* * *
Deborah Lipstadt had made meanwhile made some progress with her
book.
She told her publisher that she had written a certain statement
"with the marketing people in mind," - in other words
sometimes money mattered more than content. She had revealed in
September 1991: "I have also spoken to people in England
who have a large cache of material on David Irving's 'conversion'
to denial."96 We don't know, 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 most tactfully) the reasons why she was refused
tenure at the University of California and moved downstream to
the lesser university in Atlanta where she now teaches.
In the light of Mr Rampton's strictures on my now famous little
ditty, 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. We know that
she has written papers, and delivered many fervent lectures, on
the vital importance of people marrying only within their own
race ("We know what we fight against: . . .," she wrote,
"intermarriage and Israel-bashing, but what is it we fight
for?")97 She has attracted much criticism from many in her
own community for her implacable stance against mixed marriages.
In one book Lipstadt quotes a Wall Street Journal interview with
a Conservative rabbi, Jack Moline, whom she called "very
brave" for listing ten things that Jewish parents should
say to their children: "Number one on his list," she
wrote (in fact it was number three), "was 'I expect you to
marry Jews'."98 My one little ditty was a perhaps tasteless
joke. Professor Lipstadt's repeated denunciation of mixed marriages
addressed to adults was deadly serious.
Professor Lipstadt accuses me or error and 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 the memoirs of the spurious Auschwitz survivor Benjamin
Wilkomirski in her teaching of the Holocaust, according to Professor
Peter Novick. Those "memoirs" have now been exposed,
worldwide, as fraudulent. When it turned out the Wilkomirski had
never been near the camp, 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.99 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, evidently prepared
for a talk delivered to the ADL in Palm Beach, Florida, in early
1994. In these, if I have read her handwriting correctly - and
she appears to be relying on something that Lord Bullock had just
said - she states that my aim seems to be to de-demonize Hitler;
and that I had said that FDR, 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
a "historian with a revisionist bent" like A J P 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."100 Had she stuck with that view, which
is a very fair summary of my views both then and now, she and
we would not find ourselves here now.
But she was led astray. 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, and other such worthy bodies, since she thanks
them all in her Introduction. Some time in 1992 her book was complete
in its first draft, and she 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 that early draft, with Professor Yehuda
Bauer's "scribbles" on it, in her sworn list of documents.
It was clearly discoverable. We do know however what was not in
it: we know that there was no mention of 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 evident from the letter which Professor Yehuda
Bauer wrote, congratulating her on November 27, 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."101
Somehow therefore I had to be shoe-horned into the text before
publication. Bauer urged her too not to write things inadvertently
that might convince the reader that there was "something"
to what revisionists ("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 Affairs (the same Mr Lerman who would later spread 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: that "earlier incarnation"
has not been disclosed in her sworn list either.102 She had been
ordered to swear an affidavit on her list. When I made a subsequent
complaint about deficient discovery, her solicitors reminded me
that I could not go behind her affidavit until she presented herself
for cross examination. This chance has been denied to me.
Lipstadt spent much of that last month of 1992 putting me into
the book, and so herself, into this courtroom today. They were
the weeks after the spectacular success of the global campaign
to destroy my legitimacy, which culminated in getting me deported
in manacles from Canada on November 13. "I am just finishing
up the book," she wrote to Lerman on December 18, "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 research which I conducted on my
biographical subjects. "I think he [Irving] is one of the
more dangerous figures around," she added, pleading the urgency.103
It was a spectacular epiphany, this Court might think, given that
only three weeks earlier the manuscript barely mentioned me, as
Bauer had complained.
Lerman faxed his materials to her a few days later: we don't know
precisely what, as here too the Defendants' Discovery is only
fragmentary, and these items were provided to me 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 myself, that I had even deserved it - he was talking about
the hate-wreath that was sent to me on the death of my daughter.
We shall see.
* * *
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 area
is, I am informed, overgrown with fast food restaurants, souvenir
and trinket shops, motels, and the like. Under prime minister
Josef Cyrankiewicz (who had been prisoner number 62,993) it was
known at its opening in 1948as a "monument to the martyrdom
of the Polish and other Peoples."104
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 that the Russians had captured
Auschwitz, Hitler is recorded by the stenographers as merely acknowledging:
"Yes."105 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 that the Russians will find not 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 Krema II cemented
over so there's no trace, before you blew it up." I will
shortly explain the significance of that.) When the name of SS-Gruppenführer
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.106
How many had died at Auschwitz? We still do not now with certainty,
because the tragic figure has become an object of politics too.
Professor Arno Mayer, Professor of European History at the University
of Princeton, a scholar of considerably greater renommée
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. "From 1942 to 1945 more Jews died, at least
in Auschwitz, and probably everywhere else, of 'natural' causes
of death than of 'unnatural.'"107
The Russians who captured the camp did not at first make any mention
in their news reports of "gas chambers". Moreover, as
we saw on the newsreel which I showed on the first day of the
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."
It concluded that the camp now stood "as a monument of shame
to the lasting memory of its three hundred thousand victims."
(Again, gassing was not mentioned).108 The New York Times quoted
the same figure, 300,000 when the trial began in 1947.109 The
figure gradually grew however. The Russians set up an inquiry
including some very well known names - including the "experts"
who had examined the "Nazi mass graves" at Katyn, and
even the notorious Lysenko, and they announced that four million
had been murdered at Auschwitz. Under the Polish communists, a
monument to "four million dead" was duly erected, a
number 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 the figure
was brought down, to 1.5 million, and then to 750,000 by the acknowledged
expert Jean-Claude Pressac.110 The Defendants' own expert Peter
Longerich spoke of one million deaths there from all causes, and
in response to cross-examination by myself and to Your Lordship's
queries Dr Longerich confirmed that he included all non-homicidal
deaths, deaths "from other causes," including epidemics
and exhaustion, in that figure.111
As for the overall deathroll of the Holocaust, what meaning can
one attach to figures? The International Military Tribunal (IMT)
at Nuremberg found that "the policy pursued resulted in the
killing of six million Jews, of which four million were killed
in the extermination institutions"? But the six million figure
derives, as US chief prosecutor Mr Justice Robert H 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. Professor
Raul Hilberg put the figure at 5.1 million or less.112 Gerald
Reitlinger had the figure at 4.6 million, of which he stated about
three million were conjectural as it was not known how many Jews
had escaped into the unoccupied part of the USSR.113 The Israeli
Prime Minister's office, we are told by Norman Finkelstein, recently
stated that there were still nearly one million living survivors.114
There are doubts not only about precise figures but about specific
events. The same IMT ruled on October 1, 1946 that the Nazis had
attempted to "utilise the fat from the bodies of the victims
in the commercial manufacture of soap." In 1990 historian
Shmuel Krakowski of Yad Vashem announced in the world's press
that that too had been a ("Nazi") propaganda lie.115
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 public perception was
that the Wannsee protocol, of the January 20, 1942 meeting, recorded
the actual order to exterminate the European Jews. Yehuda Bauer,
the director of Yad Vashem, the world's premier Holocaust research
institution in Israel, - one of the correspondents of the Second
Defendant - 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."116
Despite this, Your Lordship has had to listen to the "silly
story" all over again in this Court from the expert witnesses.
Surely, say my critics, there must now be evidence for a Hitler
Order?
Back in 1961 Raul Hilberg, one of Yehuda Bauer's great rivals
for the laureate, asserted in The Destruction of the European
Jews 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 voiced my own doubts - Hilberg was back-pedalling:
Hilberg went methodically through his new edition, excising the
allegation of a Hitler Order. "In the new edition,"
as Professor Christopher Browning, an expert who testified before
this Court, criticised in a learned journal, "all references
in the text to a Hitler decision or Hitler order for the 'Final
Solution' have 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
[1941] ended'." "In the new edition," Browning
repeats, scandalised, "decisions were not made, and orders
were not given."117 Your Lordship will find my exchange with
Browning as to whether he had indeed written those words in 1986
on Day 17 at page 121: you will find too that he regretted that
he could not recall clearly the events of fifteen years ago, which
invited a rather obvious riposte from me about the probably similar
memory-deficiencies in the eye-witnesses on which he had on occasions
relied.
The director of the Yad Vashem archives has stated that most survivors'
testimonies are unreliable. "Many," he writes, "were
never in the places were they claim to have witnessed atrocities,
while others relied on second-hand information given them by friends
or passing strangers" - the phenomenon I have referred to
as "cross-pollination."118 Your Lordship may have been
as startled as, I confess, was I, upon learning the degree to
which the case for the mass gassings at Auschwitz relies on eye-witness
evidence, rather than on any firmer sources. Your Lordship will
remember the exchange I had with Donald Watt, professor emeritus
of history at the London School of Economics and a learned diplomatic
historian, early on in the trial, about the value of difference
categories of evidence:
"IRVING: Professor, I was not going to ask you about eyewitness
evidence but where would you rank eyewitness evidence on the scale,
if you had, for example, aerial photographs, if you had prisoner
of war intelligence, contemporary prisoner of war intelligence,
if you had intercepts from Bletchley Park, if you had captured
documents, either captured during the war or after the war, and
eyewitness evidence, in other words, anecdotal evidence and, finally,
interrogations, whether under oath or not in Court, how would
you classify those in order of reliability, starting with the
least reliable?
PROFESSOR WATT: I do not know that there is any way of classifying
those, because it depends so much on the individual. I did a great
deal of interviews, particularly in the period before the 1967
Public Records Act released documents of 30 years of age, and
in my experience the kind of evidence I got differed according
to the personality of the person giving it. In some cases I found
that the man I was interviewing had his own documentary record
and was consulting it, and that what he said was confirmed later.
In other cases, including at least one Minister of the Crown,
I was given a very plausible and, for all I know, a very true
story of a meeting at which he was supposed to have been present;
and when the records of that meeting subsequently became available,
it was clear that he was not. He should have been, but he just
was not that day, and he must have heard the story from one of
the people there and then repeated it.
IRVING: But he seriously believed that he had been there?
PROFESSOR WATT: [...] If a gentleman who holds the rank of Admiral
of the Fleet and is a junior Minister in the Cabinet tells you
that he is there, one's reaction is not to question him [...]
IRVING: So to repeat my original question, where you would rank
on that scale of material that is lying before you, at one end
of the bench you have the eyewitnesses and at the other end of
the bench you have, for example, the Bletchley Park intercepts?
PROFESSOR WATT: 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 and, therefore, he would put truth in them."
This supports my view that eyewitness evidence is less credible
than forensic evidence and the Bletchley Park intercepts. I do
not completely ignore eye-witness evidence, but I feel entitled
to discount it when it is contradicted by the more reliable evidence,
which should then prevail
The Leuchter Report
I am criticised by the Defendants for having relied initially
on what is called the Leuchter Report. At the time they levelled
their criticism at me, the Defendants appear 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 April 1988 I was introduced by
defence counsel at the Canadian trial of Ernst Zündel to
the findings made by a reputable firm of forensic analysts of
samples extracted from the fabric of various buildings at Auschwitz
and Birkenau by Fred Leuchter, who was at the time a professional
American execution-technology consultant. These, and his investigations
at the Majdanek 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 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 [in civil cases]. That doesn't make them admissible
because they've prepared reports. They [the expert witnesses]
go in the box, they're qualified as experts, and they testify."119
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.
Mr Leuchter testified on April 20 and 21, 1988 as an expert in
gas chamber technology. He had inspected the three sites in February
and taken samples which were subsequently 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 could give oral evidence, but
that the report itself should not be filed.120 He held further
that Mr Leuchter was not a chemist or a toxicologist.121 But he
agreed that Mr Leuchter was an engineer, because he had made himself
an engineer in a very limited field.122
A summary of the rest of the judge's findings was that Leuchter
was not capable in law of giving the expert opinion that there
were never any gassings or exterminations carried on in the facilities
from which he took the samples.123 For the same reasons he was
not capable of testifying regarding the results of the analysis.
