The Nizkor Project: Remembering the Holocaust (Shoah)

Shofar FTP Archive File: people/i/irving.david/libel.suit/transcripts//Closing_Address.Irving



   MR IRVING:  May it please the court.  The Defendants in this
        action, the publisher Penguin Books Limited and the
        American scholar Deborah Lipstadt, have sought to cast
        this trial as being about the reputation of the Holocaust.  It is not.

                  The world's press have also reported it in this way.  
        Again, it is not.

                  This trial is about my reputation as a human
        being, as an historian of integrity, and - thanks to the
        remarks made by Mr Rampton - as a father.  The Defendants
        are saying, and have so convinced many people, that I am
        not entitled to continue to earn a living in the way that
        I have earned it for nearly 40 years.  A judgment in my
        favour is no more than that judgment that disputed points
        which I have made about some aspect of the narrative are
        not so absurd, given the evidence, as to disqualify me
        from the ranks of historians.  Under the laws of
        defamation as they exist in this country, it could not be
        anything else, and nor must the defence team, no matter
        how powerful, how moneyed, or eloquent, or numerous, be
        allowed by their tactics to skew it in any other way.

.          P-50

                  I may add that the points I have made do not
        necessarily lessen the horror or the burden of guilt.
        I have always accepted that Adolf Hitler, as Head of State
        and government in Germany, was responsible for the
        Holocaust.  I said, in the Introduction to my flagship
        biography, Hitler's War (this is a reference to the 1991
        edition):

                  If this biography were simply a history of the
        rise and fall of Hitler's Reich, it would be legitimate to
        conclude: "Hitler killed the Jews".  But my years of
        investigations suggested that many others were
        responsible, that the chain of responsibility was not as
        clear cut as that.  Nothing that I have heard in this
        Court since January 11th has persuaded me that I was wrong
        on this account.

                  These latter points lead to another
        consideration.  Your Lordship will have heard of the -
        largely successful - effort to drive me out of business as
        an historian.  This Court has seen the timidity, in my
        submission, with which historians have already been
        fraught once Holocaust is questioned, not denied,
        questioned.  One notable historian, whose name has been
        mentioned this morning, ordered by summons by myself to
        attend, showed himself reluctant even to confirm what he
        had written in my favour, repeatedly, over the last 20 years.

.          P-51

                  A judgment rendered against me will make this
        paralysis in the writing of history definitive; from then
        on, no one will dare to discuss who exactly was involved
        in each stage of the Holocaust -- rather like in Germany
        now, you cannot do it any more -- or how extensive it
        was.  From then on, discussion will revolve around "safe"
        subjects, like sacred texts in the Middle Ages, or Marx in
        the old Soviet Union, or the Koran in some fundamentalist
        state today.  Every historian will know that his critique
        needs to stop sharply at the boundaries defined by certain
        authorities. He will have a choice; accept the official
        version, holus-bolus; or stop being an historian.

                  A judgment in my favour does not mean that the
        Holocaust never happened; it means only that in England
        today discussion is still permitted.  My opponents would
        still be able to say, just as now, would still be able,
        just as now, to produce other documents if they can; to
        expound alternative interpretations.  They would be as
        free as ever to declare that they think that I am wrong
        and all the other things that have been said about me
        today.  They would be impeded in one way only: they would
        not be able to say in a loud and authoritative voice that
        I am not an historian, and that my books must be banned.
        As a result of my work (and of this case) the Holocaust,
        in fact, has been researched more, not less.  Those who
        (rightly) believe that these crimes should never be

.          P-52

        forgotten (and I stress the word "rightly"), these crimes
        should never be forgotten, should ask whether their case
        is better served by a compulsory - and dead - text imposed
        by law and intimidation, or by a live and on-going
        discussion.

                  Our Common Law has at its kernel an
         "adversarial" procedure whereby, it is believed, truth is
        best elicited by each side putting their case as strongly
        as possible.  We have heard some pretty strong things said
        today.  I agree with English Common Law.

                  I read in The Independent, a newspaper in this
        country, in a lengthy and deeply libellous article
        published only last week about me, these words: "But if
        he wins, it will open the door for revisionists to rewrite
        any event in history without the requirement to consider
        evidence that does not suit them and without fear that
        they will be publicly denounced for their distortion".

                  My Lord, in bygone days, I venture to submit,
        such an article, published while an action was literally
        sub judice, would have been a clear contempt.  Your
        Lordship will have noticed that I wearied, after a few
        days, of drawing attention to the coverage of this trial
        in the media.  Allow me, however, to introduce one
        cautionary statistic:  not including the fuss about the
        Eichmann manuscript, the British press have published no
        fewer than 167 reports during the seven days that I was on

.          P-53

        the witness stand, that is 24 per day; but just 58 reports
        during the 20 days when the boot was on the other foot and
        I was cross-examining Mr Rampton's fine witnesses, that is
        roughly three per day.  That is a disparity of about eight
        to one.  I make no complaint about that.  If your Lordship
        has noticed any of these items, you will perhaps have
        observed that the reporting in both cases is almost
        exclusively devoted to the defence statements, or their
        questions to me, and not to the product of the
        examination.  That is the way things are in a free
        society.  The Court, however, operates by different
        standards, and it will not allow public sentiment, I hope,
        to guide its verdict.

                  I believe it was Churchill who once said, "There
        is such thing as public opinion, there is only published
        opinion".  Given such a baleful glare from the press
        gallery, my Lord, I am glad that her Majesty has such a
        resolute officer presiding over this case.  The outcome is
        in your Lordship's hands and yours alone, and I am glad,
        I am confident that nothing that the press has written, or
        may yet write, will deflect your Lordship from arriving at
        a just conclusion.

                  The Defendants have sold around the world a
        book, "Denying the Holocaust".  May I say here that I see
        Penguin Books among the Defendants to my sorrow, as they
        have published my own works in the past.  They continuing

.          P-54

        even today, however, and I stress this fact, to sell this
        book for profit, in the knowledge that it contains very
        defamatory allegations and that those allegations are held
        to be untrue.  It is a reckless, even foolhardy, gesture
        which I submit, my Lord, goes to the question of
        aggravated damages when the time comes.

                  Neither of these Defendants evidently bothered
        even to have the manuscript professionally read for
        libel.  I say "evidently" because we do not know: they
        have not deigned to enter the witness box themselves, no
        executive of Penguin Books, not the author who has, I must
        say, sat in this room for the two months that the trial
        has continued, neither of them has deigned to enter the
        witness box to answer even that most straightforward and
        elementary of questions, was there a libel reading of this
        book?  Nor have they answered this question when it was
        put to them in writing.  Such a report, a libel report,
        is, in my submission, not privileged, and I would have
        been well prepared to argue the point; had they claimed
        that privilege, I would have asked, "On what grounds?"  If
        a report was written, it should and no doubt would have
        been disclosed, and it was not disclosed.  So we are
        entitled to assume that they did not bother to have the
        book read.  It does not exist, the report.

                  Whatever other limited excuses - whether of
        sheer ignorance, or of innocent dissemination - that the

.          P-55

        publisher might have (quite wrongfully) deployed for
        publishing this malicious and deeply flawed work were
        destroyed from the moment when they received my writ in
        September 1996, and were thus informed, if they did not
        know in fact already, of the nature and scope of the
        libels it contains.  And, as said, they have continued to
        sell it, hoping no doubt to cash in on, to profit from,
        the notoriety gained by these libel proceedings, which is
        a textbook case of Rookes v. Barnard if there ever was
        one, since the book they are selling still contains even
        the several libels which they have made no attempt here to
        justify.  They have to justify their allegations - - I am
        referring, of course, my Lord, to the ----

   MR JUSTICE GRAY:  Yes.

   MR IRVING:  --- matters they have pleaded section 5 on
        originally.  They have made no attempt to justify their
        allegations or their defence fails -- I am sorry.  They
        have to justify their allegations, or their defence fails;
        and as your Lordship is aware, where the defamations are
        particularly grave, a higher burden of proof falls upon
        them than the mere balance of probabilities that is
        normally acceptable.  In both Defendants, moreover, there
        is clear evidence of malice, both in those few documents
        which the author of this work has disclosed -- I stress
        the word "few"; pitifully few documents have been placed
        in my hands -- and in the fact that the same firm of

.          P-56

        publishers had previously distributed a work, a book, in
        which I was variously caricatured as Adolf Hitler and
        wearing swastika eyeglasses.

                  The very worst of the libels are so blatant that
        neither Defendant has insulted the intelligence of this
        Court by offering any justification to them.  They hope
        instead to divert the court's attention by reference to
        distant and notorious matters of history and by calling me
        a racist.  In consequence, for 30 days or more of this
        Court's time, we have had to rake over the embers of what
        may be one of the greatest crimes known to Mankind:  a
        harrowing, time-wasting, needless effort, which has
        yielded even now few answers to great questions and
        mysteries which even the world's finest academics have so
        far not managed to unravel.

                  I come now to one of the first of these
        unanswered and unjustified libels which will come as a
        surprise to many people in this courtroom because there is
        no reference to it in Mr Rampton's summary.  On page 14 of
        the book, the Defendants published one of the gravest
        libels that can be imagined for a respectable English
        citizen who lives a very public life, namely that I
        consort with the extremist anti-Semitic Russian group
        Pamyat, with violent anti-Israeli murderers, with
        extremist terrorists, and with Louis Farrakhan, a Black
        Power agitator who is known to be acting in the pay of a

.          P-57

        foreign power, namely the Libyan dictator.  This is not
        just the simple allegation of associating with
        "extremists", the kind of people who use fountain pens to
        deliver their extremism, about which they have made so
        much.  The words on page 14 are as follows - and I make no
        apology, my Lord, for reminding the Court of them, the
        Second Defendant wrote:

                  "The confluence between anti-Israel,
        anti-Semitic, and Holocaust denial forces was exemplified
        by a world anti-Zionist conference scheduled for Sweden in
        November 1992.  Though cancelled at the last minute by the
        Swedish government, scheduled speakers included black
        Muslim leader, Louis Farrakhan, Faurrison, Irving", that
        is me, "and Leuchter.  Also scheduled to participate were
        representatives of a variety of anti-Semetic and
        anti-Israel organisations, including the Russian group
        Pamyat, the Iranian-backed Hizbollah and the
        fundamentalist Islamic organization Hamas".

                  Now, that whole statement was a reckless lie.
        It appears from their discovery to have been based on a
        press release issued by the jewish Telegraph Agency in New
        York which neither that agency or the Defendants made any
        attempt to verify.  The Court will have noticed in one of
        my bundles the letter which I sent to every Scandinavian
        Embassy at the time, anxiously denying this allegation. I
        have pleaded, as your Lordship is aware, that the innuendo

.          P-58

        was that I was "thereby agreeing to appear in public in
        support of and alongside violent and extremist speakers,
        including representatives of the violent and extremist
        anti-Semitic Russian group Pamyat ... the Hizbollah ...
        the Hamas ... Farrakhan ... who is known as a Jew-baiting
        black agitator ... and he is known as an admirer of Hitler
        and who is in the pay of Colonel Gaddafi".

                  And "that the true or legal innuendo of the word
         'Hizbollah' is that used to refer to and describe a known
        international terrorist organization ... in the Lebanon,
        also known as Hizbollah whose guerrillas kill Israel
        citizens and soldiers ... provoking retaliation, and which
        organization has been determined by President Clinton ...
        as being among the enemies of peace and, whose officials
        and armed activists are now being hunted down by the ...
        Israeli army".

                  As for the Hamas, much the same, I set out in
        paragraph 12 of my statement of claim that "the true or
        legal unnuendo of the words 'Hammas' is that of an Islamic
        fundamentalist terrorist organization similar in nature to
        the Hizbollah".

                  I submitted to your Lordship at the beginning of
        this trial a representative selection of news reports from
        reputable, reliable outlets, including the BBC, on the
        murderous nature of the organizations involved, concerned.

                  In my pleadings I also argued that by these

.          P-59

        allegations I had "been brought into hatred, ridicule,
        contempt, risk of personal injury and/or assassination".
        I know, my Lord, the law of defamation has no concern for
        people's personal safety, but it certainly has concern for
        their reputation; and the allegation that I was consorting
        with the violent extremist body who goes around with
        machine guns and bombs and bullets is substantially more
        serious, in my view, than the allegation that I consort
        with people who use their fountain pens to disseminate
        crack pot ideas.

                  In my pleadings -- the nature of the libel, and
        the damage that it caused, hardly needed arguing in detail
        here.  Put in into domestic context, if the Defendants, if
        the Defendants, had equally untruthfully stated, for
        example, in a Channel 4 television documentary (and there
        is a reason why I say that) that I had consorted with
        Ulster loyalist death squads who were part of a conspiracy
        to murder Roman Catholic nationalists, itself a grave
        accusation which would also put me at risk of
        assassination, and if the Defendants made no attempt to
        justify that libel, then I respectfully submit that your
        Lordship would have no hesitation giving judgment in my
        favour.  I submit there is no difference fundamentally
        between these examples.

                  Now, I was going to say that the Defendants have
        relied on section 5 of the Defamation Act, but

.          P-60

        I understand from what Mr Rampton said yesterday that they
        are not relying on that section 5 at all, my Lord.

   MR JUSTICE GRAY:  No, I do not think that is quite right.  I
        think what he said was that they say they do not need
        section 5, that is their primary position, but that if
        they do need it, then, indeed, they rely on it.  So do not
        assume that it has disappeared out of the picture because it has not.

   MR IRVING:  In that case, I will leave it as I originally
        wrote.  I am aware that your Lordship is also capable, of
        course, of putting something in section 5 if you consider
        it to come under section 5.

   MR JUSTICE GRAY:  I probably would be, but that I believe to
        Mr Rampton's position.

   MR IRVING:  This is not the place to make a submission, but my
        position is that there is no common sting between those
        allegations.  They are totally different kinds of extremism.

   MR JUSTICE GRAY:  Elaborate on that later.

   MR IRVING:  In other words, they accuse a respectable
        Englishman of consorting with terrorists and murderers,
        and then plead the relative insignificance of the
        accusation when it turns out to be a reckless lie.  And
        there are other incendiary lies which they have stuffed
        into that particular sand-bucket, section 5 of the
        Defamation Act, in the hope that they will sputter out:

.          P-61

        the Defendants repeated the story in that book - first
        published in Izvestia - that I placed a portrait of Adolf
        Hitler over my desk.  For that lie -- I have had hundreds
        of journalists visiting me over the 30 years and never
        once has that picture occurred to any of them for there is
        no such picture.  For that lie too they have offered no
        justification.  I read incidentally recently in Literary
        Review that Lloyd George had signed photographs of both
        Hitler and Mussolini on display, and that was a British
        Prime Minister.  The only signed paragraph in my
        apartment, as many journalists have observed, is one of
        Sir Winston Churchill.

                  So I submit that your Lordship should not accept
        the Defendants' contention, if they wish to stand by it,
        that these allegations should be disregarded on the basis
        of section 5.  Even if they could sufficiently justify
        their claim that I deliberately bent history in favour of
        Hitler, and I do not believe they can, I submit that they
        have not, it would still "materially injure the
        plaintiff's reputation", which is the word of the Act,
        section 5, to say that I had a portrait of Hitler above my
        desk.  The claims which they do seek to justify suggest
        that I am culpably careless and (perhaps unconsciously)
        sympathetic to Hitler; bad enough, bad enough, but having
        a portrait of that man -- I am sorry, having a portrait of
        that man above my desk implies a full-hearted 100 per cent

.          P-62

        conscious commitment to that man, which is very
        different.

                  I have provided your Lordship on an earlier
        occasion in one bundle a number of passages quoted from
        AJP Taylor's works, a very famous English historian and
        writer.  Taylor himself accepted that they inevitably
        improved Hitler's image -- the words that Taylor had
        written -- maybe he did not originate the actual mass
        murders himself, wrote Taylor; maybe he did slip into war
        with Britain rather than planning it; maybe the Anschluss
        with Austria was more a stroke of good fortune, which he
        grasped, rather than long planned as a take-over; maybe
        the Nazis did not burn down the Reichstag building in
        1933.  These views of Taylor have been criticised as being
        wrong, even as being too sympathetic to Hitler.  But
        everybody would accept that to suggest that Taylor had a
        portrait of Hitler "over his desk" would suggest something
        far worse.  So it should be for me too.

                  Again, for the purpose of section 5, the
        allegation that I bend history in favour of Hitler because
        I am said to admire him, and that I consort with other
        people holding such views, is a very different kettle of
        fish from stating, as the Defendants do, that I consort
        with people who are widely regarded as violent and
        murderous terrorists.

                  I continue now from the bottom of the page:

.          P-63

                  My Lord, the Court will be aware from the very
        outset I argued that this hearing should not, effectively,
        leave the four walls of my study, where I wrote my books;
        and that what actually happened 50 or 60 years ago was of
        less moment to the issues as pleaded.  The matter at
        issue, as pleaded by the Defendants, is not what happened,
        but what I knew of it, and what I made of it, at the time
        I put pen to paper.  We had some argument on that matter,
        my Lord.  To take crude example: neglecting to use the
        Eichmann memoirs, releases to us only a few days ago, had
        they contained startling revelations - which they did not
         - could not have been held against me because they were
        not available to me in the 1960s, 1970s or 1980s.  But
        your Lordship took a different view and I respectfully
        submit that it was wrong.

   MR JUSTICE GRAY:  May I interrupt you again?  I do not think
        that is right.  I think everybody agrees that the Eichmann
        memoirs, because they have surfaced so late, really have
        no bearing on this trial at all.

   MR IRVING:  I gave that as a particularly crude example of why
        what mattered was what happened in the walls of my study
        as I wrote, what was on my desk, so to speak, and not what
        actually happened.

   MR JUSTICE GRAY:  I see.

   MR IRVING:  Your Lordship took a different view, and
        I respectfully submit that it was wrong.  The Defendants

.          P-64

        have invested a sizeable fortune in reresearching the
        Holocaust, and possibly for that reason we have all been
        dragged through that vast and inhuman tragedy yet again,
        because of the money spent on it now, and again quite
        needlessly, in my submission.  It would have sufficed for
        their purposes if they could have proved, on the basis of
        the total disclose of my files which I made to them and
        their experts, that I had indeed "distorted, misstated,
        misquoted and falsified", their words.  Fearing or
        finding, however, that they were unable to prove wilful
        fraud, in effect, in my submission, they have fallen back
        on the alternative plea in the tort of negligence: that
         "Mr Irving ought to have known".  I respectfully submit
        that this unsettle change of defence should not have been
        allowed to them, it should not have been available to
        them, as it was not pleaded at the outset.  It has to be
        specifically pleaded, in my submission, my Lord, at the time.

                  If my submission on the law is, however, wrong,
        then your Lordship must ask what effort would have been
        reasonable on the part of an individual historian, acting
        without institutional support like that of Yad Vashem, and
        with the doors of the archives increasingly being slammed
        against him because of the activities of the bodies to
        which I shall shortly refer.  What it would have been
        reasonable to expect me to do to find out what happened?

.          P-65

        These Defendants have reportedly spent some $6 million,
        and 20 man-years or more, in researching this case:  this
        blinding and expensive spotlight has been focused on the
        narrowest of issues, yet it has still generated more noise
        than illumination.  I heard the expert witnesses who were
        paraded before us use phrases like the "consensus of
        expert opinion" as their source so often - in fact, I did
        a check, the word "consensus" occurs 40 times in the daily
        transcripts of this trial - that I began to wonder what
        the archives were for.  I suggest that these experts were
        more expert in reporting each other's opinions and those
        of people who agree with them than in what the archives
        actually contain and what they do not contain which is
        equally important.

                  The phrase "Holocaust denier", which the Second
        Defendant boasts of having invented, is an Orwellian
        stigma.  It is not a very helpful phrase.  It does not
        diminish or extend thought or knowledge on this tragic
        subject.  Its universal adoption within the space of a few
        years by media, academia government and even academics
        seems to indicate something of the international endeavour
        of which I shall shortly make brief mention.  It is, in my
        submission, a key to the whole case.  Perhaps this court
        should raise its gaze briefly from the red and blue files
        and bundles that are around the court room of documents
        for a brief moment, and re-read George Orwell's appendix

.          P-66

        to "1984", which seems very relevant to this case.

                  From the witness box, with its revelations of
        the "consensus of opinion", and "moral certainty", and the
        mass male voice choir of the "social sciences" that we
        heard about from Professor Funke, on which the Defendant's
        German expert, Professor Hajo Funke, relies for his
        certainty, his certainty, as to what is right-wing
        extremism, we seem hear more than a vague echo of
        Orwellian Newspeak -- a language that moulds minds, and
        destroys reputations and livelihoods.

                  Orwell was wrong in one point:  he thought it
        would take the forces of the State to impose Newspeak:
        Professor Lipstadt and her reckless publishers Penguin
        Books Limited -- I shall justify that adjective -- have
        sought to impose it through the machinery of the literary
        and media establishments.  Only the Royal Courts of
        Justice here in London, independent and proud, can protect
        the rights of the individual from now on.   And those
        rights include the right, as Lord Justice Sedley recently
        put it in another Court in this building, of any person to
        hold to, and to preach, unpopular views, perhaps even
        views that many might find repellent.

                  My Lord, I have not hesitated myself to stand
        here in the witness box and to answer questions.
        Mr Rampton rose to the occasion, and he, or indeed I, may
        yet regret it.  Your Lordship will recall that, when

.          P-67

        I brought a somewhat reluctant and even curmudgeonly
        Professor Donald Watt, who is not the Professor
        I mentioned earlier incidentally, doyen of the diplomatic
        historians, into the witness box, he used these words:

                  "I must say, I hope that I am never subjected
        to the kind of examination that Mr Irving's books have
        been subjected to by the defence witnesses.  I have a very
        strong feeling that there are other senior historical
        figures, including some to whom I owed a great deal of my
        own career, whose work would not stand up, or not all of
        whose work would stand up, to this kind of examination".

                  I am not throwing myself on the charity of this
        court, my Lord, but I am asking that the court should be
        reasonable in the standards that it sets.  That
        effectively is a line that Professor Watt has supported me
        in.  It is fair to say, of course, that I had to subpoena
        Donald Watt.

   MR JUSTICE GRAY:  Yes, I am aware.

   MR IRVING:  When I invited him to mention some names, of
        course, he declined.  What he was saying was that whatever
        mistakes or whatever unconventional interpretations of
        mine, the Defendants have revealed with their
        multi-million dollar research, and I am going to admit
        some mistakes that I have made, not many, this does not
        invalidate me as an historian, or my historical methods
        and conclusions.

.          P-68

                  Your Lordship will find that Professor Watt
        continued by suggesting that simply by facing the
        challenge of the views that I had put forward, "and basing
        them on historical research rather than idealogical
        conviction," this had resulted in other historians
        devoting an "enormous burst of research" to the Nazi
        massacres of the Jews, an area which can now in
        consequence support journals and conferences.  He said,
        "This, I think, is a direct result of the challenge which
        Mr Irving's work posed and the consistency and the effort
        which he has put into maintaining it in public".  In other
        words, I forced the others to do their homework finally at
        last.  In other words, Watt stated that, far from being a
        Holocaust denier, my work has directly increased
        historical research into, and the understanding of, the
        Holocaust.

