A Really Ugly Story

Arrested in Vancouver 1992

The Free World  and its Freedom of Speech 

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[This is the early draft of a publication being prepared on the international campaign mounted to silence to author David Irving since 1989. In its final form it will be longer, illustrated, and have links to key documents on which the narrative is based]

[Download a different and better printed form as a pdf file]

THE SMALL PRINT: This is a copyright work. The manuscript is reproduced as part of the Focal Point Publications Website. While it can be downloaded for personal use, the manuscript may not be marketed or commercially traded.  ©1998 David Irving.

VER SINCE DAVID IRVING, an historian with thirty years' experience writing on the Third Reich, was accepted by the courts in Toronto in April 1988 to give expert evidence for the defence in the landmark case brought against Ernst Zündel under a Canadian law dating back to 1892, for spreading "false information" in April 1988 - the Canadian supreme court finally acquitted Zündel in August 1992 - certain of the world's organisations have targeted him for a campaign of harassment at every level, designed to injure, smear, and if possible ruin him. 
Their campaign has recruited people at every level, from jobless street-people to dentists, from immigration officials to prime ministers. 
The Englishman is fighting back with every legal means. Here are some of the milestones, large and small, in that fight. 

At the Zündel trial in 1988 Mr Irving testified that there was no evidence, at least in the archives in which he had researched for many years, that Hitler had ever ordered the physical extermination of the Jews. He was so impressed by the persuasiveness of the Leuchter Report, the defence exhibit reporting the investigations of Frederick A Leuchter, the leading execution technology consultant employed by U.S. penitentiaries, that he published in the summer of 1989 an illustrated version of this affidavit evidence in London and announced his intention of making sure that a copy went to every school in the land. 

David Irving had first visited Canada in 1968, starring as guest-challenger on the Canadian Broadcasting Company's popular television quiz Front Page Challenge on February 26 of that year. The Panelists: Pierre Berton, Betty Kennedy, Lister Sinclair, and Gordon Sinclair (they guessed the challenger's identity). 
In 1986 he had organised a speaking tour in Australia and New Zealand, and then across Canada, promoting first his Australian reprint of Uprising, the history of the 1956 Hungarian uprising based on CIA and Hungarian communist party records among other sources. He followed this with a 1987 tour promoting his first volume of his Churchill biography, and in 1989, 1990, and 1991 there were further tours from west to east across the great North American nation; at some of these he spoke about the Zündel trial, and the other great controversies of history. 
Each time he returned, the audience grew in size and so did the concern of his opponents. 
The various Jewish organisations in Canada, where they are particularly wealthy, had made no attempt at lawful or traditional criticism of his lectures, but resorted instead to behind-the-scenes blackmail and threats to deprive him of his lecture audiences. 
Records of the Attorney-General of Canada, now released under that country's Access to Information Act, reveal that for all their public posturing and accusations that the writer is "inciting hatred against the Jews," a criminal offence in Canada, and although this is the method which they have employed to silence Ernst Zündel, at no stage have they called for the Briton's criminal prosecution. 
Equally, although the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP), the Ontario provincial police and other police authorities attend his many meetings because of 

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the disorder threatened by these opponents, none of them ever sees cause to prosecute. 
This fact bears emphasising: While publicly citing the country's "hate laws" as their basis for concern, at no time do Mr Irving's opponents ever instigate a prosecution; talking in measured language they express regret to the newspapers that this university or that military forum is providing the writer with prestige and credibility. In this way they silently seek to gag those who still believe in free and fair debate. 
Here as in other countries the Jewish representatives refuse Mr Irving's frequent invitations to come on stage and debate publicly with him (except for one instance which will be referred to below, in one of the biggest halls in Ottawa). 
Instead they apply clandestine pressure to hotels, restaurants, military institutions, and universities to cancel their bookings for him, usually at the very last moment, and they pile commercial blackmail  - threatening the withdrawal of advertising revenues - on newspapers and magazines which allow him to reply or which dare to give favourable coverage to his published writings and lectures. 

The story can open in North America, with Mr Irving's third cross-country speaking tour. 

February 23, 1989 David Irving speaks at the University of California at Berkeley, birthplace of the free speech movement in the United States. Andrew Allen, the local organiser, has hired the International House lecture theatre. Since early afternoon opponents have besieged the hall and tried to block all access. The writer's police escort forces a path through the mob into the back of the building and through the boiler-room into the auditorium. Two hundred people have been turned away, as the hall is already full. Allen has however had to put up $3,500 for extra police security. 
The next day Irving speaks at Victoria, in British Columbia, lecturing on Churchill's role in World War Two. On the following day he speaks to a large audience at Vancouver's Pacific National Exhibition Centre, and on the day after that at the Sandmann Inn in Kelowna, on "Hitler and the Final Solution finally Solved." 
In general these British Columbia meetings pass off without opposition. 

The campaign opens in 1989, as the community, as though on a given signal, begins a mediæval drumbeat of accusations that the writer, by his incidental comments on, and analysis of, the established notions of the Holocaust, is spreading "hatred". Like "Holocaust" and its derivative "Holocaust denier", "genocide", and "sensitivity" the word "hatred" becomes one of the primitive building bricks of their propaganda campaign. The Atlantic Jewish Council issues this press release: 
The Atlantic Jewish Council views David Irving as a hate-monger whose ultimate objective is to discredit the Holocaust, promote the Jewish conspiracy theory and to incite hatred against the Jewish people.

While they do not spell out what they mean by the "conspiracy theory," it is presumably the notion that their brethren around the world, who may never even have met each other, whether in North America, in Europe, in Australia, New Zealand or South Africa, secretly conspire and connive using every means of modern technology to achieve their aims: nothing, they imply, could be further from the truth, and it may well be that they believe it. 

February 27, 1989 At Calgary, in Alberta, Mr Irving is interviewed by a university radio station, and sees that the interviewer has taken a copy of Hitler's War out of the university library: "It has been heavily used, its paragraphs lined and underlined by countless students," notes Mr Irving pleasurably in his private diary. He speaks that evening to a large audience on Hitler's role in the Final Solution. 
At Regina and Winnipeg over the next two days the temperature drops to minus 20, then minus 31 during the daytime, but the audiences' enthusiasm here is not chilled. 

March 3, 1989 Word of his eastward progress across Canada is preceding him. As Mr Irving arrives in Toronto, he finds that the evening television news is carrying coverage of riots threatened when he speaks at Carleton University in Ottawa on the seventh. It is plain that 

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certain community organisations and left-wingers are now determined to halt his triumphant lecture tour. 
Who is behind them? Where is their money coming from? Harry Bick, national chairman of the League of Human Rights of B'nai Brith Canada, makes a scathing attack on Mr Irving: "Mr Irving has clearly ventured beyond legitimate historical analysis," says Bick in a statement issued on Friday March 3. 

June 23, 1989 Mr Irving speaks at Focal Point Publications' launching of the English edition of The Leuchter Report, to which he has written a cautious introduction. Under organized Jewish pressure the London World Trade Centre cancels the room booked for the press conference; Jewish organisations lay siege to his Mayfair flat, to which the press conference is transferred, and force all entering newspapermen to identify themselves. 

June 20, 1989 A posse of eighty-eight British Members of Parliament tables an "early day" Motion condemning Mr Irving--an instrument which is not debated or voted on, but provides a useful means for lawmakers to vilify a member of the public from within the privileged walls of the House of Commons. The Parliamentary lynch-party includes kingpins of the House's Jewish community like Greville Janner and Ivan Lawrence QC, the selfsame barrister who unsuccessfully defended the gangster and Searchlight editor Gerald Gable on housebreaking charges in November 1963 (Gable got caught red-handed burglarizing Mr Irving's apartment.) Their Motion is given wide publicity, as is their intent. It proposes 

that this House, on the occasion of the reunion in London of 1,000 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 longtime Hitler apologist David Irving that the infamous gas chambers of Auschwitz, Treblinka and Majdendk [sic] did not exist ever, except perhaps, as the brainchild of Britain's brilliant wartime Psychological Warfare Executive; draws attention to a new fascist publication, The Leuchter Report, in which this evil calumny appears; and condemns without qualification such pernicious works of Hitler's heirs


October 3, 1989 Sender Freies Berlin, the city's government TV channel, which has invited Mr Irving to participate in "Berliner Salon"--a televised discussion with other historians and literary personalities--withdraws the invitation under pressure from the Holocaust photo-forger Professor Eberhard Jäckel (who authenticated the fake Hitler Diaries in 1982) and other professors. Mr Irving arrives in the still-divided Berlin nevertheless; at a press conference in the Hotel Kempinski he predicts German reunification "in twelve months" (Germany is reunified exactly twelve months later, on October 3, 1990). 
As the programme begins, Mr Irving and a hundred friends demonstrate outside the television studios with banners proclaiming German historians -- liars and cowards. 
Alleging that David Irving wrote and distributed leaflets in public on December 11, 1989 with the caption "German historians - liars and cowards", the Nuremberg city police commences proceedings against him for Volksverhetzung ("incitement"). In fact he never wrote such leaflets, nor handed them out. The police abandon the case on June 14, 1990. 

A PATTERN develops of television companies inviting Mr Irving to appear on prime-time programmes ("Ring my Bell", "Central TV Weekend") then mysteriously cancelling a few hours before air time. Equally Martin Gilbert, the Jewish biographer of Winston Churchill, procures Mr Irving's removal from BBC television projects on the life of the politician. A campaign begins to fill in Mr Irving's name on application forms for companies supplying heavy mechanical engineering equipment using names like "Mengele Research Ltd.", "F Nick Cleansing Corp.", "Degesch & Co." 
 

October 1989 A lecture by Mr Irving scheduled at Carleton University in Ottawa and a speech to a black-tie dinner at the Royal Military Institute in Toronto are cancelled after protests by Jewish groups. 

October -- November 1989 A lecture tour of Germany and Austria by Mr Irving is authorised by the police. Massive organized communist and Jewish protests lead to the closure of several meetings. Police inspectors attend the second hall, which the police then close as a "fire hazard". The meeting takes place at a third location unknown to the police. An arrest warrant is allegedly issued by Salzburg police, and the remaining speeches are delivered in locations just across the border, inside Germany. (Mr Irving has visited Austria several times since, and the alleged warrant has never been enforced). 

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March 1990 Invited to give the keynote speech at the DVU's mass rally at Passau, on Germany's future role as a great power, Mr Irving is met on the steps of the Nibelungenhalle by police officers who hand him a gagging order, forbidding him to speak. (The order is later declared illegal by the Bavarian courts.) 

March 1990 The German government secretly orders Mr Irving excluded from its borders. "On March 9, 1990 the Federal German minister of the interior directed that Mr Irving be turned back when attempting to enter the Federal Republic of Germany." So reports the 1990 annual review of Bonn's Office for the Protection of the Constitution, adding however: "Irving was not recognized when he entered Germany." (He has spoken hundreds of times up and down the country since 1970). "In spite of this he succeeds in entering Germany again and again as he is not recognized," states the report of the crypto-communist Federal Agency for the Protection of the Constitution (first chief: Otto John, the notorious later defector to the Soviet Zone of Germany). 

April 21, 1990 Mr Irving speaks at the Löwenbräu hall in Munich to two thousand people. He says, quite truthfully, "By now we know - and I am sure I don't need to point this out as anything more than an aside - that there were never any gas chambers in Auschwitz." Further he states: "We believe that, just as the gas chambers which the Americans put up here in Dachau [outside Munich] in the first few days after the war were fakes, those gas chamber facilities which tourists can now sightsee in Auschwitz were set up by Polish authorities after the Second World War. The German taxpayers have had to shell out no less than 16 billion Deutschmarks as a penalty for Auschwitz for a fake." 
Police arrest him outside the hall, as he is heading for his hotel, on a trumped-up charge ("leading a demonstration") which is later dropped and replaced by the one to which German courts allow no defence: challenging the existence of gas chambers. 
Michael Schmid, the Jewish film cameraman [of No.22 Beistadter Strasse in Wiesbaden] whom organizer Ewald Althans has allowed in, accepting his assurances, to film the Löwenbräu meeting for Spiegel TV, subsequently false-edits the footage with the criminal Jewish sleuth ("Searchlight") Gerald Gable, adding Nazi marching songs and deceptive crosscutting of shots, into an amateurish attack on Mr Irving's integrity which is broadcast in 1993 on the British television Channel Four, as well as in France, the United States and around the world. 
Schmid also complains about Mr Irving's Auschwitz revelations to the Munich political police, provides them with the video, and swears affidavits for them as a witness. On July 17, 1991 the Munich courts impose in absentia a fine of DM 7,000 on Mr Irving for the opinions he has stated. 

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October 27, 1990 Mr Irving starts a two-week lecture tour of Canada. "All regions of B'nai Brith Canada (BBC) and Canadian Jewish Congress will closely monitor the tour," reports the Canadian Jewish News, "and [B'nai Brith Canada] is considering lobbying the venues at which Irving is to speak to cancel their contracts with him." Members of Parliament like Shirley Maheu and Margaret Mitchell write to selected centres stating untruthfully: "Irving had to abandon his assertion that Anne Frank's diary was a fake after losing a legal battle to Otto Frank, Anne's father" (there was no such legal battle, and Mr Irving stands by his original assertion); and "Irving testified on behalf of Ernst Zündel who was found guilty of promotion of hatred" (the Supreme Court found Zündel innocent). Refusing to bow to this pressure, which was often backed by (unfulfilled) threats of violence, the prestigious Ottawa Congress Centre and other halls allowed the meetings to go ahead. Alex Cullen, director of the Canadian Rights and Civil Liberties Federation, issued a statement backing Irving's right to speak. 

