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David Irving vs. Deborah Lipstadt Libel Trial in London England
Part Four - January 28--February 4, 2000
Dates and sources are listed at the end of each respective report
The Curse of Revisionism
Pacing back and forth across the court, often bouncing slightly on his heels, the historian David Irving looked like a man who could not wait to unleash another devastating point in service of his theories concerning the Holocaust. And when the witness he was cross-examining finally fell silent for a moment, he practically lunged like a swordsman delivering a fatal blow.
"If there were no holes in the roof, there was no gas chamber," he barked, looking around the courtroom as if waiting for signs of approval. And the whole story of 500,000 people being gassed in this one place rises and falls on those holes, does it not?" The witness before him, Robert Van Pelt, a Dutch historian who has spent years combing through the ruins of the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp, which was the subject under debate, paused for a moment, considering his answer."That roof has weathered badly over 50 years," he said dismissively. "It is impossible to examine it..."
It wasn't a very strong answer, and Irving seemed satisfied that he had won this round. During the previous hour, the two men had discussed some large black and white photographs of one of the Birkenau crematoriums which showed what looked like small chimneys being placed in the roof of part of the complex during its construction. These were Van Pelt's exhibits, aimed to prove that holes had existed and that cyanide gas pellets could be dropped into the underground chamber, where up to 2,000 Jewish prisoners had been herded for slaughter
But Irving, without a lawyer in sight and conducting his own case, seems to be well prepared to challenge any expert thrown at him, no matter how illustrious. He is one of the world's great discoverers of lost and overlooked documents, one of the best diggers in the archival business. Before him, on a 20ft-long table, he has piles of documents, photographs, archival mate-rial and textbooks. He even has a manual of German building regulations, which he plans to put to good use. He had other photographs, he said, showing the same roof, and there was not a chimney in sight.
He also claimed that the roof, now collapsed, rotting and lying on the ground, has been examined by "experts" who could not find not a single hole. Back and forth it went. Hour after hour. There were no holes, said Irving. Indeed there were holes, contradicted the witness. The cut and thrust of polite legal argument, just two learned historians examining the evidence and drawing different conclusions. But still managing to behave like gentlemen and experts.
I sat packed in with about 50 others, in the rear of room 73 in the London Law Courts, listening to this and more. At the lunchtime interval, wandering around the court building and trying to come to terms with what I was seeing and hearing, I felt like a man in some kind of Kafkaesque dream. What was going on here? Was this some kind of grotesque Monty Python episode? Everybody seemed to be in such good spirits. As if they weren't taking part in some kind of historical parlour game. Spot the gas chamber for 20 points.
Another day, another pile of large retainers for the lawyers and some good copy for the hacks. Irving, once hailed as the brightest young historian of the Second World War, is now claiming that he has been falsely discredited and is thus unable to find a reputable publisher for his books and is effectively ruined financially. He is suing Dr Deborah Lipstadt, also a historian, and her publishers Penguin Books, for allegations within her book Denying the Holocaust that Irving was a right-wing fanatic who had "distorted, manipulated and falsified" history to show that there were no gas chambers for humans in Auschwitz.
During the morning session, Irving repeatedly made the point that he was not denying the existence of the Holocaust. He had never denied it. On the contrary, he agreed fully at one point with Van Pelt's description of how some 180,000 people had been murdered in gas vans further north at a place called Chelmno.
However, when it came to the gigantic Auschwitz-Birkenau complex -- the twin concentration camps in the southern Polish swamps that lie at the very heart of the Holocaust -- he was not prepared, either as a man or a historian, to accept myth and folklore in the face of provable evidence to the contrary.
For much of the time, Irving was not so much cross-examining his witness as making one statement after another about a place that he believes to be partly a fraud, at worst, and a Polish state-run tourist attraction, at best. He attacked the accepted narrative of Auschwitz as the premier Nazi killing ground, and the home of the gas chambers, without the slightest mercy.
There were hospitals full of sick Jewish people still alive when the Red Army arrived in 1945, weren't there? Why were they being fed and medically treated, and why did so many survive when the Germans were killing them at such a rate? Wasn't it a fact that the 12 tons of Zyklon-B gas, allegedly used in the gas chambers, was simply an industrial delousing agent used in the fight against the epidemics that repeatedly swept the camp, killing thousands of slave workers? Why bother cleaning the clothes and beds of people you intended to kill?
