MR JUSTICE GRAY: Yes, Mr Irving?

MR IRVING: May it please the court. I have three very small matters that I would just like to bring to the court's attention ----

MR JUSTICE GRAY: Yes.

MR IRVING: --- and to try to keep it within the five minutes that I have set out. Your Lordship has before you a very small heap of documents which, as far as I am concerned, can be disposed with immediately afterwards. They are purely to draw attention to certain points I wish to make. The first one is headed August 17th 1942, on the right, a translation. It is a two-page document.

MR JUSTICE GRAY: Yes.

MR IRVING: We were dealing, your Lordship will remember, with the deportations from France which were discussed between Hitler and Himmler at the end of 1942, and the question was what was going to happen to them, and there was reference to a Sonderlager, a special camp. Your Lordship will see within the first paragraph of the translation the second sentence: "At first"?

MR JUSTICE GRAY: Yes.

MR IRVING: "At first the evacuated Jews will be accommodated in the Auschwitz concentration camp, but a special reception camp is to be erected in the Western Reich territory." If I may summarise the rest of the document,

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it says: "We will continue deporting train loads of Jews from France to avoid this lengthy journey to Auschwitz. Can we please set up camps inside the Reich to house these deportees?"

MR JUSTICE GRAY: That is an odd movement, is it not?

MR IRVING: It is a very odd movement.

MR JUSTICE GRAY: Sending them all the way from France to Poland and then back again.

MR IRVING: And then back again. I cannot speculate as to the reason why they should engage in this movement, except that Auschwitz does appear to have had a transit camp character about it. It had facilities there for stealing, robbing; it had facilities there for fumigating and checking; it had also the big slave labour camp that was attached to the Monowitz factory. There are two reasons, your Lordship has quite rightly spotted that fact, and that is I wanted to hint at the possibility this may have been the kind of movement -- remember your Lordship drew attention to the fact that people were coming back from the East, from Lemberg to one of the camps on the border. Of course, the special reception camp, that is, Besonderes Auffanglager, you will see on the next page, my Lord, in line 4, "Besonderes Auffanglager", a special reception camp, is clearly the Sonderlager to which reference is later made, in my submission.

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If I can move rapidly on to the next document, my Lord, it is headed "Pocket Dictionary". It is three or four pages.

MR JUSTICE GRAY: I am not sure I have that.

MR IRVING: In that case ----

MR JUSTICE GRAY: Hang ob. I probably have it somewhere.

MR IRVING: It will be in white, my Lord, with a green corner tab.

MR JUSTICE GRAY: No. Oddly enough, that has not arrived.

MR IRVING: My Lord, I went to some trouble over the last few months obtaining contemporary a German dictionary by which I mean a wartime Third Reich German dictionary so we can see what the meaning of words were at that time, rather than the modern Langenscheidt being used and relied upon by the Defence. This is a 1935 dictionary, my Lord, which is this one here. I have just looked up at random some of the words we are interested in. The first page is "entfernen" which means "to remove". It has no subsidiary sinister meanings.

MR JUSTICE GRAY: I do not think anyone is suggesting, except in a euphemistic way, that it means anything other than to remove or distance.

MR IRVING: My Lord, I believe the Defence is relying heavily on the fact that I have mistranslated and distorted. In my submission, if I use the correct wartime translation of the word, then this destroys that particular Defence

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justification.

MR JUSTICE GRAY: Yes.

MR IRVING: The next page is "vernichten", a very sinister word, "annihilate and destroy". The next page is "Abschaffen" which is quite significant in connection with the French movements, you will remember, my Lord, because Himmler wrote next to the figures "Abschaffen" in his handwriting, and this means "to dismiss".

MR JUSTICE GRAY: I think the difficulty with "Abschaffen" is that it would not normally be applied to people. Is that not a fair point?

MR IRVING: You are right, my Lord. It could apply to a body of people, perhaps, to dismiss them, and I shall be making, obviously, my closing speech submissions at some length summarising this question of the translations which is a thorny one, I appreciate, but in view of the fact the Defence do rely on it so heavily for the distortion element of their justification; and, finally, my Lord, on page 33 of the dictionary we have the famous "Ausrotten" and there the 1935 meaning of the word is quite clearly "to root out", as you would imagine, the word "Ausrotten"; whereas I quite readily accept that nowadays in 1999/2000, the word "Ausrotten" quite clearly means "liquidate". It has become that, the same as words change their meaning over the years.

MR JUSTICE GRAY: Yes.

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MR IRVING: My Lord, finally, I come to the little bundle of documents. It is a rather arcane matter, but again I believe the Defence rely heavily on my choice of language. Your Lordship will remember the rather heated remarks I made about certain Jewish fraudsters and racketeers in the United States, Ivan Boesky, Michael Milken, and so on. I suggested they were hiding behind, they were insulating themselves from public criticism by the use of the Holocaust. This is what is now scientifically or academically referred to as the instrumentalisation of the Holocaust. This is one particular example which came to our attention. Mr Melvin Mermelstein, who may well be mentioned later on in the case, started a claim against the Hertford Insurance Company. His lawyers warned the insurance company that, as a survivor of Nazi concentration camps during World War II, this matter is extremely important to Mr Mermelstein. That is page 2, my Lord. On page 6, the insurance company's own lawyers warned them, warned the insurance company, to settle the $100,000 being claimed, saying, "The lawyer argues that a jury will be sympathetic to a man who has survived a Nazi concentration camp", and so on. So this is the kind ----

MR JUSTICE GRAY: It is not quite the same point, is it? The point that I think you were making in that talk that we looked at on Thursday was that Jews who get up to some

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sort of financial or other misconduct then used the Holocaust as a kind of shield against their own criminality.

MR IRVING: My Lord, it may well be that I shall lead ----

MR JUSTICE GRAY: This is a slightly use or instrumentalisation of the Holocaust.

MR IRVING: It is an insulation which goes on. Perhaps it is automatic -- we all have the utmost sympathy with victims of the Holocaust, and that includes myself, and I want to say that here; but I want to get this one instance in now because of the rather ugly note we closed on on Thursday evening, and it may well be I will lead further evidence which will go more closely to the matter actually raised. With that, I end my submission, my Lord.

MR JUSTICE GRAY: I will put these into, just so we know where they are going, J. I think we have got to 8, but there is a problem with these loose documents. So that completes what you wanted to say about that, Mr Irving.

MR IRVING: I have completed my submission, my Lord.

MR JUSTICE GRAY: Mr Rampton, you do not want to say anything about this matter?

MR RAMPTON: No, I do not want to say anything about any of them at the moment. I may have to come back to some of them in due course, but certainly not today. J8, my Lord, says Miss Rogers.

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MR JUSTICE GRAY: Could I mention something that I would like to do, I think probably first thing tomorrow morning, if that is convenient, and that is to have a look and see what the future timetable is looking like, as far as one can judge it. I would appreciate there are witnesses to be accommodated. We might need to discuss what topics need to be cross-examined to and possibly some do not need to be.

MR RAMPTON: I agree.

MR JUSTICE GRAY: And timing generally.

MR RAMPTON: I mean, I quite agree with that. One reason, if I may respectfully say so, I would say it was a good idea to do it tomorrow is that today is a bit uncharted, I am chartered, but I do not know where my charts will lead me today. But there is also the very good question your Lordship has raised on how much more of Evans do I have to do? Of course, essentially, that is a question for me, subject to being told not to. There are only, I think, two big topics left in Evans, that is Reichskristallnacht -- three, Reichskristallnacht early anti-Semitism of Hitler with the Nuremberg rules and Dresden.

MR JUSTICE GRAY: I think there is another heading post Kristallnacht, is there not?

MR RAMPTON: Yes, but that is all part of the same subject.

MR JUSTICE GRAY: All right.

MR RAMPTON: My Lord, can I mention something which I think

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I have mentioned before, which is this, that it would be convenient to us if we could have our reading day on Thursday rather than Friday of this week for the reason that Professor van Pelt has to go to Stockholm on Thursday.

MR JUSTICE GRAY: For a day or for a weekend?

MR RAMPTON: Only for a day. He is going in the morning and coming back in the afternoon, but there is a conference that he has been asked to attend and thinks that he should. So if we could possibly have ----

MR JUSTICE GRAY: I do not see any problem with that. Does that cause you any difficulty, Mr Irving?

MR IRVING: My Lord, we were going to call Dr John Fox as our expert witness on that day, but I can easily postpone him.

MR JUSTICE GRAY: That is very accommodating. Thank you. We will do that first thing Thursday morning, if that is all right with both of you? So we can now press on with cross-examination.

MR IRVING: My Lord, I am calling Mr Peter Miller as a witness tomorrow, but he will be relatively brief, I think, on the events in Moscow.

MR JUSTICE GRAY: That raises a question that I have canvassed before. To what extent are we going to have to go through quite voluminous evidence on the Goebbels' diaries? To some extent I am in both of your hands. I have made no secret of the fact that whilst I understand, Mr Irving,

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your complaint about it, and I have seen the way the Defence is put, in the end is it a topic that we benefit by spending a very great deal of time on?

MR IRVING: On the Goebbels' diaries.

MR JUSTICE GRAY: On the Goebbels' diaries and the breach of the agreement or whatever it was.

MR IRVING: My Lord, I am accused of having breached agreements in Moscow. This is what I will certainly ask Peter Miller to evidence on.

MR JUSTICE GRAY: This is really in a way addressed to Mr Rampton as he will understand.

MR RAMPTON: There are really only two points left in Moscow. There is an admission that plates were removed without permission. The question, was there any significant risk they might be damaged? Second, how many plates? Now, whether that is more than about half an hour's cross-examination -- nothing more than that, I doubt.

MR JUSTICE GRAY: Well, well and good. That is, I think, all it really merits, frankly.

MR RAMPTON: That is how I see it. There is the additional point, of course, that Moscow would be, if it fell anywhere in the case, a section 5 question.

MR JUSTICE GRAY: That is what you say.

MR RAMPTON: That is what I believe, and it may be against everything else I will take a view (and it will be my decision) that it pales into insignificance.

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MR JUSTICE GRAY: That is really why I have said what I have just said. I do appreciate, Mr Irving, you do not accept that it is an insignificant point because you say you are accused of breaking an agreement.

MR IRVING: Well...

MR JUSTICE GRAY: It does not sound as if Mr Rampton is really pursuing that at all.

MR RAMPTON: Yes, but without permission.

MR JUSTICE GRAY: Yes, but without permission does not mean breaking an agreement necessarily.

MR RAMPTON: That is a question of terminology really.

MR JUSTICE GRAY: I am in both your hands about that, but I personally do not think we should spend a lot of time.

MR RAMPTON: That is my present view, but I am not committing myself now. But I think your Lordship can reasonably expect that Moscow will not take up a lot of the court's time, as far as I am concerned.

MR IRVING: My Lord, if they were to put Moscow into section 5 as well, I think that bucket is beginning to overflow.

MR JUSTICE GRAY: That is a very vivid way of putting it.

MR IRVING: We can put the whole of his Hizbollah and Farrakhan into section 5.

MR RAMPTON: That is not section 5. That is common sting which is different.

MR JUSTICE GRAY: Right, anyway, let us get on. That disposes of that. Yes, do please come back, Mr Irving.

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< MR DAVID IRVING, recalled. < Cross-Examined by MR RAMPTON, QC, continued.

MR RAMPTON: My Lord, there are three new bundles. They are not new in any surprise sense. They are new in that we have composed them for ease of reference for this part of the case. There are two Auschwitz core bundles; the first consisting of what one might call material arising out of the Leuchter Report, and it has the Leuchter Report at the beginning of it. The second Auschwitz core bundles are the original drawings and documents.

MR JUSTICE GRAY: Yes.

MR RAMPTON: The third new file, again composed from other sources, are statements by Mr Irving about Leuchter and the Leuchter report. That has been extracted from a range of the D files, D1 and 2 and 3.

MR JUSTICE GRAY: Many of which we have been through?

MR RAMPTON: Yes, exactly, but not the specific reference and I am hoping to cut that short this morning, if I possibly can.

MR JUSTICE GRAY: I am sorry to be tedious about it, but can we perhaps give these bundles a slightly more convenient means of identification?

MR RAMPTON: We started off by calling them "K".

MR JUSTICE GRAY: Well, why not?

MR RAMPTON: All right. K1, 2 and 3 then.

MR JUSTICE GRAY: It is just going to make life simpler later

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on.

MR RAMPTON: Certainly, of course we will. The first fat one is K1, the second one which has not got as much material in it is K2, and the Claimant's statements are K3.

MR JUSTICE GRAY: Yes.

MR RAMPTON (To the witness): Mr Irving, could you turn open the first tab in the first of those files? That should be the Leuchter?

A. It is, yes.

Q. I would rather you use the one in the file because it has the appendices. Before I do that, I want to do something else. May I? I am sorry about that, my Lord, I had forgotten what I intended to do.

MR JUSTICE GRAY: That is all right.

MR RAMPTON: It is Monday morning. Could you, Mr Irving, turn up in the third file, K3, tab 4? This is a transcript of the press conference that you gave, introducing the Leuchter in your published edition on 23rd June 1989. Could you turn to page 21, please? I will start, if I may, at the bottom of page 20. You are being asked questions, Mr Irving, and somebody says at the bottom of page 20: "So they fabricated this evidence?" You say: "Oh, we fabricated a lot of evidence at Nuremberg. I am very familiar with the private diaries", etc., "of Robert H Jackson and the American Judge Biddle." Page 21 at the top: "They fabricated the

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evidence?" asked the questioner?

