Day 7 Transcript: Holocaust Denial on Trial

Part I: Initial Proceedings (1.1 to 22.26)

IN THE HIGH COURT OF JUSTICE 1996 I. No. 113 QUEEN’S BENCH DIVISION Royal Courts of Justice Strand, London Thursday, 20th January 2000 Before: MR JUSTICE GRAY B E T W E E N: DAVID JOHN CAWDELL IRVING Claimant -and- (1) PENGUIN BOOKS LIMITED (2) DEBORAH E.

LIPSTADT Defendants The Claimant appeared in person MR RICHARD RAMPTON Q.C. (instructed by Messrs Davenport Lyons and Mishcon de Reya) appeared on behalf of the First and Second Defendants MISS HEATHER ROGERS (instructed by Davenport Lyons) appeared on behalf of the First Defendant Penguin Books Limited MR ANTHONY JULIUS (of Mishcon de Reya) appeared on behalf of the Second Defendant Deborah Lipstadt (Transcribed from the stenographic notes of Harry Counsell & Company, Clifford’s Inn,

Fetter Lane, London EC4 Telephone: 020-7242-9346) PROCEEDINGS – DAY SEVEN

<Day 7 Thursday, 20th January 2000. MR JUSTICE GRAY: Yes, Mr Irving? MR IRVING: This morning we are going to be dealing, as I apprehend, may it please the court, with the Schlegelberger document which I brought, as I indicated yesterday evening, with one or two of the surrounding documents. [Document not provided]. MR JUSTICE GRAY: Yes. I have only just received this clip, so I am afraid I have not had a chance to go through it. MR IRVING: I appreciate that, my Lord.

I do not think it will be a very painful exercise. We will also take on board this argument, and I have taken the liberty of submitting to your Lordship a two-page skeleton, which again you will not have had time to reflect upon but I thought it would be of assistance to your Lordship.

I have also excised the first paragraph of that and put it on a separate sheet for your Lordship, in case you wish to mark it up and say,”Yes I thoroughly approve of this, this is a jolly good idea, I think Irving has it right”. MR JUSTICE GRAY: We will come to whether that is going to be my conclusion in a moment, shall we? Can we just have open the Schlegelberger note, unless it is in your clip? MR IRVING: It is in the clip, my Lord.

It is little bundle D which you have just received, and you will find it on page 9. MR JUSTICE GRAY: I am going to put this into J. We

must keep an eye on not having stray bits of paper knocking around. MR IRVING: This is a bundle called Schlegelberger, a 25 page document relating to the context and provenance of the Schlegelberger document which I have loosely dated as spring 1942. The document concerned is on page 9, my Lord, Tab 7. MR JUSTICE GRAY: Yes.

MR IRVING: The first document is page 1 which your Lordship will see is the folder cover of the Reich Ministry of the Justice, and I will read the words to you which are rather illegible. We have had problems with the German text before. Behandlung der Juden, “treatment of the Jews”. My only gloss on that is to say it is not treatment of the mixed race questions. It is a Ministry of Justice file on the treatment of the Jews.

I have taken the liberty, my Lord, of highlighting one or two sentences in the bundle I gave you. MR JUSTICE GRAY: That is helpful. MR IRVING: Somebody has my highlighted copy. I do not. MR JUSTICE GRAY: Can you date the cover to the file or the cover top sheet? MR IRVING: Only inasmuch as the earliest document in the file is early 1942, my Lord. It is a very slim file, the way sometimes these governmental jackets, I think they are called in English parlance, go.

MR JUSTICE GRAY: Yes. MR IRVING: Page No. 2, my Lord, is the translation into English of the following page. Unless Mr Rampton has any objection, I will just deal with the English text. MR JUSTICE GRAY: Yes. MR IRVING: We read it out yesterday but I will read it out again.

It is from Schlegelberger, who is acting Minister of Justice after the death of the Minister, and he is writing to the Reich Minister, Hans Lammers: My personal assistant has just briefed me on the result of the session of March 6th on the treatment of Jews and mixed races”. Your Lordship will probably see that I have highlighted the fact that it is both A and B, so to speak, not just the mixed race. MR JUSTICE GRAY: That is your gloss, anyway.

MR IRVING: I am now still awaiting the official minutes. My Lord, of course, I will argue that it is not unreasonable — we will be dealing later in the argument with what is reasonable and what is not reasonable, what would be perverse and what would not perverse. I am now still waiting the official minutes. From the briefing by my personal assistant there seem to be decisions in preparation which I have to consider for the most part to be completely impossible.

As the outcome of the talks in which a personal assistant of your department took part is to form the basis for the decision of the Fuhrer, it would

be urgently desirable for me to have a personal talk with you in good time about the affair. As soon as the minutes of the session are before me, I shall permit myself to phone you and to ask you whether and when a discussion between us might take place.” Lammers replies, my Lord, and this is on page 4, that he is very ready to conform. He suggests an appointment at the end of the month; in other words, at the end of March.

I do not think it is perverse then to say that the conversation which is referred to in the memorandum is therefore at the end of March 1942. I may be wrong. I allow that I may be wrong. It is always possible to be wrong, but we are looking for a deliberate or wilful distortion. MR JUSTICE GRAY: You rely presumably also on the heading to that letter which is “overall solution to the Jewish problem”.

