(10.30 a.m.)

MR JUSTICE GRAY: Mr Irving, before you say what you want to say and before Mr Rampton starts, can I just say this. I certainly do not intend to have a sort of inquest about why yesterday was abortive. I was a bit surprised, as you may have gathered. I have looked at the transcript of day 30 and I can see how the misunderstanding arose. I think it was then contemplated we would have two days of closing submissions and it has not worked out like that. The reason I mention it is simply this. Having looked again at both sets of written closing submissions -- for which I am very grateful, a lot of work has gone into them obviously -- there are one or two points that I think I ought to put really to both sides. I will do that whenever it is convenient to you both. I will either do it before or during or after, whichever you find convenient -- probably after, I suspect.

MR RAMPTON: After, I would suggest.

MR JUSTICE GRAY: After your public statement, but I do not want to do it. That is what I am really telling you.

MR RAMPTON: I would also suggest, perhaps, because they are not things in which the majority of people in this room are going to be closely interested, we could also deal with these five points after.

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MR JUSTICE GRAY: Which five?

MR RAMPTON: Mr Irving's five points.

MR JUSTICE GRAY: The Müller document standard of proof, section 5 etc.

MR RAMPTON: They are partly matters of law and partly matters of detail.

MR JUSTICE GRAY: Subject to Mr Irving, I entirely agree about that. Mr Irving, these are the nitty-gritty, are they not?

MR IRVING: I did not want to be wrong-footed by leaving them out. I want to draw your Lordship's attention to the fact that there are these final loose ends that need to be tied up.

MR JUSTICE GRAY: I certainly agree. We ought to spend a few minutes on the Müller document.

MR IRVING: Except for the one point, my Lord, point 4 on that list. Having reconsidered the matter, I do consider I am entitled to make slightly broader use of the material which was in the bundle E matters on the basis that I have set out there, that they might go to aggravated damages and they certainly go to explaining my state of mind when I am alleged to have made certain remarks about the bodies or persons concerned.

MR JUSTICE GRAY: What I will do -- I know the Defendants are not very happy about this but I think I am going to do it anyway unless Mr Rampton wants to try and dissuade me --

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is to let you make your closing submissions along the lines of the written document. I am bound to say that I think a lot of it goes beyond what the evidence establishes, and also goes beyond what you are really entitled in any event to rely on by way of aggravated damages against the Defendants because, of course, you have to prove the Defendants' involvement in the conspiracy. But I am going to let you do it, unless Mr Rampton continue tries to dissuade me.

MR RAMPTON: No, I have no objection.

MR JUSTICE GRAY: I think it is the right thing to do in this particular case.

MR RAMPTON: I agree. Miss Rogers has dealt with it very succinctly and, in my submission, very effectively on paper. It is in your Lordship's hands at the end of all this. If this were a Jury case, it would be entirely different, but it is not. We are confident that we can leave it happily to your Lordship. I would also add this. It does seem to me, and I will say this, that the more of that kind of speculative fantasy Mr Irving spins in a public court in this country, the more harm he does his own cause. I only say that at this stage.

MR JUSTICE GRAY: That is as may be.

MR IRVING: Be that as may be, my Lord, of course, I would be perfectly entitled in my closing speech to put to the court the matters that I would have put to the Defendants

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had they had the courage to go into the witness box. That is the kind of material that I would have put to them.

MR JUSTICE GRAY: Well, I am not sure that is actually right, as a matter of law, but I am taking a liberal approach. Say what you have indicated you intend to say in due course.

MR IRVING: I will certainly tighten it up. I shall not go to such lengths.

MR RAMPTON: My Lord, I will then read, if I may, what your Lordship has in writing. I start by observing that your Lordship will notice, as I read it, that there are one or two stylistic changes that I have made overnight. They are merely stylistic. They do not touch the substance of what I have to say.

MR JUSTICE GRAY: I will keep my mouth shut and I will not interrupt you, but there are the points that I want to raise with you at the end of your statement.

MR RAMPTON: If your Lordship would rather do it now?

MR JUSTICE GRAY: No, it is better at the end.

MR RAMPTON: My Lord, I start with this, that if one had read some of the media reports of this trial, which I realise that your Lordship probably has not, one might have supposed that Mr Irving had been dragged into this court to defend his freedom of expression as an historian. In fact, of course, that is not so. The history of the matter is quite the reverse. Professor Deborah

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Lipstadt, an America academic, wrote a book called "Denying the Holocaust", which was first published in the United States in 1993. It was then republished by Penguin Books in this country in 1994. The book contained trenchant criticisms of Mr Irving's historiographical methods and his political views and associations. Mr Irving then issued legal proceedings claiming aggravated damages for libel and an injunction against Professor Lipstadt and Penguin. This trial has taken place only because they decided to defend their right to publish the truth. The principal accusations made against Mr Irving by Professor Lipstadt in her book were, in summary: first, that Mr Irving deliberately falsified history in order to make it conform with his ideological leanings and political agenda, and, in particular, in order to exonerate Adolf Hitler of responsibility for the Nazi persecution of the Jews. Second, that in order to achieve his objective, Mr Irving distorted historical evidence and manipulated historical documents. Third, that Mr Irving had become one of the most dangerous spokespersons for Holocaust denial. Last, that he himself held extremist views and allied himself, with other right-wing extremists, in particular Holocaust deniers and anti-Semites.

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My Lord, those were undoubtedly serious charges and, had they been untrue, Mr Irving would clearly have been entitled to a large sum of money and an order of the court preventing the Defendants from repeating their accusations. But, as it turns out on the evidence before this court, the accusations are true, in every significant respect. Mr Irving had in the past claimed that there was a chain or series of documents which showed that Hitler was innocent of the persecution of the Jews, and in particular their mass-murder during the War; indeed, that he was, in fact, "the best friend the Jews ever had in the Third Reich. " The Defendants decided to put that claim to the test. They asked a professional historian, Professor Richard Evans of Cambridge University, to investigate it. His findings were astonishing. Upon examination, virtually every single one of the links in Mr Irving's chain crumbled in his hands, revealing a falsification of history on massive scale. Equally revealing was the discovery that each of Mr Irving's falsifications led to the same end: the exculpation of Hitler. In addition, in order to test Mr Irving's historiography by reference to his work on a topic other than Hitler -- in a sense, a control sample -- Professor

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Evans examined a number of successive editions of one of Mr Irving's most successful works, his book on the Allied bombing of Dresden in February 1945. Here again Professor Evans found deliberate falsification on a grand scale, all of it tending to the same result: a gross inflation of the numbers of German civilians killed in those raids. The long written submission of the Defendants which is before your Lordship contains a detailed account of Professor Evans' findings and the evidence which supports them. By the Defendants' estimate, there are, in relation to Hitler alone, as many as 25 major falsifications of history, as well as numerous subsidiary inventions, suppressions, manipulations and mistranslations employed to support the major falsifications. If those relating to Auschwitz, Dresden and other matters are added in, the number goes well over thirty. My Lord, in order to illustrate the extraordinary nature and extent of these falsifications, I will give but two examples. On the evening of 9th November 1938, and through the night until the following morning, there was an orgy of violence and destruction against Jews and Jewish property throughout Germany. This was Reichskristallnacht. It had been prompted by the assassination in

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Paris of a German diplomat by a young Polish Jew. The Nazi leadership in Berlin exploited it to the full. It was orchestrated by the SA and the SS, and the police were ordered, by Hitler, not to intervene. Mr Irving has described this pogrom in various places, but most particularly in his book "Goebbels: Mastermind of Third Reich", which was published in 1996, where he devotes a whole chapter to it. In summary, his account of it is that the whole thing was initiated and orchestrated by Goebbels, without Hitler's knowledge or participation; and that when, in the early hours of 10th November 1938, Hitler found out what Goebbels had done, he was "livid with rage" and took immediate steps to put a stop to it. This account purports to be based partly on the post-war testimony of former Nazis, but principally on the contemporary documents. On examination of those documents, Mr Irving's account turns out to be completely bogus. His use of two of those documents will suffice to illustrate the point. On page 276 of his Goebbels book, Mr Irving writes this: "What of Himmler and Hitler? Both were totally unaware of what Goebbels had done until the synagogue next to Munich's Four Seasons Hotel was set on fire around 1 am. Heydrich, Himmler's national chief of police, was relaxing down in the hotel bar; he hurried up to Himmler's

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room, then telexed instructions to all police authorities to restore law and order,; protect Jews, and Jewish property, and halt any ongoing incidents. I emphasise the last part of that sentence, to restore law and order, protect Jews, and Jewish property, and halt any ongoing incidents. The reference given by Mr Irving in his book as his source for this is a telex sent by Heydrich at 1.20 am on 10th November 1938. In fact, so far from ordering "all police authorities to restore law and order, protect Jews and Jewish property, and halt any ongoing incidents", it read as follows: "(a) Only such measures may be taken as do not involve any endangering of German life or property (e.g. synagogue fires only if there is no danger of the fire spreading to the surrounding buildings). (b) The shops and dwellings of Jews may only be destroyed, not looted. The police are instructed to supervise the implementation of this order and to arrest looters. (c) Care is to be taken that non-Jewish shops in shopping streets are unconditionally secured against damage. (d) Foreign nationals may not be assaulted even if they are Jews." That was what Heydrich stayed at 1.20 a.m. on

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10th November 1938. Then, on page 277 of his book, after a colourful account of Hitler's supposedly furious intervention, Mr Irving writes this: "At 2.56 am Rudolf Hess's staff also began cabling, telephoning, and radioing instructions to gauleiters and police authorities around the nation to halt the madness", and I emphasise those words. The source given by Mr Irving for this is a report made by the Nazi Party Court about the pogrom in February 1939. It records this order from Hess's office, made on Hitler's authority. This shows that, in truth, all that the order forbade was the continuing of arson attacks on Jewish shops. Synagogues, houses, apartments, cemeteries, and, in particular, Jewish people were left to the mercy of the continuing violence. As your Lordship knows, there was an aftermath of Reichskristallnacht. Mr Irving describes one aspect on page 281 of Goebbels in these terms: "Hess ... ordered the Gestapo and the party courts to delve into the origins of the night of violence and turn the culprits over to the public prosecutors". Thus Mr Irving gives the impression that those who had perpetrated the violence were to be brought to justice and properly punished. Nothing could be further from the truth. As the contemporary documents, and in particular the Party Court

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report of February 1939, which Mr Irving himself used as a principal source for his account of Reichskristallnacht, reveal: First, the Ministry of Justice ruled, on 10th November 1938, that those who had "merely" caused damage to Jewish shops, synagogues and the like should not be prosecuted at all. Second, other more serious offences, such as looting, rape, assault, murder and the destruction of Jewish homes for selfish motives were to be referred to the Party Court, which would first decide whether any of the offenders should be referred to the ordinary criminal courts or acquitted by order of the Führer. Third, in the event, as was no doubt intended, the proceedings of the Party Court were a farce. Of 16 cases dealt with in the report of February 1939, 14 were disposed of with little more than a rap on the knuckles for the culprits, including 13 cases of murder involving the deaths of 21 Jews. The two cases which were referred to the criminal courts were sexual offences against Jewish women - not because of their gravity, however, but because the offenders had been guilty of "racial defilement" (Rassenschande)! Finally, the reason the Party Court gave for its leniency in the other 14 cases was that the criminals were in fact "only carrying out the unclearly expressed but

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properly recognized will of the leadership" - that is, Hitler. Mr Irving knows all of this, but suppresses it entirely in his book. The second striking example, amongst many, of Mr Irving's shocking falsification of history relates to 1943. By the beginning of 1943, many of Europe's Jews had already been murdered. Hungarian Jews, however, of whom there were perhaps 600 to 700,000, had, so far, escaped the destruction. The reason was that the ruler of Hungary, Admiral Horthy, although Hitler's ally, had steadfastly refused to deliver up Hungary's Jews. There was much agitation about this in Berlin. Eventually, on 16th and 17th April 1943, Hitler and his Foreign Minister, Ribbentrop, summoned Admiral Horthy to Klessheim, near Salzburg, in order to put pressure on him to surrender the Hungarian Jews into Nazi hands. The notes of the meetings were taken by a man called Paul Schmidt and are agreed by Mr Irving, who used them for his own accounts of these meetings, to be very reliable. According to Schmidt's notes at the first meeting on 16th April, Horthy protested at the Nazi leader's demands. "But they" (the Jews) "can hardly be murdered or otherwise eliminated", he said. Hitler's response was palliative: "There is no need for that", he

