text:
Holocaust Denial on Trial, Trial Transcripts, Day 8: Electronic Edition
Pages 1 - 191 of 191
1996 I. No. 113
2Royal Courts of Justice
3Strand, London
4 Monday, 24th January 2000
10Claimant -and-
14The Claimant appeared in person
15MR RICHARD RAMPTON Q.C. (instructed by Messrs Davenport Lyons and Mishcon de Reya) appeared on behalf of the First and
16Second Defendants
17MISS HEATHER ROGERS (instructed by Davenport Lyons) appeared on behalf of the First Defendant Penguin Books Limited
18MR ANTHONY JULIUS (of Mishcon de Reya) appeared on behalf of
19the Second Defendant Deborah Lipstadt
21(Transcribed from the stenographic notes of Harry Counsell & Company, Clifford's Inn, Fetter Lane, London EC4
22Telephone: 020-7242-9346)
23* Transcript not to be reproduced without the written permission of Harry
Counsell & Company
1 <Day 8 Monday, 24th January 2000.
2 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Yes, Mr Irving?
3 MR IRVING: May it please the court. I have three very small
4matters that I would just like to bring to the court's
5attention ----
6 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Yes.
7 MR IRVING: --- and to try to keep it within the five minutes
8that I have set out. Your Lordship has before you a very
9small heap of documents which, as far as I am concerned,
10can be disposed with immediately afterwards. They are
11purely to draw attention to certain points I wish to make.
12The first one is headed August 17th 1942, on the right, a
13translation. It is a two-page document.
14 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Yes.
15 MR IRVING: We were dealing, your Lordship will remember, with
16the deportations from France which were discussed between
17Hitler and Himmler at the end of 1942, and the question
18was what was going to happen to them, and there was
19reference to a Sonderlager, a special camp. Your Lordship
20will see within the first paragraph of the translation the
21second sentence: "At first"?
22 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Yes.
23 MR IRVING: "At first the evacuated Jews will be accommodated
24in the Auschwitz concentration camp, but a special
25reception camp is to be erected in the Western Reich
26territory." If I may summarize the rest of the document,
1it says: "We will continue deporting train loads of Jews
2from France to avoid this lengthy journey to Auschwitz.
3Can we please set up camps inside the Reich to house these
5 MR JUSTICE GRAY: That is an odd movement, is it not?
6 MR IRVING: It is a very odd movement.
7 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Sending them all the way from France to
8Poland and then back again.
9 MR IRVING: And then back again. I cannot speculate as to the
10reason why they should engage in this movement, except
11that Auschwitz does appear to have had a transit camp
12character about it. It had facilities there for stealing,
13robbing; it had facilities there for fumigating and
14checking; it had also the big slave labour camp that was
15attached to the Molovitz factory.
16 There are two reasons, your Lordship has quite
17rightly spotted that fact, and that is I wanted to hint at
18the possibility this may have been the kind of movement --
19remember your Lordship drew attention to the fact that
20people were coming back from the East, from Lemburg to one
21of the camps on the border. Of course, the special
22reception camp, that is, Bezonderes Auffanglager, you will
23see on the next page, my Lord, in line 4, "Bezonderes
24Auffanglager", a special reception camp, is clearly the
25Sonderlager to which reference is later made, in my
1 If I can move rapidly on to the next document,
2my Lord, it is headed "Pocket Dictionary". It is three or
3four pages.
4 MR JUSTICE GRAY: I am not sure I have that.
5 MR IRVING: In that case ----
6 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Hang ob. I probably have it somewhere.
7 MR IRVING: It will be in white, my Lord, with a green corner
9 MR JUSTICE GRAY: No. Oddly enough, that has not arrived.
10 MR IRVING: My Lord, I went to some trouble over the last few
11months obtaining contemporary a German dictionary by which
12I mean a wartime Third Reich German dictionary so we can
13see what the meaning of words were at that time, rather
14than the modern Langenscheidt being used and relied upon
15by the Defence. This is a 1935 dictionary, my Lord, which
16is this one here. I have just looked up at random some of
17the words we are interested in. The first page is
18"Entfernen" which means "to remove". It has no
19subsidiary sinister meanings.
20 MR JUSTICE GRAY: I do not think anyone is suggesting, except
21in a euphemistic way, that it means anything other than to
22remove or distance.
23 MR IRVING: My Lord, I believe the Defence is relying heavily
24on the fact that I have mistranslated and distorted. In
25my submission, if I use the correct wartime translation of
26the word, then this destroys that particular Defence
2 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Yes.
3 MR IRVING: The next page is "Vernichten", a very sinister
4word, "annihilate and destroy". The next page is
5"Abschaffen" which is quite significant in connection
6with the French movements, you will remember, my Lord,
7because Himmler wrote next to the figures "Abschaffen" in
8his handwriting, and this means "to dismiss".
9 MR JUSTICE GRAY: I think the difficulty with "Abschaffen" is
10that it would not normally be applied to people. Is that
11not a fair point?
12 MR IRVING: You are right, my Lord. It could apply to a body
13of people, perhaps, to dismiss them, and I shall be
14making, obviously, my closing speech submissions at some
15length summarising this question of the translations which
16is a thorny one, I appreciate, but in view of the fact the
17Defence do rely on it so heavily for the distortion
18element of their justification; and, finally, my Lord, on
19page 33 of the dictionary we have the famous "Ausrotten"
20and there the 1935 meaning of the word is quite clearly
21"to root out", as you would imagine, the word
22"Ausrotten"; whereas I quite readily accept that nowadays
23in 1999/2000, the word "Ausrotten" quite clearly means
24"liquidate". It has become that, the same as words
25change their meaning over the years.
26 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Yes.
1 MR IRVING: My Lord, finally, I come to the little bundle of
2documents. It is a rather arcane matter, but again
3I believe the Defence rely heavily on my choice of
4language. Your Lordship will remember the rather heated
5remarks I made about certain Jewish fraudsters and
6racketeer in the United States, Ivan Boesky, Michael
7Milken, and so on. I suggested they were hiding behind,
8they were insulating themselves from public criticism by
9the use of the Holocaust. This is what is now
10scientifically or academically referred to as the
11instrumentalisation of the Holocaust. This is one
12particular example which came to our attention. Mr Melvin
13Murmelstein, who may well be mentioned later on in the
14case, started a claim against the Hertford Insurance
15Company. His lawyers warned the insurance company that,
16as a survivor of Nazi concentration camps during World War
17II, this matter is extremely important to Mr Murmelstein.
18That is page 2, my Lord. On page 6, the insurance
19company's own lawyers warned them, warned the insurance
20company, to settle the $100,000 being claimed, saying,
21 "The lawyer argues that a jury will be sympathetic to a
22man who has survived a Nazi concentration camp", and so
23on. So this is the kind ----
24 MR JUSTICE GRAY: It is not quite the same point, is it? The
25point that I think you were making in that talk that we
26looked at on Thursday was that Jews who get up to some
1sort of financial or other misconduct then used the
2Holocaust as a kind of shield against their own
4 MR IRVING: My Lord, it may well be that I shall lead ----
5 MR JUSTICE GRAY: This is a slightly use or instrumentalization
6of the Holocaust.
7 MR IRVING: It is an insulation which goes on. Perhaps it is
8automatic -- we all have the utmost sympathy with victims
9of the Holocaust, and that includes myself, and I want
10to say that here; but I want to get this one instance in
11now because of the rather ugly note we closed on on
12Thursday evening, and it may well be I will lead further
13evidence which will go more closely to the matter actually
14raised. With that, I end my submission, my Lord.
15 MR JUSTICE GRAY: I will put these into, just so we know where
16they are going, J. I think we have got to 8, but there is
17a problem with these loose documents.
18 So that completes what you wanted to say about
19that, Mr Irving.
20 MR IRVING: I have completed my submission, my Lord.
21 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Mr Rampton, you do not want to say anything
22about this matter?
23 MR RAMPTON: No, I do not want to say anything about any of
24them at the moment. I may have to come back to some of
25them in due course, but certainly not today. J8, my Lord,
26says Miss Rogers.
1 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Could I mention something that I would like
2to do, I think probably first thing tomorrow morning, if
3that is convenient, and that is to have a look and see
4what the future timetable is looking like, as far as one
5can judge it. I would appreciate there are witnesses to
6be accommodated. We might need to discuss what topics
7need to be cross-examined to and possibly some do not need
8to be.
9 MR RAMPTON: I agree.
10 MR JUSTICE GRAY: And timing generally.
11 MR RAMPTON: I mean, I quite agree with that. One reason, if
12I may respectfully say so, I would say it was a good idea
13to do it tomorrow is that today is a bit uncharted, I am
14chartered, but I do not know where my charts will lead me
15today. But there is also the very good question your
16Lordship has raised on how much more of Evans do I have to
17do? Of course, essentially, that is a question for me,
18subject to being told not to. There are only, I think,
19two big topics left in Evans, that is ReichsKristallnacht
20 -- three, ReichKristallnacht early anti-Semitism of
21Hitler with the Nuremberg rules and Dresden.
22 MR JUSTICE GRAY: I think there is another heading post
23Kirstallnacht, is there not?
24 MR RAMPTON: Yes, but that is all part of the same subject.
25 MR JUSTICE GRAY: All right.
26 MR RAMPTON: My Lord, can I mention something which I think
1I have mentioned before, which is this, that it would be
2convenient to us if we could have our reading day on
3Thursday rather than Friday of this week for the reason
4that Professor van Pelt has to go to Stockholm on
6 MR JUSTICE GRAY: For a day or for a weekend?
7 MR RAMPTON: Only for a day. He is going in the morning and
8coming back in the afternoon, but there is a conference
9that he has been asked to attend and thinks that he
10should. So if we could possibly have ----
11 MR JUSTICE GRAY: I do not see any problem with that. Does
12that cause you any difficulty, Mr Irving?
13 MR IRVING: My Lord, we were going to call Dr John Fox as our
14expert witness on that day, but I can easily postpone him.
15 MR JUSTICE GRAY: That is very accommodating. Thank you. We
16will do that first thing Thursday morning, if that is all
17right with both of you? So we can now press on with
19 MR IRVING: My Lord, I am calling Mr Peter Miller as a witness
20tomorrow, but he will be relatively brief, I think, on the
21events in Moscow.
22 MR JUSTICE GRAY: That raises a question that I have canvassed
23before. To what extent are we going to have to go through
24quite voluminous evidence on the Goebbels' diaries? To
25some extent I am in both of your hands. I have made no
26secret of the fact that whilst I understand, Mr Irving,
1your complaint about it, and I have seen the way the
2Defence is put, in the end is it a topic that we benefit
3by spending a very great deal of time on?
4 MR IRVING: On the Goebbels' diaries.
5 MR JUSTICE GRAY: On the Goebbels' diaries and the breach of
6the agreement or whatever it was.
7 MR IRVING: My Lord, I am accused of having breached agreements
8in Moscow. This is what I will certainly ask Peter Miller
9to evidence on.
10 MR JUSTICE GRAY: This is really in a way addressed to
11Mr Rampton as he will understand.
12 MR RAMPTON: There are really only two points left in Moscow.
13There is an admission that plates were removed without
14permission. The question, was there any significant risk
15they might be damaged? Second, how many plates? Now,
16whether that is more than about half an hour's
17cross-examination -- nothing more than that, I doubt.
18 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Well, well and good. That is, I think, all
19it really merits, frankly.
20 MR RAMPTON: That is how I see it. There is the additional
21point, of course, that Moscow would be, if it fell
22anywhere in the case, a section 5 question.
23 MR JUSTICE GRAY: That is what you say.
24 MR RAMPTON: That is what I believe, and it may be against
25everything else I will take a view (and it will be my
26decision) that it pales into insignificance.
1 MR JUSTICE GRAY: That is really why I have said what I have
2just said. I do appreciate, Mr Irving, you do not accept
3that it is an insignificant point because you say you are
4accused of breaking an agreement.
5 MR IRVING: Well...
6 MR JUSTICE GRAY: It does not sound as if Mr Rampton is really
7pursuing that at all.
8 MR RAMPTON: Yes, but without permission.
9 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Yes, but without permission does not mean
10breaking an agreement necessarily.
11 MR RAMPTON: That is a question of terminology really.
12 MR JUSTICE GRAY: I am in both your hands about that, but I
13personally do not think we should spend a lot of time.
14 MR RAMPTON: That is my present view, but I am not committing
15myself now. But I think your Lordship can reasonably
16expect that Moscow will not take up a lot of the court's
17time, as far as I am concerned.
18 MR IRVING: My Lord, if they were to put Moscow into section 5
19as well, I think that bucket is beginning to overflow.
20 MR JUSTICE GRAY: That is a very vivid way of putting it.
21 MR IRVING: We can put the whole of his Hizbollah and Farrakhan
22into section 5.
23 MR RAMPTON: That is not section 5. That is common sting which
24is different.
25 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Right, anyway, let us get on. That disposes
26of that. Yes, do please come back, Mr Irving.
1 < MR DAVID IRVING, recalled.
2< Cross-Examined by MR RAMPTON, QC, continued.
3 MR RAMPTON: My Lord, there are three new bundles. They are
4not new in any surprise sense. They are new in that we
5have composed them for ease of reference for this part of
6the case. There are two Auschwitz core bundles; the first
7consisting of what one might call material arising out of
8the Leuchter Report, and it has the Leuchter Report at the
9beginning of it. The second Auschwitz core bundles are
10the original drawings and documents.
11 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Yes.
12 MR RAMPTON: The third new file, again composed from other
13sources, are statements by Mr Irving about Leuchter and
14the Leuchter report. That has been extracted from a range
15of the D files, D1 and 2 and 3.
16 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Many of which we have been through?
17 MR RAMPTON: Yes, exactly, but not the specific reference and
18I am hoping to cut that short this morning, if I possibly
20 MR JUSTICE GRAY: I am sorry to be tedious about it, but can we
21perhaps give these bundles a slightly more convenient
22means of identification?
23 MR RAMPTON: We started off by calling them "K".
24 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Well, why not?
25 MR RAMPTON: All right. K1, 2 and 3 then.
26 MR JUSTICE GRAY: It is just going to make life simpler later
2 MR RAMPTON: Certainly, of course we will. The first fat one
3is K1, the second one which has not got as much material
4in it is K2, and the Claimant's statements are K3.
5 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Yes.
6 MR RAMPTON (To the witness): Mr Irving, could you turn open
7the first tab in the first of those files? That should be
8the Leuchter?
9 A. [Mr Irving] It is, yes.
10 Q. [Mr Rampton] I would rather you use the one in the file because it has
11the appendices. Before I do that, I want to do something
12else. May I? I am sorry about that, my Lord, I had
13forgotten what I intended to do.
14 MR JUSTICE GRAY: That is all right.
15 MR RAMPTON: It is Monday morning. Could you, Mr Irving, turn
16up in the third file, K3, tab 4? This is a transcript of
17the press conference that you gave, introducing the
18Leuchter in your published edition on 23rd June 1989.
19Could you turn to page 21, please? I will start, if
20I may, at the bottom of page 20. You are being asked
21questions, Mr Irving, and somebody says at the bottom of
22page 20: "So they fabricated this evidence?" You say:
23 "Oh, we fabricated a lot of evidence at Nuremberg. I am
24very familiar with the private diaries", etc., "of Robert
25H Jackson and the American Judge Biddle."
26 Page 21 at the top: "They fabricated the
1evidence?" asked the questioner?
2 A. [Mr Irving] "This evidence".
3 Q. [Mr Rampton] I am sorry, "this evidence". You are quite right,
4Mr Irving: "No, but I am familiar with how things like
5the figure of 6 million were arrived at because that is
6dealt with at great length in their private diaries."
7Then you say this: "Judge Biddle, however, sitting in
8judgment at Nuremberg, he looked at one Auschwitz survivor
9all day, a Frenchman -- I am sure you know her name, she
10gave a heartbreaking testimony about what she had survived
11 -- and in his diary at the end of that day Judge Biddle
12privately wrote: 'I don't believe a word of what she is
13saying. I think she is a bloody liar'."
14 Mr Irving, he did not say that in his diary?
15 A. [Mr Irving] You are right. He did not write those words.
16 Q. [Mr Rampton] No. Those are your words, are they not?
17 A. [Mr Irving] This is my gloss on it, yes.
18 Q. [Mr Rampton] And he did not say it, did he, about the whole of her
20 A. [Mr Irving] I think he did. He sat there listening to the testimony
21and after a time when he could stand it no longer, he
22wrote in brackets in the middle of her testimony words
23which gave precisely this meaning to me as the reader.
24You must remember I have read the entire notes of Biddle
25in the archives in the United States.
26 Q. [Mr Rampton] I am going to show you the notes of Judge Biddle and what
1you wrote about them on your little index cards in a
2moment. Can I just draw attention -- you do not need to
3get it out -- the woman in question was a lady called
4Marie-Claude Valliant-Courturier, was she not?
5 A. [Mr Irving] A French Communist yes.
6 Q. [Mr Rampton] A French Communist. As she said, a member of the
8 A. [Mr Irving] Well, exactly, a member of the Resistance and a French
10 Q. [Mr Rampton] Do you remember in your Nuremberg book -- if you would
11like to get it out, you shall -- you published a lot of
12pictures, quite a good selection of pictures really, after
13page 182?
14 A. [Mr Irving] Yes.
15 Q. [Mr Rampton] A caption to a picture of that lady, Madame
16Valliant-Couturier, reads as follows: "Credibility
17problems. As Madame Marie-Claude Valliant-Couturier below
18left testifies about her ordeal as a Communist interned at
19Auschwitz, Judge Francis Biddle notes that he does not
20believe her"?
21 A. [Mr Irving] Perhaps it would assist the court if you were to read out
22some of this lady's testimony to the Nuremberg court?
23 Q. [Mr Rampton] No, it would not in the very slightest, Mr Irving.
24 A. [Mr Irving] Well, it certainly would because you can see yourself how
25totally incredible her testimony was.
26 Q. [Mr Rampton] No, Mr Irving, I am sorry. You can do that later in
1re-examination of yourself if you wish?
2 A. [Mr Irving] I certainly shall because all those things taken together
3indicated why the Judge wrote down those words in his
5 Q. [Mr Rampton] Could his Lordship and Mr Irving please be given the
6original transcript, or whatever it is, of Judge Biddle's
7notes and also Mr Irving's noted form of that document on
8his index cards?
9 A. [Mr Irving] These were provided by me to your solicitors.
10 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Where are they going to go? There is another
11loose document coming, floating in. Where shall I put
13 MR RAMPTON: The back of core file Auschwitz K2. It will be
14tab ----
15 MR JUSTICE GRAY: This is really a core bundle document, is
17 MR RAMPTON: It is an Auschwitz document in a sense, but
18actually on this little exercise for mismisrepresentation.
19 MR JUSTICE GRAY: This is Biddle's notes of Madame Couturier.
20 MR RAMPTON: That is right. 28th January 1946. This is his
21notes of her evidence.
22 A. [Mr Irving] "Sang the Marseillaise when the gas trucks started to
24 Q. [Mr Rampton] On page 3, Mr Irving, if you turn to page 3 -- I marked
25it tab 7 in K2, my Lord, if that is convenient?
26 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Yes, thank you.
1 MR RAMPTON: At the top of page 3 of his actual notes there are
2two sentences: "SS distributed punishment in form of 50
3blows of stick on back by a sort of machine. Endless roll
4calls and gymnastics". Then a new paragraph, Mr Irving.
5 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Sorry, which page.
6 MR RAMPTON: Page 3, my Lord. 3 at the top or 34 at the
7bottom. Then there is a new paragraph: "House of
8prostitution for SS selected young women as they were
9washing for maids or camps used the same system. (This
10I doubt)." Then he starts a new paragraph.
11 A. [Mr Irving] Yes.
12 Q. [Mr Rampton] The only thing. Mr Irving, that he is doubting is her
13statement about the prostitution.
14 A. [Mr Irving] I do not think you have any justification for saying that.
15 Q. [Mr Rampton] It is perfectly obvious.
16 A. [Mr Irving] In the previous paragraph we have heard about the SS
17having a machine for beating people with, which on the
18face of it is totally implausible, and we now know it to
19be totally untrue. By this time, this Judge Biddle, who
20is a very, very level headed American, as I know from his
21private papers, is so fed up with this woman's testimony
22that he finally can stand it no longer and he dictates in
23parenthesis into his report -- this, you remember, is not
24in typing or handwriting, this is him dictating to a
25secretary so we do not know where the paragraphs begin or
26end in his dictation. He says, "This I doubt".
1 Q. [Mr Rampton] Mr Irving, will you look at your own note of this
2document? You came upon these in Syracuse in New York
3State, I think?
4 A. [Mr Irving] The Americans call it Syracuse.
5 Q. [Mr Rampton] I beg their pardon. But that is right, is it not?.
6 A. [Mr Irving] This is correct, at the university of Syracuse.
7 Q. [Mr Rampton] There is a little clip, two pages, of your own index card
8notes -- have I got it right?
9 A. [Mr Irving] That is correct.
10 Q. [Mr Rampton] On the second page, in the top right hand corner, you
11report this part of Judge Biddle's note and, wherever you
12are, as it were, missing something out, you put quite
13properly an ellipse with three dots.
14 A. [Mr Irving] Yes.
15 Q. [Mr Rampton] At the bottom of that box on the right-hand side, which
16I assume is a card, you write: "... House of prostitution
17for SS selected young women as they were washing for
18maids. All camps used the same system (this
19I doubt). ..."
20 A. [Mr Irving] The reason why I write down about the house
21of prostitution is because this was referred to as a
22sonderhouse and sondergeboide and so, for people who are
23interested in the Holocaust, you noticed the word sonder
24as being attached to something which was not connected
25with gassing, and that is why I quoted that particular
26paragraph but, once again, I submit that this dictated
1parenthesis by Biddle refers to everything he has heard up
2to this point. It is getting more and more implausible
3and, when he hears about the machine for beating people,
4his patience snaps.
5 MR RAMPTON: Mr Irving, that must be complete nonsense, must it
6not?. Look at the little paragraph in Judge Biddle.
7 A. [Mr Irving] He did not say, "new paragraph Miss Smith", he just
9 Q. [Mr Rampton] What warrant did you have for inflating that side note
10about one little paragraph about prostitution into a
11general doubt by Judge Biddle about the credibility of the
12whole of this lady's testimony. What warrant was there
13for that?
14 A. [Mr Irving] I sat for either one or two days in the university library
15of Syracuse University. Reading all Judge Biddle's notes
16on the testimony given by the witnesses that I was
17interested in, and also his notes on the deliberations on
18the judgment, whether to hang or sentence to life
19imprisonment and so on. So you get a very good feeling
20for the sense of the way a judge is thinking and, if he
21did not make this kind of comment about the other
22witnesses and suddenly at this point he does, then this is
23what said to me that this was a witness who tested his own
25 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Can I just ask because I am not quite sure
26that I am following this? You interpret those three words
1in parenthesis, appearing where they do in the summary of
2this lady's evidence, as the judge casting doubt over the
3totality of it?
4 A. [Mr Irving] Up to that point, yes. There is no reason for him to
5doubt really the house of prostitution but there certainly
6is reason to doubt what comes in the paragraph before
7about the special machine for caning people. We did not
8even have that at public school. Everything up to this
9point he has been listening, as judges do, I am sure your
10Lordship also does sometimes, with mounting impatience,
11and he made a little mental note that he dictated that
12evening to a secretary, "(this I doubt)".
13 MR RAMPTON: Mr Irving, you know perfectly well, do you not,
14that you have done what you have so often done? You have
15taken one little phrase which is applied to one
16proposition made by the witness about prostitution when
17the judge has put a parenthetical note that he doubts this
18proposition, and the word "this" is very specific in
19English. It means that which we are now talking about,
20does it not?
21 A. [Mr Irving] What they were now talking about was the SS distributed
22punishment in the form of 50 blows by a stick on the back
23by a machine, and all the other stories about the
24orchestra playing music as people went into the gas
25chambers, all these other stories that this witness
26generated in her testimony. There is a great deal of it
1in these five pages and you have been very careful not to
2read out the five page so that people can hear exactly how
3ludicrous this witness's statement was, as we now know
4with hindsight.
5 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Give us one other example. The machine for
6beating you have described. Just so that I have the
7flavour of it.
8 A. [Mr Irving] Dogs tore at their legs and killed, set on by SS guards,
9corpses in the courtyard, a hand or head would now and
10then stir in the corpses seeking to free itself, the heap
11moaned from morn till night in all languages "Water
12water", huge rats everywhere, and so on. I think there is
13a reason why the judge is dictating this kind of
14material: In order to get the flavour of what this
15witness is saying. He finally then writes down "(this
16I doubt)".
17 MR RAMPTON: Mr Irving, I simply cannot accept that.
18 A. [Mr Irving] This is frankly why I think eyewitness evidence is so
20 Q. [Mr Rampton] Yes, maybe you do, Mr Irving. I am not on about
21eyewitness. I am on about a deliberate distortion of what
22the text of Judge Biddle's note actually says.
23 A. [Mr Irving] I agree and I concede, for what it is worth, that what
24I said in the press conference, no doubt four or five
25years after reading Judge Biddle's notes, or possibly even
26ten years after I read Judge Biddle's notes, I cannot
1remember precisely when I saw the papers.
2 Q. [Mr Rampton] What about what you said here in the picture caption?
3 A. [Mr Irving] About the credibility of the witness?
4 Q. [Mr Rampton] Yes.
5 A. [Mr Irving] I think that is absolutely justified. If he says that he
6doubts her, then ipso facto her credibility has been
8 Q. [Mr Rampton] Would you turn back to tab 2 in the third of those files,
9the same files as you have the Leuchter press conference?
10 A. [Mr Irving] Yes.
11 Q. [Mr Rampton] It is page 18. My Lord, this is a speech at Toronto in
12August 1988. Turn to page 18, please.
13 A. [Mr Irving] I cannot see any pagination.
14 Q. [Mr Rampton] Bottom of the page?
15 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Tab 2. Are you in the right tab?
16 A. [Mr Irving] I am in the right tab but there is no pagination in mine.
17However --
18 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Are you in the right volume?
19 A. [Mr Irving] It is the district court of Ontario.
20 MR RAMPTON: I am sorry about this. Tab 2, page 18. It is
21Toronto August 1988.
22 A. [Mr Irving] What is the page number?
23 MR JUSTICE GRAY: It is the wrong file.
24 MR RAMPTON: I am sorry, Mr Irving, it is the same file as the
25one from the Leuchter press conference.
26 A. [Mr Irving] Now we have it.
1 Q. [Mr Rampton] Before we look at this, Mr Irving, tell me when you went
2to Syracuse, as you call it.
3 A. [Mr Irving] I would have to look at my notes to see precisely when
4I went to Syracuse in fact on two or three occasions.
5 Q. [Mr Rampton] You wrote to us on 21 December 1999. You said -- my
6Lord, this is inter partes correspondence --
7"I originally read Judge Biddle's papers at Syracuse in
8about 1988"?
9 A. [Mr Irving] Off the top of my head, that may have been correct.
10I went to Syracuse two or three times because they have
11many collections of papers there.
12 Q. [Mr Rampton] So, when you are speaking at the Leuchter press conference
13in 1989, that is not more than a year after you have seen
14the notes, is it?
15 A. [Mr Irving] In that event, yes, but I will come back with further and
16better information, if you want to know the exact date.
17 Q. [Mr Rampton] This speech in Toronto which I am now asking you to look
18at, was made in August 1988?
19 A. [Mr Irving] Yes.
20 Q. [Mr Rampton] And on page 18 you say this. Actually, we had better
21start on page 17 because this may be important. Can you
22read, please, from about the beginning of the second
23quarter of the page, there is a sentence: "Let me just
24read out the kind of material that was given in the
25witness box in Nuremberg". Then you mention Judge
26Biddle. Have you got that on page 17?
1 A. [Mr Irving] Yes.
2 Q. [Mr Rampton] Would you read to yourself please, not out loud if you do
3not mind, all of the rest of that page and down to the end
4of the first complete paragraph on page 18?
5 A. [Mr Irving] (Pause for reading) Yes. I clearly had my notes in front
6of me when I was saying this.
7 Q. [Mr Rampton] You give some sort of an account of many things about
8which the French lady testified.
9 A. [Mr Irving] Yes.
10 Q. [Mr Rampton] You finish that account with the piece about the
11prostitution, and then you say: "Here Judge Biddle writes
12in brackets in his diary 'all this I doubt'. Why did he
13not say it at the time, for heavens sake but he just sat
14there with his face motionless because he is an American
15judge, but in his private diary he writes", you repeat it,
16 "all this I doubt", and so it goes on, and I am not going
17to read the rest of it.
18 A. [Mr Irving] Right. I had my notes in front of me.
19 Q. [Mr Rampton] That is not what Judge Biddle said, is it?
20 A. [Mr Irving] But I am just stating quite clearly I had my notes in
21front of me when I was making this statement, and I added
22the word "all", but I would aver that that is precisely
23what I said in my earlier statement, that he has clearly
24referred to all that has gone before.
25 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Yes, but he did not say that.
26 A. [Mr Irving] He did not say that, my Lord.
1 MR RAMPTON: Do you not see the difference between "all this
2I doubt" which I quite agree with you might certainly have
3reference to the evidence given to date by that lady, and
4the words "this I doubt" in parenthesis against a single
5statement in a single paragraph?
6 A. [Mr Irving] This is precisely what I said in my previous statement.
7My conclusion from reading his diary was that he was
8referring to the foregoing, all these incredible stories
9which are here listed in summary form in my speech about
10the baby saying, "can I walk now I have had my leg torn
11off?" and all this kind of thing.
12 Q. [Mr Rampton] I am going to suggest to you that you made that speech in
13Toronto on the same visit to North America as when you
14first saw the Biddle notes.
15 A. [Mr Irving] No. I think from the way it is constructed, the fact that
16the passages in my speech here follow closely at first
17glimpse anyway the actual notes that I typed on to the
18index cards that I clearly had the index cards in front of
19me when I was making this statement.
