  A. [Professor Richard John Evans]: Yes.
    13  Q. [Mr Irving]: Now, I am nervous. As soon as we have the word
    14  “systematic” coming in, of course, then the court pricks
    15  up its ears?
    16  A. [Professor Richard John Evans]: Yes.
    17  Q. [Mr Irving]: Is “wide agreement” sufficient proof, in your view, or do
    18  you want to be more rigorous with our methods?
    19  A. [Professor Richard John Evans]: I am trying to summarize here what the concept of the
    20  Holocaust or, well, what I am saying actually is that the
    21  term, the word “Holocaust”, is a secondary issue. I think
    22  in order to —-
    23  Q. [Mr Irving]: Are wide agreements always right? There was wide
    24  agreement that the earth was flat —-
    25  MR JUSTICE GRAY:  We had this almost exact exchange on
    26  Thursday.

    .           P-109


      1  A. [Professor Richard John Evans]: We have had this before.
      2  MR IRVING:  I am glad that your Lordship is familiar with
      3  that. In other words, “wide agreement” is not sufficient
      4  evidence alone; we do need more rigorous support, do we
      5  not?
      6  A. [Professor Richard John Evans]: What I am saying, of course, is that there is wide
      7  agreement based on an enormous amount of research into a
      8  very large quantity of documentation —-
      9  Q. [Mr Irving]: Well, did you say three lines from the bottom —-
    10  A. [Professor Richard John Evans]: — which I do not think you can say is true of the belief
    11  that the earth is flat.
    12  Q. [Mr Irving]: You do say three lines from the bottom: “The Nazi
    13  authorities also left an enormous quantity of
    14  documentation providing detail of the policy of
    15  extermination”.
    16  A. [Professor Richard John Evans]: Yes.
    17  Q. [Mr Irving]: Have we not been hearing now for four weeks that there is
    18  no such documentation?
    19  MR RAMPTON:  No, my Lord, that is simply not right. I do not
    20  know if Professor Evans has been in court all the time,
    21  I am sure he has not, but your Lordship will recall that
    22  Mr Irving himself, on the basis of a very considerable
    23  volume of documentation, has conceded — I use that word
    24  advisedly — not only that the systematic shooting of vast
    25  numbers of Jews in the East, in Russia, happened, but that
    26  it happened on Hitler’s authority.

    .           P-110


      1  MR IRVING:  Of course we are not talking just about the
      2  shootings on the East, are we?
      3  MR RAMPTON:  Just, no.
      4  MR IRVING:  We are talking about we have a major problem with
      5  what happened elsewhere.
      6  MR RAMPTON:  We are talking about something like 1.2 million
      7  people, on Mr Irving’s figures.
      8  MR IRVING:  I think that the question I should have asked is,
      9  is there a vast body of documentation giving evidence,
    10  providing details, of the policy of extermination in
    11  Auschwitz and the other camps like that?
    12  A. [Professor Richard John Evans]: That is not what I say. All I am trying to do here is to
    13  advise the court that there is a very large quantity of
    14  documentation, something which I am sure the court now
    15  realizes.
    16  Q. [Mr Irving]: On page 79 at line 5 you refer to a recent Holocaust
    17  denial work. Is this a massive tome by one Barbara
    18  Kulaszka with the title: “Did Six Million Really Die”?
    19  A. [Professor Richard John Evans]: I cannot recall whether it is a massive tome.
    20  Q. [Mr Irving]: It is about 650 pages, A4 size?
    21  A. [Professor Richard John Evans]: Edited.
    22  Q. [Mr Irving]: Edited. Am I right in saying that this is an account by
    23  Barbara Kulaszka of the trial in Toronto on the history of
    24  Auschwitz, shall we say?
    25  A. [Professor Richard John Evans]: I think that is right, on the Zundel trial.
    26  Q. [Mr Irving]: Am I right in saying that Barbara Kulaszka, being a

    .           P-111


      1  solicitor of the Court of Ontario, is an officer of the
      2  court and well qualified to write this kind of summary?
      3  A. [Professor Richard John Evans]: That, I am not sure. I think she has some kind of legal
      4  status. I took this to be a work of Holocaust denial from
      5  it contents.
      6  Q. [Mr Irving]: So that a summary of the evidence for the Prosecution and
      7  the Defence in a law court can be taken to be a work of
      8  Holocaust denial?
      9  MR JUSTICE GRAY:  Whether it could or it could not, it has
    10  nothing to do with this case.
    11  MR IRVING:  My Lord, the reason I am bringing it to your
    12  Lordship’s attention is that I have provided in the little
    13  bundle a two-page summary at pages 20 and 21 by this
    14  solicitor of the issues of Holocaust denial which is a
    15  very useful summary of what is said about it and what the
    16  various authorities are. That is from that particular
    17  publication. Your Lordship might find it useful at some
    18  time just to digest its contents. I put it no stronger
    19  than that.
    20  A. [Professor Richard John Evans]: I do take Barbara Kulaszka to be an advocate of Holocaust
    21  denial from the contents of what she writes.
    22  Q. [Mr Irving]: In other words, because a solicitor writes an account of
    23  the trial of a Holocaust denier, giving the Prosecution
    24  and Defence case, it is the work of Holocaust denial?
    25  A. [Professor Richard John Evans]: Let me say, I do not think it is a neutral account and the
    26  fact that she is a solicitor is neither here nor there.

    .           P-112


      1  MR RAMPTON:  No. In fact, I am told that she was Zundel’s
      2  solicitor and also Mr Irving’s.
      3  MR IRVING:  Well, of course, Mr Rampton will be familiar with
      4  the concept that she is an officer of the court and is
      5  subject to certain basic principles and etiquettes. My
      6  Lord, might I suggest that we pause there for our lunch
      7  break?
      8  MR JUSTICE GRAY:  Yes, the time has come, certainly. Where are
      9  we going after the adjournment?
    10  MR IRVING:  We will make future progress into the parts your
    11  Lordship is interested in.
    12  MR RAMPTON:  I have laid hands on (because they have been given
    13  to me) some pages showing recent references on Mr Irving’s
    14  website, I think it is Mr Irving’s website, to what he
    15  calls some “traditional enemies of free speech”.
    16  MR JUSTICE GRAY:  Have you got a copy?
    17  MR RAMPTON:  We have had these printed out. It may not be the
    18  whole story by any means.
    19  MR JUSTICE GRAY:  That is very helpful. Thank you very much.
    20  Then you can return to this, if you want to, Mr Irving,
    21  briefly at 2.00. So 2 o’clock.
    22  (Luncheon adjournment)

    Part III: Evans Cross-Examined by Irving, afternoon session (113.23 to 217.26)

    Section 113.23 to 126.9

    23  (2.00 p.m.)
    24  Professor Evans, recalled.
    25  Cross-Examined by Mr Irving, continued.
    26  MR JUSTICE GRAY:  Yes, Mr Irving?

    .           P-113


      1  MR IRVING:  My Lord, we are now well into Holocaust denial and
      2  trying to make forward progress. Professor Evans, have
      3  you had any discussion since Thursday with anybody else
      4  about the evidence you are giving, or with the instructing
      5  solicitors in this case?
      6  A. [Professor Richard John Evans]: No.
      7  Q. [Mr Irving]: None at all? You know that you are not allowed to, do you
      8  not?
      9  A. [Professor Richard John Evans]: I do indeed, yes.
    10  Q. [Mr Irving]: Can I ask you to go to page 89 of your expert report
    11  please, looking at paragraph 5: “The murder by shooting
    12  of thousands of Jews is not the same as the extermination
    13  by shooting, gassing starvation and deliberate neglect of
    14  millions of Jews which forms an essential part of the
    15  Holocaust as conventionally understood”.
    16  A. [Professor Richard John Evans]: Yes.
    17  Q. [Mr Irving]: No doubt you mean the shooting or gassing or starvation or
    18  deliberate neglect — is that right?
    19  A. [Professor Richard John Evans]: Yes, of course.
    20  Q. [Mr Irving]: You do accept that I have written in most of my books, in
    21  recent years certainly, about the shootings in a way which
    22  makes it quite plain that I do not deny that they took
    23  place?
    24  A. [Professor Richard John Evans]: Yes.
    25  Q. [Mr Irving]: So we are limiting really the allegations of Holocaust
    26  denial to the more narrow front of the fact that I call

    .           P-114


      1  into doubt the existence of gas chambers for mass
      2  extermination of Jews.
      3  A. [Professor Richard John Evans]: I think that is one very important element in it. As
      4  I say here, there are a number of different elements to
      5  Holocaust denial. One of them is what I call here the
      6  extermination by shooting, gassing starvation and
      7  deliberate neglect of millions of Jews, plus the
      8  systematic nature of this, plus the number, the millions
      9  of Jews as opposed to thousands, as I put it there, and
    10  the allegation of the fabrication of evidence for the
    11  Holocaust as conventionally understood. All those things
    12  belong together, as I said this morning.
    13  Q. [Mr Irving]: I am moving forward now into the hundreds, I think. I did
    14  ask you — this is a written question, in fact page 91.
    15  You commented once or twice on the index to my books.
    16  A. [Professor Richard John Evans]: Oh, yes.
    17  Q. [Mr Irving]: You say that you write the index of your own books?
    18  A. [Professor Richard John Evans]: Yes.
    19  Q. [Mr Irving]: Do you accept that most reputable publishers in fact have
    20  the index prepared by an outside indexing professional?
    21  A. [Professor Richard John Evans]: No. Not in the case of scholarly works of history. My
    22  experience in research books authors, historians, are very
    23  keen to index their own books. In any case, my comment on
    24  indexing is simply because, in your written reply to the
    25  Defence, you draw attention to index entries in your
    26  books, so I assume that that meant that you accepted that

    .           P-115


      1  they were genuine, and accept some responsibility for
      2  them. Otherwise you would not have drawn attention to
      3  them.
      4  Q. [Mr Irving]: But you do accept that, in the case of all my books with
      5  the exception of one, I have no part in the preparation of
      6  the index?
      7  A. [Professor Richard John Evans]: If you say so.
      8  MR JUSTICE GRAY:  How does that work? I am asking you because
      9  you are the witness. How easy is it for the writer of
    10  Hitler’s War, for example, to get somebody else to do his
    11  index?
    12  A. [Professor Richard John Evans]: I think, my Lord, correct me if I am wrong, what would
    13  happen is that an author would simply say to the
    14  publisher, well, employ a professional indexer, and there
    15  are such individuals, and take the money off my royalties,
    16  something like that, to pay the fee.
    17  Q. [Mr Justice Gray]: I follow how it might work financially, but what I do not
    18  understand at the moment is how the professional indexer
    19  is going to know what to put in the index.
    20  A. [Professor Richard John Evans]: Well, that is a problem. They are professional indexers
    21  so they use their own judgment as to what is important and
    22  what is not. You start with place names, person names,
    23  and then a number of subjects that you think are important
    24  in the book.
    25  MR IRVING:  As the author of some 30 books, perhaps I can
    26  explain to your Lordship that there is a professional

    .           P-116


      1  society of indexers and there is actually a British
      2  Standard for indexes, believe it or not. The wise author
      3  is well advised to leave the index to the professionals
      4  rather than to attempt to do it himself. The only book
      5  that I have indexed in fact was The Destruction of
      6  Dresden, the recent edition?
      7  A. [Professor Richard John Evans]: I disagree with that. I think a wise author should index
      8  his or her own books. It is a way you maintain control
      9  over what the index says.
    10  Q. [Mr Irving]: Except you cannot draw conclusions from the content of the
    11  indexes of my books as to the author of those books, if
    12  I say that the author did not write the index.
    13  A. [Professor Richard John Evans]: Mr Irving, you are the one who drew attention to the index
    14  in your reply to the Defence of the second Defendant. You
    15  cite index entries as evidence of what you write about the
    16  Holocaust. That is the only reason why I use the index so
    17  you yourself rely on them.
    18  Q. [Mr Irving]: I do not want get sucked into this particular morass.
    19  Will you agree that the only reason the index was cited
    20  was to draw the attention to pages that were there by
    21  reference and not to the actual index itself?
    22  A. [Professor Richard John Evans]: Indeed, yes. Obviously.
    23  Q. [Mr Irving]: If you now have a look please at page 93, just going back,
    24  you refer to the fact that these editions of Hitler’s War
    25  were published under the same cover, line one?
    26  A. [Professor Richard John Evans]: Yes.

    .           P-117


      1  Q. [Mr Irving]: And you will agree with me, do you not, that you comment
      2  frequently on my having omitted things from the later
      3  edition of my book, that passages were omitted?
      4  A. [Professor Richard John Evans]: Yes, in particular references to the Holocaust.
      5  Q. [Mr Irving]: Would you accept that Hitler’s War in the first edition
      6  was 959 pages long, that is this edition, the first
      7  edition, and that The War Path was 328 pages, and that the
      8  1991 all in one edition was less than a thousand pages, so
      9  there must have been substantial abridgement in order to
    10  fit them all into one volume?
    11  A. [Professor Richard John Evans]: Indeed, yes. It is not the fact of abridgement that I am
    12  commenting on but what is excised.
    13  Q. [Mr Irving]: Will you accept that, in the course of abridgement, by
    14  virtue of the task of abridgement, things get omitted?
    15  A. [Professor Richard John Evans]: Indeed, yes, of course. That is what abridgement is.
    16  Q. [Mr Irving]: Page 93, paragraph 1, two lines from the end, you say, the
    17  liquidation programme and the systematic murder
    18  are ‘notions’ as much as Hitler’s knowledge of them. Are
    19  you suggesting that the word ‘notions’ is mine? You put
    20  it in quotation marks.
    21  A. [Professor Richard John Evans]: Yes. I quote you here saying that Hitler made statements
    22  in 1942 and 3 which are incompatible with the notion that
    23  he knew the liquidation programme had begun and that
    24  Europe’s Jews had been systematically murdered.
    25  Q. [Mr Irving]: Will you accept from me that a digital search of the text
    26  for the word “notions” found it only once in a 1940

    .           P-118


      1  reference to the French campaign?
      2  A. [Professor Richard John Evans]: Well, “notion” is in the singular. That is why the plural
      3  failed.
      4  Q. [Mr Irving]: Notion or notions. In other words, once again, you put a
      5  word in quotation marks as though it is by me which is not
      6  actually by me. It is just your word.
      7  A. [Professor Richard John Evans]: I am sorry, it is. It is your word.
      8  Q. [Mr Irving]: Well, I am just saying it is not, because I have done a
      9  word search on the entire text and it is not in there.
    10  Will you now carry on to page 93, the last line, that
    11  I have removed all mention of the word ‘extermination’
    12  from the book.
    13  A. [Professor Richard John Evans]: I have to say I do not accept that. I am quoting your
    14  words there, the notion that you knew a liquidation
    15  programme had begun. It is in the introduction to the
    16  1991 edition.
    17  Q. [Mr Irving]: Would you look at the last line of that page, please, the
    18  introduction to the 1977 edition of the book? I am sorry,
    19  in the later edition of the book, I have removed all
    20  mention of ‘extermination’, is that correct?
    21  A. [Professor Richard John Evans]: I am trying to find this. Where is it?
    22  Q. [Mr Irving]: The last line of page 93 and the first line of page 94.
    23  A. [Professor Richard John Evans]: The introduction? Yes.
    24  MR RAMPTON:  My Lord, I intervene to correct an error by
    25  Mr Irving, no doubt perhaps not for the last time. Page
    26  90 of the introduction to Hitler’s War, first complete

    .           P-119


      1  paragraph, “On several occasions in 1942 and 1943 Hitler
      2  made in private statements which are incompatible with the
      3  notion that he knew that a liquidation programme had
      4  begun”.
      5  MR JUSTICE GRAY:  I think that is right, Mr Irving, is it not?
      6  MR IRVING:  Yes. Will you now go to the last line of 93 and
      7  the first line of 94, where you say that I have removed
      8  all mention of the word ‘extermination’?
      9  A. [Professor Richard John Evans]: No. I do not say that.
    10  Q. [Mr Irving]: All mention of —-
    11  A. [Professor Richard John Evans]: The introduction — let me read those sentences. The
    12  first reference in the introduction on pages 17 to 21 is
    13  the defence of Irving’s views of Hitler. “It has already
    14  been pointed out above how it differs from the
    15  corresponding introduction to the 1977 edition of the book
    16  in removing all mention of the extermination of the Jews”.
    17  Q. [Mr Irving]: Will you accept that the word ‘exterminate’ or
    18  ‘extermination’ occurs 29 times in that book?
    19  MR JUSTICE GRAY:  It depends in reference to who.
    20  A. [Professor Richard John Evans]: It is the introduction I am talking about.
    21  MR JUSTICE GRAY:  I did not hear your answer, Professor Evans.
    22  A. [Professor Richard John Evans]: I am referring to the introduction. I am not claiming
    23  that the word does not occur in the whole book.
    24  MR IRVING:  At page 96 you refer to the fact that from the
    25  second edition of 1991, the 1991 edition, looking at the
    26  first line of paragraph 7, “Even more strikingly the

    .           P-120


      1  testimony of Morgen and Lorenz and the Slovak Jews has
      2  entirely vanished”.
      3  A. [Professor Richard John Evans]: Yes.
      4  Q. [Mr Irving]: Which Slovac Jews are you referring to?
      5  A. [Professor Richard John Evans]: Verba and one other.
      6  Q. [Mr Irving]: Verba and Wetzler, is that correct?
      7  A. [Professor Richard John Evans]: Yes.
      8  Q. [Mr Irving]: Is it possible that I had learned something between the
      9  two editions that made me totally distrust the evidence of
    10  Verba?
    11  MR JUSTICE GRAY:  How can he know that unless you put what it
    12  was?
    13  MR IRVING:  Thank you, my Lord, for inviting this. Will you
    14  turn to the little bundle, please?
    15  A. [Professor Richard John Evans]: I can cut this short. I footnote this. I explain in
    16  footnote 14 on page 97, since having written this book in
    17  1977, you said, “I understand that that Slovac report is
    18  open to some question”, so I point that out.
    19  Q. [Mr Irving]: Yes. It was not just open to some question.
    20  A. [Professor Richard John Evans]: Well, that is what you said.
    21  Q. [Mr Irving]: Could you go to pages 4 and 5 of the little bundle F?
    22  This goes to a rather wider issue in fact than just the
    23  footnoting. Pages 4 and 5 of the little bundle F, is this
    24  an article from the Toronto Star as reproduced on my
    25  website?
    26  A. [Professor Richard John Evans]: It is an article in your website. It is not reproduced in

    .           P-121


      1  the original. It is not a photocopy. It is copied.
      2  Q. [Mr Irving]: Does it purport to be reproduced from an article from the
      3  Toronto Star dated January 24th 1985?
      4  A. [Professor Richard John Evans]: It does purport to be that, yes.
      5  Q. [Mr Irving]: Is the headline, “Book an artistic picture, survivor never
      6  saw actual gassing deaths”?
      7  A. [Professor Richard John Evans]: That is the headline, yes.
      8  Q. [Mr Irving]: Is it an account of testimony given by the afore mentioned
      9  Verba in the Toronto trial of Zundel in which, under
    10  cross-examination, Verba, and this is the indented
    11  passage, “yesterday admitted he was never inside that
    12  particular bunker” and Verba had seen, it was the roof he
    13  had seen of the mortuary and not a gas chamber. That is
    14  the indented passage.
    15  A. [Professor Richard John Evans]: That is right, yes.
    16  Q. [Mr Irving]: Does the rest of the article suggest that Verba was not a
    17  very reliable eyewitness of what he claimed to have seen
    18  or reported on?
    19  A. [Professor Richard John Evans]: It suggests that there are some aspects of what he
    20  original originally said were not reliable but he insists
    21  that others were, according to the article.
    22  Q. [Mr Irving]: Yes. I am sure, if he had been in Auschwitz as he
    23  undoubtedly was, he was able to testify to certain aspects
    24  of what he had seen, but on the important issue of the
    25  goings on in gas chambers, it turned out he was not an
    26  eyewitness and was therefore in no sense reliable as a

