[Professor Evans, recalled.]

Cross-Examined by Mr Irving, continued.

MR JUSTICE GRAY: Mr Irving?

MR IRVING: May it please the court. I have placed in your Lordship's bundle F a continuation of about 20 or 30 pages, and I have also provided your Lordship, as you have just noticed, with a copy of Nuremberg to which we were referring to yesterday.

MR JUSTICE GRAY: Yes, I see that. Thank you.

MR IRVING: And if we can just take up one or two of the points your Lordship requested yesterday? Your Lordship requested a copy of what the pull-down menu says. That is in the bundle which I have just given you, bundle F. It is at the back of bundle F which your Lordship was using yesterday.

MR JUSTICE GRAY: The pull-down menu, where do I find that?

MR IRVING: If you go to page 93 of bundle F, my Lord, it should be -- unless the numbering has gone wrong.

MR JUSTICE GRAY: I had this in a different form yesterday, did I not, from Mr Rampton?

MR IRVING: Well, I did not have it yesterday from Mr Rampton.

MR JUSTICE GRAY: Did you not? Well, I got something.

MR IRVING: It is difficult to obtain, but that is the works of it, in what is called HTML.

MR JUSTICE GRAY: Having looked through it, whilst we are on

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this, it did appear to me that whatever their titles may be, they are mostly Jewish organisations of one kind or another.

MR IRVING: My Lord, that is not correct. If you look at the list, there are 16 items, of which seven are not, if I can put it like that.

MR RAMPTON: I do not think we have 16.

MR IRVING: That is precisely why your Lordship should be looking at my pull-down menu rather than the one given to you. Shall I read through them?

MR JUSTICE GRAY: I do not think that would serve any particularly useful purpose.

MR IRVING: No. But your Lordship will notice the Australian Government, the Centre for Democratic Renewal, the Coalition for Human Dignity, the German Government.

MR RAMPTON: There are only two I think that are not Jewish, my Lord.

MR IRVING: Searchlight ----

MR RAMPTON: Two National Governments.

MR IRVING: Well, Mr Rampton, if you would just allow me to finish reading out those that are not Jewish that are on the list?

MR JUSTICE GRAY: You read out the ones you say are not Jewish.

MR IRVING: I will start again. Australian Government, Centre for Democratic Renewal.

MR RAMPTON: That is Jewish.

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MR IRVING: I beg your pardon?

MR RAMPTON: It is Jewish.

MR JUSTICE GRAY: Let him read them, Mr Rampton, then we can debate it further, if needs be.

MR IRVING: Coalition for Human Dignity, the German Government, Searchlight, and Surf Watch Internet Censorship.

MR JUSTICE GRAY: Yes.

MR IRVING: Each of those, if you would click on that, you would come to a subindex, my Lord, which has the actual documents which qualified for inclusion in the list of enemies of free speech.

MR JUSTICE GRAY: Yes. I think this is in a way dicing with words because I have actually got the indices supplied yesterday. It appears to me, without knowing in detail what the individual items on the indices are, that really all of these organisations, there is a great deal of interplay, put it like that, between these organisations and what you would, perhaps, describe as the Jewish lobby. Is that not fair?

MR IRVING: In some of the documents quite clearly there is, in some of the documents listed on the index, and, obviously, I then have to make the point that this is a website which has been set up in response to the attack on me.

MR JUSTICE GRAY: Yes, I follow.

MR IRVING: So, clearly, this is not a global attempt to address all the world enemies of free speech when,

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undoubtedly, you bring in the Chinese Government and all sorts of other ghastly organisations, but these are the bodies that have impinged on my professional career. That is why they figure on my personal list of traditional enemies of free speech.

MR JUSTICE GRAY: I follow that. I think I interrupted Mr Rampton. Did you want to add anything?

MR RAMPTON: I was just going to say, Mr Irving has identified as being not Jewish I think four that, in fact, are Jewish. The only two that are not that we can tell are the Australian and the German governments.

MR IRVING: Perhaps you should say which of the four that you consider are Jewish.

MR RAMPTON: All the rest are Jewish.

MR IRVING: Centre for Democratic Renewal?

MR RAMPTON: Yes.

MR IRVING: A Jewish body?

MR RAMPTON: Yes -- so I am told.

MR JUSTICE GRAY: We may or may not come back to that at some later stage. Let us leave it for the moment. I cannot actually find my bundle F.

MR IRVING: I asked your clerk, my Lord, this morning to put the fresh documents into it.

MR JUSTICE GRAY: I then think I said not for the time being until I know that is what everybody thinks is right.

MR IRVING: Your Lordship will need bundle F9, in fact.

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MR JUSTICE GRAY: I do not seem to have F. Yes. So I put this in the back?

MR IRVING: That is correct, my Lord. Mr Rampton's intervention, of course, has highlighted the problem that I face in view of the fact that the representative of the Centre for Democratic Renewal and the Coalition for Human Dignity who gave statements relied which have been relied upon by Professor Levin, those statements are not sworn. They are just put in by way of evidence. They are relied on by Professor Levin. Professor Levin is not going to give oral evidence, so I cannot test the validity of any of the statements that Mr Rampton has made or any of the statements these witnesses have made.

MR JUSTICE GRAY: Professor Levin, who is not coming to give evidence, I had understood (and perhaps I am wrong about this and perhaps we can clarify now) that his report is no longer relied on.

MR RAMPTON: No, that is not right. There is a Civil Evidence Act Notice.

MR JUSTICE GRAY: For an expert?

MR RAMPTON: Yes, in respect of that. What weight it has is another question, but it has to be a 1968 Act Notice because this case was started before the 1995 Act came into force. So there is a Civil Evidence Act statement in respect of Professor Levin.

MR JUSTICE GRAY: It is highly unusual to have an expert's

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report subject to the Civil Evidence Act.

MR RAMPTON: It may be unusual but ----

MR JUSTICE GRAY: I do not know whether I have ever heard of it before.

MR RAMPTON: --- there is nothing the matter with it in principle.

MR JUSTICE GRAY: That may be right.

MR IRVING: It does place me at a serious disadvantage, of course.

MR JUSTICE GRAY: I know. Actually, I thought the disadvantage was less great than it now appears to be because I had wrongly taken it (and I am glad I have now discovered my error) that the Defendants were not any longer relying on Levin and Eatwell.

MR RAMPTON: If I can say this, quite frankly, I do not myself believe I need to depend very heavily on Professor Levin anyway for ----

MR JUSTICE GRAY: I think that is probably right.

MR RAMPTON: --- quite different reasons. The factual witnesses probably, so far as the United States and Canada are concerned, are more important.

MR JUSTICE GRAY: Yes. To help you with your difficulty, Mr Irving, can I suggest this, that when you come to be cross-examined, as you will be I think on ----

MR IRVING: Next week sometime.

MR JUSTICE GRAY: --- the sort of rogues' gallery point, if

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I can rudely call it that, namely your associating with these extremists.

MR IRVING: Guilt by association.

MR JUSTICE GRAY: Yes, well, that is the way you put it. I am not sure it is as simple as that.

MR IRVING: It is the way Morland J would put it probably too.

MR JUSTICE GRAY: Well, you might then take the opportunity, either in cross-examination or perhaps re-examining yourself, to make the points you are wanting to make in reference to Professor Levin or Dr Levin's report.

MR IRVING: I was proposing to make it by way of submission.

MR JUSTICE GRAY: All right. You can do it that way as well or instead, rather.

MR IRVING: But is a rather unfortunate halfway house that he is going to partly rely on Mr Levin's report, and we have no way of knowing which part he is relying on and which part he is not. Either he should or he should not, in my view, my Lord, and your Lordship may wish to make a ruling on that.

MR JUSTICE GRAY: Well, you may want to make the application that it is not legitimate for a party to use the Civil Evidence Act machinery to avoid having the expert witness in question called and cross-examined.

MR IRVING: Now that we are under the CPR, as we are, I think it should be either or.

MR JUSTICE GRAY: Well I am not going to that now because

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Professor Evans is, no doubt, wanting to get on with his evidence, but if you want to make that application, feel free to do so. But, as I say, I think it is unusual. Yes, now, are we ready to resume?

MR IRVING: One more minor matter, your Lordship asked to see the index of the Hitler's War books, the new version, and that also appended as -- it is the very last page of what you have.

MR JUSTICE GRAY: When you say the "new" version, the one that is about to come out?

MR IRVING: No, this was an index we commissioned for the 1991 edition, in other words, it is a fuller index for 1991.

MR JUSTICE GRAY: I see.

MR IRVING: It has now been superseded because we are about to do a completely updated edition.

MR JUSTICE GRAY: So this is just the extract dealing with...

MR IRVING: That, I presume, is the page that your Lordship was interested in.

MR JUSTICE GRAY: Yes, you are quite right.

MR IRVING: Also, finally, my Lord, if you look two items back from that, your Lordship will find The Spectator.

MR JUSTICE GRAY: Is this "as many as"?

MR IRVING: "As many as", yes, my Lord. Your Lordship will see that I was absolutely correct; either Professor Eatwell or Professor Levin or both omitted the word which completely reversed the meaning.

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MR JUSTICE GRAY: Yes. Professor Evans, this is a point at which I think you ought to join in, if I can put it like that. I think, Mr Irving, the point he made yesterday is right?

A. It is right, yes, indeed.

MR IRVING: Is it right to say that I, therefore, did not double the death roll by means of the comparison, in fact? I adhered to a death roll in Hamburg of up to or nearly 50,000?

A. That is right, yes.

MR JUSTICE GRAY: Not, I think, your error, but Professor Eatwell's?

A. It looks like it, my Lord.

MR IRVING: My Lord, the problem is Professor Evans' report has turned out to be a bit of a dummy minefield. I am advancing into it, but very gingerly, because I do not know where the real mines are and where the dummies are like that one, and this is what is delaying us.

MR JUSTICE GRAY: I am not sure I accept any of that, but let us move on anyway. We have got to about 100?

MR IRVING: 128, my Lord, is where I propose to continue, my Lord. I am on 128 at paragraph 4, Professor Evans.

MR JUSTICE GRAY: You are still on the topic of Holocaust denial, are you not?

MR IRVING: We are, my Lord, and we are dealing just briefly with the experiment made with the gas vans. Your Lordship

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was concerned that I described this as an experiment in view of the large numbers. So Professor Evans has quoted me as saying, "So I accept that this kind of experiment was made on a very limited scale". Do you agree that there was, in fact, an experiment, Professor Evans, the use of the gas vans for a limited period of months on the Eastern Front and elsewhere?

A. You go on to say: "But, I don't accept that the gas chambers existed, and this is well known. I've seen no evidence at all that gas chambers existed". So what I am saying there in that quotation is that you say that gassing took place on a very limited scale, experimental scale, but, as you say, it was rapidly abandoned as being a totally inefficient way of killing people.

Q. Yes.

A. I understand that during the trial you have now admitted that that was wrong, that it was, that gassing was not merely used on a limited experimental scale.

Q. You are overlooking the use of loaded words like "conceded" and "admitted". Do you accept that, therefore, the gas vans were used as an experimental basis for killing, and that they were abandoned then for whatever reason afterwards?

A. No, I do not. They were used for killing on a large scale, as I think----

Q. Did they continue using them throughout the war or did

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they stop?

A. There was a transition to mainly using gas chambers, but they were used on far more than a limited scale, as I believe you yourself have said in the course of this trial.

Q. Looking purely at the word "experimental" at this point, you have agreed that Professor Burrin, the Swiss Professor is something of an expert. He is not an extremist or what you call a Holocaust denier.

A. That is so, yes.

Q. I just put to you one sentence from his standard work on this. This is on page 112 of Philip Burrin: "The gas truck had been an improvised response to a situation no one had foreseen or imagined". Would you agree with that?

A. I would have to see the whole passage. I find it difficult to comment simply on a single sentence taken out of that. In any case, the context of this section of my report is concerned with your denial that gas chambers existed, that gas chambers were used. That is the context.

Q. Before we move on, just a simple answer. You do accept therefore that the gas vans were used and then abandoned at some stage as a means of killing?

A. Well, yes. In the end of course the gas chambers were abandoned as a means of killing when they had fulfilled their purpose. I do not accept----

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MR JUSTICE GRAY: Mr Irving, I just want to see where we are going occasionally.

MR IRVING: That was the end of that.

MR JUSTICE GRAY: At an earlier stage in this case -- correct me if I am recollecting wrongly -- you were presented with a document which indicated that at Chelmno 97,000 Jews were killed in five weeks.

MR RAMPTON: Five months, my Lord.

MR JUSTICE GRAY: I agree you did not accept that figure was correct, but I believe you did accept in terms that the gas vans were not used on a solely experimental basis but were used for the systematic killing of substantial numbers of Jews.

MR IRVING: They were. I do not agree that they were used only at Chelmno. They were certainly used once at Chelmno because there was an explosion there, but there is no evidence they were used only there.

MR JUSTICE GRAY: I did not say "only there". I am using that as an illustration of what I had understood you to have accepted earlier in this case.

MR IRVING: I am trying to justify the use of the word "experimental" by the virtue of the fact that other historians of reputation have also described this as being an interim phase and it was abandoned, as it proved not to be a very feasible or practical way of doing things.

MR JUSTICE GRAY: That may be rather a different thing from

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saying it is experimental, but there we are.

