Irving v. Lipstadt

 1IN THE HIGH COURT OF JUSTICE
1996 I. No. 113
QUEEN'S BENCH DIVISION
 2Royal Courts of Justice
 3Strand, London
 4Monday, 24th January 2000
 5
 6Before:
 7MR JUSTICE GRAY
 8
 9B E T W E E N: DAVID JOHN CAWDELL IRVING
10Claimant -and-
11(1) PENGUIN BOOKS LIMITED
12(2) DEBORAH E. LIPSTADT
13Defendants
14The Claimant appeared in person
15MR RICHARD RAMPTON Q.C. (instructed by Messrs Davenport Lyons and Mishcon de Reya) appeared on behalf of the First and
16Second Defendants
17MISS HEATHER ROGERS (instructed by Davenport Lyons) appeared on behalf of the First Defendant Penguin Books Limited
18MR ANTHONY JULIUS (of Mishcon de Reya) appeared on behalf of
19the Second Defendant Deborah Lipstadt
20
21(Transcribed from the stenographic notes of Harry Counsell & Company, Clifford's Inn, Fetter Lane, London EC4
22Telephone: 020-7242-9346)
23* Transcript not to be reproduced without the written permission of Harry
Counsell & Company
24
25PROCEEDINGS - DAY EIGHT
26

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 1<Day 8 Monday, 24th January 2000.
 2MR JUSTICE GRAY:    Yes, Mr Irving?
 3MR IRVING:    May it please the court. I have three very small
 4matters that I would just like to bring to the court's
 5attention ----
 6MR JUSTICE GRAY:    Yes.
 7MR IRVING:    --- and to try to keep it within the five minutes
 8that I have set out. Your Lordship has before you a very
 9small heap of documents which, as far as I am concerned,
10can be disposed with immediately afterwards. They are
11purely to draw attention to certain points I wish to make.
12The first one is headed August 17th 1942, on the right, a
13translation. It is a two-page document.
14MR JUSTICE GRAY:    Yes.
15MR IRVING:    We were dealing, your Lordship will remember, with
16the deportations from France which were discussed between
17Hitler and Himmler at the end of 1942, and the question
18was what was going to happen to them, and there was
19reference to a Sonderlager, a special camp. Your Lordship
20will see within the first paragraph of the translation the
21second sentence: "At first"?
22MR JUSTICE GRAY:    Yes.
23MR IRVING:    "At first the evacuated Jews will be accommodated
24in the Auschwitz concentration camp, but a special
25reception camp is to be erected in the Western Reich
26territory." If I may summarize the rest of the document,

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 1it says: "We will continue deporting train loads of Jews
 2from France to avoid this lengthy journey to Auschwitz.
 3Can we please set up camps inside the Reich to house these
 4deportees?"
 5MR JUSTICE GRAY:    That is an odd movement, is it not?
 6MR IRVING:    It is a very odd movement.
 7MR JUSTICE GRAY:    Sending them all the way from France to
 8Poland and then back again.
 9MR IRVING:    And then back again. I cannot speculate as to the
10reason why they should engage in this movement, except
11that Auschwitz does appear to have had a transit camp
12character about it. It had facilities there for stealing,
13robbing; it had facilities there for fumigating and
14checking; it had also the big slave labour camp that was
15attached to the Molovitz factory.
16    There are two reasons, your Lordship has quite
17rightly spotted that fact, and that is I wanted to hint at
18the possibility this may have been the kind of movement --
19remember your Lordship drew attention to the fact that
20people were coming back from the East, from Lemburg to one
21of the camps on the border. Of course, the special
22reception camp, that is, Bezonderes Auffanglager, you will
23see on the next page, my Lord, in line 4, "Bezonderes
24Auffanglager", a special reception camp, is clearly the
25Sonderlager to which reference is later made, in my
26submission.

