(10.30 a.m.) <

[Professor Evans, recalled.]

Cross-Examined by Mr Irving, continued.

MR JUSTICE GRAY: Mr Irving?

MR IRVING: May it please the court. My Lord, this morning I shall deal with the Reichskristallnacht, the Night of Broken Glass, and then, as a useful exercise, I will put before the witness a bundle of documents, which is the chain of documents referred to. We will go through that and invite his opinion on that as an expert on the various documents.

MR JUSTICE GRAY: Certainly.

MR IRVING: My Lord, we left the operation yesterday, we left the battlefield, so to speak, I had advanced about 250 pages into the minefield. There were a number of smoke screens which had been laid by the witness and others and by the documents, and I am now going to proceed through the smoke screen into Reichskristallnacht. But, first of all, I wanted to ask the witness briefly about page 210 of your expert report, which is a matter which will be covered by the documents later on, where you criticised the fact that ----

A. I am sorry, I have not brought this with me. I thought we were going to start with Kristallnacht. Can I have a copy?

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Q. I will just read it out, it is just one sentence.

A. No, I will have a copy, please.

Q. Let me put it to you. You say that my position on Hitler on all these issues is highly favourable to Hitler.

A. Yes.

Q. You criticise me for adopting positions on Adolf Hitler and his decisions that are sometimes favourable.

A. Could you point me to where I do that, please?

Q. On page 210 you say: "Irving's position on all these issues" -- this is paragraph 4.1.10 -- "is highly favourable to Hitler".

A. I am commenting in this section on the allegation by Professor Lipstadt that you are, I think, "an admirer of Hitler". I cannot exactly remember the precise words.

MR JUSTICE GRAY: That is one of them, yes.

MR IRVING: Which is why I am asking you to expand on this one sentence where you say that Irving adopts a position on all these issues, which we have been into before, which is highly favourable on Hitler, and I was asking you whether it is wrong for an historian at any time to say things that are favourable to Hitler.

A. If that goes against the evidence, yes.

Q. Does it not put me in precisely the same position as an historian like AJP Taylor, who, as you pointed out, is not a Professor, not an academic, but a very well-known perhaps even notorious writer before his death, and who

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was also very well-known for adopting positions where he came under criticism for having adopted positions which were also favourable to Hitler on certain points?

A. Well, of course, AJP Taylor was an academic. He was a Fellow and tutor in modern history at Magdalen College, Oxford for many years. Indeed, he was a Professor towards the end of his life in another university. He was heavily criticised. There was a long debate about that. He was not shown, to my knowledge, to have deliberately manipulated or falsified historical evidence in order to arrive at what was alleged to be. And what he denied to be. His position.

Q. But he did adopt positions that were on occasions favourable to Hitler, did he not?

A. If you can cite them to me?

Q. Here is a copy of AJP Taylor's very well-known book, 'Origins of the Second World War'. Can you turn to page 7, for example? He says there, for example, does he not: "Historians often dislike what happened or wished it had happened differently. There is nothing they can do about it. They have to state the truth as they see it without worrying whether this shocks or confirms existing prejudices." Is that a fair statement of the position of an historian?

A. Yes.

Q. He should write what he finds, what happened and why?

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A. Yes.

Q. Even if he is going to be accused of saying things that are favourable to Hitler or Stalin, or Churchill, or Roosevelt, he just should write what he finds. The fact that he writes something favourable to a great personality of history is not ipso facto perverse?

A. No. It depends how you arrive at that position, of course.

Q. Then there is another position I am accused of in my books, is there not, that by my books or by my writings I give comfort to people on the extreme right. Is that one of the allegations against me?

A. You would have to point that out. I do not think I comment on that in this section.

Q. On pages 8 to 9, does he also write: "I have no sympathy with those in this country who complain that my book had been welcomed, mistakenly or not, by former supporters of Hitler. This seems to me a disgraceful argument to be used against a work of history. The historian must not hesitate, even if his books lend aid or comfort to the Queen's enemies or even the common enemies of mankind".

A. Well, you did leave out a little about there. Let me read that last sentence again: "An historian must not hesitate, even if his books lend aid and comfort to the Queen's enemies though mine did not, or even to the common enemies of mankind". You did not indicate there to the

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court that you were leaving out those four words, "though mine did not".

Q. Then he continues: "It is not my fault that according to the record the Austrian crisis (that is 1938) was launched by Schuschnigg, not by Hitler, nor my fault that the British government, according to the record, and not Hitler took the lead in dismembering Czechoslovakia", and so on. In other words, he is just writing what he finds, even though it comes out in favour of Hitler?

A. He is writing what he has argued that he found, and of course there is a great deal of argument about this. But I do not think that he would have accepted, and it is very difficult, that he is favouring Hitler. "Destroying these legends is not a vindication of Hitler", he says.

Q. Then he also refers to specific episodes like the Reichstag fire and other controversial episodes in history where he claims the right to take a different line from that commonly or politically correctly adopted by historians up to that point. He says, if he does so, this is not necessarily to be taken as a vindication of Hitler, he is just doing his job as an historian.

A. That is right.

Q. In other words, I am not unique in my standpoint; there are other historians who accept, who on occasion find words of admiration for Adolf Hitler's military capacities, is that right?

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A. I really do not know. The point is, Mr Irving ----

Q. Professor Evans, you are holding yourself out to this court as an expert on the historiography of the Third Reich, and now you are saying you do not know if any historians----

A. I imagine there are. I am not a military historian, but I would accept that there are historians who have had words of praise for some of Hitler's military interventions, most certainly, yes, but it is not really what is at issue here in this case.

MR JUSTICE GRAY: I think that is right, Mr Irving, is it not? We are really not concerned with Hitler as a military figure. I think I am right in saying that all the criticism of you relates to your writings about his, for want of a better word, political persona, not his military persona.

MR IRVING: My Lord, I respectfully disagree. I think the allegation is that I have written a book that is an admiring work, a panegyric.

MR JUSTICE GRAY: Yes.

MR IRVING: And this encompasses the whole Hitler, not just the bits that the Defendants may wish to seize upon.

MR JUSTICE GRAY: I think it is right that they say you have written a book which admires Hitler, but the criticism, as I understand it, is of the way in which you write about his political activities, not his military activities.

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Mr Rampton, is that right as a very general summary, just so that we know where we stand?

MR RAMPTON: It may or may not be thought a good thing to write a book which has elements, perhaps significant elements, which are favourable to Hitler, but that has nothing to do with this action. What is said here is that this book is in large part an apology for Hitler, in particular those aspects of Hitler's thinking and actions which reflect upon what happened to Jews in Europe during Hitler's reign, if I can call it that. Allied to that, and indeed inseparable from it, is the criticism which is perhaps even more important, that this picture of Hitler which Mr Irving paints in his book is arrived at by bending and distorting the evidence.

MR IRVING: These are two separate issues. At present we are dealing solely with the issue with whether it is legitimate for a historian to write a book which is in part admiring of Adolf's Hitler capabilities in whichever field, and this was the burden of my opening remarks to the court. I thought as a general matter I would deal with that first.

MR JUSTICE GRAY: I do not think anyone is suggesting that the historian is not entitled to express admiration, if the facts and the evidence justify it. I think that is a historian's duty. I do not think anyone would doubt that.

MR IRVING: But your Lordship is familiar with the fact that,

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as soon as one utters the slightest positive word about "that man", as he used to be called in Tommy Handley's day, one then comes under the full guns of one's enemies, who say, there he is saying that he did the right thing in the battle of France, or there he is saying that he did the right thing over Czechoslovakia. There are different opinions. Some historians take this point of view, some historians take that point of view, and AJP Taylor is just one example I wanted to present because he is so well known. No-one has suggested that he did so for any perverse reasons, or at any rate they no longer do so, and whether the reasons were perverse, or whether I distorted or manipulated is the second part of the argument with which we are now occupying the court. We will now turn to the Reichskristallnacht, please. I am going to ask you a few general questions, first, Professor, if I may.

A. Sorry, I am just trying to keep my desk a bit clear.

Q. Housekeeping, yes. Your researchers who were doing the research for you, and possibly even you yourself, made use of or looked into my files and the research that I had done when I wrote my various books from the 1970s onwards. Is that correct?

A. That is correct, yes.

Q. You looked in my files, in my collection, the Irving collection, in the Institute of History in Munich, is that right?

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A. Yes.

Q. Did you look in the equivalent collections which are in the Federal archives in Koblenz?

A. I believe we did, yes.

Q. Did you also look not just at the collections of documents which were in Munich but also at the collections of correspondence that I had donated to the Institute of History in Munich between myself and, for example, Adolf Hitler's private staff?

A. I think we did, yes. We looked at as much as we could find in the time available.

Q. The time available was 18 months, is that right?

A. To write the whole report, yes, of which this is only one chapter.

Q. You had a large number of people, or relatively large number of people, working on your staff?

A. Two.

Q. It was probably several man years.

A. Two. I had two people, Mr Irving.

Q. Again, it was several man years in the compilation of these particular aspects?

A. Well, not really, no, because everybody of course had other things to do at the same time. None of us was working full time on this.

Q. Yes. Do you think that any documents in my collection would have eluded your attention, or your researchers'

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attention?

A. I hope not, but it is always possible.

Q. It is always possible. So, although it is possible that some of my documents on which I base my book may have eluded your attention, you quite boldly used these very repugnant words about my writing, about having distorted, manipulated and had no possible evidence, and this kind of thing?

A. If you can show me that there are important documents in your collections which run against what I have said, then obviously I will accept it. I said I hoped that important documents did not elude our attention, and I have based what I say here and what I write here on the most thorough possible research in the time available.

Q. On balance, you disapprove of my method of relying to any great degree on the statements made either to me or to post-war investigators and historians and interrogators by the members of Adolf Hitler's private staff, is that correct?

A. We have been over this ground, Mr Irving.

Q. Well, let us go through it again.

A. This is later testimony, sometimes given many years after the event, and therefore has to be treated with caution on those grounds alone. Other things being equal, as it were, one gives somewhat greater weight to contemporary evidence such as the Goebbels diaries. And, in addition

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of course, we have already discussed this, members of Hitler's entourage had good reason not to tell the whole truth.

Q. You say that you attach great importance to Goebbels' diaries. Would you look at footnote 2 on page 233 of your report, please? You list there a number of these books that are on your shelves in your book lined cave where you do your writing, if I can put like that. Do any those books show any sign of having used the Goebbels diaries?

A. I do not think that is a very fair question, Mr Irving. The point here is simply that I am introducing the section on the Reichskristallnacht. I say in sentence to which that is a footnote: "The episode is well-known to historians. There have been many important and scholarly studies based on a painstaking examination of the original archival documentation. These include two accounts by staff members of the Institut fur Zeitgeschichte in Munich and other detailed studies", and so on. This is simply an indication to the court of the fact that this is a well-known episode about which historians are writing.

Q. Do you accept that every single item you refer to on that page, including all the books and all the well-known studies, and the work of historians at the institute, all emerged before I brought back the Goebbels diaries from Moscow relating to precisely this episode? Therefore they are, to that degree, superseded, they are old hat?

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A. I would not describe them as old hat, Mr Irving, and in any case the point I am making there is that this has been the subject of many studies over many years. This is not something that has suddenly emerged into our knowledge with the Goebbels diaries.

Q. Now, you have relied in your footnote 1 on Hermann Graml (whom I know personally). He wrote that book in 1956, did he not?

A. Indeed, yes, that is right.

Q. Are you aware of the fact that I submitted my entire chapter on this Reichskristallnacht to Hermann Graml for his, not clearance, but for his edification and for him to comment on at the time I wrote the book?

A. No, I am not, no.

Q. But would you have expected to find that in the correspondence put before you in the discovery process?

A. I did not, no. If it is there, it is there. You can show it to me.

Q. Again the second source in footnote 1 is 1957 which is, what, 33 years old?

A. Indeed. I am trying to establish here, Mr Irving, the fact that this is a well-known episode in history which has been studied over many years by many historians. I am not saying that all these books are absolutely right or that they are the last word or that they are up-to-date. I am saying they are works by scholars which in their day,

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if you like, were advances of knowledge.

Q. And these scholars have nothing to learn from us revisionists then?

A. It depends what you mean by "revisionists".

Q. If somebody brought back from Moscow the Goebbels' diaries, would that not be a contribution to the historical debate?

A. That is something different. You do not have to be a revisionist to bring back the Goebbels diaries from Moscow.

MR JUSTICE GRAY: Mr Irving, I expect you will come shortly, will you not, to what it is in Goebbels diaries that you say casts important light on the events of Reichskristallnacht?

MR IRVING: I am laying the groundwork for the cross-examination, my Lord. I am establishing what this expert's credentials are for this particular matter. Professor Evans, you have worked for five years in Germany?

A. On and off over a period of about 30 years, yes, if you totted up all the times I had been there, I have not done it, but it would come to, I do not know, five, six years. It is difficult to say.

Q. But do you think that your knowledge of German is sufficient to understand all the vernacular and all the slang phrases and all the nuances?

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A. Mostly, yes. I would not say it was absolutely perfect. It is impossible for any foreigner to enter totally 100 per cent into the inside of a language.

Q. Would you say that I having worked in Germany for 39 years on and off would have possibly a better knowledge of German than yourself?

