(10.35 a.m.)

[Professor Evans, recalled.]

Cross-Examined by Mr Irving, continued.

MR JUSTICE GRAY: Yes, Mr Irving?

MR IRVING: May it please the court. My apologies for this late start.

MR JUSTICE GRAY: That is quite all right.

MR IRVING: My Lord, today we will certainly advance to the end of 1942 and I will certainly finish on Monday.

MR JUSTICE GRAY: Good.

MR IRVING: So that is the target that I have set. Professor Evans, good morning.

A. Good morning.

Q. Would you please go to page 306 of your report? If we could just before that go briefly to page 302 on paragraph 4? It is a minor point but we will take in our stride. You criticise on line 4 of paragraph 4 that "Irving all too often provides inaccurate references or no source references at all".

A. Yes.

Q. Now, on the facing page on the bottom you have quoted three documents from the Public Records Office, Foreign Office, archives?

A. Yes.

Q. Did you find those yourself or were they from my discovery

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or from my ----

A. These were found by one of my researchers in the Public Record Office.

Q. In the Public Record Office.

A. Where there are documents that I found in your discovery, I have said so.

Q. So they made no use of the identical documents in my discovery provided to your solicitors then or of the reference numbers that I gave in the footnotes of my books?

A. No, we went straight to the Public Record Office.

Q. How did they know which of these tens of thousands of files to look in if it was not from the source references I gave in the book?

A. That was, I presume, how we knew.

Q. We now advance to page 306. You, of course, have strong criticism ----

A. If I may just add to that, that I think these concern British Ambassadorial reports, that is right, and I note at the top of page 301 that you footnote those reports.

Q. Yes, thank you. In other words, I give sufficient references for you and your research to find documents like that?

A. In some instances, yes, in some instances you do not.

Q. Yes, well, we will come to those instances later on. I do not think it is enormously important, but one or two I am

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going to pick off like a sniper. You have general criticism of a lady called Ingrid Weckert. You consider that her work is anti-Semitic and that she is a neo-Nazi, and these are reasons why one should not use her, is that right?

A. She is not a serious historian. Her work is anti-Semitic propaganda.

Q. I do not want to labour the point, but we had a discussion several days ago, you may remember, in which I asked you do revisionists ever turn up anything useful? Do they ever do any useful research or would you totally ignore the body of evidence the revisionists provide?

A. I would ignore it unless ----

Q. Ignore it?

A. --- I mean, unless you count yourself as a revisionist.

Q. This was going to be my -- well anticipated. Do you consider me to be a revisionist whom you would ignore the work I do?

A. That is what you call yourself. I mean, I have said repeatedly that you have turned up in the course of your career a number of documents of varying value, but some are valuable.

MR JUSTICE GRAY: We are slightly missing the point on Ingrid Weckert, are we not? I think the point that Professor Evans makes (and you may want to deal with this) is that she is, as he describes her, not a serious historian but

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an anti-Semitic propagandist and you cite her seven times in, is it Goebbels -- yes, Goebbels.

MR IRVING: My Lord everyone is anticipating very well what I am about to ask this morning.

MR JUSTICE GRAY: Except me.

MR IRVING: I was going to get on to this. At the beginning of paragraph 6 on page 306, you tend to talk a great deal about the book by Ingrid Weckert?

A. Yes.

Q. Now, why do you do this? Is there any evidence at all that I have had the book or I that I have used the book or that I have relied on the book?

A. Yes, there is.

Q. What is this book then?

A. There is a -- in a number of my footnotes ----

Q. Are you referring to footnote 162?

A. 154 and 160.

Q. Yes.

A. And ----

Q. Is that a book?

A. And 158 and 162, and I understand that these are articles which were put together then to make a book.

Q. You reference the actual book on footnote 159, is that right?

A. That is right, yes.

Q. Is there any evidence whatsoever that I have had that book

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or used that book or relied on that book in any degree?

A. Yes, because in footnote -- I mean, you are really splitting hairs here, Mr Irving ----

Q. No, I am talking about your paragraph No. 6.

A. If you will allow me to answer the question, please? It is only two minutes into this and you are already interrupting me, Mr Irving. As I have said, you have in your discovery, in the documents you made available to the Defence, some articles by Ingrid Weckert with pencil margin lines, presumably by yourself. These articles went together to form a book, though that, I mean, the articles in the book are, essentially, the same thing.

Q. I think it would be useful if we, therefore, have a look at this article that I am supposed to have done with the alleged pencil lines on it. It is in bundle H1 (vi). Do you have that?

A. I do not have that here.

MR JUSTICE GRAY: Before you do, Mr Irving, can I be clear why we are doing this? Is it to show that she is not an anti-Semitic propagandist?

MR IRVING: No, my Lord, it is because I have repeatedly been accused in this report of relying on an inaccurate book and of drawing pencil marks in an article to indicate that I have relied on the article. First of all, we are dealing with the book. I have asked him to say, is there any evidence at all that I have even had the book in my

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possession and, of course, there is not. So everything he says about the book is totally irrelevant.

A. I am sorry, Mr Irving. I have already explained twice why it is not irrelevant.

MR JUSTICE GRAY: He says, Mr Irving -- he may be wrong, but what he says is that the articles you do quote or cite are really regurgitated in the book. Is that what you are saying, Professor Evans? I do not know whether it is right or wrong.

MR IRVING: Can I draw your attention ----

A. Yes, not simply regurgitated.

MR IRVING: Can I draw your Lordship's attention to footnote 160 which is one typical example where the witness says: "The testimony of Naumann, discussed later in this Report, is taken over by Irving from Weckert, but only mentioned in her book".

A. Not in the two articles by her which he has included in his discovery.

Q. Will you ----

A. But this is also, Mr Irving, I mean, in your account of the Reichskristallnacht, you have concealed where you get your material from. You cite simply "the author Ingrid Weckert" or "Ingrid Weckert" without giving a precise reference to where your material comes from. If one looks at some of the more extraordinary assertions you make in your account of the Reichskristallnacht, they occur in

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Ingrid Weckert's work and it is a fair inference that you have derived from her.

Q. But you have stated specifically ----

A. I am not saying that you take over all of her extraordinary ideas, but you take over some.

Q. To cut the matter short, can we accept, can we agree that you now accept that I have not used her book?

A. No, you cannot.

MR JUSTICE GRAY: He has just said the opposite.

A. I have already explained three times that the articles are substantially the same as the book.

MR IRVING: But you criticise me for what is in her book and I have asked you to agree that I have never had her book?

A. Let us have a look at some ----

Q. This should be a matter briefly disposed of.

A. --- let us have a look at some of the ideas. I mean, this is all extremely vague at the moment.

Q. First of all, can you point to the pencil lines on the article to which you refer?

A. Right, well, can you refer me to the page, please?

Q. It is page 646 of bundle H1 (vi).

A. 600 and?

Q. 46. That is where it begins I believe. H.

MR RAMPTON: It may be your Lordship will find it in L2.

MR IRVING: H1 (vi) is the copy that I have used.

MR RAMPTON: Yes. That may be, but what is it called?

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A. This is Kristallnacht 1938, the great anti-German spectacle, and this may be taken directly from the journal and not ----

MR RAMPTON: I do not know. Your Lordship will find it in L2 at tab 6.

MR JUSTICE GRAY: Thank you very much.

MR RAMPTON: Without the pencil marks, I think.

MR IRVING: Without pencil marks?

A. Without pencil marks.

Q. What is the point of putting in a footnote 162, see the pencil lines, if we cannot see the pencil lines?

A. You deny that there are pencil lines, Mr Irving.

Q. I am asking you to show them to us.

A. Could I have the original copy, then, please?

Q. I have just given you the reference. It is H1(vi) 646.

A. No, the original.

Q. So we have now established that I did not use the book?

A. No, Mr Irving.

MR JUSTICE GRAY: We have not established that.

MR IRVING: I am not getting a clear answer from the witness, my Lord.

MR JUSTICE GRAY: I am not sure what it is I am looking at in L2. Is this extract from the book or one of the articles?

A. It is an article.

MR IRVING: It is not the reference I gave. The reference I gave was H1 (vi) 646, which is the way the documents

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were given to me?

A. It is the same.

MR JUSTICE GRAY: Mr Irving, I am bound to say I do not really find this terribly helpful. The nub of the criticism, I will say it again, is that you have used and cited as a source for events succeeding Kristallnacht a lady who is alleged by this witness to be worthless as a historian and an anti-Semite. You have various answers to that. Either you can say I think she is a serious historian and you can put to the witness why, or you can say that the material you cited has no signs of any anti-Semitism, but really burrowing through the documents to see whether there are pencil side-notes on an article seems to me to be a waste of time.

MR RAMPTON: I have the original discovery copy and it has lots of pencil marks on it, or what appear to be copies of pencil marks, to be exact.

MR IRVING: Can I take you to the little bundle of documents? We will jump several stages in this case, my Lord. Towards the end of the little bundle of documents probably on the second page ----

A. Sorry, you will have to tell me which little bundle, Mr Irving. I have plenty here.

Q. The one I gave you this morning.

A. Let me try and find it. Yes.

Q. About two pages from the end, is that a letter from me to

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somebody called Mrs Weckert dated June 3rd 1979?

A. It is.

MR JUSTICE GRAY: I am sorry. I wonder if I am looking at the wrong thing?

MR IRVING: It is two pages from the end of that little bundle, my Lord.

MR JUSTICE GRAY: I do not think it has found its way here. It does not appear in my clip, at any rate not two pages from the end?

A. This is the one with 693 in the top right hand corner.

Q. Does the 693 indicate that that letter was in my discovery?

MR JUSTICE GRAY: Yes. I am sure it does.

MR IRVING: Am I replying in that letter to a sehr ausführliche Darstellung which this lady has sent to me?

A. Yes.

Q. I am thanking her for a very ----

A. Extensive.

Q. Extensive description.

A. Yes.

Q. Will you accept that this was a description of the events of the Kristallnacht as she has researched it up to that point?

A. I accept that that is her tendentious account of the Reichskristallnacht.

Q. Very well. Will you look in the second paragraph and see

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that I make criticisms already of her account and suggest that I am not going to go along with everything that she writes? You cannot just dismiss the report of the SA Group -- do I write that?

A. You write that, yes.

Q. This will certainly interest you most of all? I also refer to the diary of von Hassell, the diary of Groscurth and other contemporary sources?

A. Yes, Mr Irving. As I have already said, I do not say that you take over all her ideas. You do not, for example, depict, as she does, the pogrom of the Reichskristallnacht as devised and put forward by Zionists in order to cast opprobrium on the Nazi regime and cause it to fall. Even you have some scruples, Mr Irving.

Q. Is possible that an amateur historian like Ingrid Weckert will succeed by her obsessive diligence in turning up items, or documents, or conversations with people that she conducted, that would be use to the general body of historical opinion?

A. I would not regard her as an amateur historian, Mr Irving.

Q. An amateur writer, an amateur chronicler?

MR JUSTICE GRAY: Answer the thrust of the question, Professor Evans.

A. There is always a possibility, yes, of course, that anyone can do that.

MR IRVING: Is this the kind of correspondence you would expect

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to see between one writer and another where one writer is saying, "I found this kind of thing", and the other writer writes back and says, "well, I think you got this right but you got that wrong, here are some documents that I have got" -- does this go on?

A. I have not said that you take over all her ideas, or that you agree with absolutely everything she says. The fact remains, Mr Irving, that in your accounts of the Reichskristallnacht some years later than 1979, and after she had published her work in the course of the 1980s, you do adopt a number of her ideas.

Q. Have you seen the lengthy Darstellung that she sent me? It was in the discovery.

A. We used her book and her ----

Q. You have used her book?

A. Wait a minute, and the articles with the pencil lines in the margin.

Q. You have used her articles, but have you seen the lengthy typescript letter she sent me with all the details of the research that she had done?

A. We have not used that in the report, Mr Irving. We have used her -- this is not a report about Frau Weckert and her works.

Q. But quite a lot of it is about her, is it not?

A. The report is about you, and your use of her work. There are one, two, three, four, five, about half a dozen pages

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here about your reliance on aspects of her work rather than on your own research.

Q. The inference you are giving in your report -- I am going it move on very shortly from this -- is that I have relied on her book. You go in great detail into her book. You say that her book has been black listed by the Germans. It has been put on the censorship list, has it?

A. It is illegal to sell or lend it to any person under the age of 18 because it is regarded by the authorities as an anti-Semitic work which is liable to corrupt young minds, and also shows no evidence of even minimal attempts at truthfulness and objectivity. Let me say once again, Mr Irving, that what I demonstrate in my report is that you have taken some, although not all, of Ingrid Weckert's ideas from her writings, from her articles, which then were reprinted and put together as the book.

Q. But you have not made no reference at all to the fact that I had from her a lengthy special Darstellung which she wrote at my request and which has no reference to her book, which is the thing that has been banned and on which I pass critical comment?

A. Are you claiming that this is entirely different from the book and the articles, it says completely things and that that is what you use in your book, Mr Irving? I do not think so.

Q. In the corner of the world where you come from, Professor

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Evans, do you agree with the censoring of books, blacklisting of books?

MR JUSTICE GRAY: I do not think we need to get into that.

A. That is an entirely different matter.

MR IRVING: Why did you mention it then in this report?

A. Because the German authorities have investigated her work and decided after the investigation that it is anti-Semitic, corrupting and shows no evidence of even minimal attempts at truthfulness or objectivity.

Q. As you said earlier, have we anything----

A. What they do as a result of that is a matter for them.

Q. Have we anything to learn from Germany in this last century about freedom of speech?

MR JUSTICE GRAY: I do not think that question helps, Mr Irving.