    .           P-122


      1  witness. Is that correct?
      2  A. [Professor Richard John Evans]: Yes. I do point that out in the footnote, as I have had
      3  said. You understand it is open to some question. It
      4  seems to me a fair comment.
      5  Q. [Mr Irving]: Your Lordship will appreciate that the reason I have
      6  brought that to your Lordship’s attention is it goes to
      7  the question of eyewitnesses again. This was an
      8  eyewitness of crematorium No. 2, the big building. It
      9  turns out that he collapsed under cross-examination in
    10  Toronto. Under that circumstance was I right therefore in
    11  later editions of the book to omit his testimony or
    12  reference to it?
    13  A. [Professor Richard John Evans]: It depends rather on what testimony you were omitting.
    14  For example, he does say that he heard things from
    15  reliable sources, that he insisted he had made accurate
    16  estimates of the number of murder victims, and so on.
    17  But, if those passages which you omitted concerned those
    18  which he himself admitted were wrong, then of course you
    19  were right to omit them.
    20  Q. [Mr Irving]: Thank you. Can we now go to page 100, where we are now
    21  dealing with my biography of Hermann Goring. Do you have
    22  that in paragraph 1?
    23  A. [Professor Richard John Evans]: Indeed, yes.
    24  MR JUSTICE GRAY:  Are we leaving Hitler’s War?
    25  MR IRVING:  For the moment.
    26  MR JUSTICE GRAY:  I realise for the moment. Can I ask

    .           P-123


      1  Professor Evans a general question? It may be rather
      2  difficult for you because you may not have it all in mind
      3  at the moment. In so far as reference was made to the
      4  Jews in the first edition of Hitler’s War 1977, and the
      5  references to Jews in the second edition 1991,
      6  quantitatively and indeed qualitatively, I suppose, did
      7  you notice a significant difference? I have just been
      8  looking at the indexes in both instances. Are the
      9  excisions significant?
    10  A. [Professor Richard John Evans]: Yes, they are. Mr Irving himself said that he removed all
    11  references to extermination camps and death factories from
    12  the 1991 edition which I quote on page 100 near the top,
    13  so they are significant changes.
    14  MR JUSTICE GRAY:  Yes. Sorry, Mr Irving, you are going on to
    15  Goring.
    16  MR IRVING:  Yes. If the witness again says that I removed all
    17  reference to extermination camps and death camps, then
    18  I draw attention to the fact that the word “exterminate”
    19  occurs 28 times in the second edition of the book, my
    20  Lord.
    21  A. [Professor Richard John Evans]: That is not quite the same thing, of course.
    22  MR IRVING:  Did I understand your Lordship to say that you were
    23  comparing the indexes of the two volumes?
    24  MR JUSTICE GRAY:  Yes, I was.
    25  MR IRVING:  May I draw attention to the fact that the index of
    26  the 1991 edition that you have there was prepared by the

    .           P-124


      1  American publishing company Avon, which was highly
      2  inadequate, whereupon we commissioned a separate index,
      3  which I can provide your Lordship. We have that index
      4  available. It is about 50 pages long of typescript, much
      5  more comprehensive, and a comparison —-
      6  MR JUSTICE GRAY:  I follow that the index being different may
      7  have been rather less detailed in one case than the other,
      8  but it may be a worth while exercise to see what was there
      9  in the first edition and what has come out.
    10  A. [Professor Richard John Evans]: The point, Mr Irving, is that you yourself, as I note in
    11  paragraph 2, page 93, drew attention in your written reply
    12  to the Defence, you drew attention to the 1991 index
    13  entries as evidence that you were not a Holocaust denier.
    14  So I am puzzled as to why you should be disputing the
    15  accuracy of it.
    16  MR IRVING:  I draw attention to the pages referenced by those
    17  indexes but, of course the actual index itself which his
    18  Lordship is doing a statistical comparison with, he should
    19  therefore use the correct index rather than this rather
    20  cheap index produced by the Americans. The third edition
    21  of the book which is going to press this month has an even
    22  better index being prepared. But, once again, the index
    23  is not — can I now proceed to Hermann Goring?
    24  MR JUSTICE GRAY:  Yes. That was my fault, sorry.
    25  MR IRVING:  Your question, as I understood, was purely about
    26  the comparison between the indexes of the two or the

    .           P-125


      1  actual mentions in the book?
      2  MR JUSTICE GRAY:  It was more whether the index would suggest
      3  that there was quite a lot that was not repeated in the
      4  1991 edition gives a fair impression of whether there were
      5  significant omissions and the answer that Professor Evans
      6  has given is yes.
      7  MR IRVING:  The 1991 edition was a very truncated edition in
      8  its original incarnation.
      9  MR JUSTICE GRAY:  That makes it even odder.

    Section 126.10 to 160.11

    10  MR IRVING:  At page 100, please, Professor Evans, we are
    11  dealing now with the biography of Hermann Goring. You
    12  have in the fourth line of that paragraph noted that the
    13  book was published in 1989. What conclusions do you draw
    14  from that?
    15  A. [Professor Richard John Evans]: That you had completed it, roughly speaking, a year or
    16  slightly less before.
    17  Q. [Mr Irving]: So what you are suggesting is that by that time I had
    18  taken on board the Leuchter report, is that right?
    19  A. [Professor Richard John Evans]: Yes. That would be my assumption, the way books were
    20  published.
    21  Q. [Mr Irving]: You had my diaries available when you wrote your report,
    22  or researchers had the diaries available. Can I read to
    23  you the entry in my diary of January 11th 1988, which is
    24  only one line long, “January 11th 1998, 4.45 p.m. posted
    25  rest of Goring by Data Post courier to New York”. Will
    26  you take it that that implies that the book was completed

    .           P-126


      1  on January 11th 1988 therefore?
      2  A. [Professor Richard John Evans]: Yes, though of course then you have the opportunity to
      3  make revisions in the proof.
      4  Q. [Mr Irving]: Will you accept therefore that the book was delivered to
      5  the publishers three months before I first set eyes on
      6  Fred Leuchter or the Leuchter report?
      7  A. [Professor Richard John Evans]: The manuscript yes, but you do have the opportunity to
      8  make changes to the proof, do you not?
      9  Q. [Mr Irving]: And that, if I did not make such changes in proof stage,
    10  therefore this would invalidate any points you seek to
    11  make based on the presumption that I had the Leuchter
    12  report information at that time?
    13  A. [Professor Richard John Evans]: That is an interesting point, but it does not really
    14  affect what I say about the Goring book.
    15  Q. [Mr Irving]: If you are seeking to make some kind of watershed around
    16  the time that I learned of the Leuchter report as being
    17  April 1988, this is significance that the Goring book was
    18  completed before the watershed and delivered to
    19  publishers. Are you familiar with the fact that
    20  publishers frown on any kind of proof stage corrections,
    21  their authors’ corrections, charges levied, are you
    22  familiar with that?
    23  A. [Professor Richard John Evans]: It is a matter of negotiation. You can usually make up to
    24  about 10 per cent changes. It is matter of negotiating
    25  percentages of what you are allowed to change. It depends
    26  on the publisher and so on.

    .           P-127


      1  Q. [Mr Irving]: Have you any evidence that the manuscript that I delivered
      2  to the publisher in January 1988 was different from that
      3  subsequently published in 1989?
      4  A. [Professor Richard John Evans]: No, I do not.
      5  Q. [Mr Irving]: In other words, the Goring book counts as a pre watershed
      6  book and there is no evidence to the contrary?
      7  A. [Professor Richard John Evans]: Unless what you are telling me is that the watershed might
      8  have been slightly earlier than the Leuchter report, which
      9  is a very interesting point. What I have to say about the
    10  Goring book does not really depend on that. That is, if
    11  you like, an assumption on my part which may have been
    12  wrong. What is important about it is that you point to it
    13  as evidence that you are not a Holocaust denier, and
    14  I examine it briefly on pages 100 to 103, and point out
    15  that what you say in the book is not incompatible with
    16  Holocaust denial.
    17  Q. [Mr Irving]: Yes, but at the time you wrote that you presumed that
    18  I was post watershed, so speak, and that was why you
    19  confidently adopted these interpretations.
    20  A. [Professor Richard John Evans]: No. I adopted the interpretation on the basis of what
    21  I read.
    22  Q. [Mr Irving]: Do you know of any evidence that Hermann Goring was aware
    23  of the goings on in Auschwitz, the mass extermination in
    24  gas chambers which is part of the Holocaust story?
    25  A. [Professor Richard John Evans]: Oh goodness.
    26  Q. [Mr Irving]: Any documentary evidence?

    .           P-128


      1  A. [Professor Richard John Evans]: I have not presented any documentary evidence for the
      2  court. I am not really concerned with that issue. What
      3  I am concerned with in this section are your views on the
      4  Holocaust as exemplified by the Goring book.
      5  Q. [Mr Irving]: Did I not write in the Hermann Goring book on pages 343 to
      6  9, this is your second line at page 101, that in the
      7  winter of 1941 to 42 Goring heard rumours of mass killings
      8  in the East, which is of course what we all accept
      9  happened, that there were these mass killings?
    10  A. [Professor Richard John Evans]: The operative word there I think is “rumours”.
    11  Q. [Mr Irving]: Yes.
    12  A. [Professor Richard John Evans]: You continue: The surviving documents provide no proof
    13  that these killings were systematic, they yield to no
    14  explicit orders from above and the massacres themselves
    15  were carried out by the local Nazis, by no means all of
    16  German, points which I think you have now admitted are
    17  wrong.
    18  Q. [Mr Irving]: Now that we have access since 1988 when this manuscript
    19  was delivered to the police decodes, we are able to
    20  establish with much greater detail, is this not correct,
    21  precisely how these things happened?
    22  A. [Professor Richard John Evans]: Yes, but part of my point is that in 1977 in Hitler’s War
    23  you took a rather different attitude to these matters.
    24  Q. [Mr Irving]: Different altitude in which direction?
    25  A. [Professor Richard John Evans]: You accepted much more that there was systematic mass
    26  murder of Jews.

    .           P-129


      1  Q. [Mr Irving]: On the Eastern Front, the shootings or altogether?
      2  A. [Professor Richard John Evans]: Altogether.
      3  Q. [Mr Irving]: In other words, at that time I accepted the whole package
      4  uncritically?
      5  A. [Professor Richard John Evans]: Oh, I do not know whether it was uncritical or not. You
      6  seem to accept a large part of it, certainly that there
      7  were mass murders of many millions of Jews, including the
      8  use of gas. I think you did accept that in 1977, and
      9  there really is not any evidence in the Goring book that
    10  you accept it there.
    11  Q. [Mr Irving]: You appreciate that, when I wrote the Hermann Goring book,
    12  I did so on the basis of his as yet unpublished diaries
    13  and other documents to which I had had very limited or
    14  exclusive access like the entire transcripts of his
    15  conferences and documents like that, which other
    16  historians had not seen, and therefore I was probably
    17  entitled to express a view of my own on the basis of those
    18  documents?
    19  A. [Professor Richard John Evans]: No. It is a matter of how you comment on these things.
    20  If you cite, as you do on page 469, Goring claiming under
    21  interrogation that the extermination camps were merely
    22  propaganda, I always thought he said there were places
    23  where people were put to useful work, you do not actually
    24  comment on that, you just seem to accept that.
    25  Q. [Mr Irving]: In other words, I should have done what an establishment
    26  historian would do and immediately pooh-pooh the notion

    .           P-130


      1  that somebody as powerful as Goring could have
      2  been unfamiliar with what was going on, should I?
      3  A. [Professor Richard John Evans]: It seems to me a responsible historian should comment on
      4  that statement, yes.
      5  Q. [Mr Irving]: He should just have said, the documents suggest this but
      6  common sense suggests differently? Is it perverse not to
      7  make such a comment, just to leave the documents to speak
      8  for themselves?
      9  A. [Professor Richard John Evans]: What we are dealing with here is the allegation that you
    10  are a Holocaust denier, and my point there simply that
    11  what you are saying in the Goring book is not incompatible
    12  with your being a Holocaust denier, although in your reply
    13  to the Defence you say that it is.
    14  Q. [Mr Irving]: Can we go on to page 106? We have now crossed the 100
    15  mark. Professor, will you accept that I have let you off
    16  a lot of hooks which I considered were buried in the first
    17  100 pages?
    18  MR JUSTICE GRAY:  That risks undoing the good that you have
    19  just pointed out you have done as he will ask what hooks
    20  and then we will be back.
    21  A. [Professor Richard John Evans]: I promise not to ask that, my Lord. I will not accept
    22  it.
    23  MR IRVING:  Page 106, halfway down paragraph 1, the second
    24  paragraph on the page, you say, “Within a couple of years,
    25  however, Irving was declaring himself to be an expert on
    26  the subject”.

    .           P-131


      1  A. [Professor Richard John Evans]: Yes.
      2  Q. [Mr Irving]: When have I declared myself to be an expert? We are
      3  talking here about the mid 1980s, are we not? Within a
      4  couple of years Irving was declaring himself to be an
      5  expert on the Holocaust?
      6  A. [Professor Richard John Evans]: Yes.
      7  MR JUSTICE GRAY:  I take that to be 1988, actually.
      8  A. [Professor Richard John Evans]: 1988.
      9  MR JUSTICE GRAY:  It is within a couple of years of 1986, and
    10  that is Zundel.
    11  A. [Professor Richard John Evans]: I follow it on by talking about Zundel, where you were
    12  appearing as an expert witness.
    13  MR IRVING:  Was I appearing as an expert witness on the
    14  Holocaust or as an expert witness on Adolf Hitler’s role
    15  in directing the Third Reich?
    16  A. [Professor Richard John Evans]: As I recall, you were appearing as an expert witness on
    17  the Second World War.
    18  Q. [Mr Irving]: So, in other words, not an expert on the Holocaust?
    19  A. [Professor Richard John Evans]: I think that is included. The point in any case is that
    20  you were asked on the numbers killed in the Holocaust, you
    21  gave your opinion as I quote it there, and therefore you
    22  are lending the imprimatur of your expertise to those
    23  views. If you did not have any expertise on the numbers
    24  killed in the Holocaust, presumably you would have said
    25  that you did not have any expertise.
    26  Q. [Mr Irving]: Defence counsel is there putting something to me and

    .           P-132


      1  asking me for a comment, and I begin my reply, the last
      2  three lines on that page with, “I am not familiar with any
      3  documentary evidence of any such figure”.
      4  MR JUSTICE GRAY:  No. You have the emphasis wrong. “I am not
      5  familiar with any documentary evidence”. I think that is
      6  fair, Mr Irving, if you read on.
      7  MR IRVING:  For the purpose of what I am saying, my Lord, it is
      8  I am not familiar. I am not claiming to be a Holocaust
      9  expert?
    10  A. [Professor Richard John Evans]: Mr Irving, here you claim in the witness box in that
    11  particular trial, “I am not familiar with any documentary
    12  evidence of any such figure of 6 million, it must have
    13  been of the order of 100,000 or more but to my mind it was
    14  certainly less than the figure which is quoted, 6
    15  million”, and so on. You were giving that testimony as an
    16  expert. In August 1988 you told an audience in Toronto,
    17  “I have now begun over the last few months going around
    18  the archives with a completely open mind looking for the
    19  evidence myself because of Auschwitz, just to take that
    20  one cardinal tent pole of the case, if Auschwitz itself
    21  was not an extermination factory, what is the evidence
    22  that it was”? You claimed that you were looking in 40
    23  different government and private archives to see what they
    24  had on Auschwitz. You were writing a book on Auschwitz
    25  according to one of your speeches.
    26  Q. [Mr Irving]: Can halt your flood there and say—-

    .           P-133


      1  MR JUSTICE GRAY:  He is answering the question.
      2  A. [Professor Richard John Evans]: I am trying to answer your question. You said that this
      3  final book you claimed you were writing on Auschwitz would
      4  pull off a coup even more spectacularly than exposing the
      5  Hitler diaries as a fake, and all that seems to me to be
      6  evidence that you were proclaiming yourself to be an
      7  expert on the Holocaust. You said you had been fined in a
      8  German court. In 1992 you said you had been fined in a
      9  German court for uttering an opinion, a sincerely held
    10  opinion, “an opinion, I would venture to add, which I hold
    11  as an expert on the Third Reich”, and the opinion was that
    12  the gas chambers shown to tourists in Auschwitz was a
    13  fake. That seem to me to constitute a claim for expertise
    14  on the Holocaust. You are writing a book about Auschwitz.
    15  Q. [Mr Irving]: I did not say that I am an expert on the Holocaust, did
    16  I? I said I am an expert on the Third Reich, is that
    17  right?
    18  A. [Professor Richard John Evans]: You were claiming expertise by saying that you were doing
    19  an enormous amount of research on Auschwitz.
    20  Q. [Mr Irving]: Excuse me. Is it not right I did not say I am doing it, I
    21  have begun recently visiting the archives, is that right?
    22  A. [Professor Richard John Evans]: Indeed, and you have —-
    23  Q. [Mr Irving]: Is that immediately? Does one become an instant expert by
    24  visiting the archives? Is that the inference one is
    25  giving?
    26  A. [Professor Richard John Evans]: You said that your opinion that you were fined for in

    .           P-134


      1  Germany you held as an expert on the Third Reich, which of
      2  course includes the policy of exterminating the Jews,
      3  although you may not think so.
      4  Q. [Mr Irving]: Proceeding to page 107, paragraph 3, it is your
      5  contention, am I right in understanding, that somebody who
      6  seeks to suggest that the figures have been exaggerated is
      7  a Holocaust denier?
      8  A. [Professor Richard John Evans]: No, that is clearly not true. It is a matter of
      9  emphasis. As you know, estimates of the figures have
    10  varied between about 5.1 and 6.1 or over 6 million.
    11  Q. [Mr Irving]: In the individual operations —-
    12  A. [Professor Richard John Evans]: So the person who, like Raul Hilberg, whose opinion
    13  I respect, would say that it is in the sort of low 5
    14  millions would no doubt think that claims of over 6
    15  million were exaggerated, but that does not make him a
    16  Holocaust denier.
    17  Q. [Mr Irving]: I am talking about the component atrocities like their
    18  shootings and so on.
    19  A. [Professor Richard John Evans]: Yes.
    20  Q. [Mr Irving]: Are these figures absolutely cast in stone or is it
    21  possible that any of these individual figures have been
    22  exaggerated by the officers concerned?
    23  A. [Professor Richard John Evans]: These are — we are talking about the Einsatzgruppen
    24  report, is that right?
    25  Q. [Mr Irving]: Yes, the body counts by the Einsatzgruppen.
    26  A. [Professor Richard John Evans]: My point here is that you are in paragraph 3, page 107, is

    .           P-135


      1  that you are suggesting without any evidence whatsoever
      2  that the numbers of Jews killed listed in the
      3  Einsatzgruppen reports were exaggerated by the task force
      4  leaders. “Statistics like this are meaningless”, I quote
      5  you as saying. “It is possible that sometimes an
      6  overzealous SS officer decided to put in a fictitious
      7  figure”.
      8  All this is — I mean, elsewhere you are
      9  extremely concerned to have authentic, authenticated
    10  documentary evidence for what you are saying or for, let
    11  us say, Hitler’s involvement in the extermination of the
    12  Jews, but here you are indulging in what I think is wild
    13  speculation unsupported by any documentary evidence at
    14  all. That is the point I am making in this paragraph.
    15  Q. [Mr Irving]: So when you see a figure referred to in a decode or in a
    16  telegram or in a report, you accept that this figure is
    17  necessarily accurate and there is no need to analyse it
    18  and investigate the feasibility of such a figure?
    19  A. [Professor Richard John Evans]: No, I did not say that. I mean, I think obviously one
    20  looks for documentary evidence which will corroborate it
    21  or falsify it, but I think that is rather different from
    22  speculating simply that the officers might have written in
    23  phoney figures. There is no evidence for it.
    24  Q. [Mr Irving]: Was one of the German Army officers who were put on trial
    25  after the War by the British for his part in these
    26  atrocities Field Marshal Von Manstein?

