Part 3:

IN AUSTRIA then I carried out a speaking tour in November 1989. On that occasion the speaking tour went well, the police in fact themselves endorsed the content of my speech, they said it was unimpeachable, they listened to the recordings.

Notwithstanding that, shortly after I left Austria, it was made known to me that an international Interpol arrest warrant had been issued against me; but it has never been executed. I've been to Austria several times since them, most recently on January 14th this year [1993], the "arrest warrant" has never been executed -- but these are the methods that our opponents are using.

It's a strange type of method to use against an historian, I would have thought, why don't they just say, "Mr Irving here's a document that proves you're a liar, here's a document from the archives that proves you're talking through your hat". They can't do that, and so they use the systems with which they are familiar, they use the corruption, they use the intimidation, they use all the mechanisms of the law that they have been accustomed to use for the last 40 or 50 years in order to preserve their position.

In Germany, as I described earlier, they now have a special law to protect the gas-chamber legend, and so many other lies of history.

In France they have a special law amending the Press Act, which makes it a criminal offence to challenge the truth of any of the Nuremberg crimes.

I went to Canada in October last year [1992] to conduct a speaking tour right the way across Canada, where I have been every year for the last 5 or 6 years -- speaking in big cities and small from Vancouver on the Pacific Coast right the way across to Ottawa and Montreal -- and as soon as our traditional enemies knew I was going to be speaking in Canada yet again, they pleaded with the Canadian Government in Ottawa not to let me in and once again. It's a mystery isn't it, the influence that these people have: the mighty Canadian Government wrote back a letter to these people in Los Angeles saying that yes, yes, yes, they would keep Mr Irving out and on October the 9th, when I was in Los Angeles speaking to an audience there, I received by Federal Express a letter from the Canadian Government saying that they weren't going to let me in if I came, because I was deemed to fall into one or two categories of inadmissible people, namely

• people who were likely to commit a criminal offence if they did enter Canada, or
• people who had already committed a criminal offence which was a criminal offence under Canadian law as well.

The criminal offence in question was the "criminal offence" that I have been convicted of in Germany: because the German judge -- the one in jeans and sneakers had found me guilty of having libelled the memory of the dead, this trumped up charge in Germany -- this technically made me a convicted felon; never matter the fact, never mind that we had appealed that charge n Germany and under the United Nations Charter no conviction is deemed to be a conviction until the last remedies of an appeal have been exhausted.

So I'm not a convicted person at all. This didn't matter, and that's what we would have said straight away in Canada. And as for being likely to commit a criminal offence in Canada, well, having been in Canada for 30 or 40 years I'm not likely to start committing criminal offences now.

So I went into Canada, the passport official duly stamped my passport, and I began the speaking tour in Victoria in British Columbia on October the 28th last year.

I made the speech, and at the end of the speech eight -- no fewer than eight -- Royal Canadian Mounted policemen stormed into the hall and arrested me and took me off in handcuffs.

The speech ironically was on the subject of the freedom of speech. I had just been awarded the George Orwell Freedom of Speech medal by the local society for freedom of speech and within minutes of having been awarded this very impressive plaque, I was being arrested by eight Canadian mounted police, and taken off, in handcuffs, to the local police station: where an extraordinary three-week battle, began right the way across Canada. This showed once again how badly our traditional enemies have miscalculated, because they had hoped of course, that I would just be thrown out of Canada, over the border into Washington State perhaps, and there would just be two lines if that, in the local edition of the Vancouver Sun.

Instead of which there were 25 television teams present -- as the case grew in importance, the judge had to provide a special media room to hold all the journalists who had come from right the way across the continent, right the way across Canada, close circuit television; that occupied the front pages of the newspapers and their televisions stations for three weeks, and boy, did our enemies miscalculate on that occasion!

The head of the local Jewish organisation, a rather unappetising man called Martin Kurz, was seen on television screaming "I want that guy out of Canada.

Well OK -- they want me out of Canada. They want me out of the United States. They want me out of Germany. They want me out of Italy. They want me out of all these countries -- but the fact remains, they can't refute what I'm saying, they can't refute what the evidence in the archives says, and the evidence of the archives is what I'm going to come to now.

Where did the Holocaust legend come from? I don't say that the Holocaust is a lie, because to say that it is a lie implies first of all you don't believe any of it, and parts of it have to be believed.

To say it is a lie also implies that's it's a malicious lie, that people know it is a lie and they've been spreading it knowingly as a lie for the last fifty years.

I call it a Holocaust legend because then it has something like the quality of a religion, almost. You believe things because you've been told it by people who seem reliable. You believe it because you've been told it by people who in turn have been told it by people -- it's a long chain of gullible people who over the last fifty years have been told it and have believed it because they have had no reason not to believe it.

And this is why the Holocaust legend has survived until now, because nobody has come forward really with any kind of credibility and has rattled at the foundations of that legend and said OK, prove it.

Explain to me for example how it was possible to gas millions of people in gas chambers and yet leave no significant residue of the poison gas used, hydrogen cyanide, in the fabric of that gas chamber.

