|  David Irving under arrest in Vancouver, BC, October 30, 1992 [Photo: Vancouver Sun] DAVID
IRVING WAS ACCEPTED as an expert witness on WW2 History by
the Court in Toronto during the trial of publisher Ernst
Zündel in April 1988. One evening he spoke to a
large audience in the Canadian city. Somebody taped it, and
provided this transcript to us in July 2011. Under pressure
from Jewish leaders Canada arrested and banned Mr Irving in
1992. The ban is still in force today. True, he has revised
some of the opinions he expressed below, as fresh
documentary evidence became available. Revising opinions is
something that the conformist historians never dare to
do. |
[speaks in German] Meine Damen und Herren. Ladies and gentlemen, I intend speaking to you in English this evening, because I am sure most of you understand English. [speaks in German] I will occasionally use a few words of German to make the Germans among you also feel at home. I am, as your President this evening rightly said, an English historian. But I concentrate, for my crimes, almost entirely on German history, largely through an accident. The fact that I concentrate on German history comes from the fact that I worked in Germany many years ago as a steelworker and one of my fellow steelworkers had been in Dresden during the German holocaust, if you can say -- the British air raid on Dresden that killed a hundred thousand people or more, in the space of two or three hours. And having been introduced in this rather inelegant way to the crimes committed by others during the Second World War, I decided to sit down and write a history. At that time I was only twenty-one or twenty-two years old. And I intended to write a newspaper article, but the newspaper article then became a book, and the book, Der Untergang Dresdens/The Destruction of Dresden was published around the world and that is the reason why nowadays the media, the lazy writers, the journalists, the world's press, talk of Hiroshima, Auschwitz, Nagasaki, and Dresden all in one breath. Until my book was published, nobody accept the Germans had ever heard of what happened in Dresden. And now towards the end of my writing life, I find that I'm having to re-examine one of those other towns -- Auschwitz. And it's a very, very painful process, because half way through my writing career, I wrote a book about Hitler, a biography of Hitler, in which I was still a believer. And now I have turned into an unbeliever. In fact, having given evidence in a trial here in Toronto in April this year, I was telephoned by some friends on the west coast of the United States who said, "Welcome to the ranks of the damned." It was as though I had been bitten by a vampire. I was now one of the undead. And it was an uneasy feeling and I thought, well, I'm sure that this gentleman thinks that he is doing me a favour calling me one of, one of the damned. But he's not. Because life is not going to be easy for me as a historian and as a writer now that I have gone over that particular brink. And I'm going to talk to you in the course of the next half hour or so about how I have come to that new conclusion. I have changed my opinion -- my belief. But in the process I'm going to tell you a little bit about the way I write books, and the way I select or reject evidence, because that's all part of the story. I am notorious as a writer, as a writer who rejects, as a writer who refutes and repudiates. If you remember [holds up a booklet], many years ago, in 1983, I was notorious for the fact that I was the one who exposed that other six million fake, the six million dollar fake, the six million dollar Adolf Hitler Dairies as being fakes. This is me at the press conference in the middle of Der Stern's press conference. [jump in footage] ...of that kind of money at his disposal to lard around. And yet somehow we've got to keep up this fight, because we are all dedicated, we're resolved and determined to find out what really happened. And this is where people like me come in -- the historian. Because Churchill himself said, "It is the job of the historian to find out what happened and why." And the problem over the Holocaust, if I can use that cheap phrase -- "the Holocaust". The problem with the Holocaust, is we've been told what happened and the historians over the last forty years have spent an awful lot of time and energy trying to find out why. And they've accepted what they've been told about what happened. And now that a few brave men are out there re-examining the credentials of what really happened, they are coming under colossal attack, because, of course, they're shaking a multi-million dollar business at its very roots. And this isn't just David Irving saying it. This is... This is... This is the phrase that was used... This is a phrase that was used by the great, English, Jewish authority, the Chief Rabbi of England, United Kingdom, Lord Immanuel Jacobovits. He, himself, is the one who said that the Holocaust has become big business and it's a shame. And I agree, it is a shame, because if it happened it was a tragedy and let me say right in front that a lot of things happened in World War II were tragedies. I mentioned Dresden, but I'm also going to say what the Germans did frequently to minority groups or to people in whose, people who temporarily fell into their clutches -- that was a tragedy. None of you could do anything for