His allegations came in a great torrent of words. Van Pelt tried to give as good as he got. For each question he gave a considered answer. He knows this terrible place as no other human being knows it, arid the previous day he had produced an awesome phrase to sum up his years of investigative labour. "In a map of human suffering," he said, "Auschwitz would be at the centre."
He was "absolutely certain" that at least one million people had died there between 1942 and 1944. And he was "absolutely certain" that the gas chambers were used to kill them.
But Irving gave him little leeway, and by late afternoon, with another verbal flourish, he suddenly produced what might be the main witness for his case. Not a human being -- but something as mundane as the single lift-shaft con-necting the "alleged" gas chamber with the crematorium ovens above. He called in the bottleneck, or, as he put it, the bottleneck in the glass timing jar, The bottleneck that would blow holes in the Auschwitz story.
Irving knows the value of a strong phrase and the silence in Court 73 seemed to deepen as he said it. We all knew what was coming. Even the judge murmured that he could see where this was leading. How could 500,000 bodies -- the number estimated to have died in that one crematorium -- be transported up a single lift-shaft, only about 9ft square. Irving demanded that Van Pelt now do the arithmetic of nightmares. How much could the lift carry? 750 kilos, 1,500 kilos, 3,000 kilos? How many bodies would that be at, say 60 kilos a body? Were they in gurneys or were they just squeezed in, like people squashed into a telephone box? How long to take each batch up to the ovens? Ten minutes, or more, each batch? Twenty corpses at a time, or 25?
Van Pelt entered into the exercise reluctantly, and his answers were unclear. It was not helpful to count the numbers of lift journeys, but rather the time it took to burn each batch. In the end, no conclusion was reached on this point. Nobody came up with a pat figure that would make such a logistics exercise possible or impossible during the years the crematorium was operational, But Irving repeated his phrase over and over again. The Bottleneck.
And on the way home in the train that night, to my shame, I took out a pocket calculator and began to do some sums. Ten, minutes for each batch of 25. I tapped in. That makes 150 an hour. Which gives 3,600 for each 24-hour period. Which gives 1,314,000 in a year. So that's fine. It could be done. Thank God, the numbers add up.
When I realised what I was doing, I almost threw the little machine across the compartment in rage. I remembered I had felt the same compulsive curiosity when I saw the first "investigative" reports that said that the Diary of Anne Frank may have been a fake. And I remembered the same relief I felt when I did the necessary and simple research and found that every word of this, perhaps the most famous book of the 20th century, was indeed true.
What is happening in Court 73 is more than just another libel action. And David Irving is entitled to challenge those who he claims have defamed him. But the case he has brought has meant something else. For the first time, in a major British arena, we have been forced to enter the strange and flourishing landscape that has come to be known as historical revisionism. It is an area of study with only one subject. The Holocaust. And it is a place where tiny flaws can be found -- and magnified -- in large structures, where great truths can be tainted and wounded by small discrepancies, where millions of dead people can be turned into a chimera. And where doubt can be planted like seed in the wind, to grow and fester as the screams of history grow fainter with the years. A dark and dangerous place where even reasonable people start to do furtive sums on pocket calculators.
Source: The Independent, January 29, 2000
While his numbers add up, his assumptions are in error
Letter to the Editor, The Independent
James Dalrymple's column from the January 29th issue of "The Independent," contains the following passage: "And on the way home in the train that night, to my shame, I took out a pocket calculator and began to do some sums. Ten, minutes for each batch of 25. I tapped in. That makes 150 an hour. Which gives 3,600 for each 24-hour period. Which gives 1,314,000 in a year. So that's fine. It could be done. Thank God, the numbers add up."
While his numbers add up, his assumptions are in error. First, he assumes 10 minutes per cremation. This is not correct. At best, it takes about one half hour to cremate a body. After that, the retort (oven) must be cooled for about an hour. Most modern crematories take 2.5 to 3 hours to take the cremation process from beginning to end. (See "Death to Dust : What Happens to Dead Bodies" by Kenneth V. Iserson, M.D. page 262).