A. It is possible and I do not dispute the fact you have a very good knowledge indeed of German, Mr Irving.

Q. Is it right that the sources that you have relied upon by way of preference are largely war criminals who were properly convicted at Nuremberg and elsewhere for their activities, whereas not one of Adolf Hitler's personal private staff was ever convicted as a war criminal?

A. No, I do not think that is true.

Q. Which part is not true, that not one of Adolf Hitler's staff ----

A. No, no. The fact that I have relied on these sources and in any case that -- I mean, relied, for example, on the Goebbels' diaries.

Q. Was Karl Wolff a war criminal?

A. He was sentenced in 1964.

Q. Was Max Jüttner a war criminal?

A. Now, I am not sure, but in any case the point here ----

Q. I am just commenting on the odd feature that you rely on Nazi war criminals and ----

A. You will have to point out to me, Mr Irving, where I rely

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on the testimony of Max Jüttner, and so on.

MR JUSTICE GRAY: I think, if I may say so, that is an entirely fair observation. I quite understand the criticism. You are saying he has relied on convicted criminals for ----

MR IRVING: In preference to people who have not got a criminal record.

MR JUSTICE GRAY: --- his contentions. But let us get to the nitty-gritty of it. I think that is what the witness is saying and I think it is a fair point, if I may say so, Mr Irving. Where does he rely on Wolff?

MR IRVING: It is a comment on the quality of sources, my Lord, and the quality of sources is very important, particularly in a matter like this.

MR JUSTICE GRAY: I quite agree, but this point only has any impact if you show me where he relies on Wolff or whoever ----

MR IRVING: It is where I rely on rather than where he relies on, my Lord, which we are now going to come to. Would you look at the little bundle of documents which was handed to you this morning which begins with the word "Deckblatt", "Sammlung Irving Deckblatt", do you find that?

A. Yes.

Q. If you would just briefly scan it you, would you agree that this appears to be the covering sheet of a file of documents relating to one Wilhelm Brückner?

A. That is right.

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Q. Do you know who Wilhelm Brückner was?

A. He was the head of Hitler's, a sort of personal or Adjutantur in the 1930s.

Q. He was dismissed in ----

A. '40.

Q. --- humiliating circumstances in December 1940, is that correct?

A. Yes. He was also a senior officer of the SA, the brown shirts, and he was an old Nazi -- he seems to have been already active before 1923.

Q. Yes. So that he was Hitler's chief person adjutant at the material time, namely the Reichskristallnacht?

A. That is right.

Q. In November 1938?

A. Yes.

Q. From this covering sheet, it is evidence that I collected a number of papers and manuscripts and affidavits and letters from him?

A. That is right.

Q. In fact, this collection was obtained by me from his son, Manfred, in March 1971 and, as was my way, I denoted all these documents to the Institute of History in Munich?

A. Yes.

Q. Did you find this file of documents?

A. Now, what we found was a summary of a statement by, I mean, you are referring here to page 252 of my report,

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is that correct?

Q. I am asking you just about this one document in front of you at present about the Irving collection?

A. Well, yes, but Brückner is dealt with on page 252 of my report, and I think we should really look at that to get the context.

Q. No, I am asking you to answer my questions first please which is ----

A. I am trying to point out the context here.

Q. --- have you bothered to find the Brückner papers on which I relied in writing this passage?

A. Well, now, we tried to chase up a reference of yours which was very difficult to find in the Institute for Contemporary History, and the only thing that we could find, because you did not point very carefully to it, was a summary statement of what Brückner said.

Q. So the answer to my question is, no, you did not find the file of Wilhelm Brückner papers of which this was the covering sheet?

A. This "Deckblatt" here.

Q. Yes, but this covering sheet was actually brought to your attention, was it not? It was part of my discovery along with 500 other such covering sheets?

A. It is just a covering sheet, Mr Irving.

Q. Yes, but in the discovery there were 500 such covering sheets, there were 500 collections of documents that

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I gave to the Institute of History, and this was one of them, and it was copied by the instructing solicitors so you were aware that this file on Wilhelm Brückner existed in the Institute and yet you did not find it or use it?

A. Well, what does it say? Let us have a look at the description under No. 1: "Brief description" -- I am translating here [German- documents not provided]. "Documents from the"...

Q. "Wilhelm Brückner papers"?

A. "Papers of Wilhelm Brückner, herein [German] ----

Q. In other words ----

A. "Declaration on oath 3749 on [German] SA on Adolf Hitler. Notice notes on the [German] Putsch 1934. General religious considerations and" ----

Q. "Clemency" ----

A. --- "clemency" ----

Q. --- "application"?

A. --- "Application for clemency or pardon". So there is no indication here that there is anything in here that has anything to do with the Reichskristallnacht. That is why it does not appear.

Q. So his manuscript on Adolf Hitler would not contain that matter than?

A. It is not a manuscript from Adolf Hitler.

Q. It is a manuscript on Adolf Hitler.

A. It is an essay on Adolf Hitler.

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Q. Yes. If I reference that in my source notes of several books, then you would have normally gone to some trouble to find that particular file, as you obviously had privileged access to my papers which I no longer have, of course, but you had access to these papers?

A. Not privileged, no. Could you point out to me where you cite this document, please?

Q. It is referenced in several parts in the Goebbels' biography, is it not?

A. Could you point out where you reference it, please?

Q. We are back to delaying tactics again, are we?

A. No, I want to see where you reference it.

MR JUSTICE GRAY: It is not a delaying tactic. I think it is a fair point, Mr Irving. I mean, if you want to spend a lot of time on this particular document, which I am not finding very helpful, then I think that is a fair observation for the witness to make.

MR IRVING: Can I draw your attention to page 252 of your expert report on line 5, which is line 3 of paragraph 3?

A. Yes.

Q. "The evidence offered by Irving for the encounter between Eberstein and Hitler" which you will agree is quite a crucial encounter, is it not?

A. In your account, yes.

Q. "The evidence offered by Irving for this is the testimony of Wilhelm Brückner". My Lord, do you now understand why

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I am zeroing in on this particular collection of documents which the witness has made no attempt to find?

MR JUSTICE GRAY: No, I have not the faintest idea, no. I really have not.

MR IRVING: My Lord, your Lordship is familiar with the meeting between Hitler and the Police Chief of Munich in the middle of the night on the night in question?

MR JUSTICE GRAY: Yes, I am.

MR IRVING: And one source for that meeting was the papers of Wilhelm Brückner which is the papers which I donated ----

MR JUSTICE GRAY: You cite that, do you, in Goebbels?

MR IRVING: Which are the papers which I donated, well, the reference in Goebbels is page 277.

MR JUSTICE GRAY: Yes. I am just looking at the footnotes at 277.

A. Could I have a copy, please ----

Q. Footnote 45 is what you are referring to, is it?

A. --- of what we are talking about here?

MR JUSTICE GRAY: 630.

MR RAMPTON: It says: "Testimony of Wilhelm Brückner (IfZ, Irving collection)".

MR IRVING: That should be plain enough, should it not.

A. No.

Q. Is the IfZ the Institute of History in Munich?

A. Yes.

Q. But is the Irving collection a well-known body of

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documents there under the designation Ed200 or Ed100?

A. Sorry, let me please just check this. Page 277 at footnote 45.

MR RAMPTON: Page 613.

A. 613.

MR IRVING: This is going to take a long time if we have to go into this.

MR JUSTICE GRAY: Well, we started it back to front, if I may say so, Mr Irving. If we are going to go on this like this, I think I will make this observation to you. There is a criticism made of your account, particularly in relation to Hitler's knowledge of the pogrom that broke out during the course of whenever it was, 10th November, I think. It would be helpful to me if you went to the passage in Goebbels which is the subject of the criticism, then went to what you say is the source for what you write. As it is, we plunged into an extremely obscure document called the Deckblatt without any indication of where you were going; the result was I was not following your cross-examination.

MR IRVING: I apologise, my Lord ----

MR JUSTICE GRAY: Do you see my point?

MR IRVING: --- if I am not making myself plain. The reason for this particular reason line of cross-examination is I am trying to establish the repugnant allegations made about me for having made statements in my books with no

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kind of foundation is the result of these expert witnesses not having looked in the file which I actual reference in the book.

MR JUSTICE GRAY: Yes, but I do not think you are quite understanding what I am saying.

A. It would have been helpful I think if in your cross-examination you had gone to page 277 and shown me the passage that you are seeking to justify, namely sending for the police chief, Eberstein, and Eberstein finding Hitler livid with rage, and phoning Goebbels, saying what is going on, and then you can of course take me to what Brückner says about it, what Eberstein says about it, and we can see where we go from there. Is that not the right way of doing it?

MR IRVING: In this case unfortunately not, because your Lordship will have caught the words that I used when I said that the expert witnesses have access to these papers of mine but I do not. I am disbarred from visiting my own archives, my own collection. I am drawing to their attention----

MR JUSTICE GRAY: You can give evidence. All right, you are not able to produce in disclosure Brückner's account of these events, but you can put to Professor Evans what you say Brückner's account reveals, can you not?

MR IRVING: That is the version sustained in my book, which is probably footnoted and referenced back to this document

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which I had at the time I wrote the original manuscripts of Adolf Hitler and Hitler's War, which I no longer have. It is quite plain that the Defence solicitors in this action were aware of the Brückner collection in Munich and yet they did not use it. They are quite happy to allege that I have had no foundation for this statement of mine, and there are other documents to which I am going draw your Lordship's attention.

MR JUSTICE GRAY: This is all back to front. It is not a question of whether the Defendants' advisers have been diligent about it. It is a question of you showing, by your cross-examination of Professor Evans, that he is wrong to criticise you for what you write at page 277, because you have good reliable testimony to support it. That is what you should be putting in cross-examination. I am sorry to sound as if I am lecturing you, but it is very important that you conduct the cross-examination in a way that conveys to me ----

MR IRVING: I am doing the very best I can given the limited circumstances that the Defence have access to my documents which I do not have.

MR JUSTICE GRAY: Are you suggesting that they are physically in court, these memoirs of Brückner?

MR RAMPTON: No. Can I help?

MR JUSTICE GRAY: Yes. Otherwise I am completely lost.

MR RAMPTON: I think the position is this. Mr Irving is rather

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rushing his fences this morning. I understand what he is saying, I think. The position is this, that they are in the Munich archive.

MR JUSTICE GRAY: I follow that.

MR RAMPTON: He cannot go there. My people went there and could not find it. Professor Evans does not know that, I do not think, because he did not go himself. One of the researchers went.

A. I am sorry, I do know that.

MR RAMPTON: He does know that? I must not give his evidence then. I am sorry, it is there already.

MR JUSTICE GRAY: But none of that invalidates what I was suggesting. I am not suggesting it, I think it must be done that way. Otherwise this is meaningless for me.

MR IRVING: We have two more documents which will answer your Lordship's question straightaway.

A. Let me say the footnote reference to testimony of Wilhelm Brückner I have said Irving collection. It is really not very helpful in trying to locate a document. When you look at Sammlung Irving Deckblatt, it does not contain anything that is entitled testimony of Wilhelm Brückner. It just contains the things that I read out. It does not indicate that there is anything in here giving his testimony about the events of the Reichskristallnacht.

MR IRVING: Two follow up questions, however. The fact is that you did not look, or you did not find it, for the Brückner

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file, is that correct?

A. Those are two different things, Mr Irving.

Q. You did not find the Brückner file, is that correct?

A. We looked very very hard.

Q. Yes or no? Did you find the Brückner file?

A. You mean this Sammlung Irving with the Deckblatt and so on document? We could not locate the testimony which you refer to, no.

Q. Should you not therefore have said in your report, it is quite possible that this document contained in this file would have borne out Mr Irving's version but we cannot state, not having seen it?

A. Well I will read the you the sentences: "Irving only provide an incomplete reference for Brückner's testimony, which could not be located in the Institute for Contemporary History in Munich". That is very carefully phrased. That not mean to say it is not there. It is just to say that we could not locate it there. It goes on to say: "The only document which could be located was a summary of a statement of Brückner, written by a German historian. According to this summary, Brückner claimed that Hitler 'is said to have raged' when he is informed of the burning Munich synagogue". So that does appear to be the source which you are relying on. If you can show me it is a different source you are relying on, I would be happy to see that.

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Q. Is that document that you just referred to a part of the Irving collection?

A. It is.

Q. It is part of their ZS collection?

A. It is in the Siegler -- it is footnoted in footnote 39.

Q. Let us move on to another personality now?

A. I do not think it is.

MR JUSTICE GRAY: I am going to pursue this, if I may. I am sorry to interrupt again but I think this is quite important. Professor Evans, you are in the difficulty you did not personally search the archive.

A. Exactly yes.

Q. Can you help and say if this is any problem about doing so? Who was it who went to Munich?

A. It was my assistant Mr Wachsmann.

Q. Tell me more about him. Is he in your department?

A. He is a junior research fellow in Downing College, Cambridge.

Q. Never having had to consult an archive in my entire life, I do not know how difficult it is to do a search. I have to form some sort of view about how easy the testimony of Brückner should have been to find. I have no idea.