MR IRVING: I think that you had fastened on the word "experimental" as being something repugnant in this particular connection and I can appreciate that, but I was just trying to establish what was meant by the word "experimental". Can we now proceed to paragraph 6 on the same page 128, where we are talking about the subsequent Polish tests which attempted to replicate the Leuchter tests. You say that I allege that there was a refusal of the authorities to call for site examinations and that forensic tests were carried out by the Poles, but the results were suppressed". Is that correct in the last four lines on page 128?

A. Yes.

Q. Are you suggesting that I have got it wrong somehow?

A. In this paragraph I am trying to sum up your views as succinctly as I can.

Q. Do you accept that the Poles did carry out tests and suppress them?

A. No, I do not. I have to say I am not an expert on Auschwitz and there has been a separate, as I call attention to at the top of the next page 130, expert witness report by Professor van Pelt, who is an expert on Auschwitz, who goes into this in very great detail.

Q. Yes. So we will not dwell very long on this, but would

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you go to page 56 of the little bundle, which is the first page of the Polish report I am referring to. We are going to look at two dates on it.

A. Yes.

Q. It is a Polish document. I am told that the date at the top in Polish means 24th September 1990, and that is the date that the report was submitted by this Polish Institute to the museum at Auschwitz, as you can see in the address line on the top right quarter. If you look in the rubber stamp box, can you see a date on the final line?

A. Indeed, 11.10.1990.

Q. Did the Polish State authority, the Auschwitz authorities, at any time thereafter publish that report, or did it sit in their safe for some months and years?

A. I am not an expert on this subject. I cannot really comment. I think probably, if one consulted Professor van Pelt's report, one would be able to clear that up.

Q. You spent a whole page -- again on the foot of page 129 you say that Irving went on to claim that Dr Piper, in other words the Auschwitz State Museum, had suppressed the fact and filed the report away.

A. Yes, I say that.

Q. You disqualify the Leuchter report in your view. I have to ask you these questions because it is said that I have relied on the Leuchter report and that this was an

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unjustifiable act of a responsible historian.

MR JUSTICE GRAY: You do not have to ask these questions. I have already indicated that on Auschwitz -- I know it is referred to in Professor Evans' report -- it does not appear to me that, if I may respectfully say so, Professor Evans' opinions really bulk very large. I think that is really Professor van Pelt. So do not feel you have to ask these questions.

MR IRVING: I would like to ask him purely then about one matter. Is it right that you suggest that the report was not admitted as evidence at the Toronto trial, and that this in some way discredits the report?

A. No, I cannot see that in my report. I say it was discredited at the Zündel trial in 1988. That is my understanding, having read some of the transcripts of the trial.

Q. Was the report actually admitted as evidence of the Zündel trial?

MR JUSTICE GRAY: I think we know it was, do we not? We can move on.

MR IRVING: The point that I am trying to make, my Lord, is that I have had considerable dealings overnight with the Canadian solicitors involved in that action who confirmed to me -- I just put the essential three lines of their letter to you. The solicitor Barbara Kulaszka has written to me saying that the Leuchter report itself was not filed

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as an exhibit for the sole reason that such engineering reports are not generally admissible under Canadian rules of evidence unless the other side consents.

MR JUSTICE GRAY: I treat that with a certain amount of scepticism. The evidence up to now is that it was not admitted in evidence at the Zündel trial because it was not accepted that Leuchter was suitably qualified as an expert.

MR IRVING: My Lord, with the utmost respect, I have to say that I have a very large bundle here now which contains the actual transcript on that matter between the prosecution and the defence and the court in Toronto.

MR JUSTICE GRAY: Shall we put that on one side? I do not suppose Mr Rampton has had a chance to look at what you are referring to me at the moment. At any rate, let us got on with Professor Evans. I am not shutting you out from adducing that evidence.

MR IRVING: I am prepared to make this transcript available to the Defence in this matter.

MR RAMPTON: I have the transcript. I used it in cross-examination of Mr Irving. It is perfectly clear the judge would not admit Mr Leuchter as an expert.

MR JUSTICE GRAY: What you have not seen is what Mr Irving is relying on from the Canadian lawyers giving an entirely different reason why.

MR RAMPTON: I have seen it. There is a one page letter

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I think in this new bundle.

MR JUSTICE GRAY: What I am suggesting is that Mr Irving follows this up later.

MR RAMPTON: Yes, I agree. I attach no weight to what the lawyer says at all.

MR JUSTICE GRAY: Rather than now.

MR IRVING: Whether Mr Rampton attaches weight to it or not is neither here nor there. In that case I shall put it to your Lordship by way of submission later on.

MR JUSTICE GRAY: Would you mind.

MR IRVING: At page 130 line 8 you say that my arguments derive from previous work from well-known Holocaust deniers, and then you mention some.

A. Yes.

Q. Professor Faurisson. . Are you familiar with the expertise of Germar Rudolf?

A. I mention Faurisson there. I do not mention Rudolf there.

Q. I can make this very brief. Can you accept that there are a number of other documentary bases on which I base my arguments, for example the air photographs as interpreted by a man called John Ball?

A. It is clear I think that in the documents that I cite you do rely heavily upon Faurisson, whose work you did read in the late 1980s, as you recall in your diary.

Q. Which works of Professor Faurisson do you allege that I read?

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A. It was an article in your diary entry of 26th July 1986. You wrote "Faurisson's paper on Auschwitz set me thinking very hard." I presume that is an article that he published or a paper that he gave to you.

Q. Are you suggesting that he is my only source, the only basis of my arguments that I do not rely----

A. No, I am not. I give that as an example there.

Q. When is set thinking very hard, as no doubt you have also been occasionally made to think very hard, you then start looking at other sources to see how one should finally align one's own political or scientific or historical viewpoint.

A. Yes. I say here that it derives from previous work by well-known Holocaust deniers such as Faurisson.

Q. Would you call Professor Hinsley a well-known Holocaust denier?

A. I do not think that these arguments, the arguments are derived -- you misuse Professor Hinsley's material in your work.

Q. But you have here referred of course only to Professor Faurisson. Does that imply that he was my only source of any change of mind or new direction of my thinking that I may have adopted?

MR JUSTICE GRAY: "Such as" are the words used.

A. "Such as", yes. You were familiar with the brochure, Did 6 million really die, by Richard Verrall of the National

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Front published under the pseudonym of Richard Harwood.

Q. You are saying I am very familiar with it. When did I become familiar with it?

A. You note in 1988 that you said in the Zündel trial in the evidence you gave over 90 per cent of the brochure is factually accurate.

Q. Have you also read in the diary that the Verrall report was given to me to read one day before I gave evidence, and that I looked at it the same as you look at documents here in order to be able to form an opinion of it?

A. I am saying you read it, Mr Irving.

Q. Yes, but are you suggesting that I thought it out and read it and then used it as a basis for my arguments?

MR JUSTICE GRAY: He cannot possibly answer that, can he?

MR IRVING: I mean, the allegation, the suggestion, the imputation, from the witness is that I have read it and used it as a source when, in fact, I read it as an expert witness has to read documents that are put to him.

MR JUSTICE GRAY: You just said you were familiar with it, Mr Irving.

MR IRVING: I had sufficient familiarity with it on the basis of 24 hours study in order to be able answer questions as an expert witness. This is the point I wish to put to him. If the witness makes a statement like that, which is intended to create an impression, then I am surely entitled to rectify the impression.

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MR JUSTICE GRAY: Well, you cannot ask him questions to which he obviously cannot possibly know the answer.

MR IRVING: My Lord, he can because the reference to this particular report is in my diaries which he has just quoted from and it makes quite plain that the Verrall(?) Report was submitted to me. It was put to me by the Defence counsel to read in order that I could answer questions on it when I came into the box.

MR JUSTICE GRAY: Well, what is the answer?

A. I am not sure what the question was, my Lord.

MR IRVING: Are you familiar with, have you read my diary and do you accept that, in fact, the Verrall report was put to me purely for that purpose?

A. That is what your diary says. I am familiar with the diary entry. The fact is that you read the report and you judged it 90 per cent correct. Similarly, you are familiar with the work of another Holocaust denier, Dr Wilhelm Stäglich which you have commented on on a number of occasions.

Q. Notwithstanding your desire to move on to other matters, can we deal with one thing at a time and say that a number of documents have been put to you by me in the last few days, is that is right?

A. That is right.

Q. Would you find it repugnant if people said you have relied on these documents that I have put to you and that

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you have read these Irving documents and that, therefore ----

MR JUSTICE GRAY: Mr Irving, please, come on. It is just becoming unhelpful and argumentative. Let us get on to what matters. I say that for, I should think, the 12th time.

MR IRVING: 132, Professor, page 132, line 4. I am afraid I have to demolish this witness in detail, my Lord. It is the only way I can do it.

MR JUSTICE GRAY: Mr Irving, I am sorry, I am intervening more than I want to, but I have told you before that on Auschwitz I do not regard Professor Evans as being, if I may say so, authoritative. Therefore, you do not have to ask interminable questions about Auschwitz. What matters starts at about page 150, as I have said many times before.

MR IRVING: If I am accused of putting things into documents which are not in the documents, this goes to the root of one of the principal libels on my name, my Lord. That is in line 4. That is why I will ask this witness now to go to page 57 of the bundle and see the document to which I am referring.

MR JUSTICE GRAY: Page 54.

MR IRVING: Page 57. Is this an invoice for the supply of Zyklon-B to Auschwitz concentration camp?

A. Yes, it appears to be.

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Q. Do you in your report say: "It makes no mention at all of pest control"?

A. Yes, I do, yes.

Q. Would you now look at line 5 of the invoice, the typed portion? Do you agree that it says: "This material was sent to Auschwitz Abteilung, Entwesung und" ----

A. Yes. My mistake, Mr Irving.

Q. This is your mistake?

A. Yes.

Q. So, in other words, I did not fake and I did not distort and I did not insert and I did not manipulate on that particular document?

A. Let me read the paragraph. "The plates", we are still on the plates of your Nuremberg book, and the caption says: "Tonnes of Zyklon-B pellets, containing poisonous hydrogen cyanide, are shipped by the Degesch factory to the Pest Control division of Auschwitz and other camps including Oranienburg in 1944". The delivery note, though, only concerns Auschwitz. I agree I overlooked the mention of the pest control in Auschwitz, but it does not affect the other camps.

Q. It does not affects the other camp? But that is not the point I am making here. It is just that once again I have been accused of distorting and manipulating and you have now admitted that you are wrong?

A. Well, no ----

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Q. Just as on the Spectator letter and other things.

A. --- because you are illustrating, you have an illustration there of a note to Auschwitz and you are making claims on the basis of it about other camps.

Q. I am not going to put to you all the other invoices which I have in the file which show deliveries to the other camps which makes the point. But the point I am making here, will you accept that, is purely that you wrongly accused me of mistranslating or distorting a document?

A. I do not think I wrongly -- and I admit I am wrong on that point, yes.

Q. Thank you.

A. I have already admitted that.

Q. Footnote 60, very briefly, you reference there the Gerstein report. Will you now accept that the Gerstein report has been totally discredited by the people you call the Holocaust deniers because of the figures and ludicrous facts it contains?

A. No, I will not, no. As I have said, I am not an expert on this subject, but it is a report that is -- I will not accept simply on your word, that it has been discredited.

Q. The next footnote, No. 61, you refer to an interview between me and Radio Ulster, but, unfortunately, is not produced in any of the bundle of documents, so it is difficult for me to judge how accurate this is.

MR JUSTICE GRAY: Can you help about that, Professor Evans?

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A. I cannot, I am afraid.

Q. Do you know where the transcript is?

A. I am unable to locate it, but we can quite well dispense with that. There are plenty of other statements here on which we can rely, as in the very next sentence: "There were no gas chambers in Auschwitz" as you said on 5th March 1990.

MR IRVING: Are you familiar with the distinction between Auschwitz and Birkenau?

A. I think we have been through this in this case, Mr Irving, and that ----

Q. No, but I am asking you. Are you familiar ----

A. It is generally understood that when one talks about Auschwitz, one talks about the whole complex of all the various camps inside covered by the name of Auschwitz. When one talks about Birkenau, that includes Birkenau.

Q. Have you been to Auschwitz?

A. I have not been to Auschwitz.

Q. So I cannot ask you and there is no point in my asking you questions about that. You refer on page 133 to the shower baths?

A. I am not, really not an expert on this. What I am trying to do here is to assemble evidence that you have denied that there are gas chambers, there were gas chambers in ----

Q. I am placed at a disadvantage and I appreciate his

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Lordship's impatience with this procedure, but you have rambled on for pages in your report about Auschwitz and included numerous false statements and I am trying to proceed at speed, but every time I ask you you say you are not an expert on this.

A. What I am trying to do here is to include and present numerous statements of yours to the effect that gas chambers were not used, did not exist, and so on, at Auschwitz and elsewhere. I presented a substantial number of these statements here. I do not really propose to read them out.

Q. Well, I am afraid you will have to do what I ask under cross-examination. One of them is look at line 1 at page 134, please.

A. Yes.

Q. "On 8th November 1990 he", that is Irving, "repeated the same claim to an audience in Toronto: 'The gas chambers that are shown to the tourists in Auschwitz are fakes'."

A. Yes.

Q. Do you now agree that this is true?

A. It is true that you said that.

MR JUSTICE GRAY: Do we have to go through this again? You say fake, Mr Rampton says reconstruction. I have the point.

