Archive/File: people/i/irving.david/libel.suit/transcripts/day032.09 Last-Modified: 2000/07/25 Even if I had read that far on that day's glass plate in the Moscow archives, and even if I had seen those lines of diary entries, some 20 pages after the page where I in fact stopped reading for that that day -- and I must emphasise again that I did not read that far on that day because that did not come within my remit, I doubt that . P-95 I would have attached any significance to them other than adding this list to the occasions -- adding this entry to the list of occasions on which Hitler harked back, for whatever reason, to his famous "prophecy" of 1939. I have read again the printed version of the meeting of the generalgouvernenent, the Polish authorities, the German occupation authorities in Poland, Hans Frank, on December 16th 1941. It is significant to see the amount of space taken, even in this abridged published version, by the typhus epidemic sweeping through the region, the climax of which was expected to come in April 1942. Hans Frank states that he has begun negotiation with the purpose of deporting the Jews to the East, and he mentions the big Heydrich conference which is set down for January 1942 on this topic in Berlin. Then comes the sentence which pulls the rug out from beneath the Defendant's feet, in my submission: Hans Frank says: "For us the Jews are exceptionally damaging mouths to feed. We've got an estimated 2.5 million here in the Generalgouvernement, perhaps 3.5 million Jews now, what with all their kinfolk and hangers-on. We cannot shoot these 3.5 million Jews, we cannot poison them, but we will be able to do something with them which somehow or other will have the result of destroying them, in fact, in conjunction with the grander measures still to be discussed at Reich level". I think that is a fair . P-96 translation of that passage. MR JUSTICE GRAY: It is not complete, but it is fair. MR IRVING: Ah, your Lordship says it is not complete. This is an extract taken from a seven or eight page printed volume. MR JUSTICE GRAY: Yes, it is what Frank says he was told in Berlin that I think perhaps is not there, but, anyway, press on. MR IRVING: I would -- well, I will press on. The December 18th 1941 diary entry by Himmler reads, this is the diary entry made by Himmler, it is an agenda for his meeting with Hitler on December 18th 1941, Himmler jotted down the words "Judenfrage", Jewish question, and next to that in German the words "als partisanen auszurotten", Himmler had, as I pointed out to the Court, repeatedly referred in earlier documents to the phrase "Juden als Partisanen". This was nothing new or sensational therefore, and the words he was recording were, in my submission, not necessarily Hitler's but more probably his own stereotype phrase. The correct pedantic translation, is in any case "Jewish problem, to be wiped out as being partisans". Not "like partisans", which would have been "wie partisanen". There can be no equivocating about this translation of "als". Wie is a comparison, als is an equivalent. MR JUSTICE GRAY: I think that probably is a convenient . P-97 moment. 2 o'clock. (Luncheon adjournment) MR JUSTICE GRAY: Schlegelberger, Mr Irving. MR IRVING: Before Schlegelberger, my Lord, on December 16th 1941, there was a meeting in Poland which Hans Frank referred to discussions he had in Berlin, in the course of which he said in Berlin the people asked us ---- MR JUSTICE GRAY: Liquidate them yourselves, something like that, was it not? MR IRVING: He said to the people in Berlin: "Imagine that we are housing these people in nice little housing estates here in the Baltic, in the Eastern territories. We tell them we cannot handle it here, liquidate them yourselves. My submission on that is that this is a reference to the Gauleiters from the Ostland whom he had met in Berlin, on whom the Jews being deported were going to be dumped, and they had made that remark to him, it is remiss of me not to have put that in this closing submission. I looked at that text again actually three or four days ago and my attention was drawn to the sentence before the remark about "liquidate them yourselves", in which it becomes quite plain he is referring to the Gauleiters of the Eastern territories by inference on whom these people are going to be dumped. MR JUSTICE GRAY: Yes, thank you very much. MR IRVING: I now come to the Schlegelberger document, which is . P-98 another most difficult piece of historical paper for my opponents. It is a document -- I would explain for the benefit of those who do not know it -- which comes in a file of the German Ministry of Justice. In late March or early April 1942, after seeing Germany's top civil servant who reported only to Hitler, Franz Schlegelberger, who was acting as Minister of Justice, dictated this famous memorandum, the Schlegelberger Document as we call it here in this courtroom, upon which all Holocaust historians, and the Defendants' experts witnesses in this case have hitherto turned enough blind eyes to have won several battles of Trafalgar. For many years after the war it vanished, this document, but that is another story. Asked about this specific document after a lecture in the German Institute, here in London in November 1998, Dr Longerich, who is now the Defendants' expert witness, who had the function of chairman, rose to inform the audience at that meeting that the speaker was not prepared to answer questions from David Irving. It is a genuine document, the one I was going to ask him about, the Schlegelberger Document, and he refers in one breath both to Hitler and