Archive/File: people/i/irving.david/libel.suit/transcripts/day032.15 Last-Modified: 2000/07/25 During his slide-show, Professor van Pelt told us that one cardinal piece of evidence in this drawings was the relocation of an internal double-door which sealed off Leichenkeller No. 1 from the interior of the building, . P-175 from the inside of the Leichenkeller doorframe to the outside. The door was moved in the drawings from the inside of the wall to the outside. I pointed out that in the new layout, the doors were shown as being actually rebated into the doorframe and I suggested to the witness that this was indicative of a gas-tight door being fitted as in any standard air raid shelter design. Air raid shelter doors are routinely fitted outside the shelter, to open outwards, so as to withstand blast. Neufert, which is the wartime architects' handbook, bears this out. The witness seems not to have considered this possibility. As Mr Rampton again mentioned, the doors allegedly found around the Birkenhau and Auschwitz sites subsequently are fitted with peep holes. But I say that that is the standard air raid shelter design complete with the obligatory peep hole that is fitted to air raid shelter doors. The amendment of the drawings to provide for an external door, leading from the far end of the subterrranean morgue to the open air, Leichenkeller No. 1, was also consonant with its dual use as an air raid shelter, and I put this to the witness on Day 11, as was the relocation of the main entrance staircase from the back of the building to the street-side. Among the architectural drawings provided to us from the Auschwitz archives is one entitled "Modification of the old Crematorium", namely crematorium No. 1 in Auschwitz, . P-176 subtitled: "Air Raid Bunker for SS Station HQ with an Operating Theatre". So such modifications of the morgues to provide air raid shelter capacity were clearly nothing extraordinary. Mr Rampton made a lot of the order for the doors with peep holes both during the hearings and this morning, but peep holes were standard fittings, not only on the gas-tight air raid shelter doors, but also on the delousing facilities. Jean-Claude Pressac prints photographs of two such doors on the "Canada" delousing chamber at Birkenhau. Looking specifically at the possible use of crematorium No. II and the underground basement area as being adapted for future air raid shelter use: Crematorium No. II, like its mirror image Crematorium No. III on the other side of the road, was originally designed as a state-of-the-art crematorium, possibly not just for the camp but for the whole catchment area of Auschwitz which had for centuries been an area of pestilence and plague. No expense was spared in its design. This was German tax-payer money and they did not care. The best equipment and architects were used on what was clearly a permanent facility. Building the morgue, the mortuary, underground, instead of above ground, increased construction costs by several times, but provided for keeping the morgue cool during the baking hot Central European summers. Had the building been designed . P-177 from the start as a human slaughterhouse, it would certainly not have been designed on several levels with resultant handling problems. Slaughterhouses are normally built on one level. We saw in Professor van Pelt's slide- show the pouring of the concrete roof, the roof slab, of the subterranean Leichenkeller No. II; the roof was undoubtedly much the same as Leichenkeller No. 1 with a six inch reinforced steel mesh. This undoubtedly made the new building one of the most robust on the site: certainly more robust and fireproof in an air raid than the flimsy wooden horse-barracks in which the prisoners and slave labour were housed. We were told by Mr Rampton this morning this seemed improbable to establish an air raid shelter facility for the SS who were 1.5 miles away. Well, the early warning posts were in Holland, and they were probably 1,500 miles away. So they would provide more than adequate time for the SS to gallop that 1.5 miles to this building with the concrete roof. The captured Bauleitung records of Auschwitz housed in Moscow confirm that from mid 1942 onwards they began to consider the construction at the camp of shelters, splinter trenches, and other ARP, Air Raid Precaution, measures. To be fair to the witness, when these Moscow catalogue entries were put to Professor van . P-178 Pelt he seemed unfamiliar with them. After the air raids, our British air raids, on Cologne, Rostock and Lubeck - that was in March/April 1942 - the German High Command recognized the likelihood that air raids would spread across Poland and Central Europe, and they ordered the construction of extended ARP facilities throughout the occupied Eastern territories insofar as they can within bomber range. Existing basements, this document said, were to be converted into shelters, and anti-gas equipment provided, and personnel trained in anti-gas warfare, as gas attack was widely expected. I have given your Lordship the reference. I put the document to Professor Longerich and on Day 10 I said to him: "[...] the Defence rely on a number of photographs of doors