it, because you weren't the ones who were committing these crimes. But it was a tragedy, nonetheless. But we have to find out what the true scale of that tragedy was. And also, it's not without interest to find out if the tragedy was a tragedy which the entire German people wanted. If it was a tragedy that the German state inflicted on these people, or the Fuhrer acting on behalf of the German state and in the name of the German state, or if it was a tragedy inflicted by a group of a hundred or five hundred or a thousand nameless criminals. The kind of criminal that you find in every demi-monde, in every military organisation and structure. You only have to look at what the United States did in Vietnam, what Lieutenant Calley did to My Lai to realise that there are criminals like that, regrettably, in every army, in every unit, in every core, not just the Germans, not just the Czechs, or Ukrainians. You find those criminals everywhere. I've been working for the last two or three weeks in the American archives. I'm over here in North America for four months now. I shall be over here working in virtually every major American archives. I drove up especially from Syracuse yesterday to come and speak to you here in Toronto today and I'm speaking, I believe, in Ottawa tomorrow to a similar audience and I'm going on down to Harvard and Boston to work in the archives down there. Because I make a habit of using, in my books, only primary sources. Now, by primary sources, I mean the actual documents written by the actual men. Hugh Trevor-Roper, Lord Dacre, as he now is, the great English historian, who unfortunately was... had the misfortune to say, originally, that the Hitler Diaries were genuine, but then he rapidly changed his mind. Hugh Trevor-Roper told me, "Mr Irving, when you look at any document ask yourself three questions before you accept it in your research files. Firstly, is it an authentic document?" A simple question, but it is an important question. "Secondly, why does this document exist? For what purpose was it written? And thirdly, was the person who wrote this document in a position to know what he's writing about?" They're such simple criteria. And yet how often you can reject a document out of hand as being useless for the purpose of writing history, because it doesn't meet one or the other of these three criteria. Obviously, a document has got to be genuine. And yet when we come up against the Auschwitz case, just to simplify our whole issue this evening on the name Auschwitz -- that one great, big, kingpin of the whole Holocaust mythology. When we come up against that we find documents that don't even meet that simplest of criteria -- the authenticity criterion. And then you come up against the other criteria. Who wrote it? And why does this document exist? And then you begin to suspect perhaps this document exists for a reason completely unassociated with establishing the truth. It was written in 1944. The war was still on. For what purpose was the document written? Was it written for a specific psychological warfare purpose? And when you start asking yourself with a pure and clean mind these simple questions, then you realise that you are coming up with awful answers, with answers that are so awful that they give you nightmares, because you know that your career as a writer is probably over from this moment. After attending this trial in Toronto in April, giving evidence that I did give there, I went back to London and I talked to my publishers, Macmillans -- one of our oldest and most widely respected publishers in the United Kingdom who published my last three or four books and, God bless them, are going to be publishing my memoirs and believe me into my memoirs I'm going to be putting all the stuff that I can't put into the books. Now Macmillans... I've mentioned... I've mentioned to the Macmillans that I intend to write a book about Auschwitz and I can say, I have never seen jaws sag before. These jaws sagged and the blood drained from their face and, I mean, every clique was there in the editors that I spoke to. They are not at all happy that I am intending to write a book about Auschwitz. I have reassured them that it's not for several years yet and it's probably the last book that I shall write, inevitably, because this is a book that will please very, very few people indeed and it's going to take a lot of research. And the research is what I am doing at this moment. I'm going around the United States archives working, ostensibly, on other subjects, but I am, at the same time, digging up what they have on this one case. I'm doing the kind of work that historians should have done over the last forty years. And the reason I'm doing it is because of one man and that man is Ernst Zündel. Now, a lot of us know Ernst Zündel and a lot of us have had our own private feelings about him. And I must admit when I first got to know the name of Ernst Zündel I was apprehensive. When I was met by somebody in Vancouver a couple of years ago at the airport and I was introduced to him as being a friend of Ernst Zündel, I thought, "My God! I'm being photographed with a friend of Ernst Zündel. This is the beginning of the end." -- The Rake's Progress. Let me skip forward to April this year when I saw the kind of documents that had been collected for the Zündel case, and I say that Zündel has done two pieces of research, he's