Hardtalk - David Irving (BBC 2000)

the holocaust became the focus of a trial in london last month when the historian david irving sued an american writer for libel and lost irving who claimed that there were no systematic gassings of jews in auschwitz was branded by the judge as an active holocaust denier anti-semitic and racist and an associate of right-wing extremists who promote nazism why does he think he lost so badly david irving welcome to the program yes hello in the introduction the newer to the new edition of hitler's war you quote what you call a scornful adage and you say to historians is granted a talent that even the gods are denied to alter what has already happened was that you giving the game away and telling us exactly what you've been doing well history since 1988 i'd add a category to that not only historians can do it but apparently lawyers can also do it but you did it in this country according to the judge didn't you no i i don't agree and i had to be careful what i say about in commenting on the trial because we're going to go to appeal on this so i had to be careful not to try and second guess the judge well the record of the judge already stands what he said i mean irving has for his own ideological reasons persistently and deliberately misrepresented and manipulated historical evidence yeah this isn't if you have a lot of historians but of course what is the view of a lot of historians isn't it a lot of historians is there's a consensus of historians who obviously don't like me and i must admit that if i was invited to be an expert witness in this case as several historians were for the defense and i've been offered a hundred thousand pounds to testify against david irving and i would find it difficult to refuse as well and that was the amount of money that was poured into this case so you're saying professor richard evans professor of modern history at cambridge deliberately lied and falsified his version of events or his record on you uh for money oh no i can't say that of course he was paid so that's what you asked he was paid 76 000 pounds to write a report and that gave him the confidence that he needed in order to smear me from one end of the country and in fact around the world well he didn't explain he said what he thought you know your record was like yeah with without without having heard me cross-examine him in the witness box and he turned out to be not exactly expert on the history of the third right in fact his knowledge of german was in on occasions lamentable um i was astonished that a person of his qualifications can rise to be a professor of history at cambridge he was astonished by you he said he wasn't prepared for the sheer depths of duplicity in your treatment of sources i wouldn't trust him about what he said hitler had for breakfast yes he wouldn't throw me aside he would throw a grand piano either he's not alone but if you read the judge's verdict you'll see the judge also says i don't agree with a lot of the negative things that evans in particular has had to say about mr irving pity the judge wasn't specific about what he didn't agree with well you're still lost didn't he found against you whatever nice things the judge may have said as well he certainly didn't retract the other things he said for the same reason he's portrayed hitler in an unwarrantedly favorable light particularly in relation to his attitude towards responsibility for the treatment of the jews misinterpreting and mistranslating documents i think when we come to misinterpreting and mistranslating documents the court of appeal will have something to say about the judge in this case i have to be very careful and if it doesn't then of course i go to the judgment stance then i crash in flames we already have i'm sure we we're crashing in flames but you've got to realize i was a lone litigant in this case facing people who had poured about 10 million pounds into into defending the action that i had brought into finding out the truth if if the truth was there in the archives hidden for the last 55 years he shouldn't have taken 10 million pounds to prove me wrong and at the end of the day the judge was rather scratching his head in his judgment the judge says i always assumed that there was the evidence that auschwitz had gas chambers and i was surprised to find that there wasn't until this case came along it wasn't documentary evidence is what he said doesn't say there wasn't any evidence yes he said there wasn't documentation there were eyewitnesses and he relies on half a dozen eyewitnesses and that's not good enough for me i'm afraid i want to see i want to see documents if all the shootings on the eastern front are documented there's no doubt that the nazis killed millions of jews on the eastern front and we've got any number of documents on that but nothing for the gas game we're talking about talking of relying on documents you seem to have relied for your central thesis that there was no mass gassing of jews in auschwitz on a man called frederick leuchtter who had no formal training in engineering or forensic science but took some samples from brickwork and plasterwork in auschwitz and converted you overnight in 1988 to his findings i don't think no formal training stands against him as i pointed out and it wasn't the forensic sciences was in the cross-examination of their chief witness professor van pelt who's a professor of architecture in in canada it turns out he never qualified as an architect uh he would be arrested if he called himself an architect yet he was paid 109 000 pounds to give evidence against me in this case this is the odd kind of case i found myself in i found myself baffled by the way the legal system works but you acknowledged there were flaws in the leicester report i mean you said criticism of the