Archive/File: people/i/irving.david/libel.suit/transcripts/day019.22 Last-Modified: 2000/07/24 Q. We will come to that in a minute. A. -- and squalor and so on were an extremely important part . P-198 of this. Therefore this is not part of a deliberate systematic extermination of the Jews by the Nazis. So you have to take that together with other things. Q. Are you saying that all ---- A. Of course, four million is a figure that is well below the range of figures which responsible historians of the Holocaust consider, even leaving apart the question of the deliberate and systematic nature of the killing. Q. If we look at the 6 million figure or the 5.1 million figure, are they all people who met a violent death? A. Well, I guess it depends what you mean by violence. I think the argument is that these are people who were killed as a result of a systematic mass murder by the Nazis. Q. Privations killed them as much as violence, right? Starvation, epidemic, brutality, exhaustion? A. Indeed, yes. Q. Which is exactly what I said in the radio interview, correct? A. As I said, you have to take that in conjunction with how and why you think that people died of typhus and epidemics in the camps. Q. Because I do not buy the whole 6 million, I am a Holocaust denier. I am suddenly not a responsible historian? A. I think you have to take this together with other aspects of what you have said and written about the Holocaust. As . P-199 I say, we are focusing here on one statement you make where quite exceptionally you go up to 4 million, and in many other places you did use before that much lower figures. Q. You are aware that that radio broadcast was subsequently broadcast around the world by the newspapers; it was headlined in Australia and headlined in other countries around the world, and never once did I issue a dementi. I was quite happy to accept that I had stated those figures. Have you seen the press clippings? A. I have not, no, but I am happy to accept that though. Q. Can we now move on to the matter you wish to raise, which is the death by epidemics? MR RAMPTON: Before we do that, can I draw your Lordship's attention to the stated position on the pleadings? I am sufficiently still enough of an anorak occasionally to refer to the pleadings. In relation to Belzec, Sobibor and Treblinka as at 18th March 1997 when the Reply was served, the allegation had been that Belzec, Sobibor and Treblinka were established as extermination camps as part of Aktion Reinhardt, Mr Irving said this: "The Plaintiff was not aware of any authentic wartime archival evidence for the allegations raised in this paragraph. Aktion Reinhardt was named after Friz Reinhardt, the Civil Service, in the Reichs Finance Ministry in charge of exploiting the assets of deceased . P-200 and murdered Jews and other concentration camp victims. It is denied that Aktion Reinhardt was itself an extermination operation." MR JUSTICE GRAY: Yes. My recollection is that in the initial stages Mr Irving was not accepting ---- MR RAMPTON: That is right. MR JUSTICE GRAY: --- during his evidence that there was any gassing there, but when pressed he did. His position has evolved, in other words. MR RAMPTON: The position has evolved to this, that he accepts there were Jews killed by gas at those camps. He is, I think to be fair, unsure of the scale. MR JUSTICE GRAY: Well, my recollection is he has actually had figures put to him which he has accepted. MR RAMPTON: Then your Lordship's memory is better than mine. MR JUSTICE GRAY: Mr Irving, I think that that is historically right, for whatever it may be worth. MR IRVING: Your Lordship will undoubtedly refer to the transcripts when the time comes, whatever I said in the transcripts. My recollection of the matter is that in order to speed the trial along we have stream lined a lot of the arguments and concentrated on certain institutions and centres, and left it like that. MR JUSTICE GRAY: Yes. MR IRVING: It is not a formal concession. It is not a denial, but it helps to speed the process of the trial along. If . P-201 I were to start digging my heels on all the other sites and locations and events and episodes then we would be here until Christmas. MR JUSTICE GRAY: Do not overestimate the importance of the speed of the trial. Obviously we have a duty not to waste time, but you cannot found your concessions on a wish to keep the trial moving along. They are either concessions, and I use that word I think correctly in this context, or they are not. MR IRVING: My logic there is to say that if I am proved wrong on the main camp, on Auschwitz two, then what happened or did not happen in Sobibor, Treblinka and Belzec is neither here nor there. If, on the other hand, I am proved right on Auschwitz two, then equally what happened in Sobibor and Treblinka and Belzec is neither here nor there. MR JUSTICE GRAY: We may have to examine that further, but I am conscious you are trying to sustain a cross- examination and it is very difficult for you to have to argue. Mr Rampton was right, I think, to get up and say what he did. I certainly do not want to take you out of your cross-examination. MR IRVING: He is certainly right to have pointed that out, although he very correctly read out exactly what the pleadings said, and the pleadings did not really justify the burden that he sought to place upon them. MR JUSTICE GRAY: I think I know what you are getting at. Why . P-202 do you not resume your cross-examination. If you are running out of steam ---- MR IRVING: I am not running out of steam. There is one other point I believe that the witness wishes to make which concerns the epidemics in Buchenwald at the end of the war. A. Let me go back and say that I quote you on page 106 in saying in 1998, you were asked: If Holocaust is representative of the allegation of the extermination of 6 million Jews due to the Second World War as a direct result of official German policy of extermination, what would you say? You replied that: "I am not familiar with any documentary evidence of any such figure of 6 million. It must have been of the order of 100,000 or more". MR IRVING: I would wish to see, to quote your words, I would wish definitely to