Part 1
Closing Speech
by David Irving
Part
III Another most difficult piece of historical paper
for my opponents is the Schlegelberger Document. In
late March or early April 1942, after seeing
Germany's top civil servant, who reported only to
Hitler, Franz Schlegelberger dictated this famous
memorandum, upon which all Holocaust historians,
and the Defendants' expert witnesses in this case
have hitherto turned enough blind eyes to have won
several battles of Trafalgar. For many years after
the war it vanished: but that is another story.
Asked about this specific document after a lecture
in the German Institute, here in London in November
1998, Dr Longerich, who is now the Defendants'
expert witness, had the function's chairman rise to
inform the audience that the speaker was not
prepared to answer questions from David Irving. It
is a genuine document, referring in one breath both
to Hitler and the Solution of the Jewish Problem.
Confronted with it in the witness box, he and his
fellow experts have argued, either that it was
totally unimportant; or that it concerned only the
Mischlinge, the mixed race Jews, and not the Final
Solution in any broader sense. Ingeniously, Dr
Longerich even tried to suggest that it originated
in 1940 or 1941. The document has them in a
breathless panic. The document's own contents destroy their latter
argument: In the first sentence, it says: "Mr Reich
Minister Lammers informed me that the Führer
had repeatedly declared to him that he wants to
hear that the Solution of the Jewish Problem has
been adjourned [or postponed] until after
the war." That this is the broader Final Solution
is plain from the second sentence which shows
namely that the Mischling question was something
different: "Accordingly," the memorandum continues,
"the current deliberations have in the opinion of
Mr Lammers purely theoretical value." Those
deliberations were, as my opponents themselves have
argued, solely concerned with what to do with the
Mischlinge and the like. The document is quite
plain; and it was dictated by a lawyer, so he
presumably knew what he was writing. There is no
room for argument. My opponents have pretended for
years that this document effectively does not
exist. I have dealt at length in my statements in the
witness box, and while cross-examining the
witnesses, with the other contentious items, namely
the Goebbels Diary entries for March 27 and May 30,
1942, the Himmler minute of September 22, 1942 and
his note for his meeting with Hitler on December
10, 1942; meetings with Antonescu and with Horthy
in April 1943; the deportation and murder of the
Jews in Rome in October 1943, Himmler's speeches on
October 4 and 6, 1943, and May 15 and 24 1944, and
Hitler's speech on May 26, 1944, and Ribbentrop's
testimony and evidence from his cell at Nuremberg.
I contend that my use of these items was quite
proper. I must mention the Report (Meldung) No. 51
submitted by Himmler to Hitler through their
adjutants, and dated December 29, 1942. The
Defendants have made great play with this document,
claiming that it is clear proof, that Hitler was
apprised by Himmler of the murder of over 300,000
Jews on a transparent pretext in the previous three
months. Your Lordship will remember that I
established that on the same December 1942 day,
which was at the height of the Battle of
Stalingrad, and in exactly the same manner, a
document of precisely the same general character,
namely Meldung No. 49, had to be vorgelegt or
submitted to the Führer not once but twice - a
clear indication that he was not reading them on
the first occasion or perhaps even at all. If I may
draw an analogy, with which the Court may well be
familiar, sometimes a series of briefs are put to a
fashionable and expensive Counsel; he is obliged to
read them fully and properly, and draws a fat fee
for doing so; but in fact he does not. A number of
names are known for this particular dereliction in
legal circles, not of course that I am comparing
them with the Führer, or even indeed with Mr
Rampton. In law, as in history, the fact that a
document has been "put to" somebody does not mean
that that somebody has read it, unless there is
some collateral evidence of feedback, and in this
case there clearly was not. My various references to Marie
Vaillant-Couturier seem to have been quite
justified, from what we know of her and of her full
testimony to the Nuremberg tribunal in 1946. She
had married the editor of l'Humanité, she
and her father were bosom friends of Willi
Münzenberg, author of the propaganda about the
Reichstag Fire - a founder member and one of the
most accomplished propagandists of the Comintern.