MR IRVING: This is my way of now introducing a cardinal document which is on pages 59 and 60, my Lord, on which I shall very definitely rely. It is a visit by a very

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well-known French news magazine called L'Express on the anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz. On page 60 there is the admission that everything in it is fake, and they do not know how to tell the tourists this.

MR RAMPTON: I really do not know where this is going. This was not put to Professor van Pelt who made it perfectly clear that the single gas chamber at Auschwitz I, Stammlager, is a post-war reconstruction and he explained ----

MR IRVING: It is a post-war reconstruction.

MR RAMPTON: He explained how it had been done and that the beginning and the end of that story. How Professor Evans is expected to deal with this, I do not know.

MR JUSTICE GRAY: The difficulty, as you know, is that one does have the section on Auschwitz. That is the problem.

MR RAMPTON: I know, but, as your Lordship knows, as I have shown your Lordship already and Mr Irving has been in court, again and again Mr Irving has referred to gas chambers in the plural, not just at Auschwitz but elsewhere.

MR JUSTICE GRAY: Mr Irving, I just have never from the word go understood the point that you make about these so-called fake gas chambers.

MR RAMPTON: There are two points, my Lord. First of all, Mr Rampton calls it a "reconstruction", I call it a "fake". The second point is if I am accused of having a

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criminal conviction in Germany, which is used against me by the Defence, I am entitled to point out the criminal conviction is for saying precisely this sentence and it turns out to be true.

MR JUSTICE GRAY: I am not remotely interested in your criminal conviction in Germany. I simply am not.

MR IRVING: I am indebted to your Lordship for saying that because the Defence has repeatedly referred to it ----

MR JUSTICE GRAY: I am now going to rule that you get on. Please, Mr Irving, this is enough about Auschwitz. I just do not think that there is anything to be gained by any further cross-examination on Auschwitz. You have spent a long time on it.

MR IRVING: Just about Auschwitz or about the Final Solution, my Lord?

MR JUSTICE GRAY: I am not stopping you on the Final Solution.

MR IRVING: Page 134. "Systematic nature of the extermination". You take exception to my suggestion that Jews were the victims of a large number of rather run-of-the-mill criminal elements, and I mention there the Latvians, Lithuanians and Estonians?

A. And Austrians.

Q. Yes.

A. And Germans.

Q. Are you familiar with the report by Jan Karski who was one of the first people to report on the Final Solution?

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A. Not -- I am not, no.

Q. In that case I cannot ask you about it. On page 135, paragraph 3: "Irving's view that these local initiatives were excusable", is the word "excusable" excusable in this context? Have I ever tried to excuse what the Germans are doing to the Jews?

A. Well, let me read what you told the press conference in Australia in 1986 which is the quote beginning halfway down the quote on the previous page where you say, you are questioning whether the killing of Jews "was a tragedy ordered and organised on the very highest German state level, namely by Hitler himself. Because if my hypothesis is correct, it means that all these Jews - and it may be any figure, I don't look at the figure concerned - if my hypothesis is correct, it indicates that the Jews were the victims of a large number of rather run-of-the-mill criminal elements which exist in Central Europe. Not just Germans, but Austrians, Latvians, Lithuanians, Estonians, feeding on the endemic antisemitism of the era and encouraged by the brutalisation which war brought about anyway. These people had seen the bombing raids begin. They'd probably lost women, wives and children in the bombing raids. And they wanted to take revenge on someone. So when Hitler ordered the expulsion, as he did - there's no doubt that Hitler ordered the expulsion measures - these people took it out on the person that

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they could".

Q. And you say this is somebody excusing the Nazis for taking these ghastly actions against the Jews?

A. It seems to me that that is the implication in that statement, yes.

Q. Is it not, in fact, a very sloppy use of the English language? What you meant was not "excusable" but "explicable" and there is a very great difference between these two words?

A. I think, given your attitude -- well, first of all, I find it very difficult to see how Latvians, Lithuanians and Estonians could get so worked up by bombing raids on Germany that they started killing Jews.

Q. Is that what I say?

A. It is the clear implication, "these people", and in the previous sentence you say, "Not just Germans, but Austrians, Latvians, Lithuanians and Estonians". "These people had seen the bombing raids begin".

Q. Are you familiar with the fact that Jan Karski, the man whom I previously referred to, warned the Polish government of the likelihood of pogroms in the Baltic states, and he had explained the reasons why in a 1940 report?

A. Mr Irving, there is plenty of documentation to show that there were, that Latvians, Lithuanians and Estonians and so on were involved in the mass killing of Jews with the

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encouragement of the SS unit and the Einsatzgruppen.

Q. But are you not by using the word "excusable" suggesting that David Irving said that what had happened to the Jews was right, that I am excusing it, whereas, in fact, I am explaining it and there is a substantial difference. Do you not agree?

A. No, I do not. I am afraid the tenor and tendency of your explanations is to find excuses.

Q. So ----

A. And you go on, and I go on to quote numerous places in the report at some length arguments which you put forward to try to suggest (and sometimes say in so many words) that the Jews were responsible themselves for the misfortunes which befell them.

Q. You still do not appear to appreciate the difference between the word ----

A. I think this falls into a pattern.

Q. --- to excuse and to explain. Your use of the word "excusable" implies that David Irving welcomed the Holocaust, that I am excusing it; whereas I am explaining it by saying, "These people had a vengeance, these people had a grudge, these people felt wronged, these people took it out on the people they perceived as being the ones who did it". Is that an excuse or is that an explanation?

A. I think given the fact that they not been bombed, that is an excuse.

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Q. I think we can abandon bombing for a moment and point to other things. I do not want to go into the reasons why the Baltic Jews had a particular grudge, but that is neither here nor there.

A. Well, I think it is very much here or there. If you want to use as an explanation of the massacres of Jews by Baltic peoples, if you want to use in explanation of that allegations that you want to make about their maltreatment by Jews or justified -- or in some ways grievances that they had which were in some ways justified, that seems to me that you are excusing it.

Q. In other words, what you are saying is that I welcomed the Holocaust, is that the way you are trying to put it to the court?

A. I do not use the word "welcome", Mr ----

Q. Well, I am trying to understand why you use the word "excusable". If something is excusable, then this implies that the person who is making the excuses thinks it is a jolly good thing.

A. No, I do not think that is true actually. Those are two rather different things. Applauding something and excusing it are rather different things, Mr Irving, and I come back to this fact that you say, "These people had seen the bombing raids begin, they'd lost probably women, wives and children in the bombing raids". So these poor Estonians who had been subjected to allied bombings,

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therefore, felt so angry with the Jews that they took it out on them. Now, I do not think there is evidence that Estonians were heavily bombed by the Allies in 1941.

Q. Forget the bombing raids for the time being.

A. I am not forgetting the bombing raids because that is a central passage -- a central part of this passage, Mr Irving.

Q. My Lord, let me explain the reason why I am dealing with this at length. This is one of the issues pleaded. In the pleadings one of the complaints is that I am accused by the Second Defendant of having, I think, applauded the incarceration of the Jews in the concentration camps.

MR JUSTICE GRAY: I do not believe that she ever has made that accusation. What you are accused of in this part of the report is making excuses for those who took part in the ----

MR IRVING: Finding something excusable rather than explicable, and there is a substantial difference there. I find the use of the word "excusable" which I hope the Professor will admit was a slip, but now he is trying to justify it?

A. I will not admit it is a slip, no. I mean, I looked at this passage and it seems to me to excuse these massacres.

MR JUSTICE GRAY: Speaking for myself, I think I understand the point you are making, Mr Irving, and I understand the answer as well.

MR IRVING: In that case, I will now wish to speak another

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paragraph about the explanation why the Baltic Jews took revenge on their native Jewish population during the brief interregnum between the time the Soviets moved out and the German Army arrived. Did you appreciate that there were substantial killings in that period?

A. I would have to be provided with evidence, I think, to show that.

Q. So you make the allegations without the evidence then? You say that the bombing raids and so on, you say they had, the Nazis, the Latvians and Lithuanians the Estonians had no ----

A. Let me set the context here, Mr Irving, is that I am talking about your denial that there was a systematic element in the Nazi extermination of Jews.

Q. You are going substantially further; you are saying that I am welcoming it, I am excusing it?

A. I do not say you are welcoming it. Welcoming is different from excusing.

MR JUSTICE GRAY: Mr Irving, he is not saying you are welcoming it. He is saying you are making excuses for it.

MR IRVING: And this is precisely the point that I have to challenge, my Lord, because, of course, what I am actually saying is there are explanations for these pogroms committed by the local population against the Jews, and that is not making excuses for them in any way at all.

MR JUSTICE GRAY: I have already said, I understand the point

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you are making and I understand the answer.

MR IRVING: But it is a repugnant allegation to be made either ----

MR JUSTICE GRAY: There is no point in just using this point as a sort of punch bag and going on and on because I have the point.

MR IRVING: Well, I am beginning to feel like a punch bag when I read this report with things being thrown at me the whole time like that, and I find that allegation particularly repugnant. I have described the atrocities committed by the Nazis against the Jews and by their collaborators against the Jews in very much detail in my works and never at any time have I given even the slightest hint of relish or welcoming these things.

A. That is not what I am saying, Mr Irving.

Q. I have repeatedly tried to argue away the Wannsee conference, you say at the foot of page 137. I am not going to dwell at length on that. If you are an historian, you would, no doubt, know that there is a great debate raging among genuine historians and scholars -- to spare you any difficulties here -- as to whether the Wannsee Conference was important or not. Do you agree with that?

A. There are arguments about how important it was, yes.

Q. Yes, so if somebody tries ----

A. I do not think anybody has said that it was unimportant.

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It is a question of the level and degree of importance you attach to it.

Q. Do you agree that there is no reference to the word "liquidation" in the records or to any order by Hitler or to any systematic killing in the Wannsee Conference?

A. Yes, that is true.

Q. Middle of page 138, please. You say that I relied on Eichmann's testimony on other occasions but not when it does not suit me. This is another allegation of manipulation, right?

A. Yes.

Q. Can you tell me what other occasions I did rely on Eichmann's testimony? Are you just referring to the episode where he looks through the peep hole in the back of the van and saw the gas vans operating?

A. I think that is one of them, yes. There are others, I think, which I mentioned in the report.

Q. I relied on it when it suited me -- why would it suit me to use Eichmann's confirmation of something which I, as a denier, am supposed to be denying?

A. Well, this comes back to the point that we talked about yesterday, that I made it clear that Holocaust deniers as a group have, on the whole, always admitted, as Faurisson said, there were some small scale, relatively small scale, killings on the Eastern Front of Jews, and that belongs to that.

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Q. Have you ever read very much of Eichmann's testimony either in his memoirs or in the subsequent trial in Israel?

A. I have read some, not the whole thing.

Q. Are you familiar with the passage where Eichmann, challenged about a particular episode, interrupted the interrogator two minutes later and said words to this effect: "I am sorry. You asked me two minutes ago about that episode, and I have to say now I cannot remember whether I am actually remembering it or just remembering being asked a question about it more recently"?

A. Well, you would have to show me that document.

Q. Do you agree that sometimes this happens in interrogations, that the interrogator puts questions with such force that sometimes the person being interrogated comes to believe what is being suggested to him by the questions?

A. Well, that is a very general statement, Mr Irving, and I suppose in some integrations somewhere or other that kind of thing takes place.

Q. Going on to page 139, the Commissar Order, and the guidelines for jurisdiction issued to the German Army and armed forces in the spring of 1941. I am not asking you in detail about them, but would you agree that these are documents of a military nature?

A. I am sorry, I cannot see this.

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Q. 139, paragraph 11. We are dealing here with the orders to kill Jews, Red Army Commissars and others in the German Army area?

A. Oh, yes, yes.

Q. So this is a reference to the Commissar order, is it not?

A. Yes.

Q. All I am trying to get from you is a concession that the Commissar order issued by the German High Command of the armed forces was a military document concerned with military measures and that it did not convey a clear and overriding intent to kill the Jews as such?

A. It is, no, it is an order that Red Army Commissars will be killed. There were orders issued to that effect in its -- I mean, it is very hard to describe that as a military order in the sense that it did not seem to me, or to most historians, there to be any military justification for it. It is a political act.

Q. The simple question there is were they being killed as Commissars or as Jews?

A. As Commissars. The Jews are a separate matter in these orders.

Q. And do you accept that at this time the Soviet Union was not a signatory of the Geneva Convention on prisoners-of-war and, therefore, the Germans had no obligation whatsoever to treat their prisoners properly?

A. That is a rather different matter, Mr Irving, and actually

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issuing an order to the Army to kill Red Army Commissars is a very different matter from simply not treating people properly.

Q. Well, you accept that when nations become belligerent, they have a choice that they can make, they can agree both sides, they can become signatories and parties of a convention like the Geneva Convention on treatments of prisoners-of-war, and the Soviet Union had specifically opted out of it and, therefore, at no time opted into it, so the Soviet Union, legally speaking, Soviet prisoners could not expect to be treated as prisoners-of-war and, in fact, nor could German prisoners be expected to be treated as prisoners-of-war?

A. Well, if you are advancing that argument as an excuse or justification for the order to the Germany Army to kill all the Red Army Commissars found and for the deliberate killing of between 3 and 4 million Soviet prisoners-of-war by the Germans, then I do not think it is a very strong justification or excuse.

