TIMES LONDON 03.02.00
http://www.the-times.co.uk/news/pages/Times/frontpage.html?999
Irving denies raising glass to Hitler

BY MICHAEL HORSNELL

THE after-dinner toast was to the memory of a "certain statesman" to mark
what would have been his 101st birthday. But, unlike the 16 other guests at
the hotel in Munich on April 20, 1990, the British historian David Irving
declined to join in. The trinkspruch (toast) was to Adolf Hitler and the
guests were neo-Nazis.

The cosy scene was painted at the High Court in London yesterday when Mr
Irving, 62, denied taking any part in the tribute to the F=FChrer.

The author referred to his private diary recording the event in which he
wrote: "All rose, toasted; I had no glass as I don't drink."

He was in Munich as the "star speaker" at a revisionist conference organised
by Ewald Althans, an alleged leading neo-Nazi in the city who also sells and
distributes the historian's books, videos and cassettes. Pressed on whether
he did raise a glass when Herr Althans proposed the toast, Mr Irving
responded: "Did I join in or not in this very tasteless toast? If one has no
glass and does not drink, how can one toast anyone?"

Mr Irving is suing the American academic Deborah Lipstadt and Penguin Books
for libel over claims that he is a Hitler partisan who denies that the
Holocaust took place.

The story of the night of Hitler's birthday was disclosed by Hajo Funke, a
Professor of Politics and Culture at the Free University of Berlin, during
cross-examination by Mr Irving.

Professor Funke, who has produced a 137-page report for the hearing on Mr
Irving's alleged extremist connections, told him: "You are an admirer of
Adolf Hitler."

Later, Mr Irving was referred to a letter that he had written to Gerhard
Frey, the leader of the far-Right anti-Semitic DVU party, on January 30,
1991, prophesying the emergence of a new German empire.

He forecast a huge expansion of the German economy with a political drawing
together of the German- speaking peoples of Europe, with incredible
potential for the mark.

In the letter, which outlined the contents of a speech that he proposed
making, he said: "Germany would use this economic power in order to help the
backward countries in the east of Europe - therefore expand a kind of German
empire in the east.

"The German economic hegemony would then, in the course of ten to 20 years,
expand to Poland, the Ukraine, White Russia and the original German sphere
of interest, the Baltic States.

"Within the framework of a just settlement with Warsaw, in which the partial
repayment of the Polish debts should play a not insignificant role, it would
result in a return of the German eastern territories, only sparsely settled
by Poles anyway.

"In the framework of a partnership with the Russian people (but, mind you,
not the criminal Soviet Government), it would also result in a blossoming of
the Russian economy, and a return of Kaliningrad and north-east Prussia to
Germany."

Mr Justice Gray, who is sitting without a libel jury, was also told about a
speech that Mr Irving made in Alsace in which the author denied suggestions
that the Germans used portable gas chambers to exterminate the Jews in
countryside areas of Poland. Mr Irving denies that gas chambers were used
for the mass extermination of Jews.

The case continues today.

==


TORONOTO GLOBE & MAIL 03.02.00

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/gam/International/20000302/UNAZIN.html

David Irving holds court on Eichmann, libel case Historian at centre of
defamation trial rails against detractors, dismisses the Nazi's diary and
assesses his odds of legal success

ALAN FREEMAN European Bureau Thursday, March 2, 2000

London -- Sitting in his comfortable flat after another day of fighting to
protect his reputation, such as it is, David Irving doesn't hesitate to
speak in apocalyptic terms about how people are out to bring him down.

"I don't talk about a global Jewish conspiracy because that's paranoid,"
Britain's most controversial historian says.

Then, without missing a beat, he makes it clear who he believes is working
against him.

"It's a networking by the Board of Deputies of British Jews, the Simon
Wiesenthal Centre in Toronto, the American Jewish Committee, the
Anti-Defamation League in New York, the Australian Jewish Congress . . .
Using various legal means in Canada, the United States and Australia, they
have been involved in a joint endeavour to destroy my career."

