MR DAVID IRVING, Recalled. MR JUSTICE GRAY: Yes, Mr Irving? MR IRVING: May it please the court, with your Lordship's permission, I have brought the bundle of the documents that we were referring to last night. Unless your Lordship would see any reason against, I propose rapidly stepping through these documents, pausing at the ones which are significant as far as we can determine so far from the direction and thrust of the cross-examination. MR JUSTICE GRAY: Yes. You are in the middle of your cross-examination. So, in the ordinary way, we will wait and see when the documents became relevant to Mr Rampton's questions. MR IRVING: They have been in discovery throughout, my Lord. MR JUSTICE GRAY: I follow that. But I suspect most of them are going to become relevant to the answers you are going to be giving to some of the questions Mr Rampton is asking. MR IRVING: I do apprehend it will be useful to the court, I appreciate that it is your Lordship's court, but I believe it will be useful. MR JUSTICE GRAY: You may well be right. I cannot really tell, I have only glanced at it. Shall I ask Mr Rampton -- because he is cross-examining, so, on the face of it, he has the right to continue to cross-examine. P-2 MR RAMPTON: I have no objection. In a sense, it is either evidence-in-chief in anticipation of cross-examination, or it is what one might call "premature re-examination". MR JUSTICE GRAY: Yes. MR RAMPTON: One way or the other it is going to make no difference. MR JUSTICE GRAY: If you are happy I will not stand in the way. Before that happens I wonder if I could mention one or two administrative points? The first is, I think we are all agreed through nobody's fault, this is not a very suitable court and I am very concerned that there are members of the public who, I think, are not able to get in and listen and want to. Having made enquiries, as I said I would, I think there are two possible courts to which we could move which were not available or were not thought to be available when we started. One is court 73, which I have looked at and looks to me to be much better than this in almost every respect. There is, apparently, another one, which is in Chichester Rents in Chancery Lane, which is even bigger. I think I would have some slight personal preference for 73, but what I wanted to ask you is that I think we should move anyway, because this is not satisfactory and it seems to me, unless you are going to tell me there are insuperable problems, tomorrow is the day to do the move. Are you in agreement that that is the right thing to do? P-3 MR IRVING: I would have suggested doing it over the weekend although I have no logistical problems myself -- MR JUSTICE GRAY: Well, I think they have a lot of problems ahead of them, but I think it is better to do it now than to struggle on and regret it every day from hereon. MR RAMPTON: That would suit us awfully well, if we could make a fresh start in what I call a "proper big court" on Monday morning. MR IRVING: Not a fresh start. MR JUSTICE GRAY: We will decide -- not a fresh start. MR RAMPTON: No, thank you. MR JUSTICE GRAY: We will decide during the course of today which it is going to be and, obviously, let you know. We will take it that on Monday we will be in a different court. MR RAMPTON: May I ask where exactly 73 is? MR JUSTICE GRAY: It is where all those new Court of Appeals are. MR RAMPTON: In the East Building. MR JUSTICE GRAY: Yes. MR RAMPTON: In the end I would have to say, my Lord, it is a matter for you. MR JUSTICE GRAY: I think it is, if you have strong feelings. MR RAMPTON: No, I do not know Chancery Lane much at all anyway. MR JUSTICE GRAY: That is point one. P-4 The next relates to the TA Law Transcripts which are being done. Really, I think I am saying this on behalf of the lady who is doing the transcribing. She is having the most appalling task. She is here all day, and she is by herself, as it were. It would help her if we could slightly slow down. Mr Irving, you speak fairly rapidly anyway. That is not a criticism at all. MR IRVING: I thought I was speaking slowly. MR JUSTICE GRAY: If you can bear in mind there is somebody trying to take down what you say, if we can try to remember to spell out the German names when they crop up for the first time. That is going to make everybody's life much easier. There is one other point on the transcripts. The Day 2 transcript starts at page 104. My own feeling (and I do not know whether you share it, Mr Rampton) is that it would be better if every day started at 1, so you have Day 2, page 1, rather than page 104. I am told that is physically possible. So that is what I think we will have in the future. That is all that I wanted to raise except that, Mr Irving, I have seen (and I do not know whether Mr Rampton has) your letter about the letter to me about the article in the Stuttgart press. Do you know about it? MR RAMPTON: No. P-5 MR IRVING: I was going to ask, my Lord, I might, having given the Defendants time to consider it, if I might address the court briefly on the matter after the lunch adjournment? MR JUSTICE GRAY: If you would like to do that, that is fine. Mr Rampton? MR RAMPTON: I have no comment until I have seen it. MR JUSTICE GRAY: I do not suppose you will, even when you have. MR RAMPTON: I see. My Lord, the only thing I would mention about the transcript, I do not know what the cure is. Is that, normally speaking, of course, one can deduce what it was, but here and there -- this is not a criticism of the transcriber, far from it -- one sees in square brackets the word "German" which represents something that has been said in German. That is going to repeat itself indefinitely in that case. I do not know what cure is. Whether the word should be spelt out each time. It is a terribly laborious way of dealing it, or whether we supply at some stage when it is important a list of what we suppose was the word used. As I say, most of the time one can deduce it. MR JUSTICE GRAY: Is it actually going to be all that much of a burden to spell it out or, at any rate, spell out the key words in the document? I am thinking yesterday "Liquidierung". One can spell that out. MR RAMPTON: There is going to be more of that today. P-6 MR JUSTICE GRAY: I follow. MR RAMPTON: Perhaps spell it out? MR JUSTICE GRAY: I am inclined to think so. I think that is the best way. It is going to slow things down. Would you prefer it, both of you? MR RAMPTON: Yes. MR JUSTICE GRAY: It is going to slow things down, but it needs to be done that way. So, Mr Irving, would you like to take me through the... MR IRVING: Page 1, my Lord, this is a letter -- the sole purpose of this letter is that it indicates the date when I really made use of the Himmler telephone notes, being 1974; some 25 years ago, 26 years ago. MR JUSTICE GRAY: Can I just ask you this? You there transcribe Judentransport, J-U-D-E-N-T-R-A-N-S-P-O-R-T, in the singular, and that is in 1974. MR IRVING: We have check the original in the German. You are absolutely right, my Lord. You are absolutely right. MR JUSTICE GRAY: Right. MR IRVING: In a very vague, and, of course, I am still considering myself to be under oath as I make these remarks, in a very vague way my recollection is that time I regarded the word "transport" as not just meaning like a transport train or one consignment, or a transport ship in the way that you would talk about a convoy of 26 transports but also in the sense that transportation. P-7 I consider that the words and meant "transportation of Jews". MR JUSTICE GRAY: Yes, I note that you make that point. MR IRVING: This is an alternative inference but now I am quite happy to accept that this particular discussion from external evidence only referred to one particular transport of Jews, and I am indebted to your Lordship for having reminded, or took me back into the mind set of 26 years ago. MR JUSTICE GRAY: Yes. MR IRVING: As you know, my presumption is, I will just read the middle paragraph that Hitler had become an active knowledge bearer or accomplice in the destruction of the Jews only in 1943. This is of course a translation of the following page, my Lord. From the attached page, which is a facsimile, which we will see in a minute, it is evident that Himmler, arriving at midday on November 30th, 1941, in the Wolf's Lair, which I explain was Hitler's headquarters in East Prussia, after a brief conversation with Hitler immediately had to telephone Heydrich in Prague, and then comes the phrase, "Judentransporte aus Berlin keine Liquidierung", which I believe the shorthand writer already had from us. If you take this in conjunction with various other entries, e.g. that of 17th November 1941, in which Heydrich informs the Reichsführer, that is Himmler, on P-8 conditions in the Generalgouvernement, Poland. MR JUSTICE GRAY: That is SS Reichsführer. MR IRVING: Well, Reichsführer SS would be the full title. There was only one Reichsführer in German -- conditions in the general government Poland -- getting rid of the Jews, Beseitigung, this can only indicate that Himmler has been rapped across the knuckles by Hitler. This conversation note has until now evidently slipped through the fingers of the historical research community, as you might call it. Then the other two lines at the bottom are not without interest in the chain of documents I refer to, my Lord. Himmler had to issue a similar "Halt" order in April 1942 on account of the liquidation of the gypsies, again after a brief visit to Hitler. "I thought this might be of interest to you." You will see that document too, my Lord, in this bundle. Because it is false to try and draw inferences from one document without looking at other documents in the series. I appreciate in court it is difficult to do this. My Lord, the next document I am going to draw your Lordship's attention to is 03 at the foot of the page. This is another document that was in discovery. MR JUSTICE GRAY: I have read that. That is you asking Professor Hinsley whether he has any more information. MR IRVING: Yes, my Lord, except that at that time it does P-9 indicate at that time he did not have the German originals. MR RAMPTON: I am sorry, Mr Irving. I beg your pardon. May I intervene to ask your Lordship to insert it in that bundle? It comes from Mr Irving's discovery. There is no mystery about it. Professor Hinsley's reply. MR JUSTICE GRAY: It was not there. MR RAMPTON: Yes, we have it now. MR IRVING: I could not find it last night, my Lord. In it, Professor Hinsley indicates that he has obviously not yet seen himself the German originals of the British intercepts. MR JUSTICE GRAY: Yes. MR IRVING: It is quite interesting. MR JUSTICE GRAY: The postscript is perhaps of some significance. MR IRVING: It is interesting the British Official Historian and British Secret Service had either not been allowed to see or had not found in general chaos the documentation, these are the originals, which are now in the Public Record Office. But the German originals are very, very informative in their scope, breadth and depth. That, my Lord, is 04. This is the first of the notes of the telephone conversations from Himmler's telephone log to the Chief of the SS, and the one on which I rely is the one timed 12.15. It is the fourth P-10 conversation. I am afraid I have not attached a translation of it, but I will do a translation on reply on the one or two lines that matter. It is a 15 minute conversation with Heydrich who on that day was in Berlin. We do not know who initiated the conversation, my Lord, whether Heydrich phoned Himmler or Himmler phoned Heydrich. We never see them. We have to infer. Conference with Rosenberg, conditions in the government general, getting rid of the Jews, Beseitigung of the Jews, and then the third line -- the fourth line rather, Juristen nur als Berater, roughly lawyers just as advisers. Nothing else on that page to which I will refer. Merely it shows there were conversations going on between these two gentlemen on liquidation or getting rid of the Jews. MR JUSTICE GRAY: What is the significance for my purpose of that? MR IRVING: It is the context in which the principal document is embedded, my Lord. The inference that has been drawn against me is that I have one cardinal document and I would go around the world waving this document and saying "here it the proof". It is, in fact, showing that they were constantly talking about getting rid of the Jews, using -- MR JUSTICE GRAY: There is no issue, is there, that that was something that both Himmler and Heydrich were intent upon P-11 doing. MR RAMPTON: Yes. The word " Beseitigung" is interesting. You can look at it either this way or that way, literally as getting rid of, which can be sweeping under the carpet or liquidation. I am quite happy to accept that here they were talking about liquidation, these two gentlemen. It now becomes more interesting, my Lord, on page 5. MR JUSTICE GRAY: Can you just let me highlight? MR IRVING: We come to the intercepts and Mr Rampton does not wish me at this point to bring in this material. I am quite happy to turn the page, but I think it is useful to bring it in all in chronological sequence. MR JUSTICE GRAY: When you "intercept" -- MR IRVING: This is the Bletchley Park intercept of the -- MR JUSTICE GRAY: Messages to Berlin. MR IRVING: Messages between Berlin and the Eastern Front for police commanders, and also a whole number of other SS units, but these are the ones I rely on. No. 35 is a message addressed from Berlin on November 17th, that same day as the previous conversation, to the commander of security police, Dr Lange, L-A-N-G-E, in Riga, concerning, and I use the next word in original German -- these are my translations, concerning the Evakuierung of the Jews. "Evakuierung", my Lord, is one of those words we will probably tussle over. The literal translation is "evacuation", but I am perfectly ready to P-12 accept for the purposes of this action that "Evakuierung" is occasionally used by the SS as a euphemism for a more ugly means of disposing. But in this particular case what is significant is that the man in Berlin is telling the recipient in Riga, on November 17th, in other words, that same day, at 6.25 p.m., transport train No. DO 26 has left Berlin for Kovno or Kaunas, with 940 more Jews on board. That was usually the rough size of each train load of Jews, about 1,000 Jews. Transport escorted by two Gestapo and 15 police officers. Transport commander is Criminal Oberassessor Exner, the man's name, who was two copies of the transport list with him. Transport provided with following provisions, and this is interesting part, my Lord, 3,000 kilograms of bread, three tonnes of bread for a two or three day journey. 