From The Guardian Weekly (email service), 20 January 2000:
UK news / Holocaust claims 'impossible' / Vikram Dodd
Auschwitz gas chamber is a fake, and the Nazis did not systematically kill Jews, historian tells libel trial
Vikram Dodd
The alleged Nazi apologist David Irving branded survivors of the Auschwitz death camp with the acronym "ASSHOLS", the High Court heard last week.
The controversial historian, who is defending himself, is suing the US academic Deborah Lipstadt and the publisher Penguin over a book, Denying The Holocaust: The Growing Assault On Truth And Memory, that said he denied the Holocaust as a historical fact, and wilfully manipulated and distorted history.
Richard Rampton QC, for the defendants, quoted a 1991 speech in Canada in which he claimed Mr Irving rubbished the idea that the Auschwitz camp existed to murder Jews. Mr Irving allegedly said: "I don't see any reason to be tasteful about Auschwitz. It's baloney, it's a legend. Once we admit the fact that it was a brutal slave labour camp and large numbers of people did die, as large numbers of innocent people died elsewhere in the war, why believe the rest of the baloney?
"I say quite tastelessly, in fact, that more women died on the back seat of Edward Kennedy's car at Chappaquiddick than ever died in a gas chamber in Auschwitz.
"Oh, you think that's tasteless? how about this: there are so many Auschwitz survivors going around, in fact the number increases as the years go past, which is biologically very odd to say the least. I'm going to form an association of Auschwitz Survivors, Survivors Of The Holocaust And Other Liars, or the ASSHOLS."
Mr Rampton said that in the same speech Mr Irving had complained about Jewish protests at his being granted a platform and had added: "And it's happening now. They're zeroing in on the university [saying], 'Nazism not welcome here. Self-professed moderate fascist'; I strongly object to that word 'moderate'. "
Mr Irving told the court: "By virtue of the activities of the defendants . . . 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. Such is the nature of the odium that has been generated by the waves of hatred recklessly propagated against me by the defendants."
Mr Irving condemned laws in Germany aimed at protecting the memory of the Holocaust: "Some good friends of mine are sitting at this very moment in German prisons" after questioning the scale, system and numbers of dead. Mr Irving said he felt no shame that he was fined in Germany for saying the gas chamber at Auschwitz seen by tourists "is a fake built by the Poles after the war, just like the one established by the Americans at Dachau".
"Fifty years on," he said, "it has become a criminal offence to question whether Nuremberg [war crimes trials] got it right. History is to be as defined by the four victorious powers."
Mr Irving said it was logistically impossible for millions of people to have been gassed to death. He said he believed that the Nazis had killed between 1m and 4m Jews during the second world war, but denied that the Holocaust had been "systematic" or ordered by the Third Reich's leadership. "The defendants will find it very hard to prove it was a Third Reich decision and an Adolf Hitler decision. There were multiple shootings, but it was not pursuant to any programme," he added.
Mr Rampton said that Mr Irving's position was undermined by a 1942 report, seen by Adolf Hitler, detailing the massacre by one German unit of 363,211 Jews on the Eastern Front. In August 1941 Hitler had ordered that he be kept informed of the activities of the unit, the Einsatzgruppen, a special SS death squad operating behind German lines. Mr Irving described the document as "an orphan", saying there were no other reports of this nature which existed and were addressed to the Führer.
Asked by Mr Rampton: "Do you deny that the Nazis killed millions of Jews in gas chambers in purpose-built establishments?", he replied: "Yes. I deny that millions died in the gas chambers because of the logistical problems for a start."
Mr Irving said that 1m people would weigh 100,000 tonnes, and the "logistical and architectural impossibilities" in constructing extermination camps could not be overlooked.
The trial continues.
The Guardian Weekly 20-1-2000, page 11