Day 28 of his libel trial against American professor Deborah Lipstadt has
just ended. It is the first day of proceedings since Israel released the
1,300-page diary of Holocaust overseer Adolf Eichmann in an effort to help
Prof. Lipstadt's case.

At issue in the trial is whether she defamed Mr. Irving in her 1994 book
Denying the Holocaust: The Growing Assault on Truth and Memory.

Mr. Irving, who has written a series of books on Nazi Germany and is a
favourite on the far-right lecture circuit, dismisses the importance of the
Eichmann diary with obvious disdain.

Eichmann, he says, was just a "very pathetic worm of a man."

The Nazi wrote the diary while on trial for war crimes. He was executed by
Israel in 1962.

The only "troublesome passage" in it, Mr. Irving says, is the recounting of
a conversation Eichmann had with a senior Gestapo chief in 1942 to the
effect that Hitler had ordered the physical destruction of the Jews.

But Mr. Irving is quick to characterize the passage as nothing more than a
"fourth-hand statement being reported by Eichmann 20 years after the event."

Mr. Irving's own views are clear enough -- Hitler knew nothing about the
Final Solution for Europe's Jews. Jews were killed by firing squads on the
Eastern Front but not en masse in gas chambers. For Mr. Irving, a beefy
62-year-old whose best-known book is a biography of Nazi propagandist Joseph
Goebbels, the Holocaust has been turned into a "legend."

Mr. Irving has not yet read the full Eichmann manuscript but says that in
1991 he saw a 600-page excerpt obtained from one of Eichmann's friends in
Argentina, where the Nazi was captured by Israeli agents 40 years ago.

Eichmann wrote that the Holocaust was the "most enormous crime in the
history of mankind." But Mr. Irving suggests that Eichmann may simply have
been hoping to please his captors as he awaited the death penalty.

The libel case has resulted in vast international attention. Courtroom 37 at
the Royal Courts of Justice was packed with journalists and other spectators
yesterday. Still, despite the subject matter, it is at times a tedious affair.

Mr. Irving spent almost five hours on his feet during yesterday's
proceedings, attacking a report on speeches he made on behalf of neo-Nazi
and other extreme German organizations in the early 1990s. The report was
prepared by a Berlin professor, Hajo Funke.

Acting as his own lawyer, Mr. Irving utilized a scattershot approach,
questioning footnotes in Prof. Funke's study, attacking the accuracy of
translations and denying he knew the prominent neo-Nazis who organized the
rallies he addressed.

Dressed in a blue pinstriped suit, he stood before a table lined with his
works on Hitler and Goebbels, a leather-bound copy of Mein Kampf to one side.

At times, his views came clearly to the fore. Referring to one interview
cited by Prof. Funke, Mr. Irving denied that Auschwitz was an extermination
camp, adding that "it is a defamation of the German people if one talks of
extermination camps or death camps." Mr. Irving insisted that he has been
misquoted, saying that he was referring only to Auschwitz, not to all
concentration camps.

Lawyer Richard Rampton, who represents Prof. Lipstadt, countered that Mr.
Irving isn't just denying the Holocaust but also is trying to absolve Nazi
Germany of responsibility for the outbreak of the war and to equate Allied
bombing of Dresden with Nazi war crimes -- all favourite themes of the
extreme right in Germany.

"Our case is not just that he's a racist and an anti-Semite, but a
right-wing extremist with deep sympathies for the Nazi regime," Mr. Rampton
said.

Prof. Lipstadt declined to be interviewed, saying she won't speak with the
press during the trial.

But Mr. Irving operates under no such compunction and readily invited
several journalists to his apartment near the Canadian High Commission after
the day's hearing.

In his cluttered study, he railed against his detractors. He said he has a
65-per-cent chance of winning the case. In the next breath, though, he made
it clear that he is preparing himself for defeat.

"It's David versus Goliath and this may be the one case where Goliath wins,"
he conceded.

If he loses, he will face financial ruin, he said, even losing the apartment
where he has lived for 32 years. "Everything I have goes."

There's one artifact, however, he clearly does not want to lose. He showed a
journalist a pencil drawing -- by Hitler, he said, a gift from the Fuhrer's
secretary. He said he will never give it up, even if forced to sell it to
pay legal costs.