A. "This evidence".

Q. I am sorry, "this evidence". You are quite right, Mr Irving: "No, but I am familiar with how things like the figure of 6 million were arrived at because that is dealt with at great length in their private diaries." Then you say this: "Judge Biddle, however, sitting in judgment at Nuremberg, he looked at one Auschwitz survivor all day, a Frenchman -- I am sure you know her name, she gave a heartbreaking testimony about what she had survived -- and in his diary at the end of that day Judge Biddle privately wrote: 'I don't believe a word of what she is saying. I think she is a bloody liar'." Mr Irving, he did not say that in his diary?

A. You are right. He did not write those words.

Q. No. Those are your words, are they not?

A. This is my gloss on it, yes.

Q. And he did not say it, did he, about the whole of her testimony?

A. I think he did. He sat there listening to the testimony and after a time when he could stand it no longer, he wrote in brackets in the middle of her testimony words which gave precisely this meaning to me as the reader. You must remember I have read the entire notes of Biddle in the archives in the United States.

Q. I am going to show you the notes of Judge Biddle and what

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you wrote about them on your little index cards in a moment. Can I just draw attention -- you do not need to get it out -- the woman in question was a lady called Marie-Claude Valliant-Couturier, was she not?

A. A French Communist yes.

Q. A French Communist. As she said, a member of the Resistance?

A. Well, exactly, a member of the Resistance and a French Communist.

Q. Do you remember in your Nuremberg book -- if you would like to get it out, you shall -- you published a lot of pictures, quite a good selection of pictures really, after page 182?

A. Yes.

Q. A caption to a picture of that lady, Madame Valliant-Couturier, reads as follows: "Credibility problems. As Madame Marie-Claude Valliant-Couturier below left testifies about her ordeal as a Communist interned at Auschwitz, Judge Francis Biddle notes that he does not believe her"?

A. Perhaps it would assist the court if you were to read out some of this lady's testimony to the Nuremberg court?

Q. No, it would not in the very slightest, Mr Irving.

A. Well, it certainly would because you can see yourself how totally incredible her testimony was.

Q. No, Mr Irving, I am sorry. You can do that later in

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re-examination of yourself if you wish?

A. I certainly shall because all those things taken together indicated why the Judge wrote down those words in his notes.

Q. Could his Lordship and Mr Irving please be given the original transcript, or whatever it is, of Judge Biddle's notes and also Mr Irving's noted form of that document on his index cards?

A. These were provided by me to your solicitors.

MR JUSTICE GRAY: Where are they going to go? There is another loose document coming, floating in. Where shall I put it?

MR RAMPTON: The back of core file Auschwitz K2. It will be tab ----

MR JUSTICE GRAY: This is really a core bundle document, is it?

MR RAMPTON: It is an Auschwitz document in a sense, but actually on this little exercise for misrepresentation.

MR JUSTICE GRAY: This is Biddle's notes of Madame Couturier.

MR RAMPTON: That is right. 28th January 1946. This is his notes of her evidence.

A. "Sang the Marseillaise when the gas trucks started to move".

Q. On page 3, Mr Irving, if you turn to page 3 -- I marked it tab 7 in K2, my Lord, if that is convenient?

MR JUSTICE GRAY: Yes, thank you.

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MR RAMPTON: At the top of page 3 of his actual notes there are two sentences: "SS distributed punishment in form of 50 blows of stick on back by a sort of machine. Endless roll calls and gymnastics". Then a new paragraph, Mr Irving.

MR JUSTICE GRAY: Sorry, which page.

MR RAMPTON: Page 3, my Lord. 3 at the top or 34 at the bottom. Then there is a new paragraph: "House of prostitution for SS selected young women as they were washing for maids or camps used the same system. (This I doubt)." Then he starts a new paragraph.

A. Yes.

Q. The only thing. Mr Irving, that he is doubting is her statement about the prostitution.

A. I do not think you have any justification for saying that.

Q. It is perfectly obvious.

A. In the previous paragraph we have heard about the SS having a machine for beating people with, which on the face of it is totally implausible, and we now know it to be totally untrue. By this time, this Judge Biddle, who is a very, very level headed American, as I know from his private papers, is so fed up with this woman's testimony that he finally can stand it no longer and he dictates in parenthesis into his report -- this, you remember, is not in typing or handwriting, this is him dictating to a secretary so we do not know where the paragraphs begin or end in his dictation. He says, "This I doubt".

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Q. Mr Irving, will you look at your own note of this document? You came upon these in Syracuse in New York State, I think?

A. The Americans call it Syracuse.

Q. I beg their pardon. But that is right, is it not?.

A. This is correct, at the university of Syracuse.

Q. There is a little clip, two pages, of your own index card notes -- have I got it right?

A. That is correct.

Q. On the second page, in the top right hand corner, you report this part of Judge Biddle's note and, wherever you are, as it were, missing something out, you put quite properly an ellipse with three dots.

A. Yes.

Q. At the bottom of that box on the right-hand side, which I assume is a card, you write: "... House of prostitution for SS selected young women as they were washing for maids. All camps used the same system (this I doubt). ..."

A. The reason why I write down about the house of prostitution is because this was referred to as a Sonderhaus and Sondergebäude and so, for people who are interested in the Holocaust, you noticed the word sonder as being attached to something which was not connected with gassing, and that is why I quoted that particular paragraph but, once again, I submit that this dictated

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parenthesis by Biddle refers to everything he has heard up to this point. It is getting more and more implausible and, when he hears about the machine for beating people, his patience snaps.

MR RAMPTON: Mr Irving, that must be complete nonsense, must it not?. Look at the little paragraph in Judge Biddle.

A. He did not say, "new paragraph Miss Smith", he just dictated.

Q. What warrant did you have for inflating that side note about one little paragraph about prostitution into a general doubt by Judge Biddle about the credibility of the whole of this lady's testimony. What warrant was there for that?

A. I sat for either one or two days in the university library of Syracuse University. Reading all Judge Biddle's notes on the testimony given by the witnesses that I was interested in, and also his notes on the deliberations on the judgment, whether to hang or sentence to life imprisonment and so on. So you get a very good feeling for the sense of the way a judge is thinking and, if he did not make this kind of comment about the other witnesses and suddenly at this point he does, then this is what said to me that this was a witness who tested his own credulity.

MR JUSTICE GRAY: Can I just ask because I am not quite sure that I am following this? You interpret those three words

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in parenthesis, appearing where they do in the summary of this lady's evidence, as the judge casting doubt over the totality of it?

A. Up to that point, yes. There is no reason for him to doubt really the house of prostitution but there certainly is reason to doubt what comes in the paragraph before about the special machine for caning people. We did not even have that at public school. Everything up to this point he has been listening, as judges do, I am sure your Lordship also does sometimes, with mounting impatience, and he made a little mental note that he dictated that evening to a secretary, "(this I doubt)".

MR RAMPTON: Mr Irving, you know perfectly well, do you not, that you have done what you have so often done? You have taken one little phrase which is applied to one proposition made by the witness about prostitution when the judge has put a parenthetical note that he doubts this proposition, and the word "this" is very specific in English. It means that which we are now talking about, does it not?

A. What they were now talking about was the SS distributed punishment in the form of 50 blows by a stick on the back by a machine, and all the other stories about the orchestra playing music as people went into the gas chambers, all these other stories that this witness generated in her testimony. There is a great deal of it

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in these five pages and you have been very careful not to read out the five page so that people can hear exactly how ludicrous this witness's statement was, as we now know with hindsight.

MR JUSTICE GRAY: Give us one other example. The machine for beating you have described. Just so that I have the flavour of it.

A. Dogs tore at their legs and killed, set on by SS guards, corpses in the courtyard, a hand or head would now and then stir in the corpses seeking to free itself, the heap moaned from morn till night in all languages "Water, water", huge rats everywhere, and so on. I think there is a reason why the judge is dictating this kind of material: In order to get the flavour of what this witness is saying. He finally then writes down "(this I doubt)".

MR RAMPTON: Mr Irving, I simply cannot accept that.

A. This is frankly why I think eyewitness evidence is so dangerous.

Q. Yes, maybe you do, Mr Irving. I am not on about eyewitness. I am on about a deliberate distortion of what the text of Judge Biddle's note actually says.

A. I agree and I concede, for what it is worth, that what I said in the press conference, no doubt four or five years after reading Judge Biddle's notes, or possibly even ten years after I read Judge Biddle's notes, I cannot

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remember precisely when I saw the papers.

Q. What about what you said here in the picture caption?

A. About the credibility of the witness?

Q. Yes.

A. I think that is absolutely justified. If he says that he doubts her, then ipso facto her credibility has been maligned.

Q. Would you turn back to tab 2 in the third of those files, the same files as you have the Leuchter press conference?

A. Yes.

Q. It is page 18. My Lord, this is a speech at Toronto in August 1988. Turn to page 18, please.

A. I cannot see any pagination.

Q. Bottom of the page?

MR JUSTICE GRAY: Tab 2. Are you in the right tab?

A. I am in the right tab but there is no pagination in mine. However --

MR JUSTICE GRAY: Are you in the right volume?

A. It is the district court of Ontario.

MR RAMPTON: I am sorry about this. Tab 2, page 18. It is Toronto August 1988.

A. What is the page number?

MR JUSTICE GRAY: It is the wrong file.

MR RAMPTON: I am sorry, Mr Irving, it is the same file as the one from the Leuchter press conference.

A. Now we have it.

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Q. Before we look at this, Mr Irving, tell me when you went to Syracuse, as you call it.

A. I would have to look at my notes to see precisely when I went to Syracuse in fact on two or three occasions.

Q. You wrote to us on 21 December 1999. You said -- my Lord, this is inter partes correspondence -- "I originally read Judge Biddle's papers at Syracuse in about 1988"?

A. Off the top of my head, that may have been correct. I went to Syracuse two or three times because they have many collections of papers there.

Q. So, when you are speaking at the Leuchter press conference in 1989, that is not more than a year after you have seen the notes, is it?

A. In that event, yes, but I will come back with further and better information, if you want to know the exact date.

Q. This speech in Toronto which I am now asking you to look at, was made in August 1988?

A. Yes.

Q. And on page 18 you say this. Actually, we had better start on page 17 because this may be important. Can you read, please, from about the beginning of the second quarter of the page, there is a sentence: "Let me just read out the kind of material that was given in the witness box in Nuremberg". Then you mention Judge Biddle. Have you got that on page 17?

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A. Yes.

Q. Would you read to yourself please, not out loud if you do not mind, all of the rest of that page and down to the end of the first complete paragraph on page 18?

A. (Pause for reading) Yes. I clearly had my notes in front of me when I was saying this.

Q. You give some sort of an account of many things about which the French lady testified.

A. Yes.

Q. You finish that account with the piece about the prostitution, and then you say: "Here Judge Biddle writes in brackets in his diary 'all this I doubt'. Why did he not say it at the time, for heavens sake but he just sat there with his face motionless because he is an American judge, but in his private diary he writes", you repeat it, "all this I doubt", and so it goes on, and I am not going to read the rest of it.

A. Right. I had my notes in front of me.

Q. That is not what Judge Biddle said, is it?

A. But I am just stating quite clearly I had my notes in front of me when I was making this statement, and I added the word "all", but I would aver that that is precisely what I said in my earlier statement, that he has clearly referred to all that has gone before.

MR JUSTICE GRAY: Yes, but he did not say that.

A. He did not say that, my Lord.

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MR RAMPTON: Do you not see the difference between "all this I doubt" which I quite agree with you might certainly have reference to the evidence given to date by that lady, and the words "this I doubt" in parenthesis against a single statement in a single paragraph?

A. This is precisely what I said in my previous statement. My conclusion from reading his diary was that he was referring to the foregoing, all these incredible stories which are here listed in summary form in my speech about the baby saying, "can I walk now I have had my leg torn off?" and all this kind of thing.

Q. I am going to suggest to you that you made that speech in Toronto on the same visit to North America as when you first saw the Biddle notes.

A. No. I think from the way it is constructed, the fact that the passages in my speech here follow closely at first glimpse anyway the actual notes that I typed on to the index cards that I clearly had the index cards in front of me when I was making this statement.

Q. You distorted what they said, did you not.

A. I added the word "all" to make it more literate for an audience.

Q. Yes, you added the word "all"?

A. This is not a distortion of what my own perception was of that paragraph, that he was clearly referring to all the foregoing.

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Q. Very well. I will just tell you for the sake of record.

A. Clearly, he would not just have put in this unusual parentheses just because she is talking about a house of prostitution. It was well known at that time that there were brothels in all the SS concentration camps camp, in Dachau and everywhere else they had brothels for the use of the prisoners. This was well known at Nuremberg, so he certainly would not have put that in brackets "this I doubt" at that point. That refers to what he has heard up to this point.

Q. Even now, Mr Irving, you will not or cannot read the words in front of you. Actually the sentence which precedes the parenthesis is "all camps used the same system", is it not?

MR JUSTICE GRAY: Yes, and it might well have been a reference to that.

MR RAMPTON: Exactly.

A. It might well have been, but that was not my reading of it.

MR JUSTICE GRAY: Anyway ----.

A. On the basis of my knowledge of the Biddle papers and on the basis of this particular one.

MR RAMPTON: Yes, Mr Irving. Just for completeness, your diary tells us that you were in Syracuse on August 11th 1988, you made this entry, "worked at Syracuse University all day, very hot, private papers yielded little but the

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Nuremberg trials collection of Judge Francis Biddle had some gems, including his diary (with comments of I do not believe) comments you put in the plural, on one Auschwitz"?

A. That clearly shows that I took that as being a reference to all his comment and not just the previous comment. I am indebted to you for pointing out exactly when I saw it, which was a few days before this which means I was carrying those index cards with me at the time I went to this lecture.

Q. On that occasion in Toronto in the press conference, in London the following year and in your Nuremberg book, you told a lie about what the notes said, did you not?