                  The German Professor Eberhard Jaeckel made the
        same controversial -- and he is no friend of mine, of
        course -- point in his essay in the book published by the
        Us Holocaust Memorial Museum a year or two ago, namely
        that before my book Hitler's War was published in 1977,
        the first edition, there had been virtually no meaningful
        research into the tragedy at all.  Professor Hans Mommsen,
        Professor Raul Hilberg, Professor Gordon C Craig, these
        and many others have more or less supported my claim to be
        regarded as a serious historian.  I of course say things

.          P-69

        like that with the utmost personal distaste.  I do not
        believe in blowing my own trumpet.  The outcome of my
        research, my books, and my speaking is therefore that
        people in general are more, and not less, aware of the
        horrors of the Holocaust, and they are certainly better informed.

                  One of the most damaging accusations which Mr
        Rampton has repeated again this morning, is that I, the
        plaintiff, driven by my obsession with Hitler, distort,
        manipulate and falsify history in order to put Hitler in a
        more favourable light, thereby demonstrating a lack of the
        detachment, rationality and judgment necessary for an historian.

                  I submit that, in assessing whether I am an
        historian who "distorts, manipulates and falsifies" your
        Lordship should give most weight to my avowedly historical
        written works.  Your Lordship will be thoroughly aware of
        why I am saying this.  I suggested my speeches, very
        occasional lapses of taste in them, lapses of taste
        Mr Rampton has identified and mentioned repeatedly,
        I think three altogether, are relevant purely as
        background material.  Of those written historical works,
        I submit that your Lordship give most weight to my
        flagship work Hitler's War.  I ask that your Lordship read
        (again, if your Lordship has already done so) the
        introduction to the 1991 edition.  This was published well

.          P-70

        after the year when the Defendants (wrongly) assert that
        I "flipped over" to become what they call a Holocaust denier.

                  I have always differed from my colleagues in my
        profession in insisting on using original documents,
        including where possible the authors' drafts of books or
        memoirs rather than the heavily edited West German
        editions, later rewritings, or posthumous adaptations.  I
        also make use of many more unpublished original documents
        than my historian colleagues, in my belief.  In the 1960s
        and 1970s, I must add, of course, that was much more
        difficult than it is today.

                  I differ too from others, in making copies -- and
        I am going to emphasise this quite a lot- of the original
        documents which I unearth freely available to others
        as soon as my own works are complete, and in fact often
        before that time, as the panne, the accident, the mishap
        which Professor Harold Deutsch's book showed.  Your
        Lordship will remember that Harold Deutsch got there first
        and used it before me, and I was accused of plageurising
        his book, because I gave him the materials before I used
        them.  As page 14 of Hitler's War shows, I donate these
        records regularly to publicly accessible archives and
        I also make them available on microfilm.  There are nearly
        200 such microfilms in my records, nearly half a million
        pages.  I also devote time to corresponding with and

.          P-71

        assisting other historians and researchers.  If,
        therefore -- this is the important point -- some of my
        interpretations are controversial, I also do all that is
        possible to let other people judge for themselves.  This
        speaks strongly against the accusation, levelled against
        me again today by Mr Rampton, that I distort, manipulate
        and falsify history.

                  On Hitler and the Holocaust I wrote these words,
        and this is in the 1991 edition, after the time when
        I supposedly became a denier obsessed with Hitler and with
        exonerating him.

                  Page 2: My conclusions ... startled even me.
        Hitler was a far less omnipotent Fuhrer than had been
        believed, his methods and tactics were profoundly
        opportunistic.

                  Page 4:  ... the more hermetically Hitler locked
        himself away behind the barbed wire and mine fields of his
        remote military headquarters, the more his Germany became
        a Fuhrer Staat without a Fuhrer.  Domestic policy was
        controlled by whoever was most powerful in each sector -
        by Goring, Lammers, Bormann, Himmler.

                  Page 17:  If this biography were simply a
        history of the rise and fall of Hitler's Reich, it would
        be legitimate to conclude "Hitler killed the Jews".  He
        had after all created the atmosphere of hatred with his
        speeches in the 1930s; he and Himmler had created the SS;

.          P-72

        his speeches, though never explicit, left the clear
        impression that "liquidate" what was he meant.

                  At pages 17 to 18:  For a full length war
        biography, I wrote, I felt that a more analytical approach
        to the key questions of initiative, complicity and
        execution would be necessary.  Remarkably, I found that
        Hitler's own role in the "Final Solution", whatever that
        was, had never been examined.

                  At page 38:  Every document actually linking
        Hitler with the treatment of the Jews invariably takes the
        form of an embargo, and I maintain that position, despite
        everything we have heard for the last two months.

                  This is the famous "chain of documents", of
        course, notwithstanding everything we have heard in court,
        I still adhere to this position.

                  At page 19 it is plausible to impute to him, to
        Hitler, that not uncommon characteristic of heads of
        state, a conscious desire "not to know", what the
        Americans now call, I believe, plausible deniability.  But
        the proof of this of course is beyond the powers of a historian.

                  At page 21 I write:  ... dictatorships are
        fundamentally weak ... I concluded, the burden of guilt
        for the bloody and mindless massacres of the Jews rests on
        a large number of Germans (and non-Germans), many of them
        alive today and not just on one "mad dictator", whose

.          P-73

        order had to be obeyed without question.

                  The similarity with the thesis propagated by
        Dr Daniel Goldhagen of the University of Harvard in his
        worldwide best seller book, "Hitler's Willing
        Executioners", will surely strike everybody in this
        court.  I am saying the burden falls on a large number of
        Germans and not just on that one madman's.  Note the word
        "just".  I do not say "not on the madman", I say not just on him.

                  Allow me to rub this point in:  What I actually
        wrote and printed and published in my flagship study
        Hitler's War was that Hitler was clearly responsible for
        the Holocaust both by virtue of being head of state and by
        having done so much by his speeches and organisation to start it off.

                  Where I differed from many historians was in
        denying that there was any documentary proof of detailed
        direction and initiation of the mass murders by Hitler,
        and I am glad to say two months in that respect has not
        brought us any closer.  The view was considered to be
        heretical at the time.  But this lack of wartime
        documentary evidence for Hitler's involvement is now
        widely accepted.  Indeed, on the narrower matter of the
        lack of wartime documentary evidence on the gas chambers,
        your Lordship was already good enough to grant as follows
        in an exchange between your Lordship and myself and

.          P-74

        Professor Evans.

                  I said:  If his Lordship is led to believe by a
        careless statement of the witnesses that there is a vast
        body of wartime documents, namely about gas chambers, this
        would be unfair, would it not, because you, Professor
        Evans, are not referring to wartime documents, you are
        referring to postwar documents?

                  Professor Evans at this point replies: I am
        referring to all kinds of documents.

                  I insist, this is me:  You are not referring to wartime documents?

                  Evans says:  I am referring to documents
        including wartime documents, the totality of the written
        evidence for the Holocaust which you deny.

                  Irving then says:  Are you saying there is a
        vast quantity of wartime documents?

                  You see, I am a bit persistent on this matter.

                  Evans says:  What I am saying is that there is a
        vast quantity of documents and material for all aspects of the Holocaust.

                  At this point your Lordship was good enough to
        say:  I expect you would accept, Professor Evans, just to
        move on, the number of overtly incriminating documents,
        wartime documents, as regarding gas chambers is actually
        pretty few and far between?

                  That is how it was left.

.          P-75

                  To summarise, in Hitler's War I differed from
        the other historians in suggesting that the actual mass
        murders were not all or mainly initiated by Hitler.
        I pointed out that my sources were consistent with another
        explanation:  A conscious desire "not to know" (a kind of
        Richard Nixon kind of complex) to which I referred, I
        believe, on three occasions during the hearings here.

                  I submit that I have not distorted, manipulated
        and falsified.  I have put all the cards on table; I made
        the documents available to all comers, on microfilm and in
        the archives, and I have pointed to various possible explanations.

                  I further submit that, while certainly "selling"
        my views, I have been much less manipulated that those
        historians, including some whom you heard in this court,
        my Lord, whose argument has an important part been simply
        this -- that I ought not to be heard, because my views are
        too outlandish or extreme.  Disgracefully, these scholars
        cleared from the sidelines as I have outlawed, arrested
        harassed, and all but "vernichtet" destroyed as a
        professional historian; and they have put pressure on
        British publishers to destroy my works.  This is a
        reference to MacMillan Limited, to which we will come later.

                  To assist your Lordship in deciding how
        outlandish and extreme these views of mine are, I allow

.          P-76

        myself to quote from AJP Taylor's The War Lords, published
        by Penguin -- the First Defendants in this action -- in
        London in 1978. Of Adolf Hitler Taylor wrote.

                       "... it was at this time that he became really a 
        recluse, settling down in an underground bunker, running the 
        war from the front.  (at pages 55-57).

                  Precisely same kind of image I generated from my
        own sources.

                       "He was a solitary man, though he sometimes 
        accepted, of course, advice from others, sometimes decisions 
        [my emphasis].  [he accepted decisions from others] It is, I think, 
        true, for instance, that the terrible massacre of the Jews".

                  This is AJP Taylor who "was inspired more by
        Himmler than by Hitler, though Hitler took it up".  (At
        pages 68-70).

                  These quotations are from the foreword of AJP
        Taylor's own flagship work, The Origins of the Second
        World War, published in 1963:

                       "Little can be discovered so long as we
        go on attributing everything that happened to Hitler.  He supplied 
        a powerful dynamic element, but it was fuel to an existing machine... 
        [later on he writes] He have counted for nothing without the 
        support and co-operation of the German people.  It seems to be believed 
        nowadays that Hitler did everything himself, even driving the trains 
        and filling the gas chambers unaided. This

.          P-77

                  was not so.  Hitler was a sounding-board for the German nation.  
        Thousands.  Many hundred thousand, Germans carried out his evil orders 
        without qualm or question."

                  What I wrote, with less felicity of style than
        Professor Taylor, was a reasonable interpretation of the
        information available to me at the time.  I might add that
        my words are often accepted, quoted, and echoed by other
        historians far more eminent than me.  (including the
        government's Official Historians like Professor Frank
        Hinsley, in his volumes on British intelligence) who
        specifically footnotes and references my works.  Some may
        regard my interpretations as not the most probable.  But
        they are never perverse. For the Defendants to describe me
        as one who manipulates, distorts, and falsifies it would
        be necessary for them to satisfy your Lordship that
        I wilfully adopted perverse and ridiculous
        interpretations. But I have not and they have not
        satisfied your Lordship either, I submit.

                  The Defendants' historiographical criticisms

                  I now turn to some of the particular matters
        which exercised your Lordship, in the list of points at issue.

                  As a preamble I would say that I trust your
        Lordship will be bear in mind that the task facing an
        historian of my type -- what I refer to as a "shirtsleeve
        historian", a shirtsleeve historian working in the field,

.          P-78

        from original records -- is very different from the task
        facing the scholar or academic who sits in a book-lined
        study, plucking handy works of reference from his shelves,
        printed in large type, translated into English, provided
        with easy indices and often with nice illustrations too.

                  Your Lordship will recall that while researching
        the Goebbels Diaries in Moscow for the first week in June
        1992 I had to read those wartime Nazi glass microfiches
        plates through a magnifier the size of a nailclipper, with
        a lens smaller than a pea.  The Court will appreciate that
        reading even post-war microfilm of often poorly reproduced
        original documents on a mechanical reader is tedious, time
        consuming, and an unrewarding business.  Your Lordship
        will be familiar with the reason why I saying this.  There
        were certain matters which we dealt with. Notes have to be
        taken in handwriting when are you sitting at a reader.
        There are no "pages" to be xeroxed. In the 1960s xerox
        copies were nothing like as good as they are now, as your
        Lordship will have noticed from the blue-bound volumes
        brought in here from my own document archives.  Mistakes
        undoubtedly occur:  the mis-transcription of difficult
        German words pencilled in Gothic or Sutterlin-style
        handwriting, a script which most modern German scholars
        find unreadable anyway; mistakes of copying are made;
        mistakes of omission (i.e. a passage is not transcribed
        when you are sitting at the screen because at the time it

.          P-79

        appears of no moment).  These are innocent mistakes, and
        with a book the size of Hitler's War which currently runs
        to 393,000 words, they are not surprising.

                  Your Lordship may recall another exchange I had
        with Professor Evans:  may I emphasise here that there is
        no personal animus from me towards Professor Evans at all.
        I thought he gave his evidence admirably.

                  IRVING:   Professor Evans, when your researchers
        were researching in my files at the Institute of History
        in Munich, did they come across a file there which was
        about 1,000 pages long, consisting of the original
        annotated footnotes of Hitler's War which were referenced
        by a number to a every single sentence in that book?

                  ANSWER:  No.

                  IRVING:  It was not part of the original corpus,
        it was part of the original manuscript, but it was chopped
        out because of the length.

                  EVANS:   No, we did not see that.

                  IRVING:  Have you seen isolated pages of that in
        my diary (sic) in so far as it relates to episodes which
        were of interest, like the Reichskristallnacht?

                  EVANS:  No, I do not to be honest, recall, but
        that does not mean to say that we have not seen them.

                  IRVING:   You say my footnotes are opaque
        because they do not always give the page reference. Do you
        agree that, on a page which we are going to come across in

.          P-80

        the course of this morning, of your own expert report, you
        put a footnote in just saying "see Van Pelt's report", and
        that expert report is 769 pages long, is it not?

                  So from this exchange it is plain that I was not
        just a conjurer producing quotations in my books,
        producing quotations and documents out of a hat; I made my
        sources and references available in their totality to
        historians, even when they were not printed in the book.

                  The allegation that the mistakes are
        deliberate -- that they are manipulations, or
        distortions --  is a foul one to make, and easily disposed
        of by general considerations, which I ask your Lordship to
        pay particular attention to.  If I intended deliberately
        to mistranscribe a handwritten word or text on which the
        defence places such reliance, I would hardly on the
        deliberate nature of the mistranscription, I would hardly
        have furnished copies of the original text to my critics,
        or published the text of the handwritten document as a
        facsimile in the same work (for example, the famous
        November 30th 1941 note, which is illustrated as a
        facsimile in all editions of Hitler's War); nor would
        I have placed the entire collection of such documents
        without restriction in archives commonly frequented by my criticism.

                  If I intended to mistranslate a document, would
        I have encouraged the publication of the resulting book,

.          P-81

        with the correct original quotation in the German
        language, where my perversion of the text would easily
        have been discovered?  Yet like all my other works both,
        Hitler and Goebbels have appeared in German language
        editions with a full and correct transcription of the
        controversial texts. Is that the action of a deliberate mistranslator.

                  As for the general allegation that the errors of
        exaggeration or distortions that were made were "all" of a
        common alignment, designed to exonerate or exculpate Adolf
        Hitler, the test which I submit your Lordship must apply
        should surely be this: if the sentence that is complained
        of be removed from the surrounding paragraph or text (and
        in each book there are only one or two such sentences of
        which this wounding claim is made) does this in any way
        alter the book's general thrust, or the weight of the
        argument that is made?

                  An example of this test is the wrong weight
        which I gave to the contents of the 1.20 am telegram
        issued by SS-Gruppenfuhrer Reinhard Heydrich on
        Kristallnacht. I think Mr Rampton referred to that this
        morning. It is a famous telegram, printed in the Nuremberg
        volumes, five pages long or so. Would such an error have
        been committed wilfully by me, given the risk that it
        would inevitably be exposed? Is it not far more likely on
        the balance of probabilities that in the process of

.          P-82

        writing and rewriting, and of cutting and of cutting and
        condensing, the Goebbels manuscript, the author, that is
        me, gradually over the eight years lost sight of the full
        content and the thrust of the original document?  Your
        Lordship should know, if not then I say so now, that that
        book witness through five successive drafts and retypes
        over eight years, filling eventually four archives boxes,
        a total of eight cubic feet of manuscript, all of which I
        disclosed to the Defendants by way of discovery.  St
        Martin's Press, my American publishers, particularly asked
        that these early chapters of the book should be trimmed
        back in length.

                  These general considerations disposed of the
        defence arguments on the "Policeman Hoffman" evidence as
        rendered in the 1924 Hitler treason trial.  For the
        limited purposes of writing a biography of -- my Lord,
        these are points you have asked me to address specifically
        in your list of issues. I say that because those who
        listen to Mr Rampton's speech will not have heard them
        referred to and may be puzzled as to why I am addressing
        them. For the limited purposes of writing a biography of
        Hermann Goring -- not of Hitler -- I relied on the
        thousands of typescript microfilmed pages of the
        transcript of this trial.  So far as I know, nobody had
        ever used them before me at that time.  Now the handy,
        printed, bound, indexed, cross-referenced edition, which

.          P-83

        Professor Evans drew upon had not appeared at that time.
        The printed edition appeared in 1988, two years ago.
        Eleven years after my Goring biography was published.  In
        other words, even more years after I wrote it by Macmillan
        Limited. I extracted -- with difficulty -- from the
        microfilmed pages of the original transcript the material
        I needed relating to Hitler and Goring and I was not
        otherwise interested in that man Hofmann at all.  I do not
        consider the printed volume on the trial which is now
        available shows that I made meaningful errors, if so, they
        certainly were not deliberate.

                  The Kristallnacht in November 1938 is a more
        difficult episode in every way.  I do not mean in that
        sense, my Lord, that it is difficult for me personally.
        It is a difficult episode to reconstruct from the material
        available to us.  As said, I clearly made an error over
        the content (and reference number) of the 1.20 a.m.
        telegram from Heydrich.  It was an innocent error.  It was
        a glitch of the kind that occurs in the process of
        redrafting a manuscript several times over the years. The
        Court must not overlook that by the time was completed in
        1994 and 1995 and as I described in the introduction to
        that book, Goebbels, the Mastermind of the Third Reich, by
        that time I had been forcefully severed from both my own
        collection of documents in German institutions and from
        the German Federal archives in Koblenz.  On July 1st 1993,

.          P-84

        my Lord when I attended the latter archives in Koblenz
        explicitly for the purpose of tidying up loose ends on the
        Goebbels manuscript, I was formally banned from the
        building in the interests of the German people I was told,
        for ever on orders of the minister of the interior -- that
        is one of the gravest blows that has been struck at me in
        my submission by this international endeavour to which
        I shall shortly refer.

                  The allegation of the Defendants in connection
        with the Kristallnacht is that in order to "exonerate
        Hitler" I effectively concocted or invented, a false
        version of events on that night, namely that Adolf Hitler
        intervened between 1 and 2 a.m. in order to halt the
        madness.  I think that is a fair summary of the charge
        against me.  I submit that their refusal to accept this,
        my version, is ingrained in their own political
        attitudes.  There is evidence both in the archives and in
        the reliable contemporary records like Ulrich von Hassell,
        the diaries of von Hassell, Alfred Rosenberg and Hellmuth
        Groscurth, and in the independent testimonies. By which I
        mean independent from each other, testimonies of those
        participants whom I myself carefully questioned, or whose
        private papers I obtained -- I mention here Nicolaus von
        Below, Hitler's adjutant.  Another adjutant, Bruckner,
        Julius Schaub, Karl Wolff and others -- which the Court
        has seen, to justify the versions which I rendered.  It

.          P-85

        therefore was not an invented story.  It may well be that
        my critics were unfamiliar with the sources that I used
        before they made their criticisms.  The dishonesty lies
        not with me, for printing the "inside" story of Hitler's
        actions that night, as far as we can reconstruct them
        using these and other sources; but with those scholars who
        have studiously ignored them, and in particular the Rudolf
        Hess "stop arson" telegram of 2.56 am, which was
        issued "on orders from the highest level", which the
        Defendants' scholars are agreed or testified is a
        reference to Hitler.

                  Your Lordship may well have marvelled to hear
        the Defendants' witnesses dismiss this message from Rudolf
        Hess -- like the Schlegelberger Document, referred to
        later -- as being of no consequence.

                  The Kristallnacht diaries of Dr Goebbels, which
        I obtained in Moscow in 1992, some years after I first
        drafted the episode for my biography, substantially bore
        out my version of events, in my submission, namely that he
        and not Hitler was the prime instigator, and that Hitler
        was largely unaware and displeased by what came about, or
        by the scale of what came about, would be a fairer way to
        put that.  Your Lordship will recall that Professor
        Phillippe Burrin, a Swiss Holocaust historian for whom all
        the witnesses expressed respect when questioned by me,
        comes to the same conclusion independently of me.  Now he

.          P-86

        (and I have given the quotation at the foot of page).
        Now, he is manifestly not a "Holocaust denier" either.
        The Court will also recall that the witness Professor
        Evans admitted that unlike myself he had not read all
        through the available Goebbels Diaries.  It is a massive
        task.  A mammoth task.  He had not had the time, he said,
        and we must confess a certain sympathy with that
        position -- for an academic, time is certainly at a
        premium.  But reading all of the available Goebbels
        Diaries is however necessary, in order to establish and
        recognize the subterfuges which this Nazi minister used
        throughout his career as diarist, in order to conceal when
        he was creating what I call alibis for his own wayward and
        evil behaviour.

                  I drew attention to this historiographical
        conundrum several times in the book, my Goebbels
        biography, the fact that Goebbels Diaries were not
        trustworthy.  I discussed both in my scientific annotated
        German language edition of the 1938 diaries and in my full
        Goebbels biography which your Lordship has read, a
        characteristic example from this same year, 1938, although
        the one episode which most deeply harrowed and unsettled
        him that year was his affair with the Czech actress, Lida
        Baarova, an affair which drove him to the brink of
        resignation, divorce, and even suicide, neither her name
        nor any of those events figures explicitly in the diary at

.          P-87

        all, unless the pages be read particularly closely, when
        certain clues can be seen.  That is an example ...

                  The Goebbels diary is sometimes a very deceitful
        document; it must be recognized as such and treated very
        gingerly indeed.  It is the diary of a liar, a
        propagandist. The fact that it was evidently written up
        not one, but two or even three days later, after the
        Kristallnacht episode, calls for additional caution in
        relying on it for chronology and content.

                  My Lord, your Lordship will notice that I have
        not dealt specifically with the number of the issues you
        put in your list.  I hope your Lordship does not take
        umbrage with that, but I felt that I dealt with them
        adequately in my cross-examination.

   MR JUSTICE GRAY:  It is entirely a matter for you.

   MR IRVING:   If this was wrong of me then all I can say is
        culpa mea (sic) but I now continue with the various
        narratives of the Nazi shooting of the Jews in the East.

                  There is little dispute between the parties on
        what actually happened in my view.  This is the shootings
        of the Jews in the East by the Nazis and their
        collaborators.  There is little dispute between the
        parties on what actually happened in my view, and your
        Lordship is aware that I have given these atrocities due
        and proper attention in the various biographies I have
        written; I however add the one caveat, that they are not

.          P-88

        intended to be reference works on the Holocaust, but just
        orthodox biographies.

