Archive/File: people/i/irving.david/libel.suit/transcripts/day020.17 Last-Modified: 2000/07/24 Q. So a journalist does or does not have an interview with me, which he then passes on to a magazine which publishes it, which you say has contacts with the HIAG and out of that connection you say I had contacts with the HIAG. In other words, if I gave an interview to the Tablet, would I have contacts with the Pope? Is what you are suggesting? A. I think that is very different. This is the house magazine of the Waffen SS Veterans Association, Mr Irving. Q. It is exactly the same, is it not? . P-150 A. It is not exactly the same. Q. If a journalist comes and speaks to me and asks me for an interview, and I give him an interview, and he then passes that interview on to a magazine which is called Der Freiwillige, which I have never heard of from start to finish, and you say that that is the house magazine of HIAG, which may or may not be true, and you say this is evidence of me having contacts (in the plural) with HIAG? A. Yes. I assume that someone must have set up the interview and that then you must have had the interview. Is this in the court's record, because I have a photocopy of this here. This is another one of my written answers. I am not quite sure why we are going through all these written answers to your written questions, I do not accept that you were not aware of who was doing the interview or where it was going to be published. Q. But you are suggesting that I have contacts with HIAG, which is a pretty serious and almost indeed a repugnant allegation to make. You are saying I do not have just the one contact through a journalist but I have contacts in the plural with them. You have already withdrawn the previous part of this sinister allegation about being a contact with a sinister denier, Mr Remer, and it turns out that this contact too just turns out to be an interview with a journalist? A. I do not think it is just a journalist, Mr Irving, . P-151 otherwise why would he have adopted what appears to be ---- MR IRVING: What you think is neither here nor there. It is not evidence. MR JUSTICE GRAY: Please, Mr Irving, there is no point in asking questions if you constantly interrupt the answers. I expect you have forgotten what the question is; I have certainly forgotten. A. Yes. This is not just any old journalist who then gives you an interview and then kind of hawks it around until he somehow, by some extraordinary chance, comes across the house magazine of the Waffen SS Veterans Association and manages to find a spot for it there. This is clearly somebody who is acting on behalf of this organization and its house magazine who comes and interviews you. MR IRVING: Then you invite two further questions. Have you found in my private diaries, to which of course you had complete access for the purposes of this trial, any suggestion of any contact between myself and the HIAG or any of its officials whatsoever? A. No, I have not. That does not mean to say of course that there were not any. Q. Have you found in all my files of correspondence, to which of course you have also had complete access by way of discovery, any suggestion of contact between myself and the HIAG whatsoever? . P-152 A. No, but it is the sort of thing you would like to keep quiet, is it not? Q. The sort of thing I would like to keep quiet? Are you suggesting that I have destroyed ----? A. You have just denied all knowledge of this magazine and this interview, and you describe it as "some journalist" who came to you without your knowing what the source was and where he was going to place the interview. Q. By your reference to "the sort of thing I would like to keep quiet", are you alleging that I have destroyed materials instead of properly discovering them? MR JUSTICE GRAY: I did not understand that to be the allegation. A. No. MR IRVING: Because it is a very serious allegation to make. In fact, it is a criminal charge. A. I am not saying you destroyed materials, Mr Irving. MR IRVING: Destroying evidence instead of producing it for discovery. A. I have no evidence that you have destroyed any. Q. You have no evidence whatsoever that I have destroyed material, rather than produce it for discovery? MR JUSTICE GRAY: He did not say that. MR RAMPTON: What he said was it does not appear in the diary and he is not surprised it does not, considering what a tainted piece of information it is. . P-153 MR IRVING: That is not what he said. We were talking about the letters. MR JUSTICE GRAY: As a matter of fact, it is, Mr Irving, but I am not going spend time reading back the transcript to you because I am very anxious that we move on. MR IRVING: The witness has referred to the obituary of General Remer. Can I ask that his Lordship be shown the actual text of the obituary to General Remer which I published? MR JUSTICE GRAY: If there is a reason for my doing so, yes. MR IRVING: Because he says I published an obituary of him praising him. In fact, I made it quite plain that he is a reprobate and an unreconstructed Nazi, and I think that words like that should be before the court. MR JUSTICE GRAY: Well, I suppose, yes, if you want me to look at it. MR IRVING: Unless your Lordship wishes to move on, in which case we can move on. MR JUSTICE GRAY: No. If you say that is wrong, I had better look at it. A. May I just read it then? It is quite short. MR JUSTICE GRAY: Yes, do. A. General Remer is dead. "Famed German Army General Otto Ernzt Remer, who was forced into exile by Bonn in 1994, died in Spain 1985 on October 4th. Born in Brandenborg on December 18, 1912 Remer played the key role in crushing the uprising against Adolf Hitler by disgruntled officers . P-154 and disaffected aristocrats on July 20th 1924 . Originally sent by the plotters to arrest propaganda minister Dr Goebbels, he learned that Hitler had survived the bomb, recognised