Real History and free speech

International Campaign for Real HistorySpeeches by David Irving

November 8, 1992

Sequels: Bowing to the demands of the League of Human Rights of the B'nai Brith that he not be allowed to remain in Canada, the Canadian authorities had arrested Mr Irving on November 1, 1992 after he was mystifyingly not allowed to cross into the United States.
Held for several days in an Immigration Jail, he was released after an angry Canadian -- a complete stranger -- posted a twenty thousand dollar bond. With free speech thus restored to him, Mr Irving described these disturbing events to a large audience in Toronto on November 8.

Introduction by Mr Paul Norris:

LADIES AND gentlemen, as I have said, public speaking isn't my format, unfortunately.
I've been travelling with Mr. Irving for the past week. I am sure in a much more eloquent way he can describe the events of the last week, what has transpired; but if, upon hearing about the events of the last week, you feel the same sense of indignation at the treatment by our government of a world-renowned writer that I felt, I will ask each of you to try to find it in yourselves to defray some of the costs that we have incurred by contributing to the David Irving Defence Fund. The donations are tax-deductible, and I couldn't think of a finer cause for it to go to at this time.
Thank you very much.

DAVID IRVING:

WELL, LADIES AND GENTLEMEN, the audiences are getting bigger and bigger -- more and more strange faces coming to hear me. This leads me to the first regrettable statement that I have to make, which is more in the form of a question or a challenge. And this is as follows: In the light of certain events that followed my speech here in Toronto in the Primrose Hotel last Sunday, can I ask any immigration officer, or R.C.M.P. officer, or O.P.P. [Ontario Provincial Police], please to identify yourselves with a badge if you are present.

Right, I am therefore entitled to take it that nobody present is here in their official capacity as an immigration officer. I have to say this, because I was ambushed at the last meeting that I addressed here in Toronto by an officer [Mr. Harold Musetescu] who was hanging around in another room and subsequently in the room in which I was speaking, dressed -- some of you might have seen him -- in an extraordinary hippie garb with a kind of combat pants, and a black T-shirt and a foot-long ponytail and an ear-ring --
[Laughter]
He turned out to be an "undercover" officer of the Immigration Branch!
What kind of camouflage did he think he was wearing in an audience like yourselves? -- as I asked him to describe, in the witness box in Niagara Falls the next day.
I said, "Would you describe my audience?"
"Yes," he said: "they were mostly middle aged, bourgeois people wearing collars and ties and suits."

So I said, "Why on earth were you wearing this hippie garb?" [Laughter] "Why should I believe that you were an immigration officer just when you said you were and you didn't show me your badge? Why should I take you seriously? Are you familiar, for example, with the dress code of English immigration officers? Can you take it from me that an English immigration officer wears a suit, or a uniform and a peaked cap and usually a little toothbrush moustache? And that I had not the slightest reason to believe that you were an immigration officer?"
I am mentioning all these things, because the events that have occurred in the last seven days since I spoke to most of you have shaken me to the core and given me profound cause for disquiet about the future of your great nation and Dominion, a country which I have been visiting for a quarter of a century now, and which I have grown to love.
I have visited Canada again and again, from one end of the Dominion to the other, from the maritime provinces to British Columbia; I have visited city after city, and spoken to audiences after audiences, and I have never had the need to fear.
I have never felt apprehensive about my future -- until an extraordinary event that happened [at the hearings] in Niagara Falls two days ago, when I suddenly realised that I was being railroaded, I was being set up; and that the entire machinery of government -- this tottering fabric which is coming down around your ears these very weeks and months -- the entire machinery of government such as it is here in Canada was being used to frame me. And I wondered why? Why frame me? -- I am just an ordinary English citizen, a visitor. I have come and gone in this country, and I have spoken to audiences which I suppose by many standards are rather small -- they are growing, but they are small.
So what are the problem? Why are they using these methods on me?
YOU KNOW BY NOW what happened, of course, before I spoke to you in Toronto last week: I came across the Niagara Falls at the Rainbow Bridge [on October 26] and parked my car in Toronto; I flew across to Vancouver, I drove down to Victoria on the island of Vancouver, and I addressed an audience of about this size in a Chinese restaurant. After I had addressed that audience -- rather pleased with myself since the Canadian Government had written to me a letter saying, Don't come, we won't let you in! -- six Royal Canadian Mounted Police officers stormed into that restaurant, arrested me, and let me off in handcuffs. I was held, the next two days, in five different prisons in British Columbia.
I came back to Toronto under these humiliating circumstances -- demeaning not just for me, but demeaning for Canada as well, I think; as the Toronto Globe and Mail so rightly pointed out in an editorial on my case just a couple of days ago, asking: "What in this country coming to, when we put a writer into handcuffs? What are we frightened of? That he might type something?" -- The Toronto Globe and Mail.