And our opponents say Hey! -- Hey, fifty years later you don't expect to find residues of gas in a gas chamber.

The answer is, you do. And any chemist worth his salt, excuse the pun, any chemist worth his salt will confirm it.

And a gas chamber which has been exposed to hydrogen cyanide gas over the years, there were forty or fifty years, you are still going to find residues of that totally permanent compound ferric ferrocyanide which is otherwise known as Prussian Blue.

In fact it is so permanent this stuff, that it's a dyestuff, it's the blue dye stuff known as Prussian Blue.

So you've got this substance which should be in the walls of the gas chambers even now, fifty years later, and yet it is not there, although allegedly millions of people have been gassed in these buildings using hydrogen cyanide.

We can prove that it should be there because just a few hundred yards away in the Auschwitz complex, there is a little gas chamber which looks like a gas chamber, this one's got gas-tight doors and a peephole and rails for little railings for carrying in the racks full of clothing, because it was used for fumigating clothing, the prisoners' clothing -- and the walls of that little gas chamber in Auschwitz are so soaked with ferric ferrocyanide that on the outside of the gas chamber walls you can see the blue stains seeping through, and colleagues of mine back in February 1988 took samples from that gas chamber, illegally. Illegally they hammered and chiselled away samples of the brickwork from there and samples from brickwork from the other gas chambers where allegedly millions of people were gassed. And they took them all back to the United States. And these forty samples -- from the little chamber here, the fumigation one, and the big lethal one, allegedly -- samples were taken back to the United States and tested by qualified American forensic laboratories for the concentration of cyanide still found in them. And in this little one, which was used for fumigating clothing, they found no fewer than 141mg of cyanide residue per 1kg of brickwork.

A colossal concentration, -- you can even actually see the blue stain on the walls still, -- and yet the buildings where they had allegedly murdered millions of people with cyanide gas, there's not the slightest significant trace of cyanide residue. And this fact, which was told to me in April 1988, when I attended a court case in Toronto as a qualified expert witness as an historian, -- when I saw those forensic reports, that's what tilted me into becoming a hardcore disbeliever in the Holocaust.

I don't believe in the gas chambers now, because having at University studied analytical chemistry, quantitative and qualitative analysis, I know that -- unlike writing history, -- chemical analysis is an exact science.

You see, when you are a historian if you don't find what you want in documents you can "read between the lines," and in-between the lines you find the evidence you don't find in the actual documents. Historians have been doing that now for fifty years.

But in the laboratories they can work to six or ten or fifteen decimal points now. They use gas chromatography, they use all the modern methods of spectroscopic analysis, they can use any kind of analytical techniques to establish precisely what chemical compounds are still present in the fabric of those buildings.

This report which was published in 1988, is the Leuchter Report, and it has caused consternation around the world. Fred Leuchter was actually the American, -- whether he was an engineer or a gardener or a soothsayer or a caricaturist, is unimportant, -- he was the American who went to Auschwitz in February 1988 with a couple of colleagues and they took the actual samples, they took the samples back to the United States, and had them analysed by qualified laboratories.

I published the Leuchter Report in England, I published it myself, in June 1989 we did a very good edition of it. England and I wrote the introduction in which I said that it was flawed, -- there were loop holes of course, -- I would like personally to have seen those forty samples that Leuchter took notarised, each one notarised, by a lawyer and I wanted to be sure beyond any peradventure that the samples did come from the gas chambers and not from a BP petrol station on the road on the way to Auschwitz for example, -- just for example, -- and at a press conference that I held in England [June 1989] -- note that I had difficulty to launch the Leuchter Report -- I mentioned the difficulties here because although that our traditional enemies were panicking -- they put pressure on the hall where the press conference was going to be held to cancel the contract; so I held the press conference in the drawing room of my own home in Mayfair in London, with the result that the journalists arriving at the press conference found that there were 500 members of the Jewish community outside the building, blocking the way to the front door, so that they couldn't attend the press conference. They were as frightened as that.

When the journalists, some of whom are quite tough, insisted on attending the press conference they were required first of all to identify themselves with their press passes; and when they got back to their editorial newsrooms they found that the editors had received telephone calls from certain members of the Jewish community requesting them not to publicise the Leuchter Report.

All of this satisfies me that we must be on the right track. As indeed did the dialogue that took place at the press conference, because a couple of the Jewish newspapers were present, and said, "Mr Irving how do we know that Fred Leuchter wasn't a trickster and that you're not a gullible fool, -- that Fred Leuchter didn't take the sample somewhere totally different and yet that you're a gullible fool to have fallen for him?"

I said that you are absolutely right. "But then it is for you surely to prove that we've have been taken in, by replicating the tests. You now go to Auschwitz, take forty samples and submit them yourself, -- you could have lawyers present, -- you could have them submitted to another laboratory and prove that there are massive quantities of cyanide in this building!"

