Day 2 Transcript: Holocaust Denial on Trial
Part I: Intial Proceedings (104.1 to 128.17)
Section 104.1 to 115.3
1 IN THE HIGH COURT OF JUSTICE
1996 I. No. 113
QUEEN’S BENCH DIVISION
2 Royal Courts of Justice
3 Strand, London
4 Wednesday, 12th January 2000
5
6 Before:
7 MR JUSTICE GRAY
8
9 B E T W E E N: DAVID JOHN CAWDELL IRVING
10 Claimant -and-
11 (1) PENGUIN BOOKS LIMITED
12 (2) DEBORAH E. LIPSTADT
13 Defendants
14 The Claimant appeared in person
15 MR RICHARD RAMPTON Q.C. (instructed by Messrs Davenport Lyons and Mishcon de Reya) appeared on behalf of the First and
16 Second Defendants
17 MISS HEATHER ROGERS (instructed by Davenport Lyons) appeared on behalf of the First Defendant Penguin Books Limited
18 MR ANTHONY JULIUS (of Mishcon de Reya) appeared on behalf of
19 the Second Defendant Deborah Lipstadt
20
21 (Transcribed from the stenographic notes of Harry Counsell & Company,
Clifford’s Inn, Fetter Lane, London EC4
22 Telephone: 020-7242-9346)
23 PROCEEDINGS – DAY TWO
24
25
26
. P-104
1DAY 2 Wednesday, 12th January 2000
2 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Yes, Mr Irving
3 MR IRVING: May it please your Lordship. This morning I wish
4 to kick off by playing to the court excerpts from two, or
5 possibly three, video tapes which are of relevance. I
6 will explain what the video tapes are, if I may, my Lord.
7 The first one is one minute 20 seconds long. It is a
8 postwar German newsreel, January 1948, and the very first
9 section on it, fortunately, is the reporting of the end of
10 the Auschwitz trial where a number of Defendants, rather
11 as at Nuremberg, had been prosecuted on this occasion by
12 the Polish Government. Auschwitz is in Poland. They had
13 been prosecuted for crimes against humanity, and sentence
14 was passed a week or two before this trial, before this
15 newsreel was shown.
16 So it is a newsreel showing the judge handing
17 down sentence. The relevance is purely the newsreel
18 statement from the judge’s findings of how many people
19 died in Auschwitz which is a matter of contention. We are
20 told by the expert witnesses in this case that anybody who
21 says the figure is less than is now commonly assumed is a
22 “Holocaust denier”. I purely wish to show that there is
23 a broad band of opinion over the years as to what the
24 figures were
25 MR JUSTICE GRAY: The judge is expressing whatever view he does
26 express on the basis of, what, the evidence he had heard
. P-105
1 during the course of the trial or what?
2 MR IRVING: A very lengthy trial, which ended with the
3 execution of a number of people. We see on this short
4 film the hearing of evidence, the hearing of witness
5 statements, the taking of depositions, the forensic
6 examination of the site which makes the statement that he
7 utters all the more important. My Lord, do you have the
8 short transcript of the passage? I have it in German
9 MR JUSTICE GRAY: If I have, I do not think I know where it
10 is. I have not seen it
11 MR IRVING: I can provide one, my Lord
12 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Or has it been handed in? Is it somewhere in
13 the files because there are a few loose documents
14 MR IRVING: There is one. If I can kick off by showing that
15 excerpt
16 MR IRVING: It is a tracking error, I think, my Lord
17 MR JUSTICE GRAY: You are having a quite a task if you are
18 trying to cope with that as well as everything else. I do
19 not know if there is anyone else around who is more
20 conversant with it than you are? We are getting a sound
21 now. Shall we come back to that one? It may be we do not
22 get the same problem with your next one
23 MR IRVING: Let me just read out what the translation is, if
24 I may
25 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Yes, please do
26 MR IRVING: This is a translation of the German text:
. P-106
1 “In Cracow the trial of the principal culprits
2 for the Auschwitz concentration camp came to an end before
3 a Polish court. The Defendants were German camp guards or
4 members of the German camp administration staff.
5 Unheard-of atrocities against the camp inmates,
6 particularly against female prisoners, were proved against
7 them. Altogether nearly 300,000 people” — this is the
8 part I am relying upon, my Lord — “from the most
9 different nations died in the Auschwitz concentration
10 camp. The court sentenced 23 of the accused to death, six
11 to life sentences and 10 to lengthy jail terms; one was
12 acquitted”.
13 It then continues with the same statement: “The
14 Auschwitz concentration camp remains as it stands today,
15 as a monument of shame to the lasting memory of its
16 300,000 victims”. Of course, nowadays, my Lord, we are
17 told a very different picture of Auschwitz, but that was
18 within the immediacy of the event
19 MR JUSTICE GRAY: I appreciate that no one is being too fussed,
20 I understand why not, about the admissibility of the
21 evidence, but this reads to me not like the judge or the
22 court talking but some sort of newsreel
23 MR IRVING: It is a German official newsreel produced in early
24 1948 at the time that Germany was under allied occupation
25 and all the media outlets in Germany were licensed by the
26 allied authorities
. P-107
1 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Yes, but, I mean, in terms of evidence, I am
2 not sure this has terribly much weight, does it
3 MR IRVING: Except, my Lord, for two arguments here: firstly,
4 if the allegation is that anybody who states figure less
5 than one million or 4 million, whichever figure we look
6 at, for Auschwitz is a Holocaust denier, then, denial,
7 apparently started very early; and, secondly, if this was
8 one of the documents before me at the time I wrote my
9 book, my Lord, then I could hardly be accused of
10 manipulation or distortion if I choose to rely on this
11 document rather than on the evidence of someone like
12 Rudolf Hess
13 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Where am I going to put it because I think we
14 must have a system of finding a home for every document
15 that is handed in, if you are going to rely on it
16 MR IRVING: My Lord, that should be in the bundles of
17 transcripts, in my submission
18 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Perhaps the Defendants can help because let
19 us be sensible about putting them were they belong
20 MR RAMPTON: Yes. I suspect what is going to happen during the
21 course of this trial is that we are going to create new
22 files as we go along. The resources of Her Majesty’s
23 courts probably do not run to that. So I think what we
24 had better do is, as these documents build up, is put them
25 in files — this is a document I have never seen before
26 either — and try to provide an identical file for each
. P-108
1 person in the court who will need to look at it
2 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Yes. I do not want to spend undue time on
3 it, but in some ways it is better to try to find them a
4 spot in the existing bundles where they logically belong
5 rather than having a, sort of, rather random new file
6 created with whatever happens to turn up
7 MR RAMPTON: Yes, that is probably right. The only place I can
8 think of to put this at the moment is with Mr Irving’s
9 statement
10 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Yes, I think that may be right
11 MR IRVING: In my statement
12 MR RAMPTON: It has no other natural home that I can think of
13 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Yes, I think that may be right
14 MR IRVING: Now, I add to your Lordship’s misery by giving you
15 the transcript of the video which we will now show
16 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Yes. For the time being, at any rate, we
17 shall put this in C4, shall we? Is that what you mean,
18 Mr Rampton
19 MR RAMPTON: Yes, I think it is C4. Unfortunately, mine do not
20 any longer correspond to the numbers — nor does
21 Miss Rogers’
22 MR JUSTICE GRAY: The other thing is we need a hole puncher
23 MR RAMPTON: Tab 1, C4, my Lord
24 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Yes, that is what I thought, at the back
25 MR RAMPTON: This next one, what is the number of the
26 transcript file? The next one goes in D(ii). I do not
. P-109
1 know which of the D(ii)s it will be; I have a feeling it
2 is already there actually
3 MR JUSTICE GRAY: It is worth spending just a little bit of
4 time on this sort of thing at the moment because then we
5 can get the system right for the future
6 MR RAMPTON: D(ii), tab — my Lord, the best place for it is at
7 the back of the second volume of D(ii) where it will have
8 a new tab No. 23
9 MR IRVING: I believe I am right in saying that this transcript
10 was not already provided by the Defendants; this is a new
11 transcript
12 MR JUSTICE GRAY: No, I think that is right. I think that is
13 accepted. Shall we play it now
14 MR IRVING: My Lord, can I just explain what it is
15 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Yes
16 MR IRVING: This is a transcript of a tape of a news programme
17 broadcasted in Australia on July 20th 1994 on ABC
18 Television in Australia. It is a typical kind of news
19 commentary programme, rather like News Night, which starts
20 off with the news bulletin and then follows with a
21 feature. The feature on this occasion was a feature
22 called “The Big Lie”. I do not propose to run the whole
23 tape, but to start about three minutes in where I have
24 positioned it as at the present which is page 2 near the
25 top, my Lord. Mr Anthony Lerman of —-
26 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Yes
. P-110
1 MR IRVING: — the Institute of Jewish affairs is about to
2 start speaking. The reason I am playing it is because
3 your Lordship will see that this interview provides the
4 Second Defendant, Professor Lipstadt, with a chance to
5 express her opinions unopposed
6 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Yes
7 MR IRVING: I feel it is appropriate to allow her some minutes
8 of the court’s time in this rather oblique manner to
9 express her opinions
10 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Yes
11 MR IRVING: I understand that she will not be testifying in
12 person in this case
13 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Yes
14 (Excerpt of video was played)
15 MR IRVING: My Lord, I pause very briefly there and invite your
16 attention to one scene in the newsreel that is being
17 displaced, black and white newsreel, where we are no
18 longer outside the railroad trucks filming the people
19 climbing into the railroad trucks, but the camera has
20 suddenly positioned itself inside the railroad trucks.
21 I am not going to draw any inferences from that
22 at this moment, my Lord, but we are suddenly inside a
23 darkened railway truck, taking a shot from the inside to
24 the outside as people climb in towards us
25 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Yes
26 MR IRVING: That is the only point I make, my Lord. My Lord,
. P-111
1 this is Professor van Pelt who will be testifying in this
2 case. This is the actual building which we will be
3 talking quite a lot about over the coming weeks,
4 crematorium No. 2
5 MR JUSTICE GRAY: At Auschwitz
6 MR IRVING: At Auschwitz — correction, at Birkenhau, my Lord,
7 which is five miles from Auschwitz
8 MR IRVING: My Lord
9 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Is that all you want from that, Mr Irving
10 MR IRVING: Yes. Your Lordship will see from the transcript
11 the rest concerns Rwanda —-
12 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Yes, I have read on and I did not think there
13 was anything in the rest of it
14 MR IRVING: Unless the Defendants object, I would not propose
15 to play the rest of the tape
16 MR JUSTICE GRAY: I am sure they will not
17 MR RAMPTON: No
18 MR IRVING: My Lord, I do not know if you consider that was a
19 useful exercise? I would welcome your Lordship’s guidance
20 on —-
21 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Well, to be frank, I think not very. In the
22 end we have to get down to the specific criticisms of your
23 historical approach
24 MR IRVING: Yes
25 MR JUSTICE GRAY: How we are quite going to deal with it, I do
26 not know, but I think that is what has to be grappled with
. P-112
1 and, from my point of view, the sooner the better
2 MR IRVING: We are also concerned with the Second Defendant
3 here. My Lord, I understand she will not be having a
4 chance to speak and I will not be having a chance to
5 cross-examine her. I think it was a useful exercise
6 because it gave us a chance to see her in action. I think
7 she could have handled herself under cross-examination,
8 had she proposed to do so
9 MR JUSTICE GRAY: You are entitled to make the point that she
10 is, apparently, not going to give evidence. I have that
11 point and I have now had the opportunity of seeing her on
12 the interview
13 MR IRVING: The other point I wish to draw attention to in the
14 video is that the other witness who will be called,
15 Professor van Pelt, draws great attention to the building
16 he was standing on which was crematorium No. 2 in
17 Birkenhau. He points to the holes, he points to the
18 room. He says, “This is where it happened”. In another
19 video which I will show on another occasion, my Lord, he
20 goes into much greater detail more emotionally saying,
21 “This is where it happened, this was the geographical
22 centre of the Holocaust”, and so on
23 MR JUSTICE GRAY: You say that is a post war reconstruction
24 MR IRVING: No, my Lord. We say something different about
25 that. This is crematorium building in Birkenhau. What we
26 say about that is that it was not what the Defence make
. P-113
1 out that it was. With your Lordship’s permission and
2 consent, I do not want to reveal precisely the arguments
3 we will lead on this occasion. We will give the Defence
4 great time to prepare counter arguments and we have spent
5 a great deal of time and money with architectural
6 consultants and so on providing this evidence. I would
7 prefer to leave that evidence —-
8 MR RAMPTON: Can I intervene to say something about that? I do
9 not find myself left very happy about what Mr Irving has
10 just said. The days are long gone where a Claimant who
11 responds to a plea of justification is entitled to keep
12 his rabbits in his back pocket and pull them out when it
13 suits him so as to deprive the other side of due notice so
14 that they can deal with it. If he is sitting on expert
15 reports, expert evidence, as indeed he flagged up
16 yesterday in his opening that he was, then we must have
17 them
18 MR JUSTICE GRAY: I think that is right. Can we just take
19 stock at the moment, Mr Irving, and see where we are
20 going? You did, I think, say you were intending to show
21 three videos. Are you really wanting to show a third
22 one
23 MR IRVING: I sense a certain impatience of your Lordship
24 MR JUSTICE GRAY: I hope I am not displaying impatience. I am
25 just telling you how I see the priorities. I am not
26 impatient
. P-114
1 MR IRVING: Possibly when we come to the Auschwitz phase, it
2 will be useful to show the next one which does concentrate
3 much more closely on the fabric of the sites of Auschwitz
Section 115.4 to 128.17
4 MR JUSTICE GRAY: May I ask you, following up what you told me
5 yesterday about the misunderstanding, whether it is or it
6 is not agreed that Auschwitz should be taken separately
7 and first
8 MR IRVING: We have agreed that, my Lord, and we have reached a
9 very satisfactory arrangement on the presentation of our
10 principal witnesses from overseas
11 MR JUSTICE GRAY: That is very good to know. Your opening is
12 really concluded now, as I understand it
13 MR IRVING: That is so, my Lord
14 MR JUSTICE GRAY: So I think probably, unless you tell me that
15 there is something else you want to deal with first, the
16 time has come for you to start giving evidence
17 MR IRVING: What I had proposed to do this morning, my Lord,
18 the bundle which I submitted this morning and replicates
19 bundle D(ii), I think, which we have already had, which is
20 a very large number of photocopies of all the books which
21 I have ever written, apparently, which have been very ably
22 put together by the Defendants. I had put together a
23 selection of pages from those books on which I was going
24 to draw your attention, passages which would refute
25 statements that had been made by the Defendants and also
26 by counsel yesterday
. P-115
1 MR JUSTICE GRAY: In relation to Auschwitz
2 MR IRVING: No, my Lord. Do I am apprehend that your Lordship
3 wishes to deal immediately with Auschwitz or other
4 different phases
5 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Well, if we are going to divide up the trial,
6 and I can see the sense of it, into Auschwitz and the
7 rest, it seems to me at the moment, and Mr Rampton may
8 take a different view, I do not know, that it is sensible
9 really to plunge into the issues that arise out of
10 Auschwitz rather than going to anything else, because the
11 time for doing that may be when we get to the second, as
12 it were, half of the trial
13 MR IRVING: My Lord, the Auschwitz matter is an immensely
14 complicated matter involving the assembly of a great deal
15 of expert material, drawings. The Defendants deluged me
16 on Friday evening after close of business with a further
17 5,000 pages of documents from van Pelt’s report. To start
18 straightaway today with that would put me at a
19 gross disadvantage. I am sorry that there may be a
20 misunderstanding. The agreement we reached was on the
21 dates of presentation of our witnesses from beyond the
22 seas, van Pelt in the case of the Defence and Professor
23 McDonald in my case, and I was still hoping and
24 anticipating we could deal with the reputation aspect
25 first which is well prepared, and push Auschwitz along
26 away from us for a while
. P-116
1 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Well, you say “for a while”, I mean how long
2 is the while
3 MR IRVING: As long as is necessary for me to deal with the
4 reputation aspects of the case
5 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Well, I do see the sense of your
6 establishing, I think by evidence, your reputation. I do
7 not myself think that will take very long because, bear in
8 mind, I have read a lot of the material. That is not to
9 say I do not want to hear you say it from the witness box
10 in summary
11 MR IRVING: My Lord, you have read it, but the Press have not
12 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Yes, but the exercise is not really entirely
13 for the members of the Press. I do not think we want to
14 take a lot of time in dealing with matters which are not
15 uncontentious, but which, perhaps, are not at the heart of
16 what is the true issue between the parties. I am very
17 anxious we get on if we can as soon as possible.
18 Can I just see what Mr Rampton would suggest as
19 the appropriate course? I think my own view is that
20 Mr Irving ought to go into the witness box from now on
21 because I think the case has really been opened. I see
22 the sense of hearing some evidence about his reputation by
23 way of preliminary
24 MR RAMPTON: I have read his witness statement. Apart from
25 what he said in his opening yesterday, I really have no
26 clue, no real clue, about what his case is on the detailed
. P-117
1 factual issues. I am in the same position as your
2 Lordship found yourself yesterday or said you did
3 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Yes
4 MR RAMPTON: I would like to know what his case is and I do
5 not
6 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Yes, well, I understand that
7 MR RAMPTON: I do not mind what order he takes to do that. If
8 he wants to saturate with his historiographical issues,
9 his techniques and the inaccuracies of the criticisms
10 which we have made, that is no problem to me at all.
11 Whether he does it from the witness box or whether he does
12 it as part of his opening, again I really do not mind
13 MR JUSTICE GRAY: No, I do not think it is terribly important,
14 but I think it probably is properly done by evidence
15 rather than by further opening statements
16 MR RAMPTON: I agree. If he says he is not yet prepared to
17 deal with the Auschwitz issues because they are, indeed,
18 detailed and complicated, that is perfectly all right with
19 us, but I do want to know what his case is and at the
20 moment I do not
21 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Well, his case is to be found not only in his
22 witness statement plainly but in the pleadings
23 MR RAMPTON: Yes, I have some of his case from the reply
24 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Yes. That is quite comprehensive, it
25 appeared to me, on the extent to which Hitler is
26 responsible for the Final Solution, relatively speaking
. P-118
1 MR RAMPTON: Yes, relatively
2 MR JUSTICE GRAY: It is not, if I may say so, Mr Irving, very
3 detailed in relation to Auschwitz. I have the broad
4 thrust of your case, but I think there is a lack of
5 detail
6 MR IRVING: My Lord, I am ignorant of the rules of procedure in
7 this matter. Would it be possible for me to be examined
8 in the witness box on two occasions?
9 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Yes. Let us get clear what is being
10 proposed. It is being proposed that there should be a
11 division of this trial really into two separate
12 compartments, one is Auschwitz which is to an extent a
13 free standing issue, it seems to me, a discrete issue.
14 The other is all the other issues, such as the bombing of
15 Dresden, Hitler’s responsibility for the Final Solution,
16 and so on. Obviously, they are not wholly separate, but
17 I think they can be taken separately for the purposes of
18 the trial
19 MR IRVING: My Lord, I think a perfectly satisfactory solution
20 which the court will, no doubt, find favour with is that
21 I will go into the witness box today and submit myself to
22 cross-examination on my pleadings, on the statements that
23 I have made, on the correspondence that I have submitted
24 to the other parties, on my opening statement and whatever
25 other matters they choose to put to me. I will answer
26 from the baggage that I carry around in my memory. No
. P-119
1 doubt, I will have the opportunity at a later date,
2 possibly when I can go back to my diaries or other papers,
3 to produce materials that I could not produce from
4 memory. I am sure this would be an adequate solution to
5 the problem
6 MR JUSTICE GRAY: May I make a suggestion and then you can
7 both, if you would like to, comment because I am very
8 conscious you are in person and this is, for obvious
9 reasons, not an easy case for you to conduct in person,
10 but what I would suggest is that you now go into the
11 witness box, that you deal with your reputation and your
12 published works and so on, and you can take it that I have
13 read your witness statement, that you then state, at any
14 rate in broad outline, what your case is on Auschwitz —
15 I am perfectly happy, as it were, to help you along by
16 asking you questions and then you can elaborate in your
17 answers — and then for Mr Rampton to cross-examine you in
18 relation to Auschwitz,
19 MR IRVING: At a later date
20 MR JUSTICE GRAY: No, straight off, why not? We are dealing
21 with that issue first
22 MR IRVING: Very well
23 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Then we will have, I do not know whether this
24 will work in terms of timing, the expert evidence in
25 relation to Auschwitz, hopefully, from your expert and
26 from Professor van Pelt. Then you will have the
. P-120
1 opportunity to make submissions about it either at the
2 very end of the case or, perhaps, at an earlier stage.
3 Does that sound a sensible way of proceeding to you
4 MR IRVING: I am not too happy about being cross-examined on
5 Auschwitz because our work on that is not complete. Your
6 Lordship may consider this is irrelevant, whether our work
7 on that is completed or not, because I am being asked
8 about my own work and my own writings, and things that
9 I may find out in the future are neither here nor there
10 which is the phrase that I used yesterday, but I am sure
11 your Lordship will have my interests at heart
12 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Yes. I am very anxious that you should say
13 whatever it is you want to say. Your case should be fully
14 deployed. But the case has been brewing a very long
15 time. I am a bit alarmed to hear that you are not, as it
16 were, fully up to speed on the Auschwitz issue
17 MR IRVING: We have been fully up to speed repeatedly, my Lord,
18 with all the indications of that phrase. Every time we
19 thought we were up to speed, we then received a fresh
20 avalanche of binders with further documents
21 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Yes, plus the 5,000 pages on Friday
22 MR IRVING: Indeed, and more during the weekend
23 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Would you be content to proceed along the
24 lines I have indicated and if you reach a point where, for
25 example, Mr Rampton is putting to you a document which you
26 have not had a chance to look at before, then you make
. P-121
1 that point and —-
2 MR IRVING: Precisely.
3 MR JUSTICE GRAY: — we ask him, perhaps, to go on to some
4 other point?
5 MR IRVING: I believe that the present atmosphere and climate
6 of opinion in court is, as Mr Rampton rather indicated, it
7 is not fair to sand bag your opponents with surprise
8 materials.
9 MR JUSTICE GRAY: That is very much the way in which litigation
10 is now conducted.
11 MR IRVING: And we certainly have not done so. I found it
12 mildly offensive that the Defendant should imply that we
13 had. I have subjected the Defendants to a stream of
14 questions over the last few weeks on their reports which,
15 clearly, indicates which way we are thinking.
16 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Well, may I now ask Mr Rampton whether he is
17 happy to proceed in the way I have just outlined?
18 MR RAMPTON: I will proceed in any way your Lordship wants; the
19 problem I have starting straightaway with Auschwitz is
20 simply a practical one. I do not have my Auschwitz papers
21 here. I have to go and get them.
22 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Yes.
23 MR RAMPTON: We will not get to Auschwitz today? In that case,
24 there is no problem, I can start tomorrow. If I do not
25 have to cross-examine today, then I do not have any
26 problem at all. I will start wherever it pleases your
. P-122
1 Lordship tomorrow.
2 MR JUSTICE GRAY: But, in principle, the idea of dealing with
3 Auschwitz separately is one that I believe you are in
4 favour of?
5 MR RAMPTON: Yes. We were given an indication that Mr Irving’s
6 opening in evidence-in-chief would take us up to about the
7 end of the week after next, that is to say, until Monday,
8 24th January, which is why Professor van Pelt is not here
9 at the moment. So, in that sense I have a slight
10 reluctance to start on Auschwitz until he gets here. It
11 is not an overwhelming reluctance by any means at all.
12 I can quite easily, on the other hand, start with
13 something completely different. I can start with issues
14 arising from Professor Evans’ report without any problem
15 at all.
16 MR JUSTICE GRAY: He covers really the whole gamut.
17 MR RAMPTON: I know. From your Lordship’s point of view, that
18 is perhaps a little inconvenient. The alternative — it
19 is one I do not advance with any great warmth — is to
20 adjourn this case until the beginning of next week by
21 which time Mr Irving should be up to speed on Auschwitz.
22 I say that for this reason. Although it is
23 perfectly true that the source documents were served on
24 him last week, Van Pelt’s report, the fact is that a very
25 large number of those reports, documents, plans are
26 illustrated in van Pelt’s report; that they have been
. P-123
1 available in the archives in Auschwitz and in Moscow for a
2 very long time. The main report was served at the end of
3 July last year. I do not have all of that much sympathy
4 with Mr Irving — I have some, of course, because he is in
5 person.
6 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Yes. I think the point you make is actually
7 a fair one, that Professor van Pelt makes his point in his
8 report without actually exhibiting the source material,
9 but it is pretty obvious what he is saying.
10 MR IRVING: My Lord, it is not. Architectural consultants who
11 have asked us for detailed drawings of many levels of the
12 construction work that went on over a period. They need
13 to know where the light switches were, that kind of
14 thing. You cannot see that kind of information from the
15 rather smudgey photocopies that were exhibited to the
16 report.
17 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Yes.
18 MR RAMPTON: You do not do any better if you look at the nice
19 coloured photographs which Professor van Pelt has now
20 produced in that regard. They are just better copies of
21 what he has already reproduced.
22 MR JUSTICE GRAY: I am very reluctant to adjourn the case.
23 I really think we have to get on for obvious reasons.
24 MR IRVING: My Lord, can we not start the cross-examination on
25 non-Auschwitz matters which will certainly take us up to
26 the weekend? I am sure Mr Rampton has a any number of
. P-124
1 questions he is curious about.
2 MR JUSTICE GRAY: I am perfectly easy. I think you had between
3 you reached agreement. It appears, perhaps, that is not
4 really right. I do not mind in which order we take
5 things. I think there is something to be said for taking
6 Auschwitz first, but if you prefer that it was dealt with
7 the other way round, that is fine.
8 MR RAMPTON: I can deal with a whole range of different topics,
9 not necessarily in an orderly fashion. That is the
10 trouble. What I am anxious to avoid is when I do get to
11 Auschwitz in cross-examination, perhaps it might be
12 tomorrow, for example, Mr Irving says, “Well, I am sorry,
13 I cannot answer that, I have not had time to think about
14 it or to instruct myself”. That is absolutely hopeless.
15 He then comes back, having heard my questions, and we have
16 to start all over again.
17 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Yes, I see that.
18 MR RAMPTON: I am not really interested in attributing blame
19 for these things. He is obviously not up to speed on
20 Auschwitz and I do not really want to cross-examine him on
21 it until he is because it is an unfair contest, apart from
22 anything else.
23 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Let us do it the other way round then. Let
24 us take the other issues. That is really a course that
25 you prefer, is it not?
26 MR IRVING: That was my original proposal, my Lord.
. P-125
1 MR RAMPTON: When Professor van Pelt gets here (which is the
2 week after next, I think) then I will start on Auschwitz
3 because that, I would think, would have given Mr Irving
4 enough time
5 MR IRVING: We are looking forward to it, in fact
6 MR JUSTICE GRAY: We will proceed on the opposite basis of
7 taking all the other issues
8 MR IRVING: I am indebted, my Lord
9 MR JUSTICE GRAY: It is up to you in which order you deal with
10 them, but you will start with your reputation and history
11 which I think you can take quite —-
12 MR IRVING: In cross-examination
13 MR JUSTICE GRAY: No, this is in chief
14 MR IRVING: Right
15 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Then it is really entirely up to you,
16 I think, how much you want to say in chief, and it is not
17 very easy for you to do because in a sense you will be
18 making a speech from the witness box, or whether you want
19 to simply submit yourself to cross-examination on these
20 various other issues, Dresden, Hitler’s role, and the
21 like
22 MR IRVING: The court would simply certainly prefer for reasons
23 of integrity that the evidence should be under oath
24 MR JUSTICE GRAY: I would, I think that is the right way of
25 doing it
26 MR IRVING: Then the sooner I go into the witness box,
. P-126
1 therefore, the better. That may well speed things up
2 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Yes. So you are happy to proceed in that
3 way
4 MR IRVING: I am happy to proceed in that way, provided the
5 Auschwitz stage is left until later on
6 MR JUSTICE GRAY: It is going to be. Mr Rampton, you are
7 content with that as well
8 MR RAMPTON: Yes, I agree to that. I will find something else
9 to start with
10 MR JUSTICE GRAY: I am sure you will. Mr Irving, the next
11 problem, and you can really choose whichever you prefer,
12 that is the witness box. If you find it more convenient
13 to stay where you, I am perfectly happy if Mr Rampton is
14 happy at this stage anyway, for the evidence to be given
15 from there. When it comes to cross-examination, the
16 position may be different because I do not see that you
17 can really cross-examine along a row. But it may be
18 easier for Mr Irving to stay where he is for the time
19 being
20 MR RAMPTON: That is what Miss Rogers suggested. It is a good
21 idea. He has all his papers there. When he gets to be
22 cross-examined, we may have to have a break while he gets
23 all the stuff up there because I cannot cross-examine side
24 by side
25 MR IRVING: I would prefer, my Lord, the first part of the
26 cross-examination should be done from box, but when we
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Part II: David Irving’s Evidence in Chief (128.18 to 216.6)
1 come to the Auschwitz stage where we will have papers,
2 I might revert to your Lordship’s original proposal, that
3 it should be continued with me standing here
4 MR JUSTICE GRAY: We will see about that when the time comes.
5 But would you prefer to give your evidence-in-chief —-
6 MR IRVING: I would prefer to give it from the traditional
7 place
8 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Unless you want to deal with anything else,
9 I think you ought to go and be sworn
10 MR IRVING: Very well, my Lord. At some stage, of course, my
11 Lord, your Lordship is aware wish to deal with the
12 Hizbollah allegations and the Farrakhan allegations, but
13 this can done at any time
14 MR JUSTICE GRAY: I think even that is best done from the
15 witness box because this is a libel trial, it is a rather
16 unusual one, but you will want to give what one might call
17 some of the standard defamation evidence
Section 128.18 to 135.13
18 MR DAVID IRVING, sworn
19 Examined by the Court
20 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Mr Irving, I think the best thing is if
21 I give you a little bit if a steer, if I can put it that
22 way. Would you rather sit down
23 <spanclass=”speaker”>A. [Mr Irving] I am not sure that I need scaring
24 <spanclass=”speaker”>Q. [Mr Justice Gray] No, the word I used was “steer” not “scare”, simply so
25 that your evidence has a shape that might make it more
26 comprehensible. Shall we start by your full name address
. P-128
1 A. [Mr Irving]: My full name is David John Cawdell — I will spell that,
2 C-A-W-D-E-L-L Irving, I-R-V-I-N-G
3 Q. [Mr Justice Gray]: And address
4 A. [Mr Irving]: My address is No. 81 Duke Street, London W1
5 Q. [Mr Justice Gray]: Yes. You have made a witness statement for the purposes
6 of this action and it is dated 22nd January last year.