A. Yes. This is getting very convoluted, my Lord. Archives have file numbers, core numbers, so everything has a number and here we cite in footnote 39, that is the core number that I have said is in the Institute of

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Contemporary History in Munich, Zs-243/I. Basically it is a kind of interview. They did a series of interviews in the Institute after the war. Footnote 38 gives a numbered film, which is an interview or interrogation really, of Wilhelm Brückner in 1947, statement by Schaub, so they all have those core numbers. It is normal practice by historians to put the core numbers in their footnotes, not just to have some vague reference to testimony, which makes it very difficult to locate what one is trying to find. Then archives have descriptions, both in what are called location aids or search aids, which are usually typed up and only available in the archive, and those have numbers of the files and rough descriptions of what is in then. So you can see in this document here Sammlung Irving Deckblatt, that is start a rough description, brief description, of what is in the file. These are all done by archivists. You can go on. It says who is the author and then who is allowed and who is not, whose permission has to be given to see the files.

MR JUSTICE GRAY: If you had been your researcher and you had seen the Kurzbezeichnung, which, if any, of those would you have gone to if you were looking for Brückner's account of these events?

A. It does not say the testimony of Wilhelm Brückner, which is the tile the Mr Irving gives. There is nothing in

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there indicating that there is anything about the 1938 Reichskristallnacht.

Q. So you say the answer is really none of them suggests that it would have any bearing?

A. No. In the limited time available, it might be interesting to see his views on religion, or his essay on Adolf Hitler, but there is nothing there to indicate that he has a testimony about 1938. But there is an indication in there of his testimony about other specific events, the Hanfstaengel the Rowan Putsch 1934. Given the fact that those specific references are in there, one would expect there to be a specific reference in there to his testimony about 1938.

MR JUSTICE GRAY: One more question and then I will keep quiet. Who compiles the Kurzbezeichnung?

A. It is usually archivists, my Lord.

Q. It would not have been Mr Irving?

MR IRVING: No, my Lord. In fact, this particular cover sheet was compiled by me. I gave 500 collection of documents to this institute and for each one there was this sheet in the front of each file. The Brückner file is about quarter of an inch thick. It would have taken possibly five minutes to flip through and find the appropriate passage.

MR JUSTICE GRAY: We may need to hear from the person who actually searched the archive. Yes.

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MR IRVING: The point I am making, my Lord, is that I am accused of not having had proper sources for the events of that night. The sources were there, they were referenced in my Goebbels biography in a manner in which any competent researcher would have found the file in a matter of minutes.

A. I cannot agree with that, Mr Irving.

Q. Can you tell the court now -- I am moving on to another personality -- who Julius Schaub was?

A. Yes. He was sort of Hitler's ----

Q. Factotum?

A. Yes, side kick. It is difficult to find a precise way of describing him. He was a very close aid of Hitler's for very many years.

Q. An amanuensis, one of the old guard, with him in the 1923 Putsch?

A. Yes. He joined the party very early on in 1921 or 22, personal adjutant from the mid 20s on, and again he was given a senior office in the SS and possessed various decorations and so on.

Q. Look at page 257 of your report, please, where we are dealing with the Schaub as a source, the source which Irving gives for Schaub's claims is: Schaub's unpublished memoirs in the author's collection in the Institute of History in Munich, file ED.100/202. ED.100 is the Irving collection, is that right?

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A. I think that is true, yes.

Q. Oblique stroke 202. They have now changed the reference, you say, to 203. Can I draw your attention to page 26 of the little bundle I gave you?

A. Indeed, yes.

Q. This I think will put your Lordship's mined at rest. This is the reason I am going through these documents. Is that a translation of a passage from these Julius Schaub papers?

A. I find myself in some difficulty here. I do not know, is the answer.

MR JUSTICE GRAY: You made this translation, Mr Irving, did you?

MR IRVING: I made it last night, my Lord, yes.

MR JUSTICE GRAY: You have access then to Julius Schaub's papers? I thought they were in the archive in Munich.

MR IRVING: I am pretty certain that this comes from -- yes, it comes from the discovery. There was one page in the discovery from these papers I think. Off of the top of my head I have to say that, but this is a genuine translation.

A. You have not supplied the original.

Q. It is in H 5?

MR RAMPTON: I do not know what particular document Mr Irving is talking about or which it is that he has translated. There is a piece about Goebbels apparently headed Schaub

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Nachlass, whatever that means, at page 4 of tab 5 of the file L2, the Reichskristallnacht.

MR IRVING: Yes, my Lord, that is where it comes from.

MR RAMPTON: Which is the reference given by Professor Evans at page 257.

MR IRVING: It was quite late when I did this translation last night.

MR JUSTICE GRAY: I am sure. I am not forgetting that side of things.

A. Yes, I have it.

MR RAMPTON: Page 4 of tab 5 my Lord. It is leaded IfZ ED 100/203.

A. Yes.

MR IRVING: If I had provided just the German to your Lordship, you would have rightly reprimanded me.

MR JUSTICE GRAY: The witness asked to see the German, which is fair enough. I am very happy with the translation.

MR IRVING: If the witness wishes to challenge the translation, then of course he may. "Without doubt Goebbels had the biggest influence on AH"?

A. Can you direct me to where exactly it is?

MR RAMPTON: Page 5, last paragraph.

MR IRVING: I have translated only the passage dealing with the events of that night. "Without doubt Goebbels had the biggest influence on AH, far more so than Bormann, he invented the concept Führer for AH and he hammered the

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Führer principle into the people. Goebbels always discussed his propaganda with Hitler, even during the war". The part I am relying on is a sentence or two later: "It is a certainty that Goebbels ordained the Reichskristallnacht Sunday".

A. You skipped a bit. All right, yes.

Q. "It is a certainty that Goebbels ordained the Reichskristallnacht Sunday with the SA command". Of course it was not a Sunday, was it? It was another day of the week. Then comes no doubt Schaub's own particular hobby horse. He says, "The SS was innocent of this, apart from a few lesser officers. When AH learned on that Sunday of the anti-Semitic outrages, he was furious with Goebbels. He made a frightful scene with Goebbels and told him that this kind of propaganda was just damaging".

A. Yes.

Q. Now, this is a source that you would disqualify for some reason, or downgrade?

A. Yes.

Q. Would you disqualify it because of its content, because it does not agree with your own views, or because of something about Schaub, or something about the document?

A. It is a number of different things. I think he is just making this up, basically.

Q. You think he is just making it up?

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A. Indeed, yes. There is an enormous amount of other evidence, contemporary evidence, and not much later evidence such as this, that most of what he says here is not true, and that I go into in great length in my report.

Q. First of all, you do accept that this document is genuine, that this is a collection of papers given to me by the son of Schaub Mr Roland Schaub, containing an odd collection of manuscripts and notes, articles, carbon copies and the like?

A. Indeed. I describe it on footnote 54 of my page 257.

Q. You have actually had a look at the heap of papers, have you?

A. Yes. It is cited in the report on page 257.

Q. Yes, but the point I am looking at is of course that here we have a man who was on Adolf Hitler's private staff, his chief adjutant, and factotum, who says he was an eyewitness, or he reports to us that, when Hitler learned of the outrages, he was furious with Goebbels, he made a frightful scene. Should I have disregarded that evidence completely?

A. No. You weigh it up against other evidence and against Schaub's possible motives in writing this, and the fact that, as you say repeatedly, eyewitness testimony after the war is less reliable than contemporary testimony. This is another example of your double standards, Mr Irving.

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Q. Double standards?

A. Yes. You are determined to give credence to this report but you dismiss all reports of victims of the Holocaust as being fabrications due to mass hysteria, as we heard yesterday.

Q. Which of us has the double standard? The person who pretends that this report and the contents that it contains should be in some way played down for no reason other than you do not like it? You cannot give a real reason why. You cannot say Schaub was a congenital liar?

A. You have already said that he was wrong to say that it was on a Sunday, Mr Irving.

Q. He got the wrong day of the week but this is a mistake any of us can make. No doubt it stuck in his mind.

A. Not if he is an utterly reliable eyewitness who has total recall of what went on. That alone I think should alert one to the fact that his memory is not particularly good. Then you yourself went on to discredit, or cast doubt over his statement that the SS was completely without any guilt. No doubt that is connected with the fact that Schaub himself was a senior officer in the SS. This is an extremely self serving document. One has to regard it with the deepest suspicion and compare it with other documents, preferably contemporary ones dealing with the same events.

Q. Do we have any contemporary records of what went on in

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Adolf Hitler's private residence, any contemporary records whatsoever of went on in his private residence?

A. Not directly, no.

Q. So we are really then on our uppers, are we not?

A. We are comparing a lost of post war reminiscences and we have to be very careful in treading through this particular minefield of documents.

Q. So ideally we want to have more than just one source that says the same thing?

A. Whole range of sources, indeed.

Q. How many would you accept? Two sources?

A. I am not going to put a number on it, Mr Irving.

Q. But, if we have another source that says the same thing, then we are getting convergences of evidence beginning to kick in, are we?

A. Well, it is a problem with the evidence of Hitler's entourage, that they of course had a major incentive after the war for trying to exculpate them for involvement in a number of crimes such as the Reichskristallnacht. They also seem to have been a fairly close knit group who had the opportunity to discuss their line, as it were, amongst themselves, so I think one has to be very cautious.

Q. Any common sense historian would adopt that line, that is correct. But, if we ignore for a moment the main trend of these statements, and I am going to introduce another one to you in a moment, and we look for the little bits of

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verisimilitude which tend to support the main trend, for example he was livid with rage and he shouted at Goebbels, those kinds of things which appear to figure in several of the statements or certainly more than one, then the convergence of evidence then becomes more convincing. Would you agree?

A. No, not necessarily. This might have been a story they cooked up.

Q. Can we now turn to a third witness?

A. The sentence you are relying on here claiming such a tremendous piece of evidence is-- I will quote it: "As AH on this Sunday" -- we know it was not a Sunday.

Q. Do you attach much important to the fact he got the day of the week wrong?

MR JUSTICE GRAY: I do not.

A. Yes. It is pretty easy to remember. "As AH heard on that Sunday about the anti-Semitic excesses, he was angry with Goebbels". It does not seem to me to be very circumstantial.

MR IRVING: He was furious with Goebbels. You are changing the words.

A. It is angry, very angry, furious, yes.

Q. He made a frightful scene, did he not?

A. Yes.

Q. Told him that this kind of propaganda was just damaging.

A. Yes. Mr Irving, I do not know how much detail I ought to

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go into here, but there is an enormous amount of evidence which is laid out in my report and which was gone over in your cross-examination ----

MR IRVING: But not of the events in your----

MR JUSTICE GRAY: Do not keep talking over the witness.

A. -- about Hitler's responsibilities for these events.

MR IRVING: We are not talking about that at this point.

A. You know that, and accepted that what Goebbels said in his speech to the party assembly at between about 10 o'clock at night on 9th November that (I quote) on Goebbels' briefing the Führer has decided that such demonstrations should not be quelled. That is contemporary evidence, Mr Irving.

Q. I really have to halt you here because this is a totally different matter.

MR JUSTICE GRAY: Please do not interrupt, Mr Irving.

A. That is contemporary evidence that Hitler had decided that these excesses should continue, they should continue to burn synagogues and destroy the dwellings and shops of the Jews. It seems reasonable to suppose that, if Hitler had been angry and had not approved of this, if Goebbels was making this up, then the consequences for Goebbels would have been extremely serious. I cannot imagine that Goebbels would have said that to a mass assembly of senior party officials if that was not true. Indeed, you have accepted that what Goebbels said in his speech was what

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Hitler told him at the dinner. You have also accepted that, when Heinrich Müller telexed the police, ordering them again not to interfere in the excesses, the burnings and the destruction, and to arrest 20,000 Jews at 11.55 p.m., that is an order that came from Himmler to Müller, from Himmler who had had it from Hitler, i.e. that Hitler's order was the source of this Müller telegram.

MR IRVING: Can we now halt your flow of verbiage and get back to the point I am asking about?

A. We have a whole series of contemporary----

MR JUSTICE GRAY: I am finding this extremely helpful and please will you stop interrupting.

MR IRVING: This is not the point I am asking about. I am asking about the events in Hitler's home.

A. We have a whole series of contemporary documents going on to the telex from Heydrich, to the German police again saying they are not to interfere unless German property is threatened or foreigners are threatened at 1.20 a.m., again which Mr Irving has admitted under cross-examination was a result of Hitler and Himmler having discussed this issue. So right through the night -- and this goes on. There is a whole string of further documents, a telegram from Eberstein, a telegram from Hess at 2.56, which indicate all the way through that Hitler was fully apprised of the situation, right from the very beginning, that he approved of Goebbels' idea and ordered that these

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excesses should be carried out. These are contemporary documents and therefore they undermine wholly the credibility of post-war ex post facto self-serving justifications by members of Hitler's entourage who were heavily involved in these events, that Hitler somehow did not know about it, and got very angry when he heard about it.

MR IRVING: Are you saying ----

A. We know from Goebbels' diary, as I quote on pages 257 to 8, that Schaub himself was involved. Schaub is completely worked up, says Goebbels, his old shock troop past is waking up. So Schaub himself was heavily involved. Obviously, all these things are things that Schaub does not really want to admit after the war.

MR JUSTICE GRAY: That was a very long answer but what are you really saying -- and this is condensing it absurdly -- is that, when you are approaching the testimony of the Adjutants, you have to weigh what they say happened against the whole background and consider the likelihoods?

A. Yes. It is not a question of dismissing them totally.

Q. No. I said "weigh against".

A. But you have to weigh them up, yes, and particularly the circumstances in which these statements were made after the war.

