Archive/File: people/i/irving.david/libel.suit/transcripts/day020.13 Last-Modified: 2000/07/24 Q. For example -- I do not want to go over old ground -- the Baltic States and so on? A. Let us leave the Baltic States out of it. What you say is that "maybe the chairman of St Martin's Press was right when he said this book suggests they (the Jews) had it coming to them, maybe I did not make it plain enough and maybe I did not put enough distance between myself and Dr Goebbels, or maybe I did not put in all the arguments, counter arguments, I should have done to be politically correct". One notes that sneering phrase at the end there. Then you go on in paragraph 55 to recount what you said in a meeting. "I said", quoting you, "to a leader of the Jewish community in Freeport Louisiana, you are disliked, you people. You have been disliked for three thousand years. You have been disliked so much that you have been hounded from country to country, from pogrom to purge, from purge back to pogrom, and yet you never asked . P-112 yourselves what is it that the rest of humanity does not like about the Jewish people, to such an extent" ---- MR IRVING: Witness, we have had all this so many times My Lord, if he is going to read these parts, he must read the other parts as well. A. "that they repeatedly put us through the grinder?" -- I know you do not want this read out, Mr Irving, but I am going to read it out. MR IRVING: I want all of it read out and not just your selection. MR JUSTICE GRAY: Mr Irving, will you be quiet. The witness is trying to answer your question. MR IRVING: He is not. He is just wasting time. A. "And he went berserk", you go on, this Jewish man. "He said: 'Are you trying to say that we are responsible for Auschwitz? Ourselves?' And I said, 'Well, the short answer is yes'". MR IRVING: "The short answer is yes". And? A. "The short answer I have to say is yes. If you had behaved differently over the intervening 3,000 years" ---- Q. But you have left out bits, have you not, the whole way through that? You left out four passages from that? MR JUSTICE GRAY: Mr Irving, we have been through all this before. We are going to resume at five past two and I hope you will move on. MR IRVING: With respect, my Lord, he should not have been . P-113 allowed to read out the truncated version again. MR JUSTICE GRAY: Five past two. (The Luncheon Adjournment) (2.05 p.m.) Professor Evans, recalled. Cross-Examined by Mr Irving, continued. MR JUSTICE GRAY: Yes, Mr Irving? MR IRVING: My Lord, I anticipate that in the rest of this afternoon we will get through as far as the Reichskristallnacht and well into it, in fact. MR JUSTICE GRAY: Good. MR IRVING: That is certainly my aim. In other words, we will definitely manage that. MR JUSTICE GRAY: Good. MR IRVING (To the witness): Professor Evans, on page 171 you quoted this passage. I am not going back to that passage. I have one problem with that quotation you gave us in paragraph 56 -- you provided no source for it? A. Yes, that is oversight on my part. The source is given on page 7 of my answers to your written questions, your questions of 2nd January. That is video tape 225, interview in Key West, Florida, 1996, just 33 minutes into the interview. Q. Tape 225? MR JUSTICE GRAY: Have we got that? MR RAMPTON: I am sorry, which one is it? I am lost. . P-114 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Tape 225, Key West 1996. Do you want us to look at it, Mr Irving, for context or not? MR IRVING: I will not delay the court. Obviously, I wanted to see what the context was of that and see if there had been any omissions. Professor, when you make omissions from a document, do you always indicate it by ellipses? A. Yes, of course. You will find one there, in fact. Q. Yes, it would be very sloppy not to indicate the omission, would it not? A. It would be a mistake, yes. Q. And if I were to do that, of course, you would rightly criticise me? A. That would depend on the circumstances. It could either be just an oversight, a misprint, or it could be deliberate falsification, depending on the circumstances. Q. I am anxious to try to shorten your answers. I know that the Welsh are famous for their loquacity, and I hope that this will not be taken by Mr Rampton as yet another example of my racist predilections when I say that, but your answers sometimes do tend to run overboard and his Lordship has given me little assistance in this matter. MR JUSTICE GRAY: No, well, I think that is the sort of thing you have to leave to me, Mr Irving. MR IRVING: I am an unskilled cross-examiner, as your Lordship is aware, and if you feel that the witness is overrunning his time, I would be grateful if your Lordship would be . P-115 bring it to the witness's attention. MR JUSTICE GRAY: Of course I will. That is one of my jobs and it has not happened yet though. MR IRVING: I say that because we are now going to come to Madagascar briefly at paragraph 57 on page 172. Can briefly say, in your view, whether the Madagascar plan was not a feasible option when the Nazis talked of the Madagascar plan, whether it was a pipe dream or it was a realistic project. MR RAMPTON: Sorry, can I just interrupt? Before we move to Madagascar, my Lord, the reference is, in fact, in K4, tab 8. It is an interview called Cover Story on 4th March 1997, in fact -- that is the date of the programme. It is an Australian television company, and the relevant passage is at page 7 of that transcript. MR JUSTICE GRAY: Thank you very much. MR IRVING: Was Madagascar ---- MR JUSTICE GRAY: I am sorry, can you pause again? I have a slight problem with my screen. MR RAMPTON: K4, tab 8, page 7. MR IRVING: In that case, before we come to Madagascar, in view of the fact it was an Australian company I was talking to, can I ask you one question? Witness, what is the time difference between Florida and Australia, approximately? Is it about 12 hours? A. I have no idea actually. I imagine, probably, yes. . P-116 Q. So if an Australian radio station is conducting a live interview in the day time, in fact, you are being telephoned in the middle of the night? A. If it is a live interview. MR RAMPTON: No, I am afraid again we have gone way off course somewhere around the end of the world. This is an Australian film crew travelling with Mr Irving in America and doing the interview