leuchttur report had to be taken on board these are your words and the probably concessions have to be made at both ends of this scale so despite defending this man's integrity and his scrupulous methods you still acknowledge that there were errors in his room when i published his report in june 1989 in the introduction i said it's a pity that there are things that forensically one would have liked to have seen done differently it's flawed and i said that at the time but the forensic test because you also said you were converted by it was converted by a flawed report as converted by the laboratory tests that the flawed report contained there had been lab tests conducted on the fabric of the so-called gas chambers at auschwitz which found no significant traces of cyanide which is what said my mind thinking i have to admit leuchttur claimed that the samples of concrete taken from the walls at auschwitz gas chambers contained qualities of quantities of hydrogen cyanide that were too low to kill human beings and thus he suggested the chambers were for delausen but as it came out of the child the truth was the reverse the real amount of hydrogen cyanide needed to kill humans is 20 times lower than that needed to kill lice that's a convincing argument it is it's a very clever kind of argument used by the defense lawyers but if you've got a gag you have a kind of argument used by you if you've got a a so-called gas chamber a room about this size in which allegedly half a million people have been gassed by cyanide and you find there's no trace no significant trace whatsoever of cyanide left in the concrete now and there should be because it turns into a very permanent substance called prussian blue that sets my mind thinking the tests have been replicated since then by other reputable scientists and the same result has come up and there's other reasons also for doubting this not just the forensic tests how saddened are you by the state of your reputation i mean you went sad the word i'm horrified you went to court in a sense the salvage of reputation that you no longer had i had no choice the enemies were the truth as i call them were conducting a mudslide and the mudslide was building up and it was being financed on a colossal scale around the world with a single dedicated aim of destroying david irving what about your colossal support i mean you've had what 4 000 supporters around the world not they don't have the kind of money that steven spielberg has how do we know well i can tell you they don't you don't tell us who they are i have i throw my records open to a journalist the jewish chronicle i said here you have a look at the computer and look at that he sat there 15 minutes going through all the records and i said as long as you don't write down names you can look to your heart's content i'm i'm that okay where have i taken where have you taken money from we have a very broad base of supporters around the world people are giving me the smallest amount i suppose two dollars the largest amount is fifty thousand take money from any group anywhere if there's nothing if there's no strings attached to it i will take money from whoever will support my legal fight no money too dirty for you to take oh come on have you seen the kind of money that's been imported into this case by my opponent i'm asking you the kind of money that you would take this is a really dirty fight being fought against me this is money being fought they would say that you distorted the truth we've only just found out after the case was over how much money was paid to the witnesses we've only just found out after the trial was over where the money came from paying expert witnesses isn't unique to this child i i'm sad to hear i'm sad to hear this i didn't pay my witnesses a penny they spoke because they spoke from their expertise they spoke from their knowledge as professors and as historians so you see this as a giant conspiracy and a jewish conspiracy again against uh irving i i'm sorry to say that this is irving david david against goliath yes for the last i suppose 20 years the various parties it's not the jews as such as just certain self-appointed leaders of the jewish community who quite demonstrably because we have the documents they were in court they weren't relevant the judge quite rightly said these aren't relevant to the case mr irving but i put them in just because i wanted the world to know what i've been up against for the last 20 years you've enjoyed the publicity attendant with this case um it had there were two exhilarating qualities the exhilaration of standing in the higher court and cross-examining witnesses and see them crumble in your best which made you feel superior which made me feel immensely superior to the kind of people i was up against isn't a question i was i certainly never felt inferior one moment to any of those expert witnesses i ran rings around them i made them confess that they had no qualifications i made the confession they didn't know yet you still managed to lose you called the judge mindfure at one particular point why look at the transcript i'm asking one of those legends i'm asking one of those legends did you or didn't you there's a passage in the in the transcript where i'm saying what the crowd is calling out to me of the neo-nazis now as i'm addressing and hello and they're calling out things like zeke kyle and they're calling out things like mind fiora and i say this and if you look at that it's quite plain and if the journalists wanted to report it either way i can't be responsible for them one of the additional charges was that you misinterpreted evidence now document crucial to you was the telegram from hitler's headquarters november 1941 requiring that one transport of jews from berlin to the east should not be liquidated the document