The History-making
Irving Trial

DJC Irving

Penguin Books Ltd and Deborah Lipstadt

David Irving's Opening Statement

May it please Your Lordship,

this is my Opening Statement in the matter of David Irving vs. Penguin Books Ltd. and Deborah E. Lipstadt.

I appear as a litigant in person, and the Defendants are represented by Mr. Richard Rampton and Miss Rogers of Counsel and by Mr. Anthony Julius. There were originally three other Defendants, who can be characterised here as booksellers; but your Lordship will observe that they no longer figure in this action, a settlement having been reached.

This is an action in Libel arising from the publication by the First Defendant of a book, entitled Denying the Holocaust, by the Second Defendant, Professor Lipstadt.

As Your Lordship is aware, the Work complained of has attracted considerable attention, both in this country and in the United States and elsewhere since it was first published in 1993. Your Lordship will have before you my Statement of Claim in which I set out the grounds for my complaint, the consequence of which I am asking that the Defendants be ordered to pay damages of an amount which I will venture to suggest, and I will invite Your Lordship issue an injunction against further publication of this work and that the Defendants should make the usual undertakings.

It is almost thirty years to the day since I first set foot in these Law Courts and I trust that Your Lordship will allow me to digress for two or three minutes, being (in my submission) something of an historian, on the history of those events; because they are not without relevance to the proceedings upon which we are about to embark.

The occasion of that visit to this building, was an action heard before Mr. Justice Lawton, which became well known to law students as Cassell vs. Broome and Another. It too was a Libel action, and I am ashamed to admit that I was "Another", having written a book on a naval operation, The Destruction of Convoy PQ.17.

That was the only actively fought Libel action in which I became engaged in thirty years of writing. There were two reasons for this abstinence: first, I became more prudent about how I wrote; and second, I was taught to turn the other cheek.

The man who taught me the latter lesson was my first publisher. He had signed up my first book, The Destruction of Dresden, which was eventually published in 1963.

I had been approached in about 1961 by a well known English publisher, Mr. William Kimber. When I visited him in his offices &emdash; which were on a site which has long since been buried by a luxury hotel, the Berkeley, in Belgravia &emdash; I found him surrounded by files and documents, rather as we are all in this court room today. He wore an air of exhaustion.

Your Lordship may remember that Mr. Kimber and his author Mr. Leon Uris had become involved through a book which Uris had written, entitled Exodus, in a Libel action brought by a London doctor who had been obliged to serve at Auschwitz. That case was also heard before Mr. Justice Lawton. There was one other similarity that closes this particular circle of coincidence: like me now, Mr. Kimber was in consequence also obliged to spend two or three years of his life wading, as he put it, "knee-deep" through the most appalling stories of atrocities and human degradation.

That day he advised me never, ever, to become involved in Libel litigation. I might add that, with one exception that I shall later mention, I have heeded his advice.

There have since then been one or two minor legal skirmishes, which have not involved much "bloodshed": there was an action against an author, which I foolishly started at the same time as the PQ.17 case and, having lost the latter, was obliged for evident reasons to abandon on relatively painless conditions; and a more recent action against a major London newspaper, who put into my mouth, no doubt inadvertently, some particularly offensive words which had in fact been uttered by Adolf Hitler; that newspaper settled out of Court with me on terms which were eminently acceptable.

I have often thought of Mr. Kimber's predicament since the 1960s, and more particularly the last three years. I have been plunged into precisely the same "knee-deep" position, ever since I issued the originating writs in this action in September 1996. If I am late with the bundles and papers upon which this Court relies, I can only plead this in mitigation.

I have never held myself out to be a Holocaust expert, nor have I written books about what is now called the Holocaust: if I am an expert in anything at all, I may be so immodest as to submit that it is in the role that Adolf Hitler played in the propagation of World War Two and in the decisions which he made, and the knowledge on which he based those decisions.

As a peripheral matter to that topic, on which I have written a number of books, I inevitably investigated the extent to which Hitler participated in or had cognisance of the Holocaust. That was the sum total of my involvement as a book author up to the launching of these writs.

Since then, because of the tactics chosen by the Defendants, I have been obliged, willy nilly, to become something of an expert, through no desire of my own. To my utmost distaste it has become evident that it is no longer possible to write pure history, untrammelled and uninfluenced by politics, once one ventures into this unpleasant field.