MR JUSTICE GRAY: Yes.

MR IRVING: My Lord, with respect this witness has laid a

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terrible choking suffocating smoke screen across the courtroom and across the points that I was trying to arrive at.

MR JUSTICE GRAY: Mr Irving, let me explain why I think it is helpful. You say, and I quite understand, and I think there are three of them, Schaub, Eberstein and Brückner , as supporting evidence for Hitler's angry reaction in the middle of the night. Now, they may be right, they may be wrong. What Professor Evans was doing, and it was a long answer, was summarising all the considerations that should weigh with an objective historian in deciding whether to attach credence to what the individual witnesses say. Now, what is wrong with that?

MR IRVING: With respect, I should have been permitted to conduct the cross-examination my way, which would have been to go over those documents, having dealt with this central issue, and then looked at those documents which were prior to that.

MR JUSTICE GRAY: Well, I am afraid I see nothing wrong with that answer and I tried to explain why I found it helpful.

MR IRVING: Well, we have had all of that. The whole of that little speech -- little is not the right word -- we have had several times in this courtroom. What I am introducing here is material going to the issue, which is whether I had no basis for writing what I did.

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Unfortunately, the witness, by his smoke screen, has interrupted my cross-examination.

MR JUSTICE GRAY: No. What the witness was saying was yes, you have records of what these Adjutants told you, but you were in dereliction of your duty as a historian in forgetting to weigh that evidence against the background, the context.

MR IRVING: Should he not have waited until he heard the third witness and then started off with his little speech?

MR JUSTICE GRAY: Go on with your third witness.

MR IRVING: Yes. Would you now turn finally, preferably without five-minute speeches, to the translation of the tape recorded interview of Colonel Nicholas von Below?

A. Could you point me to the original German, please?

Q. The original German is here. Am I right in saying -- I am trying to save time now -- that Colonel Nicholas von Below was Hitler's air force adjutant from 1937 until the last day of his life?

A. Yes.

Q. He was an air force professional officer?

A. The last day of whose life, Hitler's life, you mean?

Q. I beg your pardon?

A. Last day of Hitler's life?

Q. Yes. He was a professional German air force officer, he was not a Nazi Party member, is that correct?

A. I think that is right, yes.

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Q. On this occasion, on this night, he was in Hitler's home?

A. Yes.

Q. In Munich?

A. Yes.

Q. Is he a source whose recollections have been rightly impugned on any other occasion, to your knowledge, of any other historical event?

A. My memory fails me here, Mr Irving. They are a source of variable quality but it is a valuable source.

Q. Professor, you have held yourself out to this court as an expert witness on the Third Reich. You have spent 18 month in investigating these sources in particular, and I am just asking you if you have any impression about colonel von Below?

A. I think Colonel von Below gave a number of different testimonies, parts of which are valuable and parts of which are not so valuable, is that enough?

Q. Is right that in general you are inclined to criticise my interview technique and suggest that I may have asked leading questions, or in some way browbeaten my Nazi sources?

A. Where do I use the word "browbeating".

Q. You know what I am getting at, that in fact I used improper techniques?

A. I know what you mean by attempts to browbeat, Mr Irving, but I do not say that you do that with people cited in

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this report.

Q. Browbeating is part of the job of somebody in cross-examination, is it not, obtaining information from a reluctant witness, shall say? Is there any sign here ----

A. I thought you were complaining I was not reluctant, I gave too much information, Mr Irving.

Q. Is there any indication from this transcript? Would you agree it is a verbatim transcript?

A. Yes.

Q. From a tape recording?

A. Yes, it appears to be such.

Q. Is there any indication that I am asking leading questions?

MR JUSTICE GRAY: The first one is a leading question, but let us move on.

MR IRVING: My Lord, my interview technique is part of the criticism against me, that I have distorted history.

MR JUSTICE GRAY: Yes, but you asked whether there were any leading questions and the first question is a leading question, Mr Irving. Let us get to his answer.

A. "You were with Hitler at his home when the news of the Reichskristallnacht arrived there in Munich and he was rather surprised by that, can you depict that who else was there, suggest to the witness that he was surprised". What you should have asked was, "you were with Hitler in his home on the eve of Reichskristallnacht, can you say

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what happened", something neutral like that?

MR IRVING: Is it not likely----

A. You are suggesting things here.

Q. Is this an extract from an interview or is it the whole interview?

A. It is an extract. It starts with one question as well.

Q. Is it likely that there had been some discussion of this before this extract begins therefore?

A. You will have to show me documentation of that previous discussion if I am to answer that question, Mr Irving.

Q. Would you look at the second question from the end, please? Irving asked, "back to the Reichskristallnacht", is that a leading question, "back to the Reichskristallnacht"?

A. Sorry, I cannot find it.

Q. On the first page.

A. First page, yes.

Q. At the bottom of the page, Irving asks, "back to the Reichskristallnacht"?

A. Yes.

Q. Is that a leading question?

A. No.

Q. And the answer comes, "the first thing that came to us was a phone call from the Four Seasons Hotel". Do you wish to follow this in the German original and correct me if I am wrong in the translation?

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A. Yes.

Q. "Those of us who were on duty with Hitler always lived at that time in the Four Seasons Hotel and on this day we were billeted in rooms that were quite high up. The staff phoned to us". Where was he then at this time?

A. In Hitler's residence.

Q. "The staff phoned us to say we ought to come right over and pack our bags as in a neighbouring building the synagogue was on fire and the sparks were flying right over the building". Does this sound like he is recalling the actual conversation?

A. Yes, sounds like that.

Q. It is verisimilitude, is it not?

A. Sounds like that.

Q. "It was just a matter of security. Brandt", he is the doctor, "always lived in that hotel too. He said, 'Ought we to drive over or not? Somebody" and this is the adjutants speaking to each other, is it not?

A. Yes.

Q. "Somebody said then, 'Well, one of us ought at least to go and take a look'. Whether anybody did drive over, I don't know. Then further reports came. I don't know on the basis of what facts, whether it was Schaub asking or the fire brigade or the Gaul headquarters. Shortly after that it became known that the synagogue had not cut fire by itself, but had been set on fire and that there was a

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demonstration going on. Thereupon that was immediately passed on by Schaub to Hitler. Thereupon the Police President of Munich, von Eberstein, was immediately sent for. Herr von Eberstein then appeared soon after at the Führer's residence. He was an SS Obergruppenführer. He was now interrogated by Hitler. Then there was a conversation between Hitler and Goebbels by" -- has he been led with any of this by me, to your knowledge?

A. Yes, by the opening question. "You were with Hitler in his home when the news of the Reichskristallnacht arrived there in Munich and he was rather surprised by that. Can you depict that?" and that is what he is doing here.

Q. Have I mentioned in my opening question Eberstein or telephone conversation with Goebbels?

A. "Can you depict that, who else was there?" That is your question.

Q. Then the we carry on now from the bottom of the page when I asked, "What was Hitler' reaction to the first news report?" Is that a leading question?

A. Well...

Q. And then does he answer?

A. Well, it depends. I mean, it makes the assumption, of course, that these were the first news reports. But if it refers just to reports of the synagogue burning in Munich, then it is not a leading question.

Q. "Then Below admittedly recalling the events 30 years

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later", because it is, it is 1968 this interview with von Below, is it not?

A. That is right.

Q. He records Hitler's reaction as being, "What is going on? Please find out. I have to know what the game is."

A. I cannot find this in the German, I am sorry, for the moment.

Q. "It was my impression that we all and even Hitler"?

MR JUSTICE GRAY: Pause a second, would you mind, Mr Irving?

A. Yes.

MR IRVING: "It was my impression"?

A. Yes, "What is going on?" Yes.

Q. "Please find out. I have to know what the game is". Is that a fair translation, admittedly it is ----

A. Yes -- no, it is fine.

Q. --- obviously not a verbatim recollection, but that was his impression.

A. That is fine.

Q. "It was my impression that we all and even Hitler himself were totally in the dark". I assume that is what he means by "Musspot". "Nobody knew anything about anything. I can only say", and then he continues with his own impression: "Form my many years with Hitler and on his staff, if that had been organised by Hitler and with Hitler's knowledge, a charade on that scale would have been impossible. I would not put it past Goebbels,

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absolutely not". And then what does he say? "Then Hitler became angry and raised his voice quite loudly to Eberstein and said: 'I demand that order is restored at once'." Is this now another source saying the same thing that Schaub said?

A. It seems to be, yes.

MR JUSTICE GRAY: Would you like to read the next sentence?

MR IRVING: "That was, however, limited just to Munich. I overheard that because the conversation took place as I was on the way out". In other words, von Below was returning to his own quarters -- [German] as they say in German. Then he quite frankly admits what happened with regard to the "directive to Goebbels or to Himmler for the rest of the Reichs territory, that, I do not know". Then comes a bit of hearsay: "I spoke once more with Eberstein about this business in Nuremberg prison in 1948 and I asked him: 'Did you know anything about it before you came to Hitler's?' He described it to me just as I had it in my own recollection". Is that significant? Do we derive from that that it came as a surprise to Eberstein too?

A. It is unclear what time he is talking about here, and I find that difficult to accept.

Q. Is it significant, in other words?

A. I mean, this is 30 years after the event, Mr Irving. He has had an enormous amount of time to concoct a story

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which will exculpate himself from involvement in these events which is in his clear interests to do.

Q. How could von Below had been implicated in any way himself?

A. Because he was with Hitler.

Q. But how would that in any way have made him into an accomplice?

A. Because Hitler ordered this pogrom.

Q. Why would he have invented this conversation with Eberstein in Nuremberg prison where Eberstein confirms 10 years after the event, "It was surprise to me too"? Was there any reason? Does it not look like a piece of verisimilitude again then? A random scrap of something that stuck in his memory over the years that he then repeats to me 20 years later on as something that always ----

A. It is extraordinary, is it not, Mr Irving? All these old, all these police officers and SS men have been with Hitler during the appalling violence against the Jews in 1938, many years afterwards when it has become clear that society and the world disapprove very strongly of these events, all tell each other, "Well, I did not know anything about it. I had not heard about it"?

Q. Can we just look finally on the von Below and if we just on the final page, at the end of the first paragraph on that page, there is just one little passage that I am

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doing to draw your attention to: "For a long time Hitler did not really place much trust in him", that is Goebbels, "but then after a while he began to on matters of importance, because Goebbels had the knack of putting things forward, putting forward his things in a very logical and penetrating manner, Hitler was in some way a sucker for this whole kind of act. There is no doubt about that."

A. Yes.

Q. Is that an unusual picture of Hitler, that he could be taken in by members of his staff, do you think, or taken advantage of from your expertise as an ----

A. Yes.

Q. --- historian on the Third Reich?

A. Yes, it is somewhat unusual, yes.

Q. Have you heard it before by other authors, that Hitler was not such a strong man after all, that he was taken advantage of?

A. I do not think "taken advantage of" is a phrase that other authors would use. I mean, there is sort of glimmering of -- I mean, this is not to be dismissed entirely, as it were. It is clear, I think, it is general agreement, that the Reichskristallnacht was initially Goebbels' idea.

Q. And, overall, looking at the von Below interview, now that they are in front of you completely transcribed and translated, in general, is it a proper interview or has it

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been deliberately skewed in some way by the man asking the questions?

A. Well, as has been remarked several times now, the initial question there is very much a leading question.

Q. Or picking up on something previously said during that evening?

A. You would have to show me that before I could accept that. In any case, it is a leading question.

Q. So I do not want to go over that because we have been over that.

MR JUSTICE GRAY: Subject to that, it is an account which bears out what Mr Irving writes in Goebbels?

A. No, I am not -- not entirely, no, my Lord.

MR IRVING: Can I ask you to have a look at the Eberstein telegram of the previous evening?

MR JUSTICE GRAY: Pause a moment. It is really the top of page 277, I suppose?

A. Of Goebbels?

Q. Of Goebbels. I mean, I will read it to you. It is two lines. "According to Luftwaffe adjutant Nicolaus von Below, Hitler phoned Goebbels, 'What's going on?' he snapped, and, 'Find out'".

A. Yes, now, in his memoirs von Below says something rather different, that he conducted his phone conversation with Goebbels on his own from his living room, so that contradicts what he says in the interview. In other

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words, if he conducted the phone conversation on his own from his living room, he could not have heard what Hitler was saying to Goebbels on the phone. That is at page 258, paragraph 6, of my report.

MR IRVING: Will you accept that I have the original typescript of von Below's memoirs that he wrote in 1947 and I was relying on that and not on a later published work. When were the memoirs published? In 1980?

A. In 1980 in Mainz, yes.

Q. So how could I have possibly made use of that in 'The Warpath' which was published in 1977?

A. Well, I would say that von Below said, for what it is worth, I quote him on paragraph 9 of page 260, that he objected to your claim that he had provided you with unpublished contemporary manuscripts and letters and checked through pages of your manuscripts. He remembered "some visits by Irving during which I answered his questions. But I must decidedly reject his more far-reaching claims as not corresponding to the truth".

Q. So what is von Below saying there, that he did not provide me with any manuscripts?

A. I assume that is what he is saying, yes.

Q. He provided me with no letters, wartime letters?

A. If one is to believe him, that is what he is saying.

Q. If one is to believe the printed word and that he did not revise the manuscript then it was written by me, is that

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correct?