He was restricted to testifying as to the actual extraction of
the samples,124 and his own observations on the feasibility of
the buildings that he had examined being used as gas chambers.125
The Second Defendant therefore was wrong to state on page 164
of her book, "The judge ruled that Leuchter could not serve
as an expert witness on the construction and functioning of the
gas chambers."126 To give evidence in a criminal trial, Mr
Leuchter must have been accepted as an expert. Professor Lipstadt
further stated, on pages 164-5 of her book: "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 (this was
Dr Roth's area, and he gave the testimony on those matters). On
page 169, Professor Lipstadt insists: "The exposure to the
elements lessened the presence of the hydrogen cyanide. . . Nor
did Leuchter seem to consider that the building had been exposed
to the elements for more than forty years so that 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 was an accumulative reaction, that it augmented with each
exposure to the gas; and that it did not normally disappear unless
physically removed by sandblasting or grinding down.127
Roth seems since then to have changed his mind, to judge by the
television film "Mr Death" which is shortly to be shown
on Channel Four, and upon which film both I and learned counsel
in the current action rely. Zündel's counsel comments, "He
[Roth] obviously is frightened" and no wonder, considering
what was subsequently inflicted upon Mr Leuchter. Your Lordship
will remember that in order to destroy Roth's absurd argument,
quoted to the Court by 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
brickwork to the outside face of one of the cyanide fumigation
chambers, where it has been exposed to sun, wind, and rain for
over fifty years, and where it is still visible, as deep and blue
as ever. Krema II has been protected from these outside elements;
it is possible to crawl beneath the famous roof - 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 found any significant traces of cyanide compounds
present in the fabric of this building, despite the eye-witness
accounts of that same chamber having been used for the gassing
of half a million people. 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
ground down.
The Morgue roof
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 Krema II, crematorium
No. 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 saw him, as
the film camera showed Fred Leuchter descending into the hole
which was broken post-war through the collapsed concrete roof
slab and reinforcing bars of Leichenkeller 1 (morgue No. 1) of
Krema II, and we heard him (Van Pelt) uttering these words:
" Crematorium II is the most lethal building of Auschwitz.
In the 2500 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 Center."128
The Court will recall that on the 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
Krema II and its underground Leichenkeller 1, the chamber which
Pelt alleged had been a mass-gassing chamber.
Irving: Very well. You say: "In any case, Krematorium II
is the most [something] of Auschwitz. In the 2500 square feet
of this one room", and you are pointing downwards, "more
people lost their lives than in any other place on this planet.
500,000 people were killed. If you would draw a map of human suffering,
if you create a geography of atrocities, this would be the absolute
centre." That is a reference to Krematorium II and you are
standing on the roof of Leichenkeller No. 1?
PROF. VAN PELT: It is a reference to Krematorium II, but I am
actually not in the picture. It is Fred Leuchter standing on the
roof of Leichenkeller 1.
IRVING: But you are speaking yourself?
PROF. VAN PELT: But I am speaking.[...]
IRVING: Professor, just so that we can be completely clear about
this and the record can be clear, you are describing Krematorium
II as being the place where 500,000 people were killed or -
PROF. VAN PELT: Yes.
IRVING: - give or take a few numbers.
PROF. VAN PELT: Yes.
IRVING: And that this was the centre of the atrocity?
PROF. VAN PELT: Yes.
IRVING: So if I am to concentrate a large part of my investigation
in this cross-examination on that one building and, in fact, on
Leichenkeller 1, the one arm of the crematorium, this is not entirely
unjustified if I am trying to establish that the factories of
death did not exist as such?
PROF. VAN PELT: No. I think that that the obvious building to
challenge would be Krematorium II.129
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 Krematorium II,
so that there could later be no doubt as to which precise building
he had just agreed was the "factory of death."
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": a handful of eye-witnesses;
a few architectural drawings; and a slim file of documents.
The eye-witnesses 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 1 (morgue No. 1) and tipping tins
of Zyklon B pellets inside. One witness was David Olère,
an artist, who drew sketches years later in Paris, obviously intending
to sell them. His sketches show flames and smoke belching from
the crematorium chimney of Krema III, which was quite impossible130;
he portrays the victims of the Nazi killers mostly as nubile young
females, all naked and sketched in a pornographic way, often clutching
naked teenage children to their breasts.131 It was Olère,
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).132 Ada Bimko proved at
the Belsen Trial that she too had lied. Entering another "gas
chamber" building at Auschwitz she said she "noticed
two pipes which I was told contained the gas. There were two huge
metal containers containing gas." She evidently did not even
know that the "gas" supposed to have been used, Zyklon
B, was actually in pellet form, not cylinders.133 Distorting her
account too, Pelt also omitted this part of her testimony. Dr
Bendel, another of Pelt's eye-witnesses, stated that at Krema
IV the people crowded into the gas chambers found the ceiling
so low that "the impression [was given] that the roof was
falling on their heads."134 This too was untrue, as the Court
has seen how high those 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 eye-witness
after eye-witness in the same way.
Let us first look for those holes. The roof pillars were blown
up in 1945, and the reinforced concrete roof slab pancaked downwards
into the morgue basement, starred but otherwise intact. Van Pelt
suggested that the Zyklon B introduction holes in the roof of
Leichenkeller 1 were not much larger in diameter than tennis balls.
The evidence of his eye-witnesses Henry Tauber and Michal Kula
was that they were closer to the size of manholes - "70 centimetres
[27 inches] square."135 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 the concrete covers had
to be lifted off "with both hands". As the ceiling height
in Leichenkeller 1 was 2.40 meters, 60 cm of each column would
have had to extend through the "holes" in the concrete
ceiling, with about six inches poking up outside.136 There is
no trace of those holes in the roof today. The underside, which
can be inspected and photographed from beneath, 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 spoke137,
one could not possibly have lost sight of four holes as large
as manholes. Those holes would be perfectly obvious today, on
the ground at Auschwitz, to any observer using the naked eye,
without the slightest possible doubt as to their location.
Van Pelt accepts that those holes are not in that roof slab now.
In his expert report and for this honesty I give him full credit
- he writes:
Today, these four small holes 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 both the wire-mesh
columns and the chimneys. What would have remained would have
been the four narrow holes and the slab. While there is no certainty
in this particular 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.138
Van Pelt thus asserts, without any evidence at all, that late
in 1944, with the Red 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 to "restore the
slab" (before dynamiting the pillars supporting it anyway).
He again asserted when I cross-examined him on January 25 that:
"It would have been logical to attach at the location where
the columns had been, some formwork at the bottom of the ceiling,
and pour some concrete in the hole and thus restore the slab."139
How would this have been more logical than completely removing
the roof of Leichenkeller 1, as the Nazis had removed the roof
of Leichenkeller 2, identified by Van Pelt as the "undressing
rooms," as shown in the aerial photos taken on December 21,
1944 that one can see on page 15 of THE HOLOCAUST REVISITED, the
book published by Dino A Brugioni of the CIA. The originals of
this photo were shown to Van Pelt in Court. To believe his version,
we would have to believe that the Nazis deliberately created architectural
relics of Leichenkeller 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 zero to four feet, or when photographed
from the underside. Unable to point them out to us in close-up
at ground level, the Defendants invited us to consider instead
either 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 works such objects as barrels of tar were parked on a
large flat slab, and I shall not repeat it in detail here.140
The notion that the high flying plane could have photographed
an object of 27 cm diameter, let alone of tennis ball size, protruding
six inches above the ground, is quite absurd. The four smudges
seen on one photograph are evidently many feet long.
On Day 11, I brought into the Court half a dozen vertical aerial
photographs taken by the Americans or South African airforces
during 1944, and I invited Van Pelt to find those same smudges
on that roof.141
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 on 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 did willingly agree to the weakening
of the roof by having makeshift holes of that size cut through
the slab right next to the supporting pillars - I say "makeshift"
holes, because there is no provision for them in any of the architectural
drawings - we should certainly expect to see the holes now. My
Lord, the Court will recall two things:
1. I asked the witness Van Pelt if he was familiar (in view of
the fact that he is not qualified architecturally) with the expression
"fair faced concrete finish".142 He confirmed that it
is concrete left untreated. It is not covered with, e.g. cement
or plaster or pebble-dash or tiling. He confirmed that it is the
most expensive such finish that an architect can specify, because
the concrete has to be poured right first time: 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 naiveté, 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.
2. We have photographed the underside of that slab. There is no
trace of any such blemish on the concrete roof's underside.
On two occasions I stated a challenge in Court, including to the
witness Van Pelt. 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 the eye-witnesses agreed
they were next to the main columns - and bring back a photo of
just 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 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 Krema 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 has that roof.
Accordingly the eye-witnesses 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 "eye-witnesses," Professor
Van Pelt's only remaining proofs that Leichenkeller 1 of Krema
II was an instrument of mass murder - a factory of death in which
five hundred thousand 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, he referred for instance to the
- to him, sinister - requirement that the morgue should be vorgewärmt
by a central heating plant. In cross-examination I drew his attention
to the relevant section of the wartime NEUFERT, the architect's
handbook or building code which was standard for the S.S. architects,
which specifies that morgues must have both cooling and central
heating facilities to avoid damage to the corpses.143 Document
after document fell by the wayside in the manner. Mr Rampton introduced
the timesheet of one humble workman in March 1943, showing him
actually concreting "the floor in the Gaskammer." But
Birkenau camp was full of gas-chambers. In his fine facsimile
book of the camp documents, Jean-Claude Pressac has printed the
drawing No. 801 of November 8, 1941, for an Entlausungsanlage
(delousing installation) for the prison camp, right in the middle
of which drawing is a Gaskammer.144 He also reproduces drawing
No. 1293 dated May 9, 1942, of the drainage and water supply of
the delousing barracks, buildings BW5b. Here too there is a Gaskammer
smack in the middle of the drawing.145
The real handling capacity of the crematoria is also surprisingly
difficult to establish. Professor Van Pelt produced a histogram,
on an easel, for us, which showed truly staggering projections
of cadavers to be cremated in coming years; but on cross-examination
he admitted that the projection was based solely on one document,
the questionable "crematorium capacities" document of
June 28, 1943, and that all else was extrapolated backwards from
that.146 Pelt relies heavily on this document.147 Even if genuine,
the handling figures which this document gives for the furnace
installation in Krematorium II do not tally with any of the figures
in the specifications provided by the manufacturers, the Topf
Company, for this type of equipment.148 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.149
I had shown the Court on the previous day that this one page of
paper contained not just one or two, but four or even five bureaucratic
discrepancies which indicated that the document is not authentic.150
Any one of those flaws would normally be enough to call its integrity
into question: but five in one document, including the wrong rank
for the highest man in the SS site-construction system, SS Gruppenführer
Hans Kammler? 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 in 1981. That alone is why it now bears
an Auschwitz archival stamp.151 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 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 Krema II "factory of death"
story is however the little freight elevator that was installed
between Leichenkeller 1, as in any such state-of-the-art crematorium,
to haul the bodies 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, or cage, or walls - it was just a platform jolting
up and down that elevator shaft. We do know that as finally installed
it had a specified load bearing capacity of 1500 kg. Van Pelt
suggested that the hoist could therefore have hauled twenty-five
cadavers at a time.152 In practice, as there was just a flat platform
with no walls or door, jolting up and down the narrow concrete
elevator shaft, it would have been impossible to stack onto one
small flat platform twenty-five naked cadavers in the conditions
of filth and slime that were described by the eye-witnesses.
