[David Irving testified as the twenty-third and final witness in the
Zündel trial on Friday, April 22, Monday, April 25 and Tuesday, April
26, 1988.]
David Irving, the British historian and author, was permitted to testify
as an expert in the area of the history of the Second World War. (33-9346)
Irving had worked as a professional historian since 1963 and was the author
of between twenty and thirty books. These included Hess: The Missing Years,
1941 - 1945, The Service: The Memoirs of General Gehlen, Accident: The
Death of General Sikorski, The Destruction of Dresden, The Secret Diaries
of Hitler's Doctor, The Trail of the Fox, The War Between the Generals:
Inside the Allied High Command, The German Atomic Bomb, Convoy: The Destruction
of Convoy PQ 17, The Mare's Nest, The War Path, Hitler's War, The Morgenthau
Plan, Breach of Security, Uprising, and Churchill's War.
As a historian, he was interested in contemporary history; that of the
twentieth century. Irving himself came from an English service family.
His father was a Royal Navy service officer. For twenty-five years, Irving
had researched in archives around the world, including Canada, the United
States, France, East and West Germany and other countries. He had also
had the co- operation of the archives in Israel and the Soviet Union. (33-9312
to 9325)
He was "very familiar with the records of the German High Command
and the other German wartime government agencies." He had acquired
this knowledge and expertise initially at Alexandria in Virginia, where
the archives were originally stored after they were seized by the American
army. The documents had been subsequently sent back to West Germany. They
were still available in Washington partly in original form and partly on
microfilm. A number of records were also held by the British government.
(33-9325)
Irving had also done in-depth research into the life of Adolf Hitler: "For
ten years I researched Hitler's life based entirely on primary records.
I don't believe in buying other people's books or reading them on Adolf
Hitler. We can readily surmise there must be many tens or hundreds of tons
of books. I think it's easier to go to the archives and look at the documents.
That way you avoid soaking up other people's prejudices...Dealing with
Adolf Hitler, I would look for the private papers of his personal staff,
people who were directly associated with him from secretarial or adjutant
level, up to Field-Marshal. I would try and amass a great body of documentary
evidence which passes certain criteria. And these were the criteria which
the great English historian, Hugh Trevor-Roper, laid down in particular;
three criteria for a document to be acceptable to a historian. The first
criterion is quite obviously, is the document you are looking at genuine?
The second criterion is, was the person who wrote the document in a position
to know what he is writing about? A street sweeper in Berlin may have been
in Berlin in the last days of the war, but he doesn't know what's going
on in Hitler's mind. The third criterion you ask yourself, why does this
document exist? Why has it come into existence? You may look at a document
that is apparently honest but you find out later on from other sources
that the general wrote the document to protect himself. So you ask yourself,
how did this document meet these three criteria and in the ten years that
I worked on the Hitler project, I built up a shelf of about seventy feet
of original documents that probably no other historian had ever seen. I
persuaded Hitler's staff to trust me with their private papers that they
had not shown to anyone else. I also built up a card index of ten or fifteen
thousand filing cards on a day-by-day basis so you knew exactly what Hitler
was doing, rather like a diary. You could say exactly what he was doing
which meant that you had a useful tool to check any document. Any document
that was shown to you had to fit with that card index. If it didn't, then
there was something phony about the document." (33-9326, 9327)
Irving was very familiar with German documents, "...with the way they
look, the way they smell - they have a certain physical smell - with the
way they are phrased and with the archives they come from and the language
they use, of course. I'm very fluent in the German language." (33-9328)
He had also conducted scientific tests as part of his research: "In
the twenty-five years I have done research, on occasion documents have
been offered to me that I had reason to suspect. On one occasion I was
offered the private diaries of the German Vice Admiral Wilhelm Canaris...who
is the chief of the German Secret Service. We knew that these diaries existed.
We have been looking for them. They haven't been found to this day. In
the end I persuaded the man who had offered these diaries to me and the
English publishers, Collins, to come to London bringing one page of those
diaries. In return, we paid 50,000 pounds into his bank but we didn't release
it into his account until we carried out laboratory tests on the paper.
This was in about 1970. And the laboratory tests carried out on the paper
and the ink and the typewriter showed that the paper was wartime paper.
It didn't have the whiteness that modern paper has; it didn't have melamine
formaldehyde added that modern paper has. The paper had been cut to the
German size with scissors, as microscopic examination showed. Also the
signature had been written in a ball point pen. The chemical tests showed
that quite clearly. Tests were carried out on the ink of the signature
normally to show how old the signature is. This laboratory in London which
I use, Hehner & Cox, carried out a test normally on the iron content
[of the] ink. Normally, if you write a signature with ink, the iron oxidizes,
so I am told, and you can tell the degree of oxidization, and tell how
long a signature has been there. This document was signed in a ball- point
pen and was clearly a forgery. I had the man prosecuted for criminal fraud
and he avoided the consequences by dying, or by purporting to have died.
At any rate, he submitted a death certificate which I was prepared to accept
as genuine. And of course, I was involved in the very famous discovery
of the Hitler diaries forgery. I had had the Hitler diaries submitted to
me six months, I recall, earlier along with ancillary documents. I had
had the Hitler's diaries submitted to me in 1982, November, along with
other ancillary documents. And I detected that the letterhead on a Hermann
Goering notepaper was actually misspelled. They misspelled the rank of
the Field-Marshal, of the Reichsmarschall as he was, which was completely
improbable, and when the Hitler diaries were presented to the world in
April, 1983, I attended the press conference and exploded that press conference
as you may have seen on "Good Morning America" and the other
television programmes. The diaries were a fake and I had the forensic evidence
they were fake...there had been occasions, sir, when I have used laboratories
to determine forgeries. "(33-9328 to 9330)
Irving's Hitler research failed to uncover any evidence that Hitler was
aware of the alleged "final solution" of the Jews: "At the
end of writing the Adolf Hitler biography in draft, I was aware of the
fact that having written it from primary, original Hitler sources, I, as
the author, didn't know about the Holocaust. I had found no documents showing
any involvement between Adolf Hitler and the Holocaust which was very disturbing
for me. So I re-investigated. I sent a researcher back into the archives
where, with a specific job, the researcher, who was a trained historical
scientist at the Institute of Contemporary History in Munich, I said to
her, 'Go back to the archives in Freiburg, Munich and Berlin, and see if
I have missed anything'. I couldn't believe what I was seeing, the fact
there were no documents whatsoever showing that a Holocaust had ever happened.
I'm using the word 'Holocaust' in the modern sense that the newspapers
tell us to use it. And certainly there was no evidence that Hitler had
ever known such a thing was going on, whatever it was. This was very disturbing
for me and it was even more disturbing for my literary agent who warned
me of the consequences of producing the Hitler book in this fashion."
(33-9330, 9331)
This completed defence attorney Doug Christie's examination of Irving for
the purpose of qualifying him as an expert witness. Crown Attorney John
Pearson then rose to cross-examine Irving on his qualifications as an expert
in history. (33-9332)
In response to Pearson's questions, Irving testified that his book Churchill's
War, was published in West Australia by Veritas Publishing Company. David
Thompson, the firm's East Australian sales manager, introduced Irving at
a speech Irving gave at the University of Sydney. (33-9332, 9333)
And do you remember, asked Pearson, saying that you had no qualifications
whatsoever and you were proud of the fact that you had no qualifications
whatsoever?
"I think my precise words would be to say that the only examination
I...failed at school is O-level history which is the most elementary level
of history you can fail," said Irving. (33-9333)
You were proud to say you flunked history?, asked Pearson.
"I have started off from such humble beginnings...I have no academic
qualifications whatsoever." (33-9333)
Right, said Pearson, you make your living writing and publishing controversial
books about history.
"I make my living publishing books about history, yes...Many of them
are controversial. I don't create the controversy, the media do...I'm a
controversial historian." Irving agreed that his books had been the
object of contempt and scorn and that he had been hounded and attacked.
He disagreed, however, that controversy was good for book sales: "Quite
the contrary, sir. I rather hinted when I mentioned my literary agent,
in the matter of Hitler's War, my literary agent warned me of the severe
consequences of the controversy that would develop from omitting Hitler's
role in the Holocaust. He told me we would lose the Sunday Times deal,
the Reader's Digest deal, the Book of the Month Club deal, and we would
not sell the book as a paperback in the United States. We lost about one
million dollars. Controversy is not necessarily good." (33-9334, 9335)
Well, are you familiar with the book called Spy Catcher?, asked Pearson.
Irving replied that he knew of the book and that it had been banned when
he left Britain five weeks before. And wouldn't you agree with me it was
good for sales?, asked Pearson. Irving agreed this had been true for sales
of Spy Catcher in Australia, but said: "Being banned ipso facto is
not good for sales. You have to be banned in a certain way...There are
useful controversies and there are controversies which don't promote your
purposes as a historian." (33-9335, 9336)
Well, said Pearson, if there's controversies that create media attention,
that's good for sales because thereby people learn about a book that they'd
otherwise not even know about. Isn't that right? Said Irving: "This
is true. And I emphasize as a professional historian I have to sell my
books. I can't afford to lose my credibility." (33-9336)
When you say you're a professional historian, asked Pearson, what you mean
by that is you write books on history and sell them?
"I write books on history as a profession. That's what professional
historian means." Irving agreed that he was in a fight for media attention:
"I think that is correct. In England 58,000 new books are published
every year and only 1,000 will ever get reviewed...So, it's a bit of a
struggle of life." (33-9336)
Would you agree with me that you hold academic historians in contempt?,
asked Pearson.
"I hold them in contempt for specific reasons," said Irving.
"Not all academic historians but the broad majority of them."
(33-9337)
Would you agree with me, asked Pearson, that the academic historians, for
instance, Martin Broszat, consider your thesis in your Hitler book as embarrassing?
Irving disagreed: "On the contrary. Martin Broszat went to great lengths
in a 54-page review of my Hitler book to say on one central issue he considered
that I was correct, that there was no general order for the extermination
of the Jews...I don't think he ever used the word embarrassing. I'm not
familiar with all his writings." (33-9337)
Pearson produced a copy of an article by Broszat published in Yad Vashem
Studies. Irving indicated he was familiar only with the German edition:
"...I haven't read this particular one. I don't subscribe to Yad Vashem
Studies. If he said it was embarrassing, I will accept your word for it,
but it would be embarrassing for the body of academic historians because
I have shown them up for not doing the research which did I." Irving
examined the article and confirmed that it was an English translation of
the original German paper which appeared in Vierteljahrshefte für
Zeitgeschichte with which he was familiar. (33-9338, 9339)
And it doesn't matter that it's published in Yad Vashem, does it?, asked
Pearson.
"I...think I did emphasize I have co-operation from the Israeli archives
so that does mean it's a two-way co-operation." (33-9339)
Pearson repeated the question.
"I can't see what point you're driving at," said Irving, "I
just said...I'm not familiar with the Yad Vashem version of it." (33-9339,
9340)
The title of the article by Broszat was "Hitler and the Genesis of
the 'Final Solution': An Assessment of David Irving's Theses."1 At
Pearson's request, Irving read the first paragraph:
THE ENGLISH EDITION of David Irving's Hitler book, published in the spring
of 1977, two years after the expurgated German edition, has created a furore
both in England and elsewhere. The British author, who gained a reputation
as an enfant terrible with earlier publications on contemporary history,
has propounded a thesis which is embarrassing even to some of his friends
and admirers.
Pearson indicated that Broszat went on to say that Irving was a very good
writer. Pearson then continued reading from page 76 of the article:
The discovery and utilization of contemporary primary sources has long
been a sort of adventuresome passion of Irving the historian. However,
the unprejudiced historian and researcher is obstructed by the passionately
partisan author whose insistence on primary sources lacks the control and
discipline essential in the selective interpretation and evaluation of
material.
He is too eager to accept authenticity for objectivity, is overly hasty
in interpreting superficial diagnoses and often seems insufficiently interested
in complex historical interconnections and in structural problems that
transcend the mere recording of historical facts but are essential for
their evaluation. Spurred by the ambition of matching himself against professional
historians in his precise knowledge of documents, he adopts the role of
the terrible simplificateur as he intends to wrest fresh interpretations
from historical facts and events and spring these on the public in sensational
new books.
