text:
Holocaust Denial on Trial, Trial Transcripts, Day 6: Electronic Edition
Pages 1 - 195 of 195
1996 I. No. 113
2Royal Courts of Justice
3Strand, London
4 Wednesday, 19th 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)
1 <Day 6. Wednesday, 19th January 2000
2 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Mr Rampton, I wonder if I could ask you for a
3bit of help on really a logistical problem? Some of the
4source material that the experts rely on is fairly
5inaccessible. I was wondering if your team could provide
6me with copies of, I think, just three documents, report
7No. 51, that report from the Einsatzgruppen A, you know
8the one I mean, giving the partisans and the Jews killed?
9 MR RAMPTON: Is that the Jaeger report?
10 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Yes. And also a document which I do not
11think actually I have ever seen, but Muller's's document
12of August 1941.
13 MR RAMPTON: Yes, the Muller order.
14 MR JUSTICE GRAY: If I had those separately, it would make life
15much easier.
16 MR RAMPTON: Certainly, my Lord. We have copies of originals
17of all of those.
18 MR IRVING: Muller is in one of the bundles, my Lord.
19 MR JUSTICE GRAY: I am sure it is, but I have not actually seen
20it yet. Is there anything that needs to be done before
21Mr Irving goes back into the box?
22 MR RAMPTON: I do not know whether he has anything.
23 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Would you like to come back?
24 < MR DAVID IRVING, recalled.
25< Cross-Examined by Mr Rampton QC, continued.
26 MR RAMPTON: My Lord, I am going to start in Riga, then I am
1going to go to Yugoslavia and then I am going to go to the
2Warthegau, just to complete my 1941/42 tour of the size of
3the operation, and also make reference to what is plainly
4in some cases direct language and in other cases
5camouflage language. That should not, I hope, take very
6long. Then I will go back to, as it were,
7historiographical error -- I use the word neutrally --
8with the so-called Schlegelberger memorandum.
9 May Mr Irving, please, be given Professor
10Browning's report and at the same time files H3(ii), and
12 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Yes.
13 MR RAMPTON: Could one turn, please, to page 28 of Professor
14Browning's report? In fact, I will perhaps, because it
15will be important for context later on, start at the
16bottom of page 27, if I may, in paragraph 5.1.6: "Between
17October 18 and 21, 1941, the Foreign Office expert for
18Jewish affairs, Franz Rademacher" -- pausing there,
19Mr Irving, do you disagree with that description of Herr
20Rademacher's position?
21 A. [Mr Irving] He was head of the appropriate department in section 2.
22 Q. [Mr Rampton] He had a special responsibility in the Foreign Office for
23Jewish affairs?
24 A. [Mr Irving] Among other things, yes.
25 Q. [Mr Rampton] Yes. "and Eichmann's second deputy, Friedrich Suhr,
26visited Belgrade. After the trip Rademacher reported how
1the adult Jewish men in Serbia had been shot by the German
2army." Do you notice that? They have not been shot by the
3SS, they have been shot by the Wehrmacht, have they not?
4 MR JUSTICE GRAY: That is Browning's words.
5 MR RAMPTON: Yes. But, if Browning is right, that is Wehrmacht
6and not the SS, is it not?
7 A. [Mr Irving] He has not given a quotation there for that.
8 Q. [Mr Rampton] Well, it may be that we would find it if we looked at
9Rademacher report?
10 A. [Mr Irving] Yes.
11 Q. [Mr Rampton] Would you like to look at that now?
12 A. [Mr Irving] No. I am not quite happy with that. In fact, you
13remember there is a page of photographs of this kind of
14thing in my book on the Nuremberg trials.
15 Q. [Mr Rampton] So not all the systematic -- I must not use that word,
16must I -- not all the mass shootings were done by the SS?
17 A. [Mr Irving] No,. We do not know, of course, why they were shot.
18 Q. [Mr Rampton] No.
19 A. [Mr Irving] He has just reported how they were shot, but not why.
20 Q. [Mr Rampton] Perhaps we might be able to deduce that in a little while,
21Mr Irving. " Concerning the fate of the Jewish women,
22children, and elderly, Rademacher reported: 'Then as soon
23as the technical possibility exists within the framework
24of the total solution to the Jewish question, the Jews
25will be deported by waterway to the reception camp in the
1 A. [Mr Irving] Yes.
2 Q. [Mr Rampton] Do you want to make a comment about that?
3 A. [Mr Irving] Well, of course, you are aware of the fact that I am going
4to comment on the fact that he has mistranslated "camps"
5as "camp".
6 Q. [Mr Rampton] "Camp", I see.
7 A. [Mr Irving] There is a substantial difference. "Into the reception
8camps". I think it is a deliberate mistranslation by
9Professor Browning.
10 Q. [Mr Rampton] You must put that to him. I am not going to take it up on
11his behalf.
12 A. [Mr Irving] I certainly shall. I am also drawing it to the court's
13attention. It puts a totally different complexion on the
15 Q. [Mr Rampton] Put your eye down, if you will, to the bottom of the page
16where you see the German?
17 A. [Mr Irving] "... In die Auffanglager..."?
18 Q. [Mr Rampton] Professor Browning, if he has made a deliberate
19mistranslation, it is not a very clever thing to have done
20as he has also given us the German text against which his
21English can be checked.
22 A. [Mr Irving] I have no doubt he is obliged to, but we have spotted his
24 Q. [Mr Rampton] You do not do it in your books, do you, Mr Irving?
25 A. [Mr Irving] You wish me in a thousand page book not only to put the
26English text of the documents, but the German text as
2 Q. [Mr Rampton] Mr Irving, if I may use one of your phrases, if you are
3trying to pull the wool over people's eyes, one way of
4doing it is to give your version of the German without
5giving the original, is it not, and that is not here what
6Professor Browning has done.
7 A. [Mr Irving] But at the same time, of course, what one could also do,
8if one was the historian you are talking about, he could
9denote his entire files to the relevant archives and could
10draw the attention of other historians to those
11contentious documents in the way that I do.
12 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Shall we move on? It seems to me to be a
13fairly narrow point.
14 A. [Mr Irving] If it is just one camp, then there is obviously an
15inference to be drawn but, if they are being sent to many
16camps, then that rather destroys any inference that can be
17drawn from it.
18 MR JUSTICE GRAY: You develop that when we hear from Professor
20 MR RAMPTON: "In short, Jews deported from Europe were not
21simply going to be expelled into eastern Russia, but
22rather they were to be interned in a German'reception
23camp' [or'reception camps'] not yet built."
24 A. [Mr Irving] That is the point that has now been destroyed, has it not,
25by the improper translation? "Into a reception camp which
26has not yet been built" when, in fact, they have been sent
1to many camps, or more than one, hence the plural.
2 Q. [Mr Rampton] I will re-read it, Mr Irving, to take account of your
3wounding criticism of Professor Browning: "In short, Jews
4deported from Europe were not simply going to be expelled
5into eastern Russia, but rather they were to be interned
6in German'reception camps' not yet built. Furthermore, as
7these reception camps were for women, children, and
8elderly, clearly they were not labor camps."
9 A. [Mr Irving] That is not what he has written. He has written: "... as
10this reception camp was for women, children, and elderly,
11it was clearly not a labor camp". Can I remind you, Mr
12Rampton, of the fun you had with my mistranslation of
13transporte of transport as "transports"? Is this not
14precisely the same kind of manipulation by your expert?
15 Q. [Mr Rampton] You must put that to him.
16 A. [Mr Irving] I am mentioning to you, Mr Rampton, so that the court can
17hear it.
18 Q. [Mr Rampton] My case against you, Mr Irving -- you brought this action;
19you want to take money off my clients and you want to shut
20them up for the future with an injunction -- is that you
21deliberately falsified the original documents amongst
22other things. If you are making the same accusation
23against good Professor Browning, then you must make it to
24him, not to me.
25 A. [Mr Irving] Professor Browning has made an error of precisely the same
26magnitude as transport and transporte, Mr Rampton.
1 MR JUSTICE GRAY: I am well aware of that point. Let us move
3 MR RAMPTON: Let us move on. There are two reasons I read that
4earlier paragraph, first because the next paragraph makes
5more sense if one has seen it; and secondly, because we
6will be coming back to Belgrade later on.
7 "A second relevant document is a short
8hand-written letter of October 23, 1941, that Franz
9Rademacher found waiting for him from the foreign editor
10of Der Stormer, Paul Wurm, when he returned to Berlin.
11Wurm wrote:...", and again the German is at the bottom of
12this page and the next if you want to look at it. Would
13you like to look at it first? Footnote 82.
14 A. [Mr Irving] Yes.
15 Q. [Mr Rampton] My Lord, it is not unfortunately in the bundle.
16 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Do we really need it?
17 MR RAMPTON: No. I am fearful of poor Professor Browning being
18accused of misquoting the German.
19 A. [Mr Irving] I think I have satisfied the court on that point.
20 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Come on.
21 MR RAMPTON: Have you read the German?
22 A. [Mr Irving] I am sorry, my Lord, to mention it again, but there is a
23certain element of malicious glee.
24 Q. [Mr Rampton] Have you read the German, Mr Irving?
25 A. [Mr Irving] I have indeed and it is an accurate translation.
26 Q. [Mr Rampton] It is an accurate translation. It reads: "Dear Party
1comrade Rademacher! On my return trip from Berlin I met
2an old party comrade, who works in the east on the
3settlement of the Jewish question. In the near future
4many of the Jewish vermin..." The German is Ungezeifer, is
5it not?
6 A. [Mr Irving] Ungeziefer. It has been mistyped.
7 Q. [Mr Rampton] Deliberate manipulation."... will be exterminated through
8special measures." That is unequivocal, is it not?
9 A. [Mr Irving] Yes, except the word "exterminated" is the usual
10contention that we have. He translates "vernichtet" and
11"vernichtung", we discovered from the dictionary, is
12destroyed. He has taken the third or fourth meaning of
13the word in the way that your experts have.
14 Q. [Mr Rampton] I see. This is, I am bound to say, a baffling
15proposition, Mr Irving. He has used the word
16"Ungeziefer", which means, you tell me accurately, means
18 A. [Mr Irving] Vermin.
19 Q. [Mr Rampton] Vermin.
20 A. [Mr Irving] Yes.
21 Q. [Mr Rampton] What does one do with vermin? Transport them to camps in
22the East, put them to work?
23 A. [Mr Irving] I am giving a literal translation of the word. You
24remember we had the discussion about the difference
25between destroyed or annihilated and exterminated.
26 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Let's not get bogged down. What is being put
1to you is that, where you have vernichtung in combination
2with a reference to vermin, there can be no two ways about
3it. What is being talked about is extermination. Do you
4not agree with that?
5 A. [Mr Irving] There is more than one way to skin a cat and I am not
6going to go beyond what the actual document says, my
7Lord. For example -- it could equally well be destroyed
8as vermin by being locked up for life. I am just talking
9about theoretical possibilities, but I agree that there is
10a sinister connotation on this document.
11 MR JUSTICE GRAY: You do agree?
12 A. [Mr Irving] Yes.
13 MR RAMPTON: Professor Browning goes on ----.
14 A. [Mr Irving] He has also talked about the fact that the Jewish men have
15been shot and disposed of, which is many of what he calls
16the vermin. This does not really take it much further.
17 Q. [Mr Rampton] We are coming to the female and the infant vermin in a
18moment. What did Wurm mean by special measures for the
19destruction of Jews in the east, extermination,
20vernichtung, whatever?
21 A. [Mr Irving] I am not the writer of this letter, Mr Rampton, so I do
22not know what he is talking about.
23 Q. [Mr Rampton] No. Well, we will leave that, shall we? I do not believe
24there can be any doubt about what extermination of vermin
25actually means.
26 Q. [Mr Rampton] "On October 25, 1941, Rademacher's counterpart in the Reich
1Ministry for the Occupied Eastern Territories, Eberhard
2Wetzel ...". Is that a correct description of Herr
3Wetzel's position?
4 A. [Mr Irving] Yes.
5 Q. [Mr Rampton] Was he of equal rank with Rademacher?
6 A. [Mr Irving] Yes. He survived the war and he died in his bed at a ripe
7old age without having suffered any penalty. I remember
8corresponding with him some time ago.
9 Q. [Mr Rampton] "... Met first with Viktor Brack of the Fuhrer
10Chancellery..." Can I pause there to ask you to explain
11what the Fuhrer Chancellery actually was, please?
12 A. [Mr Irving] It is a total misnomer really to call it the Fuhrer
13Chancellery. It was an office set up in another building
14many hundreds yards away from Hitler's Chancellery. It
15was a body which was primarily concerned with dealing with
16the public, and in that way it became involved with
17dealing with applications for clemency, and in that way it
18became involved in the euthanasia programme because
19doctors who were required to take part in the euthanasia
20programme had to apply, so to speak, to the head of state
21in advance for clemency for the actions they proposed to
22take. In that way it became involved in the mass killing
23operations. Viktor Brack, I believe, was No. 2 in the
24Fuhrer Chancellery under Philip Buhler.
25 Q. [Mr Rampton] Can you tell me, I think Viktor Brack was, at any rate,
26one Dr Brack, sometimes German doctors are Dr Dr, but he
1is Dr Brack, is he not?
2 A. [Mr Irving] Yes.
3 Q. [Mr Rampton] Do you know what his doctorate was in?
4 A. [Mr Irving] No. Probably in law. Most of the gangsters were
5lawyers. Most of the concentration camp commandants were
7 Q. [Mr Rampton] As we shall see shortly. Dr Brack had a chemist called
9 A. [Mr Irving] Dr Kalmeier, yes.
10 Q. [Mr Rampton] I should ask you a further question. Is it your position
11then that, despite the fact that it is called the Fuhrer
12Chancellery, there is not only a hundred yards, but a
13great deal more metaphorically speaking of distance
14between what goes on in that Chancellery and the Fuhrer
16 A. [Mr Irving] I have read a great deal in the files of that department,
17and I cannot remember having seen any correspondence
18between that department and Hitler himself.
19 Q. [Mr Rampton] What was the Fuhrer's office called?
20 A. [Mr Irving] The Fuhrer's office?
21 Q. [Mr Rampton] Yes. Did he have actual office of his own?
22 A. [Mr Irving] The Reichskanzlei would be the closest body to him which
23was under Dr Hans Lammas who we will meet later on this
24morning probably. He was head of the Reichskanzlei, the
25Reich Chancellery as Reich chancellor. As head of the
26Wehrmacht he would be the Oberkommando der Wehrmacht,
1which was his military office, so to speak.
2 Q. [Mr Rampton] "... of the Fuhrer Chancellery (where he was involved with
3the so-called euthanasia program for the killing of
4mentally-and physically handicapped patients in German
5hospitals and asylums)..." Pause there a moment. This is
6not an important point but we will mention it, if we may,
7in passing. That is the so-called T 4 programme, is it
8not, from No. 4 Theresien Strasse?
9 A. [Mr Irving] No, Tiergarten Strasse.
10 Q. [Mr Rampton] I beg your pardon. I muddled up two words.
11 A. [Mr Irving] The T 4, and they developed the expertise for killing, the
12gas trucks and so on.
13 Q. [Mr Rampton] That programme did have Adolf Hitler's authority, did it
15 A. [Mr Irving] The euthanasia program was authorized by Hitler in the
16middle of September 1939. Around about August 1940, when
17it began to gather momentum voices in the public became
18agitated about it and retrospectively Hitler signed a
19decree on September 1st 1939 authorizing it, in other
20words giving it the force of law.
21 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Authorizing the use of gas trucks to effect
22the euthanasia?
23 A. [Mr Irving] No, my Lord, authorizing the euthanasia programme.
24Strictly speaking, he specified which doctors were allowed
25to carry it out or to make the decisions of life and death
26over the victims of the euthanasia programme. He did not
1talk about the methods.
2 Q. [Mr Justice Gray] He did not talk about methods at all?
3 A. [Mr Irving] Not in this decree. It is a five or six line decree.
4 Q. [Mr Justice Gray] Nor anywhere else?
5 A. [Mr Irving] No. It is a very interesting document because it is
6obviously a signed death warrant for thousands of people
7which Adolf Hitler has himself signed. It is that kind of
8order which does sometimes exist.
9 MR RAMPTON: I do not know, they probably used a variety of
10methods to begin with, did they not?
11 A. [Mr Irving] To do what?
12 Q. [Mr Rampton] A variety of methods to begin with, the euthanasia people?
13 A. [Mr Irving] I understand so. I think the order actually spoke of
14humane means, and you can interpret the word "humane" how
15you want if you are a Nazi, I suppose.
16 Q. [Mr Rampton] One of the means used, I do not know whether it was the
17most frequently used, was carbon monoxide gas from
18bottles, was it not?
19 A. [Mr Irving] I believe that is correct, yes. I think this was the
20method. There was a discussion at Hitler's table about
21the most humane ways of doing it. I discussed this with
22the widow of Dr Conte, who was the original chief doctor,
23and she remembered being at her home of the telephone call
24from Hitler to her husband in September 1939. Her
25husband, immediately after the phone conversation, went to
26a dictionary to look up to see what the word "euthanasia"
1meant. After that, they had the discussions at Hitler's
2chancellery about the most humane ways of putting these
3people to sleep, if you can put it like that.
4 Q. [Mr Rampton] Including by the use of carbon monoxide gas?
5 A. [Mr Irving] This was one of the methods discussed on that occasion and
6I believe they did use it, yes.
7 Q. [Mr Rampton] It is said by Professor Browning that Wetzel met also
8Adolf Eichmann, Heydrich's special adviser on Jewish
9policy. Two things. Is there anything in that short
10account of whom Wetzel met on 25th October 1941, which is
11a matter of history you disagree with? It is not a matter
12of history I disagree with in broad terms, but the
13documentary basis is a bit suspect. I know the documents
14that Browning is referring to and some of them are in
15pencil, some of them had gaps in, I think it was N 0365 or
16something like that is the Nuremberg document number.
17They go through various drafts.
18 Q. [Mr Rampton] The second question is this. Is it right that Adolf
19Eichmann was Heydrich's special adviser on Jewish policy?
20 A. [Mr Irving] He was the head of the Jewish desk of the amtfuhrer which
21was the section 4 of the Riesigerhauptamt.
22 MR JUSTICE GRAY: I am not sure whether this is really covered
23by Mr Rampton's question, but do you accept that Brack of
24the kanzlei did declare himself ready to aid in the
25construction of gassing apparatus?
26 A. [Mr Irving] Yes, I think so, my Lord. I think we can very rapidly
1slice through this if I accept most of the contentions
2that are made in these paragraphs.
3 MR JUSTICE GRAY: That is helpful.
4 MR RAMPTON: In that case I need not ask you to look at the
5Wetzel letter to Lohse, who is the Reichs commissar for
6the Ostland. You may, if you wish. It is in H3 (ii) at
7footnote 83.
8 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Do we need to?
9 MR RAMPTON: No.
10 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Broadly speaking, the narrative is accepted?
11 A. [Mr Irving] Yes. I think that would probably just dot Is and cross
13 MR RAMPTON: I will tell you this. It is actually marked
14Geheim, which is what was second security classification.
15 A. [Mr Irving] Could you tell me again what the reference number for the
16document is.
17 Q. [Mr Rampton] I think you ought to look at it. I am sorry about this,
18my Lord, but I feel uncomfortable being the only one with
19the document open in front of me. It is H3 (ii), footnote
21 A. [Mr Irving] I have it.
22 Q. [Mr Rampton] This is, I think, a Nuremberg document, is it not?
23 A. [Mr Irving] Yes.
24 Q. [Mr Rampton] You can tell that from the top?
25 A. [Mr Irving] Right. With this document, of course, now I can see the
26document you are referring to, I do have a problem fitting
1it into the actual framework you are trying to ascribe it
2to. It refers to unterkunfte and vergasungsapparate. It
3is referring to Riga and by implication it also brings in
4Dr Tesch, who was the head of the company that
5manufactured or rather had the sole distribution rights on
6Zyklon B east of the river Elb, and I am quite familiar
7with the Tesch case because I did take the trouble, before
8this action began, to read through the entire transcripts
9of the war crimes trial against the Tesch company.
10 MR JUSTICE GRAY: If I am supposed to follow that, I am afraid
11I am simply not following a word of it. It is no
12criticism of you, Mr Irving.
13 A. [Mr Irving] It is just that I have extraneous knowledge, my Lord,
14about what was going on at Riga with Tesch, who had been
15sent out with his experts to set up fumigation facilities
16as a central fumigation plant for the huge masses of
17clothing, army clothing, military clothing, refugee
18clothing -- and vergasungsapparate and unterkunfte, and we
19have one intercept which goes to this and which, purely by
20coincidence, I actually handed to Mr Rampton this morning,
21the German intercept, which actually deals with the
22provision of the Zyklon to Tesch for this purpose.
23 MR RAMPTON: This is merely a reference to using Dr Brack's
24machinery to destroy, literally speaking, vermin. Is that
26 A. [Mr Irving] Perhaps we had better go through the document in detail.
1 Q. [Mr Rampton] I think you had better look at the first complete
2paragraph on the second page, the first sentence, before
3you commit yourself to that, Mr Irving.
4 A. [Mr Irving] That is quite plainly a reference to liquidating the Jews,
5the second paragraph, yes.
6 Q. [Mr Rampton] Using Dr Brack's machinery means?
7 A. [Mr Irving] Well, either machinery or methods.
8 Q. [Mr Rampton] Yes, methods, Dr Brack's gassing apparatus. It is a
9reference to exterminating by means of gas those Jews who
10could not work, is it not?
11 A. [Mr Irving] I am not going to be specific about means. All they are
12saying here is that they are going to be using Brack's
13means or methods, which could be any means. They used
14various different means to dispose of the euthanasia
16 Q. [Mr Rampton] Could you please read us in translation that first
17sentence of the first complete paragraph on page 2,
18Mr Irving?
19 A. [Mr Irving] In German or in English?
20 Q. [Mr Rampton] No, in English.
21 A. [Mr Irving] According to the state of affairs, we have no misgivings
22if those Jews who are not capable of working are disposed
23of using Brack's methods. Yes.
24 Q. [Mr Rampton] So the reference to vergasungsapparate is nothing whatever
25to do with lice or rats or anything else?
26 A. [Mr Irving] It does have a slight bearing on the fact that there were
1extensive war crimes trial after the war. Dr Wetzel, who
2wrote this letter, was never prosecuted. He lived in
3complete comfort until the end of his life in Germany, and
4how can this be if this is the only interpretation to be
5placed on those words?
6 MR JUSTICE GRAY: What does beseitegen mean?
7 A. [Mr Irving] "Getting rid of". It is one of those vague words again,
8disposing of.
9 MR RAMPTON: There is no objection, or we have no reservations,
10if those Jews who cannot or who are unable to work,
11incapable of work, are disposed of by Dr Brack's means?
12 A. [Mr Irving] Dr Brack's methods, yes.
13 Q. [Mr Rampton] Again, I am not asserting a positive case, Mr Irving,
14about history. I do not have to do that. I am asking
15you, in your role as an open minded objective and
16scholarly historian, what is the natural interpretation of
17that letter and the word vergasungsapparate?
18 A. [Mr Irving] I would say quite clearly they are going to be liquidated.
19 Q. [Mr Rampton] Liquidated by what means?
20 A. [Mr Irving] Using the methods of Dr Brack.
21 Q. [Mr Rampton] What is a vergasungsapparatein that context?
22 A. [Mr Irving] There are two paragraphs here of course. We know what was
23going on at Riga and this is that there was a major
24fumigation centre at Riga.
25 Q. [Mr Rampton] No, please.
26 A. [Mr Irving] Well, you asked me the question; I gave you the answer.
1 Q. [Mr Rampton] I want to know what the German word "Vergasungsapparate"
3 A. [Mr Irving] Literally, "gassing equipments". "Unterkunfte" means
5 Q. [Mr Rampton] Well, or huts or whatever, a place where you put people?
6 A. [Mr Irving] "Unterkunfte" means "rooms". So we have those two words
7in conjunction.
8 Q. [Mr Rampton] We do not know whether these are nice little rooms with a
9view of the countryside?
10 A. [Mr Irving] I do not think so. I think that they built a 50 cubic
11metre gassing chamber there for the clothing and this
12comes out at the test trial. The documents and the test
13trial make this quite plain.
14 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Yes, but let us get back to the Brack methods
15referred to on page 2 of that letter. You, as
16I understand it, accept that is a reference back ----
17 A. [Mr Irving] Yes, indeed, but I think it would be ----
18 Q. [Mr Justice Gray] --- "fergasungs"?
19 A. [Mr Irving] --- false to link these two matters because nobody has
20ever suggested that the gas chambers, homicidal gas
21chambers, were set up at Riga and that, frankly, my Lord,
22is the bottom line.
23 Q. [Mr Justice Gray] Whether or not they were set up, I just want to be clear
24what your evidence is about what was meant by the Brach
25methods of getting rid of these Jews.
26 A. [Mr Irving] Well, I think we established several paragraphs earlier
1that they used various methods to kill the euthanasia
3 Q. [Mr Justice Gray] But including gas chambers?
4 A. [Mr Irving] They used carbon monoxide, gas chambers using carbon
5monoxide. I do not think they ever used any kind of
6chemicals apart from carbon monoxide from cylinders. They
7used phenol injections. They used other lethal
9 MR RAMPTON: Could you then please turn, first of all ----
10 A. [Mr Irving] But I do emphasise once again that even the most
11determined Holocaust historian has never suggested that
12there was a homicidal gas chamber set up at Riga, which is
13what this letter is about.
14 MR JUSTICE GRAY: I think Mr Rampton puts it forward as
15evidence of the genesis of a policy ----
16 A. [Mr Irving] Right.
17 Q. [Mr Justice Gray] --- of extermination by methods including gas, is that
19 MR RAMPTON: It is, my Lord. My plain submission about this is
20that it is very strong evidence of intention at a high
21level to kill Jews by using gas. In the event, it is
22perfectly right they that did not build a gas chamber.
23They used trucks at this point. If we want to know what
24actually happened, may we please go to Professor
25Longerich's report, the second part, page 49?
26 A. [Mr Irving] I can only emphasise the fact that in the test trial, all
1this was exhaustively analysed, and the court accepted
2that there was never any suggestion that gassing equipment
3was used in Riga.
4 MR JUSTICE GRAY: I think that is accepted.
5 A. [Mr Irving] Yes.
6 MR JUSTICE GRAY: By Mr Rampton, I mean.
7 MR RAMPTON: In the sense that, yes, "unterkumfte" means
8accommodations really, does it not?
9 A. [Mr Irving] Yes.
10 Q. [Mr Rampton] It is always almost used in relation to people in German,
11is it not?
12 A. [Mr Irving] Yes.
13 Q. [Mr Rampton] Have you got that Longerich report?
14 A. [Mr Irving] Yes.
15 Q. [Mr Rampton] At page 49 of the second part at the top of the page,
16Dr Longerich sets out a translation of the significant
17parts of the letter from Wetzel to Lohse which, as you
18have noticed, is marked "Geheim". That is not the highest
19security classification, is it, Geheim?
20 A. [Mr Irving] No.
21 Q. [Mr Rampton] I will not read the first paragraph, but I will read the
22second since we have not done that:
23 "The appropriate apparatus are not available in
24the required quantity at present, and must first be
25produced. As Brack is of the opinion that the production
26of the apparatus would provide greater difficulties in the
1Reich than on-site, he considers it purposeful to send his
2people to Riga. His chemist, Dr Kallmeyer, in particular,
3will make all the necessary arrangements."
4 Then it is clearly indicated by Dr Longerich
5that there is an ellipse. I can tell you that in the
6original the next sentence begins at the bottom of the
7first page of the letter.
8 "According to Sturmbannfuhrer Eichmann, camps
9for Jews will be established in Riga and Minsk, into which
10Jews from the area of the Altreich will also possibly be
11brought. At the moment Jews are being evacuated from the
12Altreich who will be brought to", there probably should be
13an "o" on that "to" so that "brought too", in other words,
14"as well as", "in so far as they are fit for work.
15According to this state of affairs, there are no
16reservations if those Jews who are incapable of work, are
17eliminated by the Brackian means ... Those fit for work,
18on the other hand, will be transported for labour in the
20 The sense of that is, surely, this, is it not,
21Mr Irving -- you can surely accept this -- that the
22intention was -- what happened in the event is another
23matter -- as expressed by Wetzel in Berlin in the Ostland
24Ministry in Berlin, to bring train loads of Jews from the
25Altreich to Riga and to send some of them that were fit
26for work to the East and to gas the rest?
1 A. [Mr Irving] That is a quantum leap which disregards the other
2evidence. You are talking about the intention.
3 Q. [Mr Rampton] I am.
4 A. [Mr Irving] In fact, it is not the intention. It is the proposal.
5 Q. [Mr Rampton] Yes.
6 A. [Mr Irving] And I think that there is more than just a nuance between
7those two words; just the same as somebody in Posnan,
8I think it was Mr Hukner, in July 1941 wrote a letter to
9Eichmann saying, would it not be far more humane if you
10would dispose of these people before the winter comes by
11some rapidly working means? Well, nobody did that at that
12time. So these proposals were ventilated by these
14 Q. [Mr Rampton] Rather than letting them starve to death, I think it was,
15was it not?
16 A. [Mr Irving] I beg your pardon?
17 Q. [Mr Rampton] I said it was rather than letting them starve to death was
18the proposal.
19 A. [Mr Irving] Yes, and that is exactly the same kind of thing. These
20proposals were ventilated and aired. As we find out,
21nothing was ever done in that direction.
22 Q. [Mr Rampton] You may or may not agree with Professor Longerich. If you
23disagree, there is nothing I can do about it. You will
24have to wait until he gets here. He says: "Gas chambers
25(here described as 'dwellings' (Unterkunfte) were not in
26fact erected in Riga. Rather, so-called gas vans were to
1be employed"?
2 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Where do you get that from?
3 MR RAMPTON: I do not know; maybe it is in the next sentence.
4 A. [Mr Irving] Well, oddly enough, I would agree with that.
5 Q. [Mr Rampton] You would?
6 A. [Mr Irving] Yes.
7 Q. [Mr Rampton] Well, there we are?
8 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Then we need not bother.
9 MR RAMPTON: I will just read on, if I may?
10 A. [Mr Irving] But I think it is irresponsible to talk about gas
11chambers being described as "dwellings" in this. I mean,
12as we know ----
13 Q. [Mr Rampton] You must take that up with him, I am afraid.
14 A. [Mr Irving] As we know, they did erect this very large fumigation
15chamber in Riga which is why Dr Hesch went there in
16October 1941.
17 Q. [Mr Rampton] You would not describe a fumigation chamber as an
18"unterkunfte", would you?
19 A. [Mr Irving] Well, we do not know exactly what shape this fumigation
20chamber took. They may have taken over a Nissan hut and
21turned it into a gassing chamber with the appropriate
22sealants, and so on.
