Day 29 Transcript: Holocaust Denial on Trial
Part I: Initial Proceedings (1.1 to 12.2)
1 IN THE HIGH COURT OF JUSTICE
1996 I. No. 113
QUEEN’S BENCH DIVISION
2 Royal Courts of Justice
3 Strand, London
4 Thursday, 2nd March 2000
5
6 Before:
7 MR JUSTICE GRAY
8
9 B E T W E E N: DAVID JOHN CAWDELL IRVING
10 Claimant -and-
11 (1) PENGUIN BOOKS LIMITED
12 (2) DEBORAH E. LIPSTADT
13 Defendants
14 The Claimant appeared in person
15 MR RICHARD RAMPTON Q.C. (instructed by Messrs Davenport Lyons and Mishcon de Reya) appeared on behalf of the First and
16 Second Defendants
17 MISS HEATHER ROGERS (instructed by Davenport Lyons) appeared on behalf of the First Defendant Penguin Books Limited
18 MR ANTHONY JULIUS (of Mishcon de Reya) appeared on behalf of
19 the Second Defendant Deborah Lipstadt
20
21 (Transcribed from the stenographic notes of Harry Counsell
& Company, Clifford’s Inn, Fetter Lane, London EC4
22 Telephone: 020-7242-9346)
23 (This transcript is not to be reproduced without the written permission of Harry
Counsell & Company)
24
25 PROCEEDINGS – DAY TWENTY-NINE
26
. P-1
1 (10.30 a.m.)
2 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Mr Rampton and Mr Irving, before we start
3 today, I wonder if I can hand to you now a list of
4 issues?
5 MR IRVING: Yes.
6 MR JUSTICE GRAY: I think I did mention earlier that it might
7 be helpful — it is up to both of you — if we could
8 perhaps take the issues in more or less the order in which
9 I have set them out, if that is not inconvenient? I also
10 want to make sure that I have got everything in that
11 I need to cover, and that I have not included things that
12 really are no longer live issues. Do not take time with
13 it now.
14 MR RAMPTON: No, I will not. There is one item in (i) of four
15 which is still to come today from Evans, which will need
16 to be added.
17 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Yes. It is just that either at a later stage
18 today, or perhaps tomorrow, it might be worth spending a
19 few minutes just going through that.
20 MR RAMPTON: I do not think I will finish my cross-examination
21 today.
22 MR IRVING: That is very useful, my Lord. There are four or
23 five minor points that I wish to raise before Mr Rampton
24 resumes.
25 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Yes.
26 MR IRVING: The first point is that I have repeatedly asked the
. P-2
1 Defence to provide me with the speeches, the transcripts
2 on disk, most recently about 10 days ago by letter. It
3 would obviously assist me in responding to and rebutting
4 these juicy morsels that they are tossed out of their cage
5 into the courtroom, like yesterday. If I had such a thing
6 on disk, and I am entitled to it of course under the
7 rules, once the documents have been pleaded, I am entitled
8 to have them in digital form. There is no reason for this
9 delay other than a deliberate and wilful attempt to impede
10 my response.
11 MR JUSTICE GRAY: So that I am clear what you are asking for,
12 is it a disk containing the speeches that you have made
13 that the Defendants rely on?
14 MR IRVING: No, it is a disk containing the transcripts. They
15 are put into court by way of their pleadings in evidence.
16 Obviously it exists in digital form. It is no great
17 burden on them. It is five minutes work to do, just
18 pressing one button. They could have done this 10 days
19 ago, if not, indeed, when I first asked for them.
20 MR JUSTICE GRAY: It does not sound an unreasonable request.
21 MR RAMPTON: I have no idea. I do not deal in disks, I am
22 afraid. I deal in paper. I will pass on that request.
23 I am surprised it has not been responded to. If it is
24 anybody’s fault, I apologise for it on their behalf. If
25 these transcripts — and I think Mr Irving means the
26 transcripts that are in the K files —-
. P-3
1 MR IRVING: Yes.
2 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Yes, which is racism, anti-Semitism, or
3 allegedly so.
4 MR RAMPTON: — which are mostly his own words. If they are on
5 a disk, which I imagine they must be, then by all means,
6 if it is easier.
7 MR JUSTICE GRAY: I think I know they are on disk because I am
8 not — well, anyway, if it can be done, it should be done
9 soon because Mr Irving needs it.
10 MR RAMPTON: If it is possible, it should be done before the
11 weekend.
12 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Before the weekend, I agree, yes.
13 MR IRVING: A not unrelated matter is that the Defence
14 solicitors are still sitting on a number of my microfilms
15 and papers. They keep promising to return them. When
16 they returned my previous boxes of papers, they returned
17 them in a totally disheveled state, which has not assisted
18 me —-
19 MR JUSTICE GRAY: That is something I do not really want to get
20 into now. Raise that, but perhaps at a later stage.
21 MR IRVING: The third point, my Lord, is the Eichmann
22 manuscripts. I gave the undertaking which your Lordship
23 very properly required. The manuscript has now been
24 placed in the public domain. It is on, for example, the
25 website of Der Spiegel and elsewhere. I would ask that
26 the undertaking which I gave should now be rescinded or
. P-4
1 annulled, if Mr Rampton has no objection, in order that I
2 am not—-
3 MR JUSTICE GRAY: I suspect he may not really know the score on
4 that.
5 MR RAMPTON: I do not know the score. I am told that that
6 version, which is the electronic version, that came to us
7 from the Israeli Government cannot be used for any purpose
8 but this trial. If it is on some website or other, then
9 perhaps we can have our disk back so we can give it back
10 to the Israeli Government, and people can use the public
11 domain copy.
12 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Well …
13 MR IRVING: Without wanting to compare the public domain
14 version word for word with the version given to me, I see
15 that it has been published in the Guardian yesterday, for
16 example.
17 MR JUSTICE GRAY: I have seen reports which make it appear that
18 you may be right.
19 MR IRVING: Having given the undertaking —-
20 MR JUSTICE GRAY: What I am not in a position to judge is
21 whether the whole of it is in now in the public domain.
22 If the whole of it is, then it seems to me that you should
23 be released from your, undertaking, but I am not going to
24 release you now. I do not think this is really in a way
25 Mr Rampton’s problem.
26 MR RAMPTON: My problem is that I am merely the conduit pipe
. P-5
1 for this material. I gave my own personal undertaking in
2 order to get the material released; I do not really feel I
3 can break it.
4 MR JUSTICE GRAY: To save time, what I am inclined to say is
5 this. It does appear to me that there is good reason for
6 supposing that it is in the public domain. If that be
7 right, I do not see it is realistic to maintain the
8 undertaking. I am therefore inclined to think it should
9 be lifted, but I would like to give an opportunity to
10 whoever it may be to make representations, whether through
11 you or in some other way.
12 MR IRVING: I do not want to be held in contempt.
13 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Of course you do not, but the undertaking
14 will stay until tomorrow morning. If somebody tomorrow
15 morning wants to say that the undertaking should remain in
16 place, I will hear argument then.
17 MR IRVING: My Lord, tomorrow is Friday.
18 MR JUSTICE GRAY: I know, but I suspect your cross-examination
19 is going to continue until tomorrow.
20 MR RAMPTON: I do not know that there is going to be any
21 difficulty at all. The only difficulty I can see, and it
22 is mere conjecture, is that there may be parts of the
23 electronic version which has been given to Mr Irving for
24 the purposes of this case and no other purpose. There may
25 be parts of that which are not in the copy which has been
26 released.
. P-6
1 MR JUSTICE GRAY: That may be.
2 MR RAMPTON: — in which case I would have to maintain my
3 position so far as those other parts are concerned.
4 MR JUSTICE GRAY: I am bound to say I am not sure that
5 I understand why the Eichmann diaries are relevant
6 because, if they were not, and they by definition were
7 not, available to Mr Irving, I am not sure how they can be
8 used by way of criticism.
9 MR RAMPTON: I may say I rather agree with that. It is not my
10 intention contention today at any rate to make any
11 reference to them in this court. The fact is they do
12 contain, as anybody can see if they read the public
13 report, some statements made in 1960 something which, if
14 reliable, demolish Holocaust denial really at one fell
15 swoop, but so what.
16 MR JUSTICE GRAY: I can see that there is a way in which they
17 could be capable of being used in this trial, but I will
18 leave you to take whatever course you think is right.
19 MR RAMPTON: My present inclination, I am not saying it is the
20 final inclination, is that this is something for the
21 historians to argue about, rather than the lawyers in this
22 court, but I will reserve my position for the present at
23 least, if I may. I do not know, Mr Irving may have
24 further things?
25 MR JUSTICE GRAY: I think there is one other point.
26 MR IRVING: There are two other points, my Lord. One is the
. P-7
1 video of the Halle meeting on 9th November 1991. I wish
2 to make submissions to your Lordship next week about the
3 admissibility of that video, because it was the subject of
4 a bitter dispute between myself and the instructing
5 solicitors for the Defendants. It was a matter of
6 withheld discovery, fraudulently withheld discovery. In
7 fact, I was reminded of this by the OSS this morning.
8 I put a complaint into the OSS over undertakings broken by
9 the solicitors, and so on.
10 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Who are the OSS?
11 MR IRVING: Offices for the Supervision of Solicitors in
12 Leamington Spa; a rather toothless body which watches over
13 malfunctions by solicitors. So I would like permission to
14 make a submission about the admissibility of the video as
15 such.
16 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Yes. Do that when you like. In some ways it
17 ought to be perhaps done sooner rather than later.
18 MR IRVING: I had prepared a little bundle on this many, many
19 weeks ago and I was just reminded of this actual matter
20 this morning by this phone call from the OSS.
21 The final matter is the little bundle I put
22 before your Lordship headed “Documents on Mr Irving’s 1991
23 arrest”.
24 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Yes.
25 MR IRVING: This is the Lowenbraukeller meeting. It is a
26 matter of my truthfulness, whether I am right or whether
. P-8
1 the Defence submissions are correct, namely that I was a
2 participant in an illegal demonstration or not. These are
3 three or four documents on the police file which contain
4 the statement that was made at the time of arrest and so
5 on, which I have summarised in the two-page translation at
6 this beginning. Either your Lordship can say now that you
7 attach no importance to the issue of the submissions made
8 yesterday as to whether I was telling the truth or not.
9 It bulked quite large in the cross-examination but your
10 Lordship may very well say you attach no importance to it.
11 If your Lordship does attach importance to it, then
12 I would ask permission to put these documents to Professor
13 Funke, who is in the court this morning.
14 MR JUSTICE GRAY: I do not think it matters a row of beans
15 whether it was an illegal demonstration, or whether it was
16 not.
17 MR IRVING: I agree, my Lord.
18 MR JUSTICE GRAY: The relevance, as it appears to me —-
19 MR IRVING: The question is my truthfulness.
20 MR JUSTICE GRAY: — is simply whether you did either
21 participate in, or in some other way associate yourself
22 with, the demonstration that one sees on the video.
23 MR IRVING: I appreciate that point, my Lord, but the other
24 point is my truthfulness. If I state something which is
25 then disbelieved by the Defence and they maintain their
26 position despite my several invitations to accept that
. P-9
1 they are wrong, and here are the documents that clearly
2 show from the police files that I am right, namely what
3 time it was, the fact that it was an hour after the
4 function in the Lowenbraukeller ended that I was
5 apprehended, the fact that we were heading northwards, so
6 to speak —-
7 MR JUSTICE GRAY: What I am going to do, subject to Mr Rampton,
8 is — I do not know whether he is going to cross-examine
9 you about this?
10 MR RAMPTON: No.
11 MR JUSTICE GRAY: I do not think there is any reason — I do
12 not think it has anything do with Professor Funke. He was
13 not there. I do not see any reason why you should not
14 very shortly, as it were, put this in evidence through
15 your own mouth, as it were, or indeed by way of
16 submission, I do not mind.
17 MR IRVING: Very well.
18 MR JUSTICE GRAY: That can be done either straightaway or it
19 can be done later on. Mr Rampton, I do not know whether
20 you are going to touch on this in cross-examination?
21 MR RAMPTON: No. For the most part, right-wing extremism to my
22 way of thing, has been done and dusted. I have very
23 little cross-examination left on that, and it certainly
24 does not concern Germany. As to these new document, I am
25 completely neutral because I do not know what they say.
26 MR JUSTICE GRAY: That suggests to me that probably this ought
. P-10
1 to be done at a later stage.
2 MR IRVING: By way of submission.
3 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Perhaps first thing tomorrow or at the end of
4 cross-examination tomorrow, if we go into tomorrow.
5 MR RAMPTON: I will need to have them looked at by German
6 speakers in the usual way.
7 MR IRVING: There are two or three more letters from me to
8 German Embassies and people like that, which show that
9 I went about things in a perfectly proper way, asking
10 whether the bodies that invited me to speak were legal and
11 lawful and constitutional and so on.
12 MR JUSTICE GRAY: We do not want to get disproportionate about
13 it.
14 MR RAMPTON: I would only say this about that kind of material,
15 whether it advances the matter one way or another, I
16 rather doubt, but self-serving protests by Mr Irving are
17 not evidence that it did not happen.
18 MR JUSTICE GRAY: I appreciate that.
19 MR IRVING: I did not catch that, but it is my veracity which
20 I am concerned about that.
21 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Yes. You are obviously concerned about that.
22 I have indicated the way I think we ought to deal with it
23 so we will leave it until tomorrow. That concludes the
24 points you wanted to raise?
25 MR IRVING: Yes.
26 MR JUSTICE GRAY: I think the next step is for you to go into
. P-11
1 the witness box, please. You are obviously still under
2 oath.
Part II: Rampton Cross-Examines Irving, morning session (12.3 to 106.25)
Section 12.3 to 37.24
3 MR RAMPTON: My Lord, before I start, I announce the first
4 thing, if I may, that I am going to do. Your Lordship
5 will remember the short sequence we had from the
6 negationists, or whatever you call it, meeting at Hagenau
7 in Azas in November 1989, and the reference to the sedan
8 chair and the telephone box. What I am now going to do,
9 with your Lordship’s leave, is show a short section from a
10 speech that Mr Irving made at Milton, Ontario, on 5th
11 October 1991, that is to say almost two years after the
12 Hagenau event. Its transcript is at K3, tab 10.
13 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Is this what is called the Moers speech?
14 MR RAMPTON: No, it is not Moers. This is Milton, Ontario,
15 which I think is in Canada. It is more of the same. Then
16 I shall ask Mr Irving some questions about it in the light
17 of the questions he asked Professor Funke yesterday.
18 < Mr Irving, recalled.
19 < Cross-Examined by Mr Rampton QC continued.
20 MR RAMPTON: My Lord, I think the relevant part of the
21 transcript is pages 17 and 18. Have I got that right?
22 The television seems to be defunct.
23 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Do we need to start with this, Mr Rampton?
24 MR RAMPTON: It is a question of continuity, and it is fresh in
25 everybody’s mind from yesterday. I find it difficult to
26 cross-examine with the witness box overrun by
. P-12
1 technicians!
2 (Video played)
3 MR RAMPTON: Stop there, thank you. Mr Irving, that is the
4 same story in a rather more expanded version that you told
5 to your audience at Hagenau in November 1989, is it not?
6 A. [Mr Irving]: Yes.
7 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Where does it come from?
8 A. [Mr Irving]: There are — which ones are you talking about? The
9 conveyor belts, the swimming pool, the electric shock that
10 comes from Pravda, February 1945?
11 Q. [Mr Rampton]: No, Mr Irving.
12 A. [Mr Irving]: There is a whole bundle of these, there is a whole series
13 of these eyewitness accounts which have been given in
14 various postwar trials, 1945, 1946, 1947. These are the
15 accounts that are not quoted by the Holocaust historians
16 for obvious reasons.
17 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Where did the telephone box come from?
18 A. [Mr Irving]: Which part of the story are you asking for, about the box,
19 the one man —-
20 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Telephone box.
21 MR RAMPTON: The telephone box?
22 A. [Mr Irving]: The telephone box?
23 Q. [Mr Rampton]: The telephone box. “Well, the answer is”, says Irving,
24 “it is disguised as a telephone box, this one man gas
25 chamber. This is the mentality of the people who invent
26 these eyewitness stories. It is a disguised as a
. P-13
1 telephone and if I am a man who has escaped from
2 Auschwitz, a harrowing experience, and I am standing
3 around in the Polish countryside and suddenly a telephone
4 box” —-
5 A. [Mr Irving]: Appears from nowhere, yes.
6 Q. [Mr Rampton]: — “where there was not one a few minutes ago and two
7 German soldiers standing around looking like nothing,
8 nothing is going to get me inside that phone box. The
9 eyewitnesses, plural, say they got you to get inside by
10 having the phone inside ringing”. Where does that little
11 anecdote come from? How many sources?
12 A. [Mr Irving]: The phone ringing is an embellishment. But the disguised
13 as a telephone box is in the eyewitness account.
14 Q. [Mr Rampton]: How many eyewitness accounts and who were the people that
15 told those stories?
16 A. [Mr Irving]: Alleged survivors of Auschwitz.
17 Q. [Mr Rampton]: How many?
18 A. [Mr Irving]: Certainly one account.
19 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Eyewitnesses, plural?
20 A. [Mr Irving]: That, obviously, is a slip of the tongue.
21 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Yes, it is not. It is a deliberate exaggeration, is it?
22 You got some good laughs with this little story?
23 A. [Mr Irving]: I think it is such a ludicrous story and it so clearly
24 exaggerates the problem, it so clearly illustrates the
25 problem with the eyewitness accounts of Auschwitz —-
26 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Oh, really?
. P-14
1 A. [Mr Irving]: — this and the other similar accounts. There is the
2 conveyor belt, there is the swimming pool, there is the
3 electric shock, there is the killed in steam chambers, all
4 these stories which come out of the earlier accounts, if
5 you read the account published by Pravda, I think on
6 February 2nd 1945, there is the first description of the
7 conveyor belt. These are never quoted by the modern
8 historians. Even the Gerstein report that you have which
9 is an alleged eyewitness account had, of course, 130 foot
10 high mountain of shoes. These details need to be brought
11 to the attention of the public so they can see what the
12 problem is and how selectively the historians use the
13 eyewitness accounts. They take the ones that they like
14 and they ignore the ones that are obviously baloney.
15 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Mr Irving, do you see any purpose in a serious historian,
16 I mean a serious, reputable historian, reciting simply for
17 the purpose of knocking it over, a story, if it indeed is
18 a story, which is quite obviously untrue?
19 A. [Mr Irving]: Well, as we have heard in this court, Mr Rampton, the
20 factory of death story, as far as crematorium (ii) in
21 Auschwitz is concerned, relies on three legs, it is a
22 stool with three legs, one is the eyewitnesses, one is the
23 discrepancies between the blueprints or the architectural
24 drawings and the other one is the German documentation.
25 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Quite a lot more than that.
26 A. [Mr Irving]: Well, you will have time to say that when you make your
. P-15
1 closing speech. If the eyewitnesses turn out to be partly
2 baloney, and they are a body of evidence that, in my
3 opinion, should, therefore, be discounted, I am entitled
4 to make this point as forcefully as I can by drawing
5 attention to the ludicrous elements contained by some of
6 the eyewitness accounts.
7 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Did you tell this audience about the evidence, the
8 eyewitness testimony, of Henrich Tauber, for example?
9 A. [Mr Irving]: Probably at that time it was not known to me, but I would
10 certainly have done so and I would have drawn attention to
11 the discrepancies in his account as well.
12 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Why do you think your audience in Milton, Ontario, find
13 these little anecdotes, fables, if you like, so funny?
14 A. [Mr Irving]: There are two ways of addressing an audience. One is in
15 an academic climate where you are enveloped in professors’
16 robes and speaking to students who have no obligation but
17 to sit there with their notepads on their lap, and then
18 you can dictate to them all the documents and all the
19 material you want until the bell rings and it is time for
20 them to go out.
21 The other way is to make or deliver a talk or a
22 lecture in such a manner that you capture and hold your
23 audience’s attention, and you do that repeatedly by
24 interlacing the serious documents that you want them to
25 listen to with material to keep them awake, if I can put
26 it like that.
. P-16
1 Q. [Mr Rampton]: How long, is it, Mr Irving, since any, if ever, reputable
2 historian has paid any attention whatsoever to this kind
3 of material?
4 A. [Mr Irving]: I would say within living memory shall we say within four
5 weeks in this very courtroom we have listened to account
6 after account from Professor van Pelt who relies on Ade
7 Bimco, who relies on Henrich Tauber, who has relied on
8 five or six eyewitness, all of whom have elements of total
9 distortion. Ludicrous elements. For example, the
10 Gerstein report. Ludicrous elements contained in their —
11 Christopher Brown, he had to put back into the Gerstein
12 report the stuff that he had omitted, the mountains of
13 shoes and shirts, and these ludicrous elements which
14 disqualify the eyewitness from any source value
15 whatsoever, just as they disqualified finally
16 the allegation that there were gas chambers in Dachau.
17 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Like your old chum Karl Wolff, for example?
18 A. [Mr Irving]: I have never met Karl Wolff in my life except once when he
19 was pushed under my nose by a Sunday Times cameraman at a
20 function in Schattenburg.
21 Q. [Mr Rampton]: An eyewitness in some sense to the events in this part of
22 German history, would you agree?
23 A. [Mr Irving]: Well, I do not understand. What is the question?
24 Q. [Mr Rampton]: You rely on him to exculpate Hitler, so far as the
25 conversation, reported conversation, between him and
26 Himmler in August 1942 is concerned, do you not?
. P-17
1 A. [Mr Irving]: I relied on Karl Wolff who was the adjutant of Heinrich
2 Himmler for a period of about 10 or 15 years, if my memory
3 serves me right, who wrote in this confidential manuscript
4 an account of his own personal impressions of the
5 character and nature of this rather weird man, Heinrich
6 Himmler, who came from humble origins and turned into one
7 of history’s biggest mass killers. He was an interesting,
8 obviously a man very well placed, Karl Wolff, to describe
9 Heinrich Himmler in his underpants, so to speak.
10 Q. [Mr Rampton]: You put that passage from Karl Wolff’s interrogation in
11 1952 —–
12 A. [Mr Irving]: Yes.
13 Q. [Mr Rampton]: — by Dr von Siegler, I think his name was, before this
14 court because you wanted to rely on a single passage where
15 Karl Wolff, effectively, in your eyes, exculpates Adolf
16 Hitler in relation to the Holocaust, is that not what you
17 did?
18 A. [Mr Irving]: No. I put it before the court because I am accused of
19 having invented or manipulated or distorted without any
20 fundamental or documentary basis whatsoever, and I cannot
21 help it if your historians and experts either did not know
22 of these sources or knew of them but decided not to use
23 them.
24 Q. [Mr Rampton]: In your eyes, is Karl Wolff a reliable witness?
25 A. [Mr Irving]: In some respects he is and in some respects he is not.
26 Q. [Mr Rampton]: So when he talks in unvarnished terms about the Juden
. P-18
1 ausrottung, the extermination of the Jews — your
2 translation — is he reliable or not?
3 A. [Mr Irving]: It depends precisely what he is saying. As I said, he is
4 in some respects reliable and in some respects he is not.
5 If you let me see the passage you wish to ask me about,
6 then, of course, I will comment on it.
7 Q. [Mr Rampton]: It is a very short line. You translated it yourself only
8 a very few days ago. We are not going back to —-
9 A. [Mr Irving]: Please, if you wish me to comment on a passage, my Lord, I
10 think —-
11 MR JUSTICE GRAY: There are two points. You can have it if you
12 like, but I think the two points are (1) is the reference
13 to millions of Jews having been killed and the other is a
14 reference to gassing. We can look at the document if you
15 like?
16 A. [Mr Irving]: I probably have it in front of me here somewhere.
17 I promise I am not going to use the tactics that have been
18 used by the Defence witnesses throughout this case of
19 constantly relying, asking to see the documents.
20 MR JUSTICE GRAY: No, well, if you want to see it, we can see
21 it.
22 A. [Mr Irving]: In this particular case, I am asked for an impression and
23 I ought to have a look at the original document.
24 MR RAMPTON: If you would like to look at page 5 of your own
25 translation, it is just above and below your page
26 reference 00032. I am quite happy with your translation,
. P-19
1 so we need not bother with the German.
2 A. [Mr Irving]: Page 5, right?
3 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Fifth page. I do not know where it is.
4 A. [Mr Irving]: Yes, I have it. It is page 00031 or 32.
5 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Yes.
6 A. [Mr Irving]: “From what we survey today”, is this right?
7 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Yes, I will read it, if I may: “From what we survey
8 today, there were perhaps 70 men, all told, from Himmler
9 to Hoess who were involved in the extermination of the
10 Jews”, and you give the German, Juden ausrottung.
11 “General Wolff also saw Bormann who was definitely
12 actively involved in these things together with Hoess, the
13 former Famer murderer. Bormann and Himmler”, handwritten
14 insert “Wolff probably”, “represented the view that the
15 Jewish problem had to be dealt with without Hitler getting
16 his fingers dirty in the process. The gassing idea”, and
17 that means gassing of human beings, does it not?
18 A. [Mr Irving]: Yes.
19 Q. [Mr Rampton]: “… probably emerged when a genuine epidemic broke out in
20 the Auschwitz camp and mass dying resulted”. Can we rely
21 on General Wolff as telling the truth in that passage so
22 far as the extermination of Jews by gassing is concerned?
23 A. [Mr Irving]: It is the curate’s egg, if you know the expression,
24 Mr Rampton.
25 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Yes, Mr Irving, I am nearly as old as you are.
26 A. [Mr Irving]: The figure of 70 is clearly wrong. That is clearly an
. P-20
1 understatement. Far more than 70 men all told were
2 initiated in the mass killing of Jews by the Nazis.
3 Depending on what he means by that, regardless of what he
4 means by that, whether he is talking about just the
5 Auschwitz and the killings of the western European Jews or
6 if he is talking about the shootings on the East. I think
7 here he is talking about the first. He is talking only
8 about the killing of the European Jews.
9 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Come on. He uses the word “gassing”.
10 A. [Mr Irving]: Yes. That is precisely what I am mentioning. That is why
11 I am saying that. The gassing idea. Now, that part
12 I think he is clearly commenting on what he now knows,
13 1952, after seven years of reading newspapers.
14 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Yes. Oh really?
15 A. [Mr Irving]: Yes. But also he is involved — if he read the Harold
16 Turner letter, of course, from Serbia, then he would have
17 been aware of gassings on a small scale in Serbia.
18 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Not in relation, Mr Irving, to a reference to Auschwitz as
19 having been the source of the gassing because, if it was
20 Auschwitz and disease there that gave rise to the idea, as
21 General Wolff suggests, then the substance used for the
22 gassing in consequence of the realization of that idea
23 would have been prussic acid, would it not?
24 A. [Mr Irving]: Yes, Zyklon-B.
25 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Thank you. Now I want to go back to this Milton thing.
26 I am going to make a suggestion, you will deal it with it
. P-21
1 and then we can pass on to something else. I suggest to
2 you that, so far from, as it were, approaching this matter
3 as a serious historian would be and asking your audience
4 to be critical about eyewitness accounts, had you done
5 that, you would have paid attention to the serious
6 eyewitness accounts, so far from doing that, what you are
7 doing is feeding the anti-Semitism of your audience by
8 mocking the survivors and indeed the dead from the
9 Holocaust?
10 A. [Mr Irving]: I do not think that in that fragment we saw, and of course
11 I do not know else is in the rest of the speech.
12 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Assholes?
13 A. [Mr Irving]: I think I am right in referring — do you wish me to deal
14 with that matter or the matter you just asked me about?
15 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Finish your answer.
16 MR RAMPTON: You finish the answer and I will draw your
17 attention to that. Carry on. You finish your answer, I
18 am sorry.
19 A. [Mr Irving]: I think that the word “Jew” or the reference to “Jews” was
20 not made in that fragment, and of course very many other
21 people suffered the torment of Auschwitz. I do not know
22 why you just single out the Jews for this particular
23 comment.
24 Q. [Mr Rampton]: I see. Here we are talking about Polish gentiles, are
25 we? This telephone box and the sedan chair and all that
26 kind of thing?
. P-22
1 A. [Mr Irving]: I think the reference is to Poles, yes. Thank you for
2 reminding me.
3 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Can I ask you, because I am not quite clear,
4 Mr Irving? You say there was one eyewitness who told the
5 story about the mobile telephone box?
6 A. [Mr Irving]: There are sheaves of stories like this which came out in
7 various trials, right up to the to 1960s.
8 Q. [Mr Justice Gray]: Focus on my question. I think you did say earlier on, in
9 answer to Mr Rampton, that there was one eyewitness who
10 told the story of the telephone box?
11 A. [Mr Irving]: Yes, that is one of the stories that is told.
12 Q. [Mr Justice Gray]: Yes. I just want you to focus on that one eyewitness.
13 Did you read it or hear it? How did you come to know
14 about it?
15 A. [Mr Irving]: This was probably ten years ago and I have to say that,
16 having read large numbers of documents at that time and
17 having read very large numbers of documents more recently,
18 I cannot say whether I saw the actual eyewitness
19 interrogation, or whether it has become part of the law
20 through being quoted in the Frankfurt trial by the defence
21 or prosecution. It is certainly part of the folk law, if
22 I can put it like that in a non-derogatory way,
23 surrounding the Auschwitz killings, rather like the
24 conveyor belt and the rest of it, that is known to
25 historians on both sides of the divide. Yesterday
26 evening, when I got home, I did put out an appeal to my
. P-23
1 world wide circle of historian friends to say, who can
2 provide me with the actual document.
3 Q. [Mr Justice Gray]: Has anything come up as a result of that?
4 A. [Mr Irving]: By this morning, when I checked the e-mails, one person
5 came up with a reference to a one man portable low
6 temperature chamber that was being developed and that was
7 being spoken.
8 Q. [Mr Justice Gray]: That is obviously not it, is it?
9 A. [Mr Irving]: Not yet, no.
10 Q. [Mr Justice Gray]: You have not been able to pinpoint where this comes from?
11 A. [Mr Irving]: No, but obviously I have put wheels in motion to obtain
12 the actual document, because of the value it would have
13 for the court.
14 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Yes. Sorry, Mr Rampton.
15 MR RAMPTON: I just put these remarks of yours in context, if
16 I may, Mr Irving. You say you were talking only about
17 gentile Poles that escaped from Auschwitz. Let us read on
18 on page 18.
19 A. [Mr Irving]: I did not say I was only talking about Poles. My actual
20 remark was that I did not talk about Jews in that
21 particular fragment. You then said Poles.