It is evident from the way that the hard-pressed
defence counsel Marx conducted his
cross-examination of her that he was implying to
the tribunal that she had not even been in
Auschwitz. Your Lordship will remember that she
described to the IMT a beating-machine used by the
SS to administer corporal punishment. Her testimony
is riddled with such absurdities, and when the
experienced American Judge Biddle jotted down his
sceptical comment on this witness, even as she was
still speaking, he meant it - and I certainly took
it in that way - to be a reference to all that he
had heard (and largely disbelieved) up to that
point. I found the Kurt Aumeier dossier by conducting a
systematic, "shirtsleeve" search of the Public
Record office files in 1992. Any one of the
scholars introduced by the Defendants as witnesses
could have found it equally readily. At first I
intended to transcribe and publish the document
myself, properly annotated, like the 1938 Goebbels
Diaries. Instead I drew the attention of several
scholars to it, including, to the best of my
recollection, both Sir Martin Gilbert and Dr Gerald
Fleming; I had often sent them documents I had
found which I knew would interest them. When I
abandoned the publication idea, I drew the
attention of other scholars to it, including
Professor Robert Van Pelt, in a very lengthy letter
written to him in May 1997; in this I identified to
him numerous archival references of interest to his
special subject, including the Aumeier dossier. Not
receiving a reply, I published that letter to Van
Pelt in full in a 1997 newsletter, and I posted it
on my website. Numerous correspondents utilised the
email link to Pelt on that page, and the
Defendants' solicitors eventually asked me to
"deactivate" it. My long letter had been mailed to
Pelt from Chicago with proper postage, addressed to
his correct postal address at the university, and
it was never returned to me. Professor Van Pelt
claimed here not to have received it, and he
suggested in his report that I told people about it
only when the Defendants' legal team of researchers
found the file in the PRO.24 This is absurd. They
found the Aumeier file not least because it was
included in my Discovery (both in the general
Judenfrage archive box, and as No. 2066). I did not
know until two years later that he was to be a
witness in this case. As for the Aumeier dossier's content, his
manuscripts suggest, or confirm, the existence of
limited-scale gassings at Auschwitz. The figures
are unreliable, and many of the other details
conflict with those provided by the equally flawed
writings of Auschwitz commandant Rudolf Höss.
This is in my submission the most likely reason why
the Defendants have not relied heavily on either
source in their defence. Nor for that matter have they made any use of
the loudly trumpeted Eichmann memoirs prised out of
the Israeli Government archives - perhaps because
in the entire document, although this former
SS-Obersturmbannführer is writing with brutal
frankness, and describing the most appalling
spectacles that he has seen, he does not refer even
once to being shown a gas chamber during his
official guided tours as "executioner in chief" of
the Auschwitz and Birkenau camps. I heard what Professor Evans and learned counsel
had to state about General Kurt Daluege as a source
for the criminal statistics for 1932. The
Defendants have been unable to locate the figures
that I quoted in the Daluege lecture which I used
as one source. Nor did they notice that it was in
fact a lecture to the recently formed Interpol.