20 Q. [Mr Rampton] You distorted what they said, did you not.
21 A. [Mr Irving] I added the word "all" to make it more literate for an
23 Q. [Mr Rampton] Yes, you added the word "all"?
24 A. [Mr Irving] This is not a distortion of what my own perception was of
25that paragraph, that he was clearly referring to all the
1 Q. [Mr Rampton] Very well. I will just tell you for the sake of record.
2 A. [Mr Irving] Clearly, he would not just have put in this unusual
3parentheses just because she is talking about a house of
4prostitution. It was well known at that time that there
5were brothels in all the SS concentration camps camp, in
6Dachau and everywhere else they had brothels for the use
7of the prisoners. This was well known at Nuremberg, so he
8certainly would not have put that in brackets "this
9I doubt" at that point. That refers to what he has heard
10up to this point.
11 Q. [Mr Rampton] Even now, Mr Irving, you will not or cannot read the words
12in front of you. Actually the sentence which precedes the
13parenthesis is "all camps used the same system", is it
15 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Yes, and it might well have been a reference
16to that.
17 MR RAMPTON: Exactly.
18 A. [Mr Irving] It might well have been, but that was not my reading of
20 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Anyway ----.
21 A. [Mr Irving] On the basis of my knowledge of the Biddle papers and on
22the basis of this particular one.
23 MR RAMPTON: Yes, Mr Irving. Just for completeness, your diary
24tells us that you were in Syracuse on August 11th 1988,
25you made this entry, "worked at Syracuse University all
26day, very hot, private papers yielded little but the
1Nuremberg trials collection of Judge Francis Biddle had
2some gems, including his diary (with comments of I do not
3believe) comments you put in the plural, on one
5 A. [Mr Irving] That clearly shows that I took that as being a reference
6to all his comment and not just the previous comment. I
7am indebted to you for pointing out exactly when I saw it,
8which was a few days before this which means I was
9carrying those index cards with me at the time I went to
10this lecture.
11 Q. [Mr Rampton] On that occasion in Toronto in the press conference, in
12London the following year and in your Nuremberg book, you
13told a lie about what the notes said, did you not?
14 A. [Mr Irving] The difference clearly is that in Toronto, I have driven
15up from Syracuse to Toronto probably two or three days
16later and made the speech with the cards in front of me,
17whereas at the Leuchter press conference I am giving the
18sense of it from memory, and that is clearly the sense, as
19I have told the court, I had from that comment made by
20Judge Biddle in his own private papers. Listening to this
21witness with her incredible stories about beating machines
22and all the rest of it, he writes down in brackets "this
23I doubt". Frankly, I do not think there is very much
24mileage to be made out of that.
25 Q. [Mr Rampton] Now we are going to go to Leuchter, Mr Irving. If you put
26that file on one side, I am coming back to it in a moment,
1the file of what you said about Leuchter. Before I do
2that, I would like you to look at the Leuchter report
3itself, which is the first divider in the first Auschwitz,
4file K 1. It has a cover and an inside page headed Ernst
5Zundel. Have you got that?
6 A. [Mr Irving] Yes.
7 Q. [Mr Rampton] At the bottom of the page you write what the cover
8pictures are, because there are four of them.
9 A. [Mr Irving] You are stating that I wrote this?
10 Q. [Mr Rampton] I do not know who wrote this.
11 A. [Mr Irving] I am the publisher of this, not the writer of it.
12 Q. [Mr Rampton] Who writes the information?
13 A. [Mr Irving] I wrote the introduction.
14 Q. [Mr Rampton] About what the pictures represent?
15 MR JUSTICE GRAY: So this is not the report submitted to the
16Canadian court?
17 MR RAMPTON: No. I do not believe I need to use that if I have
18Mr Irving's own published version.
19 MR JUSTICE GRAY: I am not being critical. I am just trying to
20ensure that I know what I am looking at.
21 MR RAMPTON: I do not know if I have ever seen that.
22 A. [Mr Irving] You have. It has been in the discovery and it is very
23much more comprehensive than this.
24 Q. [Mr Rampton] That does not mean that I have seen it, Mr Irving. This is
25published by Focal Point Publications, London, June 1989.
26 A. [Mr Irving] Yes. The notice said published by, not written by.
1 Q. [Mr Rampton] My question was, do you see that in effect on the inside
2page somebody has provided captions for the cover pictures
3under the line at the bottom of the page? It is not very
4easy to read.
5 A. [Mr Irving] On the inside page?
6 Q. [Mr Rampton] Yes. That is right. There is a picture of some machinery
7I think, by the look of things.
8 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Which page are you on now?
9 MR RAMPTON: My Lord, there is a cover and on the next page
10there is a picture of what looks like machinery. Cameras.
11 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Cameras, yes. It is Monday morning!
12 MR RAMPTON: I know it is Monday. This is a rotten copy. It
13could be anything. It could be a sheep shearing station?
14 A. [Mr Irving] Or a beating machine.
15 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Let us get on.
16 MR RAMPTON: The line at the bottom of the page, underneath of
17the line are provided captions for the cover pictures on
18the front cover. What I ask you is who wrote those
20 A. [Mr Irving] I do not know.
21 Q. [Mr Rampton] You do not?
22 A. [Mr Irving] It was not me.
23 Q. [Mr Rampton] Well, you published this thing.
24 A. [Mr Irving] There is a distinction between publishers and authors.
25I explained it to you.
26 Q. [Mr Rampton] I know that, but a publisher normally has to organise the
1printing of the pictures. He has to make sure that the
2pictures are properly identified and he usually knows who
3does it, does he not?
4 A. [Mr Irving] For purposes of this court, it would satisfy you if I say
5on oath that I did not write that, surely?
6 Q. [Mr Rampton] Not necessarily, no, Mr Irving. Look at the one in the
7bottom right hand corner.
8 A. [Mr Irving] The picture?
9 Q. [Mr Rampton] No. First of all, caption. It says bottom right that an
10actual fumigating chamber was used to delouse inmates'
12 A. [Mr Irving] You have lost me, I am afraid.
13 MR JUSTICE GRAY: You have lost me too.
14 A. [Mr Irving] You have lost us both.
15 MR RAMPTON: Then I will have to come back to it the copy you
16have is not the copy that I have. It is on Mr Julius's
18 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Maybe I am looking in the wrong place, but
19I do not think I have it.
20 MR RAMPTON: I just want to make sure the Foreword is the same
21before we get completely --
22 MR JUSTICE GRAY: I do not think there is any problem about
23that. It is about six pages in. Foreword by David
24Irving. Have you got the Foreword now?
25 A. [Mr Irving] Yes.
26 MR RAMPTON: You wrote the Foreword, it appears, in May 1989?
1 A. [Mr Irving] Yes.
2 Q. [Mr Rampton] It is copyright?
3 A. [Mr Irving] Yes.
4 Q. [Mr Rampton] David Irving. You start: "Unlike the writing of history
5chemistry is an exact science", yes?
6 A. [Mr Irving] Yes.
7 Q. [Mr Rampton] I am not going to read the whole of it by any manner of
8means. There are only some small parts that I need for
9this purpose.
10 A. [Mr Irving] I rely on the whole Foreword and not just on the parts you
11are going to read.
12 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Rely on me to read them.
13 MR RAMPTON: Ask his Lordship to read it, but I am not going to
14read it all out. It is a waste of the court's time and of
15my vocal chords. If you go please to the first column,
16five paragraphs down, you write this: "Nobody like to be
17swindled, still less where considerable sums of money are
18involved (since 1949 the state of Israel has received over
1990 billion deutschemarks in voluntary reparations from
20West Germany, essentially in atonement for the "gas
21chambers of Auschwitz)". Gas chambers in plural. Then
22you go on: "This myth will not die easily."
23 Then you go on about how it was an ingenious
24plan invented by the PWE during the war. Please go to the
25next column, second paragraph. I will start at the first
26paragraph first complete paragraph:
1 "Yet I have to admit" -- this is you
2Mr Irving -- "that it would never have occurred to me to
3subject the actual fabric of the Auschwitz concentration
4camp and its "gas chambers" - the holiest shrines of this
5new 20th century religion - to chemical tests to see if
6there was any trace of cyanide compounds in the walls.
7The truly astonishing results are as set out in this
8report: While significant quantities of cyanide compounds
9were found in the small delousing facilities of the camp,
10whether proprietary and lethal compounds were used, as all
11are agreed, to disinfect the plague ridden clothing of all
12persons entering these brutal slave labour camps, no
13significant trace whatsoever was found in the buildings
14which international opinion - for it is not more than that
15-- as always labelled as the camps' infamous gas
16chambers. Nor, as the report's gruesomely expert author
17makes plain, could the design and construction of those
18buildings have made their use as mass gas chambers
19feasible under any circumstances".
20 Then in the next paragraph you write that you
21have reservations about his methodology, but they are
22reservations which you quickly, if I may suggest,
23abandon. You end the paragraph: "The video tapes made
24simultaneously by the team - which I have studied -
25provide compelling visual evidence of the scrupulous
26methods that they use". Then you finish up: "Until the
1end of this tragic century there will always be
2incorrigible historians, statesmen and publicists, who are
3content to believe, or have no economically viable
4alternative but to believe, that the Nazis used "gas
5chambers" at Auschwitz to kill human beings. But it is
6now up to them to explain to me as an intelligent and
7critical student of modern history why there is no
8significant trace of any cyanide compound in the building
9which they have always identified as the former gas
11 A. [Mr Irving] "The building" is in the singular.
12 Q. [Mr Rampton] Sorry, "in the building which they always identified as
13the former gas chambers. Forensic chemistry is, I repeat,
14an exact science. The ball is in their court."
15 Mr Irving, just so that we do not get tangled up
16in singular or plural gas chambers, please turn quickly to
18 A. [Mr Irving] You rather skated over the paragraph, of course, in which
19I drew attention to the flaws in the report.
20 Q. [Mr Rampton] You can draw attention that in your re-examination,
21Mr Irving.
22 A. [Mr Irving] Yes, but several days will pass between now and then.
23 Q. [Mr Rampton] I am trying to make progress.
24 MR JUSTICE GRAY: That is a reference to the sentence where you
25say you prefer to have seen more rigorous methods used in
26identifying and so on?
1 A. [Mr Irving] Indeed, my Lord. I accept already at this time that the
2report is flawed.
3 MR RAMPTON: As will you see, Mr Irving, as time goes by, your
4reservations seem to vanish into thin air.
5 A. [Mr Irving] Completely the opposite. If you read the correspondence
6in this very bundle which you put before the court, there
7are letters between me and Mr Zundel and other people
8saying that engineers have now drawn attention to the
9serious flaws in the Leuchter report, and we have to
10address them.
11 Q. [Mr Rampton] We are going to look at that. The point is this,
12Mr Irving.
13 A. [Mr Irving] My reservations did not vanish.
14 Q. [Mr Rampton] What you say privately to people like Mark Weber and Ernst
15Zundel is quite different from what you say publicly.
16That is my point and this is where we are going to go
18 A. [Mr Irving] Good.
19 Q. [Mr Rampton] You say publicly that which you know to be untrue about
20the value of the Leuchter report.
21 A. [Mr Irving] In the meantime, of course, we have other reports to back
22up the original conclusions of the Leuchter report.
23 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Do not let us get distracted. You have made
24your point about the flaws in the methodology.
25 A. [Mr Irving] Yes.
26 MR RAMPTON: Just so we do not have any more confusion about
1this at all, had you read this version of the Leuchter
2report when you wrote your introduction?
3 A. [Mr Irving] No. I had read, of course, the original affidavit, the
4full length affidavit of which this is a precis.
5 Q. [Mr Rampton] Had you read this version of the Leuchter report before
6your press conference in June 1989?
7 A. [Mr Irving] No. Why should I read the abridged version when I had
8already read the full version length version?
9 Q. [Mr Rampton] Because you are the publisher, Mr Irving. It is a very
10short document.
11 A. [Mr Irving] I am sorry to disappoint you, but that does not
12necessarily follow. I had read the original one inch
13thick version.
14 Q. [Mr Rampton] Just look on page 15.
15 A. [Mr Irving] Had I attended in greater detail to this, there are
16certain things that I would not have tolerated, for
17example the sideways printing I would not have liked,
18things like that.
19 Q. [Mr Rampton] Just look at page 15 of this version of the Leuchter
21 A. [Mr Irving] Yes.
22 Q. [Mr Rampton] Which is published by you in the right hand column under
23the heading "Forensic considerations of HCN cyanide
24compounds..." in the bottom right hand corner.
25 A. [Mr Irving] Yes.
26 Q. [Mr Rampton] Look at the second paragraph.
1 A. [Mr Irving] Yes.
2 Q. [Mr Rampton] "31 samples were selectively removed from the alleged gas
3chambers (plural) at Kramers 1, 2, 3, 4 and 5, a control
4sample was taken from delousing facility no 1 at
5Birkenau ". Let us not have any more of this nonsense
6that, when you talk about the gas chambers at Auschwitz
7and the value of Mr Leuchter's report, you are talking
8simply about the reconstructed gas chamber at Auschwitz.
9 A. [Mr Irving] I never said that. On the contrary, this is exactly what
10I have denied saying. We are referring to all the
11buildings which are now claimed to have been gas chambers,
12from which these samples were taken.
13 Q. [Mr Rampton] If you look at the next paragraph, while we have it open
14and I shall not have to come back to it, you write in
15bold, or it is printed in bold under your imprint: "The
16control sample was removed from any delousing chamber in a
17location where cyanide was known to have been used and
18was apparently present as blue staining. The chemical
19testing of control sample No. 32 showed a cyanide content
20of 1,050 milligram per kilogram, a very heavy
21concentration". Perfectly right.
22 MR JUSTICE GRAY: And sample No. 32 is the one taken from the
23Birkenhau delousing facility. Is that right?
24 MR RAMPTON: Yes. When Professor van Pelt gives evidence, he
25will make it a good deal clearer but, if your Lordship
26looks at page 26 of this report, this time the page is on
1the left hand corner, there is a plan of Birkenhau at the
2bottom of the page. On the right-hand side of that plan
3is a key and F in the key is delousing facility No. 1,
4where Mr Leuchter says he found concentration of over
51,000 milligrams per kilogram of some kind of cyanide
7 MR JUSTICE GRAY: That is bottom left.
8 MR RAMPTON: Exactly. That is the building known as BW 5A. It
9is a brick building and it is in what became the women's
10part of the camp at Birkenau. It is there to this day.
11 MR JUSTICE GRAY: That is on your case the first gas chamber?
12 MR RAMPTON: No, it is not a gas chamber at all. That is a
13delousing facility. If your Lordship wants to look at
14where the gas chambers are, they are K 2 on the left-hand
15side and K 3, and then in the middle of the page towards
16the top there is K 4 and K 5.
17 MR JUSTICE GRAY: I have not found K 2 and K 3.
18 MR RAMPTON: On the left, my Lord, you see the compass.
19 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Up there yes, I see.
20 MR RAMPTON: If one goes southeast of the compass, they are
21side by side, either side of the railway track.
22 MR JUSTICE GRAY: That is all Birkenhau?
23 MR RAMPTON: This is all Birkenhau, as it says in the bottom
24left hand corner.
25 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Yes, sorry. That was my enquiry.
26 MR RAMPTON: Your Lordship should ignore the little (f) at the
1top of the page. That is not Mr Leuchter's (f). That is
2an (f) from the original plan and that is a separate
3delousing facility that was built in 1944, and which was
4hardly used in the Zyklon bay at all, mostly steam
5autoclaves as are shown in the front of the report.
6 Then I will read on, if I may, Mr Irving, on
7page 15: "The conditions and areas from which these
8samples were taken are identical with those of the
9controlled sample, cold dark and wet. Only Kramers 4 and
105 differed in the respect that these locations had
11sunlight, the buildings had been torn down, and sunlight
12may hasten the destruction of uncomplex cyanide. The
13cyanide in the mortar and brick becomes ferro-cyanide or
14Prussian blue pigment, a very stable iron cyonide
16 Are you aware of the errors in that paragraph,
17Mr Irving?
18 A. [Mr Irving] I am not a chemical expert.
19 Q. [Mr Rampton] Are you aware of the errors in the description of the
20state of the buildings?
21 A. [Mr Irving] No.
22 Q. [Mr Rampton] Then he says the locations from which the analysed samples
23were removed are set out in table 3.
24 A. [Mr Irving] If you are going to say there are errors, perhaps you
25ought to explain to the court what the errors are.
26 Q. [Mr Rampton] No, Mr Irving. If you do not know what they are?
1 A. [Mr Irving] You just claimed there were errors.
2 Q. [Mr Rampton] Yes, there are errors. Van Pelt's report is full of errors
3identified, for example, crematoria 2 and 3 are open to
4the skies, the ruins.
5 A. [Mr Irving] I have very big photographs taken recently of those
6crematoria which I will show to the court this afternoon,
7if the court pleases.
8 Q. [Mr Rampton] That is fine, Mr Irving. They are open to the skies.
9They were blown up in early 1935 just before the Russians
10got there. They are ruins. The delousing facility BW 5A
11in the women's camp is a perfectly intact building with a
12roof on it.
13 A. [Mr Irving] I beg to differ. The morgue No. 1 of crematorium II may
14have been blown up but it is intact inasmuch as the roof
15just pancaked downwards and it is possible to crawl
16underneath the roof, which is what I believe Mr Leuchter
18 Q. [Mr Rampton] What about crematorium III? He took samples there too,
19did he not?
20 A. [Mr Irving] Yes.
21 Q. [Mr Rampton] Look what he found. "It is notable that almost all the
22samples were negative and that the few that were positive
23were very close to the detection level, one milligram" --
24he has misprinted printed this, it is not KP but KG --
25"per KG, 6.7 milligrams per K G at Kramer 3, 7.9
26milligrams per kilogram at Kramer 1", that is in the old
1camp, Auschwitz I.
2 A. [Mr Irving] "Close to the detection level" means of no significance,
3in other words no statistical significance.
4 Q. [Mr Rampton] I thought you were not a scientist?
5 A. [Mr Irving] You asked me what I know about ferro-cyanides and
6uncomplex cyanide compounds. I am afraid I am way out of
7my depth there.
8 Q. [Mr Rampton] You know it is wrong that it is very stable, do you not?
9 A. [Mr Irving] Ferro-cyanide is so stable that it is used as a dye stuff,
10Prussian blue.
11 Q. [Mr Rampton] Not if it is exposed to the elements over a period of 40
13 A. [Mr Irving] We will produce photographs to the court to show just how
14stable it is.
15 Q. [Mr Rampton] It goes on: "In the absence of any consequential readings
16at any of the tested locations as compared with the
17controlled sample reading of 1050 milligrams per kilogram
18supports the evidence that these facilities were not
19execution gas chambers. The small quantities detected
20would indicate that at some point these building were
21deloused with Zyklon bay as were all the buildings at
22these facilities. Additionally, the areas of blue
23staining show a high iron content indicated ferro cyanide
24no longer hydrogen cyanide." Then in italics in bold,
25which we have seen before but I will just read it again
26now, "One would have expected higher cyanide detection in
1the samples taken from the alleged gas chambers because of
2the greater amount of gas alleged to be utilized there
3than that found in the controlled samples. Since the
4contrary is true, one must conclude that these facilities
5were not execution chambers when coupled with all the
6other evidence gained on inspection."
7 Leave it there, will you, for the moment?
8 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Can I ask this question because we are
9plundering into this and I do need to, sort of, understand
10the big picture. Is this the passage which struck you
11when you first saw the affidavit which led you to have
12your change of mind?
13 A. [Mr Irving] The statistical table, quite simply, the contrast between
14the enormous quantities in the delousing chamber and the
15infinitesimally insignificant quantities in the alleged
16homicidal gas chambers where, allegedly, 500,000 people
17had been gassed to death.
18 Q. [Mr Justice Gray] My question is whether it is the text or whether ----
19 A. [Mr Irving] It is.
20 Q. [Mr Justice Gray] --- it is the tables. This is the bit of the report
21which ----
22 A. [Mr Irving] The argument, I would say, rather than the actual bit of
23the report. When you come away, having looked at that,
24you say, well, if those are the figures, if that is the
25argument, I am wow'd by it, I am impressed, because, as
26I said in my introduction, that is an exact science we are
1talking about. We do not have to read between the lines
2of German documents and try to look for euphemisms.
3 MR RAMPTON: Mr Irving, before we go back to the Leuchter
4report, just so there shall not be any doubt about what
5you have been saying since it came out, this is merely one
6example, there are about at least a dozen, maybe 20, if we
7turn to tab 20 of the third of these new files?
8 A. [Mr Irving] I can quite simply right now my position has remained
9unchanged from that day to this on precisely these
11 Q. [Mr Rampton] Despite the fact that you have communicated reservations
12about this question, in particular, to your friends,
13Mr Zundel and Mr Weber, a consequence of having received
14critical reports from outside people?
15 A. [Mr Irving] The critical reports, if my memory is correct, were
16relating to Mr Leuchter's other rather superfluous
17calculations, like how many people can fit into one square
18metre, and this kind of calculation which I thought
19detracted from the ----
20 Q. [Mr Rampton] Mr Irving, be careful.
21 A. [Mr Irving] Yes.
22 Q. [Mr Rampton] We are going to look at what Mr Beer, for example, wrote
23to you in January 1990 in a moment.
24 A. [Mr Irving] Well, we are looking at a letter written 10 years ago.
25I am quite happy to be surprised by what I wrote then.
26 Q. [Mr Rampton] No, Mr Irving. In 1995 at Tampa, Florida, for example,
1you were as categorical in your dependence on
2Mr Leuchter's findings as to the relative amounts of
3residues as you ever have been?
4 A. [Mr Irving] And I still am.
5 Q. [Mr Rampton] Despite having known that they were rubbish?
6 A. [Mr Irving] I still am. My position on the significance, the global
7significance, of those discrepancies between the residues
8is the same now as it was then and I will be justifying
9this when the time comes.
10 Q. [Mr Rampton] Can you please take the first of those files, Auschwitz
11files, and it is in the same file as the Leuchter report
12which we are going to come back to in a moment, and turn
13to tab 5?
14 MR JUSTICE GRAY: We are leaving the Leuchter now?
15 MR RAMPTON: No, this is all to do with the Leuchter. My Lord,
16what I am interested in is not the objective value of the
17Leuchter report, which I hope we need not go into in this
18court -- we may have to -- but Mr Irving's treatment of it
19in the light of the knowledge which he had and which is
20itself contained in the report to which I am coming back,
21but only for that purpose.
22 MR JUSTICE GRAY: His position is really very simple, is it
23not? It is this particular aspect of the report which
24caused him to engage in what you have described as the
25volte-face, and he maintains that position. So, in a
26sense, his position could not be more sharply defined.
1 MR RAMPTON: He knows it is wrong.
2 MR JUSTICE GRAY: That is the point, obviously, that needs to
3be pursued.
4 MR RAMPTON: He knows there is a whole lot else wrong with this
5report. He knows, for example, the densities in the gas
6chambers is wrong.
7 MR JUSTICE GRAY: That may or not be an issue; I suspect not.
8 A. [Mr Irving] The what in the gas chambers?
9 MR RAMPTON: The density of people in the gas chambers.
10 A. [Mr Irving] Oh, the density of people.
11 Q. [Mr Rampton] Leuchter's assumptions about that are complete rubbish,
12are they not?
13 A. [Mr Irving] Well, of course, this is precisely one thing that
14I challenged in my correspondence behind the scenes with
15people saying, "He is wrong on this and we have got to
16watch that he does not" ----
17 Q. [Mr Rampton] Have you ever made that statement publicly before today?
18 A. [Mr Irving] No, because that was not the crucial element of the
19Leuchter on which I relied. The crucial element is the
20scientific findings. As I say, chemistry is an exact
21science; you cannot get round it. The courts are
22convicting people the whole time on the basis of
24 Q. [Mr Rampton] Yes, Mr Irving. Sometimes they are. It is not quite as
25exact as you may think, I think. However, that s beside
26the point. Chemistry is an exact science. You get small
1residues, or you call them insignificant, traces in the
2gas chambers remains and much bigger traces in the
3delousing remains. That is the position, is it not?
4 A. [Mr Irving] That is the position.
5 Q. [Mr Rampton] You have known that all along?
6 A. [Mr Irving] Yes, and it has been confirmed by subsequent tests, even
7by the Poles.
8 Q. [Mr Rampton] Mr Irving, I know that. They found that out and Professor
9Markievitch found it out in 1994. You know that?
10 A. [Mr Irving] He did not actually carry out the tests himself. He had
11others carry out the tests.
12 Q. [Mr Rampton] Now please turn to ----
13 A. [Mr Irving] Tab 6 or tab 5 did you say?
14 Q. [Mr Rampton] I think it is tab 5.
15 A. [Mr Irving] "Critique of forensic examinations".
16 Q. [Mr Rampton] This you received -- I am just checking the date of the
17letter you wrote to Mr Weber, 12th January 1990?
18 A. [Mr Irving] Yes.
19 Q. [Mr Rampton] You write actually to Mr Beer, from Florida, and you say:
20 "Dear Mr Beer, thank you so much for sending me that
21anonymous treatise on the Leuchter report"?
22 MR JUSTICE GRAY: I am sorry, Mr Rampton, I was distracted.
23Where are you now? I thought you said you were tab 5.
24 MR RAMPTON: I will try to do a little of bit of history
25first. If it is not the way round, then it makes sense,
26perhaps, to do it chronologically. In tab 8, my Lord,
1there is a short bundle of correspondence, and I do not
2know if your Lordship's pages are paginated?
3 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Yes, they are.
4 MR RAMPTON: Mine are not. Then it is a letter which has 12th
5January 1990 on it, page 12?
6 A. [Mr Irving] Page 12, yes. My Lord, this, of course, is not an agreed
7bundle in any sense. We are just seeing the documents
8that the Defence ----
9 MR JUSTICE GRAY: If there is any document in it that you for
10one reason or another challenge, then please say so.
11 A. [Mr Irving] No, my Lord, but, of course, it is just a very loaded
12selection of documents. Of course, they have not put any
13documents that would support my case.
14 Q. [Mr Justice Gray] You have not seen this file until today?
15 A. [Mr Irving] Not until this morning, but I am quite happy to rest on
16these letters.
17 MR RAMPTON: "Dear Mr Beer", you write on 12th January 1990,
18 "Thank you so much for sending me that anonymous treatise
19on the Leuchter report to which I wrote the introduction.
20Incidentally, that is all that I wrote. My involvement in
21the project is no larger than that" ----
22 A. [Mr Irving] So why did you suggest that I had written the rest of the
24 Q. [Mr Rampton] I did not. I wanted to know who had written the captions,
25Mr Irving?
26 A. [Mr Irving] You wanted to know who wrote the report.
1 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Mr Irving, I know it is very tempting, but if
2we chase every hare we are going to be here until ...
3 MR RAMPTON: And then you say this, Mr Irving: "I agree" -- we
4will look at the criticisms in a moment -- "agree, in
5fact, with many of your friends' criticisms and ascribe
6most of the shortcomings to the fact that engineers, like
7trade unionists, do not share the facility of expressing
8themselves in English that writers and poets have. Having
9said that, let me make a few general and specific
10points". Then I need not read the first three sentences,
11I think.
12 A. [Mr Irving] I would rather you do.
13 Q. [Mr Rampton] I will if you want: "In October 1989, a follow up mission
14went to Auschwitz and brought back their findings in video
15form and they will shortly be published as a video.
16Again I have provided a German spoken introduction. The
17quality is magnificent and enables the viewer to see where
18somebody, the Poles(?) has attempted to falsify cavities,
19openings, etc. in the 'gas chambers' to make them accord
20with eye witness testimony".
21 Now this is the sentence that I am interested
22in: "I think your friends' strictures about the 3,200
23parts per million argument are right, but cannot agree
24that you should automatically go right to the other end of
25the scale 100 parts per million".
26 Mr Irving, that shows, does it not, that you
1knew perfectly well that Fred Leuchter's assumption that
2the Nazis would have used a concentration of 3,200 parts
3per million to kill their victims was a nonsense?
4 A. [Mr Irving] No, not a nonsense, but probably not justified on the
6 Q. [Mr Rampton] Now ----
7 A. [Mr Irving] Not to go right to the other end of the scale.
8 Q. [Mr Rampton] It goes down to about 300, I agree. It does not go as far
9as 100.
10 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Do I not need to see what the strictures
12 MR RAMPTON: Yes. I am just going to show your Lordship. The
13best way, my Lord, of doing this -- it is at tab 5, my
14Lord -- maybe the best way of dealing with this, because
15it is quite important, I would suggest ----
16 MR JUSTICE GRAY: I can understand it is.
17 MR RAMPTON: --- that your Lordship reads the whole of it.
18 MR JUSTICE GRAY: The critique?
19 MR RAMPTON: Yes.
20 A. [Mr Irving] And this letter to Mr Beer, please.
21 MR RAMPTON: And the whole of the letter to Mr Beer as well,
22I quite agree with that, because it will save time when
23I then come back because I can ask ----
24 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Do you want me to do that now?
25 MR RAMPTON: I think it would help before I start asking
26questions about it because your Lordship will only find
1that I am jumping too far ahead. It will take quite a
2little bit of time. Whether your Lordship would like to
3leave court for five minutes?
4 MR JUSTICE GRAY: I suspect that there would be some who would
5welcome that. Perhaps I shall. It should not take up
6more than five minutes.
7 MR RAMPTON: It should not, but it is not something to skim, if
8I may say so?
9 A. [Mr Irving] I agree. If your Lordship will also pay attention to the
10marginal notes in the left-hand margin of the critique?
11They are handwritten notes by me at the time.
12 MR RAMPTON: Yes, that, certainly. Unfortunately, mine have
13been cut off.
14 MR JUSTICE GRAY: I think they have been cut off.
15 A. [Mr Irving] I can just very rapidly say at the first page it says
16"totally untrue"; the second page it says "vernouwi
17effect" which is something in liquid dynamics; the third
18page says "this is a bit too pretty" -- these are my
19comments -- then "important" I have underlined and then
20"no", I cannot read the next one.
21 MR JUSTICE GRAY: When did you put those comments on?
22 A. [Mr Irving] The day I received it, my Lord.
23 MR RAMPTON: Is there another "important" on the fifth page?
24 A. [Mr Irving] Yes, I have no idea what they refer to. I just...
25 Q. [Mr Rampton] Against paragraph 7 in a bracket on page 5, I cannot make
26anything of that. Mine has a hole punched through it
1apart from anything else. This small handwriting.
