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Subject: David Irving interview: 2BL Transcript
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Archive/File: pub/people/i/irving.david/2gb-transcript.0795
Last-Modified: 1995/09/18
Source: Media Monitors
Transcription: Ken McVay (kmcvay@nizkor.org)

                   MEDIA MONITORS
                BROADCAST TRANSCRIPT

STATION: 2GB	DATE: 27/07/95		TIME: 0930
PROGRAM: RON CASEY
ITEM: (S36962003) INTV: DAVID IRVING, BRITISH HISTORIAN

RON CASEY:
David Irving in London is on the line and I first of all want
to ask him was he kicked out of Canada and Germany because of
his controversial views or because of some technicality
regarding the law. Good morning, Mr. Irving.

DAVID IRVING:
Good morning. It's just after midnight here. The answer to
your question is it's a pretext every time. They fish up some
kind of pretext. It is my views that they are trying to
suppress.

CASEY:
I want to get to that point but why did they ban you or why
were you, in the terms of today's newspaper, thrown out of
Germany and Canada? What was the legal reason for it?

IRVING:
In Germany I was convicted in 1993, in January, of having
said, at a public meeting, that the gas chamber at the
Auschwitz concentration camp, which is shown to tourists is,
in fact, a fabrication, a fake.

The Auschwitz authorities have now admitted that what I said
was right that, in fact, that gas chamber was built by the
Polish communists in 1948 but this hasn't stopped the German
Government from fining me 30,000 deutschmarks, which is about
25,000 Australian dollars, for making that remark.

Being convicted in Germany means the German Government can ban
me from German soil, which is what they did so it's a chain
reaction.

CASEY:
What about Canada?

IRVING:
In Canada it was a very technical business. The Jewish
community in Canada objected to the fact that I was about to
embark on a lecture tour of Canada in November 1992 and they
tried to get the Canadian Government to ban my entry but the
Canadian Government pointed out that I'd been to Canada 50
times before without any trouble and I'd not broken any laws
so they couldn't really keep me out.

When I went to Canada, nevertheless, I was arrested at the end
of making a speech on freedom of speech in Victoria, British
Columbia and after a two week court battle which started in
British Columbia and ended in Ontario, I attempted to leave
Canada voluntarily, going into the United States, where I have
a permanent visa but, for some reason, I was denied entry into
the United States.

It now turns out that my opponents in Canada had put fake
information about me on the American immigration computer.
These are the kinds of tricks that they use.

CASEY:
What about the alleged breaking of laws or your criminal
record that's making your entry to Australia difficult with
our immigration department? There's a court case currently
under way regarding that.

IRVING:
This is the criminal record.

CASEY:
This is the criminal record that you spoke in Germany in 1993
that there was no death camp.

IRVING:
That's right. I expressed the opinion, as a historian of some
repute, that what they show the tourists in Auschwitz is a
fake. Two years later, the Auschwitz authorities, the people
who run the state museum there, have finally come clean and
admitted it is a fake.

What they show the trourists was built by the Polish
Communists in 1948, three years after the war was over. I'm
not talking about the rest of the camp. I'm talking about what
they show the tourists now.

CASEY:
Let's come back to the other point. What about the other
details, the other alleged criminal record that you have? Is
there any falsification of information that you've supplied to
immigration departments anywhere?

IRVING:
No. I am as baffled as you are and probably as the judge in
Perth is. I think that every time that I defeat the Australian
- I defeated the Australian Government, of course, a year ago
in the Federal Court and the Australian Government immediately
changed the law in order to make it still possible to keep me
out. It makes me wonder who is calling the tune in Australia.

CASEY:
Let me ask you, Mr. Irving, if you came to Australia and you
did have a lecture tour, would you be willing to debate your
theories regarding the Holocaust with leading people from the
Jewish community here in Australia?

IRVING:
If it could be done peacefully.

CASEY:
Say a television debate.

IRVING:
Not quite that. I've never written a book or a newspaper
article about the Holocaust. I'm an expert on Hitler and the
Third Reich so people ask my opinion about it sometimes but
I've never written about it. I've got no axe to grind
anywhere.

CASEY:
If you haven't written about it why do you evoke so much
aggression from the Jewish community?

IRVING:
I think it's probably because I do speak with some authority.
I am very well known as a historian. I've written 30 books
which are in most of the libraries. I do my work in the
archives like any respectable historian should and my views do
attract a certain amount of attention. They do hold water and
I think this is why they pay attention to me where they don't
pay attention to the extreme neo-Nazi rabble.

CASEY:
Which of your books is the one that seems to offend most? Is
it 'Hitler's War'?

