Funke: David Irving, Holocaust Denial, and his Connections to Right Wing Extremists and Neo-National Socialism (Neo-Nazism) in Germany

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1. Introduction

1.1 Professional qualifications of the author

1.1.1  I am professor of politics and culture at the Political Science Institute [Otto-Suhr Institute] of the Free University of Berlin.

1.1.2  I was born in 1944 in Guhrau in Silesia. High school completed in 1964, I served my military service from 1964 to 1966. In 1971 I gained my diploma in political science at the Free University, where I became a part-time teaching assistant at the Political Science Institute from 1971 to 1976. I gained my Ph. D. on the political sociology of work-conditions, with special reference to Frederic W. Taylor [summa cum laude]. From 1977 to 1983 I was awarded a research fellowship at the Science Centre, Berlin to undertake empirical research on industrial relations.

1.1.3  In 1984 I took the German postdoctoral thesis [‘Habilitation’], with a lecture on the theory and history of German anti-Semitism.. From 1983 to 1986 I undertook further research and held guest-professorships at the Technical University of Copenhagen [Tekniske Hojskole], the University of Linz in Austria, and the Darmstadt College [Fachhochschule]. From 1986 to 1988 I researched the conditions of Jewish emigration from Nazi-Germany. From 1988 to 1989 I held a guest-professorship [Vertretungsprofessur] of the Alexander Schwan chair of political philosophy, the Free University Berlin. From 1989 to 1992 I was the German Academic Exchange Service [Deutsche Akademische Austausch Dienst] professor of German Area Studies at University College Berkeley, California, specialising on modern history, German literature, and politics.

1.1.4  Since 1993 I have held my current chair as professor of political science (politics and culture) at Free University Berlin. My main fields of interest are right-wing extremism, ethno-centric nationalism, and social prejudice with case-studies of Bosnia and Kosovo, Southeast Europe.

1.1.5  I reconstructed and analysed the ideology of the right-wing oriented German political party the ‘Republicans’ particularly in reference to its hatred of foreigners, its anti-Semitism, and its ultra-nationalism. I have also analysed the ideas and roots of ethno-centricity within German nationalism. Since 1993 I have been engaged in researching the sociological, ideological, and political dynamics of right-wing extremism following German unification. I have also examined the ideological roots of right-wing extremism, for instance the anti-democratic ‘conservative revolution’of the Weimar Republic. Since 1995 My research and published work has concentrated on the sociological and ideological aspects of violence within right-wing and left-wing extremist movements, especially amongst the younger generation in east-Germany. I have written on the neo-Nazi network, and the role played in them by radical revisionism and social prejudices, especially anti-Semitism and a hatred of foreigners. My most recent publication examines the Southeast European crisis and the ideology and the political causes of ultra-nationalism in that region.

1.1.6  I am author or co-author of

• Hajo Funke, Die Republikaner. (Berlin, 1989).
• Hajo Funke,“Jetzt sind wir dran” – Nationalismus im gecinten Deutschland. Aspekte der Enigunspolitik und nationalistische Potentiale in Deutschland (Berlin, 1991).
• Hajo Funke, Brandstifter (Göttingen, 1993).
• Hajo Funke, Markus Kemper, and Harald Klier, “Ich kann mich nicht daran gewöhnen” – Fremdenfeindlichkeit in Oranienburg (Berlin, 1998).
• Hajo Funke and Alexander Rhotert, Unter unseren Augen. Ethnische Reinheit: Die Politik des Milosevic-Regimes und die Rolle des Westens (Berlin, 1999).

1.1.7  I am the editor or contributor to the following:

• Hajo Funke (ed.), Von der Gnade der geschenkten Nation. Über die politische Kultur (1988).
• Hajo Funke, Die andere Erinnerung (Frankfurt, 1989).
• Hajo Funke, ‘Rechtsextremismus – Zeitgeist, Politik und Gewalt. Eine Zwischenbilanz’, in Richard Faber, Hajo Funke, and Gerhard Schönberner (eds.), Rechtsextremismus, Ideologie und Gewalt (Berlin, 1995).
• Hajo Funke, ‘Die Republikaner’, in Jens Mecklenburg (ed.), Die braune Gefahr (Berlin, 1999).

1.1.8  I am likewise the author of various articles on nationalism, RWE, right-wing extremism including:

• Hajo Funke and Elliot Neaman, ‘Germany -the Nationalist Backlash’, dissent, winter 1993.
• Hajo Funke and Lars Rensmann, ‘”Out of a German soul”. Why Martin Walser can’t understand Ignatz Bubis’, Allgemeine Jüdische Wochenzeitung, 24 December 1998.
• Hajo Funke, ‘”When memory comes”. On solidarity with the unknown. On the debate of the Berlin-holocaust-Mahnmal,’ Freitag, 27 February 1998.

1.2 Scope of the report.

1.2.1  The following expert opinion is given in the suit David Irving has brought against Deborah Lipstadt, especially with reference to the ‘defence of the second defendant'(1996 I. NO. 1113). In particular it will be examined that,

•  i)  that the plaintiff has on numerous occasions denied the holocaust;
• ii)  that the plaintiff holds extremist views, and has aligned himself with others who do so, including individuals such as Dr. Robert Faurisson and Ernst Zündel;

and that,

• 14)  Moreover, the plaintiff has strong links with Ewald Althans, the leading Neo-Nazi in Munich, who is anti-Semitic and racist (and proud of it). Althans booked the plaintiff’s hotel in Munich for him under a pseudonym in May 1992, and sells and distributes the plaintiff’s books, videos and cassettes.
• 15)  As a result of the plaintiff’s aforesaid views and activities, the plaintiff has been deported from Austria (inter alia, for his extremist views and his connections with the German extremist group, the DVU), and banned from entering Australia, Canada and Germany. The plaintiff has also been banned from the German state archives.

1.2.2  And to the plaintiff’s ‘reply to the defence of second defendant’ that

6. (i)  it is denied that the plaintiff has denied the holocaust; it is denied, that the plaintiff has denied that gas chambers were used by Nazis as the principle means of carrying out that extermination…

   (ii)  it is denied that the plaintiff holds extremist views. He has on occasion taken issue with both, Faurisson and Zündel and with their views, and they have taken issue with him…

1.2.3  And further

(15) (ii)  it is admitted that the plaintiff is currently banned from entering Germany… it is denied that the plaintiff has extremist views, and also that he has connections with any extremist German group. The DVU (German People’s Union) is a long standing democratic and lawfully constituted German political organization which has competed in the national and municipal elections.

1.2.4  The following text will address in particular the plaintiff’s denial that he holds extremist views and that he has connections to extremists in Germany. To address these points, it is necessary, to refer to the definition and concept of right-wing extremism [henceforth RWE] within the German official institutions responsible for the defence of the constitution, in particular the office responsible for defending the constitution [Bundesamt für Verfassungschutz, henceforth OPC, i.e. office for the protection of the constitution] and the definition within the social and political sciences.

1.2.5  We will first describe and analyse the peculiarities of RWE in Germany after 1945, in keeping with the definition of right-wing extremism outlined. In the second part of the first chapter we will reconstruct the development of the organizations and persons with RWE views in Germany, in so far as it is of importance to understand with whom David Irving has connections and with whom he co-operates.

1.2.6  We will further address the ideas and the strategy of the German People’s Union [Deutsche Volksunion – DVU] and of its leader Dr. Gerhard Frey, as one of the central representatives of RWE in the 1980s, and further the specifics of David Irving’s connections with the DVU. We will also look at the DVU in the context of the development of RWE in this period and beyond.

1.2.7  In the third chapter we will describe the changes within, and the radicalisation of RWE in the 1980s and early 1990s. We will outline the connection between these groups and the role of radical revisionist ideology in mobilizing their supporters. In the second part of the third chapter we will reconstruct the connections David Irving has had with these radicalized extremists and especially with Germany’s neo-National Socialists [henceforth neo-Nazis] in the early 1990s, such as the National Offensive [Nationale Offensive – NO], National List [Nationale Liste – NL], or Ewald Althans and the Althans Sales and Publicity Organisation / Office for People’s Enlightenment and Publicity [Althans Vertriebswege und Öffentlichkeitsarbeit / Amt für Volksaufklärung – AVÖ].

1.2.8  We will also illustrate how in the late 1980s David Irving decisively took on extremist views on Auschwitz and the Holocaust, and moved into the radical revisionist camp around Robert Faurisson, Ernst Zündel, and Fred Leuchter. Together they constituted the core international propagators of the so-called ‘Auschwitz lie'[‘die Auschwitz Lüge’¹]. It is also important to consider the structural confluence of interest that bound the denialist or revisionist upsurge of the 1990s with the resurgent neo-Nazi movement in Germany.

1.2.9  Finally the report will discuss how Irving knowingly and wilfully violated the current laws of the Federal Republic of Germany, not in his self-appointed capacity as an historian, but as a political agitator for the revisionist cause, RWE, and neo-Nazi groups. This will involve an analysis of why the German authorities fined David Irving, banned (partially or fully) his speeches, and finally asked him to leave Germany and banned him from re-entering in 1993 – measures that give empirical weight to the OPC’s analysis of Irving’s political activities in Germany.

1.2.10  The main body of the report will concentrate on the years 1988/9 -1993, as these are the years involved in most of the accusations concerning David Irving’s political activities. There would be much to say about the overlaps between David Irving’s political activities in Germany and those in Austria, but by necessity I have chosen to deal exclusively with Germany. Persons named in the body of the text can be referred to in the appendix.

1.2.11  In the conclusion we attempt to answer the question posed in the introduction, especially if David Irving has connections with extremists in Germany and to what degree he co-operated with them? Does David Irving hold extremist views and in what form has he presented them to the German public?

1.3 Sources.

1.3.1.  The arguments and opinions set out below have relied on those set out by the Plaintiff and the Defendant as set out their respective pleadings. In the course of writing I have relied mainly on the documents and materials released in the Plaintiff’s further discovery².

1.3.2.  It is important at this juncture to comment on two items in the further discovery. David Irving’s diaries, although named such, are not what one would consider diaries in the normal sense. Only rarely does David Irving comment on political activities or political issues. Much more they constitute a listing of daily occurrences and business (political or domestic). References in the diaries indicate that Irving at times gave copies to friends or used them to substantiate legal issues. This would suggest that they have been ‘sanitised’ for other readers, and thus do not constitute a private but rather a public diary. As will be set out below important passages in Irving’s diaries have not been released to the defence, sometimes consisting of a few days, sometimes weeks or even months. David Irving has also released many hours of video and audio material. As will become apparent Irving and those he associated with were almost obsessive in their recordings of David Irving’s speeches in Germany. The suspicion is that some crucial speeches have not been disclosed. Where this suspicion arises it is noted.

1.3.3.  Part of the duties of the German office for the protection of the constitution [Bundesamt für Verfassungsschutz – OPC] is to monitor those activities within Germany seen as extra-constitutional and more importantly anti-constitutional (see below). Since the late 1960s the OPC has published their monitoring activities and their judgements on parties, groups, and individuals. These findings are published in Germany at both a national and state level in the form of annual constitutional reports [Verfassungsschutzberichte, henceforth VSB]. They constitute an invaluable and authoritative source on extremism in Germany and more importantly on what activities and individuals are officially considered extremist in Germany by the authorities. In this sense the VSBs can be viewed as an equivalent in politics to say yearly government economic reports. The reports are consequently cited frequently in my report.

1.3.4.  A certain amount of secondary literature has been relied on, particularly in identifying some of the more obscure figures and organisations Irving came into contact with. Some of it is what David Irving would consider ‘anti-fascist’, although it has mostly been written by experienced and conscientious academics and researchers. In my own experience I have found that the material contained in such reference books is reliable, and that any short-comings are inherent to the secretive and conspiratorial nature of individuals and groups concerned.

2. The definition and concept of right-wing extremism [RWE], especially in the 1980s.

2.1  What constitutes RWE in Germany is well defined by the official institutions set up to defend the constitution of the Fereral Republic of Germany [Bundesrepublikdeutschland – FRG] and also in the political and social sciences.

2.2.  The importance and significance of the official definition of RWE are related to the peculiarities of West Germany’s post-war democratic development to a system of values encompassing human and civil rights. As opposed to other classic western democracies, with their long tradition of freedom and rule of law, West Germany had to build a new democratic system of liberty, basic human rights, and a democratic political system, following the terroristic and anti-democratic rule of an ultra-nationalistic right-wing extremist regime between 1933 – 1945. Part of the ideological core of this system had been a deadly friend-foe dichotomy (described amongst others by the professor of constitution and law, Carl Schmitt), and a racist anti-Semitism.

2.3.  The Basic Law of 1949 represents the endeavour to return to a (western) liberal tradition of freedom and individual rights. Contrary to some other long-lasting democracies like Britain it laid out explicit standards and values as immediate, direct laws. In other words, basic human rights are legally binding and written into the Basic Law, the constitution of the FRG. For example the basic human rights of the dignity of man, individual freedom, equality before the law, freedom of belief, conscience and religion, etc. This represents a divergence from some other democratic traditions, but is clearly anchored in the uniqueness of recent German history.

2.4.  The constitution’s right to protect itself is also enshrined in the Basic Law. One of the ‘fathers’ of the German constitution, Professor Carlo Schmid, posed a fundamental question during the debates of the Parliamentary Council charged with drawing up the constitution.

Should equality and liberty be granted absolutely and without any restriction? Should it also encompass those who singularly strive to achieve power and then having done so destroy freedom? I personally believe that the principles of democracy in itself cannot nuttier the means for its removal. Democracy rises to more than a mere product of usefulness only where courage is found to believe in it as something that is necessary to preserve human dignity. Should this courage be found, then so should the courage to be intolerant of those who abuse democratic principles to destroy it³.

2.5.  This idea is expressed in the German idea of a ‘militant democracy’ [streitbare Demokratie]. In article 73 of the Basic Law it is stated that the federal government can exclusively legislate in the defence of constitutional rights to ensure their continuity and the security of the German federation and of the individual federal states. According to article 87.1 a federal law can initiate and establish central offices to collect information necessary to uphold the constitution. Thus state institutions also include a federal office for the defence of the constitution and an executive arm. It aims to guarantee the constitution and protect its enemies. Part of its activities are to monitor extra-constitutional and anti-constitutional activities, individuals, and groups, and to publish its findings⁴.

2.6.  The OPC defines as extremist all endeavours aimed at abusing, fully or in part, constitutional law and all efforts to replace it with a totalitarian nationalistic system, efforts often based on ideas of dictatorial order⁵. The principles protected are set out are as follows:⁶

• respect towards basic human rights as set out in Basic Law
• democratic sovereignty of the people
• division of power
• accountability of the government
• lawfulness of the administration
• independence of the judicial system
• a multi-party system
• equal opportunity for all political parties
• right to build democratic opposition

2.1 The question of a ban on extremist activities in the German legal system.

2.1.1.  Although the definition applied to the protection of the constitution is very clear, the one applied to banning political parties is more diffuse. This is due to the decisive role political parties play within the political system, as defined by the constitution. According to article 21 of the Basic Law, political parties have a special role to play in the realization of the democratic sovereignty of the people. As this privilege is guaranteed by constitutional law, only the Federal Constitutional Court [Bundesverfassungsgericht – BVG] can rule on if a political party violates this law. The initiative to ban a political party can only come from a constitutional institution, for example the federal government, or the upper and lower houses of parliament. The constitutional court has decided to ban a political party only twice since 1949. This was the case with the Socialist Reich Party [Sozialistische Reichsparte – SRP] in 1952 and the German Communist Party [Kommmunistische Partei Deutschland – KPD] in 1956. The argument was essentially that the constitutional law had been infringed by both parties.

2.1.2.  To repeat: only constitutional organs are entitled to ask for a ban of a political party. And they in turn are free to decide whether to ask for such a prohibition or not. This means that a party that is not banned, but is nevertheless described as extremist by the OPC, is by no means necessarily democratic. It is therefore wrong to suggest, as Irving does in the case of the DVU, that a party is not extremist if it is not banned. In the case of the DVU the OPC is absolutely clear that the party is extremist and has extremist views (see below).

2.1.3.  The procedure involved in banning political groups and associations (as aposed to parties) is different. In practice it is easier for official institutions to prohibit associations and societies that violate the Basic Law. This can be taken at the initiative of the Interior Ministries or ministers, both at a federal or state level. For instance in 1980 the militant military sport group ‘Wehrsportgruppe Hoffmann’ was banned as was the neo-Nazi group ‘Volkssozialistische Bewegung Deutschlands/Partei der Arbeit’ and it’s youth wing ‘Junge Front’ in 1982. Michael Kühnen’s neo-Nazi National Socialist’s Action Front [Aktionsfront Nationale Sozialisten – ANS, later to become the ANS/NA, NA for National Activists] was likewise banned in December 1983. There were also a series of bans in the 1990s (see below).⁷

2.2 Additional definitions from the political and social sciences.

2.2.1  Although there is a debate as to what the definition of RWE legitimately encompasses, there is wide academic consensus that RWE is essentially anti-democratic, in that it stands contrary to the tradition of human rights and the constitutional state. Ethnocentricity, often in the form of overt racism and nationalism, are at the core of an ideology that claims superiority over all other values. The values of universal human rights (of individual liberty, freedom, equality, respect of human dignity) are despised, rejected, or denied – as well as fundamental rights of freedom of speech, thought, conscience and religion. RWE is directed against parliamentary and pluralistic democratic political values and systems, against the sovereignty of the people and the division of power. RWE aims to achieve an authoritarian, totalitarian and centralized power system, often in the form of a hierarchical anti-democratic one-party movement, ruled by a strong leader.

2.2.2  Uwe Backes and Eckhard Jesse, prominent academic experts on extremism in Germany, define RWE as a collective name for various anti-democratic beliefs and efforts. The core of this doctrine denies the basic claim of equality represented by equal rights⁸. These extremists principally advocate inequality and an aggressive nationalism that breeds resentment against ethnically foreign groups; a phenomenon often leading to an advocacy of naked racism. They seek a strong state that will realize the ‘objective’ interest of nationalist values, even by military means.

2.2.3  This ideological impulse to fight back is often not confined to mere political rhetoric. Within the framework of political culture and political psychology, the aggressive authoritarianism of RWE presents a specific view of perceiving the world as one surrounded by dangerous enemies, so that fighting back is essentially the only solution to survival (although the perceived enemies are merely scapegoats). As this tendency towards authoritarian aggression against weak scapegoats solves neither the social nor the personal problems of the aggressor, these aggressions have an addictive quality. Consequently right-wing extremists perceive themselves, as recognised by Adorno and Alport, in a paranoid way as ‘persecuted persecutors’⁹. RWE’s ideology of inequality and denial of human rights leads to advocating violence. RWE is often connected with an ideology and/or a practical tendency towards violence, militancy, and terror (see especially the neo-Nazi groups in eastern Germany).

2.2.4  Thus the belief system inherent in RWE is the perception of dangerous enemies within and without that have to be defeated if their own world and values are to survive. These internal ‘enemies’ are often migrants, foreigners, or others of different opinion who are perceived as threatening their supposed homogenous society and state system. These foreigners are often the scapegoats for the existing social miseries in society, and as such the targets of political violence. Such racist perceptions of the outer world lead externally to ideas of containing or even conquering this outer world by expansion (a new Reich) or an aggressive foreign policy.

2.2.5  In general RWE tendencies and groups can arise in many forms, not only in Germany, but in Great Britain (the National Front), France (Jean Marie LePen), Austria (Jörg Haider’s Austrian Federal Party – FPÖ) or in Belgium (Vlaams bloc).

2.2.6  However German RWE is particular in its ambivalent relationship to the most extreme form of nationalism in German history – National Socialism [henceforth NS]. Despite the de facto military and moral disaster of NS, the resulting destruction and self-destruction (the genocide of Jews, gypsies and Slavs), many right wing extremists see in NS a point of orientation. In many ways historical NS acts as a model for RWE within the FRG. NS, although tactically criticised, may be fully identified with, its characteristics applauded, and its symbols used as an efficient means of bringing out confrontational behaviour. To serve this purpose various tactics are used to ‘save’, ‘rescue’, or rehabilitate the NS ideology (sometimes in the Italian version of fascism) by:¹⁰

• relativising and playing down the its atrocities
• denying some of these atrocities
• in its most radical form, rehabilitating the system by a form of radical negation and denial, so called ‘revisionism’ or ‘denialism’

2.2.7.  These tactics are of interest when analyzing the shape and the format of post-war RWE in Germany. This ideological affinity with NS and the resulting attempts to free NS of the burden of its crimes is of pivotal importance for national and international ‘networking’ within the RWE scene, both in Germany and elsewhere in Europe and North America.. The revisionist campaign of Auschwitz denial since the late 1980s plays a key ideological and organisational role in this effort.

2.2.8.  To summarize. RWE strives towards a hierarchical, anti-democratic, and even totalitarian state, based on cultural or racist subordination, the rejection of ‘others’, especially so-called inferior races, foreigners, and other scapegoats. Implementation of this ideology of subordination often takes the form of advocating and using physical violence.

2.3 ‘Old’ and ‘new’ RWE

2.3.1.  The terms old and new RWE are clearly defined in academic literature. Grosso modo the old RWE (sometimes referred to as the ‘ewig Gestrigen’ – literally ‘eternal stick-in-the-muds’) align themselves to more state-orientated modes of extreme nationalism. They identify with the fascist traditions of authoritarianism that were prevalent for example at the end of the Weimar Republic or with traditions of the Weimar Harzburg front, which combined the ultra-nationalists ‘Deutsche Nationale’ with Hitler’s National Socialist German Workers Party [Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei – NSDAP].

2.3.2.  The new RWE presents itself as an updated, so-called ‘modernized’ version of the same basic idea¹¹. They pay lip service to a non-racist recognition of ‘other’ ethnic groups, conceptualized as ‘ethno-pluralism’, which is de facto ethno-pluralistic racism. They de facto also do not accept principles of Enlightenment and the universality of basic human rights. They have intellectual links to the far right and extreme nationalists within the ‘conservative revolution’ of the late Weimar Republic (with persons like Ernst Jünger, Carl Schmitt, or Möller van den Bruck).¹² For some of the new RWE, the belief systems encompassed in Judeo-Christianity, Marxism and the idea of basic equality are themselves eliminatory of the Celtic or Nordic traditions, the ‘justification’ for the ‘greatest genocide’ in history. Thus the new RWE appeals to the peoples of the world to rejuvenate their unique cultural heritages and demand the basic right to be ‘different’. The belief propagates animosity towards multi-racial society and other cultures and belief systems.¹³

2.3.3.  Parts of the new right try to disguise their RWE affiliations by presenting themselves as the new ‘democratic’ right, in as far as they fear the attentions of the OPC might oust them from the democratic system. Having styled themselves as democratic these groups can broaden their sphere of influence, using this democratic stance to build bridges between national conservatives and RWE. Thus in the late 1980s the RWE parties of the so-called ‘Republicans’ [die Republikaner] and the German People’s Union [Deutsche Volksunion – DVU] positioned themselves accordingly. Nevertheless they are perceived as anti-constitutional by the OPC.¹⁴

2.3.4.  Part of RWE supports national revolutionary politics, often arguing and agitating for a third way between capitalism and socialism, that of nationalist liberation and a corresponding movement (like the neo-Nazis in the 1990s in eastern Germany). These groups often see parallels between themselves and similar groups in the NS movement of the 1930s, and are avid exponents of a socialist version of a nationalist, racist movement. Examples of this are the present neo-Nazis, the revitalized neo-Nazi youth organization of the German National Democratic Party [Nationaldemokratische Partei Deutschlands – NPD] the Young National Democrats [Jungen Nationaldemokraten – JN] or the NS-oriented groups centred around Michael Kühnen, Christian Worch and Ewald Althans, with whom Irving had strong ties in 1990 -1993 (see below).

2.3.5.  This process of radicalisation within RWE has been particularly militant in the former German Democratic Republic [Deutsche Demokratische Republik – GDR] immediately prior to, during, and after German reunification. This opened a ‘space’ for neo-Nazi agitation and propaganda. The male youth of eastern Germany has proven particularly recipient to such ideas.

2.4 Features and peculiarities of old and new RWE in Germany after 1945.

2.4.1.  After 1945 the RWE world was inhibited for decades by the total political, moral and military defeat of NS. But despite the Allied repression of extremist attitudes in post-war west Germany the west-German population continued to display anti-Semitic prejudices in one way or another¹⁵. According to first polls taken by the American occupying forces up to 40 % of the population identified with right-wing, anti-Semitic attitudes¹⁶. In the late 1970s the well-known Sinus-study considered 13 % of the population as having a full scale RWE belief system¹⁷. Similarly in the late 1990s according to different polls up to 30 % of the population identified with anti-foreigner sentiments or anti-Semitic beliefs.

2.4.2.  Politically the FRG has experienced at least three waves of RWE:¹⁸

• in the late 1940s (resulting in a ban on the SRP).
• in the late 1960s (centred on the NPD and, after its 1969 election defeat, on Dr. Gerhard Frey’s DVU).
• since the late 1980s with Franz Schönhuber’s newly founded Republicans, the DVU, and NPD, coupled and with militant neo-Nazi activists, operating partially beyond the pale of the ‘established’ RWE.

2.4.3.  According to Richard Stöss RWE secured 1.4 million votes in the 1949 election (that is 5.7 % of the population). During the second RWE-wave in the late 1960s RWE secured 1.4 million votes (that is 4.3 % of the votes). The NPD narrowly failed to get into parliament because of the 5 %- hurdle in the German voting system .¹⁹ In 1989 during the third RWE wave the Republicans, together with the DVU and NPD secured 2.5 million votes (that is 8.8 % of the votes in the European parliament’s election).

2.4.4.  Official membership of the ‘organized’ RWE went through ups and downs. First counts in 1954 registered 80,000 persons as members of organized RWE. By the early 1960s this membership had decreased to 20,000, before the numbers increasing again to 40,000, boosted by NPD memberships. The late 1960s saw an ebb back 20,000. In the early 1990s RWE membership was reckoned at some 40.000 again.²⁰

3. David Irving and the right-wing extremist German People’s Union [Deutsche Volksunion – DVU ²¹], the German National Newspaper [Deutsche Nationalzeitung – DNZ], Dr. Gerhard Frey.