23 Q. [Mr Rampton] No, no, the letter talks about the construction of the
24required dwellings. That cannot be right, Mr Irving. I
25am sorry.
26 A. [Mr Irving] Well, Nissan huts constructed. I just gave that as a kind
1of ready translation.
2 Q. [Mr Rampton] They are not probably (and I am only dealing in
3probabilities because I am interested in historical
4integrity rather than proof of what happened) they are not
5likely, the words "dwellings which needs to be
6constructed", to be fumigation chambers, are they, given
7the use of the German word "unterkunfte"?
8 A. [Mr Irving] Well, I gave precisely the reason why they are. Given the
9wartime circumstances, I find it highly likely they would
10have taken an existing building, like a Nissan hut,
11applied the appropriate sealants and then used that as a
12fumigation chamber.
13 Q. [Mr Rampton] What word would you naturally use in German for a
14delousing or fumigation chamber?
15 A. [Mr Irving] Entlausungs kammer, Entwesungs kammer, Vergasungs kammer.
16 Q. [Mr Rampton] But not this word?
17 A. [Mr Irving] Well, they have actually done the two. They have said
18Unterkunfte, Vergasungsapparate.
19 Q. [Mr Rampton] Let us read paragraph 5, may we? "These gas vans were
20developed by the Criminal Police in autumn 1941 - parallel
21to the transfer of the technology of 'euthanasia' to
22Eastern Europe".
23 A. [Mr Irving] That, I venture to suggest, if I may just interrupt you,
24is why the letter had a Geheim rating rather than the Top
25Secret rating.
26 Q. [Mr Rampton] Yes.
1 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Mr Rampton, I have read the next four or five
2paragraphs. What is really being said -- I think this is
3agreed which is why I am intervening -- is that the policy
4of using gas vans was not only proposed but was
6 A. [Mr Irving] It was implemented, yes.
7 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Eight or 10 of them were employed to kill
8Jews, starting, as I read it, in Chelmo. Does one need to
9go through it more detail? Do you accept that, Mr Irving?
10 A. [Mr Irving] Except for the numbers, I think that is right.
11 MR RAMPTON: I do have a point to make about this. If one
12looks at paragraph 5, halfway through the paragraph:
13"After having an execution of Jews performed for his",
14that is Himmler's, "observation, he demanded of Nebe, the
15Head of EG B, that other methods of killing should be
16sought which were more 'humane' than execution", that is
17by shooting, that is my interpolation, "methods, that is
18which would put less strain on the firing squads of the SS
19and policemen". Is that correct? Is that what Himmler
20demanded of Nebe?
21 A. [Mr Irving] What a waffly footnote, though, is it not? This is
22reconstructed from the accounts of witnesses and ----
23 Q. [Mr Rampton] Do you agree ----
24 A. [Mr Irving] Excuse me, and he then actually uses the "indictment" of
25somebody as a source when an "indictment" is something
26that has been untested in law. If it had been a judgment
1by a court, that would be different.
2 Q. [Mr Rampton] Mr Irving, you can, as I say, take up the cudgels with
3Dr Longerich and Professor Browning and anybody else,
4Professor Evans, about their methods, just as I am doing
5with you about yours.
6 A. [Mr Irving] Mr Rampton, you put the sentence to me and I immediately
7draw attention to the waffly basis.
8 Q. [Mr Rampton] Mr Irving, I wish you would sometimes just listen to my
9question. Do you agree, as a matter of fact, with what
10Dr Longerich has there written?
11 A. [Mr Irving] That Himmler was squeamish?
12 Q. [Mr Rampton] No, that Himmler was worried about the mental and physical
13effect on the troops, the SS people, of having to shoot so
14many people?
15 A. [Mr Irving] I have heard this said about the same kind of evidentiary
16foundation that Mr Browning has put in. Let me put it the
17other way round. There is no letter from Himmler to
18Berger or to Bouhler or to Heydrich saying, "We have to do
19this some other way; this is putting too much strain on my
20men", but there is one episode which I clearly remember --
21I have mentioned it before -- when Hitler's film cameraman
22accompanied Himmler to a mass shooting outside Minsk in
23the middle of August 1941. Half way through that, one of
24the machine gunners came running across the field to
25Himmler and to this party saying he could not do it, his
26nerves could not take it any more, could he be posted
1somewhere else? He was sent back into the line.
2 Q. [Mr Rampton] That takes me back, you see, to Wisliceny and to Bruns and
3to the suggestion I made some days ago, if you remember,
4that the principal reason why, well, one of the two
5reasons why mass shootings of this kind were to stop was
6that they were apt to draw attention to themselves; the
7other was that it was a strain on the people who had to do
8the shooting, and that, in consequence, they had to find
9another means of killing Jews and so they hit upon
10gassing. Now, will you please comment on that suggestion?
11 A. [Mr Irving] I do not think that is an adequate suggestion. I do not
12think that the noise suggestion, if I can paraphrase it as
13that, holds water because these mass killings took place
14many miles outside the built up areas; and as for the
15strain on the nerves, of course, then how is it that the
16Russians managed to carry out their mass shootings on
17similar scales, if not even indeed even greater scales,
18without having to resort to gas chambers? I do not think
19there is a ----
20 Q. [Mr Rampton] Perhaps, Mr Irving, this is not a trial about the
21Russians. Perhaps Russian public opinion was not as
22sensitive as German public opinion; who knows?
23 A. [Mr Irving] Well, exactly. Who knows the answers to many of these
24questions that you give?
25 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Mr Rampton, will you go this far -- I cannot
26give you chapter and verse for it, but my impression is
1that there is quite a lot of evidence -- I think that is
2the right word -- to suggest that carrying out the
3shootings was causing, understandably I suppose, real
4anxiety, nervous breakdowns and the rest amongst those
5Germans who were being ordered to carry it out?
6 A. [Mr Irving] My Lord, with respect, if they intend to make this a plank
7of their case, then they should lead such evidence and not
8allow ----
9 Q. [Mr Rampton] I am asking you if you accept it.
10 A. [Mr Irving] I do not accept that, my Lord, unless they wish to put it
11to us in a slightly better founded form than Professor
12Browning has done saying it is based on an unspecified
13witness statement on an indictment of someone.
14 MR RAMPTON: That is Dr Longerich, begging your pardon, and
15I am just about to show you something which I hope you
16will agree, as it were, helps to found the stability of
17this proposition by Dr Longerich. Can you please turn to
18file H4(v) and to footnote 260?
19 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Before you do, can I ask one further question
20to see whether you are prepared to accept this, that there
21was at least disquiet about the method of executing Jews
22by shooting by the SS?
23 A. [Mr Irving] Clearly, a lot of the men did not like doing it, but a lot
24of the men did like doing it. I think Daniel Goldhart has
25brought this out very clearly in his book "Hitler's
26Willing Executioners", that a lot of men actually
1volunteered for the work. So there is an entire book
2written on this subject recently. This is Witte, right?
3 MR RAMPTON: My Lord, this is two pages from a book, this
4footnote 262, to Professor Longerich's, the second part of
5his report. I will, if I may, read from nearly the top of
6the page.
7 MR JUSTICE GRAY: 260, are you talking about?
8 MR RAMPTON: Yes, in fact, I had better start with 16. That is
9the internal page number on the left-hand side. The
10German personnel, I do not know even know whose book this
12 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Yitzhak Arad.
13 MR RAMPTON: "Odilo Globocnik's first" under "German Personnel"
14"was to organize the manpower required for the
15construction and operation of the killing centres. The
16people assigned to Operation Reinhard came from the
17following sources: 1. SS and policemen who served under
18Globocnik's command in the Lublin district until Operation
19Reinhard". Then there is a number. "Members of the SS
20and Police staffs or units. 3. Chancellery of the Fuhrer
21- Euthanasia programme". A total of 450 men.
22 "The most important group of Operation Reinhard
23came from the euthanasia programme. They brought with
24them knowledge and experience in setting up and operating
25gassing institutions for mass murder. They filled the key
26posts involved with the extermination methods, the
1planning and construction of three death camps - Belzec,
2Sobibor and Treblinka - and the command over these
3camps". So far, that is just Mr Arad speaking.
4 Now, Mr Irving, here is a report of something
5Dr Brack is later to have said: "Victor Brack gave
6evidence in his trial after the war about the transfer of
7the euthanasia personnel to Operation Reinhard:
8 "'In 1941, I received an order to discontinue
9the euthanasia programme. In order to retain the
10personnel that had been relieved of these duties and in
11order to be able to start a new euthanasia programme after
12the war, Bouhler asked me - I think after a conference
13with Himmler - to send this personnel to Lublin and place
14it at the disposal of SS Brigadefuhrer Globocnik". Are
15you familiar with that evidence, Mr Irving?
16 A. [Mr Irving] I was reading this a few days ago, yes.
17 Q. [Mr Rampton] Have you never read it before?
18 A. [Mr Irving] Just a few days ago I read it for the first time.
19 Q. [Mr Rampton] It is a Nuremberg piece of evidence, is it not?
20 A. [Mr Irving] According to the footnote, it comes from somebody else's
22 Q. [Mr Rampton] From what?
23 A. [Mr Irving] From somebody else's book.
24 Q. [Mr Rampton] I think -- maybe it is not your fault; I made the same
25mistake when I first looked at it -- the footnotes in
26question are those under the heading "Chapter Two" the
1next page?
2 A. [Mr Irving] Very well. It is an affidavit, yes.
3 MR JUSTICE GRAY: It is page 16, so it is likely, I think, is
4it not?
5 MR RAMPTON: I think so, particularly when we looked a bit
6further down the page. Anyhow the text goes on as
8 "The first group of euthanasia personnel,
9numbering a few dozen men, arrived at Lublin between the
10end of October and the end of December 1941. Among them
11was Kriminalkommissar of Police Christian Wirth, the
12highest ranking officer from the euthanasia programme
13assigned to Operation Reinhard, and Oberscharfuhrer Josef
14Oberhauser. Additional people from the euthanasia
15programme arrived in Lublin during the first months of
161942. Viktor Brack visited Lublin at the beginning of May
171942 and discussed with Globocnik the contribution of the
18euthanasia organization to the task of exterminating
19Jews. Globocnik asked for more euthanasia personnel to
20be placed under his command. His request was accepted.
21After this meeting Brack wrote to Himmler:
22 "'In accordance with my orders from Reichsleiter
23Bouhler, I have long ago" -- that would mean October 1941,
24I assume, according to this historical context, would it
25not, Mr Irving?
26 A. [Mr Irving] It could, yes.
1 Q. [Mr Rampton] -- "put at Brigadefuhrer Globocnik's disposal part of my
2manpower to aid him in carrying out his special
3mission'". Pause there, do you accept that that special
4mission was the extermination of hundreds of thousands of
6 A. [Mr Irving] Can I make a general comment about the unsatisfactory
7nature of this kind of evidence?
8 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Yes, but can you answer the question first?
9 A. [Mr Irving] No, I do not, not on the basis just of this one extract
10without knowing what the German document said, without
11seeing the classifications on it, without knowing the
12original wording. Why are we being presented with
13somebody else's book as a source, just being given
14extracts from it in English?
15 MR RAMPTON: We will try to remedy our negligent behaviour,
16Mr Irving, but assume for a moment that is a fair
17translation of the German of Brack's original letter in
18May 1942. Do you agree that it as reference to a special
19mission by Globocnik which means exterminating Jews in
20Eastern Poland?
21 A. [Mr Irving] On the balance of probabilities, yes, but I would like to
22know why we are not being shown the original document.
23You have had teams of researchers working in the archives
24who could have produced the original affidavit and the
25original letter, and we are only being produced somebody's
26gloss, somebody's chosen excerpts. I will draw attention
1to one or two -- you are looking weary, Mr Rampton.
2 Q. [Mr Rampton] I am looking weary because.
3 A. [Mr Irving] But maybe my criteria are different.
4 Q. [Mr Rampton] If you have an application to make, Mr Irving -- this is a
5court of law and not some forum for you to expound your
6views about this, that and the other, in particular the
7Defendants' weakness.
8 A. [Mr Irving] Mr Rampton, frankly I would have hoped that the court
9would have made these observations.
10 Q. [Mr Rampton] Mr Irving, if you have an application to make for further
11discovery, make it to his Lordship at the proper time,
12will you?
13 A. [Mr Irving] I would have hoped that the court would have made the
14observation about the quality of this kind of evidence.
15 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Since you invite me to, I have some sympathy
16for what you are just saying because this may be quite an
17important document, I do not know. As far as I can see,
18the reference for it in the note 7 is to some Nuremberg
19documents, but it does not quite read like an extract from
20a Nuremberg document.
21 MR RAMPTON: It is a letter, my Lord, and many of the Nuremberg
22documents are letters.
23 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Are they?
24 MR RAMPTON: Yes. We have looked at several of them in the
25last couple of days.
26 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Right. But, Mr Rampton, the point really
1that is concerning me a little is you are insisting (and
2it may be you are right to do so) on going in your
3cross-examination of Mr Irving to a lot of the source
4material. This is a bit second-hand, is it not?
5 MR RAMPTON: Of course it is and I would much rather have the
6original. The fact is I do not have it. I will try to
7get it. I have a feeling that I have seen it somewhere,
8but I cannot at the moment remember where. But there it
9is. I will try to get it.
10 The purpose of this cross-examination is not, my
11Lord, to, as it were, investigate the Defendants'
12efficiency or bona fides in the material that they have
13disclosed. The purpose of it is to see whether I can get
14Mr Irving to agree about what the evidence actually
16 A. [Mr Irving] May I also point out that the references to Operation
17Reinhard are not apparently contained in the documents
18quoted, but they are the interpolation of the author of
19this book, Mr Yitzhak or whoever it is. I mean, this is
20the kind of thing that worries me, that these things are
21slid in. There is no reference to Operation Reinhard in
22the quotations actually given.
23 Q. [Mr Rampton] Well, what was Odilo Globocnik's special mission?
24 A. [Mr Irving] He was chief of police in Lublin at this time.
25 Q. [Mr Rampton] Why should Brack write to Himmler about the Globocnik's
26special mission?
1 A. [Mr Irving] Mr Rampton, in the final analysis we are probably on the
2same side in this document.
3 Q. [Mr Rampton] I think we are too.
4 A. [Mr Irving] But I do not want to be ambushed with secondhand sources
5like this.
6 Q. [Mr Rampton] If we are on the same side, Mr Irving, there is no ambush,
7is there?
8 A. [Mr Irving] Well, you are ambushing me with second-hand sources like
9this where I have no means of testing the integrity of the
10document. I would like to make certain observations about
11the nature of affidavits sworn in Nuremberg which I shall
12probably do when I come to cross-examination of Professor
14 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Let us cut this short. Would the Defendants,
15if they can, unearth this document? In the meantime, you
16have your answer that "special mission" probably does
17refer to extermination.
18 MR RAMPTON: But I am unapologetic, my Lord, because that is
19not actually the most important part of this letter.
20 MR JUSTICE GRAY: You mean you have not get to the most
21important part?
22 MR RAMPTON: No, it is at the bottom of the page.
23 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Shall we press on?
24 MR RAMPTON: Yes, please. "'Upon his renewed request, I have
25now transferred to him additional personnel. Globocnik
26took this opportunity to explain to me his idea that the
1action against the Jews", that is pretty explicit, is it
2not, Mr Irving?
3 A. [Mr Irving] Well, of course, at this time they are busy cleaning all
4the Jews out of the General Government which is the
5actioning of the Jews.
6 Q. [Mr Rampton] What would Dr Brack have to do with that?
7 A. [Mr Irving] I do not know.
8 Q. [Mr Rampton] No, quite. "'... should be carried out with all deliberate
9speed, in order to avoid getting stuck [in the middle]'"--
10That is in square brackets; I know not why -- "'one of
11these days when some sort of difficulty may force us to
12stop. You, yourself, Reichsfuhrer'", that is Himmler,
13"'once voiced to me your opinion that the requirements of
14secrecy also oblige us to act as quickly as possible.
15Both conceptions are thus directed in principle towards
16the same result, and according to my experience, they are
17more than justified'".
18 Again looking at that, as a matter of
19probability, is Brack not saying two things? Brack,
20remember, Mr Irving, is master of the gassing apparatus.
21 A. [Mr Irving] Yes.
22 Q. [Mr Rampton] "You do not need secrecy to exterminate lice; you do need
23secrecy to cloak the killing of people"?
24 A. [Mr Irving] I quite agree. That is undoubtedly, on the balance of
25probabilities, the overall burden of this document.
26 Q. [Mr Rampton] Thank you very much.
1 A. [Mr Irving] However, if I may now make my own comments on it?
2 Q. [Mr Rampton] Please do.
3 A. [Mr Irving] At no point is it being said (as it could so easily have
4been said) "This operation which the Fuhrer has commanded
5should be done" or anything like that. It is purely about
6"Your opinion, Mr Himmler. You suggested this. We are
7doing that". This is still failing to establish the
8bridge between the upper link of the system, which so far
9is Mr Himmler, and Adolf Hitler himself, which is what
10I have always maintained.
11 Q. [Mr Rampton] No, Mr Irving, you see, that is only part of what you have
12maintained. What you have consistently maintained, so far
13as I am aware, until perhaps we got some concession in
14this court yesterday, what you have also maintained is
15Jews were not killed by the use of homicidal gas?
16 A. [Mr Irving] Oh, I disagree. I have repeatedly allowed that they were
17killed in gas vans.
18 Q. [Mr Rampton] On a limited scale. Yes, sorry. I will read you
19something. You will probably recognize it. I have not
20got a date for it, I am afraid. 1992, what does it come
21from? What is the IHR called in 1992? The institute of
22Historical Review? It is something you wrote about the
23Goebbels' diary.
24 A. [Mr Irving] Probably about the Eichmann papers.
25 Q. [Mr Rampton] It is about the Eichmann papers, that is right. You are
26talking about Eichmann.
1 A. [Mr Irving] Because Eichmann in his papers describes himself having
2sat inside the front of a bus or a truck which is being
3driven around with people being gassed in the back.
4 Q. [Mr Rampton] My Lord, for reference -- not to get it out -- the
5reference is file D3(i), tab 30. You say of Eichmann:
6"I do not know why he recounted that kind of detail in
7his memoirs. It is an ugly piece of circumstantial
8evidence". I do not know what it was. It was something
9about shooting children or something at Minsk. "It is an
10ugly piece of circumstantial evidence, but it lends
11credibility and authenticity to the descriptions, what a
12writer calls verisimilitude. It did no surprise me. He
13also describes, and I have to say this being an honest
14historian, going to another location a few weeks later and
15being driven around in a bus, then being told by the bus
16driver to look through a peep hole into the back of the
17bus where he saw a number of prisoners being gassed by the
18exhaust fumes". Then, Mr Irving, this: "So I accept that
19this kind of experiment was made on a very limited scale"?
20 A. [Mr Irving] Yes. We are talking about, even in your own paper, eight
21or nine trucks, I believe, which is a very limited scale.
22 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Mr Rampton, it would help me if one could see
23quite where we have got now. You have, I will not use the
24word "concession" because I can understand why Mr Irving
25does not like it put that way, but in relation to gas
26vans, one has that being carried out on a limited
1experimental basis with the authority of Himmler but
2without the knowledge of Hitler, am I right?
3 A. [Mr Irving] That is precisely how far we have got.
4 MR RAMPTON: That does not take the matter very far, with
6 A. [Mr Irving] And myself having said so in public on various occasions.
7 MR JUSTICE GRAY: That is what we spent this morning on so far.
8 MR RAMPTON: That represents, as it often has in this case and,
9no doubt, often will, a giant step back from what I think
10was conceded yesterday which is that all those people who
11went to those three little villages in Eastern Poland
12actually were actually going to be killed, most of them.
13 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Not by gassing.
14 MR RAMPTON: Not by gassing. Therefore, I must press on.
15 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Yes, but we are not on Treblinka or the
16others at the moment, are we?
17 MR RAMPTON: Well, Operation Reinhard is Treblinka, Sobibor and
18Belzec. That is what Globocnik was in charge of. The
19point about it is this. There is again this systematic
20chain of events. Brack is, first of all, summoned, as it
21were, to Riga which is in the Ostland. I do not really
22want to have make a speech. This is not a ----
23 MR JUSTICE GRAY: No, I am trying not to get too bogged down
24when at the end one gets the concession that, perhaps,
25would have enabled one to take the individual documents
26more rapidly.
1 MR RAMPTON: I think it is very difficult. One sees what
2happens if I take an individual document.
3 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Yes. Well, that is part of the problem.
4 MR RAMPTON: The trouble is this. If at the end of the case I
5say to your Lordship, "Your Lordship has read all the
6documents" or "I draw them to your Lordship's attention",
7and then I simply say, "Well, the inference to be drawn
8from this is perfectly obvious", Mr Irving could
9legitimately say, "Well, I was never given a chance to
10deal with that in cross-examination".
11 MR JUSTICE GRAY: We may have to tackle that as a problem in
12this case, whether everything has to be put.
13 MR RAMPTON: Your Lordship will see, when I get to the
14remaining part of Professor Evans, that there is a great
15deal that I will not even refer to and a great deal that I
16will take very shortly, but with this I cannot because
17your Lordship does have to see the scale and the system.
18 MR JUSTICE GRAY: But can we just focus on what it is that
19there is an issue about and see whether Mr Irving agrees.
20 MR RAMPTON: Your Lordship had better ask Mr Irving.
21 MR JUSTICE GRAY: I think I am. The issue appears to be
22whether at Belzec Sobibor and Treblinka there was any
23gassing at all by the use of gas vans or gas chambers. Is
24that something you dispute?
25 A. [Mr Irving] My answer will be initially disappointing to say that
26frankly I am not an expert on that and I do not know. The
1court is probably dissatisfied with that answer. I have
2made such cursory investigations as I could in preparation
3for this case, which I should not really have had to do,
4and establish that there is a great deal of uncertainty,
5buildings which the evidence or eyewitnesses suggest
6should have been at Treblinka and Mydonek cannot be seen
7on the aerial photographs. We have that kind of problem.
8That is why I am happy not to have had to engage myself in
9any greater depth with those matters.
10 Q. [Mr Justice Gray] I think we are not concerned with Mydonek. It is Belzec,
11Sobibor and Treblinka. You do challenge the fact that
12there was gassings of Jews in gas chambers or by the use
13of gas vans.
14 A. [Mr Irving] There are serious problems, my Lord. Mr Rampton has been
15rather vague about how the gassings were conducted in
16Treblinka, what kind of means were used, what kind of gas,
17was it diesel engines or petrol engines, and there is a
18great deal of dispute about that among other people than
19myself. Go ahead, Mr Rampton.
20 MR RAMPTON: I should not interrupt. You are in discourse with
21the judge and I should have kept quiet.
22 A. [Mr Irving] Do you wish to ask something?
23 Q. [Mr Rampton] No. I will not bother with it.
24 A. [Mr Irving] I am sorry, if I may just say so, that is why I would have
25preferred if one was to hinge this case on Auschwitz
26rather than what I might call the lesser camps, where
1there is a great deal of uncertainty, whereas Auschwitz is
2really the battleship, the capital ship of this entire
4 Q. [Mr Rampton] You might say that, Mr Irving, but you have entered the
5arena. Nobody asked you to comment on the Holocaust.
6Nobody asked you to sink the battleship Auschwitz. Nobody
7asked you to say with that there were a very limited
8number of experimental gassings in trucks. You said all
9that voluntarily?
10 A. [Mr Irving] Did I say very limited?
11 Q. [Mr Rampton] I am about to. My job is about undermining your position
12by reference to what you should have looked at, if you
13have not already, by the time you made those statements?
14 A. [Mr Irving] The reason I made that statement in 1992 which you just
15quoted is that only a few weeks earlier I had come into
16possession of Adolf Eichmann's private papers and I had
17discovered in those papers a description by him of how he
18had personally attended a gassing in a gas truck, and he
19had been required by Muller, the chief of Gestapo, to
20witness this to see how it was going on. This of course
21is evidence of high quality. It is evidence that in no
22way can be said to be in one own's self interest. That is
23why I told this audience in California that there was no
24question whatsoever that these gassings in trucks or buses
25had gone on. To be accused now of having denied this kind
26of thing is the ultimate absurdity, when the evidence is
1front of the defence and I never denied it.
2 Q. [Mr Rampton] I am going to suggest, Mr Irving, that you have made
3statements even about the use of gas trucks which fly in
4the face of the available evidence, and I am going to do
5it by reference to some Nuremburg documents which must
6have been available since goodness knows when.
7 A. [Mr Irving] To say that something must have been able available to me
8of course, is ----
9 Q. [Mr Rampton] I am suggesting, Mr Irving, that a man in your position
10does not enter the arena waving flags and blowing trumpets
11unless he has taken the trouble to verify in advance what
12it is that he is proposing to say, particularly when what
13he is proposing to say is something of great sensitivity
14and importance to millions of people throughout the
16 A. [Mr Irving] Mr Rampton, the sensitivity is neither here not there in a
17case like this, where historians cannot regard the
18sensitivities of people when you write history. Nor I do
19enter arenas blowing trumpets and waving flags. I am not
20a Holocaust historian, Mr Rampton. I am a Hitler
21historian. I am a biographer of the top Nazis.
22 Q. [Mr Rampton] Why do you not keep your mouth shut about the Holocaust?
23 A. [Mr Irving] Because I am asked about it. It apparently obsesses
25 Q. [Mr Rampton] You gave a press conference to announce the triumphant
26arrival on these shores of the Liechter report?
1 A. [Mr Irving] Yes.
2 Q. [Mr Rampton] This is your glossy version of the Liechter report, is it
4 A. [Mr Irving] I am a publishing company and we published that under our
5imprint, yes.
6 Q. [Mr Rampton] Why?
7 A. [Mr Irving] Because it is an important contribution to the debate.
8 Q. [Mr Rampton] This?
9 A. [Mr Irving] Yes.
10 Q. [Mr Rampton] Well, we will come to that next week.
11 A. [Mr Irving] Oh dear.
12 Q. [Mr Rampton] Is this the only stimulus you have had for charging into
13the arena of Holocaust denial?
14 A. [Mr Irving] Well, I find those words, of course, repugnant.
15 Q. [Mr Rampton] They are meant to be tendentious. I put it that way so
16that you can deal with it, because that is what I shall
17say at the end of the case.
18 A. [Mr Irving] As is well known to the court, when I read the results of
19the chemical test on the buildings which will play quite a
20substantial part in this debate, I changed my mind.
21 Q. [Mr Rampton] Here is something, Mr Irving, you said at the Liechter
22press conference on 23rd June 1989. My Lord, the
23reference is D2 (i), Tab 5, pages 30 and 32.
24 A. [Mr Irving] Is it the conference where we presented this report to the
26 Q. [Mr Rampton] Yes.
1 A. [Mr Irving] So far as we were able to after the press had been
2barricaded out by organizations outside my front door.
3 Q. [Mr Rampton] Can I read what you are reported as having said? You had
4two things to do, the first to confirm that you did say it
5because I do not want to put words into your mouth, and
6then second answer a question from me in consequence if
7you say yes.
8 "Mr Irving is asked whether he denies that Nazis
9killed a large number of Jews by unnatural methods
10including gassing. Answer: That is a very good question,
11because obviously we have at the back of our minds
12certainly episodes involving gas trucks in Chelmno and
13things like that. I have not investigated." Then you say
14this : "I am prepared to accept that local Nazis tried
15bizarre methods of liquidating Jews. I am quite prepared
16to accept that, and that they may have experimented using
17gas trucks, because I have seen one or two documents in
18the archives implying that there was a roll over from the
19use of those methods of killing, the same people who
20created the euthanasia programme and they may have tried
21to (something unintelligible) of killing Jews but it is a
22very inefficient way of killing people. The Germans
23themselves had discovered this and there are much easier
24ways of killing people".
25 Now, Mr Irving, that has all your great
26authority as an historian on an important occasion for you
1behind it, does it not?
2 A. [Mr Irving] It does indeed, and I think that is a very fair summary of
3the state of my knowledge at that time. Killing people in
4gas wagons is an extremely inefficient way of doing it.
5You will have seen from the documents they had with the
6trucks, they broke their axles, the gas pipe broke.
7 Q. [Mr Rampton] Sure, but I want you just to look quickly, please ----
8 A. [Mr Irving] Also, they had the nasty mess to clear up afterwards.
9 Q. [Mr Rampton] That is all in Professor Browning's report in fact at page
11 A. [Mr Irving] What I said in that part of what you read out is
13 Q. [Mr Rampton] It is not, because you did not give the impression, you
14made it clear that these were local bizarre experiments
15and, by implication, on a very small scale.
16 A. [Mr Irving] Well, I think the small scale is something that had to be
17proven. I have been proven wrong on that.
18 Q. [Mr Rampton] What about the one I read you just now? You said a very
19limited number.
20 MR JUSTICE GRAY: No, I think you are at cross purposes.
21I think what Mr Irving is saying is that, if you are
22suggesting it was on more than a limited basis at Sobibor
23and the others, then you must prove it, or at any rate
24present the evidence for it. Is that what you meant, Mr
26 A. [Mr Irving] My Lord, yes. If are talking about six or eight trucks
1then that, to my mind, is a limited scale.
2 MR RAMPTON: May I just deal with that because that was my next
3question. Will you please turn to page 38 of Professor
4Browning's report? Since you do not trust his
5translation, you better also have ----
6 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Shall we try on Professor Browning without?
7We may save the labour of going through ----
8 MR RAMPTON: I quite agree. This is under the heading Chelmno,
9my Lord. I am going to read both these paragraphs.
10 "Beginning in December 1941, Jews from the Lodz
11ghetto and other towns in the Warthegau were deported to
12the small village of Chelmno. On May 1 1942" -- my Lord,
13we have seen this letter already --"Arthur Greiser wrote
14to Himmler: 'The special treatment [sonderbehandlung] of
15some 100,000 Jews in my territory in an action approved by
16you in agreement with the Chief of the Reich Security Main
17Office SS-Obergruppenfuhrer Heydrich will be completed in
18the next two to three months."
19 Next paragraph, this is Professor Browning:"The
20completion of this task was not without incident, however,
21as can be seen in a report in the motor pool section of
22the RSHA of June 5, 1942, concerning technical alterations
23in the production of the'special trucks.'".
24 I, not for reasons of taste but because it is
25not presently relevant, am not going to read what the
26troubles were with the gas trucks, but I am going to read
1the next indented paragraph.
2 "Since December 1941, for example, 97,000 were
3processed by three trucks in action, without any defects
4in the vehicles being encountered".
5 A. [Mr Irving] Shall we go straight to the bottom line and say yes,
6I fully accept the innuendo you are placing on that
8 Q. [Mr Rampton] Innuendo?
9 A. [Mr Irving] It is not stated clearly, but quite clearly 97,000 people
10have been liquidated in these trucks.
