No.25, Jan 2004

David Irving v Penguin & LipstadtDeborah Lipstadt’s Defence (continued)All hyperlinks are added by this Website and are not part of the original document (iii) In October 1990, the Plaintiff lectured to the Tenth said conference. Amongst his fellow speakers was Dr Robert Faurisson. The Plaintiff’s lecture was introduced by Mark Weber.

Mr Weber described how at the trial of Ernst Zundel (see (7) below), the Plaintiff had explained in detail why he now accepted the Revisionist view of the extermination story. Mr Weber called the Plaintiff “a kind of one-man IHR”, and set out the conclusion of the Plaintiff’s address in Dresden on the anniversary of the fire-bombing of that city in which he said: “Ladies and gentlemen, survivors and descendants of the holocaust of Dresden, the holocaust of Germans in Dresden really happened.

That of the Jews in the gas chambers of Auschwitz is an invention. I am ashamed to be an Englishman”.(iv) In the course of his said lecture to the IHR in 1990 (to the whole of which the First Defendants will refer) the Plaintiff said (inter alia):”Just picture me seven years ago, in 1983. I’m at the press conference of the West German Magazine Der Stern, in Hamburg. I’d been smuggled in disguised as a reporter for Bild-Zeitung, which is the opposition newspaper group in Germany.

I was very familiar with the Hitler case: I’d spent twenty years of my life studying the story of Adolf Hitler. I’d built up a personal card index on his life – about 30,000 index cards – and when they told me that they were about to publish the Hitler diaries, I knew it was phony! So Bild-Zeitung said: “Will you come along disguised as our press correspondence and attend this damned press conference and blow it up for them”? So I went along.

I was the first one at the microphone, and I was the first one to have the chance to ask the people at Der Stern certain questions. I said right out: “The diaries are fake – the Adolf Hitler diaries are fake!” They’d spent nine million deutschmarks on them! And all the German historians had said they were genuine. Eberhard Jäckel had said they were genuine, so they must be genuine – but they weren’t.I got the same kind of feeling about the Holocaust. (I’m going to come to Rommel further on).

But it’s the same story, because when we come to look at the story of Field Marshall Rommel, and the legend that he was a member of the anti-Hitler resistance movement, that he was a hero of the twentieth of July, 1944, a story that has come down for forty years, since World War Two – we find that nobody has bothered to go back and look at the actual records. They all believed what everybody else had written about him.

And it isn’t until you go back and look at the records that you realise that the truth is somewhere else”.This how it was when I was in Toronto a couple of years ago. I was called as an expert witness as a historian to give evidence at the Ernst Zundel case, where Zundel’s researchers showed me the Leuchter Report, the laboratory tests on the crematoria and the gas chambers.

As a person who, at University in London, studied chemistry and physics and the exact sciences, I knew that this was an exact result. There was no way around it. And suddenly all that I’d read in the archives clicked into place.

You have to accept that, if there is no evidence anywhere in the archives that there were any gassings going on; that if there’s not one sing German document that refers to the gassings of human beings – not one wartime German document; and if there is no reference anywhere in the German archives to anybody giving orders for the gassings of people, and if, on the other hand, the forensic tests of the laboratories, of the crematoria, and the gas chambers and Auschwitz and so on, show that there

is no trace, no significant residue whatsoever of a cyanide compound, then this can all only mean one thing.So how do we explain the fact that for forty-five years since the end of World War Two, we have all, internationally, globally, been beset by a common guilt: the idea that the human race was responsible for liquidating six million human beings in gas chambers? Well, the answer is: we have been subjected to the biggest propaganda offensive that the human race has ever known.

It’s been conducted with such finesse, with such refinement, with such financial clout, that we have not been able to recognize it as a propaganda offensive – from start to finish. And yet there are these weapons cruising past us on the horizon – in all their ugliness – and the biggest weapon, of course, of all in this propaganda campaign against the truth since 1945 has been the great battleship Auschwitz!

And we have now, at last, the historical profession – above all, the Revisionist historical profession – have found as our own task, the major task: “Sink the Auschwitz!”I warned you that I was going to show no respect for tests in the first part of this talk. Sink the Auschwitz!

But we haven’t had to sink the Auschwitz, because the crew of the Auschwitz, Beate Klarsfeld, the Wiesenthals, Elie Wiesel and the rest of them, have been struggling on the bridge and battling with each other – boxing and engaging in fisticuffs – and the Auschwitz has been steering itself amongst the icebergs, and finally it has begun to scuttle itself. They have begun to haul down the flat of the battleship Auschwitz.