A. I take that as a rhetorical question, Mr Irving.

Q. Yes. Leave me to deal with the question.

MR IRVING: In paragraph 10 on page 308 you object to the fact that I have corrected a wrong date to a correct date. What on earth is wrong with that?

A. Sorry, where is this?

Q. In paragraph 10 on page 308. You say he unilaterally alters the date of arrival of Goebbels back in Berlin. I have corrected a wrong date to a correct date. What is wrong with that?

A. Let me just read back here. I am afraid this might

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require ----

MR JUSTICE GRAY: Professor Evans, if this is a point that you do not really place much reliance on, I think I would say so.

MR IRVING: Again it is an allegation that I have relied on the book, and the wrong date in the book. In fact, of course, I have relied on the correct date from other sources.

MR JUSTICE GRAY: It does appear to me, Mr Irving, that whether you actually relied on the book is, in a sense, a bit of a side issue. Even if you have not, the criticism that is made of you, and you have not really addressed it, is that you are content to cite a source who Professor Evans says is anti-Semitic and not a worth while source for a reputable historian to use.

MR IRVING: Let me address that point now, my Lord, by way of a response to your Lordship. This is to say that there may be some historians with a political bent who will disregard entirely evidence coming from people of whose politics they disprove. If we were to do that with all sources, of course, we would be left without a very large body of historical documentation, for example, the works of all the Nazi war criminals, somebody like Rudolf Höss, Commandant of Auschwitz, who clearly was not very pro-Semitic, to disregard the writings as somebody on the basis of the fact that they have expressed anti-Semitic views, or racist views, or any other views of which the

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researcher personally disapproves, is a very poor criterion for selectivity of documentary materials, in my submission, my Lord.

MR JUSTICE GRAY: Yes, I see. Would you like to comment very briefly on that? Turn that into a question, if you see what I mean, and give your answer.

A. I do not think anybody suggested that Rudolf Höss was an historian.

MR IRVING: Very well, if that is your answer. Now will you go down to page 309 and the justification for my having dealt with that previous matter at such length, my Lord, is the first line of paragraph 1, "another instance of Irving's poor scholarship is". In other words, you are saying that all the aforegoing is evidence of my poor scholarship?

A. Indeed, yes.

Q. Although you now admit that I did not use the book, I have not got the book?

A. Do we have to go over this all over again, Mr Irving? I have already given my answer about five times to that.

Q. I think I have made my point. Page 312, line 6 of your report?

A. Yes.

Q. My Lord, I necessarily have to leap forward onto little mountain peaks like this, because otherwise we will get bogged down in the minefield.

MR JUSTICE GRAY: As long as they are mountain peaks. You also

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must explain to me in what context if you go to the middle of a paragraph. We are on now the testimony of Schirrmeister and Fritzsche.

MR IRVING: Professor Evans, you objected to the fact that I have mentioned the figure of 91 deaths in the Reichskristallnacht in the previous paragraphs, or are you going to insist that we look for the actual references?

A. Well, it is not a very important point, Mr Irving.

Q. Can you allow me to decide what is important?

A. No. Please, I think I am entitled to say what points in my report I regard as important, and what I do not regard as important. You may disagree with that. That is another matter. But I am perfectly entitled to say that. This is not a particularly important point ----

Q. Do you agree you spent an entire page describing this?

A. Will let me speak, please, Mr Irving? I am getting very fed up with these constant interruptions. I will read this out, OK? "In the War Path, published in 1978, Irving gave the official figure of 91 killed, arrived at by the Nazis themselves. Of course, this figure is still far too low, and does not account for suicides, of which there were 680 by Jews during or shortly after the pogrom in Vienna alone. Others were killed after their transport to the concentration camps. However, many other historians have quoted the figure of 91 deaths, and Irving's account

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in 1978 at least gives some insight into what happened during the pogrom".

Q. Will you please now stop? That is all we need?

A. This is intended to comment relatively favourably, or to sort of find some redeeming features in the account you gave in 1978. It is not a very important criticism.

Q. You say it is not an important criticism. You devote an entire paragraph, an entire page, to the suggestion that my entire portrayal is designed to diminish the suffering of the Jews. You pick on the figure of 91 and it turns out many other historians have quoted precisely the same figure.

A. Mr Irving, let us read on a bit, shall we?

MR JUSTICE GRAY: Just read on, Mr Irving. Let me try and get some sort of sense into this. If you read that page, I do not think Professor Evans is criticising your use of the figure of 91. What I think he is saying is (and he is being critical here) that after you used that figure in 'The Warpath', you then reduced it when you came to publish your book on Goebbels. Now, I take that to be the gist of the criticism. It is probably not the most important criticism made, but that is the criticism. So let us address that rather than something that is not being criticised.

MR IRVING: I will address it briefly because I do not think it is a just criticism. Are you suggesting that in the book

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on Goebbels I left the final death roll at 35?

A. Well, in the book on Goring published in '89, the book on Goebbels '96, you cite a figure of 35 or 36 basing it on an early incomplete report by Heydrich.

Q. You are suggesting that I left it at that figure?

A. And I cite Goring page 237, if you want to have a look at that?

MR JUSTICE GRAY: Mr Irving, show him the passage where you bump the figure up again.

MR IRVING: My Lord, you are one who has brought this matter up and I am not prepared to answer that at short notice, but I will look into it and I will bring the figure and the source material out. The point that I was making with that is that on several previous occasions he has criticised my figure of 91 in the Goebbels book, and here he says, "Well, lots of other historians have had the same figure"?

A. And my point, Mr Irving, as his Lordship has quite correctly said, that reduce the figures to 35 or 36 in your later work.

Q. On page 309?

A. Going back?

Q. Yes. Do you rely on the testimony of Schirrmeister and Fritzsche and the fact that page numbers and dates are wrong as being one more instance of David Irving's poor scholarship?

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A. Well, let me read that paragraph. You give a footnote on page 281 of Goebbels.

Q. I summarise it for you? Are you suggesting that I got the dates wrong of the testimony and the pagination wrong which caused your researchers some difficulty?

MR JUSTICE GRAY: This is one of the tiniest points I would have thought in the entire report that Professor Evans has ----

MR IRVING: My Lord, it is a barrage of tiny points. It is death by a thousand cuts. I am picking on some of them which I can with relative ease amend the damage.

MR RAMPTON: Can I intervene because that reflects on something I raised yesterday. I am very concerned about this because it put me in a difficulty. We had passed through Reichskristallnacht yesterday, I would have thought.

MR JUSTICE GRAY: So did I.

MR RAMPTON: We have now come back to it for what I might call pinpricks. One huge section, major section, of Professor Evans' of Mr Irving's treatment of Reichskristallnacht was the Heydrich telex at 1.28 and we have not touched on it.

MR JUSTICE GRAY: You have said just now -- I am trying to guide you, Mr Irving -- that you were concentrating on the mountain peaks. Absolutely right. That is what you must do. Professor Evans has taken some what I agree are pretty tiny points, but you must not forget about the mountain peaks altogether. I mean, the Heydrich telex is

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a crucial part of the criticism that is made of your rendering of the accounts of Kristallnacht. I think Mr Rampton is right and I think I am right in saying that you have not really challenged that part of the report.

MR IRVING: I can deal with the Heydrich telex in two lines, quite simply by pointing to the 2.56 telegram that came subsequently.

MR JUSTICE GRAY: Sorry?

MR IRVING: By pointing to the 2.56 document issued by the officer Rudolf Hess which came subsequent to that which clarifies that matter.

MR JUSTICE GRAY: What do you mean, it clarifies?

MR IRVING: I mean which renders the 1.20 telex, in my view, of much less significance.

MR RAMPTON: No, it is not a question of history, my Lord. It is the question of how it is written by Mr Irving. I am looking at the bottom of page 276 of Goebbels and I see what Mr Irving wrote about it. Then if I look at the actual document, I think I am looking at two completely different things. That is the criticism made by ----

MR JUSTICE GRAY: This is the criticism Professor Evans makes.

MR RAMPTON: Yes. Mr Irving has not even touched on it. Maybe he accepts it as being a fair criticism. That is what I need to know.

MR IRVING: Maybe I find these ----

MR JUSTICE GRAY: I mean, there are two points here and they

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are separate points. One is whether you have accurately reported what the telex or the message or the order or whatever it was said, and the second point is whether it matters one way or another. I quite understand you say you can forget about it because things moved on an hour and a half later.

MR IRVING: Am I right in understanding that if I do not challenge or traverse something here in cross-examination, then it could be taken as accepted?

MR JUSTICE GRAY: Well, the mountain peaks, yes. You cannot chase every single tiny point, and I would not dream of criticising you for not doing so.

MR IRVING: To be accused of poor scholarship, my Lord, is not a tiny point.

MR JUSTICE GRAY: I follow that, but what I would be critical of is if you did not pick up in cross-examination major criticisms. It is terribly easy to see what the major criticisms are -- at least I believe it is.

MR IRVING: We will come to them, and I am not aided by the lengthy discourses which are caused by the very frequent interruptions by Mr Rampton.

MR JUSTICE GRAY: I do not think they are very frequent and if they are justified, then Mr Rampton cannot be criticised for making them.

MR RAMPTON: Can I add, while I am on this subject, that is one major criticism which seemed to me to have, I do not know

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what the word is, bypassed a mountain peak. Another one appear to have been bypassed yesterday, and again it puts me in a difficulty because I am bound to say at the end of the case, if these mountain peaks are not tackled, I shall say that Mr Irving has conceded them. Another one was the Himmler log entry for 1st December 1941.

MR JUSTICE GRAY: Yes. I think Mr Irving must take his own course.

MR RAMPTON: I agree.

MR JUSTICE GRAY: In the end, he must cross-examine on what he wants to. I am not going to take anything as conceded because it is not cross-examined to, but I ----

MR IRVING: Unless I expressly concede it.

MR JUSTICE GRAY: --- I think it is right that I should take into account the fact that he has not challenged it. I have to make up my own mind in the end. I do not think I can say that the point goes by default.

MR RAMPTON: I am using a shorthand; I would if he were a professional advocate, he is not, but I am bound to say that I will place considerable weight on the fact that he makes no challenge.

MR JUSTICE GRAY: Yes, I can see why you would.

MR IRVING: Of course, they have been extensively dealt with in my cross-examination of me.

MR JUSTICE GRAY: No, I do not think that is a sufficient answer. I said yesterday (and I will say it again) you

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must cross-examine to the mountain peaks if you want to challenge what Professor Evans says but you can do it briefly.

MR IRVING: Yes, I shall certainly do so.

MR JUSTICE GRAY: Just going back, let us use the Heydrich message of 1.20, or whatever it was ----

MR IRVING: As an example.

MR JUSTICE GRAY: --- as an example; if you want to say that what you said about it in Goebbels is entirely accurate and no sensible person can criticise your account of it, you can put that very briefly.

MR IRVING: My Lord, the submission that I intend to make on a number of those matters is, apply the following test: if that sentence or that error or that flaw or that misreading be taken out of that book, does it in the slightest alter the thrust or the weight of the arguments?

MR JUSTICE GRAY: That is a very good point, but that is a point for final submissions ----

MR IRVING: Yes, and that is why ----

MR JUSTICE GRAY: --- not for cross-examination.

MR IRVING: --- it may well be that I shall readily concede the points when the time comes.

MR JUSTICE GRAY: So be it. That, in a way, rather tallies with what Mr Rampton just said. But you must make a judgment about that, but it is very important you

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understand how I see the important points and what should do if you are going to challenge Professor Evans' criticisms.

MR IRVING: My Lord, it is revealing no secrets if I say that in my final speech I shall not be addressing all the issues; I shall be strongly addressing to your Lordship that a number of the issues are of far less moment.

MR JUSTICE GRAY: I quite agree.

MR IRVING: And that the major issues like poor scholarship, distortion, manipulation, Holocaust denier and so on are the ones to which I shall attend in the final speech. That is why, with your Lordship's permission, I intend to dwell on matters like poor scholarship in a way that may appear infuriating to you, but I can only pick on the examples that are given in this report.

MR JUSTICE GRAY: Yes, but I am getting the impression -- I am Judge alone, I can say this and I do not have to worry about the Jury -- I get the slight impression that you are cherry picking your way through and alighting on some really rather minor points. I mean, the point about Schirrmeister and Fritzsche, if I may say so, with respect to Professor Evans, it be could have been omitted from his report without doing any injustice to the Defendants' case.

MR IRVING: Let me just ask two brief questions then, my Lord?

MR JUSTICE GRAY: Yes, of course.

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MR IRVING: Professor Evans, you find criticism with the fact that the pagination of the references to the testimony did not tally?

A. Let me read everything I say about this: "Another instance of Irving's poor scholarship is the footnote reference given on page 281 of Goebbels: 'Mastermind of the "Third Reich"' to back up his claim that 'Goebbels however would brag that he had proved that the Jews could be eliminated from the economy, whatever Funk said to the contrary'. When we turn to pages 190-1 and 235-7 of volume 17 of the Nuremberg Trials documents, cited by Irving as the location of the 'Testimony of Schirrmeister and Fritzsche, June 28, 1946' in support of his statement, we find that the reference for pages 190-1 refers to June 27 not June 28, that Schirrmeister is never mentioned on these pages, and that Fritzsche's testimony deals with a completely different subject". I am bound to say this is a very minor I point. I thought it, on balance, worth putting in. I was not advised that it should be taken out, but it really is not an important, not a desperately important, point.

Q. Can I ask you just one brief question? Are you aware of the fact that there are two parallel editions, one German and one English?

