London, April 3,
1999
Dear Professor Kershaw,
Please regard this letter, for
various legal reasons, as confidential.
As you may know from the grapevine, I
have brought in 1996 a
libel action against the
American author, Professor
Deborah
Lipstadt, and her UK
publisher Penguin Books Ltd, for
passages in her book
Denying the
Holocaust. It turns out
that most of these passages were
supplied to her by bodies that I will
call "all the usual suspects",
principally outside the UK. These
bodies have run a reckless and
continuous defamation campaign against
me since 1977, even for example trying
to implicate me in the Oklahoma
City bombing.
From the documents produced in
her Discovery, it is clear that I was
not mentioned in her original
manuscript; I am sorry to say that
Professor Yehuda
Bauer, for whose integrity
I formerly had considerable respect,
and whose agency commissioned the book,
then wrote her asking her to make me
one of the principal objects of attack,
even at that late stage. The libel
action is the result. If you are
interested in the nature of the
Claim,
her Defence,
and my Reply,
you will find them on my Website at:
http://www.fpp.co.uk/Legal/Penguin/PenguinIndex.html.
You are familiar with my
writings, so you may feel that I have
brought this nuisance on my own head by
my obstinacy and refusal to accept
blindly what I cannot find archival
proof of. (In short, I have probably
found and published more
Holocaust-related documents, like the
Bruns
and Aumeier
dossiers, than any other historian: but
I refuse to buy the whole package, and
this has outraged their
establishment).
After a slow, ostrich-like
start, Lipstadt retained
Anthony Julius
and Messrs. Mishcon de Reya for her
defence. Julius has created
a multi-million dollar defence
fund. The High Court has
last week fixed the date for the trial
to begin. It will begin on January 11,
and is estimated to last twelve weeks.
It may even drag on as long as the
MacLibel case. I do not expect to start
calling witnesses before the end of
January. I shall be bringing in expert
witnesses from New Zealand, Australia,
and Canada. The High Court has allowed
me six historians, and six political
scientists. Needless to say, I am
shooting for only the finest names
&emdash; "revisionists" are firmly out.
I wonder how much the Court will allow
me to introduce, and how much they will
(no doubt rightly) exclude as
irrelevant.
Anyway, the purpose of this
message is twofold:
1. I am looking for an expert on
the wartime spoken and written German
language, who can testify impartially
for a couple of hours one day, probably
in February, on the meaning of
Third-Reich words: the knotty problem
of Nazi euphemisms (like
Umsiedlung);
how words change their meaning as time
passes, and even depending on who is
speaking them and to whom they are
being spoken. May I state straight away
I am not looking for a blind advocate
of any cause: merely a button-down
collar type of expert, at whom both
sides can with profit fire questions,
and who can educate the judge in this
respect (this is not being heard by a
jury).
2. Would you yourself be
confident in answering such questions,
given your eminent background?
3. Would you be willing to give
expert testimony for a couple of hours
on the same basis about my products as
a researcher and writer? Given your own
solid and uncontroversial background, I
am sure that the court would attach
great weight to your remarks. Part of
the reckless Lipstadt allegations
against me is that I have manipulated
evidence, mistranslated documents,
suppressed items, damaged and destroyed
archives (and even that I stole the
Goebbels
diaries from the Moscow
archives!)
If you would agree to assist the
Court in this way, as what is called
"an expert witness", one of the
formalities is that I must draw up
before the end of April a brief outline
of the areas you would cover. It is all
part of the new Rules: there is nothing
"Perry Mason" allowed -- no last-minute
opening of the courtroom doors and
surprising production of a witness who
solves the mystery in the final three
minutes of the soap-opera. All cards
are on the table, in advance.
May I repeat, that I am (perhaps
surprisingly) not looking for
partiality; if any of my witnesses
needs to say things that run counter to
my cause, so be it. I want to get at
the truth on a number of matters, and
the real experts are the ones who will
count for more in my view than the
David
Cesaranis and
Walter
Laqueurs. (Incidentally, I
never knew that L. was not a trained
historian).
Yours sincerely,
David Irving
- Professor Ian
Kershaw
- Department of Modern
History
- University of
ShefÞeld
- ShefÞeld S10
2TN
write to David
Irving