see exactly what has been left out there, because that is such a remarkable statement in that form that I cannot accept that is a complete ---- A. Well, you have had the opportunity to do so. You have had my report since July I think. MR JUSTICE GRAY: We have probably got it. What page were you reading from, Professor Evans? A. 106. MR IRVING: 106. A. Right at the bottom. MR JUSTICE GRAY: We have the testimony. Unfortunately we have . P-203 not got a page reference. Yes, we have, page 12. MR IRVING: By looking at the figures I think we are talking about how many are known to have died in Auschwitz. A. That is not the question that you were asked. It is the extermination of 6 million Jews during the Second World War. Q. That is why I want to see exactly what the testimony says. It would be clearly impossible for me to have said that the Holocaust was 100,000. MR RAMPTON: No, it is not, Mr Irving is wrong. The question was: "And if the Holocaust is represented as the allegation of the extermination of 6 million Jews during the Second World War as a direct result of official German policy of extermination, what would you say to that thesis?" Then we get the answer. MR JUSTICE GRAY: Where are you reading from? MR RAMPTON: I am sorry, I am reading from the transcript of Mr Irving's evidence. MR JUSTICE GRAY: I have got that, but I have pages running into the hundreds. MR RAMPTON: 204 in the bottom right-hand corner. MR JUSTICE GRAY: Do you want to see it, Mr Irving? You asked to see it and you are perfectly entitled to. MR IRVING: I would wish to see the whole of it rather than just two or three lines that have been read out to me by Mr Rampton, to see what the context is. . P-204 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Yes, that is fair. MR RAMPTON: Then there was a further question on 205, my Lord: "Do you have any opinion as a result of your research as to the number of Jews who died in concentration camps during the Second World War? I am not sure that an opinion wore here would be of use. I have opinions. I have opinions of the kind of statistical orders of magnitude where you can see there is a minimum number and a maximum number and I can only set these two limits and say that to my mind it must have been of the order of 100,000 or more". MR IRVING: Yes, in other words 100,000 is the minimum ---- MR RAMPTON: Yes. MR IRVING: --- of those died in concentration camps. MR JUSTICE GRAY: He does go on to say that certainly less than the figure which is quoted nowadays of 6 million. MR RAMPTON: With the ellipse it is accurately set out in Professor Evans' report. MR JUSTICE GRAY: I think that is true. MR IRVING: Just once again those three lines quoted in the report do not really give the flavour of the deliberations that go on. If I am being asked as how many Jews died in the concentration camps during the war years, and I do what any scientist would which is give a lower limit and an upper limit which in this particular case are very wide indeed, not less than 100,000, not more than 6 million, . P-205 that is all one can say on the basis of the certainties that we have. Is there anything further you wish to say about that, witness? A. No. Q. Do you now wish to say something about the epidemics in Belsen and the responsibility of the Allies for them? A. Yes. I go on in my report to quote you, saying that it was the Allies: "We, the British and the Americans, were partially responsible, at least partially responsible, for their misfortune because we vowed deliberate bombing of the transportation networks, bombardation, deliberate ... bombarding the German communications ... pharmaceutical industry, medicine factories. We had deliberately created the conditions of chaos inside Germany. We had deliberately created the epidemics and the outbreaks of typhus and other diseases which led to those appalling scenes that were found at their most dramatic in the enclosed areas, the concentration camps, where, of course, epidemics can ravage and run wild". That is you in 1986. Q. You dispute that, do you? A. Yes, I do. The conditions of epidemics are created, essentially, by the Nazis who ran camps in such a way that they were extremely unhygienic. Q. How can you combat epidemics if you do not have the pharmaceutical products to combat them? . P-206 A. Well, the point is that they -- first of all, the major epidemics were well before the end of the war. As you know, there is a major epidemic in Auschwitz in 1942 to 3, I think, and you are talking here as if this is only at the end of war. Q. Are you also familiar were the fact that epidemic is a by-product of bombardment of cities, that the water mains are destroyed, the rats feed on the cadavers? A. Well, we are not talking about the bombardment of concentration camps. We are talking about conditions extremely unhygienic in which the particular disease concerned was typhus which is a disease of dirt and lack of hygiene, and there is plenty of evidence that these are the conditions in the camps which the Nazis deliberately created. MR JUSTICE GRAY: What would you make of an historian who says, I suppose, the political party which had rounded up a particular race and put them into camps where typhus broke out and killed huge numbers of them, how do you feel about an historian who says that the person who deliberately created the epidemics was the person who bombed the pharmaceutical factories which might have been able to provide the distribution which might have limited the typhus epidemic, how would you regard? A. I feel that that is a reversal of the truth. That is extremely perverse. Typhus is a disease which the Germans . P-207 knew very well how to combat. They had had experience of it from the First World War. There had been a lot of medical intervention by the Germans since well before that combating diseases in Eastern Europe. MR IRVING: How do you combat typhus? A. Essentially, by cleanliness. It is by, for example, giving the inmates of a concentration camp fresh clothing and bedding at regular intervals which was not done at all. Q. What is the carrier of typhus? A. It is the human body louse.
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