MR JUSTICE GRAY: Mr Irving?

MR IRVING: My Lord, may it please the court. Two minor housekeeping matters: first of all, I have postponed my two witnesses until later because, obviously, we are in the middle of Professor van Pelt's cross-examination, and that is the witnesses Fox and Peter Millar.

MR JUSTICE GRAY: I hope that does not cause problems.

MR IRVING: Not at all, no. I dealt with them last night about this. So one of the things I gave to you in the bundle yesterday morning referred to the Millar. It is a section of the 1992 diary. It will presumably be in your ----

MR JUSTICE GRAY: I have it loose and I will keep it loose.

MR IRVING: Keep it loose or put it in J.

My Lord, the other minor matter concerns once again the press.

MR JUSTICE GRAY: Yes.

MR IRVING: From today's press coverage -- particularly I am referring to the Times -- one gets the impression they are relying more on hand outs than on their personal experiences in the courtroom.

MR JUSTICE GRAY: I saw the report. I did not read it. What about it are you concerned?

MR IRVING: Purely, that there were things in the article which were not in the testimony yesterday, and I am not in any way pointing a finger at the Defendants on this. It may

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well be there are third parties who are doing this and providing copies of the Professor's report or something like that to the press. This clearly disadvantages me.

I am aware of the fact that your Lordship is sitting without a jury, so this is of less moment, but if it in any way gradually affects or put wrong guidelines on public opinion and skews public opinion in some way, then this may indirectly be seen to be affecting the outcome of this decision.

MR JUSTICE GRAY: Well, I am afraid that really is a sort of fact of life that you just have to put up with. Really, what matters here for my purposes is whether I am going to be influenced by it and, as I have not read it, I will not be.

MR IRVING: Very well, my Lord. Clearly, it would be improper for any of the parties in this case to start putting hand outs to the press in the way I appreciate the law is on contempt which would disadvantage the other party.

MR JUSTICE GRAY: If anything that really does disturb you comes up, mention it, but at the moment I do not think there is anything that can usefully be done about what appeared or, indeed, should be done. So I think we might as well get on.

MR IRVING: Very well, my Lord. It will probably assist your Lordship if I now just in one topic paragraph, so to say, outline what I intend doing ---- .

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MR JUSTICE GRAY: I would find that very helpful.

MR IRVING: --- for the next hour, shall we say? Firstly, there will be no more traps being sprung. I am sure that the Professor will appreciate advance notification. There are no more hidden booby-traps or mines, but I am going to be dwelling briefly on crematorium No. II still for a while because I believe the Professor wishes to make certain comments on what I said yesterday.

I then want to have a look at the quality of the eyewitness evidence that the Professor was relying upon, in particular the witnesses Tauber and Bimko and Broad.

Then we will move to Auschwitz, the main camp, and have a look at the alleged gassing facilities there.

MR JUSTICE GRAY: Yes. Thank you for that.

MR IRVING: If I can just recapitulate where we were when we ended yesterday and invite the Professor to state what comments he had on that. This was the fact that we had established, I believe (and I am sure the Professor will correct me when the time comes if I am wrong) that the evidence on which he based his contention that crematorium No. II, the mortuary No. 1 in that crematorium, the underground mortuary, was, in fact, a gas chamber, was entirely eyewitness evidence, what we would call anecdotal evidence from certain named eyewitnesses.

MR JUSTICE GRAY: I do not think he would, accept but that may be what you are putting to him.

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MR IRVING: He may wish to tell the court what other evidence he is relying upon. I shall certainly invite him to do so. If I may continue? The evidence then is that the roof has pancaked downwards, has remained relatively intact, sufficiently in tact that one can draw certain conclusions from its present condition, and that in its present condition it certainly shows no signs of the holes through which allegedly the murderers poured the cyanide capsules into the chamber below. They should certainly have been visible, in my submission.

MR JUSTICE GRAY: Yes, that is the point we were on yesterday evening.

MR IRVING: This is where we left it yesterday evening, my Lord.

MR JUSTICE GRAY: Yes, absolutely.

< PROFESSOR VAN PELT, Recalled < Cross-examined by MR IRVING, continued.

Q. Professor van Pelt, do you disagree with any part of that brief summary?

A. My Lord, I do.

Q. Right. With which part do you disagree? Shall we take it stage by stage? My contention that your belief that this building was a homicidal gas chamber rests solely on the eyewitness evidence of those named eyewitnesses?

A. I disagree with that statement, and I can bring in some other evidence, if you would like to consider it?

.

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Q. Was this other evidence contained in any of your reports or in your published book?

A. It is contained in a report. It is also contained -- it is basically a number of images I would like to introduce right now.

MR JUSTICE GRAY: Can I just be clear? Are we talking about crematorium II or generally?

MR IRVING: We are still talking about crematorium No. II, my Lord, the one of which we had these large photographs.

MR JUSTICE GRAY: Yes, I just wanted to be clear.

MR IRVING: We are talking specifically about the Leichenkeller No. 1.

A. Or, even more specifically, we are talking about the way Zyklon-B was introduced in that Leichenkeller by means of wire mesh columns which above ground were capped with a kind of introduction device, a chimney like introduction device.

Q. Rather like a funnel of some kind?

A. Some kind of little chimney.

Q. Was this introduction device made of wire mesh or was it made of concrete or do you have any evidence?

A. Tauber describes it as a chimney with a concrete lid, but I would like at the moment, with your permission, just to introduce the evidence and maybe we can consider the evidence.

Q. This is the eyewitness Tauber you are referring to?

.

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A. Yes. My Lord, I would like to go to core file Auschwitz 2, the trial bundle,.

MR JUSTICE GRAY: K2 we are talking about?

A. No. 2, K2, and I would like to go to tab 1 where it is called "Plans and blueprints", and I would like to go to page No. 10 and No. 10A.

MR IRVING: Handwritten 10?

A. Yes.

MR JUSTICE GRAY: Yes, I think it must be a handwritten 10.

A. Yes. It is 22 printed and 45 printed, but it is 10 and 10A. That is how the numbers of the sequence in which these images are in the file.

MR JUSTICE GRAY: These are photographs?

A. These are photographs, and what we see here is we have an image of the back of crematorium II in February 1942.

You see it is winter. The photo is very clear. There is snow on the ground. We are looking at the foreground is actually the construction site of the Klaranlage, the sewage waste, the sewage treatment plant. We look at the back of the crematorium, and we see there the main building with the roof and the chimney and then, jutting out from that building and it is clearer on the next page, we see the gas chamber, or the morgue No. 1 as a kind of box, a low box like structure, and on top of that we see four boxes. It is certainly three of them are very clear and maybe the fourth one to the left right under the .

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window. This would be the third double window from the left of the building. We see these box like, chimney like, structures which jut up from this low, this low box like structure, which is morgue No. 1.

This is a picture of the building as it was on the construction. Shortly after this photo was taken the gas chamber itself, or the morgue No. 1 itself, was covered with dirt, and so that the projection of the little chimneys above the level of the roof of the morgue in the final result would probably have been less, but we do not, of course, know if we look at the finished chimneys right now or if these were in some way still capped with another kind of structure.

So this is, I think, a very important piece of evidence because this is a photo taken by a member of the SS Bauleitung, Scharführer Kaman. He was the only one allowed with a camera in the camp and this photo very clearly shows the structures.

MR IRVING: Can I interrupt you at this point?

MR JUSTICE GRAY: Yes, of course.

MR IRVING: Right. I am anxious to let the witness have his say, but you refer to them as "chimneys"; of course, they are not. They are objects on this photograph. We do not know what the objects are. Professor, have you, presumably, in your life visited a building site?

A. Yes.

.

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Q. And have you seen flat roofs on building sites under construction?

A. Yes.

Q. Have you seen these roofs when they are being treated with some kind of substance to water proof them?

A. Yes.

Q. What does the substance come in? Would I be right in saying it comes in 40 gallons drums or something like that?

A. I would not be able to comment on that. I mean, if you want to assert it comes in 40 gallon drums, I will accept that.

Q. But it comes in drums, does it not? These drums stand around the roof while the men brush it up and down on the roof. This kind of thing happens?

A. That is quite possible.

Q. And this photograph was taken in the winter of 1942?

A. Yes.

Q. At this time this particular building was under construction, was it not? They were stilling completing ---- A. It was under construction.

Q. It was under construction. Of course, if we cut straight to the bottom line in this, if we are to accept your hypothesis or theory that these were rather irregularly spaced openings in the roof, and these were some kind of .

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pipe on top of that, as I understand you are putting to the court, with some kind of cover on top, then we would expect to find the openings in the roof, would we not, or some trace of those openings in the roof even today? Here is the roof now, that is the very roof we are talking about, is it not? That has pancaked downwards. The underside of the roof is largely intact. You can see just where those columns would have been then, these openings would have been, and there is not the slightest trace of them, is there?

A. I have said, it is in my report that one cannot observe these things, but I have also said before that when the gas chamber was dismantled before the destruction of this building, two months before the destruction of this building, it would have been a very likely, I mean, the obvious solution would have been to actually close these holes. Now, I have also mentioned yesterday ---- Q. I am going to question you on that in a minute.

A. I wonder if I should go back to the discussion of yesterday or address straight the issue of the boxes with material, the alleged boxes with the material on the roof.

Q. Well, we will come back to the alleged boxes with material on the roof, but I must hold up your statement to the court where you said that just before demolition of the building, workers were sent in with the instructions to fill the holes with cement or concrete or something?

.

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A. This is an inference on my side because you do not want these holes in the roof of a space to remain. When you have taken out the columns, it is an obvious conclusion that you would close these holes.

Q. I can see his Lordship frowning and I think the whole court is inwardly frowning about this rather improbable story, implausible idea.

MR JUSTICE GRAY: Well, just for the record and for the transcript, I did not frown.

MR IRVING: I am sorry, my Lord.

MR JUSTICE GRAY: Let us get on with the question.

MR IRVING: Yes. The implausibility of the story, that before putting in packs of dynamite beneath the building to blow everything up so that the Red Army does not find any criminal traces, they send in workmen with buckets of cement and trowels and tell them to make good the holes in the roof. This sounds, I must say, totally implausible to me, and we know now that it never happened because the roof is there and there is not the slightest trace of such patchwork having been done on the concrete?

A. My Lord, it is at the moment impossible to see because of the state of the roof if there was patchwork or not. The roof is fragmented. The roof has weathered very, very badly over 50 years, and the colour of concrete in the roof is of a motley quality, to say, and there is a lot of growth has been on the roof. It is impossible to tell one .

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way or another.

Q. We are talking about the underside of the roof, of course, and we have any number of photographs of the underside of that roof where you can actually see the original wood grain in the formwork on the concrete that survives, and that shows not the slightest displacement or interference or tampering with. This is the implausible part of your story. I appreciate that you are anxious to move on to other topics because, frankly, this blows holes in the whole of the gas chamber story. If there are no holes in that roof, no holes in that roof, there are no holes now and there were no holes then, and that totally demolishes the evidence of your so-called eyewitnesses?

A. My Lord, I have already yesterday pointed out that the column which remains and over which the room has been folded is the second column which was not the column where the column, the Zyklon-B introduction column was attached to, there were four of them, attached to column 1, 3, 5 and 7. May I address ---- MR JUSTICE GRAY: I wanted to ask you -- may I do it now -- about the columns because I understood your evidence yesterday to be that jutting out, as it were, from the roof of the alleged gas chamber there were the columns as well as the metal apertures through which the Zyklon-B, you say, was poured?

A. The columns -- it is unlikely, my Lord, that the ---- .

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Q. Did I misunderstand that?

A. --- columns would be going through the roof completely because the columns themselves were wider. They had these three concentric layers, but what would have happened is that there were a hole through the roof, and then on the top of it you get a kind if chimney like structure, and as long as the hole is connected to the innermost, to the innermost kind of column inside and of the same width so that this little thing can be brought up and down which ultimately allowed people to retrieve the earth in which the Zyklon was absurd during transport. As long as that hole was the same as the diameter of the inner column, then whatever you do above the roof is irrelevant.

