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David Irving: Good morning. It’s just after midnight here. The answer to your question is: It’s a pretext every time. They fish up some kind of pretext. It is my views that they are trying to suppress.

Ron Casey: I want to get to that point; but why did they ban you or why were you, in the terms of today’s newspaper, thrown out of Germany and Canada? What was the legal reason for it?

Irving: In Germany I was convicted in 1993, in January, of having said, at a public meeting, that the gas chamber at the Auschwitz concentration camp which is shown to tourists is, in fact, a fabrication, a fake. The Auschwitz authorities have now admitted that what I said was right: that, in fact, that gas chamber was built by the Polish communists in 1948. But this hasn’t stopped the German Government from fining me 30,000 deutschmarks, which is about 25,000 Australian dollars, for making that remark. Being convicted in Germany means the German Government can ban me from German soil, which is what they did. So it’s a chain reaction.

Ron Casey: What about Canada?

Irving: In Canada it was a very technical business. The Jewish community in Canada objected to the fact that I was about to embark on a lecture tour of Canada in November 1992 and they tried to get the Canadian Government to ban my entry. But the Canadian Government pointed out that I’d been to Canada fifty times before without any trouble and I’d not broken any laws, so they couldn’t really keep me out.

Ron Casey: What about the alleged breaking of laws or your criminal record that’s making your entry to Australia difficult with our immigration department? There’s a court case currently under way regarding that.

Irving: This is the “criminal record”.

Ron Casey: This is the criminal record: That you spoke in Germany in 1993 that there was no death camp.

Irving: That’s right. I expressed the opinion, as a historian of some repute, that what they show the tourists in Auschwitz is a fake. Two years later, the Auschwitz authorities, the people who run the state museum there, have finally come clean and admitted it is a fake. What they show the trourists was built by the Polish Communists in 1948, three years after the war was over. I’m not talking about the rest of the camp. I’m talking about what they show the tourists now.

Ron Casey: Let’s come back to the other point. What about the other details, the other alleged criminal record that you have? Is there any falsification of information that you’ve supplied to immigration departments anywhere?

Irving: No. I am as baffled as you are and probably as the judge in Perth is. I think that every time that I defeat the Australian… – I defeated the Australian Government, of course, a year ago in the Federal Court, and the Australian Government immediately changed the law in order to make it still possible to keep me out. It makes me wonder who is calling the tune in Australia.

Ron Casey: Let me ask you, Mr. Irving, if you came to Australia and you did have a lecture tour, would you be willing to debate your theories regarding the Holocaust with leading people from the Jewish community here in Australia?

Irving: If it could be done peacefully.

Ron Casey: Say a television debate. [text missing?]

Irving: Not quite that. I’ve never written a book or a newspaper article about the Holocaust. I’m an expert on Hitler and the Third Reich, so people ask my opinion about it sometimes. But I’ve never written about it. I’ve got no axe to grind anywhere.

Ron Casey: If you haven’t written about it why do you evoke so much aggression from the Jewish community?

Irving: I think it’s probably because I do speak with some authority. I am very well known as an historian. I’ve written thirty books which are in most of the libraries. I do my work in the archives like any respectable historian should and my views do attract a certain amount of attention. They do hold water and I think this is why they pay attention to me where they don’t pay attention to the extreme neo-Nazi rabble.

Ron Casey: Which of your books is the one that seems to offend most? Is it Hitler’s War?

Irving: I think my Hitler biography has upset them because I did attempt to be as objective as I could about that man and I think it’s the … [text missing]

Ron Casey: You have published a book on Churchill’s War and in that you question his role and his place in history as a great statesman.

Irving: I think there’s no denying the fact that Churchill was a great man, he was a man of considerable presence and character and he was a magnificent speaker and a wonderful writer. I think it was a great tragedy for Britain that he became Prime Minister in 1940, because I think he took the wrong turning with Britain and the British Empire. I think that if he’d taken a different turning in 1940 the world would have been spared a lot of suffering and would also, incidentally, have been spared what is now called the Holocaust.

