(12)*
The Plaintiff submits that the whole of World
War Two can be defined as a Holocaust. This he
has never denied. He considers it invidious to
single out one single act of mass murder of
innocents and to label it 'The Holocaust,' as
though there was none other. If however the
Defendants seek to define the Holocaust as the
mass murder of Jews by the Nazis and their
cohorts during World War II, then the Plaintiff
maintains that he has at no time denied it; on
the contrary, he has rendered it more plausible
by investigating documents, questioning
witnesses, and uncovering fresh sources and
making no secret of for example the alleged
liquidation of 152,000 Jews at Chelmno on
December 8, 1941 about which he wrote in
HITLER'S WAR, 1991 edition, at page 426. At page
7 of his book on aerial warfare against
civilians von guernica bis vietnam (From
Guernica to Vietnam), the very first page of
text, the Plaintiff emphasised: 'The massacre of
minorities by the National Socialists in Germany
. . . probably cost more lives than all the air
raids carried out to the present date.' It is a
particularly mischievous and damaging libel to
call the Plaintiff 'a Holocaust denier', a lie
worthy of the Nazi propaganda minister Dr
Goebbels himself.
(13)*
(i) It is denied that the Plaintiff
holds extremist views.(ii) It is denied that the Plaintiff has
ever described himself as a 'mild
fascist.' Thirty-eight years ago, on May
1, 1959, The Daily Mail printed
a purported interview with the Plaintiff,
then registered as an undergraduate student
at Imperial College, London, by journalist Mr
Clifford Luton. The published report
contained many statements by Luton that were
defamatory and untrue; the Plaintiff was then
aged twenty-one, and unable even to finance
his university education, let alone to
institute libel proceedings against a
newspapers possessed of unlimited funds. Mr
Luton vanished from sight after criminal
charges for child-molesting were laid against
him. After the Plaintiff's first book
THE DESTRUCTION OF
DRESDEN was published (April 1963),
serialised in The Sunday Telegraph, and
became a best-seller, a certain London-based
organisation
resuscitated this and the other alleged
quotations as part of an extraordinary
campaign of dirty
tricks designed to discredit the
Plaintiff, which ended only after Scotland
Yard's Special Branch was called in. When one
Arthur Pottersman repeated
the lies in 1963 in The Daily Sketch the
Plaintiff instructed his solicitor Michael
Rubinstein to issue proceedings, but again
financial restraints prevented the issue of a
writ. The Plaintiff has repeatedly objected,
but the same organisation has continued
to circulate these lies, while of course
concealing their vintage (anno 1959), in a
global campaign of vilification which as he
will show to the court has endured to the
present day. The Plaintiff will submit that
they are the primary source of the
Defendants' libels on this occasion too.
(iii) The Plaintiff admits that along with
tens of millions of other tourists he has
visited Berchtesgaden -- once in 1958, and
once in 1990. Most 'shrines' might seem to
qualify for more than two visits in a
lifetime. The source of the alleged
quotation, which is denied, is again The
Daily Mail, May 1, 1959. See para. 13 (ii)
above.
(iv) The Plaintiff denies having made the
remarks in quotation marks ('I am . . .
charisma').
(v) The Plaintiff possesses a small
pencilled self-portrait executed by Adolf
Hitler in about 1930. The head measures
2·5 inches by 2·5 inches. It is not
on display. He denies that there are 'Nazi
memorabilia' on display in his office or at
all; he admits that there are three framed
and fast fading front pages of historic
issues of the Völkischer Beobachter --
reporting respectively the Ludendorff
funeral, the start of the Kristallnacht, and
Hitler's famous speech of January 30, 1939,
'Eine der größten Reden Adolf
Hitlers: prophetische Warnung an das
Judentum' (One of the Führer's greatest
speeches. Prophetic warning to Jewry). There
are also engravings of the opposing generals
in the Franco-Prussian war, and a signed
photograph of Winston Churchill (endorsed to
its original owner, 'Your friendship has been
a privilege to me'). The relevance and
admissibility of the final sentence of para.
13 are denied.
(14)*
The relevance and admissibility of this
paragraph are denied.
(15)*
(i) It is denied that the Plaintiff
is banned from Austria.
After a campaign of vilification conducted by
the above-mentioned London-based organisation
and related bodies in Austria in 1983, the
Austrian authorities arrested the Plaintiff
at the start of a lawful lecture tour in June
1983 and took him to the border with Germany.
In a Viennese court action brought by the
Plaintiff against the Austrian minister of
the interior, the expulsion was declared
unlawful and the Plaintiff was awarded
damages against the Austrian state.
