Archive/File: people/i/irving.david/libel.suit/transcripts/day019.05 Last-Modified: 2000/07/24 MR IRVING: I have to let you get away with that, because I am not allowed now to ask any further questions about the photograph or about ---- MR JUSTICE GRAY: I did say I was not stopping you, but I was telling you that at the moment I do not find it very helpful. Do not say you are not allowed to; you are allowed to. MR IRVING: Is Professor Jackeln a recognized authority on Hitler and the Holocaust? Has he written books and articles about it? A. Yes, he has written books and articles about Hitler in particular, Hitler's views. Q. Does it diminish him in your esteem that he has fallen repeatedly for forgeries produced by a notorious forger, that he has he published them, that he did not willingly confess that they were forgeries or where they came from, and that he has relied on a dubious photograph? A. Well, you mentioned one instance in which he fell for material from a notorious forger. If you can show me there are many others, then I will accept the word "repeatedly". Q. Do you agree that, in dealing with your treatment of the Hitler diaries, you accused me of liking the Hitler diaries and believing they were genuine because they gave a favourable impression of Hitler? A. Again, I am following Mr Harris there. Let me quote him . P-39 in explaining why you endorsed them at a late stage, "Finally there was the fact that the diaries did not contain any evidence to suggest that Hitler was aware of the Holocaust". Really I am following Mr Harris's argument there. Q. On what basis do you say ---- A. That was one of a number of reasons which he puts forward for your having endorsed them at a late stage. Q. On what basis do you say that these fake diaries showed Hitler ordered a stop to the Reichskristallnacht? MR JUSTICE GRAY: Mr Irving, I did say quite a long time ago that I am not going to pay any attention to the Hitler diaries because it is not any part of the Defendants' case. Really these questions are directly focused on the Hitler diaries, so I do now say you must move on. MR IRVING: In paragraph 2.4.9, lines 5 and 6, there is a sentence there beginning, "If an obvious forgery like the Hitler diaries gives credence to my views, I will use it". Is that not a reflection -- am I allowed to say that, my Lord? MR JUSTICE GRAY: I have already told you in the clearest possible way that I am not going to place any reliance in forming my judgment on what did or did not happen in the case of the Hitler diaries, so questions about it can only do you harm. MR IRVING: Three lines from the bottom of that page 40 you . P-40 accuse me of rendering my footnotes deliberately opaque. A. Yes. Q. Can you think of any reason why a researcher or writer who has spent a lot of his private funds, who is not a tenured professor, who is entirely reliant on his professional income, obtaining access to sources, might wish to leave his footnotes opaque? A. Yes. Either in the case of your extremely vague references to the author Ingrid Weckert in your account of the Reichskristallnacht, because that source is discreditable, because she is an anti-semitic politically motivated falsifier of history upon whom you rely in part of your account ---- MR IRVING: Do you consider that anti-semitic ---- MR JUSTICE GRAY: Let him finish his answer and then ask you next question. A. Or that the sources do in fact, if anybody goes to the immense trouble of tracking them down as in the instance we already mentioned on Thursday, the evidence of the policeman Hoffmann at the 1924 trial of Hitler, if that source in fact contains things which you do not want to appear and you do not want people to know about. So it is a kind of judgment call on your part that you need to give a source, but you do not want people to find out too easily what is there. MR IRVING: Can you think of no innocent explanation why the . P-41 aforementioned author might leave his sources opaque? A. No. Q. Are you familiar with the kind of scholar and academic who will pretend that he has done the research, who will pretend that he too has been to Canberra and Ottowa and Washington and Moscow, he will quite the file and he will quote the document number and even the page number in that file to give the impression that he has been there and done the work? A. Give me an example. Q. I am just asking you if are familiar with that kind of scholar? A. I cannot think of any examples. Try and give me one. MR JUSTICE GRAY: Is that legitimate, I really do not know as a matter of a historian's proper approach? If you have seen some other historian give a reference for a particular proposition as being File X in the Washington archive or wherever, is it then illegitimate for the next historian simply to cite that as being the authority without actually going to the Washington archive and looking for himself? A. Well, it is normal, my Lord, to say file so and so in the archive as cited in such and such a book. If you simply say file so and so in the archive, that does suggest you have been there. It is what I would call slightly sharp practice. . P-42 MR IRVING: If, for example, you found in a book by David Irving on Winston Churchill unusual sources and you were an academic and a scholar, if you did not want to be associated with him, would there be a temptation just to use that file in the French National Archives or whatever it is and pretend you had seen it yourself, but not of course that you had it from David Irving's book? Would there be that temptation? A. I would not be tempted. I can only answer for myself. Q. You would not be tempted to use the source? A. I would want to go, if that was the work I was doing, to the archive and check the source. I would not take