Archive/File: people/i/irving.david/libel.suit/transcripts/day014.05 Last-Modified: 2000/07/20 MR RAMPTON: Have you ever seen a police interview with a witness, Mr Irving -- a record, a handwritten record, of a police interview with a witness, Mr Irving? A. I think there have been references to them in various Courts of Appeal, yes. Q. No, Mr Irving. Have you ever actually seen the record of a police interview? I am talking about the days before they were tape recorded and later typed, transcribed. . P-37 Have you ever seen a record of an interview in a Police Station? A. Yes. Q. You know perfectly well it is common form that poor old officer Bobby laboriously writes out what the witness is saying, and then when he comes to a name he always puts it in capital letters? A. But is he writing out what the witness is saying or is he writing down something and saying to the witness, "No sign here, please. This is what you said"? Q. So it is not just the notorious Colonel Scotland, it is the notorious Scotland Yard, is it? A. Well, you dragged them in. I did not mention them. Q. Come on, Mr Irving, the fact that it is written in pencil with the names in capitals tells us nothing. A. On the contrary, it indicates clearly that he is doing precisely what he is told to at the dictate of the British Army officers who, undoubtedly, had ways of doing their job, they had ways of making people talk, and I have no criticism whatsoever of that. We won the war and these are the methods we used to win the war. But to use these same documents that we won the war with to write history from is, I think, indicative of the problems that we are having in the courtroom today. Because you yourself have admitted, your expert witnesses have admitted, that Almeyer frequently made wrong statements in his report. . P-38 Q. Yes, he did. In fact, he gave his first account in Norway, did he not? A. Yes. Q. I am told, and you probably will not know because you have never studied it, but in fact I am told that his most explicit and detailed account was given in Norway. A. Not with these numbers, as I said in my letters to Mr Weber and also Mr Philip on the same day. Q. His significance is not numbers, is it? His significance is procedure at Auschwitz, is it not? MR JUSTICE GRAY: Is that right, Mr Irving? A. I am sorry, I was not listening. I was just checking this other letter I wrote on that day. I am not sure if it is in the file or not. MR RAMPTON: If there is one in German, I am going to ask you about it. It is Karl Philip. A. Yes. Q. I will ask you about that in a moment. The significance of Almeyer for the record in so far as he has significance is not the numbers that he gives, but the description that he gives of how they killed the people at Auschwitz, is it not? A. Even there, if my memory is correct, he gets it wrong. MR JUSTICE GRAY: Well, what is the answer to the question and then carry on about whether he gets it right or wrong. A. He describes gassing procedures, this is true, but, of . P-39 course ----- Q. But the question, Mr Irving -- do focus on the question -- is that the significant thing about Almeyer's account is not the number that he gives of the Jewish prisoners who were gassed, but the description he gives of the way in which they were gassed. That is the question. MR RAMPTON: It is the question. MR JUSTICE GRAY: Can you say whether you agree or disagree with it? A. If you tell me what the description is that he gave? MR RAMPTON: Let me tan an example, the middle of page 262 of the transcript, as it where, that appears in van Pelt. It corresponds very roughly with what SS Untersturmfuhrer Broad tells us: "In the time that followed some three to four gassing were undertaken in the old crematorium. These always occurred in evening hours. In the morgue were two or three air vents and medical orderlies wearing gas masks should blue cyanide gas into these" ---- A. Now, which crematorium are we talking about? Crematorium number ---- Q. That is crematorium (i) at Auschwitz 1 at the stammlager. A. About which, unfortunately, we have not asked the Professor very much in his evidence. Q. Well, you did not. A. Yes, indeed, but I tried to bring this up and his Lord . P-40 said, "We are not interested in whether this building has been faked after the war or not". Q. Mr Irving, do you never answer an overt question? MR JUSTICE GRAY: That is a total misrepresentation of what I said, but let us move on.. A. Well, I tried to bring up crematorium No. (i) in order to get the admission from the witness that it has been built in 1948 by the Poles and at this point your Lordship intervened, you will remember, and said, "This is of" ---- MR JUSTICE GRAY: Well, I am not going to go through that again because the transcript is there, but let us get back to Almeyer. MR RAMPTON: We will just read on, and this is where Almeyer is a real killer for you revisionists, is it not, Mr Irving? A. I do not know. I will have to see what it says. Q. "We were not allowed to come close and only the next day the bunker, gas chamber, was opened. The doctor told that the people died within half a minute to a minute. In the meantime, in Birkenhau, close to the burial sites, two empty houses were equipped by the construction office with gas chambers. One house had two chambers, the other four. These houses were designed as bunkers 1 and 2. Each chamber accommodated about 50 to 150 people. "At the end of January or February, the first gassings were undertaken. The Commando was called "SK" and the camp commander had put it under the direct . P-41 authority of Untersturmfuhrer Grabner and was again led and