11 Q. [Mr Rampton] In three trucks?
12 A. [Mr Irving] Over the months concerned.
13 Q. [Mr Rampton] No, it is actually just about a month and a week. 97,000
14people in three trucks in the course of five weeks?
15 A. [Mr Irving] It is a very substantial achievement when you work it out
16with a pocket calculator ----
17 Q. [Mr Rampton] Clever SS!
18 A. [Mr Irving] -- at 20 people per time, and they drove 20 kilometres
19into the countryside. I have read all the reports on
21 Q. [Mr Rampton] Not if they are doing them in situ.
22 A. [Mr Irving] No. They drove them out into the country and did it and
23that is where the axle broke.
24 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Is it very limited and experimental?
25 A. [Mr Irving] My Lord, I did not have this document at the time I said
26that. I had this document five or six months ago.
1 Q. [Mr Justice Gray] Answer the question even so. Would you describe it as very
2limited and experimental?
3 A. [Mr Irving] Not on this scale. This is systematic.
4 MR RAMPTON: It is systematic, huge scale, using gas trucks to
5murder Jews?
6 A. [Mr Irving] Yes. No question at all. Can I refer you back to the
7letter where it says Greiser writing to Himmler of the
8special treatment "approved by you in agreement with
9Heydrich"? Again, there is no reference to Hitler, I am
11 Q. [Mr Rampton] Yes. We are not going to have that argument at the
13 A. [Mr Irving] It is not unimportant, Mr Rampton. Surely, if Hitler had
14given the order, they would all willingly have said, "On
15the instructions of the Fuhrer, we are carrying out our
16beloved Fuhrer instructions", but that is not in the
18 Q. [Mr Rampton] Mr Irving, if you bother to read yesterday's transcript,
19you will know precisely what I say about this. I spelt it
20out at his Lordship's request, and there it is for you and
21anybody else who wants to see it in black and white.
22 A. [Mr Irving] My comment was about three lines and your response is
23about ten. I think my comment is more valuable.
24 Q. [Mr Rampton] No doubt you do, Mr Irving, or we should not be here.
25 A. [Mr Irving] You have failed to establish the link upwards to Hitler.
26 Q. [Mr Rampton] So you keep asserting. I beg to differ, but I am not
1going develop that until the end of this case.
2 Now, Mr Irving, page 36 please. Again, my Lord,
3I do this for completeness because on page 36 of Professor
4Browning we move southwards to Yugoslavia, and again
5I have the document if anybody wants to see it. In this
6instance I will ask Mr Irving to glance at it in a minute
7for one particular reason.
8 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Is it worth a general question first of all
9as to whether what is now accepted as having happened at
10Chelmno, broadly speaking, was happening at Treblinka and
12 MR RAMPTON: Yes. There are two particular reasons to refer to
13the document. Have you read these two paragraphs?
14 A. [Mr Irving] The Yugoslavia one?
15 Q. [Mr Rampton] Yes.
16 A. [Mr Irving] Yes, I read it and there is no question at all that the
18 Q. [Mr Rampton] Do you accept therefore that they shot all the Jewish men
19first and then, sometime after in spring of 1942, they
20gassed all the women and children, using a gas truck?
21 A. [Mr Irving] That is the interpretation to derive from these records,
23 Q. [Mr Rampton] Now could I please ask you to look -- in fact this is the
24name of this document, though it is referred to by
25Professor Browning. It is H1 (xv). You will not have it
1 A. [Mr Irving] What is the document?
2 Q. [Mr Rampton] It is a letter from Harold Turner to Wolf.
3 A. [Mr Irving] I know this document.
4 Q. [Mr Rampton] I have given him a German pronounciation. Perhaps he was
5an Englishman?
6 A. [Mr Irving] Again, I do not think we are going to have any dispute
7with this letter.
8 Q. [Mr Rampton] You may not do, but there are two questions which, at any
9rate, if you already know the answers, I want his Lordship
10to hear.
11 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Is there a copy for me because it is one of
12the files I do not have here.
13 MR RAMPTON: It is page 849. I do not know if I mentioned
14this, my Lord? What Miss Rogers and I are going to do is
15try and put together a bundle of core documents.
16 MR JUSTICE GRAY: I wondered about that.
17 MR RAMPTON: By reference to the transcripts. Whether we can
18do it at the end of this week, I do not know, but we will
19try. By reference to the transcript we can see which ones
20are likely to be important. Your Lordship mentioned three
21this morning already.
22 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Yes. Thank you.
23 MR RAMPTON: This is a three-page document from somebody called
24Stadtrat Dr Turner. What does Stadtrat mean?
25 A. [Mr Irving] It is the equivalent of a Privy Counsellor.
26 Q. [Mr Rampton] OK. He is in Belgrade, is that right?
1 A. [Mr Irving] In Serbia, yes.
2 Q. [Mr Rampton] In Serbia, and he is writing to Karl Wolf, who is
3Himmler's Adjutant and liaison officer with Hitler. Is
4that right?
5 A. [Mr Irving] He is writing to Karl Wolf, who is Himmler's Adjutant.
6 Q. [Mr Rampton] I thought you agreed with me yesterday that there was a
7time when I do not know how long a time or what the dates
8were, when Wolf was a liaison officer.
9 A. [Mr Irving] Wolf was liaison officer to Hitler from August 26th 1939.
10Whether he was still at this time or not, I do not know.
11There was a matrimonial problem.
12 Q. [Mr Rampton] It is obviously going to be important that we find that
13out. I am sorry, I have been given some history.
14 A. [Mr Irving] He was out of favour with Hitler.
15 Q. [Mr Rampton] We will deal with this later?
16 A. [Mr Irving] I thought you probably would.
17 Q. [Mr Rampton] It is too complicated to for me to pick up at this stage.
18Can you just look at the first page of this letter? I am
19sorry, somebody has written something on the top. I do
20not think that is probably the original. Do you?
21 A. [Mr Irving] No.
22 Q. [Mr Rampton] I think that is a later edition. But I am interested in
23what looks like pencil, rather bad pencil, capital letters
24A R, with two underlines. Do you see that?
25 A. [Mr Irving] Yes. It is interesting, is it not?
26 Q. [Mr Rampton] Do you think it possible that somebody in Berlin put those
1on, possible only, and put it into the Aktion Reinhardt
3 A. [Mr Irving] Can I reserve judgment on that until tomorrow? I will
4look at my copy. I have a copy of the original. We will
5see then if it was he person who did the handwriting at
6the top or on the original but let us assume for the
7moment that it is on the original for your purposes.
8 Q. [Mr Rampton] Yes. Assume it is an original.
9 A. [Mr Irving] Yes.
10 Q. [Mr Rampton] Do you think that is possible?
11 A. [Mr Irving] Yes.
12 Q. [Mr Rampton] You will correct me because you probably have a much
13better copy than I have, but am I wrong in thinking that
14there is no security classification on this document?
15 A. [Mr Irving] Except on the rubber stamp. You can also make out the AR
16to which I drew attention yesterday on the July 1942
18 Q. [Mr Rampton] That just means action Reinhardt.
19 A. [Mr Irving] Yes. I think that is a reasonable interpretation. I do
20not think anyone else has spotted that, apart from you and
21me, Mr Rampton.
22 MR JUSTICE GRAY: What, the absence of a security?
23 A. [Mr Irving] No. It is he initials A R. They appear to have
24established a separate file for A R, Aktion Reinhardt.
25 MR RAMPTON: Stadtrat Dr Turner is writing to Wolf?
26 A. [Mr Irving] Yes.
1 Q. [Mr Rampton] It is probably not Dr Turner's reference, is it?
2 A. [Mr Irving] Excuse me. There is a security classification on it.
3 Q. [Mr Rampton] Where?
4 A. [Mr Irving] Next to the handwritten 2, where it says 1, 2, 3.
5 Q. [Mr Rampton] No, that says Chief Hatkentness (?)
6 A. [Mr Irving] I am sorry, I thought it might be chef -- right, carry on.
7 Q. [Mr Rampton] I thought it was too, until I took advice. So this is a
8letter without a security classification put on it by the
9sender and certainly no clear security classification put
10on it by Berlin at the other end?
11 A. [Mr Irving] Unless A R was a special, ultra secret classification.
12 Q. [Mr Rampton] Plausible, but speculative.
13 A. [Mr Irving] Yes, except that the A R on the rubber stamp is in the
14place where the security classification goes.
15 A. [Mr Irving] Often you get the rubber stamp Geheimer Reisache, do you
17 A. [Mr Irving] Yes. As I say, it is in the place on the rubber stamp
18where the security classification goes. I think we have
19made a discovery of that.
20 Q. [Mr Rampton] Conceivably. Over the page, only this, there is a big
21paragraph. It fills most of the page and about halfway
22down the paragraph there are some German starting Schon
23von... Would you read it to yourself as far down as you
25 A. [Mr Irving] Already months ago I have had every Jew I could get my
26hands on shot in this country, and I have had all the
1Jewish women and children concentrated in a camp and at
2the same time, with the help of the Security Service
3I, have managed to procure a "delousing truck" which in 14
4days to four weeks will have managed to clean out the
6 Q. [Mr Rampton] Well now, that is obviously code?
7 A. [Mr Irving] Yes.
8 Q. [Mr Rampton] For some idiotic reason, he has put it in inverted commas,
9which rather gives the game away, does it not?
10 A. [Mr Irving] It does, yes.
11 Q. [Mr Rampton] That is code for gassing truck, is it not?
12 A. [Mr Irving] Yes.
13 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Which camp is being referred to?
14 MR RAMPTON: Semlernin outside Belgrade. So the same business
15is going on there as elsewhere. I do not know how many
16they managed to -- well, you can see how many they managed
17to polish off if you look at 5212 of Professor Browning's
19 A. [Mr Irving] Can I stay with this document for a moment, Mr Rampton?
20 Q. [Mr Rampton] Yes.
21 A. [Mr Irving] And say, if I was cantankerous, there are any number of
22reasons why I could challenge this document, but I do not.
23 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Then you do not need to spend time on it.
24 A. [Mr Irving] For example, it is on non-standard German size paper. It
25does not use the S runes. It has wierd typed toward in SS
26runes and so on. But I do not. I fully accept that it is
1genuine and I think it important to make that distinction.
2This is quite clearly a very sinister document.
3 MR RAMPTON: Do you now accept therefore that statements that
4you have made to the effect that oh, yes they used gas
5trucks on a very limited scale for experiments were just
6plain wrong?
7 A. [Mr Irving] Yes.
8 Q. [Mr Rampton] And do you also accept, which is the important question,
9that, before making a statement of that kind about such an
10important matter, it matters not that these people were
11Jews, they were human beings, do you not think, before
12making such statements, it behoved you to do a little bit
13of research in accessible files?
14 A. [Mr Irving] Mr Rampton, I was being asked this question at a press
15conference, if you remember. I did not volunteer the
16information. Somebody asked me did I accept that there
17had been such use of gas trucks. My information at that
18time was based on what I knew from Adolf Eichmann's papers
19that he himself had taken part in those experimental runs.
20 Q. [Mr Rampton] I am just pausing only, Mr Irving, because I want to find
21what you said about it in the pleadings.
22 A. [Mr Irving] Yes. It is in answer to a question, if I am right.
23 MR JUSTICE GRAY: In the pleadings I think it is a limited
24experimental basis, is it not?
25 A. [Mr Irving] I think this really falls into two or three parts.
26I quite clearly said yes, there were gassings in gas
1trucks, but at that time the state of my knowledge was
2that it had not been on anything like this scale.
3 MR RAMPTON: This was probably some time served in 1996 or 1997
4I should think. Yes, it is in the reply, my Lord. It is
5on page 3 of the reply. It was served in March 1997. One
6part of it says this: "It is denied that the plaintiff has
7denied the Holocaust. It is denied that the plaintiff has
8denied that gas chambers were used by the Nazis as the
9principal means of carrying out that extermination".
10I think those two sentences are going to be contradictory
11with what next follows. "They may have used them on
12occasion on an experimental scale which frankly is not
13denied". That is in March 1997. This is a considered
14statement by you for the purpose of these proceedings?
15 A. [Mr Irving] Yes.
16 Q. [Mr Rampton] And I have just shown you what is not a particularly
17secret document in the historical sense.
18 A. [Mr Irving] Which shows that that element of my statement was wrong,
20 Q. [Mr Rampton] And you made the same statement to the public at large?
21 A. [Mr Irving] In response to a question on the basis of my information
22at that time.
23 Q. [Mr Rampton] I think I am going to be enabled to contradict that, too,
24in a moment.
25 A. [Mr Irving] I think it also has to be said that these gas trucks of
26course did not carry on month after month after month
1after month after month. According to the information in
2this document and others, it just operated for a few
4 Q. [Mr Rampton] Tell me, Mr Irving, we got to 97,000 in a month.
5 A. [Mr Irving] Yes, which certainly seems an incredible figure, when you
6have only three trucks, they can only take 20 at a time
7and they have to drive 20 miles into the country side.
8But I do not have the information on which to challenge
9the figure, apart from the inherent improbability of that
11 Q. [Mr Rampton] It is a massive figure.
12 A. [Mr Irving] You also have to remember that they are bragging and
13boasting about what they have achieved.
14 Q. [Mr Rampton] Yes, of course. There is always that danger, that they
15are seeking to please somebody. If that were so,
16Mr Irving, I think that letter about the 97,000 sent to
17Himmler, I cannot remember?
18 A. [Mr Irving] Yes.
19 Q. [Mr Rampton] They must have believed, if they were exaggerating, that
20Himmler was avid for information, telling him that vast
21numbers of Jews had been murdered.
22 A. [Mr Irving] Yes.
23 Q. [Mr Rampton] Right, and you say, oh, it is not really credible that
24Hitler knew anything about that?
25 A. [Mr Irving] I do not see the connection between those two statements.
26 Q. [Mr Rampton] You have been, I think, in the services, have you not?
1 A. [Mr Irving] Is it not remarkable we have documents of this quality for
2everything below Himmler, but not a single page above
4 Q. [Mr Rampton] Yes. How often do you say that Hitler and Himmler met in
5the course of a week?
6 A. [Mr Irving] It varied through the year, depending on whether he was in
7or out of favour.
8 Q. [Mr Rampton] When they were on good terms?
9 A. [Mr Irving] I would suggest two or three times a week.
10 Q. [Mr Rampton] You were in the army, I think?
11 A. [Mr Irving] No.
12 Q. [Mr Rampton] Navy?
13 A. [Mr Irving] No.
14 Q. [Mr Rampton] Air force?
15 A. [Mr Irving] No.
16 Q. [Mr Rampton] Right. So you have not been in service? Have you ever
17worked in a company?
18 A. [Mr Irving] No.
19 Q. [Mr Rampton] Do you know anything about how companies work? For
20example, do you know anything about the day-to-day
21relationship between a managing director and a chief
23 A. [Mr Irving] No.
24 Q. [Mr Rampton] You live in a little world of your own, do you,
25Mr Irving? You know nothing about the means by which
26humans convey information to each other in matters of
1importance on a day to day----
2 A. [Mr Irving] Mr Rampton, it was not the question you asked. You asked
3specifically whether I had been in companies, army, navy
4or air force and I said no.
5 Q. [Mr Rampton] Do you not think it more than likely, leave aside report
6number 51 which speaks for itself, that on a day-to-day
7basis Himmler and Hitler would have talked about all the
8things that concerned him. Obviously Hitler, as leader of
9his country, would be chiefly concerned with the progress
10of the war, would he not?
11 A. [Mr Irving] I do not think so. I think there is written evidence
12that, whenever people went to Hitler with stories of the
13atrocities they had heard about, Himmler's immediate
14response was always as relayed back to the person
15concerned, usually through Lammas, "Do not bother the
16Fuhrer with this, he will only say this is all Himmler's
17business and I do not want to hear about it".
18 Q. [Mr Rampton] Then why did Himmler bother having the Korheir report
19edited in March 1943 to take out the word
21 A. [Mr Irving] Very interesting, is it not, that it was camouflaged
23 Q. [Mr Rampton] Answer my question, please. If it is right that Hitler was
24not interested in that kind of thing and would just have
25swept it aside and said oh, that is all Himmler's
26business, silly old fool, he is passionate about this
1Jewish question, it would not mattered, would it?
2 A. [Mr Irving] I think the Korheir report really needs a discussion of
3its own without being dealt with in this rather flippant
5 Q. [Mr Rampton] Please, Mr Irving, could I have an answer to my question?
6Why do you think that Himmler had that report sanitized,
7as I put it?
8 A. [Mr Irving] Well I am not inside Himmler's head but, if the original
9report said expressus verbus, or as plain as a pike staff,
10that a million Jews had been killed or sonderbehandlung
11zugefuhrt, but if Himmler says I want a shorter version
12without that in so that I can show it to the Fuhrer,
13I think that that very much supports what I have said
14rather than what you are maintaining.
15 Q. [Mr Rampton] What it means, Mr Irving, is this, is it not, that if the
16word sonderbehandlung had been left in, Hitler would have
17known exactly what it meant?
18 A. [Mr Irving] Well, in the way that it was written, if you remember, if
191,200,000 people are subjected to special treatment at a
20camp, that does not mean they are having their hair cut.
21 Q. [Mr Rampton] It did not say at a camp. It said in the Warthegau and I
22think in the General Government.
23 A. [Mr Irving] I beg to differ. I know that document fairly clearly.
24 Q. [Mr Rampton] Maybe we will go back to later on. I do not have a copy
25of that.
26 A. [Mr Irving] I really think that document, if we are going to deal with
1it, should be dealt with extensively rather than here in
2this rather cursory manner.
3 Q. [Mr Rampton] Mr Irving, I am taking what I know of it simply from your
4own book.
5 A. [Mr Irving] Yes, but you have quoted it wrongly there from memory, and
6I know the exact text.
7 Q. [Mr Rampton] I am afraid, Mr Irving, that you are going to have to look
8at this, because this is important. This is one of the
9two most important aspects of the case.
10 A. [Mr Irving] Mr Rampton, you will always find I am willing to eat
11humble pie if I have made a mistake. There is never any
12question about that.
13 MR RAMPTON: My Lord, this is D3(i), tab 30. Mr Irving, do you
14have there a paper by you with the suppressed Eichmann and
15Goebbels papers?
16 A. [Mr Irving] Yes.
17 Q. [Mr Rampton] It is presented by you at the 11th IHR conference in
18October 1992?
19 A. [Mr Irving] Yes.
20 Q. [Mr Rampton] Do you write these things before you present them?
21 A. [Mr Irving] No.
22 Q. [Mr Rampton] So you spoke, as it were, off the top of your head.
23 A. [Mr Irving] I am well known for that.
24 Q. [Mr Rampton] Yes, I can believe that.
25 A. [Mr Irving] Some people say it is waffling but other people say it is
1 Q. [Mr Rampton] You see, Mr Irving, that the questions begin at page 174.
2Is this yet again one of those papers that you had
3checked, or you checked or approved before publication in
5 A. [Mr Irving] I would probably have edited it for split infinitives and
6the like.
7 Q. [Mr Rampton] Yes, quite. Now turn to page 173. Remember this is in
8October 1992. This is a bit I read to you earlier but it
9is well we see it in context, as part of what shall I say,
10not a rehearsed but as part of a serious paper presented
11to something which calls itself the Institute for
12Historical Review. You see the passage that I read to you
13earlier halfway down the page, bang in the middle of the
14left-hand column on page 173. I do not know why Eichmann
15recounted that kind of detail in his memoirs?
16 A. [Mr Irving] Can we have what the detail was?
17 Q. [Mr Rampton] Absolutely not.
18 A. [Mr Irving] May I read if out after you have dealt with it?
19 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Yes you can, but then I will ask you why you
20want it read out. Let's get on with Mr Rampton's
22 MR RAMPTON: So shall I. Go down to the end of that paragraph
23in the middle of the page on page 173. You say: "So
24I accept this kind of experiment, we are talking about a
25gassing experiment in a bus witnessed by Eichmann, what
26you call a gassing experiment, so I accept that this kind
1of experiment was made on a very limited scale but that it
2was rapidly abandoned as being a totally inefficient way
3of killing people. But I do not accept that the gas
4chambers existed and this is well known. I have seen no
5evidence at all that gas chambers existed". Unless you
6are going to quibble about the word "chambers", Mr Irving,
7the fact is that what you said about the gassing on that
8bus and the limited kind of scale for that kind of
9experimental gassing, was just rubbish, was it not?
10 A. [Mr Irving] Mr Rampton, when you talk about gas chambers and the
11public perception, people are imagining what they see at
12Auschwitz, the big concrete fixtures, the chimneys, the
13steel doors, the whole of the paraphernalia. I am sure
14that I am right on that.
15 Q. [Mr Rampton] Leave out the last----
16 A. [Mr Irving] Would you not interrupt me, please? They are not talking
17about the mobile gas truck experiment and to try and
18suggest that when I say that the gas chambers did not
19exist, this is a reference to the gas trucks which I have
20here said quite clearly do exist, I think is perverse.
21 Q. [Mr Rampton] Mr Irving, I am going to read it again. Just one little
22bit. You have described how Irving looked through a peep
23hole into the back of a bus and he saw a number of
25 A. [Mr Irving] Eichmann looked through the peep hole.
26 Q. [Mr Rampton] Eichmann saw a number of people being gassed by the
1exhaust fumes. This is Mr Irving speaking, formally
2speaking, in a corrected or approved version in
3print. "So I accept that this kind of experiment, that is
4to say, the sort that Eichmann witnessed, and I stress the
5word experiment, was made on a very limited scale, but
6that it was rapidly abandoned as being a totally
7inefficient way of dealing people".
8 Now that, as a statement of history, was just
9rubbish, was it not?
10 A. [Mr Irving] The very element now turns out to be wrong, yes.
11 Q. [Mr Rampton] So does the experiment.
12 MR JUSTICE GRAY: That has been conceded now, has it not?
13 A. [Mr Irving] Except that it was abandoned and replaced by other means
14of killing people.
15 MR RAMPTON: The point of my going back to that was this. You
16said not long ago that you cannot be blamed for making an
17off the cuff answer in answer to a statement in answer to
18a question?
19 A. [Mr Irving] Yes.
20 Q. [Mr Rampton] That was a wrong answer too, was it not?
21 A. [Mr Irving] Yes.
22 Q. [Mr Rampton] This is not an off the cuff response to a question?
23 A. [Mr Irving] This is part of the main talk, yes.
24 Q. [Mr Rampton] I repeat my earlier question, do you not think -- is this
25IHR a reputable and authoritative body?
26 A. [Mr Irving] Do we wish to discuss that at this time?
1 Q. [Mr Rampton] I just want to know. Are these conferences attended by
2top notch historians and that kind of thing?
3 A. [Mr Irving] Yes.
4 Q. [Mr Rampton] They are. But this is an occasion ----
5 A. [Mr Irving] I will be producing evidence later on the nature of the
6audience at these bodies and the directors of the
7Institute all have academic qualifications and degrees.
8 Q. [Mr Rampton] I just want to get the flavour of the occasion on which
9you uttered these words.
10 A. [Mr Irving] Well, I was going to mention that fact. This is a body of
11incorrigible, shall we say, people whom I am sure the
12Defence would describe as Holocaust deniers, and I am
13rubbing their noses in what did happen, and I think I
14deserve commendation for that. I am saying, "Here is
15Eichmann describing in his memoirs how he attended a mass
16shooting from such close range that he was personally
17affected in a rather disagreeable way by the shooting that
18went on.
19 Q. [Mr Rampton] Mr Irving, I am sorry, you must try -- I am perhaps not
20making myself clear -- you say this paper was presented at
21a conference of reputable academics and others who may
22take one or other view about the past, but this is a
23serious occasion?
24 A. [Mr Irving] This is a talk by me to an audience in California, yes.
25 Q. [Mr Rampton] But it is a serious occasion?
26 A. [Mr Irving] To an audience who do not want to hear me say this. They
1want to hear me say something totally different.
2 Q. [Mr Rampton] Mr Irving, please, is this a serious occasion or not?
3 A. [Mr Irving] In what sense? Is it a collar and tie occasion?
4 MR JUSTICE GRAY: You expect it to be taken serious.
5 MR RAMPTON: Do you expect to be taken seriously?
6 A. [Mr Irving] Yes. People have gone there to come away improved with a
7knowledge improved, enhanced.
8 MR RAMPTON: So it is quite different from a question and
9answer session at a knock about press conference, is it
11 A. [Mr Irving] Knock about press conference?
12 Q. [Mr Rampton] K-N-O-C-K about. You expected what you said to be taken
13seriously by your audience?
14 A. [Mr Irving] Yes, and it was taken very seriously.
15 Q. [Mr Rampton] What you said was historical nonsense?
16 A. [Mr Irving] The word "very limited" is wrong.
17 Q. [Mr Rampton] So is the word "experiment".
18 A. [Mr Irving] I disagree. They abandoned the gas trucks after a time
19which showed that the experiment did not work.
20 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Well, 97,000 people, is that not rather a
21long experiment?
22 A. [Mr Irving] On the scale of 6 million, my Lord, which is the figure
23claimed by the Defence.
24 Q. [Mr Justice Gray] Not by you?
25 A. [Mr Irving] My Lord, 97,000 is a large figure which we now know about
26from the document which has now been shown to us, the
1documents that have now been shown to us, which, of
2course, I had not seen at that time. If they abandoned
3the gas trucks method of killing people, as they clearly
4did, and we know from the documents now that it was
5precisely because it turned out to be a totally
6impracticable way of killing people.
7 MR RAMPTON: Mr Irving ----
8 A. [Mr Irving] I think the word "experimental" is entirely unjustified.
9 Q. [Mr Rampton] Leaving aside for the moment ----
10 A. [Mr Irving] The idea of experimenting in killing people is grotesque
12 Q. [Mr Rampton] Particularly if it is to the tune of 100,000 people?
13 A. [Mr Irving] I agree. It is actually obscene.
14 Q. [Mr Rampton] Why did you not say that? Why did you not say, Mr Irving,
15"I have looked at this question. They have managed to
16get up to 100,000 at least", we know that from the
17documents, "but then they decided that was not a very good
18way of doing it, so they stopped doing it that way.
19Nonetheless, the fact is that they succeeded in killing in
20the East and in the Reinhard camps well over a million
22 A. [Mr Irving] I always suspected, Mr Rampton, you are not listening to
23my answers, and that is just proof of it. I told you this
24figure of 100,000 only comes to my knowledge within the
25last few weeks or months.
26 Q. [Mr Rampton] But it was there to be found, was it not?
1 A. [Mr Irving] Lots of things are there to be found. I do not have teams
2of 30 or 40 researchers working at the expense of God
3knows who is paying for the defence in this case, looking
4through all the archives, trying to find documents to
5prove me wrong.
6 Q. [Mr Rampton] You know about the letter, you have always known about the
7letter, of 1st May 1942 from Greiser to Himmler, yes?
8 A. [Mr Irving] Yes.
9 Q. [Mr Rampton] That is in your books, is it not?
10 A. [Mr Irving] I have quoted it in my books, yes.
11 Q. [Mr Rampton] And that speaks of "Sonderbehandlung of some 100,000 Jews
12in my territory in an action approved by you in agreement
13with Heydrich will be completed in the next two or three
15 A. [Mr Irving] Yes.
16 Q. [Mr Rampton] Experimental? Sonderbehandlung?
17 A. [Mr Irving] But, Mr Rampton, this document is quoted in full in my
18books. That passage is quoted in full in my books.
19 Q. [Mr Rampton] But not in connection with gassing by trucks?
20 A. [Mr Irving] Well, we do not know from Greiser what method has been
21used to specially treat, if I can use the word, those
22100,000 people.
23 MR JUSTICE GRAY: I thought you accepted earlier on this
24morning -- we can find the reference -- that that was
25actually a reference to gassing?
26 A. [Mr Irving] From the later documents which are now available, my Lord,
1this is plain, but at the time I wrote the book I had only
2the 1st May document. Our knowledge advances by stages,
3particularly now these other archives have been opened to
4us. It cannot be held against me that I did not know
5something in 1970 when I wrote the book which is now only
6available at the end of the 20th century.
7 MR RAMPTON: No, I am not talking about the book, Mr Irving.
8You knew about the Greiser letter for a long time. It
9mentions the killing, or proposed killing, of 100,000 Jews
10in the Warthegau from 1st May in a couple of months, two
11or three months?
12 A. [Mr Irving] Yes, but we do not know what methods have been used to
13dispose of them.
14 Q. [Mr Rampton] Please, Mr Irving, I have not finished my sentence. That
15is all that is in the book because you did not know about
16the Turner letter of 5th June 1942, you tell us. I am not
17in a position to contradict you?
18 A. [Mr Irving] Well, of course, can I tell you when I first got the
19Turner letter? That was in 1977.
20 Q. [Mr Rampton] The Turner letter in 977?
21 A. [Mr Irving] I have to state that, yes. I was sent page 1 of the
22Turner letter, I believe, by Mr Sereny round about July
24 Q. [Mr Rampton] By the time of the second edition of Hitler's War you did
25know about it?
26 A. [Mr Irving] Yes. But whether I would have read it in detail or not.
1 Q. [Mr Rampton] Do I find it in that? I am asking that as a completely
2open question to which I do not know the answer.
3 A. [Mr Irving] I think you will probably ...
4 Q. [Mr Rampton] I think I had better check it.
5 A. [Mr Irving] I must make this quite plain. I have had the Turner
6letter in my possession probably for 23 years.
7 Q. [Mr Rampton] Yes. So?
8 A. [Mr Irving] But the Turner letter by itself is a very suspect document
9until you see the subsidiary documents that have become
10available since then.
11 Q. [Mr Rampton] Will your Lordship forgive me? I am just trying to look
12in the index to see whether there is any reference to
13this. If there were a reference, Mr Irving, it would be
14in the later part of the book, would it not? I mean in
15the 1991 edition?
16 A. [Mr Irving] Are you enquiring whether I used Turner letter in either
17edition of the Hitler book?
18 Q. [Mr Rampton] Yes.
19 A. [Mr Irving] I do not believe I did.
20 Q. [Mr Rampton] Obviously not the first one because you told us ----
21 A. [Mr Irving] I do not believe I did.
22 Q. [Mr Rampton] You do not think you did?
23 A. [Mr Irving] No.
24 Q. [Mr Rampton] Can I put it to you that you suppressed it?
25 A. [Mr Irving] You can put it to me like that, but, obviously,
26I suppressed many hundreds of thousands of documents when
1I wrote a book of that magnitude.
2 Q. [Mr Rampton] What was that? I am sorry I missed it.
3 A. [Mr Irving] The Turner letter has been subjected to the most intensive
4scrutiny by people both yeh and nay, if I can put it like
5that, and when there is a document like that, one's
6instinct is to steer clear of it.