2 A. [Mr Irving] Well, I very probably then quoted it in my letter to
3Mr Beer because that is what I appear to have done.
4 Q. [Mr Rampton] All I can see is an exclamation mark.
5 MR JUSTICE GRAY: I will go and read it. It will probably take
6me between five and 10 minutes.
7 MR RAMPTON: Shall we come back at 10 to 12?
8 MR JUSTICE GRAY: I will let you know.
9 (The court adjourned for a short time)
10 MR JUSTICE GRAY: I have read the critique and the letter to
11Mr Beer.
12 MR RAMPTON: My Lord, I am grateful. Then, Mr Irving, I need
13only ask this, I hope. That report sent to you by
14Mr Colin Beer, I think it was, at the beginning of January
151990 was, in fact, a demolition of the Leuchter report,
16was it not?
17 A. [Mr Irving] He calls it a critique. It is not an extermination or
18even an annihilation. It is a critique.
19 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Fundamentally flawed?
20 A. [Mr Irving] Yes.
21 MR RAMPTON: Yes, fundamentally flawed. I will read the last
22paragraph of his conclusions. "The evidence of the
23Leuchter report when taken in the context of the times and
24in full consideration of all other evidence is consistent
25with that other evidence and together strongly supports
26both the fact and scale of the massacres in the gas
1chambers at Birkenhau, provided the assumption is made
2that the gas chambers operated at a relatively low toxic
4 That is the key to it, is it not, Mr Irving?
5 A. [Mr Irving] Yes.
6 Q. [Mr Rampton] If there is a low concentration used in the gas chambers,
7a number of consequences flow, do they not? First, the
8need for a ventilation system, if any, is much reduced?
10 A. [Mr Irving] Well, the ventilation system in mortuaries as prescribed
11by the architectural handbook.
12 MR JUSTICE GRAY: That is not an answer to the question.
13 MR RAMPTON: It is not a mortuary. If it is a gas chamber,
14Mr Irving, and the concentration used is contrary to what
15Mr Fred Leuchter unjustifiably assumed, contrary to its
16being 3,200 parts per million, it is something around 300
17parts per million or, as Mr Beer suggests, 100 parts per
18million, then any need to pay serious attention to
19ventilation is much reduced, is it not?
20 A. [Mr Irving] That would be a logical conclusion, yes.
21 Q. [Mr Rampton] It will be a logical conclusion, would it not, that the
22risk of contamination of water in the sewers is much
23reduced, perhaps to complete insignificance?
24 A. [Mr Irving] That would be another logical conclusion.
25 Q. [Mr Rampton] It would be a logical conclusion that the need for the
26people administering the poison gas to take what I might
1call strong security precautions, safety precautions, is
2much reduced, is it not?
3 A. [Mr Irving] That would be a logical conclusion to your hypothesis,
5 Q. [Mr Rampton] It means, does it not, Mr Irving, that the time which has
6to be waited before the sonder commander can go in and get
7the bodies out, whether or not they are wearing gas masks,
8is much reduced, is it not?
9 A. [Mr Irving] This would be the logical conclusion of your hypothesis,
11 Q. [Mr Rampton] Above all, it means this, does it not, that the discovery
12by Mr Leuchter of the small traces of cyanide compounds in
13material taken from the walls of the alleged gas chambers
14at crematorium (iii) in Birkenhau is entirely consistent
15with a low concentration having been used in the first
17 A. [Mr Irving] No.
18 Q. [Mr Rampton] Why?
19 A. [Mr Irving] You have to take various other factors into
20consideration. It is a totally false logic. We know from
21the other documentation that your witness is going to
22present that these buildings had been freshly constructed,
23they were made of concrete. You are shaking your head.
24 Q. [Mr Rampton] Because only one building has been reconstructed.
25 A. [Mr Irving] Freshly constructed at the time they were put in ----
26 MR JUSTICE GRAY: "Freshly" not "re".
1 MR RAMPTON: I see.
2 A. [Mr Irving] They were made -- they were raw, they were green
3concrete. The concrete was still sweating. You are
4shaking your head.
5 Q. [Mr Rampton] I am shaking my head, Mr Irving, simply because you are
6plain wrong. If you had taken the trouble to go to
7Birkenhau, you would have seen on the walls of the
8Leichenkellers in (ii) and (iii) remains, quite
9substantial remains, of a coating on the walls, plaster or
11 A. [Mr Irving] We shall be producing photographs of the interior of
12Liechenkeller (1) and the other buildings which show quite
13clearly there is no coating on the walls.
14 Q. [Mr Rampton] Mr Irving, look at it this way. Suppose that -- some of
15the coating has fallen off, I quite agree.
16 A. [Mr Irving] No. This is the original interior.
17 Q. [Mr Rampton] Mr Irving, I have seen it. Do not argue with me. Argue
18with Professor van Pelt. If you are going to produce ----
19 A. [Mr Irving] I am providing an answer to your points. You may not like
20the answers, but these are the answers you get from me.
21 Q. [Mr Rampton] Mr Irving, if you are going to produce evidence that there
22is no coating to be found on any of the remains of
23LiechenKellar (1) in crematoria (ii) and (iii) at
24Birkenhau, I am happy to see it. I shall admit fault if
25you are right. Mr Irving -----
26 A. [Mr Irving] Can I continue with the point I was making?
1 Q. [Mr Rampton] Yes.
2 A. [Mr Irving] This is fresh concrete. Fresh concrete sweats, I know.
3I have worked in a concrete gang myself for three years
4with John Lang. Concrete is very alkaline. You have to
5wear gloves when you are working with it unless you want
6your fingers to end up rotting away. Hydrogen cyanide is
7an acid. They react fiercely, even in small quantities.
8You would expect to see precisely the kind of chemical
9compounds and changes which would have produced permanent
10lasting results ----
11 Q. [Mr Rampton] Mr Irving ----
12 A. [Mr Irving] --- even in small quantity, even in small dosages.
13 Q. [Mr Rampton] (A) not if the walls are coated, and (B) not probably if
14the concentration is as low as 300 parts per million.
15 A. [Mr Irving] There are we are in terra incognita ----
16 Q. [Mr Rampton] Well, you are.
17 A. [Mr Irving] --- Mr Rampton, because we do not know what the scientific
18qualifications of this particular author are. We know all
19about the scientific qualifications of Professor van
20Pelt. We know about the scientific qualifications of
21other experts in this case. It would be very dangerous
22indeed to attach as much weight as you are seeking to do
23to this critique of forensic examinations by an anonymous
24correspondent who does not give us any details of his
25chemical or scientific qualifications purely because he,
26hostile to the Leuchter report, puts in the paragraph at
1the end saying deeply flawed. You cannot do that kind of
2weighing up. You have to -- yes, my Lord.
3 MR JUSTICE GRAY: In a way, you are slightly perverting the
4argument. I do not mean that in a critical sense. The
5point that is really being made by the South African
6engineer, Crabtree, is really that the fundamental premise
7of Leuchter's argument can be, as it were, turned on its
8head so that really Leuchter's conclusions are
9diametrically wrong. Is that not what Crabtree is saying?
10 A. [Mr Irving] This is what he says, my Lord. And let me just, if I can
11just turn the wheel back very slightly and remind you of
12the last words of my introduction to the Leuchter report?
13The ball is now in their court. This report is very much
14intended to provoke precisely the kind of discussion which
15is now arising.
16 Q. [Mr Justice Gray] No, but my trouble with your evidence -- let me make it
17clear -- is that you are, as it were, criticising
18Crabtree's conclusion that the level would have been 100
19ppm or 300 ppm?
20 MR RAMPTON: My Lord, this is Beer, not Crabtree, this one.
21 MR JUSTICE GRAY: I am sorry.
22 MR RAMPTON: Crabtree is an earlier one. I may go back to him.
23 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Yes, but are you criticising Beer's
24conclusion that it would have been 100 to 300 ppm, when
25really what we should be addressing is whether Leuchter's
26assumption of 3,200 ppm was a legitimate and sensible
1assumption to be making; is that not right?
2 A. [Mr Irving] I completely agree with you.
3 Q. [Mr Justice Gray] Do you follow the point I am putting to you?
4 A. [Mr Irving] I completely agree and you are absolutely right. There
5are probably concessions have to be made at both ends of
6this scale.
7 Q. [Mr Justice Gray] That may well be right, but let us focus on Leuchter's
8assumption of the very high concentrate?
9 A. [Mr Irving] My Lord, you will see that in the bundle of correspondence
10which your Lordship has read only one item under No. 8,
11I wrote to all parties concerned saying: "Clearly, these
12criticisms I am now receiving have to be taken on board
13and we have to do something about it". Back came the
14objection from Mr Zundel: "This is a court affidavit
15which we cannot publish it in an altered form. We can
16only continue to publish it in the form as originally
17submitted". So we are at a slight -- over a bit of a
18barrel there. It is not as easy as your Lordship thinks.
19 The other point that I thought I had made is
20that the Leuchter report was intended to provoke precisely
21the discussion which we have succeeded in provoking at
22every level, including the scientific discussion.
23 MR RAMPTON: But, Mr Irving, I am diverting slightly. I am
24coming back to Leichenkeller (1) in crematoria (ii) and
25(iii) in a moment. You have never ever publicly
26acknowledged the powerful -- no, I am going to use this --
1cogent, very cogent, critiques which you have received of
2the Leuchter report?
3 A. [Mr Irving] Because, in the meantime, of course, Leuchter had been
4replicated by other experts. At the very press conference
5that you read excerpts out from, I was challenged on this
6point, and I said, "If you don't like Leuchter's results,
7go and do the tests yourself and prove that I am a
8nincompoop", I think was the word I used.
9 Q. [Mr Rampton] Professor Markievitch did just that and did prove that you
10were a nincompoop, did he not?
11 A. [Mr Irving] Are you going to put his report in evidence to the court?
12 Q. [Mr Rampton] It is here.
13 A. [Mr Irving] Shall we say that when we get to it?
14 Q. [Mr Rampton] Yes, we will look at it. It is not done until 1994.
15 A. [Mr Irving] There is also an earlier report conducted in 1945.
16 Q. [Mr Rampton] That is in German and we are certainly going to look at
17that. That is the one from Cracow in December 1945. Go
18back to this question.
19 A. [Mr Irving] And, of course, Gelmar Rudolf did a much more detailed
20scientific test.
21 Q. [Mr Rampton] I am sure you will refer to that in your evidence at some
23 A. [Mr Irving] It cannot be ignored. He is a qualified scientist. The
24only reason he did not get his doctorate was precisely
25because of coming up with politically incorrect findings
26on this matter.
1 Q. [Mr Rampton] Mr Irving, the fact is, though you evidently do not know
2it, that the walls of Leichenkeller I and crematoria 2 and
33 are not made of concrete at all.
4 A. [Mr Irving] We are talk about the roof, the ceiling.
5 Q. [Mr Rampton] You are talking now about the roof, are you?
6 A. [Mr Irving] The cyanide was not exactly selective about where it
8 Q. [Mr Rampton] Do you agree with me that, if the concentration needed to
9kill lice is 22 times greater than that needed to kill
10human beings -- I am not suggesting this is an exact
11proportion -- it is more likely that you will find 40
12years later or whatever it is, 50 years later, you will
13find residual traces of hydrogen cyanide in the delousing
14facility than you will in the supposed gas chamber?
15 A. [Mr Irving] They carried out controlled tests on buildings where there
16had been no cyanide used whatsoever, not just in these
17camps but also in for example in Bavaria, and found
18exactly the same in significant levels.
19 MR JUSTICE GRAY: I do not think that that is an answer to the
20question at all.
21 A. [Mr Irving] Very well.
22 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Do you want the question repeated?
23 A. [Mr Irving] If those figures are correct, then obviously you would
24expect substantially more. This is correct, but you
25certainly would not expect nothing significant in the
26alleged homicidal gas chambers and that is what all the
1tests so far have established.
2 MR RAMPTON: Would you please turn to tab 9 of this bundle? It
3is a very short extract?
4 A. [Mr Irving] Oh, yes, Dr Roth.
5 Q. [Mr Rampton] Tell me who Dr Roth is?
6 A. [Mr Irving] Dr Roth was the forensic analyst who was employed by Ernst
7Zundel's defence team to carry out the quantitative and
8qualitative analysis of the 30 odd samples which were
9brought back by Mr Leuchter from his visit to Auschwitz in
10February 1988.
11 Q. [Mr Rampton] Thank you very much. Now I will read out what he said in
12a television----
13 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Mr Rampton, you are assuming quite often more
14knowledge on my part than I possess. You are now looking
15at tab 9?
16 MR RAMPTON: Tab 9, my Lord, Dr Roth.
17 MR JUSTICE GRAY: I know nothing about Dr Roth at all.
18 MR RAMPTON: Mr Irving has just said that he is the chemist in
19charge of the Leuchter analysis.
20 A. [Mr Irving] He was the one who actually carried out the tests on the
21samples that Leuchter brought back.
22 MR JUSTICE GRAY: He is the chemist from the independent
24 A. [Mr Irving] In New England, yes. The Cornell University or something.
25 MR JUSTICE GRAY: It does sometimes help me if I have a little
26more context. My Lord, this transcript is, I believe from
1the film Dr Death, Mr Death, so we do not know if it is a
2complete transcript or not, but I accept for the purposes
3that it is.
4 MR RAMPTON: This is what Dr Roth said when he was interviewed
5for that programme, last year or something like that. He
6said this:
7 "I do not think that the Leuchter results have
8any meaning. There is nothing in any of our data that
9says those services were exposed or not. Hindsight being
1020/20, the test was not the correct one to have been used
11for the analysis. Leuchter presented us with rock samples
12anywhere from the side view of thumb up to half the size
13of your fist. He broke them up with a hammer so that we
14could get a subsample, placed it in a flask, add
15concentrated sulphuric acid and undergoes a reaction that
16produces a red coloured solution. It is the intensity of
17this red colour that we can relate with cyanide
18concentration. You have to look at what happens to
19cyanide when it reacts with a wall. Where does it go, how
20far goes it go? Cyanide is a surface reaction. It is
21probably not going to penetrate more than 10 microns. A
22human hair is 100 microns in diameter. Crush this sample
23up. I have just diluted that sample 10,000, 100,000
24times. If you are going to look for it, you are going to
25look on the surface face only. There is no reason to go
26deep because it is not going to be there. Which was the
1exposed surface? I did not have any idea. That is like
2analysing paint on a wall by analysing the timber that is
3behind it."
4 Now Mr Irving, that is the man that did the
6 A. [Mr Irving] Yes. Can I add that he also said on a part that is not in
7the film, "Had I known that these samples came from
8Auschwitz, I would have come up with completely different
10 MR JUSTICE GRAY: What is the significance, you say, of that?
11 A. [Mr Irving] I suggest that he is not entirely subjective not.
12 Q. [Mr Justice Gray] You mean objective?
13 A. [Mr Irving] Not entirely objective.
14 MR RAMPTON: Maybe. Mr Irving, what this suggests is, to use
15one of your words, it is absolutely shattering, is it not?
16Despite the absolutely hopeless methodology that Fred
17Leuchter used to obtain his samples, the fact is that the
18sample from the Leichenkeller in crematorium 3 still
19produced traces of hydrogen cyanide, did it not?
20 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Which samples is he talking about here?
21 MR RAMPTON: He is talking about the ruins of Auschwitz which
22Fred Leuchter surreptitiously removed on his visit and
23brought back to be analysed in America.
24 MR JUSTICE GRAY: From the gas chambers or the delousing
25chamber or both?
26 MR RAMPTON: Both, as far as I know. He did the whole lot and
1that is the where the figures in the Leuchter report come
2from, my Lord. It is from Dr Roth's analysis.
3 A. [Mr Irving] Dr Roth says that it is less than one tenth the thickness
4of a human hair that the cyanide will penetrate into the
6 Q. [Mr Rampton] Exactly. If you are going to do the test scientifically,
7you need carefully to scratch or scrape the surface and
8put it in a plastic bag, take it back and have it
9analysed. What Fred Leuchter did was to hack great lumps
10out of the fabric, did he not?
11 A. [Mr Irving] Mr Rampton, I am not just going to go annihilate evidence
12from Dr Roth, I am going to exterminate it when the time
13comes, when we produce the photographs.
14 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Make a start now.
15 A. [Mr Irving] My Lord, we have photographs taken of the outside of some
16of these buildings, I emphasise the word "outside", and
17the blue stain from the cyanide has gone right through the
18brickwork, inch after inch after inch. You can see the
19outside of the building is stained blue with a stain that
20turns out to be Prussian blue from the cyanide that has
21come right through the brickwork.
22 Q. [Mr Justice Gray] That is the delousing chamber, is it?
23 A. [Mr Irving] The delousing chamber, my Lord, yes and also a gas chamber
24at Stutthorf outside Dansig.
25 MR RAMPTON: How long, Mr Irving, does it take to delouse a
26set, I call it a set, of clothing of, let us say, 1500
1people in a delousing chamber using Zyklon B?
2 A. [Mr Irving] That is neither here nor there. Dr Roth had not spoken
3about the length of time. He says it goes less than one
4tenth of the thickness of a human hair into the brickwork.
5 Q. [Mr Rampton] How long does it take to disinfect, using Zyklon B,
6delouse the clothing of 1500 people?
7 A. [Mr Irving] I do not know.
8 MR JUSTICE GRAY: I think Mr Rampton is right, that the way it
9is put here, and it is not perhaps the most satisfactory
10way to present Dr Roth's views, if this is a television
11interview, is that cyanide is only ever a surface
13 MR RAMPTON: Yes indeed.
14 A. [Mr Irving] My Lord, these photographs will be in evidence later on
15this week.
16 MR JUSTICE GRAY: It is really a chemistry point, not a
17photograph point.
18 A. [Mr Irving] An image is worth a thousand words, perhaps.
19 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Maybe.
20 MR RAMPTON: It depends. The camera never lies, of course,
21does it, Mr Irving? Have the outside surfaces of that
22building which you say has the blue staining on it been
24 A. [Mr Irving] Yes, by Mr Gelman Rudolf. He has carried out very
25intensive tests on them.
26 Q. [Mr Rampton] Mr Irving, these criticisms by Mr Beer were cogent, were
1they not?
2 A. [Mr Irving] They were, yes, of course. I did not ignore them at all.
3I immediately contacted all relevant parties as the
4correspondence under flag 8 or 9 shows, and said we have
5to take these on board.
6 Q. [Mr Rampton] What about the general public?
7 A. [Mr Irving] Well, you must realize, by this time you also have the
8other collateral evidence.
9 Q. [Mr Rampton] By what time? When did your so-called collateral evidence
10come to light?
11 A. [Mr Irving] Oh, it was coming in the whole time. As soon as the
12Leuchter report was published, people starting contacting
13us and telling us about other such things.
14 Q. [Mr Rampton] What do you mean by collateral evidence?
15 A. [Mr Irving] For example, we know that both of a forensic nature,
16somebody sent us a copy of the Krakow report by the Jansen
17Institute which the Auschwitz state museum immediately
18commissioned after the Leuchter report was published, and
19they did not like the findings, and so they pigeonholed
20it. They put it in a safe and locked it away, because it
21basically substantiated what Mr Leuchter had said. Then
22the original Jansen report was also supplied to us, the
231945 report.
24 Q. [Mr Rampton] Us? Who is "us"?
25 A. [Mr Irving] Us?
26 Q. [Mr Rampton] You said "supplied us"?
1 A. [Mr Irving] A copy was supplied to me, a copy was supplied to the
2Institute of Historical Review in California, and in fact
3it was supplied to us surreptitiously. Somebody in the
4Auschwitz archives photographed a copy and sent us a copy
5of what the Auschwitz archives were concealing from.
6 Q. [Mr Rampton] I still do not know who "us" is?
7 A. [Mr Irving] Is it material?
8 Q. [Mr Rampton] Yes, I think it probably is, in the light of this
9correspondence which we are going to look at more in a
11 A. [Mr Irving] A copy was sent to me, a copy was sent to Mark Weber
12probably of the Institute of Historical Review.
13 Q. [Mr Rampton] And one no doubt to Ernst Zundel?
14 A. [Mr Irving] I think I sent a copy to him, if my memory is correct.
15These things were shuffled back and forth. Sometimes
16I got them, sometimes the others got them and then we
17would collaborate. We put our heads together. Obviously
18there is no point rushing into print with some kind of
19conclusion this way and that. It would be looking like
20headless chickens if you come out with first one thing and
21then another thing.
22 Q. [Mr Rampton] You have never publicly acknowledged any of these reports,
23critiques and so on which cast doubt, sometimes 100 per
24cent doubt, on your utterances about the gas chambers at
26 A. [Mr Irving] I do not agree. I think that the central chemical
1conclusions of the Leuchter report, although flawed, have
2now been substantially confirmed by a whole string of
3other reports in the meantime, both the one kept secret by
4the Auschwitz authorities and the earlier 1945 one, and
5the Gelmar Rudolf one, and other reports that have been
6conducted since then. Obviously the numbers do not
7exactly match, and you would not expect them to, but the
8broad trend is the same, very large quantities in the
9fumigation clambers, cyanide residues and not the
10quantities you would expect in the buildings where
11allegedly hundreds of thousands of people have been gassed
12to death with cyanide.
13 Q. [Mr Rampton] So you say. In order to set the scene, this has become a
14little bit disorderly, Mr Irving, because you keep
15referring to some documents we have and others that we do
16not. Leave that on one side for the moment. We are just
17going to do, if we may, a little bit of arithmetic.
18 A. [Mr Irving] These documents have all been in my discovery. None of
19them have been concealed.
20 Q. [Mr Rampton] I am not suggesting you are hiding anything from this
21court, Mr Irving, in the way of documents. Can you please
22turn in the Leuchter report in the front of your bundle.
23You may be better to use the copied one unless that has
24all 12 appendices. Appendix 12 to the copy of the
25Leuchter report that I have, my Lord, in the bottom right
26hand corner should be page No. 49.
1 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Yes.
2 MR RAMPTON: This is Mr Fruisson's name written on the top of
3it, if you turn it sideways, has it? It has Fruisson
4written beside Appendix 12. Please turn to page 51,
5bottom right hand corner, that is the internal page number
6of the report. This is a document produced by the firm of
7Degesch, do you agree, who are the manufacturers of Zyklon
8B? I am not suggesting this is a wartime document.
9 A. [Mr Irving] They are not the manufacturers. The manufacturers were I
10G Farbon. Degesch were the people who controlled the
11supplies and Tesh were the company who allocated the
13 Q. [Mr Rampton] The distributors?
14 A. [Mr Irving] Yes.
15 Q. [Mr Rampton] If you look at page 55, you can see a picture of some tins
16of Zyklon B. That is only just mentioned in passing, so
17one can see there are three different tin sizes. I do not
18know what the rates were. If you look at page 51, in the
19left-hand column under hydro cyanic acid, which is the
20active agent in these pellets, is it not?
21 A. [Mr Irving] Yes.
22 Q. [Mr Rampton] At the very bottom of the column we see that one part per
23million of hydrogen cyanide, that is a concentration, is
24equivalent to .0012 grammes per cubic metre.
25 A. [Mr Irving] Yes.
26 Q. [Mr Rampton] Now, if you turn backwards in this file to appendix 3, we
1come to a translation of a wartime document. My Lord, it
2is page 23, which I think is a Nuremberg document, is it
4 A. [Mr Irving] Yes, from the industrial case N I.
5 Q. [Mr Rampton] And we see that it is issued, I do not know the exact
6date, but it was issued presumably during the war, it must
7have been during the war, by the Health Institution of the
8Protectorate of Bohemia and Morevia in Prague. We find
9that on page 25. If you turn to the second page of this
10document, page 24, and look at IX towards the bottom of
11left hand column, we see there:
12 "The strength of gas and the time required for
13it to take effect depends on the type of vermin, the
14temperature, the amount of furniture in the rooms, the
15imperviousness of building. With inside temperatures of
16more than 5 degrees centigrade it is customary to use 8
17grammes of Prussic acid, that hydrogen cyanide, per cubic
18metre. Time needed to take effect 16 hours, unless there
19are special circumstances such as a closed in type of
20building which requires less time. If the weather is
21warm, it is possible to reduce this to a minimum of 6
22hours. The period is to be extended to at least 32 hours
23if the temperature is below 5 degrees centigrade. The
24strength and time as above are to be applied in the case
25of bugs, lice, fleas, etc. with eggs, larvae..."
26 If, Mr Irving, .0012 grammes per cubic metre
1produces a concentration of one part per million, 8
2grammes per cubic meter produces, I can tell you, a
3concentration of 6,666 parts per million.
4 A. [Mr Irving] Wrong.
5 Q. [Mr Rampton] What?
6 A. [Mr Irving] Wrong.
7 Q. [Mr Rampton] Why?
8 A. [Mr Irving] You are talking about hydrogen cyanide.
9 Q. [Mr Rampton] Yes, that is what they are talking about.
10 A. [Mr Irving] But we are talking about pellets, and pellets only contain
11a small quantity of hydrogen cyanide sucked into them.
12 Q. [Mr Rampton] Who is talking about pellets, Mr Irving? I am certainly
14 A. [Mr Irving] OK, carry on.
15 Q. [Mr Rampton] Where does it say anything here about pellets?
16 A. [Mr Irving] If later on you start talking about tins of Zyklon B.
17 Q. [Mr Rampton] No, I am reading from the wartime document.
18 A. [Mr Irving] All right. As long as we are clear there is a distinction
19between the weight of cyanide and the weight of the
21 Q. [Mr Rampton] Degesch is talking in the other document we looked at
22about concentrations of cyanide parts per million of air.
23 A. [Mr Irving] Yes.
24 Q. [Mr Rampton] So is this document. Customary to use 8 grammes of
25Prussic acid per cubic metre?
26 A. [Mr Irving] Hydrogen cyanide supplied.
1 Q. [Mr Rampton] Nothing about pellets. So I am right, am I not?
2 A. [Mr Irving] I do accept the point that it takes less Zyklon B or
3hydrogen cyanide to kill the vermin in fumigation chambers
4at lower concentration than it does to kill human beings.
5I accept this point.
6 Q. [Mr Rampton] If you look at the Leuchter report, Mr Leuchter knows
7this, does he not? If you look at page 12, right hand
8column, the toxic effects of H C N gas under the bold
9heading, "medical tests show that a concentration of
10hydrogen cyanide gas in an amount of 300 parts per million
11in air is rapidly fading. Generally for execution
12purposes concentration of 3,200 parts per million is used
13to ensure rapid death." Mr Irving, that has nothing to do
14with this case, has it?
15 A. [Mr Irving] I am lost.
16 MR JUSTICE GRAY: I am completely lost.
17 MR RAMPTON: Page 12 of the Leuchter report.
18 MR JUSTICE GRAY: I do not know what it is that, after a great
19many questions, Mr Irving said he accepted.
20 MR RAMPTON: That you need higher concentration to kill lice.
21 MR JUSTICE GRAY: I thought we established that about three
22quarters of an hour ago.
23 MR RAMPTON: Yes. I am interested in the figures though. That
24is why I wanted to do the arithmetic.
25 MR JUSTICE GRAY: I am lost on the figures.
26 A. [Mr Irving] I am lost on figures and I am not sure they are all that
2 MR RAMPTON: You need a concentration in air of over 6,000
3parts per million to kill lice. Now look at what
4Mr Leuchter says at the bottom right hand column of page
512: "Medical tests show that a concentration of hydrogen
6cyanide gas in an amount of 300 parts per million is
7rapidly fading." So you need to kill human beings
8approximately 22 times lower concentration than you do to
9kill lice? That is right, is it not?
10 A. [Mr Irving] Yes. You are overlooking certain theoretical
11considerations, though.
12 Q. [Mr Rampton] Such as?
13 A. [Mr Irving] If I put a tin of Zyklon B over there by the door or by
14one of these pillars, it can be there all day and there
15would be very little trace of cyanamide over on this side
16of the room. So the concentration on that side has to be
17much higher for it to have a lethal effect on this side of
18the so-called gas chamber. You appreciate that? There
19will be a gradient of concentration across the room. They
20would not have circulating fans in the room to make sure
21it ----
22 Q. [Mr Rampton] If it so happened that this room had four columns running
23the length of room and you dropped the pellets down each
24of those four columns, why then you would get an even
25distribution, would you not, Mr Irving?
26 A. [Mr Irving] Not to the outer edges of the room. If you wanted the
1lethal concentration at the further reaches of the room,
2then you are going to have to have a higher than minimum
3amount. Let me put it like that. Does your Lordship
4understand the point I am trying to make?
5 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Yes, I understand the point you are trying to
6make. I am just wondering where you got the point from?
7 A. [Mr Irving] From my own common sense, my Lord.
8 Q. [Mr Justice Gray] That is rather what I thought.
9 A. [Mr Irving] It stands to reason.
10 MR RAMPTON: The fact is, Mr Irving, as you may or may not
11know, I do not know, according to eyewitness accounts, by
12that I mean the people who did the killing, and some of
13the sonderkommando, for precisely that reason amongst
14others, the SS used somewhat greater quantities of the
15product than were needed to produce a strict concentration
16of only 300 parts per million.
17 A. [Mr Irving] Ah, so this is a concession on your part?
18 Q. [Mr Rampton] It is not a concession at all.
19 MR JUSTICE GRAY: It is departing from Dr Beer, if he is a
21 MR RAMPTON: It is what?
22 MR JUSTICE GRAY: It is departing from Dr Beer.
23 MR RAMPTON: No. The point is, my Lord, whether it is Dr Beer
24who it or whether one works it out, as I did, from the
25contents of Leuchter report itself, whichever way one
26goes, the fact is that the concentration required to kill
1human beings is very significantly less, even if you have
2to make allowance for the circumstances, than is ever
3needed to kill lice. Lice are very difficult to kill.
4 A. [Mr Irving] Can I comment? The pillars, we have just referred to the
5four pillars, next to which this or down through which the
6Zyklon B was poured, are still standing, and from those
7very pillars the -- you are shaking your head.
8 Q. [Mr Rampton] Mr Irving, have you read Professor van Pelt's report?
9 A. [Mr Irving] In great detail, we have photographs of those pillars now,
10and samples were taken from that concrete and also tested.
