Archive/File: people/i/irving.david/libel.suit/transcripts/day014.18 Last-Modified: 2000/07/20 Q. OK. Now would you get your Goebbels' book please, if you have it to hand, and turn to after page 332. Sorry, I will have to count the pages. I will count them as double: 1, 2, 3, 4. On the left-hand side page there is . P-157 a picture of Hitler wearing what looks like a bathrobe in the bottom of the picture or it might be a dust coat, I do not know, with a hat on. A. Yes. Q. On the right-hand side there are some pictures with the heading "Isidor's Torment"? A. Yes. Q. "From the moment of his arrival in Berlin on November 28th Dr Goebbels wages a remorseless war against the city's police chief, Dr Bernhard Weiss. Weiss sues him forty times, mostly for calling him Isidor", of course his name was not Isidor. "Nazi caricaturist Mjolnir portrays him as a donkey skating on thin ice. After a judge rules the cartoon defamatory, Goebbels' newspaper announces: Judge agrees donkey does look like Isidor." I do not know what that is doing in that book. Perhaps you would tell us? A. In this book? Q. Yes. You have put a picture of Dr Weiss or whatever he was. A. If you have read the book ---- Q. He was chief of police, was he not? A. I am sure his Lordship has read the book, although may not have. Goebbels' arch enemy during the years when he was Gauleiters of Berlin before the Nazis came to power, was in fact Bernhard Weiss who Goebbels mocked and called . P-158 "Isidor". He raged this remorseless campaign against him in the newspapers he controlled resulting in no fewer than 40 libel actions brought against him by the police chief, and this is a page devoted to that particular episode. Goebbels was obviously completely incorrigible. He had utter contempt for the law courts in Berlin. He repeated the libels. Weiss fled to England after the Nazis came to power, and I believe his daughter is still alive in North London. Q. She may still be. We knew that she was in 1994. A. Yes, I approached her to try to obtain a more flattering photograph of her father. Q. Can I just read what you wrote, it saves us getting out yet another file. This is revelations from the Goebbels' diary in the Historical Review for January/February -- no, I am reading from the wrong thing -- it is 1995. My Lord, the reference is K3, tab 18, pages 7 to 8. Mr Irving, I expect you will want to look at the full text. A. I am sure we can take it if you just read it out. Q. You publish a picture of Dr Weiss or Mr Weiss or Superintendent Weiss or whatever he was. A. Yes, I went to some pains to try to get a better photograph of him. Q. You write this, the right-hand column on page 7: "Isidor Weiss", and you retain Goebbels' nomenclature and you put the two quotes round the name. . P-159 A. Yes. Q. "When Goebbels arrived in Berlin as Gauleichter in 1926 he was confronted by a city with 179,000 Jews, one third of all Jews in Germany and he made use of this fact. The Berlin population already receding because of the presence of these Jews. In the coming years Goebbels repeatedly explained to foreign diplomats that the problem there was the usual one in which the Jewish population disproportionately controlled all the lucrative professions. This rankled the Berlin's non-Jewish population of course and Goebbels, whether deliberately or by instinct, zeroed in on this as a wound that he could work on to promote the Nazi cause." You seem to accept in that paragraph that Goebbels was right in thinking that the professions were disproportionately controlled by the Jews? A. Well, it was not just Goebbels; the German Federal Statistical Office has provided me with the figures. Q. I am putting a marker down because this is something which you are going to have to argue with Professor Evans about. A. What the German Statistical Office told me? Q. No. About what the fact was. A. Which fact? Q. The one you have stated here. A. In other words, the disproportionate ---- . P-160 Q. "The Jewish population disproportionately controlled all the lucrative professions". I put a marker down. I am not going to argue about it now. A. We are just going to argue about the word "all", are we? Q. No. Read the report, Mr Irving. A. Well, can I suggest that Professor Evans also reads what President Roosevelt said about precisely the same situation in Germany when he said, in fact he made the completely impossible statement that if he had been the Germans he would have acted in exactly the same way because of this disproportionate, this imbalance. Q. I do not know about Professor Roosevelt. A. President Roosevelt. Q. I am sorry. Everybody in this court is a professor except you and me, Mr Irving. "He was aided in this endeavour by the fact that his chief opponent there, Berlin's Deputy Police Chief who acted as though he was police chief, he was a real police chief, referred to him as being a chief, Dr Bernhard Weiss, a Jew, Weiss looked so much like a Jewish character, but his photographs did not need to be retouched by the Nazis. He was stereotypically semitic in feature, short with rounded ears and hooked nose and wearing spectacles." A. This is a description I took out of one of the contemporary Western newspapers I believe. Q. We are not to take that as being any kind of endorsement . P-161 by you, are we, Mr Irving? A. No. There is actually a very good book on Bernhard Weiss written by a Professor of history Cologne University whose name escapes me, and he made precisely that point, that because of his appearance he was unfortunately doomed to become a target of the Nazis. Q. He deserved to be persecuted by Dr Goebbels. A. That is not the words I used, Mr Rampton. But this is precisely the reason why I went to great lengths to locate his daughter in London and tried to obtain a different photograph of her father than the one the Nazis used. Q. I have one more reference