Archive/File: people/i/irving.david/libel.suit/transcripts/day005.11 Last-Modified: 2000/08/01 Q. Then if you go to Lublin and you go east/south/east towards the Russian border you come to a place Kelm or Khelm. A. First of all Treblinka and then Kelm, yes. . P-92 Q. And you go sharp left northwards to Sobibor? A. Yes. Q. Which is just again next to the border. If on the other hand you turn right before you get to Kelm or Khelm and go to Savadar, again, travelling right down to the border on a single line you get to Belsec? A. Yes. Q. Those, Mr Irving, were little villages in the middle of nowhere, and from the 22nd July 1942, if these figures you have given in your book are right, which they are not quite, but the volume, if you multiply, must be hundreds of thousands of Jews transported from Lublin and Warsaw and as I shall show you after the adjournment also from the East; what were those Jews going to do in these three villages on the Russian border? A. The documents before me did not tell me. Q. No, but try and construct in your own mind, as an historian, a convincing explanation. A. There would be any number of convincing explanations, from the most sinister to the most innocent. What is the object of that exercise? It is irrelevant to the issues pleaded here, I shall strongly argue that, it would have been -- MR JUSTICE GRAY: If you want to take that point, can you - - A. -- it would have been irresponsible of me to have speculated in this book, which is already overweight, and . P-93 start adding in my own totally amateurish speculation. MR RAMPTON: No, you mistake me, Mr Irving, it is probably not your fault I, as his Lordship spotted what I have done, I have taken what you have wrote in the book as a stepping stone to my next exercise, which is to show the scale of the operation, and in due course, and I give you fair warning, to demonstrate that anybody who supposes that those hundreds of thousands of Jews were sent to these tiny little villages, what shall we say, in order to restore their health, is either mad or a liar. A. -- Mr Rampton, can I just draw one parallel and say during World War II large numbers of people were sent to Aldershot, which is also a tiny village, but I do not think anybody is alleging there were gas chambers at Aldershot. MR JUSTICE GRAY: I think actually the problem Mr Irving has is we moved on a different phase of the case. We are no longer dealing with allegations of manipulating the historical records which we were when we were going through "Hitler's War" and so on. I think really Mr Rampton is now on the issue of Holocaust denial, where the defence case is that what you have said flies in the face of evidence, but it is not an allegation of manipulating the record. Do you follow what we are on now? A. The evidence he has adduced so far apart from that is from my own books. . P-94 MR JUSTICE GRAY: You objected to the question, I am trying to explain what I perceive at the moment to be its relevance. MR RAMPTON: Your Lordship is absolutely right. A. Mr Rampton knows which way he is going, but of course I have to prepare little minefields all the way round just in case. MR JUSTICE GRAY: It is important you know where he is going and that is why I was trying to help you. Anyway I think the question perhaps needs to be put again, does it, because I am not sure there has been an answer yet. MR RAMPTON: No. I suggest, Mr Irving, that anybody -- any sane, sensible person would deduce from all the evidence, all the available evidence, including, if you like, the shootings in the East which you have accepted, would conclude that these hundreds of thousands of Jews were not being shipped to these tiny little places on the Russian border in Eastern Poland for a benign purpose? A. Mr Rampton, what possible other conclusion could somebody have drawn from reading that page in my book? You are implying that the reader is being invited to draw a different conclusion. Q. No, I am wondering what your position is, you see, Mr Irving, because if it is simply this; I accept that the Germans systematically murdered Jews in vast numbers throughout 1941, accelerating through 1942 1943 and reaching a crescendo in 1944, but I simply do not accept . P-95 there were any gas chambers, then I am not bothered because it does not matter how it is done, the fact is it is a systematic genocide. I want to know whether you accept that; if you do accept it, then we can forget the Professor van Pelt and all his works and everything else beside in relation to Holocaust denial. A. It is my belief that Professor van Pelt's purpose in coming here is prove to us that the gas chambers at Auschwitz existed. Q. He is not. He is coming here to demolish the basis of your Holocaust denial, which is the Leuchter Report, amongst other things? A. But the Leuchter Report relies solely on the gas chambers in Auschwitz. So there seems to be a contradiction in what you said. Q. So if, for example, Franjiseck Piper, the custodian of the museum as he was, at Auschwitz, now proposes a figure of 1.whatever it is, 2 million Jews murdered, I do not mean worked to death or killed by types, murdered in Auschwitz, you are going to accept that, are you? A. No. I have a good reason not to and -- Q. I think in that case we are back to where we are, alas. I thought I saw a chink of daylight, but it is not there. MR JUSTICE GRAY: Right, well, I am not clear in my mind what it is that it is suggested Mr Irving may need to look at over the luncheon adjournment. I have no idea whether it . P-96 is practical to ask him to do that or whether it is not. MR RAMPTON: It is probably not, because they are spread all over the bundles and that would be quite unreasonable because he would have to stay here and I would have spend at any rate 40 minutes giving him a list of documents and that would not be sensible either. I will go as cautiously as I can in the afternoon and I will try and make sure if I do not remember, perhaps your Lordship will, to find