Closing Speech
by David Irving
Part
IV In England a parallel campaign was launched by
the Board of Deputies, and by other organisations
which we know to have collaborated with the
Defendants in producing this libellous book. This
had kicked into high gear after my own imprint
published an abridged edition of the Leuchter
Report in June 1989. Pressure was put on the World
Trade Centre in the City of London to repudiate our
contract for the press conference. A picket was
staged outside our front door to prevent
journalists from attending when the conference was
switched to my own home. The Board arranged an
early day motion in the House of Commons, as a
privileged way of publishing a smear on my name. On
June 30 of that year the Jewish Chronicle revealed
that representations had been made to my principal
British and Commonwealth publisher, Macmillan Ltd.,
to drop me as an author.51 Macmillan had already published several of my
books, and were under contract to publish several
more. I had no fears that they would succumb to
this intimidation. They had informed me that
HITLER'S WAR was running so successfully that they
intended to keep it permanently in print. I am
entitled to mention this background, as I have
mentioned the Board's other clandestine activities
against me, because it was said by Mr Rampton that
I later made one public tasteless remark (in
October 1991) about the Board of Deputies.52 If
somebody attacks, using secretive and furtive
means, the very basis of the existence of my family
then it may be at least understandable that I speak
ill of them. It is worth mentioning that when I invited Mr
Leuchter privately to address my Clarendon Club at
Chelsea Town Hall in November 1991, the Board tried
strenuously to have him gagged. They just do not
understand the word, "debate". They piled pressure
onto Kenneth Baker, then the Home Secretary, to
stop him coming, and Ben Helfgott of the Holocaust
Education Trust of whom we shortly hear more,
threatened in July 1991 that "violence would greet
the revisionists if they were allowed in."53
Secretly, on July 17, 1991 fifty years to the day
after Hitler granted police powers to Himmler in
the occupied Soviet Union the Board of Deputies
wrote to the president of the German Office for the
Protection of the Constitution (BfV), a body of
which we have heard greatly admiring words from
Professor Funke; this English Board urged that they
take steps to stop me, a British citizen like no
doubt the members of the Board, from entering
Germany. Germany is a country on whose publishers and
archives I have been heavily dependent, as the
Court is aware.54 We have only the BfV's reply,
dated August 9, 1991, to Neville Nagler of the
Board of Deputies. I retrieved a copy of this
letter from the files of the Prime Minister of
Australia; so the same Board, in London, had
evidently also secretly sent its dossiers to its
collaborators in Canberra, and no doubt other
countries, in its efforts to gag me worldwide. That
is an indication of the world-wide networking that
went on, this secret common enterprise, this
frantic international endeavour to destroy my
legitimacy as an historian and to deprive me of
free speech, of which the Defendants have made
themselves the willing executioners. As is evident from a letter from the Austrian
ambassador dated June 22, 1992 the Board also
applied pressure on that country to ensure that I
did not enter, or that I was arrested if I did.55
The equivalent Argentinean body, the DAIA, launched
a well-co-ordinated smear on me when I arrived in
Argentina in October 1991 to lecture on historical
themes at universities and to private associations
in Spanish and German.56 When the DAIA headquarters
building was blown up with heavy loss of life a few
months later, it now was inevitable that my name
would be linked with that outrage too, and my
Argentinean publisher was obliged in consequence to
abandon its contracts with me, as they revealed
privately in a letter to me. (Four years later the
similar lie was circulated that I was directly
involved in the Oklahoma City bombing.) These tides of hatred and suppression lapped at
the doors of my London publishers. On November 27,
1991 a note appeared in the internal files of my
publisher Macmillan Ltd., listing the remaining
stocks of my books and the current contract
positions. This was an ominous sign. In another
internal Macmillan memorandum, editor in chief Alan
Gordon Walker stated to his editors, "We will not
publish Irving again." I was not told this; in fact
my own editor there continued to write oleaginous
letters to me, as they were waiting for the
GOEBBELS biography which they had paid for and
which was under contract. What had happened meanwhile? Firstly, I had
established my own publishing imprint which was
capable of producing a better quality of book than
Macmillan Ltd. were currently achieving, while
using the same printing firm in Somerset. The new
omnibus edition of HITLER'S WAR, published in
November 1991, was one of its first products. This
was just as well. On December 6, 1991 an Internal
Office Memo from Macmillan's files records that
"quite a number of people" had commented
unfavourably to Macmillan's about them publishing
my books, and one person, an unnamed "Oxford
Professor of Politics," who had evidently learned
nothing from the book burning episodes of Nazi
Germany, stating "that they would be more inclined
to publish with us [Macmillan] if we were
not publishing Irving." (The Oxford professor of
politics was probably Peter Pulzer, identified by
Lipstadt in her book as such and quoted by The
Independent at the time).57 This campaign had been co-ordinated by the Board
of Deputies. In some of its members, it seems that
the illiberal spirit of Dr Goebbels lived on behind
the Board's facade. Meeting behind locked doors at
their headquarters on December 12, 1991, a body
identified as the "Education and Academic
Committee" of the Holocaust Educational Trust,
registered as a charitable body, had a conference
on several matters, of which one pointed
specifically indicated that those present,
including Mr Helfgott, were searching for ways to
silence my publications; after this meeting,
minutes were written, including this point 6: "David Irving: Concern was voiced over the
publication of the 2nd edition of Hitler's War.