Finally the press is getting it right; they have begun to sense that something is amiss. To use the American argot, they have woken up and smelt the coffee -- finally.
It has been at my expense. I have lost a lot of face; I don't like being photographed . . . with people telephoning from England and Germany saying, "we've seen your picture in handcuffs !" "We hear that you are being extradited !" -- You know the way that newspapers are always getting it wrong -- "you are extradited." "You are being deported!" "You are being thrown out."
Give him the boot! Goodbye David Irving!
Well, that is what they wanted. They thought last Sunday, if you remember, when I spoke to you for what I thought would be my last time in Canada, that they had seen the back of me. Yet here I am again, back in Canada!
[Cheers and applause ]
If our traditional enemies wonder what Irving is doing back in Canada, they've got themselves to blame for it, because I kept my part of the bargain.
When I was arrested in Vancouver, the authorities said to me, "Mr. Irving, right -- we are going to have you in jail for the next four weeks while we try your deportation case, and at the end of it you will be deported. Which means, Mr. Irving, you get a stamp in your passport 'Deported from Canada.'"

DEPORTED FROM CANADA however doesn't just mean deported from Canada: It means deported from the entire world. If I have got a deportation stamp from any country in the world, then I can't visit Australia, or New Zealand, or China, or India, or Japan, or any other country: because the first question they ask on the visa application from is, "Have you been deported from any country?" Deported from Canada at the behest of the Simon Wiesenthal Centre in Los Angeles -- those sleazy gentlemen who are putting pressure on your people in Ottawa -- deportation from Canada therefore means: David Irving, shut-up, the world wide!
So I had no alternative in Vancouver but to strike a bargain with the immigration officers, whereby I said: "There is no point my staying in Canada if I am going to be held four weeks in jail; my tour is finished."
Fifteen cities I was going to visit, you remember: not just in British Columbia, not just Vancouver and Victoria, but Kelowna, Salmon Point, and right across the country; Alberta, Calgary, Red Deer, Edmonton, Saskatoon, Regina, Winnipeg, here in Toronto, Ontario, Kitchener, Hamilton -- all the way across Ottawa. All of these cities, I was going to visit in those three weeks.
The whole tour was finished if I was in prison. As my opponents thought, they had silenced me -- one way or the other.
I did a deal with Canadian Government. I said: "Okay, I'll leave. Give me seven days." They said, "We'll give you forty-eight hours. Otherwise we shall lose face."
Hearing that, the adjudicator, who is a kind of a judge in Canada said, "Right, we will give him not just 48 hours -- we will give him fifty-six hours," just to let the government lose a little bit of face!
The government weren't very happy about this; they wanted to have a deportation order against me. They considered that I had outsmarted them by winning what is called a "Voluntary Departure Notice", whereby I depart from Canada under my own steam and at a place of my own choosing, as long as I leave Canada by a certain date and by a certain time.
The time that was allotted to me was Sunday [November 1], a few hours after I spoke to you last -- by midnight on Sunday I had to leave Canada.
I said I would leave by the Rainbow Bridge. In fact I turned up at the Whirlpool Bridge at eleven P.M. that night and I drove across it. Then something very odd happened. When I got to the American end, the American officials delayed and they dawdled. I was the only car there for fifteen, twenty, thirty minutes. They dawdled and they looked at my papers, and they said, "We'd better check up a bit." The telephone rang back and forth across the bridge, and there were messages that passed to and fro by the needle-printer that I could hear zipping back and forth behind the partition.