done two pieces of research that I'm ashamed that I never thought of doing myself. The chemical research and the forensic investigation of the site. Actually,... If there's one... If there's one thing that has converted me to the ranks of the damned, it was what I saw here in Toronto in April. And it has given me an open mind. It's made me go back to redo the research that I should have done all these years and relook at the files. So that now as in Syracuse the last couple of days where I've been working in the files of the American Attorney General, his private papers, Judge Francis Biddle, one of the judges at Nuremberg and you find his private diaries and you find all the documents and materials related to the conduct of those infamous trials at Nuremberg and you find out that when he himself, sitting on that lofty bench in Nuremberg, heard the witnesses giving their evidence ostensibly coming from Auschwitz and ostensibly coming from Majdanek and the other horror camps. And this American judge who has been through it all before. He has sat on countless benches in his career. He writes down in his private dairies... I've got the quotations here with me if you are interested. He writes down after listening to one French woman [Marie Claude Vaillant Courturier] who claimed to have been in Auschwitz and claimed to have experienced all these unimaginable tortures and atrocities. He writes in brackets in his private diaries, "I don't believe a word of this." I don't believe a word of this. This woman describes how, well, you know the stories that they told -- the bestial atrocities that were conducted on them -- the smoking chimneys, the crematoria, the bodies, the unloadings, the standing naked in the cold, and then, incidentally, one or two little bits and pieces that give the sense of verisimilitude which stick in your memory because she said, [paraphrasing] "We were made to take off all our clothes so they could be disinfected in the special chambers." Ah! But, of course, Judge Biddle at that time, he doesn't associate that with what [unintelligible] was subsequently found and the receipts of the documents for the Zyclon B, and so on. But he is a suspicious man and he continues writing as she is describing how the women are sterilized and the men were castrated often. I would have thought that being castrated once was enough. But these are the words in her testimony. And so it goes on. The evidence is there in the files. And over the week before I've been working in Hyde Park, not Hyde Park, London, but Hyde Park, New York, where the Roosevelt Archives are. Now the uninitiated [unintelligible] might imagine that in the Roosevelt Archives, you're just going to find President's Roosevelt's papers, but no. You'll find there the papers of a lot of bodies and agencies that were connected with the Roosevelt administration. Very strange people have donated their papers to the Roosevelt Archives. And I never realised until I turned up at the Roosevelt Archives, ten days ago to work there for a week or more, that they have in those archives the entire papers of the War Refugee Board. And you might think that that's a very unpromising kind of body, but the War Refugee Board turns out to have been three men -- Henry Stimson, Cordell Hull, and Henry Morgenthau, Jr. Henry Stimson, Secretary of War; Cordell Hull, Secretary of State, foreign minister; and Henry Morgenthau, Jr, that rather murky, ominous, insidious figure, the Head of the American Treasury, the Secretary of the Treasury. So that was the War Refugee Board. And they were responsible for channelling colossal sums of money from various Jewish bodies like the Joint Distribution Agency, the World Jewish Congress and various other bodies, which you are all familiar, into Europe in 1944, making sure that it reached the Jewish organisations in Europe and helped the Jews out of their tragedy. And we're not going to deny that the Jews were in a tragic situation in Europe in 1944, not just in Germany -- nobody wanted them. This was the situation they found themselves in and the American Jews rallied round and provided colossal sums of money and in the records of the War Refugee Board are the cheques and the receipts -- the receipted photocopies of the receipted cheques for millions of dollars from the World Jewish Congress being sent over to Switzerland where the Americans had their representatives. And then in July 1944, come the first signs of an extraordinary document coming out of Czechoslovakia -- a report allegedly by two Slovak Jews who have been in Auschwitz. And this is one of the king-pin documents of the whole Auschwitz case -- if not, the king-pin document. It is a long report about twenty-five or thirty pages long. It is in the Roosevelt Library. Two young Slovak Jews who claimed to have been in Auschwitz and claimed to have witnessed all these atrocities. And the extraordinary thing is there that this is the seminal document of the whole of the Auschwitz mythology. You find everything in this document -- the gas chambers, the crematoria, the smoking chimneys, the dressing, the undressing, the women, the men, the babies, the children having their arms and legs torn off -- all these extraordinary, lurid details as though written by a journalist in this Slovak report. And, of course, I'm interested, because I want to see the original and it's not there. The only documents