7 Q. [Mr Rampton] Well, now there is another letter which we saw referred to
8in paragraph 5.2.2 of Professor Browning. That is the
9letter about the functioning of the trucks of 5th June
101942. That is not the Turner letter. This a Warthegau
12 A. [Mr Irving] On what page is that?
13 Q. [Mr Rampton] It is page 38, and the body of the report is translated at
14the bottom of the page. As I say, I have absolutely no
15intention of reading that out whatsoever.
16 A. [Mr Irving] Yes, but you are not implying that I have had that
17document in my possession until a few weeks or months ago?
18 Q. [Mr Rampton] You have only recently had that document?
19 A. [Mr Irving] Yes. That is what I say. When you see a document like
20that, then you are more inclined to accept the Turner
21letter as being genuine.
22 Q. [Mr Rampton] What about the Greiser letter?
23 A. [Mr Irving] The Greiser letter, there has never been any doubt as to
24that, the authenticity, because it was an American custody
25and it is microfilmed with the Heinrich Himmler papers.
26 Q. [Mr Rampton] But you did not think before wading in and saying that
1there were only a very limited number of experimental
2truck gassings or bus gassings at a serious conference of
3historians, you did not pause to consider what it might be
4that the Turner letter told you which you had at that
5time, indeed, you had when you wrote Hitler's War '91?
6 A. [Mr Irving] Well, I could have expatiated at length at that conference
7on the Turner letter, and I could have pointed to the
8things that point to its authenticity, but also at great
9length to the things that give rise to be dubious about
10it; for example, the very weird SS runes that had been
11hand typed in and things like that.
12 Q. [Mr Rampton] Mr Irving, as you see and as you know perfectly well, and
13as I will, no doubt, have to put to you again along down
14the road, you are all too eager to jump on anything,
15dignify it with your authority, that suggests that the
16scale of Nazi criminality during the war, whether it be
17the killing of Jews or the responsibility of Adolf Hitler,
18anything that seems to diminish or reduce that
19proposition, size of the crime, or the level to which the
20criminality went up?
21 A. [Mr Irving] Mr Rampton, we are talking about 97,000 on one case. You
22are saying that I have suppressed that fact and yet I have
23quoted in full the Greiser letter which talks of 100,000,
24it is precisely the same one. I believe the belief is
25that it is exactly the same victims we are talking about,
26so you cannot accuse me of having suppressed that
1particular atrocity. I quoted the Greiser letter and
2I quoted the figure.
3 MR JUSTICE GRAY: When you say the "same Jews", do you mean the
497,000 equals the 100,000?
5 A. [Mr Irving] A part of the 100,000. I believe that is the submission
6that Mr Rampton is trying to make.
7 MR RAMPTON: My Lord, I would like, if I may, just one minute
8when I get the reference to look and see what it is that
9Mr Irving said about the Greiser letter.
10 MR JUSTICE GRAY: It says 1991 Hitler's War.
11 MR RAMPTON: Yes, my Lord. Page 426.
12 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Page 426.
13 MR RAMPTON: Yes, 426.
14 MR JUSTICE GRAY: About two-thirds of the way down.
15 A. [Mr Irving] It is on page 330 of the first edition too.
16 Q. [Mr Justice Gray] It is probably the same words.
17 A. [Mr Irving] It almost certainly is. I think I make it quite plain
18there that 100,000 had been, quotation marks, "specially
19treated" and the innuendo is quite plain for reader to
21 MR RAMPTON: Yes. My only comment about that in that version,
22Mr Irving, is that you for some reason -- I do not know
23what the reason is -- you add the sentence "Hitler was not
25 A. [Mr Irving] It is in the first edition too, yes.
26 Q. [Mr Rampton] Why?
1 A. [Mr Irving] Am I wrong?
2 Q. [Mr Rampton] No, what is the significance?
3 A. [Mr Irving] I am writing about Adolf Hitler, Mr Rampton. If Hitler is
4not mentioned in a document concerning the killing of
5100,000 Jews, it is significant for the reader -- you will
6probably agree.
7 Q. [Mr Rampton] You are afraid that the reader seeing this huge number
8which it is -- there is no question about that -- being
9killed in the Warthegau might infer that Hitler knew
10something about it, is that right?
11 A. [Mr Irving] Shall we go back to May 1st document again, Mr Rampton?
12Greiser is saying to Himmler: "The operation carried out
13in your authority and the authority of Heydrich and
14killing 100,000" or "I have killed 100,000 or I am about
15to kill 100,000 or submit them to special treatment", if I
16am writing about Hitler, I am absolutely justified to say,
17"Oh, by the way, Hitler is not mentioned in this
18document". That is a very important clue.
19 Q. [Mr Rampton] Mr Irving, if Himmler had a general authority to do such
20things, where would it come from?
21 A. [Mr Irving] It would come from Adolf Hitler. He would say in the
22correspondence: "On the Fuhrer's instructions, I am
23ordering the following". That covers him.
24 Q. [Mr Rampton] It does not, Mr Irving. If Himmler had a general
25authority (and you should sometimes listen more carefully
26to my questions) to do these kinds of things, it would
1come from Hitler?
2 A. [Mr Irving] Oh, dear! If, general, these kinds of things, is this a
3smoking gun, the best we can do after 55 years?
4 Q. [Mr Rampton] What is the answer to my question?
5 A. [Mr Irving] That is the answer. 55 years we have had to paddle around
6in the archives now of Warsaw, Moscow as well as the
7Western world, and there is still not the slightest shred
8of written evidence that Hitler ----
9 Q. [Mr Rampton] The answer to my question, I think, must be yes; if he had
10such authority, it would have come from Hitler?
11 A. [Mr Irving] But he would have mentioned ----
12 Q. [Mr Rampton] Your second answer to a question I have not asked, but
13never mind, is we do not know of any evidence that Hitler
14did confer any such general authority on Himmler, is that
16 A. [Mr Irving] Yes, and the rider, the corollary of that is that we would
17have expected to find such evidence just as there is in
18the euthanasia programme where the actual signed order
19from Hitler is in the archives.
20 MR JUSTICE GRAY: But Hitler did authorize the euthanasia
22 A. [Mr Irving] He actually signed the order, my Lord, backdated it to
23September 1st, 1939. That is in the archives.
24 Q. [Mr Justice Gray] The euthanasia programme really came to an end when the
25gas vans were transferred to killing on the Eastern
1 A. [Mr Irving] Hitler ordered it to stop in August 1941. He ordered the
2euthanasia programme stopped in 1941 because of public
3unrest and disquiet, but it is characteristic and not
4without significance for these hearings that, in fact, the
5euthanasia programme continued in the background, rather
6like the Bruns business, where the SS man was ordered to
7stop but still said, "Well, we are going to carry it on
8with unobtrusive means".
9 Q. [Mr Justice Gray] But I think really the drift of my question was, well, if
10he was brought in to authorize the euthanasia programme,
11does that suggest at all that it might be probable that he
12was consulted about using the gas vans for some other
14 A. [Mr Irving] I do not want to be flippant, my Lord, but the answer is
15the archives do not tell us.
16 Q. [Mr Justice Gray] No, but as a matter of guessing what the reality was?
17 A. [Mr Irving] They should, my Lord, because knowing the mentality of the
18German people, they would have covered themselves with
19paper. They would have written letters to each other
20saying, "We are doing this on the Fuhrer's orders. The
21Fuhrer has instructed". Even if that was not in the
22archives, we would expect to find it in the Bletchley Park
23files. That is what I shall be questioning one of your
24experts about.
25 MR RAMPTON: My Lord, I can do one of two things now. I am
26entirely in your Lordship's hands really. I can develop
1this question of Himmler's authority which I do not think
2Mr Irving disputes, not only that, well, that he did do
3it, apparently, on Mr Irving's account, without any kind
4of authority from Hitler to murder millions of Jews.
5I can pursue the question of Himmler's authority, or I can
6move to completely different topic which is the
7Schlegelberger memorandum. Both are somewhat intricate in
8a sort of a sense. The first exercise will involve going
9to 1943 and 1944 for some references to what both Himmler
10and Hitler said. The second involves merely a discussion,
11if I can put it like that, of what the so-called
12Schlegelberger memorandum might be and what it might
13represent. I really do not mind which I do.
14 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Well, it is very difficult for me to suggest
15one way or the other. In a sense, we are on Hitler and
16Himmler and their respective knowledge and authority for
17what was going on, so maybe that is better taken next.
18But can I before you do that just ask a question which
19I think I may have raised before, but I do not understand
20Mr Irving to have answered it yet.
21 Do you accept or do you not that there was
22gassing of Jews using trucks or vans at Treblinka, Sobibor
23in the same way as you have accepted there was at Belzec?
24 A. [Mr Irving] I do not accept it, which does not mean to say that I do
25not believe that it happened, but, quite simply, I have
26not investigated it and I do not think we have been shown
1any evidence that it did happen yet. That is an
2unsatisfactory answer, I am afraid.
3 MR RAMPTON: My Lord, I would only make one small correction to
4that. I think the evidence of Professor Browning will be
5that once they had established those three Reinhard camps,
6they stopped using mobile vans and started using
7stationery tank engines and other sorts of things like
8that, but we will come to that along the line. The
9question that I would ask Mr Irving, in the light of that
10answer is this, you do not know of any firm evidence, you
11sigh, that it did happen, whether by stationery engines or
12by vans. Do you see a difference between saying, "I do
13not know whether or not it happened, I have not seen good
14evidence", and denying that it did happen?
15 A. [Mr Irving] I do not know that it did happen and denying that it
17 Q. [Mr Rampton] Do you see a difference between saying, "I do not know
18that it happened"?
19 A. [Mr Irving] Well, the word "deny", of course, in law has a specific
20meaning, does it not?
21 Q. [Mr Rampton] No, it is an ordinary English word.
22 A. [Mr Irving] But in law the word ----
23 Q. [Mr Rampton] It means, in effect, the person is saying this?
24 A. [Mr Irving] If somebody denies something, he is saying there is
25something within his cognisance.
26 Q. [Mr Rampton] It is very simple. One English sentence says, "I do not
1know whether it happened or not", the other says, "It did
2not happen"?
3 A. [Mr Irving] Well, it is the former.
4 Q. [Mr Rampton] If, therefore, on some former occasion you have said it
5did not happen, that would be an excessive statement of
6your own belief, would it not?
7 A. [Mr Irving] What did not happen?
8 Q. [Mr Rampton] Oh, gassing at Treblinka, for example?
9 A. [Mr Irving] It depends what the question is and what my precise answer
10was to that question -- not the question you asked, but
11the question put to me by the questioner and what my
12precise answer was.
13 Q. [Mr Rampton] We will track that down. I just wanted to get the
14position clear. Your present position is not that you
15denied that it happened, but that you have not seen good
16evidence that it did happen?
17 A. [Mr Irving] I have seen a balance of evidence in each direction.
18There is the lack of the photogrammetric evidence on the
19aerial photographs, the lack of any evidence that these
20structures existed, on the one hand, and the
21unsatisfactory nature of the eyewitness evidence.
22 Q. [Mr Rampton] Your present position is that you are in a state of
24 A. [Mr Irving] A state of doubt and I see no reason to investigate it
25because I am not a holocaust historian. One has limited
26resources which one has to apply to the proper targets.
1 Q. [Mr Rampton] We will come back to the other part of it later because,
2as Miss Rogers says, Mr Irving, it fits quite neatly into
3the Auschwitz question as a sort of coder, perhaps, or
4maybe an introduction, I do not know, prelude?
5 A. [Mr Irving] I would prefer we just adhere to the Auschwitz examination
6and ignore the other camps which is not really going to
7lead us much further.
8 Q. [Mr Rampton] No, I am not going to go into the evidence of the other
9camps. If I go back to the other camps, it will be for
10this purpose, Mr Irving, that which I have already stated,
11to demonstrate that you have, if I am right, made
12categorical denials about the existence of extermination
13facilities at the Reinhard camps when the truth is simply
14that you do not know?
15 MR JUSTICE GRAY: In other words, it goes to Holocaust denial
16rather than Auschwitz?
17 MR RAMPTON: It does, but it also goes to irresponsible, at the
18very least, historiography.
19 MR JUSTICE GRAY: That is part of Holocaust denial, is it not?
20 MR RAMPTON: Yes, of course it is.
21 A. [Mr Irving] Let us wait until we get the exact statements I am
22supposed to have made.
23 MR RAMPTON: Of course. I said if I am right about that, if.
24 A. [Mr Irving] Yes.
25 Q. [Mr Rampton] That will be the only object of ----
26 A. [Mr Irving] Let us also consider the question of proportionality.
1These are the minor escorts, the corvettes and
2minesweepers, not the actual battleship which is Auschwitz
4 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Anyway, Hitler and Himmler?
5 MR RAMPTON: Yes. Hitler and Himmler. For this purpose, my
6Lord, it will be useful, I think, to turn to page 73 of
7Longerich 1. While I ask, I am going to have displace my
8chronology, my Lord, because I have not got the document
9reference. I am sorry.
10 A. [Mr Irving] Mr Rampton, did you not tell us yesterday that Auschwitz
11did not start gassing until the end of 1942, and yet
12paragraph 2 of this page says exactly the opposite.
13 Q. [Mr Rampton] Mr Irving, let me give you advance notice -- if you have
14not Van Pelt's report two or three times, I quite
15understand you may not have picked it -- of what the best
16view of the history of Auschwitz, so far as gassing is
17concerned, and it is our case, if we had to prove it,
18which we do not; but what that report tells us is this,
19that there were some early gassings, first of all, of
20Soviet prisoners in the autumn of 1941 in the basement of
21block 11 at Auschwitz 1. They then started using, I think
22later that same year, the crematorium, the morgue in the
23crematorium at Auschwitz 1, for the gassing of Jews again
24to some extent on an experimental scale. In 1942 they
25developed two gassing facilities.
26 A. [Mr Irving] What do you mean by "the experimental scale" -- a few
1thousand or?
2 Q. [Mr Rampton] Only a few hundred people at a time, that kind of thing.
3 A. [Mr Irving] I am just interested in your use of the word "experimental
5 Q. [Mr Rampton] "Experimental", Mr Irving, because they were experimenting
6with the efficacy of Zyklon B?
7 A. [Mr Irving] Very interesting. Exactly the same as I said about the
8gas trucks.
9 Q. [Mr Rampton] Yes, but in 1942 (and I cannot give you the exact month)
10they developed two local farmhouses into much more
11effective gas chambers. They tipped the Zyklon B through
12the windows which they then closed with gas type
13shutters. That went on for some considerable time. As
14you know, in July 1942, Himmler visited Auschwitz and
15following that, and I say as a matter of cause and effect
16so I shall not be accused of post hoc propter hoc,
17following that the existing plans for the two new big
18crematoria at Birkenhau are altered, so as to convert them
19into gas chambers with crematoria, and at the same time
20crematoria 4 and 5 are designed and built in the early
21part of 1943 up to about June. Then they start in full
22operation from then until the autumn of 1944. That is the
23Auschwitz story.
24 A. [Mr Irving] Only yesterday you said that there no mass killings by gas
25in Auschwitz until the end of 1942.
26 Q. [Mr Rampton] I did not say that, I think, if you look at the
1transcript. Do not let us argue about what I said. You
2can verify it on the transcript.
3 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Shall we go back it Hitler and Himmler
4because we are going to have to go through Auschwitz in
5detail later?
6 MR RAMPTON: I agree.
7 A. [Mr Irving] It is just that paragraph 2 rather challenged that.
8 MR JUSTICE GRAY: I know. You made that observation and we
9have dealt with it. Let us get on.
10 MR RAMPTON: I am going to deal first, since I have now got
11it -- my Lord, the file in question is H1(ix) at page 260.
12 A. [Mr Irving] Page 260.
13 MR JUSTICE GRAY: I do not think we have had H1 (ix), have we?
14 A. [Mr Irving] Page 260?
15 MR RAMPTON: Yes, page 260.
16 A. [Mr Irving] It appears to be an orphan. It has no title.
17 Q. [Mr Rampton] I am sure you have not read it, but you will have heard of
18Noakes' and Pridom's great work on the history of Nazi
20 A. [Mr Irving] Whose book is this?
21 Q. [Mr Rampton] You are not going to read it, so I do not really see why
22I need to, but, anyhow, it is called J. Noakes, G. Pridom,
23"Nazis 1919 to 1945" in three volumes, published by
24I think the Exeter University Press in 1988. This page,
25260 in our file, is page 1199 of that massive work. It is
26a translation, presumably by Mr Noakes or Mr Pridom, or
1both of them, I know not, of a speech which Himmler is
2supposed to have made at Posen to, I think, German
3Generals? Were they German Generals?
4 A. [Mr Irving] It was the SS Gruppenfuhrer.
5 Q. [Mr Rampton] SS chiefs in Posen, nowadays called Posner, on 4th October
61943. Unfortunately, once again I do not have the
7German. I would like to have it and I am hoping to get
9 A. [Mr Irving] It will not be contentious, Mr Rampton. I will not
10dispute this translation.
11 Q. [Mr Rampton] Have you glanced at it?
12 A. [Mr Irving] Yes. It is a very famous speech. It is referred to on
13page 575 of my Hitler's War. I quote it in full.
14 Q. [Mr Rampton] He says: "I also want to talk to you quite frankly about
15a very grave matter", etc, etc. "We can talk about it
16quite frankly amongst ourselves and yet we will never
17speak of it publicly". Then he goes on a bit talking
18about an analogous event in the past which is the Night of
19the Long Knives, it is the SA obliteration, is it not?
20 A. [Mr Irving] Yes.
21 Q. [Mr Rampton] Then this is the sentence to which I would like to draw
22your attention: "I am referring to the Jewish evacuation
23programme, the extermination of the Jewish people". That
24is, you say, a very famous speech. What words can you
25remember -- I am sorry I have not got the German -- what
26words can you remember Himmler used when he said what we
1see here, "I am referring to the Jewish evacuation
2programme, the extermination of the Jewish people"?
3 A. [Mr Irving] I shall have to look at the original text, it is
4either Auswotung or Vernichtung -- but it is not a
5material point, because he immediately explains he means
7 Q. [Mr Rampton] The point I wish to draw your attention to is this, that
8there, Himmler, speaking to SS chiefs, or whatever it was,
9uses evacuation and extermination synonymously, does he
11 A. [Mr Irving] In that case, yes.
12 Q. [Mr Rampton] It is a jolly good pointer, is it not, Mr Irving, to the
13use of such camouflage language habitually within the SS
14at the very least?
15 A. [Mr Irving] Yes, it is rather like the Americans talking about
16terminating with extreme prejudice.
17 MR JUSTICE GRAY: I think you did agree that "Evakuierung" can
18be used and is sometimes used as synonymous with
20 A. [Mr Irving] It is not always used, but in this case it clearly is.
21 MR RAMPTON: Here is an example one cannot argue with.
22 A. [Mr Irving] But it would be false to argue automatically the other
24 Q. [Mr Rampton] That as a matter of logic is necessarily right; as a
25matter of history it may not be. Can we then turn to page
2673 of Longerich, please?
1 A. [Mr Irving] Yes.
2 Q. [Mr Rampton] At the top of the page, now here I have got the texts.
3"On 6th October 1943 Himmler explained to Gau and Reichs
4chiefs in Posen: I ask you that that which I say to you in
5this circle be really only heard ..."
6 A. [Mr Irving] Which page are we on now?
7 Q. [Mr Rampton] 73 of Longerich one.
8 A. [Mr Irving] I do not think it can be 73.
9 Q. [Mr Rampton] You must have the wrong part of Longerich.
10 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Are you sure it is Longerich one?
11 MR RAMPTON: Longerich is divided into two parts. Yes, you have
12the wrong bit; you are looking at the second bit.
13 A. [Mr Irving] All Longerich is divided into two parts.
14 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Why he divided it into two, I do not know.
15 MR RAMPTON: Generalities and then particulars, rather like a
17 A. [Mr Irving] OK, yes, it is a totally different volume. This is, of
18course, a different speech now, isn't it?
19 Q. [Mr Rampton] It is two days later.
20 A. [Mr Irving] That is right, yes.
21 Q. [Mr Rampton] The audience is different as well.
22 A. [Mr Irving] The Gau- and Reichsleiter.
23 Q. [Mr Rampton] You will find that and I think we should look at it -- it
24is going to be particularly important when we come to
25Sonthofen in May 1944 -- in bundle H4 (ii).
26 MR JUSTICE GRAY: We are darting about a bit. Are we leaving
173 of Longerich?
2 MR RAMPTON: No, I am just starting 73 of Longerich; I am
3actually getting the document.
4 A. [Mr Irving] I am not sure you want to read this out, because this
5supports entirely what I have always said, but carry on.
6 Q. [Mr Rampton] That is very good of you, Mr Irving; I think we probably
7will. The document begins -- have you got the document
9 A. [Mr Irving] Yes.
10 Q. [Mr Rampton] It is quite a long speech, something like 49 pages.
11 A. [Mr Irving] Yes.
12 Q. [Mr Rampton] The first page is marked, my Lord, at the bottom
13right-hand corner, FNA (86).
14 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Yes, I have got it.
15 MR RAMPTON: It says: "Rede des Reichsfuhrer SS". Does that
16mean speeches?
17 A. [Mr Irving] Speeches of the Reichsfuhrer SS to the Reichs- and
18Gauleiters in Posen on 6th October 1943, and speaking as
19always as the Reichsfuhrer SS and as a Party comrade to
21 Q. [Mr Rampton] The Reichsleiters and Gauleiters -- how senior are they?
22 A. [Mr Irving] The Reichsleiters come directly beneath Hitler and they
23have the rank of minister.
24 Q. [Mr Rampton] And they have automatic access to Hitler, do they not?
25 A. [Mr Irving] Subject to what I said a few days ago, that they would
26have to get an invitation before they could go to see
1Hitler. They could not just knock on the door or ring the
3 Q. [Mr Rampton] If you just turn the page, I am sure you are very familiar
4with this.
5 A. [Mr Irving] If I may just carry on there, Krista Schroeder, Hitler's
6private secretary, was a witness of the conversation
7between Hitler and Martin Bormann after the flight of
8Rudolf Hess when Martin Bormann took over as chief of the
9Party Chancellory, and Bormann said to Hitler, "Mein
10Fuhrer, what instructions do you have", and Hitler's
11response was: "Only one. Keep the Gauleiters off my
12back". In other words, he did not need them any more.
13I think it is a material point of view of the fact that
14you are trying to draw attention to the closeness between
15Hitler and the Gauleiters.
16 Q. [Mr Rampton] I think you have accepted a closeness between Himmler and
18 A. [Mr Irving] Yes, they visited two or three times a week.
19 Q. [Mr Rampton] Yes, and here is Himmler talking to high-ranking people in
20the Nazi machine.
21 A. [Mr Irving] Yes.
22 Q. [Mr Rampton] And the Gauleiters are perhaps subordinate or they are
23less high ranking than ----
24 A. [Mr Irving] Than the party machinery, yes.
25 Q. [Mr Rampton] --- than the Reichsleiters?
26 A. [Mr Irving] Yes, a bit like the constituency chairman.
1 Q. [Mr Rampton] This is a gathering of high-ranking people?
2 A. [Mr Irving] Yes.
3 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Gau is a region or an area, is it?
4 A. [Mr Irving] It is, yes, like a constituency in the Conservative Party;
5these being the chairmen of the local region. They
6wore Jackboots and carried guns.
7 MR RAMPTON: If you turn to page 17 -- this is taken from a
8microfilm -- I think I am right that the relevant passage
9or the passage which is translated in Longerich begins
10just in about the middle page opposite the punch hole,
11"ich bitte Sie"?
12 A. [Mr Irving] "I do ask you to keep secret, to listen to what I am
13saying, just listen and never to speak about it, what I am
14saying in these circles. We came up against the question,
15what about the women and children, and I took the
16decision here too for a clear solution".
17 Q. [Mr Rampton] Carry on.
18 A. [Mr Irving] "I did not consider myself justified in liquidating just
19the men", in other words he says "auszurotten", which is
20the word there he uses and then he expands. He explains
21because he feels he has to explain what he means by
22"auszurotten". In other words, "to kill them" or "to
23have them killed". He himself is pointing out the word
24"auszurotten" is not sufficiently clear even in these
25circles; he has to emphasise what he means by it, and to
26leave ----
1 Q. [Mr Rampton] Can you carry on just a bit further, please?
2 A. [Mr Irving] Yes. It is very complicated German.
3 Q. [Mr Rampton] I know, something about letting the avengers ----
4 A. [Mr Irving] Exactly, and "to leave alive the children to act as the
5avengers against our sons and grandchildren". In other
6words, the idea is that if you leave the next generation,
7the younger generation alive, then they will come back to
8haunt you.
9 Q. [Mr Rampton] You have got to exterminate the whole brood.
10 A. [Mr Irving] Absolutely what he says that.
11 Q. [Mr Rampton] If you leave one mouse then it may have children?
12 A. [Mr Irving] That is right. A highly significant speech in many
14 Q. [Mr Rampton] Carry on reading, please, just two more sentences, "es
15musste der schwer Entschluss".
16 A. [Mr Irving] "There had to be taken", I am putting it like that, "there
17had to be taken the grave decision to have this people
18disappear from the face of the earth. For the
19organization which had to carry out this job, it was the
20most difficult that we had so far."
21 Q. [Mr Rampton] Yes. The method of disappearance about which Heinrich
22Himmler, the Reichsfuhrer SS, is speaking in early October
231943 is murder?
24 A. [Mr Irving] Quite clearly.
25 Q. [Mr Rampton] Quite clearly.
26 MR JUSTICE GRAY: By what means?
1 A. [Mr Irving] I am not sure if it is really relevant here, my Lord.
2 Q. [Mr Justice Gray] Well, answer would you even so?
3 A. [Mr Irving] I do not think he is talking about means there, but
4obviously by murder.
5 Q. [Mr Justice Gray] I appreciate that, but what do you assess him as having
6had in mind?
7 A. [Mr Irving] But whatever means to convey them from life to death. He
8is certainly not being explicit here, but of course, my
9Lord, it will not surprise you that I rely on the earlier
10part of that paragraph where he says, "I had to take the
11serious decision." I think this is a very powerful point
12in my favour. He does not say: "The Fuhrer took the
13decision", where he very easily could have in these
14circles. He is speaking, after all, to the top Nazi
16 MR RAMPTON: Not on this occasion explicitly.
17 A. [Mr Irving] He is being very explicit indeed. "I had to take this
19 Q. [Mr Rampton] If Hitler or -- no, it does not say that.
20 A. [Mr Irving] "I decided".
21 Q. [Mr Rampton] "I decided to find a very clear solution to this
23 A. [Mr Irving] "I have taken the decision to find a clear solution".
24 Q. [Mr Rampton] If Hitler already knew about it ----
25 A. [Mr Irving] You cannot climb out of that one, Mr Rampton.
26 Q. [Mr Rampton] I can, I am just about to. Do not worry, I am going to
1show you another document which I know you are familiar
2with, so I do not know why you say what you say. I will
3find out later perhaps.
4 A. [Mr Irving] There is no need to get rattled about it, but this is a
5cardinal document, Mr Rampton. Here is Himmler saying,
6"I took the decision".
7 Q. [Mr Rampton] Mr Irving, can I ask you to calm down a little and answer
8this question. If Hitler already knew about it, the
9injunction to the Gau and Reichs leaders to not speak
10about it would not matter, would it, I mean so far as its
11going upwards is concerned? What they are not supposed to
12do is to talk about it lower down.
13 A. [Mr Irving] He does not actually say that. He just says "keep mum".
14 Q. [Mr Rampton] I know, but if Hitler already knew about it and had
15actually given Himmler the order to do it, in general
16terms, the authority to do it, then he is not talking
17about not telling Hitler, is he?
18 A. [Mr Irving] I am not prepared to extrapolate from what it is in that
19document. I am just saying what the document tells us,
20since he says: "We are doing this but keep quiet about
22 Q. [Mr Rampton] Let us look at something a little bit more explicit, shall
24 A. [Mr Irving] But if you remember what I clearly allow is that from this
25point on Adolf Hitler no excuse not to know because the
26very next day these same gentlemen went to him and he
1spoke to them.
2 Q. [Mr Rampton] My googolies are I think a little bit more subtle than you
3sometimes think, Mr Irving. Can you turn on just for
4reference in this bundle to the next document which is
5after page 49 of Himmler's Posen speech. My Lord, it is
6footnote 187.
7 A. [Mr Irving] My Lord, would be it be helpful if I pointed out that
8after making this speech Himmler had everybody who was
9present sign a list to agree that they had hear the
10speech, or if they had not heard it to agree that they had
11read it subsequently. All the SS Generals who were
12present were required -- I have never seen that on any of
13Himmler's other speeches.
14 MR JUSTICE GRAY: What do you say is the significance of that?
15 A. [Mr Irving] It is very interesting to speculate, my Lord. I think he
16was making them into accomplices in his own mind. He was
17saying: "There you are, now I have told you. Now we are
18all in it together." It is a very interesting historical
19document. I have never seen that on any of Himmler's
20other speeches, that he listed all SS Generals present and
21made them sign that they had been present and heard the
22speech or if they not been present that they had read it
24 MR RAMPTON: Mr Irving, Heinrich Himmler kept copies of these
25speeches, did he not?
26 A. [Mr Irving] In various versions. There was the original raw
1transcript and then a corrected transcript.
2 Q. [Mr Rampton] I know, I happen to have for the 5th May which we are
3coming to in a minute, I happen to have both versions.
4 A. [Mr Irving] Yes. There are also his handwritten notes on the basis of
5which he spoke.
6 Q. [Mr Rampton] Yes, Mr Irving, your knowledge is extensive. I want to
7know why you think it is that Himmler kept copies of his
9 A. [Mr Irving] I keep copies of me speeches.
10 Q. [Mr Rampton] But you do not talk about having given the order for the
11extermination of millions of Jews, do you, in your
13 A. [Mr Irving] I have not exterminated millions of Jews, Mr Rampton.
14 Q. [Mr Rampton] Mr Irving, maybe it is late in the morning or something.
15Heinrich Himmler's speech is not just this one. We had
16the one earlier, the 4th October at Posen. We have this
17one here. We have two more in May 1944, which are quite
18explicit, at any rate about his role in the extermination
19of the whole Jewish race?
20 A. [Mr Irving] Letting them vanish from the face of the earth, brutally
22 Q. [Mr Rampton] Yes, by killing them?
23 A. [Mr Irving] Brutally explicit, yes. As he says, by murdering, and not
24just the men but the women and children too.
25 Q. [Mr Rampton] Yes, I know that. Why would he keep those admissions of
26guilt, particularly in 1943 and 1944 by which time he must
1have known that the German world was probably going to
2come to an end?
3 A. [Mr Irving] Why would he have kept it to himself?
4 Q. [Mr Rampton] Yes. Why did he commit these things to writing and then
5keep them after he had uttered them to his Generals or his
6Reichsleiters or whatever they are?