    .           P-136


      1  A. [Professor Richard John Evans]: Yes.
      2  Q. [Mr Irving]: Have you read the account of his case by Paget QC who was
      3  his Defence counsel?
      4  A. [Professor Richard John Evans]: I have to say I have not, no.
      5  MR JUSTICE GRAY:  That does not stop you asking the next
      6  question if you want to, although I am not necessarily
      7  encouraging you.
      8  MR IRVING:  I cannot lead evidence. We have had this same
      9  problem before. I should really bring along the pages and
    10  put the pages to the witness. That is the only way to do
    11  it, my Lord, I think.
    12  MR JUSTICE GRAY:  I do not think anyone would mind if you put
    13  the next question and just see if you can get an answer
    14  from Professor Evans.
    15  MR IRVING:  Very well. If Manstein’s Defence counsel in this
    16  British Army court in Hamburg put it to the prosecutors
    17  that the Einsatzgruppen did not have the logistical means,
    18  in terms of manpower and truck space, to carry out the
    19  killings they claimed to have carried out, would that not
    20  be justification for casting doubt on the integrity of
    21  some of the figures?
    22  A. [Professor Richard John Evans]: No, not of itself. I mean, I think one would have to look
    23  at the evidence which was presented of the logistical
    24  means and weigh it against the evidence for the numbers
    25  killed.
    26  Q. [Mr Irving]: To your knowledge, had any of the historians on the

    .           P-137


      1  Einsatzgruppen carried out this kind of exercise, carried
      2  out feasibility studies on the numbers?
      3  A. [Professor Richard John Evans]: I cannot answer that in reference to what the Defence said
      4  in the Manstein trial, but certainly there is a great deal
      5  of writing about the Einsatzgruppen which goes into
      6  enormous detail about what they did.
      7  Q. [Mr Irving]: There is. Do you accept that SS officers would have had a
      8  motive to try to inflate their achievements in order to
      9  compare their prowess as opposed to the neighbouring
    10  Einsatzgruppen, if I can put it like that?
    11  A. [Professor Richard John Evans]: I do not really know of any evidence for that.
    12  Q. [Mr Irving]: Was there a similar phenomenon in the Vietnam War that you
    13  are familiar with?
    14  A. [Professor Richard John Evans]: I really do not know.
    15  Q. [Mr Irving]: Moving on to the famous December 1942 document, the report
    16  to Hitler with the 300,000 figure in it, are you roughly
    17  familiar, in vague terms, with that document?
    18  A. [Professor Richard John Evans]: Yes.
    19  Q. [Mr Irving]: I do not think there is any need to look at it. You
    20  comment on the fact that I said that I was unhappy about
    21  it because it is an unusual, isolated document. We are
    22  now at the top of page 108, my Lord.
    23  A. [Professor Richard John Evans]: Yes, I have that.
    24  Q. [Mr Irving]: Is a responsible historian not entitled to be unhappy
    25  about a document if it appears to stick out slightly from
    26  the rest of the body of documentation?

    .           P-138


      1  A. [Professor Richard John Evans]: Well, I think what you — firstly, this is a habit that
      2  you have, Mr Irving, of labelling documents that you do
      3  not like as being orphan documents. In the course of this
      4  trial in your work you have accumulated enough orphan
      5  documents to fill half an orphanage. There are many of
      6  these documents — I have counted at least half a dozen —
      7  and the problem is —-
      8  Q. [Mr Irving]: I do accept the document is genuine.
      9  A. [Professor Richard John Evans]: — when you encounter, when an historian encounters a
    10  document that runs counter to the thesis that he or she is
    11  trying to put forward, then you have to take it
    12  seriously. You do not try to find every possible means
    13  you can of discrediting it and doing away with it. You
    14  have to look at it and try to deal with it. That may be
    15  it that it means you have to revise the views that you
    16  came to the document with.
    17  Q. [Mr Irving]: Are there not certain questions that a responsible
    18  historian should put when he is facing a document like
    19  that look which is egregious, that he should say to
    20  himself (a) is the document genuine — well, we have
    21  decided that it is — but (b) what about the content of
    22  the document? Is it serving a particular purpose which is
    23  not what might at first appear. Should he not ask himself
    24  questions like that?
    25  A. [Professor Richard John Evans]: I think you ask all the questions on all documents. You
    26  ask the question, who wrote it? What for? Who was it

    .           P-139


      1  addressed to? Is it authentic? And so on.
      2  Q. [Mr Irving]: And the more remarkable the document, the more unhappy you
      3  should be, if I can put it like that?
      4  A. [Professor Richard John Evans]: I think you look at all documents — one should look at
      5  all documents in roughly the same way.
      6  Q. [Mr Irving]: Yes. You comment on the fact that my books do not publish
      7  photographs of concentration camp victims. I am now on
      8  paragraph 5, 109.
      9  A. [Professor Richard John Evans]: Yes.
    10  Q. [Mr Irving]: Page 109, paragraph 5: “By contrast”, you write, “there
    11  re no pictures of concentration camp or extermination camp
    12  inmates or victims”. Is this a serious criticism of my
    13  works?
    14  A. [Professor Richard John Evans]: Yes, I think you have an illustration section in the 1991
    15  edition of Hitler’s War where you include three
    16  photographs, but over two entire pages, of the victims of
    17  allied bombings of German towns, but you have no pictures
    18  of concentration or extermination camps’ inmates or
    19  victims nor of any of the shootings, and so I add. So
    20  that does seem to be me to be evidence of imbalance.
    21  Q. [Mr Irving]: Yes. Are you suggesting that I should have included the
    22  drawings by David Olaire which have been figured in this
    23  case, for example?
    24  A. [Professor Richard John Evans]: I do not want to go into any particular ones, particular
    25  photographs.
    26  Q. [Mr Irving]: Would you accept —-

    .           P-140


      1  A. [Professor Richard John Evans]: But there are well-known attested photographs of the
      2  shootings, for example, which you could have included.
      3  There is a selection of photographs you could well have
      4  included.
      5  Q. [Mr Irving]: Would you accept that as a publisher of books where we
      6  attach importance to high quality photographs, we are
      7  faced with the problem when it comes to finding
      8  photographs of concentration camp or extermination camp
      9  victims or mass shootings?
    10  A. [Professor Richard John Evans]: I do not think that that was your motive for not including
    11  them.
    12  Q. [Mr Irving]: Will you accept that there are problems, that the archives
    13  do not hold such photographs?
    14  A. [Professor Richard John Evans]: No. I will not accept that. I think there are such
    15  photographs of photographs.
    16  Q. [Mr Irving]: Are there photographs of unimpeachable quality and
    17  integrity?
    18  A. [Professor Richard John Evans]: Quality, some of them, obviously, are not of very high
    19  quality, but it is still, I think, incumbent on anyone who
    20  wishes to give a balanced view of who were the victims of
    21  the Second World War and wants to include photographs of
    22  them, to try to give a balanced selection of photographs
    23  on both sides, and not just put the German victims of
    24  allied bombing raids, and having the only photograph of
    25  the Nazis’ Jewish victims is of a train at Riga, a series
    26  of passenger carriages, and people handing luggage out of

    .           P-141


      1  the windows.
      2  Q. [Mr Irving]: We will come back to that picture in a minute. But can I
      3  ask you, are you familiar with the scandal surrounding the
      4  German photographic exhibition of atrocity photographs
      5  recently?
      6  A. [Professor Richard John Evans]: The Vermacht Exhibition, yes.
      7  Q. [Mr Irving]: Yes, what was the complaint about most of those
      8  photographs?
      9  A. [Professor Richard John Evans]: It was, well, this is a complex issue because there are
    10  allegations and counter allegations on both sides.
    11  Q. [Mr Irving]: Has the Exhibition been closed down?
    12  A. [Professor Richard John Evans]: It has been withdrawn for — the issue here, my Lord, is
    13  that there has been an exhibition, a travelling
    14  exhibition, in Germany of crimes of the German Army in the
    15  Second World War which includes a number of photographs
    16  which it is now alleged by critics of the Exhibition were
    17  not, in fact, of victims of the German Army at all, but
    18  victims of the Russian NKVD; and there are counter
    19  allegations that these allegations have been brought by
    20  people with extreme right-wing connections and to
    21  discredit the view that the German Army was not behaving
    22  properly —-
    23  MR IRVING:  I interrupt you there and ask —-
    24  MR JUSTICE GRAY:  No, I am quite interested in that.
    25  A. [Professor Richard John Evans]: — and it is an extremely, it is a complex issue. But
    26  I think it is clear that some of the photographs there are

    .           P-142


      1  not genuine photograph and not what they purport to be,
      2  though it is equally clear that I think that some of them
      3  most probably are, and the Exhibition has been withdrawn
      4  in order to try to sort all this out by means of
      5  research. That does not mean to say, of course, that
      6  there are no photographs which you could have used.
      7  MR IRVING:  Is it not true that the Exhibition was finally
      8  closed as a result of two learned papers published in
      9  learned journals, one by an Hungarian historian and one by
    10  a Polish historian?
    11  A. [Professor Richard John Evans]: Indeed, and, according to an article in Das Spiegel —-
    12  Q. [Mr Irving]: And they are not extreme right-wingers?
    13  A. [Professor Richard John Evans]: According to an article in Das Spiegel, these are two
    14  people who have extreme right-wing connections. Now, that
    15  does not necessarily invalidate everything they have said,
    16  but, as I recall the controversy, that the counter
    17  argument is that their criterion for what is a crime of
    18  the German Army is extremely narrow. They will not
    19  accept, for example, these two authors will not accept,
    20  that crimes carried out by local units in Lithuania, or
    21  wherever it might be, at the behest of the German Army are
    22  crimes of the German Army. So it is a very convoluted
    23  debate.
    24  But the point at issue is that — to come back
    25  to it — are you really saying that there no pictures, no
    26  genuine pictures, at all anywhere of any victims of the

    .           P-143


      1  Nazis? You could just as well have put up photographs of
      2  people who were killed by the Nazis. You could have had a
      3  photograph of Anne Frank, for example.
      4  MR JUSTICE GRAY:  The case that is being made is that there are
      5  no good quality bona fide such photographs. That is what
      6  you have put, Mr Irving?
      7  MR IRVING:  Absolutely right, and I am about to move on to the
      8  justification for that in a second.
      9  A. [Professor Richard John Evans]: Well, I do not accept that there are no bona fide
    10  photographs is my answer to that and that, irrespective of
    11  the quality, it does behove a balanced historian who
    12  wishes to give an objective account of these events to
    13  include something other than just photographs of the
    14  victims of allied bombing raids on Hamburg and…
    15  Q. [Mr Irving]: Before we leave the Exhibition, is it right, have you
    16  heard it said that the reason why German historians were
    17  frightened to write the learned pages that would expose
    18  the Exhibition in the way the Hungarian did is because
    19  they would then have been prosecuted under German law?
    20  A. [Professor Richard John Evans]: I have not heard that, no.
    21  Q. [Mr Irving]: You accept that the photographs that I published in my
    22  books, both in the Hitler biography and in the Nuremberg
    23  history, are original photographs from original negatives,
    24  do you accept that?
    25  A. [Professor Richard John Evans]: It looks like it, yes.
    26  Q. [Mr Irving]: The photograph which you object to, a photograph of a

    .           P-144


      1  train load of Jews at Riga station — it might be useful
      2  if his Lordship sees the photograph?
      3  A. [Professor Richard John Evans]: I am not saying it is not genuine.
      4  MR JUSTICE GRAY:  I remember it really.
      5  A. [Professor Richard John Evans]: I am really not saying it is not genuine. Nowhere do
      6  I say that.
      7  MR IRVING:  Will you accept the photograph was given to me from
      8  an album taken —-
      9  MR JUSTICE GRAY:  He is not doubting its genuineness.
    10  A. [Professor Richard John Evans]: No, it is perfectly OK.
    11  MR IRVING:  It is a question of the selection of the photograph
    12  and the reason I selected that rather than one of the more
    13  traditional pictures which you are familiar with.
    14  MR RAMPTON:  Your Lordship might care to look at the file copy.
    15  MR JUSTICE GRAY:  Yes, I was reminding myself why it is there.
    16  MR RAMPTON:  The file copy has been skewed because one of the
    17  pages is the wrong way round. Can I pass up a copy of the
    18  original book?
    19  MR IRVING:  I am indebted to you. While that is being passed,
    20  if I can explain, perhaps, by way of a question that
    21  that —-
    22  MR JUSTICE GRAY:  I think I have got it, but maybe I am wrong.
    23  MR IRVING:  My Lord, the son of one of those policemen, you can
    24  see on the platform at Riga —-
    25  MR JUSTICE GRAY:  Yes, I have it.
    26  MR IRVING:  The sone of one of those German policemen on the

    .           P-145


      1  platform at Riga has the album of his father, and he
      2  provided me with the original negatives to make those
      3  prints from. That is why I have picked that particular
      4  photograph. It is an identifiable event, an identifiable
      5  train load of Jews, arriving at Riga. I do not know what
      6  happened to them. One I can only fear the worst for them.
      7  MR JUSTICE GRAY:  But there is something in the text, I think,
      8  about the photograph, is there not, or about this
      9  consignment?
    10  MR IRVING:  This is five days after the famous Bruns episode,
    11  my Lord, of November 30th.
    12  MR JUSTICE GRAY:  I probably have this wrong, but do you not
    13  somewhere say that the photographic evidence does not bear
    14  out the notion of cattle trucks and —-
    15  MR IRVING:  I did not say that, no, my Lord. The only comment
    16  there you will find is whatever the caption says.
    17  MR JUSTICE GRAY:  You certainly do not say it in the caption.
    18  MR IRVING:  I certainly do not say it in the caption, and I do
    19  not think we do deny that there were cattle trucks used in
    20  the later stages of this atrocity.
    21  A. [Professor Richard John Evans]: No, it is simply that you do not mention it in your
    22  caption.
    23  MR IRVING:  In the caption, of course, I can only point out
    24  what is in this photograph. In the Nuremberg book, if
    25  I can just jump on one or two pages of your — do you wish
    26  to make a comment?

    .           P-146


      1  A. [Professor Richard John Evans]: No, that is all right.
      2  MR JUSTICE GRAY:  Well, what you do say in the text — I have
      3  just found it; it is all a bit jumbled up in the copy —
      4  “A rare original photograph shows the next train load of
      5  1,200 Jews leaving for Riga. Except for one uniformed SD
      6  officer near the third open carriage door, the escorts are
      7  all elderly German police officers with two Latvian police
      8  in the right foreground”.
      9  MR IRVING:  Which rather bears out, my Lord, what one of those
    10  decodes said that a train load of 1,000 or 900 Jews was
    11  going escorted by 14 local policemen, if you remember?
    12  MR JUSTICE GRAY:  That is the point you are trying to make with
    13  this photograph, is it not?
    14  MR IRVING:  No, my Lord. A picture is worth 1,000 words which
    15  is one reason why I have supplied so many pictures to your
    16  Lordship rather than documents.
    17  MR JUSTICE GRAY:  Thank you very much.
    18  MR IRVING:  It is an original photograph, high quality
    19  photograph, of the tragedy actually happening, and it is a
    20  photograph of unquestionable authenticity that was
    21  supplied to me by one of the policemen’s sons.
    22  The allegation against me on page 109 is that
    23  this only picture shows an orderly scene (as though I had
    24  deliberately picked a photograph with an orderly scene) of
    25  passenger carriages and people handing luggage out of
    26  windows, no brutality, no herding and no whips. Well,

    .           P-147


      1  I am sorry. Are you suggesting that I should have
      2  abandoned this photograph and looked for a more hackneyed
      3  stereotyped photograph, Professor?
      4  A. [Professor Richard John Evans]: I am afraid I am, yes. I think that you should have
      5  balanced out your picture, your extremely gruesome
      6  pictures which you put in the book of victims, emotive
      7  pictures of victims of the bombing raids, including a dead
      8  child clutching the body of an adult over — a very large
      9  reproduced picture. I think you should have balanced that
    10  with pictures of the victims of the Nazis. If you only
    11  look at the pictures section, the impression given is
    12  that, well, how jolly nice this train is at Riga, what a
    13  nice time they are having?
    14  Q. [Mr Irving]: On the contrary, is that not a picture of the utter
    15  banality of this kind of atrocity, that there are people
    16  handing baggage out of windows and stepping on to a
    17  platform —-
    18  A. [Professor Richard John Evans]: Sorry, there is no mention of any atrocity there in the
    19  caption at all.
    20  MR JUSTICE GRAY:  So how do you react to the suggestion that
    21  the reason for not including the sort of picture you have
    22  just been describing is the utter banality of those kinds
    23  of photographs? I think that was the suggestion.
    24  A. [Professor Richard John Evans]: Yes. I find that very hard to accept, that pictures of,
    25  let us say, the victim, people about to be shot by the
    26  Einsatzgruppen lining up in front of a ditch are banal

    .           P-148


      1  pictures. It does not matter how many times they are
      2  reproduced, they still remain, I think, very shocking.
      3  MR IRVING:  Professor Evans, how often have you seen pictures
      4  in my books that are familiar to you from other people’s
      5  books? Never? Once?
      6  A. [Professor Richard John Evans]: Plenty of portraits, I think, which I am familiar with.
      7  You include lots of portraits of individuals which are
      8  quite familiar.
      9  Q. [Mr Irving]: Colour ones or black and white?
    10  A. [Professor Richard John Evans]: Some of these pictures are not familiar. I am not
    11  disputing that these original pictures that you got, that
    12  they are very high quality, and so on. What I am talking
    13  about is the balance of the presentation and, indeed, the
    14  captions.
    15  Q. [Mr Irving]: You wanted me to include the fact that travel without food
    16  and water, for example, if I look at the second line from
    17  the end of that paragraph?
    18  A. [Professor Richard John Evans]: Not if they did not, no.
    19  Q. [Mr Irving]: The evidence is from the decodes that they did, that they
    20  had the food and water they needed for these journeys?
    21  A. [Professor Richard John Evans]: That the people who travelled in the autumn of 1941 on
    22  these particular trains did, yes.
    23  Q. [Mr Irving]: But that is what this picture shows, is it not?
    24  A. [Professor Richard John Evans]: Yes, I am not saying you should not have included that
    25  picture. I am saying that you should have had a balanced
    26  selection.

