Archive/File: people/i/irving.david/libel.suit/transcripts/day010.17 Last-Modified: 2000/07/20 Q. --- during the whole time she was there? But against that, we set the evidence of Bruno Tesch in his trial, and . P-143 he is the acknowledged leading German expert on disinfestation who says, having been given the figures, he is astonished that they managed to carry out the fumigation of all these sets of clothing, given the number of prisoners, because he knew how many kilograms of Zyklon-B were needed for each 100 sets of clothing. That is the calculation he did. MR JUSTICE GRAY: Is that Tesch you are talking about now? MR IRVING: I am talking about Bruno Tesch, T-E-S-C-H. MR JUSTICE GRAY: May I ask Professor van Pelt a question about that? The prosecution against Tesch, presumably, involved the prosecution establishing that he knew what the Zyklon-B was being supplied to Auschwitz for? A. Yes. Q. So he was likely to say that the quantity was the right amount to do the delousing? A. The case, the evidence on which Tesch was ultimately convicted was not the quantity delivered to Auschwitz. It was actually a statement made by one of his employees who had said that Tesch knew about that what the Zyklon was being used for. MR IRVING: He said that he came back and he dictated a travel report on a trip which had indicated that he knew what was going on? A. Yes. Q. This was hotly disputed by other members of Tesch's staff . P-144 who knew the travel reports concerned, but he was hanged on the basis of that one witness? A. You know, I do not want to redo the Tesh trial. I mean, it may have been true that Tesch knew about it or it may not have been true. But the issue was, the issue at stake in the trial was not the quantity of the deliveries. Interestingly enough, if you go back to the trial documents, what really made people very, very upset about it is the profit they got out of the deliveries. There was constant talk about how many Reichs Marks actually were made out of his deliveries to Auschwitz. Q. I appreciate your Lordship's point and, of course, it is absolutely right, he would have had a motive for trying to minimize it, but against that is to be set the fact that whereas you and I are, no doubt, astonished to see nine tonnes of cyanide being delivered to any camp or any place, and you think, "Well, this can only mean one thing", the drift of my argument has been it could mean many things and it was by no means out of the ball park when you are looking at the other uses to which this domestic fumigant was very properly put. MR JUSTICE GRAY: Yes, I understand. MR IRVING: Can I now proceed to a different topic, my Lord? MR JUSTICE GRAY: Yes, of course. MR IRVING: We have dealt with the eyewitness in some detail, Professor van Pelt. I must say I am left unhappy at the . P-145 notion that so far the mass extermination of 500,000 victims in this building here, krammer No. 2, rests, apparently, on a number of very shaky eyewitnesses -- I think I have shaken two or three them -- and on certain other documents that we have not really properly explored. Can you talk to the court, please, if I say to you what architectural drawings are there relating to crematorium No. (ii) and, in particular, to the alleged gas chamber in mortuary No. 1, can you tell the court about which one document in particular would be the one you would say was something close to a smoking gun -- if there is such a document, such a blueprint? MR JUSTICE GRAY: Do you mean Kuhler? Is he included in the question? MR IRVING: Kuhler we can come to later, my Lord. I am interested in Kuhler, obviously, because that will bring us back to the holes, and I am going to keep on driving holes in this case until your Lordship appreciates the significance of the holes, or their absence. So I want to do that kind of scattered throughout these two days. MR JUSTICE GRAY: Yes. THE WITNESS: So we are talking about blueprints? MR IRVING: We are talking about drawings, architectural drawings. If there is anything in any of those drawings which you considered to be very suspicious? . P-146 A. I have said in my report that the way the materials should be interpreted is as a convergence of evidence and not in terms of a single smoking gun. There are in the documents in Auschwitz, of course, documents which are more difficult to bring into harmony with the thesis that there would have been no gas chamber, no homicidal gas chamber, in crematorium (ii). For example, there is a letter, the notorious vergasungs letter, the keller letter of 29th January 1943; but since I am being asked about blueprints and I will limit my answer to blueprints, there is not one blueprint which by and in itself is a smoking gun. Q. But you have repeatedly talked in radio programmes on the BBC, for example, the Horizon programme, you said, "We have the blue prints", have you not? "We have the drawings"? I appreciate ---- A. But we have to -- we have the blueprints as historical evidence and one can draw conclusions out of the historical evidence. Q. That is not the way you put it, of course. You were rather more specific. You said: "We have the drawings of the gas chambers". A. But it allows us, these drawings allow us to reconstruct the history of these things, the way these things were constructed, and the history includes a certain amount the history of the use and the modification of these buildings as a killing machine. . P-147 Now, there are certain drawings which certainly pop out of the bundle of drawings which is preserved. For example, a very, very important drawing, but again only seen in context, would have been the modification of the basement done by Walter Dejaco in December 1942. But again that drawing by itself does not say anything. That drawing has to be compared to the drawings that preceded that drawing. So, you know, I am happy to go -- the problem is I do not know if everyone has the drawings -- I am happy to go through a