I mean, you can have a box or you can have just a lid there.

MR JUSTICE GRAY: I follow. But the question I am really trying to get at is this. If your evidence is that the pillars were protruding above the level of the roof ---- A. You said the Zyklon-B introduction pillars?

Q. Well, that is what I am asking you. I thought you said that the pillars, the structural pillars, were protruding ---- A. No, the structural pillars did not and do not.

Q. Well, that was my misunderstanding of your evidence.

A. We have a blue print which shows those pillars and we can look at if you want.

.

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Q. Whilst I am asking you questions, I am not sure you have really responded to the suggestion that was implicitly being put to you by Mr Irving which is that these objects that one can see on the roof of the gas chamber, alleged gas chamber, are, in fact, drums containing some sort of sealant. You have not actually dealt with that suggestion.

A. No, and I would like to deal with that, if it is possible?

MR IRVING: Are you saying that all four of those objects were the pipes, as you call them?

A. No, these would be, this would be the chimney. There would be some structure around the pipe, because if you just have a pipe coming up, you want to have probably some kind of insertion mechanism. If you take a tin of Zyklon-B, that probably there is a little funnel attached to, and also you want probably not the pipe to run straight through the earth, you probably want to have some kind of protection around that pipe.

Q. My Lord, can I draw your attention to picture 10A in K2?

MR JUSTICE GRAY: Yes. I still do not think, Professor van Pelt, you have really dealt with the suggestion that these are drums containing sealant. Could that be so?

A. I would like to deal with it.

Q. Deal with it now.

A. First of all, we are coming, of course, in a -- the .

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problem is the exact dating of this image. If this image had been taken, let us say, in November, December, let us say December 1942, I think it could have been a plausible suggestion. I mean, we would have to look then in what shape of tins sealant is coming, but let us assume that this is, this is December, at that moment we know that there was construction activity on the roof. We also know that by the end of January, I mean, in fact, by the middle of January already, from correspondence, that the roof of morgue No. 1 had been completed, and one of the reasons for that we know that is the notorious Vergasung's letter of January 29, 1943. So, what is the reason that we know that this is not December 1942, but that this is or that we are already talking about probably February 1943.

MR JUSTICE GRAY: I thought you said '42, I am bound to say.

MR IRVING: November '42?

A. My argument is that Mr Irving's argument could be taken seriously at least for a moment until we have established what shape these containers come if this photo had been taken in December 1942. My argument is that the roof was already completed by January 1943.

My second argument is that one can, if one looks carefully at this photo, see that there is some kind of black line on the top of the chimney. There seems to be some soot on the top of the chimney which means that the chimney, as it is depicted in this photo, has had some .

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kind of activity already.

We know that there were trials, the first trial firing of the incinerators was, in fact, in late January 1943. That was the first trial firing of the incinerators. On the basis of that, it is very clear that this photo must be taken after the first trial firing of the incinerators. That is again the letter of 19, 29 talks about the trial firing of the incinerators, otherwise there would be no soot on the top of the chimney.

On the basis of that, it is possible to date this photo at least after the end of January 1943 when the roof was completed and, therefore, would be no reason at that moment for any other kind of boxes with sealant to be on the roof.

MR JUSTICE GRAY: Can I just ask one question and then I will stop? How do you date this photograph as February '43?

A. Because we know that by early March '43, the whole building was completed and, by implication, the gas chamber would have been covered with dirt. We know also -- so that is the last date that is possible. I mean, these photos are not dated.

We also know that the first experimental firing of the incinerators happened in end of January 1943. So it must have been, this photo must have been taken after the end of January 1943 and before the official completion .

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of the building in early March 1943. This is why I say February.

MR IRVING: Professor van Pelt, have you seen a photograph of that roof with just snow on it and no kind of protuberances at all, that flat roof?

A. Yes, I think there is a photograph of that, yes.

Q. What conclusions do you draw from examining that photograph? Those protuberances were moveable?

A. If you present me to the photograph, I will draw conclusions from it.

Q. You say you have seen the photograph. If there is a photograph of that roof with flat snow on it, a pure sheet of white snow, and no protuberances on it, and that implies that the protuberances were mobile and could be carried around like drums of tar, for example?

A. Mr Irving, I am not going to speculate upon a photograph I do not have in front of me. If you present the photo, I am very happy to explain that photo and I have an explanation for that photo.

MR JUSTICE GRAY: Professor, actually I think you are wrong on this point because you have accepted there is such a photograph. You have seen it. Can you not help Mr Irving -- he obviously has not got the photograph -- by giving the explanation that you obviously have?

MR IRVING: I have the photograph but not immediately available, my Lord.

.

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A. OK. Then the explanation is simple. What happens is that after the dirt was brought on top of the roof of the gas chamber or morgue No. 1, the protection of these chimneys would have been less. If we then had snow on top of that, it is very unlikely we would have seen much of these little chimneys.

MR IRVING: I only have one more question going to these protuberances on the roof. You say the Germans are basically a very methodical and orderly kind of people when they design their buildings; they are not arty crafty. They do not put a pillar here and a pillar there and "Let us have two over there". They will put them in a straight line down the middle, as, indeed, we know they did in that very building, in the gas chamber, as you call it?

A. They are construction pillars we are talking about?

Q. Yes, the construction pillars that go down the centre of the room, do they not, with one single reinforced concrete beam down the centre of the room?

A. Yes.

Q. So these pillars go down the centre of the room.

A. Not only Germans. I presume even English architecture and Canadian architecture do the same.

Q. I am sure they do. Therefore, the wire mesh columns that you talked about which went up the side of the pillars would also be running down the centre of the roof, would .

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they not?

A. No, not necessarily. I mean, you can put them either on the left or on the right side of the columns.

Q. Can we have another look at that photograph, in particular the one on page 10A? Is it your impression that those four objects are evenly spaced?

A. It seems that the second object is slightly more, the second object from the right, seems to be slightly more to the left -- it seems to be at a different line than the first and the third.

Q. Very well. Do they appear to you to be running down the centre line of that roof?

A. No.

Q. Or anywhere near the centre line of that roof?

A. I do not know, near. It is very difficult to say in this photograph exactly where they are, but it seems to be in this perspective that the interpretation is that No. 1 and No. 3 maybe would be in line, but certainly No. 2 would not be on the same line as No. 1 and 3, going from the right, and No. 4 it is very difficult to determine exactly what that thing is.

Q. Professor van Pelt, have you received just now a copy of this photograph of the underside of the roof?

A. Yes. I have it right in front of me.

Q. You accept that the underside of that slab we are looking at there in the colour photograph, which is Leichenkeller .

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No. 1 of crematorium No. 2, is the room you identified as the room where 500,000 people were gassed to death?

A. Yes.

Q. Will you accept that we can indeed see a very large amount of the space of that underside of that roof?

A. It is very difficult from this photograph to say how much space it is. I have been under the roof and it is a very tight space when you go there, when you actually film it or photograph it, the scale becomes very difficult to determine. What we certainly see here is that, if indeed what we see in the front of this photograph is the bricks, and pieces of bricks, then actually we are looking in a very, very narrow space, because these bricks are this size more or less, so we are talking about a space here, a crawl space right now.

Q. Like speleology, is it not, like cave hunting? It would be like going down into a very narrow cave, but all the same the people manage to get down there and take the photograph of that large area of roof space and you can see the lines of the formwork, the wooden lines where the concrete has been moulded into the wet concrete as running between the boards of the formwork?

A. Yes.

Q. You would expect therefore to find that interrupted in some way if there were these holes in the roof?

A. I would like to point out to you that in fact, if we see .

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the kind of converging parallel lines of the formwork going from the top of the photo, then passing over at least two big kind of stains, which shows it is not very smooth, and then suddenly that formwork stops because there is actually a diagonal line going more or less from the top left of the picture to the middle of the right hand side, so the form work certainly not very regular, which it is very easy to see on this photo.

Q. You do accept, do you not, that the whole of the story of the 500,000 people killed in that chamber rises or falls, rests or falls on the existence of those holes in that roof?

A. No.

Q. We only have the eyewitness evidence.

A. I disagree with that. The whole story rises and falls on the evidence that this room was a gas chamber, which is a slightly different issue.

Q. Well, setting that aside for a moment and we will come back to that other evidence in a moment, we still have not heard any other evidence than the eyewitness evidence we have heard about.

MR JUSTICE GRAY: Mr Irving, before you leave the photograph, took this photograph?

MR IRVING: A number of, shall we say, revisionist researchers have gone down there and taken these photographs.

MR JUSTICE GRAY: The professionals say it is revisionist .

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research.

MR IRVING: It is revisionist research, my Lord, but the point I was about to make was, as your Lordship may apprehend it was, as it is now accepted and has been accepted for some years that the whole story rises and falls on the existence of holes, one would have expected the researchers at the other end of the spectrum to have been down frantically looking for those holes to prove us wrong and they have not. They have not bothered to scrape off the rubble on the top to look for the evidence on top of the holes. They have not bothered to make any kind of survey clearing aside this brick mess underneath, digging deeper in, looking for evidence that those holes exist and frankly, my Lord, I cannot accept the notion that the Nazis, in the last frantic days when we heard yesterday they were in a blue funk, blowing up buildings, taking out the equipment, dismantling everything nut and bolt, that they would have gone round with a bucket of cement filling in the holes of the buildings they were about to dynamite.

MR JUSTICE GRAY: That is in the nature of a small speech and obviously you will be making that point later on, but for the time being press on with your questions.

A. My Lord, may I respond to this? Can I take the speech as a question?

MR JUSTICE GRAY: Let us deal with it slightly more evidentially. You are being asked for the evidence you .

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rely on apart from the eyewitnesses.

MR IRVING: My Lord ---- MR JUSTICE GRAY: Just pause. You have your shout and I am going to have mine. You have identified the photographs which we have just been looking at, and I think we are going to want to know what other evidence you rely on.

Mr Irving, that is not an inconvenient moment to ask that question, is it?

MR IRVING: I was just going to ask one supplementary question, which is to your knowledge, Professor, have any investigations of the underside of that roof been made by the Auschwitz museum authorities or the Polish authorities?

A. I do not know, my Lord.

Q. Do you believe that, if there was any doubt as to the existence of those holes, or if there was any belief that those holes really existed, is it not likely that they would have made the most strenuous attempts to establish that fact?

A. I cannot second guess the way the Auschwitz museum or the Polish authorities operate. What I do know is that they do not generally allow their research agenda to be set by revisionists.

Q. Very well.

A. My Lord, may I introduce a second piece of evidence?

MR JUSTICE GRAY: Yes. I would find it helpful, Mr Irving, to .

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know what other evidence. You started by asking what other evidence is there.

MR IRVING: This is the question I asked earlier on and I did say that we would come back to that.

MR JUSTICE GRAY: We have the answer now.

MR IRVING: We have the eyewitnesses to whose integrity I shall be coming back later on this morning, but let us hear what else you have?

A. The second piece of evidence I would like to introduce is in tab No. 2, and it is circled photo No. 6, which is an air photo taken by Americans in the summer of 1944, which shows, if we look at that --, I do not know exactly how to turn it. If one looks at the photo from the side, we see crematorium II to the right and crematorium III to the left. Now, one sees in this photo very clearly jutting out the undressing room. It is actually the entry at the end. It is like a little tab attached to it, and the morgue No. 1, and on morgue No. 1 there are four dots. In the same morgue No. 1 at crematorium III one sees those three dots.

MR IRVING: You describe them as dots, Professor. Would you like to estimate how long those dots actually are?

MR JUSTICE GRAY: The dots are going, as it were, in a line up to the top of the page. Are these the dots there?

A. Yes.

MR JUSTICE GRAY: I see.

.

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MR IRVING: If I may point them out on this large colour map, my Lord, they go along this roof here, do they not, which is the alleged gas chamber? Right?