7 Would you formally confirm that that is so
8 A. [Mr Irving]: That is so. I have made a witness statement and the
9 statements in it are true
10 Q. [Mr Justice Gray]: Yes, thank you. Now, you can take it that I have read it,
11 but, as you pointed out a little while ago, the Press is
12 reporting this case and I think it would be right to give
13 you the opportunity to restate in summary form anything
14 that you wish to from that statement
15 A. [Mr Irving]: I do not have a copy of the statement with me
16 Q. [Mr Justice Gray]: I think you probably should. Do you have anyone to help
17 you fetch and carry documents
18 A. [Mr Irving]: My entire staff was called to the Bar just before
19 Christmas, unfortunately
20 Q. [Mr Justice Gray]: Perhaps if you can provide? Thank you
21 A. [Mr Irving]: The statement is 18 pages, my Lord. If I were to read the
22 statement out, it would take us until lunch time or would
23 that be too long
24 Q. [Mr Justice Gray]: I am very much against you doing that because the main
25 object of the exercise is, perhaps, to get your evidence
26 across to me. I have read it, but I am giving you the
. P-129
1 opportunity to be selective and make in a summary way any
2 of the points that you want to make again in your oral
3 evidence
4 A. [Mr Irving]: I think I have made the principal statements from this.
5 I repeated them in my opening statement yesterday. My
6 books have received high praise from established academic,
7 official and government historians in every country where
8 they have been published. I just mention the names of
9 Professor Hugh Trevor-Roper, AJP Taylor, Professor MRD
10 Foot, Captan Stephen Roskill, Professor Norman Stone,
11 Professor Donald Cameron Watt. The reason I
12 have mentioned those names, as your Lordship will see in
13 your files copies of the reviews and praise that these
14 people have given to my works.
15 I have not only written about World War II, of
16 course; I have also written about other matters like the
17 Hungarian Uprising and the German Uranian Research
18 Programme during World War II.
19 John Keegan, the Defence Correspondent for The
20 Daily Telegraph (and your Lordship will be aware why I
21 have stated this) has written: “Two books in English
22 stand out from the vast literature of the Second World
23 War: Chester Wilmott’s ‘The Struggle for Europe’
24 published in 1952 and David Irving ‘Hitler’s War'” which
25 appeared three years ago. That kind of quotation rather
26 gives the lie to the statement by the Second Defendant
. P-130
1 which we saw on video that nobody takes me seriously.
2 It says here in about 1975 Adolf Hitler’s
3 Private Secretary, the late Christa Schroeder, gave me a
4 small pencil sketch, a self-portrait of Adolf Hitler,
5 which he had retrieved from his desk in the last days of
6 the war. She gave it to me as a gift and I keep it. I do
7 not, of course, have any kind of portrait of Adolf Hitler
8 on my office hanging on the wall in the way that has been
9 described.
10 Am I proceeding in the correct manner
11 Q. [Mr Justice Gray]: Yes, I think this is exactly what I think is the right way
12 of proceeding
13 A. [Mr Irving]: I consider myself to be an expert on the careers of the
14 principal Nazi leaders, including specifically Adolf
15 Hitler, Goring and Dr Josef Goebbels. I am an expert on
16 the archives about these people. I am expert on the
17 current state of research into German and other wartime
18 persecution and liquidation of the European Jewish
19 communities
20 Q. [Mr Justice Gray]: You said yesterday — I am sorry to interrupt you– that
21 you did not regard yourself as being an historian of the
22 Holocaust, can you just in your evidence —-
23 A. [Mr Irving]: This is true
24 Q. [Mr Justice Gray]: — explain what you mean
25 A. [Mr Irving]: There is a subtle difference. I am an expert in the state
26 of research but not on their findings, so to speak. I am
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1 an expert on the way they go about their research, but not
2 so much on the actual details of the Holocaust, and so on
3 Q. [Mr Justice Gray]: When you say “they”, who do you mean by “they”, the
4 Defendants
5 A. [Mr Irving]: No, my Lord. I am sorry, I should have made myself
6 clear. I mean the Holocaust historians, the historians
7 who specialize in that topic
8 Q. [Mr Justice Gray]: Yes
9 A. [Mr Irving]: Over the years I have collected a very large archive of
10 original documents and copies of original documents, like
11 private diaries and papers like that, from the top Nazi
12 leaders using various techniques and methods, all entirely
13 legal and, as part of my technique, I would then donate
14 these papers immediately to the suitable archives so they
15 are immediately available to other historians.
16 My views upon politics are on page 1047
17 Q. [Mr Justice Gray]: Yes
18 A. [Mr Irving]: The Defendants have chosen to refer to my politics and
19 they wrongly categorise them. They say that I am extreme
20 right-wing or something like that. I have never belonged
21 to a political party, left or right, except I think
22 I joined the Young Conservatives at University.
23 My father stood as a Labour candidate in the
24 1945 General Election. I voted for Sir James Goldsmith,
25 my Lord, if I can make that point in the last election, in
26 other words, neither one nor the other. I regard myself
. P-132
1 as a laissez faire Liberal. In other words, I do not
2 really care much about politics so long as they spend the
3 money on hospitals rather than Millennium Domes. I have a
4 family reason for saying that.
5 I do not look down on any section of humanity,
6 either coloured immigrants, I have regularly employed
7 them, or females. Your Lordship will appreciate the
8 reasons why I make these points. I have five daughters,
9 in fact — I am sorry, I had five daughters.
10 I do not look down on the mentally or physically
11 disabled. I admit to having little patience with smokers
12 and none at all with drug abusers. This is not to say
13 that I have applauded — I have to state this because
14 I will probably be asked about it — I cannot say that I
15 have applauded the uncontrolled tide of commonwealth
16 immigration into this country.
17 Like most fellow countrymen of my background and
18 vintage, I regret the passing of the Old England.
19 I sometimes think, my Lord, that if the soldiers and
20 sailors who stormed the beaches of Normandy in 1944 could
21 see what England would be like at the end of this century,
22 they would not have got 50 yards up the beach. I think
23 they would have given up in disgust
24 Q. [Mr Justice Gray]: You said you are getting towards paragraph 23 of your
25 witness statement, 1048
26 A. [Mr Irving]: My reputation as an historian
. P-133
1 Q. [Mr Justice Gray]: You said you wanted to develop that and I think now is
2 probably the appropriate time to do that, if you want to
3 A. [Mr Irving]: I have, of course, a very large collection of ring binders
4 of Press clippings which have been made available to the
5 Defendants and in which they have not shown the slightest
6 interest. Reviews in all the leading newspapers of the
7 world of the books that I have written. I believe I have
8 written about 30. I could have produced all those reviews
9 to the court, but if I just summarize and say that they
10 are largely very favourable reviews, the kinds of reviews
11 that made publishers line up to publish my books until the
12 turning of tide.
13 Obviously, there were some reviews that you
14 could describe as the curate’s egg, but, by and large, the
15 reviews were exceptionally favourable. It may be said
16 that the reviewers were not as clever, perhaps, as the
17 expert witnesses whom the Defendants have summoned for
18 this case. That may be one argument; maybe they had not
19 seen though me, perhaps. Arguments like that will be
20 advanced, but I submit this is not the case. These were
21 book reviews written by experts in their own field, like
22 Captain Steven Roskill who was an eminent naval historian,
23 Professor MRD Foot, who is another official historian,
24 Professor Sir Frank Hinsley. If I just summarize it as
25 briefly as that, my Lord
26 Q. [Mr Justice Gray]: Yes, I think that is sufficient
. P-134
1 A. [Mr Irving]: If you wish to question that, of course, I will be quite
2 happy to put in all the evidence to support the
3 contention, but Defendants have not shown any interest in
4 these statements
5 Q. [Mr Justice Gray]: Can you help me because I have not alighted on them. Are
6 they in one of the files
7 A. [Mr Irving]: They were within my discovery. They were disclosed to the
8 Defendants in proper form. Admittedly, I did not do an
9 index of the entire set, but they were shown 16 ring
10 binders full of chronologically organized, properly pasted
11 up reviews and Press clippings in which, who knows, they
12 might have found some goodies they could have used against
13 me, I do not know, but they did not bother with them
Section 135.14 to 152.17
14 Q. [Mr Justice Gray]: Take your own course, Mr Irving, but do you now want to
15 deal with the publication of “Denying the Holocaust”
16 A. [Mr Irving]: The publication of the book. I paid no attention to that
17 book, my Lord, until 1996. It did not come into my ken
18 until 1996. I believe it was published in 1994, but in
19 April 1996 we published in this country my book the
20 Goebbels’ biography, “Goebbels. Mastermind of the Third
21 Reich”. Your Lordship will be aware this is the only book
22 that I requested that your Lordship study in some detail
23 because it is a book that I am particularly proud of.
24 When we began marketing that book in the United
25 Kingdom, which meant literally that I and my publisher
26 imprint rented a van and visited approximately 980
. P-135
1 bookstores up and down the length and breadth of the
2 country, which is a very enjoyable exercise. I do not do
3 it out of tedium; it is very interesting to visit the
4 bookstores and their managers. We marketed the book
5 directly to them and we sold many thousands of copies in
6 this manner, but we came across the phenomenon that in a
7 number of bookstores, particularly in the Waterstones
8 chain, the head of the history department took an aversion
9 to me.
10 After visiting a number of the bookstores, it
11 became quite plain that the reason for the aversion to me
12 was the fact that they were selling the book “Denying the
13 Holocaust”, published by the first Defendant and written
14 by the Second Defendant. This book was being believed by
15 Waterstones or by their employes and by, no doubt, other
16 bookstores too. It was causing me considerable concern
17 because these bookstores were thereupon refusing to stock
18 my books.
19 So I thereupon during that tour began to
20 purchase copies of “Denying the Holocaust” as evidence
21 that the book was on sale within the jurisdiction. I put
22 the publishers on notice. I put the author on notice.
23 I put certain of the book sellers themselves on notice
24 because under the Defamation Act anybody in the
25 distribution chain can be held liable for the peddling of
26 libels. I subsequently, of course, separated those —
. P-136
1 I discontinued the action against the book sellers for
2 reasons that need not occupy the court.
3 At the beginning of September 1996, which is
4 that same year, which had been a very harrowing year for
5 me, as I had seen my American publishers, St Martin’s
6 Press, in conjunction with my big American publisher,
7 Doubledays, simultaneously deciding, we now learn, upon
8 representations made by the Second Defendant not to go
9 ahead with publication of my Goebbels’ biography,
10 I decided that I had no recourse but to take libel action
11 against this book which was, obviously, part of the cause
12 of my problem.
13 So I issued the writ, after taking usual
14 procedural steps, the letter before action and so on,
15 I think it was dated September 6th 1996
16 Q. [Mr Justice Gray]: Yes. Now, you have selected for complaint a number of
17 particular passages from the book and I think it would be
18 appropriate if you were to deal with them, and where you
19 best find them, I do not know, but certainly they are to
20 be found in your Statement of Claim, but it may be you
21 would rather deal with it in some other way
22 A. [Mr Irving]: May I return my papers and collect the Statement of
23 Claim
24 Q. [Mr Justice Gray]: Yes, of if you point out where they are, perhaps somebody
25 can do it for you rather than having you go backwards and
26 forwards
. P-137
1 A. [Mr Irving]: They are in the ring binder
2 Q. [Mr Justice Gray]: Thank you very much
3 A. [Mr Irving]: My Lord, I was defamed and libelled on a number of pages
4 in the book. I do not propose to read out, unless your
5 Lordship wishes otherwise, the specific passages
6 Q. [Mr Justice Gray]: No. You are entitled to take your own course about that
7 but I think what you ought to do is just give an
8 indication of —-
9 A. [Mr Irving]: I will read out —-
10 Q. [Mr Justice Gray]: — why you object to the passages that you have selected
11 for complaint
12 A. [Mr Irving]: If I go to paragraph 9 of the Statement of Claim which is
13 “The natural or ordinary meaning of the words complained
14 of”
15 Q. [Mr Justice Gray]: Yes
16 A. [Mr Irving]: I contend that the passages meant, and were intended to
17 mean and understood to mean, firstly, “that the
18 Plaintiff”, meaning myself, “is a dangerous spokesperson
19 for Holocaust denial … for denial forces who
20 deliberately and knowingly consorts and consorted with
21 anti-Israel, anti-Semitic and Holocaust denial forces and
22 who contracted to attend a world anti-Zionist conference
23 in Sweden in November 1992, thereby agreeing to appear in
24 public in support of and alongside violent and extremist
25 speakers, including representatives of the violent and
26 extremist anti-Semitic Russian group, Pamyat, and of the
. P-138
1 Iranian-backed Hezbollah and of the fundamentalist Islamic
2 organization Hamas and including the black Muslim leader
3 Louis Farrakhan, born Louis Eugene Walcott, who is known
4 as a Jew-baiting black agitator, as a leader of the US
5 Nation of Islam, as an admirer of Hitler and who is in the
6 pay of Colonel Gaddafi”.
7 My Lord, the wording that I use in this is, of
8 course, very closely related to the wording used in the
9 work complained of. I have not chosen those words
10 myself. I have merely distilled them out of the
11 Defendant’s text and adhered as closely as possible to the
12 original wording
13 Q. [Mr Justice Gray]: Yes. You are just paraphrasing really
14 A. [Mr Irving]: I am not even paraphrasing, my Lord. I am gluing the
15 words together into a complaint form using the words
16 actually used by the Defendants in the work complained of
17 Q. [Mr Justice Gray]: That is what I meant by “paraphrase”
18 A. [Mr Irving]: So I have added no colour, I have turned up no volume.
19 These are the extraordinary words used to describe me by
20 the Defendants. They say, “that the Plaintiff”, myself,
21 “is an historian who has inexplicably misled”, in other
22 words, the word “inexplicably” is in the original book,
23 “misled academic historians like Ernst Nolte into quoting
24 historically invalid points contained in his writings”, my
25 writings, “and who applauds the internment of Jews in Nazi
26 concentration camps”. I am accused of having applauded
. P-139
1 the internment of Jews in Nazi concentration camps which
2 is a particularly perverse allegation in my view.
3 No. (iii) “that the Plaintiff”, David Irving,
4 “routinely perversely and by way of his profession, but
5 essentially in order to serve his own reprehensible
6 purposes ideological leanings and/or political agenda”,
7 and here are the allegations, “distort accurate historical
8 evidence and information; misstate; misconstrue; misquote;
9 falsify statistics; falsely attribute conclusions to
10 reliable sources; manipulate documents; wrongfully quote
11 from books that directly contradict my arguments in such a
12 manner as completely to distort their author’s objectives
13 and while counting on the ignorance or indolence of the
14 majority of readers not to realize this”
15 Q. [Mr Justice Gray]: May I interrupt and ask you this? Am I right in thinking
16 (and I may be quite wrong) that really that is the
17 imputation against you which causes you the most concern
18 A. [Mr Irving]: Professionally, clearly so, my Lord
19 Q. [Mr Justice Gray]: Yes
20 A. [Mr Irving]: I mean, the name calling is neither here nor there and
21 your Lordship may make of it what your Lordship wants,
22 I submit. Clearly, some of the name calling will stick,
23 but it would be a real waste of this court’s time if
24 I take each of the names I have been called in turn and
25 try to prove that is not so. This is what has cost me my
26 career, unless the court disposes otherwise at the end of
. P-140
1 this trial, my Lord.
2 I complained that the work complained of
3 describes me as an Adolf Hitler partisan who wears
4 blinkers and skews documents and misrepresents data in
5 order to reach historically untenable conclusions
6 specifically those that exonerate Hitler.
7 I am accused of being an ardent admirer of the
8 Nazi leader, Adolf Hitler, an ardent admirer of the Nazi
9 leader, Adolf Hitler; that I conceive myself as carrying
10 on Hitler’s criminal legacy and that I placed a
11 self-portrait of Hitler over my desk; that I
12 have described a visit to Hitler’s mountain top retreat as
13 a spirit experience; that I have described myself as a
14 moderate fascist. These are the allegations contained in
15 the book.
16 Further, that before the Zundel trial began in
17 1988 in Toronto, I, the Plaintiff, compromising my
18 integrity as an historian, and in an attempt to pervert
19 the course of justice and one Faurisson, Robert Faurisson
20 whom we saw in the video, that I wrongfully and/or
21 fraudulently conspired together to invite an American
22 prison warden and thereafter one Fred Leuchter, an
23 engineer who is depicted by the Defendants as a charlatan,
24 to testify as a tactic for proving that the gas chambers
25 were a myth”.
26 The loaded words in that sentence, my Lord, are
. P-141
1 words that are actually contained in the book.
2 “That the Plaintiff after attending Mr Zundel’s
3 trial in 1988 in Toronto, having previously hovered on the
4 brink now denies the murder by the Nazis of the Jews”. So
5 I deny the murder by the Nazis of the Jews, this is one of
6 the allegations. That I described the memorial to the
7 dead at Auschwitz as a tourist attraction; that I was
8 branded by the British House of Commons as “Hitler’s
9 Heir”, and that I was denounced by the same British House
10 of Commons as a Nazi propagandist and long-time Hitler
11 apologist and accused by them of publishing a fascist
12 publication, and that this marked the end of my reputation
13 in England.
14 My Lord, it may possibly not be familiar to the
15 Defendants that there is a distinction between an early
16 day motion being put in the House of Commons by a group of
17 disgruntled members of Parliament and the House of Commons
18 actually voting and reaching a decision. It is nothing
19 more than a propaganda move by people who wish to draw
20 attention to something within the privileged atmosphere.
21 It is rather like the privileged atmosphere that exists in
22 this court, my Lord; people can say what they want about
23 me and the newspapers are free to print it
24 Q. [Mr Justice Gray]: Yes, well, I certainly do know about early day motions,
25 so…
26 A. [Mr Irving]: That some other person had discovered in a Russian archive
. P-142
1 — this is the allegation in the book — that some other
2 person had discovered in the Russian archive in 1992 the
3 Goebbels’ diaries, that it was assumed that these would
4 shed light on the conduct of the Final Solution, but that
5 I was hired and paid a significant sum by the London
6 Sunday Times to transcribe and translate, although I was a
7 discredited and ignominious figure and, although by hiring
8 the Plaintiff, the newspaper threw its task as a
9 gatekeeper of the truth and of journalistic ethics to the
10 winds and, although there was thereby increased the danger
11 that the Plaintiff would in order to serve his own
12 reprehensible purposes misstate, misconstrue, misquote,
13 falsify, distort and/or manipulate these sets of documents
14 which others had not seen, namely, the Goebbels’ diaries;
15 I would do all that in order to propagate my reprehensible
16 views and that I, the Plaintiff, was unfit to perform such
17 a function for this newspaper.
18 Finally, the book contained the allegation that
19 I violated an agreement with the Russian archives, and
20 that I took and copied many plates without permission
21 causing significant damage to them and rendering them of
22 limited use to subsequent researchers
23 Q. [Mr Justice Gray]: Mr Irving, the first of those imputations that you say
24 that Professor Lipstadt makes against you in her book is
25 one that links you with Hamas and Hezbollah, and again
26 I think you indicated earlier on that you wanted to say
. P-143
1 something about those organizations
2 A. [Mr Irving]: My Lord, I put to your Lordship a small bundle of
3 documents —-
4 Q. [Mr Justice Gray]: Yes
5 A. [Mr Irving]: — on those organisations
6 Q. [Mr Justice Gray]: I have read it.
7 A. [Mr Irving]: It is probably not necessary for me to go in detail
8 through them. I will indicate to your Lordship that
9 reliable sources, like the BBC or other news media
10 organizations, have consistently described the Hezbollah
11 and Hamas, which are two Muslim fundamentalist terrorist
12 organizations, as being criminal organizations whose
13 members are not allowed into other countries and are
14 actively pursued by the forces of law and order and,
15 indeed, actively pursued with less law and order by the
16 forces of the Mossad, who sometimes dispose of them by
17 jabbing the aforementioned hypodermic needle laden with
18 nerve gas into their neck which is one of the documents
19 which I put before your Lordship
20 Q. [Mr Justice Gray]: Yes, I have read them
21 A. [Mr Irving]: So anybody who is described in this reckless way as being
22 a member of the Hamas or the Hezbollah or some other
23 similar terrorist organization is at risk of being
24 declared fair game with the forces of law and order or, at
25 the very least, for the immigration authorities and
26 countries who already look askance upon people for various
. P-144
1 reasons and, at worst, they are having their life put at
2 risk or they are going to be ruffed up in the street by
3 people who disagree with the Hezbollah or the Hamas.
4 I do not share your Lordship’s earlier opinion
5 at the pretrial review that is a matter which falls under
6 section 5 of the Act, my Lord
7 Q. [Mr Justice Gray]: I did not express any concluded view, obviously
8 A. [Mr Irving]: I am sorry, my Lord. This was totally misquoted
9 Q. [Mr Justice Gray]: Can you help me on something else? You will have the
10 opportunity to make submissions about that later on. You
11 supplied documents relating to the bombing in Oklahoma
12 City. Does that feature in Professor Lipstadt’s book
13 A. [Mr Irving]: It does not feature in the book, my Lord, but I thought
14 this was the appropriate bundle to put them, in February
15 1996 the media in the United States, where such
16 allegations can be made with impunity, raised the
17 allegation that I had supplied the trigger mechanism for
18 the Oklahoma City bomb.
19 Now, the Oklahoma City bombing features in some
20 of the documents quoted, I believe, by Professor Evans or
21 by Professor Brian Levin, because they quote from my diary
22 on that particular day; and to be accused of having
23 anything to do with that crime was something I found
24 particularly repugnant and I regard it as being part of
25 the general campaign to vilify me and blacken my name
26 which originated from the same sources which have funded
. P-145
1 the Defendants with the material they have used to smear
2 me. It is no more directly associated with them than
3 that
4 Q. [Mr Justice Gray]: Thank you very much
5 A. [Mr Irving]: But it is like trying to put a hook into a custard pie.
6 You cannot really pin anything down until you stand back
7 and you see the whole continuum of the onslaught to which
8 I have been subjected
9 Q. [Mr Justice Gray]: The next thing you might want to deal with, Mr Irving, is
10 the effect that that the publication of the book of which
11 you complain has had on you. I have seen what you say in
12 your witness statement about that, but if you want to
13 expatiate on that, then please do
14 A. [Mr Irving]: My Lord, people have said to me, “Why have you picked on
15 that book and those particular Defendants?” and the simple
16 answer is because it is an open and shut case. I have
17 been accused of doing things which they cannot justify.
18 If we admittedly find it more difficult to disprove the
19 subjective claims, ad hominem statements that are made,
20 there are certain specific claims that are made, like the
21 Adolf Hitler portrait or like the misquoting of documents
22 or deliberate and reprehensible mistranslation or
23 distortion, which are easy to disprove and they are the
24 ones which reflect on my professional integrity and on my
25 career and on my livelihood, which is precisely what the
26 Defamation act, as I understand it, is about
. P-146
1 This is one reason why I decided that the time
2 had come after 30 years to take some kind of action which
3 I did with the utmost reluctance because Penguin Books,
4 the First Defendants, have published books of my own in
5 the past and you are not eager to go and sue people who
6 have published your own books.
7 The book, undoubtedly, had caused me serious
8 damage. When I consider, admittedly, this was not damage
9 within the jurisdiction, and it is possible the Defence
10 counsel objected and it is, therefore, relevant, but in
11 view of the fact that the publication of this book and the
12 author of the book were widely quoted in justification by
13 the American publishers for cancelling my Dr Goebbels’
14 biography, which was for me a particularly wounding and
15 injurious event, when I wrote the biography of
16 Dr Goebbels, it was a task of nine years, my Lord.
17 We have just spent three years preparing this
18 case, writing that one book which your Lordship has seen
19 took me nine years. It went through, I think, six
20 different drafts; the first draft entirely in handwriting,
21 the drafts of the manuscript which the Defendants have
22 seen fills some ten cubic feet of boxes, as it was refined
23 and refined and then finally totally rewritten when I came
24 into possession of the diaries. The book was set to
25 restore my reputation completely until the United States,
26 because your Lordship may well agree that the book cannot
. P-147
1 be described as “anti-Semitic”, the book, in my
2 submission, cannot be described as justifying the
3 Holocaust or admiring Hitler or exonerating Hitler in any
4 kind of way, the book was, I consider, one of the most
5 well-founded and well-researched and watertight accounts
6 of the higher leadership of the Third Reich that I have
7 ever written. It was the crowning point of my career. We
8 waited with the utmost eagerness for publication day in
9 the United States, shortly before which the publishers
10 contacted me and said, Mr Irving, we are beginning to come
11 under attack from all quarters. One of the quarters was
12 from the second Defendant
13 Q. [Mr Justice Gray]: Your evidence is, is it, that the — I think you said “the
14 author” did you mean..
15 A. [Mr Irving]: The Second Defendant
16 Q. [Mr Justice Gray]: The American publishers of the Goebbels book told you that
17 Professor Lipstadt and —
18 A. [Mr Irving]: No, my Lord, media accounts have linked Professor Lipstadt
19 with this particular event
20 Q. [Mr Justice Gray]: — media accounts, rather than the American publishers
21 A. [Mr Irving]: This is true, my Lord, and it is very unsatisfactory that
22 we are not going to be able, as I understand it, to
23 question Professor Lipstadt about what contact she may
24 have had
25 If I may state at this point also, one would
26 have liked to have seen in her discovery, had her
. P-148
1 discovery been complete, and I am going to submit her
2 discovery was incomplete, any correspondence that she
3 might have had or any communications she might or might
4 not have had with the publishers’ concerns, St Martins
5 Press, or with the people who were putting pressure on the
6 publishers, because the Second Defendant was certainly
7 instantly quoted as an authority on the reasons why the
8 book should be suppressed
9 Q. [Mr Justice Gray]: Yes, but you are entitled to make applications for
10 discovery, but let us focus on your evidence. If you want
11 to make that application we can deal with that at the
12 beginning or the end of the day
13 A. [Mr Irving]: It is not an application, my Lord, it is an allegation.
14 I was informed by the second Defendants’ lawyers when your
15 Lordship will have seen that I succeeded in obtaining an
16 order that the Second Defendant should be required to
17 swear a list on affidavit. When that occurs, as your
18 Lordship is aware, I am not allowed to go behind the
19 affidavit until the trial of the action. I was repeatedly
20 reminded of this by the defendants’ solicitors, who said
21 you will be able to cross-examine Professor Lipstadt when
22 the time comes, on her affidavit, and, of course, now we
23 will not
24 Q. [Mr Justice Gray]: Yes
25 A. [Mr Irving]: That is not the last time I shall refer to that, my Lord.
26 I find it an unfortunate state of affairs
. P-149
1 So the book anyway in the United States did not
2 appear. The just proceeds of that book not appearing were
3 denied to me. But not only the just proceeds of that book
4 but as it seems now all future books, because all the
5 publishers with whom I previously dealt in the United
6 States have pointed to that episode in grief and terror
7 and said we cannot afford that to happen to us. The
8 chairman of the St Martin’s Press was obliged to resign
9 six weeks later over the scandal and nobody wanted to go
10 through that again
11 Q. [Mr Justice Gray]: Yes. So that is your evidence about the effect of what
12 has been published by these Defendants. Now —
13 A. [Mr Irving]: Specific details, yes, my Lord, of course, there is a
14 long-term effect in this country as well
15 Q. [Mr Justice Gray]: — describe that
16 A. [Mr Irving]: The book, which has been published by the First and Second
17 Defendants has been not just sold through the normal
18 outlets, it has been placed on the Internet on two
19 different website locations. I have no way of knowing
20 whether they are active participants in that or not
21 because we cannot cross-examine them on that. I, the
22 Defendant, but the book has been made available in other
23 words to 200 million Internet users. They can download it
24 free, the entire book, and review probably regardless of
25 whatever injunction your Lordship sees fit to make at the
26 end of this trial that book will continue in perpetuity in
. P-150
1 cyber space. The book has been donated to very large
2 numbers of university libraries around the world. One of
3 my correspondents at the University of Durham has found no
4 fewer than three copies in Durham University library with
5 library plate gummed into the front saying “donated by
6 Friends of Durham University History Society”. There is
7 no such Society. So it has been actively propagated by
8 who knows whom. The book is relied on as a source. It is
9 an authoritative source by people who wish to attack me
10 further. So it has an ongoing rolling effect far beyond
11 the effect it has just on the one customer who picks it up
12 at his local Barns & Noble or Waterstones bookshop, my
13 Lord.
14 Of course, the book is a very much more serious
15 libel — vehicle for a libel then a newspaper. When
16 newspapers have libeled me or defamed me in the past and
17 people have come to me wringing their hands in grief as
18 you will see from one of the speeches I made. I said, fear
19 not because today is already Monday and what appeared
20 yesterday is already wrapping fish and chips or being
21 flushed down the drains in some paper processing plant.
22 Whereas books go into libraries.
23 But simultaneously, as your Lordship will have
24 seen from the witness statement of Professor Evans, when
25 he went to the British Library and asked to obtain a copy
26 of my book he was told that it had mysteriously been put
. P-151
1 in the pornographic book section and was not freely
2 available. The book which I have on the desk in front, my
3 book “Hitler’s War”.
4 It is quite ingenious campaign, my Lord, I would
5 aver that on the one side my book is being suppressed and
6 squirreled away, hidden out of sight so people cannot see
7 what I actually wrote. Pressure is put on publishers so
8 they do not publish my books and simultaneously a campaign
9 is launched by very well qualified writers and very gifted
10 writers, armed with ammunition from all around the world
11 in an attempt to defame me which I then cannot answer.
