[14 JANUARY, 1994, THE 25TH CRIMINAL CHAMBER OF THE REGIONAL COURT OF MUNICH UPHELD IRVING'S CONVICTION WITH A WARNING  back]

27. On 14 January 1994, the 25th Criminal Chamber of the Regional Court of Munich upheld the said conviction of the Plaintiff, and increased his fine (to 200.00 DM for 150 days). During the course of his appeal the Plaintiff claimed that his researches had revealed no evidence of the gassing of the Jews in Auschwitz and scientific opinions had proved the impracticability of gassing. During the course of its judgment upholding the Plaintiff's conviction as aforesaid, the Regional Court further found that (as was the fact):

"Anyone denying the gassing and murdering of Jews in the `Third Reich' defames every Jews and slanders the memory of all Jews gassed in Auschwitz. By calling the mass gassing of Jews in Auschwitz an invention, the Accused [the Plaintiff] denies the Jews the inhumane fate to which they were subjected in the `Third Reich' purely on account of their origins...He knew that the so-called Auschwitz lie would be assessed as defamation and prosecuted...The Accused is seeking only superficially to paint a picture at variance with established research and in truth is clearly seeking to deny the mass murder of the Jewish people in the Third Reich...The Accused can only reach his conviction by failing to heed the historical fact of the gassing of the Jews in Auschwitz...and by relying on a few revisionist outsiders and pseudo natural history propaganda magazines apologetic to the National-Socialist cause. Had the Accused applied his endeavours in an unprejudiced manner, not marked by any ideology of the Right, he would always have been in a position to assess accurately the numerous historical sources and witnesses...To the extent that the Accused is relying on his belief, the Criminal Chamber has not taken this into account to reduce the fine...since the gassing of the Jews in Auschwitz is such a publicly known historical fact that only people - like the Accused - who refuse to acknowledge this dreadful truth are able to arrive at such a belief.

To the detriment of the Accused it has to be said that a denial of the fate of the Jews in Auschwitz represents a massive insult to Jewish people and a grave defamation of those who died. The Criminal Chamber has also appraised as aggravating the fact that the Accused from his own testimony disseminated the so-called Auschwitz lie even subsequent to the events at issue here.... there is a risk of the generation which did not experience as direct contemporary witness the situation prevailing during the National Socialist period and the persecution of the Jews accepting this line of thinking without questioning it... It also had to be taken into account that the Accused as a writer and historian is also in a position to give the impression that his thoughts are backed up by scientific evidence. There is the risk that by giving voice in this way he will be used by revisionists of the neo Nazi movement as a historical-scientific signboard and thereby introduce above all uncritical young people not versed in history to his ideas...." [emphasis added]

[ THE ULTRA RIGHT WING, PSEUDO ACADEMIC INSTITUTE OF HISTORICAL REVIEW back ]

28. [link to Nizkor] The Institute of Historical Review ("the IHR") is an ultra-right wing, pseudo academic organisation which is the centre of revisionist activities and publications, and which attracts neo Nazis, anti-semites and racists. The IHR is part of a network that includes the [link to Nizkor] Liberty Lobby which publishes Spotlight, a journal devoted to the Jewish conspiracy theory, and the [link to Nizkor] Committee for Open Debate on the Holocaust. The IHR holds an annual revisionist conference, devoted to the promulgation of the view inter alia that there was no Holocaust. On its editorial board was [link to Nizkor] Ditlieb Felderer, an Austrian resident of Sweden, publisher of the vitriolic anti-semitic publication "Jewish Information Bulletin", who in 1983 was sentenced to 10 months in prison for distributing hate material (he had sent leaders of the European Jewish community pieces of fat and locks of hair with a letter asking them if they could identify the contents as Hungarian Jews gassed at Auschwitz).

