Archive/File: people/i/irving.david/libel.suit/transcripts/day007.16 Last-Modified: 2000/07/20 MR JUSTICE GRAY: The difficulty that I see is I have all those articles and I do not want to plough through them particularly, and I would have no problem, unless Mr Irving tells me he does not like this idea, in your sidelining, or somebody on your team, the passages on which you rely. The problem arises because, as I understand Mr Irving, he says that in a number of the statements you rely on he has been taken out of context. MR RAMPTON: Then I will have to do it. MR JUSTICE GRAY: Well, heaven forbid, but that is right, Mr Irving, is it not? A. If it is relevant, my Lord, yes, then we ought to look at it, but I thought that the statement that I just made would have helped your Lordship, if I make a crystal clear . P-135 statement of denial there of an element of the Holocaust. MR JUSTICE GRAY: No, I had better just highlight it whilst I am thinking of it. Sorry. A. One could have operated with that statement in lieu of looking at all the passages. MR JUSTICE GRAY: Yes, I think, well, I will not say that. I think it is up to Mr Rampton to decide what course he takes. MR RAMPTON: No. I am open to guidance, if not actually of being told what to do. I want to save time. At the same time I must make absolutely sure (a) that your Lordship has the relevant parts of the evidence and, quite frankly, I cannot ask you to sit down and read all these transcripts; (b) that Mr Irving is given a fair chance of dealing with what I shall say about his conduct in this regard at the end of the case. MR JUSTICE GRAY: My feeling is it probably can be dealt with without actually ploughing through the individual transcripts. You might want to take some what you would describe as prime examples. Beyond that, I think it may be down to me to read them. MR RAMPTON: I will do that. I will need help from my learned junior who is the master of these, if I can call her that, mistress, if you like, of these transcripts. A. I think they are very similar. It is always the same gramophone record. It may just be embedded in a different . P-136 amount of verbiage. MR RAMPTON: Could your Lordship and Mr Irving be provided, please, with file D2(i)? MR JUSTICE GRAY: I hope I have it. What I am going to try to do, my Lord, is to take what your Lordship calls a prime example from each year to start with and see how we get on. MR JUSTICE GRAY: That would be very helpful. MR RAMPTON: Could your Lordship and Mr Irving please turn to tab 4 in this file? This, Mr Irving, is a speech made in Toronto, I know not on what date, but in August, 13th August 1988. My Lord, this file has an index, not an index, a contents page, two contents pages, at the beginning from which one can see that tab 4 is an audio cassette marked "Toronto". But I do not know, therefore, what the audience was. I will ask Mr Irving. (To the witness): Could you tell us, please, Mr Irving, who the audience was on this date? A. Human beings. MR JUSTICE GRAY: That is not a conspicuously helpful answer? A. Well, my Lord, I have no idea who was in the audience, without wishing to be disrespectful. MR RAMPTON: Was it an event arranged by somebody else? A. Without looking at my diary, I cannot tell you who was there. Sometimes I spoke 150 times a year. Q. 40 to 50 -- who lives at Kentville? . P-137 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Mr & Mrs Weisner? A. Mr & Mrs Weisner, I think it was a private soiree in their home probably. MR RAMPTON: 255, I am reading from your diary for that day: "3.00 p.m. function, audience of 40 to 50, in stiflingly humid basement room, no air conditioning"? A. I remember and there was a colossal thunder storm that evening. Q. I do sympathise. Also there are some remarks about the gate of $350 and Ernst, that is Ernst Zundel's, book sales $600. Our book sales $180." Who is the "we" in "our"? Whose book is that? A. I think Mr Zundel bought a number of books off me as I sold books all around the world, and he runs a bookshop. So I divided it up between this bulk sale of books to him and bulk and books that we sold. That was myself and my assistant. Q. So in this stiflingly hot basement in August in Toronto, if you turn to page 6 ---- A. I think it was probably Ottawa rather than Toronto. Q. I cannot help about that. It has "Toronto" on the front. MR JUSTICE GRAY: Canada anyway? A. It was Ottawa. MR RAMPTON: It is Miss Rogers fault. I will scratch out "Toronto" and put -- sorry about that -- "Ottawa"? A. Manipulate the place back to Ottawa, shall we? . P-138 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Just negligence, I think. MR RAMPTON: We will sort this out later. It is just a waste of time. It does not matter. It is the words that matter. Whether it is an audience of 130 or an audience of 50, it is still quite a lot of people? A. Well, you asked me who the audience was and that is why you, obviously, attached importance to it. Q. Yes, I wondered what the occasion was. Some friends of Mr Zundel's who paid at the door to come in, is that right? A. No, it was the friends of the Weisners. Q. The Weisners? A. The Weisners who live in Ottawa, and they invited me to go and address their family and friends, basically. Q. Yes. Were these family and friends mostly German speakers? A. I am not anti-German. I dislike this kind of ethnic slur. Q. No, no, no, Mr Irving, nor am I. A. Anti-Germanism is as bad as anti-Semitism, I think. Q. That is a matter of opinion. Can you please turn to page 6 of this document? A. Page 6? Q. Yes. A. Yes. Q. There is a parenthetical note, (286). That must be some . P-139 kind of mark on the recording. You say this: "But just imagine the omelette on their faces", they