It does not bear thinking about, I agree. We can not produce hard
figures for this part of the exercise, but one thing is plain:
that one elevator in Krema II was the inescapable bottleneck,
and it makes plain that, whatever was happening downstairs in
Leichenkeller 1, it was not on the huge scale that history now
suggests.
In response to Your Lordship's helpful questioning, Professor
Van Pelt stated that the wartime documents had to be interpreted
if they were to be relied on for this proof. These interpretations
are tenuous. He produced to us a document referring to the special
secrecy to be attached to the crematorium drawings, and suggested
that this was because of the mass gassings being carried on in
it. It stressed that this was because of the wehrwirtschaftlich
importance [importance to the military economy] of the work being
conducted there. But Van Pelt confirmed under my cross-examination
that the homicidal Final Solution, the genocide, was never regarded
as being wehrwirtschaftlich important. I submitted that the reference
was clearly to keeping secret the ugly business of the looting
by the SS of gold and valuables from the corpses processed by
the building, a system which was undoubtedly wehrwirtschaftlich
important to the SS.153
Similarly, the architectural drawings seemed to provide the required
"proof" only when one was compared with another. As
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 . . ."154
Is that the best level of proof that is available now, even after
fifty-five years? During his slide-show Professor Van Pelt told
us that one cardinal piece of evidence in these drawings was the
relocation of an internal double-door which sealed off Leichenkeller
1 from the interior of the building, from the inside of the Leichenkeller
doorframe (in a December 1942 drawing) to the outside (January
1943). I pointed out that in the new layout, the doors were showed
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 fitted outside the shelter, to open outwards, so as
to withstand blast. NEUFERT, the wartime architects' handbook,
bears this out.
The witness seems not to have considered this possibility. The
doors allegedly found around the Birkenau and Auschwitz sites
subsequently are all of standard air-raid shelter design, complete
with the obligatory peephole 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 subterranean Leichenkeller
1 to the open air, was also consonant with its dual use as a shelter,
and I put this to the witness on Day 11,155 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 Krema I in Auschwitz; subtitled:
"Air Raid Bunker for SS Station HQ with an Operating Theatre."156
So such modifications of the morgues to provide air raid shelters
were clearly nothing extraordinary. Mr Rampton made a lot of the
order for doors with peepholes.157 But peep holes were standard
fittings not only on the gastight air raid shelter doors, but
also to delousing facilities. Jean-Claude Pressac prints photos
of two such doors on the "Canada" delousing chamber
at Birkenau.158
Krema II as air raid shelter
Krema II, like its mirror-image Krema 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; the best equipment
and architects were used on what was clearly a permanent facility.
Building the Leichenkeller 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 from the start as a human
slaughterhouse, it would certainly not have been designed on several
levels, with the resultant handling problems. Slaughterhouses
are normally built on one level.159
We saw in Professor van Pelt's slide-show the pouring of the concrete
roof slab of the subterranean Leichenkeller 2; the roof was undoubtedly
much the same as Leichenkeller 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.
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
Air Raid Precaution (ARP) measures.160 To be fair to the witness,
when these Moscow catalogue entries were put to Van Pelt he seemed
unfamiliar with them. After the air raids on Cologne, Rostock,
Lübeck etc., in March/April 1942, the German High Command
recognised 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 were within bomber range. Existing basements were to be
converted into shelters, and anti-gas-equipment provided, and
personnel trained in anti-gas warfare, as gas attack was widely
expected.161 I put one such document to Prof. Longerich, and on
Day 10 I said (at page 95): "[...] the Defence rely on a
number of photographs of doors found scattered around the compound
of Auschwitz and Birkenau, and we will show that these are standard
German air raid shelter doors complete with peep holes."
(Photographs of such air raid shelter doors will be found in the
bundle that I provided at page ).
These precautions were not in vain. In May 1943, there was an
air raid on the nearby Auschwitz Buna plant. This is reflected
in Auschwitz documents. At least one of the American aerial photographs
of Birkenau that I produced to the Court and to the witness Van
Pelt shows a stick of heavy bombs just released by the plane that
took the photograph. By the end of the war there was also an anti-aircraft
unit assigned to defending the region, as shown by the reference
to Judge Stäglich's membership of the Flak unit that manned
it.162
Your Lordship will also recall that during his slide show the
Dutch historian Van Pelt showed the Court a series of most interesting
computer-generated "walk-through" reconstructions of
the interiors of Kremas IV and V. Your Lordship memorised the
dimensions of the shutters designed to be fitted on the openings
inside: 30cms by 40cms. There were also said to be steps leading
up to the openings. The wartime German civil defence journal Luftschutz
(Air Raid Protection) shows precisely this arrangement of gas-tight
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?"163
The eye-witnesses stated that thousands of victims were gassed
in these rooms, and their bodies burned in large pits to the building's
rear. But the contemporary air photographs reveal no such pits,
nor are they evident today. Confronted with what your Lordship
has yourself referred to as the lack of any documentary evidence
for the gassings, Van Pelt could only offer the suggestion that
the use of gas chambers at Auschwitz and Birkenau was a "moral
certainty". Three times in his report he fell back upon that
semi-religious phrase.164 The available proofs certainly do not
support the belief that the gassings there occurred on a mass
scale.
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
even have the "moral certainty" which comforted Professor
Van Pelt. I can challenge here only 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".
I place great weight on this admission. Here, the expert cannot
even find one contemporaneous document. He relies entirely upon
the eye-witnesses - men of the ilk of Kurt Gerstein, Jan Karski,
Adolf Eichmann and Rudolf Höss. The fictional elements -
the "130 foot mountains of clothes" which Browning in
his first draft skipped over,165 the "electrocution chambers",
the "steam chambers"166, the deliberately inflated death
tolls which would otherwise shriek their warnings to critical
researchers are ignored or suppressed, in order to maintain appearances.
There is an impressive 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 Reinhard camps. One word, Why?, justifies
a revisionist's scepticism.
The Walter Föhl letter produced a similar response. Found
in his Berlin Document Center personnel file, this man, in charge
of a resettlement office at Krakow, is seen writing on June 21,
1942 to his SS comrades,
"Every day, trains are arriving with over 1000 Jews each
from throughout Europe.
"We provide first aid here give them more or less provisional
accommodation, and usually deport them further towards the White
Sea to the White Ruthenian marshlands, where they all - if they
survive ( and the Jews from Kurfürstendamm or Vienna or Pressburg
certainly won't) - will be gathered by the end of the war, but
not without having first built a few roads. (But we're not supposed
to talk about it.)"167
The expert witnesses, unable otherwise to explain this document,
dismissed it as obvious "camouflage" talk.168 But why
should Föhl use camouflage writing to his "SS comrades"?
As I pointed out to Dr Longerich, Reinhard Heydrich himself had
spoken of the White Sea option on February 4, 1942 in Prague too.169
It was also noticeable elsewhere that none of the experts was
willing to give documents their natural meanings when they did
not accord with their views. The Ahnert document, recording a
meeting at the RSHA in Berlin, under Eichmann, on August 28, 1942,
was one example. There was talk of the need for the deportees
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 appendix 94 in Die Ermordung der europäischen Juden,
had forgotten it even existed when I cross-examined him about
it.170
The allegations of racism and anti-Semitism
The Defendants have resorted to the allegations that I am anti-Semitic
and racist. Mr Rampton's highly paid experts have found one 1963
diary entry four lines written thirty-seven years ago, about a
visit to my lawyer Mr. Michael Rubenstein, to discuss a satirical
magazine article, after which I commented. "Thick skinned
these Jews are!"171 This is all that they could _nd from
the millions of words available to them? When I remarked, on March
2, upon the obvious paradox that an alleged anti-Semite would
have retained Michael Rubenstein as his solicitor and respected
adviser for over twenty years, Mr Rampton's comment, which Your
Lordship may remember, was: "Many of my best friends are
Jews too, Mr Irving."172 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 - of which they have transcribed
around half a million words. I trust that your Lordship will in
each case consider both the context in which the remarks are made,
and also the broader surrounding countryside, if I may put it
like that. For thirty years, as I set out earlier, I have found
myself subjected to vicious attack by bodies, acting as they freely
admit as Jews. For thirty years I endeavoured to turn the other
cheek, and I hope I succeeded.
Mr Rampton drew attention to the fun I poked at Simon Wiesenthal,
a joke made explicitly about his other-than-good looks.173 He
called that remark "anti-Semitic". It was not, it was
a joke about his looks, of the same genre that Mr Rampton made
on Day 28 when he inquired 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 a woman.174
In view of the manner in which the two Simon Wiesenthal Centres
have been abusing my name in their fund raising leaflets, and
endeavouring to destroy my own livelihood, the Court might think
that my fun-making, while tasteless, was not undeserved, possibly
even rather reserved. It was not anti-Semitic, and 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 investigators of the Board of Deputies in 1992 came
up empty-handed in their secret report to be planted on the Canadian
government: they confirmed that I had dealings with Jews in my
professional life, and added that I "use 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
writes, "to openly admit to being an anti-Semite." "We
endorse all condemnation of anti-Semitism," they quote me
as writing in my newsletter issued on January 31, 1982. All of
these things, including this secret 1992 Intelligence report filed
by the Board of Deputies, were disclosed to these Defendants in
my Discovery.
The Defence quoted a passage from a speech delivered, they said,
in May 1992. In fact, as my diary con_rms, it was delivered in
May 1993, by which 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 smashed,
his hands manacled, his person assaulted, his printers burned
down, his access to the world's archives denied, his family's
livelihood destroyed, his phone lines jammed with obscene and
threatening phone calls and death threats, his house beset by
violent and angry mobs, the walls and posts around his address
plastered with stickers inciting the public to violence against
him, and a wreath sent to him with a foul and taunting message
upon the death of his oldest daughter, - then it ill behoves people
to offer cheap criticism if the writer finally stops turning the
other cheek and rounds upon his tormentors.
I single out in this respect, the Executive Director of the Board
of Deputies, Mr Michael Whine, whose organisation staged the demonstrations
outside my home of such a violent and ugly nature that police
reinforcements had to be called. Whine had caused defamatory documents
about me to be placed in the _les of foreign governments with
the intention that my free access to those countries should be
impeded. He had caused the surroundings of my home to be stickered
with labels bearing in_ammatory slogans inciting violence against
me. Some of these offensive items have been before the Court.
Whine had issued a Press release in January 1993, no doubt one
of many, in which he accused me of attending "Nazi Training
Camps". My only response, as Your Lordship has seen, apart
from a failed and very costly attempt to sue his Board of Deputies
in libel, during which they did not plead justi_cation, but merely
that I was out of time, was to make fun of Whine's name. That
may have been tasteless, but it was not anti-Semitism, and it
was certainly justi_ed under the circumstances.
The references that I have made to what is now formally called
the instrumentalisation of the Holocaust have also been adduced
as evidence of anti-Semitism. Are non-Jews disbarred from making
a criticism that is being made increasingly vocally by others
like Professor Peter Novick?175 Or by Leon Wieseltier, literary
editor of the New Republic? He wrote there on May 3, 1993, at
page 20:
"'It's a sad fact,' said the principal philanthropist of
the grotesque Simon Wiesenthal Center in Los Angeles, 'that Israel
and Jewish education and all the other familiar buzzwords no longer
seem to rally Jews behind the community. The Holocaust, though,
works every time.' His candour was refreshing, even if it was
obscene. On the subject of the extermination of the Jews of Europe,
the Jews of America are altogether too noisy."