Said Irving: "I think every historian is entitled to his opinion...What
he is saying is I haven't learned to read between the lines the way that
the academic historians have." (33-9341, 9342)
Pearson asked whether Irving's thesis in Hitler's War was that Hitler was
a bad administrator who liked ideas and not details, and that it was Heydrich,
Himmler, Frank and others who were engaged in perpetrating the Holocaust.
Said Irving: "In the introduction I make plain that I regard Germany,
by the end of the Second World War, as a Führer state without a Führer.
He had lost control of whatever was going on and I'm not going to be so
simple as to say it was quite simply what is now called the 'Holocaust.'
Whatever it was that was going on, there is no evidence that Hitler knew
it. There's not enough evidence to satisfy an English magistrate's court
and it certainly shouldn't satisfy an academic historian or a professional
one." (33 9342, 9343)
Are you repudiating what you wrote in Hitler's War about the activities
of Himmler, Heydrich and Frank?, asked Pearson.
"I didn't use the word 'Holocaust' to the best of my knowledge. This
is a relatively modern invention. I think we have to be much less simple
than using a word like that. We have to try to examine what was going on,
see if there was a pattern or was it just a haphazard series of ad hoc
tragedies generated by all sorts of different criminals who were running
amok." Irving indicated that he did not think he repudiated anything
he wrote in Hitler's War, but indicated that he "would need to know
exactly which passage I am being asked to...repudiate." (33-9343,
9344)
Pearson asked if Irving's thesis in his book Churchill's War was that Churchill
wanted a war because he knew he wouldn't get elected in peacetime and he
conducted a lot of his activities during the war in a drunken haze?
"This is not a thesis," said Irving. "That is, in fact,
a statement of fact." (33-9344)
David Irving was accepted as an expert witness qualified to give testimony
in the area of the history of the Second World War. Defence attorney Douglas
Christie commenced his examination-in-chief of Irving. (33-9346)
In your opinion as a historian of the Second World War, asked Christie,
what is the 'Holocaust' as it is currently presented?
"The Holocaust as it is currently presented," said Irving, "I
can do no better than quote the words used by the chief rabbi of England,
Lord...[Immanuel] Jakobovits, who has recently said that in his view, it
has become big business...Which he deplores." (33-9347)
Irving had read Did Six Million Really Die?: "...I have seen this
book before over several years. I have never read it until two days ago
when a copy was sent to me by courier in Florida with a request that I
should read it for the purposes of this trial. And I read it with great
interest and I must say that I was surprised by the quality of the arguments
that it represented. It has obvious flaws. It uses sources that I would
not personally use. In fact, the entire body of sources is different. This
is based entirely on secondary literature, books by other people, including
some experts, whereas I use no books. I use just the archives. But independently,
the author of this came to conclusions and asked questions of a logical
nature which I had arrived at by an entirely different route, so-to-speak.
I give one example. On one page, which I can't remember, he asks the obvious
logical question, if you are going to exterminate millions of people, why
did you go to all the trouble of shipping them thousands of miles across
Europe first? This is the kind of logical question which the academic historian[s]
have ducked until now. And if I was to ask what is the value of a brochure
like this, I think it is that it provokes people to ask questions, rather
as my book on Hitler's War provoked the historians. I think I am told that
this court has heard about the historians' dispute that has opened up in
Germany. That was entirely as a result of my controversial book on Hitler.
Until 1977, the German historians had never asked the obvious questions.
This is the kind of value which I found this brochure to have. It was asking
proper questions on the basis of an entirely different set of sources.
But I do emphasize that it contains flaws and it contains also some opinions
with which I personally wouldn't agree." (33-9347, 9348)
If the 'Holocaust' is represented as the allegation of the extermination
of 6 million Jews during the Second World War as a direct result of official
German policy of extermination, what would you say to that thesis?, asked
Christie.
"There are several elements of that sentence I would dispute,"
said Irving. "Firstly, the allegation that it was official German
policy. We are not familiar, neither the academic nor the professional
historians are familiar with the slightest documentary evidence that there
was any such German policy. And I should be familiar with it having spent
ten years wading around in the archives of the German High Command and
speaking with Hitler's private staff. It isn't there. I am not familiar
with any documentary evidence of any such figure as 6 million and I think
I know how the figure originated because I am familiar with the private
papers of the American Chief Justice at Nuremberg, the Justice Robert H.
Jackson and I saw the actual interview on which that figure was...arrived
at...Many years ago, I wrote a very detailed analysis of the Nuremberg
trial and the procedures and the sequence of events at the Nuremberg trial.
In the course of which I obtained privileged access to all the private
and official records of the American chief prosecutor, Justice Robert H.
Jackson, in the course of which I changed my opinion about him. I set off
with a bad opinion of him and in the light of what I read in his diaries,
I came to realize he was a profound and honest American lawyer." (33-9349,
9350)
Do you have any opinion as a result of your research as to the number of
Jews who died in concentration camps during the Second World War?, asked
Christie. Said Irving: "I am not sure that an opinion here would be
of use. I have opinions. I have opinions, however, in the kind of statistical
orders of magnitude, where you can see there's a minimum number and a maximum
number, and I can only set these two limits and say that to my mind, it
must have been of the order of 100,000 or more, but to my mind it was certainly
less than the figure which is quoted nowadays of 6 million. Because on
the evidence of comparison with other similar tragedies which happened
in the Second World War, it is unlikely that the Jewish community would
have suffered any worse than these communities. You can weigh the figures
in certain ways and look at air raid damage and look at other communities
like the gypsies and so on and say, this is the balance of probabilities.
But it shouldn't be necessary to talk about probabilities. All Hitler's
other crimes are documented in statistical details in the archives. This
is supposed to have been the biggest crime of all and yet the documents
just aren't there so why do we have to speculate? Why do we have to have
opinions about figures?" Irving pointed out that there was documentary
evidence to support the German policy of deporting the Jews: "Oh,
yes. Quite definitely. In the course of my Hitler research I came across
acceptable German archival evidence which met the criteria which Hugh Trevor-Roper
had taught me, being authentic documents written by people in a position
to know. I came across documents showing that Hitler had given the orders
for the deportation of the Jews to the east. This deportation was in full
swing by the middle of 1942 and you find, for example, Heinrich Himmler
writing to Gauleiters that the Führer, Adolf Hitler, has given me
the order to make Europe free of the Jews, clean of the Jews from west
to east, stage-by- stage, and it's quite clearly referred to as Hitler's
order, the deportation." (33-9351, 9352)
There were, however, no orders for the extermination of Jews: "None
whatsoever. I have not found in any archives of the world, including I
mentioned the Israeli archives which have been co-operating with me; I
also underline the fact even in the British archives, where we were reading
the signals, the code signals of the SS units operating on the eastern
front, with our code- breaking machinery, not even in the British archives
are there any deciphered Hitler orders for the killing of Jews...There
are no explicit orders and this is where the academic historians start
asking us to read between the lines and find fancy translations for certain
words and I wouldn't go along with those methods. I want in a crime as
big as this to find explicit evidence." (33-9352, 9353)
Was there a Madagascar plan?, asked Christie.
"The original 'final solution' of the Jewish problem as envisaged
by the German High Command," said Irving, "was to deport the
Jews to different territories. Various different territories were called
into account for this. On one occasion, the Jews were going to be shipped
to western Australia. On another occasion they were going to be shipped
to Palestine and Adolf Eichmann was actually sent to...Palestine in 1939
to negotiate with the Zionists in Palestine. The principal plan was the
so-called Madagascar plan. Madagascar is an island off the coast of Africa
about the size of Germany. A temperate island, the kind you have in Canada
or in Britain, and the idea was to ship all the world's Jews to Madagascar.
In 1940 after the German defeat of France, the intention was to incorporate
the Madagascar plan in the final peace treaty obliging France to make Madagascar,
which was a French colony, available for the purpose of Jewish resettlement.
And there are traces, by which I mean there are extensive files, on the
Madagascar plan in the archives of the German admiralty, because they would
be involved in the transportation, and the archives [of] the German Foreign
Ministry and in various other German government bodies. This plan was abandoned
when the war continued because it was impossible to have an overseas shipment
of Jews at a time of war. And finally, in 1942, there is a document in
the records of the German Foreign Ministry which says the Madagascar plan
is being abandoned because we now have new territories available in the
east, the occupied Russian territories, to which all the Jews will be transported
instead." (33-9353, 9354)
Is there any one document in the archives, asked Christie, of the various
ministries which say, as late as March 1942, that there was a plan to exterminate
the Jews?
"This is typical of the documents which I have found and which the
academic historians, until I had published it, would not publish it,"
replied Irving. "In the archives of the German Ministry of Justice,
I found a document which was concealed at Nuremberg...which resurfaced
in the archives in Koblenz, dated in the spring of 1942. It is a note of
a telephone conversation of the Secretary of State of the German Ministry
of Justice with the Reich Chancellor...That would be rather like a Prime
Minister, a Prime Minister in a dictatorship, second man down from Hitler...[who
was] Hans Lammers. Lammers had telephoned the ministry in the spring of
1942 and the minister writes a note on the conversation, and I can quote
the memorandum from memory. It says: 'Lammers has said that the Führer,
Adolf Hitler, has repeatedly ordained that he wants the 'final solution'
- that he wants the solution of the Jewish problem postponed until after
the war is over.' And this document, of course, takes some explaining and
this is the kind of document which embarrasses the historians, if I can
use the word that Mr. Pearson has reminded me of. They are embarrassed
because they haven't found that document themselves." (33-9354, 9355)
Irving testified that he was familiar with the Einsatzgruppen reports:
"Here we have to look at the third of the Trevor-Roper criteria. If
you remember, the question a historian should ask is, 'Why does this document
exist?'. A man is out in the field behind the Russian front doing his job
for the SS and he is being asked how well he is doing and he's going to
submit a report containing figures and he's going to show he's doing a
jolly good job and that's the kind of category I... put these Einsatzgruppen
reports into. I don't trust the statistics they contain. Soldiers who are
out in the field doing a job or murderers who are out in the field doing
a job, they don't have time to count. I don't think Lieutenant Calley stopped
to find out how many people [he] killed. Statistics like this are meaningless.
Documents like this I am very, very worried about as a historical source."
(33-9355, 9356)
Christie produced Exhibit 118, a document referring to Galicia, which he
showed to Irving. Said Irving: "May I say that I am very wary about
any Nuremberg document that has the document number L...This is L-18...Historians
are familiar with quite a number of L documents from the Nuremberg series
and a lot of them turn out to be forgeries. A lot of them turn out to be
produced or manufactured for the Nuremberg trials to the best of my knowledge.
So, this is the first thing that would worry me about that." (33-9357)
Crown Attorney Pearson objected to this testimony, alleging that this was
a serious accusation to make. Irving replied: "If I may answer that
point, sir, I investigated the Nuremberg trials in some detail and I was
familiar with the fact that at Nuremberg, they did have a collection of
the necessary rubber stamps, the security classification stamps in order
to manufacture documents and they did do it. There are several instances
where this subsequently turned out...I have published a book on that sir.
It's Nuremberg - The Last Battle...The prefixes on the Nuremberg documents
give some index of the providence of the document. There's a PS series
which was found by Colonel Storey [in] Paris, the Paris/Storey collection.
Many PS series are thoroughly authentic. The L series were a small collection
of documents used at Nuremberg and contain documents produced by journalists
and handed over by a very eclectic series of sources. The NOK documents,
the German for the [High] Command trial, the private files give us a first
sniff, if I might put it like that." (33 9358, 9359)
Irving testified that he was not familiar with this particular document:
"...I am not familiar with the document. I am not, I emphasize, a
Holocaust historian." (33-9360) With respect to the authenticity of
the document, Irving testified that he would "accept these documents
as attached are probably genuine on the basis of the photocopies but that's
just the first impression you get in looking at an archives - I recognize
the numbers at the bottom. I can tell you which microfilms they come from.
They are authentic reproductions from Nuremberg microfilm. . . Prima facie
it appears to be genuine." (33-9362, 9363)
Have you yourself ever seen any evidence in any of the archives to establish
the existence of homicidal gas chambers?, asked Christie.
"No, sir. None whatsoever. And certainly one would have expected to
have found it in the number of archives that I've been in." (33-9363)
Yesterday, said Christie, the Crown produced a letter from someone in Auschwitz
pertaining to the building of the crematories and the word used there was
Vergasungskellers. Are you familiar with that document?, he asked.