July 17, 1991 The Board of Deputies of British Jews, the "government within a government" of the U.K.'s Jewish community, writes to the German Office for the Protection of the Constitution, Germany's leftist, subversive and grossly corrupt "FBI", to draw attention to the "right-wing extremist activities" of Mr Irving. The Office's vice president could have told these phoney Englanders to mind their own business; instead he grovels to Board chief Neville Nagler, "You can rest assured that the Office is closely following every such attempt in the Federal Republic of Germany. The Office is doing what it can to hinder such activities within the limits of the law and to inform the public about the true aims of political extremists." He adds that the Federal Minister of the Interior has already instructed frontier authorities in March 1990 to turn back Mr Irving: "In practice," he adds, "this is only incompletely 

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practicable, as the frontiers between the member states of the European Community are largely wide open." 

August 1991 Mr Irving is accepted by the Munich administrative court as an expert witness in the case appeal by Lieutenant-Commander Ortwin Pohl, a German officer accused of expressing politically incorrect historical views at a private cocktail party at his home in Washington, D.C. The court asks Mr Irving to submit an opinion on the disputed matters of history raised. 

September 4, 1991 Professor Helmuth Auerbach, Jewish-expert of the Institute of Contemporary History - where Mr Irving has placed one-half of his Third Reich research archives - writes a letter to the Munich public prosecutor which shows that they are in close collusion. Auerbach is appearing for the prosecution in the case of Lieut.-Commander Pohl. Under pressure from the Jewish-expert, the judge writes Mr Irving that he can not guarantee his safety from police prosecution if he delivers his opinion at the hearing in person, and invites him to submit it by mail. (Pohl's appeal is denied: he is reduced to the ranks, discharged from the navy, loses his pension, fined, and ordered to pay costs). 

September 17, 1991 Ian J. Kagedan, "National Director of Community Relations" (we kid you not) of the B'nai Brith Canada, writes privately to managers of every hall booked for Mr Irving's forthcoming cross-Canada lecture tour, urging them to violate the contracts, defaming him ("neo-Nazi skinheads often serve as bodyguards at his lectures") and promising aid if the managers come into line: "Our own legal experts are available should you require advice on how to cancel." 

October 1991 During a further speaking tour across Canada, several halls cancel contracts at the last minute. One of them reveals a letter from Canadian Jewish organisations which offers financial inducements to breach the rental agreement, and guarantees to indemnify the hall owners against any legal costs and damages incurred. 

October 18, 1991 Mr Irving tours Argentina, lecturing to Spanish- and German-language audiences. Buenos Aires newspaper La Nación reports that DAIA (The Argentina Delegation of Israeli Associations) announces that David Irving, denounced by DAIA as an "agitador internacional" who "publicly vindicates the sinister Nazi regime, denies the Holocaust, and incites race hatred" is in Argentina.Under hostile pressure all remaining lecture hall contracts, newspaper interviews, and television programmes are cancelled. But an Argentine citizen donates to Mr Irving two packages containing the original 500 pp. memoirs of Adolf Eichmann. 

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November 15, 1991 At Mr Irving's invitation, U.S. execution-technology consultant Fred Leuchter arrives to speak at Chelsea Town Hall. He has legally entered Britain at Dover. But Jewish groups have spent weeks pressuring Kenneth Baker, the Home Secretary, Britain's interior minister, into denying Leuchter entry to Britain. Policemen storm onto the stage, arrest Leuchter in mid-speech, confine him to a prison cell, and deport him overnight to Boston, Massachusetts. 

November 1991 Speaking in Halle, an ugly industrial city in the former Soviet Zone of Germany, at a mass meeting covered by camera teams from the BBC (commentator: Martin Bell), ITN, French, and German television and every major American television chain, Mr Irving says: 
I welcome this opportunity to speak as an Englishman to the German youth on this historic day, November the Ninth - the day of the reunification of Germany. But the process of reunification is anything but over yet. There used to be a German-German-German question. There is still a German-German question. There are still German communities, German territories, that are part of the German Reich - not only here in Germany, not only here in Europe, but also scattered around the whole world. I come to you bearing greetings from the German community in Canada where I spoke last week. 
He continues: "I am now getting old. I am nearly at the end of my writing career. But you are still young. You are the representatives of Germany's future. Nobody can accuse you of crimes against humanity." (Filming the cheering German audience, British television translates only the last sentence in sub-titles - a deliberate distortion.) 
As Mr Irving begins to speak of Rudolf Hess, the man of peace whom the Allies kept caged in Spandau prison for forty-eight years before his murder in solitary confinement in 1987, provocateurs planted in the front ranks of the crowd begin to give the Hitler salute and shout Sieg Heil. Mr Irving angrily interrupts his speech to denounce them, repeating: "You are the representatives of Germany's future. Do not come here with those discredited salutes and 

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slogans of the past!" (These words too are edited out of the television news bulletins.) 

November 1991 Mr Irving's publishing company Focal Point launches the standard edition of his Hitler's War with many black-and-white and colour illustrations. At a cocktail party in Mr Irving's home in the book's honour, British defence minister Alan Clark - a fellow-historian - is spotted by journalists, and forced to resign under Jewish pressure a few days later. 

JEWISH ORGANISATIONS mount determined pressure on bookshops and bookstore chains not to handle the Focal Point edition of Hitler's War. Adam Smallman of Southsea organizes a campaign against all the W.H. Smith bookstores along the South Coast; the branch in Worthing cancels a book-signing, and W.H. Smith's head office orders Focal Point to cease supplying their branches direct. Focal Point is told of individual Jews - wearing their insignia - sighted entering branches of Waterstone's bookstore chain in Hampstead and elsewhere, taking the book off the shelves and burying it in lower shelves with its spine toward the wall. The Portsmouth Times reported that bookshops there had been pressured to "destroy" copies of the book. The Hendon Times reported that Finchley Progressive Synagogue had written to Margaret Thatcher, their Member of Parliament, demanding Mr Irving's prosecution for stating that statistics of Holocaust victims had been exaggerated. 
 


January 9, 1992 The manager of the big W.H. Smith bookstore in Worthing, Sussex, is forced to cancel a book-signing to which he has invited Mr Irving after his Area Manager refers the matter to Head Office. That week sees the re-launch with Peter Hain, the South African terrorist-apologist, of the Jewish front organisation, the "Anti-Nazi League"; the ANL is denounced by Black groups in Britain as a front for the Socialist Workers' Party, a born-again communist outfit. Their first activity is to send a deputation to urge prime minister John Major to dismiss defence minister Alan Clark for attending Mr Irving's cocktail party; he complies, and Clark resigns soon after. 

January 1992 Mr Irving wrote in the Liverpool Daily Post: "As the Poles themselves now admit, the 'gas chambers' on display at Auschwitz were built after the war for tourists to look at." The Palm Beach Jewish World of January 31 quoted a Polish embassy spokesman in London as branding that statement "absolute nonsense". The London Jewish Chronicle put it slightly differently: a Polish embassy official had checked with government, political, and academic sources in Poland and "virtually" all of them said they had never heard "such an absurd opinion." (The Auschwitz state archives however subsequently admitted that what they show the tourists is indeed what they call a "postwar reconstruction". See box on this page). 

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January 16, 1992 London's Jewish Chronicle reports that in an interview Mr Irving said: "The Jews are very foolish not to abandon the gas chamber story while they still have time." He adds: "In ten years Israel will cease to exist and the Jews will have to return to Europe." 

January 28, 1992 Lawyer Harry Wruck for Canadian minister of state Gerry Weiner, who has libelled Mr Irving in a circular on government stationery issued on October 26, 1990 to news agencies in British Columbia and throughout Canada as the latest lecture tour begins, successfully pleads in the courts of British Columbia for the libel case to be switched to the Ontario courts, his home ground; not without reason, he has more confidence in the judges there. Weiner is fighting with taxpayer money. Mr Irving, financing the litigation himself, has to abandon the action. 

January -- March 1992 Mr Irving tours South Africa again, speaking in a score of cities. This, his most successful and peaceful tour of the country yet, is followed by a letter from the South African government informing Mr Irving that although a British citizen does not require a visa, they will make an exception in his case. The South African press finds that the South African Jewish Board of Deputies (SAJBOD) has appealed to Pretoria to ban future visits by Mr Irving; even the African National Congress (ANC) is incensed by this, and spokesman Carl Niehaus says that Mr Irving should not be banned. 

February 20, 1992 During Mr Irving's South Africa tour, he is scheduled to appear on Johannesburg's popular Radio 702; he is informed ten minutes before the programme that under Jewish pressure they have had to cancel it. The previous evening he lectures to an overflowing hall in the university of Pretoria; his meeting in the War Museum hall in Johannesburg on the 20th is cancelled by the management at short notice, and the replacement hall at Sturrock Park is cancelled two hours before the meeting begins, explanation being that the S.A. Union of Jewish Students had threatened to "disrupt the event." The South African Jewish Board of Deputies (SAJBOD) again claims the credit for silencing the debate. 

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March 1992 Unidentified terrorists bomb the Israeli embassy in Buenos Aires killing 29. Intelligence sources say that the explosion has come from within the embassy, but President Carlos Menem drops a gratuitous hint that "the presence of a British revisionist historian" a few weeks earlier in Buenos Aires has a link with the outrage. (In July 1994 a mystery explosion destroys the Jewish community centre and headquarters of DAIA in Buenos Aires killing up to one hundred people.) Jewish organisations in Buenos Aires use the terrorist bombing of the Israeli embassy in an unsuccessful attempt to persuade his Argentine publishers to cancel contracts! 

May 5, 1992 Mr Irving appeals in Munich against his conviction on the "fake gas chamber" charge. Judge Thomas Stelzner, 30, allows an unprecedented Jewish demonstration inside the court building. Photographs of Mr Irving being bullied and harassed are distributed around the world. The court refuses his request to allow as defence witnesses Dr Franciszek Piper, Polish director of the Auschwitz state archives, and other experts who agree that the gas chamber shown to tourists is a fake or "reconstruction". HerrmannEvery defence document is also disallowed. With Mr Irving's approval, his eminent lawyers Hajo Herrmann [wartime photo, left] and Klaus Goebel walk out of the courtroom in disgust. Speaking in German, Mr Irving tells the judge, according to the London Daily Telegraph: "We both have our duties. My duty as an historian is to establish the truth. Your duty is also to establish the truth - but you have a problem in Germany." 

Mr Irving tells the judge and woman prosecutor in his closing speech: 

I am nearly at the end of my career as an historian. Quite simply, I am running out of words. But you both, judge and prosecutor, are still young: you are on the threshold of your careers, and it is clear to me that you've got no alternative but to stick to the Federal German version of the truth. 

Citing Mr Irving's "obstinacy" in justification, Judge Thomas Stelzner increases the fine to DM10,000 at the suggestion of public prosecutor Kaps. Stelzner ignorantly cites in his judgment the Wannsee Conference of January 1942 (in which however there is not the slightest reference to gas chambers, Auschwitz, killings, or financial compensation). 

Without Mr Irving's knowledge, underground versions of his closing speech in court--a privileged document in every other country of the free world--are printed and circulated around the world. A German schoolteacher is dismissed, stripped of his pension, and sent to prison for circulating copies. A north German publisher who issues 40,000 copies of the speech to his mailing list has his offices raided by police, who seize the printing plates. 

May 8-26, 1992 Crudely addressed envelopes sent to British national newspapers contain photocopies of letters and a fake press clipping accusing Mr Irving of having been arrested for homosexual offences by Canadian police during his 1986 tour. The press exposes both the letters and the clipping as clumsy forgeries. 

May 11, 1992 Bernard Levin, ageing columnist of The Times, publishes yet another hate-filled, half-page attack on Mr Irving. This time the newspaper allows a truncated reply. "He [Levin] devoutly wishes that I would go to Austria," writes Mr Irving, "and be thrown in jail for life for my (to him) inconvenient views. I was in Austria, researching, on Sunday [May 10] despite an arrest warrant issued in 1989 for expressing precisely the same opinion", i.e., that the Auschwitz gas chambers never existed. 
Following this letter and newspaper reports (e.g. The Times diary, May 12) that Mr Irving has just visited Austria (to interview Lida Baarova, 80, the film actress, for his Goebbels biography), the Board of Deputies of British Jews writes indignantly to the Austrian ambassador in London to ask why the warrant for Mr Irving's arrest has not been enforced. 
Instead of inviting the Board to cease interfering in his country's internal affairs, the Austrian ambassador promises on June 11 to look into the matter, and writes on June 22 that according to the Ministry of the Interior "the warrant for Mr Irving's arrest issued on 8th November 1989 by the Criminal Court Vienna continues to be valid." Since the issue of that warrant, he adds soothingly, Mr Irving has not been in Austria. (He has.) This secret correspondence makes plain who is the moving force behind the persecution of Mr Irving in Austria and Germany. 