                  I believe that I was the first historian
        anywhere in the world to discover and make use of the
        CSDIC reports relating further details to these killings,
        particularly the Bruns Report, and I made these reports
        available to many other historians.  I should explain to
        the people who are not familiar with them that these CSDIC
        reports are eavesdropping reports on Nazi prisoners that
        we British made using hidden microphones.  It took -- it
        takes many days to read them.  There are thousands and
        thousands of pages in these files.  Over the last twenty
        years I have read these horrifying narratives out
        repeatedly to public audiences, they describe the killings
        of the Jews in the most horrifying detail, including
        "right-wing" audiences.  This fact alone entitles me to
        express my contempt at those who would describe me as a
        "Holocaust denier".

                  We have seen the Defendants scrabbling around at
        the end of the Bruns Report for its seizing on its
        third-hand reference by this SS murderer and braggart in
        Riga, Altemeyer, to an "order" that he claimed to have
        received to carry out such mass shootings more
        circumspectly in future.  But we know from the late 1941
        police decodes -- we British were reading the SS and
        police messages passing between Berlin and the front.  We

.          P-89

        know from the late 1941 police decodes, which is a much
        firmer source-document in my view than a snatch of
        conversation remembered years later, in April 1945, we
        know precisely what orders had gone from Hitler's
        headquarters, radioed by Himmler himself to the SS mass
        murderer, SS Obergruppenfuhrer Friedrich Jeckeln, stating
        explicitly that these killings exceeded the authority that
        had been given by himself, Himmler, and by the
        Reichsssicherheitshauptamp (the RSHA).  We know that the
        killing of all German Jews stopped at once, for many
        months upon the receipt of that message.  When I first
        translated the word "Judentransport" a word which I
        emphasise again can mean "transportation of the Jews", as
        "transports of Jews", in the plural, in the 1970s, being
        unaware of the surrounding context of data which helps now
        to narrow down the purport to the one Riga-bound trainload
        from Berlin.  I was thus inadvertently coming closer to
        the truth, not further from it; because the liquidation of
        all the trainloads from Germany was halted next day,
        December 1st 1941, by the order radioed from Hitler's
        headquarters (whether initiated by Himmler or Hitler seems
        hair-splitting in this context).

                  As I stated under cross-examination, I did not
        see the Schulz-Dubois document when I wrote my books and
        I have not seen it since; having now read Professor Gerald
        Fleming tells us about it, I confess that I would be

.          P-90

        unlikely to attach the same importance as does learned
        counsel for the Defendants, to what the famously anti-Nazi
        Abwehr Chief Wilhelm Canaris allegedly told Lieutenant
        Schulz-Dubois of Hitler's reaction. The British decodes of
        the SS signals, to which I introduced the Court, and the
        subsequent events (the actual cessation for many months of
        the liquidation of German Jews) in my submission speak louder.

                  Your Lordship asked in your list of questions
        for my comments on the reference in Hitler's table talk of
        October 25th 1941.  Well, your Lordship is familiar with
        the Defendants' argument and with mine.  My extract from
        this document which I used was based originally on the
        original Weidenfeld translation, in fact, I used the
        original Weidenfeld translation into English, as is well
        known, in disagreement with the Defendants' experts I
        still maintain and others have followed me in this
        (notably Professor Phillippe Burrin, who translates
        Schrecken as "the ominous reputation") in that context,
        that the appropriate translation here for the word
        "schrecken" is indeed "rumour" and not "terror", a word
        which makes for a wooden and uncouth translation anyway.

                  Ladies and gentlemen, it will make no sense,
        unfortunately, this passage, unless you see the document.
        A relevant passage from the SS Event Report from
        activities in the rear of the eastern front, dated

.          P-91

        September 11, 1941 front (provided by the Defendants),
        shows that this is precisely what was meant: "The rumour
        that all Jews are being shot by the Germans had a salutary
        effect".  The Jews were now fleeing before the Germans
        arrived.  The rumour!  To accuse me of wilful
        mistranslation and even worse distortion when (a) I used
        the original (sic) Weidenfeld translation, not at that
        time having received the original German from Switzerland,
        and (b) the word "rumour" gives precisely the nuance, the
        correct nuance that the surrounding history shows the word
        was meant to have, this accusation seems to me an
        excessively harsh judgment on my expertise.

                  The next in line is the Goebbels diary entry for
        November 22nd, 194:  Again, I just pick out what seems to
        matter to me in that particular entry here, for the
        purposes of today's submissions.

                  This diary entry, my Lord, includes a fair
        example of how dishonest the reporting by Goebbels was
        when it comes to his meetings with Hitler.  He records
        "the exceptional praise" of Hitler for the weekly
        newsreel produced by his ministry, the propaganda
        ministry; in fact Hitler was forever criticising this very
        product of the Goebbels ministry, as the diary of
        Rosenberg shows. Goebbels then continues, here is the
        quote: "With regard to the Jewish problem too the Fuhrer
        completely agrees with my views. He wants an energetic

.          P-92

        policy against the Jews, but one however that does not
        cause us needless difficulties."  Goebbels diary entry
        continues: "The evacuation of the Jews is to be done city
        by city".  So it is still not fixed when Berlin's turn
        comes; but when it does, "the evacuation should be carried
        out as fast as possible".  In other words, he had not got
        his way.  He had been agitating once again that the
        evacuation should start but Hitler had not come into line.
        "Still not fixed when Berlin's time comes".  Hitler then
        expressed the need for "a somewhat reserved approach" in
        question of mixed marriages -- that is marriages between
        Jews and non-Jews. What do you do with them? Are you going
        to keep them in Germany or deport them?  Hitler's view was
        the marriages would die out anyway by and by, and they
        should not go grey worrying about it.

                  Now I have suggested that on the balance of
        probabilities Hitler was alluding to the public unrest
        when he said he wanted a policy that does not cause us
        needless difficulties. I have suggested on a balance of
        probabilities Hitler was alluding to the public unrest
        caused by the suicide a few days earlier of the popular
        actor Joachim Gottschalk and his family.  Apart from
        "needless" becoming "endless", in an irritating typo
        which hardly amounts to manipulation, in other words, in
        the original German, the original translation started off
        as "causing us needless difficulties", which is correct,

.          P-93

        and somehow it became "endless difficulties" is an
        irritating typo which hardly amounts to "manipulation".
        This passage bears out what I have always said of Hitler.
        While Goebbels was the eternal agitator, as witness his
        anti-Semitic leading article published in Das Reich only a
        few days before, November 16th 1941, Hitler was (even by
        Goebbels own account) for a reserved approach towards the
        Jewish problems; and he was doing so, even as the
        trainloads of Jews were heading eastwards from Bremen and
        Berlin, for example to the conquered Russian territories
        and the Baltic states.  Your Lordship will not need
        reminding of the curious British decodes, which revealed
        the provisioning of the deportation trains with tonnes of
        foods for the journey.  These are messages which we
        British decoded, which reveal the provisioning of the
        deportation trainloads of Jews with tonnes of food for the
        journey, stocks of many weeks food for after they arrived
        and even deportees' appliances, "Gerat", appliances.  So
        the evacuation at this time evidently meant just that to
        very many Reich officials, and no more.

                  My Lord ----

   MR JUSTICE GRAY:  Press on.  Let us get as far as the
        Schlegelberger document, shall we, on the next page.

   MR IRVING:  Jolly good, yes, good point.

                  Mr Rampton went to some effort and expense to
        suggest that I suppressed vital information from the newly

.          P-94

        discovered Goebbels diary, December 13th 1941.  In this
        day's entry Goebbels reported on various things and he
        reported on Hitler's rhetoric to the Gauleiters, speaking
        on December 12th 1941 in Berlin, the Nazi governors.
        Anybody who is as familiar as I am with Hitler's speeches,
        and with Goebbels' diary entries relating to be them will
        effortlessly recognize this entire passage as being usual
        the Hitler gramophone record about his famous 1939
        "prophecy".  It was part of his stock repertoire when
        speaking to the Party old guard -- they had carried him
        into power, the Party old guard had carried him into power
        and they expected to hear from him that he had not
        abandoned the hallowed Party programme.  I can understand
        the temptation for the younger generation of scholars,
        unfamiliar with Hitler's rhetoric, to fall greedily upon
        such freshly discovered morsels as though they were the
        answer to the great Holocaust mystery:  None of the
        witnesses to whom this item was put by myself, or by
        counsel for the Defendants, was able to identify any part
        of this passage which was out of the ordinary for Hitler.

                  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.

                  I know very little about these bodies, but I am
        aware that the anti-defamation league of the B'nai Brith,
        which is an American body, has a 50 million dollar annual
        budget, substantially greater than an author commands
        whose livelihood has been destroyed by their activities.
        When your Lordship comes to consider such things as costs
        and damages, I would respectfully submit that you bear
        these things in mind.

                  We have them to thank for the spectacle that has
        been presented in this court room since January.  Without
        their financial assistance, it is unlikely that Mr Rampton
        and this defence team and his instructing solicitors could
        have mounted this colossal onslaught on my name.

                  Further down, for over three years this

.          P-115

        well-funded team sitting opposite me, next to me, has
        drilled down deep into my private papers, burrowed on a
        broad front into the archives of the world and a
        multi-pronged attack trying to establish that what I have
        written over the last 35 or more years is distorted or
        mistranslated in pursuance of an agenda, namely the
        exoneration of Adolf Hitler, trying to dig up every little
        morsel of dirt on me that that can.

                  My book Hitler's War was published by the Viking
        Press in New York and by Hodder and Stoughton in this
        country in 1977.  That is when what can be seen as the
        coordinated attack on the book began.  The Viking Press
        was and is one of that nation's most reputable publishers
        and in fact I believe they are owner of the first
        Defendant company in this case.

                  Turning the page now, the Anti-defamation League
        issued a report with more fervour than accuracy, saying:

        "David Irving is the nom de plume of John Cawdell" --
        this not true, I hasten to say, do not get it wrong, it is
        totally untrue -- "a revisionist historiographer of Adolf
        Hitler, particularly regarding Hitler's role in and
        knowledge of the mass extermination of European Jewry.
        His major premise", says the Anti-defamation League, "is
        that Hitler was largely oblivious to the large scale
        killings of Jews in the death camps".

                  I carry on:  The agent's report -- this is a

.          P-116

        report put out in 1977.

   MR JUSTICE GRAY:  I wonder, Mr Irving, really whether one might
        just go to the middle of page 35 without doing any
        injustice to your case.

   MR IRVING:  Yes.  When I then began my lecturing activities
        around the United States in the early 1980s, speaking at
        private functions, schools and universities, the
        headquarters of the ADL sent out a secret circular, a
        "Backgrounder", in 1983, to all their local agents.  The
        backgrounder, dated July 6th 1983, began with the words,
        "British author David Irving has been of concern to ADL,
        as well as to the Jewish community generally, since the
        1977 publication of his book Hitler's War", and it
        indicated that it was the controversy over Hitler and the
        Jews that was the reason.  We have heard of similar such
        circulars being generated by them on other famous names.
        In my case the ADL instructed its"regional offices":

                  "Should he surface in your region, please
        notify the Fact Finding Department and your Civil Rights Co-ordinator".

                  It is quite plain that the ADL were not
        concerned with promoting civil rights.  I am mentioning
        them because of course that collaborated very closely with
        the Second Defendant in the preparation of the book that
        is the subject of this trial.

                  It is quite plain that the Anti-defamation

.          P-117

        League were not concerned with promoting civil rights, but
        in abrogating one of the most basic rights of all, the
        right to freedom of speech.

                  Further down, correspondence with my literary
        agent showed by 1984 that already the international smear
        campaign was inflicting substantial financial damage on
        me.  It was at precisely this time, 1984 -- I will not
        comment on the year -- that the Second Defendant, then
        teaching in the Near Eastern Languages Centre of the
        University of California at Los Angeles, Professor
        Lipstadt, offered her services to Yehuda Bauer in
        Jerusalem, a very well known Israeli Professor.  She
        attached "A proposal for research:  The Historical and
        Historiographic Methodology of the Holocaust
        revisionists".  This was the genesis of the book that we
        are complaining about.  I ask your Lordship to note that
        on page 38 of the synopsis prepared by the Second
        Defendant, which is in my bundle E at page 38, The Second
        Defendant, Professor Lipstadt, mentioned my name in the
        following words:  "They [the deniers] also find it
        expedient to associate themselves with those such as David
        Irving who do not deny that the Holocaust took place but
        seek to shift the blame to others."

                  To conclude this, on the matter of her
        employment:  on May 31, 1988 Professor Lipstadt was
        awarded and additional agreement for research on this

.          P-118

        topic by the Vidal Sassoon Centre for the study of
        Anti-Semitism at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.  So
        at all material times, the book was being commissioned by
        that University in Jerusalem.  This research, it should be
        added, was what finally bore fruit as the book complained
        of, "Denying the Holocaust".  The publisher at that time
        was to be Mr Robert Maxwell, who was liaising with
        Professor Yehuda Bauer.

                  Briefly summarizing the next page: During this
        period the international campaign against me achieved some
        ugly successes.  I was illegally deported from Austria.
        The Austrian government had to pay me compensation when it
        was overturned.

                  The Second Defendant's discovery -- lower down
        that page -- which included such correspondence with, and
        items from, the Anti-Defamation League as she has seen fit
        to provide, throws some interesting lights on the ADL.
        When a local newspaper, The Daily Pilot, published in
        Orange County, south of Los Angeles, a report on a
        function of the Institute of Historical Review, about
        which we have heard much from the Defence in the last few
        weeks.  The anti-Defamation League was horrified as the
        regional office reported, to find that the reporter in the
        newspaper, and I quote "seems to find an air of legitimacy
        surrounding the group".  That word "legitimacy" again;
        remember they were going to destroy my legitimacy?  The

.          P-119

        reporter, Mr Bob Van Eyken, who had evidently not got the
        message, even described the IHR members as "neatly dressed
         ... evoking a sense of reasoned dignity".  This clearly
        clashed with the skinheaded, jackbooted extremist
        stereotype that the ADL, like the expert witnesses in this
        case, wished to promote for the IHR and other "right-wing"
        groups.  This material, though clearly discoverable in
        this action, was withheld from discovery by the Second
        Defendant until a summons was issued to produce all her
        correspondence with the ADL.

                  We know that the Second Defendant has had
        extensive dealings with the Anti-Defamation League, the
        ADL, this American body.  Even from her own limited
        discovery, about the deficiencies in which I still have
        more to say, we know that Professor Lipstadt was provided
        with smear dossiers by them.  She thanks them in her
        Introduction.  She made not attempt to verify the contents
        of this material with me as the victim (or, so far as this
        court knows, with any others), but she recklessly
        published it raw and unchecked.  A 25-cent phone call to
        me would have saved her endless trouble.  Instead she
        preferred to rely on these sheets like the "confidential"
        and defamatory four-page item dated October 23rd 1986,
        headed:  "Profile on Dave Irving", evidently coming from
        another Canadian body.  Characteristically, the "profile"
        was disclosed to me by her solicitors without any covering

.          P-120

        letter from its author or custodian and shorn of any
        identifying material; I wrote more than once in vain
        asking for the missing pages to be provided.

                  It is quite evident that the Anti-Defamation
        League, who were in cahoots with the Second Defendant, set
        itself the task of destroying my career, in consort with
        other similar organisations around the world, many of
        whom, if not all, collaborated with the Second Defendant
        in writing her book.  The pinnacle of their achievement
        came in 1996, when the Second Defendant, as she herself
        boasted to The Washington Post, was among those who put
        pressure on St Martin's Press Incorporated, who had been
        one of my United States publishers for some 15 years, to
        violate their publishing agreement with me and abandon
        publication of Goebbels, my Goebbels biography, "Goebbels,
        Mastermind of the Third Reich".

                  For a few days, these enemies of free speech
        stepped up the pressure.  They publicised the private home
        addresses of St Martin's Press executives on the
        Internet.  They staged street addresses in Manhattan.
        They organised a walkout by the publisher's staff.  When
        SMP refused to be intimidated, Professor Lipstadt wheeled
        out the rhetoric:  to Frank Rich, a syndicated columnist
        of The New York Times, she accused me of being a repeat
        killer, if I can put it like that: "What David Irving is
        doing ... is not the destruction of live people, but the

.          P-121

        destruction of people who already died.  It's killing them
        a second time.  It's killing history".  This was not far
        distance from the outrageous claim on page 213 of her
        book, to which no justification has been pleaded to my
        knowledge, that I justified the incarceration of Jews in
        Nazi concentration camps.  Quoted by The Washington Post
        on April 3rd 1996, Professor Lipstadt stated:

                   "They ... don't publish reputations, they
        publish books", referring to St Martin's Press.  "But
        would they publish a book by Jeffrey Dahmer on man-boy
        relations?  Of course the reputation of the author
        counts.  And no legitimate historian takes David Irving's
        work seriously."

                  We have heard quoted in this Court two tasteless
        remarks I am recorded as having made, about Chappaquiddick
        and about the Association of Spurious Survivors, and I do
        not deny that those words were tasteless.  But bad taste
        is not what is in the pleadings, while express malice is:
        and the odiousness of Professor Lipstadt's comparison, in
        a mass circulation newspaper of record, of a British
        author with Jeffrey Dahmer, a madman who had recently
        murdered and cannibalised a dozen homosexuals in the
        mid-West of the USA, in surely compounded by the fact that
        Lipstadt had at that time not read a single book that
        I had written, let alone the manuscript of Dr Goebbels
        that she had joined in trying to suppress.  It is clear

.          P-122

        that neither she nor the ADL was concerned with the
        merits, or otherwise, of the Goebbels biography.  They
        wanted it put down, suppressed, ausgerottet:  and me with it.

                  Having, like St Martin's Press, thoroughly read
        it, the major US publisher Doubleday Inc. had selected
        this book as their May 1996 choice for History Book of the
        Month.  But that deal depended on the SMP contract, and
        thus it too collapsed.  The financial losses inflicted on
        me by this one episode in April 1996 were of the order of
        half a million dollars, which might seen proper reward for
        the eight years' hard work that I had invested in writing
        this box, and hauling it through its five draft versions.
        The book never appeared in the United States.

                  From the publication of Hitler's War onwards,
        the attitude of the print media to me changed.  A
        strategically placed review written in one afternoon, by
        one man furnished with the appropriate dossier on me,
        could go a long way to destroy the product of six or eight
        years' research, as we have just seen.  That was why these
        dossiers had been created.

                  To the right journalists or writers, such as the
        Second Defendant, these dossiers were on tap.  A fax from
        Professor Lipstadt to the Institute of Jewish Affairs in
        London, or to the ADL in New York, or to the Simon
        Wiesenthal Centre in Toronto, and we have got these faxes

.          P-123

        from her discovery, released to her a cornucopia of filth,
        which she had no need to check or verify, because in the
        United States such writings are protected by the authority
        of the First Amendment to the US Constitution, the
        laudable name of the freedom of speech, or by the
        authority of New York Times v. Sullivan, which
        effectively declares to libellers that it is open season
        on any public figure.

                  I turn the page, my Lord.

                  This Court will surely not take amiss of me that
        I refused to be intimidated by these truly "Nazi" methods,
        and that I have on a few occasions used perhaps tasteless
        language around the world about perpetrators.  The
        violence against me spread around the world, and always it
        was orchestrated by the same organizations.

                  Turn the page.

                  In England, a parallel campaign was launched by
        the Board of Deputies, and by other organizations which we
        know to have collaborated with the Defendants in producing
        this libellous book.  This kicked into high gear after my
        own imprint published an abridged edition of the Leuchter
        report in 1989.  Pressure was put on the World Trade
        Centre in the City of London to repudiate our contract for
        the press conference.  A picket, a muscle man picket, was
        staged outside our own front door to prevent journalists
        from attending when the conference was switched to my own

.          P-124

        harm.  The Board arranged an early day motion in the House
        of Commons, as a privileged way of smearing my name --
        publishing a smear on my name.  On June 30th of that year
        the Jewish Chronicle, which is one of the newspapers that
        has reported this entire proceedings most fairly, in my
        view (and I wish to put that on record) revealed that
        representations had been made to my principal British and
        Commonwealth publisher, Macmillan Limited, to drop me as
        an author.

                  Macmillan had already published several of my
        books and they were under contract to publish several
        more.  I had no fears that they would succumb to this
        intimidation.  They had informed me that Hitler's War was
        running so successfully that they intended to keep it
        permanently in print.  I am entitled to mention this
        background, as I have mentioned the Board's other
        clandestine activities against me, because it was said by
        Mr Rampton that I later made one tasteless remark in
        public about the Board of Deputies.  If somebody attacks,
        using secret and furtive means, the very basis of the
        existence of my family then it may be at least
        understandable that I speak ill of them.

                  Lower down the next paragraph: Secretly, on
        July 17th 1991, the Board of Deputies wrote to the
        President of the German Office for the Protection of the
        Constitution (which is their MI5), a body of which we

.          P-125

        heard greatly admiring words from Professor Funke in the
        witness box; this English board urged that they take steps
        to stop me, a British citizen like no doubt the members of
        the Board, from entering Germany.

                  Germany is a country on whose publishers and
        archives I have been heavily dependent, as this Court is
        aware.  We have only the BfV's reply, dated August 9th
        1991, to the Board of deputies.  I retrieved a copy of
        this letter.  If your Lordship is wondering how I come
        into possession of documents like that, I retrieved a copy
        of this letter from the files of the Prime Minister of
        Australia; so the same Board in London had evidently also
        sent its dossiers to its collaborators in Canberra and, no
        doubt, other countries, in its efforts to gag me
        worldwide.  That is an indication of the worldwide
        networking that went on, this secret common enterprise, of
        which the Second Defendant is a party, to destroy my
        legitimacy as an historian and to deprive me of free
        speech, of which the Defendants have made themselves the
        willing executioners.

                  As is evident from a letter from the Austrian
        Ambassador dated June 22nd 1992, the Board also applied
        pressure on that country to ensure that I did not enter,
        or that if I did I would be arrested.  The same kind of
        thing happened in Argentina.

                  Lower down the page towards the end:  On

.          P-126

        December 6th 1991, an Internal Office Memo from
        Macmillan's files -- my own publisher in London -- records
        that "quite a number of people" had commented unfavourably
        to Macmillan's about them publishing my books, and one
        person, who was an unnamed Professor of Politics at
        Oxford, who had evidently learned nothing from the book
        burning episodes of Nazi Germany, stated "that they would
        be more inclined to publish with us [Macmillan] if we were
        not publishing Irving".  (The Oxford professor of politics
        was probably, in my view, Professor Peter Pulzer,
        identified by Professor Lipstadt in her books as such and
        quoted by The Independent at the time).