They’ve taken down the placard, they’ve taken down the memorial to the four million, and they’ve replaced it with a rather smaller memorial to one million.Of course that’s not the end of the story. I’m convinced that it’s just the “interim memorial”. I think it’s on cardboard, if you have a close look, because why waste money on an expensive memorial when you’re only going to have to change it again in a few months time! They’re going to have to change it because it’s quite obvious.

I’m not going to say only a million – I’m not going to say only any figure died in Auschwitz. We don’t know the exact figures of how many people died in Auschwitz…That’s what’s happening in Germany now. They’re still sticking to the six million figure. And they’re still being told that they were gassed. Although all the evidence runs the other way. To me, Auschwitz is unimportant – I’m happy that the ship is scuttling itself. It’s vanishing.

It’s going to be left like the battleship Arizona at Pearl – if you ever go to Hawaii and have a look at it – with just its mast sticking out of the water to mark where once a great legend stood. And when people go there a hundred years from now and say: “Down there is the most incredible legend that people believed for fifty years: it’s the great battleship Auschwitz, it was scuttled by its crew!”Why don’t we have to believe it? Well, you know about the Leuchter Report”.

The First Defendants will further rely on a comparison between the use made by the Plaintiff in his lecture of what was said by Professor Arno Mayer in his book “Why Did the Heavens Not Darken?”, and what was actually said in the book in context, as an example of manipulation of source material (see (16) and following below);(v) In October 1992 the Plaintiff lectured to the 11th said conference.

Amongst his fellow speakers were Arthur Butz, author of “The Hoax of the Twentieth Century”, which purports to prove that there was never a Holocaust, Fred Leuchter, Ahmed Rami described by the IHR as a gallant Moroccan who has become a radio apostle for Revisionism in Sweden and who tells of his jail sentence for “lack of respect” for Jews in Sweden, and (by videotape, since he was refused permission to enter the USA) Ernst Zundel, a Canadian neo-Nazi.(6) Ernst Zundel, is the author of “The

Hitler We Loved and Why”, published by “White Power Publications” which concluded with the proclamation that Hitler’s spirit “soars beyond the shores of the White Man’s home in Europe. Where we are, he is with us. WE LOVE YOU, ADOLF HITLER!”; and also of the book, ” UFOs: Nazi Secret Weapons?” which argued that UFOs were Hitler’s secret weapons and are still in use at bases in the Antarctic beneath the earth’s surface.

Zundel advocates fascism, denies that the Holocaust occurred and created Samisdat Publications to reprint and distribute material which was racist, anti-semitic and which denied the Holocaust. (7) In 1988, Zundel was prosecuted by the Canadian Government (for the second time) for stimulating anti-semitism through the publication and distribution of material he knew to be false. (Zundel was convicted on that charge at the first trial, but the conviction was overturned on appeal).

The Plaintiff gave evidence at that second trial on Zundel’s behalf, purportedly as an expert witness. The Plaintiff was shown by Zundel’s researchers, the so-called “Leuchter Report”, (“the Report”). which purported to be an expert report based on a visit by Fred Leuchter and Dr Robert Faurisson to Auschwitz – Birkenau and Majdanek, and which proved (so its author claimed) that there had never been any homicidal gassing at Auschwitz, Birkenau and Majdanek.

The Plaintiff adopted the said report enthusiastically. As he said at the IHR meeting referred to at (5)(iv) above:”As a person who, at University in London, studied chemistry and physics and the exact sciences, I knew this was an exact result. There was no way round it. And suddenly all that I’d read in the archives clicked into place.

You have to accept that, if there is no evidence anywhere in the archives that there were any gassings going on; that if there’s not one single German document that refers to the gassing of human beings…and if, on the other hand, the forensic tests of the laboratories, of the crematoria, and the gas chambers and Auschwitz and so on, show that there is no trace, no significant residue whatsoever of a cyanide compound, then this can all only mean one thing…” [no gassings of human beings (at

Auschwitz-Birkenau) in gas chambers]. (8) In fact, Fred Leuchter had no expertise in the matters upon which he purported to give an expert view in the Report, and his evidence as a self-styled expert was (rightly) rejected (save to a very limited extent) by the Canadian Court, for that reason. Moreover, the scientific validity and methodology of the Report were fundamentally flawed. Though Leuchter claimed an expertise in engineering, he had none.

Indeed in June 1991, 2 weeks before Leuchter was due to go on trial in Massachussets for practising or offering to practice engineering without a licence, Leuchter signed a consent agreement admitting that he was not and never had been a professional engineer, and had fraudulently presented himself to various states as an engineer with the ability to consult on matters concerning execution technology.

Leuchter further acknowledged that though he was not an engineer and had never taken an engineering licensing test, he had produced reports, including the Report containing his engineering opinions. Henceforth, Leuchter agreed to cease and desist, presenting himself as an engineer and issuing any reports, including the Report. |