Second, he assumes a batch to be 25. Krema II had 15 retorts. A batch would be 15, not 25.
So that makes 15 cremations / 1.5 hrs or 10 per hour, not 150. or 240 per day, not 3,600. That is 87,600 cremations per year, not 1,314,000 cremations per year.
There was another crematory building. Krema III also had 15 retorts. So the above rate can be doubled to 175,200 possible cremations in a year. (Krema IV and V did not operate for very long because they failed soon after they started operation. Their additional capacity is not statistically significant because they operated for only a few weeks.)
But if the 3 hour figure is used, the figure must be halved back to 87,600 cremations in a year for Krema II & III. But wait. Cremation equipment must be maintained. It can't operate continuously. These numbers are therefore unreasonably high.
Mr. Dalrymple's speculation in this regard is fanciful and based on ignorance of cremation and the resources available at Auschwitz-Birkenau from 1943 through 1944. So how many bodies were being cremated at that concentration camp each day during this period? What is the reality here? There is no need for speculation for the rate during this period. Enough information has been published to know.
Prof. Lipstadt wrote in her book about "triangulation." So let us do it. Take three pieces of information available from three sources. First. The number of registered deaths for many months is known. The death books which contain records of prisoner deaths have been released by the Russians for 1941,1942, and 1943. The 1944 and January 1945 volumes are missing.
Second. The amount of fuel (coke) delivered to the camp crematoria is known for 20.5 months of 1942 and 1943.
Third. The approximate amount of coke needed to cremate a body in cremators of the type at Birkenau is also known. Since Krema II and III were completed in the spring and summer of 1943, and since 1943 death record totals are known, I will use the average monthly registered deaths and coke deliveries for that year as far as they have been published.
The total registered deaths for Auschwitz and Birkenau in 1943 is 36,960. That is an average of 3,080 deaths per month. ("Some Thoughts on Pressac's Opus" by Arthur R. Butz, Supplement C of "The Hoax of the 20th Century," pg 371.) The total coke delivered for the first ten months of 1943 is 704.5 metric tons. That is an average of 70.45 metric tons per month. ("Technique and Operation of the Gas Chambers," by J.C.Pressac, pg 224). These totals yield an average of 22.87 kilograms of coke per death. So, is this an unreasonably high amount of fuel with which to cremate a body? Does this indicate most of those who were cremated at Birkenau were unregistered victims of gas chambers? The final piece of information shows this not to be the case.
The three-chambered cremators installed at Birkenau required an average of 16.7 kg to 20.3 kg per cremation depending on the condition of the corpse with emaciated bodies requiring more fuel than normal ones. ("Auschwitz: The End of a Legend," by Carlo Mattogno, pg. 23). This isn't rocket science. And though it might make some people feel ashamed for doing some simple math to try to verify claims for Auschwitz, it only makes sense to do so. There is no reason to swallow every horror story offered, even if it is about one's enemies.
It is clear that approximately 100 people were dying daily at that Nazi complex of camps (at Auschwitz-Birkenau), during 1943 and that coke barely adequate to dispose of the bodies of those people--about 40 percent of whom were Jews--was being supplied to do the job. All three figures triangulate: Work to be done, fuel needed to do the job, and fuel available for the job. Make no mistake about it. One hundred people per day is an appalling statistic. The truth about Auschwitz is shameful enough. There is no need to thank God about how the numbers add up. Why would anyone thank God that such suffering is possible?
Sincerely, John Weir, Overland Park, Kansas
Syrian Newspaper Says 'Holocaust' Has Been "Astronomically Exaggerated"
An official Syrian newspaper on Monday described the Holocaust as a myth, accusing Israel of exaggerating the extent of the Nazi slaughter of Jews to gain Western support and contain its opponents. ``Why does Israel insist on bringing up this alleged Holocaust policy?'' the editor of the state newspaper Tishreen, Mohamed Kheir al-Wadi, wrote.
``I believe Israel and the Zionist organizations have two aims. The first is to receive more money from Germany and other Western establishments on the pretext of compensation for the Holocaust.The second aim is to invest the myth of the Holocaust and accuse anyone opposed to Zionism and its expansionist policies of anti-Semitism.''
The Jerusalem office of the Nazi-hunting Simon Wiesenthal Center called the comments ''government-sanctioned Holocaust denial.''
