Archive/File: people/i/irving.david/libel.suit/transcripts/day004.07 Last-Modified: 2000/08/01 Q. You have. You have seen it on some of the Auschwitz documents, have you not? A. Are we going to get into a discussion now on authenticity of documents? Q. No. I just want to know what you say about that little word? A. I am saying that it is not regular German. Q. No, but it is a mistake, if it be a mistake, that a German could easily make, is it not? A. It could be a mistake that an ill educated German would make, as would be, for example, on blatt 7, if I may turn to that. MR JUSTICE GRAY: Before you do that, whereabouts on this page are you, 1st December, Mr Rampton? A. Very first line top right. MR RAMPTON: Top right hand corner underneath handwritten 119. . P-56 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Page 5. MR RAMPTON: I asked your Lordship to go back to page 1, just to identify it, because your Lordship wanted it identified. MR JUSTICE GRAY: Sorry I missed you. Right. MR RAMPTON: Kauen is one German form of Cogno? A. For Cogno. Q. 1st December 1941. I am going to look at much more of this in a moment, but it is a report. I cannot read the first one gezundt aus stellung (?), is it? A. Gezundt aus stellung. Q. A full ---- MR JUSTICE GRAY: Collective presentation. MR RAMPTON: Presentation. Q. Der imber Reich (?) -- What does that mean? A. In the area of. Q. E K 3, up to the 1st December 1941, of executions carried out. Is that right? A. Yes. Do you wish to address briefly the authenticity of this document. MR JUSTICE GRAY: If you are denying it, you ought to say so. A. He has asked me would I accept that um ersten (?) December is authentic German and I would say no, it is not. It would be incorrect irregular German. Q. Do you say this is not an authentic document? A. My Lord, I am not saying that. I am answering his . P-57 question. I also wish to draw attention on page 7, about 15 lines down in the third complete paragraph, das zeil (?), halfway down there, my Lord, you will see that the rank of SS Oberstum Fuhrer and SS is typed as two capital Ss. Q. So? A. All the high ranking SS officers had typewriter with the SS runes, my Lord. They would not type SS. It would be very rare to find an SS document in which SS is typed as two capital Ss. It is not entirely impossible, but it is very rare. Q. I am baffled by this. Are you challenging the authenticity of this? A. My Lord, it is not a document I have relied upon. It is not a document laid before me when I wrote my book and I am quite happy to answer questions on the content of it. But Mr Rampton asked me my opinion about the document and I spotted straight away those two discrepancies just by leafing through it. MR RAMPTON: You may have done, Mr Irving, but that really does not answer his Lordship's question. I have no doubt that you recognized this document immediately as soon as we opened the file, did you not? A. I know what it is about. I have heard about it, yes. Q. No, you recognized it. You said this is the Jaeger report. . P-58 A. Yes, by the date, 1st December 1941. Q. You have never read it? A. No. I have never analysed it in detail, let's put it like that, and I certainly did not read it when I wrote my books. Q. Either you have X-ray eyes or you read very quickly because you seemed to have spotted a mistake, as you call it, on blatt 7 immediately. A. That is what I was looking for. That is the real giveaway. MR JUSTICE GRAY: You knew it was there? A. No, my Lord, you would have seen it. When he asked me to look for it, I began leafing through it and looking for SS, which is the first thing you would look for in a document you are suspicious about. But, for the purpose of this morning, I will accept that it is authentic, with reservations. MR RAMPTON: Then we have had an interesting but wholly academic discussion. A. Mr Rampton, you asked me if I considered it to be authentic. Q. I asked you whether you accept that this is an authentic document. A. That is right. MR JUSTICE GRAY: Anyway, now we all accept it is. MR RAMPTON: Now we know that it is so far as this discussion . P-59 is concerned. A. With reservations. Q. Yes. Page 5? A. Yes. Q. Under the middle of the page, months of November. A. Yes. Q. Third line, 25th November of 41, Kauen F 9 is Fort 9. It was divided up into different sort of fortresses, was it not? A. Yes. Q. They kill, execute, 2,934 Jews, Jewesses and Jewish children? A. That is correct, yes. Q. In brackets underneath it says, again roughly speaking: Evacuees from Berlin, Munich and Frankfurt? A. Yes. Q. Do you agree that it is likely that that is where your train load of 944 well provisioned Jews wound up? A. I would say it is not impossible. It is eight days later. There were several train loads, of course. I cannot speak specifically that that particular train load would have ended up in that particular atrocity. Q. I can tell you that there are no other references to Jews from Berlin in this document. A. In this document? Q. Yes, and this document is a complete report of the doings . P-60 of that unit or formation. A. Yes. Q. In that place and all over Cogno up to the beginning of December. A. May I say that this particular page was supplied to me by Dr Gerald Fleming in fact, two or three years ago. I relied on that when I wrote my Goebbels biography. Q. Sorry? A. This particular page was supplied to me by Dr Gerald Fleming, and I relied on the statistics in it when I wrote my biography of Dr Joseph Goebbels. You will find that I have quoted his statistics. Q. We are looking at it now, Mr