 Deborah
Lipstadt's Defence (continued) All
hyperlinks are added by this Website and are not
part of the original document | (iii) In October 1990, the Plaintiff
lectured to the Tenth said conference. Amongst
his fellow speakers was Dr Robert Faurisson. The
Plaintiff's lecture was introduced by Mark
Weber. Mr Weber described how at the trial of
Ernst Zundel (see (7) below), the Plaintiff had
explained in detail why he now accepted the
Revisionist view of the extermination story. Mr
Weber called the Plaintiff "a kind of one-man
IHR", and set out the conclusion of the
Plaintiff's address in Dresden on the
anniversary of the fire-bombing of that city in
which he said: "Ladies and gentlemen, survivors and
descendants of the holocaust of Dresden, the
holocaust of Germans in Dresden really happened.
That of the Jews in the gas chambers of
Auschwitz is an invention. I am ashamed to be an
Englishman". (iv) In the course of his said lecture to the
IHR in 1990 (to the whole of which the First
Defendants will refer) the Plaintiff said (inter
alia): |  "Just
picture me seven years ago, in 1983. I'm at the
press conference of the West German Magazine Der
Stern, in Hamburg. I'd been smuggled in
disguised as a reporter for Bild-Zeitung, which
is the opposition newspaper group in Germany. I
was very familiar with the Hitler case: I'd
spent twenty years of my life studying the story
of Adolf Hitler. I'd built up a personal card
index on his life - about 30,000 index cards -
and when they told me that they were about to
publish the Hitler diaries, I knew it was phony!
So Bild-Zeitung said: "Will you come along
disguised as our press correspondence and attend
this damned press conference and blow it up for
them"? So I went along. I was the first one at
the microphone, and I was the first one to have
the chance to ask the people at Der Stern
certain questions. I said right out: "The
diaries are fake - the Adolf Hitler diaries are
fake!" They'd spent nine million deutschmarks on
them! And all the German historians had said
they were genuine. Eberhard Jäckel had said
they were genuine, so they must be genuine - but
they weren't.I got the same kind of feeling about the
Holocaust. (I'm going to come to Rommel further
on). But it's the same story, because when we
come to look at the story of Field Marshall
Rommel, and the legend that he was a member of
the anti-Hitler resistance movement, that he was
a hero of the twentieth of July, 1944, a story
that has come down for forty years, since World
War Two - we find that nobody has bothered to go
back and look at the actual records. They all
believed what everybody else had written about
him. And it isn't until you go back and look at
the records that you realise that the truth is
somewhere else". This how it was when I was in Toronto a
couple of years ago. I was called as an expert
witness as a historian to give evidence at the
Ernst Zundel case, where Zundel's researchers
showed me the Leuchter Report, the laboratory
tests on the crematoria and the gas chambers. As
a person who, at University in London, studied
chemistry and physics and the exact sciences, I
knew that this was an exact result. There was no
way around it. And suddenly all that I'd read in
the archives clicked into place. You have to
accept that, if there is no evidence anywhere in
the archives that there were any gassings going
on; that if there's not one sing German document
that refers to the gassings of human beings -
not one wartime German document; and if there is
no reference anywhere in the German archives to
anybody giving orders for the gassings of
people, and if, on the other hand, the forensic
tests of the laboratories, of the crematoria,
and the gas chambers and Auschwitz and so on,
show that there is no trace, no significant
residue whatsoever of a cyanide compound, then
this can all only mean one thing. So how do we explain the fact that for
forty-five years since the end of World War Two,
we have all, internationally, globally, been
beset by a common guilt: the idea that the human
race was responsible for liquidating six million
human beings in gas chambers? Well, the answer
is: we have been subjected to the biggest
propaganda offensive that the human race has
ever known. It's been conducted with such
finesse, with such refinement, with such
financial clout, that we have not been able to
recognize it as a propaganda offensive - from
start to finish. And yet there are these weapons
cruising past us on the horizon - in all their
ugliness - and the biggest weapon, of course, of
all in this propaganda campaign against the
truth since 1945 has been the great battleship
Auschwitz! And we have now, at last, the
historical profession - above all, the
Revisionist historical profession - have found
as our own task, the major task: "Sink the
Auschwitz!"
| I warned you that I was going to show
no respect for tests in the first part of this
talk. Sink the Auschwitz! But we haven't had to
sink the Auschwitz, because the crew of the
Auschwitz, Beate Klarsfeld, the Wiesenthals,
Elie Wiesel and the rest of them, have been
struggling on the bridge and battling with each
other - boxing and engaging in fisticuffs - and
the Auschwitz has been steering itself amongst
the icebergs, and finally it has begun to
scuttle itself. They have begun to haul down the
flat of the battleship Auschwitz. They've taken
down the placard, they've taken down the
memorial to the four million, and they've
replaced it with a rather smaller memorial to
one million.Of course that's not the end of the story.