"I am very familiar with the German language and I am quite familiar
with that document also," said Irving. "No German would have
referred to a gas chamber, which of course is quite a common concept because
the Americans use[d] gas chambers at that time for legal executions. No
German would have translated the word 'gas chamber' as vergasungskeller.
They have a perfectly good German word for that... a gaskammer." (33-9363,
9364)
Christie noted that the Crown had quoted a man named Martin Broszat during
his cross- examination of Irving. What was Broszat's job?
"He is now the director of the Institute of Contemporary History in
Munich, which is a very good historical institute partly funded by German
federal funds and partly by provincial funds...My dealing with the Institute
of History began in late 1963 before he became director of the institute.
The institute has acquired my entire research collections of documents
which are now housed in that building as the David Irving Collection and
I have suspended further deliveries of documents until Broszat resigns
or retires." Irving testified that there were personal animosities
between himself and Broszat which "began in the 1970s over a certain
young lady who is now living with him...further animosity was caused by
the fact that I revealed that documents that the Broszat institute published
were forgeries. The diary of...Engel turned out to have been written on
post-war paper and yet the Institute went ahead and published this diary
knowing that it would pollute the writing of history for many decades afterwards...It
is now recognized as a forgery and yet the institute of Dr. Broszat still
publishes it." (33-9366, 9367)
Christie turned to the subject of the Posen speech of Heinrich Himmler.
Said Irving: "In October, 1943, Heinrich Himmler, the chief of the
SS, delivered two speeches, one to the SS generals and one to the Gauleiters
- the Nazi party district chiefs, the governors of the districts."
Irving had examined the transcripts of the speech and other archival materials:
"I looked at Heinrich Himmler's handwritten notes on the basis of
which he delivered those speeches, I looked at the typescript of the transcript
made from the recording of the speeches, I looked at the final copy made
that have typescript in the special large typewriter face that was used
for Adolf Hitler to read, so the speeches exist in several copies and I
understand that in the National Archives, there is also a sound recording
of the two speeches." (33-9368)
Did he have any reason to question the accuracies of the Posen speech?,
asked Christie.
"[In] both speeches which I referred to," said Irving, "Heinrich
Himmler made startling admissions to his very select audience which amounted
to the fact that he was - he had given orders personally not only for the
killing of certain Jewish men, but also for the killing of certain Jewish
women and children and he tried to justify what he was doing, using, if
I may say so, rather the same kind of language as [Israeli Prime Minister]
Mr. Shamir now uses in the West Bank, saying that we have to carry out
this task in order to be able to live in security in future. This was the
language that Himmler used and I arrived at the very strange discovery
when I looked at the transcript of both those speeches that those two pages
had been retyped at some other date. I can't say whether it was retyped
before or after the bulk of the speech, but they had been typed by a different
secretary on a different typewriter using different carbon paper. Obviously
you only discover this if you look at the original documents which the
average historian is not patient enough to do. They had been retyped and
they had been repaginated in pencil at that point and I have to say to
preempt your question, I have no explanation why. It just raises the fact
that a document - if a document has been retyped at a key point, then I
hold that document to be suspect." (33-9368, 9369)
Do historians generally have any criterion for accepting documents as being
both authentic, genuine and true or do they simply take them at their face
value?, asked Christie.
"It depends very much on the historian," replied Irving. "The
green historian who is fresh out of university and not inquisitive, will
be happy to accept the printed volumes of documents particularly if they
have pictures in them and an index at the end. Later on, you learn not
to trust printed volumes of documents. If I can give one example from my
Churchill research, there is a report by the American Assistant Secretary
of State, Sumner Welles, on a visit to Churchill in March 1940, describing
how he found Churchill in a state of complete intoxication in the admiralty.
The printed version of this document and the American government volumes
omits those sentences describing Churchill's drunkenness, but the original
report by the Secretary of State in the Roosevelt library contains those
sentences. So, I can only say that a historian must be very careful about
using printed or even photocopied documents."(33-9369, 9370)
Irving had also studied the Goebbels diaries: "I am very familiar
with the Goebbels diaries insofar as they have been publicly available
and in the course of the next twelve months I shall begin reading the entire
microfiche of the Goebbels diaries that have now become available to western
historians," said Irving. "They appeared in a very mysterious
way from the custody of the East German government, where they have been
held since the end of the Second World War unknown to us; we didn't know
those diaries were there and then they suddenly turned up. I have to say
from what I have seen so far, I consider the diaries to be genuine, but
we have to apply once again the third criteria of Trevor-Roper which is,
'Why did they come into existence'? Why did Goebbels write them?"
The diaries were partly written and partly transcribed: "Many early
years are written in his very difficult, indecipherable handwriting. The
later years when he was Minister of Propaganda in Nazi Germany, he dictated
them onto a recording machine and his secretary transcribed them each day,
sometimes at very great length. Sometimes 139 pages on one day in 1943."
(33-9370, 9371)
He was also familiar with the Wannsee Conference documents: "In January
1942, there was a conference at a house in Berlin, Wannsee, an inter-agency
or inter ministerial conference between state secretaries. The state secretaries
were like the deputy minister in a ministry and they were discussing the
technicalities of the final solution of the Jewish problem, and to understand
the Wannsee protocol, it is not enough just to look at that document. You
have to look at the entire file containing that document. And you then
realize what the document is about. Even then it is written in very obscure
civil service language and several of the participants in the Wannsee Conference
subsequently testified in later criminal proceedings that they emerged
from that conversation no wiser than when they went in. Certainly none
of them had - certainly none of them had any idea that at that conference
there had been a discussion of liquidation of Jews." (33-9371, 9372)
Had he investigated the trials of these individuals?, asked Christie.
"I read the records of the Wilhelmstrasse trial," said Irving,
"which is the second trial to be held in the post-Nuremberg proceedings
series after the plain Nuremberg trial. There were twelve subsequent proceedings.
The Wilhelmstrasse trial was the second one. None of them testified that
there had been any discussion of liquidation of the Jews at the Wannsee
Conference." (33-9372, 9373)
Christie referred to the letter from Goering to Heydrich of July 1941 which
had figured prominently in both Hilberg's and Browning's testimony and
asked if Irving was familiar with it. Irving replied that he was: "On
July the 31st, 1941, as is said from Hermann Goering's private diary, which
I suppose I'm one of the very few people to have used it in the original,
on the afternoon of that day, Reinhard Heydrich, the chief of the Gestapo,
visited Goering who was passing very rapidly through Berlin and put a pile
of documents on the desk for Goering to sign, one of which was a piece
of what I would describe as legal bumph, where Heydrich is just saying
to Goering, 'In 1939, you gave me orders to carry out certain measures
connected with the Jewish solution, will you now extend the authority given
by those orders to the new territories in Russia which we've captured'.
That is what the document says. I wouldn't attempt to repeat the document
from memory. I'm sure it's in the court files. July the 31st, 1941, Goering
signs the document for Heydrich without ever even bothering to read it.
It's a piece of legal bumph which again says nothing about killing Jews.
It is talking about the overall solution of the Jewish problem which, as
I testified earlier today, was at that time regarded to be the geographical
resettlement of Jews, relocating them from where they were at that time."
(33-9373, 9374)
Did those sources - the Posen speech, the Goebbels diary, the Wannsee Conference
and the letter of July 31, 1941 - indicate any plan to exterminate European
Jews?, asked Christie.
"No," said Irving. "There is no explicit reference either
implicit in these documents or legible in these documents to liquidation
of Jews. They are all equally applicable to any other solution. Of course,
relocation of the Jews in the middle of a war was a radical solution but
it is not what is described as the 'Holocaust.'" (33-9374)
Does the existence of these documents indicate to you that there is any
other material that would corroborate an extermination programme?, asked
Christie.
"I think it highly unlikely. It is very difficult to prove a negative
to say that documents don't exist. But I will say is, if the documents
did exist, I would have found them by now and if I hadn't found them, then
certainly the Holocaust historians would have found them by now, explicit
documents, and as you may know I have offered repeatedly around the world
a thousand pounds for any wartime contemporary document showing that Adolf
Hitler even knew what was going on, whatever it was, whatever is now described
as the 'Holocaust' and they haven't been able to find that let alone explicit
orders or documentary evidence about gas chambers or the similar kind of
documentary material." (33-9374, 9375)
In your research as a historian, asked Christie, do you consider it likely
that an enterprise of the magnitude of the extermination of the Jews of
Europe could be accomplished by the people [Germans] knowing the way they
conducted their business from their documents without the existence of
explicit orders and plans?
"Not only without existence of orders," said Irving, "but
also without the existence of any written reference to it. I have to say
that the German wartime civil servant was basically a - a cowardly animal
and he would not do something that he considered to be criminal without
getting a document clearing himself. He would get his superior to write
a letter saying, 'On the Führer's orders, we are doing the following',
which is why there are letters showing Himmler saying, 'On the Führer's
orders, we are deporting the Jews.' Which was the extent of the Führer's
orders and which was the extent, to my mind, of the final solution. So
the documents don't exist where you would expect to find them. Hitler's
other crimes, the documents are there: the euthanasia order, the order
to kill British commandos, the orders to lynch American airmen, the orders
for the killing of the male population of Stalingrad if ever they occupied
it. Hitler's other crimes, simple crimes, the documents are there where
you expect to find them. And yet this biggest crime of all, there is no
document...I think there would definitely have had to be orders and these
orders would have been referred to in countless files of different ministerial
bodies. So, it would have been impossible for these documents to have been
destroyed at the end of the war. There would always be carbon copies somewhere."
(33-9375, 9376)
The term ausrotten, said Christie, has been represented to mean 'extermination'
in the literal sense. Have you examined that word in its context in the
various speeches of Adolf Hitler?
"I am very fluent in the German language, having lived in that country
for a long time and having read, of course, millions of words in the German
language in context," said Irving. "There is no doubt that in
modern Germany the word ausrotten now means murder. But we have to look
at the meaning of the word ausrotten in the 1930s and the 1940s, as used
by those who wrote or spoke these documents. In the mouth of Adolf Hitler,
the word ausrotten is never once used to mean murder, and I've made a study
of that particular semantic problem. You can find document after document
which Hitler himself spoke or wrote where the word ausrotten cannot possibly
mean murder. I can give one or two examples briefly. In August 1936, Hitler
dictated the famous memorandum on the four year plan which contains the
phrase 'if the Bolsheviks succeed in entering Germany, it will lead to
the ausrotten of the German people'. Now, clearly, he doesn't mean that
if the Bolsheviks invade Germany it will lead to the murder of 50 million
Germans. He is saying it will lead to the end of Germany as a national
state, as a power, as a factor, an end of the German people. He says the
same to the Czechoslovakian President Emil Hácha, on March the 15th,
1939. Hácha has just signed away Czechoslovakia's independence in
a midnight session with Hitler and Hitler says to him afterwards, 'It is
a good thing that you signed because otherwise it would have meant the
ausrotten of the Czechoslovakian people'. Hitler didn't mean, 'If you hadn't
signed, I would have had to kill 8 million Czechs.' What he is saying [is],
'If you hadn't signed, I would have ended Czechoslovakia's existence as
a separate country.' There are various other examples of that and I defy
anybody to find the meaning of the word differently used by Adolf Hitler
to mean the word 'murder'. This is the kind of analysis which unfortunately
the academic historians have not bothered to conduct." (33-9377, 9378)
Could you give us your opinion of the value of Did Six Million Really Die?,
asked Christie.
"It has a - a value I would suggest in technical terms of a catalyst.
It has existed rather like the grain of sand inside an oyster. It has provoked
and irritated people [in] rather the same way but on a different level
that my book Hitler's War did. It has forced people to prove what they
have been maintaining - to put their money where their mouth is in common
terms - and they haven't been able to do it and because they haven't been
able to prove what they've been maintaining for thirty or forty years,
they resort to extramural methods. In Germany, it is declared a criminal
offence now to question certain historical facts. In other countries, I
think judicial notice is taken of them." (33-9378, 9379) Irving estimated
"over 90 percent of the brochure Did Six Million Really Die? to be
factually accurate on the basis of the facts which I arrived at by an entirely
different approach, namely, the documentary basis." (33-9388)
Irving testified that he was familiar with the subject of Kurt Gerstein:
"I have examined the Kurt Gerstein report and its various adaptations
and having read the very interesting doctoral dissertation by the Frenchman
Henri Roques, which was produced a year-and-a-half ago, I came to the conclusion
on the basis of the documents that Roques found in the French police files,
on the basis of my own family experience with a handicapped member of my
family, that Gerstein himself was probably unstable when he wrote his various
reports." Irving did not examine the documents in their original form:
"I examined facsimiles. Had I been a Holocaust historian, of course,
I would have gone into much greater detail and demanded to see the originals."