in the files are an English version of the report and a German version of the report. But no Slovak version of the report! And this is allegedly written by two Slovak Jews who have escaped from Auschwitz. Okay, well, I'm not going to let you into too many details of the research that I've done on the War Refugee Board. I just want to give you a few hints of what is coming in a few years time when the book comes out. It is very likely, in my view, that this report was written by two men who had been nowhere closer to Auschwitz than probably Madison Avenue. Who knows? I don't think it ever existed in a Slovak version. The authenticating documents associated with it are originated by the American legation in Bern. The American Ambassador in Bern, sends report after report to the State Department describing how he's trying to authenticate it, but not getting very far. And he keeps on coming up with second and third order evidence. He says, "I've spoken to the people, [name of official], who claims to have interviewed the two men and he finds them very credible." And then gradually it comes out that the report has been concocted with the assistance, the editorial assistance, of the Jewish Resistance organisation in Bratislava, the capital of Slovakia. So it isn't a report by these two men at all. It is a committee report written by some nameless committee, in German. And when it came out in November 1944, finally, after it was smuggled out of Slovakia in dramatic ways to Switzerland and then brought out of Switzerland by the Americans, sent to Washington and then issued by the War Refugee Board on November 26th, 1944, remarkable things happened. The first remarkable thing that happens is that the Washington Post and the New York Times declined to print it. Every other newspaper in the United States printed it except these two magnificent, respectable, responsible newspapers. The Washington Post and the New York Times said we want further and better particulars before we're going to fall for this one. Very interesting. And two of their best journalists actually challenge it. One of them finally writes in a column in the newspaper, "We've had so many atrocity stories in this war that we want to have a few more details about this report put out by the War Refugee Board." And it's so refreshing to go back to a wartime document in November, 1944, and find people, even then, challenging something about that. Because, of course, now it is heresy. You can't challenge it. We can do it here in this confidential room because no one is going to go outside and start telling what I've been saying. But we can't do it, because if we do it, we are in some way beyond repair. We are bandits -- we're illegals. In Germany we are illegals, of course, because in Germany [speaks in German] the lie has become anchored in law in Germany. In Germany you are not allowed to challenge the six million, or Auschwitz, because if you do you are breaking the criminal law, in Germany. And in this country, and in America, and indeed in Britain, it has become something akin to blasphemy. It has become a religion. It has become a religion as holy as the holy scriptures. And anybody who stands up and says, "I don't believe" in a voice of anything less than the utmost reverence, then he is blaspheming. And it is very difficult, of course, for an historian now to stand up and start challenging the holy scriptures with the methods of an historian. He's not allowed to and soon the position will arise where we are not allowed to stand up and start criticising this particular piece of holy mythology, because an entire industry has grown up around it with all sorts of holy priests -- Elie Wiesel, for example, that unfortunate gentleman who was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize last year -- regrettable case. It can't be very nice to be called Wiesel, but you don't get awarded peace prizes for that. I mean, at most, you should be entitled to some humane society award, but not a peace prize. So... So this is the first thing we find that when that report was issued on November 26th, 1944, responsible journalists who knew their job challenged it straight away. They had a gut feeling that something wasn't quite right. The second thing we notice about it is that one of the people who was ostensibly a member of the War Refugee Board, Henry Stimson -- he knew nothing about the report being issued over his name. The first he knew about it was when his Assistant Secretary of War, John McCloy, telephoned him and said, "Henry, what the hell is going on?" And Henry telephoned the other Henry, Henry Morgenthau, who'd actually issued the report. Morgenthau had the War Refugee Board housed in his building. And we've got the Henry Morgenthau diary and let me just read out what Henry Morgenthau's diary says on that day -- November 27th, 1944. The Henry Morgenthau diary, on the morning of the report being splashed in the newspapers. Stimson phoned him. Morgenthau says, "How are you?" Stimson says, "I've just learned that there was some quite striking announcement put out as to the atrocities yesterday by the Committee on Refugees", meaning the War Refugee Board. "Well, it must have been done without anybody showing it to me, so I was rather mortified by not knowing anything about it." Huh! Mortifying, isn't it? To find out that your pal, Morgenthau, down the road has