His Master's voice on the phone, and acted swiftly against the plotters. His troops put them to death by firing squad in Berlin a few hours later. Described by baffled newspaper men as an unreconstructed Nazi, Remer remained loyal to the old cause. In 1950 he founded the socialist Reichs party. In March 1952 he was jailed for three months for slandering the July 1944 plotters as traitors. The SRP was banned. He allowed his name to be used by German revisionists publishing the Remer despatch in 1994, sentenced to two years jail despite his medals for heroism, advancing years and illness. He was wheelchair bound and breathed with an oxygen pump. He took refuge in Spain. The Spanish government resisted repeated demands by German prosecutors for his extradition, saying that his "offences" did not exist as such under Spanish law. He is survived by his widow Marie Oberstein." MR IRVING: So I draw attention to the fact that he founded this neo-Nazi party, the Reichs party, and I say that he was described as an unreconstructed Nazi, and you left that out in the references that you published in your report. A. By baffled newspaper men. . P-155 Q. Yes. A. I think the tenor of that obituary is positive, that is my reading of it. Q. Proceed now to paragraph 15, please, on page 198, the last sentence on that line. You say that the activities which led to the imprisonment of my friend Gunter Deckert included translating a lecture". A. Yes, I have got this. Q. Are you aware of the fact that Gunter Deckert served a seven year prison sentence for translating that lecture? Do you approve of that? A. I am not sure what the question is meant to elucidate. Q. Just answer the question. Are you aware that he served a seven year prison sentence? MR JUSTICE GRAY: It is a fair enquiry. So what? MR IRVING: It goes indirectly to the political situation in Germany where all the historians are encouraged to write history one way, and they are sent to prison for seven years if they breathe a word in the other direction or if they even translate a lecture, my Lord. MR JUSTICE GRAY: I do not think that has anything to do with this case. A. Deckert is not an academic historian. He is Federal Chairman of the National Democratic Party, which is an extreme right-wing political organization in Germany in the early 1990s. He has a number of convictions for . P-156 incitement to racial hatred, insulting the memory of the dead, slandering the Chairman of the Central Council of Jews in Germany, and other similar offences. The activities which led to his imprisonment, I say, included translating a lecture. MR IRVING: Are you answering the question or just making a speech? A. I am, because you have misrepresented what I said in my report yet again Mr Irving. The activities which led to his imprisonment included translating a lecture given in 1991 by Fred Leuchter, denying existence of gas chambers at Auschwitz. Then I quote you, "Dear Gunter", you write to him, "I am shocked about what the police state has done to you yet again". You describe him as a freedom fighter and so on, defender of this great cause, which presumably is the cause of Holocaust denial. Q. You say, "presumably is Holocaust denial"? A. What else? Q. Is this just your interpolation? A. What is this great cause that you write about or speak about? Q. I am only going to ask you one question. Do you approve of people being imprisoned for translating? MR JUSTICE GRAY: No, you do not need to answer that question. MR IRVING: Exactly. I do not really want to ask questions about Deckert here. I think this is not the appropriate . P-157 place to ask questions about Deckert. MR JUSTICE GRAY: Then we can move on. MR IRVING: I was rather shocked that he was allowed to continue just reading out the whole of that paragraph. In paragraph 16 you summarize. You say: "In general, therefore, Irving's close association with virtually all the most prominent Holocaust deniers in several different countries demonstrates once more that he is to be counted amongst their number". How many have you actually dealt with in this chapter? About five people? A. Goodness. Do you really want me to count, Mr Irving? Q. Of the order of five or ten? I am not counting their fathers, just the actual people. A. I think the senior Hancock is a Holocaust denier. Eleven, I think. Q. Eleven. A. There are not very many of these people. Q. There are not very many, exactly, and we have already discovered that I had no contact with Mr Ahmed Rami, who is paragraph 13. MR JUSTICE GRAY: We have dealt with Mr Rami. MR IRVING: I am just saying, my Lord. I am just knocking some off this 13. MR JUSTICE GRAY: We not going to go back through all of them. MR IRVING: We have discovered that General Remer in fact was only talked to once. This is the quality of the evidence . P-158 I am up against. This grandiose closing sentence, "Irving's close association with virtually all the most prominent Holocaust deniers". MR JUSTICE GRAY: This is cross-examination, Mr Irving, not a speech. So move on to your next question, if you would? MR IRVING: Then on page 200, you conclude at 3.6.1.: "Not everyone who has studied Irving's writings and speeches in the 1990s has reached the conclusion that he has become a consistent and undeviating Holocaust denier". You then mention one or two cases, do you not, and immediately bang them on the head for it? A. Well, I felt it fair to mention that. I did not want to suppress that fact. Q. Do you accept what they say? A. No, I do not. Q. Halfway down that paragraph you say: "Moreover, in the course of his conversation with Rosenbaum", now he is a Jewish writer, is that correct? A. That had not occurred to me actually. If you say he is Jewish, I do not usually think about whether people are Jewish or not when I read their writings.
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