David Irving v Penguin & Lipstadt (#3162)

DJC Irving – v – Penguin Books Ltd and Deborah Lipstadt published Denying the Holocaust , product of a research contract funded by an Israeli agency. British writer David Irving claims that it libels him. David Irving’s Witness Statement [continued] [paras.1-30] Specific allegations: 31. In 1988 I was asked by defence counsel for the German-Canadian Ernst Zündel whether I would be willing to testify on historical matters in the latter’s trial in Toronto. I agreed to do so, flew to Toronto

on April 21, 1988 and after examination by the Court was accepted as an expert witness . 32. It was on this occasion, and no earlier, that I first met Frederick Leuchter, the Massachusetts inventor and execution technology consultant, of whom I had never heard before. (I had no part whatsoever in the defence counsel’s decision to secure Mr Leuchter’s expertise).

I read his affidavit, and was impressed by the conclusions reached by the US forensic laboratory which had tested samples he had purportedly removed from the fabric of certain buildings at Auschwitz . Until that moment it had never occurred to me that any of the famous buildings there could have been faked or reconstructed.

Even with my own very limited knowledge of chemistry, it was clear that the quantitative analysis of those samples established beyond doubt that they had not been subjected at any time to massive exposure to cyanide compounds. 33. For legal reasons Leuchter’s affidavit on his tests was not accepted by the court as an exhibit.

In June 1989 I published a printed version of its main conclusions, to which I appended an Introduction in which I expressed some reservations about his methodology and peripheral conclusions. Anticipating that the report would have the same stimulating effect on others that it had on my own beliefs, I also arranged for its free circulation to numbers of people, including members of the House of Lords prior to their debate on the war crimes bill. 34.

On April 21, 1990 I stated to an audience of Munich citizens at a lawfully permitted assembly that the gas chamber shown to tourists in Auschwitz is a fake, built after the war; and I mentioned that this meant that this element of reparations, amounting to several billion deutschmarks, had been paid for a fake.

For making this statement, which the Polish authorities have now several times confirmed to be true, I was fined by the Munich court first seven thousand marks, then on appeal ten thousand marks, and on further appeal thirty thousand marks, for the offence (known only to German law) of defaming the memory of the dead. The courts did not permit us to call any defence witnesses or introduce any defence documents establishing the truth of what I had said. 35.

On September 4, 1990 I had a private conversation at the Freiburg home of my friend and colleague Professor Dr Bernard Martin , head of the university’s history faculty, on which I that same day typed a note. He informed me that he had visited Auschwitz several times, and that the local authorities had confirmed to him that the gas chamber shown to tourists was not authentic.

It is symptomatic of the atmosphere of terror in modern Germany that when I made public in an interview what Professor Martin had told me, he wrote me a letter formally breaking off our friendship. 36. In October 1991 I lectured again in Canada.

On this occasion I was the victim of a calculated smear issued as a press release by a Canadian government minister, Mr Gerry Weiner , against whom I issued immediate libel proceedings in British Columbia, one of the provinces in which the cause had accrued.

The minister successfully applied for the action to be moved to Ontario, three thousand miles from the offices of the counsel whom I had instructed; since the courts in Ontario were less likely to be favourable, and since Weiner could obtain in Ontario (but not in British Columbia) a possibly crippling order for security for costs in that province, I abandoned the action. Mr Weiner had made no attempt to justify his smears. 37.

In about September 1990 the Italian publishing company Alberto Mondadori Editore commissioned me to read, authenticate, transcribe, and edit the 1938 diary of Dr Joseph Goebbels, of which they had obtained a complete photographic copy from a secret Soviet source; the agreed initial fee was $10,000. It took eighteen months to learn the peculiarities of the Goebbels handwriting, which was his own mixture of the Sütterlin and Latin scripts. 38.

In May 1992 Professor Broszat’s widow, who is Europe’s principal editor of the Goebbels Diary fragments, disclosed to me privately that she had established that the long lost diaries of Dr Joseph Goebbels, for which we had all been looking for many years, were in a certain Moscow building where she had seen them. Her own institute had refused to raise the necessary funding to exploit and obtain them.

While asking me not on any account to make her own name public, for professional reasons (which no longer obtain), she advised me to raise a sum of dollars — I suggested twenty thousand — stating that she knew for a fact that the archives director would be willing to sell me those diaries, which were on hundreds of glass plates; since they had never been identified as such, they were not listed on the archive inventories, and he could sell them without problem.

She gave me the director’s visiting card as an introduction, and subsequently contacted him directly on my behalf to smooth my path. 39.

I was aware from press reports that the Soviet archival system was in collapse, that records were being strewn to the winds, that the former Soviet authorities were in dire shortage of funds, and that many learned bodies, including the Hoover Library in California, and my friend and colleague the late historian Dr John Costello , had already done such deals with Russian and KGB officials. I obtained the necessary finance from The Sunday Times, and made a pilot trip to the archives

on June. Andrew Neil , editor in chief, expressed in our first conversation serious misgivings about the authenticity of the glass plates, reminding me that his newspaper had already fallen for the fake Mussolini diaries and the fake Hitler Diaries. I told him I was offering him the chance of rehabilitating his newspaper’s name. 40.

I have set out the salient points of both this June 1992 visit to the Moscow archives and the subsequent one in my Reply , and in my contemporary diary which is a document in my Discovery. I need affirm here only that (a) I took extravagant care of all the archival goods that were entrusted to me; (b) none was damaged; (c) none was stolen or otherwise permanently removed from those archival collections. 41. On my