7 A. [Mr Irving] I think the problem is we are so often on exactly the same
8side, Mr Rampton. Have I not frequently allowed in all my
9books that from this point on Hitler had no reason not to
11 Q. [Mr Rampton] Hitler did know, come on.
12 A. [Mr Irving] On precisely this point I have said Hitler had no
13justification for pleading ignorance, because everybody
14else immediately around him had been informed, but also
15you have to set this kind of speech in the context. This
16is 5th October, 4th and 6th October 1943 rather, at the
17height of the bombing campaign. There is a reason why
18Himmler is making a speech like this to the disgruntled SS
19Generals. Morale is at a low ebb and he is saying, "Hey,
20we are hitting back, we're doing this to them".
21 MR JUSTICE GRAY: I am really puzzled. Can I explain why,
22Mr Irving. When Mr Rampton was putting that passage from
23the October 1943 speech, 4th October 1943 speech, you were
24at pains to point out that Himmler was saying that it was
25he who would have taken the decision, but if you are
26accepting, as you have throughout, that by October 1943
1Hitler knew about the extermination policy ----
2 A. [Mr Irving] I say "from this point on", my Lord, because on the
3following day ----
4 Q. [Mr Rampton] But what is the significance of emphasising that it was
5Himmler's decision if you accept Hitler was in on it?
6 A. [Mr Irving] Because Himmler is accepting the responsibility for the
7job which has now been completed. Himmler is kind of
8reporting ----
9 Q. [Mr Rampton] I see, ex post facto.
10 A. [Mr Irving] Yes, saying, "We've done it all, the job has been done,
11I had to take the decision, it was a difficult job for us,
12but we done it, and I am proud of you, my SS men, for
13having carried out such a difficult task."
14 Q. [Mr Rampton] So the knowledge you say Hitler had from October 1943 did
15not include knowledge of what had been going on in 1942,
16is that what you are saying?
17 A. [Mr Irving] I am saying it is quite likely that he will have
18ex post facto have learned about all these things,
19particularly the Gauleiters who went to see him the next
20day and the SS Generals who went to see him. The same
21audience went effectively to see Hitler where he lectured
22them, and it would be stretching the bounds of probability
23too far to say that not one of them went up to Hitler, one
24of the old veterans, and said, "Mein Fuhrer, we heard
25something yesterday which rather disturbed me", but I do
26not think it did disturb them. I think they rather liked
1it. The eyewitness accounts we have of one of these
2speeches says that there were roars of applause.
3 MR RAMPTON: It was ----
4 A. [Mr Irving] The Germans were like that.
5 Q. [Mr Rampton] If you are right, it is something of which Himmler was
6very proud, is it not?
7 A. [Mr Irving] He was proud of his men for having carried out those
8extremely distasteful tasks.
9 Q. [Mr Rampton] But he was pleased, if your interpretation is right, and
10I am going to suggest it is not, but he was pleased to
11announce to this august gathering that he personally had
12made the decision to carry out this difficult task?
13 A. [Mr Irving] Would it not have been wonderful for him if he had said:
14"The Fuhrer gave us this task and look how well we have
15performed his duties for him.
16 Q. [Mr Rampton] Of course he did.
17 A. [Mr Irving] The great temptation would have been there, but he does
18not say this.
19 Q. [Mr Rampton] He does not?
20 A. [Mr Irving] He says specifically: "I was the one who took the
22 Q. [Mr Rampton] So that being so you would not expect that in May 1944 he
23would reveal that he done what he did in consequence of an
24order, and the only person of course who could have given
25an order is Hitler?
26 A. [Mr Irving] Mr Rampton, shall we get to that document when we get to
1it and look at the precise wording?
2 Q. [Mr Rampton] Very well. Let us doing that now. I have it open.
3 MR JUSTICE GRAY: It is page 187.
4 MR RAMPTON: Page 187.
5 A. [Mr Irving] There are of course about ten such speeches and you have
6just picked out two of them. In none of the others does
7he make any suggestion that there is a Fuhrer order. So
8it is not just one speech where there is no reference. It
9is many speeches.
10 Q. [Mr Rampton] He makes another such reference later the same month,
11about three weeks later. We will come to that probably
12after the adjournment.
13 A. [Mr Irving] Are we also going to look at Adolf Hitler's speech of I
14think it was June 26th 1944?
15 Q. [Mr Rampton] Yes, indeed I certainly am. Let us start with 5th May
161944. On page 18, tell me who this speech is made to, if
17you will?
18 A. [Mr Irving] I think it is the military leader, the leadership, the top
19brass, shall we say.
20 Q. [Mr Rampton] The top brass.
21 A. [Mr Irving] I know the names of a number of people who were present.
22General Stumpf was Air Force; General Reinicke was Germany
24 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Generals of the Wehrmacht.
25 MR RAMPTON: These are not SS creatures. These are proper
26soldiers; these are Generals of the Wehrmacht, are they
2 A. [Mr Irving] Yes, the top brass of the German armed forces.
3 Q. [Mr Rampton] On page 28 it has been altered. One can see how these
4pages evolve sometimes. Page 28. My Lord, it looks like
5an 18, so one has to look at page 27 at the top, page 5 of
6the file.
7 A. [Mr Irving] This is one of the most interesting pages I have ever
8looked at.
9 Q. [Mr Rampton] You can tell us everything you know about this page in
10just a moment when I have referred you to the relevant
11passage, which I think begins in the middle of the page:
12The Jewish question has been solved within Germany itself
13and in general within the countries occupied by Germany".
14Is that roughly right?
15 A. [Mr Irving] Yes.
16 Q. [Mr Rampton] I am going to read on in the English from Dr Longerich's
18 "It was solved in an uncompromising fashion in
19accordance with the life and death struggle of our nation
20in which the existence of our blood is at stake." Yes?
21 A. [Mr Irving] Yes.
22 Q. [Mr Rampton] Then elipse, if you do not mind. Have you got that?
23 A. [Mr Irving] Yes.
24 Q. [Mr Rampton] "You can understand how difficult it was for me"?
25 A. [Mr Irving] "You can feel with me how difficult it was" yes.
26 Q. [Mr Rampton] "To carry out this soldatischen befehl". What is that?
1 A. [Mr Irving] Soldierly order or military order.
2 Q. [Mr Rampton] "And which I carried out and went through with a sense of
3obedience", which word is that? Translate the last part
4of the sentence for me?
5 A. [Mr Irving] "Which I obeyed and carried out from obedience and from a
6sense of complete conviction".
7 Q. [Mr Rampton] Obedience to whom, Mr Irving, Hitler or his own sense of
8what was necessary for the sake of the thousand year
10 A. [Mr Irving] I think the sense of what is coming out of that paragraph
11is a sense of duty.
12 Q. [Mr Rampton] So it is the sense of duty, is it, that gives him the
13soldatischen befehl?
14 A. [Mr Irving] Yes.
15 Q. [Mr Rampton] A very odd choice of words, is it not, this soldierly
17 A. [Mr Irving] Yes.
18 Q. [Mr Rampton] The only person who can give Mr Himmler a soldierly order
19is Mr Hitler?
20 A. [Mr Irving] Absolutely right.
21 Q. [Mr Rampton] Pardon?
22 A. [Mr Irving] Yes.
23 Q. [Mr Rampton] He is saying: "I did what I did because Hitler told me
25 A. [Mr Irving] Yes. I refer to this of course in my Hitler biographies.
26I quoted this with the ----
1 Q. [Mr Rampton] Let me put to you the sort of expression you might use.
2How do you get yourself out of that one then, Mr Irving?
3 A. [Mr Irving] By counting.
4 Q. [Mr Rampton] By what?
5 A. [Mr Irving] Counting.
6 Q. [Mr Rampton] Counting what?
7 A. [Mr Irving] Can I ask you to look at the previous page?
8 Q. [Mr Rampton] Yes.
9 A. [Mr Irving] Can you see the number of the page at the top of the
11 Q. [Mr Rampton] Yes.
12 A. [Mr Irving] 27.
13 Q. [Mr Rampton] Yes.
14 A. [Mr Irving] It is typed.
15 Q. [Mr Rampton] The next one is an altered type. I already drew attention
16to that.
17 A. [Mr Irving] All the following pages have been written in in
19 Q. [Mr Rampton] So what?
20 A. [Mr Irving] And so what? Can you continue to count, please? Will you
21count down on page 27 nine lines to the beginning of the
22new paragraph.
23 Q. [Mr Rampton] "In Deuchsland"?
24 A. [Mr Irving] Yes.
25 Q. [Mr Rampton] Yes.
26 A. [Mr Irving] How many spaces is that paragraph indented by?
1 Q. [Mr Rampton] I have absolutely no idea. I am not a typist, Mr Irving.
2 A. [Mr Irving] I will count for you. Five spaces indented.
3 Q. [Mr Rampton] You stop interrogating ----
4 A. [Mr Irving] Tap, tap, tap, tap, tap.
5 Q. [Mr Rampton] You stop interrogating me, if you will, Mr Irving and give
6me your explanation why, as I now apprehend, you are
7saying we cannot trust the page we have been looking at?
8 A. [Mr Irving] Because it has been typed -- I have looked at the original
9of this document, Mr Rampton, you are looking at a
10photocopy. I have looked at the original in the
11archives. It is typed on different, here onwards it is
12typed on a different typewriter, this page, the page 28.
13 Q. [Mr Rampton] Where was it found?
14 A. [Mr Irving] What do you mean "where was it found"?
15 Q. [Mr Rampton] Where was this speech found, Mr Irving?
16 A. [Mr Irving] Can I just complete what I am saying?
17 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Yes, I would like you to because I want to
18know exactly what you say about ----
19 A. [Mr Irving] It is very important, my Lord. It has been typed by a
20different typist.
21 Q. [Mr Justice Gray] Page 28.
22 A. [Mr Irving] And this frequently happened. I spotted many diaries that
23had been fumbled with subsequently or pages of documents.
24This had been typed by a different typist. They use
25different ways of typing. You will notice that there is
26more space after the first line on page 28, after the
1"Reichsfuhrer SS", it has a double space after that
2instead of a single space on the previous page. She has
3indented by five spaces at the beginning of each
4paragraph. I am assuming it is a she.
5 Q. [Mr Justice Gray] So what do you infer from that?
6 A. [Mr Irving] We do not, my Lord. All we can say is that for some
7reason this page was retyped at a different date. We do
8not whether it was retyped during the war, which is the
9likelihood. We do not know what has been inserted or
10taken out. On this occasion we do not have the other
11transcripts of that speech. So that is a page that I am
12unhappy about pinning a capital issue on. You do not
13often find a document that has been so clearly tampered
14with as that.
15 MR RAMPTON: Oh, yes, there is, for example, at least two
16versions of the next speech we are coming to.
17 A. [Mr Irving] We are looking at this speech though are we not, the fact
18that change just occurs on this page.
19 Q. [Mr Rampton] I wish you would sometimes let me ask you a question.
20 A. [Mr Irving] I have not really finished what I was speaking abut.
21 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Let us pause. Finish your answer and then the
22next question.
23 A. [Mr Irving] About the falsification of this particular page, the fact
24that this particular page has been clearly retyped at a
25different date and that this is the one page that
26contains, as I quite agree, a pivotal sentence, makes me
1very unhappy about just relying on this version of that
2sentence. I am not saying it is a postwar forgery.
3I think it is unlikely. I think it is the kind of
4fumbling that goes on during the war, when people have
5spotted they have said something wrong and so they have
6put something else in instead. For example, just for one
7minute I would say I found exactly the same in the private
8diary of Henry Stimpson, who was the American Secretary of
9War who retyped the pages just before Pearl Harbour to cut
10out incriminating material, and as he said later said to
11Henry Morgan: "I have gone through my diaries cutting out
12everything that incriminates President Roosevelt", you can
13spot that if you look at the originals, as I always prefer
14to, rather than looking at printed versions on in this
15case microcopies.
16 MR RAMPTON: Mr Irving, we will see when we get to the next
17speech similar things have happened?
18 A. [Mr Irving] Yes.
19 Q. [Mr Rampton] I am not the least bit resistant to the idea that that
20particular page, like others of no particular
21significance, was retyped.
22 A. [Mr Irving] Yes.
23 Q. [Mr Rampton] How many versions of a speech or of pages of a speech do
24you think you go through before you reach the final
25version if you type them out or draft them beforehand?
26 A. [Mr Irving] Well, I have looked at very many of the original Himmler
1speeches. As I said, I have must have looked at about ten
2of these kinds of transcripts, and there are transcripts,
3there is a whole published volume of Himmler speeches, so
4you end up with a large number of transcripts to look at.
5This speech I think is the only one where I found a
6discrepancy of this magnitude which has not been remarked
7on by the historians. I am very uneasy that it is this
8page of all the pages that shows the signs of I would
9wartime tampering.
10 Q. [Mr Rampton] Not wartime tampering. Can I suggest a natural human
11process for the production of one amongst several pages
12that look different? For example, if you look at page 7,
13the next page, the number at the top of the page has not
14been typed; it has been handwritten.
15 A. [Mr Irving] From thereon they are handwritten, yes, in the entire
17 Q. [Mr Rampton] Yes, but what is baffling me, Mr Irving, is why you will
18not actually use your knowledge of the world to advance
19the most likely explanation of this phenomenon, is that
20somebody types version one, Himmler looks at it and he
21says, "Oh, I don't think like that very much", and in
22those days of course you do not have word processors, so
23it has to be retyped on a different typewriter, perhaps
24the same day, perhaps on another day, it matters not.
25This is Himmler's words in Himmler's speech in Himmler's
26own private file.
1 A. [Mr Irving] This is the man who also wrote on another occasion: "Let
2us do this for camouflage purposes. I like the new
3version, it's going to the Fuhrer. Excellent for
4camouflage purposes." We cannot trust him, unfortunately.
5When we find a speech has been tampered with in this way,
6then frankly I mention it, in fact I think in Hitler's War
7I drew attention to the discrepancy in the numbering and
8the typeface and the paragraph indent and so on.
9 Q. [Mr Rampton] You did, and in such a way as to suggest that there is
10clear evidence of an order from Hitler to Himmler to carry
11out the extermination programme could not be relied upon.
12 A. [Mr Irving] Is this a hanging document?
13 Q. [Mr Rampton] Oh, yes.
14 A. [Mr Irving] Would you hang somebody on this?
15 Q. [Mr Rampton] I would not hang anybody for anything, as it happens,
16Mr Irving, not even Adolf Hitler if he were here, though
17some people in this room might. This is not a prosecution
18of Adolf Hitler. This is in your mind, should be, not
19setting out to prove something, seeing what the evidence
21 A. [Mr Irving] Yes, but this is precisely the same situation, to my mind,
22as where a court is shown a so-called confession and then
23when you look at the original you find out that one page
24of the confession has been rewritten and inserted at a
25later date. The court would then throw out the whole
26confession, frankly.
1 Q. [Mr Rampton] This has been put in by the Allies to incriminate Hitler,
2has it?
3 A. [Mr Irving] No. You are putting it in to make your point.
4 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Mr Rampton, I think we probably ought to
5pause. You have not finished with this and it may be it
6would be worth looking perhaps after the adjournment at
7how this is dealt with in whichever of Mr Irving's books
8it is dealt within.
9 A. [Mr Irving] Yes, I did try to find it, my Lord.
10 MR RAMPTON: Yes.
11 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Shall we say 5 past 2?
12 (Luncheon Adjournment)
13MR DAVID IRVING, continued.
14Cross-Examined by MR RAMPTON, QC, continued.
15 MR RAMPTON: Now, Mr Irving, will you please tell us slowly and
16carefully why it matters, in your view, if it be right,
17that this page of this speech by Himmler has been retyped?
18 A. [Mr Irving] Well, I have had the advantage, of course, that I have
19refreshed my memory from reading my own book.
20 Q. [Mr Rampton] Yes.
21 A. [Mr Irving] So I will give the same explanation or speculation now as
22I did in my book.
23 Q. [Mr Rampton] Yes.
24 A. [Mr Irving] First of all, I have had the advantage that I have seen
25the original and I work from the original paper of this
26transcript. From the original paper, it is evident that
1the original in the archives is a carbon copy, which means
2that the ribbon copy went somewhere else. It is
3reasonable to suppose, as this is typed on the large
4typeface, that the ribbon copy went to Adolf Hitler.
5 All we can say, however, is that at some time,
6somebody considered it necessary to retype page 28 which
7contains the pregnant sentence about the order.
8I speculate in my book that it is reasonable to assume
9that the version that went to Adolf Hitler did not have
10this retyped page in. It went in with some different
12 Q. [Mr Rampton] There is the leap into space which, I am afraid, I do not
14 A. [Mr Irving] Well, the alternative -- I would be interested to hear
15what your alternative explanation would be.
16 Q. [Mr Rampton] No. I do not see anything in the evidence before my
17eyes. Assuming you are right it was retyped, certainly
18the page numbering has been changed.
19 A. [Mr Irving] And the indenting is different.
20 Q. [Mr Rampton] There does not seem to be anything in what I see before my
21eyes to tell me that it was done after or before the other
22pages. There is nothing which I see in this document
23which leads me to think that if it was altered, it was
24altered for any other reason than that Himmler had changed
25his mind about precisely what he wanted to say.
26 A. [Mr Irving] He did not read from this. This is a transcript of what
1he said -- if you appreciate the difference? This is not
2a script that he read from. This is the typed version of
3what he said taken from a shorthand note.
4 Q. [Mr Rampton] Well, can you look at this document? My Lord, this is
5another version of the same page which I am told comes
6from the archives. It was obtained for me yesterday
7because I thought we might get to this today. There is
8one for his Lordship and one for Mr Irving. We have in
9front of us a typescript, not in Fuhrer's size type, have
10we not, Mr Irving?
11 A. [Mr Irving] Yes.
12 Q. [Mr Rampton] With a lot of manuscript alterations on it?
13 A. [Mr Irving] Editing, yes.
14 Q. [Mr Rampton] In the top right-hand corner the typewritten No. 17 which
15has not been changed.
16 A. [Mr Irving] Yes.
17 Q. [Mr Rampton] If you look at about nine lines down, you see the same
18passage beginning that we were discussing before the
19adjournment, do we not, "Die Judenfrage" at the end of the
21 A. [Mr Irving] Yes.
22 Q. [Mr Rampton] It still has seven lines below that or eight, six to
23seven: "Dieses mehr gegevenen [German - document not
24provided] -- zustattenen befalls war"?
25 A. [Mr Irving] Yes.
26 Q. [Mr Rampton] I should read the whole thing, "Wie schwer [German -
1document not provided] -- befalls war". That is the same
2phrase as appears in the other version?
3 A. [Mr Irving] That is absolutely correct. Exactly the same, no editing
4on that passage at all.
5 Q. [Mr Rampton] But we can, can we not, infer from the page number that
6the speech was at that stage a good deal shorter because
7in our other version the page number finally winds up as
8being 28, I think, does it not? That may be a function of
9the different size.
10 A. [Mr Irving] Different size typeface.
11 Q. [Mr Rampton] But I ask you to notice that the top right-hand corner of
12the one we have got in the bundle ----
13 A. [Mr Irving] Yes.
14 Q. [Mr Rampton] --- appears to have been changed from a number in its
15teens, does it not?
16 A. [Mr Irving] Hard to say on the basis of that copy.
17 Q. [Mr Rampton] In manuscript.
18 A. [Mr Irving] I can only say it is hard to say on the basis of that
20 Q. [Mr Rampton] It is hard to say, but the first of those digits looks a
21bit like a 1, does it not?
22 A. [Mr Irving] I can only say it is hard to say.
23 Q. [Mr Rampton] You see, I do not make these observations in order to lead
24to a particular conclusion. All I say is you do not find
25in these different versions and different numberings of a
26page containing the same words, do you, any suggestion
1that this page was added at a later date, after some
2sanitized version had been given to Hitler?
3 A. [Mr Irving] That is not the suggestion that I made.
4 Q. [Mr Rampton] Well, what is it?
5 A. [Mr Irving] I am perfectly content with the suggestion and, in fact,
6with the clear proof that Himmler actually used these
7words when speaking to this audience of military gentlemen
8who were accustomed to accepting orders from above. What
9I am suggesting is that in the version that he then sent
10to Hitler he retyped that page and replaced it by another
11page that is not before us.
12 Q. [Mr Rampton] But why do you say that?
13 A. [Mr Irving] Because something has happened to this page. Quite
14clearly something has happened to this page.
15 Q. [Mr Rampton] But people make alterations to their drafts all the time.
16Look, do you agree that this smaller typeface probably
17represents an earlier generation of the same ----
18 A. [Mr Irving] Quite clearly. It is almost certainly the original
19shorthand version.
20 Q. [Mr Rampton] So what leads you to suppose then that the speech was made
21in these terms, let us suppose this is an earlier draft?
22 A. [Mr Irving] Yes.
23 Q. [Mr Rampton] With the manuscript alteration, that is not Himmler's
24writing, an earlier draft, the speech is not made in those
25terms, it is recorded in these terms as they were
26recorded, were they not?
1 A. [Mr Irving] Sometimes they are recorded.
2 Q. [Mr Rampton] Yes. Then comes a transcript or a version anyway?
3 A. [Mr Irving] Yes.
4 Q. [Mr Rampton] To be put before the Fuhrer?
5 A. [Mr Irving] Yes.
6 Q. [Mr Rampton] And for some reason or another the page which we have here
7and which is in the draft is removed?
8 A. [Mr Irving] Yes.
9 Q. [Mr Rampton] And replaced by something else?
10 A. [Mr Irving] Yes.
11 Q. [Mr Rampton] What is the evidence for that?
12 A. [Mr Irving] The fact that this page has clearly been retyped at some
14 Q. [Mr Rampton] So what?
15 A. [Mr Irving] And renumbered from there on.
16 Q. [Mr Rampton] Perhaps it was badly typed in the first place.
17 A. [Mr Irving] That is another, third possible alternative, but it is the
18funniest thing, is it not, that this is the one page that
19it happens on. The one page that contains the pregnant
20sentence has clearly been retyped at a different date by a
21different hand on different paper.
22 Q. [Mr Rampton] Why do you say a different date?
23 A. [Mr Irving] Well, because it is on different paper. It is not taken
24from the same wad of paper that the rest of the speech is
25typed on.
26 Q. [Mr Rampton] But suppose the secretaries do a shift job or something
1later in the same day, perhaps the evening, I do not know
2what time of the day the speech is made, nor do we know
3what dates these were drafts were on, do we?
4 A. [Mr Irving] No, we do not.
5 MR JUSTICE GRAY: I am sorry, Mr Rampton, I hope you do not
6mind, can I just see where we have got to? This is a
7speech made by Himmler to a whole collection -- how many
8Gauleiters Reichsleiters?
9 A. [Mr Irving] This is to top brass in the armed forces.
10 Q. [Mr Rampton] How many would there have been there?
11 A. [Mr Irving] Probably in the order of 100.
12 Q. [Mr Rampton] And several of them would be seeing Hitler on a fairly
13regular basis?
14 A. [Mr Irving] Yes.
15 Q. [Mr Rampton] And your hypothesis is that Himmler is telling the
16Generals that he has been ordered to take this drastic
17action ----
18 A. [Mr Irving] He is speaking ----
19 Q. [Mr Rampton] --- as against Jews?
20 A. [Mr Irving] Once again he is not reading from a prepared script.
21 Q. [Mr Rampton] No, but he is telling the generals that when it is not
22true he is inventing the order -- is this your hypothesis
23-- and that is the reason why he has to sanitize the
24version that goes to Hitler?
25 A. [Mr Irving] If I can paraphrase the way I have put it in my book, my
26Lord, we have any number of speeches where Himmler made
1the same kind of statement. This is the only one where he
2inadvertently, perhaps, talked about a Fuhrer order. He
3may very well have inadvertently, because the General has
4spoken of a Fuhrer order because they are accustomed to
5orders. I do not know what his motive for that was.
6 Q. [Mr Rampton] It is scarcely inadvertent. It is plainly a speech that
7was carefully prepared in advance.
8 A. [Mr Irving] He is not reading from a script, my Lord. We have
9probably in this case, certainly in other cases, like on
10one page of paper he would write down 15 or 20 words on
11the basis of which he would speak.
12 Q. [Mr Rampton] I am bound to say that looking at the bit of paper
13Mr Rampton handed in a moment ago, that looks to me like a
14preparatory draft which was altered ----
15 A. [Mr Irving] No, my Lord, it is not.
16 Q. [Mr Rampton] --- for grammatical reasons. Well, you tell me that and
17I will accept it because I expect you have good reason for
18doing so.
19 A. [Mr Irving] It very definitely is not, my Lord. This is a typed
20version taken from either the shorthand notes or, as
21Mr Rampton rightly says, from the sound recording which is
22then edited in handwriting by a third hand. From that is
23then prepared, as we can see by comparison, the large
24Fuhrer size typewriter. All I am saying, my Lord, is one
25has to comment on the fact that this page alone has been
26retyped at a different date and inserted, and ----
1 Q. [Mr Rampton] Yes, I follow that.
2 A. [Mr Irving] It is significant.
3 Q. [Mr Rampton] But what I want to ask you is this, Mr Irving, was Himmler
4not taking an almighty risk in pretending to the Generals
5that he had an order when he had not, given that the
6Generals were going to be, or some of them, in
7communication directly with Hitler?
8 A. [Mr Irving] This might be the very reason why he had that page retyped
9making no reference to a Fuhrer order. We do not know
10what is on the retyped version. I hesitate to venture out
11too far across that particular thin ice. We cannot
12speculate what was on the other version of that page, the
13one that was correctly typed and correctly indented.
14 Q. [Mr Rampton] I thought you were speculating that it might have been
15sanitized to delete the reference to an order.
16 A. [Mr Irving] Yes, we cannot safely speculate really any more than
17I have done in the book. My Lord, the whole of this
18passage is in my book "Hitler's War" with the entire
19incriminating quotation, and in a footnote of three lines,
20two and a half lines, I have drawn attention to the fact
21that this page is for some reason or other retyped.
22 MR RAMPTON: I am not sure you are right about it. It is a
23small point, but, to be clear, it is both this and the
24next speech of 24th are in Hitler's War 1977?
25 A. [Mr Irving] On pages 630 and 631.
26 Q. [Mr Rampton] Yes. But I think you will find, if you look at page 630
1of 1991, I think 4th May has disappeared, has it not?
2I may be wrong about that.
3 A. [Mr Irving] I would be very surprised indeed if they are.
4 Q. [Mr Rampton] I compared it with 1977. I think ----
5 A. [Mr Irving] I would be prepared to bet a substantial sum of money it
6has not vanished.
7 Q. [Mr Rampton] You find it in Hitler's War 1991 because I could not.
8I am not saying it is not there; I could not find it.
9 A. [Mr Irving] Well, it will be on page 630. Oddly any, it is exactly
10the same page as the old version.
11 Q. [Mr Rampton] 630 of the old version. Let us compare the two, shall we?
12 MR JUSTICE GRAY: I cannot see it on 630.
13 A. [Mr Irving] I may have to withdraw my bet.
14 MR RAMPTON: It is on 630 of 1977 ----
15 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Yes.
16 MR RAMPTON: --- sure enough, and 24th May is on page 631.
17I am baffled to know where to find it in the edition for
19 MR JUSTICE GRAY: You can always come back to this, Mr Irving,
20because it is difficult to find something when you are on
21the hoof, as it were.
22 A. [Mr Irving] I am slightly puzzled because I am just looking at the end
23notes and I see there are two pages of the end notes have
24vanished, three pages of the end notes have vanished from
25your photocopy and I wonder if it is in the end notes
1 MR RAMPTON: That is not very likely, is it, Mr Irving?
2 A. [Mr Irving] I am still on page 830.
3 Q. [Mr Rampton] If there were an end note about it, it would be in the
4same part of the text, would it not?
5 A. [Mr Irving] But it would be on page 830 of the end notes which I do
6not have.
7 MR JUSTICE GRAY: I think I have.
8 MR RAMPTON: I have lost mine too.
9 A. [Mr Irving] Either that or it has been shovelled to a different part
10of the book which I -- there has been some major
11structural change to that chapter I can see with all the
12fresh material we have put in.
13 MR JUSTICE GRAY: I do not think the note on page 630 ----
14 A. [Mr Irving] It does not contain it.
15 MR JUSTICE GRAY: --- helps.
16 MR RAMPTON: Your end notes in the 1991 edition are done by
17numbers, are they not?
18 A. [Mr Irving] By page number.
19 Q. [Mr Rampton] Yes, I see. My fault. So I have to look to the end note
20to page 630?
21 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Which is on page 830?
22 A. [Mr Irving] I may have put it to a different part of the book, but it
23is not in the same place. We can say that anyway.
24 MR RAMPTON: There is a real oddity here, Mr Irving. You have
25not got it, so I will read it out.
26 A. [Mr Irving] Yes.
1 Q. [Mr Rampton] The end note to page 630 says (and, no doubt, this is
2exactly what it says in the 1977 edition), I am reading at
3the end of the note: "His May 5th speech is on microfilm
4and that of May 24th", that is another microfilm
6 A. [Mr Irving] Yes.
7 Q. [Mr Rampton] It had been in the text in 1977, but there is no question,
8since this is a reference to page 630 of the text, that it
9has left the main stage by the time of the 1991 edition?
10 A. [Mr Irving] As you can see, I am as baffled as you are by this.
11 Q. [Mr Rampton] No, it is quite easy.
12 A. [Mr Irving] Yes.
13 Q. [Mr Rampton] You have edited it out of the text of the 1991 edition,
14but have forgotten to change the end note which is merely
15replicating what was said in 1977?
16 A. [Mr Irving] Can I amend that statement to say it has been edited out?
17 Q. [Mr Rampton] OK.
18 A. [Mr Irving] If it has been edited out, of course, many hands edit it.
19The American editors who produce this text may well have
20decided this was just repeating what the next paragraph
21said. I am as baffled as you are and I will look into it
22within the next 24 hours and see what I can make of it.
23 MR JUSTICE GRAY: We will come back to it.
24 MR RAMPTON: I will not push that any further for the moment
25until I hear, if you can produce it, what the explanation
26might be. You see, if we look at the history of the thing
1(with which you are well familiar), you told us yesterday,
2I think, that by this time, May 1944, it is likely that
3Hitler was well aware of what Himmler had been doing?
4 A. [Mr Irving] Yes.
5 Q. [Mr Rampton] And you also told us, I think, that if Hitler had been
6told or had known earlier in 1942, early 1943, he probably
7would not have minded very much?
8 A. [Mr Irving] Yes.
9 Q. [Mr Rampton] So if you are right, what was Himmler so terrified -- I do
10not accept for a moment you are right; I have to say
11I think it is a fanciful suggestion -- what on earth was
12Himmler afraid of?