The unusually strong Syrian attack at a sensitive time in Middle East peace negotiations followed a major conference on the Holocaust which ended in Stockholm last week. Participants from 48 countries pledged to ensure that World War Two atrocities, including the Nazi slaughter of Jews, remained in the spotlight.
The Syrian newspaper charged that Israel had convened the conference to further Jewish lies about the Holocaust in the face of credible voices questioning it, including that of the controversial British historian David Irving.
``Zionism is erasing from human memory 50 million Nazi victims and concentrating on the suffering of Jews, although historical facts prove that Zionism leaders then collaborated with the Nazis for the Jewish problem to get worse,'' Tishreen said. Zionism hides these dark pages of its history, blackens them completely and invents stories about the Holocaust and exaggerates it to astronomical levels,'' it said.
``Israel, which is presenting itself as heir to the victims of the Holocaust,
committed and keeps on committing against the Arabs crimes that are uglier
than the ones committed by the old Nazis. The Nazis, for example, did not
drive out a whole nation from their homeland and did not bury people alive,
which is what the Zionists did,'' said Tishreen.
Source: Reuters, Jan. 31, 2000
Irving not anti-Semitic, libel case told
An expert in Judaism told the High Court yesterday (Jan. 31), that he did not consider David Irving, the historian who denies the mass gassing of Jews in concentration camps, to be anti-Semitic.
Kevin MacDonald, professor of psychology at California State University, was giving evidence on behalf of Mr Irving, who is suing the American academic Deborah Lipstadt and her publisher, Penguin Books, for libel. Mr Irving, 62, the author of Hitler's War, claims that his career has been sabotaged by Prof Lipstadt's accusation that he is a "Holocaust denier" who has distorted history in an effort to deny the systematic extermination of the Jews by the Nazis.
In her book, "Denying the Holocaust," Prof Lipstadt alleges that Irving misused statistics and documents to serve his own ideological purposes and reach historically untenable conclusions. Mr Irving says the book has generated "waves of hatred" against him. He has vehemently denied an allegation by the defendants that he has made statements "designed to feed the virulent anti-Semitism" still alive and kicking throughout the world today. Mr Irving, who is representing himself, asked Prof MacDonald, the author of books on Judaism and anti-Semitism: "Do you consider me to be an anti-Semite?"
Prof MacDonald replied: "I do not consider you to be an anti-Semite. I have had quite a few discussions with you and you almost never mentioned Jews - never in the general negative way." During the hearing before Mr Justice Gray, who is sitting without a jury, Mr Irving was accused of making "grossly anti-Semitic" statements. Richard Rampton, QC, counsel for Miss Lipstadt and Penguin, said the historian had made remarks designed to feed the virulent anti-Semitism still existing in the world. Mr Irving rejects the claim that he is a Holocaust denier. But he does question the number of Jews killed by the Nazis and the mode of their death, insisting that there is no evidence of the use of gas chambers for mass killings.
Source: The Telegraph, Feb. 1, 2000
Irving accused of exaggerating Dresden toll
The Hitler historian David Irving was accused in the High Court yesterday (Feb. 1) of using a fake Nazi document to exaggerate the number of civilians killed by the Allied bombing of Dresden in February 1945. The exercise was allegedly carried out to make a "false equivalence" between the number of victims and the number of Jews killed at Auschwitz. Richard Rampton, QC, told Mr Irving, 62, that he had exaggerated the Dresden death toll by tenfold "for your own base political purposes".
Mr Rampton is counsel for Deborah Lipstadt, an American academic. Mr Irving is suing Ms Lipstadt and Penguin Books, for libel over a claim in her book "Denying the Holocaust: the growing assault on truth and memory," that he is a Holocaust denier. Mr Irving, the author of "Hitler's War," rejected Mr Rampton's assertion. He said of the bombing of Dresden: "It was a war crime. There is no way round it. I am deeply ashamed of what we did."
Mr Rampton told him that his cross-examination was to question his bona fides as an historian, not to establish what happened at Dresden. Mr Irving was questioned about a document he obtained during a visit to the city in November 1964, which showed the death roll to have been estimated on March 20, 1945, to be 202,040 with an assumption that the final figure would be 250,000, while official estimates were 25,000 to 35,000.