11 Q. [Mr Rampton] I do not think you can have read it with much care, Mr
12Irving, because, if you had, you would know that the
13eyewitness account, particularly of the prisoner Michael
14Kulan, also of Heinrich Taiber who worked there ----
15 A. [Mr Irving] He had totally worthless witnesses, as we shall shortly
17 Q. [Mr Rampton] You say so, Mr Irving, but their testimony is not that the
18Zyklon B was poured down the centre of a concrete pillar,
19it was poured into wire mesh attachments to the concrete
20pillars. You knew that, did you not?
21 A. [Mr Irving] I do indeed. I know exactly what they said.
22 Q. [Mr Rampton] Why are you going on about solid concrete pillars? They
23have nothing to do with the case at all.
24 A. [Mr Irving] You yourself mentioned the four pillars down the centre of
25the room.
26 Q. [Mr Rampton] Because we were talking about an even distribution.
1Mr Irving, you are not trying very hard to deal with my
2questions, I do not believe.
3 A. [Mr Irving] The transcript will show exactly what you said,
4Mr Rampton. Those were the pillars that we tested.
5 Q. [Mr Rampton] You know perfectly well, Mr Irving, that the fact that the
6pillars or the remains of pillars, I know you have never
7been there, that you can now see in the gas chambers at
8Birkenhau, the fact they are solid concrete has nothing
9whatever do with the case.
10 A. [Mr Irving] We will have something to say about the wire mesh columns
11of which there is talk and we will have a great deal to
12say about those witnesses you mentioned.
13 Q. [Mr Rampton] Now we will go back, if we may. I wish you would tell us
14what it was, Mr Irving. Time is getting short.
15 A. [Mr Irving] When I try ----
16 MR JUSTICE GRAY: This is all terribly discursive. I am just
17wondering where we are really getting with this. I have
18read Professor van Pelt with interest obviously.
19I understood the points that he was making. What I am not
20feeling I am getting much benefit from is the
21cross-examination at the moment. I am not of course
22stopping it for a single moment, but I just wonder whether
23it is the way to deal with this part of the case.
24 MR RAMPTON: My Lord, the only point of this part of the case
25is that, as ever, Mr Irving dives off the top board
26without giving any acknowledgment publicly of what he
1knows to be the fallacy of what he is saying. That is all
2that it is about. The concentration point goes no further
3than that. He must have known, and he certainly knew it
4when he heard what Mr Beer had to say, that Fred Leuchter
5completely reversed the significance of the
6concentration. So the principal brick falls straight out
7of Fred Leuchter's report.
8 MR JUSTICE GRAY: That seems to me to be the thing to
9concentrate on because, if you are right about that or, to
10put it more accurately, Mr Irving, as a conscientious
11historian should have appreciated that that was, arguably
12at the very least, a huge fallacy in the Leuchter report,
13well, I understand how you put your case. But does it go
14wider than that?
15 MR RAMPTON: It depends how much further I have to go. On
16concentration I do not have to go any further than that.
17The only consequence of the low concentration that
18Mr Irving has not accepted is that you would expect to
19find lower residual concentrations 40 years later but that
20is so obvious that I am not going to pursue it.
21 A. [Mr Irving] I think you to ought ask these questions to give me a
22chance to answer them.
23 MR JUSTICE GRAY: I am anxious you should have an opportunity
24to answer what needs to be answered. As I understand it,
25you have understood the point that is made on Leuchter and
26it has been made by reference to Mr Beer. I have not been
1told who Mr Beer is but anyway----
2 A. [Mr Irving] His credentials, precisely.
3 Q. [Mr Justice Gray] But you have also, I think you have to have the
4opportunity to develop this if you want to, said, well
5although I understand the criticism that is made of
6Leuchter and his assumption, his key assumption,
7nevertheless matters have moved on and Leuchter's report
8has been, as you put it, replicated.
9 A. [Mr Irving] It has been overtaken by other better reports.
10 Q. [Mr Justice Gray] If that be right and if that is your case, then I think
11you ought to have the opportunity to develop that at some
12stage. I do not want to take Mr Rampton out of order.
13 A. [Mr Irving] Perhaps Mr Rampton wanted to avoid asking precisely those
14questions that your Lordship has now asked.
15 MR RAMPTON: Oh, Mr Irving, I do not need to avoid asking you
16anything at all. This is not the time for you to give --
17if you chose not to give me the documents and give
18evidence-in-chief about it, you will have to do it later.
19 A. [Mr Irving] Mr Rampton, all these documents have been in discovery,
20and I can summarize very briefly. I accepted the Leuchter
21was flawed on its figures and on its methodology. It was
22a pioneering report. It was the first kind of examination
23that had ever been conducted to our knowledge of the
24Auschwitz site. It was replicated afterwards. It has
25been superseded. Everybody on the incorrigible
26revisionist wing says Leuchter is a good old chap, but he
1got bits wrong and, in the meantime, there are other much
2more solid reports that have replaced it.
3 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Just pause there for a moment. Just so that
4I have it clear because I have in the end to make sense of
5all this, what do you say is the report or reports which
6replicate Leuchter's conclusion?
7 A. [Mr Irving] There have been a series of reports and I can summarize
8them in this way. In 1945, it subsequently turned out,
9the Poles had themselves conducted a test or tests on
10artifacts found at Auschwitz, including a metal grating, a
11metal grating and human hair. After the Leuchter came
12into public -- came to public attention, the Auschwitz
13authorities themselves carried out a secret replica of the
14tests, came up with unsatisfactory results and kept their
15report secret.
16 Subsequently Gemar Rudolf went to Auschwitz and
17wrote a report which is known as the Rudolf Report. Now,
18Rudolf is a qualified chemist and he conducted the tests
19on a much more scientific basis. He came up with figures
20which broadly confirmed the conclusions that Leuchter had
21originally reached.
22 After criticisms were expressed of the Leuchter
23report, which are under one of these tabs which your
24Lordship has read some of, we took the appropriate
25action. We discussed among ourselves how far these
26criticisms had to be taken seriously and what should be
1done about them. We did not do that in public. I do not
2think anybody -- a scientific institute would have done it
3in public. We certainly did not ignore the criticism. We
4did not just go charging ahead like a blind bull.
5 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Yes. So it is Polish tests in 1945,
6Auschwitz authorities sometime in the late 80s/early 90s.
7 A. [Mr Irving] 1989 or '90, yes.
8 Q. [Mr Justice Gray] And Mr Rudolf?
9 A. [Mr Irving] And then Mr Rudolf since then, yes. I think there have
10been other tests conducted also since then. The bone has
11been repeatedly chewed over, and if the Leuchter achieved
12anything at all, it was an open discussion of this very
13awkward matter.
14 MR RAMPTON: Then, I am afraid, this is inevitable, Mr Irving,
15in the light of those answers or that evidence you have
16now given. Turn to what you said in Tampa, Florida.
17 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Mr Rampton, I am so sorry to be
18interrupting. I have to understand the validity or the
19invalidity of the criticisms of Leuchter. What he said
20about it seems to me -- we have seen plenty of quotes
21where he says, "Leuchter has convinced me that they never
22existed, these camps".
23 MR RAMPTON: No, but, my Lord, I think what he has just told
24your Lordship is this, is it not: "I accept", although he
25has never said it publicly, "that Leuchter was flawed, his
26methodology was poor, his logic was wrong", or whatever it
1is, "but, of course, he has since been validated by other
2work", including two documents which I am shortly going to
3show him. It is surprising, in the light of that answer,
4that in 1985 he still adheres to Leuchter as though it
5were gospel.
6 MR JUSTICE GRAY: We can certainly look and see what he says in
8 MR RAMPTON: That is tab 20 of the new file 3, page 19.
9 A. [Mr Irving] Of course, if I may leap ahead and say that if, at the end
10of the day, it turns out that you were right all along
11about these buildings, then all of this discussion is
13 MR RAMPTON: No, Mr Irving, it is not because we are not
14concerned in this court with proving or disproving what
15happened in Auschwitz. We are concerned with your state
16of mind and your standards of, what shall I say, truth
17when it comes to reporting history?
18 A. [Mr Irving] You are quite right, but, of course, my state of mind does
19not rely solely on scientific reports or chemical
21 Q. [Mr Rampton] I do not dignify Fred Leuchter's report as a scientific
22report, I am afraid, Mr Irving?
23 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Did you say tab 19?
24 MR RAMPTON: 20, my Lord, page 19. Second paragraph on the
25page after the break. "Fred Leuchter who wrote the report
26here which is one of the most telling reports on the
1Auschwitz case"?
2 A. [Mr Irving] On what page are we, I am sorry?
3 Q. [Mr Rampton] Sorry, page 19, bottom of the page. "Fred Leuchter who
4wrote the report here which is one of the most telling
5reports on the Auschwitz case, if you may remember, Fred
6Leuchter was the American consultant on the gas chamber
7design. He designs and gives advice on the building of
8gas chambers by American ... He was nominated by every
9governor of every American penitentiary as a defence
10consultant for a law case in Canada which hinged on the
11Nazi gas chambers. You have seen it in the OJ Simpson
12case. They call in experts; experts on DNA, experts on
13footprints or whatever, and that expert then gives expert
14evidence, and the expert in this Canadian case was Fred
16 Pausing there, Mr Irving, it is not true, is
17it? He was not allowed to give expert evidence about
18Auschwitz, was he?
19 A. [Mr Irving] He was called as an expert evidence -- he was allowed to
20give expertise. If you read the transcript of the trial,
21you will see what areas he was allowed to give expert
22evidence on.
23 Q. [Mr Rampton] "And the Canadian lawyer sent Fred Leuchter actually to
24Auschwitz in Poland and said, 'You are a gas chamber
25expert. Tell us what you think about the buildings in
26Auschwitz. Would they have worked?' Well, the short
1answer", note that, "is Fred Leuchter came back and proved
2there had never been any cyanide gas or compounds in those
3buildings. He brought back 40 samples and had those
4samples of brickwork tested in laboratories", plural, "in
5the United States with the result there was no trace of
6cyanide compound whatsoever in all the brickwork samples
7except one. You can see it here. There was one building
8in Auschwitz where clothing was fumigated with cyanide and
9you could see the blue stain coming through the brickwork
10from the cyanide gas which was used in that building 50
11years ago, and the blue stain has permeated right through
12the brickwork to such a degree that you can actually see
13the stain there 50 years later.
14 "When the Leuchter report was published, it
15produced a howl of rage from the traditional enemy of the
16truth". Who is the traditional enemy of the truth,
17Mr Irving?
18 A. [Mr Irving] Oh, I see them every now and then outside my building in
19Duke Street. I am woken at 3.00 in the morning by the
20police unloading barricades. I look out of the window and
21they are all standing outside holding up their signs
22saying, "Gas Irving", screaming and shouting. That is the
23way I envisage the traditional enemy of the truth.
24 Q. [Mr Rampton] You go on then to talk about Gemar Rudolf, it is perfectly
25true. But the fact is in that little passage that I have
26just read in October 1995, according to you, Leuchter is
1still gospel?
2 A. [Mr Irving] He wrote the most telling report. It was the one that
3started the whole avalanche.
4 Q. [Mr Rampton] Not a word there of any of he flaws, and they are
5fundamental flaws, which you knew then, if not before,
6certainly by the early 1990s, late 1980s, the Leuchter
8 A. [Mr Irving] By this time, of course, we have had probably two or even
9three of the backup, the replica tests carried out by
10other groups or organizations which showed that Fred
11Leuchter had, broadly speaking, got it right. So why
12I should mention the fact that there were the cosmetic
13flaws like when you said you could not get 10 people
14standing on a square metre of floor and this kind of
16 Q. [Mr Rampton] Fred Leuchter is complete bunk, his report, is it not?
17I am going to go through the criticisms because his
18Lordship has asked me to.
19 A. [Mr Irving] Well, repeating that sentence 20 or 30 times a day ----
20 MR JUSTICE GRAY: I think that is what matters. That is why I
21have said it.
22 MR RAMPTON: It is not only what matters. There are two sides
23to Mr Irving, my Lord. There is the public face and the
24private face. I think I have done that exercise so far as
25the public face is concerned. Your Lordship should,
26however, see one or two of what I call the private face
2 MR JUSTICE GRAY: I am much more interested in the validity or
3invalidity of the criticism. At the moment, I will be
4candid with you, Mr Irving, it seems to me that Mr Beer
5had an extremely good point on Leuchter, but he started
6off from a fundamental false premise.
7 A. [Mr Irving] I agree, my Lord, yes.
8 Q. [Mr Justice Gray] That is the way I am seeing it at the moment. There is no
9point in my concealing it.
10 A. [Mr Irving] And what else should I have done than what I immediately
11did? I immediately forwarded the Beer report. We did not
12know who Beer was. We do not know what his credentials
13are. He may be a toxicologist, he may be a chemist, he
14may be gardener for all I know.
15 Q. [Mr Justice Gray] I would be interested to be told.
16 A. [Mr Irving] Yes, we were not told, but I immediately forwarded this
17report to the people concerned, including those who had
18written the report, and said, "This is a criticism we have
19to take on board". You do not immediately rush into print
20and start tearing something apart because of one criticism
21or because of two criticisms.
22 Q. [Mr Justice Gray] And something you then learned told you that Leuchter's
23assumption was a justified one or ----
24 A. [Mr Irving] Well, as I mentioned, my Lord, we then obtained the
25additional reports which showed that Leuchter had been not
26barking up the wrong tree, but barking up the right tree,
1and I do draw attention again to the fact that as early as
2my introduction to that report, I said this is a flawed
3report. There are things in it that I would like to have
4seen done differently. The whole purpose of the report
5was to put the ball in the court of the other side so they
6come back and convince us.
7 Q. [Mr Justice Gray] That is as may be, but I am interested to know what it was
8that emerged that told you that Leuchter was right,
9because at the moment it seems to me there is a
10fundamental problem with his report.
11 A. [Mr Irving] In that case, when my turn comes to lead evidence, I shall
12lead evidence introducing these other reports if
13Mr Rampton is reluctant to put before the court.
14 MR RAMPTON: May I invite your Lordship -- it will save time,
15it will save me having to do it now -- just to read -- not
16now, I do not mean, when it is convenient to your Lordship
17 -- the little bundle of correspondence that is in tab 8
18of the first of the new bundles, K1?
19 A. [Mr Irving] I already requested his Lordship to do that.
20 Q. [Mr Rampton] What?
21 A. [Mr Irving] I already requested that his Lordship should do that.
22 MR RAMPTON: Not now, my Lord. There are some quite
23significant letters in there, we would say, and then I
24need not ask questions about them unless your Lordship
25invites me to do so. Before I come to the Leuchter report
26itself, though, there are two things I want to get out of
1the way, Mr Irving. In 1945, the forensic laboratory at
2Cracow made a report on two different things: (1) metal
3covers with holes in them taken from what they call the
4gas chambers at Birkenhau. They were covers on the
5ventilation openings, so the report said -- I am sure you
6know it well?
7 A. [Mr Irving] It may be useful if we actually had the report before us.
8 Q. [Mr Rampton] Very well. My Lord, that is in tab 6.
9 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Or possibly Professor Pelt's ----
10 MR RAMPTON: There is only ----
11 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Sorry, van Pelt.
12 MR RAMPTON: There is only a summary of it in van Pelt, my
14 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Is that not going to be -- I do not know.
15Take your own course.
16 MR RAMPTON: No, because I know what is going to happen, we are
17going to wind up looking at the report anyway, if we are
18not careful.
19 A. [Mr Irving] Tab 6, you said?
20 Q. [Mr Rampton] Tab 6 of this new file, K.
21 A. [Mr Irving] This is the one in German?
22 Q. [Mr Rampton] Yes, this is the report of 15th December 1945.
23 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Tab 6.
24 MR RAMPTON: Yes, tab 6. This, I think, Mr Irving, is perhaps
25 -- Mr Irving, I can tell you this a copy made for the
26court in Vienna when the Auschwitz architects were on
1trial in, I think, 1971 or 2.
2 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Is this in German?
3 MR RAMPTON: Yes. It does not matter.
4 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Is it not simple letter to look at Professor
5van Pelt? Can you give me the reference, at any rate, so
6that I can follow it there?
7 MR RAMPTON: Yes.
8 MR JUSTICE GRAY: It cannot be 931. No, it is in the text of
9his report because I think that will probably have the
10guts of it and if Mr Irving does not agree, he will say
11so. I think it is 611. Is it 611?
12 MR RAMPTON: It is in two places, I think, actually.
13 A. [Mr Irving] I do not think I have any problem with this document at
14all. I will concede that they found in the ventilator
15grating taken from mortuary No. 1 of crematorium (ii)
16remains of cyanide.
17 MR RAMPTON: Yes. How do you account for that, Mr Irving?
18 A. [Mr Irving] Because that particular room was used as vergasungskeller,
19as a gassing cellar.
20 Q. [Mr Rampton] Yes. Gassing what?
21 A. [Mr Irving] I think the evidence is clear that it was used as a
22gassing cellar for fumigating objects or cadavers.
23 Q. [Mr Rampton] Fumigating cadavers?
24 A. [Mr Irving] Yes.
25 Q. [Mr Rampton] What makes you say that?
26 A. [Mr Irving] That is what that room was for. That is what mortuaries
1are for. In mortuaries you put cadavers.
2 Q. [Mr Rampton] That is news to me, Mr Irving. What is the evidence for
4 A. [Mr Irving] I beg your pardon?
5 Q. [Mr Rampton] What is the evidence that they used that for gassing
7 A. [Mr Irving] That is what it was built for.
8 MR JUSTICE GRAY: I am sorry, this seems a crude question, but
9what is the point of gassing a corpse?
10 A. [Mr Irving] Because they came in heavily infested with the typhus
11bearing lice that had killed them.
12 MR RAMPTON: So why would it need a gas type door with a peep
13hole with double eight millimetre thick glass and a metal
14grill on it?
15 A. [Mr Irving] Well, I think you will have to show us the evidence for
17 Q. [Mr Rampton] I will do.
18 A. [Mr Irving] And the evidence that this door was intended for that
19particular room and the evidence it was possible to obtain
20doors without the peep holes and the evidence that the
21room was not intended to be used for other purposes too.
22 Q. [Mr Rampton] No, Mr Irving. You see, I do not have to prove anything.
23I am testing your, I have to say, slightly bizarre
24suggestion that you put Zyklon B into a room where the
25people are already dead. You tell me, "Oh, well, that is
26because they wanted to delouse the corpses". Then I asked
1you, "Why then does it need a gas type door with a peep
2hole and a metal protection on it?"
3 A. [Mr Irving] Because at this time in the war most of Germany was coming
4under the, it was feeling the weight of Royal Air Force
5bomber commands forays. We were bombing all over Eastern
6Europe. Our bombing raids were extending further and
7further into Central Europe. You will see from the
8Auschwitz construction department files an increasing
9concern about the need to build bomb tight shelters and
10gas tight shelters because of the danger of gas attack.
11 Q. [Mr Rampton] Now it is an air raid shelter, is it?
12 A. [Mr Irving] I beg your pardon?
13 Q. [Mr Rampton] In early 1943, Mr Irving, the first bombing raid anywhere
14near Auschwitz was not until late '44?
15 A. [Mr Irving] Mr Rampton, if the court so pleases, I will tomorrow
16produce to you an index of all the documents in the
17Auschwitz construction department files from late 1942
18onwards dealing with the necessity to build air raid
19shelters, gas tight air raid shelters and other similar
20constructions on the Auschwitz compound and on the
21Birkenhau compound for precisely the reasons that I have
23 Q. [Mr Rampton] It is either a cellar for gassing corpses, is it,
24Mr Irving, or else it is an air raid shelter?
25 A. [Mr Irving] Did I say either or?
26 Q. [Mr Rampton] Both. If it is an air raid shelter, Mr Irving, why would
1the doors open outwards? It only has a single door.
2 A. [Mr Irving] If an air raid shelter, why would the doors open outward?
3 Q. [Mr Rampton] Yes. You have the SS sheltering from the allied bombs.
4No bombs had been near Auschwitz yet in the war, not for
5another year ----
6 A. [Mr Irving] I will produce this clip of documents tomorrow,
7Mr Rampton, to satisfy even the most incorrigible counsel
8that, yes, our air raids were beginning to be felt in that
9part of Europe.
10 Q. [Mr Rampton] We shall be pleased to see them is all I will say at the
11moment, Mr Irving.
12 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Can I just see where we have got to? I still
13have not been provided with the reference in Professor van
15 A. [Mr Irving] We have plunged deep into basement No. 1.
16 MR JUSTICE GRAY: It just helps me to follow what is not always
17immediately clear.
18 A. [Mr Irving] My Lord, can I show you?
19 MR JUSTICE GRAY: This is 1945 Polish investigation?
20 A. [Mr Irving] Can I show you a picture of the building we are talking
21about? This is the crematorium No. (ii), the whole
23 Q. [Mr Justice Gray] Yes.
24 A. [Mr Irving] And this is the Leichenkeller No. 1, which is the mortuary
25No. 1. You can see the roof is pancaked downwards, but it
26is still possible to crawl underneath it just so you get a
1kind of visual impression of what the building looks like
2now. You can see the tourists down there looking at it.
3 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Yes, thank you. I thought I had found the
4reference at page 611, but I do not think that is it.
5 MR RAMPTON: Miss Rogers tells me, my Lord, that there are
6references to the 1945 Polish report, but, as I
7had originally thought, there are only sort of what one
8might call passing references?
9 A. [Mr Irving] Shall I just very briefly translate the first page?
10 Q. [Mr Rampton] No, not yet. I am in the middle of trying to tell his
11Lordship why it is not profitable to look in the report
12itself because the substance of the report as a whole is
13not reproduced or summarised.
14 MR JUSTICE GRAY: I am trying for the purposes of eventually my
15note to ----
16 MR RAMPTON: Would your Lordship like to look at page 198?
17 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Of Professor van Pelt?
18 MR RAMPTON: Yes, since that was your Lordship's question.
19 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Yes. I wanted to know whether that is what
20you were referring to. I have 198.
21 MR RAMPTON: Cracow, my Lord, appears on page 198 and just a
22line at the top of 199.
23 MR JUSTICE GRAY: This is Dawidowski, is it?
24 MR RAMPTON: No. This is a set of tests done by the forensic
25laboratory at Cracow, and their report was dated 15th
26December 1945. It may have been have part of
1Zane/Dawidowski exercise, but it is, in fact, a separate
2document, and it is the document which is at tab 6 of the
3new file.
4 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Well, the reference to that report is note
5310, is it not?
6 MR RAMPTON: That is right.
7 MR JUSTICE GRAY: I cannot for the life of me see where the
8evidence that you say one derives from your tab 6 is to be
9found in Professor van Pelt's report.
10 MR RAMPTON: Well, because, my Lord, the first page under
11[German- document not provided] reports that they took --
12were sent to them four complete and two damaged covers,
13clasps or grilles from the ventilation openings which
14during inspection of crematorium No. (ii) in Birkenhau
15were found and which from the ventilation openings of the
16gas kammer, Leichenkeller No. 1, of this crematorium came
18 MR JUSTICE GRAY: I am sorry, I am probably being very thick,
19but what is the significance of that?
20 MR RAMPTON: In 1945, in May 1945, the Cracow laboratory was
21sent some zinc covers from the ventilation openings
22described by Michael Kula in his testimony: "Ventilation
23openings from the gas chamber of crematorium (ii) at
24Birkenhau". They tested them and they found that there
25were traces of hydrogen cyanide.
26 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Where do I get that from tab 6?
1 MR RAMPTON: You get that at the end. It is page ----
2 MR JUSTICE GRAY: I do not think Professor van Pelt makes that
3observation at all.
4 MR RAMPTON: My Lord, he does. Page 3, that is right. He
5reports, does Professor van Pelt, that the zinc covers
6(which I just told your Lordship about) were "dislocated
7when the demolition squads dynamited the gas chambers, but
8six of them were retrieved in the rubble of crematorium
9(ii) and sent for analysis in the forensic laboratory in
10Cracow. The laboratory report noted that these were
11covered with a thin white colour of the strongest smelling
12deposit. The laboratory retrieved 7.2 grammes of the
13deposit ... (reading to the words)... Sulphuric acid was
14added to this solution and the resulting gas was absorbed
15in an absorbent material. This was divided into two and
16subjected to two different tests" which your Lordship can
17see described on pages 2 and 3 of this document, "each of
18which revealed the presence of hydrogen cyanide".
19 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Thank you very much. That is what I needed
20and I have now got it, thank you. That you accept,
21Mr Irving, do you not?
22 A. [Mr Irving] Yes.
23 MR RAMPTON: They also retrieved a paper sack, and this is the
24second paragraph on the first page of the report, which
25had marked on it a weight of 25.5 kilograms of hair, which
26they say was taken from the corpses of females after
1gassing and before burning in the crematorium ovens in
2Birkenhau. "Shorn" is the word, or "shaved off". They
3tested that too and in that also they found traces of
4hydrogen cyanide. That is not in van Pelt, but it is in
5the report.
6 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Mr Irving, do you want to say anything about
8 A. [Mr Irving] Well, I do not think that the human hair takes us any
9further, my Lord, because the Germans did subject
10everything that went through the camp to fumigation.
11So ----
12 Q. [Mr Justice Gray] Well, why would human hair have been fumigated?
13 A. [Mr Irving] Because they processed it.
14 Q. [Mr Justice Gray] What, after the death of the person concerned?
15 A. [Mr Irving] Well, we do not know when this human hair was actually cut
16off, my Lord, whether it was cut of -- the evidence that
17I have is when the prisoners arrived as part of the
18hygiene methods -- Mr Rampton is shaking his head.
19 MR RAMPTON: No. Do you know where it was found, Mr Irving?
20 MR JUSTICE GRAY: In the gas chamber, the alleged gas chamber.
21 MR RAMPTON: No, that is where it was "gischoren", that is
22where the killing was killed?
23 A. [Mr Irving] Yes, that is what it says in the report, but, of course, I
24have not accepted that paragraph.
25 Q. [Mr Rampton] Do you know, Mr Irving, where this 25.5 kilo bag of hair
26was found?
1 A. [Mr Irving] It does not actually say in the report.
2 Q. [Mr Rampton] It will not help you to look in the report; you will not
3find it there?
4 A. [Mr Irving] Then I do not know where it was found, no.
5 Q. [Mr Rampton] You do not know?
6 A. [Mr Irving] No.
7 Q. [Mr Rampton] Would it surprise you that it was found in the part of the
8camp called "Canada"?
9 A. [Mr Irving] That is where all the stolen property was kept.
10 Q. [Mr Rampton] That is correct.
11 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Then what is this worth as evidence?
12 A. [Mr Irving] Everything from Canada was fumigated.
13 MR RAMPTON: What is it worth as evidence? Well, what it shows
14is, my Lord, this is hair, as the report says, taken from
15people after they had been gassed.
16 A. [Mr Irving] As the report alleges. This is a prosecution report being
17prepared for the prosecution of criminals.
18 Q. [Mr Rampton] 25.5 kilograms of hair in total is the hair of about,
19what, 500 women?
20 A. [Mr Irving] I do not know. I have not done any calculations. It
21seems to me, I think that he is being very cautious about
22that weight. As he himself says, that is the weight
23marked on the bag, but I think that you would have had to
24have a bag the size of an elephant to make it weigh 50lbs
25of human hair.
26 Q. [Mr Rampton] But, you see, Mr Irving, you have accepted that that is
1what it says. You may not like it, but that is what it
2says. Can I ask you to turn -- I am sorry about this, my
3Lord, but it is necessary because Mr Irving commented on
4this report to his friend, Mr Zundel, in September 1989.
5My Lord, that is in tab 8 ----
6 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Of which of these files?
7 A. [Mr Irving] The same file.
8 MR RAMPTON: The same one as the report, K1. Have you got a
9page there? I have not got a page on mine. It is your
10letter of 19th September.
11 A. [Mr Irving] Yes.
12 Q. [Mr Rampton] You write to Mr Zundel: "The two enclosures appear to
13be" -- has your Lordship got that? It has a 1241 in the
14top right-hand corner. 7, my Lord, I think.
15 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Thank you.
16 MR RAMPTON: "The two enclosures appear to be an initial
17counter attack on the Leuchter report. It may be that we
18have to take them seriously, particularly if the Polish
19one when translated contains firm evidence of cyanide in
20the hair of the young Jewish women or in the zinc
21basket". That is plainly, is it not, Mr Irving, a
22reference to this 1945 Cracow ----
23 A. [Mr Irving] Unquestionably, yes, which at that time we only had in the
24Polish, I think.
25 Q. [Mr Rampton] Why do you use the words, "It may be we have to take this
26one seriously"? What is that meant to mean?
1 A. [Mr Irving] I think that is underlined in suggestion B, we have to
2take it into account the possibility that this is a
3product of communist cold war propaganda.
4 Q. [Mr Rampton] Have you any evidence that it was?
5 A. [Mr Irving] No, but we would derelict in our duty if we did not take
6into account the possibility that it was the product of
7cold war propaganda. Jan Sehn was a notoriously political
8lawyer. He was the Polish Vyshinksky, so this possibility
9cannot be entirely discounted coming from that neck of the
10woods, shall we say.
11 Q. [Mr Rampton] But would you accept, being as open-minded as you can,
12that much the likelier of the two possibilities set out in
13this letter is A?
14 A. [Mr Irving] I have not put it that way. I said there are two
16 Q. [Mr Rampton] I am asking you whether you would not accept, as an
17open-minded historian, that A is much the likelier of the
18two possibilities?
19 A. [Mr Irving] At this time I had not read the report. I just had a
20Polish document in front of me from which I could pick out
21a few words indicating what it was about. Again, totally
22wrong of me to start drawing up conclusions about which
23version is correct.
24 Q. [Mr Rampton] If it is right that it contains firm evidence of cyanide
25in the hair of the young Jewish women or in the zinc
26basket, what is it that that evidence implies with all
1that that implies as you write, what does it imply?
2 A. [Mr Irving] Your first instinct is, undoubtedly, the impression that
3you gained when you read this report; you think to
4yourself, well, there you have it, there you have chapter
5and verse ----
6 Q. [Mr Rampton] No.
7 A. [Mr Irving] --- but then you realize that it came from, the hair, in
8fact, came from the, as you yourself now say, from Canada,
9which was the collecting centre for all their loot, and so
10there are all alternative explanations. I mean, this is
11 -- one's first instinct, which is absolutely right, but
12then you settle back and you say to yourself, "This is a
13new document. Whenever you see a new document, you must
14not rush at it and let it bedazzle you. You have to take
15it into account and analyse all possibilities carefully".