3.1 Irving’s earlier activities in Germany, 1978 – 1981.

3.1.1.  Based on his publishing (particularly his biographies of Hitler and Field Marshall Erwin Rommel) Irving’s earlier tours in Germany and Austria had involved such bodies and organisations as banks, bookshops, student fraternities [Burschenschaften], US-Army Corps stationed in Germany, and so on. At the same time Irving became increasingly feted by national-conservative and right-wing individuals and organisations in Germany, some of them RWE.

3.1.2.  Foremost was Dr. Gert Sudholt, head of the Druffel Verlag, and his Society for free Communication [Gesellschaft für freie Publizistik – GfP].²² Sudholt was at the time a member of the NPD in Munich and owner of the Druffel Verlag, that in turn specialised in publishing important NS figures. ²³ The GfP had been set up in 1960 by the former Reich deputy-spokesman of the NSDAP, Helmut Sündermann. Although ostensibly a cultural organisation to allow former NS authors an open forum, the GfP vehemently combated what it saw as the ‘untrue descriptions of the causes and backgrounds to both world wars and the defamation of German soldiery’.²⁴

3.1.3.  Irving also spoke to other organisations with connections to the GfP, such as the ‘Collegium Humanum’ in Vlotho,²⁵ the ‘Deutsches Kulturwerk Europäischen Geistes’,²⁶ the ‘Bund Heimattreüer Jügend’,²⁷ the ‘Verein für Kultur und Zeitgeschichte’, and Dietmar Munier of the Arndt-Verlag and his group ‘Sturmwind’.²⁸ All these groups and individuals can be counted likewise as right-wing and/or with links to the right-wing extremist circles. Some of them were to remain loyal supporters of Irving in the 1990s.²⁹

3.2 Irving’s activities for the DVU, 1981 – 1987

3.2.1.  After the SRP was banned in 1952, RWE had fallen into disarray until in the early 1960s a new collective organisation, the NPD, was formed. The NPD had appointed a moderate leader, Friedrich Thielen, so as to appeal more to national conservatives, although the cadre itself was in fact far more right-wing. Subsequently in state elections they made relative gains (in the mid 1960s up to 9.8 % of the votes). However in 1969 they failed to take any seats in the Bundestag, the lower house of parliament. After this defeat the NPD faltered despite a change of leadership.³⁰

3.2.2.  As a result of the NPD’s defeat in 1969 the DVU was formed in 1971, with the aim of gathering together the splinter group’s alienated from the NPD and in an attempt to galvinize a fragmented RWE. The DVU thus constituted a collecting tank for the remnants of the NPD, particularly the so-called ‘ewig Gestrigen’, the national conservatives and old Nazis who partially or fully still identified with the ideals, ideas, and even practices of NS. Thus this organization led by Dr. Gerhard Frey had within it far right-wingers, and since the 1980s has been considered to constitute the hardcore of old RWE in Germany

3.2.3.  The DVU’s effectiveness lay in organizing their members through subscription to Frey’s newspapers, especially the German National Newspaper [Die Deutsche Nationalzeitung – DNZ] which by 1980 had 10,000 subscribers. Another effective organizational instrument was their annual rally, normally in Passau.

3.2.4.  In 1986 the DVU and NPD formulated a common election strategy and put forth a joint list for the Bavarian state election and the federal election in 1987. It then became known as the DVU – Liste D [List Germany]. The OPC described this list as having an anti-constitutional goal because the organizations concerned and Dr. Gerhard Frey’s magazines were considered RWE. According to the office, Frey, through his publications, incited anti-Semitism and hatred against foreigners, distorted historical truths about NS, glorified the leading persons of the NS-system, and defamed the present day representatives of democratic parties. In their opinion the party merely paid lip service to its declared belief in democracy and in the constitutional and free democratic basis of the Federal German [‘freiheitlich demokratische Grundordnung’] for tactical reasons.³¹

3.2.5.  This should be matched against Irving’s statement that the DVU is a long standing democratic party. Neither the OPC nor academic social-science research would accept this opinion. The DVU as well Dr. Gerhard Frey’s DNZ has for decades been declared RWE (or radical right wing) by the OPC. ³² As early as 1971 the OPC stated in a report that Dr. Gerhard Frey’s DNZ had maintained a leading position in radical right-wing journalism. For example the 1985 VSB of Lower Saxony outlined the party platform and its profile as ‘Hatred against foreigners, anti-Semitism, playing down of the national socialist terror regime and disparagement of democratic institutions and persons.’³³

3.2.6.  The contents of the DNZ can be described as a ‘secondary anti-Semitism’, designed to address the ‘ewig Gestrigen’ mind-set.³⁴ For instance Jewish representatives are held responsible not only for the widespread stories about alleged atrocities committed against the Jews, but also for the fact that the Germans have to continually pay a financial, moral, and political price for the Holocaust.³⁵ This variant of anti-Semitism is often fused with the ‘old’ one.

3.2.7.  So-called revisionism was also identified by the OPC as playing a strategic part in DVU propaganda. Long before the debate on the ‘Auschwitz-lie’ was intensified by the Leuchter Report, Frey tactically relativised or even denied major NS crimes. As early as 1977 the radical revisionist Arthur Butz, who denied the existence of gas chambers in his denialist classic ‘The hoax of the 20th Century’ was presented with the DNZ honorary award for political victims of persecution.³⁶ The book was also serialized in the DNZ in the same year. In 1979 the book was officially labelled as one that invoked racial hatred and played down the atrocities of the Nazi regime.

3.2.8.  Finally Frey partially co-operated with more militant and extremist fringes of the RWE scene, groups whom in public he criticises for tactical reasons, namely the NPD and even RWE terrorists. ³⁷ For example Frey co-operated with the terrorists of the Wehrsportgruppe Hoffmann, whom he used as body guards at DVU rallies in 1977. Roland Tabbert, who co-ordinated the DVU’s 1987 election campaign, was later president of the anti-Semitic Anti-Zionist Action [Anti-Zionist Action – AZA] within the neo-Nazi movement. Members of the militant neo-Nazi Free German Workers’ Party [Freiheitliche Deutsche Arbeiter Partei – FAP, banned in 1995] were present at the DVU annual meeting in Munich in 1986. Violent rightwing attacks against foreigners were also executed by DVU members.

3.2.9.  Irving’s ‘soft’ revisionist themes of the 1980s (Winston Churchill as a warmonger, 100,000 to 250,000 dead in Dresden, the debunking of the ‘myth’ of Erwin Rommel as a hero of the resistance against Hitler, the stylising of Rudolf Hess as a martyr for freedom etc.³⁸) were all themes which exercised the German public mind, but in particular found a resonance in national-conservative and RWE circles. This corresponded with the DVU’s political attempts to relativise the crimes of NS, particularly the question of Germany’s war guilt and the Holocaust, and overlapped with the DVU’s latent anti-Semitism. In short Irving was an important spokesman for the DVU to win over to their party.

3.2.10.  Irving was first informed that he would be welcome to address DVU meetings in 1981, and by 1982 had managed to win Irving’s services as a star speaker for the DVU.³⁹ In that year Irving spoke for the DVU in 10 German cities on ‘the unatoned Holocaust – the expulsion of the Germans’ [‘Der ungesühnte Holocaust – die Vertreibung der Deutschen’].⁴⁰ On 9 May 1982 Irving received the DNZ’s European Freedom Prize [‘Europäischen Freiheitspreises der Deutschen National Zeitung’].⁴¹ By the end of 1982 the DVU had apparently paid Irving somewhere in the region of DM 100,000 for his speeches and ‘services’ [‘Verdienste’].⁴² A model of blocks of 10 speeches, initially at a fee of DM 2,000 per speech, later reduced to DM 1,500, was to continue until 1987.⁴³

3.2.11.  Irving later wrote that he ‘always spoke as an historian, never as a politician‘ to the DVU.⁴⁴ Although in the strictest sense Irving spoke on ‘historical’ topics, the very platform he spoke on (DVU meetings and rallies) gave them an explicitly political character. Added to this is the convolution between the attractions of Irving and his topics to old RWEs and that these same people constituted the bedrock of DVU support. The topics Irving was requested to talk on were both historically and politically tendentious, in the sense stated by the OPC when they talked of the DVU’s playing down of the crimes of National Socialism.

3.2.12.  For instance Frey wrote to Irving on 23 July 1983, giving him precise instructions for his forthcoming lectures.

… we agreed during our phone-call yesterday, that you should tackle the topic of the guilt of aerial terror in your September lecture series. You might perhaps take the occasion in the various towns to briefly go into the corresponding attacks. Regarding the topic as a whole there is a general interest everywhere in who began when and where with aerial terror and in what way? Which related planning occurred from what reasons and under what conditions when and where? What aerial attacks were allowed for in international law and which break international law? How are the three main accusations against the Germans since then [World War II], namely Warsaw, Rotterdam and Coventry, to be judged? […] Why were attacks preferred on working-class areas to attacks on exclusive residential districts? What was the German answer and how did it correspond to the bombardments of allied planes in terms of the number of bombs dropped, the intensity of detonation, the loss of housing and the death rate? How are the Allied bombardments of 1945 to be classified, for example Dresden, when the war had long been decided? How many deaths did the Allied attacks on concentration camps and ships with concentration camp prisoners cause? Perhaps the lecture should finish with an examination of the Nuremberg trial and Rudolf Hess. […] Please leave Hitler and the Jews unmentioned.⁴⁵

3.2.13.  As well as orchestrating the contents of Irving’s speeches, Frey carefully controlled their timing in order for the DVU to maximum political impact from them. In 1982 an American drama series entitled ‘Holocaust’ was to be repeated on German television. The first showing in 1979 had been watched by millions of Germans and despite the controversy surrounding it is considered as representing a mile-stone in German public consciousness about the Holocaust.⁴⁶ With respect to Irving’s forthcoming lectures Frey wrote to Irving,

I suggest the next series of lectures begin on Friday 12 November [1982] and end on Sunday 21 November (10 meetings) on the same conditions. A theme worth considering could be “Who bears responsibility for the unatoned holocaust of the expulsion?” [i.e. of the Germans from former Reich territories which fell to eastern Europe]. I hope we will formulate this more succinctly and impressively. In the enclosed copy you’ll find the dates for the repeat of the Hollywood-Holocaust soap on “German” television. During these days you will speak, at a different time, about the expulsion holocaust and provide the true historical accompanying music to the horror slush. Please again leave Hitler and the Jews out completely.⁴⁷

3.2.14.  Irving’s speaking tour of 1982 was indeed titled ‘The unatoned Holocaust – the expulsion of the Germans’ [‘Der ungesühnte Holocaust – die Vertreibung der Deutschen’] and was a political attempt to counter-act the TV-series ‘Holocaust’.⁴⁸

3.2.15.  Irving’s DVU sponsored speaking-tours coincided with carefully contrived publicity-campaigns in the DNZ. His latest speeches and books were heralded and marketed by Frey’s publishing concerns. Irving also played an important part in the DVU’s veneration of former Nazi heroes. For instance on 9 January 1983 Irving delivered a memorial speech [‘Gedenkrede’] on the death of Oberst Hans-Ulrich Rudel.⁴⁹

3.2.16.  As of 1987 Frey also invited Irving to contribute articles to the DNZ although Irving had long fed Frey with documents he felt might interest him, the DVU, or the readers of the DNZ.⁵⁰ For instance in 1984 Irving offered Frey and the National News [National Zeitung] photos taken in the immediate aftermath of the ‘ “freeing”‘ [‘ “Befreiung”‘ – Irving’s quotation marks] of Dachau concentration camp, purporting to show executed camp guards. If the photos were to be used Irving hoped he would receive his usual commission [‘Verwendungsgebühr’].⁵¹ In 1984 Irving was asked by Frey if he had anything ‘exonerating’ [‘Entlastendes’] in the case of the notorious Klaus Barbie, and if so to send it to Barbie’s daughter.⁵²

3.2.17.  In 1984 Irving was requested on Frey’s behalf to investigate certain names in the Berlin Document Centre for their backgrounds and activities during the Third Reich. He was offered DM 2,000 for the work plus costs and was to pass the documents on to the DVU.⁵³ The list of over 100 names included many prominent left-wing and liberal personalities in Germany such as Rudolf Augstein, Joseph Beuys, Heinrich Böll, Marion Gräfin von Dönhoff, Günter Grass, Eugen Kogon, Erich Kuby and Harry Ristock.⁵⁴ Frey wrote to Irving that the DVU themselves were not in a position to do the work because the ‘incriminated person’ [‘Belastete’] would have to be mad [‘verrückt’] to allow them access to their files.⁵⁵ Irving duly wrote to the Berlin Document Centre claiming that he was researching the names as part of his work on Reich Marshall Hermann Göring.⁵⁶ The Director Daniel P. Simon politely told Irving that ‘…you should know that Mr. Frey, who is not authorized to receive information from our files, has on several occasions in the past tried to obtain information from the BDC.’⁵⁷

3.2.18.  In his reply Irving made clear that his activities for Frey and the DVU were political.

It is true that I am familiar with Dr Gerhard Frey. He is a strange character, his own enemy sometimes, but one of the few people on the Right putting his money where his mouth is in the fight against the Far Left. That is why I place my oratory at his disposal. It helps to keep the Right Wing in the fringe, I hope.⁵⁸

3.2.19.  It would seem that the list was declined by the Berlin Document Centre, but alone Irving’s attempt to undertake such work for Frey speaks for the political nature of Irving’s relations to the DVU.⁵⁹

3.2.20.  The case became public in 1988 surrounding a scandal about documents being purloined from the Centre. In the course of the discussion Irving himself admitted the details of his political work for the DVU in 1984.⁶⁰ In 1989 Irving tried to re-approach the Centre for research materials, and was reminded of his statements to the media and informed that passing materials on to ‘someone whom you knew had been refused access to the BDC…with the prospect of receiving money’ constituted ‘a grave misuse of the privilege of access to the BDC.’⁶¹ As he recorded in his dairy 5 July 1989: ‘…writing long letters…, and to the Berlin Document Centre, apologizing for my 1984 lapse (Dr Frey asked me to “research” there for him). I don’t think it will work.’⁶²

3.2.20. More importantly perhaps, and interestingly for Irving’s later fortunes in Germany, Irving consistently acted as a pawn in the DVU’s strategy of using ‘the court-room as political forum’ [‘Der Gerichtssaal als Forum der Politik’].⁶³ Until 1988 there seems to have been little danger that Irving would in any way damage the DVU by questioning the reality of Holocaust as such. Nevertheless Frey made it repeatedly clear to Irving that he was on no account to even talk about Hitler or the Jews, particularly for benefit of the DVU’s media image.⁶⁴ This included Irving’s pet thesis at the time that Hitler had not ordered or even known of the Holocaust.⁶⁵

3.2.21.  It is clear that the strategy related to the limits the law in Germany sets on denialist statements, and the DVU’s good democratic image. On 29 April 1983, Frey wrote to Irving that

…during the forthcoming lecture series I ask you strictly to observe that we should give even the malicious no chance whatsoever to unpunishably accuse us of any glorification of Hitler or the NS era, let alone justification of the persecution of the Jews…. On no account do we want the vanished NS, the dead Hitler, and as always leave out everything which directly or indirectly touches on the Jews.⁶⁶

3.2.21.  In discussing his forthcoming lecture series on the Nuremberg trial Frey wrote to Irving in 1985.

At the same time I am presuming that you will steer completely clear of Hitler and the Jews, because both topics could only be our ruin. Even if you say something absolutely accurate about the two topics it will be turned around, misinterpreted, and in the end must even serve for bans and other prosecutions. The more objective your presentation, the more unassailable.⁶⁷

3.2.22.  The DVU’s strategy was thus a tactical and preventative one, strictly avoiding all possible excuses for incurring adverse publicity or the unwelcome attentions of the authorities. From 1981 to 1987 Irving, who at the time can be considered a ‘soft’ revisionist, would seem to have no trouble conforming to Frey’s requests. If such publicity nevertheless surfaced then the DVU’s practiced legal machinery was brought to bear. In the mid 1980s the DVU and Irving mounted a number of successful legal attacks, serving injunctions on newspapers and organisations who suggested that Irving in any way denied the Holocaust or was a supporter of the so-called ‘6 million lie’.

3.2.23.  Although Irving himself had had connections with German right-wing radical organizations since the 1970s, he was only mentioned for the first time in the OPC’s 1982 report.

The British writer David Irving (44),who spoke in 5 series of lectures in numerous German cities was the most frequent speaker at DVU rallies including on the “Nuremberg Trials – Justice or Arbitrary Law”, the “Truth about the Morgenthau Plan” or “The Guilt of the Holocaust of Aerial Terror”.⁶⁸

3.2.24.  The Schleswig-Holstein VSB noted his speeches in 1982 and commented that as a speaker for the DVU Irving was keeping company with the old Nazis like Otto-Ernst Remer and Hans-Ulrich Rudel.⁶⁹ The 1982 Baden-Württemberg VSB stressed that Irving had been a speaker at DVU meetings ‘for quite some time’.⁷⁰

3.2.24.  In 1983, Irving’s speech at the Munich rally honouring the RWE and former Wehrmacht Colonel, Hans-Ulrich Rudel was noted.⁷¹ He was identified as one of the DVU’s ‘principal speakers’ apart from Frey himself.⁷²

3.2.25.  In 1984 Irving’s speech to the DVU rally on 10 March 1984 was noted, when Irving spoke on ‘Freedom for Rudolf Hess’. He had stated that Hess was lured to Great Britain and tortured there.⁷³ His June 1984 tour was likewise noted. He spoke at the annual DVU rally in Passau on the 4 August 1984 about ‘The martyrdom (ordeal) of Rudolf Hess and its true background’ and was also noted as accusing Winston Churchill of having executed an underhand warmongering policy.⁷⁴

3.2.26  1985 was the first year in which some of the VSBs described Irving as a ‘right-wing extremist publicist’⁷⁵ or as a ‘right-wing extremist historian’.⁷⁶ Irving was noted as having spoken at several DVU rallies.⁷⁷ These lectures dealt with Rudolf Hess, the question of war guilt, the Nuremberg Trial, and the Nazi leadership.⁷⁸ He lectured several times in southern Germany on the topic ‘The 8th of May: Should the Germans pay forever?’ Importantly the OPC noted that Irving ‘questioned the extent of the extermination of the Jews.’⁷⁹

3.2.27.  In June 1985 he was given the ‘Hans-Ulrich-Rudel-Award’, donated by Gerhard Frey.⁸⁰ The award was officially presented to Irving for his servicower Saxony noted that ‘Irving in his speeches and writings plays down the unjust system of the Third Reich. He supports the opinion that Hitler neither ordered the extermination of the Jews nor did he know anything about it. Irving tries hard to improve the reputations of former leading Nazi politicians.’⁸¹ In November 1985 he again lectured several times in Bavaria on the Nuremberg Trial. ‘He proclaimed the Nuremberg War Tribunal to be a sham in which evidence was falsified and manipulated, testimonies bought and confessions acquired through torture.’⁸²

3.2.28.  On the 19 January 1986 Irving spoke at a DVU rally honouring the former fighter pilot Colonel Walter Dahl. Irving described the deceased as the ‘perfect German soldier’.⁸³ He participated in additional DVU meetings dealing with the issues of Rudolf Hess and the ‘depriving of the German people of its rights’.⁸⁴

3.2.29.  In 1987 Irving remained a frequent DVU speaker.⁸⁵ He spoke at the annual DVU rally in Passau in August 1987 on ‘The secrecy of the martyrdom of Rudolf Hess’.⁸⁶

3.2.30.  Thus in the 1980s Irving was a leading speaker in what is described as the tradition of ‘old’ RWE represented by the DVU. This old RWE line of thought included playing down the crimes of the NS period, questioning the extent of the extermination of the Jews, questioning German war guilt, denouncing the Nuremberg Trial as a sham, praising military and political personnel who actively identified with the Nazi system (like Dahl, Rudel, or Hess), and an aggressive rhetoric against the Allies. Irving pandered to a barely disguised fascination with the ‘heroes’ of the Nazi regime amongst the adherents of old RWE, particularly with his praise for the alleged martyrdom of the deputy ‘Führer’ Rudolf Hess, and would imply a certain fascination his own part.⁸⁷ Most importantly he himself had been labelled a right-wing extremist by the German constitutional authorities.

3.3. Irving’s activities for the DVU, 1990 -1993.

3.3.1.  Whilst Irving’s position in 1988/9 had changed radically as a result of the Leuchter report (see below), the DVU continued to be cited in OPC reports along lines already established in the early 1980s.

3.3.2.  The VSB of 1993 stated that the DNZ published anti-Semitic articles, repeatedly using the anti-Semitic metaphor of the avaricious and meddling Jew. It cited two examples. ‘The Zionist world congress and its leader, Edgar Miles-Bronfman described as a Canadian resident, industrialist and a loyal Israel supporter have been accused of intervening in the German debate on Weizsäcker’s [the then Federal German President] successor.’⁸⁸ The German Weekly / German Advertiser [Deutschen Wochenzeitung / Deutschen Anzeiger – DWZ/DA], the DNZ’s sister papers in the Frey press imperium, presented one Hungarian-born son of a Jewish lawyer as the ‘finance guru of the world’, a master of financial speculation, who through his dealings undermines the German mark. The DWZ made the point that the economic recovery of central Germany was jeopardised by Jewish restitution claims.⁸⁹

3.3.3.  The 1993 VSB noted that racist rhetoric against foreigners had become particularly aggressive in the DVU. The DVU advocated an ethnically pure Germany with phrases like ‘Germany for the Germans’ and declaring its aversion to a ‘mix of people’. The DVU was noted as advocating a worldwide-system of apartheid. As an example the report quoted Hans Otto Weidenbach, a DVU-member of the Bremen state parliament as having said ‘Kick out the swindlers and scoundrels, the criminals of multi-ethnic origin, the Turkish heroin dealers, the negro cocaine dealers, the gypsy looters, the Polish swindlers and criminal car dealers, because by tolerating them, you only breed hatred for foreigners.’⁹⁰

3.3.4.  The 1992 VSB described such sentiments as racist and claimed that they were designed to incite anti-foreigner sentiment, especially against asylum seekers. ‘This systematic aggressive incitement against ethnic minorities aims to suggest that immigrants abuse the asylum laws and are criminals and parasites.’ The report singled out the DNZ and DWZ/DA as vehicles for such sentiments.⁹¹ Propaganda headlines like ‘Gypsy terror – Germany a victim?’, ‘Opposition will be suppressed’, ‘Gypsies – danger for Germany?’, ‘Crimes of foreigners – danger to all of us’, ‘The civil state is in danger – result of crime and abuse of asylum seeking law’ gave the impression that immigrants were inferior and in essence criminals.⁹²

3.3.5.  Irving’s endorsement of the Leuchter Report and his conversion to radical revisionism (see below) did not prevent Irving appearing as a star speaker at the DVU’s annual Passau in March 1990, after not haven spoken at DVU functions for a year-and-a-half.⁹³ His allotted topic was ‘Moscow’s new policy to Germany’. Originally Irving had cancelled his appearance at Passau (‘for economic reasons’ as he told Frey⁹⁴) in favour of a meeting in Belgium arranged by Ewald Althans (see below), but changed his mind at the last minute when the meeting was banned.⁹⁵ On 9 March 1990 the city of Passau banned Irving from appearing altogether as a speaker.⁹⁶ Irving described his appearance at Passau on 10 March in his diary.

Here [in a side room of the hall in Passau] I was handed a police Verordnung [ordinance] issued under the Ausländergesetz [law governing foreigners] banning me from even attempting to speak there or anywhere else in Passau today, on the grounds of what I had allegedly said at Landshut. Schweinerei [disgraceful]. Bruno Wetzel appeared, said I should comply, and Frey would litigate for damages. Vigorous applause as I went on the stage. Hall was packed, galleries overflowing, over 8,000 people present….When Frey announced, with me standing next to him, [“disgusting”] that the police had banned my speech, there was a colossal tumult of cheers, boos, shouts of “Pfui”, etc.⁹⁷

3.3.6.  The city of Passau had justified its ban, according to later appeal documents, with the fact that at Landshut on 23 February 1990 Irving had presented his theory ‘that there had never been a gassing of Jews’ and that ‘The figure of 6 million murdered Jews was described by the plaintiff thereby as a life lie [‘Lebenslüge’] by the state of Israel as a means of permanent financial and political blackmail.’⁹⁸

3.3.7.  On 15 October 1990 Frey wrote to Irving in an irritated tone that ‘The court case for your right to speak in Passau, for which I am not responsible because it was caused by other appearances, is costing me many thousands of marks…’⁹⁹ He reminded him that ‘We have so often repeated our agreement that you do not talk of Hitler or the Jews at all at our events, that I will content myself with this short reminder also for our events in the future.’¹⁰⁰

3.3.8.  On 29 January 1991 the Regensburg administrative court found partially in the DVU’s favour and the city of Passau retreated to a position of allowing Irving to speak in Passau in the future so long as he obliged himself to refrain from mentioning certain topics.¹⁰¹

3.3.9.  Enclosing the court ruling to Irving Frey pointed out that the original ban had been based on statements Irving had made outside the DVU’s meetings and that this was an important factor in allowing them to appeal the ban on Irving’s behalf.

We would fall under the banning order if these other theses were to be spread with us. Nevertheless I know from your numerous previous speeches with the DVU that you would not even touch upon the topics Hitler or the Jews. […]

If Hitler or the Jews were even touched upon in your speech it would be a decisive blow against our position and enough grounds for us never to get the Nieblungen hall [in Passau] again, which we have be able to gain in court victories year for year. As always I trust in the full observance of our agreement.¹⁰²

3.3.10.  Irving’s opinions on the Holocaust were not the only thing to worry Frey and the DVU. They were also concerned about Irving’s new political allies in Germany, especially with Ewald Althans and his AVÖ. As early as December 1989 Bernd Dröse of the DVU’s publishers wrote to Irving warning him about ‘a man called Ewald Althans’ and advised ‘caution’ [‘Vorsicht’] in his dealings with him.¹⁰³

3.3.11.  Regarding an illegal demonstration in Munich after the international revisionist conference in Munich on 20 April 1990 (see below) Irving wrote in his dairy.