There was debate over how to approach Macmillan
publishers over Goebbels Diary. It was agreed to
await new[s] from Jeremy Coleman before
deciding what action to take."58 We know more of this meeting from the statement
to this Court by my witness Dr John Fox, who was
present at this cabal in his capacity as editor of
The British Journal of Holocaust Education. He
testifies: As an independently-minded historian, I was
affronted by the suggestion concerning Mr David
Irving [...] At a certain point in the
meeting, attention turned to the subject of Mr
Irving and reports that the publishing company of
Macmillan would be publishing his biography of
JOSEPH GOEBBELS. Mr Ben Helfgott, the Chairman of
the main United Kingdom Yad Vashem Committee, spoke
about how that publication by that publishing firm
might be stopped. Mr Helfgott then turned to me,
the only non-Jew present at the meeting, and
suggested that "John could approach Macmillan to
get them to stop publication". I refused point-blank to accede to that
suggestion, arguing that in a democracy such as
ours one simply could not do such a thing. That
amounted to censorship, especially since nobody
present had the least idea what Mr Irving's
biography of Goebbels would contain. For me, such
attempted censorship was totally unacceptable. I
said that if people did not like what Mr Irving
wrote, the time to respond to him was when anything
was actually published. I - and to their credit, at
least two other (Jewish) committee members -
rejected Mr Helfgott's proposal out of hand. Nevertheless, as the Committee minutes make it
clear, it was planned by some to consider further
action about how best to scupper Mr Irving's
publishing plans with Macmillan. The clandestine pressure on Macmillan's began at
once. My editor at Macmillan's, Roland Philipps,
who had married the new Managing Director Felicity
Rubinstein, noted in an internal memo of January 2,
1992 that they should reassure prospective authors
that they had turned down many other book proposals
from me, and had no plans to continue publishing me
after Goebbels. It was not the bravest of postures
to adopt, this Court might think. "If this helps
you to reassure any prospective authors we are
happy for you to say it (although not too publicly
if possible)."59 The desire of Macmillan's for this
stab in the back to be kept secret from their own
highly successful author is understandable. Their
ultimate stab in the back was however still to
come, in the summer of 1992. In May 1992 we find Deborah Lipstadt providing a
list of her personal targets, including now myself,
to the US Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington;
she advised the USHMM to contact Gail Gans at the
Research Department of the ADL in New York City for
additional names, and "tell her I told you to call
her."60 This establishes that the Defendants
considered that the museum, a US taxpayer-funded
body, was actively participating in their network,
and the museum duly provided press clippings from
London newspapers relating to me, which have now
turned up in the Defendants' files.61 The attempts to suffocate my publishing career
continued. A second arm of this attack also needs
to be mentioned. Since my own imprint would not be
intimidated as easily as Macmillan's, or indeed at
all, the hostile groups applied pressure to major
bookselling chains to burn or destroy my books and
in particular the new edition of HITLER'S WAR. Some
of the press clippings reporting this nasty
campaign are in my Discovery. They include reports
of a sustained campaign of window smashing of the
branches of Waterstone's bookstore in the biggest
Midlands cities, after complaints by "local Jewish
and anti-racist groups."62 Waterstones informed one
Newcastle newspaper that they were taking the book
off public shelves "following a number of vandal
attacks on book stores across the country."63 The
Nottingham Waterstones took the book off display
after a brick was thrown through its window.64 The
campaign was clearly centrally co-ordinated from
London. None of this was reported in the national
press, but one would have thought that these groups
would have recognised the bad karma in any campaign
of smashing windows or burning books. I wrote
privately to Tim Waterstone guaranteeing to
indemnify his chain for their costs of any
uninsured claims.65 He refused to be intimidated by
the campaign, which is one reason why I removed the
names of four Waterstones branch employees from the
list of Defendants in this action at an early
stage. Others took a different line. According to
the Evening Standard, Mr Ivan Lawrence, a QC, MP,
and a member of the Board of Deputies, justified
the vandals who committed the window smashing and
book burning outrages (while formally "condemning"
them).66 The Board was at this time actively organising
violent demonstrations outside my residence. Its
address appeared on at least one leaflets posted
over the West End calling for demonstrations
outside my private address.67 The Campaign against
Fascism in Europe (CAFE, a body identified by a
Sunday Express investigation as a Mossad front),
set up a "broad based temporary united front" in a
"Committee to Stop Irving'." Its primary purpose
was to stage what it called "a mass militant
demonstration" to prevent me from lecturing to a