A. The difference clearly is that in Toronto, I have driven up from Syracuse to Toronto probably two or three days later and made the speech with the cards in front of me, whereas at the Leuchter press conference I am giving the sense of it from memory, and that is clearly the sense, as I have told the court, I had from that comment made by Judge Biddle in his own private papers. Listening to this witness with her incredible stories about beating machines and all the rest of it, he writes down in brackets "this I doubt". Frankly, I do not think there is very much mileage to be made out of that.

Q. Now we are going to go to Leuchter, Mr Irving. If you put that file on one side, I am coming back to it in a moment,

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the file of what you said about Leuchter. Before I do that, I would like you to look at the Leuchter report itself, which is the first divider in the first Auschwitz, file K 1. It has a cover and an inside page headed Ernst Zündel. Have you got that?

A. Yes.

Q. At the bottom of the page you write what the cover pictures are, because there are four of them.

A. You are stating that I wrote this?

Q. I do not know who wrote this.

A. I am the publisher of this, not the writer of it.

Q. Who writes the information?

A. I wrote the introduction.

Q. About what the pictures represent?

MR JUSTICE GRAY: So this is not the report submitted to the Canadian court?

MR RAMPTON: No. I do not believe I need to use that if I have Mr Irving's own published version.

MR JUSTICE GRAY: I am not being critical. I am just trying to ensure that I know what I am looking at.

MR RAMPTON: I do not know if I have ever seen that.

A. You have. It has been in the discovery and it is very much more comprehensive than this.

Q. That does not mean that I have seen it, Mr Irving. This is published by Focal Point Publications, London, June 1989.

A. Yes. The notice said published by, not written by.

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Q. My question was, do you see that in effect on the inside page somebody has provided captions for the cover pictures under the line at the bottom of the page? It is not very easy to read.

A. On the inside page?

Q. Yes. That is right. There is a picture of some machinery I think, by the look of things.

MR JUSTICE GRAY: Which page are you on now?

MR RAMPTON: My Lord, there is a cover and on the next page there is a picture of what looks like machinery. Cameras.

MR JUSTICE GRAY: Cameras, yes. It is Monday morning!

MR RAMPTON: I know it is Monday. This is a rotten copy. It could be anything. It could be a sheep shearing station?

A. Or a beating machine.

MR JUSTICE GRAY: Let us get on.

MR RAMPTON: The line at the bottom of the page, underneath of the line are provided captions for the cover pictures on the front cover. What I ask you is who wrote those captions?

A. I do not know.

Q. You do not?

A. It was not me.

Q. Well, you published this thing.

A. There is a distinction between publishers and authors. I explained it to you.

Q. I know that, but a publisher normally has to organise the

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printing of the pictures. He has to make sure that the pictures are properly identified and he usually knows who does it, does he not?

A. For purposes of this court, it would satisfy you if I say on oath that I did not write that, surely?

Q. Not necessarily, no, Mr Irving. Look at the one in the bottom right hand corner.

A. The picture?

Q. No. First of all, caption. It says bottom right that an actual fumigating chamber was used to delouse inmates' clothes.

A. You have lost me, I am afraid.

MR JUSTICE GRAY: You have lost me too.

A. You have lost us both.

MR RAMPTON: Then I will have to come back to it the copy you have is not the copy that I have. It is on Mr Julius's copy.

MR JUSTICE GRAY: Maybe I am looking in the wrong place, but I do not think I have it.

MR RAMPTON: I just want to make sure the Foreword is the same before we get completely --

MR JUSTICE GRAY: I do not think there is any problem about that. It is about six pages in. Foreword by David Irving. Have you got the Foreword now?

A. Yes.

MR RAMPTON: You wrote the Foreword, it appears, in May 1989?

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A. Yes.

Q. It is copyright?

A. Yes.

Q. David Irving. You start: "Unlike the writing of history chemistry is an exact science", yes?

A. Yes.

Q. I am not going to read the whole of it by any manner of means. There are only some small parts that I need for this purpose.

A. I rely on the whole Foreword and not just on the parts you are going to read.

MR JUSTICE GRAY: Rely on me to read them.

MR RAMPTON: Ask his Lordship to read it, but I am not going to read it all out. It is a waste of the court's time and of my vocal chords. If you go please to the first column, five paragraphs down, you write this: "Nobody like to be swindled, still less where considerable sums of money are involved (since 1949 the state of Israel has received over 90 billion deutschemarks in voluntary reparations from West Germany, essentially in atonement for the "gas chambers of Auschwitz)". Gas chambers in plural. Then you go on: "This myth will not die easily." Then you go on about how it was an ingenious plan invented by the PWE during the war. Please go to the next column, second paragraph. I will start at the first paragraph first complete paragraph:

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"Yet I have to admit" -- this is you Mr Irving -- "that it would never have occurred to me to subject the actual fabric of the Auschwitz concentration camp and its "gas chambers" - the holiest shrines of this new 20th century religion - to chemical tests to see if there was any trace of cyanide compounds in the walls. The truly astonishing results are as set out in this report: While significant quantities of cyanide compounds were found in the small delousing facilities of the camp, whether proprietary and lethal compounds were used, as all are agreed, to disinfect the plague ridden clothing of all persons entering these brutal slave labour camps, no significant trace whatsoever was found in the buildings which international opinion - for it is not more than that -- as always labelled as the camps' infamous gas chambers. Nor, as the report's gruesomely expert author makes plain, could the design and construction of those buildings have made their use as mass gas chambers feasible under any circumstances". Then in the next paragraph you write that you have reservations about his methodology, but they are reservations which you quickly, if I may suggest, abandon. You end the paragraph: "The video tapes made simultaneously by the team - which I have studied - provide compelling visual evidence of the scrupulous methods that they use". Then you finish up: "Until the

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end of this tragic century there will always be incorrigible historians, statesmen and publicists, who are content to believe, or have no economically viable alternative but to believe, that the Nazis used "gas chambers" at Auschwitz to kill human beings. But it is now up to them to explain to me as an intelligent and critical student of modern history why there is no significant trace of any cyanide compound in the building which they have always identified as the former gas chambers".

A. "The building" is in the singular.

Q. Sorry, "in the building which they always identified as the former gas chambers. Forensic chemistry is, I repeat, an exact science. The ball is in their court." Mr Irving, just so that we do not get tangled up in singular or plural gas chambers, please turn quickly to ----

A. You rather skated over the paragraph, of course, in which I drew attention to the flaws in the report.

Q. You can draw attention that in your re-examination, Mr Irving.

A. Yes, but several days will pass between now and then.

Q. I am trying to make progress.

MR JUSTICE GRAY: That is a reference to the sentence where you say you prefer to have seen more rigorous methods used in identifying and so on?

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A. Indeed, my Lord. I accept already at this time that the report is flawed.

MR RAMPTON: As will you see, Mr Irving, as time goes by, your reservations seem to vanish into thin air.

A. Completely the opposite. If you read the correspondence in this very bundle which you put before the court, there are letters between me and Mr Zündel and other people saying that engineers have now drawn attention to the serious flaws in the Leuchter report, and we have to address them.

Q. We are going to look at that. The point is this, Mr Irving.

A. My reservations did not vanish.

Q. What you say privately to people like Mark Weber and Ernst Zündel is quite different from what you say publicly. That is my point and this is where we are going to go today.

A. Good.

Q. You say publicly that which you know to be untrue about the value of the Leuchter report.

A. In the meantime, of course, we have other reports to back up the original conclusions of the Leuchter report.

MR JUSTICE GRAY: Do not let us get distracted. You have made your point about the flaws in the methodology.

A. Yes.

MR RAMPTON: Just so we do not have any more confusion about

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this at all, had you read this version of the Leuchter report when you wrote your introduction?

A. No. I had read, of course, the original affidavit, the full length affidavit of which this is a precis.

Q. Had you read this version of the Leuchter report before your press conference in June 1989?

A. No. Why should I read the abridged version when I had already read the full version length version?

Q. Because you are the publisher, Mr Irving. It is a very short document.

A. I am sorry to disappoint you, but that does not necessarily follow. I had read the original one inch thick version.

Q. Just look on page 15.

A. Had I attended in greater detail to this, there are certain things that I would not have tolerated, for example the sideways printing I would not have liked, things like that.

Q. Just look at page 15 of this version of the Leuchter report.

A. Yes.

Q. Which is published by you in the right hand column under the heading "Forensic considerations of HCN cyanide compounds..." in the bottom right hand corner.

A. Yes.

Q. Look at the second paragraph.

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A. Yes.

Q. "31 samples were selectively removed from the alleged gas chambers (plural) at Kremas I, II, III, IV and V, a control sample was taken from delousing facility no 1 at Birkenau ". Let us not have any more of this nonsense that, when you talk about the gas chambers at Auschwitz and the value of Mr Leuchter's report, you are talking simply about the reconstructed gas chamber at Auschwitz.

A. I never said that. On the contrary, this is exactly what I have denied saying. We are referring to all the buildings which are now claimed to have been gas chambers, from which these samples were taken.

Q. If you look at the next paragraph, while we have it open and I shall not have to come back to it, you write in bold, or it is printed in bold under your imprint: "The control sample was removed from any delousing chamber in a location where cyanide was known to have been used and was apparently present as blue staining. The chemical testing of control sample No. 32 showed a cyanide content of 1,050 milligram per kilogram, a very heavy concentration". Perfectly right.

MR JUSTICE GRAY: And sample No. 32 is the one taken from the Birkenau delousing facility. Is that right?

MR RAMPTON: Yes. When Professor van Pelt gives evidence, he will make it a good deal clearer but, if your Lordship looks at page 26 of this report, this time the page is on

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the left hand corner, there is a plan of Birkenau at the bottom of the page. On the right-hand side of that plan is a key and F in the key is delousing facility No. 1, where Mr Leuchter says he found concentration of over 1,000 milligrams per kilogram of some kind of cyanide compound.

MR JUSTICE GRAY: That is bottom left.

MR RAMPTON: Exactly. That is the building known as BW 5A. It is a brick building and it is in what became the women's part of the camp at Birkenau. It is there to this day.

MR JUSTICE GRAY: That is on your case the first gas chamber?

MR RAMPTON: No, it is not a gas chamber at all. That is a delousing facility. If your Lordship wants to look at where the gas chambers are, they are K 2 on the left-hand side and K 3, and then in the middle of the page towards the top there is K 4 and K 5.

MR JUSTICE GRAY: I have not found K 2 and K 3.

MR RAMPTON: On the left, my Lord, you see the compass.

MR JUSTICE GRAY: Up there yes, I see.

MR RAMPTON: If one goes southeast of the compass, they are side by side, either side of the railway track.

MR JUSTICE GRAY: That is all Birkenau?

MR RAMPTON: This is all Birkenau, as it says in the bottom left hand corner.

MR JUSTICE GRAY: Yes, sorry. That was my enquiry.

MR RAMPTON: Your Lordship should ignore the little (f) at the

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top of the page. That is not Mr Leuchter's (f). That is an (f) from the original plan and that is a separate delousing facility that was built in 1944, and which was hardly used in the Zyklon bay at all, mostly steam autoclaves as are shown in the front of the report. Then I will read on, if I may, Mr Irving, on page 15: "The conditions and areas from which these samples were taken are identical with those of the controlled sample, cold dark and wet. Only Kremas IV and V differed in the respect that these locations had sunlight, the buildings had been torn down, and sunlight may hasten the destruction of uncomplex cyanide. The cyanide in the mortar and brick becomes ferro-cyanide or Prussian blue pigment, a very stable iron cyanide complex". Are you aware of the errors in that paragraph, Mr Irving?

A. I am not a chemical expert.

Q. Are you aware of the errors in the description of the state of the buildings?

A. No.

Q. Then he says the locations from which the analysed samples were removed are set out in table 3.

A. If you are going to say there are errors, perhaps you ought to explain to the court what the errors are.

Q. No, Mr Irving. If you do not know what they are?

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A. You just claimed there were errors.

Q. Yes, there are errors. Van Pelt's report is full of errors identified, for example, crematoria 2 and 3 are open to the skies, the ruins.

A. I have very big photographs taken recently of those crematoria which I will show to the court this afternoon, if the court pleases.

Q. That is fine, Mr Irving. They are open to the skies. They were blown up in early 1935 just before the Russians got there. They are ruins. The delousing facility BW 5A in the women's camp is a perfectly intact building with a roof on it.

A. I beg to differ. The morgue No. 1 of crematorium II may have been blown up but it is intact inasmuch as the roof just pancaked downwards and it is possible to crawl underneath the roof, which is what I believe Mr Leuchter did.

Q. What about crematorium III? He took samples there too, did he not?

A. Yes.

Q. Look what he found. "It is notable that almost all the samples were negative and that the few that were positive were very close to the detection level, one milligram" -- he has misprinted printed this, it is not KP but KG -- "per KG, 6.7 milligrams per KG at Krema III, 7.9 milligrams per kilogram at Krema I", that is in the old

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camp, Auschwitz I.

A. "Close to the detection level" means of no significance, in other words no statistical significance.

Q. I thought you were not a scientist?

A. You asked me what I know about ferro-cyanides and uncomplex cyanide compounds. I am afraid I am way out of my depth there.

Q. You know it is wrong that it is very stable, do you not?

A. Ferro-cyanide is so stable that it is used as a dye stuff, Prussian blue.

Q. Not if it is exposed to the elements over a period of 40 years.

A. We will produce photographs to the court to show just how stable it is.

Q. It goes on: "In the absence of any consequential readings at any of the tested locations as compared with the controlled sample reading of 1050 milligrams per kilogram supports the evidence that these facilities were not execution gas chambers. The small quantities detected would indicate that at some point these building were deloused with Zyklon bay as were all the buildings at these facilities. Additionally, the areas of blue staining show a high iron content indicated ferro cyanide no longer hydrogen cyanide." Then in italics in bold, which we have seen before but I will just read it again now, "One would have expected higher cyanide detection in

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the samples taken from the alleged gas chambers because of the greater amount of gas alleged to be utilised there than that found in the controlled samples. Since the contrary is true, one must conclude that these facilities were not execution chambers when coupled with all the other evidence gained on inspection." Leave it there, will you, for the moment?