I have done my best to prepare the case that follows, but I respectfully submit that I do not have any duty to become an expert on the Holocaust; it is not saying anything unknown to this Court, I remind those present that, the Defendants having pleaded justification, as they have, it is not incumbent upon me as the Claimant to prove the wrongness of what they have published. It is for them to prove that what they wrote was true.

I intend to show that far from being a "Holocaust denier", I have repeatedly drawn attention to major aspects of the Holocaust and have described them, and I have provided historical documents both to the community of scholars and to the general public, of which they were completely unaware before I discovered these documents, and published and translated them.

It will be found that I selflessly provided copies of the documents, that I had at great expense myself unearthed foreign archives even to my rival historians, as I felt that it was important in the interests of general historical research that should be aware of these documents (I am referring for example to the Bruns Report, which we shall shortly hear; and to the dossier on Kurt Aumeier in British files, a dossier which even the Defence Experts admit is one of the most important historical finds, since the writings of Rudolph Höss, the commandant of Auschwitz, were published after the war.

There is one essential plea I wish to make of this Court; I am aware that the Defendants have expended a considerable sum of money in researching all over again the harrowing story of what actually happened in what they call the Holocaust.

I submit that, harsh though it may seem, the Court should take no interest in that tragedy. The Court may well disagree with me, and show a profound interest in it; but in my submission, we have to avoid the temptations of raking over the history of what happened in Poland or in Russia fifty years ago: what is moot here is not what happened in those sites of atrocities &emdash; but what happened over the last thirty-two years, on my writing desk in my apartment off Grosvenor Square.

To justify her allegations of manipulation and distortion, it will not suffice for Professor Lipstadt to show, if she can, that I misrepresented what happened, but the following that I knew what happened; and that I perversely and deliberately, for whatever purpose, portrayed it differently from how I knew it to have happened.

That is what manipulation and distortion means, and the other, though fundamental, story of what actually happened is neither here nor there. In effect, this inquiry should not leave the four walls of my study: it should look at the papers that lay before me &emdash; and not before some other, magnificently funded researcher or scholar &emdash; and at the manuscript that I then produced on the basis of my own limited sources.

My Lord, if we were to seek a title for this Libel action, I would venture to suggest "PICTURES AT AN EXECUTION".

Your Lordship may or may not be aware that I have had a reputation as an historian and as an investigative writer arising from the thirty or so works which I have published in English and other languages over the years since 1961. I am the author of many scores of articles in serious and respected newspapers, including over the years in this country The Daily Telegraph, The Sunday Telegraph, the Jewish Chronicle, the Sunday Express, the Evening Standard, Encounter, and publications of similar repute in Germany, my articles have appeared in newspapers ranging from Die Welt, Die Welt am Sonntag, and magazines and journals like Stern, Der Spiegel, Neue Illustrierte, Quick.

My books have appeared between hard covers under the imprint of the finest publishing houses. I might mention in this country the imprints of William Kimber Ltd., Cassell & Co. Ltd., Macmillan Ltd., Hodder & Stoughton, Penguin and Allen Lane and others. As the Second Defendant is I understand an American citizen, it might be meritorious for me to add that my works have also been published by her country's leading publishing houses, including the Viking Press; Little, Brown; Simon & Schuster; Holt, Reinhardt, Winston; St Martin's Press; and a score of no less reputable paperback publishing houses.

Each of those published works by me contained in or near the title page a list of my previous publications and frequently a sample of the accolades bestowed on my works by the leading names of literature and historiography on both sides of the Atlantic.

This happy situation, namely having my works published in the leading publishing houses of the world, ended a year or two ago under circumstances which I shall venture, if Your Lordship permits, to set out later in my remarks. Suffice it to say that this very day the Australia/Israel Review has published in Sydney a presumably well-informed article, coming as it does from their corner, which provides one missing link in the circumstances under which St. Martin's Press finally terminated their contract to publish my book Goebbels. Mastermind of the Third Reich:

... One of the catalysts for the case was Irving's experience with American publisher St Martin's Press, which, after being warned by Lipstadt and others about Irving's approach to history, then cancelled its agreement to publish Irving's book Goebbels. Mastermind of the Third Reich in the US.