private seminar in Central London on July 4, 1992
(the topic was Freedom of Speech); it called for "a
working class alliance of . . . black, Jewish,
lesbian and gay" communities. The leaflets which
this faceless body handed out in the West End
stated that I "whitewash Nazi crimes and incite
racist murder."68 I gave copies of these leaflets
to the police. The resulting demonstration was
violent and pointless, because I was still in
Moscow. A photograph in The Observer shows one of
the CAFE posters reading GAS IRVING NOW! The
newspaper reported that seven people were arrested
in the violence, and that my home was under
round-the-clock police guard. It quoted me as
saying that I had received four or five death
threats in the last twenty-four hours. "For thirty
years I have been subjected to a reign of
terror." The same newspaper reported that the Anti-Nazi
League and its parent body the Board of Deputies
were applying pressure to The Sunday Times to
violate its contract with me.69 One reason why I
mention all of this may well be apparent to Your
Lordship: when I made remarks about certain of my
critics, occasionally using vivid language, I had
reason. As an indication of the pressure my family was
under: the West End Central Police station
telephoned to ask permission to film the interior
of my residence, in case we had to be rescued. An
officer informed me that they had received
information of a planned attack. For twelve months
after our young child was born, we lived with a
wicker Moses basket in the furthest corner of our
apartment, near a window, attached to a length of
wire rope in case the building was set on fire and
we had to lower her to safety. I arranged with the
Grosvenor Estate to increase the fire safety
precautions in the building. I have lived since
then with a four foot steel spike stowed in a
strategic point inside my apartment. No historian
should have to live with his family in a civilised
city under such conditions. An orchestrated barrage
of abuse and death threats began on my unlisted
phone number. One of them I recorded. It is one of
the transcripts which the Defendants have not shown
to Your Lordship. At the same time as they organised this campaign
of intimidation, and the attacks on my London and
foreign publishers, the Board and its collaborating
foreign bodies did what they could to hamper my
freedom of movement. On April 1, 1992 South Africa
informed me that I would no longer be allowed to
enter the country.70 On June 5, 1992 the South
African Jewish Board of Deputies wrote a letter to
Michael Whine, executive director of the
corresponding London Board, gloating over this
success.71 An Israeli survey on subsequent events
summarised: "In 1993 the controversial right-wing
historian David Irving was granted a three month
visa to visit South Africa on condition that he
refrain from addressing any public gathering. The
South African Jewish Board of Deputies objected to
the visit. In December it was reported in the press
that Irving had been refused the special permission
he needed to visit South Africa during 1994."72 (It
has taken Nelson Mandela and the ANC to lift this
ban imposed by the outgoing regime.) On June 9, 1992 I was denied entry to Italy to
address university students in Rome.73 That bars me
from access to the Archivi Segreti del Stato, the
Italian state archives in which I worked on
Mussolini's papers. In Canada, Sol Littman, director of the Simon
Wiesenthal Centre in Toronto, joined this
formidable international endeavour to destroy my
career. Once again we do not have to rely on
something as vague as a scholarly "consensus," or
on the opinion of "the social sciences," to learn
what happened. Quoting Littman in their global
report Response at the end of 1992, the parent
Wiesenthal Center in Los Angeles boasted: "Alerted through its international contacts that
Irving was about to begin his 1992
[Canadian] tour, the Wiesenthal Center was
determined to drop Irving in his tracks to prevent
him from entering Canada. A legal research team
provided the Canadian Department of Immigration
with a brief pointing to Irving's conviction in
Germany" - which was for describing the Krematorium I
currently on display to tourists at Auschwitz,
truthfully, as a fake.74 The League of Human Rights
of the B'nai Brith Canada made a similar boast in
their confidential annual report to the 1993 B'nai
Brith Canada convention. Dr Karen Mock bragged in
this document and I rely on this too as proof of
the international nature of this endeavour, to
which the Defendants on this action have added
their weight: British Holocaust denier David Irving attempted
to conduct one of his cross-Canada tours in 1992,
but thanks in part to League [i.e., League of
Human Rights of the B'nai Brith Canada]
interventions, and excellent co-operation between a
number of police agencies and government
departments, Irving was arrested and deported. He
is no longer permitted to enter Canada without
ministerial consent. In both these cases, the
League worked to warn the Immigration department of
these individuals' impending visit and provided
information to government officials. Australian and
South African Jewish communities have used
materials provided by the League to lobby their
governments for similar treatment of Irving.75 Where did the Canadian "materials" come from?