MR JUSTICE GRAY: Can I ask this question because we are plundering into this and I do need to, sort of, understand the big picture. Is this the passage which struck you when you first saw the affidavit which led you to have your change of mind?

A. The statistical table, quite simply, the contrast between the enormous quantities in the delousing chamber and the infinitesimally insignificant quantities in the alleged homicidal gas chambers where, allegedly, 500,000 people had been gassed to death.

Q. My question is whether it is the text or whether ----

A. It is.

Q. --- it is the tables. This is the bit of the report which ----

A. The argument, I would say, rather than the actual bit of the report. When you come away, having looked at that, you say, well, if those are the figures, if that is the argument, I am wowed by it, I am impressed, because, as I said in my introduction, that is an exact science we are

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talking about. We do not have to read between the lines of German documents and try to look for euphemisms.

MR RAMPTON: Mr Irving, before we go back to the Leuchter report, just so there shall not be any doubt about what you have been saying since it came out, this is merely one example, there are about at least a dozen, maybe 20, if we turn to tab 20 of the third of these new files?

A. I can quite simply right now my position has remained unchanged from that day to this on precisely these grounds.

Q. Despite the fact that you have communicated reservations about this question, in particular, to your friends, Mr Zündel and Mr Weber, a consequence of having received critical reports from outside people?

A. The critical reports, if my memory is correct, were relating to Mr Leuchter's other rather superfluous calculations, like how many people can fit into one square metre, and this kind of calculation which I thought detracted from the ----

Q. Mr Irving, be careful.

A. Yes.

Q. We are going to look at what Mr Beer, for example, wrote to you in January 1990 in a moment.

A. Well, we are looking at a letter written 10 years ago. I am quite happy to be surprised by what I wrote then.

Q. No, Mr Irving. In 1995 at Tampa, Florida, for example,

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you were as categorical in your dependence on Mr Leuchter's findings as to the relative amounts of residues as you ever have been?

A. And I still am.

Q. Despite having known that they were rubbish?

A. I still am. My position on the significance, the global significance, of those discrepancies between the residues is the same now as it was then and I will be justifying this when the time comes.

Q. Can you please take the first of those files, Auschwitz files, and it is in the same file as the Leuchter report which we are going to come back to in a moment, and turn to tab 5?

MR JUSTICE GRAY: We are leaving the Leuchter now?

MR RAMPTON: No, this is all to do with the Leuchter. My Lord, what I am interested in is not the objective value of the Leuchter report, which I hope we need not go into in this court -- we may have to -- but Mr Irving's treatment of it in the light of the knowledge which he had and which is itself contained in the report to which I am coming back, but only for that purpose.

MR JUSTICE GRAY: His position is really very simple, is it not? It is this particular aspect of the report which caused him to engage in what you have described as the volte-face, and he maintains that position. So, in a sense, his position could not be more sharply defined.

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MR RAMPTON: He knows it is wrong.

MR JUSTICE GRAY: That is the point, obviously, that needs to be pursued.

MR RAMPTON: He knows there is a whole lot else wrong with this report. He knows, for example, the densities in the gas chambers is wrong.

MR JUSTICE GRAY: That may or not be an issue; I suspect not.

A. The what in the gas chambers?

MR RAMPTON: The density of people in the gas chambers.

A. Oh, the density of people.

Q. Leuchter's assumptions about that are complete rubbish, are they not?

A. Well, of course, this is precisely one thing that I challenged in my correspondence behind the scenes with people saying, "He is wrong on this and we have got to watch that he does not" ----

Q. Have you ever made that statement publicly before today?

A. No, because that was not the crucial element of the Leuchter on which I relied. The crucial element is the scientific findings. As I say, chemistry is an exact science; you cannot get round it. The courts are convicting people the whole time on the basis of chemistry.

Q. Yes, Mr Irving. Sometimes they are. It is not quite as exact as you may think, I think. However, that s beside the point. Chemistry is an exact science. You get small

P-44

residues, or you call them insignificant, traces in the gas chambers remains and much bigger traces in the delousing remains. That is the position, is it not?

A. That is the position.

Q. You have known that all along?

A. Yes, and it has been confirmed by subsequent tests, even by the Poles.

Q. Mr Irving, I know that. They found that out and Professor Markievitch found it out in 1994. You know that?

A. He did not actually carry out the tests himself. He had others carry out the tests.

Q. Now please turn to ----

A. Tab 6 or tab 5 did you say?

Q. I think it is tab 5.

A. "Critique of forensic examinations".

Q. This you received -- I am just checking the date of the letter you wrote to Mr Weber, 12th January 1990?

A. Yes.

Q. You write actually to Mr Beer, from Florida, and you say: "Dear Mr Beer, thank you so much for sending me that anonymous treatise on the Leuchter report"?

MR JUSTICE GRAY: I am sorry, Mr Rampton, I was distracted. Where are you now? I thought you said you were tab 5.

MR RAMPTON: I will try to do a little of bit of history first. If it is not the way round, then it makes sense, perhaps, to do it chronologically. In tab 8, my Lord,

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there is a short bundle of correspondence, and I do not know if your Lordship's pages are paginated?

MR JUSTICE GRAY: Yes, they are.

MR RAMPTON: Mine are not. Then it is a letter which has 12th January 1990 on it, page 12?

A. Page 12, yes. My Lord, this, of course, is not an agreed bundle in any sense. We are just seeing the documents that the Defence ----

MR JUSTICE GRAY: If there is any document in it that you for one reason or another challenge, then please say so.

A. No, my Lord, but, of course, it is just a very loaded selection of documents. Of course, they have not put any documents that would support my case.

Q. You have not seen this file until today?

A. Not until this morning, but I am quite happy to rest on these letters.

MR RAMPTON: "Dear Mr Beer", you write on 12th January 1990, "Thank you so much for sending me that anonymous treatise on the Leuchter report to which I wrote the introduction. Incidentally, that is all that I wrote. My involvement in the project is no larger than that" ----

A. So why did you suggest that I had written the rest of the report?

Q. I did not. I wanted to know who had written the captions, Mr Irving?

A. You wanted to know who wrote the report.

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MR JUSTICE GRAY: Mr Irving, I know it is very tempting, but if we chase every hare we are going to be here until ...

MR RAMPTON: And then you say this, Mr Irving: "I agree" -- we will look at the criticisms in a moment -- "agree, in fact, with many of your friends' criticisms and ascribe most of the shortcomings to the fact that engineers, like trade unionists, do not share the facility of expressing themselves in English that writers and poets have. Having said that, let me make a few general and specific points". Then I need not read the first three sentences, I think.

A. I would rather you do.

Q. I will if you want: "In October 1989, a follow up mission went to Auschwitz and brought back their findings in video form and they will shortly be published as a video. Again I have provided a German spoken introduction. The quality is magnificent and enables the viewer to see where somebody, the Poles(?) has attempted to falsify cavities, openings, etc. in the 'gas chambers' to make them accord with eye witness testimony". Now this is the sentence that I am interested in: "I think your friends' strictures about the 3,200 parts per million argument are right, but cannot agree that you should automatically go right to the other end of the scale 100 parts per million". Mr Irving, that shows, does it not, that you

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knew perfectly well that Fred Leuchter's assumption that the Nazis would have used a concentration of 3,200 parts per million to kill their victims was a nonsense?

A. No, not a nonsense, but probably not justified on the figures.

Q. Now ----

A. Not to go right to the other end of the scale.

Q. It goes down to about 300, I agree. It does not go as far as 100.

MR JUSTICE GRAY: Do I not need to see what the strictures were?

MR RAMPTON: Yes. I am just going to show your Lordship. The best way, my Lord, of doing this -- it is at tab 5, my Lord -- maybe the best way of dealing with this, because it is quite important, I would suggest ----

MR JUSTICE GRAY: I can understand it is.

MR RAMPTON: --- that your Lordship reads the whole of it.

MR JUSTICE GRAY: The critique?

MR RAMPTON: Yes.

A. And this letter to Mr Beer, please.

MR RAMPTON: And the whole of the letter to Mr Beer as well, I quite agree with that, because it will save time when I then come back because I can ask ----

MR JUSTICE GRAY: Do you want me to do that now?

MR RAMPTON: I think it would help before I start asking questions about it because your Lordship will only find

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that I am jumping too far ahead. It will take quite a little bit of time. Whether your Lordship would like to leave court for five minutes?

MR JUSTICE GRAY: I suspect that there would be some who would welcome that. Perhaps I shall. It should not take up more than five minutes.

MR RAMPTON: It should not, but it is not something to skim, if I may say so?

A. I agree. If your Lordship will also pay attention to the marginal notes in the left-hand margin of the critique? They are handwritten notes by me at the time.

MR RAMPTON: Yes, that, certainly. Unfortunately, mine have been cut off.

MR JUSTICE GRAY: I think they have been cut off.

A. I can just very rapidly say at the first page it says "totally untrue"; the second page it says "Bernoulli effect" which is something in liquid dynamics; the third page says "this is a bit too pretty" -- these are my comments -- then "important" I have underlined and then "no", I cannot read the next one.

MR JUSTICE GRAY: When did you put those comments on?

A. The day I received it, my Lord.

MR RAMPTON: Is there another "important" on the fifth page?

A. Yes, I have no idea what they refer to. I just...

Q. Against paragraph 7 in a bracket on page 5, I cannot make anything of that. Mine has a hole punched through it

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apart from anything else. This small handwriting.

A. Well, I very probably then quoted it in my letter to Mr Beer because that is what I appear to have done.

Q. All I can see is an exclamation mark.

MR JUSTICE GRAY: I will go and read it. It will probably take me between five and 10 minutes.

MR RAMPTON: Shall we come back at 10 to 12?

MR JUSTICE GRAY: I will let you know. (The court adjourned for a short time)

MR JUSTICE GRAY: I have read the critique and the letter to Mr Beer.

MR RAMPTON: My Lord, I am grateful. Then, Mr Irving, I need only ask this, I hope. That report sent to you by Mr Colin Beer, I think it was, at the beginning of January 1990 was, in fact, a demolition of the Leuchter report, was it not?

A. He calls it a critique. It is not an extermination or even an annihilation. It is a critique.

MR JUSTICE GRAY: Fundamentally flawed?

A. Yes.

MR RAMPTON: Yes, fundamentally flawed. I will read the last paragraph of his conclusions. "The evidence of the Leuchter report when taken in the context of the times and in full consideration of all other evidence is consistent with that other evidence and together strongly supports both the fact and scale of the massacres in the gas

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chambers at Birkenau, provided the assumption is made that the gas chambers operated at a relatively low toxic concentration." That is the key to it, is it not, Mr Irving?

A. Yes.

Q. If there is a low concentration used in the gas chambers, a number of consequences flow, do they not? First, the need for a ventilation system, if any, is much reduced? Yes?

A. Well, the ventilation system in mortuaries as prescribed by the architectural handbook.

MR JUSTICE GRAY: That is not an answer to the question.

MR RAMPTON: It is not a mortuary. If it is a gas chamber, Mr Irving, and the concentration used is contrary to what Mr Fred Leuchter unjustifiably assumed, contrary to its being 3,200 parts per million, it is something around 300 parts per million or, as Mr Beer suggests, 100 parts per million, then any need to pay serious attention to ventilation is much reduced, is it not?

A. That would be a logical conclusion, yes.

Q. It will be a logical conclusion, would it not, that the risk of contamination of water in the sewers is much reduced, perhaps to complete insignificance?

A. That would be another logical conclusion.

Q. It would be a logical conclusion that the need for the people administering the poison gas to take what I might

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call strong security precautions, safety precautions, is much reduced, is it not?

A. That would be a logical conclusion to your hypothesis, yes.

Q. It means, does it not, Mr Irving, that the time which has to be waited before the Sonderkommando can go in and get the bodies out, whether or not they are wearing gas masks, is much reduced, is it not?

A. This would be the logical conclusion of your hypothesis, yes.

Q. Above all, it means this, does it not, that the discovery by Mr Leuchter of the small traces of cyanide compounds in material taken from the walls of the alleged gas chambers at crematorium (iii) in Birkenau is entirely consistent with a low concentration having been used in the first place?

A. No.

Q. Why?

A. You have to take various other factors into consideration. It is a totally false logic. We know from the other documentation that your witness is going to present that these buildings had been freshly constructed, they were made of concrete. You are shaking your head.

Q. Because only one building has been reconstructed.

A. Freshly constructed at the time they were put in ----

MR JUSTICE GRAY: "Freshly" not "re".

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MR RAMPTON: I see.

A. They were made -- they were raw, they were green concrete. The concrete was still sweating. You are shaking your head.

Q. I am shaking my head, Mr Irving, simply because you are plain wrong. If you had taken the trouble to go to Birkenau, you would have seen on the walls of the Leichenkellers in [Kremas] II and III remains, quite substantial remains, of a coating on the walls, plaster or cement.

A. We shall be producing photographs of the interior of

Leichenkeller (1) and the other buildings which show quite clearly there is no coating on the walls.