22 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Shall we put the fragment in context, Mr Irving? On page
23 16, the page before the one we were looking at, there is a
24 lengthy reference at the bottom of the page to somebody
25 call called Ely Wiesel. Is he a Polish gentile or is he a
26 Jew?
. P-24
1 A. [Mr Irving]: I think he is a very well-known Holocaust propagandist, if
2 I can put it like that.
3 MR RAMPTON: That is not an answer to my question.
4 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Is he a gentile or is he a Jew?
5 A. [Mr Irving]: He is Jewish, so far as I know.
6 MR RAMPTON: Then let us have a look at page 18, from where the
7 video stopped. It is the top of page 18 after the note
8 that there was applause.
9 A. [Mr Irving]: I do not have the transcript in front of me and perhaps
10 I should.
11 MR RAMPTON: I am sorry. Then you will need it.
12 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Yes, you should.
13 MR RAMPTON: It is K3, tab 10, page 18.
14 A. [Mr Irving]: Yes. Ely Wiesel, of course, is one of the people I call
15 the spurious survivors of the Holocaust like Benjamin
16 Wilkormierski and others, who have made a living out of
17 it.
18 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Sandwiched between that Jewish gentleman whom you
19 characterize as a spurious survivor of the Holocaust and
20 the next passage, which is also about spurious, in your
21 view, survivors of the Holocaust, is all this stuff about
22 the telephone box. So let us read page 18, shall we: “Let
23 me give you an example of why I think it” — that is to
24 say this imaginary experience — “is a psychiatric
25 problem. Let me give you a little parable here, a
26 biblical parable almost, because in Israel, now the
. P-25
1 Ministry of Justice, announced three or four weeks ago the
2 British newspaper, the Independent, reported this news
3 communique, that every year 200 tourists go to Jerusalem,
4 which is, of course, that magnificent city, this crossing
5 point of three different religions and cultures. They are
6 so overwhelmed by these cross currents, these, the vibes
7 of the city of Jerusalem, that every year 200 tourists go
8 there and believe that they are the messiah reborn and
9 returning to Jerusalem. They cannot all be the messiah.
10 At most one of them can be the messiah”, and you are not
11 talking about Jesus of Nazareth, are you?
12 A. [Mr Irving]: It is quite clear that I am. This is a genuine statement
13 released by the Israeli government.
14 Q. [Mr Rampton]: No.
15 A. [Mr Irving]: Carry on.
16 Q. [Mr Rampton]: You are talking about the messiah, for whom the Jewish
17 people are still waiting, are you not?
18 A. [Mr Irving]: This reminds me of mathematical equations. You said the
19 letter E in an equation can be the exponential factor but
20 need not be. These people could be the messiah, but need
21 not be, if I can put it like that.
22 MR JUSTICE GRAY: You call it a parable, do you not? Come on.
23 MR RAMPTON: “They cannot all be the messiah. At most, one of
24 them can be the messiah, so 199 of them are liars”.
25 A. [Mr Irving]: Yes.
26 Q. [Mr Rampton]: “But they have had this immense religious experience, and
. P-26
1 it is rather the same kind of trauma as people who went to
2 Auschwitz, or people who believed they went to Auschwitz,
3 or people who can kid themselves into believing they went
4 to Auschwitz, and the only way to overcome this appalling
5 pseudo-religious atmosphere that surrounds the whole of
6 this immense tragedy called World War II is to treat these
7 little legends with the ridicule and the bad taste that
8 they deserve. Ridicule alone is not enough. You have got
9 to be tasteless about it. You have to say things like
10 more women died on the back seat of Senator Edward
11 Kennedy’s car at Chappaquidick than died in the gas
12 chambers of Auschwitz (applause)”.
13 A. [Mr Irving]: The applause drowned the rest of the sentence,
14 unfortunately, which is “in the gas chambers of Auschwitz
15 which are shown to the tourists”. I always say exactly
16 the same thing.
17 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Oh no, you do not, Mr Irving. We went through that
18 before.
19 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Is it on the video?
20 MR RAMPTON: This is on the video. Would your Lordship like to
21 see it?
22 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Yes, unless it is going to take ages to get
23 it going.
24 MR RAMPTON: No, it is not. It is only the rest of this page
25 really. Just go from where it is.
26 (The video was shown).
. P-27
1 MR RAMPTON: Stop there, please.
2 A. [Mr Irving]: You are right. You are absolutely right. In that
3 particular one I did not put in the rider that that is the
4 one they show the tourists.
5 Q. [Mr Rampton]: You did not. Frequently you have not. Not only have
6 you not put in the rider, you have added other gas
7 chambers elsewhere, Treblinka, Belzec. Not here. In the
8 documents we were looking at yesterday.
9 A. [Mr Irving]: You are adding them now verbally into my speech.
10 Q. [Mr Rampton]: No, I am not.
11 A. [Mr Irving]: Shall we just abide by the speech that I was speaking
12 here?
13 Q. [Mr Rampton]: You said a moment ago that you never make any reference to
14 any gas chamber but the one which was reconstructed by the
15 Poles after the war. That is simply false, is it not?
16 A. [Mr Irving]: The one that is faked by the Poles after the war.
17 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Yes, whatever you like. It is simply a false statement,
18 is not, Mr Irving? We saw a whole lot of statements by
19 you yesterday, did we not?
20 A. [Mr Irving]: Will you please ask the question again because you —-
21 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Your statement that you never make reference to any but
22 what you call the fake gas chamber at Auschwitz (i), gas
23 chamber singular, is a false statement, is it not?
24 A. [Mr Irving]: I frequently refer to gas chambers elsewhere, yes.
25 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Yes.
26 A. [Mr Irving]: But in what connection?
. P-28
1 Q. [Mr Rampton]: In the context of saying that they never existed.
2 A. [Mr Irving]: In Dachau, for example. We now know that eyewitnesses
3 reported there were gas chambers in Dachau, and we now
4 know the German government has confirmed there were never
5 any gas chambers in Dachau. That is a typical example.
6 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Mr Irving, I do not believe you have that bad a memory. I
7 really do not.
8 A. [Mr Irving]: You just asked me a question and I have answered it.
9 Q. [Mr Rampton]: In that case I am going to have to remind you of what you
10 were shown but yesterday. Laborious, but necessary.
11 A. [Mr Irving]: Dachau is typical example of survivors who were caught out
12 lying.
13 Q. [Mr Rampton]: You will have to be patient with me, Mr Irving. I will
14 find it. This is just an example from page 156 of
15 yesterday’s transcript, if you have yesterday’s
16 transcript. This is a speech by you at Moers that we
17 looked at yesterday.
18 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Would you like a copy of it?
19 A. [Mr Irving]: If it is not going to be too tedious.
20 MR RAMPTON: I will read it out. You said: “The dummies are
21 still standing in Auschwitz, because the German government
22 has no sway there”. Page 156, line 8. “The dummies are
23 still standing in Auschwitz because the German government
24 has no sway there, and understandably that is problem for
25 you” — that is the Germans — “that you have a
26 government in Bonn that allows its own people to be
. P-29
1 defamed by all countries of the world, although in the
2 meantime it is cried out that these things in Auschwitz,
3 and probably in Maidonek, Treblinka and in other so-
4 called extermination camps in the East, are all dummies”.
5 That is a direct quote from your speech in Moers.
6 A. [Mr Irving]: Yes. Are you quoting the speech to me? Are you going to
7 quote something from the exchange that follows? If so,
8 I cannot quite understand why we are looking at
9 yesterday’s exchange rather than looking at the actual
10 speech.
11 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Because it was the easiest way to what you said in Moers.
12 I have it in the file.
13 A. [Mr Irving]: Of course, if you do it that way, we do not know exactly
14 what was said in the actual speech.
15 MR JUSTICE GRAY: We can track it down, I am sure.
16 MR RAMPTON: Page 3, tab 5, Mr Irving.
17 A. [Mr Irving]: Perhaps we can just wait to see what the question is and
18 then it may not be worth the effort.
19 Q. [Mr Rampton]: I have put the question already. You made a statement not
20 more than a couple of minutes ago that you never make
21 reference to the non-existence of gas chambers except in
22 relation to what you call the fake gas chamber at
23 Auschwitz (i). That statement was false, was it not?
24 A. [Mr Irving]: “The dummies were still standing in Auschwitz, these
25 things in Auschwitz and probably in Maidonek, Treblinka
26 and in the other so-called extermination camps”. I think
. P-30
1 the word “probably” therefore has to be looked at and
2 emphasised.
3 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Carry on. Read on.
4 A. [Mr Irving]: In other words —-
5 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Read on. The fact is that Auschwitz we know that what
6 they show the tourists is fake because the Poles have no
7 now admitted it. I am sorry, “reconstructed” is what you
8 call it.
9 Q. [Mr Rampton]: What?
10 A. [Mr Irving]: But the other places, Maidonek, Treblinka and so on, my
11 hands are tied in really dealing with that because, for
12 the purposes of this court action, I am not challenging
13 them.
14 MR JUSTICE GRAY: I think we are getting a bit confused here.
15 A. [Mr Irving]: My Lord, perhaps I can help?
16 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Yes, because I may have misunderstood the
17 position. I think it all arose out of your saying to
18 Mr Rampton earlier that, whenever you refer to no Jews, or
19 virtually no Jews, having died in concentration camps, you
20 add the rider that you are really talking about what you
21 call the dummy constructed after the war at Auschwitz.
22 A. [Mr Irving]: I hesitate to allow your Lordship to put words into my
23 mouth.
24 MR RAMPTON: Let us go back on the transcript for today and we
25 will find it.
26 A. [Mr Irving]: I am much more specific than that, and I say that, in this
. P-31
1 rather tasteless way, more women died on the back seat of
2 that car than died in the gas chamber at Auschwitz,
3 meaning the one they showed the tourists.
4 MR RAMPTON: It is when I was reading the transcript before we
5 saw the video. We will get the exact words, my Lord.
6 A. [Mr Irving]: It is part of the gramophone record, if I can put it like
7 that.
8 MR RAMPTON: In the light of yesterday’s evidence from
9 Professor Funke — I cannot read that. Now, Mr Irving, I
10 am going to read you back your answer.
11 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Page 24.
12 MR RAMPTON: Page 24 of today. This what gave rise to all of
13 this, you see, Mr Irving. You made yet another, shall
14 I say courteously — “The applause drowned the rest of the
15 sentence, unfortunately, which is, ‘in the gas chambers of
16 Auschwitz which are shown to the tourists’. I always say
17 exactly the same thing”. It was a false statement, that,
18 was it not?
19 A. [Mr Irving]: It was clearly wrong.
20 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Yes.
21 A. [Mr Irving]: But not deliberately wrong. I have this same part of my
22 speech that I deliver again and again and it is possible
23 that, in the heat of this particular speech which was
24 spoken without notes, as you will see —-
25 Q. [Mr Rampton]: No, Mr Irving.
26 A. [Mr Irving]: — to a non-skinhead audience.
. P-32
1 Q. [Mr Rampton]: What was false is that you always say exactly the same
2 thing. You do not. You frequently refer to the
3 non-existence of any gas chambers in the plural.
4 A. [Mr Irving]: I think you will have to show me the passages where
5 I frequently say this.
6 MR JUSTICE GRAY: The point is you deny the existence of gas
7 chambers and, when you do that, you do not talk only of
8 the dummies such as the one that was constructed after the
9 war at Auschwitz. That I think is the point.
10 A. [Mr Irving]: If that is the point he is trying to make, then of course
11 he is wrong because I have made it quite plain earlier in
12 this case that I accept that in Auschwitz Birkenhau gas
13 chamber experiments were conducted, for example, in the
14 bunkers, the two buildings called the bunkers, and to that
15 degree I certainly do not deny it.
16 MR RAMPTON: I expect you have been reading the Eichmann
17 memoirs, have you not?
18 A. [Mr Irving]: Not yet. If you know how little time I have.
19 Q. [Mr Rampton]: If you do a word search on them, look for the word
20 “Vergasungslager”.
21 A. [Mr Irving]: I take your tip. Thank you very much.
22 “Vergasungslager”?
23 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Yes, “Vergasungslager”, gassing camps, Mr Irving.
24 A. [Mr Irving]: I will tell you the result of that when I come here
25 tomorrow.
26 Q. [Mr Rampton]: I am just going to finish. My Lord, unless your Lordship
. P-33
1 wants me to —-
2 A. [Mr Irving]: Mr Rampton, if you intend to rely on that particular word,
3 I think you should show me the passage so I can comment on
4 it now, rather than just leave it hanging in mid air.
5 MR JUSTICE GRAY: At the moment we have not gone to the
6 Eichmann diaries at all, and I do not know whether we are
7 even going to.
8 MR RAMPTON: I am going to continue, my Lord, if I may, with
9 page 18 of the transcript, unless your Lordship would like
10 to see it on the screen.
11 MR JUSTICE GRAY: No, I think not.
12 A. [Mr Irving]: That is certainly not the way to introduce the Eichmann
13 memoirs, to do it like that, just to throw one word out.
14 MR JUSTICE GRAY: They have not been introduced, Mr Irving. Let
15 us go back to page 18.
16 MR RAMPTON: After the statement that more women died on the
17 back seat of Edward Kennedy’s car at Chappaquidick than
18 died in the gas chambers (plural) at Auschwitz, there is
19 some applause which did not drown out anything else you
20 said. You then continued: “Now” you think that is
21 tasteless. What about this? I am forming an association
22 especially dedicated to all these liars, the ones who try
23 and kid people that they were in these concentration
24 camps. It is called the Auschwitz Survivors of the
25 Holocaust and Other Liars Assholes”, and you spell it out
26 for them so that they get the joke. “Cannot get more
. P-34
1 tasteless than that but you have got to be tasteless
2 because these people deserve all our contempt and in fact
3 they deserve the contempt of the real Jewish community and
4 the people, whatever their class and colour, who did
5 suffer.” I do not know that I need to go on.
6 A. [Mr Irving]: Yes. I got something wrong, of course.
7 Q. [Mr Rampton]: What was that?
8 A. [Mr Irving]: The title of that association. It is the Association of
9 Spurious Survivors of the Holocaust, but, once again, in
10 the heat of the talk, I got it wrong.
11 Q. [Mr Rampton]: I am awfully sorry about that. The fact is, Mr Irving,
12 what you are doing here, as you were at Hagenau and on
13 other occasions that we have seen —-
14 A. [Mr Irving]: Mocking the liars.
15 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Oh yes, Mr Irving, but why the applause?
16 A. [Mr Irving]: Because I am a good speaker, Mr Rampton.
17 Q. [Mr Rampton]: What?
18 A. [Mr Irving]: I am a good speaker.
19 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Mr Irving, Professor Funke had you bang to rights, did he
20 not? What you are doing is appealing to, feeding,
21 encouraging, the most cynical radical anti-Semitism in
22 your audiences, are you not?
23 A. [Mr Irving]: Do liars not deserve to be exposed as such? If you saw
24 the audience as you saw them in that film, did you see any
25 skinheads or extremists or people wearing arm bands?
26 I did not. They looked like a perfectly ordinary bunch of
. P-35
1 middle-class Canadians.
2 Q. [Mr Rampton]: No doubt they too, Mr Irving, will spread the word, if
3 I may use that terminology?
4 A. [Mr Irving]: Is that evidence or are you asking me a question?
5 Q. [Mr Rampton]: I am asking you a question. That is what you are hoping,
6 is it not?
7 A. [Mr Irving]: Spread the word that there are elements of the Holocaust
8 story that need to be treated with scepticism, yes.
9 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Mr Irving, an I ask you this? Of these
10 eyewitnesses, are you saying that they have come to
11 believe what they say about their experiences and that is
12 why they need psychiatric treatment? Or are you saying
13 that they are collectively telling lies, deliberate
14 falsehoods?
15 A. [Mr Irving]: Different people have different motives or different
16 reasons. There are different reasons why they tell
17 stories that are not true in this particular context. We
18 saw the witness Professor van Pelt in the video and in his
19 report talking of the almost mystical and religious awe in
20 which he holds the site of Auschwitz. I can well
21 understand that. It has become very central to their
22 existence as the Jewish people. It has become an
23 important part of their social awareness. It has become
24 very close to religion in some aspects, in my view. It
25 has become almost blasphemy to trample on any part of that
26 ground. It has become holy ground, both in the physical
. P-36
1 concrete sense and in the metaphysical sense. As with any
2 religion, there are hangers on, people who believe they
3 were there, people who believe they touched the cloth, if
4 I can put it like that. There have been an increasing
5 number in recent years — Benjamin Wilkormierski is one
6 example Ely Wiesel is another — who have capitalized on,
7 or instrumentalized, the Holocaust. Now, I am not a
8 psychologist, I am not a psychiatrist, but I have looked
9 into some of the learned psychiatric texts that have been
10 written about this phenomenon of the man who believes he
11 is a survivor, the man who has been through a traumatic
12 experience and either puts himself in the middle of an
13 experience that he was on the periphery of, or who puts
14 himself into an experience when he was not there at all.
15 That is what the reference to the psychiatric problem is
16 in this. It is put admittedly in the most tasteless
17 possible way. Nobody can accuse me of not having been
18 tasteless, and I probably deserve to be horse whipped for
19 it, but the fact is that I am dealing here with a serious
20 problem concerning the eyewitness accounts from Auschwitz.
21 MR RAMPTON: And your audience absolutely love it, do they not,
22 Mr Irving? It is music to their ears, is it not?
23 A. [Mr Irving]: They travel 200 miles sometimes to come and hear me speak,
24 yes.
Section 37.25 to 60.13
25 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Good. Now I want to ask you about the National Alliance,
26 if I may. For this purpose you will need Bundle A. It is
. P-37
1 the request for information and the answers that the
2 witness will need. Page 79 of the request first of all,
3 question 23, in the middle of the page under the main
4 heading, the National Alliance. We asked you the
5 questions, Mr Irving. I hope you have got it: “Do you
6 agree that the National Alliance is responsible for the
7 material contained in the appendix to Rebecca Goodman’s
8 witness statement? Do you agree that it is the largest
9 and one of the most influential neo-Nazi organizations in
10 the United States of America, being extremely right-wing,
11 racist and anti-Semitic? Do you agree that it publishes
12 and/or advertises through national vanguard publications
13 which are extremely right-wing, racist and anti-Semitic”?
14 Then we asked you: “Do you agree that you spoke at
15 various National Alliance events”?
16 You will find your answers to questions 23 and
17 25 in a document in tab 9, I think I am told, page 7. Can
18 I ask you this? When you receive a document like this in
19 the course of legal proceedings, and I know this is not
20 the first time you have litigated, do you take the
21 questions which are asked seriously? Do you take this to
22 be a serious event in the course of the proceedings?
23 A. [Mr Irving]: Well, in view of what happened to Mr Aitken, I take it
24 very seriously indeed, yes.
25 Q. [Mr Rampton]: So your response to the first question about your
26 knowledge of the National Alliance is this: “I have no
. P-38
1 association of the body known to the Defendants as the
2 National Alliance as such or whatsoever. I cannot rule
3 out that members of that organization, which I take to be
4 a legal organization in the United States, have attended
5 functions at which I spoke. Accordingly I have no
6 knowledge of, and I take no interest in, what materials it
7 publishes or distributes. I have no knowledge whatsoever
8 of the character of the National Alliance, other than what
9 is now claimed by the witnesses for the Defendants, nor
10 the publications which it is alleged to publish or
11 advertised”.
12 In relation to the next question, in answer to
13 the next question, you gave this answer: “I do not agree
14 that I have spoken at any National Alliance meetings. It
15 might be that on occasions a gentleman who was a member of
16 the National Alliance offered to organize a lecture for
17 me. In other words, he undertook to find a suitable
18 room. But I then circulated ‘my’ entire local mailing
19 list to provide an audience. No doubt he brought his
20 friends as well. It will be seen that in all these
21 photographs of these events which are produced at trial,
22 there is no kind of National Alliance ‘presence'”.
23 Those statements were false, were they not,
24 Mr Irving?
25 A. [Mr Irving]: At the time I made them, they were absolutely correct,
26 yes. They were not false. I have the photographs.
. P-39
1 I have not yet introduced the photographs I am referring
2 to, but I have them ready.
3 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Mr Irving, we showed in this court, oh some time ago now,
4 video tape of you standing on a platform with a National
5 Alliance banner by your left shoulder, did we not? That
6 was film taken by the Australia film crew, was it not?
7 A. [Mr Irving]: You showed a video tape of me in a room, on one wall of
8 which was a banner, which has been pointed out to me in
9 this courtroom as being a National Alliance banner. I do
10 not suppose a single person in this courtroom would be
11 able to tell you what a National Alliance banner looks
12 like, and that is the position of most English people.
13 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Except, may I suggest, you, Mr Irving. Could the witness
14 be given RWE 1, and be asked to turn to tab 2?
15 A. [Mr Irving]: Shall I get my own file?
16 Q. [Mr Rampton]: No. Somebody must do it for you. The first document in
17 this section of the file, Mr Irving, is a letter dated 3rd
18 February 1990. It has on its left-hand side a sort of
19 symbol?
20 A. [Mr Irving]: Yes.
21 Q. [Mr Rampton]: On the right-hand side it says in large, emphatic black
22 ink: “National Alliance, PO Box something or other, Palma,
23 Ohio”, does it not?
24 A. [Mr Irving]: Yes.
25 Q. [Mr Rampton]: “Hello David”, it says, “I have arranged for you to speak
26 on Wednesday, June 3rd, 7.30 p.m. at the Croatian Home in
. P-40
1 Cleveland. Enclosed is a map, Croatian Home”, and then
2 the address. “You are welcome to stay again at the
3 residence of Mark Wavra”, I think it is, in somewhere or
4 other and then the telephone number is given?
5 A. [Mr Irving]: Yes.
6 Q. [Mr Rampton]: “Stay in touch and call me if need be.”
7 A. [Mr Irving]: Yes.
8 Q. [Mr Rampton]: That letter, I suspect, comes from your discovery, I do
9 not know?
10 A. [Mr Irving]: Almost certainly, yes.
11 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Yes, so is this letter a forgery?
12 A. [Mr Irving]: No.
13 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Well, how do you explain it?
14 A. [Mr Irving]: Well, if you would like to ask me specific questions?
15 Q. [Mr Rampton]: How do you explain this letter in the light of the answers
16 you gave us on paper?
17 A. [Mr Irving]: Would you ask me a specific question?
18 MR JUSTICE GRAY: It looks like a letter from an official of
19 the National Alliance because it has “National Alliance”
20 at the top, and it looks as if you have a prior
21 relationship with the writer, Gliber, is that the point?
22 A. [Mr Irving]: Can I draw your attention to the second sentence of my
23 answer No. 25? It might be that on occasions a gentleman
24 who was a member of the National Alliance offered to
25 organize a lecture for me, in other words, he undertook to
26 find a suitable room. Is that the kind of letter you
. P-41
1 would expect in response, describing the room that he has
2 offered, that he has provided? No reference that it is
3 going to be a National Alliance function; he is just using
4 his own notepaper?
5 MR RAMPTON: “I have no association with a body known to the
6 Defendants as the National Alliance as such, or
7 whatsoever. I do not agree that I have spoken at any
8 National Alliance meetings”. Those were false statements,
9 were they not, Mr Irving?
10 A. [Mr Irving]: Still completely true. This is not an association with a
11 body. He is not writing in official capacity to me. He
12 is writing to me as a personal friend. I do not know why
13 he used that notepaper. It was not a National Alliance
14 function, and if you asked me 10 years later, do
15 I recognize that logo on the top left-hand corner, I do
16 not recognize it; and if you had asked me even between the
17 time we saw the video and now, I could not have drawn it
18 from memory, let alone 10 years later. Can you draw from
19 memory the logo of the Automobile Association, just to
20 give one example? I do not know.
21 Q. [Mr Rampton]: I have not finished, Mr Irving. Do not be too hasty.
22 A. [Mr Irving]: That is why I asked you to ask specific questions rather
23 than…
24 Q. [Mr Rampton]: The specific question is you know perfectly well who the
25 National Alliance are and you always have done?
26 A. [Mr Irving]: I now know who they are, yes.
. P-42
1 Q. [Mr Rampton]: No, no. You always knew who they were.
2 A. [Mr Irving]: That is a different question, is it not?
3 Q. [Mr Rampton]: You have cooperated with them willingly. You agreed to
4 speak at meetings hosted or organized by them in the full
5 knowledge of who they were, did you not?
6 A. [Mr Irving]: The answer is, no, I did not. I am talking in the past
7 tense. I know now who they are because I have now read a
8 lot of literature provided by the Defendants about them.
9 At the time that, at all material times, I was not aware
10 who the National Alliance were, I was not aware of what
11 their logo looked like, the fact that somebody had some
12 kind of logo on the top left-hand corner of letters
13 certainly is not going to embed itself in my
14 consciousness. Why should it?
15 Q. [Mr Rampton]: I will tell you why in a moment. Turn over to page 2,
16 please.
17 A. [Mr Irving]: Yes. Is there any logo on this letter?
18 Q. [Mr Rampton]: No, there is no logo —-
19 A. [Mr Irving]: Is there any “National Alliance” heading on the letter?
20 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Please be patient. You will see how the matter develops
21 very shortly. This is dated 15th September 1995. It
22 comes from somebody called Erich Gliber?
23 A. [Mr Irving]: The same man.
24 Q. [Mr Rampton]: What?
25 A. [Mr Irving]: The same man, yes.
26 Q. [Mr Rampton]: No. Is it?
. P-43
1 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Yes, the same man.
2 MR RAMPTON: Oh, yes, the same man, the same fellow. This time
3 you are going to be speaking at Lithuanian Village in
4 Cleveland as opposed to Croatian Home in Cleveland.
5 A. [Mr Irving]: Do you want to make anything out of that? I mean, you
6 appear to be emphasising those words as though you were
7 attaching importance to.
8 Q. [Mr Rampton]: I do, perhaps, Mr Irving.
9 A. [Mr Irving]: Do I detect any xenophobia there?
10 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Mr Irving, answer the questions.
11 MR RAMPTON: Perhaps you can help us.
12 A. [Mr Irving]: I have nothing against Croatians or Lithuanians.
13 Q. [Mr Rampton]: No, during the war the Croatians were one of the Nazi
14 puppet governments, were they not?
15 A. [Mr Irving]: Is that the point you are trying to make?
16 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Answer my question, please, Mr Irving.
17 A. [Mr Irving]: The Croatians?
18 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Yes.
19 A. [Mr Irving]: There was a puppet Croatian government, yes. There was a
20 puppet Belgian Government and a puppet Dutch Government,
21 yes.
22 Q. [Mr Rampton]: But the Croatians — I do not want to go too far down this
23 road — it is right were enthusiastic supporters of the
24 Nazis, were they not?
25 A. [Mr Irving]: All the Croatians? I do not know.
26 Q. [Mr Rampton]: No, no, the Croatian Government.
. P-44
1 A. [Mr Irving]: Well, the puppet government was. That is what puppet
2 governments do. There were puppet Marxist governments.
3 Q. [Mr Rampton]: And during the war in Lithuania, as we have seen,
4 Reinhardt Heydrich saw Lithuania, amongst other places in
5 the Baltic states, as being a fertile source of
6 anti-Semitic problems, did he not?
7 A. [Mr Irving]: I think most of the Eastern European countries were, yes.
8 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Do you know why these places are called “Croatian Home”
9 and “Lithuanian Village”?
10 A. [Mr Irving]: I think they had — if you look in one of the photographs
11 which I will present to the court, there is actually a
12 Croatian banner hanging on the back wall. It is rather
13 like the British Legion. The veterans who live in that
14 area, in the Cleveland area, there are a lot of these
15 ethnic minorities, and I have got nothing against ethnic
16 minorities.
17 Q. [Mr Rampton]: No.
18 A. [Mr Irving]: But they have their own meeting place, their own social
19 halls and so on.
20 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Now, the next page over, page 3 in the circle in
21 handwriting at the bottom of the page, is from what?
22 There will be an index somewhere.
23 A. [Mr Irving]: I have no idea at all. Never seen it.
24 Q. [Mr Rampton]: It is from the National Alliance bulletin, yes. It is a
25 very bad photograph and one could not tell it was a
26 photograph of anything at all in the top right-hand
. P-45
1 corner, and it is captioned “David Irving lecturing at
2 Cleveland. A fund raising activity for the Cleveland
3 unit.” Under “Cleveland activity”, the cross heading in
4 the middle column says: “On October 1st, the Cleveland
5 united hosted”, sorry, just looking for a date, “October
6 1st, the Cleveland unit hosted a very successful lecture
7 by the British historian and revisionist author, David
8 Irving. More than 100 tickets were sold at $10 each.
9 After paying Mr Irving’s $500 fee and the modest rent for
10 the hall, the unit had a profit of approximately $400. To
11 this was added the income from sales of Alliance books and
12 from a bake sale”. Drop down, please, to the bottom of
13 the page.
14 A. [Mr Irving]: From a bake sale organised by the unit’s women — a very
15 dangerous body, obviously!
16 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Yes, of course, it is like the Women’s Institute! Drop
17 down to the bottom of the page: “Mr Irving’s lecture was
18 received enthusiastically by the audience and he was able
19 to autograph and sell a substantial number of his own
20 books during the meeting. The Cleveland unit’s next
21 public activity will be a white power rock concert on New
22 Year’s Eve”?
23 A. [Mr Irving]: “White power rock concert”.
24 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Yes. Now please turn over the page to page 4.
25 A. [Mr Irving]: Are you going to ask a question about that? Have I ever
26 seen that before? The answer is no.
. P-46
1 Q. [Mr Rampton]: No, this is just part of the narrative, Mr Irving. My
2 question may sometimes come after several documents. You
3 have to be patient.
4 A. [Mr Irving]: Well, sometimes I will give an immediate response.
5 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Page 4, your diary, October 1st 1995: “Pittsburg,
6 Pennsylvania to Cleveland, Ohio. Rose at 7.30 a.m..
7 Packed. Left for Cleveland around 3 p.m. Arrived at
8 meeting place 6.00 p.m. Fine meeting, around 150 people,
9 many ethnic Germans. Gate of $500 was agreed plus £1700
10 book sales. What a relief. Sat up to 2 a.m. with my
11 hosts after supper chatting”. October 2nd: “Rose 9.50
12 a.m. breakfast with my hosts, plural, lawyer etc.” Do
13 you still maintain that you do not know who these people
14 were?