Michael Whine, executive director of the Board of
Deputies, unashamedly revealed the answer in an
affidavit sworn in November 1996.76 He swore this
affidavit in connection with the libel action that
I later sought to bring against the Board. He
confirmed that in response to an appeal by the
Wiesenthal Centre in Toronto for dirt that they
could plant on government files in Canada - a
country I have visited countless times since the
1960s - the Board of Deputies furnished to their
Canadian counterparts two "confidential"
Intelligence reports that they had concocted on me;
the second such report was covered by a letter
dated June 17, 1992. The letter also relayed to
Toronto reports from similar Jewish organisations
in Cape Town and Germany, boasting of their success
in getting me banned from South Africa and fined in
Germany. The intelligence reports which Whine has
admitted he furnished to his Canadian friends
contained vicious and damaging libels: I was said
to have married the daughter of one of General
Franco's top generals to ingratiate myself with the
Spanish falangist movement. This gives a clue to
the fantasy world that the Whines of this world
live in. "Uncorroborated evidence," the document
continued, "implies that Irving has been the
recipient of substantial funding from unknown
sources. It has repeatedly rumoured that these
sources are Nazis." I had been, the report stated
confidently, "active in the British Union of
Fascists." That was another lie. There were hints
that I had maintained improper relations with the
East German authorities, and the totally untrue
statement that during the 1970s "Irving appeared
annually on the public list of 'Enemies of the
State'" compiled by the German Office for the
Protection of the Constitution. And so on.77 When I found out - too late - that this fake
evidence had been planted on Canadian files, I was
angered and astounded that a British organisation
could be secretly doing this to British citizens.
It turned out from these files that academics with
whom I had freely corresponded and exchanged
information, including Gerald Fleming, had been
acting as agents and informants for this body. I
submit that these are the bodies that collaborated
directly or indirectly with the Defendants in the
preparation of the book and that the Defendants,
knowing of the obvious fantasy in some of what they
said, should have shown greater caution in
accepting their materials as true. There was an immediate consequence of this fake
data planted on Canadian files. One data report
recorded the "fact" that I had written many books
denying the Holocaust. That was of course untrue.
In August 1992 a docket was placed on Canadian
Immigration files about me, saying among other
things, "Subject is Holocaust denier, may be
inadmissible" under section A19(1)(d)(1) of the
Act. The Canadian government had been provided by
the Wiesenthal centre with a list of my proposed
travel dates across Canada in October and November
1992. After more lying data was placed on Ottawa
files about me, which I have since retrieved by the
Access to Information Act, a letter was sent to me
by courier stating that I might not be allowed to
enter Canada. I did so, legally, on October 26; I
was arrested on October 28 at Vancouver, and
deported permanently from Canada on November 13,
1992, causing me great damage and financial loss.