12 Has your Lordship further questions on —-
13 Q. [Mr Justice Gray]: Not on that aspect, and I do not want to impose any kind
14 of rigid pattern to your evidence if you do not want it to
15 emerge in that way
16 A. [Mr Irving]: My Lord, I find it is very useful that you ask me these
17 questions because it is like an examination in chief
Section 152.18 to 172.19
18 Q. [Mr Justice Gray]: I hoped you might. Yes, that is what it is really intended
19 to be. What I was going to suggest you deal with now, is
20 the plea of justification because that is obviously the
21 main issue. If it is not inconvenient to you it would be
22 most helpful to me if you were to deal perhaps quite
23 briefly with the various allegations that are put against
24 you in the Defendant’s summary of case, because I think
25 everybody agrees that superseded the original defence, we
26 discussed that at pretrial review
. P-152
1 A. [Mr Irving]: Yes
2 Q. [Mr Justice Gray]: I think it is a convenient summary of the allegations that
3 are made against you and can you deal with it briefly or
4 at greater length. It is a matter for you. I have no
5 doubt you will be cross-examined about it anyway, but
6 would it be appropriate to go through —
7 A. [Mr Irving]: If I can find it in this bundle
8 Q. [Mr Justice Gray]: — the topics. I have it in a separate file. I do not
9 know whether if you have it in the same form I have, the
10 Defendant’s summary of case
11 MR RAMPTON: We have it. Does your Lordship have it in a
12 separate file
13 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Yes. That may be something I did and have
14 forgotten about.
15 MR RAMPTON: It is in the pale green thing
16 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Have you got it
17 A. [Mr Irving]: I have the summary of the Defendants case, yes
18 Q. [Mr Justice Gray]: Well, as you recall it is divided into sections, and the
19 first section, which is quite a short one, is the
20 allegation that is made against you by the Defendants that
21 you are what is called a “Holocaust denier”
22 A. [Mr Irving]: My Lord, I think I led, or at any rate I gave my reply to
23 that allegation in my opening statement yesterday at some
24 length, and I am not sure there is very much more I can
25 add to that in chief, so to speak. Perhaps the —-
26 Q. [Mr Justice Gray]: Can I just put a little bit of flesh on the bones of that
. P-153
1 A. [Mr Irving]: Yes
2 Q. [Mr Justice Gray]: The way the Defendants put their case is to quote quite a
3 large number of, mostly speeches, that you have made
4 A. [Mr Irving]: Yes
5 Q. [Mr Justice Gray]: Usually in North America, and to say that you have denied
6 that there were any Jews killed in gas chambers at
7 Auschwitz and so on, and refer to Auschwitz in dismissive
8 terms. The first question, I suppose, is to what extent
9 you accept that you are accurately quoted. I am not
10 asking you to go into the detail of it, but do you accept
11 that you have said that sort of thing, in general, whether
12 the quotation is accurate
13 A. [Mr Irving]: In general, those quotations are accurate, my Lord. Of
14 course, I am quite unhappy about the use of word
15 “holocaust” without having had it very closely defined.
16 It is a very elastic expression
17 Q. [Mr Justice Gray]: You state what you understand it to mean
18 A. [Mr Irving]: The Holocaust was the tragedy that befell the Jewish
19 people during World War II. I would set it as broadly as
20 that. One could even set if more broadly and say the
21 Holocaust was whole of World War II and that the people
22 who died and suffered in that Holocaust were not
23 necessarily confined to the Jewish religion, but any
24 number of innocents, whether gypsies, homosexuals, the
25 people in Coventry, the people in Hiroshima. I think it
26 is otiose to try and define the Holocaust just the way you
. P-154
1 wish to define it in order to snare somebody, which
2 appears to be what happens in a case like this. They set
3 it as wide as they want when it is a concern, for example,
4 of taking money from the Swiss banks. I will justify that
5 statement in a moment, and they set it very narrowly when
6 they then try to snare a writer who is dangerous to them,
7 as they put it.
8 The reference to the Swiss Bank is justified as
9 follows. I have in my files and I can produce it to your
10 Lordship if you wish probably five or ten whole page
11 advertisements inserted in the newspapers around the
12 world, and your Lordship may well have seen them, inviting
13 people in entitled to compensation for their suffering in
14 the Holocaust to come forward, and for the purposes of
15 that advertisement those people are defined as any person
16 who was persecuted in Germany during the periods of the
17 Third Reich, or in Nazi occupied territories, by virtue of
18 his religion or by virtue of being a minority. He did not
19 have to be in a concentration camp. He did not have do
20 work in a slave labour factory. The mere fact of being
21 within the frontiers of those countries justified that man
22 to Holocaust compensation. That, of course, is, in my
23 submission, an offensively wide description of the word
24 and I think that the two line description I gave, the
25 Holocaust is — I would prefer to see it defined for the
26 purposes of this court, this trial, the Holocaust is the
. P-155
1 tragedy that befell — that undoubtedly befell the Jewish
2 people during the Third Reich, not even just during World
3 War II
4 Q. [Mr Justice Gray]: Well, do not let us be too bothered about labels, but can
5 I just ask you this; I understand what are you saying
6 about the Holocaust being a term you could apply to the
7 World War II generally, but if you take it as meaning, for
8 the purposes of this question anyway, a systematic
9 programme of exterminating Jews, conducted by the Nazi
10 regime —
11 A. [Mr Irving]: My Lord, I think the difference —
12 Q. [Mr Justice Gray]: — can I just ask you this, do you accept that there was
13 any such programme first; leave aside the issue of gas
14 chambers
15 A. [Mr Irving]: — no, I do not. I think this is the defect, with
16 respect, in your Lordship’s definition. The systematic
17 programme to exterminate the Jews is the cause, whereas
18 the Holocaust, the word “Holocaust” as I would see it is
19 the effect, the result, the tragedy that results. When we
20 are looking at the Holocaust we are looking at the
21 victims. We are looking at the mass graves. We are
22 looking at the people being machine gunned into pits. The
23 Holocaust in my submission is not the machinery which
24 produced the result, it is the suffering and not the
25 murderer, shall we say
26 Q. [Mr Justice Gray]: So I want to be clear on this, because it is obviously
. P-156
1 important
2 A. [Mr Irving]: It is very important indeed, my Lord
3 Q. [Mr Justice Gray]: You are saying that, yes, there were multiple shootings by
4 Einsatzgruppen and so on during the invasion of Soviet
5 Russia —
6 A. [Mr Irving]: There was mass murders of Jews committed by Nazis in their
7 satraps —
8 Q. [Mr Justice Gray]: — but it was not pursuant to any systematic programme, is
9 that your case
10 A. [Mr Irving]: — again, I would have to — I am not caviling, but these
11 are important definitions, my Lord. If the
12 definition — if by using the word “systematic” you are
13 implying that the system, the Third Reich as such
14 originated these massacres, then I would have to quibble
15 with that. I would say that certainly at a lower level a
16 system emerged and that it was systemized somewhere in the
17 hierarchy; does your Lordship appreciate —
18 Q. [Mr Justice Gray]: Yes, I follow what you are saying
19 A. [Mr Irving]: — yes. I submit that the Defendants will find it very
20 difficult to suggest that it was a Third Reich decision.
21 In other words an Adolf Hitler decision, which is of
22 course the open water between us at present.
23 Q. [Mr Justice Gray]: Can I ask a similar question; do you accept or deny
24 totally that there was any systematic gassing of Jews in
25 gas chambers, whether at Auschwitz or at elsewhere?
26 I know we are not dealing with Auschwitz but I think that
. P-157
1 that ought to be part of —
2 A. [Mr Irving]: Yes, I think if we can leave out the word “systematic”
3 which is contentious, I do not deny that there was some
4 kind of gassing at gas chambers in Birkenhau, it is highly
5 likely that there was
6 Q. [Mr Justice Gray]: — on a solely experimental basis or —
7 A. [Mr Irving]: That is the word I have used to give an indication of
8 scale and to give an indication of the authority on which
9 it was conducted, and, well, I leave it at that. But now
10 you appreciate the reason why I am reluctant to insert the
11 word systematized into that, because that implies that it
12 was conducted on authority from above and that there were
13 guidelines, and in some of the killings they were very
14 definitely guidelines, my Lord, and I will lead some
15 evidence on that later. Because Heinrich Himmler in fact
16 refers to guidelines in a message he send to one of the
17 commanders which has not been revealed previously
18 Q. [Mr Justice Gray]: — do you want to add anything more in advance of
19 cross-examination about the allegation that you are a
20 Holocaust denier using the term “Holocaust” in the narrow
21 definition
22 A. [Mr Irving]: I do, my Lord, I wish to say that if you are not allowed
23 to examine components of the Holocaust as I described it,
24 the tragedy that was inflicted on the Jewish people in the
25 Third Reich, if you are not allowed to examine individual
26 components of that and say, yes, this definitely
. P-158
1 happened. This is slightly exaggerated, that bit I find
2 little evidence for. In other words not to carry out
3 normal kind of analysis that you would do as a writer or
4 as an historian without being accused and defamed as being
5 a Holocaust denier instantly by the assembled mass media,
6 then I would think would be a very sorry state of affairs.
7 To that extent I find it offensive to be called a
8 Holocaust denier because there are aspects of the
9 Holocaust as currently portrayed that I find questionable,
10 debateable and they need to be debated. But that is not
11 Holocaust denial in my view, my Lord.
12 The defence contention that somebody who
13 challenges the figure is a Holocaust denier ipso facto, I
14 have read Professor Evans’ report in great deal here where
15 I think he gives four criteria of what a Holocaust denier
16 is. Somebody who says that Adolf Hitler did not give the
17 order, somebody who challenges a figure. Somebody who
18 says there were no gas chambers. I forget the fourth
19 one. It is almost as though those four criteria have been
20 tailor made in the way that you would have a suit tailor
21 made for this very action, my Lord. I do not think that
22 your Lordship will set much store by those four criteria.
23 I hope you will not. Because if it is not possible to
24 question the 6 million figure, for example, that I have
25 been I accused of being a Holocaust denier, you run into
26 immediate difficulties, because the Auschwitz authorities
. P-159
1 themselves removed the memorial stone for 4 million dead
2 and replaced it with a memorial stone for one million
3 dead; are they Holocaust deniers under Professor Evans’
4 definition? It is an absurdity
5 Q. [Mr Justice Gray]: Again, take your own course, but I was being to move on
6 and I was going to skip for the purposes of my so-called
7 examination-in-chief of you, skip altogether the section
8 dealing with Auschwitz and indeed the one..
9 A. [Mr Irving]: If you had not, my Lord, I would have reminded you of what
10 we agreed this morning
11 Q. [Mr Justice Gray]: Yes, quite. I am also going to skip Treblinka, Sobibor
12 and Belsic, because it seems to me they really belong in
13 the same compartment of the case as Auschwitz.
14 There is a section though in a subsection in
15 section 2, you may be able to find the page 28, which is
16 headed: “Mass Murder of Jews by Shootings”, I am not sure
17 that really belongs in that particular section, but I can
18 see why it has landed up there; do you want to say
19 anything at this stage about that in fairly general
20 terms? I think the criticism is made of you that whilst
21 you recognize that many, to use a neutral word, many Jews
22 were shot and killed in horrific circumstances, you have
23 downplayed it, you have underestimated the number of
24 deaths which occurred in this fashion
25 A. [Mr Irving]: I do not like playing numbers games, my Lord, and a lot of
26 these numbers are very suspect. Your Lordship may not be
. P-160
1 familiar with this, but there was the case against Field
2 Marshall Manstein, conducted by British War Crimes Court
3 in Germany, where Manstein was represented by very eminent
4 and able QC, I think it was Paget, who subsequently wrote
5 a book called “Manstein and His Trials” and he led very
6 good evidence indeed on these figures, proving how totally
7 impossible many of the figures were relating to the
8 Einsatzgruppen, but I say this with the utmost diffidence
9 as I am not a expert and I have no intention of becoming a
10 expert on that. What I am an expert on is the role played
11 by Adolf Hitler in these killings and if I can just spend
12 two minutes of the court’s time describing the sequel to
13 what happened yesterday, the November 30th 1941 episode,
14 documents we have here in the British archives. They are
15 of the utmost importance because they go a long way to
16 refuting what Mr Rampton said yesterday about my
17 interpretation of that Himmler document.
18 If you remember, my Lord, on November 30th 1941,
19 an event to which both the defence and I in our opening
20 statements have referred occurred. A train load of 1,035
21 Jews from Berlin arrived after a two or three day journey
22 at Riga. They were unloaded from the train that morning
23 in ice cold conditions and had the misfortune to arrive in
24 the middle of a mass extermination, a mass shooting of
25 Jews being conducted by the local SS commander. They were
26 shot immediately in the pits, and, my Lord, I am sure you
. P-161
1 will vividly remember the description of that very
2 shooting that was given to us by General Bruns in the
3 Bruns Report, to which I have repeatedly referred
4 Q. [Mr Justice Gray]: Yes
5 A. [Mr Irving]: So that one episode, when great good fortune, having a lot
6 of documentation, the defence as I understand it are going
7 to seize on the fact that in the Bruns Report the local SS
8 junior says it is the Fuhrer’s orders. I think there are
9 very grave reasons for doubting that because Heinrich
10 Himmler, as we heard yesterday, at 1.30 p.m. on that same
11 Sunday, November 30th 1941, was called into Hitler’s
12 bunker and at or about that time, and I am going to be
13 quite careful how I say this, he had reason to make a
14 telephone call to SS Obergruppen Fuhrer Reinhardt
15 Heinrich, who was his henchman, his closest lieutenant.
16 He was the head of the killers, shall we say, he was above
17 the Gestapo, Reinhardt Heinreich, and in that telephone
18 conversation he said certain things as a result of which
19 he jotted down two lines in his note pad. I have the
20 actual handwritten notes on the table next to my stand
21 there. The first line says: ( German spoken) Jew
22 transport from Berlin. I appreciate quite readily that in
23 the first chapter of my “Hitler’s War” book I wrongly put
24 that in the plural. The second line continued with the
25 words ( German spoken) “no liquidation”.
26 Now, many things can be said about that
. P-162
1 document, my Lord, the first is, how is it that it was not
2 until 1974 when David Irving took the trouble to
3 transcribe Heinrich Himmler’s note, 30 years after the war
4 was over that this extraordinary note came to the
5 attention of the historical community. Well, I do not
6 know why they do not want to read Heinreich Himmler’s
7 handwriting. It is a very difficult handwriting and
8 I have to plead that as being my partial excuse for having
9 misread ( German spoken) and also on the following day for
10 having misread word “juden” as “haben” (?) or vice versa
11 Q. [Mr Justice Gray]: I think the point they make is not so much about
12 legibility, but that this on its face looks as if it is
13 talking about a single train transportation to —
14 A. [Mr Irving]: Yes, this true, my Lord
15 Q. [Mr Justice Gray]: — to Riga from Berlin
16 A. [Mr Irving]: I should have put in the word “the”. I left out the word
17 “the” in my text based on it. I should not have said
18 “transportation of Jews” I should have said “the
19 transport of Jews”. But I corrected this as soon as this
20 was pointed out to me, my Lord.
21 But I can continue because the inference that
22 I drew from this, if this telephone call is made ( German
23 spoken), from the bunker, from Hitler’s bunker at the
24 Wolf’s lair in Rustenberg, East Prussia, Himmler has been
25 required to telephone Reinhardt Heydrich and tell somebody
26 these Jews from Berlin were not to be liquidated, you have
. P-163
1 to very interesting conclusion, namely the liquidation was
2 in the air and people have pointed this out to me and I do
3 not dispute that for one moment. But what interested me
4 is Adolf Hitler’s biographer is that here is a case of
5 Hitler intervening in a negative way. But it gets more
6 interesting, my Lord, because we now have 20 years further
7 down the road at the end of the 1990s in the Public Record
8 Office the intercepts of the radio messages sent by
9 Himmler the very next day to the man who had carried out
10 the killings, SS Obergruppenfuhrer Joachim. Now this may
11 be new to your Lordship. It is certainly new to everybody
12 in this court; December 1st 1941, the day after the
13 killings, Joachim gets a message from Heinrich Himmler in
14 top secret SS code which we broke reading, and I have this
15 there memory, I have the actual document on my desk over
16 there but the sense is, the words are: These shootings
17 that have been carried out in Riga, concerning the
18 shootings in Riga, any excess, any further excesses,
19 arbitrary excesses and actions against instructions given
20 to you — no. You have been given clear guidelines
21 MR JUSTICE GRAY: I think we ought to look at this document
22 I am not familiar with it
23 MR RAMPTON: Nor are we
24 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Then I think we should look at it
25 A. [Mr Irving]: My Lord, it has been supplied to the Defence several weeks
26 ago
. P-164
1 MR JUSTICE GRAY: I am not doubting that for a moment. Can you
2 indicate where it is so we can get it for you
3 A. [Mr Irving]: It is large yellow sheets headed “Most Secret” in my case,
4 at the bottom of the inside of my case. Then I do not
5 have them with me, because I was intending to lead this
6 material tomorrow
7 Q. [Mr Justice Gray]: So I understand what you are saying, you are saying there
8 is a message from Himmler to Joachim
9 A. [Mr Irving]: From Himmler to the Chief of the SS saying: There were
10 very clear guidelines for the outsettlement, the
11 outplacing of the Jews from Berlin
12 Q. [Mr Justice Gray]: So it is about the Jews from Berlin
13 A. [Mr Irving]: It is talking about Jews from Berlin, clearly referring to
14 this train load. He then continues: Any further arbitrary
15 actions and actions against instructions will be severely
16 punished, and he ordered Joachim to report immediately to
17 Hitler’s headquarters. On December 4th, my Lord, and this
18 I do have there in the big blue volume — can you give it
19 to me, the Himmler Diary, have had that volume now for 20
20 years — on December 4th 1941 Joachim then turns up at
21 Hitler’s headquarters and he is raked over the coals,
22 there is no question, because the killings of German Jews
23 stopped for the next few months. On December 1st I would
24 say —-
25 Q. [Mr Justice Gray]: Is there a copy of this document? If there is not there
26 should be one
. P-165
1 A. [Mr Irving]: My Lord, there are copies made. I had all this bundle
2 ready to be produced tomorrow
3 MR RAMPTON: Can I help
4 A. [Mr Irving]: Because of the importance —-
5 MR JUSTICE GRAY: I think Mr Rampton knows where it is
6 MR RAMPTON: I do not know if it is he same document. From its
7 wording I very much suspect it is, but on page 353 of
8 Professor Evans’ report at paragraph 6 —-
9 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Professor who
10 MR RAMPTON: Professor Evans page 353, paragraph 6, he has a
11 quotation from a document: “The Jews have been resettled
12 out of the territory of the “Ouslander” (?) only to be
13 dealt with in accordance with guidelines issued by me or
14 the Reich Security Head Office on my authority. I will
15 punish individual initiatives and contraventions.
16 Signed H. Himmler”, and it is annotated as being Himmler
17 to Joachim, 1st December 1941 at 7.30 p.m. in the Public
18 Record Office HW16/32
19 A. [Mr Irving]: That is correct
20 MR RAMPTON: It is the same document
21 A. [Mr Irving]: Does he also have the following message, let me ask
22 Mr Rampton, where he instructs Joachim to report to
23 headquarters immediately
24 MR RAMPTON: I do not have that document
25 A. [Mr Irving]: Clearly the significance of that is even more important
26 than this rap on the knuckles about the arbitrary
. P-166
1 reactions and acting against authority and disobeying the
2 guidelines. On December 1st, the day after the killings,
3 the same day as these telegrams, here is in Himmler’s own
4 handwriting a telephone call at 1315 to SS General
5 Heinrich about the executions in Riga which everybody
6 agrees is referring to this appalling atrocity where the
7 Jews had been shot into the pits. The significant feature
8 is, as all the historians on both sides now agree, that
9 from that time on the killing of German Jews stopped for
10 many months. The fact that this instruction had come in
11 the first instance from Hitler’s bunker and on the
12 following day from Heinrich Himmler who had been to see to
13 Hitler who sends him a message that I would describe as
14 “panic stricken” to General Joachim saying “any further
15 actions of this nature, any arbitrary actions against the
16 guidelines, will be severely punished and you are ordered
17 to report to Hitler’s headquarters”, is a matter which
18 I think is so serious that this is the reason why I was
19 preparing a very detailed bundle on it, my Lord, with
20 complete facsimiles and translations for your Lordship’s
21 attention, because it goes very closely to the central
22 issues in this case: How far was Hitler personally
23 involved and what were his intentions
24 Q. [Mr Justice Gray]: In relation to the shooting
25 A. [Mr Irving]: Of European Jews as opposed to Russian Jews
26 Q. [Mr Justice Gray]: Yes, but in relation to death by shooting
. P-167
1 A. [Mr Irving]: And also in relation to my contention, as your Lordship
2 will be aware, that there is a chain of documents of
3 varying magnitudes of integrity and weight which indicate
4 that Hitler was a negative force in this matter, whereas
5 there are no comparable documents indicating the
6 opposite. I know it is barely credible, but if one comes
7 to this with a open mind and then 20 years later one comes
8 across yet another document like this extraordinary
9 British intercept, this decode of the SS message from
10 Himmler to the man on the spot who had done the killings,
11 saying any further such actions will be subject to
12 punishment and ordering him to report to Hitler’s
13 headquarters. It is an extraordinary episode and I find it
14 also highly significant that the German historians have so
15 far not been prepared to refer to this episode with a
16 single line as far as its significance is concerned,
17 because they are mortally terrified under the consequence
18 of the new laws passed in Germany. It has been the
19 foreign historians, like myself, who have drawn attention
20 to this exchange of documents
21 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Your case really, as I understand it, that
22 that particular example of the transport from Berlin
23 demonstrates what you say was Hitler’s role in relation to
24 it
25 A. [Mr Irving]: My Lord, it is one indication. It is not the only
26 evidence that I rely upon, my Lord
. P-168
1 Q. [Mr Justice Gray]: No, that is what I meant by “demonstrate”, “illustrates”
2 is a better word
3 A. [Mr Irving]: I am careful there, because when I introduced in my
4 previous book, the November 30 handwritten annotation by
5 Himmler, my opponent said, “this is his only evidence,
6 this is what he relies on”, and it was not, I had more.
7 My Lord, we shall be hearing at a later stage in these
8 proceedings Dr John Fox, who is an expert, among other
9 things, on these police decodes, and I shall be asking
10 him, with your Lordship’s permission, the condition of
11 these decodes and are they wall to wall? Is everything
12 there, or are there gaps? If one finds an item like this,
13 of course, it is a nugget, one is not entitled to expect
14 to find it, but one find it and here it is, suddenly in
15 our faces, you cannot ignore it. There are several
16 documents like that, my Lord
17 Q. [Mr Justice Gray]: Well, I was going to invite you to perhaps pass on now
18 from the shootings of the Jews and to skip section 3,
19 which is the Leuchter Report
20 A. [Mr Irving]: While I am in full flood can I move on to another Hitler
21 document just three months later
22 Q. [Mr Justice Gray]: Yes, of course
23 A. [Mr Irving]: After the Danzig Conference, which was an interministerial
24 conflict on the executive measures for the Final Solution,
25 whatever it was, there was a lot of paperwork in 199 —
26 Q. [Mr Justice Gray]: In 1942
. P-169
1 A. [Mr Irving]: In 1942, the Danzig Conference was held on January 20th
2 1942, my Lord. After the Danzig Conference the ministries
3 engaged in a lot of paperwork, and at one stage the
4 necessity was ventilated of bringing up this matter with
5 Adolf Hitler, whatever the Final Solution was, the
6 Ministry of Justice began to get uneasy about it, because
7 they could see it had ugly connotations; there were
8 illegalities being adumbrated, and the head of the German
9 Civil Service, Dr Hans Lammers, who was a minister, a
10 Reich minister, telephoned the head of the German Ministry
11 of Justice, whose name was Schlegelberger, we shall be
12 hearing quite a bit about the Schlegelberger document and
13 in this telephone conversation which Schlegelberger wrote
14 a minute on, or what a lawyer would probably call an
15 “attendance note”, Lammers said “the Fuhrer”, Adolf
16 Hitler, “the Fuhrer”, Adolf Hitler, “has repeatedly said
17 he wants the solution of the Jewish problem postponed
18 after until the war is over”. This is a document that is
19 caused my opponents immense difficulties. The
20 difficulties they solved initially by pretending it did
21 not exist, by which I mean they did not quote it. They
22 did not adduce it in their history books, and when that
23 thorn in the flesh, David Irving, kept on reminding them
24 of existence of this document, which tripped them up
25 whatever their hypotheses were, that is when the real
26 battle began, the skirmishing began. But I think your
. P-170
1 Lordship will appreciate that I am entitled to point to
2 that document as being another document in that chain of
3 evidence, unless of course I have deliberately
4 mistranslated it, or misconstrued it
5 Q. [Mr Justice Gray]: No, I do not think that is suggested
6 A. [Mr Irving]: Yes, but it is clearly a very important document. A
7 wartime document written by a lawyer on a phone call from
8 the head of the German Civil Service, who is the next one
9 up to Adolf Hitler, saying the Fuhrer has repeatedly said
10 he wants the solution of the Jewish problem postponed
11 until after the war was over, which was typical Adolf
12 Hitler, anything like that he wanted put on the back
13 burner he had fought this ghastly war through. There were
14 several problems like that, the church problem was another
15 one
16 Q. [Mr Justice Gray]: What was Schlegelberger’s position
17 A. [Mr Irving]: He was at that time, as I understand it, Secretary of
18 State, which is the equivalent of a permanent Under
19 Secretary in a British ministry. In the Ministry of
20 Justice, his Minister was Dr Franz Goertner, who I believe
21 had died recently at that time, so he was effectively in
22 charge of the Ministry, Schlegelberger, and the minute he
23 wrote was directed to a few notorious names including
24 Rowland Friessler. It is quite an interesting document
25 and interesting about the document, my Lord, is at the
26 time of the Nuremberg trials it vanished. It remained in
. P-171
1 original in the Ministry files, but the photocopies
2 provided to the lawyers at Nuremberg, this extraordinary
3 document, vanished. It was not there, and it gave me a
4 lot of trouble locating the original eventually
5 Q. [Mr Justice Gray]: Yes. Would you like to pass on now, do you accept that
6 the Leuchter report is plainly part and parcel of the
7 Auschwitz issue
8 A. [Mr Irving]: Yes
9 Q. [Mr Justice Gray]: I think that must be right. Then the next section in the
10 Defendant’s summary of case, which is –
11 A. [Mr Irving]: The Leuchter Report, of course, exists in two
12 incarnations, my Lord. The original Leuchter Report was an
13 affidavit drawn up as an expert report for the Canadian
14 courts and what we published was a glossy version
15 truncated and streamlined
16 Q. [Mr Justice Gray]: — but it was basically the same
17 A. [Mr Irving]: Made the same allegations and on the same contentions
18 Q. [Mr Justice Gray]: We will leave that on one side, shall we
19 A. [Mr Irving]: Yes
Section 172.20 to 195.7
20 Q. [Mr Justice Gray]: I can see it comes in in some other context. Then there
21 is a heading called “Historiography”, this is really the
22 section where there are a whole series of detailed
23 criticisms made of you, it being alleged that you have
24 skewed documents and generally behaved in a –
25 A. [Mr Irving]: Reprehensible –
26 Q. [Mr Justice Gray]: — disreputable way as a historian in your treatment of
. P-172
1 the evidence. Now it is up to you how you deal with it,
2 you can either deal with it generally, or you can make
3 some specific points on the instances that are cited
4 against you
5 A. [Mr Irving]: — well, the general statement I would say is Mandy
6 Rice-Davies, they have to say this, my Lord, they would
7 say, would they not? My opponents, who I could also
8 categorise as my rivals, dislike the fact that I get to
9 the documents before them. For 30 years I have been the
10 one to dig out the diaries.
11 By way of a general remark I would say I that
12 I would visit the widows and obtain the papers, not
13 because I was more industrious than them, but purely
14 because I took the trouble. I visited the widow of State
15 Secretary Anstrom Wiedsecher, who had been Ribbentrop’s
16 State Secretary. She was Baroness Marianne von Wiedsecher,
17 who was subsequently the mother of the State President of
18 Germany, President von Wiedsecher and it turned out that
19 she had all her husband’s diaries and letters, which she
20 made available to me, and was rather puzzled that she had
21 not made them available to the German historians and her
22 reply was, “Mr Irving, they never asked”. It was the same
23 with very many other historians — many other historical
24 sources. Purely by virtue of visiting the widows or next
25 of kin or digging around I have obtained these diaries and
26 private papers
. P-173
1 Q. [Mr Justice Gray]: But leaving aside digging out the evidence
2 A. [Mr Irving]: Well, this generated the envy and jealousy which is
3 unfortunately what has fuelled lot of the criticism
4 Q. [Mr Justice Gray]: I hear you say that, but what about the criticism of the
5 use that you make the evidence once you have got it
6 because what is said against you is that you pick and
7 choose
8 A. [Mr Irving]: My Lord, this is almost certainly something which can only
9 be dealt with on piecemeal basis, they will put individual
10 documents to me in cross-examination and to their delight
11 I may occasionally concede that, yes, I got something
12 wrong. I will concede that I misread the word “harbun” in
13 Himmler’s appalling handwriting, and if you were to have a
14 look at his handwriting you will see how very similar it
15 is. I will provide the documents to your Lordship
16 tomorrow to the alternative word. This kind of thing
17 happens
18 Q. [Mr Justice Gray]: Well, if I may say so, I think you are right that this
19 particular topic has to be dealt with on a ..
20 A. [Mr Irving]: Piecemeal basis
21 Q. [Mr Justice Gray]: Well, case by case basis, I think that is it probably
22 right, but if you want to say anything more generally at
23 the moment about your —
24 A. [Mr Irving]: I will say generally, of course, and it is important for
25 the case to know, and I am saying this on oath, I have
26 never knowingly or wilfully misrepresented a document or
. P-174
1 misquoted it, or suppressed parts of the document which
2 would run counter to my case, I think it is important to
3 state that. Any of the other allegations in that line,
4 misquoting, misconstruing, mistranslating, distorting or
5 manipulating a document I have not done. I shall be very
6 surprised indeed if the defence manage to make out a
7 watertight case on even one document in that line.
8 I think I would hang up my hat if that could be
9 established against me. It would be a despicable thing
10 for a historian to do, but it would be also very
11 difficult, because in my case I have always
12 instantaneously made my documents available to my
13 opponents. Sometimes in advance of publication of my own
14 book I would turn over documents like the Bruns Report to
15 Professor Fleming. When I found the article Aumeier
16 Report in the British archives I actually contacted
17 Professor Richard van Pelt, whose book on Auschwitz
18 I greatly admired and I said you will certainly find this
19 document of great interest and I told him exactly where
20 the file was to be found. I have always been like that.