27 kilograms of flour, nearly three tonnes of flour; 200 kilograms of peas; 200 kilograms of nutriments; 300 kilograms of corn flakes; 18 bottles of soup spices. They continue in the next message; 52 kilograms soup powders, 10 packets of something or other, we do not know; 50 kilograms of salt; 47,200 Reich Marks in crates. Signed Gestapo Headquarters, Berlin. Quite an interesting document, my Lord. It is the first kind of thing we come across in my view to show that these trains were actually well-provisioned. It is a bit of a dent, a tiny dent in P-13 the image that we have, the perception, as Mr Rampton calls it, of the Holocaust today. The next one, page 6, is a message intercepted on 20th November. It is unimportant for our purposes on what day it was decoded. It was decoded 10 days. It takes 10 days to decode it. The actual message is dated three days later, 20th November 1941, again, addressed to Commander of Order Police and the SS in Riga, concerning evacuation of Jews. The same kind of thing, transport train No. DO56. Has left Bremen, destination Minsk with 971 Jews on 18th November. Escort command regular police Bremen, transport commander Police Meister Bockhorn, B-O-C-K-H-O-R-N, is in possession of two lists of names and 48,700 Reich Marks in cashiers' credits. Jews are well-provisioned with food and appliances. My Lord, on the next page you will see the actual intercept, page 7 is what the actual intercept looked like. They are headed "Most Secret". It is the second paragraph, my Lord. MR JUSTICE GRAY: "Most secret" is put on at Bletchley, is it not? MR IRVING: Indeed, of course. There is no indication on the intercepts themselves, as intercepted here, what security classification they have. But I want to draw attention only to the word "Gerät" in the fifth or sixth line of the intercept, which means appliances. Any German speakers in P-14 the room I am sure would agree the word "Gerät" is the tools of the trade, roughly, they are being sent to the East with food, with provisions, and with the tools of their trade. MR JUSTICE GRAY: You have translated that as what? MR IRVING: Appliances. It is a rough cover-all, tools of the trade would be a little bit too specific, I am sure Mr Rampton will probably eventually object. But the sense of Gerät, if a cameraman comes into this room he would bring his Gerät with him, his appliances with him. The next one is No. 15, I rely on this because it shows in the first line, I am sorry I am still on page 6, my Lord, the second message on page 6 SS Obergruppenführer Jeckeln, transferred from Kiev to Riga. So that was the day this criminal was transferred to Riga, round about November 20th, and in fact it is a pretty low level message. They are worried about what happened to motor cars and things like that if I remember correctly. If we can now turn straight over to page 9, my Lord, I took the trouble during the night to dig out of my files, the war diary of Hitler's headquarters, which I have. These are all my documents. All my documents when I obtained them for the book, I had bound in these volumes because I anticipated perhaps Mr Rampton would say, well, we have no proof that Hitler was in his headquarters, that he was at home on the day of the crucial P-15 message November 30th. MR RAMPTON: No, he would not say that, my Lord, because Himmler recalls that he had lunch with Hitler on that day. MR IRVING: Well, I am just dotting the Is and crossing the Ts. MR JUSTICE GRAY: The point is not made, so we need not trouble with that. MR IRVING: It also talks about the arrival of the Führer's train that very morning. On the following day is the photocopy from the page of war diary at Hitler's headquarters. We then come to the crucial document we were talking about yesterday evening, which I ... MR JUSTICE GRAY: I still have your copy of that. MR IRVING: I put it in the bundles for sake of completeness. It is referred to in the third conversation. I draw attention only to the first lines, which says: "Telephone conversation on November 30th 1941". The next line "Wolfsschanze" means Wolf's Lair. The next line "Aus dem Zug" it means from the train. Himmler is still in the train going to Hitler's headquarters. Three lines down, Aus dem Bunker, from the bunker, he is at the bunker now, in the Wolf's Lair, 13.30 he telephones Heydrich, as we know only the third and fourth line of the notes are important, "Jew transport from Berlin, no liquidation". MR JUSTICE GRAY: Yes. MR IRVING: If I may proceed now to page 13, my Lord. This is P-16 the one that I am alleged mysteriously to have misread and the implication being I deliberately misread it or deliberately changed word the Verwaltungsführer into "Juden", which would be quite a feat. My Lord on the page 13 the question of the line, the contentious line is third from the bottom, haben zu bleiben. MR JUSTICE GRAY: Have to remain. MR IRVING: You will notice, my Lord, the word "haben" has obviously been retyped, a bit of squeeze getting it in. It was retyped by me when I realized my error in transcription. That typewriter was disposed of some or ten or 15 years ago. That is how early I realized my error. I do not know if it is significant one way or the other, it may count against me. I do not know. It is also significant to see in the following line, my Lord, I have written the words "truppenschuhe", and this is another misreading by me. MR JUSTICE GRAY: It does not really matter, does it. MR IRVING: My Lord, I am just trying to say, as you will see from the next page, to which I now ask you to turn. MR JUSTICE GRAY: Before you leave that, I thought there was another point made on this document, which is your translation of the words -- MR IRVING: That is Verwaltungsführer. MR JUSTICE GRAY: Am I not right about that? P-17 MR IRVING: This was the point Mr Rampton sought to make, and I corrected him, my Lord, and said that was not the word that I misread. It was the word on the following line haben, which I misread as Juden, and this is why I was going to ask your Lordship, respectfully, to turn to the next page, page 14, where you will see the words in question, three lines from the bottom on the right, that is the quality of the original I was working from. I do not know if your copy is highlighted, the crucial word is not perhaps... MR JUSTICE GRAY: Yes, it is. What did you originally transcribe that as? MR IRVING: Juden, I would submit this is a perfectly reasonable kind of mistake to make. If I was to labour the point I would draw your Lordship's attention to all the other versions of the word "Juden" that are correct, you will see they are very similar indeed in the German Gothic handwriting. So what we have, my Lord, to recap at this point, November 30th Himmler for some reason in a telephone conversation with Heydrich saying that train load of Jews from Berlin is not to be liquidated. I believe that is a fair expansion of that sentence. On the following day he has that telephone conversation with SS Gruppenführer Pohl, I am back on page 13, at 4.45 p.m. They touch Verwaltungsführer, but more important now is the conversation, again, with Heydrich about the same time as the previous one, on the previous day, 13.15 on that page 13. He has a conversation with Prague, first of all about his scribes, the female scribes, and, secondly, "Exekutionen", like "executions", in Riga. I am sure I do not have to translate that. So it is now very much in the air that something has gone on in Riga, my Lord. On page 15, that same day, we are well in the chronology, my Lord, this is a telephone conversation at 7.15 a.m. on that Monday morning, December 1st, 1941. This is coming from Jeckeln to Berlin. This is a very ugly one indeed, my Lord. He is saying (in English:) "I need by next available air courier 10 Finnish", Finland, in other words, "military pistols with two drum magazines each. Execution of Sonderaktionen", special actions, S-O-N-D-E-R A-K-T-I-O-N-E-N, "request radio telegram reply. Senior SS and Police Command, North Russia". MR JUSTICE GRAY: Who is this addressed to in Berlin then? MR IRVING: The main leadership Hauptamt, would be the body concerned with the procurement of such armaments. The significance of this, my Lord, if you remember the harrowing description by General Bruns of the shootings on the edge of the pit where the men were using machine guns, Tommy-guns, and he has run, he has not enough Tommy-guns, P-19 he needs more. You can see the actual intercept of that, my Lord, on the next page. What is the answer he gets? Page 17, again my translation my Lord, Himmler himself contacts him, either in person, that is the second message, or through his Adjutant, Grothmann (who is still alive in Germany now). He sends this message to that same criminal, Jeckeln, at 7.30 p.m. on December 1st: "To SS Obergruppenführer Jeckeln, Senior SS and Police Commander, Ostland, Riga. In other words, he had been summoned urgently to the Headquarters. The very next message explains what is going to happen. "SS Obergruppenführer Jeckeln" -- this is the message we dealt with yesterday, my Lord -- "The Jews being outplaced to Ostland", to the Baltic, "are to be dealt with only in accordance with the guidelines laid down by myself and/or by the ... (reading to the words) ... on my orders. A most incredibly important message, I think, for many reasons. He is not talking about a Hitler order here. He is saying: "The guidelines issued by me", by Himmler, "or by the Reichssicherheits-Hauptamt" who is Heydrich, his telephone-conversation partner. Jeckeln, out on the Eastern front, has overstepped the guidelines. P-20 He started shooting thousands of Germans. He had been summoned to Himmler's headquarters, to Rastenburg, in East Prussia to account for himself. MR JUSTICE GRAY: Where do we find the guideline? MR IRVING: My Lord, we will hear in the course of this trial that these intercepts are not wall to wall. We do not have everything that they sent. There is an enormous mass of trivia, people whose cars have been towed and that kind of thing, people whose wives have died. Occasionally embedded in the trivia, like in a goldmine, in the slurry, there are diamonds like this. The incredible thing is, although this document has now been in the public domain for about five or six years, the historians and the world have not leapt on this document and said, "Irving was right. This proves that the Führer's headquarters were not only indignant, but were calling people to account. In the way that the wars are, although he is brought back from the Front and he is rapped on the knuckles, he is sent back to the Front to carry on with his job. He is not dismissed from service; in rather the same way as I know General Patton, for example, went to the Front when General Patton had been liquidating prisoners. He was called before Eisenhower and called to account. He was put on ice for two or three months and then he was given command of one of the best armies, the 3rd American Army, because good men are hard P-21 to come by in a war. That is, undoubtedly, the way the Nazis viewed this criminal. May I proceed, my Lord? MR JUSTICE GRAY: Yes, thank you. MR IRVING: We can see on page 21 the arrival of the unfortunate criminal, the arrival of the unfortunate criminal, SS Obergruppenführer Jeckeln in Himmler's appointment book, in other words, at Hitler's headquarters. One notices at 1300 they are driving over Hitler's headquarters. Then Himmler visits the barber and the dentist. He sees Hitler at 5 p.m. and at 7 p.m. he sees other SS Generals. At 8 p.m. he has dinner in part of Hitler's headquarters with Jeckeln and at 9.30 he hauls Jeckeln over the carpet, the Jewish question, the SS brigade, economic business. So that is the actual visit. MR JUSTICE GRAY: Would it be a fair interpretation of this document that the original plan was that Jeckeln should be present with Hitler and Himmler at 5 o'clock in the afternoon? MR IRVING: I cannot be specific on that, my Lord. MR JUSTICE GRAY: It looks like it, does it not? MR IRVING: I do not want to speculate, but these are grey areas. The documents do not tell us everything we would dearly love to know. What we do know is the final two pages I put in the bundle. My Lord, you will see that the last page has some red print on the bottom, the very last P-22 page. This is the German, I would say, official transcript of Himmler's diary which, my Lord, the Defendants also have on the desk in front of them. It is published this year. It is enormously expensive. It is a very good and highly dependable transcription of Himmler's diaries and appointment book. They put that in as a footnote at 104, I believe, in which they say: "After these signals were exchanged", which, oddly enough, they do not elucidate to the degree that I have, "the killings of German Jews stopped for many months". I have no further submissions to make about these documents. MR JUSTICE GRAY: You have lost me a little. Where do I find after these messages ---- MR IRVING: The very last line of the red text. This is the comments by the editors, who are a team of German historians, on the Himmler diaries which they have annotated most expertly, and they too have drawn finally on these two mysterious messages that we intercepted. MR JUSTICE GRAY: But the point that may be made, I do not know, on this is that it is the mass shootings of German Jews that ceased. MR IRVING: I agree, my Lord. This is why I have been very careful to make a distinction in my evidence and, indeed, in my books. MR JUSTICE GRAY: That suggests to me -- tell me if I am wrong P-23 about this -- that the guidelines mentioned in the earlier message were guidelines relating to German Jews. MR IRVING: This is quite possible, my Lord. I would only ask you in reading, as undoubtedly you will, and re-reading passages from my books on which the Defendants seek to rely, you ask yourself this question: Has Mr Irving, the so-called Holocaust denier, at any time implied that this kind of massacre did not go on, and that it was systematic and it was carried out on guidelines from above? MR JUSTICE GRAY: Yes. MR IRVING: But you will notice that Mr Himmler talks about "orders that I have issued and the Reichssicherheits-Hauptamt". He never says, "On the Führer's instructions" which, obviously, there would be a strong temptation in a message like this to say, "You have not only upset me, but you have put Adolf's nose really out of joint". So, I mean, obviously, I am going to submit that if documents like this exist of a quality like that, to imply that I was speaking off the wall in some way with no kind of documentary basis for the submissions that I make in my books, it would be unfair, unjust and perverse. MR JUSTICE GRAY: Yes. You have taken me through, and thank you for that ---- MR IRVING: I ---- MR JUSTICE GRAY: --- this little bundle. I am making this point at this stage because it is going to crop up time P-24 and again. I am rather anxious not to have little one issue bundles cropping up at odd stages because, frankly, in a case of this length, it is all going to get lost and tangled. I imagine that all these documents are in one or other of the existing files. MR IRVING: They are in this cover, my Lord, but not in such pristine condition as that. I went to very great trouble last night to prepare this particular bundle in the hope that you would say to yourself, well, if he was able to come up with evidence like this on this matter, no doubt he will be able on any other matter ---- MR JUSTICE GRAY: Do not misunderstand me. I am not critical. I think it is helpful to have a bundle prepared like this, but what I need to be sure of is that I know where these documents can be found in the existing files. What I will ask somebody on the Defendants' side to do, if they would be good enough, if they can do this, is to provide me with the cross-reference. Could you ask somebody to do that? MR RAMPTON: We will think about that. The trouble is at the moment that our files are ordered according to the experts' reports. MR JUSTICE GRAY: Yes, but most of these documents would be relatively easily traced? MR RAMPTON: Most of them, I think, are referred to in the expert reports anyway. Whether they are copied in quite that form, I am not sure; I think probably not. P-25 MR JUSTICE GRAY: You see why I need to have what I am asking for. MR RAMPTON: Yes, I do. My immediate idea is just to put them with a separate numeration at the back of Professor Browning or that report. It is apparently ---- MR JUSTICE GRAY: I think that is not a bad idea, to put them into J, otherwise there is going to be proliferation of... MR IRVING: My Lord, I am using an alphabetical system which requires that there are going to be less than 26 such files over the entire case that I would anticipate putting in of this nature. If you will bear with me, the reason I called this just "Himmler" is that I was intending to produce further documents, for example, the Schlegelberger series (which I am sure your Lordship is familiar with). I would also put that into that binder. So there will just be an Irving series, Irving A, Irving B, Irving C. This is, after all, my case, my Lord, and I do not want my structure to be subsumed into the case for the Defendants. MR JUSTICE GRAY: I entirely agree with that. This may all seem very boring, but, believe me, in a case like this you ---- MR IRVING: "Boring" is not a word I would use. MR JUSTICE GRAY: --- really do have to watch the sort of housekeeping. Just so that everybody knows where I have it, I am putting it into J. MR RAMPTON: Tab C. P-26 MR JUSTICE GRAY: I have not got a tab C. MR IRVING: My Lord, I would propose that we now continue where we left off last night. MR JUSTICE GRAY: I am going to treat what you have told me in the last 20 minutes or so as being part of your evidence, although you told me from counsel's bench. It is up to you; I think you probably ought to go back, if you would be good enough, into the witness box. THE WITNESS: My Lord, there is just one other document there that I forgot to refer to and this is No. 23. I will just read it out to you. There is no need for your Lordship to see it. MR JUSTICE GRAY: I had better follow it. A. A telephone conversation of exactly the same kind from Himmler's telephone log: On Hitler's birthday, at midday with Heydrich, again that is H-E-Y-D-I-C-H, a conversation with Heydrich in which the last line reads: "Kindly", "Keine Vernichtung der Zigeuner", K-E-I-N-E V-E-R-N-I-C-H-T-U-N-G D-E-R Z-I-G-E-U-N-E-R. Q. That is "gypsies", is it not? A. That is right, my Lord. Q. How would you translate "Vernichtung"? A. Literally "destruction" and that is how I will leave it. "No destruction of the gypsies"; the significance being that on this day at mid-day, Himmler is with Hitler P-27 celebrating a birthday party. It was Hitler's birthday, April 20th. Once again he has had to telephone his chief executioner, so to speak, Heydrich, and say, "The gypsies are not to be liquidated" and yet they were liquidated. Q. You say Himmler was with Hitler at 12 o'clock? A. Quite definitely. It was Hitler's birthday and I would be happy to lead evidence to prove that, but I am sure Mr Rampton will not dispute that the head of the SS ---- Q. And this is a phone call to Heydrich from Himmler? A. It is a telephone conversation between them. Q. Yes, I take that point. A. Of significance, it is one more document in that chain that I occasionally refer to. MR JUSTICE GRAY: Thank you. MR RAMPTON: Yes, as to that, Mr Irving, the "no liquidation of the gypsies", again that was before there was any meeting between them, was it not, on that day, which is 20th April 1942, Himmler's log said that he met Führer at 12.30? A. This may well be. It may well be what his log says. Q. Whereas the telephone call is at noon, I think. A. Yes. Q. Rather like 30th November? A. Yes. Q. 1941? A. Yes. Q. Can we go back to 30th November 1941, please? Did you get P-28 a transcript of your evidence of the proceedings yesterday -- have you got a copy that looks like this, Mr Irving? A. Yes I have. Q. With a quarter page like that? A. Yes. Q. Could you turn, please, to the page numbered 289? It is the top left-hand block on one of the pages. A. Yes. Q. I was asking you if you remember why it was that you had translated "Judentransport", a singular word, as Jews in general? A. Yes. Q. You had said, you can see it there, can you not, that it was a silly misreading of the word. You said at line 19: "I admit I made a mistake in the transcription"? A. Yes. Q. This was your sworn evidence on oath yesterday? A. Yes. Q. Now would you please turn to the first page of your new bundle? A. Yes. Q. The translation you have made for us kindly ---- A. Yes. Q. --- 23rd January 1974, where you have transcribed it correctly? P-29 A. Yes. Q. The answer you gave yesterday was wrong, was it not? A. That is correct. Q. Why was it wrong, Mr Irving? A. Because we are talking about events almost 30 years ago. I was writing this book 32 years ago. I received these documents 35 years ago. I probably transcribed it, as you can see from the letter, round about 1974. It is very difficult to put myself back into my mind set of 25 or 26 years ago. You asked me what the reason for that was and my first presumption was that I misread the word, but ably challenged by his Lordship, questioned by his Lordship, on this matter, I recalled also that at the time I looked at it, the word "transport", "Judentransport", to me also could be translated as "transportation of Jews". Indeed, it can be translated that way and I refined it later on when I was informed by Dr [Gerald] Fleming, as he then was, who is an expert on the Holocaust, that there was one very clear train load of Jews to which reference was being made. That is so, I think, an accurate answer which should really replace yesterday's answer. Q. I dare say it should, Mr Irving. Whether I accept it, of course, is quite another question, even in its remodelled form. A. Yes. P-30 Q. The answer is, of course, that I do not. Mr Irving, I would like you to think a little bit about what you have just said. You heard me open this case on Tuesday afternoon, did you not? A. Yes. Q. Yes. You have to say "yes" just for the recording. That is all. Nodding or so will not do. You had a copy of the written document that I read out, did you not? A. Which document are you referring to? Q. My opening statement in this case? A. Yes. Q. That was on Tuesday afternoon. A. Yes. Q. You realised then ---- A. Yes. Q. --- that this is one of the points that I was going to make against you, did you not? A. Yes, that has been repeatedly made, yes. Q. It has been repeatedly made, has it not? Yet, when you come into the witness box to answer questions on oath, you simply pluck an explanation out of the air, do you not? A. Mr Rampton, may I explain to you that in the last four days I have had six hours sleep? Is this a satisfactory answer to why one occasionally makes slips of the memory in the witness box? If not, then I will go into it in greater detail. P-31 Q. What is the truth, Mr Irving? You did not misread it, that is clear. A. Yes -- not this particular word. Q. No. So yesterday's answer was a false answer. A. Misinterpreted. Q. You now say, "Well, I may have mistranslated it, but my translation was, on the face of it, legitimate"? A. Well, in this case it is not a translation that is needed, it is an interpretation because it is a cryptic word. "Transport" can mean several different things. There are many words that can mean several different things, and you have to look at the context and you have to take other documents and possibly later information into account in arriving at which of those words is the correct translation. None of the words would be a wrong translation at the time you first make it. You then refine the translation on the basis of external evidence. Q. Would not a more natural way of putting it in German to be to put it in the plural "Judentransporte" with an "e" on the end? A. It can also be done that way, yes. MR JUSTICE GRAY: Would part of the context be that there did happen at this time to be a train load of Jews setting out from Berlin to Riga? A. There were many train loads setting out. By this time, by November 30th, there had been five trainloads of Jews P-32 heading for Riga or Minsk. Q. Over what sort of period? A. One week, round about that time -- no, I am sorry, two weeks would be a closer approximation. They were given numbers, "D" for Germany, "O" for East or German, rather, and "O" for East. That is what the numbers in the intercepts are. MR RAMPTON: Mr Irving, another of the things that you and I disagreed about yesterday was your unequivocal categorical assertion in your various publications that that order from Himmler to Heydrich on that day was given at the instigation of Hitler. You say it was, or at least that is a reasonable inference; you called it a "judgment call", I think, did you not? A. I called that, the reason I used it, or referred to it in that -- I think we ought to see the actual wording I used. If you say that I said it on a number of occasions, it would be helpful to see the actual wording that I used. Q. For example, let us just look at how you put it in "Hitler's War 1991". My Lord, that is bundle D1(v). It is in two halves. This is the second half. At page 427, Mr Irving, if you are using the published edition? A. I am just looking at the 1977 one to pre-empt you. Q. We will look at that first, if you will. I think there it is round about 300 and something. P-33 A. At 1.30 p.m. Q. Well, his Lordship may not have it. MR JUSTICE GRAY: Yes, I have. MR RAMPTON: Have you got 1977, my Lord? 332. A. Yes. I think, with respect, it makes more sense to take it from the chronology that I wrote the various editions. Q. I was not actually going to look at all the references, but if you wish me to do so, I do not mind in the slightest. A. Well, it is like a building, the way a building changes over the years, that tells us something also. Q. "Himmler's personal role is ambivalent. On November 30th 1941, he was summoned to the Wolf's Lair for a secret conference with Hitler in which the fate of Berlin's Jews was clearly raised". Pause there. What evidence that Himmler was summoned to the Wolfsschanze the Wolf's Lair? A. My very great expertise on this matter. Q. What? A. My very great expertise on this matter. Do you wish me to elaborate? MR JUSTICE GRAY: Yes, I think you had better; I am not quite sure I understand the answer. MR RAMPTON: I asked for evidence, not expertise. A. Well, the evidence is that if you go to the archives and work through the files of Hitler's Chancellery, you will find every year, two or three times, the head of his P-34 Chancellery, Hans Lammers, issued an edict to all the Reich ministers and all the senior Nazi officials informing them that nobody was permitted to visit Hitler, just ringing the door bell and saying, "Mein Führer, can I drop in and see you for a moment?" They had to have a specific summons and invitation because Hitler was constantly being besieged by junior and senior officials who were ringing his doorbell in that way and asking to see him. Eventually, it had to be forbidden, first of all, by Lammers and then by an edict of Martin Bormann. So you could not visit Hitler unless you were summoned. Q. Mr Irving, I am not going away from that topic, believe me, I am not, but it may be we had better get this sorted out earlier rather than later in this case. Where do you place Himmler in the Nazi hierarchy? A. Nowhere in the hierarchy that it would just turn up on Hitler's doorstep. Q. Please, we will come to that I promise I not leaving the topic, where do you put him? A. He had the rank of a Reichsminister, the rank of Reichsminister was equivalent to a field marshal, so it would be the equivalent rank of four star general. He had Hitler's ear, he took orders directly from Hitler, there was no intermediary, is that sufficient? Q. -- yes, I am going to go a little bit further. This is not hostile interrogation, Mr Irving, this is an attempt P-35 to see if we can agree on some broad general facts which may be of use in this case. Himmler was, was he not, one of the original putschists of 1923? A. He is there to be seen marching in the ranks. Q. Wearing Nazi uniform. A. One of the old guard. Q. Have you read Ian Kershaw's book? A. Whose? Q. Ian Kershaw's book? A. I do not read books. Q. You do not read books. Of course not. He [Himmler] is one of old guard, is he not? A. Yes. Q. So was Göring? A. Yes. Q. And so was Goebbels? A. On and off, if you see what I mean. Q. Yes, I do see what you mean. Is there anything which leads you to suppose -- A. In connection with Goebbels, of course, he was not one of the putschists, he came in several years later. Q. -- Rosenberg was perhaps, I do not know. Is there anything you know of that prevents one from supposing that Hitler might have telephoned as he apparently was able to use the telephone on the train, was he not? A. Himmler, you are talking about? P-36 Q. Himmler I mean, telephoned the Wolf's Lair and said "can I come and talk to you about something"? A. No reason to suppose that at all, yes. Q. So why you do use the word "summon"? A. Because then Hitler would have said "all right, come and see me". Q. You see in the context, do you agree, the word "summoned"? A. Yes. Q. Means that he is being summoned in order to discuss the fate of the Berlin Jews? A. In the context. Q. Yes. Amongst other things, perhaps? A. No, I disagree with you Mr Rampton, on November 30th, he, Himmler was summoned to the Wolf's Lair for a secret conference with Hitler at which the fate of Berlin's Jews was clearly raised. Q. By whom? A. We do not know. Q. Then you go on, at 1.30 p.m. Himmler was obliged to telephone from Hitler's bunker? A. Yes. Q. Who could have obliged, that is to say compel, Himmler to do such a thing? A. His own inner conscience. Q. That is what it was, was it? A. That is why I used word "obliged" otherwise I would have P-37 said "ordered". MR JUSTICE GRAY: The reality of the way, would you not accept, Mr Irving, of the way it is put in your book is that the reader is going to infer that that was an order from Hitler to him? A. My Lord, I use my words with utmost care when I write passages like that. I will go backwards and forwards over them looking for a word which I considered to be justified by the evidence but not implying or imputing or inferring too much. If I used the word "obliged" then it was because I hesitated to use the word "order" but for some reason he made the telephone conversation. He did not wait until he got back to his own headquarters, he immediately phoned Heydrich from Hitler's bunker without even getting over to the local phone box, he phoned Heydrich with these instructions saying "stop the killing". MR RAMPTON: That is what you intended to convey in that passage of that page of Hitler's War 1977? A. That is all that I felt it was safe to convey on the basis of the very skimpy evidence I had at that time. At that time, of course, I did not even have the decodes, but now the decodes confirm me. Q. So you say. Let us turn to page (xiv) of the introduction to this book, may we? A. Yes. P-38 Q. Perhaps for completeness start at the bottom of page 13: "Many people, particularly in Germany and Austria had an interest in propagating the accepted version of the order of one madman originated the entire massacre." We are talking here about Holocaust in the old sense, old, in the Irving history. MR JUSTICE GRAY: I am so sorry, Mr Rampton, I am lost, page 13. MR RAMPTON: (Xiii) of the introduction. MR JUSTICE GRAY: Thank you. MR RAMPTON: I will start again. Last two lines bottom of page 13: "Many people, particularly in Germany and Austria had an interest in propagating the accepted version that the order of one mad man originated the entire massacre." That is to say the massacre of the Jews, those are my words, my Lord. "Precisely when the order was given in what form has admittedly never been established. In 1939? But the secret extermination did not