Thereafter he was free once more to enter
Austria, and legally did so as recently as
July 1993. The Plaintiff also instituted
successful proceedings for abuse of official
authority against the officers concerned.(ii) It is admitted that the Plaintiff is
currently banned from entering Germany.
Under pressure from the same above-mentioned
London-based organisation as is evidenced by
secret letters passing between it and the
German embassy in London and the offices of
the German intelligence agency known as the
Bundesamt für Verfassungsschutz, in 1990
the German government issued a secret edict,
illegal under European Union law, instructing
border officials not to allow the Plaintiff
in; no efforts were however made to prevent
his entry until November 1993. As traversed
hereinbefore it is denied that the Plaintiff
has extremist views, and also that he has
connections with any extremist German group.
The DVU (German People's Union) is a
long-standing democratic and lawfully
constituted German political organisation
which stands candidates in national and
municipal elections.
(iii) It is admitted that the Plaintiff is
currently banned from entering Canada.
In a further attempt to destroy the
Plaintiff's livelihood and reputation, in
June 1992 the same above-mentioned
London-based organisation,
as it has deposed in a sworn affidavit,
secretly transferred to a sister
body in Canada a lengthy purported
intelligence
report, which it now concedes is
substantially untrue, for the latter body to
submit to the Canadian authorities with the
express intention, in which it ultimately
succeeded, of preventing the Plaintiff's
entry to Canada for his lawful purposes of
research, publishing, and lecturing. As a
result of this campaign, which included the
planting by persons unknown of false
information on Canadian and United States
official computer databases about the
Plaintiff, the Canadian government excluded
the Plaintiff from the country. The Plaintiff
was in 1993 refused
leave to appeal against this unlawful
measure, without any reason being stated.
(iv) It is admitted that the Plaintiff is
currently banned from entering Australia.
Coming under intense
pressure from the same international
lobby, Australia refused the Plaintiff
permission to enter for his third visit in
1993, on the grounds that he had been
excluded from Canada. The Australian Federal
Court allowed his appeal on September 16,
1993, declaring the exclusion to be illegal.
By then the Australian government, coming
under continued pressure, had already
preemptively changed the immigration law
in
order to exclude the Plaintiff
permanently, as will be shown at the hearing
of this action.
MEANING
(I) -- (III), (V) 'HITLER'S
WAR'*
(16)
It is admitted that on June 9, 1977 Hodder &
Stoughton Ltd published the Plaintiff's
biography HITLER'S WAR.
The book was published in the United States of
America by The Viking Press -- now
Viking-Penguin Inc., parent company of the First
Defendants -- and kept in print by Macmillan
Ltd until about
1992. The book met an overwhelmingly
positive response from the world's leading
reviewers.
Already in the Introduction at pages xii and
xv of this edition (and at pages 5 and 20 of the
more comprehensive Introduction
to the revised 1991 edition) the Plaintiff
makes explicit reference to the crimes committed
by Hitler.
(17)*
For the Defendants' false reference to 'one
vital document' in the case of the death of
Sikorski see paras. 51 and 52 below.
It is denied that the Plaintiff offered, as
falsely stated by the Defendants, just one
document (HITLER'S WAR
first edition, at page xiv) or represented that
this alone presented 'incontrovertible evidence'
that Hitler was not responsible for the
extermination of the Jews; the Defendants'
reference is to one documented instance when
Hitler ordered
that there was to be no liquidation of Jews. The
Second Defendant places an exaggerated
construction on the book's first (1977) edition.
In this first edition, in the later (1991)
edition (summarised therein at pages 16-21), and
in subsequent works the Plaintiff built up and
refined his argument that when each wartime
document was subjected to rigid historical
criteria, namely as to its authenticity, the
reason for its existence, and the vantage point
of its author (rejecting e.g. documents of
purely janitorial level; postwar oral trial
evidence; spurious diaries), a relatively slim
dossier of evidence resulted which portrayed
Hitler intervening in every instance to mitigate
or lessen wrongdoing against the Jews.
Apart
from the content of his speeches and public
proclamations, which were often of a Delphic
ambiguity, there were few, if any, documents of
comparable quality -- documents which met the
same criteria -- giving the opposite sense.
Within the constraints imposed by the rule O.18,
r 7, the Plaintiff lists some of the documents
on which he relied (and relies) as, in
sequence:--
(a) As stated in the Plaintiff's book
GÖRING, A BIOGRAPHY,
at page 59, a police sergeant giving evidence at
the 'Treason Trial, Adolf Hitler et al.,' held
in Munich between February 26 and April 1, 1924
testified that during the November 9, 1923
putsch when Hitler learned that a Nazi squad had
ransacked a kosher grocer's during the night, he
sent for the ex-army lieutenant who had led the
raid and dismissed him from the Party on the
spot, saying: 'I shall see that no other
nationalist unit allows you to join either!'
