Closing Speech
by David Irving
Part
VII May I again remind Your Lordship of my basic
principle on lecturing. Unlike the Defendants, who
have proudly stated that they refuse to debate with
opponents, I have expressed a readiness to address
all and any who are willing to listen. Your
Lordship will remember my letter of June 24, 1988,
to my editor at William Morrow Inc., Connie
Roosevelt, in which I wrote: "I have been invited to speak as a guest speaker
at a right wing function in Los Angeles next
February. They have offered a substantial fee and
all my expenses and until now I have adopted a
policy of never refusing an invitation if the
organisers meet my terms, namely free speech and
fat fee. On this occasion I intend to give the
audience a piece of my mind about some of their
more lunatic views."180 I may secondly point out that were it not for
the clandestine activities of the violent and
extremist bodies dedicated to destroying my right
to free speech and the rights of all audiences in
the United States and elsewhere at Berkeley, at
Dublin, at Pretoria, or wherever to hear my
opinions; and equally dedicated to intimidating my
publishers around the world and smashing bookstore
windows;- were it not for their hate-campaign, I
would have been enabled to continue in the normal
manner with my exemplary professional career. It
rings hollow that the same shabby bodies who have
generated the hatred against me, now point their
crooked fingers at me and abuse me, using the very
considerable privileges afforded to them by this
Court, for continuing to make my voice heard
wherever I can; and that when I use words to
describe them in detail which they well deserve,
they wring their hands and lament about
"extremism." I have pointed out that so far as Germany is
concerned, none of the German bodies who invited me
to speak was illegal or banned. In fact when first
invited to address the German People's Union, I
wrote to, and telephoned, the German embassy, as
the documents in my Discovery show, and asked them
specifically whether this was a legal and
constitutional body. The embassy confirmed in
writing on July 25, 1984 that it was.181 The
"extremism" was in the eye of the beholder. The
further to the Left the beholder squinted from, the
more distant these bodies may have seemed from
him. We heard a lot from Professor Hajo Funke,
sociologist of the Free University in Berlin. The
university may well have become a hotbed of
conservative and liberal views since I was last
familiar with it and spoke there, but I doubt it.
His published sources are all tainted works of the
"anti-fascist" genre with which the Court may well
be familiar. He readily and uncritically adopted
their untruths as his own; thus although we saw
with our own eyes in the video of the Munich
function on April 21, 1991 that the young people
paraded with asses' heads and placards reading,
"ASS THAT I AM, I BELIEVE EVERYTHING I'M TOLD" (I
have double checked that wording), Funke tried to
tell this Court that the wording was: "I STILL
BELIEVE IN THE HOLOCAUST, THE ASS THAT I AM", which
is something very different.182 [...] As for his allegation here in court that I
"should have known" that various organisations were
going to be banned in years ahead: it is difficult
for an Englishman, coming from a country with
deeper democratic traditions than Professor
Funke's, to implant himself into the brain, or
mind-set, of the authoritarian German mould, where
book-burning is now once again de rigueur, where a
German academic like Funke does not bat an eyelid
upon hearing that a teacher is still serving a
seven year jail sentence imposed for chairing a
lecture at which I spoke, where the two District
Court judges who acquitted that teacher were
reprimanded, and finally retired in disgrace, by
order of the minister of justice, and where
recently governments have begun routinely banning
fringe opposition parties and circumscribing even
their legal activities. Germany now has several
hundred political prisoners in her jails. The security authorities in Germany, so readily
quoted by Professor Funke, are nothing more than
the political arm of each provincial or federal
minister of the interior. They have little concern
with legality. As the Frankfurter Allgemeine
Zeitung reported on September 15, 1995, Dr Ernst
Uhrlau, president of the Hamburg branch of the
Office for the Protection of the Constitution (BfV)
said: "The persistent steps taken by the state
authorities against right wing extremists have
largely paralysed their legal possibilities of
action."183 The paralysing of the "legal
possibilities of action" of opposition parties can
hardly be considered a matter for pride in any
normal democratic government. None of these banned
parties has anything to do with violence. My general response to this attempt at "guilt by
association" is to compare it with the worst
excesses of the inquisitions conducted by Senator
Joseph McCarthy. In Britain the courts have always
viewed it as repugnant - most recently Mr Justice
Morland in another Court here in this building.
Hollywood finest scriptwriters, many of them
Jewish, had their careers vernichtet by the
reckless allegation that they had associated with
known communists. Now come these Defendants,
levelling the mirror-image of these same charges at
my door. McCarthyism was rightly exposed for what
it was in more recent, and more enlightened, years.