21 It would be very difficult simultaneously do that, my
22 Lord, and at the same time distort the document because
23 you are going to get found out and shot. So I did not do
24 it. But that is the only general remark I would make and
25 possibly of importance because it is a statement on oath
26 Q. [Mr Justice Gray]: I think that is right. The next topic that is addressed
. P-175
1 by the Defendants is the bombing of Dresden in 1945
2 A. [Mr Irving]: Again, I will make a general statement on it, my Lord.
3 This was the — it was not actually the first book
4 I wrote. The first book I wrote was a history of the
5 bombing war, but it was only published in German — in
6 Switzerland. It was written at the same time as I wrote
7 the book “The Destruction of Dresden”, which was a three
8 year task, between 1961 and 1963.
9 I emphasise the years, because in 1961 and 1963,
10 of course, we were not in the happy position that we are
11 in now where we can go to the public archives and see the
12 documents. I understand that I can go down the road to
13 the public archives and actually see correspondence that
14 I had with Harold Wilson, this kind of thing.
15 I personally frown on it. I liked the old 50 year rule
16 because there were ways round it. But in those years there
17 was a 50 year rule in operation. In you wanted to write a
18 history of something that happened in World War II you
19 could not get the original documents if you were not an
20 official historian
21 Q. [Mr Justice Gray]: That is from the British –
22 A. [Mr Irving]: From the British point of view
23 Q. [Mr Justice Gray]: — what about the German records, were they available
24 A. [Mr Irving]: The German records were in a more difficult position
25 because Dresden lay in the Soviet zone of Germany, the
26 German Democratic Republic as it had by that time become
. P-176
1 and although I had established cordial relations with City
2 Archives Director in Dresden, Dr Walter Lange, they were
3 under no kind of obligation or compulsion to make their
4 records available to me and they did so on a very
5 piecemeal basis, what the Germans would call in salami
6 slices, piece by piece they would give me a document,
7 according to how they thought they could fit it into the
8 Cold War propaganda. I had to weigh it from that point of
9 view.
10 I emphasise this because three years later after
11 the book was published those same officials in East
12 Germany decided they had now just found a report on the
13 statistics on the air raid on Dresden which produced
14 figures which were different from mine
15 Q. [Mr Justice Gray]: You are making this point really to explain why your
16 estimate of the number of deaths, which is really what the
17 Dresden issue is about
18 A. [Mr Irving]: Yes.
19 Q. [Mr Justice Gray]: Has fallen fairly dramatically from a quarter of a
20 million –
21 A. [Mr Irving]: I would not say “fallen”, that implies only way, I would
22 say “fluctuate”
23 Q. [Mr Justice Gray]: — in a downwards direction, would you accept that
24 A. [Mr Irving]: If you were a scientist you would not say “the figure is
25 this”, you would say it is probably that, with a upper
26 margin of this and a lower margin of that. You would give
. P-177
1 a range of probabilities, and the range of probabilities
2 I have given has remained roughly the same, but I have
3 brought down the target figure. The original figure
4 I gave, I hasten to add, was not my figure, it was the
5 figure given to me by a man who met the Trevor Roper
6 criteria. If you remember, my Lord, somebody who is in a
7 position to know.
8 This was a man who was school teacher in Hanover
9 who had nothing to gain from it, who had asked no money
10 for it, but after the air raid on Dresden, which took
11 place on February 13th 1945, this school teacher had the
12 unfortunate task of running the missing persons bureau in
13 Dresden, the Dead Person Section, he had been given the
14 job of setting a card index in this appalling task of
15 trying to identify the dead. They did it, for example,
16 they collected buckets of wedding rings from the corpses.
17 I am sure the defence will appreciate when I talk about
18 buckets of wedding rings, gold wedding rings, were
19 collected from the corpses of the air raid victims because
20 inside a German wedding ring there is the initials and the
21 date of the wedding, so they could identify the corpse
22 from that. Or they could have an index card just saying
23 “KD” and a date on the inside of wedding ring. They built
24 up this card index.
25 Of course, this was incomplete because they had
26 not got all the corpses and not all the corpses were
. P-178
1 adults, not all the adults were married. But he was able
2 to extrapolate and he kept a diary, which he also made
3 available to me. When I asked him the 60,000 dollar
4 question, I said, Dr Voigt or Mr Voigt, how many people in
5 your estimate died in that air raid on Dresden? He gave
6 me an upper estimate and a lower estimate, and he then
7 said that in his own belief the figure was probably
8 135,000. Which was the figure I then used, and I quoted
9 the source as being this man. In other words it was not a
10 figure on my authority, it was a figure on the authority
11 of the source. I see no reason really to depart from that
12 figure because, it may sound self-defeating, I say that
13 there is not much difference between 135,000 dead and
14 35,000 dead. Both of them are a monstrous tragedy or
15 crime, depending on which end of scale you are viewing it
16 from. If you are one of those dead it hurts just as much
17 if you are one of the 35,000 or one of 135,000. So
18 I confess that I did not dedicate as much work to try to
19 pin down the actual death roll as no doubt the defence
20 would have liked me to have done, the Defendants in this
21 case, my Lord.
22 But I would also submit this cannot be
23 categorized as being wilful misrepresentation, or
24 distortion. My Lord, you will remember that I said that
25 the German police chief’s document giving a different
26 death figure had been found three years after I wrote the
. P-179
1 book. It was supplied to me by the East German
2 authorities, very kindly, voluntarily, and by an
3 extraordinary coincidence in exactly the same post
4 I received from the West German Government a summary of
5 the German Finance Ministry files for that week which
6 contained precisely the same figures that that East German
7 document contained, because otherwise one which might have
8 suspected this was an East German cold war propaganda
9 trick. So it was a very authentic kind of document. But
10 even then you had to say the document was dated,
11 I believe, March 10th 1945, less than four weeks after the
12 air raid on Dresden.
13 My Lord, I do not know if you have seen the
14 photographs of Dresden after the air raid. There was not
15 very much left standing. The building — the city was
16 pancaked. Nobody had excavated the city centre. The
17 people who were living in the old town were still buried
18 in the basements where they had been suffocated or crushed
19 alive. So the figure that the Police Chief gave in his
20 report of March 4th 1945 could still only be regarded as
21 provisional
22 Q. [Mr Justice Gray]: What is the figure in the current edition of “Destruction
23 of Dresden”
24 A. [Mr Irving]: Can I just complete what I was about to say, I was just
25 pausing for dramatic effect. The step which I then took,
26 having received this document, was as follows:
. P-180
1 I discussed it with my publisher, and I said that it was
2 an important enough document that I had to draw it to the
3 attention of the reading public immediately, and he —
4 Mr Kimber — and Mr Kimber, God rest his soul, he said:
5 David do not do that. If you do, it will come down on
6 your head. It will reflect on you in a bad way, and I said
7 this is an important document, and I have a duty to bring
8 it to the attention of reading public, and I sent it as a
9 letter to The Times, which is in the discovery, and The
10 Times newspaper published it, I believe, on July 6th 1966,
11 within a very true days of my actually receiving the
12 document from the East Germans, the new figures, the fact
13 that there was a considerably lower death roll estimated
14 by the local Police Chief. I added my reservations, the
15 fact that the city was still largely unexcavated, even
16 then, in 1966 and the fact that local Police Chief was in
17 charge of air raid civil defence measures. So he had no
18 reason to give a bigger figure. He would prefer to give a
19 lower figure
20 Q. [Mr Justice Gray]: This is Mr Grosse
21 A. [Mr Irving]: I cannot remember exactly which name it was, the man who
22 wrote the final report. Grosse wrote the incorrect
23 report, the propaganda report, my Lord. I emphasise the
24 fact that I made this immediately known to the reading
25 public and not only that but at my own expense I had a
26 reprint made of that letter by The Times newspaper. I had
. P-181
1 500 copies printed and for the next few years I enclosed
2 that letter with all my correspondence to other
3 historians.
4 Now I do not know any other historian who would
5 have taken action like that, my Lord. He would hoped
6 nobody found out, possibly. He certainly would not have
7 gone out of the way to draw the attention of other people
8 to an error or possible error that he had made in one of
9 his own books. To find myself now, 30 years later,
10 defending myself against the allegation of manipulation
11 and distortion beggers description, it is repugnant, my
12 Lord
13 Q. [Mr Justice Gray]: What is the figure in the current edition of “Destruction
14 of Dresden” for the number of deaths
15 A. [Mr Irving]: I have reduced my best estimate to the region of 60,000.
16 This is the edition which is called “Apocalypse 1945” the
17 destruction of Dresden because it was not until three
18 years ago that I sat down and analysed that Police Chief’s
19 report and compared it with the Grosse Report and saw the
20 obvious similarities and the obvious discrepancies and
21 decided that the Grosse Report had been deliberately
22 issued by the Propaganda Ministry for propaganda
23 purposes. But 60,000, my Lord, 35,000, 135,000, you may
24 disagree with me, but I see no difference between these
25 figures, any more than somebody whose says it was not 6
26 million who died in the Holocaust, it was only one million
. P-182
1 which is the kind of sentence I would never utter because
2 each one of those people being killed is a crime and
3 I consider people being killed in saturation bombing air
4 raids, although I am British, I think it is wrong
5 Q. [Mr Justice Gray]: Do you sometimes in your books make comparisons between
6 the number of deaths caused by Allied bombing raids with
7 the number of deaths caused by Nazi bombing raids
8 A. [Mr Irving]: I think the word “comparison” would be wrong, my Lord, but
9 I have done it in a way that possibly a journalist would,
10 I have mentioned the facts in successive sentences.
11 In my very first book “The Destruction of
12 Dresden”, if your Lordship were to turn to the very last
13 page of that book, which I have with me, and it is in the
14 bundles I distributed this morning, of “The Destruction of
15 Dresden”, the very last page says: “That this was
16 undoubtedly a terrible crime. It was a crime committed
17 against a city in Germany, a country which had carried out
18 the most appalling massacres against helpless citizens.”
19 I forget the actual wording I used, but it is in that
20 book. There was that kind of comparison. I do not
21 consider it to be offensive to say too colloquially “you
22 did it too” and when airmen say, as I asked them at the
23 time, I would ask the Bomber Command airmen who pressed
24 the button and dropped the bombs, I would say to them what
25 were your feelings? They said they had no feeling because
26 they could not see their victims. I consider this is not
. P-183
1 an adequate justification but I do not think this goes to
2 the issues in this case
3 Q. [Mr Justice Gray]: Yes. The next section is the allegation that is made by
4 the Defendants that you consort and associate with some
5 pretty unsavoury characters in North America and
6 elsewhere; that is to say very right-wing extremists
7 A. [Mr Irving]: My Lord, can I deal with this in summary in general
8 terms
9 Q. [Mr Justice Gray]: Yes
10 A. [Mr Irving]: At this stage, undoubtedly if they want to go through it
11 piece by piece and name by name and phrase by phrase
12 MR RAMPTON: My Lord, I am sorry to intervene, particularly to
13 correct a judge, but your Lordship might have missed a
14 couple of sections, I think
15 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Have I
16 MR RAMPTON: After Dresden comes — it may be because the way
17 the file is arranged
18 MR JUSTICE GRAY: There is Hitler’s Adjutants
19 MR RAMPTON: Yes, Hitler’s Adjutants
20 MR JUSTICE GRAY: That does not belong in Dresden
21 MR RAMPTON: No
22 MR JUSTICE GRAY: That is rather why I skipped it
23 MR RAMPTON: Another route to the exoneration. But your
24 Lordship went straight from Dresden to right wing
25 extremism
26 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Yes
. P-184
1 MR RAMPTON: Along the way jumping over Hitler’s Adjutants
2 MR JUSTICE GRAY: And Nazi anti-Semitism
3 MR RAMPTON: Yes
4 MR JUSTICE GRAY: You are quite right
5 MR RAMPTON: Hitler Adjutants is quite an important section,
6 certainly
7 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Thank you for that, Mr Rampton. Can
8 I therefore invite you to comment on the — you will find
9 this as page 7
10 A. [Mr Irving]: Page 7
11 Q. [Mr Justice Gray]: The allegation that you really ignored the evidence when
12 you claim –
13 A. [Mr Irving]: Shall we go through 1 to 6 in detail, my Lord, now
14 Q. [Mr Justice Gray]: — yes, if you would like to because Mr Rampton is quite
15 right –
16 A. [Mr Irving]: The allegation is that I ignored the most basic cautions
17 in interviewing members of Hitler’s staff. Well, jealousy
18 place a part in this. Adolf Hitler’s personal staff at
19 the end of World War II, so far as they survived, were
20 very bruised people. He had four female secretaries, they
21 were all locked up for periods of several years by the
22 Allies. I remember my friend, Ralph Hoffmann, who
23 I invited to lunch just to see what it would be like to
24 having a liberal playwright lunching with Hitler’s
25 secretary. When he heard that the Americans had locked
26 her up for two years he said but why did they put you in
. P-185
1 prison? She said I typed for the Fuhrer. I typed for the
2 Fuhrer. He said, but millions carried guns for the
3 Fuhrer. They were very bruised people. They did not want
4 to speak to their own historians and they certainly did
5 not want to speak to the former enemy. It took me many
6 years to win their confidence by methods that might be
7 found odious. I would become very friendly. In the case
8 Christa Schroeder particularly, I would just invite her
9 out to lunch and say Frau Schroeder we will not talk about
10 the War, knowing very well that she would want eventually
11 to mention something that happened. But at the moment
12 I took out a pen she would clam up. She would not say
13 anything, so I had to write a note afterwards. It was this
14 kind of situation. Very delicate, drawing them out and
15 then eventually after five or ten years Christa Schroeder
16 revealed that she had written private letters to a woman
17 friend throughout her time with Hitler and she got all
18 those letters back. She produced the letters and gave them
19 to me.
20 The allegation is — I think allegation No. 2
21 that I would use documents like that in injudiciously.
22 Q. [Mr Justice Gray]: — just one more question on the first criticism; you say
23 that you accept that you did not approach the matter in
24 what you regard as the ideal way, but you say there was no
25 all alternative because that was the only way of getting
26 these people to talk
. P-186
1 A. [Mr Irving]: A historian is accustomed to going to archives or my
2 reproof to the historians, particularly of the Defendants’
3 historians, is that they sit if their book lined caves
4 taking books out of shelves, taking a sentence and working
5 it into their own fabric and at the end of the day not
6 cricking anything to the sum total of human knowledge.
7 I did the exact opposite. I ignored the book lined
8 caves. I did not reads their books, which they regarded
9 as a personal slight. I went to the very fountainhead of
10 the information, the people who had worked at Hitler’s
11 side for twelve years. By then I aver and I submit and
12 I strongly resent in this court on oath at no time was
13 I not aware of the fact that I had to treat what they said
14 to me with the utmost caution, and it was only when I was
15 satisfied they were being completely frank with me, that
16 I added weight to the evidence they gave me and I will
17 give two examples of that, my Lord. One of them was
18 Walter Frentz. He was the personal film camera man
19 attached to Hitler’s staff and he took the colour
20 photographs of Hitler’s staff which figure in a lot of my
21 books. One day Heinrich Himmler said to Walter Frentz in
22 August 1941, which he told me and this is the reason I am
23 saying this, because I persuaded him to tell me something
24 against himself. He said that Heinrich Himmler had said
25 to him in August 1941, Herr Frentz it gets very boring
26 here at the wolf’s lair, doesn’t it? We are going out to
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1 the Eastern Front for a few days, do you want do come with
2 us? Two or three days later Himmler said to Walter Frentz
3 and Frentz related to me this one evening over a body of
4 wine (he is still alive) at Lake Constance. Himmler said
5 to Frentz, tomorrow we are going to be doing a mass
6 shooting, do you want to come along and have a look? The
7 next morning in the misty hours of dawn Frentz and Himmler
8 and Carl Wolf, and a number of other SS gentlemen, Frentz
9 himself is in the airforce, found themselves standing at
10 one end of a field outside Minsk, at the other end of
11 which, as Frentz described it to me, large pits had been
12 dug out by “backhose” or bulldozers and truck loads of
13 civilians who were being driven up and stood of this pit
14 and being machine gunned in the pit. He described this to
15 me in great deal. I do not have to go into all the detail
16 he gave here, my Lord. His wife was very astonished to
17 hear this. Halfway through this description his wife,
18 Mrs Frentz, said, Walter, I have never heard this before.
19 And Walter went slightly pink because I suppose he was in
20 his cups and he had not realized he had told me so much.
21 Mrs Frentz niggled slightly in the way that wives do and
22 said, Walter, you say these were civilians being shot,
23 were there women and children being shot too? Walter
24 Frentz said, “I cannot remember”, but you could tell from
25 the way he said “I cannot remember” that he could.
26 My Lord, I aver that if I get that kind of
. P-188
1 information out for the first time from a man who has not
2 even told it to his own wife, then I have succeeded in
3 extracting information, even from Hitler’s Adjutants.
4 There is another episode of exactly the same
5 character. I persuaded a man to talk to me who had been
6 the Adjutant, not of Hitler, but the Adjutant of Hitler’s
7 Adjutant, his SS Adjutant. Hitler’s SS Adjutant was an SS
8 general named Hermann Fegolein. He subsequently married
9 the sister of Eva Braun. Hermann Fegolein’s Adjutant was
10 Johannes Gohler, who lived in Stuttgart
11 Q. [Mr Justice Gray]: May I interrupt you, it is going to be helpful to the
12 transcriber, who is having a fairly massive task with all
13 these names if you when you mention a fresh name just
14 spell it out
15 A. [Mr Irving]: I have given her a list of 5,000 names. His Adjutant was a
16 man I am going to speak of SS Colonel Gohler. I will not
17 bother with the accents. Johannes Gohler told me that in
18 the last days of the War, in April 1945, he was present
19 when Heinrich Himmler, the chief of the SS came to see
20 Hitler and reported that there was a concentration camp in
21 Turinier (?), probably the Buchenwald Concentration Camp,
22 about to be captured by the American forces, and what they
23 should they do with the inmates, because they could not
24 evacuate them all in time, Gohler said to me, Mr Irving,
25 Hitler said, Herr Heiss Fuhrer, stay over until the end of
26 the conference. After the conference Gohler said, after
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1 the conference Hitler sat on the edge of the conference
2 table with his legs dangling and said, “Herr Himmler,
3 those convicts are to be liquidated if they cannot be
4 evacuated in time”. I asked Mr Gohler about that episode
5 on three separate occasions, spread over several years
6 just to see if there were discrepancies in the different
7 versions, rather like a stereoscopic picture of the
8 episode. The narrative remained the same. You will find
9 that particular episode in my books on Adolf Hitler. That
10 is an episode recounted to me by an SS officer against the
11 reputation and honour of the SS and against the honour and
12 reputation of Adolf Hitler, yet I extracted it from
13 Hitler’s Adjutants, or the person who I would certainly
14 put in this category. This is what entitles me to aver
15 once again that I have not failed in my duty as an
16 historian in so far as the Adjutants are concerned
17 Q. [Mr Justice Gray]: That conversation, which I am bound to say I do not
18 remember, is in “Hitler’s War”
19 A. [Mr Irving]: Certainly in “Hitler’s War”
20 Q. [Mr Justice Gray]: Cited in a way that accepts it did happen
21 A. [Mr Irving]: Unquestionably, my Lord, yes
22 Q. [Mr Justice Gray]: I am afraid I have not got that in my mind. Yes. I think
23 you were on the..
24 A. [Mr Irving]: That was number 2
25 Q. [Mr Justice Gray]: Yes. That is illustrative, is it really, about what you
26 are saying about that criticism
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1 A. [Mr Irving]: Well, the plaintiff, that is myself, is tendentious in his
2 choice and interpretation of documents, rejecting out of
3 hand the greater wealth of statements. My Lord, you will
4 have noticed the subtle difference between statements and
5 documents, I am sure. Directly implicating Hitler in the
6 Final Solution and adopting as persuasive the few
7 statements exculpating Hitler without any proper
8 explanation for so doing.
9 My Lord, in your former incarnation as a
10 barrister I am sure you have also had to weigh statements
11 and documents and decide which you attach more importance
12 to. Documents in this connection are anything from a
13 wartime document, a microfilm, a tape recording, an aerial
14 photograph, a deciphered intercept, or even a building as
15 document in this connection; where a statement made by
16 somebody for whatever purpose, usually to exculpate
17 himself and pass the blame on to somebody else, as
18 frequently happened in the war crimes trials, is to be
19 viewed with the utmost suspicion.
20 Statements in my submission are usually relied
21 upon by people who have not got enough documents, they
22 have not got enough documents because they have not gone
23 out and done the fieldwork. They like using the
24 statements because they fit in with their preconceived
25 notions, whereas the documents like the ones I have
26 I mentioned, the Schlegelberger document and the Himmler
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1 telephone notes are inconvenient. They find no
2 explanation for them. So they prefer their statements to
3 my documents, my Lord. This may seem a trite answer, but
4 it is the answer which I shall give until they come at me
5 with chapter and verse in cross-examination
6 Q. [Mr Justice Gray]: Yes, I think this is another example of an allegation that
7 is really only capable of being dealt with by looking at
8 the individual cases relied on
9 A. [Mr Irving]: I think the choice of words between their statements and
10 my documents is not by happen chance, I think they have
11 chosen the word “statement” deliberately because they
12 intended to put to me self-serving statements made by
13 people in various war crimes trials under whatever
14 conditions against the documents which I have obtained
15 Q. [Mr Justice Gray]: Yes. Now the next criticism really relates, I think, to
16 mainly to the way in which you dismiss some sources which
17 do not say what you want them to say
18 A. [Mr Irving]: I am sure your Lordship is also a bit baffled as to what
19 they are getting at here, I am sure Mr Rampton will assist
20 us when he comes to the cross-examination. If they are
21 saying I do not put in adequate apparatuses in my book
22 saying what sources and archives I have used there are
23 several reasons for that
24 Q. [Mr Justice Gray]: I think the key phrase in that criticism is “double
25 standards”; I think what is said against you is that you
26 are inclined to adopt uncritically some source material
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1 because it suits your agenda, as they put it, whereas you
2 dismiss –
3 A. [Mr Irving]: I accept –
4 Q. [Mr Justice Gray]: — more reliable evidence because it does not fit in with
5 your agenda
6 A. [Mr Irving]: — I accept that that is a valid criticism, my Lord. AGP
7 Taylor said the same to me once. He said, when you are
8 looking at the Final Solution you are asking for a
9 document, when you looking at what happened to General
10 Sikorski you are quite happy to make allegations without a
11 document. There are answers you can give. It is a valid
12 criticism, but I am not going to say it is a “correct
13 criticism”
14 Q. [Mr Justice Gray]: Can you explain what you mean by that
15 A. [Mr Irving]: They are entitled to make that criticism on their
16 perception of the way history is written. If I take that
17 specific example, that there is no document — I point out
18 there is no document showing that Hitler even knew about
19 Auschwitz, whereas when I wrote about the death of General
20 Sikorski in a book published in 1967 I am accused of
21 having said it was probably sabotage even though there is
22 no documentary evidence to suggest it was. This is
23 I think an acceptable distinction because we are after all
24 the victor nation; all our records are intact. We lost
25 none of our records through World War II. We were not
26 invaded by the Red Army; our archives were not bombed and
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1 blasted and burnt to pieces. Our archives are intact. We
2 now no longer have a 50 year rule, and so we would be
3 entitled to expect to find as a result of our having had
4 unconditional surrender from the Germans and total insight
5 into their archives we would expect to find the record
6 relating to Hitler, then we would not expect to find in
7 the British Secret Service archives, which, of course, are
8 only the archives which are still closed in this country.
9 That became a bit convoluted, if I had a second chance
10 I would say it again slightly differently
11 Q. [Mr Justice Gray]: I think I understand what you are saying. You are really
12 saying that because the German archive is incomplete –
13 A. [Mr Irving]: Yes, we have total insight into the German archives such
14 as they have survived by virtue of unconditional surrender
15 which we did not have at the end of World War I, but we
16 certainly had at the end of World War II. There are no
17 German archives that were withheld from the invading
18 forces.
19 So after over 50 years we would be entitled by
20 now to have found the document that proves me wrong,
21 whereas we are not entitled to expect to find records
22 about General Sikorski, even now, because it would have
23 been a Secret Service matter and Secret Service files are
24 closed for at least the next 100 years.
25 So it looks like a double standard to start with
26 until you realise you are looking at two different
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1 theatres of operation. But, again, if they want to put
2 specific examples to me, some I will concede, and most
3 I will not, probably
4 Q. [Mr Justice Gray]: — well, I think before we move on to the next point we
5 will adjourn and resume, if you will, please, at
6 2 o’clock
7 (Luncheon adjournment)
Section 195.8 to 219.6
8 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Mr Irving, can I before we resume with your
9 evidence just ask Mr Rampton something, if you will
10 forgive me? It is a logistical question, Mr Rampton.
11 Assuming you are going to be starting to cross-examine
12 this afternoon —
13 MR RAMPTON: Yes
14 MR JUSTICE GRAY: — I am wondering whether I have all the
15 files that I ought to have here because what I do not want
16 to find happening is that you ask a question in relation
17 to a document that I do not have a copy of. Are you able
18 to help
19 MR RAMPTON: Can I just say, I do not know how long I will get,
20 but assuming it were an hour or so, your Lordship would
21 need the copy of Mr Irving’s opening which you should have
22 already
23 MR JUSTICE GRAY: I have
24 MR RAMPTON: And files D2(i), (ii) and (iii)
25 MR JUSTICE GRAY: I have all of those too
26 MR RAMPTON: The only other thing that your Lordship would need
. P-195
1 would be Professor Evans’ report if we got as far as that.
2 MR JUSTICE GRAY: I have that. Thank you very much. I thought
3 I had better check
4 A. [Mr Irving]: My Lord, before you resume your examination or your
5 questioning, can I raise just two points
6 Q. [Mr Justice Gray]: Of course, yes
7 A. [Mr Irving]: I drew your Lordship’s attention to a newspaper, a leading
8 article which appeared in The Independent this morning
9 Q. [Mr Justice Gray]: Which I have read. I cannot lay my hands on it at the
10 moment
11 A. [Mr Irving]: I have it here, my Lord. I personally found it pushing
12 the envelope of what is permissible, but maybe, in view of
13 the fact that either I am a litigant in person or we are
14 sitting without a jury, this kind of comment is permitted
15 MR JUSTICE GRAY: I think the position really is this,
16 Mr Irving. I understand what you say, but I can really
17 only intervene if I were to take the view that in some
18 shape or form it amounts to a contempt. I do not. I am
19 fairly clearly of that view. But if it helps at all,
20 I totally disregard it
21 A. [Mr Irving]: Thank you very much, my Lord
22 Q. [Mr Justice Gray]: I think I will not say any more about it
23 A. [Mr Irving]: My Lord, you asked in one of your questions whether I had
24 compared or weighed casualties against casualties,
25 atrocity against atrocity. I have referred to the final
26 paragraph of my “Destruction of Dresden” book, and, my
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1 Lord, the bundle which I handed you this morning which
2 I believe is on the desk in front of you at this end, the
3 thin bundle, is that it, bundle B on page 5
4 Q. [Mr Justice Gray]: Yes, this is the new bundle
5 A. [Mr Irving]: That is the new one I gave you this morning. It is
6 selections from the books. You already have the entire
7 books
8 Q. [Mr Justice Gray]: Yes, you mentioned that
9 A. [Mr Irving]: If you look at page 5, my Lord, big figure 5, at the foot
10 of the page, there is this paragraph: “On 13th February
11 1946, the former Commander in Chief of RAF Bomber Command
12 sailed from Southampton on the first stage of his
13 journey. That night throughout eastern and central Europe
14 at 10.10 p.m. the church bells began to peal. For 20
15 minutes the bells ran out across the territories now
16 occupied by a force as ruthless as any that the bomber
17 offensive had been launched to destroy. It was the first
18 anniversary of the biggest single massacre in European
19 history, a massacre carried out in the cause of bringing
20 to their knees a people who corrupted by Naziism had
21 committed the greatest crimes against humanity in recorded
22 time”.
23 That is about as close as I have ever got to
24 weighing atrocity against atrocity, my Lord, and that was
25 in my first book
26 Q. [Mr Justice Gray]: I am just puzzled by the date
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1 A. [Mr Irving]: Well, it is the first anniversary of the Dresden raid, my
2 Lord
3 Q. [Mr Justice Gray]: I see
4 A. [Mr Irving]: This is why the bells are ringing
5 Q. [Mr Justice Gray]: I see. It was the Commander in Chief of Bomber Command
6 setting out that misled me
7 A. [Mr Irving]: The second page I would draw your Lordship’s attention to
8 concerns the adjutants. You asked whether I had made use
9 of that information I obtained from the adjutants about
10 Buchenwald inmates to be liquidated. Page 99, my Lord, by
11 chance, is one of the pages that I included in the
12 selection
13 Q. [Mr Justice Gray]: Tab 4, the last page
14 A. [Mr Irving]: It is big figures 99 at the bottom of the page. The third
15 paragraph, my Lord, is: “As American troops advanced
16 across … Hitler was confronted with the problem of the
17 concentration camps. Goring advised him to turn them over
18 intact and under guard to the Western allies who would
19 sort out the criminals from the foreign labourers and
20 Russian prisoners thus preventing hoards of embittered
21 ex-convicts from roaming the countryside and inflicting
22 additional horrors on the law-abiding. Hitler did not
23 share Goring’s trust in the enemy. Sitting casually on
24 the edge of the map table after one conference, he
25 instructed Himmler’s representative to ensure that all
26 inmates were liquidated or evacuated before the camps were
. P-198
1 overrun.”
2 The footnote at the back of the book which I
3 could show you if my Lordship is interested, because I
4 have the book here, says the source of that information is
5 the SS Major, who was Himmler’s Adjutant’s Adjutant, who
6 has, however, requested that his identity be withheld.
7 Some of these people at the time I wrote that book were
8 still nervous about being identified, but he was the
9 source
10 Q. [Mr Justice Gray]: But he is no longer nervous
11 A. [Mr Irving]: I am sure he has no nervousness now, my Lord, because the
12 years has passed, but he was the source and that was the
13 episode which I recounted to you. You asked if I used it.