[ THE PLAINTIFF, DAVID IRVING,  LECTURED TO THE IHR AT THEIR 5TH CONFERENCE. ONE OF HIS FELLOW SPEAKERS WAS  DR. ROBERT FAURISSON WHO WAS CONVICTED IN A FRENCH COURT FOR THE LIBEL OF DENYING THE HOLOCAUST back ]

29. In September 1983, the Plaintiff (described by the IHR as "noted British revisionist historian"), lectured to the Fifth said conference. Amongst his fellow speakers was Dr Robert Faurisson, author of numerous revisionist works, and sued (according to IHR literature advertising the conference) for defamation for speaking "independently on the Six Million/Gas Chambers thesis". Dr Faurisson was in fact convicted by the French courts for the libel of denying the Holocaust. Dr Faurisson has claimed the "so-called gassing" of the Jews was a "gigantic politico-financial swindle whose beneficiaries are the state of Israel and international Zionism" and whose chief victims were the German people and the Palestinians. He has further claimed that the Nazi decree making it mandatory for Jews to wear a yellow star was a measure to ensure the safety of German soldiers because Jews engaged in espionage, terrorism, black market operations and arms trafficking; and that Jewish children were required to wear the yellow star from the age of 6, because they too were engaged in illicit or resistance activities against the Germans;

"They [the Exterminationists] have realised that they are way out of line with the Auschwitz story, and they are frantically engaged in damage control at present. They're pulling their entire army of liars back from the main battlefront, into the second line, because all the artillery that's coming down on the front line now is making it too dangerous for them".

[ AT ANOTHER IHR CONFERENCE MARK WEBER MADE REFERENCE TO IRVING'S ADDRESS IN DRESDEN ON THE ANNIVERSARY OF THE ALLIED FIRE BOMBING OF THAT CITY. THIS ADDRESS ENDED WITH THE WORDS: "THE HOLOCAUST OF GERMANS IN DRESDEN REALLY HAPPENED. THAT OF THE JEWS IN THE GAS CHAMBERS OF AUSCHWITZ IS AN INVENTION. I AM ASHAMED TO BE AN ENGLISHMAN." back ]

31. In October 1990, the Plaintiff lectured to the Tenth said conference. Amongst his fellow speakers was Dr Robert Faurisson. The Plaintiff's lecture was introduced by [link to Nizkor] Mark Weber. Mr Weber described how at the trial of Ernst Zundel (see (7) below), the Plaintiff had explained in detail why he now accepted the Revisionist view of the extermination story. Mr Weber called the Plaintiff "a kind of one-man IHR", and set out the conclusion of the Plaintiff's address in Dresden on the anniversary of the fire-bombing of that city in which he said:

"Ladies and gentlemen, survivors and descendants of the holocaust of Dresden, the holocaust of Germans in Dresden really happened. That of the Jews in the gas chambers of Auschwitz is an invention. I am ashamed to be an Englishman".

[DAVID IRVING ARGUES THAT FRED LEUCHTER'S "SCIENTIFIC"  REPORT "PROVES" THERE IS NO EVIDENCE THAT GASSINGS TOOK PLACE AT AUSCHWITZ. WHY DID PEOPLE BELIEVE THAT 6 MILLION JEWS DIED? IT WAS A RESULT OF "THE BIGGEST PROPAGANDA OFFENSIVE THAT THE HUMAN RACE HAS EVER KNOWN."
                "SINK THE AUSCHWITZ" back]

32. In the course of his said lecture to the IHR in 1990 (to the whole of which the First Defendants will refer) the Plaintiff said (inter alia):

[selected portions follow]

....This how it was when I was in Toronto a couple of years ago. I was called as an expert witness as a historian to give evidence at the Ernst Zundel case, where Zundel's researchers showed me the[link to Nizkor]  Leuchter Report, the laboratory tests on the crematoria and the gas chambers. As a person who, at University in London, studied chemistry and physics and the exact sciences, I knew that this was an exact result. There was no way around it. And suddenly all that I'd read in the archives clicked into place. You have to accept that, if there is no evidence anywhere in the archives that there were any gassings going on; that if there's not one sing German document that refers to the gassings of human beings - not one wartime German document; and if there is no reference anywhere in the German archives to anybody giving orders for the gassings of people, and if, on the other hand, the forensic tests of the laboratories, of the crematoria, and the gas chambers and Auschwitz and so on, show that there is no trace, no significant residue whatsoever of a cyanide compound, then this can all only mean one thing.