MR IRVING: “Overall solution to the Jewish problem”, yes, my Lord, I am indebted to your Lordship for pointing that out, the overall solution of the Jewish problem. The next letter, my Lord, pages 6 to 8, I do not propose to read out. They do not take us very much further. If your Lordship is interested in their content, then there is a British summary. MR JUSTICE GRAY: If are you not going to rely on anything there, I am not going to take time on it.

MR IRVING: Very well, my Lord. Mr Rampton may very well wish to point to one or two things in it. MR JUSTICE GRAY: Let us see. MR IRVING: The next document, page 9, is the actual memorandum. Page 10 is something that I did not have before me yesterday, my Lord. It is a translation of the following page, page 11 or part of it.

If your Lordship were just to turn to page 11, I draw your attention to two things: first of all, the number at the top, 2653, where, at the beginning of the notes or near the beginning of the notes to the second volume of my Hitler biography, namely Hitler’s War, and we are already on manuscript page 2,653. This will give your Lordship an idea of the magnitude of the task and I would therefore pray your Lordship’s indulgence if I have occasionally got a word wrong or mistyped a word.

MR JUSTICE GRAY: I do not underrate the magnitude of the task at all. MR IRVING: I am indebted to you. I have translated note 63. Your Lordship will notice that the notes are not in the book in this form. Quite simply, the publisher said, “Mr Irving, that would add an extra 500 pages on to the text”, so it went. It is helpful because note 53 refers, in this context, to the Schlegelberger document. The staff evidence analysis sheet, which is also in this bundle, we referred to yesterday.

The copies were notarised by

Dr Robert Kempner, which is not really important, unless we get on to the question of who found it first and when should he have used it. Then I continue: ” Before the International Military Tribunal (at Nuremberg) Lammers testified that Himmler had told him that he had received from the Fuhrer the task of bringing about a Final Solution of the Jewish problem, i.e. that ‘the Jews were to be evacuated out of Germany’”. That part is in quotati

on marks. “Lammers wanted to find out for himself, he said, and fixed an appointment with Fuhrer whereupon the Fuhrer told me that, yes, it was quite right that he had given the evacuation order to Himmler, but he did not want to hear any more briefings about this Jewish problem during the war”. MR JUSTICE GRAY: That is undated. MR IRVING: This is from the transcript of the international military tribunal. MR JUSTICE GRAY: No.

What I mean is there is no indication in the document as to when that was said by Hitler. For all we know, it may have been said in 1940 or ’41. MR IRVING: I will deal with that point very shortly, my Lord, when we skip a page, and we now come to page 12. Your Lordship or Mr Rampton might quite well object that it is unsatisfactory, that I should produce the quotation from the transcript in that form, of course, the Military Tribunal transcript. I objected, of course, in exactly

the same terms yesterday but, if your Lordship is interested, I am sure we can obtain the precise page from the transcript. Page 12. Two or three years ago, I went to the national archives in Washington and looked at the detailed verbatim interrogations of the number of people who were present at the Wannsee Conference and at the subsequent conference, my Lord, which your Lordship will remember was on March 6th 1942. MR JUSTICE GRAY: Do you mean Wannsee? MR IRVING: Wannsee

on January 20th 1942 — W-A-N-N-S-E-E — and the subsequent conference, which was held at the headquarters of Heydrich

on March 6th 1942. I wanted to find out what the participants said, what they recalled immediately afterwards, after the war. They were interrogated in detail by the Americans. We have the verbatim transcripts in German and English. I did not copy the transcripts, but I typed extracts on the filing cards which you will see on pages 13 and 14, my Lord, the relevant parts. I have translated them on page 12 which I think is all we need to look at today.

Cabinet counseller, Dr Hans Ficher of the Reich Chancellery (Lammers department) stated that from the invitation it was evident that evacuation or sterilisation were on the agenda.” I skip on to the next sentence: “Lammers took this minute to the Fuhrer and

returned with a memorandum. The discussion of the whole affair is to be postponed until after the end of the war”. That must have been in March 1942. That is the opinion of Bohle. “To our horror”, and I rely on this sentence, my Lord, “we learned that that then continued behind the scenes. We learned that that then continued behind the scenes”.

Although Hitler had given this order, leave everything until the end of the war, to our horror, they learned that it went on behind the scenes, rather like the Bruns business, your Lordship will remember. The order comes down from Hitler’s headquarters. What we are looking for, I would submit, is any indication that I have been perverse in putting on this kind of document the meaning that I did in my various writings and utterances.

If I continue now to the next statement by Mr Gottfried Bohle, who is also at the Reichs Chancellory Department, he testified that he had been interrogated about this on more than one occasion. The conference, he recalled, was at the headquarters of Heydrich’s department, the RSHA. Eichmann opened, and I am relying on this purely to show that it was not just a discussion about the mixed race, my Lord. It was a discussion about the Jews as a whole.

Eichmann opened with the need for a quick solution of the Jewish Question. Bohle told his wife

afterwards that they had talked of Jews being supplied like cattle. One man had objected, one cannot proceed against Jews who had behaved correctly, Eichmann’s No. 2, that was SS van Fuhrer Gunter, said “that comes under our police judgment”. MR JUSTICE GRAY: I do not at the moment see what bearing that has on the issue we are concerned with. MR IRVING: It is an indication where the kind of decisions are being taken, my Lord. MR JUSTICE GRAY: I see. Anyway Bohle again?