15 A. [Mr Irving]: Yes. The host was Mark Wavra who is a well-known
16 Cleveland lawyer who had nothing to do with the Alliance.
17 Is that the question you are asking?
18 Q. [Mr Rampton]: They were your hosts for this meeting, Mr Irving.
19 A. [Mr Irving]: The hosts are the people I am actually staying with. If
20 you saw the previous letter, the first letter, that they
21 have arranged for me to be accommodated in this lawyer’s
22 home, I have nothing against lawyers.
23 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Is that Mark Wavra the — I can never remember what “IHR”
24 stands for and I do not much care. IHR is historian?
25 A. [Mr Irving]: Sorry, it is not. It is Wavra, W-A-V-R-A.
26 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Yes, it is mishearing?
. P-47
1 A. [Mr Irving]: I point out, of course, there is not the slightest
2 reference either in that diary entry or in any other diary
3 entry to the NA or the National Alliance or to any other
4 body which confirms what I said about having had no
5 knowledge of them.
6 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Well, I asked you to be patient. You have jumped in as
7 you so often do —-
8 A. [Mr Irving]: Yes.
9 Q. [Mr Rampton]: —- and I turn now, please, to page 5?
10 A. [Mr Irving]: Page?
11 Q. [Mr Rampton]: 5, your diary again?
12 A. [Mr Irving]: Yes.
13 Q. [Mr Rampton]: October 6th 1995, same year?
14 A. [Mr Irving]: Oh, yes.
15 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Five days later: “Savanna, Georgia to Tampa, Florida.
16 7.45 a.m. radio show from Tampa. Did a 20 minute
17 interview and they announced the location. Not amused by
18 that. Drove all day to Tampa, phoned Key West, etc. etc.
19 etc. Arrived at the Hotel Best Western at 4.00 p.m.
20 Sinister gent with pony tail was the organizer. Turned
21 out the meeting here is also organized by the National
22 Alliance and National Vanguard Bookshop. Well
23 attended”. Now, Mr Irving, do you want to revise the
24 answers you have just been giving me?
25 A. [Mr Irving]: It just goes to show how bad my memory is, yes, but it
26 always illustrates, does it not, the fact that I am
. P-48
1 learning as I go along, and that I had not the slightest
2 notion who these people are. Would that be a proper
3 interpretation to put on that entry?
4 Q. [Mr Rampton]: No, Mr Irving, it would not. Turn now to the meeting
5 here, Tampa, is also organized by the —-
6 A. [Mr Irving]: The same entry.
7 Q. [Mr Rampton]: — National Alliance. In other words, you knew that both
8 the meetings were organized by the National Alliance?
9 A. [Mr Irving]: Obviously, I had subsequently learned that the previous
10 one was also organized by this body which I had never
11 heard of.
12 Q. [Mr Rampton]: We have seen that speech in Tampa in full in this court
13 some weeks ago. On this occasion the host, let me call
14 him this, whose name I am afraid I do not know, but I
15 suppose it might have been this chap Gliber, I do not
16 know, although he seems to be in Cleveland and not Tampa,
17 he opened the proceedings with you on the platform and the
18 banner nearby: “Ladies and gentlemen, on behalf of the
19 National Alliance and National Vanguard Books, I would
20 like to proudly welcome Mr David Irving.” Do you want to
21 revise your evidence, Mr Irving?
22 A. [Mr Irving]: Well, obviously he put in a plug, what on TV would be
23 called a plug for his own particular passion.
24 Q. [Mr Rampton]: “On behalf of the National Alliance and National Vanguard
25 Books”, remember your diary entry —-
26 A. [Mr Irving]: Yes.
. P-49
1 Q. [Mr Rampton]: — organized by the National Alliance and National
2 Vanguard Bookshop, “On behalf of the National Alliance and
3 National Vanguard Books, I would like proudly”, “I would
4 like to proudly”, he is an American, “I would like to
5 proudly welcome Mr David Irving”?
6 A. [Mr Irving]: Yes.
7 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Well, Mr Irving.
8 A. [Mr Irving]: Well, as I say, he has taken the advantage that he is
9 making the opening speech to put in a plug for his own
10 friends. That is all I can say, and it does not contrast
11 with what I said in paragraph 25, that I have been invited
12 by an individual and that the audience is almost entirely
13 made up from my own list and that is why he is putting in
14 his plug and why he is welcoming the outsiders.
15 Q. [Mr Rampton]: “I have no association with a body known to the Defendants
16 as the National Alliance as such or whatsoever. I do not
17 agree that I have spoken at any National Alliance
18 meetings”. Two statements which are both completely
19 false, am I right?
20 A. [Mr Irving]: No. I stand entirely with what I said in paragraph 25,
21 and it is quite evident from my diary entries that I am
22 learning as I literally drive around the United States
23 that I speak at these functions and afterwards I have
24 found out, “Oh, that one was organized by this person too
25 or by that body too”, and I find out subsequently. Once
26 again, I have to say that I have not the faintest notion
. P-50
1 who they are or who they were. I spoke in the United
2 States sometimes 100 times in one year, always to
3 different bodies, and I am not going to make any
4 particular note of which these bodies or these functions
5 or universities or groups or whatever.
6 Q. [Mr Rampton]: I take leave, if I may, Mr Irving to inform you that
7 I reject every word of that answer. I will not take it
8 any further in that direction, but I do ask you, have you
9 familiarised yourself with the National Alliance
10 literature?
11 A. [Mr Irving]: No, I am not the least bit interested in it.
12 Q. [Mr Rampton]: I thought you said you had looked at it since this case
13 began?
14 A. [Mr Irving]: I fluttered through the things that were put into your
15 bundles. That is when I have been mystified as to the
16 relevance of them, frankly, catalogues of books and
17 things. I thought, what on earth has that got to do with
18 me?
19 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Because this poisonous material is on sale at the meetings
20 which you have allowed yourself to be exploited at, if
21 I may put it like that, held and organized with your
22 knowledge by the National Alliance?
23 A. [Mr Irving]: I understand that Karl Marx’s “Das Kapital” and Adolf
24 Hitler’s “Mein Kampf” is on sale at Harrods, but that does
25 not mean to say that people who go and shop in the
26 crockery department are in some way poisoned, does it, or
. P-51
1 in some way associated with those poisonous gentlemen?
2 MR RAMPTON: My Lord, I foresee there is not going to be much
3 point in my asking Mr Irving to look at the material at
4 this stage. However, in the light of this passage in the
5 evidence, I will invite your Lordship to look at it along
6 down the line because it will form part of my closing
7 submissions.
8 MR IRVING: Perhaps you should put them to me seriatim if you
9 intend that his Lordship rely on them and I can say point
10 by point have I seen it before, answer no.
11 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Not seriatim, but what I think would be
12 helpful and I think would be right, if I may say so, would
13 be for you to put maybe a couple of them by way of
14 representative samples.
15 MR RAMPTON: I will simply put their ideology. One need not go
16 any further than that.
17 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Where, as a matter of record, would I find
18 National Alliance?
19 MR RAMPTON: You would find the literature behind Rebecca
20 Gutman’s statement which is in file —-
21 A. [Mr Irving]: That is right. That is where I saw it too.
22 Q. [Mr Rampton]: — C1, tab 2.
23 A. [Mr Irving]: That is where I saw it for the first time and, frankly,
24 I thought what on earth has it got to do with me, which is
25 precisely why these witnesses should have been called so
26 they could have been cross-examined, in my view.
. P-52
1 MR JUSTICE GRAY: You are now going to have the
2 opportunity —-
3 A. [Mr Irving]: It is not quite the same thing.
4 Q. [Mr Justice Gray]: — to comment on the literature.
5 A. [Mr Irving]: It is not quite the same thing, though, is it?
6 MR RAMPTON: My Lord, the document I wish to refer to is the
7 second document of the appendix to Rebecca Gutman’s
8 statement. The front page says: “What is the National
9 Alliance?” Ideology and programme of the National
10 Alliance. Copyright 1993″.
11 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Has Mr Irving got a copy of this?
12 MR RAMPTON: I am hoping he will be given one.
13 A. [Mr Irving]: Can I draw your attention to page 1 which is one of the
14 leaflets for one of the meetings that is relied on,
15 apparently, and there is not any reference whatsoever to
16 the National Alliance. That is the Tampa function, is it
17 not?
18 MR RAMPTON: True, but that was, as you acknowledge in your
19 diary, a National Alliance event?
20 A. [Mr Irving]: I say it subsequently turned out that the organizer was
21 National Alliance.
22 Q. [Mr Rampton]: No, this is 1998, Mr Irving, not 1995.
23 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Do I already have this file that has just
24 been handed in?
25 MR RAMPTON: I am afraid mine is anonymous. You have got your
26 own C1 bundle, my Lord, I think.
. P-53
1 MR JUSTICE GRAY: It seems to be differently made up.
2 A. [Mr Irving]: Can we, first of all, ask what paragraph of Gutman’s
3 report relies on this document so we can fit it into the
4 constellation of evidence, so to speak?
5 MR RAMPTON: 14, I think, I am told. This is another National
6 Alliance meeting at which you spoke, you see, Mr Irving,
7 in 1998. It might be worth looking at some of this. Does
8 your Lordship have it there?
9 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Yes, I am just puzzled. I do not think
10 I have ever had this file. I may be wrong about that,
11 anyway.
12 MR RAMPTON: My Lord, may I first draw attention to parts of
13 the Rebecca Gutman’s statement? This is the Civil
14 Evidence Act evidence, paragraph 10 on the fifth page, the
15 eligibility requirements of the National Alliance
16 are: “Any White person (a non-Jewish person of wholly
17 European ancestry) of good character and at least 18 years
18 of age who accepts as his own the goals of the National
19 Alliance and who is willing to support the programme
20 described herein”. It continues: “No homosexual or
21 bisexual person … no person with a non-White spouse or a
22 non-White dependant … may be a member”. Notice,
23 Mr Irving, the “white” wherever it appears has a capital
24 W. Now paragraph 14 —-
25 A. [Mr Irving]: Can I draw your attention to paragraph 3 first?
26 Q. [Mr Rampton]: By all means.
. P-54
1 A. [Mr Irving]: The flyer made no mention of the National Alliance. She
2 points out that the function had no National Alliance
3 presence apart from these leaflets that were, apparently,
4 offered on some table somewhere else in the building.
5 Q. [Mr Rampton]: But for somebody, Mr Irving, like you who already knew
6 that it was the National Alliance who was organizing the
7 meeting, that really does not matter, does it?
8 A. [Mr Irving]: Are you going to lead evidence that I knew in advance it
9 was the National Alliance organizing the meeting?
10 Q. [Mr Rampton]: I am suggesting to you it must have been perfectly
11 obvious.
12 A. [Mr Irving]: That is something different, is it not?
13 Q. [Mr Rampton]: This is an old friendship, Mr Irving.
14 A. [Mr Irving]: Is this the consensus of opinion again or is it something
15 for which you have evidence?
16 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Mr Irving, please. You have seen the evidence in your own
17 diary. You know the National Alliance, do you not?
18 A. [Mr Irving]: Will you take me to the evidence in the diary?
19 MR JUSTICE GRAY: We have just been through it, Mr Irving. I
20 do not think we need to go through it again.
21 A. [Mr Irving]: This is a different meeting, my Lord.
22 MR RAMPTON: Yes, different meetings, three years later?
23 A. [Mr Irving]: It is conflating different meetings, if I can use that
24 word. If he relies on this document, then, of course, we
25 have to look at the actual meeting where the witness
26 obtained this document which was, apparently, not a
. P-55
1 National Alliance meeting.
2 Q. [Mr Rampton]: We will just have a look at paragraph 14, if we may?
3 “Inside the room there was a table set up with
4 Mr Irving’s books and copies of this latest newsletter.
5 Across the room there was” —-
6 A. [Mr Irving]: “Across the room”.
7 Q. [Mr Rampton]: What?
8 A. [Mr Irving]: “Across the room”, in other words, nowhere near me.
9 Q. [Mr Rampton]: How big was the room, Mr Irving?
10 A. [Mr Irving]: About twice as big as this.
11 Q. [Mr Rampton]: “Across the room there was a table set up for the National
12 Alliance with books, fliers and cassette tapes. I picked
13 up a selection of the material on offer. This material is
14 at appendix pages 11 to 106″, and so on and so forth,
15 “including a flier advertising Mr Irving’s books, a
16 handwritten photocopied flier advertising Mr Irving’s next
17 lecture and a publication entitled ‘David Irving’s Action
18 Report dated 20th July 1998′.”
19 Now, Mr Irving, can we have just a quick look at
20 the policy document?
21 A. [Mr Irving]: Well, I will just draw your attention once more to the
22 page before it, page 1, which makes no mention whatsoever
23 to this being a National Alliance function. Do you accept
24 that?
25 Q. [Mr Rampton]: I accept it does not say it. I certainly do not accept
26 that you did not know that it was. That is quite
. P-56
1 different.
2 A. [Mr Irving]: Well, if it was a National Alliance function, then
3 why would it not have said so on the actual flier?
4 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Perhaps because the National Alliance are slightly nervous
5 about making too much publicity for themselves outside the
6 magic circle?
7 A. [Mr Irving]: Your own witness said there was no evidence of it being a
8 National Alliance meeting.
9 MR JUSTICE GRAY: You have made that point; I have taken it on
10 board.
11 A. [Mr Irving]: So what possible relevance, whatever leaflet was on the
12 table 100 feet away from me —-
13 MR JUSTICE GRAY: I am bound to say I regard it as being
14 relevant to know what sort of an organization it is that
15 you have addressed on three occasions?
16 A. [Mr Irving]: My Lord, I object to the suggestion that I was addressing
17 an organization. I was addressing my people who had come
18 from all over Northern Florida to hear me speak at a
19 function organized by this gentleman. I am sure it was a
20 slip of the tongue, but I would hate it to go on the
21 record unchallenged.
22 MR RAMPTON: Inside the front cover, “What is the National
23 Alliance?” we read this: “Building a new White world”, do
24 we not?
25 A. [Mr Irving]: What are we looking at?
26 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Headline.
. P-57
1 MR RAMPTON: “Building a new White world”.
2 A. [Mr Irving]: 80?
3 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Oh, sorry. I think it is called C1, tab 2,
4 page either 3 or 80, according to your preference.
5 MR RAMPTON: We notice, as I said a moment ago, the date of
6 this document is 1993, so it was written before your visit
7 to Cleveland in 1995, your visit to Tampa in 1995 and your
8 visit to Tampa in 1998?
9 A. [Mr Irving]: It is another lie, Mr Rampton, I am afraid. Look at page
10 9 — I am sorry, page 86. Top left-hand corner of the
11 box. Do you see some figures there?
12 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Yes, yes, Mr Irving. The copyright date is 1993. This
13 may be a revised or updated version perhaps.
14 A. [Mr Irving]: Well, I am telling you this document appears — I am
15 saying I have never seen it before — to be dated October
16 1996.
17 Q. [Mr Rampton]: In which case it was in existence at the date of this
18 speech by you at Tampa 1998, was it not?
19 A. [Mr Irving]: Yes, but you cannot rely on it for what happened in 1993.
20 I may be wrong but —-
21 MR JUSTICE GRAY: I think you are wrong, but I am not sure it
22 tremendously much matters.
23 MR RAMPTON: That is one of the areas where it matters not
24 least to me whether you are right or wrong, Mr Irving.
25 Can you turn over the page, please? I am not going to
26 wade through all that acres of sludge on the first page
. P-58
1 all about — I will read “Summary statement of belief”, if
2 I may, bottom right-hand column: “We may summarize in the
3 following statement the ideology outlined above. We see
4 ourselves as a part of nature, subject to nature’s laws”,
5 nothing very controversial about that, one may think?
6 A. [Mr Irving]: I do not know where you are.
7 Q. [Mr Rampton]: “We recognize the inequalities which arise as natural
8 consequences of the evolutionary process and which are
9 essential to progress in every sphere of life”. Again,
10 somewhat uncontroversial. “We accept our responsibilities
11 as Aryan men and women to serve for the advancement of our
12 race in the service of life and to be the fittest
13 instruments for that purpose that we can be.” Then if you
14 turn over the page we are beginning, Mr Irving, you may
15 agree, to enter familiar territory.
16 A. [Mr Irving]: In what respect?
17 Q. [Mr Rampton]: In the respect that this is, one might think, simply an
18 English, a modern English American version of Nazi
19 ideology.
20 A. [Mr Irving]: So what? I mean, so what? What has that got to do with
21 me.
22 Q. [Mr Rampton]: “White living space”. You fuel these people with your
23 thoughts about the Holocaust, Mr Irving, that is why it
24 has got to do with you.
25 A. [Mr Irving]: Well, has it occurred to you I may go there and correct
26 their opinions? I read them the documents they do not
. P-59
1 want to hear. Has this possibility occurred to you?
2 Q. [Mr Rampton]: When did you last address a meeting of the South Balham
3 Trotsky Society, Mr Irving?
4 A. [Mr Irving]: Mr Rampton, you are perfectly familiar with my policy
5 which says I accept invitations from whichever body
6 invites me, left or right.
7 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Mr Irving, my question was put —-
8 A. [Mr Irving]: If they choose not to invite me, that is their own loss.
9 Q. [Mr Rampton]: No comment, Mr Irving.
10 A. [Mr Irving]: Well, you asked me a question and I gave you an answer.
11 Q. [Mr Rampton]: The answer to my question is never, is it not?
12 A. [Mr Irving]: If they invite me, I will come. I cannot force myself on
13 them.
Section 60.14 to 78.25
14 Q. [Mr Rampton]: “White living space”. “In spiritually healthier times,
15 our ancestors took as theirs those parts of the world
16 suited by climate and terrain to our race, in particular
17 all of Europe and the temperate zones of the Americas, not
18 to mention Australia and the southern tip of Africa”,
19 note. “This was our living area and our breeding area and
20 it must be so again. After the sickness of
21 multiculturalism which is destroying America, Britain and
22 any other Aryan nation in which it is being promoted, has
23 been swept away, we must again have a racially clean area
24 of the earth for the further development of our people.”
25 Does that reference to the “sickness of multi-culturalism”
26 in Britain have any resonance for you, Mr Irving?
. P-60
1 A. [Mr Irving]: Not really, no.
2 Q. [Mr Rampton]: You do not remember the remarks you made in South Africa
3 about God working out the Final Solution remorselessly by
4 means of AIDS against homosexuals and blacks?
5 A. [Mr Irving]: I think if you are going to rely on a passage like that,
6 you should see the actual words that I used in the context
7 I used them.
8 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Do you remember the remarks —-
9 A. [Mr Irving]: In particular, use the actual words and not your
10 vulgarized recalled version.
11 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Do you remember the remarks you made about feeling queasy
12 when you saw black people playing cricket for England?
13 A. [Mr Irving]: Yes, because they are better than us.
14 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Do you remember —-
15 A. [Mr Irving]: And I am sorry about it.
16 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Do you remember that you reported that it gave you a
17 shudder when you were welcomed at Heathrow about Pakistani
18 immigration officials?
19 A. [Mr Irving]: And it turned out that you associated the word “Pakistani”
20 with coloured when I would have been equally queasy if it
21 had been a German standing there checking my passport —
22 probably even more queasy.
23 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Do you remember saying that you wanted Trevor McDonald,
24 the famous black news reader, relegated to reading the
25 news about muggings and drug busts?
26 A. [Mr Irving]: Have you never listened to Dave Allen on television
. P-61
1 telling similar jokes and not being prosecuted for racial
2 incitement? If somebody tells a joke about a black man
3 and a Rabbi and a Irishman, is that serial racism? I
4 mean, where does hypocrisy end and real indignation start?
5 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Shall we read on? “We must have White schools”, all these
6 “Whites” have capital Ws, I point out, “we must have
7 White schools, White residential neighbourhoods and
8 recreational areas, White workplaces, White farms and
9 countryside”?
10 A. [Mr Irving]: I think you will find the Daily Telegraph also capitalizes
11 the word “White” and “Black”.
12 Q. [Mr Rampton]: All you are doing is putting a number of other rogues in
13 your gallery, Mr Irving, by these remarks. However, let
14 us read on.
15 A. [Mr Irving]: You have upset at least one Correspondent, I am afraid.
16 Q. [Mr Rampton]: “We must have no non-Whites in our living space”, and you
17 know from their definition that that includes Jews as
18 non-Whites. “We must have no non-Whites” —-
19 A. [Mr Irving]: What an extraordinary remark.
20 Q. [Mr Rampton]: — in our living space us and we must have open space
21 around us for expansion”, etc. etc. etc. Then read down,
22 drop your eye, please, to “an Aryan society”: “We must
23 have new societies throughout the White world which are
24 based on Aryan values and are compatible with the Aryan
25 nature. We do not need to homogenize the White world.
26 There will be room for Germanic societies, Celtic
. P-62
1 societies, Slavic societies” — in that respect more
2 generous, perhaps, than the Nazis — “Baltic societies and
3 so on, each with its own routes, traditions and language.
4 What we must have, however, is a thorough rooting out”,
5 Ausrotten, Ausrotten, Mr Irving, “of Semitic and other
6 non-Aryan values and customs everywhere”.
7 A. [Mr Irving]: All very interesting, but what has it do with me?
8 Q. [Mr Rampton]: It has everything to do with you, Mr Irving.
9 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Mr Irving, you say that this is, as it were,
10 news to you.
11 A. [Mr Irving]: I read it with the same interest that your Lordship has.
12 These people have obviously —-
13 MR JUSTICE GRAY: If you just wait for the question, then you
14 will see what I am wanting to know. How do you react to
15 this sort of stuff?
16 A. [Mr Irving]: It is a most appallingly badly written piece of
17 propaganda.
18 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Badly written?
19 A. [Mr Irving]: I am reading it now for the first time and it is
20 head-shaking stuff, is all I can say. I keep on saying
21 what is it doing in this courtroom frankly. I am sure it
22 interests Barbara Gutmann no end and it interests the
23 Defence no end, but it does not interest me in the
24 slightest this kind of stuff, because wherever it was it
25 was not within my cognisance and I do not intend to retain
26 it in my memory quite frankly.
. P-63
1 MR RAMPTON: Mr Irving, can you put aside that file; I do not
2 think I need to come back to it, that National Alliance
3 document, and take back the RWE 1 file, please, and turn
4 to page 14.
5 A. [Mr Irving]: RW1?
6 Q. [Mr Rampton]: RWE 1, yes, in tab 2 where we were and turn to page 14,
7 please. First of all, actually I think we had better
8 perhaps start at page 11, as this will give us the context
9 for what you write on 25th July 1990. The entry for the
10 7th December 1996, again at Tampa, and again I suggest
11 quite obviously a National Alliance meeting, leave the
12 first line: “I shook off the Australians around 2 p.m.”.
13 They were the Australian film crew that were following you
14 around, were they not, Mr Irving?
15 A. [Mr Irving]: Yes.
16 Q. [Mr Rampton]: “And scooted on ahead to Tampa, arriving at 4 p.m. Set up
17 room nicely”.
18 A. [Mr Irving]: I set up the room, in other words; it was not somebody
19 else setting up the room for me.
20 Q. [Mr Rampton]: So you must have seen the National Alliance banners, must
21 you not?
22 A. [Mr Irving]: Were there any?
23 Q. [Mr Rampton]: We have seen them on film, in this courtroom.
24 A. [Mr Irving]: On this particular occasion?
25 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Yes. This film that we have shown in court. We did not
26 show the whole of it. We just saw you standing on a
. P-64
1 podium you speaking like an inverted CND sign, the
2 National Alliance banner a few feet away from your left
3 shoulder.
4 A. [Mr Irving]: Yes, of course it must have been that because that was the
5 Australian film.
6 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Exactly. “Set up room nicely. Good audience at 7 p.m.
7 Around 90 to a 100 people. Their book sales were not
8 commensurate. Too many young people. I gave a few books,
9 too, to lighten a load and I had four boxes of Goering
10 (that is your book) to each hard paperback with P and
11 his/her name is not given to us”.
12 A. [Mr Irving]: No, Pat Ryan.
13 Q. [Mr Rampton]: “Vincent Breeding decided he had to deliver a Nazi-type
14 introduction and preparation which I tried hard to defuse
15 by my remarks about that and the Swastika t-shirts, Nazi
16 tattoos, etc., will give the Australians any amount of
17 ammunition to use against me in their feature. What
18 short-sighted, mindless types I am surrounded with.
19 Despair”?
20 A. [Mr Irving]: Will you please read on.
21 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Certainly. “To my disenchantment, the Australian
22 television team spent some time in the foyer interviewing
23 obvious Nazi crack pots, so I shall stop co-operating with
24 them and they can whistle for tomorrow’s interview, then
25 that is the Australians”.
26 A. [Mr Irving]: That is right.
. P-65
1 Q. [Mr Rampton]: “I had one of the crack pots informing the Australians
2 loudly that Rupert Murdoch is obviously a secret Jew.
3 Aargh! I shall set out early for Key West. That is the
4 end of this mini book I am speaking to”.
5 A. [Mr Irving]: Yes.
6 Q. [Mr Rampton]: So there were a lot of Nazi-looking types?
7 A. [Mr Irving]: Nazi crack pots, yes.
8 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Nazi-looking types.
9 A. [Mr Irving]: “Nazi crack pots” are the words I use.
10 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Nazi-looking types, Mr Irving. You did not like that
11 because you thought that that appearance could be
12 exploited against you by the television crew.
13 A. [Mr Irving]: I did not like it because that is not my chosen company.
14 I cannot prevent — it is a free world, particularly in
15 the United States where they believe in the freedom of
16 speech — I cannot stop people wearing what they want;
17 I cannot stop people cutting their hair the way they want
18 to; I cannot stop people coming into a public meeting, but
19 I express my obvious displeasure at it.
20 Q. [Mr Rampton]: A bit like those nice friendly young men we saw in the
21 video tape of Halle in 1991. It is nothing to do with;
22 you cannot help it if Nazi, Neo-Nazi —-
23 A. [Mr Irving]: Is it the ones waiving the red flags or their opponent?
24 Q. [Mr Rampton]: No, the red flags were not your opponents. Professor
25 Funke told you clearly that was one sections of the
26 neo-Nazi movement in Germany.
. P-66
1 A. [Mr Irving]: That is why there is a long line of police holding them
2 apart.
3 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Mr Irving, can we now look at page 14. This is you at the
4 what I call the National Alliance event in 1998, two years
5 later.
6 A. [Mr Irving]: You call it the National Alliance event?
7 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Oh, there is no question.
8 MR JUSTICE GRAY: The fact is that they there were National
9 Alliance events, so you were wrong to suggest that I was
10 guilty of a slip of the tongue. You may be whether you
11 knew about it knew that that was the organisation.
12 A. [Mr Irving]: This is 1998, my Lord, and I held up to your Lordship the
13 invitation which has no reference whatsoever on it to
14 National Alliance, no logo, no inverted CND sign, just a
15 —-
16 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Wait for the question.
17 MR RAMPTON: Let us look at the diary entry at the bottom of
18 the page, shall we Mr Irving: “July 25th 1998. Tampa
19 Florida”, again. Then there is a square bracket with
20 three dots in it. I am coming back to that, Mr Irving.
21 A. [Mr Irving]: Yes.
22 Q. [Mr Rampton]: “5 p.m. Over to Bess Western. Good function at 7 p.m.
23 About a 100 there. Good book sales”. Vincent Breeding,
24 remember him from 1996?
25 A. [Mr Irving]: Yes, he learned his lesson from my lecture.
26 Q. [Mr Rampton]: He is the National Alliance organiser, is he not?
. P-67
1 A. [Mr Irving]: That I do not know. I am sorry, that I did not know, let
2 me correct that.
3 Q. [Mr Rampton]: “Better behaved this time. His young men were dressed in
4 suits or blazers, standing impassively at the corners. No
5 skinheads, neo-Nazis, thugs or jack boots in evidence. No
6 doubt, the press will tell their readers otherwise”. What
7 you worried about, Mr Irving, is not the presence of
8 neo-Nazis. You are worried about the dent in your public
9 image, the public knowledge of the presence of neo-Nazis
10 will make, are you not?
11 A. [Mr Irving]: No, I am worried about the press lying. I have seen press
12 reports in this courtroom saying the courtroom is filled
13 with skinheads in the audience, and I do not think any of
14 us have ever seen that. That is what has been in the
15 press reporting around the world on this particular trial,
16 that my skinhead supporters are packing the benches here.
17 I am very familiar with this kind of press reporting.
18 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Mr Irving, I said I would come back to look at that
19 ellipsis in square brackets we find in that diary again.
20 A. [Mr Irving]: Yes.
21 Q. [Mr Rampton]: I would like you to look at a couple of documents,
22 please. This is also taken, partly from a discovery and
23 partly from a document which you produced in court.
24 Mr Irving, you said repeatedly in this court, when
25 cross-examining my expert witnesses, that you have
26 disclosed the whole of your diaries.
. P-68
1 A. [Mr Irving]: On disk, yes.
2 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Yes.
3 A. [Mr Irving]: You have received them on disk.
4 Q. [Mr Rampton]: If you look at the first of these documents —-
5 A. [Mr Irving]: Let me just qualify that, please. I disclosed all of
6 those that were discoverable. I may be wrong but my
7 belief is that the diaries were discoverable up the time
8 the writ was served. Am I right, my Lord?
9 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Oh, yes.
10 A. [Mr Irving]: And when was the writ served, September 1996?
11 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Look at the entry for 2nd June 1998.
12 A. [Mr Irving]: Which is after the writ was served.
13 Q. [Mr Rampton]: That depends, Mr Irving. Your analysis of law is a little
14 short.
15 A. [Mr Irving]: Perhaps we ought to —-
16 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Discoverability depends not on the date of the writ; it
17 depends upon, subject to legal professional privilege,
18 relevance.
19 A. [Mr Irving]: Perhaps his Lordship can lecture me on this point, but you
20 ask me whether I had disclosed everything that was — you
21 put to me the sentence that I had withheld nothing —-
22 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Well, come on, let us not waste time on
23 this. It is quite obvious that you disclosed something in
24 relation to June 2nd 1998 —-
25 A. [Mr Irving]: Yes.
26 MR RAMPTON: Yes, and now would you look at the second sheet,
. P-69
1 which is what you produced in court.
2 MR JUSTICE GRAY: — and that is after the writ. The point
3 is that there is an ellipse in what you disclosed, as I
4 understand it.
5 A. [Mr Irving]: Yes.
6 MR RAMPTON: If you look at the second two pages of that little
7 clip — it is two and a half pages, this is something you
8 wanted to use in court so you produced it for our
9 edification during the course of this trial.