AT ABOUT TEN minutes to twelve I got anxious. I said, "I am very sorry, but I have to get back to the Canadian end to get this form stamped." The man [a Mr. Howe] said, "Only a few moments. . ."At five minutes past twelve he said, "Right, now you can go back to the Canadians and sort it out, and then come back here." The Canadian immigration officials were waiting at the Canadian end -- an ambush! Trapped!
"Mr Irving, you can park your car there and unload; you won't be needing your car anymore. The rental company will come and take it away. We will have it repatriated to Washington, D.C."
Handcuffs, back to the immigration department.
"Your deportation hearing will start in the morning."
They had me just where they wanted: A deportation notice after all!
I don't know at what level these decisions were taken, ladies and gentlemen. I am not at this moment going to blame Mr. Bernard Valcourt, the minister of immigration and employment here in Canada. Not yet!-- Not till next Thursday!
Next Thursday is the great showdown here in Ontario, and I shall explain why later on.
All I know is that somebody struck a deal across the Whirlpool Bridge whereby I would be bounced back into the welcoming arms of the immigration officers who had tried and failed to get that gag order on me. And this time I had no alternative but deportation.
I was held in a cell again, the sixth on this trip -- how sorry I am for your country! -- taken in a van round to the immigration Hearing Centre in Niagara Falls for the hearing that was going to take place at nine A.M.
By nine-fifteen it would all be over, of course, if all went smoothly: I would be in handcuffs, on the floor in the back of a van being driven to Toronto airport for deportation back to Britain.
And that would be the end of the matter.
Were it not for one unfortunate circumstance:
At ten to nine [that Monday, November 2] I was visited by the authorities in my cell [the case presenting officer, Mr. Steve McCaffery]. He asked me: "Mr. Irving, we have heard a rather disquieting rumour -- that last Friday you paid a two-hour visit to the United States. Is this true or is it not?"
This was of course a few hours after the Voluntary Departure Notice had been served on me.
Had I made a short excursion to the United States, across the border from British Columbia into Washington State, or not?
I said, "Before I answer that question, I want you to answer a question of mine. You are bound to answer it, and because I am here without an attorney you have got to give me independent advice. If I say, 'Yes, I did visit the United States last Friday after the Departure Notice, am I making my situation worse or better?"
"Mr Irving," he said, "if you can prove that you went to the United States last Friday evening for an hour or two then your situation is immeasurably better, and we are in a very embarrassing predicament indeed.
So I said, "Right. I did. And you are."

