“ Well, there was the one-man gas chamber where you had the two German soldiers carrying a one man gas chamber around the Polish countryside looking for anybody who had escaped. Now there appear to be hundreds of thousands who’ve escaped but they were looking for individuals at that time. And all I can say is if I’m a, an Auschwitz inmate who is fortunate enough to have escaped which was undoubtedly a very brutal slave labour camp and I’m standing around in the countryside and suddenly a one-man gas chamber turns up next to me, I’m going to be queasy. ”

“ They're are saying, “This is just going to nourish the neo-Nazi stereotype of the Jew - grasping, gold hungry, greedy, inconsiderate, vengeful; all these anti-semitic stereotypes that the neo-Nazis have are just being nourished by this latest clamour about the Swiss gold.”’
‘Well, they have been dining on Auschwitz. Auschwitz is a big tourist site now. They have millions of visitors every year. It’s like Hitler’s mountain top retreat in Berchtesgaden. They have half a million visitors a year there too. They make money out of it. Auschwitz has become a major money-spinner, the Holocaust. ”

“ And what these people don’t understand, by way of conclusion, is that they are generating anti-semitism by their behaviour, and they can’t understand it. They wonder where the anti-semitism comes from, and it comes from themselves, from their behaviour. We don’t promote anti-semitism, we’ve got no reason whatsoever to promote anti-semitism. I find the whole Holocaust story utterly boring. It goes on and on and on and they keep on going on about the Holocaust because it’s the only interesting thing that’s happened to them in the last 3000 years. ”

“ Every town has a survivor. In Florida, I understand that every school now has its visiting survivor, who comes to inflict the nameless horrors on these eight-year-old toddlers, telling them what happened to them at the hands of the Germans. In Australia there are professional survivors, a woman called Mrs Altman who will roll up her sleeve and show the tattoo to prove that, yes, she was in Auschwitz. ”

“ It is full of hundreds of thousands of survivors of the Holocaust if not, in fact, millions by now. The numbers of survivors seems to grow these passing years, it defies all laws of natural deceased and all laws, now the number of survivors is growing. And I said isn’t the existence of so many survivors in itself an indicator, something doesn’t, it doesn’t fit. If the Nazis had this dedicated programme to exterminate the Jews, how come so many of you have survived, were the Nazis sloppy or what? ”

“ Mr Irving, we’ve been told by the British Minister of the Interior, the Home Office that they are going to ban Fred Leuchter setting foot in Britain at the request of the British Board of Deputies of Jews. And this is the way they work, they refuse to allow debate. They scurry and hide furtively, they’re like the cockroaches who you don’t see normally by light of day. They hide, they fear the truth, it bedazzles them, it blinds them, they can’t stand that [unintelligible] . ”

“ Suddenly a lot of people aren’t claiming to be Auschwitz survivors any more. Elie Wiesel, for one, for example, he has always been uncertain whether it was Auschwitz he had been in, or Dachau, or Buchenwald. [Laughter]
Well, I say that, because there’s a photograph, a photograph, in which he identifies himself as being a prisoner in a photograph of various prisoners in a bunk-house in a barracks in the concentration camp in Buchenwald, and he said, “Yes, that’s me”. But it turns out that photograph was in Auschwitz and he says, “Ohh, yes, I meant Auschwitz.” ”

“ In this action the Defendants rely on a number of Irving’s talks and interviews, as well as upon certain diary entries, as demonstrating by their tone and content that he is an anti-semite and a racist. They define anti-semitism to mean theory, action or practice directed against the Jews and racism as a belief in the superiority of a particular race leading to prejudice and antagonism towards people of other races, especially those in close proximity who might be felt as a threat to one’s cultural and racial integrity or economic well-being. ”

“ To me, money is not the most important thing. But the perception that the world has of the Jewish people is one of greed, and they contribute to that by their behaviour. They contribute to that, for example, in recent years by their behaviour over the Swiss gold business. ”

“ But we are being disliked on a visceral, gut-wrenching, murderous level, that no sooner do we arrive then we are being massacred, and beaten, and brutalised and imprisoned, until we have to move on somewhere else. ”