8.20 a.m. phoned DVU’s [Bruno] Wetzel, he says they are alarmed by the press reports, they couldn’t imagine that I would have marched on the Feldherrenhalle. I said, greatly exaggerated. He asked if Althans was on the square (inappropriate metaphor). I said, so far as I can see. But he’s a hothead, needs curbing.¹⁰⁴

3.3.12.  In 1991 Irving’s alleged presence on this demonstration continued to disturb the DVU. An AVÖ flyer advertising the second Munich revisionist congress of 23 March 1991 celebrated the exploits of the previous one, writing that ‘300 participants joined David Irving in a spontaneous demonstration to the Feldherrenhalle after our event.’¹⁰⁵ The DVU brought the flyer to Irving’s attention and Irving requested Althans correct his statements.¹⁰⁶

3.3.13.  But Frey was equally unhappy about Irving’s willingness to attend this second congress. After thanking him for his 1991 Passau appearance, Frey wrote that he had just received a flyer for the forthcoming conference. ‘I fear this will be the cause of a final residency ban [‘Aufenthaltsverbot’] in the Federal Republic, which I am very sorry about.’¹⁰⁷ A few weeks later Frey again wrote to Irving expressing his concern, and apparently turning down a suggestion by Irving that he tour for the DVU again.

In that you are announced to speak on 23.3. on a topic that does not coincide with the contemporary political legal order, I fear serious drawbacks for you, that could also influence presentations you give on legally harmless topics. […]

At the moment I have considerable doubts if we could in practice carry through a speaking tour with you, even if we continually won in the courts.¹⁰⁸

3.3.14.  Two weeks later Frey reiterated his concerns.

…I have just received some documents about the supposed congress that is meant to take place in the “German Museum”.

I consider the whole venture in no way accords with the current legal system, presume that the congress will not take place at all, and considerable disadvantages with consequences will arise in the matter of your entry [to Germany].

With regard to our long-standing connection I do not want to be able to say that I neglected to explain this to you yet again.¹⁰⁹

3.3.14.  Evidently, although aware that Irving’s statements to other organisations had become far more radical, Frey trusted that Irving would not become a liability for the DVU.¹¹⁰ Irving faxed back immediately that ‘as always’ [‘wie immer’] at DVU events he would say nothing of the Jews or death camps.¹¹¹ Frey entreated Irving again to be more careful a week later, asking him to avoid all ‘other activities’ [‘anderweitige Aktivitäten’] in Germany in the run up to the Passau rally of 1991, especially anything which might give cause for another ban. Frey warned Irving that the authorities were waiting to deport him or ban him from Passau. ‘It would be madness if you walked in to the open knife that is plain for all to see.’¹¹²

3.3.15.  On 6 February 1991 the city of Passau banned Irving again from mentioning the theses contained in the Leuchter Report.¹¹³ This being only a partial ban meant that Irving spoke at Passau on ‘Germany’s new role as a great power’ [‘Deutschlands neue Rolle als Großmacht.’] on 16 February 1991, the audience obviously charged by his previous ban. ‘At 4 p.m. I spoke: the audience came alive, began cheering, roaring with laughter, chanting my name (first time), “Ir-ving, Ir-ving!” I made what I consider to be my finest political speech so far.’¹¹⁴

3.3.16.  At this point the Irving’s documentation becomes sketchy. It would appear that Irving spoke again at Passau on 14 March 1992,¹¹⁵ but for the October 1993 rally Irving was informed by Bruno Wetzel that the DVU had ‘put together a program with other speakers for a number of necessities’, thus bringing to an end a 12-year political alliance.¹¹⁶

3.4 Initial conclusions.

3.4.1.  Irving has been one of the main speakers and agitators for the RWE DVU, from the early 1980s until he was banned from entering Germany in 1993. The DVU is itself a party that propagates hatred against foreigners, anti-Semitism, revisionism, incites violence, and has a record of repeatedly co-operating with the NPD and sometimes even with the RWE militia groups.

3.4.2.  Not only was Irving, apart from Frey himself, one of the principal speakers at the DVU’s annual meetings and rallies, but he also co-operated systematically with the DVU. Both the OPC and the social sciences consider the DVU to be RWE and subsequently view Irving’s activities for them in the same category. Irving at no time distanced himself from any of these central DVU positions. On the contrary it would appear that the DVU felt itself obliged to distance itself from Irving as his position on the Holocaust and his new-found allies in Germany were even more extremist. This not for a lack of political empathy, but out of a necessity for the DVU to maintain its democratic clothing.

4. Double-radicalization of RWE from the late 1980s and the role of Holocaust denial.

4.1 German neo-National Socialists (neo-Nazis).

4.1.1.  The third RWE wave that started in the second half of the 1980s and continued through the early 1990s, had fundamental repercussions on the development of RWE organizations and their organizational networks. The significant factors were:

• the co-operation between DVU and the more extreme NPD.
• the creation of a new party, the Republicans, a splinter group of the Bavarian CSU. Their leader Franz Schönhuber presenting it as a modernised version of RWE
• in the early 1990s a lurch in the NPD youth organization the JN, towards neo-Nazism. Günter Deckert, with whom Irving had many contacts in the 1990s, oversaw this process as leader of the NPD from 1991 to 1995.¹¹⁷
• the emergence of committed and militant neo-Nazis groups around Michael Kühnen, Christian Worch, and others, who succeeded in developing new organizations with roots in a violent neo-Nazi youth movement and linked to a prolonged spate of attacks on foreigners in eastern Germany that shocked Germany and the world.

4.1.2.  In the following sections we will first deal with these movements and then, in a chronology of Irving’s activities in Germany from 1989 to 1993, demonstrate Irving’s close and enduring connection to these neo-Nazi groups. In the process it will be demonstrated that the rejuvenated international revisionist movement (following the Leuchter Report), of which Irving was a main pillar, and German RWE in general and the German neo-Nazi movement in particular, were firm and mutual allies.

4.1.3.  One of the most influential and notorious neo-Nazi leaders was Michael Kühnen (and with him later Christian Worch, Ewald Althans, Arnulf Priem, and the Austrian Gottfried Küssel).

4.1.4.  In 1977 Kühnen founded the National Socialists Action Front [Aktionsfront Nationale Sozialisten – ANS, later to become the ANS/NA, NA for National Activists] with amongst others, former NPD cadres. This overtly neo-Nazi group was banned in 1983. However a sizeable number of its activists moved into the neo-Nazi scene through the more traditional Free German Workers’ Party [Freiheitliche Deutsche Arbeiter Partei – FAP].

4.1.5.  The FAP had been founded by Martin Pape in 1979, who had started off as more of a national-conservative with neo-Nazi leanings. Pape was not strictly averse to ‘infiltration’ by the neo-Nazis around Michael Kühnen which swelled the FAP’s membership figures to about 500 in the mid 1980s. They created a series of sub-organizations like ‘Gaue’ [the NS term for administrative geographical units during the Weimar Republic and in the Third Reich], as well as local community and county-based organizations. At the same time specific political splinter organizations were created like the German Women’s Front [Deutsche Frauen Front – DFF], and the Preparation Committee for the Celebrations of Adolf Hitler’s 100th Birthday [Komitee zur Vorbereitung der Feierlichkeiten zum 100. Geburstag Adolf Hitlers – KAH]. Kühnen’s homosexuality sparked a bitter conflict amongst the ‘comrades’ within the FAP. The faction around the FAP leaders Friedhelm Busse and Jürgen Mosler distanced themselves from Kühnen and it was not until his death in 1991 that a reconciliation took place.

4.1.5.  The FAP explicitly strived for a Germany along NS lines and towards recreating a Greater Germany within the Reich’s 1939 boundaries (which would include Austria and Czechoslovakia). The party platform was extremely nationalist, racist, anti-Semitic, and embraced violence as an instrument to achieve their aims. The degree of racism and hatred directed at foreigners is illustrated by the following phrases that were used internally: ‘We won’t put up with the niggerization of Germany’, ‘The people’s wrath is on the rise! Asylum seekers will be repeatedly set on fire. We as National Socialists are the only ones who foresee the civil and racial war.’ ¹¹⁸

4.1.6.  Even prior to reunification, the FAP had good connections with right-wing oriented skinheads and hooligans in the former GDR. One of these activists was Christian Wendt. FAP rallies often resulted in violent attacks against foreigners, as was the case in Rostock in August 1992. The party co-operated with the Danish National Socialist Movement [Dansk Nasjonal Sosjalitisk Bevaegelse – DNSB] that published propaganda leaflets against liberals and leftists calling for personal retaliation (‘Einblick’).¹¹⁹ In September 1993 the federal government announced that it would put in a request that the party be banned, which duly occurred in 1995.

4.2 The Party of the Like-minded New Front [Gesinnungsgemeinschaft der Neuen Front – GdNF], National List [Nationale Liste – NL], German Alternative [Deutsche Alternative – DA], and National Alternative [Nationale Alternative – NA].

4.2.1.  The GdNF, an overtly neo-Nazi organization and more influential than the FAP, was founded in 1985 by Kühnen in an attempt to subvert the ban on the ANS. It had similarities to the FAP in that it had former ANS ‘comrades’ within its ranks. The GdNF went through similar conflicts as the FAP on the question of whether to align the party towards the ideologies of Ernst Röhm’s SA or more towards the SS, the latter position favoured by Mosler. The GdNF under Michael Kühnen’s control perceived themselves as a ‘society of like-minded, convinced and self-confessed national socialists, who strive to overcome the ban on NS and to forge new foundations for the NSDAP as a legal party.’ They see themselves politically within ‘the tradition of the SA and of the revolutionary faction of the historic NSDAP’. They aim to achieve a second NS revolution and perceive Hitler as a ‘sacred hero of the Aryan race’.¹²⁰

4.2.3.  Kühnen, in his 1988 text ‘The Second Revolution – Belief and Struggle’ stated:

Our aim is a national socialist revolution, from which the Fourth Reich will emerge and with it a new order for the white race suitable to our sort and natures.[…] To achieve that, we have to strive for and to carry out various intermediary aims in the present time of struggle:

• to overcome the ban imposed on the NS
• to set up the NSDAP anew
• a reform of the state
• unification of all ethnic German regions in one unified sovereign and socialistic Great Germany.¹²¹

4.2.4.  The GdNF further fights against ‘foreign infiltration’, against Americanisation, environmental destruction and for the ‘purity of the Aryan Germanic race’.

4.2.5.  In 1989 and 1990 a lot of tiny, very active neo-Nazi organizations were founded often within the immediate orbit of the GdNF. Core activists were, to name but a few:

• Michael Kühnen himself
• Christian and Ursula [Uschi] Worch in Hamburg
• Arnulf-Winfried Priem
• Frank Lutz and Andreas Storr in Berlin
• Frank Hübner in Cottbus
• Heinz Reisz in Hessen
• Thomas Dienel in Halle
• Michael Swierczek in southern Germany
• Ewald Althans in Munich
• Gottfried Küssel and Günther Reinthaler in Austria

4.2.6.  We will show that between early 1990 and 1993 Irving had close political contacts and connections with more than a few of the above. His contact with Christian and Ursula Worch in Hamburg and Ewald Althans in Munich were particularly intense and long-lasting, with Christian Worch to the extent that he and Irving used the informal ‘you’ [du] form when addressing each other.

4.2.7.  How are the growing neo-Nazi activities and groups in the decisive period of Germany reunification from 1989 to the early 1990s best characterised? One of those who knew the neo-Nazi ‘scene’ best before he renounced it and dropped out is Ingo Hasselbach, originally from east-Berlin. He described in his book ‘The Reckoning’ that the GdNF perceived itself as a new SA and that Kühnen had for years been the unassailable ‘Fuhrer of the neo-Nazi movement’ [‘Führer der Bewegung’].¹²² His stated tactic was to use terror in Germany to destabilize the given social and political system to pave the way to a new NS revolution. Christian Worch, Gottfried Küssel, and Ewald Althans were amongst his closest followers. Hasselbach described Althans as Kühnen’s talented pupil’ [‘gelehrigen Schüler’]. Hasselbach portrayed him as Kühnen’s true successor, although in later years Küssel vied with him for the title.¹²³ Kühnen’s alleged homosexuality made him to a controversial figure. Althans separated himself from Kühnen in the late 1980s and allied himself to Ernst Zündel.¹²⁴

4.2.8.  According to Hasselbach, Christian Worch was different in that he was Kühnen’s closest political friend. Worch, whom Hasselbach described as a true ‘national socialist’, was ‘able to subordinate himself without being humiliated….’¹²⁵ Unlike Althans who was unpredictable in his utterances and actions (something Irving often complained of) Worch was very controlled in what he said and has never fallen victim of an uncontrolled craving for recognition.¹²⁶ As far as the comments on Irving’s connections with both men are concerned it is important to bear in mind that both were direct successors of the real founder and leader of the neo-Nazi movement, Kühnen.

4.2.9.  The centre of this outbreak of neo-Nazi activities was the newly opened former east Germany. The power vacuum (especially a disillusioned, lax, and disorientated police and judicial system) that ensued in the GDR with the collapse of the eastern block provided the neo-Nazi cadres from the west with an open space for their activities and a home-grown east German militant youth culture that since 1986 had shown a frightening readiness to physically attack foreigners, leftists and liberals.

4.2.10.  One of the tactics used to widen their influence was to ground a bewildering number of different types of organizations to avoid identification and suppression. We will briefly describe the organizations which were founded and active in that period.

4.2.11.  In March 1989 various neo-Nazis from Hamburg, like Christian Worch and Thomas Wulf, founded the National List [‘Nationale Liste’ – NL]. In May 1989 a legal political arm of the GdNF, the German Alternative [Deutsche Alternative – DA] was founded, followed shortly afterwards in January 1990 by its east German equivalent, the National Alternative [Nationale Alternative – NA].

4.2.12.  The east German NA is of particular importance. The founding members had been active in the pre-1989 neo-Nazi scene in east Berlin and the GDR such as Ingo Hasselbach, supported by western comrades like Arnulf-Winfried Priem, Gottfried Küssel, Günter Reinthaler, Christian Worch, and Michael Kühnen.¹²⁷ Some of them knew each other from the so-called Lichtenberg-Front in east-Berlin and from the so-called Movement 30 January [referring to the beginnings of the Nazi-regime on 30 January 1933]. The NA perceived itself as a militant NS avantgarde. It organized and ran militia-camps, and formulated concepts for fighting the perceived enemies under their code of defence. In this document the NA argued that its enemies like left-wing activists of the democratic parties should be systematically categorized, observed, and fought against.¹²⁸

4.2.13.  The NA set up house in the now notorious 122 Weitlingstrasse in east Berlin and co-operated with several tiny and obscure neo-Nazis sub-organizations, like Arnulf-Winfried Priem’s Ministry of Education, Wotans People’s [Hauptschulungsamt Wotans Volk im Asgarde-Bund e. V].¹²⁹ The NA strove to form a joint ‘organization of all nationals’ and together with Worch and Heinz Reisz of the Hessen FAP sought to extend this joint effort beyond just east Berlin. To carry this out, they co-operated with Frank Hübner from Cottbus, who was active in the Anti-Zionist Action [Anti-Zionistische Aktion – AZA], one of the many sub-organizations of the neo-Nazi scene. By the end of 1989 these activists had managed to organize the first official Central (i.e. east) German Comradeships [mitteldeutsche Kameradschaften] in Cottbus and Dresden, that included members of the GdNF, the DA, and the Central German SA [Mitteldeutsche SA], all of them self-confessed national socialists aimed at building a national socialist cadre organization in the former GDR.¹³⁰

4.2.14.  Their activities also included militia-camps, like the first joint east-west militia camp in the Schorfheide in 1990. They also committed violent attacks on the housing of foreign contract-workers in the former GDR. The group even armed themselves by searching various World War II battlefields for weapons, or buying them from impoverished and departing Russian soldiers.¹³¹ Their political schooling was based on texts like Adolf Hitler’s, ‘Mein Kampf’ and Michael Kühnen’s ‘What is national socialism?’.¹³² Gary Lauck, from the internationally organized NSDAP/AO, were present during the party convention in July 1990 near Cottbus.¹³³ Thus the neo-Nazi NA is defined not so much by its public support, but by its militant, military, and partially terrorist quality of attacking those considered alien to Germany and the body politic, like left-wing punks and guest workers.¹³⁴

4.2.15.  One year later the NA had practically disbanded. Some of the former activists quit and others, members of a new generation, like Kay Diesner, moved into the Social Revolutionary Nationalists [SRN], again forming a militant cadre, some of them terrorist.

4.2.16.  The Nationalist Front [Nationalistische Front – NF] also fell within the GdNF network . This group was founded in the mid 1980s and later came to prominence through its leader Meinolf Schönborn, who was active in the Bielefeld region. They likewise subscribed to the SA-tradition and positioned themselves as social and national revolutionaries within the neo-Nazi spectrum. The group is known for its so-called National Task Force [Nationales Einsatzkommando – NEK], a kind of military group. The NF was amongst the first neo-Nazi groups to be banned by the Federal Minister of the Interior in 1992.¹³⁵

4.2.17.  We will discuss other splinter groups of the neo-Nazi scene below, but two more are worthy of note.

4.2.18.  The German National Party [Deutsche Nationale Partei – DNP] was founded in early 1992 in Wechselburg in Saxony by Thomas Dienel, a former local NPD leader in Halle.¹³⁶ Like other groups the DNP was founded to obstruct a nationwide ban on the neo-Nazis. The DNP aimed to continue the ‘central German revolution of 1989 in a national sense’. The party stood for a revisionist presentation of German history and for the denial of the crimes of the Third Reich, stating such crimes were propaganda put out by the Allies and Zionism.¹³⁷ They demanded the abolition of the system of holding land in tenancy to a landlord and the integration of the individual into an ethnically-pure German national community through work. According to the 1992 VSB, the DNP took over core elements of the NSDAP-programme of 1920. As leader of this new party Dienel was a virulent public racist and anti-Semite. According to the 1992 VSB report, Rudolstadt County Court sentenced him to two years and eight months in prison for racial incitement and slander.¹³⁸

4.2.19.  Another GdNF sub-organisation was the National Offensive [Nationale Offensive – NO]. The NO was founded on 3 July 1990 and banned on 22 December 1992. Its base lay in Bavaria and Saxony, counting some 150 members. NO leader Michael Swierczek had formally belonged to the FAP and played a role in the KAH, that in turn had close links to the NO. In February 1991, NO activists like Swierczek were accused by a court of being active in the banned ANS/NA.

4.2.20.  The NO was banned at the end of December 1992.

4.3 Günter Deckert’s radicalized NPD.

4.3.1.  The NPD was particularly affected by the radicalization of the neo-Nazi movement. After the relative electoral successes of the Republicans and the DVU, for example in Hesse in 1989, the NPD began to wane as a RWE party. According to the 1992 VSB new hopes pinned on the leadership of Günter Deckert failed to materialise. Deckert’s activism and his sympathy for radical revisionism were not welcomed by parts of the NPD. Also the NPD youth organization JN failed to gain influence, although it underwent a process of radicalization in the 1990s.

4.3.2.  It was only after several neo-Nazi organisations were banned that the JN gained more influence. According to the 1992 VSB their agitation became much more radical, citing a JN sentiment ‘We should persist! Ethnically pure collectivism is the alternative to a multicultural and multinational society; the “blood of the Germans” is very special stuff and is different to “evil smelling slime.”‘¹³⁹ The 1993 VSB stated ‘Each NPD anti-Semitic action is combined with playing down Nazi crimes.’ The JN and their leader Andreas Storr were more radical. Storr stated that the JN was fighting for a new system, that of a nationalist people’s state and describe the JN as the avantgarde of a new Reich. The 1993 VSB further observed that the JN had intensified their connections and co-operation with neo-Nazis groups like the FAP, the NL and the Viking Youth (another Neo-Nazi organization).¹⁴⁰ JN leaflets advocated the neo-Nazi concept of the so-called free national zones, where the party exercises de facto power in an area or town, a concept implemented by violence and terror.

4.3.3.  The JN thus became the most influential organization within the neo-Nazi and militant camp in the second half of the 1990s, especially in east Germany where the JN swallowed a lot of the other tiny neo-Nazi organizations and its members.¹⁴¹ This dangerous success was the result of deliberate radicalization of the party orchestrated by Günter Deckert, Andreas Storr, and others.

4.3.4.  The relative successes of radical RWE and the neo-Nazis movement is the result of the social and political crisis that accompanied the reunification process, and of the internal radicalization of the RWE network itself in terms of ideology and action. Thus the neo-Nazi network in Germany intensified its influence from the late 1980s onwards and especially during the early 1990s. The influence of these groups spread so quickly and was so politically alarming that Ministers of the Interior decided in 1992 and 1993 to ban several of these organizations, at the same time as Irving was expelled from entering the country.

4.3.5.  As will be discussed below Irving had strong and consistent connections with many of these neo-Nazi organizations between 1990 and 1993. He repeatedly and systematically co-operated with and supported the most radical elements within RWE, i.e. the neo-Nazi network around the GdNF, Kühnen, Worch, Dienel, and others. He sometimes even co-operated with organizations that were officially blocked or even banned later in the same year, such as the NO. Even before their banning considerable portions of this network were prone to physical violence, often terrorist, against their alleged enemies like foreigners. Between 1990 and 1993 more then 70 people were killed in political racist violence in unified Germany. In 1993, for example, officially 10,561 criminal acts were committed with proven or suspected right-wing motives.¹⁴² This third RWE wave has been the most bloody seen since 1945.

4.4 Irving’s conversion to Holocaust denial and Holocaust denial (radical revisionism) as a core element of the German neo-Nazi Network.

4.4.1.  In January 1985 a trial started by the Crown against Ernst Zündel in Toronto, Canada. He was charged with reprinting and distributing Richard Harwood’s denialist “classic”, Did Six Million Really Die? On 25 March 1985 Zündel was found guilty of peddling anti-Semitic propaganda and was sentenced to 15 months imprisonment.¹⁴³ Because of technicality in the trial proceedings the judgement was lifted and a second trial was ordered, that commenced in January 1988. The Holocaust denier Robert Faurisson commissioned a specialist, Fred Leuchter, to undertake a scientific investigation of the gas chambers and the de-lousing facilities in Auschwitz for the court. Faurisson hoped thereby to prove the non-existence of the gas chambers in Auschwitz. Leuchter flew to Auschwitz and on 5 April 1988 presented his 132-page report to the court. Against the wishes of Zündel’s lawyer, the report was not accepted by the court, either as an expert opinion or as evidence, but it was appended to the trial files for documentary purposes. It was first printed in London in June 1989 as The Leuchter Report: The First Forensic Examination of Auschwitz with a foreword by Irving.¹⁴⁴

4.4.2.  The Leuchter Report appears to have convinced Irving to abandon his previous belief in the existence of a concerted plan for the physical destruction of the Jews and the existence of gas chambers in Auschwitz, and other Nazi death camps, although Irving never seems to have been very far from becoming a full-blown denialist. In 1983 he explained to an audience at the International Revisionist Conference the full scope of what he was certain of, which considering the systematic nature and vast scale of the Holocaust was very little.

I would specify as follows: I would say I am satisfied in my own mind that in various locations Nazi criminals, acting probably without direct orders from above, did carry out liquidations of groups of people including Jews, gypsies, homosexuals, mentally incurable people and the rest. I am quite plain about that in my own mind. I can’t prove it, I haven’t investigated that particular aspect of history but from the documents I have seen, I’ve got the kind of gut feeling which suggests to me that that is probably accurate.¹⁴⁵

4.4.3.  In public in Germany before 1989 Irving endorsed the 6 million figure. For instance in a legal affirmation of 1982 he wrote ‘I do not support the “six-million lie”, nor do I underpin it in scholarship. The opposite is true. I myself speak in my works of the extermination of 6 million Jews.’¹⁴⁶ Yet in private he would seem to have had his doubts about the overall figure. In a letter to Günter Deckert of the NPD in the same year he wrote ‘One could therefore present my opinions on the “Final Solution” (in short: it happened, more than a million people certainly died, but on whose orders?)’¹⁴⁷

4.4.4.  Following the Leuchter Report, Irving saw himself obliged to remove all previous references to Auschwitz, Treblinka, and Majdanek as extermination camps from his subsequent publications, starting in Germany in 1989 with a book based largely on previous works.¹⁴⁸ In his foreword to the Leuchter Report Irving wrote:

For myself, shown this evidence for the first time when called as an expert witness at the Zündel trial in Toronto in April 1988, the laboratory reports were shattering. There could be no doubt as to their integrity….

Until the end of this tragic century there will always be incorrigible historians, statesmen, and publicists who are content to believe, or have no economically viable alternative but to believe, that the Nazis used “gas chambers” at Auschwitz to kill human beings. But it is now up to them to explain to me as an intelligent and critical student of modern history why there is no significant trace of any cyanide compound in the buildings, which they have always identified as the former gas chambers.

Forensic science is, I repeat, an exact science. The ball is in their court.¹⁴⁹

4.4.5.  In the press release accompanying the launch of the Leuchter Report Irving wrote:

In April last year I was called to give expert evidence at the Toronto appeal hearing of Ernst Zündel. The defence attorneys there showed me the forensic test results on the buildings identified by Holocaust historians as Auschwitz gas chambers. The results have convinced me that the buildings were not, at any time, gas chambers. There is no trace of cyanide compounds in their fabric, and there should be.¹⁵⁰

4.4.6.  Similarly he explained his conversion to the Tenth International Revisionist Conference in a talk held under an exhortation to ‘Sink the Auschwitz.’

This is how it was when I was in Toronto a couple of years ago. I was called as an expert witness as a historian to give evidence at the Erst Zündel case, where Zündel’s researchers showed me the Leuchter Report, the laboratory tests on the crematoria and the gas chambers. As a person who, at the University in London, studied chemistry and physics and the exact sciences, I knew that this was an exact result. There was no way around it. And suddenly all that I’d read in the archives clicked into place. You have to accept that, if there is no evidence anywhere in the archives that there were any gassings going on; that if there’s not one single German document that refers to the gassing of human beings – not one wartime German document; and if there is no reference anywhere in the German archives to anybody giving orders for the gassings of people, and if, on the other hand, the forensic tests on the laboratories, of the crematoria, and the gas chambers and Auschwitz and so on, show that there is no trace, no significant residue whatsoever of a cyanide compound, then this can all only mean one thing.¹⁵¹

4.4.7.  The international revisionist network intensified and radicalized its activities in the late 1980s and early 1990s, Germany being no exception. This development was in some senses coincidental, in others integral to the growth and force of the German neo-Nazi network. It must suffice to comment that the interdependence of the neo-Nazi movement and radical revisionism was mutual, and indeed in the cases of individuals like Ernst Zündel or Ewald Althans one-and-the-same.