MR IRVING: Bohle in another interrogation said, and I draw attention only to the second two sentences, Hitler wanted postponement until after the war. “Whether the security police knew about the different orders from Hitler, I cannot say.” In other words, different to what they were doing. MR JUSTICE GRAY: Yes. MR IRVING: My Lord, your Lordship may attach no significance whatsoever to these documents. I am a historian looking at these documents.

I submit that it is perfectly proper for me to pay attention to them, and it is not perverse for me to attach the significance to them that I did and the meanings that I did. MR JUSTICE GRAY: Yes. MR IRVING: That is all that I have to submit on this Schlegelberger memorandum, my Lord.

MR JUSTICE GRAY: You did that very, if I may say so, effectively and briefly. MR IRVING: Your Lordship will have apprehended that I attach importance to the Schlegelberger memorandum. I have quoted it frequently, I have illustrated it in my books, and I wish to make sure that it stayed upright without being sunk. MR JUSTICE GRAY: It would not be exaggerating to say that it is something of a linchpin for your thesis about the extent to which Hitler knew about what was going on.

MR IRVING: One of the chain of document to which we occasionally refer, my Lord. MR JUSTICE GRAY: That is Schlegelberger. MR JUSTICE GRAY: Mr Rampton, do you want to add anything? MR RAMPTON: I have some questions remaining about Schlegelberger, particularly in the light of these documents. MR IRVING: Do you wish me to go into the box? MR JUSTICE GRAY: We have to keep an eye on the time. MR RAMPTON: Your Lordship need not fear; we have enough material for today.

MR JUSTICE GRAY: I am not worrying about having enough. Mr Irving, perhaps you would go back into the box? < MR DAVID IRVING, recalled. < Cross-Examined by MR RAMPTON QC, continued. MR RAMPTON: Mr Irving, there is one document which you have

not included in that little clip, is there not? A. [Mr Irving]: Mr Rampton, I spent a large part of the night in looking for my Schlegelberger file, but the documents came back from solicitors for the Defendants in such disarray that it was in vain. I had to reconstruct it from other sources. Q. [Mr Rampton]: Curiously enough, I did the same exercise myself last night, and the document that I have included in my little clip which I will hand in—- (Document not provided) .

MR JUSTICE GRAY: Where are we going to put these? MR RAMPTON: For the moment they can go together. Perhaps they can both go in whatever the J number is. MR JUSTICE GRAY: J7. MR RAMPTON: Some of them may in due course be filed away into the core file. A. [Mr Irving]: May I express incidentally my amazement that this bundle of documents did not turn up in the bundles that were put to the court? MR JUSTICE GRAY: I know. I understand the point. Let us get on.

MR RAMPTON: There is a document, Mr Irving, that you did not include — I am not saying it is deliberate, at least not at the moment — in the little clip and that is the actual minute of the meeting on 6th March 1942, is it not? A. [Mr Irving]: That is correct. The reason for that being that it did not come from that Ministry of Justice file. This comes

from, as the serial numbers at the foot of it clearly show, the Foreign Ministry files. Q. [Mr Rampton]: It did not, but it is one of the footnotes to your Goebbels book, is it not? A. [Mr Irving]: I am sorry, the footnote is referred to in the Goebbels book? It is indeed, yes. Q. [Mr Rampton]: It is footnote 36 to page 388, and one knows it is the same document for two reasons: First because the personnel mentioned at as being at the meeting include Karssonsen and Schmidtburg?

A. [Mr Irving]: Yes. Q. [Mr Rampton]: And because the film roll number at the bottom right hand corner of the page that you have got there is the one which you give in your footnote. So we are looking now at the right document, are we? It is 371962? A. [Mr Irving]: Yes. Can you show me again the page reference in the Goebbels? Q. [Mr Rampton]: Yes I have copied it for convenience. It is page 388, and it is note 36 in the upper half of the page, the big paragraph before the word Eichmann.

My Lord, I have copied for your Lordship note 36 which is on page 647, where Mr Irving said — perhaps I will read the Goebbels text first so that it will become a little clearer what it is that I am driving at. I will start if I may on 388. “On the following day” — that is he and one can see from the previous page that that is Goebbels and the following day

is 6th March — “Goebbels took note of an extensive report prepared by Heydrich’s office, probably on the Wannsee conference. There were still eleven million Jews in Europe, he dictated, summarizing the document. ‘For the time being they are to be concentrated in the east [until] Later; possibly an island like Madagascar can be assigned to them after the war.’ ‘Undoubtedly there will be a multitude of personal tragedies,’ he added airily,’But this is unavoidable.

The situation now is ripe for a final settlement of the Jewish question.’ In a covering letter Heydrich invited Goebbels to a second conference,

on March 6. Goebbels sent two of his junior staff.” Then one goes to note 36, and one sees that it says they, that is the two junior members of staff, were Karssonsen and Schmidtburg of its Eastern territory subsection. Minutes of conference, March 6th 1942, on Final Solution of Jewish problem. Then your Lordship sees inside the bracket right at the end is the same film roll number, whatever it is, reference number 371962. MR JUSTICE GRAY: Right?

A. [Mr Irving]: “Eichmann talked crudely at this meeting”– that is the meeting of 6th March attended by Karssonsen and Schmidtburg – “of ‘forwarding’ the Jews to the east, like so many head of cattle. The ministry of justice handled the report on this new discussion like a hot potato.” — That is note 38. That is the letter of 12th March, which

your Lordship has, to Herr Lammers in the Reichkanzlei “The Reich Chancellery referred it all to Hitler.” That is an is interrogation of Hans Ficher, that footnote.