Q. Mr Irving, look at it this way. Suppose that -- some of the coating has fallen off, I quite agree.

A. No. This is the original interior.

Q. Mr Irving, I have seen it. Do not argue with me. Argue with Professor van Pelt. If you are going to produce ----

A. I am providing an answer to your points. You may not like the answers, but these are the answers you get from me.

Q. Mr Irving, if you are going to produce evidence that there is no coating to be found on any of the remains of Leichenkeller (1) in crematoria (ii) and (iii) at Birkenau, I am happy to see it. I shall admit fault if you are right. Mr Irving -----

A. Can I continue with the point I was making?

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Q. Yes.

A. This is fresh concrete. Fresh concrete sweats, I know. I have worked in a concrete gang myself for three years with John Laing. Concrete is very alkaline. You have to wear gloves when you are working with it unless you want your fingers to end up rotting away. Hydrogen cyanide is an acid. They react fiercely, even in small quantities. You would expect to see precisely the kind of chemical compounds and changes which would have produced permanent lasting results ----

Q. Mr Irving ----

A. --- even in small quantity, even in small dosages.

Q. (A) not if the walls are coated, and (B) not probably if the concentration is as low as 300 parts per million.

A. There are we are in terra incognita ----

Q. Well, you are.

A. --- Mr Rampton, because we do not know what the scientific qualifications of this particular author are. We know all about the scientific qualifications of Professor van Pelt. We know about the scientific qualifications of other experts in this case. It would be very dangerous indeed to attach as much weight as you are seeking to do to this critique of forensic examinations by an anonymous correspondent who does not give us any details of his chemical or scientific qualifications purely because he, hostile to the Leuchter report, puts in the paragraph at

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the end saying deeply flawed. You cannot do that kind of weighing up. You have to -- yes, my Lord.

MR JUSTICE GRAY: In a way, you are slightly perverting the argument. I do not mean that in a critical sense. The point that is really being made by the South African engineer, Crabtree, is really that the fundamental premise of Leuchter's argument can be, as it were, turned on its head so that really Leuchter's conclusions are diametrically wrong. Is that not what Crabtree is saying?

A. This is what he says, my Lord. And let me just, if I can just turn the wheel back very slightly and remind you of the last words of my introduction to the Leuchter report? The ball is now in their court. This report is very much intended to provoke precisely the kind of discussion which is now arising.

Q. No, but my trouble with your evidence -- let me make it clear -- is that you are, as it were, criticising Crabtree's conclusion that the level would have been 100 ppm or 300 ppm?

MR RAMPTON: My Lord, this is Beer, not Crabtree, this one.

MR JUSTICE GRAY: I am sorry.

MR RAMPTON: Crabtree is an earlier one. I may go back to him.

MR JUSTICE GRAY: Yes, but are you criticising Beer's conclusion that it would have been 100 to 300 ppm, when really what we should be addressing is whether Leuchter's assumption of 3,200 ppm was a legitimate and sensible

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assumption to be making; is that not right?

A. I completely agree with you.

Q. Do you follow the point I am putting to you?

A. I completely agree and you are absolutely right. There are probably concessions have to be made at both ends of this scale.

Q. That may well be right, but let us focus on Leuchter's assumption of the very high concentrate?

A. My Lord, you will see that in the bundle of correspondence which your Lordship has read only one item under No. 8, I wrote to all parties concerned saying: "Clearly, these criticisms I am now receiving have to be taken on board and we have to do something about it". Back came the objection from Mr Zündel: "This is a court affidavit which we cannot publish it in an altered form. We can only continue to publish it in the form as originally submitted". So we are at a slight -- over a bit of a barrel there. It is not as easy as your Lordship thinks. The other point that I thought I had made is that the Leuchter report was intended to provoke precisely the discussion which we have succeeded in provoking at every level, including the scientific discussion.

MR RAMPTON: But, Mr Irving, I am diverting slightly. I am coming back to Leichenkeller (1) in crematoria (ii) and (iii) in a moment. You have never ever publicly acknowledged the powerful -- no, I am going to use this --

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cogent, very cogent, critiques which you have received of the Leuchter report?

A. Because, in the meantime, of course, Leuchter had been replicated by other experts. At the very press conference that you read excerpts out from, I was challenged on this point, and I said, "If you don't like Leuchter's results, go and do the tests yourself and prove that I am a nincompoop", I think was the word I used.

Q. Professor Markievitch did just that and did prove that you were a nincompoop, did he not?

A. Are you going to put his report in evidence to the court?

Q. It is here.

A. Shall we say that when we get to it?

Q. Yes, we will look at it. It is not done until 1994.

A. There is also an earlier report conducted in 1945.

Q. That is in German and we are certainly going to look at that. That is the one from Cracow in December 1945. Go back to this question.

A. And, of course, Germar Rudolf did a much more detailed scientific test.

Q. I am sure you will refer to that in your evidence at some stage.

A. It cannot be ignored. He is a qualified scientist. The only reason he did not get his doctorate was precisely because of coming up with politically incorrect findings on this matter.

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Q. Mr Irving, the fact is, though you evidently do not know it, that the walls of Leichenkeller I and crematoria 2 and 3 are not made of concrete at all.

A. We are talk about the roof, the ceiling.

Q. You are talking now about the roof, are you?

A. The cyanide was not exactly selective about where it settled.

Q. Do you agree with me that, if the concentration needed to kill lice is 22 times greater than that needed to kill human beings -- I am not suggesting this is an exact proportion -- it is more likely that you will find 40 years later or whatever it is, 50 years later, you will find residual traces of hydrogen cyanide in the delousing facility than you will in the supposed gas chamber?

A. They carried out controlled tests on buildings where there had been no cyanide used whatsoever, not just in these camps but also in for example in Bavaria, and found exactly the same in significant levels.

MR JUSTICE GRAY: I do not think that that is an answer to the question at all.

A. Very well.

MR JUSTICE GRAY: Do you want the question repeated?

A. If those figures are correct, then obviously you would expect substantially more. This is correct, but you certainly would not expect nothing significant in the alleged homicidal gas chambers and that is what all the

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tests so far have established.

MR RAMPTON: Would you please turn to tab 9 of this bundle? It is a very short extract?

A. Oh, yes, Dr Roth.

Q. Tell me who Dr Roth is?

A. Dr Roth was the forensic analyst who was employed by Ernst Zündel's defence team to carry out the quantitative and qualitative analysis of the 30 odd samples which were brought back by Mr Leuchter from his visit to Auschwitz in February 1988.

Q. Thank you very much. Now I will read out what he said in a television----

MR JUSTICE GRAY: Mr Rampton, you are assuming quite often more knowledge on my part than I possess. You are now looking at tab 9?

MR RAMPTON: Tab 9, my Lord, Dr Roth.

MR JUSTICE GRAY: I know nothing about Dr Roth at all.

MR RAMPTON: Mr Irving has just said that he is the chemist in charge of the Leuchter analysis.

A. He was the one who actually carried out the tests on the samples that Leuchter brought back.

MR JUSTICE GRAY: He is the chemist from the independent company?

A. In New England, yes. The Cornell University or something.

MR JUSTICE GRAY: It does sometimes help me if I have a little more context. My Lord, this transcript is, I believe from

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the film Dr Death, Mr Death, so we do not know if it is a complete transcript or not, but I accept for the purposes that it is.

MR RAMPTON: This is what Dr Roth said when he was interviewed for that programme, last year or something like that. He said this: "I do not think that the Leuchter results have any meaning. There is nothing in any of our data that says those services were exposed or not. Hindsight being 20/20, the test was not the correct one to have been used for the analysis. Leuchter presented us with rock samples anywhere from the side view of thumb up to half the size of your fist. He broke them up with a hammer so that we could get a subsample, placed it in a flask, add concentrated sulphuric acid and undergoes a reaction that produces a red coloured solution. It is the intensity of this red colour that we can relate with cyanide concentration. You have to look at what happens to cyanide when it reacts with a wall. Where does it go, how far goes it go? Cyanide is a surface reaction. It is probably not going to penetrate more than 10 microns. A human hair is 100 microns in diameter. Crush this sample up. I have just diluted that sample 10,000, 100,000 times. If you are going to look for it, you are going to look on the surface face only. There is no reason to go deep because it is not going to be there. Which was the

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exposed surface? I did not have any idea. That is like analysing paint on a wall by analysing the timber that is behind it." Now Mr Irving, that is the man that did the analysis?

A. Yes. Can I add that he also said on a part that is not in the film, "Had I known that these samples came from Auschwitz, I would have come up with completely different figures".

MR JUSTICE GRAY: What is the significance, you say, of that?

A. I suggest that he is not entirely subjective not.

Q. You mean objective?

A. Not entirely objective.

MR RAMPTON: Maybe. Mr Irving, what this suggests is, to use one of your words, it is absolutely shattering, is it not? Despite the absolutely hopeless methodology that Fred Leuchter used to obtain his samples, the fact is that the sample from the Leichenkeller in crematorium 3 still produced traces of hydrogen cyanide, did it not?

MR JUSTICE GRAY: Which samples is he talking about here?

MR RAMPTON: He is talking about the ruins of Auschwitz which Fred Leuchter surreptitiously removed on his visit and brought back to be analysed in America.

MR JUSTICE GRAY: From the gas chambers or the delousing chamber or both?

MR RAMPTON: Both, as far as I know. He did the whole lot and

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that is the where the figures in the Leuchter report come from, my Lord. It is from Dr Roth's analysis.

A. Dr Roth says that it is less than one tenth the thickness of a human hair that the cyanide will penetrate into the brickwork.

Q. Exactly. If you are going to do the test scientifically, you need carefully to scratch or scrape the surface and put it in a plastic bag, take it back and have it analysed. What Fred Leuchter did was to hack great lumps out of the fabric, did he not?

A. Mr Rampton, I am not just going to go annihilate evidence from Dr Roth, I am going to exterminate it when the time comes, when we produce the photographs.

MR JUSTICE GRAY: Make a start now.

A. My Lord, we have photographs taken of the outside of some of these buildings, I emphasise the word "outside", and the blue stain from the cyanide has gone right through the brickwork, inch after inch after inch. You can see the outside of the building is stained blue with a stain that turns out to be Prussian blue from the cyanide that has come right through the brickwork.

Q. That is the delousing chamber, is it?

A. The delousing chamber, my Lord, yes and also a gas chamber at Stutthof outside Danzig.

MR RAMPTON: How long, Mr Irving, does it take to delouse a set, I call it a set, of clothing of, let us say, 1500

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people in a delousing chamber using Zyklon B?

A. That is neither here nor there. Dr Roth had not spoken about the length of time. He says it goes less than one tenth of the thickness of a human hair into the brickwork.

Q. How long does it take to disinfect, using Zyklon B, delouse the clothing of 1500 people?

A. I do not know.

MR JUSTICE GRAY: I think Mr Rampton is right, that the way it is put here, and it is not perhaps the most satisfactory way to present Dr Roth's views, if this is a television interview, is that cyanide is only ever a surface reaction.

MR RAMPTON: Yes indeed.

A. My Lord, these photographs will be in evidence later on this week.

MR JUSTICE GRAY: It is really a chemistry point, not a photograph point.

A. An image is worth a thousand words, perhaps.

MR JUSTICE GRAY: Maybe.

MR RAMPTON: It depends. The camera never lies, of course, does it, Mr Irving? Have the outside surfaces of that building which you say has the blue staining on it been tested?

A. Yes, by Mr Germar Rudolf. He has carried out very intensive tests on them.

Q. Mr Irving, these criticisms by Mr Beer were cogent, were

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they not?

A. They were, yes, of course. I did not ignore them at all. I immediately contacted all relevant parties as the correspondence under flag 8 or 9 shows, and said we have to take these on board.

Q. What about the general public?

A. Well, you must realise, by this time you also have the other collateral evidence.

Q. By what time? When did your so-called collateral evidence come to light?

A. Oh, it was coming in the whole time. As soon as the Leuchter report was published, people starting contacting us and telling us about other such things.

Q. What do you mean by collateral evidence?

A. For example, we know that both of a forensic nature, somebody sent us a copy of the Krakow report by the Jansen Institute which the Auschwitz state museum immediately commissioned after the Leuchter report was published, and they did not like the findings, and so they pigeonholed it. They put it in a safe and locked it away, because it basically substantiated what Mr Leuchter had said. Then the original Jansen report was also supplied to us, the 1945 report.

Q. Us? Who is "us"?

A. Us?

Q. You said "supplied us"?

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A. A copy was supplied to me, a copy was supplied to the Institute of Historical Review in California, and in fact it was supplied to us surreptitiously. Somebody in the Auschwitz archives photographed a copy and sent us a copy of what the Auschwitz archives were concealing from.

Q. I still do not know who "us" is?

A. Is it material?

Q. Yes, I think it probably is, in the light of this correspondence which we are going to look at more in a moment.

A. A copy was sent to me, a copy was sent to Mark Weber probably of the Institute of Historical Review.

Q. And one no doubt to Ernst Zündel?

A. I think I sent a copy to him, if my memory is correct. These things were shuffled back and forth. Sometimes I got them, sometimes the others got them and then we would collaborate. We put our heads together. Obviously there is no point rushing into print with some kind of conclusion this way and that. It would be looking like headless chickens if you come out with first one thing and then another thing.

Q. You have never publicly acknowledged any of these reports, critiques and so on which cast doubt, sometimes 100 per cent doubt, on your utterances about the gas chambers at Auschwitz.

A. I do not agree. I think that the central chemical

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conclusions of the Leuchter report, although flawed, have now been substantially confirmed by a whole string of other reports in the meantime, both the one kept secret by the Auschwitz authorities and the earlier 1945 one, and the Germar Rudolf one, and other reports that have been conducted since then. Obviously the numbers do not exactly match, and you would not expect them to, but the broad trend is the same, very large quantities in the fumigation clambers, cyanide residues and not the quantities you would expect in the buildings where allegedly hundreds of thousands of people have been gassed to death with cyanide.