A. If you -- well, in order -- if you really want to go into this, Mr Irving, we will have to look up both editions and

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have to have copies of both editions of the Nuremberg Trial documents here and a copy of your book, "Goebbels: Master mind of the Third Reich" which I have here.

MR JUSTICE GRAY: Well ----

A. Do we really want to go through this?

MR JUSTICE GRAY: Speaking for myself, I do not think I would. I would forget it. This is not going to feature in any conclusions that I come to in this case.

MR IRVING: The allegations of poor scholarship, my Lord, rest substantially on these trivial complaints.

A. I do not accept that, Mr Irving.

Q. Pages 321 to 322. We are now back in Riga at the shootings. Can I ask you just a brief, simple question to start with? Professor Evans, do you challenge my account of the shootings at Riga, the actual shootings on November 30th 1941, and if so, why?

A. Tell me what your account is, where it is, what you are referring to exactly.

Q. Have you read, in pursuance of your duties as an expert witness, the account I have given of that in various books including Hitler's War volume 2 -- the second edition, rather, and the Goebbels biography?

A. Can you point me to one of these, please?

MR JUSTICE GRAY: We can do that quite quickly.

MR IRVING: My problem here, my Lord, is once again the fact that this is not the right witness to ask these questions

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of.

MR JUSTICE GRAY: Why not?

MR IRVING: Because this was certainly the matter to be addressed to the Holocaust witness rather than to this witness, but he has spent a page and a half looking at this episode, and I am just trying to deal with this summarily. Does he accept my account is right?

MR JUSTICE GRAY: I think that is a very sensible question to start with actually.

A. Yes, well, turn to pages 347 and 348 of my report, and there you will see my criticisms.

MR JUSTICE GRAY: That should give us the reference too for the ...

MR IRVING: The manipulation of statistics?

A. Yes.

MR JUSTICE GRAY: Can somebody find us the passage in Hitler's War? It is not very good on its index.

A. This is also Goebbels, page 645.

MR IRVING: Shall we just dwell on the Goebbels one which is a more recent one?

MR JUSTICE GRAY: Yes. That is page 645 or thereabouts.

MR IRVING: Yes, the footnotes. (To the witness): Do you suggest, witness, that I have given the wrong overall total for the number of Jews killed in Riga or on this specific day?

A. First of all, you say that on 30th November 1941 5,000

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Jews were killed.

Q. Yes.

A. Whereas there is a documentation to indicate that 10,000 were killed and after the war the court accepted that the number was actually between 13 and 15,000. You then claim, when you are confronted with this evidence, that each ditch into which these unfortunate people were dumped, shot, would have held 1 or 2,000 victims without having any evidence at all about the size of the ditches. That is the first point. Then the second point is that in the main narrative in Goebbels you do not say anything about the second massacre on 8th December. You do, however, as I say, in the footnotes say that 27,800 Jews are executed in Riga, but you then claim that that is possibly an exaggeration.

Q. Can we take those two points?

A. And that is -- yes.

MR JUSTICE GRAY: Yes, take them one by one.

MR IRVING: Take them one at a time. So we are now on pages 347 and 348?

A. Yes.

Q. You say: "Faced with this evidence", five lines from the bottom, right, of page 347?

A. Yes.

Q. "Faced with this evidence, Irving offers a further

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argument". Why do you say "faced with this evidence"?

A. Do you not mention this evidence?

Q. Did you find these documents that you referred to earlier in that paragraph in my discovery or are they referenced in my footnotes?

A. Let me just have a look. This is the Bruns and then there is the ----

Q. The evidence for the figure of 10,600 shot on that day which was a book published in 1989. You have no evidence that I was faced with that evidence, do you?

A. What you do, what you say is that they will have held 1 or 2,000 victims each. What you are aware of, you see, in the second -- let us leap to the second account here -- is that Einsatzgruppen A reported that a total of 27,800 Jews were executed in Riga, which seems to be a pretty accurate estimate and that is the evidence that you are faced with.

Q. That is the second part of the question?

A. And are you saying that you ----

Q. And you object to the fact that I say that this is possibly exaggerated?

A. Well, there is this -- you say that is possibly exaggerated, yes, you try to cast doubt upon it, and then you mention the size of the ditches without mentioning their depth.

Q. We will come back to the size of the ditches. You take exception to the fact that I say that 27,800 is possibly

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exaggerated. You are familiar with the historian Ezergailis, the Baltic historian who is, I think we both agree, an expert on this matter?

A. Yes, I cite him in footnote 75.

Q. And at the end of that paragraph 2 you say that he has arrived at figures of certainly almost 25,000 Jews killed?

A. That is right, yes.

Q. So 27,800 is about 12 per cent more than that, is it not?

A. The estimates by the court in Hamburg is about 25 to 30,000.

Q. Is Ezergailis, Andrew Ezergailis, who, as you say, used various methods of calculating the victims arrived also at figures of certainly almost, in other words, less than, 25,000 less killed?

A. Mr Irving, when you saw possibly an exaggeration, you do not mean to suggest to the reader that it might have been a couple of thousand or 2,800 less.

Q. 12 per cent?

A. I think you are casting in your usual, a way that you frequently employ, you are trying to cast a general doubt on these figures. "Possibly an exaggeration" does not mean that it is within that range of possibilities. I think you are trying to suggest it could be a gross exaggeration.

MR JUSTICE GRAY: Can we just, I am trying keep an eye on the wood rather than looking at the trees. The first

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criticism, if I remember what you said a few minutes ago, was that if anyone just read the text in Goebbels, he would get the impression that there were only 5,000 killed. Am I right so far?

A. Yes.

Q. And that is page 379 of the text?

A. Yes.

Q. I cannot find a reference to 5,000. I can find a reference to 4,000.

MR RAMPTON: It is 1,000 plus 4?

A. 1 plus 4. 1,000 from Berlin and 4,000 from Riga.

MR JUSTICE GRAY: Are you saying -- Mr Irving will, no doubt, ask you a question if you are wrong about it -- that there is no reference in the text to any more Jews having been shot at Riga than the 5,000?

A. That is right.

MR IRVING: But the reference is there in the end notes at the back to 27,800, is that right?

A. Yes, where you frequently put embarrassing things in footnotes hoping, no doubt, that the common reader will not consult them.

Q. Why would I put footnotes in a book if I hoped that the reader would not consult them? Would it not just be simpler not to put them in at all?

A. Well, it is a matter of what strategy you are adopting to try to make your work plausible to those, that minority of

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readers who will consult the footnotes.

Q. Which of us has the minority of readers? Me with my best selling books or you with the 10,000?

A. That is not what I meant.

Q. The suggestion that I put footnotes in a book in the hope that nobody will read them is rather implausible, is it not?

A. No. I think that the average reader does not consult the footnotes. You are addressing yourself to two audiences, as I think you yourself said under cross-examination. You are addressing yourself to the general reader, but also to people who have a more specialised knowledge.

Q. Will you accept that if you are writing a book which has a strong chronological flow and you are dealing with an episode that in happened in November, it would be disruptive to the reader to be told about things at the end of December and that it, therefore, makes sense to put in footnotes the overall result of this kind of murder operation?

A. It is not the end of December, Mr Irving. It is 8th December. That is a week later.

Q. Yes, but would you accept that it is confusing for ----

A. That is not a huge chronological gap.

Q. --- a reader to be ----

A. No, I will not accept it. I think you have a duty to give an accurate estimate of the numbers killed, and not to

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partly underestimate it and then hide the actual final number in a footnote and cast doubt on it in a footnote.

Q. Are there better ways of hiding things than printing things in books; you can hide them by just dropping on the floor, like the Schlegelberger document?

MR JUSTICE GRAY: I think you have asked that question and I think you have got the answer.

MR IRVING: I have, my Lord, and I will I move on now to the pits.

MR JUSTICE GRAY: Yes, would you, because I have not quite got the picture on that.

MR IRVING: Do you agree that General Bruns in his gripping and harrowing account of the mass shootings that occurred on November 30th 1941 -- you remember the girl with the flame red dress that he had in his mind's eye just before she was shot? Do you agree that he describes that there were two or three pits of a certain length and a certain width.

A. Yes.

Q. And can we not calculate from that in a rough -- can we not do a check sum to work out the feasibility of numbers of bodies that would fit into those pits?

A. No, you cannot, unless you know the depth.

Q. How deep can a pit be dug, do you think?

A. Oh, goodness! I mean, any depth. I would not want to make an estimate, I mean.

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Q. Would you accept that I am expert in digging pits, having worked in my early years as a student as a navvy for many years in order to finance my way through university?

MR JUSTICE GRAY: Mr Irving, come on. You can dig a pit as deep as you have got the energy to dig it.

MR IRVING: My Lord, that is a very hazardous operation if you are standing at the bottom of the pit and you dig it without any kind of shoring. I would now draw your Lordship's attention to one such pit which is photographed in the little bundle I gave you. It is the last item in the bundle. It provides a useful check point for the depth that these pits go when they are only three metres wide.

A. And you are saying, are you, Mr Irving, that this is one of the pits in Riga? This is an authenticated photograph of one of them?

Q. This is, well, as you can tell by the British soldier standing around with machine guns, this is probably Bergen-Belsen or Buchenwald, where the victims of Nazi atrocities are being buried by some of the perpetrators.

A. And what does that tell us about the pits in Riga, Mr Irving?

Q. I am sorry, my Lord. You do not have the photograph?

MR JUSTICE GRAY: I think maybe I am missing a few pages off the back of this little clip.

MR IRVING: This is the photograph from my collection of

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original photographs that I have assembled over the years of Nazi atrocities.

MR JUSTICE GRAY: What is the question?

MR IRVING: Yes. Do you have the photograph in front of you?

A. Yes. I will take it out again.

Q. Can you give a rough estimate as to how wide and probably how long that pit or, at any rate, how wide the pit is?

A. Mr Irving, I am not -- this is not one of the pits at Riga. This is no relevance whatsoever to the matter we are dealing with.

Q. It is relevant to the matter of how deep you can dig a pit in circumstances like this ----

A. You can dig pit any depth you like, Mr Irving.

Q. Is that your expert evidence as a pit digger or can we apply some common sense?

A. As it happens, I have been having my house reconstructed, Mr Irving, recently ----

MR JUSTICE GRAY: That is as may be.

A. --- and people have been digging pits and I have watched them, so I do know something about digging pits.

MR IRVING: Can I ask my Lord, did your Lordship consider that it is possible now using that photograph to make some basic assumptions about the kind of pits and graves that were dug and whether they had layers of soil on top of them and...

MR JUSTICE GRAY: Put your case briefly for saying that the

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pits could have contained -- well, put your case briefly.

MR IRVING: Would you agree, as General Bruns describes, the ditch was 24 yards long and 3 metres wide, and if it was 2 metres deep, that would be 144 cubic metres?

A. 25 metres long and 3 metres wide? No, I do not, no. They could have dug it any depth they wanted to.

Q. We will ignore that remark for the moment and continue with this calculation, please. Will you agree that if the pit is 25 by 3 by 2 metres deep, for an example, it would be 150 cubic metres?

A. I am not going to challenge your mathematics, Mr Irving, but it really is not a very relevant question. I do not know how deep these pits.

MR JUSTICE GRAY: Let him continue. I see which way he is going. That is on the assumption it is 2 metres deep, the arithmetic is right.

MR IRVING: Yes. Would you agree that the bodies were not left exposed, that there was a certain amount of back fill done afterwards?

A. Yes, if you wish.

Q. So, in other words, 2 metres of this hypothetical pit would not be used. But let us assume that it was used and let us assume that the walls went straight down, they did not slope inwards, as you can see in the photograph which is before you, so there we would have 150 cubic metres, and you can get about 10 bodies to a cubic metre if you do

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a calculation with which I will not bother you. So how many bodies would be in that pit, just on that rough order of magnitude?

A. You say this all in your footnote, "It would have held 1 or 2,000 victims each", that is what you say, but it is entirely hypothetical. There is a number of "ifs" in that question ----

Q. Just one "if"?

A. --- if that is the question you were asking. It is entirely hypothetical. We do not know how deep this pit was.

Q. So if it was 2 metres deep and if it had straight sides and if there was no back fill ----

A. That is three "ifs", Mr Irving.

Q. --- would you stop interrupting -- you would get 1,500 bodies into that pit, is that right?

A. Yes.

Q. So if it was another metre deep, you would get another 750 in, so you can do an order of magnitude calculation, can you?

A. On the basis of those four "ifs", yes, you can do any calculation you like.

Q. So you can do a ball park calculation of two or three pits of that kind of size and magnitude would hold of the order of, say, three to 7,000 bodies?

A. Yes, on the basis of those four hypotheticals, yes.

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Q. Did you bother to do such a check sum before you criticised me?

A. I did not know how deep the pits were, Mr Irving. My criticism is that there is no evidence of the depth of the pits. You do not provide any. You simply make all these if, if, if assumptions and then somehow treat them as facts.

Q. Do you accept that when you are writing history and you cannot get all these documents on hand, occasionally you have to make common sense calculations and deductions?

A. This is not common sense, Mr Irving. This is a systematic attempt to undermine the figure given of 27,800 Jews, suggesting that this is too large. This is typical of your minimisation of the statistics of the numbers of Jews killed in any number of instances.

MR JUSTICE GRAY: Right. On to the next point, Mr Irving. I think we have exhausted that.

MR IRVING: My Lord, I just say, you do accept that I had a document which stated the figure of 5,000, and that it is within the order of magnitude that the pits would allow?

A. No.

Q. When you write books, Professor, just as an after thought, do you ever bother to look at photographic evidence like that?