Irving had also examined facsimiles of Gerstein's writings of a personal
nature, which were found among his effects after his suicide. (33-9379,
9381)
In the course of his research, Irving was required to make assessments
of the credibility of the people who had produced the documents: "Indeed
I do, and one can do so on the internal evidence of the document itself
or of associated events and documents. In this case, the suicide or apparent
suicide of the person who wrote the document is a clear sign of mental
instability...The documents themselves are unstable. The most graphic description
of that are the words, that the facts and dates contained by the documents
vary dramatically," said Irving. As a historian, he had made these
types of assessments in regard to other documents as well: "Yes, over
the years I have repeatedly had to do so. One has to weigh documents."
(33-9380)
Irving testified that Professor Hans Mommsen of the University of Bochum
now shared his thesis pertaining to the absence of a plan or order. That
had not been the case in 1970. Said Irving: "...At the end of the
Second World War, the - the professorial bodies at the institutes of higher
learning in Germany were extensively re-staffed. New textbooks were introduced;
the professors were retaught. The university system produced, in its turn,
new professors. There was a broadly held body of opinion as to what had
happened and it has not been without - not to be wondered at, as fresh
documents became available, then this opinion is changed. Fresh hypotheses
are raised by authorized or unauthorized writers and even the academics
then have to change their minds." Irving himself had changed his mind
over the years. In a book he published many years before on the Vietnam
War, he had referred "to the 6 million who were killed at Auschwitz
and if I was to be asked now why did I write that, then I would have to
quote the words of William Casey and I - 'I believe[d]', but since then,
since having spent ten years writing the Hitler biography and since having
worked in the world's archives, I've come to question that belief which
was an oversimple belief." (33-9381, 9382)
In your opinion as a historian, asked Christie, from what you have seen
of the information about the subject, has the Holocaust been sufficiently
investigated to determine accurately its extent and meaning?
"I think there has been virtually no investigation of the Holocaust,"
replied Irving. "When we realize that Mr. Zündel, the defendant
in this case, is the first person who has gone to the trouble to get the
aerial photographs of the German concentration camps, the kind of concrete
evidence that anybody is entitled to demand when you're carrying out an
investigation, this shows us how we can - all the other historians on that
field, including myself - have been. And the same kind of forensic examination
which has now been made of the site, an idea which hadn't occurred to me
one could conduct - really getting down to the basics of what happened.
This has not been done by historians of the Holocaust." (33-9382,
9383)
Are there factual errors in major history books?, asked Christie.
"Oh, yes. I think it would be a foolish historian who denies he makes
errors on Adolf Hitler. The standard works like Alan Bullock, his book
Hitler: A Study in Tyranny, is riddled with errors and yet that book goes
into reprint after reprint. William Shirer's book The Rise and Fall of
the Third Reich, is a very good book in its way, written at a very early
stage. It is based entirely on the prosecution documents at Nuremberg and,
as such, is out of balance and also contains misstatements of fact. These
are gradually reshaped and corrected as the years pass. One never really
establishes total truth. One only approximates to it." (33-9383)
Christie turned to Did Six Million Really Die? and some of the specific
allegations made in it. Did Irving know of any indication that Ohlendorf,
for example, was tortured?
"Oh, yes," said Irving. "The SS General Ohlendorf and the
SS General Pohl were both very severely maltreated at Nuremberg and in
the internment camps where they were held by the Allies after the Second
World War and prior to their testimony. They subsequently testified to
that to their fellow prisoners like Field Marshal Milch, who kept a diary
which I have and also in the subsequent trials...Field-Marshal Milch was
the second person in the German air force. He was threatened with severe
punishment unless he testified against Goering. On November the 5th, 1945,
an American, who is a Major Ernst Engländer, who is a Wall Street
financier, who presented himself to Milch as Major Evans, instructed him
that he would be subjected to a war crimes trial unless he agreed to perjure
himself against Goering. Milch refused to perjure himself and although
there was an animosity between himself and Goering, he went into the witness
stand and spoke in defence of Goering and on the next day, Milch was thrown
into the punishment bunker at Dachau concentration camp, a bunker which
had been designed by the SS to hold one recalcitrant prisoner, but which
the Americans were using rather more economically in as much as they put
six prisoners in this one-man bunker, all of them Field-Marshals as a punishment.
Milch was then subjected to a war crimes trial and sentenced to life imprisonment.
Admiral Eberhard Godt, the Chief of Staff, was threatened with hanging
unless he...testified that Dönitz had given illegal orders and so
on. There's a whole string of examples of the coercion of prisoners at
Nuremberg." (33-9384, 9385)
Irving testified that "[t]he principal trial was the trial of the
major war criminals at Nuremberg from October 1945 to October 1946. There
was then a series of twelve subsequent proceedings against Milch, who was
the first trial, and then the Wilhelmstrasse trial defendants...The legal
records, the whole of the legal system at Nuremberg was unlike any other
legal system. No appeal was permitted. The procedure for hearing witnesses
was remarkable. The affidavits were submitted [e]ven [if] their witnesses
were present in person and could have testified personally...many, many
hundreds of thousands of affidavits were submitted with no chance for the
defence to cross-examine the person who had submitted the affidavit as
to the conditions under which he had given the affidavit, sworn the affidavit."
(33-9385, 9386)
Irving was familiar with the book on the Manstein war crimes trial written
by Paget. Said Irving: "R.T. Paget was a labour member of Parliament
who was a King's Counsel, defence counsel of Field-Marshal Manstein, one
of the most illustrious German soldiers. He was put on...trial by the British
in Hamburg. I read that book when I was twenty-two with great fascination
and increasing indignation to read of the methods that had been used to
obtain testimony from prisoners, including the very severe maltreatment,
brutalization of a number of witnesses." As a result, Irving made
inquiries of certain documents from the National Archives in Washington:
"In the very early 1960s, I obtained from them a complete photocopy
of the Simpson Commission of Inquiries which the American Justice Department,
to its credit, sent to Europe to investigate the allegations that American
officers were torturing German defence witnesses." After reading the
document, said Irving, "I formed the opinion that in future, one would
have to be very, very cautious before accepting without verification the
evidence sworn by defence or prosecution witnesses in the Nuremberg trials."
(33-9387)
In the course of your research, asked Christie, have you discovered new
documents as you went along or documents now being made available that
were not available in the past?
"It's a continuous process. For example, I have contacts with the
Russians who provided me copies of the German documents that the Russians
captured at the end of the war. I am constantly generating new sources
of documents which I make available to international historians all over
the world." (33-9388)
Irving testified that he was familiar with Sefton Delmer: "Sefton
Delmer was a former German citizen who emigrated to Britain fairly early
on and worked for the British propaganda agency, the psychological warfare
executive, as a clandestine broadcaster, broadcasting what is called black
propaganda; in other words, disinformation and lies to the enemy over clandestine
radio transmitters. A very good journalist but not a man that one would
turn to establish the truth." Irving did not know whether Delmer had
been involved in activities in Germany after the war or not: "He may
have been but I'm not familiar with that." (33-9388, 9389)
Christie turned to the subject of the Hans Frank diaries and whether Irving
was familiar with them. Said Irving: "Very familiar with the Hans
Frank diaries which is - the original Hans Frank diaries are in very many
volumes, seventeen or twenty volumes of typescript and handwriting containing
not just what we describe as diaries but also the verbatim transcripts
of very many records of conferences which he attended...I read them from
the angle of somebody...writing a biography of Adolf Hitler, so I was specifically
interested in any reference to Adolf Hitler's doings and wrongdoings and
the doings and wrongdoings of the Third Reich under Hitler's rule."
In Irving's opinion the diaries did not verify the existence of any plan
for or any extermination of the Jews of Europe: "There is no reference
in the Hans Frank diaries," said Irving, "and one would expect
them, because Hans Frank was the Governor General of Poland, or the Governor
General of the area of...Poland where the extermination camps are now supposed
to have existed. There is no explicit reference in the Hans Frank diaries
from start to finish to gas chambers or to a mass extermination of the
Jews as government policy whatsoever. And this is a unique source because
it is so homogenous the whole way through. The most remarkable passage
I found was in February or March, 1944, and I have quoted it in Hitler's
War, where he has a long conference with Hitler as the Russians are invading
Poland, his own territory, and Frank wants to know what to do and there's
a passage there where Hans Frank writes in his diary saying, 'the Führer
said to me how glad we are...solving the problem by deporting the Jews
to all the different territories.' Words to that effect. When you see something
like that, you have to say [to] yourself, are we all writing the same language?
Did either of them know what is supposed to have been going on?" (33-9389,
9390)
Irving referred to Adolf Hitler's reaction when Auschwitz was captured
by the Soviets in 1945: "On January the 26th or January the 27th,
1945, the Russian troops overran Auschwitz and on this day, the stenographers,
who took down in Hitler's headquarters every word he spoke, recorded a
passage which has survived. We have the fragment of what he said. General
Guderian reported to the Führer, 'Yesterday the Russians overran Auschwitz',
and Hitler just replied, 'Oh, yes.' Now, if Hitler had known what was going
on, if Hitler had known what was supposed to have been going on, he would
surely have said something like, 'Well, let's hope they manage to get rid
of it' or 'They're not going to find anything.' All he said was 'Oh, yes'
and move on to the next business. This is the kind of clue that one has.
Straws in the wind. Altogether it makes a very different picture."
(33-9390, 9391)
Are you familiar with someone by the name of Robert Kempner?, asked Christie.
"Robert M. W. Kempner, an attorney now in Frankfurt, was [with] Goering's
Ministry of the Interior in Prussia in 1933. He emigrated to America because
of the Nazi anti-semitism. There he became a successful attorney. He returned
to Nuremberg after the war and he became a leading member of the American
prosecution staff in the rebuttal division...Robert Kempner used methods
of coercion to prevent witnesses from testifying in certain ways. Friedrich
Gaus...a legal member of the German Foreign Ministry, testified to this
in a subsequent trial and affidavit that he had been threatened by Kempner
with being handed over to the Russians unless he withdrew certain incriminating
testimony. By incriminating, I mean testimony that was going to incriminate
the Russians." (33-9391, 9392)
Irving testified that at Nuremberg, the "prosecution witnesses, the
witnesses who appeared on behalf of the prosecution were cosseted. They
were flown in by special plane; they were housed in the few remaining luxury
hotels in Nuremberg. They were lavishly fed. They were well paid and they
were promised jobs in the American zone of Germany." On the other
hand, he testified: "The defence witnesses were universally badly
treated. They were housed in the criminal wings in the Nuremberg Palace
of Justice. They were housed in cells with no windows; in winter in unheated
cells. They were very poorly fed. They were subjected to coercion and physical
maltreatment." Said Irving: "I think that not only I but I think
reputable lawyers around the world are rather ashamed about the Nuremberg
proceedings. Certainly Justice Robert H. Jackson, the American chief prosecutor,
was ashamed about them as is quite evident from his private diary...I've
examined it. I've had privileged access to that diary in the Library of
Congress...I have made a copy of it which I could make available if necessary...Shortly
after Robert H. Jackson was given the job by President Truman of conducting
the American prosecution at Nuremberg, he learned of the American plans
to drop the atomic bombs and from that moment on, he became very uneasy
with what he, himself, was doing. Prosecuting for one nation, crimes it
had committed, being fully aware that the United States was about to commit
and indeed committing a crime of an even greater magnitude." (33-9392
to 9394)
The unfairness of the Nuremberg proceedings extended to the manner in which
documentary evidence was handled. "The procedure with documents [at]
Nuremberg was rather rare," said Irving. "The prosecution obtained
all the documents for its own purposes and the defence was then allowed
to build up its case entirely on the basis of the prosecution collection
of documents. No collection of documents by the defence was made possible
by the authorities in Nuremberg. They were allowed very limited access
to the documents collected exclusively for the purposes of the prosecution."
