Archive/File: people/i/irving.david/libel.suit/transcripts/day019.14 Last-Modified: 2000/07/24 MR IRVING: For the moment. MR JUSTICE GRAY: I realise for the moment. Can I ask . P-123 Professor Evans a general question? It may be rather difficult for you because you may not have it all in mind at the moment. In so far as reference was made to the Jews in the first edition of Hitler's War 1977, and the references to Jews in the second edition 1991, quantitatively and indeed qualitatively, I suppose, did you notice a significant difference? I have just been looking at the indexes in both instances. Are the excisions significant? A. Yes, they are. Mr Irving himself said that he removed all references to extermination camps and death factories from the 1991 edition which I quote on page 100 near the top, so they are significant changes. MR JUSTICE GRAY: Yes. Sorry, Mr Irving, you are going on to Goring. MR IRVING: Yes. If the witness again says that I removed all reference to extermination camps and death camps, then I draw attention to the fact that the word "exterminate" occurs 28 times in the second edition of the book, my Lord. A. That is not quite the same thing, of course. MR IRVING: Did I understand your Lordship to say that you were comparing the indexes of the two volumes? MR JUSTICE GRAY: Yes, I was. MR IRVING: May I draw attention to the fact that the index of the 1991 edition that you have there was prepared by the . P-124 American publishing company Avon, which was highly inadequate, whereupon we commissioned a separate index, which I can provide your Lordship. We have that index available. It is about 50 pages long of typescript, much more comprehensive, and a comparison ---- MR JUSTICE GRAY: I follow that the index being different may have been rather less detailed in one case than the other, but it may be a worth while exercise to see what was there in the first edition and what has come out. A. The point, Mr Irving, is that you yourself, as I note in paragraph 2, page 93, drew attention in your written reply to the Defence, you drew attention to the 1991 index entries as evidence that you were not a Holocaust denier. So I am puzzled as to why you should be disputing the accuracy of it. MR IRVING: I draw attention to the pages referenced by those indexes but, of course the actual index itself which his Lordship is doing a statistical comparison with, he should therefore use the correct index rather than this rather cheap index produced by the Americans. The third edition of the book which is going to press this month has an even better index being prepared. But, once again, the index is not -- can I now proceed to Hermann Goring? MR JUSTICE GRAY: Yes. That was my fault, sorry. MR IRVING: Your question, as I understood, was purely about the comparison between the indexes of the two or the . P-125 actual mentions in the book? MR JUSTICE GRAY: It was more whether the index would suggest that there was quite a lot that was not repeated in the 1991 edition gives a fair impression of whether there were significant omissions and the answer that Professor Evans has given is yes. MR IRVING: The 1991 edition was a very truncated edition in its original incarnation. MR JUSTICE GRAY: That makes it even odder. MR IRVING: At page 100, please, Professor Evans, we are dealing now with the biography of Hermann Goring. You have in the fourth line of that paragraph noted that the book was published in 1989. What conclusions do you draw from that? A. That you had completed it, roughly speaking, a year or slightly less before. Q. So what you are suggesting is that by that time I had taken on board the Leuchter report, is that right? A. Yes. That would be my assumption, the way books were published. Q. You had my diaries available when you wrote your report, or researchers had the diaries available. Can I read to you the entry in my diary of January 11th 1988, which is only one line long, "January 11th 1998, 4.45 p.m. posted rest of Goring by Data Post courier to New York". Will you take it that that implies that the book was completed . P-126 on January 11th 1988 therefore? A. Yes, though of course then you have the opportunity to make revisions in the proof. Q. Will you accept therefore that the book was delivered to the publishers three months before I first set eyes on Fred Leuchter or the Leuchter report? A. The manuscript yes, but you do have the opportunity to make changes to the proof, do you not? Q. And that, if I did not make such changes in proof stage, therefore this would invalidate any points you seek to make based on the presumption that I had the Leuchter report information at that time? A. That is an interesting point, but it does not really affect what I say about the Goring book. Q. If you are seeking to make some kind of watershed around the time that I learned of the Leuchter report as being April 1988, this is significance that the Goring book was completed before the watershed and delivered to publishers. Are you familiar with the fact that publishers frown on any kind of proof stage corrections, their authors' corrections, charges levied, are you familiar with that? A. It is a matter of negotiation. You can usually make up to about 10 per cent changes. It is matter of negotiating percentages of what you are allowed to change. It depends on the publisher and so on. . P-127 Q. Have you any evidence that the manuscript that I delivered to the publisher in January 1988 was different from that subsequently published in 1989? A. No, I do not. Q. In other words, the Goring book counts as a pre watershed book and there is no evidence to the contrary? A. Unless what you are telling me is that the watershed might have been slightly earlier than the Leuchter report, which is a very interesting point. What I have to say about the Goring book does not really depend on that. That is, if