So these Defendants have done very real damage to my professional existence. May I first of all set out the very real pecuniary damage which can be done to an author by an attack on his reputation. It is not merely that he suffers injury and hurt to his feelings from unjustified attacks, whatever their nature.

An author, by virtue of his trade, lives a precarious financial existence. A tenured Professor or other scholar can look forward to a brief career, lengthy vacations, high rewards, and eventually a pension. Perhaps some members of the legal profession enjoy the same fortunate expectations.

A writer leads a much lonelier and more hazardous existence. When he first embarks on his career he may write a string of works that are never published. I was fortunate in this respect; when I first started advertising in The Times in 1961, inviting British airmen who had taken part in the principle operations of Royal Air Force Bomber Command to come forward, among those who contacted me was Mr. William Kimber, a publisher of great repute who himself felt deeply about the ethical questions raised by these saturation bombing operations.

I therefore did not have the usual problem that faces most first-time authors, namely that of crossing the difficult threshold from being an unpublished, to a published author. My first book, THE DESTRUCTION OF DRESDEN, was serialised by The Sunday Telegraph' and attracted much critical acclaim. It was only then that I took the, perhaps fateful, decision to become a writer.

If I may now advance rapidly some twenty or thirty years -- and I sense the Court's relief -- I would repeat a brief conversation I had with my Accountant, at a time when I was earning more than £100,000 p.a. in royalties. My Accountant, no doubt with his eye on the commission involved, asked what steps I had taken in anticipation of retirement. My immodest reply was that I did not intend to retire, and when he murmured something about pensions, I replied that my books were my pension fund.

If I may explain that remark: if an author has written a good book it will be published and republished, and on each occasion a fresh ripple of royalties reaches the author's bank account. Admittedly the ripples become smaller as the years recede, but if he has written enough books in his 30 or 40 years of creativity then the ripples together make waves large enough to sustain him into and beyond the years of retirement. Indeed, they should also provide something of a legacy for his children, of whom I still have 4.

That situation no longer obtains.

By virtue of the activities of the Defendants, in particular of the Second Defendant, and of those who funded her and guided her hand, I have since 1996 seen one fearful publisher after another falling away from me, declining to reprint my works, refusing to accept new commissions and turning their backs on me when I approach.

In private, the senior editors at those publishing houses still welcome me warmly as a friend, invite me to lunch in expensive New York restaurants -- and then lament that if they were to sign a contract with me on a new book, there would always be somebody in their publishing house who would object. Such is the nature of the odium that has been generated by the waves of hatred recklessly propagated against me by the Defendants.

In short my "pension" has vanished, as assuredly as if I had bee employed by one of those companies taken over by the late Mr. Robert Maxwell.

I am not submitting that it is these Defendants alone who have single handedly wrought this disaster upon me. I am not even denying that I may have been partly to blame for it myself.

Had I written books about the Zulu Wars, as the Air Ministry earnestly advised me in 1963, when my book THE DESTRUCTION OF DRESDEN was first published, I would no doubt not have faced this hatred.

Unfortunately, World War Two became my area of expertise; I generated a personal archive of documents, a network of sources and contacts, a language ability, and a facility to research in foreign archives, and eventually a constituency of readers who expected and wanted me to write only about the Third Reich and its criminal leadership.

What obliges me to make these sweeping opening remarks, is that I shall maintain that the Defendants did not act alone in their determination to destroy my career, and to vandalise my legitimacy as an historian. They were part of an organised international endeavour at achieving precisely that. I have seen the papers. I have copies of the documents. I shall show them to this Court. I know how they did it, and I now know why.

Nearly all of these villains acted beyond the jurisdiction of these Courts. Some of them however acted within, and I have on one disastrous occasion tried to proceed against them too.

I mention here and, only in a few words, that one example: as the Court will no doubt hear, I was expelled in the most demeaning circumstances from Canada in November 1992. I need not go into the background of that event here, but I shall certainly do so later if in their attempts to blacken my name further, the Defendants indulge in that exercise in this Court.

Seeking to establish why Canada, a friendly Government, of a country which I had entered unhindered for thirty years or more, should suddenly round upon me as savagely as a rottweiler, I used all the appliances of Canadian law to establish what had gone on behind closed doors.

I discovered in the files of the Canadian Government, using that country's Access to Information Act, a mysterious and anonymous document blackening my name which had been planted there for the purpose of procuring precisely the ugly consequence that had flowed from it in 1992.