Well, they didn't comment on that, in fact they didn't even quote that in their report from the press conference, but believe it or not Franciszek Piper -- the director of the Auschwitz state archives -- two years later he did precisely that: in all secrecy and undercover of darkness, with lawyers present, he carried out a replica of the Leuchter tests. He took 20 samples from the fumigation chamber and from the alleged lethal gas chambers in Auschwitz, until (?) to his great embarrassment when the result came back from the state forensic laboratory in Krakow. It was exactly the same that Leuchter and his laboratory had found out two years before.

Did the Auschwitz state museum of archives publish their report, the same [way] as we had? No. They put it in their safe -- they rubberstamped it, they put it in their safe and they hoped that it would go away. But it didn't go away, in fact, somebody in those archives supplied a copy of it to us, that's how we know that those found out.(?)

Another crucial piece of evidence that we're right and that they are lying.

And it's not the only evidence that the gas chambers didn't exist. I think probably the most significant piece of evidence is what we British ourselves did in the war. We actually broke the codes of the SS.

We began reading in 1942 the coded top secret messages of the Commandant of Auschwitz, reporting back to Berlin, Rudolf Höss -- not Rudolf Hess -- Rudolf Höss; Rudolf Höss reported back to Berlin day by day, well, what his actual daily reports contained were batches of figures.

But the official British historian Professor Sir Frank Hinsley, who wrote the British official history of the British intelligence in World War II, he published an appendix in volume two -- based just on these Auschwitz intercepts, -- where Hinsley came to the conclusion that these figures that the Höss reports contained were without doubt the following four figures.

• Firstly the number of prisoners who arrived in Auschwitz in the period of 24 hours.
• secondly, the number of prisoners who had left in the previous 24 hours.
• thirdly, the number of prisoners on hand in Auschwitz, and it was a big camp about 200,000 people. And
• the fourth figure. was fatalities, how many people died in the period of 24 hours.

This fourth figure was broken down into three sub-categories and Hinsley said it wasn't too difficult to work out that firstly there was a number who had died from epidemics and disease, the second figure, a vastly small figure, infinitesimally smaller figure, was the number of prisoners who had been shot and the third figure was the number of prisoners who had been hanged, which was of the same order of managing.

Nearly all the deaths of Auschwitz, said Hinsley, were from epidemics and disease and I quote him saying verbatimly he said, "There is no reference in the intercepts to any gassing."

Remember these are the top secret signals written in the top secret code of the SS. So there can be no question of Höss writing something for the benefit of historians after the war.

Now, I've not seen our traditional opponents, Jeremy Jones or Michael Marx or any of the other Australians Jews who have opposed my coming into the country, explaining those coded intercepts away; and yet they have to be explained.

If you are a historian, you can't just accept the evidence you like and use that ,and drop the other and push it under the carpet and pretend that it doesn't exist.

Somehow, now, our opponents have to explain to me as an intelligent person, how you can gas millions of people without leaving any cyanide residue in the walls.

Somehow you have got to explain to me as an intelligent historian, why Rudolf Höss was gassing millions of people in Auschwitz and yet not mentioning this fact in his daily reports back to Berlin.

Something funny is going on -- and there is more evidence than this, and if I ever come to Australia and have a chance to speak in public to the audiences there, I will go into all the other detailed evidence.

It is only fair that I should mention the evidence against these, against the likelihood that these gas chambers didn't exist. The evidence is pretty weak but it needs to be mentioned.

• First of all, how do you explain the eye witnesses? Hundreds of eye witnesses -- thousands of eye witnesses now. In every newspaper you see them parading their tattoo-marks.
• secondly what happened to the Jews then? They can all say, "I had a friend whose entire family vanished in World War II." And,
• thirdly, if the gas chambers didn't exist, then where did the legend come from? How do you explain where it comes from?

These are three important questions that we would have to face now.

Of these three questions the question about the eye witnesses is the most sensitive, because it is difficult to answer it without offending. But I think it is important that we have to answer it because it's the one that first springs to mind: everyone had seen an eye-witness, -- they're there in the newspapers, they're there on television, they are usually very voluble, their stories are streamlined, they know what a gas-chamber looked like, they've seen the crematoria, their stories are heart-rending. They suffered a trauma -- there's no doubt at all: they were put in concentration camps as innocent people, they were Jews, they were brutally manhandled, they were separated from their families, whom in many cases they never saw again. And you don't really like questioning the veracity of their memories. And yet as a historian you have to, just as if you were a policemen or a judge.

Any judge would say: Given a choice between forensic evidence and eye-witness, he will prefer the forensic evidence every time; so would the policeman, and so would in fact a journalist. And it shouldn't be any different just because we are dealing with Holocaust survivors in the Jewish community. They had no special right to be believed.

What is the phenomenon that is at work here? Now I have said that the eye witnesses are in fact a matter for psychological examination I think, psychiatric examination in England.(?) It was that sentence that earned me the arrest warrant in Austria apparently, because it is such a sensitive issue; but I don't mean that in an offensive way.   [Continued]