I ask you to note the words “it all”, Mr Irving. “Hitler wearily told Hans Lammers that he wanted the solution of the Jewish problem postponed until after the war was over – a ruling that remarkably few historians now seem disposed to quote.” That suggests, does it not, to the reader, Mr Irving, that the conference on 6th March was about the overall solution of the Jewish question? A. [Mr Irving]: The final solution of the Jewish question is the title given on the minutes.

MR JUSTICE GRAY: But that was not the question. The question is you are conveying to the readers there that it is the final solution which is postponed. MR RAMPTON: That was what that conference discussed, is what you are telling the reader. A. [Mr Irving]: Yes. Q. [Mr Rampton]: Now would you please look at the minute of the conference, the one you footnoted? A. [Mr Irving]: Yes. Q. [Mr Rampton]: Please read it yourself. Tell me when you have finished and I will ask you a question.

A. [Mr Irving]: I think I am familiar enough with the document. My Lord, can I mention the fact that we have one of my

witnesses present. Is he allowed to be in court? MR JUSTICE GRAY: Yes. It is only in criminal trials that generally speaking you do not. A. [Mr Irving]: Yes. I think I am sufficiently familiar with the content of this memorandum to answer questions. MR RAMPTON: The only topics that were discussed at that meeting on 6th March 1942 are the fate of the mischlinge, that is to say the children of mixed marriages, and their parents, the mischehen. There are two items, there are not?

A. [Mr Irving]: Yes. Q. [Mr Rampton]: The first is the mischlinge on page 478 at the bottom? A. [Mr Irving]: Yes. Q. [Mr Rampton]: And the second, on page 483 at the bottom, is the mischehen, that is to say mixed marriages? A. [Mr Irving]: Yes. Q. [Mr Rampton]: There is not a word in that memorandum of that conference about the solution in general, apart from the heading which was a general heading always used for these documents. Am I right?

A. [Mr Irving]: You can say that about this document, yes. Q. [Mr Rampton]: Then, if you will, turn to the next page in my little file. A. [Mr Irving]: 371? Q. [Mr Rampton]: Yes. I will use yours because you have translated it and I have not.

A. [Mr Irving]: This refers clearly to the conference concerning the Jews and the mixed races. Q. [Mr Rampton]: I will just find your English first. I am going to read it again. MR JUSTICE GRAY: Do not, because we have been through it once before. MR RAMPTON: “My personal assistant has just briefed me on the result of the session

on March 6th, meeting might be a better word, on the treatment of Jews and mixed races”. That personal assistant was a man called Masfelder, was it not? A. [Mr Irving]: That I do not know. Q. [Mr Rampton]: If you look at the protocol, you can see Masfelder, sorry. The front sheet of the protocol, which is one of your own documents. MR JUSTICE GRAY: We can short circuit this. Mr Irving, this must be a reference to the conference of which we have just seen the record, is it not?

A. [Mr Irving]: Yes indeed. MR RAMPTON: That conference had nothing whatever to do with what was to happen to the Jews overall. It was under that general heading, but it was specifically about mischlinge and mischehen, was it not? A. [Mr Irving]: The minutes of the conference record only those parts dealing with the mischehen, the mixed marriages. Q. [Mr Rampton]: So, in effect, you have totally distorted what was

discussed at that meeting. You have totally distorted therefore the reason why Schlegelberger wrote to Lammers and therefore, if the Schlegelberger has a place in this chronology, you have distorted the effect of that, too, have you not? A. [Mr Irving]: This omission that you repeatedly make, and I beg to differ on that because of course I am looking at the other documents in the file and also looking at the interrogations of the people who were at the meeting.

Q. [Mr Rampton]: Let us look at the interrogations, shall we? A. [Mr Irving]: If you remember, the business about Jews being supplied like cattle and so on. Quite clearly that is not in the minutes either. There is a lot of stuff that happened at that conference which is not recorded in the minutes. I think it is a mistake to adhere slavishly to the Nazi memoranda taken by these gentlemen, the minutes, which as you yourself have said frequently were written for camouflage purposes.

Q. [Mr Rampton]: It is page 12 my Lord. Let us look at your extract from the postwar interrogation, shall we? A. [Mr Irving]: Yes. Q. [Mr Rampton]: Whether or not Hans Ficher is talking about this meeting one does not know because one has not got the full text, but assume that he is, then what he said was: From the invitation, whatever that means, it was evident that evacuation or sterilization were on the agenda. What was

discussed at that meeting was to how to deal with the mischlinge and their parents the mischehen, and the question arose should they be sterilized, should they be evacuated, should they be allowed to stay where they are? That is what was discussed, was it not? A. [Mr Irving]: Well we have of course two different versions of the same meeting. We have several different versions of the same meeting.

We have the wartime minute taken by the one that you referred to us from the Foreign Ministry files, which of course was before me, but we also have the other sources of that meeting. Q. [Mr Rampton]: Mr Irving, the document that you referred to and relied on in the account that you gave in your book Goebbels is this document. A. [Mr Irving]: I specifically refer also to these interrogations of Ficher and Bohle and the rest in this paragraph.

Q. [Mr Rampton]: Do not move the goal posts please, Mr Irving. It is no good talking about some other memorandum. This is the memorandum which you footnoted in Goebbels, is it not? A. [Mr Irving]: These gentlemen are clearly referring to this conference in their interrogations because they say it was at the headquarters of Heydrich, which pins it down as being this conference where the talk is about Jews being supplied like cattle.

