Archive/File: people/i/irving.david/libel.suit/transcripts/day011.05 Last-Modified: 2000/07/20 Q. What would you infer from that? A. That dental gold was being probably ---- Q. Extracted? A. Not extracted. It would not have been extracted here. The dental gold would have been basically worked at and would have been stored here. Q. Yes, a matter of the utmost secrecy, of course? A. I do not know how secret it was. This whole building was in a completely isolated compound. Q. We will see if that is true later on when I show you some photographs. A. OK. This is by the way, that connection piece right above there connecting the pipes of the side to the other side. We see here the staircases. Q. What is the overall width of that staircase from wall to wall? A. The overall width of the staircase from wall to wall? Now you have me. Q. Roughly about eight feet? A. This thing here? Q. Yes. A. Yes, I presume something like 8 feet. Q. The other end of that space is the elevator, is it not? . P-38 A. Yes, it is the elevator. Q. Or the hoist? A. Yes. The space we talked about, the counterweights -- -- Q. It is not an extra space at all. It is just part of the actual shaft? A. Yes. You see that there is some space left so that the weight can go there. Q. We gained the impression two days ago that there was a separate channel for the counterweight to go down? MR JUSTICE GRAY: I did not. A. I did not want to make that impression. This is the coloured version. What we see here is ofen, furnace. But interesting of course is that there is no ofen in the office. We know from eyewitness testimony that of course the dental gold was melted in the crematorium, so is that the ofen put there in order to melt dental gold? It is a design, nothing more than a design, but certainly they were designing something to that effect. Q. It would be a schmelzofen, would it not? A. That is the official German, schmelzofen, but ofen would be a good shorthand for that. Q. I think it is a very reasonable inference actually. A. But certainly this ofen -- one would expect also to have if everywhere there is no heating. My theory is that, if this would be about heating those particular offices, one . P-39 would first have expected one there, and secondly one there, but this is actually the other way round. Why is there no ofen at that site? Q. That is a very clear inference obviously, which I agree with. A. OK. I am going to show a few copies of this. This is a new declat. Now we see the hand is very different of the declat. In this case we know actually that the person who drew it was Dejaco himself, which means the chief of the drawing room who was an SS lieutenant. It is very unusual, strangely enough. This man almost never makes a drawing himself. Q. How do we know that he was the person who drew this? A. Because it is in the box at the bottom. I am sorry it is not in this picture. In the box at the bottom it always says who draws that, who approves that and then finally the final signing off by Bischoff. Normally what you see is a prisoner number. In this case Dejaco's name is in the first box, and in the second box. He draws it and then he also ultimately red lines it, and then only Bischoff signs off on the third. MR JUSTICE GRAY: Is it dated? A. Yes. It is 19th December 1942. So this is quite late. Now, a number of modifications are in this drawing. It says again it is a declat number 32 and 33, which are basically for the standard basement plan. . P-40 The major thing is it says (German spoken) which means that the entrance to the basement is going to be moved to the side of the street, street side, which means the side also where people enter. Whoever is going to enter this thing. This is basically the railway side. So we see that the stairs have been removed here and the rutsche. I will come back to the rutsche because it is a problem. In crematorium 3 the rutsche is still there, I mean the fragment. There is no fragment of the rutsche right here, but in crematorium 3 you can see it under a collapsed piece of concrete. We see here now a new staircase. This is a staircase which I depicted in the model. We see the new staircase going down right here, going into the first new vestibule which has been carved out of what was before the bureau, the office. Gold arbeiten is still there right at the side. The bureau has been moved to the left where before it was morgue No. 3 the tiny morgue No. 3. Again, there is a Tresor right there. Q. You have not explained what the Tresor is, but it is obvious is it not? It is a safe? A. It is a safe, yes. I thought I had mentioned that before. Then we come into the vestibule. What is very interesting in this drawing is that it very clearly indicates the way the doors are hung. They still open inwards into morgue No. 1, but they have been rehung in . P-41 relationship to the original design to open outwards. From morgue No. 2 they go inwards and from morgue No. 1 they open outside. The question, of course, is why would these doors have been rehung? Why was the design changed? MR IRVING: May I have a closer look