    .           P-149


      1  Q. [Mr Irving]: I should have skewed it the other way?
      2  A. [Professor Richard John Evans]: It is not a question of skewing; it is question of
      3  balance. What you have is an illustration section with
      4  some very good pictures, original ones that I have not
      5  seen before, absolutely authentic, rare, and so on. But
      6  that these give the impression, the way they are
      7  cumulatively arranged, that there were massive numbers of
      8  victims of allied bombings, and that that is, as you say,
      9  48,000 people died in devastating Holocaust in Hamburg.
    10  You are trying to establish, at the very least, I think,
    11  an equivalence, and the impression given by the imbalanced
    12  selection of pictures is that it is more — that the
    13  bombing of German cities is a more serious crime than the
    14  killing of millions of Jews. That is what I take from
    15  your — not having seen it before, that is what I take it
    16  from your illustration section.
    17  Q. [Mr Irving]: Is there no equivalence between these crimes — not on any
    18  level?
    19  MR JUSTICE GRAY:  The question is that the bombing by allied
    20  planes of German cities is morally equivalent to the
    21  extermination that Professor Evans believes took place, is
    22  that the question?
    23  MR IRVING:  In certain circumstances it was and that is
    24  certainly…
    25  MR JUSTICE GRAY:  What is your reaction to that, Professor
    26  Evans?

    .           P-150


      1  A. [Professor Richard John Evans]: I find that a very difficult question to answer. I am not
      2  a moral philosopher.
      3  MR IRVING:  Do you not later on in your report say that it is
      4  totally wrong for me to suggest that Dresden would now be
      5  a war crime if it was repeated?
      6  A. [Professor Richard John Evans]: I do not think you say that, you say that it is a
      7  certified war crime, I do not believe it has been
      8  certified as a war crime. That is not to say that
      9  I approve of it, but we are not really dealing here with
    10  the moral issues or with what happened. We are dealing
    11  with your presentation. In my view, this selection of
    12  illustrations is imbalanced.
    13  Q. [Mr Irving]: Well, go to the next book then, “Nuremberg, the Last
    14  Battle”, where once again you find fault with my selection
    15  of illustrations, although on this occasion I have
    16  included victims of what can loosely be called the
    17  Holocaust. I have obtained from a German sale an original
    18  soldier’s album from the Balkans showing these German
    19  soldiers brutally stringing up obviously defenceless
    20  civilians and hanging them. They are the most brutal
    21  photographs I have ever seen. They are nightmare
    22  photographs. Yet here too you find fault with what I have
    23  done.
    24  A. [Professor Richard John Evans]: Let me just read your captions: “Punished”,
    25  headline, “… snapshots from a German soldier’s photo
    26  album. The daily routine of a cruel warfare in the

    .           P-151


      1  Balkans. A German soldier is found mutilated. The German
      2  troops take reprisals stringing up the men folk in the
      3  village like washing on a line. One by one, a chair
      4  kicked away … (reading to the words) … and then
      5  painful death by strangulation. For crimes like these,
      6  German Generals are executed at Nuremberg …”
      7  Second heading: “And unpunished. No Allied
      8  General is ever called to account for the appalling fire
      9  raids on Japan, above, or Dresden, left and below. In
    10  each of these 1945 raids about 100,000 innocent civilians
    11  are burned alive”, and we know that that is a grossly
    12  exaggerated figure, “in what is now only universally
    13  recognised as a crime against international law” which
    14  I do not believe it is.
    15  MR JUSTICE GRAY:  We will leave that one — we will not chase
    16  that one.
    17  MR IRVING:  Professor, you are not an expert on international
    18  law. I have a lot of evidence that it is, my Lord, but I
    19  am not going to put it to the court.
    20  MR JUSTICE GRAY:  We will not chase that one. I think it is
    21  not the point.
    22  MR IRVING:  Yes, but on the photographs here again, it seems I
    23  just cannot do right. My Lord, you do not have the
    24  photographs in front of you, do you?
    25  MR JUSTICE GRAY:  No, but I think this is not an unimportant
    26  point, I think I can get them quite easily. I know

    .           P-152


      1  exactly the ones that are being referred to.
      2  MR IRVING:  Yes. It is a whole page of photographs, snapshots
      3  from a soldier’s album showing the reprisals they have
      4  taken against these people in a Balkan village.
      5  A. [Professor Richard John Evans]: Yes, you do make it clear that they are reprisals for what
      6  you call the mutilation of a German soldier.
      7  Q. [Mr Irving]: And I do have to admit that I have not published the most
      8  gruesome photographs for obvious reasons of taste.
      9  A. [Professor Richard John Evans]: That did not stop you publishing the photographs of the
    10  victims of the Hamburg bombing raid.
    11  Q. [Mr Irving]: Believe me, the ones that I did not publish in the
    12  Nuremberg book were unpublishable.
    13  A. [Professor Richard John Evans]: What I am trying to establish here is that you are trying
    14  to set up an equivalence between the two sides in order to
    15  diminish the importance of the Nazi extermination of the
    16  Jews.
    17  Q. [Mr Irving]: If an author has —-
    18  A. [Professor Richard John Evans]: And, indeed, I mean, in some sense, I think these captions
    19  and illustrations do have the effect of suggesting that
    20  what the Allies did was worse than what the Germans did.
    21  Q. [Mr Irving]: Worse?
    22  A. [Professor Richard John Evans]: Yes.
    23  MR JUSTICE GRAY:  Because they got away with it scott-free.
    24  MR IRVING:  If an author has sincerely held views —-
    25  A. [Professor Richard John Evans]: And because the pictures are more — have larger numbers,
    26  more gruesome, and so on.

    .           P-153


      1  Q. [Mr Irving]: If an author has sincerely held views on the morality of
      2  what both sides did in World War II, by way of killing
      3  innocent people and civilians, is this grounds for him to
      4  be held up to public ridicule and opprobrium and obloquy?
      5  A. [Professor Richard John Evans]: This is systematic distortion, I think, in your
      6  presentation of these pictures, the selection that you
      7  make.
      8  Q. [Mr Irving]: Is not the systematic distortion that practised by those
      9  who have suppressed the evidence of crimes that the Allies
    10  committed during World War II? I do not really want to go
    11  far down this particular road, his Lordship will not allow
    12  us.
    13  A. [Professor Richard John Evans]: I am not here to defend the bombing of Dresden and the
    14  bombing of Hamburg, goodness knows. I do not think that
    15  these have been suppressed at all. There has been an
    16  enormous amount of debate and discussion about these and
    17  passionately argued on both sides.
    18  Q. [Mr Irving]: What about an author’s right to write about it if he has
    19  these views sincerely, can he do so without fear —-
    20  A. [Professor Richard John Evans]: I think an author has —-
    21  Q. [Mr Irving]: — of being labelled a Holocaust denier?
    22  A. [Professor Richard John Evans]: Well, I think an author has a view to try to maintain a
    23  certain balance when talking about the atrocities, to use
    24  that word, committed on both sides.
    25  Q. [Mr Irving]: Yes.
    26  A. [Professor Richard John Evans]: And I do not think you do that.

    .           P-154


      1  Q. [Mr Irving]: Have I not had a record ever since my very first book
      2  of speaking out against this kind of air warfare right up
      3  to the present day in Kosovo, and does this not entitle me
      4  to adopt a kind of moral equivalency between the two
      5  crimes, although, obviously, there is no comparison on
      6  scale?
      7  A. [Professor Richard John Evans]: Yes, but what you are doing is to try to establish, both
      8  in terms of numbers as I am arguing in this action and in
      9  terms of the atrocities, the impression to your readership
    10  and your audience that the allied bombing of German cities
    11  was as bad as or worse than the Nazi killing of Jews in
    12  Auschwitz and elsewhere. That is really what this is
    13  about.
    14  Q. [Mr Irving]: In a few pages’ time you say, “On one particular night we
    15  only killed 17,000 people by burning them alive in 20
    16  minutes”, is that right?
    17  A. [Professor Richard John Evans]: Could you point me to that passage?
    18  Q. [Mr Irving]: Page 114.
    19  A. [Professor Richard John Evans]: Yes.
    20  Q. [Mr Irving]: Line 5, you are suggesting that killing 17,600 people by
    21  burning them alive in the space of 20 minutes is in some
    22  way, I do not know, not a crime?
    23  A. [Professor Richard John Evans]: No. What I say here is that —-
    24  MR JUSTICE GRAY:  Read it out, would you, Professor Evans,
    25  since that suggestion is being put?
    26  A. [Professor Richard John Evans]: Yes, I will read that out, yes. This refers back to a

    .           P-155


      1  lengthy quote on the previous page where you talk about
      2  25,000 people being killed in 25 minutes in Pforzheim by
      3  an allied air raid in 25 minutes, and in Auschwitz there
      4  were 25,000 killed in four years. “When you put things
      5  into perspective like that, it diminishes their Holocaust
      6  – that word with a capital letter”, “their” meaning ,
      7  presumably, the Jews.
      8  I point out in the passage that you cite that
      9  your equivalence does not stand up to examination, quite
    10  apart from the gross minimization of the Auschwitz figures
    11  because you exaggerate the number of deaths caused by the
    12  Pforzheim raid, which was estimated in a report of the
    13  Statistical Office of the City of Pforzheim in 1954 not as
    14  25,000 or 27,000, as you claim, but as 17,600. So you are
    15  deliberately trying to say 25,000, 25,000, and, in fact,
    16  it is not that equivalence at all.
    17  That does not mean to say that I justify the
    18  bombing of Pforzheim; that does not come into it at all.
    19  I am simply trying to talk about the way that you present
    20  these things.
    21  MR IRVING:  Can we just go back to Nuremberg, please? You
    22  suggest that at the end of paragraph 8 on page 110 that
    23  the way I juxtaposed those photographs was intended to
    24  imply to the careless reader that the perpetrators of the
    25  atrocities were Jews, that the atrocities were committed
    26  by Jews and that they were getting their — is there any

    .           P-156


      1  justification at all for this suggestion?
      2  A. [Professor Richard John Evans]: Yes. It seems to me that that is what seems to be the
      3  suggestion.
      4  MR JUSTICE GRAY:  I think I had better have a look at that.
      5  MR IRVING:  I think your Lordship ought to have a look at it
      6  because it is a serious allegation.
      7  MR JUSTICE GRAY:  I could not find the photographs.
      8  MR RAMPTON:  My Lord —-
      9  MR JUSTICE GRAY:  It is between 182 and 183.
    10  MR RAMPTON:  In Nuremberg it is after 182.
    11  MR JUSTICE GRAY:  I follow that. Where does it come in the
    12  great wodge of photographs?
    13  MR RAMPTON:  It is after a panorama of Nuremberg Defendants
    14  with somebody or other giving a — Robert H Jackson giving
    15  a speech for the Prosecution, I think.
    16  MR IRVING:  I will have the actual book brought tomorrow, your
    17  Lordship.
    18  MR JUSTICE GRAY:  Mr Rampton has it; I may have to look at it
    19  because I have a slight feeling that —-
    20  MR RAMPTON:  It is worth looking at the original actually, if
    21  I may suggest it?
    22  MR JUSTICE GRAY:  I have a feeling the photograph has not for
    23  some reason found its way into my —-
    24  MR RAMPTON:  I think the witness should have it too.
    25  MR IRVING:  Again the quality of the photographs is
    26  remarkable. They are original colour photographs to the

    .           P-157


      1  Nuremberg trials and this is the standard I am going for.
      2  MR JUSTICE GRAY:  That is not really the point, is it?
      3  MR IRVING:  Well, it is the basis I make the selection of books
      4  that I publish.
      5  MR JUSTICE GRAY:  Actually, I would rather look at the
      6  original. Well, the point that Professor Evans is making
      7  is, obviously, in reference to the photograph on the
      8  left-hand side under the text and they do have a Jewish
      9  appearance.
    10  MR IRVING:  Undoubtedly, they are Jews. Undoubtedly, they are
    11  also being swept up into the general Holocaust on that
    12  site. But I think to suggest that by the juxtaposition of
    13  the photographs I had implied in any way at all that they
    14  were guilty for whatever had befallen the German troops or
    15  whatever, that is perverse and unjustified and certainly
    16  unintentional on my part.
    17  A. [Professor Richard John Evans]: Well the caption does say: “A German soldier is found
    18  mutilated. The German troops take reprisals”.
    19  Q. [Mr Irving]: Yes. But, as you know, the reprisal is just swept up, a
    20  round number of males in the area and liquidated them,
    21  murdered them?
    22  A. [Professor Richard John Evans]: It is a question of what the captions and the pictures
    23  suggest.
    24  Q. [Mr Irving]: But nowhere is it suggested in the caption that the Jewish
    25  victims on those pictures have been picked for that
    26  reason?

    .           P-158


      1  A. [Professor Richard John Evans]: No, it is a matter of suggestion really. It was what the
      2  pictures suggest. I mean, of their very nature pictures
      3  are suggestive, captions are short. As you say, they are
      4  very powerful — worth a thousand words.
      5  Q. [Mr Irving]: To summarise, before we move on, this is a page of
      6  photographs of victims of the Nazis, is that right?
      7  A. [Professor Richard John Evans]: I believe I say so, yes.
      8  Q. [Mr Irving]: So that your suggestion in the previous book that I do not
      9  publish photographs of the victims of the Nazis does not
    10  always hold up?
    11  A. [Professor Richard John Evans]: Well, I say you — in the previous book I mention that you
    12  have a picture of the train at Riga. That is the only
    13  picture of the Nazis’ Jewish victims to set aside several
    14  extremely graphic pictures of the victims of allied
    15  bombing raids.
    16  Q. [Mr Irving]: So, somebody who is minimizing something like that in
    17  their books is a Holocaust denier, is that part of the
    18  element?
    19  A. [Professor Richard John Evans]: What you are trying to do — all of this is about your
    20  attempt to establish an equivalence between the two, as it
    21  were, to suggest that essentially all sides in the Second
    22  World War committed crimes of some dimensions. That is
    23  what we are really talking about. I think that is an
    24  element in Holocaust denial.
    25  Q. [Mr Irving]: In Sir Winston Churchill’s books, were there any
    26  photographs at all of train loads of Jews at Riga or

    .           P-159


      1  anywhere else on his History of the Second World War, six
      2  volumes?
      3  A. [Professor Richard John Evans]: I do not recall. I am not sure I see the relevance of
      4  that in any case to what you do in your books.
      5  Q. [Mr Irving]: That is for his Lordship to decide. If someone like Sir
      6  Winston Churchill writes a six-volume history without
      7  mentioning the Holocaust or the killing of Jews in seven
      8  line, does that make him a Holocaust denier or does it
      9  mean times have now changed?
    10  MR JUSTICE GRAY:  I think we can do better than take time with
    11  that question.

    Section 160.12 to 184.14

    12  MR IRVING:  We can indeed, my Lord, we are now going to come to
    13  a little piece of gold on page 111. In paragraph 10 you
    14  accuse me once again of exaggerating the numbers killed in
    15  allied bombing raids. The number of Germans killed in
    16  allied bombing raids, is that correct?
    17  A. [Professor Richard John Evans]: Yes, that is right.
    18  Q. [Mr Irving]: But you do not distort documents or quotations in order to
    19  justify that kind of allegation?
    20  A. [Professor Richard John Evans]: I am not sure what you are referring to here.
    21  Q. [Mr Irving]: All will shortly become plain. Will you go to the next
    22  paragraph 111?
    23  A. [Professor Richard John Evans]: Yes.
    24  Q. [Mr Irving]: Here you say on page 441 of Goebbels: “He describes the
    25  numbers of those killed in the bombing raid on Hamburg on
    26  27, 26, 28 July 1943 as ‘nearly 50,000′”.

    .           P-160


      1  A. [Professor Richard John Evans]: Yes.
      2  Q. [Mr Irving]: That was the big fire storm, was it not, that summer?
      3  A. [Professor Richard John Evans]: Yes, that is right.
      4  Q. [Mr Irving]: Operation Gomorrah, the British call it?
      5  A. [Professor Richard John Evans]: Yes, it is 48,000 in the captions of Hitler’s War which
      6  I cite on page 109.
      7  Q. [Mr Irving]: Is 48,000 a number that you had seen regularly in
      8  connection with air raid victims in Hamburg, that
      9  operation, the fire storm raids?
    10  A. [Professor Richard John Evans]: No. I go into this in the same paragraph, that the
    11  probable number, the generally agreed number is between
    12  35,000 and 40,000, that 74,000, or nearly twice 74,000 as
    13  you put in a letter to The Spectator in 1989, is a wild
    14  exaggeration.
    15  Q. [Mr Irving]: So you rely entirely on that letter to The Spectator, do
    16  you?
    17  A. [Professor Richard John Evans]: No, 50,000, I do not know where you get the figure from.
    18  It is plucked out of the air of 48,000.
    19  Q. [Mr Irving]: So in 1989 you say he put it far higher than I did,
    20  claiming that, while 74,000 people had died at
    21  Auschwitz, “nearly twice as many died in the July 1943
    22  RAF Dacken Hamburg”?
    23  A. [Professor Richard John Evans]: That is right.
    24  Q. [Mr Irving]: That is the quotation from my letter to The Spectator, is
    25  it?
    26  A. [Professor Richard John Evans]: Yes.

    .           P-161


      1  Q. [Mr Irving]: Can we have a look at that letter to The Spectator; it is
      2  worth having a look at?
      3  MR JUSTICE GRAY:  Where do we find it?
      4  A. [Professor Richard John Evans]: It is in your bundle.
      5  MR IRVING:  It is not in my letter. I do not know. If we
      6  are lucky, it is in the bundle.
      7  MR JUSTICE GRAY:  Well, I think we will get it from E12, page
      8  312, will we not?
      9  MR IRVING:  I do want to see it.
    10  MR JUSTICE GRAY:  Yes, I think that is fair.
    11  MR IRVING:  Otherwise, I can tell you from memory what the
    12  actual quotation is.
    13  A. [Professor Richard John Evans]: I have to see it, I am afraid.
    14  Q. [Mr Irving]: You have to see it, you are afraid?
    15  A. [Professor Richard John Evans]: Yes.
    16  Q. [Mr Irving]: Otherwise, I will tell you from memory and I will bring
    17  the letter in tomorrow. There is only one word missing.
    18  MR JUSTICE GRAY:  Can anyone on the Defendant’s side help?
    19  MR RAMPTON:  We are trying, my Lord; it is a chase to find
    20  Irving’s documents.
    21  MR JUSTICE GRAY:  The trouble is if we come back to it then we
    22  have to start all over again, that is the problem.
    23  MR RAMPTON:  I agree. Let me put it like this. If the word
    24  “as” was in after the word “many”, would that change the
    25  meaning of that sentence?
    26  A. [Professor Richard John Evans]: Yes, of course it would.

    .           P-162


      1  Q. [Mr Irving]: If it said, “nearly twice as many as died in the July 1943
      2  air raid”, would that change the meaning?
      3  A. [Professor Richard John Evans]: Yes, of course. That would make it 30, 37, is that
      4  right?
      5  Q. [Mr Irving]: Would it totally deflate the point of the whole paragraph
      6  and the paragraph before, as far as exaggerating air raid
      7  figures goes?
      8  A. [Professor Richard John Evans]: No, it would not, because you describe, you give the
      9  number as nearly 50,000 on page 441 of Goebbels.
    10  Q. [Mr Irving]: Is not the commonly accepted figure for these series of
    11  air raids on Hamburg 48,000?
    12  A. [Professor Richard John Evans]: No. It is between 35,000 and 40,000.
    13  Q. [Mr Irving]: On page 2, I am sorry, the next page, 112, line 2, you say
    14  31,647 dead had been found?
    15  A. [Professor Richard John Evans]: Yes.
    16  Q. [Mr Irving]: And you are familiar with the pictures of what it looked
    17  like inside bunkers?
    18  A. [Professor Richard John Evans]: Yes, indeed.
    19  Q. [Mr Irving]: The flat tyres, the little heaps of ash which had been
    20  human beings? Have you seen the photographs on the
    21  streets of the heaps ash?
    22  A. [Professor Richard John Evans]: Indeed I have. I take it that that is why official German
    23  estimates at the time put the total as somewhat higher at
    24  35,000 or even 40,000.
    25  Q. [Mr Irving]: And you have never seen a figure of 48,000?
    26  A. [Professor Richard John Evans]: Only in your work.