Among the stupid lies that this anonymous document contained about me, was the suggestion that I had married my first wife because she was "the daughter of one of General Francisco Franco's top generals", in order to ingratiate myself with the Spanish fascist regime. Another suggestion was that I lived too well for an author (I have lived for over thirty-two years in the same house off Grosvenor Square in Mayfair) -- that to sustain such a level of living purely from my income as an author was impossible; the implication being that I was receiving secret cheques from Nazi fugitives in South America.

I telephoned my first wife to ask her what her father had been, and she reminded me that he was an industrial chemist, a dedicated enemy of the regime after two of his brothers had been shot by Franco's men.

It took over a year to establish beyond doubt who was the author of this infamous document. Eventually it turned out to have been provided secretly to the Canadian Government by an unofficial body based in London, whose name I do not propose to state in this Court here, as they are not formally represented in this action.

Suffice it to say that when I applied to a judge in chambers for leave to take Libel action out of time, the culprits made no attempt to justify their Libels, but pleaded that the Statute of Limitations had run; which plea was allowed, though with regret, by Mr. Justice Toulson. The mendacious body concerned then had the temerity to pursue me to the threshold of the Bankruptcy Court for the legal costs that it had incurred in that one day hearing, amounting to over £7,500. It is a rough life, being an independent author.

Which brings us to the present case. In 1993 the First Defendant, as they allow in their Witness Statements, published Denying the Holocaust, the work complained of, within the jurisdiction, written by the Second Defendant.

The book purports to be a scholarly investigation of the operations of an international network conspiracy of people whom the Second Defendant has dubbed "Holocaust deniers". It is not. The phrase itself, which the Second Defendant prides she herself on having coined and crafted, appears repeatedly throughout the work, and it has subsequently become embedded in the vernacular of a certain kind of journalist who wishes to blacken the name of some person, where the more usual rhetoric of neo-Nazi, Nazi, racist, and other similar epithets is no longer deemed adequate. Indeed, the phrase appears over 300 times in just one of the Defendants' experts reports!

It has become one of the most potent phrases in the arsenal of insult, replacing the N-word, the F-word, and a whole alphabet of other slurs. If an American politician, like Mr. Patrick Buchanan, is branded even briefly a "Holocaust denier", his career can well be said to be in ruins. If a writer, no matter how well reviewed and received until then, has that phrase stuck to him, then he too regard his career as rumbling off the edge of a precipice.

As a phrase it is of itself quite meaningless. The word "Holocaust" is a artificial label commonly attached to one of the greatest and still most unexplained tragedies of this past century.

The word "denier" is particularly evil: because no person in full command of his mental faculties, and with even the slightest understanding of what happened in World War Two, can deny that the tragedy actually happened, however much we dissident historians may wish to quibble about the means, the scale, the dates and other minutiae.

Yet meaningless though it is, the phrase has become a part of the English language. It is a poison to which there is virtually no antidote, less lethal than a hypodermic with nerve gas jabbed in the neck, but deadly all the same: for the chosen victim, it is like being called a wife beater or a pædophile. It is enough for the label to be attached, for the attachee to find himself designated as a pariah, an outcast from normal society. It is a verbal Yellow Star.

In many countries now where it was considered that the mere verbal labelling was not enough, governments have been prevailed upon to pass the most questionable laws, including some which can only be considered a total infringement of the normal human rights of free speech, free opinion and freedom of assembly.

Germany has not had an enviable reputation in any of these freedoms over the last century. True to form, in Germany it is now a criminal offence to question the mode, the scale, the system, or even the statistics of the Holocaust. No defence is allowed. Some good friends of mine, I have no hesitation in allowing to this Court, are sitting at this very moment in German prisons for having ventured to voice such questions.

In France the situation is even more absurd: any person found guilty in France, under a new law aptly named an "amendment of the law on the freedom of the Press" finds himself fined, or imprisoned, or both. This law, passed in 1991, makes it a criminal offence to challenge (the French word is contester) any war crimes or crimes against humanity "as defined by the Nuremberg Statute" of 1945.

Fifty years on, it has become a criminal offence to question whether Nuremberg got it right. History is to be as defined by the four victorious powers in the Nuremberg trials of 1945--1946.