I HAD MADE this trip down from British Columbia, down their highway Route 99 onto Interstate-5, into Washington State, just twelve of fifteen miles over the border, because a man had visited me in the Hearing Centre at Vancouver, and he wanted me to authenticate some documents; I am an historian, and he had some documents in his home which were just over the border -- would I drive down with him and authenticate these documents for him as a historian, countersign them, and then he would drive me back. In fact, he'd do me a favour: he would drive me over the ferry, over the straits into Victoria to pick up my bags and bring me back. He was prepared to do an eight-hour favour to me, and that's what I did. I never knew this man before; I had never met him before, and I haven't met him since.
I am going to meet him on Thursday though: You wait! He is coming over; we are bringing him over. We need him now as a witness, of course, because very odd things have happened in the meantime. (If you think that that little episode on the Whirlpool Bridge was odd, wait till you hear this!) With the utmost difficulty we traced this man. Fortunately . . . In the detention centre everything was taken off me, of course. In the detention centre your tie, your belt, your shoelaces, everything goes.
They took away all my property, my suitcases and everything. But tucked down inside my jacket pocket I found that I had still got his visiting card. Providence again!
We began to try to find him; he wasn't at home in Vancouver; he wasn't at home in Washington State; we couldn't find him for three days. I managed to get an adjournment till Wednesday. My attorney came over that day. The famous Doug Christie, a brilliant, bold, brave, courageous barrister of whom Canada can be proud.
[Loud applause ]
You may wonder why I am in Ontario, yet I want to have a barrister from British Columbia. This is because I want a barrister who is not incumbent here in Ontario and who doesn't tremble for his future if he stands up for the likes of me before the courts of Ontario -- I have to say this -- because your system here in the law courts is corrupt --
[Prolonged applause ]
Documents upon documents, exhibit upon exhibit, case upon case, prove how corrupt the law courts are: they are all on a kind of auto-pilot. They know what judgements to hand down, they know which opinions to express in order to avoid causing offence.
If an outside barrister like Doug Christie registered before the bar in British Columbia makes, as he is allowed, an occasional appearance before the bar here in Ontario, he can expect the wrath of God to be brought down on him -- or in this case the wrath of other Gods -- because by defending Ernst Zündel, by defending others who has transgressed against the Thought Laws in this country, he is now subjected to enquiries and allegations and claims against himself, demanding that he be disbarred in Ontario, disbarred in British Columbia, because he's offended against these people by standing up for what he believes to be right in the courts in this country.
And by God, when he came on Wednesday to my little, rather humble, immigration hearing at this rather tiny courtroom in Niagara Falls, he put the fear of God for the first time into the Adjudicator and the case presenting officer. I felt proud that at last I had a man beside me who wasn't going to take any nonsense. Straight away he secured for example bail.

You might think it is reasonable that a man like me should be given bail so that I can carry out the investigations to prove that I am in the right here.
You can be a murderer in Canada -- a case was reported in the Toronto Star two or three days ago, a man from Barbados; he had killed his fiancée, stabbed her to death, twenty-six slashing wounds with a dagger; he had murdered her! Released on six thousand dollars bail! Six thousand dollars bail; he jumps bail, he is gone. Farewell! Good riddance too, we might well say.
The Adjudicator in my case said: "Well, very well then. Reluctantly -- because I am not satisfied that Mr. Irving will appear for a hearing -- I will grant bail. Twenty thousand dollars!"
That is the difference. A murderer: twenty-six stab wounds into some unfortunate girl's back: six thousand dollars' bail! A writer: in handcuffs: twenty thousand dollars bail. --
A man stood up in court, whom I have never seen in my life before. One of you. A Canadian. A German, in fact; not a German like many of you who came over after World War Two, because he came over here at age six, seventy years ago. A man who spent his entire life serving Canada as an employee on the Saint-Lawrence Seaway, one of the finest, most outstanding, examples of Old Canada as I remember it.
[Applause ]
He stood up in court and announced, "I don't know Mr. Irving, but I am a judge of character; I've got a couple of his books, and I will stand surety for him."
Embarrassed, the Adjudicator said: "Standing surety is not enough; we want cash. "
The man said: "Very well," -- and he went to his bank and he came back with twenty thousand dollars in cash.
[Spirited applause ]