10 A. [Mr Irving]: No, I did not. Which one?
11 Q. [Mr Rampton]: The large three-page document.
12 A. [Mr Irving]: Yes.
13 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Headed “June 2nd 1998, Chicago Illinois”.
14 A. [Mr Irving]: No, you asked me for the summary of the Himmler letters to
15 his mistress, and I have gave that entire summary, that
16 entire day’s entry in my diary.
17 Q. [Mr Rampton]: That is an entire entry in your diary?
18 A. [Mr Irving]: Yes.
19 Q. [Mr Rampton]: So, it is not right to say that we have had the whole of
20 your diaries, is it? Look at the difference in length.
21 This is four lines long and this is two and a half pages.
22 A. [Mr Irving]: Perhaps we should have a lesson from his Lordship about
23 what is discoverable and what is not.
24 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Let me take it in the sequence which I
25 understand it to be in.
26 A. [Mr Irving]: The writ was served in September 1996.
. P-70
1 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Do not worry about whether the writ was served; that has
2 nothing to do with it. You, is it right, originally
3 disclosed an extract from your diary of June 2nd 1998
4 which consisted about four and a half lines?
5 A. [Mr Irving]: Yes.
6 Q. [Mr Rampton]: There was then, as I understand it, a request from the
7 Defendants that you disclose more of that entry whereupon
8 one gets —-
9 MR RAMPTON: No. It was something that Mr Irving himself
10 produced voluntarily to answer some question about the
11 Himmler diaries.
12 A. [Mr Irving]: Yes.
13 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Right. So then you voluntarily disclosed
14 additional from that day’s diary entry?
15 A. [Mr Irving]: About 10 days ago, yes.
16 MR RAMPTON: So we must not be misled, must we Mr Irving, to
17 thinking that the diary entries that we have in this court
18 are anything like the complete diary entries?
19 A. [Mr Irving]: His Lordship is aware of the fact that a lot of private
20 material that has been taken out, a lot of personal
21 material to which you are not entitled.
22 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Of course. I, being the lawyer here, Mr Irving, or one of
23 the lawyers, have no problem with the obliteration (that
24 calls a Court of Appeal authority for it), from disclosed
25 documents of material that is irrelevant, or that is
26 legally professionally privileged, no problem at all. My
. P-71
1 question here is, in relation to 25th July 1998, there is
2 an ellipse, does that ellipse disguise a reference to the
3 National Alliance or not?
4 A. [Mr Irving]: That is a very proper question and I will certainly have
5 it answered. I can send you the entire diary entry.
6 I will even ask you for undertakings, but I think that
7 I can say with honesty that, to my knowledge, I have
8 redacted nothing out of the diaries which is properly
9 discoverable.
10 Q. [Mr Rampton]: What do you know about the British National Party,
11 Mr Irving?
12 A. [Mr Irving]: I know more about them than I know about the National
13 Alliance.
14 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Tell me what you know about the British National Party,
15 please?
16 A. [Mr Irving]: What the Germans call a “verlorenes Haufen” – a lost
17 heap, a band of hopeless right-wingers going nowhere.
18 Q. [Mr Rampton]: But you speak to them, do you not?
19 A. [Mr Irving]: No.
20 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Or you have done?
21 A. [Mr Irving]: No.
22 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Tab 5, please, in the right-wing extremist file, page 2A
23 for example, diary entry for some date in June 1983,
24 second paragraph: “4.30 p.m. Train to Leicester. Spoke
25 there to 27 people at a British National Movement meeting
26 organised by Ray Hill”.
. P-72
1 A. [Mr Irving]: You are asking me about the British National Party,
2 right?
3 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Yes. What is different between the British National
4 Movement and the British National Party?
5 A. [Mr Irving]: I am not totally ignorant. I assume there is a
6 difference, otherwise I would have not written that.
7 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Turn over the page, please. This is 17th July 1990, a
8 letter from —-
9 A. [Mr Irving]: Seven years later.
10 Q. [Mr Rampton]: — Geoffrey D Brown. “British National Party, Yorkshire
11 region. Dear Mr Irving, further to our telephone
12 conversation today, I am writing to confirm that we would
13 be very happy for to you come up to Leeds on Friday 14th
14 September to address a special northern regional meeting
15 —-“.
16 A. [Mr Irving]: Yes.
17 Q. [Mr Rampton]: ” — whilst the bulk of the audience will no doubt be
18 from the BNP. It is expected that there will also be
19 people attending from other groups such as the Monday Club
20 Yorkshire Area and something called English Solidarity”.
21 A. [Mr Irving]: Yes.
22 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Last line: “Again, many thanks for accepting our
23 invitation”.
24 A. [Mr Irving]: Yes. It is very similar to the functions in America where
25 somebody who is a local functionary of some political
26 group is inviting me to come and address an umbrella body
. P-73
1 which all sorts of functions will come. If you look at
2 the diary entry which covers —-
3 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Mr Irving, come on, that is letter on the
4 stationery of the British National Party.
5 A. [Mr Irving]: — all these jumped up people, you notice he then gives me
6 his private address to reply to. He is inviting me as a
7 person, my Lord.
8 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Are you inviting me to accept that this is
9 not an invitation to speak, and an invitation by the
10 British National Party to speak at a British National
11 Party meeting.
12 A. [Mr Irving]: He says that the bulk of the audience will, no doubt, be
13 from the BNP, and that I accept. It is also going to be
14 totally hybrid. There are going to be people from the
15 Monday Club which is another disreputable group, and
16 English Solidarity. If you look at my diary entry which
17 is on page 5, my Lord, you will see that there is not the
18 slightest reference to me being at the BNP function.
19 MR RAMPTON: Mr Irving, you do give the most appalling hostages
20 it fortune, if I may say so. Please turn to page 7.
21 A. [Mr Irving]: Perhaps I can say that this is mark of an honest witness,
22 that I am speaking from memory, I have not prepared for
23 this, I have not rehearsed. We are all hostages, not so
24 much to fortune as to bad memory, looking at events in
25 1983, which is 17 years ago and 1990 which is 10 years ago
26 —-
. P-74
1 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Now we are coming to 1993.
2 A. [Mr Irving]: — and I speak at, as I have said many times, 190 or
3 sometimes 200 functions a year.
4 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Page 7, please.
5 A. [Mr Irving]: Yes.
6 Q. [Mr Rampton]: “British National Party, in Kent. Dear Mr Irving, the
7 British National Party is organising a rally in central
8 London on the afternoon of Saturday 6th November. It is
9 expected that several hundred people will attend. You are
10 hereby invited to attend as a guest speaker”.
11 A. [Mr Irving]: And I refused.
12 Q. [Mr Rampton]: You refused?
13 A. [Mr Irving]: End of story.
14 Q. [Mr Rampton]: You refused?
15 A. [Mr Irving]: Yes. Sorry. So your BNP file is rather thin, I am
16 afraid.
17 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Well, turn to page 8, will you. You are in key West.
18 A. [Mr Irving]: I am sorry, which tab was it again?
19 Q. [Mr Rampton]: The same tab, page 8, bottom of the page: “12 midday,
20 Kirk Lyons phoned”.
21 A. [Mr Irving]: Tab 8 you say?
22 MR JUSTICE GRAY: No. Page 8, tab 5.
23 MR RAMPTON: “12 midday. Kirk Lyons phoned. Going to London
24 November 2nd to November 9th for BNP meeting”. Is that
25 you or Kirk Lyons?
26 A. [Mr Irving]: Mr Lyons, he is a lawyer.
. P-75
1 Q. [Mr Rampton]: What is his connection with the BNP then?
2 A. [Mr Irving]: I have no idea; he is an American lawyer.
3 Q. [Mr Rampton]: No idea?
4 A. [Mr Irving]: No.
5 Q. [Mr Rampton]: How do you know he is an American lawyer?
6 A. [Mr Irving]: Is it relevant?
7 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Yes.
8 A. [Mr Irving]: You asked me what his connection with the BNP is and the
9 answer is I do not know.
10 Q. [Mr Rampton]: I am mildly interested in your associates. Mr Irving. I
11 am much more interested in you personally, of course?
12 A. [Mr Irving]: Speaking of my first lawyer, who was Michael Rubenstein
13 who was my lawyer for 25 years or 20 years and may be
14 familiar to this court. I am quite happy to go through
15 all the lawyers I have employed in my life.
16 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Many of my best friends are Jews too, Mr Irving. I want
17 to go back now, if I may, some 50 years or so.
18 A. [Mr Irving]: So the BNP file was rather slim. Can we agree on that?
19 Q. [Mr Rampton]: That is your comment, Mr Irving. You have given one
20 dishonest answer already in relation even to so slim a
21 file as the BNP, which is that you it did not go to the
22 BNP me in Leeds, and you told us in answer to our
23 question, answer 45, “I have no connection with the
24 British National Party nor have I been following its
25 progress, nor do I have any knowledge of its official aims
26 or policies”.
. P-76
1 A. [Mr Irving]: I think that is a very reasonable and fair answer. It
2 turns out that I attended one semi-BNP function 23 years
3 ago or 17 years ago or something like.
4 Q. [Mr Rampton]: 1990, Mr Irving.
5 A. [Mr Irving]: Ten years ago.
6 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Then you said: “From memory I have never spoken at a BNP
7 meeting”.
8 A. [Mr Irving]: If you want to hang your hat on that then you are at
9 liberty.
10 Q. [Mr Rampton]: No, I have a whole row of pegs for my hat, thank you,
11 Mr Irving.
12 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Mr Irving, what is puzzling me a little bit
13 is why you troubled on the 26th October refer to the fact
14 that Mr Lyons was going to London for the BNP meeting?
15 A. [Mr Irving]: Mr Lyons is an acquaintance of mine and he told me he was
16 going to go London, that is all. He probably wanted to
17 know if I was going to be in London at that time and he
18 could come and drop in on me, but that is all. I mean, my
19 Lord, I can be quite plain and say had I attended the BNP
20 meeting your Lordship will be familiar with the fact that
21 they have had my entire diaries and they would have
22 dredged that little morsel out of the diaries and dangled
23 it before this court. It is dishonest of them to have
24 suggested any different. In view of the fact they have
25 had 20 million words of diaries and these are the only
26 references to the BNP, that is a minuscule, almost
. P-77
1 frantic, attempt to associate me with them.
2 MR RAMPTON: Describe the BNP? You seem to have some knowledge
3 of them which I am afraid I do not have, but you tell me
4 who they are, the BNP, while I search for a document?
5 Hopeless right-wing, is that right, going nowhere? What
6 did you mean by that, hopeless right-wing going nowhere?
7 A. [Mr Irving]: Their attempt to establish a right-wing alternative party
8 in this country which is, as I understand from newspaper
9 accounts, riven by internal dissension, by poor quality,
10 officers. I do not know. I do not follow them develop.
11 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Who is Mr Anthony Hancock who in Munich describes himself
12 as Mr Michael Carter?
13 A. [Mr Irving]: Are you asking if he has any association with the BNP?
14 I do not know.
15 Q. [Mr Rampton]: No. I am asking you who he is, what his political stance
16 is?
17 A. [Mr Irving]: I think he is a right-winger.
18 Q. [Mr Rampton]: What do you mean by a right-winger, free market?
19 A. [Mr Irving]: Somebody who is to the right-wing of me, shall I say. If
20 I describe him as being right-wing, then he is right-wing.
21 Q. [Mr Rampton]: So he would like black people to be sent back to wherever
22 their ancestors came from, that kind of thing, is it?
23 A. [Mr Irving]: I imagine so, yes, but I have not had learned political
24 discussions with him, so perhaps I should not give that
25 answer.
Section 78.26 to 106.25
26 Q. [Mr Rampton]: I am sorry, my Lord, there has been a hitch in the
. P-78
1 administration, I am afraid. Mr Irving, do you remember
2 the question arose, first of all, in Professor Evans’
3 report of a letter written to his wife probably sometime
4 in 1942 of a German officer called Schaultz du Bois?
5 A. [Mr Irving]: Yes.
6 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Do you remember telling this court some days or weeks ago
7 that you were not aware of the contents of that letter?
8 A. [Mr Irving]: I cannot remember what I told the court, but I can tell
9 you now what my position is.
10 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Please do.
11 A. [Mr Irving]: At the time I was researching the background of the Bruns
12 Report, checking on the names in the report, finding out
13 who was who, I read the book by Professor Gerald Fleming,
14 the relevant parts of that book, and Professor Gerald
15 Fleming had done research into the same shootings at Riga,
16 and he had managed to obtain a copy of the letter which
17 Schaultz de Bois had written in 1942, and I read the lines
18 in the Fleming book relating to that letter. In other
19 words, I have not read the actual letter but I know the
20 letter exists.
21 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Yes, indeed you do. You were I think asked by his
22 Lordship, this is day 22, which is 17th February 2000,
23 page 103, his Lordship asked you this at line 23:
24 “Is it your case, Mr Irving, because you must
25 put it”, because you were cross-examining Professor Evans,
26 Mr Irving, “because you must put it clearly and
. P-79
1 straightforwardly, that you were unaware of what
2 Mr Schaultz de Bois said in this letter?” Mr Irving:
3 “Yes, and your Lordship will have heard from the
4 cross-examination over the previous ten minutes that I do
5 not attach very great importance to the remarks by
6 Canaris.” We can ignore most of that sentence, except the
7 “yes”, Mr Irving. It was not a straightforward answer,
8 was it?
9 A. [Mr Irving]: Ah!
10 Q. [Mr Rampton]: You know very well what was in the Schaultz de Bois
11 letter, did you not?
12 A. [Mr Irving]: I am sure his Lordship is familiar with the problem with
13 transcripts in court, that when a witness is having
14 something read it him and there is a pause and the witness
15 says “yes” as though to say, “Yes, I hear what you are
16 saying”, right? This should not be taken as being, yes,
17 I agree with what you are saying, but, yes, I hear what
18 you are saying.
19 MR JUSTICE GRAY: I hope we are not going to treat all your
20 answers in that light.
21 A. [Mr Irving]: I think your Lordship is capable of seeing the difference.
22 MR JUSTICE GRAY: I certainly see the difference.
23 A. [Mr Irving]: What I would call a substantive yes rather than a nod.
24 This is mine. Can I have it back now, please?
25 MR RAMPTON: Yes, exactly. Indeed so.
26 A. [Mr Irving]: This is the Gerald Fleming book in my hand.
. P-80
1 Q. [Mr Rampton]: It is indeed. The reason why that letter comes into the
2 case, Mr Irving, as I expect you will remember, is that it
3 contains an account of what happened when the message got
4 back to Hitler — you will find it on page 98, will you
5 not, it is in German, but you will recognize the passage.
6 It is just above a red marking by you, is it not?
7 A. [Mr Irving]: Yes.
8 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Read out what it was reported to Schaultz de Bois that
9 Hitler had said after he learned of the Riga shootings.
10 It is just before your red marking.
11 A. [Mr Irving]: I have to find it first.
12 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Schaultz de Bois went it Canaris to get him
13 to intercede with Hitler?
14 MR RAMPTON: That is right. He wrote a letter to his wife
15 apparently reporting what Hitler’s reaction had been.
16 A. [Mr Irving]: I am not deliberately delaying anything. I am just trying
17 to find the actual passage.
18 Q. [Mr Rampton]: I think it is on page 98.
19 A. [Mr Irving]: OK I am sorry. Yes, here we have it. This man, who went
20 in and out, he is talking about Canaris obviously.
21 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Yes, obviously.
22 A. [Mr Irving]: This man, who went in and out at the Fuhrer’s, was to tell
23 the Fuhrer the consequences and the atrocities of these
24 methods once more in a most penetrating manner. No, he is
25 said to have done this whereupon the latter, Hitler, is
26 said to have said, and then comes the quotation: “Mein
. P-81
1 Herr, you want to go soft, do you? I have to do that
2 because after me there will not be anybody else to do it”.
3 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Right. Now, that is some evidence, is it not — I am not
4 saying it is the strongest evidence in the world, of
5 course not, Mr Irving — that Hitler thought it his
6 job — Hitler, his job — to abolish the Jews and kill
7 them?
8 A. [Mr Irving]: It is some evidence, yes.
9 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Yes. Why have you never brought that to the attention of
10 your readers? You have known about it since 1982.
11 A. [Mr Irving]: I have known about it since roughly the same time as
12 I found the Bruns book, yes.
13 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Professor Fleming sent you a copy of his book, the German
14 copy, which I think came out in 1982, did it not?
15 A. [Mr Irving]: Yes.
16 Q. [Mr Rampton]: If you look carefully at that copy, just flick through the
17 pages, you may agree with me that you have in fact read
18 the whole of it up to page 104.
19 A. [Mr Irving]: No. I think I set this out at the time I gave the book to
20 you. I obviously dipped into the first 17 or 18 pages.
21 Let us see where the markings end. I think 27 was where
22 I stopped reading.
23 Q. [Mr Rampton]: See if you can find the next marking after 27.
24 A. [Mr Irving]: Then I put it away. Then, when I needed a source to look
25 up details on the Bruns Report, I picked it up and looked
26 specifically at the Bruns passages. You will see the ink
. P-82
1 is a different colour.
2 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Sorry, I did not mean to interrupt. Would you look at
3 page 88?
4 A. [Mr Irving]: Yes.
5 Q. [Mr Rampton]: There is one of your markings there, is there not?
6 A. [Mr Irving]: Yes, and I write “oy” in the margin.
7 Q. [Mr Rampton]: There is something said that you do not like, I suppose?
8 A. [Mr Irving]: Yes. It is what I would say to him. If he had read this
9 out to me, I would have said “oy”.
10 Q. [Mr Rampton]: There is a slight diversion. What is it about that
11 passage you did not like?
12 A. [Mr Irving]: I do not know. Let us have a look.
13 Q. [Mr Rampton]: We have a photographic copy of the relevant part of this.
14 MR JUSTICE GRAY: I am following.
15 A. [Mr Irving]: Oh yes. On the basis of the liquidation order issued on
16 November 10th and 11th to the newly appointed senior
17 police chief and SS chief in the Baltic, who was Jeckeln,
18 the order issued by Himmler and Hitler, I have underlined
19 the words “Himmler and Hitler” and that is where I have
20 written “oy” in the margin as though to say, “OK, Himmler,
21 I agree but how are you just sliding in the words ‘and
22 Hitler’ as well”?
23 Q. [Mr Rampton]: He no doubt has reached the position in 1982, which you
24 have now reached in this court for the first time, that
25 Hitler authorized the shootings in the East.
26 A. [Mr Irving]: Are you asking me a question?
. P-83
1 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Yes, I am. That is right, is it not?
2 A. [Mr Irving]: Let me just explain why I have written “oy” then next to
3 it because that may be part of the answer. This is a book
4 which has been written for the purpose of disproving me,
5 as he admits himself, and this is admitted in the reviews,
6 and this is the evidence on which he relies in disproving
7 me, to prove that it is the Fuhrer’s wish. In fact the
8 subtitle of this book is, “It is the Fuhrer’s Wish”, and
9 it is that actual quotation, the so-called liquidation
10 order, “tell Lohse it is my order and it is also the
11 Fuhrer’s wish”. I have written in the margin, saying “oy,
12 is that as good as it gets?”, the same as I have sometimes
13 said to you, Mr Rampton.
14 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Yes, Mr Irving.
15 A. [Mr Irving]: One had expected better, same as his Lordship has
16 sometimes said to me, in fact.
17 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Turn back two pages, will you, from that marking to page
18 86?
19 A. [Mr Irving]: I did notice on the opposite page they are relying on the
20 Wetzel letter, which of course the Eichmann manuscript now
21 challenges as being a forgery.
22 Q. [Mr Rampton]: That matters not to me in the least, Mr Irving.
23 A. [Mr Irving]: Yes.
24 Q. [Mr Rampton]: As we discussed earlier today in this court, recent
25 discoveries have very little bearing on your competence or
26 honesty as an historian. Page 86 Mr Irving. What is it
. P-84
1 that Professor Fleming is reciting on the top of that
2 page?
3 A. [Mr Irving]: He is referring to the Muller document, about which of
4 course I have made representations to this court, dated
5 August 1st 1941.
6 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Yes. The Muller document saying the Fuhrer is to have
7 running or continuous information, or reports, about the
8 work of the Einsatzgruppen in the East.
9 A. [Mr Irving]: Got to be kept au courant.
10 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Laufend is the German.
11 A. [Mr Irving]: I was using a French phrase on the work of the
12 Einsatzgruppen in the East, yes.
13 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Do you remember that I put it to you in cross-examination
14 that, contrary to what you said in court, you were indeed
15 familiar with the Muller order of 1st August?
16 A. [Mr Irving]: You put to me, yes.
17 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Are you saying you did not read this passage in Fleming’s
18 book?
19 A. [Mr Irving]: I have to say that you are asking me about something 18
20 years later but I can say with great confidence that, as
21 there are no kind of markings on those pages, then, with
22 the high degree of probability, I did not read them.
23 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Then I asked you by reference to this very passage, “Have
24 you read Gerald Fleming’s book?” And your answer is,
25 “I have not read that book”.
26 A. [Mr Irving]: I have not read the book as such, no. But may I also say
. P-85
1 that had I seen that passage about the Muller document,
2 which is very interesting, obviously, I would have written
3 to my friends at the Institute of History or the very next
4 time I went there, because that is the source he gives
5 there, footnote 172, and on my next visit to Munich after
6 1982 I would have said, “Can I, by the way, have a look at
7 that file, please?” and, obviously, that is one indication
8 that I did not see that document. But I have to say that
9 I will have submissions to make about that document when
10 the time comes unless the Defence can produce the exact
11 file of where it is stated to be.
12 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Do not worry; we are working on it, Mr Irving. Don’t you
13 worry about that.
14 A. [Mr Irving]: Well, I am just reminding…
15 Q. [Mr Rampton]: We have plenty of time and lots of contacts. Many
16 rabbits —-
17 A. [Mr Irving]: Well, I need time after I have been told the file number,
18 of course, to make use of it.
19 Q. [Mr Rampton]: There are many rabbits in this burrow. Do you remember,
20 Mr Irving, that in your account of the conference on 16th
21 and 17th April 1943 you transposed a remark made by Hitler
22 on 16th as though it had been made on the 17th?
23 A. [Mr Irving]: Yes, that is one of the two errors I have corrected in the
24 new edition of my Hitler book.
25 Q. [Mr Rampton]: I am pleased to hear it. My reason for asking you that is
26 this. You have been aware of what the true chronology was
. P-86
1 at least since 1977, have you not?
2 A. [Mr Irving]: Yes — wait a minute, wait — yes, since 197.
3 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Martin Broszat pointed it out to you?
4 A. [Mr Irving]: Yes.
5 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Do you remember writing to a Mr Ashton on 31st December
6 1978?
7 A. [Mr Irving]: Oh, yes, clearly. What did I say? Can we see the letter,
8 please?
9 Q. [Mr Rampton]: I will but I will just read it out.
10 A. [Mr Irving]: I am being sarcastic.
11 Q. [Mr Rampton]: We may not need to get it out. “As for your views on the
12 1943 Horthy document, I believe I have replied to you
13 quite fully about this, drawing your attention to Hitler’s
14 explicit remark to the Reichs vorweise” one day
15 previously?
16 A. [Mr Irving]: Yes.
17 Q. [Mr Rampton]: — “to the effect that nobody was asking him to kill the
18 Jews”?
19 A. [Mr Irving]: Yes.
20 Q. [Mr Rampton]: So in 1978 you were fully conscious that Hitler’s remark,
21 “There is no need for that” —-
22 A. [Mr Irving]: Was one day earlier.
23 Q. [Mr Rampton]: — was made on a previous day?
24 A. [Mr Irving]: Yes.
25 Q. [Mr Rampton]: And you never corrected it, did you?
26 A. [Mr Irving]: No. But you know my views on that, Mr Rampton, that
. P-87
1 whether the remark is dated in my book on April 6th or
2 April 17th, I think that is a very flimsy peg and the hat
3 falls on the floor —-
4 Q. [Mr Rampton]: I hear what you say, Mr Irving.
5 A. [Mr Irving]: I beg your pardon?
6 Q. [Mr Rampton]: I said I hear what you say.
7 A. [Mr Irving]: Well, you interrupted me before I had finished.
8 Q. [Mr Rampton]: That was the excuse, if I can put it like that, that you
9 gave us last time.
10 A. [Mr Irving]: In fact, it is one of the errors I corrected in the latest
11 edition because it is a minor error, but it is worth
12 picking up.
13 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Yes. I want to ask you about another document from 1942.
14 My Lord, this is the Kinner Report from Zamosk in Poland
15 on 16th December 1942. I believe your Lordship will find
16 that in file K2, tab 4, page 19A (vi). For once, my Lord,
17 we have the English as well as the German. This is an
18 English translation, Mr Irving, but you would probably
19 prefer to use the German, I do not know.
20 A. [Mr Irving]: I have them both here.
21 Q. [Mr Rampton]: It concerns, does it not, a transport of 644 Poles to the
22 work camp at Auschwitz on 10th December 1942, am I right?
23 A. [Mr Irving]: Yes.
24 Q. [Mr Rampton]: If you turn to look at the second page under the
25 subheading or by the underlined subheading “arbeit
26 Einsatzfahigskeit”.
. P-88
1 A. [Mr Irving]: In German, yes, I have that.
2 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Yes, or the English. “Capacity for employment as
3 labour”. We find this: “SS Hauptsturmfuhrer Halmeier”,
4 in fact, that is a mistake for Almeier, “explained that
5 only Poles capable of work should be delivered so as to
6 avoid as far as possible any useless burdening of the camp
7 and also of the delivery traffic. In order to relieve the
8 camp, limited people, idiots, cripples and sick people
9 must be removed”, the word is “entfernt”, “from the same”,
10 that is the camp, “by liquidation”. The word there is
11 “liquidation”, is it not?
12 A. [Mr Irving]: Yes — very explicit.
13 Q. [Mr Rampton]: It is very explicit. There again we see another example,
14 as in Himmler’s closing speech of 4th October 1943, of
15 removal and liquidation, evacuation and extermination
16 being used synonymously, do we not?
17 A. [Mr Irving]: Yes.
18 Q. [Mr Rampton]: “This measure”, that is to say liquidation, “however
19 becomes more difficult to implement because, according to
20 an order from the RSHA”, the English is translated as “in
21 opposition to”?
22 A. [Mr Irving]: “In contrast to”, I think.
23 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Yes, “in contrast to”, I was going to suggest that, “in
24 contrast to the measures applied to the Jews, the Poles
25 must die a natural death.” Does that not mean, Mr Irving,
26 in fairly unvarnished terms, that whereas Poles must be
. P-89
1 kept alive until they die, the Jews can be killed?
2 A. [Mr Irving]: I think that is the interpretation on those words, yes.
3 Q. [Mr Rampton]: And this is in relation to procedures at Auschwitz, is it
4 not?
5 A. [Mr Irving]: It is in relation to Auschwitz, yes.
6 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Yes, because Aumeier was at Auschwitz, was he not?
7 A. [Mr Irving]: Yes.
8 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Is that not some sort of rather powerful evidence that
9 Auschwitz, so far as Jews were concerned, was so far from
10 being a work camp a place where they were being
11 exterminated, liquidated?
12 A. [Mr Irving]: Well, I am not saying they were being exterminated; it is
13 a place where they are not being protected and —-
14 Q. [Mr Rampton]: They can be killed at will, can they not?
15 A. [Mr Irving]: That is right, yes, according to this document.
16 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Are you mistrustful of this document?
17 A. [Mr Irving]: No. I am not challenging the authenticity of the document
18 at all, but it is —-
19 MR JUSTICE GRAY: But are you challenging what is said here,
20 that the policy appears to have been, in relation at least
21 to this transportation, that any Jews who were not fit for
22 labour would be liquidated?
23 A. [Mr Irving]: The comment I would I make on this document, and obviously
24 it is an important document, I am not challenging that
25 respect, but is written by an SS, what, Untersturmfuhrer
26 which is, what — I have to look at my military dictionary
. P-90
1 and see the rank, but it is an SS corporal, I think.
2 Q. [Mr Justice Gray]: Well, he is quoting an SS Haupsturmfuhrer which is going
3 slightly higher up the hierarchy.
4 A. [Mr Irving]: He is what?
5 Q. [Mr Justice Gray]: He is quoting Aumeier.
6 A. [Mr Irving]: But the actual document has written or drafted by an SS
7 corporal and we have had this kind of problem with
8 documents before, that you have to be very careful if you
9 are going to look at actual words used or actual senses
10 conveyed, and I do not want to put it more strongly than
11 that, just to say that — I do not want to put it more
12 strongly than that. I just want to say that it is — the
13 corporal’s language, he is not a lawyer drafting a
14 document.
15 MR RAMPTON: No, if he had been, Mr Irving, he might have used
16 rather more guarded language?
17 A. [Mr Irving]: No, I do not —-
18 Q. [Mr Rampton]: That is the advantage of these janitorial documents, is it
19 not, that one sees the truth?
20 A. [Mr Irving]: I agree it is an important document. It says the Jews are
21 being killed at Auschwitz and this has not been denied.
22 Q. [Mr Rampton]: The word is actually “liquidate”?
23 A. [Mr Irving]: Yes.
24 Q. [Mr Rampton]: “Liquidation”.
25 A. [Mr Irving]: Yes. Well, that is why I say that this is the kind of
26 language the corporals would probably have used to each
. P-91
1 other.
2 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Yes. Now we are going to go even further back in time,
3 Mr Irving. We are going to go back via your book Goebbels
4 1935, 33, 34, and 32, but we are going to do it in one
5 sentence, as it were. Have you got your Goebbels book,
6 Mr Irving?
7 A. [Mr Irving]: Yes. My Lord page.
8 Q. [Mr Rampton]: My Lord, page 46 of Goebbels.
9 A. [Mr Irving]: Yes.
10 Q. [Mr Rampton]: My Lord, this relates to pages 692 to 698 of Professor
11 Evans’ report. It has to do with criminal statistics in
12 Berlin and to some extent Germany but Berlin in 1932 to
13 ’35, and the way in which Mr Irving has represented the
14 Jewish share of those criminal statistics, if I may put it
15 like that.
16 Generally speaking, in this part of the book you
17 are discussing, in general terms, how it was that Goebbels
18 came to be so radical and anti-Semite?
19 A. [Mr Irving]: No.
20 Q. [Mr Rampton]: This is general context, is it not?
21 A. [Mr Irving]: I do not think so. I am explaining how Goebbels came to
22 be so successful in Berlin with his anti-Semitism, if
23 I can put it like that?
24 Q. [Mr Rampton]: OK. It does not matter. It is all about Berlin, is it
25 not?