Evans appears not to have looked in the other three
sources listed for that one sentence in my book,
which included two reputable works of history, so
his strictures are meaningless. For the reasons
known to the court, since 1993 I no longer have
access to the German institute in which those
sources are housed. I do not invent statistics, and
it is clear by inference that the data which I gave
came from one of the other three sources and not
from the lecture. Hitler's knowledge of the solution of the Jewish
question: This became the most controversial issue, both
in this courtroom and stretching far back into my
writing career; I wish, just because of this, that
I had picked upon a different biographical
subject. Because of the inescapable conclusion - that
Hitler had probably not ordered, or been aware
until relatively late, of the ultimate fate of the
European Jews - I forfeited, as my U.S. agent
predicted, perhaps half a million dollars or more
of lucrative sub-licensing deals with major
corporations - the Reader's Digest, paperback
houses, reprints, The Sunday Times. After I
completed a first draft of the book in about
1969-1970, I realised that there was this
inexplicable - and unexpected - gap in the
archives. I hired a trusted friend, Dr Elke
Fröhlich of the Institute of History, to go
through all the then-available German archives
again, with the specific task of looking for
documents linking Hitler with the Final Solution.25
She did a conscientious and excellent job, working
for me in the files of the Nuremberg state
archives, the Institut für Zeitgeschichte, the
Berlin Document Center, the Bundesarchiv, and the
military archives in Freiburg. Her resulting
research materials, my correspondence with her, the
index cards and photocopies, form a part of my
Discovery in this action. It was she who produced
for me for example the then-unpublished diary entry
of Governor-General Hans Frank - actually a
meeting-transcript of December 13, 1941, currently
being edited by her colleagues at the institute -
to which I duly made reference. I would incidentally rely on this episode as one
further instance of my integrity as an independent
historian: Inherently dissatisfied with the results
of my own research, I hired and paid out of my own
pocket for this second opinion, as an avocatus
diaboli, to trawl once more, and with a net of
finer mesh, across the same fishing grounds for
documents that might in fact destroy my, then still
tentative, hypothesis. In a similar step, which I
think I took to appease the now worried American
publishers, I wrote in December 1975 to four or
five of the major international Jewish historical
research institutions, appealing for "evidence
proving Hitler's guilt in the extermination of the
Jews." All of these inquiries by me drew a blank,
except for one. As I summarised in a letter to The
Sunday Telegraph on June 19, 1977, "... all offered
their apologies, except Professor Raul Hilberg,
author of the standard history on the subject, who
honourably conceded that he too has come to the
view that Hitler may not have known." (His letter
is in my Discovery).26 The other institutions stated that they had no
such evidence, or they did not reply. The International Endeavour to destroy my
Legitimacy as an Historian Before I proceed to the problems with the
accepted version of the history of Auschwitz, I
turn first to the submissions that Your Lordship
will allow me to make on the thirty-year
international endeavour by a group of organisations
to destroy my legitimacy as an historian. I submit
that I am entitled to draw these documents to Your
Lordship's attention, because these bodies, acting
with that secret and common purpose, compiled
dossiers and reports on me with the intention of
destroying me. They did so exercising no proper
care for accuracy; and, as is evident from the
Second Defendant's Discovery, and from the
Introduction to her book in which she explicitly
acknowledges the assistance provided by many of
these bodies, she drew upon these tainted
wellsprings as the source for much of the poison
she wrote about me.27 We shall hear that, buried in
the files of the Simon Wiesenthal Centre in
Toronto, is a document, now also in ms. Lipstadt's
files - they sent it to her - which forms something
of a blueprint for the attempt to destroy my name.
A researcher for the Centre, commissioned to
investigate my life in detail, recommended in that
compilation, after referring to my "thorough
archival research" and "genuine historical insight"
as follows: "Given this accurate version of reality, it is
all the more clear why his activities must be
curtailed, and why his [David Irving's]
alleged legitimacy must be eradicated." I have been subjected since at least 1973 and
probably before then to what would be called in
warfare a campaign of interdiction. I know of no
other historian or writer who has been subjected to
a campaign of vilification even one tenth as
intense. the book Denying the Holocaust was the
climax of this campaign. There exist, as I said in
my opening speech, various bodies in this country
and around the world who have at heart the
interests of special groups. I make no protest
about that: but many other Englishmen have noticed,
or found out, usually by chance, that these bodies
keep files on us, which they use to our
disadvantage if they believe we are a danger to
their interests. Despite the best intentions of the
Data Protection Act, it seems that we have no means
of checking those files, or revising their content,
let alone of cleansing them of libels. To give one
particularly gross example: Under the cover
provided by the United States First Amendment, the
Jewish Telegraphic Agency accused me in 1995 of
having supplied the trigger mechanism for the
Oklahoma City bomb. That item was picked up by the
American, and then faintly echoed by the British
press. It was only months later that I found out
who had started that lie. But regrettably this has become a campaign to
defame people whom they regard as a danger. A
number of special bodies exist solely for this
purpose. Some of them are listed on my website
index as being "... some traditional enemies of
Free Speech". Professor Kevin MacDonald, of the
University of Southern California, a sociologist
who is the world's leading expert on these things,
expressed forceful opinions to this Court in his
expert report - on which he offered himself for
cross-examination - and I urge Your Lordship not to
disregard the substance of what he had to say. These bodies will not endear themselves, if
found out, to the victims of their campaigns. Mr Rampton made much of Mr Ernest Zündel's
gross and ill-considered reference to the Judenpack
- as anti-Semitic a word as one might hear.28 Mr
Rampton labels this man as an extremist, and
anti-Semitic, in consequence. The Court has been
told nothing by Mr Rampton of what if any remarks,
or incidents, preceded the outburst by Mr
Zündel. We do know, and I can so inform this
Court, that his home has been torched and burned to
the ground. Such violent incidents certainly can
not excuse the violent remarks; but they can
explain them. Because they don't like what he
writes or publishes, these bodies have attempted to
destroy his life with criminal prosecution in an
attempt to have him deported or jailed. They have
failed, and Canada's highest Court has ruled that
he is free of any criminal taint. Your Lordship may
consider that this finding by a judicial body has
some bearing on the label of extremism. Quite
probably as the direct result of these bodies'
agitation against him, he was subjected to violent
assault. He was sent a large parcel bomb which the
RCMP police authorities took away and detonated.