MR JUSTICE GRAY: You are missing, I think, Mr Rampton’s point on this, and I do not think we want to spend very long on

it. It is that the evacuation and sterilisation that were on the agenda may have been the evacuation or sterilisation of mischlinge? A. [Mr Irving]: It may be. MR RAMPTON: You do not tell your readers that, do you? You do not tell your readers that the discussion at this conference was confined to the fate of the mischlinge and the mischehen.

A. [Mr Irving]: I am sure that Professor Evans would have spent eight pages on this one detail, but I am writing a book which has to be kept into the confines of one bound volume. Q. [Mr Rampton]: Unless you will answer my questions, we are going to have a bad day. Will you answer my question? You do not tell the readers that the discussion at this conference was confined to the fate of the mischlinge and mischehen, do you? A. [Mr Irving]: Will you allow me to read again what I have written?

Q. [Mr Rampton]: Yes, indeed. MR JUSTICE GRAY: Do not take long because really the answer to that question must be yes, that you are conveying to the reader that it is the whole question that is being postponed until the end of the war? A. [Mr Irving]: I think, My Lord, that I have stated on several occasions in the Goebbels’ book, and your Lordship will remember the case of Gottschalt having caused Hitler particular agony, in my submission; that I have repeatedly referred to the

fact, to the question of the mixed marriages and mixed races was a thorn in the side of the Nazis because they did not know how to treat them, which side of the line to put them. I cannot keep on, in a book which is for publication, coming back and reminding readers of things that the intelligent reader will be carrying in his brain anyway. MR JUSTICE GRAY: No, Mr Rampton was asking you about the passage at page 388, I think. MR RAMPTON: I was, yes.

A. [Mr Irving]: Well, I think that the lines, about 10 lines down, where Goebbels is quoted as saying: “For the time being that it be concentrated in the East, undoubtedly, there will be a multitude of personal tragedies, but this is unavoidable”. We then go straight on to talk about the March 6th conference. I am making it in a way that a responsible writer should. I did not want to put the whole contents of this 10 page memorandum into a book at this point.

That would have been acres of sludge again. MR RAMPTON: Mr Irving, I am going to put it once more and I cannot go on making speeches through questions which are never answered. The fact is you that you led the reader in this passage to believe that what was discussed at the conference on 6th March was the fate of the Jews

generally, that that then went to Hitler, via Lammers, and Hitler made a ruling that the fate of the Jews generally was not to be considered or discussed at that time. That is a total distortion of the evidence which you had before you when you wrote that. A. [Mr Irving]: I totally disagree with you, Mr Rampton. The evidence of Bohle, that there was talk there of delivering the Jews to the East like so many head of cattle, that is no longer talking about the mixed marriage problem.

They are talking about the overall Holocaust in the way that I have accepted it can be defined and perceived. Q. [Mr Rampton]: If you can find in this memorandum which you have cited in your book reference to the general question, please show it to us, otherwise that is my last question. A. [Mr Irving]: Mr Rampton, I have referred to the fact that I do not just rely on one document. I do not jump from mountain peek to mountain peek. I look at all the surrounding hills as well.

MR JUSTICE GRAY: There we are. That is the Schlegelberger note. MR RAMPTON: I think, my Lord, that will do. MR JUSTICE GRAY: Thank you very much. MR RAMPTON: My Lord, I was not intending to embark on anything new at the moment. MR JUSTICE GRAY: I think the plan is we have your witness so he is not kept waiting.

Part II: Professor Cameron Watt Examined by Mr. Irving (23.1 to 54.18)

MR RAMPTON: As Professor Cameron Watt is here, he had better give evidence. MR JUSTICE GRAY: That is what I think so, Mr Irving, if you would like to revert to your role as counsel? < (The witness stood down) MR IRVING: Can Professor Cameron Watt be called? MR JUSTICE GRAY: Yes, of course.

Section 23.1 to 40.8

< PROFESSOR CAMERON WATT, sworn. < Examined by MR IRVING. MR JUSTICE GRAY: Professor Watt, would you be more comfortable sitting down? You are welcome to sit down. MR IRVING: I was going to make precisely the same suggestion, my Lord. (To the witness):nbsp;Professor Watt, thank you very much for coming today. You are appearing, of course, under a witness summons.

I want to make that quite plain to the court and you are not appearing voluntarily, so no odium can attach to you for coming and being called for the defence, for my defence, in other words, for the Plaintiff in this action. MR JUSTICE GRAY: Shall we introduce Professor Watt and ask him about his background? MR IRVING: Yes. Professor Watt, your name is Donald Cameron Watt? A. [Professor Cameron Watt]: It is.

Q. [Mr Irving]: You are Emeritus Professor of International History at the London School of Economics and Political Science?

A. [Professor Cameron Watt]: Yes. Q. [Mr Irving]: How long were you teaching at the London School of Economics? A. [Professor Cameron Watt]: From 1954 to 1993. 39 years altogether. Q. [Mr Irving]: 39 years a Professor of History at the London School of Economics? A. [Professor Cameron Watt]: I did not have the rank of Professor until 1971, but I was on the staff.