I'm convinced that it's just the "interim
memorial". I think it's on cardboard, if you
have a close look, because why waste money on an
expensive memorial when you're only going to
have to change it again in a few months time!
They're going to have to change it because it's
quite obvious. I'm not going to say only a
million - I'm not going to say only any figure
died in Auschwitz. We don't know the exact
figures of how many people died in
Auschwitz... That's what's happening in Germany now.
They're still sticking to the six million
figure. And they're still being told that they
were gassed. Although all the evidence runs the
other way. To me, Auschwitz is unimportant - I'm
happy that the ship is scuttling itself. It's
vanishing. It's going to be left like the
battleship Arizona at Pearl - if you ever go to
Hawaii and have a look at it - with just its
mast sticking out of the water to mark where
once a great legend stood. And when people go
there a hundred years from now and say: "Down
there is the most incredible legend that people
believed for fifty years: it's the great
battleship Auschwitz, it was scuttled by its
crew!" Why don't we have to believe it? Well, you
know about the Leuchter Report".  The First Defendants will further rely on a
comparison between the use made by the Plaintiff
in his lecture of what was said by Professor
Arno Mayer in his book "Why Did the Heavens Not
Darken?", and what was actually said in the book
in context, as an example of manipulation of
source material (see (16) and following
below); (v) In October 1992 the Plaintiff lectured to
the 11th said conference. Amongst his fellow
speakers were Arthur Butz, author of "The Hoax
of the Twentieth Century", which purports to
prove that there was never a Holocaust, Fred
Leuchter, Ahmed Rami described by the IHR as a
gallant Moroccan who has become a radio apostle
for Revisionism in Sweden and who tells of his
jail sentence for "lack of respect" for Jews in
Sweden, and (by videotape, since he was refused
permission to enter the USA) Ernst Zundel, a
Canadian neo-Nazi. | (6) Ernst Zundel, is the author of "The Hitler
We Loved and Why", published by "White Power
Publications" which concluded with the proclamation
that Hitler's spirit "soars beyond the shores of
the White Man's home in Europe. Where we are, he is
with us. WE LOVE YOU, ADOLF HITLER!"; and also of
the book, "UFOs: Nazi Secret Weapons?" which argued
that UFOs were Hitler's secret weapons and are
still in use at bases in the Antarctic beneath the
earth's surface. Zundel advocates fascism, denies
that the Holocaust occurred and created Samisdat
Publications to reprint and distribute material
which was racist, anti-semitic and which denied the
Holocaust. (7)
In 1988, Zundel was prosecuted by the Canadian
Government (for the second time) for stimulating
anti-semitism through the publication and
distribution of material he knew to be false.
(Zundel was convicted on that charge at the first
trial, but the conviction was overturned on
appeal). The Plaintiff gave evidence at that second
trial on Zundel's behalf, purportedly as an expert
witness. The Plaintiff was shown by Zundel's
researchers, the so-called "Leuchter Report", ("the
Report"). which purported to be an expert report
based on a visit by Fred Leuchter and Dr Robert
Faurisson to Auschwitz - Birkenau and Majdanek, and
which proved (so its author claimed) that there had
never been any homicidal gassing at Auschwitz,
Birkenau and Majdanek. The Plaintiff adopted the
said report enthusiastically. As he said at the IHR
meeting referred to at (5)(iv) above: "As a person who, at University in
London, studied chemistry and physics and the
exact sciences, I knew this was an exact result.