issued a report over your name. This sensational report about the Germans killing 1.75 million people in one camp by gas with all these bestial atrocities and you find your name has been appended as one of the signatories. Morgenthau says, "Well, I..." He's interrupted by Stimson, who is obviously very angry. You see, Morgenthau kept a verbatim record of all his telephone conversations, which in this case is rather foolish. Stimson says, "I don't think they ought to do that." Morgenthau says, "Well, I was under the impression. I know he showed it to me." Stimson says, "I know, I'm thoroughly, I'll probably be in thorough sympathy with any such announcement, but I think it's important to get it out, but as long as I'm one of the committee, I think I ought to know about it, particularly when you and I are the only two members of the committee in the sickness of health." Aha! Aha! It turns out that the third member of the committee, Cordell Hale, was off sick. Aha! So now we understand how the report gets delayed from July, 1944, until November. He waits until Cordell Hale is off sick, the Secretary of State, and then he issues it without telling the other member, Henry Stimson. So we're learning a little bit about how this magnificent report on Auschwitz came into being. And then yesterday, as I was going through the private papers of Justice Biddle in Syracuse, the judge at Nuremberg, a little thought lit up in my head. And it's the kind of thought that lights up in my head, but not in the head of the average historian. Because it's the thought you're only entitled to light up when you've done the work. Something is missing. You're missing something. What we're missing on this occasion, of course, is as follows. At Nuremberg, a year after this Auschwitz report hit the headlines. At Nuremberg they produced a French woman, and a Dutch woman, and a Polish man, and a Czech person -- any number of different people who have been in Auschwitz to give evidence. These ridiculous scenes about children screaming, "Mummy, how am I going to walk with only one leg? This nasty man has torn off my leg." These extraordinary things that were actually in the testimony at Nuremberg. And yet the Slovak document was not introduced as evidence. Nor were the two Slovak Jews produced as witnesses, either. Although they had the most extraordinary report giving chapter and verse, and dates, and details, and statistics. Of course, one of these two so-called Slovak Jews, a man called Vrba, is now peregrinating around the world attending various conferences and claiming to have been one of those particular two signatories. So where was he at the time of the Nuremberg trials? The whole thing stinks. In my mind, it is proof that the Nuremberg authorities, the prosecuting authorities, if they ever considered tabling that one cardinal document which has now become one of the cardinal pieces of evidence -- looked at it, shook their heads, possibly even investigated it and found out that its source was something completely different. And there are two possible sources. One of the possible sources was, of course, our own Secret Service, and I'll come to that in a minute -- the British Secret Service. And the other possible source was the German Secret Service. And this is an interesting thought. Did the German propaganda operation in 1944 decide to feed to the Allies, evidence about Auschwitz? Atrocious evidence about Auschwitz. And you may think, well if so, of course, it was a big own goal. But this isn't just me saying this. This was the suggestion put forward to the War Refugee Board, by one very learned correspondent a few days after the publication. He wrote a letter to Stimson and to Henry Morgenthau saying, "Isn't it possible that we've fallen for Nazi propaganda?" Because if you read the report from one side to the other, from the beginning to the end, the one fact that sticks in your craw at the end of it all, is the fact that the people who were doing the killing and the organising, and the listing, and documenting, were Jews themselves. And this is what the Nazis want us to swallow. The fact that the really cruel people in World War II, the ones who were absolutely ruthless even towards their own people were Jews. And if you think, of course, that they are scoring an own goal by putting out atrocity stories about Auschwitz, the Nazi Propaganda Ministry will have said... they will have said, [paraphrasing] "Who cares? We're being blamed with these atrocities anyway, so let's put that in as the meat and deepen the meat is the barb that we bury saying that the real people who were doing the killing were the Jews." A vicious piece of anti-Semitic propaganda put out by the Nazi Propaganda Ministry. Now, I'm only offering this to you as one possible origin of the Slovak Jews' alleged report. Not my own theory. It's a theory which is in the files of the War Refugee Board. And the other theory is the interesting one which again I thank one of Mr Zündel's henchmen whose been doing extensive work, Paul Norris here, whose been doing extensive work in the British archives. By doing the work in the British archives that the other historians have not done, Paul Norris has turned up the evidence that our own Psychological Warfare Executive were behind the entire gas chamber story. Back in the early 1940s -- 1942, 1943, 1944 -- our Psychological Warfare Executive, the