The right-wing historian, Mr David Irving, said yesterday he expects to be arrested in Britain on foot of a German extradition warrant concerning comments he made in 1990 claiming the gas chambers at Auschwitz were built by Polish communists after the second World War.
The claim was made on the third day of a libel action at the High Court in London. The historian is suing the US academic, Prof Deborah Lipstadt, and Penguin Books over allegations in her book Denying the Holocaust: The Growing Assault on Truth and Memory that he is a "Holocaust denier" who deliberately mistranslates and manipulates historical documents to cast Hitler in a positive light.
The introduction of a press clipping from yesterday's edition of Stuttgart Zeitung, in which the extradition request was described, surprised the court. Mr Richard Rampton QC, representing Prof Lipstadt and Penguin, insisted the article had not been inspired by any intervention by the defendants.
But Mr Irving said he wished to draw Mr Justice Gray's attention to the clipping in the event that "this end of the bench should suddenly be empty", in the event of his arrest. He said the Home Office was in receipt of the warrant and he "wouldn't at all be surprised" if the Home Secretary, Mr Jack Straw, ordered that it should be acted upon.
On the second day of cross-examination by Mr Rampton, the historian denied deliberately mistranslating a document used in his books Hitler's War and Goebbels: Mastermind of the Third Reich, in order to portray Hitler as "merciful".
Mr Irving insisted in both books that a document from November 1941 showed there was "incontrovertible evidence" that Hitler had ordered there should be no liquidation of the Jews.
However, the German translation of the reported order from Hitler did not prohibit the liquidation of Jews generally, Mr Rampton argued, but referred to a particular "Jew transport from Berlin" of about 1,000 Jews to Riga, Latvia. "You inflated it from one trainload to a general ruling against the liquidation of Jews," Mr Rampton suggested.
After circular arguments about the position of a full stop in the document, Mr Irving eventually conceded: "I interpreted that line as being Jews [in general]. We now know it was probably a reference to that particular transport of Jews." However, Mr Irving insisted there was not a "shred of evidence" of deliberate mistranslation and in subsequent editions of his books he had inserted the "narrower interpretation" of the translation.
Moving on to the diary entries of a Reich General Governor based in east Poland, Mr Rampton said that during a visit to Berlin in 1941 the general heard Hitler deliver a speech in which he referred to the "annihilation of the Jews". The governor later wrote that he had been told in Berlin "why all this trouble [with the Jews]. . . we've got no use for them. . . liquidate them yourselves."
Mr Rampton said this reference was evidence that the Berlin authorities, and possibly even Hitler, had told the general to liquidate a fresh transport of European and Polish Jews. It was not, as Mr Irving would have it, the general telling Berlin to stop "dumping" Jews in Poland for him to deal with.
But another entry in the general's diary "completely demolishes" that theory and Mr Irving's argument that the Jews were not gassed by the Nazis, Mr Rampton said. He quoted the passage: "For us the Jews are also particularly useless. . . We have approximately 3.5 million Jews. We can't shoot them. We can't poison them. But we have to be able to do something which will one way or another lead to their successful annihilation. . . "
The case continues on Monday.