(The source is the transcript of the police
sergeant's evidence, on U.S. National Archives
microfilm; to the knowledge of the Plaintiff no
other historian has ever quoted this passage,
finding it hard to reconcile with their
obsessively held views.)
(b) Hitler's adjutants who were eye-witnesses
told the Plaintiff that on the night of the
November 1938 'Kristallnacht'
(Night of Broken Glass) Hitler spent the whole
night intervening with Heinrich Himmler
[picture],
Joseph Goebbels, the police chief of Munich von
Eberstein, and others to quell the pogrom that
Goebbels had mischievously started (see para. 36
[viii] below).
(c) On November 30, 1941 the SS chief
Heinrich Himmler went by special train to
Hitler's headquarters. From 'The Bunker', as
Himmler noted,
he 
conducted
a phone conversation with Reinhard Heydrich, the
SS Gruppenführer placed between him and the
operational SS units, in the course of which he
jotted down: 'Judentransport aus Berlin. Keine
Liquidierung.' (Transport of Jews from Berlin.
No liquidation.) The Plaintiff was the first
historian to transcribe this inscription
although it had been available to historians for
twenty years.
(d) Hitler made references on several
occasions when talking with Dr Goebbels, who
recorded them in his diary, and with his
table
guests (the adjutants of Reichsleiter Martin
Bormann or Reich minister Alfred Rosenberg took
notes), to his plans for solving the Jewish
problem, which remarks are impossible to
reconcile with Hitler's having a detailed
knowledge of what has become known as the
Holocaust.
(e) In the spring of 1942 the
Staatssekretär (permanent
under-secretary) at the Reich Ministry of
Justice Dr Franz Schlegelberger recorded the
following note:
'Reich minister Lammers [chief of the Reich
Chancellery] has informed me that the
Führer has repeatedly declared to him that
he wants the Solution of the Jewish Problem
postponed until after the war is over.'
(Nuremberg Document 4025-PS; German Federal
Archives file R.22 / 52, at page 01 / 111). No
other historians have quoted this document,
possibly finding its content hard to reconcile
with their obsessively held views.
On June 11, 1947, Kabinettsrat Dr Hans
Ficker, a top civil servant of the Reich
Chancellery, testified on oath that he had sent
his finance department chief Dr Gottfried Boley
to the post-Wannsee
conference of March 6, 1942, and that Ficker,
Kritzinger, and Boley had drawn up a note on the
conference. Lammers had taken this to Hitler,
but came back with a memorandum, 'Any discussion
on the whole business is to be postponed until
the end of the war.' That must have been in
March 1942. 'To our horror we learned later that
things went on nevertheless behind the scenes'
(National Archives microfilm M.1019 / 17). Boley
testified in support of this on September 15,
1945, recalling Hitler's postponement order, and
his own distaste at the callousness of the SS
representatives at the meeting (ibid., M.1270 /
2); and he testified again on June 10, 1947
(ibid., M.1019 / 8), emphasising that there was
no talk whatever of 'the really gruesome
[grausigen] things' but only of
preliminaries like evacuation and sterilisation
of the Jews.
(f) At midday on April 20, 1942, after
visiting Hitler, Himmler stated in a phone call,
of which he also jotted down a note, to Heydrich
that there was to be no liquidation of gypsies
('Keine Vernichtung d. Zigeuner'). The
Plaintiff will maintain that these murders
provide a clear parallel to the tragedy of the
Jews. No other historians have ever quoted this
document, finding it hard to reconcile with
their obsessively held views.
(g) As stated in the Plaintiff's book
GÖRING, A BIOGRAPHY,
at page 347, on July 6, 1942, after
visiting Hitler two days before, Hermann
Göring stated: 'I've just briefed the
Führer about this. We have exploited one
Jew in Vienna for two years, and another in the
field of photography, because they've got things
we need of the utmost value to us at this time.
It would be madness to say, "He'll have to go!
of course he's a great researcher, a fantastic
brain, but he's got a Jewish wife and can't be
at the university, and so on." The Führer
has made similar exceptions all the way down to
operetta level.' (The Plaintiff found the
verbatim transcript in the official files of
Field Marshal Erhard Milch, retained in the
British air ministry historical branch, volume
58, pages 3,640 et seq.)
(h) On October 6, 1943 at 1:30 p.m.