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said, and added that they could be sent to remote work camps or down the mines." The next day, 17th April 1943, Hitler's and Ribbentrop's demands became a good deal cruder. Horthy again protested that he "surely couldn't beat the Jews to death". Ribbentrop replied that they "must either be annihilated or taken to concentration camps. There is no other way". Hitler then followed up with this: "Where the Jews are were left to themselves, as for example in Poland, gruesome poverty and degeneracy had ruled. There were just pure parasites. One had fundamentally cleared up this state of affairs in Poland. If the Jews there didn't want to work, they were shot. If they couldn't work, they had to perish. They had to be treated like tuberculosis bacilli, from which a healthy body could be infected. That was not cruel", said Hitler, "if one remembered that even innocent natural creatures like hares and deer had to be killed so that no harm was caused. Why should one spare the beasts who wanted to bring us Bolshevism once more? Nations who did not rid themselves of Jews perished". Mr Irving's account of this exchange in his 1977 edition of "Hitler's War" (at page 509) is extraordinary. First, as an invented pretext for Hitler's remarks, he introduces the Warsaw Ghetto uprising, which did not in fact begin until two days later. Then, immediately

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following Hitler's brutal assertion of the need to kill the Jewish "beasts", Mr Irving adds this: "Horthy apologetically noted that he had done all he decently could against the Jews: 'But they can hardly be murdered or otherwise eliminated', he protested. Hitler reassured him: 'There is no need for that'. But just as in Slovakia, they ought to be isolated in remote camps where they could no longer affect the healthy body of the public; or they could be put to work in the mines, for example. He himself did not mind being temporarily excoriated for his Jewish policies, if they brought him tranquillity. Horthy left unconvinced." As, my Lord, will immediately be apparent, this was a quite brazen piece of manipulation: as Mr Irving knew perfectly well, because he was familiar with Schmidt's notes, this exchange had, in fact, occurred on the previous day (16th April), not 17th. It is apparent, therefore, that Mr Irving quite deliberately transferred it to 17th April in order to mitigate the chilling impact of Hitler's stark observation about the need to kill the Jewish "beasts". The account given in the 1991 edition of "Hitler's War" (at pages 541 to 542) is no better. True, the spurious reference to the Warsaw uprising has been removed. But so, too, has Hitler's repellent analogy between the need to kill animals which cause damage and

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the need to kill the Jewish "beasts". And the brazen transfer that Hitler's palliative remark on 16th April to this meeting on 17th is perpetuated. My Lord, these two examples are but the tip of a large iceberg imposed of numbers of other equally egregious falsifications by Mr Irving in his written work and in his public utterances. I conclude here, my Lord, with this, that the Defendants say, on this part of the case: "Case proved: Mr Irving is, as was proposed at the outset of this trial, a liar". My Lord, it might be thought that that would be enough to dispose of Mr Irving's claim, given the emphasis he places on the damage to his reputation as an historian which he says was caused by Professor Lipstadt's book. But the evidence in the case has covered a lot of other topics as well, and I shall, therefore, briefly mention them too. Until 1988, Mr Irving had accepted the historical reality of Holocaust, but denied that Hitler authorized it or, until late on in the War, knew anything much about it. This position, for an historian, was described by Sir John Keegan, the well-known military historian, who was called on subpoena to give evidence in this court by Mr Irving, it was described as "perverse" and as "defying reason." Dr Peter Longerich, a

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distinguished historian of the period, who gave expert evidence for the Defendants, called it "absolutely absurd". And so it was, for reasons which can be stated quite shortly. The Holocaust - that is the systematic mass murder of millions of Jews, gypsies and others - took place in stages. The first stage, beginning in the autumn of 1941, after Hitler's invasion of the Soviet Union, consisted of mass shootings carried out specially-formed SS groups and their local allies. This continued through into 1942 and resulted in the deaths of up to 1.5 million Jews living in Russia and the Baltic states. The second stage, which began in December 1941 and continued through into 1943 or later, consisted of the gassing of the Jews of the Warthegau and Poland. This resulted in the deaths of probably as many as 2.6 million Jews (300,000 in the Warthegau and 2.3 million in Poland). The third stage, beginning with mass deportations to the East in the autumn of 1941, culminated in the deaths by gassing, mostly at Auschwitz, of Jews from Central, Western and Southern Europe. This stage lasted until late 1944. Reliable recent estimates of the numbers gassed at Auschwitz/Birkenau give a figure of

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about 1.12 million. Thus the total achievement of this horrendous exercise in systematic mass murder was probably somewhere between five and six million innocent lives. The whole of this gigantic operation was orchestrated by Heinrich Himmler, the Reichsführer SS, and his able subordinates, such as Heydrich, Globocnik and Eichmann. As Dr Longerich explained in court, Hitler and Himmler were long-time intimate associates. Himmler had been with Hitler during the 1923 putsch and Hitler appointed him Reichsführer SS in 1929. Throughout the War, and certainly while the Holocaust was underway, they met frequently, sometimes two or three times a week, often for hours at a time and often alone together. It is, therefore, wholly inconceivable that during the whole three and a half years for which the killing lasted, Himmler could, or indeed would, have concealed from Hitler the enormous, systematic operation that he was directing. This becomes all the less credible when it is remembered, as the documents show, that Hitler was the mainspring and driving force of Nazi anti-Jewish policy from 1923 onwards and that his anti-Semitism became noticeably more radical, if that were possible, from the date that he declared war on America (11th December 1941). Thus, leaving aside all the specific evidence to

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be found in the contemporary documents, including documents written by Himmler himself, which, fairly read by an open-minded, careful historian, plainly implicate Hitler, the overall picture is compelling: the Holocaust could not possibly have happened without Hitler's knowledge and authority. It takes only a moment's light reflection to realise that the contrary idea is both absurd and perverse: suppose, say, in July 1942, when Himmler went to Lublin and Auschwitz to review and advance the mass killing in Poland, and on his return had lunch with Hitler (as he did) that Hitler, previously in a state of complete ignorance, and in any case opposed to any Final Solution that involved any more than deportation of the Jews to Siberia or Central Africa after the War, had suddenly found out what Himmler was doing. What, one wonders, would have happened to Himmler? Well, of course, it didn't, not then or at any time thereafter. In 1988 Mr Irving's position changed dramatically. Not only did Hitler not know about the Holocaust, the Holocaust did not happen (which is why, of course, Hitler did not know about it). The question is why? Why this change in Mr Irving's position? The one-word answer is: Leuchter. In April 1988, Mr Irving went to Canada, for reasons best known to himself, to give expert evidence at the trial in Toronto of a man called Ernst Zündel, a dedicated

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Holocaust denier, and since 1988, one of Mr Irving's staunchest allies and promoters. While he was in Toronto, he met a man called Fred Leuchter, also proffered by Zündel, but rejected by the Canadian court, as an expert witness. Leuchter was, it seems, some kind of consultant on execution facilities in the USA. He'd been to Auschwitz and Birkenau to seek "scientific" evidence of the existence of homicidal gas chambers. He made a report on his findings. Mr Irving gave this report a cursory reading. His conversion was instantaneous. Even as he gave evidence to the Canadian court, the Holocaust had suddenly never happened. In June 1989, Mr Irving gave a press conference in London, triumphantly announcing the English publication of the Leuchter Report, with a foreword written by himself. In his foreword, Mr Irving trumpeted the virtues of the Report, with particular emphasis on the chemical analysis of the samples which Leuchter had brought back from Auschwitz/Birkenau. "Forensic chemistry" proclaimed Mr Irving, "is an exact science". And, my Lord, indeed so it is. Fred Leuchter had taken samples from the remains of the gas chambers and one sample from the delousing facility in the women's camp at Birkenau. The samples from the gas chambers showed small, but significant, traces of cyanide, the active

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element in the Zyklon-B pellets used for the gassings, the sample from the delousing facility, relatively high traces. Therefore, concluded Leuchter, the "gas chambers" could never have been gas chambers, because, according to Leuchter, the concentration of hydrogen cyanide needed to kill humans was higher than that needed to kill lice. The Leuchter report (as Mr Irving has accepted during this trial) was riddled with numerous errors of various kinds, but this error was colossal. As the material contained in the Leuchter report itself showed, the concentration of hydrogen cyanide required to kill humans is, in fact, some 22 times lower than that required to kill lice. Thus, so far from disproving the existence of homicidal gas chambers at Auschwitz, the Leuchter Report actually succeeded in proving the opposite. Despite this, Mr Irving continued to cling, and still clings, to Leuchter's "forensic chemistry" as the flagship of his Holocaust denial. In consequence, Mr Irving has, ever since 1988, used the Leuchter Report as the foundation not only for his denial of the existence of any homicidal gas chambers at Auschwitz, but also, quite illogically, for the existence of any gas chambers anywhere. In the end, at the trial of this action, Mr Irving has been driven, in the face of overwhelming evidence presented by Professor Robert Jan van Pelt,

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Professor Christopher Browning and Dr Longerich, to concede that there were indeed mass murders on a huge scale by means of gassing at Chelmno in the Warthegau and at the Reinhardt camps of Belzec, Treblinka and Sobibor; and even that there were "some gassings" at Auschwitz. His last remaining defence against the evidence showing that the crematoria at Birkenau were used to murder vast numbers of Jews by means of Zyklon B was to make the slippery concession that the gas chambers -- known as Leichenkeller I at crematoria II and III at Birkenau -- were, indeed, gas chambers, but for gassing only (I quote Mr Irving's words) "objects and cadavers". This last proposition is ludicrous. If this were not such a serious matter, it would be hilarious. For the evidence, clearly explained by Professor van Pelt, is that the gas-tight doors in Leichenkeller I at both those crematoria were equipped with thick glass spyholes, protected by metal grilles. Why, it was asked of Mr Irving, should these be required for the observation of the gassing of lice-infested "objects" and corpses? Faced with this, Mr Irving retreated to the position that Leichenkeller I had been intended to serve an alternative purpose as an air-raid shelter. This last refuge will be dealt with shortly below. Meanwhile, Professor van Pelt also explained that when the plans of crematoria II and III were redesigned in late 1942 and early 1943, the

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corpse-slides or chutes appearing on the original plans were removed, and the entrance to the basement moved to the other side of the building. Thus, if the re-design was intended to facilitate the gassing of corpses, people who are already dead, it had only succeeded in compelling those who were carrying the corpses to negotiate a series of small rooms, narrow passages, and staircases to reach the gassing-space. Moreover, the plans were re-designed at that time so as to change the way in which the doors of the gassing-space opened from inwards to outwards, thus further impeding the carrying of corpses into the space. Mr Irving's air-raid shelter proposal is equally absurd. It is obvious that the Leichenkellers could never have served as air-raid shelters for an inmate population of 100,000 or more, even if it thought likely that the SS should have wanted to protect the inmates against air-raids. Therefore, if the Leichenkellers were ever intended to be used as air-raid shelters, they must have been intended for the SS. In fact, crematoria II and III are about one and a half miles from the nearest SS barracks. The picture of SS personnel running from their barracks, round the perimeter wire, in full gear, one and a half miles to the crematoria, under a hail of bombs, is just plain daft. Mr Irving's concession that Leichenkeller I was indeed a gas chamber is, of course, entirely inconsistent

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with his continued adherence to Leuchter's chemical analysis as being conclusive evidence that Leichenkeller I never was a gas chamber. It is also wholly inconsistent with his final line of defence, which is that Leichenkeller I could never have been a gas chamber because the remains of the roof that can be seen at Birkenau do not show the holes through which the gas pellets were thrown. This last line of defence, which emerged at a very late stage in Mr Irving's Holocaust denial, is, in any case, easily demolished. In the first place, Professor van Pelt, who has subjected the remains of the roof of Leichenkeller I at crematorium II to careful examination (which Mr Irving has never done), told the court that the remains are so fragmentary that they do not allow any firm conclusions to be drawn as to the existence or non-existence of the holes. Second, if, as Mr Irving accepts, Leichenkeller I was a gas chamber (for whatever purpose) it would always have needed apertures for inserting the Zyklon-B, since it never had any windows and only one gas-tight door. Third, even if Mr Irving were right that it was used for gassing objects and corpses, the concentration of hydrogen cyanide required for this would have been comparatively high, with the consequence that the need for tight fitting apertures which could be opened and closed quickly and easily, would, for the

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protection of those throwing in the pellets, have been all the greater. Finally, leaving aside all the mass of eyewitness testimony, there is a coincidence between two pieces of independent evidence which demonstrates conclusively the existence of these holes or apertures. In 1945, a former inmate of Auschwitz, David Olère, an artist, drew the ground plan of Leichenkeller I in crematorium III. This drawing shows a zigzag alignment of the gassing columns in Leichenkeller I. These are the columns which would have ended in the apertures through which the gas pellets were inserted. It happens that that zigzag alignment is precisely matched by an aerial photograph taken by the Allies in 1944, which was not released to the world until 1979. There can, therefore, be no possibility of any cross-contamination between Olère's drawing and the aerial photograph. No doubt recognising this, Mr Irving sought to suggest at this trial that the aerial photograph had been faked by the CIA. Professor van Pelt, however, explained to the court that he had had the photograph tested by Dr Nevin Bryant at NASA and that the result of those tests showed conclusively that the photograph was authentic. In the light of Mr Irving's concession that Leichenkeller I was indeed a gas chamber and of the fact that it is clear that it was never intended for the gassing of corpses or other inanimate objects, or for use