begin operating until December 1941. At the January 1942 Wannsee conference? "But the incontrovertible evidence is", note those words, Mr Irving, in the light of your recent answers, "the incontrovertible evidence is that Hitler ordered on November 30th 1941 that there was to be 'no liquidation' of the Jews (without much difficulty I found in Himmler's private files his own handwritten note on this)." In the light of that, Mr Irving, would you care to revise the P-39 answers you gave a moment ago? A. No. Q. Well, what do those words mean? Do they speak for themselves or do they not, that I have just read? A. I have done exactly what any normal editor would do, you present the evidence and then you draw conclusions. I present the evidence in the body of the book. I even in this one case print a facsimile of the document which is pivotal to this particular argument and then in the introduction (as a good author should) I put my principal conclusions. Here I am putting my principal conclusion as the author, David Irving, that I draw the conclusion from this episode that Hitler had intervened to stop -- and here is the error -- the liquidation of the Jews. What I should have written is "the liquidation of a transport of Jews". That was the state of my knowledge at the time I wrote this version of this book. Subsequently of course I amended it. Q. I think you told me yesterday that the only evidence you had for the order of Hitler was that Himmler was there at the time? A. The only evidence that I had for an order of Hitler? Q. Yes, was that Himmler was at the Wolfsschanze at the time? A. I think we would have to see exactly what I testified before I would agree to that brief summary. MR JUSTICE GRAY: I think it is right, but if you want to be P-40 referred to it then no doubt you should be. MR RAMPTON: A summary? A. I hate to agree with bowdlerised versions of what I testified. MR JUSTICE GRAY: Let us have a look and see what you did say. MR RAMPTON: My Lord, one could start at line 20 on page 285 perhaps? A. 285? Q. 285, line 20, I am trying not to take too much of it. I suppose it really begins at line five on page 285, but I hope I summarised it fairly? A. I do not think you did, but I will certainly stand by what I stated on those two pages. MR JUSTICE GRAY: Look at line 286, line 3 and onwards. MR RAMPTON: Yes, please. A. This is the question, of course, and not the answer. MR JUSTICE GRAY: Yes, but there is an answer after the question. MR RAMPTON: At line nine there is an answer. A. Yes. Q. My summary was a fair one. There is no evidence beyond the fact that Himmler was at the bunker that day and had lunch with Hitler an hour later, is there? A. Evidence for what? Q. For an order from Hitler that Jews -- that the train load of Jews, let us stick with that for the moment? P-41 A. This is -- Q. Should be not liquidated? A. -- I do not mean this offensively, but this is the common sense interpretation of the evidence lying before us, rather the perverse interpretation. We will always have versions or two interpretations, one is the obvious one, which is -- and the other is the perverse one. The obvious one is if Himmler goes to Hitler's headquarters and is handed a phone at some time on his way out and he then has to make phone call to Heydrich saying, "stop killing the Berlin Jews", then there is some close connection between that and the fact he has seen Hitler that day. Q. That is a possible interpretation, we in this court, and I do not know about the court of history, we in this court when we say "evidence" we mean "evidence" not "inference". A. The issues that are being pleaded are mistranslation, or distortion, deliberately mistranslation, distortion, manipulation and I do not think that the particular avenue we are going down leads in the -- Q. I will put it bluntly to you and then I will leave it, you can deny it, because you will deny it, I am sure; (a) you deliberately mistranslated it, you inflated from one train load into Jews generally, that is number one; and (b) you inserted an order from Hitler for which there was no evidence? P-42 A. -- I will take those two allegations seriatim; that I inflated it deliberately, there is not a shred of evidence for that. The evidence is quite clear, that as soon as Dr Gerald Fleming brought to me the evidence there was one train load of Jews which was in trouble that day, I immediately and in subsequent editions of the book revised it to the narrow interpretation of the word "transport" rather than the wider interpretation. Q. And you are sticking with the Hitler order answer? A. As being the reasonable rather than perverse analysis of the documents at that time before us. I emphasise of course it has now been very amply confirmed by the intercepts I read out in my bundle this morning. Q. Very well, then, we must look at another document. This is one of your documents? MR JUSTICE GRAY: Before you do can I ask one rather mundane question. MR RAMPTON: Yes, of course. MR JUSTICE GRAY: But I think you will understand why I ask it, Hitler's headquarters or the Wolf's Lair, how big a building or collection of buildings was that? A. At that time it was not the big formidable complex which exists today, huge concrete bunkers. There were one or two air raid shelters, but it was mostly in the form of wooden barracks scattered around in a compound of a 2 or 3 kilometres area with minefields and forests. P-43 Q. How many people would work there? A. Probably in the order of one thousand people including all the escorts and security. It had various inner areas and so called "Sperrkreise", which were the security zones, and he was in security zone A. But if it is aus dem Bunker, from the bunker, then it is from Hitler's bunker. MR JUSTICE GRAY: By which you mean an office or -- A. No, Hitler -- Q. -- a part of the compound where Hitler was himself based? A. -- in the security zone A there was the bunker in which Hitler resided, lived and conducted his conferences. Later on it was massively reinforced after the Allied air raids started. MR RAMPTON: This is all on the same topic, Mr Irving, so that the document you are will next need is to be found in bundle D8(iii), somebody will give it to you (same handed). A. Very well. Q. The page I want is 1042. A. Yes. Q. At the same time could I give you and his Lordship -- I have composed a page of the reprinted Himmler logs for Sunday 30th November 1941 and Monday 1st December 1941, I have taken from that Witte book. I have taken out the footnotes because I wanted the text. I wanted the text to appear unvarnished. First of all would like you to look P-44 at the page in D8(iii) page in D8(iii), 1042. This is taken from your website; do you recognize it? A. Yes. Q. You do, Mr Irving. At the bottom of the page the last entry starts: Meanwhile another page from the Himmler file in the Moscow archives obtained by David Irving on Sunday May 17th 1998, reveals the Reichsführer's appointments for November 30th 1941, see above. The day of the telephone call with Heydrich". Turn over now to page 1043. "This suggests that Mr Irving's original theory that Himmler discussed the matter with Hitler before phoning Heydrich is wrong. Himmler saw SS Sturmbannführer Gunther d'Alquèn, a journalist, from 12 to 1 p.m. (Reisebericht über SS Pol Division [that is short for Polizei] u. [that is an abbreviated U stop] Totenkopfdivision) then worked for an hour ('gearbeitet') during which he made the phone call, received General Dietl from 2 to 2.30 p.m." I will not bother to read the next bit. "And only then, at 2.30 p.m., went for lunch until 4 p.m. with Hitler ('Mittagessen b. Führer') that is short for bei, yes ? A. Yes. Q. That is your account, must postdate the 17th May 1998, must it not? According to that entry anyway it does, if P-45 you look at the first page? A. Yes. I did not understand the question, last question, it was what? Q. Well, if you say that you arrive at this conclusion in consequence of the discovery of a Himmler, a file page on 17th May 1998, this, what shall we say, "confession" must postdate that, must it not? A. Perhaps I should explain to his Lordship, if your Lordship is wondering why it is written in the third person. This is a page -- MR JUSTICE GRAY: I do not think that matters at all. A. No, right. But in other words I wrote that. This is what is important. Q. I follow you wrote it. MR RAMPTON: I had assumed you wrote that. This is why I called it a confession. A. Confession implies that something is wrong. MR JUSTICE GRAY: Put the substance, Mr Rampton. MR RAMPTON: It is quite inconsistent with the version you have been giving us in this court? A. It is absolutely consistent with my methods as an historian as saying here is one version, but the audience should know there is an alternative version. This is absolutely consistent with -- you remember how I sent that letter to The Times in 1966 saying there are other figures on Dresden and it is right that the public knows this. P-46 I know it is unusual for historians to do this, but I do that kind of thing. Q. But you did not say, but on reflection I think this suggestion that I was mistaken is probably wrong, and I adhere to my original thesis that it was a Hitler order? A. I draw attention to the first two words on page 1043 "this suggests". Q. I know that? A. It does not say "this confirms" or "proves". MR JUSTICE GRAY: But to be blunt about it, Mr Irving, what I think is the suggestion made on the basis of your website entry is that it was because a journalist tipped off Himmler what had been going on that the message went out to Riga; have I understood it correctly? A. I think I would be reading very much between the lines, my Lord. Q. That is what you are saying here, is it not, Mr Irving? A. No, not at all. I am saying exactly what happened. What his timetable was. MR RAMPTON: Mr Irving, the position is this, you quite properly in this website entry recognize the possibility, I would say the probability, it does not matter, that your original thesis, that it was an order from Hitler was wrong, do you not? A. Well, you say "probability" and "possibility"; I would say what I am saying here is it is important that the learned P-47 public, academics and others who are accessing this website realise there are documents which indicate a discrepancy in the times. However, we should not "lay every word on the gold balance", as the Germans say, because it is quite possible and indeed highly probable that as soon as Himmler arrived at Hitler's headquarters he did not go and have a shower or something, he went straight in to see the boss, and said "boss I am here, what time shall I come past" and the boss said "oh by the way Himmler, I will have to tear a strip off you because of what is happening at the Eastern Front". Q. Mr Irving, who reads these books of yours? Do not take that as a suggestion that nobody does, at all, I do not mean that, but who are they aimed at? A. How would I know? Q. Who do you write your books for? When are you writing a book, if I write something to my wife I do not use the kind of pompous language I use in court, I hope. So you know, you have an audience? A. Obviously, I am trying to write for as wide an audience as possible so that it is both learned enough for the academics to use as a source book, in the case of the Goebbels biography but also entertaining enough for the general public to look at and read from end to end without putting it down at the end of a chapter. Q. Exactly. It is meant to be readable and it is also P-48 scholarly and authoritative, is it not? A. Yes. Q. All three of those things. Do you not think, Mr Irving, that the respectable approach to this problem of the Himmler telephone call, for problem it is, historically? A. Yes. Q. Would have been to put both possible "theories", as you call them, in this website into your book? A. Well, here you have another time discrepancy, Mr Rampton, because the book was delivered to the publishers in 1995, and this Moscow diary came to my hands in 1998; three years, so it would have been quite a feat of imagination to imagine what was in the archives and I had not at that time seen. Q. No, but you had assumed without more, had you not? A. This is not the point you were just trying to make, you were trying to imply I concealed what I knew, which would fall within the grounds of manipulation and mistranslation. Q. What I put to you is this, that you inserted an order from Hitler without evidence? A. I inferred an order from Hitler with very strong evidence. Q. You state it as a categorical fact? A. In my introduction to the book, yes, I draw conclusions. Q. And also in the text, if I may say so. A. No, in the text I state exactly what the documents say. P-49 Q. And you mistranscribe the word Judentransport so as to make Hitler appear the more merciful because that is what it is about? A. No, I applied the wider interpretation of the "transport" rather than the narrow interpretation, which one could subsequently apply once one knew more about the history of that particular train load. Q. You do not agree now that you have been caught out by the full entry in the Hitler log? A. Mr Rampton, historians are constantly being caught out by fresh documents that come into their purview and one is -- I am personally very satisfied how infrequently I am caught out. I wrote the entire Goebbels biography initially, for example, without access to the diaries in Moscow. I was pleased to find out how much I had managed to work out correctly from secondary sources. So it is with this particular episode, the decodes only came into our possession within the last four or five years and yet they confirmed exactly what I inferred 20 years, 25 years ago. I do not think it is a question of being caught out. If one revises and updates information it is not because one has been caught out, with all pejorative implications. Q. I am afraid they are pejorative. I would like to know why you say that the decodes (we will go it now, I will come back to where I was in a moment) why the decodes confirm your account? P-50 A. I think I have gone through the little bundle this morning in some detail, I am glad I did. Q. You show me the decode, I suppose you mean the one on page 17? A. December 1st. MR JUSTICE GRAY: Mr Rampton, you are moving to a slightly different topic, may I ask one more question? MR RAMPTON: Yes. MR JUSTICE GRAY: It is back to your website, looking at it now, forget what you have written in the past, but looking at it now, it is obvious that there was some sort of discussion or meeting between Himmler and the journalist; is that not right? A. My Lord, I regard this meeting between Himmler and the journalist as being a matter of very low priority, I just put it in purely because it shows what he was doing that morning. It never occurred to me that Gunther d'Alquèn who is in fact still alive, I believe -- no, he died three or four months ago in fact, -- that he would have brought to Himmler any kind of serious information about was going on. I have never heard that implied or inferred. D'Alquèn has been questioned on very many occasions, both by the courts and by journalists, and I am sure that that kind of information would have come into my possession; if it had had I would have immediately used it. Q. The entry does suggest that this journalist did have some news to give to Himmler, does it not? P-51 A. I shall go straight home and change the wording of the entry, my Lord, because that was not what I intended as the author of this passage. Q. What is Reisebericht? A. It is a travel report. He has