These Defendants, for their own purposes, are
seeking to turn the clock back. As far as the United States are concerned apart
from the Institute of Hitorical Review (IHR), which
I shall deal with separately, the one organisation
identified by learned Counsel for the defence is
the National Alliance. First, let me point out that
no doubt with good reason the Defendants have
decided not to call their expert on Political
Extremism in the United States, Professor Levin,
and they have withdrawn his expert report - Mr
Rampton used the word "junked" or "dumped," I
believe. Had they not, it would have been
"debunked" - by me. We have therefore no general
expert evidence as to the nature of the National
Alliance, and the Court is probably as much in the
dark about this group as anybody else. The defence
invites the Court to study the leaflets put about
by that body at one meeting, but can offer to the
Court not the slightest evidence that I was aware
of such leaflets - or for that matter, if they are
once again falling back on "negligence," that I
ought to have been. If, as I submit, the meetings
were organised by individual friends of mine,
acting outside whatever their capacity, if any,
within the National Alliance may have been, there
is no reason why I should have read such leaflets
if indeed they were on offer. As for the IHR: I have little to add to what I
stated in my various written replies. It is clearly
unsatisfactory, though not surprising, that
establishment scholars feel the need to dismiss any
rival body of scholars as "extremist", merely on
the basis that these others propagate a different
version of history from their own "consensus"
version. The officials of the IHR nearly all hold
academic qualifications. True, they are not all
trained historians, but then neither are some of
the most famous names of historians in both ancient
and contemporary times. It is clear from
correspondence before the court that I recognised
shortcomings in the old IHR, and was keen to
introduce them to new speakers including main line
scholars and historians like John Toland (who did
in fact speak there), Professor Ernst Nolte, and
Michael Beschloss. I am not, and never have been, an official of
the IHR; at most, one of many friendly advisers. As
for speaking engagements, my association with the
IHR has been the same as my association was with,
for instance, the Cambridge University Fabian
Society, or the Trinity College Dublin Lit. &
Deb., or any other body of enlightened people keen
to hear alternative views. Professor Evans, in his
odious attempts to smear and defile my name, which
I hope will long haunt him in the common rooms of
Cambridge, called me a frequent speaker at the IHR.
And may I say, So what: none of my lectures had a
Holocaust-denial, or anti-Semitic, or extremist
theme. I spoke on Churchill, on Pearl Harbor, on
Rommel, on the Goebbels diaries, on my
Eichmann-papers find, and on general problems of
writing history. The Court has learned that I have
in fact addressed functions of the IHR only five
times in seventeen years, one lecture each time. No
amount of squirming by this expert witness could
increase that figure. It is true that I socialised
before or after the event with the IHR officials
and their wives. So what. It is true that I use
their warehousing facilities. So what. It is true
that the IHR (along with thousands of other retail
outlets) sell my books. So what. It is also true that I introduced them to
subjects which some members of the audience found
deeply uncomfortable, for instance the confessions
of Adolf Eichmann, the harrowing Bruns Report, and
the Kristallnacht. I would willingly read out the
relevant extracts of my lectures to the IHR, but my
Lord, through the courtesy and industry of the
Defendants solicitors, which I have had cause
already to praise, Your Lordship is already funded
with extensive transcripts of those talks, and I
would ask that Your Lordship read them with this
paragraph in mind. I am accused of telling
audiences what they want to hear; that may
partially be true, but by Jove, having done so I
then used the goodwill generated like that to tell
them a lot of things they very much did not want to
hear! The Defendants would willingly overlook this
aspect of my association with the IHR. I trust that
the Court will not. As for the National Alliance, an organisation of
which the defence makes much. As an Englishman I am
completely unfamiliar with the nature of the
National Alliance, its logo, and its name. It may
be that the name means more to the Defendants and
to those who are financing their efforts than it
does to me. It certainly meant nothing to the
English members of the public gallery on the days
that it was mentioned here. It may be that Your
Lordship was, even before the trial began,
thoroughly familiar with the National Alliance and
its officials and policies. But I doubt it. Even
now I suspect it does not count for more than a
relatively small row of beans. I have had no meaningful contacts with the
organisation as such. One or at most two of its
individual members, who were already on my mailing
list, volunteered, like scores of other Americans,
to organised lectures for me. One was Erich Gliebe,
who has always organised my lectures in Cleveland,
Ohio; on the evidence of his notepaper from the
year 1990 he is also a National Alliance member. I
ask the Court to accept that, when asked about it
ten years later, I had long forgotten receiving
that one letter from him with its heading and logo.