That was Wednesday. By which time the Adjudicator had said, "The whole case hinges on whether Mr. Irving did in fact make this trip last Friday evening to the United States or not. The evidence is that he didn't, because he didn't get a stamp in his passport in either direction."
We now said, "But we understand," -- because I had been tipped off by a little dickie-bird,* and such is indeed the case -- "we understand that when a car enters the United States from Canada, its licence tag is now automatically registered by computer as it goes through the border." (Its tag is automatically read by a computer, by a long-distance telescopic camera -- that is why they make you stand with your car a certain distance -- and the operator punches in the number of passengers sitting in the car too).
The adjudicator inquired, "Is this so?"
The case presenting officer, an immigration officer of long standing, said: "I am afraid we don't know if that is true or not --"
[Ironic laughter ]
" -- We don't know if that is true or not. But I will make enquiries," he said. (This was Wednesday.) "And besides," he said, "even if Mr. Irving can produce the computer record showing that his friend's car crossed the border on that occasion, on the night of October 30 -- on Friday night -- and that there were two passengers in it, this does not of course prove that he was one of the people in the car!"
"No," I said, "It wouldn't prove that I am telling the truth. But it would prove if I am lying , wouldn't it? If you obtain the computer record -- as you have probably already done -- and if you find our car isn't registered, then you prove that I am not only a liar but a perjurer, because I have sworn under oath here in this court that I made that journey!" -- Very uncomfortable, very embarrassed.

-
* A Burns Security guard on night duty at the Niagara Falls detention centre had just privately advised Mr. Irving of this.

"Well," the adjudicator asked, "What other evidence have you?"
We have now located Mr. Brian Fisher," I said, "the man who drove me across the border. We will try to get an affidavit from him although he is very reluctant because he is a powerful businessman on the west coast, and of course having business interests on both sides of the frontier he has to fear the kind of pressure that can be put on businessmen." (He made this quite explicitly clear when we began to deal with him.) But finally on Thursday Mr. Douglas Christie persuaded him to swear an affidavit himself, confirming all the details of the journey we had made -- the ferry trip to Victoria, the ferry trip back, the border crossing and the American border guard who said. "Oh, yes. You have an Englishman ; I knew an Englishman once. He was a dweeb as well!" I don't know what that means; I suppose it is some kind of endearment, but these little things, they stick in your mind -- like the fact that when we came back, the Canadian border guard was a Pakistani. I remember that fact -- in fact I found it ironic. Here is a Pakistani letting Mr. David Irving back into Canada!
These little things register in your mind, because it turns out (we now have his testimony) that his name was Mr. Sandip Basra. So I was right on that point as well.
So all these facts are confirmed. We obtained the ferry tickets, with times printed on the ferry tickets, crossing from Vancouver to Victoria and from Victoria back to Vancouver, which exactly fitted in with my testimony. But we did not yet have the essential testimony from Mr. Fisher himself.
WELL, ON THURSDAY Fisher supplied the testimony; he had sworn an affidavit in Vancouver and he sent it across to us by Federal Express, and we had it in the courtroom on Friday morning.
All the media were there. They had so many media men in that tiny courthouse in Niagara Falls that they set up a special media room, about half the size of this room, in which they had thirty or forty journalists and closed-circuit television being pooled among all the television channels (because they expected I was going to be led away in handcuffs and deported back to England.) But, of course, we had the [Fisher] affidavit.
Five minutes before the court hearing began, in came the case presenting officer [Mr McCaffery]: "Mr. Irving, did you get that evidence that you thought you might be able to get?"
I said, "You are about to find out -- you are about to find out."
We had it all lined up. We went into court. And this is when events took an extraordinary turn. You remember --
we had a sworn testimony of Mr. Brian Fisher, the man who drove me across in his pale blue Lincoln convertible, number plate (licence tag) 020 ELU-Washington State.
we have also the testimony of his girlfriend, Helga Ashton, who was in the house down in Washington State when I arrived.
more than that: I made two telephone calls from his house, one to a friend here in the 416 area and one to a friend in the 604 area in British Columbia.
and both of them have testified, by affidavit or in the witness stand, that they have received telephone calls from me in which one of them I said I was "south of the border," and in the other I said I was "in the United states."
(The gentleman in Area Code 416, in Toronto, said, 'What, are you in Buffalo?" I said, "I, uh, can't say where I am, just that I am in the United States.")