Irving, as you no doubt noticed. A. I recognized the figures. You will find that page in my discovery. Q. What you say in the Goebbels book is a little more generous in point of truth or accuracy than what you said just now. You said it was a possibility that it was the same one. In the book you said on page 377: "So much for Minsk". I do not know what you are saying about Minsk, but it may not matter. A. Very much the same. Q. The train load of Berlin's Jews sent to Kanas, Cogno, in Lithuania on November 17th probably fared no better". You cite the Jaeger report and that entry in it. . P-61 A. Yes. How can I be called the Holocaust denyer when again and again I put these statistics in my books, if I may ask the question? Q. Let's get the position clear. You keep asking that question rhetorically as though it answered itself, Mr Irving. It does not. So far as the shooting of Jews is concerned, what do you reckon is the total number that were disposed of by shooting? We maybe had this discussion on the first day of the trial, I cannot remember, but tell me again if we have. A. Disposed of by shooting? Where? In the East? Q. Yes. A. Order of magnitude I would say at least half million, and probably as many as one and a half million. Q. Where we part company, Mr Irving, I think, is that you have repeatedly said, have you not, that these were, and you rely for example on the message to Jekiln (?) Of 1st December from Himmler? You have repeatedly said that these words, quasi or not even quasi, were criminal shootings by high Maverick commanders of the SS out in the East? A. The phrase used by Himmler is arbitrary actions. Q. We are coming back to Himmler very shortly. A. And actions against the guidelines. Q. Your position is that these mass shootings and other shootings in the East were not in any sense part of a . P-62 system, but were local acts of criminality? A. The system ended when the train arrived. The system put the Jews and the other victims on the trains and sent them to the East with the food and equipment to start a new life. Once they arrived on the spot, the system broke down, and the murderers stepped in. MR JUSTICE GRAY: But these reports coming back from the Einsatzgruppen are going to Berlin, are they not? A. We do not know, my Lord, because there is no kind of indication on it or initialling on whom it went to. Q. Where do you say they were going then? A. They certainly went -- unfortunately we do not know, my Lord, because my copy of the report ends on page 9, I think, so it has not even got a signature on it. It has a signature Jaeger, but no address list, so we do not know where it went to. But it would be reasonable to assume that the report went to the Reichzeike heis haufdampt (?) Of Heydrich. Q. Which is in Berlin? A. In Berlin. MR RAMPTON: Because Mr Irving, in Berlin, in Heydrich's headquarters, from time to time -- I do not know whether they were regular or how frequent they are -- but there were these things called areignis meldungen (?) A. Yes. Q. Which were actually composed in that office in Berlin, and . P-63 many of them carry summaries of this kind of material? A. Yes. Q. Do they not? A. Yes. Q. So the probability is that that went back to Berlin? A. The probability is that this went back to Berlin, yes, as I said. Q. Is that not evidence of some kind of system operating at the behest of and under the control of the authorities in Berlin? A. I draw your attention to the fact this is the very day when the very sharp reprimand went from Hitler's headquarters, signed by Himmler, to the people carrying out the murders saying these arbitrary actions are to stop forthwith, and the murder of the Jews stopped for many months, the German Jews. Q. These Jews? A. The murder of the German Jews stopped for many months, so that is indication that the system had broken down. MR JUSTICE GRAY: Yes, but you agreed on Wednesday or whenever it was that that message related only to German Jews and these reports cover all other manner of Jews? A. The message did not relate only to German Jews but certainly the effect was German Jews. The killing of German Jews stopped and these are the numbers to which Mr Rampton has drawn attention to, Jews being evacuated . P-64 from Berlin and Munich and other cities, I believe. MR RAMPTON: The shooting of these Jews, Mr Irving, I quite accept, if you are right that there was to be no mass shootings under any circumstances of German Jews, these few, and in the context of this report alas there are few, these few German Jews, probably also the ones from Vienna and Bresslau in the next entry, probably would have infringed the Himmler order if the Himmler order had got to Jaeger in time to save them, which evidently it did not. A. That is the reason why I submit that the system broke down upon the arrival of these train loads of Jews in the East. Q. Right. A. And the people on the spot said: Let us just get rid of them, liquidate them ourselves. Q. And they had food for a maximum of about three weeks anyway? A. A start up food supply, yes. Q. I see. So Berlin was expecting the SS in Cogno to feed them indefinitely? A. No. The instructions were to build camps for them. They had to build their own concentration camps to live in. They were expected to build the camps and set up their own work shops there and start a new life in the East, anywhere but Germany. That sounds very nice for the planners in Berlin, but it is less practical on the spot . P-65 when you have got a military disaster looming.
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