MR JUSTICE GRAY: Mr Rampton, I wonder if I could ask you for a bit of help on really a logistical problem? Some of the source material that the experts rely on is fairly inaccessible. I was wondering if your team could provide me with copies of, I think, just three documents, report No. 51, that report from the Einsatzgruppen A, you know the one I mean, giving the partisans and the Jews killed?

MR RAMPTON: Is that the Jäger report?

MR JUSTICE GRAY: Yes. And also a document which I do not think actually I have ever seen, but Müller's document of August 1941.

MR RAMPTON: Yes, the Müller order.

MR JUSTICE GRAY: If I had those separately, it would make life much easier.

MR RAMPTON: Certainly, my Lord. We have copies of originals of all of those.

MR IRVING: Müller is in one of the bundles, my Lord.

MR JUSTICE GRAY: I am sure it is, but I have not actually seen it yet. Is there anything that needs to be done before Mr Irving goes back into the box?

MR RAMPTON: I do not know whether he has anything.

MR JUSTICE GRAY: Would you like to come back?

MR DAVID IRVING, recalled.

Cross-Examined by Mr Rampton QC, continued.

MR RAMPTON: My Lord, I am going to start in Riga, then I am

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going to go to Yugoslavia and then I am going to go to the Warthegau, just to complete my 1941/42 tour of the size of the operation, and also make reference to what is plainly in some cases direct language and in other cases camouflage language. That should not, I hope, take very long. Then I will go back to, as it were, historiographical error -- I use the word neutrally -- with the so-called Schlegelberger memorandum. May Mr Irving, please, be given Professor Browning's report and at the same time files H3(ii), and H4(v)?

MR JUSTICE GRAY: Yes.

MR RAMPTON: Could one turn, please, to page 28 of Professor Browning's report? In fact, I will perhaps, because it will be important for context later on, start at the bottom of page 27, if I may, in paragraph 5.1.6: "Between October 18 and 21, 1941, the Foreign Office expert for Jewish affairs, Franz Rademacher" -- pausing there, Mr Irving, do you disagree with that description of Herr Rademacher's position?

A. He was head of the appropriate department in section 2.

Q. He had a special responsibility in the Foreign Office for Jewish affairs?

A. Among other things, yes.

Q. Yes. "and Eichmann's second deputy, Friedrich Suhr, visited Belgrade. After the trip Rademacher reported how

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the adult Jewish men in Serbia had been shot by the German army." Do you notice that? They have not been shot by the SS, they have been shot by the Wehrmacht, have they not?

MR JUSTICE GRAY: That is Browning's words.

MR RAMPTON: Yes. But, if Browning is right, that is Wehrmacht and not the SS, is it not?

A. He has not given a quotation there for that.

Q. Well, it may be that we would find it if we looked at Rademacher report?

A. Yes.

Q. Would you like to look at that now?

A. No. I am not quite happy with that. In fact, you remember there is a page of photographs of this kind of thing in my book on the Nuremberg trials.

Q. So not all the systematic -- I must not use that word, must I -- not all the mass shootings were done by the SS?

A. No,. We do not know, of course, why they were shot.

Q. No.

A. He has just reported how they were shot, but not why.

Q. Perhaps we might be able to deduce that in a little while, Mr Irving. " Concerning the fate of the Jewish women, children, and elderly, Rademacher reported: 'Then as soon as the technical possibility exists within the framework of the total solution to the Jewish question, the Jews will be deported by waterway to the reception camp in the east.'"?

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A. Yes.

Q. Do you want to make a comment about that?

A. Well, of course, you are aware of the fact that I am going to comment on the fact that he has mistranslated "camps" as "camp".

Q. "Camp", I see.

A. There is a substantial difference. "Into the reception camps". I think it is a deliberate mistranslation by Professor Browning.

Q. You must put that to him. I am not going to take it up on his behalf.

A. I certainly shall. I am also drawing it to the court's attention. It puts a totally different complexion on the document.

Q. Put your eye down, if you will, to the bottom of the page where you see the German?

A. "... In die Auffanglager..."?

Q. Professor Browning, if he has made a deliberate mistranslation, it is not a very clever thing to have done as he has also given us the German text against which his English can be checked.

A. I have no doubt he is obliged to, but we have spotted his error.

Q. You do not do it in your books, do you, Mr Irving?

A. You wish me in a thousand page book not only to put the English text of the documents, but the German text as

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well.

Q. Mr Irving, if I may use one of your phrases, if you are trying to pull the wool over people's eyes, one way of doing it is to give your version of the German without giving the original, is it not, and that is not here what Professor Browning has done.

A. But at the same time, of course, what one could also do, if one was the historian you are talking about, he could denote his entire files to the relevant archives and could draw the attention of other historians to those contentious documents in the way that I do.

MR JUSTICE GRAY: Shall we move on? It seems to me to be a fairly narrow point.

A. If it is just one camp, then there is obviously an inference to be drawn but, if they are being sent to many camps, then that rather destroys any inference that can be drawn from it.

MR JUSTICE GRAY: You develop that when we hear from Professor Browning.

MR RAMPTON: "In short, Jews deported from Europe were not simply going to be expelled into eastern Russia, but rather they were to be interned in a German 'reception camp' [or 'reception camps'] not yet built."

A. That is the point that has now been destroyed, has it not, by the improper translation? "Into a reception camp which has not yet been built" when, in fact, they have been sent

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to many camps, or more than one, hence the plural.

Q. I will re-read it, Mr Irving, to take account of your wounding criticism of Professor Browning: "In short, Jews deported from Europe were not simply going to be expelled into eastern Russia, but rather they were to be interned in German 'reception camps' not yet built. Furthermore, as these reception camps were for women, children, and elderly, clearly they were not labour camps."

A. That is not what he has written. He has written: "... as this reception camp was for women, children, and elderly, it was clearly not a labour camp". Can I remind you, Mr Rampton, of the fun you had with my mistranslation of Transporte of transport as "transports"? Is this not precisely the same kind of manipulation by your expert?

Q. You must put that to him.

A. I am mentioning to you, Mr Rampton, so that the court can hear it.

Q. My case against you, Mr Irving -- you brought this action; you want to take money off my clients and you want to shut them up for the future with an injunction -- is that you deliberately falsified the original documents amongst other things. If you are making the same accusation against good Professor Browning, then you must make it to him, not to me.

A. Professor Browning has made an error of precisely the same magnitude as Transport and Transporte, Mr Rampton.

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MR JUSTICE GRAY: I am well aware of that point. Let us move on.

MR RAMPTON: Let us move on. There are two reasons I read that earlier paragraph, first because the next paragraph makes more sense if one has seen it; and secondly, because we will be coming back to Belgrade later on. "A second relevant document is a short hand-written letter of October 23, 1941, that Franz Rademacher found waiting for him from the foreign editor of Der Stürmer, Paul Wurm, when he returned to Berlin. Wurm wrote:...", and again the German is at the bottom of this page and the next if you want to look at it. Would you like to look at it first? Footnote 82.

A. Yes.

Q. My Lord, it is not unfortunately in the bundle.

MR JUSTICE GRAY: Do we really need it?

MR RAMPTON: No. I am fearful of poor Professor Browning being accused of misquoting the German.

A. I think I have satisfied the court on that point.

MR JUSTICE GRAY: Come on.

MR RAMPTON: Have you read the German?

A. I am sorry, my Lord, to mention it again, but there is a certain element of malicious glee.

Q. Have you read the German, Mr Irving?

A. I have indeed and it is an accurate translation.

Q. It is an accurate translation. It reads: "Dear Party

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comrade Rademacher! On my return trip from Berlin I met an old party comrade, who works in the east on the settlement of the Jewish question. In the near future many of the Jewish vermin..." The German is Ungeziefer, is it not?

A. Ungeziefer. It has been mistyped.

Q. Deliberate manipulation."... will be exterminated through special measures." That is unequivocal, is it not?

A. Yes, except the word "exterminated" is the usual contention that we have. He translates "vernichtet" and "Vernichtung", we discovered from the dictionary, is destroyed. He has taken the third or fourth meaning of the word in the way that your experts have.

Q. I see. This is, I am bound to say, a baffling proposition, Mr Irving. He has used the word "Ungeziefer", which means, you tell me accurately, means ...?

A. Vermin.

Q. Vermin.

A. Yes.

Q. What does one do with vermin? Transport them to camps in the East, put them to work?

A. I am giving a literal translation of the word. You remember we had the discussion about the difference between destroyed or annihilated and exterminated.

MR JUSTICE GRAY: Let's not get bogged down. What is being put

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to you is that, where you have Vernichtung in combination with a reference to vermin, there can be no two ways about it. What is being talked about is extermination. Do you not agree with that?

A. There is more than one way to skin a cat and I am not going to go beyond what the actual document says, my Lord. For example -- it could equally well be destroyed as vermin by being locked up for life. I am just talking about theoretical possibilities, but I agree that there is a sinister connotation on this document.

MR JUSTICE GRAY: You do agree?

A. Yes.

MR RAMPTON: Professor Browning goes on ----.

A. He has also talked about the fact that the Jewish men have been shot and disposed of, which is many of what he calls the vermin. This does not really take it much further.

Q. We are coming to the female and the infant vermin in a moment. What did Wurm mean by special measures for the destruction of Jews in the east, extermination, Vernichtung, whatever?

A. I am not the writer of this letter, Mr Rampton, so I do not know what he is talking about.

Q. No. Well, we will leave that, shall we? I do not believe there can be any doubt about what extermination of vermin actually means.

Q. "On October 25, 1941, Rademacher's counterpart in the Reich

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Ministry for the Occupied Eastern Territories, Eberhard Wetzel ...". Is that a correct description of Herr Wetzel's position?

A. Yes.

Q. Was he of equal rank with Rademacher?

A. Yes. He survived the war and he died in his bed at a ripe old age without having suffered any penalty. I remember corresponding with him some time ago.

Q. "... Met first with Viktor Brack of the Führer Chancellery..." Can I pause there to ask you to explain what the Führer Chancellery actually was, please?

A. It is a total misnomer really to call it the Führer Chancellery. It was an office set up in another building many hundreds yards away from Hitler's Chancellery. It was a body which was primarily concerned with dealing with the public, and in that way it became involved with dealing with applications for clemency, and in that way it became involved in the euthanasia programme because doctors who were required to take part in the euthanasia programme had to apply, so to speak, to the head of state in advance for clemency for the actions they proposed to take. In that way it became involved in the mass killing operations. Viktor Brack, I believe, was No. 2 in the Führer Chancellery under Philipp Bouhler.

Q. Can you tell me, I think Viktor Brack was, at any rate, one Dr Brack, sometimes German doctors are Dr Dr, but he

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is Dr Brack, is he not?

A. Yes.

Q. Do you know what his doctorate was in?

A. No. Probably in law. Most of the gangsters were lawyers. Most of the concentration camp commandants were lawyers.

Q. As we shall see shortly. Dr Brack had a chemist called Kallmeyer?

A. Dr Kallmeyer, yes.

Q. I should ask you a further question. Is it your position then that, despite the fact that it is called the Führer Chancellery, there is not only a hundred yards, but a great deal more metaphorically speaking of distance between what goes on in that Chancellery and the Führer himself?

A. I have read a great deal in the files of that department, and I cannot remember having seen any correspondence between that department and Hitler himself.

Q. What was the Führer's office called?

A. The Führer's office?

Q. Yes. Did he have actual office of his own?

A. The Reichskanzlei would be the closest body to him which was under Dr Hans Lammers who we will meet later on this morning probably. He was head of the Reichskanzlei, the Reich Chancellery as Reich chancellor. As head of the Wehrmacht he would be the Oberkommando der Wehrmacht,

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which was his military office, so to speak.

Q. "... of the Führer Chancellery (where he was involved with the so-called euthanasia program for the killing of mentally-and physically handicapped patients in German hospitals and asylums)..." Pause there a moment. This is not an important point but we will mention it, if we may, in passing. That is the so-called T 4 programme, is it not, from No. 4 Theresien Strasse?

A. No, Tiergarten Strasse.

Q. I beg your pardon. I muddled up two words.

A. The T 4, and they developed the expertise for killing, the gas trucks and so on.

Q. That programme did have Adolf Hitler's authority, did it not?

A. The euthanasia program was authorised by Hitler in the middle of September 1939. Around about August 1940, when it began to gather momentum voices in the public became agitated about it and retrospectively Hitler signed a decree on September 1st 1939 authorising it, in other words giving it the force of law.

MR JUSTICE GRAY: Authorising the use of gas trucks to effect the euthanasia?

A. No, my Lord, authorising the euthanasia programme. Strictly speaking, he specified which doctors were allowed to carry it out or to make the decisions of life and death over the victims of the euthanasia programme. He did not

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talk about the methods.

Q. He did not talk about methods at all?

A. Not in this decree. It is a five or six line decree.

Q. Nor anywhere else?

A. No. It is a very interesting document because it is obviously a signed death warrant for thousands of people which Adolf Hitler has himself signed. It is that kind of order which does sometimes exist.

MR RAMPTON: I do not know, they probably used a variety of methods to begin with, did they not?

A. To do what?

Q. A variety of methods to begin with, the euthanasia people?

A. I understand so. I think the order actually spoke of humane means, and you can interpret the word "humane" how you want if you are a Nazi, I suppose.

Q. One of the means used, I do not know whether it was the most frequently used, was carbon monoxide gas from bottles, was it not?