14 In my submission, I have used it exactly as it should
15 have been used and at the proper length
16 Q. [Mr Justice Gray]: Is this the 1991 edition or the 1977
17 A. [Mr Irving]: That is the very first edition, my Lord, 1997. If your
18 Lordship is interested, I can certainly produce almost
19 identical pages from the subsequent editions
20 Q. [Mr Justice Gray]: No, do not bother. Thank you very much. Yes, now
21 anything else or shall we resume? We are still on the
22 topic of Hitler’s Adjutants. I think you have dealt with
23 criticisms (i), (ii) and (iii)
24 A. [Mr Irving]: Double standards
25 Q. [Mr Justice Gray]: And the next one is, at any rate, self-explanatory
26 A. [Mr Irving]: I distort, suppress, manipulate evidence, but until they
. P-199
1 give chapter and verse, I cannot say.
2 “The Plaintiff claims falsely that all of
3 Hitler’s surviving adjutants, secretaries and staff had
4 uniformly testified that the extermination of the Russian
5 or European Jews was never mentioned at Hitler’s
6 headquarters. That claim is contradicted by the evidence,
7 my Lord. I shall be interested to see what the evidence
8 is to which they are referring
9 Q. [Mr Justice Gray]: Just pause a moment. Do you accept that you have made the
10 claim that all the Hitler surviving adjutants and so on
11 have uniformly testified that the extermination of the
12 Russian or European Jews was never mentioned at
13 Hitler’s —
14 A. [Mr Irving]: I think the full extent of the statement was that they
15 have been frequently questioned ever since the war both by
16 American and British interrogators and by others in
17 between and certainly by myself on each occasion, and each
18 of them has said that this systematic extermination of the
19 Jews, or whatever — what is it — the extermination of
20 the Russian or European Jews was never mentioned at
21 Hitler’s headquarters, that it was never mentioned in
22 their presence. Obviously, they can only testify to what
23 they personally witnessed and that was all I was
24 interested in
25 Q. [Mr Justice Gray]: Yes, but the point I was on really was this, you have made
26 that claim
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1 A. [Mr Irving]: I have made that claim
2 Q. [Mr Justice Gray]: You say it is a true claim
3 A. [Mr Irving]: I have maintained that it is true claim. If, however, the
4 Defendants produce new evidence that it is false, I will
5 accept that evidence, but that does not amount to my
6 having distorted and manipulated. They would have to show
7 that evidence was on my desk within my four walls, so to
8 speak
9 Q. [Mr Justice Gray]: Yes. The last one
10 A. [Mr Irving]: “In full knowledge of the historical detail, the Plaintiff
11 subjectively filtered, bent and manipulated his sources to
12 his own political and ideological desire to exculpate
13 Mr Hitler.” Well, that is a bit of a polemical question,
14 I suppose, in which the sting is in the question rather
15 than in the answer
16 Q. [Mr Justice Gray]: Not really. Anyway, answer it
17 A. [Mr Irving]: Well, the answer is under oath, no. My Lord, I have never
18 consciously done any of those things in order to exculpate
19 Hitler. In fact, I have bent over backwards to include
20 what I knew from reliable sources which met my criteria,
21 and in the very introduction to my book “Hitler’s War”
22 which is included in the bundle which I provided this
23 morning, my Lord, I gave a short list, a check list, of
24 the crimes he did commit: “He issued the commisart order
25 for the liquidation of the Soviet commisarts and signed
26 it. He issued the euthanasia order for the killing of the
. P-201
1 mentally disabled and signed it, back-dated it to
2 September 1st 1939. He ordered the killing of British
3 commandos who fell into German captivity. He ordered the
4 liquidation of the male population of Stalingrad and
5 Leningrad…” and so on. There is a long list of these
6 crimes which I gave as a kind of check list form in the
7 introduction of the book specifically to avoid the kind of
8 accusation that I apprehended would one day be made
9 Q. [Mr Justice Gray]: I suppose, to be balanced, you would accept that you would
10 not only need that short list, but also a list of what one
11 might call the opposite points where you say —
12 A. [Mr Irving]: Said nice things about him
13 Q. [Mr Justice Gray]: — said commendatory things about him which, I think it
14 is right to say, you do from time to time in “Hitler’s
15 War”
16 A. [Mr Irving]: I have obviously said commendatory things about him.
17 There was a time when he was on the right course and then
18 he went off the rails. That is roughly what I have said.
19 But, of course, he was not on the right rails in every
20 respect. You cannot praise his racial programmes. You
21 cannot praise his penal methods. But, on the other hand,
22 he did pick his nation up from out of the mire after World
23 War II and reunify it and gave it a sense of direction and
24 a sense of pride again which, from the German point of
25 view, though not from the English point of view, was
26 something commendable. I say those things which need to
. P-202
1 be said and it would be wrong to suppress them
2 Q. [Mr Justice Gray]: May I just ask you one thing that struck me when I was
3 reading “Hitler’s War” which is that I think you say in
4 the Forward that you are writing it, as it were, from his
5 perspective
6 A. [Mr Irving]: Well, my Lord —
7 Q. [Mr Justice Gray]: Is that a usual way to approach an historical biography
8 A. [Mr Irving]: No. It is my trademark way of writing, the books which
9 I have written. If you collect enough original primary
10 sources, first of all, you are confronted with many
11 problems. First of all, a super abundance of material and
12 you have to decide which way you slice that particular
13 cake. The easy way that I decided to slice the cake was
14 to say let us imagine we are sitting in his swivel chair
15 and that confronting us, as writer, are only the documents
16 that passed across his desk. It is, in theory, a nice
17 idea; in practice, it is more difficult to put into
18 effect. But this is the first criterion you apply, and
19 you then tell the story as seen from his viewpoint and in
20 the sequence in which it came to him.
21 I give one example: The July 20th 1944 bomb
22 blot. Every other writer would describe the planning of
23 the bomb plot and the conspiratorial meetings and the
24 arrangement and the provision of the explosives and the
25 comings together and the various failed attempts. In my
26 book, your Lordship will have noticed the first we know
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1 about the bomb plot is when the bomb goes off under your
2 table. Then, retrospectively, you see the Gestapo reports
3 and the enquiries and the investigations, and you find out
4 this was not the first time they tried do it and so on.
5 You may say it is a literary trick as a literary advice,
6 which is why my books are probably more readable than
7 their books, but I do not think it is something
8 necessarily derogatory
9 Q. [Mr Justice Gray]: Now, I think, unless you want to add anything on the topic
10 of Hitler’s adjutants, the next section or the next part
11 of this section is the question of Nazi anti-Semitism.
12 What is said against you is that you tried to blame what
13 was done during the Third Reich against Jews upon the Jews
14 themselves
15 A. [Mr Irving]: That is a gross oversimplification. I do not level that
16 accusation at your Lordship, of course, but I think it
17 would be a gross oversimplification to put my conclusions
18 in that way. I have said on a number of occasions, for
19 example, most recently to Daniel Goldhagen who wrote a
20 book on Hitler and his executioners. If I was a Jew,
21 I would be far more concerned, not by the question of who
22 pulled the trigger, but why; and I do not think that has
23 ever been properly investigated. Anti-Semitism is a
24 recurring malaise in society. It recurs not just in
25 Germany, not just in Europe, but it keeps on coming back.
26 If I had enough spare time, one day I would like to sit
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1 down and investigate just that, the root causes of it, but
2 I do not have the qualifications and the training for it,
3 my Lord, and I suppose nobody in this room probably does.
4 One would have it have a great degree of independence,
5 independence of mind and independence of means, but there
6 must be some reason why anti-Semitism keeps on breaking
7 out like some kind of epidemic.
8 That is at the root of several of the books that
9 I have recently written, probably most recently in
10 Dr Goebbels’ biography where we had the phenomenon of
11 Dr Goebbels who, on the evidence of his own private
12 letters in his earliest youth was the opposite of
13 anti-Semitic. He actually ticked off his girlfriend for
14 writing an anti-Semitic letter to him, saying that this
15 kind of sentiment is very cheap and needless, and yet he
16 later on becomes the worst and most criminal anti-Semite
17 of all times. One can say facetiously, is it something in
18 the water? But something must have caused him to change.
19 I do not think it is irresponsible to ask that question,
20 even if one cannot provide a full answer
21 Q. [Mr Justice Gray]: Can I just be clear what you are meaning when you say
22 “something must have caused that change” — something
23 done by the Jews themselves
24 A. [Mr Irving]: Something which I have not been able to establish and
25 something which I am frightened of even investigating, and
26 I do not really have to investigate because it would not
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1 come within the purview of a biographer to start getting
2 involved in sociological problems, I do not think
3 Q. [Mr Justice Gray]: Is it not an historical problem as well
4 A. [Mr Irving]: It is an historical problem but for somebody else to
5 investigate because I am in trouble as it is, my Lord, and
6 I do not think that one would earn any great kudos for
7 investigating that because, frankly, I do not have the
8 qualifications to investigate it. I am not a
9 sociologist. My findings would not be heeded anyway. So
10 I would prefer to spend the time somewhere else that was
11 put to better use. But I did what I could in the case of
12 Dr Goebbels, as you will see, trying to develop why he
13 became an anti-Semite.
14 I think what is most offensive in my works is
15 the apportionment of blame between Hitler and Goebbels
16 which a lot people find offensive. They find it
17 incredible, but I think that it is well-founded in my
18 works
19 Q. [Mr Justice Gray]: Yes, well, I think perhaps we can move on, if you are
20 ready to, to the —
21 A. [Mr Irving]: Extremism
22 Q. [Mr Justice Gray]: — penultimate topic, I think, which is your alleged
23 association with Neo Nazis and other right-wing
24 extremists
25 A. [Mr Irving]: My Lord, I would make a general comment here, and I think
26 it was in this very building only a few weeks ago that
. P-206
1 Moreland J said that there is no such crime in Britain as
2 guilt by association and there never has been, and it
3 would be very difficult to define and very difficult to
4 pursue in any way.
5 I suppose it can easily be said (and I am making
6 no great concession here) if I say that probably everybody
7 in this courtroom has acquaintances who they shudder when
8 they ring the door bell. When you hold a cocktail party,
9 you say you hope that Smith does not come or whoever it is
10 but, on the other hand, he is an agreeable person to have
11 around. This does not mean to say that you share all of
12 Smith’s opinions.
13 Sometimes when the allegation is made, as it is
14 made, I am rather shocked to say, in some of the expert
15 statement, the expert reports, that it is not Smith that
16 I am being accused of being associated with, but somebody
17 who is associated with Smith, then it is beginning to
18 become rather like that musical song about “I danced with
19 a man who danced with a girl who danced with the Prince of
20 Wales”. How far down the line does this buck stop? Does
21 it mean that everybody who is in this room is in some way
22 polluted by being in the same room as I am? It is
23 ridiculous. Which way does this particular flow of odium
24 run?
25 I think it is a very loose kind of argument when
26 people say, “Look who he is in the same room with” or
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1 “Look who comes to hear him speak” which is what a lot of
2 the allegations appear to be. It is name calling. It is
3 a waste of the court’s time, and I shall answer the
4 questions, my Lord, but it is very difficult to come to
5 grips with it.
6 These people are extremists by definition of
7 these expert witnesses. I do not think there is any
8 satisfactory definition of “extremist”. In my book, an
9 extremist is somebody who plants bombs under motor cars,
10 somebody who plots the overthrow of governments, somebody
11 who goes around with a gun in his pocket, somebody who
12 holds views which are extreme, this is a very subjective
13 concept. It depends on which viewpoint you view those
14 views from.
15 Am I making sense, my Lord
16 Q. [Mr Justice Gray]: Yes, I understand what you are saying and, indeed, it may
17 well be that this does not turn out to be one of the most
18 important issues in the case
19 A. [Mr Irving]: My Lord, I have not chosen this. This is —
20 Q. [Mr Justice Gray]: No, I appreciate that. No, that is not said in a way
21 critical of you at all. But, having said that, one needs
22 to break it down a little bit. I mean, do you accept that
23 you have found yourself on the same platform or at the
24 same meeting as a number of people who could be
25 legitimately categorized as extreme right-wing fanatics
26 A. [Mr Irving]: It is the subsidiary clause there who could be legitimate
. P-208
1 categorized, and you have even put it into the passive
2 voice which puts one further removed — we do not know who
3 is doing the categorising
4 Q. [Mr Justice Gray]: So you are saying that the people who you found yourself
5 alongside are not, in truth, right-wing extremists or
6 fanatics
7 A. [Mr Irving]: I do not regard them as extremists, by my definition of
8 the word “extremist”. I am prepared to believe there are
9 people at the other extreme who would regard them as
10 extreme from their viewpoint because they hold views that
11 are extremely or diametrically opposed to their own. But
12 this is a free society. They are not extremist in the
13 degree that they do not go around espousing violence or
14 practising violence or advocating overthrow of
15 governments. They are people who just hold views with
16 which I am not necessarily associated. As your Lordship
17 will have seen from the correspondence, I frequently had
18 very marked altercations with these people, saying, in
19 effect, “You may be a frightfully nice person privately
20 and you have got a good tennis serve but, on the other
21 hand, your views on the Holocaust are wrong”
22 Q. [Mr Justice Gray]: So would you say that there is not anyone who you feel, in
23 hindsight, you should not have associated with
24 A. [Mr Irving]: Oh, in retrospect, good Lord, yes! In retrospect, you
25 could look out of the back of the truck as it goes
26 trundling down the highway of history and you say, “I wish
. P-209
1 I never get to know him”, but we have all met people like
2 that, my Lord. This should not be held against me.
3 People change.
4 There is one particular gentleman called
5 Mr Althans, Ewald Althans, who figures in this
6 correspondence. He was a German character who I got to
7 know when he was a student. I first met him, I think, in
8 1989 and my first impressions of him which I have recorded
9 in my diary was that he was a very forceful, energetic,
10 forthright and fearless young man.
11 It subsequently turned out he held opinions that
12 could be really categorised as extreme, that he was, in
13 fact, an agent of the German government and an agent
14 provocateur because he testified to that effect when he
15 finally got his comeuppance. I bitterly regret ever
16 having made his acquaintance, and certainly if he came
17 anywhere near me I would say, “Go away”. If he came to my
18 front door, I would pretend I was not in. Well, if that
19 can be held against me, my Lord, then I think this is an
20 unjust society. These things happen. People change as
21 you get to know them. They become different from the way
22 they were when you first knew them
23 Q. [Mr Justice Gray]: So you are saying really, are you, that you want to be
24 judged by what you said rather than by what people you may
25 have been at the same meeting with
26 A. [Mr Irving]: My Lord, I am very satisfied to be judged on what I
. P-210
1 have said verbally which is recorded in great abundance in
2 the transcripts. I am very satisfied to be judged on the
3 basis of what I have written to any of these gentlemen,
4 but I do not think I should be judged on the basis of what
5 they may have said either to me or to others. That is
6 their own affair. Frequently, I have had cause to
7 reprimand them privately and say, “Do not do it”.
8 For example, I remember one trip I made to South
9 Africa. The South Africans are a different people from
10 us. They have different attitudes to us. I visited South
11 Africa on a speaking tour and I went to Johannesburg
12 Airport to pick up my assistant who was to accompany me
13 and I warned her; I said, “You will find the people here
14 in Johannesburg treat coloured people in a manner which is
15 totally repugnant to us, but I must request you not to say
16 anything about it because we are their guests”, but that
17 is as far as you can go
18 Q. [Mr Justice Gray]: The last topic, is there anything you want to add
19 A. [Mr Irving]: No, my Lord — unless you wanted to ask me about any
20 specific names that they have mentioned? You do not
21 Q. [Mr Justice Gray]: Well, I was not proposing to, but if you want to say
22 anything about, for example, Mr Zundel who is, perhaps,
23 more important than most of the others
24 A. [Mr Irving]: Mr Zundel, I can speak about very briefly. I first met
25 Mr Zundel, Z-U-N-D-E-L, who is a German of Canadian
26 extraction who has been in constant hot water for the last
. P-211
1 10 or 15 years, but is sill in the eyes of the law
2 blameless, in other words, he has not been convicted on
3 anything he has been accused of which is a matter not to
4 be taken lightly, of course. A lot of accusations have
5 been made against him, but he has so far not been found
6 guilty of anything.
7 I first heard about him before 1986 in the most
8 disparaging terms. In 1986, I conducted around the world
9 lecture tour, and coming up from Australia and Fiji to
10 Vancouver, I was met at Vancouver Airport in Colombia, in
11 Canada, by a man who introduced himself in the car to me
12 as Mr Douglas Christie. I said, “But you are the
13 barrister for Mr Zundel, are you not, in the hearings in
14 Toronto?” He said, “Yes, I am. I am chairing the meeting
15 tonight”. I was so shocked by this that I telephoned my
16 tour organizer in Australia immediately and said, “I am
17 afraid I cannot allow Mr Christie to act as chairman of
18 tonight’s meeting”. My hostility to Mr Zundel at that
19 time was so pronounced I would not even allow his
20 barrister to come near me, in other words.
21 I then flew across to Toronto where I was to
22 speak and I was picked up at Toronto Airport by two
23 gentlemen who drove me down town, and half way down the
24 Queen Elizabeth Highway into Toronto, one of the gentlemen
25 turned to the other and said, “Ernst, I think we will put
26 Mr Irving off at his hotel first”. I said, “Do you mind
. P-212
1 if I ask who you are?” and he said, “Yes, I am Ernst
2 Zundel”. I am afraid I was terribly shocked to be found
3 sitting in the same car with him because the blackening of
4 his name at that time had gone to such an extent that not
5 only did I not want to be associated with his barrister,
6 but not with him either.
7 Now I say that, having got to know him over the
8 next two or three years, you realize that the reputation
9 he had and the man he was were two different things. He
10 was an enbattled person, coming under, I will not even say
11 the same kind of attack as I have, he came under the most
12 vicious kind of attack which included the burning down of
13 his house and a constant onslaught and violent and
14 physical assault, and he was bearing himself up with more
15 fortitude than taste; and you had to realize that he was a
16 man with a certain intellect, a certain sense of humour
17 and execrable private opinions. That is the only way that
18 I can characterize him
19 Q. [Mr Justice Gray]: Yes
20 A. [Mr Irving]: I repeatedly said this, my Lord. I have sent him messages
21 and letters and I have said that, frankly, your opinions
22 are off the wall — in fact, they are off the map. The
23 correspondence has been in the discovery for the
24 Defendants and they could have seen it and, no doubt, it
25 has alarmed them because it does not confirm the picture
26 that they would have wished to portray
. P-213
1 Q. [Mr Justice Gray]: But you agreed to give evidence at his trial
2 A. [Mr Irving]: I thought it was my duty as an historian, as a public
3 citizen, to give evidence. I did not realize at the time
4 the odium that would accrue. In fact, the element of
5 odium, I think, would have been impossible in this
6 country. I think it would have been almost a contempt for
7 witnesses to be subjected to the kind of onslaught that
8 I was after I gave evidence in that trial, but it
9 happened. I wrote letters to the newspapers about it.
10 I said, “This will be completely impossible in England”.
11 The letters were published, but there it is.
12 If people ask me now, as they have, “Would you
13 do it again?” I say, “No, I would not”, not because I did
14 not consider my duty to give the evidence I gave as
15 an historian, and I understand the Judge afterwards said
16 that he had never had such a convincing witness, but it
17 was a mistake, because of the fact that that has been used
18 as a reason to destroy me subsequently. Frankly, I do not
19 seek personal destruction. If I was given the chance to
20 do it again, if the people who have destroyed me since
21 came to me now and said, “Mr Irving, we are prepared to
22 put you back where you were”, I would say, “Show me what
23 I have to sign and I will do it”. It is as simple as
24 that
25 Q. [Mr Justice Gray]: Then, finally, I think this is the last topic that you
26 need to deal with, the allegation that you broke an
. P-214
1 agreement in relation to the microfiche containing the
2 Goebbels’ diaries by removing them from Moscow, or from
3 the archive in Moscow, and risking damage to them
4 A. [Mr Irving]: Yes. Well —
5 Q. [Mr Justice Gray]: You dealt with this quite thoroughly in your opening
6 A. [Mr Irving]: Yes, I have to be a bit careful because you have actually
7 compounded two elements in that statement. You said by
8 removing the glass plates and by something else. I do not
9 know what the agreement was supposed to have been. I have
10 dealt with this quite thoroughly in my opening statement,
11 and I am happy to aver here on oath that what I said in my
12 opening statement in this respect, as in other respect, is
13 true to the best of my knowledge and belief.
14 Ten years nearly, or eight years, have passed
15 since that time when I was in Moscow and I obtained the
16 diaries. You will be hearing the evidence of Mr Peter
17 Miller who was with me at the time; and there is no
18 written agreement either in my discovery or in the
19 discovery produced by the Defendants who have had close
20 collaboration with the Russian archival officials, will be
21 able to cross-examine the Russian witnesses, and on this
22 occasion they will be giving evidence, I understand, and I
23 think, perhaps, we had better reserve judgment until after
24 we have had the opportunity of hearing all that.
25 But, to the best of my knowledge and belief,
26 there was no agreement, and I have made the admission
. P-215
1 (which I had to) which was quite proper about having
2 illicitly or illegally or even improperly removed the
3 glass plates on the archives and returned them the next
4 day and whatever which, to my mind, not such a big deal
5 because they allowed me to two days later anyway
6 Q. [Mr Justice Gray]: Well, so far as I am concerned, that is all I was going to
7 invite you to give evidence about, leaving aside
8 Auschwitz, but do feel free to add anything that you think
9 has not been sufficiently covered before you are
10 cross-examined
11 A. [Mr Irving]: I only wanted to say that you asked me earlier about the
12 consequences of the book. I mentioned the pecuniary
13 consequences and I mentioned the consequences for my
14 career, but there has also been a more intangible
15 consequence, that I have found myself subjected to a
16 burden of hatred which you cannot quantify, but which is
17 quite definitely there, the blank telephone calls, the
18 obscene messages and so on. I would give only one
19 example, my Lord, of the kind hatred — well, two
20 examples: one when I was assaulted in the Book Exhibition
21 in Chicago — in Los Angeles which I attended with my
22 publishing imprint a few weeks ago when a member of the
23 Jewish community — a very notorious member of the Jewish
24 community; one of the most extreme members in the United
25 States with a long criminal record — came up to the stand
26 and screamed that he was going to come back and kill me,
. P-216
1 “You’re a Holocaust denier” he screamed as he was led
2 away by the police, using the phrase coined by the Second
3 Defendant.
4 The second one would make more sense to your
5 Lordship if you are aware of who Philip Bullard is.
6 Philip Bullard was the head of the Nazi Extermination
7 Programme for the mentally and physically disabled, the
8 Euthanasia Programme
9 Q. [Mr Justice Gray]: Yes, I know
10 A. [Mr Irving]: My Lord, I had the great misfortune in September to lose
11 my eldest daughter. After we buried her, I received a
12 phone call from the undertakers that another wreath had
13 come. When the wreath was delivered late that afternoon,
14 it was a very expensive and elaborate wreath of white
15 roses and lilies — far more expensive than we could have
16 afforded — with a card attached to it saying, “Truly a
17 merciful death”, “It was truly a merciful death”, signed
18 “Philip Bullard and friends”. I should mention that my
19 daughter was disabled in all those respects. She was
20 legless and she had been brain damaged for 18 years.
21 I submit that this is the kind of hatred that
22 this book has subjected me to — something intolerable,
23 something unspeakable, and which I would wish no other
24 person to be subjected to
25 Q. [Mr Justice Gray]: Yes
26 A. [Mr Irving]: Thank you
. P-217
1 Q. [Mr Justice Gray]: Is there anything you wish to add
2 A. [Mr Irving]: Not to that, my Lord, no, and in any other respect I think
3 that you have drawn the essentials out of my admirably, as
4 was only to be expected
5 Q. [Mr Justice Gray]: Well, you will have the opportunity, obviously, to amplify
6 your case after cross-examination, if you wish to. Now,
7 I do not know whether we need to clear the decks before
8 you cross-examine so that Mr Irving has the documents that
9 you mentioned earlier on, Mr Rampton
10 MR RAMPTON: I do not know how best to do it. I have to say
11 (and I will say it again; I sort of hinted at it
12 yesterday) this is the most ghastly inconvenient and
13 uncomfortable court I have ever been in. That is nobody’s
14 fault. I can hardly stand up. I cannot get at my
15 documents
16 MR JUSTICE GRAY: I wish I thought I could do something about
17 it
18 MR RAMPTON: I say that as a preliminary. The witness is miles
19 away from the files that he needs. I can hardly see him
20 because of this pillar and my learned junior cannot see
21 him
22 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Otherwise you are pretty happy!
23 MR RAMPTON: Except for the feeling that I am being boiled
24 alive
25 MR JUSTICE GRAY: That I have tried to do something about. The
26 air conditioning was supposed to be on. I do not know
. P-218
Part III: Richard Rampton’s Cross Examination of Irving (219.7 to 292.26)
1 whether it actually was over the midday adjournment — it
2 was. I just do not see that we can solve any of these
3 problems
4 MR RAMPTON: Perhaps the authorities at least might pretend
5 that it was mid summer instead of Siberia, we might be a
6 little bit more comfortable
Section 219.7 to 239.13
7 Cross-examined by MR RAMPTON, QC
8 Q. [Mr Justice Gray]: Mr Irving, to be serious (and I am sorry to be a little
9 bit facetious) Mr Irving will need some files
10 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Yes, I think it is best to do that first
11 before you start
12 MR RAMPTON: Yes, I agree. D2(i) and (ii), a copy of his
13 opening —
14 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Would you prefer to have your own copies
15 A. [Mr Irving]: No, my Lord, they are not marked up
16 MR RAMPTON: Those are the first two transcript files.
17 Eventually, but perhaps not now, and Mr Irving’s own
18 writing, his books. Those are the two, just (i) and (ii)
19 are the only ones that are needed and a copy of the
20 opening to start with.
21 (To the witness): Mr Irving, there is an
22 elegiac story that you told us just now — I do not mean
23 that sarcastically at all; it is perfectly true it is —
24 you blame that appalling note on the wreath on Deborah
25 Lipstadt’s book, is that right
26 A. [Mr Irving]: I think I was quite careful to say that it is difficult to
. P-219
1 quantify and difficult to be precise, but one thing leads
2 to another which thereupon leads to another and in that
3 respect the book has created and generated a climate of
4 hatred
5 Q. [Mr Rampton]: If what the book said about you is true, then it would
6 not, perhaps you would agree, be the book’s fault but
7 yours, would it not
8 A. [Mr Irving]: I do not think any man can ever be expected to receive a
9 wreath from hateful people like that and have it said it
10 is his own fault
11 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Let us take a step back in time (and I promise you, as
12 I have before, both publicly and privately, that I am
13 going on to Auschwitz this week, to give you time to get
14 your head round it). In 1977, when the first edition of
15 Hitler’s War was published, you accepted the Holocaust in
16 all its essential details in its ordinary sense, did you
17 not, its generally understood sense
18 A. [Mr Irving]: Would you tell the court what you mean by the —
19 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Yes, I will. The systematic mass murder of millions of
20 Jews by the Nazi regime during the Second World War
21 A. [Mr Irving]: I do not accept the word “systematic”, but for the rest of
22 it, then that is an accurate precis
23 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Including the continuous, if not systematic, though it is
24 difficult to distinguish the two, perhaps, use of
25 homicidal gas chambers in institutions like Auschwitz
26 A. [Mr Irving]: Continuous
. P-220
1 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Yes, over a period of time
2 A. [Mr Irving]: It is not a word that I used
3 Q. [Mr Rampton]: No, not daily on a continuous basis, but for a long period
4 of time, something like, I think, 22 months you accepted
5 that Auschwitz used homicidal gas chambers to kill very
6 large numbers of Jews, did you not
7 A. [Mr Irving]: I certainly did not say 22 months
8 Q. [Mr Rampton]: No, let us try to get to the point. In your 1977 edition,
9 Auschwitz was characterized, I am not quoting, I am
10 paraphrasing, as one of the extermination camps, was it
11 not
12 A. [Mr Irving]: That is correct
13 Q. [Mr Rampton]: In the 1991 edition, it had become, am I not right, merely
14 a slave labour camp?