(33-9394)
In Irving's opinion, many of the witnesses at Nuremberg and other war crimes
trials were unreliable. An example was Karl Wolff: "Major General
Karl Wolff was the liaison officer between Hitler and Himmler, an SS general,
a character I would describe as being a rather suave character who ended
up, by reason of his personal favouritism with Himmler, in charge of the
police units in northern Italy at the end of the war and as the military
commander in that region, and largely in order to create an alibi, he then
began negotiating with the American secret service in order to speed the
surrender of the German troops in northern Italy...Wolff testified on many
occasions over the years up to his death, frequently varying his testimony
according to...which way he was being required to testify. He was always
acutely aware of the fact that he had done a deal with the Americans whereby
the Americans...promised him immunity and the subsequent West German government
also promised him immunity from prosecution if he behaved in a certain
way." (33 9394, 9395)
Another example was Dieter Wisliceny: "Dieter Wisliceny was a high
SS official who was held by the Communist authorities at the end of the
war, and among the private papers which Hugh Trevor-Roper, the British
historian, made available to me, was a long, handwritten account by Wisliceny
which greatly amplifies the version which is more familiar and known to
historians...I read the Wisliceny report with great interest and entertainment,
but one has to say that the internal evidence suggested that it was not
a document that could be taken seriously in the absence of collateral evidence."
Irving continued: "He explained things for which there was not a trace
in the archives. He described episodes and matters - well, for example,
he describes a conversation with Adolf Eichmann and Adolf Eichmann showing
to him a Führer document, a Führer order. Well, there is no such
order. It has not been seen and we then have to understand in human terms
why Wisliceny is writing this down...It was written in Bratislava (or Pressburg)
in Czechoslovakia... He was being held in rather inhumane conditions in
captivity at the end of the war...by the Communist authorities." (33-9396,
9397)
The Allied authorities also ensured that certain witnesses were "not
available" for the defence, such as Karl Koller: "General Karl
Koller...[w]as the Chief of Staff of the German air force at the end of
the war. I have his private diaries and papers...his presence was required
by the defence at Nuremberg but the Americans pretended that they didn't
know where to find him. They had, in fact, locked him away in a prison
camp and were interrogating him at that time. This was one typical example
of the Americans obstructing the defence at Nuremberg. Karl Wolff was locked
up in a lunatic asylum and the Americans pretended they didn't know where
he was either and he didn't surface again until 1947." (33-9395, 9396)
Christie turned to the subject of the Eichmann trial and asked Irving if
he considered the information there to be of value to historians.
"I think the Eichmann trial is already getting very late in the day
as far as recollected testimony is concerned. I personally hesitate to
question a witness thirty or forty years after an event as to what happened.
You can no longer separate in his mind, no matter how willing the witness
is, what really happened and what he has in the meantime read has happened...I
recollect from the parts of his testimony that I have read - and I can't
purport to have read all the Eichmann testimony for the reason I just said
- I recollect at one stage where Eichmann interrupts himself to say 'one
moment, I want to point out what I just said I can no longer recollect
whether I actually saw this or whether I'm recollecting what you told me
I saw.' And this, I think, is a very honest statement by Eichmann where
he is questioning his own powers of recollection. In human terms you have
to say it's not unlikely in 1963 or 1964, when that trial was held, much
had happened." (33-9397, 9398)
Irving had been involved in the publication of the book Ich, Adolf Eichmann:
"Adolf Eichmann's son, who is an engineer in Germany, approached me
and revealed he had all the tape recordings that his father had made several
years before his kidnapping. And the son wanted to know what to do with
these tape recorded memoirs of his father. I suggested he should transcribe
them and have them published by the world's publishers as a historical
source. Again of questionable value, depending on when the [tape] recordings
were made, but certainly of great historical interest to historians to
see how versions of events had changed over the years. And subsequently,
those were published, I think, in the English language, the German language
and Spanish." (33-9398, 9399)
Had Irving himself undertaken any investigation of the Anne Frank diaries?,
asked Christie.
"The Anne Frank diaries have had a long and checkered history,"
said Irving, "which is best described by the present state of play,
as a result of a court decision in a libel action. The father of Anne Frank,
with whom I corresponded over many years, finally relented and allowed
the diaries to be submitted to the kind of laboratory examination that
I always insist [upon] where a document is in question. As a result of
this laboratory examination carried out by the West German criminal police
laboratory, in Wiesbaden, it was determined that the Anne Frank diaries
were partly written in ball-point pen. It's a long story. I'm not going
to bore you with the details. My own conclusion on the Anne Frank diaries
is for the greater part they are authentic writings of a pubescent teenage
Jewish girl who was locked up and hidden, that they were then taken by
her father, Otto Frank, after the girl's tragic death of typhus in a concentration
camp, and her father or other persons unknown amended the diaries into
a saleable form as a result of which he and the Anne Frank Foundation became
rich, but as a historical document they are completely worthless by virtue
of having been tampered with." (33-9399, 9400)
Irving continued: "Anne Frank's father, Otto Frank, fought a number
of legal actions to defend the authenticity of the diaries and the first
legal action which I believe was fought in Lübeck, he introduced handwriting
evidence of a graphologist and an affidavit swearing that the diaries were
written throughout in the same handwriting. Subsequently, I stated in the
introduction of the German edition of my Hitler biography, that a number
of forged documents existed which were unquestionably accepted and I've
mentioned them in court today, the Canaris diary, the Engel diaries, and
I mentioned the Anne Frank diary, which was one of dubious authenticity.
Anne Frank's father threatened my German publishers with libel proceedings.
The German publishers paid him a cash settlement to shut up without consulting
me. I would have told them they were on very safe ground. Subsequently,
he has litigated against other people, but in the meantime this litigation
has now been - is being spun out, because the only remaining trial I believe
is in northern Germany and they are playing it for time. They're waiting
for the defendant to die." (33-9400, 9401)
Christie noted that one of the publications tendered as an exhibit in the
court was the book The Hitler We Loved and Why. Was Hitler loved in Germany?
"I think I'm right in saying in April 1938, 48 million Germans loved
Adolf Hitler and about 200,000 didn't. That was as a result of a perfectly
genuine plebiscite that was held shortly after the annexation of Austria
by the Germans. I think there's not the slightest evidence that this plebiscite
was faked in any way. I don't see how you can fake a referendum on that
scale, and yet 48 million adult Germans voted for Adolf Hitler. I would
like to add I personally found the title rather tasteless," said Irving.
(33-9401, 9402)
Did Churchill have anything good to say about Adolf Hitler?, asked Christie.
"In the 1930[s], when Churchill was not in Parliament and he lived
from journalism and writing in the Evening Standard in September 1937,
he had words of high praise for Adolf Hitler...Words to the effect that,
'If Britain...should ever come into the position that Germany was in, I
would hope that one day we would find a national leader of the stature
of Adolf Hitler'." (33- 9402)
Christie asked Irving if there was a document called Table-Talk by Heinrich
Heim and whether there was a reference in that to the position of Jews
after the war.
"Indeed," said Irving. "Heinrich Heim was the adjutant of
Martin Bormann who wrote down on a day by day basis a detailed semi-verbatim
record of Adolf Hitler's lunch-time and dinner-time conversation...Hitler
repeatedly referred to his post war plans with the Jews. He refers in the
Table-Talk in July 1942, I believe I'm right in saying, to his plans for
the deportation or relocation of the Jews elsewhere and Heinrich Heim was
a very reputable German civil servant who is alive, in fact. I have no
doubt that is an accurate rendering of Hitler's words." Irving testified
that he had met Heinrich Heim: "I have also made use of the original
paper of the Table- Talk. I'm one of the few privileged historians to have
used that material. It's in private hands in Switzerland." (33-9402,
9403)
Christie referred back to Did Six Million Really Die? and asked Irving
for his opinion on its conclusions regarding the number of Jews who survived.
Said Irving: "Let me say at this point I think this conclusion...they
are aiming at here is justified. I am delighted that so many Jews survived
what they now describe as the 'Holocaust' and I am puzzled at the apparent
lack of logic: that the Nazis are supposed to have had a government policy
for the deliberate, ruthless, systematic extermination of the Jews in Auschwitz
and other places of murder and yet tens if not hundreds of thousands of
Jews passed through these camps and are, I am glad to say, alive and well
amongst us now to testify to their survival. So either the Nazis had no
such programme or they were an exceedingly sloppy race, which isn't the
image that we have of them today. It's another of the logical questions
which is being asked in this history which the historians hitherto have
not asked." (33-9403, 9404)
Do you consider it possible to be accurate in terms of statistical analysis?,
asked Christie. Irving did not: "No, I shy away from statistics. I
am very, very nervous. I had a one year's training in statistics at university.
I know how risky it is to operate with statistics, different tables or
different fields or different sources. It's like subtracting apples from
potatoes - you can't say there were so many Jews here at the beginning
of the war and so many Jews there at the end of the war and subtract one
total from the other and say this is the difference. I say this whether
it helps or hinders the defence or prosecution. I am very nervous about
mass statistics." (33 9404)
Was the conclusion of Did Six Million Really Die?, that the number of Jews
who died in concentration camps could only be measured in thousands, legitimate
and arguable?, asked Christie.
"Well, I refer to my previous answer," said Irving, "and
say that I'm very nervous giving opinions about statistics. Do we mean
died or killed?" (33-9405)
Christie indicated roughly 6 million were allegedly killed by either gassing
or by the Einsatzgruppen. In your research, asked Christie, has there been
any indication of hard evidence for numbers at all?
"Certain numbers for certain specific tragedies. One episode outside
Dvinsk, being on the road to Dvinsk being in November 1941, certainly there
was an episode there ...a mass grave had been dug and a mass execution...of
unidentified civilians was being carried out by unidentified people. It
was witnessed by one German Major General Walter Bruns. There is another
episode which was witnessed by Hitler's photographer, Walter Frentz, who
described it to me...from his own memory what he had seen when he accompanied
Heinrich Himmler. Again one isolated episode behind the front, nothing
to do with Auschwitz or Treblinka or the so-called extermination camps.
So, we're looking there at several hundred if not several thousand people
being killed in specific, isolated episodes which are repeatedly served
up again and again as being examples of what was going on. I can only look
at them as isolated episodes of what was going on." (33-9405, 9406)
Is there any hard evidence to support the estimates of millions of Jews
gassed, for example, 4 million in Auschwitz-Birkenau?, asked Christie.
"No documentary, contemporaneous evidence of the kind that would satisfy
me," said Irving, "but I think that other historians may perhaps
be less pernickety...I think Winston Churchill once defined the job of
a historian [is] to find out what happened and why and those are the major
areas of historical fact that a historian should try to investigate. What
happened and why and the Holocaust historians haven't really established
either fact, in the case of the Holocaust, what really happened and why
it happened." (33-9406)
In Irving's opinion it was the reader who decided what constituted a historical
fact: "The reader. The reader on the balance of probabilities having
weighed up not just one source but several sources. He can buy my book
on Winston Churchill, he can buy Martin Gilbert's book on Winston Churchill
and he can decide where on the two scales...the truth about Winston Churchill
lies, but he has to have the alternate sources to look at. He can't have
one book presented to him and be told this is the truth, take it or lump
it. Take it or go to prison. That would be a very unacceptable form of
society." (33-9406, 9407)
Irving pointed out that history was "constantly being revised. I mentioned
the episode of the British code-breaking operations. Until 1974, the British
official historians, the government historians, were not allowed to be
told and not allowed to reveal that we British had been reading the German,
the Japanese, the Spanish, the American, the Italian codes by computer.
This is a so- called Ultra secret. Knowledge of that is, of course, crucial
to the knowledge of how we won the war and yet our entire multi-volume
official history of the Second World War until 1974 makes no mention of
this. They are going to have to be rewritten. All history books are going
to have to be rewritten since 1974 since that one fact became known and
so it is in many other fields. It would be a sad day if there was no work
for the historian to do. I say that with profound conviction as a professional
historian." (33-9407, 9408)
And does a historian, asked Christie, when he's confronted with a document,
have to take time to test and evaluate that source to determine its accuracies?
"Certainly with some documents," replied Irving. "Usually
a historian will very rapidly get the feeling for where he can be easy
with a document and comfortable, and where suddenly his ears prick up and
say to himself, wait a minute, I didn't know this. This is so egregious,
this fact, so unusual, can I trust it? There's one or two documents in
the Holocaust mythology which make me very suspicious for no other reason
than that they stand out too much. They are statistic oddities. It looks
nice, it looks neat, it looks as though suddenly there's proof, there's
100,000 Jews been killed as partisans and Hitler's told this. And yet we
have to say to ourselves, why suddenly this one document which looks like
none of the other documents in that series? This is where you have to act
a bit like a magistrate and say well, it's nice, I will take notice of
that but I want to see more, please. The historian should be constantly
weighing and evaluating and not necessarily accepting without question."