I respectfully submit that Your Lordship would find such laws, if enacted in this country, to be utterly repugnant. For that same reason I have no hesitation in saying that some more good friends of mine have been fined under precisely this French law. Indeed, in 1993 or 1994, I was myself fined the sum of £500 under this law: I had given an interview to a French journalist in the study of my home in London; this interview was published in a reputable journal, there were complaints in Paris; and I was summoned before the Paris magistrates, and fined along with the publisher, editor and journalist concerned for having given this interview. It is indeed a very sorry state of affairs.

We may hear the word "conspiracy" uttered during the next few days and weeks. If there has been a conspiracy, it is a conspiracy against free speech.

I might mention that my father fought as an officer in the Royal Navy in both wars, both in the Battle of Jutland in 1916 and in the Arctic convoys of 1942, and that both my brothers have served in the Royal Air Force. My father was an arctic explorer between the wars, and admiralty charts show two island points in the South Sandwich Islands named after him and his first officer, my uncle.

I come from a service family and I find it odious that at the end of the Twentieth century writers and historians going about their own respective businesses, writing books that may indeed have been completely wrong have found themselves suddenly and vicariously threatened with imprisonment or with crippling fines for having expressed opinions on history which are at variance with these new freshly enacted laws, which have been introduced at the insistence of wealthy pressure groups and other enemies of the free speech for which we fought two World Wars in this country.

Your Lordship will undoubtedly hear from the Defendants that I was fined a very substantial sum of money by the German Government under these witless new laws. It is no matter for shame for me, although it has had catastrophic consequences, as it now makes me de facto "a convict", with a criminal record, and as such liable to a concatenation of further indignities and sanctions in every foreign country which I now wish to visit.

The circumstances: I may say here quite briefly that on April 21, 1990, I delivered an address, quite possibly ill-judged, to an audience at a hall in Munich.

When one agrees to attend such functions, one has little way of knowing in advance what kind of audience one will be addressing, and one has no control over the external appearance of the function. I make no complaint about that.

Your Lordship will hear, that in the course of my speech, of which apparently no full transcript in survives, I uttered the following remark:

"We now know that the gas chamber shown to the tourists at Auschwitz is a fake built by the Poles after the war, just like the one established by the Americans at Dachau".

This may well raise eyebrows. It might be found to be offensive by sections of the community, and if they take such offence, I can assure this Court that I regret it and that such was not my intention. The fact remains that these remarks were true, the Poles admitted it (in January 1995) and under English law truth has always been regarded as an absolute defence.

We shall hear, indeed from the Defence's own expert witnesses, though perhaps the admission will have to be bludgeoned out of them, that the gas chamber shown to the tourists at Auschwitz was indeed built by the Polish Communists three years after the war was over.

I do not intend to go into the question of whether or not there were gas chambers at Birkenau, some five miles from Auschwitz, in these opening remarks. By the time this trial is over we shall probably all be heartily sick of the debate, which has little or no relevance to the issues that are pleaded.

So what are the issues that are pleaded? And how do I propose to address those issues in opening this case?

First, let me emphasise that I also have no intentions, and neither is it the purpose of this trial, to "refight World War Two". I shall not argue, and have never argued, that the wrong side won the war, for example; or that the history of the war needs to be grossly rewritten. I must confess that I am mystified at the broad thrust which the Defendants have taken in the vast body of documentation which they have served upon this Court -- another five thousand pages were delivered to me on Friday evening, and more last night.

It is all something of an embarrassment to me, and I am being forced into positions that I have not previously adopted. I have never claimed to be a Holocaust historian. I have written no book about the Holocaust. I have written no article about it. If I have spoken about it, it is usually because I have been questioned about it. On such occasions, I have emphasised my lack of expertise, and I have expatiated only upon those areas with which I am familiar. In doing so, I have offended many of my friends, who wished that history was different. But you cannot wish documents away, and it is in documents that I have always specialised as a writer.

Your Lordship will find upon reviewing my various printed works that I have very seldom used other peoples' books as sources. I have found it otiose and tedious, not only because they are ill-written, but also because in reading other peoples' books you are liable to imbibe the errors and prejudices with which those books are beset.

If however, you go to the original documents, you will often find to your joy that the weight of documents you have to read is, pound for pound, or indeed ton for ton, less than the weight of books that you might otherwise have to read upon the same subject. And you are kilometres closer to the original Real History.