26 A. [Mr Irving]: Yes, and why his anti-Semitism found a fertile audience.
. P-92
1 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Yes, in the first, second and third paragraphs on page 46
2 there are some references to the Jewish deputy police
3 chief, Dr Wernhart Weiss, and then at the bottom of the
4 page, it starts: “Dr Goebbels would shun no libel to
5 blacken his”, that is Dr Weiss’s, “name. Instinctively
6 carrying on an ancient tradition of name calling he seized
7 on Dr Weiss’ nickname of ‘Isidor’ and commissioned the
8 scurrilous Nazi marching song about him. He would
9 highlight”, that is Goebbels, “every malfeasance of the
10 criminal demimondes and identify it as Jewish. In these
11 closing years of the Weimar Republic he was unfortunately
12 not always wrong.”
13 So now, Mr Irving, we are getting a recitation
14 of the true facts as opposed to Goebbels’ propaganda.
15 “In 1930 Jews would be convicted in 42 of 210
16 known narcotics smuggling cases; in 1932 69 of the 272
17 known international narcotics dealers were Jewish. Jews
18 were arrested in over 60 per cent of the cases concerning
19 the running of illegal gambling dens; 193 of the 411
20 pickpockets arrested in 1932 were Jews. In 1932 no fewer
21 than 31,000 cases of fraud, mainly insurance swindles,
22 would be committed by Jews”. Then we are referred to
23 footnote 29 which we will find on pages 547 to 548.
24 The footnote for that last statement “In 1932 no
25 fewer than 31,000 cases of fraud, mainly insurance
26 swindles, would be committed by Jews”, footnote 29 on page
. P-93
1 547 says: “Interpol figures” —-
2 A. [Mr Irving]: Excuse me. The footnote refers to everything —-
3 Q. [Mr Rampton]: OK.
4 A. [Mr Irving]: — prior to that.
5 Q. [Mr Rampton]: That fine.
6 A. [Mr Irving]: Everything after footnote 28, if you see what I mean? Not
7 just the last statement.
8 Q. [Mr Rampton]: I follow that, but it includes the figures given in the
9 last sentence, does it not?
10 A. [Mr Irving]: Yes.
11 Q. [Mr Rampton]: “Interpole figures, in Deutsche Nachrichten-Buro
12 (hereafter DNB) July 20th 1935; and see Kurt Daluege,
13 ‘Judenfrage als Grundsatz’ in Angriff, August 3rd 1935″,
14 and then there are some general references about the
15 general demimonde. Tell me first, Mr Irving, who is, who
16 was, I should say, Kurt Daluege?
17 A. [Mr Irving]: He was the head of the Ordungspolizei which is the order
18 police in Germany.
19 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Yes, Mr Irving. Tell us a wee bit more about him, would
20 you?
21 A. [Mr Irving]: Oh, he was a mass murderer later on. He was in charge of
22 all the killing on the Eastern Front.
23 Q. [Mr Rampton]: He was, what shall I say, an enthusiastic member of the
24 Nazi Party?
25 A. [Mr Irving]: Yes. And he met his just desserts on the Czech gallows.
26 Q. [Mr Rampton]: So one should be rather cautious, perhaps, about what one
. P-94
1 is told by Mr Daluege, do you not think?
2 A. [Mr Irving]: Yes, properly cautious.
3 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Properly cautious. You will see that I have used his
4 files which are in the German Federal archives. That is
5 what the reference is that you left out.
6 Q. [Mr Rampton]: I am going to show you what are the references on which
7 you have relied.
8 A. [Mr Irving]: No? Yes, this one.
9 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Yes. Now, the first of these documents, Mr Irving, is a
10 written version, probably a draft, in the sense that he is
11 going to speak as they say nowadays to it, I rather say
12 from it, he is going to speak from, this is Daluege, on
13 20th July 1935 at a press conference, is it not?
14 A. [Mr Irving]: Yes. I have not seen this typed document. I relied on
15 the Gothic typed face one.
16 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Look at the Gothic one if you prefer because it is
17 identical. The sixth paragraph of the Gothic is identical
18 to the sixth paragraph —-
19 A. [Mr Irving]: Yes.
20 Q. [Mr Rampton]: — on our pages 16 to 17 of the typescript. Since the
21 typescript is easier to read, can we look at the bottom of
22 page 16 of this little clip? You will have to forgive me
23 if my translation is a wee bit rocky. We will get it
24 proper translated, my Lord, in due course. Does it say
25 this, roughly speaking: “Even though we have succeeded in
26 decreasing the number of cases of fraud in the Reichs
. P-95
1 capital to 18,000 in 1934 compared with 31,000 in 1933,
2 the damage caused still amounts to over 112.5 million
3 Reichsmarks”, am I doing all right so far?
4 A. [Mr Irving]: Yes.
5 Q. [Mr Rampton]: And here we come to the conclusion after further
6 investigation that “a considerable or significant part, if
7 not the largest, of these fraudulent manipulations are
8 still committed by Jews.”
9 A. [Mr Irving]: Yes.
10 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Right, where did you get your figure of no fewer than
11 31,000 cases of fraud committed by Jews?
12 A. [Mr Irving]: I am just now looking for the original quotation. What
13 page was the original quotation? 43?
14 Q. [Mr Rampton]: It is 47. You have the year wrong, but I am not going to
15 criticise you for that. You put 1932 instead of 1933, but
16 leave that on one side.
17 A. [Mr Irving]: Have you checked the two books that I give as sources
18 there?
19 Q. [Mr Rampton]: No. I have not checked the two books, Mr Irving. This is
20 your primary source. The books have been checked, yes,
21 and so I am not on false ground.
22 A. [Mr Irving]: Yes — well, I will give you a conditional response which
23 probably will not satisfy you, and say that if the books
24 which are also given in the footnote, there are four
25 sources given in the footnote, do not support the year
26 which is different from the year contained in the document
. P-96
1 you gave me, or do not support the figure of 31,000, then,
2 clearly, the same kind of error has occurred here as
3 happened with the 1.20 a.m. telegram that in the course of
4 writing six separate drafts one after the other this kind
5 of error goes —-
6 Q. [Mr Rampton]: You have —-
7 A. [Mr Irving]: — but it is a conditional response.
8 Q. [Mr Rampton]: You have effectively doubled, or more than doubled, the
9 number of fraud cases attributed by this rabid Nazi
10 Daluege to the Jews in Berlin in that year, have you not?
11 At the very most, even if the Jews are 50 per cent, it is
12 only 15,500 cases attributable, according to Daluege, to
13 Jewish perpetrators?
14 A. [Mr Irving]: Yes. If you are right, then that is correct, but, I
15 mean, I have to say that is a conditional answer not
16 seeing all the sources.
17 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Right.
18 A. [Mr Irving]: And I would not be able to reconstruct that now because
19 I no longer have access to the sources that I had at the
20 time for the reasons you know.
21 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Why do you say that these are Interpol statistics in your
22 footnote?
23 A. [Mr Irving]: Presumably from one of the sources.
24 Q. [Mr Rampton]: No. Interpol was not actually established as Interpol
25 until after the war.
26 A. [Mr Irving]: I am very sorry, but, of course, the Haus an Wannsee, the
. P-97
1 famous Wannsee House, where the Wannsee conference took
2 place, was the headquarters of Interpol. Interpol was
3 actually founded by Reinhardt Heydrich.
4 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Yes, but, no, it was not called Interpol, was it?
5 A. [Mr Irving]: It was presumably written out in full.
6 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Even assuming (which I do not) that this was an innocent
7 mistake on your part to double the number of offences
8 attributable to Jews, do you think it right when your
9 source is this man Daluege uncritically simply to take his
10 figure as being right? You state it as a fact, you see.
11 In probability, he had already doubled the figures at
12 least, do you not think?
13 A. [Mr Irving]: You are faced with a problem, of course, when you are
14 writing a history of the 1930s, you look at as
15 many sources as you can of what sources are available.
16 These are the sources from the German Federal archives
17 which contain all Daluege’s papers. It is very easy to
18 say, “Well, why do you take those figures because I do not
19 like those figures, why do you not take these figures?”
20 You have to take some kind of figures from somewhere, and
21 if you are writing the Battle of Britain and you are going
22 for a long time to believe Winston Churchill’s figures of
23 how many Nazi bombers were shot down, and we no know that
24 those are wrong. But there we have the benefit of
25 complete access to records and you can correct the
26 statistics.
. P-98
1 Q. [Mr Rampton]: May I suggest, Mr Irving, that if a reputable historian
2 were writing about this, he would say, “According to the
3 Nazi propagandist, Kurt Daluege, whose figures are very
4 probably not reliable” —-
5 A. [Mr Irving]: Yes.
6 Q. [Mr Rampton]: — perhaps as many as 15,500 frauds were attributable to
7 Jews”, but to assert that that is what Goebbels would find
8 in 1932 is just the most appalling distortion of the
9 truth, is it not?
10 A. [Mr Irving]: I do not agree. I have made it quite plain what the
11 source of this evidence is. You found it, your
12 researchers found it. Everybody knows who Kurt Daluege
13 was. He was not a Nazi propagandist. He was the head of
14 the German police system. He was in a position to know.
15 He is giving facts to a learned audience. They would be,
16 no doubt, in a position to check and expose these facts if
17 they were wrong. I certainly would not have said it was
18 an Interpol function if I did not have the evidence for
19 it, and I am not going to waste the court’s time looking
20 in these pages of Gothic script for the actual evidence
21 for it, why would I have invented that? And, of course,
22 if you look at the rest of the page —-
23 Q. [Mr Rampton]: I can think of a simple answer, Mr Irving —-
24 A. [Mr Irving]: If you had looked at the rest of the page that you did not
25 read out, I have relied on the figures from the German
26 Federal Statistical Office on the percentages and so on.
. P-99
1 I built up a very careful picture from all the regular
2 sources and, admittedly, we are — I beg your pardon.
3 Q. [Mr Rampton]: We are going to look at some of those in a moment,
4 Mr Irving?
5 A. [Mr Irving]: And, admittedly, in this particular matter we have to rely
6 on a dodgy source which is what you are trying to suggest.
7 Q. [Mr Rampton]: We do not have to, Mr Irving.
8 A. [Mr Irving]: But then, of course, the Goebbels diaries are dodgy
9 sources too. They are diaries written about the arch Nazi
10 liar, and you have to pick and choose and that is the
11 problem you have when you are writing history about the
12 Nazis and it is a problem when you write about history
13 about anything.
14 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Oh, Mr Irving. Where in that Daluege, which is your
15 primary source, that Daluege document, do you have find
16 any reference to insurance swindles?
17 A. [Mr Irving]: What basis do you have for saying it is the primary source
18 when it is a scource of four.
19 Q. [Mr Rampton]: It is the first source you cite?
20 A. [Mr Irving]: The reason for lumping several sources under one number is
21 because otherwise the book is going to look like a rash of
22 measles, every single word is going to have a note number
23 attached to it. So it is the standard practice that you
24 will lump three or four sources relating to the previous
25 two or three statements, even if they are gathered up in
26 one sentence, into one note number. This does not mean to
. P-100
1 say that is the primary source for that statement.
2 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Can we agree this far —-
3 A. [Mr Irving]: Have you ever written book? Oh, we had this out before,
4 did we not?
5 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Yes, we have had this before and, yes, I have. It is not
6 a very good book, but I have written a book, yes.
7 A. [Mr Irving]: It is quite a difficult task to satisfy all the parties,
8 the publishers, the readers and everybody else.
9 Q. [Mr Rampton]: I do not agree with you, Mr Irving. I do not accept that
10 for one moment. This is a case of deliberate distortion
11 by you so as to inflate the number of wicked, dishonest
12 Jews in Berlin in 1932. That is my case and you may as
13 well know it, because what we have got is you double
14 Daluege’s numbers, at least, you have relied on an
15 unreliable source, you have attributed his figures to
16 Interpol and you have spoken about insurance swindles
17 which are not mentioned in Daluege’s document.
18 A. [Mr Irving]: But I am sorry to sound incorrigible. There are four
19 sources listed under that footnote, and you have waved one
20 source at the court and said, “It is not in this source of
21 the four”. If you were to do your job properly, you would
22 produce the other three scourss and say, “It is not in
23 these three either”.
24 Q. [Mr Rampton]: All the figures, I am told, come from Daluege. How about
25 that?
26 A. [Mr Irving]: Who is that or what is that?
. P-101
1 Q. [Mr Rampton]: That is a note passed to me by people who know better than
2 I and , apparently, better than you, Mr Irving?
3 A. [Mr Irving]: I mean, with the utmost respect for your researchers, if
4 they had done their job properly, they would have had
5 those books that I cited in court as well, and they would
6 possibly even have given me fair warning and said,
7 “Mr Irving, we are going to challenge you on these
8 figures; do you want to spend the lunch hour or this
9 evening just providing the evidence for them?”
10 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Well, it was in Professor Evans’ report.
11 MR RAMPTON: It is all in Professor Evans’ report, Mr Irving.
12 This document which you now have at the back of that
13 little clip is one of Professor Evans’ documents.
14 A. [Mr Irving]: I have only got the Daluege report here.
15 Q. [Mr Rampton]: What?
16 A. [Mr Irving]: I have only got the Daluege report.
17 Q. [Mr Rampton]: No, it is folded at the back, I hope. It is an A3 size
18 page.
19 A. [Mr Irving]: Oh, this one?
20 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Yes.
21 A. [Mr Irving]: Right.
22 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Now look at the front of it, will you, please, Mr Irving?
23 This is what you might call a slightly more reliable
24 source, you may think, because it is the official Berlin,
25 it is the official German statistics?
26 A. [Mr Irving]: Is this from my discovery or from elsewhere?
. P-102
1 Q. [Mr Rampton]: What?
2 A. [Mr Irving]: Is this from my discovery or from —-
3 Q. [Mr Rampton]: No, this is Professor Evans’.
4 A. [Mr Irving]: I mean, it is important to know whether this is from my
5 discovery or from your own research.
6 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Why? It is a public document, Mr Irving.
7 A. [Mr Irving]: All right, yes.
8 Q. [Mr Rampton]: You are the great archive fiend.
9 A. [Mr Irving]: There is no need for that tone of indignation. I am just
10 asking a simple question.
11 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Well, Mr Irving, really. Is this a forgery then by
12 Professor Irving (sic) and his cronies?
13 A. [Mr Irving]: No, I am sure you are familiar with the point I am trying
14 to establish.
15 Q. [Mr Rampton]: I am not at all, Mr Irving.
16 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Well, I think I understand the point that is
17 being made. But let us look at it anyway.
18 MR RAMPTON: If you look, you see this is for the whole of
19 Germany?
20 A. [Mr Irving]: Yes.
21 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Is it not? “Statistik des deutschen Reichs”, that is the
22 whole of the Reich for the year 1932. If you look down
23 the left-hand side of this big sheet, we find Nos. 80,
24 80B, 80C and 81. Now, in 1932 — I am going to work
25 upwards — in the whole of Germany, No. 81, there were but
26 74 cases of insurance fraud, do you agree?
. P-103
1 A. [Mr Irving]: You say in the whole of Germany, but although I agree you
2 have given us the title page of this, this is page 112, we
3 do not know if it was the whole of Germany or just a
4 province of of Prussia or what.
5 Q. [Mr Rampton]: I am told it is the whole of Germany.
6 A. [Mr Irving]: Well —-
7 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Mr Irving —-
8 A. [Mr Irving]: Because I am quite familiar with these statistical reports
9 and they are broken down into provinces, and I would like
10 the assurance we are not just looking at Berlin or just at
11 Prussia.
12 Q. [Mr Rampton]: So far as it is within my power to do so, I give you that
13 assurance because that is what I am told and I regard my
14 source as reliable. Now, even if it were just Berlin,
15 Mr Irving, just 74 cases of insurance fraud were committed
16 by persons of all ethnic backgrounds in Berlin, if you
17 like, but in fact for the whole of Germany during 1932.
18 Where are these over 50 per cent of 31,000 insurance
19 swindles committed by Jews?
20 A. [Mr Irving]: We are looking at 80B and 80C, is that right?
21 Q. [Mr Rampton]: 81 is ver sicherungsbetreff which I think means insurance
22 fraud?
23 A. [Mr Irving]: Yes. I was looking at the betreff, the ones above, which
24 total something like 70,000, 60,000.
25 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Betreff, 80A, that is plain fraud is 50,000 plus?
26 A. [Mr Irving]: Yes.
. P-104
1 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Repeat frauds, that is 80B [German] 7,000 and a bit?
2 A. [Mr Irving]: Yes.
3 Q. [Mr Rampton]: And then something about minor fraud offences, 80C, 312.
4 81, insurance fraud — insurance swindle, to use your word
5 — 74 cases, yes?
6 A. [Mr Irving]: The overall total of frauds —-
7 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Is 57,888 for the whole of Germany?
8 A. [Mr Irving]: And Daluege says that in Berlin it was 32,000 — of
9 course, we are looking at different years, are we not?
10 One is 1932 and here it is 1934 or thereabouts.
11 Q. [Mr Rampton]: No, Mr Irving, I am sorry. Leave Daluege out of this, if
12 you will? You made an assertion of fact in your book
13 about the number of frauds committed by Jews, mainly
14 insurance swindles, in 1932. I am suggesting that any
15 reputable historian would have gone to this document, as
16 opposed to some rabid Nazi’s utterance to a press
17 conference, to find out what the truth was.
18 A. [Mr Irving]: Are you saying that Paul Veiglin is a rabid Nazi and that
19 Walter Keolein, who is a very well-known German historian
20 of the police, is a rabid Nazi?
21 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Those are your other references, are they?
22 A. [Mr Irving]: These are my other sources — two of the other, two of the
23 four sources used, yes.
24 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Well, then if we find that your figures and statements are
25 not supported by either of those sources, will you accept
26 without equivocation that you have here committed a
. P-105
1 deliberate distortion, inflation of the figures against
2 the interests of the —-
3 A. [Mr Irving]: Obviously, if you find that those books do not support the
4 statements I made, then I would accept that I have made an
5 error. But, of course, I am not going to accept that such
6 an error is deliberate because I have got no reason to
7 make a deliberate error. You do not establish a
8 reputation by making deliberate errors and I am baffled
9 that anyone could suggest that you do.
10 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Well, I think I have about 25 in my pocket by now,
11 Mr Irving, and that is the 26th. Thank you. Now I want
12 to deal with the Goebbels diaries. My Lord, may I stop
13 now because it is quite intricate and it is 1 o’clock?
14 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Yes, but before you depart, can we work out
15 where we are going to put these?
16 MR RAMPTON: It is in a sense a new section because it is a new
17 period.
18 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Shall we put it at the back of what I
19 am calling J3?
20 MR RAMPTON: Yes. Could your Lordship put it at in the
21 separate tab at the back of N1?
22 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Back of N1.
23 MR RAMPTON: Because it is an historical document.
24 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Right, 2 o’clock.
25 (Luncheon adjournment)
Part III: Rampton Cross-Examines Irving, afternoon session (106.26 to 186.9)
Section 106.26 to 162.13
26 MR RAMPTON: Mr Irving, before I pass from the criminal
. P-106
1 statistics for 1932 to a question or two about the
2 Goebbels diaries, can I pass you up a piece of paper? It
3 is a sheet from the same German government document that
4 we were looking at this morning, and there is one for the
5 judge, please. (Same handed). I would like you to look
6 at the section headed “Summer A bis D” for the year 1932.
7 Tell us, please, to what area or areas of Germany these
8 statistics relate?
9 A. [Mr Irving]: Which? I am sorry, the bottom one, right.
10 Q. [Mr Rampton]: What does the heading say?
11 A. [Mr Irving]: It says the crimes and misdemeanours against Reich laws
12 that have been tried by German courts.
13 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Yes. That disposes of that question. This relates to the
14 whole of Germany, does it not?
15 A. [Mr Irving]: Yes, apparently.
16 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Thank you very much.
17 A. [Mr Irving]: This particular page.
18 MR JUSTICE GRAY: It is the page before the following page, is
19 it?
20 A. [Mr Irving]: It is not, my Lord, no.
21 MR RAMPTON: No, there are some pages missing, but you can see,
22 if you look at the top of page 112, which we already have,
23 that the numbers run serially. At the beginning we start
24 with 1 and by 112 we are at 63B.
25 A. [Mr Irving]: That may or may not be the case, I cannot comment on that,
26 but there are pages missing. I am sure your researchers
. P-107
1 would not mislead us deliberately.
2 Q. [Mr Rampton]: I hardly think that. The missing pages are here, if you
3 would like to see them. (Same handed). I feel quite
4 confident in saying that these run serially from 1 through
5 (as the Americans say) 115. Anyhow, have a look and see
6 if you agree with me that these are the statistics for the
7 whole of Germany for 1932.
8 A. [Mr Irving]: Yes, they do.
9 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Do you agree?
10 A. [Mr Irving]: Yes, they do.
11 Q. [Mr Rampton]: They do? Good. Excellent. Perhaps we could have that
12 back because it is not mine. I said Goebbels diary, but I
13 have been interrupted because we do not have sufficient
14 copies of the documents I want, so that will take about a
15 quarter of an hour to do. I want to pass to something
16 else instead, if I may, which is your assertion that the
17 gas chambers were an invention of British propaganda
18 during the war. Do you agree that you have, on a number
19 of occasions, made that assertion?
20 A. [Mr Irving]: Yes. This is the Foreign Office clip of documents you
21 gave me recently? Is that right?
22 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Yes. Has the judge got a copy of the clip of documents on
23 this topic?
24 MR JUSTICE GRAY: No?
25 A. [Mr Irving]: I do not know if I still have it.
26 MR JUSTICE GRAY: I thought you meant a new clip. The old
. P-108
1 ones?
2 MR RAMPTON: I feel cautious about that, but yes. File L1, tab
3 6.
4 A. [Mr Irving]: Yes. I still have it here.
5 Q. [Mr Rampton]: My Lord, this relates to two different years, 1942 and
6 1943.
7 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Yes.
8 MR RAMPTON: 1943 starts at page 11, and I will deal with 1942
9 first, if I may. Through no fault of ours, the passage of
10 time, inefficiency of typewriters in those days, some of
11 this is a bit difficult to read, but never mind. The
12 first page — does your Lordship have it now?
13 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Yes, I have.
14 MR RAMPTON: The first page contains some typescript in the
15 top, and some manuscript in the bottom.
16 A. [Mr Irving]: Yes.
17 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Mr Irving, doing the best I can, the date of this,
18 I think, is 8th August 1942.
19 A. [Mr Irving]: Yes.
20 Q. [Mr Rampton]: It says “Reported German plan for extermination of all
21 Jews”. Do you see that?
22 A. [Mr Irving]: Yes.
23 Q. [Mr Rampton]: This is a Foreign Office document, is it not?
24 A. [Mr Irving]: Yes.
25 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Then it says, I think, “Geneva telegram No. 174, Message
26 for Mr Sidney Silverman, Chairman of World Jewish
. P-109
1 Congress, London, from Mr Gerhard Riegner, Secretary of
2 World Jewish Congress, Geneva. Mr Riegner has received a
3 report stating that in the Fuhrer’s headquarters a plan
4 has been discussed and is under consideration for the
5 extermination after deportation to East of all Jews in” —
6 can you read the next bit — “in the areas occupied or
7 controlled by Germany. Action is planned for the autumn.
8 Ways and means are still (something or other) and include
9 the use of prussic acid”. Hydrogen cyanide, that is, is
10 it not?
11 A. [Mr Irving]: Yes. The full text is on the next page actually in
12 typescript. You could have read it.
13 Q. [Mr Rampton]: I know that, but I just wanted to see the first date at
14 which this information was relayed to the Foreign Office
15 in London via Mr Sidney Silverman via Mr Gerhard Riegner
16 in Geneva.
17 A. [Mr Irving]: It was received 11th August 1942.
18 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Exactly. 17th August 1942, which is the next page, that
19 information is laid out. Says the Foreign Office, “Have
20 received by telegraph through His Majesty’s Consul General
21 at Geneva the following message”, and then in a legible
22 form we see it on the next page, page 3.
23 A. [Mr Irving]: Yes.
24 Q. [Mr Rampton]: I will read this: “Following for Mr Sidney Silverman, SS
25 Silverman MP, chairman of British section, World Jewish
26 Congress London, from Mr Gerhard Riegner, Secretary of
. P-110
1 World Jewish Congress, Geneva. Received alarming report
2 stating that in the Fuhrer’s headquarters a plan has been
3 discussed and is under consideration, according to which
4 all Jews in countries occupied or controlled by Germany
5 numbering three and a half to four millions should after
6 deportation and concentration in the East, be at one blow
7 exterminated in order to resolve once and for all the
8 Jewish question in Europe. Action is reported to be
9 planned for the autumn. Ways of execution are still being
10 discussed, including the use of prussic acid. We transmit
11 this information with all the necessary reservation as
12 exactitude cannot be confirmed by us”, that is Geneva.
13 “Our informant is reported to have close connections with
14 the highest German authorities, and his reports are
15 generally reliable. Please inform and consult New York”.
16 That message from Geneva is an authentic
17 message, or was an authentic message, was it not,
18 Mr Irving?
19 A. [Mr Irving]: Yes. I am very familiar with these documents.
20 Q. [Mr Rampton]: It was not an invention of the British propaganda machine,
21 was it?
22 A. [Mr Irving]: No.
23 Q. [Mr Rampton]: So why do you maintain that the use of homicidal gas
24 chambers employing prussic acid, hydrogen cyanide,
25 Zyklon-B, was an invention of British propaganda?
26 A. [Mr Irving]: Because the following pages make plain the skepticism of
. P-111
1 the Foreign Office about this particular report.
2 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Well, unless you want to go —-
3 A. [Mr Irving]: Page 5, at the foot of it, says, “I do not think we should
4 be wise to make use of this story in propaganda to Germany
5 without further confirmation”.
6 Q. [Mr Rampton]: And the decision is made not to do so. Do you agree?
7 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Can we take it in stages? The first thing
8 is, are you accepting you said that this was all an
9 invention of British propaganda?
10 A. [Mr Irving]: My Lord, you will be familiar with the document on which
11 I rely, which is a year later than this, signed by
12 Cavendish-Bentinck, saying, “we have no evidence
13 whatsoever that these things” —-
14 Q. [Mr Justice Gray]: That is why I asked you. I am asking you about whether
15 you agree that you have claimed that the lie about the gas
16 chambers was an invention, underline “invention”?
17 A. [Mr Irving]: Yes. A propaganda story put out by the British in early
18 1942.
19 Q. [Mr Justice Gray]: Invented by the British? That is the point.
20 A. [Mr Irving]: And invented by the British propaganda agencies.
21 Q. [Mr Justice Gray]: What Mr Rampton is putting to you is that this is a
22 message from Geneva that they have had a report.
23 A. [Mr Irving]: Yes. They are two separate —-
24 Q. [Mr Justice Gray]: I am not following at the moment why you say it is an
25 invention of British propaganda.
26 A. [Mr Irving]: If we abandon gas chambers for a moment, and say, suppose
. P-112
1 a message came from Geneva, saying children were having
2 their hands hacked off, on the face of it an implausible
3 story, which the Foreign Office said, “We find this
4 difficult to believe”, as it says later in this document,
5 “We find no confirmatory evidence” and so on, and then
6 later on the propaganda agencies send out reports by the
7 propaganda channels, the BBC, Voice America and the rest
8 of it, saying, “We have reliable stories that the Germans
9 are cutting off children’s hands”, that would be an
10 invention, would it not?
11 MR RAMPTON: Mr Irving, may we stick with history, rather than
12 fantasy? Here we have a report from Geneva, from
13 Mr Riegner, who is not an agent of the British propaganda
14 machine, he is an element in the World Jewish Congress,
15 that, as, indeed you might say, prophetically turned out
16 to be the case, there was a plan reported to him from the
17 Fuhrer’s headquarters to exterminate the whole of the Jews
18 in Europe, or most of them, at one blow by the use,
19 amongst others perhaps, of hydrogen cyanide. Now, how can
20 it be that that story is, to use your words, an invention
21 of British propaganda?
22 A. [Mr Irving]: Which story?
23 Q. [Mr Rampton]: This story that you see reported on the page in front of
24 you.
25 A. [Mr Irving]: That is two separate things. Riegner is sending a message
26 to England to be passed on to Sidney Silverman, reporting
. P-113
1 a story which the Foreign Office clearly, from the
2 handwritten minutes, do not consider to be part of what is
3 actually happening. They say there is no doubt that large
4 numbers of Jews are dying. They even used the word
5 I think —-
6 MR JUSTICE GRAY: They may not believe it, but they did not
7 invent it. That is the point that I was asking about and
8 I think Mr Rampton is asking about.
9 A. [Mr Irving]: I hesitate to use the words “hair splitting”, my Lord, but
10 I think it is quite plain that if in August 1943
11 Cavendish-Bentinck, the head of the British Intelligence
12 Service, says, “We have no evidence that these gas
13 chambers exist”, and yet by that time for 12 months
14 already the British propaganda agencies have been pumping
15 out the message, then that is an invention, and there is
16 no other way of interpreting that.
17 MR RAMPTON: Mr Irving, the story originated not with British
18 propaganda. It originated with a personal organization in
19 Geneva, a remarkably accurate story, as it happens. If
20 you turn over to page 4, you see the comment at the time
21 in August 1942: “Mr Silverman having asked if he could
22 see somebody about the cable, Sir Beaugrave Beecham had a
23 talk with him this morning, first, Mr Silverman said he
24 would let us have some particulars about Mr Riegner — I
25 think it is misspelt — “whom he regards as entirely
26 trustworthy. Secondly, Mr Silverman stated that he had
. P-114
1 received reports of transportation of Jews from occupied
2 territories in Germany towards the East, which might be a
3 confirmation of the alleged plan”.
4 Then we see in the following pages — turn to
5 page 5, for example. I do not know whose notes these are,
6 probably one of the Allens, but I am not sure about that.
7 Yes, it is David Allen. In the middle of the next page 5
8 he is talking about atrocious conditions in the East, and
9 he says: “Such stories do provide a basis for Mr Riegner’s
10 report, but they do not of course amount to extermination
11 at one blow. The German policy seems to be rather to
12 eliminate useless mouths, but to use able-bodied Jews as
13 slave labour.”
14 In the light of all of that, the Brits, bless
15 their little cotton socks, I might say if I were Jewish,
16 decide not to make use of this information. Is that not
17 right? They put the kaibosh on it, do they not?