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THE INTERNATIONAL hue and cry against David Irving is in full swing. After a very successful lecture tour across South Africa in the first months of 1992, Pretoria notifies him in April that it has withdrawn from him the visa exemption enjoyed by every other British citizen. 
 

He has broken no laws. 
The local Jewish lobby claims the credit. On June 5, 1992 the country's Cape Times reports that a Home Affairs spokesman has refused to give reasons why Mr Irving, who has visited the country four times, has lost the visa exemption. 
The newspaper clipping is triumphantly faxed by Ian Sachs of Cape Town to Seymour Kopelowitz, national director of SAJBOD -- the South African Jewish Board of Deputies. That same day Kopelowitz privately rushes it to Michael Whine, director of the Board of Deputies of British Jews, in London, who is coordinating the worldwide vendetta. Kopelowitz comments to Whine: "I thought that I would bring to your attention the fact that David Irving is now persona non grata. Enclosed is a press cutting which appeared in this morning's newspaper." 

June 9, 10, 1992 Newspapers in Newcastle-upon-Tyne, Nottingham, and other British cities report that in an orchestrated campaign bricks are being tossed through the windows of branches of the bookstore chain Waterstones and Dillons to force them to take books by David Irving off display. Local Jewish groups coordinated by the Board of Deputies claim the credit, as the bookstore chains remove the books temporarily from their shelves "in the interests of security." "It should have been withdrawn," huffs Gordon Leigh, president of the representative Council of North-East Jewry to a Newcastle newspaper, referring to the book - Hitler's War - which has attracted the brickbats. Mr Irving writes to Tim Waterstone and the CEO of Dillons' guaranteeing to indemnify the costs of any uninsured damage. The campaign subsides, without even one reference in the national press. 

June 13, 1992 Returning from Moscow, where he has researched in the Soviet secret state archives, Mr Irving flies from Munich to Rome to address university students. His Lufthansa plane is surrounded by police cars, and he is put on the next flight back to Munich. Italian newspapers state that the unprecedented operation has been requested by local Jewish organisations. 

June 15, 1992 The Springer-group newspaper Die Welt, which as recently as 1987 asked Mr Irving to write its whole-page obituary of Deputy Führer Rudolf Hess, and in July 1992 commissions a major article from him on the Goebbels Diaries, publishes a photograph of marching skinheads captioned: 

"Over 50 skinheads stage a White Pride March with Ku Klux Klan members through the US city of Birmingham. On the same day the right-wing radical author David Irving is refused entry to Italy as 'non grata.' He wanted to visit the neo-Nazi group Movimento Politico."

 

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Mr Irving has in fact never heard of Movimento Politico. 

June 16, 1992 Mr Irving's old friend and television sparring-partner (The David Frost Show, June 1977), the Breslau-born former professor of history at Sussex University popularly known by his English name of Gerald Fleming, sends the Die Welt clipping with a handwritten letter marked "personal" to Mike Whine, director of the Board of Deputies of British Jews: 

Dear Mike, In future, it will be very much easier to point out to the German authorities how v. odd it is that they cannot keep Irving out of Germany, when the Italian Govt. had no difficulty in preventing him from entering Italy! If in fact he tries entering Germany again, and if, on such an occasion, the order of the 9 March 1990 is again blatantly flouted. Best, Gerald. 


June 28, 1992 Leaving his Mayfair flat this Sunday morning at 6:45 a.m. to return to Moscow, Mr Irving finds every lamppost, parking meter, and bollard within hundreds of yards plastered with stickers proclaiming David Irving Speaks and Rostock Burns, and advertising rallies to be held at his front door on July 3 and 4. On the back seat of a red Ford Fiesta parked nearby he sees boxes of stickers and cans of spray paint. A forty-something man wearing a Jewish yarmulke shortly scurries round the corner back to the car with an empty box under his arm and drives off. Mr Irving passes details of the car's licence tag to the police. 

July 3 -- 4, 1992 Two days of unprecedented and violent demonstrations by Blacks, Jews (carrying posters reading GAS IRVING), Homosexuals, Lesbians and underworld scum outside Mr Irving's central London home are organised by Jewish organisations masquerading as "the Campaign against Fascism in Europe" (Cafe). Under one Steve Myers, Cafe sets up a "Committee to Stop Irving," and plasters London with posters calling for a "mass militant demonstration" against him. The Sunday Express later reveals Cafe as being a front of the Mossad, the Israeli terror and intelligence network. 
A typical letter from a Sheffield bookshop to Focal Point reads: 

"Following complaints from valued customers we no longer feel able to stock this title" Throughout the summer Jewish newspapers report a series of bookshops in Glasgow and other cities "withdrawing" copies 

of HITLER'S WAR. (In fact none of them returns copies). 

July 10, 1992 They try another privileged smear. Egged on by the Jewish lobby, faded film actress Glenda Jackson, now a Labour member of Parliament, asks in Parliament what consideration the Director of Public Prosecutions has given to "prosecuting David Irving under the Race Relations Act 1976 over the organisation of revisionist seminars describing the

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holocaust as a liberal myth." ( The official parliamentary record uses the small H.) The Attorney General replies: "The Director of Public Prosecutions" -- a gentleman whose English name is Alan Green and who is later obliged to resign after being arrested for kerb-crawling -- "is not currently giving consideration to any proceedings against David Irving. Anyone who has evidence giving reasonable grounds to believe that an offence has been committed should report it to the police." Strike one, as they say in baseball. 

July 1992 When the London Sunday Times admits that it has signed an £85,000 contract with Mr Irving for the historic missing fragments of the diaries of Dr Joseph Goebbels, Nazi propaganda minister, which he has brought back from Moscow, the international community goes berserk, protesting that the newspaper is giving Mr Irving both funds and prestige and demanding that it think again (if it does not want a negative outcome in its current New York banking negotiations). The president and vice-president of the American Jewish Committee write letters to the editor insisting that he break the contract. So do Jewish leaders in Britain. Pandering to these international tortfeasors, the British editor Andrew Neil publishes an immediate, heart-rending two-page spread on Holocaust revisionism, and promises to distribute it free to every British schoolchild. 
Under further pressure from the "Anti-Racist Alliance Poale Zion" (a Jewish front agency) and the Jewish Socialist Group, on July 16 the Sunday Times violates its contract with Mr Irving to pay him for the missing diaries which they have published in sensational extracts for three weeks. Engaging one of London's toughest law firms Mr Irving commences High Court action for breach of contract and claiming damages for Neil's infamous behaviour. After nearly two years the legal costs already top £200,000, but Neil has told lawyers it is his intention to bankrupt Mr Irving. (In June 1994 Editor Neil leaves for a position in New York, his spiritual homeland.) The case is set down to be heard in October 1995. The fight continues. 

July 12, 1992 After days of living under police protection after death threats and organised riots outside his Mayfair, London, address -- West End Central police officers have at their own request photographed his entire apartment in case they have to rescue him, and the steel barricades around it are still up -- Mr Irving attends a local restaurant, Richoux, in South Audley Street, London, for Sunday lunch at the regular time. Somebody has evidently tipped off the traditional enemy, because three thugs ambush him in the restaurant, savagely beat him, and try to lure him into the street (where a mob, some equipped with mobile phones, gathers within minutes). Since Richoux's staff do nothing to call the police Mr Irving's companion does, just in time. The police find an Anglia Television news team waiting just around the corner -- complete with a fake police car. Mr Irving demands prosecutions for criminal conspiracy, but London's overburdened police drop the investigation. Mr Irving returns to Richoux later that week to apologize for the disturbance. One waitress states that she recognized one attacker but has been instructed to tell the police nothing. The manageress adds that the restaurant's owner, a Mr Michael da Costa, has requested that Mr Irving not return

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July 14, 1992 Unknown people circulate to Members of Parliament, using Mr Irving's address, and to newspapers, using the fax number of Focal Point, his publishing house, a professionally produced, viciously anti-Semitic leaflet headlined Jews -- people of the book -- or of the cosh? There is uproar. Mr Irving proves that his fax machine was not the source. The Director of Public Prosecutions Barbara Mills makes inquiries and confirms that the hate-filled leaflet is a clumsy forgery designed, according to left-wing weekly Time Out, to blacken Mr Irving's name. She orders the police to "make enquiries with a view to identifying the publishers or distributors." Whatever they find out, the affair is discreetly dropped and Mr Irving is never told the result. 

September 19, 1992 Mr Irving speaks to the Clarendon Club, his private dinner society, in London. Topic: The British Press. 
That morning the scum of London are out in force manning the barricades outside his apartment again. In his speech he says: 

Occasionally, when I speak in Germany like in Munich last weekend, last Saturday, somebody in the audience says, "Mr Irving, why do you stand up for Germany so much?" And I answer: "I don't stand up for Germany. I stand up for the truth as an historian." 
[Applause]

I ask myself sometimes, Where do our journalists come from? And I'm reminded that many years ago I had a friend who worked in Harrods, in the perfumery, a beautiful girl, and we were very good friends for many years. And she told me that when her friends in the pharmacy at Harrods got bored they used to take condoms and stick needles through them. 
I think this is the answer to where those journalists have come from. 

September 21, 1992 Under pressure from an unnamed Jewish parent, Brentwood, the British public school (est. 1496) which educated Mr Irving and which has repeatedly honoured him by invitations to address its alumniæ, cancels its latest invitation at the last minute. "To interfere in the academic life of the school through the medium of outside pressure," regrets the school Chronicle in an editorial, "is a disturbing development." A Mr Peter Calver, who started at Brentwood five years after Mr Irving left, admits in a subsequent letter to the Chronicle that he had asked the Old Brentwood's Society to expel Mr Irving because of his Munich "conviction"; alas, Mr Irving was not a member -- an oversight he has rectified by now applying to join.The history teacher who regularly invites Mr Irving writes to him in July 1994 that he hopes further visits will be possible "before many more years" but that before then he expects problems from "left-wing parents" who still have children at the school. [Nearly four more years pass before the school dares to invite him again.]

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September 1992 A painful interlude. Bothered by a painful broken tooth, Mr Irving makes an appointment with his dentist. Martyn Green, of Knightsbridge Court, London, has been his dentist for twenty years. The day before the due date, the surgery phones -- Green has struck Mr Irving off his list of patients, without offering a reason. Mr Irving lodges a complaint with the dentists' professional body. 

AN ILLITERATE document dated October 9, 1992 purporting to be an official U.S. Government (Office of Special Investigations) field report is circulated, allegedly quoting German "F.B.I." (Bundeskriminalamt) files blackening Mr Irving's name. It displays surprising knowledge of Mr Irving's movements and many of its false allegations later surface in Jewish libels against him, like the publications listed as: "David Irving 1989 Der Holocaust fand nicht statt. Weltjudentum gerät in Panik! (The Holocaust did not take place. World Judaism in Panic!), [and] a planned three volume work titled Adolf Hitler und die Judenfrage (Adolf Hitler and the Jewish Question)." A report in Der Spiegel confirms that the cryptic U.S. telegraphic addresses which this "OSI" telegram uses including B'nai Brith in London (rhdlcne) are genuine. Mr Irving protests to the U.S. embassy in London, and their Legal Attaché James W Greenleaf advises him on April 23, 1993 that the document is fake: 

"This material has been carefully reviewed and it does not appear to be an official U.S. Government document. We have instituted inquiries which will resolve the authenticity beyond a question of doubt. When the enquiry is complete, I will advise you of the outcome."

(In June 1994 the embassy confirms to Mr Irving that the document is a forgery.) 

October 6, 1992 Daniel Levitas, ex-communist agitator and boss of the Center for Democratic Renewal, in Atlanta, tells the American press that "hundreds of human rights activists" are due to protest at the speech at the Smyrna community centre, outside Atlanta, on October 16, by Mr Irving "who has recently been denied entry into Canada." 
Banned? Does the Simon Wiesenthal Centre know something that Mr Irving does not? He is about to embark on a seventeen-day lecture tour across Canada. 

October 9, 1992 The Canadian government sends a letter to David Irving warning him that he appears to be inadmissible to Canada because of the German conviction, and the likelihood that he will commit offences in Canada. The letter is handed to Mr Irving by a courier in Los Angeles several days later. Legal experts tell him that neither ground will stand up in court. On October 16, Toronto newspaper The Globe & Mail publishes an admission by the "Simon Wiesenthal Centre for Holocaust Studies" that they have asked that Irving be banned. 

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Douglas Christie, famed Canadian defender of human rights, announces legal action in Vancouver against the proposed ban. Frank Dimant, vice president of B'nai Brith Canada, and Bernie Farber, of the Canadian Jewish Congress, state that they will seek intervenor status if Christie fights the immigration department in court. "This is another bullet in the body of neo-Nazis," says Farber, using gangland language. 
But Canada has second, and then third, thoughts. Gerry Maffre of Canada's immigration department replies to the Wiesenthal Centre that while the RCMP will keep a watch on Mr Irving, "he won't necessarily be stopped at the border." Maffre tells the Vancouver Sun that Mr Irving "can't be arbitrarily banned from entry", but will get a hearing before an immigration adjudicator. The Jewish community is furious. "I'm far from satisfied," states Sol Littman, Canadian director of the Wiesenthal Centre on October 26. "I think they're taking a very, very weak position." Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) commissioner Norman Inkster writes to the Jewish body that Mr Irving's proposed visit does not constitute a crime unless he surreptitiously enters the country; they will however take action if Mr Irving breaks the Canadian hate law or any other law while in the country." From Douglas, B.C., where immigration officers have been keeping a border watch for Mr Irving for several days, they fax the newspaper report, which is entitled HOLOCAUST DENIER TO BE ALLOWED VISIT, to headquarters for comment: an anonymous hand inks the word "No" next to the headline. 