As for the nature of documents: I remember that in 1969 I visited Professor Hugh Trevor Roper, who is now Lord Dacre and I am glad to say still with us. He very kindly made available to me his collection of several thousand original intelligence documents for my biography of Adolf Hitler, but in doing so he advised me as follows: when considering new documents, you should ask yourself three questions: and if I remember correctly, those three criteria were,

1) is the document genuine (possibly, in the light of the "Hitler Diaries" scandal, an unfortunate pre-requisite in this case):

2) is the document written by a person in a position to know what he is talking about? And

3) Why does this document exist?

The latter is quite interesting, as we have all experienced, in the archives, coming across documents obviously written for window-dressing or for buck passing purposes.

It is the documents in this case which I think the Court will find most interesting and illuminating. And by that I mean documents at every level. The Court will have to consider not only the documents originating in World War Two on both sides, but also the documents that have been generated by that painful process known as Discovery.

It will not escape the Court, My Lord, when the time comes, that like many personalities, I have kept the most voluminous records throughout my career as a writer, and indeed even before it. Along with my writing career I kept a diary; sometimes I wondered why, but I think that the reason was basically this -- if you are a writer, and self-employed, you need the discipline that a diary imposes upon you. You cannot in conscience enter in a diary at the end of the day: "I did nothing all day".

Your Lordship will be amused no doubt to hear that at one stage in the Discovery process in this action, at the request of Mr. Julius, I readily agreed to make available to the Defence my entire diaries, in so far as they still exist (a few pages are missing); and that Mr. Julius only then learned that these diaries occupy a shelf eight feet long; and that in them there are approximately there are probably ten or twenty million words to be read.

Mr. Julius and his staff have, however, risen most nobly to the challenge that these pages presented, and I am sure that over the next few days and weeks we shall be hearing more than one morsel that they have dredged out if these pages. They will hold it aloft, still dripping with something or other, and read it to this Court with a squeal of delight, proclaiming this to be the Philosopher's Stone that they needed to justify their Client's Libels all along. We shall see.

But that is not what this trial is all about.

This trial is not really about what happened in the Holocaust, or how many Jews and other persecuted minorities were tortured and put to death. This Court will, I hope, agree with me when the time comes that the issue before us is not what happened, but how I treated it in my works of history: it may be that I was totally ignorant on some aspects of World War Two (and I hasten to say that I do not believe I was). But to be accused of deliberate manipulation, and distorting, and mis-translating is perverse: the Defendants must show, in my humble submission,

1) that a particular thing happened or existed,

2) that I was aware of that particular thing, as it happened or existed, at the time I wrote about it, from the records then before me;

3) that I then wilfully manipulated the text or mis-translated or distorted for the purposes that they imply.

I will submit that in no instance can they prove this to be the case. They certainly have not done so in the documents so far pleaded.

I readily concede that what I have read of the reports submitted by the Defendants' experts, particularly those of the historians, is of the utmost interest. I have to congratulate Professor Jan van Pelt, for the literary quality of his lengthy report on Auschwitz, which will no doubt eventually see general circulation on the bookstores: indeed, I congratulated him three years ago already on the first book that he published on this topic.

I admit too that there are documents contained in the expertise of Professor Browning of which I was not aware, and which have changed my own perception of some aspects of the Nazi atrocities on the Eastern front: for example, I was not aware that the S.S. Obergruppenführer Reinhard Heydrich had issued instructions to his commanders in the Baltic States, after Operation BARBAROSSA began in June 1941, not only to turn a blind eye upon the anti-Jewish pogroms started by the local populations in those countries, but also actively to initiate them and to provide assistance.

This document, however, emerged only recently from the Russian archives and there can surely be no reproach against me for not having known that when I wrote my biography of Hitler, published in 1977, or in my later works. That cannot be branded as manipulation or distortion.

What is manipulation or distortion of history would be, in my submission this: knowing of the existence of a key document and then ignoring it or suppressing it entirely, without even a mention.

If, for example, it should turn out, and be proven in this very Courtroom, that in the spring of 1942 the Nazi leader Adolf Hitler was quoted by a senior Reich Minister, in writing, as repeatedly saying that he "wanted the final solution of the Jewish problem postponed until the war is over"; and if the document recording those remarkable words has been found in the German archives; it would surely be classifiable as manipulation or distortion if a historian were to attempt to write the history of the Holocaust without even mentioning the document's existence? Would it not, my Lord?