WE HAD THAT testimony. But at this moment, the world appeared to cave in. Because as, the case began, the Canadian Government presented evidence which I have here. In fact, let me show it to you.
I also copied it for every journalist present.
Let me tell you . . . Put yourself in my position: You know you are telling the truth, and now the Canadian Government produces an affidavit from an immigration officer in Vancouver in which he says:
I removed the attached documents, marked as Exhibits 'A', 'B' and 'C' respectively, from Canadian immigration files maintained at Regional Headquarters, Office of Immigration, in Vancouver B.C.
Exhibit 'A' is a print-out, a computer print-out from the United States Immigration Service in Blaine in Washington [Just over the border] entitled 'TECS II'. This document shows the dates from September 11, 1992 to November 4,1992 that a vehicle with Washington licence 020-ELU entered the United States [from British Columbia]. The second document, also from the United States Immigration Service and marked as Exhibit 'B', identifies the owner of that car as being Mr. Brian Fisher.
Here is the computer print-out--every crossing made by that car
from Canada to the United States, allegedly. And yet that trip that I made has been deleted! It's gone! It is not there!
There we have it: October 13, the trip before. October 31, the trip after. But October 30, the trip that I made, has been wiped off the face of the computer.
[Shouts of incredulity and "Shame" ]
Imagine your position now. Your future, your career, your professional life as a world-wide historian depends on a document that has been falsified and faked.
You know it is faked; I know it is faked.
I went straight in --, the journalists present who were there that day will know what I did when I saw that -- I went straight into the press room, into the media room, blazing with rage, as soon as the hearing was adjourned. I went straight into the press room.
I said, "Here, take this! Somebody get it copied. Get twenty, thirty, forty copies made! Take it to your editors. You have got a week now" -- because we were being adjourned for a week -- "You've got a week now to carry out investigations in British Columbia to find out who did this: How did they do it? Is it possible to make the deletion from the computer? Who is the swine who did it? On what orders did he do it? How high up the chain of command from this immigration computer in British Columbia -- all the way up to the minister of immigration and employment Mr. Bernard Valcourt -- how far up the chain of command this particular scandal stops. This is in my opinion worse than Watergate, this is a government falsifying court evidence in order to --
[Loud applause ]

THEN ANOTHER STRANGE thing. A few minutes later we spotted that Exhibit "C" wasn't there; it had gone! He had referred to "Exhibits 'A', 'B' and 'C'," We went back to have a look at his hand-written affidavit. He had said:
Exhibit "C" is a document from the Delta Pacific Resort and Conference Centre [a hotel at Vancouver airport] concerning
David Irving.
But it wasn't there! Vanished!
Doug Christie challenged the government, at the hearing: "Where is Exhibit 'C'?"
"Well," McCaffery said, "Exhibit 'C' was just a document from the hotel that Mr. Irving stayed in on his return, allegedly, from this schoolboy trip, this schoolboy prank of a trip to the United States."
"But where is it?"
"Oh, we removed it, because we thought it was unimportant to the case."
[Ironic laughter ]
We finally got it produced. It turned out to show exactly the time that I arrived at the hotel at 2:28 A.M. that morning on my return from the United States, which exactly fitted in with the times that I had given in my own sworn affidavit of my movements that night. But they had removed it because it didn't fit in with their case.
At this point I have to say that the Adjudicator [Mr. Kenneth Thompson] who is apparently a decent man after all, you could see him visibly flipping.
He began to frown, and suddenly he was no longer so accessible to the arguments of the government.
When we now asked for an adjournment to enable us to bring our Mr. Brian Fisher and his friend Helga Ashton from the west coast -- a trip as you know over 2,500 miles -- the Adjudicator, who had previously turned down every single one of our applications for sub-poenas and exhibits and witnesses to be heard, suddenly said: "In this case, out of fairness to Mr. Irving, I am going to allow this application; I am going to allow Mr. Brian Fisher to be called as a witness, and Miss Helga Ashton."
AND MR. FISHER is going to arrive, believe it or not, with a print-out from his telephone company records proving that I made the telephone calls that I said I made!
So next Thursday [November 12], when the case is resumed, there are going to be embarrassing questions. Not for me! I am looking forward to it--unless of course they come with some fresh falsifications.