you like, an assumption on my part which may have been wrong. What is important about it is that you point to it as evidence that you are not a Holocaust denier, and I examine it briefly on pages 100 to 103, and point out that what you say in the book is not incompatible with Holocaust denial. Q. Yes, but at the time you wrote that you presumed that I was post watershed, so speak, and that was why you confidently adopted these interpretations. A. No. I adopted the interpretation on the basis of what I read. Q. Do you know of any evidence that Hermann Goring was aware of the goings on in Auschwitz, the mass extermination in gas chambers which is part of the Holocaust story? A. Oh goodness. Q. Any documentary evidence? . P-128 A. I have not presented any documentary evidence for the court. I am not really concerned with that issue. What I am concerned with in this section are your views on the Holocaust as exemplified by the Goring book. Q. Did I not write in the Hermann Goring book on pages 343 to 9, this is your second line at page 101, that in the winter of 1941 to 42 Goring heard rumours of mass killings in the East, which is of course what we all accept happened, that there were these mass killings? A. The operative word there I think is "rumours". Q. Yes. A. You continue: The surviving documents provide no proof that these killings were systematic, they yield to no explicit orders from above and the massacres themselves were carried out by the local Nazis, by no means all of German, points which I think you have now admitted are wrong. Q. Now that we have access since 1988 when this manuscript was delivered to the police decodes, we are able to establish with much greater detail, is this not correct, precisely how these things happened? A. Yes, but part of my point is that in 1977 in Hitler's War you took a rather different attitude to these matters. Q. Different altitude in which direction? A. You accepted much more that there was systematic mass murder of Jews. . P-129 Q. On the Eastern Front, the shootings or altogether? A. Altogether. Q. In other words, at that time I accepted the whole package uncritically? A. Oh, I do not know whether it was uncritical or not. You seem to accept a large part of it, certainly that there were mass murders of many millions of Jews, including the use of gas. I think you did accept that in 1977, and there really is not any evidence in the Goring book that you accept it there. Q. You appreciate that, when I wrote the Hermann Goring book, I did so on the basis of his as yet unpublished diaries and other documents to which I had had very limited or exclusive access like the entire transcripts of his conferences and documents like that, which other historians had not seen, and therefore I was probably entitled to express a view of my own on the basis of those documents? A. No. It is a matter of how you comment on these things. If you cite, as you do on page 469, Goring claiming under interrogation that the extermination camps were merely propaganda, I always thought he said there were places where people were put to useful work, you do not actually comment on that, you just seem to accept that. Q. In other words, I should have done what an establishment historian would do and immediately pooh-pooh the notion . P-130 that somebody as powerful as Goring could have been unfamiliar with what was going on, should I? A. It seems to me a responsible historian should comment on that statement, yes. Q. He should just have said, the documents suggest this but common sense suggests differently? Is it perverse not to make such a comment, just to leave the documents to speak for themselves? A. What we are dealing with here is the allegation that you are a Holocaust denier, and my point there simply that what you are saying in the Goring book is not incompatible with your being a Holocaust denier, although in your reply to the Defence you say that it is. Q. Can we go on to page 106? We have now crossed the 100 mark. Professor, will you accept that I have let you off a lot of hooks which I considered were buried in the first 100 pages? MR JUSTICE GRAY: That risks undoing the good that you have just pointed out you have done as he will ask what hooks and then we will be back. A. I promise not to ask that, my Lord. I will not accept it. MR IRVING: Page 106, halfway down paragraph 1, the second paragraph on the page, you say, "Within a couple of years, however, Irving was declaring himself to be an expert on the subject". . P-131 A. Yes. Q. When have I declared myself to be an expert? We are talking here about the mid 1980s, are we not? Within a couple of years Irving was declaring himself to be an expert on the Holocaust? A. Yes. MR JUSTICE GRAY: I take that to be 1988, actually. A. 1988. MR JUSTICE GRAY: It is within a couple of years of 1986, and that is Zundel. A. I follow it on by talking about Zundel, where you were appearing as an expert witness. MR IRVING: Was I appearing as an expert witness on the Holocaust or as an expert witness on Adolf Hitler's role in directing the Third Reich? A. As I recall, you were appearing as an expert witness on the Second World War. Q. So, in other words, not an expert on the Holocaust? A. I think that is included. The point in any case is that you were asked on the numbers killed in the Holocaust, you gave your opinion as I quote it there, and therefore you are lending the imprimatur of your expertise to those views. If you did not have any expertise on the numbers killed in the Holocaust, presumably you would have said that you did not have any expertise. Q. Defence counsel is there putting something to me and . P-132 asking me for a comment, and I begin my reply, the last three lines on that page with, "I am not familiar with any documentary evidence of any such figure".
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