A. I look at photographic evidence, yes.

Q. My Lord, we now come to the Himmler telephone notes. We

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have some brief after thoughts. November 30th and December 1st. We are on page 351 ----

A. If I can just tidy my desk?

Q. While you are tidying, I can ask you, do you remember yesterday saying that we had, of course, no evidence whatsoever that Himmler telephoned Heydrich. It could easily have been the other way round, could it not?

A. I think that is a point you yourself made, Mr Irving, about this telephone log. It does not say who telephoned whom.

Q. Was this, in fact, the point you made because I am asking the questions.

MR JUSTICE GRAY: Does it matter? Does it matter in the slightest? I mean, tell me if it does.

MR IRVING: Will you agree that on page 351 you on more than one occasion state, as a matter of fact, that Himmler telephoned Heydrich?

A. Yes, that is an after thought I had on reconsidering this, re-reading this suddenly. As a result of what you yourself said, and you pointed out that one did not know who was phoning whom and I took that on board.

MR JUSTICE GRAY: Can you explain very briefly why it matters one way or the other?

A. It is additional uncertainty. The point at issue here, my Lord, as you know, is that Mr Irving has on a number of occasions claimed that this is a Hitler order given by

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Hitler to Himmler to transmit then to Heydrich and that ----

Q. Well, you have got to get the link between Hitler and Himmler.

A. It is the link between Hitler and Himmler which has not been established, and this is a phone log in which there is some uncertainty which I think a responsible historian has to point out. That is all.

MR JUSTICE GRAY: Yes, no, I follow why it could be of some marginal significance.

A. It is not hugely important.

MR IRVING: You say that this is not hugely important?

A. The vital question is the link between Hitler and Himmler, plus, of course, your misrepresentation in a number of your publications of the contents of the message.

Q. Will you accept that this document is a significant document or is it totally unimportant in the flow of things?

A. No, it is a significant document.

Q. It is a significant document. Who first found it and who first used it? Was it a revisionist?

A. I do not think you described yourself as a revisionist then, Mr Irving.

Q. Was it a historian on whom you have generally looked down throughout the last few days?

A. Mr Irving, I have not at any point disputed the fact that

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you have discovered large numbers of documents.

Q. Did anybody in the world bother to read those telephone notes before I did?

MR JUSTICE GRAY: Mr Irving, everybody accepts you deserve credit for not only uncovering this document but a great many others as well?

A. It is what you do with them that is the problem.

MR IRVING: You mean I make use of them? Is that is the problem?

A. No, you misuse them .

MR JUSTICE GRAY: Let us get to the point.

MR IRVING: Will you look at the Peter Witte book, the Himmler diaries?

A. Could I have a copy, please?

Q. If mine has not been nicked, then I will lend you mine. Here we are. I say that with----

A. Will you not need it yourself?

Q. I know most of these documents off by heart.

A. Mr Rampton, I think Mr Irving should have a copy, really.

Q. April 20th 1942.

MR RAMPTON: If you do not mind, I will keep mine.

MR IRVING: April 20th 1942.

A. Where are we?

Q. It is a horribly expensive book. It is over £100, I believe.

MR JUSTICE GRAY: That explains why I do not have one, does it?

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MR IRVING: April 20th 1942. While you are looking for it, what significance did the date of April 20th have?

A. It is Hitler's birthday.

Q. Adolf Hitler's birth date. If Himmler was visiting Hitler on that occasion, as he was, if he was at the Wolfsschanze, Hitler's headquarters, is it likely he would have said more than just, "happy birthday Mein Führer, many happy returns"?

A. It says here that he goes to see Hitler at 12.30 and at half past one he brings him the congratulations of the SS. Then at half past two he has a kind of, I guess, birthday lunch.

Q. Does he telephone Heydrich on that day?

A. At 12 o'clock, yes.

Q. Is one of the references in that telephone message "keine Vernichtung der Zigeuner"?

A. Yes it is.

Q. What does that translate into English?

A. "No annihilation of the gypsies".

Q. Does that look like murder in that connection?

A. No. Clearly, they have been considering killing the gypsies, but they are not clear about whether all the gypsies should be killed. So he is ordering that they should not be.

Q. Not clear? If somebody says "keine Vernichtung der Zigeuner", that seems pretty clear to me that an order is

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being given that gypsies are not to be killed. Would you agree? If that is the word, "Vernichtung", in that case?

A. The Nazis of course divided the gypsies into mixed race gypsies, who were the majority, and what they regarded as pure bred gypsies, who were in a small minority, and for reasons of his rather strange interest in racial history, Himmler wanted to keep the pure bred gypsies alive to subject them to investigation.

Q. Is there any indication of those considerations in this telephone call? Is there any reference to pure bred gypsies, or half-bred gypsies, or is it just to gypsies?

A. Well, as the footnote explains, 5,000 gypsies had recently, just before this telephone conversation, been killed in the woods in Chelmno, and it quotes an order by Himmler, which is preserved in the Moscow archives, that gypsies who were settled should not be proceeded against. Of course, the fact is that the Nazis did kill very, very large numbers of gypsies in the Second World War in Auschwitz and elsewhere. They are the one racial group, apart from the Jews, who suffered this kinds of genocide.

Q. So, although what appears to have been a clear order not to kill the gypsies was issued by somebody at Hitler's headquarters on April 20th 1942, the Nazis killed large numbers of gypsies?

A. We do not know how this was followed up, and we do not know precisely which gypsies this referred to.

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Q. The follow up appears to have been that large numbers were killed.

MR JUSTICE GRAY: Are we not wandering miles away? I am sorry to keep interrupting, but we started off on 30th November 1941.

MR IRVING: We have moved on.

MR JUSTICE GRAY: Altogether?

MR IRVING: I think so, yes, my Lord. We dealt with it at some length yesterday.

MR JUSTICE GRAY: All right.

MR IRVING: That was an afterthought, as I said. We have now moved on. I do not know if your Lordship considers this item of relevance?

MR JUSTICE GRAY: I am not quite sure where we are going. If you could help me?

MR IRVING: This is one of the chain, actually. This document I consider to be one of the chain of Hitler----

MR JUSTICE GRAY: Your argument is that, because there was an order, and you say emanates from Hitler, that the gypsies should not be killed, that indicates a concern also for the Jews? I am not belittling the argument but that is what it is?

MR IRVING: It is a high carat, a 22 carat piece of evidence, if I can put it like that, written in the handwriting of the mass murderer himself, Heinrich Himmler, in Hitler's headquarters, an order from somebody else to him.

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A. Sorry, Mr Irving. Can I just quote this diary here? "12 o'clock, telephone with Heydrich. Visit to Greiser, so on, Poles, keine Vernichtung der Zigeuner, no annihilation of the gypsies". That is 12 o'clock. "12.30 travel to Hitler's headquarters, Führerhauptquartier, 12.30". Underneath that there is a line that says "RFSS", that is the Reichsführer SS, that is Himmler, Mein Führer, with the Führer. So the telephone conversation with Heydrich which says, "keine Vernichtung der Zigeuner", happened half an hour before Himmler even set off to see Hitler.

MR IRVING: Pure chance then that this is on that day, April 20th, and there is no connection at all therefore in your opinion with Adolf Hitler or the Führer's headquarters? This is just Himmler suddenly having had a brainstorm, saying, "let us not kill the gypsies"?

A. Yes.

Q. Yet it happened after all, did it not? They were killed?

A. As I say, we are not quite sure how long this lasted. If you can trace that up as literature, you can say how long this lasted, which groups it applied to, and so on and so forth. For the moment he is saying, "keine Vernichtung der Zigeuner". It has nothing whatsoever to do with Hitler. He had not seen Hitler at that time. There are plenty of other things that he puts in this which also appear to have nothing at all to do with the date, 20th

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April. "Termine", for example, visit to Greiser. That has nothing to do with Hitler's birthday.

Q. Would you consider it to be a significant entry in the telephone log?

A. This? "Keine Vernichtung der Zigeuner"? Yes, of course. It is very interesting.

Q. Have you seen it mentioned by any other historians whatsoever at any time?

A. I have not seen any other historian claiming that this is an order by Hitler.

MR JUSTICE GRAY: Have I got this document, Mr Irving?

MR RAMPTON: Your Lordship really ought to have a copy of this book.

MR JUSTICE GRAY: I have a feeling that somewhere the reference ----

MR RAMPTON: I copied the relevant pages for 30th November and 1st December.

MR JUSTICE GRAY: 30th November and the 1st, certainly.

MR RAMPTON: Those you have. I have never looked at this before. There was a copy of it produced by Mr Irving at some stage.

MR IRVING: This is probably in the Schlegelberger file.

MR RAMPTON: And I pointed out at that time that this took place before Himmler had lunch.

MR JUSTICE GRAY: Yes, I knew I had seen it but, if somebody could give me the reference for it, I would be grateful.

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MR RAMPTON: Yes I will try to find it?

A. Would you look to borrow this, briefly?

MR JUSTICE GRAY: I would rather have the reference. Is it J2? I have not got a J2, incidentally.

MR RAMPTON: Nor have I.

MR JUSTICE GRAY: These points just will not really get home unless I have got the document. I am sorry, Mr Irving, to interrupt.

MR IRVING: I can do it in a very nice way, my Lord, by lending your Lordship the volume of the Himmler diary.

MR JUSTICE GRAY: That is very kind. But in a way I would rather have the actual document in a file that I am going to be keeping, because I am not going to keep the book.

MR IRVING: I can have a photocopy of that page made during the luncheon adjournment. That is the actual handwritten text.

MR JUSTICE GRAY: I think I am actually getting close to it. J Yes, I have it. It is J1, tab 3, for the transcript page 23.

MR IRVING: Would you agree, Professor Evans, that this is an odd way for other historians to write history, cheerily omitting documents which you consider to be significant, or which you agree to be significant?

A. Well, it is cited by, I think, by Zimmerman's standard work on the gypsies. I have to say that the gypsies, until recently, were not a much studied group of victims

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of the Nazis. Once again, Mr Irving, it is not a problem for me that you made use of this. It is the use that you made, the way you use it.

Q. Have you referenced this particular item in your report? Can you remember what your criticism of my use of this item is?

A. I am making my criticism now. It is that you are claiming that this is an order from Hitler when it clearly is not.

Q. And, using your common sense, of which you are apparently well endowed, you would not consider there is any connection between the fact that this very unusual order, for which there is no precedent, occurs only on the day of Adolf Hitler's birthday, when Himmler is at Hitler's headquarters?

MR JUSTICE GRAY: We have had that point.

A. He was not at Hitler's headquarters, Mr Irving.

MR IRVING: It is an exact parallel to the November 30th episode then, is it not? Is that right?

A. He was not at Hitler's headquarters. He went to Hitler's headquarters after he made the telephone call. It says here in black and white.

Q. Is this an exact parallel to the November ----

A. So you have just made a completely false claim.

Q. Is this an exact parallel to the November 30th 1941 episode where the telephone call to Heydrich appears to ante-date the visit to Hitler?

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A. It is not an exact parallel but there are similarities. The 30th November telephone call concerns one particular train load of Jews. That is quite clear.

MR JUSTICE GRAY: I am sorry to interrupt. I had better have a photocopy from somebody of that page because it obviously has more than I have at the moment.

A. We are back to 30th November.

MR JUSTICE GRAY: Yes.

MR IRVING: My Lord I will provide you with a photocopy of the facsimile, but also with a typescript copy.

MR JUSTICE GRAY: That would be kind.

MR IRVING: Because the handwriting is, as we have discovered, sometimes prone to misreading.

A. That is right, on page 278.

MR IRVING: Page 278?

A. 13.30 Jew transport from Berlin. No liquidation. And then 14.30 to 1600, lunch with the Führer.

Q. Yes. Can you keep that page roughly open because we are now going to go on to the December 1st item.

A. Right.

Q. Professor Evans, have you misread any words in preparing your expert report for this case?

A. I hope not, but one can never be entirely sure.

Q. Yes.

A. As you have said yourself many times ----

Q. These things happen?

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z

A. -- one always makes errors and one does one's best to correct them. That is why I sent you an 18 page list of corrections and amendments to my report on 10th January.

Q. Would you agree that mostly misreadings are quite innocuous and have no serious consequences?

A. I hope that is true of mine. I do not believe that is true of yours.

Q. Do you remember The Spectator letter where the omission of the one word "as" totally reversed the meaning of that letter?

MR JUSTICE GRAY: We have been through that.

A. I do not think that was my misreading.

MR JUSTICE GRAY: We are more concerned with the criticisms of you, rather than the criticisms you make of Professor Evans. I understand why you make them, but let us focus on the point. I know the arguments now.

MR IRVING: It is a little bit more colour and flourish to the argument about to develop, my Lord. Would you agree that a historian who sits in a book lined cave taking printed books off shelves, like the Himmler diary in front of you, with a nice index and photographs and beautifully bound, is less likely to make reading errors than somebody who uses the handwritten original, what I might call a shirt sleeves historian, who goes into the archives and reads the microfilm? Is the latter, the shirt sleeved historian, more likely, more prone to commit these stupid

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blunders of reading an E for an A, or something like that?

A. Well, it is easier, obviously, to read the printed text than it is to read handwriting. It goes without saying. I have done an enormous amount of reading of handwritten German myself and I know how difficult it is.

Q. Yes.

A. Or can be. It depends a lot on the kind of handwriting, of course.

MR JUSTICE GRAY: If I may suggest it, I think probably the best thing to do is to show the witness the script.

MR IRVING: We have two or three versions of it.

MR JUSTICE GRAY: There is only one manuscript version.

MR RAMPTON: No. There are two different forms of copy, my Lord.

