Archive/File: people/i/irving.david/libel.suit/transcripts/day022.15
Last-Modified: 2000/07/24

MR IRVING:  Yes, I think we can agree that the March 6th 1942
conference was almost entirely concerned with the question
of the half Jews and the Mischlinger, was it not?
A.No, not almost entirely.  It was entirely concerned with
Mischlinger and half Jews.
Q.It was entirely?
A.And Jews in mixed marriages, yes.
Q.As a component of the Final Solution?
A.Yes.

.  P-132



MR JUSTICE GRAY:  Is there a document that establishes that?
Presumably there is.
MR RAMPTON:  Yes, your Lordship has it.
MR JUSTICE GRAY:  I know, but I would just like to know where it is.
MR RAMPTON:  Yes, I am trying to get help with that.  I have it
in a file I marked "Schlegelberger" which is terribly
helpful with quotes round it, mind.  It is quite a
long
document.  I have it just before the 12th March
letter.
MR IRVING:  It is page 6 onwards.  Is this the letter dated
April 5th?
MR RAMPTON:  No, I am talking about the minutes.
MR JUSTICE GRAY:  6th March, the minutes of 6th March.
MR RAMPTON:  Yes, minutes of the Conference on 6th March.
MR JUSTICE GRAY:  It seems to me this is quite an important
document.
MR RAMPTON:  It is an important document, yes.
MR JUSTICE GRAY:  And I have no idea where it is.
MR IRVING:  That has not been in any of my bundles, I know.
That would have been in one of their bundles.
MR RAMPTON:  Yes.  Mr Irving did not include it in the
papers
he gave your Lordship, so we provided it separately.
MR JUSTICE GRAY:  That is not, I think, entirely fair.
Anyway,
let us find it.  It does not matter whose fault it is.
MR RAMPTON:  All right, I can tell you.  It is in H1(viii),
if
your Lordship has it?

.  P-133



MR JUSTICE GRAY:  Can somebody make a photocopy of it this
afternoon?
MR RAMPTON:  It has been up there, but it has disappeared.
MR JUSTICE GRAY:  Do not start blaming me!
MR IRVING:  Is it in English or in German?
MR JUSTICE GRAY:  German.
MR RAMPTON:  German.
MR IRVING:  In that case, my Lord, I will ----
MR JUSTICE GRAY:  I do not think that probably matters.
MR IRVING:  --- volunteer to obtain an English translation
for
your Lordship over the weekend.
MR JUSTICE GRAY:  That is very kind.
THE WITNESS:  I do have my own copy of this document.
Thank
you very much.
MR JUSTICE GRAY:  I am ready when you are.
MR IRVING:  Very well, my Lord.  I am in the witness's
hands
here which places me in some dread.  Would you give a
brief overview of what the conference was about?  It
was
about the treatment, we have agreed, of the problem
Jews,
the half Jews, the quarter Jews, the people married to
Jews?
A.Yes, or the Jews married to non-Jews.
Q.Yes.
A.Yes, and various -- basically, various proposals were
thrown about at this meeting and there were some
proposals
that they should be sterilized and this raised alarm

.  P-134



bells.  I am just trying to find my own ...
Q.Why would this be, because of the immense burden that
this
would place on German medical services or the ----
A.Well, the alarm bells in ----
Q.--- red tape?
A.--- the Ministry of Justice because there are legal
proposals.  Right, I have got this here now.
Q.Was it a very daunting task in any way, to carry out
the
sterilization?
A.There was a proposal that they should be compulsorily
sterilized and remain in the Reich, but some thought
that
would not be -- that it is not impossible during the
war
 -- it was not possible during the war.  Mass
sterilizations would take up medical facilities needed
for
the war wounded, and that in any case this would still
keep them alive, as it were, and that would be a
problem.
There was an alternative proposal put forward which
says
that half Jews would be equated with Jews and
"evacuated"
possibly to special so-called settlements set up for
half-Jews alone.
Q.Does it use quotation marks around "evacuated" or does
it
use the word "evacuated"?
A.Sorry, I am saying that -- they are my quotation marks
because it is, I think, quite possible that that means
they would in the end be killed.  It may well be a
euphemism at this stage of events if we are talking
here,

.  P-135



well, we are talking about 6th March 1942; and there
were
other proposals, that there be a law passed which
would
dissolve marriages between Jews and non-Jewish Germans
and
that was opposed for various legal and other reasons
and
that it should be made easier for them to divorce.  So
there was a great deal of talk about all these various
different kinds of solutions.
Q.Yes, does it look like a whole bunch of problems they
are
conjuring up for themselves?
A.Well, they are kind of agonising over what to do,
given
their basic anti-semitic premises, it is a problem for
them.
Q.What position was Germany in in March 1942?  Was
Germany
pretty well down to its uppers?  Was it fighting a
desperate battle on the Eastern Front?  Had it nearly
lost
the entire Eastern Army in the previous winter?
A.Not as desperate as it became later.
Q.So they had quite a lot of things on their plate apart
from dealing with these domestic problems?
A.Yes, but it was part of their mentality, as you could
see
from the space devoted to the Mischlinger question in
the
Wannsee Conference, that they should kind of split
hairs
and spend a lot of time talking about what seems to us
to
be completely ludicrous problems, but they took these
extremely seriously ----
Q.Yes, these lawyers, they sat around all day talking
about