I would also draw your Lordship's attention to the article by
Norman Finkelstein in the London Review of Books, published as
recently as January 6, whose title gives the whole tenor of the
piece: "How the Arab-Israeli War of 1967 gave birth to a
memorial industry." Finkelstein makes in this piece the sarcastic
comment: "Every questioning of the uniqueness of the Holocaust
is taken by American Jews to be an example of Holocaust denial."176
I could produce a sheaf of such quotations; they are all equally
near the knuckle, equally true, and no more anti-Semitic than
my own remarks on the matter.
As for the allegation that I am racist, I have produced to the
Court enough evidence that I am less reluctant to hire Coloured
personal staff than, for example, certain legal teams evidently
are. I hire personal staff on a form that has always stated my
policy that we are an equal opportunity employer, - "We do
not and will not discriminate on the basis of race, religion,
national origin, sex, age, handicap, marital status."
I shall not comment at length on these evil allegations and slurs,
which lend fire and fury to the original libel complained of.
I submit that the word "racism", in the ears of that
man on the Clapham omnibus, is about Stephen Lawrence and cone-heads
and burning KKK crosses. It conjures up images of murder, thuggery,
violence, and foul-mouthed graffiti. In deliberating on the conduct
of the case and on the appropriate scale of damages Your Lordship
will however bear them in mind.
I voluntarily provided all my private diaries to the defendants
after securing the proper assurances. Those diaries total some
twenty million words. Mr Rampton produced from them one nineteen-word
ditty, attached to another quite harmless one about the "messica
dressica" of my infant daughter Jessica. To find in all those
diaries and telephone conversations written since 1959, just one
nineteen-word ditty that Mr Rampton could trot out for the media
does not suggest that I am as obsessed with race and racism as
he, and for that matter the newspapers that report these things,
are.
Your Lordship will recall that, on what I would call a pretext,
Mr Rampton formally handed to you his own opening statement, containing
this allegation, at midday on the first day of this trial, well
before I had concluded my opening statement, in order, as he admitted,
that his words should therefore come into the public domain. His
intent was to ensure that from the very first moment his remarks,
both fair and foul, were given the maximum worldwide media coverage;
his speech was released prematurely to the media for that precise
and prejudicial purpose. I repeat: this multi-million dollar defence
team 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 infant who has, I am glad to say
grown into a delightful and open minded six year old, bearing
none of the traces of the "poison" that Mr Rampton recklessly
suggested that I had fed to her. It is fortunate I did not sing
to her "Three Blind Mice," where the farmer's wife cuts
off their tails with a carving knife.
Similarly, from my hundreds of lectures and talks, these very
proper spaniels have sniffed out a few lines of music-hall wit
of the type that a Dave Allen might indulge in, with Mr Trevor
Macdonald as the butt. That, in Mr Rampton's words, is racism.
One wonders which well-shielded part of the modern world is inhabited
by learned Counsel. Can anybody go and live there?
The speeches and lectures
My Lord, the Defendants have also fished into my lectures and
writings and books, all of which have been provided to them -
literally millions of words - and they have put into evidence
a minute fraction of those words, comparable to the one-millionth
part of the diaries which the ditty represented.
I am not going to defend or justify those utterances seriatim.
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 references
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 remark that more women had died
on Kennedy's back seat than in that gas chamber at Auschwitz -
the one shown to the tourists. It is tasteless but, quite literally,
true. It is, as I have now shown in this court, even true if the
main "gas chamber" at Birkenau is brought into the equation,
the notorious Krema II "factory of death", because the
eye-witnesses lied about that one too. The Poles have admitted
that the Auschwitz building and its chimney are a post-1948 fake.
My colourful language was a rhetorical way of bringing that extraordinary
revelation home to audiences.
Extremist organisations and people
My files confirm that I occasionally addressed audiences of the
Association for Free Journalism (GfP), the National Democratic
Party (NPD), and the German People's Union (DVU). As documents
Nos. 1716, 1717, 1721, and 1723 I disclosed to the Defendants
English translations of the policy leaflets and manifestos of
these bodies, which in my submission do not show them to be extreme
in any way.177 These were furthermore bodies which were accepted
at that time under Germany's very strict laws as being legal and
constitutional.
The Court is more concerned, I believe, with individual personages.
I have not the slightest doubt that the Court will find that I
did not have any meaningful contact with the ugly ragbag of neo-Nazi
extremists mentioned by Professor Hajo 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
vain for them in my diaries and papers, to which, I emphasise
yet again, I gave them unlimited and privileged access. This has
not stopped them from bringing them forward, and mentioning these
alleged links in open Court, in an attempt to smear me still further
- with an eye particularly to the German media178 and I urge that
this, their conduct of the case, be held against them. Characteristically
of the weakness of their case Funke listed one entry in a diary
where I noted a road journey with a "Thomas", whose
second name I never learned; Funke entered the name "Dienel"
with a question mark behind it. So far 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 Kühnen -
the documentary evidence before both Funke when he wrote his report,
and before this Court, is that I explicitly said that 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 view of the weight attached to it by learned Counsel
and his witness Professor Funke, I have re-examined the raw video
of the Halle function of November 9, 1991 at which I briefly spoke,
and I have timed and listed the scenes it shows. Your Lordship
may wish at some time to have the video to check that these timings
are correct, or the Defendants' solicitors may wish to submit
any corrections they feel are needed.179
The raw details are: when the camera's meter shows 17:00:21 I
am first seen, arriving at an unnamed hotel restaurant (in Halle)
accompanied by Mrs Worch and David Leigh of The Observer; at 17:14:40
I am again glimpsed, 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 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. At 18:16:00 I walk over
to the platform, hands in pockets, and mount it. The man whom
Professor Funke tells us is "Dienel" is seen to get
off to the left, and there is no contact whatever between him
and me. Mr Worch briefly introduces me, I begin speaking at 18:16:39
and the filmed portion of my speech ends three and a half minutes
later. When the offscreen 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 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
...[etc]".
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 Ruhr, in western
Germany.
Heavily edited, for example to remove my rebuke to the slogan-shouting
people, whom I took and take to have been paid agents provocateurs,
this sequence was shown on November 28 and 29, 1991 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 a "consultant," and
in "Despatches," on the other channel. This indicates
whose hands were behind the editing. Again heavily, the film has
been shown around the world against me. This was the thrice-edited
film to which I drew your Lord's attention, in suggesting that
it 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 address
all and any who are willing to listen. Your Lordship will remember
my letter of June 24, 1988, to my editor at William Morrow Inc.,
Connie Roosevelt, in which 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 organisers meet
my terms, namely free speech and fat fee. On this occasion I intend
to give the audience a piece of my mind about some of their more
lunatic views."180
I may secondly point out that were it not for the clandestine
activities of the violent and extremist bodies dedicated to destroying
my right to free speech and the rights of all audiences in the
United States and elsewhere at Berkeley, at Dublin, at Pretoria,
or wherever to hear my opinions; and equally dedicated to intimidating
my publishers around the world and smashing bookstore windows;-
were it not for their hate-campaign, I would have been enabled
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 fingers at me and
abuse me, using the very considerable privileges afforded to them
by this Court, for continuing to make my voice heard wherever
I can; and that when I use words to describe them in detail which
they well deserve, they wring their hands and 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 People's Union,
I wrote to, and telephoned, the German 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 25, 1984 that it was.181 The "extremism"
was in the eye of the beholder. The further to the Left the beholder
squinted from, the more distant these bodies may have seemed from
him.
We heard a lot from Professor Hajo Funke, sociologist of the Free
University in Berlin. The university may well have become a hotbed
of conservative and liberal views since I was last familiar with
it and spoke there, but I doubt it. His published sources are
all tainted works of the "anti-fascist" genre with which
the Court may well be familiar. He readily and uncritically adopted
their untruths as his own; thus although we saw with our own eyes
in the video of the Munich function on April 21, 1991 that the
young people paraded with asses' heads and placards reading, "ASS
THAT I AM, I BELIEVE EVERYTHING I'M TOLD" (I have double
checked that wording), Funke tried to tell this Court that the
wording was: "I STILL BELIEVE IN THE HOLOCAUST, THE ASS THAT
I AM", which is something very different.182
I submit that Professor Hajo Funke's credentials as a neutral
"expert" deserved more penetrating scrutiny than the
Court was willing to allow. This expert's extreme left-wing sentiments
are visible from his books and activities. Germany's political
journals, both left and right, are full of his activism. He participates
in extreme left-wing political functions. He was advertised as
the main speaker at a function of the Berlin Free University student
association (Asta) on the subject of "Asylum Seekers and
Deportation: Racist Politics in Society." Ten members of
the Christian Democrat Student Ring protested that the Asta (Allgemeine
Studentenausschuß, a student body, like the British NUS)
had no right to organise such extremist political functions, and
the courts fined the Asta five thousand Deutschmarks for organising
the function. On another occasion, encouraged by Funke, left wing
extremists armed with police whistles and banners physically attacked
the speaker Professor Bernd Rabehl (a former colleague of the
notorious left-winger Rudi Dutschke) at the Otto Suhr Institute
of the university, stole his papers and denounced him as a right-winger.
Funke, billed to appear in a public university debate with Rabehl
in May last year, vilified him in public and withdrew from the
debate saying he refused to provide him with a forum for his "propaganda".
It all sounds very familiar. In short Funke, relied on by the
Defendants in this action, is not the harmless, neutral expert
on the extreme right-wing that he would have had the Court believe,
but an active left wing agitator, following his own agenda of
political extremism. He is fêted by the Marxist extreme
left in consequence. I submit that his narrow-minded and politically
motivated views on what is right-wing extremism and what is not
are of little or no value to the Court.
As for his allegation here in court that I "should have known"
that various organisations were going to be banned in years ahead:
it is difficult for an Englishman, coming from a country with
deeper democratic traditions than Professor Funke's, to implant
himself into the brain, or mind-set, 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 the two District
Court judges who acquitted that teacher were reprimanded, and
finally retired in disgrace, by order of the minister of justice,
and where recently governments have begun routinely banning fringe
opposition parties and circumscribing even their legal activities.
Germany now has several hundred political prisoners in her jails.
The security authorities in Germany, so readily quoted by Professor
Funke, are nothing more than the political arm of each provincial
or federal minister of the interior. They have little concern
with legality. As the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung reported
on September 15, 1995, Dr Ernst Uhrlau, president of the Hamburg
branch of the Office for the Protection of the Constitution (BfV)
said: "The persistent steps taken by the state authorities
against right wing extremists have largely paralysed their legal
possibilities of action."183 The paralysing of the "legal
possibilities of action" of opposition parties can hardly
be considered a matter for pride in any normal democratic government.
None of these banned parties has anything to do with violence.
My general response to this attempt at "guilt by association"
is to compare it with the worst excesses of the inquisitions conducted
by Senator Joseph McCarthy. In Britain the courts have always
viewed it as repugnant - most recently Mr Justice Morland in another
Court here in this building. Hollywood finest scriptwriters, many
of them Jewish, had their careers vernichtet by the reckless allegation
that they had associated with known communists. Now come these
Defendants, levelling the mirror-image of these same charges at
my door. McCarthyism was rightly exposed for what it was in more
recent, and more enlightened, years. 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 Hitorical Review (IHR), which I shall deal with separately,
the one organisation identified by learned Counsel for the defence
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 - Mr Rampton
used the word "junked" or "dumped," I believe.
Had they not, it would have been "debunked" - by me.
We have therefore no general expert evidence as to the nature
of the National Alliance, and 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 can 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. If, as I submit, the meetings were organised
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 indeed they were
on offer.
