[verbatim trial transcripts | previous Radical's Diary]
February
25, 2000 (Friday)
Up at 9:10 a.m. Hooray. Feeling good. I fire off this letter to Davenport Lyons (solicitors for Penguin Books): Digital daily transcripts. I have received no digital transcripts since Day 15 (February 3). I have repeatedly addressed yourselves about this matter, and I have made a written cash-per-day offer to yourselves and to Harry Counsell, which I consider reasonable, which is to include permission to continue our daily posting of the transcript on the Internet as a non-profit making service. I have received no acknowledgement or reply. [...] More good quality reporting in today's Jewish Chronicle. Major articles have also appeared in the Svenska Dagbladet and the Korea Times. The press clippings service confirms that there is however total silence in the British press during my cross-examination of the defence witnesses! Very impressive, how the "system" works. ("What, us...?") In the afternoon and then again in the evening around 7 p.m. two immense files of documents on my "extremist" associates come by courier from Mishcon de Reya; I do not have time even to open the packages yet. I am working on the remaining cross-exaimation of Longerich. Joanne comes in the evening and I set her to searching for and copying digitally references on Ewald Althans (the scoundrel) to a separate file.
February
26, 2000 (Saturday)
This letter goes by email to the Gang at 1:17 AM: I have now translated for the Judge the whole Karl Wolff document which figures in my diary entry of the court proceedings yesterday, and attach it to this document. The interesting passage is from page 0031 onwards (Hitler's ignorance of the Jewish problem, Himmler kept "the Messiah" deliberately in the dark). I repeat this e-mail to the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung: Hochzuverehrender Herr Dr Raulff!-- Ich habe meine Website-Leser gebeten, Ihnen ihre Meinung über die Berichterstattung von Frau Menasse mitzuteilen. Meine Leser, anderes als die werten Herrn Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung-Leser, können die Prozessprotokolle laufend mitlesen, und wissen etwas besser Bescheid über den Prozessablauf. Wortlaut-Protokolle sind zu finden bei: http://www.fpp.co.uk/docs/trial/transcripts/html [...] 6:10-15 PM phone call from Brazil journalist; clearly a leftwinger, and his questions edged towards the hostile and impertinent, so I ended the interview after five minutes. Worked until 2:30 a.m. on the website, updating items an d fixing a bug in the UK order form (aaargh). Frickensmith wants 200 more Goebbels. Mastermind of the Third Reich. Soon have to reprint that.
February
27, 2000 (Sunday) [...] Ha'aretz in Israel announces today that Mr Richard Rampton QC has applied to the Israeli government to release to him the Eichmann memoirs. That is interesting; M. phones at 1:34 PM and suggests, "Yes, and why not the Heinrich Himmler diaries while they are about it!" A good point, which goes straight onto the shopping list for tomorrow. N's letter arrived by FedEx with $1000 in cash; thankee kindly zur. I worked until 2 a.m. on preparing a Longerich dossier for tomorrow. February
28, 2000 (Monday) [...] Taxi to the High Court. At 10:30 a.m., as the judge enters I realise I have the wrong file with me. Not the cross-examination file at all. Aaargh. Pleading my apologies -- the judge is very understanding: He asks gently if there is nobody who can bring the file over to court for me, I explain that B. is ill, fighting a battle of her own. Taxi back to Duke Street, leaving a packed courtroom behind, with people still lining outside. Taxi plunges straight into mother of all traffic jams in Oxford Street; 45 minutes to make the round trip. [...] I complete cross examining Longerich. I ask him to examine the Karl Wolff MS, point by point. The mystic, religious nature of Himmler is agreed to; but not Wolff's more adventurous conclusions about Himmler's sole responsibility for the mass extermination of the Jews. The latter is dismissed by Longerich as Wolff's self-serving fantasy, fantasies bottled in vintage 1952. I put to him the Horst Ahnert document, and the Föhl letter. They cause him some trouble, and he has to state that the latter is just camouflage, as historian Götz Aly also avers. Not good enough. I suggest that he might find it remarkable that there are now emerging two parallel bodies of history: the established version of the Holocaust, or Final Solution, which is supported as he states by the "consensus of opinion" of German historians -- which has the flaw however of having not a single contemporary document in support; and the parallel version produced by the dissidents, which has the advantage of relying on documents, which Longerich and his ilk can only get around by dismissing them as trivial (the Schlegelberger document), forgeries, or self serving (Wolff MS) or "camouflage" (the Föhl letter, etc). On the Ahnert document, at first he says he does not know of it. But he published it himself, I point out, as an appendix to a 1989 book. He states that nobody has ever produced any sign of the "barracks" or encampments built in Russia, the White Sea, Düsseldorf, etc; I could well have made the same remark about the "holes" in the roof of Krema II. What is plain is that the documents showed the intention of those planning the deportations to build such camps; whatever the final product. I put to him what he wrote in Politik der Vernichtung, accepting that Himmler's Telefonat with Heydrich on November 320, 1941, led to the stop on killing of German Jews for many months. That too is embarrassing for the defence here; the judge asks why I repeat this point, and I say that this source makes the point far more firmly than the defence experts have allowed in their reports. He makes some damaging statements before being released from the stand: putting the death roll at Auschwitz at one million, he states in answer to my question that that figure is inclusive of all causes including pestilence, epidemic, starvation, overwork, cold, etc; astonished, the judge asks him if he means that? Longerich says he thinks that death by sickness in a place like Auschwitz is just like any other kind of murder. The Judge shrugs, defence team fumes impotently at their man's "wrong" answer. I conclude by putting to him the Horthy/Hitler conference off April 16, 1943, with Hitler's reference to the "Jewish" origins of the bombing campaign against women and children; which corrects Evans' point.