Who knows? We have to be prepared for everything.
WHAT IS THIS all about? Why are they doing this? Why did your government first of all bend its knee to the Simon Wiesenthal Centre in Los Angeles and say, "yes-Sir, yes-Sir! Mr. Irving? -- We'll have him banned from Canada straight away." And then that swine Irving comes all the same; he doesn't obey The Letter.
He not only comes; he flies right across Canada from Ontario to British Columbia and makes that speech.
"Oh gosh! What can we do next?" "Arrest him! Deport him!" "Oh, he has done a deal! Trap him on the Rainbow Bridge!" "But he's gone back in!" "Falsify the evidence!"
They are in panic; they are in panic and you have seen it. You have seen it on television. Night after night this case has been reported.
Mr. Marvin Kurtz, this arrogant representative of the Anti-Defamation League*, his first comment shown on television news was; "I want that guy out of Canada !"
Notice the language: "I", "Marvin Kurtz," "want-that-guy-out-of-Canada!"
I can well believe it. Probably for the first time in his life, he has spoken the truth; he wants that guy out of Canada.
[Applause ]
Yet of late he has become rather quiet; he has not been so prominent on television of late.
Because he is now going to have to answer questions as to the rôle of the Anti-Defamation League (With whom I have no personal squabble, of course, despite everything they have done to me.) He is going to have to admit the rôle that they have played in putting pressure on the Canadian Government at every level.
Global Television, I think, got it right in their report on this hearing on Friday night when they said
If it turns out that David Irving has been telling the truth when the hearing is resumed on Thursday, the immigration minister Bernard Valcourt is going to be in the hot seat.
* Kurtz was seen during an adjournment in the first hearing on November 2, in a corridor, coaching Crown witness Harold Musetescu. After Mr. Irving accused Musetescu of perjury, he challenged the "undercover" officer to admit speaking with Kurtz. The Adjudicator disallowed the question.

And not just in the hot seat--I hope he is going to be in an ejector seat. I hope he is going to be on his way out!
[Applause ]
TO THOSE OF you who are new to my talks. Let me summarise the possible reasons why they are using these extraordinary techniques, these extra-governmental techniques to try and silence me. It is because I am probably the most credible voice in the entire revisionist campaign, or what I call the International Campaign for Real History.
[Applause ]
And my campaign is being met world-wide by these methods. "Okay," I say, "a hundred thousand people did die in Auschwitz." We can estimate that now, because the Russians have released the death books. We have the death certificates of Auschwitz, all in bound volumes. There are forty-six volumes of death certificates, listing sixty-nine thousand dead. They are not complete; there are some volumes missing from some of the years, from 1941 to 1944, but by large they are there. We can say, probably a hundred thousand deaths all told, most of them from epidemics -- most of them from diseases like typhus -- but they are there. Around one hundred thousand dead in that brutal slave labour camp.
How many were killed in Auschwitz? Well, according to the British official history, we were reading the codes of the commandant of Auschwitz, the
top secret S.S. codes. Anti-Defamation League
We read them during two years in the middle of that period: The commandant of Auschwitz, Rudolf Höss, was reporting in top secret S.S. code to his superiors, day by day, on what had happened in Auschwitz--how many prisoners were arriving each day, how many were leaving each day, how many were on hand at midnight--and how many had died. He broke down the number of deaths into those who had died of typhus and epidemics, and those who had been executed by hanging and shooting, which were an infinitely smaller fraction according to the British official historian Professor Sir Frank Hinsley.
Now, if we say the infinitely smaller fraction might have been as many as one quarter of that hundred thousand, we arrive at around twenty-five thousand people who may have been murdered in Auschwitz, by hanging and by shooting. (Hinsley himself says, "There is no reference to any gassings in these intercepted messages.")