13 A. [Mr Irving] Hitler had repeatedly issued injunctions against people
14who were issuing Fuhrer orders of which he had no
15knowledge. There is several examples of that in the
16files. There is one occasion when Albert Speer goes to
17see him and Hitler complains to him that the foreign
18workers are not getting enough to eat. Speer says: "But
19this was a Fuhrer order, mein Fuhrer", and this is
20recorded in the minutes of that conference, and Hitler
21says: "This is the first I have ever heard of any such
22order". So ----
23 Q. [Mr Rampton] Not only did Himmler take a risk that what he said to that
24bunch of Generals on 5th May might get back to the Fuhrer
25and he, Himmler, get a rocket, he said it again on 24th,
26did he not?
1 A. [Mr Irving] Can we see in exactly what terms?
2 Q. [Mr Rampton] Yes, you can. It is the next document, 188. Here I do
3not think I have the whole document. The first three
4pages, well, let us look at the front of it, first of
5all. It is translated, my Lord, on page 74 of Longerich,
6Longerich 1, or the relevant part is. It is a speech in
7the Reichsfuhrer SS on 24th. The date has been altered
8suggesting that it was going to be on some other date, do
9you agree? This is interesting. We will come to that in
10a minute. You see the date at the top has been altered?
11 A. [Mr Irving] What are you looking at?
12 Q. [Mr Rampton] Document 188 in the file, H4 (ii). It is the next
13following document.
14 A. [Mr Irving] Yes.
15 Q. [Mr Rampton] It is the speech of 24th May 1944 again at Sonthofen?
16 A. [Mr Irving] Yes.
17 Q. [Mr Rampton] Can you translate the rest of the heading, please?
18 A. [Mr Irving] "Speech of the Reichsfuhrer SS on 24th May 1944 at
19Sonthofen to the participants in a political ideological
20course (Army Generals)".
21 Q. [Mr Rampton] Can you turn over the page to the next page in the file?
22 A. [Mr Irving] In the document or in the...?
23 Q. [Mr Rampton] In the actual document we have?
24 A. [Mr Irving] Yes.
25 Q. [Mr Rampton] Such part of it as we have?
26 A. [Mr Irving] Page 2.
1 Q. [Mr Rampton] Page 2 at the top. In brackets you have: "RF SS
2Sonthofen", I do not know, but it looks to me as if that
3date has been changed from 25th or some later date to
5 A. [Mr Irving] The typist has it wrong on the first three pages and it
6has been subsequently amended in manuscript or corrected
7in manuscript.
8 Q. [Mr Rampton] In places it has been amended, in places it is correct.
9 A. [Mr Irving] Because by the time she has got to page 4 or 5, she has
10realized what the right date should be.
11 Q. [Mr Rampton] What do you think the right date was is what I am asking.
12Can you read it? I cannot.
13 A. [Mr Irving] 24th May.
14 Q. [Mr Rampton] No, I know what the handwriting says. The overwritten
15typescript looks to me like 25th.
16 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Does it matter?
17 MR RAMPTON: It might do, yes.
18 A. [Mr Irving] We have Himmler's diary for that date, his calendar,
19which shows clearly the speech was on this date.
20 Q. [Mr Rampton] That is right. If you look at page 32 as it has at the
21top, again the page numbering has been altered by hand?
22 A. [Mr Irving] Yes.
23 Q. [Mr Rampton] There it is typed correctly, 24.5.44?
24 A. [Mr Irving] Yes.
25 Q. [Mr Rampton] The very next page it is wrong again?
26 A. [Mr Irving] Yes.
1 Q. [Mr Rampton] That suggests, does it not, that these pages are for the
2final version of the transcript, if that is what this is,
3done, as it were, at different times, some have the right
4date, some have the wrong date. Is it not odd, Mr Irving,
5if they are transcripts rather than drafts, that they have
6different dates on them originally?
7 A. [Mr Irving] Well, I have employed secretaries and you have probably
8too and dates are frequently things that are wrongly
10 Q. [Mr Rampton] So the fact that one page or another has a date altered
11and another does not, the fact that some pages are in
12different typefaces, tells us nothing except that
13different people did different pages?
14 A. [Mr Irving] That is a possible interpretation, yes, but, of course, it
15is precisely these pages that these phenomena occur.
16 Q. [Mr Rampton] Yes. Well, it goes on -- my copy does not, unfortunately
17-- the key page in this document is 31, four pages into
18the extract that we have got.
19 A. [Mr Irving] Yes.
20 Q. [Mr Rampton] And the passage in question is at the bottom of that page,
21is it not?
22 A. [Mr Irving] Yes.
23 Q. [Mr Rampton] I am going to read from Longerich's translation?
24 A. [Mr Irving] These are three pages where the pagination has been
26 Q. [Mr Rampton] No. It is amended on this page, but not on the next
1succeeding page. Do you see? The pagination has but not
2the date?
3 A. [Mr Irving] Yes, the pagination.
4 Q. [Mr Rampton] Pagination has but not the date?
5 A. [Mr Irving] Well, it might be a clue as to when the retyping was
6done. She may have been retyping it the next day for some
7reason and the way you do when you are writing cheques
8out, you get the date wrong at the beginning of a year.
9 Q. [Mr Rampton] That is right. The dating on this page that we are
10looking at has been altered in manuscript in exactly the
11same way as the preceding three pages that we have, have
12been and they are the first three pages of the speech, are
13they not?
14 A. [Mr Irving] Yes.
15 Q. [Mr Rampton] So that suggests, no more than suggests, in fact, ever so
16faintly suggests, a chronological integrity?
17 A. [Mr Irving] It suggests to me that whoever has retyped these pages did
18so on 25th and hen realized her error when she looked at
19the dates and then changed 25th to 24th.
20 Q. [Mr Rampton] Look at the last page.
21 A. [Mr Irving] I am not sure that it is important.
22 Q. [Mr Rampton] Well, I think it is. Look on to the last page we have,
23page 33. Both the date and the page have been altered,
24have they not?
25 A. [Mr Irving] Yes.
26 Q. [Mr Rampton] Now look at the page in question, which is the fourth page
1we have?
2 A. [Mr Irving] Yes.
3 Q. [Mr Rampton] The last paragraph, and I am going to read from
4Dr Longerich's translation?
5 A. [Mr Irving] Is this page 32 or 31?
6 Q. [Mr Rampton] 31, sorry. "Another question which was decisive", I am
7reading from the beginning of the last paragraph of the
8German, "for the inner insecurity of the Reich in Europe
9was the Jewish question. It was uncompromisingly solved
10after orders and rational recognition"?
11 A. [Mr Irving] "On orders", I would say.
12 MR JUSTICE GRAY: It should be in the singular.
13 A. [Mr Irving] Well, "Rachsmehfahr" (?) would be "on orders", my Lord.
14 MR RAMPTON: "On orders" or "in accordance with orders"?
15 A. [Mr Irving] Yes.
16 Q. [Mr Rampton] Following in the sense of "in obedience to"?
17 A. [Mr Irving] "In accordance with".
18 Q. [Mr Rampton] Yes. Again, the same point, is it not, Himmler does not
19take orders from anybody but Hitler, does he?
20 A. [Mr Irving] His men do. The men who carried out the orders were
21taking orders from somebody, namely from him.
22 Q. [Mr Rampton] I see. You are suggesting that this is a reference by
23Himmler ----
24 A. [Mr Irving] It is.
25 Q. [Mr Rampton] --- to the orders which he gave to his subordinates?
26 A. [Mr Irving] It is ambiguous. It is totally ambiguous, Mr Rampton,
1this particular passage. It could be him referring to
2orders he had received or orders that his men had
4 Q. [Mr Rampton] In that case, there would be no reason, would there, for
5this page to be altered in case Hitler should see it and
6blow up?
7 A. [Mr Irving] Yes, we are in no man's land here.
8 Q. [Mr Rampton] I will read on because it is, perhaps you may agree, a
9rather significant document: "I believe, gentlemen, that
10you know me well know enough to know that I am not a
11bloodthirsty person I am not a man who takes pleasure or
12joy when something rough must be done. However, on the
13other hand, I have such good nerves and such a developed
14sense of duty I could say that much for myself."
15"Developed sense of duty" is the words Grosses flicht
16flift berwusstein".
17 A. [Mr Irving] Yes, conscious of his duty. "Berwusstein" is
19 Q. [Mr Rampton] "When I recognize something as necessary, I can implement
20it without compromise. I have not considered myself
21entitled, this concerns especially the Jewish women and
22children, to allow the children to grow into the avengers
23who will then murder our fathers and our grandchildren.
24That would have been cowardly. Consequently, the question
25was uncompromisingly resolved".
26 A. [Mr Irving] This is the Himmler gramophone record. He keeps on saying
1it in speeches at this time. This is the only occasion
2and the one previously where he hints at an order.
3Normally, he swallows it, so to speak, he bites his
5 Q. [Mr Rampton] There we have two speeches, subject to your point about
6what I call your speculation about the reason why the
7pages change or the typeface changes. Then we have two
8speeches which say unequivocally really, especially if you
9put them together, that the mass murder of the Jews, the
10women and the children, was done by Himmler on Hitler's
11orders, do you not? That is what they say on their face?
12 A. [Mr Irving] No.
13 MR JUSTICE GRAY: When you say two orders you mean the 4th May
14or whenever it was?
15 MR RAMPTON: Yes, 5th May. If you put them together ----
16 MR JUSTICE GRAY: And 24th May?
17 A. [Mr Irving] 24th May.
18 MR RAMPTON: --- what he is clearly saying, and I am
19paraphrasing, but this is the interpretation which any
20right minded person would give to these documents on their
21face, Himmler is telling the Generals, as if they did not
22already know, "We have murdered all these people. It was
23a hard task, but we have done it. We have been successful
24and we did it on the orders of the Fuhrer"?
25 A. [Mr Irving] We have to look at the entire body of these speeches,
26Mr Rampton, and say why is it that he hints at on order in
1these two speeches, if we ignore the discrepancy in the
2pagination and so on at moment, but in none of the other
3speeches? It is almost as though he had run his mouth off
4here. He is not speaking from a prepared script.
5 It was a very common trick in Nazi Germany, as
6in all dictatorships, to imply that you are doing
7something on the highest orders, "So you had better not
8question what I am up to, fellows", and I think it was
9entirely proper, the use that I made of this in my book on
10pages 630 and 631, looking at the original edition, and
11I felt it entirely proper to refer in a two-and-a-half
12line footnote to the fact that there is some reason to
13note that the two pages concerned in both speeches, both
14appear to have been retyped on a different occasion, shall
15we say.
16 Q. [Mr Rampton] Well, that is can be said of a whole lot of pages in that
17set which I have only got them all there, I have only
18about six pages?
19 A. [Mr Irving] Mr Rampton, not in any of the other speeches, only in
20these speeches and these sections.
21 Q. [Mr Rampton] Maybe they were important speeches, I do not know.
22 A. [Mr Irving] The difference between me and Mr Browning and the other
23experts is that I sat with the original papers in my hand,
24looking at the quality, the texture of the paper, whether
25it was a carbon copy or a ribbon copy, and so on.
26 Q. [Mr Rampton] We explored that. I did say on their face they appear to
1be a reference to orders from Hitler to do that which had
2been done by the time these speeches were made, do they
4 A. [Mr Irving] This is precisely why I quoted both speeches in full,
5those passages on pages 630 and 631 of my biography, so
6readers could draw their own conclusions.
7 Q. [Mr Rampton] That impression which one might take away from reading
8those two speeches is unsurprising, is it not, if one
9looks at what Himmler wrote to Berger on 28th July 1942.
10My Lord, we have looked at this document before.
11 A. [Mr Irving] "This is a task which the Fuhrer has given us and which no
12one can take off my shoulders", is it not?
13 Q. [Mr Rampton] "Die besezten auf gebeten Judenfrage" -- "The occupied
14Eastern territories must be Jew-free"?
15 A. [Mr Irving] "Will become free of Jews".
16 Q. [Mr Rampton] "Will become Jew-free", "free of Jews". "The carrying out
17of this very hard order has been placed on my shoulders by
18the Fuhrer". That is right? That is what the German
20 A. [Mr Irving] Absolutely right.
21 Q. [Mr Rampton] You know it off by heart. Yes? If that is the truth --
22I do not know who Gottlog Berger was, he is said to be a
23senior SS person -- in 1942, two things follow. It is not
24the very least bit surprising to find a reference back to
25that in the speeches in May 1944; second, if it is true,
26Hitler would not be the least bit surprised to find those
1references in the transcripts of those speeches, would he?
2 A. [Mr Irving] I think the July 28th 1942 letter which we have looked at
3in some detail is quite clearly proof that Adolf Hitler
4ordered the physical, geographical eviction of the Jews
5from those territories. I think this is the one way where
6they are talking about "Etappenweise von westen nach
7osten". "Stage by stage from West to East".
8 Q. [Mr Rampton] I cannot remember and I have not got it open, but if you
9want me to look at it, I certainly will do.
10 A. [Mr Irving] It would be perverse to go two years forward in time and
11say when Himmler is talking about the order which has been
12carried out to say this is clearly a reference to what
13happened in July 1942. It may be, it may not.
14 Q. [Mr Rampton] I do not want to go over old ground, Mr Irving, but I do
15not believe that to be right, with respect. If you tell
16us as you have done recently -- I cannot remember whether
17it was yesterday or the day before -- that Hitler probably
18knew about the mass shootings in the East, if it be right,
19as it seems to be, that mass killings in the General
20Government took place by gas trucks, at any rate to some
21extent, and then by some, I think your words are, more
22efficient means thereafter, then all those people that
23went from Polish towns to these little villages were
25 A. [Mr Irving] Clearly, they were not all killed because those that went
26to Treblinka subsequently surfaced again in Mydonek and
1the Russians found ----
2 Q. [Mr Rampton] We will chase that up.
3 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Leave that on one side.
4 MR RAMPTON: Leave that on one side but, broadly speaking, that
5is the picture, is it not? Why on earth should we
6interpret this Berger letter from Himmler as being a
7reference to merely, sort of, vanishing them? It is quite
8obviously a reference to what has been going on, the
9process that had started in 1941 and is in full swing at
10these Reinhard camps in July 1942.
11 A. [Mr Irving] Well, if that is the weight of your evidence, I do not
12think you have very much, Mr Rampton. If you are trying
13to read between the lines the whole time instead of
14looking -- we have a huge volume of documentation. We
15have had 55 years to find something more specific than
16that. It has not been found, but what we do find is even
17after these two speeches, any number of references to
18Adolf Hitler meting Himmler where Himmler is still talking
19in euphemisms, talking about "aus siedlung" of the Jews,
20for example, in the summer of 1944; and how do we explain
21that Himmler is still having to use euphemisms when he is
22talking to Hitler, writing his own agenda about it, his
23own notes about it as late as the summer of 1944?
24 Q. [Mr Rampton] We do not know it, Mr Irving. You seem to have the wrong
25end of the stick permanently. I do not know whether it is
26painful always holding the wrong end of the stick. But we
1are not trying in this court (at least I am not trying) to
2prove Hitler's guilt. What I am trying to prove is that
3any sensible, respectable, honest, open-minded historian
4would be saying to himself that on the evidence, the
5overwhelming probability is not only that Hitler knew
6about all this, but that it originated with him, with an
7order to him?
8 A. [Mr Irving] In which case, Mr Rampton, what could I have done
9differently than I did in the 1977 edition of Hitler's War
10where I reproduced all these passages from these speeches
11without any omissions, mentioning only in a footnote my
12reservations on the question of pagination.
13 Q. [Mr Rampton] Mr Irving ----
14 A. [Mr Irving] I am not the kind of person who likes to read between
15lines and I do not really want to start joining the dots
16up for my readers because they have more brains.
17 Q. [Mr Rampton] It is not a question of reading between the lines. It is
18a question of giving proper weight to the evidence before
19your own eyes?
20 A. [Mr Irving] Which I have then put exactly in that form before the
21eyes of my readers.
22 Q. [Mr Rampton] Yes, but, let me take page 630 of Hitler's War 1977. True
23it is that you make reference to the speech of 24th May
25 A. [Mr Irving] On page 631.
26 Q. [Mr Rampton] Sorry, 631?
1 A. [Mr Irving] Shall I read that paragraph?
2 Q. [Mr Rampton] No, I will read it.
3 A. [Mr Irving] But it is my writing. Why can I not read it?
4 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Do not let us squabble about that. I will
5read it if you like.
6 MR RAMPTON: Yes. Good idea.
7 MR JUSTICE GRAY: No. You read it, Mr Rampton.
8 A. [Mr Irving] Mr Rampton, you win.
9 MR RAMPTON: Well, it is normal in these courts -- I do not
10know how experienced a litigant you are?
11 A. [Mr Irving] I am totally ignorant as you can see.
12 Q. [Mr Rampton] No, you are not. I am talking about Broome and Cassell.
14 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Don't let us get into Broome and Cassell.
15 MR RAMPTON: I was hoping to avoid it, but that answer will not
16do. Clobbered for exemplary damages? Inexperienced, my
18 "Consider too Himmler's speech of May 24th in
19which again speaking before generals he explained his
20stance somewhat differently. He recalled how in 1933 and
211934 he had thrown habitual criminals into concentration
22camps without trial and boasted, 'I must admit I have
23committed many such illegal acts in my time. But rest
24assured of this, I have resorted to these only when I have
25felt that sound common sense and an inner justice of a
26Germanic and right thinking people are on my side. With
1this in mind, Himmler had confronted the Jewish problem
2too. It was solved uncompromisingly on orders and at the
3dictate of sound common sense." I am not sure I think your
4translation is very good, Mr Irving, I have to say so.
5"One page later Himmler's speech again hinted that Jewish
6women and children also being liquidated". It did not
7hint. It said so in plain terms, did it not?
8 A. [Mr Irving] Well, he does not actually say he is killing them but the
9hint is plainly there. That is what is happening to
10them. If I had said he said that he was killing them,
11then I would have been wrong. He says, it would be wrong
12to allow them to emerge as the avengers against the
13fathers and the children.
14 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Not emerge, grow into the avengers. If you
15are not allowed to grow into something, that means you are
16stopped from growing. That means you are being
17exterminated. That is Mr Rampton's point.
18 A. [Mr Irving] I agree, my Lord. I am being as pedantic as I can in the
19rendition of this. I am saying that he did not actually
20say we are killing them, but he dropped a broad enough
21hint that he is killing them.
22 MR RAMPTON: At the bottom of the page you write the footnote
234: "This page alone was also retyped and possibly inserted
24at a later date in the typescript". But I want to take
25you back in that context to what I would call a deliberate
26distortion of the sense of what Himmler said, to what you
1said about the speech of 5th May, which I cannot find in
2the 1991 edition that is on page 630. It is in the last
3quarter of the page: "On May 5th 1944, however, Himmler
4tried a new version or adapted it to his audience of
5generals. After revealing in now stereo typed sentences
6that he had had uncompromisingly solved the Jewish problem
7in Germany and the German occupied countries, he added:
8I am telling this to you as my comrades. We are all
9soldiers regardless of which uniform we wear. You can
10imagine how I felt executing this soldierly order issued
11to me but I obediently complied and carried it out to the
12best of my convictions. Never before, say you and never
14 A. [Mr Irving] Can I ask just what you are reading from now? I am lost.
15 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Page 630 of the first edition?
16 A. [Mr Irving] OK.
17 MR RAMPTON: I got to last line on 630: "Never before and never
18after did Himmler hint at a Fuhrer order"?
19 A. [Mr Irving] Fuhrer underlined.
20 Q. [Mr Rampton] Fuhrer in italics?
21 A. [Mr Irving] Yes.
22 Q. [Mr Rampton] "Fuhrer order but there is reason to doubt that he dared
23show this passage to his Fuhrer ". I am not bothered
24about that sentence, Mr Irving, because you do set out in
25the next paragraph an extract from the speech of 24th
26May. What I am bothered about is the footnote. "This is
1footnote 3, page 28 of the large face typed script
2containing this pregnant sentence where only Hitler was
3empowered to issue a soldierly order to Himmler, was
4manifestly retyped and inserted in the transcript at later
5date as a different indenting shows".
6 A. [Mr Irving] Later date should be later time, presumably.
7 Q. [Mr Rampton] Well.
8 A. [Mr Irving] I am not saying it was necessarily one or more days later.
9 Q. [Mr Rampton] So, although it is true to say that you set out in this
10book the relevant part of the speech, you do not, as you
11suggested a moment ago, leave the reader to make up his
12own mind as to its effect, because you tell us that it was
13retyped so as Hitler should not see it, the only
14implication of which can be that Himmler was afraid that
15he would be caught by Hitler having told a fib about the
16so-called order.
17 A. [Mr Irving] Can we read on to the last three lines of the next
18paragraph:"One page later Himmler's speech again hinted
19that women and children also being liquidated. The fact
20remains that in his personal meetings with Hitler the
21Reichsfuhrer continued to talk only of the expulsion of
22the Jews even as late as July 1944".
23 Q. [Mr Rampton] You are doing exactly the same thing. You are driving the
24readers' focus away from the possibility, or the
25probability as I would suggest, that Hitler had indeed
26issued such an order to Himmler, are you not?
1 A. [Mr Irving] Let me explain to you about the quality of evidence. If
2you have a handwritten note by a criminal like Himmler,
3relating to a conversation he has had with Hitler which is
4precisely the link we are interested in, and all you find
5in that handwritten note for his own private papers is
6reference to having talked about aussiedlung. This is not
7to be ignored as late as July 1944. It may be you can
8find evidence of equal quality, and I emphasis the word
9"quality", not some general speaking after the war in a
10war crimes trial to save his own neck, but the quality of
11evidence we are looking at when writing this kind of
13 MR JUSTICE GRAY: By July 1944 that must be either euphemism or
14camouflage, must it not, because you have conceded that,
15since October 1943, Hitler knew perfectly well what was
16going on?
17 A. [Mr Irving] Yes.
18 Q. [Mr Justice Gray] So to say that they were only talking of expulsion really
19is not giving a very full and fair picture, is it?
20 A. [Mr Irving] They also talk of other things, so this is when the whole
21conversation starts about selling off Jews in exchange for
22trucks and so on. The outlines are very confused.
23 Q. [Mr Justice Gray] continue to talk only of expulsion?
24 A. [Mr Irving] As far as his own records show.
25 Q. [Mr Justice Gray] Is that not conveying to the reader that, as far as the
26Jews were concerned, Hitler's concern was only with their
1expulsion, nothing more sinister?
2 A. [Mr Irving] To have been completely scientific I should have said, as
3far as the records show, they only continue to talk about
5 MR RAMPTON: Let me repeat my question.
6 A. [Mr Irving] One assumes, when one is writing a book like this, that
7you are writing what the records show.
8 Q. [Mr Rampton] Let me repeat my question because I never got an answer to
9it. It is the fact that you put both speeches into this
10book, but it is also the fact, is it not, that you
11immediately qualify what the reader sees in such a way as
12to suggest that Himmler's reference to a Fuhrer order or
13soldatischen befehl is not to be relied on as evidence
14against Hitler?
15 A. [Mr Irving] I cannot speak for the reasons why the other historians
16felt that they need not mention the fact that these pages
17have been tampered with. I certainly would have been
18delinquent in my duty in quoting these paragraphs without
19mentioning the fact that they were clearly tampered with
20at some time.
21 Q. [Mr Rampton] I am sorry, one final thing about this 1977 edition, I do
22not think it is in the 1991 edition. The footnote at the
23bottom of page 631 says this: "Only Hitler was empowered
24to issue a 'soldierly order' to Himmler"?
25 A. [Mr Irving] Yes, apart from kind of order that he felt the dictates of
26his conscience, which he also speaks about which is a more
1vague kind of order, a kind of personal duty.
2 Q. [Mr Rampton] In 1977, Mr Irving, you are accepting unambiguously that
3Himmler meant what he said, whether it was true or not is
4another question, that he had been ordered by Hitler.
5 A. [Mr Irving] I have expanded those two words soldierly order, put them
6in quotation marks, and said that only Himmler was in a
7position to issue a soldierly order to Himmler.
8 Q. [Mr Rampton] That is correct. There is nothing here about the dictates
9of conscience, is there?
10 A. [Mr Irving] There is, because Himmler himself talks about the dictates
11of conscience. When later on he talks about this
12difficult task he had, is he talking about an order or
13about what he was doing for Germany?
14 Q. [Mr Rampton] This morning I am right in saying -- I am not quoting,
15I am paraphrasing -- you said in effect that that
16reference to the soldatischen befehl was equivocal or
17something along those lines, did you not?
18 A. [Mr Irving] I would have to be shown the transcript of what was
19actually said.
20 Q. [Mr Rampton] I think I asked you whose order, and I think you, with a
21little prompting from me, said the order or the dictates
22of his conscience. We can go back and look.
23 A. [Mr Irving] It might be useful to go back.
24 Q. [Mr Rampton] That was a foolish answer, was it not?
25 A. [Mr Irving] I am not going to answer that unless we know exactly what
26I am alleged to have said.
1 Q. [Mr Rampton] Fair enough.
2 Q. [Mr Rampton] My Lord, now I move on to page 75 of Longerich Part one
3for my last item in this little exercise?
4 A. [Mr Irving] Can I comment in general just for one minute how
5unsatisfactory it is that we are even, so long after the
6war years are over, obliged to scrabble around with these
7scraps of paper trying to work out what happened.
8 MR JUSTICE GRAY: We have no choice, have we?
9 A. [Mr Irving] No, we do not have any choice, my Lord, but you have to
10put yourself in a position of a writer who is trying -- on
11some records, on some matters, you have an immense body of
12evidence which you can draw upon, but on these matter you
13are really fumbling in the dark with occasional little
14gleams coming from documents that then you have to try and
15interpret as you can, on the basis of your knowledge at
16that time. Sometimes it is very easy, looking back in
17hindsight, saying why did you interpret this way or not
18that way, when we know in the meantime a lot more. When
19you are writing at that time and frequently being the
20first person to make use of these records, as I was, it is
21sometimes an unjust judgment, I think. I am not saying
22that defensively at all but I would ask that your Lordship
23bear that in mind.
24 MR RAMPTON: Mr Irving, if you succeed in persuading his
25Lordship that you are an inefficient or incompetent
26historian, that is fine. You will no doubt win this part
1case at least. My suggestion to you yet again, as it has
2been all along, is that you actually deliberately bend the
3evidence to produce a foregone result, or a fore wished
4result, that is to say the exculpation of Adolf Hitler.
5 A. [Mr Irving] Had that been the case, Mr Rampton, I would have left
6these two passages out because nobody no else had found
7these speeches.
8 Q. [Mr Rampton] By doing this, Mr Irving, what you do is this. More than
9occasionally you do leave things out or you give half a
10translation. We have been through some of those and we
11are going to go through some more. On this occasion what
12you have done is take the credit for printing the
13document, even perhaps telling them, as you repeatedly
14said in this court, that "I am the man who found it" but
15then, when you present the document, you tell the reader
16that there are reasons why they should not believe what
17they read in the document.
18 A. [Mr Irving] Well, no doubt your experts would have concealed the fact
19that the pages have been tampered with.
20 Q. [Mr Rampton] I think more likely, though, you should ask them. They
21would simply have said, well this makes it lock as though
22it is another piece of evidence, which makes it look as
23though what happened was done on Hitler's orders, though
24one has to be a bit cautious about it because the document
25which we cannot explain has been not tampered with, the
26document has been retyped. The most likely explanation
1for that is that it is a humdrum secretCourier problem and
2the first version was not good, so it had to be redone.
3 A. [Mr Irving] Precisely on those two pages, on these two speeches,
4I think the coincidence is rather tall.
5 Q. [Mr Rampton] I am not sure that that is right, but I am not going to
6answer because I do not know.
7 A. [Mr Irving] To go back to what you just said earlier, I think I would
8be very surprised if you can satisfy this court that
9I suppressed any material document that was before me at
10the time I wrote either of these versions and, if the
11earlier speech was cut out in the second version, of
12course the second version was an abridged version.
13 Q. [Mr Rampton] It was. Indeed it was. Page 75, please, of
14Dr Longerich's report, the first part, paragraph 1920, you
15mentioned this earlier and I said that I would come to it,
16and I have now got there. It is very short:
17 "Hitler himself stated in a speech addressing
18high officers of the Wehrmacht on 26 May 1944: [that is
19two days after the Himmler speech]: 'By removing the Jew,
20I abolished in Germany the possibility to build up a
21revolutionary core or nucleus. One could, naturally, say
22to me: Yes, couldn't you have solved this more simply-
23or not simply, since all other means would have been more
24complicated - but more humanely? My dear officers, we are
25engaged in a life and death struggle. If our opponents
26win in this struggle then the German people would be
1extirpated." What is your interpretation of those words?
2I take it that that is not a controversial translation and
3that you do not dispute that Hitler said it?
4 A. [Mr Irving] No. This is authentic.
5 Q. [Mr Rampton] It may not be the most elegant translation, but it is
6accurate, is it?
7 A. [Mr Irving] Yes. Once again, it is a speech that I found and used for
8the first time.
9 MR JUSTICE GRAY: What do you make of it?
10 MR RAMPTON: What do you make of it?
11 A. [Mr Irving] Exactly what I made on page 631 of my biography, Hitler's
12War, my Lord.
13 Q. [Mr Rampton] Which edition?
14 A. [Mr Irving] The first edition. Page 631. "When the same generals came
15to the Obersalzberg on May 26, Hitler spoke to them in
16terms that were both more philosophical and less
17ambiguous. He spoke of the intolerance of nature, he
18compared Man to the smallest bacillus on the planet Earth,
19he reminded them how by expelling the Jews from their
20privileged positions he had opened up those same positions
21to the children of hundreds of thousands of ordinary
22working-class Germans and deprived the revolutionary
23masses of their traditional Jewish ferment: Of course,
24people can say,'Yes, but couldn't you have got out of
25it... More humanely?' I have omitted a few words there
26which do not add or subtract really to the sense.
1 Q. [Mr Rampton] What could you not have got out of it?
2 A. [Mr Irving] More humanely.
3 Q. [Mr Rampton] I am reading from the bottom of the page in Longerich,"Man
4kann mir naturlich sagen: Ja, hatten Sie das nicht
5einfacher"- yes?
6 A. [Mr Irving] Yes. Could you not have done it more simply, as
7Mr Browning has translated it.
8 Q. [Mr Rampton] More simply, and then there is the parenthesis, or not
9more simply since all other things would have been ware
10komplizierter gewesen, aber humaner, more humanely, losen
12 A. [Mr Irving] Yes.
13 Q. [Mr Rampton] Not got out of it, solved it, the solution of the Jewish
14question, the losen konnen?
15 A. [Mr Irving] I do not think you are going to make much mileage out of
16it, getting out of something and solving something.