                  This campaign had been coordinated.  In some of
        its members, it seems that the illiberal spirit of
        Dr Goebbels lived on behind the Board of Deputies'
        facade.  Meeting behind locked doors at their headquarters
        in December 1991, December 12, a body identified as the
         "Education and Academic Committee of the Holocaust
        Educational Trust, registered as a charitable body, held a
        conference, including point 6:

                   "David Irving:  Concern was voiced over the
        publication of the second edition of Hitler's War".  This
        is 1991, 14 years after the first edition.  "There was
        debate over how to approach Macmillan publishers over
        Goebbels Diary".  That was the other book they were going
        to publish of mine. "It was agreed to await new[s] from

.          P-127

        Jeremy Coleman before deciding what action to take."

                  We know more of this meeting from the statement
        to this Court by my witness Dr John Fox, who was present
        at this cabal in his capacity as editor of The British
        Journal of Holocaust Education.  He testifies as follows:

                  "As an independently-minded historian, I was
        affronted by the suggestion concerning Mr David Irving
        [...] At a certain point in the meeting, attention turned"
         -- do you wish to suggest I move on?

   MR JUSTICE GRAY:  No.  I am reading around what you are reading out to me.

   MR IRVING:  Yes.  "At certain point in the meeting, attention
        turned to the subject of Mr Irving and reports that the
        publishing company of Macmillan would be publishing his
        biography of Goebbels.  Mr Ben Helfgott ... turned to me,
        the only non-Jew present at the meeting, and suggested
        that 'John'", John Fox, "'could approach Macmillan to get
        them to stop publication'. I refused point-blank to accede
        to that suggestion, arguing that in a democracy such as
        ours one simply could not do such a thing.  That amounted
        to censorship ...

                  Nevertheless, as the Committee minutes make
        plain, it was planned by some to consider further action
        about how best to scupper Mr Irving's publishing plans
        with Macmillan".

                  The clandestine pressure on Macmillan's began at

.          P-128

        once.  My editor at Macmillan's, Roland Philipps, noted in
        an internal memorandum of January 2nd 1992 that they
        should reassure prospective authors that they had turned
        down many other book proposals from me, and had no plans
        to continue publishing me after Goebbels.  It was not the
        bravest of postures to adopt, you might think.  The
        memorandum continues:  "If this helps you to reassure any
        prospective authors we are happy for you to say it
        (although not too publicly if possible)".  The desire of
        Macmillan's to stab in the back, for this stab in the back
        to be secret from their own highly successful author,
        myself, is understandable.  In fact, their ultimate stab
        in the back was to come in the summer of 1992.

                  In May 1992, meanwhile, we find Deborah Lipstadt
        providing a list of her personal targets, victims,
        including now myself to the US Holocaust Memorial Museum
        in Washington; she advised the Museum to contact Gail Gans
        at the Research Department of the ADL (about whom we have
        heard) in New York City for additional names, and to "tell
        her I told you to call her".  This establishes that the
        Defendants consider that that museum, which is a US
        taxpayer-funded body, was actively participating in their
        network, and the museum duly provided press clippings from
        London newspapers relating to me, which have now turned up
        in the Defendants' files.

                  The attempts to suffocate my publishing career

.          P-129

        continued.  I mention a second arm of this attack.  Since
        my own imprint, my own publishing imprint, which I had set
        up myself some years earlier, would not be intimidated as
        easily as Macmillan's, or indeed at all, the hostile
        groups applied pressure to major bookselling chains
        throughout Britain to burn or destroy my books and in
        particular the new edition of Hitler's War.  Some of the
        press clippings reporting this nasty campaign are in my
        discovery.  They include reports of a sustained campaign
        of window smashing of the branches of Waterstone's
        bookstores in the biggest Midlands cities, after
        complaints were made by local groups.

                  Waterstones informed one Newcastle newspaper
        that they were taking books off public shelves "following
        a number of vandal attacks on book stores across the
        country".  The Nottingham Waterstones took the book off
        display after a brick was thrown through its window.  The
        campaign clearly coordinated from London.  None of this
        was reported in the national press, but one would have
        thought that these groups would have recognized the bad
        karma in any campaign of smashing windows or burning books.

                  I wrote privately to Tim Waterstone, the head at
        that time of Waterstones, guaranteeing to indemnify his
        chain for their costs of any uninsured claims.  But he
        refused to be intimidated by the campaign and, my Lord,

.          P-130

        that is one reason why I took the names of four
        Waterstones branches off the list of Defendants in this
        action at a very early stage.

                  I am turning the page now, my Lord:
        Demonstrations organized outside by property, violent
        demonstrations, police were frequently called.  The same
        newspaper reported -- this is halfway down that following
        page -- that the Anti-Nazi League and its parent body, the
        Board of Deputies, were applying pressure to The Sunday
        Times to violate its contract with me which was the
        contract to obtain the Goebbels diaries from the Moscow
        archives.  Again, the reason why I mention all of this may
        be apparent, it is when I make remarks about by my
        critics, occasionally using vivid language, I sometimes
        had reason.  As an indication of the pressure ----

   MR JUSTICE GRAY:  Mr Irving, I am just wondering, and I am
        sorry to interrupt you and I am not going to stop you at
        all, but reading on to about page 54, you describe, do you
        not, the continuation of what you see as being this really
        worldwide attempt to close you down as an historian and
        attacks on your house and pressure of various kinds being
        brought to bear all over the world.  I just wonder whether
        there is any particular benefit -- tell me if you there is
         -- in reading out the next seven or so pages?  If there
        is any particular point you want to make, do, but I feel
        myself we could probably move on to the middle of page

.          P-131

        54.

   MR IRVING:  I will move on to 51, my Lord.  When I found out -
        too late - that this fake evidence had been planted on
        Canadian files, which resulted in my being deported from
        Canada in handcuffs on November 13th 1992, I was angered
        and astounded that a British organisation could be
        secretly doing this to British citizens.  It turned out
        from these files that academics with whom I had freely
        corresponded and exchanged information, including Gerald
        Fleming, had been acting as agents and informants for this
        body.  I submit (which is why I am reading this out) that
        these are the bodies that collaborated directly or
        indirectly with the Defendants in the preparation of the
        book and that the Defendants, knowing of the obvious
        fantasy in some of what they said, should have shown
        greater caution in accepting their materials as true.

                  There was an immediate consequence of this fake
        data planted on Canadian files.  One data report recorded
        the "fact" that I had written 78 books denying the
        Holocaust which, of course, is totally untrue.  In August
        1992 a docket was placed on Canadian immigration files
        about me saying, among other things, this is a secret
        file, "Subject David Irving is Holocaust denier, may be
        inadmissible" to Canada with the result, of course, that
        precisely that happened.  I was arrested on October 28th
        at Vancouver, making a speech on freedom of speech,

.          P-132

        deported permanently from Canada on November 13th causing
        me great financial damage and loss.  Access to the Public
        Archives of Canada was as essential for my future research
        as access to the PRO in Kew or to those archives in Italy.
        My Lord, this goes, of course, to the damage that has been
        caused to me by this general libel at being called a
        Holocaust denier.  That is one proof of the direct and
        immediate cost of the pernicious label "Holocaust
        denier".  And the same thing, they made the same attempt
        to get me banned from the United States but failed.

                  Page 54, my Lord.  I now come to Macmillan's
        final stab in the back.  The hand on the blade was
        Macmillan's but the blade hade been forged and
        fashioned by all the Defendants in this courtroom, and by
        their hidden collaborators overseas.

                  On July 4th 1992, as this Court knows, I had
        returned Moscow with the missing entries of the Goebbels
        Diaries exclusively in my possession, having gone there on
        behalf of The Sunday Times.  This hard-earned triumph
        caught my opponents unawares.  Newspapers revealed that
        the Anti-Defamation League and its Canadian collaborator,
        the League of Human Rights, sent immediate secret letters
        to Andrew Neil at The Sunday Times demanding that he
        repudiate their contract.  On Sunday, 5th, the London
        Sunday newspapers were full of the scoop - and also with
        hostile comment.  On Monday, July 6th, The Independent

.          P-133

        newspaper reported under the headlines "Jews attack
        publisher of Irving book", that a UK body which it
        identified as "the Yad Vashim Trust" with which we, of
        course, were we familiar, was piling pressure on to
        Macmillan's to abandon its contract with me to publish
        Goebbels, failing which they would urge booksellers not to
        stock or promote it.

                  Macmillans finally took fright that same day, as
        I only now know.  After their directors inquired, July 6th
        1992, in an internal memo, how many of my books were still
        in their stocks, and having been given totals of several
        thousand copies of all three volumes of my Hitler
        biography, representing a value of several hundred
        thousand pounds, my own editor, Roland Philipps, on July
        6th issued the secret order reading:  "Please arrange for
        the remaining stock of [David Irving's Hitler biographies]
        to be destroyed.  Many thanks".  Book burning.  They
        prepared a "draft announcement", but it was not released.
        Although still a Macmillan author, I was not told.  The
        royalties due to me on the sale of those books were books
        were lost and destroyed with them.  The Defendants'
        campaign to destroy my legitimacy as an historian, of
        which the book published by the Defendants became an
        integral part, had thus reached its climax.

                  My Lord, I now pass over the next pages to page 57.

.          P-134

                  The same thing happened in Australia.  I spoke
        in the Munich.  Final paragraph:  Opponents released --
        I am sorry, yes.  Opponents released to Australia
        television the heavily edited version of Michael Schmidt's
        1991 video tape of me addressing the crowd at Halle about
        which we have heard from Mr Rampton this morning, the Sieg
        Haels and the rest of it.  As edited, it omitted my
        visible and audible rebuke to a section of the crowd for
        chanting Hitler slogans.  Grotesque libels about me
        swamped the Australian press, printed by various
        organisations including the New South Wales Board of
        Deputies and various newspapers.  One example was an
        article by a lecturer in politics.  He wrote: "Irving has
        a history of exciting neoNazi and skinhead groups in
        Germany which had burned migrant hostels and killed people
         ... Irving has frequently spoken in Germany at rallies...
        under the swastika flag ... himself screaming the Nazi
        salute..."  This is how these stories begin.
        Unsurprisingly, Australia then banned me too.  I was t6 be
        refused a visa, they announced, on February 8th 1993 as
        I was a "Holocaust denier".  They had thus adopted the
        phrase that the Second Defendant, Professor Lipstadt,
        prides herself in having invented.

                  This new and very damaging ban on visiting
        Australia made it impossible for me to work again in the
        National Library of Australia in Canberra.  At great

.          P-135

        personal expense I appealed to the Australian Federal
        Court.  The Court declared the Minister's refusal of a
        visa illegal.  The government in Canberra therefore
        changed the law in February 1994 to keep me out.  We note
        from Professor Lipstadt's own discovery that the
        immigration minister faxed the decision to keep me out
        direct to one of her source agencies that same afternoon.
        The same kind of thing happened.

                  In July 1994, as the resulting fresh legal
        actions which I started against the Australian government
        still raged, the Second Defendant was invited by
        Australian organisations, all expenses paid to visit their
        country; she was hired to tour Australia, and to slander
        my name and my reputation and add her voice to the
        campaign to have me refused entry.  The court, my Lord,
        you will probably remember the Australian TV video which
        I showed entitled "The Big Lie" in the early days.

   MR JUSTICE GRAY: Yes.

   MR IRVING:  Broadcast in July 1994, it showed both the expert
        witness, Professor van Pelt, and Mr Fred Leuchter.  It
        showed Fred Leuchter standing on the roof of crematorium
        No. II, about which we are going to hear more, crematorium
        No. II at Auschwitz which van Pelt declared to be the
        centre of the Nazi genocide, and the Second Defendant
        being interviewed while still in Australia (and refusing
        once again to debate with the revisionists, just as she

.          P-136

        has obstinately refused to go into the witness stand here
        and be questioned).  Thus I found myself excluded from
        Australia.  We have had now Germany, Canada, South Africa,
        Australia, New Zealand as well, I lost the ability to
        visit my hundreds of friends down under and my own
        daughter too, who is an Australian citizen; and I lost all
        the bookshop sales that this ban implied in Australia -
        where my Churchill biography had hit the No. 1 spot in the
        best seller lists earlier.

                  Over the page:  My lecturing engagements in the
        British Isles came under similar attack.  I had often
        spoken to universities and debating societies, including
        the Oxford and Cambridge Unions, in the past, but now in
        one month, in October 1993, when I was invited to speak to
        prestigious bodes at three major Irish universities, I
        found all three invitations cancelled under pressure and
        threat of local Jewish and anti-fascist organisations.
        The irony will not elude the court that these Defendants,
        on the one hand, have claimed by way of defence that
        I speak only to the far right and neo-Nazi element, as
        they describe it, and yet it turns out that their own
        associates are the people who have done their damnedest to
        make it impossible for many others to invite me.

                  The Second Defendant, Deborah Lipstadt, had
        meanwhile made progress with her book.  She told her
        publisher that she had written a certain statement with

.          P-137

        the marketing people in mind.  In other words, sometimes
        money mattered more than content, in my submission.

                  She had revealed in September 1991 in a letter:
         "I have also spoken to people in England who have a large
        cache of material on David Irving's conversion to denial".
        We do not know who the people are, but we can, of course,
        readily suspect who in this case those people were.  She
        is once again not presenting herself for
        cross-examination, so there are many things we cannot ask
        her about, including and I would have asked her, in fact,
        most tactfully the reasons why she was refused tenure at
        the University of California and moved downstream to the
        lesser university, in my submission, in Atlanta where she
        now teaches religion.

                  In the light of Mr Rampton's strictures on my
        now famous little ditty -- your Lordship will remember the
        little ditty which I am supposed to have hummed to my nine
        month old daughter, the racist ditty, which went around
        the press because Mr Rampton issued a press release --
        supposedly urging my nine month old little girl not to
        marry outside her own people, I should also have wanted to
        ask questions of Professor Lipstadt's views on race had
        she gone into the witness box.  We know that she has
        written papers, and delivered many fervent lectures, on
        the vital importance of people marrying only within their
        own race.  Quotation:   ("We know what we fight

.          P-138

        against...", she wrote, "intermarriage and Israel-bashing,
        but what is it we fight for?")  She has attracted, in
        fact, much criticism from many in her own community for
        her implacable stance against mixed marriages, marrying
        outside their own race.  In one book Professor Lipstad
        quotes a Wall Street Journal interview with a Conservative
        rabbi, Jack Moline, whom she called "very brave" for
        listing 10 things that Jewish parents should say to their
        children:  "No. 1 on his list", she wrote (in fact it was
        No. 3) "was 'I expect you to marry Jews'."  She considered
        that to be very brave.  My one little ditty which I hummed
        to my nine month old daughter, Jessica, was a perhaps
        tasteless joke.  Professor Lipstadt's repeated
        denunciation of mixed marriages addressed to adults was
        deadly serious.

                  Professor Lipstad accuses me of error or
        falsification, but is apparently unable to spot a fake
        even at a relatively close range.  She admitted (in a
        recent interview with Forward) that she used memoirs of
        the spurious Auschwitz survivor Benjamin Wilkomirski in
        her teaching of the Holocaust to her defenceless students,
        according to Professor Peter Novick who has written a book
        on this.  Those "memoirs" have now been exposed,
        worldwide, as fraudulent.  Wilkomirski was never anywhere
        near Auschwitz.  In fact, he was in Switzerland.  When it
        turned out that Wilkomirski have never been near the camp

.          P-139

        or in Poland for that matter, but had spent the war years
        in comfort living with his adopted Swiss family, she
        acknowledged that this "might complicate matters
        somewhat", but she insisted that the Wilkomirski "memoirs"
        would still be "powerful" as a novel.  It may seem unjust
        to your Lordship that it is I who have had to answer this
        person's allegation that I distort and manipulate
        historical sources.

                  We have Professor Lipstadt's handwritten notes,
        however, in the rather meagre discovery, evidently
        prepared for a talk delivered to the Anti-Defamation
        League in Palm Beach, Florida, in early 1994, which again
        is meagre but substantive evidence of her connection with
        the Anti-Defamation League.  In these, if I read her
        handwriting correctly - and she appears to be relying on
        something Lord Bullock had just said - she states that my
        aim seems to be to de-demonize Hitler; and that I had said
        that Roosevelt, Hitler and Churchill were all equally
        criminal.  This is hardly "exonerating" any of them.
        Summarising Hitler's War (the 1977 edition) she calls me
        merely an "historian with a revisionist bent" which is
        rather like AJP Taylor - and she adds, and this seems
        significant - "Irving denies that Hitler was responsible
        for the murder of European Jewry.  Rather, he claims that
        Himmler was responsible.  But he does not deny its
        occurrence.  Had she stuck with that view, of course, of

.          P-140

        my writings, which is a very fair summary of my views,
        both then and now, she and we would not find ourselves
        here today.

                  But she was led astray, my Lord.  She fell in
        with bad company, or associates.  These things happen.  We
        know that, in conducting her research for the book, she
        spoke with the Board of Deputies, the Institute of Jewish
        Affairs, the Anti-defamation League and other such worthy
        bodies, since she thanks all of them in her introduction.

                  My Lord, I have given a list of the bodies she
        thanks in an affidavit which is contained in my bundle
        based on the introduction to her book.

                  Some time in 1992 her book was complete in its
        first draft, and Professor Lipstadt sent it to the people
        who were paying her, the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.
        We do not know what was in the book, since I cannot
        question the second Defendant and she has not disclosed
        the early draft, with Professor Yehuda Bauer's scribbles
        on it, as he said, in her sworn list of documents.  The
        early draft was clearly discoverable but it has not been
        provided to us.  We do know however what was not in it.
        We know that there was no mention of his Hizbollah and
        Hamas and Louis Farrakhan and the November 1992 terrorists
        in Stockholm, or of the lie about my speaking on the same
        platform with them.  In fact, we also know that in this
        first draft I was merely mentioned in passing.  This is a

.          P-141

        book about denying Holocaust and I am only mentioned in
        passing.  This is evident from the letter which Professor
        Yehuda Bauer wrote back to her, congratulating her on
        November 27th 1992.  Bauer complained that the book lacked
        the "worldwide perspective" and said, "Irving is
        mentioned, but not that he is the mainstay of Holocaust
        denial today in Western Europe" which is where all the
        misery then began of course.

                  Somehow therefore I had to be shoe horned into
        the text before publication.  Professor Bauer urged her
        too not to write things inadvertently that might convince
        the reader that there was something to what revisionists
        or deniers said, although that is hardly a true scholar's
        method, to suppress mention of opposing arguments.  In a
        letter to Anthony Lerman, of the Institute of Jewish
        Jewish Affairs, (the same Mr Lerman who would spread later
        the lying word that I had supplied the trigger mechanism
        for the Oklahoma City bomb) Lipstadt revealed that there
        was an earlier incarnation of the book.

                  Now, that earlier incarnation, to use her words,
        has also not been disclosed in her sworn list of
        documents.  She had been ordered to swear an affidavit on
        her list, my Lord, which is why there is a sworn list,
        because of discrepancies previously.  When I made a
        subsequent complaint about deficient discovery, her
        solicitors reminded me that I could not go behind her

.          P-142

        affidavit under the rules until she presented herself for
        cross-examination, which I think is, if I may say so, my
        Lord, deceptive.  Had they intended not calling this
        witness to the witness stand, they should not have written
        that to me.  This chance of cross-examining the witness
        has been denied to me.

                  Professors Lipstadt spent of that last month of
        1992 therefore putting me into the book, whereas I had
        only previously been mentioned, and thus putting herself
        into this court room today.  They were the weeks after the
        spectacular success of the global campaign to destroy my
        legitimacy, which culminated with getting me deported in
        manacles from Canada on November 13th, 1992.

                  "I am just finishing up the book" she wrote to
        Lerman on December 18th "and, as you can well imagine,
        David Irving figures into it quite prominently".  She
        pleaded with Lerman to provide, indeed to fax to her
        urgently, materials from "your files".  Your Lordship may
        think that this haste to wield the hatchet compares poorly
        with the kind of in-depth years long shirt sleeved
        research which I conducted on my biographical subjects.
        "I think that he (in other words Irving) is one of the
        most dangerous figures around", she added, pleading the
        urgency.  It was a spectacular epiphany, this court might
        think, given that only three weeks earlier the manuscript
        barely mentioned me, as Bauer himself had complained.

.          P-143

        From being barely mentioned to being one of the most
        dangerous figures around.

                  Lerman faxed his materials to her from London a
        few days later.  We do not know precisely what, and it is
        a complete extent, as here too the defendants' discovery
        is only fragmentary, and these items were provided to me,
        again only in response to a summons.

                  That is an outline of the damage, and the
        people, including specifically the Defendants in this
        action, who were behind it.  Mr Rampton suggested at a
        very early stage that I had brought all of this on my
        myself, that I even deserved it.  He was talking about the
        hate wreath that was sent to me upon the death of my
        oldest daughter.  We shall see.

                  My Lord, I now come to Auschwitz Concentration Camp.

                  Auschwitz has been a football of politicians and
        statesmen ever since World War II.  The site has become,
        like the Holocaust itself, an industry, a big business in
        the most tasteless way, the Auschwitz site.  The area,
        I am informed, is overgrown with fast food restaurants,
        souvenir and trinket shops, motels and the like.  As
        Mr Rampton rightly says, I have never been to Auschwitz
        and Mr Rampton knows the reason why.  The Auschwitz
        authorities said they would not allow me to visit the site
        and they would not allow me into their archives, and they

.          P-144

        have every reason to know why they do not want to allow a
        David Irving to get his hands on their papers.  Under
        Prime Minister Josef Cyrankiewicz (who had been prisoner
        number 62,993) it was known at its opening in 1948 as a
        monument to the martyrdom of the Polish and other
        peoples.

                  Auschwitz was overrun by the Red Army in January
        1945.  The last prisoner had received the tattooed
        number 202,499.  Informed by Colonel General Heinz
        Guderian, the chief of the German Army general staff, that
        the Russians had captured Auschwitz, Hitler is recorded by
        the stenographers as saying merely "yes".  The court might
        find it significant that he did not prick up his ears and
        say something like, "Herr Himmler, I hope you made sure
        the Russians will not find the slightest trace of what we
        have been up to".  (Or even, "I hope you managed to get
        those holes in the roof slab of crematoria No. II cemented
        over before you blew it up".)  I will shortly explain the
        significance of that.  When the name of SS General Hans
        Kammler, the architect of the concentration camps, was
        mentioned to him a few days later by Goebbels, it was
        evident that even Kammler's name meant little to Hitler
        because Goebbels commented on the fact.

                  How many had died at Auschwitz?  We still do not
        know with certainty, because the tragic figure has become
        an object of politics, too.  Professor Arno Mayer, the

.          P-145

        Professor of European history at the University of
        Princeton, a scholar of considerably greater renommee than
        Professor Evans, and himself a Jew, expressed the view in
        one book that most of the victims of the camp died of
        exhaustion and epidemics.  He said:  "From 1942 to 1945
        more Jews died, at least in Auschwitz and probably
        everywhere else, of 'natural' causes of death than of
        'unnatural'.