Q. [Mr Irving]: You enjoy the reputation of being something of a grand gentleman, a doyen, of the historical profession in this country? A. [Professor Cameron Watt]: I think it is very difficult for an individual to say what their reputation is in the minds of other people. I certainly can only say that I have held a number of senior positions in international organizations devoted to historical research. Q. [Mr Irving]: Thank you. You describe yourself as an historian, writer and broadcaster.

You are all three things? A. [Professor Cameron Watt]: These are the various sources of my income, yes. Q. [Mr Irving]: You were educated at Rugby and at Oriel College in Oxford; is that correct? A. [Professor Cameron Watt]: Yes. Q. [Mr Irving]: You served in the Army in the Intelligence Corp.? A. [Professor Cameron Watt]: I did. Q. [Mr Irving]: And that you were with the British troops in Austria in the occupation forces after World War II?

A. [Professor Cameron Watt]: From 1947 to ’48, yes. Q. [Mr Irving]: 1947 to ’48. Would you tell the court, Professor Watt, what you were engaged with in the years following your Army service? A. [Professor Cameron Watt]: Following my Army service, I had three years reading politics, philosophy and economics at Oxford because only that way could you deal with 20th century history at that time; and I indulged myself in the usual activities of undergraduate.

That is to say, I wrote, I played opera, I ran the Poetry Society — I had a number of activities of that kind. Q. [Mr Irving]: And you became a member of the Foreign Office Research Department? A. [Professor Cameron Watt]: I was attached to it, yes — I do not think I was ever a full member — from 1951 to 1954, and then again on a part-time basis from 1957 to 1960. Q. [Mr Irving]: Yes. Interesting.

So you are quite familiar in a way with the kinds of documents, Foreign Office, diplomatic documents, that we have been looking at in this court this morning, for example. The ones with the serial numbers, the six digit serial numbers stamped on the bottom? A. [Professor Cameron Watt]: The ones with the serial numbers are the ones — those serial numbers are the way we recorded them on our index cards.

They represent the serial number of the individual film and the frame number of the particular page. Q. [Mr Irving]: The British, in fact, captured all the German Foreign

Office records? A. [Professor Cameron Watt]: They fell into the hands mainly of the British and Americans, were collected in Berlin and were evacuated. The whole project for editing them and publishing them was evacuated from Berlin at the time of the Berlin airlift. Q. [Mr Irving]: Did they go to a place called Waddon Hall? A. [Professor Cameron Watt]: Waddon Hall near Bletchley, yes. Q. [Mr Irving]: Near Bletchley, near the code breaking establishment? A. [Professor Cameron Watt]: Yes.

We had no relationship with them at all. Q. [Mr Irving]: Nobody knew about them? A. [Professor Cameron Watt]: Well, we knew they were there. There wee too many of them to be concealed and some of them played their part in ordinary social activities, but what they were actually doing, no, we did not know. Q. [Mr Irving]: Would you give the court, in most general terms, one or two lines, a picture of the scale and scope of the captured German documentation? Was it small or large?

A. [Professor Cameron Watt]: Well, at Waddon itself, we had 400 tonnes —- Q. [Mr Irving]: 400 tonnes? A. [Professor Cameron Watt]: — of documents covering the records of the German Foreign Ministry and of its Prussian predecessor from 1860 onwards.

We also had access to those files of the German Navy, the Reichsmarines, had fallen into British hands at Blenzburg and we had an odd collection of documents from the Nazi leaders, from the offices of the adjutantur of the Fuhrer, for example —-

Q. [Mr Irving]: Hitler’s Adjutants? A. [Professor Cameron Watt]: — and a number of private, collections of private papers that were found with the Foreign Ministry archives. Q. [Mr Irving]: Interrupting here at this moment, Professor Watt. Can I just ask you, when did we last meet — 30 years ago? A. [Professor Cameron Watt]: 30 years ago, I think it was, yes.

Q. [Mr Irving]: Have we had any discussion about what you are going to be saying today beyond just the invitation and my saying that it would just be very painful and very short? A. [Professor Cameron Watt]: No. Q. [Mr Irving]: I have not rehearsed you in any way as to what to say? A. [Professor Cameron Watt]: No.

Q. [Mr Irving]: In your knowledge, in your time going through the German diplomatic documents, and I appreciate you did not read the entire 400 tonnes — nor can I claim to have read the 400 tonnes of German documents — were any documents there which came to your attention which showed a Hitler order for what we can call the Holocaust in the sense of the extermination of the Jews?

A. [Professor Cameron Watt]: I would not come across them because my work was confined, where the original documents were concerned, to the years 1933/1937, and where the editorial work was concerned, to the documents from 1939 to 1940. I never had occasion to go in and look individually at the later documents. We worked with the Nuremberg files and, of course, I was familiar with the evidence that was produced at Nuremberg

which dealt with war crimes and I have been consulted about this from time to time. Q. [Mr Irving]: Did you have discussions with your colleagues at the Research Department about the progress of their work when they were working on different periods?

A. [Professor Cameron Watt]: No, because the whole project was concerned in the years I was attached to it to completing series D of the documents which ended with Pearl Harbour, and to completing or doing the whole of the work on the years 1933, 1937, which were published as Series C in the documents. I never had any direct dealings with documents dealing with the —- Q. [Mr Irving]: War years? A. [Professor Cameron Watt]: — war years beyond that, no.

Q. [Mr Irving]: You never heard from one of your colleagues there that they had found, stumbled across, a document of the sort that I mentioned, that Hitler had given some extraordinary orders about killing the Jews or any other ethnic minority or persecuted people directly involving Hitler? A. [Professor Cameron Watt]: No, but I cannot think, see why that would have arisen in our discussions. We were working eight to nine hours a day on the very large quantities of documents.