“ True, as both public polls and our postbag show, British citizens as a whole are in favour, but they will hesitate to vote for any policy which may attract the opprobrium of the rest of the world, or drag Britain’s name in the mud. ”

“ You’ve got to say things like more women died on the back seat of Edward Kennedy’s car at Chappaquiddick than in the gas chambers at Auschwitz. [Applause] Now you think that’s tasteless, what about this? I’m forming an association especially dedicated to all these liars, the ones who try and kid people that they were in these concentration camps, it’s called the Auschwitz Survivors, Survivors of the Holocaust and other liars, A-S-S-H-O-L-E-S. Can’t get more tasteless than that, but you’ve got to be tasteless because these people deserve our contempt’ (p 18) . ”

“ Irving pointed out that he has disclosed millions of words from his diaries to the Defendants, who have made tendentious and unrepresentative use of them in order to vilify him as anti-semitic and racist.
Anti-semitism
9.9 In regard to his attitude towards Jews, Irving asserted that there is no reason why the Jews should be immune from criticism, but that is not to be equated with anti-semitism. It is not anti-semitic to make a statement hostile to Jews if the statement is justified. ”

“ We have no reason to promote anti-semitism, it’s not in our interest one way or the other, but they are doing it. I don’t know why. Whether it’s because they want to be the centre of attention or what. To an audience in Louisiana, I spoke in Freeport, Louisiana about 6 months ago, and to my embarrassment half the audience turned out to be with the local Jewish community. They’d come along to cause trouble, the rest was normal, but half the audience was this Jewish community with their Jewish community leaders and they showed their true colours after I had begun to speak. ”

“ There’s big money in Auschwitz, and for somebody to come along who has a reputation and a legitimacy as a historian and say “Hold it, fellahs. Make money if you want but you ought to know that it is a bit Disney-like.” The only answer is to shut him up, don’t let him anywhere near the place. He’s the last person we want here. We are all on to a very nice thing.’
9.6 The quotations which, according to the Defendants demonstrate Irving’s racism are these (again I provide the context, where appropriate) :
(i) Interview for ‘Cover Story’ (Australian television) 4 March 1997 (pp 6-7) . ”

“ He was, however, unable to recall who the witness was or when he heard about it. He accepted that the claim that the Jews were lured to enter the box by the telephone bell ringing was an “embellishment”. Irving explained that he wanted to capture the attention of his audience. He justified his use of this “ludicrous” story by saying that it illustrates the problem with eye-witness evidence about the death camps, namely that such witnesses convince themselves of the truth of manifestly incredible events. ”

“ Even if we all pull together, jointly and severally for the next ten, twenty or thirty years, and manage to put the clock back, say, half an hour of its time, the really Guilty People will have passed on, commemorated only by the bronze plaques and the statues and the memorials scattered around our capital. ”

“ Britain’s destiny, in the hands of people whose minds are so small that they could pass effortlessly through the eye of a needle. (Applause) .’
9.7 The Defendants allege that in the extracts quoted at paragraph 9.5 above Irving variously blames the Jews for the existence of anti-semitism; seeks to pin the responsibility for their misfortunes (including the Holocaust) on the Jews themselves; mocks the Holocaust survivors and accuses them of seeking to make money out of their experiences and the tattoos on their arms ”

“ The German government is adding another 1 billion dollars a year in compensation. $5 billion go to be spent on people like Mrs Altman with their tattoo. Divide that up amongst all the survivors and it’s a very sizeable annual income that they are getting. ”

“ He hankers after the days when the BBC news was read by a man wearing a dinner jacket.
9.21 Irving defended his comment that he felt “queasy” about black people playing sports for England as an expression of his “patriotic” private thoughts on the topic. When he said that it was “humiliating” to have his passport checked by a Pakistani, he as not making a racist remark. What he meant was that an Englishman would be better at controlling immigration than someone born out of this country. Irving’s comments are at (iv) and (viii) in paragraph 9.6 above. ”