17I have taken the essence of that sentence, stripped out
18this complicated mess that he got into in the middle of
19the sentence and put the essence of the sentence, which is
20could you not get out it more humanely?
21 Q. [Mr Rampton] Do you agree, Mr Irving, that one sensible interpretation
22of that little passage in Hitler's speech is, I could have
23solved it more humanely, I could not have solved it more
24simply, that is to say the Jewish question, since all
25other means would have been more complicated. That is
26what he is saying, is it not?
1 A. [Mr Irving] Yes.
2 Q. [Mr Rampton] And what do you think he means by that?
3 A. [Mr Irving] He means I solved it inhumanely. Or I am solving it
5 Q. [Mr Rampton] Yes. This is May 44, it is less than a year before the
6war ends. He could have solved it more humanely. What is
7the simplest and least humane way of solving such a
9 A. [Mr Irving] He does not actually say I have solved it in the least
10humane way I could. He says, I have solved it less
11humanely, in other words, not more humanely.
12 Q. [Mr Rampton] Exactly.
13 A. [Mr Irving] I do not want to split hairs, but let us go by what the
14document actually says.
15 Q. [Mr Rampton] Answer my question, please.
16 A. [Mr Irving] What is less humanely?
17 Q. [Mr Rampton] Answer my question, please, Mr Irving. What is the
18simplest and the least humane way of getting rid of the
19Jewish problem?
20 A. [Mr Irving] Killing them.
21 Q. [Mr Rampton] Yes. So what was the simplest way, if it was not killing
22them that he was referring to here, and relatively
23inhumane way, that he is referring to?
24 A. [Mr Irving] Well, we do not know what he is specifically referring to,
25but somewhere between humane and the least humane would be
26being woken in the middle of the night by the Gestapo and
1given half an hour to pack your bags and get on to a
2cattle truck.
3 Q. [Mr Rampton] What is the simple way of solving the problem that he is
4referring to here? Simple means than which all other
5means would have been more complicated?
6 A. [Mr Irving] Simple means than which all other means would have been
7more complicated -- this is the kind of tangle he got
8himself into this in this sentence.
9 Q. [Mr Rampton] I am asking you in your role as historian to tell us what
10you think Hitler was referring to by this simple means
11than which all other methods or means were more
12complicated or would have been more complicated?
13 A. [Mr Irving] They could have been anywhere on that scale between humane
14and least humane, and you can put your individual personal
15preference where you want.
16 Q. [Mr Rampton] But, you see, the point is this, is it not, Mr Irving? If
17Hitler on 26th May is talking to the generals of the
18Wehrmacht, as Himmler had been on the 24th and I think the
195th as well, and if Hitler has read what Himmler said to
20the generals on the 5th and 24th of the same month, it
21would not be the very least surprising, would it, if
22Hitler merely goes back over the same ground and says:
23Well, do not object to my inhumanity, it was the simplest
24way of doing it but it had to be done, you know the
25details from what Reichsfuhrer SS Himmler has told you
26earlier this month?
1 A. [Mr Irving] This is one possible interpretation.
2 Q. [Mr Rampton] Where do I find that interpretation coming anywhere from
3you in any of these published works?
4 A. [Mr Irving] I am inclined to stick more closely to what I find in the
5records without doing this quantum leap forwards or
6backwards, and I prefer just to get the records in as much
7volume as I can and allow my readers to draw the
8appropriate conclusions. I would have preferred obviously
9if Adolf Hitler in this speech had said, you know as well
10as I do what is going on at these camps rather as Goebbels
11said in his March 27th 1942 entry, that not very much
12remains of them. There are things happening there that
13beggar description, but unfortunately Hitler does not say
14that in his speeches, so we are left rather in suspense.
15I am sure that the Martin Gilberts or the William Showers
16will be quite happy to extrapolate and read between the
17lines but I am well known for the fact that I do not
19 Q. [Mr Rampton] No, you do not extrapolate at all where the conclusion you
20hit from the extrapolation is one you do not like. Where,
21however, it is necessary to, as it were, what shall we
22say, convert what Hitler actually said into something
23else, you are quite happy to do so. Could I ask you to
24look again at page 631 of this book?
25 A. [Mr Irving] Is this an example of what you just said.
26 Q. [Mr Rampton] Yes, it is.
1 A. [Mr Irving] Right. I am looking.
2 Q. [Mr Rampton] You say at the end of the first complete paragraph: "The
3fact remains that in his personal meetings with Hitler,
4the Reichsfuhrer (Himmler) continued to talk only of the
5expulsion (aussiedlung) of the Jews even as late as July
61944. When the same generals came to the Obsersalzberg",
7so it is the same audience, you see, Mr Irving.
8 A. [Mr Irving] Yes, it is the same army course.
9 Q. [Mr Rampton] Yes. "... on May 26th Hitler spoke to them in terms that
10were both more philosophical and less ambiguous. He spoke
11of the intolerance of nature, he compared Man to the
12smallest bacillus on the planet Earth, he reminded them
13how by expelling the Jews from their privileged positions
14he had opened up those same positions..."
15S" etc.. Did you have the text of what Hitler said before
16you when you wrote that?
17 A. [Mr Irving] I almost certainly had the original text, the whole text.
18In fact I still had the original text as a shorthand
20 Q. [Mr Rampton] Do you think expelling the Jews ----
21 A. [Mr Irving] From their positions as dentists, lawyers and doctors and
22so on?
23 Q. [Mr Rampton] Do you think from their positions as dentists is a fair
24translation in its context of these words: In den ich den
25juden entfernte (?)
26 A. [Mr Irving] Well, it is an even harder use of the word. "Entfernte"
1really means "to remove from".
2 Q. [Mr Rampton] That is how Dr Longerich, he has removed the Jewish
3bacillus from the German body, that is what he means, is
4it not?
5 A. [Mr Irving] That is not the specific passage that I referred to.
6 MR JUSTICE GRAY: It actually means placed at distance?
7 A. [Mr Irving] Yes, but obviously Longerich is referring to a different
8passage. Mr Rampton was talking about expelling them from
9their jobs or their positions as doctors and lawyers and
10so on.
11 MR RAMPTON: When you talk of expulsion in the previous
12paragraph, you put in brackets "aussiedlung"?
13 A. [Mr Irving] Yes.
14 Q. [Mr Rampton] That was not a word Hitler used, was it?
15 A. [Mr Irving] Ausseidlung?
16 Q. [Mr Rampton] Yes. Hitler used the word "entfernte".
17 MR JUSTICE GRAY: That is Himmler who is using that word.
18 MR RAMPTON: Yes, and for your readers you translated expulsion
19as ausseidlung.
20 A. [Mr Irving] In the July 1944 note?
21 Q. [Mr Rampton] I am sorry, Mr Irving, it is not an enormous point, but do
22you see, if you use the word "expulsion" in one paragraph
23and then translate it into aussiedlung?
24 A. [Mr Irving] Yes.
25 Q. [Mr Rampton] Then, in the next paragraph, when are you talking about
26what Hitler said and you use the same word in its present
1participle, he is going to think it is the same word, is
2he not?
3 A. [Mr Irving] Not necessarily. You can translate words backwards and
4forwards two or three times and end up with totally
5different words. "Aussiedlung" in the July 1944 note was
6the original word in the original handwriting of Himmler.
7 Q. [Mr Rampton] Nowhere do I find -- correct me if I am wrong -- in any
8of your published works at least one natural explanation
9of this passage in Hitler's speech on 26th May 1944, which
10is this: "I solved the matter simply in the most simple
11way I could which is by killing them. I am sorry that it
12was not more humane". You could of course have gone on to
13say, I am sure that is what he meant to say. You have to
14explain away what Himmler had said on the previous
15occasion as well. But I do not even find that explanation
16anywhere do I ?
17 A. [Mr Irving] If you look on page 632, Mr Rampton, at the end of the
18Adolf Hitler speech, May 26th 1944.
19 Q. [Mr Rampton] Yes I see that.
20 A. [Mr Irving] We have spirited applause at the end of the speech and
21then the two lines as follows. This is me, David
22Irving. "In Auschwitz"In Auschwitz, the defunct
23paraphernalia of death- idle since late 1943- began to
24clank again as the first trainloads from Hungary arrived."
25Does this not say everything to you?
26 Q. [Mr Rampton] No, it does not. That is exactly my point.
1 A. [Mr Irving] After we have listened to these two speeches set out at
2unusual length, if I may say so, almost the whole page of
3the book, I then say: For once, I give the reader a little
4hint as to what cause and effect is.
5 Q. [Mr Rampton] Why does the poor little reader -- in 91 they have just
6become slave labour at the I G Farben plant but that is a
7different point. We will come to that.
8 A. [Mr Irving] I think this is quite an important point. This is the way
9do things when you write books. You give the document,
10you give the quote and, in case you think the reader is
11not going to get the point, you spell it out in one and a
12half lines. You say what you are going to say, you say
13what you say and then you say what you have said.
14 Q. [Mr Rampton] Mr Irving, surely, in a book like this, had you not been
15set on exculpating Adolf Hitler, you would have said,
16would you not, and evidence, evidence, of what Hitler was
17referring to by the simple means was killing, is that in
18July of 1944 or before, in consequence of the fact that
19the Hungarians had surrendered their 400,000 Jews, by
20order of the high hierarchy in Berlin, Auschwitz started
21up again?
22 A. [Mr Irving] Well, how many lines is that?
23 Q. [Mr Rampton] So what?
24 A. [Mr Irving] You say "so what" but ----
25 Q. [Mr Rampton] You put in what, if I may say so, is a lot of Hitler's
26sludge which you did not need?
1 A. [Mr Irving] Well, I thought -- this is not Hitler sludge. This is a
2pure speech. I am the first person to find it and you
3will find that when I found something for the first time,
4I tended to put more than usual in so that other
5historians can have a bite at it too in case they cannot
6get hold of the original transcript.
7 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Can I, if you are about to leave that,
8Mr Rampton, just ask ----
9 MR RAMPTON: I am, I am going to go away from that now.
10 MR JUSTICE GRAY: --- Mr Irving what the defunct paraphernalia
11of death at Auschwitz actually were?
12 A. [Mr Irving] I prefer to leave it like that at that point.
13 Q. [Mr Justice Gray] No, but I am asking you now, when you wrote that you must
14have had something in mind.
15 A. [Mr Irving] When I wrote that, I assumed that they had gas chambers,
16the whole factory of death paraphernalia, yes, my Lord.
17You will find that when we get to the 1991 edition, that
18sentence has been changed.
19 MR JUSTICE GRAY: No, I follow that. Thank you.
20 MR RAMPTON: My Lord, I am going to leave that aspect of
21Hitler's knowledge in the spring of '44 and move backwards
22in time because it is dealt with as a separate topic in
23Professor Evans. That is what Mr Irving calls the
24Schlegelberger note.
25 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Can we spell that for the benefit of the
1 MR RAMPTON: It is "S C H L E G E B E R G E R". Before I come
2on to this and, Mr Irving, I call it the so-called
3Schlegelberger note because, whatever you may think, we
4and I, that is to say, are by no means certain that that
5is what it ought to be called. The reasons for that will
6emerge in a moment. But before we start on this topic,
7you just said about Hitler's May 26th speech that you do
8not extrapolate "I am inclined to stick more closely to
9what we find in the record with no quantum leap", yes?
10 A. [Mr Irving] Yes.
11 Q. [Mr Rampton] Well, bear that in mind, will you, as we look at your
12treatment of this particular document. My Lord, it
13starts, this exercise, which I am afraid is a little bit
14tedious, however it must be done, on page 363 of Professor
15Evans' report.
16 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Have we got the Schlegelberger note
17somewhere? Is it worth looking at that or not?
18 MR RAMPTON: It certainly is. It will be necessary to look at
19it. Yes, it will.
20 A. [Mr Irving] I have the entire file with the original just in case we
21need it.
22 Q. [Mr Rampton] The best copy, well, there are two copies of it. There is
23a translation of it at the top of page 364 of Professor
25 MR JUSTICE GRAY: That will do, I suspect.
26 MR RAMPTON: Well, no, it will not, I am afraid, because, as
1often in these cases, the markings on the note may be
2thought to have some significance. It is necessary to
3look at the actual note. That, my Lord, is to be found in
4two places. It is in H1 (viii) at page 368, which is the
5Evans' copy, but it is also to be found on Mr Irving's web
6site -- in some senses this is a more satisfactory copy --
7at page 1561 of file D8(iv).
8 MR JUSTICE GRAY: I have not got that either -- yes, I have.
9That is better actually.
10 MR RAMPTON: Your Lordship might appreciate looking at that one
12 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Instead?
13 MR RAMPTON: No both, and maybe put the Evans one away. That
14is matter for your Lordship entirely. It is the same
16 MR JUSTICE GRAY: I will stick with the one I have got. Page,
17sorry? I did not catch that in the web site.
18 MR RAMPTON: In the Evans' one, my Lord?
19 MR JUSTICE GRAY: No, the web site one.
20 MR RAMPTON: Web site one is 1561. It is in a box at the top
21of the page.
22 A. [Mr Irving] That has the translation with it?
23 Q. [Mr Rampton] Pardon?
24 A. [Mr Irving] That has the translation with it.
25 Q. [Mr Rampton] It does too.
26 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Have you got it?
1 A. [Mr Irving] I have it here.
2 MR RAMPTON: You translate it as meaning: "Mr Reich Minister
3Lammers told me, informed me, that the Fuhrer had
4repeatedly declared to him that he wants to hear the
5solution of the Jewish problem has been postponed until
6after the war is over". Which are the words which say
7that he wants to hear?
8 A. [Mr Irving] "Wissen", he wants to know that, he wants to -- I am
9trying to remain, adhere as closely as possible to the
10sense of the document, "wissen volle".
11 Q. [Mr Rampton] I see. Then you go on: "That being so, the current
12discussions are of purely theoretical value, Mr Reich
13Minister Lammers' opinion. He will moreover take pains to
14ensure that, whatever happens, no fundamental decisions
15are taken without his knowledge in consequence of a
16surprise briefing by any third party."
17 Now, that document is undated, is it not?
18 A. [Mr Irving] That is undated, yes.
19 Q. [Mr Rampton] It comes from a file of somewhat miscellaneous documents,
20does it not?
21 A. [Mr Irving] Well, it is a Ministry of Justice file headed "Treatment
22of the Jews".
23 Q. [Mr Rampton] Yes?
24 A. [Mr Irving] "The Reichs Ministry of Justice", the label on the jacket
25of the file is [German].
26 Q. [Mr Rampton] My understanding, however, is that this file was one that
1was used by the Allies or may even have been put together
2by the Allies; is that right?
3 A. [Mr Irving] A photocopy of the file was made at the 777 Berlin
4Document Centre, and the photocopies were supplied to the
5prosecution authorities at Nuremberg, where they were
6handled by Dr Kempner.
7 Q. [Mr Rampton] Can you look -- I do not want to read it out because it is
8really too boring in a sense -- I wonder if you could
9look, read to yourself, and I would ask your Lordship to
10do the same, please, paragraphs 4, 5, 6 and 7, the first
11sentence of 7, perhaps the whole of 7, of Professor Evans'
12report starting on page 364? To hear me read it out would
13drive everybody mad, I am sure.
14 A. [Mr Irving] Yes, he obviously has problems with it.
15 Q. [Mr Rampton] Well, do you not?
16 A. [Mr Irving] Not at all.
17 Q. [Mr Rampton] Have you read the whole of that?
18 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Just pause a moment. I am sure Mr Irving
19knows it by heart. I do not.
20 A. [Mr Irving] I am rather amused by the problems he has with it. This
21is one document that just does not fit into the Holocaust
22historians' repertoire.
23 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Yes.
24 MR RAMPTON: You have been absolutely categorical that this
25document comes from March 1942, have you not, Mr Irving?
26 A. [Mr Irving] Yes, the end of March or early April.
1 Q. [Mr Rampton] Do you see on your copy in the web site the name
3 A. [Mr Irving] Yes.
4 Q. [Mr Rampton] What do you think of those letters or digits which appear
5before Mr Freisler's name?
6 A. [Mr Irving] Staatssekretar, STS, big S, little T -- this is old German
7handwriting -- [German] handwriting it is called --
8capital S, little T, full stop, S, Staatssekretar. He was
9State secretary in the Ministry of Justice.
10 Q. [Mr Rampton] Why has it got his name on it?
11 A. [Mr Irving] That is the routing list. It is going to go, first of
12all, to the State Secretary, then to the person whose
13department is listed on the next line, department 4, then
14to department 5. Normally, you would expect there to be a
15little tick or a check mark next to it or an initial to
16indicate that, yes, they have seen it. So this is not a
17man who has written it. This is who it is intended for.
18 Q. [Mr Rampton] Then, please, let us remind ourselves of what you said
19about this document. First of all, page 464 of Hitler's
20War 1991. When did you discover this document, by the
22 A. [Mr Irving] In stages, if I may put it like that. Beginning in 1970,
23I found the reference in a summary of it, and then
24I received the actual document itself from a German
25historian in about 1978 and simultaneously, I believe,
26from the United States national archives.
1 Q. [Mr Rampton] You did not have it then when you first -- I do not know
2if it is in '77 Hitler's War or not. I am not interested
3if it is?
4 MR JUSTICE GRAY: It could not be if he did not have it until
6 MR RAMPTON: No, I would not have thought ----
7 A. [Mr Irving] My Lord, let me be just slightly more specific. Your
8Lordship will recall that I said that photocopies went to
9the prosecution authorities in Nuremberg. The location of
10the origin, of the originals, I do not know thereafter,
11but the photocopies remained in Nuremberg.
12 The Americans produced what was called a staff
13evidence analysis sheet which listed the contents of that
14little clip of documents which I have here in my hand. It
15listed five documents in that clip, and document No. 4 was
16note stating that Hitler intended to postpone solution of
17the Jewish problem until after the war which, obviously,
18is something which immediately attracted my attention.
19 This staff evidence analysis sheet is dated June
2022nd 1946, in the middle of the Nuremberg trials, in other
21words. When I went to the file which this referenced, all
22the other documents, the photocopies, were in that file.
23This one had vanished. It took some years to locate the
24originals with the original file still in it, the original
25document still in it. I can only surmise that this is
26possibly totally uncalled for, that the allied prosecution
1authorities in Nuremberg did not want that document to
3 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Why not?
4 A. [Mr Irving] Because it would have been used by Lammers, in particular,
5who was on trial in 1947 as a document to mitigate
6punishment or in some way to disculpate himself for any
7part in the Final Solution; that he would have pointed out
8that, as far as he knew, Hitler had ordered that nothing
9was to happen. We conducted quite a paper trail.
10I contacted Mr Kempner which drew up this staff analysis
11sheet and we had quite a long search for it.
12 MR JUSTICE GRAY: You eventually got it in about '78?
13 A. [Mr Irving] Yes, a rival historian got hold of the original document
14Professor Jekkel(?) because by that time the German
15Government archives had processed the file and found it.
16But it took 23 years just to process that file.
17 MR RAMPTON: Can we please go, therefore, to page 464 of
18Hitler's War?
19 A. [Mr Irving] Of the?
20 Q. [Mr Rampton] 1991. My Lord, that is volume 2, but your Lordship will
21shortly need volume 1 because I am going to refer to the
22introduction. I want to look at the text first.
23 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Yes, I have 464.
24 MR RAMPTON: We are going to start with the paragraph in the
25middle of the page: "Early in March 1942". Do you have
26that, Mr Irving? I will wait until you have it.
1 A. [Mr Irving] I am looking at the wrong volume.
2 Q. [Mr Rampton] Did you not have your own book copy, as it were?
3 A. [Mr Irving] This is the first edition. I am the only person in this
4courtroom who has not got a copy of my second edition.
5 Q. [Mr Rampton] You must get one.
6 MR JUSTICE GRAY: How does one tell the date of this document?
7 MR RAMPTON: Well, this is ----
8 A. [Mr Irving] Internal.
9 MR RAMPTON: --- one of the interesting questions. It is one
10of the reasons, my Lord, why one cannot ----
11 A. [Mr Irving] Internal evidence, my Lord.
12 MR RAMPTON: --- we submit make any certain categorical
13assertions about what it means, the interpretation and
14conclusions to be drawn from it. But that is what I am
15going to do sooner or later.
16 A. [Mr Irving] Yes, I have it now.
17 Q. [Mr Rampton] Probably later. All right. Early in March 1942, in fact,
18the date was, I think, 6th March, was it not?
19 A. [Mr Irving] That is correct.
20 Q. [Mr Rampton] We have the document. We are going to look at it along
21the line, Mr Irving. "Heydrich held a second
22inter ministerial conference to examine the awkward
23problem posed by half and quarter Jews. If allowed to
24remain, they might perhaps be sterilized. A 'top level'
25opinion - i.e. Hitler's - was quoted to the effect that
26they must draw a sharp distinction between Jews and
1non-Jews, as it would not be acceptable for a mini-race of
2semi-Jews to be perpetuated in law. But this
3classification process would call for a colossal
4administrative effort, so the idea was shelved. A
5subsequent memorandum in Reich Justice Ministry files
6cited this highly significant statement by Hans Lammers,
7head of the Reich Chancellery: 'The Fuhrer has repeatedly
8stated that he wants the solution of the Jewish Problem
9postponed until after the war is over'". Then I do not
10think one needs both with the next sentence, do you agree,
11Mr Irving?
12 A. [Mr Irving] No.
13 Q. [Mr Rampton] Now we turn, if may, to the introduction on page 18. You
14make a reference in the middle of page 18 to the Night of
15Broken Glass and say something about "On orders from the
16very highest level". That is something, the Night of
17Broken Glass, we will have to deal with, I am afraid, in
18the future. You write: "Every over historian has shut
19his eyes and hoped that this horrid, inconvenient document
20would somehow go away"?
21 A. [Mr Irving] That is a different context.
22 Q. [Mr Rampton] No, no, of course it is, but I am reading it for context.
23"But it has been joined by others", that is to say, other
24horrid inconvenient documents that will not go away, "like
25the extraordinary note dictated by Staatssekretar
26Schlegelberger in the Reich Ministry of Justice in the
1spring of 1942: 'Reich Minister Lammers', this states,
2referring to Hitler's top civil servant, 'informed me that
3the Fuhrer has repeatedly pronounced that he wants the
4solution of the Jewish Question put off until after the
5war is over'."
6 Can I just pause there? You notice there is a
7slide in the tense that you use there (which is what we in
8English call the perfect tense) to what we see in your
9translation on the web site where you use the pluperfect?
10 A. [Mr Irving] Well, I would not have bothered to look at the original
11translation each item. I would have just retranslated the
12document each time I wanted to use it.
13 Q. [Mr Rampton] What I want to know is which is correct, having regard to
14the original German? There is a difference, is there not,
15"the Fuhrer has repeatedly" and "the Fuhrer had
16repeatedly", unless we are talking about reported speech.
17 A. [Mr Irving] We are in trouble, Mr Rampton. It is the notorious
18subjunctive again.
19 Q. [Mr Rampton] We are in trouble?
20 A. [Mr Irving] We are in trouble. We had problems with the subjunctive
21before, and with the subjunctive it is not quite so easy
22to work out what is perfect tense and what is pluperfect
24 Q. [Mr Rampton] No, that is why I am asking you for help. I am asking you
25which of your alternative translations (and they are
26different) you think is correct.
1 A. [Mr Irving] Well, "Reich Minister Lammers informed me that the Fuhrer
2had told him repeatedly" or that "the Fuhrer has told him
3repeatedly". [German]. It is the subjunctive and we are
5 MR JUSTICE GRAY: But it is present subjunctive, not past
6subjunctive, is it not?
7 A. [Mr Irving] I bow to your Lordship's wisdom.
8 Q. [Mr Justice Gray] No, you tell me because I am not as good at German as you
10 A. [Mr Irving] It can be translated adequately either way, my Lord,
11without any malice in a particular direction, unless
12Mr Rampton wants to make a particular thing of it.
13 MR RAMPTON: No, I do not want to make a particular thing about
14it. You see, my problem with this document is that --
15I am not an historian; I am not trying to prove anything
16here in relation to history -- it is not an easy
18 A. [Mr Irving] It is not an easy document for your friends, no.
19 Q. [Mr Rampton] It does not deserve -- what?
20 A. [Mr Irving] It is not an easy document for your friends at all,
21I agree.
22 Q. [Mr Rampton] No, no, it is not an easy document for any open-minded
23historian to deal with. It has no date. There is a doubt
24about the tense. We have seen that already. Professor
25Evans' report tells us -- it may be wrong -- that even the
26way in which it is filed does not give us much clue to its
2 A. [Mr Irving] He may not have seen the staff evidence analysis sheet
3which I saw back in 1970, but then again I do not think he
4has done the work that I have.
5 Q. [Mr Rampton] Do you understand what I am saying?
6 A. [Mr Irving] Yes.
7 Q. [Mr Rampton] If the German translation is difficult because it is not
8clear -- we will have to get Dr Longerich to tell us about
9this in due course -- but if the German is difficult in
10translation and it is uncertain whether it is a perfect or
11a pluperfect that is being used, that is quite an
12important question for an historian because if it is the
13pluperfect that is being used, then it may very well be
14that all Lammers is saying is that he remembers, as we all
15know, that in the early years of the war Hitler had been
16saying, "We will put this off to the end of the war and
17then we will send them all to Madagascar". Do you
19 A. [Mr Irving] Yes. That would be one escape route if it was possible,
20but I think it would be the most perverse possible
21translation or interpretation of this document.
22 Q. [Mr Rampton] It is just a little point along the historian's road when
23he is trying to reach a tentative conclusion about where
24this document is to be placed in time and in topic and,
25therefore, what its significance is?
26 A. [Mr Irving] Being "placed in time", do you mean when it was actually
1composed or what period it is referring to?
2 Q. [Mr Rampton] (A) when it was composed; (B) what period it is referring
3to, and (C) what topic it is dealing with when it uses the
4words "die Losung der Judenfrage"?
5 A. [Mr Irving] Yes.
6 Q. [Mr Rampton] You have, if I may say so, taken a big jump into space and
7declared, in effect, on numerous occasions that it is firm
8evidence of Hitler's determination in March 1942 or April
91942 that the Jewish Solution or the Solution of the
10Jewish Question should be put off until the end of the
11war, have you not?
12 A. [Mr Irving] Put on the back burner, yes. Let me put it this way
13round. If the document had said not what it does say, but
14if the document had said, "The Fuhrer has repeatedly
15declared that he wants the Jewish Problem solved
16immediately in the most radical possible means", there is
17not an historian in this room who would say, "Well, it
18quite clearly refers to the Final Solution in the brutal
19sense of killing", but because it says Hitler saying,
20"Let's put it on the back burner", everybody starts
21getting into a fuss and saying, "Oh, dear, what does it
22mean? When was it written?"
23 Q. [Mr Rampton] I agree.
24 A. [Mr Irving] I appreciate problems it causes for you.
25 Q. [Mr Rampton] I agree, if the document were dated to, let us say,
26sometime in the early 1941, and that is what it said, if
1it were dated early 1941 and that is what it said, then,
2of course, historians would be excited about it?
3 A. [Mr Irving] But, Mr Rampton, you will notice that at the top left-hand
4corner of the document there are serial numbers that have
5been stamped 01/111 and so on, and we are in the fortunate
6position of knowing what the other documents in that file
7were and what date they were, so what it was filed between
8which is a very reasonable indication of approximately
9what week and month it was generated.
10 Q. [Mr Rampton] If you take the trouble to read Professor Evans' report at
11any rate before you cross-examine ----
12 A. [Mr Irving] Well, he, apparently, knows a great deal less about this
13than I do.
14 Q. [Mr Rampton] Please, Mr Irving. Calm down and let me finish my
15question. You will find all of this laid out with great
16care and detail (which I am certainly not going to go
17through now) ----
18 A. [Mr Irving] Has he mentioned the staff evidence analysis sheets? I do
19not think so.
20 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Mr Rampton, does it simplify matters if I say
21I am prepared to accept that there is good internal
22evidence that it is March or thereabouts 1942?
23 MR RAMPTON: No, I really think that would be unsafe. There is
24some internal evidence.
25 MR JUSTICE GRAY: All right. Just assume that, but really then
26it may become a question of what the Judenfrage was?
1 A. [Mr Irving] I agree. But even that I am not ----
2 MR JUSTICE GRAY: I am not clear, sorry, you are getting it
3from every direction.
4 MR RAMPTON: I am sorry. Your Lordship was interrupted by what
5I call harassment from my right.
6 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Can I harass you and just ask you, where does
7one find the material on which Professor Evans bases his
8proposition, namely that the Jewish question that is being
9discussed is the problem of half-Jews, as I think they
10were called?
11 MR RAMPTON: This is one of the things that one can see if one
12goes back to page 464 as a starting point in Mr Irving's
13book, he himself draws attention to that.
14 A. [Mr Irving] Oh, yes. What was at that time actuel was the question of
15who is a Jew, which I think they still cannot decide
17 Q. [Mr Rampton] Your Lordship can see the first part of the main paragraph
18in the middle of page 464 makes reference to this what is
19called the "Mischling" question. It says, quite
20correctly, that Heydrich held a second conference all
21about that on 6th -- it does not give the date, but the
22date is 6th March. You will find that, my Lord, on page
23375. It may be one should start earlier, but this is a
24long and detailed part of Professor Evans' report and I do
25not believe that it is going to help anybody if I read out
26great chunks from it at the moment.
1 A. [Mr Irving] But is it not a reasonable inference that this document,
2therefore, came after that conference?
3 Q. [Mr Rampton] It is certainly one of the available inferences and it is
4one which Professor Evans himself has said in his report
5that he thinks is the likeliest?
6 A. [Mr Irving] So we have wasted an awful lot of the court's time ----
7 Q. [Mr Rampton] No, we have not, Mr Irving, because there are problems
8with that interpretation, and this is my whole point. You
9will not face up to the problems of the documents which
10you embrace so enthusiastically. You will just have to be
11patient until I tell you what I believe the problems may
13 My Lord, I wonder if your Lordship might read
14from paragraph 7 on page 374 and going down to paragraph 9
15on page 376? We have the source documents here.
16 MR JUSTICE GRAY: To the end of 9?
17 MR RAMPTON: Sorry, my Lord, end of 9, yes, if your Lordship
18pleases, yes. That will do fine.
19 MR JUSTICE GRAY: I had read that before. That is what I would
20be interested to know what Mr Irving says about that.
21 MR RAMPTON: So would I, particularly since, as one can see
22from the original document -- I am not asking your
23Lordship to look at it -- the conference about the
24Mischling and the Mischeyer is actually headed "Ent
25Losung der Judenfrage" whereas one notices that Lammers'
26statement, or the note of Lammers' statement, refers only
1to the "Losung".
2 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Well, there would be many Juden frager, would
3there not?