The instigators were a British Columbia group of
"anti-fascists". of course Mr Zündel ought not
to have used such an expression. Apart from
anything else, his opponents are not Jews in
general but self-appointed bodies of would-be
censors. The Court will readily accept that I - Mr
Zündel is not the claimant here - have not
used such language in all the thousands of pages,
videos, and recordings which I have readily
disclosed. My own experience at the hands of these
self-appointed censors has not been so very
different. It began in 1963 when agents of
Searchlight raided my home and were caught
red-handed in this criminal attempt. Ever since
then that publication has tweaked my tail with a
stream of defamatory articles: a thirty-seven year
onslaught, to which I as a good Christian turned
the other cheek. After ten years this campaign had
begun to threaten my livelihood. Lord Weidenfeld,
one of my favourite publishers - he published no
fewer than three of my major works, including my
best-selling ROMMEL biography - was the first
publisher, first of a long and illustrious line, to
come under clandestine pressure to tear up his
publishing contract with me because my books
offended these special-interest groups. He told me
at the Frankfurt Book Fair on October 13, 1973,
that "he had cancelled the book [HITLER'S
WAR] under extreme outside pressure, he said,
from officials of Zionist groups, and
representations made by certain embassies."29 It might be said that the real Defendants in
this case are not represented in this Court, but
their presence has been with us throughout. These
are the people who commissioned the work complained
of, and provided much of the materials used in it.
I understand they have provided considerable funds
for the defence - I am talking primarily of the
American Jewish Committee and the Anti-Defamation
League of the B'nai Brith, a long-established
American body. I know very little about the former body, but I
am aware that the latter has a $50 million annual
budget, substantially greater than an author
commands whose livelihood has been destroyed by
their activities. When your lordship comes to such
things as costs and damages, I would respectfully
submit that you bear these things in mind. We have them to thank for the spectacle that has
been presented in this courtroom since January.
Without their financial assistance, it is unlikely
that Mr Rampton and his defence team and his
instructing solicitors could have mounted this
colossal onslaught on my name. One day in 1998 I
was shown a letter written that morning by Mr
Julius to some of the country's richest men,
inviting them to bankroll this action. It had
chanced into our hands. That is the other side of a
piece of legal coinage that has recently come back
into currency - champerty and maintenance. For over
three years this well funded team sitting opposite
me has drilled down deep into my private papers and
burrowed on a broad front into the archives of the
world, on a multi-pronged attack - trying to
establish that what I have written over the last
thirty-five years is distorted or mistranslated in
pursuance of an agenda (namely the exoneration of
Adolf Hitler); and trying to dig up every little
morsel of dirt on me that they can. My book HITLER'S WAR was published by The Viking
Press in New York in April 1977 and by Hodder &
Stoughton in this country in June of that year.