                  The Russians who captured the camp did not at
        first make any mention in their news reports of gas
        chambers.  There is a famous report published in the first
        day or two in February 1945 in Pravda.  Moreover, as we
        saw on the newsreel, which I showed on the first day of
        this trial, even the Poles, with access to all the
        records, claimed only that "altogether nearly 300,000
        people from the most different nations died in the
        Auschwitz concentration camp".  This is the news reel
        trial of the trial of the Auschwitz officials.  "300,000
        people from the most different nations died in the
        Auschwitz concentration camp".  It concluded that the camp
        now stood as a monument of shame to the lasting memory of
        its 300,000 victims.  In both cases gassing was not
        mentioned.  The New York Times quoted the same figure
        300,000 when the trial began in 1947.  The figure
        gradually grew however.  The Russians set up an inquiry
        including some very well-known names, including the

.          P-146

        experts who had examined the Nazi mass graves at Katyn,
        and even the notorious Lysenko.  They announced that 4
        million had been murdered at Auschwitz.  Under the Polish
        communists, a monument to "4 million dead", with those
        words on it, was duly erected, a number which was adhered
        to until the 1990s even under Franciszek Piper, one of the
        later (but still communist) directors of the Auschwitz
        State Archives.  After the communist regime ended that
        figure was brought down to 1.5 million, and then to
        750,000 by the acknowledged expert Jean-Claude Pressac.
        The Defendants' own expert Peter Longerich spoke of one
        million deaths there from all causes, and then in response
        to cross-examination by myself and to your Lordship's
        enquiries, Dr Longerich confirmed that he included all non
        homicidal deaths, deaths "from other causes", including
        epidemics and exhaustion in that overall figure of 1
        million.

                  Perhaps I should pause there and say that these
        figures seem appalling figures but, if it is one million
        or 300,000 or whatever the figure is, each of them means
        that many multiples of one individual.  I never forget in
        anything I have said or written or done the appalling
        suffering that has been inflicted on people in the camps
        like Auschwitz.  I am on the side of the innocents of this world.

                  As for the overall death roll of the Holocaust,

.          P-147

        what meaning can one attach to the figures?  The
        International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg found that
        the policy pursued resulted in the killing of 6 million
        Jews, of which 4 million were killed in the extermination
        institutions, but the 6 million figure derives, as the
        American chief prosecutor Jackson recorded in his diary in
        June 1945, from a back of the envelope calculation by the
        American Jewish leaders with whom he met in New York at
        that time.  Professor Raul Hilberg puts the overall
        Holocaust figure at one million or less.  Gerald
        Reitlinger had the figure at 4.6 million, of which he said
        about 3 million were conjectural, as it was not known how
        many Jews had escaped into the unoccupied part of the
        Soviet Union.  The Israeli prime minister's office, we are
        told by Norman Finkelstein, recently stated that there
        were still nearly one million living survivors.

                  There are doubts not only about the precise
        figures but about specific events.  The same Nuremberg
        tribunal ruled on October 1st 1946 that the Nazis had
        attempted to utilise the fat from bodies of victims in the
        commercial manufacture of soap.  In 1990 historian Shmuel
        Krakowski of Yad Vashem announced to the world's press
        that that too had been a Nazi propaganda lie.  Gradually
        the wartime stories have been dismantled.  As more
        documents have been found, widely stated propositions have
        been found to be doubtful.  For a long time the confident

.          P-148

        public perception was that the Wannsee protocol of the
        January 20th 1942 meeting at the Interpol headquarters in
        Berlin, Wannsee, recorded the actual order to exterminate
        the European Jews.  Yehuda Bauer, the director now of Yad
        Vashem, the world's premier Holocaust research institution
        in Israel -- one of the correspondents of the second
        Defendant you remember -- has stated quite clearly:  "The
        public still repeats time after time the silly story that
        at Wannsee the extermination of the Jews was arrived at".
        In his opinion Wannsee was a meeting but "hardly a
        conference", and he even said:  "Little of what was said
        there was executed in detail".  Despite this, your
        Lordship has had to listen to this "silly story" all over
        again from the expert witnesses.

                  Surely, my critics say, there must now be some
        evidence of a Hitler order.

                  Back in 1961 Professor Raul Hilberg, one of
        Yehuda Bauer's great rivals for the laureate, one of my
        correspondents, asserted in "The Destruction of the
        European Jews", his book, that there had been two such
        orders, one in the spring of 1941, and the other soon
        after.  By 1985, after I had corresponded with him and I
        had begun voicing my own doubts, Hilberg was back
        pedalling.  Hilberg went methodically through his new
        edition of his book, excising the allegation of a Hitler
        order.  It is not as though he did not mention the Hitler

.          P-149

        order.  He actually went through a book, taking every
        reference to it out.  "In the new edition", as Professor
        Christopher Browning, another of our expert witnesses here
        for the defence, who testified before this court, said,
        "all references in the text to a Hitler decision or
        Hitler order for the Final Solution had been
        systematically excised.  Buried at the bottom of a single
        footnote stands the solitary reference: 'Chronology and
        circumstances point to a Hitler decision before the summer
        ended (1941)'".  "In the new edition", Browning repeats,
        scandalized, "decisions were not made and orders were not
        given".  Your Lordship will find my exchange with
        Professor Browning as to whether he had indeed written
        those words in 1986 on day 17.  You will find too that he
        regretted that he could not recall the events clearly of
        15 years ago, which invited a rather obvious riposte from
        me about the probably similar memory deficiencies in the
        eyewitnesses on whom he had on occasions relied.

                  The director of the Yad Vashem archives has
        stated that most survivors' testimonies are unreliable.
        There is a quotation from him.  "Many", he writes, "were
        never in the places where they claim to have witnessed
        atrocities, while others relied on second-hand information
        given them by friends or passing strangers".  It is the
        phenomenon that I have referred to as cross-pollination.
        Your Lordship may have been as startled as I, I confess,

.          P-150

        was, upon learning the degree to which the case for the
        mass gassings at Auschwitz relies on eyewitness evidence,
        rather than on any firmer sources.  Your Lordship will
        remember perhaps the exchange I had with Professor Donald
        Watt, professor emeritus at the London School of
        Economics, a distinguished diplomatic historian, early on
        in the trial, about the value of different categories of
        evidence.  I will just summarize that.  I asked him, I
        said, Professor I was not going to ask you about-- --

   MR JUSTICE GRAY:  He said it all depends, did he not, really?
        Is that unfair as a summary?

   MR IRVING:  Well, my Lord, I draw your eyes straight down to
        the second line from the bottom.  Professor Watt answers
        all of that, saying:

                  The Bletchley Park intercepts, in so far as they
        are complete, are always regarded as the most reliable
        because there is no evidence that the dispatcher was aware
        that his messages could be decoded by us (by the British),
        and therefore he would put truth in them".

                  This supports my view, my Lord, that eyewitness
        evidence is less credible than forensic evidence and the
        Bletchley Park intercepts.  I do not completely ignore
        eyewitness evidence, but I feel entitled to discount it
        when it is contradicted by the more reliable evidence
        which should then prevail.

                  I mention the forensic evidence and that brings

.          P-151

        us seamlessly to the Leuchter report.

                  I am criticised by the Defendants for having
        relied initially on what is called the Leuchter report,
        1988.  At the time they levelled their criticism at me the
        Defendants appeared to have been unaware that subsequent
        and more able investigations were conducted by both
        American and Polish researchers.  The tests were in other
        words replicated.

                  First, the Leuchter report.  In 1988 I was
        introduced by defence counsel at the Canadian trial of
        Ernst Zundel to the findings made by a reputable firm of
        American forensic analysts of samples extracted from the
        fabric of various buildings at Auschwitz and Birkenau by
        Fred Leuchter, who was at that time a professional
        American execution technology consultant.  These and his
        investigations at the Maidanek site formed the backbone of
        his engineering report.  Since there have been tendentious
        statements about why the Leuchter report was not admitted
        in evidence at that trial in Canada I have studied the
        transcripts of that trial.  It emerges that engineering
        reports are not generally admissible under Canadian rules
        of evidence unless both parties consent.  In this case the
        Crown did not consent.  As Mr Justice Thomas explained,
        "I get engineering reports all the time (that is in civil
        cases).  That does not make them admissible, because they
        have prepared reports.  They (the witnesses) go in the

.          P-152

        box, they are qualified experts and they testify".  So the
        non-admission of the report by Mr Justice Thomas was no
        reflection on the worth of the report or on the
        qualifications of the witness.

                  My Lord, I have to go in some detail into the
        Leuchter report because of the criticisms levelled at me
        for having been swayed by it.

   MR JUSTICE GRAY:  Yes.  I do not disagree with that.

   MR IRVING:  Mr Leuchter testified on April 20th and 21st 1988
        as an expert in gas chamber technology.  He had inspected
        the three sites (Auschwitz/Birkenau and Maidanek) in
        February 1988 and he had taken samples which were
        subsequent sent for analysis by a qualified analytical
        chemist in the United States, a Dr James Roth of Cornell
        University, who was not told where the samples had come
        from.  His firm Alpha Laboratories, were told on the test
        certificates only that the samples were from brickwork.
        Mr Justice Thomas ruled that Leuchter would give oral
        evidence but that the report itself should not be filed.
        He held further that Mr Leuchter was not a chemist or a
        toxicologist, which are findings, of course, that he is
        quite entitled to make, but he agreed that Mr Leuchter was
        an engineer because he had made himself an engineer in a
        very limited field.

                  A summary of the rest of the judge's findings
        was that Leuchter was not capable in law of giving the

.          P-153

        expert opinion that there were never any gassings or
        exterminations carried on in the facilities from which he
        took the samples.  For the same reasons he was not capable
        of testifying regarding the results of the analysis,
        because he was not a toxicologist in other words.  He was
        restricted to testifying as to the actual extraction of
        the samples from the buildings and his own observations on
        the feasibility of the buildings that he had examined
        being used as gas chambers.

                  So the Defendant was wrong to write on page 164
        of her book, "The judge ruled that Leuchter could not
        serve as an expert witness on the construction and
        function of the gas chambers".  To give evidence in a
        criminal trial Mr Leuchter must have been accepted as an
        expert witness.  Further, Professor Lipstadt stated on
        pages 164 of her book, and 165, "The judge's finding as to
        Leuchter's suitability to comment on questions of
        engineering was unequivocal".  In fact, the judge's
        findings referred only to his lack of qualifications to
        testify on the results of the laboratory tests for cyanide
        and iron, because that was Dr Roth's area, and he himself
        (Roth) gave testimony on those matters.  On page 169
        Professor Lipstadt insists: "The exposure to the elements
        lessen the presence of the hydrogen cyanide ...  Nor did
        Leuchter seem to consider that the building had been
        exposed to the elements for more than 40 years so that

.          P-154

        cyanide gas residue could have been obliterated.  He also
        took samples from a floor that had been washed regularly
        by museum staff". Dr Roth however testified under oath
        that the formation of Prussian blue, which is a cyanide
        compound, was an accumulative reaction, that it augmented
        with each exposure to the gas, and that it did not
        normally disappear -- in other words, could not be just
        washed away -- unless physically removed by sand blasting
        or grinding down.

                  Roth seems then to have changed his mind, to
        judge by the television film "MR DEATH" which I believe is
        shortly to be shown on Channel 4, and upon which film both
        I and learned counsel in the current action partially
        rely.  Zundel's counsel comments, "He (Roth) obviously is
        frightened now", and no wonder, considering what
        subsequently was inflicted on Mr Leuchter.  Your Lordship
        will remember that, in order to destroy Roth's absurd
        argument, which was quoted to the court by Mr Rampton,
        learned counsel, that the Prussian blue stain would have
        penetrated only a few microns into the brickwork.
        I showed a photograph of the stain penetrating right
        through the brick work to the outside face of one of the
        cyanide fumigation chambers, where it has been exposed to
        sun, wind and rain for over 50 years, and where it is
        still visible, as deep and blue as ever today.
        Crematorium II has been protected from these outside

.          P-155

        elements.  It is possible to crawl beneath the famous
        roof, the one we were hearing about, the one with the no
        holes.  You can crawl beneath it even now -- about which
        roof I shall have more to say -- but neither Jan Sehn,
        nor Fred Leuchter, nor James Roth nor Germar Rudolf, nor
        any of the subsequent investigations have found any
        significant traces of cyanide compounds present in the
        fabric of this building, despite the eyewitness accounts
        of that same chamber having been used for the gassing of
        half a million people with cyanide.  Moreover, the wood
        grain of the original wooden formwork (or moulds) can
        still be seen on the face of the concrete, which is
        evidence that it has not been sandblasted or grounded down.

                  Now, my Lord, this takes us to the famous roof
        of Leichenkeller No. 1 of crematorium No. II at Auschwitz.

                  I referred earlier to the expert witness on
        Auschwitz and Birkenau in this case, Professor Robert van
        Pelt.  He has made unequivocal statements both here and
        elsewhere about crematorium II at Birkenau.  To him it was
        the factory of death, the mass gassing chamber of
        Birkenau.  He did not mince his language.  In the new
        television film MR DEATH we saw him and we heard him, as
        the film camera showed Fred Leuchter descending into the
        hole which was broken post-war through the collapsed

.          P-156

        concrete roof slab and reinforcing bars of Leichenkeller I
        (morgue No. 1) of crematorium II and we heard him uttering
        these words, quoting off the sound track:

                  "Crematorium II is the most lethal building of
        Auschwitz.  In the 2,500 square feet of this one room,
        more people lost their lives than any other place on this
        planet.  500,000 people were killed.  If you would draw a
        map of human suffering, if you created a geography of
        atrocity, this would be the absolute centre."

                  The court will recall that on ninth day of this
        action I cross-examined this witness most closely about
        this statement and I offered him a chance to change his
        mind about the pivotal importance of crematorium II and
        its underground Leichenkeller No. I (morgue No. 1) the
        chamber which van Pelt alleged had been a mass gassing
        chamber.

                  IRVING:  Very well.  You say:  This is quoting
        him from his report ----

   MR JUSTICE GRAY:  You need not read the whole of it.  He
        confirms that it is Leichenkeller I at crematorium II
        where he says the 500,000 were killed.

   MR IRVING:  Thank you, my Lord.  The expert witness could
        hardly have been clearer in his answer.

                  At page 53, I then asked him to identify the
        buildings referred to on the aerial photographs of
        Birkenau and crematorium II, so that there could later be

.          P-157

        no doubt as to which precise building he had just agreed
        was the factory of death at Auschwitz, Auschwitz/Birkenau.

                  The great problem about accepting that this
        building was an instrument for mass murder is that the
        evidence produced by Professor van Pelt relies on three
        "legs", if I can borrow Mr Rampton's word, a handful of
        eyewitnesses, a few architectural drawings, and a slim
        file of documents.

                  The eyewitnesses, in my submission, have turned out ----

   MR RAMPTON:  No, I am sorry, that is one error that cannot be
        allowed to pass.  There is a fourth leg, forensic chemical
        analysis both in 1945, 1988 and 1994.

   MR JUSTICE GRAY:  Just to elaborate that, of Leichenkeller I
        and crematorium II?

   MR RAMPTON:  Yes, Leichenkeller I at crematorium II by the
        Krakov forensic laboratory in December 1945, which found
        traces of cyanide on the ventilation covers by
        Mr Leuchter's analysts.

   MR JUSTICE GRAY:  Ventilation covers from where?

   MR RAMPTON:  From Leichenkeller I in crematorium II.  If one
        looks at the report, it is as clear as anything.  Leuchter
        himself, of course, in 1988, and Professor Markowitz at
        Krakov in 1994.

   MR JUSTICE GRAY:  Thank you.

.          P-158

   MR RAMPTON:  They are all in the evidence.

   MR IRVING:  My Lord, I will ask your Lordship when the time
        comes to look at that forensic evidence and to ask
        yourself the obvious question, what is the proof that
        these items came from that building?

   MR RAMPTON:  Leuchter is certainly proof, because Mr Irving relies on him.

   MR IRVING:  Then we have to look at the actual figures and the
        concentrations.  If I can now continue with my three legs,
        my three-legged argument?

   MR JUSTICE GRAY:  Yes, do.  Eyewitnesses?

   MR IRVING:  The eyewitnesses have turned out to be liars,
        particularly those who testified to the SS guards opening
        manhole covers on top of the flat roof of Leichenkeller
        No. I (mortuary No. 1), and tipping tins of Zyklon B
        pellets in through the holes.  One witness was David
        Olere, an artist who drew sketches years later in Paris,
        to which Mr Rampton has also referred, obviously intending
        to sell them.  His sketches show flames and smoke belching
        from the crematorium chimney of crematorium No.  II, which
        goes purely to the credibility of the witness, which was
        quite impossible.  He portrays the victims.  Your Lordship
        will remember that I asked Professor van Pelt to calculate
        the length, the path, from the furnace doors to the top of
        the chimney, and how long that flame would have had to
        be.  He portrays the victims of the Nazi killers mostly as

.          P-159

        nubile young females, all naked and sketched in a
        pornographic way, often clutching naked teenaged children
        to their breasts.  It was Olere I invite the court to
        remember, who told Jean-Claude Pressac that the SS made
        sausage in the crematoria out of human flesh (a passage
        which Mr Van Pelt did not inform us of in his expert
        report).  Another witness is Ada Bimko, who proved at the
        Belsen trial that she too had lied.  Entering another gas
        chamber building at Auschwitz she said she had "noticed
        two pipes which I was told contained the gas.  There were
        two huge metal containers containing gas".  She evidently
        did not know that the "gas" supposed to have been used,
        Zyklon-B, was actually in pellet form, not cylinders.
        Distorting her account too, van Pelt omitted also this
        part of her testimony.  Dr Bendel, another of van Pelt's
        eyewitnesses, stated that at crematorium IV the people
        crowded into the gas chamber found the ceilings so low
        that the impression was given that the roof was falling on
        their heads.  This too was untrue, as the court has seen
        how high these ceilings were in the computer-generated
        "walk through".  The court will find that in my
        cross-examination of van Pelt I destroyed the worth of
        each supposed eyewitness after eyewitness in the same way,
        if I can summarize it like that.

                  Let us first look for those holes that they
        talked about.  My Lord, your Lordship will remember that

.          P-160

        I had the big photograph of that roof photographed from a
        helicopter quite recently, standing here for some days or
        weeks.  The roof pillars beneath the roof were blown up in
        1945, and the reinforced concrete slab pancaked downwards
        into the morgue basement, starred but otherwise intact.
        By the word "starred" I mean what happens to a pane of
        reinforced glass that has been hit by a stone.

                  Van Pelt suggested that the Zyklon-B
        introduction holes in the roof of Leichenkeller I were not
        much larger in diameter than tennis balls, but the
        evidence of his eyewitnesses, Henry Tauber and Michal
        Kula, was that they were closer to the size of manholes --
        "70 centimetres square".  Kula testified that the wire
        mesh columns that he had made were of that cross section
        and three metres (ten feet) tall.  One witness said that
        the concrete covers on top of the roof above these holes
        had to be lifted off "with both hands," with two hands.
        As the ceiling height in Leichenkeller I was 2.40 metres,
        60 centimetres of each column, which is 3 metres tall,
        would have had to extend through the holes in the concrete
        ceiling with about six inches poking up outside.  As
        Professor van Pelt admits in his report, the part I was
        about to read out when your Lordship stopped me, there is
        no trace of those holes in the roof today.  I am sorry, I
        was wrong.  He did say that.  He says it later on.

   MR JUSTICE GRAY:  What did I stop you reading?

.          P-161

   MR IRVING:  You did not.  I made a mistake, my Lord.  As he
        admits in his report, there is no trace of those holes in
        the roof today.  The underside of that roof, which can be
        inspected and photographed from beneath even today, is
        intact.  Even if one could lose sight of the much smaller
        three inch diameter holes in the pancaked concrete roof of
        which van Pelt spoke, and I do not accept that they were
        that small, one could not possibly have lost sight of four
        holes as large as manholes.  Those holes would be
        perfectly obvious today on the ground that Auschwitz to
        any observer using the naked eye, without the slightest
        possible doubt as to their location, because, of course,
        Professor van Pelt told us where each hole was supposed to
        be.  It was right next to the supporting columns.

                  Professor van Pelt accepts that those holes are
        not in that roof slab now.

   MR JUSTICE GRAY:  I am not sure that is right, is it?  I think
        what he says was that the state of the collapsed roof is
        so poor now that you simply cannot see where those holes
        would have been if they were there, which is a slightly
        different thing.

   MR RAMPTON:  Not only that, my Lord.  I sit here, I listen to,
        quite frankly, a continuous misrepresentation of the
        evidence of my witness.

   MR JUSTICE GRAY:  Let us concentrate on this one.

   MR RAMPTON:  I will, but this is serious.  Van Pelt said a

.          P-162

        number of things.  He said, first of all, the fragmentary
        condition of the roof prevents any kind of assessment one
        way or the other.  Then he says, anyway, even if it did
        not, it is the wrong part of the roof.  The third, of
        course, is that there is no evidence on Mr Irving's side
        of the court one way or the other.  Mr Irving has not been there.

   MR IRVING:  May I now continue with preferably fewer interruptions?

   MR JUSTICE GRAY:  No, I think that is not fair.  Mr Rampton
        I think has been restrained.

   MR IRVING:  My Lord, restraint is what I showed.

   MR JUSTICE GRAY:  There are the odd things which I have noticed
        which I do not think are quite borne out.  I think the
        best thing is not to interrupt you, but that is quite an
        important misstatement of van Pelt's evidence.

   MR IRVING:  I will come to the alleged misstatement in a
        moment.  Of course, I sat with the utmost restraint this morning ----

   MR JUSTICE GRAY:  You did.

   MR IRVING:  -- while numerous things were said.  My Lord, I put
        to your Lordship at the time photographs of the underside
        of that roof.  To say that the underside of that roof is
        fragmented is a gross distortion of what one could see
        with one's own eyes.  The underside of that roof was as
        pristine as the concrete which is in this room today,

.          P-163

        every inch of the underside of that roof which can be accessed.

   MR JUSTICE GRAY:  Yes, I remember the photograph quite well and
        quite how much of the roof it shows and which bit of the
        roof, it is impossible, I think, on the evidence to say.

   MR IRVING:  I did, as your Lordship will know, make one very
        grand offer and very generous offer to the Defendants in
        this case saying, "Come back with photographs of those
        holes and I will stop the case within 24 hours because my
        position will be indefensible".  I made that offer, not
        once, but twice.  It is in the transcript.  They did not
        take it up, and that would have saved ----

   MR JUSTICE GRAY:  Press on.