Each document was read by members of two countries. I collaborated mainly with the Frenchmen. Q. [Mr Irving]: You are familiar, Professor, also with some of the other document collections outside your own area of expertise

because of research at that time for the Foreign Office because, of course, you have written a number of distinguished works where you have had to draw on collections outside the Waddon Hall collection? A. [Professor Cameron Watt]: Oh, I have worked in the archives, in the American archives, for the ’30s. I worked in the Public Record Office.

I have worked in British private collections and I have worked on published documents from all those European countries I had direct access to and those which were translated into languages I could read.

Q. [Mr Irving]: Professor Watt, from your knowledge of these archives that you worked in, the Public Record Office in London, the national archives in the United States, the Foreign Office collection in this country and elsewhere, would you say that the records of the Third Reich, one way and another, either in original ribbon copy or in carbon copy, are largely intact, give or take a few holes of what the Russians took?

A. [Professor Cameron Watt]: No, there are very substantial gaps in the later period. Q. [Mr Irving]: In the later period? A. [Professor Cameron Watt]: From 1941 onwards. Q. [Mr Irving]: In specific departments, like the SS or the Army or the Air Force? A. [Professor Cameron Watt]: I think that the gaps are consistent with the files not ending up in an archive and where they did to destruction by one means or another, and to their falling into hands

of people who wanted to hang on them. Q. [Mr Irving]: For example, when the Germany archives at Potsdam was burned down in an air raid, that kind of thing?

A. [Professor Cameron Watt]: That kind of thing and, in fact, some of the, one of the worst accidents was when a couple of trucks carrying German Foreign Ministry records in the Secret classification collided with one another and caught fire, and we had only fragments, burnt fragments, and the more you touched them, the more they disintegrated.

MR JUSTICE GRAY: Professor Watt, may I ask you, you may not know the answer, but was there evidence that documents had systematically had gone missing in the sense that somebody had said, “We must take out a particular category of documents” or not?

A. [Professor Cameron Watt]: Not in the Foreign Ministry, sir, because, my Lord, the German Foreign Ministry practice, as we found out when we were looking at the documents dealing with the origins of the First World War, was either to deny the existence of files which were relevant or, in a number of cases, to unstitch the backs of them and to remove the documents so that the researcher was presented with what he understood to be a complete file but was not.

Since in no case were the researchers allowed access to the registries where all these documents were and that one had noted, this kind of gap misled a number of very prominent American scholars. MR IRVING: Professor Watt, can I ask, when was this

unstitching done? Are you suggesting after the war or during the war? A. [Professor Cameron Watt]: No, no. It was done by the political archive in the late 20s and 30s. Q. [Mr Irving]: But not relating to the Third Reich records? A. [Professor Cameron Watt]: No, because the issue of anybody looking at them from outside would not have arisen at that stage. Q. [Mr Irving]: Thank you.

So, by and large, the records of entire departments are there, but sometimes there are gaps where individual accidents happen, trucks colliding, buildings burned down, but then there would have been copies elsewhere? A. [Professor Cameron Watt]: Not necessarily, no.

We were helped by the gentleman called Leursche who had filmed a great many of the important documents before the originals were destroyed and, indeed, there was a great deal of dispute over the genuineness of the text of the Nazis in 1939 discovered that this was photostat.

Q. [Mr Irving]: How safe is it to draw negative conclusions in the way that I sometimes do (if I may ask a leading question) on the basis of the fact that there is in the body of documents now existing 55 years later, after we have access to just about everything, including the Bletchley Park intercepts which are enormous, how safely can one say because there is not a document there, in your expert view, Professor Watt, would it be perverse to say the fact

that there is no such document after 55 years, it would be perverse to say that, therefore, this document probably did not exist? A. [Professor Cameron Watt]: I think there are two problems with that argument. One is that the range of the destruction is something which we cannot know because Nazi principles of registration of documents were, to put it mildly, somewhat amateurish.

Secondly, the distribution of documents within the offices over which the Nazi amateurs had taken control was very peculiar; and, thirdly, as with other major leaders of other countries at that time, there are periods in which they did not confide their thoughts to anybody else, or to anybody else who might have recorded them.

That was, I think, the reason why the first sight or the first news about the Hitler diaries, alleged Hitler diaries, was for a moment so uplifting a piece of information. I came to hear about it when I had just come back from Finland and I had missed all the previous kerfuffle about it. My first reaction was at last something is going to fill in the gaps, but then, of course, I realized that it was not.

Q. [Mr Irving]: Professor Watt, you are familiar with the way the German documents look, Civil Servant documents. They had a kind of standard layout, did they not? A. [Professor Cameron Watt]: Those that came from professional offices, yes. Q. [Mr Irving]: How would you classify the SS in this respect? Would the

documents of the SS that came into Abteilung in Langswei —- A. [Professor Cameron Watt]: I think there it depended very largely whether the SS man concerned was a trained bureaucrat or not. Q. [Mr Irving]: There was actually a Civil Service regulation, a manual, I believe, on how documents had to be laid out, the reference number, the address, the location of the address list, and so on?

A. [Professor Cameron Watt]: That is true, but there was also a very, the sort of macho SS type who says, “Do not bother me with all this nonsense”. So that one cannot, I think, read anything out of this one way or another. Q. [Mr Irving]: Are you familiar with German security classifications? A. [Professor Cameron Watt]: Yes, up to Top Secret and so on, yes.

