Archive/File: people/i/irving.david/libel.suit/transcripts/day010.03 Last-Modified: 2000/07/20 MR IRVING: I only have one more question going to these protruberances on the roof. You say the Germans are basically a very methodical and orderly kind of people when they design their buildings; they are not arty crafty. They do not put a pillar here and a pillar there and "Let us have two over there". They will put them in a straight line down the middle, as, indeed, we know they did in that very building, in the gas chamber, as you call it? A. They are construction pillars we are talking about? Q. Yes, the construction pillars that go down the centre of the room, do they not, with one single reinforced concrete beam down the centre of the room? A. Yes. Q. So these pillars go down the centre of the room. A. Not only Germans. I presume even English architecture and Canadian architecture do the same. Q. I am sure they do. Therefore, the wire mesh columns that you talked about which went up the side of the pillars would also be running down the centre of the roof, would . P-18 they not? A. No, not necessarily. I mean, you can put them either on the left or on the right side of the columns. Q. Can we have another look at that photograph, in particular the one on page 10A? Is it your impression that those four objects are evenly spaced? A. It seems that the second object is slightly more, the second object from the right, seems to be slightly more to the left -- it seems to be at a different line than the first and the third. Q. Very well. Do they appear to you to be running down the centre line of that roof? A. No. Q. Or anywhere near the centre line of that roof? A. I do not know, near. It is very difficult to say in this photograph exactly where they are, but it seems to be in this perspective that the interpretation is that No. 1 and No. 3 maybe would be in line, but certainly No. 2 would not be on the same line as No. 1 and 3, going from the right, and No. 4 it is very difficult to determine exactly what that thing is. Q. Professor van Pelt, have you received just now a copy of this photograph of the underside of the roof? A. Yes. I have it right in front of me. Q. You accept that the underside of that slab we are looking at there in the colour photograph, which is Leichenkeller . P-19 No. 1 of crematorium No. 2, is the room you identified as the room where 500,000 people were gassed to death? A. Yes. Q. Will you accept that we can indeed see a very large amount of the space of that underside of that roof? A. It is very difficult from this photograph to say how much space it is. I have been under the roof and it is a very tight space when you go there, when you actually film it or photograph it, the scale becomes very difficult to determine. What we certainly see here is that, if indeed what we see in the front of this photograph is the bricks, and pieces of bricks, then actually we are looking in a very, very narrow space, because these bricks are this size more or less, so we are talking about a space here, a crawl space right now. Q. Like speediology, is it not, like cave hunting? It would be like going down into a very narrow cave, but all the same the people manage to get down there and take the photograph of that large area of roof space and you can see the lines of the formwork, the wooden lines where the concrete has been moulded into the wet concrete as running between the boards of the formwork? A. Yes. Q. You would expect therefore to find that interrupted in some way if there were these holes in the roof? A. I would like to point out to you that in fact, if we see . P-20 the kind of converging parallel lines of the formwork going from the top of the photo, then passing over at least two big kind of stains, which shows it is not very smooth, and then suddenly that formwork stops because there is actually a diagonal line going more or less from the top left of the picture to the middle of the right hand side, so the form work certainly not very regular, which it is very easy to see on this photo. Q. You do accept, do you not, that the whole of the story of the 500,000 people killed in that chamber rises or falls, rests or falls on the existence of those holes in that roof? A. No. Q. We only have the eyewitness evidence. A. I disagree with that. The whole story rises and falls on the evidence that this room was a gas chamber, which is a slightly different issue. Q. Well, setting that aside for a moment and we will come back to that other evidence in a moment, we still have not heard any other evidence than the eyewitness evidence we have heard about. MR JUSTICE GRAY: Mr Irving, before you leave the photograph, took this photograph? MR IRVING: A number of, shall we say, revisionist researchers have gone down there and taken these photographs. MR JUSTICE GRAY: The professionals say it is revisionist . P-21 research. MR IRVING: It is revisionist research, my Lord, but the point I was about to make was, as your Lordship may apprehend it was, as it is now accepted and has been accepted for some years that the whole story rises and falls on the existence of holes, one would have expected the researchers at the other end of the spectrum to have been down frantically looking for those holes to prove us wrong and they have not. They have not bothered to scrape off the rubble on