Q. Did you hear me express it in those terms as an excuse?

A. That seemed to me what you were saying.

Q. Was I not, in fact, just taking up the point you made before I mentioned the Geneva Conventions in which you referred to the illegal killing of these Commissars?

A. You have lost me, I am afraid.

Q. In paragraph 12 you refer to Holocaust denier, Paul

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Rassinier, and on the following page, the first line of page of 140, you refer to Austin App?

A. Yes.

Q. Why do you refer to these people? Is it not totally irrelevant to bring in all these names of people?

A. No. I am suggesting here that these are familiar -- the arguments you are putting forward are familiar arguments from well-known Holocaust deniers, advanced by many other Holocaust deniers.

Q. Unless his Lordship disagrees, what possible relevance does that have to this case that other writers have strange views?

MR JUSTICE GRAY: Very, very marginal, in my view, so we can move on.

MR IRVING: In other words, I need not prepare to address it?

MR JUSTICE GRAY: No, you do not.

MR IRVING: We do, however, on this point come to the important matter of the allegation by me that the Holocaust story in part is an echo of our own propaganda. My Lord, I do think we have dealt with this allegation before, have we, in this court?

MR JUSTICE GRAY: No.

MR IRVING: It is quite an intricate allegation, and, witness, you disagree with this. Can we take it in stages? Do you agree that the Allies at any time started making propaganda broadcasts to Germany with references to the

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extermination of the Jews?

A. Yes. I certainly agree with that.

Q. Can you put a rough date on when these broadcasts began?

A. Sometime in 1942.

Q. Sometime in 1942?

A. As I recall.

Q. Have you read the memoirs -- do you know who Thomas Mann is?

A. Yes.

Q. Was he a famous German novelist?

A. Indeed.

Q. Author of I think "Wooden Brooks" and various other ----

A. Yes, that is right.

Q. --- famous novels? Where was he during World War II?

A. He was in the United States.

Q. In the United States. Was he engaged by the Allies as a propagandist?

A. That, I am not sure about, but he certainly did make broadcasts, yes.

Q. Have you read his memoirs and his own diary?

A. No.

Q. If I put to you either now or later passages from the Thomas Mann diary of 1941 in which he describes making broadcasts relating to -- here we are ----

MR JUSTICE GRAY: In a way, Mr Irving, you have got your answer because Professor Evans has agreed that there were

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propaganda broadcasts from 1942 about the extermination of the Jews.

MR IRVING: I was going to bring you back to 1941. It may seem completely immaterial, my Lord, but -- in January 1942 Thomas Mann broadcast the following words in German: "[German - document not provided] "400 Young Dutch Jews have been brought to Germany to be used as experimental objects for poison gas in January 1942". Can you accept that if he writes that in his diary as a propaganda broadcast that he made that there was such a broadcast?

A. Well, could I see a copy, please?

MR JUSTICE GRAY: Do we need to take terribly long? This is actually 1942, not 1941, but you have got your answer that there was propaganda use being made of the alleged extermination of Jews.

MR IRVING: Right.

MR JUSTICE GRAY: From, at any rate, 1942.

MR IRVING: Buttressed with three more sources but we will not go into detail, my Lord. Have you heard of the Ringelblum diary.

A. Yes.

Q. Will you accept that Ringelblum makes reference in June 1942 in the ghetto to receiving broadcasts about the extermination of Jews with poison gas?

A. Yes, I will accept that.

Q. If you have read my Goebbels biography, as no doubt you

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have for the purposes of this case, will you agree that the German Propaganda Ministry monitored a wave of propaganda broadcast in November 1942 referring to the gassing, mass gassing, of Germans?

A. Yes.

Q. In other words, they were Nazi monitoring reports of the BBC. You yourself, Professor, are an expert because you have written a box on the subject, have you not, of German wartime morale, of the reports? I think you wrote a book, did you not, on the subject of reports on public opinion, morale?

A. No, no. I think the book you are thinking of covered the years 1892 to 1914.

Q. So this is the wrong war? In other words ----

A. It is not even the war at all. It is before the First World War, I am afraid.

Q. So you are not familiar with the SD reports or with the letter intercept reports or anything like that on German public knowledge?

A. Slightly familiar, but I would not say that I was a major expert on them. I mean, I know what the SD reports were. I have read a few of them, but I am in no sense a real expert on them.

Q. Yes, you are absolutely right. I am wrong. Your book was [German] was it not? So you have not read any of the corresponding reports on German public morale, public

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opinion, that were gathered by the Gestapo or by the Propaganda Ministry in the war years?

A. Only those which were cited in publication of other scholars and one or two in the original, but I have not read them thoroughly.

Q. How much talk was there in Germany during the war years of gas chambers, do you think, in public or in private?

A. I think that is very difficult to say. We have to remember that there was a great deal of secrecy surrounding them. I think there was a fair amount of talk about shootings behind the Eastern Front, but of course it was against the law, and punished severely, if you spread news about what was going on in concentration camps or extermination camps in Germany.

Q. Given that the BBC made -- I am going to keep this brief -- repeated broadcasts during 1942 about the Nazi atrocities, and about the extermination of Jews, and about gas chambers, even before the gas chambers began operating on a large scale ----

MR RAMPTON: Wait a minute. If Professor Evans is to deal with that, Mr Irving must give some precise dates. One remembers evidence is that the evidence is that Chelmno started killing people in gas trucks 8th December 1941, and that the three Reinhardt camps were in full operation during the summer 1942. I think we need some dates.

MR IRVING: With respect, Mr Rampton, I think, in view of the

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fact that Professor Evans has stated himself that he is not an expert on this matter ----

MR JUSTICE GRAY: No, Mr Irving, that will not do, will it? You cannot put a question which has as its premise a misstatement about the date when gas chambers began operating. That is the point that Mr Rampton is making. It does not impinge on that objection that Professor Evans may not himself be an expert. If you are going to ask that question, and it is a relevant question, you must premise it correctly.

MR IRVING: I was really trying to save the court time.

MR JUSTICE GRAY: That will not do either, Mr Irving, if I may say so.

MR IRVING: It will certainly take time for me to look up the actual dates and references and I do not want to take up the court's time shuffling papers.

MR JUSTICE GRAY: Can I reformulate it for you and try and help? Or would you rather do it yourself? Do it yourself.

MR IRVING: Your Lordship is much better reformulating questions.

MR JUSTICE GRAY: No. I think I must not interfere too much.

A. Can I say that what is at issue here are Mr Irving's statements that "the British Intelligence Service suggested a propaganda campaign against Germany on the basis of invented allegations of gas chambers", or another

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quote at the top of page 141, "The story that the Germans are using gas chambers for the mass extermination of Jews is, so and so on forth, psychological warfare, etc, warned the cabinet this is a lie that we ourselves had invented." That is really what is at issue.

MR JUSTICE GRAY: I follow that.

MR IRVING: This is very helpful. In fact, the witness has been very helpful and this helps me to zero in on the particular matter. Witness, will you therefore go straightforward to page 148 of your report? You are quoting here from a clip of Foreign Office documents, are you not?

A. Yes.

Q. In the Public Record Office. They are well-known documents and I am going to rely on the final paragraph of page 148. Is this document dated August 27th 1943?

A. Yes, that is right.

Q. At this time does Mr Victor Cavendish-Bentinck, who I think later became Lord Portland, state, "I think that we weaken our case against the Germans by publicly giving credence to atrocity stories for which we have no evidence." Is that right? Does he write that?

A. That is what he says, yes.

Q. So at this time in August 1943 the British had no evidence of gas chambers, because that what is specifically being talk about in this document?

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MR RAMPTON: The Professor must be allowed to read the preceding two paragraphs that he himself has set out in his report because that is to rip something right out of context.

MR IRVING: I thought it would be helpful to go forward to 1943 to see what we did not know.

MR JUSTICE GRAY: Let us see what the context is for what Cavendish-Bentinck said.

MR IRVING: As regards putting Poles to death in gas chambers, that is pretty plain, is it not here? Here is the Foreign Office saying we have no evidence for this, and yet back in 1942 they are making the propaganda broadcasts.

MR JUSTICE GRAY: Mr Irving, I am just trying to read it. Can you just pause for a second (Pause for reading). I am bound to say that I do think that, in fairness to Mr Irving, one of the things about which Cavendish-Bentinck is saying that there is no evidence available to the British at that stage is the putting to death of Poles in gas chambers.

MR RAMPTON: Polish children, and the underline is in the original. It is not Professor Evans.

MR JUSTICE GRAY: I agree what is being talked of is killing Polish children, or selling them. But also, as a separate topic, it seems to me a fair reading of this suggests, the putting of Poles to death in gas chambers.

MR RAMPTON: Yes. Nothing to do with Jews so far as I can

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tell.

MR IRVING: Are Jews Poles? Is there some distinction there, Mr Rampton?

MR JUSTICE GRAY: Anyway, I see the point. We have now at any rate seen the whole document.

MR IRVING: My Lord, now I see that I have your Lordship's ear, may I now ----

A. Could I just make a couple of points here? These documents emerged during the formulation of a joint British/American declaration on German crimes in Poland, which is released at the request of the Polish government in exile, so it is focusing on Poles.

MR IRVING: Do you agree that the statement concerned is on the facing page 147, and that the sentence causing problem is the allegation on the authority of His Majesty the king that Poles are "now being put systematically to death in gas chambers", and the word "systematically" figures in that?

A. Yes. That is the first thing. The context of this is negotiations involving the Polish government in exile about German atrocities in Poland. The second point is that of course Cavendish-Bentinck's position is not necessarily to be accepted as a correct one. He was extremely sceptical, and indeed has been criticised by historians for his negative attitude towards reports. As he says, the Poles and, to a far greater extent, the Jews

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tend to exaggerate German atrocities in order to stoke us up.

MR IRVING: Are you saying that he was anti-Semitic?

A. Thirdly, and the really crucial point here is that this is not the same as saying that these stories about gas chambers have been invented, deliberately invented. What he says is: "As regards putting Poles to death in gas chambers I do not believe there is any evidence that this has been done." I am bound to say that is probably correct. He goes on to say: "There may have been stories to this effect and we have played them up in PWE rumours without believing that they had any foundation".

MR IRVING: What is PWE?

A. Political Warfare Executive. "At any rate", he says, "there is far less evidence than exists for the mass murder of Polish officers by the Russians at Katyn. On the other hand we do know that the Germans are out to destroy the Jews of any age unless they are fit for manual labour". So what he is saying is this. He is not saying we have deliberately cooked up these atrocity stories. He is saying we have received stories which we are using. That is quite a different matter from what say. You say they are invented by the PWE. Secondly, he is saying it is about Poles, and he is making a distinction, saying explicitly that the Germans are out to destroy the Jews of any age unless they are fit for manual labour. That is

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really the context of the quote that you originally gave.

Q. Very interesting. Will you now tell the court who Victor Cavendish-Bentinck was?

A. He was a Foreign Office official, I think.

Q. He was Chairman of the Joint Intelligence Committee, was he not?

A. Right, yes.

Q. Did he therefore have access to every single scrap of intelligence evidence that came into the British community's hands?

A. I doubt very much whether he had that. He would have received more general reports, I imagine, but I am not an expert on British intelligence in the Second World War.

Q. As Chairman of the Joint Intelligence Committee he received all the police decodes, all the other decodes, all the intercepts, all the agents reports, all the prisoner of war messages, is that not right?

A. I do not know, to be quite honest. I am not an expert on British intelligence. That sounds an awful lot for one man to master by himself. As I said, I would imagine that he would have received summaries of some description.

Q. The fact remains that he states in August 1943, when requested to authorise a government statement signed by Churchill and Roosevelt, that Poles were being systematically put to death in gas chambers on the facing page. He specifically issues a minute to the Foreign

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Office officials, saying, "We weaken our case by publicly giving credence to atrocity stories for which we have no evidence". He then goes on to say, "These mass executions in gas chambers", in other words the story of the mass executions in gas chambers, "remind me of the story of the employment of human corpses during the last war for the manufacture of fat, which was a grotesque lie and led to true stores of German enormities being brushed aside as mere propaganda". He is not pussy footing around with the way he is describing the state of British knowledge on gas chambers in August 1943, and yet you have accepted that during 1942 the BBC and the Americans repeatedly broadcast in German these stories of gas chambers, which must therefore have been invented.

A. I do not think that last statement follows at all.

Q. He says we have no evidence, so where else could it have come from?

A. He is talking about mass executions of Poles in gas chambers. He says: "We do know that the Germans are out to destroy the Jews of any rage unless they are fit for manual labour." I think this is a good example, which you have just quoted, of the scepticism which unfortunately was engendered by the belief in many Foreign Office and other officials that a lot of the atrocity stories in the First World War were mere inventions of allied propaganda.

MR IRVING: My Lord, this now goes back to the reason for this,

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which is page 141, where the allegation is that I said this with no justification.

MR JUSTICE GRAY: You have to grapple at some stage, and I think you are inviting my comment, with this, that, whatever may have been the state of knowledge within British Intelligence in 1942 or even 1943, the Defendants say that you have been alleging that the Holocaust is an invention by British Intelligence after all that we now think we know about what went on in the concentration camps has come to light. I think that is really the thrust of their case. You have established, I think, if I may say so, Mr Irving, that propaganda use was made of alleged gassing in gas chambers at a time when the senior officials in British Intelligence had no evidence for it. But you have to grapple with the next stage of the Defendant's case on this and I am sure you are coming to it.