16 Q. [Mr Rampton] But, you see, you have known about this document now,
17Mr Irving, since September 19th 1989 or before.
18 A. [Mr Irving] Indeed, and this is one reason why, of course, the
19Leuchter report by itself by now does not stand by itself.
20 Q. [Mr Rampton] Why, Mr Irving, do you not accept the report for what it
21is, that is to say, that zinc covers taken from the
22crematorium, the alleged gas chamber at crematorium (ii),
23had traces of hydrogen cyanide on them. Six of them,
24I think there were, four complete and two damaged?
25 A. [Mr Irving] Why do I or why didn't I?
26 MR RAMPTON: Do you.
1 MR JUSTICE GRAY: You do accept it, you have said that?
2 A. [Mr Irving] I do. I said that to help shorten the whole argument,
4 MR RAMPTON: Then the implication is obvious, is it not, that
5gas was used in that room?
6 A. [Mr Irving] We are going to establish that later on, yes.
7 Q. [Mr Rampton] And the only question then remaining, Mr Irving ----
8 A. [Mr Irving] This is why it is called a "sonderkeller" also in other
10 Q. [Mr Rampton] Indeed, it is. The only question then remaining is who or
11what or what was gassed in that room, is it not?
12 A. [Mr Irving] Well, it is for you to establish that point.
13 Q. [Mr Rampton] No. No, Mr Irving ----
14 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Anyway, do not let us debate about who has to
15establish what. I think we know what the position is and
16Mr Irving says that it was to gas corpses.
17 A. [Mr Irving] Well, or objects, yes, clothing or something like that.
18 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Yes.
19 MR RAMPTON: My Lord ----
20 MR JUSTICE GRAY: I think that is probably a convenient moment.
21 MR RAMPTON: Yes, my Lord, I am afraid that means that if
22Mr Irving is to contend that there is evidence for that
23suggestion (which is the first I have ever heard of it, if
24I may say so) we will have to go into some of the detail,
25I am afraid.
26 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Well, detail of the reasons for doubting
2 MR RAMPTON: My Lord, that I can do very quickly.
3 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Good. That seems to me to ----
4 MR RAMPTON: But Mr Irving has made a statement in the witness
5box. I can simply say, "Well, I am sorry, I do not accept
6that" and leave it at that and then say at the end of the
7case to your Lordship, "Well, look, this is actually what
8all the evidence is", and leave it at that, or (which
9I much prefer not to do) I can take him through all the
10contemporaneous documentation which is noticed, both plans
11and typewritten documents, to show why he must be wrong
12and why any open-minded person would accept that they are
13wrong, but since this is, so far as he is concerned,
14apparently, a new position, I think it may not matter very
16 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Well, he accepts that it is evidence of
17gassing having taken place.
18 MR RAMPTON: Yes, I know, but it is a question of what, gassing
20 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Yes, but what evidence are you going to be
21able to adduce on that?
22 MR RAMPTON: I mean, there is eyewitness testimony.
23 A. [Mr Irving] Yes.
24 MR RAMPTON: There are all the documents.
25 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Well, I put it the other way round.
26 MR RAMPTON: I do too.
1 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Maybe this is the first question at
22 o'clock, what evidence can you point to to support the
3notion that it was corpses being gassed rather than live
5 MR RAMPTON: I hoped your Lordship would say that because my
6position is that the evidence is overwhelming. If he
7wants to say that it is wrong, let him show me how.
8 MR JUSTICE GRAY: This is, in a way, dealt with in that ruling
9I gave last week.
10 MR RAMPTON: Yes, I agree.
11 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Good, 2 o'clock.
12 (Luncheon adjournment)
13 MR IRVING: My Lord, I do not know whether it is better to do
14it from here or from the witness stand. Just before the
15adjournment we were talking about the danger of air
16raids. I told your Lordship that I would bring evidence
17tomorrow. In fact, by chance----
18 MR JUSTICE GRAY: May I interrupt you? Why do you not go back
19and then you can give the evidence that I think you were
20wanting to give before the adjournment about air raids in
22 A. [Mr Irving] By chance I have two copies of a three page extract I did
23from the US Holocaust Memorial Museum's catalogue of the
24Moscow records of the Auschwitz construction office, and
25I did this three page extract purely relating to records
26on the air raid precautions in Auschwitz camp. I have
1given a copy to Mr Rampton, which I also have by chance.
2It contains files, for example, 1943 to 1944, on means of
3defence against bombs.
4 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Are these Russian bombers?
5 A. [Mr Irving] No.
6 Q. [Mr Justice Gray] Western?
7 A. [Mr Irving] It is a good question, my Lord.
8 Q. [Mr Justice Gray] I think it might have been.
9 A. [Mr Irving] It could have been either. They did have Soviet air raids
10on Berlin, certainly.
11 Q. [Mr Justice Gray] Anyway, it says, does it, that there were air raids going
12on in 1943?
13 A. [Mr Irving] It actually goes back to August 1942 my Lord, the various
14files, detailed instructions on how to build air raid
15shelters and protect buildings against incendiary bombs,
16equipping of bunker, down at the bottom of the page more
17exchanges of notes and memos about various camp
18construction projects, many having to do with providing
19air raid shelters.
20 Q. [Mr Justice Gray] Yes. I think that is probably enough.
21 A. [Mr Irving] There are quite a lot of files relating to plans for air
22raid shelter, estimates and accounts for construction of
23bomb shelters and so on. It was very much in the air, if
24I could put it like that, from August 1942 onwards.
25 MR RAMPTON: My Lord, I will not come back to that at the
26moment. I have not read it. I need to take instructions
1on it. It is, I think, a redacted version of the
2documents in question in any event.
3 A. [Mr Irving] Yes.
4 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Mr Rampton, can I, before you continue, make
5a request which is that, when one gets to a new Auschwitz
6topic, if you or your team could provide me with the
7Professor van Pelt reference for it, even if you are not
8going to necessarily use it for cross-examining, it helps
9me for my purposes.
10 MR RAMPTON: They will. Actually all those references are in
11the statement of case, in fact. But that is not much use
12to you.
13 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Not on a running basis, if you see what
14I mean. Miss Rogers can do the looking up.
15 MR RAMPTON: I think they are also in the request for
16information that we served.
17 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Anyway, if you could bear that in mind
19 MR RAMPTON: I think I am probably not going to need that, but
20I say that. No doubt my hopes will be dashed. My Lord.
21Before I go to the Leuchter report itself, there are three
22questions I would like to ask Mr Irving about something he
23said this morning, which is the first I have heard of it.
24Mr Irving, you said, I think this morning, words to this
25effect, I do not have the exact words, that it is your
26thesis that the Corpse Cellar 1 in crematoria 2 and 3 had
1a dual purpose function, used for gassing corpses and for
2gassing clothes. Did you say something like that this
4 A. [Mr Irving] Gassing corpses or objects, yes.
5 Q. [Mr Rampton] First question: If that were so, why did Mr Leuchter not
6find similar concentrations of hydrogen cyanide residue in
7those rooms as he did in the delousing facility?
8 A. [Mr Irving] Frankly, I do not know the answer to that.
9 Q. [Mr Rampton] If they were used for gassing corpses, I wonder if you can
10help me to understand the point, because shortly after
11they were in the mortuary they went to be incinerated?
12 A. [Mr Irving] Yes.
13 Q. [Mr Rampton] What would be the point of gassing a corpse that was
14shortly going to be incinerated?
15 A. [Mr Irving] The corpses arrived in a state of fully clothed. Before
16they were cremated they were undressed, and various other
17bestialities were performed on them. I believe the gold
18teeth were taken out and other functions were performed.
19As the corpses cooled, the lice that may have been on the
20body crawled off the body because lice were seeking heat.
21As the body cooled, they crawled off so you had an
22infestation problem.
23 Q. [Mr Rampton] Where?
24 A. [Mr Irving] I am not sure saying this off the top of my head,
25Mr Rampton. I have taken advice on this.
26 Q. [Mr Rampton] Where would the infestation problem arise, Mr Irving?
1 A. [Mr Irving] Anywhere between the place of death and the Leichenkeller.
2 Q. [Mr Rampton] No. You were talking about gassing corpses in
3Leichenkeller 1, beside which is a lift straight up to the
4incineration chamber?
5 A. [Mr Irving] Yes.
6 Q. [Mr Rampton] Think about it. Why would you gas a corpse that was going
7straight up to be cremated?
8 A. [Mr Irving] I thought I gave the explanation.
9 MR JUSTICE GRAY: I do not understand the explanation because,
10as I understood it, the undressing took place before the
12 MR RAMPTON: The undressing took place before the gassing?
13 A. [Mr Irving] That is not the evidence that I gave, my Lord.
14 MR JUSTICE GRAY: I thought it was. Tell me if I am wrong.
15 A. [Mr Irving] We have not had any evidence as to that, my Lord.
16 Q. [Mr Justice Gray] No, but I have read the report. Am I wrong about that?
17 A. [Mr Irving] I shall certainly be questioning ----
18 MR RAMPTON: You are absolutely right, my Lord. On the
19evidence, if one can look at the evidence rather than at
20some bizarre version of it, the bigger room is the
21undressing room. They are then shepherded through into
22the smaller room where they are gassed. When they are
23dead, they are taken out through double doors that open
24outwards on to the lift and up into the crematorium, to
25put it crudely.
26 A. [Mr Irving] I am having difficulty, my Lord. I have not been given a
1chance to comment on this rather global presentation of
2what Mr Rampton alleges to have happened.
3 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Comment now. Now is your chance.
4 MR RAMPTON: Now is your chance.
5 A. [Mr Irving] My Lord, we need to know what basis the evidence is put
6on. I apprehend that this is based on eyewitness evidence
7and I shall have something to say about each of the
8eyewitness reports on which Mr van Pelt bases his
9statement. I think the proper place to do that is in the
10cross-examination of Professor van Pelt.
11 MR RAMPTON: Yes, I agree with you, Mr Irving. Having taken
12his Lordship's indication before the adjournment, my
13position is this. Professor van Pelt provides an account
14of the evidence which no open minded person would deny led
15to the probable conclusion that this was a mass
16extermination by gassing that was going on.
17 A. [Mr Irving] That is conclusion of the closed mind. The conclusion of
18the open mind is to look for alternative explanations
19which are supported by the documents, and you have not
20even asked me what the documents to support my case are.
21 Q. [Mr Rampton] I do not know what the documents are that support your
23 A. [Mr Irving] If you ask, you shall learn.
24 Q. [Mr Rampton] You can put them to Professor van Pelt in his evidence,
25Mr Irving?
26 A. [Mr Irving] I think your Lordship might like to hear about just one
1document which supports my "bizarre hypothesis", as you
2call it.
3 Q. [Mr Rampton] I am not going to spend my time on cross-examination on
4that topic. Mr Irving, there is one other question.
5 A. [Mr Irving] May I not state what this one document is, my Lord.
6 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Are you talking about the fumigation aspect?
8 Q. [Mr Rampton] Please do.
9 A. [Mr Irving] There is an invoice which is in our possession provided by
10the firm which was responsible for the construction and
11erection and installation of these crematoria, namely the
12top firm, for the provision of manpower, and equipment for
13the tarring of the entwesungsanlage in precisely this
14building. The entwesungsanlage was the disinfestation
15plant in this building. It has no alternative meaning.
16 Q. [Mr Rampton] I do not know ----
17 MR JUSTICE GRAY: I am afraid the significance of what you have
18just said escapes me.
19 A. [Mr Irving] That is precisely what my contention is, what this room
20was being used as. They had installed this room
21Liechenkeller 1, as a disinfestation, room, as a
22sonderkeller for treating the infested bodies which were
23delivered to the crematorium during the appalling plague
24which hit Auschwitz in 1942 and 1943.
25 Q. [Mr Justice Gray] So you are saying that this invoice, or whatever it is,
26can be tied in to the chamber from which the zinc covers
2 A. [Mr Irving] I do not want to try and establish a complete link in that
3linkage in that manner, my Lord. I was only asked to
4support my "bizarre hypothesis", as Mr Rampton calls it,
5that an alternative use of this room was not just a
6mortuary but also as a disinfestation chamber.
7 MR RAMPTON: Where is this document?
8 A. [Mr Irving] I will produce it to you tomorrow morning. Had I known
9you were going to lead this evidence ----
10 Q. [Mr Rampton] You cannot do that, Mr Irving. You must produce it now.
11 MR JUSTICE GRAY: If he cannot, he cannot.
12 MR RAMPTON: You have never disclosed this document, have you?
13 A. [Mr Irving] The document only came into our possession in the last
14three weeks once we had read all the latest reports.
15 Q. [Mr Rampton] The last three weeks?
16 A. [Mr Irving] Well, you have been bombarding us with documents over the
17last few months.
18 Q. [Mr Rampton] According to you, Mr Irving, this is a key document, which
19proves your case that these were never homicidal gas
20chambers, merely licicidal.
21 A. [Mr Irving] You have asked for one document which supports this
22"bizarre hypothesis". I have given you one document.
23 Q. [Mr Rampton] Mr Irving, I do not ask for the document. You offer the
24document in proof of your "bizarre hypothesis." Why have
25I not seen it before?
26 A. [Mr Irving] His Lordship said before lunch, Mr Rampton, that he would
1ask me to support or justify, rather than asking you to
2justify the homicidal version, his Lordship asked me to
3justify the fumigation version and the air raid shelter
5 Q. [Mr Rampton] May we have a copy? I am not going to make any comment
6about it until I have seen it and until Professor van Pelt
7has seen it.
8 A. [Mr Irving] I will fax to you this afternoon and I will bring it
9tomorrow morning.
10 Q. [Mr Rampton] Can you just tell me its date?
11 A. [Mr Irving] It was early 1943.
12 Q. [Mr Rampton] Early 1943, thank you very much. I have one final
13question, to which I am sure I know the answer. In
14January 1942 an SS doctor at Auschwitz wrote an internal
15memo to the Kommandatur at Auschwitz, on the one hand
16making requests for the detailed provision for the
17dissection room in the new crematoria, and on the other
18hand requesting that there should be in the keller rooms,
19cellar rooms, of that edifice an undressing room. Why
20would the SS doctor want an undressing room next to the
21dissection room?
22 A. [Mr Irving] I have to admit that I am not very well versed in practice
23of morticians and pathologists, but I can well imagine
24that corpses which are infected would be undressed in one
25room, which would be regarded as a dirty room, and then
26cleaned, and then taken into the dissection room for
1dissection. This again is purely commonsense operating
2and not specific knowledge.
3 Q. [Mr Rampton] It is in this bundle but I am not asking you to look at it
4now unless you actually want to. Your thesis is that the
5reference to an auskleideraum in this document is to the
6undressing of people who are already dead. Is that right?
7 A. [Mr Irving] I am not sure if you have read Neufurt, which is the
8standard architects handbook in Germany over the last
9seven or eight decades? Both Professor Jan van Pelt and
10I have obtained a wartime copy of Neufurt, one each, and
11the layout of mortuaries and crematoria is described in
12some detail in this architects handbook, and it does
13include an undressing room. So, in other words, this is
14nothing unusual in a properly designed mortuary.
15 Q. [Mr Rampton] We will, if we may, Mr Irving, go back to the Leuchter.
16I hope we can take it quickly. I would like you to turn
17to page 13, my Lord, to tab 1 of the first and largest of
18the new files. In the right hand column on page 13, do
19you have it under "Design and procedures at the alleged
20execution gas chambers" and does your Lordship have it?
21 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Yes.
22 MR RAMPTON: I will jumped to the bold paragraph: "The on site
23inspection of these structures indicated extremely poor
24and dangerous design of these facilities if they were to
25have served as execution gas chambers."
26 The first point: There is no provision for gas
1fitted doors windows or vents. That as a matter of
2history is just wrong, is it not, Mr Irving?
3 A. [Mr Irving] I do not know. I have never been to Auschwitz.
4 Q. [Mr Rampton] As I said, as a matter of history, not archaeology.
5 A. [Mr Irving] You have read the documents, I expect, have you?
6 A. [Mr Irving] Which document are you referring to?
7 Q. [Mr Rampton] No, the documents, there are repeated references, for
8example as we discussed this morning, to the need for a
9gas tight door with a peep hole?
10 A. [Mr Irving] Yes. In the Auschwitz documents there are repeated
11references to this, yes.
12 Q. [Mr Rampton] I am sorry, I meant Auschwitz documents?
13 A. [Mr Irving] Yes.
14 Q. [Mr Rampton] So that is a piece of Leuchter which has no foundation in
16 A. [Mr Irving] I think what he is saying is that nothing was to be seen
17when they inspected on site.
18 Q. [Mr Rampton] That may be.
19 MR JUSTICE GRAY: What is a gas fitted door.
20 MR RAMPTON: It is a door which has seals so that air cannot
21come in and gas cannot come out, if you see what I mean.
22 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Round the jamb?
23 MR RAMPTON: Yes, round the jamb.
24 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Gas proof really?
25 MR RAMPTON: Gas proof. It might be rubber, it might be
26felt. "The structures are not coated with tar or other
1sealant to prevent leakage or absorption of the gas." Do
2you accept or not, Mr Irving, that he missed, if it is
3there, the traces, not traces, actually they are quite
4large patches of cement or plaster that is to be found on
5the walls?
6 A. [Mr Irving] Of the Leichenkeller.
7 Q. [Mr Rampton] Yes.
8 A. [Mr Irving] Yes. There is plaster on ordinary mortar plaster on the
9walls, but there is no treatment on top of the plaster.
10It is just bare plaster and this is in fact what is
11recommended for mortuaries, to be just bare plaster with
12some kind of whitewash.
13 Q. [Mr Rampton] "The adjacent crematoria are a potential danger of
14explosion". That is complete nonsense, is it not?
15 MR JUSTICE GRAY: It is nonsense on a certain assumption about
16the level of concentration.
17 MR RAMPTON: Yes.
18 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Is that not a more accurate way of putting
20 MR RAMPTON: It is a nonsense unless the concentration used was
21something in the order of 60,000 parts per million, is it
23 A. [Mr Irving] I believe I am right in saying, and I am sure Professor
24Jan van Pelt will correct me if I am wrong, that on many
25of the architectural drawings of crematoria 4 and 5, there
26are provisions for explosionsgelichte, in other words
1explosion proof light switches to be installed in some of
2these chambers, or am I referring to the fumigation
4 Q. [Mr Rampton] I do not know, Mr Irving. You will have to explain that
5to Professor van Pelt.
6 A. [Mr Irving] Yes.
7 Q. [Mr Rampton] But, from the level of concentration used, even for
8gassing lice, at a concentration of 6,666 parts per
9million, there was no danger of explosion?
10 A. [Mr Irving] They certainly installed explosion proof switches in the
11fumigation buildings because they are specified on the
12architects drawings.
13 Q. [Mr Rampton] And then, writes the good Mr Leuchter, "The exposed porous
14brick and mortar would accumulate the H C N and make these
15facilities dangerous to humans for several years". That
16is nonsense too, is it not? If it is Prussian blue, you
17tell me it is stable?
18 A. [Mr Irving] It becomes stable, yes.
19 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Well it was not porous, in any event, if it
20was plastered. Is that right?
21 A. [Mr Irving] A lot of it is brickwork, too, my Lord, you can see some
22of it.
23 MR RAMPTON: No. That is postwar deterioration, Mr Irving.
24Assume that the inside of the gas chamber is covered or
25whatever it was, at least covered with plaster or cement,
26then the brickwork is not exposed at all, is it?
1 A. [Mr Irving] It is not cement, it is a lime plaster.
2 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Lime plaster would not be porous, would it?
3It would not be porous brick and mortar anyway.
4 MR RAMPTON: Mr Leuchter writes: "The exposed porous brick and
5mortar" -- he is talking, rather as Mr Roth did in his
6rather graphic way, about analysing the surface of the
7wall by looking at the timber behind it?
8 A. [Mr Irving] Yes.
9 Q. [Mr Rampton] It is logical and it is not even scientific. It is just
10logical rubbish, is it not?
11 A. [Mr Irving] It does strike me as being unscientific, that particular
12sentence, yes.
13 Q. [Mr Rampton] Krammer 1 is adjacent to the SS hospital in Auschwitz and
14has floor drains connected to the main sewer of the camp,
15which would allow gas into every building in the
16facility. That is nonsense, too, is it not?
17 A. [Mr Irving] I think the use of word "gas" is wrong. I would say it
18would allow hydrogen cyanide into the sewer.
19 Q. [Mr Rampton] Do you know whether Mr Leuchter actually verified the
20existence of a mains sewer at Auschwitz?
21 A. [Mr Irving] One thing I have asked Professor van Pelt to produce from
22the Auschwitz records is the sewage plans.
23 Q. [Mr Rampton] And, Mr Irving, the answer is, perhaps, I do not know ----
24 A. [Mr Irving] I do not know. I do not know what Mr Leuchter had, no.
25 Q. [Mr Rampton] No. He has just made it up. He has made yet another of
26his wonderful assumptions, has he not?
1 A. [Mr Irving] It maybe that it was a logical assumption, I do not know.
2 Q. [Mr Rampton] The answer is, I think, that Professor van Pelt, who is
3perhaps the most knowledgable person in the whole world
4upon this topic, will say that it is not known whether
5there was a main sewer.
6 A. [Mr Irving] There should be, because the construction office will
7certainly have had sewer plans, and our suspicion would be
8that the water outflow from these buildings would have
9gone eventually to the water treatment plant, which is
10visible on all the air photographs.
11 Q. [Mr Rampton] "And safely dissolved in low concentrations into a harmless
12solution." Yes?
13 A. [Mr Irving] Well, I am not going to talk about the percentages because
14I do not know what percentages we are talking about.
15 Q. [Mr Rampton] OK. "There were no exhaust systems to prevent the gas
16after usage". Complete nonsense, is it not?
17 A. [Mr Irving] Which building are we talking about, 1, 2, 3, 4 and 5?
18 Q. [Mr Rampton] He has listed them all, 1, 2, 3, 4 and 5.
19 A. [Mr Irving] There was certainly a ventilation system in the building
20I am interested in, which is crematorium 2, yes.
21 Q. [Mr Rampton] And numbers 4 and 5 each had seven little windows 30
22centimetres by 40 in the outside, and each of the two
23outer rooms had big doors opening into the open air, did
24they not?
25 A. [Mr Irving] Numbers 3 and 4?
26 Q. [Mr Rampton] No, 4 and 5. No, 2 and 3 were sealed. They had but one
1door and therefore needed a ventilation system. So this
2is another piece of assertion by Mr Leuchter which is just
3plain wrong, is it not?
4 A. [Mr Irving] Yes.
5 Q. [Mr Rampton] I will skip the next one because it is controversial. "The
6facilities are always damp and not heated". You have seen
7the letter, have you not, concerning the provision of
8preheating mechanisms for Leichenkeller 1?
9 A. [Mr Irving] Yes.
10 Q. [Mr Rampton] Wrong again?
11 A. [Mr Irving] Yes.
12 Q. [Mr Rampton] "The chambers are too small to physically contain
13the occupants claimed". Wrong again?
14 A. [Mr Irving] I disagree on that.
15 Q. [Mr Rampton] He assumed 9 foot per person, did he not?
16 A. [Mr Irving] Yes, but even on lower figures you still cannot put 2,000
17into those.
18 Q. [Mr Rampton] As a matter of fact you can, but we will not argue about
19that. He assumed 9 square feet per person, did he not?
20 A. [Mr Irving] He did, yes. If you say so, that is. I mean, without
21being told where he says it, I do not know.
22 Q. [Mr Rampton] Well, it is somewhere in here?
23 A. [Mr Irving] I think the nine -- yes.
24 Q. [Mr Rampton] That is the figure which is used for judicial
25execution -- I do not like that -- legal execution in
26the United States. "The doors all opened inwards" -- that
1is wrong too, is it not?
2 A. [Mr Irving] On all five of them? I do not know.
3 Q. [Mr Rampton] All doors opened outwards, which is why they are not air
4raid shelters.
5 A. [Mr Irving] Air raid shelters doors always open outwards.
6 Q. [Mr Rampton] Why? What if the rest of the building tumbles down
7outside and you cannot get out?
8 A. [Mr Irving] The reason is because the blast from a bomber exploding
9outwards will blow the door in if it opens inwards. Air
10raid doors always open outwards.
11 Q. [Mr Rampton] They do not all open inwards, they all open outwards.
12 A. [Mr Irving] Air raid shelter doors, yes.
13 Q. [Mr Rampton] No, the doors of these rooms.
14 A. [Mr Irving] I take your word for it.
15 Q. [Mr Rampton] We can look at the plans Mr Irving, but do take my word
16for it. It is what Professor van Pelt has already told us
17and will say again if you challenge him.
18 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Mr Rampton, can you go back to the bottom of
19page 13, "With the chambers fully packed with occupants
20there would be no circulation of HCN within the room."
21 MR RAMPTON: I have not got to that yet, but by all means, your
22Lordship, ask Mr Irving about that.
23 MR JUSTICE GRAY: I would like to understand the point that
24Leuchter thinks he is making there at the bottom of page
26 A. [Mr Irving] There is actually a more valid point than that. That is,
1if you pack 2,000 people into a chamber the size of this
2room as Bruno Tesh, who was later hanged, the man who
3produced the Zyklon B, said you would not need cyanide to
4kill them, they would suffocate in a very short space of
5time anyway.
6 MR RAMPTON: Maybe. I do not know that I think that that is an
7answer to his Lordship's question. Perhaps that is no
8business of mine. He goes on: "Additionally, if the gas
9eventually did fill the chamber over a lengthy time period
10those throwing Zyklon B in the roof vents and verifying
11the death of the occupants would themselves die from
12exposure to H C N".
13 A. [Mr Irving] I would have thought it was rather unscientific also.
14 Q. [Mr Rampton] It is complete rubbish, is it not? H C N is slightly
15heavier than air, is it not, and they wore gas masks, and
16all they did was lift up the vents and drop the pellets in
17and quickly close the vents?
18 A. [Mr Irving] The ones on top of the roof, right.
19 Q. [Mr Rampton] So what is left of this report, Mr Irving?
20 A. [Mr Irving] The forensic statistics which are what I base my
21conclusions on.
22 Q. [Mr Rampton] Which is precisely consistent with what Professor
23Markievitch found in 1994, and what Krakov found in 1945,
24is it not?
25 Q. [Mr Rampton] Small traces?
26 A. [Mr Irving] What I have always said, Mr Rampton, is that the report is
1flawed and in my letters to associates I clearly said what
2a pity Leuchter started speculating about things that were
3beyond his ken when the chemical figures are all that can
4be relied upon and that speak the real language.
5 Q. [Mr Rampton] Mr Irving, the position is this, is it not? You know as
6well as I do that this Leuchter report is not worth the
7paper it is written on. You know that he got the crucial
8concentration completely the wrong way round and therefore
9drew false conclusions from it. You know that the true
10measurement of concentration is consistent with what
11Krakov found in 1945 and with what Markievitch found in
121994. Your only way round that is to assert that these
13were indeed gas chambers, but not for killing people. Is
14that not right?
15 A. [Mr Irving] Designed as, yes. But what I do not accept is your
16suggestion that the Leuchter report is totally valueless.
17The most important part of the Leuchter report was the
18forensic results which were done in fact not by
19Mr Leuchter but by Dr Roth.
20 Q. [Mr Rampton] Which is precisely consistent with the kinds of
21concentrations in residue which you would expect to find
22if on the one hand there are low residue areas with
23homicidal gas chambers, and on the other hand the high
24residue areas were delousing chambers?
25 A. [Mr Irving] Not entirely. That is going to extremes and you are not
26entitled to go to total extremes like that.
1 Q. [Mr Rampton] Broadly consistent?
2 A. [Mr Irving] I do not think even broadly so.
3 Q. [Mr Rampton] You have known this since ----
4 A. [Mr Irving] The total discrepancy in these figures is so eclatant, is
5to dramatic, that there has to be some explanation for
7 Q. [Mr Rampton] So you say. You can put that to Professor van Pelt.
8 A. [Mr Irving] So I say and so I believe.
9 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Can I go back to an answer you gave a minute
10ago? Mr Rampton asked this question: You know that the
11measurement of concentrations is consistent with what was
12found in 1945 and 1994; your only way round that - this is
13the question - is to assert that these were indeed gas
14chambers but not for killing people, is that not right?
15And then you said "designed as, yes". Can you elaborate a
16little on that?
17 A. [Mr Irving] We do not know to what degree they were then subsequently
19 Q. [Mr Justice Gray] Do you mean by that that these chambers were designed as
20gas chambers for killing people?
21 A. [Mr Irving] No, I did not mean that, my Lord. I meant that we know
22that this particular one, the crematoria 2, the one which
23interests me, Leichenkeller 1, the mass one where
24Professor van Pelt says 500 thousand people died, that the
25documentary evidence shows that it was also designed with
26dual functions as an air raid shelter and as a fumigation
1chamber. We do not know whether it was used in either of
2those capacities.
3 Q. [Mr Justice Gray] Designed as a fumigation chamber?
4 A. [Mr Irving] That is what I should have spelt out. We have not really
5been told what these other reports say yet.
6 Q. [Mr Justice Gray] No, I am waiting to hear.
7 MR RAMPTON: There is one other part of this report, Mr Irving,
8which is not dealt with in that list of the bullet points
9 -- I would say that they were blanks rather bullets -- in
10Mr Leuchter's report. It is incineration capacity.
11 A. [Mr Irving] Yes.
12 Q. [Mr Rampton] He got that completely wrong, did he not?
13 A. [Mr Irving] Incineration capacity has been a matter of great debate
15 Q. [Mr Rampton] I know that, but answer my question. Leuchter got it
16wrong, did he not?
17 A. [Mr Irving] I would not be surprised if he got it wrong.
18 Q. [Mr Rampton] Completely wrong?
19 A. [Mr Irving] I would not be surprised if he got it wrong. There are
20very widely different opinions. Even the experts cannot
21agree what the capacities were.