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as an air-raid shelter, the stark conclusion can only be this: It must have been used for gassing people, live people. One residual shred of this aspect of Mr Irving's Holocaust denial remains. He disputes the numbers of people murdered at Auschwitz/Birkenau. This last barricade of Mr Irving's is based on three distinctly unstable legs. The first leg is the so-called "death books" released in recent years from the archive in Moscow. These are incomplete. They show a total of some 74,000 recorded deaths from various causes. They relate, however, and could only ever relate, to the deaths of prisoners registered upon arrival at Auschwitz, that is to say, those destined to be accommodated in the camps at Auschwitz and, more particularly, Birkenau, as workers (for a time at least). There was, however, a preliminary process at Auschwitz, which involved separating those deemed to be fit for work from the rest. This was called "selection". The vast majority, including the old, young children, and mothers with small children, were "the rest". They were gassed immediately without ever being registered; their deaths were never recorded. There is a great deal of eyewitness evidence about this from both sides, perpetrators and surviving

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victims. This evidence is confirmed by photographs taken by the SS during the so-called "Hungarian action" in the course of which, over a matter of months, some 400,000 Hungarian Jews were gassed, in the summer of 1944. Thus, once again, eyewitness evidence is corroborated by contemporary documentary evidence. In the result, the fact that the "death books" fail to record the deaths of perhaps 1 million people killed on arrival is unsurprising and inconsequential. The second leg of Mr Irving's last barricade consists of German police radio messages decoded by the British during the war. Some of these came from Auschwitz, and of course none mentioned gassings. For exactly the same reasons as the death books make no reference to those murdered on arrival, it is not reasonable to expect that the radio messages from Auschwitz would: people who were not registered on arrival at Auschwitz because they were not destined for work in the camp but, instead, for immediate death in the gas chambers, would obviously not be mentioned in messages about recorded deaths. The last leg in the barricade is Mr Irving's contention that Auschwitz did not have sufficient incineration capacity for all the corpses of those whom it is generally held by historians were killed there. As Professor van Pelt convincingly demonstrated, by reference

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to a letter of 28th June 1943, from Karl Bischoff, the head of the building programme at Auschwitz, to Berlin, the potential incineration capacity at Auschwitz/Birkenau at that time far exceeded any possible mortality rate amongst the registered inmates from "natural" causes, including the possibility of a repeat of the typhus epidemic which had struck the camp in 1942. This means that the incineration capacity must have been calculated and built, as it was in due course, to accommodate the mortal remains of the hundreds of thousands of people who were gassed on arrival. Faced with this, Mr Irving's only possible response was (as ever) to challenge the authenticity of the Bischoff letter. This challenge, in the end, turned out to be based on nothing more than the fact that the administrative reference on the letter did not contain the year date. In fact, copies of this document have been retained in the archive at Moscow since 1945, when the Soviets liberated Auschwitz and acquired the documents which the SS had forgotten to destroy. Moreover, the document was used at the trial of the Auschwitz commandant, Rudolf Höss, in 1948, and again at the trial of the Auschwitz architects, Dejaco and Ertl, in 1971. Not unnaturally, Professor van Pelt saw no reason whatsoever to doubt the authenticity of the document. Amongst other reasons for rejecting Mr Irving's proposal

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that the document might be a post-war communist forgery, is the fact that the incineration capacity shown in the document -- that is 4,756 corpses per 24 hours -- is very significantly lower than that estimated by the Soviets and the Poles (both communist regimes) shortly after the War. It follows that if the document were a communist forgery, it would be a very strange one. Mr Irving's last challenge to the incineration capacity was that the amount of coke delivered to Auschwitz at the relevant time would not, in the ordinary way, have been sufficient to meet the required rate of incineration. As Professor van Pelt demonstrated, this challenge is demolished by two considerations which Mr Irving had evidently ignored: first, the procedure for incineration at Auschwitz involved the simultaneous incineration of up to four or five corpses even in every muffle of the ovens; and, second, in consequence, the corpses themselves served as fuel for the ovens, the more particularly so if, as they generally did, they included the comparatively well fed corpses of people recently arrived on the trains and gassed on arrival. Mr Irving's Holocaust denial is thus exposed as a fraud. It originated with a piece so-called scientific research which, on analysis, turns out, if it has any value at all, to support the overwhelming historical evidence that Auschwitz was indeed a gigantic death

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factory. Mr Irving's later adornments to his gas chamber denial also turn out to be fragile conjectures based on no significant research at all: it should be noted that Mr Irving has never himself been to Auschwitz to examine the archaeological remains or the documentary evidence contained in the archive. It follows that some other reason must be sought to explain his devotion, over many years, and even in this court, though his case has changed and changed back again throughout the trial, to the bizarre idea that no significant numbers of people were murdered in the homicidal gas chambers at Auschwitz/Birkenau. The reasons are not far to seek. As the evidence in this court has shown, Mr Irving is a right-wing extremist, a racist and, in particular, a rabid anti-Semite. Two examples, again, amongst many, will suffice to illustrate this proposition. In a speech which he made at Tampa, Florida, on 6th October 1995 to the National Alliance, a white supremacist and profoundly anti-Semitic group, Mr Irving said this about the Jews: "You have been disliked for 3,000 years. You have been disliked so much that you have hounded from country to country, from pogrom to purge, from purge back to pogrom. And yet you never ask yourselves why you are disliked, that's the difference between you and me. It

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would never occur to you to look in the mirror and say "Why am I disliked, what is it the rest of humanity doesn't like about the Jewish people, to such an extent that they repeatedly put us through the grinder?" And he (a heckler whom Mr Irving said he had perceived to be Jewish) went beserk, said Mr Irving. He said (the heckler), "Are you trying to say that we are responsible for Auschwitz ourselves"? And I, that is Mr Irving, said, "Well, the short answer is yes". The short answer I have to say is yes ... If you (the Jews) had behaved differently over the intervening 3,000 years, the Germans would have gone about their business and would not have found it necessary to go around doing whatever they did to you. Nor would the Russians, nor the Ukrainians, nor the Lithuanians, Estonians, Latvians, and all the other countries where you've had a rough time. So why have you never asked yourselves that question?" So much for the Jews. As to the blacks (and homosexuals), Mr Irving, in an entry in his private diary on 10th November 1987, on the occasion of a visit to South Africa, recorded his own thoughts: "God works in mysterious ways, but here (that is South Africa) we agree he appears to be working remorselessly towards a Final Solution which may cruelly wipe out not only blacks and homosexuals, but a large part

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of the drug addicts and sexually promiscuous and indiscriminate heterosexual population as well." These examples, again the tip of, I am afraid, a very large iceberg, demonstrate, beyond doubt, that Mr Irving is a profound racist and a radical anti-Semite. But this is not the end of the story. For many years, Mr Irving has travelled about the world giving vent to his views at gatherings composed of, and organised by, others of similar opinion. Until he was banned in 1993. Mr Irving's energies were particularly devoted to the propagation of his ideology in Germany, where pro-Nazi sentiment has not only persisted but alas, since reunification, undergone a significant revival, particularly in the East. This is chilling exposed by a demonstration of neo-Nazi boot boys, waving Nazi flags and chanting racist slogans, which was addressed by Mr Irving at Halle in East Germany in November 1991. In his diary Mr Irving described his speech at this rally as "rabble rousing", no doubt for good reason. The speech was greeted with enthusiasm, not least, perhaps, because he predicted the recreation of a greater Germany, by the reconquest, through economic power, of the former Third Reich territories in the East. This speech was greeted with enthusiasm and, unsurprisingly, shouts of "Sieg Heil!". Holocaust denial is forbidden in Germany

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(notwithstanding which Mr Irving has, from time to time, managed to slip in direct statements that there were never any gas chambers). Elsewhere, however, it has been a constant theme of Mr Irving's public utterances. He has expressed it, on numerous occasions, in terms which variously attribute the blame for the Holocaust on the Jews themselves, accuse Holocaust survivors of lying in order to extort money from the German Government, and pour scorn on the suffering of Holocaust victims, both alive and dead. These utterances are often greeted with warm applause and loud laughter by his audiences. Given that Mr Irving has repeatedly falsified history in pursuit of his obsessive desire to exonerate Hitler of responsibility for the Nazi persecution of the Jews and, in particular, of responsibility for the Holocaust, and given that he has repeatedly denied the Holocaust, without any historical foundation, and in the face of overwhelming evidence that the Holocaust took place on the scale and in the manner generally described by reputable historians, the question now arises why Mr Irving should have engaged so actively in the promotion of these historical falsehoods. The answers suggested by the evidence are: Mr Irving is an anti-Semite; Holocaust denial, in the form in which it is purveyed by Mr Irving, is an obvious expression of anti-Semitism, and is music to the ears of

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the neo-Nazis and other right-wing extremists to whom he purveys it; Mr Irving is a Hitler partisan, who has falsified history on a staggering scale in order to "prove" Hitler's innocence; this, like Holocaust denial, is obviously very appealing to his fellow travellers -- after all, if the Holocaust were a "myth", then, obviously, Hitler could have no responsibility for it. How far, if at all, Mr Irving's anti-Semitism is a cause of his Hitler apology, or vice versa, is quite unimportant. Whether they are taken together, or individually, it is clear that they have led him to prostitute his reputation as a serious historian (spurious though it can now be seen to have been) for the sake of a bogus rehabilitation of Hitler and the dissemination of virulent anti-Semitic propaganda.

MR JUSTICE GRAY: Mr Rampton, can I raise with you now the points I think I need to clarify?

MR RAMPTON: Yes.

MR JUSTICE GRAY: I do not think it will take very long. There is just one point that occurred to me as you were reading out the statement, and it relates to paragraph 41, where you are dealing with incineration capacity.

MR RAMPTON: Yes.

MR JUSTICE GRAY: The point you are making is that it is strange to suggest that the Bischoff document is a communist forgery, since it shows a rate of incineration

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lower than was estimated by the Soviets and the Poles. Am I right in thinking that the estimate you are there talking about by the Soviets and the Poles is the estimate of the total numbers killed, rather than of incineration capacity or rate of incineration?

MR RAMPTON: No, my Lord. Well, I think that is partly right, if I may say so. But also on page 207 of Professor van Pelt's report, there is rather a dense paragraph. I cannot remember now off the top of my head how the answers come out. There is rather dense paragraph from which one can certainly work out, and I know Professor van Pelt told me what the totals were by but I have forgotten them. One can certainly work out that the 4,756 corpses per 24 hours was significantly lower than the Russian and Polish estimates for incineration. I think the Russian figure was 50 per cent higher and the Polish figure about 30 per cent higher.

MR JUSTICE GRAY: Thank you very much. I did not know that. You have given me the reference so that has dealt with that. The other questions are really all rather broader ones. Can I take them in what I hope is the sensible order? The first one relates to deportation, and I will ask Mr Irving the same question in due course. It is not really clear to me what, if any, is the issue between the parties as to that particular phase.

MR RAMPTON: No. I have never understood that there was.

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MR JUSTICE GRAY: No.

MR RAMPTON: Dr Longerich told your Lordship, and we accept, we have to, he knows a lot more about it than we do, that in the beginning the transportation of the German and other central European, French and Greek, Italian Jews was just to the East, where they were put into ghettos which had been vacated by the murder of the Polish Jews.

MR JUSTICE GRAY: A sort of two phase deportation exercise?

MR RAMPTON: Yes. Then eventually, probably sometime in 1942, they started killing the arrivals. There is a notable document your Lordship will remember from the Gestapo at Lodz, explaining how they cleared one lot and made room for the other lot.

MR JUSTICE GRAY: Yes. Leaving aside the extermination, which is a separate issue and I understand what Mr Irving says about that, you do not understand there to be any argument or dispute between the Defendants and Mr Irving as to the fact that the deportation took place, and indeed also as to the fact that Hitler knew about it, because it is Mr Irving's case that that was all that was involved.

MR RAMPTON: No question. Hitler gave the order for it. As your Lordship will have seen, in one of the passages in our long submission, we draw attention, I forget which book it is, to a statement by Mr Irving where he says Hitler was neither consulted nor knew anything about the deportations. Why he should say that, I have absolutely

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no idea, but the fact is that Hitler gave the order.

MR JUSTICE GRAY: That was Hitler's preferred solution, as opposed to extermination, according to Mr Irving's argument.

MR RAMPTON: In 1941 it may or may not be so, so far as the German Jews are concerned.

MR JUSTICE GRAY: Yes.

MR RAMPTON: So far as the rest, anyway.

MR JUSTICE GRAY: I noticed something this morning which I had not noticed before, which is that -- have you got your more detailed written submissions?

MR RAMPTON: Yes, I have.

MR JUSTICE GRAY: Would you go to Tab 5 I?

MR RAMPTON: Yes.

MR JUSTICE GRAY: There is at page 56, paragraph 4, which seems to continue over the page on page 57.

MR RAMPTON: Yes, it does.

MR JUSTICE GRAY: The next paragraph is 12. I see what I have done. Yes, there is an 11 somewhere lurking way back.