    .           P-163


      1  Q. [Mr Irving]: Have you read the official history of the strategic air
      2  offensive against Germany by Nobel Frankland and Martin
      3  Webster?
      4  A. [Professor Richard John Evans]: No, but I am relying here on work produced in Hamburg by
      5  Hamburg historians.
      6  Q. [Mr Irving]: You do accept, though, that if my version of that
      7  quotation is correct and you accidently or otherwise
      8  omitted the word “as”, your entire argument that I have
      9  doubled the number of people is unjustified and you are
    10  going to have to withdraw that, are you not?
    11  A. [Professor Richard John Evans]: Yes, because, as I say here, I cite it from Eatwell.
    12  Q. [Mr Irving]: So we will put the blame on Professor Eatwell?
    13  A. [Professor Richard John Evans]: Well, if indeed the word “as” is missing.
    14  MR RAMPTON:  We cannot find it in the Eatwell documents. I am
    15  sorry, it is not in the Evans’ documents.
    16  MR JUSTICE GRAY:  In Eatwell book?
    17  A. [Professor Richard John Evans]: No. It is in an article.
    18  MR RAMPTON:  We will check that.
    19  MR IRVING:  I have the actual original Spectator letter at
    20  home. I know that, my Lord, I was looking at it last
    21  night.
    22  MR JUSTICE GRAY:  Bring it in if you would not mind. We are
    23  not going to be able to track it down today.
    24  MR IRVING:  If your Lordship thinks it is relevant.
    25  MR JUSTICE GRAY:  I think in fairness to you, if Professor
    26  Evans has misinterpreted what you said, I think it is

    .           P-164


      1  right that I should know that. I do not think this is a
      2  point that is at the heart of the case, but in fairness to
      3  you, you ought to have the opportunity to show it to me.
      4  MR IRVING:  It is at the heart of the allegation that I happily
      5  double air raid figures to make a point.
      6  MR JUSTICE GRAY:  Well, that is one aspect of a broader point
      7  that Professor Evans is making —-
      8  MR IRVING:  Yes.
      9  MR JUSTICE GRAY:  — about what is described, rather
    10  inappropriately, as moral equivalence.
    11  MR IRVING:  Also it is useful at various other levels all the
    12  way down to how easy it is to make simple errors that can
    13  totally innocently reverse the meaning of a document.
    14  This literally reverses the meaning of that particular
    15  document, the one word.
    16  So all the rest of that paragraph about the
    17  probable number, therefore, is between 35,000 and 40,000
    18  (I am on page 112 like 7), “Irving’s wildly invariably
    19  categorical statements of 48,000″, just like today I still
    20  say 48,000, nearly 50,000 or nearly twice 74,000, that of
    21  course is the wrong bit, is it not?
    22  A. [Professor Richard John Evans]: If that is that true of course it is wrong, yes, and I
    23  would withdraw it.
    24  MR JUSTICE GRAY:  I really think we have probably got
    25  everything we possibly could out of that paragraph.
    26  MR IRVING:  Moving on to the next paragraph, we are now dealing

    .           P-165


      1  with the number of people who I suggested unequivocally
      2  can be shown as having died in Auschwitz, in the last line
      3  I say: “Around 100,000 dead in that brutal slave labour
      4  camp”, and, Professor, you take exception to that
      5  sentence, do you not?
      6  A. [Professor Richard John Evans]: Yes.
      7  Q. [Mr Irving]: You think the figure should be much closer to 1 million
      8  or?
      9  A. [Professor Richard John Evans]: About that, yes. Slightly more.
    10  Q. [Mr Irving]: No doubt 20 years ago you would have said the figure would
    11  be closer to 4 million?
    12  A. [Professor Richard John Evans]: Not 20 years ago, no.
    13  Q. [Mr Irving]: No?
    14  A. [Professor Richard John Evans]: I do not think so.
    15  Q. [Mr Irving]: So you would have discounted what the memorial said?
    16  A. [Professor Richard John Evans]: We have already been through this, but that was the
    17  product of immediate postwar circumstances when not a
    18  great deal was known.
    19  Q. [Mr Irving]: You do not just go with what the prevailing wind suggests
    20  is the latest figure; you do your own independent thinking
    21  about it?
    22  A. [Professor Richard John Evans]: I am not a specialist on Auschwitz, Mr Irving. So
    23  I accept what is the general consensus of scholarship on
    24  this issue.
    25  Q. [Mr Irving]: Yet if anybody does try to analyse the figures on the
    26  basis of other sources than what the memorial says or what

    .           P-166


      1  the Auschwitz State Museum says or what Sir Martin Gilbert
      2  says, he is a denier?
      3  A. [Professor Richard John Evans]: Well, it is not a question of just what they say. There
      4  is a very large, substantial amount of work. This court
      5  has been spent several days going through a whole mass of
      6  evidence about Auschwitz.
      7  Q. [Mr Irving]: Yes, but it is the word “analyse” I am looking at. If you
      8  look at page 113, paragraphs 13 and 14, I say: “Anybody
      9  who wants to analyse any part of the Holocaust story is
    10  dismissed and smeared as an anti-semite or at the other
    11  end of the scale a pro-Hitler apologist and a Nazi
    12  apologist.” You then comment in paragraph 14: “Analyse
    13  here is a synonym for refute or deny”?
    14  A. [Professor Richard John Evans]: Yes, that seems to me it is. It is a euphemism. You are
    15  very careful to avoid the word “denial” as much as you
    16  can, or you have been in what you have written and said
    17  about the Holocaust, but clearly as it stands this
    18  statement is absurd. Historians are analysing the
    19  Holocaust story all the time.
    20  Q. [Mr Irving]: But are they?
    21  A. [Professor Richard John Evans]: It goes on massively.
    22  Q. [Mr Irving]: Are they analysing figures all the time?
    23  A. [Professor Richard John Evans]: Yes. There is an enormous amount of work that is in
    24  progress. There are hundreds of historians working on
    25  this. There are large institutions which are devoted to
    26  analysing all different parts of the Holocaust story, and

    .           P-167


      1  nobody is dismissing them as anti-semites or Nazi
      2  apologists. What you have here is “analysed” as a
      3  euphemism for “deny”.
      4  Q. [Mr Irving]: So analysing is all right until we look at the figures and
      5  then it becomes denial?
      6  A. [Professor Richard John Evans]: No. Historians are looking at the figures all time.
      7  Q. [Mr Irving]: What kind of historian do you have to be then to avoid
      8  that word “denial”? Do you have to avoid my name or do
      9  you have to be left-wing or what?
    10  MR JUSTICE GRAY:  This is semantic. We know what the
    11  definition of Holocaust denier is as contended for by the
    12  Defendants. The issue we are trying to explore is whether
    13  you, Mr Irving, fit that definition. I really think
    14  semantic discussions of this kind are unhelpful.
    15  MR IRVING:  I was scene setting with a broad brush, and now we
    16  are going to start getting out the small sable and start
    17  painting in some of the detail.
    18  Professor, if there are either logical
    19  calculations that you make or there are bodies of
    20  documents that you can make which would enable one to
    21  reassess the figures, I am avoiding the word “analyse”
    22  now, but to reassess the figures, would that be a
    23  justifiable exercise for any historian of whatever colour?
    24  A. [Professor Richard John Evans]: Yes, certainly. For example, new material is becoming
    25  available or has become available since the collapse of
    26  the Soviet Union in East European archives which has

    .           P-168


      1  helped in reassessments.
      2  Q. [Mr Irving]: Yes. In about 19899 Soviet Union released the death
      3  books, did they not, of Auschwitz relating not to all the
      4  years but some of the years?
      5  A. [Professor Richard John Evans]: That is right, yes.
      6  Q. [Mr Irving]: Would you expect these death books, the registers of
      7  deaths of people in Auschwitz, to have provided some kind
      8  of impetus to this calculation?
      9  A. [Professor Richard John Evans]: They are certainly a significant document, yes.
    10  Q. [Mr Irving]: I am avoiding the use of the word “analyse”. It would be
    11  justifiable to look at those records for any person and
    12  try to do some kind of meaningful calculation and try to
    13  work out whether these were comprehensive,
    14  all-encompassing death books, or whether they were only
    15  part of the body of Auschwitz or what?
    16  A. [Professor Richard John Evans]: Indeed, yes. You have to remember, of course, that those
    17  large numbers of people who were taken straight to the gas
    18  chambers on their arrival at Auschwitz were not entered in
    19  the camp registers, and so do not appear in the death
    20  books.
    21  Q. [Mr Irving]: This is an important part of the Holocaust history, is it
    22  not, the notion that a large number of people arrived at
    23  the camp, were unloaded and were sent straight to their
    24  deaths in the gas chambers, is that correct?
    25  A. [Professor Richard John Evans]: I think, yes.
    26  Q. [Mr Irving]: What kind of people were they?

    .           P-169


      1  A. [Professor Richard John Evans]: It is described as more than a notion.
      2  Q. [Mr Irving]: What kind of people were then selected for death?
      3  A. [Professor Richard John Evans]: Well, I am not an expert on Auschwitz, but my
      4  understanding is that the process of selection generally
      5  tended to take into the camp or register in the camp those
      6  who were considered to be capable of working and those who
      7  were not, particularly women and children, were sent to
      8  the gas chambers.
      9  Q. [Mr Irving]: Women and children were sent to the gas chambers.
    10  Professor, will you have a look at page 35 I think it is
    11  in my bundle, the little bundle you were handed this
    12  morning? It is another of these pictures speaking louder
    13  than words things again. Is that a photograph showing
    14  people standing behind barbed wire?
    15  A. [Professor Richard John Evans]: Indeed, yes.
    16  Q. [Mr Irving]: What kind of age are those people?
    17  A. [Professor Richard John Evans]: It is very difficult to say. They look like — it is
    18  difficult to say. One or two children, some adolescence.
    19  Q. [Mr Irving]: Does the caption provided by Associated Press say: This
    20  is somebody standing among a group of children?
    21  A. [Professor Richard John Evans]: Indeed, yes.
    22  Q. [Mr Irving]: When the camp was liberated by the Red Army?
    23  A. [Professor Richard John Evans]: Yes.
    24  Q. [Mr Irving]: Why would they have had children in the camp?
    25  A. [Professor Richard John Evans]: There could have been any one of a number of reasons.
    26  I mean some children were retained for medical

    .           P-170


      1  experimentation, that is a particular reason. There were
      2  numbers of allegedly or so-called pure bred gypsy children
      3  who were kept. There were a number of reasons.
      4  Q. [Mr Irving]: Is there any indication on the caption that these were the
      5  experimental ones or the gypsy ones?
      6  A. [Professor Richard John Evans]: I really could not say.
      7  Q. [Mr Irving]: It just says there were children who were in the camp at
      8  the time of the liberation?
      9  A. [Professor Richard John Evans]: There is no indication of what they are doing there or why
    10  they were there.
    11  Q. [Mr Irving]: You said also the ones who were sick were also selected
    12  for death?
    13  A. [Professor Richard John Evans]: On the whole, yes.
    14  MR RAMPTON:  My Lord, I think this is really a little unfair.
    15  Professor Evans is not a Holocaust expert. Professor van
    16  Pelt has already told your Lordship, which Mr Irving knows
    17  perfectly well, that the gas chambers ceased operation in
    18  October 1944.
    19  MR IRVING:  My Lord, Professor Evans on page 114 has gone in
    20  some detail into the death books.
    21  MR JUSTICE GRAY:  Yes. My own feeling is that we went into all
    22  these questions, particularly the camp registers, in great
    23  deal with Professor van Pelt. You are right in saying
    24  that Professor Evans does mention gas chambers in
    25  Auschwitz, but he has told you he does not regard himself
    26  as a great expert, besides which Mr Rampton’s last

    .           P-171


      1  observation does seem to be a fair one, does it not?
      2  MR IRVING:  I completely endorse this, and I always bow to Mr
      3  Rampton’s wisdom which is far superior —-
      4  MR JUSTICE GRAY:  You do not need to do that.
      5  MR RAMPTON:  I have no wisdom but I have a wizard short-term
      6  memory.
      7  MR JUSTICE GRAY:  It is right, is it not, that the gas chambers
      8  ceased to exist when they were really destroyed in 1944,
      9  so that if there were transports including women and
    10  children you would expect to find them within the barbed
    11  wire at Auschwitz in 1945?
    12  MR IRVING:  They must have arrived then as children and they
    13  must have avoided selection somehow as children.
    14  MR JUSTICE GRAY:  It may be that the selection process stopped
    15  when the gas chambers disappeared.
    16  MR IRVING:  If your Lordship will rule that this witness should
    17  not be asked questions about Auschwitz, then I will
    18  happily comply.
    19  MR JUSTICE GRAY:  No, I cannot do that, because he has referred
    20  to Auschwitz in his report and therefore he is, it seems
    21  to me, amenable to cross-examination on that topic. But
    22  if I were you, I really would not bother to cover the same
    23  ground, because you cross-examined Professor van Pelt —-
    24  MR IRVING:  I agree, but I am in difficulties because this
    25  witness has covered the same ground, particularly in his
    26  footnote, for example, No. 13 where he says: “As we have

    .           P-172


      1  seen, the camp records did not include those killed or
      2  shortly on arrival”.
      3  MR JUSTICE GRAY:  I know. That is why I am not going to rule
      4  out this cross-examination, but I say again, the bits that
      5  matter in Professor Evans’ report start in, I am afraid it
      6  is still 30 pages time when he starts to make the
      7  historians’ criticisms of you, and that is the meat of his
      8  report. But I cannot stop you, it seems to me. I can
      9  encourage you to take it quickly.
    10  MR IRVING:  Which is what I am doing.
    11  MR JUSTICE GRAY:  I can suggest you might not think it really
    12  worth doing at all.
    13  MR IRVING:  My Lord, this is short track I am taking at
    14  present.
    15  MR JUSTICE GRAY:  Right.
    16  MR IRVING:  If I could take you now to page 115, we are now
    17  going to deal with Professor Hinsley. On paragraph 16 you
    18  say Hinsley did not claim that nearly all the deaths were
    19  due to disease. Professor Hinsley is of course a
    20  recognized authority, he is not?
    21  A. [Professor Richard John Evans]: He was, yes.
    22  Q. [Mr Irving]: He is an official British historian of the British
    23  Intelligence Services?
    24  A. [Professor Richard John Evans]: He was, yes.
    25  Q. [Mr Irving]: In volume 2 of his work he published an appendix, did he
    26  not, on the police decodes?

    .           P-173


      1  A. [Professor Richard John Evans]: Yes.
      2  Q. [Mr Irving]: In the first line you write, in paragraph 16: “All he
      3  wrote was that the British decrypts of encoded radio
      4  messages sent from Auschwitz did not mention gassings”,
      5  but in fact if you look at your footnote 18 on the next
      6  page he is slightly more specific, is he not? He says:
      7  “The returns from Auschwitz, the largest of the camps
      8  with 20,000 prisoners, mentioned illness as the main cause
      9  of death”, is that correct?
    10  A. [Professor Richard John Evans]: Yes.
    11  Q. [Mr Irving]: “It included references to shootings and hangings”, and
    12  then he continues: “There were no references in the
    13  decrypts to gassing”.
    14  MR JUSTICE GRAY:  Mr Irving, I am sorry, I am going to
    15  interrupt you because I think we may be able to take this
    16  a bit more shortly. Professor van Pelt said, well, that
    17  probably is right and it is not very surprising because
    18  the decrypts were talking about what was going on in the
    19  camps, and the whole point about the gassing was that it
    20  was not going on in the camps in that sense. Mr Rampton,
    21  am I wrong about that?
    22  MR RAMPTON:  That is absolutely right.
    23  MR JUSTICE GRAY:  That was what he said?
    24  MR RAMPTON:  That is absolutely right.
    25  MR JUSTICE GRAY:  Therefore, this point — I am not saying it
    26  is not a good point on Hinsley and the decrypts, but that

    .           P-174


      1  is the explanation we have had so far.
      2  MR IRVING:  I must have nodded when Professor van Pelt said
      3  that, my Lord, because if he had said that I would
      4  certainly queried that and said: Well, where were the
      5  gassings takings place then?
      6  MR RAMPTON:  I can also tell your Lordship, to save coming back
      7  to it, this comes from Mr Irving’s website, that on 13th
      8  September 1941 Deluge, who was the Chief of the Order
      9  Police, sent a message to the forces in Russia about
    10  confidentiality and he said this: “That information which
    11  is containing State secrets calls for especially secret
    12  treatment. Into this category fall exact figures
    13  executions. These are to be sent by courier”.
    14  MR JUSTICE GRAY:  Yes, but that is another point. Am I wrong
    15  about what I recall Professor van Pelt having said?
    16  MR RAMPTON:  No, you are absolutely right. What van Pelt,
    17  amongst others, has said, it is in his report and I think
    18  he also said it in the witness box, is you would not
    19  expect to find details of the gassings on the decrypts for
    20  two reasons. First, because it was secret, as this
    21  message suggests, but much more important because the
    22  people who were gassed on arrival were never registered
    23  and would not have been subject of the codes anyway.
    24  MR JUSTICE GRAY:  Yes, I thought he had said that. We can look
    25  up the reference if you are doubtful.
    26  MR IRVING:  My Lord, that was a horrendous interruption

    .           P-175


      1  Mr Rampton and I withdraw the nice remarks I said earlier.
      2  MR JUSTICE GRAY:  Do not upset Mr Rampton, but I had rather
      3  encouraged that, I am afraid it is my fault.
      4  MR IRVING:  Deluge was only referring to the shootings on the
      5  Eastern Front. Deluge was only responsible for the
      6  shootings on the Eastern Front. He was in no way
      7  responsible for the concentration camp system which came
      8  under a completely different hierarchy. I am sure
      9  Mr Rampton knows that.
    10  MR RAMPTON:  No, the point is the same.
    11  MR IRVING:  But I will move on from there because clearly we
    12  are not going to —-
    13  MR JUSTICE GRAY:  If you want to take a short break, Mr Irving,
    14  at any stage you only have to ask. You know that, do you
    15  not?
    16  MR IRVING:  Can we move on to page 118. We are getting very
    17  close now to the —-
    18  MR JUSTICE GRAY:  Yes.
    19  MR IRVING:  You refer to the aerial photographs, but, witness,
    20  you are not an expert on Auschwitz, so there is no point
    21  really asking you about this at all, is there? I mean all
    22  the statements you made about Auschwitz and in these 180
    23  pages so far are, effectively, off the top of your head,
    24  because you have not studied it to the same degree other
    25  witnesses have?
    26  A. [Professor Richard John Evans]: I am not making statements about Auschwitz. I am making