the Solution of Jewish Problem. Confronted with it in the witness box, he, Longerich, and his fellow experts have argued either that it was totally unimportant, notwithstanding its content, or that it concerned only the Mischlinge, the . P-99 mixed race Jews, and not the Final Solution in any broader sense. Ingeniously in fact, Dr Longerich even tried to suggest it may have originated in 1940 or 1941 and not in 1942 at all. The document has them, in other words, in a breathless panic. The document's own contents, and this is the wording of the actual document, it is only very short, the document's own contents destroys their latter argument. In the first sentence, it says: "Mr Reich Minister Lammers informed me that the Fuhrer had repeatedly declared to him that he wants to hear that the Solution of the Jewish Problem has been adjourned (or postponed) until after the war". That that is the broader Final Solution is plain from the second sentence which follows. It shows, namely the Mischling question, the mixed race question, was something totally different: "Accordingly", the memorandum continues, "the current deliberations have in the opinion of Mr Lammers purely theoretical value". Those deliberations were, as my opponents themselves have argued, solely concerned with what to do with the Mischlinge and the like. The document is quite plain. It was dictated by a lawyer, so presumably he knew what he was writing. There is no room for argument. My opponents have pretended for years that the document effectively does not exist. So much for the Schlegelberger Document. I have dealt at length in my statements in the . P-100 witness box, my Lord, again, and while cross-examining the witnesses with the other contentious items or issues, namely the Goebbels Diary entries for March 27th in future to write about the Zulu wars, because of the controversies that would arise. Because of the inescapable conclusion that Hitler had probably not ordered, or been aware of until relatively late, of the ultimate fate of the European Jews, the ones who had been deported, I forfeited, as my US agent predicted, in that book Hitler's War, perhaps half a million dollars, or more, of lucrative sublicencing deals with major corporations, the Reader's Digest, paperback houses, reprints, the Sunday Times in this country and so on. . P-108 After I completed -- and this is important -- a first draft of that book in about 1969 or 1970, I realized that there was this totally inexplicable and unexpected gap in the archives, namely no evidence showing Hitler's personal involvement. I hired a trusted friend, a historian, well known to this court, Dr Elke Frohlich of the Institute of History in Munich, to go through all the then available German archives again, with the specific task of looking for documents linking Hitler with the Final Solution. She did a conscientious and excellent job, working for me in the files of the Nuremberg State Archives, the Institut fur Zeitgeschichte, the Berlin Document Centre, the Bundesarchives and the military archives in Freiburg - in this connection I should have added, of course. Her resulting research materials, my correspondence with her, the index cards and photocopies, form a part of my Discovery in this action. It was she, for example, who produced for me the then unpublished diary entry of the Governor-General Hans Frank, the one that I just dealt with, it was actually a meeting transcript of December 13th, 1941. It was currently being edited by her colleagues at the Institute and she provided me with a privileged copy of that. I would incidentally, my Lord, rely on this episode, namely hiring a historian to prove that I had got it wrong at my own expense as one further instance of my . P-109 integrity as an independent historian. Inherently dissatisfied with the results of my own research, I hired and paid out of my own pocket for this second opinion, acting as an avocatus diaboli, to trawl once more, and with a net of finer mesh, across the same fishing grounds for documents that might in fact destroy me, destroy my then still tentative hypothesis. In a similar step, which I think I took to appease the now worried American publishers, I wrote in December 1975 to four or five of the major international Jewish historical research institutions -- I remember writing to the Institute in New York, and to the Wiener library in this country and to the equivalent bodies -- appealing for "evidence proving Hitler's guilt in the extermination of Jews". That is from the actual letter I sent. All of these enquiries by me drew a blank, except for one. As I summarised in a letter to the Sunday Telegraph on June 19th 1977, "all offered their apologies except Professor Raul Hilberg, who is the author of the standard history on the subject, who honourably conceded that he too has come to the view that Hitler may not have known". This actual letter is my discovery and was available to the Defendants. This letter to me was December 12th, 1975. The other institutions stated that that too had no such evidence, or that did not reply. So I did what I could to establish the truth of . P-110 that particular allegation. My Lord, I now come to what I call the international endeavour to destroy my legitimacy as an historian, and the participation, in my submission, of the Defendants in that particular endeavour. I have abbreviated it and much of what I have put in the pages which I supplied to your Lordship I shall not read out. I shall say when I am not going to read out what follows, not because it is not true but because your Lordship has probably quite rightly