What can be seen as a co-ordinated attack on the
book began. The Viking Press was one of that
nation's most reputable publishers (and is now
owner of the First Defendant company). Public
attacks on the book in the press were concerted
with clandestine attempts to have my book squelched
and me, as its author, ostracised. The Anti-Defamation League (or ADL) - a body
which turns out to have been closely in league with
the Second Defendant in the current action - did
what it could to disrupt my USA lecture-circuit and
television tour promoting the book. The ADL had its
Washington branch put pressure on the Channel 5
television network that was to carry a "Panorama"
interview with me: we are rather well informed
about how this American lobby of bigots carries out
its duties, and I reproduce these extracts of its
secret internal report on its efforts. Hearing of
the booking for me to attend the programme, the
local ADL agent reported to headquarters: "As a
consequence, I arranged with the show's producer to
place on the same show in a debate posture my
associate, Randy Koch, which airing took place on
April 18, 1:00 to 1:30 p.m. A cassette of the show
is being sent to you under separate cover for your
advice and analysis." They added: "The following
information is provided to you so that in addition
to the cassette you may better appraise Irving's
knowledgeability and toughness as an adversary in
conjunction with ADL's problems with him." What were the ADL's "problems" with me, one
wonders? I had had no dealings with them
whatsoever. If we had been able to cross-examine
Professor Lipstadt, we might have asked her, since
her own Discovery, limited though it is, shows her
to have been in cahoots with them. With more fervour than accuracy, the ADL report
continues with the remarkable disclosure: "David
Irving is the nom de plume of John Cawdell, a
revisionist historiographer of Adolf Hitler,
particularly regarding Hitler's role in and
knowledge of the mass extermination of European
Jewry. His major premise is that Hitler was largely
oblivious to the large-scale killing of Jews in the
death camps. He alleges and underscores the lack of
historical evidence in documentation form that will
show any orders from Hitler to Himmler, Heydrich or
others. Irving further maintains that no direct
documentation exists of Hitler giving orders to
liquidate Jews.." The agent's report continues that the book is a
work of over 900 pages, including 100 pages of
footnotes. "It would appear from the quantity of
research and time that Irving put into the work
that the author appears knowledgeable and expert in
subject area." The cause for ADL concern then
follows: "My monitoring of the aforementioned telecast
leads me to conclude that Irving comes through as
an extremely knowledgeable and tough adversary
although he is extremely defensive in debating his
latest work. [...] I see no problem in our
joining in debate situations with him provided our
proponent does sufficient homework." The report
adds that they had questioned a local Board member,
identified as James Jacobs, an atomic scientist who
had allegedly befriended me when I was researching
my book THE VIRUS HOUSE, the history of the German
atom bomb project. While I have to confess that I
have no memory of that man, the 1977 report adds:
"Jacobs states that Irving is definitely not
anti-Semitic, that he is an excessive German-phile
[...]." This was no doubt an accurate report on my
private conversations with the man. "According to
Jacobs, Irving is extremely thorough in his
research and cites in this connection an inordinate
amount of time spent by him in the United States
going over the German archives reports and time
spent in discussions with eminent authorities in
the field covering associate matter concerning
Irving's writings. Jacob's appraisal concurs with
mine that as a consequence of the foregoing, Irving
does make a tough adversary." The report concludes that Jacobs would
"co-operate with you" - the addressee, evidently
the ADL's London friends, the Board of Deputies,
"in any way he can to further assist you in your
appraisal."30 When I then began my lecturing activities around
the USA in the early 1980s, speaking at private
functions, schools, and universities, the ADL
headquarters sent out a secret circular, a
"Backgrounder," to all their local agents. 31 The
backgrounder, dated July 6, 1983, began with the
words: "British author David Irving has been of
concern to ADL, as well as to the Jewish community
generally, since the 1977 publication of his book
Hitler's War," and it indicated that it was the
controversy over Hitler and the Jews that was the
reason. We have heard of similar such circulars
being generated by them on other famous literary
names, for example the Daily Telegraph writer
Auberon Waugh and Noam Chomsky, who though an
eminent Harvard professor also found mysterious
problems in getting material published.32 In my
case the ADL instructed its "regional offices": "Should he [Irving] surface in your
region, please notify the Fact Finding Department
and your Civil Rights Co-ordinator." It is quite plain that the ADL were not
concerned with promoting civil rights, but in