Q. So you say. In order to set the scene, this has become a little bit disorderly, Mr Irving, because you keep referring to some documents we have and others that we do not. Leave that on one side for the moment. We are just going to do, if we may, a little bit of arithmetic.

A. These documents have all been in my discovery. None of them have been concealed.

Q. I am not suggesting you are hiding anything from this court, Mr Irving, in the way of documents. Can you please turn in the Leuchter report in the front of your bundle. You may be better to use the copied one unless that has all 12 appendices. Appendix 12 to the copy of the Leuchter report that I have, my Lord, in the bottom right hand corner should be page No. 49.

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MR JUSTICE GRAY: Yes.

MR RAMPTON: This is Mr Faurisson's name written on the top of it, if you turn it sideways, has it? It has Faurisson written beside Appendix 12. Please turn to page 51, bottom right hand corner, that is the internal page number of the report. This is a document produced by the firm of Degesch, do you agree, who are the manufacturers of Zyklon B? I am not suggesting this is a wartime document.

A. They are not the manufacturers. The manufacturers were I G Farben. Degesch were the people who controlled the supplies and Tesch were the company who allocated the supplies.

Q. The distributors?

A. Yes.

Q. If you look at page 55, you can see a picture of some tins of Zyklon B. That is only just mentioned in passing, so one can see there are three different tin sizes. I do not know what the rates were. If you look at page 51, in the left-hand column under hydrocyanic acid, which is the active agent in these pellets, is it not?

A. Yes.

Q. At the very bottom of the column we see that one part per million of hydrogen cyanide, that is a concentration, is equivalent to .0012 grams per cubic metre.

A. Yes.

Q. Now, if you turn backwards in this file to appendix 3, we

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come to a translation of a wartime document. My Lord, it is page 23, which I think is a Nuremberg document, is it not?

A. Yes, from the industrial case N I.

Q. And we see that it is issued, I do not know the exact date, but it was issued presumably during the war, it must have been during the war, by the Health Institution of the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia in Prague. We find that on page 25. If you turn to the second page of this document, page 24, and look at IX towards the bottom of left hand column, we see there: "The strength of gas and the time required for it to take effect depends on the type of vermin, the temperature, the amount of furniture in the rooms, the imperviousness of building. With inside temperatures of more than 5 degrees centigrade it is customary to use 8 grams of Prussic acid, that hydrogen cyanide, per cubic metre. Time needed to take effect 16 hours, unless there are special circumstances such as a closed in type of building which requires less time. If the weather is warm, it is possible to reduce this to a minimum of 6 hours. The period is to be extended to at least 32 hours if the temperature is below 5 degrees centigrade. The strength and time as above are to be applied in the case of bugs, lice, fleas, etc. with eggs, larvae..." If, Mr Irving, .0012 grams per cubic metre

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produces a concentration of one part per million, 8 grams per cubic meter produces, I can tell you, a concentration of 6,666 parts per million.

A. Wrong.

Q. What?

A. Wrong.

Q. Why?

A. You are talking about hydrogen cyanide.

Q. Yes, that is what they are talking about.

A. But we are talking about pellets, and pellets only contain a small quantity of hydrogen cyanide sucked into them.

Q. Who is talking about pellets, Mr Irving? I am certainly not.

A. OK, carry on.

Q. Where does it say anything here about pellets?

A. If later on you start talking about tins of Zyklon B.

Q. No, I am reading from the wartime document.

A. All right. As long as we are clear there is a distinction between the weight of cyanide and the weight of the pellets.

Q. Degesch is talking in the other document we looked at about concentrations of cyanide parts per million of air.

A. Yes.

Q. So is this document. Customary to use 8 grams of Prussic acid per cubic metre?

A. Hydrogen cyanide supplied.

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Q. Nothing about pellets. So I am right, am I not?

A. I do accept the point that it takes less Zyklon B or hydrogen cyanide to kill the vermin in fumigation chambers at lower concentration than it does to kill human beings. I accept this point.

Q. If you look at the Leuchter report, Mr Leuchter knows this, does he not? If you look at page 12, right hand column, the toxic effects of H C N gas under the bold heading, "medical tests show that a concentration of hydrogen cyanide gas in an amount of 300 parts per million in air is rapidly fading. Generally for execution purposes concentration of 3,200 parts per million is used to ensure rapid death." Mr Irving, that has nothing to do with this case, has it?

A. I am lost.

MR JUSTICE GRAY: I am completely lost.

MR RAMPTON: Page 12 of the Leuchter report.

MR JUSTICE GRAY: I do not know what it is that, after a great many questions, Mr Irving said he accepted.

MR RAMPTON: That you need higher concentration to kill lice.

MR JUSTICE GRAY: I thought we established that about three quarters of an hour ago.

MR RAMPTON: Yes. I am interested in the figures though. That is why I wanted to do the arithmetic.

MR JUSTICE GRAY: I am lost on the figures.

A. I am lost on figures and I am not sure they are all that

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important.

MR RAMPTON: You need a concentration in air of over 6,000 parts per million to kill lice. Now look at what Mr Leuchter says at the bottom right hand column of page 12: "Medical tests show that a concentration of hydrogen cyanide gas in an amount of 300 parts per million is rapidly fading." So you need to kill human beings approximately 22 times lower concentration than you do to kill lice? That is right, is it not?

A. Yes. You are overlooking certain theoretical considerations, though.

Q. Such as?

A. If I put a tin of Zyklon B over there by the door or by one of these pillars, it can be there all day and there would be very little trace of cyanamide over on this side of the room. So the concentration on that side has to be much higher for it to have a lethal effect on this side of the so-called gas chamber. You appreciate that? There will be a gradient of concentration across the room. They would not have circulating fans in the room to make sure it ----

Q. If it so happened that this room had four columns running the length of room and you dropped the pellets down each of those four columns, why then you would get an even distribution, would you not, Mr Irving?

A. Not to the outer edges of the room. If you wanted the

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lethal concentration at the further reaches of the room, then you are going to have to have a higher than minimum amount. Let me put it like that. Does your Lordship understand the point I am trying to make?

MR JUSTICE GRAY: Yes, I understand the point you are trying to make. I am just wondering where you got the point from?

A. From my own common sense, my Lord.

Q. That is rather what I thought.

A. It stands to reason.

MR RAMPTON: The fact is, Mr Irving, as you may or may not know, I do not know, according to eyewitness accounts, by that I mean the people who did the killing, and some of the Sonderkommando, for precisely that reason amongst others, the SS used somewhat greater quantities of the product than were needed to produce a strict concentration of only 300 parts per million.

A. Ah, so this is a concession on your part?

Q. It is not a concession at all.

MR JUSTICE GRAY: It is departing from Dr Beer, if he is a doctor.

MR RAMPTON: It is what?

MR JUSTICE GRAY: It is departing from Dr Beer.

MR RAMPTON: No. The point is, my Lord, whether it is Dr Beer who it or whether one works it out, as I did, from the contents of Leuchter report itself, whichever way one goes, the fact is that the concentration required to kill

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human beings is very significantly less, even if you have to make allowance for the circumstances, than is ever needed to kill lice. Lice are very difficult to kill.

A. Can I comment? The pillars, we have just referred to the four pillars, next to which this or down through which the Zyklon B was poured, are still standing, and from those very pillars the -- you are shaking your head.

Q. Mr Irving, have you read Professor van Pelt's report?

A. In great detail, we have photographs of those pillars now, and samples were taken from that concrete and also tested.

Q. I do not think you can have read it with much care, Mr Irving, because, if you had, you would know that the eyewitness account, particularly of the prisoner Michael Kula, also of Henryk Tauber who worked there ----

A. He had totally worthless witnesses, as we shall shortly show.

Q. You say so, Mr Irving, but their testimony is not that the Zyklon B was poured down the centre of a concrete pillar, it was poured into wire mesh attachments to the concrete pillars. You knew that, did you not?

A. I do indeed. I know exactly what they said.

Q. Why are you going on about solid concrete pillars? They have nothing to do with the case at all.

A. You yourself mentioned the four pillars down the centre of the room.

Q. Because we were talking about an even distribution.

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Mr Irving, you are not trying very hard to deal with my questions, I do not believe.

A. The transcript will show exactly what you said, Mr Rampton. Those were the pillars that we tested.

Q. You know perfectly well, Mr Irving, that the fact that the pillars or the remains of pillars, I know you have never been there, that you can now see in the gas chambers at Birkenau, the fact they are solid concrete has nothing whatever do with the case.

A. We will have something to say about the wire mesh columns of which there is talk and we will have a great deal to say about those witnesses you mentioned.

Q. Now we will go back, if we may. I wish you would tell us what it was, Mr Irving. Time is getting short.

A. When I try ----

MR JUSTICE GRAY: This is all terribly discursive. I am just wondering where we are really getting with this. I have read Professor van Pelt with interest obviously. I understood the points that he was making. What I am not feeling I am getting much benefit from is the cross-examination at the moment. I am not of course stopping it for a single moment, but I just wonder whether it is the way to deal with this part of the case.

MR RAMPTON: My Lord, the only point of this part of the case is that, as ever, Mr Irving dives off the top board without giving any acknowledgment publicly of what he

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knows to be the fallacy of what he is saying. That is all that it is about. The concentration point goes no further than that. He must have known, and he certainly knew it when he heard what Mr Beer had to say, that Fred Leuchter completely reversed the significance of the concentration. So the principal brick falls straight out of Fred Leuchter's report.

MR JUSTICE GRAY: That seems to me to be the thing to concentrate on because, if you are right about that or, to put it more accurately, Mr Irving, as a conscientious historian should have appreciated that that was, arguably at the very least, a huge fallacy in the Leuchter report, well, I understand how you put your case. But does it go wider than that?

MR RAMPTON: It depends how much further I have to go. On concentration I do not have to go any further than that. The only consequence of the low concentration that Mr Irving has not accepted is that you would expect to find lower residual concentrations 40 years later but that is so obvious that I am not going to pursue it.

A. I think you to ought ask these questions to give me a chance to answer them.

MR JUSTICE GRAY: I am anxious you should have an opportunity to answer what needs to be answered. As I understand it, you have understood the point that is made on Leuchter and it has been made by reference to Mr Beer. I have not been

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told who Mr Beer is but anyway----

A. His credentials, precisely.

Q. But you have also, I think you have to have the opportunity to develop this if you want to, said, well although I understand the criticism that is made of Leuchter and his assumption, his key assumption, nevertheless matters have moved on and Leuchter's report has been, as you put it, replicated.

A. It has been overtaken by other better reports.

Q. If that be right and if that is your case, then I think you ought to have the opportunity to develop that at some stage. I do not want to take Mr Rampton out of order.

A. Perhaps Mr Rampton wanted to avoid asking precisely those questions that your Lordship has now asked.

MR RAMPTON: Oh, Mr Irving, I do not need to avoid asking you anything at all. This is not the time for you to give -- if you chose not to give me the documents and give evidence-in-chief about it, you will have to do it later.

A. Mr Rampton, all these documents have been in discovery, and I can summarise very briefly. I accepted the Leuchter was flawed on its figures and on its methodology. It was a pioneering report. It was the first kind of examination that had ever been conducted to our knowledge of the Auschwitz site. It was replicated afterwards. It has been superseded. Everybody on the incorrigible revisionist wing says Leuchter is a good old chap, but he

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got bits wrong and, in the meantime, there are other much more solid reports that have replaced it.

MR JUSTICE GRAY: Just pause there for a moment. Just so that I have it clear because I have in the end to make sense of all this, what do you say is the report or reports which replicate Leuchter's conclusion?

A. There have been a series of reports and I can summarise them in this way. In 1945, it subsequently turned out, the Poles had themselves conducted a test or tests on artefacts found at Auschwitz, including a metal grating, a metal grating and human hair. After the Leuchter came into public -- came to public attention, the Auschwitz authorities themselves carried out a secret replica of the tests, came up with unsatisfactory results and kept their report secret. Subsequently Germar Rudolf went to Auschwitz and wrote a report which is known as the Rudolf Report. Now, Rudolf is a qualified chemist and he conducted the tests on a much more scientific basis. He came up with figures which broadly confirmed the conclusions that Leuchter had originally reached. After criticisms were expressed of the Leuchter report, which are under one of these tabs which your Lordship has read some of, we took the appropriate action. We discussed among ourselves how far these criticisms had to be taken seriously and what should be

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done about them. We did not do that in public. I do not think anybody -- a scientific institute would have done it in public. We certainly did not ignore the criticism. We did not just go charging ahead like a blind bull.

MR JUSTICE GRAY: Yes. So it is Polish tests in 1945, Auschwitz authorities sometime in the late 80s/early 90s.

A. 1989 or '90, yes.

Q. And Mr Rudolf?

A. And then Mr Rudolf since then, yes. I think there have been other tests conducted also since then. The bone has been repeatedly chewed over, and if the Leuchter achieved anything at all, it was an open discussion of this very awkward matter.

MR RAMPTON: Then, I am afraid, this is inevitable, Mr Irving, in the light of those answers or that evidence you have now given. Turn to what you said in Tampa, Florida.

MR JUSTICE GRAY: Mr Rampton, I am so sorry to be interrupting. I have to understand the validity or the invalidity of the criticisms of Leuchter. What he said about it seems to me -- we have seen plenty of quotes where he says, "Leuchter has convinced me that they never existed, these camps".

MR RAMPTON: No, but, my Lord, I think what he has just told your Lordship is this, is it not: "I accept", although he has never said it publicly, "that Leuchter was flawed, his methodology was poor, his logic was wrong", or whatever it

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is, "but, of course, he has since been validated by other work", including two documents which I am shortly going to show him. It is surprising, in the light of that answer, that in 1985 he still adheres to Leuchter as though it were gospel.

MR JUSTICE GRAY: We can certainly look and see what he says in Tampa.