A. I believe that is correct, yes. I think this was the method. There was a discussion at Hitler's table about the most humane ways of doing it. I discussed this with the widow of Dr Conte, who was the original chief doctor, and she remembered being at her home of the telephone call from Hitler to her husband in September 1939. Her husband, immediately after the phone conversation, went to a dictionary to look up to see what the word "euthanasia"

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meant. After that, they had the discussions at Hitler's chancellery about the most humane ways of putting these people to sleep, if you can put it like that.

Q. Including by the use of carbon monoxide gas?

A. This was one of the methods discussed on that occasion and I believe they did use it, yes.

Q. It is said by Professor Browning that Wetzel met also Adolf Eichmann, Heydrich's special adviser on Jewish policy. Two things. Is there anything in that short account of whom Wetzel met on 25th October 1941, which is a matter of history you disagree with? It is not a matter of history I disagree with in broad terms, but the documentary basis is a bit suspect. I know the documents that Browning is referring to and some of them are in pencil, some of them had gaps in, I think it was N 0365 or something like that is the Nuremberg document number. They go through various drafts.

Q. The second question is this. Is it right that Adolf Eichmann was Heydrich's special adviser on Jewish policy?

A. He was the head of the Jewish desk of the Amt IV which was the Section 4 of the Reichssicherheitshauptamt.

MR JUSTICE GRAY: I am not sure whether this is really covered by Mr Rampton's question, but do you accept that Brack of the Kanzlei did declare himself ready to aid in the construction of gassing apparatus?

A. Yes, I think so, my Lord. I think we can very rapidly

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slice through this if I accept most of the contentions that are made in these paragraphs.

MR JUSTICE GRAY: That is helpful.

MR RAMPTON: In that case I need not ask you to look at the Wetzel letter to Lohse, who is the Reichs Commissar for the Ostland. You may, if you wish. It is in H3 (ii) at footnote 83.

MR JUSTICE GRAY: Do we need to?

MR RAMPTON: No.

MR JUSTICE GRAY: Broadly speaking, the narrative is accepted?

A. Yes. I think that would probably just dot Is and cross Ts.

MR RAMPTON: I will tell you this. It is actually marked Geheim, which is what was second security classification.

A. Could you tell me again what the reference number for the document is.

Q. I think you ought to look at it. I am sorry about this, my Lord, but I feel uncomfortable being the only one with the document open in front of me. It is H3 (ii), footnote 83.

A. I have it.

Q. This is, I think, a Nuremberg document, is it not?

A. Yes.

Q. You can tell that from the top?

A. Right. With this document, of course, now I can see the document you are referring to, I do have a problem fitting

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it into the actual framework you are trying to ascribe it to. It refers to Unterkünfte and Vergasungsapparate. It is referring to Riga and by implication it also brings in Dr Tesch, who was the head of the company that manufactured or rather had the sole distribution rights on Zyklon B east of the river Elbe, and I am quite familiar with the Tesch case because I did take the trouble, before this action began, to read through the entire transcripts of the war crimes trial against the Tesch company.

MR JUSTICE GRAY: If I am supposed to follow that, I am afraid I am simply not following a word of it. It is no criticism of you, Mr Irving.

A. It is just that I have extraneous knowledge, my Lord, about what was going on at Riga with Tesch, who had been sent out with his experts to set up fumigation facilities as a central fumigation plant for the huge masses of clothing, army clothing, military clothing, refugee clothing -- and Vergasungsapparate and Unterkünfte, and we have one intercept which goes to this and which, purely by coincidence, I actually handed to Mr Rampton this morning, the German intercept, which actually deals with the provision of the Zyklon to Tesch for this purpose.

MR RAMPTON: This is merely a reference to using Dr Brack's machinery to destroy, literally speaking, vermin. Is that right?

A. Perhaps we had better go through the document in detail.

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Q. I think you had better look at the first complete paragraph on the second page, the first sentence, before you commit yourself to that, Mr Irving.

A. That is quite plainly a reference to liquidating the Jews, the second paragraph, yes.

Q. Using Dr Brack's machinery means?

A. Well, either machinery or methods.

Q. Yes, methods, Dr Brack's gassing apparatus. It is a reference to exterminating by means of gas those Jews who could not work, is it not?

A. I am not going to be specific about means. All they are saying here is that they are going to be using Brack's means or methods, which could be any means. They used various different means to dispose of the euthanasia victims.

Q. Could you please read us in translation that first sentence of the first complete paragraph on page 2, Mr Irving?

A. In German or in English?

Q. No, in English.

A. According to the state of affairs, we have no misgivings if those Jews who are not capable of working are disposed of using Brack's methods. Yes.

Q. So the reference to Vergasungsapparate is nothing whatever to do with lice or rats or anything else?

A. It does have a slight bearing on the fact that there were

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extensive war crimes trial after the war. Dr Wetzel, who wrote this letter, was never prosecuted. He lived in complete comfort until the end of his life in Germany, and how can this be if this is the only interpretation to be placed on those words?

MR JUSTICE GRAY: What does beseitigen mean?

A. "Getting rid of". It is one of those vague words again, disposing of.

MR RAMPTON: There is no objection, or we have no reservations, if those Jews who cannot or who are unable to work, incapable of work, are disposed of by Dr Brack's means?

A. Dr Brack's methods, yes.

Q. Again, I am not asserting a positive case, Mr Irving, about history. I do not have to do that. I am asking you, in your role as an open minded objective and scholarly historian, what is the natural interpretation of that letter and the word Vergasungsapparate?

A. I would say quite clearly they are going to be liquidated.

Q. Liquidated by what means?

A. Using the methods of Dr Brack.

Q. What is a Vergasungsapparat in that context?

A. There are two paragraphs here of course. We know what was going on at Riga and this is that there was a major fumigation centre at Riga.

Q. No, please.

A. Well, you asked me the question; I gave you the answer.

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Q. I want to know what the German word "Vergasungsapparate" means?

A. Literally, "gassing equipments". "Unterkünfte" means "rooms".

Q. Well, or huts or whatever, a place where you put people?

A. "Unterkünfte" means "rooms". So we have those two words in conjunction.

Q. We do not know whether these are nice little rooms with a view of the countryside?

A. I do not think so. I think that they built a 50 cubic metre gassing chamber there for the clothing and this comes out at the test trial. The documents and the test trial make this quite plain.

MR JUSTICE GRAY: Yes, but let us get back to the Brack methods referred to on page 2 of that letter. You, as I understand it, accept that is a reference back ----

A. Yes, indeed, but I think it would be ----

Q. --- "Vergasungs"?

A. --- false to link these two matters because nobody has ever suggested that the gas chambers, homicidal gas chambers, were set up at Riga and that, frankly, my Lord, is the bottom line.

Q. Whether or not they were set up, I just want to be clear what your evidence is about what was meant by the Brach methods of getting rid of these Jews.

A. Well, I think we established several paragraphs earlier

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that they used various methods to kill the euthanasia victims.

Q. But including gas chambers?

A. They used carbon monoxide, gas chambers using carbon monoxide. I do not think they ever used any kind of chemicals apart from carbon monoxide from cylinders. They used phenol injections. They used other lethal injections.

MR RAMPTON: Could you then please turn, first of all ----

A. But I do emphasise once again that even the most determined Holocaust historian has never suggested that there was a homicidal gas chamber set up at Riga, which is what this letter is about.

MR JUSTICE GRAY: I think Mr Rampton puts it forward as evidence of the genesis of a policy ----

A. Right.

Q. --- of extermination by methods including gas, is that right?

MR RAMPTON: It is, my Lord. My plain submission about this is that it is very strong evidence of intention at a high level to kill Jews by using gas. In the event, it is perfectly right they that did not build a gas chamber. They used trucks at this point. If we want to know what actually happened, may we please go to Professor Longerich's report, the second part, page 49?

A. I can only emphasise the fact that in the test trial, all

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this was exhaustively analysed, and the court accepted that there was never any suggestion that gassing equipment was used in Riga.

MR JUSTICE GRAY: I think that is accepted.

A. Yes.

MR JUSTICE GRAY: By Mr Rampton, I mean.

MR RAMPTON: In the sense that, yes, "Unterkünfte" means accommodations really, does it not?

A. Yes.

Q. It is always almost used in relation to people in German, is it not?

A. Yes.

Q. Have you got that Longerich report?

A. Yes.

Q. At page 49 of the second part at the top of the page, Dr Longerich sets out a translation of the significant parts of the letter from Wetzel to Lohse which, as you have noticed, is marked "Geheim". That is not the highest security classification, is it, Geheim?

A. No.

Q. I will not read the first paragraph, but I will read the second since we have not done that: "The appropriate apparatus are not available in the required quantity at present, and must first be produced. As Brack is of the opinion that the production of the apparatus would provide greater difficulties in the

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Reich than on-site, he considers it purposeful to send his people to Riga. His chemist, Dr Kallmeyer, in particular, will make all the necessary arrangements." Then it is clearly indicated by Dr Longerich that there is an ellipse. I can tell you that in the original the next sentence begins at the bottom of the first page of the letter. "According to Sturmbannführer Eichmann, camps for Jews will be established in Riga and Minsk, into which Jews from the area of the Altreich will also possibly be brought. At the moment Jews are being evacuated from the Altreich who will be brought to", there probably should be an "o" on that "to" so that "brought too", in other words, "as well as", "in so far as they are fit for work. According to this state of affairs, there are no reservations if those Jews who are incapable of work, are eliminated by the Brackian means ... Those fit for work, on the other hand, will be transported for labour in the East". The sense of that is, surely, this, is it not, Mr Irving -- you can surely accept this -- that the intention was -- what happened in the event is another matter -- as expressed by Wetzel in Berlin in the Ostland Ministry in Berlin, to bring train loads of Jews from the Altreich to Riga and to send some of them that were fit for work to the East and to gas the rest?

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A. That is a quantum leap which disregards the other evidence. You are talking about the intention.

Q. I am.

A. In fact, it is not the intention. It is the proposal.

Q. Yes.

A. And I think that there is more than just a nuance between those two words; just the same as somebody in Posnan, I think it was Mr Hoepner, in July 1941 wrote a letter to Eichmann saying, would it not be far more humane if you would dispose of these people before the winter comes by some rapidly working means? Well, nobody did that at that time. So these proposals were ventilated by these gangsters.

Q. Rather than letting them starve to death, I think it was, was it not?

A. I beg your pardon?

Q. I said it was rather than letting them starve to death was the proposal.

A. Yes, and that is exactly the same kind of thing. These proposals were ventilated and aired. As we find out, nothing was ever done in that direction.

Q. You may or may not agree with Professor Longerich. If you disagree, there is nothing I can do about it. You will have to wait until he gets here. He says: "Gas chambers (here described as 'dwellings' (Unterkünfte) were not in fact erected in Riga. Rather, so-called gas vans were to

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be employed"?

MR JUSTICE GRAY: Where do you get that from?

MR RAMPTON: I do not know; maybe it is in the next sentence.

A. Well, oddly enough, I would agree with that.

Q. You would?

A. Yes.

Q. Well, there we are?

MR JUSTICE GRAY: Then we need not bother.

MR RAMPTON: I will just read on, if I may?

A. But I think it is irresponsible to talk about gas chambers being described as "dwellings" in this. I mean, as we know ----

Q. You must take that up with him, I am afraid.

A. As we know, they did erect this very large fumigation chamber in Riga which is why Dr Tesch went there in October 1941.

Q. You would not describe a fumigation chamber as an "Unterkünfte", would you?

A. Well, we do not know exactly what shape this fumigation chamber took. They may have taken over a Nissan hut and turned it into a gassing chamber with the appropriate sealants, and so on.

Q. No, no, the letter talks about the construction of the required dwellings. That cannot be right, Mr Irving. I am sorry.

A. Well, Nissan huts constructed. I just gave that as a kind

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of ready translation.

Q. They are not probably (and I am only dealing in probabilities because I am interested in historical integrity rather than proof of what happened) they are not likely, the words "dwellings which needs to be constructed", to be fumigation chambers, are they, given the use of the German word "Unterkünfte"?

A. Well, I gave precisely the reason why they are. Given the wartime circumstances, I find it highly likely they would have taken an existing building, like a Nissan hut, applied the appropriate sealants and then used that as a fumigation chamber.

Q. What word would you naturally use in German for a delousing or fumigation chamber?

A. Entlausungskammer, Entwesungskammer, Vergasungskammer.

Q. But not this word?

A. Well, they have actually done the two. They have said Unterkünfte, Vergasungsapparate.

Q. Let us read paragraph 5, may we? "These gas vans were developed by the Criminal Police in autumn 1941 - parallel to the transfer of the technology of 'euthanasia' to Eastern Europe".

A. That, I venture to suggest, if I may just interrupt you, is why the letter had a Geheim rating rather than the Top Secret rating.

Q. Yes.

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MR JUSTICE GRAY: Mr Rampton, I have read the next four or five paragraphs. What is really being said -- I think this is agreed which is why I am intervening -- is that the policy of using gas vans was not only proposed but was implemented?

A. It was implemented, yes.

MR JUSTICE GRAY: Eight or 10 of them were employed to kill Jews, starting, as I read it, in Chelmno. Does one need to go through it more detail? Do you accept that, Mr Irving?

A. Except for the numbers, I think that is right.

MR RAMPTON: I do have a point to make about this. If one looks at paragraph 5, halfway through the paragraph: "After having an execution of Jews performed for his", that is Himmler's, "observation, he demanded of Nebe, the Head of EG B, that other methods of killing should be sought which were more 'humane' than execution", that is by shooting, that is my interpolation, "methods, that is which would put less strain on the firing squads of the SS and policemen". Is that correct? Is that what Himmler demanded of Nebe?