Ribbentrop received a message from Consul
Moellhausen in Rome, reporting that SS
Obersturmbannführer Kappler had been
instructed to arrest the eight thousand Jews
living in Rome and take them to Upper Italy
'where they are to be liquidated;' and that the
commandant of Rome, Luftwaffe General Stahel,
was objecting. Upon receiving this telegram, the
foreign minister Joachim von Ribbentrop visited
Hitler at his headquarters The Wolf's Lair. He
lunched with Hitler at two p.m. on October 6,
and his liaison officer at the Wolf's Lair,
Walther Hewel had several meetings with Hitler
on October 6, 8, and 9, 1943. Ribbentrop's aide
Franz von Sonnleithner sent to the minister's
office on October 9, 1943 a telex stating that
Ribbentrop asked that their ambassador in Italy,
Rudolf Rahn, and consul in Rome, Moellhausen,
should be informed 'that by a Führer
Directive the 8,000 Jews living in Rome are to
be taken to Mauthausen, Upper Danube, as
hostages' (Nuremberg Document NG-5027) -- i.e.,
kept alive.
(18)*
It is admitted that this is an accurate excerpt
from pages xiii -- xiv of the first edition. The
Defendants fail however to mention that in the
1991 edition of the same book, the Plaintiff
sets out at pages 18-19 the same argument in
much greater detail, introducing the collateral
evidence as listed in paras. 17 (a) - 17 (h)
above.
(19)*
It is denied that the Plaintiff claimed at pages
332, 393, and 504 of the first (1977) edition of
HITLER'S WAR that this
document (the telephone note of November 30,
1941) alone proved that Hitler positively
forbade the murder of the Jews or that Jews were
exterminated in gas chambers or that the said
extermination was the unauthorised policy of
Himmler alone.
(20)*
The Plaintiff, who is as is admitted by the
Defendants at para. 54 adequately versed in the
German language, submits that in the absence of
contextual documentation to narrow the sense to
just one meaning, the German noun Transport
(as in the phrases Judentransport aus
Berlin. Keine Liquidierung) can be properly
understood either as 'transport' in the sense of
a ship (i.e., transporter) or one-time shipment,
or 'transportation' in the sense of a repetitive
movement. It is denied that it is clear from the
document in question that the phrase applied to
one particular transport, or to a train
transport. It is admitted that the phrases are
ominous and indicate that they imply that
liquidation was in the air. It is submitted
however that it accords perfectly with the
Plaintiff's hypothesis that Himmler, visiting
Hitler's bunker, proposed this solution, and
that Hitler rejected it.
After the publication of the first edition of
the Plaintiff's HITLER'S
WAR, colleagues provided him with
documentation which usefully narrowed down the
reference in the Himmler-Heydrich phone note of
November 30, 1941 to one particular trainload of
Jews being shipped from Berlin to Riga at that
time; far from seeking to manipulate or conceal
the truth, the Plaintiff willingly accepted this
refinement and amended the 1991 edition
accordingly (at pages 19--20, 427), as well as
providing more
corroborating detail in his recent biography
of GOEBBELS. MASTERMIND OF THE
THIRD REICH (at pages 378-9 and 645 at
note 43) to both of which volumes reference will
be made at the trial of this action.
(21)*
It is denied that the plate -- Himmler's
handwritten note on his telephone conversation
with Heydrich -- was not transcribed apart from
the two italicised sentences set out in (20)
above. The Plaintiff draws attention to HITLER'S
WAR, 1991 edition, which reads at page 19:
Perplexed by Himmler's handwritten
note about a call to Heydrich after visiting
Hitler's bunker on November 30, 1941--
'arrest [of] Dr Jakelius. Alleged son
Molotov. Consignment [Transport] of
Jews from Berlin. No liquidation.'-- these
wizards of modern history scoffed that
probably Molotov's son was believed to be
aboard a trainload of Jews from Berlin
concealed as 'Dr Jakelius' and was on no
account to be liquidated. In fact Molotov had
no son, Dr Jakelius was a Viennese
neurologist involved in the Euthanasia
program; and the consignment of Jews from
Berlin had that morning arrived at Riga and
had already been liquidated by the local SS
commander by the time that Himmler scribbled
down Hitler's injunction.
