Archive/File: people/i/irving.david/libel.suit/transcripts/day008.25 Last-Modified: 2000/07/20 MR RAMPTON: Ask his Lordship to read it, but I am not going to read it all out. It is a waste of the court's time and of my vocal chords. If you go please to the first column, five paragraphs down, you write this: "Nobody like to be swindled, still less where considerable sums of money are involved (since 1949 the state of Israel has received over 90 billion deutschemarks in voluntary reparations from West Germany, essentially in atonement for the "gas chambers of Auschwitz)". Gas chambers in plural. Then you go on: "This myth will not die easily." Then you go on about how it was an ingenious plan invented by the PWE during the war. Please go to the next column, second paragraph. I will start at the first paragraph first complete paragraph: . P-31 "Yet I have to admit" -- this is you Mr Irving -- "that it would never have occurred to me to subject the actual fabric of the Auschwitz concentration camp and its "gas chambers" - the holiest shrines of this new 20th century religion - to chemical tests to see if there was any trace of cyanide compounds in the walls. The truly astonishing results are as set out in this report: While significant quantities of cyanide compounds were found in the small delousing facilities of the camp, whether proprietary and lethal compounds were used, as all are agreed, to disinfect the plague ridden clothing of all persons entering these brutal slave labour camps, no significant trace whatsoever was found in the buildings which international opinion - for it is not more than that -- as always labelled as the camps' infamous gas chambers. Nor, as the report's gruesomely expert author makes plain, could the design and construction of those buildings have made their use as mass gas chambers feasible under any circumstances". Then in the next paragraph you write that you have reservations about his methodology, but they are reservations which you quickly, if I may suggest, abandon. You end the paragraph: "The video tapes made simultaneously by the team - which I have studied - provide compelling visual evidence of the scrupulous methods that they use". Then you finish up: "Until the . P-32 end of this tragic century there will always be incorrigible historians, statesmen and publicists, who are content to believe, or have no economically viable alternative but to believe, that the Nazis used "gas chambers" at Auschwitz to kill human beings. But it is now up to them to explain to me as an intelligent and critical student of modern history why there is no significant trace of any cyanide compound in the building which they have always identified as the former gas chambers". A. "The building" is in the singular. Q. Sorry, "in the building which they always identified as the former gas chambers. Forensic chemistry is, I repeat, an exact science. The ball is in their court." Mr Irving, just so that we do not get tangled up in singular or plural gas chambers, please turn quickly to ---- A. You rather skated over the paragraph, of course, in which I drew attention to the flaws in the report. Q. You can draw attention that in your re-examination, Mr Irving. A. Yes, but several days will pass between now and then. Q. I am trying to make progress. MR JUSTICE GRAY: That is a reference to the sentence where you say you prefer to have seen more rigorous methods used in identifying and so on? . P-33 A. Indeed, my Lord. I accept already at this time that the report is flawed. MR RAMPTON: As will you see, Mr Irving, as time goes by, your reservations seem to vanish into thin air. A. Completely the opposite. If you read the correspondence in this very bundle which you put before the court, there are letters between me and Mr Zundel and other people saying that engineers have now drawn attention to the serious flaws in the Leuchter report, and we have to address them. Q. We are going to look at that. The point is this, Mr Irving. A. My reservations did not vanish. Q. What you say privately to people like Mark Weber and Ernst Zundel is quite different from what you say publicly. That is my point and this is where we are going to go today. A. Good. Q. You say publicly that which you know to be untrue about the value of the Leuchter report. A. In the meantime, of course, we have other reports to back up the original conclusions of the Leuchter report. MR JUSTICE GRAY: Do not let us get distracted. You have made your point about the flaws in the methodology. A. Yes. MR RAMPTON: Just so we do not have any more confusion about . P-34 this at all, had you read this version of the Leuchter report when you wrote your introduction? A. No. I had read, of course, the original affidavit, the full length affidavit of which this is a precis. Q. Had you read this version of the Leuchter report before your press conference in June 1989? A. No. Why should I read the abridged version when I had already read the full version length version? Q. Because you are the publisher, Mr Irving. It is a very short document. A. I am sorry to disappoint you, but that does not necessarily follow. I had read the original one inch thick version. Q. Just look on page 15. A. Had I attended in greater detail to this, there are certain things that I would not have tolerated, for example the sideways printing I would not have liked, things like that. Q. Just look at page 15 of this version of the Leuchter report. A. Yes. Q. Which is published by you in the right hand column under the heading "Forensic considerations of HCN cyanide compounds..." in the bottom right hand corner. A. Yes. Q. Look at the second paragraph. . P-35 A. Yes. Q. "31 samples were selectively removed from the alleged gas chambers (plural) at Kramers 1, 2, 3, 4 and 5, a control sample was taken from delousing facility no 1 at Birkenau ". Let us not have any more of this nonsense that, when you talk about the gas chambers at Auschwitz and the value of Mr Leuchter's report, you are talking simply about the reconstructed gas chamber at Auschwitz. A. I never said that. On the contrary, this is exactly what I have denied saying. We are referring to all the buildings which are now claimed to have been gas chambers, from which these samples were taken. Q. If you look at the next paragraph, while we have it open and I shall not have to come back to it, you write in bold, or it is printed in bold under your imprint: "The control sample was