So how do we explain the fact that for forty-five years since the end of World War Two, we have all, internationally, globally, been beset by a common guilt: the idea that the human race was responsible for liquidating six million human beings in gas chambers? Well, the answer is: we have been subjected to the biggest propaganda offensive that the human race has ever known. It's been conducted with such finesse, with such refinement, with such financial clout, that we have not been able to recognize it as a propaganda offensive - from start to finish. And yet there are these weapons cruising past us on the horizon - in all their ugliness - and the biggest weapon, of course, of all in this propaganda campaign against the truth since 1945 has been the great battleship Auschwitz! And we have now, at last, the historical profession - above all, the Revisionist historical profession - have found as our own task, the major task: "Sink the Auschwitz!"

 I warned you that I was going to show no respect for tests in the first part of this talk. Sink the Auschwitz! But we haven't had to sink the Auschwitz, because the crew of the Auschwitz, Beate Klarsfeld, the Wiesenthals, Elie Wiesel and the rest of them, have been struggling on the bridge and battling with each other - boxing and engaging in fisticuffs - and the Auschwitz has been steering itself amongst the icebergs, and finally it has begun to scuttle itself. They have begun to haul down the flag of the battleship Auschwitz. They've taken down the placard, [link to Nizkor]  they've taken down the memorial to the four million, and they've replaced it with a rather smaller memorial to one million....

....That's what's happening in Germany now. They're still sticking to the six million figure. And they're still being told that they were gassed. Although all the evidence runs the other way. To me, Auschwitz is unimportant - I'm happy that the ship is scuttling itself. It's vanishing. It's going to be left like the battleship Arizona at Pearl - if you ever go to Hawaii and have a look at it - with just its mast sticking out of the water to mark where once a great legend stood. And when people go there a hundred years from now and say: "Down there is the most incredible legend that people believed for fifty years: it's the great battleship Auschwitz, it was scuttled by its crew!"

Why don't we have to believe it? Well, you know about the Leuchter Report".

[THOUGH FRED LEUCHTER CLAIMED AN EXPERTISE IN ENGINEERING, HE HAD NONE back]

36. In fact, Fred Leuchter had no expertise in the matters upon which he purported to give an expert view in the Report, and his evidence as a self-styled expert was (rightly) rejected (save to a very limited extent) by the Canadian Court, for that reason. Moreover, the scientific validity and methodology of the Report were fundamentally flawed. Though Leuchter claimed an expertise in engineering, he had none. Indeed in June 1991, 2 weeks before Leuchter was due to go on trial in Massachussets for practising or offering to practice engineering without a licence, Leuchter signed a consent agreement admitting that he was not and never had been a professional engineer, and had fraudulently presented himself to various states as an engineer with the ability to consult on matters concerning execution technology. Leuchter further acknowledged that though he was not an engineer and had never taken an engineering licensing test, he had produced reports, including the Report containing his engineering opinions. Henceforth, Leuchter agreed to cease and desist, presenting himself as an engineer and issuing any reports, including the Report.

[THE PLAINTIFF PUBLISHES, AUSCHWITZ: THE END OF THE LINE: THE LEUCHTER REPORT - - THE FIRST FORENSIC EXAMINATION OF AUSCHWITZ. HE WROTE THE FORWARD TO THIS BOOK back]

37. By then the Plaintiff [David Irving] had published under his Focal Point imprint, the English edition of the Report entitled "Auschwitz: The End of the Line: The Leuchter Report - The First Forensic Examination of Auschwitz", with a foreword written by the Plaintiff. In that foreword, the Plaintiff said:

"UNLIKE THE WRITING OF HISTORY, chemistry is an exact science. Old fashioned historians have always conducted endless learned debates about meanings and interpretations, and the more indolent among them have developed a subsidiary Black Art of "reading between the lines", as a substitute for wading into the archives of World War II documents which are now available in embarrassing abundance.