   MR IRVING:  It reminds me of the early days in this action when
        every time I was making a killer point, Mr Rampton was up
        and it is happening again.  Professor van Pelt: In his
        expert report, and for this honesty I give him full
        credit, he writes:  "Today, these four small holes" --
        this is his expert report which he provided in this case
         -- he did not have to write this, my Lord, but he put it
        in and it is a great testimony to his honesty, I think -
         "that connected the wire-mesh columns and the chimneys
        cannot be observed in the ruined remains of the concrete
        slab.  Yet does this mean they were never there?  We know
        that after the cessation of the gassings in the fall of
        1944 all the gassing equipment was removed, which implies

.          P-164



        both the wire-mesh columns and the chimneys.  What would
        have remained would have been the four narrow holes and
        the slab.  What would have remained would have been the
        four narrow holes and the slab.  While there is no
        certainty in this matter, it would have been logical to
        attach at the location where the columns had been some
        formwork at the bottom of the gas chamber ceiling, and
        pour some concrete in the hole and thus restore the slab".

                  That is why I listened with relative patience,
        my Lord, to Mr Rampton's interruption because it very
        largely bears out what I said.  The point at which he rose
        to his feet was when I said van Pelt accepted those holes
        are not in that roof slab now.  I think that his
        interruption was ill-called for.

                  Professor van Pelt thus asserts, without any
        evidence at all, that late in 1944, with the Russian Army
        winding up to launch their colossal final invasion only a
        few miles away on the River Vistula, the Nazi-mass
        murderers would remove the "Zyklon introduction columns"
        and then fill in the holes in the ceiling, as he says, to
         "restore the slab"  (before dynamiting the pillars
        supporting it anyway).  He again asserted when
        I cross-examined him on January 25th as follows: "It would
        have been logical to attach", he then reads out what he
        said, "pour some concrete in the hole and thus restore the

.          P-165

        slab".

                  How would this have been more logical than
        completely removing the roof of Leichenkeller 1 just as
        the Nazis had removed the roof of Leichenkeller 2,
        identified by Professor van Pelt as the "undressing
        rooms", as shown in the aerial photographs taken on
        December 21st 1944 that one can see on page 15 of this
        book "The Holocaust Revisited", the book published by the
        CIA.  The originals of this photograph were shown to
        Professor van Pelt in court.  I showed them to him.  To
        believe his version, we would have to believe that the
        Nazis deliberately created relics, architectural relics,
        of Leichenkeller No. 1 to confound later generations of
        tourists and Holocaust researchers.

                  The fact is that the holes are not there - at
        least they are not visible from a distance of 0 to 4 feet
        or when photographed from the underside of that slab.
        Unable to point them out to us in close up at ground
        level, the Defendants invited us to consider instead
        either their vertical aerial photographs taken from 35,000
        feet up, or a horizontal photograph taken from several
        hundred yards away, past a locomotive, where three (not
        four) unidentified objects are placed irregularly on the
        rooftop (the fourth "object" turns out to be a window on
        the wall behind).  The Court will recall what my response
        was to the not unexpected discovery that during building

.          P-166

        works such subjects as barrels of tar were placed on a
        large flat slab, and I will not repeat it here.  The
        notion that the high flying plane could have photographed
        an object of 27 centimetres, let alone of tennis ball
        size, protruding from six inches above the ground from
        that roof is quite absurd.  The four smudges seen on one
        photograph are evidently many feet long, nothing to do
        with these so-called holes.

                  Your Lordship will remember that on day 11
        I brought into the Court half a dozen very large vertical
        aerial photographs, black and white photographs, taken by
        the Americans or the South African Air Force during 1944,
        and invited Professor van Pelt to find those same smudges
        on that roof, the same dots.

                  Where until this moment he had seen dots on
        another photograph with no difficulty, the witness van
        Pelt now pleaded poor eyesight:   ("I have now reached the
        age I need reading glasses", he said, "and I do not have
        them with me.  I did not expect this kind of challenge".
        Precisely).  Had he used even a microscope, he would not
        have found the dots in the 1944 pictures I showed him.
        Because the holes were not there and are not there, and he
        and the Defendants know it.

                  Even if the Nazi architects who designed the
        building had willingly agreed to the weakening of the roof
        by having makeshift holes cut that size right through the

.          P-167


        slab next to the supporting pillars - I say "makeshift"
        because there is no provision for them in any of the
        architectural drawings that were shown to us - we should
        certainly expect to see those holes now.  My Lord, the
        court will recall two things:

                  Firstly, I asked the witness van Pelt if he was
        familiar (in view of the fact that he is not qualified
        architecturally, as it turned out) with the expression
         "fair faced concrete finish".  He confirmed that it is
        concrete that has been left untreated.  In other words, it
        is not covered with cement or pebble dash or tiling.  He
        confirmed also that it is the most expensive such finish
        that an architect can specify because the concrete has to
        be poured right first time because blemishes like holes
        and cavities can never be retouched afterwards.  Filling
        in the holes with cement, as van Pelt suggested in an
        extraordinary piece of naivete, would have been evident in
        the concrete face for ever after by differences in general
        appearance, colouring, wear and fracturing; there would
        have been a visible "drying line" as a ring around the
        patch, and the wood grain pattern left by the wooden
        formwork would have been interrupted.  Common sense tells
        us all of this as well.

                  The second point is, of course, we photographed
        the underside of that slab and there is no trace of any
        such blemish on the concrete roof's underside, and there

.          P-168

        are supposed to have been four of those filling holes.
        Those holes are a major problem for this entire case.

                  On two occasions I stated a challenge in Court,
        including to the witness van Pelt, as I said earlier.
        I challenged the Defendants to send somebody to Auschwitz
        even now, to scrape the thin layer of gravel and dirt off
        the topside of the roof slab where they "know" the holes
        must be because they know where the pillars - because the
        eyewitnesses agreed they were next to the main columns -
        and bring back a photograph of one of the holes or
        evidence that it had been filled in.

                  If they did, I said, I would abandon my action
        forthwith because my position would have become quite
        indefensible.  To my knowledge, the Defendants have not
        attempted this exercise.  They know and they knew from the
        outset that I was right about that roof.  Their entire
        case on crematorium No. II - the untruth that it was used
        as a factory of death, with SS guards tipping canisters of
        cyanide-soaked pellets into the building through those
        four (non-existent) manholes - has caved in, as surely as
        that flat roof.

                  Accordingly, the eyewitnesses who spoke of those
        holes also lied, or bluffed, and I have called their
        bluff.  In the absence of the holes themselves, and minus
        his "eyewitnesses", Professor van Pelt's only remaining
        proofs that Leichenkeller 1 of Crematorium No.II was an

.          P-169

        instrument of mass murder - a factory of death, as he
        said, in which 500,000 Jews were gassed and cremated - are
        these:  architectural drawings (rather oddly for a
        "professor of architecture" he calls them blueprints) and
        wartime documents.  He confirmed this to your Lordship
        when your Lordship asked.

                  As for the wartime documents, to take them
        first, he referred, for instance, to the - to him,
        sinister requirement that the morgue should be vorgewarmt,
        prewarmed, by a central heating plant.
        In cross-examination I drew his attention to the relevant
        section of the wartime Neufert, which is the architect's
        handbook or building code which was standard for the SS
        architects, which specifies that morgues, mortuaries, must
        have both cooling and central heating facilities to avoid
        damage to the corpses in the kinds of extremes of
        temperature which exist in Central Europe.  Document after
        document fell by the wayside in this manner.  Mr Rampton
        introduced the timesheet of one humble workman in March
        1943, showing him actually concreting "the floor in the
        Gaskammer", the gas chamber.  But Birkenau camp was full
        of gas chambers.  In his fine facsimile building of the
        camp documents, Jean-Claude Pressac has printed drawing
        No. 801 of November 8th, 1941, for an Entlausungsanlage
        (delousing installation) for the prison camp, right in the
        middle of which is a Gaskammer.  He also reproduces

.          P-170

        drawing No. 1293, dated May 9th 1942, of the drainage and
        water supply of the delousing barracks, building BW5b.
        Here too there is a Gaskammer smack in the middle of the
        drawing.  So there goes that one too.

                  The real handling capacity -- my Lord, of
        course, we did look at other documents and I am sure your
        Lordship will attend to that particular part of the
        transcript in detail, but I just wanted to give the
        flavour of the problem.  The real handling capacity of the
        crematoria is also surprisingly difficult to establish,
        notwithstanding what Mr Rampton said this morning.
        Professor van Pelt produced a histogram on an easel for us
        which showed truly staggering protections of cadavers to
        be cremated in coming years; but on cross-examination the
        witness admitted that the projection was based solely on
        one document, the questionable "crematorium capacities"
        document of June 28th, 1943, and that all else was
        extrapolated backwards from that sheet of paper.
        Mr Rampton said that, as ever, I challenge that document,
        as though I had challenged many other documents.  My Lord,
        to my knowledge, I have challenged ----

   MR JUSTICE GRAY:  Yes.  If I may just intervene and say that
        I would find it easier if there were not such an overt
        reaction to what you are saying on the other side of the court.

   MR RAMPTON:  I am sorry.

.          P-171

   MR JUSTICE GRAY:  Yes, sorry, you got to the Bischoff document?

   MR IRVING:  The Bischoff document.  Professor van Pelt relies
        heavily on this document.  My Lord, you will notice that I
        have given all the appropriate footnote references to
        assist you in navigating through the transcripts, and so on.

   MR JUSTICE GRAY:  Yes, thank you.

   MR IRVING:  Even if genuine, even if the actual paper itself is
        genuine, the handling figures which this document gives
        for the furnace installation in Crematorium No. II do not
        tally with any of the figures in the specifications
        provided by the manufacturers, the Topf Company, for this
        type of equipment.  Furthermore, the document refers to
        some crematoria which were at that time shut down, and to
        others that were due to be taken out of commission, which
        is again a mystifying business.

                  I had shown the Court on the previous day that
        this one page of paper contained not just one or two, but
        four or five, four or even five, bureaucratic
        discrepancies which indicated to me that the document is
        not authentic.  It was not just that the year date was
        wrong.  Any one of those flaws would normally be enough to
        call its integrity into question: but five such flaws in
        one document, including the wrong rank for the highest man
        in the SS site-construction system, SS Gruppenfuhrer Hans

.          P-172

        Kammler?  Professor van Pelt was unable to explain these
        flaws; he had not noticed them.  The document was first
        published in East Berlin in the 1950s, and it is now to be
        found in the Auschwitz archives, because it was sent there
        from East Berlin in 1981.  That alone is why it now bears
        an Auschwitz archival stamp.  It did not originate there,
        but elsewhere.  Even if the flaws can be explained, and
        the figures were genuine, there is no indication of how
        such huge numbers of bodies were to be handled within 24
        hours; nor of where the coke was to come from.  There is
        no -- logistic problems defeat the document.  (There is
        no acceptable evidence that the Auschwitz staff found any
        way of improving on the average coke consumption of 30 kg
        per cadaver achieved by other camps).

                  The bottleneck in the entire crematorium II
        "factory of death" story is however that little freight
        elevator that was installed between that morgue, the
        underground mortuary, Leichenkeller No. 1, as in any such
        state-of-the-art crematorium, to haul the bodies up from
        the basement-level morgue up to the crematorium furnaces
        on the ground floor.  We are told by the Defendants that
        this elevator was never anything more sophisticated than
        something like a builder's hoist.  The real elevator was
        never delivered.  It had no door, no cage, no walls - it
        was just a platform jolting up and down that elevator
        shaft.  We do know that as finally installed it had a

.          P-173

        specified load bearing capacity of 1,500 kilograms.
        Professor van Pelt suggested that the hoist could,
        therefore, have hauled 25 cadavers at a time.  In
        practice, as there was just a flat platform with no walls
        or door, jolting up and down that narrow concrete elevator
        shaft, I submit that it would have been impossible to
        stack on to one small platform 25 naked cadavers in the
        conditions of filth and slime, the horror, that had been
        described by the eyewitnesses.

                  It does not bear thinking about, I agree, and
        that is why I am not going to dwell on it.  We cannot
        produce hard figures for this part of the exercise, but
        one thing is plain:  that one elevator in crematorium II
        was the inescapable bottleneck, and it makes plain that,
        whatever was happening downstairs in the mortuary,
        Leichenkeller No. 1, it was not on the huge scale, on the
        huge scale that history now suggests.

                  In response to your Lordship's helpful
        questioning, Professor van Pelt stated that the wartime
        documents to interpreted if they were to be relied on for
        this proof.  These interpretations are quite tenuous.  He
        produced to us a document referring to the special secrecy
        to be attached to the crematorium drawings.  I am sure
        your Lordship remembers that document.  It was at first
        blush quite an interesting document.  He suggested that
        this was because of the mass gassings being carried on in

.          P-174

        the buildings, in the crematorium.  It stressed that this
        was because -- the document stressed that this was because
        of the wehrwirtschaftlich importance [the importance to
        the military economy] of the work being conducted in that
        building or those buildings.  But van Pelt confirmed under
        my cross-examination that the homicidal Final Solution,
        the genocide, was never regarded as being
        wehrwirtschaftlich important, important to the economy.
        I submitted that the reference was clearly to keeping
        secret the ugly business of the looting by the SS of the
        gold and valuables from the corpses being processed by the
        building, a system which was undoubtedly of economic
        importance to the SS.

                  Similarly, the architectural drawings seemed to
        provide the required "proof" only when one was compared
        with another.  That was one of the other problems.  As
        Professor van Pelt said:  "... we can look now at two or
        three drawings together and ... We start to observe some
        very weird things and some modifications made between one
        drawing and the other drawing..." Those were his words, to
        which my comment is, is that the best level of proof that
        is available now, even after 55 years?

                  During his slide-show, Professor van Pelt told
        us that one cardinal piece of evidence in this drawings
        was the relocation of an internal double-door which sealed
        off Leichenkeller No. 1 from the interior of the building,

.          P-175

        from the inside of the Leichenkeller doorframe to the
        outside.  The door was moved in the drawings from the
        inside of the wall to the outside.  I pointed out that in
        the new layout, the doors were shown as being actually
        rebated into the doorframe and I suggested to the witness
        that this was indicative of a gas-tight door being fitted
        as in any standard air raid shelter design.  Air raid
        shelter doors are routinely fitted outside the shelter, to
        open outwards, so as to withstand blast.  Neufert, which
        is the wartime architects' handbook, bears this out.

                  The witness seems not to have considered this
        possibility.  As Mr Rampton again mentioned, the doors
        allegedly found around the Birkenhau and Auschwitz sites
        subsequently are fitted with peep holes.  But I say that
        that is the standard air raid shelter design complete with
        the obligatory peep hole that is fitted to air raid
        shelter doors.  The amendment of the drawings to provide
        for an external door, leading from the far end of the
        subterrranean morgue to the open air, Leichenkeller No. 1,
        was also consonant with its dual use as an air raid
        shelter, and I put this to the witness on Day 11, as was
        the relocation of the main entrance staircase from the
        back of the building to the street-side.  Among the
        architectural drawings provided to us from the Auschwitz
        archives is one entitled "Modification of the old
        Crematorium", namely crematorium No. 1 in Auschwitz,

.          P-176

        subtitled:  "Air Raid Bunker for SS Station HQ with an
        Operating Theatre".  So such modifications of the morgues
        to provide air raid shelter capacity were clearly nothing
        extraordinary.  Mr Rampton made a lot of the order for the
        doors with peep holes both during the hearings and this
        morning, but peep holes were standard fittings, not only
        on the gas-tight air raid shelter doors, but also on the
        delousing facilities.  Jean-Claude Pressac prints
        photographs of two such doors on the "Canada" delousing
        chamber at Birkenhau.

                  Looking specifically at the possible use of
        crematorium No. II and the underground basement area as
        being adapted for future air raid shelter use:
        Crematorium No. II, like its mirror image Crematorium
        No. III on the other side of the road, was originally
        designed as a state-of-the-art crematorium, possibly not
        just for the camp but for the whole catchment area of
        Auschwitz which had for centuries been an area of
        pestilence and plague.  No expense was spared in its
        design.  This was German tax-payer money and they did not
        care.  The best equipment and architects were used on what
        was clearly a permanent facility.  Building the morgue,
        the mortuary, underground, instead of above ground,
        increased construction costs by several times, but
        provided for keeping the morgue cool during the baking hot
        Central European summers.  Had the building been designed

.          P-177



        from the start as a human slaughterhouse, it would
        certainly not have been designed on several levels with
        resultant handling problems.  Slaughterhouses are normally
        built on one level.

                  We saw in Professor van Pelt's slide- show the
        pouring of the concrete roof, the roof slab, of the
        subterranean Leichenkeller No. II; the roof was
        undoubtedly much the same as Leichenkeller No. 1 with a
        six inch reinforced steel mesh.  This undoubtedly made the
        new building one of the most robust on the site:
        certainly more robust and fireproof in an air raid than
        the flimsy wooden horse-barracks in which the prisoners
        and slave labour were housed.

                  We were told by Mr Rampton this morning this
        seemed improbable to establish an air raid shelter
        facility for the SS who were 1.5 miles away.  Well, the
        early warning posts were in Holland, and they were
        probably 1,500 miles away.  So they would provide more
        than adequate time for the SS to gallop that 1.5 miles to
        this building with the concrete roof.

                  The captured Bauleitung records of Auschwitz
        housed in Moscow confirm that from mid 1942 onwards they
        began to consider the construction at the camp of
        shelters, splinter trenches, and other ARP, Air Raid
        Precaution, measures.  To be fair to the witness, when
        these Moscow catalogue entries were put to Professor van

.          P-178

        Pelt he seemed unfamiliar with them.  After the air raids,
        our British air raids, on Cologne, Rostock and Lubeck -
        that was in March/April 1942 - the German High Command
        recognized the likelihood that air raids would spread
        across Poland and Central Europe, and they ordered the
        construction of extended ARP facilities throughout the
        occupied Eastern territories insofar as they can within
        bomber range.  Existing basements, this document said,
        were to be converted into shelters, and anti-gas equipment
        provided, and personnel trained in anti-gas warfare, as
        gas attack was widely expected.  I have given your
        Lordship the reference.  I put the document to Professor
        Longerich and on Day 10 I said to him: "[...] the Defence
        rely on a number of photographs of doors found scattered
        around the compound of Auschwitz and Birkenhau, and we
        will show that these are standard German air raid shelter
        doors complete with peep holes".  And, my Lord, I
        have provided photographs of such air raid shelter doors
        in various bundles.

                  These precautions were not in vain.  In May
        1943, there was an air raid on the nearby Auschwitz Buna
        plant.  This is reflected in the Auschwitz documents.  At
        least one of the American aerial photographs that I
        produced to the Court, the black and white photographs,
        the big ones, and to the witness, Professor van Pelt,
        shows a stick of heavy bombs just released by the plane

.          P-179

        that took the photograph descending over the camp.  By the
        end of the war, there was also an anti-aircraft unit
        assigned to defending the region, as shown by the
        reference in Judge Staglich's membership of the Flak unit
        that manned it.

                  Your Lordship will also remember that during his
        slide-show, van Pelt showed the court a series of most
        interesting computer-generated "walk-through"
        reconstructions of the interiors of Crematorium IV and V.
        Your Lordship had actually memorized the dimensions of the
        shutter, the wooden shutter, of 30 centimetres by 40
        centimetres.  There were also said to be steps leading up
        to the openings.  The wartime civil defence journal
        Luftschutz shows precisely this arrangement of gas type
        shutters and steps as a standard air raid shelter feature
        designed for the event of gas warfare.

                  I put this fact to the witness van Pelt: "Would
        you agree that those shutters that have been found in the
        Auschwitz camp are, in fact, standard German air-raid
        shutters supplied by manufacturers to a standard design?"

                  The eyewitnesses stated that thousands of
        victims were gassed in these rooms, however, and their
        bodies burned in large pits to the building's rear.  But
        the contemporary air photographs taken by the Americans
        show no such pits, nor are they evident today.  Confronted
        with what your Lordship has yourself referred to as the

.          P-180



        lack of documentary evidence for the gassings, Professor
        van Pelt could only offer the suggestion that the use of
        gas chambers at Auschwitz and Birkenhau was a "moral
        certainty".  Three times in his report, three times in his
        report, he fell back upon that semi-religious phrase.  The
        available proofs certainly do not support the belief that
        gassings there occurred on a mass scale.

                  If I can just fill in what I have not said
        there?  Of course, I do accept that there were gassings on
        a small scale at Auschwitz in the buildings identified as
        bunkers I and II which were houses which have since been
        torn down.

                  I will not dwell long on the uniformly poor
        evidentiary basis on the other extermination camps, known
        to the Court as the Operation Reinhard camps - Belzec,
        Sobibor and Treblinka.  Here we do not have even the
        "moral certainty" which comforted Professor van Pelt.
        I can only challenge here the scale and the systematic
        nature of the alleged gassing of more than one million
        people in these centres.  The Defendants' own witness,
        Professor Browning, admits that the documentation for
        these camps is "scant", that is his word, and I place
        great weight on that admission.  Here, the expert cannot
        find even one contemporaneous document.  He relies upon
        the eyewitnesses - men of the ilk of Kurt Gerstein, Jan
        Karski, Adolf Eichmann and Rudolf Hoss.  The fictional

.          P-181

        elements in their statements - your Lordship will remember
        the "130 foot high mountain of clothes" which Professor
        Browning in his first draft skipped over, the
        "electrocution chambers" and the "steam chambers", the
        deliberately inflated death rolls which would otherwise
        shriek their warnings to critical researchers - are either
        ignored or suppressed in order to maintain appearances.

                  My Lord, there is an impressive (and we are both
        agreed on this, all parties) level of documentation which
        demonstrates that the liquidation by shooting of hundreds
        of thousands of Jews, probably over a million, by the
        Einsatzgruppen, but there is nothing of equivalent value
        for the Operation Reinhard camps.  One word, Why?
        justifies the revisionist's scepticism.

                  The Walter Fohl letter produces a similar
        response from the experts.  Found in his Berlin Document
        Centre personnel file, this man, who is in charge of a
        resettlement office at Krakow, is seen writing on June
        21st 1942 to his SS comrades as follows:

                  "Every day, trains are arriving with over 1,000
        Jews each from throughout Europe", in Krakow, passing
        through.  "We provide first aid here, give them more or
        less provisional accommodation, and usually deport them
        further towards the White Sea or to the White Ruthenian
        marshlands, where they all - if they survive (and the Jews
        from Kurfurstendamm or Vienna or Pressburg certainly

.          P-182

        won't) - will be gathered by the end of the war, but not
        without first having built a few roads.  (But we're not
        supposed to talk about it)."  An extraordinary document.

                  The expert witnesses, unable otherwise to
        explain this document, dismissed it as obvious
        "camouflage" talk.  But why should Fohl use camouflage
        when writing to his SS comrades?  As I pointed out to
        Dr Longerich, Reinhard Heydrich himself had spoken of the
        White Sea option a few days later, on February 4th 1942 in Prague.