MR IRVING: I appreciate, and this is not the time to do that, but I can only tackle each particular part of the allegations against me piecemeal. I think I have shot that one right out of the water, if I may put it like that, that the allegation was that I had no foundation for saying that the Political Warfare Executive started the gas chamber stories running long before we had any proof for it.

MR JUSTICE GRAY: No. I think you are failing to understand

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the Defendants' point.

MR IRVING: I appreciate fully what your Lordship is saying.

MR JUSTICE GRAY: No, please listen. What the Defendants say, and Mr Rampton will correct me if I have this wrong, is that you are saying that the whole Holocaust story is a lie invented by British Intelligence. You have, as it were, part of the way along your line of argument, but you have to grapple, as I say, with the fact that the Defendants are contending that you have been making the allegation that the whole thing is a lie invented by British Intelligence in the teeth, they say, of all the evidence that it was nothing of the kind.

MR IRVING: The gas chamber lie, if I can put it like this, is the story that the Germans gassed to death millions of people in factories of death. I am going to deal with that in a separate manner. We dealt with it partly with the witness van Pelt and I shall deal with it also by submissions on documents, and with further questions, either through this witness or other witnesses. But I can only tackle each element of this piece by piece. It may well be that there are bits of the story that I cannot bridge, rather the same as there are bits of the story in this systematic nature of the killing that the defence cannot bridge. The convergence of evidence here is, if I can establish there were no factories of death and that there were no holes in that roof, to put it bluntly, and

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if I can establish that PWE started the story of the gas chambers running in 1942, then I have got a substantial part of the way towards justifying what I claim, even if there are one or two bricks still left out of the wall, if I can put it like that.

MR JUSTICE GRAY: Yes.

MR IRVING: Moving to page 150 please -- we have now dealt with that, my Lord -- paragraph 21, witness, do you take exception to my suggestion that witnesses and survivors, by virtue of the ordeal they have been through, have been subjected to some kind of traumatic stress which would affect their powers of recollection?

A. Let me see what I say here.

Q. It is the final sentences on that page, really.

A. Yes, where you are asking a question about how you judge the credibility of Holocaust survivors, and you say, "I say that psychiatrists should concern themselves with this matter some time. There are many cases of mass hysteria". So I do take exception to the view which you put there that all the recollections of Holocaust survivors are the outcome of mass hysteria.

Q. Have I had said all the recollections of Holocaust survivors or just a part of them?

A. I think that is the clear implication of that.

Q. Are you aware, witness, that there is a body of medical expertise assembled over the last 50 years into precisely

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these matters of the ordeals suffered by concentration camp and slave labour camp survivors, what they have been through, the undernourishment, the effect this has on the powers of the brain, the bad nutrition, the post traumatic stress and all the rest of it and there have been very many learned disquisitions into this? The sentence which you have quoted was not intended to be some kind of slur on the character of people, the fact that somebody has a psychiatric disorder is in no way to be interpreted in a derogatory manner. It is just an attempt to analyse why sometimes they say things that do not exactly fit in with what the documents show.

A. I think you are saying it is more than sometimes, Mr Irving. I am not familiar with the literature you refer to.

Q. So, in analysing all the eyewitnesses and the sources that one is going to use in writing this kind of history, you cast aside the possibilities of medical problems or medical objections to relying too heavily on these sources?

A. I think you would have to look at each case in turn individually.

Q. Are you familiar with the case of Benjamin Wilkomirski?

A. I am indeed, yes.

Q. How you would assess his motivation, shall we say? Obviously he went through some kind of wartime ordeal?

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A. Very difficult to say. The evidence seems to be that he did not in fact.

Q. That he did not?

A. Yes. As I understand from what I have read, this is someone who claimed in a book, or wrote a book, called I think "Fragments", a Swiss gentleman, which was purported to be a story of his incarceration as a child in various concentration camps, and subsequently he was revealed to be an impostor.

Q. He was totally spurious, was he not?

A. He was completely spurious. He was not in the concentration camps. Indeed, I think he was born after the war and brought up in Switzerland. He was not Jewish and was not a victim in any sense.

Q. He was a spurious survivor of the Holocaust?

A. That is indeed correct, yes, as I understood it.

Q. He had a tattoo, did he?

A. I have no idea.

Q. Did he maintain that he had been in Auschwitz?

A. He maintained all these things, I have already said that.

Q. He described all the grisly horrors that he had seen?

MR JUSTICE GRAY: Mr Irving, you have your answer. He made it all up.

A. What seems to have been the case is that he had read an enormous amount about the Holocaust, and somehow persuaded himself that he had gone through it. That is a very

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unusual case and that is precisely why, of course, it has given rise to such widespread debate and such a number of essays, investigations, writings and so on.

MR IRVING: Was not the reason why it attracted widespread attention the fact that he was awarded literary prizes for his work, and that he was then found out to be spurious? Was that not the reason for the widespread attention?

A. It was widely praised when it came out, yes, and therefore the shock when it was discovered to be spurious was all the greater.

Q. You think that he is the only such case, do you?

A. The only one of which I am aware. It is a rather unusual thing to do. I think one has to admit.

Q. But he made a lot of money out it, did he not?

A. That I cannot say.

Q. Well, if he won major literary prizes for his book?

MR JUSTICE GRAY: Mr Irving, I am conscious we are still on page 152. We have about 600 pages to go. It is not a race, but we have to keep an eye on what matters and what does not.

MR IRVING: I have said I will finish with the witness in two and a half days, my Lord.

MR JUSTICE GRAY: I want you to take your time when we get to what matters. We have not started on what matters, in my view.

MR IRVING: What matters is this witness's credibility, my

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Lord, and your Lordship may or may not have formed opinions about that. On page 153, half way down, line 4 of paragraph 26, you refer to the fact that I evade the question by pointing minor inaccuracies in details of these reports. Would you say that the inaccuracies that we have pointed to in the reports by Höss and Gerstein and Vrba and Bimko and Tauber were all minor?

A. I am referring here to a radio interview in June 1989.

Q. Yes. But what you are saying is that I pointed to minor inaccuracies in the reports of people on whom the Holocaust historians rely, the eyewitnesses, and I am just challenging whether these inaccuracies are in fact so minor. Are they not sufficiently large, in fact, to disqualify any reasonable historian from wanting to rely on that source?

A. No, I do not think on the whole they are sufficiently large. One has to reach a balanced judgment, in dealing with testimony after the event, sometimes many years after the event, as to how reliable it is. Of course, that kind of testimony usually contains some inaccuracies. The fact is that one should not use that as a basis for a sweeping dismissal of all this testimony. Of course, there is a larger point here, that you yourself rely quite heavily on the post-war testimony sometimes obtained in interviews which were conducted by yourself of members of Hitler's entourage, which you do

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not approach in this critical way. You do not point to inaccuracies, and generally speaking accept it as the truth. So I think you have a double standard. You wholly dismiss all the evidence of post-war testimony from the victims of Nazism and you accept the post-war testimony of the perpetrators.

Q. I am not going to answer that point because this was not a question you were asked. Would you now go to paragraph 29 please? You deal there with a French woman called Marie-Claude Vaillant-Couturier. Did you read her testimony at Nuremberg? Did you form an impression of her credibility?

A. Yes. This is dealt with at some length on the basis of Professor van Pelt's report.

Q. What was her maiden name?

A. I cannot recall that.

Q. Was she the daughter of Lucien Vogel, who was one of Willi Münzenberg's closest collaborators?

A. I will accept that, if you say that.

Q. You know who Willi Münzenberg was?

A. Yes.

Q. Was he one of the leading commentators and agents and propagandists in, first of all, Russia and then in France?

A. Indeed, yes.

Q. So she came from these propagandist circles -- is that a reasonable derivation?

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A. No. I do not think, because you are a daughter of a propagandist, that makes you a propagandist.

Q. Did she then marry somebody called Paul Vaillant-Couturier, who was the editor of Humanité?

A. I will accept that that is the case.

Q. Which is the Communist Party newspaper in France?

A. Indeed.

Q. When she was examined or cross-examined in Nuremberg by one of the defence counsel, Hans Marks, did he ask her whether she had any literary background or any training as a journalist?

A. You would have to present me with the documentation, I am afraid.

Q. What inference would you gather Mr Marks was trying to make from this question?

A. I really cannot comment without actually seeing a transcript.

Q. Is there any proof that this woman was ever in Auschwitz at all?

A. Her testimony.

Q. In other words, purely what she said?

A. There may be some other evidence, but I am not really an expert on Auschwitz.

Q. I am not only going to ask one more question. In view of that fact that she testified that at the time she was in Auschwitz she obtained records showing that 700,000

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Hungarian Jews had passed into the camp in 1944, when in fact that was the entire number of Hungarian Jews who existed, was she liable to have been testifying to something from her actual knowledge?

A. Let me say the point at issue in this paragraph of my report, I should make clear, is that you rely, and I think the court has been through this already ----

MR JUSTICE GRAY: Yes, we have.

A. On the notes of Judge Biddle.

MR IRVING: On the use I made of Judge Biddle's notes?

A. -- which you misinterpret in order to discredit this witness.

Q. Is it likely that Judge Biddle, being no fool, would also have seen through her on the basis of the cross-examination?

MR JUSTICE GRAY: Mr Irving, we are not going to go through that again.

MR IRVING: Right. At page 155 we come to the Anne Frank diary.

A. Yes.

Q. Was the Anne Frank diary a diary or a novel or both?

A. It was a diary.

Q. It was a diary. Was it one diary or was it several diaries?

A. That depends what you mean.

Q. In other words, did she write it and then did she rewrite

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it and then did she rewrite it?

A. As I understand it, it is a diary that is written through.

Q. Will you accept that she wrote it, and then she rewrote it, and then she rewrote it as a novel shortly before she was kidnapped by the Nazis?

A. No.

Q. What is your criticism of my -- in fact, I am sorry, page 156, line 2 of paragraph 31. You object to my calling the diary a novel, do you not?

A. Yes.

Q. Yet, if the final version of the diary, as has been determined by the experts in Holland, is described as a novel, then that description by me is not unjustified?

A. You would have to show me the document of the experts in Holland which describe it as a novel.

Q. You object to the fact that I suggest that whole pages are written in ball point pen?

A. Yes.

MR JUSTICE GRAY: Mr Irving, if you are relying, just let me say what I am going to say, on what you describe as the determination by experts in Holland that it is a novel, at some stage that will be something you ought really to put to Professor Evans. I cannot find it but I think he deals with Anne Frank and her diary as a substantive criticism. Am I wrong about that?

A. Pages 156 to 7.

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MR JUSTICE GRAY: I thought you came back to it. Perhaps not?

A. No.

MR IRVING: My Lord, clearly, the reason I am asking these questions is that I understand that I am going to be cross-examined on this.

MR JUSTICE GRAY: Now is your chance. I suspect -- Mr Rampton will tell me if I am wrong -- that Professor Evans may be the right person for you to target your cross-examination on the Anne Frank diary.

MR IRVING: That is precisely what I was waiting for. Every new subject I adumbrate I am frightened of being stopped.

MR JUSTICE GRAY: I am trying to stop you when you are on irrelevances. It seems to me Ann Frank is perhaps relevant and therefore do not take that aspect too quickly.

MR RAMPTON: It is. The allegation is made against Mr Irving that without any foundation whatsoever he has alleged that the Anne Frank diaries were a fake, or are a fake. What is more, he has since admitted that he was wrong about that.

MR IRVING: Well, can we elucidate this matter in my cross-examination rather than your statements from the floor?

MR RAMPTON: Certainly.

MR IRVING: Witness, will you go to the bundle of documents bundle F, and look at one item there, which is page 86?

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A. Yes.

Q. Professor Evans, are you aware of the fact that the father of Ann Frank fought a number of libel actions against people who maintained that the diary was suspect?

A. Yes, I think he did.

Q. I think three or four libel actions. Are you familiar from the discovery with the fact that I corresponded with the father of Anne Frank on a number of occasions?

A. Yes.

Q. He never of course sued me for libel, did he? Is that correct?

MR JUSTICE GRAY: That is neither here nor there.

MR IRVING: My Lord, in the allegations is the fact that we paid damages, or I paid damages to the father.

MR JUSTICE GRAY: That may be relevant.

MR IRVING: That is why I was trying to get this admission from the witness that the father never sued me for libel.

MR JUSTICE GRAY: It is the other way round that may be relevant. If you paid damages because you had alleged that the diary was a fake, that, I would have thought, might be relevant.

MR IRVING: If your Lordship had waited, there would have been two questions, with a follow up, but we have not had an to the first one yet.

MR JUSTICE GRAY: Ask the question again.

MR IRVING: Witness, are you aware of any libel action brought

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by the father against me?

MR RAMPTON: My Lord, I do not know----

MR JUSTICE GRAY: I cannot understand what the relevance of that is.

MR RAMPTON: I do not make an allegation that the father sued Mr Irving for saying that the diaries were a fake. Maybe he could have done but, as far as I know, he did not and I have never said that he did.

A. I am trying to find the passage in my report which you are referring to here.

MR IRVING: Can we have an answer to the question?

MR JUSTICE GRAY: No, because the question, I have ruled, is irrelevant, Mr Irving. Can you please pay some attention to what view I rightly or wrongly am taking about some of your questions. Sorry, Professor Evans, you were about to say something?

A. No.

MR JUSTICE GRAY: Mr Irving, press on. You were asking the witness about page 86.