MR JUSTICE GRAY: Show the better one.

MR RAMPTON: There is one that Mr Irving produced. I am quite happy for Mr Irving to use the copy that he produced.

MR IRVING: I think that would be more fair.

MR JUSTICE GRAY: I think that is J1, tab 3, page 14 but I may be wrong.

MR RAMPTON: That is right.

MR IRVING: We have the actual version I used here.

A. I have the microfilm version.

MR RAMPTON: If Mr Irving is going to use his own copy, I would like Professor Evans to have the same copy. No doubt, if it is necessary, I can come back to the better copy, the

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microfilm, in due course in re-examination, if I have to. But, if Mr Irving is going to use his rather worse copy, then I think Professor Evans should have the same one. Professor Evans will need the J file, J1, tab 3, at page 14.

MR IRVING: We are looking first at the November 30th entry which is Judentransport?

A. Oh right, yes.

Q. We will start with that one.

A. Then I have not got that here, I am afraid.

Q. There is no need to look at the actual wording. We are going to look at the word "transport" very briefly, my Lord.

MR JUSTICE GRAY: We all know what the point is.

A. Could you point me to exactly where it is.

MR JUSTICE GRAY: J1, tab 3, page 12.

MR IRVING: My Lord, I have done a little research on the word "transport" but I am sure Mr Rampton will not begrudge me ----

MR JUSTICE GRAY: Put your question, which I could put for you because I know what it is going to be.

MR IRVING: I will give my version of the question which is as follows, Professor Evans.

A. Yes.

Q. Are you familiar with the fact that the Cassell's German Dictionary translates the word "transport" only as

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follows: "The German word transport has only these meanings" in the Cassell's Dictionary and I will give the Langenscheidt one in a moment. The Cassell's entry has it in this order: "Transport, transportation, carriage, conveyance, transfer, shipment". So is it actually referring to a vehicle or to a concept?

A. What date is this dictionary, Mr Irving?

Q. The Cassell's Dictionary has remained unchanged in this particular one since 1935.

A. Are you quoting the 1935 edition?

Q. Yes. I spent a lot of money buying them at five year intervals to see if it changed, and they just used a photographic copy the whole way through.

A. Can I see a copy, please?

Q. Let us refer to the Langenscheidt edition?

MR JUSTICE GRAY: I think the witness is entitled to have the contemporary Cassell's Dictionary shown to him if he wants to see it.

MR IRVING: My Lord, the point is, if you are looking at a word without the surrounding context, and you are looking for a translation, you pick the primary meaning. If you then later on learn ----

MR JUSTICE GRAY: Yes. We do not want to overdo this point. You put that the dictionary meaning of "transport" includes as one of the meanings "transportation" and you say that has been the Cassell's Dictionary definition

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since time immemorial. The witness says he wants to look at the relevant one, which would be the one from the 1930s, and I think that is a fair request.

MR IRVING: Can I just show him the typed extract I made last night?

MR JUSTICE GRAY: If it relates to the contemporary Cassell's Dictionary, yes.

MR IRVING: In that case I will just put to the witness this 1935 dictionary.

MR JUSTICE GRAY: Is it Cassell's?

MR IRVING: No. This is now a different one. This is a Butler & Tanner. It is a Routledge Dictionary and unfortunately it is more abbreviated. It does not give the sense that I was looking for in such detail. The point I was trying to make, my Lord, is that it refers to "transportation" rather than "a transport" in the sense of a train.

MR JUSTICE GRAY: I know what the point is.

A. Here, of course, it does not.

MR IRVING: It just says "transport" which is ambiguous.

A. "Transport conveyance", transport or conveyance.

Q. Yes.

A. Those are the primary meanings.

Q. I will have to put it to you to in an "if" form, then, and on Monday bring the photocopy of the original. Professor Evans, if the 1935 or if the contemporary wartime edition of the Cassell's Dictionary says that the meaning of

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"transport" in English is in this order of priority, "transport, transportation, carriage, conveyance, transfer and shipment", is it unreasonable to assume, in the absence of any contextual information, that this is referring to a transportation, rather than to a single train load?

A. It is unreasonable, I think, yes, from the context here. "Judentransport aus Berlin. Keine Liquidierung" quite clearly means "the Jew transport from Berlin, no liquidation". I think it is likely that, had it said, had they meant there should be no liquidation of any transport, train loads of Jews from Berlin, then it would have said something, they would have said so in the plural, Transporte, or he would have put down something like people, emigrants, or people who were deported, or whatever. Let us try and remember what it is that you actually wrote in Hitler's War in 1977.

Q. I am trying to narrow this down to a simple matter.

A. Which is that Himmler was summoned to the Wolf's Lair for a secret conference with Hitler, I am quoting from your book here, at which the fate of Berlin's Jews was clearly raised. "At 1.30 pm Hitler was obliged to telephone from Hitler's bunker to Heydrich, the explicit order that Jews were not to be liquidated". That is what you said in your book. You did not mention Berlin there at all.

Q. Can we keep to the language problem, which is to say, that

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if it was what you said----

A. I am sure you would like to, Mr Irving.

Q. -- the Jew transport, would it not be "der Judentransport aus Berlin"?

A. No, because his telephone log, as you know perfectly well, is in a very abbreviated form that generally leaves out the definite article.

Q. Leaves out the context, is that right?

A. No leaves out the definite article, is what I said. You can go two lines up, "Verhaftung Dr Jekelius". It does not say "Die Verhaftung Dr Jekelius".

Q. What you are saying, this is your expert evidence, is that "Judentransport" could under no circumstances be translated as "transportation of Jews from Berlin"?

A. That is not quite what I am saying.

Q. Will you accept that it can?

A. Just let me answer.

Q. Just say yes or no. Will you accept that it can?

A. No, I am not going to say yes or no, I am going to give you a full answer.

Q. That is what I am trying to avoid, because we really are running out of time.

A. I know you are trying to avoid it, Mr Irving.

Q. We are familiar with your full answers, unfortunately.

A. I did swear to tell the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth.

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MR JUSTICE GRAY: It will not be very long, this answer, I do not think.

A. It says "Judentransport aus Berlin". That is the context. Jew transport from Berlin. It is clear it means a single train load of Jews, "Keine Liquidierung".

Q. Are you saying it is clear to because you are now familiar from the context of all the other documents we know, as indeed I am also now, that that is the correct translation. But my question to you is, if you are faced just with that one line in a document that you read back in 1970, knowing none of the surrounding documentation, right, that it would be totally improper and perverse to translate that as "transportation of Jews from Berlin", which was the sense that I gave?

A. Yes. That is what I am saying. And particularly perverse to say that it is an explicit order which Hitler has told Himmler to transmit that Jews were not to be liquidated. No mention of Berlin at all there, Mr Irving. That is a clear falsification of this document.

MR IRVING: Avoiding your renewed smoke screen which you are laying across the question I put ----

MR JUSTICE GRAY: I am not going to have you saying that. The criticism is that you misrepresented this document in your book.

MR IRVING: That is a separate criticism, my Lord, with respect.

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MR JUSTICE GRAY: On the contrary, it is the whole point of the criticism. It would not be made unless you had misrepresented, as the Defendants say you did, this document. We not be looking at this document at all.

MR IRVING: In that case I shall have to ask further questions on the question of the meaning of the word, which I thought I had established superabundantly to the satisfaction of the court and everybody present, that a primary meaning of the word is transportation and, when one has no other document to go by, and the court has not been shown that at that time I had any other document to go by ----

MR JUSTICE GRAY: I know what your case is, Mr Irving. I really do, and I do not think you need spend any longer on the pure linguistics.

MR IRVING: In that case I shall move on.

A. In the contemporary dictionary you showed me, Mr Irving, the word "transportation" was not there at all. How can it be a primary meaning?

Q. In both Cassell's and Langenscheidt "transportation" is given as the primary meaning after "transport". In the Langenscheidt case it is given as the primary meaning.

A. I have not seen these dictionaries.

MR JUSTICE GRAY: I think we have really spent long enough. I know what the issue is.

MR IRVING: When, in your view, did adequate contextual

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material in this connection come into the public domain, which would have enabled me to correct the misreading, let me put it like that?

A. The adequate contextual material is there in the document itself and consists of two words "aus Berlin".

Q. Why, in your view, is that adequate contextual material as to the nature of the transport or transportation?

A. You said adequate contextual material to correct your error. Your error was that you said it is an explicit order that Jews were not to be liquidated without any mention of the fact that we are referring to Berlin.

Q. We are still concentrating on the word "transport" and I am not looking at the "aus Berlin". Will you now answer my question? When, in your view did adequate contextual material, and I am referring to other source documents, come to light, come into the public domain, which would enable one to put a proper meaning on that? I am referring, for example, to the police decodes.

A. I have already given the answer, which is that there is adequate material in the document itself to make it quite clear that it means "Jew transport from Berlin".

Q. As opposed----

MR JUSTICE GRAY: Mr Irving, really we must move on. I think we are spending an absurd amount of time on an issue which is quite clear to me, and I know what your case is. You have put it perfectly adequately to the witness. You do

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not gain anything by going on putting it to him time and time again.

MR IRVING: I am trying not to go into the meaning of the word. I am asking about when I should have known. This is the question.

A. You should have known when you read it.

MR JUSTICE GRAY: The witness has said perfectly clearly that the context of the whole document, the document, makes it clear what is being referred to and that you misrepresented it in your book.

MR IRVING: Which is, I respectfully submit, an absurd answer. Anybody looking at that one document in 1970 could not possibly have decided between different meanings of the word.

MR JUSTICE GRAY: That is one of the things I will have to decide.

A. Mr Irving, you did decide. You decided that it meant it is an explicit order from Hitler via Himmler that Jews were not to be liquidated. You refer to it frequently. Hitler ordered on November 30th 1941 -- I am quoting you here -- incontrovertible evidence that Hitler ordered on November 30th 1941 that there was to be "no liquidation of the Jews".

MR IRVING: I am not going to get dragged back into that argument again because his Lordship will not allow it. Can we now ask the following question----

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A. That is your interpretation of the document.

MR JUSTICE GRAY: Professor Evans, you are ONLY provoking A continuation of what I think has become an exhausted topic. So let us move on.

MR IRVING: When the appropriate material came into the public domain, by which I mean the police decodes, SS documents and other materials in the 1970s and the 1980s, did I make the appropriate adjustment in the publication of the book the Goebbels biography?

MR JUSTICE GRAY: What page?

MR IRVING: Well, this is the ----

MR JUSTICE GRAY: It is about 379, I think. It says 379 towards the foot of the page.

A. At the bottom?

Q. Yes.

A. Well, you made a partial strategic withdrawal, as it were.

MR IRVING: A strategic withdrawal, was it, not an appropriate correction?

MR JUSTICE GRAY: Let the witness finish his answer, Mr Irving.

A. I will read these two sentences from page 379, if I may. "According to one army colonel who witnessed it, a train load of Jews from Berlin -- those expelled three days before -- arrived in the midst of this; Aktion, this killing of the Riga Jews. Its passengers were taken straight out to the pits and shot. This happened even as

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Hitler, hundreds of miles away in the Wolf's Lair, was instructing Himmler that these Berlin Jews were not to be liquidated.". So you accept in that text that it refers to a single train load of Jews, but you still maintain the falsehood that it was Hitler who ordered it, with no evidence whatsoever.

Q. Would you now answer the question, which is, was this the appropriate correction to the matter of one train load as opposed to transportation?

A. Yes. In that respect, it most certainly was.

Q. Will you agree with me that historians or writers or scholars sometimes differ on the inference they draw from identical documents, that you will have one reading on it from your political standpoint and I will have another reading on it from mine?

MR JUSTICE GRAY: We are now going back to what I have said we must leave.

MR IRVING: Well, we now move on to the document of December 1st. I now want you to look at the handwritten page, please. Can I ask the witness please also to look at the original photocopy? That was the one from which I worked. Near the bottom there is a telephone conversation. You assume in your expert report that Himmler telephoned General Pohl, but in fact all we know is that there was a conversation. Is that right?

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A. Yes. As I say, I have revised my views of that as a result of your pointing this out.

Q. It refers at one point to "Verwaltungsführer der SS haben zu bleiben". Those two phrases are on two separate lines, is that right?

A. That is right, yes.

Q. The words "haben zu bleiben" are pretty indistinct or could you read it easily?

A. Of course, I have read this so often now, it is very difficult to say what I would see on first coming to it. The word "haben" is very distinct, it is very clear. "Zu" is pretty readable. The "bleiben" is a little less good, and the "SS" in the previous line is cut off by the edge of the page. But, on the whole, it is pretty readable.

Q. That is not Latin handwriting, is it? Do you know the name for this German handwriting that is used?

A. Sütterlin. I am very familiar with it.

Q. You are very familiar with it now, or as a result of having worked on it for many years?

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

A. I have worked on it for many years, Mr Irving. I published an edition of documents written in it.

MR IRVING: You agree that not many modern Germans can even read that handwriting, can they?

[A.:] No, that is true.

Q. So it is a difficult handwriting to read?

A. No. Well, it depends. As an actual style of handwriting

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you have to learn it. I train my PhD students in it. It does not take more than a few weeks and a little bit of practice.

Q. And you are going to say that it is totally impossible for any reader reading that line for the first time without the benefit of what I would call cheats, in other words printed versions of the document, to mistake in that ancient German handwriting "H A B E N" for "J U D E N"? Is that going to be your answer?