A. That is what he says, I think, yes.

Q. Now, Professor, you or your researchers have had access to my files in the Institute of History, have you not?

A. Yes.

Q. Have you seen in the correspondence file between myself and Colonel von Below the covering letters with which I sent the chapters to him and which I thanked him for having returned the chapters to me, chapters which included in the files are all his marginal comments on precisely this chapter?

A. Provide me with copies and I will look at this again.

Q. Your researchers have worked in the archives, is that right, on the Irving collection?

A. That is right, yes.

Q. And you have had my personal files of correspondence with people like von Below containing all these matters and you prefer to believe what a book published in 1980 says rather than the evidence of your eyes, namely the chapters amended in his handwriting?

A. Provide me with copies of those chapters and I will comment on that. I have not seen them, no.

MR JUSTICE GRAY: You have not?

MR IRVING: You have not seen them?

A. No.

Q. Did you or your researchers bother to look in these files

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of correspondence between myself and Adolf Hitler's private staff?

A. Can you name the files, give me core numbers of the files?

Q. Will you answer my question? Did you or your researchers bother to look at my files of correspondence?

A. Well, I have already said that we did not see them, I mean, accepting for the moment your claim that there are such files.

Q. But you are quite happy to repeat ----

MR JUSTICE GRAY: If they are in the discovery ----

A. If they are in the discovery, we can see them.

MR JUSTICE GRAY: I do not know how difficult it is to dig them out. I know there has been a massive amount of discovery.

MR IRVING: My Lord, they are no longer in my discovery, of course, because I have given the originals to the Institute.

MR JUSTICE GRAY: I thought you were saying you had disclosed them in this action, your correspondence with von Below?

MR IRVING: No, my Lord, I did not. With respect, I did not say that. I said that these researchers have had access in the Institute at Munich to all my private files in which I have correspondence with Hitler's personal staff which I donated to the Institute because of its historical significance. It contains voluminous correspondence with Colonel von Below, including the chapters which he

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corrected in his own handwriting in the margin with his very characteristic handwriting. Why this passage appears in his book is a mystery to me. A final question on this matter of the documents: Professor, have you seen in my discovery now one page of extracts typed by me on my large faced typewriter from von Below's original typescript manuscript memoirs in my discovery?

A. Point it to me and I will ----

Q. On this particular episode?

A. Provide it to me and I will say whether I have seen it or not.

Q. Well, I sometimes wonder what the purpose of discovery is, if all these documents are made available in numbered folders to the defending solicitors and the evidence is there, and yet they still write paragraphs like this.

A. Sorry, like what?

Q. It is insulting, is it not?

A. Like what?

Q. The allegation that I lied, is that not insulting, the allegation that I lied about having had access to von Below's private papers and manuscripts?

A. That is his allegation.

Q. Yes, but you have repeated it. Is it not insulting for you to put that in there, although the evidence in the discovery is that I did not lie?

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A. If the man -- well, first of all, I do say, draw attention to the fact, that von Below is not always a very reliable witness, so I think anything I say about von Below, it is clear that it is with that caution. But if he does say in his published memoirs that he takes strong exception to your claims that you have -- that he checked through many pages of your manuscript, then I think one is duty bound to record that fact. The only way we can actually verify this not desperately important point is, of course, by looking at all the correspondence.

Q. You say it is not desperately important?

A. It is a rather peripheral issue, in my judgment.

Q. If a journalist or an expert said, "Professor Evans has claimed to have had access to the private papers of Colonel Smith" and Colonel Smith says, "This is a lie", is that a peripheral point? Would you consider that to be a peripheral point?

A. That is something slightly different. He also -- that is a slightly different point.

Q. But do you say that Colonel von Below turns out to be unreliable on many points. You remember that I asked you earlier this morning, "Have you any impression about von Below's reliability? Has he ever been demonstrably wrong on anything he has written about?"

A. It is variable, yes. It is variable. He is unreliable on some issues. One has to make a judgment about what he is

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saying.

Q. That was not what you said in answer to my question, was it? You said you did not know of any instances where he had been wrong?

A. I honestly cannot remember. I would have to see the transcript.

Q. You would have to see the transcript.

MR JUSTICE GRAY: Mr Irving, probably now is the right moment to ask you this. Where are you suggesting, or where is anyone suggesting, we should put this clip of documents because it is very convenient you have prepared it in the way you have.

MS ROGERS: If I can help? L2 is the Kristallnacht file. There should be an empty tab 9. If it is empty, I suggest it goes there.

MR IRVING: Do you, therefore, accept, Professor, that I had three sources of what you would describe as being of variable quality, all converging on an episode in Hitler's private quarters on the Night of Broken Glass in which Hitler, apparently, vented his anger upon receiving news of what was happening in Munich, at least?

A. Yes, and I think they are all lying.

Q. You think that all three are separately lying?

A. Well, Mr Irving, it is not beyond the bounds of possibility. You have already suggested in the course of this trial that many thousands of Holocaust survivors are

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all collectively lying, so it is not beyond the bounds of possibility that three people are lying, is it?

Q. But the problem we have with the eyewitnesses in other matters before the court is that their accounts diverge, whereas the significant detail about these three is that in minor points the little bits of verisimilitude are the same?

A. Like the fact that it took place on a Sunday, for example?

Q. I am now going to take you through some points in your report relating to the Kristallnacht, page 237, line 2?

A. 237?

Q. You say that the real number of deaths, including suicides, was certainly much higher than 91.

A. Right, yes.

Q. And, of course, I put the figure at about 91 or 100, do I not, in my book?

A. That is right.

Q. That is what you are criticising? Do you have any evidence for saying that the real number of deaths was certainly much higher?

A. Yes, now there were, certainly I think over 200 in Vienna alone. That is the figure, of course, that is given by the Nazi Party tribunal, but it is clear that there were deaths, suicides, in the camps when the 20,000 were arrested.

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Q. Where does that figure come from?

MR JUSTICE GRAY: What, 91 or 200?

MR IRVING: The larger figure.

A. The 91 are the murders which are listed in the Party report.

Q. Yes. In a Party report; of course, there were several such reports, were there not?

A. That is the Party tribunal which investigated these events.

Q. So the figure of 200 in Vienna alone, where does that kind of figure come from?

A. That comes from a contemporary report in Vienna. I am trying to find where my records are of this. I think I answered this in one of my answers to your written questions.

Q. Very well. Let us proceed then.

A. I refer you to that, my Lord.

Q. It is rather holding up the court on that matter. I do not attach much importance to that, my Lord, so we will move on.

MR JUSTICE GRAY: No, I do not think it is...

MR IRVING: At the beginning of paragraph 8, please? "These events were the only major nation-wide pogrom undertaken in public against the Jewish population during the 'Third Reich'", is that the popular perception nowadays?

A. Would you like to point me to others?

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Q. Do you accept that there were other major pogroms against the Jews in Germany?

A. Could you name some?

Q. Are these well-known to historians, do you think?

A. Could you tell me when they happened?

Q. Can I turn your attention to page 252 of my Goebbels biography?

A. Yes.

Q. Does the middle paragraph, the second paragraph, of that page describe a pogrom in Berlin organised by the Nazis in June 1938 of which there has so far by no description by historians like yourself? All the usual Nazi methods, harassment, rounding up "1,122 criminal, 445", I quote, "'anti-social', and 77 foreign Jews found ... imprisoned, 1,029 were thrown into concentration camps ... 250 Jewish-owned automobiles seized pending safety tests", I mean, real harassment going on there?

MR JUSTICE GRAY: What is the relevance of this, Mr Irving?

MR IRVING: He has said here in his paragraph 8 that this was "the only nation-wide pogrom undertaken in public against the Jewish population during the 'Third Reich'". It is an attack on his credibility as an expert witness. He appears unfamiliar with the facts that in June 1938 Goebbels organised without any consent from Hitler a pogrom against the Jews which is a kind of a trial run on a major scale in Berlin, and I found the details of this

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in records in Princeton University Library. There is the original report by Helldorff, the Police Chief of Berlin.

MR JUSTICE GRAY: I hear what you say, Mr Irving, but what I am concerned with is whether the criticisms of your account of Kristallnacht are well-founded or whether they are not, and the fact you have discovered another, as you put it, major pogrom in Berlin in June 1938 does not appear to help me very much on that.

MR IRVING: Well, it is a question of state of mind and mind set and expertise of myself versus this witness, my Lord.

THE WITNESS: May I just then, in response to that, say that, of course, I am aware of the fact that there was a great deal of harassment and violence towards Jews in the Third Reich, throughout the Third Reich, from the very beginning, in particular, the beginning of April 1933, and during the so-called Nazi seizure of power during those months there were many arrests and a great deal of violence against individual Jews. There was a considerable amount in 1935 which was the background to the Nuremberg laws, and there were a considerable number of events, of violent actions, against arrests of, harassment, maltreatment of Jews, right the way through, including 1938. The point I am trying to make here is that, "These events were the only major nation-wide pogrom undertaken in public against the Jewish population during

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the 'Third Reich'". Let me draw your attention to two words there, the first is "pogrom" which I understand to be acts of mass violence and destruction and, secondly, "nation-wide". What you are describing here in the central paragraph of page 252 of Goebbels are arrests accompanied, no doubt, by harassment and, secondly, it is only in Berlin. So I feel that I am justified in making that statement.

MR IRVING: Can we turn to page 258, please, of your report? You are accusing me here of suppressing evidence again, are you not? Line 3, you have given a quotation from the Goebbels diary, page 56: "Shock-troop Hitler gets Göring immediately to clear things out", and so on, "the events during the night". Then you state: "This contemporary document - not mentioned by Irving" ----

A. May I just pre-empt you here, in my letter with amendments, 10th January 2000, I recognize on checking through it all again that you do cite the century on page 276 of Goebbels, so I was wrong there.

Q. So you were wrong there to suggest that I had suppressed evidence?

A. Absolutely, yes, yes.

Q. I quoted it in full, in fact?

A. That is another matter, but you do mention it.

Q. I quoted it in full?

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A. You will have to direct me to the place.

Q. Page 276 of the Goebbels biography, and you have accused me of not mentioning this contemporary document?

A. No, I have withdrawn that accusation, Mr Irving. I withdrew it on 10th January. So you had over a month to read that.

Q. Yes, but I am just drawing your attention to the fact that once again you have made an accusation ----

A. The court is already aware of that. I drew my own attention -- I drew your attention to the fact, Mr Irving.

Q. You made an accusation against me which turns out to be completely unfounded?

A. I withdrew that remark. Page what of Goebbels?

Q. 276.

A. Is that right, page 276?

Q. Lower down that page, I am now back on your report again, paragraph 7.

A. Wait a minute, I am just checking the shock-troop Hitler.

MR JUSTICE GRAY: I cannot find it.

A. I cannot find it either.

MR JUSTICE GRAY: Whereabouts on 276, Mr Irving?

MR IRVING: Let us work backwards from: "His old ... (reading to the words) ... past comes flooding back". That is the final sentence of that paragraph.

MR JUSTICE GRAY: Which paragraph?

A. The indented quote in the middle of page 276, my Lord,

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which follows on: "We go with Schaub to the Artists' Club, to await further bulletins" or "reports" in my version. "In Berlin five synagogues are ablaze, then 15. Now the people's anger is aroused. That night", so on and so forth, "Schaub was on top form". I suppose that is ----

MR JUSTICE GRAY: Yes I see?

A. "Schaub is completely worked up. His old shock-troop is coming past".

MR JUSTICE GRAY: Thank you very much.

MR IRVING: Paragraph 7 on your page of your report 258, you take exception to my relying on von Below. You say: "It appears clear in this instance that rather than rely on the published book", I relied on the interview von Below in 1968?

A. Yes.

Q. How many interviews did I conduct with colonel von Below?

MR JUSTICE GRAY: Do you mean there were more than one?

MR IRVING: There were about 10, my Lord, yes.

A. This was the interview in 1968, interviews, if you like, this is a particular interview, one particular interview in 1968.

Q. All of the von Below interviews were available to your researchers in the archives, were they not?

A. We are arguing about the word "the" here, Mr Irving.

Q. No, we are arguing about "interviewer" in the singular.

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A. I do not think that sentence implies that there were not more, and it is not an important matter. I am happy to concede that you conducted various interviews. If you like, I will withdraw the word "the" and put "and".

MR JUSTICE GRAY: I am sorry, the substance of the criticism is that you go to your interview with him rather than to his own published book. That may or may not be a valid criticism, but worrying about whether there was more than one interview seems to me to be missing the wood for the trees.

MR IRVING: Over the page, my Lord, on page 259, line 2, I allegedly, von Below allegedly told me something which implies that, in fact, there is no proof for it. The word "allegedly" implies there is no proof for it. That coupled with paragraph 9 where I am accused of having lied about obtaining the papers of von Below and using his unpublished manuscript?

A. Well, he accused you of that.

Q. On page 261, paragraph 11, we come to the famous quotation where from the Goebbels diary -- from the court report "Thousands of Jews would have to believe in it in the coming days"?

A. Sorry, page what?

Q. At the end of paragraph 11 of page 261.

A. 261, right. Yes. I have opted for a literal translation there because I did not want to be accused of

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exaggerating. I mean, I tried to convey there is a sense of menace in that, of course, perhaps had better believe it in the coming days.