when they are there. MR IRVING: Right. In other words, this is another of the edited broadcasts which I shall have to pay attention to. MR JUSTICE GRAY: Mr Irving, if you want to make a point that the context affects what you said about the Jews bringing it on themselves, then, by all means, go to the full transcript. You have been told where it is. But if you do not make that kind of point, then I think we really ought to get on to Madagascar. MR IRVING: There would be a better time to do it, my Lord, in view of the fact that your Lordship is anxious to make progress. If I were to look at that transcript now, I would have to be provided with a bundle, look it up, sit down and read it and we would lose at least 10 minutes. MR JUSTICE GRAY: So Madagascar? MR IRVING: Madagascar. (To the witness): Was Madagascar a feasible operation, in your view? A. On the basis of the continued British effective command over the seas, it became clear well into the war that it . P-117 was not. I mean, obviously, it requires the ability to travel across -- this is the plan, the solution, the plan to deport the Jews to Madagascar clearly requires command over the seas. Q. But if the war had come to an end and an agreement had been reached with Vichy France or whichever French government was in power? A. This is getting into extremely hypothetical realms because that makes assumptions about how the war might have come to an end and then about international agreements, and so on. Q. I think the question I am really asking is did the Germans regard it as a feasible operation or was it just baloney? MR JUSTICE GRAY: At what date? I think that is the relevant part of the question. MR IRVING: At all relevant dates when Madagascar was discussed, in other words, from 1938 in, I think, June when it was first mentioned by Adolf Hitler to Goebbels right the way through to July 24, 1942 when it vanishes from the map of history? A. I think they certainly took it seriously. There is quite a large amount of discussion about it in 1940 through 1941. I think it became increasingly clear in the course of 1941 that the conditions were not right. Of course, the invasion of the Soviet Union changed the picture somewhat and I think by the middle of 1942 it certainly . P-118 was not taken seriously and references to it, I think, can be regarded as camouflage. Q. Were these discussions that you are talking about at Hitler's level as well? A. Including at Hitler's level, yes. Q. Including at Hitler's level. At least for sometime, in your view, the discussions were not baloney, they were meant seriously? A. It certainly looks like that from the documents, so whether it was realistic is another matter, but they certainly took it seriously. Q. Is it not difficult to reconcile that notion with a Nazi ideological desire to exterminate all the Jews they could get their hands on? A. Well, as we know, the Nazi desire to exterminate all the Jews they could get their hands on only became, at least it grew in the course of war. I think while -- there are really two answers to that. One is that the systematic extermination of the Jews did not begin until well on into the autumn of 1941, and about the time in which the Madagascar plan began to, as it were, take second rank and then began to fade away. Secondly, of course, I do think that one has to remember that the Madagascar plan, such as it was, I do not think it was ever seriously worked out in detail, was one which deported the Jews across the seas in, one . P-119 presumes, extremely poor conditions, and just dumped them on a large, somewhat inhospitable tropical island in conditions that were entirely unsuited to sustaining a large society of millions of Europeans. Q. Would those conditions have been worse than in a slave labour camp like Auschwitz or better? A. I do not accept that the conditions in the slave -- sorry, I do not accept that Auschwitz was simply a slave labour camp. That is the first thing I would say. The second is that it is very conjectural, but they may well have been comparable certainly in terms of disease, malnourishment. It is sort of a parallel in a way to the ghettoization, I think. Q. Do you accept that the population of Madagascar has grown from around 2 million in 1938 to 13 million now? A. I do not see what the relevance that is to -- of that is to Nazi plans in 1940 and '41. Q. The final question on this field. What you are saying, in other words, is that Nazi ideology towards exterminating the Jews changed sometime in 1941 from getting them out of sight, effectively, to exterminating them? Is that what you are saying, there was a change in their ideology? A. There is a sort of continuum. I think that Nazi anti-Semitism always had its murderous elements, as became clear immediately on the invasion of Poland or, indeed, in the Reichskristallnacht and so on. But the systematic . P-120 extermination of European Jews was a policy that only gradually became formulated in the course of 1941 and the early months of 1942. Q. Would you turn now to page 173? We will just look very briefly at your four central tenets of Holocaust denial. You think that to be Holocaust denier, you have got to be somebody who says that the number of Jews killed by the Nazis was far less than 6 million? Is that one criterion? A. That is, yes. Q. I am not quite clear about the criteria. Does one have to be a member of each of these four groups or any one of them? MR JUSTICE GRAY: I think we have had this before and the answer is, no, you do not have to be a subscriber to all four views. You can, as it were, adopt one or two of them and you can hold them in a full-blooded way or less so. MR IRVING: So any one would qualify you to be the title. MR JUSTICE GRAY: Professor Evans, you have dealt with this before in your evidence? A. I have dealt with this before -- it is on the transcript, my Lord. MR JUSTICE GRAY: It is on the transcript. MR IRVING: Yes, but if his Lordship is right, then his Lordship is, effectively, saying that anybody who says the figure is not 6 million but 5 million or 4 million is a Holocaust denier. . P-121 MR JUSTICE GRAY: I am not saying anything. I am saying what Professor Evans said yesterday. A. If I may say, sir, what I argued was that you really need all four.
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