removed from any delousing chamber in a location where cyanide was known to have been used and was apparently present as blue staining. The chemical testing of control sample No. 32 showed a cyanide content of 1,050 milligram per kilogram, a very heavy concentration". Perfectly right. MR JUSTICE GRAY: And sample No. 32 is the one taken from the Birkenhau delousing facility. Is that right? MR RAMPTON: Yes. When Professor van Pelt gives evidence, he will make it a good deal clearer but, if your Lordship looks at page 26 of this report, this time the page is on . P-36 the left hand corner, there is a plan of Birkenhau at the bottom of the page. On the right-hand side of that plan is a key and F in the key is delousing facility No. 1, where Mr Leuchter says he found concentration of over 1,000 milligrams per kilogram of some kind of cyanide compound. MR JUSTICE GRAY: That is bottom left. MR RAMPTON: Exactly. That is the building known as BW 5A. It is a brick building and it is in what became the women's part of the camp at Birkenau. It is there to this day. MR JUSTICE GRAY: That is on your case the first gas chamber? MR RAMPTON: No, it is not a gas chamber at all. That is a delousing facility. If your Lordship wants to look at where the gas chambers are, they are K 2 on the left- hand side and K 3, and then in the middle of the page towards the top there is K 4 and K 5. MR JUSTICE GRAY: I have not found K 2 and K 3. MR RAMPTON: On the left, my Lord, you see the compass. MR JUSTICE GRAY: Up there yes, I see. MR RAMPTON: If one goes southeast of the compass, they are side by side, either side of the railway track. MR JUSTICE GRAY: That is all Birkenhau? MR RAMPTON: This is all Birkenhau, as it says in the bottom left hand corner. MR JUSTICE GRAY: Yes, sorry. That was my enquiry. MR RAMPTON: Your Lordship should ignore the little (f) at the . P-37 top of the page. That is not Mr Leuchter's (f). That is an (f) from the original plan and that is a separate delousing facility that was built in 1944, and which was hardly used in the Zyklon bay at all, mostly steam autoclaves as are shown in the front of the report. Then I will read on, if I may, Mr Irving, on page 15: "The conditions and areas from which these samples were taken are identical with those of the controlled sample, cold dark and wet. Only Kramers 4 and 5 differed in the respect that these locations had sunlight, the buildings had been torn down, and sunlight may hasten the destruction of uncomplex cyanide. The cyanide in the mortar and brick becomes ferro-cyanide or Prussian blue pigment, a very stable iron cyonide complex". Are you aware of the errors in that paragraph, Mr Irving? A. I am not a chemical expert. Q. Are you aware of the errors in the description of the state of the buildings? A. No. Q. Then he says the locations from which the analysed samples were removed are set out in table 3. A. If you are going to say there are errors, perhaps you ought to explain to the court what the errors are. Q. No, Mr Irving. If you do not know what they are? . P-38 A. You just claimed there were errors. Q. Yes, there are errors. Van Pelt's report is full of errors identified, for example, crematoria 2 and 3 are open to the skies, the ruins. A. I have very big photographs taken recently of those crematoria which I will show to the court this afternoon, if the court pleases. Q. That is fine, Mr Irving. They are open to the skies. They were blown up in early 1935 just before the Russians got there. They are ruins. The delousing facility BW 5A in the women's camp is a perfectly intact building with a roof on it. A. I beg to differ. The morgue No. 1 of crematorium II may have been blown up but it is intact inasmuch as the roof just pancaked downwards and it is possible to crawl underneath the roof, which is what I believe Mr Leuchter did. Q. What about crematorium III? He took samples there too, did he not? A. Yes. Q. Look what he found. "It is notable that almost all the samples were negative and that the few that were positive were very close to the detection level, one milligram" -- he has misprinted printed this, it is not KP but KG -- "per KG, 6.7 milligrams per K G at Kramer 3, 7.9 milligrams per kilogram at Kramer 1", that is in the old . P-39 camp, Auschwitz I. A. "Close to the detection level" means of no significance, in other words no statistical significance. Q. I thought you were not a scientist? A. You asked me what I know about ferro-cyanides and uncomplex cyanide compounds. I am afraid I am way out of my depth there. Q. You know it is wrong that it is very stable, do you not? A. Ferro-cyanide is so stable that it is used as a dye stuff, Prussian blue. Q. Not if it is exposed to the elements over a period of 40 years. A. We will produce photographs to the court to show just how stable it is. Q. It goes on: "In the absence of any consequential readings at any of the tested locations as compared with the controlled sample reading of 1050 milligrams per kilogram supports the evidence that these facilities were not execution gas chambers. The small quantities detected would indicate that at some point these building were deloused with Zyklon bay as were all the buildings at these facilities. Additionally, the areas of blue staining show a high iron content indicated ferro cyanide no longer hydrogen cyanide." Then in italics in bold, which we have seen before but I will just read it again now, "One would have expected higher cyanide detection in . P-40 the samples taken from the alleged gas chambers because of the greater amount of gas alleged to be utilized there than that found in the controlled samples. Since the contrary is true, one must conclude that these facilities were not execution chambers when coupled with all the other evidence gained on inspection." Leave it there, will you, for the moment? MR JUSTICE GRAY: Can I ask this question because we are plundering into this and I do need to, sort of, understand the big picture. Is this the passage which struck you when you first saw the affidavit which led you to have your change of mind? A. The statistical table, quite simply, the contrast between the enormous quantities in the delousing chamber and the infinitesimally insignificant quantities in the alleged homicidal gas chambers where, allegedly, 500,000 people had been gassed to death. Q. My question is whether it is the text or whether ---- A. It is.
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