Archive/File: people/i/irving.david/libel.suit/transcripts/day021.04 Last-Modified: 2000/07/24 MR JUSTICE GRAY: If you had been your researcher and you had seen the kurz Bezeichnung, which, if any, of those would you have gone to if you were looking for Bruckner's account of these events? A. It does not say the testimony of Wilhelm Bruckner, which is the tile the Mr Irving gives. There is nothing in . P-28 there indicating that there is anything about the 1938 Reichskristallnacht. Q. So you say the answer is really none of them suggests that it would have any bearing? A. No. In the limited time available, it might be interesting to see his views on religion, or his essay on Adolf Hitler, but there is nothing there to indicate that he has a testimony about 1938. But there is an indication in there of his testimony about other specific events, the Hanfstaengel the Rowan Putsch 1934. Given the fact that those specific references are in there, one would expect there to be a specific reference in there to his testimony about 1938. MR JUSTICE GRAY: One more question and then I will keep quiet. Who compiles the kurz Bezeichnung? A. It is usually archivists, my Lord. Q. It would not have been Mr Irving? MR IRVING: No, my Lord. In fact, this particular cover sheet was compiled by me. I gave 500 collection of documents to this institute and for each one there was this sheet in the front of each file. The Bruckner file is about quarter of an inch thick. It would have taken possibly five minutes to flip through and find the appropriate passage. MR JUSTICE GRAY: We may need to hear from the person who actually searched the archive. Yes. . P-29 MR IRVING: The point I am making, my Lord, is that I am accused of not having had proper sources for the events of that night. The sources were there, they were referenced in my Goebbels biography in a manner in which any competent researcher would have found the file in a matter of minutes. A. I cannot agree with that, Mr Irving. Q. Can you tell the court now -- I am moving on to another personality -- who Julius Schaub was? A. Yes. He was sort of Hitler's ---- Q. Factotum? A. Yes, side kick. It is difficult to find a precise way of describing him. He was a very close aid of Hitler's for very many years. Q. An amanuensis, one of the old guard, with him in the 1923 Putsch? A. Yes. He joined the party very early on in 1921 or 22, personal adjutant from the mid 20s on, and again he was given a senior office in the SS and possessed various decorations and so on. Q. Look at page 257 of your report, please, where we are dealing with the Schaub as a source, the source which Irving gives for Schaub's claims is: Schaub's unpublished memoirs in the author's collection in the Institute of History in Munich, file ED.100/202. ED.100 is the Irving collection, is that right? . P-30 A. I think that is true, yes. Q. Oblique stroke 202. They have now changed the reference, you say, to 203. Can I draw your attention to page 26 of the little bundle I gave you? A. Indeed, yes. Q. This I think will put your Lordship's mined at rest. This is the reason I am going through these documents. Is that a translation of a passage from these Julius Schaub papers? A. I find myself in some difficulty here. I do not know, is the answer. MR JUSTICE GRAY: You made this translation, Mr Irving, did you? MR IRVING: I made it last night, my Lord, yes. MR JUSTICE GRAY: You have access then to Julius Schaub's papers? I thought they were in the archive in Munich. MR IRVING: I am pretty certain that this comes from -- yes, it comes from the discovery. There was one page in the discovery from these papers I think. Off of the top of my head I have to say that, but this is a genuine translation. A. You have not supplied the original. Q. It is in H 5? MR RAMPTON: I do not know what particular document Mr Irving is talking about or which it is that he has translated. There is a piece about Goebbels apparently headed Schaub . P-31 Nachlass, whatever that means, at page 4 of tab 5 of the file L2, the Reichskristallnacht. MR IRVING: Yes, my Lord, that is where it comes from. MR RAMPTON: Which is the reference given by Professor Evans at page 257. MR IRVING: It was quite late when I did this translation last night. MR JUSTICE GRAY: I am sure. I am not forgetting that side of things. A. Yes, I have it. MR RAMPTON: Page 4 of tab 5 my Lord. It is leaded IfZ ED 100/203. A. Yes. MR IRVING: If I had provided just the German to your Lordship, you would have rightly reprimanded me. MR JUSTICE GRAY: The witness asked to see the German, which is fair enough. I am very happy with the translation. MR IRVING: If the witness wishes to challenge the translation, then of course he may. "Without doubt Goebbels had the biggest influence on AH"? A. Can you direct me to where exactly it is? MR RAMPTON: Page 5, last paragraph. MR IRVING: I have translated only the passage dealing with the events of that night. "Without doubt Goebbels had the biggest influence on AH, far more so than Bormann, he invented the concept Fuhrer for AH and he hammered the . P-32 Fuhrer principle into the people. Goebbels always discussed his propaganda with Hitler, even during the war". The part I am relying on is a sentence or two later: "It is a certainty that Goebbels ordained the Reichskristallnacht Sunday". A. You skipped a bit. All right, yes. Q. "It is a certainty that Goebbels ordained the Reichskristallnacht Sunday with the SA command". Of course it was not a Sunday, was it? It was another day of the week. Then comes no doubt Schaub's own particular hobby horse. He says, "The SS was innocent of this, apart from a few lesser officers. When AH learned on that Sunday of the anti-Semitic outrages, he was furious with Goebbels. He made a frightful scene with Goebbels and told him that this kind of propaganda was just damaging". A. Yes. Q. Now, this is a source that you would disqualify for some reason, or downgrade? A. Yes. Q. Would you disqualify it because of its content, because it does not