As for the IHR: I have little to add to what I stated in my various
written replies. It is clearly unsatisfactory, though not surprising,
that establishment scholars feel the need to dismiss any rival
body of scholars as "extremist", merely on the basis
that these others propagate a different version of history from
their own "consensus" version. The officials of the
IHR nearly all hold academic qualifications. True, they are not
all trained historians, but then neither are some of the most
famous names of historians in both ancient and contemporary times.
It is clear from correspondence before the court that I recognised
shortcomings in the old IHR, and was keen to introduce them to
new speakers including main line scholars and 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 was
with, for instance, the Cambridge University Fabian Society, or
the Trinity College Dublin Lit. & Deb., 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 of 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 Harbor, 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 socialised before
or after the event with the IHR officials and their 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 also true that I introduced them to subjects which some
members of the audience found deeply uncomfortable, for instance
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 had cause
already to praise, Your Lordship is already funded with extensive
transcripts of those talks, and I would ask that Your Lordship
read them with this paragraph in mind. I am accused of telling
audiences what they want to hear; that may partially be true,
but by Jove, having done so I then 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 this aspect
of my association with the IHR. I trust that the Court will not.
As for the National Alliance, an organisation of which the defence
makes much. As an Englishman I am completely unfamiliar with the
nature of 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 their efforts than it does to me. It certainly meant
nothing to the English members of the public gallery on the days
that it was mentioned here. It may be that Your Lordship was,
even before the trial began, thoroughly familiar with the National
Alliance and its officials and policies. But I doubt it. Even
now I suspect it does not count for more than a relatively small
row of beans.
I have had no meaningful contacts with the organisation as such.
One or at most two of its individual members, who were already
on my mailing list, volunteered, like scores of other Americans,
to organised lectures for me. One was Erich Gliebe, who has always
organised my lectures in Cleveland, Ohio; on the evidence of his
notepaper from the year 1990 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 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 of 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 videotape
as seen. Had he told me he would also claim to do so on behalf
of his organisation, I would have told him not to. It was my function,
and the audience were largely my guests, not his.
The photographs taken at this meeting show, as the Defendants'
own agents have warranted, no formal National Alliance presence
(flags, armbands, or whatever). The witness statement of Ms Gutman
has confirmed this. Learned counsel for the Defendants has drawn
attention to one eighteen-inch wide pennant displayed at the function,
on a side wall, with what they state is the National Alliance
logo on it, visible on a 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 organising 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 organised at 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; and given that the audience was largely of my own
making it does not seem worthy of much note. I submit that this
kind of defence evidence does not meet the enhanced standard of
proof required by the law on defamation for justification of serious
charges.
As for the United Kingdom - the British National Party - the defence
have no doubt rightly decided to junk their own expert's report
on my alleged contacts with British extremists as well. Despite
complete access to all my records, their joint effort managed
to establish that in a twenty year speaking career I addressed
on one occasion what can fairly be described as a half-BNP audience,
or a hybrid audience, in Leeds. The invitation came from a BNP
official whose letter asked me to reply to his private address.
No doubt I gave them the usual uncomfortable litany - the Bruns
report, which I had just discovered, and the other transcripts
too. I probably also told them what I had found in Mussolini's
files, the evidence that Sir Oswald Mosley had been in the pay
of the Italian fascists, picking up large sums of money in brown
paper parcels at anonymous street corners in London. I was the
first person to find that fact out, and to publicise that, too.
It is in my 1981 newsletter. All other BNP invitations I refused,
as the exchange on Day 29, pages 74-5, shows; and it seems disingenuous
at best, and at worst rather dishonest, for Mr Rampton, funded
and furnished as he was with my entire personal diaries and files,
to suggest otherwise.
In general it is also to be stated that at the material times,
namely when I 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, 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 intersected, 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
to the Court. According to Der Spiegel, reporting his 1995 trial
in Berlin, Althans had acted for the Bavarian BfV as a Spitzenquelle
(top agent) until 1994, when they ended the liaison.184 The BfV
had, as Professor Funke agreed, a record of hiring agents provocateurs.
Only a few weeks ago, Gottfried Timm, minister of the interior
in Lower Saxony, found that the NPD chairman in Wismar, "Martin",
was a paid agent provocateur of the BfV (OPC) who had committed
a series of atrocities including attempted murder while acting
for the OPC. Timm demanded an inquiry after the agent was unmasked
during his trial for arson.185
Ernst Zündel is a German-born Canadian 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 are said to be worse than outré;
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 April 1988, relating to the Third Reich
and Hitler's own involvement in the Holocaust. I did so to the
best of my professional ability, and I was told that I had earned
the commendation of the Court for doing so. It is plain to me
from what I know that Mr Zündel has been subjected to a twenty
year onslaught by the Canadian organisations 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 Zündel 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 spoken at his trial.
* * *
There remain one or two in my view minor matters.
The Defendants allege that I wilfully exaggerated the Dresden
death roll in my 1963 book THE DESTRUCTION OF DRESDEN, and afterwards
and had no basis for my figures. In fact I have satisfied this
court, I believe, that at all times (a) I set and published the
proper upper and lower limits for the estimates that I gave, giving
a range of figures which necessarily decreased, overall, over
the years as our state of information improved; (b) I had adequate
basis for the various figures which I provided in my works.
It has to be said that authors have little or no control over
the content of books sub-licensed to other publishers. Revisions
are not encouraged for cost reasons.
I have always been aware of the highly-charged political nature
of the figures quoted for this event. The highest figure, of 250,000,
which I only mentioned in my works as the maximum ever alleged,
was given for example by the German chancellor Dr Konrad Adenauer
in an official West German government publication which I showed
the court, DEUTSCHLAND HEUTE (page 154, at footnote 2).
The lowest figures only became available in a book published in
1994 by Friedrich Reichert, VERBRANNT BIS ZUR UNKENNTLICHKEIT.
A copy of this book was provided to me in 1997. By that time I
had already published the latest updated edition of my book, now
called APOCALYPSE 1945: THE DESTRUCTION OF DRESDEN, in which I
had lowered the death roll still further on the basis of my own
investigations and considerations. This was the first edition
over which I, and 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 Hanns 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 (the officer was responsible for Dresden's ARP;
it was too early to achieve any kind of overall final figure;
the number of refugees killed was an imponderable) I took the
correct action: I sent a letter to The Times within a few days
of finding the new documents in the mail on my return from a trip
to the USA. 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 would have had the same integrity to do that.
As for the Goebbels Diaries, the Defendants do not now seek to
justify their claim that I broke an agreement with the Moscow
Archives in 1992 to bring sections of the Goebbels' Diaries back
to Germany and London. They have withdrawn the witness reports
of the Russian archivists, and will provide me no opportunity
to cross examine them. I was prepared to pursue their cross examination
vigorously. I produced a witness statement from Mr Peter Millar,
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 I could not have broken
it.186 The Defendants have left no satisfactory evidence before
the Court that refutes this. Mr Millar also confirmed to the Court
that he did not agree that my conduct gave rise to significant
risk of damage to plates.187 The plates had been withheld from
historians for 55 years or more. By my actions I made these historically
very important materials available to the world, and placed copies
of them in the appropriate German archives at my own expense.
The Defendants refer to, and seem to rely quite strongly on, a
document allegedly sent by the Gestapo chief Heinrich Müller
to the heads of the four taskforces (Einsatzgruppen) on August
1, 1941, about "procurement of visual materials", which
were to be submitted to Hitler on the work of the Einsatzgruppen
in the east. (Longerich report, para 15.6).
I submit that in the special circumstances of this action the
Court should not accept this evidence as admissible.
Admissibility: If I had myself found such a document, I would
have wanted to know everything possible about how and why it had
surfaced, where it had come from, and the surrounding documents
in the same folder which might tell us something about the ambiguous
contents. The Defendants have sought, unsuccessfully in my view,
to devalue the Schlegelberger Document on precisely the grounds
of a few other documents found in the same folder. The Court therefore
ordered the Defendants to produce (a) the original document or
a facsimile thereof, and (b) to identify the file in which it
had been found. The expert witness Dr Longerich identified the
file as ZSt Ludwigsburg, Dok. UdSSR No. 401. etc. The expert witness
Dr Browning cited Peter Klein, ed., Die Einsatzgruppen in der
besetzten Sowjetunion 1941/42: Die Tätigkeits- und Lageberichte
des Chefs der Sicherheitspolizei und des SD (Berlin, 1997), page
342. The archival source was given as Bundesarchiv Signatur BA
R 70 Sowjetunion/32. I requested the Bundesarchiv on February
7 to provide me with a facsimile. They replied that the file with
that number was something completely different. On January 28,
as is evident from the fax line on top of the version of the document
now provided by the Institut für Zeitgeschichte, the institute
had already supplied precisely the same typed Abschrift to Dr
Longerich. It was forty-two days later provided to me, shortly
before close of business before this last weekend, making it impossible
for me to follow up. On March 9, the Ludwigsburg office has provided
a copy of precisely the same item, microfilmed from a file USSR
401. This does not advance the matter.
If Your Lordship is minded, despite the conduct of the Defendants
over this document, to admit the Müller document in evidence,
then I submit these comments on its evidential value: The document
may not be genuine (although it does have SS runes in the last
line, the Russians captured Nazi typewriters); it is a typescript
copy totally bereft of any authenticating stamps or signatures;
its source is the Central State Archives of the "October
Revolution". The document merely invites the four taskforce
commanders to provide to Berlin, for submission on a current basis
to Hitler, "particularly interesting visual material like
photos, posters, leaflets and other documents" - none of
which seems to relate to the taskforces' homicidal duties, so
much as to their other well known functions as intelligence agencies
specifically tasked to raid and secure the headquarters and files
of former Soviet party and administrative offices. It is difficult
to image what "photos, posters, leaflets and other documents"
would be "procured" that might relate to the Final Solution
in the east. I know of no response-documents to this appeal -
neither letters submitting materials to Müller, referring
to this message, nor such materials being forwarded by Müller
to Hitler "on a current basis" or on any other basis.
One other matter. Your Lordship will remember that Mr Rampton
put to Professor Funke, on Day 28 (March 1) in re-examination
at page 174, a document which I wrote to Dr Frey and my Munich
lawyer, Dr Michael von Sprenger, in January 1991. Starting at
P-178 I was quoted as predicting "a political drawing together
of the German speaking peoples of Europe ... within a framework
of a just settlement with Warsaw", and expressing the personal
view that "the future of England can only be secured in common
friendship with the new Germany". Mr Rampton argued on the
basis of that letter that any person who sympathised with Hitler
in his desire for peace with England was a neo-Nazi. On March
5 this year, only a few days ago, we learned that in 1940 Her
Majesty the Queen Mother held precisely these views and expressed
them in private to Lord Halifax when he was the foreign secretary.188
The papers of the Viscount Monckton of Brenchley, which I examined
at the Bodleian ten years ago, have now given up more secrets
except for box 24, which contain, according to government sources,
correspondence showing the Royal Family's hostility toward the
new prime minister Mr Churchill and their preference for Lord
Halifax, and the Queen Mother's own desire that Britain conclude
an early peace with Hitler.
Is it not remarkable that at precisely the same time that I was
being publicly excoriated by Mr Rampton for expressing those views,
which are sincerely held, in several of my books, it turns out
that they were inherently the same as those of the Queen Mother?
She was well aware from the Cabinet papers, as indeed are most
historians now, that Hitler had made such a peace offer during
1940, and several respectable historians, including my friend
the late Alan Clark and Professor Charmley have expressed the
same belief.
Part 36 offer. It is right that Your Lordship should be informed
that pursuant to the Act I made a formal Part 36 offer to the
Defendants, many months ago; not once, but twice, since at first
they argued that the new Rules did not apply. The Defendants refused
the offer.