October 24, 1992 In South Africa the vendetta escalates. Kate Everingham, Jewish sales

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director of Media House Publications in Johannesburg, who has asked for sole rights to sell Mr Irving's book Hitler's War in South Africa, unilaterally cancels the agreement: 

"I don't want any copies on our premises," she writes in a panicky note. "We have had some incidents already."

"Many of our book buyers are Jewish," she explains to Focal Point on October 31. "It is much easier for [my staff] now to say, 'We don't stock the book.'"Similar direct pressure continues on individual bookshops all over Britain. 

October 28, 1992 In Germany too the dirty tricks multiply. Untrue rumours are circulated among bookshops in Germany that some of Mr Irving's book titles have been placed on the Index -- the German government's censorship list of works which may not be publicly sold. (Not one publication by Mr Irving has ever been censored, anywhere in the world.) 
Experts on Canadian immigration law meanwhile consulted by Mr Irving point out that to justify a ban, a foreign "conviction" has to have an exact equivalent in Canadian law; the German one does not -- in no other country is there a law against "defaming the dead"; and since he has spoken in Canada a hundred times before without breaking the law, the second pretext for an entry ban will not hold water either. 
Christie lodges his appeal in Vancouver. Erwin Nest, executive director of the Pacific Region of the Canadian Jewish Congress, warns in an affidavit sworn on October 26 of the consequences of allowing Mr Irving in, stating, according to the Vancouver Sun on October 28, 1992: 

"I believe that should David Irving be allowed to travel throughout Canada, personally disseminating his views denying the historical fact of the Holocaust with the attendant publicity arising thereby, this would cause both personal trauma to Holocaust survivors and their families, as well as to other survivors of Nazi concentration camps, and likely cause a noticeable increase in the manifestation of anti-Semitic incidents in Canada."

Nest backs his affidavit with a letter from one Robert Krell, professor of psychiatry at the University of British Columbia, who has written to Nest on October 23, 1992: Krell's credentials are above reproach though not his impartiality - he was himself hidden as a Jewish child in Holland for three years during the war. Yet another survivor. "In my experience," he testifies, 

survivors who are patients and those who are not, suffer daily from the consequences of their war time experiences. Any reminder -- a barking dog, a car backfiring resembling a shot, the sound of sirens -- all cause flashbacks to the time of their suffering. Thus, for most, articles in the newspaper, as well as television news, cause great distress when people write or appear denying them their past experiences.

Krell claims to have seen relatively well-functioning survivors "decompensate" into depression at news of the premature release of war criminals and upon discovery of articles and books querying the Holocaust. "Canadian Jews," concludes Krell, "should not have to live in fear of the presence of a David Irving." 

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Krell's affidavit is before the court, at Vancouver on Tuesday, October 27, which hears Douglas Christie's application for an injunction against immigration stopping Mr Irving's entry. The judge denies Christie's application. 
On the other side of the country, Mr Irving legally enters Canada, flies to Vancouver and drives to Victoria, British Columbia. 
Somehow -- probably by illegal wiretaps -- the traditional enemy learns that he is in the country. Moving fast, Jack R Avery, of Canada Immigration's investigations unit in Vancouver city, requests material from Toronto, from Harold Musetescu -- the pony-tailed, ear-ringed, hippie-garbed, mixed-race officer of the Immigration Investigation Service [based at 1280 Finch Avenue W., 2nd floor, Downsview, Ont. M3J 3KG]. Musetescu, who has an obsession about white supremacy, is masterminding the whole operation against Mr Irving in collusion with the Canadian Jewish bodies. In the Niagara Falls hearings two weeks later he is observed in close cahoots with Marvin Kurz, a lawyer for the B'nai Brith Canada; Mr Irving protests during that hearing about Kurz's interference with witnesses, which does not prevent Musetescu from perjuring himself in the witness stand. 
Answering Avery's plea Musetescu notifies Vancouver by computer link: 

Assistance has been sought from RCMP LO [Liaison Office] Bonn to obtain documents, convictions, etc.

He states boldly: "Subject is holocaust denier." The quality of Musetescu's further information can be seen from Avery's resulting request to the Minister, Bernard Valcourt, an ex-criminal (dangerous driving under the influence) to permit the issue of an arrest warrant against Mr Irving, who has not in fact written one book about the Holocaust: 

The subject is the author of several books that deny the existence of the holocaust. Information received from various sources leads me to believe that the subject may be in Canada to speak at meetings.

Canada has evidently wiretapped Mr Irving's guarded telephone conversations with Douglas Christie, his lawyer, and with the organizer of his forthcoming meetings in British Columbia. 
More lies follow: "The purpose of these meetings," wrote Avery, "is to deny the holocaust and incite hatred."

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Information received indicates that the subject is aware that he is being sought after by Immigration. He is therefore conducting his nefarious activities and movements in a secretive way for the express purpose of eluding Immigration authorities. Because the purpose of the subjects [sic] visit is to incite hatred against specific groups, it could be argued that he is a danger to the public. The white supremists [sic], neo-Nazi, skin-head elements that follow the philosophy of Mr Irving are known to engage in acts of random violence against specifically targeted groups.

In Victoria that evening October 28 Mr Irving is awarded the George Orwell Freedom of Speech prize ("For his courageous defence of Freedom of Speech in historical inquiry"). The restaurant is surrounded by RCMP police. He is dragged away in handcuffs by half a dozen Royal Canadian Mounted police officer ten minutes after concluding his speech of thanks. 
Because sixty to seventy ordinary Canadians have staged a noisy protest outside the Victoria city jail where Irving is held overnight, the authorities decide to provide secure handling from airport to airport and he is transferred to Vancouver city on October 29, after a spell in prison garb at the island's main convict jail, handcuffed to police officers. 
That night Musetescu forwards more material to Murray Wilkinson, the government's case presenting officer, whom the illiterate Musetescu spells as "Likson", in time for the Vancouver hearing of October 30. 
The Vancouver Inquiry is held on October 30, 1992 on the fifth floor of the Adjudication Directorate, 800 Helmcken Street, Vancouver city. There is massive press and television coverage. Documents faxed overnight by SAJBOD about Mr Irving's alleged banning from South Africa turn up in the hearing; so do documents from Germany, Italy, and Britain. He is told he will be held three weeks in jail pending a hearing while the government prepares its case for excluding him. The enemy have won: his tour is in ruins. He accepts a voluntary departure notice, agreeing to leave Canada by midnight on November 1: to his enemy's rage, this gives time for one more big meeting in Toronto. And, unlike a deportation, he will be free to return. 
In Vancouver, as the immigration hearing ends, there is a strange interlude, which is later to prove highly significant. A complete stranger, Brian Fisher, offers to drive Mr Irving from the city back over to Victoria to collect his belongings - a round trip of eight hours or more. As they return on the Tsawwassen ferry, Fisher asks Mr Irving if, in return for having done this favour, the historian will autograph fifty comic lithographs in his possession, drawn and signed by Konrad Kujau, the notorious forger of the Hitler Diaries: it was Mr Irving who, in April 1983, exposed the diaries as a hoax at the famous press conference of Hamburg news magazine Der Stern which had paid nine million marks over $6 million) for them. 
Too late, Mr Irving learns that Fisher lives just over the US border, in Washington state. 
On the drive to the border, Mr Irving discusses his situation with Fisher. Shall he get that departure form stamped here and now? Fisher asks what it says, and Irving takes it out of the folder. The envelope reads only, Important, please hand this document into Canadian authorities at the time of your departure from Canada. Your departure will be verified by return of this document to the issuing office. 
It does not read like a mandatory instruction; better therefore, says Irving, to hand it in at Niagara Falls on Sunday, the time and place he has announced he will formally leave Canada. There is, to be fair, a second uncertainty: what if Canada does not allow him back in in two hours' time -- he will be trapped on the wrong side of the border, with all his properties stuck inside Canada?

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The journey however goes well: US border officials allow him to pass with no difficulties -- and why shouldn't they? He has a permanent entry visa. 

At Fisher's home Mr Irving signs the lithographs, and makes three long-distance telephone calls by Pacific Bell. The first is to the residence of Heinz K., his Vancouver area organiser: he is concerned that the evening is now drawing on, and he still has to collect boxes of books that have been stored at the K. household, now that the tour is effectively over. There is no answer. At 10:18 p.m. Mr Irving phones Paul Norris, his organiser in Toronto, with instructions to cancel his planned speech in Ottawa and concentrate everything on a major farewell meeting in Toronto on Sunday evening (from memory, he will later testify this call was around 11:15 p.m.) At 10:43 p.m. he then phones Vancouver again: this time K.'s daughter answers, and he explains he's going to be late. She arranges a rendezvous on Route 99 for her to pilot them to their household when he gets back over the border. The Pacific-Bell company's billing records will later confirm these times and calls from Fisher's American home. 
At 11:20 p.m. Fisher drives him back the short distance over deserted roads to the United States. There is only one lane open at the Canadian border post at Douglas, British Columbia. The customs officer -- later identified as Sandy Basra -- hands back both passports without question or comment; at Heinz K's household in a Vancouver suburb they shake hands and Fisher leaves immediately to return home, crossing back into the United States a few minutes after midnight. 
All of these seemingly trivial details become of immense importance a few days later. 
October 31, 1992 His plane leaves from Vancouver for Toronto at 8 a.m. On the three thousand mile flight to Ontario Mr Irving records the brief excursion to the United States in the diary typed into his electronic typewriter's memory. 
In Toronto that Saturday October 31, he freely talks about the excursion to reporters. The Canadian Press agency reports: 

TORONTO: David Irving claimed he drove out of Canada after being ordered to leave the country on Friday and drove back in with no questions asks. "I showed my British passport (to border officials) and there were no problems", the writer said after an impromptu news conference here.

Newspapers publish this dispatch on Sunday. It seems like no big deal: Mr Irving is planning to leave Canada as agreed that Sunday night anyway, at the Niagara Falls in Ontario. 
In fact Canada has been on weak ground from the first moment and knows it. A few hours after the Departure Notice on October 30, Murray Wilkinson, the government's case presenting officer at Vancouver, secretly notifies Joseph Rikhof, chief of legal services at national headquarters in Ottawa: 

Irving plans to return to Canada. If after this experience someone wishes to alleged [sic] Irving is inadmissible I think more work is needed to prepare a case.

 

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In a confidential file note, Wilkinson also notes that the allegations they have prepared against Mr Irving [under the Immigration Act's sections 27(2)(g), 27(2)(a), 19(1)(19)(1) and 19(2)(a) of the Act] were useless: Except for 27(2)(g), to which Mr Irving concedes under duress, Wilkinson notes: 

Case on other allegations tenuous without better evidence. 

Tenuous indeed. 
Meanwhile the newspaper photographs of a visiting British historian, his handcuffed hands clasping an open pen, shock Canada. The Globe & Mail publishes an editorial in his defence -- and regrets it: for four weeks it has to publish columns of venomous letters from Canada's Jewish community and dares not print one letter in its own, or his, defence. 
November 1, 1992In Toronto on Sunday evening Mr Irving delivers a farewell speech to five hundred Canadians while the newspaper and television reporters, denied entry, mass in the foyer below. (The Primrose Hotel has to publish a half-page advertisement in Toronto's newspapers a few days later apologising to the Jewish community for having inadvertently allowed Mr Irving to speak.) 
Harold Musetescu infiltrates the Primrose Hotel with another immigration investigation officer, Kevin Tufford, and they ask Wolfgang Droege -- a convicted drug-dealer and arms runner, now a Canadian government agent masquerading as a right-winger -- to fetch Mr Irving out for them. At first the speaker refuses, as he is still lecturing. Later, he visits Musetescu and Tufford in an empty banquet hall. Musetescu is wearing khaki fatigue trousers, a black T-shirt, a leather bomber-jacket; his shoulder-length hair parted to reveal an ear-ring. He does not look much like a Canadian government official to the Englishman, and Musetescu has shown him no kind of identity badge (under oath, he perjures himself on November ·· and says that he did); when Musetescu asks him if he has left Canada and returned since the Vancouver hearing, he sees no reason to reveal to him that he has. 
If anything, by his bearing and manner Musetescu looks and acts like one of the more violent enemies of free speech. 
With the security of the more elderly members of his audience in mind, since he would not put it beyond his enemies to stage a riot even now, an hour later Mr Irving sends Paul Norris over to challenge Musetescu, who has now invaded the lecture hall, to show his identity. An hour later still, leaving the hall in the same lift as Musetescu and a female officer, Mr Irving himself demands to see any kind of official identity badge. The female produces an Ontario police badge, and with a nod from her Musetescu - reluctantly - hauls a badge out of his pocket and shows it. 
Fearing illegal attempts to detain him, he manages to shake them off as he leaves the hall. 
As he tries to leave Canada at the Niagara Falls two hours before the deadline, there is a barrage of telephone and telex messages over the famous Rainbow bridge and United States officials Randy Howe and Mitchell H Pilon refuse to let him in. In thirty years Mr Irving has never been denied entry to the United States before. Has somebody tampered with their computer? 
Sent back to the Canadian end of the bridge, he is now allowed back into Canada but only pursuant to para. 14(1)(c) of the Immigration Act, he is handcuffed by Musetescu's officials, re-arrested, imprisoned at four a.m. and held for mandatory deportation at a court hearing set for nine o'clock to be held at the Immigration Adjudication section at No. 6278 Lundy's Lane in Niagara Falls.