MR IRVING: Are you aware that, in the course of these libel actions, a German court ordered the father of Anne Frank to subject the diaries to chemical and forensic tests? Can I have an answer, Professor?

A. If you are telling me that, I will accept that that is the case, yes. They certainly were subjected to tests.

Q. Were the results of these tests leaked to the German

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magazine Der Spiegel in 1980?

A. I will accept your view that they were.

Q. Document No. 86 is a New York Post summary of what Der Spiegel has announced. Do you agree that this states that the finding is, on the second page, the result of the tests performed at the Bundeskriminalamt laboratories show that portions of the works, especially of the fourth volume, are written with ball point pen?

A. That is what it says, but this is of course is third hand information. It is a reporter who is reporting another reporter's view of a report. I think, before accepting that this particular reporter is giving an accurate account, I would need to see the original report.

Q. I do not really want to get bogged down in this kind of maze. Can I just put it to you like this? Will you accept that, on the balance of probabilities, the Bundeskriminalamt did carry out tests on the ink and came up with the surprising conclusion that portions were in fact ball point ink?

A. It depends what you mean by "portions". I think that is the crucial point. My understanding, having read the summary of the forensic scientific investigations carried out on the diaries, in the introduction to the kind of official standard edition, scholarly edition, is that there were some small stylistic emendations in ball point pen, but that paper and ink and so on were all of the

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diaries themselves were derived from the 1940s, i.e. before the end of the war.

Q. How long has this been your understanding? Did you have this understanding at the time you wrote your expert report?

A. Let me just see.

Q. In other words, is this knowledge about portions of the diary being rewritten in ball point ink or whatever recent or some years ago?

A. Well, I have looked -- my knowledge or whose knowledge?

MR IRVING: Your knowledge we are talking about.

A. My knowledge.

Q. At the time you wrote this report.

MR RAMPTON: Footnote 118.

A. Thank you. Yes, The Critical Edition, 1989.

MR IRVING: My question is, of course, if you were aware of the fact that these tests had been carried out and that there was this, shall we say, ambiguous finding?

A. I do not think it is ambiguous at all, Mr Irving.

MR JUSTICE GRAY: Yes, I wanted to ask about that.

A. It is quite clear.

MR JUSTICE GRAY: Professor Evans, may I put this question to you because then we can get on? Would it be an unfair reading of the report that you have just been shown by Mr Irving that it, in fact, far from confirming that it is a forgery, confirms that it is authentic because it says

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that there are some sections which were added subsequently, but by necessary inference is saying that most of it was genuine and already there and not in ball point? Not very articulately expressed, but do you agree with that proposition?

A. Well, yes, and that is my understanding of the forensic investigations which were carried out both by the Federal German Criminal Office and by the Dutch Centre for War Documentation, that the diaries were genuine, but that there were some small stylistic emendations, certainly not whole pages or whole sections, let alone the whole thing being fake or a novel.

MR IRVING: Have I ever said that the whole thing was written in ball point pen?

A. You said whole pages are written in ball point pen.

MR JUSTICE GRAY: You said it was a novel, Mr Irving, did you not?

MR IRVING: The third version is a novel, my Lord. The third version is a novel with the names changed.

A. You did say in the Daily Mirror on 27th November 1979: "Many forgeries are among records, including the diary of Anne Frank". "The Anne Frank" -- another occasion in 1986: "The Anne Frank diary of which you have all heard is partly written in ball point ink, parts of the Anne Frank diaries are written in ball point ink".

Q. Are you aware of the fact that the father of Anne Frank in

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one of the libel actions obtained an affidavit from a handwriting expert who testified that the entire diaries were written in the same handwriting of the same person, including, therefore, the ball point passages?

A. No, I am not aware of that.

Q. Whether that is true or not, in other words, this allegation that the entire diaries, or this finding by the expert that the entire diaries were written in one handwriting, was it not reasonable for somebody to say in 1979, as I said in the passage you just quoted, that the diaries were suspect?

A. That is not quite what you said, Mr Irving. You did not say they were suspect. You said they were fake.

Q. Let us take it stage by stage.

MR JUSTICE GRAY: Let the witness answer first. You suggested that you were only saying that they were suspect. Professor Evans, do you think that Mr Irving went further?

A. I do, my Lord. He is saying they are a forgery.

MR IRVING: Is that not a reasonable conclusion, if the father himself has produced evidence to the courts that the handwriting is the same the whole way through, graphological evidence by affidavit in one of these libel actions that the handwriting is the same and that the handwriting turns out to be partly in ball point ink?

A. Mr Irving, you said in 1993 that the diaries were a novel, the handwriting was not hers, whole pages were written in

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ball point pen, a 13 year old girl would not have the nous to write a document of that sort at all ----

Q. Professor Evans, can you stick with chronology ----

A. This is a long time after the ----

MR JUSTICE GRAY: Let the witness answer.

A. This is well after the official edition had been published in 1989. This is talking, what, four years after that.

MR IRVING: Can we stick to the chronology, please? We are at present back in 1979 and 1980, right?

A. Yes, and in my report, Mr Irving, I cite what you say in 1989, in 1993.

Q. And it is very convenient to confuse the chronology, but if we sort things out ----

A. There is not confusing about that chronology at all, Mr Irving. It is quite clear what you say in 1993; you assert that it is, that it is a fake. It is a forgery.

Q. Let us take this in stages. First of all, will you accept that the third edition written by the daughter of Otto Frank, Anne Frank, is written by her as a novel in which she has changed the names in her own diary into novel form?

A. No, the official edition published by the Dutch Centre for War Documentation is a diary.

Q. Will you accept that the third version she has written is written as a novel with the names changed in novel form?

A. I have to at this point confess I am not expertise -- I do

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not have the expertise to go into that amount of detail. I have looked at the official edition and it is quite clear to me that that is a diary.

Q. So if it is a diary, why are the names changed then?

A. The official edition.

MR JUSTICE GRAY: Well, I can think of all sorts of reasons. At the moment I do not understand the significance of Anne Frank ----

MR IRVING: Well, because he is emphasising there ----

MR JUSTICE GRAY: Please let me finish. I do not understand the significance of it having been converted into a diary if it be the case that the original was a diary -- sorry, into a novel if it be the case that the original was a diary.

MR IRVING: If your Lordship attaches no significance to the word "novel", then I will abandon that particular line.

MR JUSTICE GRAY: My impression of the evidence so far is that you have dismissed Anne frank's alleged diary as being in its totality no more than a novel, i.e. a work of fiction. If I am wrong about that, no doubt you will disabuse me.

MR IRVING: If your Lordship is going to attach importance to the word "novel", then perhaps we should look at precisely what the allegations are and the passages that are quoted. Can I just get the chronology straightened out because this is what the expert witness is, I think,

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seeking to confuse. There are two important thresholds to be crossed here. The first threshold that we cross is the investigation by the German Government laboratory in 1980, and the second threshold is the authoritative investigation by the Dutch authorities which was a few years ago. Now, the question is whether I heeded each of these authoritative enquiries or whether I disregarded them.

A. And the answer is that you disregarded them.

Q. Well, let us take it stage by stage. Before 1980, was I entitled to say that because the handwriting expertise said that the handwriting was the same the whole way through this opus and parts of it were in ball point ink, therefore, the whole opus was suspect. Was that a reasonable conclusion?

A. No, I do not think it was because the parts that were in ball point ink were only stylistic emendations.

Q. But if they were said by the father to be in the same handwriting the whole way through -- this is the point I am trying to make -- if he produced expert evidence that the handwriting was unchanged?

A. Well, you would have to -- you would have to present me with the written evidence for the claims you are making. I find it very difficult to deal with it in the way that you are ----

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Q. Well, you have set yourself up here as an expert on this particular matter and now each time we come up with an important ----

A. Let me try to give the context of this again, I am trying to ----

MR JUSTICE GRAY: Page 156, the criticism you are making, Professor Evans, is of what Mr Irving said in 1993.

A. Yes.

Q. That is the criticism.

A. Exactly.

Q. There is no point, Mr Irving, in going back to 1980 because it was in the late 80s, as I understand it, that the scientific evidence, so the Defendants say, emerged which established that these were authentic diaries. You went on after that to say that they were novels and that a 13 year old could not have written such a document.

MR IRVING: My Lord ----

MR JUSTICE GRAY: That is the point that is made against you.

MR IRVING: What exactly is said in this 1993 passage? Your Lordship has it in front of you. It is the indented passage here: "Are you aware that they have made a full report? I say: "Doesn't surprise me". This is a very selective excerpt. If there was any specific reference by me in 1993 for saying that the diaries in their totality are a fake, believe me, this expert witness would, surely, have quoted it?

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A. Well, let me quote 9th November 1993 broadcast. This is video tape 207, and it is in English in tape 213.

Q. Is this in your report?

A. No. This is in my response to your written questions, so it is available.

MR JUSTICE GRAY: Shall we try to find this? I would quite like to find it if we can.

A. My Lord. It is in my written response to Mr Irving's written questions.

Q. No, I meant the original. Is it in one of the bundles? 1993? Where was the speech? Do you know? Was it in Australia?

A. It is rather complicated, my Lord. It is a -- yes, it was in Australia. It is not clear whether it is Australian or American. It is a version of a Danish television programme which is also broadcast in German on German Television, but there should be a transcript of tape 213.

MR RAMPTON: My Lord, if your Lordship has got, I do not know what it is called, Evans 2, is it, the file Evans 2?

MR JUSTICE GRAY: Yes.

MR RAMPTON: Behind tab 1 there are Professor Evans' responses to Mr Irving's written questions. On page 5 -- sorry, somebody has restamped it. Page 5 is the internal numbering of that document. At paragraph 9 your Lordship will see set out the history, as it were, for the genealogy of this extract in the report. There is a "7"

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stamped at the bottom of the page.

MR JUSTICE GRAY: I do not know what you are looking at, but I am looking at, I think, something different.

MR RAMPTON: Well, the document is dated 7th February 2000 and it should be in the front of Evans 2.

A. This is the second set of replies to Mr Irving's written questions.

MR RAMPTON: Yes.

MR JUSTICE GRAY: Have I got it?

MR RAMPTON: You should have. It should look like that.

MR JUSTICE GRAY: Sorry. Yes, I have. I beg your pardon.

MR RAMPTON: In tab 1.

MR JUSTICE GRAY: Page 5?

MR RAMPTON: Page 5, paragraph 9. Page 5 at the top, paragraph 9, it runs over to page 6 is the history of this particular extract.

MR JUSTICE GRAY: Have you got this, Mr Irving?

MR IRVING: I do not want, but I wish to make some comments on this. Your Lordship will remember that on November 4th when we had the pre-trial review, I expressed grave misgivings about the use of edited broadcast programmes with all the, I will not say the chicanery that has gone into it, but all the clever cross-cutting and, unless we see the transcript of the whole programme or, at any rate, very substantial excerpts which are clearly indicative that nothing has been put in or nothing has been cut out,

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I would be very hesitant about allowing this kind of material which may be prejudicial to be put in in this form.

MR JUSTICE GRAY: Mr Irving, you say that, but if I read to you one of the extracts ----

MR IRVING: Yes, please do.

MR JUSTICE GRAY: --- it is in these terms: "To me, the Anne Frank's diaries are a romantic novel, rather like 'Gone With the Wind' and I would not read something like that".

MR IRVING: As a source, yes.

MR JUSTICE GRAY: How can the context really affect what you are saying which is that it is all made up?

MR IRVING: I am not saying that at all, my Lord.

MR JUSTICE GRAY: Oh, I thought you were saying...

MR IRVING: That is certainly not the point of what I am making. The Anne Frank diary, I am sure that your Lordship, like myself, has never had the pleasure of reading that particular work, but I have read a great deal about it, including the official Dutch investigation into it. I had lots of newspaper articles about it and I am quite familiar with its genesis; the way it started off first as a fragmentary diary, it was then rewritten by her in captivity because she had nothing else to do and then, as she grew up, she then rewrote it as a novel. That is what I am saying there, but to take just that one sentence and to hang on that the imputation that

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I am saying the whole thing is a pack of lies, which your Lordship just put on it, I think is a very adventurous forward step.

MR JUSTICE GRAY: Well, do we have the ----

MR RAMPTON: My Lord, I really do think this is becoming the most frightful waste of time.

MR JUSTICE GRAY: Well, at least it is relevant.

MR RAMPTON: I know.

MR JUSTICE GRAY: We have spent two days on the wholly peripheral matters.

MR RAMPTON: I have been as patient as I possibly can be, but now I really cannot sit here any longer because I have in my hand a piece of paper taken from Mr Irving's website, or through his website, on 7th February of this month of an interview that he gave to something called CNN, which is a satellite news station, and he was interviewed on 16th January.

MR JUSTICE GRAY: Yes, I have that. I have read that.

MR RAMPTON: This year.

MR IRVING: Here we go again. It is another very heavily cross-cut and edited broadcast.

MR RAMPTON: Well, I just read these four lines: "Interviewer to Irving: Did you say that the Anne Frank diary was a forgery? Irving: Guilty. Interviewer: Is it a forgery? Irving: No".