MR RAMPTON: Paragraph 11 is on page 53. It has a large number of subparagraphs.

MR JUSTICE GRAY: Yes. The next broad question is this. I am really asking for perhaps a bit of assistance on this. It is what we have called the genesis of the gassing programme, or the extermination programme.

MR RAMPTON: Yes.

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MR JUSTICE GRAY: And what you have done, and this is your II, is very helpfully to set out what you say are gathered together from various files the various documentary references which demonstrate the setting up of the gassing in the Reinhardt camps and so on. The slight problem I have with this way of dealing with it is that one has to try to confine the judgment within some sort reasonable bounds -- it is going to be horrifically long anyway -- and I do not think it is feasible to even begin to try to incorporate all those references. It would just overload it.

MR RAMPTON: No, we were not expecting that your Lordship would, of course not. It seemed to us, though, that now that one -- I mean, I am only a lawyer too -- had the chance to look at the thing with some considerable care, that that table led the eye through the stages really quite well; but if that is not so, then all I perhaps need to do is to refer your Lordship back to the little summary that I have given in this latest statement starting on page 10.

MR JUSTICE GRAY: Yes, but I think the problem is what I would really ideally want to aim at myself in order to give anyone reading the judgment a sufficient but not overextended view of what the documents show to have happened is something in between the two.

MR RAMPTON: I think what I am being asked ----

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MR JUSTICE GRAY: You will think I am by very awkward.

MR RAMPTON: No, of course not. I do not know how much time I have, that is all. What I think I am being asked for and will willingly supply -- I might even get Dr Longerich to write it actually -- is really a chronological summary with a bit more detail than I have put in here and a bit less than I have put into the main submission.

MR JUSTICE GRAY: I think that is probably right. Really in a way it perhaps will highlight the most significant documents. I think it is right, I mean, as you realise, I have been trying to sort of keep a tag on what the evidence has revealed as it has gone on, so I think I have quite a lot of them, but I suspect I am missing some of the important ones and I would like to ----

MR RAMPTON: Yes, I mean, I do not say I have covered everything either.

MR JUSTICE GRAY: Can I invite you to do that? Not at enormous length, but I think it would be helpful.

MR RAMPTON: We will do it in the course of the rest of this week.

MR JUSTICE GRAY: And bearing in mind, if I may suggest it, the issues that arise on the genesis of the gassing as opposed to Auschwitz, which I will deal with separately, seem to me to be, firstly, on what scale the extermination took place, and that is not really much of an issue now, as I understand Mr Irving's case.

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MR RAMPTON: Not an issue at all.

MR JUSTICE GRAY: But also Hitler's knowledge. So that is the thing to concentrate on, and I appreciate to some extent that may not any longer be as stark an issue as it was.

MR RAMPTON: That is covered specifically, not only with what I said today in general terms, but there was an exercise that I did in re-examination with Professor Longerich which is referred back to in here, just that really the month of July and into August 1942, which demonstrates in Professor Longerich's view, which we obviously adopt, that it is inconceivable that while Himmler was supervising the mass extermination of goodness knows how many people in the General Government Hitler did not know about it.

MR JUSTICE GRAY: Yes. One of the things I was going to ask Mr Irving is whether he accepts the concessions that you attribute to him at various stages of your submission.

MR RAMPTON: I have given the reference to it somewhere in here.

MR JUSTICE GRAY: You have, indeed, but I think it is right it should be put to him.

MR RAMPTON: I mean, what he says now, his position has changed throughout the case, but really the concessions, if I may say this now, which we have listed in various places in this long submission are those which were first driven out of him by cross-examination, no cleverness on my part, but by the evidence which was presented to him, and it was not

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selective, in cross-examination. His first reaction, eventually in some case, sometimes quite quickly, was to say, "Yes, are you right, it did happen".

MR JUSTICE GRAY: Yes, but I must find out what the up-to-date position is because I think it is fair to say that sometimes Mr Irving has fluctuated.

MR RAMPTON: As I say, I do not attach much weight to what I might call back tracking.

MR JUSTICE GRAY: Right. If Professor Longerich can perform that exercise, but also focus, if he would, on the extent of Hitler's knowledge and the reason for saying that he knew about the gassing at Chelmno and all the rest. The next question is a very short one and I think I know what your answer is, but I will ask it all the same: part of your case against Mr Irving is that he is a racist, leaving aside anti-Semitism, that he is a racist and you have a number of quotations from his speeches.

MR RAMPTON: Yes.

MR JUSTICE GRAY: How does that bear on (a) the words complained of, and (b) the meanings that you seek to justify?

MR RAMPTON: I suppose we seek to justify simply that he holds extremist views in the written bit. In the statement of case, I cannot remember. It says something ----

MR JUSTICE GRAY: There is a bit right at the back.

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MR RAMPTON: --- rather more specific than that.

MR JUSTICE GRAY: Perhaps my question really is, there is nothing about racism, is there, in ----

MR RAMPTON: No.

MR JUSTICE GRAY: --- Professor Lipstadt's book?

MR RAMPTON: Perhaps I should ask her. There is some allusion to it, she says.

MR JUSTICE GRAY: I am not sure there is; if there is, I would like to know what it is.

MR RAMPTON: But, maybe your Lordship is right, there is this to be said, perhaps, if a man is and out and out racist which we would propose that it is obvious from his own private jottings, never mind what he says publicly, that Mr Irving is, and if anti-Semitism is a form of racism, which it plainly is, then it is a bit like a case where you accuse a man of grievous bodily harm and at trial succeed in proving that he is a murderer.

MR JUSTICE GRAY: Yes. I thought that would be your answer, that anti-Semitism is just one form of racism.

MR RAMPTON: Yes, indeed.

MR JUSTICE GRAY: And, therefore, it is relevant, you would say, by way of justification of an anti-Semitic allegation that there is a general streak of racism to be perceived in what Mr Irving has said and done.

MR RAMPTON: It is evidence of his general disposition to disparage and be hostile towards people of different

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colours, ethnic backgrounds and cultures.

MR JUSTICE GRAY: Yes. Now perhaps, for me, at any rate, the most important question is to be absolutely clear about what you are saying in the section which is section 9, I think, or (ix) towards the back of your written submission about assessing Mr Irving as an historian.

MR RAMPTON: Yes.

MR JUSTICE GRAY: Do you mind turning it up because I just want to be absolutely clear about it this because I think it is exceedingly important. You first refer back to your historiographical criticisms, and I am right in taking it, am I not, it is pretty obvious from what you there say by way of criticism of Mr Irving that a number of the criticisms are criticisms that he has deliberately falsified the record.

MR RAMPTON: Every single one.

MR JUSTICE GRAY: All right, every single one. Now, you do not expressly say so, but you may tell me it is implicit, that when you deal with his partisanship for Hitler which is II, you do not expressly say that that is all deliberate distortion and manipulation and so on.

MR RAMPTON: No.

MR JUSTICE GRAY: But that I understand to be your case, am I right?

MR RAMPTON: No, what I say is that he has sought to exculpate Hitler; that he has done that by a massive falsification

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of the underlying historical record on a large number of occasions.

MR JUSTICE GRAY: But going beyond what you have selected or Professor Evans has selected as the historical criticisms?

MR RAMPTON: Then I say if one looks at the general evidence as an objective, open-minded, careful, dispassionate historian, that Hitler was, indeed, responsible, knew all about it, and authorized it, the conclusion is irresistible that he did. Mr Irving has shut that window, as it were, and has got on with the shut window behind him with the falsification of history so as to exculpate Hitler.

MR JUSTICE GRAY: Yes, so this is again another instance of deliberate manipulation which kind of runs through ----

MR RAMPTON: It is a kind of deliberate blindness to the evidence. What he does not like, he ignores.

MR JUSTICE GRAY: Deliberate blindness?

MR RAMPTON: Yes, it is deliberate blindness. He knows about, he has known for years, about report No. 51, for example.

MR JUSTICE GRAY: So it is telescope to the wrong eye?

MR RAMPTON: Yes, and for years, despite report No. 51, until we got him into this court, until he got us into this court, he did not accept that Hitler sanctioned the mass shootings in the East. It is that kind of phenomenon.

MR JUSTICE GRAY: So that the partisanship. Then Auschwitz,

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well I think it is pretty clear what your case is about that.

MR RAMPTON: Yes.

MR JUSTICE GRAY: You do not specifically rely on the denials of the Holocaust, but, presumably, you say in relation to those that they are denials which Mr Irving must have known were false when he made them.

MR RAMPTON: No, again this is a bit like the sort of general refusal to accept Hitler's knowledge. What I say about that is that his denials of the Holocaust have been made without any reference whatsoever to any reliable evidence. They started to be made on Leuchter which is an obviously completely hopeless position for any kind of self-respecting historian or, indeed, anybody else for that matter. Then much later on down the road he adds in one or two other things like the death books and the decrypts. Finally, just before this trial or a year or so before this trial, he comes to the runes. He has never been to Auschwitz. He has never looked at any o the documents or the plans. Such evidence as he knows about he dismisses out of hand as being mere eyewitness testimony. When he comes to see an aerial photograph showing the holes in the roof, he says it is a forgery; the incineration capacity document is also a forgery, and so on and so forth. This means that his denial must have another agenda because it cannot be the product of genuine

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bona fide historical research and contemplation.

MR JUSTICE GRAY: So his state of mind which is -- and it is important that I am absolutely clear what it is that is being suggested in relation to the various issues that have arisen in the case -- this is an area where you put it as being deliberately perverse blindness and acting in pursuance of what is, effectively, a neo-Nazi agenda, is that right?

MR RAMPTON: Yes, I put it in two ways and I will say it as shortly as I can. I put it forward as evidence of somebody who cannot be regarded as a serious historian, because what he has done is to allow his historical apparatus to be distorted by something beyond -- extrinsic or ulterior. Looking at the way in which he expresses Holocaust denial and the audiences to whom he expresses that denial and the things that he says on those occasions, one is driven to the conclusion that the hidden agenda, the reason for the historical incompetence, if I can I call it that (though there is a much stronger word that I could think of) is that he is at root deeply anti-Semitic and a neo-Nazi, as your Lordship just said.

MR JUSTICE GRAY: Well, that raises the last question that I wanted to canvass with you, and it is anti-Semitism and, indeed, the racism and the extremism and all the rest of it. I find it a little, and I find it throughout the case, bit difficult to see how, if at all, those

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allegations against Mr Irving dovetail with the general allegation that he falsifies to an extent deliberately the historical record because it seems to me, and I just want to know how you put it, that if somebody is anti-Semitic, and leave aside racism, but anti-Semitic and extremist, he is perfectly capable of being, as it were, honestly anti-Semitic and honestly extremist in the sense that he is holding those views and expressing those views because they are, indeed, his views.

MR RAMPTON: Yes.

MR JUSTICE GRAY: Now, it seems to me that probably, if you come down to it, that the anti-Semitism is a completely separate allegation which really has precious little bearing on your broader and perhaps more important case that Mr Irving has manipulated the data and falsified the record, or do you say that they are corrected in some way and, if so, how?

MR RAMPTON: I propose that they probably are connected. I do not have to do that, but I propose that they are connected, and that the link between them, I have no doubt at all he is genuinely anti-Semitic and all the more defamatory it is of him to say so, and it is true. I propose that certainly, that he is genuinely profoundly anti-Semitic. But the bridge between the Holocaust denial and the Hitler apology from anti-Semitism is a very easy one to build, because what more would an historian who is

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an anti-Semite want to do in exculpation of Hitler which he has been trying to do by telling lies about history for years, what more would he want to do than to deny the Holocaust?

MR JUSTICE GRAY: Yes, but he might believe what he is saying. That is the point. That is why it is important.

MR RAMPTON: Believe what he is saying about what?

MR JUSTICE GRAY: About the Holocaust.

MR RAMPTON: There is no way he could believe what he is saying about the Holocaust if it ----

MR JUSTICE GRAY: I understand that, but that has nothing to do with his anti-Semitism. I am not sure I am making my point clear to you that ----

MR RAMPTON: No, I take a profound anti-Semite, I see that he has denied the Holocaust without any historical justification whatsoever.

MR JUSTICE GRAY: But I understand all of that.

MR RAMPTON: Then I ask myself, what is his reason for denying the Holocaust because he has not got a good historical one, there must be another one? And the most obvious thing for a profound and genuine anti-Semite to do because it suits his book is to leap into Holocaust denial without any proper evidence at all, any evidence at all, and cart it around the world in front of him and to audiences at other anti-Semites and neo-fascists.

MR JUSTICE GRAY: That is another agenda, you would say?

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MR RAMPTON: Yes, that is the other agenda; the promotion of anti-Semitism.

MR JUSTICE GRAY: Yes.

MR RAMPTON: And given that there is, as I say, absolutely no historical foundation, no proper historical foundation, for Holocaust denial, and given that there is evidence that Mr Irving is an anti-Semite, as I say, the bridge between the one and the other is very easy to build indeed.