15 A. [Mr Irving]: That is correct — well, I did not say “merely”. I said a
16 slave labour camp
17 Q. [Mr Rampton]: “Merely” is my word
18 A. [Mr Irving]: You appreciate one has to be precise what I agree to
19 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Yes
20 A. [Mr Irving]: Otherwise it will be used against me later on. You said,
21 “It was merely a slave labour camp”
22 Q. [Mr Rampton]: You can be certain that I do not conduct litigation in
23 that way and that if I did his Lordship would sit on me
24 quite hard. So have no fear of silly little Perry Mason
25 traps like that
26 A. [Mr Irving]: I am very glad to hear it
. P-221
1 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Until 1988 you accepted the Holocaust, however it be
2 precisely defined (and I am not quibbling about minutia)
3 in its generally understood sense, that is to say, a mass
4 killing of Jews by the Nazis during World War II, did you
5 not
6 A. [Mr Irving]: I did not use the word “Holocaust” but I did quite
7 definitely accept that the Nazis engaged in mass killing
8 of Jews during World War II
9 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Do you accept that most people in the western world now
10 and perhaps all over the world, I know not, when the word
11 “Holocaust” is used mean the systematic mass murder of
12 millions of Jews by the Nazi regime
13 A. [Mr Irving]: I do not think that they ponder one moment to define what
14 they are thinking about. They associate pictures with
15 words. When the word “Holocaust” is used, they are
16 thinking of people behind barbed ward, they are thinking
17 of pits will bulldozers pushing bodies into them. It is
18 visual images that are conjured up. They are not using
19 legal definitions which can later on be bandied in a libel
20 action. I think it is pictures that are conjured up by
21 the word
22 Q. [Mr Rampton]: No, we are not looking for legal definitions, Mr Irving.
23 We are looking for — I give you the card straightaway so
24 that you can think about it while I ask you more questions
25 — what people would have understood you to mean when
26 later you denied the Holocaust, do you understand? Do you
. P-222
1 remember my original question was it might be thought
2 eventually that the catastrophe or the misfortune you
3 described at the end of your evidence-in-chief had been
4 brought on you by what you have said yourself. Do you
5 understand that? Do you understand, perhaps put it this
6 way, that if you use a word —
7 A. [Mr Irving]: This is very similar to saying that the catastrophe that
8 befell the Jewish people was brought on them by
9 themselves, and you can say to each of those sentences,
10 each of those points, the answer is yes
11 Q. [Mr Rampton]: I do not think —
12 A. [Mr Irving]: But between each of those alphas and omegas there are very
13 many intervening stages which you are leaving out
14 Q. [Mr Rampton]: That may be so. I do not think you are perhaps quite
15 answering my question
16 A. [Mr Irving]: I thought that was a very comprehensive one, sir
17 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Let us go back to your opening yesterday. You made noisy
18 complaint, if I may call it that, about being branded a
19 “Holocaust denier”, did you not
20 A. [Mr Irving]: Oh, yes, yes
21 Q. [Mr Rampton]: You finished up by calling it a verbal Yellow Star
22 A. [Mr Irving]: Among my remarks I called it a verbal Yellow Star. I did
23 not finish up by calling it that
24 Q. [Mr Rampton]: No. “A poison to which there is virtually no antedote,
25 less lethal than a hypodermic with nerve gas jabbed in the
26 neck but deadly all the same. For the chosen victim, it
. P-223
1 is like being called a wife beater or a paedophile. It is
2 enough for the label to be attached for the attachee to
3 find himself designated as a pariah, an outcast from
4 normal society. It is a verbal Yellow Star”. What did
5 you mean by “it”
6 A. [Mr Irving]: The phrase “Holocaust denier”
7 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Exactly. Now, then I would like you to look at some of
8 the things that you have said publicly or, at any rate,
9 semi-publicly. You have those two files there, the ones
10 with the pink spines on them. Can we start, please, with
11 the one which is, if I can find it, it is D2(i). Can you
12 please turn to tab 9 which is the transcript of a speech
13 you made at the Travelodge at the Airport Inn in Calgary,
14 Alberta, on 29th September 1991. I myself quoted some
15 part of this, I think, yesterday in opening for the
16 Defendants. Can you please turn to page 4? If you think
17 I am reading anything out of context, you must say so
18 because then I will go back and start again
19 MR JUSTICE GRAY: So take your time if you need it, Mr Irving
20 A. [Mr Irving]: My Lord, I read the whole of this speech in the small
21 hours of this morning in view of the fact that —
22 MR RAMPTON: Then can I start, please, halfway down the page,
23 five lines above the paragraph break
24 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Sorry, I missed the page
25 MR RAMPTON: Page 4, my Lord. There is a sentence which begins
26 with the last word on the line “For”, after the words “in
. P-224
1 one or two dramatic points”. Do you have it
2 A. [Mr Irving]: I have that
3 Q. [Mr Rampton]: “For example, until 1988, I believed that there had been,
4 until 1988, I believed that three had been something like
5 a Holocaust. I believed that millions of people had been
6 killed in factories of death. I believed in the gas
7 chamber. I believed in all the paraphernalia of the
8 modern Holocaust”. Now, what was “all the paraphernalia
9 of the modern Holocaust” that you believed in up to 1988
10 A. [Mr Irving]: The words that I had set out in the previous four lines,
11 the factories of death
12 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Yes
13 A. [Mr Irving]: The gas chambers
14 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Yes
15 A. [Mr Irving]: Like everybody else in this room, I believed in them up to
16 that point
17 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Then comes this: “But 1988, when I came to Canada and
18 gave evidence in the trial of Ernst Zundel as an
19 historian, I met there people who knew differently and
20 could prove to me that the story was just a legend”
21 A. [Mr Irving]: “That that story was just a legend”
22 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Quite right, thank you, “that that story”, that is to say
23 the Holocaust story in which you previously believed, “was
24 just a legend. I changed my mind I’ve now revised the
25 Hitler book so that all references to Auschwitz and the
26 gas chamber and all the factories of death”, so that would
. P-225
1 include Sobibor, Treblinka —
2 A. [Mr Irving]: Mr Rampton, you have inserted some words there. After,
3 where you read out “to prove that that story was just a
4 legend”, you then verbally inserted the words “in other
5 words, the story of the Holocaust”
6 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Yes
7 A. [Mr Irving]: Or something like that, and that is not in there
8 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Fair enough
9 A. [Mr Irving]: That story was referring to the paraphernalia
10 Q. [Mr Rampton]: You corrected my reading quite rightly, I said “the
11 story”, you said “that story”. What does that mean in
12 that context
13 A. [Mr Irving]: The paraphernalia, the equipment, the factories of death
14 and the gas chambers
15 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Yes, and the killing of millions of people
16 A. [Mr Irving]: No
17 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Really
18 A. [Mr Irving]: We have repeatedly made quite plain that the Nazis killed
19 large numbers of people
20 Q. [Mr Rampton]: “I believed millions of people had been killed in
21 factories of death”
22 A. [Mr Irving]: You see, this is why you said “the story” instead of “that
23 story”. You were trying to sweep up the whole of that
24 sentence, including the millions of people, when it is
25 quite plain that I am talking about the latter part of the
26 sentence which is the paraphernalia
. P-226
1 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Mr Irving, we will get nowhere if we argue about trivia of
2 that kind. What you had believed in —
3 A. [Mr Irving]: It is not trivia, Mr Rampton, with respect, because a few
4 days down the line you will read back to me the transcript
5 and say, “But you agreed on January 12th that this was
6 what you were referring to”, and that is why I am going to
7 be sticking on each one of these points, Mr Rampton
8 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Let us get it straight. The story that you had believed
9 in until 1988 was, amongst other things, that millions of
10 people had been killed in factories of death by the use of
11 gas chambers. I am paraphrasing the penultimate and the
12 propenultimate lines of the previous —
13 A. [Mr Irving]: I am sorry, but that is not an accurate paraphrase. You
14 just said, “I believed that millions of people had been
15 killed in the gas chambers” and that is exactly what that
16 sentence does not say. It says: “I believed that
17 millions of people had been killed in factories of death.
18 I believed in the gas chamber”. Can you not see the
19 difference between those two sentences
20 Q. [Mr Rampton]: No, I am afraid I cannot. You tell me the difference
21 A. [Mr Irving]: I believed that millions of people have been killed
22 Q. [Mr Rampton]: In factories of death
23 A. [Mr Irving]: In factories of death. I believed in the gas chambers
24 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Yes. Right, now, will you please, just so that we can
25 clear up this, I will not use the word, just this little
26 dispute, please keep your finger where you are and turn to
. P-227
1 tab 11 which is something you said apparently on the
2 unedited transcripts of an interview on 15th and 28th
3 November for the “This Week” programme and I think Irving
4 and Leuchter at the Chelsea Town Hall was a press
5 conference you gave announcing your publication of the
6 Leuchter Report, am I right
7 A. [Mr Irving]: It was a lecture that we organized at the Chelsea Town
8 Hall, yes
9 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Can you turn to page 2, please, of this transcript
10 MR JUSTICE GRAY: I am sorry, Mr Rampton. This contains two
11 separate things, this tab, does it? One, the press
12 conference and the other a television interview
13 MR RAMPTON: It does
14 A. [Mr Irving]: What I am I supposed to be looking at
15 MR RAMPTON: Page 2 of the transcript which is at tab 11,
16 please
17 MR JUSTICE GRAY: This is the press conference
18 MR RAMPTON: This is the press conference and there is a
19 passage time at 0014.25
20 A. [Mr Irving]: I only have tape 191 in this book
21 MR JUSTICE GRAY: That is what you are meant to be looking at
22 MR RAMPTON: Page 191
23 A. [Mr Irving]: Tape 191
24 MR RAMPTON: Tape 191. Please turn to the second page of the
25 transcript and look at the last paragraph on the second
26 page
. P-228
1 A. [Mr Irving]: 1425 right? The time
2 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Yes, 1425. You told his Lordship this morning that, so
3 far as you could tell, these were accurate transcripts of
4 what you had said. I will read the sentence and you tell
5 me whether you want to —
6 A. [Mr Irving]: Excuse me, you just said that I told his Lordship that
7 these were accurate transcripts of what I have said
8 Q. [Mr Rampton]: So far as you could tell, I think, yes. He asked you that
9 question
10 A. [Mr Irving]: I said with reservation, with the reservation that some of
11 them have been subjected to editing
12 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Well, just let us have a look at this one sentence and
13 then you can tell his Lordship whether you think it has
14 been edited and in some way crafted to misrepresent what
15 you said
16 A. [Mr Irving]: The one sentence, yes
17 Q. [Mr Rampton]: The one sentence: “The biggest lie of the lot, the blood
18 libel on the German people, as I call it”, that is you,
19 “is the lie that the Germans had factories of death with
20 gas chambers in which they liquidated millions of their
21 opponents”
22 A. [Mr Irving]: That is an accurate transcription of what I said
23 Q. [Mr Rampton]: You did say that
24 A. [Mr Irving]: Yes
25 Q. [Mr Rampton]: And did you regard that proposition, that the Germans had
26 factories of death with gas chambers, plural, in
. P-229
1 which they liquidated millions, plural, of their
2 opponents, at this date in November 1991 as a lie
3 A. [Mr Irving]: A big lie, yes
4 Q. [Mr Rampton]: A big lie
5 A. [Mr Irving]: Yes
6 Q. [Mr Rampton]: It is that proposition, is it not, Mr Irving, which most
7 people regard as representing not in any accurate or
8 meticulous, historical sense, but generally understood as
9 the Holocaust
10 A. [Mr Irving]: I disagree with that. I have made quite plain that in my
11 mind most people when they think of the Holocaust think of
12 everything they are shown on television. Mostly nowadays
13 it is people being made to walk to the edge of a pit and
14 being bumped off by soldiers holding rifles. That is the
15 visual image that people now have
16 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Right. So that does not represent the Holocaust, millions
17 of people being killed in gas chambers in factories of
18 death
19 A. [Mr Irving]: It represents a part of the Holocaust story
20 Q. [Mr Rampton]: So will you please go up the page two paragraphs to the
21 words “timed at 1213”, and explain what you meant by what
22 you here said? “If you look at my great Adolf Hitler
23 biography here, this bumper Adolf Hitler biography that we
24 have only just published, in fact, it literally arrived
25 off the printing process today, you will not find the
26 Holocaust mentioned in one line, not even a footnote. Why
. P-230
1 should we? If something didn’t happen, then you don’t
2 even dignify it with a footnote”
3 A. [Mr Irving]: That is correct. The word “The Holocaust” you will not
4 find in that book
5 Q. [Mr Rampton]: What was the Holocaust that did not happen that you meant
6 to signify by those words
7 A. [Mr Irving]: The way I then I specify it two paragraphs later which is
8 the millions being killed in the gas chambers. This makes
9 it quite plain it is all part of the same story
10 Q. [Mr Rampton]: So what it comes to is that the Holocaust, your own
11 words —
12 A. [Mr Irving]: Yes
13 Q. [Mr Rampton]: — has been denied by you, does it not
14 A. [Mr Irving]: No. The Holocaust as defined here by me later on, the
15 description of people being killed in factories of death.
16 This is the description here which I say you will not find
17 in the book and you will not find the word “Holocaust” in
18 the book which you will not, because I think it is very
19 confusing to use words like that. I mean, this is where
20 the confusion has come from, that instead of you asking me
21 a question about the shootings and a question about the
22 gassings, you are asking a question about a vague concept
23 called “the Holocaust” knowing that you will get me one
24 way or you will get the other, rather like Mortimer’s
25 Fork. I think it would be more forensic if you were to
26 ask specifically about what you mean rather than ask about
. P-231
1 vague concepts
2 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Thank you for your advice about how to conduct my case in
3 court, Mr Irving. I am grateful for that. What do you
4 think was the Holocaust about which Professor Lipstadt
5 wrote in her book
6 A. [Mr Irving]: Which Holocaust are we talking about
7 Q. [Mr Rampton]: I am —
8 A. [Mr Irving]: The broad definition
9 Q. [Mr Rampton]: — asking you to answer my question, what is it in her
10 book that you object to in the words “Holocaust denier”
11 A. [Mr Irving]: The word “denier” that is attached to it. That is what I
12 object to it
13 Q. [Mr Rampton]: You did not deny the Holocaust in that passage —
14 A. [Mr Irving]: I denied the gas chambers. I denied that the Germans
15 killed millions in gas chambers and we are going to have a
16 great deal of interest when we get to that phase of this
17 trial
18 Q. [Mr Rampton]: How many people do you think — I mean innocent people,
19 I am not talking about bombing raids, Mr Irving, I mean
20 innocent Jewish people do you think the Germans killed
21 deliberately
22 A. [Mr Irving]: You mean like Anne Frank
23 Q. [Mr Rampton]: I do not mind whether they are like Anne Frank or not.
24 How many innocent Jewish people —
25 A. [Mr Irving]: Well, I mean, she is a typical example and a very useful
26 example to take because everybody has heard of Anne
. P-232
1 Frank. She was innocent. I have daughters of my own and
2 if what happened to her happened to one of my daughters, I
3 would be extremely angry
4 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Oh, I see, so Mr or Mrs Frank might not have been
5 innocent, is that what you are trying to say
6 A. [Mr Irving]: But I asked you about Anne Frank; I did not ask about her
7 parents
8 Q. [Mr Rampton]: No, I am sorry, Mr Irving. The procedure in this court is
9 that you do not ask questions, I do. I asked you how
10 many —
11 A. [Mr Irving]: I did not ask a question. I just said, I mean, shall we
12 talk about Anne Frank
13 Q. [Mr Rampton]: No, I do not want to talk about Anne Frank
14 A. [Mr Irving]: You want to talk about nameless, unspecified Jews so that
15 later on we can say, “Well, I was not meaning those ones,
16 I meant those ones”? The reason you do not want to talk
17 about Anne Frank, of course, is because she is a Jew who
18 died in the Holocaust and yet she was not murdered, unless
19 you take the broadest possible definition of murder
20 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Mr Irving, this is becoming somewhat comical. We will get
21 to Anne Frank along down the road, I assure you. She is
22 part of Professor Evans’ report, apart from anything else,
23 for a completely different purpose.
24 I said “deliberately killed”. How many innocent
25 Jewish people do you say that the Nazis deliberately
26 killed during the course of World War II. That was my
. P-233
1 question
2 A. [Mr Irving]: Now, you heard me say in my opening statement, Mr Rampton,
3 that I am not an expert on the Holocaust. What I would
4 now say would be a figure without any value whatsoever.
5 It would be just an assessment off the top of my head.
6 I can say what did not happen because you can apply
7 certain logistical principles, but I cannot say what did
8 happen. It would be a waste of this court’s time for me
9 to make an assessment
10 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Let us break down your Holocaust denial then, so far as
11 you will accept that you have made it. You dispute the
12 word “millions”
13 A. [Mr Irving]: I dispute the word “millions”
14 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Yes
15 A. [Mr Irving]: No. I do not think I have disputed the word “millions”
16 Q. [Mr Rampton]: So “millions” is only wrong so far as the gas chambers are
17 concerned, is that right
18 A. [Mr Irving]: Yes
19 Q. [Mr Rampton]: So there are no gas chambers, I think we know that, do we
20 not
21 A. [Mr Irving]: Mr Rampton, if I may, I will not venture a question, but
22 I will make a statement. A million people weigh 100,000
23 tonnes. We are talking of a major logistical problem
24 here
25 Q. [Mr Rampton]: We are not — I think, Mr Irving, we are at
26 cross-purposes. I am trying to understand what it is that
. P-234
1 you deny, not your reasons for denying it. That will come
2 much later on
3 A. [Mr Irving]: I am denying that any kind of multiples of millions of
4 people were killed in the gas chambers at Birkenhau
5 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Articles then of — no, that is not what you have said
6 here
7 A. [Mr Irving]: I am very being very specific which makes it much easier
8 to nail me down
9 Q. [Mr Rampton]: No, “factories of death” is plural
10 A. [Mr Irving]: Well, there were several factories of death, allegedly, at
11 Birkenhau, the crematoria
12 Q. [Mr Rampton]: What you do you say about Sobibor, Treblinka, Belsac and
13 Chelmo
14 A. [Mr Irving]: Nothing at all. I am not an expert
15 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Do you deny that they were killed in gas chambers in those
16 places
17 A. [Mr Irving]: You did not hear what I said, Mr Rampton. I am not an
18 expert
19 Q. [Mr Rampton]: You have no opinion about that at all
20 A. [Mr Irving]: Except what I have read from other people. If other
21 people come and tell me that, for example, there is no
22 trace of any mass graves at Treblinka even now, then
23 I begin to get suspicious about the story
24 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Let me understand it, Mr Irving. By “factories of death”
25 in this sentence on page 2 of tab 11, you had no intention
26 of including in that phrase “factories of death” the
. P-235
1 installations, whatever they were, at Belsac, Treblinka,
2 Sobibor or Chelma, is that right
3 A. [Mr Irving]: Mr Rampton, you are asking me a question about a verbal
4 statement I made nine years ago and, if you wish, I will
5 look to see what the rest of the statement is and I will
6 tell you which parts of the universe I was talking about.
7 But —
8 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Your answer just now — it may have been too quick an
9 answer; it was not, perhaps, your best answer — was, “Oh,
10 when I said ‘factories of death’ here, there were
11 factories of death at Birkenhau”
12 A. [Mr Irving]: Well, I presumed that as we are still talking about the
13 Auschwitz phase of the cross-examination, you are talking
14 about Auschwitz and Birkenhau
15 Q. [Mr Rampton]: No, I am talking about what I call your Holocaust denier
16 here you write a sentence or you speak a sentence,
17 presumably written out before: “The biggest lie of the lot
18 is the lie that the Germans had factories”, plural, and
19 I said that when I read it to you first time, “of death
20 with gas chambers in which they liquidated millions of
21 their opponents”
22 A. [Mr Irving]: Yes
23 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Let us get back to the present. Which of those elements
24 in that statement “factories”, plural, “of death with gas
25 chambers”, plural, “in which they liquidated millions”,
26 plural, “of their opponents”, which of those elements do
. P-236
1 you still deny
2 A. [Mr Irving]: The millions in gas chambers
3 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Yes
4 A. [Mr Irving]: Because, among other reasons, which we will come to later
5 on in this trial, the logistical problems for a start
6 Q. [Mr Rampton]: But you do deny it
7 A. [Mr Irving]: I deny — I use that word, it might be more proper to use
8 the word “contest” or “question”, but certainly for your
9 purposes I will use the word “deny”, that it was possible
10 to liquidate millions of people in the gas chambers that
11 had been presented us by historians so far
12 Q. [Mr Rampton]: I follow that. Are you retreating from your earlier
13 answer that your use of the words “factories”, plural, “of
14 death” was confined to Birkenhau
15 A. [Mr Irving]: What, in this particular speech
16 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Yes
17 A. [Mr Irving]: Do you wish me to read the speech so that I can answer
18 that question
19 Q. [Mr Rampton]: No, no. I would rather you gave me an answer now; if you
20 want to change it tomorrow, by all means do so. That is
21 perfectly legitimate
22 A. [Mr Irving]: No, unless the Judge so orders, I think it would be
23 improper for me to answer from memory about the content of
24 a speech I made nine years ago
25 MR JUSTICE GRAY: I think that is probably a fair point. It
26 does mean that time is going to have to be taken up with
. P-237
1 it, and I am concerned we do not spend too long on it, but
2 glance through. I do not think it will take that long
3 A. [Mr Irving]: I am anxious to be responsive, my Lord, but I do not want
4 to —
5 Q. [Mr Rampton]: No, I think that is fair, as I already said. Just glance
6 through and see whether you can get any help one way or
7 the other from the rest of it
8 A. [Mr Irving]: Whereabouts was it
9 MR RAMPTON: It is on page 2, tab 11
10 A. [Mr Irving]: My Lord, with respect, I do not see why I should be
11 required to amplify a statement that I made nine years ago
12 in any respect whatsoever or I should be required to add
13 geographical locations on which I did not specify at the
14 time
15 MR JUSTICE GRAY: You were not, with respect, being asked
16 that. When you use that phrase “factories of death” —
17 A. [Mr Irving]: Well, I can certainly be helpful here and say that I think
18 I am prepared to deny the possibility that the Nazis
19 liquidated millions of people in gas chambers at any of
20 their locations during the Third Reich.
21 MR RAMPTON: That is very helpful
22 A. [Mr Irving]: But do not then start just taking elements of that
23 sentence saying, “Oh, but you said this, the gas chambers”
24 or “You said the millions” or “You said anywhere”. The
25 whole sentence in its totality is correct, and that is
26 what I am testifying to
. P-238
1 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Do you accept that the Nazis killed, by one means or
2 another, and I am not talking about hard labour or
3 exposing people to typhus, shot, murdered, gassed, kicked
4 to death millions of Jews during World War II or not
5 A. [Mr Irving]: Yes
6 Q. [Mr Rampton]: You do
7 A. [Mr Irving]: Yes, whether it was of the order of millions or not,
8 I would hesitate to specify, but I would say it was
9 certainly more than one million, certainly less than four
10 million. But that is not a very useful answer to you, the
11 limitation I put on that. I do not want you to say, “You
12 said millions, therefore, it is more than two million”,
13 for example. I do not want you to ..
Section 239.14 to 257.5
14 Q. [Mr Rampton]: So tell me what it was then that was the Holocaust that
15 you removed from the 1991 edition and announced to the
16 world that you had done so
17 A. [Mr Irving]: The word “Holocaust” has gone
18 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Yes, but why
19 A. [Mr Irving]: Because I find the word “Holocaust” misleading, offensive
20 and unhelpful
21 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Why
22 A. [Mr Irving]: For precisely the reasons that I said 10 minutes ago, that
23 it is too vague, it is imprecise, it is unscientific and
24 it should be avoided like the plague, because the word
25 “Holocaust” could be understood to mean one thing when
26 somebody is referring to it meaning something else. I try
. P-239
1 to avoid words like that.
2 I shall be calling — I shall be asking one of
3 my experts on precisely this matter who is an expert on
4 the use of the word “Holocaust”. He also takes the
5 strongest exception to it
6 Q. [Mr Rampton]: So you removed it because you found it imprecise for one
7 reason
8 A. [Mr Irving]: Yes, as a part of the general tidying up process — when
9 you take a book after 10 years and you revise it and you
10 work over it with a red pencil, you do a lot of tidying up
11 and tightening up, and we did that with the new edition.
12 We cut a lot of material out anyway because the book was
13 the one-third too long and we wanted to bring a new
14 material that we had obtained, the diaries of Hitler’s
15 doctor and Goring, and so on. So there was a lot of
16 editorial work that went on
17 Q. [Mr Rampton]: I want to take it slowly because it may be important in
18 the end. You removed it because it was imprecise, but you
19 accept, you now tell me, that the Germans deliberately
20 murdered perhaps something between one and two million
21 Jews during the course of the War
22 A. [Mr Irving]: A criminally large number of Jews, yes
23 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Where, in your opinion, did this happen, broadly speaking
24 A. [Mr Irving]: Well, we could take it sector by sector, but I am not sure
25 if it is a meaningful exercise. If I am a Jew and I take
26 it from Amsterdam and I am living a peaceful life and I
. P-240
1 find myself thrown into a stinking concentration camp
2 where I die of disease, I considered myself to have been
3 murdered
4 Q. [Mr Rampton]: I excluded them, as you know perfectly well. I talked
5 about shooting, gassing, hanging, kicking, what you like,
6 but I excluded the people who died of disease or overwork
7 or starvation
8 A. [Mr Irving]: Very well. On the Eastern front, particularly in the
9 Baltic States, particularly in the Ukraine, I would
10 estimate that up to one million Jews were murdered, using
11 that word in a way that is completely incontrovertible.
12 They were stood on the edge of pits and shot into the
13 pits, clubbed to death
14 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Just so that we get it straight: in the second edition of
15 “Hitler’s War” — start at the beginning. In the first
16 edition you accepted that Auschwitz was an extermination
17 centre, did you not
18 A. [Mr Irving]: Yes, a lazy acceptance which I now regret
19 Q. [Mr Rampton]: That is as may be. By the time of the second edition you
20 had recanted that acceptance, had you not
21 A. [Mr Irving]: That Auschwitz was an extermination centre, a dedicated
22 extermination centre
23 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Yes
24 A. [Mr Irving]: Yes
25 Q. [Mr Rampton]: You said, for example, I am paraphrasing, perhaps you will
26 accept it, that the Hungarian Jews were sent to Auschwitz
. P-241
1 for slave labour
2 A. [Mr Irving]: Yes
3 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Instead of purposefully to be killed
4 A. [Mr Irving]: Definitely
5 Q. [Mr Rampton]: What do you say went on — perhaps I will ask you this
6 first. Do you accept that there were camps, and we will
7 take them one by one, Chelmo
8 A. [Mr Irving]: Yes
9 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Belzec
10 A. [Mr Irving]: Belzec I am not certain of
11 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Treblinka
12 A. [Mr Irving]: Treblinka I am becoming uncertain about
13 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Sobibor
14 A. [Mr Irving]: Sobibor I know nothing of
15 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Chelmo you accept
16 A. [Mr Irving]: Yes
17 Q. [Mr Rampton]: The other two, second two you are uncertain about
18 A. [Mr Irving]: Yes
19 Q. [Mr Rampton]: What happened at Chelmo
20 A. [Mr Irving]: In 1940 they established a killing centre. It was in a
21 handy part of Europe. Hitler had ordered liquidation in
22 the Polish campaign and afterwards the liquidation of all
23 the Polish intellectuals and clergy and intelligentsia and
24 the Jews who were liable to occupy leading positions, and
25 a lot of them found themselves shipped off to Chelmo where
26 they were dispatched
. P-242
1 MR JUSTICE GRAY: But not by gas
2 A. [Mr Irving]: Not to the best of my knowledge, my Lord, no, but I say
3 this, and I hesitate to say this, as a non-expert on the
4 Holocaust, this book was not written as a history of the
5 Holocaust. This was book was written as a biography of
6 Hitler and it would have been neither here nor there how
7 his victims were disposed of
8 MR RAMPTON: Let us take the other three camps together. You
9 would not accept that they were purpose built
10 extermination centres either
11 A. [Mr Irving]: Not on the basis of the evidence I have seen so far
12 Q. [Mr Rampton]: It follows, does it not, that you do not accept that
13 people who were killed there were killed by the use of
14 purpose designed gas chambers
15 A. [Mr Irving]: At which camps are you talking about, Treblinka
16 Q. [Mr Rampton]: To the three East Polish ones
17 A. [Mr Irving]: There is a lot of debate each way which, in my mind, is
18 unresolved and I have no particular interest in resolving
19 it because, I repeat for the nth time, I am not a
20 Holocaust scholar, and taking the Treblinka Miediner camp
21 you have the problem there that they cannot make up their
22 mind what kind of gas was used to kill the victims, was it
23 Zyklone, was it diesel engine exhaust fumes, was it petrol
24 engine exhaust fumes, when that kind of uncertainty occurs
25 in the testimony, frankly I tend to turn my back on the
26 entire story and write something that is safe rather than
. P-243
1 something that is liable to dispute
2 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Mr Rampton, can I ask this question.
3 I thought, Mr Irving, when you were giving your
4 evidence-in-chief, I think it was in response to a
5 question from, you said you accepted that gassing had
6 occurred
7 A. [Mr Irving]: Yes
8 Q. [Mr Rampton]: But to the limited sent that it had been carried out on an
9 experimental basis
10 A. [Mr Irving]: By experimental —
11 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Let me finish the question. I had understood that to be a
12 reference to the gas vans being brought after the
13 termination of euthanasia programme. Am I wrong? Is it
14 wider than that
15 A. [Mr Irving]: By “experimental” I do not mean that men stood around in
16 white coats with clip boards and stopwatches. It as just
17 local SS commanders who had been given the job of
18 disposing of these people and were looking for other ways
19 of doing it. Certainly the gas vans were used, because in
20 Adolf Eichmann’s papers which I obtained in Argentina he
21 describes having witnessed one such killing, and there are
22 documents which satisfy me, which may be of great
23 disinterest to the Defendants but they satisfy me that
24 they are authentic that such killing trucks did exist,
25 unless there are enormous coincidences in the use of
26 language and words. The gas chambers story is
. P-244
1 sufficiently difficult to analyse, because on the one hand
2 you have apparently consistent testimony of people who
3 should have known, like the commandants and their
4 deputies, testifying to the fact that these killings were
5 carried out in gas chambers, and on the other hand you
6 have the logistical and agricultural impossibilities which
7 cannot be overlooked. I am sure that we will hear a lot
8 more about them later on in the trial
9 MR RAMPTON: Yes, perhaps. Then let us return finally to page
10 2 of tab 11 of this file. I hope you still have it open,
11 have you
12 A. [Mr Irving]: Page 2, tab 11, yes
13 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Yes. In the second paragraph timed at 12.13 the last
14 sentence reads:
15 “If something didn’t happen then you don’t even
16 dignify it with a footnote”.
17 The “it” you are referring to there is the
18 Holocaust whatever that may mean. Is that right
19 A. [Mr Irving]: Well, it is the gas chamber Holocaust
20 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Yes. I am not trying to be unfair, but according to the
21 internal syntax of that statement the “it” is the
22 Holocaust, is it not
23 A. [Mr Irving]: It is the gas chamber Holocaust and I am sure his Lordship
24 is well aware of the fact this is a speech delivered under
25 very strained circumstances without a script. So one does
26 not put every word on the gold balance, as the Germans
. P-245
1 say. The mere fact it means the gas chamber Holocaust is
2 evident from the fact that if you look at the book I am
3 talking about, Hitler’s War, there is any amount of
4 reference to the rest of the Holocaust story, namely the
5 shootings on the Eastern Front which are accepted in full
6 degree
7 Q. [Mr Rampton]: I said I was not trying to be unfair. I wanted to take it
8 in stages
9 A. [Mr Irving]: You are being very fair and you are being very patient
10 with me, but I have to be very careful with my responses
11 Q. [Mr Rampton]: In the four walls of that little paragraph the “it” that
12 did not happen is the Holocaust, grammatically speaking,
13 is it not
14 A. [Mr Irving]: We keep coming back to the same question
15 Q. [Mr Rampton]: No. Just say yes or no. It is very easy. I am not
16 trying to trick you. It is, is it not? It is not a
17 difficult question
18 A. [Mr Irving]: Which “it” are we talking about
19 Q. [Mr Rampton]: In the last line: “If something didn’t happen you don’t
20 even dignify it with a footnote”. That follows, does it
21 not, from the earlier part —
22 A. [Mr Irving]: The something that did not happen is it
23 Q. [Mr Rampton]: The something that did not happen is the Holocaust if you
24 look at the previous line
25 A. [Mr Irving]: No, the clause, “if something didn’t happen”, that is the
26 “it”
. P-246
1 Q. [Mr Rampton]: All right, we will read the whole thing. If you read —
2 A. [Mr Irving]: It is still going to say the same no matter how often you
3 read it
4 Q. [Mr Rampton]: “You won’t find the Holocaust mentioned in one line, not
5 even a footnote. Why should we? If something didn’t
6 happen then you don’t even dignify it with a footnote.”