Access to the Public Archives of Canada was as
essential for my future research as access to the
Public Record Office in Kew or those archives in
Italy. That is one proof of the direct and
immediate cost of the pernicious label, "Holocaust
denier." There was at this time also a determined attempt
to secure my exclusion from the United States; if
successful, this would finally have sabotaged my
career. A document was circulated, purporting to be
an official U.S. Government intelligence (Office of
Special Investigations) document about me. On my
protest to the U.S. security authorities, they were
good enough to confirm to me after making inquiries
that it was a fake.78 In the same month, when I
arrived at Washington's Dulles airport I was held
in immigration custody for several hours; a senior
official then apologised to me that their inquiries
had determined that somebody had planted a forged
dossier about me on their Immigration Service
computer in an attempt to keep me out. "A yard and
a half of garbage," was how he described it. The
U.S. government again apologised to me, and assured
me in writing that the computer file had now been
cleansed. 79 A few months later Washington area
Jewish organisations started putting pressure on
the big bookstore chains to stop selling my books,
but here they met with blank refusals to
comply.80 The Simon Wiesenthal Center in Toronto which had
orchestrated the Canadian attack on my freedoms
prepared similar intelligence reports of its own on
me, and one of these eventually came to light -
though not without difficulty - in Professor
Lipstadt's Discovery in this action, with a
covering letter from its chief executive, Sol
Littmann, addressed to Professor Lipstadt, the
Second Defendant. It goes in my submission to other
issues in this action, namely damages and costs,
that it required me to issue a summons and make an
application for an Unless Order to enforce the
proper disclosure of these items; and that copies
of the documents to which I was entitled under
Order 24 were withheld from me until the eve of the
hearing of my application; and that Mishcon de Reya
only then furnished me with photocopies of the
document, and with a covering letter which had
seemingly been backdated - the postmark was dated
after the receipt of my summons. In a letter to Professor Lipstadt, Sol Littman
asked her to recognise that one intelligence report
was "not for publication or direct quotation." "It
contains," he explained, "many phrases and comments
that neither you or I would use in a situation
which clearly involves considerable delicacy." The
paper itself, which was originally disclosed to me
shorn of any indication of institution, or author,
or date, was entitled History Rewritten: The World
of David Irving. It listed a number of quotations
from my works, but confirmed what it called (page
256) my "enticing writing style and thorough
archival research" and complained that I continued
revisionist themes "interspersed with genuine
historical insight." Claiming that it was my underlying purpose to
rehabilitate Adolf Hitler and the Third Reich, the
anonymous Canadian author stated these words, words
coming from my enemies which characterise the whole
of the global endeavour to silence me: "Given this accurate version of reality, it is
all the more clear why his activities must be
curtailed, and why his alleged legitimacy must be
eradicated."81 I make no apology for quoting that sentence in
full again notwithstanding Mr Littman's desire that
it should not be quoted. The word eradicated may
even jar us all somewhat, after two months of
debate about meanings of ausrotten: but the fact
remains that this is what these enemies of free
speech have tried for thirty years to do to do - by
hook or by crook, to ruin me, and to destroy my
hard won legitimacy as one of the world's most
original and incorruptible writers on the Third
Reich and its history. Writing in Response, the Wiesenthal Center world
report, Sol Littman reported from Canada that
"while David Irving squirmed, bullied, and lied, in
the end he was booted out of Canada, never to
return without the express permission of the
Immigration Minister."82 The Jewish Chronicle
reported on November 13, 1992 that Bernie Farber,
national director of the Canadian Jewish Congress,
had stated that I was "finished" in North America
which seems therefore to have been their common
intent. Mr Farber was to have been one of the
witnesses of fact chosen by the Defendants; he has
recently been disallowed by Canadian courts from
appearing as a witness in a similar case, because
he is held to be prejudiced.83 His evidence is no
longer before this Court. * * * I now come to Macmillan's final stab in the
back. That is, the hand on the blade was
Macmillan's, but the blade had been forged and
fashioned by all the Defendants in this courtroom,
and by their hidden collaborators overseas. On July 4, 1992, as this Court knows, I had
returned from Moscow with the missing entries of
the Goebbels Diaries exclusively in my possession,
having gone there on behalf of The Sunday Times.
This hard-earned triumph caught my opponents
unawares. Newspapers revealed that the ADL and its
Canadian collaborator, the League of Human Rights
of the B'nai Brith Canada, sent immediate secret
letters to Andrew Neil at The Sunday Times
demanding that he repudiate their contract with
me.84 On Sunday July 5 the London Sunday newspapers
were full of the scoop and also with hostile
comment. On Monday July 6, The Independent
newspaper reported under the headline JEWS ATTACK
PUBLISHER OF IRVING BOOK, that a U.K. body which it
identified as "the Yad Vashem Trust" was piling
pressure on to Macmillan's to abandon its contract
with me to publish GOEBBELS. MASTERMIND OF THE
THIRD REICH, failing which they would urge
booksellers not to stock or promote it. Macmillan's finally took fright that same day,
as I only now know. After their directors inquired,
in an internal memo, how many of my books were
still in their stocks, and having been given totals