been travelling around, presumably on the Eastern Front and he comes back to Himmler. He reports back to Himmler, tells him what he has seen, when he visited the SS police divisions and whatever -- Q. How would you translate Totenkopfdivision? A. -- Death's Head Division, which is a division on the Eastern Front which was not connected, as I understand it, with the killing operations, it was actually operating on the Eastern Front. I am prepared to be corrected on this but I believe that the Death's Head Division was one of the elite SS divisions which was fighting on the Eastern Front at Moscow, at this time of course in severe difficulties. Q. Yes, thank you very much. I am sorry, Mr Rampton. MR RAMPTON: It is of no matter, my Lord. THE WITNESS: I would be very willing to write material in between the lines here if I thought it assisted the evidence that on this particular case, on the balance of probabilities beyond putting the name in, that is all one can safely do. But your Lordship will notice that I do not hesitate to publicise information which is possibly P-52 hostile to my own interests. MR JUSTICE GRAY: I see that. MR RAMPTON: The original of I imagine the two documents that you are talking about when you are talking about the -- is on page 20 of your little bundle; do you have the little bundle there? A. Yes. Q. Items 24 and 25; is that right? A. 24 and? Q. 25, items 24 and 25 on page 20? A. Is this April 20th, you are talking about? Q. No, I am sorry, this is the summons to Jeckeln? A. Would you give me the page number. Q. Page 20. A. Yes. Q. Items 24 and 25. A. I see, this is actual the intercepts. Q. Yes, we go back to page 17 for the English. A. Yes. Q. It is quite clear, is it not, I mean I agree with you, that Himmler was very cross with Jeckeln for what had happened? A. For overstepping the guidelines. Q. Sure. We do not know what guidelines are you tell us? A. I do not know what the guidelines are, no. Q. It is common ground for once between you and me and the P-53 people who inform me, teach me, educate me, that following that incident because no doubt the meeting took place between Himmler and Jeckeln on 4th December 1941, yes? A. Yes. Q. Probably following receipt of the telegram or whatever it was on the 1st December. A. Mr Rampton, may I remind you of the very lengthy Bruns Report I read out. Q. I am coming to that. A. Can I answer. Q. Certainly remind me of that if you wish, yes. A. Yes. In which there is talk in the Bruns Report of Bruns saying we sent an urgent message to Hitler's Headquarters, -- "how could we do it," -- then the word comes back to the Riga front, to the young SS man; he said, we received orders, this kind of thing has to stop. This is the kind of extraneous information one takes on board when one draws inferences from documents. Q. Mr Irving, I think sometimes you set traps for yourself. A. I try not to. Q. Actually what Bruns said was mass shootings on this scale have got to stop, this has to be done more discreetly? A. Yes. Q. That is quite different? A. That is what the local SS officers said to him. Q. It is quite different, is it not, it is not the same thing P-54 at all? A. They wanted to carry on, yes, they wanted to carry [on]. Q. No, no, Bruns's report of the order through the mouth of Altemeyer was that the order which had come from Berlin was that mass shootings of this kind on the scale have to stop, that has to be done more discreetly? A. This is Bruns' version four years later [in April 1945] of what the 22 year old SS officer who wanted to carry on killing Jews told him. He said, We have gone been told by East Prussia we have to stop, however, the way he phrased it was, they have to stop on this scale and we are going to carry on doing it in a more discreet way -- because that is what they wanted to do. But of course they did not, they did not carry on, they stopped, as that footnote shows. Q. We will come to it in a moment. They did stop for a time. They stopped doing what Himmler did not like that Jeckeln had done which was mass, if you like, semi public shootings of people as they go off the trains? A. The footnote which I printed at the end of bundle says "the killing of German Jews stopped for several months after this exchange". Q. Yes, that is common ground between you and me, the killing of German Jews by this method. Maybe it stopped -- A. Mr Rampton, you are putting words in which do not exist -- Q. -- we are coming to your use, I add, your use of the Bruns evidence in a moment, but before we do that, I want you to P-55 look at these two messages, these two intercepts. There is no evidence in that of any intervention or participation by Hitler, is there? A. -- no. Q. It is all between Himmler and Jeckeln? A. Yes. Q. If you look at the log for the 1st December 1941, I have given you the composite version, having lost -- A. Composite version, yes. This is a composite because it is made up from three or four different sources by the editors. Q. -- by "composite" I meant composed from different pages in the book. A. Yes, December 1st. Q. December 1st. We see when he is making a telephone call he puts "T" is that the editors or is that Himmler? A. That is the editors who put that. Q. That is the editors. At quarter past one on the 1st there is an entry, it must be a telephone call because Heydrich is in Prague? A. It is in my bundle two. Q. The German for Prague is P-R-A-G I take it; is that right? A. Yes. Q. At quarter past 1 he rings SS Obergruppenführer Heydrich in Prague? A. If I may interrupt, we do not know he rang Heydrich, all P-56 we can say is there was a conversation. Q. Heydrich might have rung him, of course? A. Yes. Q. The first word is Schreibdamen; is that secretaries? A. That is correct. Q. They have a talk about secretaries, it seems, then they talk about the executions in Riga? A. Yes. Q. Is there any inconsistency in that entry and the suggestion that what they actually talked about was the fact that Jeckeln had not followed the guidelines because he was doing it too publicly? A. That is perfectly consistent. I might add this is the document 24 in -- I am sorry, document No. 14 in my bundle, the original. Q. Yes. You see there is no evidence in that that that phone call to Heydrich, or from Heydrich, is in any way involved or prompted by Hitler, is there? A. No, none at all, but you are setting a trap for yourself I am afraid. Q. Why? A. Because if I may refer back to the second of the messages, page 17 in my bundle, one in which Himmler contacts Jeckeln on December 1st and reads the riot act to him. Q. Yes, we looked at that. A. It says: "The Jews being outplaced to the Ostland are to P-57 be dealt with only in accordance with the guidelines laid down by myself and/or by the Reichssicherheitshauptamt on my orders." No mention of Hitler here. Q. No. A. So this is vitally important to me. I rely on that to prove that Hitler was not involved in this order. The ordering procedure was not Hitler's. The guidelines were not Hitler's. Q. Mr Irving, one would not expect, given the way in which Hitler's so-called orders and, they are very rarely orders, they are more often just an airy speech at some dinner table, the words "Hitler's orders" in quotes, were, as it were, dispersed down the hierarchical column of the Nazis, you would not expect Hitler to issue precise guidelines about how the Jews were to be treated on arrival or how they were to be killed, would you? A. This is your evidence -- you are leading -- or a question? Q. I am putting it to you that that is right, is it not? A. I rely only on my interpretation of this document that Himmler in a secret message says, they are my orders and my guidelines and you have contravened them. When the temptation would surely have been to say you have contravened the Führer's orders and the Führer's guidelines, which is a very strong point I would make because this is the centre point of my own contention. Q. Do you not think that in light of Bruns's evidence the P-58 guidelines were whatever you do you must make sure it does not come to public attention because public opinion in Germany will not stand for it if it does, and that that is precisely what was discussed between Himmler and the journalist on the train or wherever it was on the 30th November? A. I think that public opinion in Germany would have stood from it from what I know of the Germans -- most Germans would not have batted a eyelash at the knowledge that these mass killings of the Jews were going on. MR JUSTICE GRAY: Well, they were German Jews, I think you agreed earlier on? A. German Jews. MR RAMPTON: They were Berlin Jews. A. Yes, there was certainly nothing that would have caused the Germans problems on the scale that the euthanasia killings were causing in public morale problems. Maybe my interpretation of the morale in Germany is wrong, you will lead evidence later on to contradict me. Q. I think that probably is right. MR JUSTICE GRAY: I am not sure I follow the logic of that, the euthanasia programme did cause unrest to use a neutral term? A. It caused so much unrest, my Lord, that Hitler had to intervene and stop it. Q. Would not the shooting of large numbers of, to put it P-59 bluntly, healthy Jews, have caused even more unrest, or at any rate as much unrest? A. They are very -- they are parallel programmes and in very many senses. A lot of the killing operations were conducted by the same organizations and the same experts, but the campaign of Dr Goebbels against the Jews, propaganda campaign had, been conducted with very much more vehemence and personal commitment by Dr Goebbels and it had converted a large element of the German population in my opinion, to anti-Semitism of a vicious and poisonous degree. Whereas his attempt to achieve the same results against the crippled and disabled had been limited just to one or two films and articles. There was a film called "Ich Klage an", which was a film about the -- it was a film in which the mentally disabled and crippled were portrayed in a repulsive manner so the public would accustom themselves to idea of putting them out of the way, and this kind of propaganda totally failed with the German public. The doctors went along with it but the general public when they found out about it resisted very strongly euthanasia killings. Whereas the Jews were considered to be, I think, in Germany fair game as a result largely of Dr Goebbels' propaganda. Q. How good is your facility with Heinrich Himmler's spidery Gothic handwriting? A. The handwriting on these pages is not only Himmler, it is P-60 also his Adjutant who still alive in Munich. Q. Never mind. Let us be precise then and put impersonally, with the spidery handwriting, Gothic handwriting on these pages? A. On these pages, I will have a shot at it, Mr Rampton. Q. No, I just wonder how used you are to looking at it. A. Not recently, but over the last few nights I have had to strain my eyes once again, thanks to your imputations. Q. When did you first see these pages which, apparently, you did not see the whole of the page for 30th November 1941 until 17th May 1998, is that right? A. He maintained three separate continuous records. He kept the pocket diary. Those pocket diaries are scattered around the world. Some are in Israel now, some are in Russia. I found two in the United States and gave them to the German government. He also maintained a telephone log which was a sheet of paper on his disk, like the ones in front of us, on which he would write down on one side the name of the person he was talking to and on other side what they were talking about. Either he or his adjutant would also keep a daily agenda of whom he was to see and when and what they would talk about or what they had talked about. The fourth series of documents by Himmler you will also run into is when he went to see Hitler, he would write down on a sheet of paper his discussion points. P-61 Q. We are coming to one of those later on today, Mr Irving. Can you turn to page 12? A. I should also explain that these are on microfilm originally in the United States which is the way I used them and accessed them originally in the 1970s. Q. I want to be clear what it was you had seen when you wrote your books. Can you turn to page 12 in your little bundle? A. Right. This is the telephone conversations of November 30th. Q. Bear with me, if you do not mind, just allow me to ask some questions. What is this a page a copy of? Page 12? A. I just stated that he would have on his desk a sheet of paper on which he would either type or insert in handwriting the words "Telephongespräch" which is T-E-L-E-P-H-O-N G-E-S-P-R-A-C-H. Q. So that is his what we can ---- A. This is his telephone log. Q. What we could perhaps imprecisely call his telephone log? A. Yes. Q. Would you turn over then to ---- A. I was the first person to find and make use of these. Q. That is as may be. A. Well, it is important. Q. On page 14? A. Page 14, yes. P-62 Q. I ask the same question: is that the same document? It looks different. A. It looks different because that is a photocopy from my blue volume of these which is on the desk at the other end of your bench. Q. I see. A. Whereas the page previously, when I used it as a facsimile in my book "Hitler's War", I had it rephotographed by the German Government from the original in their archives as a photograph rather than as a photocopy. Q. So, looking at page 14, somebody has typed "Telephongespräch Reichsführer SS" from 1st December 1941? A. Yes. Q. Who typed that? A. That was typed by his adjutant. A blank sheet of paper would be typed for him and laid before him with that heading already prepared. Q. But the other one, the earlier one, has not got that? A. He did not have it, no. That is taken straight off the microfilm. I can show that to you on the bound volume. Q. I follow that. Let us understand it. The second one is the thing that he probably keeps in his office? A. I do not think so. He would sometimes use a presheet -- pretyped sheet that his adjutant had typed and sometimes he would just a take a blank sheet of paper if he was in a hurry and write the headings himself. P-63 Q. Which may be something of the character of the first one. A. That is correct. They are all in the same file, those ones. Q. What I want to know is what you had when you wrote your books. Was it this these two sheets of paper? A. I had those two sheets. Q. You did not have the fuller version which we can now compose? A. It is not a question of the fuller version. The other page that you are referring to was not his telephone log, but his daily agenda, his appointment book, which is in Moscow and which only became available in 1998. Q. We really would get on quicker if you would let me finish the question. I said the fuller version which we can now compose from different sources. As the editors of the Witte book have done, they have used a number of different sources to make a diary for the day. A. Well, they have. They have constructed an artificial diary, yes, a calendar. Q. Exactly, but in the days when you were writing your books, the books which we are talking about, this is all you had, was it? A. Yes. The Witte book, which is the one to the left of your box ---- Q. That is new, that one? A. Yes. It costs about £70 -- not as much as law books, of P-64 course, but still quite expensive. Q. I did not buy it. A. It was only published last year. I only obtained it about four months ago. Q. Well, now this is not in any sense a trick or an examination question or anything. Can you look at page 12? A. Yes. Q. And the last entry which I think is probably