Archive/File: people/i/irving.david/libel.suit/transcripts/day019.17 Last-Modified: 2000/07/24 Q. Well, go to the next book then, "Nuremberg, the Last Battle", where once again you find fault with my selection of illustrations, although on this occasion I have included victims of what can loosely be called the Holocaust. I have obtained from a German sale an original soldier's album from the Balkans showing these German soldiers brutally stringing up obviously defenceless civilians and hanging them. They are the most brutal photographs I have ever seen. They are nightmare photographs. Yet here too you find fault with what I have done. A. Let me just read your captions: "Punished", headline, "... snapshots from a German soldier's photo album. The daily routine of a cruel warfare in the . P-151 Balkans. A German soldier is found mutilated. The German troops take reprisals stringing up the men folk in the village like washing on a line. One by one, a chair kicked away ... (reading to the words) ... and then painful death by strangulation. For crimes like these, German Generals are executed at Nuremberg ..." Second heading: "And unpunished. No Allied General is ever called to account for the appalling fire raids on Japan, above, or Dresden, left and below. In each of these 1945 raids about 100,000 innocent civilians are burned alive", and we know that that is a grossly exaggerated figure, "in what is now only universally recognised as a crime against international law" which I do not believe it is. MR JUSTICE GRAY: We will leave that one -- we will not chase that one. MR IRVING: Professor, you are not an expert on international law. I have a lot of evidence that it is, my Lord, but I am not going to put it to the court. MR JUSTICE GRAY: We will not chase that one. I think it is not the point. MR IRVING: Yes, but on the photographs here again, it seems I just cannot do right. My Lord, you do not have the photographs in front of you, do you? MR JUSTICE GRAY: No, but I think this is not an unimportant point, I think I can get them quite easily. I know . P-152 exactly the ones that are being referred to. MR IRVING: Yes. It is a whole page of photographs, snapshots from a soldier's album showing the reprisals they have taken against these people in a Balkan village. A. Yes, you do make it clear that they are reprisals for what you call the mutilation of a German soldier. Q. And I do have to admit that I have not published the most gruesome photographs for obvious reasons of taste. A. That did not stop you publishing the photographs of the victims of the Hamburg bombing raid. Q. Believe me, the ones that I did not publish in the Nuremberg book were unpublishable. A. What I am trying to establish here is that you are trying to set up an equivalence between the two sides in order to diminish the importance of the Nazi extermination of the Jews. Q. If an author has ---- A. And, indeed, I mean, in some sense, I think these captions and illustrations do have the effect of suggesting that what the Allies did was worse than what the Germans did. Q. Worse? A. Yes. MR JUSTICE GRAY: Because they got away with it scott-free. MR IRVING: If an author has sincerely held views ---- A. And because the pictures are more -- have larger numbers, more gruesome, and so on. . P-153 Q. If an author has sincerely held views on the morality of what both sides did in World War II, by way of killing innocent people and civilians, is this grounds for him to be held up to public ridicule and opprobrium and obloquy? A. This is systematic distortion, I think, in your presentation of these pictures, the selection that you make. Q. Is not the systematic distortion that practised by those who have suppressed the evidence of crimes that the Allies committed during World War II? I do not really want to go far down this particular road, his Lordship will not allow us. A. I am not here to defend the bombing of Dresden and the bombing of Hamburg, goodness knows. I do not think that these have been suppressed at all. There has been an enormous amount of debate and discussion about these and passionately argued on both sides. Q. What about an author's right to write about it if he has these views sincerely, can he do so without fear ---- A. I think an author has ---- Q. --- of being labelled a Holocaust denier? A. Well, I think an author has a view to try to maintain a certain balance when talking about the atrocities, to use that word, committed on both sides. Q. Yes. A. And I do not think you do that. . P-154 Q. Have I not had a record ever since my very first book of speaking out against this kind of air warfare right up to the present day in Kosovo, and does this not entitle me to adopt a kind of moral equivalency between the two crimes, although, obviously, there is no comparison on scale? A. Yes, but what you are doing is to try to establish, both in terms of numbers as I am arguing in this action and in terms of the atrocities, the impression to your readership and your audience that the allied bombing of German cities was as bad as or worse than the Nazi killing of Jews in Auschwitz and elsewhere. That is really what this is about. Q. In a few pages' time you say, "On one particular night we only killed 17,000 people by burning them alive in 20 minutes", is that right? A. Could you point me to that passage? Q. Page 114. A. Yes. Q. Line 5, you are suggesting that killing 17,600 people by burning them alive in the space of 20 minutes is in some way, I do not know, not a crime? A. No. What I say here is that ---- MR JUSTICE GRAY: Read it out, would you, Professor Evans, since that suggestion is being put? A. Yes, I will read that out, yes. This refers back to a . P-155 lengthy quote on the previous page where you talk about 25,000 people being killed in 25 minutes in Pforzheim by an allied air raid in 25 minutes, and in Auschwitz there were 25,000 killed in four years. "When you put things into perspective like that, it diminishes their Holocaust - that word with a capital letter", "their" meaning , presumably, the Jews. I point out in the passage that you cite that your equivalence does not stand up to examination, quite apart from the gross minimization of the Auschwitz figures because you exaggerate the number of deaths caused by the Pforzheim raid, which was estimated in a report of the Statistical Office of the City of Pforzheim in 1954 not as 25,000 