A. What a waffly footnote, though, is it not? This is reconstructed from the accounts of witnesses and ----

Q. Do you agree ----

A. Excuse me, and he then actually uses the "indictment" of somebody as a source when an "indictment" is something that has been untested in law. If it had been a judgment

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by a court, that would be different.

Q. Mr Irving, you can, as I say, take up the cudgels with Dr Longerich and Professor Browning and anybody else, Professor Evans, about their methods, just as I am doing with you about yours.

A. Mr Rampton, you put the sentence to me and I immediately draw attention to the waffly basis.

Q. Mr Irving, I wish you would sometimes just listen to my question. Do you agree, as a matter of fact, with what Dr Longerich has there written?

A. That Himmler was squeamish?

Q. No, that Himmler was worried about the mental and physical effect on the troops, the SS people, of having to shoot so many people?

A. I have heard this said about the same kind of evidentiary foundation that Mr Browning has put in. Let me put it the other way round. There is no letter from Himmler to Berger or to Bouhler or to Heydrich saying, "We have to do this some other way; this is putting too much strain on my men", but there is one episode which I clearly remember -- I have mentioned it before -- when Hitler's film cameraman accompanied Himmler to a mass shooting outside Minsk in the middle of August 1941. Half way through that, one of the machine gunners came running across the field to Himmler and to this party saying he could not do it, his nerves could not take it any more, could he be posted

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somewhere else? He was sent back into the line.

Q. That takes me back, you see, to Wisliceny and to Bruns and to the suggestion I made some days ago, if you remember, that the principal reason why, well, one of the two reasons why mass shootings of this kind were to stop was that they were apt to draw attention to themselves; the other was that it was a strain on the people who had to do the shooting, and that, in consequence, they had to find another means of killing Jews and so they hit upon gassing. Now, will you please comment on that suggestion?

A. I do not think that is an adequate suggestion. I do not think that the noise suggestion, if I can paraphrase it as that, holds water because these mass killings took place many miles outside the built up areas; and as for the strain on the nerves, of course, then how is it that the Russians managed to carry out their mass shootings on similar scales, if not even indeed even greater scales, without having to resort to gas chambers? I do not think there is a ----

Q. Perhaps, Mr Irving, this is not a trial about the Russians. Perhaps Russian public opinion was not as sensitive as German public opinion; who knows?

A. Well, exactly. Who knows the answers to many of these questions that you give?

MR JUSTICE GRAY: Mr Rampton, will you go this far -- I cannot give you chapter and verse for it, but my impression is

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that there is quite a lot of evidence -- I think that is the right word -- to suggest that carrying out the shootings was causing, understandably I suppose, real anxiety, nervous breakdowns and the rest amongst those Germans who were being ordered to carry it out?

A. My Lord, with respect, if they intend to make this a plank of their case, then they should lead such evidence and not allow ----

Q. I am asking you if you accept it.

A. I do not accept that, my Lord, unless they wish to put it to us in a slightly better founded form than Professor Browning has done saying it is based on an unspecified witness statement on an indictment of someone.

MR RAMPTON: That is Dr Longerich, begging your pardon, and I am just about to show you something which I hope you will agree, as it were, helps to found the stability of this proposition by Dr Longerich. Can you please turn to file H4(v) and to footnote 260?

MR JUSTICE GRAY: Before you do, can I ask one further question to see whether you are prepared to accept this, that there was at least disquiet about the method of executing Jews by shooting by the SS?

A. Clearly, a lot of the men did not like doing it, but a lot of the men did like doing it. I think Daniel Goldhagen has brought this out very clearly in his book "Hitler's Willing Executioners", that a lot of men actually

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volunteered for the work. So there is an entire book written on this subject recently. This is Witte, right?

MR RAMPTON: My Lord, this is two pages from a book, this footnote 262, to Professor Longerich's, the second part of his report. I will, if I may, read from nearly the top of the page.

MR JUSTICE GRAY: 260, are you talking about?

MR RAMPTON: Yes, in fact, I had better start with 16. That is the internal page number on the left-hand side. The German personnel, I do not know even know whose book this is.

MR JUSTICE GRAY: Yitzhak Arad.

MR RAMPTON: "Odilo Globocnig's first" under "German Personnel" "was to organise the manpower required for the construction and operation of the killing centres. The people assigned to Operation Reinhard came from the following sources: 1. SS and policemen who served under Globocnig's command in the Lublin district until Operation Reinhard". Then there is a number. "Members of the SS and Police staffs or units. 3. Chancellery of the Führer - Euthanasia programme". A total of 450 men. "The most important group of Operation Reinhard came from the euthanasia programme. They brought with them knowledge and experience in setting up and operating gassing institutions for mass murder. They filled the key posts involved with the extermination methods, the

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planning and construction of three death camps - Belzec, Sobibor and Treblinka - and the command over these camps". So far, that is just Mr Arid speaking. Now, Mr Irving, here is a report of something Dr Brack is later to have said: "Victor Brack gave evidence in his trial after the war about the transfer of the euthanasia personnel to Operation Reinhard: "'In 1941, I received an order to discontinue the euthanasia programme. In order to retain the personnel that had been relieved of these duties and in order to be able to start a new euthanasia programme after the war, Bouhler asked me - I think after a conference with Himmler - to send this personnel to Lublin and place it at the disposal of SS Brigadeführer Globocnik". Are you familiar with that evidence, Mr Irving?

A. I was reading this a few days ago, yes.

Q. Have you never read it before?

A. Just a few days ago I read it for the first time.

Q. It is a Nuremberg piece of evidence, is it not?

A. According to the footnote, it comes from somebody else's book.

Q. From what?

A. From somebody else's book.

Q. I think -- maybe it is not your fault; I made the same mistake when I first looked at it -- the footnotes in question are those under the heading "Chapter Two" the

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next page?

A. Very well. It is an affidavit, yes.

MR JUSTICE GRAY: It is page 16, so it is likely, I think, is it not?

MR RAMPTON: I think so, particularly when we looked a bit further down the page. Anyhow the text goes on as follows: "The first group of euthanasia personnel, numbering a few dozen men, arrived at Lublin between the end of October and the end of December 1941. Among them was Kriminalkommissar of Police Christian Wirth, the highest ranking officer from the euthanasia programme assigned to Operation Reinhard, and Oberscharführer Josef Oberhauser. Additional people from the euthanasia programme arrived in Lublin during the first months of 1942. Viktor Brack visited Lublin at the beginning of May 1942 and discussed with Globocnik the contribution of the euthanasia organisation to the task of exterminating Jews. Globocnik asked for more euthanasia personnel to be placed under his command. His request was accepted. After this meeting Brack wrote to Himmler: "'In accordance with my orders from Reichsleiter Bouhler, I have long ago" -- that would mean October 1941, I assume, according to this historical context, would it not, Mr Irving?

A. It could, yes.

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Q. -- "put at Brigadeführer Globocnig's disposal part of my manpower to aid him in carrying out his special mission'". Pause there, do you accept that that special mission was the extermination of hundreds of thousands of Jews?

A. Can I make a general comment about the unsatisfactory nature of this kind of evidence?

MR JUSTICE GRAY: Yes, but can you answer the question first?

A. No, I do not, not on the basis just of this one extract without knowing what the German document said, without seeing the classifications on it, without knowing the original wording. Why are we being presented with somebody else's book as a source, just being given extracts from it in English?

MR RAMPTON: We will try to remedy our negligent behaviour, Mr Irving, but assume for a moment that is a fair translation of the German of Brack's original letter in May 1942. Do you agree that it as reference to a special mission by Globocnik which means exterminating Jews in Eastern Poland?

A. On the balance of probabilities, yes, but I would like to know why we are not being shown the original document. You have had teams of researchers working in the archives who could have produced the original affidavit and the original letter, and we are only being produced somebody's gloss, somebody's chosen excerpts. I will draw attention

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to one or two -- you are looking weary, Mr Rampton.

Q. I am looking weary because.

A. But maybe my criteria are different.

Q. If you have an application to make, Mr Irving -- this is a court of law and not some forum for you to expound your views about this, that and the other, in particular the Defendants' weakness.

A. Mr Rampton, frankly I would have hoped that the court would have made these observations.

Q. Mr Irving, if you have an application to make for further discovery, make it to his Lordship at the proper time, will you?

A. I would have hoped that the court would have made the observation about the quality of this kind of evidence.

MR JUSTICE GRAY: Since you invite me to, I have some sympathy for what you are just saying because this may be quite an important document, I do not know. As far as I can see, the reference for it in the note 7 is to some Nuremberg documents, but it does not quite read like an extract from a Nuremberg document.

MR RAMPTON: It is a letter, my Lord, and many of the Nuremberg documents are letters.

MR JUSTICE GRAY: Are they?

MR RAMPTON: Yes. We have looked at several of them in the last couple of days.

MR JUSTICE GRAY: Right. But, Mr Rampton, the point really

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that is concerning me a little is you are insisting (and it may be you are right to do so) on going in your cross-examination of Mr Irving to a lot of the source material. This is a bit second-hand, is it not?

MR RAMPTON: Of course it is and I would much rather have the original. The fact is I do not have it. I will try to get it. I have a feeling that I have seen it somewhere, but I cannot at the moment remember where. But there it is. I will try to get it. The purpose of this cross-examination is not, my Lord, to, as it were, investigate the Defendants' efficiency or bona fides in the material that they have disclosed. The purpose of it is to see whether I can get Mr Irving to agree about what the evidence actually suggests.

A. May I also point out that the references to Operation Reinhard are not apparently contained in the documents quoted, but they are the interpolation of the author of this book, Mr Yitzhak or whoever it is. I mean, this is the kind of thing that worries me, that these things are slid in. There is no reference to Operation Reinhard in the quotations actually given.

Q. Well, what was Odilo Globocnig's special mission?

A. He was chief of police in Lublin at this time.

Q. Why should Brack write to Himmler about the Globocnig's special mission?

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A. Mr Rampton, in the final analysis we are probably on the same side in this document.

Q. I think we are too.

A. But I do not want to be ambushed with second-hand sources like this.

Q. If we are on the same side, Mr Irving, there is no ambush, is there?

A. Well, you are ambushing me with second-hand sources like this where I have no means of testing the integrity of the document. I would like to make certain observations about the nature of affidavits sworn in Nuremberg which I shall probably do when I come to cross-examination of Professor Longerich.

MR JUSTICE GRAY: Let us cut this short. Would the Defendants, if they can, unearth this document? In the meantime, you have your answer that "special mission" probably does refer to extermination.

MR RAMPTON: But I am unapologetic, my Lord, because that is not actually the most important part of this letter.

MR JUSTICE GRAY: You mean you have not get to the most important part?

MR RAMPTON: No, it is at the bottom of the page.

MR JUSTICE GRAY: Shall we press on?

MR RAMPTON: Yes, please. "'Upon his renewed request, I have now transferred to him additional personnel. Globocnik took this opportunity to explain to me his idea that the

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action against the Jews", that is pretty explicit, is it not, Mr Irving?

A. Well, of course, at this time they are busy cleaning all the Jews out of the General Government which is the actioning of the Jews.

Q. What would Dr Brack have to do with that?

A. I do not know.

Q. No, quite. "'... should be carried out with all deliberate speed, in order to avoid getting stuck [in the middle]'"-- That is in square brackets; I know not why -- "'one of these days when some sort of difficulty may force us to stop. You, yourself, Reichsführer'", that is Himmler, "'once voiced to me your opinion that the requirements of secrecy also oblige us to act as quickly as possible. Both conceptions are thus directed in principle towards the same result, and according to my experience, they are more than justified'". Again looking at that, as a matter of probability, is Brack not saying two things? Brack, remember, Mr Irving, is master of the gassing apparatus.

A. Yes.

Q. "You do not need secrecy to exterminate lice; you do need secrecy to cloak the killing of people"?

A. I quite agree. That is undoubtedly, on the balance of probabilities, the overall burden of this document.

Q. Thank you very much.

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A. However, if I may now make my own comments on it?

Q. Please do.

A. At no point is it being said (as it could so easily have been said) "This operation which the Führer has commanded should be done" or anything like that. It is purely about "Your opinion, Mr Himmler. You suggested this. We are doing that". This is still failing to establish the bridge between the upper link of the system, which so far is Mr Himmler, and Adolf Hitler himself, which is what I have always maintained.

Q. No, Mr Irving, you see, that is only part of what you have maintained. What you have consistently maintained, so far as I am aware, until perhaps we got some concession in this court yesterday, what you have also maintained is Jews were not killed by the use of homicidal gas?

A. Oh, I disagree. I have repeatedly allowed that they were killed in gas vans.

Q. On a limited scale. Yes, sorry. I will read you something. You will probably recognize it. I have not got a date for it, I am afraid. 1992, what does it come from? What is the IHR called in 1992? The institute of Historical Review? It is something you wrote about the Goebbels' diary.

A. Probably about the Eichmann papers.

Q. It is about the Eichmann papers, that is right. You are talking about Eichmann.

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A. Because Eichmann in his papers describes himself having sat inside the front of a bus or a truck which is being driven around with people being gassed in the back.