of several thousand copies of all three volumes of
my HITLER biography, representing a value of
several hundred thousands pounds, my own editor
Roland Philipps on July 6 issued the secret order
reading: "Please arrange for the remaining stock of
[David Irving's HITLER biographies] to be
destroyed. Many thanks."85 They prepared a "draft
announcement," but it was not released. Although
still a Macmillan author, I was not told. The
royalties due to me on the sale of those books were
lost, destroyed with them. The Defendants' campaign
to destroy my legitimacy as a historian, of which
the book published by the Defendants became an
integral part, had thus reached its first
climax. Macmillan's were still under contract to publish
my GOEBBELS biography. In September that year,
1992, still not suspecting that they had done the
dirty on me and destroyed my books, I wrote to them
asking them to revert all rights in that new
biography to me. Allan Brooke of Hodder Headline,
the second biggest U.K. publishing group, made a
very satisfactory offer two years later for the
rights; he had published my books before while at
Michael Joseph Ltd. Within a few days however the
offer had been formally withdrawn - something which
had never happened to me in a lifetime of
publishing. Brooke told me that he had come under
pressure to revoke his offer. The Defendants' book
had now been published and was now, as yet unknown
to me, in the bookstores. The campaign to silence me was on a broad front,
indeed a global scale, but it also took unusual and
petty forms. For twenty-five years I had spoken as
a guest at my old school, twice a year, to history
classes and sixth formers. On September 19, 1992
the school informed me in a letter that under
"pressure which built up yesterday from Jewish
parents, the Anti-Nazi League and [...] the
press" they had to withdraw their latest
invitation, which they recognised as "a sad day for
the school and for freedom of speech."86 When my
club held a private lecture-meeting that same
month, leaflets and stickers appeared all over the
west end with slogans like "Stop the fascist
agitators," "No more Rostocks" (a reference to an
incident where an asylum seekers' hostel was burned
down), and, more threateningly, "meet at Irving's
home," and providing my private address. The global
nature of all this is evident from an Israeli
survey issued in Tel Aviv "in co-operation with the
[New York based] ADL". This stated, among
successes in preventing various meetings and
lectures from occurring, that "in London the Jewish
community and other groups worked together
[...] and made it difficult for David
Irving and his followers to maintain the fiction of
the 'Clarendon Club.'"87 Letters obtained by legal methods in Canada show
that on October 21 and November 3, 1992, the Board
of Deputies applied secret pressure on the German
embassy to stop me, a British citizen like
themselves, from entering Germany.88 If a ban was
applied, it would spell the end for me as a World
War II historian because I could no longer reach my
publishers, or access my own collections there (of
valuable documents which I had donated to the
German archives), let alone the archives of the
German government. Australia was the next country to be worked
over. The Israeli document quoted above reported
unhappily on the press backlash that had arisen
from pressure applied to the Australian government
to silence me, which, it said, had attracted
editorials in major Australian newspapers
unfavourable to the Jewish community: "The
implication was that a minority group, with
extraordinary clout, had pressured the Australian
government to act against the country's
interest."89 Nothing, they implied, could be further from the
truth. What had happened was this: In September 1992 I
announced to Australian university professors that
I would be visiting their continent for a third
lecture tour early the following year. Alerted to
this tour by the German professor Konrad Kwiet, one
of the Holocaust experts I had written to, the same
organisations applied secret pressure on the then
prime minister, Paul Keating, to refuse me entry.
The Australian Jewish News set up a hue and cry,
reporting that I had "sneaked into Canada," to give
lectures "denying the Holocaust really happened,"
and stating that I "incite the gullible to racist
violence" and that I "have a record of contempt for
anti-racism and immigration laws." Every single one
of these statements was a lie.90 But the lying was
now getting out of hand. When a Munich Court
increased the fine on me for denouncing the Krema I
building at Auschwitz shown to tourists as a
post-war fake, the Board of Deputies issued a
press-release calling me a "Nazi propagandist" who
attending Nazi training camps, and they welcomed
the trebling of the fine. Not surprisingly, no
British newspaper dared to reproduce such libels
but a copy is, significantly, in Professor
Lipstadt's discovery.91 I am of course barred from
using it as the basis for the action which it
deserved. Opponents released to Australian television the
heavily edited version of Michael Schmidt's 1991
videotape of me addressing the crowd at Halle. As
edited, it omitted my visible and audible rebuke to
a section of the crowd for chanting Hitler slogans.
Grotesque libels about me swamped the Australian
press, printed by various organisations including
the New South Wales Board of Deputies and the
Australian Jewish News (February 5, 12, and 19,
1993). One example was an article by a lecturer in
politics: "He [Irving] has a history of
exciting neo Nazi and skinhead groups in Germany
which had burned migrant hostels and killed people.
. . . Irving has frequently spoken in Germany at
rallies . . . under the swastika flag . . . himself
screaming the Nazi salute. . ."92 Unsurprisingly in
retrospect, on February 8, 1993 the Australian
government announced, though to the astonishment of
the regular Australian national press, that I was
to be refused a visa as I was a "Holocaust denier".