MR IRVING: Absolutely right. Absolutely right. Before 1979

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I was of the opinion that it was a highly suspect document for precisely the reasons I have set out, namely the father said the handwriting was the same the whole way through. He produced expert evidence in court to that effect in order to win a libel action. The handwriting was partly in ball point ink. So the conclusions there are absolutely plain. After 1980 we had the German Government investigation which confirmed that the ball point ink was there and it was not until the Dutch carried out their authoritative tests that I was perfectly satisfied I had been wrong with that belief. I have made not the slightest hesitation in admitting that I was wrong, which is absolutely the right way to handle the matter. But to take things out of chronology, which is what this witness has been doing, and to imply that by calling it a novel I am suggesting that the diary is in some way a pack of lies, is I think very unjust and not borne out by the evidence when it is presented in the proper sequence. But I repeat what I said about the prejudicial nature of producing fragments of very heavily edited sound bites from American or German or Danish television programmes. Your Lordship is familiar with how these programmes are concocted. The scissors play an important part.

A. My Lord, may I make three points?

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MR JUSTICE GRAY: Yes.

A. The first is when you describe something, when one describes something, as a novel, one surely implies that it is fictional, it is not telling the truth. I do think that is a significant use of words. Secondly, in my report on page 156 I quote an interview in 1993: "Interviewer: Are you aware that the Dutch Centre for War Documentation has made a full report about this?" that is to say the allegations of falsification and so on in the diaries. "Irving: Doesn't surprise me. Interviewer: And they say it's - they have made public all the diaries, and they examined the handwriting, and all there is to know about it. Irving: Doesn't surprise me. A lot of money is at stake. The Anne Frank Foundation is a very wealthy political organisation in Amsterdam. Interview: We're talking about the Dutch State War Documentation Centre here. We're not talking about the Anne Frank Foundation. We're talking about a public institution. Irving: But I'm talking about the financial interests which are at stake here." I think, Mr Irving, the clear implication of that is that the full report of the Dutch Centre for War Documentation is a falsification and is not reliable in any sense. The third point I want to make ----

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MR IRVING: Why have you not ----

MR JUSTICE GRAY: No, there are three points.

A. And If I can make my third point, is that again in 1993, his Lordship has already quoted part of this interview that you gave, saying that you would not read it, you read certain passages and so on. "We have samples of Anne Frank's real handwriting in postcards which she wrote to friends in 1940 and 1939. They were recently auctioned in an auction house in the United States about two years ago. That handwriting is totally different from the handwriting in the diaries. They are as different as chalk and cheese and the extraordinary finding is that some of the pages of the diaries have been written in ball point pen which is a pen that didn't exist in Anne Frank's lifetime". 1993, Mr Irving.

MR IRVING: Yes, and, quite clearly, the parts that are written in ball point ink in the diaries cannot have been written by the girl who wrote the postcards, am I right?

A. You are saying some of the pages -- that simply is not the case.

Q. But some of the pages were written in ball point pen, is that correct?

A. No. As I understand it, there were stylistic emendations. There are not whole pages written in ball point ----

Q. Do you have any evidence for the words "stylistic

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emendations"?

A. --- pen. Well, this is -- yes, the report of the Dutch Centre for War Documentation which is summarised in their introduction to their Critical Edition which you dismiss as being the product of financial manipulation by the Anne Frank Foundation, whereas a few minutes ago, Mr Irving, you just said that you had accepted that report ----

MR IRVING: I do totally.

A. --- in 1989 when it came out ----

Q. And I did and I always have done.

A. --- and here you are in 1993 saying that you do not accept it. I cannot accept what you are saying there.

MR JUSTICE GRAY: Mr Irving, I think we have now had enough evidence on the Anne Frank diaries. I think we will move on to the next topic.

MR IRVING: My Lord, he made now points.

MR JUSTICE GRAY: Mr Irving, I have got to introduce some control. We have spent this morning so far dealing with pages, I think you started at 128, is that right, and we have now got to 156.

MR IRVING: If this expert report was not so flawed ----

MR JUSTICE GRAY: So we have spent nearly two hours dealing with very subsidiary points. We still have not got on to the guts of this report.

MR IRVING: If this expert report was not so flawed and bias, then I would not have been bogged down in the marshes,

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shall we say, before we came to the real materials.

MR JUSTICE GRAY: I have made my ruling. You are going to have the opportunity to answer questions in cross-examination. We are moving on to the this next topic, and I am afraid I am going to have to be much more firm with you than I have been up until now.

MR IRVING: If the witness could possibly answer more briefly, then we would not spent so much time on these matters.

MR JUSTICE GRAY: No, that is not fair.

MR IRVING: I advance with the utmost trepidation, my Lord, because I have no idea where ----

MR JUSTICE GRAY: Well, advance and then see whether the trepidation was justified.

MR IRVING: One never knows whether the mines are dummies or not. Page 158, the end of paragraph 34, you complain that I state that the witness Höss made statements which contain egregious anachronisms, inconsistencies and other generally implausible passages. Do you not accept that that is so then?

A. Let me -- where are we? Yes. Let me read the paragraph. We are talking about the memoirs of Rudolf Höss, the Kommandant of Auschwitz, and the interrogations of Rudolf Höss which were made in Polish captivity. In your book on Nuremberg you allege, I say, that Höss was "manhandled" by those who arrested him and kept without sleep until he confessed. You term this "torture". You say: "Höss's

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confessions contain many deliberate errors to make it clear they were untrue. His memory is patchy about days and places, and about the events of four or five years earlier. There were many inconsistencies in his account. He signed a confession in English although he had no reading knowledge of English. He frequently changed his testimony about numbers. Höss wrote his memoirs in Polish captivity 'as a means of postponing his fate'. His statements, Irving charges, contained 'egregious anachronisms, inconsistencies and other generally implausible passages".

Q. Will you now answer the question?

A. So I am trying to summarise your views there.

Q. Do you dispute the fact that his statements contain these inaccuracies and implausible statements?

A. I do not think there is -- well, first of all, I do not think there is any evidence that there are deliberate errors to make it clear that what he said was untrue. Secondly, I think one has to distinguish between the interrogations and the memoirs. Höss says in his memoirs that he was manhandled and very badly treated.

Q. Where did he write the memoirs?

A. He writes his memoirs in Polish captivity, and the confessions, well, the first of his confessions which, admissions, statements, which resulted from interrogations was, therefore, discounted. What I am referring to here

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are the memoirs.

Q. I only have two questions to ask. Would a confession or a statement obtained by these means ever be accepted by a British court of law?

A. I have already said, this is only one statement, the first statement. The memoirs that he wrote were certainly not obtained under duress. They were written in captivity under the imminent prospect of death and, to my mind, that makes them more likely to be honest.

Q. Would you answer the question? Would it be acceptable in a British court of law, this kind of statement?

A. I am trying to explain the context. The statement which he made under duress, the first of his statements, was not used.

Q. If he was such a reliable witness and so convincing, why was he not called by the prosecution at Nuremberg when he was actually in the building in a cell?

MR JUSTICE GRAY: That is a question to which this witness cannot possibly know the answer.

MR IRVING: On page 160 at line 4 of paragraph 36: "Irving casts doubt on almost all testimony at the Nuremberg War" -- is that an exaggeration, that I doubt almost all the testimony produced at Nuremberg?

A. That is not what I say.

Q. Well, you say that I say it does not fit my arguments; I say it was obtained by torture and threats?

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A. No, no, I do not, Mr Irving. I say: "Irving casts doubt on almost all testimony at the Nuremberg War Crimes Trials or during the prior interrogations if it does not fit his arguments, alleging it was obtained by torture and threats". Those are my precise words.

Q. In other words, that I deliberately manipulate, I accept the evidence that I like and all the other evidence I disregard on this rather threadbare pretext of tortures and threats?

A. In your book on Nuremberg you refer constantly to -- and again, my Lord, this is in my written response No. 10 on page 6 of my reply to the second set of written questions by Mr Irving, where you talk about "the unsavoury methods of the OSS, intimidatory American tactics appear to have been routine, harassment of the prisoners, a paralysing regime of psycho-terror enforced on the defendants", and so on. That seems to me to be general attempts to discredit the testimony at the Nuremberg War Crimes trials.

Q. Having you investigated the methods used by the Allies and the interrogators at Nuremberg? Are you able to state with confidence to this court that I am wrong?

A. You do not present, you present to me -- you present in your book some isolated incidents of maltreatment of prisoners like Streicher, I think, and, of course, in the initial interrogation of Höss, but you do not present evidence in your book that this was general. I do not

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really see evidence there to justify those statements which you make in a general sense.

Q. So you have complete confidence yourself, therefore, in the methods used by the allies to obtain ----

MR JUSTICE GRAY: No. This witness has said many times you have to look at all the circumstances and evaluate the particular witness and his evidence.

MR IRVING: If you look at your footnote on that page, the second footnote: "Irving in an interview in New Zealand, recording a conversation with SS Colonel Göhler" which I claimed to have had at the end of the war when I would have been a child?

A. Yes, I look up the transcript. You said: "I remember right at the end of the war I asked one of Himmler's staff", and so on and so forth, but it is not a very important point.

Q. So why did you put it in then?

MR JUSTICE GRAY: Let us move on we all. Agree it is not a very important point.

MR IRVING: But you are implying there that I have lied again, are you not, in that footnote?

A. No, I am not, no. It is an amusing little mistake that you made.

Q. You agree that it is a misreading, therefore, of a transcript?

MR JUSTICE GRAY: Don't let us spend time on it, Mr Irving.

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A. No, I do not agree it is a misreading. I think it is just a misformulation of yours, Mr Irving. It is not very important at all.

Q. These verbatim transcripts can easily be misread?

A. No, I think I read it correctly. I am just saying it is a slip of your tongue, that is all.

Q. Or a slip of the punctuation of the person doing the ----

MR JUSTICE GRAY: Mr Irving, will you please move on?

MR IRVING: You are still critical, of course, of my methods of obtaining information from Hitler's private staff. Would you see, please, pages 83 to 5 of the little bundle? This is the complete passage from that interview you have just quoted, the one where I was allegedly conducting interviews as a six year old. Why did you not pay more attention to the surrounding three pages of that interview instead of this rather amusing little footnote you put in? Do I not describe in those three pages (and this is the question) how I have persuaded Hitler's private staff to reveal to me ugly secrets of their memories of their times with Hitler, if I can put it like that, and is that not more significant?

A. Well, that is not the context here of what I am talking about here at all, Mr Irving.

Q. Have you referred to these three pages anywhere in your expert report?

A. These are?

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Q. The reference to what Hitler's private secretary told me about the Night of the Long Knives, for example? The reference to what Johannes Göhler told me about Hitler's order to Himmler to liquidate the inmates of Buchenwald?

A. The Night of the Long Knives is not a -- I think I do mention the Night of the Long Knives briefly, but it is not really a central point in my report.

MR JUSTICE GRAY: I think you made this point on Thursday to this witness.

MR IRVING: We did, my Lord, but I am just drawing attention to the fact that he uses the transcripts very selectively to imply that I am lying about the date I conducted an interview, but there are three pages ----

A. I am sorry, Mr Irving, I did not.

Q. Will you please not interrupt?

A. I did not imply that you were lying. I am quite happy to accept it is a slip of the tongue.

Q. But he ignores the three pages ----

A. It is not an important point.

Q. --- which show me quite clearly using interviews in the manner that they should be conducted.

MR JUSTICE GRAY: Mr Irving, you made a perfectly sensible point on Thursday, namely that you often do refer, so you say, to the unfavourable things that the Adjutants and their relations told you about Hitler. You have made that point. I have absorbed it and I have digested it. There

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is no point in going back over it all over again.

MR IRVING: My remark goes purely to the selective nature of this expert witness's report and reporting on the basis of the evidence before him.

MR JUSTICE GRAY: Would you like to move on now?

MR IRVING: Page 162, when we are now dealing with Hans Aumeier, you allege that: "It did not fit into my preconceived notion" - this is three lines from the end - "it did not fit into my preconceived notion that there were no gassings" ----

A. Yes.

Q. Is it not, in fact, the case that Hans Aumeier's reports are not eagerly seized upon by the Holocaust historians because he, too, presents information which does not fit in with the standard version, like the gassings times?

A. I think that, in fact, the Aumeier documents, which you discovered in the Public Record Office after their release in 1992, were not seen by anybody else. So I do not think there is any suppression there by other people.

Q. Yes, but is it not the fact that the Aumeier documents do not fit in with preconceived notions in the way you suggest?

MR JUSTICE GRAY: We went through all this with Professor van Pelt, did we not?

MR IRVING: On page 163, now, paragraph 41, you ask: "Who could possibly have gone to all the immense trouble

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necessary to fabricate such a vast quantity of documentary material"? What documentary materials were you describing there, just so we can be sure of what you are talking about?

A. Well, a number of different things, the memoirs, for example, of Holocaust survivors which exist in substantial number.

Q. You are not talking about wartime documents then?

A. I do not say wartime documents. In addition, in the course of this trial, you have repeatedly alleged that wartime documents have been fabricated without really saying who would have done it or why, or what opportunity they might have had to do so.

Q. His Lordship knows this is not true. I cast suspicion only on one document.

MR JUSTICE GRAY: I am afraid I do not accept that, Mr Irving.

MR IRVING: On the June 24, 1943 document, my Lord.

MR JUSTICE GRAY: No, you cast suspicion on a number of other documents.

MR IRVING: I am impugning the integrity of only one document then. Let me put it like that. I raise my eyebrows at certain others, but accept them just for the purposes of argument. In other words, you are not there talking about a vast quantity of wartime documents then. You are talking about a vast quantity of post-war ----

A. I am talking there in a general sense about the evidence

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of all the crimes, for example the existence of gas chambers.