Q. My Lord, for reference -- not to get it out -- the reference is file D3(i), tab 30. You say of Eichmann: "I do not know why he recounted that kind of detail in his memoirs. It is an ugly piece of circumstantial evidence". I do not know what it was. It was something about shooting children or something at Minsk. "It is an ugly piece of circumstantial evidence, but it lends credibility and authenticity to the descriptions, what a writer calls verisimilitude. It did no surprise me. He also describes, and I have to say this being an honest historian, going to another location a few weeks later and being driven around in a bus, then being told by the bus driver to look through a peep hole into the back of the bus where he saw a number of prisoners being gassed by the exhaust fumes". Then, Mr Irving, this: "So I accept that this kind of experiment was made on a very limited scale"?

A. Yes. We are talking about, even in your own paper, eight or nine trucks, I believe, which is a very limited scale.

MR JUSTICE GRAY: Mr Rampton, it would help me if one could see quite where we have got now. You have, I will not use the word "concession" because I can understand why Mr Irving does not like it put that way, but in relation to gas vans, one has that being carried out on a limited

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experimental basis with the authority of Himmler but without the knowledge of Hitler, am I right?

A. That is precisely how far we have got.

MR RAMPTON: That does not take the matter very far, with respect.

A. And myself having said so in public on various occasions.

MR JUSTICE GRAY: That is what we spent this morning on so far.

MR RAMPTON: That represents, as it often has in this case and, no doubt, often will, a giant step back from what I think was conceded yesterday which is that all those people who went to those three little villages in Eastern Poland actually were actually going to be killed, most of them.

MR JUSTICE GRAY: Not by gassing.

MR RAMPTON: Not by gassing. Therefore, I must press on.

MR JUSTICE GRAY: Yes, but we are not on Treblinka or the others at the moment, are we?

MR RAMPTON: Well, Operation Reinhard is Treblinka, Sobibor and Belzec. That is what Globocnik was in charge of. The point about it is this. There is again this systematic chain of events. Brack is, first of all, summoned, as it were, to Riga which is in the Ostland. I do not really want to have make a speech. This is not a ----

MR JUSTICE GRAY: No, I am trying not to get too bogged down when at the end one gets the concession that, perhaps, would have enabled one to take the individual documents more rapidly.

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MR RAMPTON: I think it is very difficult. One sees what happens if I take an individual document.

MR JUSTICE GRAY: Yes. Well, that is part of the problem.

MR RAMPTON: The trouble is this. If at the end of the case I say to your Lordship, "Your Lordship has read all the documents" or "I draw them to your Lordship's attention", and then I simply say, "Well, the inference to be drawn from this is perfectly obvious", Mr Irving could legitimately say, "Well, I was never given a chance to deal with that in cross-examination".

MR JUSTICE GRAY: We may have to tackle that as a problem in this case, whether everything has to be put.

MR RAMPTON: Your Lordship will see, when I get to the remaining part of Professor Evans, that there is a great deal that I will not even refer to and a great deal that I will take very shortly, but with this I cannot because your Lordship does have to see the scale and the system.

MR JUSTICE GRAY: But can we just focus on what it is that there is an issue about and see whether Mr Irving agrees.

MR RAMPTON: Your Lordship had better ask Mr Irving.

MR JUSTICE GRAY: I think I am. The issue appears to be whether at Belzec Sobibor and Treblinka there was any gassing at all by the use of gas vans or gas chambers. Is that something you dispute?

A. My answer will be initially disappointing to say that frankly I am not an expert on that and I do not know. The

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court is probably dissatisfied with that answer. I have made such cursory investigations as I could in preparation for this case, which I should not really have had to do, and establish that there is a great deal of uncertainty, buildings which the evidence or eyewitnesses suggest should have been at Treblinka and Majdanek cannot be seen on the aerial photographs. We have that kind of problem. That is why I am happy not to have had to engage myself in any greater depth with those matters.

Q. I think we are not concerned with Majdanek. It is Belzec, Sobibor and Treblinka. You do challenge the fact that there was gassings of Jews in gas chambers or by the use of gas vans.

A. There are serious problems, my Lord. Mr Rampton has been rather vague about how the gassings were conducted in Treblinka, what kind of means were used, what kind of gas, was it diesel engines or petrol engines, and there is a great deal of dispute about that among other people than myself. Go ahead, Mr Rampton.

MR RAMPTON: I should not interrupt. You are in discourse with the judge and I should have kept quiet.

A. Do you wish to ask something?

Q. No. I will not bother with it.

A. I am sorry, if I may just say so, that is why I would have preferred if one was to hinge this case on Auschwitz rather than what I might call the lesser camps, where

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there is a great deal of uncertainty, whereas Auschwitz is really the battleship, the capital ship of this entire case.

Q. You might say that, Mr Irving, but you have entered the arena. Nobody asked you to comment on the Holocaust. Nobody asked you to sink the battleship Auschwitz. Nobody asked you to say with that there were a very limited number of experimental gassings in trucks. You said all that voluntarily?

A. Did I say very limited?

Q. I am about to. My job is about undermining your position by reference to what you should have looked at, if you have not already, by the time you made those statements?

A. The reason I made that statement in 1992 which you just quoted is that only a few weeks earlier I had come into possession of Adolf Eichmann's private papers and I had discovered in those papers a description by him of how he had personally attended a gassing in a gas truck, and he had been required by Müller, the chief of Gestapo, to witness this to see how it was going on. This of course is evidence of high quality. It is evidence that in no way can be said to be in one's own self interest. That is why I told this audience in California that there was no question whatsoever that these gassings in trucks or buses had gone on. To be accused now of having denied this kind of thing is the ultimate absurdity, when the evidence is

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front of the defence and I never denied it.

Q. I am going to suggest, Mr Irving, that you have made statements even about the use of gas trucks which fly in the face of the available evidence, and I am going to do it by reference to some Nuremberg documents which must have been available since goodness knows when.

A. To say that something must have been able available to me of course, is ----

Q. I am suggesting, Mr Irving, that a man in your position does not enter the arena waving flags and blowing trumpets unless he has taken the trouble to verify in advance what it is that he is proposing to say, particularly when what he is proposing to say is something of great sensitivity and importance to millions of people throughout the world.

A. Mr Rampton, the sensitivity is neither here not there in a case like this, where historians cannot regard the sensitivities of people when you write history. Nor I do enter arenas blowing trumpets and waving flags. I am not a Holocaust historian, Mr Rampton. I am a Hitler historian. I am a biographer of the top Nazis.

Q. Why do you not keep your mouth shut about the Holocaust?

A. Because I am asked about it. It apparently obsesses people.

Q. You gave a press conference to announce the triumphant arrival on these shores of the Leuchter report?

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A. Yes.

Q. This is your glossy version of the Leuchter report, is it not?

A. I am a publishing company and we published that under our imprint, yes.

Q. Why?

A. Because it is an important contribution to the debate.

Q. This?

A. Yes.

Q. Well, we will come to that next week.

A. Oh dear.

Q. Is this the only stimulus you have had for charging into the arena of Holocaust denial?

A. Well, I find those words, of course, repugnant.

Q. They are meant to be tendentious. I put it that way so that you can deal with it, because that is what I shall say at the end of the case.

A. As is well known to the court, when I read the results of the chemical test on the buildings which will play quite a substantial part in this debate, I changed my mind.

Q. Here is something, Mr Irving, you said at the Leuchter press conference on 23rd June 1989. My Lord, the reference is D2 (i), Tab 5, pages 30 and 32.

A. Is it the conference where we presented this report to the press?

Q. Yes.

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A. So far as we were able to after the press had been barricaded out by organisations outside my front door.

Q. Can I read what you are reported as having said? You had two things to do, the first to confirm that you did say it because I do not want to put words into your mouth, and then second answer a question from me in consequence if you say yes. "Mr Irving is asked whether he denies that Nazis killed a large number of Jews by unnatural methods including gassing. Answer: That is a very good question, because obviously we have at the back of our minds certainly episodes involving gas trucks in Chelmno and things like that. I have not investigated." Then you say this : "I am prepared to accept that local Nazis tried bizarre methods of liquidating Jews. I am quite prepared to accept that, and that they may have experimented using gas trucks, because I have seen one or two documents in the archives implying that there was a roll over from the use of those methods of killing, the same people who created the euthanasia programme and they may have tried to (something unintelligible) of killing Jews but it is a very inefficient way of killing people. The Germans themselves had discovered this and there are much easier ways of killing people". Now, Mr Irving, that has all your great authority as an historian on an important occasion for you

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behind it, does it not?

A. It does indeed, and I think that is a very fair summary of the state of my knowledge at that time. Killing people in gas wagons is an extremely inefficient way of doing it. You will have seen from the documents they had with the trucks, they broke their axles, the gas pipe broke.

Q. Sure, but I want you just to look quickly, please ----

A. Also, they had the nasty mess to clear up afterwards.

Q. That is all in Professor Browning's report in fact at page 38.

A. What I said in that part of what you read out is unexceptionable.

Q. It is not, because you did not give the impression, you made it clear that these were local bizarre experiments and, by implication, on a very small scale.

A. Well, I think the small scale is something that had to be proven. I have been proven wrong on that.

Q. What about the one I read you just now? You said a very limited number.

MR JUSTICE GRAY: No, I think you are at cross purposes. I think what Mr Irving is saying is that, if you are suggesting it was on more than a limited basis at Sobibor and the others, then you must prove it, or at any rate present the evidence for it. Is that what you meant, Mr Irving?

A. My Lord, yes. If are talking about six or eight trucks

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then that, to my mind, is a limited scale.

MR RAMPTON: May I just deal with that because that was my next question. Will you please turn to page 38 of Professor Browning's report? Since you do not trust his translation, you better also have ----

MR JUSTICE GRAY: Shall we try on Professor Browning without? We may save the labour of going through ----

MR RAMPTON: I quite agree. This is under the heading Chelmno, my Lord. I am going to read both these paragraphs. "Beginning in December 1941, Jews from the Lodz ghetto and other towns in the Warthegau were deported to the small village of Chelmno. On May 1 1942" -- my Lord, we have seen this letter already --"Arthur Greiser wrote to Himmler: 'The special treatment [Sonderbehandlung] of some 100,000 Jews in my territory in an action approved by you in agreement with the Chief of the Reich Security Main Office SS-Obergruppenführer Heydrich will be completed in the next two to three months." Next paragraph, this is Professor Browning: "The completion of this task was not without incident, however, as can be seen in a report in the motor pool section of the RSHA of June 5, 1942, concerning technical alterations in the production of the 'special trucks.'". I, not for reasons of taste but because it is not presently relevant, am not going to read what the troubles were with the gas trucks, but I am going to read

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the next indented paragraph. "Since December 1941, for example, 97,000 were processed by three trucks in action, without any defects in the vehicles being encountered".

A. Shall we go straight to the bottom line and say yes, I fully accept the innuendo you are placing on that document.

Q. Innuendo?

A. It is not stated clearly, but quite clearly 97,000 people have been liquidated in these trucks.

Q. In three trucks?

A. Over the months concerned.

Q. No, it is actually just about a month and a week. 97,000 people in three trucks in the course of five weeks?

A. It is a very substantial achievement when you work it out with a pocket calculator ----

Q. Clever SS!

A. -- at 20 people per time, and they drove 20 kilometres into the countryside. I have read all the reports on this.

Q. Not if they are doing them in situ.

A. No. They drove them out into the country and did it and that is where the axle broke.

MR JUSTICE GRAY: Is it very limited and experimental?

A. My Lord, I did not have this document at the time I said that. I had this document five or six months ago.

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Q. Answer the question even so. Would you describe it as very limited and experimental?

A. Not on this scale. This is systematic.

MR RAMPTON: It is systematic, huge scale, using gas trucks to murder Jews?

A. Yes. No question at all. Can I refer you back to the letter where it says Greiser writing to Himmler of the special treatment "approved by you in agreement with Heydrich"? Again, there is no reference to Hitler, I am afraid.

Q. Yes. We are not going to have that argument at the moment.

A. It is not unimportant, Mr Rampton. Surely, if Hitler had given the order, they would all willingly have said, "On the instructions of the Führer, we are carrying out our beloved Führer instructions", but that is not in the document.

Q. Mr Irving, if you bother to read yesterday's transcript, you will know precisely what I say about this. I spelt it out at his Lordship's request, and there it is for you and anybody else who wants to see it in black and white.

A. My comment was about three lines and your response is about ten. I think my comment is more valuable.

Q. No doubt you do, Mr Irving, or we should not be here.

A. You have failed to establish the link upwards to Hitler.

Q. So you keep asserting. I beg to differ, but I am not

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going develop that until the end of this case. Now, Mr Irving, page 36 please. Again, my Lord, I do this for completeness because on page 36 of Professor Browning we move southwards to Yugoslavia, and again I have the document if anybody wants to see it. In this instance I will ask Mr Irving to glance at it in a minute for one particular reason.

MR JUSTICE GRAY: Is it worth a general question first of all as to whether what is now accepted as having happened at Chelmno, broadly speaking, was happening at Treblinka and Sobibor?

MR RAMPTON: Yes. There are two particular reasons to refer to the document. Have you read these two paragraphs?

A. The Yugoslavia one?

Q. Yes.

A. Yes, I read it and there is no question at all that the ----

Q. Do you accept therefore that they shot all the Jewish men first and then, sometime after in spring of 1942, they gassed all the women and children, using a gas truck?

A. That is the interpretation to derive from these records, yes.

Q. Now could I please ask you to look -- in fact this is the name of this document, though it is referred to by Professor Browning. It is H1 (xv). You will not have it there.

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A. What is the document?