4.4.8.  Most extreme neo-Nazi groups closely identify with the Nazi regime and its leadership, explicit in their efforts to revive the central ideas of the Third Reich and play the role of an avantgarde paving the way towards a second National Revolution (‘Fourth Reich’). Integral to a rehabilitation of NS was the attempt to deny the realities of Auschwitz and the Nazi regime’s mass crimes. For the groups subsumed in the GdNF the ideological propaganda tool of the radicalised version of revisionism, ‘the Auschwitz lie’, was of decisive ideological importance, and was an important bond between groups, a common point of reference. The GdNF network saw revisionism as an important element in creating a neo-Nazi oriented totalitarian regime. Strands of revisionism which blame Jewish propaganda for the lie of Auschwitz gave added ammunition to attack Jews and others seen as hindering them in achieving their goals.

4.4.9.  Thus radical revisionism was to become a central ideological and organisational factor in the neo-Nazi network in Germany. Irving himself was brilliantly prepared after his conversion to denial to spread the denialist gospel in Germany (and indeed in the rest of the world).

5. Chronological breakdown.

5.1 1989:’German historians – liars and cowards’

5.1.1.  Irving visited Germany three times in 1989: from 8 July to 24 July, 30 September to 7 October, and 2 to 13 November.

5.1.2.  From 8 July to 24 July 1989 Irving was ostensibly in Germany as an ‘consultant historian’ to an American film team on a series entitled ‘Remembering World War II’, mainly organising interviews with former Nazis.¹⁵² During the visit Irving met Ewald Althans and Karl Philipp, two men who would be decisive in organising many of Irving’s activities in Germany until his expulsion in 1993.

5.1.3.  Irving would seem to have first met Althans after a speech in Toronto on 4 March 1989.¹⁵³ He recorded in his diary, ‘One of [Franz] Schönhuber’s lieutenants there, Ewald —, asked if I would speak for Sch.: jawohl [yes sir].’¹⁵⁴ On 6 March he ‘…breakfast with Ewald — to discuss if and how I could help Schönhuber. Handed a letter to him setting out my willingness, and orally told him my terms for a proposed lecture tour.’¹⁵⁵

5.1.4.  Initially Irving seems to have had some doubts about Althans on seeing him in London, writing that he seemed ‘a bit of a Nazi, but helpful.’¹⁵⁶ A month later Irving was obviously more impressed. ‘Ewald Althans has arrived by plane and is full of plans for a new tour by me of Germany, France and Spain in late February. Althans makes a very good impression, businesslike and ambitious, keen, and organized. He has learned a lot already.’¹⁵⁷ Althans was obviously already a requested commodity in revisionist circles as it would seem that he flew to Irving after having visited Pedro Varela, ‘organiser’ of Irving’s Spanish tour of 17 – 20 November 1989.¹⁵⁸

5.1.5.  On the 15 or 16 July 1989 Irving met Karl Philipp in Germany for the first time ‘for a meeting’. In his diary he described Philipp as ‘…a rather rightwing friend of Tony Hancock, he says. (Something makes me suspect he may be a stoolpigeon however). He is willing to arrange an Austrian speaking tour for me in November.’¹⁵⁹ On the 22 July Irving met Philipp a second time at Vlotho, in the Collegium Humanum to arrange Irving’s November tour of Austria. At the meeting ‘with various rightwing gentlemen’ to whom Irving ‘delivered a ten minute pep talk’, were Professor Haverback of the Collegium Humanum and Major Otto-Ernst Remer ‘hero of July 20 1944 in Berlin’.¹⁶⁰ Irving was not loath to use Philipp’s journalistic contacts to neo-Nazi and denialist newspapers like CODE, Sieg, or the Remer Depesche. For instance Philipp later asked Irving to fax him an article from the London Jewish Chronicle to enable Philipp to write up an article on the propaganda campaign against Irving.¹⁶¹ The two men likewise enjoyed contacts to Franz Schönhuber.¹⁶²

5.1.6.The first days of Irving’s October visit to Germany were spent perfecting a protest against the Berlin radio station Transmitter Free Berlin [Sender Freies Berlin – SFB]. Irving had been invited to take part in a round-table discussion with historians.¹⁶³ Upon their refusal to take part if Irving attended because of the repugnance of his views, Irving orchestrated a protest in front of the radio offices under the title ‘German historians – liars and cowards.’

5.1.7.The protest had already been planned in advance with the help of Althans and Philipp.¹⁶⁴ Ernst Zündel had offered to pay DM 500 towards Irving’s flight and provide willing ‘Zündelists’ for the protest.¹⁶⁵ Irving, conscious of his image in Germany, planned in advance to hold two brief unannounced demonstrations, thus avoiding both illegality and at the same time avoiding incurring a counter demonstration.¹⁶⁶ Irving had also asked the DVU if they could send any demonstrators.¹⁶⁷ On 1 October Irving met Althans and Philips in Berlin.¹⁶⁸ The next day he ‘…addressed a briefing session for the helpers for tomorrow’s demonstrations. Twenty-three people, some quite rough.’¹⁶⁹

5.1.8.  In the morning of 3 October Irving held a press conference in the Kempinski Hotel. Philipp had previously given publicity in Germany for the original launch of the Leuchter Report in London on 23 June 1989.¹⁷⁰ This time he obliged with a transcript of the press conference in Berlin published in Sieg and CODE.¹⁷¹ The conference, that ran under the motto ‘Truth frees’ can be considered a German press launch of the Leuchter Report.¹⁷² Irving told journalists ‘The result of this report is final. There was no mass murder with poison gas.’¹⁷³ Two other passages will suffice to give the tenor of Irving’s views.

Journalist: ‘Mr Irving, you describe the gas chambers as a fairy tale, better said propaganda. In that case who invented this fairy tale or this propaganda?’

Irving: ‘We, the English, invented it. The Political Warfare Executive had already thought up this propaganda lie in 1942.’¹⁷⁴

Journalist: ‘In your opinion what was Auschwitz?’

Irving: ‘A work camp. One needed forced labour for industry.’

Journalist: ‘Why is Auschwitz called an extermination camp then?’

Irving: ‘I don’t. Only you and the German historians. It is a defamation of the German people if one talks of extermination camps or death camps.’¹⁷⁵

5.1.9.  Irving held two brief demonstrations before and after the radio program in an attempt to confront the other participants in the radio show.

5.1.10.  On 3 November Irving spoke to a closed meeting organised by Althans in the Bayrischer Hof in Munich.¹⁷⁶ Amongst the 86 guests was Dr. Gerd Sudholt.¹⁷⁷ From the 4-10 November Irving was on a troubled speaking tour through Austria, planned accompanied at times by Philipp and Althans.¹⁷⁸ The tour had been advertised in Sieg, which had announced that Irving would answer the question ‘if there were gas chambers in German concentration camps for the mass murder of humans with Zyclon-B.’¹⁷⁹ Of note for the report is a meeting of 7 November. After a Linz restaurant refused to allow Irving to speak there, he and 120 invited guests were allowed to hold the meeting in castle Hochscharten outside Markflecken Waizenkirchen. The castle belonged to Robert Wimmer. When the Austrian police arrived Irving appeared with his mouth demonstratively covered with masking tape. He was not allowed to speak and had to make do with signing autographs.¹⁸⁰

Meanwhile some 300 people had packed into the castle’s little schoolroom to hear me, overflowing into the outside rooms. I appeared amongst them with a sticking plaster covering my mouth, and a notice stuck to my back reading: “Sorry, can’t speak – but can sign books!” Ewald [Althans] delivered my lecture, from memory, using notes I had prepared for him. He is a fine speaker, and when he relied on his own material rather than mine he was very good.¹⁸¹

5.1.11.  On 11 November Irving drove back to Germany with Althans and gave a dinner speech at the behest of Lars de Flon of the Alverlag in Bad Neuenahr.¹⁸² Before the meeting Irving had tea with de Flon ‘and his old Nazi (SS) friend Woltersdorf’.¹⁸³

5.1.12.  The next day Irving drove to Hagenau, Alsace ‘with Ewald and his skinhead friend —…’, for a revisionist conference organised by Thies Christophersen.¹⁸⁴ To begin with, and despite Irving’s conversion, he seemed to have balked at attending the congress.¹⁸⁵ Irving’s ultimate presence in Hagenau is proof of how far he had swung since the 1970s and 1980s. Christophersen had been long interested in Irving, although Irving less so in him.¹⁸⁶ He had written to Irving in 1979, bringing Irving’s attention to his book ‘The Auschwitz Lie‘ and expressing his admiration for Irving’s form of revisionism.

You said during your presentation in Kiel when a listener mentioned the Auschwitz lie to you that you did not want to discuss the topic because you were not tired of life. I understand this completely. For this reason I will always continue to defend you. There enough historians today who can disprove the Holocaust. They are all silenced. It would be bad if you too were to be silenced. We are eternally grateful for your influence. You are doing the right thing. Please don’t allow yourself be deterred.¹⁸⁷

5.1.13.  Christophersen had also invited Irving to speak in Antwerp in 1982, mentioning that he and Irving had once met and spoken briefly with one another, and that Christophersen was the person who regularly sent him Die Bauernschaft.¹⁸⁸

5.1.14.  Christophersen himself apparently did not attend the Hagenau conference because of the threat of arrest if he entered France, which could have entailed deportation to Germany to face charges.¹⁸⁹ The conference was attended by amongst others, Robert Faurisson, Ernst Zündel, Arthur Butz, Christian Worch, Karl Philipp, Wilhelm Stäglich, Udo Walendy, and Christa Goerth.¹⁹⁰

5.1.15.  Irving had initially wanted to be the only speaker, ‘this for optical reasons, but surely understandable to you’ [‘dies aus optisch, aber Ihnen sicherlich verständlichen, Gründen.’].¹⁹¹ Christophersen initially promised him a speaking slot to himself on a separate evening, but later tabled Irving to speak after Faurisson.¹⁹²

5.1.16.  There is no direct record of Irving’s speech, but its gist can be reconstructed. After the conference Christophersen wrote to Irving enclosing a reader’s letter for Die Bauernschaft from a disgruntled reader who had attended an Irving speech in Austria. The reader took issue with Irving’s description in his speech of the shooting of 5,000 Jews in Riga on 30 November 1941. Christophersen’s comment on the letter was that ‘I invited David Irving [to Hagenau] because he has now arrived at the same realisation as us about the gas chambers.’¹⁹³

5.1.17.  From a draft of the conference for his newspaper Die Bauernschaft, that Christophersen sent to Irving, it would seem that at Hagenau Irving gave his stock reasons for the lack of gas chambers in Auschwitz (British propaganda, Arno Mayer, the Auschwitz ‘death-books, etc.) so that ‘… fewer people died in Auschwitz during the whole war than in a single attack on Hamburg.’ Further,

On the question what happened to the Jews Irving said that certainly some were murdered, but that was the least of them. Many died in flight exactly like the Germans after the expulsion [from eastern Europe]. But many disappeared and live under other names in Israel or New York.¹⁹⁴

5.2 OPC observations 1989.

5.2.1.  The VSB for 1989 explicitly placed Irving alongside revisionists like Christophersen, Zündel, Walter Ochsenberger, and Gerd Honsik as belonging to one camp.¹⁹⁵ The VSB Rheinland-Pfalz stated that ‘After 1988 Irving shares the conviction of right-wing extremist revisionists who see the Holocaust as a propaganda lie.’¹⁹⁶

5.3 1990: ‘Truth Frees’ [‘Wahrheit macht Frei’].

5.3.1.  In 1991 Irving undertook at least eight visits to Germany: 11 February to 10 March, 10 to 11 April, 20 to 22 April, 3 to 10 June, 1 to 3 August, 26 to 31 August, 2 to 10 September, and 3 October. A note of caution is required because Irving’s diary entries from 22 November to 6 December are missing.

5.3.2.  From February to March 1990 Irving toured Germany for more than a month, organised again with Althans, Phillip, and Zündel.¹⁹⁷ All of them were obviously excited about the virgin terrain the former GDR offered for revisionism.¹⁹⁸ Zündel wrote to Irving about the preparations.

Althans is going to be in the “DDR” for at least a week, he is en route there now, to see if he can get a University Forum for you to talk. This is new ground we are breaking there, so it will be a real test of Ewalds skills!’¹⁹⁹

5.3.3.  On 13 February Irving spoke in Dresden on the anniversary of the Allied bombing. He was to hold a press conference at 2 p.m. in the foyer of the Hotel Gewandhaus and his speech at 5 p.m. in the Kulturpalast.²⁰⁰ The Kulturpalast had been booked by Althans and his German Youth Education Project [Deutschen Jugendbildungswerkes – DJBW].²⁰¹ Despite a large media presence, Irving seems to have felt little reason to restrain his opinions. The Swiss Weltwoche recorded Irving as saying ‘Do you know what I like about the GDR: here the people don’t have this tortured conscience as they do over there.’²⁰² He was also quoted as having said that Auschwitz was ‘A huge Allied propaganda lie.’²⁰³ This would accord with a later statement by Althans, who wrote ‘…Irving spoke to almost 1,000 people in the Dresden Palace of Culture on the anniversary of the Anglo-American terror attack on Dresden. In the following podium discussion, Irving clearly declared his belief in revisionism.’²⁰⁴ The Dresden speech was filmed by Sepp Geiger, but no copy has been made available in Irving’s discovery.²⁰⁵

5.3.4.  On 14 February attempts were made for Irving to address a meeting in Leipzig apparently because ‘Berlin is cancelled. [Franz] Schönhuber won’t go along’.²⁰⁶ On 23 February Irving spoke in Landshut to the Working Group Historical Truth [‘Arbeitskreis Historische Wahrheit’].²⁰⁷ This was the speech, according to later appeal documents, on which the city of Passau banned Irving from speaking to the DVU on 10 March, because Irving had presented his theory ‘that there had never been a gassing of Jews’ and that ‘The figure of 6 million murdered Jews was described by the plaintiff thereby as a life lie [‘Lebenslüge’] by the state of Israel as a means of permanent financial and political blackmail.’²⁰⁸

5.3.5.  In the following days two planned meetings in Stuttgart and Augsburg fell through.²⁰⁹ Althans promised Irving a press conference in Nuremberg, but Irving was worried about Althans’s intentions. ‘I am suspicious of the press conf.[erence], it sounds as though he wants me ti [Sic] disavow Frey. I don’t see the point of that.’²¹⁰ On 28 February Irving spoke in Cologne Deutz, organised by a certain Benscheid.²¹¹

5.3.6.  On 1 March Irving gave testimony in defence of Ernst-Günter Kögel before the magistrate’s court [Amtsgericht] in Remscheid.²¹² Kögel was charged with providing his own introduction to Irving’s London press conference of 23 June 1989 launching the Leuchter Report.²¹³ It is not clear what form this report took, but it appears that Kögel had tried to distribute it in some numbers.²¹⁴ In a indication of things to come, Karl Philipp expressed surprise that Irving was admitted as a witness at all, because the existence of the gas chambers in Auschwitz was usually considered manifest [Offenkundig] in German courts.²¹⁵

5.3.7.  In his report on Irving’s court appearance Philipp wrote: ‘In his statement the researcher of contemporary history [Irving] went into the Leuchter Report and reaffirmed his view, according to which it was not possible for there to have been gas chambers for killing people in Auschwitz, Birkenau, or Majdanek.’²¹⁶ In this first instance the court found in Kögel’s favour that he had only wanted to start a discussion.²¹⁷ In the second instance in 1992 he was fined DM 12,600 on the charge of incitement to hatred [Volksverhetzung].²¹⁸

5.3.8.  On 2 March Irving spoke in Kiel at a meeting organised through Dieter Munier of the Arndt Verlag. He stayed overnight with Munier, where he met Gerlind Möhring.²¹⁹ The meeting had replaced one planned with Pedersen, someone known to Christophersen.²²⁰ The next morning Irving had a conference with Munier ‘about his project for a polemical historical brochure by me on the ODER NEISSE territory. Agreed on a DM15,000 fee, of which he paid DM3000 at once…’²²¹

5.3.9.  3 March was a delicate day for Irving. It had been long planned that he make his first appearance before the NL in Hamburg, at a meeting chaired by Christian Worch.²²² This was an important meeting for Irving for two reasons . Firstly he had to make good a certain amount of bad feeling resulting from his speech in Hagenau the previous November. Worch had written to Zündel on 1 January 1990, concerning Althans’ suggestion that Worch take responsibility for Irving’s appearance in Hamburg during his forthcoming tour. Worch mentioned his doubts about organising a speech after Irving’s ‘small “faux pas”‘ [‘kleinen “fauz pas”] in Hagenau

…when he had to bring up these stories about the Riga shootings. But Ewald [Althans] explained to me that Irving has a choice of two presentations on this tour, with which we don’t have to reckon with such irritating details for our listeners.[…] Naturally clearly more agreeable than the presentation in Hagenau!²²³

5.3.10.  Zündel duly wrote to Irving chiding him for his ‘poor tactics’. His comments in Hagenau had alienated supporters from northern Germany who, as a result, were considering no longer inviting Irving to speak.²²⁴ Secondly Michael Kühnen himself was due to appear at he meeting. Hence perhaps the unusually frantic security efforts.²²⁵ All this added to the importance of the meeting.

5.3.11.  Worch had promised Irving, that although his appearance in Hamburg was organised by the NL and invitations had been sent out on NL stationary, it was in essence a meeting organised by him as a private person. Irving would be the only speaker, there would be no party emblems, and his appearance would not be ‘politically “exploited”‘ [‘politisch “ausgeschlachtet”‘].²²⁶ But Worch was obviously overjoyed at the political resonance of attracting Irving as a speaker. He wrote to Zündel ‘DM 1,000 for the speaker and DM 300 for the organiser seems to me decidedly cheap. It is worth double or triple the amount to me.’²²⁷

5.3.12.  Irving described the rest of the evening himself.

Rumours come that tonight there is to be much violence, etc., and Munier persuades me to cancel the Nationale Liste meeting – since (a) the press has got wind of it, and (b) Michael Kühnen is to be present; and to attend only the Burschenschaft Germania meeting later in the evening. This evoked consternation, then comprehension, in Althans,…. Zündel (!)(in Toronto!) is somehow eingeschaltet [brought in]. I drove to Hamburg…. Meanwhile Althans phoned from the NL venue, the Alte Mühle, insisting that I attend the NL function, major crowd there, 300, no trouble, no police, no problems. So I drove out there at speed, made a rousing speech, which was very well received, then zipped on to the Burschenschaft Germania…. There were surly faces against me at the NL meeting when I arrived. An attractive girl, 25 (who turned out to be Christian Worch’s wife), snarled at me that I had “disappointed” her by my earlier stance this day. But at the end of the meeting all were pleased. It was a good speech — knorke [super], I think my current biographical subject [Goebbels] would say.²²⁸

5.3.13.  What this ‘super’ speech contained was Irving’s gospel that there had been no gassings in Auschwitz, or indeed anywhere else for that matter.

But I no longer believe in this legend. I say the following. There were no gas chambers in Auschwitz, only dummies, built by the Poles in the years following the war, exactly like the dummies the Americans built in Dachau that had to be torn down by the Americans at the orders of the West German government because they were dummies. But the dummies are still standing in Auschwitz, because the German government has no sway there. And understandably that is a problem for you that you have a government in Bonn that allows its own people to be defamed by all the countries of the world, although in the meantime it is cried out that these things in Auschwitz, and probably in Majdanek, Treblinka, and in other so-called extermination camps in the east are all dummies.²²⁹

5.3.14.  Tellingly Irving openly admitted that what he was saying was illegal. ‘We are always running the danger that we will be arrested…because what we say boarders, that is very dangerous. Because what we say is [interrupted by commotion in the hall].’²³⁰ Later in the talk Irving asked someone who had entered the room why he had come in. After a long pause, during which the new arrival is escorted out Irving explained, ‘It is clear that I am saying before you is pretty explosive. Very dangerous. I don’t want to go to prison because he comes in with a unauthorized person and does as if he’s [an] interested observer.’²³¹

5.3.15.  Irving fails to mention in his diary if Kühnen was there or not, but the journalist Michael Schmidt was likewise present on the same evening in the Alte Mühle, in the company of Gerald Hess who gave him permission to try and film. Schmidt attests that Irving and Kühnen arrived together.²³² Whether Irving and Kühnen talked together or appeared on the same platform must remain speculation. From his diary it would seem evident that Irving was pleased with his appearance before the NL. Irving was likewise obviously pleased to have met the Worschs. He wrote to them thanking them for their friendly help and support, and expressing his hope to see them in Munich on 21 April 1990 at the coming revisionist conference.²³³

5.3.16.  Benedict gives the wider background to the meeting. The NL, the Lichtenberg neo-Nazi ‘comrades’, and ‘fighters’ of various neo-Nazi groups (DA, FAP, NA) and a hundred others from DVU and NPD were all in Hamburg that day. Parts of them were hindered by the police. Others demonstrated freely against the Soviet Consulate.²³⁴ Further she claims that Irving received applause from older members of the audience, especially SS veterans. She also mentions that this was a turning point for east-Berlin activists who up until the evening had not had fundamental doubts about the fact of the Holocaust.²³⁵

5.3.17.  On 4 March a hall was booked by Althans and the AVÖ in the Berghotel Porta Westfalica.²³⁶ Udo Walendy was the organiser.²³⁷ The meeting was relocated unnecessarily by ‘Wosch or Althans’ to the Kollegium Humanum in Vlotho.²³⁸ ‘Major meeting, around 350 people. Speech very well received. It was a good, heated, demagogic speech, with every punch line brilliantly delivered and hugely applauded.’²³⁹

5.3.18.  On 8 March Irving spoke about the ‘Future of the Germans’ in Hamburg.²⁴⁰ The meeting was organised by Ulrich Harder.²⁴¹ Ulrich Harder was leader of the Hamburg NPD and one-time leader of the 1982 founded Hamburg List to Stop Foreigners [Hamburger Liste für Ausänderstopp – HLA].²⁴² Irving had known Harder since 1984, when Harder had worked for the Society for Culture and Contemporary History [Verein für Kultur und Zeitgeschichte] whom Irving had addressed.²⁴³ The meeting does not appear in Irving’s itinerary of 6 February 1990, and therefore may have been organised spontaneously.²⁴⁴

5.3.19.  On 9 March Irving spoke in Moers at an AVÖ meeting.²⁴⁵ Irving again gave his ‘Truth frees!’ talk.²⁴⁶

Then [at the time of writing Hitler’s War] I believed these gentlemen [German historians] who said that something happened in Auschwitz. Now I no longer believe this story at all. Today I say the following: there were no gassings in Auschwitz. Today I say, that they are only dummies that the Poles built after 1945. Exactly as the Americans built similar dummies in Dachau. How do I know so precisely that they are only dummies? What convinced me? I was convinced two years ago in Canada by an expert’s report.²⁴⁷

5.3.20.  Despite the ‘closed’ nature of the meeting Irving made its political nature of his message clear.

It takes something to stand up and say that there were no gas chambers. The existing gas chambers are only dummies built by the Poles or some other officials after the end of the Second World War for the purpose of the damnation and defamation of the German people in the world. […] We’re gaining acceptance, but only with the help of the German population, the German people. You can support it yourself with letters to newspapers, through a whispering campaign, precisely by passing on what I have said to you tonight.²⁴⁸

5.3.20.  During this tour Irving also began to become aware of the possibilities of publishing, recording, and generally marketing his speeches. In a later diary entry he recorded ‘…Althans phoned, with details of Karl Höf[f]kes’ offer. Wants five brochures, 4 month intervals [Sic]; will pay DM 5000 for Wahrheit macht Frei (Tagebuch einer Vortragsreihe [diary of a speaking tour]) brochure text of Moers speech….’²⁴⁹ In an April entry ‘Worked all morning concluding the revision of the transcript of my Moers speech. It is better than I thought. Tightened it up, checked the facts, dates, and quotations. I must publish more of these.’²⁵⁰

5.3.21.  On 10 March Irving was banned from speaking to the DVU at Passau. His initial plan to speak at a meeting in Belgium organised by Althans indicates his preferences at the time.²⁵¹ Althans was obviously irritated by Irving’s last minute decision to speak in Passau, although both men agreed that there was political capital to be made from the ban for the forthcoming revisionist conference in Munich.²⁵²

Althans was not pleased that I had gone to Passau, though he agrees his April 21 meeting [‘Wahrheit macht Frei’] will now be enhanced by the result of the ban. (I hope I don’t get banned there.) He arranges a last minute deal with me, whereby he will pay me DM5000 for right to publish a synopsis of this most recent Vortrag [Speech]. They’ll print 10,000. He is an ambitious man, and I like that.²⁵³

5.3.22.  The synthesis of money, politics, and revisionism can be illustrated by referring to this one of Irving’s best documented tours.

5.3.23.  The organisation was such that Althans and the AVÖ acted as Irving’s direct agent. Althans then ‘sold’ Irving on to other organisations by closing contracts with third parties at an agreed rate.²⁵⁴ The printed contractual equivalent agreement [‘Vertragsgleiche Vereinbarung’] between ‘X’ and Althans and the AVÖ, offered three topics: New Documents of Contemporary History [‘Neue Dokumente zur Zeitgeschichte’], Warmongerer Churchill – the Fall of a Monument [‘Kriegstreiber W. Churchill – Ein Denkmal stürtzt’], and Germany’s way to Unity – a Historian looks in the Future [‘Deutschlands Weg zur Einheit – Ein Historiker blickt in die Zukunft’].