Mr Irving, whose first book was "The Destruction of Dresden," said he accepted that while the document - which he attributed to Max Funfack, deputy chief medical officer in Dresden, who was responsible for the mass disposal of victims - was authentic, the figures could have been falsified at the time and needed to be authenticated.
Mr Rampton said Mr Irving's doubt had evaporated by the time he wrote to the provost of Coventry Cathedral in 1964 suggesting he use the document in an exhibition planned to raise funds for links between Dresden and Coventry.
Mr Rampton said he accepted that at the time Mr Irving did not know the document was a fake but he emphasised the doubts he had expressed about the reliability. Mr Irving told Mr Justice Grey that he now estimates the death toll at 60,000 to 100,000.
Source: Times of London, Feb. 2, 2000
Editor's Note: The preceding appears to be a jaundiced report from the Times of London, whose journalists and editors almost seem to be under orders to produce headlines and copy which paint revisionism and Irving in terms that are decidedly negative, and favorable to the defendant (Lipstadt).
According to Irving's own account of this day in the courtroom: "At one stage Rampton rather foolishly states that the reality is that the (Dresden) death roll is not 100,000 but 'only 35,000'. From the witness box, I point out that 'only' is an extraordinary word to use when it concerns 35,000 innocent human beings whom we have burned alive in one night. I remind the Court that Rampton also dismissively expostulated 'So what!' when I mentioned the Dresden atrocity two weeks ago -- whereupon I had shown the court the huge black and white enlarged poster photograph of the February 22, 1945 Altmarkt mass cremations; I had said: 'That is why!'
"...In the afternoon session the public flogging goes on, this time switching over to the Dresden death statistics issue. Here Lipstadt's defence lawyers are on shaky ground, and their expert Evans has suppressed a number of documents that are in my Discovery. Fortunately I have pre-emptively copied them in seven sets to make them available to the court, which rather flummoxes them. Judge Gray is clearly annoyed that (a) the documents are German (b) they are largely illegible (c) the defence have omitted these seemingly highly relevant items."
Source: David Irving's diary, Feb. 1, 2000
Diary reveals Irving's ode to Aryans. Irving Accused of "Unvarnished Racism"
Sir Trevor MacDonald, the black ITN newscaster, should be restricted to reading news about muggings and drug busts, according to the Hitler historian David Irving.
His words were quoted back at him in court yesterday as he faced allegations of unvarnished racism. He agreed that in a speech to the Clarendon Club, he had yearned for the old days when newsreaders wore dinner jackets on air. He had said: "For a transitional period, I'd be prepared to accept that the BBC should have a dinner-jacketed gentleman reading the important news to us, followed by a lady reading all the less important news, followed by Trevor McDonald giving us all the latest news about the muggings and the drug busts."
Mr Irving, who is suing the American academic Deborah Lipstadt for libel over a book in which she describes him as a "holocaust denier", was taken through a passage from his private diary by her counsel, Richard Rampton QC. It concerned a day when he took his baby daughter Jessica out for a walk near their home in London. According to the diary, he had been singing her a ditty beginning "My name is Baby Jessica" when "half-breed" children were wheeled past them in their prams, and he changed the words to something more "scurrilous" which began: "I am a Baby Aryan."
Mr Irving agreed that he had recorded the ditties in his diary on September 17, 1994, after returning from the walk with his "fine little lady" of a daughter. But on a day of heated exchanges with Mr Rampton, he denied a suggestion that the diary entry was one of many examples of his alleged racism. Mr Irving said that what he had written was a private response to a smear in the magazine Searchlight in which he said that his family was described as a "perfect Aryan family".
Mr Irving was obliged to hand over his diaries before the hearing as part of the normal exchange of documents. Irving's 'Ditty': I am a Baby Aryan / Not Jewish or Sectarian / I have no plans to marry an Ape or Rastafarian.
Millions of words, both unpublished and contained in speeches he made to right-wing audiences, came under scrutiny along with damaging allegations made about how he had poisoned his daughter's mind with racism. He was also cross-examined about a book he published in which he attacked the Jews for their greed.