PWE, which was a branch of the British Intelligence Service, decided in a prolongation of the entirely admirable and justifiable propaganda warfare that we had conducted so well in World War One. You, remember the stories about the Belgian children with their hands hacked off by the wicked Germans which everyone believed for years after World War One. We carried on with the same methods in World War II with big lies and little lies. And the biggest lie that we propagated as far as I can see was the gas chamber lie. And once again we're quoting from the archives. They're in the British archives, how the Psychological Warfare Executive decides quite cold-bloodedly and cynically to start putting out over the radio waves the allegation that the Germans have built special gas chambers for gassing the Jews and getting rid of them. And later on in the files, around about 1944, you find that the Chairman of the Joint Intelligence Committee who was responsible for the Psychological Warfare Executive, writing a hand-written minute. His name is Victor Cavendish-Bentinck -- an eminent banker, an industrialist. He is still alive in England -- now Lord Portland, as he is now. Chairman of the Joint Intelligence Committee writing in hand-writing in 1944, words to the following effect, "We've had a good run for our money with this gas chamber lie, but really we've got to be a bit careful, because eventually it's going to be exposed and then our entire psychological warfare effort will be brought down with it. So isn't it a good time now to distance ourselves from this particular story. We've set the hare running and now we ought to let it go off by itself." A good run for their money in 1944 and here we are in 1988 and that hare is still running forty-four years later. And nobody has bothered to link the mythology of 1988 with the documents in the British archives in 1942, 1943, and 1944. I'm only offering this to you because, of course, people are going to say, "Well, if it wasn't true, and if it didn't happen, then how do you explain that everybody knew about it?" My own publisher in Germany, Albrecht Knaus, a lovely man. He published my Goering biography which unfortunately has all gone. I only brought ten with me from England. Albrecht Knaus -- he's... I think he's Jewish, himself, I've never asked him. But I know he suffers, he suffers with each book of mine that he publishes. And he said, "Herr Irving, you've done it again in your Goering biography. We're going to have to do something about this Endlösung problem, the Final Solution. And he says, "Everyone knew about it. I knew about it." And I have to say to him, "Herr Knaus, in the utmost respect, and I'm not calling you a liar, you didn't know about it. You have persuaded yourself that you did." It is a kind of [German word] a massenwahn. It's a kind of mass hysteria. That after a time, people believe they were there. I've discovered it as an historian. I go and interview people and they become very indignant when I have to point out to them that they weren't there -- they weren't at the centre of the stage giving the orders. They were miles away and they've read about it years later and after a time they really believe themselves to have been there. And it's not an ugly human trait. It's human nature. You believe you were there because you recall it so vividly. And the Jews are an impressionable people and it is part of the Jewish tragedy that they believe they were there. And they are rather ashamed that they weren't there. They're happy that people do believe they were there. And I'm not... I'm not... I'm not saying this in any way as a put down on the Jewish people, because it is a tragedy. It is part of the nightmare that they are still living. They want to have been there and they feel slightly guilty that they some how survived when all the time this six million killing was going on which they've now heard about, you see. And that's why they get indignant with the likes of me who come along and say, "Well, let's get to the bottom of this." And when Knaus, my German publisher, says, "Herr Irving, [speaks in German] I'm much older than you." He's seventy-five, and just turned seventy-five, now. And I have to say, "Herr Dr. Knaus, I work at the archives. I don't work in memories." And the archives tell an unmistakable language. We know exactly what people knew at that time because the Gestapo kept what are called Morale Reports [speaks in German] and these are complete and intact in the archives in Koblenz. And we know exactly what happened because people wrote letters and diaries and they wrote letters to each other which were intercepted by the British Secret Service. Millions of letters were intercepted by the British. We overran ships. We captured positions. We invaded towns. We got hold of thousands of sackfuls of private letters written by people. And these letters were then sorted and read and analysed and reports were written on the content of these letters. And nowhere -- and I've read these reports -- nowhere is there the slightest reference to any Germans during the Second World War knowing about details of gas chambers and gas camps. Rumours! But where do the rumours come from? Auntie BBC -- the impregnable, pure, virgin-like British Broadcasting Corporation which never told a lie. Never told a lie, my goodness! Read some of the news bulletins of World War II [speaks in German] You can't help blushing when you read these reports. But this was the way that psychological warfare works. And I'm not going to put down psychological warfare, because psychological warfare is bloodless, and if the enemy falls to it, then so much more the fool they are. And we were better at psychological warfare than Dr. Goebbels. We told the bigger lies. And I think the biggest lie of the lot is the one that is still militating on now. [speaks in German] Lies have short legs. You can't stop a lie once it starts. I've said that often before. In wartime, the propaganda ministries, the ministries of information, they start this flywheel spinning. And it's natural and everybody that has an interest to keep that flywheel spinning -- the BBC, the newspapers, the magazines, the generals, and the ministers, and the politicians. In the files of the War Refugee Board in Hyde Park, the ones I mentioned earlier, the ones which issued this atrocity report on two Slovak Jews, most of the letters that come in on the next few days are from other editors saying, "Please can we have reports of this?" There's a letter from Yank Magazine, which I take to have been some kind of soldiers' magazine -- the equivalent of Signal, probably. And Yank Magazine editor writes to Mr. Morgenthau saying, "Please can we have a copy of your report? We need all the atrocity stories we can get." I'm going to be quoting this letter because it is symptomatic of the way that it happened. But this propaganda flywheel that starts to spin and is finally, at the end of any major war, like a six or seven year war like the Second World War, that is spinning so fast that noboby dares to go up and put his hand on it and stop it. Because why should they? So the wheel spins on with its own momentum. Anybody who puts his hand on the flywheel to spin [sic] it, is going to get his fingers burnt. They get arrested, as I was in Austria. Well, now the Austrian government has been defeated in the law courts and they have to pay me substantial compensation. And I hope, eventually, the law courts are to pay Mr. Ernst Zündel substantial compensation for the injustice done to him, as well. It is a very thorny task what we're doing -- Zündel, for his reasons, I for mine. I'm doing it just because I get a certain amount of pernicious pleasure. I like to have on every page of every book that I write, a little piece of fun. The documents like that one about, these people were castrated often and that kind of thing. I put it in there because it gives me a little laugh. It gives me a little laugh at the expence of the other historians who have been so gullible that for forty-four years they have believed it. And, boy! If we manage to pull this one off, ladies and gentlemen, the laughter that's going to ring around the world if we manage to demote the biggest lie of all time, is going to be as nothing, because we're going to pull off [German word] a spectacular feat. And I really have to say, I thank Zündel for doing it, because he is the one who's converted me. He's converted me from being a believer into an unbeliever which is a very, very difficult step for me to take. It's not a retrograde step, it's a forward step. But from now on, if I thought the last twenty-five years of my writing career had been difficult, it is quite plain to me that the next five or ten years are probably going to be the most difficult years I've ever had. I'm going to have to put armour plate on my front door in London. I'm going to have to brief my editors in London years ahead of what they can expect. I'm going to have to find very, very good and solid publishers first in London because obviously this is so important. It's got to be done right. But we can do it. I can let you... I can lift the curtain on one or two ways I intend to do it, on the particular case of Auschwitz. The documentary evidence, one by one, we are dismissing. The documents -- I mean, this report by the Slovak Jews is one case. We're ninty-nine per cent of the way to proving that the report is a fake. The people who wrote it, did it for a specific propaganda, psychological warfare reason. Can't say who, can't say why, but it's almost certain that the report is a fake. The Gerstein Report, that other famous fake that came out in the immediate post-war period, is also obviously a fake. And some of you will know what happened to the French historian [Henri Roques] who got his Ph.D for exposing the fake. He did a magnificent job of research, the like of which no German, or French, or British historian has done. He went to the archives. He got the French police reports. He compared every available copy of the so-called Gerstein Report. He found copies of the Gerstein Report that nobody knew existed. He got hold of the unfortunate Gerstein's private papers and letters and proved that [SS Officer, Kurt] Gerstein was probably mentally unstable, as well. The Gerstein Report is completely fake and phoney. And the unfortunate French historian who exposed it, of course, has been stripped of his doctor's title in consequence. We're up against a very, very powerful, closed elite. They've got money, they've got rank, they've got all the academic titles and positions. And yet, I'm convinced that we can win, because we've got on our side the weapon they don't have. We've got the truth on our side -- I'm convinced of it. And if you're once