Archive/File: people/i/irving.david/libel.suit/transcripts/day010.20 Last-Modified: 2000/07/20 Q. No. This is not a trap. We are trying to educate the court. I have to admit that I have learned a lot out of . P-169 Neufert as I went along as well. But I think I have made the point that the provision of heating in a mortuary is a requirement, at least by the guidelines which were standard in all German architects' offices at that time, and no special significance can be read into the fact that they were trying to it in a cost effective way by using heat from the incinerators. A. If that were to be the case, the heating installation would have been included in the original design of the crematorium. It is not. What actually it says here is why, why do you want to be able to keep the temperature of the morgue in that range of 2 to 12 degrees? It is because the corpses still have to be viewed by the people who are basically the family members. If we look at the diagram, I am very sorry, my Lord. I have a diagram and you do not, but there is actually a diagram which shows that there is a Leichenshauraum, which means a room to show or to look at the corpse. So this is a very usual thing in a crematorium. The body is stored. It happened to us very recently in my family. You go and before the final cremation you still have an opportunity to look at the corpse. You do not want to look at the corpse where ultimately frost has destroyed the corpse. This is the purpose for that particular thing. It has nothing to do with the mechanics or the physics of incineration. It has to do with a certain sense of decorum. . P-170 Q. The fact remains, does it not, that the guidelines say mortuaries have to be warmed and they are going to have the local building inspector from Kattowitz or Cracow coming round and he is going to say, ' Oy, you have not got heating in here, cannot switch on until you have the heating fixed"? A. The fact of the matter, my Lord, is that these are merely guidelines. If the guidelines in Neufert had been followed by the Auschwitz central building office, they would have included the heating for the heating system and also probably the cooling system for the morgue from the beginning in the design. This has not been done. For a year and a half this design has been developed without any ability whatsoever to bring any heat in that morgue so it is absolutely, I think, nonsense to suggest that, with this Neufert in mind, the Auschwitz architects were designing their morgues. MR JUSTICE GRAY: By March 1943 how far advanced was the construction of crematoria (ii) and (iii)? A. The building was finished and the design started in October 1941. MR IRVING: They could not switch it on because they had not made provision for the heating at this point. A. They had forgotten it, but the inspector in Kattowitz obviously had also overlooked this one issue. Q. But the burden of the letter of course says this is a very . P-171 cost effective way of doing the heating. It is not saying you have forgotten the heating, it is saying let's do it by this way because that is going to save the Reich money or fuel or whatever. A. Please, Mr Irving, show me any other letter. I have never seen one. I am under oath, I understand, here. I have never seen any other letter talking about bringing any heating, any hot air, or any other means of heating into the morgue. Q. But fact remains that mortuaries have to be warmed, so our common sense for once is wrong. The audience is wrong in this particular question. The book gets it right. The book says it has to be kept in a range of temperatures between 2 degrees and 12 degrees, either by heating or by cooling. MR JUSTICE GRAY: What about crematoria 4 and 5? Was there any heating provided for that? A. There were stoves in crematoria 4 and 5. Q. That was how they heated them? A. Yes, no cooling installation. MR IRVING: Would you now turn to page 255, please? We have now left the heating element. A. Sorry, my Lord, I would like to come back to this answer because I have made a mistake. The "them" you refer to were probably morgues. I refer to the gas chambers of crematoria 4 and 5. . P-172 MR JUSTICE GRAY: I was referring to the morgues or the mortuaries, yes. Did they have any heating? A. There was a mortuary in crematoria 4 and 5 and they did not have any heating. MR IRVING: Will you now turn to page 255 of the architects guidelines? A. Yes. Q. This shows halfway down on the right things that are needed for air raid shelters. Does this show a door opening outwards? Can you see the metal gas tight door with the typical heavy handles? A. Can you refer me to the particular passage? Q. Page 255, on the page called Luftshutz air raid protection ARP, and it has various sketched layouts of air raid shelters and various air raid protection installations. I am sorry, my Lord, I should have provided you with a copy. MR JUSTICE GRAY: I am following. MR IRVING: Do you agree that that shows a steel door or a door of some heavy substance designed to open outwards with handles on the outside? A. I do not see any steel door. That is the problem. Oh there is a door. Q. Yes. Two of them? A. Yes. That is one. Q. (German spoken - document not provided) 4104. They . P-173 actually had a German standard, the equivalent of British standard, what a standard gas tight door looked like. I will make an enlargement of this and provide it to your Lordship because it is exactly like the doors that I believe the other side will produce pictures of. A. OK. It is unclear to see what is in and out in this drawing. To be very honest, if this door is hung on the inside -- again it is a very technical matter and I am uncomfortable discussing this without you actually seeing the picture. MR RAMPTON: I am also a bit uncomfortable trying to follow a cross-examination when I do not have the document. MR JUSTICE GRAY: I know, but let us try and do the best we can? A. Shall I draw what actually the picture shows and then I think we have a very quick answer. MR JUSTICE GRAY: You are saying that the drawing is equivocal about whether it opens inwards or outwards? A. No. It shows that this door actually turns towards the inside and there is a very easy way to substantiate that. MR IRVING: Do you wish to explain why. MR JUSTICE GRAY: Yes. If you want to, yes, do. A. The door is on the inside of the wall, so there is a wall and the question is where would the door be hung. I am trying to think this through. MR JUSTICE GRAY: I cannot see that that would affect which way . P-174 it opened, but maybe I am missing something. A. May I draw it? MR JUSTICE GRAY: Yes, of course. A. I have in my bag a lot of air raid shelter designs in Auschwitz. So there is a wall right here. There is a wall right