referred to one transport of jews and you must construe this to mean that no transports of jews should be murdered i'm sure you know german if you if you see the german word you didn't transport just by itself with no context at all the word transport can mean transportation the transportation of jews or it can mean a single transport and without the context to know exactly what is going on i translated that back in 1977 i was the first person to transcribe finra's handwriting that's why i found it i said the transports of jews from berlin have to stop no liquidation but very rapidly another expert gerald fleming who's a british store in contact he said no this refers to a particular train load david this is a well-known train though that went to riga and the next edition of the book i changed it these are the kind of misinterpretations that go on the whole time when you're when you're pioneering in history when you're reading somebody's handwritten documents nobody else has ever bothered to read you make errors of interpretation do you acknowledge errors of interpretation good lord and mistranslation yes if if out of out of a desire to to get them to say what you wish they would have that's what the judge says that's what the judge said but that that interpretation i totally reject you've got the two kinds of historians we didn't convince him did you no i didn't in in court and i said on on the last day in the quarter as when he finished reading writing judgment i stood up and i said my lord i have to admit that i've obviously failed to convince you and i blame myself that i'm not able to persuade you that the historical documents have to be read the way that they should be read and it's my fault and the next time around when we come to the court of appeal we will rectify that yes well no question of course there's a question there's a huge question over it well there's a question where the court of appeal even allows me to appeal that's the first hurdle we have to cross and there's a question whether we can raise the hundred thousand pounds is going to be necessary in order to to to establish the the security for cost which will undoubtedly be required by the defendants in this action on the alabama it's all about money you see it's about people this isn't about money it's about the truth and it's about your representation it's about multi-millionaires fighting somebody who hasn't got the means to defend themselves namely myself and i'm doing this so the question of means is the question of whether you actually told the truth or not yes it doesn't matter what's spent to try and prove the truth that's that's what this whole trial was about wasn't it it wasn't about money it was about the truth no it wasn't and you've done everybody a favor in many people's eyes by by proving that these theories of yours it wasn't it was about money right from day one if the truth was as plain as plainly written as they made out they wouldn't have needed to have a courtroom filled with 30 lawyers and historians and experts and researcher assistants and all the rest of it would spend 20 man years to try and prove me wrong you did the favor of getting them to have it conclusively approved no no we didn't we spent no money at all we paid no money at all on producing no i said you did them in favor of getting them you persuaded them to spend a lot of money to prove that your views were conclusive i don't think so i think if anybody reads the transcript they will say that's funny the eyewitnesses say there was holes in the roof where they poured the cyanide in through and yet the roof is there and there's no holes other people have argued that i mean this is something you've come out with it's been it's getting comprehensively challenged in court time and time again i said to the defendants halfway through the trial whinging about the money these cases is costing if you go to auschwitz tonight and scrape the mud off that roof and find the holes in the roof on the top side you can't see them from the bottom side if you find the holes in the roof then i will capitulate tomorrow i'll come to court and i'll wind up the whole action why did the judge talk about overwhelming convergence the judge said and i have to admit there are englishmen like this the judge said i believe the eyewitnesses and not the roof and this is where i can only say well you paid your money to take your choice david irving when asked if you're a racist you talked about an emotional instinctive aversion to people from other cultures yes you have that i'm not honest yes i mean i could just stood in the witness box and said no i'm not a racist but i i you acknowledged being a racist i don't think i'm probably any more racist than you or anybody else and i'll compare i'm talking about you you will classify yourself as a racist you have done you've said i'm a racist no i haven't i haven't said i'm a racist this is a typical thing taken out of out of context in in there's this film on fred leichter where the producer said mr irving put yourself in various positions now now imagine you're a you're a communist nominee you're a jew now imagine you're a racist and when we came to the one that began with now i'm a racist i began wrestling right now i'm a racist and i say that and that's all they've quoted you said that in one of your comments about the jews i would say that as a race they are better at making money than i am that's a racist remark this is just talking no this is you talking that's a racist if i was going to be crude i would say that not only are they better at making money but they are greedy yeah so you write off the whole jewish nation as greedy you don't think that that's that's right that's my perception of them but that is a racist comment isn't it i i don't think so it's a perception of