At about eight a.m. on November 30, 1941, a
few hours before Himmler spoke with Heydrich,
the Berlin Jews of this particular transport had
already been shot, having been debouched into
the thick of a shooting operation already
proceeding outside Riga, during which altogether
some four thousand Jews were shot on the orders
of the Höherer SS und Polizeiführer in
Riga, SS Obergruppenführer Jeckeln (see
Nuremberg Document NO-3257). This episode
confirms precisely what the Plaintiff averred,
namely that the liquidations were initiated at
ground level by SS units operating largely
without directives from above: these Jews were
shot despite the existence of a specific Hitler
ruling to the contrary. The Plaintiff was the
first to find and to publish further evidence of
this, namely the remarks in captivity, secretly
recorded and transcribed by British
Intelligence, of a German army officer,
General
Walter Bruns, who was an eye-witness of that
day's above-mentioned shootings outside Riga;
Bruns protested to the highest-ranking SS
officer on the spot and arranged for an
eye-witness report to be forwarded to Hitler's
headquarters, and he is heard telling fellow
prisoners on April 25, 1945 that the said SS
officer scoffed to him a few days later, 'Here's
an order that's come, saying that mass shootings
like these are no longer to take place.' The
transcript leaves no doubt as to the brutality
and horrors of these ad hoc mass shootings
conducted by the SS and their accomplices behind
the eastern front. The Plaintiff has referred to
this document in subsequent books and has read
it out at numerous speeches and lectures in
Austria, Germany, Canada, and elsewhere around
the world.
(22)*
It is plain from the diaries and other sources
including the war diary of the Commandant of
Führer Headquarters that Goebbels
[picture]
was in 1941-42 not such a frequent or
indeed welcome visitor to Hitler's headquarters
as he became in 1944-45. The Plaintiff submits
that his rendering in both the Hitler and the
Goebbels biographies of the ominous entry of
March 27, 1942 was proper and it is denied that
he manipulated and distorted the effect of this
entry.
(i) It is admitted that at page 392
of the first edition (1977) of
HITLER'S WAR the
Plaintiff wrote, 'The ghastly secrets of
Treblinka and Auschwitz were well kept.
Goebbels wrote a frank summary of them in his
diary on March 27, 1942, but evidently held
his tongue when he met Hitler two days later
for he quotes only Hitler's remark: "The Jews
must get out of Europe. If need be, we must
resort to the most brutal methods."'(ii) It is admitted that Dr Goebbels did
not meet Hitler 'two days later' and that the
remark which the Plaintiff attributes to
Hitler was actually made on March 20,
1942.
An error in date is conceded (in fact Hitler
on March 19 made the remark quoted by Goebbels
in his diary of March 20) but it is without
significance. Hitler said the same thing again
and again at this time, both before and after
the March 27, 1942 entry, according to Goebbels.
As stated, on March 20, 1942, after visiting
Hitler on the nineteenth, he wrote: 'Finally we
speak about the Jewish Problem. Here the
Führer remains as pitiless as ever. The
Jews must get out of Europe, even if we have to
use the most brutal means.' On April 27, 1942 he
wrote, after seeing Hitler the day before, 'I
discuss the Jewish Problem once more extensively
with the Führer. His standpoint on this
problem is pitiless. He wants to drive the Jews
right out of Europe.'
(iii)
The Goebbels Diaries by the Plaintiff's estimate
were microfiched on 1,400 glass plates, each
containing either 25 or 40 pages depending on
format -- a total of some 70,000 pages, each
with an average of two hundred words: there was
thus a total of some fourteen million words
written by Dr Goebbels from 1923 to 1945. In
writing a biography of some 250,000 words, some
passages inevitably have to be omitted or
paraphrased. To describe this process as
manipulation and distortion betrays both malice
and a lack of understanding of the historian's
craft and of the problems of comprehension and
compression facing him.
The passage quoted here from the Goebbels
diary at pages 19-22, of the entry dated March
27, 1942 (National Archives microfilm T-84, roll
261) is relevant, highly relevant, to a
biography of Goebbels (on which see para. 22
below), but not to a biography of Hitler, even
inasmuch as Goebbels is seen hinting at Hitler's
complicity by his two gratuitous references to
the Führer; the Plaintiff submits that,
when analysed, these references boil down to (a)
the empty rhetoric of a diarist dictating orally
to a subordinate private secretary (Richard
Otte), and (b) Goebbels' by now familiar
alibiing technique, of ascribing some historic
act -- be it Hitler's decision to stand against
Hindenburg, or the 'Kristallnacht', or some
other event -- post facto to The Will of an
omnipotent and omniscient Führer. The
perceptive historian does not fall for such
subterfuges, particularly given the Goebbels
Diaries' troubled relationship with the truth.
In short the passage quoted is evidence in law
against Goebbels, but not against Hitler. In my
Goebbels biography I quote it accordingly in
extenso, at page 388.
(iv) The Goebbels Diary entry of March 27,
1942 does not record a meeting between himself
and Hitler, but his reactions on reading a
report provided to him evidently by the SS. It
is therefore evidence against him and not
against Hitler.