A. Yes.

Q. OK.

A. So that is a second piece of evidence, and I will leave it to this for the movement. I presume Mr Irving will challenge this and I will respond to his challenge.

Q. I did ask you a question if you remember. This was, would you estimate on the evidence in front of you approximately how big those dots are?

A. I find it very difficult. I do not know exactly how the shadow runs.

Q. Is that a shadow or an object?

MR RAMPTON: My Lord, can I intervene to be helpful? There is an even clearer photograph, a medium enlargement, on the previous page in the bundle on the right-hand side.

MR JUSTICE GRAY: Yes, that is a better photograph. I think that is helpful.

MR RAMPTON: It is even clearer.

MR JUSTICE GRAY: Is it the same photograph?

MR RAMPTON: I do not know. The witness will know that.

MR JUSTICE GRAY: More overexposed, as it were, than the other one.

A. Yes. It is not exactly. It was not taken from the same thing because you can see near crematorium III, on the one .

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photograph you can see these lines going in, which actually were used for labels, attach labels to it, and when they were published in 1979 or so, and you do not see those lines pointing to crematorium III, the morgue No. 1 and the fence in the image on page No. 5, printed No. 4.

MR JUSTICE GRAY: On page 5 crematorium II is on the left.

Correct?

A. Yes. Crematorium II is on the left.

MR IRVING: Are these the same photographs, Professor?

A. No, they do not seem to be. I think they are the same photograph but they come from a different source.

Q. I do not think they can be the same photographs Professor, because of course the shadow of the chimney is going in the different direction, unless I am wrong..

A. The shadow of the chimney goes in the same direction. We see the shadow of the chimney going north west in both photos.

MR JUSTICE GRAY: I think one may be the mirror image of the other but I am not sure it matters very much whether they are the same photographs?

A. So the question posed to me was the size of the objects.

It is very difficult to determine the size of the objects, because of the way the shadow works. If one looks at the shadow of the chimney, one sees that the chimney really projects considerably out of the building, the shadow of the chimney. So it seems to be the sun is coming in this .

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case from the southeast. I do not know exactly what time, maybe it comes from the east more.

MR JUSTICE GRAY: I would not build too much on that, because I think it could be the same photograph which has been put in the wrong way round, as it were.

A. No, they are exactly the same.

MR IRVING: I accept they are the same photographs. Would you agree that both the chimney of the crematorium and whatever these pipe like objects you say are would all be vertical? They would not be leaning in any one direction?

A. The object, you mean?

Q. Yes?

A. The chimney itself and the ---- Q. Both the crematorium chimney and the protuberances on the roof which you think these dots are, would they all be vertical?

A. Yes.

Q. So they would all cast shadows in the same direction, at the same angle, would they not, if that were so?

A. Yes, that is quite likely.

Q. On this photograph they clearly do not cast shadows in the same direction. The smudges or dots appear to be first one way and then another?

A. Yes, that is the indeed true.

Q. Are these dots visible on any of the other air photographs taken of that building?

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A. Yes they are.

Q. Either before or after?

A. Yes.

Q. Are you going to show these photographs to us?

A. No. I just selected one.

Q. Well, might I suggest that it would have been helpful to the court if you had produced the other photographs that you allege exist containing these dots?

A. I thought that this was sufficient, but I presume the court can obtain them if they want it. But I think that these dots show very clearly that there are four introduction devices in morgue No. 1, or four something on top of that roof.

Q. Professor, I strongly suggest that is a major quantum leap to suggest that a dot which on the face of it is about 15 feet long on the roof of this crematorium building can have anything at all to do with the protuberances that you were talking about earlier, which at its largest extent in the eyewitness evidence that I have seen is of the order of 36 inches.

A. Mr Irving, the whole of the width of what you call the alleged gas chamber I think is something like, what is it, a little less than 20 feet. So, if you look at the width of this room and you look then at the dots, we are certainly not talking about dots which are 15 feet wide.

We are more looking at dots which are probably 3 feet .

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wide.

Q. I strongly disagree. They are over one quarter of the width of that roof in all their versions and manifestations on these various photographs.

A. I am not going to argue at moment about the width.

Q. Moreover, they cast no shadow.

A. It is impossible to say what kind of shadow they cast.

Q. They cast no shadow.

A. Mr Irving, we are looking at an immensely enlarged image from a small negative. These negatives, by the way, my Lord, have been preserved. They are sitting all on a roll and they have been preserved. These photos have been analysed by two different parties.

Q. Would you name those two different parties please?

A. Mr John Ball in Canada and in British Columbia was the first one who analysed these photos in the early 1990s.

Q. Is it not correct they were first analysed by a man called Mr Brugioni?

A. Yes, the CIA. I am sorry, indeed the CIA published these photos in 1979.

Q. About 1974, I believe?

A. Whatever, 1974, 1979.

Q. Are you aware of the fact that Mr Brugioni, the author of that publication of photographs, the CIA operative who, with a fellow author, first published these photographs, has recently published a book called Photo Fakery?

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A. I am not.

Q. In which he sets out chapter by chapter how easy it is to forge photographs, as we all know. Using modern computers and this kind of thing you can take people out of photographs and move people around. This same Mr Brugioni is an expert on photo forgery. Are you aware of that fact?

A. I was not. I presume that, with today's computer technology, he indeed would be able to do this.

MR JUSTICE GRAY: Are you suggesting, Mr Irving, that these photographs are forgeries?

MR IRVING: I am not suggesting that per se, my Lord, but what I am suggesting is that one has to be alert to the possibility that somebody, for whatever reason, has put a smudge on these photographs. The National Archives of the United States, where the original photographs were housed in the cartographic division, at the time they were issued by the CIA, the National Archives issued a disclaimer saying these photographs, as they are housed in the National Archives Cartographic Branch, do not contain the labelling which the CIA has attached. They made no references to these actual dots or anything. They just dissociated themselves from the kind of treatment.

A. My Lord, may I continue? Because I was asked ---- MR JUSTICE GRAY: Yes. What question do you think you are answering?

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MR IRVING: Do you have any opinion as to the integrity of these photographs?

A. I have an opinion on the integrity of the photographs which is based on an analysis by Dr. Neville Bryant at the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena done in 1996, and I actually was present in the room with him when he got his job. I was not present when he actually handed in the report.

Q. Professor van Pelt, is this report of the Pasadena Jet Propulsion Laboratory in evidence before us?

A. It is not, but I have testimony of Mr Michael Shermer, who commissioned the report, of the results and I just want do explain the position of Dr Bryant. He is the supervisor of cartographic applications and image processing applications at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory and he seems to be the most experienced analyst of air photos in the United States.

Q. Is Mr Shermer a friend of yours?

A. No, he is not. We have met a couple of times.

Q. Is there any reason why he would not have provided any written version of that testimony to you for the purposes you needed it for?

A. I do not think that at the moment it is necessary to have a testimony by Dr Bryant in court. You will have to prove this is a fakery, Mr Irving. These photos are at the moment evidence as photos. If you want to say that this .

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is a fake, I would say prove it and then we can get the report of Dr Bryant.

Q. Professor van Pelt, I think that his Lordship will educate you as to the burden of proof in an English defamation action.

MR JUSTICE GRAY: I am not sure that is really quite right. If you are not saying that these are fakes, and I think you just told me that you were not putting forward that positive case, then it does not seem to me that it is necessary for this witness to refer to the expert analysis at all. But, if you are saying it is a forgery or has been tampered with in some way, then it may be that we do need to see what the expert said.

MR IRVING: In that case, my Lord, I think we ought to ask the witness as to the nature of the expertise given by the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, which did not go to the forgery aspect, as I understand it, but to the aspect of what those objects were and how large they were. Am I right, Professor?

MR JUSTICE GRAY: Is that right?

A. No. The question which was asked to Dr Bryant was very simple. The first question was: Had these negatives been tampered with? It was partly based on a suggestion by Mr Ball who had analysed them in 1990, using analogue machines, which means he did not use computer enhancement but he used analogue machine, in which Mr Ball .

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had said that in the CIA report things had been added to the photo, and this went very specifically to groups of prisoners being marched around the camp where at a certain moment one could see something like a little ---- MR IRVING: Brush marks?

A. Brush marks which had been drawn in.

MR JUSTICE GRAY: That is not these photographs, anyway, is it?

A. It is actually in these photographs, but it is too small.

But that was one of the "proofs". It was that group of prisoners which is not seen in this enlargement. They are walking around in the camp.

Q. Can we remain with these photographs, please?

A. They are in these photographs but not visual. I am just trying to explain the brief which Mr Bryant got.

Q. Was he given the original negatives to look at or copies of the negatives?

A. The negatives are in Jerusalem.

Q. The original negatives are in Jerusalem?

A. Yes, there is a roll of negatives in Jerusalem.

Q. How did the American government negatives come into the possession of the Jerusalem authorities?

A. I have no idea. They are in the Yad Vashem.

Q. Are you sure this is not just a duplicate made by the National Archives of the United States?

A. I am not sure. I know there is a roll of negatives in the Yad Vashem and I have been always under the impression that .

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it is the original roll of negatives given to Israel because of the importance of this material.

MR JUSTICE GRAY: What I think we are really looking for is what was the was conclusion at which Mr Bryant arrived?

A. What Dr Bryant did was analyse these images by using computer technology, and he said that the problem which occurred in marching these prisoners which were marching around is that the size of a head of a person is the same as the size of a grain in the negative, and that the result of that was that a moiré effect which occurs when also in the newspaper when you photograph a picture which has been screened twice. This is one of the problems.

When you go to the very small scale, it becomes very difficult to exactly understand the behaviour of these individual grains at that level.

MR IRVING: Can we remain with the dots on the roof, please? Is there any moiré effect visible on them?

A. We are basically talking about very small objects, and I do not know if there is moiré effect on them. But the issue which Bryant had to address was that the so-called proof Ball had for the tampering with these photos were these lines of prisoners. Once Bryant showed that these had not been tampered with, that there had been absolutely no tampering with this image, then the issue of if they had been tampered with, the dots on top of the Leichenkeller No. 1, became in some way irrelevant, .

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because the issue which Ball had brought to him was based on those groups of prisoners.

MR JUSTICE GRAY: Yes. So Bryant did not actually address the question whether these dots that we see on the enlargements were added, forged additions?

A. No. He looked if there was any proof of addition to it and he had said no.

Q. Generally speaking?

A. Yes, generally speaking. There is a second one and this is quite an interesting one. Again, the big problem with all of this of course is that nothing of this has been published. It would have been published by Shermer if it was not for this libel case. People are waiting to see what the outcome of this libel case is. That is that these photos were taken in sequence, which means that it is a mechanical camera which starts running, and photos were taken for bombing raids on the Bunawerk in Monowitz. So what happened is that, as the bomber starts to approach, this was probably taken by a Mosquito, the camera starts to run 10 to 15 minutes ahead of time, and starts taking photographs as it is approaching the bombing site.

MR IRVING: It takes stereoscopic pairs, does it not? In other words, each photograph was a certain distance away from the next one in terms of seconds, so, when viewed through a stereoscopic viewer, you would get a stereoscopic effect .

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so that you could see if these objects were in fact just smudges on the roof of some kind, or plant growths, or if they were what you would call chimneys?

A. I do not think that they were taken with the intention to be looked through a stereoscopic viewer. It was simply that the camera was running with a certain speed and, as a result of that, you can look at them with a stereoscopic viewer, which is a slightly different issue.

Q. This was the system. They did not take two photographs simultaneously. They would take them at five second intervals to produce a stereoscopic effect?

MR JUSTICE GRAY: Mr Irving, I think we are straying a rather long way down a possibly unprofitable side alley.

MR IRVING: In view of the fact that apparently, unless I am wrong, this is his only other evidence apart from the eyewitnesses.

MR JUSTICE GRAY: We have not asked him that yet. I have the point. You are alert to the possibility that these may be forgeries. Dr Bryant apparently concluded they were not.

MR IRVING: I have one more question to ask about the smudges on the roof as visible in the air photographs. What have you to say about the spacing of those smudges when you compare them with what I call the tar barrels on the roof in the other photograph? They are differently spaced, are they not?