Q. It is a letter from Harald Turner to Wolff.

A. I know this document.

Q. I have given him a German pronunciation. Perhaps he was an Englishman?

A. Again, I do not think we are going to have any dispute with this letter.

Q. You may not do, but there are two questions which, at any rate, if you already know the answers, I want his Lordship to hear.

MR JUSTICE GRAY: Is there a copy for me because it is one of the files I do not have here.

MR RAMPTON: It is page 849. I do not know if I mentioned this, my Lord? What Miss Rogers and I are going to do is try and put together a bundle of core documents.

MR JUSTICE GRAY: I wondered about that.

MR RAMPTON: By reference to the transcripts. Whether we can do it at the end of this week, I do not know, but we will try. By reference to the transcript we can see which ones are likely to be important. Your Lordship mentioned three this morning already.

MR JUSTICE GRAY: Yes. Thank you.

MR RAMPTON: This is a three-page document from somebody called Staatsrat Dr Turner. What does Staatsrat mean?

A. It is the equivalent of a Privy Counsellor.

Q. OK. He is in Belgrade, is that right?

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A. In Serbia, yes.

Q. In Serbia, and he is writing to Karl Wolf, who is Himmler's Adjutant and liaison officer with Hitler. Is that right?

A. He is writing to Karl Wolf, who is Himmler's Adjutant.

Q. I thought you agreed with me yesterday that there was a time when I do not know how long a time or what the dates were, when Wolf was a liaison officer.

A. Wolf was liaison officer to Hitler from August 26th 1939. Whether he was still at this time or not, I do not know. There was a matrimonial problem.

Q. It is obviously going to be important that we find that out. I am sorry, I have been given some history.

A. He was out of favour with Hitler.

Q. We will deal with this later?

A. I thought you probably would.

Q. It is too complicated to for me to pick up at this stage. Can you just look at the first page of this letter? I am sorry, somebody has written something on the top. I do not think that is probably the original. Do you?

A. No.

Q. I think that is a later edition. But I am interested in what looks like pencil, rather bad pencil, capital letters A R, with two underlines. Do you see that?

A. Yes. It is interesting, is it not?

Q. Do you think it possible that somebody in Berlin put those

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on, possible only, and put it into the Aktion Reinhardt file?

A. Can I reserve judgment on that until tomorrow? I will look at my copy. I have a copy of the original. We will see then if it was he person who did the handwriting at the top or on the original but let us assume for the moment that it is on the original for your purposes.

Q. Yes. Assume it is an original.

A. Yes.

Q. Do you think that is possible?

A. Yes.

Q. You will correct me because you probably have a much better copy than I have, but am I wrong in thinking that there is no security classification on this document?

A. Except on the rubber stamp. You can also make out the AR to which I drew attention yesterday on the July 1942 letter.

Q. That just means action Reinhardt.

A. Yes. I think that is a reasonable interpretation. I do not think anyone else has spotted that, apart from you and me, Mr Rampton.

MR JUSTICE GRAY: What, the absence of a security?

A. No. It is he initials A R. They appear to have established a separate file for A R, Aktion Reinhardt.

MR RAMPTON: Staatsrat Dr Turner is writing to Wolf?

A. Yes.

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Q. It is probably not Dr Turner's reference, is it?

A. Excuse me. There is a security classification on it.

Q. Where?

A. Next to the handwritten 2, where it says 1, 2, 3.

Q. No, that says "Chef hat Kenntnis."

A. I am sorry, I thought it might be chef -- right, carry on.

Q. I thought it was too, until I took advice. So this is a letter without a security classification put on it by the sender and certainly no clear security classification put on it by Berlin at the other end?

A. Unless A R was a special, ultra secret classification.

Q. Plausible, but speculative.

A. Yes, except that the A R on the rubber stamp is in the place where the security classification goes.

A. Often you get the rubber stamp Geheime Reichssache, do you not?

A. Yes. As I say, it is in the place on the rubber stamp where the security classification goes. I think we have made a discovery of that.

Q. Conceivably. Over the page, only this, there is a big paragraph. It fills most of the page and about halfway down the paragraph there are some German starting Schon von... Would you read it to yourself as far down as you like?

A. Already months ago I have had every Jew I could get my hands on shot in this country, and I have had all the

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Jewish women and children concentrated in a camp and at the same time, with the help of the Security Service I, have managed to procure a "delousing truck" which in 14 days to four weeks will have managed to clean out the camp.

Q. Well now, that is obviously code?

A. Yes.

Q. For some idiotic reason, he has put it in inverted commas, which rather gives the game away, does it not?

A. It does, yes.

Q. That is code for gassing truck, is it not?

A. Yes.

MR JUSTICE GRAY: Which camp is being referred to?

MR RAMPTON: Semlernin outside Belgrade. So the same business is going on there as elsewhere. I do not know how many they managed to -- well, you can see how many they managed to polish off if you look at 52.12 of Professor Browning's report?

A. Can I stay with this document for a moment, Mr Rampton?

Q. Yes.

A. And say, if I was cantankerous, there are any number of reasons why I could challenge this document, but I do not.

MR JUSTICE GRAY: Then you do not need to spend time on it.

A. For example, it is on non-standard German size paper. It does not use the SS-runes. It has weird typed toward in SS-runes and so on. But I do not. I fully accept that it is

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genuine and I think it important to make that distinction. This is quite clearly a very sinister document.

MR RAMPTON: Do you now accept therefore that statements that you have made to the effect that oh, yes they used gas trucks on a very limited scale for experiments were just plain wrong?

A. Yes.

Q. And do you also accept, which is the important question, that, before making a statement of that kind about such an important matter, it matters not that these people were Jews, they were human beings, do you not think, before making such statements, it behoved you to do a little bit of research in accessible files?

A. Mr Rampton, I was being asked this question at a press conference, if you remember. I did not volunteer the information. Somebody asked me did I accept that there had been such use of gas trucks. My information at that time was based on what I knew from Adolf Eichmann's papers that he himself had taken part in those experimental runs.

Q. I am just pausing only, Mr Irving, because I want to find what you said about it in the pleadings.

A. Yes. It is in answer to a question, if I am right.

MR JUSTICE GRAY: In the pleadings I think it is a limited experimental basis, is it not?

A. I think this really falls into two or three parts. I quite clearly said yes, there were gassings in gas

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trucks, but at that time the state of my knowledge was that it had not been on anything like this scale.

MR RAMPTON: This was probably some time served in 1996 or 1997 I should think. Yes, it is in the reply, my Lord. It is on page 3 of the reply. It was served in March 1997. One part of it says this: "It is denied that the plaintiff has denied the Holocaust. It is denied that the plaintiff has denied that gas chambers were used by the Nazis as the principal means of carrying out that extermination". I think those two sentences are going to be contradictory with what next follows. "They may have used them on occasion on an experimental scale which frankly is not denied". That is in March 1997. This is a considered statement by you for the purpose of these proceedings?

A. Yes.

Q. And I have just shown you what is not a particularly secret document in the historical sense.

A. Which shows that that element of my statement was wrong, yes.

Q. And you made the same statement to the public at large?

A. In response to a question on the basis of my information at that time.

Q. I think I am going to be enabled to contradict that, too, in a moment.

A. I think it also has to be said that these gas trucks of course did not carry on month after month after month

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after month after month. According to the information in this document and others, it just operated for a few weeks.

Q. Tell me, Mr Irving, we got to 97,000 in a month.

A. Yes, which certainly seems an incredible figure, when you have only three trucks, they can only take 20 at a time and they have to drive 20 miles into the country side. But I do not have the information on which to challenge the figure, apart from the inherent improbability of that figure.

Q. It is a massive figure.

A. You also have to remember that they are bragging and boasting about what they have achieved.

Q. Yes, of course. There is always that danger, that they are seeking to please somebody. If that were so, Mr Irving, I think that letter about the 97,000 sent to Himmler, I cannot remember?

A. Yes.

Q. They must have believed, if they were exaggerating, that Himmler was avid for information, telling him that vast numbers of Jews had been murdered.

A. Yes.

Q. Right, and you say, oh, it is not really credible that Hitler knew anything about that?

A. I do not see the connection between those two statements.

Q. You have been, I think, in the services, have you not?

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A. Is it not remarkable we have documents of this quality for everything below Himmler, but not a single page above Himmler?

Q. Yes. How often do you say that Hitler and Himmler met in the course of a week?

A. It varied through the year, depending on whether he was in or out of favour.

Q. When they were on good terms?

A. I would suggest two or three times a week.

Q. You were in the army, I think?

A. No.

Q. Navy?

A. No.

Q. Air force?

A. No.

Q. Right. So you have not been in service? Have you ever worked in a company?

A. No.

Q. Do you know anything about how companies work? For example, do you know anything about the day-to-day relationship between a managing director and a chief executive?

A. No.

Q. You live in a little world of your own, do you, Mr Irving? You know nothing about the means by which humans convey information to each other in matters of

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importance on a day to day----

A. Mr Rampton, it was not the question you asked. You asked specifically whether I had been in companies, army, navy or air force and I said no.

Q. Do you not think it more than likely, leave aside report number 51 which speaks for itself, that on a day-to-day basis Himmler and Hitler would have talked about all the things that concerned him. Obviously Hitler, as leader of his country, would be chiefly concerned with the progress of the war, would he not?

A. I do not think so. I think there is written evidence that, whenever people went to Hitler with stories of the atrocities they had heard about, Himmler's immediate response was always as relayed back to the person concerned, usually through Lammers, "Do not bother the Führer with this, he will only say this is all Himmler's business and I do not want to hear about it".

Q. Then why did Himmler bother having the Korherr report edited in March 1943 to take out the word Sonderbehandlung?

A. Very interesting, is it not, that it was camouflaged downward?

Q. Answer my question, please. If it is right that Hitler was not interested in that kind of thing and would just have swept it aside and said oh, that is all Himmler's business, silly old fool, he is passionate about this

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Jewish question, it would not mattered, would it?

A. I think the Korherr report really needs a discussion of its own without being dealt with in this rather flippant manner.

Q. Please, Mr Irving, could I have an answer to my question? Why do you think that Himmler had that report sanitised, as I put it?

A. Well I am not inside Himmler's head but, if the original report said expressis verbis, or as plain as a pike staff, that a million Jews had been killed or Sonderbehandlung zugeführt, but if Himmler says I want a shorter version without that in so that I can show it to the Führer, I think that that very much supports what I have said rather than what you are maintaining.

Q. What it means, Mr Irving, is this, is it not, that if the word Sonderbehandlung had been left in, Hitler would have known exactly what it meant?

A. Well, in the way that it was written, if you remember, if 1,200,000 people are subjected to special treatment at a camp, that does not mean they are having their hair cut.

Q. It did not say at a camp. It said in the Warthegau and I think in the General Government.

A. I beg to differ. I know that document fairly clearly.

Q. Maybe we will go back to later on. I do not have a copy of that.

A. I really think that document, if we are going to deal with

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it, should be dealt with extensively rather than here in this rather cursory manner.

Q. Mr Irving, I am taking what I know of it simply from your own book.

A. Yes, but you have quoted it wrongly there from memory, and I know the exact text.

Q. I am afraid, Mr Irving, that you are going to have to look at this, because this is important. This is one of the two most important aspects of the case.

A. Mr Rampton, you will always find I am willing to eat humble pie if I have made a mistake. There is never any question about that.

MR RAMPTON: My Lord, this is D3(i), tab 30. Mr Irving, do you have there a paper by you with the suppressed Eichmann and Goebbels papers?

A. Yes.

Q. It is presented by you at the 11th IHR conference in October 1992?

A. Yes.

Q. Do you write these things before you present them?

A. No.

Q. So you spoke, as it were, off the top of your head.

A. I am well known for that.

Q. Yes, I can believe that.

A. Some people say it is waffling but other people say it is lecturing.

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Q. You see, Mr Irving, that the questions begin at page 174. Is this yet again one of those papers that you had checked, or you checked or approved before publication in print?

A. I would probably have edited it for split infinitives and the like.

Q. Yes, quite. Now turn to page 173. Remember this is in October 1992. This is a bit I read to you earlier but it is well we see it in context, as part of what shall I say, not a rehearsed but as part of a serious paper presented to something which calls itself the Institute for Historical Review. You see the passage that I read to you earlier halfway down the page, bang in the middle of the left-hand column on page 173. I do not know why Eichmann recounted that kind of detail in his memoirs?

A. Can we have what the detail was?

Q. Absolutely not.

A. May I read if out after you have dealt with it?

MR JUSTICE GRAY: Yes you can, but then I will ask you why you want it read out. Let's get on with Mr Rampton's question.

MR RAMPTON: So shall I. Go down to the end of that paragraph in the middle of the page on page 173. You say: "So I accept this kind of experiment, we are talking about a gassing experiment in a bus witnessed by Eichmann, what you call a gassing experiment, so I accept that this kind

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of experiment was made on a very limited scale but that it was rapidly abandoned as being a totally inefficient way of killing people. But I do not accept that the gas chambers existed and this is well known. I have seen no evidence at all that gas chambers existed". Unless you are going to quibble about the word "chambers", Mr Irving, the fact is that what you said about the gassing on that bus and the limited kind of scale for that kind of experimental gassing, was just rubbish, was it not?

A. Mr Rampton, when you talk about gas chambers and the public perception, people are imagining what they see at Auschwitz, the big concrete fixtures, the chimneys, the steel doors, the whole of the paraphernalia. I am sure that I am right on that.