A. Yes. I think you have to read this carefully. You thread your way through it. When you are reading handwriting, if you find something difficult to read or ambiguous, you then search for other similar letters, the same letter in other words in the same hand to try and figure out what that particular hand's version of a B or a D or an E or a U actually looks like. What we are dealing with here is your claim that that says, "Juden zu bleiben" or, as you say in Hitler's War in 1977, Himmler telephoned Paul with the order that Jews are to stay where they are. Whereas in fact it is "Verwaltungsführer der SS haben zu bleiben", it is the administrative offices of the SS have to stay. From this text there are a number of indications which somebody who was not biased and looking for some evidence to the contrary, that is say an objective historian, that this is "haben zu bleiben". First of all, the fact that it is indented, the second line "haben

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zu bleiben" does suggest that it runs on from the first line. The new entries here begin right next to the middle of the page. They are not indented. Secondly, this writer, as is common in this handwriting, generally puts a kind of what you might call a little inverted circumflex over a U.

Q. Invariably or generally?

A. Generally. Obviously, this is written in some haste.

Q. So that is not the clue then?

A. That is a general tendency and you can see that above "Besuch" with a little thing over the U. "Fliegermeldungen" is another one there at the top. There is another one over the U. So that is the general habit of this writer.

Q. But not invariable?

A. Well, you take that from -- that is one of a number of indications. That is the second one. Then you compare Bs and Ds. You can see, when you compare the B of "bleiben" with a B, or if that B in "haben" is a D, making it "Juden", then you look for another D to see whether that is the way the writer writes, and so on and so forth. I think we have been through this at some length in cross-examination.

Q. You are going through it at some length, but can I now ask you a simple question? You have gone through this at some length. Does that indicate it is quite difficult to read

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words like this?

A. It was a conditional. I said, if you are having difficulty, if you are finding it a problem, then that is what you do as an objective historian. Myself, I think it is very clear from this.

Q. Of course, if you came to the conclusion that it was reasonable, if you privately came to the conclusion it was a reasonable kind of mistake to make when one is reading that document for the first time, you would immediately tell the court, would you not?

A. Yes I would.

Q. You would have no hesitation in saying to the court that, yes, this is a reasonable mistake for David Irving to make. Although I do not like him, on this occasion I will say this is quite right. You would do that, would you not?

A. I do not dislike you, Mr Irving. I have no personal feelings at all. But I do not think this is a reasonable mistake to make.

Q. Yes.

MR JUSTICE GRAY: Can I ask you two questions actually, one is I cannot remember what "Verwaltungsführer" is.

A. Administrative officers or leaders -- Administrative leaders.

Q. And the other is the extent of the textual analysis of the kind you have just described that you undertake depends in

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a way on the significance of the document. I mean, some documents you really are not going to spend ages trying to work out. Is this a sufficiently significant document for it to be reasonable to expect an objective historian to undertake the sort of exercise that you just been describing?

MR IRVING: My Lord, that is precisely question I was going to ask.

MR JUSTICE GRAY: I have asked it for you.

A. The significance that Mr Irving places upon it does require that, that is to say, when it says in Hitler's War that Himmler telephoned SS General Oswald Pohl with the order that Jews are to stay where they are. That is quite a significant statement and it, therefore, does require that kind of textual analysis. Normally, when you are -- it is kind of the lowest form of historical imagination, as it were, when you find handwriting difficult and you do this. You can do it fairly quickly, in my view, with this particular...

MR IRVING: Have you done this kind of textual analysis with every single document you looked at, Professor? Does it take you very long to write your books?

A. Yes, I mean, of course I do this with documents, yes, when I am reading through them.

Q. You look at a letters, you look at little caps over the Us, you look to see if it is a B or a D? You do this with

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every word you read, do you?

A. Yes. You get used to a certain hand and if it is -- if you find difficulty in reading a word, as one frequently does, then that is exactly what you do. I published an edition of 350 handwritten police reports, as you know, and they were quite difficult to read. I frequently had to engage in this kind of exercise if they are written in different hands by policemen who only had a very elementary education.

Q. But it would be normal if somebody came to you and pointed out and said, "Oh, I don't think this word is this, that word is probably that", then you would do that kind of textual analysis, but you would not necessarily do it with every word before you came up against that particular ----

A. Well, you would do it with words that were significant or difficult to read. I mean, normally, as I say, you get used to a hand and if you are reading through this, this is not a particularly difficult example of this particular script, in fact.

Q. There are two obvious corollaries to the questions which I have to ask. The first question is, in your opinion, did I deliberately make this reading in order to serve my political bias? Was it deliberately perverse reading or was it an inadvertent misreading?

A. I think it is a deliberately perverse misreading.

Q. In other words, I knew the correct meaning and

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I deliberately chose the other one? That is what the word "deliberate" means.

A. Yes.

Q. In other words, I knew it was "haben" but I deliberately wrote it as "Juden" and I hoped nobody would look at the original document, is that right

A. Well, it is quite clear from this that it is "haben". I find it very difficult to think ----

Q. Not, that is not what I am asking. You are saying, "I knew that it was wrong and I deliberately wrote the wrong word"?

A. Well, we are getting a bit into psychology here. I mean, as it, I am trying to second guess your thought processes here, but I think you wanted to find a statement like this, and when you found what you thought was a statement like that, you just said, "Hooray" and you did not care to look at it any closer. You misread this. You were mislead by your overwhelming desire to exculpate the Nazi leadership into misreading this as "Juden" instead of "haben"; whereas to any objective historian, taking even a minimal amount of care about reading this, it was very easy to establish that this meant "Verwaltungsführer der SS haben zu bleiben". To that extent, therefore, I think you deliberately misused and abused this text.

Q. Can I just explain to you the meaning of the word "deliberate"? "Deliberate" means, and I am sure my Lord

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will correct me if I am wrong, I knew that the word was "haben" and I deliberately wrote "Juden" in order to serve a political end, is that what you are saying?

A. I am saying that it is very obviously that this word is ----

Q. That is not the answer.

A. --- "haben"; that any objective historian reading this would have very little difficulty in establishing this as "haben", and you put it as "Juden zu bleiben" which itself is grammatically an extremely peculiar phrase which should alert anybody to the fact that it is not likely to be what you say it is. You wanted it to read "Juden zu bleiben" and you made it read "Juden zu bleiben". That is what I am saying.

Q. So your submission to the court is that I knew it read "haben" and I deliberately wrote "Juden"? I have to keep asking this. Will you give a simple yes or no to that question?

MR JUSTICE GRAY: I think you got an answer "yes".

MR IRVING: The answer is yes?

A. Yes.

MR IRVING: Thank you very much, my Lord. Now, the obvious corollary to that is, if that sentence is taken out of the book, does that in the slightest change the thrust of that paragraph? In other words, was there any reason why the sentence should have been put in?

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A. Let me have a look at the paragraph, please. This is Hitler's war, 1977 edition.

Q. Yes. My Lord, this goes to the importance of the whole matter really. If the answer is that it can be taken out without changing the meaning, then the last 10 minutes have been largely wasted.

MR JUSTICE GRAY: No, I do not think that is right at all. So that you know why I do not think that is right, I will tell you reason and it is simply this, Mr Irving, that you might be able to say in relation perhaps even to every one of the passages that are criticised, "Well, by itself, that does not amount to much", but I think the Defendants' case, just so that you know what I am understanding it to be, is that if you put them all together, then they are of significance. I think that is the way it is put. I am not saying for a moment I accept it but ----

MR IRVING: Then we would have to look at the word "all" and see what "all" is.

MR JUSTICE GRAY: Yes, of course.

MR IRVING: Are we just going to look at three sentences and pick two that are adjacent where two flaws have been made or are we going to look at the whole book?

A. Right, yes. Well, the paragraph ----

MR JUSTICE GRAY: Page?

A. Page 332 in the edition that I have, my Lord, Hitler's War 1977, and it consists of an accumulation of falsifications

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of documentary evidence of which this is one.

MR IRVING: Do you agree that the sentence complained of was cut out of the following edition?

A. Could I have a look at the following edition, please?

Q. Or was it cut out of the Goebbels biography?

A. Which do you want me to look at, Mr Irving?

Q. Let us look at the Goebbels biography.

MR RAMPTON: It is at page 427 of the 1991 edition of Hitler's War, I think.

A. Right. Let us have a look at that first. Page 427?

MR RAMPTON: Yes, 427 at the bottom. I think it is there actually. I do not think it is cut out at all.

MR IRVING: Well, that is why I suggested the Goebbels book instead because the ----

MR RAMPTON: Yes, I have no doubt that is why.

MR IRVING: Well, obviously, the error was pointed out to me relatively later on.

MR JUSTICE GRAY: Well, it is exactly the same, I think.

A. Exactly the same -- I will take your word for it, my Lord.

MR IRVING: Professor Evans, do you agree that the error was rectified in the Goebbels biography in the corresponding passage?

A. Where is this? Page, please?

Q. 377 approximately, is it not.

A. Page.

MR JUSTICE GRAY: 377?

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A. 377 again.

MR JUSTICE GRAY: I am not sure about that.

MR RAMPTON: I think it is 379 actually, I think it is.

MR JUSTICE GRAY: That is right.

THE WITNESS: That is rather difficult but, presumably, we are looking for a lack of any mention.

MR IRVING: That is right but, in other words ----

MR JUSTICE GRAY: It has gone altogether, has it? Yes.

MR IRVING: --- it has gone altogether?

A. But, see, you are essentially lifting paragraphs from Hitler's War and putting them into Goebbels, but changing them slightly.

Q. I am relying on a reliable source, namely Hitler's War, when I write the Goebbels biography. Do you agree, to answer my question, that I took the appropriate action when the error was pointed out to me and that I excised it from all future editions of the work?

A. Can you give me some evidence to show when the error was pointed out to you? I think it was pointed out -- was this one of the ones pointed out by Professor Bruchsal or not? That is not really the issue, is it, though?

MR RAMPTON: I believe the evidence of Mr Irving was in cross-examination that this error was pointed out to him some time in the early 1980s, I think by Eberhard Jaeckel, but I am not sure.----

MR JUSTICE GRAY: I am afraid I had forgotten that.

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MR RAMPTON: Which is why he retranscribed it in the typewritten version that we have in J3 at page 13 -- sorry, J1, tab 3, page 13. I think his evidence was that he retranscribed the word "haben" from "Juden" on a typewriter which I think he said he had thrown away over 15 or 20 years ago.

MR JUSTICE GRAY: So, mid 80s?

MR RAMPTON: Yes, I think it is early to mid 80s. I am open to correction. That was done entirely from memory, but I think that is what the evidence was about it.

MR JUSTICE GRAY: Can you remember, Mr Irving, as a matter of ----

MR IRVING: Well, unfortunately, the mid 80s would be a crucial date because mid 80s is when the second edition went to press.

MR JUSTICE GRAY: What, the 1991 edition? It could not have been six years, could it?

MR IRVING: Books of this size are in the gestation period a long time, and I sent it off to be edited down and cut down and trimmed, and the first edition was 1975.

MR JUSTICE GRAY: '77.

MR IRVING: Well, the German edition was 1975, my Lord. 1977 was the first English edition which means that it was actually finished in 1974. So it is not an easy kind of question to answer, that. So I think that is why it is more sensible to look at Goebbels and say it is quite

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simply ----

MR JUSTICE GRAY: Well, it has gone from Goebbels.

MR IRVING: It has gone from Goebbels ----

MR JUSTICE GRAY: --- and everybody accepts that.

MR IRVING: --- so the appropriate action was taken.

MR JUSTICE GRAY: Yes?

A. I do not accept that, Mr Irving. I would need to know exactly when you -- when this was pointed out to you.

Q. You do not accept that it went from Goebbels.

A. No, no. I do not accept that the appropriate action was taken as soon as it was pointed to you, but in any case that is not really what we are talking about. The point is that it was in your books in the first place.

Q. Yes, so to summarise your evidence, your evidence is that the reading of "haben" in old German handwriting as "Juden" was a totally perverse and deliberate action I took in order to exonerate Adolf Hitler?

A. Yes.

Q. And that, in your opinion, therefore, even when you are confronted with the original faded photocopy that I had before me, and not the printed volume that scholars now use, this was not a permissible misreading?

A. No, I think anybody who reads the German handwriting and approaches this with any degree of objectivity can see that it says "Verwaltungsführer der SS haben zu bleiben".

Q. This kind of handwriting is pretty easy to read, is it? I

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mean, any historian can read it?

MR JUSTICE GRAY: Have we not really had that questioned asked and answered?

MR IRVING: Well, I was going to ask one obvious follow up, and that is if it so easy to read, why was it not until I used it that it was ever used?

A. I do not dispute the fact that you were the first person to read a number of documents. The point is, Mr Irving, the misuse you make of them when you do read them.

Q. Is your contention that that was a sufficiently important sentence in that paragraph that its removal makes no difference to the thrust of my arguments?

A. I think you have that sentence the wrong way round.

Q. In other words that ----

A. Could you remind me of the page again? I foolishly shut the book.

Q. Let us move on. We will move on then, for heaven's sake.

A. I think its removal does weaken the paragraph, yes.

Q. Will you turn to page 357 of your expert report, please?

A. Do I need this bundle still? Sorry, let me just clear the decks again.

Q. You are accusing me of further ----

A. Have we finished with this? Well, I will keep that.

Q. No, you will not, I will have it. It is mine.

A. You have it back, yes.

Q. Professor Evans, you accused me of further

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misrepresentations and omissions in connection with the Bruns Report and the subsequent events. Page 357 of your report.

A. Yes. Yes.

Q. The specific omission you accuse me of is not making use of or not referring to a document, a letter, written by, if you look at page 359, paragraph 6, a man called Schulz-DuBois?

