Archive/File: people/i/irving.david/libel.suit/transcripts/day010.15 Last-Modified: 2000/07/20 Q. Professor Vananstiel, that is correct? A. Professor Vananstiel(?) Later Professor Vananstiel after the war confirmed that indeed he had been with Kurt Gerstein in Treblinka and confirmed more or less the account, except where it applies to his own role in this trip, a number of remarks he would have made while looking through the spy hole into the gas chamber, but apart from Kurt Gerstein has not made any calculations, as far as I know, I do not think he even made about Treblinka or . P-126 for that matter he never mentioned Auschwitz in any context of extermination. Q. I am only deal with the Gerstein report in the context of reliability of eyewitness evidence in general. This is the only reason I am going to ask the next few questions. Did Mr Kurt Gerstein, who was an SS officer, make any statements about the number of people who were packed into the gas chamber that he witnessed allegedly? A. I am not going to comment on that without the document in front of me. Q. You have not read the Gerstein report? A. Of course I have read various editions of the Gerstein report, both the French and the German, but I am not going to comment on what Kurt Gerstein may have said or may not have said when I do not have the document in front of me. Q. Are you aware that there seven different versions of the Gerstein report? A. I know there are various different versions. I did not know it was seven. Q. Are you aware that each successive version of the report became more lurid in French captivity and that the numbers grew larger like Topsy? A. Mr Irving I do not remember ---- Q. I should have asked how many versions of the report have you read? A. I have read three versions of the report. . P-127 Q. Did you notice any discrepancy between the figures and the general scale of the atrocity he was describing? A. No. The reports are longer and shorter, so I have not compared them on actual figures. In some reports he includes more information, and in other reports he has less. I have not made a comparative study of all the reports together because they do not apply to Auschwitz. Q. Very well. MR JUSTICE GRAY: Professor van Pelt, this part of the cross-examination started off, I think, on the topic of how much Zyklon B went to Auschwitz, how much of it might have been used for delousing and disinfecting and all the rest of it, therefore how much was left, if any? A. Yes. Q. Can you ---- MR IRVING: I was about to come back on to that main line with certain specific questions. MR JUSTICE GRAY: May I get the answer to my question, Mr Irving, first? A. Can you give me in broad terms an answer, so far as your conclusions on that question go? A. OK. May I use the document for that? Q. Of course. I just thought it was a convenient way short circuiting? A. There are two years on which we know, on the basis of the testimony of Alfred Sahen, supported by his notebook but . P-128 also other information available at the trial of distributors. They were not really distributors, people that allocate Zyklon-B. The amounts of deliveries of Zyklon-B to Auschwitz, that is 1942 and 1943. On page 22 of my additional report, one can read that in 1942, seven and a half thousand kilos were delivered to Auschwitz, and in 1943 12,000 kilos were delivered do Auschwitz. MR IRVING: That is 12 tonnes? A. 12 tonnes were delivered to Auschwitz. I have done a calculation. In 1942 this seven and a half thousand kilos to Auschwitz comes out of 9,000 kilos to the whole concentration camp system. Again, I do not draw the conclusion but I want to say the conclusion other people have drawn is that, since Auschwitz received more than three-quarters of all the Zyklon-B, something like 80 per cent of the Zyklon-B, this meant of course this could only have been caused by the use of Zyklon-B as a killing agent and I do not agree such a simple jump. Q. Can we be quite plain that you do not agree with that? A. Not simply on the basis that there were seven and a half thousand kilos going to Zyklon-B, and 1,500 to the rest of the concentration camp system. I would not jump immediately to the conclusion. I think one has to be more careful when one comes to conclusions. Q. Can I ask you one question here? How many satellite camps were dependant on Auschwitz as their central distribution . P-129 headquarters? A. In 1943 or 1942? Q. Shall we say 1944? A. 1944, 34, but many measures were very small. May I continue to answer the question his Lordship has asked? Q. This need not necessarily just have been going to Auschwitz itself, they would have been possibly shovelling it on to other places that needed it? A. Yes, but only few of those camps had actually delousing installations. Most of the delousing for the satellite camps were actually done back in Auschwitz. Q. When you delouse a barracks or a barrack room like this room here, do you need installation or do you just close all the doors and windows and do what the