MR JUSTICE GRAY: Yes, thank you.

MR RAMPTON: And the same goes for Hitler exculpation.

MR JUSTICE GRAY: Thank you very much. Now, Mr Irving, it is your turn.

MR IRVING: My Lord, it might be proper, perhaps, to have a five-minute adjournment as the Defendants have provided to me a list of objections they make to my closing statement and, indeed, I think it would be fair to them if I were just to review those objections and see if I ought to take them on board.

MR JUSTICE GRAY: I do not have any difficulty with that. Will five minutes be enough?

MR IRVING: Five minutes will be enough. (Short Adjournment)

MR JUSTICE GRAY: Yes, Mr Irving?

MR IRVING: My Lord, rather like going over the top in Gallipoli, but my father was in that battle so I know what

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it is like. I will be making omissions from the text that I gave your Lordship and I will indicate by saying that I am omitting a sentence or a paragraph so that your Lordship can follow.

MR JUSTICE GRAY: That is very kind.

MR IRVING: May it please the court. The Defendants in this action, the publisher Penguin Books Limited and the American scholar Deborah Lipstadt, have sought to cast this trial as being about the reputation of the Holocaust. It is not. The world's press have also reported it in this way. Again, it is not. This trial is about my reputation as a human being, as an historian of integrity, and - thanks to the remarks made by Mr Rampton - as a father. The Defendants are saying, and have so convinced many people, that I am not entitled to continue to earn a living in the way that I have earned it for nearly 40 years. A judgment in my favour is no more than that judgment that disputed points which I have made about some aspect of the narrative are not so absurd, given the evidence, as to disqualify me from the ranks of historians. Under the laws of defamation as they exist in this country, it could not be anything else, and nor must the defence team, no matter how powerful, how moneyed, or eloquent, or numerous, be allowed by their tactics to skew it in any other way.

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I may add that the points I have made do not necessarily lessen the horror or the burden of guilt. I have always accepted that Adolf Hitler, as Head of State and government in Germany, was responsible for the Holocaust. I said, in the Introduction to my flagship biography, Hitler's War (this is a reference to the 1991 edition): If this biography were simply a history of the rise and fall of Hitler's Reich, it would be legitimate to conclude: "Hitler killed the Jews". But my years of investigations suggested that many others were responsible, that the chain of responsibility was not as clear cut as that. Nothing that I have heard in this Court since January 11th has persuaded me that I was wrong on this account. These latter points lead to another consideration. Your Lordship will have heard of the - largely successful - effort to drive me out of business as an historian. This Court has seen the timidity, in my submission, with which historians have already been fraught once Holocaust is questioned, not denied, questioned. One notable historian, whose name has been mentioned this morning, ordered by summons by myself to attend, showed himself reluctant even to confirm what he had written in my favour, repeatedly, over the last 20 years.

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A judgment rendered against me will make this paralysis in the writing of history definitive; from then on, no one will dare to discuss who exactly was involved in each stage of the Holocaust -- rather like in Germany now, you cannot do it any more -- or how extensive it was. From then on, discussion will revolve around "safe" subjects, like sacred texts in the Middle Ages, or Marx in the old Soviet Union, or the Koran in some fundamentalist state today. Every historian will know that his critique needs to stop sharply at the boundaries defined by certain authorities. He will have a choice; accept the official version, holus-bolus; or stop being an historian. A judgment in my favour does not mean that the Holocaust never happened; it means only that in England today discussion is still permitted. My opponents would still be able to say, just as now, would still be able, just as now, to produce other documents if they can; to expound alternative interpretations. They would be as free as ever to declare that they think that I am wrong and all the other things that have been said about me today. They would be impeded in one way only: they would not be able to say in a loud and authoritative voice that I am not an historian, and that my books must be banned. As a result of my work (and of this case) the Holocaust, in fact, has been researched more, not less. Those who (rightly) believe that these crimes should never be

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forgotten (and I stress the word "rightly"), these crimes should never be forgotten, should ask whether their case is better served by a compulsory - and dead - text imposed by law and intimidation, or by a live and on-going discussion. Our Common Law has at its kernel an "adversarial" procedure whereby, it is believed, truth is best elicited by each side putting their case as strongly as possible. We have heard some pretty strong things said today. I agree with English Common Law. I read in The Independent, a newspaper in this country, in a lengthy and deeply libellous article published only last week about me, these words: "But if he wins, it will open the door for revisionists to rewrite any event in history without the requirement to consider evidence that does not suit them and without fear that they will be publicly denounced for their distortion". My Lord, in bygone days, I venture to submit, such an article, published while an action was literally sub judice, would have been a clear contempt. Your Lordship will have noticed that I wearied, after a few days, of drawing attention to the coverage of this trial in the media. Allow me, however, to introduce one cautionary statistic: not including the fuss about the Eichmann manuscript, the British press have published no fewer than 167 reports during the seven days that I was on

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the witness stand, that is 24 per day; but just 58 reports during the 20 days when the boot was on the other foot and I was cross-examining Mr Rampton's fine witnesses, that is roughly three per day. That is a disparity of about eight to one. I make no complaint about that. If your Lordship has noticed any of these items, you will perhaps have observed that the reporting in both cases is almost exclusively devoted to the defence statements, or their questions to me, and not to the product of the examination. That is the way things are in a free society. The Court, however, operates by different standards, and it will not allow public sentiment, I hope, to guide its verdict. I believe it was Churchill who once said, "There is such thing as public opinion, there is only published opinion". Given such a baleful glare from the press gallery, my Lord, I am glad that her Majesty has such a resolute officer presiding over this case. The outcome is in your Lordship's hands and yours alone, and I am glad, I am confident that nothing that the press has written, or may yet write, will deflect your Lordship from arriving at a just conclusion. The Defendants have sold around the world a book, "Denying the Holocaust". May I say here that I see Penguin Books among the Defendants to my sorrow, as they have published my own works in the past. They continuing

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even today, however, and I stress this fact, to sell this book for profit, in the knowledge that it contains very defamatory allegations and that those allegations are held to be untrue. It is a reckless, even foolhardy, gesture which I submit, my Lord, goes to the question of aggravated damages when the time comes. Neither of these Defendants evidently bothered even to have the manuscript professionally read for libel. I say "evidently" because we do not know: they have not deigned to enter the witness box themselves, no executive of Penguin Books, not the author who has, I must say, sat in this room for the two months that the trial has continued, neither of them has deigned to enter the witness box to answer even that most straightforward and elementary of questions, was there a libel reading of this book? Nor have they answered this question when it was put to them in writing. Such a report, a libel report, is, in my submission, not privileged, and I would have been well prepared to argue the point; had they claimed that privilege, I would have asked, "On what grounds?" If a report was written, it should and no doubt would have been disclosed, and it was not disclosed. So we are entitled to assume that they did not bother to have the book read. It does not exist, the report. Whatever other limited excuses - whether of sheer ignorance, or of innocent dissemination - that the

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publisher might have (quite wrongfully) deployed for publishing this malicious and deeply flawed work were destroyed from the moment when they received my writ in September 1996, and were thus informed, if they did not know in fact already, of the nature and scope of the libels it contains. And, as said, they have continued to sell it, hoping no doubt to cash in on, to profit from, the notoriety gained by these libel proceedings, which is a textbook case of Rookes v. Barnard if there ever was one, since the book they are selling still contains even the several libels which they have made no attempt here to justify. They have to justify their allegations -- I am referring, of course, my Lord, to the ----

MR JUSTICE GRAY: Yes.

MR IRVING: --- matters they have pleaded section 5 on originally. They have made no attempt to justify their allegations or their defence fails -- I am sorry. They have to justify their allegations, or their defence fails; and as your Lordship is aware, where the defamations are particularly grave, a higher burden of proof falls upon them than the mere balance of probabilities that is normally acceptable. In both Defendants, moreover, there is clear evidence of malice, both in those few documents which the author of this work has disclosed -- I stress the word "few"; pitifully few documents have been placed in my hands -- and in the fact that the same firm of

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publishers had previously distributed a work, a book, in which I was variously caricatured as Adolf Hitler and wearing swastika eyeglasses. The very worst of the libels are so blatant that neither Defendant has insulted the intelligence of this Court by offering any justification to them. They hope instead to divert the court's attention by reference to distant and notorious matters of history and by calling me a racist. In consequence, for 30 days or more of this Court's time, we have had to rake over the embers of what may be one of the greatest crimes known to Mankind: a harrowing, time-wasting, needless effort, which has yielded even now few answers to great questions and mysteries which even the world's finest academics have so far not managed to unravel. I come now to one of the first of these unanswered and unjustified libels which will come as a surprise to many people in this courtroom because there is no reference to it in Mr Rampton's summary. On page 14 of the book, the Defendants published one of the gravest libels that can be imagined for a respectable English citizen who lives a very public life, namely that I consort with the extremist anti-Semitic Russian group Pamyat, with violent anti-Israeli murderers, with extremist terrorists, and with Louis Farrakhan, a Black Power agitator who is known to be acting in the pay of a

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foreign power, namely the Libyan dictator. This is not just the simple allegation of associating with "extremists", the kind of people who use fountain pens to deliver their extremism, about which they have made so much. The words on page 14 are as follows - and I make no apology, my Lord, for reminding the Court of them, the Second Defendant wrote: "The confluence between anti-Israel, anti-Semitic, and Holocaust denial forces was exemplified by a world anti-Zionist conference scheduled for Sweden in November 1992. Though cancelled at the last minute by the Swedish government, scheduled speakers included black Muslim leader, Louis Farrakhan, Faurisson, Irving", that is me, "and Leuchter. Also scheduled to participate were representatives of a variety of anti-Semitic and anti-Israel organisations, including the Russian group Pamyat, the Iranian-backed Hizbollah and the fundamentalist Islamic organisation Hamas". Now, that whole statement was a reckless lie. It appears from their discovery to have been based on a press release issued by the Jewish Telegraph Agency in New York which neither that agency or the Defendants made any attempt to verify. The Court will have noticed in one of my bundles the letter which I sent to every Scandinavian Embassy at the time, anxiously denying this allegation. I have pleaded, as your Lordship is aware, that the innuendo

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was that I was "thereby agreeing to appear in public in support of and alongside violent and extremist speakers, including representatives of the violent and extremist anti-Semitic Russian group Pamyat ... the Hizbollah ... the Hamas ... Farrakhan ... who is known as a Jew-baiting black agitator ... and he is known as an admirer of Hitler and who is in the pay of Colonel Ghaddafi". And "that the true or legal innuendo of the word 'Hizbollah' is that used to refer to and describe a known international terrorist organisation ... in the Lebanon, also known as Hizbollah whose guerrillas kill Israel citizens and soldiers ... provoking retaliation, and which organisation has been determined by President Clinton ... as being among the enemies of peace and, whose officials and armed activists are now being hunted down by the ... Israeli army". As for the Hamas, much the same, I set out in paragraph 12 of my statement of claim that "the true or legal innuendo of the words 'Hamas' is that of an Islamic fundamentalist terrorist organisation similar in nature to the Hizbollah". I submitted to your Lordship at the beginning of this trial a representative selection of news reports from reputable, reliable outlets, including the BBC, on the murderous nature of the organisations involved, concerned. In my pleadings I also argued that by these

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allegations I had "been brought into hatred, ridicule, contempt, risk of personal injury and/or assassination". I know, my Lord, the law of defamation has no concern for people's personal safety, but it certainly has concern for their reputation; and the allegation that I was consorting with the violent extremist body who goes around with machine guns and bombs and bullets is substantially more serious, in my view, than the allegation that I consort with people who use their fountain pens to disseminate crack pot ideas. In my pleadings -- the nature of the libel, and the damage that it caused, hardly needed arguing in detail here. Put in into domestic context, if the Defendants, if the Defendants, had equally untruthfully stated, for example, in a Channel 4 television documentary (and there is a reason why I say that) that I had consorted with Ulster loyalist death squads who were part of a conspiracy to murder Roman Catholic nationalists, itself a grave accusation which would also put me at risk of assassination, and if the Defendants made no attempt to justify that libel, then I respectfully submit that your Lordship would have no hesitation giving judgment in my favour. I submit there is no difference fundamentally between these examples. Now, I was going to say that the Defendants have relied on section 5 of the Defamation Act, but

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I understand from what Mr Rampton said yesterday that they are not relying on that section 5 at all, my Lord.

MR JUSTICE GRAY: No, I do not think that is quite right. I think what he said was that they say they do not need section 5, that is their primary position, but that if they do need it, then, indeed, they rely on it. So do not assume that it has disappeared out of the picture because it has not.

MR IRVING: In that case, I will leave it as I originally wrote. I am aware that your Lordship is also capable, of course, of putting something in section 5 if you consider it to come under section 5.

MR JUSTICE GRAY: I probably would be, but that I believe to Mr Rampton's position.

MR IRVING: This is not the place to make a submission, but my position is that there is no common sting between those allegations. They are totally different kinds of extremism.