A. I cannot judge that. In the one photo we looking from .

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more or less ground level at these boxes, and now we look more or less straight from above and it is impossible to come to any conclusion one way or another.

Q. I disagree with you. Would it not be correct to say that in fact there is a very uneven spacing in the four tar barrels visible from the ground, whereas the smudges on the roof appear to be admittedly irregularly spaced but in a totally different way. Therefore, they have no connection whatsoever with the protuberances that are visible from ground level.

A. I have no comment on that.

Q. Can we hear what other evidence you have that this building here, the Leichenkeller No. 1, of crematorium No. II was a homicidal gas chamber, apart from the eyewitnesses and apart from the smudges on the roof?

A. These are the two images which confirm the eyewitness report, and then there are a number of drawings made by a survivor.

Q. Mr Olère?

A. Mr Olère, which are in tab No. 3. There are three drawings I would like to refer to. The first drawing is No. 1 printed 3.

MR JUSTICE GRAY: Can you just remind me? Olère was an inmate. Was he a Sonderkommando?

A. He was a Sonderkommando.

MR JUSTICE GRAY: Drawing No. 3?

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A. It is circled in my horrible handwriting No. 1.

MR IRVING: What tab are we under, please?

MR JUSTICE GRAY: Tab 3?

A. It is a plan of crematorium No. III which is the mirror image of crematorium No. II, so we have in some way to start to switch the left and right halves of our brain to understand this. What he has drawn in the room No. 3, which is, according to him, the gas chamber, are in fact four little blocks, four little squares, which are spaced from left to right, from left to right. They are labelled here, and of course they were not labelled at the time, as the Zyklon-B introduction openings.

MR JUSTICE GRAY: Who did the labelling?

A. In the final publication of Olère's drawings I think they were done by Klarsfeld or somebody who was working with Klarsfeld.

MR JUSTICE GRAY: Did Olère survive?

A. Olère survived, yes. He survived and he was very far from Poland when Tauber gave his testimony. He was liberated in Germany and then he went back to Paris immediately. So the chance of cross pollination, as Mr Irving calls it, is very little. There is a second drawing which is in 46, so we are now one year later. It could be a little bit more problematic except the fact that at that moment images of the crematoria were not yet published. I just would like to draw your attention to .

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drawing No. 5 which is an image of crematorium No. III as people are coming in, and this was drawn in 1945 and at that moment ---- MR IRVING: Is that 1945 or 1946?

A. 1945.

Q. I do not have a date on mine.

A. OK, it says 1945.

MR JUSTICE GRAY: Well, it would not be 1946, would it?

MR IRVING: These have been drawn from memory, am I correct?

A. These are drawn from memory.

MR JUSTICE GRAY: I see. I thought he was drawing them whilst -- no, I see.

MR IRVING: My Lord, this is very important you should appreciate these are drawn after the war.

MR JUSTICE GRAY: I am afraid I had not, yes.

A. These are drawn from memory. What I would like to say that he seems to have a very good memory because the first time actually that either the plans or images of crematorium II or III was published was in 1946 in the book by Kraus und Kulgar. That is a very crude image which Kraus und Kulgar, they made a little model. The plans were not published by the Polish Commission in 1946. So we have here in 1945 someone who has been in that building, who lived in that building, who was a Sonderkommando, who is a very, very experienced draftsman and painter, had a career before the war as a painter and, .

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obviously, has a good visual memory and who draws this building; and when one compares this building with the images of crematorium No. III, then in general one must say that, indeed, he remembered quite well. So I would say that this building suggests at least that he is at least knows what he sees and he is a credible witness as even when he works from memory.

Q. What is it that you derive from photograph No. 5?

A. Nothing, except that I want to show that it is remarkable that he is able to remember this building as well as he does without any visual aids.

Then we come to No. 6 which is a drawing he made in 1946 of the same building which is crematorium No. III.

MR IRVING: Which is a mirror image of No. II, is that correct?

A. Yes. What he does there, there is one problem with this drawing because he has to try to represent something which is hidden, but we where see in the middle level, to say, that is the incineration hole with the ovens, the ovens which are labelled as No. H in this case, and we see No. I, we see the coke to the right, we see the little officers, the SS man sitting there with the window through which he looks at the incineration room, you see upstairs.

Q. Which is the gas chamber in this building?

MR JUSTICE GRAY: Bottom level, is it?

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A. At the bottom level, No. D. Of course, the gas chamber, taken from this perspective, would have been hidden by, when we see the soldier standing at No. C in the corridor, the gas chamber would have basically been running to the back out of the plain of the ---- MR JUSTICE GRAY: Towards the ---- A. Not towards, that would have been crematorium II. It runs away from us, if we go back to the original plan I showed you which was No. I. So the problem he had of how to represent that gas chamber. So he drew it as if it is under the incineration room because there was no other way to really represent it, because he also wants to represent the undressing room which is No. A. You see there are basically two stairs, one stair to the left for people that are going down and we see the second stair is at No. B.

MR IRVING: In other words, his memory was wrong; he drew it in a way it actually was not?

A. No, his memory is absolutely right.

Q. But you said that he drew it in a way that it is not because he wanted to represent it -- he could not do it otherwise?

A. No, I mean, he had to represent the location of the gas chamber which is because the gas chamber jots out from the plain of the drawing. He now draws it under the incineration room, but, in fact, it goes, you know, it .

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goes to the back. I can do it, I mean, if this is the plain of the drawing, then the gas chamber would have gone like this, to the back. So he has to represent it one way or another and he does it a little bit in the way as probably somebody in ancient Egypt would have done it.

Q. Was Mr Olère ever interrogated or questioned? Did he provide eyewitness statements?

A. No, I am happy to answer that he was not, but I would like to finish the drawing.

MR JUSTICE GRAY: Yes, make your point on this because I have not understood it yet.

A. The major point is seen at No. E, one sees here in the drawing, and the photocopy is not very good, but E points at some shadow -- it is almost seems like a shadow going down from the roof of the gas chamber to the bottom, and then you see three others, and the most right one is the clearest one in this photocopy and these are the four wire mesh introduction columns.

MR IRVING: This is in 1946?

A. This is in 1946.

Q. You are saying that he has not heard any stories at all of what allegedly went on?

A. I do not know exactly about the state of communication in 1945 and '46, but the eyewitness testimony about these introduction columns was given in May 1945 to Jan Sehn, but it was only published somewhere in 1946 and it was .

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actually the actual Kula document, and the actual, I mean, I mean the results were only published but the statements themselves were never published.

Q. Am I not right in saying that Mr Tauber, when he gave his statements to Jan Sehn, there were many photo opportunities and his photographs were splashed all over the press with stories, the other eyewitness, and that would have been early 1946 or 1945?

A. I do not know of any photo opportunities for Mr Tauber having been published in the press. If you can bring this, you know, I would be very happy to consider it.

MR JUSTICE GRAY: Professor van Pelt, can I just make sure I have understood it, that when you say that these show the projections, whatever they may have been, you are talking about -- can you see -- that smudge there, that smudge there, that smudge there?

A. No, that is actually, that is the installation which brings forced air into the ovens which actually, so that other little -- no, the smudges are going down. I tried to interpret what your finger is doing.

Q. There?

A. No, that is the door. That is the door. You are pointing now to the door.

Q. Hold up your plan and tell me where I am supposed to see evidence of these projections?

A. Do you see the arrow with No. E?

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Q. Yes.

A. There you see where it just goes down, the arrow just points at a first line going down, but the most clearest one is the one ---- Q. Oh, I see.

A. --- the clearest one is the one which is half a centimetre away from D Olère, for his name. There are four of these columns quite literally drawn into this gas chamber going down.

MR IRVING: But, in fact, he has it on the wrong side of the building. You accept that?

MR JUSTICE GRAY: Well, he has turned it 90 degrees on its axis, that is your evidence?

A. Yes. Then we have a third piece by Olère which again is a drawing from 1946 which is No. 7. There we see two Sonderkommandos who are collecting, as it says, gold teeth and hair in the gas chamber. Then we see in the background, we see one of those columns.

MR IRVING: The cross-hatching, you mean?

A. The cross-hatching, yes. It is drawn in the same way ---- Q. Are you saying they actually did this job of removing the gold teeth and the hair actually inside the gas chamber?

A. No. In general, they did it outside the gas chamber, but you must remember ---- Q. The picture says it is happening in the gas chamber, according to you?

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A. But you must remember that by the end of 1943 the gas chamber of crematorium II was divided into two. There was a back gas chamber and there was a gas chamber in front.

Q. Here is the wire mesh in the back of this picture?

A. No, but there were two wire mesh columns in the back gas chamber and there were two wire mesh columns in the front gas chamber.

Q. Coming out of these non-existent holes in the roof, is that correct?

A. Whatever. What happened was that when the transports were smaller, one of the big problems in the gassing the Germans had was that normally they had to fill up the whole gas chamber for the gassing really to go efficient.

So by actually dividing the gas chamber up into two, they could gas a group in the small gas chamber at the back, and then they could use the front room after the gassing for work which otherwise would be done in the much more tight confinement of actually the little porch or up at the exit of the elevator in the incineration room.

Q. Can I ask what your source is for that statement?

A. The source for the statement that there were two gas chambers?

MR JUSTICE GRAY: That they divided the gas chamber into two and used one half only for gassing?

MR IRVING: Is this eyewitnesses again or do you have documents .

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that support that?

A. No, there are eyewitnesses for that.

Q. Yes. In other words, you do not have a document apart from these sketches from memory ---- A. I mean, at a certain moment if eyewitnesses say that the gas chamber was divided in two at the end of 1943, and Mr Bacon, for example, testifies to it that there has been a gassing in the Eichmann trial, that he came into the gas chamber to warm up, and that there has been a gassing in the second gas chamber right at the back, Mr Bacon did not need to prove one way or another about what was happening where. I mean, he was a kid who came into that gas, into that gas chamber.

Q. Can we linger on No. 7 because I am very puzzled on this business of people extracting the teeth and cutting the hair inside the gas chamber with the bodies still piled where they lay?

A. No, the bodies -- we do not know exactly ---- Q. He is telling us here in this picture, is he not? You yourself drew attention to what otherwise we might not have noticed -- thanks very much -- the wire mesh in the background?

MR JUSTICE GRAY: Mr Irving, I think the evidence is, and you may not accept it, that these bodies had been moved from the half of the gas chamber where they had been gassed into the other half where the removal of the hair and the .

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teeth took place.

MR IRVING: And they just left this wire mesh column for no reason -- it was kind of left over from ---- MR JUSTICE GRAY: It was historical. I think that is the evidence.

A. The second gas chamber -- there were two gas chambers, they were right one behind the other -- the second one was used also when there were transports. We have a small one at the back. I mean, basically, half of the original gas chamber is used for small transports and the two are used for big transports. Of course, all the Zyklon-B introduction devices remain in that first room because the room is on occasions also used.

Q. And you notice that none of these people are wearing gas masks of any kind, although they are handling bodies that have clearly been contaminated with hydrogen cyanide?

A. I do not want at the moment to go into exactly ---- Q. Well, I do because this is an important point.

A. The testimony is that people were wearing gas masks when they went into the gas chamber itself to take the bodies out; that when these bodies were out, the dentists, the so-called dentists, did not need any gas masks any more to handle the bodies.

Q. They had been subjected to doses of hydrogen cyanide, hundreds of bodies, and yet these people are just handling them like this?

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A. And the hydrogen cyanide by that time had been taken out of the gas chamber by ventilators.

Q. How long did that procedure last then? I mean, we are trying to get some idea of the time scale of the operation involved.

A. Around half an hour.

Q. For all the hydrogen cyanide to evaporate off these bodies so these people could work on them quite harmlessly?

A. The ventilators, again eyewitness testimony says that the ventilators after the gassing that took around 20, 30 minutes to take the gas out of the gas chamber.