brought into action by Hoessler". That is different from Hoess. "The area was surrounded by notices and marked as a security zone and, moreover, encircled by eight guardposts from the Commando. "From that moment onwards the camp doctor sorted from the arriving transports immediately the inmates and those who were destined to be gassed. They had instructions to select for gassing those crippled by illness, those over 55 years of age who could not work and children up to 11 or 12 years". From a revisionist point of view, that is a catastrophic account, is it not? A. But I also draw attention to the frequent footnotes that Professor van Pelt has quite rightly written in saying this is wrong, that is wrong, the following is wrong, this is an incorrect account, the time was longer, the time was shorter. If one knows that, what kind of credence can you attach to a report like that? MR JUSTICE GRAY: In relation to the passage Mr Rampton has just read, is that not an accurate account of, I do not know, is it crematoria (iv) and (v), or (iii) and (iv)? MR RAMPTON: No. In that passage it is bunkers 1 and 2. A. It is talking about the bunkers 1 and 2, which we have not talked about and which, as far as I am concerned, actually existed. MR JUSTICE GRAY: My question really is this. Is there . P-42 anything wrong with that as an account, so far as you see it? A. I see nothing wrong with that as an account, my Lord, but then, of course, as I have to keep reminding the court, I am not a Holocaust historian. I have never set myself up as a Holocaust historian. I have not written about the Holocaust in books or otherwise. All I know is that this is a flawed account, if I can use that word. Professor van Pelt himself describes it as being inaccurate in very many respects, and this is the kind of problems which would no doubt have been brought out, had I ever sat down and read the whole file and start comparing it with all the others. MR RAMPTON: Before suggesting that this flawed account, put into his mouth by the brutal British interrogators, was tortured out of him by Colonel Scotland? A. I am talking about the figures of course, both in the English letter and in the German letter, June 4th. I said it becomes more lurid with each subsequent version, first no gassings, then 50, then 15,000 in all. I suggest brute force by interrogators perhaps. Q. So you are quite prepared to accept that these accounts, he goes on on a subsequent page to give an account of gassings of crematorium (ii) in Berkenhau? A. We have exactly same problem with Rudolf Hoess. We know Rudolf Hoess was badly manhandled and no doubt he richly . P-43 deserved it, but his account also became more lurid with each successive interrogation. Q. Mr Irving, your answers are in danger of becoming characteristically inconsistent, if I may say so. You were worried that Colonel Scotland may have tortured these numbers, or threatened to do so, out of Almeyer, is that right? A. That is not actually what I said. I said his account becomes more lurid with each successive interrogation. That is all one can safely say, looking at them, on the basis of a first blush look at the entire file. Q. Let us start again, Mr Irving. If this is a flawed account, and an obviously flawed account ---- A. In the opinion of your own expert witness. Q. No. If you only have to compare it with the rest of the evidence. I know you have never done that, but it is, let me tell you, in certain respects unclear, confused and inaccurate. The guts of it, however, I put to you a moment ago, are dangerous to revisionists. If this account had been beaten or threatened out of this man by the brutal British interrogators, would you not think that they would have made it consistent with what else they knew? A. That is perhaps what they were doing. Q. Would you not think ---- A. Perhaps that is why it is marginally consistent with other . P-44 accounts known at this time. By this time, you have to remember, they already knew quite a lot from other interrogations. Q. Exactly. So they would have made Almeyer get it right. They have not only got all the details right, they would have got the numbers right, would they not, Mr Irving? A. What you mean? Put in 2.8 million or some ---- Q. Whatever. But 15,000? That is pathetic, is it not? That is not a very good answer to a threat of torture or torture itself, is it? A. Maybe that was going to be in a later stage. Maybe there was going to be an interrogation 5 or 6 when he came to Nuremberg into the shadow of the gallows. This is a rather threadbare kind of argument. We do not know what stage they reached in their coercion. Q. Mr Irving, you have made a suggestion in this letter to your chums in the revisionist movement to the effect that this man gave a fallacious account because he was tortured or threatened with torture by the Brits. You have absolutely no basis for that whatsoever. A. Mr Rampton, when the time comes to cross-examine your expert witnesses, I shall be putting to them documents which show very clearly what methods were used to extract information from witnesses, including some of the most brutal and horrifying descriptions of what happened to the witnesses in the Malmedy trial. I shall invite them to . P-45 state whether they consider this kind of evidence is dependable. Q. Mr Irving,, I am tempted myself to resort such methods to get a straight answer to my question, I have to say. You have no evidential ---- A. It included, for example, crushing the testicles of 165 out of 167 witnesses. Is that what you are proposing to do to me?
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