18 A. [Mr Irving]: No. You are overlooking one important detail, the
19 chronology. Do you remember that I put to one of the
20 witnesses, I forget which one it was, the diary evidence
21 and other evidence of the propaganda broadcasts, some of
22 which were in June 1942, about the use of poison gas, and
23 some of which were earlier that year, about the
24 deportation of the Dutch Jews to Mauthausen, using poison
25 gas? So what is then reported back to us in August 1942
26 is interesting, but no more.
. P-115
1 MR JUSTICE GRAY: I have forgotten where the evidence is for
2 use of this by the British in their intelligence
3 propaganda.
4 A. [Mr Irving]: Your Lordship will remember there is a bundle of about ten
5 pages of documents, including pages from Thomas Mann’s
6 diary, and the diary of a man called Ringelbulm, and the
7 diary of a man called Viktor Klemporer, recording the
8 actual dates that they received these broadcasts. I am
9 afraid I do not know which bundles they are in.
10 MR RAMPTON: 1943, Mr Irving. Page 12 I cannot read. I hope
11 it is legible in your copy.
12 MR JUSTICE GRAY: I am so sorry, Mr Rampton. I appreciate you
13 want to get on, but does anybody have any idea where the
14 documents — I suspect they are somewhere in J — that
15 have just been referred to are to be found?
16 MR RAMPTON: No.
17 A. [Mr Irving]: My Lord, I can certainly very easily bring in the copies
18 again next time I come.
19 MR JUSTICE GRAY: I am sure I have them somewhere. I would
20 like to know where they are.
21 A. [Mr Irving]: I am not as well organized as I should be, I am afraid.
22 MR JUSTICE GRAY: I do not blame you for that. Could I ask
23 Miss Rogers or somebody to try to track them down?
24 MR RAMPTON: Do you still feel confident, before we come to
25 1943, Mr Irving, in saying that the gas chambers were an
26 invention of British propaganda?
. P-116
1 A. [Mr Irving]: Yes. Based on the evidence that I have seen so far, yes.
2 Q. [Mr Rampton]: You do? Can we turn to page 13, because I am afraid
3 I cannot read page 12.
4 A. [Mr Irving]: Page 12 is the draft declaration of the British and
5 American governments.
6 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Yes. Page 13 refers to a telegram to Moscow, and it is
7 said to be based in the main, or taken in the main from
8 the aide memoir by the Polish government in another file.
9 “This aide memoir”, reads this minute from Roger Allen to
10 Cavendish-Bentinck, “is in line with a good deal of other
11 information which we have received from time to time.
12 There can, I think, be little doubt that the general
13 picture painted is pretty true to life. On the other
14 hand, it is of course extremely difficult, if not
15 impossible, for us to check up on specific instances of
16 matters of detail.”
17 MR JUSTICE GRAY: I have lost you.
18 A. [Mr Irving]: So have I.
19 MR RAMPTON: I am on page 13, my Lord.
20 A. [Mr Irving]: Which paragraph are we looking at?
21 MR RAMPTON: I read from the top of the page.
22 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Something has gone wrong in that case.
23 MR RAMPTON: In that case something has gone wrong.
24 A. [Mr Irving]: I thought I was going mad.
25 MR RAMPTON: It is a minute by Roger Allen dated 27th August
26 1943. If we had another year, we might get these file
. P-117
1 sorted out.
2 MR JUSTICE GRAY: I think the problem may be we have not got
3 the first page. I think we are missing that document
4 altogether.
5 MR RAMPTON: It is a minute, Mr Irving, do you see, dated 27th
6 August 1943 from Mr Roger Allen?
7 A. [Mr Irving]: Yes.
8 MR JUSTICE GRAY: We will call that 12A, because there is a 13
9 already.
10 MR RAMPTON: Yes 12A, to Mr Cavendish-Bentinck. I will start
11 again. I understand that the information on which
12 telegram number 1190 to Moscow is based is taken in the
13 main from the aide memoir by the Polish government in C,
14 whatever it is. This aide memoir is in line with a good
15 deal of other information which we have received from time
16 to time. There can, I think, be little doubt that the
17 general picture painted is pretty true to life. On the
18 other hand, it is of course extremely difficult, if not
19 impossible, for us to check up on specific instances or
20 matters of detail. For this reason, I feel a little
21 unhappy about the statement to be issued on the authority
22 of His Majesty’s government that Poles “are now being
23 systematically put to death in gas chambers.” I expect
24 you are familiar with the rest of this document.
25 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Where is the aide memoire, Mr Rampton?
26 A. [Mr Irving]: That is the previous illegible page, my Lord.
. P-118
1 MR RAMPTON: That is the one I cannot read.
2 A. [Mr Irving]: To be a draft declaration to be signed by Roosevelt and
3 Churchill and they were meeting in Quebec to discuss it.
4 MR RAMPTON: Which I think must be the document. Maybe this is
5 better.
6 MR JUSTICE GRAY: You can actually read it fairly well.
7 MR RAMPTON: Let me try it: Reliable information has reached HM
8 Government regarding the crimes committed by the German
9 invaders against the population of Poland. Since the
10 autumn of 1942 a belt of territory extending from the
11 province of Bialistok southwards along the line of the
12 river Bund has been systematically emptied of its
13 inhabitants”, crossed out “hundreds of thousands of whom
14 have been deported from their homes”, continuing uncrossed
15 out, “in July 1943 these measures were extended to
16 practically the whole of the province of Lublin, where
17 hundreds of thousands of persons have been deported from
18 their homes or exterminated”. That is the handwriting.
19 “These measures are being carried out with the utmost
20 brutality. Many victims are killed on the spot. The rest
21 are segregated. Men from 14 to 50 are taken away to work
22 for Germany. Some children are killed on the spot.
23 Others are separated from their parents, and either sent
24 to Germany to be brought up as Germans or sold to
25 German settlers, despatched with the women and old men to
26 concentration camps, where they are now being
. P-119
1 systematically put to death in gas chambers. HM
2 government” — something?
3 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Reaffirm.
4 MR RAMPTON: “Reaffirmed their resolve to punish the
5 instigators and actual perpetrators of these crimes. They
6 further declare that, so long as such atrocities continue
7 to be committed by the representatives and in the name of
8 Germany, they must be taken into account against the time
9 of the final settlement with Germany. Meanwhile, of the
10 war against Germany” — then I run out, I am afraid, of
11 legible words, but that may not matter.
12 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Has been finally overthrown.
13 MR RAMPTON: Yes.
14 MR JUSTICE GRAY: It is not really an aide memoire, is it? It
15 is a proposed communication or release.
16 MR RAMPTON: It is a communique, is it not?
17 A. [Mr Irving]: Yes.
18 Q. [Mr Rampton]: It is a proposed communique, making reference to, in
19 particular, systematic extermination in gas chambers.
20 Correct?
21 A. [Mr Irving]: Yes.
22 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Then, says Allen R to Cavendish-Bentinck on page
23 12A apropos that proposed communique, “On the other hand,
24 it is of course extremely difficult, if not impossible,
25 for us to check up on specific instances or matters of
26 detail. For this reason I feel a little unhappy about the
. P-120
1 statement to be issued on the authority of HMG that
2 Poles ‘are now being systematically put to death in gas
3 chambers'”. Does that look to you, Mr. Irving, like an
4 intention to exploit this story for its propaganda value?
5 A. [Mr Irving]: There are two different levels of authentication here.
6 What has been put to the Foreign Office is a draft
7 telegram to be signed by the two heads of State and
8 approved by Marshal Stalin, declaration on the war crimes
9 committed by the Nazis and the punishment of the
10 perpetrators. At the other level you have black
11 propaganda where any kind of lie counts, the kind of stuff
12 that was put about by Richard Crossman and Sefton Delmer.
13 There are two totally different levels of truthfulness
14 involved. The Foreign Office obviously balked at the idea
15 of persuading the British and American heads of State to
16 sign a document containing a detail of which, as they
17 later stated in this same bundle of documents, there was
18 no proof, of which they had no evidence.
19 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Quite. “The only two references”, goes on Mr Allen,
20 “which I have been able to find in the appendix to this
21 Polish aide memoire which deal with this form of execution
22 are as follows: (1) Telegram of 17th July 1943 from
23 Poland, Commander in Chief, Armed Forces, Lublin District,
24 informed me that he had evidence that some of these people
25 are being murdered in gas cells there, Maidonek camp. (2)
26 Telegram of 17th July 1943 from Poland: ‘It has been
. P-121
1 ascertained that on July 2nd and 5th two transports'”,
2 probably about 10,000 people, do you agree?
3 A. [Mr Irving]: Yes.
4 Q. [Mr Rampton]: “Made of women children and old men” —-
5 A. [Mr Irving]: No. 2,000 people, it would have been.
6 Q. [Mr Rampton]: What?
7 A. [Mr Irving]: It would have been 2,000 people.
8 Q. [Mr Rampton]: “Women, children and old men, consisting of 30 wagons
9 each, have been liquidated in gas cells”. Did the British
10 invent the idea of gas chambers and the Nazis’ use of
11 them?
12 A. [Mr Irving]: No, but, if you are familiar with the British Foreign
13 Office files, then you will be aware that little credence
14 was attached to reports from Polish sources.
15 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Mr Irving, I ask my question again, which you resolutely
16 refuse to answer. Did the British invent the story of the
17 gas chambers?
18 A. [Mr Irving]: You will not get a direct answer. I am going to draw your
19 attention —-
20 MR JUSTICE GRAY: I am going to direct that you do give a
21 direct answer. What is the answer?
22 A. [Mr Irving]: The answer is yes, still, if the word “invent” means
23 anything at all.
24 Q. [Mr Rampton]: That is fine. That is your position. So these stories
25 which are coming back from Poland in 42 via Riegner in
26 Geneva, and directly from the Polish people in 1943, they
. P-122
1 are simply recycled British propaganda? It has to be so
2 if you are right does it not Mr Irving?
3 A. [Mr Irving]: If you are putting something out on the air waves through
4 the BBC and black propaganda channels, for which you know
5 you have no evidence, and you state in writing in terms
6 that you have no evidence, then that is an invention, and
7 that is stated quite clearly on page 14 by Victor
8 Cavendish-Bentinck himself, the head of the British
9 Intelligence Service.
10 Q. [Mr Rampton]: The Foreign Office, Mr Irving, took the view, as it had in
11 1942, that the material that they had received, either via
12 Geneva or direct from Poland, was not sufficiently
13 convincing to allow of propaganda about this matter. That
14 is right, is it not?
15 A. [Mr Irving]: They put it much more strongly in August 1943.
16 Q. [Mr Rampton]: But you are not following me, Mr Irving.
17 A. [Mr Irving]: Victor Cavendish-Bentinck wrote: “As regards putting
18 Poles to death in gas chambers, I do not believe that
19 there is any evidence that this has been done”. He is
20 head of the British Intelligence Service, the chairman of
21 the Joint Intelligence Committee and you cannot climb over
22 the document, Mr Rampton.
23 Q. [Mr Rampton]: I am not trying to climb over it, Mr Irving. I am trying
24 to make you face up to its significance. The decision is,
25 despite this information received in 42 and 43, that the
26 evidence does not stand the case up, so they do not use
. P-123
1 it.
2 A. [Mr Irving]: They do not have sufficient evidence to persuade the Prime
3 Minister and the President to put their names on a
4 document, but they have enough evidence to put the story
5 out on the air waves. They are quite happy to put it out,
6 although they are quite satisfied that they have no
7 evidence that it will stand up. It is good enough for the
8 liars, but it is not good enough for the presidents, the
9 heads of state.
10 MR RAMPTON: When did they put it out, Mr Irving, on the air
11 waves?
12 A. [Mr Irving]: They started putting the story out in late 1941, certainly
13 in January 1942, they repeat it in June 1942, in November
14 and December 1942, there was quite a blitz on the air
15 waves with stories about the liquidation of the Jews in
16 gas chambers in Poland. It is referred to in a lot of the
17 private diaries, and also in the files of the German
18 Propaganda Ministry who monitored the British Broadcasting
19 Agency.
20 Q. [Mr Rampton]: By whom were these broadcasts made?
21 A. [Mr Irving]: They were put about by the BBC. Broadcasts were carried
22 by the BBC, which has a monopoly in broadcasting at that
23 time, and by the American corresponding channels.
24 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Do the documents that you have provided to us contain
25 transcripts of these broadcasts?
26 A. [Mr Irving]: No. They contain entries either, as I was saying earlier,
. P-124
1 in private diaries of the people who listen to broadcasts,
2 either in occupied countries or in Germany or they contain
3 the monitoring reports that were maintained by the
4 propaganda agencies in Germany, who monitored foreign
5 broadcasts.
6 MR JUSTICE GRAY: I would like to see, please, what this
7 material is, which I think has probably been produced.
8 MR RAMPTON: So would I. No, I do not think so. I would know
9 it if I had seen it.
10 A. [Mr Irving]: I think this is one of the cases where your Lordship
11 intervened and said, we are not making enough progress.
12 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Never mind.
13 MS ROGERS: The position seems to be this. We have checked
14 through the documents which have produced by Mr Irving
15 which have been filed gradually in the J files. We cannot
16 find any trace of it. In transcript day 20, starting at
17 page 40, going over 41 and 42, Mr Irving, I think, in
18 cross-examination of Professor Evans raised Thomas Mann’s
19 diary.
20 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Page?
21 MS ROGERS: It starts at 40, going over to 41.
22 A. [Mr Irving]: If you look for Mauthausen, you will probably find it or
23 Dutch Jews, 400 young Dutch Jews deported.
24 MS ROGERS: That reference appears on page 42, my Lord, the 400
25 young Dutch Jews.
26 A. [Mr Irving]: And that was in January 1942. And then there is another
. P-125
1 reference in June 1942 in the —-
2 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Can we just take this in stages? Thank you
3 very much, Miss Rogers. Thomas Mann, he is the novelist?
4 A. [Mr Irving]: He was working for the American propaganda agencies.
5 Q. [Mr Justice Gray]: How is that evidence that the British Intelligence Service
6 were making use of this information about what was going
7 on? He does not have a connection with the British
8 Intelligence Service, does he?
9 A. [Mr Irving]: Only in as far as the Allied Intelligence Operations of
10 the Office of War Information in Britain and the British
11 Ministry of Information were co-ordinated, but it is as
12 tenuous as that. In other words, I cannot produce the
13 actual missing links there.
14 Q. [Mr Justice Gray]: In relation to him or generally?
15 A. [Mr Irving]: In relation to linking Thomas Mann’s broadcast with what
16 happened in No. 10 Downing Street.
17 Q. [Mr Justice Gray]: What do we next have?
18 A. [Mr Irving]: June 1942, would that be the Ringelbulm diary? I
19 am saying all this from memory, of course.
20 Q. [Mr Justice Gray]: I appreciate that.
21 A. [Mr Irving]: I do not have the documents in front of me.
22 Q. [Mr Justice Gray]: Yes, you do mention that. Ringelbulm, I have no
23 recollection of him at all.
24 MR RAMPTON: Who is Ringelbulm?
25 A. [Mr Irving]: I think he is living in one of the ghettos, either in
26 Warsaw or somewhere listening, obviously very hopefully,
. P-126
1 to BBC broadcasts.
2 Q. [Mr Rampton]: No, it does not say “BBC”. It says “broadcasts” about the
3 extermination of Jews with poison gas.
4 A. [Mr Irving]: I do not know who else would be broadcasting about the
5 extermination of Jews, apart from the Allies.
6 Q. [Mr Rampton]: You see, Mr Irving, I am puzzled by this. What evidence
7 do you have that these stories, I would say factual
8 accounts, of what was happening, maybe not in ’41, but
9 certainly in ’42 to ’43, emanated from the propaganda arm
10 of the British Government? How do you know that these
11 people did not pick it up from the Poles or from
12 Mr Riegner?
13 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Or from the Americans.
14 MR RAMPTON: Or from the Americans?
15 A. [Mr Irving]: Well, the sources that I quoted refer specifically to
16 broadcasts.
17 Q. [Mr Rampton]: To what?
18 A. [Mr Irving]: They refer specifically to broadcasts and listening in to
19 enemy broadcasts.
20 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Sure, of course, but a journalist, even in those days, a
21 self-respecting journalist, would use material supplied to
22 him if it seemed to him to be reliable, would he not?
23 What on earth connection do you see in all of this with
24 the PWE?
25 A. [Mr Irving]: Because the PWE was controlling the black propaganda from
26 Britain at this time. This was Robert Bruce Lockhart and
. P-127
1 Richard Crossman.
2 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Well, Mr Irving —-
3 A. [Mr Irving]: But I mean —-
4 Q. [Mr Rampton]: — what you are telling us is not —-
5 A. [Mr Irving]: — I am at a disadvantage here because I do not have the
6 diaries in front me and I am not able to look for the
7 collateral material which I would clearly do if I knew
8 I was going to be cross-examined on this.
9 MR JUSTICE GRAY: I would like to see it.
10 MR RAMPTON: So would I.
11 A. [Mr Irving]: I have made a note of it and I am going to produce another
12 clip.
13 MR RAMPTON: We do not need it now. This can lie in wait for
14 next week or the week after. But would you agree with me
15 on the basis of the original documentation which we have
16 seen, there is (a) evidence that the story was a real
17 story, whether a true story or not, but a real story and
18 that it did not originate with the British?
19 A. [Mr Irving]: Yes, but it is of a low grade evidence.
20 Q. [Mr Rampton]: That is as may be.
21 A. [Mr Irving]: Yes.
22 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Is there also evidence before us that on account of what
23 the British then saw as its low grade quality, they
24 decided not to use it?
25 A. [Mr Irving]: Yes.
26 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Thank you.
. P-128
1 A. [Mr Irving]: But they did not find it, of course, in the high grade
2 sources where they would have expected to find it like the
3 intercepts.
4 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Mr Rampton, before you leave this, in view of
5 what Mr Irving said about broadcasts, could you invite
6 Mr Irving to look at page 15 in this same tab, tab 6?
7 A. [Mr Irving]: Is this the actual declaration as released, my Lord?
8 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Well, it is not for me to say.
9 A. [Mr Irving]: Am I looking at the right document?
10 MR JUSTICE GRAY: It is not for me to say.
11 A. [Mr Irving]: Yes, is it the declaration headed “Confidential Future
12 Release” or?
13 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Yes.
14 A. [Mr Irving]: Yes.
15 MR JUSTICE GRAY: I do not know what it is, but it seemed to me
16 it might be relevant.
17 MR RAMPTON: I do not have the same pagination as your
18 Lordship.
19 MR JUSTICE GRAY: In my version of this it is the last page.
20 MR RAMPTON: Yes, is this, Mr Irving, 19 it is in my version,
21 15 in yours. Is this a United States document?
22 A. [Mr Irving]: Yes, Department of State.
23 Q. [Mr Rampton]: It is dated August 28th 1943?
24 A. [Mr Irving]: Yes.
25 Q. [Mr Rampton]: It says, well, I will read it: “Confidential release for
26 publication in the morning newspapers of Monday, August
. P-129
1 30th 1943, which do not appear on the streets before 9.30
2 p.m. Eastern [something]”, no, it is not Standard Time, I
3 thought it would be, but it is not, BMT. “Sunday, August
4 29th 1943, not to be previously published, quoted from or
5 used in any way not to be sent abroad before 7.30 p.m.
6 Sunday, August 29th 1943″. So it is an embargo?
7 A. [Mr Irving]: Yes.
8 Q. [Mr Rampton]: What it says is “Declaration on German crimes in Poland.
9 Trustworthy information has reached the United States
10 Government regarding the crimes committed by the German
11 invaders against the population of Poland. Since the
12 autumn of 1942 a belt of territory extending from the
13 province of Bialystok southwards along the … (reading
14 to the words) … has been systematically emptied of its
15 inhabitants. In June 1943 these measures were extended to
16 practically the whole of the province of Lublin where
17 hundreds of thousands of persons have been deported from
18 their homes or exterminated. These measures are being
19 carried out with the utmost brutality. Many of the
20 victims are killed on the spot. The rest are segregated.
21 Men from 14 to 50 are taken away to work for Germany.
22 Some children are killed on the spot. Others are
23 separated from their parents and either sent to Germany to
24 be brought up as Germans or sold to German settlers or
25 dispatched to the women and old folk concentration camps.
26 The United States Government reaffirms its resolve to
. P-130
1 punish the instigators and actual perpetrators of these
2 crimes. It further declares that so long as such
3 atrocities continue to be committed by the representatives
4 and in the name of Germany, they must be taken into
5 account against the time of the final settlement with
6 Germany. Meanwhile, the war against Germany will be
7 prosecuted with the utmost vigour until the barbarous
8 Hitler itinerary has been finally overthrown”. That is an
9 official United States press release, is it not?
10 A. [Mr Irving]: Yes.
11 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Do you notice something about that press release,
12 Mr Irving?
13 A. [Mr Irving]: That is a strange question.
14 Q. [Mr Rampton]: There is no reference to gassing or gas chambers.
15 A. [Mr Irving]: Yes.
16 Q. [Mr Rampton]: So, on the advice, no doubt of the Department of State in
17 the United States and of the Foreign Office in Great
18 Britain, the reference to gas chambers in the draft has
19 been removed?
20 A. [Mr Irving]: Yes, because it was — there was no adequate evidence.
21 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Yes, the Allies and, in particular, the British PWE
22 decided against using, unhappily perhaps, but they decided
23 against using the gas chamber story as propaganda,
24 correct, am I not?
25 A. [Mr Irving]: This is not a propaganda declaration; this is a warning to
26 the German leaders, to the Italian leaders, that
. P-131
1 retribution is on its way to them. It is nothing to do
2 with propaganda. Propaganda was what we broadcast of
3 which there is any amount of evidence.
4 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Well, I would like to see it because at the
5 moment I do not have any no evidence at all.
6 A. [Mr Irving]: I have great confidence on this score.
7 MR RAMPTON: I have been given Claimant file F, my Lord, on
8 page 61 your Lordship will find it, I hope.
9 MR JUSTICE GRAY: I think we have had this before. F became
10 something else.
11 MR RAMPTON: You should have a separate file F, my Lord, a
12 small file F. It had originally, I think, a two-page
13 index and the document in question is page 62. I think
14 Mr Irving should have it too, please.
15 MR JUSTICE GRAY: I think this what I had in mind.
16 MR RAMPTON: Yes. This is the so-called Ringelbulm diary. It
17 has, I am afraid, no year date on it. But I will read it
18 just the same because it is rather interesting. But I do
19 think Mr Irving should have it. Could somebody please
20 find Mr Irving a file F? I hope, Mr Irving, that your
21 index page, your contents page, 62, there are two pages
22 from this book?
23 A. [Mr Irving]: Yes.
24 Q. [Mr Rampton]: 294, 295, is that right?
25 A. [Mr Irving]: Yes.
26 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Can we look at 295 which is on the right-hand side in my
. P-132
1 copy?
2 A. [Mr Irving]: Yes.
3 Q. [Mr Rampton]: “Friday, June 26th has been a great day for OS”, what is
4 “OS”, see introduction”, well, that is hopeless. I have
5 not got the introduction. What is “OS”, Mr Irving?
6 A. [Mr Irving]: No idea.
7 Q. [Mr Rampton]: OK. “This morning the English radio broadcast about the
8 fate of Polish Jewry. They told about everything we know
9 so well, about … (reading to the words)… Lemburg and
10 Chelmno, and so forth. For long months we had been
11 suffering because the world was deaf and dumb to our
12 unparalleled tragedy. We complained about Polish public
13 opinion, about the liaison men in contact with the Polish
14 government in exile. Why were they not reporting to the
15 world the story of the slaughter of Polish Jewry? We
16 accused the Polish liaison men of deliberately keeping our
17 tragedy quiet so that their tragedy might not be thrown
18 into the shade. But now it seems that all our
19 interventions have finally achieved their purpose. There
20 have been regular broadcasts over the English radio the
21 last few weeks treating of the cruelties perpetrated on
22 the Polish Jews, Belzec and the like. Today there was a
23 broadcast summarizing the situation. 700,000, the number
24 of Jews killed in Poland was mentioned. At the same time
25 the broadcast avowed revenge, a final accounting, for all
26 these deeds of violence”.
. P-133
1 Which year, Friday June 26th, Mr Irving?
2 A. [Mr Irving]: 1942.
3 Q. [Mr Rampton]: 1942. Do you see anything in there about gas chambers?
4 A. [Mr Irving]: No.
5 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Am I right that the Polish Government in exile at the
6 instance, no doubt, of people in Poland had been, as it
7 were, hacking at the Allies to pay attention to these
8 stories for some considerable time?
9 A. [Mr Irving]: Yes.
10 Q. [Mr Rampton]: These stories were not invented by the British Government,
11 were they?
12 A. [Mr Irving]: Inasmuch as when the British Government put them out, they
13 had no firm evidence that they were true and they later
14 summarized that they had no such evidence, they were.
15 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Now I think we know where we are.
16 A. [Mr Irving]: My Lord, on the broadcasts in their clip there is a number
17 of docments which I did not actually rely on when
18 I cross-examined Mr Klemperer. When we next come
19 together, I will produce a schedule of broadcasts and what
20 they contained in this respect, I think, as far as I can.
21 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Is there anything else in this clip at the
22 moment that —-
23 A. [Mr Irving]: Well, I think it would take up too much of the court’s
24 time to read the 10 or 15 pages.
25 Q. [Mr Justice Gray]: I am not too bothered about that. I do not think it would
26 take very long. Do you rely on the —-
. P-134
1 A. [Mr Irving]: But what I am really saying is —-
2 Q. [Mr Justice Gray]: Do you rely on the diaries of Klemperer? I am sorry,
3 Mr Rampton, it is just that once one is on this topic, one
4 really needs to —-
5 A. [Mr Irving]: Well, I do not really want to do it in a hurried manner
6 and if I do it in a slow manner, then your Lordship will
7 get impatient. What I am really saying is that we do not
8 want to go back and have a look at the files to see what
9 else I can dredge up.
10 MR JUSTICE GRAY: We have got 64. I am just looking for
11 references to a broadcast. Page 64 is Klemperer.
12 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Page 67, I think. Could you just read the top of page 67,
13 Mr Irving?
14 A. [Mr Irving]: I do not have those numbers on this.
15 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Sorry, page 442 of whatever it is.
16 A. [Mr Irving]: “Millions of German people did, in fact, listen
17 attentively and regularly to German language BBC
18 broadcasts, even though it was illegal for them to do so.
19 Moreover, the BBC German service took considerable pains
20 to convey accurate and believable information about the
21 annihilation of the Jews. These efforts were particularly
22 noteworthy considering that they were frowned on by the
23 British Foreign Office which did not regard Jewish
24 persecution as an efficacious theme for propagandists to
25 take advantage”.
26 MR RAMPTON: So Mr Irving, your story is now this, is it not,
. P-135
1 if this story was an invention, it was the BBC, the wicked
2 journalists and their informants who invented it, it was
3 not the British Government? Is that right?
4 A. [Mr Irving]: I think at all material times the BBC was in arm with the
5 British Government and the Ministry of Information. It
6 certainly did not operate in a kind of independent way.
7 I think it would be useful if I do draw up a schedule of
8 references, including whether it specifically referred to
9 gassing or not and the dates. This will…
10 Q. [Mr Rampton]: I am moving to another topic now, my penultimate topic,
11 Mr Irving, you will be pleased to hear. The first page in
12 this clip should be a page from the transcript in this
13 trial on day 23, Monday, 21st February 2000, is it?
14 A. [Mr Irving]: Yes.
15 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Do you see what his Lordship was asking you on page 140?
16 You were cross-examining.
17 A. [Mr Irving]: Gita Sereny, yes.
18 Q. [Mr Rampton]: You were cross-examining Professor Evans about a passage
19 in his report which asserted that you had falsely accused
20 Gita Sereny, or having ignored Gita Sereny’s assertion
21 that Christa Schroeder had said that Hitler knew about the
22 Holocaust. I am paraphrasing.
23 A. [Mr Irving]: Yes.
24 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Mr Justice Gray at line 18 on page 140 asks you this: “Is
25 it your case that there is not any record, whether tapes,
26 notes or anything, of Gita Sereny’s interview with Christa
. P-136
1 Schroder and she is, in fact, making the whole thing up?”
2 Mr Irving, “Yes”. Is that still your position?
3 A. [Mr Irving]: I beg your pardon?
4 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Is that still your position that Gita Sereny made the
5 whole thing up?
6 A. [Mr Irving]: On the basis of what I have seen in her discovery in the
7 other action, yes.
8 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Now we are going —-
9 A. [Mr Irving]: You are familiar with the fact that I requested to see all
10 her– I had discovery from her.
11 Q. [Mr Rampton]: The date of this exchange between his Lordship and you is
12 Monday, 21st February 2000.
13 A. [Mr Irving]: Yes.
14 Q. [Mr Rampton]: I am now going to show you some papers from your case
15 against Gita Sereny and whichever newspaper it is,
16 I forget, the Observer, I think. The second page in this
17 little clip is a letter from you to the solicitors for
18 those Defendants —-
19 A. [Mr Irving]: Yes.
20 Q. [Mr Rampton]: — Lovell White Durrant, dated 4th January 2000. You say
21 this: “I note from my discovery item No. 545 that your
22 client, Sereny, took notes of her conversations with
23 Gunsche, von Welloff and Schultzer and that Frau Schroeder
24 also wrote to her” — notice those words, please. “These
25 items appear to be missing from your client’s discovery
26 and I would request that” —-
. P-137
1 A. [Mr Irving]: “She”.
2 Q. [Mr Rampton]: — “you give disclosure” or “she” it might be “give
3 disclosure of these within a reasonable amount of time”.
4 I do not know what the second document is.
5 A. [Mr Irving]: To which I received no reply.
6 Q. [Mr Rampton]: I see. 545 is what you enclose with your letter.
7 A. [Mr Irving]: Yes.
8 Q. [Mr Rampton]: It is a letter from the Associate Managing Editor of the
9 Sunday Times dated 13th October 1997 to you: “Dear
10 Mr Irving, thank you for your letter. With regard to the
11 first point, you will be interested to see the enclosed
12 letter which appeared in the Sunday Times two weeks after
13 publication of the original article. It indicates that a
14 misunderstanding on this point has already been publicly
15 acknowledged and corrected. With regard to the second
16 point, there is no such necessity. We have records of
17 Gita Sereny’s conversations with Walter Gunsche, Colonel
18 von Welloff and Richard Shultzer supporting what was said
19 in our article. Christa Schroeder’s comments on the
20 subject of Hitler and the extermination of the Jews were
21 conveyed to Miss Sereny in a letter. Under the
22 circumstances, therefore, I think you will agree that
23 there is no basis for the complaints made in your letter”.