convinced you've got the truth on your side then you're prepared to make the personal commitment, the financial and time commitment which I'm making now and I've begun making ever since April, this year in Toronto at the Zündel trial. I'm going to duplicate a lot of the work that Mr. Zündel has done, not because I discount the work he has done, but because I know the attacks that will start. I'm having the RAF Intelligence reinterpret the photographs of Auschwitz. That's an interesting story. I'm having the University of Keele, who have a geographical department. They've stepped forward and volunteered to remap Auschwitz for me. They've got all the mapping equipment necessary to remap from ariel photographs. And Mr. Zündel will confirm that we now have the most magnificent aerial photographs of Auschwitz taken by the British and Americans, and Germans, in 1944 and 1945. There can no longer be any doubt whatsoever, what buildings were doing what. And with that one tool alone, of course, you are in a position to discount a very large body of the so-called eye-witness evidence. I'm not going to say that the people who gave those eye-witness reports are liars, because calling them liars implies that they had perverted reasons for doing something. They gave the false testimony, not for reasons of deliberate perjury, but because they genuinely, sincerely believed their own illusions. It's a kind of very subtle madness that overcame these people. And eventually, I shall also repeat, if I can, the magnificent chemical and forensic work that Mr. Zündel has done. And with this body of evidence, I shall have to persuade Macmillans, and if they're too cowardly to do it, I shall have to persuade another English publisher to stand up and publish the result. And then, of course, will come our collective moment of rejoicing, because there's going to have to be a great rewriting of history. I knew right from the start... I knew right from the start that something was phoney because, of course, when I spent ten years writing my Hitler biography, and I knew most of Hitler's private staff, and I questioned them in very great detail, and I won their confidence, which, or course, is nine tenths of the battle, persuading Hilter's private staff to talk frankly to you, and tell you not only the clean, and upright, and decent things, but also the dirty things that happened. And they told me this, his adjutants, and his secretaries, and the colonels, and people who were close to him, day after day, for the final twelve years of his life. And it was striking for me, that having spent the ten years writing Hitler's life, I didn't come across a single document or piece of evidence showing that he knew what was going on in Auschwitz. There's one telling moment in Hitler's life on January 17th, or 18th, or 19th 1945. It was in one of his Lager Beshrechung, the war conferences, that he held twice a day on which were taken down in short-hand by short-hand reporters. And there's only fragments of these short-hand records left, not like the Morgenthau Diaries -- eight hundred volumes of them in the Hyde Park library. We've just got one volume of the Hitler stenographic fragments of his war conferences, but it's enough, because here we have him on January 17th, or 18th 1945, being told by the Chef des Generalstab, the Chief of the German Army's General Staff, [Heinz] Guderian, that Auschwitz has been overrun. The wording is there, taken down in short-hand by the stenographers. "Mein Fuhrer, gestern wurde Auschwitz von der Sowjets eingenommen." Or words to that effect -- one line. And Hitler answers, Jawohl. "Oh." And then he goes immediately on to another matter -- something to do with industrial production. If Hitler knew what was going on in Auschwitz, whatever it was, he would surely have said something like hoffentlich war es uns gelungen, inzwischen... I hope that the Reich Fuhrer managed to make sure that the Russians didn't find anything there. You would imagine that he would have had something like that, he would have said something... he would have blurted it out. But no, not a word. So in my Hitler biography, I adopted the position that whatever it was that was going on, Hitler didn't know about it. So it's not a crime committed by Hitler, as Head of the German state, for which the German people can be made to pay. But now I'm beginning to suspect that the crime didn't exist in the first place, at all, which is by far the most extraordinary discovery for me. Because, of course, the German people has been made to pay in Wiedergutmachung. Have been made to pay, not just the thousand million dollars that [Konrad] Adenauer so willingly promised to Nahum Goldman back in the 1940s. You've had to pay, and pay, and pay. Just the West Germans, of course. Not the East Germans, not the Austrians, but the West Germans have had to pay through the nose. What if it turns out that the crime was never committed? It is unthinkable. And this is why it is going to be a very ugly fight indeed. But I thought it important to impart the knowledge that I've so far amassed just from the few archives I've visited in the last few weeks, to a large and representative body like this, because the more Geheimnisträger there are, the more people who know the secret, the less the secret itself is in danger.
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David Irving 1988-2013