MR JUSTICE GRAY: Elaborate on that later.

MR IRVING: In other words, they accuse a respectable Englishman of consorting with terrorists and murderers, and then plead the relative insignificance of the accusation when it turns out to be a reckless lie. And there are other incendiary lies which they have stuffed into that particular sand-bucket, section 5 of the Defamation Act, in the hope that they will sputter out:

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the Defendants repeated the story in that book - first published in Izvestia - that I placed a portrait of Adolf Hitler over my desk. For that lie -- I have had hundreds of journalists visiting me over the 30 years and never once has that picture occurred to any of them for there is no such picture. For that lie too they have offered no justification. I read incidentally recently in Literary Review that Lloyd George had signed photographs of both Hitler and Mussolini on display, and that was a British Prime Minister. The only signed paragraph in my apartment, as many journalists have observed, is one of Sir Winston Churchill. So I submit that your Lordship should not accept the Defendants' contention, if they wish to stand by it, that these allegations should be disregarded on the basis of section 5. Even if they could sufficiently justify their claim that I deliberately bent history in favour of Hitler, and I do not believe they can, I submit that they have not, it would still "materially injure the plaintiff's reputation", which is the word of the Act, section 5, to say that I had a portrait of Hitler above my desk. The claims which they do seek to justify suggest that I am culpably careless and (perhaps unconsciously) sympathetic to Hitler; bad enough, bad enough, but having a portrait of that man -- I am sorry, having a portrait of that man above my desk implies a full-hearted 100 per cent

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conscious commitment to that man, which is very different. I have provided your Lordship on an earlier occasion in one bundle a number of passages quoted from AJP Taylor's works, a very famous English historian and writer. Taylor himself accepted that they inevitably improved Hitler's image -- the words that Taylor had written -- maybe he did not originate the actual mass murders himself, wrote Taylor; maybe he did slip into war with Britain rather than planning it; maybe the Anschluss with Austria was more a stroke of good fortune, which he grasped, rather than long planned as a take-over; maybe the Nazis did not burn down the Reichstag building in 1933. These views of Taylor have been criticised as being wrong, even as being too sympathetic to Hitler. But everybody would accept that to suggest that Taylor had a portrait of Hitler "over his desk" would suggest something far worse. So it should be for me to0. Again, for the purpose of section 5, the allegation that I bend history in favour of Hitler because I am said to admire him, and that I consort with other people holding such views, is a very different kettle of fish from stating, as the Defendants do, that I consort with people who are widely regarded as violent and murderous terrorists. I continue now from the bottom of the page:

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My Lord, the Court will be aware from the very outset I argued that this hearing should not, effectively, leave the four walls of my study, where I wrote my books; and that what actually happened 50 or 60 years ago was of less moment to the issues as pleaded. The matter at issue, as pleaded by the Defendants, is not what happened, but what I knew of it, and what I made of it, at the time I put pen to paper. We had some argument on that matter, my Lord. To take crude example: neglecting to use the Eichmann memoirs, releases to us only a few days ago, had they contained startling revelations - which they did not - could not have been held against me because they were not available to me in the 1960s, 1970s or 1980s. But your Lordship took a different view and I respectfully submit that it was wrong.

MR JUSTICE GRAY: May I interrupt you again? I do not think that is right. I think everybody agrees that the Eichmann memoirs, because they have surfaced so late, really have no bearing on this trial at all.

MR IRVING: I gave that as a particularly crude example of why what mattered was what happened in the walls of my study as I wrote, what was on my desk, so to speak, and not what actually happened.

MR JUSTICE GRAY: I see.

MR IRVING: Your Lordship took a different view, and I respectfully submit that it was wrong. The Defendants

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have invested a sizeable fortune in re-researching the Holocaust, and possibly for that reason we have all been dragged through that vast and inhuman tragedy yet again, because of the money spent on it now, and again quite needlessly, in my submission. It would have sufficed for their purposes if they could have proved, on the basis of the total disclose of my files which I made to them and their experts, that I had indeed "distorted, misstated, misquoted and falsified", their words. Fearing or finding, however, that they were unable to prove wilful fraud, in effect, in my submission, they have fallen back on the alternative plea in the tort of negligence: that "Mr Irving ought to have known". I respectfully submit that this unsettle change of defence should not have been allowed to them, it should not have been available to them, as it was not pleaded at the outset. It has to be specifically pleaded, in my submission, my Lord, at the time. If my submission on the law is, however, wrong, then your Lordship must ask what effort would have been reasonable on the part of an individual historian, acting without institutional support like that of Yad Vashem, and with the doors of the archives increasingly being slammed against him because of the activities of the bodies to which I shall shortly refer. What it would have been reasonable to expect me to do to find out what happened?

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These Defendants have reportedly spent some $6 million, and 20 man-years or more, in researching this case: this blinding and expensive spotlight has been focused on the narrowest of issues, yet it has still generated more noise than illumination. I heard the expert witnesses who were paraded before us use phrases like the "consensus of expert opinion" as their source so often - in fact, I did a check, the word "consensus" occurs 40 times in the daily transcripts of this trial - that I began to wonder what the archives were for. I suggest that these experts were more expert in reporting each other's opinions and those of people who agree with them than in what the archives actually contain and what they do not contain which is equally important. The phrase "Holocaust denier", which the Second Defendant boasts of having invented, is an Orwellian stigma. It is not a very helpful phrase. It does not diminish or extend thought or knowledge on this tragic subject. Its universal adoption within the space of a few years by media, academia government and even academics seems to indicate something of the international endeavour of which I shall shortly make brief mention. It is, in my submission, a key to the whole case. Perhaps this court should raise its gaze briefly from the red and blue files and bundles that are around the court room of documents for a brief moment, and re-read George Orwell's appendix

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to "1984", which seems very relevant to this case. From the witness box, with its revelations of the "consensus of opinion", and "moral certainty", and the mass male voice choir of the "social sciences" that we heard about from Professor Funke, on which the Defendant's German expert, Professor Hajo Funke, relies for his certainty, his certainty, as to what is right-wing extremism, we seem hear more than a vague echo of Orwellian Newspeak -- a language that moulds minds, and destroys reputations and livelihoods. Orwell was wrong in one point: he thought it would take the forces of the State to impose Newspeak: Professor Lipstadt and her reckless publishers Penguin Books Limited -- I shall justify that adjective -- have sought to impose it through the machinery of the literary and media establishments. Only the Royal Courts of Justice here in London, independent and proud, can protect the rights of the individual from now on. And those rights include the right, as Lord Justice Sedley recently put it in another Court in this building, of any person to hold to, and to preach, unpopular views, perhaps even views that many might find repellent. My Lord, I have not hesitated myself to stand here in the witness box and to answer questions. Mr Rampton rose to the occasion, and he, or indeed I, may yet regret it. Your Lordship will recall that, when

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I brought a somewhat reluctant and even curmudgeonly Professor Donald Watt, who is not the Professor I mentioned earlier incidentally, doyen of the diplomatic historians, into the witness box, he used these words: "I must say, I hope that I am never subjected to the kind of examination that Mr Irving's books have been subjected to by the defence witnesses. I have a very strong feeling that there are other senior historical figures, including some to whom I owed a great deal of my own career, whose work would not stand up, or not all of whose work would stand up, to this kind of examination". I am not throwing myself on the charity of this court, my Lord, but I am asking that the court should be reasonable in the standards that it sets. That effectively is a line that Professor Watt has supported me in. It is fair to say, of course, that I had to subpoena Donald Watt.

MR JUSTICE GRAY: Yes, I am aware.

MR IRVING: When I invited him to mention some names, of course, he declined. What he was saying was that whatever mistakes or whatever unconventional interpretations of mine, the Defendants have revealed with their multi-million dollar research, and I am going to admit some mistakes that I have made, not many, this does not invalidate me as an historian, or my historical methods and conclusions.

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Your Lordship will find that Professor Watt continued by suggesting that simply by facing the challenge of the views that I had put forward, "and basing them on historical research rather than ideological conviction," this had resulted in other historians devoting an "enormous burst of research" to the Nazi massacres of the Jews, an area which can now in consequence support journals and conferences. He said, "This, I think, is a direct result of the challenge which Mr Irving's work posed and the consistency and the effort which he has put into maintaining it in public". In other words, I forced the others to do their homework finally at last. In other words, Watt stated that, far from being a Holocaust denier, my work has directly increased historical research into, and the understanding of, the Holocaust. The German Professor Eberhard Jaeckel made the same controversial -- and he is no friend of mine, of course -- point in his essay in the book published by the Us Holocaust Memorial Museum a year or two ago, namely that before my book Hitler's War was published in 1977, the first edition, there had been virtually no meaningful research into the tragedy at all. Professor Hans Mommsen, Professor Raul Hilberg, Professor Gordon C Craig, these and many others have more or less supported my claim to be regarded as a serious historian. I of course say things

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like that with the utmost personal distaste. I do not believe in blowing my own trumpet. The outcome of my research, my books, and my speaking is therefore that people in general are more, and not less, aware of the horrors of the Holocaust, and they are certainly better informed. One of the most damaging accusations which Mr Rampton has repeated again this morning, is that I, the plaintiff, driven by my obsession with Hitler, distort, manipulate and falsify history in order to put Hitler in a more favourable light, thereby demonstrating a lack of the detachment, rationality and judgment necessary for an historian. I submit that, in assessing whether I am an historian who "distorts, manipulates and falsifies" your Lordship should give most weight to my avowedly historical written works. Your Lordship will be thoroughly aware of why I am saying this. I suggested my speeches, very occasional lapses of taste in them, lapses of taste Mr Rampton has identified and mentioned repeatedly, I think three altogether, are relevant purely as background material. Of those written historical works, I submit that your Lordship give most weight to my flagship work Hitler's War. I ask that your Lordship read (again, if your Lordship has already done so) the introduction to the 1991 edition. This was published well

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after the year when the Defendants (wrongly) assert that I "flipped over" to become what they call a Holocaust denier. I have always differed from my colleagues in my profession in insisting on using original documents, including where possible the authors' drafts of books or memoirs rather than the heavily edited West German editions, later rewritings, or posthumous adaptations. I also make use of many more unpublished original documents than my historian colleagues, in my belief. In the 1960s and 1970s, I must add, of course, that was much more difficult than it is today. I differ too from others, in making copies- and I am going to emphasise this quite a lot- of the original documents which I unearth freely available to others as soon as my own works are complete, and in fact often before that time, as the panne, the accident, the mishap which Professor Harold Deutsch's book showed. Your Lordship will remember that Harold Deutsch got there first and used it before me, and I was accused of plagiarising his book, because I gave him the materials before I used them. As page 14 of Hitler's War shows, I donate these records regularly to publicly accessible archives and I also make them available on microfilm. There are nearly 200 such microfilms in my records, nearly half a million pages. I also devote time to corresponding with and

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assisting other historians and researchers. If, therefore -- this is the important point -- some of my interpretations are controversial, I also do all that is possible to let other people judge for themselves. This speaks strongly against the accusation, levelled against me again today by Mr Rampton, that I distort, manipulate and falsify history. On Hitler and the Holocaust I wrote these words, and this is in the 1991 edition, after the time when I supposedly became a denier obsessed with Hitler and with exonerating him. Page 2: My conclusions ... startled even me. Hitler was a far less omnipotent Führer than had been believed, his methods and tactics were profoundly opportunistic. Page 4: ... the more hermetically Hitler locked himself away behind the barbed wire and mine fields of his remote military headquarters, the more his Germany became a Führerstaat without a Führer. Domestic policy was controlled by whoever was most powerful in each sector - by Goring, Lammers, Bormann, Himmler. Page 17: If this biography were simply a history of the rise and fall of Hitler's Reich, it would be legitimate to conclude "Hitler killed the Jews". He had after all created the atmosphere of hatred with his speeches in the 1930s; he and Himmler had created the SS;

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his speeches, though never explicit, left the clear impression that "liquidate" what was he meant. At pages 17 to 18: For a full length war biography, I wrote, I felt that a more analytical approach to the key questions of initiative, complicity and execution would be necessary. Remarkably, I found that Hitler's own role in the "Final Solution", whatever that was, had never been examined. At page 38: Every document actually linking Hitler with the treatment of the Jews invariably takes the form of an embargo, and I maintain that position, despite everything we have heard for the last two months. This is the famous "chain of documents", of course, notwithstanding everything we have heard in court, I still adhere to this position. At page 19 it is plausible to impute to him, to Hitler, that not uncommon characteristic of heads of state, a conscious desire "not to know", what the Americans now call, I believe, plausible deniability. But the proof of this of course is beyond the powers of a historian. At page 21 I write: ... dictatorships are fundamentally weak ... I concluded, the burden of guilt for the bloody and mindless massacres of the Jews rests on a large number of Germans (and non-Germans), many of them alive today and not just on one "mad dictator", whose

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order had to be obeyed without question. The similarity with the thesis propagated by Dr Daniel Goldhagen of the University of Harvard in his worldwide best seller book, "Hitler's Willing Executioners", will surely strike everybody in this court. I am saying the burden falls on a large number of Germans and not just on that one madman's. Note the word "just". I do not say "not on the madman", I say not just on him. Allow me to rub this point in: What I actually wrote and printed and published in my flagship study Hitler's War was that Hitler was clearly responsible for the Holocaust both by virtue of being head of state and by having done so much by his speeches and organisation to start it off. Where I differed from many historians was in denying that there was any documentary proof of detailed direction and initiation of the mass murders by Hitler, and I am glad to say two months in that respect has not brought us any closer. The view was considered to be heretical at the time. But this lack of wartime documentary evidence for Hitler's involvement is now widely accepted. Indeed, on the narrower matter of the lack of wartime documentary evidence on the gas chambers, your Lordship was already good enough to grant as follows in an exchange between your Lordship and myself and

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Professor Evans. I said: If his Lordship is led to believe by a careless statement of the witnesses that there is a vast body of wartime documents, namely about gas chambers, this would be unfair, would it not, because you, Professor Evans, are not referring to wartime documents, you are referring to post-war documents? Professor Evans at this point replies: I am referring to all kinds of documents. I insist, this is me: You are not referring to wartime documents? Evans says: I am referring to documents including wartime documents, the totality of the written evidence for the Holocaust which you deny. Irving then says: Are you saying there is a vast quantity of wartime documents? You see, I am a bit persistent on this matter. Evans says: What I am saying is that there is a vast quantity of documents and material for all aspects of the Holocaust. At this point your Lordship was good enough to say: I expect you would accept, Professor Evans, just to move on, the number of overtly incriminating documents, wartime documents, as regarding gas chambers is actually pretty few and far between? That is how it was left.