24 In response to your letter to them, Lovells
25 replied on 27th January: “Thank you for your letter dated
26 4th January 2000. We have raised your request with
. P-138
1 Miss Sereny and will revert to you again in this
2 connection once we have received her response. We take
3 the opportunity to note that we have not”, and so on and
4 so forth. That is something else.
5 Then they write again on 10th February, this is
6 but 11 days before you gave your evidence in this court.
7 A. [Mr Irving]: Yes.
8 Q. [Mr Rampton]: “We write further to our letter dated 27th January 2000,
9 having now discussed your request with Miss Sereny. The
10 documents which you seek have already been disclosed.
11 There were no notes in Miss Sereny’s conversations was
12 Gunsche, von Welloff and Schultzer, only tape recordings.
13 These have been disclosed to you. The letter to
14 Miss Sereny from Frau Schroeder was disclosed as item 2.57
15 in schedule 1 part 1 of the same list”. The rest is
16 irrelevant.
17 The last page, please, here is the letter,
18 please tell me what the penultimate paragraph says. The
19 first of the two letters printed on this page is from Frau
20 Schroeder herself, is it not?
21 A. [Mr Irving]: Yes. “Dear Miss Sereny, I regret that for health reasons
22 I have not been able to receive you”, for an interview, in
23 other words. So there was no interview.
24 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Carry on.
25 A. [Mr Irving]: “As far as the telephone conversation that you sketched of
26 1976 is concerned, what you write about, what you mention
. P-139
1 about Himmler in connection with me appears, you appear to
2 have fallen victim of having heard, misheard something.
3 Himmler has not”, underlined “not”, “spoken with me”,
4 underlined “with me”, “in this manner. I have tried to
5 arrange an interview between you and his, Himmler’s,
6 daughter, but I have unfortunately failed for which
7 I request that you leave out this passage. As far as the
8 Judenfrager is concerned: I consider it improbable or
9 unlikely that Hitler did not know — that Hitler knew
10 nothing. He had frequent conversations with Himmler which
11 took place as tete a tete. More than that,
12 I unfortunately cannot tell you as I am ignorant of the
13 things”.
14 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Now 10 days after being reminded of that letter because it
15 had been in the discovery originally according to
16 Lovells —-
17 A. [Mr Irving]: Yes.
18 Q. [Mr Rampton]: — his Lordship asked you and I repeat: “Is it your case
19 that there is not any record, whether tapes, notes or
20 anything, of Gita Sereny’s interview with Christa
21 Schroeder and she is, in fact, making the whole thing up?”
22 Answer by Mr Irving: “Yes”. A false and a knowingly
23 false answer, is it not, Mr Irving?
24 A. [Mr Irving]: To this I have to say two things. The first thing, not in
25 any order of priority, is that, as is evident from the
26 correspondence which I just read out, there was no
. P-140
1 interview. She did not get to see Mrs Schroeder.
2 Q. [Mr Rampton]: What, you mean you cannot interview somebody by telephone?
3 A. [Mr Irving]: Not in my book. Secondly, I have to confess that even
4 after receiving that letter from the opposing solicitors
5 in the other action, I did not look into the
6 correspondence and discovery files for reasons which are
7 probably evident for you. To do so would have taken me
8 probably 20 or 30 minutes to find the file and look up the
9 letter, and at present I am under very great time
10 pressure.
11 MR JUSTICE GRAY: I am sorry, I am not following that at all.
12 On 10th February 2000, you were sent a letter which
13 specifically directed you to the document. It would not
14 have taken you a second to find it.
15 A. [Mr Irving]: My Lord, my files are not in any very great shape at
16 present. They are in great shape for this action, but
17 they are not in great shape for an action which has not
18 yet been set down even. And to have looked and found the
19 Sereny discovery and to have found this particular
20 document — all I can say is that I am stating here, I am
21 asserting here, that I did not look up this document and,
22 even having looked it up, it has not altered my position
23 because I knew perfectly well —-
24 Q. [Mr Rampton]: But I am sorry, Mr Irving, on 4th January 2000 you
25 specifically requested documents relating to what Frau
26 Schroeder had said.
. P-141
1 A. [Mr Irving]: Very well. In preparation of this case, I have gone
2 through our entire discovery for the action against
3 Penguin Books which is the current case, which is what
4 this number is on the top right-hand corner of the Sunday
5 Times letter, 545. When I took this letter out, my eye
6 lit on the fact on paragraph 2 that there were quite
7 clearly interesting items that Sereny had not disclosed to
8 me, as she should have. I wrote a routine letter to the
9 solicitors for the opponents in that action, saying, “Oh,
10 by the way, I note you have not given discovery of those
11 documents, please now do so”, which is a perfectly
12 reasonable act. They then wrote back that letter. But
13 I already knew from Christa Schroeder that she never
14 interviewed Miss Sereny for personal reasons.
15 MR RAMPTON: But she did not make it up, did she, Mr Irving?
16 A. [Mr Irving]: She did not make what up? The statement?
17 Q. [Mr Rampton]: The assertion that Hitler probably knew what was going on
18 because he had these four hours, frequently had these four
19 hours conversations closeted with his friend, Heinrich
20 Himmler?
21 A. [Mr Irving]: Now, that is not the question you asked me, is it, or the
22 question which his Lordship asked me?
23 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Yes.
24 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Have a look at it again if you want to.
25 MR RAMPTON: “Did she make it up?” Answer; “Yes”.
26 A. [Mr Irving]: “Is it your case that there is not any record of Gita
. P-142
1 Sereny’s interview with Christa Schroder?” That was the
2 first question to which the answer was quite correctly,
3 “Yes”, “And that she is, in fact, making the whole thing
4 up?” in other words, the interview, answer: “Yes”. And
5 I take issue with the way you put her response. She did
6 not say she considered it probable that Hitler knew. She
7 said she considered it improbable that Hitler did not know
8 or that he knew nothing, rather, was the exact language.
9 That is not quite the same as you have said. I do not
10 want to split hairs, but let us stick to the actual
11 language.
12 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Would you like to withdraw the allegation of little
13 invention you made against Miss Sereny in this court not
14 very long ago?
15 A. [Mr Irving]: No, I would not. Miss Sereny has stated that she
16 conducted interviews with a number of Hitler’s staff, who
17 disavowed what I had reported of my very lengthy
18 interviews with the same people. It is a matter of
19 professional pride that I establish that what I wrote was
20 true on the basis of proper interviews, not conducted over
21 a snatched telephone conversation. Proper interviews.
22 You have of course seen the very complete and proper
23 records I took of those interviews, and I was perfectly
24 satisfied from my knowledge of these people and what they
25 told me that they had not granted her interview.
26 Certainly Krista Schroeder had not and, when it was
. P-143
1 suggested in this court that she had, I knew perfectly
2 well that she had not, and it now turns out I was right.
3 Q. [Mr Rampton]: The last item on my agenda for today, Mr Irving, is the
4 Goebbels diaries, the entry for 13th December 1941, what
5 Adolf Hitler said to the Gauleiters and others on 12th
6 December 1941.
7 A. [Mr Irving]: And my knowledge of what was in them, presumably.
8 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Absolutely. Precisely that. My Lord, this is on page 337
9 and 338 of Professor Evans’ report. I invite reference to
10 that because the English is there.
11 MR JUSTICE GRAY: I am sorry to be tedious about this but where
12 should I put the little clip that has just been handed in?
13 MS ROGERS: J2, which is now in an overspill marked J2 to 3.
14 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Rather than being an overspill marked J2 to
15 3, it is actually going to be J3.
16 MS ROGERS: I am very happy with that, and I think we are up to
17 17 or 18.
18 MR JUSTICE GRAY: I have run out of tabs.
19 MR RAMPTON: May Mr Irving and his Lordship have the Goebbels
20 clip and Mr Irving should also have a copy of Professor
21 Evans’ report.
22 A. [Mr Irving]: In that case I had better clear a large space on my desk.
23 MR RAMPTON: Please turn to page 337. On page 337 in paragraph
24 8 Professor Evans writes this: “On 12th December 1941,
25 less than one month after the publication of the article
26 in Das Reich, Hitler spoke about the Jews in front of the
. P-144
1 Gauleiters (noted down by Goebbels): ‘With reference to
2 the Jewish question”, Bezuglich der Judenfrage, “the
3 Fuhrer is determined to clear the decks”. The actual
4 German is reinen Tisch zu machen, which might be better
5 translated as make a clean sweep. “He prophesied to the
6 Jews that if they should once more bring about a world
7 war, they would experience their own annihilation in doing
8 so. That was no mere talk. The world war is there, the
9 annihilation of Jewry must be the necessary consequence.
10 The question is to be considered without any
11 sentimentality. We are not there to have sympathy with
12 the Jews, only sympathy with our German people”.
13 In paragraph 9 on page 338, writes Professor
14 Evans: “Here Hitler mirrored directly Goebbels’s
15 statements from the article in Das Reich”, which I think
16 was published in November of that year, 16th I think?
17 A. [Mr Irving]: November 16, yes.
18 Q. [Mr Rampton]: “While Irving does cite this speech of 12th December 1941
19 by Hitler in Goebbels, he is careful to omit any mention
20 at all of this key passage because it shows that Hitler
21 was as determined to act brutally against the Jews as
22 Goebbels was”.
23 Your account of the omission of that may be
24 thought crucially important passage from the Goebbels
25 diaries from your book on Goebbels, or indeed from
26 anything else that you have written so far as I know, is
. P-145
1 I think, if I may summarize this and you will correct me
2 if am wrong, that you went to Moscow to look at the
3 Goebbels diaries with a specific commission from the
4 Sunday Times.
5 A. [Mr Irving]: A shopping list, yes.
6 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Which consisted of, or which included, the instruction,
7 direction or request to look for material on Pearl
8 Harbour? Is that right?
9 A. [Mr Irving]: Yes.
10 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Have I got it right so far?
11 A. [Mr Irving]: Yes.
12 Q. [Mr Rampton]: When you got there, you found the glass plates on which
13 the diaries were recorded so voluminous or so crowded that
14 you stopped four lines into the second of the glass plates
15 for this date. Do you remember that? Would you like to
16 turn to tab 2, which I think are some Irving documents,
17 are they not?
18 A. [Mr Irving]: I am sorry?
19 Q. [Mr Rampton]: The little clip, the file you have been given.
20 A. [Mr Irving]: Yes, tab 2. The notes taken by my assistant on our
21 progress as we waded through the glass plates.
22 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Yes. The first page in that is headed “box 1”, is it not?
23 A. [Mr Irving]: Yes.
24 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Whether that means the big filing box or the little box of
25 glass plates, I cannot say.
26 Q. [Mr Rampton]: I have absolutely no idea. I am afraid I was not there.
. P-146
1 A. [Mr Irving]: It is a big filing box. I can see that because on box two
2 she puts in the Russian designation.
3 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Could you turn to page 9 please? It is the original 09 at
4 the bottom.
5 A. [Mr Irving]: Yes.
6 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Under No. 38 at the top of the page we see the list of
7 plates that you read, or part read, for December 1941, do
8 we not?
9 A. [Mr Irving]: The plates that we found, yes.
10 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Whatever. Lesen is German for read, is it not?
11 A. [Mr Irving]: Read or read, oddly enough.
12 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Read. It must be read. 10th December, read, 11th to 12th
13 December, read, Pearl Harbour.
14 A. [Mr Irving]: Read with gelesen.
15 Q. [Mr Rampton]: All right. 13th December, lesen, whatever it means.
16 A. [Mr Irving]: Yes.
17 Q. [Mr Rampton]: 13/14 December, 41, bis vier zeile gelesen?
18 A. [Mr Irving]: Read to the fourth line yes.
19 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Yes, to the fourth line. Now please turn over some
20 pages. There is a lot in here that I do not need.
21 A. [Mr Irving]: I am astonished that she was so meticulous in what she
22 wrote down.
23 Q. [Mr Rampton]: I am about to suggest to you that she actually might have
24 made a significant mistake.
25 A. [Mr Irving]: Ah.
26 Q. [Mr Rampton]: At tab 5 of this little file you will see a document in
. P-147
1 Russian dated 23rd February of this year. If you want to
2 turn over, we have attempted the translation.
3 A. [Mr Irving]: I was just about to get my O-level Russian to work.
4 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Forget your O-level Russian unless you are going to
5 grumble about the translation. It comes from the Federal
6 Archives Services of Russia and Moscow and it is written
7 to my solicitors Mishcon de Reya in London. It says,
8 “Dear Sirs, further to your letter we are sending to you
9 photocopies Goebbels diary pages for 13th December 1941.
10 The photocopies are taken from two separate glass
11 plates”. So far you are not falling out with the
12 Russians, I think, are you, Mr Irving?
13 A. [Mr Irving]: I am happy to accept this, yes.
14 Q. [Mr Rampton]: The second plate starts from page 18.
15 A. [Mr Irving]: I see what they mean.
16 Q. [Mr Rampton]: We turn over the page to tab 6 of this little file and we
17 find what it is that the Russians have sent us.
18 A. [Mr Irving]: Yes.
19 Q. [Mr Rampton]: If you turn through the pages, the numbers are at the
20 top. You find that the first plate ends. Well, let us
21 look at the first page. The first page has on it 13th
22 December 1941.
23 A. [Mr Irving]: Yes.
24 Q. [Mr Rampton]: That does not mean that that plate starts on the 13th
25 December 1941, does it?
26 A. [Mr Irving]: No, it does not.
. P-148
1 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Right. So, when the Russians say that plate 1 ends at
2 page 17 of this 13th December entry, which you can see,
3 they are probably right, are they not?
4 A. [Mr Irving]: Yes.
5 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Now I will direct you to where on plate 2, rather far past
6 line 4 I fear, your clip that you gave us as representing
7 what you transcribed begins. Page 26, please. If you
8 want to compare it with what you gave us as being your —
9 we had better do it in an orderly way. Your transcription
10 is at tab 4, and it begins “Mittags habe ich eine
11 Unterredung mit dem Fuhrer”.
12 A. [Mr Irving]: Yes.
13 Q. [Mr Rampton]: So we can see that that passage starts — it is the first
14 part of your transcription for the 13th and it starts on
15 page 26, I think, of plate 2, I ask you to note, of the
16 series for this date. I can tell you, because I have
17 marked it all the way through, you run out in the sections
18 you say you transcribed on page 38. Is that right? Yes,
19 it is, I think. You end with the passage “Das wir im
20 Osten nicht weitergekommen sind, als wir jetzt stehen”,
21 and we find that on page 38 of plate 2, do we not?
22 A. [Mr Irving]: That is when I run out.
23 Q. [Mr Rampton]: You end “nach Schutzproblem aber”.
24 A. [Mr Irving]: Yes.
25 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Tab 4 is what? Transcribed microfiche
26 material done by Mr Irving in Moscow?
. P-149
1 MR RAMPTON: Yes. So point 1, Mr Irving, the story that all
2 but four lines of your transcription came from plate 1 is
3 just rubbish, is it not?
4 A. [Mr Irving]: I have just done a little bit of a calculation.
5 Q. [Mr Rampton]: It all comes from plate 2, does it not?
6 A. [Mr Irving]: Mr Rampton, if you are saying that plate 2 starts on page
7 18 —-
8 Q. [Mr Rampton]: I am.
9 A. [Mr Irving]: Do you know how many images there were per plate?
10 Q. [Mr Rampton]: I have no idea.
11 A. [Mr Irving]: Ah.
12 Q. [Mr Rampton]: I can count the pages, Mr Irving. I do not need images.
13 A. [Mr Irving]: It was either 25 —-
14 Q. [Mr Rampton]: 35. It does not matter.
15 A. [Mr Irving]: It does, because I think that you will find that the
16 remaining images you got here probably come from yet a
17 third plate.
18 Q. [Mr Rampton]: No.
19 A. [Mr Irving]: Because you could not have had more than a certain number
20 of images. Unfortunately, unless your Lordship has in
21 front of you the actual colour photograph I gave you what
22 the plates look like, I think those were the handwritten
23 pages. I am sorry, that would not apply. That is
24 handwritten pages and not the typed pages. The typed
25 pages have more to a page than the handwritten images.
26 Q. [Mr Rampton]: They seem to have got on to this plate, plate 2, and I do
. P-150
1 not know whether plate 2 ends on 13th December. I think
2 not, because the Russians tell us that the second plate is
3 partly the 13th and partly the 14th, but we see, of the
4 13th, they got a total of 59 minus 18, which is 41 pages,
5 and the whole of what you transcribed came from plate 2,
6 not from plate 1, as you would have us believe.
7 A. [Mr Irving]: I am anxious not to put my foot in it by saying something
8 ill considered. The final page in the clip appears to be
9 the end of the day’s entry, does it not?
10 Q. [Mr Rampton]: It might be that it is, and it may be that there are some
11 more pages in the plate relating to 14th December. It
12 might be, it might not be, it might be the end of the
13 plate, I have no idea. I suspect it is not the end of the
14 plate because of what the Russians have just told us.
15 However, the fact is that, starting on page 26, that is
16 say, roughly speaking, eight pages into plate 2, you then
17 succeed in transcribing your way all the way through in
18 bits and pieces with some left out, to page 38. Yes?
19 A. [Mr Irving]: Right. I am sorry. I am getting the picture now.
20 Obviously, you have thrown this at me just now as I am
21 trying to get the overall picture. You know this better
22 than I do. Which pages of the large type face have
23 I actually transcribed?
24 Q. [Mr Rampton]: No. They are not continuous.
25 A. [Mr Irving]: Yes, I know that.
26 Q. [Mr Rampton]: You start on page 26, you continue on page 27. There is
. P-151
1 then a gap starting at the bottom two lines of 27, and
2 going through to the end of the first three lines on page
3 30. You then start again at “Ich habe noch gelegenheit”.
4 A. [Mr Irving]: And there is nothing on those pages that I have taken out
5 that you are worried about?
6 Q. [Mr Rampton]: No, nothing at all. This is not what I am driving at.
7 A. [Mr Irving]: All right. I think this is the way to do it.
8 Q. [Mr Rampton]: You then transcribe the whole of page 31.
9 A. [Mr Irving]: Yes.
10 Q. [Mr Rampton]: The whole of page 32, the whole of page 33 and the first
11 three lines of page 34.
12 A. [Mr Irving]: Yes.
13 Q. [Mr Rampton]: You then jump to page 38, where you transcribe all but the
14 last two lines of the large paragraph on that page.
15 A. [Mr Irving]: In the part that has been jumped there is there anything
16 significant?
17 Q. [Mr Rampton]: No, nothing significant.
18 A. [Mr Irving]: All right, so that is unimportant.
19 Q. [Mr Rampton]: I do not know whether there is or there is not. I am not
20 interested in that.
21 A. [Mr Irving]: That is the way to do it, so I know what you are getting
22 at.
23 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Exactly.
24 A. [Mr Irving]: Yes.
25 Q. [Mr Rampton]: The fact is you managed to get to page 38 of a diary entry
26 which, considering its date, is recording the speech to
. P-152
1 the Gauleiters and I think the Reichskommissars and,
2 considering its date, is a very important entry.
3 A. [Mr Irving]: Yes, if one had known that was there. But you have to
4 remember, I am looking at these glass plates through
5 something the size of my little finger nail like this all
6 day long, dictating on to a tape.
7 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Are you seriously telling me that you resisted the
8 temptation to read this important speech of the Fuhrer
9 from end to end, start to finish?
10 A. [Mr Irving]: There was a temptation to read the entire 50,000 pages,
11 this is true.
12 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Never mind the 50,000 glass pages.
13 A. [Mr Irving]: There is a limitation. I knew I was only going to be in
14 Moscow for a few days before I flew back to England.
15 Q. [Mr Rampton]: You are, or purport to be, an historian with a particular
16 interest in Adolf Hitler. Adolf Hitler makes a important
17 speech on 12th December 1941, which is recorded by his
18 chum Joseph Goebbels.
19 A. [Mr Irving]: Yes.
20 Q. [Mr Rampton]: You are in the middle of this important speech. Are you
21 telling me that your ordinary curiosity would not have
22 compelled you to read on to the end of this speech?
23 A. [Mr Irving]: I have to say that, even had I seen it, and this is an
24 entirely different question, I would not have attached any
25 importance to it, because it is the old Adolf Hitler
26 gramophone record again. But the question you are asking
. P-153
1 is why I did not read ahead and see that kind of thing was
2 there, and the answer is quite simply I did not, so I did
3 not.
4 Q. [Mr Rampton]: I am suggesting that you did. It is to be found at the
5 bottom of page 50, the relevant passage.
6 MR RAMPTON: Bezuglich der Judenfrage ist der Fuhrer
7 enschlossen, reinen tisch zu machen.
8 A. [Mr Irving]: Yes. Can you me where I stopped reading?
9 Q. [Mr Rampton]: You stopped reading eleven pages earlier, bottom of page
10 38. Actually, to be fair, in lines it is probably 12
11 pages.
12 A. [Mr Irving]: So it was not a question of kind of my eye not running
13 over on to the next page. I would have had to read on
14 twelve pages on the glass plate, and then said to myself,
15 hey, this is important, but I am afraid to say I would not
16 have, for the simple reason that none of the other people
17 present at that Gauleiter meeting, none of the other
18 Gauleiters, and there were 48 of them, bothered to write
19 anything about this particular speech being any different
20 from the others.
21 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Were you aware at this date when you were examining these
22 plates, Mr Irving, what to you at one time at least was
23 passionately important, that is to say, what you believed
24 to be the signal ending the Final Solution, Himmler’s
25 telephone call to Heydrich on 30th November of this year,
26 that is to say 12 years before the event which this diary
. P-154
1 entry records?
2 A. [Mr Irving]: 12 days?
3 Q. [Mr Rampton]: 12 days. What did I say? 12 years?
4 A. [Mr Irving]: Yes.
5 Q. [Mr Rampton]: It is obviously not 12 years, is it? 12 days. That is
6 elephantine, Mr Irving, but we will not worry about that.
7 You knew well about that diary entry, did you not?
8 A. [Mr Irving]: Yes. I knew about a lot of documents, yes.
9 Q. [Mr Rampton]: No, no. This is one of your cherished icons, or it was
10 until it was shattered.
11 A. [Mr Irving]: Said to have been, yes, but I do not agree that it was.
12 It was one of a long series of documents.
13 Q. [Mr Rampton]: This was Hitler ordering a final end to any shooting of
14 Jews for ever, or killing of Jews for ever. If you look
15 at the introduction to the 1977 edition of Hitler’s War,
16 we can all see that.
17 A. [Mr Irving]: Yes.
18 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Are you really telling me that a speech made 12 days after
19 that crucially important event in your mind, you come upon
20 a Hitler speech at the meeting with the Gauleiters and the
21 Reichskommissars, and you do not read the whole of the
22 speech?
23 A. [Mr Irving]: Quite simply did not, because of the very scarce resource,
24 namely time. The archive opened and closed at set hours.
25 I was only going to be in Moscow for two more days.
26 I think this is already probably the last page of notes
. P-155
1 that Miss Teplar made of our actual discoveries. We were
2 running out of time. I could not afford just to indulge
3 my curiosity. I had a shopping list to fill for the
4 Sunday Times. There were certain items we were trying to
5 obtain. I was reading these glass plates under extreme
6 conditions of awkwardness, namely using a 16 times little
7 thumbnail magnifier. I did not do badly under the
8 circumstances, and I agree I should be horse whipped for
9 having not seen that there but, even had I seen it,
10 I would not have used it, I do not think.
11 Q. [Mr Rampton]: You would have suppressed it anyway, would you? It does
12 not seem to you significant?
13 A. [Mr Irving]: I do not think so. I think the Schlegelberger document is
14 of far greater significance than this. This is just the
15 old Adolf Hitler gramophone record. I made that prophecy
16 then and they do it —-
17 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Sure. This is the prophecy coming to actuality, if I may
18 borrow from the French for a moment. It is being
19 realized. He prophesied to the Jews that, if they should
20 once more bring about a world war, they would experience
21 their own annihilation in doing so. This was no mere
22 talk. This is on 12th December. The world war is there.
23 The annihilation of Jewry must be the necessary
24 consequence. Then why was the world war there,
25 Mr Irving? Why was Hitler speaking to the Gauleiters on
26 12th December? The reason is that he declared war on
. P-156
1 United States the day before.
2 A. [Mr Irving]: That is right. He had picked up the gauntlet.
3 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Yes. Do you tell me honestly that you did not think that
4 that speech by Adolf Hitler the day after the declaration
5 of war by Germany on the United States, making this into a
6 world war, was something you were not interested in
7 reading from beginning to end?
8 A. [Mr Irving]: This is the difficulty. If you are sitting in a library,
9 in your book lined cave, just picking volumes off a shelf
10 with an index and a contents list, with the content of
11 every entry in the diary, then this is made so easy for
12 you. But, if you sitting in a Russian archive without
13 even a microfilm reading machine, and you are looking at
14 glass plates, and you are the first person to open those
15 boxes in 55 years, you have not the faintest idea what
16 lies ahead of you.
17 Q. [Mr Rampton]: This is the date, is it not, Mr Irving, on which in effect
18 Hitler, having declared war on the United States and thus
19 having brought about a world war, declares war on the
20 Jews?
21 A. [Mr Irving]: No.
22 Q. [Mr Rampton]: He says to them, does he not: “Right, mates, you brought
23 about the first war, I told you that you would be for it
24 if there was a second war. Now this is it. Face the
25 music”.
26 A. [Mr Irving]: Actually, the declaration of war was the next day.
. P-157
1 Q. [Mr Rampton]: What, the 13th?
2 A. [Mr Irving]: That is right. Hitler declared war on the United States
3 on 13th December, and the speech is on the 12th. The
4 diary entry is the 13th, but Goebbels also wrote it up one
5 day later. It is not any significance, that point,
6 just —-
7 Q. [Mr Rampton]: I rather think it may be. I had always thought that it
8 was 11th December. I do not know why I thought that.
9 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Just pause a moment.
10 MR RAMPTON: They think it is the 11th, too. They know a lot
11 of history, far more than I do.
12 A. [Mr Irving]: I would not bet on it, but I think I am right.
13 MR JUSTICE GRAY: I think there is a reference, which caught my
14 eye as I was looking through, in Goebbels diary to the
15 United States. I cannot now find it.
16 MR RAMPTON: Dr Longerich thinks it is the 11th, my Lord.
17 MR JUSTICE GRAY: What would be conclusive, with all respect to
18 him, is if Goebbels mentioned it as having happened before
19 he wrote his diary entry.
20 MR RAMPTON: Or if Mr Irving did, but I cannot find it in the
21 index.
22 A. [Mr Irving]: It would be in my book Hitler’s War, but of course that is
23 just a pack of lies, is it not?
24 MR RAMPTON: No. There are some things that are right. For
25 example, the name on the cover, Hitler, and war.
26 A. [Mr Irving]: I think a sudden silence is going to fall among the—-
. P-158
1 Q. [Mr Rampton]: It is quite an important point so, if your Lordship does
2 not mind, we will find out, on the best authority, when it
3 was declared.
4 A. [Mr Irving]: I think it is a “Who wants to be a millionaire” question,
5 is it not?
6 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Not really, I think.
7 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Page 15 of Goebbels diary entry?
8 MR RAMPTON: Page 15 in this Russian version, my Lord?
9 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Yes. I am not sure if it actually does
10 answer the question, but it is coming close.
11 MR RAMPTON: Perhaps we can bypass the good Dr Goebbels, my
12 Lord, because this is Professor Irving writing his Goring
13 book in 1989ish, I think, page 337. “It is probably only
14 now that he”, that is probably Hitler, might be Goring,
15 “learned that the Japanese had attacked Pearl Harbour.
16 At the Reichstag session on December 11th Hitler declared
17 war on the United States”.
18 A. [Mr Irving]: I found it at the same time, yes.
19 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Well, who is right? You or you?
20 A. [Mr Irving]: This time you are right.
21 Q. [Mr Rampton]: OK, the 11th.
22 A. [Mr Irving]: Luckily I am not a betting man.
23 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Lucky you have not lost a million quid, yet.
24 A. [Mr Irving]: I would have phoned a friend if I had one.
25 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Mr Irving, this was a very important speech, was it not?
26 A. [Mr Irving]: No.
. P-159
1 Q. [Mr Rampton]: The day after the declaration of war on the United States?
2 A. [Mr Irving]: It was the usual Adolf Hitler pep talk. He did not often
3 see the Gauleiters. He did not like the Gauleiters. He
4 said to Martin Bormann after Rudolf Hess went, “Keep the
5 Gauleiters off my back”.
6 Q. [Mr Rampton]: What he said was: “You Jews, I threatened you, I promised
7 you, you have got it coming to you, and now it is here
8 because the world war has begun”.
9 A. [Mr Irving]: Do you want to see his actual speech?
10 Q. [Mr Rampton]: No. I would like you to look at what Goebbels reports
11 that he said.
12 A. [Mr Irving]: That is what I am asking.
13 Q. [Mr Rampton]: That is at the bottom of page 50 of the Moscow microfiche.
14 A. [Mr Irving]: That is 22 pages beyond how far I got.
15 Q. [Mr Rampton]: It is not. It is 12 pages. I must say — I have to say,
16 Mr Irving — pretty weedy little pages too, narrow and
17 short. Bezuglich der Judenfrager ist der Fuhrer. It is
18 the last line on page 50. It goes through, probably the
19 bit about the Jews, only as far as page 51, because he
20 starts something new on the bottom of page 51. Yes, here
21 we are. This is going to be the German India in the
22 future in the East. So the little bit about the Jews is
23 really mostly on page 51. If you read it to yourself —-
24 A. [Mr Irving]: I have read it.
25 Q. [Mr Rampton]: I repeat my question. This is a statement that the threat
26 will now be fulfilled, is it not.
. P-160
1 A. [Mr Irving]: Yes. He had said it endless times before. It is exactly
2 the same thing. Mr Rampton, I had the advantage of having
3 read these Hitler speeches through and through for 35
4 years.
5 Q. [Mr Rampton]: I am sure you have.
6 A. [Mr Irving]: After a time, you know what he is going to say next. He
7 is that kind of person.
8 Q. [Mr Rampton]: I am surprised you remain sane, Mr Irving.
9 A. [Mr Irving]: Thank you for the compliment.
10 Q. [Mr Rampton]: However, the fact is that the world war, which was what
11 Hitler was ranting about in the Reichstag on 30th January
12 1939, for example, is now here. The day before.