.  P-136



pernickety little details, did they not?
A.I am afraid they did a lot of the time, yes.  But for
them, of course, it was very serious.
Q.For the lawyers or for Germany?
A.For the lawyers.
Q.But Germany, you agree, was fighting desperate battles
on
the on Eastern Front; the air war was just beginning;
they had manpower problems developing; they were
trying to
control an ever expanding Empire; they had unrest?
MR JUSTICE GRAY:  Mr Irving, I mean, that is a very long
question.  In the end, it is pretty neutral because
the
fact is they were doing it.  That may be odd, may be
not.
MR IRVING:  I am moving on to the point of the question.
A.Good.
Q.If you were Adolf Hitler -- perish the thought -- and
somebody came to you with all this red tape and said,
"We
are tackling this problem now, Mein Fuhrer", what
would
your response be?
MR JUSTICE GRAY:  But what do you mean by "this problem"?
MR IRVING:  Whatever the problem is, whatever ----
MR JUSTICE GRAY:  That begs rather an important question, I
think.  I mean, that is the whole point of the
discussion
you are having at the moment.
MR IRVING:  If anybody, if you were the Fuhrer or if you
were a
Dictator of a State in a desperate military situation,
and
somebody came to you with any problem which was not

.  P-137



directly related to winning the war, what would your
response be?
A.It would depend on the problem, Mr Irving.
Q.Would you not say, push this on one side, "Let us, for
heaven's sake, leave that until this war is over.  Let
us
win the war first and then we will tackle this
problem"?
A.No, Mr Irving.  I think you could say that Hitler
repeatedly the previous December made speeches,
statements, about what was to happen to the Jews.  He
spent a lot of time thinking about the Jews and this
had
gone on into the Wannsee Conference.
  Hitler was an obsessive anti-Semite in whom
there was really little distinction between the
process,
the progress of the war and the Jewish question.  He
regarded the war as having been started by the Jews.
He
thought they were responsible for it.  When America
came
into war on 11th December 1941, Hitler thought that
the
Americans had been put up to this by -- I know he
declared
war in America, but he thought that the American
support
for the allied side was a result of Jewish
machinations.
And all of this weighed extremely heavily upon his
mind.
  On the other hand, the kind of legalistic,
you
know, and to go on, I mean, he also, of course,
considered
that the Soviet Union was run by Judaio Bolsheviks and
that the Jews were behind that as well.  He was
completely
obsessed with this.  Therefore, he does not, kind of,
he

.  P-138



does not even make a distinction between the
exigencies of
the war and what he regarded as the problem of the
Jews of
Germany, Poland and the rest of Europe.
Q.Is there any evidence ----
A.On the other hand, just so that I may finish answer
the
question -- I apologise, it is rather a long answer,
but
it is an important question to get straight -- of
course,
when the Ministry of the Interior and the Ministry of
Justice and so on, and all the various other instances
start agonizing at considerable length as to what to
do
about the half Jews, the quarter Jews, Jews married to
Germans, where do you draw the line and so on, then it
is
quite likely that Hitler would have said, "Look, this
is
all too complicated.  We have got the main problem of
the
Jews solved, we are taking them all out to the East
and we
are killing them in large numbers, let us leave this
relatively small group, let us put that off to the end
of
the war".
Q.That is the spin you put on this document, is it, on
the
Schlegelberger memorandum?
A.If you want to date it, if you date it to this period,
to
the kind of bureaucratic fall out of 6th March 1942
meeting, then that seems to be the reasonable
interpretation.
Q.Have you read ----
A.If you want to date it to July 1941, then I think you
have

.  P-139



to put a different and broader interpretation on it.
It
is a matter of balancing out which you think is more
equal, which are more likely with this rather
problematic
source.
Q.Look at the evidence for the 1942 one first, and if
that
is sufficiently compelling, I will invite his Lordship
to
decide whether we ought to go back and have a look at
the
1941 scenario.
  Have you seen any testimonies of the people
who
were present at these meetings, or on the staff of the
people involved in this, in which they describe how
they
approached Lammers for a decision and Lammers informed
them that he had taken it up with Hitler and that
Hitler
had said he wanted it postponed until after the war
was
over?  I am referring to the names of Boley, Ficker
and
other members of the various Ministerial staffs who
were
present at the March 6th 1942 conference?
A.Yes, yes.
Q.So that helps to narrow it down to this 1942 period,
does
it not?
A.That depends how much you rely on their testimony.
One
has to be rather cautious with it.
Q.Because they were Nazis or anti-Semitic?  Is this, I
mean,
the usual story, that we are not going to accept them
because they were in some way loaded?
A.Well, not necessarily not going to accept them, but

.  P-140



I think again what you have here is postwar evidence
from
memory by people who were involved in these decisions
who
were quite clearly concerned not to incriminate
themselves.  I think one has to approach that kind of
evidence with a great deal of caution.  You yourself,
Mr Irving, have gone on repeatedly about the superior
nature of contemporary evidence over this kind of
evidence.
Q.If Lammers, for example, had said in the witness box
that
he wanted to find out for himself and he fixed an
appointment with the Fuhrer, "whereupon the Fuhrer
told me
that, yes, it was quite right that he had given the
evacuation order to Himmler, but he did not want to
hear
any more briefings about this Jewish problem during
the
war", is that all very much part of this scenario?
A.You will have to provide me with the documents, I am
afraid.
Q.If you would look at page 10, please, of the little
bundle
I gave you?
MR JUSTICE GRAY:  Sorry?
MR IRVING:  My little 25 page bundle of documents.
MR JUSTICE GRAY:  The one you put in yesterday?
MR IRVING:  No, it has been before your Lordship for about
10
days.  It is bundle B, I think.
A.This is J1, is it?
Q.Yes?

.  P-141



A.J1, tab 7.
Q.You may found this unsatisfactory, but these are the
original source notes and end notes for Hitler's War, as you will see ----

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