the way the jews are and the way that i see them in the newspapers and you see them as greedy you've written them off as greedy well as a result of their campaign over the last five years to lay their hand on all the swiss gold and to beat up the friendship you don't just talk about the last five years you talk about the last three thousand years they've been hated for the last three thousand this is another problem uh i i agree this is a problem which they themselves are not addressing enough attention to it if i was jew and i frequently say this and i find myself being put into a pit and machine gun today after my family i would want to know my last few dying seconds why is why are they doing it to me why is it us jews again and again who are being victimized like this there must be some reason for it there must be something in the human microchip which i think is true to which you always wish to draw attention to as a stick to beat them i don't think i think it's xenophobia i think there's an element of xenophobe in everybody and and is your xenophobia when you say if you're a man and you go into a men's public toilet and there's a black man or pakistani standing at one store then you go two or three stores possibly further away it's instinct yes it's the little it's a racist instinct the microchip kicks in and and i think you'll probably find that millions of people around the world listening this will say well why do i justify yourself by saying well millions of other people feel the same thing there's no scientific evidence to suggest that millions of people feel the same thing do you fear do you feel in better company saying these things by thinking oh well there are plenty of other people out there who feel the same way i've been around the world now does that somehow justify your views i've been i've been around the world and i've spoken to other human beings now i know millions of people presumably no but a reasonable cross-section millions a reasonable cross-section of them and i suspect strongly there's millions of people out there who say yeah you said um you told the independent once you recall seeing uh a black man on a bicycle coming towards you in florida at the moment he became confused and couldn't decide whether to go this way or that he crashed into me and nearly broke my finger i screamed at him you stupid and i i told the independent i'd never actually revealed that story before i told the independent that i was so ashamed of that having happened that when i went home to my little cottage on the island when i when i stay in america where no one could see i went down on my knees and i i i pleaded to god for forgiveness and it's it's it's it's i use it's it's a just totally unforgivable i've never used that word before i've never used it since i would find it difficult to say it even now it was pretty close to hand when you wanted it wasn't it and it was just right there it is it is inside your brain buried somewhere in in an ugly corner of your brain and in a moment of great pain it comes out and you wish you hadn't said it and and you know that he's seen you and he's heard you saying it and you go and apologize and that's all you can do what about the charge of inciting racial hatred well i think that's an odious charge and i don't know how anyone could possibly accuse me well you've you you've um you've acknowledged that you're tasteless i'm tasteless enough to say the people who are butting in rebutting stories about auschwitz you've actually recommended being tasteless in 1991 a speech at calgary you said the only way to overcome the pseudo-religious atmosphere is to use tastelessness yes yes is to treat these little legends with the ridicule and bad taste they deserve you've got to say things like more women died on the backseat of senator edward kennedy's chapel critic and died in the gas chambers at auschwitz why is it the business of a historian to be so tasteless and so hurtful to people who may have had relatives who suffered or died at auschwitz to ram your views down their throat i suppose that particular statement is true particularly people who died on the back seat of sanitation than in that fake gas chamber yes the one they show the tourists was built in 1948 you know it's not the polls have admitted it was built in 1948. and nobody nobody heard the repairs for the first time it's a totally fake building they built a chimney behind it which isn't even connected to the main building a lot of auschwitz it's like as you know it's like disneyland and the only way you can get people was in ruins it was in ruins there are plans that exist they have they have even vanished you know that they're hungry expert admits that what they show the tourists is fake yeah really whole chapter about it tasteless why so needlessly hurtful you have to be tasteless because it is the only way to bring this extraordinary fact home to the world so what they show the tourists in auschwitz is largely fake they've destroyed the integrity there's no doubt that tens or even hundreds of thousands of people died at auschwitz on various causes and you don't have to slightest quality because using language like yes because you have to you have to you have to who else does one have in this case you feel you have to because over the whole of the auschwitz complex has been put this glass cheese cover so to speak no one's allowed to go near it and lift up the cheese cover and say i want to investigate that because they put this word holocaust over the top and they made it a criminal offence in many countries around the world even to look at what happened in auschwitz look what happened to me when i started questioning auschwitz and that should make people suspicious let's look what happened to you i mean speaking for right-wing organizations in