it on trust as it appears in your work. Q. Even if you could go to some archives like the Institute of History where I did in the meantime deposit all the records so that you could check it out? Do you appreciate that there might be an innocent reason on the basis of what I have said, on the basis of my questions, why an author might sometimes wish to make it slightly less easy for a crooked scholar to steal his brain work? A. You would have to show that there were crooked scholars around who are all desperate to steal your brain work. I do not believe that that is the case, so I do not really accept that there are innocent reasons. It is quite straightforward. If you cite an original or any source, if you use a source in your work, you footnote it in order . P-43 to enable other historians to go and find it and you are as helpful as possible to them. It is part of the kind of checks and controls which historians have, and this curious way we have to enable other people to challenge our own work and to falsify it and say that we are wrong. It is part of what I would call being an objective historian is. Q. Do you agree that there are two kinds of books? There are the super academic works as submitted for PhDs or for some other kind of academic qualifications where everything has to be rigorously footnoted according to a standard scheme, and books which are sold in Books Etc. and Waterstones where books have to fit in within a reasonable size, number of pages, and that, if you put all the footnotes in to that scheme, you are going to end up with an uncommercial book. Do you agree with that proposition? A. Not really, no. I think there is a large kind of scale of books, or a spectrum of books, from the academic PhD theses which is not really publishable as a book in many cases and has to be rewritten, where everything has to be all the Is dotted and all the Ts crossed all the way down to very general non-fiction books which do not have any footnotes in at all and everything in between. So I think there is a very wide spectrum. In respect of your works, Mr Irving, Hitler's War is over 800 pages long. It is a very long book, and the claim that you make for it is that . P-44 it is based on an enormous mass of research and there are a lot of footnotes in it. It does give the appearance, as your other books do, of being a scholarly work. You make a great deal of the fact that you use a large number of source. Q. Professor Evans, when your researchers were researching in my files at the Institute of History in Munich, did they come across a thick file there which was about 1,000 pages long, consisting of the original annotated footnotes of Hitler's War which were referenced by number to every single sentence in that book? A. No. Q. It was not part of the published corpus, it was part of the original manuscript, but it was chopped out because of the length. A. No, we did not see that. Q. Have you seen isolated pages of that in my discovery in so far as it related to episodes which were of interest, like the Reichskristallnacht? A. I do not, to be honest, recall, but that does not mean to say that we have not seen them. Q. You said that my footnotes are opaque because they do not always give the page reference. Do you agree that, on a page which we are going to come across in the course of this morning, of your own expert report, you put a footnote in just saying "see van Pelt's report", see . P-45 expert report by Robert van Pelt, and that expert report is about 769 pages long, is it not? A. Yes. Q. That is not an opaque footnote? A. No, because, when one says see this or see that, that means that you are not relying on that for what you say. It is simply a further reference directing the reader, if the reader wants to gain further information about that particular topic, to go there. If I were relying on Professor van Pelt's report for anything I say in my own, which I am not, then I would footnote it as precisely as I could. MR JUSTICE GRAY: Why are you not? A. Why am I not relying on Professor van Pelt? Q. Is there a reason? A. Well, his report is about something different from mine and I thought I should reach my own conclusions on the basis of my own work, but I do cross-reference other expert reports in so far as I think it is useful. MR IRVING: It is a strange kind of cross-reference that just says "See expert report" by somebody. A. Well, can you point me to the page? Q. We will come to it later on. I am just looking for it and I do not want to hold up the court. If you would you go now to page 41 of the expert report, please, paragraph 251? Can I ask that you be given bundle H1(i), please, so . P-46 we can see what you have omitted from the quotations? It is a passage where you say: "They are not lies, what I have published, they are true. At any rate, the truth as I perceive it". Then you omit bits. A. Where is this -- yes. Q. That should be H1(i) at page 94? A. Page 94. Yes. MR JUSTICE GRAY: Whereabouts on the page, bottom of the page, is it? A. It is near the bottom of the page. MR JUSTICE GRAY: Yes. MR IRVING: Do you not admit a passage there about how it gets far more expensive the closer you approximate towards the truth, that it is quite easy to find out 90 per cent of the truth, and then it gets a bit more expensive to get 95 per cent of the truth, and to get absolute truth is impossible, but it gets more and more and more expensive? That is roughly the sense of it. I do not have it in front of me, but I am familiar with the speech. A. That is where you say it is a shame that we lost the United States. Q. Yes. "They are not out lies, what I have published, they are true, at any rate, the truth as I perceive it"? A. Yes.
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