There was no way round it. And suddenly all that
I'd read in the archives clicked into place. You
have to accept that, if there is no evidence
anywhere in the archives that there were any
gassings going on; that if there's not one
single German document that refers to the
gassing of human beings...and if, on the other
hand, the forensic tests of the laboratories, of
the crematoria, and the gas chambers and
Auschwitz and so on, show that there is no
trace, no significant residue whatsoever of a
cyanide compound, then this can all only mean
one thing..." [no gassings of human beings
(at Auschwitz-Birkenau) in gas
chambers]. (8) In fact, Fred Leuchter had no expertise in
the matters upon which he purported to give an
expert view in the Report, and his evidence as a
self-styled expert was (rightly) rejected (save to
a very limited extent) by the Canadian Court, for
that reason. Moreover, the scientific validity and
methodology of the Report were fundamentally
flawed. Though Leuchter claimed an expertise in
engineering, he had none. Indeed in June 1991, 2
weeks before Leuchter was due to go on trial in
Massachussets for practising or offering to
practice engineering without a licence, Leuchter
signed a consent agreement admitting that he was
not and never had been a professional engineer, and
had fraudulently presented himself to various
states as an engineer with the ability to consult
on matters concerning execution technology.
Leuchter further acknowledged that though he was
not an engineer and had never taken an engineering
licensing test, he had produced reports, including
the Report containing his engineering opinions.
Henceforth, Leuchter agreed to cease and desist,
presenting himself as an engineer and issuing any
reports, including the Report. Return
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| Index
to this Case
| Plaintiff's
Claim | (9) By then the Plaintiff had published under
his Focal Point imprint, the English edition of the
Report entitled "Auschwitz: The End of the Line:
The Leuchter Report - The First Forensic
Examination of Auschwitz", with a foreword written
by the Plaintiff. In that foreword, the Plaintiff
said: "UNLIKE THE WRITING OF HISTORY,
chemistry is an exact science. Old fashioned
historians have always conducted endless learned
debates about meanings and interpretations, and
the more indolent among them have developed a
subsidiary Black Art of "reading between the
lines", as a substitute for wading into the
archives of World War II documents which are now
available in embarrassing abundance.Recently, however, the more daring modern
historians have begun using the tools of
forensic science - carbon-dating, gas
chromatography, and simple ink-aging tests - to
examine, and not infrequently dispel, some of
the more tenaciously held myths of the twentieth
century Sometimes the public is receptive to the
results, sometimes not. The negative results of
the laboratory analysis of the ancient Shroud of
Turin is one example: it is not a deliberate
fake, perhaps, but nor was it nearly as old as
the priests would have had centuries of gullible
tourists believe. It is unlikely that the world's public will
be as receptive, yet, to the results of the
professional and dispassionate chemical
examination of the remains of the wartime
Auschwitz concentration camp which is at the
centre of this report. Nobody likes to be swindled, still less where
considerable sums of money are involved. (Since
1949 the State of Israel has received over 90
billion Deutschmarks in voluntary reparations
from West Germany, essentially in atonement for
the "gas chambers of Auschwitz"). And this myth
will not die easily: Too many hundreds of
millions of honest, intelligent people have been
duped by the well-financed and brilliantly
successful post-war publicity campaign which
followed on from the original ingenious plan of
the British Psychological Warfare Executive
(PWE) in 1942 to spread to the world the
propaganda story that the Germans were using
"gas chambers" to kill millions of Jews and
other "undesirables". As late as August 1943 the head of the PWE
minuted the Cabinet secretly that despite the
stories they were putting out, there was not the
slightest evidence that such contraptions
existed, and he continued with a warning that
stories from Jewish sources in this connection
were particularly suspect. As a historian, I have, on occasion, had
recourse to fraud laboratories to test
controversial documents for their authenticity.