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At eight-fifty however a worried senior immigration officer, Steve McCaffrey, the prosecuting officer, visits the historian in his holding cell: "We have heard rumours," he says, "that you left Canadian soil for two hours on Friday night. It means that you are legally back in Canada. If this is true, it puts us in a very difficult position." 
"It is," says Mr Irving, suddenly realising the significance of that fortuitous two hour U.S. trip to sign those lithographs. "And you are. " 
November 4, 1992 Lou Martens, a stranger to Mr Irving who happens to be in court during the hearing, offers to stand bail for him. The authorities do not make it easy for him. Martens is obliged to deposit twenty thousand dollars in cash with Immigration Canada as a bond to secure Mr Irving's release. Irving is ordered to reside continuously at Martens' home at nearby Thorold, and to return to the court at ten a.m. two days later for the renewed hearing. 
Douglas Christie files . . . +++ 
November 13, 1992 After a two-week legal battle which has been fought from one end of Canada to the other under the glare of the television and printed media, during which the Canadian immigration minister, Bernard Valcourt, is so determined to deport Irving that his officials like Musetescu 

  • perjure themselves in court 
  • fake computer print-outs, and 
  • blandly ignore the sworn depositions and evidence of eight witnesses and documents that Mr Irving provides to prove that he is legally in Canada -- he has the prison director retrieve the diary passage from his typewriter's memory, and Brian Fisher even produces his Pacific Bell billing records that prove Mr Irving made the phone calls from his home in the United States

the Niagara Falls immigration adjudicator Kenneth Thompson, who has taken all night to consult his conscience and no doubt other sources of wisdom, rules that the side-trip to the U.S.A. never happened. He orders Mr Irving deported immediately to London. 




November 13, 1992 Mr Irving is driven to the court in Niagara Falls for the final hearing. He is satisfied that he has established beyond doubt the truth -- that having left the country briefly for Blaine, on the west coast of the USA, that Friday evening, he has by chance thwarted the efforts of those who procured that fateful halting on the bridge at Niagara Falls. He is however prepared for all eventualities. In his inner pocket he tucks one copy of the writ, which he will slap on the adjudicator the moment it is plain he is going to order, against all the evidence, a deportation. He gives another copy to his aide Paul Norris, and says: "If I say the codeword Valkyrie, don't let anyone stop you: jump up and slap this writ on the case presenting officer McCaffery," -- representing the minister. 
The press packs into the press room and watches on closed circuit television. Four pressmen are selected by ballot for the four vacant seats. A single television camera feeds the networks news channels. The usual rented mob is building up outside with angry placards and banners once again. 
As Mr Irving waits in the foyer, giving a final interview to a reporter, McCaffery asks to see him alone: "If the adjudicator rules in your favour," he advises, "what do you plan to do?" "Drive to Ottawa and hold the meeting we have planned there, then drive back to Washington."

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McCaffery shakes his head. "I recommend that you drive straight from here to the border. Otherwise," he says earnestly, "there is every indication that you will be arrested all over again, this time on the two other charges" -- namely the ones which his Vancouver colleague Wilkinson has already guaranteed would not be revived. 
"My name is Ken Thomson," says the adjudicator, opening the hearing, and begins to read out his findings.

[Note that the version of this document posted by Nizkor is incomplete and inaccurately transcribed: Ken McVay has omitted every one of Mr Irving's objections and remarks. For the complete, accurate transcript, see elsewhere on this Website].

He agrees that the writer's assertion that he left Canada briefly on October 30 is the most significant evidence before him. "This purported departure," he repeats, "is pivotal, since if it is factually accurate it would mean that the action taken against you by immigration officials in Niagara Falls on November 1st, 1992 was based on erroneous facts." 
It shortly becomes plain that he is troubled by the minutiæ of that trip to Blaine. 
You testified that you left the mainland at 2:00 p.m. and upon your arrival in Victoria you gathered your belongings and consulted with your lawyer [Douglas Christie]. You left Vancouver Island on the 8:00 p.m. ferry [Mr Irving has produced the ticket as evidence] arriving on the mainland at 9:40 p.m. You drove directly down Route 99 to the United States border at Blaine, Washington, crossing between 10:15 and 10:30 p.m. 
Mr Fisher presented both of your passports to a U.S. immigration officer who, upon looking at your document, made a comment concerning your name which felt was off colour. No stamp was placed in your passport and you were granted entry. 
You proceeded to the Fishers' home in Ferndale, a community located a short distance from Blaine. You arrived at Mr Fisher's home shortly before 11:00 p.m. where you were met by Helga Ashton, whom, you described as Mr Fisher's lady friend [later his wife]. 
She offered you a beer and you watched the Canadian news on television where you saw film coverage of yourself outside the courthouse in Vancouver earlier in the day, driving away with Mr Fisher in his car. 

Thomson then relates the three phone calls that Mr Irving places from Fisher's home to Canadians. He continues that the allegation is that Mr Irving is lying (and of course by implication those Pacific Bell billing records and the other documents and the witnesses who have testified under oath for him): 

Immigration authorities now contend that you did not at any time in fact physically leave Canada until this attempted entry to the United States at Niagara. 

He explains that he has a great deal of difficulty in accepting Mr Irving's explanation of why he did not hand in the departure notice for stamping at the Blaine border crossing. As he continues, it is increasingly likely that he is about to order the writer's deportation. He suggests that there are four significant discrepancies in detail between Irving's and Fisher's evidence, which suggests to him, as he tells Mr Irving that "you in fact remained in Canada throughout the period in question." 
First, unlike Mr Irving his driver Fisher did not recall showing their passports either on entering the United States or on leaving. (As it is not notoriously easy to cross U.S. border posts without documents, it seems unduly perverse to attach weight to this). 

quote: 
Secondly, Mr Fisher testified that the two of you proceeded into Canada and met a car on the side of the highway [K.'s daughter] where Mr Fisher dropped you off and then returned immediately to the United States: 
IRVING [interrupting]: No, that wasn't the testimony! 
THOMSON: -- You testified that you met Sandra K. as described by Mr Fisher and that Mr Fisher and yourself followed her to the K. residence a short distance. 
IRVING: That was his testimony too. 
THOMSON: Okay. There's no need for you to say anything now. 
IRVING: Well, this is serious ? ! 
THOMSON: Well, it is very serious. 
IRVING: -- a serious matter for me. 
THOMSON: -- but you're not going to say anything now. You have had your chance. Now it's my turn. 
IRVING: Well, you're implying ? 
THOMSON: Okay!? 
IRVING: -- that I committed perjury! 
THOMSON: Well, that will be, uh, that is for me to determine. So either you be quiet or I'm going to have you evicted and I'm going to put you back in the cell back there and I'll give the decision for the rest of the people here. Okay? So there's no need for you to say another word. 

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The third "discrepancy" which Thomson finds, as he remorselessly grinds on, is that Fisher testified he crossed back to the United States at midnight; but the U.S. immigration service printout shows the car entering the United States at 3:11 a.m., "some three hours later than he testified to." 
(Weeks will pass before the United States Immigration Service US-INS reveals to Irving's lawyers what the Canadian immigration officers have known all along, but keep silent about: as Thomson should have known too, the US-INS computer is standardised on Washington D.C., i.e. Eastern Standard Time, which is three hours later than Canadian Pacific time. The print-out is in fact final proof that Fisher, and hence Irving, both told the truth: he crossed at eleven minutes after midnight, not 3:11 a.m. local time). 

The fourth contradiction is in fact the same as the first - namely that Thomson believes that Fisher testified that he dropped Mr Irving off on the highway near Vancouver and returned to the United States around midnight, while in his affidavit, from memory, he "swore that he drove to the residence of Heinz K. and departed at 12:45 a.m." Thus Fisher seems to have contradicted himself. 
"This is ridiculous," shouts Mr Irving, feeling that one man's negligent reading of the evidence before him is leading to him being railroaded out of Canada with disastrous future consequences. 
But negligence is now compounded with perversity, as Thomson refers to the phone calls from the United States, for which incontrovertible billing evidence has been produced to him. 
THOMSON: Now, I am at a loss as to how you could have telephoned Mr Norris at 10:18 p.m. when you testified you did not arrive at the Fisher residence until sometime around 10:45 p.m. 
IRVING: My memory was faulty, that's all. We now have the [billing] records. 
As for Sandra K.'s sworn testimony that yes, she did receive a call from Mr IRVING saying that he was in the United States, and it was about 10:45 p.m., well, says THOMSON, she too must have been perjuring herself. Mr K., her father, had testified under oath too, says THOMSON, that Mr IRVING and Fisher arrived at 11:30 to 11:45 p.m. "This is, uh, also at odds with Mr Fisher's testimony." 
IRVING: It is not. It is not. This is what he, uh, precisely what he said in the witness box!" 
THOMSON: I'm not here to debate this with you. 
IRVING: The journalists have heard it! 
THOMSON: Okay, you have, uh. I'm not going to warn you again. One more outburst and you're going to be removed from this room." 
Mr Irving, aware that he has the television cameras trained on him, states: "I'm not going to be rail-roaded!" 
The case presented by the Canadian immigration officials Adjudicator Thomson however finds to be persuasive, particularly the computer print-out from the Blaine border crossing: ("an incomplete report" interrupts Mr Irving). "One has to be convinced," concludes Thomson, reaching the point of his decision, "that your short trip to the United States never happened." He makes no attempt to explain the entry describing the trip which Mr Irving typed into his electronic typewriter memory - the machine was seized the moment he was arrested. Referring to the ominous encounter with the ear-ringed Musetescu in the Primrose Hotel, Thomson says: "If you were so leery of Mr Musetescu, why would you just simply not refuse to answer any questions and walk away?" He continues: "I have a great deal of difficulty accepting your evidence. It did not have a ring of truth to it . . . I could not help but get the impression that you were at times simply reciting a rehearsed script." 
He does not ask himself how long Mr Irving could have had to rehearse it: before midnight on the Bridge, he has had no reason to suppose he would need one; at four a.m. he is still having his property inventoried, at nine a.m., after a literally sleepless night he is in the witness box reconstructing from memory the sequence of the border-crossing with Brian Fisher. Thomson's voice drones on: "I found you to be a difficult witness who was often confrontational with the case presenting office when asked straightforward questions. When viewed as a whole this evidence can lead to only one conclusion, that the event was a total fabrication that never took place. I can only speculate that you and your supporters concocted your story to garner further publicity and prolong your stay in Canada - both of which you have done with some success."

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It is evident that Mr Thomson is not to be counted among Mr Irving's supporters. He exclaims to the cameras: "This is a travesty." 
"Consequently," concludes Thomson, putting away his papers, "you are hereby ordered deported." 



As Thompson finishes reading his adjudication, reports The Globe & Mail, Mr Irving jumps to his feet and hands him a request for a judicial review of the decision. "This is a time when the real courts can take over," he says. "The kangaroo court has had its say." [See too the Toronto Sun's report].

[The case for judicial review is lodged with the District Court on July 29, 1994].

Mr Irving stands up and puts his Writ on Thomson's shoulder. "Mr Thomson," he remarks courteously, "I'm afraid I have to serve this writ in the Courts of Ontario on you, which I ask you to take notice of -- " 
Thomson is startled, snaps "Very well," and orders Mr Irving to his seat. The latter continues: "I also have a writ to serve on Mr McCaffery." 
The adjudicator shouts: "Mr McCaffery, would you please summon the guards in here." 
IRVING: "This is the time now when the real courts can take over, and the kangaroo courts have had their say." 
McCaffery is screaming for a guard to come, but the writer, as he is handcuffed, announces: "I'm entitled to serve a High Court writ on this Court and on the Crown's representative, and this is precisely what I've done." 
Thompson declares: "You are hereby ordered retaken into custody pending your removal from Canada."




He is deported in handcuffs to London that night aboard an Air Canada flight despite protests from the Canadian Writers' Union, from the Canadian PEN, and from other powerful groups. 
Valcourt telephones instructions to Toronto airport's immigration detention centre to notify him by phone immediately the plane with Mr Irving aboard has left Canadian soil. 



November 9, 1992 In Europe meanwhile the battle has continued behind the scenes. After the Board of Deputies of British Jews protests to the German embassy in London that Mr Irving is still entering Germany, the embassy replies to Neville Nagler, the Board's chief executive, with a cryptic admission that at least one of Mr Irving's manuscripts has been illegally obtained: 
I have forwarded the manuscript of David Irving to the German authorities. It is indeed regrettable that such an irresponsible person still succeeds in entering Germany despite an official interdiction. 