He agreed that in July 1997 he wrote in A Radical's Diary: "They clammer 'Ours! Ours! Ours!' when hoards of gold are uncovered. And then when anti-Semitism increases and the inevitable mindless pogroms occur, they ask with genuine surprise 'Why us?' "
In a series of heated exchanges with Richard Rampton, QC, he was taken through a series of utterances he has made about the Jews, but denied that he is a racist. Mr Irving, 62, who said he strongly objected to the "kind of excerpting" exercise on which Mr Rampton embarked, was taken through an interview he had given to the journalist Errol Morris on November 8, 1998, in which he analysed anti-Semitism and suggested that money lay at its root. The historian, who has denied that Jews were exterminated in the concentration camp gas chambers during the Second World War, said that the Jewish community had only to be called liars for their accusers to be thrown into jail. He said: "The question which would concern me, if I was a Jew, is not who pulled the trigger, but why? Why are we disliked? Is it something we are doing?
"You people are disliked on a global scale. You have been disliked for 3,000 years and yet you never seem to ask what is at the root of this dislike . . . no sooner do you arrive as a people in a new country, then within 50 years you are already being disliked all over again. Now, what is it? And I don't know the answer to this. Is it built into our microchip?"
He questioned whether it could be because non-Jews did not like the way they looked or whether it was down to envy because they were more successful. "It was not just a 'nudge, nudge, wink, wink' dislike but on a 'visceral, guts-wrenching, murderous level, that no sooner do we arrive than we are being massacred, and beaten, and brutalised and imprisoned, until we have to move on somewhere else." He added: "I would say that they're a clever race. I would say that as a race they are better at making money than I am. That's a racist remark, of course. But they appear to be better at making money than I am. If I was going to be crude, I would say not only are they better at making money, but they are greedy."
Asked about such remarks by Mr Rampton, Mr Irving said: "In my own clumsy way I am trying to find out why we don't like them. It's a very coherent expression of the antiSemitic tragedy. I am putting myself in the skin of a person asking questions about a clever people." Mr Irving is suing Deborah Lipstadt, an American academic, and Penguin Books, over her book Denying the Holocaust: The Growing Assault on Truth and Memory, in which she claims that he is a denier of the Holocaust.
Mr Rampton, for the defence, put the question: "Every time there is a pogrom or gassing or machinegunning into a pit it's entirely the Jews' fault because some of them are very good at playing the piano and making money?"
Mr Irving: "That's a childish over-simplification." Mr Irving, who is representing himself, said: "I am not a racist. I haven't seen a single coloured person on your team behind you." The historian, who said he employed people regardless of their race, was reprimanded by Mr Justice Grey when he twice repeated the accusation. The High Court was shown a video of Mr Irving addressing the National Alliance (NA), a right-wing American organisation, in Tampa, Florida, in October 1995 in which he spoke of what he called the "legend of the Holocaust".
Mr Irving denied any association with the NA but it was put to him he had spoken at eight of their events between 1990 and 1998. Asked why he had said in his Tampa speech that he found the Holocaust story "boring", Mr Irving said: "I think 95 per cent of the thinking public find the Holocaust boring by now but don't say it because it's politically incorrect. What other expression is there for the fact that it's all the Jews go on about now? There have been the most incredible episodes in Jewish history but all you hear of in films and so on of late is the Holocaust."
Asked to account for a suggestion that a Holocaust survivor may have faked her Auschwitz tattoo, Mr Irving said that Jewish people were not immune from criticism.
Source: Times of London, Feb. 3, 2000
David Irving repeats 'Holocaust denier' accusations against himself on his Web site
About to hit its second month is an unusual and expensive libel trial in which the party claiming damages is amplifying the libel by publishing all the trial materials on the Internet. British historian David Irving, whose Goebbels biography hit the reefs of public scorn in 1996 and was pulled by its publisher, has brought a claim in the British High Courts against the writer Deborah Lipstadt and her publishers, Penguin.
Irving, who testified on behalf of Ernst Zundel at his Toronto 1988 "false news" retrial, claims in court documents that Lipstadt's book, Denying the Holocaust: The Growing Aassault on Truth and Memory, accuses him of being "an ardent admirer" of Hitler and having "consorted with anti-Israel, anti-Semitic and Holocaust denial forces."