22 Q. [Mr Rampton] Notwithstanding this catalogue of fundamental errors in
23Leuchter, you publicly, in your public role, have adhered
24to it as though it was the gospel of St John, have you
26 A. [Mr Irving] If you have read correctly what I said in my public
1utterances, I have always relied on the chemical forensic
2part of the Leuchter examinations and not on any of his
3other rather absurd statements which I regarded as if --
4in fact, I never even read those statements except when I,
5in general, took on board the fact that he was an engineer
6and he was venturing outside his proper field.
7 Q. [Mr Rampton] Well, you knew that at the time, did you not?
8 A. [Mr Irving] Knew what at that time?
9 Q. [Mr Rampton] That he was venturing outside his expertise which was
10extremely limited?
11 A. [Mr Irving] Well, I said so in my correspondence at the time. I said
12if only ----
13 Q. [Mr Rampton] Correspondence, I am not interested in your
15 A. [Mr Irving] Well, the correspondence shows my state of mind at the
16time, Mr Rampton, which is material in this court.
17 Q. [Mr Rampton] So, in private, in your mind, I suggest to you, you had
18received material from Beer, Crabtree, Wegner, which, in
19effect, completely discredited Leuchter, but you never
20gave that any public notice at all, did you?
21 A. [Mr Irving] I was not under any compulsion to give private
22correspondence public notice. When you are an author, you
23are constantly receiving letters from members of the
24public suggesting you have got things wrong. Sometimes
25you ignore them, and I know a lot of people ignore lots of
26things. A lot of the experts in this case have ignored
1lots of documents until they finally come up in this
2trial. But when you are conscientious, then you will put
3those objections to other people who are probably better
4informed than yourselves and say, "What do you say about
5this?" This is precisely what I did.
6 Q. [Mr Rampton] Mr Irving, I have got very little left on this Auschwitz
7question now. Can you tell me this, because the answers
8to these questions, I am not going to cross-examine you
9about them if your answer be yes. I leave you to raise
10them with Professor van Pelt by way of rebuttal of what
11I would characterize as the overwhelming evidence in
12favour of his thesis.
13 First, do you see the coke supplies at Auschwitz
14as being significant?
15 A. [Mr Irving] Coke?
16 MR JUSTICE GRAY: "Coke" did you say?
17 MR RAMPTON: Coke, C-O-K-E, which in those days meant what it
19 MR JUSTICE GRAY: I think I assumed that.
20 MR RAMPTON: You are going to raise that with Professor --
21I need to know because he has to prepare himself, you see?
22 A. [Mr Irving] Yes.
23 Q. [Mr Rampton] Are you going to raise the question of coke supply?
24 A. [Mr Irving] We shall raise that because if Holocaust denial is said to
25be minimising or reducing the scale of the tragedy in a
26numerical sense, then we are entitled to look at the coke
2 Q. [Mr Rampton] Are you going to deal with incineration capacity?
3 A. [Mr Irving] Cremation capacity, the various crematoria.
4 Q. [Mr Rampton] I am talking about burning corpses in ovens or in pits.
5 A. [Mr Irving] Well, in my side of the courtroom you call it "cremation"
6rather than "incineration".
7 Q. [Mr Rampton] Call it what you like. Are you going to raise that with
8Professor van Pelt?
9 A. [Mr Irving] I think so, yes.
10 Q. [Mr Rampton] Are you going to raise the question of the Hensley
12 A. [Mr Irving] Yes, but also I shall be doing that with Dr Jean Fox as
14 Q. [Mr Rampton] I am sure you will. Are you going to raise the question
15of the so-called "death books"?
16 A. [Mr Irving] Yes.
17 Q. [Mr Rampton] Are you going to raise the question of the supplies of
18Zyklon B to Runinberg and also to Auschwitz?
19 A. [Mr Irving] I am going to be raising the general question of the
20production rate of Zyklon B by the factory.
21 Q. [Mr Rampton] I am sorry?
22 A. [Mr Irving] And its delivery and to specific quantities delivered to
23various camps, yes. I shall also be raising the question
24of the authenticity of the eyewitnesses.
25 Q. [Mr Rampton] Certainly.
26 A. [Mr Irving] Their integrity.
1 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Yes. I think what Mr Rampton was really
2doing, if I understand him right, was investigating with
3you what other positive pointers you feel exist towards
4the non-existence of gas chambers.
5 A. [Mr Irving] The eyewitnesses come into that. I suppose that is
6negative. That is negative.
7 Q. [Mr Justice Gray] You say they are negative. I think what Mr Rampton really
8would like you to say is, is there anything else that you
9are positively relying on, as it were, against the
10existence of gas chambers? Do you understand the
11question? I hope it is not ----
12 A. [Mr Irving] I do not really understand that.
13 Q. [Mr Justice Gray] --- obscure.
14 A. [Mr Irving] Yes.
15 Q. [Mr Justice Gray] Well, I think you agreed with me that Mr Rampton has just
16run through various topics which you are going to raise
17because in your ----
18 A. [Mr Irving] Of course, we are relying on the architectural evidence,
19my Lord, what Mr Rampton will call the archeological
21 Q. [Mr Justice Gray] Right.
22 MR RAMPTON: That is fine, my Lord. With your Lordship's
23leave, at present -- I may come back to it by way of
24re-examination -- I see no purpose in my dealing with
25those what I call rebuttal topics in cross-examination.
26If your Lordship wishes me to do so, I easily can, but it
1will take time and we are going to go round the houses all
2over again when Professor van Pelt gives evidence because
3what I put in cross-examination is only what Professor Van
4Pelt will say from the witness box.
5 A. [Mr Irving] Will Professor van Pelt be actually giving
6evidence-in-chief or will he be relying on his report?
7 MR JUSTICE GRAY: That is a question for me and the answer is
8he will be relying on his report.
9 MR RAMPTON: I am going to ask his Lordship about that in a
10moment because I have now finished, my Lord, so far as
11Auschwitz is answered.
12 MR JUSTICE GRAY: No, but, I mean, in answer to the question,
13750 pages is enough to speak for itself.
14 MR RAMPTON: I am not going to read it all out your Lordship --
15which your Lordship has read once, if not more often. It
16seems to me that, really, we have reached the position
17now, if your Lordship agrees, where all I really need to
18do -- I had had in mind a sort of nice graphic demo and
19screens and all that kind of thing for Professor van Pelt,
20but I no longer think it necessary because, apart from
21this question of concentration and the chemical analysis
22results, it seems to me, I may be wrong, that really
23Mr Irving has abandoned Mr Fred Leuchter and his report in
24toto. That being so, I do not need to go through the
26 MR JUSTICE GRAY: I think that is probably right. You will
1though, presumably, have to deal, and I think probably in
2general terms only, with the other bodies of evidence,
3categories of evidence, for the existence of the gas
4chambers? For example, we have had a bit of evidence
5about eyewitnesses, but we have not had anything, for
6example, about the drawings made by -- I cannot remember
7his name, the Frenchman.
8 MR RAMPTON: Dayaco and Eiffel who were two of the Auschwitz
10 MR JUSTICE GRAY: No, I was thinking actually of the inmate.
11 MR RAMPTON: Oh, Dave Olaire.
12 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Olaire. Things of that kind will have to be
13put in general terms, will they not, as to whether
14Mr Irving knew about them, whether he attached any
15credibility to them.
16 MR RAMPTON: I suppose so, though, frankly, given his public
17stance in relation to Leuchter, I am not sure it any
18longer has much point. I am not here to debate whether
19the gas chambers existed. To my mind, I may be wrong --
20your Lordship may disagree and we have still to hear the
21cross-examination -- van Pelt demonstrates that with
22admirable clarify.
23 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Yes, I agree, but I do think one or two
24questions, and I hope it does not come to much more than
25that, along the lines of, well, the evidence does not
26consist only in, as it were, rubbishing Leuchter's report;
1there is a whole body of positive evidence which you have
2put forward as establishing beyond the possibility of
3doubt that the gas chambers did exist, so that Mr Irving
4can then make either a general or a more detailed response
5to that.
6 MR RAMPTON: I will start in the most general way. (To the
7witness): Ignoring the eyewitness accounts, Mr Irving, do
8you agree that the most suggestive effect of the
9contemporaneous documentary evidence, by which I mean the
10plans, the memoranda and the correspondence, retrieved
11from Auschwitz, the most suggestive effect of that is that
12these were, indeed, homicidal gas chambers?
13 A. [Mr Irving] No.
14 Q. [Mr Rampton] Why not?
15 A. [Mr Irving] From the Auschwitz archives and from the Moscow archives,
16historians have now retrieved many hundreds of thousands
17of pages of documents, and we are entitled to at least one
18explicit, non-ambiguous, non-reading between the lines,
19non-euphemism type of document which would gives us the
20clear smoking gun. That document does not exist.
21 Q. [Mr Rampton] No, it is bit like the order by Adolf Hitler for the
22beginning of the Final Solution: Since it does not exist,
23it did not happen; is that right?
24 A. [Mr Irving] I did not say that.
25 Q. [Mr Rampton] I thought that was nature, the effect of your
26evidence ----
1 A. [Mr Irving] No.
2 Q. [Mr Rampton] --- about Hitler and the Final Solution?
3 A. [Mr Irving] I am saying that because two bodies of documents -- you
4may not appreciate this point -- of such integrity have
5been captured, presumably intact, on the one hand, there
6in the Auschwitz state archives, on the other hand, they
7are captured by the Red Army, the entire records of the SS
8construction unit, and now they linger in the Moscow
9archives ever since, and, presumably, no incriminating
10documents have been removed by anyone, one would have been
11entitled to expect that by now when historians have had
12some 10 years to go through every single page many times,
13they would have found a document slightly more
14incriminating than those you have so far been able to
16 Q. [Mr Rampton] Leaving aside the absence of an actual document
17saying, "Now we must build some homicidal gas chambers at
18the order of SS Reichfuhrer Himmler ----
19 A. [Mr Irving] I try to avoid sarcasm like that. I try to look at it at
20a more serious and objective level.
21 Q. [Mr Rampton] No, but, I am sorry, it does seem to me perhaps
22appropriate to use sarcasm in this area?
23 A. [Mr Irving] Sarcasm is the last resort of the scoundrel.
24 Q. [Mr Rampton] Leaving that on one side, do you agree that otherwise the
25tendency of the surviving contemporaneous evidence -- by
26this I include the remains of the buildings such as they
1are -- is to suggest that, yes, indeed, these were
2homicidal gas chambers?
3 A. [Mr Irving] The tendency of?
4 Q. [Mr Rampton] Surviving documentary evidence and the ruins is to suggest
5that these were, indeed, homicidal gas chambers?
6 A. [Mr Irving] No, I do not agree that.
7 Q. [Mr Rampton] Why not?
8 A. [Mr Irving] Because there are alternative explanations which are
9equally plausible.
10 Q. [Mr Rampton] No, I am talking about tendency.
11 A. [Mr Irving] It depends how tendentious you are.
12 Q. [Mr Rampton] We have dealt with the word "vergasungskeller"?
13 A. [Mr Irving] Yes.
14 Q. [Mr Rampton] Which you say means, oh, well, that was only for gassing
15clothes or corpses?
16 A. [Mr Irving] Perhaps I can put it the other way round. A German would
17never translate "gas chamber" "vergasungskeller", never
18ever. Not any German in this room would translate the
19German word "gas chamber" by "vergasungskeller".
20 Q. [Mr Rampton] What do you take to be the meaning of the phrase found in
21Wetzel's letter to Lohse of 25th October 1941,
23 A. [Mr Irving] Gassing equipment -- whatever it was.
24 Q. [Mr Rampton] You saw on the second page of that letter, did you not,
25the statement to this effect, "We have no objection if you
26use that equipment to dispose of Jews who are unable to
2 A. [Mr Irving] Now, you have drawn a link between the
3"vergasungsapparate" and the second page which does not
4exist. I am familiar, you remember, with the Tesh trial.
5Bruno Tesh himself went to Riga, as the head of the Zyklon
6B manufacturing company, to train the staff in the
7operation of the fumigation chambers which were installed
8in Riga. So we know precisely what the vergasungsapparate
10 Q. [Mr Rampton] What would a German mean -- I am not in any sense
11deferring to you on this, Mr Irving, I am afraid; I just
12want to know what your answer is -- what would an ordinary
13German, who actually did not even get his grammar right,
14by saying that he had concreted the floor in gaskammer?
15 A. [Mr Irving] Can we see that document, please?
16 Q. [Mr Rampton] Yes, if you like. It is ----
17 A. [Mr Irving] Because, of course ----
18 Q. [Mr Rampton] It is the time sheet of a humble workman at crematorium
19(iv) in March 1943, 2nd March 1943.
20 A. [Mr Irving] Well, every German in this room will be able to tell you
21what is wrong with that phrase, of course.
22 Q. [Mr Rampton] We know that he has the gender wrong.
23 A. [Mr Irving] It is not the kind of thing one gets wrong.
24 Q. [Mr Rampton] It is, perhaps, if you are a humble workman in southern
25Poland. It perhaps is the sort of mistake which our
26humble workmen, if I may call them that without offence,
1sometimes make: "I ain't been there today"?
2 A. [Mr Irving] Can we see the actual document, please?
3 MR JUSTICE GRAY: It is "im", is it?
4 MR RAMPTON: "Im", he has just got the wrong gender.
5 MR JUSTICE GRAY: "Kammer" is "das kammer".
6 MR RAMPTON: "Kammer" is feminine.
7 MR JUSTICE GRAY: It is feminine? "die kammer", is it?
8 A. [Mr Irving] No, die kammer, "in der gaskammer" it should be
9 MR RAMPTON: Yes, exactly. He has made a grammatical mistake.
10 A. [Mr Irving] Can we have a look at the document and see how much else
11is ungrammatical about it?
12 Q. [Mr Rampton] It is in the second volume new 3 and it is in tab 4 at
13page 38. Unfortunately, the photograph we have has been
14cut off. I assure you that the word is "gaskammer"
15because I have the reproduction.
16 MR JUSTICE GRAY: You said tab 4?
17 MR RAMPTON: Tab 4, my Lord, page 38. It is a coloured
18photograph of a handwritten entry in a time sheet. Page
1938. One of the numbers on it is 35, unfortunately, but
20the one to look out for is a new handwritten No. 38. In
21the third line from the end he has written something about
22"fussboden", something or other, in gaskammer?
23 A. [Mr Irving] Yes, with the two Ss in the "gass" as well.
24 Q. [Mr Rampton] Sorry?
25 A. [Mr Irving] Two Ss in the "gass", G-A-S-S, kammer.
26 Q. [Mr Rampton] Quite right.
1 A. [Mr Irving] What does the other "S" stand for, do you think?
2Gasschuts? Gas protection?
3 Q. [Mr Rampton] You tell me.
4 A. [Mr Irving] I do not know. I am just drawing attention to further
5errors in this document.
6 Q. [Mr Rampton] Right.
7 A. [Mr Irving] But, in view of the fact that I have stated that the odds
8are that the vergasen to which reference is made is
9Leichenkeller 1.
10 Q. [Mr Rampton] This is to do with crematorium (iv)?
11 A. [Mr Irving] And this is, therefore, in all likelihood, the
12entwesungsanlager to which the document refers which
13I shall be showing you tomorrow.
14 Q. [Mr Rampton] Leave aside the grammatical mistakes and the misspelling,
15Mr Irving, what does a German mean by the word
17 A. [Mr Irving] "Gas chamber". But this is almost certainly a reference
18to the building they are making at this time, namely
19entwesungsanlager to which reference is made in the
20document I referred to earlier, the fumigation equipment.
21 Q. [Mr Rampton] I do not have that document.
22 A. [Mr Irving] Well, it will below all these things right out of the
23water tomorrow.
24 Q. [Mr Rampton] We look forward to it. I am still a little puzzled why
25the gas chamber or, sorry, the vergasungskeller at
26crematoria (ii) and (iii) need -- now could you please
1turn to page 44?
2 A. [Mr Irving] Well, it needs a steel door with a peep hole, right?
3 Q. [Mr Rampton] No. I want to look at the first paragraph first.
4 A. [Mr Irving] Right.
5 Q. [Mr Rampton] That relates to the crematoria (iv) and (v), does it not?
6 A. [Mr Irving] Yes.
7 Q. [Mr Rampton] BW 30B and 30C, and there is an order for three gas type
9 A. [Mr Irving] Yes.
10 Q. [Mr Rampton] Ignore the "M". That is a misprint. It should be "turn"
11and "gas type towers" is what the person has written?
12 A. [Mr Irving] Yes.
13 Q. [Mr Rampton] It is another error?
14 A. [Mr Irving] Yes, "gas type doors".
15 Q. [Mr Rampton] The second paragraph says that they have -- you read it to
16me and tell me what it says?
17 A. [Mr Irving] "On this occasion we remind you of a further order dated
18March 6th 1943 for the supply of one gas door, 100/192,
19for the mortuary No. 1 of crematorium No. (iii), the
20construction project 30A, which has to be manufactured
21precisely according to the type and scale of the cellar
22door, basement door, of the crematorium No. (ii) which is
23directly opposite with a peep hole with a double eight
24millimetre glass with a rubber gasket and mounting".
25 Q. [Mr Rampton] Steel, a metal mounting, is it not?
26 A. [Mr Irving] That is right, yes.
1 Q. [Mr Rampton] Now, why would you need that for a room which was to be
2used either for gassing corpses or clothes?
3 A. [Mr Irving] You remember the third alternative use which I suggested
4this morning.
5 Q. [Mr Rampton] Oh, you mean it might be an air raid shelter?
6 A. [Mr Irving] Yes.
7 Q. [Mr Rampton] With no emergency exit?
8 A. [Mr Irving] This was one of the few underground buildings in
9Auschwitz. It was built almost entirely subterraneously
10with a concrete roof, a cast concrete roof, reinforced
11concrete roof, ideally suited as an air raid shelter. The
12door described here, and the door which is, indeed, found
13in Auschwitz, is a typical air raid steel door, a gas
14tight door, of the kind which was standard throughout
15Germany at that time.
16 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Why do you need a gas type door for an air
17raid shelter in 1943?
18 A. [Mr Irving] Because they did not know that we were not going to use
19poison gas, and all air raid shelters in Germany from this
20time onwards were being built with gas tight doors.
21 MR RAMPTON: If it be the case, Mr Irving, that the metal
22grille ----
23 A. [Mr Irving] Excuse me a minute. My Lord, tomorrow I will produce the
24appropriate German air raid manuals producing pictures of
25precisely these doors with the peep holes.
26 MR RAMPTON: Two things puzzle me about this, well, there are
1three. The first is the absence of any kind of emergency
2exit which I had been led to believe de rigour in German
3air raid shelter design. Second, if it be the case that
4the metal protection for the peep hole was on the inside
5of the door, that does not speak of air raid shelter, does
7 A. [Mr Irving] I do not know what the standard at that time -- you see,
8the problem is they do not make these doors ad hoc. There
9is ----
10 Q. [Mr Rampton] They do.
11 A. [Mr Irving] If -- the air raid shelter doors are all supplied with
12peep holes, all the gas tight doors had peep holes. It is
13rather like the ATM machines which have a little braille
14pad on them, whether or not it is even a drive by ATM
15machine, it still has the braille pad on it, although,
16obviously, drivers are not blind, because that is the
17cheapest way to make ATM machines. They do not make ----
18 Q. [Mr Rampton] Mr Irving, I rather think you are making things up as you
19go along. This is an order from Bischoff?
20 A. [Mr Irving] Yes.
21 Q. [Mr Rampton] Who is the head of the architectural department, building
23 A. [Mr Irving] Indeed, yes.
24 Q. [Mr Rampton] To the work shop in Auschwitz?
25 A. [Mr Irving] Yes.
26 Q. [Mr Rampton] They made these things to order?
1 A. [Mr Irving] Excuse me, no. It is being sent to the Deutsche [German].
2 Q. [Mr Rampton] Yes. That is in Auschwitz. Look.
3 A. [Mr Irving] All it just says is the factory, Auschwitz, Obeschlazien.
4 Q. [Mr Rampton] Look, and [German - document not provided] "OS"?
5 A. [Mr Irving] "Obeschalzien". It just says, "The factory at Auschwitz"
6which is the town of Auschwitz.
7 Q. [Mr Rampton] Exactly.
8 A. [Mr Irving] It does not say, "Concentration camp, Auschwitz".
9 Q. [Mr Rampton] No, no, but these orders all go to the -- they made
10furniture and a whole lot of other things. It all goes to
11Auschwitz. This is not some order to some centralised air
12raid making department in Berlin, is it?
13 A. [Mr Irving] This is obviously a company which manufactures air raid
14shelter doors.
15 Q. [Mr Rampton] You do not find anything about air raid shelters in this
16document, do you?
17 A. [Mr Irving] "Deutsche [German]", [German] is equipment factories.
18 Q. [Mr Rampton] Yes.
19 A. [Mr Irving] It is nothing to do with furniture.
20 Q. [Mr Rampton] In Auschwitz?
21 A. [Mr Irving] In the town of Auschwitz. As Mr Van Pelt will tell you,
22Auschwitz was a town.
23 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Mr Irving, if all these air raid shelter
24doors come with a peep hole, why does he have to spell it
25out in the letter? I mean, he is saying, "I want a peep
26hole in my door". Why does he say that?
1 A. [Mr Irving] It is the same, you will see, my Lord, when they are
2ordering electric motors, they also specify exactly what
3the electric motor has to be.
4 Q. [Mr Justice Gray] That may be rather different because there are various
5kinds of electric motor.
6 A. [Mr Irving] Anyway, when you see the photographs of the doors they are
7talking about and the doors that are in all the standard
8Civil Defence manuals, they are the standard air raid
9shelter door.
10 MR RAMPTON: These doors have been purpose built. He has
11already got one, has Bischoff, for Leichenkeller 1 in
12crematorium (ii). He says to the people, the manufacturer
13in Auschwitz, the manufacturer in Auschwitz: "I want
14another exactly the same for Leichenkeller 1 in
15crematorium (iii)", does he not?
16 A. [Mr Irving] On the face of it, this is a very incriminating and highly
17sinister and murderous document, but, of course, it is
18lacking one thing, is it not?
19 Q. [Mr Rampton] What is that?
20 A. [Mr Irving] Security classification. There is no secret stamp on it.
21If this is connected to the Final Solution and it is
22talking about this kind of sinister document, they would
23have put a "Secret", even the lowest classification on it.
24This is a document of janitorial level which you are
25trying to hype up into a smoking gun.
26 Q. [Mr Rampton] Which is exactly why you might find that it does not have
1"Geheim" on it, janitorial level.
2 A. [Mr Irving] In other words, it is capable of ----
3 MR JUSTICE GRAY: There are two points. One is that it is not
4authentic because it is not stamped "Geheim" and the other
5is that it is janitorial.
6 A. [Mr Irving] I am not saying -- no, my Lord. I am not saying it is not
7authentic, my Lord. I am saying the fact that it is given
8no security classification, even by an SS officer,
9indicates that it is as harmless as it appears to be.
10 Q. [Mr Justice Gray] But I would have thought that if it is on a janitorial
11level, it might be all the more valuable as a clue to what
12is really going on.
13 A. [Mr Irving] No, it is ----
14 Q. [Mr Justice Gray] What is wrong with that proposition?
15 A. [Mr Irving] I think that this is looking for conspiracy theories the
16whole time, my Lord. If you are confronted with an
17innocent document in which he is ordering an innocent air
18raid shelter door, it does not occur to anybody to start
19stamping it "Secret", and it does not occur to him that 50
20years down the road the Queen's Bench Division is going to
21try to make this out into a smoking gun.
22 MR RAMPTON: These are all carbons, are they not, Mr Irving?
23 A. [Mr Irving] Don't fall for that one. Immediately after the top left
24where it says "43/KI/Schull", which is the name of the
25secretary, there would be another "/" followed by "GEH"
26or "G" or "GKDOS" or "GRS", according to what security
1classification it had. It would be part of the letter
2book registration number.
3 Q. [Mr Rampton] I just want to pursue the air raid shelter dream a little
4bit further, if I may, Mr Irving?
5 A. [Mr Irving] The air raid shelter?
6 Q. [Mr Rampton] "Dream" because it is, I have to suggest, complete
8 A. [Mr Irving] And this list of documents about air raid shelters is also
9a fantasy from the Moscow archives?
10 Q. [Mr Rampton] The "Deutsche aust" [German - document not provided]
11Gazelshaft", etc. ----
12 A. [Mr Irving] Yes.
13 Q. [Mr Rampton] --- in Auschwitz?
14 A. [Mr Irving] At Auschwitz.
15 Q. [Mr Rampton] --- at Auschwitz, well, in Auschwitz -- there was a sort
16of settlement there -- was SS operated and inmate staffed,
17was it not?
18 A. [Mr Irving] I will take your word for it -- probably with slave
19labour, yes.
20 Q. [Mr Rampton] I just want to pursue the air raid shelter a little bit
21further. How far away is Leichenkeller 1 or how far away
22are crematoria (ii) -- I will start again. Who was going
23to go into these air raid shelters of yours? Who were
24they for?
25 A. [Mr Irving] I have no idea.
26 Q. [Mr Rampton] For the inmates?
1 A. [Mr Irving] I have no idea.
2 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Well, you have been asked now?
3 A. [Mr Irving] But my answer ----
4 Q. [Mr Rampton] Would they have built them for the slave labour? That is
5really inherent in the question.
6 MR RAMPTON: Yes. I said "for the inmates".
7 A. [Mr Irving] If we are really interested in this subject, I can
8inundate the court with paper about the construction of
9splinter trenches, concrete roof with reinforced concrete
10beams, bunkers for the inmates and everything. There was
11a great deal of agitation and work went on providing air
12raid shelter for the SS and for the inmates ----
13 Q. [Mr Rampton] Yes. You have advanced ----
14 A. [Mr Irving] --- during these months and years.
15 Q. [Mr Rampton] --- the air raid shelter theory?
16 A. [Mr Irving] Which had, obviously, not occurred to you.
17 Q. [Mr Rampton] Obviously not occurred? We have known about it for years,
18Mr Irving. It just seems so silly we have not bothered to
19take it terribly seriously. Perhaps we are wrong. If
20this is for the SS, this air raid shelter, it is a
21terribly long way from the SS barracks, is it not? They
22would all be dead before they ever got there if there was
23a bombing raid. Have you thought about that? It is about
24two and a half miles?
25 A. [Mr Irving] I remember during the war when we got air raid warnings
26half an hour, an hour, before the planes arrived.
1 Q. [Mr Rampton] And you went down to the bottom of the garden, just as I
2did, and hid in your Andersen shelter, or whatever it was
4 A. [Mr Irving] We had a Morrison.
5 Q. [Mr Rampton] We had one of those first and then we got grand and had an
7 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Well, that is enough reminiscing.
8 A. [Mr Irving] Yes, but what I am saying is that when you were deep in
9Silesia, you had all the warning from the early warning
10system in Holland which is where it was based. You had
11all that time to tell you that enemy bombers were coming
12overhead heading your way.
13 MR RAMPTON: But, Mr Irving, you do know, do you not, that they
14draw did actually draw up plans for converting the
15crematorium at Auschwitz (i) into an air raid shelter for
16the SS.
17 A. [Mr Irving] Ah, ah, so this kind of thing did happen?
18 Q. [Mr Rampton] Oh, yes, but that is where the SS ----
19 A. [Mr Irving] But you kept it quiet until now?
20 Q. [Mr Rampton] --- that, Mr Irving, is where the SS barracks was.
21 A. [Mr Irving] Yes, well, I did not say this was for the SS.
22 Q. [Mr Rampton] They could pop out of their living quarters into the air
23raid shelter. Do you really see a whole lot of heavily
24armed soldiers running two-and-a-half or three miles from
25the SS barracks to these cellars at the far end of the
26Birkenhau camp? I mean, Mr Irving.
1 A. [Mr Irving] It was, I think, common sense to take the only two
2underground buildings which had reinforced concrete roofs
3and which had been very heavily constructed at very great
4expensive to the German taxpayer -- far more expensively
5built than above ground mortuaries -- and to convert them
6for use as air raid shelters when the alarm began at the
7end of 1942. You can see this from the construction
8files, that they became increasingly concerned about the
9risk of air raids. Even if it was not just for the
10Kommandant and his private staff and family, it does not
11detract from the value of this particular explanation.
12 MR JUSTICE GRAY: How many people could be accommodated?
13 A. [Mr Irving] Well, we are told 2,000 people could get in, according
14to ----
15 MR RAMPTON: The document of 28th June 1943 suggests something,
16a gassing, sorry, an accommodation per gassing of about
171600 people, sometimes as many as 2,000. Anyway, leave
18that on one side. I still want to know how you think it
19is even realistic, never mind credible, to expect all
20those SS men to run all the way from the barracks at
21Auschwitz (i) to the far end of the camp at Birkenhau and
22climb into this air raid shelter before they got squashed
23by the allied bombs.
24 A. [Mr Irving] I did explain to you. I do not know who this privileged
25accommodation is being provided for.
26 Q. [Mr Rampton] Well, they are not going to get 120,000 prisoners into
1such a space, are they, Mr Irving?
2 A. [Mr Irving] No, but the records show that very large numbers of other
3air raid protection facilities were being built around the
4camp at this time from the most primitive nature, which
5was of splitter trenches with primitive shelter over the
6top, to the most complicated bunkers.
7 Q. [Mr Rampton] Those are still there today. You can see little sentry
8shelters, one per person.
9 A. [Mr Irving] So they made provision for everybody according to their
10needs, to each according to his needs and to his status,
11no doubt.
12 Q. [Mr Rampton] Well, my Lord, I have only one more question about air
13raid shelters and that is to be found on pages 29 and 30
14of the same section of the file, Mr Irving. I am not
15going to struggle with this. I know what it says because
16I have had it translated for me, but I am afraid I do not
17have a translation yet.
18 A. [Mr Irving] Which file?
19 Q. [Mr Rampton] Page 29 of this file.
20 A. [Mr Irving] 11th February 1943?
21 Q. [Mr Rampton] That is the one. I ask you again. No need to read this
22out loud. It can be copied into the transcript in due
23course. I just ask you to read it to yourself. It is a
24page and a half, if that?