abrogating one of the most basic rights of all, the
right to freedom of speech. The circular about me was so defamatory and
untrue that after a copy was passed to me I sent a
written warning on October 15, 1983 to the then
director of the ADL in New York to desist from
spreading what I referred to even then as this
"libellous garbage".33 I warned that I had
prevailed in a number of defamation actions in the
German law courts enforced against provincial
newspapers, political groups, and trades unions
including the giant IG Metall, and that other
people who innocently spread such legends,
including the Israeli author Ephraim Kishon, had
preferred to apologise to me in writing for
mistakenly giving currency to such smears. The ADL
did not reply, and they continued their illiberal
campaign against me. Correspondence with my literary agent showed by
1984 already that the international smear campaign
was inflicting financial damage on me.34 It was at
precisely this time, 1984, that the Second
Defendant, then teaching in the Near Eastern
Languages Center of the University of California at
Los Angeles, offered her services to Yehuda Bauer
in Jerusalem. She attached "A proposal for
research: The Historical and Historiographic
Methodology of the Holocaust revisionists."35 I ask
Your Lordship to note that on page 38 of this
synopsis the Second Defendant mentioned my name in
these words (Bundle E, page 38): "They
[deniers] also find it expedient to
associate themselves with those such as David
Irving who do not deny that the Holocaust took
place but seek to shift the blame to others." (My
added emphasis). To conclude this, on the matter of her
employment: on May 31, 1988 she was awarded an
additional $16,000 agreement for research on this
topic by the Vidal Sassoon Center for the Study of
Anti-Semitism at the Hebrew University of
Jerusalem.36 This research, it should be added, was
what finally bore fruit as the book complained of,
Denying the Holocaust. The publisher at that time
publisher was to be Robert Maxwell, who was
liaising with Professor Yehuda Bauer.37 During this period the international campaign
against me achieved some ugly successes. Through
their Vienna collaborators, the Austrian
Documentation-Archive of the Resistance, a
recognised communist-front organisation, they
prevailed upon Austria's minister of the interior,
Karl Blecha to have me illegally deported in June
1984. In July 1986 after an appeal by myself this
was overturned, and Austria was ordered to pay me
compensation.38 I have to admit that as a writer I
was not prepared for this kind of campaign. I do
not expect that any of the expert witnesses we have
seen have ever had to experience anything like it.
When I toured universities and other speaking
venues in Australia and New Zealand in 1986 and
again in 1987, I learned that every organiser,
every television producer had received an
information pack from the ADL; and that every
university library had received a letter from the
corresponding Australian body pleading with them to
take my books off the shelves. This may remind Your
Lordship of where Professor Evans said he found my
book hidden in the British Library.39 In short,
there was and is a hidden network of Orwellian
organisations determined to ensure that no version
of history of these matters of which they
disapproved was given currency, or indeed allowed
to survive; the alternative history should be
destroyed, its publishers ruined - I am thinking of
my good friend Tom Congdon, of Congdon &
Lattès - and the writers themselves
ausgerottet too. The Second Defendant's Discovery, which includes
such correspondence with, and items from, ADL as
she has seen fit to provide, throws some
interesting lights on the ADL's methods. When a
local newspaper, The Daily Pilot, published in
Orange County, south of Los Angeles, reported a
function of the Institute of Historical Review (the
IHR), the ADL was horrified, as the ADL regional
office reported, to find that the reporter, "seems
to find an air of legitimacy surrounding the
group"; the reporter, Bob Van Eyken, who evidently
had not got the message, even described the IHR
members as "neatly dressed ... evok[ing] a
sense of reasoned dignity." This clearly clashed
with the skinhead, jackbooted, extremist stereotype
that the ADL, like the expert witnesses in this
case, wished to project for the IHR and other
"right-wing" groups.40 This material, though
clearly discoverable in this action, was withheld
from Discovery by the Second Defendant until a
summons was issued to produce all her
correspondence with the ADL. We know that the Second Defendant has had
extensive dealings with the ADL. Even from her own
limited Discovery, about the deficiencies in which
I shall have to say more later, we know that she
was provided with smear dossiers by them. She
thanks them in her Introduction.41 She made no
attempt to verify the contents of this material
with me (or so far as this Court knows, with
others), but recklessly published it raw and
unchecked. A 25-cent phone call to me would have
saved her endless trouble. Instead she preferred to
rely on smear sheets like the "confidential" and
defamatory four-page item dated October 23, 1986,