questioned the strict relevance of it to the matter before the court. MR JUSTICE GRAY: Yes, I think that is sensible, if I may say so. MR IRVING: If it does not appear to be immediately relevant, then it is because I shall rely on it in the other matters that I put, namely the aggravated damages aspect and the fact that, if I am accused of certain postures or uttering certain tasteless remarks, these momentary lapses are not justified, but explicable on the basis of what I had been through, if I can put it like that. Before I proceed to the problems with the accepted version of the history of Auschwitz, I turn first to the submission that your Lordship will allow me to make on the 30 year international endeavour by a group of organizations to destroy my legitimacy as an historian. I use that phrase for a reason. I submit that I am . P-111 entitled to draw these documents to your Lordship's attention, because these bodies, acting with that secret and common purpose, compiled dossiers and reports on me with the intention of destroying me. That did so, exercising no proper care for accuracy, and, as is evident from the second Defendant's, discovery, Professor Lipstadt's discovery, and from the introduction to her book, in which she explicitly acknowledges the assistance provided by many of these bodies, she drew upon these tainted well springs as the source for much of the poison that she wrote about me. We shall hear that, buried in the files of the Simon Wiesenthal Centre in Toronto, is a document now also in Mrs Lipstadt's files -- that sent it to her -- which forms something of a blueprint for the attempt to destroy my name. A researcher for the Centre, an anonymous researcher for the Centre, commissioned to investigate -- why was a person in Toronto commissioned to investigate my life? I do not know -- to investigate my life in detail, recommended in that compilation after referring to my thorough archival research and general historical insight as follows: "Given this accurate version of reality, it is all the more clear why this activities must be curtailed, and why this alleged legitimacy must be eradicated". This document is from Professor Lipstadt's own papers. . P-112 I have been subjected, since at least 1973 and probably before then, to what would be called in warfare a campaign of interdiction. I know of no other historian or writer who has been subjected to a campaign of vilification even 1/10th as intense. The book "Denying the Holocaust" was the climax of this campaign. There exist, as I have said in my opening speech, various bodies in this country, and around the world, who have at heart the interests of special groups. I make no protest about that but many other Englishmen have noticed, or found out, usually by chance, that these bodies keep files on us, which that use to our disadvantage if that believe we are a danger to their interests. To give one particularly gross example, under the cover provided by the United States First Amendment, the Jewish Telegraph Agency accused me in 1995 of having supplied the trigger mechanism for the Oklahoma City bomb. That item was picked up by the American press and then faintly echoed by the British press. It was only months later that I found out who started that particular lie. But regrettably this has become a campaign to defame people whom they regard as a danger. A number of special bodies exist solely for this purpose. Professor Kevin MacDonald, of the University of California at Long Beach, a sociologist who is the world's leading expert on these things, expressed forceful opinions to this court in . P-113 this expert report, on which he offered himself for cross-examination, it has to be said, and I urge your Lordship not to disregard the substance of what he had to say. These bodies will not endear themselves, if found out, to the victims of their campaigns. Mr Rampton made much of Mr Ernest Zundel's gross and ill considered reference to the Judenpack, as anti-Semitic a word as one might wish to hear. Mr Rampton labels this man as an extremist, and anti-Semitic in consequence. This court, of course, has been told nothing by Mr Rampton of what, if any, remarks or incidents preceded the outburst by Mr Zundel that was very briefly quoted. We do know, and I can so inform this court, that his home has been torched and burnt to the ground. Such violent incidents certainly cannot excuse the violent remarks but that can explain them -- a difference. Because that do not like what he writes or publishes, these bodies have attempted to destroy this life with criminal prosecution in an attempt to have him deported or jailed. Going on down the page, my own experience at the hands of these self-appointed censors has not been so very different. It began in 1963 when agents of Searchlight raided my home and were caught red handed in this criminal attempt. Ever since then that publication has tweaked my . P-114 tail with a stream of defamatory articles, a 37 year onslaught to which, as a good Christian, I turned the other cheek. In fact, the man who runs that magazine turns out to have been one of the producers of the film which has been put to the court, one of the editors. It might be said, and I have turned the page now, my Lord, that the real Defendants in this case are not represented in this court but their presence has been with us throughout like Banquo's ghost. These are the people who commissioned the work complained of and provided much of the materials used in it. I understand that provided considerable funds for the defence.
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