Q. Leave out the last----

A. Would you not interrupt me, please? They are not talking about the mobile gas truck experiment and to try and suggest that when I say that the gas chambers did not exist, this is a reference to the gas trucks which I have here said quite clearly do exist, I think is perverse.

Q. Mr Irving, I am going to read it again. Just one little bit. You have described how Irving looked through a peep hole into the back of a bus and he saw a number of people.

A. Eichmann looked through the peep hole.

Q. Eichmann saw a number of people being gassed by the

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exhaust fumes. This is Mr Irving speaking, formally speaking, in a corrected or approved version in print. "So I accept that this kind of experiment, that is to say, the sort that Eichmann witnessed, and I stress the word experiment, was made on a very limited scale, but that it was rapidly abandoned as being a totally inefficient way of dealing people". Now that, as a statement of history, was just rubbish, was it not?

A. The very element now turns out to be wrong, yes.

Q. So does the experiment.

MR JUSTICE GRAY: That has been conceded now, has it not?

A. Except that it was abandoned and replaced by other means of killing people.

MR RAMPTON: The point of my going back to that was this. You said not long ago that you cannot be blamed for making an off the cuff answer in answer to a statement in answer to a question?

A. Yes.

Q. That was a wrong answer too, was it not?

A. Yes.

Q. This is not an off the cuff response to a question?

A. This is part of the main talk, yes.

Q. I repeat my earlier question, do you not think -- is this IHR a reputable and authoritative body?

A. Do we wish to discuss that at this time?

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Q. I just want to know. Are these conferences attended by top notch historians and that kind of thing?

A. Yes.

Q. They are. But this is an occasion ----

A. I will be producing evidence later on the nature of the audience at these bodies and the directors of the Institute all have academic qualifications and degrees.

Q. I just want to get the flavour of the occasion on which you uttered these words.

A. Well, I was going to mention that fact. This is a body of incorrigible, shall we say, people whom I am sure the Defence would describe as Holocaust deniers, and I am rubbing their noses in what did happen, and I think I deserve commendation for that. I am saying, "Here is Eichmann describing in his memoirs how he attended a mass shooting from such close range that he was personally affected in a rather disagreeable way by the shooting that went on.

Q. Mr Irving, I am sorry, you must try -- I am perhaps not making myself clear -- you say this paper was presented at a conference of reputable academics and others who may take one or other view about the past, but this is a serious occasion?

A. This is a talk by me to an audience in California, yes.

Q. But it is a serious occasion?

A. To an audience who do not want to hear me say this. They

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want to hear me say something totally different.

Q. Mr Irving, please, is this a serious occasion or not?

A. In what sense? Is it a collar and tie occasion?

MR JUSTICE GRAY: You expect it to be taken serious.

MR RAMPTON: Do you expect to be taken seriously?

A. Yes. People have gone there to come away improved with a knowledge improved, enhanced.

MR RAMPTON: So it is quite different from a question and answer session at a knock about press conference, is it not?

A. Knock about press conference?

Q. K-N-O-C-K about. You expected what you said to be taken seriously by your audience?

A. Yes, and it was taken very seriously.

Q. What you said was historical nonsense?

A. The word "very limited" is wrong.

Q. So is the word "experiment".

A. I disagree. They abandoned the gas trucks after a time which showed that the experiment did not work.

MR JUSTICE GRAY: Well, 97,000 people, is that not rather a long experiment?

A. On the scale of 6 million, my Lord, which is the figure claimed by the Defence.

Q. Not by you?

A. My Lord, 97,000 is a large figure which we now know about from the document which has now been shown to us, the

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documents that have now been shown to us, which, of course, I had not seen at that time. If they abandoned the gas trucks method of killing people, as they clearly did, and we know from the documents now that it was precisely because it turned out to be a totally impracticable way of killing people.

MR RAMPTON: Mr Irving ----

A. I think the word "experimental" is entirely unjustified.

Q. Leaving aside for the moment ----

A. The idea of experimenting in killing people is grotesque anyway.

Q. Particularly if it is to the tune of 100,000 people?

A. I agree. It is actually obscene.

Q. Why did you not say that? Why did you not say, Mr Irving, "I have looked at this question. They have managed to get up to 100,000 at least", we know that from the documents, "but then they decided that was not a very good way of doing it, so they stopped doing it that way. Nonetheless, the fact is that they succeeded in killing in the East and in the Reinhard camps well over a million people?

A. I always suspected, Mr Rampton, you are not listening to my answers, and that is just proof of it. I told you this figure of 100,000 only comes to my knowledge within the last few weeks or months.

Q. But it was there to be found, was it not?

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A. Lots of things are there to be found. I do not have teams of 30 or 40 researchers working at the expense of God knows who is paying for the defence in this case, looking through all the archives, trying to find documents to prove me wrong.

Q. You know about the letter, you have always known about the letter, of 1st May 1942 from Greiser to Himmler, yes?

A. Yes.

Q. That is in your books, is it not?

A. I have quoted it in my books, yes.

Q. And that speaks of "Sonderbehandlung of some 100,000 Jews in my territory in an action approved by you in agreement with Heydrich will be completed in the next two or three months"?

A. Yes.

Q. Experimental? Sonderbehandlung?

A. But, Mr Rampton, this document is quoted in full in my books. That passage is quoted in full in my books.

Q. But not in connection with gassing by trucks?

A. Well, we do not know from Greiser what method has been used to specially treat, if I can use the word, those 100,000 people.

MR JUSTICE GRAY: I thought you accepted earlier on this morning -- we can find the reference -- that that was actually a reference to gassing?

A. From the later documents which are now available, my Lord,

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this is plain, but at the time I wrote the book I had only the 1st May document. Our knowledge advances by stages, particularly now these other archives have been opened to us. It cannot be held against me that I did not know something in 1970 when I wrote the book which is now only available at the end of the 20th century.

MR RAMPTON: No, I am not talking about the book, Mr Irving. You knew about the Greiser letter for a long time. It mentions the killing, or proposed killing, of 100,000 Jews in the Warthegau from 1st May in a couple of months, two or three months?

A. Yes, but we do not know what methods have been used to dispose of them.

Q. Please, Mr Irving, I have not finished my sentence. That is all that is in the book because you did not know about the Turner letter of 5th June 1942, you tell us. I am not in a position to contradict you?

A. Well, of course, can I tell you when I first got the Turner letter? That was in 1977.

Q. The Turner letter in 977?

A. I have to state that, yes. I was sent page 1 of the Turner letter, I believe, by Mr Sereny round about July 1977.

Q. By the time of the second edition of Hitler's War you did know about it?

A. Yes. But whether I would have read it in detail or not.

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Q. Do I find it in that? I am asking that as a completely open question to which I do not know the answer.

A. I think you will probably ...

Q. I think I had better check it.

A. I must make this quite plain. I have had the Turner letter in my possession probably for 23 years.

Q. Yes. So?

A. But the Turner letter by itself is a very suspect document until you see the subsidiary documents that have become available since then.

Q. Will your Lordship forgive me? I am just trying to look in the index to see whether there is any reference to this. If there were a reference, Mr Irving, it would be in the later part of the book, would it not? I mean in the 1991 edition?

A. Are you enquiring whether I used Turner letter in either edition of the Hitler book?

Q. Yes.

A. I do not believe I did.

Q. Obviously not the first one because you told us ----

A. I do not believe I did.

Q. You do not think you did?

A. No.

Q. Can I put it to you that you suppressed it?

A. You can put it to me like that, but, obviously, I suppressed many hundreds of thousands of documents when

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I wrote a book of that magnitude.

Q. What was that? I am sorry I missed it.

A. The Turner letter has been subjected to the most intensive scrutiny by people both yeay and nay, if I can put it like that, and when there is a document like that, one's instinct is to steer clear of it.

Q. Well, now there is another letter which we saw referred to in paragraph 5.2.2 of Professor Browning. That is the letter about the functioning of the trucks of 5th June 1942. That is not the Turner letter. This a Warthegau letter?

A. On what page is that?

Q. It is page 38, and the body of the report is translated at the bottom of the page. As I say, I have absolutely no intention of reading that out whatsoever.

A. Yes, but you are not implying that I have had that document in my possession until a few weeks or months ago?

Q. You have only recently had that document?

A. Yes. That is what I say. When you see a document like that, then you are more inclined to accept the Turner letter as being genuine.

Q. What about the Greiser letter?

A. The Greiser letter, there has never been any doubt as to that, the authenticity, because it was an American custody and it is microfilmed with the Heinrich Himmler papers.

Q. But you did not think before wading in and saying that

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there were only a very limited number of experimental truck gassings or bus gassings at a serious conference of historians, you did not pause to consider what it might be that the Turner letter told you which you had at that time, indeed, you had when you wrote Hitler's War '91?

A. Well, I could have expatiated at length at that conference on the Turner letter, and I could have pointed to the things that point to its authenticity, but also at great length to the things that give rise to be dubious about it; for example, the very weird SS runes that had been hand typed in and things like that.

Q. Mr Irving, as you see and as you know perfectly well, and as I will, no doubt, have to put to you again along down the road, you are all too eager to jump on anything, dignify it with your authority, that suggests that the scale of Nazi criminality during the war, whether it be the killing of Jews or the responsibility of Adolf Hitler, anything that seems to diminish or reduce that proposition, size of the crime, or the level to which the criminality went up?

A. Mr Rampton, we are talking about 97,000 on one case. You are saying that I have suppressed that fact and yet I have quoted in full the Greiser letter which talks of 100,000, it is precisely the same one. I believe the belief is that it is exactly the same victims we are talking about, so you cannot accuse me of having suppressed that

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particular atrocity. I quoted the Greiser letter and I quoted the figure.

MR JUSTICE GRAY: When you say the "same Jews", do you mean the 97,000 equals the 100,000?

A. A part of the 100,000. I believe that is the submission that Mr Rampton is trying to make.

MR RAMPTON: My Lord, I would like, if I may, just one minute when I get the reference to look and see what it is that Mr Irving said about the Greiser letter.

MR JUSTICE GRAY: It says 1991 Hitler's War.

MR RAMPTON: Yes, my Lord. Page 426.

MR JUSTICE GRAY: Page 426.

MR RAMPTON: Yes, 426.

MR JUSTICE GRAY: About two-thirds of the way down.

A. It is on page 330 of the first edition too.

Q. It is probably the same words.

A. It almost certainly is. I think I make it quite plain there that 100,000 had been, quotation marks, "specially treated" and the innuendo is quite plain for reader to draw.

MR RAMPTON: Yes. My only comment about that in that version, Mr Irving, is that you for some reason -- I do not know what the reason is -- you add the sentence "Hitler was not mentioned"?

A. It is in the first edition too, yes.

Q. Why?

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A. Am I wrong?

Q. No, what is the significance?

A. I am writing about Adolf Hitler, Mr Rampton. If Hitler is not mentioned in a document concerning the killing of 100,000 Jews, it is significant for the reader -- you will probably agree.

Q. You are afraid that the reader seeing this huge number which it is -- there is no question about that -- being killed in the Warthegau might infer that Hitler knew something about it, is that right?

A. Shall we go back to May 1st document again, Mr Rampton? Greiser is saying to Himmler: "The operation carried out in your authority and the authority of Heydrich and killing 100,000" or "I have killed 100,000 or I am about to kill 100,000 or submit them to special treatment", if I am writing about Hitler, I am absolutely justified to say, "Oh, by the way, Hitler is not mentioned in this document". That is a very important clue.

Q. Mr Irving, if Himmler had a general authority to do such things, where would it come from?

A. It would come from Adolf Hitler. He would say in the correspondence: "On the Führer's instructions, I am ordering the following". That covers him.

Q. It does not, Mr Irving. If Himmler had a general authority (and you should sometimes listen more carefully to my questions) to do these kinds of things, it would

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come from Hitler?

A. Oh, dear! If, general, these kinds of things, is this a smoking gun, the best we can do after 55 years?

Q. What is the answer to my question?

A. That is the answer. 55 years we have had to paddle around in the archives now of Warsaw, Moscow as well as the Western world, and there is still not the slightest shred of written evidence that Hitler ----

Q. The answer to my question, I think, must be yes; if he had such authority, it would have come from Hitler?

A. But he would have mentioned ----

Q. Your second answer to a question I have not asked, but never mind, is we do not know of any evidence that Hitler did confer any such general authority on Himmler, is that right?

A. Yes, and the rider, the corollary of that is that we would have expected to find such evidence just as there is in the euthanasia programme where the actual signed order from Hitler is in the archives.

MR JUSTICE GRAY: But Hitler did authorise the euthanasia programme?

A. He actually signed the order, my Lord, backdated it to September 1st, 1939. That is in the archives.

Q. The euthanasia programme really came to an end when the gas vans were transferred to killing on the Eastern front?

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A. Hitler ordered it to stop in August 1941. He ordered the euthanasia programme stopped in 1941 because of public unrest and disquiet, but it is characteristic and not without significance for these hearings that, in fact, the euthanasia programme continued in the background, rather like the Bruns business, where the SS man was ordered to stop but still said, "Well, we are going to carry it on with unobtrusive means".

Q. But I think really the drift of my question was, well, if he was brought in to authorise the euthanasia programme, does that suggest at all that it might be probable that he was consulted about using the gas vans for some other purpose?

A. I do not want to be flippant, my Lord, but the answer is the archives do not tell us.

Q. No, but as a matter of guessing what the reality was?

A. They should, my Lord, because knowing the mentality of the German people, they would have covered themselves with paper. They would have written letters to each other saying, "We are doing this on the Führer's orders. The Führer has instructed". Even if that was not in the archives, we would expect to find it in the Bletchley Park files. That is what I shall be questioning one of your experts about.