"I'll tell them it's totally fake."

###


JERUSALEM POST 03.02.00

http://www.jpost.com/Editions/2000/03/02/News/News.3463.html

Witness: Irving used Germany as 'playground' for extremism

By Douglas Davis

LONDON (March 2) - Holocaust revisionist David Irving had "committed himself
wholeheartedly" to neo-Nazism and had used Germany as a "playground" for his
right-wing extremism, the High Court in London was told yesterday.

The charges were made by Prof. Hajo Funke, of the Free University of Berlin,
when he testified at the trial of American historian and Holocaust
specialist Professor Deborah Lipstadt, author of Denying the Holocaust: The
Growing Assault on Truth and Memory.

Lipstadt and her British publisher, Penguin Books, are being sued for libel
by Irving, who claims that Lipstadt wrecked his career by labelling him a
Holocaust denier and claiming that he distorted historical data to satisfy
his own ideological preferences. Lipstadt and Penguin deny libel.

Funke, who who prepared a 137-page report on Irving's alleged links to
extremists, said Irving had "committed himself wholeheartedly to the cause
of revisionism, and thus to neo-Nazism, in Germany."

"By denying the Holocaust," said Funke, "he willfully and persistently
violated the criminal law in Germany."

The German expert said that from the early Eighties until his expulsion from
Germany in 1993, Irving had been one of the "main speakers and agitators"
for the DVU (German People's Union), which was extremist, antisemitic and
"propagated racial hatred." Irving's expulsion, he added, indicated the
unwillingness of the authorities "to further tolerate his use of Germany as
a 'playground' for his right-wing extremism."

The court was also shown video footage of a meeting in Germany in the early
1990s, at which Irving was a speaker, with skinheads chanting "Sieg heil."

In response, Irving said he accepted invitations from "whichever body
invited me," as long as he could accommodate them.

On Monday Lipstadt's lawyers received a copy of the Eichmann memoirs which
the government agreed to release to them from the state archives after
keeping them locked up nearly 40 years. Irving also received a copy of the
document.

What makes the Eichmann memoir so significant in the Lipstadt trial is that,
while it has been kept under lock and key in Jerusalem for the past 40
years, Irving claimed he acquired a detailed knowledge of its contents years
ago.

A Reuters report in January 1992 quoted the Holocaust Revisionist as
boasting that he had acquired a copy of the memoir from the Eichmann family
in Buenos Aires while he was on a lecture tour of Argentina in 1991.

In an interview with Sky Television at the time, he described the memoir as
"an extraordinary heap of documents, beautiful material." The memoir, he
continued, contained a direct reference to a personal order from Hitler to
destroy the Jews, prompting Irving to tell the London Observer that he might
have to revise his views about Hitler's ignorance of the Holocaust as a result.

Confident that the memoir was genuine, he said he had donated the document
to the German Federal Archive in Koblenz, where it remains.


PRESS ASSOCIATION NEWS FILE, UK, 03.02.00

Copyright 2000 PR Newswire Europe Limited
Press Association Newsfile

QC ACCUSES HISTORIAN OF 'MOCKING' HOLOCAUST VICTIMS

Cathy Gordon, PA News

Historian David Irving was accused in the High Court today of "mocking the
survivors and dead" of the Holocaust.

The allegation was made by the QC representing academic Deborah Lipstadt
and Penguin Books in their defence to Mr Irving's libel action against them
over claims that he is a "Holocaust denier".

Richard Rampton put to Mr Irving that by "mocking" eyewitness accounts
during public speaking engagements, the 62-year-old author of Hitler's War
was "appealing to, feeding, encouraging the most cynical radical
anti-Semitism in your audience, aren't you?"

Rejecting the accusation, Mr Irving said that what he was doing was "mocking
the liars" who, he said, had told untrue stories about what had happened to
them.

Mr Rampton: "Oh, yes, but why the applause?"

Mr Irving, who is representing himself during his lengthy action before Mr
Justice Gray at London's Law Courts, replied: "I am a good speaker."