25 MR JUSTICE GRAY: You are probably familiar with it, are you
1 A. [Mr Irving] Since yesterday, my Lord. Yes, it was delivered to me
2yesterday. I have asked all my colleagues around the
3world what the explanation for all this is and nobody has
4expressed very great alarm, except that I do draw
5attention, if I may, to the reference in the third and
6fourth lines to the provision eventually of two final
7permanent electric corpse elevators, or lifts, and one
8temporary corpse elevator which is to be installed as an
10 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Where is that on the page?
11 A. [Mr Irving] Lines 3 and 4 of the first page of the actual letter.
12 MR RAMPTON: Now, you have read that letter?
13 A. [Mr Irving] Yes.
14 Q. [Mr Rampton] You have seen it. I am sorry it was late coming. We only
15got it ourselves, I think, on Saturday?
16 A. [Mr Irving] I got this at 10 past 9 yesterday evening.
17 MR RAMPTON: Yes, I am sorry it is late.
18 MR JUSTICE GRAY: "Leichenaftuk"(?) is that the word for corpse
20 A. [Mr Irving] Yes, Leichenaftuk. They played quite an important part in
21the whole of the argument I shall develop when I come to
22get revenge on Professor van Pelt later on.
23 MR JUSTICE GRAY: That is not the right way of expressing
25 A. [Mr Irving] Well, I have had to endure a public flogging now for three
1 MR RAMPTON: Well, Mr Irving, you brought this action, if I may
2call it that.
3 A. [Mr Irving] I am very much entitled to, yes.
4 Q. [Mr Rampton] So you must expect to be flogged publicly. If the blows
5have been a little bit painful, I am sorry, but I am going
6to go on landing them. Look at the second page of this
7letter, will you?
8 A. [Mr Irving] Yes.
9 Q. [Mr Rampton] Am I right that, in effect, the whole of this letter is a
10frightful -- I am going to use schoolboy language --
11blowing up administered by the people of Auschwitz,
12Bischoff, to the supplier because they are behind in their
14 A. [Mr Irving] That is right, yes.
15 Q. [Mr Rampton] And he is saying in the last paragraph but one, is he not:
16 "Unless this stuff turns up quickly", and he is reciting
17a telegram he has already sent, "we cannot get this thing
18off the ground, the whole installation"?
19 A. [Mr Irving] Yes.
20 Q. [Mr Rampton] The second paragraph from the end. That is right, is it
21not, and he uses the word in the previous
22paragraph "Dringinschten" which means "most urgent", yes?
23 A. [Mr Irving] Yes.
24 Q. [Mr Rampton] Why the urgency if it is a mere air raid shelter or a
25delousing chamber?
26 A. [Mr Irving] We are at the height of the typhus emergency, are we not?
1 Q. [Mr Rampton] No. This is in February 1943. It has all gone. It was
2the summer of '42?
3 A. [Mr Irving] Yes. And there would have been no more typhus
5 Q. [Mr Rampton] There was not one in '43.
6 A. [Mr Irving] But did they know there was going to be no typhus
8 Q. [Mr Rampton] No, of course not. But this is mid winter in southern
9Poland, it is 11th February 1943, and he wants it all
10finished by 6th March. Have I got an answer?
11 A. [Mr Irving] Are they not having problems at this time with the other
13 Q. [Mr Rampton] With?
14 A. [Mr Irving] With the other crematoria?
15 Q. [Mr Rampton] Not so far as I know.
16 A. [Mr Irving] They had run into other crematoria being rendered unsafe
17by chimney fires, this kind of problem?
18 Q. [Mr Rampton] Not so far as I know. Professor van Pelt will tell you
19yeah or nay if you ask him that question.
20 A. [Mr Irving] All I can say is that I have read the three letters. This
21is one letter of three that were sent to me last night in
22conjunction with each other. Bischoff, who is at
23Auschwitz, is, as you say, tearing strips off his
24suppliers for repeatedly failing to deliver on time, and
25supplies come back to him and say: "We will give you a
26ten horse-power motor instead of a seven horse-power motor
1which will do the job as well". I do not read any great
2significance into them saying "urgently" as the kind of
3thing I say to printers when I want books printed
4urgently. What I say is that I urgently need. What I did
5notice on one of the letters (I cannot put my finger on
6which one it was - I am sure Miss Rogers can help us on
7this) is Topf, the company that is supplying the equipment
8to Auschwitz, saying that we cannot get the priority for
9our shipments, we cannot get the railroad priority, which
10seems an odd thing if this is the Final Solution they are
11talking about, and the company who is supplying the
12equipment says, "We cannot get the priority to put our
13stuff on the trains".
14 Q. [Mr Rampton] In February or March in Southern Poland, Mr Irving, I
15should think, I do not know, but I should think the
16temperature is pretty low, is it not?
17 A. [Mr Irving] Yes, but I also think and I am not an epidemiologist, but
18I do happen to know typhus epidemics are most prevalent in
19precisely these months of the year. They come and go in
20cycles. The early months of the year is when typhus
21epidemics are considered to be the most prevalent.
22 Q. [Mr Rampton] That was not the experience in 1942, was it, in this
24 A. [Mr Irving] It began in 1942 and got out of hand in early 1942 until
25it reached its peak, I think, in about August 1942.
26 Q. [Mr Rampton] We have now abandoned really air raid shelters, have we
2 A. [Mr Irving] As a topic for questioning, yes.
3 Q. [Mr Rampton] We can forget air raid shelters. You do not get a letter
4like this, "must complete, you are late, we cannot use the
5installation until these motors arrive, these ventilation
6motors", if we are talking about air raid shelters?
7 A. [Mr Irving] Like any other building that has been newly erected in
8Germany, no doubt in England, they are not allowed to put
9them into operation until they meet the building
10inspector's standard. This equipment was undoubtedly
11considered to be essential before the building could be
12put into use. German buildings, just like any other, had
13to be passed by a building inspector. I think Professor
14van Pelt makes this point also.
15 Q. [Mr Rampton] I have a piece of paper and I ask you simply to note, you
16can take it up with Professor van Pelt later on, a piece
17of paper which tells me that the mortality from the typhus
18epidemic during the summer of 1942 was, it looks like,
19about 20,000, about 20,000 -- 8,000, sorry 8,000, that is
20from the epidemic, and that there was virtually no typhus
21during 1943. Do you accept that?
22 A. [Mr Irving] Not necessarily. I would have to see the figures for
23myself, but also here we are in February 1943, they have
24had the most ghastly experience in 1942, and they are
25taking, to my mind, responsible precautions in case the
26same thing happens in 1943.
1 Q. [Mr Rampton] But in the light of all the ----
2 A. [Mr Irving] They are getting ready and prepared and they have lost two
3of their crematoria by this time I believe.
4 Q. [Mr Rampton] So you say. You must put that to Professor van Pelt. In
5the light of all the evidence, the reference
6gasungskeller, to a gaskammer, to all the rest of the
7documentary evidence, and of the eyewitness testimony,
8Mr Irving, the likeliest explanation for a document of
9this kind is this, is it not: "We want to start the big
10extermination programme in March, get on with it"?
11 A. [Mr Irving] If I was to write a book and based that conclusion on a
12document like that I would rightly stand before a court
13like this for manipulation and distortion.
14 Q. [Mr Rampton] No, Mr Irving, you know that is not a proper answer to my
16 A. [Mr Irving] Of course it is a proper answer.
17 Q. [Mr Rampton] I said in the light ----
18 A. [Mr Irving] I am being accused of basing my hypotheses on what you
19describe as flimsy lines like Judentransport and keine
20liquidierung, and the conclusions I drew on those two
21lines I am accused of having distorted and manipulated,
22and yet you are trying to read into this one document ----
23 Q. [Mr Rampton] No. You did not ----
24 MR JUSTICE GRAY: No, you have not understood what the question
25was. Mr Rampton's question expressly -- will you listen,
26please -- expressly referred to all the other evidence,
1including eyewitness evidence and the rest. You know what
2he is talking about.
3 A. [Mr Irving] My Lord, precisely as I did ----
4 Q. [Mr Justice Gray] He is saying in the light of all of that evidence would
5you not accept that gas chambers is the likely
7 A. [Mr Irving] The short answer is no, and I would add to say, add the
8remark that is precisely what I said when I was accused of
9having drawn adventurous conclusions on the documents laid
10before me. I said remember I have the basis of my entire
11expertise and all the other documents I had, and I rely on
12them too. This is precisely the argument being used by
13Mr Rampton to justify this as being a smoking gun. This
14is a very flimsy document indeed.
15 MR RAMPTON: Mr Irving, I do not say that this document ----
16 A. [Mr Irving] With no security classification on this document either.
17 MR JUSTICE GRAY: No, but it was not being put on that document
18alone. That is the point, but let us move on.
19 A. [Mr Irving] My Lord, you appreciate the point I am trying to make?
20 Q. [Mr Rampton] I certainly understand the point, but I think you may have
21underrated Mr Rampton's question.
22 MR RAMPTON: I think you have also, as you so often do, made a
23false comparison about the point I am making with the
24point I make against you in relation to Berlin Jews.
25However, I pass now from these documents. I think, my
26Lord, that is perhaps enough for the moment. We may come
1back to them in Professor van Pelt cross-examination.
2I just ask you to look at page 49 before I leave this.
3This is a letter I think, Mr Irving. It is dated 20th
4June 1943.
5 A. [Mr Irving] 28th June.
6 Q. [Mr Rampton] Sorry, 28th June 1943, to Kammler who is the head of
7Waffen SS Supply Department in Berlin, am I right?
8 A. [Mr Irving] Yes.
9 Q. [Mr Rampton] From Bicshoff, though it has not got his signature in and
10that is no doubt because it is an office copy, setting out
11what he perceives to be or is reporting to be the
12theoretical capacity of each of five crematoria at the
13time when he writes in a 24-hour period. Have I got it
15 A. [Mr Irving] Yes.
16 MR JUSTICE GRAY: So that is 4,756 corpses in 24 hours.
17 MR RAMPTON: That is 4,756 people corpses -- I must not suggest
18they were alive -- 4,756 corpses to be incinerated by
19these five installations in a 24-hour period. If you
20multiply, Mr Irving, 4,756 by 7 you get something like
2133,000 in a week; and you if multiply that by 4 you get
22something like 130,000 a month; and if you multiply that
23by 12 you get about 1.6 million in a year. What,
24Mr Irving, did they need that kind of capacity for?
25 A. [Mr Irving] Can we discuss the document first?
26 Q. [Mr Rampton] By all means.
1 A. [Mr Irving] This is one of the few documents whose integrity I am
2going to challenge.
3 Q. [Mr Rampton] Ah! On what basis, please tell us?
4 A. [Mr Irving] Well, I prefer to discuss this with one of the expert
5historians who you are calling as witnesses.
6 MR JUSTICE GRAY: No.
7 MR RAMPTON: No, absolutely not, Mr Irving. Do not keep your
8cards in your pocket, it is not allowed.
9 MR JUSTICE GRAY: You have to explain why now.
10 A. [Mr Irving] Well, as I explained already to the court and we discussed
11this briefly with Professor Watt, all German documents of
12this character had to follow a standard layout, a German
13Civil Service layout, if you can put it like this. They
14were typed in a certain way. They had certain
15characteristics like the security classification and so on
16put in. Certain things were written in by hand. Certain
17things were typed in. There are I think five or six
18different versions of this document I have seen in the
19files over the last couple of years, and there are a
20number of discrepancies. I am only going to point to one
21discrepancy and this is right in the top left. The
22"31550" has been typed in,.
23 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Why is that a discrepancy?
24 A. [Mr Irving] My Lord, if you go back to page 39 you will see that
25characteristically it would start off with "Brief
26Tagebuch" BFTGB. This is a very good one for comparison.
1Then you follow with a handwritten number 24365 which
2always handwritten on the documents, followed then by the
3"43" which is the year and that is missing in this page
449, the year is missing and the year is always there
5normally, followed by JA, and if it is supposed to be
6"Janisch" it should be a JA with an umlaut, followed on
7page 49 by NE full stop, dash, and there is no other
8document in the entire Auschwitz archives which has a
9secretary initial "NE".
10 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Why do you say that is the secretary?
11 A. [Mr Irving] The last initials to come there would always be the
12secretary who has typed the document. The one before it
13is the one who has dictated it. So that is the
14discrepancy, just in that one line. The line above the
15date we are missing the word "Auschwitz". So this is a
16document that I am very unhappy with, not to mention the
17fact that the figures do not tally with any of the
18established figures that are provided by the top company
19who actually manufactures these crematoria.
20 MR RAMPTON: Yes, Mr Irving. That is what happens, is it not?
21You come across something absolutely insuperable, so
22immediately you cast doubt on its authenticity?
23 A. [Mr Irving] I have been careful not to do this with any other
24documents, Mr Rampton.
25 MR JUSTICE GRAY: What is the provenance of this document,
26Mr Rampton, do you know.
1 MR RAMPTON: It has on my copy "reproduced from the holdings of
2the US Holocaust Memorial Museum Archives", but ----
3 A. [Mr Irving] I think it is ----
4 Q. [Mr Rampton] --- but at the bottom of the page there is a signature or
5the handwritten word "Jahrling" or it might be "Jahrling?
6 A. [Mr Irving] "Jahrling".
7 Q. [Mr Rampton] It has the umlaut on it there at the bottom of the page,
8has it not?
9 A. [Mr Irving] Yes, but the typist obviously did not bother to put it in
10because on a German typewriter it is a different letter.
11I think it first surfaced in about 1950 when it was
12supplied by the East German Government to the Auschwitz
13Museum which is a rather odd way round for it to go.
14 Q. [Mr Rampton] Do you know that?
15 A. [Mr Irving] From studies -- I am not reproducing my own conclusions on
16this document. I am not an expert on these documents, but
17I have read a study on it. But I have subsequently heard
18from someone that it did actually surface in Soviet hands
19back in the 1945 period.
20 Q. [Mr Rampton] Let us suppose for a moment it is an authentic document so
21we can get on a bit faster. You can take it up with
22Professor van Pelt probably tomorrow.
23 A. [Mr Irving] I just want to say it is a suspect document, but I am
24quite happy to accept that I may be wrong on that.
25 Q. [Mr Rampton] Let us ----
26 A. [Mr Irving] It has things that would make my ----
1 Q. [Mr Rampton] Let us assume you are wrong. Why do you think, if you are
2wrong, that they contemplated that kind of capacity?
3I mean they are contemplating incinerating more than the
4whole population of the camp once a month?
5 A. [Mr Irving] Well, that again is a pointer to the totally absurdity of
6the document frankly.
7 Q. [Mr Rampton] Oh no, it is not, Mr Irving. If they are incinerating
8people who will never form part of the population of the
9camp at all, it is not absurd in the very least bit.
10People who are selected on arrival for being killed and
11incinerated, they never get registered in the camp, do
13 A. [Mr Irving] The entire population of the camp is going to be between
14150,000 and 200,000 people.
15 Q. [Mr Rampton] No, it is projected at some stage. I will have the
16projection figures for you tomorrow, but if these are
17registered people that are being talked about here, then
18I quite agree, it is utterly absurd. If, however, what is
19contemplated is that the majority of these people who are
20going to be incinerated are never registered at all but
21are merely killed on arrival off the train, why then it is
22not the least bit absurd, is it?
23 A. [Mr Irving] It is absurd when you look at the individual figures and
24you know that those figures wildly exceed anything that
25the top company who actually designed and specified the
26crematorium furnaces had provided for by many multiples.
1 Q. [Mr Rampton] Not at all. We will get to the figures. You will
2probably get to the figures with Professor van Pelt, but
3that is the whole point about the design of these top
4multiple muffle ovens, is that you can incinerate up to
5four corpses at a time in any one muffle. Do you know why
6you do that, Mr Irving? Because they self-combust. You
7mix fat corpses with thin corpses and then you do not need
8much coke supply; it keeps going under its own steam?
9 A. [Mr Irving] Mr Rampton, you are not mortician. I am not a mortician,
10but one thing I do know is that bodies are largely made up
11of water, not fat. Nine tenths of a body is water, and
12unless you find a way of burning water then they are not
13going to self-combust.
14 Q. [Mr Rampton] We might have to look at the patent application. Did you
15read that in these papers, Mr Irving?
16 A. [Mr Irving] The patent for the furnaces actually installed?
17 Q. [Mr Rampton] Yes, it is in this bundle.
18 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Are you about to leave the document which
19Mr Irving challenges?
20 MR RAMPTON: Yes.
21 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Can I just ask you one question, Mr Irving?
22If for the sake of argument it is an authentic document,
23it is about as incriminating as one could possibly find?
24 A. [Mr Irving] My Lord ----
25 Q. [Mr Justice Gray] When I say "incriminating" you know what I mean?
26 A. [Mr Irving] Yes, it looks incriminating until you realize the trauma
1they have been through in 1942, with people who were dying
2at the rate of 400 or 500 a day and not knowing what lies
3before them in 1943 when conditions are undoubtedly going
4to get worse because the camp is expanding.
5 Q. [Mr Justice Gray] So you think they might, in order to guard against a
6repetition of 1942, have been constructing crematoria
7capable of taking nearly 5,000 people a day?
8 A. [Mr Irving] I do not accept these figures could possibly be true for
9other considerations, from the coke consumption
10considerations alone. It takes 30 kilograms of coke to
11burn one body, whatever Mr Rampton is about to say now.
12There is no provision for coke supplies on this scale in
13the entire encampment.
14 MR RAMPTON: Mr Irving, the top patent application runs in two
15parts it is, but it runs from pages 6 to 18 in this part
16of the file. It is much to long for us to struggle
17through this afternoon. It is all in German. It is cited
18by Professor van Pelt in his report.
19 MR JUSTICE GRAY: 539 did you say?
20 MR RAMPTON: Yes. Mr Irving, if you have not read it already
21I suggest you read it overnight in case you are going to
22fall out with Professor van Pelt about its effect.
23 A. [Mr Irving] Is it suggested these were crematoria actually installed?
24 Q. [Mr Rampton] No.
25 A. [Mr Irving] Then what on earth is the relevance?
26 Q. [Mr Rampton] What is suggested is that this is the model for, this is
1the patent application after all, the prototype or model
2for those which were actually installed, yes, and the key
3to it was that you had to keep, well, I will start at the
4beginning. Under German law, Mr Irving, correct me if
5I am wrong, you had to burn only one corpse at a time,
6because you had to be able to identify the ashes at the
7end of the operation?
8 A. [Mr Irving] Even in 1940 Himmler ordered this was to be the situation
9in concentration camps too, yes.
10 Q. [Mr Rampton] This was a direct breach of German law, no doubt
11sanctioned by the SS, because what they were proposing was
12to incinerate more than one corpse at a time?
13 A. [Mr Irving] On account of conveyor belt system by the look of it.
14 Q. [Mr Rampton] Yes, absolutely right, and what they observe in their
15patent application is that if you do not keep the process
16continuous you hit problems. If you operate it
17periodically it does not fully satisfy. That is how,
18Mr Irving, they can reach such high numbers. It is also
19how -- I have made a mistake. The patent used -- I made a
20mistake. Anyhow it is the description of the process I am
21interested in.
22 A. [Mr Irving] Well, I cannot quite see the relevance of this to what is
23before us, because you yourself say these were not ever
24installed in Auschwitz.
25 Q. [Mr Rampton] I may have to come back to that.
26 A. [Mr Irving] It is grisly and gruesome stuff to read, but, believe me,
1my brother was Regional Commissioner in Wiltshire and he
2tells me what we were planning for the event of nuclear
3war in this country and that was equally grisly and
4gruesome as to what to do with the bodies that would come
5from a nuclear war. They are planning for worst case
6contingencies here.
7 Q. [Mr Rampton] Mr Irving, the reason why it was possible to contemplate
8such a large daily incineration was that they could burn,
9according to the design of these ovens, one more than one
10corpse at a time in each muffle?
11 A. [Mr Irving] Yes, a zigzag or something like that.
12 Q. [Mr Rampton] No, they were just laid in lines.
13 A. [Mr Irving] Yes.
14 Q. [Mr Rampton] That is number one.
15 A. [Mr Irving] But it was never installed, this is the whole point.
16 Q. [Mr Rampton] Yes, that is exactly. If you read the eyewitness
17descriptions, if you go and look at the wretched things in
18Auschwitz, that is exactly what they are. They are
19multi-muffle ovens.
20 MR JUSTICE GRAY: But having read the extracts that Professor
21van Pelt has cited in his report, it seems to me that they
22are at best of equivocal significance on this question of
23whether human fat will cause them to incinerate more
24frequently. It is page 540 just about the middle.
25 MR RAMPTON: What I think I misunderstood ----
26 MR JUSTICE GRAY: It is the theory of the thing rather than
1whether it is the particular relevant patent.
2 MR RAMPTON: But the eyewitness testimony, Mr Irving, of, for
3example, Henrich Tagebuch tells us that that is exactly
4what they did.
5 A. [Mr Irving] We will see what we have to think of Henrich Teuer when
6the time comes.
7 Q. [Mr Rampton] The time has now come for you to outline, if you will, but
8I just want to ask one more thing before I move to the
9eyewitness evidence.
10 A. [Mr Irving] Let me say just briefly about Henrich Teuer. He was
11clearly briefed as to what to say.
12 MR JUSTICE GRAY: We are coming on to that.
13 MR RAMPTON: You can tell me in a moment about Mr Teuer,
14Mr Irving. I am sure we should like to know because then
15Professor van Pelt can deal with it. The other reason why
16it is an efficient process, if indeed it worked in the way
17in which we have been told that it did, is that of course
18you need much less fuel, do you not?
19 A. [Mr Irving] We know exactly how much fuel on average is required to
20cremate one corpse in existing crematoria.
21 Q. [Mr Rampton] Please listen to my question. If it works in this way,
22that the corpses fuel one another and so the continuous
23combustion process, then you need less coke?
24 A. [Mr Irving] This is yet another "if" on which you base your case, but
25unfortunately these were not the muffles actually
26installed in Auschwitz and we know precisely what their
1efficiency was.
2 Q. [Mr Rampton] So you say, Mr Irving. I am sorry, I just do not believe
3that you know what you are talking about on the question
4of what muffles, I am sorry, what quantity of corpses were
5put into each muffle.
6 A. [Mr Irving] We know because we have precise figures relating to the
7these types of crematoria in, for example, the Gusen
8concentration camp. We know precisely how many tons of
9coke were needed to burn how many hundred bodies, and we
10have I think an average of 30.5 kilograms of coke per body
11being cremated.
12 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Is that in a single body crematoria?
13 A. [Mr Irving] They were the identical muffles that were installed in
14Auschwitz, the identical crematoria, is my understanding.
15 MR RAMPTON: But are you saying that in that crematorium at
16Gusen they burnt more than one body at a time in a muffle?
17 A. [Mr Irving] They were the identical furnaces.
18 Q. [Mr Rampton] You do not answer my questions, Mr Irving, too often. Are
19you saying that they burnt more than one body at a time in
20those muffles?
21 A. [Mr Irving] I should certainly, if you attach importance to that, go
22back and look at it, but I do not see what the difference
23is ----
24 Q. [Mr Rampton] It is critically important.
25 A. [Mr Irving] --- because if it is an average figure and you need that
26much coke to burn one body, then stuffing them in four at
1a time is not going to make it any better.
2 MR JUSTICE GRAY: You are missing Mr Rampton's point.
3 MR RAMPTON: You are missing the point.
4 MR JUSTICE GRAY: I think the reason you are missing it is
5because you just do not know really the answer, whether
6you do burn one body ----
7 A. [Mr Irving] Yes, I would have to go and check up on the sources.
8 Q. [Mr Justice Gray] --- more quickly if you have another body being burnt
10 A. [Mr Irving] I said repeatedly I am not a Holocaust expert. I did not
11want to become a Holocaust expert. I have to defend my
12position here.
13 Q. [Mr Justice Gray] We cannot take it any further I think.
14 MR RAMPTON: I agree, we cannot take it any further. My Lord,
15I will ask one question and Mr Irving can put in what he
16likes to say about Mr Teuer or anybody else. I will ask
17one question about the eyewitness evidence, and then
18I believe I am in a position where I can sit down on this
19part of the case.
20 Mr Irving, what do you say about all the
21eyewitness evidence about Auschwitz for a start?
22 A. [Mr Irving] What an extraordinary question.
23 Q. [Mr Rampton] Well, is it ----
24 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Well, answer it. Do not worry about whether
25it is extraordinary or not.
26 MR RAMPTON: It is not an extraordinary question at all.
1 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Answer it.
2 A. [Mr Irving] All can I say in general is that I would attach less
3importance to the eyewitness evidence than I would to the
4British intercepts, to the aerial photographs, to the
5concrete evidence, literally the archeological evidence,
6to the documents I find in the archives, way down all the
7documents of that sort, sources of that nature, I would
8put way down believe that whatever any eyewitnesses might
10 MR RAMPTON: Mr Irving, if it be the case that the eyewitness
11evidence is broadly consistent with the documentary -- it
12is an "if" I know, so do not say "if" -- if the eyewitness
13evidence is broadly consistent with the documentary
14evidence, then we can pay quite a lot of attention to the
15eyewitness evidence, do you not agree?
16 A. [Mr Irving] Except on one premise.
17 Q. [Mr Rampton] What?
18 A. [Mr Irving] If the eyewitnesses have been briefed on the basis of the
19documents as to what to say.
20 Q. [Mr Rampton] Of course.
21 A. [Mr Irving] Right.
22 Q. [Mr Rampton] If they have been sitting in a room with a pistol to their
23head and they have been shown a document and said, "That
24mean it's a gas chamber, doesn't it?", and they have said
25"Yes, of course"?
26 A. [Mr Irving] If, for example, they describe as having seen a building
1which turns out to have existed only on paper, then we
2know they have been shown the architectural designs and
3they are describing what they have seen on the design and
4not what they have actually seen in real life or concrete.
5 Q. [Mr Rampton] No, you do not know that.
6 A. [Mr Irving] Well, we do. There is one particular case, Mr Teuer.
7 Q. [Mr Rampton] There may be one particular case, but you do not know that
8a person who is shown a drawing does not recognize it as
9what he has seen in real life, do you?
10 A. [Mr Irving] Except if the drawing was never actually put into effect
11in that shape but was subsequently amended.
12 Q. [Mr Rampton] One has to be very cautious about eyewitness testimony,
13particularly when it is remembered sometime after the
14events in question, does one not, Mr Irving?
15 A. [Mr Irving] Yes.
16 Q. [Mr Rampton] And one will test it by reference to material by which it
17cannot have been contaminated, yes?
18 A. [Mr Irving] Yes.
19 Q. [Mr Rampton] That includes eyewitness testimony from other people with
20whom the particular witness has not had any contact, does
21it not?
22 A. [Mr Irving] Yes, except indirectly of course through the interrogator.
23 Q. [Mr Rampton] Yes. If the Brits and the Poles put their heads together
24and produce what we might call a joint questionnaire which
25is uniformly put to all eyewitnesses, I quite agree with
26you. Have you any evidence of that?
1 A. [Mr Irving] I did not say that.
2 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Is the answer no?
3 MR RAMPTON: The answer is no, is it not?
4 A. [Mr Irving] No, but if the same British interrogator questions two
5people in a row, then there will be a certain amount of
6cross-pollination between the two reports.
7 Q. [Mr Rampton] But if somebody is being questioned in London and somebody
8else is being questioned in Norway and somebody else is
9being questioned in Poland, then unless the interrogators
10have put their heads together, there is no chance that the
11witnesses's testimony may be mistaken?
12 A. [Mr Irving] Yes.
13 Q. [Mr Rampton] But there is no chance that it is going to be deliberately
14fabricated in that way, is there?
15 A. [Mr Irving] No, not in that way.
16 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Can you tell, me and it may be that this is
17too general a question to be capable of being answered,
18what you say the motivation of the eyewitnesses who
19painted a false picture of what had been going on in
20Auschwitz was?
21 A. [Mr Irving] I would say it varies, my Lord. It would be partly fear,
22partly the promise of alleviated punishment, partly
23torture, partly pecuniary. It depends on when we are
24talking about, whether it was done recently in connection
25a Hollywood film or back in 1945 to assist the Polish
1 Q. [Mr Justice Gray] You sound from that answer as if you are really talking
2about camp officials?
3 A. [Mr Irving] I am talking about camp officials.
4 Q. [Mr Justice Gray] Rather than survivors. What about the motivation of the
6 A. [Mr Irving] To my knowledge none of the survivors who are not camp
7officials claimed to have been in gas chambers, inside
9 Q. [Mr Justice Gray] No, but they give what admittedly would be circumstantial
10evidence, but nevertheless quite vivid circumstantial
11evidence ----
12 A. [Mr Irving] They give a lot circumstantial evidence.
13 Q. [Mr Justice Gray] --- about what they infer must have been happening, do
14they not?
15 A. [Mr Irving] I really hesitate to set traps for myself by generalizing,
16my Lord. I prefer to see precisely who we are talking
17about. When we are dealing with camp officials we have
18the odd phenomenon that people who would normally be
19candidates for the gallows somehow survive, and almost
20entirely coincidentally give statements that undoubtedly
21Mr Rampton will be relying on.
22 MR RAMPTON: You see, if you read Professor van Pelt's report,
23Mr Irving, which I think you probably have done, you find
24evidence from what he calls perpetrators, camp officials,
25Rudolf Hess, Broad, Altemeyer, Gravno, people like that,
26which is broadly consistent, is it not, in every detail?
1But that is the nature of eyewitness testimony,
2Mr Irving. You would agree, would you not, eyewitness
3testimony which is consistent in every detail is highly
4suspicious, would you agree?
5 A. [Mr Irving] It prompts the word "collusion" to mind.
6 Q. [Mr Rampton] Yes, exactly, collusion. But eyewitness testimony, which
7is broadly consistent but which has differences of detail,
8is, unless there is reason to think that the person is
9lying, reliable as an honest account even if it be a
10mistaken one. Do you agree?
11 A. [Mr Irving] It depends what you call difficulties of detail. If they
12are really scandalously large differences, discrepancies,
13then you have to a ask yourself how and why the
14discrepancy exists. I am thinking, for example, of the
15memoirs of Hirst.
16 Q. [Mr Rampton] Yes. Hirst's own various accounts are not consistent
17amongst themselves, are they?
18 A. [Mr Irving] Which suggests that one should straightaway, if one is a
19reasonable historian, discard him as a source completely.