MR RAMPTON: My Lord, I can do one of two things now. I am entirely in your Lordship's hands really. I can develop

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this question of Himmler's authority which I do not think Mr Irving disputes, not only that, well, that he did do it, apparently, on Mr Irving's account, without any kind of authority from Hitler to murder millions of Jews. I can pursue the question of Himmler's authority, or I can move to completely different topic which is the Schlegelberger memorandum. Both are somewhat intricate in a sort of a sense. The first exercise will involve going to 1943 and 1944 for some references to what both Himmler and Hitler said. The second involves merely a discussion, if I can put it like that, of what the so-called Schlegelberger memorandum might be and what it might represent. I really do not mind which I do.

MR JUSTICE GRAY: Well, it is very difficult for me to suggest one way or the other. In a sense, we are on Hitler and Himmler and their respective knowledge and authority for what was going on, so maybe that is better taken next. But can I before you do that just ask a question which I think I may have raised before, but I do not understand Mr Irving to have answered it yet. Do you accept or do you not that there was gassing of Jews using trucks or vans at Treblinka, Sobibor in the same way as you have accepted there was at Belzec?

A. I do not accept it, which does not mean to say that I do not believe that it happened, but, quite simply, I have not investigated it and I do not think we have been shown

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any evidence that it did happen yet. That is an unsatisfactory answer, I am afraid.

MR RAMPTON: My Lord, I would only make one small correction to that. I think the evidence of Professor Browning will be that once they had established those three Reinhard camps, they stopped using mobile vans and started using stationery tank engines and other sorts of things like that, but we will come to that along the line. The question that I would ask Mr Irving, in the light of that answer is this, you do not know of any firm evidence, you sigh, that it did happen, whether by stationery engines or by vans. Do you see a difference between saying, "I do not know whether or not it happened, I have not seen good evidence", and denying that it did happen?

A. I do not know that it did happen and denying that it happened?

Q. Do you see a difference between saying, "I do not know that it happened"?

A. Well, the word "deny", of course, in law has a specific meaning, does it not?

Q. No, it is an ordinary English word.

A. But in law the word ----

Q. It means, in effect, the person is saying this?

A. If somebody denies something, he is saying there is something within his cognisance.

Q. It is very simple. One English sentence says, "I do not

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know whether it happened or not", the other says, "It did not happen"?

A. Well, it is the former.

Q. If, therefore, on some former occasion you have said it did not happen, that would be an excessive statement of your own belief, would it not?

A. What did not happen?

Q. Oh, gassing at Treblinka, for example?

A. It depends what the question is and what my precise answer was to that question -- not the question you asked, but the question put to me by the questioner and what my precise answer was.

Q. We will track that down. I just wanted to get the position clear. Your present position is not that you denied that it happened, but that you have not seen good evidence that it did happen?

A. I have seen a balance of evidence in each direction. There is the lack of the photogrammetric evidence on the aerial photographs, the lack of any evidence that these structures existed, on the one hand, and the unsatisfactory nature of the eyewitness evidence.

Q. Your present position is that you are in a state of doubt.

A. A state of doubt and I see no reason to investigate it because I am not a holocaust historian. One has limited resources which one has to apply to the proper targets.

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Q. We will come back to the other part of it later because, as Miss Rogers says, Mr Irving, it fits quite neatly into the Auschwitz question as a sort of coda, perhaps, or maybe an introduction, I do not know, prelude?

A. I would prefer we just adhere to the Auschwitz examination and ignore the other camps which is not really going to lead us much further.

Q. No, I am not going to go into the evidence of the other camps. If I go back to the other camps, it will be for this purpose, Mr Irving, that which I have already stated, to demonstrate that you have, if I am right, made categorical denials about the existence of extermination facilities at the Reinhard camps when the truth is simply that you do not know?

MR JUSTICE GRAY: In other words, it goes to Holocaust denial rather than Auschwitz?

MR RAMPTON: It does, but it also goes to irresponsible, at the very least, historiography.

MR JUSTICE GRAY: That is part of Holocaust denial, is it not?

MR RAMPTON: Yes, of course it is.

A. Let us wait until we get the exact statements I am supposed to have made.

MR RAMPTON: Of course. I said if I am right about that, if.

A. Yes.

Q. That will be the only object of ----

A. Let us also consider the question of proportionality.

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These are the minor escorts, the corvettes and minesweepers, not the actual battleship which is Auschwitz itself.

MR JUSTICE GRAY: Anyway, Hitler and Himmler?

MR RAMPTON: Yes. Hitler and Himmler. For this purpose, my Lord, it will be useful, I think, to turn to page 73 of Longerich 1. While I ask, I am going to have displace my chronology, my Lord, because I have not got the document reference. I am sorry.

A. Mr Rampton, did you not tell us yesterday that Auschwitz did not start gassing until the end of 1942, and yet paragraph 2 of this page says exactly the opposite.

Q. Mr Irving, let me give you advance notice -- if you have not Van Pelt's report two or three times, I quite understand you may not have picked it -- of what the best view of the history of Auschwitz, so far as gassing is concerned, and it is our case, if we had to prove it, which we do not; but what that report tells us is this, that there were some early gassings, first of all, of Soviet prisoners in the autumn of 1941 in the basement of block 11 at Auschwitz 1. They then started using, I think later that same year, the crematorium, the morgue in the crematorium at Auschwitz 1, for the gassing of Jews again to some extent on an experimental scale. In 1942 they developed two gassing facilities.

A. What do you mean by "the experimental scale" -- a few

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thousand or?

Q. Only a few hundred people at a time, that kind of thing.

A. I am just interested in your use of the word "experimental scale".

Q. "Experimental", Mr Irving, because they were experimenting with the efficacy of Zyklon B?

A. Very interesting. Exactly the same as I said about the gas trucks.

Q. Yes, but in 1942 (and I cannot give you the exact month) they developed two local farmhouses into much more effective gas chambers. They tipped the Zyklon B through the windows which they then closed with gas type shutters. That went on for some considerable time. As you know, in July 1942, Himmler visited Auschwitz and following that, and I say as a matter of cause and effect so I shall not be accused of post hoc propter hoc, following that the existing plans for the two new big crematoria at Birkenau are altered, so as to convert them into gas chambers with crematoria, and at the same time crematoria 4 and 5 are designed and built in the early part of 1943 up to about June. Then they start in full operation from then until the autumn of 1944. That is the Auschwitz story.

A. Only yesterday you said that there no mass killings by gas in Auschwitz until the end of 1942.

Q. I did not say that, I think, if you look at the

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transcript. Do not let us argue about what I said. You can verify it on the transcript.

MR JUSTICE GRAY: Shall we go back it Hitler and Himmler because we are going to have to go through Auschwitz in detail later?

MR RAMPTON: I agree.

A. It is just that paragraph 2 rather challenged that.

MR JUSTICE GRAY: I know. You made that observation and we have dealt with it. Let us get on.

MR RAMPTON: I am going to deal first, since I have now got it -- my Lord, the file in question is H1(ix) at page 260.

A. Page 260.

MR JUSTICE GRAY: I do not think we have had H1 (ix), have we?

A. Page 260?

MR RAMPTON: Yes, page 260.

A. It appears to be an orphan. It has no title.

Q. I am sure you have not read it, but you will have heard of Noakes' and Pridom's great work on the history of Nazi Germany?

A. Whose book is this?

Q. You are not going to read it, so I do not really see why I need to, but, anyhow, it is called J. Noakes, G. Pridom, "Nazis 1919 to 1945" in three volumes, published by I think the Exeter University Press in 1988. This page, 260 in our file, is page 1199 of that massive work. It is a translation, presumably by Mr Noakes or Mr Pridom, or

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both of them, I know not, of a speech which Himmler is supposed to have made at Posen to, I think, German Generals? Were they German Generals?

A. It was the SS Gruppenführer.

Q. SS chiefs in Posen, nowadays called Posnan, on 4th October 1943. Unfortunately, once again I do not have the German. I would like to have it and I am hoping to get it.

A. It will not be contentious, Mr Rampton. I will not dispute this translation.

Q. Have you glanced at it?

A. Yes. It is a very famous speech. It is referred to on page 575 of my Hitler's War. I quote it in full.

Q. He says: "I also want to talk to you quite frankly about a very grave matter", etc, etc. "We can talk about it quite frankly amongst ourselves and yet we will never speak of it publicly". Then he goes on a bit talking about an analogous event in the past which is the Night of the Long Knives, it is the SA obliteration, is it not?

A. Yes.

Q. Then this is the sentence to which I would like to draw your attention: "I am referring to the Jewish evacuation programme, the extermination of the Jewish people". That is, you say, a very famous speech. What words can you remember -- I am sorry I have not got the German -- what words can you remember Himmler used when he said what we

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see here, "I am referring to the Jewish evacuation programme, the extermination of the Jewish people"?

A. I shall have to look at the original text, it is either Ausrottung or Vernichtung -- but it is not a material point, because he immediately explains he means killing.

Q. The point I wish to draw your attention to is this, that there, Himmler, speaking to SS chiefs, or whatever it was, uses evacuation and extermination synonymously, does he not?

A. In that case, yes.

Q. It is a jolly good pointer, is it not, Mr Irving, to the use of such camouflage language habitually within the SS at the very least?

A. Yes, it is rather like the Americans talking about terminating with extreme prejudice.

MR JUSTICE GRAY: I think you did agree that "Evakuierung" can be used and is sometimes used as synonymous with extermination?

A. It is not always used, but in this case it clearly is.

MR RAMPTON: Here is an example one cannot argue with.

A. But it would be false to argue automatically the other way.

Q. That as a matter of logic is necessarily right; as a matter of history it may not be. Can we then turn to page 73 of Longerich, please?

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A. Yes.

Q. At the top of the page, now here I have got the texts. "On 6th October 1943 Himmler explained to Gau and Reichs chiefs in Posen: I ask you that that which I say to you in this circle be really only heard ..."

A. Which page are we on now?

Q. 73 of Longerich one.

A. I do not think it can be 73.

Q. You must have the wrong part of Longerich.

MR JUSTICE GRAY: Are you sure it is Longerich one?

MR RAMPTON: Longerich is divided into two parts. Yes, you have the wrong bit; you are looking at the second bit.

A. All Longerich is divided into two parts.

MR JUSTICE GRAY: Why he divided it into two, I do not know.

MR RAMPTON: Generalities and then particulars, rather like a lawyer.

A. OK, yes, it is a totally different volume. This is, of course, a different speech now, isn't it?

Q. It is two days later.

A. That is right, yes.

Q. The audience is different as well.

A. The Gau- and Reichsleiter.

Q. You will find that and I think we should look at it -- it is going to be particularly important when we come to Sonthofen in May 1944 -- in bundle H4 (ii).

MR JUSTICE GRAY: We are darting about a bit. Are we leaving

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73 of Longerich?

MR RAMPTON: No, I am just starting 73 of Longerich; I am actually getting the document.

A. I am not sure you want to read this out, because this supports entirely what I have always said, but carry on.

Q. That is very good of you, Mr Irving; I think we probably will. The document begins -- have you got the document there?

A. Yes.

Q. It is quite a long speech, something like 49 pages.

A. Yes.

Q. The first page is marked, my Lord, at the bottom right-hand corner, FNA (86).

MR JUSTICE GRAY: Yes, I have got it.

MR RAMPTON: It says: "Rede des Reichsführer SS". Does that mean speeches?

A. Speech of the Reichsführer SS to the Reichs- and Gauleiters in Posen on 6th October 1943, and speaking as always as the Reichsführer SS and as a Party comrade to you.

Q. The Reichsleiters and Gauleiters -- how senior are they?

A. The Reichsleiters come directly beneath Hitler and they have the rank of minister.

Q. And they have automatic access to Hitler, do they not?

A. Subject to what I said a few days ago, that they would have to get an invitation before they could go to see

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Hitler. They could not just knock on the door or ring the bell.

Q. If you just turn the page, I am sure you are very familiar with this.

A. If I may just carry on there, Christa Schroeder, Hitler's private secretary, was a witness of the conversation between Hitler and Martin Bormann after the flight of Rudolf Hess when Martin Bormann took over as chief of the Party Chancellery, and Bormann said to Hitler, "Mein Führer, what instructions do you have", and Hitler's response was: "Only one. Keep the Gauleiters off my back". In other words, he did not need them any more. I think it is a material point of view of the fact that you are trying to draw attention to the closeness between Hitler and the Gauleiters.

Q. I think you have accepted a closeness between Himmler and Hitler.

A. Yes, they visited two or three times a week.

Q. Yes, and here is Himmler talking to high-ranking people in the Nazi machine.

A. Yes.

Q. And the Gauleiters are perhaps subordinate or they are less high ranking than ----

A. Than the party machinery, yes.

Q. --- than the Reichsleiters?

A. Yes, a bit like the constituency chairman.

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Q. This is a gathering of high-ranking people?

A. Yes.

MR JUSTICE GRAY: Gau is a region or an area, is it?

A. It is, yes, like a constituency in the Conservative Party; these being the chairmen of the local region. They wore Jackboots and carried guns.

MR RAMPTON: If you turn to page 17 -- this is taken from a microfilm -- I think I am right that the relevant passage or the passage which is translated in Longerich begins just in about the middle page opposite the punch hole, "ich bitte Sie"?