Before each lecture date, I mailed an invitation
letter to my entire mailing list of friends in each
state. The audience was therefore largely of my own
"people," if I can put it like that. That is why Mr
Breeding rather superfluously welcomes the
strangers in his opening remarks on the Florida
videotape as seen. Had he told me he would also
claim to do so on behalf of his organisation, I
would have told him not to. It was my function, and
the audience were largely my guests, not his. The photographs taken at this meeting show, as
the Defendants' own agents have warranted, no
formal National Alliance presence (flags, armbands,
or whatever). The witness statement of Ms Gutman
has confirmed this. Learned counsel for the
Defendants has drawn attention to one eighteen-inch
wide pennant displayed at the function, on a side
wall, with what they state is the National Alliance
logo on it, visible on a video film. Its logo
appears to be based on the CND design. I did not
notice it at the time, nor would I have had the
faintest idea what it was if I did. Evidently Mr
Gliebe told me that his pals at the National
Alliance had had a hand in organising my successful
Cleveland function; and that is why I noted in my
diary, with a hint of surprise, that it "turns out"
that the National Alliance had organised at the
other meeting too. The Court may agree that this
phrase alone is evidence that their involvement was
(a) not manifest, and (b) not known to me before;
and given that the audience was largely of my own
making it does not seem worthy of much note. I
submit that this kind of defence evidence does not
meet the enhanced standard of proof required by the
law on defamation for justification of serious
charges. As for the United Kingdom - the British National
Party - the defence have no doubt rightly decided
to junk their own expert's report on my alleged
contacts with British extremists as well. Despite
complete access to all my records, their joint
effort managed to establish that in a twenty year
speaking career I addressed on one occasion what
can fairly be described as a half-BNP audience, or
a hybrid audience, in Leeds. The invitation came
from a BNP official whose letter asked me to reply
to his private address. No doubt I gave them the
usual uncomfortable litany - the Bruns report,
which I had just discovered, and the other
transcripts too. I probably also told them what I
had found in Mussolini's files, the evidence that
Sir Oswald Mosley had been in the pay of the
Italian fascists, picking up large sums of money in
brown paper parcels at anonymous street corners in
London. I was the first person to find that fact
out, and to publicise that, too. It is in my 1981
newsletter. All other BNP invitations I refused, as
the exchange on Day 29, pages 74-5, shows; and it
seems disingenuous at best, and at worst rather
dishonest, for Mr Rampton, funded and furnished as
he was with my entire personal diaries and files,
to suggest otherwise. In general it is also to be stated that at the
material times, namely when I associated with those
individuals, they were not extremists, nor has it
been shown to the Court that at that time they
were. Thus at the time I first met this young man,
Ewald Althans, late in October 1989, he seemed full
of promise, and eager to learn. I later learned
that he had been to Israel for six months on a
German-government voluntary scheme for young
Germans who wished to atone. Over the two or three
years that our orbits occasionally intersected, I
could see that he was growing more extreme and
provocative in his actions. He also became
undependable, and wayward in a number of
non-political ways that I mentioned to the Court.
According to Der Spiegel, reporting his 1995 trial
in Berlin, Althans had acted for the Bavarian BfV
as a Spitzenquelle (top agent) until 1994, when
they ended the liaison.184 The BfV had, as
Professor Funke agreed, a record of hiring agents
provocateurs. Only a few weeks ago, Gottfried Timm,
minister of the interior in Lower Saxony, found
that the NPD chairman in Wismar, "Martin", was a
paid agent provocateur of the BfV (OPC) who had
committed a series of atrocities including
attempted murder while acting for the OPC. Timm
demanded an inquiry after the agent was unmasked
during his trial for arson.185 Ernst Zündel is a German-born Canadian for
whose own particular views I hold no brief. I later
learned that he had apparently written some
provocatively-themed, books with tongue-in-cheek
titles (on flying saucers in Antarctica, and on the
Adolf Hitler that I Knew and Loved) which are said
to be worse than outré; wild horses would
not make me read such books myself. I had met him
in 1986,and found that as a personality he was not
as dark as had been painted in the media. I was
asked to give expert evidence at his trial in
Toronto in April 1988, relating to the Third Reich
and Hitler's own involvement in the Holocaust. I
did so to the best of my professional ability, and
I was told that I had earned the commendation of
the Court for doing so. It is plain to me from what
I know that Mr Zündel has been subjected to a
twenty year onslaught by the Canadian organisations
dedicated to combatting what they regard as
Holocaust denial because of his dissident views,
which are certainly more extreme than mine. My own
relationship with Mr Zündel has been proper
throughout, and the Court has not been given any
evidence to the contrary. At times it has even been
strained, because of the misfortune inflicted on me
in retribution for having spoken at his trial. 
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