Q. Professor van Pelt, are you aware of a news item in the newspapers about two years ago, an American student had committed suicide with cyanide and when the rescue workers went in, the paramedics went in, nine of them were overcome by the fumes and were hospitalised afterwards?

A. I did not read the Canadian papers, I am sorry to say.

Q. This was an American newspaper and reported in the European press as well. I have the press clipping if you are interested. Nine of them were overcome by fumes from one body of a man who had committed suicide with cyanide, and they had to be hospitalised. So, on the face of it, this is quite an improbable picture we are looking at, if that is true?

A. I think eyewitnesses will say that this is, indeed, what happened. People with gas masks go in the gas chamber to .

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remove the bodies and people without gas masks work on the bodies after they have been removed from the gas chamber.

Q. Have you also read the testimony of some of the eyewitnesses, that they went in there smoking cigarettes and they went in there eating sandwiches, despite the gas masks?

A. My Lord, you will find my discussion on that whole issue in my expert report. Mr Irving at the moment is referring to an argument which has been made by Professor Faurisson. It is based on a complete falsification, misreading, misrepresentation, of the testimony of Mr Höss.

Q. Of Mr Höss?

MR JUSTICE GRAY: We can come to that in due course, no doubt ---- MR IRVING: In other words, some eye witnesses we have to discount.

MR JUSTICE GRAY: --- but at the moment, Mr Irving -- just listen to me; I would like to get some structure into it if we can -- we are taking Professor van Pelt through the reasons other than eyewitnesses for saying that ---- MR IRVING: This, of course, is clearly an eyewitness again, is it not?

MR JUSTICE GRAY: Mr Irving, will you just listen? We are taking Professor van Pelt through his evidence for saying that crematorium No. 9ii) was used as a gas chamber, .

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evidence apart from the eyewitnesses. We have seen the photographs. We have now seen the Olère drawings. Can we move on and see whether there is any other evidence he relies on; if not, you can move on.

MR IRVING: My Lord, I would like just to linger two or three more minutes with the Olère drawings because I have not really had my say on them.

MR JUSTICE GRAY: All right.

MR IRVING: First of all, it is not correct that this is just another form of eyewitness evidence, if I can put it like that, Professor van Pelt? This is an eyewitness who has the capability of drawing as well as speaking about what he claims to have seen, is that correct?

A. Yes.

Q. He is an eyewitness. Would you say that he is an eyewitness who is normally balanced and in command of his faculties or is there anything odd about him?

A. I am not a psychologist. I think that these drawings, these drawings certainly seem to suggest, especially when we look at the architectural plans, when we look at the section of the building, that his powers of observation were perfectly in tact.

Q. I must say there is a difference between the architectural plan which he provided in 1946 and the rather more lurid pictures and, of course, you know what I am talking about, earlier. Would you look at the picture No. 5 which is the .

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exterior of the crematorium with flames and smoke belching from the chimney. Now, would you agree that these crematoria, in which the Germans had invested a great deal of money in building, would have been built to the latest design standards?

A. Design standards of what, Mr Irving?

Q. For crematoria, following all the appropriate technical specifications?

A. Mr Irving, we know very well that the Auschwitz crematoria did not follow the usual civilian crematoria design standards.

Q. Is there one single photograph, apart from the forged one put by the Simon Wiesenthal Centre in their brochure (which they have admitted is a forgery) showing the chimneys of the Auschwitz crematoria smoking?

A. There is one ---- Q. Even smoking, let alone flaming like this one?

A. There is one photo, as far as I remember, in the images of the Hungarian action of 1944 which actually shows some smoke coming from a crematorium chimney.

Q. This is the photograph I am referring to which the Simon Wiesenthal Centre have admitted now because they have been shown the comparison with the original, unretouched photograph. Can I describe this photograph to you?

MR JUSTICE GRAY: Do you know about this?

A. No, I do not know about the challenge to this photograph.

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MR IRVING: Well, it is a photograph showing prisoners arriving from the Hungarian action in the foreground, and in the background can be seen a chimney of a crematorium. On the original photograph the chimney is not smoking, but in the version posted by the Simon Wiesenthal Centre in its publicity smoke has mysteriously appeared?

A. I refer to the published version of the photo and the copy of the photo, which actually is a copy of the photo, a print of the photo, which I have seen in Auschwitz.

I have never seen the Simon Wiesenthal publication.

MR JUSTICE GRAY: Mr Irving, the position is you will have to prove that in due course.

MR IRVING: I will bring those photographs to court, my Lord.

(To the witness): One more question about the Olère pictures. Of course, have you seen all the Olère pictures or just the ones you have produced at the court?

A. I have seen all the Olère pictures.

Q. Yes, would it be right to say that he has a prurient interest in the female form?

A. I do not know how this is relevant. I mean...

Q. Concerning his mental balance.

A. I think ---- Q. Or the purpose for which these illustrations were made -- let us put it like that.

A. I think that if one would judge the ability of someone to bear witness on the basis of their interest in the female .

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form, I think that not many people would be able to give evidence.

Q. Would you agree that in almost every single one of these pictures he has drawn, for whatever purpose -- there is another photograph that I have given there which is not in your collection -- there are naked women full frontal on to the artist's brush, so to speak, and that there is no reason whatsoever that he should have made these pictures in that way unless he intended to sell them. Is that a fair speculation?

A. Mr Irving, I do not want to comment on what I understand your suggestion is that we are dealing here with a pornographer. I think it is absolutely not worth me to go into that.

Q. I did not use the word "pornography". I said that his purpose in drawing these pictures was to produce a marketable item which he could sell in the media at some time?

A. Mr Irving, you will have prove to me, if you want to me to comment on it, that he ever tried to sell these things in the media.

Q. Let me put the question this way. Is it likely that nearly all the females who became victims of the bestialities of the Nazis in Auschwitz were nubile, young and attractive?

A. No, it is not very likely.

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Q. Not likely. Thank you very much. No further questions on this particular matter. I want to go back to the testimony of the witness Bimko, unless Professor van Pelt ---- MR JUSTICE GRAY: Can we just ask, is there any further material that you rely on, apart from the eyewitnesses, for saying that crematorium II was used as a gas chamber?

A. We can go through the documents. If you want the construction documents of the crematoria, this will be quite a long exercise.

MR IRVING: Are they explicit as to the use of the building?

A. We have documents which -- we have a document, for example, about the Vergasungskeller which you know well.

We have a document about the ---- MR JUSTICE GRAY: We need not bother with that. We know about that.

A. --- the construction, the construction where at a certain moment we get an Auskleidekellers in the basement. We talk about the introduction of hot hair into morgue No. 1, the proposition being made which breaks down very quickly after it has been introduced. I am happy to go in detail through those letters if you want me to.

MR IRVING: We will deal, if you wish, with the introduction of hot air. We have dealt with the undressing room, I believe, earlier in this case?

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A. Maybe you have dealt, Mr Irving, I have not dealt with it and his Lordship asked me if I wanted to introduce other elements.

MR JUSTICE GRAY: I just want to get the full picture. I do not want you to spend very long on this, but you deal with this in your report, do you not, at some length?

A. In detail, yes.

Q. So we could call this corpus of evidence the ---- MR RAMPTON: My Lord, I do think that at some stage Mr Irving has to put it directly to Professor van Pelt what he says about the -- Mr Irving's thesis in cross-examination by me was that it was, indeed, a Vergasungskeller, but that it was used for gassing lice or people that were already dead.

MR IRVING: The way I put it was that it had alternative other uses.

MR RAMPTON: I do think at some stage Mr Irving has to allow Professor van Pelt to deal with that thesis which includes the references to "Auskleidekeller".

MR JUSTICE GRAY: So no human killing but delousing?

MR RAMPTON: That was Mr Irving's response to my cross-examination and the evidence about the cyanide in the zinc covers and the word "Vergasungskeller", yes, indeed. They used it for gassing, clothes, people.

MR JUSTICE GRAY: And objects.

MR RAMPTON: And objects.

.

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MR JUSTICE GRAY: I think that is right. I do not when Mr Irving is going to come to that, but I think Mr Rampton is right in saying that that has to be put so that Professor van Pelt has the opportunity of dealing with it.

MR IRVING: I certainly had not overlooked the need to do that, my Lord, but I was going to do it in a logical, systematic ---- MR JUSTICE GRAY: Yes, you do it when you want to.

MR IRVING: Yes, introducing two or three more documents before we got to that in which we have the word "Vergasung", and so on, of a relatively harmless nature.

MR JUSTICE GRAY: But what Professor van Pelt has said is that, in addition to the photographs and the drawings and so on which we have been looking at this morning so far, he relies also on what one might call the construction documents.

MR IRVING: Yes, which he has just vaguely summarised as inferences to be drawn from them. But if we can just now go back to your reliance on the witness Bimko? Can we, please, have once again the reference in the bundle of documents, Auschwitz 1 or 2, to the Bimko testimony in the Belsen trial? While we are looking for it, can I confirm that that testimony is actually drawn in your version from the book by Raymond Phillips, the trial of Joseph Kramer and 44 others?

A. Yes.

.

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Q. So at the time you wrote your report, you had exactly the same pages in front of you that I have here which are pages 740 to 742 of the Phillips book?

A. Yes, I presume so. I mean ---- Q. Yes.

A. --- I presume it is only one edition.

Q. Your contention is that you left nothing out of the Bimko testimony which was relevant to his Lordship and myself in evaluating the integrity of this witness?

A. I have -- Mr Irving, I have said a couple of times yesterday that my intention in giving, in writing down that section was not to bring in Dr Ada Bimko as a major witness on whom I rely. The intention of that section, which contains also other evidence or other descriptions of the gas chambers and crematoria -- for example, the Polovoy account which was proven to be wrong -- was simply to show the development of knowledge about Auschwitz since 1942. It is in three sections. I start in 1942. I try to trace exactly how the knowledge became available and in what way. In that sense, of course, the Lüneburg trial had some importance, but much more importance because of the admissions of the people of Kramer and the others who were actually tried in that case.

Q. Can I interrupt you at this point and say so, in other words, you concede that the Pravda account by Polovoy is totally or largely unreliable?

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A. I have written in my report that is -- I do not think it everything, but it is a largely unreliable account as far as the description of the exterminations is concerned.

Q. In other words, it is fanciful; it include things which never existed in Auschwitz.

A. Oh, yes, I have no problem ---- Q. It is pure propaganda for the Allies or for the Russians?

A. I do not think necessarily, Mr Irving, that this is propaganda for the Allies. We are dealing here with a writer, a correspondent, a war correspondent, attached to the Red Army who arrives in the middle of an offensive in a camp which shows, even of what remains there, it shows clear traces of a very big crime.

I think that we should remember that in 1945 people had not yet experienced these kinds of installations; that these installations were in ruins and I think Mr Polovoy, partly probably on what he heard people say who had remained there which was largely sick people, and partly on the basis of his own imaginings, tried to imagine what such a place would have been.

Q. Among the things the Russians found, was there a hospital full of sick people, including large numbers of sick Jews?

A. There were a number of Lazaretts in the camp, yes.

Q. Hospitals, yes.

A. I do not think that a Lazarett and a hospital are necessarily the same thing.

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Q. A Lazarett is a military hospital?

A. The Lazaretts were barracks in which people were put.

There was no medical equipment. There was nothing really to treat them. There were many descriptions of the way these Lazaretts were operated. There are also documents relating to them. So I think I would not want to ---- Q. We do not need to go into the problems caused in the medical conditions in Germany. I am just asking, the Russians did find hospitals or barracks of a hospital nature in which large numbers of sick and unemployable people, including large numbers of sick and unemployable Jews, were housed, for example, the father of Anne Frank was there, is that not right?

A. Mr Irving, when the camp was evacuated in the middle of January 1945, indeed, prisoners who were sick were men who could not make the march to the west remained behind.

Q. But you appreciate the point I am making that, surely, the legend has it that the Nazis liquidated everybody who fell sick or who was unemployable?