quarter past 6 -- it might be anyway, might it not? A. The last line or the last entry? Q. No, the last entry. A. 6.15. Q. It looks like it, does it not? Then across the line? A. "SS Gruppenführer ... Berlin". Q. What is the first word of the entry in the right-hand column? A. "Transport Nachersatz". Q. It is the "a" of transport which I ask you to look at. A. Yes, that is the real problem. Q. No, it is not. A. It is because the "a" looks exactly like the "e" in Gothic handwriting. Q. Exactly. In fact, you might think to an English eye it looks like a "u"? A. No. P-65 Q. "Transport"? A. I will explain why it does not. Q. No, no. A. Well, no, please. Q. It might be thought to an English person -- just bear with me, answer my person -- it might be thought to look like a "u", might it not? A. Yes. My Lord, do you have the facsimile in front of you? MR JUSTICE GRAY: Yes. I am following. MR RAMPTON: Now could you turn to page 14, please? A. 14, yes. Q. In fact, that thing that looks like a "u" to an English person in "transport" is an "a", is it not? A. Yes. Q. Now look at the word which you say you mistranscribed as "Juden" which is three lines up from the bottom of the right-hand column ---- A. Yes. Q. --- on page 14. A. Yes, I have it. Q. It is plainly "haben"; it is the same thing, it is an "a", is it not? A. That is what we call Monday-morning quarterbacking. It is somebody who knows what the answer is. If I had given this page to you, say, six months ago, Mr Rampton, and said, "Would you mind reading that word?" P-66 Q. I would not have had a clue. I cannot read hardly any of it. A. That was the position I was in 34 years ago when I looked at this. Q. Why? But you have never gone back to it? A. I must have gone back to it in the 1970s because I retyped it on my transcript. Q. The third letter, you think that is a "d" or you thought it was a "d"? A. If you look at the word "Juden" which I would ask you to look at variously, for example ---- Q. We will look at it on page 12, if you want? A. Yes. About eight lines from the bottom. In the third line of that entry you have "Judentransport", admittedly, it is a bit ---- Q. It is obscured? A. --- obscured by the word above it. Q. I agree. A. But you can already begin to see that there are distinct similarities in the outline. Q. I am afraid I cannot accept that. Anyway, the point is this, is it not ---- A. Yes, you hasten on, yes. Q. -- you say, you tell us, that you read that word, that entry as reading: "Verwaltungsführer der SS Juden zu bleiben"? P-67 A. Yes, and I can produce my contemporary index card on which I made that transcription which shows at that time as "Juden zu bleiben". Q. Turn, please, to page 13 of this bundle and there you have it correctly? A. I have corrected it, yes. Q. You tell us to look at the word "haben". One can see if one looks that the letters are squashed? A. It has been typed in subsequently with Tippex, yes. Q. Yes, or whatever was existing then because you say that was retyped on a typewriter which you threw away more than 15 years ago? A. Well, between 10 and 15 years ago -- an old IBM typewriter I had. Q. Yes, but before 1991? A. Yes. Q. Now can you take "Hitler's War 1991", please? MR JUSTICE GRAY: Can I just ask you this, Mr Irving? You are fluent in German. If you are trying to write that somebody has to stay somewhere, whether it is Jews or whoever, you would not say "haben zu bleiben", would you? A. They have to stay, "haben zu bleiben" would be the German. Just the same as in English, has to stay, has to remain. Q. Is that right? A. Yes. But, on the other hand, the line "Juden zu bleiben" would be also grammatically correct. P-68 Q. That is abbreviation, but if you are using a verb at all, you would say "haben" would be appropriate? A. Yes, and you could equally well say the word above it which is "Verwaltungsführer" was a line by itself and a topic by itself which is what I assumed it was in the original transcript. MR RAMPTON: Can you turn now to Hitler's War on page 427, 1991 edition? A. I do not have it in front of me, but if you would just read out the passage. Q. D1(v). I do not have to read very much. My Lord, page 427. MR JUSTICE GRAY: Thank you. MR RAMPTON: At the end of the last complete paragraph on page 427 -- is that 1991 you have there? A. You will not believe this, but I am only person who does not have a copy of that book. People visit my house and they think, "Well, that is nice". It has gone! Q. 1991, volume 2, it is D1(v). A. I would be quite ready to concede what you are about to say. We do not really need to go into this. MR JUSTICE GRAY: I probably ought to know what you are about to concede. MR RAMPTON: Yes. I do not think we should communicate by telepathy, Mr Irving! A. Very well. P-69 Q. Now, we have read the first part of this earlier this morning about "Hitler being obliged to telephone from Hitler's bunker to Heydrich the explicit order that these Jews were 'not to be liquidated'". Then you go on after the semi-colon ---- A. Can you tell me what page you are on? Q. I am sorry, 427. I beg your pardon. A. Yes. Q. "... and the next day Himmler telephoned SS Oswald Pohl, overall chief of the concentration camp system, with the order 'Jews are to stay where they are'." When that was published, you knew it was wrong, did you not? A. Published what. Q. When that was published, you knew it was wrong? A. No. Q. Why not? A. When it was published, yes. You must appreciate this text you are looking at here was typeset by the Americans, by the American publisher, Avon Books Inc., in probably 1985 or 1986. They published it round about that time, and two or three years later, round about 1990, we approached the English publishers and had this American edition photographed and what is called "offset" and reprinted in our own edition, which Mr Bateman is holding there, what you call the 1991 edition. So there is very little connection between the P-70 actual year given as the year of publication and the date when text goes into its final cast-in-stone form. Q. Tell me that chronology again, Mr Irving. It is rather interesting. When was the American edition of this work written? A. Written or? Q. Written. A. I have to piece it together from extraneous information. I was in Key West, I was in Florida. It would have been 1985 and 1986 because I did it before I wrote the Rudolf Hess book which was published 1987, so it was 1985. Q. So when were the references to the Holocaust removed from it? A. The references to the Holocaust? Q. Yes. A. That is a good question. That is a good question because that would, in fact, bring it forward to 1988. Q. Oh, really? A. Yes. Q. You see, Mr Irving, let me put my cards on the table, as I habitually do, your Holocaust conversion, if I can call it that, happened as a result, largely speaking, perhaps, of your encounter with Mr Leuchter and his laboratory analyses? A. Reading the laboratory reports, yes, which was April 6th 1988. P-71 Q. 1988? A. Yes. Q. As a consequence of that, we have been told by you, not in this court but elsewhere and you will, no doubt, confirm it in due course, this book in that respect ---- A. So the sequence of books is different. I wrote the Rudolf Hess book first and then I went to revise this. Q. If you say so. A. Yes. Q. It was radically altered in that respect as compared with the 1977 edition? A. Taking out the word "Holocaust", yes. Q. Now, here you have an entry, also as you now accept ---- A. Yes. Q. --- completely wrong, but it does not ---- A. Yes, but is it not exactly the same wording? Q. It does not get changed. It is exactly the same wording. A. In other words, I have not actually actively put in something; I have just left something to stand. Q. No, you could have taken it out? A. I could have taken it out, yes. If somebody had come to me and had said at the time, "Oh, Mr Irving, by the way, do you not remember you misread that word and we have now got a better reading", then, believe me, I would have taken it out and I would have contacted the Americans and changed it. But that is not what happens in real life. P-72 Q. You came to believe in 1988 that the so-called Holocaust, as you call it, so-called, did not happen? A. I have never used the phrase "so-called Holocaust", Mr Rampton. Q. No, no. I am in the difficulty, as you perfectly well understand, Mr Irving, there is no way in the world that I am going to concede that it did not happen. That is not what this case is about. I call it "so-called" because in your eyes by then it was the "so-called Holocaust"? A. You said the "so-called Holocaust, as you call it". Q. No. As you characterise it? A. Yes. Q. Yes -- had not happened so you took steps to have the book altered for its second edition to remove the references to that ---- A. Yes. Q. --- alleged event? A. Yes. Q. You did not bother to remove something which was, first of all, important and, secondly, completely wrong? A. This is a very subordinate matter in the book. It is a piece of secondary information which adds very little to the principal argument. The argument turns out now to have been correct on the basis of the decodes. This is a book of probably half a million words. One word, admittedly, I should have changed because I had some years P-73 earlier realised that I had misread it. In all the 500,000 words it never occurred to me that there may be words which I still had not actually changed yet. You are absolutely right. Q. Yes. Then I suggest that your failure to remove it, as you could easily have done, it now appears ---- A. Yes. Q. --- was deliberate because you wanted to keep this picture of benign, magnanimous Adolf Hitler holding up his arm to save the Jews before the public? A. I do not think so, and I do not think you can suggest that just on the basis of that one line. The Jews have to remain, have to remain where? Have to remain in concentration camps. Q. Where they are? A. Have to remain in the East, have to remain in the west. It is a pretty meaningless sentence as it is. Q. In that paragraph it is by no means meaningless, is it? A. Yes, but now I would certainly replace it with the decodes instead and, in fact, in the latest edition I have. That sentence is out and is replaced by absolute diamond evidence, the decodes, showing that I am right all the way down the line. MR JUSTICE GRAY: Am I right in thinking that the entry in the log was one of what you have described as the "chain of documents"? P-74 A. This particular one, I never referred to, not the "haben zu bleiben". It is totally immaterial and unimportant. My Lord, people imagine that books are written in a very precise, military kind of way, but they are written in an extraordinarily ramshackle way. They go back and forth across the Atlantic with all sorts of different people setting their hands to them, including lawyers and readers and experts and sub-editors and publicity people, and it is a miracle that anything finally comes off the end of the line. MR RAMPTON: Mr Irving, you thought it sufficiently important an event, and it is in the context of an order from Hitler, according to you, the Jews are to stay where they are, it is an order showing, not only did Hitler say that they are not to be killed, not to be liquidated, an explicit order, but they are actually to stay where they are, they are not to be shunted around from one place to another and they are certainly not to be brought to places of execution. That is why it is there, is it not? A. No. It is there purely because it was the next entry in the Himmler telephone log as I had misread it at the time. Q. And is sufficiently important in your mind for you to put an asterisk footnote, is it not? A. Saying that the facsimile of November 30 telephone conversation is reproduced as a facsimile. Q. I imagine the reason you did not -- I do not know what the P-75 verb is from "facsimile" -- you did not reproduce a facsimile of the note of 1st December is that you will say that is because it was not sufficiently legible on the copy? A. This is what you imagine, is it? Is your imagination what you are leading as evidence now? Q. Yes. I am asking you, what is the reason why -- you had a lot of pictures in the second edition, did you not? A. In the 1991 edition? Q. Yes. A. Yes. Q. Why did you not put a facsimile of this message in? A. I had something like 3,000 pictures to draw upon, Mr Rampton, and it is a judgment call which photographs you use. One facsimile of a first line document where an order is going out, "the transport of Jews not to be liquidated" is for more important than a meaningless sentence like "had to remain". Q. Now, I want to go to, if I may ---- A. But I would like just to round up that argument between us by saying that I do not think that you have established that I have deliberately manipulated or deliberately distorted or deliberately mistranslated anything. It is a sin of omission. The sin of omission is that I should sometime five years down the road, having realised the misreading, it should have occurred to me that one word P-76 had been misinterpreted or misread and that I should take that out of the 500,000 other words. Q. I will be clear about it, Mr Irving, I will lay it out for you. You can deny it. It is not my function at this stage to persuade his Lordship that I am right. That comes later on. You invented a Hitler order. You deliberately inflated it into an order to protect the whole of the Jews? A. I have not invented a Hitler order, Mr Rampton. I have hypothesised the Hitler order in the way that a scientist should and I have then supported the hypothesis with evidence. Q. Mr Irving, this is one occasion on which a "yes" or "no" will do. You invented it in the sense that you made an hypothesis (and I do not say it is an unreasonable hypothesis) you made it into a categorical assertion of fact. Now, do you agree with that or not? A. Yes, in the introduction. Q. And do you agree with that as being an irresponsible, deliberately deceptive manner for a historian to proceed? A. Quite the contrary on the basis of evidence that I have led this morning from my little bundle. Q. When did you have those Jeckeln messages? A. The intercepts? Q. Yes. A. Within the last four weeks I have seen the originals. P-77 Q. You did not have them at the time when you wrote this book? A. No, but if you have a clean mind when you set out to write a book, untrammelled by what you have seen on the TVs and on the movies or read in other people's book like that by Mr Kershaw -- if you start out with a clean mind and you read documents that meet your criteria, you are probably going to be nudged in the correct path that you arrive at the right conclusions. Q. It may happen, Mr Irving, from time to time in life that you tell what you intend to be a lie and subsequent events, that wonderful friend hindsight shows that you were telling the truth all along. Mr Irving, we are not using hindsight. I am concerned with your state of mind when you wrote these books. A. You tell a lie and it turns out to be the truth all along? MR JUSTICE GRAY: Tell what you intend to be a lie. MR RAMPTON: Yes, you tell what you intend to be a lie and it turns out to be the truth. A. Why would I intend something to be a lie? Q. Because you are trying to exonerate, exculpate Adolf Hitler. A. Well, this is your opinion, Mr Rampton, and I do not think that this can be sustained on the evidence. Q. No. There are four limbs to this which you can say, "Yes, P-78 it is right" (which you will not) or "No, it is not right" (which you will). The second limb to this is that you deliberately distorted the original