very detailed explication of those drawings, but given the fact we already have difficulty with Olaire before, I do not really know to do that because I will have to point at these things which are not labelled and these are, you know, those blueprints are ---- MR IRVING: We can get the drift of what your arguments are going to be. I just wanted to establish, though, that when you said these things on this BBC Horizon programme (of which we have the transcript here) of course, you are not reading from a script, you are just talking from memory, so to speak? If you were writing it, you would not have said that? A. No, there was no script of that. There was no script. I do not exactly know what I said, so maybe you can read it to the court and I can have a look at it and, you know, . P-148 I can comment on it. Q. Yes. But the point I am making is that you are much more careful when you write than when you speak? A. There is nothing really in the Horizon programme which at the moment I feel I would have to take back. I am quite comfortable with what I said in that programme. Q. Well, except that you also referred to a document, but I am not on documents at present in terms which were inappropriate because it turns out that what you said was not borne out by the document. Do you remember that document, the one relating to the electric supply not being adequate, and you reversed the order of killing and cremating? A. Mr Irving, in that document at a certain moment I transposed the word, I think, sonderbehantlung(?) and incineration from one to the other. Q. Yes, these things happen, do they not? A. But the meaning, the meaning of what I said is exactly the same as the meaning of the document. Q. Yes. These things happen. It was not any perverse manipulation of the evidence in any way; it was just - --- A. Unlike what some people on the web suggest? No, it was no perverse manipulation. Q. I have not suggested that, have I ---- A. I do not know if you have suggested it. Q. --- on my web site, no? That is not the point I am trying . P-149 to make. MR JUSTICE GRAY: If that is not suggested, we can move on, can we not? MR IRVING: I am your Lordship appreciates the reason why I put the question. So what you are saying is there is no one drawing -- we have established that the eye witness evidence is two legged rather than five legged. We have now heard that there is no one drawing which supports the identity of that underground mortuary as being a gas chamber either? A. No, but we can look now at two or three drawings together and then we start to look, we start to observe some very weird things and some modifications made between one drawing and the other drawing which certainly starts to point out at a use of ---- Q. An unusual use? A. --- morgue No. 1 which is used which is certainly not suggestive of either an air raid shelter or that of any other kind of non-genocidal use. Q. Can you tell us roughly what those discrepancies are on -- shall I feed clues? MR RAMPTON: My Lord, I hardly think this is satisfactory. We have the plans in the folder. MR IRVING: Indeed, yes. MR RAMPTON: It is quite a detailed exercise. I have been through it many times. It may or may not make sense, but . P-150 it is really ridiculous, in my submission, to ask this witness to try to do it ---- MR JUSTICE GRAY: You mean there is no such -- it is either the whole hog or nothing? MR RAMPTON: Yes. You cannot do that from memory. MR IRVING: I am all for the whole hog in this case. Let us go the whole hog, but I thought that the Professor was saying it would be rather difficult to do this exercise in court with things as tricky as detailed drawings. MR JUSTICE GRAY: Well, he was saying that, but if we have to do it, we have to do. MR IRVING: Yes. But if Mr Rampton objects, then by all means let us look at the individual drawings. MR JUSTICE GRAY: But let me get this clear, Mr Irving, first: we will go through the drawings, by all means, but --- - MR IRVING: Well, my Lord, I ---- MR JUSTICE GRAY: --- there is going to be no profit in doing so if, at the end of the day, you are going to put to Professor van Pelt, "Oh, well, that is all very well, but it was just a delousing chamber or disinfecting chamber". So I do not want to spend a lot of time and in the end for it to be in a sense purposeless. Do you follow me? MR IRVING: I agree, but your Lordship has heard the witness say that there are two or three specific things about the drawings which, when put together, can only lead to the sinister interpretation. I think I know what he is . P-151 alluding to. MR JUSTICE GRAY: Yes, well, I am looking at one, the following page 183 in your report ---- MR IRVING: I do not want to preempt him. MR JUSTICE GRAY: --- and I suspect that may be one of the ones, with the small holes along the top and bottom of the side walls. MR IRVING: If your Lordship feels this is inappropriate that we should continue on this? MR JUSTICE GRAY: No, well, I am in the difficulty, Mr Irving, as you will understand, I do not quite know that I know what the point that is going to be made is. MR RAMPTON: My Lord, let me say straight ---- MR RAMPTON: My Lord, may I make an intervention now? MR JUSTICE GRAY: We had better not all talk at once. MR RAMPTON: No, I know, but I have foreseen this for sometime. I really think Mr Irving has to state his position now because otherwise, as your Lordship has just said, we could spend two hours going through the drawings and end up with the same conclusion as yesterday in cross-examination, "Yes, it was a gas chamber, but not for live human beings". MR JUSTICE GRAY: That is why I said what I said. MR RAMPTON: If that is all that this examination is going to lead to, Mr Irving may as well come clean, say, "Yes, I accept it was a gas chamber. Now, Mr Van Pelt, how do . P-152 you deal with the suggestion that was for gassing corpses and clothes?"
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