Recently, however, the more daring modern historians have begun using the tools of forensic science - carbon-dating, gas chromatography, and simple ink-aging tests - to examine, and not infrequently dispel, some of the more tenaciously held myths of the twentieth century

Sometimes the public is receptive to the results, sometimes not. The negative results of the laboratory analysis of the ancient Shroud of Turin is one example: it is not a deliberate fake, perhaps, but nor was it nearly as old as the priests would have had centuries of gullible tourists believe.

It is unlikely that the world's public will be as receptive, yet, to the results of the professional and dispassionate chemical examination of the remains of the wartime Auschwitz concentration camp which is at the centre of this report.

Nobody likes to be swindled, still less where considerable sums of money are involved. (Since 1949 the State of Israel has received over 90 billion Deutschmarks in voluntary reparations from West Germany, essentially in atonement for the "gas chambers of Auschwitz"). And this myth will not die easily: Too many hundreds of millions of honest, intelligent people have been duped by the well-financed and brilliantly successful post-war publicity campaign which followed on from the original ingenious plan of the British Psychological Warfare Executive (PWE) in 1942 to spread to the world the propaganda story that the Germans were using "gas chambers" to kill millions of Jews and other "undesirables".

As late as August 1943 the head of the PWE minuted the Cabinet secretly that despite the stories they were putting out, there was not the slightest evidence that such contraptions existed, and he continued with a warning that stories from Jewish sources in this connection were particularly suspect.

As a historian, I have, on occasion, had recourse to fraud laboratories to test controversial documents for their authenticity. In the late 1960s I discarded certain diaries of Vice Admiral Wilhelm Canaris, offered to myself and the publishers William Collins Ltd, since Messrs. Hehner & Cox Ltd of the City of London advised me that the ink used for one signature did not exist during the war years. It was I who exposed the "Hitler Diaries" as fakes at Der Stern's famous International Press Conference in Hamburg in April 1983.

And yet I have to admit that it would never have occurred to me to subject the actual fabric of the Auschwitz concentration camp and its "gas chambers" - the holiest shrines of this new Twentieth Century religion - to chemical tests to see if there was any trace of cyanide compounds in the walls.

The truly astounding results are as set out in this report: while significant quantities of cyanide compounds were found in the small de-lousing facilities of the camp where the proprietary (and lethal) Zyklon B compound was used, as all are agreed, to disinfect the plague-ridden clothing of all persons entering these brutal slave-labour camps, no significant trace whatsoever was found in the buildings which international opinion - for it is not more than that - has always labelled as the camp's infamous gas chambers. Nor, as the report's gruesomely expert author makes plain, could the design and construction of those buildings have made their use as mass gas-chambers feasible under any circumstances.

For myself, shown this evidence for the first time when called as an expert witness at the Zundel trial in Toronto in April 1988, the laboratory reports were shattering. There could be no doubt as to their integrity. I myself would, admittedly, have preferred to see more rigorous methods used in identifying and certifying the samples taken for analysis, but I accept without reservation the difficulties that the examining team faced on location in what is now Poland; chiselling out the samples from the hallowed site under the very noses of the new camp guards. The video tapes made simultaneously by the team - which I have studied - provide compelling visual evidence of the scrupulous methods that they used.

Until the end of this tragic century there will always be incorrigible historians, statesmen and publicists who are content to believe, or have no economically viable alternative but to believe, that the Nazis used "gas chambers" at Auschwitz to kill human beings. But it is now up to them to explain to me as an intelligent and critical student of modern history why there is no significant trace of any cyanide compound in the building which they have always identified as the former gas chambers.