Costs. I do not propose asking for my costs in this action. Although
I have lost three years of my life in preparing for the case,
have had to hire extra staff, and have spent two months in this
courtroom, including about twenty days in the witness box, I have
decided that it would be too arduous to quantify, in a matter
that would satisfy the Taxing Master, every penny that I have
had to spend to defend and retrieve my reputation.
I do however ask that Your Lordship give Judgment in the terms
and on the 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 their servants or agents or otherwise from further
publishing or causing to be published the said or similar words
defamatory of the Plaintiff.
David Irving Tuesday, March 14, 2000
1 Hitler's War, 1991 edition, at page 17.
2 The Independent, "Holocaust Case Result will deliver Judgment
on Irving", March 4, 2000.
3 She gives her source as release from the Jewish Telegraphic
Agency, Nov 26, 1992.
4 Statement of Claim, para 9(i).
5 Statement of Claim, para 11.
6 Denying the Holocaust, page 161.
7 Literary Review, March 2000, Kenneth Rose, review of Owen Lloyd
George: A Tale of Two Fathers.
8 Report in The Daily Telegraph, July 29, 1999:"PREACHER
HAS RIGHT TO BE HEARD, HOWEVER IRRITATING." Citing Socrates
and two famous Quakers, William Penn and William Mead, Lord Justice
Sedley said: "The irritating, the contentious, the eccentric,
the heretical, the unwelcome, and provocative have a right to
be heard."
9 Day 7, January 20, at pages 48-9.
10 Eberhard Jäckel, in Michael Berenbaum and Abraham J Peck
(eds.), The Holocaust and History, Inidana University press, 1998,
at page24.
11 Defence of the First Defendants, Section.6.
12 Day 19, February 14, at page 83. I had supplied Deutsch with
the General von Fritsch papers. He used them before me. I was
then accused of having plagiarized his research without attribution.
Cross examination of Prof. Evans. Evans: "I agree. I will
climb down on Professor Deutsch." In another instance, I
gave crucial entries in the Moscow Goebbels diaries to Hans-Georg
Reuth, who published them in his five volume digest edition three
years before I used them in my biography. His publishers Piper
Verlag then vilified me on German television.
13 Day 20, February 15, at page 91.
14 See Days 4, January 17 at page 195; Day 5, January 18, at page
44; Day 16, February 7, at page 41.
15 See my opening statement; and Peter Millar's evidence, Day
15, February 3, pages 40-41.
16 Day 19, February 14, at page 45.
17 L. Gruchmann, R. Weber (eds.), Der Hitler-Prozeß 1924.
Wortlaut der Hauptverhandlung vor dem Volksgericht München
I, Vol. 2 (Munich, 1998), 545-546.
18 See Day 19, February 14, page 77. Philippe Burrin, Hitler and
the Jews, the Genesis of the Holocaust, at page 57: "While
Hitler could only have endorsed the concept of exacting reprisals,
namely on the Jews, he seems to have been surprised by the extent
of the destruction. [...] In each case Hitler covered for Goebbels
who did not derive the hoped for benefits from the affair."
Copy in my Bundle F, "Prof. Evans", No. 48.
19 Burrin, op. cit.: "... It is a good thing we are preceded
by the ominous reputation of exterminating the Jews..."
20 Ereignismeldung No. 60, dated September 11, 1941, at page 9:
"Günstig wirkt sich das Gerücht aus, daß
von den Deutschen alle Juden totgeschossen würden."
And see Ereignismeldung No. 81 of September 12, 1941 where Einsatzgruppe
C reported, "The gratuitous evacuation of hunderds of thousands
of Jews may be considered to be an indirect success of the work
of the Security Police. As we hear mostly from the other side
of the Urals, this is a considerable contribution to the solution
of the Jewish question in Europe." Translation in Arad, Krakowski
and Spektor in The Einsatzgruppen Reports, page 131.
21 Goebbels diary, printed text, November 22, 1941;
22 See the answers by Peter Millar, examined on Day 15, February
3, page 40:
"Irving: Was I going to be there [Moscow] only for a limited
space of time?
A. As far as we knew.
Q. Would it therefore have been practicable for me to have
browsed at length in the diaries for passages which were
not on the list?
A. I do not think so."
23 See the argument on Day 16, page 135.
24 Van Pelt, report, page 390.
25 These items of the Claimant's Discovery relate to the task
put to Dr Fröhlich, 1970-1971: Nos. 247, 269, 271-4, 279
(her fees and expenses, etc).
26 Bundle E, page 9: David Irving to The Sunday Telegraph, June
19, 1977. Claimant's Discovery item No. 2069: Letter from the
Plaintiff to Professor Raul Hilberg, December 5, 1975, and reply,
December 12, 1975, referred to in Item No. 440, Letter from Plaintiff
to Teresa Egan, The Viking Press, March, 1976.
27 For the full list of thirty such bodies and names, see para.
10 of my affidavit of September 4, 1998, in support of a successful
application for specific Discovery against the Second Defendant,
to be found in Bundle E at pages 245-7.
28 Day 27, page 42; day 28, pages 37, 189.
29 Bundle E, pages 6-7: David Irving diary, October 13, 1973;
Discovery, No. 372.
30 Bundle E, pages 11b-d: Typescript ADL report, headed "ADL"
and 4/17/77 in pencil; published in full on my website at http://www.fpp.co.uk
/BoD/ADL1977IntelliReport.html.
31 Bundle E, page 16: ADL backgrounder, 1983.
32 On Noam Chomsky's experiences with the ADL, see his book Language
and Politics (Black Rose Books, 19988), at page 642, quoted in
a letter in Bundle E, page at page 248.
33 Bundle E, page 33, David Irving to Justin Finger, ADL, October
15, 1983; Claimant's Discovery, No. 925.
34 Bundle E, page 35: David Irving to his literary agent, Max
Becker, January 7, 1984; Claimant's Discovery, No. 946.
35 Bundle E, page 36: Lipstadt to Bauer, August 15, 1984; Second
Defendant's Discovery, No. 36.
36 Bundle E, page 45. Vidal Sassoon Center for the Study of Anti-Semitism
at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem: Agreement, May 31, 1988.
37 See Bundle E, pages 61-62..
38 Bundle E, page 40: The Times, July ... 1986.
39 re Australian libraries: see Bundle E, page 59, para 3.
40 Bundle E, page 46: Elisabeth Gale (ADL Orange County Regional
Office), memorandum to Betsy Rosenthal, March 15, 1989: "IHR
conference, reporter's account." Second Defendant, Second
List, item No. 66.
41 Bundle E, Deborah Lipstadt, DenyING THE HOLOCAUST.
42 Bundle E, pages 41-44: Anonymous: Confidential, October 233,
1986: "Profile on David Irving."
43 Bundle E, page 263: The New York Times, "Hitler's Spin
Artist," April 3, 1996.
44 Bundle E, page 170, 171-2 : Deborah Lipstadt, quoted by Marc
Fisher in The Washington Post, April 3, 1996: "The Publisher
in a State of Denial"
45 Bundle E, page 12: Ion Trewin, Hodder & Stoughton Ltd.,
to David Irving, April 3, 1981.
46 Bundle E, page 15: Peter Carson, Penguin Books Ltd., to David
Irving, April 24, 1981.
47 Day 19, page 92: cross-examination of Prof. Evans. In direct
consequence of the premature (pre-embargo) Lukacs review, the
next day's pre-recorded segment on nationwide television's Good
Morning America show was scrapped; later reviews parroted Lukacs's
list of my "mistakes".
48 Bundle E, page 56: Canadian Jewish News, October 25, 1990.
49 Bundle E, page 75: League of Human Rights of the B'nai Brith
Canada Ian Kagedan to Franco Giammaria, Tudor Hall Restaurant,
Ottawa, September 17, 1991.
50 Bundle E, page 59: David Irving to Andrew Lownie, November
30, 1990; Claimant's Discovery, No. 1318.
51 Bundle E, page 49: The Jewish Chronicle, June 30, 1989, Irving
publishers won't drop him, Claimant's Discovery, No. 1215.
52 Day 20, February 15, 2000; speech at Milton, Ontario, October
5, 1991: "They [the Board of Deputies] scurry and hide furtively,
they re like the cockroaches who you don t see normally by light
of day."
53 Bundle E, page 64: The Jewish Chronicle, July 12, 1991: "Keep
Holocaust 'apologists' ouT OF BRITAIN, HOME SECRETARY IS TOLD
54 We have only the BfV's reply, August 9, 1991 to Neville Nagler
of the Board of Deputies. Bundle E, pages 669. It is in the files
of the Prime Minister of Australia, an indication of the world-wide
networking that has gone on an endeavour to deprive me of free
speech.
55 Bundle E, page 70: Walter F Magrutsch to Neville Nagler, Board
of Deputies, June 22, 1992.
56 Bundle E, page 78: La Nación, October 18, 1991: "La
DAIA advirtío sobre un 'agitador internacional'."
57 Lipstadt wrote: "Peter Pulzer, a professor of politics
at Oxford and an expert on the Third Reich, observed that it was
ludicrous for [Andrew] Neil to refer to Irving as a 'mere technician,'
arguing that when you hired someone to edit a 'set of documents
others had not seen you took on the whole man.'" For the
full list of names of those people and organisations who subjected
Neil and The Sunday Times to pressure to violate the Goebbels
Diaries contract with me, see Bundle E, pages 202-207.
58 Bundle E, page 82: Minutes of meeting on December 12, 1991.
59 Bundle E, page 83: Internal Memo by Roland Philipps to Steven
Kennedy, January 2, 1992.
60 Bundle E, page 85, Deborah Lipstadt to USHMM, May 6, 1992;
Lipstadt second Discovery, No. 78.
61 Bundle E, page 94: clippings from The Guardian, Jun 22, Jun
23, 1989; forwarded by USHM to Martin Smith, undated. Lipstadt
second Discovery, No. 78.
62 Bundle E, page 84: The Jewish Chronicle, Jun 12, 1942: Irving
book store attacked.
63 Bundle E, page 86: Newcastle Evening Chronicle, Jun 10, 1942:
"WAR BOOK GOES UNDER COVER."
64 Bundle E, page 87: Today, Jun 1942:"Holocaust book [sic]
fury."
65 Bundle E, page 89: David Irving to Tim Waterstone, June 19,
1992.
66 Bundle E, page 91: Evening Standard, June 19, 1992.
67 Bundle E, page 95: Metropolitan Police to David Irving, Jun
24, 1992, about demo planned in Duke Street, July 4, 1992.
68 Bundle E, pages 97-99: Committee to Stop Irving, anonymous,
leaflet: the phone numbers given were 0171 277 0817 (which is
now disconnected) and 277 1314, which has an anonymous ring-back
system. And sticker, "Mass demonstration to stop the fascist
bigots," calling for demonstrators to "meet" at
my home at 11 a.m. on July 4, 1992.
69 Bundle E, page 102: The Observer, July 5, 1992: Arrests at
protest over Goebbels historian.
70 Bundle E, page 153: Department of Home Affairs, Pretoria, to
David Irving, April 1, 1992.
71 Bundle E, page 155: David Kopelowitz, National Director, SAJBOD,
to M Whine, Board of Deputies., June 5, 1992.
72 Bundle E, pages 193ff: Tel Aviv University, "Anti-Semitism
Worldwide - 1993" here at page 200; and see ibid., page 216,
David Irving to Louis Stofberg, MP, January 5, 1994.
73 Bundle E, page 154. Die Welt, June 15, 1992, sent to the Board
of Deputies with a covering letter from Gerald [Fleming].
74 Response, Wiesenthal Center World Report, winter 1992, vol.
13, no. 3, page 13.