Americans call tenting? A. My Lord, I am a little confused right now. MR JUSTICE GRAY: Yes. Come back to that, Mr Irving. I am getting an explanation of the total figures that went to Auschwitz. So you do not make the jump simply from relative quantities? A. No. I have made the calculation and ultimately what I do is that I am making the two ways actually to determine what is a normal use for Zyklon-B? The first is to look at other camps. What would a camp of the same size use compared to Auschwitz? That is the first exercise I did on pages 25 and 26. For example, we have information for . P-130 1943 so that is why it is important to look at 1943. There is Satzenhausen in 1943 at 40,000 inmates, and it almost used 3,000 kilos of Zyklon-B that year. If Auschwitz would have been the same size as Satzenhausen because Auschwitz had an average of 60,000 inmates that year, it would have used four and a half thousand kilo if indeed we could take the Satzenhausen figure as a point of departure. In fact, Auschwitz uses 12,000. Then we look at other camps, how much do they get, and we start to basically priorate population figures. MR IRVING: These figures are quite meaningless because of course we know that Auschwitz was at the centre of one of the worst epidemics in history. A. Not any more in 1943. MR JUSTICE GRAY: That was summer 1942, was it not? MR IRVING: There was another epidemic in January 1943? A. There was a smaller epidemic in January 1943, which was dealt with rather quickly, and the outbreak of an epidemic in the gypsy camp in the summer of 1942 almost had no deaths. Q. The whole point is that you use Zyklon B preemptively. You do not use it as a mopping up operation. You use it to stop it happening again. A. Mostly. Q. You fumigate barracks again and again and again. A. Survivors have testified to the fact that these barracks . P-131 were not very often fumigated. I have recently, but I will try to continue my arguments. But I will just finish this sentence. MR JUSTICE GRAY: Mr Irving, it would be helpful to me at any rate if he can complete this answer and then you can of course cross-examine on it. MR IRVING: I am restraining myself but that was an important point to make I think. A. OK. So, my Lord, so at the one side we can look at, kind of, the figures in other camps, and we then we look at Auschwitz. On page 26, I think demonstrates that the Auschwitz figure of 12,000 kilos is much higher than you would expect on the basis of deliveries to other camps if we take the different sizes into account. Then the second kind of exercise one can do is to look at the way Zyklon-B could have been used in Auschwitz. So how much would have used in delousing in this year? This is, I start to do this on page 27 and it continues. It gets a very detailed kind of calculation. I start out with -- the question is, where are the delousing rooms and what is the capacity of these delousing rooms? So in 1943, the total Zyklon B delousing space was 940 cubic metres. That is from the bottom of page 27. Now, then we are going to look of how much, what concentration of hydrogen cyanide would have been used in . P-132 these rooms, and I refer back to a German war time document by the [German] which is the Health Institution of the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia in Prague, which instructs that one needs eight grammes of Zyklon- B per cubic metre for 16 hours to kill vermins, such as bugs, lice, flees, etc.. Now, I assume that these delousing spaces would have, indeed, used that concentration. It is the only kind of basis I can work on, and that as a result of that is that if we have one gassing per day in each of these rooms -- now, this is very unlikely because there were large rooms actually in the Sturmlager in Auschwitz which eyewitness testimony says were only used irregularly, but now I am assuming for a moment that these eyewitness are wrong, and that they were used every day, I come to basically seven-and-a-half kilogrammes of Zyklon-B per day or 2,730 kilos of Zyklon-B per year if there is a delousing every day. So I have now in some way accounted at a maximum delousing capacity in the camp for 2,730 kilos of Zyklon-B. So now we are going to look at the average size of each barrack which is 12,000 -- and these are the barracks in Birkenhau right now -- 12,000 cubic metres, in which the barracks in the women's camp are slightly larger and barracks in building sector 2 are slightly smaller. They are around 1200. In the women's camp they were . P-133 around 1250 and in Auschwitz they were larger. So if we take again the same concentration, this would be quite a high concentration for the delousing of barracks. One needs in Birkenhau six to 10 kilos per barrack, and in Auschwitz one where they are two-storey barracks, 12 to 20 kilos per barrack, which means that the complete delousing of all the 192 dwelling barracks in Birkenhau would take between 1200 and 1900 kilos, and all the 30 ----
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