germany the dvu the deutsche fox union um what's their creed i mean you take it off their website denial of vermont crimes and of german war guilt in general mass murder of german civilians by the allies the recreation of greater germany why do you speak for people like that when i was first invited to go and speak to the german people's union i was about 1984 i wrote a letter the german embassy being a cautious person and i said i've been invited to speak to this party will you tell me are they lawful are they constitutional do you recommend me not to and the german members who wrote me back a very nice letter saying they are perfectly lawful i didn't say they weren't lawful i told you these were the views and there are no reasons why you shouldn't address this organization you you agree with the views there's past no i don't but what i do and why do you address them then it is useful that i go and speak to these people many of whom are incorrigible many many of whom even i would find incorrigibles they can imagine how incorrigible they are and i give them a taste of the truth i read out the truth that they like the truth that happens to coincide with their views why are you fated i've read it i have read darling of these right wings because i'm regarded as the bringer of truth and totally attached i'm totally impartial between between the warring parties that's why they failed impartial enough to attend a dinner in 1990 to mark hitler's birthday totally totally untrue held by the well known neo-nazi avatar although it's in your diary you talked about people rising and toasting have you never had people in your in your surroundings who on april the 20th say always adolf hitler's birthday let's drink a toaster oh you probably haven't no i haven't no have you have members of parliament in this country really alan clark once came to visit me does it does it make it better he sent me you always drew attention to what other people are doing i'm talking about what you do i'm talking about the kind of company that you can i'm trying to draw attention to to normal people with with normal normal risk in the normal world that i read blooded sense of humor and red blood oh so this is a sense of humor toasting hitler's birth i i find it totally tasteless and that's why i refuse children well you said because you didn't have a glass well that's that's the obvious proof that i didn't join and i find it that's why i rate it in my diary i find it incredibly tasteless they should do this you uh what do you think of hitler well it's a rather wide question it's like where do you stand on jesus christ um he said that two very different personalities you admire him um let me start at the other end of the question i was in johannesburg a few years ago being interviewed by the editor of the city press which is a black newspaper and he was black and his name was adolf and i said how come your name is adolph and he said mr irving people of the third world their parents frequently call their children adolf in in in memory of adolf hitler and i was astonished by this and i said why he said well because in third world countries they regarded him as the hero the champion of the underdog and for a long time that was the case in the early 1930s he was that way when he came to power and until about 1937 1938 you can say had he died then had a bit fallen victim to an assassin's gun they would have erected a statue at him in hitler in germany do you admire him as a military commander unquestionably he with withstood the entire combined might of the of the allied nations until for six years um he very nearly won world war two if it if it had lasted seven years he probably would have because the allies would have run out of steam we had no manpower left and and the will to fight had gone but i think politically of course he went wrong he was a bad leader he was a bad dictator he allowed things at home to go to rot while he ran around the war and you can't you can't do that that's the basic problem with all dictatorships how saddened are you by the fact that various members of your family have rejected your views this is what the newspapers say is totally untrue well they quote your daughter paloma for instance saying i'm completely opposed to his beliefs in terms of women that's another issue what he says is a joke i think she was referring to a description of women as mental chewing gum i don't think i said that i have a point out the fact that their brains are marvel of miniaturization and daughter pilar said my views and my family's views are totally opposed to his and anyone who reads what he says must find them totally laughable does that does that upset you these these daughters have been in touch with me over the last few days to say these quotations are fictitious and invented i've seen the same thing about my twin brothers so they support you fully a national newspaper said that i i'm at loggerheads with my twin brother and this is also totally untrue and one wonders where the newspapers find these things but you as a journalist you know this is the way newspapers report that's why i find live television has such an edge and such an advantage is much more honest well you wouldn't catch me out you can you can bring tears into my eyes by asking you certain questions but on the other hand i have a chance to say things as they are we'll watch your appeal with interest david allen thank you very much indeed you

Channel: batrachious

Views: 443,182

Rating: 4.4382215 out of 5

Keywords: BBC, Interview, Tim Sebastian, Holocaust, Revisionism, Denial, World War II, Nazi, Hitler, Jews, Israel, David Irving, The Holocaust (Disaster), Nazism (Political Ideology), Ww2, Wwii, Nazi Germany (Country), Leuchter

Id: JF4GFGMNm3g

Length: 24min 12sec (1452 seconds)

Published: Fri Dec 21 2012