    .           P-176


      1  statements here about what you write about Auschwitz, and
      2  this is a particular section here which is, if I can find
      3  the beginning of it, about the figures, the numbers
      4  killed, and I am trying to go through what you write about
      5  it.
      6  Q. [Mr Irving]: Yes. Are you not familiar with the history of the
      7  operation of the Haganah in Germany after World War II?
      8  A. [Professor Richard John Evans]: No, I am not. My point here is that you claim that the
      9  Jews who disappeared did not die but were secretly
    10  transported to Palestine by the Haganah and given new
    11  identities, rather than have being killed in Auschwitz.
    12  I have to say I find that quite a fantastic suggestion for
    13  which you provide no documentary basis, even though in
    14  other areas, as we have seen repeatedly, you demand the
    15  most strictest criteria of documentary support for any
    16  statements made about the Nazis policy towards the Jews
    17  and what happened to the Jews and so on.
    18  Q. [Mr Irving]: Would it fair to expand that sentence that you have just
    19  read out slightly: He has, for instance, claimed that
    20  some of the Jews who disappeared, because obviously I am
    21  not claiming that all Jews disappeared went to Palestine?
    22  What you meant there was that I am saying that some of the
    23  Jews or a part of or a large part of the Jews but not all
    24  of, right?
    25  A. [Professor Richard John Evans]: I would have to go back to what you wrote there.
    26  Q. [Mr Irving]: Clearly I have not suggested that all the Jews who

    .           P-177


      1  disappeared went to Palestine, have I? Do you agree?
      2  A. [Professor Richard John Evans]: I am afraid I would have to go back and check. I mean
      3  where have the bodies gone from — “There is no trace in
      4  Allies’ aerial photographs of mass graves in Auschwitz.
      5  Where have the bodies gone?” You have supplied more than
      6  one answer. So, these answers may cover different groups
      7  of Jews of course.
      8  Q. [Mr Irving]: Yes. So you accept then that I am talking about a part of
      9  the missing Jews?
    10  A. [Professor Richard John Evans]: Well, the implication in what you write is clearly it is a
    11  very significant part, as again your claim that some of
    12  the missing Jews had fled to Dresden and were killed in
    13  the February 1945 bombing raid.
    14  Q. [Mr Irving]: Can we just stay with the Palestine ones? You say that
    15  you are not familiar with the operations of the Haganah in
    16  Germany after World War II, operating in conjunction with
    17  UNRRA, the Refugee and Relief Agency?
    18  A. [Professor Richard John Evans]: No, I am not, no. You do not provide any evidence that
    19  they were secretly transported to Palestine by the
    20  Haganah.
    21  Q. [Mr Irving]: Do you accept that there is a very lengthy report on the
    22  operations of the Haganah in the American Government
    23  archives about 250,000 pages long by the Military Governor
    24  of Germany describing how —-
    25  A. [Professor Richard John Evans]: Mr Irving, I am concerned with what you write here and
    26  what you write is a suggestion which is unsupported by

    .           P-178


      1  anything like that, that large numbers of Jews were
      2  secretly transported to Palestine by the Haganah and given
      3  new identities, therefore, rendered untraceable, and did
      4  not die in Auschwitz and other extermination camps or were
      5  not shot and killed.
      6  Q. [Mr Irving]: So you maintain that this did not happen? You are casting
      7  doubt on it?
      8  A. [Professor Richard John Evans]: No, I am not talking about what happened and what did not
      9  happen. I am talking about what you present as having
    10  happened.
    11  MR JUSTICE GRAY:  And the evidence for that?
    12  A. [Professor Richard John Evans]: And the evidence.
    13  MR IRVING:  Yes, but I just tried to put to him this lengthy
    14  report in the American Government archives and the witness
    15  interrupted me halfway through.
    16  A. [Professor Richard John Evans]: I am sorry. What I am trying to say is that irrespective
    17  of that, you do not cite that as evidence. You are simply
    18  suggesting, as it seems to me out of thin air, that large
    19  numbers of Jews were secretly transported to Palestine and
    20  did not die in Auschwitz.
    21  Q. [Mr Irving]: Will you accept that I do not write passages like that out
    22  of thin air?
    23  A. [Professor Richard John Evans]: No.
    24  Q. [Mr Irving]: That in fact I probably have a very good source which for
    25  one reason or another I have not identified?
    26  A. [Professor Richard John Evans]: No, I am sorry, I will not.

    .           P-179


      1  Q. [Mr Irving]: In other words, you believe that I write this out of thin
      2  air, that I make it up?
      3  A. [Professor Richard John Evans]: I do not see any evidence that you have not made it up.
      4  Q. [Mr Irving]: And you are not prepared to accept my suggestion that
      5  there is this very lengthy report in the US National
      6  archives on the operations of the Haganah written by the
      7  American Military Governor?
      8  A. [Professor Richard John Evans]: Well, you can suggest whatever you like now. The point is
      9  what I am doing is looking in here, in this report, is
    10  looking at what you have written and said in the past and
    11  the documentary support or otherwise that you have adduced
    12  for it.
    13  Q. [Mr Irving]: Let us approach from another angle then, Professor. You
    14  are aware of the fact that there are now substantial
    15  claims being made against the Swiss and American and
    16  German companies and so on for compensation? Have you any
    17  idea how many Holocaust survivors are now claiming
    18  compensation, a figure?
    19  A. [Professor Richard John Evans]: I do not know. It depends what you mean by Holocaust
    20  survivors as well.
    21  Q. [Mr Irving]: Well, if I say that the number of claimants is 450,000 now
    22  at the end of the 20th century, the beginning of the 21st
    23  century?
    24  MR JUSTICE GRAY:  I do not know where you get that figure
    25  from. I think Professor Evans is entitled to say, well,
    26  on what basis are they claiming? Are they claiming

    .           P-180


      1  because they were in Auschwitz, in some other camp, or
      2  perhaps in no camp at all, they were dispossessed by the
      3  Nazis?
      4  MR IRVING:  If they are Jewish Holocaust survivors, my Lord,
      5  and there is that number of them extant at the end of the
      6  20th century, then you can do actuCourier calculations
      7  backwards to work out roughly how many would have
      8  survived, given certain obvious adjustments you have to
      9  make for age and so on, that the older ones would have
    10  stayed behind, the younger ones would have emigrated, and
    11  you can come up with ball park figures. But the Professor
    12  has not done this kind of calculations, so there is no
    13  point asking him.
    14  MR JUSTICE GRAY:  But your suggestion, therefore, is that these
    15  are 450,000 true Holocaust survivors in the sense that
    16  they come from one death camp or another?
    17  MR IRVING:  They were Jews who were subject to the Holocaust as
    18  I defined it, which is one more reason why my definition
    19  is the right one, that they were Jews who were subjected
    20  to the Nazi atrocities during the period of the Third
    21  Reich of whatever kind.
    22  MR RAMPTON:  I am sorry, I simply do not understand this. If
    23  this is about claims against Swiss Banks who are holding
    24  or have held property taken from victims of the Holocaust,
    25  we might be talking about the great grandchildren of
    26  people who survived who had a claim on the property.

    .           P-181


      1  MR JUSTICE GRAY:  That is what was going through my mind.
      2  MR IRVING:  And also the slave labourers, the great
      3  grandchildren of the slave labourers cannot claim
      4  compensation.
      5  MR JUSTICE GRAY:  Let us go back to where we started. You were
      6  suggesting that the bulk, or a very large proportion, of
      7  the people in Auschwitz disappeared because they went
      8  secretly to Israel and I think Professor Evans —-
      9  MR IRVING:  My Lord, I have not said either the bulk or a very
    10  large portion. I just said part. This is what I was
    11  trying to nail the witness down on when he says, “Irving
    12  claimed that the Jews who disappeared did not die”, what
    13  he meant by the Jews. Obviously it does not mean all of
    14  them. He is meaning part of them.
    15  MR JUSTICE GRAY:  Leave aside the exact number. He is saying
    16  that he does not accept that there was any evidence for
    17  that statement, and I have not got clear when you first
    18  saw this report you have talked about by the Haganah.
    19  When did you first see that?
    20  MR IRVING:  Seven or eight years ago my Lord.
    21  MR JUSTICE GRAY:  Was that the source for your claim?
    22  MR IRVING:  Yes, very definitely.
    23  MR JUSTICE GRAY:  And that says? What is its conclusion in
    24  terms of numbers?
    25  MR IRVING:  The American Military Forces described how the
    26  Haganah, operating in conjunction with the United Nations

    .           P-182


      1  Rescue and Relief Agency, visited all the displaced
      2  persons camps, very well organized, with walkie-talkie
      3  radios and trucks picking up all the Jewish victims from
      4  those camps, loading them on board, and then they vanished
      5  sunset.
      6  MR JUSTICE GRAY:  My question was really about numbers. How
      7  many are we talking about?
      8  MR IRVING:  The report, I would have to have another look at
      9  the report to give your Lordship a number, but it was
    10  sufficiently important to have a 250-page report on it
    11  written by the American Government Military authorities.
    12  I adduce this purely as one way in which one cannot look
    13  at pure figures, because there are leaks, if I can put it
    14  like that.
    15  A. [Professor Richard John Evans]: Let me just make two points, if I may. One is you are
    16  presenting evidence of this report which I have not seen,
    17  I have not had the opportunity to see, so I do not know
    18  whether your account of what is in it is accurate or not
    19  and I really cannot comment on it. The second is that you
    20  do not cite it when you gave this particular speech. As
    21  far as the numbers, again you plucked, you have presented
    22  a number of what you describe as “Holocaust survivors” who
    23  have claims of one sort or another against banks and so on
    24  elsewhere, and I quote you have alleged that large numbers
    25  of so-called Holocaust survivors, as you have described,
    26  have made it up, put tattoos on their own arms and so on.

    .           P-183


      1  MR IRVING:  I shall have to turn the tables on you and say
      2  that, if you are going to suggest that I said large
      3  numbers have done that, then I would ask you to provide
      4  any evidence for that assertion.
      5  MR JUSTICE GRAY:  You said one lady and you said she was not
      6  atypical.
      7  MR IRVING:  I said she may have very well have a genuine tattoo
      8  on her name. I think those were the precise words I used
      9  about Mrs Altemann, that may very well be a genuine tattoo
    10  on your arm. If I can now pick up the other point
    11  that I did not provide a reference for this episode in my
    12  speech, one does not put footnotes in speeches.
    13  A. [Professor Richard John Evans]: No, you but you say where you get the evidence from in a
    14  speech.

    Section 184.15 to 217.26

    15  Q. [Mr Irving]: Can I now move on, in the spirit of his Lordship’s desire
    16  for progress, paragraph 21, you say that my allegations of
    17  this nature derive ultimately from the Holocaust denier
    18  Paul Rassinier.
    19  A. [Professor Richard John Evans]: Yes.
    20  Q. [Mr Irving]: Have you any evidence at all that I have ever read the
    21  works of Paul Rassinier?
    22  A. [Professor Richard John Evans]: You did write an afterword to one of his books, which
    23  I find it difficult to believe you wrote without having
    24  read it.
    25  Q. [Mr Irving]: Professor, believe. That is all I can say. That fact
    26  that I am invited to write an afterword on a particular

    .           P-184


      1  topic for a book which I then deliver without reading the
      2  book should not surprise anyone?
      3  A. [Professor Richard John Evans]: It does not say very much for your responsibility as
      4  historian, Mr Irving.
      5  Q. [Mr Irving]: I have no responsibility at all whatsoever for the content
      6  of somebody’s book if I am invited to write an historical
      7  afterword on it and, if you know the content of that
      8  afterword, you see that it no bore no resemblance or
      9  relationship to what was in the book at all. Do you agree
    10  with that?
    11  A. [Professor Richard John Evans]: You did have some very kind words to say about
    12  Mr Rassinier in your afterword. You have a rather obscure
    13  but very positive introductory paragraph talking about his
    14  work, and I find it quite extraordinary that you would
    15  write such a thing without actually having read it.
    16  Q. [Mr Irving]: Will you tell court what we know about Paul Rassinier?
    17  Was he a right-wing extremist?
    18  A. [Professor Richard John Evans]: It is in my report. I have a few paragraphs about him a
    19  bit further on.
    20  Q. [Mr Irving]: Was he a right-wing extremist?
    21  A. [Professor Richard John Evans]: He was one of the earliest and most important Holocaust
    22  deniers.
    23  Q. [Mr Irving]: Was he a right-wing extremist?
    24  A. [Professor Richard John Evans]: I am not sure about his politics.
    25  Q. [Mr Irving]: Or was he in fact a communist, a left winger, who was
    26  incarcerated in Auschwitz because of his political views?

    .           P-185


      1  A. [Professor Richard John Evans]: Initially, yes. I think that is why he went into
      2  Auschwitz. I do not think that is how he came out.
      3  Q. [Mr Irving]: He is a kind of eyewitness with first hand experience, is
      4  he?
      5  A. [Professor Richard John Evans]: Yes, he is a curious and interesting figure.
      6  Q. [Mr Irving]: A curious and interesting figure?
      7  A. [Professor Richard John Evans]: — who seems to have been, I am trying to find my
      8  references to it. It is on page 192 of my report.
      9  Rassinier was a Holocaust denier who published his book
    10  with Grabert Verlag, which is a well-known Holocaust
    11  denial publishing house in Germany.
    12  Q. [Mr Irving]: Everybody in your vocabulary is a Holocaust denier,
    13  Holocaust denial, right-wing extremist?
    14  A. [Professor Richard John Evans]: I did not say right-wing extremist.
    15  MR JUSTICE GRAY:  Let the witness finish his answer.
    16  A. [Professor Richard John Evans]: This what this trial in part is about.
    17  Q. [Mr Irving]: Is it more significance that in fact he was a left winger
    18  who was incarcerated in Auschwitz because of his political
    19  views?
    20  A. [Professor Richard John Evans]: It seems that he was beaten up by a communist fellow
    21  prisoner for having failed to pay his respects to the
    22  former German communist leader Thalmann, who was in the
    23  camp, and that this seems to have turned him against the
    24  communist party, and that he seems to have been well
    25  treated by the an SS guard. Certainly after the war he
    26  defended the SS and started to deny the existence of gas

    .           P-186


      1  chambers, asserting that the Jews are mainly responsible
      2  for starting the second world war and so on.
      3  Q. [Mr Irving]: Unlike yourself and myself, this was a man who had been in
      4  Auschwitz and so possibly his word deserves some kind of
      5  respect.
      6  A. [Professor Richard John Evans]: I am not sure he was in Auschwitz.
      7  MR JUSTICE GRAY:  Buchenwald, was he not?
      8  A. [Professor Richard John Evans]: Buchenwald I think.
      9  MR IRVING:  I think he was also in Auschwitz at some stage.
    10  Anyway he was in the German concentration camp system and
    11  he wrote about it.
    12  A. [Professor Richard John Evans]: That is why I consider it a curious case that he had the
    13  views that he had.
    14  Q. [Mr Irving]: And I therefore did the wrong thing by writing an
    15  afterword to his book?
    16  A. [Professor Richard John Evans]: I certainly think you did the wrong thing in writing an
    17  afterword to his book without actually having read the
    18  thing and making statements about the book in that
    19  afterword.
    20  Q. [Mr Irving]: Did I say in my afterword I have read this book and find
    21  it jolly good?
    22  A. [Professor Richard John Evans]: I think one assumes it. You said things about Rassinier’s
    23  views in your afterword which makes me assume that you are
    24  familiar with them.
    25  Q. [Mr Irving]: I am familiar with them to the extent that I have just
    26  described them to the court. He was a left winger who was

    .           P-187


      1  sent to the concentration camp for his political views.
      2  A. [Professor Richard John Evans]: So you were familiar with his views then on the Holocaust.
      3  Q. [Mr Irving]: I have always known the fact that he has been a doubter
      4  and I see no reason at all why I should —-
      5  A. [Professor Richard John Evans]: I find it difficult to know what we are disputing here in
      6  that case.
      7  Q. [Mr Irving]: What we are disputing is on what basis you say that my
      8  views derived from Paul Rassinier?
      9  A. [Professor Richard John Evans]: I said ultimately. I am quite prepared to accept that
    10  there may have been intervening stages for his views. For
    11  example —-
    12  Q. [Mr Irving]: If I have never read any of his books, how can my views as
    13  far as the death roll and anything else possibly have
    14  derived from Mr Rassinier? You now accept that this is
    15  just another of your wild and unsubstantiated assertions,
    16  is it not?
    17  A. [Professor Richard John Evans]: No, because his views then became taken up into the
    18  general discourse of this particular — I do not want to
    19  keep using the words “Holocaust denial” but I suppose it
    20  is unavoidable — that they were represented by a number
    21  of other people.
    22  Q. [Mr Irving]: He just wanted to shoe horn his name in somehow, is that
    23  right?
    24  A. [Professor Richard John Evans]: The idea is in his book and in his work it is put forward
    25  by you, the same view, and it seems therefore reasonable
    26  to conclude that somehow it has found its way from him to

    .           P-188


      1  you, since it has no evidential basis.
      2  Q. [Mr Irving]: On page 120 now — we will leave Mr Rassinier — at
      3  paragraph 24, you say what Irving did concede in his 1992
      4  speech was that there were some authorised mass shootings
      5  on the Eastern Front.
      6  A. [Professor Richard John Evans]: Unauthorized.
      7  MR JUSTICE GRAY:  What page?
      8  MR IRVING:  Page 120, my Lord, of his report. You say that
      9  I conceded this in 1992. Had I ever denied that there had
    10  been shootings on the Eastern Front? Does not the word
    11  “concede” imply that I was now reversing a previously
    12  held stand or conviction?
    13  A. [Professor Richard John Evans]: No. I did not mean it to. I made it quite clear that you
    14  say this repeatedly, that there were unauthorized mass
    15  shootings of Jews behind the Eastern front.
    16  Q. [Mr Irving]: In other words you have used the word “conceded” as just
    17  another loaded word you can use to help put some spice in
    18  the paragraph and flavour—-
    19  A. [Professor Richard John Evans]: I do not think it is that spicey, Mr Irving.
    20  Q. [Mr Irving]: It was not before, but you put in a word like “concede” or
    21  on the next page 121, first line, “Irving agreed once more
    22  conceding that”?
    23  A. [Professor Richard John Evans]: You have to put that in the context of what I say in the
    24  previous paragraph, which is where you go through the
    25  usual litany of stuff about casting doubt on the estimate
    26  of the numbers killed. You are trying to say that there

    .           P-189


      1  was never any written order from Himmler stating that
      2  Hitler decided the Final Solution and so on and so forth.
      3  I am using the word “concede” here to balance out what
      4  I say in the previous paragraphs. What I am saying really
      5  is that your views conform to those of Holocaust deniers,
      6  but in this case you do say that there are some
      7  unauthorized mass shootings.
      8  Q. [Mr Irving]: The words Holocaust denier are becoming more and more
      9  meaningless as we progress. If you look at the first on
    10  page 121, “Irving agreed once more”, conceding (this is
    11  1995) there again these are loaded words, Irving agreed
    12  once conceding that “there is no doubt in my mind that on
    13  the Eastern Front large numbers of Jews were massacred by
    14  criminals with guns, SS men, Ukranians, Lithuanians,
    15  whatever, to get rid of them”. That is a strange kind of
    16  Holocaust denier.
    17  A. [Professor Richard John Evans]: What I am saying here is that Holocaust deniers, including
    18  Monsieur Faurisson, whom I quote on the previous page as
    19  saying the same kind of thing, agreeing with you, have
    20  always admitted or said that there were unauthorized
    21  massacres of Jews behind the Eastern Front. Therefore,
    22  that is not evidence of, as it were, not being a Holocaust
    23  denier. That has always been a concession they have made
    24  to those who have argued that the Nazis killed large
    25  numbers of Jews. You yourself have now of course admitted
    26  in the course of this trial that there were up to a

