[verbatim trial transcripts]
Saturday, January 29, 2000
[Original Norwegian text]
DAVID IRVING IN COURT DISPUTE ABOUT HOLOCAUST
Asking questions David Irving has in 20 books queried the prevailing opinion regarding Hitler's exterminations of the Jews. Irving has among other things claimed that Hitler didn't know about the cruelties.
By Maria Brit Espinoza
LONDON: (Dagbladet): Gas chambers. Holocaust. Jews. Hitler. This is among the main ingredients when the British historian David Irving is again in the spotlight - this time in a libel case against a publisher which accuses him of being a falsifier of History.
The controversial 62-year-old has sued the American academic Deborah Lipstadt and the publisher Penguin Books for libel. In 1994 Lipstadt published the book "Denying the Holocaust - The Growing Assault on Truth and Memory". In it she describes Irving as a Holocaust denier, a falsifier of history and a Hitler partisan. These allegations have led the controversial historian to take both Lipstadt and her publisher to court for libel. Irving has chosen to represent himself in the case which is in progress in Great Britain just now. Ironically this happens the same week as politicians, historians and other representatives who are working for remembrance, are gathering in Stockholm. They have agreed that the 27th of January shall be a yearly remembrance day of the Holocaust.
One of the main points of issue is the question about how many Jews who were exterminated during the second world war. Once more Irving is in the forefront to refute that six million Jews were brutally murdered by order of Adolf Hitler. - My version questions the theory about what happened in the gas chambers, Irving maintains in the court.
He is of the opinion that he can disprove the documentation of the historians, that half a million Jews were gassed to death in Crematorium Number Two in the Auschwitz camp. Revisionist researchers have made photographs of the inside of the death chamber, and supported by these photographs Irving is of the opinion that he has documented that the so-called gas holes did not exist.
Professor Robert van Pelt, who has been called as a witness by the defence lawyers of Deborah Lipstadt, answers by pointing to the testimony of the survivors, historical photographs, and to the story of a Jew who was forced to work in crematorium number two.
Hitler-expert Irving has one time during the ongoing trial been forced to withdraw his earlier accusation that the killing of Jews by gas vans only has happened in a very small scale. He denies however that he puts forward statements that can't be proven. Irving therefore stressed his subject area to the court: "I am no expert on the Holocaust, I am an expert on Hitler." Irving emphasises the fact that he does not deny whether the Holocaust has happened. He does on the other hand question how many Jews who were killed, and he does not believe that there was a systematic extermination in gas chambers.
Saturday, January 29, 2000