7 The something that did not happen is the Holocaust in this
8 sentence, is it not
9 A. [Mr Irving]: It is the clause if something did not happen. Let me
10 explain to you, by this time I had encountered a very fine
11 American editor Tom Condon, who was my American editor,
12 American publishers have people who have editors who teach
13 you how to write, and this particular editor said:
14 “Mr Irving, don’t waste time and ink telling your readers
15 what has not happened.” He said: “Don’t say he didn’t
16 like dogs but he did like cats. You just write ‘he did
17 like cats'”. This is what I am getting at there. You do
18 not waste ink
19 Q. [Mr Rampton]: I follow that entirely, but let us look at the substance
20 of the thing. The something that did not happen is the
21 Holocaust, is it not, in this sentence
22 A. [Mr Irving]: The gas chamber Holocaust, yes
23 Q. [Mr Rampton]: No, no, in the English, the something that did not happen
24 is the Holocaust
25 A. [Mr Irving]: The whole of this speech is about the gas chamber, the
26 whole of this part of the speech. You will notice the
. P-247
1 tape has previously jumped so we have no idea what has
2 been cut out or what has been accidently omitted
3 Q. [Mr Rampton]: I said I am said trying to be fair
4 A. [Mr Irving]: I must insist on fairness here, because I have stipulated
5 that I will accept these transcripts and allow you to make
6 great horseplay with them, except where they have been
7 edited, and that is a paragraph or a sentence has that has
8 been edited. It says specifically “tape jumps” which
9 means it has been switched on and switched off. You are
10 getting the second half of a sentence
11 Q. [Mr Rampton]: I wish you would not be so nervous of me, Mr Irving.
12 I said I am trying to be fair. Now look down at the other
13 paragraph we looked at earlier. I am now going to put
14 some words into your mouth. You have said in the earlier
15 paragraph that the Holocaust did not happen. That is as
16 plain as a pikestaff to anybody who can read English. Now
17 we see, do we not, as you have been trying to tell us,
18 what you mean by the Holocaust:
19 “The biggest lie of the lot is the lie that
20 Germans had factories of death with gas chambers in which
21 they liquidated millions of their opponents.”
22 A. [Mr Irving]: My I intern that differently? I am sorry it is a
23 question. I will intern that differently. The biggest
24 lie of the lot is that the Germans had factories of death
25 with gas chambers in which they killed millions of people
26 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Liquidated, yes
. P-248
1 A. [Mr Irving]: Do you notice the difference there
2 Q. [Mr Rampton]: You can read it either, can you not
3 A. [Mr Irving]: You read it your way, Mr Rampton
4 Q. [Mr Rampton]: No. What you are saying —
5 A. [Mr Irving]: And we at this end of the wicket will read it our way
6 Q. [Mr Rampton]: What you say is the biggest lie is the assertion that
7 there were gas chambers. That is what you say you meant
8 by that
9 A. [Mr Irving]: Yes, in which millions were killed. This is what I asked
10 you not to do, not just to take individual phrases out of
11 a sentence and say, look at this bit and look at that.
12 You have to judge the whole
13 Q. [Mr Rampton]: I do not think that is very fair. I read the whole
14 sentence
15 A. [Mr Irving]: No, you did not. You said there were gas chambers, the
16 biggest lie is that they were gas chambers, and I am
17 saying that, no, what I say is the biggest lie is that
18 there were gas chambers in which millions were killed
19 Q. [Mr Rampton]: I thought, Mr Irving, these were elements in the lie,
20 factories of death, gas chambers and millions
21 A. [Mr Irving]: Only when taken together
22 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Right
23 A. [Mr Irving]: My Lord, am I labouring these points too much
24 Q. [Mr Rampton]: No, you are not at all. You deny that there were
25 factories of death with gas chambers in which were
26 liquidated millions of Jews. I have rephrased it so that
. P-249
1 it is absolutely crystal clear
2 A. [Mr Irving]: I thought I did not recognize it
3 Q. [Mr Rampton]: So that it is absolutely crystal clear, it has not an
4 ambiguity of what you wrote. I want to get your evidence
5 clear
6 A. [Mr Irving]: Let me explain what underlies this sentence. Because it
7 is logistically impossible to kill millions of people in
8 the buildings that have been portrayed to us as factories
9 of death, therefore they cannot have been, and that is the
10 big lie, if you try to cut that particular sentence up any
11 particular way then it becomes (A) something I did not say
12 and (B) worthless for the purposes of this court
13 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Mr Irving, you sorely tempt me to proceed to Auschwitz
14 straightaway, but I will resist it
15 A. [Mr Irving]: I am looking forward to Auschwitz
16 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Would you accept that one version of the Holocaust which
17 is generally understood, accepted and perceived —
18 A. [Mr Irving]: Will you avoid using the passive voice so we know
19 precisely who is generally accepting, understanding and
20 perceiving
21 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Call it the public at large, the audiences to whom you
22 speak
23 A. [Mr Irving]: Have you stood in Oxford Street with a clip board asking
24 them, the public at large
25 Q. [Mr Rampton]: You will not commit yourself to a generally understood
26 sense of the Holocaust then
. P-250
1 A. [Mr Irving]: I do not know what the generally sense of the Holocaust
2 is. I have given my version of it. You are giving the
3 court your version of it
4 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Will you accept, Mr Irving, and if you will not say no, it
5 matters not, will you accept that one element in the
6 public perception of the Holocaust is the killing of
7 millions of Jews in gas chambers constructed by the Nazis
8 in various parts of Europe
9 A. [Mr Irving]: That I accept
10 Q. [Mr Rampton]: You will
11 A. [Mr Irving]: Yes
12 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Right. And that you deny
13 A. [Mr Irving]: Why did you not ask that question right at the beginning
14 Q. [Mr Rampton]: I wanted to know what you meant
15 A. [Mr Irving]: It is one element
16 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Mr Irving, please
17 A. [Mr Irving]: It is one element, as you say
18 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Would you not accept that it was the major element in the
19 public perception of what the Holocaust was about
20 A. [Mr Irving]: Now you are saying something different
21 Q. [Mr Rampton]: I am asking you a further question
22 A. [Mr Irving]: You have changed from one element to a major element
23 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Mr Irving, please, I have asked you about one element.
24 You have accepted that is an element. I now ask you
25 whether you do not also accept that it is the major
26 element
. P-251
1 A. [Mr Irving]: In what
2 Q. [Mr Rampton]: In the public perception of the words “the Holocaust”
3 A. [Mr Irving]: I do not know
4 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Right. You do not know
5 A. [Mr Irving]: I have not take any statistical evaluations of what people
6 think in Oxford Street
7 Q. [Mr Rampton]: You deny, I think we are clear on this now, that the
8 Germans killed millions of Jews in gas chambers in
9 purpose-built establishments
10 A. [Mr Irving]: Will you repeat that sentence? You deny that Germans
11 killed
12 Q. [Mr Rampton]: You deny that the Nazis, do not let us talk about Germans,
13 let us talk about Nazis, that the Nazis killed millions of
14 Jews in gas chambers in purpose-built establishments
15 A. [Mr Irving]: Yes
16 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Yes
17 A. [Mr Irving]: I am sorry to take so long to answer, but I have to see
18 exactly what it is you are asking. Purpose-built
19 establishments, millions of Nazis in gas chambers, yes
20 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Is the reason really why you deny that
21 because you do not accept there were any such
22 purpose-built factories
23 A. [Mr Irving]: Well, the word “purpose-built” made my answer much easier,
24 my Lord. You will understand why I say that when we turn
25 to the architectural drawings and we bring in the evidence
26 that I have
. P-252
1 Q. [Mr Rampton]: And Liechter
2 A. [Mr Irving]: Liechter I think is something that I am not going to rely
3 on at all. As I said in my introduction on the Liechter
4 report, the Liechter report is flawed. We now have very
5 much better expertise
6 MR RAMPTON: Mr Irving, you do tempt me very sorely. When
7 Liechter first swam into your view, you had no expertise
8 about Auschwitz or about gassing or extermination or
9 anything like that, did you
10 A. [Mr Irving]: I did not need it. That was not what his report was based
11 on
12 Q. [Mr Rampton]: No. Mr Irving, when Liechter swam into view you had not
13 studied this question at all, had you
14 A. [Mr Irving]: No
15 Q. [Mr Rampton]: I think you said as much
16 A. [Mr Irving]: No
17 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Yet I am right, am I not, that you announced Mr Liechter
18 as having been, as it were, the corner stone of your
19 conversion, if I may mix my metaphors
20 A. [Mr Irving]: Not Mr Liechter, but the laboratory analyses attached to
21 his report. I am not sure whether I announced it in that
22 way, but certainly that was the corner stone
23 Q. [Mr Rampton]: I will just read from the same — there are many other
24 references but we need not look them all up. Page 6 of
25 the same transcript. We will start, if we may, at the
26 large paragraph in the middle of the page, timed at 30.28
. P-253
1 because again I do not want to be accused of taking
2 anything out of context.
3 “Thank you Professor Faurisson for that
4 wonderful erudite discursion on the argument on the
5 controversy in which we are so emotionally and deeply
6 embroiled. It is fascinating to see how an academic, a
7 Professor, can enlarge upon what after all is just a tiny
8 detail of history, as it now turns out. He can hold it
9 under a microscope and see details, he can see details on
10 those details and further details on those details. If
11 I can just dot the i’s and cross the t’s to some of those
12 details of details of details, he mentioned that after
13 Fred Liechter did his truly epoch making investigation of
14 the gas chambers at our Auschwitz, the forensic laboratory
15 tests which yielded the extraordinary result which
16 converted me” —
17 A. [Mr Irving]: There you have it
18 Q. [Mr Rampton]: ” … made me into a hardcore disbeliever.”
19 A. [Mr Irving]: Yes
20 Q. [Mr Rampton]: That is right, is it not
21 A. [Mr Irving]: Yes
22 Q. [Mr Rampton]: So it was the Liechter report and that aspect of the
23 Liechter report which summarised or discussed the
24 laboratory findings that converted you into a hardcore
25 disbeliever
26 A. [Mr Irving]: I specifically say there the laboratory forensic tests
. P-254
1 Can we analyse what I am disbelieving there
2 Q. [Mr Rampton]: No. It is much better we do not go down that road
3 A. [Mr Irving]: I thought so
4 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Because we might find ourselves discussing Auschwitz now
5 which might not suit your book. Do you agree
6 A. [Mr Irving]: Mr Rampton, you said it did not suit your book in the
7 interval. You were very willing to start with Auschwitz
8 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Anyway, we are not dealing with Auschwitz
9 now. We are dealing really, are we not, with Holocaust
10 denier
11 MR RAMPTON: Yes
12 A. [Mr Irving]: Yes
13 Q. [Mr Rampton]: We have touched upon Mr Liechter. We are going to grapple
14 with him much more extensively next week. We have touched
15 upon Mr Liechter and it has led you to this conclusion
16 that there were no gas chambers at Auschwitz, is it not?
17 I use the historic present. It was Mr Liechter’s report
18 and the bit about the laboratory tests which converted you
19 into disbelief that there were gas chambers at Auschwitz,
20 is that right
21 A. [Mr Irving]: That is correct
22 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Is that is correct. As a consequence of that, you have
23 come to believe, perhaps it was a matter of protest,
24 perhaps not, I do not know, that the Nazis did not use gas
25 chambers for the extermination of Jews let alone millions
26 of Jews
. P-255
1 A. [Mr Irving]: Yes, I have become very sceptical of that element of the
2 story
3 Q. [Mr Rampton]: And you have publicly expressed your disbelief
4 A. [Mr Irving]: Scepticism, yes
5 Q. [Mr Rampton]: So if and in so far as that forms a part of people’s
6 belief about the Holocaust, you are a Holocaust denier
7 A. [Mr Irving]: No
8 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Are you not
9 A. [Mr Irving]: No. You do not have to believe in the whole to be a
10 believer. How many of us are Christians who do not
11 believe in every aspect of the Christian ethos
12 Q. [Mr Rampton]: All right. I do not think we ought to argue metaphysics,
13 Mr Irving
14 A. [Mr Irving]: It is a metaphysics problem you are putting there. You are
15 saying: Believe the whole thing or you are a denier and
16 you are ruined. You will not eat lunch in this town
17 again.
18 Q. [Mr Rampton]: I did not. I said in so far as that forms a part of
19 people’s belief about the Holocaust, you deny that part,
20 put it like that
21 A. [Mr Irving]: Mr Rampton, are you leading evidence on people —
22 Q. [Mr Rampton]: I am asking you —
23 A. [Mr Irving]: — people’s belief
24 Q. [Mr Rampton]: I am asking you a question. If it should be thought that
25 it forms a part of common belief about the nature of the
26 Holocaust that large numbers of Jews were systematically
. P-256
1 gassed in purpose-built gas chambers, you are a Holocaust
2 denier, are you not
3 A. [Mr Irving]: I do not know this does form a large part of people’s
4 beliefs and I do not think you are allowed to lead
5 evidence on people’s beliefs in an effort to back it up
Section 257.6 to 279.16
6 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Mr Irving, only one last little bit about that. Whatever
7 methods were used, and you deny the use of gas chambers,
8 whatever methods were used to kill large numbers of Jews,
9 whether they are 1, 2 or 3 or 6 million, you say it was
10 not systematic, is that right
11 A. [Mr Irving]: Would you elucidate precisely what you mean by
12 “systematic”? Something organised and ordered from the
13 highest level of the Third Reich or something ordered from
14 halfway up the system, or something that was just a system
15 within the camp? I think the word “systematic” is a bit
16 of a man trap
17 Q. [Mr Rampton]: You know quite a lot about the shootings in the East after
18 Barbarossa in June 1941, do you not
19 A. [Mr Irving]: As I said this morning, they appeared to be chaotic,
20 disorganized and arbitrary
21 Q. [Mr Rampton]: You know that —
22 A. [Mr Irving]: As that one signal proves that I read out
23 Q. [Mr Rampton]: You know, do you not, that regularly, indeed frequently,
24 reports were sent back in writing from the East, from the
25 units in the East, from the Einsatzgruppen and other units
26 in the East, enumerating and totalling the numbers of
. P-257
1 people shot
2 A. [Mr Irving]: Who were these reports from and to
3 Q. [Mr Rampton]: They are from the Einsatzgruppen to Heydrich’s office in
4 Berlin
5 A. [Mr Irving]: Yes, this is true
6 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Where they are, am I not right, distilled into, as it
7 were, summary reports, meldung
8 A. [Mr Irving]: Sometimes they were, yes
9 Q. [Mr Rampton]: And there are a large number of these documents, are there
10 not
11 A. [Mr Irving]: Yes. From whom to whom did these reports go
12 Q. [Mr Rampton]: From the East to Berlin
13 A. [Mr Irving]: Yes, and the meldung you are talking about made in Berlin,
14 were did they go to
15 Q. [Mr Rampton]: That is a matter of speculation. Assume they went to
16 Heydrich or his office. We are then, are we not, in the
17 top echelons of the Nazi party at this time
18 A. [Mr Irving]: Yes
19 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Do we need to go any further
20 A. [Mr Irving]: We do not and I can make your life easier, Mr Rampton, by
21 saying that Adolf Hitler was quite satisfied, I think,
22 with the Einsatzgruppen operations on the Eastern Front in
23 so far as they had the character of security operations
24 Q. [Mr Rampton]: I see
25 A. [Mr Irving]: Subsequently of course the security operations were then
26 umbrellaed out to include the liquidation of Jews who were
. P-258
1 considered to be fair game
2 Q. [Mr Rampton]: We will come to report No. 51 on 29th December, 26th its
3 original date but 29th September 1942 further down the
4 line
5 A. [Mr Irving]: That is just one of a kind of course
6 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Well, it is 51. It is No. 51. So presumably there were
7 another 50 before it
8 A. [Mr Irving]: Yes, but the others were about things like the progress
9 and development of the rubber plant and things likes that
10 Q. [Mr Rampton]: It may be so. It gives a figure, does it not
11 A. [Mr Irving]: 316,000
12 Q. [Mr Rampton]: 363,000 plus as a separate category of Jews executed in
13 three areas
14 A. [Mr Irving]: I think you ought to look at the whole document rather
15 than just take one line out and consider the document a
16 bit and the initials that are marked on it
17 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Yes
18 MR JUSTICE GRAY: But the figure is right, is it not? That is
19 the figure
20 A. [Mr Irving]: This figure is typed on that document, my Lord, that is
21 true, yes, and the document is typed in the special large
22 faced typewriter which Himmler and Hitler used
23 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Himmler used that as well
24 A. [Mr Irving]: Yes, on occasion he would use it to write speeches in,
25 yes
26 MR RAMPTON: And that document is signed by Himmler, is it not
. P-259
1 A. [Mr Irving]: One copy of it is that I have seen
2 Q. [Mr Rampton]: And it is marked for the Fuhrer, is it not
3 A. [Mr Irving]: It is a report to the Fuhrer, yes
4 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Yes. Suppose —
5 A. [Mr Irving]: It would be far more useful if we could have the document
6 before the court
7 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Unfortunately I do not have it here. So we will have to
8 come back to it. We will come back to it in detail I am
9 afraid. There is no way round it
10 A. [Mr Irving]: I am very familiar with the document of course. I think
11 his Lordship should see it
12 Q. [Mr Rampton]: This is why I can ask you about it, so am I, without your
13 having it in front of you. Just suppose for the sake of
14 argument that that document was shown Adolf Hitler
15 A. [Mr Irving]: Yes
16 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Why would it have been shown to Adolf Hitler
17 A. [Mr Irving]: I would ask the question the other way round
18 Q. [Mr Rampton]: No, please
19 A. [Mr Irving]: I would say why is that figure buried on page 6 of that
20 document
21 Q. [Mr Rampton]: It is not. It is on the first page
22 A. [Mr Irving]: That is why we wrote it so I do not blunder into silly
23 mistakes like that. I think I am right. You think you are
24 right
25 Q. [Mr Rampton]: I am not trying to catch you. Under the heading Meldung
26 and Fuhrer or whatever it is
. P-260
1 A. [Mr Irving]: Yes, OK, why it is buried on that first page
2 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Have you got it there
3 A. [Mr Irving]: We have got it. Ah!
4 Q. [Mr Rampton]: No, I have not got my copy. We have only got one copy.
5 We do not play tricks like that in this court, Mr Irving.
6 If we do the judges get very cross with us. There is no
7 point to it
8 A. [Mr Irving]: What I shall ask you is, does it have the notation at the
9 top: Fuhrer Fordalig
10 Q. [Mr Rampton]: I did not hear that
11 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Does it have “shown to the Fuhrer” written on
12 the top
13 MR RAMPTON: Yes, it does. Well, it has a word which I believe
14 means something like “presented” in handwriting. It is
15 written by a man called Fife I think
16 A. [Mr Irving]: I know Fife and I know Gruchmann, the two initials on it.
17 It has the letters ERL which means taken care of which may
18 or may not have been shown to Hitler
19 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Please, I do not want to come on to the question of fact
20 whether the Fuhrer ever saw it. I would just like you to
21 have a look at it
22 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Can I be told where it is
23 MR RAMPTON: Yes, I am sorry. It is in H3 (i) at tab 3. It
24 has a handwritten “6” on the bottom which is a modern
25 numeral. Tab 3 page 6. It has a whole load of other
26 numbers on it as well
. P-261
1 A. [Mr Irving]: Written on the top it says “forgaleg” which means put
2 before. But it does not say whom to. But it does say
3 “put before”
4 MR JUSTICE GRAY: It is cut off on my copy
5 MR RAMPTON: Yes, I know. I have had it read by a Germanist
6 and it does say that
7 A. [Mr Irving]: The initial at the top is Fife and the initial below it is
8 Gruchmann, GR
9 MR JUSTICE GRAY: So the manuscript is “forgaleg”, is it
10 A. [Mr Irving]: Yes
11 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Do you accept that means since it is addressed to the
12 Fuhrer that it was shown to him
13 A. [Mr Irving]: On a high probability, yes, my Lord. I would have
14 accepted that as being evidence that it had probably been
15 shown to Hitler, but I would also draw attention to two or
16 three details, if I may, since we are looking at the
17 document now
18 MR RAMPTON: I would rather we left it but you can if you want
19 MR JUSTICE GRAY: I personally think I would leave it
20 A. [Mr Irving]: I do not want to upset Mr Rampton by drawing attention to
21 inconsistencies
22 Q. [Mr Rampton]: You will have an opportunity later
23 A. [Mr Irving]: I am not questioning the authenticity, my Lord, just
24 aspects of it. Right
25 MR RAMPTON: I do not mind at all, Mr Irving, if that is what
26 you would like to
. P-262
1 A. [Mr Irving]: No, you have your own way
2 Q. [Mr Rampton]: I look at it, I see it describes itself, its subject
3 matter —
4 A. [Mr Irving]: Now you are looking at details and I am not allowed to!
5 MR JUSTICE GRAY: I think we will leave it to Mr Rampton.
6 I think he can ask you more questions if he wants to
7 MR RAMPTON: If you have answers to my questions rather than
8 speeches to make by all means give them, but I really do
9 prefer to proceed my own way, if I am allowed. It
10 concerns reports to the Fuhrer about the campaign against
11 the partisans. Is that a roughly right translation
12 A. [Mr Irving]: This is what I was about to point out, that the subject
13 line is combatting partisan, partisan warfare
14 Q. [Mr Rampton]: It is report No. 51 and it concerns Souther Russia, the
15 Ukraine and Bialystok area, does it not
16 A. [Mr Irving]: Yes
17 Q. [Mr Rampton]: It is about the outcome of that campaign from 1st
18 September until 1st December 1942
19 A. [Mr Irving]: That is correct, yes
20 Q. [Mr Rampton]: The first group, the first category are called van
21 Diecknann which are —
22 A. [Mr Irving]: It is their word for “partisans”
23 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Well, not always, sometimes it is partisanan, is it not
24 A. [Mr Irving]: They have various different words for the same thing. But
25 Nazi jargon was to call partisan bandits
26 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Yes. There are some people killed under in fact four
. P-263
1 headings, August, September, October and November. So it
2 does not actually begin on 1st September; it begins
3 earlier. The second category are partisan helpers and
4 what are “vanda verdicta”
5 A. [Mr Irving]: Partisan suspects
6 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Suspects, yes. In 2C it says: First of all, arrested,
7 that is subcategory (a). Then it says subcategory (b),
8 numbers executed, a total of 14,257. In subcategory (c)
9 it says explicitly, does it not, “Jews executed”
10 A. [Mr Irving]: Yes
11 Q. [Mr Rampton]: And the total there is 363,211
12 A. [Mr Irving]: That is correct
13 Q. [Mr Rampton]: What would the Fuhrer think when he saw that. You tell
14 us? You are the Hitler historian
15 A. [Mr Irving]: I do not think that my imagined response on behalf of the
16 Fuhrer is evidence in this case
17 MR JUSTICE GRAY: No. I think that is wrong, if I may say so.
18 I thought you might say that, but you are an historian.
19 It is your job to make sense of a document, if you can.
20 I therefore think it is not only a proper question, it is
21 quite a significant question
22 A. [Mr Irving]: Well —
23 Q. [Mr Rampton]: To be asked what you think this would have conveyed to
24 Hitler, which is I think what Mr Rampton was asking
25 A. [Mr Irving]: Firstly, I accept the document was in all probability
26 shown to Hitler. Secondly, I think in all probability he
. P-264
1 paid no attention to it. The reason being the date. This
2 is the height of the Stalingrad crisis. Every waking
3 moment he is waiting for news that the fourth army that he
4 sent to rescue the sixth army, to relieve the sixth army,
5 had broken through the ring, the battleship Sharn Horse is
6 out on the high seas in the Arctic Circle just about to be
7 sunk that same day as it is shown to him. He has an awful
8 lot of things on his plate. You asked me to imagine, my
9 Lord, the situation and I can imagine the situation that
10 the Fuhrer, Heydrich Himmler has thought that this is an
11 opportune moment to slip a document into the heap to be
12 shown to the Fuhrer which he can use one way or the other
13 as time may come later on, either to say, “look how well
14 I did, mein Fuhrer”, or on the other hand to say, “But
15 I told you at the time we had done that.” There is a
16 reason why I say this because we have another document
17 later on called Korherr report with which I am sure the
18 Defendants are familiar, where Himmler goes to some
19 lengths to camouflage the documents so Hitler cannot see
20 what is going on, and references to special treatment and
21 so on are actually excised from the document before it is
22 shown to Hitler. So taking this in conjunction with other
23 documents, but I would attach no evidentiary value to what
24 I just said whatsoever, because it is literally
25 speculating on the basis of very thin evidence, on the
26 basis of the date, on the basis of my knowledge from other
. P-265
1 source of what else was going on at that time in Hitler’s
2 War. It is a mistake to contemplate documents like in
3 vacuo
4 MR RAMPTON: Oh yes
5 A. [Mr Irving]: At the same time as documents like this are happening, if
6 I can put it like that, all sorts of other things are
7 happening
8 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Sure, but one, only one, and you see, Mr Irving, we are
9 not on this side of the court setting out to prove what
10 did happen, we are only interested in the evidence which a
11 reputable historian would put into the scales and weigh
12 before arrival at a conclusion, one obvious explanation of
13 this document, which in fact is generated by the document
14 before it in the bundle if you look at it, is it not? The
15 original report is dated 26th December 1942 and comes from
16 the higher SS and police leader in South Russia, etc.,
17 does it not
18 A. [Mr Irving]: Yes
19 Q. [Mr Rampton]: So somebody has taken the trouble back at Berlin to have
20 this typed up in the large Fuhrer type
21 A. [Mr Irving]: Yes
22 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Somebody has taken the trouble to put it in front of
23 Himmler who has signed it as we see on its fourth page, my
24 Lord, that is page 9, and somebody has taken the trouble
25 to put it in front of Hitler
26 A. [Mr Irving]: Yes
. P-266
1 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Why should they do that
2 A. [Mr Irving]: Somebody has sent it to be put in front of Hitler, yes
3 Q. [Mr Rampton]: And you agree that the probability is that he saw it
4 A. [Mr Irving]: Yes
5 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Or that it was put in front of him
6 A. [Mr Irving]: Yes
7 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Why should they do that if they did not think he would
8 want to see it
9 A. [Mr Irving]: Because Hitler has personally given orders for the
10 security operations on the Eastern Front. Hitler at a
11 very early date after the operation Barbarossa began, the
12 attack on Russia, issued instructions to Heydrich that he
13 wanted to be kept regularly informed on the operations of
14 the Einsatzgruppen
15 Q. [Mr Rampton]: And on 1st August 1941 Mullar, the head of the Gestapo
16 told Einsatzgruppen that, did he not, or reminded
17 A. [Mr Irving]: Yes, that is correct. That is the document I am referring
18 to
19 Q. [Mr Rampton]: That is the beginning of the system, if I may call it
20 that, and this is one of the end results, is it not? That
21 is how the system matures
22 A. [Mr Irving]: We are trying to justify the word “systematic”
23 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Do not worry too much about what Mr Rampton
24 may or may not be trying to do
25 MR RAMPTON: It is not a joint exercise with you, Mr Irving
26 A. [Mr Irving]: I was in the dark as to what was contentious about this
. P-267
1 document, because I have actually used in document in my
2 book Hitler’s War, my Lord. I have given the data. I
3 have given the figures. I have reported it in detail.
4 There is no mystery about it. I have not tried to conceal
5 it the way that my opponents have concealed the documents
6 they do not like
7 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Mr Irving, I am not here representing your opponents
8 except in so far as you have sued some people for libel.