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Mr Irving's letters to the German embassy asking them to identify the manuscript which has obviously been feloniously obtained by the Board of Deputies go unanswered, and he asks SO1 Branch -- the Office of International & Organised Crimeat Scotland Yard to investigate. 

November 23, 1992 One episode typical of many: Sky Television invites Mr Irving to participate in a news discussion programme. Later that day they cancel the invitation because the Jews they have approached have refused to debate with Mr Irving - an easy means of silencing him under Britain's television code of practice. 

January 13, 1993 Mr Irving appeals to a higher court in Munich on the "fake gas chamber" conviction. Just before the hearing begins one of his three lawyers, the Austrian Klaus Goebel, tells him he must withdraw - he shows Mr Irving a letter he has received from the local bar association threatening disciplinary action for defending him. Mr Irving demands that the court extend its protection to his attorneys. 

Irving, with lawyers Herrmann, Schaller
DAVID IRVING with his heroic attorney at the Munich courthouse, January 13, 1993, wartime fighter ace Hajo Herrmann (centre) and Austrian Karl Schaller

In vain. Judge Huber also refuses, like his craven predecessors, to allow any defence documents or to hear any defence witnesses, including Germar Rudolf, the Max-Planck institute's expert on solid-state chemistry. Seldom has the stock of German justice fallen so low this century. 
The judge appears to fall asleep during the hearing, makes several telephone calls during adjournments, returns to increase the fine yet again to DM 30,000 (over $20,000). 

"During a break in proceedings," reports the Süddeutsche Zeitung, "Irving repeated the 'Auschwitz-Lie' in an interview with a private television station, claiming that the Auschwitz gas chambers were a fabrication. That could possibly lead to a further round in the courts," added the liberal-left-wing newspaper eagerly. 

At a public meeting in downtown Munich that evening Mr Irving calls the judge a "senile, alcoholic cretin." Police agents attending the meeting report this to the judge, who tells the Süddeutsche Zeitung that he will sue for criminal libel; as of this date no action has been initiated. (Mr Irving indicates on the phone to his German lawyers that he will call them and others as witnesses in justification of his remark). 
All of which may explain why as early as January 20, 1993 the Australian embassy in Bonn, trying to investigate the DM 30,000 Munich fine on Irving, laments to Canberra that "Bavarian Justice Ministry officials have not been forthcoming" because they know the whole case stinks. 

January - March 1993 Mr Irving spends three months writing in South Africa, after negotiating certain conditions, which however prevent him from speaking in public or to the media. 
While he is there he receives a letter dated February 5, 1993 letter from the Australian government refusing him permission to enter Australia, where he has peacefully lectured on two earlier tours. Thus a new battle front has opened. 

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Many unknown enemies have thrown their weight into silencing him. Hearing that Mr Irving is planning a speaking tour of Australia Sir Thomas Eichelbaum, a Prussian Jew and chief justice of New Zealand, and Wendy Ross, the head of the Jewish Defense league in Auckland, both hot-footed it to Australia to add their weight to gag him at all costs. Bruce Phillips of Auckland, later reveals this in a reader's letter to Time magazine on April 18, 1996 (which they do not however publish).
The Australian newspapers and television seize on the issue as one involving freedom of speech; from South Africa and later from England, Mr Irving speaks several times by radio and television to Australian television audiences. Australian and New Zealand newspapers reveal that the brothers Isi and Mark Leibler, millionaire presidents of the Australian Zionist Federation and Australian Jewish Congress respectively, are generous financial contributors to the ruling Australian Labour Party. 
Mr Irving lodges an appeal with the Federal Court. The Australian press is wholly on his side. "We lost the press war over Irving," admits the shocked Australian Jewish News. The court-ordered release of government files shows that the prime minister Paul Keating himself took the decision to ban Mr Irving. 

April 20, 1993 Arriving in Washington D.C.'s international airport, for a press conference on the opening of the Holocaust museum on the Mall, Mr Irving is held by immigration officials for three hours. U.S. Immigration (INS) officials then apologize to him that they have discovered that somebody has rigged their computer database against him, placing "a yard and a half of garbage" on his file in an attempt to get him denied entry to the United States. The file falsely claims, among other things, that there is an arrest warrant outstanding in Canada; but the Canadians' own database - each country's immigration service can access the other's computer database - shows this to be untrue. The U.S. embassy in London writes him in June confirming that the file has been cleared. 
Mr Irving starts a Freedom of Information suit in Washington to obtain access to the file to identify who is the culprit, not that there can be any real doubt. He also files suit under Canada's Access to Information Act, to enable him to commence civil proceedings against the government officials concerned, backed now by nearly a thousand supporters in North America. A David Irving Fighting Fund rapidly attracts the cash needed to fight the traditional enemy worldwide and on his own terms. 

April 27, 1993 The French courts order David Irving to attend court in Paris to be examined on charges of being an accomplice to the challenging of crimes against humanity. (The Fabius-Gayssot Law of 1990, amending the Freedom of the Press Act of 1881, expressly forbids contestation des crimes contre l'humanité). Mr Irving ignores the summons, telling the British press: "I have not been in France for years. Either the French government is off its rocker or my opponents are entering the final frenzy of defeat." 
He points out that under the new law - signed by Socialist President Mitterand on Bastille Day, July 14, 1990 - it becomes a criminal offence to question the long-discredited story of Nazi bars of soap made from the bodies of Jews, and even to state that the Russians rather than the 

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Nazis killed the fifteen thousand Polish officers at Katyn, which Moscow has now admitted. "It is designed to stifle all historical debate," Irving tells the press, "which is what my opponents want." 
Mr Irving has not been in France for many years. He has however given several interviews for French television and newspapers, from his study in London. In August 1994 the French government sends to the British government a copy of the summons to appear in court in Paris to answer this Orwellian charge on August 8: ludicrously, the words "gas chambers" have been blanked out of the passages complained of, under the new censorship law. 
Tongue-in-cheek, the British Home Office forwards the French papers to Mr Irving but adds a broad hint that there is no need for a British citizen to comply. 

May 30, 1993 The Australian Federal Court rejects Mr Irving's appeal against the government's refusal of a visa. The appeal has cost him $15,000. Undismayed he appeals to Australia's full Federal Court, backed by hundreds of supporters throughout Australia. 
Simultaneously he launches onto the Australian market an eighty-five minute video, The Search for Truth in History, which he has prepared while in South Africa for this very eventuality. Ten thousand copies of the video are distributed, and halls are booked in seven major Australian cities for public showings only days after the court announces its ruling. 
The Australian press reports that the Jewish community is pole-axed by this unexpected move. Its leaders appeal to the Paul Keating government to ban the video's release because it has not been submitted for government censorship. Mr Irving's organizers move equally swiftly, arranging for the video to be vetted by the censorship authorities and given a certificate just twelve hours before the nationwide showing. 
Appalled at the press and television interest in the Irving video, the enemies of the truth then resort to traditional methods. Just hours ahead of the nationwide premiere, six of the seven halls simultaneously cancel the rental contracts - the Jewish community swears that the halls have not come under any pressure from them this time at all. The newspapers however report threats of demonstrations. 
The censorship board, after two viewings, decides to give the video general release; four members vote for limited release, and one, who is not identified, for its banning in the national interest. 
A few weeks later the Sydney Morning Herald reports that a microphone planted by the Mossad has been discovered hidden in the video censorship authority's viewing room. 

July 1, 1993 On the unprecedented personal orders of Germany's minister of the interior, Mr Irving is denied future access to all of their public archives ("to protect Germany's national interests") and ordered to leave the archives building in Koblenz immediately, where he has researched unhindered for thirty years. 
The minister is unaware that the building houses the other half of Mr Irving's magnificent document collection on the Third Reich, which he has placed in the archives over those years; the government is accordingly obliged to return the collection to England forthwith. The unique ban is reported around the world. There is not even a whimper from the tame German press, let alone from their cowardly historians. 

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July 13, 1993 Over the signature of Pamela J. Massad, register officer of the Federal Court of Canada, the judgement is issued in the action by David Irving against the Minister of Employment and Immigration. The application was originally to be considered by Judge Mackay, but was switched at the last moment to Judge Rothstein who dismissed it without giving any reasons. Judge Rothstein, in a one-line ruling dated July 16 that vouchsafes no reasons, denies Mr Irving's lawyer's application for leave to appeal against the illegal deportation order. One page before and after the judgment certificate in the official file are withheld from release by the Canadian Justice department even now. A copy is rushed to the Department of Justice, for Kevin Lunney, Toronto counsel to the Justice department, to deliver to Robert Christie. It is a bitter and inexplicable setback. 

August 24, 1994 Under file number 679/92 Toronto solicitor Robert C. Christie serves an action by Mr Irving against the minister and against Kenneth Thomson the adjudicator in the Court of Justice, Divisional Court. The papers are served on Thomson on August 29, 1994. 
Unknown to Rothstein and his friends however the judicial review application which Mr Irving and Douglas Christie lodged at District Court level in November 1992 is still quietly ticking away. The quasi-judicial hearings and appeal procedures up to that point have cost Mr Irving nearly $20,000, in addition to the losses inflicted on him by the government's illegal interference with his tour. 



September 16, 1993 Victory in Australia! The full Federal Court, sitting in western Australia, allows Mr Irving's appeal against the entry ban, declaring that the minister Gerry Hand took his decision illegally. It orders him to reconsider, this time "within the law." 
Under mounting pressure from the international Jewish community, the Australian government has however on February 1, 1993 changed the law to make it possible to continue the ban on Mr Irving's entry. 
At a Labour lawyers' meeting in Perth over a year later, in September 1994, Professor Laurence Maher, associate law professor at Melbourne University, will mention this government trick in warning of the renewed enthusiasm for censorship in Australia. 
He gives as an example, according to the Australian Associated Press dispatch on the conference, "the passing, last year, with almost no parliamentary debate, of changes in the Migration Act

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that were then used to keep the controversial historian David Irving out of Australia." 
But Prime Minister Paul Keating is desperate to keep Mr Irving out: he has obligations to fulfil; his Labour Party's financial backers are calling in their markers. 
Despite repeated inquiries by newspapers, senators and members of Parliament, the months pass and Keating's government announces no decision on Mr Irving's new application to enter. 
What is meanwhile happening in the Australian capital? On October 26, 1993 the Australian ambassador in Bonn notifies his colleagues in Canberra and Pretoria (!) that following a phone call four days earlier the Bonn interior ministry has confirmed that Irving is prohibited from entering Germany, in case this damages her relations with unspecified foreign countries, but that the ban has proven unenforceable. "Several officials," the embassy advises, "also mentioned to us that under the Aliens Law an order can be issued which prohibit [sic] an individual from engaging in political activities while in Germany. Irving has complied with these orders in the past." 
The embassy comments: "Although an official characterised them as being 'effective' in preventing him from giving public speeches, etc., this strikes us as a fairly narrow and legalistic approach. There is obviously a strong political motivation to his visits in Germany." The ministry of the interior had continued: 

There are other measures which have been taken against Mr Irving during his (technically illegal) stays in Germany in recent years. The Federal Archives in Koblenz, for instance, have prohibited his entry onto their premises. 

The German ministry however warns the Australian embassy: "As elsewhere, these measures have led to a mail campaign from [Mr Irving's] supporters in Germany and in other countries." The Germans for their part ask Australia for "any further information" that she can provide on the worldwide bans on Mr Irving. As for Mr Irving's further avenues of appeal against the Munich conviction, the Bonn ministry of the interior confidently predicts: "The chances of success are negligible." 
This seems to support the view that these verdicts are either rigged or purely political. (In August 1994 two judges who issue a relatively mild judgement against revisionist Günter Deckert will be forced into early retirement on "health grounds"). 
Paul Keating's bloodhounds continue snuffling around. On November 9, 1993 a Mr. Hruby, desk officer at the German ministry of the interior in Bonn, sends over to the Australian embassy a four-page digest of German intelligence data on Mr Irving (Case file IS 2 -- 612400II Irving), as well as the page from the penal code recording Germany's unique law against defaming the memory of the dead. Copies are placed on Australian Intelligence (ASIO) files. 
December 6, 1993 Canberra asks Jim Silva at the political section of its embassy in Bonn whether the Bonn ministry of the interior sent the "Irving brief" under official cover; the reply, on December 14, is that it was faxed informally by the desk officer at Bonn's interior ministry, a Mr. Hruby. Nobody wants to be seen getting involved in an increasingly dirty operation. 
Since Mr Irving's "conviction" in Germany is still under appeal, and hence not in force, in November 1993 Australia begins investigating whether Mr Irving is indeed banned from Italy. The Italian left-wing national newspaper La Repubblica, they learn, had reported on June 13, 1992 that Mr Irving's views are "inspired by the Naziskin movement" [sic] and that he had been scheduled that day - if he had not been denied entry - to participate in a meeting organised by the "Movimento Politico" in Rome.