                  It was noticeable elsewhere that none of the
        experts was willing to give documents their natural
        meanings when they did not accord with their views.  It is
        a clear case of manipulation, in my view.  The Ahnert
        document, recording a meeting at the RSHA in Berlin, under
        Eichmann, on August 28th, 1942, was another example.
        There was talk of the need for the deportees, August 1942,
        to be provided with blankets, shoes, eating utensils
        before dispatch to Auschwitz.  Eichmann requested the
        purchases of barracks for a Jewish deportee camp to be
        erected in Russia, with three to five such barracks being
        loaded aboard every transport train.  In each case,
        because the document did not accord with their
        "exterminationist" views, the expert had failed to pursue
        it.  Dr Longerich, who included it as an appendix in one
        of his books, had forgotten it even existed when

.          P-183

        I cross-examined him about it.

                  Coming now towards the end of my submission, my
        Lord, the allegations of racism and anti-Semitism.  I have
        to address the allegations of racism, although I have the
        feeling that your Lordship is not over-impressed by them.

   MR JUSTICE GRAY:  Do not get feelings one way or the other
        about any part of the case, Mr Irving.  It is a trap.

   MR IRVING:  It was a good try.

   MR JUSTICE GRAY:  On the other hand, it is a matter for you
        because I am letting you say pretty much what you want to
        say, I know because I have them now provided very
        conveniently, exactly what it is that is relied on by way
        of anti-Semitic statements, racist statements and so on.

   MR IRVING:  I shall definitely make some response therefore.

   MR JUSTICE GRAY:  Yes.  I mean you can deal with them
        generally, if you like, rather than going through them, as
        it were, one by way.  I appreciate you do not go through them all.

   MR IRVING:  I have not gone through them one by one, my Lord.
        In fact I have not even read them.

   MR JUSTICE GRAY:  I offer you the opportunity of making general
        answers to those submissions rather than by reading it all
        out.  It is entirely up to you.

   MR IRVING:  I do not read them all out, but I shall certainly
        deal with my arguments.  The Defendants have resorted to
        the allegations that I am anti-Semitic and racist.  It may

.          P-184

        be that they are going to pay dearly for those remarks.
        Mr Rampton's highly paid experts have found one 1963 entry
        in my diary, four lines written 37 years ago, about a
        visit to my lawyer Mr Michael Rubenstein to discuss a
        satirical magazine article which I had written, after
        which visit I commented: "Thick skinned these Jews are".
        This is all that they could find from the millions of
        words in my diaries available to them by way of
        anti-Semitism.  Twenty million words of diaries and they
        found "Thick skinned these Jews are".  When I remarked on
        March 2nd in court, my Lord, upon the obvious paradox that
        an alleged anti-Semite would have retained Michael
        Rubenstein as his solicitor and respected advisor for 20
        years, Mr Rampton's comment, which your Lordship may well
        remember, was:  "Many of my best friends are Jews too,
        Mr Irving".  This stock line does not disguise the paucity
        of his evidence against me.

                  In further support of this contention they have
        taken isolated remarks made in lectures and speeches for
        which they have transcribed around half a million words.
        My Lord, I trust that your Lordship will in each case
        consider the context in which the remarks are made.

   MR JUSTICE GRAY:  Of course.

   MR IRVING:  And also the broader surrounding countryside, if
        I may put it like that.  What I would ask your Lordship to
        do is to take the ugliest example, whichever your Lordship

.          P-185

        deems that to be, reach up for the full transcript of
        whatever that speech was, and ask yourself why I have put
        that remark in and see what else is in that speech.  Then
        I submit that the alleged anti-Semitic remark fails into
        insignificance, if it is even taken to be anti-Semitic at
        all.

                  For 30 years, as I set out earlier in this room
        this afternoon, I have found myself subjected to vicious
        attack by bodies, acting, as they freely admit, as Jews.
        For 30 years I endeavoured to turn the other cheek and did
        nothing about it.  I hope I succeeded.  Mr Rampton drew
        attention to the fun I poked at Simon Wiesenthal.  I made
        a joke in a public meeting about his, an explicit joke
        I made about his other than good looks, if I can put it
        like that.  Mr Rampton called that remark "anti- Semitic".
        It was not.  It was a joke about the man's looks, of the
        same genre that Mr Rampton made when he enquired
        rhetorically of Professor Funke whether a certain
        outer-fringe Swedish revisionist seen in one video shown
        to the court with long blonde hair was a man or woman.  It
        is exactly the same kind of throw-away remark.

                  In view of the manner in which the two Simon
        Wiesenthal centres have been abusing my name in their fund
        rasing leaflets, and endeavouring to destroy my own
        livelihood, the court might think that my fun-making,
        while tasteless, remark was not undeserved, possibly it

.          P-186

        was even rather reserved.  It was not anti- Semitic.
        Mr Wiesenthal is no more immune from criticism either as a
        person or as a public figure than I am.

                  Searching hopefully for evidence of
        "anti-Semitism" in me, the investigation by he Board of
        Deputies in 1992 came up empty handed in their secret
        report which they planted on Canadian government files.
        They confirmed that I had dealings with my Jews in my
        professional life, and they added that I "used this as an
        excuse" to say that I am not an anti-Semite.  These people
        are hard to please.  "He is far too clever an opponent"
        the Board wrote in this secret report, "to openly admit to
        being an anti-Semite".  "We endorse all condemnation of
        anti-Semitism", they quote me as writing in my newsletter
        back in 1982.  All of these things, including the actual
        1992 secret intelligence report filed by he Board of
        Deputies, were disclosed to these Defendants in my
        discovery.  The Defendants quoted a passage from a speech
        delivered, they said, in May 1992.  In fact, as my diary
        confirms, it was delivered in May 1993.  So it may be that
        the year was not accidental, because by that time my
        family and I had been subjected to a catalogue of insults
        by the leaders of these various bodies.  If a writer's
        books are banned and burnt, his bookshops are smashed, his
        hands are manacled, his person insulted, his printers are
        burnt down, his access to the world's archives is denied,

.          P-187

        his family's livelihood is destroyed, his phone lines are
        jammed with obscene and threatening phone calls, death
        threats, his house is beset by violent, angry mobs, the
        walls and posts around his address are plastered with
        stickers inciting the public to violence against him, and
        a wreath is sent to him with a foul and taunting message
        on the death of his oldest daughter, then it ill-behoves
        people to offer cheap criticism if the writer finally
        commits the occasional indiscretion and lapse in referring
        to the people who are doing it to him.

                  I singled out in this -- well, I am not going to
        comment at length on these evil allegations and slurs.
        They lend fire and fury to the original libel complained
        of, that is my view.  I submit that the word "racism" in
        the ears of the man in the Clapham Omnibus is about
        Stephen Lawrence and cone heads in the Ku Klux Klan.  It
        conjures up images of murder and thuggery and violence and
        foul-mouthed graffiti.  In deliberating on the conduct of
        the case and on the appropriate scale of damages, your
        Lordship will no doubt bear them in mind, these
        allegations made against me.

                  I voluntarily provided all my entire private
        diaries to the Defendants in this action.  They asked to
        see a few pages and I said "take the lot".  Fifty-nine
        volumes of private diaries, 20 million words on paper and
        on disk.  Mr Rampton produced from them one nineteen-word

.          P-188

        ditty attached to another quite harmless one about the
        "messica dressica" of my daughter Jessica.  To find in
        all those diaries and telephone conversations written
        since 1959 just one nineteen-word ditty that you could
        trot out for the media, does not suggest that I am as
        obsessed with race and racism as learned counsel and, for
        that matter, the newspapers that report this case too.

                  I repeat, this multi-million dollar Defence team
        has found one nineteen-word nonsense poem, recorded in my
        diary with other Lear- or Belloc-type rhythmic verses as
        having been recited to my own nine-month old infant who
        has, I am glad to say, grown into a delightful girl of six
        now, bearing none of the traces of the poison that
        Mr Rampton recklessly suggested that I had fed to her.
        Fortunately, I did not sing to her "Three Blind Mice".

                  Similarly, from my hundreds of lectures and
        talks these very proper spaniels have sniffed out a few
        lines of music-hall whit of the type that a Dave Allen
        might indulge in, with Mr Trevor McDonald as one of the
        butts.  That in Mr Rampton's words is racism.  One wonders
        which well-shielded part of the modern world is inhabited
        by learned counsel.  Can anyone go and live there?

                  The references that I have made to what is now
        formally called the Instrumentalization of the Holocaust,
        have also been adduced as evidence of anti-Semitism.  Are
        non-Jews disbarred from making a criticism that is made

.          P-189

        increasing vocally now by others like Professor Peter
        Novak or by Leon Weiseltier, the literary editor of the
        New Republic who wrote on May 3rd 1993:  "It is a sad
        fact, said the principal philanthropist of the grotesque
        Simon Wiesenthal Centre of Los Angeles, that Israel and
        Jewish education and all the other familiar buzz words no
        longer seem to rally Jews behind the community, the
        Holocaust though works every time."

                  I turn to page 89, my Lord, the third
        paragraph.  In general, I would invite your Lordship to
        pick out one such utterance as a sample, to reach then for
        the transcript of the entire speech, to take note of the
        rest of its content, its clear reference to the very real
        sufferings of the Jews, the liquidations, the Bruns report
        and the rest, and then ask: Was the remark true?  Was it
        explicable?  Was it rhetorically justified as part of the
        skilled lecturer's armoury?

                  Your Lordship has been told of my remarks that
        more women died on Kennedy's back seat than in the gas
        chamber at Auschwitz, the one shown to the tourists.  It
        is a tasteless but quite literally true.  It is, as I have
        shown in this court, even true if the main gas chamber at
        Birkenau is brought into the equation, crematorium (ii),
        the factory of death, because the eyewitnesses lied about
        that one too.  The Poles have admitted that the Auschwitz
        building and its chimney are a post-1948 fake.  My

.          P-190

        colourful language, my tasteless language, was a
        rhetorical way of bringing that extraordinary revelation
        home to audiences.

                  The audiences, I am told, are extreme audiences,
        of extreme people, although the photographs suggest rather
        differently.  They appear rather boring middle-age kind of
        people.

                  My files confirm that I occasionally addressed
        audiences of the Association for Free Journalism in
        Germany, the National Democratic Party in Germany and the
        German Peoples Union.  My Lord, those four documents which
        I have disclosed to the Defendants, they are English
        translations of the policy leaflets, the manifestos of
        these bodies, and in my submission they do not show them
        to be extreme in any way.  These were, furthermore, bodies
        that were accepted at that time under Germany's very
        strict laws as being legal and constitutional.  But the
        court is more concerned, I believe, with have individual
        personages than with bodies, than with the actual
        organizations.  I have not the slightest doubt that this
        court will find that I had no meaningful contact with the
        ugly rag-bag neo-Nazi extremists mentioned by Professor
        Funke, people with whom, to make the point quite clearly,
        the Defendants, their experts and their legal team seem
        more familiar than I.  Most of the names were completely
        unknown to me and the Defence have sought, in vein, for

.          P-191

        them in my diaries and papers, to which I emphasise yet
        again I gave them complete and unlimited privileged
        access.  This has not stopped them from bringing these
        names forward and mentioning these alleged links in the
        open court in an attempt to smear me still further with an
        eye particularly on the German media.  I urge that this,
        their conduct of the case, be held against them.

                  Characteristically of the weakness of their
        case, Professor Funke listed one entry in a diary where
        I noted "road journey with a Thomas" whose second name
        I never learned; Funke entered the name "Dienel?" So for
        as I know, I have never met a Dienel, but it illustrates
        the kind of evidence that the Defence were hoping to rely
        upon.

                  As for Michael Kuhnen, the documentary evidence
        before both Professor Funke when he wrote his report and
        before this court, is that I explicitly said I would not
        attend any function at which he was even present.  I never
        did and I never met him.

                  By way of evidence the court has been shown a
        number of videos.  Shorn of their commercial packaging,
        they do not amount to very much, in my submission.  In
        view of the weight attached to it by learned counsel and
        by his witness Professor Funke, my Lord, I have
        re-examined the raw video of Halle function of November
        9th 1991 at which I briefly spoke, and I have timed and

.          P-192

        listed the scenes that it shows.  My Lord, you will see in
        the footnote on that page that I have given the
        appropriate breakdown referring to the time on the video.

                  Your Lordship may wish at sometime to have the
        video back to check that these times are correct, or the
        Defendants' solicitors may wish to submit any corrections
        they feel are needed.

   MR JUSTICE GRAY:  No.  I will assume your time is correct
        unless I am told otherwise.

   MR IRVING:  Yes, unless otherwise informed.  The raw details
        are, when the when camera's meter shows 170021 I am first
        seen arriving at an unnamed hotel restaurant in Halle,
        accompanied by Mrs Worch and by David Leigh of he Sunday
        Observer.  At 17:14:40 I am again glimpsed, 14 minutes
        later, still at the hotel speaking to a reporter.  The
        cameraman and David Leigh then go off to film the rival
        processions during which I am at no time seen on film.  In
        fact I remained lunching at the hotel.  At 18:11:00 a
        truck is seen being rigged as an open-air platform, and at
        18:14:26 I am seen with two reporters watching from the
        edge of the square.  In my submission, my Lord, I do not
        have a particularly happy look on my face at all at what
        I am seeing.

                  At 18:16 I walk over to the platform, hands in
        pockets and mount it.  The man whom Professor Funke tells
        us is Dienel, and I have no way of checking it one way or

.          P-193

        the other, is seen to get off to the left and there is no
        contact whatever between him and me.  Mr Worch briefly
        introduces me to the audience.  I begin speaking at
        18:16:39 and the filmed portion of my speech ends less
        than three and a half minutes later.

                  When the off-screen chanting of slogans begins
        at 18:18:59 I am clearly seen to interrupt my speech,
        shake my head at them and gesticulate with my left hand to
        them to stop, and I am clearly heard to say, "You must
        not", because they are shouting the "Siegheil" slogans,
        Mein Fuhrer, and things like, "you must not always be
        thinking of the past".  I am heard clearly to say: "You
        must always be thinking of the past.  You must not keep
        coming out with the slogans of the past.  We are thinking
        of the future [voice emphasised] of Germany.  We are
        thinking of the future of the German people.  As an
        Englishman I have to say ...", and so on.  So I am quite
        clearly expressing extreme anger at these people who have
        come along with their Nazi slogans.

                  Six seconds after ending my brief speech I am
        seen to leave the platform without further contact with
        anybody.  My diary notes that I at once left by car and
        drove back to the Rhur in Western Germany.

                  Heavily edited, for example to remove my rebuke
        to these slogan-shouting people, whom I took and take to
        have been agents provocateurs, this sequence was shown on

.          P-194

        November 28th and 29th to British TV audiences in a "This
        Week" programme entitled "Hitler's Children, the New
        Nazis", directed by the German Michael Schmidt, Professor
        Funke's star witness, and with none other than Gerald
        Gable of Searchlight listed as the consultant, and in
        Despatches on the other channel.  This indicates whose
        hands were behind the editing.  Again, heavily edited the
        film has been shown around the world against me.  This was
        the thrice edited film to which I drew your Lordship's
        attention in suggesting there was evidence of dubious
        admissibility.

                  May I again remind your Lordship of my basic
        principle on lecturing.  Unlike the Defendants who have
        proudly stated that they refuse to debate with opponents,
        I have expressed a readiness to attend, to address all and
        any who are willing to listen.  Your Lordship will
        remember my letter of June 24th 1988 to my editor William
        Morrow, Connie Roosevelt, to whom I wrote:

                  "I have been invited to speak as a guest
        speaker at a right-wing function in Los Angeles next
        February.  They have offered a substantial fee and all my
        expenses, and until now I have adopted a policy of never
        refusing an invitation if the speakers meet my terms,
        namely a free speech and a fat fee.  On this occasion
        I intend to give the audience a piece of mind about some
        of their lunatic views."

.          P-195

                  I may secondly point out that were it not for
        the clandestine activities of the violent and extremist
        bodies dedicated to destroy my right to free speech and
        the rights of all audiences in the United States and
        elsewhere, at Berkley, at Dublin, Pretoria or wherever, to
        hear my opponents and equally dedicated to intimidating my
        publishers and smashing bookstall windows, where it not
        for their hate campaign I would have been able to continue
        in the normal manner with my exemplary professional
        career.  It rings hollow that the same shabby bodies who
        have generated the hatred against me now point their
        crooked finger at my and abuse me using the very
        considerable privileges afforded to them by this court, to
        continuing to make my voice heard whenever I can.  When
        I use words to describe them in detail, which they well
        deserve, they ring their hands lament about extremism.

                  I have pointed out that so far as Germany is
        concerned, none of the German bodies who invited me to
        speak was illegal or banned.  In fact when first invited
        to address the German Peoples Union I wrote to and
        telephoned the Germany Embassy, as the documents in my
        discovery show, and asked them specifically whether this
        was a legal and constitutional body.  The Embassy
        confirmed in writing on July 25th 1984 that was.  The
        extremism was in the eye of beholder.  The further to the
        left the beholder squinted from, the more distant these

.          P-196

        bodies may have seem from him.

                  We have heard a lot from Professor Funke, the
        sociologist of the Free University in Berlin.  My Lord,
        I am now going to pass over the next two pages and
        continue from the bottom of page 94.  As for his
        allegation, the allegation by Professor Funke, here in
        court, my Lord, I also ask you to disregard those two pages.

   MR JUSTICE GRAY:  Yes, I think I know why, and I think that is
        very right and proper.

   MR IRVING:  As for his allegation here in court that I should
        have known that various allegations were going to be
        banned in years ahead, it is difficult for an Englishmen
        coming from a country with deeper democratic traditions
        than Professor Funke's, to implant himself into the brain
        or mindset of the authoritarian German mould where book
        burning is now once again de rigueur, where a German
        academic like Funke does not bat an eyelid upon hearing
        that a teacher is still serving a seven-year jail sentence
        imposed for chairing a lecture at which I spoke, where two
        District Court judges who acquitted that teacher were
        reprimanded and finally retired in disgrace by order of
        the Minister of Justice, and where governments recently
        have begun routinely banning fringe opposition parties and
        circumscribing even their legal activities.

                  My general response to this attempt at "guilt by

.          P-197

        association" which we have seen a lot over the last few
        weeks, is to compare it with the worst accesses of the
        inquisitions conducted by Senator Joseph McCarthy.  In
        Britain the courts have always viewed it as repugnant;
        most recently I believe Morland J in another court in the
        same building.  Hollywood's finest scriptwriters, many of
        them Jewish, had their careers vernichtet, to use that
        word again, by the reckless allegation that they had
        associated with known communists.  Now come these
        Defendants levelling the mirror image of these same
        charges at me.  McCarthyism was rightly exposed for what
        it was in more recent years and more enlightened years,
        and these Defendants for their own purposes are seeking to
        turn the clock back.

                  As far as the United States are concerned, apart
        from the Institute of Historical Review, which I shall
        deal with separately, the one organization identified by
        learned counsel for the Defence, as I understand it, is
        the National Alliance.  First let me point out that, no
        doubt with good reason, the Defendants have decided not to
        call their expert on political extremism in the United
        States, Professor Levin, and they have withdrawn his
        expert report.  I think "junked" was the word.  Mr Rampton
        used the word "junked" or "dumped" I believe.  Had they
        not I would have "debunked" it I think.  We have,
        therefore, no general expert evidence as to the nature of

.          P-198

        he National Alliance, and I think I ought to emphasise
        that matter.  The court is probably as much in the dark
        about this group as anybody else.

                  The Defence invites the court to study the
        leaflets put about by that body at one meeting, but could
        offer to the court not the slightest evidence that I was
        aware of such leaflets or, for that matter, if they are
        once again falling back on negligence, that I ought to
        have been aware of them.

                  If, as I submit, the meetings were organized by
        individual friends of mine acting outside whatever their
        capacity, if any, within the National Alliance may have
        been, there is no reason why I should have read such
        leaflets if they were indeed on offer.

                  As for the IHR, the Institute of Historical
        Review, I have little to add to what I have stated in my
        various written replies and on the witness stand.  It is
        clearly unsatisfactory, though not surprising, that
        establishment scholars feel the need to dismiss any rival
        body of scholars or historians as extremists, merely on
        the basis that these others propagate a different version
        of history from their own consensus versions.

                  The officials of the IHR nearly all hold
        academic qualifications.  True they are not trained
        historians, but then neither are some of the most famous
        names of historians in both ancient and contemporary

.          P-199

        times.  It is clear from correspondence before the court
        that I recognize he short-comings in the old IHR, and
        I was keen to introduce them to new speakers, including
        mainline scholars, historians like John Toland who did in
        fact speak there, Professor Ernst Nolte and Michael
        Beschloss.  I am not and never have been an official of
        the IHR.  At most, one of many friendly advisers.  As for
        speaking engagements, my association with the IHR has been
        the same as my association with (I use the word
        "association" again), for example, Cambridge University
        Fabian Society because I spoke there too, or the Trinity
        College Dublin Lit. & Debc., or any other body of
        enlightened people keen to hear alternative views.

                  Professor Evans in his odious attempts to smear
        and defile my name which I hope will long haunt him in the
        common rooms at Cambridge, called me a frequent speaker at
        the IHR, and may I say "so what?" None of my lectures had
        a Holocaust denial or anti-Semitic or extremist theme.
        I spoke on Churchill, on Pearl Harbour, on Rommel, on the
        Goebbels' Diaries, on my Eichmann papers find, and on
        general problems of writing history.  The court has
        learned that I have in fact addressed functions of the IHR
        only five times in seventeen years, one lecture each
        time.  No amount of squirming by this expert witness could
        increase that figure.  It is true that I socialized before
        or after the event with the IHR officials and their

.          P-200

        wives.  So what?  It is true that I use their warehousing
        facilities.  So what?  It is true that the IHR, along with
        thousands of other retail outlets sell my books.  So what?
        It is true that I introduced them to subjects which some
        members of their audience found deeply uncomfortable, for
        example, the confessions of Adolf Eichmann, the harrowing
        Bruns report and the Kristallnacht.  I would willingly
        read out the relevant extracts of my lectures to the IHR,
        but my Lord, through the courtesy and industry of the
        Defendants' solicitors, which I have already had cause to
        praise, your Lordship is already funded with extensive
        transcripts of precisely those talks, and I would ask that
        your Lordship read them or look at them with this
        paragraph in mind.

                  I am accused of telling audiences what they want
        to hear, and that may be partially true, but, by Jove,
        having done so, then I used the goodwill generated like
        that to tell them a lot of things they very much did not
        want to hear.  The Defendants would willingly overlook
        that aspect of my association with the IHR, and I trust
        that the court will not.

                  As for the National Alliance, an organization of
        which the Defence makes much, once again, as an Englishman ----

   MR JUSTICE GRAY:  You have dealt with that already.

   MR IRVING:  We have had it, but I am back again, my Lord.  It

.          P-201

        must have been quite late at night when I wrote this
        part.  As an Englishman I am completely unfamiliar with he
        nature the National Alliance, its logo and its name.  It
        may be that the name means more to the Defendants and to
        those who are financing the efforts than it means to me.
        It certainly meant nothing to the English members of the
        gallery on the day that it was mentioned here.