5.3.24.  The fee to be paid to Althans was set at either DM 650 or DM 1,300. Irving was guaranteed the right to sell and sign his own books, whilst the organiser was requested to restrict the amount of literature he or she himself could offer. The signator guaranteed that Irving would not be ‘misused for party politics’ [‘Herr Irving wird auf den Veranstaltungen nicht parteipolitisch mißbraucht werden.’].²⁵⁵

5.3.25.  Thus for instance the Arbeitskreis Historische Wahrheit [Robert Fronauer] booked Irving through Althans’s AVÖ to speak in Landshut on 23 February 1990.²⁵⁶ They paid an initial instalment of DM 650 to Althans, to be followed by a further DM 650 at a later date.²⁵⁷ The Arbeitskreis Historische Wahrheit in turn requested DM 10 contribution to expenses [‘Unkostenbeitrag’].²⁵⁸ Of this DM 1,300 Irving received a DM 1,000 speaker’s fee [‘Rednerhonorar’].²⁵⁹

5.3.26.  Irving received DM 500 for some speeches (presumably his share from those who had paid Althans DM 650) and DM 1000 for larger speeches (presumably his share from those who had paid DM 1,300). In Dresden 13 February 1990 the speech was free [‘kostenlos’] or the turnover did not apply [‘Umsatz entfällt’], perhaps because of Irving’s eagerness to speak there.²⁶⁰ Althans also paid Irving DM 500 compensation for the cancelled Munich and Stuttgart speeches, and DM 1,000 compensation for the banned Antwerp speech.²⁶¹ That Ernst Zündel was part of the financial dealings is clear from the same model contract between Althans and Christian Worch. For the meeting in Hamburg of 3 March 1990 Worch paid DM 300 to Althans and Irving’s DM 1,000 speaker’s fee direct to Zündel, as Worch’s preferred ‘middleman’ [‘Mittelsmann’] due to his and a general mistrust in Althans.²⁶²

5.3.27.  The three themes offered by Althans were evidently flexible or expendable.²⁶³ The Arbeitskreis Deutsche Wahrheit decided to advertise Irving to speak under the title ‘Is Germany alone Responsible for the War?’ [‘”Gibt es eine deutsche Alleinkriegsschuld?”‘]²⁶⁴ In its invitation to Irving’s speech on 11 March 1989, Stephan Raber of the Förderverein Junges Deutschland made it clear what the audience could expect. The speech was advertised as ‘The latest scholarly findings of historical research’ [‘Neueste wissenschaftliche Erkenntnisse der Gesichtsforschung.’] The letter was headed with a quote from Irving:

‘”Hundreds of millions of honest, intelligent people are being duped by extremely financially strong and brilliantly made post-war propaganda.”‘ [‘”Hunderte von Millionen ehrlicher, intelligenter Menschen wurde durch extrem finanzstarke, wie auch brilliant gemachte Nachkriegspropaganda hinters Licht geführt.”‘]

Without falling prey to self-pity, we Germans can confirm that our people are by far and away the greatest victim of manipulation of the historical truth. […]In his speech Mr. Irving will discuss the sensational report of the American engineer FRED LEUCHTER, hotly discussed amongst experts, as well as present explosive statistics about the population numbers in Europe (before and after the war) and also discuss latest documents on the complicity of Prime Minister in the start of World War II.²⁶⁵

5.3.28.  Udo Walendy was rather more measured in his language in the invitation to the meeting in Porta Westfalica on 4 March 1990, but the message was clear.

This planned meeting is of enormous political importance because the British historian has caused a great stir, better said has considerably widened the breach in the change of opinions with numerous researches, with his unequivocal position on the most recent German past and revisionist research world wide – and once again in Dresden![…] As others try to help politicians on their way with street demonstrations, so we want to assert in our way that “we are the people” by supporting the intellectual pioneer.²⁶⁶

5.3.29.  Robert Fronauer wrote to Althans: ‘Because it is supposed to be a closed meeting we have decided not to invite people in the name of the NPD. We believe that this way we can better attract national thinking people in our area to come.’²⁶⁷ Indeed the meeting took place under the auspices of a’Working Group Historical Truth’ [‘Arbeitskreis Historische Wahrheit’], obviously a front set up purely for Irving’s meeting.

5.3.30.  Ernst Zündel wrote a circular introducing Irving and his forthcoming tour to his ‘Zündel friends’ [‘Zündel Freunde’]. Zündel made an appeal for all kinds of help: cameramen, book carriers, alternative venues for any emergency cellar meetings [‘Katakomben-Versammlung.’] He also wanted volunteers for ‘strike troops’ [‘Eingreiftrupps’] to escort the audience unmolested to their cars. Zündel went on to explain the integrative nature of such events for RWE.

In this process, through the common struggle, we also grow together ourselves and bridge the existing divisive prejudices between “old” and “young”, from activists like the FAP compared to passive people like those from the DVU etc.²⁶⁸

5.3.31.  ‘He [Irving] is the best weapon in operation at the moment for truth also for our people!’²⁶⁹

5.3.32.  The clause in which the signator guaranteed that Irving not be politically used, was therefore a patent smoke screen The titles of the speeches were obviously catch-all, to pacify the authorities and perhaps to attract the unwary. The organisations Irving spoke to were fictitious fronts for organisations like the AVÖ or the NPD. Both Irving and his hosts were part of a political campaign to rehabilitate the German past.

5.3.33.  In early April Irving made a short trip to Germany. Althans flew to London and both men flew on to Germany where Althans interviewed Irving and filmed the banned Passau speech.²⁷⁰

We [Irving, Althans, and Daniel Knecht] met there [Bochum]. Althans’ benefactor and great white hope, publisher Karl Höf[f]kes, who made a splendid impression on me, particularly because he talks cash, not postdated, rubbery cheques. During the day we set up a comprehensive long term marketing approach for my brochures, speeches, videos and audio tapes.²⁷¹

5.3.34.  In January Christophersen had invited to attend a meeting in Nordschleswig on 16 April 1990. He intended to rent a boat and sail across the Baltic, ‘perhaps even as far as Rostock (GDR)’ [‘Vielleicht sogar bis nach Rostock (DDR)’].²⁷² In a later letter he wrote that Dr. Wahl from Switzerland had agreed to come, but that whether Wolf Rüdiger Hess and lawyer Jürgen Rieger would take part was still unknown.²⁷³ Irving declined to take part because of ‘a lack of time’ [‘Zeitmangel’] but ‘perhaps next time’ [‘Das nächste Mal vielleicht.’]²⁷⁴

5.3.35.  From 20 – 22 April 1990 Irving attended the first revisionist conference in Munich as its star speaker. On the evening before the planned conference Irving arrived in Munich, where he met Althans and Höffkes. Together they went to ‘…the dinner Althans “organised.” It ended with a Trinkspruch [toast], spoken by him, to a certain statesman whose 101st birthday falls today [i.e. Hitler]. All rose, toasted; I had no glass, as I don’t drink.’²⁷⁵ Amongst the guests that evening were Dr. Stäglich, Carola Ott, Karl Phillip, Karl Höffkes, Alex Baaser, Armin Scherer, Ingrid Weckert, W.D.Kempkens, Prof. Schrocke, E. Franke Griersch, Tony Hancock, Arnulf Fröhlich, Daniel Knecht, Lothar Fontes, H. Forster, and Fabian Nledermeier.

5.3.36.  The conference the next day had been organised by Althans’s DJBW and Philipp.²⁷⁶ Under the slogan ‘Truth Frees’ [‘Wahrheit macht Frei’], leading German RWEs and revisionists spoke in the Löwenbräukeller in Munich, including Althans, Raimund Bachmann, Phillip, Helmut Schroke, and Irving.²⁷⁷ In the audience were Remer, Ahmed Rami, Roeder, Stäglich, Florence Rost van Tonningen, and Anthony Hancock, members of the IHR, and other members of the GdNF and the FAP. Security was provided by Worch of the NL.²⁷⁸ Kühnen was observed as present by a local journalist.²⁷⁹ A DJBW flyer for the heralded the congress as the ‘breakthrough of revisionism’ [‘Durchbruch des Revisionismus’] and gave the title of Irving’s as ‘Germany’s way to unity and neutrality – an end to the victors’ propaganda!’ [‘Deutschlands weg zur Einheit und Neutralität – Schluss mit der Siegerpropaganda!’].²⁸⁰

5.3.37.  An invitation to the conference made the synthesis of revisionism and this RWE faction clear\.

The days of defensive revisionism are over. Revisionism (especially the Holocaust complex and the connected propaganda lies) like indiscriminate discussions about this theme in the media have achieved a scientific basis. Rethinking will be the beginning of the second revolution this century. DAVID IRVING, world renowned, respected but controversial, is only the tip of the iceberg.²⁸¹

5.3.38.  This synthesis is striking and for some commentators the congress signalled the breakthrough of the GdNF within the fascist scene in Germany.²⁸²

5.3.39.  Despite tight security, and an internal ban on filming or recording, Irving’s speech was partially filmed by journalist Michael Schmidt.²⁸³ A fragment of the speech is contained in his documentary. Irving was filmed saying,

[Commentator fades out, Irving fades in] …in Dachau, in the early post-war years was a dummy, so the gas-chamber facilities that one can see as a tourist in Auschwitz, were built by the authorities in Auschwitz after the Second World War. The evidence is available, the facilities have been chemically investigated. We have now published the document [the Leuchter Report] in the whole world. And I can tell you ladies and gentlemen, that will stir things up. That will scare the wits out of our enemy.²⁸⁴

5.3.40.  Some members of the audience wore donkey masks and hung notices around their necks which read ‘I still believe in the Holocaust – the ass that I am’ [‘Ich Esel glaube an die Vergasungslüge’] echoing a similar action carried out in 1978 in Hamburg involving Erwin Schönborn, Edgar Geiss, and further members of the ANS.²⁸⁵

5.3.41.  At the end of his speech Raimund Bachmann called on the audience to take to the streets, and 250 people followed him with the intention of marching to the Munich Feldherrenhalle, scene of Hitler’s unsuccessful 1923 putsch, until stopped by the police.²⁸⁶ In the course of the illegal demonstration Irving was arrested, interviewed, and freed on bail. Irving himself later claimed that he had been accidentally caught up in the demonstration.²⁸⁷ Althans on the other hand claimed that Irving had had an active part in it.²⁸⁸ In video footage of the march Irving is clearly seen marching with a main body of the demonstration, if not at it’s head.²⁸⁹

5.3.42.  In a letter of June Christian Worch made clear to Irving who had organised the march, and who Irving was dealing with. The letter concerned Irving’s refusal to appear at Wunsiedel [the annual Rudolf Hess March] in August, because of the presence of Michael Kühnen.²⁹⁰ Worch saw himself obliged to forcefully remind Irving who his allies in Germany were.

The people, who after the hall event on the 21 April in Munich, made sure that things got moving despite a police ‘special commando’, that a demonstration happened at all, were Kühnen’s people. Ewald Althans and Daniel Knecht or Althans’ steward Alex or my local comrade Thomas Wulff, the leader of our local party and myself, could not have forced it alone. Of the 200 people in the ‘Löwenbräukeller’ who set off in the direction of the Feldherrenhalle, at least 30 or 40 were prepared to march if it came to the crunch, even if the police or somebody else broke their skulls. Three-quarters of them were Kühnen’s people. Without them, 200 nice, good people would have allowed themselves to be stopped by 12 policemen until the police had managed to call in enough reinforcements to nip any march in the bud. It was the small radical minority who simply set off and gave the lead to the hesitant mass in their bourgeoisie caution who needed them to set themselves off.[…]

As most of the active revisionists of today were still concerning themselves with their bourgeoisie careers or at the most once a year attended the large rallies of the DVU [i.e. Irving] or got together at the weekly back-room regular’s tables of the NPD, it was Michael Kühnen who, together with the sadly in the mean-time dead Erwin Schönborn, put his men in donkey masks in 1978 and armed them with placards which read “I am an ass and still believe that Jews were gassed in Auschwitz” and demonstrated in the Hamburg city centre…(where he like myself was promptly sentenced to a few months imprisonment.)²⁹¹

5.3.43.  Irving himself wrote to Althans on 24 April 1990, complaining merely about the ‘optical’ problems of the congress. ‘That was a good event and I congratulate you on the success. My only criticism: the skinheads and the flags. It only serves our cause up to the enemy on a plate.’ He ended ‘What are we doing next?’ [‘Was machen wir als nächstes?’].²⁹²

5.3.44.  Before flying back to London Irving breakfasted with Stäglich, Tony Hancock, and Ursula and Christian Worsch.²⁹³

5.3.45.  Irving’s June tour of ‘central Germany’ was again organised in conjunction with Althans, Zündel, and Philipp.²⁹⁴ This second tour of east Germany was fuelled by a feeling of euphoria that the revisionist cause was on the march. ‘…Philipp phoned…says we are being swamped (überrollt) by the Auschwitz debate now, just as we were by the Wiedervereinigung [reunification]. He will press Althans on organising a DDR [GDR] speech tour, perhaps Eisenach. I suggest title, “Ausflug in die Wahrheit.”[“Excursion in the truth”]²⁹⁵

5.3.46.  On the 5 June Irving held a press conference in Dresden attended by only three journalists and went on to speak in the Kulturpalast again, organised by an unidentifiable ‘German-European Community of the Persecuted of Totalitarian Systems’ [‘Deutsch-Europäische Gemeinschaft der Verfolgten totalitärer Systeme’, Leipzig/Munich].²⁹⁶ Irving was accompanied by a journalist from the German magazine Der Spiegel.²⁹⁷ Some 150 people attended, but the success of February’s Dresden appearance was not to be repeated. ‘The audience awoke after an hour, became begeistert [enthusiastic], and then to my consternation sections of it began getting up and walking out. Evidently I trod on some susceptibilities.’²⁹⁸

5.3.47.  On 6 June Irving spoke in the congress hall in Leipzig, again under the auspices of the ‘German-European Community of the Persecuted of Totalitarian Systems’.²⁹⁹ After the meeting had had to switch to a smaller room in view of how few people were expected, Irving wrote: ‘I am philosophical: my job is just to speak, not to organize.’ Much to Irving and Philipp’s embarrassment Otto Ernst turned up at the same time as a photographer from Der Spiegel was present. ‘Fortunately the photographer seems not to recognize him. Philipp tells Remer the meeting is cancelled, and he leaves.’³⁰⁰ On the 7 June Irving spoke in the Haus der Kultur in Gera, again for the ‘German-European Community of the Persecuted of Totalitarian Systems’³⁰¹ The hall had been rented by Jürgen Kraut.³⁰² On 8 June Irving visited Höffkes in Essen and the next day Irving recorded several taped interviews with Althans to be marketed by Höffkes.³⁰³

5.3.48.  In August 1990 Irving briefly stopped in Germany, before travelling on to Switzerland and France.³⁰⁴ On 1 August Irving met Wolf Rüdiger Hess and Alfred Seidl for dinner in Munich.³⁰⁵ On 2 August Irving spoke in Stuttgart on ‘German history in the dock’ [‘Deutsche Geschichte auf der Anklagebank,’] under the auspices of ‘The Partyless National Opposition that Screams for Freedom’ [‘Die parteifreie, nationale Opposition, die nach Wahrheit schreit’] and Carl-Arthur Bühring.³⁰⁶ It had been planned that Irving would speak at Wunsiedel on 18 August, but after Irving’s me-or-him demand, Christian Worch turned him down in favour of Michael Kühnen (see below).³⁰⁷ On 27 August was briefly back in Germany again and met Althans and ‘guests’ including Reinhard Rade.³⁰⁸

5.3.49.  Irving toured Germany again in September. On 2 September Irving spoke in Weinheim on ‘contemporary history under the microscope’ [‘Zeitgeschichte auf dem Prufstand.’] The meeting was organised by NPD leader Günter Deckert.³⁰⁹ Deckert was to be later imprisoned for chairing this meeting.³¹⁰ On 7 September Irving held a meeting arranged through Walther Soyka and Althans.³¹¹ On 8 September Irving was to have spoken to the Rhein -Ruhr Circle of Friends [‘Freundeskreis Rhein-Ruhr’] in Duisburg on ‘Moscow’s new policy towards Germany’ [‘Moskaus neue Deutschlandpolitik’], but spoke in Oberhausen instead.³¹² On 9 September Irving recorded more tapes with Höffkes and Althans.³¹³

5.3.50.  On 3 October Irving flew to Germany and back in an attempt to be heard at the trial of Frank Grieksch.³¹⁴

5.4 OPC observations 1990.

5.4.1.  The 1990 VSB reported that

The important British revisionist David Irving (52), who spoke at the 10-3-90 DVU rally in Passau was not allowed to speak because the town administration put a ban on the meeting. Nevertheless he could express his opinions at meetings of right-wing extremists in Munich, Dresden, Leipzig, Gera, Stuttgart, Weinheim/Bergstrasse, and Oberhausen. The Minister for the Interior ordered a ban on his entering the FRG. Irving was nevertheless not identified when he entered Germany, however, he distributes the Leuchter Report from London.³¹⁵

5.4.2.  In state VSBs it was observed that at several meetings that year Irving had stated the Holocaust was just a ‘propaganda lie’.³¹⁶ In Munich he was quoted as having said that there ‘were never any gas chambers in Auschwitz’.³¹⁷ Further ‘The British writer David Irving also shared the conviction that the Holocaust is just a propaganda lie put about by the allies of World War II.’³¹⁸‘Irving, in his books and lectures puts forth vehement opinions of the so-called revisionism that claims the Holocaust (gassing of deported Jews) did not occur.’³¹⁹

5.5 1991: ‘the total catastrophe’ and how Irving reacted.

5.5.1.  Irving was in Germany at least seven times in 1991 12-27 February, 22-26 March, 7-14 May, 5-12 June, 23/24 [?]-31 June, 6-10 November, and December. Again important passages are missing in Irving’s diaries and attempts to reconstruct all of Irving’s activities in the year must remain inconclusive. The missing entries are 29 March-24 April (25 April incomplete), 26-28 April, 30 April-6 May, 27 August-22 October, 4-5 November, 19-29 November, 31 November-22 January 1992.

5.5.2.  Irving’s February tour was mainly involved with seeking out NS witnesses for an American television documentary. On 12 February slept at Höffkes’s grandparents’ home and recorded his forthcoming DVU Passau speech ‘just in case I am arrested first.’³²⁰ On 13 February Irving held a ‘sparsely attended’ press conference in Frankfurt.³²¹ On 16 February Irving spoke at Passau (see above) and on 20 February he had dinner with Althans in Munich.³²²

5.5.3.  In March Irving was again invited to speak at the second revisionist conference in Munich. On 22 March Irving met Althans ‘at his office’ in Munich and had dinner with W. R. Hess.³²³

5.5.4.  On 23 March the revisionist campaign in Germany was meant to reach a new high point with a planned ‘international revisionist congress’ in Munich, organised under the title ‘International Annual Meeting of Critical Contemporaries’ [‘Internationaler Jahrestagung kritischer Zeitgenossen’]. This second revisionist conference was organised by Althans (and his AVÖ), Zündel, Reinhold Rade, and Stephan Niemannn³²⁴ Irving, who would seemed to have been still concerned about his public persona, wrote to reassure Frey ‘As far as the 23.3. is concerned, the theme of my talk is “Churchill in World War II”. I therefore expect no difficulties from the authorities.’³²⁵

5.5.5.  Althans had hired the hall of the German Museum in Munich that could hold 2,400 people. That the congress did not take place as planned was due only to the determination of the museum administration. A ban [‘Veranstaltungsverbot’] by the local district administration [Kreisverwaltungsamt] was overturned by the administrative court [Verwaltungsgericht], but the museum held firm despite the threat of claims for compensation. On the evening before the congress the higher administrative court [Oberverwaltungsgericht] decided in favour of the museum because of ‘wilful deceit’ [‘arglistiger Täuschung’] by Althans who had booked the hall under a false title. The revisionists were nevertheless allowed to hold a vigil [‘Mahnwache’] in front of the museum.

5.5.6.  In the filmed record of the protest Althans announced that David Irving, Mark Weber, Ahmed Rami, Wilhelm Stäglich, Fred Leuchter, Dietlieb Felderer, Nancy Lang, Jerome Brennter, Ernst-Otto Remer, and Mrs. Rost von Tonningen were to have spoken. The speakers at the improvised protest meeting included Irving, Althans, Rost von Tonningen, Ahmed Rami, Henri Rocques, Wilhelm Stäglich, Dietlieb Felderer, Christian Worch (responsible for “security”), Raimund Bachmann, and Pedro Varela who conveyed the greetings of Leon DeGrelle.³²⁶ The Bavarian VSB claimed that Meinolf Schönborn was also present.³²⁷ Zündel was unable to speak as he had been arrested the evening before.³²⁸

5.5.7.  Irving recorded the fiasco in his diary, no longer willing to incur arrest after his experience at the first conference.

Althans arrives around 9:30 a.m., and after discussion I agree we speakers should go to the hall steps to meet the press; but not to make speeches. At the steps…, I speak with Seipl, police commander; her [Sic] confirms that people will be allowed to speak only on the Vertragskündigung, [cancelled contract] nothing else. This again showed Althans lied to us – he doesn’t care if we get arrested. I consequently speak only two minutes, telling the crowd (around 400 hardy soulds [Sic] braving the blustery weather) that I am not allowed to speak.³²⁹

5.5.8.  The next day Irving attended a press conference given by Althans in Munich, but ‘no press’.³³⁰

5.5.9.  On the 25 March Irving attended ‘a new press conference by Althans (who was missing!) and Leuchter, who read out his report endlessly. Further shambles.’³³¹ The same day Irving met ‘local NPD agent’ Renate Werlberger to arrange details of a meeting for 12 May.³³²

5.5.10.  The period April to May is impossible to reconstruct with any degree of certainty. It is worthy of note that Michael Kühnen died of AIDS, 25 April 1991.³³³

5.5.11.  In May Irving returned to Germany. On 10 May Irving spoke in Rothenburg to the GfP on ‘the future of the German people between England and Russia’ [‘Die Zukunft d. dt. Volkes zwischen Engländern u. Russen.’³³⁴ On 11 May Irving spoke in Munich to the Rudolf Hess Society [‘Rudolf-Heß-Gesellschaft’] on the fiftieth anniversary of Hess’s flight to England.³³⁵ ‘Frl. Fath (R[udolf]H[ess]’s secretary) was in the audience which made it so much better.’³³⁶

5.5.12.  On 12 May Irving talked to the Munich NPD.³³⁷ The meeting was organised with Frau Werlberger, ‘a local NPD agent’.³³⁸ According to later court documents the meeting had been advertised under the rubric,

The famous contemporary historian, under the topic “Germany’s future in the shadow of political extortion”, will for the first time give his opinion “if the Germans and their European neighbours can still afford to tolerate contemporary history as a political instrument of extortion”. ³³⁹

5.5.13.  The NPD was informed that the meeting could only go ahead if they took the responsibility that Irving only speak about the persecution of the Jews in the Third Reich as far as he did not deny it.³⁴⁰ Hence Werlberger wrote to Irving ‘We have only the request that you avoid mention of the word “Auschwitz”, in your own interest and in the interests of the party which is bound by the present conditions.’³⁴¹ Just how far Irving complied with the request is evident from a (incomplete) recording of the meeting. Referring to legends that he may not mention, Irving proclaimed, ‘In three, four years at the latest these legends will no longer hold water. The legend will be over and then the tables will be turned, then the whole [drowned out in applause]’³⁴² Few in his audience can have had any doubt as to which ‘legends’ Irving was referring to.

5.5.14.  On 14 May Irving had breakfast with Reinhard Rade. Althans was due to have joined them but didn’t. ³⁴³

5.5.15.  On 5 June Irving attended a function of the Danubia student fraternity [Studentenschaft] in Munich.³⁴⁴ The following day Irving met Althans.³⁴⁵ On 7 June Irving dinned with Althans, Susie Töpler (Reinhard Rade’s fiancee), and other guests at Althans’s house. The company later went on to a beer hall where they met Ursula Worsch.³⁴⁶ On 8 June Irving signed books at Althans’ AVÖ bookshop in Herzog-Heinrich-Strasse in Munich. Irving recorded in his diary, ‘It is an impressive effort by Althans (though Susie [Töpler] told me later that Reinhard Rade has financed it and is the title holder, as Althans’s creditworthiness is not much at present). About 150 to 200 people came during the time I was there, including familiar faces.’³⁴⁷ On 10 June Irving met the Worschs in Munich and spent the day with Töpler and Rade.³⁴⁸

5.5.16.  Intestine quarrels were slowly brewing between Althans and Philipp, crippling Irving’s planned July – August tour. On 1 July 1991, Althans faxed Irving ‘Two pages of hysteria’, announcing the collapse of the forthcoming July / August tour.³⁴⁹

…now it’s come to this. The total catastrophe. The speeches of 25.07 to 17.08 will not take place. I have to give up.

I can picture you now foaming with rage. And I am very scared that we will fall out again over this.[…]

You yourself know what kind of a position I have been in since the Leuchter Congress. Now it’s got worse.³⁵⁰

5.5.17.  Althans complained that he was plagued by the bailiffs, his phone had been cut off, and that trips to the former east Germany required time and money, neither of which he had. A banned meeting had been broken up with truncheons. The bookshop had become subject to numerous attacks making it necessary to guard it. Comrades, like Harder [Ulrich?] were proving incapable of acting responsibly or autonomously. Worst of all, Philipp was conducting a whispering campaign against him.

