MR JUSTICE GRAY: Yes. We do not want to overdo this point. You put that the dictionary meaning of “transport” includes as one of the meanings “transportation” and you say that has been the Cassell’s Dictionary definition since time immemorial. The witness says he wants to look at the relevant one, which would be the one from the1930s, and I think that is a fair request.
MR IRVING: Can I just show him the typed extract I made last night?
MR JUSTICE GRAY: If it relates to the contemporary Cassell’s Dictionary, yes.
MR IRVING: In that case I will just put to the witness this 1935 dictionary.
MR JUSTICE GRAY: Is it Cassell’s?
MR IRVING: No. This is now a different one. This is a Butler &Tanner. It is a Routledge Dictionary and unfortunately it is more abbreviated. It does not give the sense that I was looking for in such detail. The point I was trying to make, my Lord, is that it refers to “transportation” rather than “a transport” in the sense of a train.
MR JUSTICE GRAY: I know what the point is.
[Professor Richard John Evans]: Here, of course, it does not.
MR IRVING: It just says “transport” which is ambiguous.
[Professor Richard John Evans]: “Transport conveyance”, transport or conveyance.
[Mr Irving]: Yes.
[Professor Richard John Evans]: Those are the primary meanings.
[Mr Irving]: I will have to put it to you to in an “if” form, then, and on Monday bring the photocopy of the original. Professor Evans, if the 1935 or if the contemporary wartime edition of the Cassell’s Dictionary says that the meaning of “transport” in English is in this order of priority, “transport, transportation, carriage, conveyance, transfer and shipment”, is it unreasonable to assume, in the absence of any contextual information, that this is referring to a transportation, rather than to a single train load?
[Professor Richard John Evans]: It is unreasonable, I think, yes, from the context here. “Judentransport aus Berlin. Keine Liquidierung” quite
clearly means “the Jew transport from Berlin, no liquidation”. I think it is likely that, had it said, had they meant there should be no liquidation of any transport, train loads of Jews from Berlin, then it would have said something, they would have said so in the plural, transporte, or he would have put down something like people, emigrants, or people who were deported, or whatever. Let us try and remember what it is that you
17 actually wrote in Hitler’s War in 1977.
[Mr Irving]: I am trying to narrow this down to a simple matter.
[Professor Richard John Evans]: Which is that Himmler was summoned to the Wolf’s Lair for a secret conference with Hitler, I am quoting from your
book here, at which the fate of Berlin’s Jews was clearly raised. “At 1.30 pm Hitler was obliged to telephone from Hitler’s bunker to Heydrich, the explicit order that Jews were not to be liquidated”. That is what you said in your book. You did not mention Berlin there at all.
[Mr Irving]: Can we keep to the language problem, which is to say, that if it was what you said—-
[Professor Richard John Evans]: I am sure you would like to, Mr Irving.
[Mr Irving]: — the Jew transport, would it not be “der Judentransport aus Berlin”?
[Professor Richard John Evans]: No, because his telephone log, as you know perfectly well, is in a very abbreviated form that generally leaves out the definite article.
[Mr Irving]: Leaves out the context, is that right?
[Professor Richard John Evans]: No leaves out the definite article, is what I said. You can go two lines up, “Verhaftung Dr Jekelius”. It does not say “Die Verhaftung Dr Jekelius”.
[Mr Irving]: What you are saying, this is your expert evidence, is that “Judentransport” could under no circumstances be translated as “transportation of Jews from Berlin”?
[Professor Richard John Evans]: That is not quite what I am saying.
[Mr Irving]: Will you accept that it can?
[Professor Richard John Evans]: Just let me answer.
[Mr Irving]: Just say yes or no. Will you accept that it can?
[Professor Richard John Evans]: No, I am not going to say yes or no, I am going to give you a full answer.
[Mr Irving]: That is what I am trying to avoid, because we really are running out of time.
[Professor Richard John Evans]: I know you are trying to avoid it, Mr Irving.
[Mr Irving]: We are familiar with your full answers, unfortunately.
[Professor Richard John Evans]: I did swear to tell the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth.
MR JUSTICE GRAY: It will not be very long, this answer, I do not think.
[Professor Richard John Evans]: It says “Judentransport aus Berlin”. That is the context. Jew transport from Berlin. It is clear it means a single train load of Jews, “Keine Liquidierung”.
[Mr Justice Gray]: Are you saying it is clear to because you are now familiar from the context of all the other documents we know, as indeed I am also now, that that is the correct translation. But my question to you is, if you are faced just with that one line in a document that you read back in 1970, knowing none of the surrounding documentation, right, that it would be totally improper and perverse to translate that as “transportation of Jews from Berlin”, which was the sense that I gave?
[Professor Richard John Evans]: Yes. That is what I am saying. And particularly perverse to say that it is an explicit order which Hitler has told Himmler to transmit that Jews were not to be liquidated. No mention of Berlin at all there, Mr Irving. That is a clear falsification of this document.
MR IRVING: Avoiding your renewed smoke screen which you are laying across the question I put —-
MR JUSTICE GRAY: I am not going to have you saying that. The criticism is that you misrepresented this document in your book.
MR IRVING: That is a separate criticism, my Lord, with
respect.
MR JUSTICE GRAY: On the contrary, it is the whole point of the criticism. It would not be made unless you had misrepresented, as the Defendants say you did, this document. We not be looking at this document at all.
MR IRVING: In that case I shall have to ask further questions on the question of the meaning of the word, which I thought I had established superabundantly to the satisfaction of the court and everybody present, that a primary meaning of the word is transportation and, when
one has no other document to go by, and the court has not been shown that at that time I had any other document to go by —-
MR JUSTICE GRAY: I know what your case is, Mr Irving. I really do, and I do not think you need spend any longer on the pure linguistics.
MR IRVING: In that case I shall move on.