They had thus adopted the phrase that the Second
Defendant prides herself on having invented. The new and very damaging ban on visiting
Australia now made it impossible for me to work
again in the National Library of Australia in
Canberra. At great personal expense I appealed to
the Australian Federal Court. The Court declared
the minister's refusal of a visa to be illegal. The
government in Canberra therefore changed the law in
February 1994 to keep me out, and on May 3, 1994
they again refused my application for entry. We
note from Professor Lipstadt's own Discovery that
the immigration minister faxed the decision direct
to one of her source-agencies that same
afternoon.93 In July 1994, as the resulting fresh legal
actions which I had started against the government
still raged, the Second Defendant was invited by
Australian organisations, all expenses paid, to
visit their country; she was to hired to tour
Australia, and to slander my name and reputation
and add her voice to the campaign to have me
refused entry. The Court will perhaps remember the
Australian TV video which I showed, entitled "The
Big Lie." Broadcast on July 1994, it showed both
the expert witness Professor Van Pelt, and Fred
Leuchter standing on the roof of Krema II which Van
Pelt declared to be the centre of the Nazi
genocide, and the Second Defendant being
interviewed while still in Australia (and refusing
once again to "debate" with the revisionists,
rather as she has obstinately refused to go into
the witness stand here). Thus I found myself
excluded from Australia and inevitably New Zealand
too. I lost the ability to visit my many hundreds
of my friends down under, and my own daughter too,
who is an Australian citizen; and I lost all the
bookshop sales that this ban implied in Australia -
where my CHURCHILL biography had hit the No. 1 spot
on the best seller lists. There was one interesting little postscript
which helps to tie all these things together: I
produced a video, a rather unpretentious document
entitled The Search for Truth in History, which was
to travel the Australian continent until I could
again enter myself. A closed session of the video
censorship authority in Sydney was convened, at the
request of the special interest groups who urgently
wanted to suppress my video. Afterwards, the
security authorities discovered that a hidden
microphone had been planted in the chamber.
Indicating that he already had the answer, the
leader of the opposition, Tim Fisher, challenged
the government to admit that it was planted by the
Mossad.94 This is an indication that some very
dangerous forces indeed had aligned themselves
behind the Second Defendant and against me. My lecturing engagements in the British Isles
came under similar attack. I had often spoken to
universities and debating societies including the
Oxford and Cambridge Unions in the past. But now,
in one month, in October 1993 when I was invited to
speak to prestigious bodies at three major Irish
universities, I found all three invitations
cancelled under pressure and the threat of local
Jewish and "anti-fascist" organisations.95 The
irony will not elude the Court that these
Defendants on the one hand have claimed by way of
defence that I speak only to the far-right and
neo-Nazi element, as they describe it, and that it
turns out their own associates are the people who
have done their damnedest to make it impossible for
many others to invite me. Deborah Lipstadt had made meanwhile made some
progress with her book. She told her publisher that she
had written a certain statement "with the marketing
people in mind," - in other words sometimes money
mattered more than content. She had revealed in
September 1991: "I have also spoken to people in
England who have a large cache of material on David
Irving's 'conversion' to denial."96 We don't know,
but we can of course readily suspect, who in this
case those "people" were. She is, once again, not
presenting herself for cross-examination, so there
are many things we cannot ask her about including
(and I would have asked her most tactfully) the
reasons why she was refused tenure at the
University of California and moved downstream to
the lesser university in Atlanta where she now
teaches. In the light of Mr Rampton's strictures on my
now famous little ditty, supposedly urging my
nine-month old little girl not to marry outside her
own people, I should also have wanted to ask
questions of Professor Lipstadt's views on race. We
know that she has written papers, and delivered
many fervent lectures, on the vital importance of
people marrying only within their own race ("We
know what we fight against: . . .," she wrote,
"intermarriage and Israel-bashing, but what is it
we fight for?")97 She has attracted much criticism
from many in her own community for her implacable
stance against mixed marriages. In one book
Lipstadt quotes a Wall Street Journal interview
with a Conservative rabbi, Jack Moline, whom she
called "very brave" for listing ten things that
Jewish parents should say to their children:
"Number one on his list," she wrote (in fact it was
number three), "was 'I expect you to marry
Jews'."98 My one little ditty was a perhaps
tasteless joke. Professor Lipstadt's repeated
denunciation of mixed marriages addressed to adults
was deadly serious. Professor Lipstadt accuses me or error and
falsification, but is apparently unable to spot a
fake even at a relatively close range. She admitted
(in a recent interview with Forward) that she used
the memoirs of the spurious Auschwitz survivor
Benjamin Wilkomirski in her teaching of the
Holocaust, according to Professor Peter Novick.