A. Mr Irving, in my report I think I have pointed out in response to things you have said about what happened to the Frank family, that by the end of 1944 the situation in Auschwitz had changed, that while until the end -- while throughout the history of the camp there were regular selections of sick, in the Lazaretts of sick inmates who when they were considered to be incurable or too weakened .

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that they were taken to the gas chamber, that this policy had stopped -- first of all, it had been diminished in late 1944 and at a certain moment stopped. No gas selections were undertaken any more in the Lazaretts in the end of 1944. This is one of the reasons that there were a relatively large amount of sick prisoners by the time the camp was evacuated.

Q. So the Nazis are feeding large numbers of useless mouths who were Jewish and sick and they were in the jaws of death, they were in the heart of the extermination camp ---- A. Mr Irving ---- Q. --- and they were in hospital?

A. --- I would not want to infer any kind of thing about the regular procedures in the camp on the basis of what was happening there in December or January 1944 -- December 1944 or January 1945.

Q. Do you now have in front of you the Bimko testimony?

A. I do not have it right in front of me now.

MR RAMPTON: My Lord, it is H2II. It starts at footnote 404 behind the tab 401 to 420.

MR IRVING: You have conceded, in other words, that the Pravda account as an eyewitness account is largely unreliable?

A. Yes, I have done that in my report so I have no problem with that statement.

Q. So systematically we will now continue with the next .

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eyewitness.

MR JUSTICE GRAY: Are we on Dr Bimko?

MR IRVING: We are now on Dr Ada Bimko, as she was at that time. Her real name now, at any rate, Hadassah Rosensaft

MR JUSTICE GRAY: She is still alive, is he.

MR IRVING: I believe she is still alive. She is a leading figure, or was a leading figure, in the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. She was an adviser and on their Library Council. (To the witness): Can we look at paragraph 1?

A. Which footnote?

Q. On page 740. Paragraph 1. This is, of course an eyewitness who is claiming to testify in a capital trial against captured Nazis who were on trial for their lives.

She has made this deposition. At the end of paragraph 1, did you read the words when you were doing your research: "I have examined the records of the numbers cremated and I say that the records show that about 4 million persons were cremated at the camp"?

A. Yes.

Q. Have you any comment to make on the voracity of that statement?

A. It is unlikely that it happened, but I do not exactly know what record she was looking at.

Q. Could she have looked at any records in Auschwitz and .

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found that 4 million people had been cremated?

A. I do not know. I do not know exactly what records there were. The 3 or 4 million is very unlikely.

Q. Yes. The figure of 4 million was, of course, the original propaganda figure put out by the Polish Government for whatever reason, is that correct?

A. Yes -- it was a figure which was established actually, I do not say for propaganda reasons, it was a figure which was established by the Russians after they liberated the camp, the first ---- Q. But, of course, she is not testifying here that she has seen a figure put about by Russia propaganda; she says "I have seen the records and they show that 4 million people had been cremated"?

A. So, I mean, if you want to make a point, Mr Irving, that she is wrong there or that she maybe says something which she did not do, that is fine.

Q. The point, obviously, which his Lordship will appreciate, as I am working towards this, you have had this document in front of you when you wrote this report. In the very first paragraph, when she is making this statement on oath, she has said a statement which, to your knowledge and to mine and to the court's knowledge now, is quite obviously untrue?

MR JUSTICE GRAY: I think that is not actually right, is it?

She is claiming to have looked at some records. We do not .

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know what the records were or what they show. She is not giving, as it were, false eyewitness evidence at that point in her statement, is she?

MR IRVING: My Lord, I beg to differ. "I have examined the records of the numbers cremated." "I have examined the records and I say that the records show that about 4 million persons were cremated at the camp". What other possible interpretation can you put on that statement?

MR JUSTICE GRAY: Well, I have just suggested one to you.

Anyway, carry on with your questions.

A. My Lord, may I make a remark?

MR JUSTICE GRAY: Yes.

A. I think this would be an interesting exercise, and I do not want to judge it any further, if I had made use of the Bimko evidence in any way in relationship to did the gas chamber exist or not? I have never used -- I have just mentioned Bimko in this one particular context; the emergence of knowledge of Auschwitz. I have not used her anywhere else ever. I have not brought her here in as an eyewitness to the gassings, to the existence of Zyklon-B columns.

MR IRVING: You just threw her in as a bit of spice?

A. Sorry?

Q. You threw her into your report as a bit of spice, did you?

A. Not as a spice.

Q. As one more statistic? So, instead of having four .

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eyewitnesses, you would have five?

A. Mr Irving, I tried to give an impression of what was happening at the Lüneberg trial, what was said at the Lüneberg trial.

Q. We know what happened at the Lüneberg trial. A large number of these unfortunates who were on trial were convicted and hanged on the basis of her testimony, including the person mentioned in the last paragraph, paragraph 8 on the next page: "On the day before the British troops arrived at Belsen", she said, "I saw Karl [Francioh], who was a cook, shoot a man internee dead for stealing vegetables". Were you aware that in her oral evidence at the Belsen trial she said it was a woman that the man shot?

A. Mr Irving, I did not know that, to be very honest, the witness Ada Bimko does not really interest me so much because I have not made use of her in reconstructing the history of any of the four crematoria.

Q. So we are working towards the point where we do not have to strike off Mrs Bimko. There is one more thing I want to draw your attention to. At the beginning of paragraph 6, this woman who has medical knowledge -- she is a doctor -- writes: "Whilst at Auschwitz I saw SS male nurses Heine and Stibitz inject petrol into women patients". Are you aware, Professor van Pelt, that phenol injections are a standard treatment for typhus?

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A. In Auschwitz, I understand that phenol was used as a regular -- sorry, I will answer the question. I am sorry, for this. No, I did not know that.

Q. Very well. So on top of the evidence we looked at yesterday where Bimko described cylinders of gas and pipes which you admitted was wrong, but possibly a misinterpretation of what she was -- you thought she might have seen the ventilation system -- we have no evidence of that. Bimko is, in other words, a totally unreliable witness and should not have been relied upon in any way, notwithstanding the fact that her evidence sent several men to the gallows in Lemberg?

A. My Lord, I do not want to judge the Lüneberg trial.

MR JUSTICE GRAY: No, but do you accept that she is not a witness on whom reliance should be placed as to what did or did not take place at Auschwitz?

A. I think that some of her statements are historically defensible and some of them probably not. This is also, of course, an issue of cross-examination. I do not think there was much of a cross-examination at the time. But I think this is with every, you know, with every witness, there always will be some things which will be wrong or will be mistaken.

MR IRVING: Is there a possibility that with a witness like Bimko and Tauber who had suffered appalling indignities at the hands of the Nazis, that when the Allies came, in the .

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case of Bimko, it was the British Army who rescued here, that she saw her moment for revenge had come and she could take out a few of the hated Nazis?

A. Anything is possible, Mr Irving.

Q. I am trying to find some other reason why she should have deliberately lied in her depositions, sworn on oath in a capital case? You can suggest no alternative reason than that, that possibly her memory was wrong, she had a bad memory or she was imaginative?

A. There are many possibilities. It may be she was an habitual liar; maybe she was an habitual story-teller.

Who knows? We cannot second guess the situation. The only evidence we have is right in front of us.

Q. So of your five eyewitnesses, we have lost the Russians, we have lost the Pravda account, we have lost Bimko now?

A. But I never introduced Bimko, so I do not know how I can have lost Bimko.

Q. Well, some bulk larger than others in your report.

Mr Tauber you rely on quite heavily, do you not?

A. Mr Irving, I rely on Tauber for the description of the operation of the crematorium and the gas chambers. I have never, never introduced Miss Bimko as a witness for this material. So I cannot see how I lost her because I did not introduce her as a witness.

MR JUSTICE GRAY: I do not think the idea of "losing" somebody is a very helpful one, but it would help me if you .

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would ----

MR IRVING: Perhaps I should put a row of beans on the counter ----

MR JUSTICE GRAY: Mr Irving, can you just let me complete my sentences sometimes? Would you for my benefit, Professor van Pelt, just tell me, really just enumerate, those witnesses, those eyewitnesses, who you say deserve some attention for what they have said in their accounts?

A. OK. Are we dealing only with crematorium II or are we dealing with the ---- Q. With gassing, the extermination by gassing?

A. Extermination by gas?

Q. Just the names so that Mr Irving knows who you do rely on.

A. An important one is Slova Dragon who was one of the Sonderkommandos. An important witness is Henryk Tauber mentioned already before. An important witness is Pery Broad. An important witness is Höss. Then we can take in also, both as a witness and his diary, Dr Kramer.

These are either from the time itself or immediately after the war. Hans Aumeier talks about gassings, but he is rather confused about many things so I would not want to rely too much one way or the other.

MR IRVING: Explain to the court who Hans Aumaier is, please?

A. Hans Aumeier was the Lager Führer in Birkenau in 1942 and early 43, but he left by the time these crematoria started to be in operation.

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Q. By the time he was acting in effect as the deputy commandant, is that right?

A. Yes. Let me just try to get back to my enumeration of witnesses. Then during the Lüneburg trial Kramer admitted to gassings but did not describe the procedure in detail. So at the moment I would leave it to basically build up a general picture, these witnesses I think produce a sufficient evidence to come to some kind of solid conclusion on that issue.

MR JUSTICE GRAY: Thank you. That is extremely helpful.

Mr Irving, do resume.

MR IRVING: That is a relatively small number of eyewitnesses for a relatively large proposition, namely that the Nazis killed 500,000 people in that gas chamber with the collapsed roof. That is the only evidence that we have, apart from the sketches of Mr Olère, and there is not a single document of any credible worth which explicitly bears out your case in all the hundreds of thousands of pages of paper found in the Auschwitz museum and in the Moscow archives. I am trying to summarise at this stage what the position is.

A. On which case?

Q. On the case that that was a homicidal gas chamber.

A. No. I think these are the principal -- these are people who basically give us the texture, who have describe the operation in some detail. One probably could have found .

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---- Q. If we can fault them in any significant way, if we can punch a hole in their testimony, if I can put it like that, then of course that rather collapses the entire value of the rest of their testimony.

A. I do not think that is necessarily the case, but I am not a professional judge. I am an historian. Some of their testimony will be absolutely correct and there will be always some testimony where they are maybe confused. But I think that Faurisson's theory that, if you punch one hole in the testimony, all of testimony becomes irrelevant I think is an irresponsible way to work with the testimony.

Q. Let Mr Faurisson fight his own battles.

A. But what you said was quite literally a quotation from Mr Faurisson. It is his thesis, his original thesis.

Q. Yes. It may be his thesis, I am sure. It is such an obvious thesis that I appreciate that the Holocaust historians had maximum difficulty with it. If there are no holes in that roof now and we can satisfy the court that there were never any holes in that roof, then that demolishes the eyewitnesses and thereby demolishes the story of the homicidal gas chamber, because there is no other evidence. Even if I am wrong on that, as we say, in the alternative, I have justifiable reason for maintaining the position I did and it was not perverse to adopt the .

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position I did.

A. I am not fighting this case so I cannot comment on that.

Q. Can we proceed now to Mr Tauber? How big does Mr Tauber rank in your list of witnesses? Is he near the top in importance?

A. He is a very important witness.

Q. So straight away Mr Tauber of course said that he saw the people pouring the cyanide in through the imaginary holes in the roof. He did not say imaginary but ---- A. Let us look at the text.

Q. We read what he said. I think you will find it in your report Part 1 IV page 73 of your report.

MR JUSTICE GRAY: I think your pagination is different from everyone else, Mr Irving.

A. I have it right here. It is page 191.

MR IRVING: Thank you very much. He says here right at the top: " Through the window of the incineration room, I observed how the Zyklon was poured into the gas chamber.

... They took the cans of Zyklon from the car and put them beside the small chimneys [the things that you described on the roof].... Then he closed the orifice with a concrete cover." Was this the man who said he needed two hands to lift the concrete cover, that he saw the people using two hands to lift the concrete cover? This is Tauber, is it .

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not?