(33-9408)
Does the fact that documents are located in archives satisfy those tests?,
asked Christie.
"I shall disappoint you, I think, by saying on balance, usually yes,"
replied Irving. "I have rarely if ever come across an archive document
which is fake. It is very difficult to get a fake document into an archive.
Having said that, I would add it's not impossible and one would then want
to look at the file of documents and say does this document, which is controversial,
look different in any way? Is the paper newer? Is the ink of the signature
fresher? Are the holes in a different position? Questions like that. I
mean, the way the document looks; it's not impossible to put fake documents
into archives. Certainly they get stolen out of them. But all the fakes
that have been put to me - I emphasize all the fakes that have been put
to me - come from private hands and not archival sources." (33-9409)
Did you investigate the effects of the breaking of the German codes upon
the whole question of the Holocaust in relation to transportation of millions
of people without orders?, asked Christie.
"Well, it is unlikely that the Germans could have been issuing criminal
orders for the liquidation of millions of people or even hundreds of thousands
of people to their SS or police units on the eastern front without us British
knowing of it at the time from our code-breaking operations. And of course
the Germans, at the end of the war, could not have required us to destroy
those records." (33-9409, 9410)
There were, however, references during the war to allegations of mass gassings
of Jews in some Allied documents: "I am familiar with the...British
archives, the public records office, of attempts to start a black propaganda
campaign alleging that the Germans were employing gas chambers and at one
stage the head of the British secret service is being cautioned not to
go too far with this propaganda because it will make the whole - it will
undermine the credibility of the propaganda effort if we go too far with
these allegations...This would have been in 1944," said Irving. The
fact that these allegations were now made so freely was due, said Irving,
to what the chief rabbi of Britain, Lord Jakobovits, said had "unfortunately
...become big business with whose teams of script writers and screen writers
and journalists and newspaper writers, making great money out of it. I
think it's a great tragedy." (33 9410, 9411)
As a writer yourself, you've been involved in publishing, said Christie.
Do you have any knowledge of what would happen if you were writing about
the subject of the Holocaust in your own books in a more favourable way
than you have?
"After I wrote Hitler's War, my front door was smashed down by a gentleman
with a sledgehammer," replied Irving. "I was raided by people
disguised [as] telephone engineers who turned out to be from a Jewish organization
in Britain. The people who printed this in Britain...had their printing
works burned to the ground by one of these fake engineers. They all went
to prison. I am an ordinary writer with a family who is frightened for
- I don't like to be subjected to this kind of terror. If I was to write
the other kind of book, if I was to follow the general line of the present
Holocaust mythology, the easy acceptance of it all, 'Adolf Hitler ordered
the killing of 6 million Jews in Auschwitz', I would do a very good job
of it because I'm a good writer and I would be rich beyond the dreams of
avarice, but I couldn't live with my own conscience." (33-9411)
[The testimony which follows was given by Irving in the absence of the
jury in support of an application by defence attorney Douglas Christie
for leave to introduce the Leuchter Report into evidence and to allow Irving
to give his expert opinion on its value as a historical document.]
Irving testified that the previous day he had read the Leuchter Report
in its entirety. Said Irving: "If a future historian was to be writing
the history of the Holocaust controversy, then undoubtedly they can no
longer ignore a document of this validity." (33-9413) He continued:
"It is clearly an authentic document. It's clearly a document written
by somebody in the position to know what he is writing about and it's a
document written for a valid purpose. It's not a spurious document written
in order to camouflage something, in my view...It is very much the kind
of document that I, as a historian, would hope to find if I was investigating
the Holocaust controversy. I'm very impressed, in fact, by the presentation,
by the scientific manner of presentation, by the expertise that's been
shown by it and by the very novel conclusion that he's arrived at and I
must say that as a historian I'm rather ashamed it never occurred to me
to make this kind of investigation on this particular controversy."
(33-9414)
To your knowledge, asked Christie, has any physical examination of Auschwitz,
Birkenau or Majdanek previously been published to determine if these places
could have been used in the manner alleged in the Holocaust literature
as homicidal gas chambers?
"There has been...to the best of my knowledge, no forensic examination
of the sites conducted whatsoever. Either in situ by an expert in execution
technology, or in absentia by taking samples for laboratory analysis elsewhere,"
Irving testified. (33 9414, 9415)
Crown Attorney Pearson rose to cross-examine Irving and began by asking
him if the Leuchter Report was a document he would look to as a historian
researching the Holocaust controversy.
Irving replied: "If I was a future historian researching the Holocaust
controversy, this is certainly the kind of evidence that I should want
to make use of." (33-9415)
Are you saying, asked Pearson, that if you were a historian in the year
2015 and you were doing research with respect to what happened in Birkenau
on August 25, 1944, you would use this document as a foundation for a conclusion?
"This would give me a foundation for a conclusion about what did not
happen in the concentration camps which were investigated by the expert
in [the report]," replied Irving. (33- 9415)
What do you mean by saying the report is 'authentic', asked Pearson.
"By that I mean this clearly isn't a fake report. It isn't a report
which purports to be what it is but in fact isn't, in the sense of what
a fake document is. In other words, this isn't something that has not been
written by the purported author. It is quite clearly an authentic investigation
by the man who purports to be the author." (33 9416)
Irving agreed that the document was described as an "engineering report"
and testified that he "would expect to find it written by a man who
has some engineering qualifications." He defined 'engineering qualifications'
to mean "[s]aid qualifications for the job that he was purporting
to report on...In other words, if he is reporting on execution technology,
then I would expect him to be an expert on the subject of the engineering
of execution chambers." (33-9416)
If he was reporting on the residue of hydrogen cyanide, would you want
him to have a background in chemistry?, asked Pearson.
"No," said Irving, "but I would want him to produce...evidence
that - that would satisfy me that he had obtained the samples in a scientific
manner and...had sub contracted the quantitative analysis of those samples
to a qualified person to make those determinations. It would be too much
to expect an engineer to be qualified in the quantitative or qualitative
analysis."
An engineer, someone with a degree in engineering?, asked Pearson.
"Yes."
All right, said Pearson, issued by a recognized university?
"Is that a question?"
Yes, said Pearson. What I want to get at is you said authentic and you
just said an engineer, someone with a degree in engineering?
"What I actually said was I expect to find him qualified in the engineering
field on which he is purporting to report, in this case, execution technology,"
replied Irving. (33-9417)
So, would you mean somebody who's been recognized by a professional engineering
body as being a competent person?, asked Pearson.
"This undoubtedly would be ideal, but obviously we're looking here
at the - at what is practicable rather than what is ideal. In this case
this is the best engineering report available to this date on the execution
technology alleged to have been present at Auschwitz and the other camps."
Irving testified that he did not know Leuchter's qualifications personally:
"I don't know the author of this report personally at all. All I know
from having read the report with the eye of a historian is that he purports
to be an expert, a qualified expert in execution technology and...is recognized
as such by those states of the United States of America which carry out
executions by gas chamber."
If you found out that he only had a Bachelor of Arts and he didn't have
an engineering degree, wouldn't that cause you some concern about his engineering
report?, asked Pearson.
"It would cause me some concern but it obviously hasn't concerned
the states of the United States of America which carry out the very grizzly
business of forwarding people from life to death inside gas chambers. They
have accepted his expertise." (33-9418, 9419)
Did the states of the Unites States have this man go over to Poland to
produce an engineering report about what happened in Poland in 1944?, asked
Pearson.
"No, this was, as I understand it, entirely an undertaking organized
and financed at the expense of the defendant in the current proceedings,"
said Irving.
And what was the third criteria that Hugh Trevor-Roper mentioned?, asked
Pearson.
"That is...the reason why the document has come into existence. I
mentioned earlier this morning that sometimes German generals would write
a document for a specific reason, namely to cover themselves for an operation.
They would fake something to clear themselves in future. Now, the reason
why this document has come into existence is quite clearly as a defence
document in this case, and if I would elaborate on that, I would say that
therefore the author of that report would be aware of the fact that the
document would be subjected to the most expert scrutiny by the likes of
yourself and therefore he would employ an enhanced accuracy in presenting
his findings." (33-9419)
Irving testified that he would take into account the fact that the report
was commissioned by the defence. Asked Pearson, And don't you think that
might have some bearing on how much value a historian attaches to it? Irving
replied: "Um, this is true, but one wouldn't expect the author of
the report to perjure himself and one certainly wouldn't expect the highly
qualified analytical laboratories which carried out the chemical analysis
on the compounds which were procured from the gas chambers so-called and
the delousing chambers so-called in the concentration camps, to have falsified
their findings in any way. And certainly, my eye could detect no sign of
any kind of falsification in these analytical reports."
Do you purport to have any expertise to draw conclusions from those analytical
reports, sir?, asked Pearson.
"Not on the basis of any more than the quantitative chemistry analysis
one has learned in the course of a university career," said Irving.
"Certainly on the basis of a historian, I can detect fudging. I can
detect where something is being omitted. When I exposed the Hitler diaries
as being a fake, it was on the basis of the fact that the magazine purported
to carry out tests on the ink but didn't, in fact, submit those tests to
us at the press conference. They fudged around their findings." (33-9420,
9421)
Pearson indicated that the tests themselves did not say anything; it was
the conclusions drawn from them that were important.
"I think that if historians are inclined to accept the eyewitness
or hearsay testimony of people who were present on a site, forty years
later, the testimony of the bricks and stones which can be collected from
the site and subjected to objective chemical analysis should very certainly
be relevant to a historian." (33-9421)
You're a historian, said Pearson. You agree with me that you do not have
the expertise to draw a conclusion from the absence of a chemical compound
on the wall of an installation? Irving disagreed: "Well, I'm afraid
there's only one conclusion possible. If, forty years later, this chemical
compound is absent from that wall and we are instructed by the scientific
expertise it should have been present if it ever was present, then it never
was present." (33-9422)
And whose scientific expertise are you talking about?, asked Pearson.
"Going by the expertise of the analytical chemists who were commissioned
to make this report...It was either stated in the analysis reports or in
the findings of the specialist who has prepared this report on the basis
of the evidence presented by DEGESCH, the manufacturers of the cyanide,
or on the basis of Dupont, who are the American manufacturers of an equivalent
chemical compound. But this chemical compound should still have been present
after that length of time." (33 9422, 9423)
Pearson suggested that the only person who had drawn that conclusion was
Leuchter, in his report.
"Very well, sir," said Irving. "This is if you were to ask
me, and I am sure you eventually will, if I find any flaws in this report,
this is the kind of flaw which I would have found in this report and which
I think could have been obviated if more money and time had been spent
on it...I'm not saying that the report is perfect. What I am saying is,
it is important. In fact, I think it is shattering in the significance
of its discovery." (33-9423)
If someone is going to draw a conclusion about the absence of a compound
on a wall, wouldn't you agree, asked Pearson, they should really know what
they're talking about?
"Or consult people who knew what they were talking about," said
Irving. "Yes, I would agree with you. But if I were to amplify my
opinion as to the - the expertise of this particular witness, I can think
of a no more suitable expert to go and examine the sites of purported gas
chambers in Poland than one of the few American experts on the construction
of gas chambers. And I think it's a stroke of genius on the part of the
defence that they should have thought of this and gone to the expense of
sending this particular expert with his team out to Poland to collect the
samples and bring them back and I think it portrays a certain weakness
of the supporters of the Holocaust historiography that they have not undertaken
this kind of analysis in the past." (33- 9424)
Irving testified that from his understanding from reading the report, Leuchter
was under contract and constructed gas chambers and been consulted by the
various American states on their construction. He continued that he could
be open to correction on this, and that Leuchter might merely have been
consulted as an expert by the various American states concerned. Said Irving:
"My conclusion as a historian is that on the basis of what is in front
of me, Mr. Leuchter was in a position to know what he was talking about
when he was investigating Auschwitz with the eye of a man familiar with
the design of gas chambers." (33-9424 to 9427)
Judge Ron Thomas interjected: "Well, I think I can shorten this. You
needn't ask any further questions. Do you have any submissions?,"
he asked Christie. (33-9427)
Christie said: "Yes, I would submit that it would be a remarkable
double standard if the Crown can introduce documents without authors for
them, without any proof of who wrote them in this case because they happen
to be filed in the National Archives...I would submit to you that this
witness has said that this evidence is important for historians, it's a
valuable piece of historical evidence. It meets the test of historical
evidence. The author of the report has been called and cross-examined in
front of the jury, unlike any of the other pieces of evidence that have
been tendered by the Crown through Mr. Browning, who didn't have any first-hand
knowledge of any of them, and for that reason it's my submission that the
witness should be allowed to tender that evidence and give his opinion
of the value of it in a historical context. I would also like to ask the
witness whether, to his knowledge, any physical examination of Auschwitz-
Birkenau or Majdanek have previously been published to determine if these
places have been used in the manner alleged [as] homicidal gas chambers."