out as I ask the questions whether the documents in question is one that he has seen before or not. MR JUSTICE GRAY: Yes. Mr Irving, do you have any problems with that? You are going to be asked about documents which I suspect you know about now, but you may well say in relation to it some of them, well, I see that now and I saw that last summer, but I did not know about it when I was writing "Hitler's War"? A. I am in your Lordship's hand on that matter but where possible I shall state which ones I have seen for the first time. Q. That will not cause you a problem, will it? A. No. Your Lordship will decide later on whether it is relevant or not. MR RAMPTON: I will give your Lordship a copy too. I am not saying it is exhaustive, complete, or comprehensive -- what Miss Rogers and I have done is to produce a . P-97 chronological list of the relevant events. I am not going to start at the beginning of this in my cross- examination, but it does give Mr Irving an idea of what I will be asking about this afternoon. MR JUSTICE GRAY: The topic is what? MR RAMPTON: The topic is the scale of what happened during the summer and early autumn of 1942, from which one can make quite obvious deductions, both about system and knowledge, and also about the intent. MR JUSTICE GRAY: Your case is these are deaths in the gas chambers? MR RAMPTON: Oh, there is no question. MR JUSTICE GRAY: They started operating in November 1941. MR RAMPTON: The first gassings start systematically in December 1941 at Chelmo, I am not going to deal with Chelmo this afternoon, except at the tail end if I get there. There is the three Reinhardt camps; Belsec, Sobibor and Treblinka. They used a different system of gassing. They used a vehicle exhaust -- A. Carbon? Q. -- carbon monoxide. You can also suffocate someone with carbon dioxide, can you not? A. You can suffocate someone by locking them into a closed room. Q. And by hydrogen cyanide at Auschwitz. I do not say there were not some random murders as well by kicking, shooting, . P-98 but the system was gas? MR JUSTICE GRAY: Yes, so Mr Irving is going to get a copy of this, so at any rate he will have some; is that right? MR RAMPTON: Yes. MR JUSTICE GRAY: Mr Irving, that will at any rate give you some foretaste of what is to come this afternoon. MR RAMPTON: I am not saying he must read it. But it might be helpful if he did. MR JUSTICE GRAY: We will adjourn now and resume at 2.00 pm. (Luncheon Adjournment) MR DAVID IRVING, continued. Cross-Examined by MR RAMPTON QC, continued. THE WITNESS: My Lord, before he begins his cross- examination on this, can I make a few general observations on these documents? MR JUSTICE GRAY: What difficulties you are going to have dealing with them, or what? A. I would draw attention to three general observations which I may not have a chance to make when we go through them document by document. MR JUSTICE GRAY: I think that is fair, Mr Rampton. MR RAMPTON: It is what? MR JUSTICE GRAY: Fair that he should do so now before going through these various documents. MR RAMPTON: I did not hear, I was looking for documents. MR JUSTICE GRAY: He going to make three points and I am going . P-99 to allow that to happen? A. General observations, and please interrupt me if you think they are wrong. Obviously, some of them I am familiar with because they come from my own records, some of them I am not. I am unhappy about the elipses, the passages that have been left out. I do hope we will have a chance to see the whole document rather than just these abbreviated versions. MR RAMPTON: Oh, yes, carry on. A. In general, of course, there are much larger elipses which are the material surrounding the documents, if I could put it like that, which are not represented here. MR JUSTICE GRAY: Yes. A. The second observation I would make, my Lord, is this. Bear in mind all along that we are now 55 years down the road since the end of World War Two and we are entitled to expect a better quality of evidence and documentation from the archives than would have been accepted, say, in 1945 or 1946. This is the standard I have always held in front of myself. I say to myself if, even now, there are no better documents than this, therefore we have to be much more careful about how we assess these documents that are put to us. We are no longer entitled to jump across from mountain peak to mountain peak. We have to say that, if there are no other documents, then there is probably a reason why there are no other documents. That is the sum . P-100 total of the observation I wish to make. MR JUSTICE GRAY: Thank you very much. MR RAMPTON: As to that last point, Mr Irving, jumping from mountain peak to mountain peak may sometimes be necessary. Sometimes one can do it because one knows what is lying on the ground in between, and there is nothing the matter with that, is there? A. Yes, from one's general expertise. Q. No, no, the general array of evidence. Mr Irving, never mind that for the moment. It is the fact, is it not, perhaps I am wrong but I do not think so, I think you said it several times in this court, what I might call the residue of German wartime documents that we have got, whether from the bottom fighting units, police units or whatever, right up to the top, is fragmentary? A. I would say on the contrary, it is there in embarrassing superabundance. Q. We have everything, have we? A. There is such a volume of documentation that in the United States they still have not finished cataloguing it. They are still working on it and usually the Germans create multiple copies of the documents that they are dealing with. So, if they had destroyed in one place, they would exist in another. Q. So, unless a document has been deliberately destroyed, which it might well have been, one could expect to find it . P-101 somewhere at some stage in the future near or far? Is that right? A. I would have expected to have found it in the past, frankly, at least one copy of it.
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