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Both the newspaper's statements are grotesque lies. "I have never heard of either Naziskins (even as lampshades), or the Movimento Politico," Mr Irving notifies his Australian lawyer Ed Wall. "I was invited to Rome by a university professor to address students." 
Remorselessly drilling deeper, the Australian embassy in Rome sends a Note Verbale with a further inquiry to the Italian government, but the Italians, not keen to get dragged in any deeper, respond only after weeks of reminders. "Finally," reports the embassy on January 19, 1994, "this week we were advised that a formal response is not possible. However the official from the ministry of foreign affairs was able to confirm that the newspaper report was correct." (It was not). 
The upshot is that Canberra sends a list of forty questions to Mr Irving to answer about his friends and associates - the list has been drawn up by international Jewish organisations, many of them criminal bands like the London-based Searchlight burglary and arson gang, whose director Gerald Gable has Mr Irving to thank for his criminal conviction for breaking and entering (caught red-handed by police burglarizing Mr Irving's apartment) in 1963. 
Mr Irving files a sixty-page reply to the forty questions and settles back to wait. 
Meanwhile he begins five libel actions against Australian newspapers and journalists, all Jewish, which have libelled him: all of the Defendants formally argue, not that what they printed is true, but that each is too poor to defend himself; one produces a copy of the Legal Aid application made in London by Mr Irving in his breach of contract action against the Sunday Times in

London. Who says they aren't an international network? 

October 1993 Under joint pressure from Jewish front-organisations and (at Cork) the IRA terrorist organisation, four Irish universities (Trinity College Dublin, and the University Colleges of Dublin, Cork, and Galway) withdraw their invitations to Mr Irving to lecture, after expensive poster-campaigns in Dublin and the other cities call for violence if he attends. Who has paid for the campaigns? 

November 9, 1993 Arriving in Munich to address students, Mr Irving is confronted by security police in the restaurant agreed as an initial rendezvous - the police have learned its name by wiretapping. He is served with a Munich city order requiring him to leave Germany for good within twenty-hours. The "expulsion" is reported instantly in newspapers around the world. He instructs his lawyers to appeal against this action, which is illegal under European Community law. Germany is a signatory of the Helsinki Accords which forbids precisely this kind of oppression of free speech. 

December 5, 1993 The German constitutional court in Karlsruhe announces its refusal to hear Mr Irving's appeal against the "fake gas-chamber" conviction, offering no reasons other than that the courts have taken judicial notice of the chambers' existence. 

December 30, 1993 Mr Irving appeals to the American Historical Association to take up his case (since the AHA announced in its journal Perspectives that "for its spring agenda the Professional Division decided to re-examine past doctrine for handling allegations of human rights abuses against historians in other countries.") "I'm finding that I also have the support of other bodies," writes Mr Irving, "e.g. the Canadian Writers' Union, so I am not as alone as I first felt in this unequal struggle."

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The AHA does nothing. 

NEW ZEALAND joins the ban. The minister of immigration writes to warn Mr Irving that, although he has not yet even applied to visit New Zealand -- for which as a British subject he does not need a visa -- he will be denied entry. Wendy Ross, leader of New Zealand's Jewish community, takes the credit in New Zealand newspapers for this new ban. 
 


December 22, 1993 The outgoing South African government writes to Mr Irving denying his application to visit the country in January for three months on the same conditions and staying at the same place as the year before. There is uneasy media comment in the South African press. 

January 25, 1994 the South African department of home affairs explains privately to the Australian embassy that Mr Irving's visa application has been refused "because of his 'right wing political connections' and [because] his entry to South Africa would not be in the interests of [the] South African community." 
Mr Irving refrains temporarily from any legal action against South Africa pending resolution of the country's internal political problems. 

LATE IN 1993 David Irving's lecture video entitled The Search for Truth in History arrives in Canada from Australia. Canadian Jewish leaders appeal for a ban but -- as in Australia -- the British Columbia authorities approve release of the 85-minute video. "The B.C. film classification board says it doesn't censor films," laments the Canadian Jewish News on February 3. 
 


February 8, 1994 A minor pinprick. Needing a solicitor to countersign an affidavit in the Australian actions, Mr Irving calls in at David Brecher & Co., solicitors, of Gilbert Street, London. He hands the notary a gift book, Göring (Macmillan & Co., London, 1991), to add to the usual fee. The solicitor refuses to witness the affidavit, and calls security to have Mr Irving evicted, saying: "I have personal reasons." 
He does not specify why he is unable to sign. "Pen out of ink?" speculates Mr Irving in his next ACTION REPORT. "Wanker's Cramp?" 
David Brecher, senior partner, refuses to apologize for his firm's conduct, and explains to the Law Society that his partner is Jewish, and that Mr Irving tried to hand him a book he had written "on the Holocaust." That is a lie, and the Law Society agrees to investigate Mr Irving's complaint that a solicitor has refused to perform his statutory duty, as an officer of the courts, to witness an affidavit. At every level, the fight continues. 

February 11, 1994 Without any advance warning, police from West End Central station

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suddenly arrive at Mr Irving's London apartment and remove him to the notorious Pentonville prison to serve a three month sentence (without any court orders, appearance, or hearing) for "contempt of court." 
It turns out that, that morning, counsel for Rowohlt Verlag, a liberal left-wing German publishing house, appeared in the High Court and asked for Mr Irving's immediate committal to prison. Among records later obtained by Mr Irving's Australian solicitors from the Paul Keating government's files in April is this verbatim tape-recorder transcript: 

Mr Justice Brooke: "Subject to that, I order that [Mr Irving] be committed to prison for a period of three months for his contempt of Court as I have found it." 
Later in the Day 
Mr Charles Mackenzie (Counsel): "My Lord, I have been asked to raise one matter with your Lordship and I would crave your Lordship's indulgence. It relates to the time of imprisonment. I would have moved your Lordship for a sentence of two years "

The transcript shows that Mr. Justice Brooke considered it a "most unlikely event" that Mr Irving would serve a prison sentence: "I would be extremely surprised if Mr Irving both fails to set aside my order on some technicality and actually serves three months." 
Of course were Mr Irving to be sent behind bars for two years (and inevitably ruined) it would certainly serve those trying to silence him.

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When he obtains a High Court judge's order for his release on February 22, Mr Irving finds that the solicitors who applied for his committal to prison are acting in collusion with the British law firm representing the Sunday Times and the Australian law firms representing the five Jewish defendants in his libel actions Down Under, and that the London printing firm, B & H. Newman & Co. (run by a Jewish widow whom Mr Irving has supported with print orders as an act of personal charity) has voluntarily supplied them with his confidential papers. 
Both the imprisonment and the release are reported overnight, sometimes with photos, around the world -- the Singapore Times, the San Francisco Chronicle, the Jerusalem Post, the Melbourne Age being among the interested newspapers. 
Paul Keating's men cannot believe their good fortune. Canberra immediately faxes to Mr Irving's solicitor in Perth, West Australia: 

We have received advice from London that Mr Irving has been arrested and is presently serving three months in prison for contempt of court.

Irving replies within hours direct to the minister: 

In order that you may deal with the important matters without delay, let me dispose of this trivial matter direct. The judge hearing the matter in my absence, and without my knowledge, granted my opponents' application that I be committed for contempt. I served a sworn Affidavit and was immediately freed. 
I cannot forfend from remarking upon two coincidences: that some person or persons had fully informed the opposing solicitors in court of all the court proceedings which I am bringing Australia; and, that some person or persons evidently apprised your own office of this remarkable event occurring so far away from Canberra...

Coincidence indeed. On February 25, 1994 Australia urgently instructs its High Commission in London to mine this new High Court seam for the latest dirt on Mr Irving -- not easy, as Britain's courts impose a forty-day non-disclosure rule. "We really have come up against every brick wall possible," writes Robyn Bicket from the High Commission. 
Once again however officials bend the rules, and a Mrs. Stone, clerk of the court in London, unofficially briefs the Australians on what led to Mr Irving's imprisonment and release. 
One other matter looks promising to the Canberra sleuths. On March 22, 1994 Australia faxes to the embassy in Vienna "urgently" asking them to investigate the truth of the arrest warrant out for Mr Irving. At first Vienna pettifogs, talks of Austria's Privacy Laws. In private however one Austrian official is somehow persuaded to help.

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"Our reliable source", as the embassy calls him, reporting to Canberra, tells them all they need to know off the record "and cannot be quoted." An arrest warrant, he says, was issued on November 8, 1989 under Austria's all-embracing political thought-crime law, the Verbotsgesetz (Revisionism), but it was, sadly, never executed as Mr Irving had already left the country. "Whether Irving was on January 13 and July 14, 1993 in Austria could not be confirmed," reports the embassy. "However if he was checked against the computer data base on the boarder [sic] / airport it is doubtful that he entered Austria." (He did; not once, not twice, but three or four times since then.)

Simultaneously Australia diverts considerable taxpayer funds to trying to prove that Mr Irving was banned from Germany in March 1990, but had defied the ban; Mr Irving has however testified on oath that no such ban was ever served on him. 
On March 28, 1994 the Australian embassy in Bonn advises Canberra, after consulting with the German authorities, that Mr Irving has told the truth - that evidently no decision had actually been served on Mr Irving and hence "subsequent entry by Irving into Germany might not have constituted an offence per se." The embassy noted that even Munich's expulsion order made no mention of the "entry ban." The embassy commented, "We would simply note that Irving is well networked through his associates and might have been made aware of the 1990 decision by them. We have also heard unconfirmed reports that he may have been turned back at the Netherlands - German border at one point, only to succeed at another crossing which was unstaffed at the time. Even if this can be confirmed, its relevance to the issue of good character is not immediately clear." Even Keating's own embassy thus hints to Canberra that he is scraping the bottom of a very thin barrel. 
All this is then confirmed by German officials at the highest level. On March 31, 1994 the German Office for the Protection of the Constitution hands to the Australian embassy in Bonn this message: 
The direction to turn him [Mr Irving] back at the border dated 9 March 1990 was not an entry ban directed towards him but simply an internal instruction to border control authorities. It was not officially communicated to either him or people in his circle. Since he was turned back at the German-Netherlands border at least once, he must have known that the border control authorities had such an instruction. The fact that he did not turn back, but travelled on to the next border crossing and entered at that point, in our opinion leads to the conclusion that he wanted to circumvent the instruction to turn him back. 
Again this is circulated to Paul Keating and his entire Cabinet. But it is all a lie: at no time was Mr Irving in Holland, nor was he ever turned back, nor did he duck into Germany at another crossing point. When Australian files reveal this secret German report Mr Irving writes to the German government protesting at this lie and asking for an explanation; none is ever given.

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On April 21 Frank Schoneveld, Australia's Legal Counsel (Europe), with an office in Brussels, informs Canberra that their legal advice is that "the decision of the Supreme State Court of Bavaria [on November 30, 1993] to dismiss Irving's appeal means that his conviction remains final and binding." On April 22 1994 the Australian embassy in Bonn sends a confidential telex to Canberra, entitled "David John Irving: German Courts and Nazi Lies," dealing with the German Federal Court's judgment in the Deckert case, just published on April 21; the embassy concludes: 

"We are inclined to think that the Federal Court's judgment in Deckert is now even less likely to support a challenge by Irving and his lawyers against the Bavarian conviction for defamation."


April 9, 1994 Mr Irving receives out of the blue a letter from a Mr Bill Goldstein written to his literary agent on March 4. Goldstein -- no relation to Baruch Goldstein, the hero of Hebron -- is a hitherto unknown senior editor at Charles Scribner's Sons, the financially-strapped New York publishers who signed a contract with Mr Irving on April 29, 1988 for his forthcoming biography Goebbels. Mastermind of the Third Reich. Goldstein pronounces this death sentence on the book: 

"The Work as delivered has been found to be unsatisfactory by the Publisher." 

Odd fact: he has not read it. He can not have. The Goebbels manuscript is not mailed to Scribner's until four weeks after the date of his letter, which the author receives only on April 9. Mr Irving's agent writes asking the publisher to justify that word "unsatisfactory"given that the manuscript has not even been submitted -- and notifies them that Mondadori, Italy's second largest publisher, has written: "It is an impressive work; the writing is superb." A leading English literary writer, who is to review the work for the Literary Review, has added: "The whole Goebbels manuscript [is] excellent, as good as Milch or better." 
"But, there we are," adds Irving, ironically: 

We can lead a cart-horse to the water, but not oblige it to imbibe. I must take exception incidentally to your suggestion that there is nothing sinister or troubling about the books Goebbels or Hitler. I wonder if you are criticizing what I wrote, or what you and your pals mistakenly expected that I would write?A common malaise among editors. 