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 1    If I can move rapidly on to the next document,
 2my Lord, it is headed "Pocket Dictionary". It is three or
 3four pages.
 4MR JUSTICE GRAY:    I am not sure I have that.
 5MR IRVING:    In that case ----
 6MR JUSTICE GRAY:    Hang ob. I probably have it somewhere.
 7MR IRVING:    It will be in white, my Lord, with a green corner
 8tab.
 9MR JUSTICE GRAY:    No. Oddly enough, that has not arrived.
10MR IRVING:    My Lord, I went to some trouble over the last few
11months obtaining contemporary a German dictionary by which
12I mean a wartime Third Reich German dictionary so we can
13see what the meaning of words were at that time, rather
14than the modern Langenscheidt being used and relied upon
15by the Defence. This is a 1935 dictionary, my Lord, which
16is this one here. I have just looked up at random some of
17the words we are interested in. The first page is
18"Entfernen" which means "to remove". It has no
19subsidiary sinister meanings.
20MR JUSTICE GRAY:    I do not think anyone is suggesting, except
21in a euphemistic way, that it means anything other than to
22remove or distance.
23MR IRVING:    My Lord, I believe the Defence is relying heavily
24on the fact that I have mistranslated and distorted. In
25my submission, if I use the correct wartime translation of
26the word, then this destroys that particular Defence

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 1justification.
 2MR JUSTICE GRAY:    Yes.
 3MR IRVING:    The next page is "Vernichten", a very sinister
 4word, "annihilate and destroy". The next page is
 5"Abschaffen" which is quite significant in connection
 6with the French movements, you will remember, my Lord,
 7because Himmler wrote next to the figures "Abschaffen" in
 8his handwriting, and this means "to dismiss".
 9MR JUSTICE GRAY:    I think the difficulty with "Abschaffen" is
10that it would not normally be applied to people. Is that
11not a fair point?
12MR IRVING:    You are right, my Lord. It could apply to a body
13of people, perhaps, to dismiss them, and I shall be
14making, obviously, my closing speech submissions at some
15length summarising this question of the translations which
16is a thorny one, I appreciate, but in view of the fact the
17Defence do rely on it so heavily for the distortion
18element of their justification; and, finally, my Lord, on
19page 33 of the dictionary we have the famous "Ausrotten"
20and there the 1935 meaning of the word is quite clearly
21"to root out", as you would imagine, the word
22"Ausrotten"; whereas I quite readily accept that nowadays
23in 1999/2000, the word "Ausrotten" quite clearly means
24"liquidate". It has become that, the same as words
25change their meaning over the years.
26MR JUSTICE GRAY:    Yes.

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 1MR IRVING:    My Lord, finally, I come to the little bundle of
 2documents. It is a rather arcane matter, but again
 3I believe the Defence rely heavily on my choice of
 4language. Your Lordship will remember the rather heated
 5remarks I made about certain Jewish fraudsters and
 6racketeer in the United States, Ivan Boesky, Michael
 7Milken, and so on. I suggested they were hiding behind,
 8they were insulating themselves from public criticism by
 9the use of the Holocaust. This is what is now
10scientifically or academically referred to as the
11instrumentalisation of the Holocaust. This is one
12particular example which came to our attention. Mr Melvin
13Murmelstein, who may well be mentioned later on in the
14case, started a claim against the Hertford Insurance
15Company. His lawyers warned the insurance company that,
16as a survivor of Nazi concentration camps during World War
17II, this matter is extremely important to Mr Murmelstein.
18That is page 2, my Lord. On page 6, the insurance
19company's own lawyers warned them, warned the insurance
20company, to settle the $100,000 being claimed, saying,
21 "The lawyer argues that a jury will be sympathetic to a
22man who has survived a Nazi concentration camp", and so
23on. So this is the kind ----
24MR JUSTICE GRAY:    It is not quite the same point, is it? The
25point that I think you were making in that talk that we
26looked at on Thursday was that Jews who get up to some

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