The author, who is being cross-examined by the QC, posed the question:
"Liars don't deserve to be exposed as such?"

Mr Irving, of Duke Street, Mayfair, central London, is seeking damages over
Prof Lipstadt's  1994 book, Denying the Holocaust: The Growing Assault on
Truth and Memory, which he says has generated waves of hatred against him.

The defence case is that Mr Irving's audiences often consisted of radical
right-wing, neo-fascist, neo-Nazi groups of people - "in truth largely
Holocaust deniers".

Mr Rampton said that what Mr Irving did was "fuel these people" with his
thoughts about the Holocaust.

To laughter in court, counsel asked the author: "When did you last address a
meeting of South Balham Trotsky Association?"

Mr Irving said he accepted invitations from those organisations who asked
him to speak: "If they choose not to invite me that's their own loss."

Mr Rampton reminded the court of what Mr Irving had said to an audience in
Canada in 1991.

Mr Irving then stated: "I don't see any reason to be tasteful about
Auschwitz. It's baloney, it's a legend.

"Once we admit the fact that it was a brutal slave labour camp and large
numbers of people did die, as large numbers of innocent people died
elsewhere in the war, why believe the rest of the baloney.

"I say quite tastelessly, in fact, that more women died on the back seat of
Edward Kennedy's car at Chappaquiddick than ever died in a gas chamber in
Auschwitz.

"Oh, you think that's tasteless, how about this? There are so many Auschwitz
survivors going around, in fact the number increases as the years go past,
which is biologically very odd to say the least. Because I'm going to form
an Association of Auschwitz survivors, survivors of the Holocaust and other
liars, or the ASSHOLS."

Mr Rampton claimed that Mr Irving had hoped the audience would "spread the
word".

Mr Irving pointed out that there were no "skinheads or extremists" in the
audience, adding that they looked to him like a "perfectly ordinary bunch of
middle-class Canadians".

The defence claims that Mr Irving is a liar who has distorted history in a
bid to exonerate Hitler.

Mr Irving rejects their allegations and claims he has been the victim of an
international conspiracy to destroy him.

He also rejects the accusation that he is a Holocaust denier. He does
question the number of Jewish dead and denies the systematic extermination
of the Jews in concentration camps.

###



GUARDIAN LONDON 03.02.00

'Mockery' of Nazi victims by Irving

http://www.newsunlimited.co.uk/irving/article/0,2763,142776,00.html

The David Irving libel trial: special report

Friday March 3, 2000

The historian David Irving was accused in the high court yesterday of
"mocking the survivors and dead" of the Holocaust.

The allegation was made by the QC representing the academic Deborah Lipstadt
and Penguin Books in their defence to Mr Irving's libel action against them
over claims that he is a "Holocaust denier".

Richard Rampton put it to Mr Irving that by "mocking" eyewitness accounts
during public speaking engagements, he was "appealing to, feeding,
encouraging the most cynical radical anti-Semitism in your audience."

Mr Irving said that he was "mocking the liars" who had told untrue stories
about what had happened to them.

Mr Rampton replied: "Oh, yes, but why the applause?"

Mr Irving, who is representing himself during his action before Mr Justice
Gray, replied: "I am a good speaker."

Mr Irving, of Mayfair, central London, is seeking damages over Professor
Lipstadt's 1994 book, Denying the Holocaust: The Growing Assault on Truth
and Memory, which he says has generated waves of hatred against him.

The defence alleges that Mr Irving's audiences often consisted of radical
rightwing, neo-Nazi groups. Mr Rampton reminded the court of what Mr Irving
had said to an audience in Canada in 1991. Mr Irving then stated: "I don't
see any reason to be tasteful about Auschwitz. It's baloney, it's a legend.
Once we admit the fact that it was a brutal slave labour camp and large
numbers of people did die, as large numbers of innocent people died
elsewhere in the war, why believe the rest of the baloney?

"I say quite tastelessly, in fact, that more women died on the back seat of
Edward Kennedy's car at Chappaquiddick than ever died in a gas chamber in
Auschwitz.