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To summarise, in Hitler's War I differed from the other historians in suggesting that the actual mass murders were not all or mainly initiated by Hitler. I pointed out that my sources were consistent with another explanation: A conscious desire "not to know" (a kind of Richard Nixon kind of complex) to which I referred, I believe, on three occasions during the hearings here. I submit that I have not distorted, manipulated and falsified. I have put all the cards on table; I made the documents available to all comers, on microfilm and in the archives, and I have pointed to various possible explanations. I further submit that, while certainly "selling" my views, I have been much less manipulated that those historians, including some whom you heard in this court, my Lord, whose argument has an important part been simply this -- that I ought not to be heard, because my views are too outlandish or extreme. Disgracefully, these scholars cleared from the sidelines as I have outlawed, arrested harassed, and all but "vernichtet" destroyed as a professional historian; and they have put pressure on British publishers to destroy my works. This is a reference to Macmillan Limited, to which we will come later. To assist your Lordship in deciding how outlandish and extreme these views of mine are, I allow

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myself to quote from AJP Taylor's The War Lords, published by Penguin -- the First Defendants in this action -- in London in 1978. Of Adolf Hitler Taylor wrote.

"... it was at this time that he became

really a recluse, settling down in an underground bunker, running the war from the

front. (at pages 55-57).

Precisely same kind of image I generated from my own sources.

"He was a solitary man, though he

sometimes accepted, of course, advice from others, sometimes decisions [my emphasis].

[he accepted decisions from others] It is, I think, true, for instance, that the

terrible massacre of the Jews".

This is AJP Taylor who "was inspired more by Himmler than by Hitler, though Hitler took it up". (At pages 68-70). These quotations are from the foreword of AJP Taylor's own flagship work, The Origins of the Second World War, published in 1963:

"Little can be discovered so long as we

go on attributing everything that happened to Hitler. He supplied a powerful dynamic

element, but it was fuel to an existing machine... [later on he writes] He have

counted for nothing without the support and co-operation of the German people. It seems

to be believed nowadays that Hitler did everything himself, even driving the trains

and filling the gas chambers unaided. This

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was not so. Hitler was a sounding-board for

the German nation. Thousands. Many hundred thousand, Germans carried out his evil

orders without qualm or question."

What I wrote, with less felicity of style than Professor Taylor, was a reasonable interpretation of the information available to me at the time. I might add that my words are often accepted, quoted, and echoed by other historians far more eminent than me. (including the government's Official Historians like Professor Frank Hinsley, in his volumes on British intelligence) who specifically footnotes and references my works. Some may regard my interpretations as not the most probable. But they are never perverse. For the Defendants to describe me as one who manipulates, distorts, and falsifies it would be necessary for them to satisfy your Lordship that I wilfully adopted perverse and ridiculous interpretations. But I have not and they have not satisfied your Lordship either, I submit. The Defendants' historiographical criticisms I now turn to some of the particular matters which exercised your Lordship, in the list of points at issue. As a preamble I would say that I trust your Lordship will be bear in mind that the task facing an historian of my type -- what I refer to as a "shirtsleeve historian", a shirtsleeve historian working in the field,

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from original records -- is very different from the task facing the scholar or academic who sits in a book-lined study, plucking handy works of reference from his shelves, printed in large type, translated into English, provided with easy indices and often with nice illustrations too. Your Lordship will recall that while researching the Goebbels Diaries in Moscow for the first week in June 1992 I had to read those wartime Nazi glass microfiches plates through a magnifier the size of a nail-clipper, with a lens smaller than a pea. The Court will appreciate that reading even post-war microfilm of often poorly reproduced original documents on a mechanical reader is tedious, time consuming, and an unrewarding business. Your Lordship will be familiar with the reason why I saying this. There were certain matters which we dealt with. Notes have to be taken in handwriting when are you sitting at a reader. There are no "pages" to be Xeroxed. In the 1960s Xerox copies were nothing like as good as they are now, as your Lordship will have noticed from the blue-bound volumes brought in here from my own document archives. Mistakes undoubtedly occur: the mis-transcription of difficult German words pencilled in Gothic or Sütterlin-style handwriting, a script which most modern German scholars find unreadable anyway; mistakes of copying are made; mistakes of omission (i.e. a passage is not transcribed when you are sitting at the screen because at the time it

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appears of no moment). These are innocent mistakes, and with a book the size of Hitler's War which currently runs to 393,000 words, they are not surprising. Your Lordship may recall another exchange I had with Professor Evans: may I emphasise here that there is no personal animus from me towards Professor Evans at all. I thought he gave his evidence admirably. IRVING: Professor Evans, when your researchers were researching in my files at the Institute of History in Munich, did they come across a file there which was about 1,000 pages long, consisting of the original annotated footnotes of Hitler's War which were referenced by a number to a every single sentence in that book? ANSWER: No. IRVING: It was not part of the original corpus, it was part of the original manuscript, but it was chopped out because of the length. EVANS: No, we did not see that. IRVING: Have you seen isolated pages of that in my diary (sic) in so far as it relates to episodes which were of interest, like the Reichskristallnacht? EVANS: No, I do not to be honest, recall, but that does not mean to say that we have not seen them. IRVING: You say my footnotes are opaque because they do not always give the page reference. Do you agree that, on a page which we are going to come across in

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the course of this morning, of your own expert report, you put a footnote in just saying "see Van Pelt's report", and that expert report is 769 pages long, is it not? So from this exchange it is plain that I was not just a conjurer producing quotations in my books, producing quotations and documents out of a hat; I made my sources and references available in their totality to historians, even when they were not printed in the book. The allegation that the mistakes are deliberate -- that they are manipulations, or distortions -- is a foul one to make, and easily disposed of by general considerations, which I ask your Lordship to pay particular attention to. If I intended deliberately to mistranscribe a handwritten word or text on which the defence places such reliance, I would hardly on the deliberate nature of the mistranscription, I would hardly have furnished copies of the original text to my critics, or published the text of the handwritten document as a facsimile in the same work (for example, the famous November 30th 1941 note, which is illustrated as a facsimile in all editions of Hitler's War); nor would I have placed the entire collection of such documents without restriction in archives commonly frequented by my criticism. If I intended to mistranslate a document, would I have encouraged the publication of the resulting book,

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with the correct original quotation in the German language, where my perversion of the text would easily have been discovered? Yet like all my other works both, Hitler and Goebbels have appeared in German language editions with a full and correct transcription of the controversial texts. Is that the action of a deliberate mistranslator. As for the general allegation that the errors of exaggeration or distortions that were made were "all" of a common alignment, designed to exonerate or exculpate Adolf Hitler, the test which I submit your Lordship must apply should surely be this: if the sentence that is complained of be removed from the surrounding paragraph or text (and in each book there are only one or two such sentences of which this wounding claim is made) does this in any way alter the book's general thrust, or the weight of the argument that is made? An example of this test is the wrong weight which I gave to the contents of the 1.20 am telegram issued by SS-Gruppenführer Reinhard Heydrich on Kristallnacht. I think Mr Rampton referred to that this morning. It is a famous telegram, printed in the Nuremberg volumes, five pages long or so. Would such an error have been committed wilfully by me, given the risk that it would inevitably be exposed? Is it not far more likely on the balance of probabilities that in the process of

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writing and rewriting, and of cutting and of cutting and condensing, the Goebbels manuscript, the author, that is me, gradually over the eight years lost sight of the full content and the thrust of the original document? Your Lordship should know, if not then I say so now, that that book witness through five successive drafts and retypes over eight years, filling eventually four archives boxes, a total of eight cubic feet of manuscript, all of which I disclosed to the Defendants by way of discovery. St Martin's Press, my American publishers, particularly asked that these early chapters of the book should be trimmed back in length. These general considerations disposed of the defence arguments on the "Policeman Hoffmann" evidence as rendered in the 1924 Hitler treason trial. For the limited purposes of writing a biography of -- my Lord, these are points you have asked me to address specifically in your list of issues. I say that because those who listen to Mr Rampton's speech will not have heard them referred to and may be puzzled as to why I am addressing them. For the limited purposes of writing a biography of Hermann Goring -- not of Hitler -- I relied on the thousands of typescript microfilmed pages of the transcript of this trial. So far as I know, nobody had ever used them before me at that time. Now the handy, printed, bound, indexed, cross-referenced edition, which

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Professor Evans drew upon had not appeared at that time. The printed edition appeared in 1988, two years ago. Eleven years after my Goring biography was published. In other words, even more years after I wrote it by Macmillan Limited. I extracted -- with difficulty -- from the microfilmed pages of the original transcript the material I needed relating to Hitler and Goring and I was not otherwise interested in that man Hoffmann at all. I do not consider the printed volume on the trial which is now available shows that I made meaningful errors, if so, they certainly were not deliberate. The Kristallnacht in November 1938 is a more difficult episode in every way. I do not mean in that sense, my Lord, that it is difficult for me personally. It is a difficult episode to reconstruct from the material available to us. As said, I clearly made an error over the content (and reference number) of the 1.20 a.m. telegram from Heydrich. It was an innocent error. It was a glitch of the kind that occurs in the process of redrafting a manuscript several times over the years. The Court must not overlook that by the time was completed in 1994 and 1995 and as I described in the introduction to that book, Goebbels, the Mastermind of the Third Reich, by that time I had been forcefully severed from both my own collection of documents in German institutions and from the German Federal archives in Koblenz. On July 1st 1993,

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my Lord when I attended the latter archives in Koblenz explicitly for the purpose of tidying up loose ends on the Goebbels manuscript, I was formally banned from the building in the interests of the German people I was told, for ever on orders of the minister of the interior -- that is one of the gravest blows that has been struck at me in my submission by this international endeavour to which I shall shortly refer. The allegation of the Defendants in connection with the Kristallnacht is that in order to "exonerate Hitler" I effectively concocted or invented, a false version of events on that night, namely that Adolf Hitler intervened between 1 and 2 a.m. in order to halt the madness. I think that is a fair summary of the charge against me. I submit that their refusal to accept this, my version, is ingrained in their own political attitudes. There is evidence both in the archives and in the reliable contemporary records like Ulrich von Hassell, the diaries of von Hassell, Alfred Rosenberg and Hellmuth Groscurth, and in the independent testimonies. By which I mean independent from each other, testimonies of those participants whom I myself carefully questioned, or whose private papers I obtained -- I mention here Nicolaus von Below, Hitler's adjutant. Another adjutant, Brückner, Julius Schaub, Karl Wolff and others -- which the Court has seen, to justify the versions which I rendered. It

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therefore was not an invented story. It may well be that my critics were unfamiliar with the sources that I used before they made their criticisms. The dishonesty lies not with me, for printing the "inside" story of Hitler's actions that night, as far as we can reconstruct them using these and other sources; but with those scholars who have studiously ignored them, and in particular the Rudolf Hess "stop arson" telegram of 2.56 am, which was issued "on orders from the highest level", which the Defendants' scholars are agreed or testified is a reference to Hitler. Your Lordship may well have marvelled to hear the Defendants' witnesses dismiss this message from Rudolf Hess -- like the Schlegelberger Document, referred to later -- as being of no consequence. The Kristallnacht diaries of Dr Goebbels, which I obtained in Moscow in 1992, some years after I first drafted the episode for my biography, substantially bore out my version of events, in my submission, namely that he and not Hitler was the prime instigator, and that Hitler was largely unaware and displeased by what came about, or by the scale of what came about, would be a fairer way to put that. Your Lordship will recall that Professor Phillippe Burrin, a Swiss Holocaust historian for whom all the witnesses expressed respect when questioned by me, comes to the same conclusion independently of me. Now he

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(and I have given the quotation at the foot of page). Now, he is manifestly not a "Holocaust denier" either. The Court will also recall that the witness Professor Evans admitted that unlike myself he had not read all through the available Goebbels Diaries. It is a massive task. A mammoth task. He had not had the time, he said, and we must confess a certain sympathy with that position -- for an academic, time is certainly at a premium. But reading all of the available Goebbels Diaries is however necessary, in order to establish and recognize the subterfuges which this Nazi minister used throughout his career as diarist, in order to conceal when he was creating what I call alibis for his own wayward and evil behaviour. I drew attention to this historiographical conundrum several times in the book, my Goebbels biography, the fact that Goebbels Diaries were not trustworthy. I discussed both in my scientific annotated German language edition of the 1938 diaries and in my full Goebbels biography which your Lordship has read, a characteristic example from this same year, 1938, although the one episode which most deeply harrowed and unsettled him that year was his affair with the Czech actress, Lida Baarova, an affair which drove him to the brink of resignation, divorce, and even suicide, neither her name nor any of those events figures explicitly in the diary at

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all, unless the pages be read particularly closely, when certain clues can be seen. That is an example ... The Goebbels diary is sometimes a very deceitful document; it must be recognized as such and treated very gingerly indeed. It is the diary of a liar, a propagandist. The fact that it was evidently written up not one, but two or even three days later, after the Kristallnacht episode, calls for additional caution in relying on it for chronology and content. My Lord, your Lordship will notice that I have not dealt specifically with the number of the issues you put in your list. I hope your Lordship does not take umbrage with that, but I felt that I dealt with them adequately in my cross-examination.