    .           P-190


      1  million Jews who were shot behind the Eastern Front as
      2  part of a systematic plan.
      3  Q. [Mr Irving]: Why do you say admitted?
      4  MR RAMPTON:  Let him finish.
      5  MR JUSTICE GRAY:  May I make a suggestion and see whether you
      6  agree with it. Your thesis, whether it is right or wrong,
      7  is that Mr Irving denies to an extent the fact and the
      8  scale of the extermination and whether it was systematic.
      9  It seems to me that, if that is your thesis, when you get
    10  Mr Irving, he will not like the word, making admissions or
    11  concessions that particular events happened, you are going
    12  to describe it as an admission or a concession. Is that
    13  why you use the word?
    14  A. [Professor Richard John Evans]: Yes, exactly.
    15  Q. [Mr Justice Gray]: It is not really in any sense intended to be denigratory
    16  of you, I think?
    17  MR IRVING:  I disagree, my Lord. In the context of this report
    18  it is used as a loaded and as an emotive word.
    19  MR JUSTICE GRAY:  I do not read it that way. I really do not.
    20  You can take it from me that I do not.
    21  A. [Professor Richard John Evans]: I certainly did not intend it that way. It is difficult to
    22  find another word in this context.
    23  MR JUSTICE GRAY:  That is true.
    24  MR IRVING:  Page 123, please, paragraph 27, “The standard works
    25  on the Holocaust”, you write, “make it clear both that a
    26  substantial proportion of those killed were shot or

    .           P-191


      1  starved to death or deliberately weakened and made
      2  susceptible to fatal diseases as a matter of policy, and
      3  that gassings took place at other centres besides
      4  Auschwitz, including notably Belzec, Sobibor and
      5  Treblinka”. That is you writing that, is it not, Professor
      6  Evans?
      7  A. [Professor Richard John Evans]: Yes.
      8  Q. [Mr Irving]: From what part of that statement or cataclysm that you
      9  have written down there yourself do you believe I differ?
    10  Is there not one line of that statement with which
    11  I agree?
    12  A. [Professor Richard John Evans]: Well, it looks at the previous part of that paragraph,
    13  where you say that, “The Holocaust with a capital ‘H’ is
    14  what’s gone down in history in this one sentence form, so
    15  to speak: ‘Adolf Hitler ordered the killing of six
    16  million Jews in Auschwitz'”. What I go on to say is that
    17  nobody in fact has ever argued that six million Jews were
    18  killed by gassing at Auschwitz, or indeed six million Jews
    19  were killed in Auschwitz. That is not the common
    20  definition of “the Holocaust” and I am trying to say that
    21  your notion that that is what the Holocaust with a capital
    22  ‘H’ is is a figment of your own imagination.
    23  Q. [Mr Irving]: You have now skirted around answering my direct question.
    24  The final sentence of that paragraph is your definition of
    25  the word “Holocaust” and there is not one line of that
    26  with which I disagree, is there?

    .           P-192


      1  A. [Professor Richard John Evans]: Yes, there is. Gassings took place at other centres
      2  besides Auschwitz, including notably Belzec, Sobibor and
      3  Treblinka. You denied altogether—-
      4  Q. [Mr Irving]: This is a point that his Lordship is familiar with, I have
      5  conceded in all my books as well.
      6  A. [Professor Richard John Evans]: I wrote this report before this trial, Mr Irving.
      7  MR JUSTICE GRAY:  I am not sure about Belzec.
      8  MR RAMPTON:  No. The concession was recently made in the
      9  course of this trial.
    10  MR JUSTICE GRAY:  And conceded Belzec too?
    11  MR IRVING:  Yes, my Lord, and also in the books as well.
    12  A. [Professor Richard John Evans]: I could not know, Mr Irving, what you were going to
    13  concede when I used the word in this trial.
    14  Q. [Mr Irving]: They are also in the books, are they not, the fact that
    15  these gassings took place, exterminations in Belzec,
    16  Sobibor and Treblinka? The only point I am holding out on
    17  is that crematorium No. 2, that particular building.
    18  MR JUSTICE GRAY:  You are now. Yes, I agree. I did not realize
    19  that you had been conceding this all along, and indeed
    20  I thought at the earlier stages of this trial you were not
    21  conceding it, but anyway.
    22  A. [Professor Richard John Evans]: This is not the case, Mr Irving.
    23  MR IRVING:  It is an important point.
    24  MR JUSTICE GRAY:  Yes, I think it may be. Which books,
    25  Mr Irving, can I ask you that? Hitler’s War? Do not
    26  answer if it is difficult off the top of your head.

    .           P-193


      1  MR IRVING:  It would be time consuming to look it up but I will
      2  look up the references overnight, my Lord.
      3  MR JUSTICE GRAY:  That is fine.
      4  MR IRVING:  I have tripled lined that in the margin, that
      5  particular part of the report, as being a definition with
      6  which I wholeheartedly agree.
      7  MR JUSTICE GRAY:  Yes?
      8  A. [Professor Richard John Evans]: My view is that you did not agree with that definition
      9  when you said, “The Holocaust with a capital ‘H’ is what’s
    10  gone down in history in this one sentence form, so to
    11  speak: ‘Adolf Hitler ordered the killing of six million
    12  Jews in Auschwitz'”.
    13  MR IRVING:  That is the popular view, is it not?
    14  A. [Professor Richard John Evans]: No.
    15  Q. [Mr Irving]: The man on the Clapham omnibus view. If you say to him,
    16  “What is the Holocaust?”, he will say, “Is that not that
    17  guy Hitler, did he not kill 6 million Jews in Auschwitz?”
    18  Is that not the common view of the Holocaust now?
    19  A. [Professor Richard John Evans]: “The Holocaust with a capital ‘H’ is what’s gone down in
    20  history in this one sentence form, so to speak: ‘Adolf
    21  Hitler ordered the killing of six million Jews in
    22  Auschwitz'”. I am not aware of anybody in print who has
    23  argued or suggested that.
    24  Q. [Mr Irving]: Even when I am quite specific about how huge the figures
    25  concerned are, I am looking now at the next paragraph, you
    26  dismiss that as being just one occasion when

    .           P-194


      1  I accidentally or inadvertently conceded these huge
      2  figures.
      3  A. [Professor Richard John Evans]: Well, let me make a couple of point about that. That is
      4  the only occasion I could find.
      5  Q. [Mr Irving]: Yes.
      6  A. [Professor Richard John Evans]: I did not find any more. And, of course, when you say 4
      7  million, then you say that is of course due mainly to
      8  barbarity and typhus and epidemics, as you say, and you
      9  have many other statements which I cite in my report,
    10  where you say the Nazis killed in the order of thousands
    11  at a time, not millions, as you said in 1990.
    12  Q. [Mr Irving]: Can we just —-
    13  A. [Professor Richard John Evans]: I also make the point that of course that last statement,
    14  the statement before the last one, the last statement
    15  I quoted you as saying the Nazis killed of the order of
    16  thousands at a time, not millions, as in 1990, and your
    17  exceptional figure, the only instance I could find of 4
    18  million, where you mentioned barbarity and typhus and
    19  epidemics was in 1995. In other words, that is after
    20  Professor Lipstadt’s book was published.
    21  Q. [Mr Irving]: Can we just reel back slightly there? Looking at the last
    22  sentence in paragraph 29, the Nazis killed in the order of
    23  thousands at a time, not millions. I am not going to
    24  bother the court with looking up what the omission is
    25  because I will presume it is not important. But it is
    26  perfectly correct, is it not, that the Nazis killed them

    .           P-195


      1  thousands at a time, did they not? They did not kill them
      2  millions at a time?
      3  A. [Professor Richard John Evans]: I guess it depends what you mean by “at a time”.
      4  Q. [Mr Irving]: In other words, there is one trench with thousands being
      5  lined up and shot into it on a particular morning. That
      6  statement is accurate, is that right?
      7  A. [Professor Richard John Evans]: In that sense, yes, of course.
      8  Q. [Mr Irving]: And July 27th 1995 is over a year before the writ was
      9  issued in this particular action?
    10  A. [Professor Richard John Evans]: Yes, I do quote this here, but I do point out that it is
    11  after Professor Lipstadt published her book.
    12  Q. [Mr Irving]: Have you any evidence that I took cognisance of the
    13  content of Professor Lipstadt’s book or indeed even of her
    14  opinions before the middle of 1996?
    15  A. [Professor Richard John Evans]: No. I am not suggesting anything. There is no suggestion
    16  in my report that you said that because Professor Lipstadt
    17  had published her book.
    18  Q. [Mr Irving]: Is not the evidence in fact that some time in 1996
    19  I obtained a copy of the report of the book round about
    20  April when I was marketing the Goebbels biography, and
    21  that I immediately wrote a letter before action and took
    22  legal steps. So it was 1996 after I made this broadcast?
    23  A. [Professor Richard John Evans]: Yes. I am not suggesting anything else. as I said,
    24  I repeat myself, I am not suggesting that you said this
    25  because of Professor Lipstadt’s book.
    26  Q. [Mr Irving]: So this broadcast cannot have been self-serving in any

    .           P-196


      1  particular way in connection with this action?
      2  A. [Professor Richard John Evans]: I am not concerned with why you made this broadcast.
      3  Q. [Mr Irving]: Would it be possible that I made those statements because
      4  I considered them to be true, in your view?
      5  A. [Professor Richard John Evans]: Perfectly possible, yes. Let me quote the whole statement
      6  we are talking about. “I have to say, the figure I would
      7  have to give you is a minimum of one million, which is a
      8  monstrous crime, and a maximum of about 4 million,
      9  depending on what you mean by killed. If putting people
    10  into a concentration camp where they die of barbarity and
    11  typhus and epidemics is killing, then I would say the 4
    12  million figure, because undoubtedly huge numbers did die
    13  in the camps in the conditions that were very evident at
    14  the end of the war”, and on other occasions, as I go on to
    15  say, you have argued that the deaths from disease in the
    16  camps were due in large measure to the allied bombing of
    17  the factories that made the medicines in Germany.
    18  Q. [Mr Irving]: Professor Evans, have I put this July 1995 broadcast with
    19  those figures on my website for the world to see already
    20  for a couple of years now?
    21  A. [Professor Richard John Evans]: It is here in my report, Mr Irving. I have not suppressed
    22  it.
    23  Q. [Mr Irving]: No, but is there any indication that it was a one off on
    24  my part and I blurted it out by mistake at four in the
    25  morning, this is after all Australia I am talking to?
    26  A. [Professor Richard John Evans]: When did you put it on your website?

    .           P-197


      1  Q. [Mr Irving]: Well, within the last year or two.
      2  A. [Professor Richard John Evans]: That is after the beginning of this action.
      3  Q. [Mr Irving]: Yes. In other words, there is no reason to suggest that
      4  this is a one off broadcast. You said that it is the one
      5  recorded episode. There may have been more episodes when
      6  I gave the same kind of figures.
      7  A. [Professor Richard John Evans]: It is the one recorded episode when I wrote this report
      8  which I finished last spring, spring last year.
      9  Q. [Mr Irving]: But in fact the figures I give there are probably pretty
    10  accurate, are they not? Killed by all means? Order of
    11  one to four million? Hilberg says 5.1 million, others say
    12  6 million, does that make me a Holocaust denier because
    13  I come down to four?
    14  A. [Professor Richard John Evans]: I think, in conjunction with the other things — well, let
    15  me say two things. First of all, this is an isolated
    16  statement by the time I had written this report, and you
    17  had not made it before Professor Lipstadt wrote her book.
    18  You have many other statements where you give much lower
    19  figures, and indeed the interviewer Rawden Casey was
    20  extremely surprised that you should give this figure.
    21  Secondly, you suggested and you have to take this as a
    22  kind of package, that huge numbers died in the camps in
    23  the conditions that were very evident at the end of the
    24  war, and that epidemics —-
    25  Q. [Mr Irving]: We will come to that in a minute.
    26  A. [Professor Richard John Evans]: — and squalor and so on were an extremely important part

    .           P-198


      1  of this. Therefore this is not part of a deliberate
      2  systematic extermination of the Jews by the Nazis. So you
      3  have to take that together with other things.
      4  Q. [Mr Irving]: Are you saying that all —-
      5  A. [Professor Richard John Evans]: Of course, four million is a figure that is well below the
      6  range of figures which responsible historians of the
      7  Holocaust consider, even leaving apart the question of the
      8  deliberate and systematic nature of the killing.
      9  Q. [Mr Irving]: If we look at the 6 million figure or the 5.1 million
    10  figure, are they all people who met a violent death?
    11  A. [Professor Richard John Evans]: Well, I guess it depends what you mean by violence.
    12  I think the argument is that these are people who were
    13  killed as a result of a systematic mass murder by the
    14  Nazis.
    15  Q. [Mr Irving]: Privations killed them as much as violence, right?
    16  Starvation, epidemic, brutality, exhaustion?
    17  A. [Professor Richard John Evans]: Indeed, yes.
    18  Q. [Mr Irving]: Which is exactly what I said in the radio interview,
    19  correct?
    20  A. [Professor Richard John Evans]: As I said, you have to take that in conjunction with how
    21  and why you think that people died of typhus and epidemics
    22  in the camps.
    23  Q. [Mr Irving]: Because I do not buy the whole 6 million, I am a Holocaust
    24  denier. I am suddenly not a responsible historian?
    25  A. [Professor Richard John Evans]: I think you have to take this together with other aspects
    26  of what you have said and written about the Holocaust. As

    .           P-199


      1  I say, we are focusing here on one statement you make
      2  where quite exceptionally you go up to 4 million, and in
      3  many other places you did use before that much lower
      4  figures.
      5  Q. [Mr Irving]: You are aware that that radio broadcast was subsequently
      6  broadcast around the world by the newspapers; it was
      7  headlined in Australia and headlined in other countries
      8  around the world, and never once did I issue a dementi.
      9  I was quite happy to accept that I had stated those
    10  figures. Have you seen the press clippings?
    11  A. [Professor Richard John Evans]: I have not, no, but I am happy to accept that though.
    12  Q. [Mr Irving]: Can we now move on to the matter you wish to raise, which
    13  is the death by epidemics?
    14  MR RAMPTON:  Before we do that, can I draw your Lordship’s
    15  attention to the stated position on the pleadings? I am
    16  sufficiently still enough of an anorak occasionally to
    17  refer to the pleadings. In relation to Belzec, Sobibor
    18  and Treblinka as at 18th March 1997 when the Reply was
    19  served, the allegation had been that Belzec, Sobibor and
    20  Treblinka were established as extermination camps as part
    21  of Aktion Reinhardt, Mr Irving said this:
    22  “The Plaintiff was not aware of any authentic
    23  wartime archival evidence for the allegations raised in
    24  this paragraph. Aktion Reinhardt was named after Friz
    25  Reinhardt, the Civil Service, in the Reichs Finance
    26  Ministry in charge of exploiting the assets of deceased

    .           P-200


      1  and murdered Jews and other concentration camp victims.
      2  It is denied that Aktion Reinhardt was itself an
      3  extermination operation.”
      4  MR JUSTICE GRAY:  Yes. My recollection is that in the initial
      5  stages Mr Irving was not accepting —-
      6  MR RAMPTON:  That is right.
      7  MR JUSTICE GRAY:  — during his evidence that there was any
      8  gassing there, but when pressed he did. His position has
      9  evolved, in other words.
    10  MR RAMPTON:  The position has evolved to this, that he accepts
    11  there were Jews killed by gas at those camps. He is,
    12  I think to be fair, unsure of the scale.
    13  MR JUSTICE GRAY:  Well, my recollection is he has actually had
    14  figures put to him which he has accepted.
    15  MR RAMPTON:  Then your Lordship’s memory is better than mine.
    16  MR JUSTICE GRAY:  Mr Irving, I think that that is historically
    17  right, for whatever it may be worth.
    18  MR IRVING:  Your Lordship will undoubtedly refer to the
    19  transcripts when the time comes, whatever I said in the
    20  transcripts. My recollection of the matter is that in
    21  order to speed the trial along we have stream lined a lot
    22  of the arguments and concentrated on certain institutions
    23  and centres, and left it like that.
    24  MR JUSTICE GRAY:  Yes.
    25  MR IRVING:  It is not a formal concession. It is not a denial,
    26  but it helps to speed the process of the trial along. If

    .           P-201


      1  I were to start digging my heels on all the other sites
      2  and locations and events and episodes then we would be
      3  here until Christmas.
      4  MR JUSTICE GRAY:  Do not overestimate the importance of the
      5  speed of the trial. Obviously we have a duty not to waste
      6  time, but you cannot found your concessions on a wish to
      7  keep the trial moving along. They are either concessions,
      8  and I use that word I think correctly in this context, or
      9  they are not.
    10  MR IRVING:  My logic there is to say that if I am proved wrong
    11  on the main camp, on Auschwitz two, then what happened or
    12  did not happen in Sobibor, Treblinka and Belzec is neither
    13  here nor there. If, on the other hand, I am proved right
    14  on Auschwitz two, then equally what happened in Sobibor
    15  and Treblinka and Belzec is neither here nor there.
    16  MR JUSTICE GRAY:  We may have to examine that further, but I am
    17  conscious you are trying to sustain a cross-examination
    18  and it is very difficult for you to have to argue.
    19  Mr Rampton was right, I think, to get up and say what he
    20  did. I certainly do not want to take you out of your
    21  cross-examination.
    22  MR IRVING:  He is certainly right to have pointed that out,
    23  although he very correctly read out exactly what the
    24  pleadings said, and the pleadings did not really justify
    25  the burden that he sought to place upon them.
    26  MR JUSTICE GRAY:  I think I know what you are getting at. Why

    .           P-202


      1  do you not resume your cross-examination. If you are
      2  running out of steam —-
      3  MR IRVING:  I am not running out of steam. There is one other
      4  point I believe that the witness wishes to make which
      5  concerns the epidemics in Buchenwald at the end of the
      6  war.
      7  A. [Professor Richard John Evans]: Let me go back and say that I quote you on page 106 in
      8  saying in 1998, you were asked: If Holocaust is
      9  representative of the allegation of the extermination of 6
    10  million Jews due to the Second World War as a direct
    11  result of official German policy of extermination, what
    12  would you say? You replied that: “I am not familiar with
    13  any documentary evidence of any such figure of 6 million.
    14  It must have been of the order of 100,000 or more”.
    15  MR IRVING:  I would wish to see, to quote your words, I would
    16  wish definitely to see exactly what has been left out
    17  there, because that is such a remarkable statement in that
    18  form that I cannot accept that is a complete —-
    19  A. [Professor Richard John Evans]: Well, you have had the opportunity to do so. You have had
    20  my report since July I think.
    21  MR JUSTICE GRAY:  We have probably got it. What page were you
    22  reading from, Professor Evans?
    23  A. [Professor Richard John Evans]: 106.
    24  MR IRVING:  106.
    25  A. [Professor Richard John Evans]: Right at the bottom.
    26  MR JUSTICE GRAY:  We have the testimony. Unfortunately we have

    .           P-203


      1  not got a page reference. Yes, we have, page 12.
      2  MR IRVING:  By looking at the figures I think we are talking
      3  about how many are known to have died in Auschwitz.
      4  A. [Professor Richard John Evans]: That is not the question that you were asked. It is the
      5  extermination of 6 million Jews during the Second World
      6  War.
      7  Q. [Mr Irving]: That is why I want to see exactly what the testimony
      8  says. It would be clearly impossible for me to have said
      9  that the Holocaust was 100,000.
    10  MR RAMPTON:  No, it is not, Mr Irving is wrong. The question
    11  was: “And if the Holocaust is represented as the
    12  allegation of the extermination of 6 million Jews during
    13  the Second World War as a direct result of official German
    14  policy of extermination, what would you say to that
    15  thesis?” Then we get the answer.
    16  MR JUSTICE GRAY:  Where are you reading from?
    17  MR RAMPTON:  I am sorry, I am reading from the transcript of
    18  Mr Irving’s evidence.
    19  MR JUSTICE GRAY:  I have got that, but I have pages running
    20  into the hundreds.
    21  MR RAMPTON:  204 in the bottom right-hand corner.
    22  MR JUSTICE GRAY:  Do you want to see it, Mr Irving? You asked
    23  to see it and you are perfectly entitled to.
    24  MR IRVING:  I would wish to see the whole of it rather than
    25  just two or three lines that have been read out to me by
    26  Mr Rampton, to see what the context is.