IRVING:
I think my Hitler biography has upset them because I did
attempt to be as objective as I could about that man and I
think it's the [no further text this page. knm]

CASEY:
You have published a book on Churchill's war and in that you
question his role and his place in history as a great
statesman.

IRVING:
I think there's no denying the fact that Churchill was a great
man, he was a man of considerable presence and character and
he was a magnificent speaker and a wonderful writer. It [sic]
think it was a great tragedy for Britain that he became Prime
Minister in 1940 because I think he took the wrong turning
with Britain and the British Empire.

I think that if he'd taken a differeint turning in 1940 that
the world would have been spared a lot of suffering and would
also, incidentally, have been spared what is now called the
Holocaust.

CASEY:
What would that turn have been? To sign a peace with Germany?

IRVING:
If we had accepted the very generous peace offer that the
Germans made to us in 1940, as a lot of British historians are
now coming to agree - the younger generation of British
historians are coming round to agree that David Irving isn't
all that wrong with his - as you said I published the book in
1987 in Australia and the others are now gradually coming
round to my point of view.

CASEY:
You just a moment ago, something that interests me very much.
You said it would have avoided the Holocaust.

IRVING:
Whatever it was, yes.

CASEY:
No, no, but by your own words, you said there was a Holocaust.

IRVING:
You're the one who said I said that.

CASEY:
I just heard you.

IRVING:
You said that I denied it. I've denied that there was a
Holocaust. I don't like using that word. I don't like talking
about The Holocaust as though there was only one Holocaust,
it's just that I get a bit unhappy about the fact that the
Jewish community have tried to make a monopoly of their own
suffering.

They are the ones who make the money out of misery whereas the
Australians who suffered in the Japanese prison camps haven't
made a bent nickel out of their suffering. And I tend to be
even-handed, if I can.

CASEY:
What is your estimate of the number of Jews who died at the
hands of Hitler's regime in the war years? What number - and I
don't like using this word - what number would you concede
were killed in concentration camps?

IRVING:
I think, like any scientist, I'd have to give you a range of
figures and I'd have to say a minimum of one million, which is
a monstrous crime, and a maximum of about four million,
depending on what you mean by killed. If putting people into a
concentration camps where they die of barbarity and typhus and
epidemics is killing then I would say the four million figure
because, undoubtedly, huge numbers did die in the camps in the
conditions that were very evident at the end of the war.

CASEY:
I'm finding this more and more surprising as we go along, Mr.
Irving.

IRVING:
Yes.

CASEY:
No, hold on. Because I've always been told that you deny the
Holocaust, you deny the persecution of the Jews to the extent
to which the Jewish community would have us believe but here
you have just now admitted that you would go to a high figure
of four million.

That, to me, is a huge number of people and it vindicates the
claim of a Holocaust but you say that there could have been up
to four million. That doesn't sound to me as though you're
trying to deny it. You've just said four million.

IRVING:
There's been a lot of hard lying about me ever since this
unfortunate business began. People have tended to do a lot of
lying and they've tried to smear my character and it's very
difficult at a range of 12,000 miles to keep my end up in this
particular ugly campaign and I'm very grateful to you for
allowing me to speak, in fact.

CASEY:
It just surprises me that there is so much antagonism towards
your proposed visit to Australia and yet here, on this
programme, you've just admitted that the Holocaust could have
taken four million lives.

It's like your guilty or you're not guilty, you're pregnant.
You can't be a little bit pregnant, you've got to be pregnant
or not pregnant. What you've said to me now is that you would
as high as four million then all the Jews have said about the
Holocaust is true and, indeed, that's a horrible figure but
I've never heard it said that David Irving would agree to four
million people being killed in the Holocaust. That, to me, for
you to say it, is quite amazing.

RVING:
It depends on definitions. It depends on what we mean by that
ugly word Holocaust and I think that the Jewish community were
very clever in inventing that word round about 1970,
incidentally. They've invented the word but they refuse to
define what they mean by it.

If you include everybody who died by whatever means, then you
could probably go as high as four million but an awful lot of
people died in World War Two, about twenty or thirty millions
Russians and quite a lot of English people and not a few
Australians as well. It was limited just to the Jewish
community.

CASEY:
All right, good to talk to you, Mr. Irving. Thank you for
setting the record straight once again, and this is the bottom
line with this interview, if the court rules that you can come
to Australia, you are quite willing to appear to debate, to
discuss, perhaps, is a better word, your theories regarding
the Holocaust, your theories regarding the persecution of the
Jews and the deaths of Jews in concentration camps in World
War Two, you'd be quite willing to discuss that publicly on
television with leaders of the Jewish community.

IRVING:
You've got my word for it.

CASEY:
All right. Thanks David Irving in London. Thank you for your
time, sir.

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