Forensic chemistry is, I repeat, an exact science.

The ball is in their court.

David Irving London, W1 May 1989"


[BRITISH PARLIAMENT CONDEMNS DAVID IRVING back]

38. In an Early Day Motion, in the 1988/9 session of Parliament, 92 Members of Parliament condemned the Plaintiff and the Report as follows:-

"That this House, on the occasion of the reunion in London of 1000 refugees from the Holocaust, most of whose families were killed in gas chambers, or otherwise by Nazi murderers, is appalled by the allegation by Nazi propagandist and long-time Hitler apologist David Irving that the infamous gas chambers of Auschwitz, Treblinka and Majdenak did not exist, ever, except perhaps as the brain-child of Britain's brilliant wartime Psychological Warfare Executive; draws attention to a new fascist publication, the Leuchter report, in which this evil column appears; and condemns without qualification such pernicious works of Hitler's heirs."

39. In an Early Day Motion, in the 1991/2 session of Parliament, 43 Members of Parliament condemned the Plaintiff and his aforesaid views and the Plaintiff's activity in smuggling Leuchter, the subject of an exclusion order by the Home Secretary into the United Kingdom. The Plaintiff had done so in order that Leuchter could speak at a meeting organised by the Plaintiff which coincided with the publication by the Plaintiff of the revised version of Hitler's War, held at Chelsea Town Hall in November 1991. The meeting was addressed by the Plaintiff and was attended by prominent members of the National Front and the BNP (which organisations were described by the Plaintiff after the meeting as NCOs and foot soldiers).

[IRVING PUBLISHES THE ENGLISH EDITION OF HITLER'S WAR  -- EXONERATES HITLER, CLAIMING HE HAD NOTHING TO DO WITH, AND IN FACT WAS UNAWARE OF, THE MASS MURDER OF JEWS back]

44. In 1977, the English edition of the Plaintiff's book, "Hitler's War" was published. The purpose of Hitler's War, informing its massive documentary presentation, was to present a revised picture of Hitler by transferring both the political and military errors and the crimes ascribed to him to others: the errors to his generals, the crimes to his political associates.

[PLAINTIFF DISTORTS THE MEANING OF GOEBBELS' DIARIES. LATER HIS BOOK ABOUT GOEBBELS SERVES TO EXCULPATE HITLER back]

80. In the Goebbels' book, published by Focal Point in 1996, the Plaintiff continues his exculpation of Hitler, this time transferring not merely the responsibility for the extermination camps but the policy of anti-semitism itself from Hitler to Goebbels: his method is to dwell on Goebbels' anti-semitism, and to attenuate, or slide-over that of Hitler. Thus, when Goebbels in his diary reported Hitler as being in support of the most radical programme of extermination, the Plaintiff commented (at pp.386-7) that where as Goebbels may be believed when he expressed his own views, his citation of Hitler's statements to him need not be taken seriously: the diarist was merely repeating "threadbare phrases". The Plaintiff makes much of the fact that Hitler was not pleased by the violent anti-semitic riots which were orchestrated by Goebbels - the so-called "Kristallnacht" on 9 November 1938 (and see (36) below). By this variation of emphasis, the Plaintiff builds up a portrait of Goebbels as the driving force of Nazi anti-semitism, the "Mastermind of the Third Reich", goading his reluctant Führer into ever more radical actions against the Jews. As in "Hitler's War", Hitler is portrayed by the Plaintiff as a weak leader, fundamentally benevolent and constructive, but driven to occasional violent actions by evil or treacherous counsellors.