There is a discussion then on remaining points. I insist that I must be told the correct file number for the document August 1, 1941, Müller to the Einsatzgruppen; the Bundesarchiv had told me that the file number they have given me is incorrect. Judge Gray mentions to Rampton that it has not escaped his attention that he has reserved the cross examination of me on right wing extremism, which he was originally inclined not even to bring before the court, until the very end -- no doubt as a bon bouche for the press gallery. Rampton intends to show a video; I shall sit heavily on that, if it is edited. I now say that I have read that Mr Rampton is applying for the Eichmann papers, and I applaud his initiative; will he now try and get the Himmler diaries from the same source...! Back to Duke Street flat at 4:30 p.m. with George Stern [...]. The court reporters are asking £100 per day for our posting of the transcripts. [...] 7:19 PM W. phones from northern Germany, that the German television news has just announced that Israel "hat die Eichmann-Papiere freigegeben" for a trial going on in London; he's going to send me back my set of original Eichmann papers (finally) by courier in about nine days, will that too late? (I say Beweisaufnahme ends in a week, but I want to get those papers back anyway!) [...] Work until 3:45 a.m. preparing for Funke cross-examination. February
29, 2000 (Tuesday) Jessica spreads a path of happiness and joy all the way from our front door to the front door of the school. She breaks away from me, and skips and dances the last hundred yards to the school's front door. To the High Court at 10:30 a.m. After argument from myself based on the fact that, according to today's Israeli newspapers and the Washington Post, the Eichmann MS is now already in the hands of the defence, and therefore discoverable to me, Judge Gray orders Lipstadt's defence lawyers to turn over to me a copy of the Eichmann Memoirs by close of business today, which they do on disc (as I request) at 4 p.m.; this is only hours after they have received the document from Israel. The judge obtains a very proper undertaking from me first that I will not use it except for the trial at this stage; i.e. no posting on the website. There
is an amusing exchange on the matter of "public domain". I
point out that legally the Eichmann documents have come into
the public domain already by virtue of having Rampton begins by showing the five videos; I first argue as to their inadmissibility in their present form, as some have been heavily edited. It turns out that one has been edited ("redacted," in legalese) no less than three times -- by Michael Schmidt, the (Polizeispitzel) cameraman; by Dispatches, for Thames TV; and by the defence solicitors themselves. The judge finally rules that he will accept the videos only as a kind of Rogues Gallery, evidence of whom I am seen with. The problem for the defence is that in most of the videos I am not seen in the same shot as their target personages like Faurisson and Zündel -- who is seen evidently using deplorable language about the "Judenpack" -- and others. I point this absence out, and Judge Gray responds that he too has been waiting to glimpse me in the videos! The Halle video is irksome: it has been cut at three points of my speech, as the cameraman moves to change his angle, and each time he has lost important parts of the transcript: the first part, where I tell the audience that they are young, and I am old; and that they are Germany's future. Then again as I angrily shout at the lunatics in the front rank for giving the Hitler salute (no doubt having been well paid to do so by the newsreel teams). The local stringer from the Süddeutsche Zeitung buttonholes me, and I take him downstairs for a snack while we talk. -- After lunch, I cross-examine Professor Hajo Funke. His German is excellent, his English less so for expressing complex concepts. The judge however is interested only in a few names, a dozen or so of the people I know, and wants me only to cross-examine Funke on these names. This simplifies matters. As I deal with one of the names, Judge Gray interrupts, apologises, and says, "Mr Irving I am interrupting this time only to say that these last questions of yours are precisely how a cross-examination should be conducted." That was nice. Altogether it has been a successful day, with the judge effectively throwing out much of the video "evidence" as irrelevant, because it does not relate to me; and throwing out most of the names in the Funke report as well, as being irrelevant or uninteresting to him. The mystery remains: Why on earth have the defence, at this late stage in the proceedings, felt they need to go to Israel to get the Eichmann document? It cannot be purely playing to the gallery. If they wanted to go on an excursion, why not to Auschwitz, to the roof of Krema II, taking a trowel with them, to find those vital holes? I cross-examine until 4:30 p.m., and take the cab home with the Süddeutsche Zeitung reporter (the usual lefty type) and R. [...] I rapidly print out the entire Eichmann papers; and search out all relevant references to Hitler and Führer, which I shall put to the judge in a bundle tomorrow. Some half dozen pages. No surprises, I think. I work
again until 3:30 a.m. Getting harder to do than it used to
be.
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In
re-examination, Rampton trawls through a number of items. He
trudges interminably through the Himmler Taschenkalender of
July 1942, a visit to Auschwitz, meal with Hitler, etc. If
asked, I would have pointed out that one person is missing
in the diary and photo on this trip: Karl Wolff!
been
mentioned in this trial. Richard Rampton QC heaps
withering sarcasm on me, saying that mere mentioning is not
enough, and that Mr Irving does not know the law. Judge Gray
looks baffled, and murmurs that he thinks it is. Miss
Rogers (Rampton' Junior) leans over and whispers
something, and Rampton graciously climbs down: he has now
learned that mentioning is, according to the new
authorities, enough to put the document in the public
domain. I ask, "My Lord, would you be so good as to say
which of us was therefore right?" Judge Gray says with a
smile: "Mr Irving, you were right."
write
to David Irving