A. I do not remember that he said it but, if you can point to the passage ---- Q. We went through the Tauber evidence in some detail yesterday.

A. We did not discuss the thing on top, people manipulating those covers.

Q. Yes. If he talks of concrete covers with two handles, does this not rather contradict the story given by other eyewitnesses even of there being wooden lids on these openings, Holzblenden in German? They have not got their story straight, these eyewitnesses. They know a bit about the holes in the roof but they do not know quite what the covers were. They must assume that there were covers because otherwise the rain would get in. So one says concrete and another one says wood.

A. If you want to introduce that, I would be happy to comment on that. I do not even know which eyewitness you are talking about right now.

Q. Tauber.

MR JUSTICE GRAY: No, the ones who say they were wooden, not concrete. That is what you mean, is it not?

MR IRVING: My Lord, we will probably stumble across them in the course of time.

MR JUSTICE GRAY: That is not a very good way of cross-examining, if I may say so. Are you able to refer .

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to them now?

MR IRVING: Not at this instant in time, my Lord.

MR JUSTICE GRAY: All right.

MR IRVING: If I was surrounded by research assistants, no doubt I would be bombarded with copies of that very document. Does Tauber not say --, I refer you now to Pressac page 483. Do you have a copy of Pressac?

MR JUSTICE GRAY: I do not.

MR RAMPTON: Your Lordship has the tab of Pressac at the back of H 2(vi).

MR JUSTICE GRAY: I do not have H 2(vi).

MR RAMPTON: Then somebody will get it for your Lordship.

MR JUSTICE GRAY: I am sorry, I do not have the supporting documents in court.

MR RAMPTON: I will find your Lordship the tab. It is tab 5.

It folds out because Pressac is an oblong book. What has been copied here is just the Tauber chapter, I think.

MR IRVING: Would you agree, reading this very detailed account, Professor, that it is likely that, when Tauber made this deposition to Jan Sehn, I believe it was made, they had in front of them the architectural blueprints to jog his memory?

MR JUSTICE GRAY: We had this yesterday, that point.

MR IRVING: Very well. I am just drawing attention to how detailed it was. Yet he says that on either side of these pillars, the central support pillars, there were four .

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others, two on each side. Now He is relying on his memory ---- MR JUSTICE GRAY: Where are you now?

A. We are now back in the gas chamber? Where are we at page 483? OK. We are at the top of 484, the first column to the left.

MR IRVING: Thank you very much.

MR JUSTICE GRAY: I have not got the pagination so there is no way I am going to find this.

MR IRVING: It is over the page, the page beginning with the words "middle of its length".

MR JUSTICE GRAY: I just do not have page numbers, that is the problem. They have all been cut off.

MR IRVING: I will read it out. It says, "On other side of these pillars there were four others, C1 to C4, two on each side". Mr Pressac, who is quite an expert on this, says that Mr Tauber is mistaken, this arrangement is found only in the gas chamber of crematorium III. He is confusing things, is he not?

A. Mr Pressac?

Q. No. Mr Tauber is confusing things.

A. I know that Mr Pressac thinks that. I do not agree with Mr Pressac. There is no evidence at all that Pressac is right on this issue.

Q. That Pressac is sometimes wrong, in other words?

A. Oh, yes. Pressac is sometimes wrong. I have had my .

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quarrels with Pressac in the past.

Q. He says, and I am quoting again, "The gas chamber had no water supply of its own".

A. Where are we now?

Q. I only have extracts, unfortunately. Further down that same column, Pressac says that three taps were in fact installed in the room, according to the drawing?

A. I am just trying to find this thing.

Q. According to the inventory.

A. I see the gas chambers, no water supply and so on, it is around two inches from the bottom, and the first column, the same column where the pillars were described.

MR IRVING: Yes.

MR JUSTICE GRAY: I am not following why that is a criticism of Tauber at the moment.

MR IRVING: Well, he has made another error.

A. There is a little note. It is followed by a little note which says ---- Q. Saying they were later taken out?

A. Yes, so we do not know which day or date Tauber was referring to.

Q. Yes. You yourself have confirmed that at the end of 1943, I believe, the gas chamber was divided into two by a brick wall?

A. Yes.

Q. So the small transports could be handled. Mr Tauber .

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confirmed this. He is the source of that information, is he not?

A. No. There is also a Greek. Actually, in my report I mention a Greek Jew who was transported from Saloniki, who actually mentions also, he was quite specific in his description of that division of the gas chamber.

Q. Another eyewitness?

A. Yes, another eyewitness.

Q. Is there any trace of that division in the ruins?

A. You cannot see that. That is the problem because the roof has collapsed on the floor of the gas chamber.

Q. Yes. It would not make much sense, would it, to all the bodies that far because this small transports were gassed in the chamber furthest from the entrance, so the bodies would have been pulled the whole way down. Would that not have made gassing of large numbers like 2,000 at a time very difficult?

A. If you have the small chamber at the back, you would gas fewer people and, in fact, as we have seen in the Olère drawing, it actually provides an opportunity for the so-called dentists among the Sonderkommando and the people who cut the hair to actually do their work downstairs and not in the incineration room, as was usually the custom.

Q. He also describes, does he not, the crematorium chimneys smoking?

A. I presume that is crematorium chimney smoke, indeed, yes.

.

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I would like to see it but I assume on your authority that the crematorium chimneys do smoke, yes.

Q. From your memory, presumably you have read Mr Tauber's testimony in detail, is it right that he describes it as being possible to cremate five or eight bodies simultaneously in one furnace?

A. I think that we can probably go to the passage itself.

Q. Well, he does say that, does he not?

A. Let us go to the passage, because he is very particular in his description.

MR JUSTICE GRAY: Is this in your report at page 194?

A. 194 yes.

MR JUSTICE GRAY: I cannot see the bit at the moment.

A. 194. We go to 192 and 193. I can read the whole passage, or Mr Irving can read the passage, starting: "The procedure was to put the first corpse with the feet towards the muffle, back down and face up". Then he gives a very detailed description of that procedure.

MR IRVING: So he is the source of the information that five to eight bodies were cremated simultaneously or quickly?

A. No. I think that Mr Höss also talks about that, that more bodies are inserted in the muffles at one time.

Q. Does Mr Tauber also describe the bodies of those gassed as being red with green spots?

A. I do remember that he gives a quite a longish description of the ---- .

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Q. If you remember it, there is no need to look it up.

A. I do not any more remember if it is Tauber or any other Sonderkommandos.

Q. Do you know what a body that has been gassed with hydrogen cyanide looks like, what colour it turns?

A. I understand it starts to look slightly reddish.

Q. Like a radish? Red with green spots?

A. No, reddish.

Q. With green spots. Would you think that that is possibly the victim of some epidemic?

A. I am not an epidemiologist. I do not know how people who have died from typhus or other epidemics look like.

Q. Cyanide victims do not go red with green spots, not if they have just been gassed. If they have been left lying around for a few days, perhaps they might.

A. I have no comment on that. I cannot possibly comment on that.

Q. Does he describe a prisoner being dowsed with naphtha which is a flammable substance?

MR JUSTICE GRAY: This is Tauber still?

MR IRVING: This is Tauber, yes, and then being burned alive in a crematorium muffle, and then they let him out and he ran around screaming?

A. He has a particular incident. Again, I do not know where it is.

MR JUSTICE GRAY: Is it in your report?

.

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A. It is in my report, yes.

MR IRVING: Does he describe another prisoner being chased into a pool of boiling human fat, which sounds like an almost Talmudic kind of quotation.

MR JUSTICE GRAY: I am not quite sure, Mr Irving, perhaps you can explain to me. You are putting various things which you say Mr Tauber described.

MR IRVING: Well, my Lord, the inference is ---- MR JUSTICE GRAY: With what object? Are you suggesting all of this is invention?

MR IRVING: I am not suggesting they are all invention, but they test a reasonable historian's credulity, and one should therefore be inclined to subject this particular testimony to closer than normal scrutiny, if I can put it like that.

MR JUSTICE GRAY: Let us ask Professor van Pelt what he makes of that suggestion.

MR IRVING: I have two more of these episodes to put to him.

MR JUSTICE GRAY: Put two more and then answer the general question, would you?

MR IRVING: The prisoner was chased into a pool of boiling human fat -- does he describe that?

A. Mr Irving, if you give me the passage, I will---- Q. He is your principal eyewitness, or one of your principal eye witnesses.

MR JUSTICE GRAY: He wants the reference, Mr Irving, which is .

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not unreasonable. I am trying to find it and I must say I cannot.

MR IRVING: Certainly if I had read the Tauber report, I would be able to say yes or no to that.

MR JUSTICE GRAY: I am looking in Professor van Pelt's report.

A. Mr Irving, we are in a court of law here and whatever I say does matter. It means that I need to respond to the exact quotation of what Tauber says, and then I am prepared to say yes or nay.

MR IRVING: Very well. We will look up the exact quotation in time for lunch. Let us proceed then to the final one. Do you agree that Mr Tauber also attests to the figure of 4 million killed in Auschwitz?

MR RAMPTON: We thought we had found the passage in question.

It is page 190 of the report.

MR JUSTICE GRAY: Thank you very much.

MR IRVING: Yes. This is the problem with writing with word processors. Things tend to go through the finger tips rather than through the memory and brain. In other words, he does have this rather lurid description of the man ---- A. Mr Irving, I do not deny that I put this in, and I do remember the incident, but I do not want to comment on a very general description you give of the incident when I do not have the text in front of me.

Q. Can I read it to you? It is on page 190 of your own report. "When the shifts were changing over, they had .

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found a gold watch and wedding ring on one of the labourers, a man Wolbrom called Lejb. This Jew, aged about twenty, was dark and had a number of one hundred thousand and something. All the Sonderkommando working in the crematorium were assembled, and before their eyes he was hung, with his hands tied behind his back, from an iron bar above the firing hearths. He remained in this position for about an hour, then after untying his hands and feet, they threw him in a cold crematorium furnace.

Gasoline was poured into the lower ash bin... And lit.

The flames reached the muffle where this Lejb was imprisoned. A few minutes later, they opened the door and the condemned man emerged and ran off, covered in burns.

... This fat was poured over the corpses to accelerate their combustion. This poor devil was pulled out of the fat still alive and then shot." Does that sound to like a completely neutral and plausible account of an atrocity?

MR JUSTICE GRAY: Leave aside "neutral". That is an unhelpful word. Do you think it is plausible?

A. Yes.

MR IRVING: Very well. The figure of 4 million to which Tauber attested, do you call that also plausible at the time he testified?

A. The figure of 4 million? Not, because nowadays we have very detailed information on what actually the figure is .

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and it is more likely to have been around a million.

Q. So would you agree that this is an example of what I call cross pollination? He hits on the figure of 4 million because that was the current figure at that time?

A. I do think that we should look at how the figure of 4 million originally arose.

MR JUSTICE GRAY: So do I. Where do we find that, Mr Irving?

If we do not find it in the report perhaps you could just quote in its context where one gets that estimate.

MR IRVING: My Lord, with respect, if the witness agrees that Tauber attested to 4 million, we are only concerned with the figure.

MR JUSTICE GRAY: He has made the point, which I think is a fair one, that he wants to see in what context and on what basis that 4 million figure was arrived at by Tauber.

That is a reasonable thing for him to want to do, and I am simply asking you to identify where one finds it.

MR IRVING: My Lord, I will have to adjourn that piece of information, the page number, until after lunch. If it is substantial, we can come back to it and retake it.

MR JUSTICE GRAY: Can anyone on the Defendants side find that page?

MR RAMPTON: I am sorry?

A. I can point to the page. It is page 178.

MR JUSTICE GRAY: Of your report?