found scattered around the compound of Auschwitz and Birkenhau, and we will show that these are standard German air raid shelter doors complete with peep holes". And, my Lord, I have provided photographs of such air raid shelter doors in various bundles. These precautions were not in vain. In May 1943, there was an air raid on the nearby Auschwitz Buna plant. This is reflected in the Auschwitz documents. At least one of the American aerial photographs that I produced to the Court, the black and white photographs, the big ones, and to the witness, Professor van Pelt, shows a stick of heavy bombs just released by the plane . P-179 that took the photograph descending over the camp. By the end of the war, there was also an anti-aircraft unit assigned to defending the region, as shown by the reference in Judge Staglich's membership of the Flak unit that manned it. Your Lordship will also remember that during his slide-show, van Pelt showed the court a series of most interesting computer-generated "walk-through" reconstructions of the interiors of Crematorium IV and V. Your Lordship had actually memorized the dimensions of the shutter, the wooden shutter, of 30 centimetres by 40 centimetres. There were also said to be steps leading up to the openings. The wartime civil defence journal Luftschutz shows precisely this arrangement of gas type shutters and steps as a standard air raid shelter feature designed for the event of gas warfare. I put this fact to the witness van Pelt: "Would you agree that those shutters that have been found in the Auschwitz camp are, in fact, standard German air-raid shutters supplied by manufacturers to a standard design?" The eyewitnesses stated that thousands of victims were gassed in these rooms, however, and their bodies burned in large pits to the building's rear. But the contemporary air photographs taken by the Americans show no such pits, nor are they evident today. Confronted with what your Lordship has yourself referred to as the . P-180 lack of documentary evidence for the gassings, Professor van Pelt could only offer the suggestion that the use of gas chambers at Auschwitz and Birkenhau was a "moral certainty". Three times in his report, three times in his report, he fell back upon that semi-religious phrase. The available proofs certainly do not support the belief that gassings there occurred on a mass scale. If I can just fill in what I have not said there? Of course, I do accept that there were gassings on a small scale at Auschwitz in the buildings identified as bunkers I and II which were houses which have since been torn down. I will not dwell long on the uniformly poor evidentiary basis on the other extermination camps, known to the Court as the Operation Reinhard camps - Belzec, Sobibor and Treblinka. Here we do not have even the "moral certainty" which comforted Professor van Pelt. I can only challenge here the scale and the systematic nature of the alleged gassing of more than one million people in these centres. The Defendants' own witness, Professor Browning, admits that the documentation for these camps is "scant", that is his word, and I place great weight on that admission. Here, the expert cannot find even one contemporaneous document. He relies upon the eyewitnesses - men of the ilk of Kurt Gerstein, Jan Karski, Adolf Eichmann and Rudolf Hoss. The fictional . P-181 elements in their statements - your Lordship will remember the "130 foot high mountain of clothes" which Professor Browning in his first draft skipped over, the "electrocution chambers" and the "steam chambers", the deliberately inflated death rolls which would otherwise shriek their warnings to critical researchers - are either ignored or suppressed in order to maintain appearances. My Lord, there is an impressive (and we are both agreed on this, all parties) level of documentation which demonstrates that the liquidation by shooting of hundreds of thousands of Jews, probably over a million, by the Einsatzgruppen, but there is nothing of equivalent value for the Operation Reinhard camps. One word, Why? justifies the revisionist's scepticism. The Walter Fohl letter produces a similar response from the experts. Found in his Berlin Document Centre personnel file, this man, who is in charge of a resettlement office at Krakow, is seen writing on June 21st 1942 to his SS comrades as follows: "Every day, trains are arriving with over 1,000 Jews each from throughout Europe", in Krakow, passing through. "We provide first aid here, give them more or less provisional accommodation, and usually deport them further towards the White Sea or to the White Ruthenian marshlands, where they all - if they survive (and the Jews from Kurfurstendamm or Vienna or Pressburg certainly . P-182 won't) - will be gathered by the end of the war, but not without first having built a few roads. (But we're not supposed to talk about it)." An extraordinary document. The expert witnesses, unable otherwise to explain this document, dismissed it as obvious "camouflage" talk. But why should Fohl use camouflage when writing to his SS comrades? As I pointed out to Dr Longerich, Reinhard Heydrich himself had spoken of the White Sea option a few days later, on