A. No.

Q. You do. You say: "However, he makes no mention of the letter's contents"?

A. That is not the specific -- I mean, I make a number of points about this, but that is one of them, yes.

Q. One objection you make to my use of the Bruns document is that I rely on the fact that after these German Army officers saw what was going on, the SS shooting Jews on that morning November, 30th 1941, they discussed among themselves who was going to bring it to Hitler's attention, is that right?

A. Where is that?

Q. According to General Bruns? I am telling you what is in the report.

A. Right. Can you just point me to the paragraph and where I say that?

Q. I am telling you what is in the report and we have had this evidence before the court.

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A. In my report?

Q. In the report by General (as he became) Bruns.

A. I am looking in my report for where I make this allegation.

Q. Paragraph 1 on page 357 is your reference to it.

A. Yes.

Q. "Irving relies on Walter Bruns as the source for his claim that a report about the killings in Riga eventually reached Hitler's headquarters". Does that refresh your memory?

A. Yes. It quotes: "Hitler seemingly intervened at once to order a halt to 'diese Massenerschiessungen' (these mass shootings)" ----

Q. Can we take this stage by stage?

A. --- "as soon as a report, signed by a junior officer, was forwarded to him".

Q. Will you be responsive to the questions I am asking?

A. That is what you say.

Q. Have you read the Bruns Report?

A. Yes.

Q. Does the Bruns Report describe how the Army officers who witnessed these atrocities discussed among themselves how to bring it to Hitler's attention?

A. Yes. Do we have a copy of that?

MR JUSTICE GRAY: Yes, we must look at it.

A. We must look at it, yes.

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MR RAMPTON: It is a very bad copy, I am afraid. It is J1, tab 4, my Lord. It is very difficult to read.

A. Do we have a page number?

MR RAMPTON: It is the beginning of tab 4.

A. Yes, of course, that is right.

MR RAMPTON: So it is a wartime copy document.

MR JUSTICE GRAY: Yes.

A. Right.

MR IRVING: Have you found the passage towards the end of the report where they are discussing, the question was who was going to bring it to the Führer's attention?

A. That is right, yes.

Q. Do you agree that Colonel Bruns at that time was a senior German Army Engineer Officer in Riga?

A. At the time he is referring to, yes.

Q. At the time he is referring to, but at the time of this conversation that the British have overheard he is a Major General ----

A. That is right.

Q. --- in British captivity?

A. That is right. It is, whatever you call it, a spying, a record made by the British without the Germans, the captives, knowing that it was being made.

Q. What kind of reliance would you place on a report like this on the British intercept, if I can call it that, of an overheard conversation? Is it liable to be dependable,

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used with caution, with proper circumspect?

A. One should use all documents with proper circumspect and caution, but it is certainly, since they do not seem to have been aware that they were being recorded, it does seem to be quite reliable.

Q. There might be a tendency to brag a bit or possibly even to conceal things they had a guilty conscious about?

MR JUSTICE GRAY: I think you got your answer "yes" is the answer.

MR IRVING: The reason I am about to ask this is to say how would this compare with the testimony given by somebody in the witness box at Nuremberg, the same person? Would it be more reliable or less reliable?

A. That would -- I mean, one has to take all these things individually and actually look at them. One would be perhaps a little more suspicious at the testimony in the witness box at Nuremberg, but one would have to take these things on their merits.

Q. Having read the Bruns Report or scanned it, would you agree that he is describing something he actually witnessed, the shooting of these people at the pits, the girl with the flame red dress ----

A. Yes.

Q. "I see her in my mind's eye even now"?

A. Yes, yes.

Q. The same General Bruns in 1948, did he not deny that he

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had witnessed these things? He said in the witness box under oath that, yes, he had received reports on it and he had sent people out to see what was going on?

A. Right.

Q. So, in fact, there are distinctions between the calibre of evidence? Sometimes ----

MR JUSTICE GRAY: I think the witness has accepted that already.

MR IRVING: Yes.

A. Yes. I mean, clearly here he did not think he was implicating himself because he thought he was talking in private, whereas in the witness box he was very careful about making any admissions.

MR IRVING: So used with proper caution, a document like this CSDIC report is a valuable source?

A. Yes.

Q. What kind of cautions were then used about what one accepts? Should one be careful about hearsay where they are reporting what B has said to C, or is there any other kind of caution you would apply?

A. Yes, cautious in every -- I mean, you take it on its merits.

Q. A self-serving statement you would be cautious about?

A. If it is obviously self-serving, yes, but, as I say, it is less likely to be self-serving in these circumstances than it is in the witness box.

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Q. Are you familiar with these CSDIC reports? Have you worked with them in any detail?

A. I have not, no.

Q. You have not?

A. No.

Q. There is something like 50,000 pages of these overheard conversations with top Nazis and you never used them?

MR JUSTICE GRAY: Well, come on, Mr Irving, is that helpful?

MR IRVING: Page 359 -- I am sorry, we had better have a look at page 358 at paragraph 3. What happened to the report that went up to Hitler, that was finally sent up to Hitler? How did it go, do you know?

A. You tell me, Mr Irving.

Q. Is it right that the report was drafted by a junior Army officer was sent up through what one can call Army channels and then across to intelligent channels to Admiral Canaris?

A. That seems to be the case, according to the Schulz-DuBois document, yes.

Q. When Schulz-DuBois refers in his letter, which was, apparently, written in January 1942, is that right? I referred you to paragraph 6.

A. Well, yes, it is certainly uncertain. I mean, his wife dated it to January '42, yes.

Q. Well, Schulz-DuBois did not survive the war?

A. That is right, yes.

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Q. On the foot of page 359, you say the report had been forwarded to the top counter-espionage official. Is that a reference to Admiral Canaris?

A. Yes, I presume it is, yes.

Q. Would you consider a statement made by Admiral Canaris as against Adolf Hitler to be dependable or not? In other words, if he had made a statement that was critical of Adolf Hitler, would that be dependable?

A. Those are two different questions.

Q. The second question.

A. Again, one does regard this in the same way as other sources. I mean, this is ----

Q. Was Adolf Hitler a member of the anti-Hitler resistance?

A. You mean was Canaris?

Q. I am sorry. Was Admiral Canaris -- a Freudian slip -- was a member of the anti-Hitler resistance and was he hanged for this on April 8th 1945?

A. He was indeed, yes.

Q. So a statement made by Admiral Canaris to the disadvantage of the Führer should be viewed circumspectly, should it?

A. Well, no more circumspectly, I mean, than those of other members of the resistance or any other source. One takes all these things on their own merits. I do not think you can simply discredit what members of the resistance said about Hitler simply because they were critical of him.

Q. Not necessarily untrue but ----

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A. Though you would like to discredit everything that is critical that is said about Hitler.

Q. In other words, a statement made by Canaris would not necessarily be untrue ----

A. No.

Q. --- but you might want to have a document to back it up, another document, a second source?

A. Yes, I think you have to make it clear that Canaris is who he is.

Q. At the top of the following page, of course, you quote then what information came back from Canaris.

A. Yes.

Q. "This man", Canaris, "who has constant access to the Führer is said to have described the consequences and the terrible nature of these methods, namely the killings, to the F", Hitler, "once more compellingly" ----

A. Yes.

Q. --- "whereupon he", Hitler, "is said to have said, 'You want to show weakness, do you, Mein Herr, I have to do that for after me there will not be another one to do it".

A. Yes.

Q. In other words, "I had to do the killings".

A. Yes.

Q. And this is Canaris' statement about what Hitler's response to him was?

A. Yes.

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Q. And is the fact that the channel of information that it comes through Admiral Canaris not sufficient to make one want possibly to quote that reference, but add a caveat at the end and say, "Well, of course, Admiral Canaris may have been reporting something genuinely, but it has to be borne in mind that he was later hanged as a member of the anti-Hitler resistance"?

A. Well, I do not -- I mean, I do not think that it necessarily disproves it. I mean, the crucial thing really is that this, this is obviously a second-hand evidence and one has to make that clear, but I do not think, as I say, you should discredit, or I do not think you should say that I think it is unlikely that people who disapproved of Hitler and his methods simply made up things about him. I think the members of the German resistance were honourable men.

Q. Yes. Are you aware of the fact that I have large parts of the private diary and official diary of Admiral Canaris and his second-in-command, Colonel Lahousen, also? They both kept diaries and I have parts of the Canaris diary which were in British Cabinet Office files right up to June 1943, covering this period, in other words?

A. You mean they are in British Cabinet Office files?

Q. Yes.

MR JUSTICE GRAY: So what? What is the significance of that?

MR IRVING: I was going to ask in the best way I can that if

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there is no reference to any such remark by Adolf Hitler in that diary, would that be one reason, if this information had been before me at any time?

A. Too many "ifs" there; I would have to see the diary with dates, but it does say here that he is, that he has said to have described the consequences ----

Q. Yes.

A. --- whereupon Hitler is said to have said, so it is clear. I mean, it is an important piece of evidence, but it is very indirect and I think one has to make that clear.

Q. So there are two parts of that statement, that he made the report to Hitler which is probably credible because that is why the report had been sent to him?

A. Yes.

Q. Whereupon, and this is the second part of the statement, Hitler is said to have said something?

A. Yes.

Q. And then at some point in time, two or three days later about, a message comes back out to Riga saying, "These shootings have to stop. These kind of mass killings, mass shootings have to stop". This is the first part. I know we will come to the part you want to come to next.

A. We have to be clear about the dates here.

MR JUSTICE GRAY: Sometime after 30th November 1941?

A. That is right.

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MR IRVING: Sometime after 30th November?

A. January '42 being the letter. So we do not know exactly when this actually happened. It is a piece of supporting evidence for what is in the Bruns document.

Q. Can you look at the end of the Bruns Report where Bruns describes going back at some time to see the man he refers to as Altenmeyer, but in fact his name was Altemeyer ----

A. Yes.

Q. --- a 23 year-old SS gangster who was the big top brass on the spot. Altemeyer says, "We have received this new order saying that this kind of mass shootings have to stop", and then he adds a sneering comment afterwards which we will come to in a minute?

A. Well, yes.

MR JUSTICE GRAY: I think perhaps one ought to read the whole of what is quoted?

A. One should read the whole thing.

MR IRVING: My Lord, I do want to take this in two parts, if I may?

A. It would help, I think, if I read the whole thing.

MR JUSTICE GRAY: I think you should.

A. "Altenmeyer triumphantly shows me, 'Here's an order that has come that saying that mass shootings of this kind may no longer take place in the future. That is to be done more cautiously or discreetly".

MR IRVING: Shall we take the first part of that first? If

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this order has come, that this kind of mass shootings have got to stop, what does your supposition about whether, knowing what you now do about the report that went up from Canaris, through Canaris to the "F", to the Führer, and that back comes this order saying, "This kind of mass shootings has got to stop", can you draw any conclusions from that?

A. Yes, it would seem likely that the order derived from Hitler.

Q. And is there any connection at all, do you think, with the police decodes we looked at yesterday from Himmler, December 1st 1941, where he orders Jaeckel straight to Führer's Headquarters on December 4th and there is a meeting between the two of them on December 4th, "These arbitrary measures have got to stop. You have got to stick to the guidelines. I will severely punish actions like this." Do you see any connection between all this?

A. Well, Himmler's meeting with Jaeckel was in his own headquarters.

Q. Do you see any connection with this kind of general chain of events, that killings were going on and they stopped, that there are orders that these mass shootings have got to stop and there are reports to Hitler? Do you see, does your brain -- I know it is difficult for you to grapple with totally new concepts, but here is this matter. We are trying to work out who possibly may have ordered,

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"These kinds of mass shootings have to stop"?

MR RAMPTON: Well, I am sorry, that just ----

MR IRVING: Mr Rampton, I do wish you would stop interrupting every time we are doing something.

MR RAMPTON: Counsel, I am afraid, as his Lordship will tell Mr Irving, has a right to intervene when the cross-examination is proceeding on a false and time wasting basis. He has a duty to the court and to his client and to the witness. It is not possible for that question to be answered as though the second sentence did not exist, in my submission.

MR JUSTICE GRAY: I have well in mind the whole of it, and I think one has to take the whole of it in end, Mr Irving.

MR IRVING: My Lord, we are very definitely going to come to the second sentence, but I do respectfully submit that I am taking this in the proper sequence, and we will give each part of that second sentence the weight that it deserves.

MR JUSTICE GRAY: Well, you see, I do not really see that you can do that. If by taking half the sentence you really significantly distort the sense of the whole of it, it seems to me the question is being asked on something of a false premise.

MR RAMPTON: Yes.

MR JUSTICE GRAY: That is the difficulty. I think what you ought to do, if I may suggest it, is proceed the other way

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round, as it were, and deal with the latter part of it, namely that the shootings are to be carried out more discreetly, and put your case.

MR IRVING: If that will make my case more comprehensible to your Lordship, I will willingly do that.

MR JUSTICE GRAY: I know what it is because you have just mentioned it. I think that is the right way of doing it, if I may say so, and it meets Mr Rampton's objection.

MR IRVING: I appreciate why Mr Rampton keeps on interrupting and it is now becoming statistically evident that every time I am about to make what I consider to be an important point ----

MR JUSTICE GRAY: If I thought he were doing that, I would tell him to desist.

MR IRVING: Because it does seriously disrupt the flow of cross-examination when this occurs.

MR JUSTICE GRAY: Well, do not let it disrupt it any more.

MR IRVING: Professor Evans, I referred just now to the message decoded on December 1st. There were, in fact, three messages, the first one on the morning of December 1st was from Jaeckel to Himmler saying: "I need to have six more Tommy guns". Can you accept that as being the fact? We have seen them in court.