May 3, 1994 Having purposefully amended its immigration laws to the required degree on February 1, 1993, and despite the September 1993 court ruling, the Australian government again denies Mr Irving's application to enter Australia for a lecture tour. "The Minister decided

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that you did not meet the good character requirements for the issue of a visa," writes his aide Elie Joseph to Mr Irving, then completing a major lecture tour in the United States. 
Bolkus tells the Australian Senate: "I have decided to reject Mr Irving's application on the basis that he does not meet the public interest criterion of good character in the migration regulations as they were at the time of Mr Hand's decision." 
[No such character determination was made by Gerry Hand, whose ministerial files were ordered released in confidence to Mr Irving's lawyers at the time of the mid-1993 court hearings.] 
The new regulations issued on February 1, 1993, Bolkus explains, enable a range of conduct to be taken into account when assessing a person's character such as a person's past conduct. "They also prescribe a number of matters which deem a person not to be of good character. For example, a deportation order or exclusion from another country for national security reasons." Mr Irving, Bolkus informs the Senate, was deported from Canada in November 1992 and remains inadmissible to that country. In 1993 he was excluded from Germany. 
The Australian government announces plans for legislation to ban "racial vilification." This leads to protests from the media, who can see where the journey may well end: "In the name of curbing the unacceptable views of a few," editorialised the West Australian, "the legislation puts at risk a right which lies at the heart of democracy." It accuses Paul Keating's Labour government, and immigration minister Nick Bolkus in particular, of building up a dubious record in their "attacks on free speech." 
Told of Senator Bolkus' remarks that he had not come up to the requisite character standards, Mr Irving comments: "Having my character called into question by an Australian Labour Party minister is an unusual sensation: I now know how it would feel to have the cut of my raincoat criticized by television's Lieutenant Columbo." 
As for Bolkus's references to the deportation from Canada and exclusion from Germany, Mr Irving states that he has evidence that the Jewish lobby in Australia has peddled a one-and-a-half-inch dossier of lies to the Keating government. 
"It's rich!" he comments: "It was they themselves who applied pressure to ministers in Canada and Germany to act in the illegal way they have. And now they holler that because I am inadmissible to those countries I should be excluded from Australia too" "That's rather like the Menendez Brothers," he continues, referring to two young men facing trial in California for murdering their wealthy parents, "throwing themselves on the mercy of the court because they're orphans." 
Speaking to radio reporters, Isi Leibler, president of the Executive Council of Australian Jewry, calls historian David Irving a "criminal." [A reference to the $25,000 fine slapped on him in Germany for pointing out that the gas chamber shown to Auschwitz tourists is a postwar fabrication, as the Auschwitz authorities now admit.] 
"A criminal?" exclaims Mr Irving. "This is pretty ripe coming from a representative of those wonderful people who gave the world not only Einstein, Menuhin, and Freud but also Myer Lansky, Bugsy Siegel, Robert Maxwell, Ivan Boesky, Michael Milken, Baruch Goldstein, Menachem Begin " 
If the law is rigorously applied, he points out, it must also prevent Ignatz Bubis, present head of the German Jewish community, from visiting Australia, because he was sentenced in 1952 to twelve years imprisonment for fraud, racketeering, and smuggling - the basis of his multi-million dollar private fortune. 
"Besides," says Mr Irving, "a law denying entry to 'deportees' and people with 'criminal records' seems an odd decision for a nation whose greatness was founded two hundred years ago on both." 
The new Canberra ban attracts widespread media attention. Australia's coast-to-coast television and radio channels contact Mr Irving in the United States and on his return to London he gives four interviews for Channel Seven and Channel Nine television; the stations also interview the historian at length for their June 1994 D-day commemoration programmes (his book The War Between the Generals was the first to reveal the depth of the ill-feeling between the Allied commanders Montgomery, Eisenhower, Patton, and Bradley.)

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May 26, 1994 An article by Caren Benjamin in the Washington Jewish Week [address: 12300 Twin Brook Parkway #250, Rockville, MD 20852, USA; tel. 301-230 2222] reveals that Jewish activists have begun a telephone campaign to pressure the DC area bookstores including B Dalton, Border Books, Crown Books and Barnes & Noble not to stock David Irving's books and in particular his flagship biography Hitler's War. "The book was panned by reviewers," lies the weekly, whose report relies heavily on quotations from the criminal Anti-Defamation League of the B'nai Brith. 
Donna Passanante, a spokesperson for the Barnes & Noble chain which has a centralized book buying office [105 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10003, USA; tel. 212-633 4000], comes under pressure as does Glen Hemmerle, president of Crown Books. Tackled by Jewish Week, Hemmerle responds that her company believes in the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution which guarantees freedom of speech.

Dissatisfied with that response, the Jewish weekly then approaches the public relations department of the Dart Group [3300 75th Avenue, Landover, MD 20785, USA; tel. 800-831 7400], which owns Crown. Things here seem at first more promising; but Stan Rubenstein, their spokesman, says: "The company tries not to play the role of censor." 
Three cheers for Rubenstein and Hemmerle. 

May 27, 1994 On Mr Irving's instructions, his lawyers in West Australia -- the successful legal team of Ed Wall, solicitor, and Peter Bates, barrister, who won the first round in September 1993 -- lodge a fresh application with the Federal Court in Australia to set aside the government's ban on his entry. Once again the government has to lay bare all its relevant documents and files, and once again they are bulging with secret manuvering by the world's Jewish agencies to deny David Irving free speech in Australia. 
Most of the inward telegrams in the David Irving case are found to have been circulated to the Prime Minister Paul Keating, as well as his minister of foreign affairs, the attorney general, and every member of his Cabinet. 
A constitutional issue is involved, the freedom of speech. Here too the fight continues. 

June 4, 1994 A six man squad of hoodlums lies in wait for Mr Irving outside his London apartment. Out for a stroll, he sees them first; they escape as police vans with thirty riot police arrive [See Radical's Diary, AR#8]. 

July 4, 1994 The South African embassy phones Mr Irving, who has again applied for a visa: Pretoria wants to know if he has completed the Pentonville "prison sentence". He sets them straight in an immediate reply. 

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July 29, 1994 Mr Irving's lawyers start fresh action in the Canadian courts to overturn his illegal deportation. The government delays the release of its secret files to him under the Access to Information Act until two days past the deadline for lodging this action. 

August 1994 Australia's Channel Nine television, which has tried since May 20, 1993 to find a local Jewish Holocaust survivor willing to fly to Poland in return for a $2,000 fee, with all expenses paid, to debate with Mr David Irving on the site of the Auschwitz camp itself, finally gives up the attempt. 
On May 10 and 12, Allen Hogan of Channel Nine's "Sixty Minutes" prime time programme contacts Mr Irving in the United States again trying to set up the debate and confrontation. On June 12 he phones Mr Irving in London saying he is still searching. 
Mr Irving faxes back: 

Thank you for your call. You may find Kitty Hart proper for your purposes; she puts on a nice little emotional act when she visits A., claims to have lain in the sun, sunbathing only yards away from the "gas chambers" as the victims were marched in, and watching the S.S. officers tipping the cyanide crystals in through apertures in the roof. I.e., she's a Profi. 
On the other hand, I read in the Sydney Morning Herald of March 23 about a remarkable Mr Steve Denenberg, executive director of a Jewish Community Services group which has been giving counselling and group therapy sessions to a hundred or so survivors, relatives of survivors and those upset by the film Schindler's List, and I think it highly probable he can put you in touch with at least one native Australian survivor, which would seem better for your purposes.

Reports Allen Hogan, he has run into a stone wall. Eventually the penny drops, and he realizes that the Jewish community has issued blanket instructions not to debate. 
Meanwhile the Australian Institute of Jewish Affairs -- the same people who paid to keep David Irving out -- hire Deborah Lipstadt, professor of religion at Atlanta's Emory university, to tour Australia by plane, damping down the burning curiosity of the Australian people: who is telling the truth about the Holocaust?

July 1994  Deborah Lipstadt, author of the Anti-Defamation League's blockbuster book Denying the Holocaust--The Growing Assault on Truth and Memory (The Free Press/Macmillan, New York, 1993) made her third tour of Australia on a junket paid for by the Australian Institute of Jewish Affairs, and at the invitation of the no less greasy Gerard Henderson's Sydney Institute. Both bodies are frantically engaged in damage control after the two year long controversy over David Irving's banning from the country has resulted in a situation where, as the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC) admitted in July, seventy percent of the Australians have now heard the claim that the Holocaust did not happen as legend maintains.

In her book and elsewhere Lipstadt, associate professor of Modern Jewish and Holocaust Studies at Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia, has emphasised that there is a danger that when the last eye-witnesses, as she calls them, have died, the accepted version of the Holocaust will die with them.
Seemingly in direct contradiction of this statement, she adds that there are mountains of documents proving the existence of the gas chambers and factories of death.

"The documents," she writes on page 226 of her twenty-eight dollar book, "include work orders, supply requisitions, time sheets, engineering instructions, invoices, and completion reports. All clearly indicate that the gas chambers were to be used for nothing but homicidal gassings."

Barely twenty-four hours into her trip across Australia, she repeated this lie about the existence of "gas chamber plans" in a radio interview conducted by Ramona Koval on ABC Radio on Jul.20. Originalton Lipstadt:

"Our best proof to the Holocaust are the perpetrators. They left us an incredible amount of documentation, precise documentation. Plans of the gas chambers, work orders for the gas chambers, precise requisition forms for building the gas chambers. They left us with reports of exactly what happened."


November 11, 1994 At a typical lecture to students in Atlanta she went even further with her lies, claiming to possess "blueprints" of the gas chambers "showing the holes in the ceiling through which the S.S. officers tipped in the lethal cyanide crystals."

This was the famous lecture attended, unbeknownst to Lipstadt, by David Irving himself, whom she had just smeared extensively in her lecture as an "historian whom no other reputable historian respects". Invited to state a question, at the meeting's end, he rose and in front of the five hundred students attending this compulsory lecture he plucked a wad of $20 bills from his pocket and challenged:

"Why are you lying to these innocent students! I have here $1,000 in bills. This cash is yours, Professor Lipstadt, if you can produce the 'blueprint' you just claimed to have in your possession, or if you can even tell us where to find it. You know it does not exist. Why do you lie to the students?"

Lipstadt angrily called on campus security guards to throw Mr Irving out. (They approached him, but did not attempt to evict him after he called the students' attention to her unorthodox way of handling debates.)
At this Atlanta lecture she proudly took the credit for having coined the ADL's latest phrase, "Holocaust deniers". In the Australian media however she denied it.
Words mean more than substance to her. During her Australian tour she emphasised to what the Australian Jewish News called a disappointingly small audience, "I cannot counsel strongly enough against using the term 'Holocaust revisionism.' It simply does not exist." She continued: "Those who seek to debate the Holocaust are not revising anything. They are simply denying history." "Instead of supporting Hitler," said Dr Lipstadt, shocked at the convolutions of her opponents' new tactics, "they condemn him. But they say the Holocaust was a hoax and they only want scholarly conferences. They only want the truth." That was where the "deniers" had gained ground.
In a prime-time television programme aired by ABC Television Lipstadt admitted that she had refused to appear on their programme if they also invited a representative of the other side of the debate: she would never debate a "denier", she said.

Sometimes she had no choice. At her Melbourne meeting on Sunday Jul.31 when Dr Frank Knopfelmacher, amidst an uproar, insisted that he had a copy of Hitler's Order to the extermination of the Jews (there is no such document in fact) Lipstadt--no historian, she--bluffed, said that she too was aware of this document, but dismissed it outright. Knopfelmacher muttered loudly that he was a "true" survivor and he used a vulgar word to describe those like Lipstadt who wished to silence him.

Although a professor of religion Lipstadt has problems with seeking, finding, and even using the truth. Believing that Mr Irving would never hear of her words, she told shocked audiences in Melbourne and Sydney that he has a lifesize portrait of Adolf Hitler in his study in London. If so, thirty years of visiting journalists have never glimpsed it. The Australian published this letter from David Irving:

I see from Frank Devine that my old antagonist Deborah Lipstadt is currently touring the land promoting the Holocaust and denigrating historians who differ as "Holocaust deniers" (an odious phrase that she herself invented). Among other things, she states that I have a portrait of Adolf Hitler above my desk--a weird and untrue allegation first made by Moscow's Izvestia in 1982 (not that I am suggesting that that is her source). She and her ilk have a strange idea of historical debate: it consists of defaming from a safe distance and refusing to debate face to face in the traditional manner. I spoke in her home town of Atlanta, Georgia, at the old courthouse, on Nov. 4 last year: challenged to share a debating platform with me, she refused, and fled to Boston, Massachusetts. I wonder who has paid her surely not modest air fares to, and around, Australia; I strongly suspect it is the same gentlemen who have gone to such lengths to keep me out.

Nothing if not inventive in her ripostes, Lipstadt published in the same newspaper on Aug. 9 a letter denying that she had invented "Holocaust denier" (Originalton: "I did not create the phrase 'Holocaust deniers'") and claiming that Mr Irving had spoken not in the courthouse, but on the steps outside. This attracted another Irving rebuttal:

Sir ,--Accusing me of playing fast and loose with facts, visiting American professor of religion Deborah Lipstadt writes: "Irving did not lecture at the old courthouse in Atlanta. He tried to hold a night-time rally on the steps." I am momentarily baffled. I certainly thought I spoke inside the Old Court House. Did I imagine it? Did the eye-witnesses? Just as she imagined that Hitler portrait over my desk in London? Then I realised: She of course had gone to Boston that day, thus sadly missing the chance of a square debate. In her absence, under the usual pressure from her pals, the city authorities cancelled the contract for the Old Court House; but a judge, sitting that afternoon in the new courthouse, ordered the city to honour its contract with us and the lecture went ahead that evening--inside the building, not on the steps. It all has such a familiar ring. I'll happily show Ms Lipstadt the court order in our favour, if she still wonders which of us is pulling the wool over the eyes of the Australians.

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© Focal Point 1998 e-mail: write to David Irving