are the orthodox historians, are they, or who? A. Well, probably like saying I like seeing egg on the historians' faces. The court may have gained that impression also over the last few days. Q. I would have to trace it a way back and I really ---- MR JUSTICE GRAY: Do not let us worry. MR RAMPTON: "Imagine the omelette on their faces if we managed to unmask the other six milliion lie". What do you mean by the words "the other 6 million lie"? "This is the prospect that is now opening up in front of me"? A. Oh, because the previous day I had been talking about Derstern spending $6 million on buying the Adolf Hitler diaries. Q. So this is what you call the Holocaust lie, is it not? A. Well, it is obviously a play on words between $6 million and 6 million people, yes. Q. But you frequently referred to what you might call the received view about Auschwitz and the Holocaust generally as a lie, have you not? A. I do not think you will find many occasions, Mr Rampton. This is not being spoken from a script. This is an extemporary talk to a group of fans and friends in the south. Q. And, rather like Heinreich Himmler -- I mean no offence by . P-140 that, but we looked at something this morning -- the more apt, I suggest, to portray your true inner thoughts than a carefully crafted script? MR JUSTICE GRAY: That is what he says in the next sentence. MR RAMPTON: "And I am glad, in fact, that we are such a small circle" -- indeed so, my Lord -- "today because I can talk, I think, in a small audience like this more frankly than I would in a large audience about what I am doing and what I am proposing to do. Because, of course, an historian who now stands up and says, 'I do not believe it happened' is putting his name on the line. He's risking his reputation and his career and his prospects and his profession". A. Precisely what we have seen over the last few years, of course. Q. "In Germany, of course, if you say it you're risking a jail sentence, because that particular lie has become a lie anchored in law and it is now a criminal offence to challenge that six million lie. And I think that alone is prove sufficient that there is not documentary evidence to back the lie up". A. Can I point to the word "challenge" rather than "deny"? "Challenge" implies you are looking at aspects of it. Q. Please do not be impatient, Mr Irving. The more time goes by, the more emphatic you become about this. A. No, these are quite important points -- small though they . P-141 may seem. Q. "And I think that alone is proof sufficient that there is not documentary evidence to back the lie up. So they anchor it in law and this is one particular reason why I am even keener to demolish the lie. Yet, to find myself speaking like this to you now, in August 1988, until would have astonished me", "until now", I do not know, "would have astonished me had I thought about it at the beginning of this year, because at the beginning of this year I was among the believers. You can find that if you look at a number of my books, the Adolf Hitler biography I wrote or a book that I wrote called 'von Guernica bis Vietnam'. A number of books I accept quite happily that Auschwitz existed and that Auschwitz did exist as an extermination camp, among other extermination camps. What I did write, which upset a lot of people in my Hitler biography, was", and then you go on about upsetting people by denying that Hitler knew anything about it. Then you say: "This was the kind of halfway house in my conversion". A. Yes, and then if I can just draw attention to three lines from the bottom: "... not the slightest evidence of Hitler knowing about Auschwitz, Auschwitz as we are now taught to regard it". When we are talking about Auschwitz, I was being quite specific there. "Auschwitz as we are now taught to regard it". That is what I am . P-142 trying to demolish. Q. I know exactly what are you talking about, Mr Irving. That is why you say it was a halfway house in your conversion. You were saying to yourself, were you not, whether honestly or not is not today's work, "Well, if Hitler did not know about the fact that Auschwitz was a massive extermination camp, very likely or perhaps it was not", then you get Mr Leuchter's little report put in your hand and you said, "Oh, well, I am right after all. Hitler cannot have known about it because it never happened"? A. What never happened? Q. That is the whole house in your conversion, is it not? A. What never happened? Q. Auschwitz use as an extermination camp by the use of homicidal gas chambers? A. As a factory of death, yes. Q. A factory of death. It was never built -- we know this -- we have been over this a dozen times already in this court -- everybody knows who knows anything about it at all that Auschwitz did not start life as a totas fabrik , as you call it? A. There is no point getting testy about it, Mr Rampton. I think it is appropriate if I remind the court at this point that if it turns out that I am right, then truth is an absolute defence to this kind of position. And I am . P-143 quite happy to stand here and be subjected to this grilling, but if it turns out that I am right at the end of this trial on this particular matter, then this been a lot of water under the bridge that we could have spared our time over. Q. With respect, Mr Irving, I believe you might have misconceived the nature of this case. This case is not, as I have repeatedly said, about who is right and who is wrong? A. Oh! Q. It is not indeed. It is about your qualities as an exponent of the truth. A. So, in other words, "OK, he propagated the truth, but he did it in a tasteless manner and an offensive manner and an insensitive manner"?
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