Q. But this is important.

A. It refers right back to the previous three sections of this particular chapter in my report.

Q. I am trying to narrow down here -- this is quite important. If his Lordship is led to believe by a careless statement of the witnesses that there is a vast body of wartime documents, this would be unfair, would it not, because you are not referring to wartime documents? You are referring to post-war documents?

A. I am referring to all kinds of documents.

Q. You are not referring to wartime documents?

A. I am referring to documents including wartime documents, the totality of the written evidence for the Holocaust which you deny.

Q. Are you saying there is a vast quantity of wartime documents?

A. What I am saying is that there is a vast quantity of documents and material for all aspects of the Holocaust.

MR JUSTICE GRAY: I expect you would accept, Professor Evans, just to move on, the number of overtly incriminating documents, wartime documents, as regards gas chambers is actually pretty few and far between?

A. Gas chambers, other things such as the systematic nature of the extermination, I am referring to the whole package

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of evidence.

MR IRVING: But I am trying to divide that package.

A. Wartime, post-war, shootings, gassings, systematic nature and so on.

Q. Professor Evans, you accept that we cannot do things that way in this court. We have to divide things up into parcels and look at the Eastern Front, look at the systematic nature, and look at the gas chambers, and look at the documentary basis for each. As his Lordship has said, you do accept that the documentary basis for the gassings, the gas chambers and for the systematic nature of that is thin compared with the documentation of the Eastern Front shootings?

A. Yes, but what I am describing here is really -- I am moving on to the totality of all the different kinds of evidence. For example, I have dealt previously ----

Q. I am anxious you do not move on from the questions I am actually asking.

A. Have dealt previously in the report in an earlier section with your allegation that Holocaust survivors have made it all up, for example.

Q. Can we have a clear answer ----

A. Stabbed their tattoos on their arms themselves and so on.

Q. -- so that we can move on. The documentation relating to the gas chambers and the systematic nature of gas chamber killings is sparse compared with the documentation of the

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killings on the Eastern Front, is that right?

A. Yes. I think that is correct, that I am referring here to the totality.

Q. Paragraph 44 on the facing page. You object to my suggestion that there was a well-financed campaign.

A. I say it is a typical Holocaust denier's argument.

Q. Yes. If it is a true statement, is that an unjustified statement therefore?

A. Let me quote the sentence. In the preface, this is a comment on a quote----

Q. Do not start reading all this out.

A. I am sorry, Mr Irving, but I do want to get quite straight what I am actually saying. I do not want the court to rely simply on your gloss on it.

Q. It is the question I am asking which you have to answer, I am afraid.

A. Yes, I am going to answer it.

Q. Do you agree that it is a well-financed campaign?

A. I am trying to -- can I just say what I say in the report, because that will make it much simpler to answer. In the preface to the English edition of the Leuchter report you wrote: "Nobody likes to be swindled, still less where considerable sums of money are involved". You go on to say: "Millions of honest, intelligent people have been duped by the well financed and brilliantly successful post war publicity campaign which followed on from the original

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ingenuous plan of the British Psychological Warfare Executive (PWE) in 1942 to spread to the world the propaganda story that the Germans were using 'gas chambers' to kill millions of Jews other 'undesirables'." I go on to say then that this is the typical Holocaust denier's argument that the "myth" of the Holocaust has been kept going by a "well-financed" campaign in order to legitimise the paying of German reparations to the State of Israel. Quite clearly, I do not accept that everyone who has written about the gas chambers in Auschwitz and elsewhere, and the Holocaust, the extermination of the Jews, has been financed in order to legitimise the paying of German reparations to the State of Israel. I think that is an appalling slur on the large numbers of decent and serious scholars who have devoted a large amount of their lives to doing this. I think it is a disgraceful remark.

Q. I must insist that you answer my questions briefly because I ask the questions and then I am the one who gets into trouble when you answer at such length.

A. Yes, Mr Irving, but your question did not make it clear what I was saying in my report. I felt it necessary to say what I was saying.

Q. Have you heard of the phrase "instrumentalisation of the Holocaust"?

A. I have certainly heard of that, yes.

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Q. Can you answer in two or three lines what you understand by the phrase "instrumentalisation of the Holocaust"?

A. It is an accusation sometimes levelled at people who make a reference to the Holocaust and are accused of doing so for ulterior motives.

Q. Is this the allegation that somebody like Norman Finkelstein makes?

MR JUSTICE GRAY: I do not really think that matters.

MR IRVING: Page 168, paragraph 50, line 3, those three dots, you agree, stand for 58 words, five commas, two full stops and a colon, is that right?

A. I think we have already been through this. I do not think that is right, actually.

MR JUSTICE GRAY: We are not going to count the full stops. Come on, Mr Irving. You have made your point about selective quotation.

MR IRVING: Page 51: This goes to the anti-Semitism element, I suppose, does it not?

A. Paragraph 51.

Q. Yes. I have made a speech in 1992 and you take exception to my description of the Board of Deputies, and the words that I use. Is any criticism of an organisation like that permissible, do you think?

A. I do think it is rather over the top to describe the Board of Deputies of British Jews as cockroaches.

Q. If you are familiar with the methods that they have used

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to try to destroy a professional historian's career and family, would that professional historian be entitled to use pretty colourful language to describe these people who are secretly trying to destroy him?

A. That is a very hypothetical question. I think what you are saying there is that the Board of Deputies of British Jews have been engaged in a secret campaign to try and destroy your livelihood.

Q. That is what I said. If the intention is to destroy an author and his family and his career and livelihood by underhand methods or by whatever methods, is he not entitled to defend himself and use occasional lurid language?

A. I would have to first of all see evidence to persuade me that such a secret dastardly campaign had been carried out. I do not want to answer a hypothetical question of that nature. I do think that professional historians should be reasonably measured in their language. I do not think that is an appropriate word to use.

Q. If the court is shown a document showing that at this precise time that body was contemplating putting pressure on that author's publisher to stop publishing his books and thereby destroy his career and livelihood, and they were doing it behind armour plated doors in their headquarters ----

MR JUSTICE GRAY: Show the witness the document and then we can

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see.

MR IRVING: May I do so, my Lord?

MR JUSTICE GRAY: Yes, of course.

MR IRVING: Would you go to bundle E?

A. I am not sure I have this.

MR JUSTICE GRAY: Bundle E. No, you may well not have.

MR IRVING: I am looking for the document. Page 82 in the bundle called Global.

A. This is a meeting on 12th December 1991, Education and Academic Committee?

Q. The Education and Academic Committee of the Holocaust Educational Trust. Can you read item No. 6 please?

A. "David Irving. Concern was voiced over the publication of the second edition of Hitler's War. There was debate over how to approach Macmillan publishers over Goebbels Diary. It was agreed await news from Jeremy Coleman before deciding what course of action to take".

Q. I am not going to go into the remaining documents in that bundle, Professor Evans, but, if I put it to you that this is evidence and that other documents will be submitted to court later on, the pressure that was put on my publishers by this body, which is part of the Board of Deputies, which was meeting at their headquarters, am I not entitled to use that kind of language to describe these people?

A. Well, to be quite honest, no. This is a meeting of five people, Mr Coleman, Professor Gould, Professor Polonski,

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Mr Nyman and Dr John Fox. It is not a meeting of the Board of Deputies of British Jews. Where it takes place I think is pretty immaterial. It says that there is a debate, but they agreed that they are not going to do anything. So I do not think that is justification for calling the Board of Deputies of British Jews cockroaches.

MR RAMPTON: What is more, there is another thing needs to be pointed out. That document, which is the first time I have seen, is dated 12th December 1991. It is predated therefore by some months by what Mr Irving said, which apparently was said on 5th October 1991.

MR IRVING: Are you ----

A. It post dates it?

MR RAMPTON: Yes. The document post dates the Irving statement about cockroaches.

A. You said predates.

MR RAMPTON: I am sorry.

MR IRVING: I do not want to hold up the court at this point, but will you accept that that bundle you are holding called Global is about three inches thick, and contains many hundreds of documents?

MR JUSTICE GRAY: That is not a terribly illuminating question.

MR IRVING: My Lord I do not really want to read through all the other documents.

A. It is not a very contentious statement.

MR JUSTICE GRAY: No, I am not asking you to. Anyway, I think

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we will move on. You have put that document.

MR IRVING: Precisely. Witness, will you accept that, on the balance of probabilities, there are other documents of that nature in that bundle?

MR JUSTICE GRAY: If I may say so, Mr Irving, we must do better than that.

MR IRVING: Mr Rampton has suggested that this was it, and so what.

MR JUSTICE GRAY: What it comes to is, if there was in existence a document prior to what you said about the British Board of Deputies being cockroaches, which you say justifies you having said that, then put it to the witness. If you have not got such a document, move on, please.

MR IRVING: I shall put it to the court in due course, my Lord, the whole bundle, as your Lordship is familiar. If an author is aware that such a campaign is being conducted against him by a body of whatever class or colour or race or religion, is he entitled to use lurid language in private?

MR JUSTICE GRAY: You have asked that question many times before and that is a comment. You have not established the factual premise for it, so can you move to the next topic, which means going beyond page 168.

MR IRVING: My Lord, you say I have not established a factual premise. To do that I would have to go back to the bundle

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and I do not want to do that at this point.

MR JUSTICE GRAY: In that case you cannot ask the question.

MR IRVING: The final five lines of that same paragraph: "In April 1998 Mr Irving spoke of American Jews 'moving into the same positions of predominance and influence'", and so on, that they held in the Weimar Republic. This is a quotation, is it not, from my diary in April 1998?

A. From your website. Published on your website.

Q. It is a quotation from my diary in 1998?

A. Published on your website. In other words, it is free to anybody to access, which is what we did.

Q. Have you had access to all my private diaries?

A. I did not need access to your private diaries to get hold of this quotation.

Q. Will you answer the question?

A. May I read the whole quotation first to establish what we are talking about?

Q. Just answer that question. Have you had access to my diaries?

A. I am sorry, I want to read the whole quotation to get clear what we are going to see, then I will answer your question.

Q. Will you answer the question first?

A. In April 1998 he spoke of American Jews moving into the same positions of predominance and influence..."

Q. My Lord, will you instruct the witness to answer questions

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put to him?

MR JUSTICE GRAY: I am despairing. Would you let the witness -- and then you can ask the question. Read it out please.

A. "In April 1998 he spoke of American Jews 'moving into the same positions of predominance and influence (media, banking, business, entertainment, and the more lucrative professions like law, medical and dentistry) that they held in Weimar Germany, which gave rise to the hatreds and the resulting pogroms; and that this being so, twenty or thirty more years might see in the USA the same dire consequences as happened in Nazi Germany". Extract from Irving's personal diary April 13, 14th 1998, on Irving's Focal Point website. The answer to your question is yes, I have had access to your personal diaries.

MR IRVING: Do you have any reason to suspect this is not a genuine diary, what is on my website?

A. I think it is as genuine as the Anne Frank diary, yes.

Q. I will repeat the question. Do you have any reason to believe that this is not a genuine diary extract?

MR JUSTICE GRAY: The answer is no.

A. The answer is no. I answered it.

MR IRVING: Will you go to page 88 of the bundle which is F? My Lord, the purpose of this is purely to point out, not words left out but surrounding material left out.

MR JUSTICE GRAY: Yes, context.

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MR IRVING: Is this the diary as reproduced on my website?

A. It looks like it, yes. I have downloaded on 15th February 2000.

Q. So it is a description of a lecture that I delivered to students at the University of Washington State in Pullman in 1998?

A. Yes, seems to be.

Q. The questions are the best part as usual, a German girl student a quiet well spoken 20 year old, the Federal Republic's equivalent of a Rhodes scholar. I carry on now to the next paragraph. The paragraph begins: Several coloured students are there mostly training to become teachers.

MR JUSTICE GRAY: This has nothing to do with the context of what Professor Evans quoted. It is completely irrelevant.

MR IRVING: They are bright and friendly.

MR JUSTICE GRAY: I have read it all. The context? This adds nothing and subtracts nothing. What is the point, Mr Irving? Why are we looking at this?

MR IRVING: I am putting this in connection with the allegation of racism.

MR JUSTICE GRAY: What, about several coloured students being present?

MR IRVING: "Several coloured students were there, mostly training to become teachers. They are bright and friendly".

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MR JUSTICE GRAY: I see. I thought we were looking at this for context of what Professor Evans quoted.

MR IRVING: I used the eye witness testimony of General Walter Bruns, which your Lordship is familiar with. I read out the whole of that document to these students, which goes to the Holocaust denial issue. This is a typical speech by me to university students who are a bright and friendly lot, and we have had just this one passage taken out of context when a Jewish Professor from the floor asked questions and I put to him my take on the present situation in the United States.

A. Well, I do think that that is completely irrelevant. If you want a little bit more, the context is: "One questioner addresses the issue that I had raised in discussing the Daniel Goldhagen thesis, that if I were a Jew I would want to see an answer to the vital question why the Jews are so hated within only a few years of their arrival in each host country. He points out that the Jews have now been in the United States in strength for 50 years yet they are not hated. I reply that, on the contrary, my own perception is that they are moving into the same positions", and so on and so forth. That is the context.

MR IRVING: That is the context, my Lord, and I think that that substantially softens what might be taken to be the sting of that passage left, as it is, in that rather bald and

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exposed position i