MR JUSTICE GRAY: It is entirely a matter for you.

MR IRVING: If this was wrong of me then all I can say is culpa mea but I now continue with the various narratives of the Nazi shooting of the Jews in the East. There is little dispute between the parties on what actually happened in my view. This is the shootings of the Jews in the East by the Nazis and their collaborators. There is little dispute between the parties on what actually happened in my view, and your Lordship is aware that I have given these atrocities due and proper attention in the various biographies I have written; I however add the one caveat, that they are not

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intended to be reference works on the Holocaust, but just orthodox biographies. I believe that I was the first historian anywhere in the world to discover and make use of the CSDIC reports relating further details to these killings, particularly the Bruns Report, and I made these reports available to many other historians. I should explain to the people who are not familiar with them that these CSDIC reports are eavesdropping reports on Nazi prisoners that we British made using hidden microphones. It took -- it takes many days to read them. There are thousands and thousands of pages in these files. Over the last twenty years I have read these horrifying narratives out repeatedly to public audiences, they describe the killings of the Jews in the most horrifying detail, including "right-wing" audiences. This fact alone entitles me to express my contempt at those who would describe me as a "Holocaust denier". We have seen the Defendants scrabbling around at the end of the Bruns Report for its seizing on its third-hand reference by this SS murderer and braggart in Riga, Altemeyer, to an "order" that he claimed to have received to carry out such mass shootings more circumspectly in future. But we know from the late 1941 police decodes -- we British were reading the SS and police messages passing between Berlin and the front. We

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know from the late 1941 police decodes, which is a much firmer source-document in my view than a snatch of conversation remembered years later, in April 1945, we know precisely what orders had gone from Hitler's headquarters, radioed by Himmler himself to the SS mass murderer, SS Obergruppenführer Friedrich Jeckeln, stating explicitly that these killings exceeded the authority that had been given by himself, Himmler, and by the Reichssicherheitshauptamt (the RSHA). We know that the killing of all German Jews stopped at once, for many months upon the receipt of that message. When I first translated the word "Judentransport" a word which I emphasise again can mean "transportation of the Jews", as "transports of Jews", in the plural, in the 1970s, being unaware of the surrounding context of data which helps now to narrow down the purport to the one Riga-bound trainload from Berlin. I was thus inadvertently coming closer to the truth, not further from it; because the liquidation of all the trainloads from Germany was halted next day, December 1st 1941, by the order radioed from Hitler's headquarters (whether initiated by Himmler or Hitler seems hair-splitting in this context). As I stated under cross-examination, I did not see the Schulz-Dubois document when I wrote my books and I have not seen it since; having now read Professor Gerald Fleming tells us about it, I confess that I would be

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unlikely to attach the same importance as does learned counsel for the Defendants, to what the famously anti-Nazi Abwehr Chief Wilhelm Canaris allegedly told Lieutenant Schulz-Dubois of Hitler's reaction. The British decodes of the SS signals, to which I introduced the Court, and the subsequent events (the actual cessation for many months of the liquidation of German Jews) in my submission speak louder. Your Lordship asked in your list of questions for my comments on the reference in Hitler's table talk of October 25th 1941. Well, your Lordship is familiar with the Defendants' argument and with mine. My extract from this document which I used was based originally on the original Weidenfeld translation, in fact, I used the original Weidenfeld translation into English, as is well known, in disagreement with the Defendants' experts I still maintain and others have followed me in this (notably Professor Phillippe Burrin, who translates Schrecken as "the ominous reputation") in that context, that the appropriate translation here for the word "Schrecken" is indeed "rumour" and not "terror", a word which makes for a wooden and uncouth translation anyway. Ladies and gentlemen, it will make no sense, unfortunately, this passage, unless you see the document. A relevant passage from the SS Event Report from activities in the rear of the eastern front, dated

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September 11, 1941 front (provided by the Defendants), shows that this is precisely what was meant: "The rumour that all Jews are being shot by the Germans had a salutary effect". The Jews were now fleeing before the Germans arrived. The rumour! To accuse me of wilful mistranslation and even worse distortion when (a) I used the original (sic) Weidenfeld translation, not at that time having received the original German from Switzerland, and (b) the word "rumour" gives precisely the nuance, the correct nuance that the surrounding history shows the word was meant to have, this accusation seems to me an excessively harsh judgment on my expertise. The next in line is the Goebbels diary entry for November 22nd, 1941: Again, I just pick out what seems to matter to me in that particular entry here, for the purposes of today's submissions. This diary entry, my Lord, includes a fair example of how dishonest the reporting by Goebbels was when it comes to his meetings with Hitler. He records "the exceptional praise" of Hitler for the weekly newsreel produced by his ministry, the propaganda ministry; in fact Hitler was forever criticising this very product of the Goebbels ministry, as the diary of Rosenberg shows. Goebbels then continues, here is the quote: "With regard to the Jewish problem too the Führer completely agrees with my views. He wants an energetic

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policy against the Jews, but one however that does not cause us needless difficulties." Goebbels diary entry continues: "The evacuation of the Jews is to be done city by city". So it is still not fixed when Berlin's turn comes; but when it does, "the evacuation should be carried out as fast as possible". In other words, he had not got his way. He had been agitating once again that the evacuation should start but Hitler had not come into line. "Still not fixed when Berlin's time comes". Hitler then expressed the need for "a somewhat reserved approach" in question of mixed marriages -- that is marriages between Jews and non-Jews. What do you do with them? Are you going to keep them in Germany or deport them? Hitler's view was the marriages would die out anyway by and by, and they should not go grey worrying about it. Now I have suggested that on the balance of probabilities Hitler was alluding to the public unrest when he said he wanted a policy that does not cause us needless difficulties. I have suggested on a balance of probabilities Hitler was alluding to the public unrest caused by the suicide a few days earlier of the popular actor Joachim Gottschalk and his family. Apart from "needless" becoming "endless", in an irritating typo which hardly amounts to manipulation, in other words, in the original German, the original translation started off as "causing us needless difficulties", which is correct,

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and somehow it became "endless difficulties" is an irritating typo which hardly amounts to "manipulation". This passage bears out what I have always said of Hitler. While Goebbels was the eternal agitator, as witness his anti-Semitic leading article published in Das Reich only a few days before, November 16th 1941, Hitler was (even by Goebbels own account) for a reserved approach towards the Jewish problems; and he was doing so, even as the trainloads of Jews were heading eastwards from Bremen and Berlin, for example to the conquered Russian territories and the Baltic states. Your Lordship will not need reminding of the curious British decodes, which revealed the provisioning of the deportation trains with tonnes of foods for the journey. These are messages which we British decoded, which reveal the provisioning of the deportation trainloads of Jews with tonnes of food for the journey, stocks of many weeks food for after they arrived and even deportees' appliances, "Gerät", appliances. So the evacuation at this time evidently meant just that to very many Reich officials, and no more. My Lord ----

MR JUSTICE GRAY: Press on. Let us get as far as the Schlegelberger document, shall we, on the next page.

MR IRVING: Jolly good, yes, good point. Mr Rampton went to some effort and expense to suggest that I suppressed vital information from the newly

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discovered Goebbels diary, December 13th 1941. In this day's entry Goebbels reported on various things and he reported on Hitler's rhetoric to the Gauleiters, speaking on December 12th 1941 in Berlin, the Nazi governors. Anybody who is as familiar as I am with Hitler's speeches, and with Goebbels' diary entries relating to be them will effortlessly recognize this entire passage as being usual the Hitler gramophone record about his famous 1939 "prophecy". It was part of his stock repertoire when speaking to the Party old guard -- they had carried him into power, the Party old guard had carried him into power and they expected to hear from him that he had not abandoned the hallowed Party programme. I can understand the temptation for the younger generation of scholars, unfamiliar with Hitler's rhetoric, to fall greedily upon such freshly discovered morsels as though they were the answer to the great Holocaust mystery: None of the witnesses to whom this item was put by myself, or by counsel for the Defendants, was able to identify any part of this passage which was out of the ordinary for Hitler. Even if I had read that far on that day's glass plate in the Moscow archives, and even if I had seen those lines of diary entries, some 20 pages after the page where I in fact stopped reading for that that day -- and I must emphasise again that I did not read that far on that day because that did not come within my remit, I doubt that

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I would have attached any significance to them other than adding this list to the occasions -- adding this entry to the list of occasions on which Hitler harked back, for whatever reason, to his famous "prophecy" of 1939. I have read again the printed version of the meeting of the Generalgouvernement, the Polish authorities, the German occupation authorities in Poland, Hans Frank, on December 16th 1941. It is significant to see the amount of space taken, even in this abridged published version, by the typhus epidemic sweeping through the region, the climax of which was expected to come in April 1942. Hans Frank states that he has begun negotiation with the purpose of deporting the Jews to the East, and he mentions the big Heydrich conference which is set down for January 1942 on this topic in Berlin. Then comes the sentence which pulls the rug out from beneath the Defendant's feet, in my submission: Hans Frank says: "For us the Jews are exceptionally damaging mouths to feed. We've got an estimated 2.5 million here in the Generalgouvernement, perhaps 3.5 million Jews now, what with all their kinfolk and hangers-on. We cannot shoot these 3.5 million Jews, we cannot poison them, but we will be able to do something with them which somehow or other will have the result of destroying them, in fact, in conjunction with the grander measures still to be discussed at Reich level". I think that is a fair

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translation of that passage.

MR JUSTICE GRAY: It is not complete, but it is fair.

MR IRVING: Ah, your Lordship says it is not complete. This is an extract taken from a seven or eight page printed volume.

MR JUSTICE GRAY: Yes, it is what Frank says he was told in Berlin that I think perhaps is not there, but, anyway, press on.

MR IRVING: I would -- well, I will press on. The December 18th 1941 diary entry by Himmler reads, this is the diary entry made by Himmler, it is an agenda for his meeting with Hitler on December 18th 1941, Himmler jotted down the words "Judenfrage", Jewish question, and next to that in German the words "als Partisanen auszurotten", Himmler had, as I pointed out to the Court, repeatedly referred in earlier documents to the phrase "Juden als Partisanen". This was nothing new or sensational therefore, and the words he was recording were, in my submission, not necessarily Hitler's but more probably his own stereotype phrase. The correct pedantic translation, is in any case "Jewish problem, to be wiped out as being partisans". Not "like partisans", which would have been "wie Partisanen". There can be no equivocating about this translation of "als". Wie is a comparison, als is an equivalent.

MR JUSTICE GRAY: I think that probably is a convenient

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moment. 2 o'clock. (Luncheon adjournment)

MR JUSTICE GRAY: Schlegelberger, Mr Irving.

MR IRVING: Before Schlegelberger, my Lord, on December 16th 1941, there was a meeting in Poland which Hans Frank referred to discussions he had in Berlin, in the course of which he said in Berlin the people asked us ----

MR JUSTICE GRAY: Liquidate them yourselves, something like that, was it not?

MR IRVING: He said to the people in Berlin: "Imagine that we are housing these people in nice little housing estates here in the Baltic, in the Eastern territories. We tell them we cannot handle it here, liquidate them your