headed: "Profile on David Irving," evidently
supplied to her by a Canadian body.42
Characteristically, the "profile" was disclosed to
me by her solicitors without any covering letter
from its author or custodian and shorn of any
identifying material; I wrote more than once in
vain asking for missing pages to be provided. It is quite evident that the ADL set itself the
task of destroying my career, in concert with other
similar organisations around the world, many of
whom if not all collaborated with the Second
Defendant in writing her book. The pinnacle of
their achievement came in 1996, when the Second
Defendant, as she herself boasted to The Washington
Post, was among those who put pressure on St
Martin's Press Inc., who had been one of my US
publishers for some fifteen years, to violate their
publishing agreement with me and abandon
publication of GOEBBELS. MASTERMIND OF THE THIRD
REICH. For a few days, these enemies of free speech
stepped up the pressure. They publicised the
private home addresses of St Martin's Press (SMP)
executives on the Internet. They staged street
demonstrations in Manhattan. They organised a
walkout by SMP staff. When SMP refused to be
intimidated, Lipstadt wheeled out the rhetoric: To
Frank Rich, a syndicated columnist of The New York
Times, she accused me of being a repeat killer:
"What David Irving is doing ... is not the
destruction of live people, but the destruction of
people who already died. It's killing them a second
time. It's killing history."43 This was not far
distant from to the outrageous claim on page 213 of
her book, to which no justification has been
pleaded, that I justified the incarceration of Jews
in Nazi concentration camps. Quoted by The
Washington Post on April 3, 1996, Deborah Lipstadt
stated: "They say they don't publish reputations, they
publish books. But would they publish a book by
Jeffrey Dahmer on man-boy relations? Of course the
reputation of the author counts. And no legitimate
historian takes David Irving's work
seriously."44 We have heard quoted in this Court two tasteless
remarks I am recorded as having made, about
Chappaquiddick and about the Association of
Spurious Survivors, and I do not deny that those
words were tasteless. But bad taste is not what is
in the pleadings, while express malice is: and the
odiousness of Professor Lipstadt's comparison, in a
mass circulation newspaper of record, of a British
author with Jeffrey Dahmer, a madman who had
recently murdered and cannibalised a dozen
homosexuals in the mid-West of the USA, is surely
compounded by the fact that Lipstadt had at that
time not read a single book I had written, let
alone the manuscript on Dr Goebbels that she had
joined in trying to suppress. It is clear that
neither she nor the ADL was concerned with the
merits, or otherwise, of the Goebbels biography.
They wanted it put down, suppressed, ausgerottet:
and me with it. Having, like St. Martin's Press, thoroughly read
it, the major US publisher Doubleday Inc. had
selected this book as their May 1996 choice for
History Book of the Month. But that deal depended
on the SMP contract, and thus it too collapsed. The
financial losses inflicted on me by this one
episode in April 1996 were of the order of half a
million dollars (£312,500), which might seem
proper reward for the eight years' hard work that I
had invested in writing this book, and hauling it
through its five draft versions. From the publication of HITLER'S WAR onwards,
the attitude of the print media to me changed. A
strategically placed review written in one
afternoon, by one man furnished with the
appropriate dossier on me, could go a long way to
destroy the product of six or eight years'
research. That was why these dossiers had been
created. To the right journalists or writers, such as the
Second Defendant, these dossiers were on tap. A fax
from Professor Lipstadt to the Institute of Jewish
Affairs in London, or to the ADL in New York, or to
the Simon Wiesenthal Centre in Toronto, released to
her a cornucopia of filth, which she had no need to
double-check or verify, because in the United
States such writings are protected by the authority
of the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, in
the laudable name of the freedom of speech, or by
the authority of New York Times vs. Sullivan, which
effectively declares to libellers that it is open
season on any public figure. Thus my book on The Hungarian Uprising of 1956,
published in 1981 by Hodder & Stoughton, was
savaged by certain reviewers: Neal Ascherson,
Arthur Koestler and others disliked it. Ion Trewin,
then that firm's chief (and now head of Weidenfeld)
wrote to me: "I must say I'm rather shocked by the
abuse levelled at you from certain quarters - the
obvious liberal ones of course."45 And Penguin
Books Ltd, now Defendants in this action, wrote to
me, "Criticism may have been occasionally
necessary, but venom, though to be expected, was
not called for."46 (Had that same firm remembered
that dictum fifteen years later, we should not be
here today). This unfair attack on my works was a source of
great concern to me. Reviews are an author's life
blood, but the trend of lying reviews continued.