Those "memoirs" have now been exposed, worldwide,
as fraudulent.
When it turned out that Wilkomirski had never been
near the camp, or in Poland for that matter, but
had spent the war years in comfort living with his
adopted Swiss family, she acknowledged that this
"might complicate matters somewhat," but she
insisted that the Wilkomirski "memoirs" would still
be "powerful" as a novel.99 It may seem unjust to
Your Lordship that it is I who have had to answer
this person's allegation that I distort and
manipulate historical sources. We have Professor Lipstadt's handwritten notes,
evidently prepared for a talk delivered to the ADL
in Palm Beach, Florida, in early 1994. In these, if
I have read her handwriting correctly - and she
appears to be relying on something that Lord
Bullock had just said - she states that my aim
seems to be to de-demonize Hitler; and that I had
said that FDR, Hitler, and Churchill were all
equally criminal. This is hardly "exonerating" any
of them. Summarising HITLER'S WAR (the 1977
edition), she calls me merely a "historian with a
revisionist bent" like A J P Taylor - and she adds,
and this seems significant - "Irving denies that
Hitler was responsible for the murder of European
Jewry. Rather, he claims that Himmler was
responsible. But he does not deny its
occurrence."100 Had she stuck with that view, which
is a very fair summary of my views both then and
now, she and we would not find ourselves here
now. But she was led astray. She
fell in with bad company, or associates. These
things happen. We know that, in conducting her
research for the book, she spoke with the Board of
Deputies, the Institute of Jewish Affairs, and
other such worthy bodies, since she thanks them all
in her Introduction. Some time in 1992 her book was
complete in its first draft, and she sent it to the
people who were paying her, the Hebrew University
of Jerusalem. We do not know what was in the book,
since I cannot question the Second Defendant and
she has not disclosed that early draft, with
Professor Yehuda Bauer's "scribbles" on it,
in her sworn list of documents. It was clearly
discoverable. We do know however what was not in
it: we know that there was no mention of Hizbollah
and Hamas and Louis Farrakhan and the November 1992
terrorists in Stockholm, or of the lie about my
speaking on the same platform with them; in fact we
also know that in this first draft I was
merely mentioned in
passing. This is evident from the letter
which Professor Yehuda Bauer wrote, congratulating
her on November 27, 1992: Bauer complained that the
book lacked the "worldwide perspective," and said:
"Irving is mentioned, but not that he is the
mainstay of Holocaust denial today in Western
Europe."101 Somehow therefore I had to be shoe-horned into
the text before publication. Bauer urged her too
not to write things inadvertently that might
convince the reader that there was "something" to
what revisionists ("deniers") said although that is
hardly a true scholar's method, to suppress mention
of opposing arguments. In a letter to Anthony
Lerman, of the Institute of Jewish Affairs (the
same Mr Lerman who would later spread the lying
word that I had supplied the trigger mechanism for
the Oklahoma City Bomb), Lipstadt revealed that
there was an "earlier incarnation" of the book:
that "earlier incarnation" has not been disclosed
in her sworn list either.102 She had been ordered
to swear an affidavit on her list. When I made a
subsequent complaint about deficient discovery, her
solicitors reminded me that I could not go behind
her affidavit until she presented herself for cross
examination. This chance has been denied to me. Lipstadt spent much of that last month of 1992
putting me into the book, and so herself, into this
courtroom today. They were the weeks after the
spectacular success of the global campaign to
destroy my legitimacy, which culminated in getting
me deported in manacles from Canada on November 13.
"I am just finishing up the book," she wrote to
Lerman on December 18, "and as you can well imagine
David Irving figures into it quite prominently".
She pleaded with Lerman to provide, indeed to fax
to her urgently, materials from "your files". Your
Lordship may think that this haste to wield the
hatchet compares poorly with the kind of in-depth,
years-long research which I conducted on my
biographical subjects. "I think he [Irving]
is one of the more dangerous figures around," she
added, pleading the urgency.103 It was a
spectacular epiphany, this Court might think, given
that only three weeks earlier the manuscript barely
mentioned me, as Bauer had complained. Lerman faxed his materials to her a few days
later: we don't know precisely what, as here too
the Defendants' Discovery is only fragmentary, and
these items were provided to me only in response to
a summons. That is an outline of the damage, and the
people, including specifically the Defendants in
this action, who were behind it. Mr Rampton
suggested at a very early stage that I had brought
all of this on myself, that I had even deserved it
- he was talking about the hate-wreath that was
sent to me on the death of my daughter. We shall
see. 
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