German so as to inflate one transport of Jews from Berlin into the whole of the German Jews? A. I am not going to respond to that because I have made a response to that argument. Q. Exactly. The third step is that you did not misread by accident the word "haben" as "Juden"; you knew all along that it was "haben" but you wrote it in as "Jews"? A. I am not going to respond to that because I have stated my position very fully on that too. Q. The fourth proposition is that in any event, on your own account, by the time this version of the book, the 1991 edition, comes out, you know for a certainty, even if you did not before, that it was wrong and you deliberately chose not to change it? A. On the contrary, you could use the word "deliberate" if I put it in at this time. A failure to take something out is an omission, a sin of omission, and not a sin of commission, if I may put it that way. I respectfully suggest that it was a sin of omission and a failure to take a word out of 500,000 words is ---- Q. I do not think it matters what words one uses. A. --- it would be improperly and unjustly described as being the kind of distortion that you are trying to impute. P-79 Q. Indeed I do. To allow a falsehood once told to remain on the record is just as reprehensible as to have invented it in the first place, is it not? A. I object to the word "falsehood". Q. Well, it is a false statement. A. A misreading of a word which is a perfectly legitimate misreading of a word which, I suppose, every person in this room would have read that way if they had been in exactly the same situation. Q. These books, Mr Irving, are in some sense, are they not, history books? A. Which books? Q. These, the Hitler's War books? A. They are ---- Q. They are meant to be? A. --- works of history, yes. Q. --- meant to be history books. They are meant to be a history of the Second World War seen not through Hitler's eyes, I do not mean that, but with an angle on it that perhaps others have not treated before, that is to say, the Hitler angle. Hitler is at the centre of these books, is he not? A. Yes. Q. You use what in the second edition it appears by the time it appears you know to be a false statement of fact about history? P-80 A. By the time the second edition appears, it is true that five years earlier I had known that a word had been wrongly read. If you know -- when one publishes successive editions of the book, if one is in the fortunate position that I am, you are in the position that you can, if you have the chance, constantly upgrade and update and polish and refine. The latest edition that we put out, before it goes to the printers, I have had it on the Internet for the last six weeks, and I have invited people around the world to spot errors precisely like that, and I have increased the reward to a present $8 per error. I have had to shell out 2 or $3,000 already. I am not in the least bit ashamed because one wants to turn out a work that is as perfect and as error free as possible; but even so, errors go in. There is a very famous case where a man did exactly the same and he offered a very large reward if anybody could spot a typographical error in a book that he had produced, and it turned out that the very title on the title page had been -- can I point out, Mr Rampton, another very serious error? Q. I am listening; it is just that I have to get ready for my next question. Do continue, yes. A. I will continue rambling on. There is a very serious error in the book "Hitler's War" which is before you, the 1991 edition, and this is that my name does not appear on it. That you would consider is a most serious error that P-81 an author can face, that his name does not appear on his own book. Q. It depends, rather, on one's point of view, Mr Irving, I would have said. Mr Irving, can we turn please to -- what is that? That seems to have your name on it but maybe this is the wrong edition. A. Not on the jacket, but actually in the book, Mr Rampton, you will not find it. Q. I have not, I confess, looked, nor do I think I ---- A. I mean, I confess that I am the author for the purposes of this action. Q. Nor do I think that I will spend the court's time doing it now. Thank you very much. Mr Irving, I want to return to General Bruns. How do you pronounce it, in fact? A. Bruns, B-R-U-N-S. Q. With no umlaut though? A. No umlaut. Q. If that is the right word. Do you have your two-page English translation? A. I think I know it virtually off by heart. Q. I would rather you had it. A. It is in my opening statement. I have it, yes, I have the opening statement version. Q. Maybe I should use that. It will make it easier for everybody. I have the PRO [Public Record Office] version. A. It is on page 22. You say that Bruns' account has P-82 verisimilitude? A. Yes. Q. Account of what he said he saw? A. I remarked that because later on under oath in the witness box in Nuremberg he said he had not been there, I find that hard to believe. Q. I agree with you, I think it has verisimilitude for what it matters. It is an horrendous account of an unpleasant -- more than an unpleasant event in human history. That is not what I am interested in. Given that it has verisimilitude, if you look in the middle of page 22, one of the things that Bruns was overheard saying to whoever he was speaking to was this, middle of the page: "I told that fellow Altemeyer?" In fact, Altemeyer, whose name I shall always remember and who will be added to the list of war criminals, listen to me they [that is Jews] represent valuable manpower. Altemeyer: Do you call Jews valuable human beings, Sir? I [that is Bruns said] Listen to me properly, I said valuable manpower, I did not mention their value as human beings. He said [Altemeyer said] Well, they are to be shot in accordance with the Führer's orders! I said: Führer's orders? He said, yes, whereupon he showed me his orders." Now that has never appeared in any of your books, has it? A. Too true, yes, absolutely right. P-83 Q. Why not? A. I discounted it. Q. Why? A. Because I am familiar with other sources where people claim to be acting on Hitler's orders because it was the ready answer to shut anybody up if somebody came and complained then the senior officer or the other officer would say: "Do not start criticising me, this is the Führer's orders", and I discounted the subsequent sentence about "then he showed it to me" for exactly the same reason that I discounted the statement at Nuremberg that Eichmann claimed that the -- rather Wisliceny claimed that Eichmann had showed him the orders. There are no orders. They have not been found. We have now been in the archives, in and out of the archives of the world for the last 50 years, since the end of World War II, 55 years and no primary or secondary or tertiary evidence of the existence of these orders has been found as regards the war years. I concede that in interrogations and in War Crimes Trials and elsewhere everyone else is happy to talk about Führer's orders but the fact remains had there been any such order or any such document, and you are tapping this one, this is what I will put in the category of "interrogations", had there been any such order, it would have surfaced by now. P-84 MR JUSTICE GRAY: You put this in the category of "interrogations", did you say? A. It is at the end of war, my Lord, he is in the enemy hands. Q. He is being surreptitiously... A. I appreciate that, my Lord, but it is in a grey area. He is in the enemy's power and custody and I draw attention to the line a bit earlier up where he says: "His name I shall always also remember and who will be added to the list of war criminals". That is a gentle hint to me that perhaps he is not entirely unaware that somebody may be listening. MR RAMPTON: What do you know -- A. You must appreciate that, my Lord. MR RAMPTON: What do you know of General Bruns? A. -- what do I know of him? Q. What do you know of him, yes. A. Only what I know from this document and from the writings of Gerald Fleming. I suppose we would describe him now as been an anti-Nazi by the time the war ended, but then a lot of people were anti-Nazi by the time the war ended. Q. --- what if they happened to be an anti-Nazi all along, there were such people in German during the 1940s, were there not. A. Undoubtedly, yes. Q. Quite a lot of the ordinary army, I am not talking about P-85 the SS, who are not army at all, really, were anti-Nazi? A. Is this the evidence that you are leading, I am not familiar with any statistical basis for that. Q. I am suggesting you could give me the answer "yes"? A. I have not seen any documentary evidence of that. I do not think GALLUP Polls are conducted among the Wehrmacht soldiers who still support Adolf. I always want to see this kind of evidence and if I can just -- if I can just add here we have got very high quality evidence of the morale and opinions of the Germans. We have the SD Stimmungsberichte, which were the morale reports where Gestapo agents would hang around in bars listening to what people said. We have sacks and sacks of captured mail, captured by the Allies when a troop ship were caught or when positions were overrun. We know exactly what these people were writing. So we are very well informed about what was going on. I have never seen any kind of statistical analysis. Q. If this is not an interrogation, which it plainly is not? A. Yes. Q. And if General Bruns does not know that he is being recorded, and if it be the case that he simply is chatting to his fellow prisoners in German, which he is, am I right? A. While you just read that, may I just add a further point, we are dealing here with a 22 year old young man called P-86 Altemeyer who has been put in SS uniform. Q. I am sorry, Mr Irving, there are times when you may make speeches and times when you must answer my questions, this is one of them; you said yesterday, no, I think this is on Day One? A. I will come back to what I was about to say when you have finished. Q. "This document has, in my submission, considerable evidentiary values... it is not self-serving, the General is not testifying in his own interest, he is merely talking, probably in a muffled whisper to fellow prisoners at a British interrogation centre and he has no idea that in another room British experts are listening to and recording every word. We also have the original German text of this document. I might add my, Lord ... " MR JUSTICE GRAY: That, I think, was Mr Irving's speech. MR RAMPTON: That is Mr Irving's speech. That is on page 46 -- A. Can I make it easy for you, Mr Rampton, and say I accept Altemeyer did say those words. Q. -- right. A. Or as best as Bruns recalls them. Q. The whole of Bruns' account in this regard has the ring of truth then? A. Yes. Q. So it is likely also then, is it, one cannot be certain, one was not there. P-87 A. It is very likely that the SS officer concerned used those words. Q. It is likely also he used the words at the end of this extract on the bottom of page 24 of your opening: "Here is an order, just issued, prohibiting mass shootings on that scale from taking place in future" -- A. Have we now left that previous passage, if so -- Q. -- I am coming back to it, but I want to try and be consistent, if you are saying that we can believe that Altemeyer used the words in the first passage, can we also believe that Altemeyer said this: "Here is an order, just used, prohibiting mass shootings on that scale from taking place in future"? A. -- that I believe. Q. "They are to be carried out more discreetly." A. That I attach less credibility to. Q. Why? A. It is the kind of throw away line that soldiers would use, particularly in captivity, adding a gag, looking for a bit of a snigger from someone, saying not to be done on a mass shooting, of course, has to be done a bit more discreetly. If I can draw a comparison, you very rightly read out a passage of a speech I made in Calgary where I protested that I had been called a mild fascist by the newspapers and I said I do not like that word "mild" it is a throw away line, you are looking for a laugh. P-88 Q. I do not -- A. You then attach great weight to the fact Mr Irving obviously accepts he is fascist, which is untrue. But these things happen in conversation, Mr Rampton. It calls for judgment and integrity before you use any particular part of a sentence. Q. -- no, you misjudge me, Mr Irving, you should re-read what I actually said and you will find what you just said is a misrecollection. However, that matters not in the slightest. A. Can I now go back to the previous part you are relying on in that, where he says "here are the Führer's orders" and he showed it to me. Q. He did not say that. He said "whereupon --" this is important, Mr Irving, you must be accurate, this is an important distinction: "Whereupon he showed me his orders"? MR JUSTICE GRAY: That is Bruns speaking, not Bruns quoting Altemeyer? A. Altemeyer says, well, they are to be shot in accordance with the Führer's orders, Bruns said: Führer's orders? Yes, says Altemeyer, whereupon he showed me his orders. MR RAMPTON: His orders? A. Yes. Q. That does not mean the Führer's orders, that means Altemeyer's orders? P-89 A. I am grateful to you for drawing that to my attention. If you wish to infer from that that he showed to Bruns orders from Hitler, or orders quoting orders from Hitler, because he later on talks about the Führer's orders, can I now comment on that? Q. I am not going to comment on a suggestion I have not -- I am not going to invite you to comment on a suggestion I have not made. A. May I nevertheless comment? Q. No, Mr Irving, you may not. If his Lordship permits it, why, yes. My question is a completely different one; my question is this, it is credible that Altemeyer said what he is here reported as having said? A. Yes. Q. It is also credible, is it not, that he showed Bruns a written order saying that these people were to be shot? A. Yes. Q. Good, thank you very much. Put those two things together, and there is evidence here which needs to be taken into account; do you agree? A. Discounted or taken into account, yes. Q. Take into account, brought to the attention of the public or the historians so that they can make up their own minds whether or not this is evidence of a Führer order for these shootings? A. You are absolutely right . P-90 Q. Thank you. A. Can I continue? Q. Yes. A. I have done precisely that. Q. Where? A. On my website. Q. Yes, but what about your books? A. I am not writing books about the Holocaust, Mr Rampton, I am writing books about Adolf Hitler. The book is already 1,000 pages long. If I was to start going into that detail then I would be sternly reprimanded by the editors saying, Mr Irving, when I wrote the Hermann Göring biography, the American publishers came to me and said Mr Irving will you please cut out 2,000 lines from the printed text. This happens. We do not have a problem that our books are too short, we have the problem that our books are too long. Q. Yes. Mr Irving -- A. But the entire document is on the Internet and I am the one who placed it there. Q. -- Mr Irving, you have made reference to this Bruns testimony in your published books? A. As I said in my opening speech, again and again, it is the most harrowing account and element of the Holocaust. Q. But without ever mentioning either of these verbal exchanges in their entirety? P-91 A. Absolutely right. Q. Why not? A. Because this is descending into a level of textual analysis which would bore the pants off an audience, which would be totally out of place in a book about Adolf Hitler for which I am perfectly prepared