Twenty-five thousand killed, if we take this grossly inflated figure to be on the safe side: That is a crime; there is no doubt. Killing twenty-five thousand in four years -- 1941, 1942, 1943, and 1944 -- that is a crime; there is no doubt.
Let me show you a picture of twenty-five thousand people being killed in twenty-five minutes. Here it is, in my book HITLER'S WAR, a vivid picture of twenty-five thousand people being killed in twenty-five minutes by us British [in February 1945] in Pforzheim, a little town where they make jewellery and watches in Baden, Germany. Twenty-five thousand people were being burned alive. An aerial photograph of it, taken by Canadian airman. (You might think this ironic in connection with the recent dispute over the television film "The Valour and the Horror"). That is what it looks like when twenty-five thousand civilians are being burned alive in twenty-five minutes. One person in four, in twenty-five minutes. One person in four in that town.
As I said when I was speaking in Kitchener yesterday, it is as though somebody came to Kitchener, a town with about a hundred thousand people, and killed one person in four in twenty-five m inutes. That too is a crime.
Twenty-five minutes! In Auschwitz it was a crime committed over four years.
You don't get it spelled out to you like that. Except by us, their opponents. When you put things into perspective like that, of course, it diminishes their Holocaust -- that word with a capital letter, the word with the capital H.
(That in itself makes it so suspicious, when you think about it. It's like a registered brand name: Tylenol, capital T. Something you've got to buy! Comes in a package.
But there is nothing that says you have got to take the whole packet; you are perfectly entitled to say, 'I Believe part of it, but I don't believe all of it.")
You are entitled to analyse what you are being told. But we are told that this is precisely what we are not do. Anybody who wants to analyse any part of the Holocaust story is dimissed and smeared as an anti-Semite or, at the other end of the scale, a "pro-Hitler apologist, a "Nazi apologist," -- you have read the headlines, the words the newspapers use about me as a present.
But not for much longer. I guarantee they won't use these headlines about me on Thursday, at the end of our hearing in Niagara Falls.
Of course, as my friend Mr. Norris spelled out to you, it is going to be a terrific battle. I used to hear the word campaign; it isn't just a campaign now. It has turned into a life-and-death struggle; I have got them by the throat, they have got me by the throat. But on Thursday we shall see what happens, because on Thursday we are flying in from the west coast Doug Christie again.
[Applause ]

We are flying in Mr. Brian Fisher; we are flying in his friend Helga Ashton, and they are going to swear under oath that I made this "pivotal" trip [to the U.S.A.], and that is when the fireworks begin.
OBVIOUSLY, AS Mr. Norris said, this isn't easy for us. We have taken upon ourselves more probably than we can match; we are coming up against the entire Government, funded by all the funds that you tax-payers provide. They don't mind how much all this costs, but it is costing us a fortune.
I have not only lost the entire proceeds of this three week tour, as you can believe -- if I had come across Canada visiting all these cities. (I am a professional writer, a professional historian, a professional speaker; I live from it.) They have effectively wiped out two months of my income by doing this to me, and not only that; they have held me incommunicado, they have held me in prison, they have inflicted on me the cost of hiring lawyers like Doug Christie.
But it is worth it. It reminds me of 1970, when once I was sued for libel. I fought that case, and it didn't matter who lost or won -- I lost on that occasion -- but the man who fought me, he went down on that occasion as well; because finally he was ruined by the cost of having sued me. Since then I have never had anybody suing me for libel. Because they learn the lesson that I fight.
I think that this time the Canadian Government has learned the lesson too: David Irving fights; he doesn't take it lying down, and certainly not when they welch on a bargain that is freely struck between the two of us, as it was in Vancouver a week ago. They welched on that; they ambushed me; they tricked me on the Whirlpool Bridge. And now, by God, they are going to have to pay for it.
Loud applause
© Focal Point David Irving 1998