75 Bundle E, pages 180ff: League of Human Rights of the B'nai
Brith Canada, Annual Report to the 1993 B'nai Brith Canada Convention.
Claimant's Discovery No. 1679.
76 Bundle E, page 277, Affidavit of Michael Whine, November 1996:
"Mr Irving's Activities have been monitored by the Board
for a number of years. [...] The report was compiled by my department
as part of its normal day to day activities. [...] At some time
in 1992 I received a request for information on Mr Irving by the
B'nai Brith League of Human Rights, a similar organisation to
the Board in Canada. They were in the process of providing information
to the Canadian Department of Citizenship and Immigration which,
at the time, was considering whether to permit Mr Irving to enter
Canada. Mr Irving obtained a copy of the report following his
inquiries in Canada under the Canadian Access to Information Act.
. ."
77 Bundle E, page 116: [Board of Deputies], confidential Intelligence
report, David Irving, Biographical Information, 31pp, June 1992.
78 Bundle E, page 184: US Embassy, Legal Attaché, to David
Irving, April 23, 1993: Claimant's Discovery, No. 1681.
79 Bundle E, pages 209-201: David Irving to U.S. Consul, London,
June 6, 1993; Claimant's Discovery, No. 1687; ibid., page 211:
reply, June 14, 1993, Claimant's Discovery, No 211.
80 Bundle E, page 221: Washington Jewish Week, May 26, 1994.
81 Bundle E, pages 251ff. [Anonymous, Simon Wiesenthal centre,
Toronto]: History Rewritten: The World of David Irving. Here,
pages 256 last paragraph, and 258 last paragraph. Lipstadt Discovery,
No. 500.
82 Response, Wiesenthal Center World Report, winter 1992, vol.
13, no. 3, page 13.
83 The Toronto Star, November 19, 1999: "JudGE REJECTS HATE
EXPERT": "Although Farber has previously testified as
an expert in about a dozen cases, Mr. Justice Russell Otter ruled
in this instance he could be perceived as having a bias."
84 Bundle E, page 106: Jewish Advocate, Boston, Massachusetts,
July 10, 1992.
85 Bundle E, page 104: [Macmillan Ltd] Internal Memo, Roland Philipps
to Alan Gordon-Walker and others, July 6, 1992.
86 Bundle E, page 108: Michael Willis, Brentwood School, to David
Irving, September 19, 1992.
87 Bundle E, pages 193ff: Tel Aviv University, "Anti-Semitism
Worldwide - 1993" here at page 194.
88 Bundle E, page 109: German Embassy, Ministerialrat Gerhard
Kunz, to Neville Nagler, chief executive, Board of Deputies, Nov
9, 1992. This letter thanked the Board for the "manuscript
of David Irving," which they had "forwarded to the German
authorities." This manuscript had evidently been stolen from
me. The embassy did not respond to requests from me beginning
on June 25, 1994 (ibid., page 222) to return the manuscript, whatever
it was.
89 Bundle E, pages 193ff: Tel Aviv University, "Anti-Semitism
Worldwide - 1993" here at page 195.
90 Australian Jewish News, December 25, 1992; Bundle E, page 175:
David Irving to Australian Jewish News, January 6, 1993 (not printed),
Claimant's Discovery No. 1668.
91 Bundle E, page 176. Board of Deputies, Press release, January
14, 1993. Lipstadt's Discovery, No. 351.
92 Bundle E, page 177-8: David Irving to his lawyer Ed Wall February
27, 1993.
93 Bundle E, page 219: Hansard Pink, Question answered by [Immigration
Minister] Senator Bolkus, faxed by his department in Canberra
at 4:53 p.m. that same day, May 3, 1994, to the Sydney fax number
61 2 360 5416.
94 Bundle E, page 191: The Sunday Times, Perth, May 30, 1993;
and page 208, The Sunday Telegraph Mirror, Sydney, May 30, 1993:
"Israel Spies" in Sydney Bugging.
95 Bundle E, page 213: The Jewish Chronicle, September 17, 24,
1993.
96 Bundle E, page 73: Deborah Lipstadt to Adam Bellow, Free Press,
September 3, 1991: Lipstadt item N o. 77.
97 See Professor Deborah Lipstadt, "Benefits of Belonging,"
in Hadassah Magazine, June/July 1993, an article adapted from
her speech in 1992 to the General Assembly of the Council of Jewish
Federations.
98 Deborah Lipstadt, "Tomer Devorah," in Jewish Spectator
(Fall, 1991), page 63. Moline's actual list is in United Synaogue
of Conservative Judaism, Intermarriage: What Can we Do? (New York,
no date). Quoted in Ellen Jaff McClain, Embracing the Stranger
(HarperCollins, New York, 1995), at pages 18, 231-2.
99 Blake Eskin, "Wilkomirski's new identity crisis,"
Forward, September 18, 1998 at page 12; see Peter Novick, The
Holocaust in American Life, New York, 1999, page 275.
100 Bundle E, page 226, ADL release: "Acclaimed author tells
how Holocaust deniers assault truth," N.Y. February 15, [1994].
And ibid., pages 228-9, two pages of handwritten notes from Lipstadt
Discovery.
101 Bundle E, page 161-2: Prof. Yehuda Bauer to Lipstadt, November
27, 1992. Lipstadt Discovery No. 80.
102 Bundle E, page 163: Deborah Lipstadt to Anthony Lerman, December
18, 1992. Lipstadt Discovery No. 81.
103 Ibid.
104 Pomnik Meczenstwa Narodu Polskiego i innych Narodow.
105 Helmut Heiber, Hitlers Lagebesprechungen, January 1945.
106 Goebbels diary, March 1945.
107 "Erst nach dem Zusammenbruch der Ostfront seien die Umsiedlungspläne
gegenstandslos geworden ... Aber auch jetzt noch seien die meisten
Juden an Entkräftung und Epidemien gestorben: »von
1942 bis 1945 erlagen - jedenfalls in Auschwitz, wahrscheinlich
jedoch überall - mehr Juden sogenannten 'natürlichen'
Todesursachen als 'unnatürlichen'«." So wurde
der jüdische Professor für Europäische Geschichte
an der Princeton-Universität (USA), Dr. Arno J. Mayer, in
der Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, vom April 8, 1989 aat page
29.
108 German postwar newsreel: Welt im Film No. 137, dated January,
8, 1948. Soundtrack: "In Krakow the trial of the principal
culprits for the Auschwitz concentration camp came to an end before
a Polish Court . The Defendants were German camp guards or members
of the German camp administration staff. Unheard-of atrocities
against the camp inmates, particularly against female prisoners,
were proved against them. Altogether nearly 300,000 people from
the most different nations died in the Auschwitz concentration
camp. The Court sentenced 23 of the accused to death, six to life
sentences, and ten to lengthy jail terms; one was acquitted. The
Auschwitz concentration camp remains as it stands today, as a
monument of shame to the lasting memory of its three hundred thousand
victims." [Original German:] ,In Krakau ging vor einem polnischen
Gerichtshof der Prozeß gegen die Hauptverantwortlichen für
das Konzentrationslager Auschwitz zu Ende. Die Angeklagten sind
deutsche Lagerwachen oder Angehörige des deutschen Verwaltungspersonals.
Es wurden ihnen unerhörte Greueltaten gegen die Lagerinsassen
nachgewiesen, besonders gegen weibliche Gefangene. Insgesamt kamen
nahezu 300.000 Menschen verschiedenster Nationen im Konzentrationslager
Auschwitz um. Das Gericht verurteilte 23 Angeklagte zum Tode,
6 zu lebenslänglichem Gefängnis, 10 zu längeren
Gefängnisstrafen, einer wurde freigesprochen. Das Konzentrationslager
Auschwitz bleibt als Mahnmal der Schande so erhalten, wie es heute
steht, zum bleibenden Gedenken an seine 300.000 Opfer."
109 The New York Times, November 25, 1947: "Poles Open Trialk
of Nazis. Cracow, Poland, Nov.24 (AP) Forty former Nazi officials
at notorioius Oswiecim extermination camp accused of responsibility
for the killing of 300,000 prisoners from a dozen European countries
went on trial today before the Supreme natiponal Tribunal."
110 Jean-Claude Pressac, Auschwitz, Technique and Operation of
the Gas Chamber.
111 Day 26, Feb 28, at page 58.
112 Jackson papers, diary, Jun 1945; Raul Hilberg, The Destruction
of the European Jews ()
113 Gerald Reitlinger, The Final Solution ()
114 Norman Finkelstein, London Review of Books, January 6, 2000:
"How the Arab Israeli War of 1967 gave birth to a memorial
industry," page 36. He adds, "'If everyone who claims
to be a survivor actually is one,' my mother, a former concentration
camp inmate used to exclaim, 'who did Hitler kill?'"
115 Newspaper clipping from The Daily Telegraph April 25, 1990:
"Jewish soap tale 'was Nazi [sic] lie.'" Claimant's
Discovery No. 1278.
116 Canadian Jewish News, Jan 30, 1992.
117 Christopher Browning, "The Revised Hilberg," in
Simon Wiesenthal Annual, voll. 3, 1986, page 294; and Day 17,
Feb 8, 2000, page 121.
118 Quoted by Norman Finkelstein, London Review of Books, January
6, 2000: "How the Arab Israeli War of 1967 gave birth to
a memorial industry," page 36.
119 Zündel action, April 1988, Day 32, page 9031.
120 Zündel action, April 1988, Day 32, page 9032.
121 Zündel action, April 1988, Day 32, page 9034.
122 Zündel action, April 1988, Day 32, page 9038.
123 Zündel action, April 1988, Day 32, page 9049.
124 Zündel action, April 1988, Day 32, pages 9047-48.
125 Zündel action, April 1988, Day 32, page 9054.
126 For the formal ruling by the Judge in the presence of the
jury that Leuchter was an expert in the construction, design,
maintenance and operation of gas chambers, see Zündel action,
April 1988, Day 32, pages 9062-3.
127 Dr Roth's testimony on this is at Zündel action, April
1988, Day 32, pages 9297-9298.
128 Transcript of Mr Death, at 01:00:00.
129 Day 9, January 25, at page 52.
130 On the aerial photographs taken on May 31, June 25, July 8,
August 25 and September 13, 1944 there is no visible smoke rising
from any of the crematorium chimneys. The photographs can be seen
on the Internet at http://www.air-photo.com/grap/bcmp.jpg.
131 Day 10, January 26, page 53.
132 Pressac, Technique etc., 1989: page 554, fourth column, lines
17-22.
133 Raymond Phillips, Trial of Josef Kramer and 44 others, transcripts
at pages 66-69.
134 Philipps at page 132; Van Pelt quoted this book on page 271
of his report.
135 Jean-Claude Pressac, Auschwitz, Technique and Operation of
the Gas Chambers; and see the Nizkor website: Nizkor's essay entitled
"Zyklon Introduction Columns", at http://www.holocaust-history.org/auschwitz/intro-columns/
with the elevation sketch of the wire net column which I also
supplied to the Court and showed to the witness Pelt (Day 11,
page 124).
136 The ceiling height is given in numerous Bauleitung drawings
incl. No. 933 [934] on page 278 of Pressac.
137 Day 9, January 25, page 182.
138 Van Pelt, expert report, page 518; Day 9, January 25, page
187.
139 Day 9, January 25, Page 188.
140 Day 10, January 26, page 9.
141 Day 11, January 28, pages 111 et seq.
142 Day 9, January 25, at page 189.
143 Day 10, January 26, page 168.
144 Pressac, page 55.
145 Pressac, page 56.
146 Day 9, January 25, page 148.
147 See his report, pages 48, 210, 231, 246, 301 and 317. Although
he states it is in the Auschwitz museum, on pages 48, 210 and
301 he gives a Moscow archives file reference for it. The fifteen
minute cremation rate implied for Kremas II-V is in contradiction
of all studies by experts elsewhere; the Gusen camp of Mauthausen
never achieved better than 30 minutes per cadaver.