A. "I do ask you to keep secret, to listen to what I am saying, just listen and never to speak about it, what I am saying in these circles. We came up against the question, what about the women and children, and I took the decision here too for a clear solution".

Q. Carry on.

A. "I did not consider myself justified in liquidating just the men", in other words he says "auszurotten", which is the word there he uses and then he expands. He explains because he feels he has to explain what he means by "auszurotten". In other words, "to kill them" or "to have them killed". He himself is pointing out the word "auszurotten" is not sufficiently clear even in these circles; he has to emphasise what he means by it, and to leave ----

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Q. Can you carry on just a bit further, please?

A. Yes. It is very complicated German.

Q. I know, something about letting the avengers ----

A. Exactly, and "to leave alive the children to act as the avengers against our sons and grandchildren". In other words, the idea is that if you leave the next generation, the younger generation alive, then they will come back to haunt you.

Q. You have got to exterminate the whole brood.

A. Absolutely what he says that.

Q. If you leave one mouse then it may have children?

A. That is right. A highly significant speech in many respects.

Q. Carry on reading, please, just two more sentences, "es musste der schwere Entschluss".

A. "There had to be taken", I am putting it like that, "there had to be taken the grave decision to have this people disappear from the face of the earth. For the organisation which had to carry out this job, it was the most difficult that we had so far."

Q. Yes. The method of disappearance about which Heinrich Himmler, the Reichsführer SS, is speaking in early October 1943 is murder?

A. Quite clearly.

Q. Quite clearly.

MR JUSTICE GRAY: By what means?

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A. I am not sure if it is really relevant here, my Lord.

Q. Well, answer would you even so?

A. I do not think he is talking about means there, but obviously by murder.

Q. I appreciate that, but what do you assess him as having had in mind?

A. But whatever means to convey them from life to death. He is certainly not being explicit here, but of course, my Lord, it will not surprise you that I rely on the earlier part of that paragraph where he says, "I had to take the serious decision." I think this is a very powerful point in my favour. He does not say: "The Führer took the decision", where he very easily could have in these circles. He is speaking, after all, to the top Nazi leaders.

MR RAMPTON: Not on this occasion explicitly.

A. He is being very explicit indeed. "I had to take this decision".

Q. If Hitler or -- no, it does not say that.

A. "I decided".

Q. "I decided to find a very clear solution to this problem".

A. "I have taken the decision to find a clear solution".

Q. If Hitler already knew about it ----

A. You cannot climb out of that one, Mr Rampton.

Q. I can, I am just about to. Do not worry, I am going to

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show you another document which I know you are familiar with, so I do not know why you say what you say. I will find out later perhaps.

A. There is no need to get rattled about it, but this is a cardinal document, Mr Rampton. Here is Himmler saying, "I took the decision".

Q. Mr Irving, can I ask you to calm down a little and answer this question. If Hitler already knew about it, the injunction to the Gau and Reichs leaders to not speak about it would not matter, would it, I mean so far as its going upwards is concerned? What they are not supposed to do is to talk about it lower down.

A. He does not actually say that. He just says "keep mum".

Q. I know, but if Hitler already knew about it and had actually given Himmler the order to do it, in general terms, the authority to do it, then he is not talking about not telling Hitler, is he?

A. I am not prepared to extrapolate from what it is in that document. I am just saying what the document tells us, since he says: "We are doing this but keep quiet about it."

Q. Let us look at something a little bit more explicit, shall we?

A. But if you remember what I clearly allow is that from this point on Adolf Hitler no excuse not to know because the very next day these same gentlemen went to him and he

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spoke to them.

Q. My googlies are I think a little bit more subtle than you sometimes think, Mr Irving. Can you turn on just for reference in this bundle to the next document which is after page 49 of Himmler's Posen speech. My Lord, it is footnote 187.

A. My Lord, would be it be helpful if I pointed out that after making this speech Himmler had everybody who was present sign a list to agree that they had hear the speech, or if they had not heard it to agree that they had read it subsequently. All the SS Generals who were present were required -- I have never seen that on any of Himmler's other speeches.

MR JUSTICE GRAY: What do you say is the significance of that?

A. It is very interesting to speculate, my Lord. I think he was making them into accomplices in his own mind. He was saying: "There you are, now I have told you. Now we are all in it together." It is a very interesting historical document. I have never seen that on any of Himmler's other speeches, that he listed all SS Generals present and made them sign that they had been present and heard the speech or if they not been present that they had read it subsequently.

MR RAMPTON: Mr Irving, Heinrich Himmler kept copies of these speeches, did he not?

A. In various versions. There was the original raw

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transcript and then a corrected transcript.

Q. I know, I happen to have for the 5th May which we are coming to in a minute, I happen to have both versions.

A. Yes. There are also his handwritten notes on the basis of which he spoke.

Q. Yes, Mr Irving, your knowledge is extensive. I want to know why you think it is that Himmler kept copies of his speeches?

A. I keep copies of me speeches.

Q. But you do not talk about having given the order for the extermination of millions of Jews, do you, in your speeches?

A. I have not exterminated millions of Jews, Mr Rampton.

Q. Mr Irving, maybe it is late in the morning or something. Heinrich Himmler's speech is not just this one. We had the one earlier, the 4th October at Posen. We have this one here. We have two more in May 1944, which are quite explicit, at any rate about his role in the extermination of the whole Jewish race?

A. Letting them vanish from the face of the earth, brutally explicit.

Q. Yes, by killing them?

A. Brutally explicit, yes. As he says, by murdering, and not just the men but the women and children too.

Q. Yes, I know that. Why would he keep those admissions of guilt, particularly in 1943 and 1944 by which time he must

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have known that the German world was probably going to come to an end?

A. Why would he have kept it to himself?

Q. Yes. Why did he commit these things to writing and then keep them after he had uttered them to his Generals or his Reichsleiters or whatever they are?

A. I think the problem is we are so often on exactly the same side, Mr Rampton. Have I not frequently allowed in all my books that from this point on Hitler had no reason not to know?

Q. Hitler did know, come on.

A. On precisely this point I have said Hitler had no justification for pleading ignorance, because everybody else immediately around him had been informed, but also you have to set this kind of speech in the context. This is 5th October, 4th and 6th October 1943 rather, at the height of the bombing campaign. There is a reason why Himmler is making a speech like this to the disgruntled SS Generals. Morale is at a low ebb and he is saying, "Hey, we are hitting back, we're doing this to them".

MR JUSTICE GRAY: I am really puzzled. Can I explain why, Mr Irving. When Mr Rampton was putting that passage from the October 1943 speech, 4th October 1943 speech, you were at pains to point out that Himmler was saying that it was he who would have taken the decision, but if you are accepting, as you have throughout, that by October 1943

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Hitler knew about the extermination policy ----

A. I say "from this point on", my Lord, because on the following day ----

Q. But what is the significance of emphasising that it was Himmler's decision if you accept Hitler was in on it?

A. Because Himmler is accepting the responsibility for the job which has now been completed. Himmler is kind of reporting ----

Q. I see, ex post facto.

A. Yes, saying, "We've done it all, the job has been done, I had to take the decision, it was a difficult job for us, but we done it, and I am proud of you, my SS men, for having carried out such a difficult task."

Q. So the knowledge you say Hitler had from October 1943 did not include knowledge of what had been going on in 1942, is that what you are saying?

A. I am saying it is quite likely that he will have ex post facto have learned about all these things, particularly the Gauleiters who went to see him the next day and the SS Generals who went to see him. The same audience went effectively to see Hitler where he lectured them, and it would be stretching the bounds of probability too far to say that not one of them went up to Hitler, one of the old veterans, and said, "Mein Führer, we heard something yesterday which rather disturbed me", but I do not think it did disturb them. I think they rather liked

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it. The eyewitness accounts we have of one of these speeches says that there were roars of applause.

MR RAMPTON: It was ----

A. The Germans were like that.

Q. If you are right, it is something of which Himmler was very proud, is it not?

A. He was proud of his men for having carried out those extremely distasteful tasks.

Q. But he was pleased, if your interpretation is right, and I am going to suggest it is not, but he was pleased to announce to this august gathering that he personally had made the decision to carry out this difficult task?

A. Would it not have been wonderful for him if he had said: "The Führer gave us this task and look how well we have performed his duties for him.

Q. Of course he did.

A. The great temptation would have been there, but he does not say this.

Q. He does not?

A. He says specifically: "I was the one who took the decision".

Q. So that being so you would not expect that in May 1944 he would reveal that he done what he did in consequence of an order, and the only person of course who could have given an order is Hitler?

A. Mr Rampton, shall we get to that document when we get to

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it and look at the precise wording?

Q. Very well. Let us doing that now. I have it open.

MR JUSTICE GRAY: It is page 187.

MR RAMPTON: Page 187.

A. There are of course about ten such speeches and you have just picked out two of them. In none of the others does he make any suggestion that there is a Führer order. So it is not just one speech where there is no reference. It is many speeches.

Q. He makes another such reference later the same month, about three weeks later. We will come to that probably after the adjournment.

A. Are we also going to look at Adolf Hitler's speech of I think it was June 26th 1944?

Q. Yes, indeed I certainly am. Let us start with 5th May 1944. On page 18, tell me who this speech is made to, if you will?

A. I think it is the military leader, the leadership, the top brass, shall we say.

Q. The top brass.

A. I know the names of a number of people who were present. General Stumpff was Air Force; General Reinecke was Germany Army.

MR JUSTICE GRAY: Generals of the Wehrmacht.

MR RAMPTON: These are not SS creatures. These are proper soldiers; these are Generals of the Wehrmacht, are they

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not?

A. Yes, the top brass of the German armed forces.

Q. On page 28 it has been altered. One can see how these pages evolve sometimes. Page 28. My Lord, it looks like an 18, so one has to look at page 27 at the top, page 5 of the file.

A. This is one of the most interesting pages I have ever looked at.

Q. You can tell us everything you know about this page in just a moment when I have referred you to the relevant passage, which I think begins in the middle of the page: The Jewish question has been solved within Germany itself and in general within the countries occupied by Germany". Is that roughly right?

A. Yes.

Q. I am going to read on in the English from Dr Longerich's version. "It was solved in an uncompromising fashion in accordance with the life and death struggle of our nation in which the existence of our blood is at stake." Yes?

A. Yes.

Q. Then ellipse, if you do not mind. Have you got that?

A. Yes.

Q. "You can understand how difficult it was for me"?

A. "You can feel with me how difficult it was" yes.

Q. "To carry out this soldatischen Befehl". What is that?

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A. Soldierly order or military order.

Q. "And which I carried out and went through with a sense of obedience", which word is that? Translate the last part of the sentence for me?

A. "Which I obeyed and carried out from obedience and from a sense of complete conviction".

Q. Obedience to whom, Mr Irving, Hitler or his own sense of what was necessary for the sake of the thousand year Reich?

A. I think the sense of what is coming out of that paragraph is a sense of duty.

Q. So it is the sense of duty, is it, that gives him the soldatischen Befehl?

A. Yes.

Q. A very odd choice of words, is it not, this soldierly order?

A. Yes.

Q. The only person who can give Mr Himmler a soldierly order is Mr Hitler?

A. Absolutely right.

Q. Pardon?

A. Yes.

Q. He is saying: "I did what I did because Hitler told me to"?

A. Yes. I refer to this of course in my Hitler biographies. I quoted this with the ----

P-103

Q. Let me put to you the sort of expression you might use. How do you get yourself out of that one then, Mr Irving?

A. By counting.

Q. By what?

A. Counting.

Q. Counting what?

A. Can I ask you to look at the previous page?

Q. Yes.

A. Can you see the number of the page at the top of the page?

Q. Yes.

A. 27.

Q. Yes.

A. It is typed.

Q. The next one is an altered type. I already drew attention to that.

A. All the following pages have been written in in handwriting.

Q. So what?

A. And so what? Can you continue to count, please? Will you count down on page 27 nine lines to the beginning of the new paragraph.

Q. "In Deutschland"?

A. Yes.

Q. Yes.

A. How many spaces is that paragraph indented by?

P-104

Q. I have absolutely no idea. I am not a typist, Mr Irving.

A. I will count for you. Five spaces indented.

Q. You stop interrogating ----

A. Tap, tap, tap, tap, tap.

Q. You stop interrogating me, if you will, Mr Irving and give me your explanation why, as I now apprehend, you are saying we cannot trust the page we have been looking at?

A. Because it has been typed -- I have looked at the original of this document, Mr Rampton, you are looking at a photocopy. I have looked at the original in the archives. It is typed on different, here onwards it is typed on a different typewriter, this page, the page 28.

Q. Where was it found?

A. What do you mean "where was it found"?

Q. Where was this speech found, Mr Irving?

A. Can I just complete what I am saying?

MR JUSTICE GRAY: Yes, I would like you to because I want to know exactly what you say about ----

A. It is very important, my Lord. It has been typed by a different typist.

Q. Page 28.

A. And this frequently happened. I spotted many diaries that had been fumbled with subsequently or pages of documents. This had been typed by a different typist. They use different ways of typing. You will notice that there is more space after the first line on page 28, after the

P-105

"Reichsführer SS", it has a double space after that instead of a single space on the previous page. She has indented by five spaces at the beginning of each paragraph. I am assuming it is a she.

Q. So what do you infer from that?

A. We do not, my Lord. All we can say is that for some reason this page was retyped at a different date. We do not whether it was retyped during the war, which is the likelihood. We do not know what has been inserted or taken out. On this occasion we do not have the other transcripts of that speech. So that is a page that I am unhappy about pinning a capital issue on. Yo