[verbatim trial transcripts | previous Radical's Diary]
February
18, 2000 (Friday) Jessica dawdles getting dressed, so I have to take her to school by cab. A ten-inch high pile of correspondence to deal with this morning. The British press has been totally silent during the entire week of my cross-examination of Professor Evans; the acres of print that the Journaille found while I was on the witness stand under assault by Rampton are now empty of any reference to the trial. Only the Jewish Chronicle continues with its notably fair reporting of the action. No doubt when I return to the stand next week, things will change... This message of thanks goes to A-- who has been assisting me with documents and translations: "[...] Unlike all the exterminationist historians, the judge has been wowed by the Schlegelberger document (Spring 1942) -- Hitler ordering Final Solution postponed until the end of the war. He refuses to accept their version that this was just the red tape on the mixed-marriages, and made this quite clear from his remarks and from his energetic highlighting of the passages that really matter (which is always a good clue). 11:49 AM phoned Weckert, and she informs me that the school hours in Germany were 8 a.m. to midday. That fixes the time of the Goebbels broadcast [on November 10, 1938] nicely. Well that's amusing: Nicholas H-- emails me, "I thought you might be interested in some comments by Deborah Lipstadt that I just caught on BBC2. Working late (again!), I had the TV on in the background - the BBC's 'Learning Zone' - that featured a programme on Jews in America. Several segments of an interview with Miss Lipstadt were broadcast (from 1.30am Thursday, BBC2). She began by condemning mixed-marriages, with Jews 'marrying out', and, paraphrasing, if this trend continues "intermarriages could destroy everything", with over "52%" of Jews in America marrying non-Jews. I am sure that Mr [Richard] Rampton [QC, Lipstadt's defence counsel] would not look too favourably on similar comments, if, for example, you suggested that "it could destroy everything" if Christians mixed with Jews. Around 6 p.m. a courier brings an unexpected 24 pp document from Lipstadt's lawyers Mishcon de Reya - yet another trick by them. "Professor" Peter Longerich's paper entitled "Glossary of some terms used by the NS regime in connection with the murder of European Jews." (The limiting adjective "European" is not uninteresting.) I read it rapidly and find that Longerich has dipped into the Ausrottung dossier that I was required to provide by Discovery, and has attempted to swat most of the arguments in advance. [...] 10:02-04 PM a mystery voice, identifying himself only as Schäfer [...] said he had some information for me, "Your friend Gerald Gable is in the High Court next week, on Monday, in the High Court, court 35, defending a libel action." [Brought by a chartered accountant, one Riley, against whom Gable alleged criminal acts]. He could not give me the name of the plaintiff, but he had seen the confidential papers and knew that Gable would be raising my name on Monday. The hearing was before the Hon Mr Justice Walker. "You should send somebody along."
[Of course there is no suggestion that the defendants in this action had any part of that].
February
19, 2000 (Saturday) [...] Benté drags herself out of her sickbed to take Jessica to the dancing school at 2 p.m. since I am not allowed to, and comes back near to tears. One of her old-time best friends, Jeannette -- (a psychology Ph.D., married to the vice president of Sony UK, both of them Germans) has screamed at her outside the ballet school entrance at 43 Harley Street, shouting that she should be ashamed to be with me, etc., and that Jessica has been poisoning the minds of other children! She now boasts that she has agitated against us to all the other parents, and it was she who sent the poison pen letter to Vicky Wolf, owner of the dance school, to cause last week's incident. In fact Jessica has the most glowing reports, as a model pupil, from her school. So, thank you Richard Rampton QC: to score a cheap point, you don't mind if you destroy a family. 7 p.m. American lawyer G-- shows up for dinner; I did not know I had invited him, and that rips a three-hour hole in the evening which I can ill afford. [...] I do not wish to spend my remaining years and free time talking of the trial, the Holocaust, and the Jews. I find them all boring, boring, boring. I work until 2:45 a.m. again. The paper mountain is down to about 1.5 inches. February
20, 2000 (Sunday) Asleep at 8 a.m., I hear the phone ringing, and Jessica, six, answers. Later she wakes me and says somebody phoned: "I told them Mummy is sick and you are in bed asleep." While I am writing this morning, she hides in the cubby-hole under the desk (sometimes I wish I could do that too). She asks à propos of nothing, at 11:02 AM, "Daddy, why don't you get one of those 'lawyers' to do all the work for you, then you would have more time to play games with me. You could play Hide and Seek with me! You could get loads of lawyers." Their little ears are wide open all day long, picking things up and processing them. Contributions
are coming in from all over the world toward the cost of
putting the daily transcripts back on line: I tell them, "We
are trying to raise cash to pay the fee that the court
reporters are demanding for us to use the current
transcripts; as a punishment, they have ceased supplying
them even to me!"
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Interesting
email from Düsseldorf lawyer Hajo Herrmann. He
was a WW2 Heinkel bomber pilot (PQ.17!) and then a fighter
pilot in the Defence of the Reich; through the new "wilde
Sau" tactics which his squadron introduced in 1943, he
spared Berlin from a second "Hamburg" in September 1943,
saving perhaps a million lives. After losing 150 Lancaster
bombers in three raids "Butcher" Harris gave up the
attempt. From 1990 to 1993 Herrmann was my defence lawyer in
the Munich trials under Germany's laws for the suppression
of free speech, and found himself himself braving attempts
by the ministry of justice to have him actually prosecuted
for adopting the views of his clients! (I.e., he is the very
opposite of the cowardly defence lawyer appearing before
Roland Freisler in a treason trial after the July 20
1944 bomb plot, who listened to the prosecution opening
statement and said: "Having heard that, I can only
wholeheartedly endorse the views expressed by my learned
colleague against my client.") The Bar Association found
Herrmann had acted impeccably, but it still shook him and
the attempts to jail him have not let up. 
He
now writes me about the Lipstadt case, and mentions the
indifferent attempts by the Frankfurter
Allgemeine Zeitung
to cover it objectively, and the good reporting by Don
Guttenplan in The
Atlantic Monthly.
My openness toward Guttenplan has thus paid dividends.
Herrmann concludes, "Guttenplan writes '[Otto]
Günsche thinks it has to be assumed that Hitler
knew of the exerminatuion of the Jews.' Günsche has
just told me on the phone on February 17 that the first he
heard of the gassing and Auschwitz was in the Lubianka
prison in Moscow. When the people came to him [more
recently] he was under the suggestive influecne of the
media, like most Germans, so he had gradually come to accept
the Auschwitz story as likely. And from that viewpoint then
he thought Hitler must have know of it too. He could not say
that any longer today." [German at foot of this
page] Günsche [right,
in 1982 with David Irving]
was Hitler's SS adjutant from 1936 to April 30, 1945,; he
carried Eva Braun's body upstairs from the bunker, and he
was the man whom Hitler entrusted with the burning of his
body in the bunker garden. Herrmann adds: "Don't let that
Cassandra-gentleman get under your skin. He was told to do
it. I know their methods."
write
to David Irving