148 A letter cited by Pressac from the Topf archives gives a top
rate of 800 per day for Krema II and III
149 Krema II was in service from March 15 to 24 and July 18 to
December 31, in 1943; Krema III from June 25 to december 31; Krema
IV from March 22 to May 10. Krema II and IV were apparently "down"
at the date of the alleged document; and Krema I was taken right
out of service soon after for conversation to an air raid shelter.
150 Day 8, January 24, page 153.
151 The document was printed in an East German propaganda book
published by the Komitee der antifaschistischen Widerstandskämpfer
in der DDR, SS im Einsatz, (Kongress Verlag, East Berlin, 1957)
on page 269. The committee sent a photocopy of it to the Auschwitz
archives on May 15, 1981.
152 Day 11, January 28, page 188.
153 Day 11, January 28, page 92.
154 Day 10, January 26, pages 150 et seq.
155 Day 11, January 28, page 21.,
156 "Ausbau des alten Krematorium. Luftschutzbunker für
SS Review mit einem Operationsraum."
157 Day 8, January 24, page 132.
158 Jean-Claude Pressac, Auschwitz, Technique and Operation of
the Gas Chambers, page 46; for more photos, see page 48. On page
61 he offers photos of a gastight door with inspection windows,
as used at one of the delousing chambers of the BW5a and BW5b
buildings. There have never been any allegations that these buildings
or "Canada" were used for homicidal gassings.
159 Day 9, January 25, page 96.
160 USHMM microfilms, reel 19, 24, 25, 47, 48, 70, from the Fond
No. 502 of the Auschwitz Bauleitung, in Moscow archvives. File
400 (reel 47) includes "correspondence with firm Geynemann
& Co regarding supply of construction materials for construction
of bomb shelter, 1942, five pp." Folder 401 (ibid.) includes
"correspondence with Silesian construction inspectorate and
other higher institutions regarding provision of bomb and gas
shelters (including blueprints), 1940-1944. 21 pp." The lit
was put to Van Pelt on Day 8, January 24, at pages 87 and 100.
161 LS [Luftschutz] Besprechung am 6.8.1942: Richtlinien für
den Aufbau des Luftschutzes im Bereich des M.i.G. (NA film T 501,
roll 216, frames 1444-7). This emphasises in para. ii the "strength
of cellar roofs against rubble" (Trümmerfestigkeit der
Kellerdecken.)
162 Extremists: appendix to Funke report, entry under Stäglich.
163 Day 11, January 28, page 71.
164 Three times: in his Introduction, in chapter 5 and in chapter
7.
165 Day 17, February 8, at pages 167 et seq.
166 See Nuremberg Document ND: 3311 PS. The Treblinka "steam
chambers" lie was repeated by the Anti Defamation League
in The Record, The Holocaust in History 1933-45 (New York, 1985)
at page 10. Later, the alleged mode of killing was changed to
"diesel exhaust fumes": Düsseldorf Court verdict,
K I Ks 2/64.
167 Götz Aly: "Endlösung". Völkerverschiebung
und der Mord an den europäischen Juden (Frankfurt a. M. 1995).
See too the discussion of this document in Isaiah Trunk, Judenrat:
The Jewish Councils in Eastern Europe under Nazi Occupation, University
of Nebraska press, 1972 and 1996, at pages 260-1: This quotes
the SD Report No. 9, dated June 26, 1942, about concentrating
Jews in White Russia pending the Final Solution, which is clearly
of significance (Nuremberg document ND: NO-5156).
168 Day 26, February 28, pages 33 et seq.
169 Day 25, February 24, page 174.
170 Day 24, February 23, page 75; day 25, February 24, page 199;
day 26, February 28, pages 43 et seq.
171 David Irving, Diary entry, 10 June 1963: K4, Tab. 10, page
1.
172 Day 29, May 2, page 76.
173 Day 14, page 162. May 29, 1992. Rampton to Irving: You say:
"I had a lot of trouble with Simon Wiesenthal yesterday,
and I remember that three or four years ago I had the unnerving
experience sitting in my rental car after I had been speaking
in London, not London England but London Ontario, which is about
200 miles west Toronto and I had driven back to Toronto that night,
the speaking was very exhausting and I got back in Toronto at
half past 2.00 on this November morning and as I drove up Yonge
street in Toronto, which is the main artery of Toronto, I pulled
up at the traffic lights and glaring at me from the car next to
me in the traffic lights was Simon Wiesenthal himself, his face
hideously contorted by rage". So, evidently, Mr Irving, some
things make him cross too. "I got a real shock because he
looked into me through my driver's window and there was Mr Wiesenthal,
this hideous, leering, evil face glaring at me, then I realised
it wasn't Simon Wiesenthal, it was a Halloween mask [Applause].
"Now, those of who you have seen Mr Wiesenthal will know
what I'm talking about. Mrs Wiesenthal who has seen Mr Wiesenthal
many times, of course, and she says to him at Halloween, 'Simon,
please keep the mask on, you look so much nicer with it on'".
That is just pure racist abuse, is it not, Mr Irving?
174 Day 27, February 29, at page 75. Funke: "This is now
Ditlieb Felderer, a Swedish activist[...]" Mr Rampton: "Is
it a man or a woman -- oh, it is a man."
175 Peter Novick, The Holocaust in American Life (Houghton Mifflin,
1999).
176 Norman Finkelstein, London Review of Books, January 6, 2000:
"How the Arab Israeli War of 1967 gave birth to a memorial
industry."
177 They will be found most readily as pages 11 6 of the bundle
headed "Documents on Mr Irving's 1991 arrest".
178 Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, March 3, 2000. "Er [Irving]
befand sich in einschlägiger Umgebung, nicht einmal, sondern
viele Male: Michael Kühnen, Gottfried Küssel, Ewald
Althans, Ernst Zündel, Christian und Ursula Worch, um einige
der Jungen, Otto-Ernst Remer (ein Held dieser Leute, weil er den
Aufstand vom 20. Juli 1944 niedergeschlagen hat), Wilhelm Steglich
[sic],..."
179 Video No. 226. At 17:00:21 David Irving arrives at hotel restaurant
with Mrs Worch and David Leigh of The Observer.
17:01:00 cut to outside hotel - 17:12:12 man identified by Defendants
as "Dienel" first appears on film - 17:12:34 Martin
Bell visible with "Dienel" - 17:14:40 Mr Irving visible,
still at hotel, speaking to reporter - 17:17:52 man identified
by Defendants as "Gottfried Küssel" first seen,
as procession straggles off. Mr Irving is visible at no time during
the procession. - 18:00:15 procession still straggles on, "Küssel"
with them - 18:00:50 Leigh interviews "Küssel"
during procession - 18:11:00 truck is set up as platform - 18:14:26
Mr Irving and two reporters are seen watching from fringe of square
on which truck is ready - 18:15:14 "Dienel" and Worch
visible on truck platform - 18:16:00 Mr Irving arrives, hands
in pockets, and mounts platform; "Dienel" is seen to
get off to left, no contact whatever between him and Mr Irving
- 18:16:30 Worch briefly introduces Mr Irving: "Ich übergebe
das Wort an den englischen Historiker David Irving." - 18:16:39
Mr Irving's begins brief speech - 18:17:22 picture interrupted,
cut to close up - 18:17:57 picture interrupted, cut to rear view,
camera then moves round to his left - 18:18:59 offscreen chanting
of "Siegheil" starts, Mr Irving (holding microphone
still in right hand) shakes his head at them, gesticulates with
his left hand to people to stop chanting, and interrupts his speech
to say: "You must not 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 ...[etc]" ["Man soll nicht an die Vergangenheit
immer denken, man soll auch nicht immer mit den Parolen der Vergangenheit
kommen. Wir denken an die Zukunft Deutschlands, wir denken an
die Zukunft des deutschen Volkes. Ich als Englander muss sagen..."]
- 18:19:35 cut - 18:19:50 cut - 18:20:01 Mr Irving ends speech
with words, "Onward Germany." ["Deutschland voran"];
- 18:20:07 immediately, Mr Irving is seen to hand the microphone
wordlessly to Worch and leave the platform without further contact
with anybody.
180 Irving to C Roosevelt, Jun 24, 1988; read out at Day 20, page
166.
181 German embassy, J Wilmans, consul general, to David Irving,
July 25, 1984 (Claimant's Discovery, No 1013). See page17 of the
bundle headed "Documents on Mr Irving's 1991 arrest".
My telephone log shows that on December 14, 1981 at 10:05 a.m.
I phoned the German embassy to ask: "Is DVU on Index of Rechtsradikal
parties? Ext.751".
182 Funke read out the wording (Ich Esel glaube noch immer alles
was man mir so erzählt ) correctly when shown the video,
Day 27, February 29, page 64. In his report on page 74, at para.
5.3.40 he alleged, relying on a tainted source, that the wording
was "I still believe in the Holocaust, the ass that I am."
He admitted his mistake under cross-examination on Day 28, March
1, at page 112.
183 Der Hamburger Verfassungsschutzpräsident Uhrlau sagte:
»Das konsequente Vorgehen der staatlichen Behörden
gegen die Rechtsextremisten hat deren legale Aktionsmöglichkeiten
weitgehend lahmgelegt.« (Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung,
15.9.1995, page 1).
184 Der Spiegel, No. 28/1995, at page 18: "Panorama Neonazis
Nebenberuf V-Mann: Der Münchner Neonazi Bela Ewald Althans,
29, [...] war zeitweise V-Mann des bayerischen Verfassungsschutzes.
Althans berichtete ausführlich über die deutsche Neonazi-Szene
und ihre internationalen Beziehungen, etwa nach Nordamerika und
Rußland. Weil er gute Verbindungen unter Rechtsradikalen
hatte und auch sehr mitteilsam war, galt er beim Verfassungsschutz
als Spitzenquelle. [...] Der Verfassungsschutz beendete die Zusammenarbeit
mit ihm 1994 wegen 'mangelnder Nachrichtenehrlichkeit', so ein
Verfassungsschützer."
185 Der Spiegel, No. 46/1999, at page 18: " Verfassungsschutz:
Amtshilfe für Schwerin: Mecklenburg-Vorpommerns Innenministerium
hat in Niedersachsen um Amtshilfe gebeten, weil der eigene Verfassungsschutz
aus dem Ruder zu laufen scheint. In einem Prozess vor dem Amtsgericht
Wismar wegen eines Brandanschlags hat sich einer der Angeklagten
als V-Mann der Schweriner Geheimen geoutet. V-Mann, "Martin"
war Kreisvorsitzender der NPD in Wismar. Er soll während
seiner Tätigkeit für die Ermittler in mehrere Straftaten,
darunter einen versuchten Totschlag, verwickelt gewesen sein.
Um die Vorgänge aufzuklären, hat Innenminister Gottfried
Timm (SPD) nun aus Niedersachsen den Geheimdienstkontrolleur Neidhard
Fuchs angefordert, einen Referatsleiter im hannoverschen Innenministerium."
186 Day 15, February 3, page 40: Peter Millar, examination in
chief.
187 Ibid., page 48. And my answers under cross-examination, page
76.
188 The sources are quoted in The Independent on Sunday, March
5, 2000: Sophie Goodchild's story, "Queen Mum Wanted Peace
With Hitler".
Closing Statement, March 15, 2000 104
103
Closing statement, March 15, 2000
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