"Oh, you think that's tasteless, how about this? There are so many Auschwitz
survivors going around, in fact the number increases as the years go past,
which is biologically very odd to say the least. Because I'm going to form
an association of Auschwitz survivors, survivors of the Holocaust and other
liars, or the ASSHOLS."

Mr Irving said there were no "skinheads or extremists" in the audience, who
looked like a "perfectly ordinary bunch of middle class Canadians".

Mr Irving rejects the accusation that he is a Holocaust denier, although he
does question the number of Jewish d

ead and denies the systematic extermination of the Jews in concentration camps.

The hearing was adjourned until March 13.



TIMES LONDON 03.02.00

Irving challenged over 'cynical anti-Semitism'

http://www.the-times.co.uk/news/pages/Times/frontpage.html?999

BY MICHAEL HORSNELL

DAVID IRVING, the controversial Hitler historian, faced accusations at the
High Court of mocking the victims of the Holocaust as the evidence in his
long-running libel action concluded yesterday.

The case was adjourned until March 13 when the two sides will make final
speeches. Amid acrimonious exchanges, Mr Irving, 62, was accused by Richard
Rampton, QC, of "feeding and encouraging the most cynical anti-Semitism" in
his audience during public speaking engagements.

Mr Rampton is representing the American academic Deborah Lipstadt and her
publisher, Penguin Books, which Mr Irving is suing over her claims that he
poured doubt on the Holocaust and was a Hitler partisan who twists history.
Mr Rampton said: "What you are doing is feeding the anti-Semitism in your
audience by mocking the survivors and dead of the Holocaust." Mr Irving said
he was actually "mocking the liars" who he said had told lies about what had
happened to them.

Mr Rampton queried why he got so much applause from his right-wing extremist
audiences. Mr Irving: "I am a good speaker." Mr Irving, who denies that gas
chambers were used for the mass extermination of Jews at Auschwitz, was
referred to a speech he gave in Alberta, Canada, in 1991.

He told his audience: "I don't see any reason to be tasteful about
Auschwitz. It's baloney, it's a legend. Once we admit the fact that it was a
brutal slave labour camp and large numbers of people did die, as large
numbers of innocent people died elsewhere in the war, why believe the rest
of the baloney? There are so many Auschwitz survivors going around, in fact
the number increases as the years go past, which is biologically very, very
odd to say the least. I'm going to form an association of Auschwitz
Survivors, Survivors of the Holocaust and Other Liars, or the ASSHOLS."

Defending his remarks on the victims of the camp, Mr Irving told the court:
"It's become an important part of their social and religious awareness and
it is almost blasphemy to them to tread on that holy ground. There have been
increasing numbers in recent years who have capitalised on the Holocaust."

Mr Irving says he has been the victim of an internationalconspiracy to
destroy him and rejects the claim in Professor Lipstadt's book, Denying the
Holocaust: The Growing Assault on Truth and Memory, that he has distorted
history in order to exonerate Hitler.

==

The Palm Beach Post

March 2, 2000

OPINION

REQUIRED READING ON EVIL

Israel's decision to release Adolf Eichmann's prison memoirs, for a libel
trial in Britain, is wise, although late. No one, especially a Jew, can be
blamed for not wanting to touch the hateful pages, but humanity needs to
read the criminal's own words.

Eichmann describes how he worked the machinery for the Final Solution - an
euphemism then, an obscenity now. He says he was besotted with his Fuhrer
and only obeying orders. But he reveals the orders.

There are those who doubt that the orders were issued or followed. It takes
a heap of anti-Semitism and tons of ignorance to deny the plain facts, but
denial makes fools feel superior, so they wouldn't believe the truth even in
Hitler's own voice.

Israelis delayed deciding what to do with Eichmann's notes after he was
tried in 1961 and hanged in 1962. A libel suit, on which the notes can shed
some light, triggered the decision to release them now.

The notes' existence refutes denial. Few will have the stomach to read them,
but they stand as a bookend with Hitler's Mein Kampf for those who dare to
study why sociopathy became the norm in a modern state and how it might again.

###

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