Thus for example K[arl] P[hilipp] has managed to incite Gen.[eral] Remer and presumably G.[erd] Honsik against me. They in turn have managed to stir things up more with their naive innocence (you know how much I value Remer and Honsik).³⁵¹

5.5.18.  Since February Althans had been on trial in Stuttgart and was threatened with a long imprisonment.

Perhaps one would have got somewhere if we had been at the meeting. There were a lot of people there upon whose supportive assistance I could have hoped. But Karl Philipp, who knew that you were coming because I was stupid enough to register you as a guest as required, lied to you that I wanted to use you to break up the event. You believed him and cancelled with me. So Philipp could tell people Althans is a liar, even David Irving doesn’t like him and therefore dosen’t come to the conference. And, as expected, I alone received no invitation.³⁵²

5.5.19.  This passage presumably relates to a meeting that had taken place between Irving and Althans in Munich on 11 June. ‘[Althans] Also suggests I come to Munich two days June 28 for a confrontation with Karl Philipp and Faurisson at Nuremberg. What the —?’³⁵³

5.5.20.  This in turn is with certainty related to the NF’s intention, announced at its national congress on 6 April, to also hold a revisionist campaign in June (originally in Roding in Cham, Bavaria) under the slogan ‘Down with the Holocaust’ [‘Schluß mit dem Holocaust’]. The list of those who were to speak was almost identical to that in Munich.³⁵⁴ The Bavarian VSB for 1991 recorded the intention to hold the same congress. Speakers were to have been NF leader Meinolf Schönborn, Faurisson, Remer, Stäglich, and Philipp. The conference was banned. Despite the ban 150 people gathered in Roding, only to be cleared out of the meeting rooms by police. Some 150 NF supporters fought with police, leading to two arrests and hurt policemen and neo-Nazis. An later attempt to hold the congress in the evening led to 38 arrests.³⁵⁵

5.5.21.  Karl Phillip wrote to Irving on 4 July boasting about the meeting in Cham where he had successfully held a meeting for Dr. Schaller and Faurisson despite a concerted police effort to break up the meeting.

That was a masterpiece by Meinolf Schönborn and his people. We should take it in mind to do something with him in late Autumn. He is really a soldier and everything goes off with military discipline and according to military organisation. He has almost 400 young people around him who follow his commands.³⁵⁶

5.5.22.  The nuances of the dispute are unclear, but the conclusions are inescapable. Irving was no mere hired speaker to the neo-Nazis or in the revisionist movement, but had the political weight to support or undermine political positions and alliances within both scenes.³⁵⁷ That Philipp, who had now known and worked with Irving for almost two years, should try and impress Irving with tales of his own conspiratorial skills and Schönborn’s violent antics, speaks for Irving’s tastes.

5.5.23.  Irving promptly sent a circular to Karl Höffkes and Philipp asking if they, or anyone they knew, could fill in at such short notice and organise anything. Irving was willing to agree on ‘a topic acceptable to the authorities’ [‘ein den Behörden genehmes Thema vereinbaren’].³⁵⁸ Irving likewise wrote to Zündel.

I am of course alarmed, sorry, and annoyed. It is unprofessional to say the least of Althans. We have been planning this four week tour of Mitteldeutschland [central Germany] since Leuchtercongeß [Leuchter congress]. For him to abandon it giving me three weeks’ notice is unhelpful. I have ordered a thousand books, etc. I am now left hanging around like a spare prick at a wedding! The only items that survive are Hamburg (which I arranged, after he failed to contact Ulrich Harder for weeks); Bonn, and (weeks later) Wunsiedel. I doubt personally that Wunsiedel will come off this year, but one must be an optimist.

What can we do? Do you have any independent people there, anybody in the major cities who could set up isolated events for me on the lines of Stuttgart last September, which was a brilliant success?

Needless to say, I have the utmost faith in you. You are a professional. You know the law in both Canada and Germany, and keep within it, so far as I can judge. […]

I do of course appreciate the serious personal problems Althans is facing, which must be a serious disappointment for him. Sometimes we have to hang strong. Those times are now. I am very sorry that we are losing Mittledeutschland [central Germany] like this.³⁵⁹

5.5.24.  Irving also asked Ulrich Harder if he could arrange anything at short notice. Harder regretted he could do nothing.

I’m sorry that I can’t give you any better news. You know that I have always made a great effort for you because I think you are simply fantastic and indispensable to Germany. And I certainly also have some contacts. Nevertheless not sufficient in central Germany, [as] we from the NPD are still in the process of initially building them up and this will still take a little time.³⁶⁰

5.5.25.  Philipp likewise replied in the negative.³⁶¹ Zündel wrote that he had contacted Carl-Arthur Bühring, Michael Schönborn, and had tried to contact Walendy for Irving.³⁶²

5.5.26.  Between Philipp, Althans, Harder, and Zündel the tour managed to go ahead.³⁶³ Irving toured accompanied by Susanne Töpler.³⁶⁴ Diary entries 21 – 24 July 1991 are missing, but Zündel had suggested a book-signing at the AVÖ bookshop in Munich on the 23 July, which he suggested he also attend ‘as an additional drawing card.’³⁶⁵ Irving had been booked to speak in Augsburg, as arranged by Althans.³⁶⁶ This is possibly a meeting arranged with Michael Swierczek.³⁶⁷ There is no record of whether the meeting took place, but alone Irving’s willingness is indicative. Irving had originally planned to stay overnight with Althans.³⁶⁸

5.5.27.  On 24 July Irving spoke in Stuttgart (Degerloch) at the invitation of Carl-Arthur Bühring on ‘German history seen today’ [‘Deutsche Geschichte aus heutiger Sicht.’]³⁶⁹ Irving thanked Klaus Ewald for the meeting.³⁷⁰ On 25 July Irving visited Philipp in Frankfurt. Once again the milieu in which Irving operated is clear. ‘He [Philipp] showed us [Irving and Töpler] the latest paste up of the Remer Depesche on which he is working. It is good. I asked if Otto Ernst Remer is not fearful of being prosecuted: Ph.[ilipp] said that is what Remer wants.’³⁷¹

5.5.28.  On 26 July Irving spoke at an NPD meeting in Hamburg (Harburg) arranged by Ulrich Harder. The meeting obviously produced a lot of resonance. Harder wrote to Irving over two months later, ‘Your speech in Hamburg in July is still being discussed. It was magnificent and you really are an outstanding contemporary.’³⁷² On 27 July Irving attended a garden party thrown by Dietmar Munier of the Arndt Verlag.³⁷³ On 30 July Irving spoke at a meeting at Bonn University given by Andreas Jahrow and organised by Althans.³⁷⁴

5.5.29.  On 17 August Irving was to have spoken at Wunsiedel at the annual Rudolf-Hess-Memorial March.³⁷⁵ Remembering that 1) Irving had refused to appear on the same platform as Kühnen at Wunsiedel the year before, 2) that Worch had chosen Kühnen over Irving because the movement owed more to Kühnen (implying that Irving was nevertheless a contender), and 3) that in the meantime Kühnen had died, it is important to remember exactly what the march was. Worch’s NL had played an important part in Rudolf-Hess-Memorial marches in Wunsiedel since 1989, and it constituted one of the main organisational focuses of the NL.³⁷⁶ The 1991 march (and the replacement demonstration) was organised together with the NO. The NA was likewise to have taken part in 1991.³⁷⁷ This made the march one of the annual highlights of the German neo-Nazi calendar.

5.5.30.  A flyer for the meeting, under the title ‘National Collective in need!'[‘Nationale Sammlung tut not!’] give the tenor of the meeting.

We won’t put up with it any more! Don’t be deterred[.] Should a ban be made public again this year by the press and television, don’t be deterred by it.! Let’s fight together! In August 1990 we showed the anarchists what for – they ran like hares – ! The reds and anarchists must be driven from the streets! Comrades, the streets have to be ours again, because >the right is coming again[.]³⁷⁸

5.5.31.  Worch writing to Irving in 1990 had justified his choice of Kühnen with the words, ‘Especially – and this needs to be stressed here – because from the beginning Wunsiedel marches have been political events and not about historical revisionism.’³⁷⁹ Presumably nothing had changed in the meantime. The march was ultimately banned and 2,000 people demonstrated in Bayreuth against the ban.³⁸⁰ It is not clear up to what point Irving remained ready to appear.

5.5.32.  On 8 September Irving had been asked to hold a speech in Neuss a meeting of the Neuss branch of the Association of Expellecs [Bund der Vertriebenen], an invitation he accepted. The invitation was cancelled when the city hall in Neuss threatened to cancel the contract for the hall if Irving appeared as a speaker.³⁸¹

5.5.33.  Irving’s November tour had been originally planned for 1 -7 November.³⁸² On 5 November Zündel was tried in Munich and a demonstration was planned by the AVÖ.³⁸³ Irving had recorded in his diary that he ‘…phoned Zündel. Using codenames, it turns out he and Leuchter will be in Munich for Z[ündel]’s trial Nov 5; that we shall all confer in Pforzheim, Nov 6.’³⁸⁴ On 29 October Zündel had asked Irving if he could arrive earlier in Germany. ‘No change [chance?] of being in München for a press conference on the 4 and or 5th evenings? French National T.V. will send a crew and Bavarian T.V. as well.’³⁸⁵ The diary entries for 4 and 5 November are missing.

5.5.34.  On 6 November the town hall in Pforzheim was booked for Irving’s lecture on ‘New Europe’ [‘Neues Europa’], but an advertisement in the Pforzheimer Zeitung led the hall to cancel, supported by the city administration [Stadthallenverwaltung].³⁸⁶ Instead the meeting took place in the restaurant Adler in Büchenbron outside Pforzheim. Both venues were organised by Christian Democratic Union [CDU] politician Dr. Manfrid Dreher. Dreher had contacted Irving through Zühdel.³⁸⁷ Dreher and Irving had met in London previous to the meeting, and Irving had even persuaded Dreher to buy surplus stocks of his books in Germany on his behalf, the money to be repaid later.³⁸⁸ Irving described the meeting.

We left for Dreher’s factory, and waited there interminably. Dreher there, eventually joined by Zündel and Leuchter. Dreher has lost the town hall, moved the venue to a restaurant in nearby village. Spoke there, late, for two hours. British (Thames) and Danish, French and WDR TV there. Good atmosphere…^{389 390}

5.5.35.  The television teams Irving had unexpectedly brought with him, the presence of Zündel and Leuchter, Irving’s deviation from the advertised topic, and Irving’s notoriety all contributed to the subsequent scandal.³⁹¹ Over the next two years Dreher, a highly respected member of the CDU, had to fight off several attempts to have him expelled from the party. Moreover, as a result of Irving’s appearance, Dreher was stripped of the FRG’s highest civil order [Bundesverdienstkreuz], an almost unique event in the history of the country.³⁹² Although Dreher was later keen to distance himself from the content of Irving’s speech it would appear that this was a cosmetic measure. On 12 July 1991 he had written to Irving saying ‘I have already been thinking about how we can hold the event from a “neutral stand point”.’³⁹³ Dreher also later dictated Irving’s expected explanation of events to him.³⁹⁴

5.5.35.  On 7 November 1991: Irving spoke in Hamburg (Harburg) organised by the NPD’s Ulrich Harder who was present at the meeting.³⁹⁵ On 8 November Irving spoke in Lentförden [Segeberg] to the ‘Friends Circle “A Heart for Germany”‘ [Freundeskreis “Ein Herz für Deutschland”], again organised by Harder.³⁹⁶ The Minister of the Interior of Schleswig Holstein ordered a partial speaking ban [‘eingeschränktes Redeverbot’] which was handed to Irving at the meeting.³⁹⁷ The ban demonstratively failed to deter Irving, who proceeded to read out its contents to the audience .³⁹⁸ Neither did the ban do anything to dampen Irving’s feelings of success. He later thanked the Worchs for their efforts ‘which lead to a successful event in Lentförden’ [‘…die zur erfolgreichen Veranstaltung in Lentförden führten.’].³⁹⁹

5.5.36.  The constellation of neo-Nazis Irving had failed to speak to at Wunsiedel were addressed by Irving on 9 November in Halle, an open-air rally he attended at the suggestion of Ursula Wosch ‘as the meeting planned for Aachen has fallen through.’⁴⁰⁰ The rally had been organised by Thomas Dienel, in co-operation with Christian and Ursula Worch, as a nationwide affair. This well co-ordinated demonstration included groups and members of various neo-Nazi groups within the GdNF including the NL, ‘Deutsches Hessen’, the DA, and was attended by, amongst others, prominent neo-Nazis Gottfried Küssel of the Austrian VAPO and Otto Riehs.

5.5.37.  Amid a sea of waving Reich war-flags and NL and DA banners Irving addressed a prominently skin-head audience. During the speeches given by Irving, Worch, and Dienel, the audience at times broke into rhythmic cries of ‘Germany for the Germans’ [‘Deutschland den Deutschen’], ‘Foreigners out’ [‘Ausländer Raus’] and made the illegal Nazi salute ‘Sieg Heil’. Irving himself recorded that ‘I spoke first, a rabble rousing ten or fifteen minutes, with loud cheering, and alas some shouts of Sieg Heil to which I admonished, “Let’s have no calls from the past; it’s the [illegible word] that counts”.’⁴⁰¹ The video record of the meeting shows Irving merely making a weak gesture of disapproval.⁴⁰²

5.5.38.  As if Irving’s presence on a neo-Nazi platform were not enough, the rally took place at a time when Germany was in the grips of a vicious wave of attacks against foreigners.

5.5.39.  Irving returned to Germany in December On 6 December he spoke at the first ‘nationale Großkundgebung’ of the DVU in Passau.⁴⁰³ From 9 – 11 December Irving was in Hamburg apparently in connection with a court case with the German publisher Rowohlt.⁴⁰⁴

5.6 OPC observations 1991.

5.6.1.  The importance of the revisionist campaign in 1991 is substantiated by the various VSBs, both on the federal and state levels. They noted that the revisionist campaign had become enmeshed in neo-Nazi strategies to widen their political influence, especially in eastern Germany and to initiate a new Neo-Nazi movement in Germany.

The so-called revisionists intensified their endeavour to spread their opinions that no crimes were committed, certainly not the Holocaust which is a propaganda lie put about by the victorious Allies of World War II. Neo-Nazis and the “national democrats” tried four times to arrange meetings with Holocaust deniers from Germany and abroad:

• the first attempt took place on the 23-3-91 in Munich…,
• on the 29-6-91 the NF leader, Schönborn tried to organise a meeting in Cham, amongst others with Faurisson…
• the third attempt was made by the NPD leader Deckert; this meeting, planned for the 1.9.91 in Weinheim was banned. Karl Philipp and Udo Walendy, (both former NPD members) were to address the gathering.
• finally Deckert was successful on the 10.11.91 and Leuchter addressed more than 100 people.⁴⁰⁵

5.6.2.  The VS Report added, ‘But again the most active speaker on German soil was David Irving, who spoke in Passau, Rothemburg ob der Tauber, Munich, Augsburg, Stuttgart, Hamburg, Pforzheim, Lentförden (county Seegeberg) and Halle an der Saale amongst others.’

5.7 1992: the ‘International Campaign for Real History’ falters.

5.7.1.  Irving was in Germany at least four times in 1992; from 13[?] – 23 March, 3-18 May, in June briefly on his way to Moscow, and 10 -15[?] September. Again diary entries are missing, namely the entries for February 24 to March 22, and 10 and 11 (partially) May.

5.7.2.  In an unusual move, Irving took the initiative into his own hands in attempting to organise the year’s tours. On 1 January, Irving sent a circular letter to his contacts in Germany offering his services [‘…ich stelle mich gern zu Verfügung’] and advising them of his availability during the forthcoming year. The letter went out to Günter Deckert, Christian Worch, Karl Höffkes, Klaus Ewald, Dr. Gerd Sudholt, Dr. Dreher [who passed it on to Dill⁴⁰⁶], Renate Werlberger, Carl-Arthur Bühring, Joachim Siegerist, Lars de Flon, Pedro Varela, Althans, Arwed Sader, Thies Christophersen, Michael Swierzeck, Dr. Michael Koll, and Andreas Jahrow.⁴⁰⁷

5.7.3.  The March tour was organised by Worch and Michael Swierczek (who was meant to organise two meetings in South Germany), with help from Zündel.⁴⁰⁸ On 13 March Irving had planned to arrive in Munich and wanted to pick up books from Althans’s book store.⁴⁰⁹ On 14 March Irving spoke to the DVU in Passau.⁴¹⁰

5.7.4.  On 15 March Irving spoke in Hetendorf [Lüneburger Heide] near Hamburg on the destruction of Dresden, under the auspices of a “Dresden-Holocaust-Monument” project, thought up by Zündel and Worch.⁴¹¹ Worch had written to Irving in January trying to interest him in the project. In the process he ruminated on the day-to-day problems in Germany

The year begins for me with stress: street fighting got out of hand at Michael Kühnen’s funeral, only the day after renewed confrontation with the left in Wilhelmshaven (but there without brawls), yesterday the news that Gottfried Küssel had been arrested in Vienna…⁴¹²

5.7.5.  In trying to interest Irving for the project, Worch explained that one of his problems was that although he could easily gather a ‘powerful’ [‘schlagkräftiges’] public and although he could protect halls, speakers, and public against ‘enemy attacks’ [feindliche Angriffe’] his ‘powerful’ public was not usually ‘affluent’ [‘zahlungskräftig’]. This was the job of Harder for example, or the people around the NPD, DVU, Republicans, and the independent national-conservatives, entities that could attract older people who paid an entry fee.

5.7.6.  Worch added that the project had an important role for NL. ‘It would be no problem with precisely such a project if the more radical wing, represented by me, unite with the more reserved moderate wing.’ He suggested Irving speak in Hetendorf where there were some ‘middle-class national associations, that are partly scared’ [‘bürgerlich-nationalen Vereinen, die Leilweise ängstlich sind.’]. For instance an event with Fred Leuchter would be too dangerous for them.

5.7.7.  If Irving had any scruples about the politics of his role, he repressed them in appearing.⁴¹³

5.7.8.  On 16 March Irving spoke at the Bonn university, as arranged by the AVÖ’s Stephan Wiesel.⁴¹⁴ This is an important speech because the contents of Irving’s stock speeches would seem to have remained constant. In a report on the speech Dr. Michael Koll reported Irving as having said,

Main thesis: “In 18 months the horrific episode with the gas chambers finished.” Irving referred to the fact that earlier predictions of his had come true.

“When this pack of lies (i.e. the “Holocaust” – M.K.) collapses, it will be very embarrassing for German politicians”. The Germans payments for “gaschambers that did not exist” will be stopped and

“without this money the state of Israel will collapse”.

The Jews according to Irving, have to free themselves from the Holocaust legend, “otherwise there will be a wave of anti-Semitism”.

[…]

Comment:

Concepts like “final victory”, “total victory”, “total truth” fall hard on the ears. […] Quote Irving: “When Auschwitz falls then the Jews have lost the battle”.⁴¹⁵

5.7.9.  On 19 March Irving would appear to have tried to speak in Ausburg, at a meeting arranged by Michael Swierczek.⁴¹⁶ This might coincide with one of the meetings attributed to Irving in the VSB for 1992, which recorded Irving speaking to an NO meeting in Engen/Welschingenin near Konstantz in March 1992.⁴¹⁷ On 23 March Irving breakfasted with Zündel in Munich.⁴¹⁸

5.7.10.  In May Irving announced his intention to ‘continue…his “International Campaign for Real History” in the FRG with speeches in Berlin, Munich, and Stuttgart.’⁴¹⁹ On 4 May Irving gave a press conference in Munich.⁴²⁰ The room was booked for Irving by Althans.⁴²¹ The hotel ‘Bayerischer Hof’ cancelled the room on learning that Althans had booked it on Irving’s behalf and the press conference had to take place elsewhere.⁴²² On 5 May Irving appeared before a Munich court, where he was fined DM 10,000 (see below).

5.7.11.  During 1991 there had been new attempts to organize a bigger neo-Nazi camp, that would also include members of the Republicans, the NPD, and others. On the 31 October 1991 a new party was formed in Villingen-Schwennigen called the German League for People and Home [Die Deutsche Liga für Volk und Heimat – DLVH]. In Berlin the neo-Nazis around the DLVH organized a group to stand for elections, called ‘We Are The People’ [‘Wir sind das Volk’]. Early in 1992, they re-named themselves ‘the Nationals’ together with a group of known neo-Nazis like Peter Boche, Dr. Bernd Witte, Frank Schwerdt and Andreas Storr (the latter from the JN) and together they intended to stand in the forthcoming Berlin elections.⁴²³> Thilo Kabus explained the change of name to Irving.

To steer round the guile of the Berlin electoral law a change of our name to “the Nationals” was necessary. Independently of this the number of members and sympathisers has approximately tripled. So everything is getting better.⁴²⁴

5.7.12.  As part of their campaign to profile themselves in the forthcoming Berlin local elections a big rally was organized for the 9 May 1992, the day after the anniversary of the unconditional surrender of 1945. The venue was provocatively to be the former communist museum dedicated to the surrender in Berlin-Karlshort.⁴²⁵ Irving was announced as the star speaker.⁴²⁶ In planning the rally Irving had long been in contact with prominent members of the Nationals, such as Dr. Bernd Witte, Thilo Kabus, and Frank Schwerdt.⁴²⁷

5.7.13.  Ultimately the rally was cancelled. This would seem to have been for a number of reasons, not all of them to do with Irving.⁴²⁸ As far as Irving was concerned, it was intended to ban his speech. ⁴²⁹ But Salomon had written to Irving informing him that because of developments the organisers were of the opinion that they did not want to involve Irving in the ‘incalculable risks’ that had come up.⁴³⁰

5.7.14.  After a total defeat in the local elections, the strategy of the Nationals was altered and a decision was made to expand through decentralization and to concentrate on recruitment of youngsters. In the following years, this group became one of the successful organizers of the neo-Nazi Comradeship and adhered to the concept of so-called ‘nationalbefreite Zonen’, freed national zones, where foreigners were driven out.⁴³¹

5.7.15.  The diary record for 10 and 11 May is mostly missing. A journalist for the Independent suggested that Irving spoke in Poland instead, and was then off to Auschwitz. ‘Yesterday, he was due to address 800 Germans in Oppeln, a small town in Poland. […] After that [meeting in Oppeln] he planned to head for Auschwitz to “have another look at the place” and, no doubt, to strengthen his conviction that the gas chambers there are fakes erected after the war for the benefit of tourists and those “clever opponents” seeking financial retribution from the German state.’⁴³² To Althans Irving conveyed that he would be in Dresden.⁴³³

5.7.16.  On 11 May Irving ate dinner with Stephan Niemann, functionary in the AVÖ.⁴³⁴ From 12 to 14 Irving recorded with Althans his plea [‘Schlußwort’] of his Munich trial ‘which we shall now market as a propaganda tool.’⁴³⁵

5.7.17.  On 15 May Irving was in Echterdingen, outside where Stuttgart Irving’s tour started to falter

Peter Müller broke to me here the news that the police have in writing banned tomorrow’s function at Sindelfingen Holiday Inn. Sicne [Since] they cite “Auschwitz” as the motive, it is plain that the unauthorised National Offensive leaflet issued “from Munich” (I.e. by Althans!), which already muddled up the starting time, starting 3 p.m. instead of 5 p.m., is to blame. The leaflet gave no topic. I am furious. […] I remain stoical, however, and hope another location can be found. Saur (NO) states: “Herrenberg”, and by fax (for security) he informed us the location, Cafe Neumann’⁴³⁶

5.7.18.  A meeting with the NO in Sindelfingen, near Stuttgart, on 16 May suffered a similar fate.⁴³⁷ The meeting had been organised with Hans Joachim Dill, Klaus Ewald, and Peter Müller.⁴³⁸ Klaus Ewald had assured Irving that Dill could ‘make a storage hall available, in which Ernst Zündel and Fred Leuchter spoke on 3 November 1991′ if the worst came to the worst.⁴³⁹

…arrived at Holiday Inn, Sindelfingen, near Stuttgart. Here the manager whose staff had told us last night there was no problem, we could set up at 3 p.m., announced the meeting would not take place; no, not banned by the hotel, so they would not refund the rent; nor allowed either. Klaus Ewald arrived, got nowhere with them either. So we headed for the alternative venue [venue] at Herrenberg, 22km away. The Kripo [criminal police] arrived 5 minutes later, and in due course they banned the mee[ti]ng there. […] I agreed to address a meeting of valiant remnants in a field 5km from Böblingen, and played to them the tape of my Schlußwort [plea] (which resulted in 13 sales immediately.)⁴⁴⁰

5.7.19.  After the disaster Dill wrote to Irving that ‘We will thoroughly discuss the lessons to be learnt out of this with Ernst Zündel. Meetings only in private circles with the registration of a topic which is not contestable. Only personal invitations…’⁴⁴¹ Irving replied ‘That really was an unlucky week! Five meetings in the FRG, all cancelled by the police.’⁴⁴²

5.7.20.  On 17 May disaster struck again for Irving in Schliersee where he had been booked to speak by Althans.⁴⁴³

Arrived at Schliersee Bahnhof 12:30 p.m.; Althans arrived twenty minutes later, and told that a “catastrophe” occurred here too, namely the Kripo had arrived at 9:2 a.m. here and told the organisers not to let me speak. They of course knew nothing of my planned presence. Kripo knew more than they did. The 300 people at tables cheered as I walked in, but organiser confirmed to me that the police ban made it impossible for them to let me speak, as they depended on the town to let them have the hall each year…So it looks like the fifth meeting this tour is also K.O.d. [knocked out] I am fuming.⁴⁴⁴

5.7.21.  Irving stayed overnight on the AVÖ premises in Munich.⁴⁴⁵ In retrospect Irving was clear in his mind where the roots of disaster lay, and it was certainly not due to his own utterances. He wrote to Renate Werlberger of the Munich NPD ‘…my last journey to Germany simply a wash out. Five events all banned by the police with different excuses. I have Mr. Althans, better said the NO to thank for that.’⁴⁴⁶ To Zündel he wrote ‘I don’t believe that I will speak for the Nat.[ionale] Liste, Nat.[ionale] Offensive or the AVÖ again. The two weeks (costs: 12,000,–) brought nothing in. Everything banned, mostly caused through stupidity.’⁴⁴⁷

5.7.22.  Obviously not the politics of such groups, but their lack of organisational skills was what disturbed Irving.

5.7.23.  On 5 June Irving stayed in Germany briefly on his way to the Moscow archives, squeezing in a meeting in Hamburg for Ulrich Harder.⁴⁴⁸ Sometime in June Irving had also agreed to attend a think tank [‘Denkfabrik’] in Munich at the behest of the ‘the German Conservatives [‘Die Deutschen Konservativen’] of Joachim Siegerist, as mediated by Dr. Manfrid Dreher.⁴⁴⁹ The event was cancelled.⁴⁵⁰ On 12 June Irving in was Germany on his return from the Moscow archives.⁴⁵¹ The next day Irving flew from Munich to Rome, where he was promptly deported back to Munich. In Munich again (Irving was surprised that the Italians had not alerted the German authorities to his return) he spoke with Zündel at a meeting arranged by Althans.⁴⁵² On the 14 Irving met Zündel again to plan his forthcoming Canadian tour.⁴⁵³

5.7.24.  On 11 September 1992 Irving was to have spoken to the Munich NPD on the Goebbels diaries, but received a speaking ban.⁴⁵⁴ On 12 September Thies Christophersen had invited Irving to attend a conference organised by him in Antwerp⁴⁵⁵ Irving accepted and drove to Antwerp with Pedro Varelax, Althans, and friend Thomas [Dienel?].⁴⁵⁶ Zündel and Worch also attended the conference, where Irving spoke on ‘Nuremberg.’⁴⁵⁷ There are no nearer details of the conference. On 13 September Irving had planned to speak at a NPD meeting in Cologne.⁴⁵⁸ On 14 September Irving planned to speak in Aachen, but apparently the meeting was cancelled ‘by the organisers.’⁴⁵⁹

5.8 OPC observations 1992.

5.8.1.  As in 1990 and 1991 the VSBs noted Irving repeatedly participating at neo-Nazi meetings, presenting his revisionist statements. As a leading representative of this international ‘revisionist campaign’ he was also described as de facto leading representative of neo-Nazi activities in Germany.⁴⁶⁰

5.9 1993: expulsion

5.9.1.  Irving’s diaries and documentation for 1993 being fragmentary, we will suffice ourselves with summarising the little that is reconstructable.