MR JUSTICE GRAY: What is the point on that, Mr Irving?

MR IRVING: It is a German slang for "will die".

A. No, I cannot agree with that.

Q. "Are going for a Burton"?

A. No, it is not German slang for "will die". If you look it up in the dictionary as I have done. It is "will suffer the consequences" is one possible meaning.

MR JUSTICE GRAY: "Glauben" means "believe", it does not mean "die".

MR IRVING: It does indeed, but it is German slang. A Burton is a beer, but "going for a Burton" has a specific meaning, my Lord. Goebbels writes his diary in slang, Goebbels speaks slang. "Daran glauben müssen" is a German slang, as, in fact, the Frankfurt Allgemeine [Zeitung] has pointed out, that I was perfectly correct in this particular matter.

A. There is a threat -- there is threat included in that, but it does not threaten death. If you look it up in a dictionary, Mr Irving, you will find it does not mean "will" die.

MR RAMPTON: My Lord, can I intervene to correct one completely false point that Mr Irving -- I know it is a small point, but it does offend my sense of fairness. He just ploughs

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on. The reference to what von Below said, or is alleged to have said, is on page 613 at note 44. The reference which Mr Irving gives for what von Below is reported to have said to him is "Author's interview of colonel Nicolaus von Below, May 18th 1968". So the other nine interviews can go hang. That is what Professor Irving is referring to.

MR IRVING: And I draw attention to the fact that all that is before you are the three pages and it was, obviously, an interview lasting many hours.

A. You put the pages before us, Mr Irving.

Q. I have to ask a question about that then. Is it right you have only had three pages of the original German transcript in discovery?

A. Is that the case? You will have to check what is in discovery. I cannot recall it, I am afraid.

Q. Well, is it likely that the transcript of an interview lasting two or three hours would be longer than three pages if it is a verbatim transcript?

A. Yes.

Q. Is it likely that the original transcript therefore is in the archives in Munich and that only those three pages remained in my possession?

A. I really do not know; there is no reason why the whole lot should not have remained in your possession. I do not know what arrangements you made about making copies of the

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material before you sent it to Munich.

Q. There is a lot that you really do not know then, is there not? This is the problem; you are an expert witness on this case, you had access to my papers and the archives and yet your answer again and again is that you do not know what is there, you did not see this, you did not find that.

A. I am not quite sure what point you are trying to make now, Mr Irving, in this specific sense. As you know, we had three people who also had other things to do, 18 months to go through 30 years of your work, and we did the best we could do in the time available. I am satisfied it was thoroughly done.

MR JUSTICE GRAY: Mr Irving, I am sorry to go back but you must realise that I need to understand what the issue is. You went to paragraph 11 of Professor Evans' report, page 261, and you had your argument with him about having to believe it.

MR IRVING: The issue is purely which of us has the better knowledge of German, my Lord; it is only that.

MR JUSTICE GRAY: That is, no doubt, a fascinating topic, but it is not one I am actually dealing with. The criticism is of what you wrote about Kristallnacht in Goebbels's biography.

MR IRVING: Yes, which presupposes the knowledge of German.

MR JUSTICE GRAY: Could you be kind enough to direct me to the

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passage, where you quote, if you do quote, Goebbels saying what he said.

MR IRVING: We have already had it better, in fact, in one of his other expert reports. I think it has been quoted from Longerich's report. We dealt with the matter of that ----

MR JUSTICE GRAY: That is as may be, but would you be kind enough to point me to where it is in your book one finds the reference to this quote, so that I can make sense of your criticism of the translation?

MR IRVING: It is not in my book at all, my Lord, that passage. I rely on it purely as evidence of the fact that this witness does not have command of the German language that he should have, to be an expert on a difficult matter like what the Goebbels diaries mean, for example.

MR JUSTICE GRAY: Let us move on.

MR IRVING: Page 265, paragraph 8, the indented paragraph: You have not indicated in that paragraph that there is an omission, is that correct?

A. Can you point me to it then, please?

Q. In footnote 66, you can see where the omission is in fourth line?

A. Yes.

Q. There is an omission of about 20 or 30 words that have been taken out, is that right?

A. It is indicated in the footnote; no, that's a typo. There should be been three dots there, but the footnote gives it

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quite clearly.

Q. The words that have been left out are not reproduced in either version, are they?

MR JUSTICE GRAY: What is the point, Mr Irving? Let us get to the point. Obviously your case is that something important has been omitted which affects what is there. What is it that you say has been omitted?

MR IRVING: There are two points that I am saying. Firstly, we cannot always be certain that the quotation given to us by this witness indicates when there have been omissions.

A. Sorry, Mr Irving, it does indicate.

MR JUSTICE GRAY: That is futile. I am not even going to trouble Professor Evans. That is an absolutely futile point. It is clear from the footnote. What are you saying is omitted that makes any difference?

MR IRVING: The words left out are: "As far as I recall from these first reports, it already emerged that these actions had been set in motion by the party or by subordinate formations of a party whereupon, in my presence, Hitler gave Himmler the order that the SS must keep out of these events".

MR JUSTICE GRAY: Speaking for myself, that has no bearing at all on the point that is being made here which is that, according to Wolff, Himmler and Hitler were both surprised. Mr Irving, I am sorry to keep interrupting, but this cross-examination does not appear to me to be

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grasping the nettle of the criticisms against you. You are finding tiny little points on which you hope, and sometimes succeed, in tripping up Professor Evans, but you are not grappling with what the criticisms are of your account of Kristallnacht. That is what you have to do, if you are going to advance your case in relation to this part of the criticism of you.

MR IRVING: There are so many criticisms made by this witness of me that all I can really hope to do on any cross-examination is pick on central points, which I have done, like the events in Hitler's residence that night, and suggest that this witness is wrong in saying I had no sources for what I wrote.

MR JUSTICE GRAY: You have not even touched on the inception of the events of this night, which is a key part of -- Mr Rampton will correct me if I am wrong or Professor Evans will -- of their case on Kristallnacht that Hitler was in on it from the word go.

MR IRVING: We dealt with that at very great length under cross-examination of myself, my Lord, and my belief was that I would be testing your Lordship's patience if I went all over that ground again.

MR JUSTICE GRAY: On the contrary, this part of Professor Evans is absolutely central. Professor Evans, I think, makes that point and you are taking tiny little points like whether a sentence has been left out of an account he

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gives as part of his testimony. That just does not really affect the issues that I have to decide at all.

MR RAMPTON: I would have to say this, my Lord. It is as well perhaps I say it now. Unless Mr Irving challenges Professor Evans on this and other topics, upon the foundation of his criticisms of Mr Irving's writings, which is not in every case but in most cases and in all important respects the way in which Mr Irving has treated contemporary documents, then I am afraid I will take it that Mr Irving has accepted the criticisms.

MR JUSTICE GRAY: We will come back to that. That would, in the ordinary case, be a completely unarguable proposition for Mr Rampton. Maybe we will have to come back to it later on, but you hear what Mr Rampton says. I do think you have to actually tackle the fundamental points that are made in Professor Evans's report, and there is no point in, if I may put it this way, pussy footing around the borders of the issue because that is not going to help me, is it, really?

MR IRVING: I was coming at it from the rear.

MR JUSTICE GRAY: All right, I accept that.

MR IRVING: I was trying to establish that this witness has an agenda of his own; that he is not reliable; that he distorts and manipulates evidence against me; that he is quite happy to ignore evidence which was before him for what I wrote; and that, on balance therefore, probably my

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version of events is more accurate than his. Let me therefore just take one more point. Would you go to page 266, please, where again you are accusing me of falsification? Halfway down, four lines from the bottom of that paragraph, you say: "Irving, for his part, cites Goebbels diary entry, only first to cast doubt on its validity as a source, then to falsify it by reporting on the basis of this reference, not that Hitler ordered the Jews arrested, but he failed to prevent them being taken to concentration camps".

A. Yes.

MR JUSTICE GRAY: Can you just pause, so that I understand what we are on at the moment?

MR IRVING: Has your Lordship found it?

MR JUSTICE GRAY: I have found the paragraph but you plunged into the middle of it, so I am just trying to remind myself what he is talking about.

MR IRVING: Again, I am accused of falsification. Is this relevant or not, my Lord?

MR JUSTICE GRAY: I think it may be; it is not perhaps the most important point. Can you, Professor Evans, explain because I am not quite taking on board what you are saying in your paragraph 11?

A. I am trying to find the reference to the Goebbels ----.

MR IRVING: Perhaps I can help you. If you go straight to Goebbels's biography, page 276, you will find where

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I quoted exactly that passage.

MR JUSTICE GRAY: Whereabouts on the page?

MR IRVING: I am sorry, it is at the end of the second paragraph, the sentence beginning: "The 'Führer', claimed Goebbels in the diary, 'has directed that 20 or 30,000 Jews are to be arrested immediately. That will do it. Let them now see our patience is exhausted'". How can you reconcile that quotation from the book with your allegation that I falsified it, by reporting that not Hitler ordered the Jews arrested, but that he failed to prevent them being taken to concentration camps?

A. I am trying to find the reference to where you say he failed to take them.

Q. I have given you the actual quotation from the book where I stated that Hitler ordered them arrested.

A. Unfortunately, I do not have a reference there.

Q. 20,000 or 30,000 were, in fact, arrested that night, were they not?

A. That is right, yes.

Q. They were locked away for a few days and then released, is that correct?

A. Weeks, a few weeks, Mr Irving.

MR RAMPTON: Yes, the reference is the end of the first big paragraph on page 277, I believe. The first sentence begins: "But 20,000 were already -- -- ", but I am not sure.

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A. I cannot find this. Yes, but 20,000 Jews were already being loaded on to trucks and transported to concentration camps at Dachau, Buchenwald, Oranienburg. Hitler made no attempt to halt this inhumanity. He ordered it, Mr Irving, and, in fact, as you indeed quote Goebbels -- but however you say in the passage that you are quoting on page 276: "'The Führer', claimed Goebbels in the diary, 'has directed that 20 or 30,000 Jews are to be arrested immediately'".

MR IRVING: So, I state precisely what you say that I concealed?

A. You are saying it is claimed, you are not saying that it is an accurate report. You go on, on page 277, to say that Hitler's involvement was limited to making no attempt to stop it.

Q. Where do I say Hitler's involvement was limited to making no attempt to stop it, when I made it quite clear on page 276 that he ordered their arrest?

A. No, you do not, Mr Irving.

Q. "The Führer has directed 20 or 30,000 Jews are to be arrested immediately". How else can you interpret that?

A. "'The Führer', claimed Goebbels in the diary, 'has directed that 20 or 30,000 Jews are to be arrested immediately'".

Q. Goebbels is our source for it, is he not?

A. He is one source. The other source is the telegram of

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Müller ordering the arrests.

Q. Do you make any reference ----

A. That is a telex.

Q. Do you make any reference in your report to this early quotation on page 276 of my book?

A. Yes.

MR JUSTICE GRAY: Yes, the third line. What is the evidence for saying that Hitler ordered them to be taken to the concentration camps as opposed to having them arrested?

A. There are two pieces of evidence -- well, three. One is the fact that they were taken to concentration camps; the second one is the Müller telegram which ordered the arrests; and the third one is the Goebbels diary.

MR JUSTICE GRAY: Hang on. Goebbels's diary does not say anything about having all of them taken to concentration camps, does it?

A. No, just arrested.

MR JUSTICE GRAY: So, the evidence for that, saying he ordered them to be taken to concentration camps, consists of ----

A. Well, my Lord, I think one has to work it out. They could only really have been taken to state prisons, because you needed a regular legal trial to put people in state prisons. So this has to be an action that takes place outside the regular legal framework, a penal system. You cannot keep them in police cells. If you have that number of people, the only place you can put them in is

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concentration camps and, of course, that indeed is what happened. The Müller telex is quoted on pages 265 to 266.

MR IRVING: Does the final sentence (on page 277) of that paragraph, "Hitler made no attempt to halt this inhumanity. He stood by, and thus deserved the odium that now fell on all Germany", not refer to the whole episode?

A. Let me just read: "20,000 Jews were already loaded onto and transported to the concentration camps at Dachau, Buchenwald and Oranienburg. Hitler had made no attempt to halt this inhumanity. He stood by." He did not stand by, Mr Irving, he ordered the whole thing. He ordered the arrests and he ordered the burning of the synagogues, and he ordered the destruction of Jewish shops and dwellings.

Q. And?

A. He ordered the arrests, and he did not merely stand by.

Q. Have I left any doubt in the minds of the readers that, in fact, he went further and that he ordered a massive fine on the Jewish community and various punitive measures?

A. You accept that after the event.

Q. I accept this. Is this another concession by me or have I stated this in accordance with what the documents tell us?

A. You point me to where you state this, please. You certainly said that, in court, Hitler ordered the economic measures against the Jews.

Q. Is another source which I rely on, Professor Evans, the

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diary of the SA commander Viktor Lutze?

A. Yes.

Q. I rely on it quite extensively, because his men were involved that night, were they not?

A. That is right, yes.

Q. Were you able to check my references?

A. Let me have a look. No, I am afraid we ----.

Q. Do you know where the diary is now?

A. It is in the Friedrich Ebert Stiftung, I think.

Q. Is it in the archives of the Friedrich Ebert Stiftung which is equivalent of the archives of the Labour Party in Germany?