(33-9427, 9428)
Judge Ron Thomas ruled: "You will be permitted to ask that question.
There will be no comment on the Leuchter Report. Send for the jury, please.
You can refer to the fact, and advise this witness, that Mr. Leuchter testified
here and that he had conducted this analysation (sic) and then find out
from this historian if anything like this had been done to his knowledge
before in the history of researching the Second World War." (33-9428)
Christie asked: "Can I ask him whether he considers such evidence
valuable?" (33 9429)
Thomas replied: "No." (33-9429)
[This ended the voir dire to determine the admissibility of the Leuchter
Report through the expert historian, David Irving. Thomas gave no reasons
for disallowing the admission of the Leuchter Report, which had met all
tests of valid historical evidence. The evidence which follows was given
in the presence of the jury.]
Mr. Irving, said Christie, we have had in this trial the testimony of a
Mr. Leuchter, indicating investigations of the physical sites and he was
a person who has certain expertise in execution technology using hydrogen
cyanide gas and certain chemical analysis was done pertaining to that report
in regard to the content of hydrogen cyanide in the walls of the alleged
gas chamber. To your knowledge, asked Christie, has any physical examination
of Auschwitz, Birkenau, Majdanek, Treblinka, Belzec, Sobibor or any of
the alleged extermination camps been previously published to determine
if these places could have been used in the manner alleged in the Holocaust
literature as homicidal gas chambers?
Irving replied: "No, sir. To the best of my knowledge, there has been
no kind of examination prior to this trial and to the evidence introduced
or the evidence mentioned in this trial of the so-called murder camps,
the extermination camps. No kind of teams of analytical chemists were sent
there to investigate the soil or the bricks of the chambers, no kind of
a determination was made as to the suitability of the doors or the levers
or the flanges or whether the walls had any kind of special sealing compound
applied to them to protect the passersby on the street outside. There had
been no kind of special determination made as to whether these buildings
could ever have effectively been used as homicidal gas chambers and it
wasn't until this trial that an attempt was made to carry out such an investigation."
This ended the examination-in-chief of Irving by defence attorney Douglas
Christie. Crown Attorney John Pearson rose to commence his cross-examination.
(33-9430, 9431)
Pearson referred first to the July 31, 1941 document from Goering to Heydrich
and Irving's testimony that Goering could never have read the document.
Said Irving: "He couldn't have had time to read it. It's quite evident
that Heydrich was only with him for a matter of minutes. Heydrich, in fact,
had the document prepared on a letterhead which Heydrich himself had typed.
It wasn't even typed on Hermann Goering's notepaper. It was typed on Heydrich's
notepaper. It was slipped in for Goering to sign and slipped out again."
Irving knew this "From the evidence contained in Goering's diary showing
how briefly Heydrich was with Goering." Heydrich was with Goering
"ten minutes." Irving pointed out that it was not the only document
signed that day. (33-9431, 9432)
How do you know it's not the only one he didn't read?, asked Pearson.
"Because Hermann Goering himself so testified under oath," replied
Irving. "Goering testified that he was unfamiliar with this document.
I have the entire series of Hermann Goering interrogations, when he was
interrogated before the trial began, the pretrial interrogations."
Are you telling us, asked Pearson, that Goering testified that he never
read that document?
"It was a surprise to him...To the best of my memory, he was shown
the document under pretrial interrogation and this was the first time he
recalled seeing it. The document itself is very harmless. It just talks
about giving - giving Heydrich, extending his powers for the overall solution
of the Jewish problem to the newly occupied-territories." Irving testified
that Goering did not deny signing it: "No, in fact, I have the copy
as signed by Hermann Goering with his signature." He agreed with Pearson
that Goering must have seen it when he signed it but he continued: "Do
you have any idea how many documents Hermann Goering would have signed
every day normally?...It made no impression on him at all...let me say
once again the document was shown to him in the course of a ten minute
interview between the chief of the Gestapo, Heydrich, and himself on a
rainy afternoon when Hermann Goering was hurrying to the station to pick
up his wife whom he hadn't seen for three months." Irving pointed
out there were certainly three documents signed by Hermann Goering that
day for Heydrich in the ten minute period. He agreed with Pearson that
Goering therefore had about three minutes per document. (33-9433 to 9435)
Wouldn't you agree, asked Pearson, that you are speculating when you say
he never read it?
"We have to try to interpret how much a man can do in ten minutes
when it's such an unimportant document as that." Irving pointed out
that the document in question was two paragraphs long.
How long do you think it takes to read?, asked Pearson.
"Two paragraphs, a piece of bureaucratic bumph, I'm afraid you're
not familiar with Hermann Goering's lifestyle," said Irving. "...he
had a very opulent kind of lifestyle. He wasn't really interested in the
minutiae of the bureaucratic life. He wasn't really interested in Reinhard
Heydrich, he wasn't really interested in the Jewish question. In July 1942,
he still is saying in a verbatim conference that the Führer has made
exceptions all the way down the bureaucratic level. He can't understand
why all this persecution of the Jews is going on...[t]he same with the
Nuremberg race laws. He couldn't understand how they had come into being."
(33-9436)
If the academic historians are right, suggested Pearson, that was indeed
a significant memo, wasn't it?
"Indeed. They clutch at straws."
What was Heydrich's position?, asked Pearson.
"Heydrich was the chief of the Reichssicherheitshauptamt, which put
him in overall charge of the Gestapo and various other important SS police
executive agencies." Irving agreed that he held a senior position
in the Nazi hierarchy and that "Hitler at one time was considering
him as a successor." (33-9436, 9437)
Wasn't it right, asked Pearson, that Heydrich, being a senior person in
the hierarchy, was looking to Goering for approval to do something?
"For the reason that Hermann Goering was chief of the four year plan.
The head of the four year plan had very, very substantial economic influence
in Germany, responsibilities also which had been assigned to him under
the overall umbrella of the four year plan office. One of those responsibilities
which Hitler had given to Goering at the time of the Reichskristallnacht,
the night of broken glass in November 1938, was to oversee the final solution
of the Jewish problem. Hermann Goering in January 1939 put Reinhard Heydrich
in charge of the geographical resettlement of all Germany's Jews and Austria's
Jews and Reinhard Heydrich set up at that time a central office for the
relocation of the Jews and so it became Heydrich's penchant, drawing on
Hermann Goering's authorities which is why he then had to go back to Hermann
Goering in July 1941 to say, 'Look Hermann, we've now taken over all these
territories in the east and I need you to expand that authority to me so
I can carry on the job in the eastern territories', and that's what Hermann
understood was the meat of the document he was signing. In other words,
a piece of bureaucratic bumph, drawing the line a little bit further to
the east." (33-9438, 9439)
Said Pearson, I don't know, sounds pretty important to me. Bureaucratic
bumph?
"You're clutching at straws, the same as historians, if I may be so
rude," replied Irving.
You are the one, said Pearson, who told us that this was a significant
four year plan and the mandate of the senior official is being extended
by the second most powerful man in Nazi Germany?
Said Irving: "The four year plan was very important until March 1942
and it virtually vanished...Heydrich took it as a useful convenience that
he could put on his headed notepaper the fact that he was acting on behalf
of the head of the four year plan [in] carrying out these jobs. It was
a...short-circuiting [of] any kind of opposition that would come along
that Heydrich could [use] and indeed did. For example, when Heydrich called
the Wannsee Conference, he referred specifically to Hermann Goering's July
1941 document which says that the Reichsmarschall and head of the four
year plan has instructed me to carry out an investigation of how we're
going to carry out the final solution. I am therefore calling a meeting,
which was the famous Wannsee Conference. Heydrich would point to the Goering
document and [say] 'This is my authority, so don't start smart-talking
me.'" (33-9439, 9440)
Irving agreed that the document was very important to Heydrich and that
he used it. Pearson pointed out that Irving had nevertheless described
it as 'bureaucratic bumph'. Said Irving: "Yes. When...you ask me why
Hermann Goering himself would have paid little attention to what he was
signing, he would have viewed it as a piece of bureaucratic bumph...he
himself never again referred to it throughout the war years...We have seventy
volumes of verbatim records of Hermann Goering's wartime conferences so
we're pretty well informed about the way his mind was working. If people
take the trouble to read them. But they are in that strange language and
people don't take the time." (33-9440, 9441)
Pearson asked Irving whether he disputed the authenticity of the Wannsee
Conference protocols. Irving testified that he did not: "I have read
the entire file...incorporating the Wannsee Conference protocol and the
other versions of the protocol. There are two or three records of the same
meeting in various files." (33 9441)
You would agree, suggested Pearson, that at his trial in Jerusalem, Eichmann
indicated that that was an important stage in the final steps of the creation
of the 'final solution.' Irving interjected to point out that the trial
was "twenty years later" and then continued: "I think we
can agree that Adolf Eichmann at Jerusalem, when he was on trial, wasn't
exactly attending a historical seminar. He was under considerable physical
and mental coercion. Some of the things he said would have been true; others
of the things that he said would have been false; and I am not in a position
to determine which was which."
Are you now saying that the important thing is he was being coerced?, asked
Pearson.
"Yes...I am saying that given the wealth of other documentation that
we have, we should be able to dispense with looking at twenty year old
trials to try and find still further clues as to what happened."
Pearson pointed out that Irving looked at the testimony of other participants
at the conference as being significant.
"At the Nuremberg trials. This is true," said Irving. "The
trials held in 1945, 1946 and 1947, they were particularly...in '46 and
'47, the pretrial of Kritzinger and Lammers and the other...people who
had attended, ...Wilhelm Stuckart, who attended the Wannsee Conference,
were interrogated in great detail as to what they recollected." Irving
agreed he viewed their testimony as significant: "One year or less
after the end of the war, yes. I would consider that to be more acceptable
than what Eichmann would be saying twenty years after the war." (33-9442.
9443)
So, asked Pearson, the significance now isn't the coercion, it's the passage
of time, is it?
"There's an element," replied Irving. "There's an element
of passage of time; an element of coercion. If a man, despite coercion,
is saying things in a certain way, then it's more likely to be true than
if a man because of coercion twenty years later is saying things in a certain
way." (33- 9443)
Pearson asked if Irving agreed that if Eichmann attended and prepared the
minutes of a meeting which was integral to the plan to exterminate the
Jews of Europe, that the passage of twenty years was not going to make
him forget that? Irving pointed out that this was Pearson's interpretation
of the meeting. He continued: "I think that you have to realize the
Wannsee Conference is one of very many interministerial conferences that
were held during the war years on all sorts of different topics, stocks,
shipping, barges, economy, the fat supply, nitrogen, this kind of conference.
And to single out one conference and expect a man years later to recollect
what went on there when it's a matter which was as boring to most of them
as the solution of the Jewish problem - who is a Jew, who is a half-Jew,
what is a quarter-Jew, what do we do with people who have one Jewish grandparent
- this kind of thing, a lot of them will have had their minds elsewhere.
A lot of them did have their minds elsewhere."
Is it your position, asked Pearson, as a professional historian, that the
Wannsee Conference was not a conference to discuss the extermination of
the Jews of Europe?
"There is no explicit reference to extermination of the Jews of Europe
in the Wannsee Conference and more important, not in any of the other documents
in that file. We cannot take documents out of context...In my opinion,
it has been inflated to that importance by irresponsible historians who
probably haven't read the document," said Irving.
Pearson pointed out there was also the testimony of Eichmann.
"Twenty years later...I think we talked this morning a bit about Eichmann's
powers of recollection and the fact he himself got confused about what
he really recalled and what he had in the meantime been told. And this
is a human failing which unfortunately afflicts all of us, that our memories
get bad as we get older."
Forget about the minutes of the meeting and forget about the testimony,
said Pearson. Is it your opinion that the Wannsee Conference itself was
not a conference to discuss the extermination of Jews?