at that, please? A. Of course. MR JUSTICE GRAY: Go as close as you like. Just walk up to it if you can. Q. Which are the doors you are referring to? A. The doors, if you just move a little, these are the doors I am referring to. Those doors. MR IRVING: Can I make a comment on them, please. MR JUSTICE GRAY: Ask a question. MR IRVING: Can you see any difference in the way that the door jamb, the concrete has been drawn there, from the way it was previously drawn? Previously it was flush, if I can put it like that, and now it has been rebated inwards to provide a secure flange, so to speak? A. Yes. We can look at the original, I mean, there is also a photograph, I am quite happy to go back to the original because we -- the nice thing about these things is you can just go -- here we have the same kinds of jambs. Q. But there is no ---- A. At the inside, but not, but that this side it has been taken out there in the drawing. . P-42 Q. On the inside, yes, but I am looking at the other side of that. A. This one? Q. Yes. If you look at the one you just showed us previously, there is like an L shaped step in the frame as though something is going to fit into it, a tight fit? A. Yes, but at that moment when we still assume the door is opening inwards, that same thing, that same tight fit is right there. Q. But without that L shaped step? A. That ---- Q. The section ---- A. --- original of this. Q. Well, I did look at it quite closely. A. One sees it right there. This, of course, is very small. We have drawn, I think, these drawings scale 1:200. So we are talking here about, basically what a pen does over 2 or 3 millimetres -- less because this is very much enlarged. Q. But there is not the same L shaped step shape flange? A. We also have a different hand drawing now. Q. Can I ask you a question now? Would this not be appropriate if you were going to put an air raid door in there which might have to withstand a blast pressure? A. I do not think this is an air raid door. I do not think that, I mean, if you want to raise the issue if the morgue . P-43 could have been an air raid shelter, I am quite happy to give a presentation on that. MR JUSTICE GRAY: Shall we hive it off? I think in a way it is a separate issue. MR IRVING: It is, but I wanted to draw attention while the picture was on there, my Lord. MR JUSTICE GRAY: I understand. A. So the importance of this door, and that is the major element, it is a question of why would this design have been hung. The answer, I think, is obvious, that this has to do with the transformation now of this building into a gas -- of morgue No. 1 into a gas chamber; and then if that, when the gassing takes place, you do not want to be able and you have, as Mr Irving has said, you have packed, jammed people inside the space, and at least we know from the descriptions with the gas vans that it was a run towards the door when the gas came in, and that from again eyewitness testimony that people tried to get out, and they died right in front of the door. If the door would have hung differently and would have opened inwards, you would not have been able to enter the basement any more. So again we talk about convergence of evidence. If you just take this drawing alone and say, "Is this a proof that morgue No. 1 became a gas chamber?" No. But if you take the drawing in relationship to the original designs and which we can follow in the original sketch, . P-44 and any original first official blueprint where the doors are hung exactly the opposite way, and we then at a certain moment are also going to cross-reference this to eyewitness testimony, then, of course, it makes perfect sense. MR JUSTICE GRAY: Is there any reason of convenience why one might have adapted the design as to the doors opening outwards rather than inwards? A. In fact, a convenience is actually inconvenient because one of the problems the door has now is that if it opens out like that, it starts actually interfering in some way with the elevator. Also, the second reason why, when I had assumed when I reconstructed the change of the door from two panels to one panel, that probably one would not have used the second panel anyway because it starts to actually be in the way of the route towards the elevator when one gets a mass transport of corpses, so that the panel which would have been closed in order to use that gas door of one metre wide by 192 centimetres high, that this one would have been closed and this one would have been open. So you have only one panel which can be really securely locked with a number of locks into this one right here, instead of having the whole situation going to depend on, basically, the strength of the bar going up and down into the floor and the ceiling. . P-45 MR IRVING: Is that the only change made on this deck plan? A. There are two other changes, I already indicated. A second important change is that stair going down. Now, why would the -- why was the slide in this original entrance removed and why was the stairs moved to the other side?
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