20 Q. [Mr Rampton] No. This would be grossly improper as a reasonable
21historian, Mr Irving, may I suggest. The right approach to
22such evidence is to treat it with all caution and to ask
23oneself, where can I check it against other evidence to
24see whether it is accurate or not?
25 A. [Mr Irving] I agree.
26 Q. [Mr Rampton] One can could do that with Commander Hirst.
1 A. [Mr Irving] It is a yellow light, proceed with caution.
2 Q. [Mr Rampton] Yes, proceed with caution. One can do that with Commander
3Hirst and one can find, unless he has been fed his lines
4by the polls, corroboration for almost all the important
5things that he says in his various statements, do you
7 A. [Mr Irving] I think Hirst and Eichmann are two pitiful characters --
8Eichmann is another eyewitness -- where we need to know a
9great deal almost as psychologists about their mentality
10of this servile eager to please kind of mentality that we
11are feeling with. That is why I hate using eyewitness
12evidence because you have intangible subjective factors
13coming in, where all your instincts as a historian, as
14I say, will close to cover on that file because this file
15is trouble, let us look for something that is more
16concrete. Altemeyer is another case in mind.
17 Q. [Mr Rampton] I cannot accept that, Mr Irving. You will take as an
18historian, if you have an open mind that is, such evidence
19as there is, give it such weight as it may deserve and you
20will then make a decision whether or not to discard it.
21 A. [Mr Irving] That is an alternative approach.
22 Q. [Mr Rampton] You do not discard a piece of evidence just because it is
23rocky in some area.
24 A. [Mr Irving] In the case of Hirst, you see, you have the following
25problem. He undoubtedly deserved it. He was brutally
26treated when he was taken prisoner by the by British in
1March 1946. He was very badly man handled. At the end of
2the following year, of course, he was then hanged by the
3Poles and I would be the last person to say he did not
4deserve it. In between those months, the day of his
5arrest and the day of his final hanging, execution and
6hanging, we do not know what went through his tortured
7mind. We do know that his report is full of the most
8incredible misstatements so that even Adolf Eichmann,
9writing in the margin of the Hirst report, and I have this
10book actually in my hand, because somebody bought it in a
11second hand book shop, with Eichmann's comments on it,
12said this man is talking through his hat. This is totally
13untrue. It renders the whole source document so suspect
14that either you can use it indiscriminately and say, hey
15this helps my case and I am going to use every bit I can
16that is of use and pretend the rest does not exist, which
17is what the average historian has done, or in my case you
18say this document is so suspect I do not want to go
19anywhere near it. That is the way I would treat it.
20 Q. [Mr Rampton] But, you see, the problem is, Mr Irving, that much of what
21Hirst said is corroborated by other people, is it not?
22 A. [Mr Irving] You say corroborated but, of course, we do not know how
23far it has been cross pollinated by reading the
25 Q. [Mr Rampton] That is a different point.
26 A. [Mr Irving] By sitting in the same court house and hearing what other
1people are saying, by being told by interrogating
2officers, "If you sign this affidavit we have typed up,
3then we will get you a shorter sentence". This is the
4kind of thing that went on at Nuremberg, along with a lot
5of uglier things. These so-called affidavits that these
6people signed were not written out in their own longhand.
7They were dictated to them and they were then obliged to
8sign them.
9 Q. [Mr Rampton] Are you familiar with the testimony which Eric Bauer gave
10at Ludwigsberg in, I do not know what year it was?
11 A. [Mr Irving] No, I am not, I can read it though.
12 Q. [Mr Rampton] My Lord, I am looking at page 581 of van Pelt. He is
13recorded by Professor van Pelt to have testified as
14follows about the extermination of Jews in Sobibor.
15 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Let Mr Irving find it.
16 MR RAMPTON: I am sorry.
17 A. [Mr Irving] Can I say straightaway that I have myself been before the
18courts in Austria. They do not take verbatim testimony in
19the manner that we take here with court reporters. The
20report is drawn up by a court official in abbreviated form
21so these are not necessarily ----
22 Q. [Mr Rampton] Well, it is in the first person. I dare say, I do not
23know, I have not seen the original document. Maybe it is
24in the file. He said this, he also used the word
25vergassung as an adjective, he is talking about gassing of
26Jews at Sobibor, "The doors were sealed airtight and
1immediately the gassing procedure
2vergassungsforgang commenced". Is that after some 20 to
330 minutes, complete silence in the gas chambers, people
4were vergassed?
5 A. [Mr Irving] He is probably accurate. He is probably describing
6something that really happened there.
7 Q. [Mr Rampton] It is the same formation, is it not, vergassungswagen we
8see with Eichmann at the top of the page? We notice
9Wetzel's vergassungsakavater earlier.
10 A. [Mr Irving] There is no other way you could describe gassing procedure
11except by the German phrase vergassungsforgang.
12 Q. [Mr Rampton] Then we come to Dayaco and Eiffel, who were tried, I think
13in ----
14 A. [Mr Irving] 1972. I believe I am right in saying that they were both
15aquitted, oddly enough, were they not?
16 Q. [Mr Rampton] I believe that they were acquitted.
17 A. [Mr Irving] So obviously the court did not pay much attention to this
18kind of evidence. They had the chance of cross-examining
19the witnesses.
20 Q. [Mr Rampton] We should take precedent from that, should we, Mr Irving?
21 A. [Mr Irving] Certainly, if they hear the same witnesses. We do not
22have the chance of cross-examining these witnesses that
23you are giving to me now, but if the court in Vienna
24acquitted Dayaco and Eiffel, who were the architects of
25Auschwitz, they were acquitted and set free. They had had
26the chance of cross-examining these witnesses. Surely
1that should say something to you about the value of the
2testimony they gave.
3 Q. [Mr Rampton] It says nothing to me at all because I do not know the
4reason why they were acquitted.
5 A. [Mr Irving] They were acquitted because they were innocent.
6 Q. [Mr Rampton] There are all sorts of reasons why people can be
7acquitted. If you are anxious to find out the answer to
8why they were acquitted, you can ask Professor van Pelt.
9 A. [Mr Irving] I know why they were acquitted. I know their case quite
11 Q. [Mr Rampton] You see, it says both Dayaco and Eiffel, testifying during
12their trial in 1972, used the term "gassing spaces"
13vergassungsraume to denote gas chambers. You can see that
14that is so if you turn back -- I am sorry it is such a
15long journey -- to page 341 of the same report, my Lord.
16Would your Lordship at the same time find it convenient to
17turn up this document? It is in the same file. You might
18do the same, Mr Irving. In the smaller of the two
19Auschwitz files, the second one, there is a document at
20page 2 to which this part of the text of van Pelt refers.
21 A. [Mr Irving] The smaller of the two Auschwitz files at page 2?
22 Q. [Mr Rampton] Tab 4, sorry, yes. Tab 4, page 2. It is in the same set
23of originals.
24 A. [Mr Irving] The same document.
25 Q. [Mr Rampton] Just so that, if you want to, you can look at the original
1 A. [Mr Irving] Can I draw attention to the brief number on that document,
2handwritten number?
3 Q. [Mr Rampton] Yes.
4 A. [Mr Irving] I do not say these things just to be pig headed about
5documents arousing my suspicion.
6 Q. [Mr Rampton] At the top of page 341 of van Pelt we see this: "On August
719th 1942 Eiffel chaired a meeting in which members of the
8Central Construction Office discussed with engineer Kurt
9Brufer of Topf and sons the creation of four crematoria in
10Birkenhau. Item 2 mentioned the construction of two
11triple oven incinerators near the bath houses for special
13 If you look over at the other document, the
14original German document, it is in paragraph 2 on the
15first page, first sentence, is it not?
16 A. [Mr Irving] Yes.
17 Q. [Mr Rampton] Could you read out what it says in German?
18 A. [Mr Irving] [German spoken- document not provided].
19 Q. [Mr Rampton] No, I am sorry, I meant translated.
20 A. [Mr Irving] With regard to the erection of two each three muffle
21furnaces at the bath house for special actions we propose
22Engineer Brufer suggested ----
23 Q. [Mr Rampton] That will do.
24 A. [Mr Irving] Taking the furnaces ----
25 Q. [Mr Rampton] In fact as you see, if you look at the end of the
26memorandum, what in fact in the end they decided on was
1I think two four muffle ovens?
2 A. [Mr Irving] Yes.
3 MR JUSTICE GRAY: What were sonderhaktiernun, do you think, Mr
5 MR RAMPTON: Notice that the word [German spoken - document not
6provided] are in quotes in the original, are they not?
7 A. [Mr Irving] Yes.
8 Q. [Mr Rampton] I am going to ask you a question about that in a moment,
9go back to the text of van Pelt the top of 341, if you
10will. "Item 2 mentions the construction of two triple oven
11incinerators near the bath houses for special actions.
12These are the gas chambers also known as bunkers one and
13two". Van Pelt says that. "On January 21st 1972 Eiffel
14testified in court that, when he wrote down the word bath
15houses for special actions, he knew exactly what this
16euphemism meant 'I knew at the time that this concerned
17gassing spaces'".
18 Now, that is right is it not? I mean, he said
19that, do you know? You say you know the trial well. Yes?
20 A. [Mr Irving] I know the reason why he was acquitted, yes.
21 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Concentrate on the point that Mr Rampton is
23 A. [Mr Irving] Yes.
24 MR RAMPTON: Concentrate on the point. It is at the bottom of
25page, the German, so we can be sure that you are not going
26to accuse van Pelt of mistranslation.
1 MR JUSTICE GRAY: If it did not mean that, I think this is
2really the point, what did sonderaktionen mean?
3 A. [Mr Irving] It does not really advance us very far. It just says he
4knows they were talking about the gassing spaces.
5 Q. [Mr Justice Gray] That was for clothes?
6 A. [Mr Irving] Vergassungsraume is always for fumigation of clothes,
8 MR RAMPTON: No. Unless Van Pelt has got it wrong, I do not
9know, the German seem to say, I knew at that time that
10this, that is [German spoken- document not provided]
11concerned gassing spaces.
12 A. [Mr Irving] I think we can assume that, had Eiffel then been examined
13further, as no doubt a good counsel would have done, and
14said what do you mean by [German spoken - document not
15provided] presumably mean homicidal gas chambers, and he
16would then have given either yes or no answer, but we are
17not told because Mr van Pelt has only give us half a
18sentence here.
19 MR JUSTICE GRAY: This is a fair point.
20 MR RAMPTON: You can take that up with him. It is maybe a fair
22 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Mr Rampton, at some stage can we elicit
23something we had planned to elicit, namely to what extent
24was Mr Irving aware, when he made his statements about the
25gas chambers not having existed, of this and indeed the
26other evidence which you are taking him through? At some
1stage we have to know the answer to that, do we not?
2 MR RAMPTON: Actually no, because I have always said, as I have
3said earlier, I think last week, that he leapt on to
4Leuchter when it must have been perfectly obvious, if he
5had been interested in finding out, by thinking about it
6and asking if the Leuchter was rubbish, he stuck with
7Leuchter, despite the fact that it is rubbish. He has
8never taken the trouble to go to Auschwitz and look and
9I suggest two things flow from that. One is that he is
10not just a rotten historian but a bent historian because
11he lends his weight to Holocaust denial without having the
12materials to do so, and second, that he has an ulterior
13motive for that disreputable stance.
14 MR JUSTICE GRAY: I follow that, but does the question not need
15to at least to be asked at some stage?
16 MR RAMPTON: By all means.
17 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Well all this evidence is out there. Did
18you consult it and, if you did, why did you reject it?
19I think we went through this.
20 MR RAMPTON: I thought that I had done that. He had never been
21to Auschwitz.
22 MR JUSTICE GRAY: No, certainly never been to Auschwitz.
23 MR RAMPTON: Did you ever go to Vienna and look at the record
24of the trial of these people?
25 A. [Mr Irving] No. I can simplify the matter by saying that, whenever
26there is an Auschwitz stamp on a document like this one,
1I have not seen it before the trial.
2 MR JUSTICE GRAY: You follow the point I am trying to get at.
3There is a lot of evidence which the Defendants point to
4as demonstrating beyond the shadow of doubt that there
5were gas chambers at Auschwitz and they were used to kill
7 A. [Mr Irving] My Lord, I strongly disagree with that statement.
8 Q. [Mr Justice Gray] When you read Leuchter, I appreciate that you then formed
9a view, but to what extent did you take into account the
10other evidence outside Leuchter and his examination of
11those samples?
12 A. [Mr Irving] Let me take it seriatim. First of all, I disagree with
13the fact that we have seen a volume of evidence that there
14were indeed gas chambers. I do not think that we have
15seen any evidence yet. We have seen evidence which can be
16read that way if you are so inclined. Secondly, I am told
17that I never tried to go to Auschwitz. In 1992
18I contacted the director of state archives at Auschwitz,
19Mr Piper and he refused to assist me. So it was quite
20evident that I would get no assistance whatsoever from the
21Auschwitz state archives.
22 MR RAMPTON: We have been through this last week.
23 A. [Mr Irving] No, we have not.
24 Q. [Mr Rampton] Yes, we have.
25 A. [Mr Irving] No, we have not.
26 MR JUSTICE GRAY: It is new to me.
1 A. [Mr Irving] In 1998 when I attempted to go to Auschwitz with the BBC
2team, Auschwitz ruled that I would not be allowed to set
3foot on the compound, on their campus or to visit their
4state archives.
5 MR RAMPTON: I do not want to go over old ground, but I am
6going to in a minute, Mr Irving.
7 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Can he finish the answer? I personally think
8this is quite important. That was a closed book to you
9but there are other sources of information.
10 A. [Mr Irving] I have therefore never seen any documents that have come
11from the Auschwitz state archives. In 1992 I went to the
12Moscow state archives where the other major collection is,
13which I used only in order to obtain the Goebbels
14diaries. As a result of the machinations of my opponents,
15the Moscow state archives were thereupon closed to me and
16I was informed that I would not be allowed to return
17there, so I am told. So that also closed that avenue of
18access to any documents which come from the Moscow state
19archives which were also not known to me until shortly
20before this trial.
21 MR RAMPTON: I am going to pursue that, Mr Irving.
22 MR JUSTICE GRAY: I am so sorry, Mr Rampton. I just want to
23get the complete answer and then by all means pursue any
24of it. So that, you say, closed off the Moscow archives
25as well. But you would accept, would you not, that there
26is whole lot of material and data to be found in all sorts
1of places, some of which is before the court and a lot of
2it in Professor van Pelt's report, to which you could have
3had access, had you been so minded? Is that not right?
4 A. [Mr Irving] My Lord, the litany of woe continues. I am banned from
5the Institute of History in Munich, thanks to exactly the
6same campaign. I am banned from the German federal
7archives with effect from July 1st 1993, thanks to exactly
8the same campaign. I have faced mounting difficulties in
9continuing to do research. When I tried recently to get
10documents from the Wiener Library in London, which
11is exactly the same kind of historical archives, the
12director of the Wiener Library archives said that it would
13refuse to assist me.
14 Q. [Mr Justice Gray] So what it really comes to -- forgive me, Mr Rampton,
15I will stop after this question -- is that really almost
16every avenue, you say, has been closed to you for one
17reason or another and at one stage or another?
18 A. [Mr Irving] At one stage or another. I am not saying that it has been
19closed over the entire period. It is fair to say that.
20 Q. [Mr Justice Gray] Might it be said against you that in that case it might
21have been more sensible, when were you giving talks about
22whether the Holocaust had happened or not, to make it
23clear that you really, beyond Leuchter, had almost no
24historical material available to you?
25 A. [Mr Irving] My Lord, there had been endless publications about
26precisely these matters, for example the suspect document,
1which I have paid due attention to. I have not had access
2to the archives myself, but I have had the opportunity of
3benefiting from the expertise of others.
4 Q. [Mr Justice Gray] But my question was, should you not have made that clear
5to your audiences when you were saying, well, it is plain
6that battleship Auschwitz had sunk?
7 A. [Mr Irving] I think I made it quite plain to the audiences that the
8initial impetus for making that statement was the Leuchter
9report with the chemical results contained in that report,
10which I still considered to be a very valuable starting
11point for the whole controversy.
12 MR JUSTICE GRAY: I see. Thank you. That now clarifies my
14 MR RAMPTON: I am sorry, Mr Irving, I simply cannot accept
15anything really of what you have said, apart from the fact
16that you have been banned from various places, but the
17thrust of it I reject in its entirety. Do you have the
18first of the Auschwitz files, please, the big one? Can
19you turn to the correspondence tab (which I think is tab
208) and to a letter of 30th October 1989? I do not have
21the page number, I am afraid.
22 A. [Mr Irving] I am hoping his Lordship will read all the letters under
23tab 8.
24 Q. [Mr Rampton] Yes. I am hoping he will too but that is not the point.
25It is marked with a 10. Is that a letter from Mr Weber to
1 A. [Mr Irving] Yes.
2 Q. [Mr Rampton] Will you turn please to the last page of that letter?
3Remember that the date is 30th October 1989.
4 A. [Mr Irving] Yes.
5 Q. [Mr Rampton] Look at the first paragraph on that last page: "Some time
6ago you mentioned that we might be willing to contribute a
7Foreword to my book conditional upon reading the
8manuscript and, even though you are now working on a book
9of your own about Auschwitz and our work may therefore
10overlap somewhat, I hope that you are still willing to
11consider contributing a Foreword. I like to think that
12all the thoughtful and well documented revisionist work is
13mutually beneficial and a boost to the overall cause".
14Now, Mr Irving, were you working on a book about Auschwitz
15in October 1989?
16 A. [Mr Irving] No.
17 Q. [Mr Rampton] Why did Mr Weber think that you were?
18 A. [Mr Irving] I do not know. In October 1989 I was working -- let me
19think -- I had just delivered the new edition of Hitler's
20War, I was almost certainly working on the Herman Goring
22 Q. [Mr Rampton] May I suggest that Mr Weber said what he did because
23either you or somebody else on your behalf had told him
24that you were working on a book on Auschwitz?
25 A. [Mr Irving] Mr Rampton, your instructing solicitors have had complete
26access to all my files, including my entire private
1diaries. If you had found any evidence that I was working
2on a book about Auschwitz, I am sure you would have had it
3before the court.
4 Q. [Mr Rampton] I did not say that you were, Mr Irving. You notice
5I tried to choose my words carefully.
6 A. [Mr Irving] You were strongly suggesting.
7 Q. [Mr Rampton] -- that somebody had told him, perhaps you, that you were?
8 A. [Mr Irving] Perhaps.
9 Q. [Mr Rampton] Yes.
10 A. [Mr Irving] That is not evidence. As I say, you have had complete
11access to all my private records.
12 Q. [Mr Rampton] It would be evidence, Mr Irving, if you had told Mr Weber
13that, would it not? Not that you were doing it, but that
14you said that you were doing it.
15 MR JUSTICE GRAY: I cannot quite see why he should, myself?
16 A. [Mr Irving] He does not say even though you said you are now working
17on a book. But I can only repeat, had you found any
18evidence of this in my private diaries or telephone logs
19or papers, I am sure you would have had it before the
21 MR RAMPTON: Mr Irving, the Leuchter report came to your
22knowledge in August 1988, did it not?
23 A. [Mr Irving] April 1988.
24 Q. [Mr Rampton] I beg your pardon, April 1988. When did you first make an
25attempt to look at any of the archive documents, whether
26in Auschwitz or in Moscow?
1 A. [Mr Irving] I cannot tell you off the top of my head, but certainly,
2when I went to the national archives in Washington,
3I would have read more intensively in the papers of
4Heinrich Himmler or the SS and, when I went to any other
5places, for example the Public Record Office, I started
6also paying more attention to Auschwitz at that time.
7 Q. [Mr Rampton] When was that?
8 A. [Mr Irving] Well, again I cannot, I have been to the Public Record
9Office in London probably 50 or 100 times.
10 Q. [Mr Rampton] You were going in August '89 I think, '88, and you said,
11I do not know what this is from, this is a speech in
13 "I am going to visit in this four-month swing
14around the entire United States, East Coast and West
15Coast, probably about 40 different Government and private
16archives on various projects, and everywhere I go I am
17looking into the archives to see what they have got on
19 A. [Mr Irving] Yes.
20 Q. [Mr Rampton] Yes. Now what was to prevent you making a similar trip to
21Poland at that time?
22 A. [Mr Irving] 1988?
23 Q. [Mr Rampton] In 1988.
24 A. [Mr Irving] It was behind the Iron Curtain.
25 Q. [Mr Rampton] So what?
26 A. [Mr Irving] The Iron Curtain had not come down.
1 Q. [Mr Rampton] Humble Mr Pressac got there in '82, '83. Professor van
2van Pelt was there in 1990.
3 A. [Mr Irving] Yes, but you seem to forget I am not a Holocaust
4historian. I have to keep on reminding you of this. I am
5an historian of the top Nazis. I write about Goring and
6Hitler and Rommel and Hess. To do that you do not have to
7go to Auschwitz. I read Professor van Pelt's book with
8enormous interest as a book. One of the first books I
9read from cover to cover.
10 Q. [Mr Rampton] That is where I thought we were going to get to. So the
11fact that in due course you would have been unable to go
12to Auschwitz because of a ban, is quite beside the point.
13You never had any intention of doing so, did you?
14 A. [Mr Irving] I never had any need to go there. I am not a Holocaust
15historian for the hundredth time.
16 Q. [Mr Rampton] Then, may I suggest, that it was wholly improper of you to
17give Leuchter such a high profile, given your supposed
18position as an historian of repute?
19 A. [Mr Irving] I do not think so. You say "high profile", how many lines
20of each speech did I deliver? Shall I do a calculation
21tonight of how many per cent, what fraction of 1 per cent
22of my speeches concern Mr Leuchter over the last ten
23years? I would suggest it is less than 1 per cent. You
24have read out just the lines dealing with him.
25 Q. [Mr Rampton] No, Mr Irving.
26 A. [Mr Irving] His Lordship has in front of him the entire bundle and he
1can see how very low he barked on my horizon.
2 Q. [Mr Rampton] No, Mr Irving, it will not do. You actually went to the
3trouble of publishing your own glossy version of the
4Leuchter report nine months, no more, over a year after
5the Zundel trial, and of announcing its birth to the world
6with a press conference?
7 A. [Mr Irving] Yes.
8 Q. [Mr Rampton] Well, what is the point of that?
9 A. [Mr Irving] I think it produced an extremely valuable stimulus to the
10entire research community. Without the Leuchter report
11there would have been none of these in depth
12investigations in archeological tests and searches and so
13on. It has been an extremely useful report in that
14respect. That is why I said in the introduction, I said
15the ball is now in their court. It is very much intended
16as stimulus to further research.
17 Q. [Mr Rampton] Without your having taken the least trouble to investigate
18the question yourself?
19 A. [Mr Irving] I am a publisher in this respect.
20 Q. [Mr Rampton] Oh, in this guise you are a publisher. You are only an
21historian when it comes to Adolf Hitler and that sort of
22thing, is that right?
23 A. [Mr Irving] I do not think I actually said that. Certainly you asked
24me about the Leuchter report and I acted as the
25publisher. I was not the author. You have seen the
26letters in which I say I did not write a single line of
1it, except the introduction. I merely provided the
2publishing facilities.
3 MR RAMPTON: My Lord, I do not think I can usefully ask any
4more questions in relation to Auschwitz at all, unless
5I am told that I must.
6 MR JUSTICE GRAY: No, I think that is right.
7 MR RAMPTON: I really do. I will come back now finally to
8where I started I think last week.
9 MR JUSTICE GRAY: My only hesitation is, and it is a problem
10because Mr Irving is in person, that he plainly is
11wanting, as I understand it, to say there are various
12later developments post Leuchter which confirmed in his
13original conclusion that Leuchter was really a dramatic
14new piece of evidence which really did clinch the argument
15against the Holocaust affirmers, as it were. Do you want
16to leave that hanging in the air until re-examination?
17You do not have to ask any questions, but there is
18something to be said for seeing ----
19 MR RAMPTON: About the new evidence?
20 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Yes.
21 MR RAMPTON: I have a question about the new evidence, because
22he mentioned, I think, really only one specifically which
23was a report by somebody called I think Germer Rudolf?
24 A. [Mr Irving] The Rudolf report.
25 MR JUSTICE GRAY: It was not only that, but certainly that was
26one of the things.
1 MR RAMPTON: What else is there, Mr Irving?
2 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Something in 1945, Auschwitz.
3 MR RAMPTON: 45 was the Polish report we looked at.
4 MR JUSTICE GRAY: I am not sure it was.
5 A. [Mr Irving] There was no another Polish after the Leuchter report.
6 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Yes, in 1945.
7 A. [Mr Irving] No, in 1989.
8 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Was there not another one in 1945 that you
9are relying on.
10 MR RAMPTON: No, the only 1945 report is the report your
11Lordship has seen. There was a preliminary report by the
12forensic people in about 1991 in response to Leuchter. It
13was unsatisfactory. They redid it under Professor
14Markovic's aegis and that produced positive results.
15 A. [Mr Irving] The first one was politically incorrect, so they put it
16away in the safe and they produced a new version.
17 MR JUSTICE GRAY: You say that. When are you proposing to deal
18with that?
19 A. [Mr Irving] My Lord I am going to have to ask for instructions from
20your Lordship as to how I can put this material. I was
21proposing to do this kind of thing in the -- I was going
22to put these documents to the experts and I thought that
23would be an appropriate way of doing it.
24 MR JUSTICE GRAY: I am not disagreeing about that, but you
25obviously want to say something on these topics.
26 A. [Mr Irving] I certainly do not like leaving it.
1 Q. [Mr Rampton] I am content to deal with it that way.
2 MR RAMPTON: I am too. The only thing I am not content about,
3since I have finished maybe I can say this now, I am not
4content about is (A) I have not had time and nor, I dare
5say, has Professor van Pelt who has been sitting in court,
6to review the new material we were given this morning; and
7(B) I have never seen the Rudolf report because it is not
8in Mr Irving discovery.
9 A. [Mr Irving] Yes, it is.
10 Q. [Mr Rampton] I am told it is not.
11 A. [Mr Irving] If it is not then I humbly apologise. It certainly should
12have been, and I will provide copies immediately.
13 MR RAMPTON: Miss Rogers is the most reliable person in the
14world when it comes to these matters and she says it is
15not. So I am going to rely on her for the moment.
16 A. [Mr Irving] I will eat humble pie today provided ----
17 MR RAMPTON: If reliance is to be placed on it then we need
18time to look at it.
19 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Professor van Pelt needs time particularly
20because he will be the one who has to deal with it. How
21easy would it be for you to dig it out?
22 A. [Mr Irving] I can have it couriered around this afternoon.
23 MR JUSTICE GRAY: That would be helpful. I think he ought to
24have it.
25 MR RAMPTON: My Lord, that leads to my final enquiry of your
26Lordship. Other things being equal I would want Professor
1van Pelt to go into the witness box sometime tomorrow, but
2plainly if he does Mr Irving must keep off the new
3material until Professor van Pelt has had a chance ----
4 MR JUSTICE GRAY: He may have time because Mr Irving has just
5said he is going to be able to get it round this
7 A. [Mr Irving] My Lord, there are two things. The Rudolf report is one
8and also on your Lordship's instructions I have allowed
9the Defence sight of an expert critique I received from an
10architect on his report.
11 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Is that what you gave me this morning?
12 A. [Mr Irving] It is what I gave your Lordship this morning, yes.
13 MR RAMPTON: It has no name on it.
14 A. [Mr Irving] You are not entitled to this man's name, with respect.
15 MR JUSTICE GRAY: I am afraid that is a matter for me and I do
16not at the moment understand why you say that.
17 A. [Mr Irving] This man is obviously in a leading position in the world
18of architecture and he is, frankly, frightened because he
19knows what the people backing the Defendants in this
20action are capable of doing to people of stature.
21 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Hang on, are you proposing to call him to
22give evidence?
23 A. [Mr Irving] No, I am not. He is purely a person who has advised me in
24private on some of the technical matters, the
25architectural matters, which are involved in this case, as
26the nature of correspondence.
1 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Then, subject to Mr Rampton, I think you can
2put the propositions contained in whichever document you
3are talking about, because I do not think I have seen it,
4and I do not think there is any reason why I should compel
5his identity to be disclosed.
6 MR RAMPTON: Absolutely not. As I now understand it, all
7I think has happened is that we have been given a brief
8for cross-examination.
9 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Yes, which is what you asked for and you have
10now got it.
11 MR RAMPTON: Yes. I do not think Mr Irving is asking your
12Lordship to receive it as evidence, because you cannot do
14 A. [Mr Irving] No, it is not, but your Lordship did say that this kind of
15thing was disclosable to the Defendants.
16 MR JUSTICE GRAY: I am bound to say I was under a slight
17misapprehension. I thought you were talking about
18material that was going to be led by you through the mouth
19of an expert witness. If I had known it was simply ----
20 A. [Mr Irving] It is more of the nature of correspondence between
22 Q. [Mr Rampton] --- simply material for you to cross-examine on, I think I
23would not have had said you had to hand it over.
24 A. [Mr Irving] We have no reason not to show it to them. It is just that
25unfortunately he have now been obliged to disclose some of
26our cards.
1 MR JUSTICE GRAY: I think there may have been a
3 MR RAMPTON: I misunderstood. I thought what we were being
4given was some sort of expert's report. As it is not so,
5may I in front of Mr Irving endorse what your Lordship
6said. I do not want to see anything which has not been
7tendered in evidence or otherwise relied on.
8 MR JUSTICE GRAY: You hear that, Mr Irving?
9 A. [Mr Irving] Yes.
10 MR RAMPTON: My Lord, with luck Professor van Pelt can give
11evidence tomorrow. He is here.
12 MR JUSTICE GRAY: I follow that. Then you are going to resume
13again afterwards.
14 MR RAMPTON: Yes, I am then going back to Irving stuff.
15 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Shall we have the discussion tomorrow about
16the future programme? I suspect you would rather do that
17then than now. Mr Irving has had a long day just as you
19 MR RAMPTON: I need to take instructions.
20 MR JUSTICE GRAY: That is what I thought, yes. So I think we
21will adjourn a little earlier, unless there is anything
22else that can usefully be covered.
23 < (The witness stood down)
24(The Court adjourned until the following day)