A. Yes, the report of the Social Democrat Party archive.

Q. Did I have complete access to that diary when I wrote that book?

A. I assume so, since you cited that we were denied access.

Q. I had access to the source and you were denied access to it?

A. That is right, yes.

Q. Is it possible therefore that there are things in the diary of Viktor Lutze of which you were unaware?

MR JUSTICE GRAY: Such as?

A. Yes, give me some examples. Show me.

MR IRVING: The fact that he was personally opposed to the pogrom and ordered that it should not occur, and that the SA people should not participate in it.

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A. Could you show me the passages in the diary where he says that, please.

Q. I am referring to paragraph 1 on page 246.

MR JUSTICE GRAY: 246 of what?

MR IRVING: Of his expert report, my Lord.

A. Yes.

Q. Sorry, I have forgotten what the question was now.

Q. In broad general terms, is it likely that, having had access to the diary of Viktor Lutze, and your not having had access to it, therefore I know more about what is in the diary than you do?

A. Well, that is true but, of course, it has to be regarded with extreme suspicion. What you claim is that Lutze had misgivings, that indeed he ordered the SA not to stay out, and that only three of the 28 SA groups received orders to stage demonstrations.

MR JUSTICE GRAY: But the source for that -- I am sorry to interrupt again -- is not Lutze but Jüttner.

MR IRVING: My Lord, if you look at note 34 on page 251, we do have indication that I had the diary of Lutze, that I was using it and relying on it.

MR JUSTICE GRAY: No, but we are really looking at footnote 31. It is perfectly true you do there refer to the diary entry of Lutze, but that does not say what you put in your text. What you put in your text comes from Gruppenführer Max Jüttner.

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MR IRVING: As well, yes.

MR JUSTICE GRAY: Not as well.

MR IRVING: Obviously one relies on many different sources when one is writing that but, in view of the fact that I had the Lutze diary which has not been available like many other documents to the Defence, this is the picture I am trying to build up. I have had a lot of documents that have not been available to the expert witnesses in this case.

MR JUSTICE GRAY: I am bound to say I find that a bit bizarre. If you have first hand evidence from Lutze as to what he said, why would you cite somebody else as support for what you say in your text Lutze said?

MR IRVING: Well, when you look at note 34, where we have the German text of one fragment of what the Lutze diary contains, the problem is once again that all my records have been donated to the German government archives in Bonn in June 1993, after this passage was written, and I no longer have the Lutze diary. I have filing cards, but that is all I have left.

A. What we had access to of course were your notes, as this footnote says, on the Lutze diary.

MR IRVING: But in view of the fact that you write on page 251 quite robustly at the end of paragraph 1, once more Irving's account relies on a tissue of inventions, manipulations, suppressions and omissions, and I have been

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telling you for the last two hours there are numbers of documents to which you paid no attention or to which you have had no access, this is probably an over robust verdict. Would you agree?

A. Well, this is your account that Hitler did "everything he could to prevent things nasty happening" to the Jews in the pogrom of 8, 9, particularly 9 and 10 of November 1938. That is your account and it does indeed rely on a tissue of inventions, manipulations, suppressions and omissions.

Q. You describe even now the interview with von Below, the Schaub papers, the Brückner papers, whatever they were, as being just this tissue of inventions?

A. Yes. I think you accept their lies as being truth because that supports your line.

Q. You think that I accept their lies as being true?

A. Yes.

Q. Because it supports my line?

A. Indeed.

Q. You have no evidence for that at all, apart from the fact that there are a number of documents which can be interpreted in a different way. Would you consider the Eberstein telegram, the one signed by Eberstein during the night -- do you remember the one?

A. Yes.

Q. It is a triggering, an igniting telegram, is it not?

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A. No. I do not think it is an igniting telegram. The igniting event of course was Goebbels' speech at 10 o'clock to the senior party people, the SA leaders.

Q. Perhaps we should have a look at that telegram. Can we identify the two page telegram, the one with the typescript signature of von Eberstein?

MR JUSTICE GRAY: It is probably in L2, is it not?

MR RAMPTON: That is L2, tab 1, page 7.

A. I do not think I have this.

MR IRVING: My Lord, you will see I am now working backwards from Hitler's fury or from round about that time. It is a two-page telegram, is it not, typescript?

A. Yes.

Q. And, if you look at the second page, it has two signatures on it. One is the typescript signature of von Eberstein?

A. Yes.

Q. Who was the police chief of Munich and Bavaria?

A. Yes, that is right.

Q. And it is counter signed in handwriting by a Kanzleiangestellter, which is some kind of Chancellery official?

A. Clerk, yes.

Q. Eberstein has not signed it himself, has he?

A. No. It seems to be a copy. It is a copy indeed. Abschrift.

Q. Are you familiar with the German Civil Service method of

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occasionally sending out telegrams over the signature of the boss?

A. Yes.

Q. Which does not necessarily mean that the boss is actually there when it is being sent out? It is just his authority that it is being sent out on?

A. Of course, done with his authority.

Q. So the fact that this is a telegram signed at 2.10 a.m. in typescript by Eberstein does not necessarily mean that Eberstein is physically at the police headquarters at that moment? He might be somewhere completely different?

A. That is a possibility, yes.

Q. Yes. So that it is entirely within the bounds of possibility that at this moment Eberstein, unaware that this was going on, was at Hitler's residence, having strips torn off him by his boss, by Hitler, while somebody else had said, you had better send this message out over Eberstein's signature because there has to be this going on tonight. It is an igniting telegram, is it not, of a sort? He is saying about the police standing back and the synagogues are going to be burning and this kind of thing, is it not?

A. It is very similar to previous telegrams, the Müller and the Heydrich telegrams. I do not really think it is very likely that Eberstein was unaware of the fact that this rather important telegram was being sent out under his

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name. I find that very difficult to believe. They had have telephones of course in Germany at this time.

Q. If at this moment Eberstein was in Hitler's residence, it would still be possible for this telegram to be is sent out by police headquarters, over his typed name authenticated by this staff member, would it not?

A. The telephone, you say?

Q. This is the way that the German bureaucracy works sometimes. The order would go out over the name of the boss, but it would be signed by some responsible official on his part, on his behalf?

A. Yes. I think, though, he would have known about it, of course. The boss would have been apprised of it. He simply would not have been in a physical position to sign it.

Q. So, if we have 2 or 3 people on Hitler's staff who say that Eberstein was here with them at that time, then it is not necessarily contradicted by the existence of this telegram with Eberstein's typed signature on it?

A. It is possible there might have been a telephone conversation, as I said. We do not have any evidence of that.

Q. Are you familiar with the message that went out very shortly afterwards over the signature of Opdenhoff of Rudolf Hess's staff?

A. That is at 2.56 a.m.?

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Q. Yes.

A. Yes.

MR RAMPTON: That is page 9 of tab 1.

MR IRVING: One of those messages has an igniting function, if I can put it like that, and the other message has an extinguishing function?

A. I do not accept either of those claims.

Q. If the second message timed at 2.56 on the notepaper of the Deputy Führer orders that actions are to stop, then this has an extinguishing function?

MR RAMPTON: I think it might be proper to get Professor Evans to translate this short little message as he stands in the witness box, rather than receiving what to my mind is a completely pie-eyed version.

MR IRVING: I think it would be very nice if I was allowed to conduct my cross-examination in the manner I wish.

A. Could we see this document.

MR JUSTICE GRAY: I remember this fairly well but it would be helpful if we just read it through together.

MR IRVING: It is noticeable that every time I am about to make a killer point----

A. Page 9 is ----

MR RAMPTON: That is my function, Mr Irving, I am afraid.

A. This is a very brief telegram.

MR IRVING: I promise that I will interrupt your killer points.

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A. May I have give a translation, my Lord?

MR JUSTICE GRAY: Yes, if the conversation in the background ceases.

A. This is a telegram at 2.56 a.m. on 10th November 1938 from the Brown House in Munich to all Gau leaderships.

MR IRVING: Can you translate the heading too then please?

A. Telegram via the propaganda writer, whatever that is.

MR IRVING: It is on the headed notepaper of the deputy of the Führer, is it not?

A. Not in the copy I have here, no.

Q. In that case you had better have one of these copies then which is the genuine telegram.

A. Thank you. That is very helpful.

Q. And not the version produced by the Defence.

A. Right. National socialist German Workers Party. It is very difficult to read this. Is that deputy of the Führer staff? I am guessing. Munich 33, 10th November.

MR IRVING: The office of the Deputy of the Führer.

A. Right. It is whited out here on my copy, I am afraid.

MR JUSTICE GRAY: There is no----

A. To all Gau leaderships for immediate ----

MR IRVING: To be put into immediate effect?

A. Yes, immediate effect, ordnance No. 174/38, repeat of the ----

MR IRVING: Repetition of the telegram of November 10th.

A. November 10th 1938, on the emphatic command of the all

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highest position.

MR IRVING: Acts of arson?

A. Acts, well, arson on Jewish shops or ----

Q. Businesses?

A. Shops or similar.

Q. Shop would be Laden, would it not?

A. No, Geschäft. I think you yourself translated Geschäft as shop in the witness box, Mr Irving.

MR RAMPTON: That is how Mr Irving translated it when I first asked him to do it.

MR IRVING: Businesses is more precise.

A. No, shops, Mr Irving.

MR JUSTICE GRAY: I am not sure that it makes a huge amount of difference, actually?

A. It does, my Lord, I am afraid, but still.

Q. I am not sure it does.

A. Not in this particular context.

Q. That is what I was talking about.

A. Arson and Jewish shops or the like must not ----

MR IRVING: Business.

A. -- happen.

Q. Establishment.

A. Sorry. May I translate it, Mr Irving, please? Arson or the laying of fire in Jewish shops or the like may not or must not take place under any circumstances and in no case, and so on. That is the essence of it.

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Q. Pretty emphatic, is it not?

A. Yes. What it is saying is that nobody is to set light to Jewish shops or ----

Q. Businesses.

A. -- or similar kinds of premises. It is not saying that nobody is to arrest the Jews. It is not saying that nobody should smash the shops up. It is not saying that nobody should smash up the apartments and houses of Jews.

Q. Professor, I have not asked you what it does not say.

A. It does not say that nobody should commit arson against many hundreds of synagogues which were burnt down.

Q. Professor, I have not asked you what it does not say.

A. What it does not say, Mr Irving, is extremely important. This is a very limited telegram which says that Jewish shops and similar kinds of premises are not to be set alight. The reason for that is very similar, it is the same kind of telegram that ----

Q. Where does it say similar businesses?

A. May I finish my answer, Mr Irving, please? It is the same kind of telegram that went out from Heydrich at 1.20 or from Müller at 11.55. That is to say, it is saying that laying fire to Jewish shops at similar apartments, whatever it might be, is not to be allowed because of course it endangers the surrounding premises, which are owned by Germans ----

Q. Where does it say that?

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MR JUSTICE GRAY: Would you please not interrupt?

A. And, of course, some of these shops may well have been owned by Germans. That is all it is saying. It is very limited. It does not say, "Bring the whole thing to an end". That is a completely illegitimate interpretation of this document.

MR IRVING: Where does it say, "because of the danger to surrounding premises"?

A. Well, I am going back there to ----

Q. No, I am looking at this telegram. Let us just look at one document at a time, please?

A. It does not say that, but that is my interpretation of the reason.

Q. Can we look at what it does say and not what it does not say?

A. Indeed, yes.

Q. Because that, surely, is where the evidence is?

A. Yes.

Q. It goes to all the Gauleiters, is that right?

A. That is right.

Q. What, about 48 of the senior Nazi Party officials though the entire country?

A. Yes.

Q. And it is telling them there are to be no acts of arson against Jewish Geschäfte, whatever that is. I translate that as "businesses".

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A. Shops.

Q. And "dergleichen", what does that mean?

A. "And similar".

Q. What does the "similar" mean? Similar to businesses or similar to acts?

A. Similar to business, of course, Mr Irving.

Q. On what basis do you say that? Your knowledge of German?

A. Because it is Geschäfte oder dergleichen. Had it been "arson", it would have been "[German] Oder dergleichen". It is quite clear. It is a shameless manipulation of this text to suggest that it says that "arson and similar acts".

Q. Is this based on your ----

A. Quite clearly not.

Q. --- superior knowledge of the German language?

A. It is based on my knowledge of the German language which is a good knowledge of the German language, Mr Irving. I am not claiming my knowledge is superior to yours. You also have a very good knowledge of the German language. That is why I say this is a shameless manipulation of the text. It is not due to mere ignores.

Q. It would be useful if you could keep your answers a little bit shorter and more to the point.

A. I know you do not like what I am saying, Mr Irving, but I shall say what I want to unless I am told not to by his Lordship.

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Q. Otherwise Mr Rampton will complain about the expense again. That is why I am trying to keep these answers brief. If it says "Brandlegungen an jüdischen Geschäften oder dergleichen", and you say that if the word "dergleichen" was going to refer to the "Brandlegungen", then it would have to go immediately after "Brandlegungen".

A. Yes.

Q. "Brandlegungen oder dergleichen an jüdischen Geschäften".

A. Yes.

Q. But then that would make nonsense, would it not?

A. No.

MR JUSTICE GRAY: Why?