13 A. [Mr Irving]: He had had the entire British Empire around his neck
14 already, so it was not exactly a localised conflict, and
15 the Soviet Union.
16 Q. [Mr Rampton]: It is highly significant to anybody, is it not, Mr Irving,
17 who is in the least bit interested in an objective account
18 of Hitler’s responsibility for what happened to the Jews?
19 A. [Mr Irving]: Well, I can only repeat what I said earlier. There are
20 two separate issues here: Whether I saw it and suppressed
21 it and whether, if I saw it, I attached any importance to
22 it, or would have attached any importance to it, and the
23 answer to the second question is decisively no. I would
24 not have attached any undue importance to that passage
25 beyond what Hitler had said on countless occasions
26 before. The answer to the first question I can say with
. P-161
1 the utmost emphasis is that I never saw this passage,
2 I did not read the passage, I did not get that far in the
3 glass plate, I had other things on the shopping list.
4 Q. [Mr Rampton]: I make it clear, Mr Irving — I am going to sit down
5 now — that I do not accept either of those answers so
6 that you shall not be surprised when I say it when I close
7 this case. May I just take a moment to read my briefing,
8 my Lord?
9 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Yes, of course.
10 MR RAMPTON: (After a pause). Thank you, Mr Irving.
11 A. [Mr Irving]: Thank you.
12 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Yes Mr Irving.
13 A. [Mr Irving]: Unless your Lordship has any questions on that?
Section 162.14 to 186.9
14 MR JUSTICE GRAY: You have somewhat theoretical possibility of
15 re-examining yourself if you want to add anything by way
16 of evidence to what you have told Mr Rampton.
17 A. [Mr Irving]: I re-examine myself every night in the small hours to see
18 what I have done wrong, and that is as far as I can get,
19 unfortunately. By way of submission, I will certainly
20 make certain propositions which, whether permitted or not,
21 is the only way that I can effectively do it on the basis
22 of documents.
23 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Yes. I think I would find it quite helpful
24 if you were able to perhaps fax the little clip of
25 documents that I think you are probably going to produce
26 in relation to the invention by the British, the PWE.
. P-162
1 A. [Mr Irving]: The broadcasting. I have made a note of that. The
2 immediate question is when do we next come together?
3 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Do you want to return to your usual place?
4 A. [Mr Irving]: Yes.
5 (The witness withdrew).
6 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Mr Rampton, there are a number of loose ends,
7 I think.
8 MR RAMPTON: Yes, I agree.
9 MR IRVING: Can I ask a technical question? Is Mr Rampton
10 continuing to rely on any other names in the bundle?
11 MR RAMPTON: What names?
12 MR JUSTICE GRAY: I am sorry, what names?
13 MR IRVING: Hancock and names like that.
14 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Who?
15 MR IRVING: Mr Hancock.
16 MR RAMPTON: No, I have the answer I need about Mr Hancock. He
17 is some kind of unattached roving rightist who thinks that
18 all immigrants should be sent home. He is in the diary
19 entry for what he is worth.
20 MR JUSTICE GRAY: I am taking it that the Defendants are relying
21 on —-
22 MR RAMPTON: The list.
23 MR JUSTICE GRAY: — all the names on the list.
24 MR RAMPTON: Yes.
25 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Although they may abandon some of those names
26 in the light of your answer. I do not know whether they
. P-163
1 will or they will not, but they are entitled to rely on
2 them.
3 MR IRVING: The question I am really asking, my Lord, is do
4 I need to make submissions about any of the other names
5 than those that I have been cross-examined on?
6 MR JUSTICE GRAY: The ones that are not on the list you mean?
7 MR IRVING: The ones that I have not been cross-examined on.
8 MR JUSTICE GRAY: I am not sure that there really in the end
9 there were any. There may have been one.
10 MR IRVING: There were several. I am not going to mention
11 names.
12 MR RAMPTON: I have no intention of cross-examining Mr Irving
13 on any of the names on the list in so far as the
14 cross-examination was done for me by Professor Funke over
15 the last two proceeding days. There is no point in my
16 cross-examining and repeating just on Professor Funke has
17 said. I rely on the evidence of Professor Funke, so far
18 as those names are concerned. But, as I have said before,
19 principally do I rely on Mr Irving’s own words and
20 appearances.
21 MR JUSTICE GRAY: I am taking it that if the names on the list
22 have not featured in the oral evidence at all, then they
23 drop from the picture.
24 MR RAMPTON: I would accept that.
25 MR IRVING: Easily.
26 MR JUSTICE GRAY: I think you will find that only is one or
. P-164
1 two.
2 MR IRVING: I think there are rather more than that.
3 MR JUSTICE GRAY: I am open to correction on that. The first
4 thing is, any evidence that you have not, as it were,
5 formally tendered, Mr Rampton, now I think probably is the
6 time it should be done. You have some more evidence?
7 MR RAMPTON: I?
8 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Not oral.
9 MR RAMPTON: I see, the Civil Evidence Act witnesses, yes
10 I think we probably have.
11 MR JUSTICE GRAY: It is customary to inform the court what the
12 evidence you rely on is. It is just that I do not
13 actually really —-
14 MR RAMPTON: I really do not want to ask Miss Rogers to stand
15 here and read them out.
16 MR JUSTICE GRAY: No. I want to know what there is, because
17 I was slightly alarmed to get a bundle that I am not sure
18 I previously had which I have kept.
19 MR RAMPTON: Can we not make a snap statement about that now.
20 To say I have not read it would be false, but to say
21 I have not read it recently would be true. I cannot even
22 remember what is in it. I do not have it. Lipstadt your
23 Lordship can forget, not as a person but as a witness. As
24 to the rest, frankly your Lordship can forget the
25 Russians, I have got what I need from Mr Irving. As to
26 the rest, they are all Americans I think.
. P-165
1 MR JUSTICE GRAY: I do not even have an index in this bundle.
2 MR RAMPTON: Can we come back on that?
3 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Are we meeting tomorrow?
4 MR RAMPTON: I would rather not meet tomorrow if it is
5 possible.
6 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Then I need to know now, do I not?
7 MR RAMPTON: Unless we are meeting on Monday or unless we send
8 a written note to your Lordship’s Clerk just saying which
9 names we rely on. I certainly do not feel competent to
10 make a decision about that now. I know I rely on Miss
11 Gutmann, but beyond that I really cannot say. For
12 example, it may be possible that some of these people make
13 reference to people that I do not rely on as primary
14 actors, in which case this Civil Evidence Act Notice can
15 be ignored.
16 MR JUSTICE GRAY: I am not entirely happy, if I may say so,
17 with it being left in quite that way, because I do not
18 think it is reasonably to expect me to plough through
19 whatever it may be you are relying on. I am just wondering
20 whether we are not going to have to have a further session
21 in court before everybody goes away to write final
22 speeches to deal with, at any rate, that.
23 MR RAMPTON: I do not mind coming back tomorrow morning, if
24 that would help.
25 MR JUSTICE GRAY: I think it really is not, if I may say so,
26 satisfactory just to be told, well, we rely on some of
. P-166
1 them, but we cannot really say which or which parts.
2 I think it has to be a bit more crystallised than that.
3 MR RAMPTON: I was suggesting might be able to do it on paper,
4 that is all.
5 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Mr Irving, do you have any submissions to
6 make about this.
7 MR IRVING: I would be perfectly happy to receive a faxed list
8 of the names on which they intend to rely, if it would
9 prevent your Lordship from reading untoward material on
10 which they are not intending to rely.
11 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Yes, quite. It is not just which witnesses
12 but also I think some guidance as to which parts of the
13 witness statements. I do not know how long they are.
14 MR RAMPTON: Would your Lordship like us to take your C1 back
15 and send you an edited version?
16 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Yes.
17 MR RAMPTON: Would that help?
18 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Yes, it would.
19 MR RAMPTON: We will send it to you tomorrow.
20 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Absolutely.
21 MR RAMPTON: That was not my idea, needless to say.
22 MR IRVING: The next question is when can we appoint the time
23 for me to make the submissions I have to make on various
24 other documents and bundles?
25 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Yes. Mr Rampton, Mr Irving is asking when he
26 can make the submissions he has, which are basically, as I
. P-167
1 understand it, really objections to certain parts of the
2 evidence.
3 MR IRVING: Objections, but also I wish to put in bundle E if
4 I possibly can.
5 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Put in what?
6 MR IRVING: Put in bundle E by way of submission.
7 MR RAMPTON: Bundle E is in, without objection from me. The
8 question of what anybody makes of bundle E is a matter for
9 submission at the end of the case, final speeches.
10 MR JUSTICE GRAY: I think that is right, Mr Irving.
11 MR IRVING: Yes.
12 MR JUSTICE GRAY: We are really dispensing with the rules of
13 evidence pretty much entirely in this case, which I think
14 is actually right and inevitable, but that means that you
15 have got into bundle E a whole lot of documents that in an
16 ordinary case would not be evidence or admissible or even
17 relevant some of them. So do not worry about that, but if
18 you are objecting to any of the evidence that the
19 Defendants have put in, then my own feeling is that that
20 ought to be dealt with sooner rather than later, because
21 if there are documents that are going to disappear from
22 the case, well, then it is better we know they are going
23 to disappear sooner rather later.
24 MR IRVING: There are two documents I am objecting to, one is
25 the Muller document of which I still have not been given
26 adequate information on its surroundings, its family and
. P-168
1 where it comes from, and even if I am given the
2 information I am not sure how I can put that before your
3 Lordship, except by way of including my representations in
4 my closing speeches which is clearly unsatisfactory
5 because they will then have to answer to that.
6 MR JUSTICE GRAY: That is the first document.
7 MR IRVING: The second document which I object to in the manner
8 in which it was presented was the video tape of the Halle
9 speech over which we had serious altercations with the
10 solicitors for the Defence, because it was withheld from
11 me, most improperly and fraudulently withheld, which
12 resulted in a hearing at a lower level, as a result of
13 which the Second Defendant was ordered to provide an
14 affidavit on her list, behind which I was not able to go.
15 I was informed that she would be presented for
16 cross-examination in the appropriate manner, which of
17 course has now not happened. The object of that
18 particular altercation was Halle video, and has now been
19 presented to the court. I think that as they have
20 misbehaved over that video, withholding it from me, it was
21 then accidentally provided to me, it was returned with all
22 my videos to me, that was the only way I became aware of
23 the fact that this video consisted containing the real raw
24 material —-
25 MR JUSTICE GRAY: You are giving me a bit of the history and
26 I do not think now is the time to go into it, because you
. P-169
1 need to get your thoughts together, but that is something
2 I think ought to be dealt with sooner rather than later,
3 because the way of the Defendants have put their case is
4 quite a significant aspect of —-
5 MR IRVING: It is significant when it goes to costs, my Lord.
6 MR JUSTICE GRAY: — that compartment in the case.
7 MR IRVING: It is significant when it goes to costs.
8 MR JUSTICE GRAY: I do not know about costs, but I do think you
9 ought to have the opportunity to make objections. I do
10 not think that is a frivolous objection. I think the
11 Muller document is in an altogether different category, if
12 I may say so.
13 MR RAMPTON: Can I take this these stages? The Muller document
14 is in hand. Dr Longerich is in touch with the IFZ. As
15 I have told your Lordship and Mr Irving at least once
16 before, the reason we believe why Mr Irving could not get
17 hold of it was that the file reference he gave, not
18 through his fault, was wrong. We think that the document
19 is both in Munich and in the criminal prosecution archive
20 in the Ludwigsburg, and we will produce what we can find
21 when we can find it.
22 As to the Halle tape, can I say two things?
23 That is the best version we have. If Mr Irving, by way of
24 argument or submission, is able to point to features of
25 the video, or indeed to extraneous evidence which
26 demonstrates that that tape is in some sense, some
. P-170
1 important sense, unreliable, why then, your Lordship can
2 take that into account; not by way of whether or not it is
3 admissible, but whether or not it should be given weight.
4 MR JUSTICE GRAY: I am not even sure about that. As
5 I understand the objection, it is that it has been so
6 heavily edited at various stages by various people that it
7 gives a wholly false impression of what actually happened.
8 MR RAMPTON: No. It has not been edited.
9 MR JUSTICE GRAY: I am not saying I agree with that. I am
10 saying that that I understand to be the objection, and if
11 that be right then it might be that it will be knocked out
12 altogether.
13 MR RAMPTON: It might be.
14 MR JUSTICE GRAY: I am not deciding it now obviously, but
15 I think that that objection, if it is taken, ought to be
16 disposed of one way or the other sooner rather than later.
17 MR RAMPTON: If it is authentic and not a forgery and not, as
18 it were, apt to mislead because of the way in which it has
19 been edited, I mean mislead significantly, why then, it is
20 admissible. It matters not what its provenance is. It
21 matters not in the least what fraud Mr Irving may assert
22 on the part of my solicitors — I have to say I have
23 absolutely no idea what he is talking about.
24 MR JUSTICE GRAY: I am not going to deal with it now, but if
25 I am told by a party that there is a video which has been
26 put in about which he wants to make, in effect, a
. P-171
1 submission that it has become a bogus item of
2 evidence —-
3 MR RAMPTON: It is not bogus.
4 MR JUSTICE GRAY: That is effectively what I understand
5 Mr Irving to be saying.
6 MR RAMPTON: Then I will deal with it when I am fully
7 instructed.
8 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Quite. All I am saying at the moment is that
9 I think this ought to be dealt with before final speeches,
10 because one normally deals with these sort of evidential
11 questions at an earlier stage, which unfortunately means
12 that we will have to have another session sometime. I do
13 not really mind myself whether it is tomorrow or Monday.
14 MR IRVING: Next week sometime would be preferable.
15 MR RAMPTON: I would rather not tomorrow because I need time.
16 I do not want to relay half understood messages.
17 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Then I think Monday morning is the right time
18 to do it.
19 MR RAMPTON: Monday morning might be all right, but first
20 I need to know chapter and verse as to what Mr Irving’s
21 objections actually are, with supporting documentation.
22 MR IRVING: I have put a clip together, but can I say that
23 I expect it will be a conduct of the case matter, rather
24 than a withdrawal of the video tape matter finally, if I
25 can summarise it like that.
26 MR RAMPTON: In that case, I really do not see the point of
. P-172
1 wasting his Lordship’s time, and I have to say mine, at
2 this stage in the case. If it is a conduct of the case
3 question it can only every reflect on costs or damages.
4 MR JUSTICE GRAY: I do not know. I am not sure what the
5 objections are.
6 MR RAMPTON: Can I wait to see what Mr Irving actually says
7 because I have no idea what he is talking about at the
8 moment?
9 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Yes. I hope we can avoid having a further
10 session in court —-
11 MR RAMPTON: So do I.
12 MR JUSTICE GRAY: — but one thing I do want to deal with, and
13 if it can be dealt with now well and good, is the list of
14 issues, because I think it is going to make a huge amount
15 of difference to my task for a start, and I think it is
16 possible going to simplify Mr Irving’s task if we can
17 agree or possibly improve on the list and the order in
18 which the issues are taken. If you have not had a chance
19 to look at it —-
20 MR RAMPTON: I have not, I am afraid.
21 MR JUSTICE GRAY: I wonder whether we can deal with that —-
22 MR RAMPTON: I do not want to deal with it on the hoof, if your
23 Lordship will permit me not to. This is a list very
24 similar to that which I myself have composed. I really do
25 want to be sure before I agree to anything that it is
26 either not got something in that I do not read or has some
. P-173
1 things missing.
2 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Mr Irving, you obviously have not had a
3 chance to consider it?
4 MR IRVING: I have glanced at it and it seemed to be very
5 useful indeed, but I hope not it is not an obligatory
6 list, that I do not have to address all the matters that
7 are contained in it.
8 MR JUSTICE GRAY: You do not have to address any of them, but
9 they are, it seems to me, all questions that I have to
10 consider and, to an extent anyway, make a finding about.
11 MR IRVING: Yes.
12 MR JUSTICE GRAY: So if you do not deal with them —-
13 MR IRVING: I hear those words and I understand the meaning of
14 them.
15 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Mr Rampton, do you want to say anything about
16 them?
17 MR RAMPTON: I would rather not say anything about them at the
18 moment.
19 MR JUSTICE GRAY: When are you going to?
20 MR RAMPTON: What I will do, if I gain permission, is to write
21 any additions or subtractions that I having thought about
22 it tomorrow probably, that I feel in my client’s interests
23 ought to be made any amendments and then I will simply
24 send it to your Lordship and to Mr Irving.
25 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Yes. I am again perfectly happy with that.
26 Can you at the same time consider, and this obviously
. P-174
1 applies to Mr Irving as well, what I think is very
2 difficult in this case, which is the sequence in which it
3 is sensible to take the issues, because they all mesh into
4 one another and overlap and so on, and it is quite
5 important that the judgment —-
6 MR IRVING: As drafted by your Lordship?
7 MR JUSTICE GRAY: What I am trying to do is to make the
8 judgment flow, if that is the right word, or be
9 comprehensible.
10 MR IRVING: I am sure that your Lordship being an outsider will
11 have synthesized the matters adequately and absolutely
12 probably.
13 MR JUSTICE GRAY: If you have any suggestions for improving it
14 in that respect, then I would be grateful.
15 MR RAMPTON: My Lord, I have some housekeeping that I am
16 supposed to do. First, they are on the list, little
17 sections for RWE 1 Staglich and Varela 8A and 8B. They
18 are very small.
19 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Yes. That is that. What else?
20 MR RAMPTON: I promised a response if I could get one from
21 Professor van Pelt about those three labour camps that
22 Mr Irving produced. I have the response and I would like
23 to add it, if I may, as a supplement to Professor van
24 Pelt’s report. It contains some typographical errors but
25 no matter.
26 MR JUSTICE GRAY: It is all very well just throwing documents
. P-175
1 at me, but this is another 20 pages. What is this?
2 MR RAMPTON: The broad conclusion is very simple. They have
3 got nothing whatever to do with extermination. Those are
4 documents which deal with keeping up the levels of
5 workers, because they date from a period which arrived
6 I think in 1942, they deal with a period when the SS,
7 unlike the preceding period, had started hiring out its
8 workers to commercial companies like I.G. Faben and so on,
9 and therefore there came a concern because these workers
10 were no condition to do the jobs they were being paid for,
11 and they were paid, there came a concern that the SS camps
12 were letting their slave workers die like flies instead of
13 keeping them fit and healthy to work in the factories.
14 This is connected, according to Professor van Pelt,
15 obviously and naturally with the fact that the Germans
16 needing to recruit soldiers were having to take them from
17 factories in the greater Reich, and so needed the slave
18 labour to keep the war economy going.
19 He then explains why this has absolutely no
20 connection with the extermination, first, because the
21 exterminees, if I can call them that, were not registered
22 as worker prisoners, and second because of course they do
23 not concern any of the extermination camps.
24 MR JUSTICE GRAY: So it is exactly what Professor Funke says?
25 MR RAMPTON: Yes, that is what Professor Longerich says.
26 MR JUSTICE GRAY: I am sorry, Longerich.
. P-176
1 MR RAMPTON: It was observed by your Lordship in the course of
2 the cross-examination that Mr Irving’s questions were
3 directed to the wrong witness.
4 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Actually it was Professor Funke, was it not?
5 MR RAMPTON: No, it was Professor Longerich.
6 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Anyway, whoever.
7 MR RAMPTON: So that is what that deals with.
8 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Thank you very much.
9 MR RAMPTON: I am not suggesting your Lordship read it now or
10 anything like that, but I may make reference to it in
11 closing. Then the next thing, my Lord —-
12 MR IRVING: Before we move on from that, my Lord, what kind of
13 document is this?
14 MR JUSTICE GRAY: It is further evidence which actually to be
15 fair to the Defendants —-
16 MR RAMPTON: Mr Irving laughs —-
17 MR JUSTICE GRAY: — resulted from your putting documents
18 which I think had not really been seen before, I do not
19 think they were disclosed documents —-
20 MR RAMPTON: Absolutely not.
21 MR JUSTICE GRAY: — in the course of your cross-examination,
22 I thought it was of Professor Funke but I am sure
23 Mr Rampton is right, it was Dr Longerich. Do you remember
24 that?
25 MR IRVING: Yes, but the difference is of course I have had the
26 chance to cross-examine and Mr Rampton has had the chance
. P-177
1 to re-examine on those documents. On this of course
2 I have no possibility of making any comment at all.
3 MR JUSTICE GRAY: No, you have every opportunity to make
4 comments about it. What you cannot do is cross-examine
5 Professor van Pelt because he is in Canada presumably.
6 MR IRVING: It is neither fish nor foul really.
7 MR JUSTICE GRAY: No, on the contrary, it is further evidence.
8 You are perfectly right, you have not had the opportunity
9 to cross-examine him. I am not quite sure what you could
10 really have put to him in cross-examination that you did
11 not already put to Dr Longerich.
12 MR IRVING: Your Lordship says further evidence; it is a
13 further statement, it is a further opinion.
14 MR JUSTICE GRAY: In the way we use the term evidence experts’
15 reports are evidence.
16 MR IRVING: I am sure your Lordship will attach the proper
17 weight to it.
18 MR RAMPTON: I protest at that. Mr Irving pulled out of his
19 back pocket far too late for us to get Professor van Pelt
20 to deal with it in the witness boxes, long after he had
21 gone back to Canada, expecting poor Dr Longerich, who is
22 not a Holocaust expert, to deal with it, and then
23 complains because I get the proper witness to deal with it
24 on paper.
25 MR JUSTICE GRAY: I am afraid that is why it seems to me to be
26 fair to let it in, which I have done. I have already said
. P-178
1 it could go in. You must deal with it, Mr Irving, by
2 making any submissions you want in relation to it. It
3 seemed to me actually when Dr Longerich was in the box, it
4 was fairly obviously right that it was dealing only with
5 what one might call camp inmates in the proper sense
6 rather than people who never got as far as the camp
7 itself.
8 MR IRVING: It is difficult to fit in with the accepted picture
9 of the extermination programme which is the reason
10 why —-
11 MR JUSTICE GRAY: That is the sort of point you can develop in
12 your final speech.
13 MR IRVING: It goes to the scale operation again, which is one
14 of the main planks of my case.
15 MR RAMPTON: So Mr Irving says. Let us deal with all that in a
16 week or so hence, if we may. Then, my Lord, I have the
17 little clip of documents relating to Mr Irving’s, in our
18 book, misrepresentation of what Judge Biddle wrote in his
19 notes at Nuremberg about the evidence of Mme
20 Valliant-Couturier.
21 MR JUSTICE GRAY: What extra do I need on that?
22 MR RAMPTON: You do not. You just need the papers in one
23 convenient lump.
24 MR JUSTICE GRAY: I have them already.
25 MR RAMPTON: I see, well, that is fine. We were told by
26 somebody that your Lordship had not got them. It is K2,
. P-179
1 it is Auschwitz, tab 7.
2 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Did I tell that you or not?
3 MR RAMPTON: Not your Lordship. Maybe it has been Chinese
4 whispers that we got from somewhere. It is tab 7 of K2.
5 MS ROGERS: Mr Rampton hates filing more than me, my Lord.
6 MR JUSTICE GRAY: The answer is I have some of the file but not
7 all of it.
8 MS ROGERS: I think it is sensible for your Lordship to have
9 the lot in one place.
10 MR JUSTICE GRAY: I agree, yes.
11 MS ROGERS: I am taking over on the housekeeping.
12 MR JUSTICE GRAY: I think that is a good idea.
13 MS ROGERS: It is too boring for Mr Rampton. Your Lordship has
14 been asking for the denial statements put together in one
15 lump.
16 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Yes.
17 MS ROGERS: In a sense the hard copy form is going to be less
18 useful than the disk copy which will follow, but for now
19 could this go into the front of K3?
20 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Yes. That effectively means I can discard
21 K3.
22 MS ROGERS: I think not. Mr Irving relies on context so much
23 that I think —-
24 MR JUSTICE GRAY: For that purpose, yes.
25 MS ROGERS: — it is better to keep them there, and the
26 passages on that document are the passages which have been
. P-180
1 highlighted in the K3 files.
2 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Yes. Mr Irving will get the —-
3 MS ROGERS: Mr Irving will have exactly what your Lordship has.
4 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Good.
5 MS ROGERS: Then going into an N file, this is a document which
6 Mr Irving had but I do not think your Lordship does have.
7 It is the Moscow chronology derived from the diaries and
8 letters. All of the documents — there are extracts from
9 the documents — all of the documents extracted are
10 contained in the file, but for convenience it is a sort of
11 chronology of the relevant events in Moscow. If that
12 clipped at the front of N. Then hot of the press there is
13 a transcript of part of the tape your Lordship saw, the
14 Leuchter Congress. This is an extract of the speech by
15 Ahmed Rami.
16 MR JUSTICE GRAY: In French.
17 MS ROGERS: In French and translated into German and what the
18 translator has done, which has just been produced in the
19 course of the afternoon, is to translate both the French
20 and the German for reasons which will be become apparent
21 on reading it. Can I suggest that goes into the Rami
22 section which is RWE 2 tab 18? I hope that that completes
23 the filing part of the exercise. Mr Berry has been most
24 helpful in liaising on indexes. I would invite your
25 Lordship, through Mr Berry, if there are any loose papers
26 that do not have a home, to let us know and then we will
. P-181
1 produce indexes which are final versions of the files so
2 your Lordship will know what is in them.
3 MR JUSTICE GRAY: I think everything that matters has got a
4 home now.
5 MS ROGERS: I hope so, but if something turns up, then we will
6 file it.
7 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Yes. Right.
8 MR RAMPTON: I wonder if your Lordship would want to take away
9 any of the tapes we have been showing in court? I am
10 going to comment on them in closing the case, but whether
11 your Lordship wants to have them in the meantime or simply
12 we hand them over when we finish speaking because I
13 obviously now (and I do not know that your Lordship has
14 either) do not have any idea how long it will be before
15 your Lordship is able to give judgment.
16 MR JUSTICE GRAY: I am hoping not tremendously long. It
17 depends a little bit. The only one that perhaps one might
18 need to look at it is the Halle video, but we will
19 probably be doing that anyway in the context of any
20 argument that may be going to take place on its
21 admissibility.
22 MR RAMPTON: We do not want to burden your Lordship with them,
23 so we will hang on to it in the meantime.
24 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Yes. I am not terribly keen on looking
25 through them.
26 MR RAMPTON: No. There will be coming a transcript of
. P-182
1 Mr Irving’s home made tape [German] which places him,
2 I think, in Germany after he has been banned. I think it
3 means “I am coming back” — “I will be back”.
4 MR IRVING: “I shall return”.
5 MR JUSTICE GRAY: “Come again”. I do not know what you are
6 proposing to do about reducing any part of the final
7 speech into writing.
8 MR RAMPTON: My Lord, I am going to write the whole thing, at
9 least Miss Rogers and I are together, and I am going when
10 the time comes obviously to give a copy to your Lordship
11 and to Mr Irving. However, what I will not do, unless
12 otherwise ordered to do, is give Mr Irving a copy in
13 advance of his giving me a copy of what he is going to
14 say. I am not saying he should write it for exchange. If
15 there is not going to be an exchange, because he does not
16 want an exchange because he is not going to write it out,
17 then I will hang on to mine and I will give your Lordship
18 a copy after I have read it.
19 MR JUSTICE GRAY: I certainly would not —-
20 MR RAMPTON: As I read it.
21 MR JUSTICE GRAY: — order that there should anything other
22 than exchange.
23 MR IRVING: An exchange on the day perhaps?
24 MR JUSTICE GRAY: What I am really driving at is this, that if
25 it were to prove to be possible to exchange, even if it is
26 only one day in advance of actually having the argument,
. P-183
1 I suspect we would save a lot of time because I could, you
2 know, spend a bit of the previous day having a look and
3 perhaps going to the bits that I would like more help on
4 as opposed to the other bits.
5 MR IRVING: In theory, yes, my Lord, but, of course, I would
6 then forfeit the advantage which comes to the person who
7 makes the closing speech which is answering specific
8 points that have been made.
9 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Yes, that is true. That is a perfectly fair
10 point. Well, I will leave it this way, that if you could
11 on Friday, first thing on Friday, agree to exchange, that
12 would help me but if —-
13 MR RAMPTON: I think that will be too soon.
14 MR JUSTICE GRAY: I do not mean tomorrow, obviously, I mean
15 Friday week.
16 MR RAMPTON: No, no, I doubt it will be ready before the Monday
17 morning anyway.
18 MR JUSTICE GRAY: So be it.
19 MR RAMPTON: If it is, so be it, but I doubt it will be. What
20 I would like to do, since your Lordship said I think
21 yesterday that Monday 13th was not a fixed day for
22 delivery of the speeches, as it were, in court, what
23 I would possibly like to do is to let your Lordship have
24 it as soon as I can, and I hope it might be before the
25 Monday morning but it might not be, and then come to court
26 (which is what I did in another long case I finished
. P-184
1 recently) and answer questions, as it were, when your
2 Lordship has had a chance to read it. But in the
3 particular and peculiar circumstances of this case, there
4 will be quite a lot that I will want court time to read
5 out.
6 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Yes, I think we want to regard Monday 13th as
7 being pretty much a fixed date when we are going to have
8 speeches.
9 MR IRVING: I may have over misheard something there. Is the
10 intention that the speeches should be read out and not
11 just taken as read?
12 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Oh, no, no, not read out at all, no. I think
13 one has to play it by ear. I do not know what you are
14 proposing to do. You do not have to write a word down.
15 MR IRVING: No, I propose to write mine, yes.
16 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Well, I suspect then there may be odd points
17 I want to pick up with you. I mean, do not feel the need
18 to just read out your prepared final speech. That would,
19 I think, be a complete waste of time.
20 MR IRVING: Right, so it is a written submission rather than —
21 that point I had not appreciated.
22 MR JUSTICE GRAY: But I do not know what you are going to say
23 so I cannot really —-
24 MR IRVING: That I am right and that they are wrong,
25 basically.
26 MR JUSTICE GRAY: — predict how I would want to deal with it.
. P-185
1 Good. Anything else, Mr Irving?
2 MR IRVING: No, my Lord.
3 MR JUSTICE GRAY: So I am assuming next Monday for any argument
4 that is going to take place on the Halle speech.
5 MR IRVING: This coming Monday?
6 MR JUSTICE GRAY: This coming Monday, which will be the 6th.
7 MR IRVING: It will be a short session.
8 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Yes.
9 (The court adjourned until Monday, 6th March 2000)
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
20
21
22
23
24
25
26
. P-186