In the late 1960s I discarded certain diaries of
Vice Admiral Wilhelm Canaris, offered to myself
and the publishers William Collins Ltd, since
Messrs. Hehner & Cox Ltd of the City of
London advised me that the ink used for one
signature did not exist during the war years. It
was I who exposed the "Hitler Diaries" as fakes
at Der Stern's famous International Press
Conference in Hamburg in April 1983. And yet I have to admit that it would never
have occurred to me to subject the actual fabric
of the Auschwitz concentration camp and its "gas
chambers" - the holiest shrines of this new
Twentieth Century religion - to chemical tests
to see if there was any trace of cyanide
compounds in the walls. | The truly astounding results are as set
out in this report: while significant quantities
of cyanide compounds were found in the small
de-lousing facilities of the camp where the
proprietary (and lethal) Zyklon B compound was
used, as all are agreed, to disinfect the
plague-ridden clothing of all persons entering
these brutal slave-labour camps, no significant
trace whatsoever was found in the buildings
which international opinion - for it is not more
than that - has always labelled as the camp's
infamous gas chambers. Nor, as the report's
gruesomely expert author makes plain, could the
design and construction of those buildings have
made their use as mass gas-chambers feasible
under any circumstances.For myself, shown this evidence for the first
time when called as an expert witness at the
Zundel trial in Toronto in April 1988, the
laboratory reports were shattering. There could
be no doubt as to their integrity. I myself
would, admittedly, have preferred to see more
rigorous methods used in identifying and
certifying the samples taken for analysis, but I
accept without reservation the difficulties that
the examining team faced on location in what is
now Poland; chiselling out the samples from the
hallowed site under the very noses of the new
camp guards. The video tapes made simultaneously
by the team - which I have studied - provide
compelling visual evidence of the scrupulous
methods that they used. Until the end of this tragic century there
will always be incorrigible historians,
statesmen and publicists who are content to
believe, or have no economically viable
alternative but to believe, that the Nazis used
"gas chambers" at Auschwitz to kill human
beings. But it is now up to them to explain to
me as an intelligent and critical student of
modern history why there is no significant trace
of any cyanide compound in the building which
they have always identified as the former gas
chambers. Forensic chemistry is, I repeat, an exact
science. The ball is in their court. David Irving
London, W1
May
1989" (10) In an Early Day Motion, in the 1988/9
session of Parliament, 92 Members of Parliament
condemned the Plaintiff and the Report as
follows:-
"That this House, on the occasion of
the reunion in London of 1000 refugees from the
Holocaust, most of whose families were killed in
gas chambers, or otherwise by Nazi murderers, is
appalled by the allegation by Nazi propagandist
and long-time Hitler apologist David Irving that
the infamous gas chambers of Auschwitz,
Treblinka and Majdenak did not exist, ever,
except perhaps as the brain-child of Britain's
brilliant wartime Psychological Warfare
Executive; draws attention to a new fascist
publication, the Leuchter report, in which this
evil column appears; and condemns without
qualification such pernicious works of Hitler's
heirs." (11) In an Early Day Motion, in the 1991/2
session of Parliament, 43 Members of Parliament
condemned the Plaintiff and his aforesaid views and
the Plaintiff's activity in smuggling Leuchter, the
subject of an exclusion order by the Home Secretary
into the United Kingdom. The Plaintiff had done so
in order that Leuchter could speak at a meeting
organised by the Plaintiff which coincided with the
publication by the Plaintiff of the revised version
of Hitler's War, held at Chelsea Town Hall in
November 1991. The meeting was addressed by the
Plaintiff and was attended by prominent members of
the National Front and the BNP (which organisations
were described by the Plaintiff after the meeting
as NCOs and foot soldiers). Return
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| Index
to this Case
| Plaintiff's
Claim | (12) Whilst publicly denying the Holocaust (for
example see (1)(v) and (5)(iv) above) in the new
edition of "Hitler's War" in 1991, the Plaintiff
wrote extensively about the shooting of hundreds of
thousands of Jews, including women and children, by
the Einsatzgruppen in the East, mentioned the
152,000 Jews killed at Chelmo on 8 December 1941
only to propose that an official exchange of
letters, six months later proved Hitler had nothing
to do with them, and referred to the "thousands
[of Jews] evidently being murdered",
between March 1942 and July 1942, without
explaining how they were killed, again emphasising
that Hitler knew nothing. (13) The Plaintiff holds extremist views (see
above). He described himself as "a mild fascist"
(or took no objection to being so described until
recently), and said he had visited Hitler's eyrie
at Berchtesgarten and regarded it as a shrine. The
Plaintiff has also said,
"I am more sympathetic to Hitler than others have
been ... I may well exchange pleasantries with
Andries Tremact but he lacks Adolf Hitler's
charisma ...". The Plaintiff has a small
self-portrait of Hitler in a glass case in his
study, and other Nazi memorabilia. The Plaintiff
believes in the benevolent repatriation of
immigrants. (14) Moreover, the Plaintiff has strong links
with Ewald Althans, the leading neo-Nazi in Munich,
who is anti-semitic, and racist (and proud of it).
Althans booked the Plaintiff's hotel in Munich for
him under a pseudonym in May 1992, and sells and
distributes the Plaintiff's books, videos and
cassettes. (15) As a result of the Plaintiff's aforesaid
views and activities, the Plaintiff has been
deported from Austria (inter alia, for his
extremist views and his connections with the German
extremist group, the DVU); and banned from entering
Australia, Canada and Germany. The Plaintiff has
also been banned from the German State
Archives. Return
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| Index
to this Case
| Plaintiff's
Claim | 
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