9 Beyond that I have no role
10 A. [Mr Irving]: You are representing my opponents
11 Q. [Mr Rampton]: In this case
12 A. [Mr Irving]: Yes
13 Q. [Mr Rampton]: What, you mean Professor Lipstadt has suppressed
14 documents, is that what you are trying to say
15 A. [Mr Irving]: You said I am not representing your opponent
16 Q. [Mr Rampton]: No, I am not. You said “in the way that my opponents have
17 suppressed documents”. I said I do not answer for those
18 opponents
19 A. [Mr Irving]: Those opponent you are not representing
20 Q. [Mr Rampton]: No, I do not represent them. Here is a document which
21 appears to represent a part of a systematic reporting to
22 Adolf Hitler about the numbers of people killed by the
23 Einsatzgruppen in the East
24 A. [Mr Irving]: I strongly disagree. This document is an orphan. Can you
25 produce to me one other document shown to Hitler with
26 figures of that magnitude reporting crimes on that scale
. P-268
1 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Earlier they would have been less. We do not have the
2 other 50 or do we
3 A. [Mr Irving]: I am saying that these reports —
4 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Have you got —
5 A. [Mr Irving]: No. What I am saying is that the other reports in the
6 Meldung series are not necessarily statistics. They may
7 be as I gave one example, a typical thing would be a
8 report on a two-man midget torpedo operation against the
9 Tirpitz where Himmler’s men had caught the British seamen
10 involved and had them executed and that would go to Hitler
11 as a meldung to the Fuhrer at exactly this time. So what
12 I am saying is that this kind of meldung with these kinds
13 of statistics to Hitler on an Einsatzgruppen operation is
14 an orphan. You cannot produce to me one similar document
15 in that series
16 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Have we got any of numbers 1 to 50
17 A. [Mr Irving]: I have at home, my Lord, yes
18 MR RAMPTON: Do they look like this? I am not saying the
19 wording is similar, but do they look like this
20 A. [Mr Irving]: No. This is just something that Himmler sent in because
21 he thought it is just as interesting to Hitler midget
22 torpedo operations or the rubber plant that he is working
23 on
24 Q. [Mr Rampton]: We are know at the end of 1942 with this document
25 A. [Mr Irving]: Yes, but you are trying to justify the system, the fact
26 that they were systematically put in on the basis of
. P-269
1 reports like this and I am saying this is the only such
2 report
3 Q. [Mr Rampton]: It is the only one which has survived
4 A. [Mr Irving]: No. There is a complete series
5 Q. [Mr Rampton]: How many are there in this form with a large Fuhrer type
6 A. [Mr Irving]: I have only seen one such report reporting statistics of
7 this kind. All the others are in the large Fuhrer type
8 Q. [Mr Rampton]: They are
9 A. [Mr Irving]: Yes, the ones about the two-man torpedoes and things like
10 that. They make fascinating reading. They are obviously
11 of great interest
12 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Would you suggest that that report to Hitler of 363,000
13 plus Jews executed in those eastern territories by the end
14 of 1942 bore no relation to the order that the
15 Einsatzgruppen should report to Hitler on the activities,
16 on their activities, on their work, in the East
17 A. [Mr Irving]: Yes, it may have born, and we know from the decoding
18 operations of the Einsatzgruppen regularly reported their
19 killing operations and there are enormous figures involved
20 in them
21 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Then, Mr Irving, can we face reality? There is an order
22 in August 1941 that these people shall report to the
23 Fuhrer on their activities
24 A. [Mr Irving]: The Fuhrer wishes to be kept constantly informed on the
25 Einsatzgruppen operations.
26 Q. [Mr Rampton]: That is right, he wishes to have continuous report
. P-270
1 A. [Mr Irving]: That is right
2 Q. [Mr Rampton]: In the result, as I have put it, in the result in December
3 1942 he gets just such a report
4 A. [Mr Irving]: Oh, I do not think you can say that because somebody gives
5 an order in August 1941 and a document turns up, what, 16
6 months later this is the result of that
7 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Why not
8 A. [Mr Irving]: It may have been but it may not
9 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Why not
10 A. [Mr Irving]: If it had turned up two weeks later then I would say yes
11 there is probably a very clear link between one and the
12 other
13 Q. [Mr Rampton]: If in August 1941 at the time that the Einsatzgruppen were
14 just starting their work there is an order in place that
15 the Fuhrer is to be supplied with regular reports of their
16 work, it is not at all surprising that by December 1942
17 that system is still in place and these reports are still
18 coming in, is it
19 A. [Mr Irving]: I disagree. Suppose in August 1941 you ask for a plumber
20 to come and fix a sink, and finally in December 1942 a
21 firm of plumbers contacts you and says, “here is an
22 estimate for fixing your sink”, it does not necessarily
23 mean there is any connection between them
24 Q. [Mr Rampton]: It is not a very good analogy, Mr Irving. I do not ask
25 the plumber for continuous plumbing over a period of time
26 all over a large part of Eastern Europe. Better keep off
. P-271
1 those sorts of analogies
2 A. [Mr Irving]: But then where are the other continuous reports,
3 Mr Rampton? I have not seen them
4 Q. [Mr Rampton]: No, I do not know where they are, Mr Irving
5 A. [Mr Irving]: This is one report
6 Q. [Mr Rampton]: But this is a report of some of the work of the
7 Einsatzgruppen in the East to be placed before the
8 Fuhrer
9 A. [Mr Irving]: But this was not the only task of Einsatzgruppen. The
10 Einsatzgruppen had a whole bunch of tasks they carried
11 out
12 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Mr Irving, I really do think that you ought
13 to consider the position. Hitler gives an order that he
14 wants to be kept regularly informed about the shootings by
15 the Einsatzgruppen
16 A. [Mr Irving]: No, he wants to be kept informed of the operations of the
17 Einsatzgruppen
18 MR RAMPTON: The work
19 MR JUSTICE GRAY: The work, whatever you like, kept informed.
20 That suggests he wants to be told on a repeated basis what
21 is going on
22 A. [Mr Irving]: Yes
23 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Are you suggesting that for some reason he countermanded
24 that order or that it was not obeyed or what
25 A. [Mr Irving]: No, I am not, but I am not saying that it is established
26 to my satisfaction at any rate that this document
. P-272
1 is — I am sure what the relevance is — that this
2 document is the direct product of that order
3 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Well, forget about whether it is the direct product.
4 Would you not think it a reasonable inference that there
5 would have been reports in one shape or form or another to
6 him reaching Hitler’s desk of the number of people being
7 shot by the Einsatzgruppen
8 A. [Mr Irving]: One would have expected it, but this is the only one we
9 have and this is what surprises us
10 Q. [Mr Rampton]: So you agree that one would expect that there would have
11 been other similar reports
12 A. [Mr Irving]: Yes, my Lord
13 MR RAMPTON: Mr Irving, let us look at it in a slightly
14 different way. If, as you have proposed on occasion, the
15 killings by the Einsatzgruppen in the East and some of the
16 police battalions and some of the local malitia were
17 merely, I say “merely” I do not mean to diminish what
18 happened, but in the sense of structure, merely criminal
19 acts by local maverick SS commanders and others, nobody
20 would have dreamed of putting this document before
21 Hitler,, would they
22 A. [Mr Irving]: You are regarding it in vacuo again. The episode which
23 I recounted was at the end of 1941. The clock has now
24 moved on one year, many things have happened. Germany has
25 started to lose. People are getting frantic. The tide has
26 turned as Churchill himself said, it was no longer the
. P-273
1 beginning of the end, but it was the end of the beginning
2 I think Churchill said. This was Stalingrad, it was
3 encircled, El Allgemeine, the battle had been won. The
4 Germans were now seeing the writing on the wall and it may
5 well be that Himmler thought this was a good time to show
6 this kind of thing to Hitler
7 Q. [Mr Rampton]: And for why
8 A. [Mr Irving]: Can I just remind you once again, this document is in my
9 books
10 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Yes. We are going to look at your books in some detail
11 further on down the road, not today, Mr Irving, except for
12 one remaining purpose
13 A. [Mr Irving]: That is what worries me about why we are spending the
14 court’s valuable time on looking at this document when
15 I have gone into in great detail in my book
16 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Because, Mr Irving, I think your position is that mass
17 killings —
18 A. [Mr Irving]: Yes
19 Q. [Mr Rampton]: — not by gas but by other means were not systematic
20 A. [Mr Irving]: I have said all along mass killings occurred on the
21 Eastern Front. This is the Eastern Front
22 Q. [Mr Rampton]: And then we started this little digression, if you
23 remember, by your asking me what I meant by “systematic”
24 A. [Mr Irving]: Yes
25 Q. [Mr Rampton]: I said and you agreed there are all those meldungs that go
26 back to Heydrich’s office
. P-274
1 A. [Mr Irving]: Halfway up the hierarchy
2 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Or whatever, but quite a long way up, halfway up the RHSA,
3 he is head of the RHSA in Berlin
4 A. [Mr Irving]: Yes
5 Q. [Mr Rampton]: He is quite close to Himmler
6 A. [Mr Irving]: Yes
7 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Who is quite close to Mr Hitler
8 A. [Mr Irving]: Yes
9 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Then this was another example designed only to illustrate
10 this, that a reputable historian might well conclude that
11 this document would not have surprised Adolf Hitler one
12 bit
13 A. [Mr Irving]: Might not have
14 Q. [Mr Rampton]: No. Well, surely, use your imagination, Mr Irving, if
15 I am Adolf Hitler I am king of the German world, as it
16 were, and this is put in front of me and it represents
17 something that I do not approve of, I am going to go
18 through the roof, am I not
19 A. [Mr Irving]: I do not say he did disapprove of the killings of the Jews
20 on the Eastern Front
21 Q. [Mr Rampton]: He did not
22 A. [Mr Irving]: He did in December 1941 in the case of the German Jews
23 being killed. He was quite plain. I mean Himmler sent
24 the message which the British decoded ordering the man
25 responsible to come immediately to headquarters, but the
26 killings on the Eastern Front of the Russian Jews and the
. P-275
1 others, Hitler did not care about them
2 Q. [Mr Rampton]: This is South Russia, the Ukraine and Bialystok which is
3 on the border then of Poland and Russia
4 A. [Mr Irving]: Still the Eastern Front according to my map
5 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Though by 1942 quite a long way behind the Eastern Front
6 A. [Mr Irving]: It is the rear Eastern Front area. It is the area in which
7 the SS still operated
8 Q. [Mr Rampton]: It is miles away. It is right over, well, as you say,
9 Stalingrad. This is the height of he battle for
10 Stalingrad
11 A. [Mr Irving]: But it is the area in the rear of the Eastern Front where
12 the Einsatzgruppen had h task of pacifying and cleansing
13 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Before I move on to something else, do you distinguish in
14 your own mind a sensitivity in Hitler towards the murder
15 of central or western Jews, German Jews, and the murder of
16 363,000 Eastern Jews
17 A. [Mr Irving]: I am not sure what that question means, but if I say that
18 one of his staff, Walter Havel, whose diary I had, said
19 that if you want to understand Hitler’s attitude to
20 humanity was the way that a man might look on an ant heap,
21 and that is how he regarded the Eastern peoples whether
22 they were Jewish or not, but he very definitely intervened
23 to stop the killing of German Jews at the time that
24 I specified. So there was clearly a distinction in his
25 own mind at that time
26 Q. [Mr Rampton]: We are talking about two events a year apart
. P-276
1 A. [Mr Irving]: Well, you are talking about two events a year apart. Also
2 you are talking about the giving of the order and the
3 receiving of meldung
4 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Yes, surely, but that is in a completely different
5 context, Mr Irving, as you very well know. You use what
6 you say as Hitler’s opposition to the Riga killings as
7 having some kind of relevance to this document. Tell me
8 what the relevance is
9 A. [Mr Irving]: Hitler clearly intervened, if we can assume that the fact
10 that the telephone call in the first place was made from
11 Hitler’s bunker, and if we know that the next day Himmler
12 was ordered to send or Himmler was required to send a
13 radio message to the man who had carried out the killings
14 telling him that he had overstepped the mark, that he had
15 to follow the guidelines in the future with outsettled
16 Jews, the ones sent from Germany, in other words, and this
17 is clearly an indication that German Jews were kept in a
18 different category because the killings then stopped as
19 the historians agree for several months as far as the
20 German Jews were concerned, but the killing operations of
21 non-German Jews behind the Eastern Front continued and
22 obviously, according to this document, on a huge scale.
23 I can only repeat why are we wasting our time looking at
24 this document which I have printed in my books, which
25 I agree is authentic, I am not going to challenge the
26 authenticity of it
. P-277
1 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Or the likely conclusion to be drawn from it that Hitler
2 will have seen it
3 A. [Mr Irving]: We have agreed that it is probable that given that is says
4 “forgaleg” it is probable that it was shown to Hitler
5 because that is the phrase they would have used
6 Q. [Mr Rampton]: You deny, however, that there is any evidence that the
7 shootings in East were systematic in the sense that they
8 got up and were approved, got up to and were approved by
9 the highest level
10 A. [Mr Irving]: To justify the word “systematic” I would want to not just
11 one out message and one in message which is all we have
12 separated by 18 months, I would want to see a flow of out
13 and in and out and in, in the way that we are accustomed
14 to seeing them in the archives
15 Q. [Mr Rampton]: You have read what I call in shorthand the EMs coming in
16 from the East to Heydrich’s office, have you not
17 A. [Mr Irving]: They go up to Heydrich’s office and hey are detailing
18 purely these security operations
19 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Security operations. I mean they list killings of
20 hundreds of thousands of Jews, as Jews, as Jews, not as
21 partisans
22 A. [Mr Irving]: Well, let us have a look at all the other ones and see how
23 they are categorized
24 Q. [Mr Rampton]: We will do
25 A. [Mr Irving]: I agree that the Jews are being brought in under that
26 umbrella. They are being killed under that camouflage
. P-278
1 Q. [Mr Rampton]: You are familiar with the Jager report, are you not
2 A. [Mr Irving]: Yes, but I very much hope we are going to have a look at
3 the original
4 Q. [Mr Rampton]: We are going to have a look at the original. We certainly
5 are
6 A. [Mr Irving]: It comes from the Russian archives
7 Q. [Mr Rampton]: I want to be sure, because I do not want to do you any
8 disservice at the end of this case. I want to make sure
9 I have your position clear. You do not accept that that
10 document, let alone its forerunner, you say it is not a
11 forerunner, back in August 1941 is any evidence that the
12 killings in the East by shooting, not by gassing, but the
13 killings in the East by shooting is any evidence at all
14 that this was a systematic process approved of at the
15 highest level of the Third Reich
16 A. [Mr Irving]: That is my position
Section 279.17 to 292.26
17 Q. [Mr Rampton]: I see. Thank you very much. Now I want to pass to
18 something different. What you will need now are copies of
19 your two books, 1991 Hitler’s War and Goebbels Master Mind
20 of the Third Reich. You will also need in case we need to
21 refer to it, a copy of your opening yesterday. You will
22 need D2 (i) (ii) and (iii). Forgive me, Mr Irving, I am
23 just trying to find the document. I apologise for that
24 pause, my Lord. Mr Irving, yesterday you made quite
25 something of this document from the PRO which records
26 statements made —
. P-279
1 A. [Mr Irving]: The Bruns document
2 Q. [Mr Rampton]: — by General Bruns but secretly recorded
3 A. [Mr Irving]: That is true
4 Q. [Mr Rampton]: You told us that this document has considerable
5 evidentiary value. It is not self-serving
6 A. [Mr Irving]: Not self-serving, yes
7 Q. [Mr Rampton]: And that it has the ring of truth from the phraseology and
8 the things he describes, is that right
9 A. [Mr Irving]: Yes, very similitude
10 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Yes. Do you have a copy of it with you or can you tell us
11 where to find it
12 A. [Mr Irving]: Well, the text is in my opening speech of course
13 Q. [Mr Rampton]: I will try to use the same version as you
14 A. [Mr Irving]: Page 22
15 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Yes, page 22
16 MR JUSTICE GRAY: It is not 100 per cent accurate I remember
17 noticing, but I do not think there is any real
18 difference
19 MR RAMPTON: I am just checking, my Lord, to see whether the
20 two little passages which I have are the same
21 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Yes, the one right at the end
22 MR RAMPTON: There is one, as your Lordship says, right at the
23 end. As far as I can tell at a quick glance, the words
24 which Mr Irving has printed in his speech are the same as
25 I have on the document. So perhaps we can use the
26 speech. In the middle of the page just below the middle
. P-280
1 of page 22, Mr Irving, General Bruns reports having, as it
2 were, been subjected to the experience of one of these
3 Riga shootings. He reports that a man called Altemeyer
4 said to him upon his protest at the use of, at the misuse
5 of he waste of valuable manpower, Altemeyer said: “Well,
6 let it be shot in accordance with the Fuhrer’s orders. I,
7 that is Bruns, said: Fuhrer’s orders? Answer from
8 Altemeyer: Yes. Whereupon he, Altemeyer, showed me,
9 Bruns, his orders.” Yes
10 A. [Mr Irving]: That is correct, yes
11 Q. [Mr Rampton]: That is what is in the PRO document. Therefore,
12 presumably, General Bruns actually said that
13 A. [Mr Irving]: Yes
14 Q. [Mr Rampton]: And was recorded as having said it by Allies. If you go
15 right to the end, the narrative is that they managed,
16 Bruns and his colleagues managed, to get back to Berlin,
17 perhaps to Canaris, an account of this shooting, perhaps
18 in the form of an objection, is that right
19 A. [Mr Irving]: My reading of the document was — in fact, we know also
20 from other sources — Gerald Fleming had done some very
21 good work on this particular episode, that an Army
22 Lieutenant wrote a report, having been sent down the road
23 to go and have a look for himself by these cowardly German
24 Generals, and this Army Lieutenant’s report was sent over
25 the Army Lieutenant’s name up to Hitler’s headquarters by
26 the route of Admiral Canaris who was the Head of the
. P-281
1 German Intelligence Service
2 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Can I start at the bottom of the next page 24 where
3 “Canaris” begins a line, do you see that
4 A. [Mr Irving]: Yes
5 Q. [Mr Rampton]: “Canaris had the unsavoury task of waiting for the
6 favourable moment to give the Fuhrer certain gentle
7 hints. A fortnight later I visited the Oberburgermeister,
8 or whatever he was called then, concerning some other
9 business. Altenmeyer(?) triumphantly showed me: ‘Here is
10 an order just issued prohibiting mass shootings on that
11 scale from taking place in future’. They are to be
12 carried out more discreetly.’ From warnings given me
13 recently, I knew that I was receiving still more
14 attentions from spies”, etc.
15 “They are to be carried more discreetly in
16 future” means the shootings are to be carried out more
17 discreetly in the future
18 A. [Mr Irving]: I would even go so far as to say mass shootings
19 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Yes. It does not mean that the mass shootings were to
20 come to an end, does it
21 A. [Mr Irving]: Not in that sentence, no
22 Q. [Mr Rampton]: What it means is that they must be more cleverly disguised
23 from anybody who might notice what was going on
24 A. [Mr Irving]: Yes
25 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Just whilst you are on that document, you
26 told us, I think, that Bruns would have been a Colonel
. P-282
1 A. [Mr Irving]: He was a Colonel at that time in the Engineer Corp. and he
2 was a Major-General at the time of his capture in 1945
3 Q. [Mr Rampton]: And Altenmeyer, presumably, was his superior officer
4 A. [Mr Irving]: No, sir. Altenmeyer, his real name was “Altemeyer”,
5 without an “n”, he was a 21 or 22 year-old very junior SS
6 officer who just happened to have the lives of these
7 unfortunate people in his power
8 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Hitler’s orders go to him before they go to the Colonel
9 A. [Mr Irving]: No, sir the orders went — I think the route was that
10 Hitler told Himmler, who sent the message to Joachim which
11 is what we talked about yesterday which we, British,
12 intercepted and decoded, so we had an inkling of what was
13 going on. Himmler said to Joachim, “Come straight to
14 headquarters, that it had to stop”.
15 In Himmler’s diary on December 1st 1941, the
16 following day, I noticed yesterday there is the telephone
17 call from Himmler to Heydrich on December 1st, SS
18 Obergruppenfuhrer Heydrich “Executzionan in Riga”, the
19 executions, the shootings, in other words, in Riga, they
20 talked about this very episode again on the day after it
21 happened; and when Joachim came — unfortunately, I cannot
22 show you this, my Lord, that bundle is still at home; we
23 know it from Himmler’s diary in Moscow — Joachim came to
24 see Himmler on December 4th. Himmler wrote in his diary
25 that evening that he dined with him at 9.30 p.m. and the
26 topic of their conversation which Himmler also noted was
. P-283
1 [German], Jewish question, and [German] “in Riga”, which
2 [German], economic businesses, small shops, something like
3 that, in Riga, which fits rather in with Bruns’
4 description, in my view, that these executions were
5 causing problems in the local economy because they were
6 running out of manpower, but that is a possible
7 interpretation of that.
8 But, obviously, there was a certain amount of
9 toing and froing from the very highest level down through
10 these channels down to this very low level SS Officer who
11 claims he received a Fuhrer order, if I may go into that,
12 when the army Colonel came to see him and said, “What on
13 earth is going on here?” and this very junior SS Officer
14 said, “Oh, it is the Fuhrer’s orders” which frequently was
15 said. Frequently people claimed they were Fuhrer’s
16 orders. We know, however, from our other sources (which
17 are much superior sources) that the Fuhrer’s orders were
18 distinctly very different in this case [German] “No
19 liquidation”
20 MR JUSTICE GRAY: But Bruns says that Altemeyer showed him the
21 orders
22 A. [Mr Irving]: Yes, I do not attach too much importance to that, my Lord
23 MR RAMPTON: Well, in considering all the other trappings of
24 verisimilitude that this —
25 A. [Mr Irving]: I thought you might mention that, actually
26 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Of course I might mention it. It is obvious, is it not
. P-284
1 A. [Mr Irving]: Yes, but the problem we have with that, Mr Rampton, is how
2 do you reconcile in with the kind of [German] in Himmler’s
3 own notes what Hitler told him, Jew transport, no
4 liquidation
5 Q. [Mr Rampton]: You have never shown us any evidence, shall I say, or any
6 of your readers that Himmler [German] came from Hitler
7 A. [Mr Irving]: It is coming from Hitler’s bunker, from a phone booth in
8 Hitler’s bunker, just as if I made a phone call from that
9 phone booth outside
10 Q. [Mr Rampton]: But as I think you have accepted on your web site an hour
11 before Himmler met Hitler
12 A. [Mr Irving]: But he was in and out all day. When you visited Hitler in
13 his headquarters, you would have lunch with him, you would
14 have tea with him, you would be in and out of Hitler’s
15 bunker all day
16 Q. [Mr Rampton]: The entry in his log for that day — it is not a diary,
17 except in the most primitive sense — in Himmler’s log,
18 the only entry referring to Hitler is, I think, 1430,
19 [German] or something along those —
20 A. [Mr Irving]: Yes, I agree entirely with what you say, Mr Rampton, but
21 I have to say that if he drives over to Hitler’s
22 headquarters and, for whatever reason, finds it necessary
23 suddenly to telephone Heydrich and say, “That transport of
24 Jews from Berlin is not to be liquidated”, it is a very
25 reasonable interpretation indeed to say this is not
26 unconnected with the fact that he is speaking from
. P-285
1 Hitler’s bunker. And it would be perverse not to accept
2 that
3 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Mr Irving, bear with me. I do wish that one could insert
4 the word “objective” into every answer you give. It is a
5 possibly, certainly, that Himmler spoke to Hitler before
6 he made that telephone call. That is quite different, is
7 it not, from an assertion that the telephone call was made
8 on Hitler’s orders
9 A. [Mr Irving]: I agree, I agree
10 Q. [Mr Rampton]: And you have asserted the latter, have you not
11 A. [Mr Irving]: I agree, it is a judgment call, and it is a judgment call
12 which — may I speak? It is a judgment which, in my
13 submission, is entirely justified. If Himmler drives over
14 to Hitler’s bunker in the train, [German] makes a few
15 phone calls and then [German], from the bunker, from
16 Hitler’s Wolf’s Lair bunker, he makes a phone call to
17 Heydrich saying, “That train load of Jews is not to be
18 liquidated”, it would take a very perverse and obtuse
19 person indeed to say there is no connection between the
20 two facts
21 Q. [Mr Rampton]: May I suggest that what an objective, reputable historian
22 who was not punting a particular line to exonerate Adolf
23 Hitler might have written would be something like this:
24 The evidence is that Himmler saw Hitler about an hour
25 after he made that telephone call. There is no direct
26 evidence that Himmler spoke to Hitler before he made the
. P-286
1 telephone call. It is possible that that telephone call
2 was made at Hitler’s instigation
3 A. [Mr Irving]: Yes
4 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Yes
5 A. [Mr Irving]: Why did he make the phone call from Hitler’s bunker then
6 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Because he happened to be there for heavens sake
7 A. [Mr Irving]: Why did he not make the phone call from his own
8 headquarters? I do not want to say that I am less obtuse
9 than you, but I am beginning to suspect it in this
10 matter. It is not a question of reputable or not. It is
11 a question of seeing a logical solution written in six
12 inch letters in front of your own face
13 Q. [Mr Rampton]: I see
14 MR JUSTICE GRAY: My impression, I think it is relevant on this
15 topic, from your book Hitler’s War is that at this time
16 Himmler was seeing Hitler almost more often than anybody
17 else
18 A. [Mr Irving]: Very frequently as we know now from his diary and
19 telephone log, but you will appreciate that particular
20 episode because it is a pivotal episode has now gone
21 through three or four different chameleon like changes
22 with very subtle refinements and a word knocked out here
23 which cannot be justified and so on, as happens. One is
24 constantly revising history. This does not mean to say
25 one is manipulating or is in any way trying to exonerate.
26 You are trying to get closer and closer and closer to the
. P-287
1 likelihood of what actually happened
2 MR RAMPTON: Mr Irving, tell me plainly, we are off course
3 again but it does not matter, we will get back on course
4 in a moment, tell me plainly what is the evidence for
5 this, this is in the 1991 edition —
6 A. [Mr Irving]: Right
7 Q. [Mr Rampton]: And you have repeated it since. I think you repeat it in
8 the appendices or the footnotes to Goebbels, these words:
9 “On 30th November he, Himmler, was summoned to the Wolf’s
10 lair”, pause there. Sorry, page 427
11 A. [Mr Irving]: I am looking at my Himmler diary because I know what you
12 are going to say next
13 Q. [Mr Rampton]: I expect you know it off by heart
14 MR JUSTICE GRAY: I am sorry
15 MR RAMPTON: It is D1 (v). It is Hitler’s War second volume,
16 1991 edition
17 A. [Mr Irving]: What is the evidence for —
18 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Wait a minute. I am waiting until his Lordship has the
19 volume
20 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Yes
21 A. [Mr Irving]: What page of Hitler’s War is it? This is the new
22 edition
23 MR RAMPTON: Now you can help me with some German perhaps in a
24 moment. It is the new edition. It is changed from the
25 1977 edition in that you have conceded that the Himmler
26 order concerned but a single train load of Jews
. P-288
1 A. [Mr Irving]: Yes
2 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Instead of Jews in general
3 A. [Mr Irving]: Yes
4 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Can you first of all explain why it was that in the 1977
5 edition this passage referred to Jews in general
6 A. [Mr Irving]: It was a silly misreading of the word. If I show you the
7 actual handwriting —
8 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Yes, it is printed in the book, is it not
9 MR JUSTICE GRAY: I think you said you misread, you could not
10 read the handwriting of Himmler
11 A. [Mr Irving]: Perhaps I would like to show to his Lordship what the
12 handwriting of Heydrich Himmler looks like
13 MR RAMPTON: Your Lordship will find it in this —
14 A. [Mr Irving]: I have a reasonable facsimile of the original here. He
15 wrote a particularly nasty form Gothic spiky handwriting
16 which modern Germans cannot read either. You could show
17 that document to several Germans in this room, unless they
18 were the older generation, they would not be able to read
19 it. It is pretty horrific. I admit I made a mistake in
20 the transcription. I was paying more attention to the
21 position of the full stops in the lines which are quite
22 important
23 MR RAMPTON: Yes. I have it somewhere here. You actually
24 printed a facsimile of that page in both the editions, did
25 you not
26 MR JUSTICE GRAY: It is in the following page 506
. P-289
1 A. [Mr Irving]: It would be remarkable if when one transcribes a lot of
2 that handwriting one does not occasionally miss out a
3 letter E or something like that.
4 MR RAMPTON: When printing that as a facsimile in your editions
5 Hitler’s War, you would not expect your ordinary English
6 reader to be able to decipher what it said
7 A. [Mr Irving]: I would be very surprised if they could decipher that
8 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Even if they knew German
9 A. [Mr Irving]: Older generation Germans can read that, prewar
10 generations
11 Q. [Mr Rampton]: But your ordinary English reader, these books are
12 published primarily in English, are they not
13 A. [Mr Irving]: No. My books are published in every language in the
14 world
15 Q. [Mr Rampton]: I know, but are they written in English originally
16 A. [Mr Irving]: This one was, yes. I have written books in German too
17 Q. [Mr Rampton]: As you fairly concede even a modern German might struggle
18 with that unless they had the old handwriting
19 A. [Mr Irving]: The point I am trying to make is that this is not
20 manipulation on my part. It is not manipulation or
21 distortion. It is a traffic accident, shall we say
22 Q. [Mr Rampton]: I have to disagree with you. I do not have any training
23 of the German language. I have relatively poor eyesight.
24 I look at the word on the page and it quite plainly does
25 not have an E on the end of it, does it
26 A. [Mr Irving]: No
. P-290
1 Q. [Mr Rampton]: It is perfectly clear
2 A. [Mr Irving]: I now see that, yes
3 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Why did you put an E on it? Were you in a terrible hurry
4 or very tired or something when you wrote this
5 A. [Mr Irving]: You are asking me to recall. This was actually written in
6 1970. We are looking at something 30 years ago you and
7 you are asking me why I had an E on the end of a word
8 which I wrote 30 years ago
9 Q. [Mr Rampton]: I will tell you why I am suggesting it was deliberate,
10 Mr Irving, for a number of reasons which are cumulative,
11 but one which is very closely related. There are two
12 closely related reasons. The first we are coming back to
13 in a moment which is the way you have handled he Bruns
14 testimony, but the other is in relation to the entry for
15 the following day, 1st December 1941, where for some
16 reason best known to yourself, and of course we shall need
17 to hear your explanation, you translate the words
18 “[German] SS” as Jews
19 A. [Mr Irving]: No.
20 Q. [Mr Rampton]: That cannot be a misreading, can it
21 A. [Mr Irving]: I misread the word “harbun” for “uden” and I have it here
22 in front of me and I will show that to his Lordship
23 Q. [Mr Rampton]: What have you got in front of you
24 A. [Mr Irving]: Himmler’s diary, the actual handwritten page
25 Q. [Mr Rampton]: We have not got that. We would like to see it. May we
26 see it
. P-291
1 A. [Mr Irving]: Had I known you were going to attach importance to I would
2 have provided you with any number of copies
3 Q. [Mr Rampton]: You would have heard in my opening speech that I attach
4 some importance to it
5 A. [Mr Irving]: I am terribly sorry, but I had actually prepared a dozen
6 facsimiles of this to bring in tomorrow in a bundle
7 Q. [Mr Rampton]: In fairness to you and perhaps to me we should leave it
8 where it is until we get the facsimile
9 A. [Mr Irving]: Yes. I did envisage that I would have the running of this
10 and that we would be looking at my bundle of stuff
11 tomorrow
12 Q. [Mr Rampton]: The running of what, your cross-examination
13 A. [Mr Irving]: I had not —
14 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Shall I sit down
15 A. [Mr Irving]: — envisaged that I would envisioned I would be standing
16 up for cross-examination today. Had I known that I would
17 not have worked to 6 o’clock this morning preparing
18 bundles
19 MR JUSTICE GRAY: You can blame me for that
20 MR RAMPTON: That said, my Lord and since he was up until 6
21 o’clock —
22 MR JUSTICE GRAY: ! I agree with what you are about to say.
23 I think you have had quite a long day. 10.30 tomorrow
24 morning
25 (The court adjourned until the following day)
26
. P-292