4 MR RAMPTON: Yes, precisely, of which I have no doubt the
5mischlinge one was a knotty one, because I think the
6evidence is that Hitler himself did not think that it was
7a good idea to split marriages and send what might be
8called half and halfs off on the trains. That is right,
9is it not?
10 A. [Mr Irving] If you were to pursue this line of argument, the document
11would say that the solution of this Jewish problem would
12need to be postponed.
13 Q. [Mr Rampton] Exactly, Mr Irving.
14 A. [Mr Irving] He is talking about the solution of the Jewish problem
16 Q. [Mr Rampton] That is another problem with the document. You would have
17expected it to say diese Juden frager?
18 A. [Mr Irving] Of this Jewish problem, but it does not, of course.
19 Q. [Mr Rampton] I quite agree.
20 A. [Mr Irving] So that does not help you very much.
21 Q. [Mr Rampton] I am not looking for help, Mr Irving. You see, you have
22completely the wrong end of the stick.
23 A. [Mr Irving] I am trying to help you because I am enjoying this.
24 Q. [Mr Rampton] You are not helping me at all because you are always
25punting to the same end of the pond. I am not. I am in
26the middle and I am looking at all the lily pads around me
1and wondering what the answer is. I do not think it is
2clear that this is a general statement by Hitler in the
3context of the file in which it was found, which would be
4a floating statement of no significance at all, that
5Hitler has said yesterday, "Stop all this talk about
6mischlinge because I have said that the whole Jewish
7question is to go off to the end of the war". I do not
8think that is the only possible explanation. I think
9anybody who leaps on that band wagon and ignores all the
10others is not being a respectable and competent historian.
11 A. [Mr Irving] You are not, with respect, being a respectable and
12competent counsel if you ignore the document that
13immediately precede this note, which is Schlegelberger
14writing to Lammas, saying that ugly things seem to be
15looming ahead, I really think I ought to talk about this
16with you before we go any further. Lammas then writes
17back to him saying, no, the Fuhrer does not want to be
18bothered with this kind of thing. He wants all the Jewish
19problem postponed until the end of the war.
20 Q. [Mr Rampton] You say, write back. Where is Schlegelberger's signature
21on that thing?
22 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Could I see it, because are you assuming
23I know. What is this note about ugly things going on
24because that would be very relevant, it seems to me?
25 A. [Mr Irving] It is immediately preceding this in the file.
26 MR JUSTICE GRAY: In the web site?
1 A. [Mr Irving] Well, it is certainly in the actual file, which is the
2file here. While they are looking for it, I will just get
3it to the front. It would be on the web site definitely.
4 MR JUSTICE GRAY: It may not have been reproduced.
5 MR RAMPTON: I am certainly not aware of it.
6 A. [Mr Irving] It is probably page 1564 of the web site just off the top
7of my head. Yes, here it is. If I can just read it
8straight out while you are looking for it, my Lord, it is
9March 12th 1942. This is six days after the conference.
10 MR RAMPTON: Mr Irving, I have the original German here,
11I think. Can you just identify it and then give it to his
12Lordship to look at?
13 MR JUSTICE GRAY: I think we have found it in the web site.
14 MR RAMPTON: I have not got the web site file. I just want to
15make sure that we are talking about the same document?
16 A. [Mr Irving] It is from the same Justice Ministry file. It is
17paginated in that series 01/109, in the original wartime
18series, it is just two documents ahead of the
19Schlegelberger note, dated March 12th 1942:
20 "Dear Reichs Minister Dr Lammas, I have just
21been briefed by my personal assistant on the outcome of
22the conference of March 6th concerning the treatment of
23Jews and mixed race Jews. I am still awaiting the
24official protocol. After the briefing by my personal
25assistant there appear to be decisions in preparation
26which for the larger part I consider to be quite out of
1the question, quite impossible, as the outcome of the
2conferences at which an adviser or a personal assistant of
3your house has also taken part will form the basis for the
4Fuhrer's decision. I would urgently request that I can
5have in good time a conversation with you in person, a
6personal conversation with you, about the matter. As soon
7as the protocol of the session is in front of me, I will
8allow myself to telephone you and to ask you whether and
9when we can have that talk."
10 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Mr Irving, that seems to me to run quite
11counter to the proposition for which you contend because
12that is dealing entirely with the problem of Juden and
14 A. [Mr Irving] Jews and mixed race. "The Jews and" I think is
15significant there. But, be that as it may, my Lord, even
16if you are right, and I am sure your Lordship is right,
17I hesitate to say that your Lordship is wrong in that
18matter, but, even if you are right, what I am saying is,
19and I have reason for saying this, that the outcome was
20the note from Lammas to Schlegelberger, which effectively
21says that the Fuhrer does not want to be bothered about
22this, he wants this whole thing, he wants the solution to
23the Jewish problem postponed until the war is over. If
24I just continue that, we also know from interrogations of
25people who were at the conferences that Lammas came back
26to them and said he had mentioned it to the Fuhrer with
1precisely that outcome. The Fuhrer said he did not want
2to be bothered with this kind of stuff, postpone it all
3until the war is over.
4 MR JUSTICE GRAY: All of that points, so far as I see it at the
5moment, to this having been the narrow question of, if one
6can call it, mischlinge?
7 A. [Mr Irving] Juden und mischlinge.
8 Q. [Mr Justice Gray] I follow that that phraseology is used, but that does not
9seem to me to be tremendously significant, given the whole
10context of the reference to the conference on 6th March.
11 A. [Mr Irving] I appreciate this is one possible interpretation if you
12ignore the fact that the Schlegelberger memorandum says
13die losung der juden frager (?), the solution of the
14Jewish problems, not this Jewish problem.
15 Q. [Mr Justice Gray] I have the point about der rather than dies.
16 MR RAMPTON: That points in one direction, Mr Irving. The
17other considerations point in the opposite direction,
18including, if I may -- I do not know, I am completely
19ignorant but I am told that this is a good point by those
20like you that have inspected the file. The file number on
21the top right-hand side of what you call the
22Schlegelberger memo, I prefer for safety sake to call it
23the Freisler document, is 153.
24 A. [Mr Irving] Yes, with the handwritten number 153 on it?
25 Q. [Mr Rampton] No. There is stamp on the one I have.
26 A. [Mr Irving] Yes, but the one I am looking at is stamped on the left.
1 Q. [Mr Rampton] I know you are looking at your web site copy.
2 A. [Mr Irving] No. I am looking at the one on the left. This is the
3original document with the stamp on the left.
4 Q. [Mr Rampton] So you say, but the other document with 12th March 1942
5has the stamp number 155 on it.
6 A. [Mr Irving] Well I do not have ----
7 Q. [Mr Rampton] You will find it in H1 (vii) at page 371.
8 A. [Mr Irving] Previously, of course, you could not find it. Now you can
9find it. Yes.
10 Q. [Mr Rampton] There is no evidence, is there, that these file page
11numbers are contradictory? One is 109 followed by 111.
12 A. [Mr Irving] This is why we cannot be absolutely certain as to exactly
13which sequence within the month they are shuffled.
14 Q. [Mr Rampton] You cannot assert with any confidence that the anonymous
15undated Freisler document was generated or prompted by the
16dated and signed note of the 12th March 1942, can you?
17 A. [Mr Irving] Within the space of a month you can be pretty certain.
18You can say it was after March 6th.
19 Q. [Mr Rampton] If this relates to the question of the mischlinge at all?
20 A. [Mr Irving] Well, it was within this file and we know where it is
21placed in the file, and there are no documents outside
22that time frame, so on a high degree of probability that
23is the time, and we know when, reasonable from other
24documents, you know when the conversation took place
25between Schlegelberger and Lammas.
26 Q. [Mr Rampton] Now, Mr Irving, consider a problem of real substance.
1 A. [Mr Irving] The problem of real substance is that I am the only
2historian to mention these documents. Everybody else
3pretends they do not exist, although they have ----
4 Q. [Mr Rampton] Mr Irving, you have grasped it with your usual boyish
5enthusiasm because you think it acquits Adolf Hitler of
6any hand in the mass murder of Jews.
7 A. [Mr Irving] Which is precisely why the other historians have not even
8mentioned it.
9 Q. [Mr Rampton] Mr Irving, that was not what I was going to ask you
10about. The problem you do not seem to have faced up to is
11this. I am going to ask you a question first. What in
12your version of history was in Hitler's mind the entlosung
13(?), and we notice this document does not use that word,
14to be put into effect after the war in Hitler's mind in
15March 1942?
16 A. [Mr Irving] Well, at this time, of course, as you know, I will say he
17was talking about deportation overseas, or deportation
18beyond the pale.
19 Q. [Mr Rampton] As a first step to that desirable end beyond the pale,
20were the deportations from the Outreich and the
22 A. [Mr Irving] Yes.
23 Q. [Mr Rampton] Those had already begun in September or October 1941?
24 A. [Mr Irving] That is correct.
25 Q. [Mr Rampton] What on earth then would it mean for a high ranking Civil
26Servant such as Lammas to say: Hitler wants that which has
1already been put into effect on his own orders of
2September 1941 to be postponed until the end of the war?
3 A. [Mr Irving] Can you look at the full text of the document? The full
4text of document says: "The Fuhrer has repeatedly said
5that he wants the solution of the Jewish problem postponed
6until the war is over and for this reason he does not want
7all this continued talking about it. He does not want all
8this to-ing and fro-ing within the ministry, but this is
9at the height of the military crisis".
10 Q. [Mr Rampton] That goes back right into the circle which his Lordship
11has drawn for you, does it not? If it is a general
12statement by Hitler about the losung of the Jewish
13question which is to be treated as evidence of Hitler's
14intention as at the 3rd or 12th March 1942, then it is a
15nonsense, because that entlosung has already been put into
16operation. It started in October 1941.
17 MR JUSTICE GRAY: And it is still in operation, would that that
18not be right.
19 MR RAMPTON: Yes, and it is still going on.
20 A. [Mr Irving] Yes, it is.
21 Q. [Mr Rampton] It makes absolute nonsense. If, on the other hand, this
22is a limited reference to the mischlinge question being
23discussed by Heydrich and his colleagues, then it makes
24perfect sense, it does not say that but this is the proper
25interpretation, this part of the losung has to be
26deferred. Hitler is not interested in it.
1 A. [Mr Irving] That is not exactly what it says. It does not say this
2solution of this Jewish problem, and does not this
3document also therefore destroy your Riegner document
4which you quoted to the court with Adolf Hitler allegedly
5saying he wanted everything finished this year, for which
6purpose they are using the prussic acid, I am sure you
7remember the content of the Riegner document, which is
8only a week or two after this one. If you were right, this
9would destroy that.
10 MR JUSTICE GRAY: No, I would not go down that road.
11 MR RAMPTON: I am not going to. I am not picking up that
13 A. [Mr Irving] Can I also remind you, of course, that this is not
14Hitler's word? This is second hand already. This is
15Schlegelberger being told by Lammas what Hitler had said
16to him, with Schlegelberger making the note.
17 Q. [Mr Rampton] Let us try and get a little common sense into this, shall
19 A. [Mr Irving] Do not attach too much importance to whether it is losung
20or entlosung that is the word that is being used.
21 Q. [Mr Rampton] I am not, but it is one of the little things that, though
22significant to an historian, is not decisive. I am not
23saying that. Let us use common sense and objectivity.
24During this period and for seven months up to this period,
25according to you, Hitler's version of the losung or the
26entlosung has been in top gear.
1 A. [Mr Irving] It has been gathering momentum, first one City then
3 Q. [Mr Rampton] It would not make any sense for Lammas to report that
4Hitler wants what is now taking place on his command to be
5postponed until the end of war, would it? So we are not
6talking about any general losung plainly?
7 A. [Mr Irving] We are talking about the overall completion of every I
8dotted and every T crossed.
9 Q. [Mr Rampton] Exactly, including including the solution of the
10mischlinge problem. Do you follow?
11 A. [Mr Irving] Can we stand back from these trivia and look at the
12overall effect of the document? This is a high level
13diamond document of unquestioned integrity, stating that
14Hitler wants the solution of the Jewish problem postponed
15until after the war is over and that is what the document
16states. We do not have to read between lines any more
17unless you want to try and devalue the document.
18 Q. [Mr Rampton] No. I am not trying to devalue the document. I am trying
19to help you, if I may put it so patronisingly, to see the
20light because you just will not, will you? Here you have
21a document which refers to Hitler having said he wants the
22solution of the Jewish question postponed until after the
23war. If you extract it from all its historical, rip it off
24the wall, take it out of its historical context, then
25yes, of course, it is a sort of diamond or golden sword
26that you like to brandish. But, if you put it in its
1historical context, your interpretation makes no sense
2whatsoever, does it?
3 A. [Mr Irving] Equally less does your interpretation make any sense, if
4I may say so.
5 Q. [Mr Rampton] Now, consider another possibility.
6 A. [Mr Irving] You are putting the narrowest possible definition on this
7extraordinary broad phrase, the solution of the Jewish
8problem. We have been hearing for days how the Final
9Solution of the Jewish problem was the Holocaust. Here is
10a document saying he wants it all postponed until after
11the war is over and suddenly you say this document is of
12no value at all, and all your historians have never
13mentioned it until now they are forced to because I have
14put it in this court.
15 Q. [Mr Rampton] Did you write to Professor Jekel?
16 A. [Mr Irving] Yes.
17 Q. [Mr Rampton] Who I think actually found this document?
18 A. [Mr Irving] When I pointed him where to find it.
19 Q. [Mr Rampton] He wrote an article in a German newspaper first off about
20this, did he not?
21 A. [Mr Irving] If you remember, I found the staff evidence analysis sheet
22which pointed out the document had once existed.
23 Q. [Mr Rampton] The fact is, whenever you have said, as you so frequently
24have, that all the other historians have ignored this,
25Abraham Jekel is, I suppose, is a historian?
26 A. [Mr Irving] When does he claim to have found it?
1 Q. [Mr Rampton] I do not know. I thought you just conceded that he did.
2 A. [Mr Irving] If it is a question of who was first.
3 Q. [Mr Rampton] But he certainly has not ignored it, has he?
4 A. [Mr Irving] Yes, he cannot ignore it now.
5 MR JUSTICE GRAY: We are fencing a little bit.
6 MR RAMPTON: I am not interested in defending Professor Jekel
7any more than I am Professor Evans. I am sure they can
8both fight for themselves. On 28th February 1978 you
9wrote to Professor Jekel in German from London, saying
10that you thought that this document could date anywhere
11between October 1941 and March 1942, did you not?
12 A. [Mr Irving] Yes.
13 Q. [Mr Rampton] That is actually a recognition of yet another explanation
14of this curious document, is it not?
15 A. [Mr Irving] In the meantime, of course, I have checked on the
16interrogations of everybody who was present at that
17session in 1942, so we know much more narrowly when the
18document originates from.
19 Q. [Mr Rampton] So you say, but one reasonable interpretation of this
21 A. [Mr Irving] You say so I say, that is why I am standing here in the
22witness box.
23 Q. [Mr Rampton] I know. I am only saying that because I have not read
24those things myself. I do not actually have to say that I
25need to rely on what you say in the witness box.
26 A. [Mr Irving] Mr Rampton, I would not say something in the witness box
1under oath if I was not speaking the truth.
2 Q. [Mr Rampton] I have to say, I am afraid, Mr Irving, on a number of
3occasions in this court you have said things from the
4witness box which I do not accept as being the truth and
5which I will characterise it at the end of the case as
6being knowingly untrue.
7 A. [Mr Irving] There is of course a solution for that kind of problem
8known as the Aitken solution and, if you want to go that
9road, you can, but I think you will find it very
11 MR RAMPTON: I do not know what that is.
12 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Can I ask two questions, first of all,
13Mr Irving? Would you or would you not accept that the
14theory that Mr Rampton is propounding, namely that this
15Schlegelberger note is really confined to the problem of
16the mischlinge, is a feasible one?
17 A. [Mr Irving] It does hold water but it is an alternative theory, my
19 Q. [Mr Justice Gray] It is alternative?
20 A. [Mr Irving] Yes.
21 Q. [Mr Justice Gray] And a viable theory?
22 A. [Mr Irving] Except for the fact that the document does not say this
23Jewish problem, it says the solution of the Jewish
25 Q. [Mr Justice Gray] Apart from that fact, would I also be right that in
26Hitler's War you have espoused 100 per cent the theory
1that it is in fact a highly significant statement because
2it is referring to postponing the Jewish question
3altogether until after the end of the war?
4 A. [Mr Irving] My Lord, with respect, I would draw attention to the fact
5that in that very paragraph you are alluding to, I refer
6to the fact that it came immediately after the discussion
7about the half Jews and the mixed Jews.
8 Q. [Mr Justice Gray] That is true. You think that is enough to tell the reader
9that this may not really be a very significant statement?
10 A. [Mr Irving] Well, it tells the intelligent reader the kind of context
11in which this document was found. It has taken Professor
12Evans, I think, eight pages to analyse the value of this
13document. I did not have eight pages. I have one
14paragraph or less.
15 MR RAMPTON: Mr Irving, I must say I happen to believe his
16Lordship is right, that is very, what I shall say, weasley
17reference to the mischlinge question in Hitler's War.
18 A. [Mr Irving] His Lordship did not say weasley reference. I do not
19think he used those words.
20 Q. [Mr Rampton] I interpret what I hear or see, Mr Irving. I suggest to
21you that the reference to the mischlinge question in
22Hitler's War is not apt to lead the reader to suppose that
23you are saying, which you are plainly not, that the
24so-called Schlegelberger note has anything to do with the
25mischlinge question. Not directly.
26 A. [Mr Irving] I will not read it out, my Lord, but it is the third
1paragraph on page 464.
2 MR RAMPTON: Yes, I know.
3 MR JUSTICE GRAY: I have it well in mind. I have in mind what
4you say in the last sentence of that paragraph.
5 A. [Mr Irving] I rely simply on that paragraph and my own comment on it.
6 MR RAMPTON: I think I have it here.
7 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Mr Rampton, if it helps -- it probably will
8not -- I think I have got the picture on the
9Schlegelberger note because I have read Professor Evans
10and I have heard Mr Irving. You may say there are lots of
11other points to take, but I thought I would say that to
13 MR RAMPTON: But there is one other main point, or two other
14main points. Whatever one may think of what was written
15in Hitler's War in 1991, if one were inclined to be
16generous to Mr Irving and say, well, he has mentioned the
17two in juxtaposition, therefore, one might think, though
18it is not explicit, what he has had to say about it since
19then and before is very much more categorical about, in
20his mind, the importance, or at any rate in his expression
21the importance, of this document. My Lord, I give an
22example from 1984:
23 "Finally, I think the most cardinal piece of
24proof in this entire story of what Hitler knew about what
25was going on, is a document that mysteriously vanished
26from the Nuremberg files in 1945. It is clear", and then
1there is a lot of stuff about the files. It says ----
2 A. [Mr Irving] Can I enquire what this is that you are reading from?
3 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Yes, can I ask that too?
4 MR RAMPTON: I am sorry. I was trying to save time. It is
5file D3(i), tab 20, page 101. Has your Lordship got it?
6 MR JUSTICE GRAY: I am going to wait to hear you read it out.
7 A. [Mr Irving] What was the page number again?
8 MR RAMPTON: It is page 101.
9 A. [Mr Irving] I have it.
10 Q. [Mr Rampton] It is one of these reprints I think of an Irving speech or
11presentation or lecture, whatever you call it. It is tab
1220, Mr Irving, with page 101 stamped at the bottom, the
13right-hand side which is page 281 of the document. My
14Lord, I will start again, I am sorry:
15 "Finally, I think the most cardinal piece of
16proof in this entire story of what Hitler knew about what
17was going on, a story of what Hitler knew about what was
18going on is a document that mysteriously vanished from the
19Nuremberg files in 1945. It is clear that it was in the
20files in August 1945 when they were sighted by the
21Americans in Berlin and catalogued". "Sighted", my Lord,
22is spelt with an S, it is "sighted". " ... when they were
23sighted by the Americans in Berlin and catalogued, because
24it appears as item 4 of a five-item list. It then
25vanished from the files by the time they reached Nuremberg
26for the Nuremberg trials, and so could not be produced
1there as evidence, and then reappeared now in the files of
2the Federal archives in Koblenz. That is the file that it
3is in, Reichsminister of Justice. The heading is: The
4Treatment of the Jews."
5 A. [Mr Irving] The heading of the file.
6 Q. [Mr Rampton] Oh, the file, not the document?
7 A. [Mr Irving] Yes.
8 Q. [Mr Rampton] It is a document. What is the German, the treatment of
9the Jews, on this file?
10 A. [Mr Irving] "Behandlung des Juden", not "Behandlung Mischlinge".
11 Q. [Mr Rampton] No, it is a general file no doubt. The Justice Ministry
12had problems to resolve in relation to the Jews, I am
13going to come to that in moment, but that is it right, is
14it not?
15 A. [Mr Irving] Yes.
16 Q. [Mr Rampton] "It is a document, a memo, on a telephone conversation
17inside the Ministry of Justice. From its placing in the
18file we know that this conversation is about March 1942,
19two months after the notorious Wunzie conference when all
20is supposed to have been put in train by Adolf Hitler.
21The Reichsminister, Hans Lammers, was the Chief of the
22German Civil Service. He would be rather like the Prime
23Minister in a normal society. The memo says:
24Reichsminister Lammers informs me that the Fuhrer has
25repeatedly told him that he wants a solution of the Jewish
26problem postponed until after the war is over. And it
1goes on about the fact that for this reason all this talk,
2all this jaw that is going on at present, is completely
3superfluous." Then in italics, and these are Mr Irving
4words: "Hitler has repeatedly said: He wants the solution
5to the Jewish problem postponed until after the war is
6over." Out of italics, new paragraph:
7 "Again this is a document which is of extreme
8embarrassment for the rival school of history. They
9cannot talk their way around it. They cannot talk their
10way out of it. They close their eyes and when they open
11them it is still there. It refuses to go away. Believe
12me, from this moment on right through to 1943 there are
13further documents showing Hitler interceding, acting,
14trying to stop preventing ..." My Lord, I will stop
16 You agree, Mr Irving ----
17 A. [Mr Irving] Excuse me, you rather hinted that there is nothing more.
18There is another telephone conversation from Himmler to
19Heydrich on 20th April 1942, again from Hitler's
20headquarters. Himmler telephoned Heydrich: "No
21destruction of the gypsies". It is not without
22significance that you stopped just before I could read
23that out.
24 Q. [Mr Rampton] It is 20th April.
25 A. [Mr Irving] Yes, it is all part of the sequence.
26 Q. [Mr Rampton] It is a bit like Himmler's telephone call to Heydrich of
130th November 1941, is it not?
2 A. [Mr Irving] But what quality my records are, Mr Rampton, compared with
3the quality of the records that you are producing against
5 Q. [Mr Rampton] Mr Irving, can we try to keep on the rails. We have not
6got much longer this afternoon. I want to finish this
7topic this afternoon.
8 A. [Mr Irving] Are you implying I am going off the rails?
9 MR JUSTICE GRAY: I think we can move on.
10 MR RAMPTON: Mr Irving, that is characteristic, what I just
11read, of the importance which you attach to this little
12document, I mean little in terms of significance, not of
13size, this little document as evidence of, as you propose,
14the fact that Adolf Hitler neither ordered nor knew about
15any massacring of Jews, at any rate up until late 1943?
16 A. [Mr Irving] It has taken Professor Evans eight pages to waffle his way
17out of it.
18 Q. [Mr Rampton] That is cheap rhetoric, Mr Irving.
19 A. [Mr Irving] It is not cheap rhetoric. It is exactly correct.
20 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Let us pass on.
21 MR RAMPTON: I am sorry if Professor Evans irritates you so
22much. You can take your feelings out on him when he is in
23the witness box. The position was this, was it not, at
24this time, Mr Irving, and this is my last but one thing
25for you to think about if you ever come to reconsider your
26position on this document. There was at this time a
1squabble going on, and I am paraphrasing, I am using
2colloquialisms, so please forgive me, the hour is late,
3between the SS on the one hand who wanted the Mischlinge
4carted off and the mixed marriages split up, and on the
5other hand the Ministry of Justice who probably for
6entirely practical reasons since they would have to make
7all sorts of laws and decisions, wanted the question left
8on one side?
9 A. [Mr Irving] That is absolutely right.
10 Q. [Mr Rampton] Thank you. It is quite natural that Lammers, having
11thought about it, should say: "Well, I think if I asked
12Adolf Hitler he would probably say, well, forget the
13Mischlinge question", and thought to himself: "Well, we
14all know that in the past Hitler said he wants to postpone
15the entlosung until after the war. I will just tell
16Schlegelberger to write that down"?
17 A. [Mr Irving] But that is not what this document says, Mr Rampton, if
18I can ----
19 Q. [Mr Rampton] It says: "The Fuhrer has repeatedly said" or "The Fuhrer
20had repeatedly said". We all know that the Fuhrer had
21repeatedly said that way back in 1940 and 41.
22 A. [Mr Irving] Well, if you attach importance to the tense there I will
23take expert advice overnight and ask exactly what the
24English translation of that tense should be.
25 Q. [Mr Rampton] Even if it has, a senior Civil Servant will be well aware
26of the fact that the Fuhrer has in the past repeatedly
1said that he wants the thing postponed. What the document
2does not say is that Herr Lammers went into Hitler's
3office and said: "Look, Mein Fuhrer, there is this
4squabble going on", and that Hitler said on that
5occasion: "But you know perfectly well this can't
6happen. I am not having the Jewish question solved at
7this stage. It has got to be postponed until the end of
8the war."
9 Now that last fanciful example is what you have
10deduced from this document, is it not?
11 A. [Mr Irving] Mr Rampton, I am going to ask his Lordship's permission to
12come in tomorrow with a little bundle say of, say, four or
13five documents on this particular point, which I would ask
14his Lordship's permission to put before the Court.
15 Q. [Mr Rampton] If you would rather leave it now, I will leave it now. I
16am just going to propose, you can think about it
17overnight, one other possibility to you.
18 A. [Mr Irving] It is just that I would like the chance to bring in the
19documents which will support my position rather than
21 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Yes, by all means.
22 MR RAMPTON: I think that is perfectly reasonable.
23 A. [Mr Irving] It will be a very small clip, and not one of my usual
25 Q. [Mr Rampton] I may need time to consult them with my expert team. I am
26not an expert. Mr Irving, there is one other possibility,
1is there not, that if this represents, this note, a
2contemporaneous statement by Hitler about his intentions
3for the Jews in general ----
4 A. [Mr Irving] Yes.
5 Q. [Mr Rampton] --- then it is quite possible that it is not a 1942
6document at all for this reason, that up to September
71941, the beginning of the entlosung on Hitler's order had
8not happened?
9 A. [Mr Irving] Yes.
10 Q. [Mr Rampton] So it is logically consistent with Hitler's known
11intentions and statements in the earlier part of 1941 or
12in 1940, that this document might emanate at that date, is
13it not?
14 A. [Mr Irving] A vanishingly small probability that that was possible.
15To suggest that this 1942 file of documents could contain
16a stray document out of 1941, flies in the face of the
17German mentality.
18 Q. [Mr Rampton] Before we stop tonight, Mr Irving, and you collect your
19thoughts on the things I have been putting to you, does
20the file which you are talking about, is it an original
21Justice Ministry file in full integrity, or has it been
22mucked around with by the Allies?
23 A. [Mr Irving] I can establish what condition it was in when it came into
24Allied possession because we have the staff evidence
25analysis sheet of the contents of that file, listing the
1 Q. [Mr Rampton] But the thing you have seen is not, therefore, an original
2pristine, untouched Reichs Justice Ministry file?
3 A. [Mr Irving] No. I would just comment, I do not intend just to collect
4my thoughts tonight. I know precisely where my thoughts
5are, but I think it would be more useful if I can buttress
6them with the actual paperwork which establishes that
7these are not stray thoughts.
8 Q. [Mr Rampton] Is your Lordship content with that?
9 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Yes. That is a convenient moment, are you
10saying, Mr Rampton?
11 MR RAMPTON: No, I meant is it convenient for me to stop now?
12 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Yes, that is what I thought you mind. Can
13I just mention one or two things?
14 (Administrative Discussion).
15 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Finally, Mr Rampton, can I just ask this.
16I thought I said something, but I may have forgotten, in
17which case it is my fault, about maybe having half a page
18of argument, just so I know what the issue is in advance
19of tomorrow on this question of Auschwitz.
20 MR RAMPTON: It may only just be a question of my copying out
21what I said from the transcript in that case. I have
22nothing more to say.
23 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Even that or the reference. Could you fax
24through the reference?
25 MR RAMPTON: Yes. The short point is this. It seems to
26unarguable that on the pleadings, and whether you talk
1about the old pleadings or the new Statement of Case, and
2on the discovery and everything else besides our case is
3perfectly clear. It is I hope accurately stated by me
4I think it was yesterday. I cannot do any better then
6 MR JUSTICE GRAY: It is the convergence of evidence point, is
8 MR RAMPTON: Yes. There are two separate things about it. Let
9me take it stages. I am not here to prove that Auschwitz
10had gas chambers, homicidal gas chambers. I do not need
11to do that. If you again you have an open mind and you
12look at the convergence of evidence, eyewitness testimony
13from victims.
14 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Yes, I remember what you said.
15 MR RAMPTON: All of that, perpetrators, and the contemporaneous
16documentary evidence and the archeological remains, you
17are drink to conclude, as a matter of probability at the
18very least, that indeed what the eyewitnesses tell us is
19true. I am not here to persuade your Lordship of that,
20save as a preliminary first step to two things. Mr Irving
21on the back of a piece of so-called research which is not
22worth the paper it is written on jumped up and said he was
23perfectly certain that there were never any gas chambers
24at Auschwitz, and he has said that statement, made that
25statement repeatedly in circumstances where it is apt to
26excite the hostility towards Jews of people who are likely
1to be anti-Semitic, which is the political side of this
2case which we will get to later on. As an insight into
3Mr Irving's credentials as a so-called historian, it is
4extremely illuminating, and that is the whole of my
6 MR JUSTICE GRAY: The question which may be capable of being
7narrowed is the extent to which Mr Irving contests the
8possible validity of the eyewitnesses' evidence, the
9survivor's evidence, the camp officials' evidence and so
11 MR RAMPTON: Mr Irving, I do not know what his case is. His
12case could be twofold: No, Liechter is not rubbish, it is
13jolly good and what is more there is a whole lot of other
14stuff besides relating, for example, to coke consumption
15and incineration capacity and goodness what else, which
16converges towards the conclusion that everybody has been
17wrong all this time, that leads me to the conclusion that
18the eyewitnesses are mistaken or lying. It could be his
19case. I just do not know.
20 MR JUSTICE GRAY: I think that may be sufficient. We can
21debate that tomorrow. 10.30 tomorrow.
22 <(The witness stood down)
23(The court adjourned until the following day)