5.9.2.  Between 11/12 – 14 January Irving was in Germany and Austria in the company of Althans and Susie Töpler.⁴⁶¹ On 14 January spoke in Munich to a meeting of ‘the friends of Ernst Zündel’ organised by Althans, where Irving received a partial speaking ban.⁴⁶²

5.9.3.  Sometime between 17-23 May an international meeting was organised by Christophersen, which Irving would have appeared to have agreed to attend, if the event had not been cancelled because of adverse publicity.⁴⁶³

5.9.4  On 26 June a conspirative meeting was planned by Worch for Irving outside Hamburg, although Worch refused to fax Irving exact details for fear of observation.⁴⁶⁴ Irving recorded, ‘Good speech on the problems and vicissitudes of the last twelve months; no police presence (I hope) so I spoke freely.’⁴⁶⁵ On 27 June Irving spoke to the ‘Association for Culture and Contemporary History’ [‘Verein für Kultur und Zeitgeschichte,’] in Hamburg organised by Ulrich Harder.⁴⁶⁶ On 5 July a meeting had been planned with Althans, which Irving himself apparently called off.⁴⁶⁷

5.9.5.  On 3 July Irving spoke to a NPD meeting in Mainburg. In his diary he wrote, ‘Police presence, usual teilweise Redeverbot [partial speaking ban] handed to me. Backed up an hour later by warning that if I read it out I would be arrested. Democracies!’⁴⁶⁸ The ban was apparently based on that handed down to Irving in Munich on 11 January 1993.⁴⁶⁹ Interesting in this context is what Irving then said to the audience. Irving told the audience that he was banned from explaining his theses ‘But that is not important. Because I am convinced that most of you knew what I would talk to you about, what my theses are, what I would say [laughter, applause]’⁴⁷⁰ Even when banned, Irving’s mere presence and innuendo was enough to spread the denialist cause.

5.9.6.  On 9 November Irving started a tour arranged by the AVÖ’s Wiesel, arranged to start in Munich and Baden Württemberg and end in Dresden.⁴⁷¹ Whilst in Munich he was requested to quit the country by the German authorities.⁴⁷² Irving recorded the next two days in his diary.

Arranged dinner at Mövenpick [with Töpler] at 9 p. m.. Ten minutes later a Kriminalkommissar [police officer] Wolf of the Staatsschutz [security service] and a female officer arrived brandishing a thick envelope containing two copies of a 33pp. Aufenthaltsverbot [residency ban] issued against me and date stamped today, November 9. That’s torn it. I read it through at leisure, and heard him remark that he had something even grimmer to do (or hand me) as soon as I had read it. He sent the female out to get it; I nonchalently said I would of course have to phone my lawyer Herrmann, and rose to get his number from the car. “You’re coming back?” asked the officer, and I said yes, before climbing into the car and speeding off, nearly colliding with a pack of Jews at the local Kristallnacht memorial. Drove to Wiesel’s headquarter and left a message to him to meet me at Hotel Drei Löwen. Then phoned Susie [Töpler] and using coded language changed rendez-vous to same place (“the place where I gave you that pen”). Wiesel turned up and I took him round the block then in car. It was obvious to me, the police intended to serve on me the latest Strafbefehl [summary sentence] personally, or perhaps even arrest me (Leuchter is still in jail!).⁴⁷³

5.9.7.  Irving’s lawyers refused to take the case, whereupon Irving realised that he had to vacate Germany as quickly as possible to avoid the indignity of deportation. ‘…changed reservation from 9 p. m. flight to stand by on 5 p. m. flight to London, hoping thereby to loose any policeman who had checked the British airways computer… Dash to airport gate and just got on as they closed the doors. Back in London.’⁴⁷⁴

6. Judicial Sanctions.

The OPC differentiates between a wider and narrower (radical) version of revisionism. The wider concept includes all right-wing extremist attempts to relativise NS. The narrower concept concentrates on the denial of the mass murder of Jews in the gas chambers, that is to say on the ‘Auschwitz lie.’ This form of revisionism has been long punishable in Germany under articles 130 [incitement of the people – Volksverhetzung], 185 [slander – Beleidigung] and 189 [disparagement] of the criminal code [Strafgesetzbuch – StGB].

In the 1980s the revisionist campaign led to a sharpening of these laws.⁴⁷⁵ The Jews, as former inmates of concentration camps, were insulted by the denialist statements, but such was the burden of their experiences that it was anticipated that many would not want to relive them by bringing a case to court. Subsequently the law was altered in 1985 so that the state could initiate action on the part of the plaintiff.⁴⁷⁶ The law was sharpened once again in 1994 when denying the Holocaust (the so-called ‘Auschwitz-lie’) was expressly forbidden, punishable with up to 5 years imprisonment.⁴⁷⁷

Up until 1988/9 when Irving’s pronouncements on the Holocaust could still be considered as ‘soft’ revisionism, he could rely on the legal and financial weight of the DVU to decisively quash all commentaries which labelled him a ‘denialist’ or that he was an exponent of the ‘Auschwitz lie.’⁴⁷⁸ With his whole-hearted embracement of the findings of the Leuchter Report Irving’s legal position became at once more precarious, although he continued to a degree to exercise the same kind of caution practiced by Frey and the DVU.⁴⁷⁹ Although 1989 remained for Irving personally a period of grace as far as legal prosecution went, it was clear that the revisionist campaign initiated by the Leuchter Report was attracting the attentions of the police and courts. In justifying his expulsion from Germany the Munich authorities explained that ‘To begin with your political activities were inconspicuous and largely took place unnoticed by the wider public. But as of summer 1990 you increasingly appeared at meetings of right-wing extremist groups, especially also in the new Federal states.’⁴⁸⁰

It would be beyond the scope of this report to consider in detail all of the speaking bans (partial or complete) Irving received in the period 1990 -1993, not to mention the number of meetings banned at the initiative of the local authorities, or cancelled by those who offered premises to Irving’s organisers. It is considered sufficient to examine in detail three exemplary instances of Irving’s conflict with the German judicial system and to detail in the process the German courts’ estimation of Irving’s activities in Germany, leading up to his final expulsion in November 1993.

In light of Irving’s later claims to the contrary, it is worth noting that Irving was fully aware of the laws that both he, and those around him, were infringing in Germany in denying the Holocaust.⁴⁸¹ In the early 1980s the German embassy had written to him confirming that the DVU was not an ‘illegal organisation’. Nevertheless the Consul General reminded Irving, that as a foreign national he was subject to § 6 section 3 of the German Foreigners Act of 1965 concerning political activities which forbade him to endanger the free democratic constitutional structure of the Federal Republic, or support any parties, groups or directions that did the same outside the purview of the German law.⁴⁸² This was the self-same paragraph under which Irving was to receive his first speaking ban in Passau in March 1990.⁴⁸³ Thus Irving himself had long been aware of the laws he was in danger of infringing with his speeches. In Canada in October 1991 Irving told his audience the Bavarian Ministry of Justice, whom Irving described in the same speech as the ‘extended arm’of ‘you know who’ [i.e. the Jewish people]

…wanted to talk to me about certain things I had done and said in Germany. Well what I do and say in Germany unfortunately does violate the law in Germany. I am well aware of that. And I go round from meeting place to meeting place in Germany now quite voluntarily sticking my neck out, because Germany is one of the most difficult places in the world to speak now.⁴⁸⁴

6.1 Partial speaking ban [Redeverbot] of 8 November 1991.

6.1.1.  On 8 November Irving was invited to speak in Lentförden [Segeberg] to the Freundeskreis “Ein Herz für Deutschland.” by Ulrich Harder.⁴⁸⁵ The Minister of the Interior of Schleswig Holstein ordered a partial speaking ban [‘eingeschränktes Redeverbot’], defining particular topics Irving was forbidden to talk on, citing the law governing foreign nationals [Ausländerrecht] concerning disruption of the public peace [‘Störung des öffentlichen Friedens’].⁴⁸⁶ The ban was handed to Irving at the meeting.⁴⁸⁷ This seems to have had little effect on Irving. He recorded in his diary that ‘Police handed me a Verordnung [ordinance] of Kreis Segeburg, what I am not allowed to say, in such detail that I could not reits [Sic] the temptation to read out the whole document, stressing at each paragraph, “I am not allowed to say that either…!”⁴⁸⁸ Irving later described the meeting as ‘successful’.⁴⁸⁹

6.1.2.  Ulrich Harder was not so glib. He wrote to Irving explaining to him why he had excluded the television teams Irving had brought with him to a meeting in Harburg the night before, and what such a ban might entail.⁴⁹⁰

• I know that you don’t think much of law…, but I think it better for your future appearances in Germany if one tries to reverse such rulings. […]
• A word about Harburg – you will understand my behaviour a little better after Lentförden. Naturally I have known you long enough to know that you would bring the television with you to the meeting place in Harburg in the end. Otherwise you would not be David Irving. It was clear beforehand that the owner, even if with great reservation, would allow the television into the pub. […]
• On the other hand the meeting with you was a closed meeting. Let’s imagine there had been somebody in the hall, or had arrived, from the authorities. Then he would have been able, with the appropriate order in his pocket, to immediately dissolve the meeting if the television had been in the hall from the start or it had been recognisable that they would have come in. In judicial German it would have then ‘been produced for the public’ and a closed, private meeting would have become a public one and that one would have certainly banned. Therefore also the evasion in the last ten minutes.
• To explain all of this to you would have been too long-winded in Harburg. This is why I acted as I did and did not let the television into the anteroom.
• […]You are an indescribable positive factor for our country! which we seek to serve in our way. Enough compliments?⁴⁹¹

6.1.3.  Irving then employed [bevollmächtige] Ulrich Harder to raise a objection [‘Widerspruch’] to the ban for him, which Harder duly undertook, in co-operation with H.J. Rieger.⁴⁹²

6.1.4.  In comparison to the judicial wrangling surrounding Irving’s fine of July 1991 (see below) Harder had to convince Irving that the proper course of action was to avoid politics in the courts.

You will hopefully have seen [in the action] I have not argued with the cause but legally. At the moment one does not get anywhere with the CAUSE itself, only with false application of the law. But I don’t mean a ‘secondary theatre of war’, as you say, rather flak cover for the main thrust. Without resistance the authorities could become over confident. That would damage you as regards the freedom of movement in Germany.⁴⁹³

6.1.5.  Irving’s protest [Wiederspruch] was considered and rejected on 15 November 1991 with a ruling [Wiederspruchsbescheid] of 12 February 1992, which Irving in turn took action against on 4 March 1992. Irving claimed that his speech was not political but scholarly [Wissenschaftlich] and that the ban infringed his rights as embodied in the civil code [Grundrecht] Article 5, Paragraph 3 protecting freedom of scientific research and teaching. Even if the speech had been political he was protected by Article 5, Paragraph 1 ensuring freedom of expression.⁴⁹⁴

6.1.6.  On 25 May 1992 the court ruled against Irving ruling that Irving’s speech had threatened to damage the image of the Federal Republic at a time of flux in Europe and as Germany’s neighbours looked on nervously with fears of a re-birth of a nationalist spirit in Germany. The court ruled that Irving had intended in his speech to influence public political opinion.

… your speech is suitable and intended to rake up emotions in the audience to allow clear right-wing extremist statements to be aired in public. The thoughts of your like-minded audience can be further stimulated so that they express Nazi opinions in public, vociferously repeat slogans for a revival of Nazi rule.⁴⁹⁵

And further:

His speeches are not the mere representation of historical events. The statements the plaintiff makes, especially those in which he refers to the so-called Leuchter Report, are primarily intended to supply points of argument to those social groups in the Federal Republic whose aim is a renewed spreading of National Socialist thought. You offer the psuedo-scientific background which provides right-wing extremist groups a legitimacy and in addition is meant to allow them to convince those who are generally openly disposed to right-wing theses, but faced with the crimes of the National Socialists are lost for arguments, of their ideas.⁴⁹⁶

The court ruled that

In calling the racial murder by the National Socialists a lie, he [Irving] deprives the Jews the inhuman fate that they exposed too merely because of their origins. The tendency to free National Socialism from the stigma of the murder of the Jews is very clearly apparent in the plaintiff.⁴⁹⁷

6.1.7.  Irving appealed again on 25 June 1992, calling for the original ban to be declared unlawful and the court ruling of 25 May 1992 to be changed.⁴⁹⁸ In the final instance before Schleswig-Holstein’s higher administrative court in October 1993 Irving’s appeal was rejected. The court concluded that because of numerous judgements Irving was well aware of legal sanctions against the public denial of the Holocaust, and that his continued statements despite this allowed the conclusion that he was conscious of the degrading character of his opinions.⁴⁹⁹

6.1.8  It added that in as far as Irving supported his case with the Leuchter Report ‘this is completely unsuited to refute the historical fact of the Holocaust.’⁵⁰⁰ Indeed ‘In as far as the plaintiff bases his findings on the so-called Leuchter report it is already very doubtful if his interpretation of history can be called research at all.’⁵⁰¹

6.1.9.  Irving, who had ‘acquired himself the reputation as a right-wing extremist writer and historian [‘sich den Ruf eines rechtsextremen Schrifstellers und Historikers erworben.’⁵⁰²] had committed a ‘considerable disturbance of the public safety and order’ with his statements on the Third Reich and the Second World War, statements that represented a ‘mockery’ [‘Verhöhnung’] of the victims of National Socialism.⁵⁰³

6.2 Irving’s arrest as leader of an illegal demonstration, 21 May 1990 and the consequences.

6.2.1  Following an illegal demonstration to the Feldherrenhalle in Munich after the revisionist congress ‘Wahrheit macht Frei’ on 21 April 1990 Irving, Ewald Althans, and Christian Worch were the subjects of a preliminary investigation [Ermittlungsverfahren]. Irving was arrested during the investigation and later that night freed on bail.⁵⁰⁴

6.2.2.  Originally the investigation against Irving had been because of his part in the demonstration [Verstoss gegen das Versammlungsgesetz]. The Munich prosecutor [Staatsanwaltschaft] interviewed Peter Köpf, a journalist with the local Munich Abendzeitung who had been present in the Löwenbräukeller.⁵⁰⁵ Köpf mentioned that the meeting had been filmed by a team from Spiegel-TV from Hamburg, and the prosecutor duly invited the journalist concerned, Michael Schmidt, to give a statement.⁵⁰⁶ Schmidt ‘declared that he had actually recorded Irving’s speech. It is correct that he [Irving] said that Auschwitz was a dummy. In addition he said “We know that there were never gas chambers in Auschwitz. Auschwitz gas chambers were built in Poland for the tourists.” Mr. Schmidt declared himself willing to appear as a witness.’⁵⁰⁷ At some date Irving underlined the quote and wrote in pen in the margin ‘This is dangerous.’

6.2.3.  At some point in 1990 this preliminary investigation then became one for defamation and reveiling the memory of the dead [Beleidigung und Verunglimpfung des Andenkens Verstorbener].⁵⁰⁸ The investigation also resulted in an investigation into Karl Philipp’s press releases and articles on Irving’s activities.⁵⁰⁹

6.2.4.  The Staatsanwaltschaft Munich duly asked the British authorities that Irving be advised of the offence, the penal provisions, his right to consult a lawyer and ‘to have the accused person interrogated by the police in regard to the described state of facts and to thereby grant to him the opportunity of being heard.’⁵¹⁰ Irving’s lawyer Michael Hubertus von Sprenger began preparations for the charges, asking Irving amongst other things for ‘a copy of the tape recording of my speech’. Irving commented in his dairy ‘I may have inadvertently broken the law with my statements that there were no gas chambers’.⁵¹¹ Sprenger had represented Irving since the early 1980’s through the DVU.⁵¹²

6.2.5.  On 17 July 1991 the court found against Irving and issued a summary award of punishment [Strafbefehl]. As guilty of defaming the memory of the dead Irving was fined in absetia DM 7,000.⁵¹³ The court recorded:

Amongst other things in your speech you said the following: “In the meantime we now know, I only need to mention this as a footnote, that there were never gas chambers in Auschwitz.” Further you explained the following: “In the meantime we believe that just as the gas chamber which the Americans built in Dachau in the first days after the war a dummy is, so the gas chamber facilities, which one can now see as a tourist in Auschwitz, were built by the authorities in Auschwitz after the second world war…. Because the German taxpayers have had to pay a complete 13 thousand-million German marks as a punishment for Auschwitz…for a dummy.⁵¹⁴

6.2.6.  Irvings lawyer von Sprenger duly appealed against the fine on 21 August 1991.⁵¹⁵ The trial came to appeal before the Munich magistrate’s court on 5 May 1992.

6.2.7.  Despite ominous warnings that the facts of the Holocaust were regarded as manifest or evident [Offenkundig], and that German courts would accept no witnesses or documents to the contrary, Irving was eager to try and capitalize on the trial.⁵¹⁶ This time the trial was to be fought with different tactics and with as much media attention as could be found.

6.2.8.  In September 1991 Michael Hubertus von Sprenger wrote to Irving.

I presume that a court no longer investigates evidence if a gassing took place in Auschwitz or not. The court will see this as a irreversible fact.

In the defence you also can not withdraw from it in that you say the results of the Leuchter expert’s report are correct. The point here is not the correctness or incorrectness of this expert’s report, rather your statement that there were no gassings in Auschwitz, it was all a fairy tale.

If you really want to conduct a new “Auschwitz trial” here, I recommend you avail the services of a specialist defendant in such questions.⁵¹⁷

6.2.9.  One plank of Irving’s preferred strategy was a vain attempt to call the head of the Auschwitz Museum Archive, Dr. Franciszek Piper. This attempt had it’s roots in two occurrences.

6.2.10.  Firstly, early in August 1989, Irving and Zündel discussed a video project at the same time as Irving made his first concerns about flaws in the Leuchter Report known to Zündel.⁵¹⁸ The correspondence is not complete, but it would appear to have been some sort of attempt to lend the Leuchter Report more credibility, with Irving as authority. Zündel had written to Irving in August 1989,

Philipp seems to have an eager young publisher with some money and expert television crews and equipment interested in going back there to Auschwitz, Majdanek etc.

You seem to get along with him. Could you not expand that LEAD into a full-fledged [ ] with you being the narrator on the scene both in German and English, on location. With proper [ ] Cameras, good footage, excellent still photos, possibly taking along a British expert in [ ] and a German one as well as a “mobile notary”, to notarise samples taken on the spot.

This would give you “instant expert” status let you talk more forcefully and convincingly with “eyewitness status”, I was there etc. It would make the whole thing a serious archaeological history finding endeavour.⁵¹⁹

6.2.11.  On the 2 August Irving wrote in his diary,

[Zündel] Discusses Karl Philipp expedition idea. I am warming to it: we could invite leading German historians (who will refuse), or their PhD students as representatives of a new, more open-minded generation! Lots of mischief there. However Sally is rightly concerned that these loonies are trying to haul me over into their corner, which orthodox publishers will not like at all.⁵²⁰

6.2.12.  On the 29 August Zündel wrote to Irving ‘Good news. Our friend S.[epp] G.[eiger] is back [ ] from Poland with 22 [illegible prefix] samples and good video film! The bridgehead is therefore enlarged.’⁵²¹

6.2.13.  On 3 October 1989 Irving had been filmed by Philipp’s ‘excellent video cameraman’ Sepp Geiger in front of the Reichstag in Berlin for ‘a 15 minute Einleitung [introduction] for the film on KZ Auschwitz’ for which Philipp paid Irving DM 5,000.⁵²² Irving had seen Geiger’s videos the day before, and was obviously impressed.

…Sepp Geiger and Frau Hart arrived, former straight from Auschwitz camp where he has made eight first-rate, professional-standard videos which he showed us in his hotel, Econtel. They are impressive proof of evident falsifications there: a square hole chopped through one “gas chamber” ceiling to accord with eye witness testimony, but abandoned after the choppers found steel reinforcing bars! And crematorium chimneys which are apparently not even connected in anyway to the crematorium furnaces.

Geiger is a strange type; he does not stand very close to the razor blades, it seems, but he is a dedicated, professional photographer who knows what he is doing.⁵²³

6.2.14.  Secondly Irving had met a then friend, historian Professor Bernd Martin, on 4 September 1990.

He [Martin] has visited Auschwitz three times, says that Piper, Archivleiter [head of the archive], confirmed to himt hat [Sic] the Gaskammer [gas chamber] shown in Auschwitz I was built after the war for tourists to see, the “real” ones are in Birkenau. Logical questions were apparently not asked.⁵²⁴

6.2.15.  In notes made on the same afternoon Irving also recorded that Martin had told him that ‘there were never any gassings in Auschwitz I, where there were not many Jews. The gassings were all in Birkenau (which he however did not visit).’⁵²⁵ Irving promptly published this statement of Martin’s in the newspaper CODE as an extra piece of proof that there had been no gassings in Auschwitz.⁵²⁶ Martin demanded his right of reply and a reader’s letter was duly published explaining that the fact that the gas chamber in the Auschwitz main camp had been ‘partially reconstructed’ [‘teilweise rekonstruiert’] in no way negated what had happened in Auschwitz and that he had repeatedly told Irving to visit Auschwitz himself instead of relying on ‘rumours’ [‘Gerüchte’] to minimise the Holocaust. Martin added that in their conversation Irving himself had ‘admitted the fact of the extermination.’ [‘…hat Herr Irving selbst die Tatsache der Vernichtung zugestanden.’]⁵²⁷ Irving wrote to Martin to correct him. ‘…readers might think I admitted the Menschenvernichtung [human extermination] in Auschwitz, and this I certainly do not….⁵²⁸‘

6.2.16.  Hajo Hermann wrote to Irving on 21 January 1992

As you have said during other occasions, you did not hear Piper’s dummies from his own mouth, rather through Prof. Martin. On the assumption that Prof. Martin heard correctly Piper’s statement in court would have the same effect as a middle-sized atom bomb.

6.2.17.  Herrmann advised that Irving approach Piper, perhaps pressuring him with his statement to Martin, as a request from a lawyer might alarm Piper.⁵²⁹ A few days later Irving was informed by Hans-Rudolf von der Heide,⁵³⁰ who knew the director of the Institute for Forensic Research in Cracow, who in turn had ‘close contacts’ with Piper, that Piper would be unlikely to come to Munich ‘since he finds himself under severe pressure from Polish/Jewish authorities, for obvious reasons.’ Nevertheless Irving’s correspondent went on ‘My friend suggest[s] that you should at any rate make sure that both Frantisczek Piper and Dr. Markiewicz are summoned to appear, if only for tactical reasons.’ ⁵³¹

6.2.18.  Irving contacted Herrmann saying ‘He [Piper] has told various people including Mr. Prof. Dr. Bernd Martin, that the “gas chamber” shown to the tourists is a post-war dummy – precisely what I established in the Löwenbräukeller on 21.4. 1990.’⁵³² Hans-Robert von der Heide was in turn contacted by Hajo Herrmann and Heide again addressed himself to Irving on 28 February, suggesting Irving make an approach to a Dr. Dragquan [of the Polish Historical Society, Connecticut, spelt ‘Dragon’ by Heide] who had told von der Heide that ‘he entertains friendly relations with both Piper and Markiewicz, and he would try to persuade the two gentlemen to come to Germany.’ Heide continued

…he [Herrmann] came up with a fine idea. He said, rather than officially summoning the two persons from his office – which would most likely be ignored – somebody should suggest to Piper and Markiewicz to come to Germany as tourists or for some other “inoffensive” reason. Once these gentlemen are in the country, he could send them a summons to appear and they would have to comply. This might provide them with a perfect excuse for their “friends” in Poland who we suspect are not very keen about the idea of these men testifying before the Munich court.

It might therefore be helpful to contact Dr. Dragon again and tell him about Herrmann’s proposal. Another possibility would be to ask Tjuda Rudolph to write to Piper, but as far as I am concerned it is always better to travel on two tracks at the same time….⁵³³

6.2.19.  Heide finished off ‘I do not know Dr. Dragon personally, but I understand Ernst Zündel does.’⁵³⁴

6.2.20.  Despite Piper’s refusal, Irving then made increasingly frantic efforts to persuade Piper to appear on his behalf.⁵³⁵ The aim of the exercise was laid out in a letter from Irving to Dr. Klaus Goebel on 23 April 1992.

Today I sent Mr. Dr. Piper (who is of Jewish decent, to be precise an old communist) the following fax:

[followed by details of Irvings letter to Piper of 15 April 1992]

It is clear to me that Mr. Piper will not appear. I intend, if you or to be precise Mr. Dr. Herrmann have nothing against it, to make capital. At a press conference to take place in Munich on 4 May I will distribute copies of the correspondence. The court will also be presented with the letters.

