Archive/File: people/i/irving.david/libel.suit/transcripts/day016.08 Last-Modified: 2000/07/20 Q. And you can see the word umsiedlung. My Lord, you will see it in line 7 of the first paragraph. Does your Lordship have the document? MR JUSTICE GRAY: I am still making my way there. MR IRVING: In 54 (i), document November 8th, 1942. Actually, there is no dispute about this. The Nazis killed 20,000 Jews in two days in the middle of October 1942. We are just looking at words. MR JUSTICE GRAY: Where is umsiedlung? MR IRVING: Seven lines down my Lord "Umsiedlung der Juden". Then in the following line you have umgesiedelt. So quite clearly it means killing, does it not? A. Yes. Q. So in this man's mouth at this time, in this document, umsiedlung and umgesiedelt means killing? A. Yes. Q. Now would you look at the last line of that paragraph, Professor? This is the only trap I have got prepared for you today. Would you translate into English the last . P-54 sentence please? A. Let me read the whole first. Q. The sentence beginning with the words "Die helfter... A. Yes. They are referring to village which had had contact with the partisans and they say half the inhabitants were shot and the other half umgesiedelt to a neighbouring village. Q. So there you have in the same paragraph two totally different meaning of the word umsiedlung? A. And the context making it fairly clear. Q. Otherwise it would have been no use to us, but it is an illustration, is it not, of the pitfalls we have and how easy it is to adopt what Mr Rampton might call a translation of a word, purely because we do not have the context, the surrounding country side, to tell us what this particular word means? A. There are different meanings to the same word, yes. Q. So, in fact, if somebody accused you of using the word wrongly and perversely and doing it deliberately, and you did not have the surrounding country side to help you, that would be a bit unfair, would it? A. It would depend upon the broader context of the accusation. Q. Would you now please take your expert report? You say your pagination is different from ours? A. I believe they have my court formatted one here as well. . P-55 Q. Go to page 5. A. Yes. Q. First of all, I would ask you to look at your main title, The Evidence For the Implementation of the Final Solution. A. Yes. Q. What do you understand by the phrase "Final Solution"? A. I understand that is a programme to kill the Jews within the Nazi sphere of influence in Europe. Q. Is that not a perverse translation of that phrase Endlosung? A. No. I think it is a translation that becomes very clear, in terms of that stage. The word Endlosung does appear with a less lethal meaning earlier, but I think certainly it comes into this meaning and a number of documents have ---- Q. A less lethal meaning in earlier documents. In other words, that does not necessarily mean killing? It can also mean other final solutions? A. They speak in different ways of an engilticus losung or a total or gazumpt losung. There is a different series of words. By 42 when you get folders, for instance, it will then say this becomes in a sense the accepted word, and I think at that time it also becomes the word that applies to a particular programme, not a general statement that has lots of different meanings. . P-56 Q. Professor Browning, would you accept that in the archives of the German Foreign Office the file title "Endlosung der Judenfrage" goes back to 1936, certainly to 1938? A. There are certainly documents that predate, but the file that I think is actually called that, I would have check and see what the earliest documents on that are. I do not recall at the moment. MR JUSTICE GRAY: It is true, is it not, that Endlosung is used at a time when deportation rather than extermination was policy? A. Yes, at the earlier period there will be a series of words. Sometimes it will be losung, sometimes it will be gazumpt losung, and sometimes total losung and sometimes endlosung. When we get to the period of the Wannsee conference on, it usually is expressed as Endlosung and you do not get nearly the same mix. That is just my impression. I have not done an actual count of how often that occurs, but my impression is that at that point, when it is referring to a specific programme, that is the word that is used almost consistently. MR IRVING: In other words, you should really have called the report, this is no real criticism, not evidence for the implementation of the final solution, but evidence for implementation of a killing programme, or a systematic killing programme? Final Solution could have meant something else? . P-57 A. I think I define what I mean by it in the report, so I would say that it is perfectly fine to use the term that I used. Q. We are not denying the fact that Final Solution does come to mean killing, but it did not always mean that, did it? A. It will appear in earlier documents when it does not mean killings, yes. Q. You are familiar with the event reports, are you not? A. Yes. Q. You did not quote in your report the passage on the Jewish question from the event report No. 81 dated September 12th 1941. I am just going to quote to you three and a half lines from it. It is the operations of Einsatzkommando 6, and the quotation is as follows. It may be familiar to you. "The gratuitous evacuation of hundreds of thousands of Jews", what would "evacuation" there be? A. I have not seen the written ---- Q. "The gratuitous evacuation of hundreds of thousands of Jews may be considered to be an indirect success of the work of the security police. As we hear mostly from the other side of the Urals, the Ural mountains, this is a considerable contribution to the solution of the Jewish question in Europe". This is September 1941 and in your opinion are they are referring there to a geographical evacuation, or something more sinister? A. Not seeing the wider context, I think he is probably . P-58 referring to the escape of Jews to the Soviet side, and that these were Jews that were no longer within German control. Q. "The gratuitous evacuation of hundreds of thousands of Jews may be considered to be an indirect success of the work of the security police", in other words they had fled? MR JUSTICE GRAY: They did not want to get shot? A. They are Jews that do not have to be shot because they have left German custody. MR IRVING: So at this time there was no plan to catch all the Jews you could and kill them? A. What the reports note as they go further East, there are fewer and fewer Jews in the areas the Germans get because so many have fled, and this is in a sense of a way of saying why his body count has not been maintained, that so many of these are have fled beyond the Soviet lines. We can consider this an indirect success. If the programme then was still expulsion, this would not be an indirect success, it would be a direct success. If it is an indirect success, that implies that it is something other than what the direct process is. Q. You said something rather interesting there, the fact that his body count had not been maintained. What did you imply by that? A. Some of the Einsatzgruppen or Einsatzkommandos have a much . P-59 lower count than some of the others? Q. Did this reflect badly on them, do you think? A. In the sense that sometimes the commander says, well, the Jews have fled from this area in the sense he is explaining up the line why there is a discrepancy, or why there is an uneven pattern and some of his officers will not be reporting the same numbers as others. He does not go into detail but I would infer from that that he fears that they may be viewed as not zealous enough in the sense he is covering for them and giving an explanation to Berlin as to why some kommandos have much larger numbers than others. Q. You appreciate what I am getting at here, do you not? The fact that there may have been a tendency to bloat reports or to exaggerate figures, a temptation? A. There certainly is the possibility of that, but at the same time of course that means they know that Berlin wants big numbers, which would indicate that they perfectly realize they are part of that programme, the purpose of which is to get big numbers, that they report exact numbers when everything we know about how the killings were carried out, no one was sitting with a clicker giving a precise body count. So we would not take these as precise numbers, but they are ball park numbers. Q. So, when somebody reports from the front to Himmler or to Berlin that 360,000 Jews have been killed in a three month . P-60 period -- you are familiar with the report I am referring to? A. Yes. Q. And It is a very precise figure, accurate down to the last digit, we should not expect that to be genuinely accurate down to the last digit? A. No, because it is based on reports like Pressertoft, which is a round figure of 20,000. So that is a false precision in the report; that it is a ball park figure of the general area, I think is also the case. Q. They are mind boggling figures, are they not? A. Indeed. Q. When you consider -- I do not know what your equivalent stadium in North California is, but Wembley Stadium here, for example, and you imagine shooting all that number of people in that space of two days, it is quite a daunting task. A. It is a very large figure. Q. How large were the units that carried out these shooting operations? How big was an Einsatzgruppe? A. Einsatzgruppen total about 3,000.
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.