A. Why?

MR IRVING: Because all you could do with the businesses as an object would be to set them on fire or to demolish them or whatever, whereas my contention is that the "dergleichen" refers to acts of arson and the "dergleichen" refers to other actions being carried out during that night which can amount to all sorts of different things.

MR JUSTICE GRAY: Like?

MR IRVING: Well, whatever was going on that night, my Lord. We know already in great detail what was going on that night, the arrests, the murders, the outrageous, the harassment, the violence, and that ----

MR JUSTICE GRAY: So your case is -- I am interested because I

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have not heard this before -----

MR IRVING: --- the "dergleichen" can refer equally ----

MR JUSTICE GRAY: That this meant that all criminal, violent activities should stop, although it refers to arson? Your case, Mr Irving?

MR IRVING: I was hoping that we had Mr Rampton's undivided attention.

MR RAMPTON: I am just having confirmation from a German speaker behind me of your Lordship's interpretation.

MR IRVING: Are you wishing to give evidence, Mr Rampton, because, if so, perhaps we ought to wait until we have a German in the witness box who we can cross-examine properly on this matter. No doubt we will when the time comes.

MR JUSTICE GRAY: But I asked you a question.

MR IRVING: My contention is (and I am putting this to this witness) that it is equally possible that "dergleichen" refers either to the businesses or to the "Brandlegungen", if I can put it like that?

A. That is absolutely ridiculous. It is a completely illegitimate misinterpretation and manipulation of this text.

Q. Very well. We have your answers. In your considered view, that is an impossible interpretation?

A. That is right. I have already said it would have been "Brandlegungen oder dergleichen an Jüdischen

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Geschäften" because it says "Brandlegungen an Jüdischen Geschäften oder dergleichen". "Dergleichen" refers to Jüdischen Geschäften".

Q. You are plumbing once again the depths of your considerable knowledge of the German language. "Allerhöchste Stelle", to whom does that refer?

A. That must refer to Hitler.

Q. That must refer to Adolf Hitler. There is no question about that then.

A. It would seem that ----

Q. It is not a janitorial level order then, this one?

A. No, no.

Q. This comes from the very top man.

A. No. Hitler is saying here, "Go ahead with burning down synagogues. Go ahead with wrecking Jewish shops and smashing up the interiors. Go ahead with arresting 20,000 people. Go ahead with smashing up Jewish apartments, destroying the furniture, chucking it out of the window, throwing some of the inhabitants out of the window. Go ahead with all of that, but don't commit arson on Jewish shops or similar premises".

Q. You read all of that out of these three lines, do you?

A. Yes. I think what is omitted from here is more significant in a way than what is in here.

MR JUSTICE GRAY: I am looking at a document you do not have, Professor -- well, you have it but you are not looking at

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it -- and it has got "Brandlegungen an Jüdischen Geschäften" underlined. Is that in the version you are looking at? Is it underlined?

A. Mr Irving's version is not underlined.

Q. So somebody has done that later is the point?

MR IRVING: Effectively, yes, my Lord. I should amplify that the version which is here is originally a negative copy which is in the files of the Berlin Document Centre and there is no question as to its authenticity.

MR JUSTICE GRAY: No, I accept that.

MR IRVING: Professor, have you ever seen this document reproduced or printed or quoted at any time before I published it in my work in 1977? Has any German historian or non-German historian deigned to use this document?

A. Not to my knowledge.

Q. Is there any reason why an orders from the very highest level, in other words, from Adolf Hitler to all the Gauleiters concerning the Reichskristallnacht should have been suppressed in this manner if it was so innocent, as you suggest, if it just fits in with the general pattern?

A. I do not know that it was suppressed, Mr Irving. I cannot say.

Q. Well, there appeared to be at least two different copies of it in existence, the one which the Defence provided and

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my different version, so I found it easily enough. So is there any reason you can suggest why historians have been embarrassed about it and have preferred not to use it?

A. I do not think it is true that historians have been embarrassed about it. There is nothing to be embarrassed about here at all. It fits in perfectly well into the other documents we have from that same disastrous and ghastly evening.

Q. A document showing Adolf Hitler intervening at 2.56 through his deputy, through the office of his deputy, ordering a halt to whatever, or a stop, a veto on however narrow a front you wish to portray it, did not deserve any kind of comment by the entire assembled body of historians around the world?

A. Mr Irving, you have already said that the telex of Heydrich at 1.20 was the result of discussions between Hitler and Himmler, the Müller telex earlier in the evening was also on Hitler's orders, and all of these things say roughly the same thing. We can look at the other telexes, if you like. They all, taken together, represent the attempt by Hitler to make sure that German property was not damaged, and that foreign -- it is not in this one, but it is in the other ones -- that foreign Jews were not to be harmed because of the diplomatic consequences. None of these documents, certainly not this one, puts it in any way -- attempting to put the

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whole action to an end.

Q. So why have other historians not quoted it?

A. This is part of a stream of documents. There is nothing surprising or new or novel or shocking about this one.

Q. Why have other historians not quoted a brief telegram which is on the authority of the very highest level in a matter of such importance?

A. You will have to ask them.

Q. Well, I am asking you as ----

A. I do not think it surprises ----

Q. --- the expert on historiography. You have written books on the way people write history.

MR JUSTICE GRAY: Professor Evans, can I just ask you this question? If, indeed, the telex or the message, whatever it is, had said, "Stop everything", would you then agree that it would be surprising that historians have ignored it, as Mr Irving suggests?

A. I do not think that historians would have deliberately suppressed it, had it said that. I mean, I can only assume that ----

Q. That is not quite an answer to my question.

A. I know.

Q. What I am really saying is that if, indeed, Hitler had decided at 2.56 in the morning that everything must stop ----

A. Yes.

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Q. --- would that be something that you would expect somebody giving an account, an historian giving an account, of Kristallnacht would include in his account or her account?

A. Yes, most certainly because it would change our entire picture of the whole series of events, and you would then have to explain, of course, why lower police officials sent out orders for the actions to start later in the morning, why the Reichskristallnacht events only really began in the morning well after this of the 10th November in Vienna, for example, and this would cast very interesting light on why Hitler's orders were not followed if that was the case. I mean, I should also say I am here simply accepting Mr Irving's suggestion that other historians have not quoted this, although he himself says he does not read other historians, so...

Q. Yes, well, assuming that.

A. If may well be that if I had time to check up in detail through the literature of other historians, I might find that they had quoted this before 1977.

MR IRVING: But we assume that you have read all the literature on the Reichskristallnacht because you are an expert witness on this.

A. Well, I would have to -- this is one small document, and I would have to go back and check it all. I do not have a photographic memory.

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Q. It is small in as much as it contains only three lines, but it does rely on the authority of the very top level in the Third Reich in the middle of the night on the Night of Broken Glass ----

A. Yes, but so ----

Q. --- and yet nobody else quoted it except me?

A. Well, how can you say that if you do not read other historians' work, Mr Irving?

Q. Well, I am asking you as the expert on historiography.

A. And you are just telling me, and I am telling you that you have no right to say that. You do not read what other historians have written on the subject. You have no idea.

Q. Well, I believe that we would have had an echo by now. I have been waving this document in the air for the last 25 years, saying, "Look what I found. Why have you not quoted it?" I remembered a mass meeting at the University of Bonn saying precisely this, and advising the students to ask their professors afterwards why they were hearing it from me for the first time. So, surely, somebody would have said, "Mr Irving, you are not first"?

A. Yes, I am not sure I believe you, Mr Irving, I am afraid.

Q. You are not sure you believe me?

A. No. I would have to go up and check the literature to see whether this document was quoted and it would not surprise me if it was.

Q. Will you accept the proposition that if my interpretation

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of the document is correct, that Adolf Hitler was hereby acting on the information that he had received during the previous hour as described by the Adjutants, the three of whom I have related earlier this morning, he was determined to stop this nonsense and he telephoned Rudolf Hess and said, "Send an immediate message to the Gauleiters", that if this signal meant that, this would be an embarrassment to the historical profession?

A. Too many ifs there, Mr Irving. I do not accept a single part of your premises, I am afraid.

Q. But that, in a way, answers my question, does it not, because it is an embarrassing document for the historians to have a look at?

A. It is not an embarrassing document at all. It does not really say very much.

Q. So it does not say all the things you said earlier, about "Go out and burn the synagogues and arrest the 20,000", you said that you could read all that into it.

A. All it says, Mr Irving, is that there should be no arson in Jewish shops or similar premises under any circumstances. That is all it says. This is in the middle of the evening where all over the country synagogues are being burned down. Everybody knows that synagogue are being burned down. I do not see any mention of synagogues here, and I do not think you can describe them as being like shops, although I am not very familiar

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with synagogues.

MR JUSTICE GRAY: Mr Irving, my feeling is that we could probably move on. I think we have really explored this issue.

MR IRVING: Except, my Lord, that he said this was the middle of the evening and, of course, that is not. It is the middle of the night. It is 2.56 a.m. which fits ----

A. Sorry, night, yes.

Q. --- in precisely with the timetable that I have adumbrated from the very start of my writings on the Reichskristallnacht. That is why i attach such importance to it.

A. That is a completely phoney timetable, Mr Irving, based on the manipulation and falsification of the material that you have got before you and the acceptance of lies told by people involved after the war simply because they support your belief or your attempts to show that Hitler did not order all these goings on and was not cognisant of them and tried to stop them when he found out about them. It is a tissue of your lies on your part, Mr Irving, based on the shameless manipulation of documents like this whose meaning is absolutely obvious to anybody with even the most elementary knowledge of German.

Q. Well, you accept that I do not have just an elementary knowledge of German, do you not?

A. Quite.

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Q. Yes, but you still feel entitled to trot out all those adjectives again, the tissue of lies, the manipulations, the distortions and so on, because that is the only kind of language you can use to confront a document like this, is that right?

A. I am not confronting a document like this. It is the use you make of it that I am commenting on which I find quite extraordinary.

Q. Which do you find more extraordinary, the fact that no other historian has quoted that document or the fact that I do quote it?

MR JUSTICE GRAY: Mr Irving, do you remember a few moments ago I said that I thought we ----

MR IRVING: You said we should move on, my Lord, yes, right. (To the witness): What is the evidence that we do have for the fact that Adolf Hitler initiated the pogrom therefore?

A. The Goebbels speech to the Party at the 10th -- at 10 p.m.

Q. What transcript do we have of that speech, if any?

A. It is in his -- well, that is -- there are two, I think two relevant documents there, in particular, one is, of course, Goebbels own diary, and the other is the Party tribunal investigation.

Q. The Party tribunal, of course, only refers to the fact that Goebbels triggered the events ----

A. Well ----

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Q. --- according to the ----

A. All right. Can we have a look at the Party tribunal report then, please? It is very brief.

MR RAMPTON: Tab 2, my Lord.

A. Tab 2 of this?

MR RAMPTON: Yes?

A. I seem to have a loose leafed folder here.

MR RAMPTON: Tab 2 of L2.

A. Right. In the first very opening paragraph it says, if I may translate: "On the evening of 9th November 1938, Reichs Propaganda Minister Party Comrade, Dr Goebbels, informed the Party leaders gathered for a comradely evening in the Old Town Hall in Munich that there had been anti-Jewish demonstrations in the Gaus, Hessen, Magdeburg, Anhalt, and thereby Jewish shops had been smashed up and synagogues had been set on fire. The Führer had" -- this is reported speech of what Goebbels was saying -- "the Führer had decided on his report that such demonstrations, these kinds of demonstrations, should neither be prepared by the Party", I mean "should neither in future", as it were, "be prepared by the Party nor organised by it in so far as they emerged or arose spontaneously, but they were not to be opposed".

MR IRVING: Now was Adolf Hitler present when Goebbels made these remarks, allegedly?

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A. No, the Party court accepted that this was the case, of course, that these remarks were accurate.

Q. Accepted that what was the case?

A. That Hitler never intervened to say, as surely he would have done, that he had not given this permission. Goebbels had dinner with Hitler on the evening of the 9th November, immediately before the speech, and what he said in his speech was, essentially, what Hitler told him at the dinner, as you agreed under cross-examination.

Q. Would you answer my question? Was Hitler present when Goebbels made these alleged remarks to the Gauleiters?

MR JUSTICE GRAY: He has answered that question.

MR IRVING: In other words, he was not present?

MR JUSTICE GRAY: He said no.

MR IRVING: Yes. The only evidence we have, therefore, for there having been such a conversation between Hitler and Goebbels is Goebbels' reported speech, as reported four months later by the Supreme Party court, in other words, it is a third party source?

A. I think it is in his, well, this is an investigation of the events of that evening by a Party court ----

Q. Does the report ----

A. --- under the chairmanship of a man who -- Buch, I think his name was.

Q. Walter Buch?

A. Walter Buch who was rather hostile to Goebbels.

P-104

Q. I was about to come to that point. What was the relationship between the Chairman of the Party court and Dr Goebbels about whom he is writing?

A. It is not very good.

Q. Not very good at all, were they? In fact, if you read the Goebbels diaries, there was most outspoken hostility between them. They loathed each other. Is that correct?

A. Yes.

Q. Is it correct towards the end of the same report it justifies the actions of a number of the criminals involved in the outrages on the basis that they believed that they were acting in accordance with the Führer's wishes?

A. That is right. Let us have a look at that passage, can we?

Q. Does that not imply that ----

A. Can we have a lo