Since under strict British libel laws, defendants assume the burden of proving their claims in court, Lipstadt and Penguin have gathered together a battery of renowned lawyers and experts, including Cambridge University historian Richard Evans. With access to thousands of letters, videotaped speeches and diaries, including a verse Irving wrote to his one-year-old "Baby Aryan" daughter, Evans has prepared a 740-page document to debunk Irving's related claims.
Since British rules of procedure demand that before trials each side reveals witnesses and what they intend to say in court, Evans' treatise has already appeared in public -- strangely enough, on Irving's Web site, www.fpp.co.uk, along with a host of other materials that drag Irving through the mud.
Trial onlookers include the Canadian Web site Nizkor, www.almanac.bc.ca/hweb, devoted to confronting claims diminishing or denying the Holocaust, and Penguin U.K., www.penguin.co.uk, which has published its own opening statement calling Irving a "falsifier of history" and a "Holocaust denier."
The dispute has posed a difficult question for observers: Is Irving's mission to win, or to force Holocaust historians to engage him in a theatrical debate on even ground? Irving's limited assets and vulnerability are bound to make any win for Lipstadt and Penguin a pyrrhic one, allowing a martyred Irving to broadcast, via the courts, the newspapers and the Internet, a kind of virtual history no mainstream publisher would be likely to touch. - Dan Glove
Source: The National Post, (Toronto, Canada), Feb. 3, 2000
An inability to appreciate the concept of balance and fairness
Letter to the Editor of the National Post
Dan Glove's article about the Irving-Lipstadt libel trial and Irving's website (Shelf Life, Feb. 3) is so biased it bears little relation to the reality of the issues at stake. Glove claims that Irving's "Goebbels biography hit the reefs of public scorn in 1996 and was pulled by its publisher." But the American public never got the opportunity to read the book. It wasn't "public scorn" but clandestine pressure and blacklisting which caused St. Martin's Press to self-censor the biography.
The suppression of this book is a classic example of the absurdity and obscurantism of the "Holocaust" lobby."Goebbels: Mastermind of the Third Reich" shows the Nazi propaganda minister to have been the evil genius behind many of the crimes of the Nazis. It is the most exhaustively researched biography of Goebbels ever produced. It was blocked only because it was written by David Irving.
Irving has brought suit for libel in part because of the very process which led to the suppression of one the most potent indictments of a Nazi leader, primarily because Irving authored it. The suppression demonstrated the power of the new inquisition to smear and silence anyone who dares to doubt even a scintilla of Allied or Zionist orthodoxy.
Glove's incredulity over the fact that Mr. Irving publishes the writings of his opponents on his website reveals an inability to appreciate the concept of balance and fairness, qualities which have been absent of late from the establishment media. Irving's website reveals a spirit of intellectual adventure lacking in the hectoring "official" media, which put greater emphasis on shoring up "correct" beliefs than on encouraging vigorous competition between rival viewpoints, and healthy skepticism toward the dogmas of church, state and synagogue.
Michael A. Hoffman II, Coeur d'Alene, Idaho
England's black cricketers left Irving 'queasy'
David Irving's lament for an "old England", in which the national cricket team was white to a man and Jack Warner gave avuncular advice from the steps of Dock Green police station, was played to a rapt High Court yesterday. The last thing that Anglo-Saxon Englishmen returning from abroad expected to greet them at Heathrow was an immigration officer of Pakistani descent.
When did it all go wrong? who was to blame? Mr Irving wondered. The answers came thick and fast from the controversial Hitler historian at the end of his cross-examination from the witness box, where he has spent most of the past four weeks of his libel action.
Describing the start of mass immigration as a "body wound" to Britain, he said: "At the end of the war in 1945 the British Empire was at its greatest ever extent. Our armies straddled the globe. We were beginning to get back the territories that we had lost in the Far East through Churchill's foolish military and naval strategy . . . And suddenly the Empire went."
His words, quoted back at him, were delivered in a speech that he made to a gathering of the right-wing Clarendon Club in 1990. At that time, "groping around in the darkness" of an unrecognisable country in which a handful of true English, as well as Irish, Scots and Welsh, furtively exchanged shared sensations and sorrows, he searched for what he called the "Guilty Men" who had betrayed the land of their fathers.