there, and then the door is hung sitting right here, and the door is like that. The implication of course is that the door opens like that. MR IRVING: It is not going to open any other way. A. No. Q. It is going to come up against---- A. I just want to say that I am talking here, just trying to think out loud. I do not have anything more right now about it. MR JUSTICE GRAY: I think I know what you are going to say next. A. I have not seen this door and I have not inspected this particular shelter, but if indeed the door is fastened right here and right there, it would make sense to me to think that, if the hinges are right there, the hinges would be on the inside, not on the outside because, if they are on the outside, it would be easy to blast them off. That is all I can say right now if you want to determine what is inside and outside. I do not want to make any more specific statements on this. But we can look at documentation on doors and air raid shelter design . P-175 in Auschwitz and I am happy to do that to the court. MR IRVING: That is the actual copy. I have marked it with an arrow, my Lord. You will see the door rests on rims on the outside of the wall. MR JUSTICE GRAY: Yes, I see. MR IRVING: I did alert the defence to the fact that I was going to take an interest in Neufert and I enquired whether Professor van Pelt had a copy of Neufert. I am sorry, I did not alert them to the specific matters that I was going to raise. Finally, is there anything further you wish to say on the subject? A. No. I think it is very difficult to come to any conclusion right now on the basis of that drawing. Q. But common sense suggests that, if you have 4,000 pound bombs blasting outside a building, you do not want a door that is going to come flying open into your face? A. I do not know. It is common sense that you do not want, if a building collapses and collapses over the air raid shelter, you do not want all the brick and rubble to be right in front of the door so you can never open the door. So you are inside there without able to leave. Q. Can I now in general ask you by what means the corpses were taken out of the gas chamber upstairs to the level where the furnaces were? A. In crematorium (ii)? Q. In crematorium (ii) I am only interested in crematorium . P-176 (ii). A. I just have to redirect my mind. Q. I am only interested in crematorium (ii) because that is where you said this was where the 500,000 people were killed. You called this the centre of the atrocity. A. They were brought up by elevator. Q. They were carried up by elevator. It is difficult to say where it was, I suppose, is it not? A. No it is actually quite easy. The elevator is right here. Actually the pit is still there. Q. The pit is still there? Do you know anything about the dimensions of the elevator shaft? A. It would be a little over, I would say, 2 metres 30, one side, maybe 1 metre 40, 50 in the other. Q. In our language how many feet is that? Six or seven feet? A. Yes, eight feet by five feet, something like that. Q. Yes. Well 2 metres 30 is six feet, about seven feet. A. We can check it on the blueprints, so why do we not do that? Q. This is quite an important point, my Lord. This is the bottleneck. We are looking at the bottleneck now. A. We have actually the dimensions 2 metres 70 by 1 metre 43, so 2 metres 70. In the blueprints this is document 3B, tab 1, of the documents, it says in the enlargement to the right. So 143 would be 4 feet, 4 feet 10 inches and 2 metres 70 would be ---- . P-177 Q. Eight feet? A. No, it would be 9 feet, 30 centimetres per foot. Q. So, what, it is about as big as one of these table tops, is it, the shaft? A. No, 9 feet is longer than this table, and certainly it is much wider. This is less than a metre. Q. I am just trying to get an idea. Of course, that is not the area of the floor space in elevator itself, is it? A. The elevator, we can go back to the blueprint. Q. Yes. A. It says -- the dimension is taken, the width is taken on the basis of the actual width of the platform. In the length I have to admit, at least in the design, the actual platform would have been slightly less than 2 metres 70. Q. Because of course you have got to have room for the counter weight to go up and down? A. No, the counter weight, there is a space for the counter weight right -- it is spared out to the side towards morgue No. 1. Q. Although it is not in any of these designs, in the Neufert designs the counter weight comes down inside the shaft? A. Are we referring to the plans of the crematorium or to Neufert? Q. You are saying there was an extra shaft to the counter weight? A. There is quite a substantial space, I would say probably . P-178 one foot and a half, at the side of the platforms through which the counter weight could go. Q. Very well. So what was put into this? It was like a hospital lift, was it, in which bodies put or how would it normally be designed if this operating as a mortuary, what kind of insulation? Would a gurney or stretcher be wheeled in there carrying the bodies if it was a normal mortuary? A. I have no idea how lifts in normal mortuaries are. The information says "auf Zug", I presume that in this case this was designed for this building. This building obviously deals with mass mortality one way or another. So I think it is very unlikely that a gurney would have been wheeled into this thing, because I would not know why you would bring out a gurney into this morgue, and then load it on a gurney, put the gurney in the elevator and then immediately burn the body upstairs in a mass incineration facility. Q. First of all, we will start with the normal mortuary design because this was presumably a standard mortuary design which has been adapted for special conditions? A. No, Mr Irving, this is standard mortuary design. This is a rather unique mortuary design, probably unique in the world, in the history, no, it is not a standard. Q. But it was designed as a mortuary? A. Sorry, I stated it wrongly. You said "mortuary" . P-179 I meant ---- Q. The entire building was ---- A. --- crematorium.
Home ·
Site Map ·
What's New? ·
Search
Nizkor
© The Nizkor Project, 1991-2012
This site is intended for educational purposes to teach about the Holocaust and
to combat hatred.
Any statements or excerpts found on this site are for educational purposes only.
As part of these educational purposes, Nizkor may
include on this website materials, such as excerpts from the writings of racists and antisemites. Far from approving these writings, Nizkor condemns them and
provides them so that its readers can learn the nature and extent of hate and antisemitic discourse. Nizkor urges the readers of these pages to condemn racist
and hate speech in all of its forms and manifestations.