Q. [Mr Irving]: If a document is marked “Vertraulich”, is that round about the lowest security classification, “Confidential”? A. [Professor Cameron Watt]: I suppose so, yes. It is somewhere between “Restricted” and “Confidential” in the British classification. Q. [Mr Irving]: We will stick to the British classification because the American classifications are different, are they not? A. [Professor Cameron Watt]: Yes.

Q. [Mr Irving]: For example, American “Top Secret” is our Most Secret. If we go up the next rung in the ladder “Geheim”? A. [Professor Cameron Watt]: “Geheim” is” Secret. Q. [Mr Irving]: The one above that, we then divide? A. [Professor Cameron Watt]: “Streng geheim”, “hochts geheim”. The problem with that

kind of document is exactly the same as one has in the British system, that there is a tendency to overclassify simply to emphasise the importance of the individual and of the post that he has occupied. It is not a very good guide. Q. [Mr Irving]: If you were to be shown a document in which the classification “Geheim” had been upgraded manually to “Geheim Kommandosache”? A. [Professor Cameron Watt]: Yes.

Q. [Mr Irving]: Then that would apply that somebody attached importance to the increased security rating? A. [Professor Cameron Watt]: It would certainly imply that somebody did, yes. Whether —- Q. [Mr Irving]: Conversely, if somebody had crossed out the “Kommandosache” and left it just as “Geheim”, that would imply that they thought it was overclassified? A. [Professor Cameron Watt]: That is certainly true.

Q. [Mr Irving]: And this would indicate that the person who wrote that document did attach importance to security classifications; he was being pernickety? A. [Professor Cameron Watt]: Either that or he was engaged in a feud with the person who had first put the original grade on. I do not think you could arrive at any distinct generalization without looking at the document concerned.

Q. [Mr Irving]: There is a parting of the ways, is there not, in this top security classification of Geheim Kommandosache on the

Army documents, roughly speaking, and Geheim Reichsache on the political documents? A. [Professor Cameron Watt]: Those were classifications which go back before the Nazi period, yes. Q. [Mr Irving]: But normally you find Geheim Reichsache — R-E-I-C-H-S-A-C-H-E —- A. [Professor Cameron Watt]: Yes, that would be — certainly if one found that from the Wehrmacht(?) period, one would regard that as the top classification.

Q. [Mr Irving]: Then there another one on top of that which is “Nur durch offizier”, “Only by officer’s hand”? A. [Professor Cameron Watt]: No. That is an instruction as to how the documents should be handled.

It is a bit like the — there are very similar classifications in the British and it has to do with the handling of the document in transition, not with the actual — I would have expected to find “Nur durch offizierhande” on a document which was already classified as “Geheim” or “Hochstgeheim” or “Sprengheim” or one of the classifications of … Q. [Mr Irving]: One of the highest — “hochstgeheim” is H-O-C-H-S-T?

A. [Professor Cameron Watt]: Yes, that means “Highest Secret”. Q. [Mr Irving]: Very rare. I have to admit, I have not seen that. To our surprise, we found another secret classification, Professor Watt, in the last day or two, on some of the documents, “AR”. We have come to the conclusion, I think, although this speaks against me, that this is the

classification “Aktion Reinhard”. That is a possible or probable interpretation. A. [Professor Cameron Watt]: I never came across anything like that. I had a look at the document. Q. [Mr Irving]: Professor Watt, just remaining on that topic for one more question: if you were an historian, as indeed you are, or you were teaching historians how to become an historian, would you advise them to use the original document or facsimile, if possible, rather than use the printed text?

A. [Professor Cameron Watt]: Always, and, indeed, I used to urge my graduate students when using secondary works always to check the original reference if this was at all possible.

The geographical distribution of the documents used to meant very often that there was not, but where you have to look at the original, I mean, where an original document has been cited by another author and that seems to play an important part in the argument you are using yourself, then it is of extreme importance to check the original.

I would add that, in my experience and in the advice I gave to my students, I always recommended that they should take most seriously those documents which seemed to support the views that they were in the process of supporting. After all, if you are in the process of being sold a pup by somebody, the man who is trying to deceive you will come as close as possible to what you know to be the truth before slipping in the element of

falseness; and the conflict between the historian’s desire to arrive at a decision and the insubstantiality of any written evidence, or any other evidence, particularly oral evidence, or of the kind of man who comes up and says, “Never mind what the documents say, I was there and this is the real truth”, is one which is a constant pitfall in our paths and which has mislead a great many people, including some extremely important and senior historians in the past.

Q. [Mr Irving]: Professor, I was not going to ask you about eyewitness evidence but where would you rank eyewitness evidence on the scale, if you had, for example, aerial photographs, if you had prisoner of war intelligence, contemporary prisoner of war intelligence, if you had intercepts from Bletchley Park, if you had captured documents, either captured during the war or after the war, and eyewitness evidence, in other words, anecdotal evidence and, finally, interrogations, whether under oath

or not in court, how would you classify those in order of reliability, starting with the least reliable? A. [Professor Cameron Watt]: I do not know that there is any way of classifying those, because it depends so much on the individual. I did a great deal of interviews, particularly in the period before the 1967 Public Records Act released documents of 30 years of age, and in my experience the kind of evidence I got differed according to the personality of the person