                  I have no meaningful contacts with the
        organization as such.  One or at most two of its
        individuals members who were already on my mailing list
        volunteered, like scores of other Americans, to organize
        lectures for me.  One was Erich Gliebe who has always
        organized my lectures Cleveland in Ohio.  On the evidence
        of his notepaper from the year 1990 (that is ten years ago
        now) he is also a National Alliance member.  I ask the
        court to accept that when asked about it ten years later
        I had long forgotten receiving that one letter from him
        with its heading and its logo.  Before each lecture date
        I mailed an invitation letter to my entire mailing list of
        friends in each State.  The audience was, therefore,
        largely my own people, if I can put it like that.  That is
        why Mr Breeding rather superfluously welcomes the
        strangers in his opening remarks on the Florida video tape
        as seen.  Had he told me he would also claim to do so on
        behalf of his organization, I would have told him not to.
        It was my function and the audience were my guests and not

.          P-202

        his.

                  The photographs taken at this meeting shows, as
        the Defendants' own agents have warranted, no formal
        National Alliance presence, flags, arm bands or whatever.
        The witness statement of Rebecca Gutmann has confirmed this.

                  Learned counsel for the Defendants has drawn
        attention to one 18-inch wide pennant, that is my
        estimate, displayed at the function on a side wall with
        what they state is the National Alliance logo on it
        visible on the video film.  Its logo appears to be based
        on the CND design.  I did not notice it at the time nor
        would I have had the faintest idea what it was if I did.
        Evidently Mr Gliebe told me that his pals at the National
        Alliance had had a hand in organizing my successful
        Cleveland function, and that is why I noted in my diary
        with a hint of surprise that it turns out that the
        National Alliance had organized the other meeting too.

                  The court may agree that this phrase alone is
        evidence that their involvement was (A) not manifest, and
        (B) not known to me before.  Given that the audience was
        largely my own making, it does not seem worthy of much
        note.  I submit that this kind of defence evidence really
        does not meet the enhanced standard of proof required by
        law on defamation for justification of the more serious charges.

.          P-203

   MR JUSTICE GRAY:  I do not think you need bother with the next
        paragraph frankly.

   MR IRVING:  In general, it is also to be stated that at
        material times, namely when associated with those
        individuals, they were not extremists -- I take it that
        your Lordship accepts what I said in that paragraph?

   MR JUSTICE GRAY:  I do not think, frankly, that the evidence of
        your contacts with the BNP amounts to anything.

   MR IRVING:  Thank you very much.  In general, it is also to be
        stated that at material times, namely when I was
        associated with those individuals, they were not
        extremists; nor has it been shown to the court that at
        that time they were.  Thus at the time I first met this
        young man Ewald Althans in Germany late in October 1989,
        he seemed full of promise and eager to learn.  I later
        learned that he had been to Israel for six months on a
        German Government voluntary scheme for young Germans who
        wished to atone.  Over the two or three years that our
        orbits occasionally intercepted I could see that he was
        growing more extreme and provocative in his actions.  He
        also became undependable and wayward in a number of
        non-political ways that I mentioned in court.

                  According to Der Spiegel at his 1995 trial in
        Berlin, Althans had acted for the Bavarian security
        authorities as a top agent until 1994 when they ended the
        liaison.  The German security authorities had, as

.          P-204

        Professor Funke agreed, a record of hiring agents
        provocateurs.

                  I now come to Ernst Zundel, the next paragraph.
        Ernst Zundel is a German born Canadian [sic] for whose own
        particular views I hold no brief.  I later learned that he
        had apparently written some provocatively-themed books
        with tongue-in-cheek titles on flying saucers in
        Antarctica, and on the "Adolf Hitler that I knew and
        loved", which is said to be worst than outre; wild horses
        would not make me read such books myself.  I had met him
        in 1986 and found that as a personality he was not as dark
        as had been painted in the media.  I was asked to give
        expert evidence at his trial in Toronto in 1988 relating
        to the Third Reich and Hitler's own involvement in the
        Holocaust.  I did so to the best of my professional
        abilities, and I was told that I had earned the
        commendation of the court in doing so.

                  It is plain to me from what I know that
        Mr Zundel has been subjected to 20-year onslaught by the
        Canadian organizations dedicated to combatting what they
        regard as Holocaust denial because of his dissident views,
        which are certainly more extreme than mine.  My own
        relationship with Mr Zundel has been proper throughout,
        and the court has not been given any evidence to the
        contrary.  At times it has even been strained because of
        the misfortune inflicted on me in retribution for having

.          P-205

        spoken at his trial.

                  My Lord, there remain one or two minor matters,
        in my view.  The Defendants alleged that I wilfully
        exaggerated the Dresden death roll in my 1963 book "The
        Destruction of Dresden", and that I had no basis for my
        figures.  I have satisfied this court, I believe, that at
        all times (A) I set and published the proper upper and
        lower limits for estimates that I gave, giving a wide
        range of figures which necessarily decreased overall over
        the years as our state of information improved, and that
        (B) I had an adequate basis for the various figures which
        I provided in my works at the material times.  It has to
        be said that authors have little or no control over the
        content of books that are sub-licensed by their main
        publisher to other publishers.  Revisions are not
        encouraged for costs reasons.

                  I have always been aware of the highly charged
        political nature of the figures quote for this event, the
        bombing of Dresden.  The highest figure of 250,000, which
        I mentioned in my books only as the maximum ever alleged,
        was given, for example, by the German Chancellor
        Dr Comrade Ardenau in a West German official government
        publication which I showed the court.  The lowest figures
        only became available in a book published in 1994 by
        Fredrich Reichardt.  A copy of this book was provided to
        me in 1997.  By that time I had already published the

.          P-206

        latest updated version of my book which is now called
        "Apocalypse 1945, The Destruction of Dresden", in which
        I had lowered the death roll still further on the basis of
        my on investigations and considerations.  This was the
        first edition over which I, not the publisher, had total
        control, as it appeared under my own imprint.

                  In 1965, as the court is aware, I received
        written estimates of 140,000 and 180,000 dead from a
        rather anxious Soviet zone citizen, Dr Max Funfack, who
        claimed to have received them about nine days after the
        raid from the City Commandant and the Chief Civil Defence
        Officer respectively, both of them his personal friends.
        That being so, there was no reason why I should have
        revised the 135,000 estimate which I had earlier received
        from Hans Voigt, a city official charged with drawing up
        death lists when I was researching my first book in 1961.

                  In 1966 I received the police final report of
        March 1945.  While still remaining sceptical about it for
        the reasons stated, for example, the officer was
        responsible for Dresden's ARP and it was too early to
        achieve any kind of overall final figure, the number of
        refugees killed was also an imponderable.  I took the
        correct action, however.  I sent to letter to The Times
        within a few days of finding the new documents, that is
        July 1996, within a few days of finding the new documents
        in the mail on my return from a trip to the United

.          P-207

        States.  Not only that, but at my own expense I had the
        letter reprinted and sent to hundreds of historians and
        the like.  One hopes that the expert witnesses whom we saw
        in the witness stand on behalf of the Defence would have
        had the same integrity to do the same kind of thing.

                  As for the Goebbels diaries, the Defendants, as
        I understand it, do not now seek to justify their claim
        that I broke an agreement with the Moscow archives in 1992.

   MR JUSTICE GRAY:  I do not think that is right, but do not take
        time on it because I think I know what the case is.

   MR IRVING:  They have withdrawn witness reports of the Russian
        archivists and will provide me no opportunity to
        cross-examine them.  I was prepared to pursue those
        cross-examinations most vigorously.  I produced a witness
        statement from Mr Peter Millar of the Sunday Times, my
        colleague in Moscow, and I made him available for
        cross-examination.  He confirmed that there was no verbal
        or written agreement, as I had also stated in my various
        replies, so therefore I could not have broken it.  The
        Defendants have left no satisfactory evidence before the
        court that refutes this, in my submission.

                  Mr Millar also confirmed to the court that he
        did not agree that my conduct gave rise to significant
        risk of damage to the plates.  The plates had been
        withheld from historians by the Russians for 55 years or

.          P-208

        more.  That figure of course is wrong.  It is 48 years at
        that time, I am sorry.  The plates have been withheld from
        historians for 48 years or more.  By my actions I made
        this historically very important materials available to
        the world, and I placed copies of them in the appropriate
        German archives at my own expense.

                  My Lord, I make submission now on the Heinrich Muller document.

   MR JUSTICE GRAY:  I do not think I would read that out if
        I were you.  I think that is not the best way of dealing with it.

   MR IRVING:  No.  I will leave it as a written submission.

   MR JUSTICE GRAY:  Have you seen what -- I am sure you have seen
        it because I have a copy of a letter to you with attachments.

   MR IRVING:  I have seen it, my Lord, yes.

   MR JUSTICE GRAY:  In the light of those attachments and
        including Professor Longerich's really quite helpful
        account of his investigations, what is your submission?

   MR IRVING:  I am not challenging the authenticity of the
        document, my Lord, but I am asking that attention be paid
        to the fact that it is highly unsatisfactory that I am not
        provided in good time, in a timeous manner, with the file
        dated that I needed in order to go behind the document and
        establish whether there was anything which would undermine
        the purport that the defendants were seeking to attach to

.          P-209

        that document.

   MR JUSTICE GRAY:  You mean the other documents in the same file?

   MR IRVING:  Like in the case of the Schlegelberger document,
        which enabled the Defendants to attack the meaning of the
        Schlegelberger document, because they had documents
        relating to it in the same file which enabled them to
        narrow it down and say this is clearly a reference to the Mischlinge.

   MR JUSTICE GRAY:  Sorry, we are talking about the Muller
        document, are we not?

   MR IRVING:  We are talking about the Muller document.  I am
        saying that, had I had the other documents in the same file ----

   MR JUSTICE GRAY:  What has it got to do with Mischlinge?

   MR IRVING:  I could have gone behind the Muller document, using
        the other documents in the same file.

   MR JUSTICE GRAY:  You mean as you did with Schlegelberger?

   MR IRVING:  As they did with Schlegelberger.

   MR JUSTICE GRAY:  Yes, I follow.  I am not quite sure,
        Dr Longerich wrote to Dr Aaron Reich, as I understand it,
        to see what other documents there were in the file, but
        I do not know what the result was, or indeed when the
        question was asked.  You do not know either?

   MR IRVING:  I asked the question and I was given a totally
        fictitious file number in the German Federal archives.

.          P-210

   MR RAMPTON:  Not by us.

   MR IRVING:  It was given by you because it was in the footnote
        of one of your expert reports as being the source.

   MR JUSTICE GRAY:  As I understand it, and do not let us talk
        over each other too much, my understanding is that first
        time around the wrong file number was given, but then
        later the correct file number is thought to have been
        discovered, which then prompted Dr Longerich to write to
        or to fax Dr Aaron Reich, asking if he could say what the
        other documents in this file are.

   MR IRVING:  The correct file number was then notified to me
        this last weekend, which of course gave me no time
        whatsoever to do the kind of research that I would have
        had to do.

   MR JUSTICE GRAY:  Anyway, your position is you do not deny its
        authenticity, but you do say that the provenance is
        unsatisfactory.

   MR IRVING:  I do say it has been improperly produced to me in a
        manner which has made it impossible for me to attack its
        meaning, but I have attacked its meaning nevertheless in
        my submission.

   MR JUSTICE GRAY:  I know you have.

   MR IRVING:  I am not seriously worried about it because I am
        sure that your Lordship will accept what I said about the meaning.

   MR JUSTICE GRAY:  Do you mind if I ask Mr Rampton what the

.          P-211

        explanation of----

   MR RAMPTON:  I do not see it that any criticism at all can be made ----

   MR JUSTICE GRAY:  When was Dr Aaron Reich asked the question?

   MR RAMPTON:  Where is that, my Lord?

   MR JUSTICE GRAY:  It is paragraph numbered 4 on the second page.

   MR RAMPTON:  I think that, unless I have completely
        misunderstood this clip of papers, I confess I have not
        paid it a terrific lot of attention recently, there is,
        I think, actually a page of the little clip showing that a
        fax was sent or received -- I can see.  It has my own fax
        number right at the top of it so I think it is what
        Dr Longerich says he sent from my chambers.  It looks like
        16.48 on Friday, but unfortunately I cannot read it.

   MR JUSTICE GRAY:  That was the problem I had which is why
        I asked when it had been sent.  Leave aside when it was
        sent.  What was the answer?

   MR RAMPTON:  I do not know when it was sent.

   MR JUSTICE GRAY:  Sorry, what was the answer from Aaron Reich?

   MR RAMPTON:  There was one in the Washington archive as well.
        The reply says, whatever its date may be -- I can see it
        is 10th March.  It is from somebody called Anna Row.  She
        is writing to both Aaron Reich, who I think might be in
        New York, I really do not know, and to Dr Longerich.  What
        she says is: "After some searching and help from Jurgen,

.          P-212

        we were able to find a copy of the document in question.
        The citation in Moscow is, according to the two records"
        etc. etc., and gives the reference.  "If a fax copy is
        desired we can send it along".

   MR JUSTICE GRAY:  I follow all that and, as I understand it,
        not making too much of a meal of it all, there are two
        copies of this document, one in Moscow and another in
        Germany, the German copy having been provided from
        Moscow.  That may or may not be satisfactory, but what
        I was really concerned to know is what attempts, if any,
        have been made to discover what other documents were in
        the same file, because I think the request was not an
        unreasonable one, that the other documents in the file
        might cast some light on the significance of Muller.

   MR RAMPTON:  I simply do not know.  If that is not addressed in
        Dr Longerich's note, I cannot give an answer about it
        because I was not a party to it.

   MR JUSTICE GRAY:  That was one of the things that I think
        I suggested on day 30 or day 31, I cannot remember,
        Mr Irving should be given an answer to.

   MR RAMPTON:  Plainly, I would submit, the position must be
        this.  The reason why, not including the November 1941
        document, Mr Irving tendered the other Schlegelberger
        documents is that, on one view of its dating, the other
        documents might be of some relevance.  I assume -- this
        is an assumption -- that a distinguished and respectable

.          P-213

        historian like Dr Longerich would not produce a single
        document from a file if there were other surrounding
        documents which, to his knowledge, had a bearing on its
        interpretation.

   MR JUSTICE GRAY:  Yes, but he does not say so, that is the
        problem.  He does not say that he has looked, or tried to
        look and failed.

   MR RAMPTON:  In any event, since Mr Irving accepts the
        authenticity of the document, the fact that there are not
        any other documents around it leads nowhere.

   MR JUSTICE GRAY:  We do not even know that, do we?  We do not
        know whether there are other documents in the same file.

   MR RAMPTON:  There might be a source, I do not know.  In fact,
        I think I may have been guilty of not reading the message
        carefully enough.  I read paragraph 1 of Dr Longerich's
        note which was prepared yesterday:  "I am familiar with
        this document.  A copy is available in the archival
        collection of the Zentralstelle in Ludwigsburg.  This is a
        collection of documents which was handed over by the
        Soviet authorities in 1969 to the Federal Republic".  It
        begs the question, I interpose there, how on earth it is
        that Mr Irving has never seen it.  It has been there since
        1969.  "The document is accompanied by a covering page
        with an archival reference to the file where the original
        is kept 500.1.25.  This is an archival reference from the
        Soviet archive in Moscow.  Fons" -- whatever that

.          P-214

        means -- "security police and SD, part 1 of the
        collection, file 25.  I was in Moscow", says Dr Longerich
        "in 1992 for four weeks, and I looked at documents from
        this fons extensively.  At the moment I cannot remember
        whether I saw the original of this document during my stay
        in Moscow, but I kept notes about this day and could
        reconstruct what I saw there.  The notes are at the moment
        in Munich".  That plainly does not suggest that he
        believes that there are any other relevant documents in that file.

   MR JUSTICE GRAY:  It does not say one way or the other.  He
        says he cannot remember.  It probably is a point of
        absolutely no significance but, since it is something that
        Mr Irving has raised and I did indicate that I thought he
        ought to have an answer, I would still like such
        information as can be obtained from Dr Longerich to be
        communicated to him and to me.

   MR RAMPTON:  I will try again.  Given that it is accepted to be
        an authentic document, and given also that it is not
        perhaps a document that lies at the heart of the case
        though it has some significance obviously, I will do
        it.  That leads me to make an enquiry, if I may, of your Lordship.

   MR IRVING:  Can I just finish?

   MR JUSTICE GRAY:  Yes.  You have some other points?

   MR RAMPTON:  My Lord, I am sorry, this is a connected enquiry,

.          P-215

        if I may.  That may take time.  I do not know myself at
        the moment what date judgment is likely to be because
        obviously, if your Lordship is going to consider any
        additional documents, they will need to be got sooner
        rather than later.

   MR JUSTICE GRAY:  I do not know either.  I hope it will not be
        as long as you might fear.  That does not tell you very
        much, does it. That is not intended to be delphic,
        but think in terms of a small number of weeks rather than
        a large number of months.

   MR RAMPTON:  I was not trying to put any pressure on at all.
        For the sake of this exercise, I obviously need to know.
        If it is going to be in three or four days time,
        I probably will not be able to achieve it.

   MR JUSTICE GRAY:  I think that will be unlikely.  That is all I
        can do.  If you can obtain it as soon as possible -- if
        you cannot, so be it.  We will have to manage without.

   MR RAMPTON:  We will do what we can.

   MR JUSTICE GRAY:  Mr Irving, you have listed some other matters.

   MR IRVING:  I wish to conclude on page 104, if I may.

   MR JUSTICE GRAY:  I am so sorry.  Hang on, why are you telling me about that now?

   MR IRVING:  Okay, then it is wrong that I should let your Lordship know.

   MR JUSTICE GRAY:  Is that not relevant only to costs?  Tell me

.          P-216

        if I am wrong, but that would be the way I would see it.

   MR IRVING:  Not only the costs, my Lord, there are other features of part 36.

   MR JUSTICE GRAY:  Let me just read it.

   MR IRVING:  My understanding is that your Lordship was not
        informed of what was in the offer, but that offer was made
        under the new rules.

   MR JUSTICE GRAY:  I do not see the relevance of telling me that
        unless and until it comes to the question of costs.

   MR IRVING:  Yes.  The question of costs is covered by the next
        paragraph, which is that I do not propose asking for my
        costs in this action.

   MR JUSTICE GRAY:  It is premature to be telling me that.

   MR IRVING:  Not at all, my Lord.  This is surely the place when
        I can put this into your Lordship's mind and that deals
        with it, puts it out of the way.

   MR JUSTICE GRAY:  It is true, but I would only address that
        question once judgment had been given.

   MR IRVING:  But I do ask your Lordship to give judgment in the
        terms and premises set out in my writ and statement of
        claim, namely damages, including aggravated damages for
        libel and an injunction restraining the Defendants and
        each of them, whether by themselves or agents or otherwise
        from further publishing or causing to be published the
        said or similar words defamatory of myself as claimant.

   MR JUSTICE GRAY:  Yes.  You gave me that little list of other

.          P-217

        things you were going to raise today.  Standard of proof
        in graver libels, I think you know that I believe I know
        what the law is on that so you need not trouble with it,
        unless you want to.  Is there anything you wanted to say
        particularly, Mr Irving?  I am not stopping you, I just do
        not think it is really necessary.

   MR IRVING:  It is trite law, is it not, my Lord?

   MR JUSTICE GRAY:  It is.

   MR IRVING:  We had this discussion earlier and I thought it
        important -- in fact it is obviously very impertinent of
        me to draw it your Lordship's attention.

   MR JUSTICE GRAY:  It is not at all, no.  I have it in mind
        anyway.  Section 5, I think we have resolved that in an
        earlier discussion today.

   MR IRVING:  We have dealt with 4 because I have now done it.

   MR JUSTICE GRAY:  Yes.  Costs we have decided it is premature.
        Now I realize time is passing but it is obviously sensible
        to conclude everything today, and I hope I can perhaps do
        it in this comprehensive way.  You have seen that in the
        Defendants' detailed written submissions they recite
        various concessions -- you may not like the term but they
        call them concessions which they say you have made about
        such matters as shootings in the East, numbers killed,
        whether it was systematic, whether Hitler knew about it,
        and also in relation to deaths at the Reinhardt death
        camps.  Do you accept you did make those concessions?

.          P-218

   MR IRVING:  The answer is I have not seen them, but I know of
        them.  I have not had any time at all to read that big
        thick thing.

   MR JUSTICE GRAY:  Then I do not think it is fair to ask you to
        give answers on the hoof.  What I will ask you to do
        though is this.  If you either dispute that you ever made
        the concessions that the Defendants say you made, or you
        want now to reconsider ----

   MR IRVING:  Resile.

   MR JUSTICE GRAY:  Well, I was trying not to use that word
        actually -- to reconsider, then would you write to me and
        to the Defendants, shortly setting out what you say you
        said, or what you now say?

   MR IRVING:  Yes.

   MR JUSTICE GRAY:  Because I do not want to be under any misapprehension.

   MR IRVING:  Purely on the matter of concession?

   MR JUSTICE GRAY:  Yes.

   MR IRVING: I will certainly do that within the next two or three days.

   MR JUSTICE GRAY:  Good.  Is there anything else, Mr Rampton?

   MR RAMPTON:  Yes, there is.  I should like to apologise
        personally -- I dare say I am right in thinking it was
        directed at me -- for not being able in one moment to
        restrain my frustration.  I apologise for that.

   MR JUSTICE GRAY:  There is no need for that.

.          P-219

   MR RAMPTON:  Yes.  I should at my age know better.  But, as
        your Lordship will remember, it is sometimes extremely
        difficult to restrain oneself when one can actually hear
        the evidence of one's own witnesses being misrepresented.
        I am not going to do a trawl through what Mr Irving has
        said.  Your Lordship has the evidence.

                  But there is one thing which he said which
        I really do think needs to be corrected.  If this is a
        case without this kind of high profile, I might say
        nothing at all.  Mr Irving said that Professor van Pelt
        had no explanation for the many oddities in Bischoff's
        letter of 29th June 1943.  That is an important document.
        In fact, when I re-examined on 2nd February, that is day
        14, page 3 to page 13 at the end, by reference to the
        little clip of documents by which Mr Irving sought to show
        the uniquely ----

   MR JUSTICE GRAY:  Yes, I remember that quite well, all the
        oddities, as it were.

   MR RAMPTON:  In fact, he explained every single oddity, except
        the missing year date in the reference.

   MR JUSTICE GRAY:  Yes, I remember that quite well, but thank
        you for reminding me what the reference is.

   MR IRVING:  My Lord, in view of my traditional right to the
        last word, I would reserve the right to write your
        Lordship a letter setting out the oddities in that
        Bischoff letter, with a copy to the Defendants.

.          P-220

   MR JUSTICE GRAY:  No.  I do not think I am going to invite
        that.  I feel fairly deluged anyway with paper.  I really
        do.  I have in mind both what you said were the reasons
        why you at that stage disputed the authenticity, and
        I know you still question the authenticity of that
        document, but I also have in mind, in a general sense, the
        explanations that were given by Professor van Pelt.  Now,
        anything else?


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