February 4th 1942 in Prague. It was noticeable elsewhere that none of the experts was willing to give documents their natural meanings when they did not accord with their views. It is a clear case of manipulation, in my view. The Ahnert document, recording a meeting at the RSHA in Berlin, under Eichmann, on August 28th, 1942, was another example. There was talk of the need for the deportees, August 1942, to be provided with blankets, shoes, eating utensils before dispatch to Auschwitz. Eichmann requested the purchases of barracks for a Jewish deportee camp to be erected in Russia, with three to five such barracks being loaded aboard every transport train. In each case, because the document did not accord with their "exterminationist" views, the expert had failed to pursue it. Dr Longerich, who included it as an appendix in one of his books, had forgotten it even existed when . P-183 I cross-examined him about it. Coming now towards the end of my submission, my Lord, the allegations of racism and anti-Semitism. I have to address the allegations of racism, although I have the feeling that your Lordship is not over-impressed by them. MR JUSTICE GRAY: Do not get feelings one way or the other about any part of the case, Mr Irving. It is a trap. MR IRVING: It was a good try. MR JUSTICE GRAY: On the other hand, it is a matter for you because I am letting you say pretty much what you want to say, I know because I have them now provided very conveniently, exactly what it is that is relied on by way of anti-Semitic statements, racist statements and so on. MR IRVING: I shall definitely make some response therefore. MR JUSTICE GRAY: Yes. I mean you can deal with them generally, if you like, rather than going through them, as it were, one by way. I appreciate you do not go through them all. MR IRVING: I have not gone through them one by one, my Lord. In fact I have not even read them. MR JUSTICE GRAY: I offer you the opportunity of making general answers to those submissions rather than by reading it all out. It is entirely up to you. MR IRVING: I do not read them all out, but I shall certainly deal with my arguments. The Defendants have resorted to the allegations that I am anti-Semitic and racist. It may . P-184 be that they are going to pay dearly for those remarks. Mr Rampton's highly paid experts have found one 1963 entry in my diary, four lines written 37 years ago, about a visit to my lawyer Mr Michael Rubenstein to discuss a satirical magazine article which I had written, after which visit I commented: "Thick skinned these Jews are". This is all that they could find from the millions of words in my diaries available to them by way of anti-Semitism. Twenty million words of diaries and they found "Thick skinned these Jews are". When I remarked on March 2nd in court, my Lord, upon the obvious paradox that an alleged anti-Semite would have retained Michael Rubenstein as his solicitor and respected advisor for 20 years, Mr Rampton's comment, which your Lordship may well remember, was: "Many of my best friends are Jews too, Mr Irving". This stock line does not disguise the paucity of his evidence against me. In further support of this contention they have taken isolated remarks made in lectures and speeches for which they have transcribed around half a million words. My Lord, I trust that your Lordship will in each case consider the context in which the remarks are made. MR JUSTICE GRAY: Of course. MR IRVING: And also the broader surrounding countryside, if I may put it like that. What I would ask your Lordship to do is to take the ugliest example, whichever your Lordship . P-185 deems that to be, reach up for the full transcript of whatever that speech was, and ask yourself why I have put that remark in and see what else is in that speech. Then I submit that the alleged anti-Semitic remark fails into insignificance, if it is even taken to be anti-Semitic at all. For 30 years, as I set out earlier in this room this afternoon, I have found myself subjected to vicious attack by bodies, acting, as they freely admit, as Jews. For 30 years I endeavoured to turn the other cheek and did nothing about it. I hope I succeeded. Mr Rampton drew attention to the fun I poked at Simon Wiesenthal. I made a joke in a public meeting about his, an explicit joke I made about his other than good looks, if I can put it like that. Mr Rampton called that remark "anti- Semitic". It was not. It was a joke about the man's looks, of the same genre that Mr Rampton made when he enquired rhetorically of Professor Funke whether a certain outer-fringe Swedish revisionist seen in one video shown to the court with long blonde hair was a man or woman. It is exactly the same kind of throw-away remark. In view of the manner in which the two Simon Wiesenthal centres have been abusing my name in their fund rasing leaflets, and endeavouring to destroy my own livelihood, the court might think that my fun-making, while tasteless, remark was not undeserved, possibly it . P-186 was even rather reserved. It was not anti- Semitic. Mr Wiesenthal is no more immune from criticism either as a person or as a public figure than I am.
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