MR RAMPTON: That is tab 20 of the new file 3, page 19.

A. Of course, if I may leap ahead and say that if, at the end of the day, it turns out that you were right all along about these buildings, then all of this discussion is superfluous.

MR RAMPTON: No, Mr Irving, it is not because we are not concerned in this court with proving or disproving what happened in Auschwitz. We are concerned with your state of mind and your standards of, what shall I say, truth when it comes to reporting history?

A. You are quite right, but, of course, my state of mind does not rely solely on scientific reports or chemical analyses.

Q. I do not dignify Fred Leuchter's report as a scientific report, I am afraid, Mr Irving?

MR JUSTICE GRAY: Did you say tab 19?

MR RAMPTON: 20, my Lord, page 19. Second paragraph on the page after the break. "Fred Leuchter who wrote the report here which is one of the most telling reports on the

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Auschwitz case"?

A. On what page are we, I am sorry?

Q. Sorry, page 19, bottom of the page. "Fred Leuchter who wrote the report here which is one of the most telling reports on the Auschwitz case, if you may remember, Fred Leuchter was the American consultant on the gas chamber design. He designs and gives advice on the building of gas chambers by American ... He was nominated by every governor of every American penitentiary as a defence consultant for a law case in Canada which hinged on the Nazi gas chambers. You have seen it in the OJ Simpson case. They call in experts; experts on DNA, experts on footprints or whatever, and that expert then gives expert evidence, and the expert in this Canadian case was Fred Leuchter". Pausing there, Mr Irving, it is not true, is it? He was not allowed to give expert evidence about Auschwitz, was he?

A. He was called as an expert evidence -- he was allowed to give expertise. If you read the transcript of the trial, you will see what areas he was allowed to give expert evidence on.

Q. "And the Canadian lawyer sent Fred Leuchter actually to Auschwitz in Poland and said, 'You are a gas chamber expert. Tell us what you think about the buildings in Auschwitz. Would they have worked?' Well, the short

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answer", note that, "is Fred Leuchter came back and proved there had never been any cyanide gas or compounds in those buildings. He brought back 40 samples and had those samples of brickwork tested in laboratories", plural, "in the United States with the result there was no trace of cyanide compound whatsoever in all the brickwork samples except one. You can see it here. There was one building in Auschwitz where clothing was fumigated with cyanide and you could see the blue stain coming through the brickwork from the cyanide gas which was used in that building 50 years ago, and the blue stain has permeated right through the brickwork to such a degree that you can actually see the stain there 50 years later. "When the Leuchter report was published, it produced a howl of rage from the traditional enemy of the truth". Who is the traditional enemy of the truth, Mr Irving?

A. Oh, I see them every now and then outside my building in Duke Street. I am woken at 3.00 in the morning by the police unloading barricades. I look out of the window and they are all standing outside holding up their signs saying, "Gas Irving", screaming and shouting. That is the way I envisage the traditional enemy of the truth.

Q. You go on then to talk about Germar Rudolf, it is perfectly true. But the fact is in that little passage that I have just read in October 1995, according to you, Leuchter is

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still gospel?

A. He wrote the most telling report. It was the one that started the whole avalanche.

Q. Not a word there of any of he flaws, and they are fundamental flaws, which you knew then, if not before, certainly by the early 1990s, late 1980s, the Leuchter contained?

A. By this time, of course, we have had probably two or even three of the backup, the replica tests carried out by other groups or organisations which showed that Fred Leuchter had, broadly speaking, got it right. So why I should mention the fact that there were the cosmetic flaws like when you said you could not get 10 people standing on a square metre of floor and this kind of thing?

Q. Fred Leuchter is complete bunk, his report, is it not? I am going to go through the criticisms because his Lordship has asked me to.

A. Well, repeating that sentence 20 or 30 times a day ----

MR JUSTICE GRAY: I think that is what matters. That is why I have said it.

MR RAMPTON: It is not only what matters. There are two sides to Mr Irving, my Lord. There is the public face and the private face. I think I have done that exercise so far as the public face is concerned. Your Lordship should, however, see one or two of what I call the private face

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documents.

MR JUSTICE GRAY: I am much more interested in the validity or invalidity of the criticism. At the moment, I will be candid with you, Mr Irving, it seems to me that Mr Beer had an extremely good point on Leuchter, but he started off from a fundamental false premise.

A. I agree, my Lord, yes.

Q. That is the way I am seeing it at the moment. There is no point in my concealing it.

A. And what else should I have done than what I immediately did? I immediately forwarded the Beer report. We did not know who Beer was. We do not know what his credentials are. He may be a toxicologist, he may be a chemist, he may be gardener for all I know.

Q. I would be interested to be told.

A. Yes, we were not told, but I immediately forwarded this report to the people concerned, including those who had written the report, and said, "This is a criticism we have to take on board". You do not immediately rush into print and start tearing something apart because of one criticism or because of two criticisms.

Q. And something you then learned told you that Leuchter's assumption was a justified one or ----

A. Well, as I mentioned, my Lord, we then obtained the additional reports which showed that Leuchter had been not barking up the wrong tree, but barking up the right tree,

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and I do draw attention again to the fact that as early as my introduction to that report, I said this is a flawed report. There are things in it that I would like to have seen done differently. The whole purpose of the report was to put the ball in the court of the other side so they come back and convince us.

Q. That is as may be, but I am interested to know what it was that emerged that told you that Leuchter was right, because at the moment it seems to me there is a fundamental problem with his report.

A. In that case, when my turn comes to lead evidence, I shall lead evidence introducing these other reports if Mr Rampton is reluctant to put before the court.

MR RAMPTON: May I invite your Lordship -- it will save time, it will save me having to do it now -- just to read -- not now, I do not mean, when it is convenient to your Lordship -- the little bundle of correspondence that is in tab 8 of the first of the new bundles, K1?

A. I already requested his Lordship to do that.

Q. What?

A. I already requested that his Lordship should do that.

MR RAMPTON: Not now, my Lord. There are some quite significant letters in there, we would say, and then I need not ask questions about them unless your Lordship invites me to do so. Before I come to the Leuchter report itself, though, there are two things I want to get out of

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the way, Mr Irving. In 1945, the forensic laboratory at Cracow made a report on two different things: (1) metal covers with holes in them taken from what they call the gas chambers at Birkenau. They were covers on the ventilation openings, so the report said -- I am sure you know it well?

A. It may be useful if we actually had the report before us.

Q. Very well. My Lord, that is in tab 6.

MR JUSTICE GRAY: Or possibly Professor Pelt's ----

MR RAMPTON: There is only ----

MR JUSTICE GRAY: Sorry, van Pelt.

MR RAMPTON: There is only a summary of it in van Pelt, my Lord.

MR JUSTICE GRAY: Is that not going to be -- I do not know. Take your own course.

MR RAMPTON: No, because I know what is going to happen, we are going to wind up looking at the report anyway, if we are not careful.

A. Tab 6, you said?

Q. Tab 6 of this new file, K.

A. This is the one in German?

Q. Yes, this is the report of 15th December 1945.

MR JUSTICE GRAY: Tab 6.

MR RAMPTON: Yes, tab 6. This, I think, Mr Irving, is perhaps -- Mr Irving, I can tell you this a copy made for the court in Vienna when the Auschwitz architects were on

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trial in, I think, 1971 or 2.

MR JUSTICE GRAY: Is this in German?

MR RAMPTON: Yes. It does not matter.

MR JUSTICE GRAY: Is it not simple letter to look at Professor van Pelt? Can you give me the reference, at any rate, so that I can follow it there?

MR RAMPTON: Yes.

MR JUSTICE GRAY: It cannot be 931. No, it is in the text of his report because I think that will probably have the guts of it and if Mr Irving does not agree, he will say so. I think it is 611. Is it 611?

MR RAMPTON: It is in two places, I think, actually.

A. I do not think I have any problem with this document at all. I will concede that they found in the ventilator grating taken from mortuary No. 1 of crematorium (ii) remains of cyanide.

MR RAMPTON: Yes. How do you account for that, Mr Irving?

A. Because that particular room was used as Vergasungskeller, as a gassing cellar.

Q. Yes. Gassing what?

A. I think the evidence is clear that it was used as a gassing cellar for fumigating objects or cadavers.

Q. Fumigating cadavers?

A. Yes.

Q. What makes you say that?

A. That is what that room was for. That is what mortuaries

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are for. In mortuaries you put cadavers.

Q. That is news to me, Mr Irving. What is the evidence for that?

A. I beg your pardon?

Q. What is the evidence that they used that for gassing corpses?

A. That is what it was built for.

MR JUSTICE GRAY: I am sorry, this seems a crude question, but what is the point of gassing a corpse?

A. Because they came in heavily infested with the typhus bearing lice that had killed them.

MR RAMPTON: So why would it need a gas type door with a peep hole with double eight millimetre thick glass and a metal grill on it?

A. Well, I think you will have to show us the evidence for this.

Q. I will do.

A. And the evidence that this door was intended for that particular room and the evidence it was possible to obtain doors without the peep holes and the evidence that the room was not intended to be used for other purposes too.

Q. No, Mr Irving. You see, I do not have to prove anything. I am testing your, I have to say, slightly bizarre suggestion that you put Zyklon B into a room where the people are already dead. You tell me, "Oh, well, that is because they wanted to delouse the corpses". Then I asked

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you, "Why then does it need a gas type door with a peep hole and a metal protection on it?"

A. Because at this time in the war most of Germany was coming under the, it was feeling the weight of Royal Air Force bomber commands forays. We were bombing all over Eastern Europe. Our bombing raids were extending further and further into Central Europe. You will see from the Auschwitz construction department files an increasing concern about the need to build bomb tight shelters and gas tight shelters because of the danger of gas attack.

Q. Now it is an air raid shelter, is it?

A. I beg your pardon?

Q. In early 1943, Mr Irving, the first bombing raid anywhere near Auschwitz was not until late '44?

A. Mr Rampton, if the court so pleases, I will tomorrow produce to you an index of all the documents in the Auschwitz construction department files from late 1942 onwards dealing with the necessity to build air raid shelters, gas tight air raid shelters and other similar constructions on the Auschwitz compound and on the Birkenau compound for precisely the reasons that I have mentioned.

Q. It is either a cellar for gassing corpses, is it, Mr Irving, or else it is an air raid shelter?

A. Did I say either or?

Q. Both. If it is an air raid shelter, Mr Irving, why would

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the doors open outwards? It only has a single door.

A. If an air raid shelter, why would the doors open outward?

Q. Yes. You have the SS sheltering from the allied bombs. No bombs had been near Auschwitz yet in the war, not for another year ----

A. I will produce this clip of documents tomorrow, Mr Rampton, to satisfy even the most incorrigible counsel that, yes, our air raids were beginning to be felt in that part of Europe.

Q. We shall be pleased to see them is all I will say at the moment, Mr Irving.

MR JUSTICE GRAY: Can I just see where we have got to? I still have not been provided with the reference in Professor van Pelt.

A. We have plunged deep into basement No. 1.

MR JUSTICE GRAY: It just helps me to follow what is not always immediately clear.

A. My Lord, can I show you?

MR JUSTICE GRAY: This is 1945 Polish investigation?

A. Can I show you a picture of the building we are talking about? This is the crematorium No. (ii), the whole building.

Q. Yes.

A. And this is the Leichenkeller No. 1, which is the mortuary No. 1. You can see the roof is pancaked downwards, but it is still possible to crawl underneath it just so you get a

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kind of visual impression of what the building looks like now. You can see the tourists down there looking at it.

MR JUSTICE GRAY: Yes, thank you. I thought I had found the reference at page 611, but I do not think that is it.

MR RAMPTON: Miss Rogers tells me, my Lord, that there are references to the 1945 Polish report, but, as I had originally thought, there are only sort of what one might call passing references?

A. Shall I just very briefly translate the first page?

Q. No, not yet. I am in the middle of trying to tell his Lordship why it is not profitable to look in the report itself because the substance of the report as a whole is not reproduced or summarised.

MR JUSTICE GRAY: I am trying for the purposes of eventually my note to ----

MR RAMPTON: Would your Lordship like to look at page 198?

MR JUSTICE GRAY: Of Professor van Pelt?

MR RAMPTON: Yes, since that was your Lordship's question.

MR JUSTICE GRAY: Yes. I wanted to know whether that is what you were referring to. I have 198.

MR RAMPTON: Cracow, my Lord, appears on page 198 and just a line at the top of 199.

MR JUSTICE GRAY: This is Dawidowski, is it?

MR RAMPTON: No. This is a set of tests done by the forensic laboratory at Cracow, and their report was dated 15th December 1945. It may have been have part of

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Sehn/Dawidowski exercise, but it is, in fact, a separate document, and it is the document which is at tab 6 of the new file.

MR JUSTICE GRAY: Well, the reference to that report is note 310, is it not?

MR RAMPTON: That is right.

MR JUSTICE GRAY: I cannot for the life of me see where the evidence that you say one derives from your tab 6 is to be found in Professor van Pelt's report.

MR RAMPTON: Well, because, my Lord, the first page under [German- document not provided] reports that they took -- were sent to them four complete and two damaged covers, clasps or grilles from the ventilation openings which during inspection of crematorium No. II in Birkenau were found and which from the ventilation openings of the Gaskammer, Leichenkeller No. 1, of this crematorium came from.

MR JUSTICE GRAY: I am sorry, I am probably being very thick, but what is the significance of that?

MR RAMPTON: In 1945, in May 1945, the Cracow laboratory was sent some zinc covers from the ventilation openings described by Michael Kula in his testimony: "Ventilation openings from the gas chamber of crematorium (ii) at Birkenau". They tested them and they found that there were traces of hydrogen cyanide.