"That is my opinion." (33-9444 to 9446)
So, suggested Pearson, Eichmann made it up?
"I'm saying that Eichmann was wrong in giving contrary testimony,"
replied Irving, "but you would have to tell me precisely what Eichmann
said. I'm not prepared to take your word for what Eichmann said. I think
I have to know his precise words. I don't mean that offensively at all.
Even in paraphrasing we may oversimplify what somebody...had said."
Have you read the transcript of Eichmann's testimony?, asked Pearson.
"No, I haven't. I've read a few snatches of it like I mentioned this
morning."
Pearson suggested that this hindered Irving's ability to reach the conclusion
he had reached. Irving disagreed: "No. I think that when one has a
given life span, one can decide how one spends that life. You can spend
your life in a library reading all the books [on] Adolf Eichmann...and
write the X plus one book or spend your life in the archives and try to
write a truer book. If you do that, you don't have to read and why should
you bother with the trial records because where you are sitting is right
where the truth is, in the archives, and you haven't got the Israeli Ministry
of Justice putting itself between you and Adolf Eichmann." (33-9447)
Said Irving: "I don't consider that the testimony of Adolf Eichmann
at Jerusalem would have advanced...my knowledge of what happened at the
Wannsee Conference. It is twenty years after the war, which is five years
after the Wannsee Conference, four years after the Wannsee Conference,
and it would have polluted my knowledge rather than improved it."
Irving agreed that Eichmann was present at the Wannsee Conference but would
not swear that it was he who drafted the protocol: "To the best of
my knowledge there is no signature on it." (33-9448)
It's your opinion, suggested Pearson, it's of no value to read the words
of a participant in a conference to determine what the conference was about?
"Having read the fragments of Adolf Eichmann's testimony where he
says his memory is so shaken that he can no longer distinguish between
fiction and fact, he can no longer distinguish between what he really recollects
and what he is told he recollects, from that point on all the Adolf Eichmann
testimony becomes polluted, dangerous to read for a historian. It would
be really like watching a made-for-TV movie about Auschwitz. That would
not advance my knowledge," said Irving.
Pearson suggested again that Irving relied on the testimony of the other
participants at the conference when they were on trial and had a clear
interest in denying that it had anything to do with extermination.
"I accept that, yes...I accept your inference too, that they had a
reason to simulate, they had a reason to deceive...I read it with interest.
That doesn't mean to say I rely on it. You take note of it."
But you don't take note of Eichmann?, asked Pearson.
"No," said Irving. "Not in that account because of the particular
circumstances where Adolf Eichmann was being [heard]. Had Adolf Eichmann
been questioned in 1945 at very great length by American or British interrogators,
that would have been of substantially greater evidentiary value for a historian
than given the circumstances where he is being interrogated under the certain
knowledge that he's about to be executed." (33-9449, 9450)
April 25, 1988
Irving agreed that he had written about thirty books and researched for
more than ten years before writing Hitler's War and ten years before writing
Churchill's War. Hitler's War was first published in Germany in 1975. Said
Irving: "The German publishers, without so informing me, willfully
excluded and changed parts of the text. I then obliged them to withdraw
the book from publication overnight on publication day." Among other
things, the publishers had changed parts relating to Hitler's knowledge
of the extermination of the Jews. (34-9455, 9456)
Is it your evidence, asked Pearson, that they published that first run
without letting you see the final version they were going to publish?
"Most unusual," said Irving. "They did not let me see the
typescript of the German translation which I normally like to check myself.
They did not honour their promise to let me see the proofs. They did not
supply me with an advance copy of the book. I had to buy a copy of the
book myself in a book shop in Munich and I immediately sent a telegram
forbidding them to print any further editions or to sell any more copies."
The English language version of the book appeared in 1977. (34 9456)
Irving agreed that he commenced Hitler's War by saying that the ten years
that he had chosen to research Hitler were the best ten years to do so
because the archives opened up to researchers and the people who had been
involved with Hitler, especially his closest personnel, were still available.
(34-9457)
Irving wrote in his introduction to Hitler's War that "the most important
documents were provided by Professor Hugh Trevor-Roper..." Irving
testified that "Professor Hugh Trevor-Roper is a very well-known and
eminent professor of history, modern history. He was the regius professor
of Oxford in history...he is now the master of an important college at
Cambridge University...He is an academic historian who started initially
as a non-academic historian in British intelligence." Irving agreed
that he had "[not] the slightest" contempt for Trevor-Roper and
in fact had written that the historian's work The Last Days of Hitler was
a brilliant exception to most weak biographies of Hitler. Said Irving:
"This is why I singled him out for special commendation." He
owed Trevor-Roper a "very considerable debt." (34-9457 to 9459)
Irving also agreed that in his introduction to Hitler's War he had acknowledged
the debt he owed to Professor Raul Hilberg. Said Irving: "Indeed,
oh, yes. I corresponded with Professor Hilberg who I understand has given
evidence in a previous hearing." Irving testified he had "[not]
the slightest" contempt for Hilberg: "Again, he's one of the
few academic historians who has done his homework, if I can put it in that
shorthand form." (34-9459)
Would you agree, asked Pearson, that Hugh Trevor-Roper is probably the
foremost expert on the Nazi regime in Germany of any English historian?
"Except in one respect," said Irving. "He has very little
knowledge of the German language which is a substantial impediment. But
otherwise I agree with your statement." (34- 9459)
After Hitler's War, Irving moved on to Churchill, but kept his Hitler dossiers
open "as a matter of professional interest." His research into
Churchill relied more on archival documents than testimonials as many of
Churchill's associates had already died. (34-9460)
Pearson turned to the subject of the assassination of General Sikorski,
the Polish Prime Minister-in-exile during the war who died in a plane crash
in Gibraltar. Irving gave qualified agreement that his book on Sikorski
claimed that Churchill was responsible for his assassination. "I will
go along with that description. In fact, it was left more open than that
but the reader was invited to draw that conclusion," said Irving.
Did the law courts consider the proposition that Sikorski was assassinated
by Churchill?, asked Pearson.
"They did indeed...The lower courts, on the basis of a play written
by a completely different person, considered a libel action brought by
the sole survivor of the plane, a Czechoslovakian national. The libel action
was rather uniquely fought in as much as the defendant was a German living
in Switzerland who made no attempt to appear and on the basis of that kind
of court case, the court found, of course, for the plaintiff...to be perfectly
specific, of course, my book was not on trial. The pilot, the Czech, Prchal,
issued a libel writ against me as the author of the book, Accident: The
Death of General Sikorski, and he chose not to, which implies in my view,
he accepted that what I had written was not open to challenge in the English
lower courts. We would certainly have defended it had he issued a writ."
(34-9461, 9462)
Pearson produced a review of Hitler's War written by Hugh Trevor-Roper
which appeared on June 12, 1977 in the Sunday Times Weekly Review, with
which Irving was familiar:
It is well known that Mr. Irving, some years ago, convinced himself that
General Sikorski, who died in an air-crash at Gibraltar, had been "assassinated"
by Winston Churchill, to whom in fact his death was a political calamity.
Not a shred of evidence or probability has ever been produced for this
theory, and when it was tested in the courts, Mr. Irving's only "evidence"
(which was very indirect at best) was shown to be a clumsy misreading of
a manuscript diary. (I have myself seen the diary and feel justified in
using the word "clumsy"). And yet here is this stale and exploded
libel trotted out again, as if it were an accepted truth, in order to support
a questionable generalisation.
Did Hugh Trevor-Roper say that in his article, sir?, asked Pearson.
"He did indeed," agreed Irving, "but he is wrong in suggesting
that my theory was ever tested in the lower courts and you can have a look
at my book if you wish, Accident: The Death of General Sikorski, and you
will find no reference whatsoever in it to the diary which he mentions...The
newspaper then refused to publish a letter from me in reply. I pointed
out he was entitled to his opinions and he could put them to music and
have them played by the Mainstream Guards, but I deal in facts."
Didn't Sir Frank Roberts say that Churchill wept when he heard the news?,
asked Pearson.
"I have read that statement recently. It's a very recent statement
by the head of the Central Department of the Foreign Office in 1943. He
made that statement in the 1980s, forty years later to Winston Churchill's
authorized biographer and we can each of us attach whatever weight we choose
to that statement."
You choose not to accept it?, asked Pearson.
"Churchill wept freely and readily," said Irving. (34-9464, 9465)
Pearson turned to Hitler's War and read from the introduction:
The negative is traditionally always difficult to prove; but it seemed
well worth attempting to discredit accepted dogmas if only to expose the
"unseaworthiness" of many current legends about Hitler. The most
durable of these concerns the Führer's involvement in the extermination
of the Jews. My analysis of this controversial issue serves to highlight
two broad conclusions: that in wartime, dictatorships are fundamentally
weak - the dictator himself, however alert, is unable to oversee all the
functions of his executives acting within the confines of his far-flung
empire; and that in this particular case, the burden of guilt for the bloody
and mindless massacre of the Jews rests on a large number of Germans, many
of them alive today, and not just on one "mad dictator," whose
order had to be obeyed without question.
"I think that today, eleven years later, I still stand by what I published
on that date," said Irving. "...There were very large numbers
of massacres which can only be described as bloody and mindless of Jews
and other ethnic minorities in occupied Europe during the Second World
War."
I suggest, said Pearson, that the way you have written it - 'the Jews',
not 'some Jews' - that you're talking about race genocide.
"I think that readers who are picking up my book and looking at it
are very familiar with the fact there has long been an allegation about
a massacre or extermination of the Jews in the Second World War. The same
as we talk about the extermination or massacre of the Armenians. I think
it would - I really hope you have better material than this with which
to challenge me frankly. I've come a very long way. I don't really want
to spend a great deal of time debat[ing] one word, 'the'." (34-9466,
9467)
Pearson continued reading:
I had approached the massacre of the Jews from the traditional viewpoint
prevailing in the mid- 1960s. "Supposing Hitler was a capable statesman
and a gifted commander," the argument ran, "how does one explain
his murder of six million Jews?" If this book were simply a history
of the rise and fall of Hitler's Reich, it would be legitimate to conclude:
"Hitler killed the Jews." He after all created the atmosphere
of hatred with his anti-Semitic speeches in the 1930s; he and Himmler created
the SS; he built the concentration camps; his speeches, though never explicit,
left the clear impression that "liquidate" was what he meant.
For a full length war biography of Hitler, I felt that a more analytical
approach to the key questions of initiative, complicity, and execution
would be necessary.
Pearson suggested that in that passage Irving was saying that if one was
looking at Hitler's Reich and not just at Hitler, it would be legitimate
to conclude that Hitler killed the Jews. Irving replied that Hitler "had
a constitutional responsibility as head of state." (34-9467, 9468)
What was the significance of the statement that Hitler and Himmler created
the SS?, asked Pearson.
"Back in the 1930s, back in the 1920s in fact," said Irving,
"the SS was created as an elite bodyguard for Hitler and out of which
emerged the various branches of the SS, including the Waffen SS, which
was the biggest branch of all, and the sentence means what it says. They
both jointly created the SS." (34-9468)
Pearson suggested that in effect, Irving was saying Hitler was responsible
for creating the organ that massacred the Jews. Irving disagreed: "I
don't think I say that the SS is the organ that massacred the Jews. I'm
just saying what, in fact, I printed there. I chose those words very carefully
in writing the introduction." (34-9468)
Pearson continued reading:
For a full-length war biography of Hitler, 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 of the Jewish Problem" has never been examined.
What did you mean by the "final solution of the Jewish problem"?,
asked Pearson.
"Well, earlier in that paragraph, I have talked about the argument,
the public perception of what had happened and I have clearly put that
sentence in quotation marks; what the public calls the 'final solution
of the Jewish problem'...We are going to examine in the book what the 'final
solution' was, but I am already advancing here, I am alerting the reader
to the fact that in this book he's going to find data on this controversy."
Wasn't the "final solution" the term generally accepted as being
the term used for the racial genocide of the Jews?, asked Pearson.
"On Friday I quoted you from memory a spring 1942 document in which
Hitler is quoted by the chief of his Reich Chancellery as saying 'the Führer
wants the solution of the Jewish problem postponed until after the war
is over'. Now, you can't have it both ways. That document is a genuine
document." (34-9469)
Pearson suggested that in his introduction, Irving was telling the reader
that he was going to prove that Hitler did not have