[IRVING OMITS THE HISTORY OF HITLER'S RABID ANTI-SEMITISM back]

81. In that context, the Plaintiff omits the history of Hitler's rabid anti-semitism. The first known political utterance of Hitler is a paper on the Jewish question, written in 1919. In it, Hitler demanded that the Jewish question be solved, not by "emotional" attacks - sporadic pogroms which lead nowhere - but by "rational anti-semitism", "the anti-semitism of reason", "planned judicial opposition" whose "ultimate goal is the removal of Jews altogether. An even stronger statement of Hitler's intentions towards the Jews before he knew Goebbels is expressed in a newspaper interview from 1922 as quoted in Fleming's "Hitler and the Final Solution", 1984, p.17:

"Once I really am in power, my first and foremost task will be the annihilation of the Jews. As soon as I have the power to do so, I will have gallows built in rows - at the Marienplatz in Munich, for example - as many as traffic allows.

Then the Jews will be hanged indiscriminately, and they will remain hanging until they stink; they will hang there as long as the principles of hygiene permit. As soon as they have been untied, the next batch will be strung up, and so on down the line, until the last Jew in Munich has been exterminated. Other cities will follow suit, precisely in this fashion, until all Germany is completely cleansed of Jews."

In "Mein Kampf", Hitler was explicit: the First World War, he stated, might not have been lost if a sufficient number of Jews had been eliminated at the start of it by poison-gas. Both these statements were uttered before Hitler had met Goebbels. Hitler's last political message to the world, the last sentence of his last political testament, dictated shortly before his suicide, was an adjuration to the German people "above all [emphasis added] ... implacably to oppose the universal poisoner of all nations, international Jewry." None of these statements are cited by the Plaintiff in the Goebbels' book (even in Hitler's War, where the Plaintiff cites part of Hitler's last testament, he fails to mention that last solemn adjuration).

[THE PLAINTIFF'S "OMISSIONS, DISTORTIONS AND MISREPRESENTATIONS MUST BE DELIBERATE." CHURCHILL IS COMPARED, UNFAVORABLY, TO HITLER back]

128. The Plaintiff knows the primary sources for the history of Nazism. He speaks excellent German. The omissions, distortions and misrepresentations must be deliberate, and they all tend in the same direction: i.e. to present Nazism and Hitler in particular in a more favourable light and Britain, Churchill in particular, in an unfavourable light. Thus, Hitler, without any evidence, is cleared of at least some of the responsibility for The Final Solution and his anti-semitic is down-played; Churchill, without any evidence, is stated to have assassinated General Sikorski. Hitler, the destroyer of Europe, whose favourite words were "austrotten" and "vernichten", who sought to destroy whole peoples and obliterate whole cities, even in the end Germany itself, is presented as a constructive statesman. Churchill, who resisted him, is described by the Plaintiff (at p.xv in his book "Churchill's War") as "rarely a creator, always a destroyer - of cities, of monuments, of works of art, of populations, of frontiers, of monarchies and finally his own country's empire".

129. The Plaintiff's thesis does not emerge from the evidence, it precedes the evidence, shapes the evidence, determines what evidence shall be admitted or omitted, and how it shall be interpreted.

[" THERE ARE GROUNDS TO SUSPECT THAT THE PLAINTIFF HAD REMOVED CERTAIN MICROFICHES OF GOEBBELS' DIARIES CONTAINED IN THE MOSCOW ARCHIVES, FROM THE SAID ARCHIVES WITHOUT PERMISSION." back]

130. There are grounds to suspect that the Plaintiff had removed certain microfiches of Goebbels' diaries contained in the Moscow archives, from the said archives without permission. The Plaintiff claimed in July 1992 that members of the archive staff at Moscow had lent him a number of the original plates to take out and do certain things with, and that it was not until an allegation had been made that he had stolen the plates that he was required to sign a declaration that everything was in place. The said explanation is inherently improbable, given the valuable and fragile nature of the glass plates, and the Plaintiff's lack of official status. [back]

 SERVED this 18th day of April 1997 by Mishcon de Reya of 21 Southampton Row, London, WC1B 5HS. Solicitors for the Second Defendant