agree with your own views, or because of something about Schaub, or something about the document? A. It is a number of different things. I think he is just making this up, basically. Q. You think he is just making it up? . P-33 A. Indeed, yes. There is an enormous amount of other evidence, contemporary evidence, and not much later evidence such as this, that most of what he says here is not true, and that I go into in great length in my report. Q. First of all, you do accept that this document is genuine, that this is a collection of papers given to me by the son of Schaub Mr Roland Schaub, containing an odd collection of manuscripts and notes, articles, carbon copies and the like? A. Indeed. I describe it on footnote 54 of my page 257. Q. You have actually had a look at the heap of papers, have you? A. Yes. It is cited in the report on page 257. Q. Yes, but the point I am looking at is of course that here we have a man who was on Adolf Hitler's private staff, his chief adjutant, and factotum, who says he was an eyewitness, or he reports to us that, when Hitler learned of the outrages, he was furious with Goebbels, he made a frightful scene. Should I have disregarded that evidence completely? A. No. You weigh it up against other evidence and against Schaub's possible motives in writing this, and the fact that, as you say repeatedly, eyewitness testimony after the war is less reliable than contemporary testimony. This is another example of your double standards, Mr Irving. . P-34 Q. Double standards? A. Yes. You are determined to give credence to this report but you dismiss all reports of victims of the Holocaust as being fabrications due to mass hysteria, as we heard yesterday. Q. Which of us has the double standard? The person who pretends that this report and the contents that it contains should be in some way played down for no reason other than you do not like it? You cannot give a real reason why. You cannot say Schaub was a congenital liar? A. You have already said that he was wrong to say that it was on a Sunday, Mr Irving. Q. He got the wrong day of the week but this is a mistake any of us can make. No doubt it stuck in his mind. A. Not if he is an utterly reliable eyewitness who has total recall of what went on. That alone I think should alert one to the fact that his memory is not particularly good. Then you yourself went on to discredit, or cast doubt over his statement that the SS was completely without any guilt. No doubt that is connected with the fact that Schaub himself was a senior officer in the SS. This is an extremely self serving document. One has to regard it with the deepest suspicion and compare it with other documents, preferably contemporary ones dealing with the same events. Q. Do we have any contemporary records of what went on in . P-35 Adolf Hitler's private residence, any contemporary records whatsoever of went on in his private residence? A. Not directly, no. Q. So we are really then on our uppers, are we not? A. We are comparing a lost of post war reminiscences and we have to be very careful in treading through this particular minefield of documents. Q. So ideally we want to have more than just one source that says the same thing? A. Whole range of sources, indeed. Q. How many would you accept? Two sources? A. I am not going to put a number on it, Mr Irving. Q. But, if we have another source that says the same thing, then we are getting convergences of evidence beginning to kick in, are we? A. Well, it is a problem with the evidence of Hitler's entourage, that they of course had a major incentive after the war for trying to exculpate them for involvement in a number of crimes such as the Reichskristallnacht. They also seem to have been a fairly close knit group who had the opportunity to discuss their line, as it were, amongst themselves, so I think one has to be very cautious. Q. Any common sense historian would adopt that line, that is correct. But, if we ignore for a moment the main trend of these statements, and I am going to introduce another one to you in a moment, and we look for the little bits of . P-36 verisimilitude which tend to support the main trend, for example he was livid with rage and he shouted at Goebbels, those kinds of things which appear to figure in several of the statements or certainly more than one, then the convergence of evidence then becomes more convincing. Would you agree? A. No, not necessarily. This might have been a story they cooked up. Q. Can we now turn to a third witness? A. The sentence you are relying on here claiming such a tremendous piece of evidence is-- I will quote it: "As AH on this Sunday" -- we know it was not a Sunday. Q. Do you attach much important to the fact he got the day of the week wrong? MR JUSTICE GRAY: I do not. A. Yes. It is pretty easy to remember. "As AH heard on that Sunday about the anti-Semitic excesses, he was angry with Goebbels". It does not seem to me to be very circumstantial. MR IRVING: He was furious with Goebbels. You are changing the words. A. It is angry, very angry, furious, yes. Q. He made a frightful scene, did he not? A. Yes. Q. Told him that this kind of propaganda was just damaging. A. Yes. Mr Irving, I do not know how much detail I ought to . P-37 go into here, but there is an enormous amount of evidence which is laid out in my report and which was gone over in your cross-examination ---- MR IRVING: But not of the events in your---- MR JUSTICE GRAY: Do not keep talking over the witness. A. -- about Hitler's responsibilities for these events. MR IRVING: We are not talking about that at this point. A. You know that, and accepted that what Goebbels said in his speech to the party assembly at between about 10 o'clock at night on 9th November that (I quote) on Goebbels' briefing the Fuhrer has decided that such demonstrations should not be quelled. That is contemporary evidence, Mr Irving. Q. I really have to halt you here because this is a totally different matter.
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