A. Yes.

Q. The next one from Himmler's staff to Jaeckel later on December 1st says: "You are to report back to the

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Führer".

A. Yes.

Q. "And tell us what means of travel your are adopting".

A. Report back, not to the Führer.

Q. And the second message is signed by Himmler himself, with what I aver is greater urgency, saying: "This kind of arbitrary action has exceeded the guidelines"----

A. No, it says: "Arbitrary actions".

Q. "Arbitrary actions" ----

A. It does not say: "This kind of arbitrary action", does it?

Q. I do not want to ----

A. "Eigenmächtigkeiten und Zuwiderhandlungen," or something.

Q. " -- und Zuwiderhandlungen werden strengstens bestraft".

A. Yes, exactly.

Q. Is this not an indication that the shootings were done in disfavour at one of the highest levels, if I can put it like that?

A. Yes, this relates to the shooting of the transport from Berlin by Jeckeln which ----

Q. Now we are coming to ----

A. Which Himmler, on 30th November, Himmler and Heydrich clearly wanted to be stopped and did not get to on time.

Q. Now we are coming to the point which his Lordship attaches importance. Is there any hint in these messages that went

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from one of these highest levels out to Jaeckel, that shootings could continue provided they were done in surreptitious way?

A. The reference in those clearly refers to Jews who were transported from Berlin. It clearly relates to the trainload that came on 30th November and was shot, and it quite clearly relates to the shooting of Jews who were transported from Germany. Himmler and Heydrich wanted it to stop and, indeed, it does stop. What the Bruns document says is, in effect, that mass shootings must continue but more discreetly. They do not ----

Q. Can we remain with the hard evidence which is the decodes, please.

A. I am sorry, the hard evidence is, "here is an order that has come saying that mass shootings of this kind" ----

Q. No, we are referring to the decodes.

A. --- "may no longer take place in the future. That is to be done more cautiously".

Q. Which is?

A. You interpret that as saying Hitler seemingly intervened at once to order a "halt zu diese Massenerschiessungen" -- these mass shootings -- whereas the word actually says: "Derartige Massenerschiessungen" -- this kind of mass shooting, and you leave out the sentence about this having to be done more cautiously.

Q. If I can halt the flow of words for one moment ----

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A. What Bruns is talking about is an order to continue them more discreetly, and you are presenting this as an order to stop them altogether. Indeed, what we know is that four days after Jaeckel was given his dressing down by Himmler about the shooting of transports from Berlin, the rest of the Riga ghetto of local Jews was shot by Jaeckel.

Q. I hesitate to halt this kind of flow of verbiage, but I have to.

A. So presumably, Himmler must have therefore discussed with Jaeckel the shootings of the Jews in Riga.

Q. Can we try and keep to the point. You referred to the hard evidence, which is the harder kind of evidence, decoded messages intercepted on the same day in real time by the British, of which the SS have no knowledge that we are decoding them whatsoever and which have been in the British archives ever since then, or something said at second or third hand by a German Army General four years later? Which is the hard evidence, in your view?

A. Hard evidence of what?

MR JUSTICE GRAY: Can we look at the documents. It is all so unsatisfactory. Are we talking about J1 tab 3, page 17 or some other document? If you want me to follow it, you are going to have to tell me which document you are talking about.

MR IRVING: I am referring to the police decodes of December 1st, 1941, on the one hand, and the Bruns document of

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April 1945, on the other?

A. Let us have a look. Let me see this decode.

MR JUSTICE GRAY: I know about the Bruns document. This simply refers to guidelines, does it not?

MR IRVING: The simple question that I have asked first of all is ----

A. Could you refer me to the decode, please.

Q. In the witness's opinion ----

MR JUSTICE GRAY: I think it is J1 tab 3, page 17.

A. Page 17.

MR JUSTICE GRAY: I may be completely wrong, but I do need to be anchored to a document.

MR IRVING: I agree, my Lord, and that has narrowed it down these two documents.

A. The decode says: "The Jews being out-placed to the Ostland are to be" ----

Q. Will you answer my question first, please?

A. I just want to read this document that you are referring to.

MR JUSTICE GRAY: Let him read it out. You see, he is just reminding himself of what it says, Mr Irving. Just because you do not want to listen to some of what is given by way of an answer, you must not prevent him.

MR IRVING: We will get to his content later, but I must ask him which class of information he considers to be harder and he will not answer this.

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A. Evidence is evidence of something; otherwise, it is just a document.

MR JUSTICE GRAY: Just read out the bit and then say what you are wanting to say.

A. "The Jews being out-placed" [this is an order from Himmler to Jeckeln decoded by British on 1st December]. "The Jews being out-placed to Ostland are to be dealt with only in accordance with the guidelines laid down by myself and/or by the Reichssicherheitshauptamt on my orders. I would punish arbitrary and disobedient acts. (Sgd. H HIMMLER)". That refers to the Jews being placed, being transported from Germany, particularly Berlin.

MR IRVING: Professor Evans, you do not have to know the content of a message to be able to answer the simple question, in your opinion as a historian and as a person who has written books on historiography, which kind of evidence is harder, in other words, more dependable as a primary source, something which is recorded at the time, in real time by British interceptors of decodes, on the one hand, or something reported at third hand in captivity by a German Army general four years later?

A. As a general rule, of course, it is the first. That does not mean to say you discredit the second altogether.

Q. I agree entirely, but you have to attach the appropriate weight to each of those sources in the absence of any

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other support.

A. Yes.

Q. Right. So, our only information of what Altemeyer said, that it has to be done more surreptitiously in future - or whatever word he used more furtively - out of the public eye, is a third-hand report by Bruns as overheard by the British in April 1945?

A. Yes, but he also says, Mr Irving (the previous sentence): "Here is an order that has come saying that mass shootings of this kind may no longer take place in the future, that to be done more cautiously". You cannot say that the second sentence is unreliable but the first is. In your work, you make use of the first. You not only make use of the first sentence, you know now that you are just trying to discredit what Bruns says. You actually manipulate and distort it by talking about these mass shootings, instead of saying it is mass shootings of this particular kind.

Q. What is the difference between the words: "These mass shootings" and "mass shootings of this kind".

A. It is quite clear. "These mass shootings" refers to all mass shootings, whereas "mass shootings of this kind" refers to ones which are indiscreet. You gather that, from me, you are incautious. You gather that, from the second sentence, that two sentences belong together.

Q. Did you agree that the reference in the first part of the

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statement by Altemeyer, that: "We have received orders from above that mass shootings" (let me put it like that) "are to stop", is a clear reference to the kind of signal contained in the decode?

A. You are trying to ----

Q. And that therefore one has hard evidence supporting that part of his the statement, right?

A. Not necessarily, because you are talking about the decode that relates to transports from Berlin, whereas really ----

MR JUSTICE GRAY: I am missing something, Professor Evans, can you help me?

A. Yes.

MR JUSTICE GRAY: The decode is said by Mr Irving to be hard evidence and obviously one understands why he says that. But hard evidence of what, because all that seems to me to say is that the Jews, as you say from Berlin, are to be dealt with in accordance with guidelines, but we do not know what the guidelines are. So I do not quite see what it is hard evidence of. Am I missing something?

A. I do not think so, my Lord, no.

MR IRVING: Will you read that signal out in full in a clear voice so that the court can hear it, please? The one talking about arbitrary acts and acts against the guidelines.

MR JUSTICE GRAY: I do not frankly think it is necessary. It

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has just been read, it was read yesterday and today. What is the point pout of reading it again?

MR IRVING: Because it make clear reference to the fact that these shootings have found disfavour higher up and future such actions will be severely punished, and he simultaneously orders the man who does done it to come to his headquarters?

A. No, it does not. It says: "The Jews being out-placed to the Ostland are to be dealt with only in accordance with the guidelines laid down by myself and/or by the Reichssicherheitshauptamt on my orders. I would punish arbitrary and disobedient acts". So if you took that, that could mean that they are only to be shot if Himmler says they are to be shot.

Q. It could mean anything, could it not? It could mean that they were going to be sent to Butlin's Holiday Camp, but we are going to use common sense here, are we not?

A. I do not think it could mean that, Mr Irving.

Q. We are going to use common sense here where it says that there has been a mass shooting that very previous day which has been reported to Hitler's headquarters; the words come up the grapevine; now the fat has hit the fan, to put it that way, and heads are going to roll and this has got to stop. I am going to punish this kind of thing in the future. Come immediately to headquarters, which then happens. And this the common sense sequence of

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events and we have back out in the fields, so to speak, Bruns hearing then down the grapevine, as he says a few days later - that is the word he uses. He goes to see Altemeyer, the one who set the mass executions rolling at the lower level, and he says that we have got this order now from on top. The top brass has said that these mass shootings have got to stop. But they are going to carry on anyway, right? Is that the way it was done?

A. No, I am sorry, let us look at this decode. "The guidelines laid down by myself and/or the Reichssicherheitshauptamt" could easily say something about doing it cautiously or discreetly.

MR IRVING: They could, indeed.

MR JUSTICE GRAY: I really think, Mr Irving, that we have he batted this one backwards and forwards enough.

MR IRVING: Indeed, and we have, I think, discovered what the harder of the evidence is, and why there are reasons why one is entitled to discount, if I may put it this way, my Lord, in the mildest possible way, the second part of that sentence for we have no supporting evidence.

MR JUSTICE GRAY: No, you say that the first half of it is reliable because of the circumstances under which was provided then it was eavesdropped upon.

MR IRVING: And the consequences that flowed from it.

MR JUSTICE GRAY: That is reliable but second half is unreliable.

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MR IRVING: The second part is less reliable, if I may put it like that. Professor Evans, are you suggesting that the letter of de Bois was in front of me at any time when I wrote any of my books?

A. Let me come back and say that the point I am making is that you have misrepresented even the first part of the order on which you rely.

MR JUSTICE GRAY: We have moved on.

MR IRVING: I am looking at paragraph 6 of page 359.

A. Yes, on your website.

Q. Yes. Are you suggesting that at any time that the actual letter has been in front of me?

A. Yes. Presumably that is why you mention it in the website.

Q. I refer to it on the website ----

A. Yes.

Q. --- to draw people's attention to it?

A. Yes.

Q. Do you know where the letter is now?

A. I would imagine ----

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

MR JUSTICE GRAY: The question is whether you had it in your possession, is it not, Mr Irving, really?

MR IRVING: Yes.

MR JUSTICE GRAY: Well, did you or did you not?

MR IRVING: The answer is not, but I cannot lead evidence as a

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cross-examiner.

MR JUSTICE GRAY: Of course you can. You can say: Were you aware, Professor Evans, that I never actually had this letter from Mrs de Bois?

MR IRVING: Yes. Can I put it this way? Professor Evans, in writing in line 4, "However, he makes no mention of the letter's contents", were you aware at the time you wrote this in your report that I have never had the letter in my hands in my life?

A. On this report I quote you as saying that there was this letter and you say it was on your website, and I assumed because you were referring to it and that it is about killings in Riga that you must have known what was in, otherwise why would you refer to it?

Q. Is it not just stated on the website that in fact there are some interesting documents if people who want to follow it up may wish to go and have a look at, and one of them is the de Bois letter?

A. How would you know it was interesting if you have not seen it?

Q. Because I am told by this correspondence. Could that be possible?

MR JUSTICE GRAY: Is your case, Mr Irving, because you must put it clearly and straightforwardly, that you were unaware of what Mrs Schultz de Bois said in this letter?

MR IRVING: Yes, and your Lordship will have heard from the

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cross-examination over the previous ten minutes that I do not attach very great importance to the remarks by Canaris.

MR JUSTICE GRAY: That is a different matter.

MR IRVING: But that the letter was not in front of me at any material time anyway.

A. If you think it was an important piece of evidence, Mr Irving, and you did not have it, why did you not make attempts to obtain it?

Q. So, winding up this chapter on page 362, once again you have allowed yourself to dip into the dictionary of insult. You say that I am totally discredited a few months earlier; the document proved to be too useful to be discard altogether; a more egregious institute, manufactured manipulated, doctored, untenable, all the words come out?

A. Yes.

Q. Are you prepared to withdraw any of those on the basis of what you have been saying this morning?

A. Absolutely not, Mr Irving. The point is you acknowledge, as I say on pages 360 to 361, concerning the -- what it is about is your persistent claim that Hitler told Himmler to make the phone call to Heydrich attempting to stop the killing of the transport of Jews from Berlin to Riga, and you produced on your website on 17th May 1998 a document which is now in the Himmler appointments diary edition,

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showing that Himmler only met Hitler after he phoned Heydrich; and therefore that what you then call your original theory, which in fact was presented as a matter of incontrovertible fact that Hitler had told Himmler to tell Heydrich to get the shootings stopped, was wrong. Yet, even though you have done that in May 1998, it is too nice a document for you really to let go of, so you post another document on the website on 31st August 1998 in which you argue that on 30th November Hitler had, "demonstrably ordered that the Berlin Jews were not to be killed", whereas you knew that to be wrong. That, to my mind, is an egregious instance of a completely unscrupulous use of a manipulated source.

Q. Are you prepared to accept that historians or scholars or writers sometimes have differing opinions on the interpretation of the identical sets of documents, and that one scholar or historian will have one interpretation because of his own particular mind set, and the other historian will have perhaps better sources, he will be familiar with the CSDIC reports which you yourself have admittedly totally unfamiliar with; he will have worked for many weeks months in the police decodes with which you are also totally unfamiliar, and that this entitles to him to reach conclusions on the quality of evidence which you are not entitled to reach?

MR JUSTICE GRAY: I think you are missing the thrust of the

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criticism that Professor Evans is making there. The criticism he is making is that at one point you are actually admitting