the top to look for the evidence on top of the holes. They have not bothered to make any kind of survey clearing aside this brick mess underneath, digging deeper in, looking for evidence that those holes exist and frankly, my Lord, I cannot accept the notion that the Nazis, in the last frantic days when we heard yesterday they were in a blue funk, blowing up buildings, taking out the equipment, dismantling everything nut and bolt, that they would have gone round with a bucket of cement filling in the holes of the buildings they were about to dynamite. MR JUSTICE GRAY: That is in the nature of a small speech and obviously you will be making that point later on, but for the time being press on with your questions. A. My Lord, may I respond to this? Can I take the speech as a question? MR JUSTICE GRAY: Let us deal with it slightly more evidentially. You are being asked for the evidence you . P-22 rely on apart from the eyewitnesses. MR IRVING: My Lord ---- MR JUSTICE GRAY: Just pause. You have your shout and I am going to have mine. You have identified the photographs which we have just been looking at, and I think we are going to want to know what other evidence you rely on. Mr Irving, that is not an inconvenient moment to ask that question, is it? MR IRVING: I was just going to ask one supplementary question, which is to your knowledge, Professor, have any investigations of the underside of that roof been made by the Auschwitz museum authorities or the Polish authorities? A. I do not know, my Lord. Q. Do you believe that, if there was any doubt as to the existence of those holes, or if there was any belief that those holes really existed, is it not likely that they would have made the most strenuous attempts to establish that fact? A. I cannot second guess the way the Auschwitz museum or the Polish authorities operate. What I do know is that they do not generally allow their research agenda to be set by revisionists. Q. Very well. A. My Lord, may I introduce a second piece of evidence? MR JUSTICE GRAY: Yes. I would find it helpful, Mr Irving, to . P-23 know what other evidence. You started by asking what other evidence is there. MR IRVING: This is the question I asked earlier on and I did say that we would come back to that. MR JUSTICE GRAY: We have the answer now. MR IRVING: We have the eyewitnesses to whose integrity I shall be coming back later on this morning, but let us hear what else you have? A. The second piece of evidence I would like to introduce is in tab No. 2, and it is circled photo No. 6, which is an air photo taken by Americans in the summer of 1944, which shows, if we look at that --, I do not know exactly how to turn it. If one looks at the photo from the side, we see crematorium (ii) to the right and crematorium 3 to the left. Now, one sees in this photo very clearly jutting out the undressing room. It is actually the entry at the end. It is like a little tab attached to it, and the morgue No. 1, and on morgue No. 1 there are four dots. In the same morgue No. 1 at crematorium 3 one sees those three dots. MR IRVING: You describe them as dots, Professor. Would you like to estimate how long those dots actually are? MR JUSTICE GRAY: The dots are going, as it were, in a line up to the top of the page. Are these the dots there? A. Yes. MR JUSTICE GRAY: I see. . P-24 MR IRVING: If I may point them out on this large colour map, my Lord, they go along this roof here, do they not, which is the alleged gas chamber? Right? A. Yes. Q. OK. A. So that is a second piece of evidence, and I will leave it to this for the movement. I presume Mr Irving will challenge this and I will respond to his challenge. Q. I did ask you a question if you remember. This was, would you estimate on the evidence in front of you approximately how big those dots are? A. I find it very difficult. I do not know exactly how the shadow runs. Q. Is that a shadow or an object? MR RAMPTON: My Lord, can I intervene to be helpful? There is an even clearer photograph, a medium enlargement, on the previous page in the bundle on the right-hand side. MR JUSTICE GRAY: Yes, that is a better photograph. I think that is helpful. MR RAMPTON: It is even clearer. MR JUSTICE GRAY: Is it the same photograph? MR RAMPTON: I do not know. The witness will know that. MR JUSTICE GRAY: More overexposed, as it were, than the other one. A. Yes. It is not exactly. It was not taken from the same thing because you can see near crematorium 3, on the one . P-25 photograph you can see these lines going in, which actually were used for labels, attach labels to it, and when they were published in 1979 or so, and you do not see those lines pointing to crematorium 3, the morgue No. 1 and the fence in the image on page No. 5, printed No. 4. MR JUSTICE GRAY: On page 5 crematorium (ii) is on the left. Correct? A. Yes. Crematorium (ii) is on the left. MR IRVING: Are these the same photographs, Professor? A. No, they do not seem to be. I think they are the same photograph but they come from a different source. Q. I do not think they can be the same photographs Professor, because of course the shadow of the chimney is going in the different direction, unless I am wrong.. A. The shadow of the chimney goes in the same direction. We see the shadow of the chimney going north west in both photos.
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