to discuss here in court if you attach importance to you, but you do not want me to discuss it. Q. I am not trying to prove a case about Adolf Hitler one way or the other? A. But you will not allow me to discuss it here. Q. Of course I allow you discuss it here. A. You stopped me. Q. I interested in why it makes no appearance -- A. Because I have reasons for discounting it. MR JUSTICE GRAY: Discounting bits of it I suppose would be more accurate. A. -- I am discounting the bit about being shown the Führer's order, or being shown orders implicating Hitler. MR RAMPTON: Why do you discount it? A. Ah, at last. Because other evidence shows that Hitler had not issued the order; firstly I said that nowhere in all the documentation of all the world's archives has any such order turned up. Q. That not evidence, that is an absence of evidence? A. It is evidence in a very powerful sense. P-92 Q. It is a negative piece of evidence? A. I hate to remind you of the basic principle of English law that a man is innocent until proven guilty; am I right? Q. Hitler is not on trial, alas. A. Is Hitler somehow excluded from this general rule of fair play? MR JUSTICE GRAY: I think that is a slightly -- THE WITNESS: Mr Rampton talks about absence of evidence not counting, all the world's archives are effectively now open to us, there has not come forward any collateral evidence and as for a 22 year-old SS man's word being believed when he has the power of life and death over thousands of Jews who have just been ordered shot, this SS man obviously has more front than Selfridges, he is going around saying, yes, we have orders, I have orders, do not come criticising me, that is what is going on here. That is the way I read that and that is the way any responsible historian should read it. MR JUSTICE GRAY: Let us move on. You accept a lot what is in here? A. -- I do indeed. Q. But you do not accept that particular -- A. Certainly not to the degree -- Q. As it was reflecting the reality? A. -- that one general's recollection of what a 22 year old SS man told him in Riga should be taken discounting the P-93 negative evidence as Mr Rampton calls it of all the world's archives. MR RAMPTON: Mr Irving, I am not going to take you up on that; you can argue with my experts about that if you like. I am interested in the way you write your books. Both in the Nuremberg book, and we will not need to look at them, because we are looking for a black hole, both in the Nuremberg book and in the Goebbels book you mention, either in the text or in a footnote, or both, the Bruns, call it what you like? A. Yes, I consider my duty to draw everyone's attention to this report. Q. But nowhere in either of those books do you mention either of these exchanges that Bruns reported he had with Altemeyer? A. You are repeating yourself, I will repeat the answer. Q. You repeat your answer, yes, please. A. No, I did not. Q. No, you did not. You actually have done this with the Altemeyer passages; may I show you? Can you find, please, file D3(i), I think it is tab 27 that I want. I will tell you where to look in a moment, Mr Irving, I just want to remind you and his Lordship of what Bruns actually said on Altemeyer's return with an order from Berlin after the shootings had been reported. "Here is an order, just issued, prohibiting mass shootings on that scale from P-94 taking place in the future." That is your translation of the German. A. Yes. Q. It is one that I agree with. A. This is from my introduction? Q. Yes, but then it goes on, does the sentence reported by General Bruns: "They are to be carried out more discreetly." That is the full text of General Bruns' words as a report of what he was told by Altemeyer. Will you please look at page 415 of the document which is at tab 27 which is a written introduction by you in the Journal of Historical Review, to your new edition of "Hitler's War". At the end of that article there are some footnotes on page 415. MR JUSTICE GRAY: Why are we looking at it there as opposed to in the copy? A. That is what I am wondering. MR RAMPTON: Copy of which book? MR JUSTICE GRAY: We have the whole of "Hitler's War". MR RAMPTON: It is not in the book. MR JUSTICE GRAY: I thought you said it was. MR RAMPTON: No. MR JUSTICE GRAY: I thought this was the introduction to the 1991 edition. MR RAMPTON: Well, I do not think it is. It is an edition I have not got, that is why. That is why we have it P-95 separately. MR JUSTICE GRAY: I follow. THE WITNESS: We also have a date on that, January 1989. Q. Two dates '76 and '89. A. That answers the point. MR JUSTICE GRAY: Two editions. MR RAMPTON: Anyhow, if you look at the footnotes in the right hand column on page 415, footnote 7 says this: "The most spine chilling account of... methodical mass murder of these Jews [that is the Berlin Jews] at Riga is in ... 1158 in file etc. in the Public Record Office, Major General Bruns, an eyewitness, describes it to fellow generals in British captivity in April 25th 1945 unaware that hidden microphones are recording every word. Of particular significance his qualms about bringing what he had seen to the Führer's attention and the latter's [that is Hitler's] renewed orders that such mass murders were to stop forthwith"? A. Yes. Q. As an account of what Bruns is recorded as having said that is completely dishonest, is it not? A. Does it say that the Bruns account is the only source for that final paragraph, that final sentence? Q. It purports to be an account of what Bruns said, does it not, Mr Irving? A. It references the Bruns' file as the source of that P-96 material in the main text, and it adds the comment: "Of particular significance his qualms about bringing about what he has seen to the Führer's attention and the latter's renewed orders that such mass murders were to stop forthwith". In other words, that was of particular significance. Q. Of particular significance in the Bruns's eyewitness testimony. A. I do not say that. MR JUSTICE GRAY: Read it through to yourself again. MR RAMPTON: Read it through. MR JUSTICE GRAY: And consider that answer, Mr Irving. A. Of the particular significance his qualms about bringing what he had seen to the Führer's attention and the latter's renewed orders that such mass murders were to stop forthwith. I see no objection to that as being an encapsulated version of Bruns's report -- may I read out from the Bruns' report the sentences on which I would rely? MR RAMPTON: No, you may not, Mr Irving. I would like you to read the whole of that footnote and I shall repeat my question, and we will have a "yes" or "no" if you please. A. You will not let me read out these sentences in the Bruns report on which I rely? MR JUSTICE GRAY: In a moment. Just do what Mr Rampton is asking at the moment. P-97 A. Very well. "The most spine chilling account --" MR JUSTICE GRAY: No, read it to yourself. MR RAMPTON: Yes, I did not mean. A. Well, because I am accused of being a Holocaust denier it is interesting that I am repeatedly saying this kind of thing, including in journals like this. You do not let me read it out loud? Q. I would like you to read it yourself. A. You do not want public to hear what I wrote. MR JUSTICE GRAY: It has just been read out. A. Yes, I have read it. MR RAMPTON: You have read it. Now I will repeat my question; do you not agree that read as a whole, as one must read it as a whole, not selecting those little bits which one would rather ignore, and you are relying on the ones you want to be heard, reading that as whole, do you not agree that that is a singularly dishonest account of what Bruns was recorded as having said? A. I do not agree. Q. Why? A. Can I now draw attention to the sentences in the Bruns Report on which I rely? Q. Whatever you wish in answer to my question. A. I will summarise them and you can tell me if it is a false summary. They had difficulty, he did not want to write the report himself, he persuaded a junior army officer to P-98 go down the road and have a look and come back and write up what he had seen. The question then was who is going to bring it to the Führer's attention; they work out a way to bring to the Führer's attention involving Vice-Admiral Canaris, shortly the orders come back, such mass murders have to stop. Am I totally wrong in drawing the perfectly justified inference that as a result of this army officer's report being drawn to the Führer's attention the orders come, which we have seen in the intercepts, that such mass murders have to stop. MR JUSTICE GRAY: Mr Irving, can I put it to you straight, as it were, because this is the suggestion. A. Yes. Q. That what you have said as being of particular significance, namely the renewed orders that such mass murders were to stop forthwith, totally perverts the sense of Bruns' conversation in captivity because Bruns makes clear that Altemeyer said that the killings were to continue? A. I think I have explained the reason why I discounted that part of his remark, my Lord, this was the... Q. Yes, but are you giving particular significance to a proposition which is the opposite of what one finds in the document? A. The decision of the little man on the spot in Riga is of no significance to the argument that Hitler had given the P-99 order quite clearly that such killings had to stop. Q. Yes. A. Have I made it plain, my Lord. Q. Yes, you have. A. Thank you. I think that -- MR RAMPTON: Do you think, Mr Irving, that if General Bruns were here today he would think what you have done with what he said was fair and honest? A. -- taken in elements, stage by stage, yes. Q. Do you? I see. You said it again in that same file you have got there, I think it is at -- it is at tab 30, this is a paper, I think, presented by you at the Institute of Historical Review, a talk given by you? A. A talk? Q. Yes, a talk, in October 1992, and the passage which matters is again an account of the Bruns evidence on page 24, ignore the stamped number at the bottom of page, 24 of the article. I think this is an answer to a question very likely. Yes, it is. It is in the bottom part of the left-hand column on that page' does your Lordship have it? MR JUSTICE GRAY: Yes, I have. MR RAMPTON: This is the last thing, my Lord, I do before the adjournment if that is convenient. "But other reports unfortunately have the ring of authenticity. Most of these SS officers, the gangsters that carried out the mass shootings were I think acting P-100 from the meanest of motives. There was a particular SS officer in Riga who is described in the report by Bruns in which Bruns said the difficulty for us was how to decide to draw what he had seen what we had seen to the Führer's attention, and eventually they sent a lieutenant down the road and got him to write what he saw and they sent this report signed by the lieutenant up to the Führer's headquarters through Canaris. Two days later the order comes back from Hitler 'these mass shootings' [in quotes notice, Mr Irving] these mass shootings have to stop at once so [and this is now you again] Hitler intervened to stop it." As a quotation from the evidence of General Bruns those words in quotes: "These mass shootings have got to stop at once", is a complete perversion, is it not, of what Bruns actually said? A. What is the difference? Q. He said these mass shootings have got to stop at once, they have to be done more discreetly? A. The 22 year old SS man allegedly said that to Bruns -- Q. That is what Bruns is reported as having told his fellow officers? A. -- yes. Q. He did not say this, did he, that you have written here? A. I gave the essential part of the information, which was that the orders -- we are talking about here the chain of P-101 command from Hitler downwards and that the killings were carried out there, the SS officers on the spot and I make this very clear distinction, the gangsters were in the SS who did the killings on the Eastern Front and for that there is any amount of evidence, a lot of which you have in your own files but the evidence of Hitler's involvement is very tenuous and goes in the direction which I indicated from my small bundle. May I also draw your attention to the fact this is a question and answer session, Mr Rampton. Q. Yes, I follow that. A. So there is no script. I am not reading out from a document. MR JUSTICE GRAY: Yes, I think the point on the quotation marks is not a fair one given that this is which you said in a speech because whoever transcribed it may well have just added the quotation marks? A. Not just but obviously when one is answering questions from the floor one is giving an encapsulated version of the essence of a document as one recalls it. Q. I follow that. MR RAMPTON: My Lord, there are two minutes, so it might help. MR JUSTICE GRAY: Yes, why not use them. MR RAMPTON: If might help if we looked at the original German of what Bruns said that Altemeyer had said. A. It does sometimes vary from the translation. P-102 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Where do we find that? MR RAMPTON: It is bundle H1(vii), some of Professor Evans documents? A. It is actually from my discovery. Q. No, I do not know where it comes from. A. If it has a number written on the top right hand corner. MR JUSTICE GRAY: Unfortunately, I have not brought that particular file. THE WITNESS: I was the person who discovered this document. MR RAMPTON: The page, have you got that? A. Not in front of me. Q. You do not have the German? A. No. Q. It is 233, which looks to me like the British transcript it is the transcript of Bruns' actual words -- before I ask the question I must look in the dictionary because I have not got my own. MR JUSTICE GRAY: "Massen" is underlined, is it underlined in the translation? MR RAMPTON: Yes, I do not know who did that. MR JUSTICE GRAY: No, it looks original. A. It is original. MR RAMPTON: Shows how important it is, Mr Irving, to go back to source, does it not. A. That is a "yes". Q. Do you know how those transcripts were made? They were P-103 secretly recorded, presumably by some hidden microphone. A. It is still very secret but in the next door room everything was taken down on outsize large disks like the old fashioned 78s. Q. Now can we assume that this is an accurate transcript; there is no reason to doubt it, is there? A. They are normally very accurate transcripts. They had research teams who would have extensive catalogues and indices to check on words and names. Q. Let us look at the German, you will help me when my German strays off course as it very likely will, the relevant passage is at the bottom of page 233. It is line beginning der Altemeyer something triumphantly said quotes: "Hier ist eine Verfügung" that is an order? A. Not necessarily, that is a strange kind of order. It is more of an ordinance. Q. Yes. Here is an ordinance come, just come? A. Yes. Q. That says, yes? A. Yes. Q. To the effect that, let us say, shall we, dass? A. Yes. Q. This kind of or these kinds of "derartige"? A. That kind of, yes. Q. These kind of? A. Mass shootings. P-104 Q. Mass shootings, do you hear how I read it, mass shootings? A. Yes. Q. In future, in Zukunft... which means must not take place any more, does it not? A. Yes. Q. "Das soll vorsichtiger gemacht werden"; that means this shall in future be more cautiously or discreetly done? Yes? A. Very good, Mr Rampton, yes. Q. Well, not very good, but it is not very difficult, is it, two things about it? A. Yes. Q. It translates not as "shootings on this scale", it translates as "shootings of this kind"? A. Yes. Q. And the word "mass"? A. Yes. Q. Is underlined. Do you agree that that is likely to reflect the transcriber's |