When THE WAR BETWEEN THE GENERALS (the Eisenhower
and Montgomery story) was published in New York in
1981, one review in The New York Times on March 8,
of that year by John Lukács, to which I
referred in Court, sank the book without trace and
in fact destroyed the highly reputable American
publisher, a close personal friend of mine, too. I
will not weary the court with the precise mechanism
by which one such review can inflict so much
damage, but such is the power of the press.47 Whenever I now appeared in the United States to
lecture, there were well-orchestrated tumults. Well
meaning bodies were tricked by the vile propaganda
into organising against me. At the University of
California at Berkeley there was violence on
October 14, 1994, encouraged openly by the "Hillel"
in conjunction with the Marxist and Spartacist
organisations they boasted about this to the campus
newspapers which the campus and city police forces
were quite unable to control. One building was
comprehensively wrecked, with tens of thousands of
dollars of damage being done and several elderly
members of my audience hospitalised. This Court will surely not take it amiss of me
that I refused to be intimidated by these truly
"Nazi" methods, and that I have on a very few
occasions used perhaps tasteless language about the
perpetrators. The violence spread around the world,
and always it was orchestrated by the same
organisations. It would be otiose to list them all here. Some
of them can be seen on pages 54 of the Bundle E: On
November 5, 1989 the Israelite Community of Vienna,
Austria, called for violent action to stop me
speaking in that city. I initiated police
prosecution of the leader of the community for his
public incitement to violence. In 1990 the two
Canadian bodies, the League of Human Rights of the
B'nai Brith Canada and the Canadian Jewish Congress
announced that they were to "monitor" my tour of
that country.48 "Monitoring" turns out to be
euphemism for a campaign of letters, pressure, and
threats of violence and commercial pressure against
hotels, halls, and lecture-theatres which had been
hired by which ever body, student society, military
institute, or group had invited me. Attempts to
force the prestigious Ottawa Congress Center to
violate its contract failed, resulting in a violent
demonstration organised by the same two bodies. One
such letter came into my hands, from the League of
Human Rights of the B'nai Brith Canada to an Ottawa
restaurant owner written in September 1991. Its
content, which I shall not quote her - it is in the
evidence before Your Lordship - shows clearly the
methods used to get hall owners to violate their
contracts.49 They did this to us, acting as Jews;
if we had done the same to them, as Jews, the
uproar would have been intense. To a visiting lecturer and writer like myself, a
guest in their countries, finding myself up against
powerful and wealthy political lobbies, the
situation was deeply disturbing. My livelihood and
personal safety were at stake, but I was determined
not to be browbeaten or defeated. Seen from the
outside, at first this campaign, this huge
international endeavour against me, appeared to be
coincidental; but eventually it began to bite.
Perhaps publishers are made of less stern stuff
than myself. After Andrew Lownie, my new UK
literary agent, wrote warning me that four major UK
publishers "just do not want to be associated" with
me, on November 30, 1990 I wrote expressing
astonishment and concern at how rapidly this
situation had developed, and stating: "I have begun
to suspect a concerted effort [...] to rob
me of my publishing basis, not just in the U.K. but
worldwide."50 
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