or 27,000, as you claim, but as 17,600. So you are deliberately trying to say 25,000, 25,000, and, in fact, it is not that equivalence at all. That does not mean to say that I justify the bombing of Pforzheim; that does not come into it at all. I am simply trying to talk about the way that you present these things. MR IRVING: Can we just go back to Nuremberg, please? You suggest that at the end of paragraph 8 on page 110 that the way I juxtaposed those photographs was intended to imply to the careless reader that the perpetrators of the atrocities were Jews, that the atrocities were committed by Jews and that they were getting their -- is there any . P-156 justification at all for this suggestion? A. Yes. It seems to me that that is what seems to be the suggestion. MR JUSTICE GRAY: I think I had better have a look at that. MR IRVING: I think your Lordship ought to have a look at it because it is a serious allegation. MR JUSTICE GRAY: I could not find the photographs. MR RAMPTON: My Lord ---- MR JUSTICE GRAY: It is between 182 and 183. MR RAMPTON: In Nuremberg it is after 182. MR JUSTICE GRAY: I follow that. Where does it come in the great wodge of photographs? MR RAMPTON: It is after a panorama of Nuremberg Defendants with somebody or other giving a -- Robert H Jackson giving a speech for the Prosecution, I think. MR IRVING: I will have the actual book brought tomorrow, your Lordship. MR JUSTICE GRAY: Mr Rampton has it; I may have to look at it because I have a slight feeling that ---- MR RAMPTON: It is worth looking at the original actually, if I may suggest it? MR JUSTICE GRAY: I have a feeling the photograph has not for some reason found its way into my ---- MR RAMPTON: I think the witness should have it too. MR IRVING: Again the quality of the photographs is remarkable. They are original colour photographs to the . P-157 Nuremberg trials and this is the standard I am going for. MR JUSTICE GRAY: That is not really the point, is it? MR IRVING: Well, it is the basis I make the selection of books that I publish. MR JUSTICE GRAY: Actually, I would rather look at the original. Well, the point that Professor Evans is making is, obviously, in reference to the photograph on the left-hand side under the text and they do have a Jewish appearance. MR IRVING: Undoubtedly, they are Jews. Undoubtedly, they are also being swept up into the general Holocaust on that site. But I think to suggest that by the juxtaposition of the photographs I had implied in any way at all that they were guilty for whatever had befallen the German troops or whatever, that is perverse and unjustified and certainly unintentional on my part. A. Well the caption does say: "A German soldier is found mutilated. The German troops take reprisals". Q. Yes. But, as you know, the reprisal is just swept up, a round number of males in the area and liquidated them, murdered them? A. It is a question of what the captions and the pictures suggest. Q. But nowhere is it suggested in the caption that the Jewish victims on those pictures have been picked for that reason? . P-158 A. No, it is a matter of suggestion really. It was what the pictures suggest. I mean, of their very nature pictures are suggestive, captions are short. As you say, they are very powerful -- worth a thousand words. Q. To summarise, before we move on, this is a page of photographs of victims of the Nazis, is that right? A. I believe I say so, yes. Q. So that your suggestion in the previous book that I do not publish photographs of the victims of the Nazis does not always hold up? A. Well, I say you -- in the previous book I mention that you have a picture of the train at Riga. That is the only picture of the Nazis' Jewish victims to set aside several extremely graphic pictures of the victims of allied bombing raids. Q. So, somebody who is minimizing something like that in their books is a Holocaust denier, is that part of the element? A. What you are trying to do -- all of this is about your attempt to establish an equivalence between the two, as it were, to suggest that essentially all sides in the Second World War committed crimes of some dimensions. That is what we are really talking about. I think that is an element in Holocaust denial. Q. In Sir Winston Churchill's books, were there any photographs at all of train loads of Jews at Riga or . P-159 anywhere else on his History of the Second World War, six volumes? A. I do not recall. I am not sure I see the relevance of that in any case to what you do in your books. Q. That is for his Lordship to decide. If someone like Sir Winston Churchill writes a six-volume history without mentioning the Holocaust or the killing of Jews in seven line, does that make him a Holocaust denier or does it mean times have now changed? MR JUSTICE GRAY: I think we can do better than take time with that question. MR IRVING: We can indeed, my Lord, we are now going to come to a little piece of gold on page 111. In paragraph 10 you accuse me once again of exaggerating the numbers killed in allied bombing raids. The number of Germans killed in allied bombing raids, is that correct? A. Yes, that is right. Q. But you do not distort documents or quotations in order to justify that kind of allegation? A. I am not sure what you are referring to here. Q. All will shortly become plain. Will you go to the next paragraph 111? A. Yes. Q. Here you say on page 441 of Goebbels: "He describes the numbers of those killed in the bombing raid on Hamburg on 27, 26, 28 July 1943 as 'nearly 50,000'". . P-160 A. Yes. Q. That was the big fire storm, was it not, that summer? A. Yes, that is right. Q. Operation Gomorrah, the British call it? A. Yes, it is 48,000 in the captions of Hitler's War which I cite on page 109.
Home ·
Site Map ·
What's New? ·
Search
Nizkor
© The Nizkor Project, 1991-2012
This site is intended for educational purposes to teach about the Holocaust and
to combat hatred.
Any statements or excerpts found on this site are for educational purposes only.
As part of these educational purposes, Nizkor may
include on this website materials, such as excerpts from the writings of racists and antisemites. Far from approving these writings, Nizkor condemns them and
provides them so that its readers can learn the nature and extent of hate and antisemitic discourse. Nizkor urges the readers of these pages to condemn racist
and hate speech in all of its forms and manifestations.