Ron Casey: What would that turn have been? To sign a peace with Germany?

Irving: If we had accepted the very generous peace offer that the Germans made to us in 1940, as a lot of British historians are now coming to agree – the younger generation of British historians are coming round to agree that David Irving isn’t all that wrong with his [hypothesis] – as you said I published the book in 1987 in Australia – and the others are now gradually coming round to my point of view.

Ron Casey: You said just a moment ago, something that interests me very much. You said it would have avoided the Holocaust.

Irving: Whatever it was, yes.

Ron Casey: No, no, but by your own words, you said there was a Holocaust.

Irving: You’re the one who said I said that.

Ron Casey: I just heard you.

Irving: You said that I denied it. I’ve [never] denied that there was a Holocaust. I [just] don’t like using that word. I don’t like talking about The Holocaust as though there was only one Holocaust, it’s just that I get a bit unhappy about the fact that the Jewish community have tried to make a monopoly of their own suffering. They are the ones who make the money out of misery whereas the Australians who suffered in the Japanese prison camps haven’t made a bent nickel out of their suffering. And I tend to be even-handed, if I can.

Ron Casey: What is your estimate of the number of Jews who died at the hands of Hitler’s regime in the war years? What number – and I don’t like using this word – what number would you concede were killed in concentration camps?

Irving: I think, like any scientist, I’d have to give you a range of figures and I’d have to say a minimum of one million, which is a monstrous crime, and a maximum of about four million, depending on what you mean by killed. If putting people into a concentration camps where they die of barbarity and typhus and epidemics is killing then I would say the four million figure because, undoubtedly, huge numbers did die in the camps in the conditions that were very evident at the end of the war.

Ron Casey: I’m finding this more and more surprising as we go along, Mr. Irving.

Irving: Yes –

Ron Casey: – No, hold on! Because I’ve always been told that you “deny the Holocaust”, you deny the persecution of the Jews to the extent to which the Jewish community would have us believe but here you have just now admitted that you would go to a high figure of four million. That, to me, is a huge number of people and it vindicates the claim of a Holocaust but you say that there could have been up to four million. That doesn’t sound to me as though you’re trying to deny it. You’ve just said four million.

Irving: There’s been a lot of hard lying about me ever since this unfortunate business began. People have tended to do a lot of lying, and they’ve tried to smear my character, and it’s very difficult at a range of 12,000 miles to keep my end up in this particularly ugly campaign and I’m very grateful to you for allowing me to speak, in fact.

Ron Casey: It just surprises me that there is so much antagonism towards your proposed visit to Australia and yet here, on this programme, you’ve just admitted that the Holocaust could have taken four million lives. It’s like your guilty or you’re not guilty. You’re pregnant: You can’t be a little bit pregnant, you’ve got to be pregnant or not pregnant. What you’ve said to me now is that you would as high as four million then all the Jews have said about the Holocaust is true and, indeed, that’s a horrible figure but I’ve never heard it said that David Irving would agree to four million people being killed in the Holocaust. That, to me, for you to say it, is quite amazing.

Irving: It depends on definitions. It depends on what we mean by that ugly word Holocaust and I think that the Jewish community were very clever in inventing that word round about 1970, incidentally. They’ve invented the word but they refuse to define what they mean by it. If you include everybody who died by whatever means, then you could probably go as high as four million but an awful lot of people died in World War Two, about twenty or thirty millions Russians and quite a lot of English people and not a few Australians as well. It was not limited just to the Jewish community.

Ron Casey: All right, good to talk to you, Mr. Irving. Thank you for setting the record straight once again, and this is the bottom line with this interview, if the court rules that you can come to Australia, you are quite willing to appear to debate, to discuss, perhaps, is a better word, your theories regarding the Holocaust, your theories regarding the persecution of the Jews and the deaths of Jews in concentration camps in World War Two, you’d be quite willing to discuss that publicly on television with leaders of the Jewish community.

Irving: You’ve got my word for it.

Ron Casey: All right. Thanks David Irving in London. Thank you for your time, sir.