    .           P-204


      1  MR JUSTICE GRAY:  Yes, that is fair.
      2  MR RAMPTON:  Then there was a further question on 205, my
      3  Lord: “Do you have any opinion as a result of your
      4  research as to the number of Jews who died in
      5  concentration camps during the Second World War? I am not
      6  sure that an opinion wore here would be of use. I have
      7  opinions. I have opinions of the kind of statistical
      8  orders of magnitude where you can see there is a minimum
      9  number and a maximum number and I can only set these two
    10  limits and say that to my mind it must have been of the
    11  order of 100,000 or more”.
    12  MR IRVING:  Yes, in other words 100,000 is the minimum —-
    13  MR RAMPTON:  Yes.
    14  MR IRVING:  — of those died in concentration camps.
    15  MR JUSTICE GRAY:  He does go on to say that certainly less than
    16  the figure which is quoted nowadays of 6 million.
    17  MR RAMPTON:  With the ellipse it is accurately set out in
    18  Professor Evans’ report.
    19  MR JUSTICE GRAY:  I think that is true.
    20  MR IRVING:  Just once again those three lines quoted in the
    21  report do not really give the flavour of the deliberations
    22  that go on. If I am being asked as how many Jews died in
    23  the concentration camps during the war years, and I do
    24  what any scientist would which is give a lower limit and
    25  an upper limit which in this particular case are very wide
    26  indeed, not less than 100,000, not more than 6 million,

    .           P-205


      1  that is all one can say on the basis of the certainties
      2  that we have.
      3  Is there anything further you wish to say about
      4  that, witness?
      5  A. [Professor Richard John Evans]: No.
      6  Q. [Mr Irving]: Do you now wish to say something about the epidemics in
      7  Belsen and the responsibility of the Allies for them?
      8  A. [Professor Richard John Evans]: Yes. I go on in my report to quote you, saying that it
      9  was the Allies: “We, the British and the Americans, were
    10  partially responsible, at least partially responsible, for
    11  their misfortune because we vowed deliberate bombing of
    12  the transportation networks, bombardation, deliberate …
    13  bombarding the German communications … pharmaceutical
    14  industry, medicine factories. We had deliberately created
    15  the conditions of chaos inside Germany. We had
    16  deliberately created the epidemics and the outbreaks of
    17  typhus and other diseases which led to those appalling
    18  scenes that were found at their most dramatic in the
    19  enclosed areas, the concentration camps, where, of course,
    20  epidemics can ravage and run wild”. That is you in 1986.
    21  Q. [Mr Irving]: You dispute that, do you?
    22  A. [Professor Richard John Evans]: Yes, I do. The conditions of epidemics are created,
    23  essentially, by the Nazis who ran camps in such a way that
    24  they were extremely unhygienic.
    25  Q. [Mr Irving]: How can you combat epidemics if you do not have the
    26  pharmaceutical products to combat them?

    .           P-206


      1  A. [Professor Richard John Evans]: Well, the point is that they — first of all, the major
      2  epidemics were well before the end of the war. As you
      3  know, there is a major epidemic in Auschwitz in 1942 to 3,
      4  I think, and you are talking here as if this is only at
      5  the end of war.
      6  Q. [Mr Irving]: Are you also familiar were the fact that epidemic is a
      7  by-product of bombardment of cities, that the water mains
      8  are destroyed, the rats feed on the cadavers?
      9  A. [Professor Richard John Evans]: Well, we are not talking about the bombardment of
    10  concentration camps. We are talking about conditions
    11  extremely unhygienic in which the particular disease
    12  concerned was typhus which is a disease of dirt and lack
    13  of hygiene, and there is plenty of evidence that these are
    14  the conditions in the camps which the Nazis deliberately
    15  created.
    16  MR JUSTICE GRAY:  What would you make of an historian who says,
    17  I suppose, the political party which had rounded up a
    18  particular race and put them into camps where typhus broke
    19  out and killed huge numbers of them, how do you feel about
    20  an historian who says that the person who deliberately
    21  created the epidemics was the person who bombed the
    22  pharmaceutical factories which might have been able to
    23  provide the distribution which might have limited the
    24  typhus epidemic, how would you regard?
    25  A. [Professor Richard John Evans]: I feel that that is a reversal of the truth. That is
    26  extremely perverse. Typhus is a disease which the Germans

    .           P-207


      1  knew very well how to combat. They had had experience of
      2  it from the First World War. There had been a lot of
      3  medical intervention by the Germans since well before that
      4  combating diseases in Eastern Europe.
      5  MR IRVING:  How do you combat typhus?
      6  A. [Professor Richard John Evans]: Essentially, by cleanliness. It is by, for example,
      7  giving the inmates of a concentration camp fresh clothing
      8  and bedding at regular intervals which was not done at
      9  all.
    10  Q. [Mr Irving]: What is the carrier of typhus?
    11  A. [Professor Richard John Evans]: It is the human body louse.
    12  Q. [Mr Irving]: And what is used for disposing of this typhus bearing
    13  louse?
    14  A. [Professor Richard John Evans]: Well, it is a question of prevention to start with, and
    15  that is the nub of the question. The concentration camp
    16  authorities did very little to prevent it because they did
    17  not provide conditions of cleanliness. It was exactly the
    18  same about the way in which they treated Russian prisoners
    19  of war.
    20  Q. [Mr Irving]: Are you not familiar with the fact that in all the
    21  concentration camps of the Nazi system they had fumigation
    22  chambers for cleaning the clothing of the incoming
    23  prisoners? They had the clean side, the dirty side, the
    24  showers, the baths, the hair cuts, the whole of this
    25  system that went with this combatting of the typhus
    26  epidemic? Are you not familiar with that?

    .           P-208


      1  A. [Professor Richard John Evans]: Yes, it was an extremely —-
      2  Q. [Mr Irving]: In your statement the Nazis did nothing is, therefore,
      3  wrong?
      4  A. [Professor Richard John Evans]: It is extremely ineffective and I said did nothing to
      5  prevent it. I mean, it certainly did not. The evidence
      6  is there.
      7  Q. [Mr Irving]: So the fumigation chambers, what they there for if it was
      8  not to prevent the typhus plague?
      9  A. [Professor Richard John Evans]: It was done in a rather inadequate way. Obviously, there
    10  was some incentive on the part of the SS to try to
    11  restrict the level and spread of epidemics, but the fact
    12  is that unhygienic conditions were part and parcel of the
    13  inhumanity of the concentration camps.
    14  MR JUSTICE GRAY:  Mr Irving, we have to keep a slight grip on
    15  reality. It is your case that the typhus killed a very
    16  large proportion of the Jews who lost their lives.
    17  MR IRVING:  Yes.
    18  MR JUSTICE GRAY:  It is difficult in the next breath to say how
    19  wonderful the system of fumigating clothes and the like
    20  was.
    21  MR IRVING:  My Lord, that is not the way I put it, but this
    22  witness —-
    23  MR JUSTICE GRAY:  Well, it comes close to it.
    24  MR IRVING:  — said the Nazis did nothing to prevent the
    25  typhus epidemics.
    26  MR JUSTICE GRAY:  Well, you were putting to him that they had

    .           P-209


      1  done a very great deal. Well, if they had —-
      2  MR IRVING:  I picked up the words that they had done nothing
      3  and, in fact, we have been sitting here for five weeks
      4  listening to nothing but the evidence that they had
      5  fumigation chambers for dealing with these epidemics.
      6  Particularly in Auschwitz, they went very, very far
      7  indeed. I do not have the photographs here any more, but
      8  there were the water purification plants they were
      9  installing. They went a very long way to try to combat
    10  this appalling problem which spread across Central Europe
    11  from 1942 onwards and, of course, as the war approached
    12  its end, this problem reached its zenith with the total
    13  collapse of hygiene, the total collapse of medical
    14  facilities, the collapse of transportation, the shifting
    15  of tens of hundreds of thousands of people in these
    16  unhygienic conditions.
    17  A. [Professor Richard John Evans]: Well, the measures which were undertaken, fumigation and
    18  so on, were mostly undertaken after epidemics had broken
    19  out to try to limit them, obviously, because the SS in the
    20  camps would then feel that they are endangered themselves,
    21  and other measures which they did undertake when epidemics
    22  broke out were killing the sick by injections or putting
    23  them into gas chambers. So they did undertake some
    24  measures. But I cannot say that they were in the — that
    25  they did very much to prevent the epidemics.
    26  Q. [Mr Irving]: Did the Germans not have an Institute of Racial Hygiene

    .           P-210


      1  which did nothing other than combat epidemics? That is
      2  what it was created for?
      3  A. [Professor Richard John Evans]: I do not agree that the Institute of Racial Hygiene was
      4  about combating epidemics, no.
      5  Q. [Mr Irving]: Professor Pfannenstiel, was he not a member of that
      6  Institute?
      7  A. [Professor Richard John Evans]: The institute of Racial Hygiene was much more concerned
      8  with as it suggests, not hygiene in common sense —-
      9  Q. [Mr Irving]: But did they not have —-
    10  A. [Professor Richard John Evans]: — but it is to do with race.
    11  Q. [Mr Irving]: — a special body set up doing nothing else than
    12  investigating the spread of epidemics because of the
    13  damage it was causing to German war effort?
    14  A. [Professor Richard John Evans]: Yes, what I said was that — I am not quite sure what we
    15  are arguing about here, but what I said was that the
    16  conditions in the camps which favoured — there were
    17  conditions in the camps which were deliberately created by
    18  the Nazis which were unhygienic, dirty, degrading and
    19  encouraged epidemics.
    20  Q. [Mr Irving]: Would you explain the word “deliberately”? Are you
    21  implying that these epidemic bearing lice in some way
    22  distinguished between the prisoner, on the one hand, and
    23  the SS guard, on the other? They knew which uniform to go
    24  for?
    25  A. [Professor Richard John Evans]: No.
    26  Q. [Mr Irving]: Why would anybody create an epidemic deliberately in a

    .           P-211


      1  camp?
      2  A. [Professor Richard John Evans]: I did not say they created the epidemic. I said that they
      3  created the conditions. I mean, they knew full well what
      4  would —-
      5  Q. [Mr Irving]: They deliberately created epidemic conditions?
      6  A. [Professor Richard John Evans]: They full knew what would happen in those filthy
      7  conditions which they —-
      8  Q. [Mr Irving]: They negligently created epidemic conditions?
      9  A. [Professor Richard John Evans]: I do not think it was a matter of oversight on their part,
    10  Mr Irving.
    11  Q. [Mr Irving]: Have you read Professor van Pelt’s book on Auschwitz in
    12  which he describes in great detail the negligence of the
    13  designers in this respect?
    14  A. [Professor Richard John Evans]: I have to admit I have not, no.
    15  MR JUSTICE GRAY:  In what respect in the design of?
    16  MR IRVING:  The layout of the camp. They said it was inviting
    17  epidemics, the way it was designed. The prisoners had to
    18  march long distances in order to get to hygiene
    19  facilities, and so on.
    20  A. [Professor Richard John Evans]: That would seem to confirm my point of view.
    21  MR JUSTICE GRAY:  That is rather what I thought, yes. I mean,
    22  does that not rather suggest that they were not too
    23  concerned about epidemics breaking out?
    24  MR IRVING:  Through negligence they have the camp badly
    25  designed is very different from saying that they
    26  deliberately created epidemic conditions?

    .           P-212


      1  A. [Professor Richard John Evans]: But you just maintained, Mr Irving, that they knew all
      2  about epidemics and they had institutes devoted to them
      3  and so on. It is rather puzzling that in that case it
      4  should be a mere oversight when they are building these
      5  institutions.
      6  Q. [Mr Irving]: So you agree that there were major epidemics in
      7  Bergen-Belsen and Buchenwald at the end of the war?
      8  A. [Professor Richard John Evans]: Yes.
      9  Q. [Mr Irving]: Were these deliberately created, is that your contention?
    10  A. [Professor Richard John Evans]: The conditions there were deliberately created by the
    11  Nazis, of course. In other words, had they wanted to
    12  prevent them, they could have done so.
    13  Q. [Mr Irving]: But they just let the epidemics run, did they?
    14  A. [Professor Richard John Evans]: No. As I have said, they then made attempts (which I have
    15  just described) to try to limit the epidemics. You can
    16  compare this, if you like, with prisoners of war camps for
    17  British airmen and troops in which hygienic conditions
    18  were a good deal better.
    19  Q. [Mr Irving]: Do you know how many people died in Dachau concentration
    20  camp in the first two months after World War II from
    21  epidemics?
    22  A. [Professor Richard John Evans]: A substantial number.
    23  Q. [Mr Irving]: Was it of the order of 20,000 prisoners?
    24  A. [Professor Richard John Evans]: I will take your word for it.
    25  Q. [Mr Irving]: Under American control, with the Americans deliberately
    26  spreading epidemics too?

    .           P-213


      1  A. [Professor Richard John Evans]: No, Mr Irving. They were dealing with the consequences.
      2  MR JUSTICE GRAY:  Mr Irving, this is all getting a little
      3  absurd. This all started out because you wrote or said
      4  that, “We”, that is to say the Allies, “have deliberately
      5  created the epidemics” and maybe I have rather contributed
      6  to this by asking Professor Evans whether he thought that
      7  was a sensible view for an historian to take. We now seem
      8  to have gone the full circle, as it were. Anyway, I think
      9  we have probably exhausted the topic.
    10  MR IRVING:  I do not think I put it exactly they way your
    11  Lordship says. I say we deliberately created the
    12  conditions of chaos through our bombing campaign,
    13  Operation Point Blank and Eclipse and so on.
    14  A. [Professor Richard John Evans]: Well, may I quote to you, Mr Irving: “We had deliberately
    15  quote created the epidemics and the outbreaks of typhus
    16  and other diseases which led to those appalling scenes
    17  that were found at their most dramatic in the enclosed
    18  areas, the concentration camps” — a lecture you gave in
    19  1986.
    20  MR IRVING:  Oh, a speech?
    21  A. [Professor Richard John Evans]: Yes.
    22  Q. [Mr Irving]: A lecture? I thought it was from a book.
    23  A. [Professor Richard John Evans]: Well, I presume you accept responsibility for saying that,
    24  Mr Irving —-
    25  Q. [Mr Irving]: In other words, that is —-
    26  A. [Professor Richard John Evans]: — whether you said it or wrote it.

    .           P-214


      1  Q. [Mr Irving]: — from a transcript of a speech made by somebody, is
      2  that right?
      3  A. [Professor Richard John Evans]: It is a video — an audio cassette of a speech.
      4  Q. [Mr Irving]: Have you not just read out a speech two or three minutes
      5  ago which was quite clearly vulgarized, the text?
      6  MR JUSTICE GRAY:  We can, if necessary, look at that speech if
      7  you think that the context makes any difference, but
      8  I think probably, Mr Irving, we can break off your
      9  cross-examination now.
    10  MR IRVING:  That would be a useful point to break off at this
    11  point, my Lord.
    12  MR JUSTICE GRAY:  Can I make an enquiry of you which is really
    13  to ask, and I expect Professor Evans would like to know
    14  the answer, what your estimate is as to the future of your
    15  cross-examination?
    16  MR IRVING:  Two and a half more days.
    17  MR JUSTICE GRAY:  How many?
    18  MR IRVING:  Two and a half more days.
    19  MR JUSTICE GRAY:  Right. Are you going to follow the —-
    20  MR IRVING:  I am going to follow the —-
    21  MR JUSTICE GRAY:  — structure of his report?
    22  MR IRVING:  I think it is the only way to do it, my Lord.
    23  MR JUSTICE GRAY:  Yes, I think I agree with that. I think you
    24  are right. To the extent that there are matters raised in
    25  Professor Evans’ report that are not any longer, I think,
    26  relied on as part of the Defendants’ case, then you can

    .           P-215


      1  probably not trouble with them or, at any rate, take them
      2  very shortly if you want to.
      3  MR IRVING:  Yes. Has your Lordship in your Lordship’s memory
      4  which particular matters those are that are no longer
      5  relied on? Sikorsky is one, I believe?
      6  MR JUSTICE GRAY:  Sikorsky is certainly one. Hitler’s
      7  adjutants, I think, has rather come back in again.
      8  I mean, I think it is probably not sensible for me to try
      9  to identify them now because I do not really have them in
    10  mind, but if the Defendants let you know whether there are
    11  parts in your report that are no longer relied on, that
    12  might simplify things all round.
    13  MR IRVING:  What about Moscow? Is there anything about Moscow
    14  in this report?
    15  MR JUSTICE GRAY:  I do not think there is.
    16  MR RAMPTON:  Not about Moscow. I have done that anyway.
    17  Moscow is certainly a live issue. There is nothing about
    18  Moscow in this report, as far as I know.
    19  MR IRVING:  My Lord, are you going to permit a further
    20  cross-examination of me?
    21  MR JUSTICE GRAY:  I think we have always contemplated there
    22  would be a further cross-examination, but it is not
    23  open-ended. It is dealing with left over topics.
    24  MR RAMPTON:  Can I tell your Lordship what I have left? I have
    25  got the Fleming book which has a reference to the Muller
    26  message to the Einsatzgruppen on 1st August 1941. I have

    .           P-216


      1  got Kinner Zamos report of 16th December 1942. I have got
      2  Anne Frank. I have got the criminal statistics which is
      3  dealt with towards the end of Professor Evans’ report,
      4  pages 692 to 8, and I have got a couple of other things
      5  which I am just having checked at the moment. If
      6  necessary, I will give notice and, of course, I have the
      7  political associations as well.
      8  MR JUSTICE GRAY:  Yes. That is very helpful, but if you are
      9  able to tell, or Miss Rogers or somebody is able to tell,
    10  Mr Irving that there are parts of Professor Evans’ report
    11  which are no longer really relied on and, therefore, he
    12  need not trouble with them?
    13  MR RAMPTON:  I think it means we can regard the Adjutants and
    14  the Roman Jews as out of the ring.
    15  MR JUSTICE GRAY:  There may be other bits?
    16  MR RAMPTON:  Little bits, but those are the two main subjects,
    17  yes.
    18  MR JUSTICE GRAY:  Does that help, Mr Irving, a bit?
    19  MR RAMPTON:  Though I cannot guarantee it will not —-
    20  MR IRVING:  If I had known we could have torn up the first 120
    21  pages of his report, it would have saved a lot of time.
    22  MR JUSTICE GRAY:  I am not sure that I would put it quite like
    23  that.
    24  (The court adjourned until the following day)
    25
    26  br />

    .           P-217