MR JUSTICE GRAY: Where do I get that from tab 6?

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MR RAMPTON: You get that at the end. It is page ----

MR JUSTICE GRAY: I do not think Professor van Pelt makes that observation at all.

MR RAMPTON: My Lord, he does. Page 3, that is right. He reports, does Professor van Pelt, that the zinc covers (which I just told your Lordship about) were "dislocated when the demolition squads dynamited the gas chambers, but six of them were retrieved in the rubble of crematorium (ii) and sent for analysis in the forensic laboratory in Cracow. The laboratory report noted that these were covered with a thin white colour of the strongest smelling deposit. The laboratory retrieved 7.2 grams of the deposit ... (reading to the words)... Sulphuric acid was added to this solution and the resulting gas was absorbed in an absorbent material. This was divided into two and subjected to two different tests" which your Lordship can see described on pages 2 and 3 of this document, "each of which revealed the presence of hydrogen cyanide".

MR JUSTICE GRAY: Thank you very much. That is what I needed and I have now got it, thank you. That you accept, Mr Irving, do you not?

A. Yes.

MR RAMPTON: They also retrieved a paper sack, and this is the second paragraph on the first page of the report, which had marked on it a weight of 25.5 kilograms of hair, which they say was taken from the corpses of females after

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gassing and before burning in the crematorium ovens in Birkenau. "Shorn" is the word, or "shaved off". They tested that too and in that also they found traces of hydrogen cyanide. That is not in van Pelt, but it is in the report.

MR JUSTICE GRAY: Mr Irving, do you want to say anything about that?

A. Well, I do not think that the human hair takes us any further, my Lord, because the Germans did subject everything that went through the camp to fumigation. So ----

Q. Well, why would human hair have been fumigated?

A. Because they processed it.

Q. What, after the death of the person concerned?

A. Well, we do not know when this human hair was actually cut off, my Lord, whether it was cut of -- the evidence that I have is when the prisoners arrived as part of the hygiene methods -- Mr Rampton is shaking his head.

MR RAMPTON: No. Do you know where it was found, Mr Irving?

MR JUSTICE GRAY: In the gas chamber, the alleged gas chamber.

MR RAMPTON: No, that is where it was "geschoren", that is where the killing was killed?

A. Yes, that is what it says in the report, but, of course, I have not accepted that paragraph.

Q. Do you know, Mr Irving, where this 25.5 kilo bag of hair was found?

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A. It does not actually say in the report.

Q. It will not help you to look in the report; you will not find it there?

A. Then I do not know where it was found, no.

Q. You do not know?

A. No.

Q. Would it surprise you that it was found in the part of the camp called "Canada"?

A. That is where all the stolen property was kept.

Q. That is correct.

MR JUSTICE GRAY: Then what is this worth as evidence?

A. Everything from Canada was fumigated.

MR RAMPTON: What is it worth as evidence? Well, what it shows is, my Lord, this is hair, as the report says, taken from people after they had been gassed.

A. As the report alleges. This is a prosecution report being prepared for the prosecution of criminals.

Q. 25.5 kilograms of hair in total is the hair of about, what, 500 women?

A. I do not know. I have not done any calculations. It seems to me, I think that he is being very cautious about that weight. As he himself says, that is the weight marked on the bag, but I think that you would have had to have a bag the size of an elephant to make it weigh 50lbs of human hair.

Q. But, you see, Mr Irving, you have accepted that that is

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what it says. You may not like it, but that is what it says. Can I ask you to turn -- I am sorry about this, my Lord, but it is necessary because Mr Irving commented on this report to his friend, Mr Zündel, in September 1989. My Lord, that is in tab 8 ----

MR JUSTICE GRAY: Of which of these files?

A. The same file.

MR RAMPTON: The same one as the report, K1. Have you got a page there? I have not got a page on mine. It is your letter of 19th September.

A. Yes.

Q. You write to Mr Zündel: "The two enclosures appear to be" -- has your Lordship got that? It has a 1241 in the top right-hand corner. 7, my Lord, I think.

MR JUSTICE GRAY: Thank you.

MR RAMPTON: "The two enclosures appear to be an initial counter attack on the Leuchter report. It may be that we have to take them seriously, particularly if the Polish one when translated contains firm evidence of cyanide in the hair of the young Jewish women or in the zinc basket". That is plainly, is it not, Mr Irving, a reference to this 1945 Cracow ----

A. Unquestionably, yes, which at that time we only had in the Polish, I think.

Q. Why do you use the words, "It may be we have to take this one seriously"? What is that meant to mean?

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A. I think that is underlined in suggestion B, we have to take it into account the possibility that this is a product of communist cold war propaganda.

Q. Have you any evidence that it was?

A. No, but we would derelict in our duty if we did not take into account the possibility that it was the product of cold war propaganda. Jan Sehn was a notoriously political lawyer. He was the Polish Vyshinsky, so this possibility cannot be entirely discounted coming from that neck of the woods, shall we say.

Q. But would you accept, being as open-minded as you can, that much the likelier of the two possibilities set out in this letter is A?

A. I have not put it that way. I said there are two possibilities.

Q. I am asking you whether you would not accept, as an open-minded historian, that A is much the likelier of the two possibilities?

A. At this time I had not read the report. I just had a Polish document in front of me from which I could pick out a few words indicating what it was about. Again, totally wrong of me to start drawing up conclusions about which version is correct.

Q. If it is right that it contains firm evidence of cyanide in the hair of the young Jewish women or in the zinc basket, what is it that that evidence implies with all

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that that implies as you write, what does it imply?

A. Your first instinct is, undoubtedly, the impression that you gained when you read this report; you think to yourself, well, there you have it, there you have chapter and verse ----

Q. No.

A. --- but then you realise that it came from, the hair, in fact, came from the, as you yourself now say, from Canada, which was the collecting centre for all their loot, and so there are all alternative explanations. I mean, this is -- one's first instinct, which is absolutely right, but then you settle back and you say to yourself, "This is a new document. Whenever you see a new document, you must not rush at it and let it bedazzle you. You have to take it into account and analyse all possibilities carefully".

Q. But, you see, you have known about this document now, Mr Irving, since September 19th 1989 or before.

A. Indeed, and this is one reason why, of course, the Leuchter report by itself by now does not stand by itself.

Q. Why, Mr Irving, do you not accept the report for what it is, that is to say, that zinc covers taken from the crematorium, the alleged gas chamber at crematorium (ii), had traces of hydrogen cyanide on them. Six of them, I think there were, four complete and two damaged?

A. Why do I or why didn't I?

MR RAMPTON: Do you.

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MR JUSTICE GRAY: You do accept it, you have said that?

A. I do. I said that to help shorten the whole argument, yes.

MR RAMPTON: Then the implication is obvious, is it not, that gas was used in that room?

A. We are going to establish that later on, yes.

Q. And the only question then remaining, Mr Irving ----

A. This is why it is called a "Sonderkeller" also in other documents.

Q. Indeed, it is. The only question then remaining is who or what or what was gassed in that room, is it not?

A. Well, it is for you to establish that point.

Q. No. No, Mr Irving ----

MR JUSTICE GRAY: Anyway, do not let us debate about who has to establish what. I think we know what the position is and Mr Irving says that it was to gas corpses.

A. Well, or objects, yes, clothing or something like that.

MR JUSTICE GRAY: Yes.

MR RAMPTON: My Lord ----

MR JUSTICE GRAY: I think that is probably a convenient moment.

MR RAMPTON: Yes, my Lord, I am afraid that means that if Mr Irving is to contend that there is evidence for that suggestion (which is the first I have ever heard of it, if I may say so) we will have to go into some of the detail, I am afraid.

MR JUSTICE GRAY: Well, detail of the reasons for doubting

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Leuchter?

MR RAMPTON: My Lord, that I can do very quickly.

MR JUSTICE GRAY: Good. That seems to me to ----

MR RAMPTON: But Mr Irving has made a statement in the witness box. I can simply say, "Well, I am sorry, I do not accept that" and leave it at that and then say at the end of the case to your Lordship, "Well, look, this is actually what all the evidence is", and leave it at that, or (which I much prefer not to do) I can take him through all the contemporaneous documentation which is noticed, both plans and typewritten documents, to show why he must be wrong and why any open-minded person would accept that they are wrong, but since this is, so far as he is concerned, apparently, a new position, I think it may not matter very much.

MR JUSTICE GRAY: Well, he accepts that it is evidence of gassing having taken place.

MR RAMPTON: Yes, I know, but it is a question of what, gassing what?

MR JUSTICE GRAY: Yes, but what evidence are you going to be able to adduce on that?

MR RAMPTON: I mean, there is eyewitness testimony.

A. Yes.

MR RAMPTON: There are all the documents.

MR JUSTICE GRAY: Well, I put it the other way round.

MR RAMPTON: I do too.

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MR JUSTICE GRAY: Maybe this is the first question at 2 o'clock, what evidence can you point to to support the notion that it was corpses being gassed rather than live people?

MR RAMPTON: I hoped your Lordship would say that because my position is that the evidence is overwhelming. If he wants to say that it is wrong, let him show me how.

MR JUSTICE GRAY: This is, in a way, dealt with in that ruling I gave last week.

MR RAMPTON: Yes, I agree.

MR JUSTICE GRAY: Good, 2 o'clock. (Luncheon adjournment)

MR IRVING: My Lord, I do not know whether it is better to do it from here or from the witness stand. Just before the adjournment we were talking about the danger of air raids. I told your Lordship that I would bring evidence tomorrow. In fact, by chance----

MR JUSTICE GRAY: May I interrupt you? Why do you not go back and then you can give the evidence that I think you were wanting to give before the adjournment about air raids in 1943.

A. By chance I have two copies of a three page extract I did from the US Holocaust Memorial Museum's catalogue of the Moscow records of the Auschwitz construction office, and I did this three page extract purely relating to records on the air raid precautions in Auschwitz camp. I have

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given a copy to Mr Rampton, which I also have by chance. It contains files, for example, 1943 to 1944, on means of defence against bombs.

MR JUSTICE GRAY: Are these Russian bombers?

A. No.

Q. Western?

A. It is a good question, my Lord.

Q. I think it might have been.

A. It could have been either. They did have Soviet air raids on Berlin, certainly.

Q. Anyway, it says, does it, that there were air raids going on in 1943?

A. It actually goes back to August 1942 my Lord, the various files, detailed instructions on how to build air raid shelters and protect buildings against incendiary bombs, equipping of bunker, down at the bottom of the page more exchanges of notes and memos about various camp construction projects, many having to do with providing air raid shelters.

Q. Yes. I think that is probably enough.

A. There are quite a lot of files relating to plans for air raid shelter, estimates and accounts for construction of bomb shelters and so on. It was very much in the air, if I could put it like that, from August 1942 onwards.

MR RAMPTON: My Lord, I will not come back to that at the moment. I have not read it. I need to take instructions

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on it. It is, I think, a redacted version of the documents in question in any event.

A. Yes.

MR JUSTICE GRAY: Mr Rampton, can I, before you continue, make a request which is that, when one gets to a new Auschwitz topic, if you or your team could provide me with the Professor van Pelt reference for it, even if you are not going to necessarily use it for cross-examining, it helps me for my purposes.

MR RAMPTON: They will. Actually all those references are in the statement of case, in fact. But that is not much use to you.

MR JUSTICE GRAY: Not on a running basis, if you see what I mean. Miss Rogers can do the looking up.

MR RAMPTON: I think they are also in the request for information that we served.

MR JUSTICE GRAY: Anyway, if you could bear that in mind please.

MR RAMPTON: I think I am probably not going to need that, but I say that. No doubt my hopes will be dashed. My Lord. Before I go to the Leuchter report itself, there are three questions I would like to ask Mr Irving about something he said this morning, which is the first I have heard of it. Mr Irving, you said, I think this morning, words to this effect, I do not have the exact words, that it is your thesis that the Corpse Cellar 1 in crematoria 2 and 3 had

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a dual purpose function, used for gassing corpses and for gassing clothes. Did you say something like that this morning?

A. Gassing corpses or objects, yes.

Q. First question: If that were so, why did Mr Leuchter not find similar concentrations of hydrogen cyanide residue in those rooms as he did in the delousing facility?

A. Frankly, I do not know the answer to that.

Q. If they were used for gassing corpses, I wonder if you can help me to understand the point, because shortly after they were in the mortuary they went to be incinerated?

A. Yes.

Q. What would be the point of gassing a corpse that was shortly going to be incinerated?

A. The corpses arrived in a state of fully clothed. Before they were cremated they were undressed, and various other bestialities were performed on them. I believe the gold teeth were taken out and other functions were performed. As the corpses cooled, the lice that may have been on the body crawled off the body because lice were seeking heat. As the body cooled, they crawled off so you had an infestation problem.

Q. Where?

A. I am not sure saying this off the top of my head, Mr Rampton. I have taken advice on this.

Q. Where would the infestation problem arise, Mr Irving?

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A. Anywhere between the place of death and the Leichenkeller.

Q. No. You were talking about gassing corpses in Leichenkeller 1, beside which is a lift straight up to the incineration chamber?

A. Yes.

Q. Think about it. Why would you gas a corpse that was going straight up to be cremated?

A. I thought I gave the explanation.

MR JUSTICE GRAY: I do not understand the explanation because, as I understood it, the undressing took place before the gassing.

MR RAMPTON: The undressing took place before the gassing?

A. That is not the evidence that I gave, my Lord.

MR JUSTICE GRAY: I thought it was. Tell me if I am wrong.

A. We have not had any evidence as to that, my Lord.

Q. No, but I have read the report. Am I wrong about that?

A. I shall certainly be questioning ----

MR RAMPTON: You are absolutely right, my Lord. On the evidence, if one can look at the evidence