After three or four days (i.e. something like 27 April), I will then pose this question to Piper in writing:

After ignoring my written invitation, please allow me that I pose you at least one question in writing, that I would have otherwise asked you in the witness stand. Question: is it correct that in your position as the head of the Auschwitz state archive and museum you make no secret of the fact to many visitors and scholars that the ‘gas chamber’ in the Auschwitz main camp [Stammlager Auschwitz I] is a dummy that was built by the Polish authorities after the war [?] And is it correct that amongst others you told this to your friend Mr. Prof. Dr, Bernd Martin…as Mr. Prof. Martin confirmed to me on 4 Sept.?

What do you think?⁵³⁶

6.2.21.  Dr. Goebel had no problems with Irving’s plan, merely adding that Irving should let it be known that he would make an application in court to hear him.⁵³⁷ To Ewald Althans, Irving wrote: ‘In my press release I will announce that F[ranciszek] P[iper] will be invited. When he cancels I will give the reason that he must be scared to tell the truth in this point on German soil, because he would also make himself punishable.’⁵³⁸

6.2.22.  This attempt to call Martin and Piper lay at the root of Irving’s later somewhat inconsistent attempts to defend himself against his detractors and to partially rehabilitate himself.⁵³⁹ Ample evidence has been cited already (see above) that Irving repeatedly claimed that the gas chambers in Auschwitz were fakes . Especially following his later expulsion from Germany Irving piously claimed that he had only asserted that the gas chamber in the Auschwitz main camp was a fake .⁵⁴⁰

6.2.23.  A room was booked for the press conference through Ewald Althans’s AVÖ for 4 May 1992. Althans wrote to Irving: ‘VERY IMPORTANT MESSAGE…the enclosed press release was sent by us to all the influential organs IN GERMANY. The hall has been contractually secured according to your wishes….The “staff” asked for are naturally available.’⁵⁴¹ Althans enclosed the invitation to the press conference ‘where he [Irving] will explain to you his tactic and motives.’⁵⁴² It also quoted Irving’s words of 21 April 1990: ‘” The gas chambers in Auschwitz are dummies” and mentioned Irving’s invitation to Piper.⁵⁴³ The invitation finished in bold ‘DAVID IRVING DOES NOT DEFEND HIMSELF- DAVID IRVING ATTACKS: AS HISTORIAN SWORN TO THE MOTTO: “TRUTH FREES!”‘⁵⁴⁴

6.2.24.  Irving produced his own press release, which was more measured in its language.⁵⁴⁵ On the day of the trial Ewald Althans and the AVÖ continued their publicity. In a newspaper format, the Munchen Aktuell [imprint Deutsches Jugendbildungswerk] announced the trial under the heading ‘STATE GUARENTEED EVENT with DAVID IRVING[.] Topic: “THE AUSCHWITZ GAS CHAMBERS ARE DUMMIES”.⁵⁴⁶ The article ran

‘But he will not come as the accused, appear humbled in front of the conventions of the justice of the Federal Republic – he comes as the accuser himself, as attacker with a suitcase full of new evidence to support his thesis that he expressed in the words: “THE GAS CHAMBERS IN AUSCHWITZ ARE DUMMIES”.’⁵⁴⁷

6.2.25.  Irving’s strategy was obviously two-pronged. Although eager to capitalize on the appeal trial (he did indeed set up his books to prove that he was not a nobody⁵⁴⁸ ) he was equally eager to try and distance himself from more extreme individuals. This involved executing a precarious balancing act between his reputation and the practicalities of his case on the one hand, and his own wishes and those of his political allies on the other.⁵⁴⁹

6.2.26.  Before travelling to America he wrote to Hajo Herrmann ‘As you know I hope that you manage to invite Dr. Piper of the Auschwitz museum, but I also wish to do without “right-wing” witnesses.’⁵⁵⁰ Irving wrote to Karl Philipp that ‘I fundamentally do not want it to come to rallies with this date, however I wish to make as much capital as possible with the press out of my appearance. Therefore let’s think what we could do to this end.’⁵⁵¹ To Hajo Hermann he wrote that he wished to do without Karl Philipp as a witness ‘this for your confidential information’ and announced his intention to bring his ‘collected works in various translations, unload them on the table as silent witnesses to the fact that I’m not anybody, and that I enjoy a high reputation in the outside world (that means in the free outside world).’⁵⁵² Nevertheless Irving enjoyed the explicit help of Ewald Althans and Karl Philipp, and the trial was given prominence by Ernst Zündel.⁵⁵³ Moreover the trial’s nature is characterised by the presence in the courtroom of Leuchter disciple Germar Rudolf, at Irving’s agreement.⁵⁵⁴ Germar Rudolf was in court to testify, but the application to hear him was refused.⁵⁵⁵

6.2.27.  Secondly Irving himself had tried to tactically and rhetorically retreat to a position that he had only said that one of the gas chambers (i.e. in the Auschwitz main camp) was a ‘dummy’ and not all of them.⁵⁵⁶ If the court had allowed Martin, and more importantly Piper, to give testimony, they would have been able, according to Irving, to confirm that the gas chamber shown to the tourists in Auschwitz was a post-war dummy [‘Attrappe’]

…namely exactly that which I have been accused of in the prosecution demand, why I am standing before you. This admission was made in front of many credible witnesses, although with the comment that the “real gas chambers” were to be found somewhere completely different in the camp. (Which naturally allows the logical question to appear legitimate, why build a dummy here when the “real” ones can be seen there next door.⁵⁵⁷

6.2.28.  This was a retreat doomed to failure because it was a lie.⁵⁵⁸ But even this tactical retreat was not as clear cut as it would have seemed. In his closing speech Irving stated:

I had hoped that you would seize the opportunity, Mr. Judge, to take up cudgels for the German people.

Because a blood lie has been pronounced on the German people for fifty years by the enemies of the German people, beginning with the original English propaganda lie, that we ourselves put in circulation in November 1942 against the German Reich.⁵⁵⁹

6.2.29.  All this, Irving’s claim to speak as a friend of the German people’ [‘Freund des deutschen Volkes.’], his self-attributed authority, and his claim that the trial was slightly reminiscent of a show trial, all failed to impress the court.⁵⁶⁰ Irving’s fine was increased to DM 10,000, because at the original meeting of 21 April 1990 ‘…the plaintiff in particular held view that Jews were never gassed in Auschwitz.’⁵⁶¹ The judgement continued that ‘Whoever denies the murder of the Jews in the Third Reich, and the accused consciously did that, as he acknowledged in the main trial [Hauptverhandlung], defames every Jew…’, and further that this denial was a ‘smear’ [‘Verunglimpfung’] on those Jews murdered.⁵⁶²

6.2.30.  In handing down punishment it was in Irving’s favour that he had admitted the ‘outward course of events’ [äußeren Ablauf’], but, pointing to the exhibiting of Irving’s books in the court room, that it weighed against him that he ‘also negates the National Socialist atrocities denied by the so-called revisionists to market his own works.’⁵⁶³

6.2.31.  The court was perceptive in identifying this mixture of denial and marketing. Irving’s closing speech was in due course recorded and marketed by Althans ‘which we will now use as a propaganda tool.’⁵⁶⁴

6.2.32.  In a later trial the court again rejected Irving’s appeal and raised his fine to DM 30,000.⁵⁶⁵

6.2.33.  On the 30 November 1993, Irving’s higher appeal application was heard by the Bavaria’s highest state court [Bayerischen Obersten Landesgericht], who confirmed the judgement of 13 January 1993.⁵⁶⁶ Irving received the decision in December 1993 calling judge Huber ‘senile’ and ‘alcoholic’.⁵⁶⁷

6.3 The speaking bans [Redeverbot] of 9 September 1992, 9 December 1992, and Irving’s ultimate exclusion from Germany.

6.3.1  Irving had been the subject of an exclusion order since 9 March 1991, handed down by the Ministry of the Interior. The exclusion order had been issued in view of Irving’s reputation as a right-wing extremist writer and historian, and was repeatedly renewed, for instance in February 1994.⁵⁶⁸ Although the order repeatedly gave Irving cause for thought when entering Germany, it proved ineffectual once he was in Germany.⁵⁶⁹ As the German authorities had to admit: ‘The Federal Minister of the Interior had already instructed the frontier control authorities in March 1990 to send back Irving when attempting to enter the Federal Republic. In practice, however, this can only be done in an imperfect manner, since the frontiers between EC countries are wide open.’⁵⁷⁰

6.3.2  On 11 September 1992 Irving was to have spoken to a branch of the Bavarian NPD in Munich on ‘What is in the Goebbels’s Diaries’⁵⁷¹ In light of previous experience’ [‘bisherigen Erfahrungen’] the authorities responsible for foreigners [Ausländerbehörde] handed Irving a speaking ban.⁵⁷² What was to have graver effects for Irving was that on the same day Irving was written a letter announcing that his exemption from meeting the requirement for a residence permit for short periods of residency had been withdrawn [‘die Befreiung vom Erfodernis der Aufenthaltsgenehmigung für Kurzaufenthalte zu entziehen.’].⁵⁷³ In other words Irving was no longer covered by the normal exemption for fellow members of the EU from having to possess a residence permit for short stays in Germany. In December the Munich authorities widened Irving’s speaking ban to include mentioning a number of specific themes at any future meeting in the Federal Republic.⁵⁷⁴

6.3.3  On 9 November 1993, the anniversary of the so-called ‘Reichskristallnacht,’ Irving arrived in Munich to start a tour arranged by Stephan Wiesel.⁵⁷⁵ Irving was expelled from Germany after it became known that he intended to take part in meetings on the 55th anniversary of Crystal Night. That same afternoon Irving was handed an indefinite residence ban [unbefristetes Aufenthaltsverbot] as an unwanted foreigner by officers of the Bavarian security police [Sicherheitspolizei] whilst Irving sat in the Café Mövenpick.⁵⁷⁶

6.3.4  Irving was requested to leave Germany by 10 November 1993 and applied the ban nationwide.⁵⁷⁷ By choosing to leave Germany that same day Irving was spared the ignominy of being deported.

6.3.5  The 33-page explanation of Irving’s expulsion is worth quoting at some length, especially in view of Professor Deborah Lipstadt’s claim that ‘Irving is one of the most dangerous spokespersons for Holocaust denial.’⁵⁷⁸

6.3.6  After having pointed out that Irving’s thesis followed the example set in the works of Fred Leuchter, Ernst Zündel, and Robert Faurisson,⁵⁷⁹ the authorities cited what had been established in previous trials involving Irving as defendant or plaintiff.

The court saw it as proven that it was only superficial intention of yours to paint a picture of history which deviated from the established research. In fact your intention was to deny the systematic mass murder of the Jewish population. This thesis undoubtedly insults the victims of National Socialism. In addition you met with wide approval, especially in right-wing extremist, neo-Nazi, and revisionist circles, or circles close to them. For a number of years increasingly right-wing extremist and xenophobic attitudes have been ascertainable in precisely these circles.

This opinion of the court is based on the one hand on the widespread effect of you opinion. The court considered it as proven that particularly neo-Nazi and revisionist groups endorse your theses and made use of your thoughts. On the other hand the judgement considered your lack of understanding. Even after the reporting of an offence [Strafanzeige] had been raised you persistently publicly represented your theses.⁵⁸⁰ […] In the meantime [since summer 1990] you have become very famous. Your mere presence is enough to inflame moods. […] That you yourself are not amongst the active members of right-wing extremist groups is insignificant. Decisive is that these groups use your thoughts, are strengthened by your theses, and enhance them.

Your personal responsibility is that you use events of right-wing extremist circles as a supposed historian for your publications and thereby are at least aware of the consequences of your actions.

Your conduct represents an endangerment of the inner security of the Federal Republic of Germany in the widest sense and in addition inflicts considerable damage on the external reputation of the German state.

Your interpretation and expression of the thesis given under point I.1 is suited to endanger the peaceful co-existence of Germans and foreigners. They are considered the truth by a small but radical part of the population and ultimately motivate violence and racial hatred.⁵⁸¹ […]

Although the largest part of the German population distances itself from such attacks [the judgement cited the murders and violent attacks on foreigners in Rostock, Hoyerswerda, Hünxe, Mölln, and Solingen] the most recent developments show the existence of grass-roots right-wing extremist motivated culprits who are willing to use violence. Precisely this circle of people is receptive to revisionist thoughts and feel themselves confirmed in their political opinions whereby they express their opinions with violence.⁵⁸²

6.3.7  These developments entailed an endangerment of the public safety and order, the danger of a further escalation of violence, and posed a threat to Germany’s economy and reputation. It was in turn considered that Irving contributed to these threats.⁵⁸³

The interest of revisionist, right-wing extremist and Nazi groups in your participation in future events remains undiminished. […] Added to this is that, in view of your previous reputation in right-wing extremist circles, already your mere attendance at political events suitable to harm the interests of the general public, as stated above.⁵⁸⁴

6.4 Further appeals.

6.4.1  Irving was initially optimistic about his chances of overturning the expulsion. To his lawyer, Irving wrote ‘Anyway I don’t intend to appear in the FRG before the middle of next year, therefore it has time. As a first step I will enter into a working relationship with a German firm, so that I can demonstrate a reason for being in the FRG.’⁵⁸⁵ On 30 December 1993 Irving wrote to Mainz lawyer, Dr. K A R Schütz:

Two ideas of mine: (a). I am in a working relationship with a small north German publishers, as has been recently confirmed in writing. (b) what if I stand for a seat in the European Parliament, perhaps as a NPD candidate? Would one administer a residency ban? Merely an idea.⁵⁸⁶

6.4.2  But all further appeals in Germany against his fine and his expulsion were rejected out of hand, or the courts found against him.⁵⁸⁷ They all pronounced along similar lines that the FRG had a right and a duty to protect itself from the extremist political efforts of the likes of Irving.

The Federal Republic of Germany must not become a playground for right-wing extremist authors. There is no demand for psuedo-scientific denials of the Holocaust that however have the aim of reaching a justification of the NS dictatorship.⁵⁸⁸

6.4.3  In the meantime an appeal to the European Commission of Human Rights, prepared with Zündel was likewise declared inadmissible.⁵⁸⁹

The public interests in the prevention of crime and disorder in the German population due to insulting behaviour against Jews, and similar offences, and the requirements of protecting their reputation and rights, outweigh, in a democratic society, the applicant’s freedom to impart publications denying the existence of the gassing of Jews under the Nazi regime…⁵⁹⁰

7. The containment of David Irving’s activities and his shrinking influence since 1993/1994, but ongoing identification with Holocaust denial.

7.1  No sooner back in England after his expulsion, than Irving began to think of ways to make good the effects of the ban. ‘Karl Philipp phoned twice, from Tony’s and from Gatwick. I suggest I video a speech in German, for distribution. A great idea, he agrees. Working title “Ich komme Wieder.” [“I’ll be back”].’⁵⁹¹

7.2  On 23 November 1993 Irving wrote to Hajo Hermann

‘…in my absence my voice will continue to do service, i.e. I will produce a fairly open video recording in my own Focal Point publishing house with the title I’LL BE BACK, analogous to the video I distributed in Australia (incidentally completely legal). One has to be careful in the FRG because I don’t want in any way to be accused of infringing whatever laws. I intend therefore to supply the videos with something like the following “health warning”:

This video film was filmed and produced in England in accordance with the laws prevailing there. Distribution takes place only for aims of scholarly research. Neither Focal Point publishers or Mr. Irving are responsible for the further distribution inside the FRG or for possible consequences resulting.

Do you have any comments or changes to suggest for this small text? The preventative nature of the text should be clear to you. ⁵⁹²

7.3  Irving did of course concern himself with the distribution in Germany, namely through the AVÖ. Two days earlier he had written to the AVÖ’s Stephan Wiesel

In the coming weeks I will produce a video presentation for Germany with the title “I’LL BE BACK”. You could make good money out of it. I’ll send you the advertising for it in the next few days. The film will be supplied from England to avoid problems with our traditional enemies.⁵⁹³

7.4  The slickly produced self-promotional video is an interesting document, and a thermometer of Irving’s views and resentments following his expulsion.⁵⁹⁴

7.5  The video, which included ’s catch phrase ‘I can do without Germany, but can Germany do without me?'[‘Ich kann auf Deutschland verzichten, aber kann Deutschland auf mich verzichten?’], included a detailed explanation of the Leuchter Report, Irving adding his own evidence that no gassings had taken place in Auschwitz, and that Auschwitz had been ‘wrapped in a sort of conspiratorial plot against the truth’ since the end of the war.’⁵⁹⁵

7.6  Despite claiming to see his expulsion as ‘the peak of my success’ [‘der Gipfel meines Erfolgs’] and that it proved that no one was in a position to refute him, Irving’s pique with the German judicial system was given free reign.

German justice has always been a special case since the beginning of the century, and it really has not changed at all. In the Weimar Republic, in the Third Reich, also in the Federal Republic, the jurists clap their heels together and say “yes sir”. Nothing has changed only that they don’t need to wear armbands anymore.⁵⁹⁶

7.7  He described the judicial measures against revisionism as ‘a terror of opinions in Germany, a police power without parallel.’

I can say that. If I say that as an expert in the history of the Third Reich then that can mean something ladies and gentlemen. As far as I am concerned one thing is absolutely clear and let it be established right now. During the Third Reich, during the Second World War countless masses of innocent people were murdered on both sides. The Jews were shot in their hundreds of thousands in the East, not only by the Germans, but by the Ukranians and Estonians and Letts and Lithuanians. […] But the death factories did not exist. And whoever claims that [the contrary] puts up a blood-lie against the German people.

7.8  Rather alarmingly, Irving not content with tastelessly comparing his fate and that of his fellow revisionists with that of the Jews under the Nazis, then called on his viewers to draw up lists of people who spread the ‘blood-lie’.

He must also somehow be called to account. To the viewers who are listening to my words, and who are looking at me in this moment, I call on you to write down the names of these people who go along with this blood-lie, this defamation of the German people. Write the names down because it can not continue for ever. One day the hour of revenge will come when we will avenge ourselves that we have been persecuted for years because we told the truth. And then there really must be compensation. A compensation not just for those who have made money for fifty years from their own supposed tragedy. A compensation for the simple school teachers, the lawyers and jurists and judges. The normal people who as patriotic German citizens wanted to establish and spread the truth about their own past and lost everything for it.⁵⁹⁷

7.9  At the time the ban had obviously taken Irving by surprise, and left him trying to tie up loose ends in Germany. On 21 November 1993 he wrote to Stephan Wiesel of the AVÖ’s Herzog-Heinrich Buchhandlung in which he had expressed the hope that Wiesel had been able to pick up ‘all the books etc.’ [‘die ganzen Bücher u.s.w.’] which Irving had left in ‘the Institute’ in Leonrodstraße ‘in time’ [‘rechtzeitig’].⁵⁹⁸ He wrote to Wiesel again in December reminding him of the books and asking him ‘Please ring me up – from a telephone box, so that the commune doesn’t listen in on every word! I’ll then ring you straight back.‘⁵⁹⁹

7.10  Irving’s ban on entering Germany had much wider recuperations for him in Germany and the world, than Irving had apparently anticipated. In May 1994 he wrote to Hajo Hermann that they had to take legal proceedings. ‘I can not even visit my publishers!’ More seriously ‘The German judgement against me has had the rather unexpectedly resulted in a blocking of the whole world to me.’⁶⁰⁰ In July 1994 he told Herrmann that the ban meant that ‘in the meantime all my business in the FRG are waning.’⁶⁰¹ In April 1995 Irving repeated the refrain. ‘No longer in the FRG for two years, all my business with German publishers etc. has come to a standstill because of this, I can’t even complain about my delivered manuscripts’⁶⁰² As late as 1997 the GfP expressed its sorrow that Irving was unable to attend their congress, but were pleased to accept Irving’s offer of a taped contribution ‘for example a general contribution to the situation of revisionism…’ [‘allgemeinen Beitrag-zur Lage des Revisionismus etwa…’].⁶⁰³

7.11  In 1995, under the pretence (see above) that he had been originally fined for claiming that only the gas chamber in the Auschwitz main camp was a dummy, Irving started a postcard campaign against the German authorities. As he explained to an American audience

…we’re fighting back. I have a mailing list of people around the world; now some 3,000 wise and intelligent people of every walk of life, to whom I correspond and to whom, after I’d read this French article, I sent 20,000 postcards for them to mail to the German authorities. 20,000 postcards. In English and in German. All pre-printed. All they had to do was to cut them out, stick a stamp on, add a few words of their own, and then mail them. The post card said, “I understand the French magazine has reported this fact, that what they show the tourists is fake.” In the original French the words are “Tu il est fau,” everything in it is fake. Everything in that gas chamber building is fake. Why is it then that your government fined British historian David Irving $22,000 for saying just that? Alternatively, is it now legal to say this in Germany? If it is legal then what is going to be done about the fine imposed on Mr. Irving? If it is still illegal to tell the truth like this in Germany, then what are you doing to punish the French magazine for publishing that fact, because it was also sold in Germany?”⁶⁰⁴

7.12  Irving exhorted his correspondents to send the postcards to foreign representatives of German newspapers in their own country, to German travel agents, to church dignitaries, and local German authorities.

“Because my postcard isn’t just going to be read by you and the man you’re mailing it to. It’s going to be read by his secretary too. It’s going to be read by the mail carrier. It’s going to be read by the FBI at this end. It’s going to be read by the German FBI at the other end, or wherever in the world it is. Everyone’s going to be asking questions about it.”⁶⁰⁵

7.13  Despite Irving’s claim that ‘This postcard campaign has caused immense damage around the world to the Holocaust legend’, in the last four to five years Irving’s public presence in Germany has shrunk to a bare minimum.⁶⁰⁶ He is still considered by the OPC as a leading revisionist, but as his ban on entering Germany has led to a growing public neglect of him, although his remaining reputation amongst supporters is undiminished.

7.14  His former main-stream publishers have ended their co-operation or are in conflict with him, although a small number of right-wing oriented publishers continue to distribute taped interviews and speeches.

7.15  So the 1994 Hamburg VSB merely stated that Irving was considered a contact person of the neo-Nazi circle around Ernst Zündel and was one of the authors of the extremist Arndt-Verlag. There was a court order to imprison him because he had not paid his fine.⁶⁰⁷ In 1995 he is again recorded as an author of the extremist Arndt-Verlag and as a member of the international revisionist campaign.⁶⁰⁸ In 1996 he was listed as one of the authors of the extremist Arndt-Verlag and of the extremist Verlagsgesellschaft Berg. In 1997 he is just named as an international active revisionist without further differentiation.

8. Conclusion.

8.1  According to the standards of the OPC and the social sciences extremism represents thoughts, beliefs, and attitudes that systematically attack the civil and public order [freiheitlich demokratische Grundordnung]. RWE involves an extreme, ethnocentric, and racist (or in the German sense völkisch) nationalism combined with a hatred of minorities and foreigners.

8.2  The DVU is a mainstay of RWE in the German political landscape. The party is extremist, anti-Semitic, and propagates racial hatred. From 1982 to 1992 Irving was a partner in an sustained political alliance with the DVU and its leader Gerhard Frey. Albeit not a member of the DVU Irving enjoyed a position of political prominence within the party. With his lecture tours and ‘star’ status at the DVU’s annual rallies, Irving not only publicly identified himself with the main aims of the party, but actively propagated them. In the process he first became indicted as a right-wing extremist in Germany.

8.3  Following his conversion to ‘hard’ revisionism with the Leuchter Report in 1988, Irving charted a course still further to the right. From this date Irving, alongside Zündel, can be considered international radical-revisionism’s most active and prominent exponent in Germany. This movement, and Irving as its ideologue, propagated ideas that played an important part in the third wave of RWE. Denial of the Holocaust became part of the standard political repertoire of neo-Nazi organisations. In turn the politics of neo-Nazism in Germany since the late 1980s has exhibited a profoundly alarming tendency to either condone ‘spontaneous’ acts of violence against the objects of its resentments or even to politically organise that violence.

8.4  Irving was not merely increasingly willing to appear on platforms of the radicalised NPD, but he entered into a methodical political alliance with neo-Nazi circles and organisations around Michael Kühnen and his political heirs. For example Irving’s political co-operation with Christian Worch and Ewald Althans was reciprocal and fruitful. Some of these organisations were banned in the same year in which Irving co-operated with them, for example the banning of NO at the end of 1992.

8.5  Any unease Irving felt in this alliance was not due to principled democratic or liberal political scruples. Irving’s worries were pedestrian. His prime concern was the ‘optical’ damage incurred by any public association with persons such as Remer or Kühnen. Irving’s self-propagated ‘independence’ (‘an Englishman fights for the honour of the Germans’) and his clean image were valuable and marketable political assets, cultivated and exploited by himself and his neo-Nazi allies.

8.6  Eager to maintain the rags of this ‘independent’ reputation, Irving sought to hygienically distance himself from individuals like Kühnen. In practice this sanitary divide was non-existent. The indigestible elements of neo-Nazism (and for that matter radical revisionism) for Irving was the sometimes lunatic packaging, not the political content per se. Although eager to distance himself from the excesses, in deed Irving committed himself wholeheartedly to the cause of revisionism and thus neo-Nazism in Germany. Any frictions in this alliance came down to personal rivalries and Irving’s intolerance of sloppy organisation.

8.7  We would mistake the agency in this alliance were we to believe Irving’s argument that he was somehow the political innocent in this process, forced onto a neo-Nazi platform by academic refusal to allow him a reputable forum and exploited by forces more calculating than he. The alliance accorded wholly with Irving’s political tastes. Far from performing a passive function in the RWE scene in Germany Irving, like the message of denial he preached, was a catalyst. His person and his ideology were vital to the political ‘effectiveness’ of RWE in Germany.

8.8  Finally, Irving is author of his own misfortunes. By denying the Holocaust he wilfully and persistently violated the criminal law in Germany. His unconditional expulsion in late 1993 indicated the authorities’ unwillingness to further tolerate his use of Germany as a ‘playground’ for his right-wing extremism.

8.9  In reaching this conclusion, I have understood that my overriding duty is to the Court. My paramount obligation, as I have been advised by my Instructing Solicitors, is to assist the Court on all matters within my expertise regardless of whom my instructions are from and who is paying my fees. I confirm that this report is impartial, objective and unbiased and has been produced independently of the exigencies of this litigation. I believe that the facts I have stated in this report are true and that the opinions I have expressed are correct.

Signed……………………………………………. Date……………………………………………….