I think in this, maybe more than one I do not know, in this file K4, tab 4, page 33 at the bottom of the clip, my Lord. A. We are going to go out with a whimper. Q. I doubt that, Mr Irving. It is not my style. We are not going to go out with a whimper. Page 17 at the top. This is you speaking to, and I will tell you who you are speaking to, somebody or people at Bow in London on 29th May 1992. You say: "I had a lot of trouble with Simon Wiesenthal yesterday, and I remember that three or four years ago I had the unnerving experience sitting in my rental car after I had been speaking in London, not London England but London Ontario, which is about 200 miles west Toronto and I had driven back to Toronto that night, the speaking was very exhausting and I got back in Toronto at . P-162 half past 2.00 on this November morning and as I drove up something street in Toronto, which is the main artery of Toronto, I pulled up at the traffic lights and glaring at me from the car next to me in the traffic lights was Simon Wiesenthal himself, his face hideously contorted by rage". So, evidently, Mr Irving, some things make him cross too. "I got a real shock because he looked into me through my driver's window and there was Mr Wiesenthal, this hideous, leering, evil face glaring at me, then I realised it wasn't Simon Wiesenthal, it was a Halloween mask [Applause]. "Now, those of who you have seen Mr Wiesenthal will know what I'm talking about. Mrs Wiesenthal who has seen Mr Wiesenthal many times, of course, and she says to him at Halloween, 'Simon, please keep the mask on, you look so much nicer with it on'". That is just pure racist abuse, is it not, Mr Irving? A. On the contrary, the word "Jew" is not mentioned there from start to finish. The racism is in your mind, Mr Rampton. This is a reference to a person who is not one of the world's most attractive people. He is known for not being particularly attractive. Whether he is Jewish or not does not play any part at all. Q. Mr Irving, really! Will you turn back to ---- A. If I pick on any other name and put that name to this, then it would never have occurred to suggest, if I pick on . P-163 any other race, but because Mr Wiesenthal is apparently Jewish, I do not know, but he presumably is Jewish, therefore, you say it is anti-Jewish. It is not. It is anti-ugly. Q. Mr Irving, now we are going to end with a bang. Turn back, please, to the top of page 16, will you? A. Yes. Q. "I have found governments being involved in trying to silence me in Canada and South Africa and Australia and I never used to believe in the existence of an international Jewish conspiracy". Pause there. Who is Simon or Simon Wiesenthal? Who is Simon Wiesenthal? A. He is an Austrian who has no connection at all with the Simon Wiesenthal Centre. Q. Is he Jewish? A. I presume he is, yes. Q. Right, and so now we are going to see the context in which you put his Halloween mask. "I never used to believe in the existence of an international Jewish conspiracy, and I am not even sure even now if there is an international Jewish conspiracy. All I know is that people are conspiring internationally against me and they do turn out mostly to be" -- in fact, the word must have been "Jews", must it not? A. I do not know. It does not say. Q. Oh, come on. Look at the syntax of the sentence. . P-164 A. OK, let us assume it was "Jews", yes. Q. "Applause, applause"? A. But that is precisely what we are going to be demonstrating to the court in the next few days, how much this international endeavour has been, unfortunately, guided by the self-appointed leaders of that community. Q. If you are going to attempt that, you will have to give me notice. It is no part of your pleading and I shall have something to say about it because it has nothing to do with Mrs Lipstadt. A. Well, you will see -- oh, and indeed it does and that is, undoubtedly, the reason why I have put in bundle E global. MR JUSTICE GRAY: Well, that is a digression. We may have to come back to that. MR RAMPTON: A digression. But that inspiring observation, Mr Irving, was greeted with applause. Do you see that? A. Yes. Q. Do you know why? A. Probably because they thought it was funny or that they were applauding the fact that I said there was no international Jewish conspiracy or because -- I do not know. What is your theory? Q. They are very pleased that, in fact -- it is another of your clever, little sarcastic racist jokes about the Jews -- though you do not know there is an international Jewish conspiracy, it turns out most of the conspirators . P-165 are Jews? A. So, in other words, I am not allowed to criticise the fact that this community's self-appointed leaders around the world have set about trying to suppress freedom of speech, to abrogate my right to travel freely around the world, I am not allowed to criticise that because they are Jewish, is that right? On the contrary, if I find any person or any body of people, whether they are black or yellow or Asian or French or Germans or leading counsel, indeed, who are trying to abrogate my rights to freedom of speech and free right to travel, then I will criticise them without fear or favour. And the fact that this comment happens to be Jewish is neither here nor there. It cannot be construed as anti-Semitic. Q. Shall we read on and see whether we agree with that, Mr Irving? "We have one basic problem and this is, apart from the literature displayed on the table over there, we have no national" -- I do not know who "we" are -- "organ that we can read to find out what is going on. I am not ashamed to say that I read the Jewish Chronicle to find out what they are doing because they seem pretty well informed". This is the sort of Aryan Defence League against the Jews, the "we", is it? A. Where do you get "Aryan Defence League" from?
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