Irving v. Lipstadt



Pages 71 - 75 of 204

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    When it was published, yes. You must appreciate this text
 1actual year given as the year of publication and the date
 2when text goes into its final cast in stone form.
 3 Q. [Mr Rampton]     Tell me that chronology again, Mr Irving. It is rather
 4interesting. When was the American edition of this work
 6 A. [Mr Irving]     Written or?
 7 Q. [Mr Rampton]     Written.
 8 A. [Mr Irving]     I have to piece it together from extraneous information.
 9I was in Quay West, I was in Florida. It would have been
101985 and 1986 because I did it before I wrote the Rudolf
11Hess book which was 1987 published, so it was 1985.
12 Q. [Mr Rampton]     So when were the references to the Holocaust removed from
14 A. [Mr Irving]     The references to the Holocaust?
15 Q. [Mr Rampton]     Yes.
16 A. [Mr Irving]     That is a good question. That is a good question because
17that would, in fact, bring it forward to 1988.
18 Q. [Mr Rampton]     Oh, really?
19 A. [Mr Irving]     Yes.
20 Q. [Mr Rampton]     You see, Mr Irving, let me put my cards on the table, as
21I habitually do, your Holocaust conversion, if I can call
22it that, happened as a result, largely speaking, perhaps,
23of your encounter with Mr Leuchter and his laboratory
25 A. [Mr Irving]     Reading the laboratory reports, yes, which was April 6th

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 1 Q. [Mr Rampton]     1988?
 2 A. [Mr Irving]     Yes.
 3 Q. [Mr Rampton]     As a consequence of that, we have been told by you, not in
 4this court but elsewhere and you will, no doubt, confirm
 5it in due course, this book in that respect ----
 6 A. [Mr Irving]     So the sequence of books is different. I wrote the Rudolf
 7Hess book first and then I went to revise this.
 8 Q. [Mr Rampton]     If you say so.
 9 A. [Mr Irving]     Yes.
10 Q. [Mr Rampton]     It was radically altered in that respect as compared with
11the 1977 edition?
12 A. [Mr Irving]     Taking out the word "Holocaust", yes.
13 Q. [Mr Rampton]     Now, here you have an entry, also as you know accept ----
14 A. [Mr Irving]     Yes.
15 Q. [Mr Rampton]     --- completely wrong, but it does not ----
16 A. [Mr Irving]     Yes, but is it not exactly the same wording?
17 Q. [Mr Rampton]     It does not get changed. It is exactly the same wording.
18 A. [Mr Irving]     In other words, I have not actually actively put in
19something; I have just left something to stand.
20 Q. [Mr Rampton]     No, you could have taken it out?
21 A. [Mr Irving]     I could have taken it out, yes. If somebody had come to
22me and had said at the time, "Oh, Mr Irving, by the way,
23do you not remember you misread that word and we have now
24got a better reading", then, believe me, I would have
25taken it out and I would have contacted the Americans and
26changed it. But that is not what happens in real life.

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 1 Q. [Mr Rampton]     You came to believe in 1988 that the so-called Holocaust,
 2as you call it, so-called, did not happen?
 3 A. [Mr Irving]     I have never used the phrase "so-called Holocaust",
 4Mr Rampton.
 5 Q. [Mr Rampton]     No, no. I am in the difficulty, as you perfectly well
 6understand, Mr Irving, there is no way in the world that
 7I am going to concede that it did not happen. That is not
 8what this case is about. I call it "so-called" because in
 9your eyes by then it was the "so-called Holocaust"?
10 A. [Mr Irving]     You said the "so-called Holocaust, as you call it".
11 Q. [Mr Rampton]     No. As you characterize it?
12 A. [Mr Irving]     Yes.
13 Q. [Mr Rampton]     Yes -- had not happened so you took steps to have the book
14altered for its second edition to remove the references to
15that ----
16 A. [Mr Irving]     Yes.
17 Q. [Mr Rampton]     --- alleged event?
18 A. [Mr Irving]     Yes.
19 Q. [Mr Rampton]     You did not bother to remove something which was, first of
20all, important and, secondly, completely wrong?
21 A. [Mr Irving]     This is a very subordinate matter in the book. It is a
22piece of secondary information which adds very little to
23the principal argument. The argument turns out now to
24have been correct on the basis of the decodes. This is a
25book of probably half a million words. One word,
26admittedly, I should have changed because I had some years

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 1earlier realized that I had misread it. In all the
 2500,000 words it never occurred to me that there may be
 3words which I still had not actually changed yet. You are
 4absolutely right.
 5 Q. [Mr Rampton]     Yes. Then I suggest that your failure to remove it, as
 6you could easily have done, it now appears ----
 7 A. [Mr Irving]     Yes.
 8 Q. [Mr Rampton]     --- was deliberate because you wanted to keep this picture
 9of benign, magnanimous Adolf Hitler holding up his arm to
10save the Jews before the public?
11 A. [Mr Irving]     I do not think so, and I do not think you can suggest that
12just on the basis of that one line. The Jews have to
13remain, have to remain where? Have to remain in
14concentration camps.
15 Q. [Mr Rampton]     Where they are?
16 A. [Mr Irving]     Have to remain in the East, have to remain in the west.
17It is a pretty meaningless sentence as it is.
18 Q. [Mr Rampton]     In that paragraph it is by no means meaningless, is it?
19 A. [Mr Irving]     Yes, but now I would certainly replace it with the decodes
20instead and, in fact, in the latest edition I have. That
21sentence is out and is replaced by absolute diamond
22evidence, the decodes, showing that I am right all the way
23down the line.
24 MR JUSTICE GRAY:     Am I right in thinking that the entry in the
25log was one of what you have described as the "chain of

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 1 A. [Mr Irving]     This particular one, I never referred to, not the "haben
 2zu bleiben". It is totally immaterial and unimportant.
 3My Lord, people imagine that books are written in a very
 4precise, military kind of way, but they are written in an
 5extraordinarily ramshackle way. They go back and forth
 6across the Atlantic with all sorts of different people
 7setting their hands to them, including lawyers and readers
 8and experts and sub-editors and publicity people, and it
 9is a miracle that anything finally comes off the end of
10the line.
11 MR RAMPTON:     Mr Irving, you thought it sufficiently important
12an event, and it is in the context of an order from
13Hitler, according to you, the Jews are to stay where they
14are, it is a coder showing, not only did Hitler say that
15they are not to be killed, not to be liquidated, an
16explicit order, but they are actually to stay where they
17are, they are not to be shunted around from one place to
18another and they are certainly not to be brought to places
19of execution. That is why it is there, is it not?
20 A. [Mr Irving]     No. It is there purely because it was the next entry in
21the Himmler telephone log as I had misread it at the time.
22 Q. [Mr Rampton]     And is sufficiently important in your mind for you to put
23an asterisk footnote, is it not?
24 A. [Mr Irving]     Saying that the facsimile of November 30 telephone
25conversation is reproduced as a facsimile.
26 Q. [Mr Rampton]     

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