He said that "Traitor No 1 to the British cause" was Lord Hailsham of St Marylebone. The deputy leader of the House of Lords and chairman of the Conservative Party, as he then was, was said to have told the Cabinet in 1958: "I don't think this coloured immigration is going to be much of a problem in Britain. We only have 100,000 of these immigrants so far, and I don't think the numbers are likely to grow much beyond that. So on balance I am against having any restrictions imposed."
Mr Irving said that in the search for culprits in his changed England, he would like to think that there was "somebody, somewhere, doing what Gilbert and Sullivan would have had the Mikado do: which is making up a little list of names of people . . . ". Even if the clock were turned back, however, most of the guilty would have passed on, commemorated only by the bronze plaques, statues and memorials scattered around the capital.
Not even Mrs Thatcher, he thought in 1990, would be able to put Britain back where it was, and certainly not the Socialist Party. Mr Irving went on to tell the Clarendon Club: "Nothing makes me shudder more than two or three months, working on a new manuscript, and I arrive back at Heathrow airport - where of course my passport is checked by a Pakistani immigration officer. Isn't that a humiliation for us English?" Mr Irving is suing Deborah Lipstadt, an American academic, and Penguin Books for libel over a book in which she describes him as a holocaust denier.
He was questioned by Richard Rampton, QC, for the defence, about his remarks to the club and a speech that he made at Bow Town Hall, East London, in 1992. In that speech, he spoke of feeling "queasy about the immigration disaster that's happened to Britain" and the infiltration of the England cricket team by black players.
"Why queasy?" Mr Rampton asked. Mr Irving, the author of Hitler's War, relied: "I was speaking about what a pity it is we have to have blacks on the team and they are better than our whites. I say it's a pity because I am English."
The England he was born in in 1938 was different, he said, and he was imbued with all its values. In a clash over Mr Rampton's allegations of racism and his own preference to be described as a patriot, Mr Irving said: "Patriotism is respecting the country handed down to you by your fathers. I don't think there is anything despicable or disreputable about patriotism."
He said that blacks were not inferior to whites but were different from them. "I wish I could go to Heathrow airport, take a 747 and fly back ten hours later to find England as it used to be.
"In the 1950s, Britain was a country at peace. We had defeated a major world power, we were licking our wounds and recovering, and for no perceptible reason we then, through the folly and negligence of the Government we had voted into power, inflicted on this country a body wound which only began at that time."
Source: Times of London, Feb. 4, 2000
'I find the Holocaust endlessly boring'
British historian David Irving says that, had the Jews not been allowed to set up a state in Palestine but were sent to Madagascar instead, as proposed in the plan he attributes to Nazi Germany, "the world would be a happier place."
In an interview with Ha'aretz, Irving claims that during the 1956 Sinai Campaign he took part in a demonstration supporting Israel, but today he sees no big difference between Israelis and Nazis. The interview was held in Irving's home in London's Mayfair district, as he sat under a large portrait of U.S. President Franklin Roosevelt, whom he praised for extricating his country from a deep crisis, commenting: "like Hitler."
The interview with Irving came at the end of a long day of hearings in the libel case he filed against American historian Deborah Lipstadt over a book she wrote describing him as a Holocaust denier. Irving does not deny that the Nazis murdered Jews, but claims that they did not systematically murder millions in gas chambers. Asked where all the Jews that he claims the Nazis did not murder disappeared to, Irving said: "The fact is there are Jews everywhere. That's how they are. They always pop up again, everywhere. Maybe they changed their names to Israeli names." But he's not too interested in that. He finds the Holocaust endlessly boring, he says.
Irving added that the Jews should ask themselves why they are hated so much, and always have been, everywhere. "What is it in them that generates this hatred? They would do well to think about that."
"There is no doubt that they are hated today in part because of all the 'Holocaust propaganda' they are constantly spreading. It's become impossible to open a newspaper or see a television program these days without coming across the Holocaust. Holocaust, Holocaust, everywhere Holocaust. The Holocaust has 'hijacked' all the media, all of Western culture. The world is fed up with it. People are losing their patience and are liable to resort to acts of violence against Jews. If the Jews don't stop, they can expect a genuine Holocaust."
Source: Ha'aretz, Feb. 4, 2000
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