The Defendants have, as said, arbitrarily and recklessly decided to label me a "Holocaust denier" -- their motivation for doing so we shall shortly hear about. My Lord, before I continue to address this point in my opening speech, may I take this opportunity to read to the Court, and into the public records, a two-page document, which I shall refer to as the Walter Bruns interrogation. I do so because perceptions matter, and I want at this late afternoon hour to leave a firm perception in the minds of all those present. It is a document which first came into my hands some time before 1985.

I should say, My Lord, by way of introduction, that this document, which is in my Discovery, was originally a British TOP-SECRET document. TOP SECRET is only one rung lower than ULTRA-SECRET, the classification given to the British decoded intercepts. It was TOP SECRET, because it is the record of an interrogation which was obtained by methods that were illegal, I understand, under the Conventions.

Enemy prisoners of war were brought into British prison camps, treated lavishly, well-fed, reassured by their relaxed surroundings, and gradually led into conversation, unaware that in every fitting and appliance in the room were hidden microphones capable of picking up. (That was the illegality.) Released to the British archives only a few years ago were all of these reports, but I had already obtained already several hundred fifteen or twenty years earlier. I consider these transcripts to be a historical source which, if properly used and if certain criteria are applied, can be regarded as part of the bedrock of Real History.

I would say further by way of preamble, My Lord, that the speaker whose recorded voice we are about to hear, as reproduced in this typescript, was on November 30, 1941, the day of the episode he narrates, a Colonel in the German Army Engineers force (the sappers, or Pioniere); he was commanding a unit based at Riga, the capital of Latvia. He had learned to his vexation that it was intended by the local SS unit to round up all the local Jews, including "his Jews" in the next day or two and to liquidate them.

I read from this document:

My Lord, permit me a word about the credentials of that document. It is of course authentic. It comes from the British archives. A copy can be found in the Public Record Office this very day if one wishes to go and see it. First: is the General describing something he had really seen?

I mention this because later, on his sworn oath in the Witness stand in Nuremberg, he claimed only to have heard of this atrocity. Yet there can surely be no doubt of the very verisimilitude: it doesn't take university level textual analysis to realise that if a General says, "I can see her in my mind's eye now, a girl in a flame-red dress", this is a man who has been there and seen it with his own eyes.

This document has in my submission considerable evidentiary value. It is not self-serving. The General is not testifying in his own interest. He is merely talking, probably in a muffled whisper, to fellow prisoners at a British interrogation centre, and he has no idea that in another room British experts are listening to and recording every word. We also have the original German text of this document I might add, My Lord.

To what purpose do I mention this? Well, firstly because I shall later add further unknown documents, from the same superb British archives, to the events of this one day, documents which show Hitler taking a most remarkable stand on this atrocity.

But I also adduce this document for the following reason:

if an historian repeatedly refers to this document;

if he quotes from it;

if he immediately writes showing it to fellow historians, both Jews and non-Jews alike, and in writing draws their attention to the existence of this document, and its fellow documents, all of which were hitherto unknown to them;

if moreover that historian reads out this document in public, with its awful, infernal descriptions of the mass killings of Jews by the Nazis on the eastern front, on multiple speaking occasions;

if this historian, speaking to audiences even of the most extreme hues of left and right, heedless as to their anger, insists in reading out the document in full, thus "rubbing their noses in it" so to speak; and

if he continues to do so over a period of fifteen years, again and again, right up to the present date, and

if he quotes that document in the text, and references that document in the footnotes of all his most recent works, beginning with the HITLER'S WAR biography republication in 1991, through GOEBBELS. MASTERMIND OF THE THIRD REICH in 1996 and NUREMBERG, THE LAST BATTLE in 1997:

Then -- is it not a Libel of the most grotesque and offensive nature to brand that same historian around the world as a "Holocaust denier", when he has not only discovered and found and propagated this document and brought it to the attention of both his colleagues and his rival and his foes, regardless of their race or religion, and to countless audiences?

This is not an isolated example, My Lord. In the Introduction to my biography of Adolf Hitler, HITLER'S WAR, which was published by The Viking Press in America and by Hodder & Stoughton in the United Kingdom and later by Macmillan, we shall find that I have drawn specific and repeated attention of the reader to the crimes that Adolf Hitler committed.