A. 178 of my report, which goes back to Pressac 501. What he .

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says is that he came to this figure on the basis of conversations he had with various prisoners. Yes? If you allow me, I can probably quote the whole thing. I give the full quotation now from Pressac on page 501: "I imagine that during the period in which I worked in the crematorium as a member of the Sonderkommando a total of about 2 million people were gassed. During my time in Auschwitz I was able to talk to various prisoners who had worked in the crematorium and the bunkers before my arrival. They told me that I was not among the first to do this work and that before I came another 2 million had already been gassed in bunkers 1 and 2 and crematorium I. Adding up the total number of people gassed in Auschwitz amounted to about 4 million".

That is what he says.

MR JUSTICE GRAY: Half of it comes from other people?

A. Half of it comes from other people.

MR IRVING: This information is being taken by Judge Jan Sehn in whom you repose great trust?

A. Yes. I think that Sehn did a marvellous investigation.

Q. Can you tell us something about these depositions were taken in communist countries? Would the man sit down with a pencil and paper and retire to a room and write it all out himself, or would it be summarised by the lawyers and he would be asked to sign it.

A. I do not know what happened. I already told you .

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yesterday. I do not know what happened in that room where Jan Sehn was interviewing Mr Tauber. I know there were witnesses there because the original report mentions other people being present. That is all I know.

Q. If I can just leap sideways to the name of Rudolf Höss, the commandant of Auschwitz, is it right that he was interrogated several times at Nuremberg?

A. Yes, that is right.

Q. And that, as a result of these interrogations, a deposition was taken or put before him for signature?

A. Yes, that is right.

Q. And you have now read these interrogations, I believe?

A. I have read a copy of the interrogations, yes.

Q. The verbatim interrogation transcripts?

A. Yes. I do not think I have read every one of them but, I have read them in general.

Q. Have you managed to form an impression there of how the Americans obtained depositions from their witnesses?

A. Maybe you can lead me on that, because I do not exactly know where ---- Q. Would I be right in saying that, on the basis of the interrogations, the Americans would draw up a deposition, confront the witness with it, and say, "Sign here"?

A. I cannot conclude that on the basis of the interrogations I read.

Q. Very well.

.

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A. Certainly not.

MR JUSTICE GRAY: Mr Irving, have you left Tauber now.

MR IRVING: I believe we have just one more point on Tauber and that is to look at page 481 of Pressac, where we do have four photographs of Pressac posing in various costumes, post war photographs taken by the Polish authorities who obviously regarded him as a star witness.

A. This is Henryk Tauber?

MR JUSTICE GRAY: You said Pressac.

MR IRVING: My mistake. There are four photographs of him posing in the camp costume.

MR JUSTICE GRAY: What is the significance of that?

MR IRVING: That he was a star witness, my Lord, of the Polish prosecution authorities, he was being subjected to what we call now photo ops, and they were relying on him very heavily, and that no doubt there was a certain amount of privilege being granted to him by the Polish authorities in the way that he was co-operating with them.

MR JUSTICE GRAY: So he was making it up to express his gratitude to the Polish authorities?

MR IRVING: It is not an unknown phenomenon for witnesses to make things up. Your Lordship will probably recall that, at the end of World War II, the whole of Europe was in a very, very sorry state. You did not have food supplies, there were no consumer goods and this was something with which the people who were in authority, whether they be .

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Poles or Russians or Americans or British, were able to barter.

MR JUSTICE GRAY: May I put the general question to Professor van Pelt which I invited you to ask a little while ago?

That is this. Are there aspects of Tauber's testimony or account which cause you to doubt his plausibility?

A. I think that Tauber is an absolutely amazingly good witness. I find his powers of observations very precise in general. I do not have any general reason to doubt his credibility as a witness.

MR IRVING: May I ask a question on that, my Lord?

MR JUSTICE GRAY: Of course, yes. I was only asking the question that seemed to me to be need to be asked.

MR IRVING: Would your impression be, or would it not, that, at the time he was being questioned by the Polish authorities for the purpose of providing this deposition, he was being confronted or furnished with drawings, documents and so on to help jog his memory. His apparent precision may have come from this kind of prompting by the Polish authorities.

A. This is possible indeed but let us now just go back for a moment. Let us assume this happened, Tauber would have been confronted with blueprints which, sadly to say, for 40 years after the these blueprints came in the public realm, most people were unable to interpret. These are very technical documents. These documents are not easy to .

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interpret. It is not so that, if the blueprints had been there, and a man who is not an architect or even, for that matter an historian who teaches in an architecture school, when they are confronted with that, it is not that they immediately are able to make up a story which matches point for point information in the blueprint of a very technical and specialist nature.

Q. But they would know, for example, the difference of left from right, would they not? If for example they described a staircase being on one side of the building, or the Rutsche, the slide, being on one side of the building when the drawing showed it on the other or vice verse, if they showed it on the side that the drawing showed it when in fact it was not built that way?

A. One of the things we have to remember is that Tauber gives a description of crematorium II. It is a general description. However, Sonderkommandos of crematorium II and III had access to both buildings. Sonderkommandos have testified to the fact that they lived in these buildings but they shared facilities. So they would be allowed to actually cross that little path and go over to the other crematorium and back. So we have two buildings which are mirror images of each other, which left and right are completely turned upside-down, which both are used by the same people, but otherwise are identical. So if at a certain movement he gets left or right wrong.

.

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I would not at that moment give such incredible evidentiary value to that, that he is making it up, or that he is totally confused. It is simply that these buildings were identical except for the left and the right of everything.

Q. In your original book you made one claim about the position of the Rutsche in a building which you then reversed in your report. Is that correct?

A. No, I do not think so.

Q. You stated that it was on one side of the building on the drawings, and that in fact it was somewhere else.

A. I am happy to consider this and to discuss it with you, but again show me the passage in the book and show me the passage in the report. I will deal with it then.

Q. This has all taken rather longer than I had hoped. I am sure his Lordship is getting impatient and we should move on. Can we move on now to the witness Pery Broad?

Summing up on Tauber, one point, can I get you to make the following statement? Tauber described the cyanide being poured into the gas chamber of crematorium No. II through holes in the roof. That is correct?

A. Yes, that is correct.

Q. If (and this is a hypothetical; it is one of Mr Rampton's if's) it should turn out there were never any such holes in the roof, then Tauber has lied, has he not?

A. Then he would have lied, yes.

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Q. Thank you. We now move on to Mr Pery Broad.

P-E-R-Y Broad. This is, of course, a more general eyewitness because he is also of relevance to Auschwitz rather than Birkenau, am I right?

A. Most of his testimony on at least gassings relates to the Stammlager. And he only observed from a distance what was happening in Birkenau.

Q. Very briefly we are going to deal with Mr Broad. Pery Broad was employed by the British as an interrogator in a British camp; is that correct?

A. I would wonder if you can be more precise about what "employs" means in this case before I can say yes or no.

Q. Would it be reasonable -- your Lordship wished to say something, no -- to say that, in view of his special position within this prison camp, he was given special favours by the British, whether they be in the form of payment or accommodation or clothing or food or money?

A. He was an inmate who was used in the inmate administration of the camp.

Q. Can you tell me what happened at the end to Pery Broad back in the 1960s?

A. Pery Broad was tried in Frankfurt and he ---- Q. As a war criminal?

A. As a war criminal.

Q. Eventually, he was put on trial by the Germans, is that correct?

.

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A. He was put on trial by the Germans. I think he was convicted to two years or two-and-a-half years in prison.

Q. Am I right in saying that he was convicted for the war crime of having participated in shootings at block 11 in Auschwitz?

A. I do not know exactly what the judgment, what were the reasons for his conviction, what crime he was convicted for and what crime he was not.

Q. In other words, your eyewitness was a murderer who was going at some time to be prosecuted for war crimes by the Allies, quite rightly, and he had bought a certain amount of breathing space -- is this not a reasonable presumption -- by testifying in various cases that the British were bringing in Northern Germany?

A. Let us go back to the situation in a British internment or in a prison of war camp in, I think it was, Mecklenburg, Northern Germany, very far away from Auschwitz in May 1945. If Mr Broad had not come forward to say he had been in Auschwitz, I think nobody would ever have found out because many SS men at that time were, basically, sitting in allied prison of war camps and were sitting there until they were released. So, certainly, Mr Broad, if he had not volunteered the information about Auschwitz, I think would have had anything to fear at that time because there were in that camp no surviving inmates from Auschwitz who could have identified him.

.

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Q. Well, the British had ways of identifying people. We had lists of names, we had the code breaking intercepts and so on. We knew who was who.

A. Mr Broad was, as far as we know, a Rottenführer. I do not think his name was very high on the list of people the British were looking for.

Q. The fact remains that he had a guilty conscious because he had participated in shootings in Auschwitz concentration camp, and eventually he was put on trial, not by the British, but by the Germans. The British treated him in some special way, is this correct?

A. He was, he became an interpreter in the camp and then at a certain moment when he gave his evidence it was recognized that he was a very important witness.

Q. Yes. He is one of your eyewitnesses for the existence of the pipes on the roofs, admittedly at a distance, but he described, if I remember his testimony in the Tesch case correctly, these pipes on the roof being opened and people pouring stuff in. He described six of them rather than four, is that correct?

A. Again I think we should look at the material that is in my report, but I think at least I can say right now that what I remember that in the Tesch case he refers to a gassing happened in crematorium I, that the particular incident you refer to. But again I think we should, before we have a final conclusion on that, look at the actual evidence .

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given in the Tesch case because I thought it was crematorium No. I he was talking about.

Q. Is it known to you that Pery Broad was a Brazilian national?

A. Yes, I know that.

Q. In other words, he was not a German national, he was a Brazilian national. Was Brazil fighting on the side of the Allies in World War II?

A. I think that ultimately Brazil joined, yes.

Q. And yet he was wearing the uniform of the SS, of an enemy power and he was committing these crimes in the uniform of an enemy power?

A. I would like to remind the judge that many people in the SS were actually Volksdeutsche who had passports from different countries, from countries other than Germany.

MR JUSTICE GRAY: The significance of the fact he was Brazilian is escaping me at the moment, but...

MR IRVING: I was about to say, would not the fact that he was a member of an allied nation fighting in German uniform have put him in precisely the same category as William Joyce or John Amery, and have exposed him to being put on trial in Brazil for treason? Was this not another threat that was hanging over his head at the time he was in captivity?

A. I cannot possibly comment on that.

Q. But you do agree that he was technically committing .

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treason by fighting in the uniform of an enemy power?

A. I think that Mr Broad in May 1945 probably had other things on his mind than that particular issue of if Brazil was going to ask for his extradition.

Q. Do you use the statement of a witness called Hans Stark as proof of the gassings?

A. I have the statement in my report, yes.

Q. Yes. In section 9, the Leuchter report of your report -- I am afraid again I do not know the page number -- you quoted from it and I will quote the passage that you have used, in your language: "As early as autumn 1941, gassings were carried out in a room in the small crematorium which had been prepared for this purpose. The room held 200 to 250 people"?

MR RAMPTON: 514, my Lord.

MR IRVING: Thank you very much. I am indebted. I will begin again.

A. We are talking about Stark now, the Stark testimony?

Q. The testimony of the eyewitness Hans Stark: "As early as autumn 1941" -- this goes more to the question of your treatment of sources rather than crematorium No. II.

"As early as autumn 1941 gassings were carried out in a room in the small crematorium which had been prepared for this purpose. The room held 200 to 250 people, had a higher than average ceiling, no windows only a specially insulated door with bolts like those of an airtight .

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door." Is that your translation of that document?

A. Yes, this is my translation -- no, this is actually an existing translation. If we go to the quote, we see it was done by Deborah Burnstone.

Q. Deborah?

A. Burnstone.

Q. Does it also give the original German of the text?

A. No, it is not.

Q. Did you take any trouble to ascertain the original German of that text?

A. No, I did not.

Q. If I tell that you the word "airtight", the word translated as "airtight door", in the original German is Luftschutztür, is that how you would have translated it?

A. An airtight door as a Luftschutz door?

Q. In the original German of Hans Stark it is "Luftschutztur" which has been translated ----

A. If you show me the passage, Mr Irving, I am happy to confirm or not that, indeed, that is the way ----

Q. I am putting one word to you. The original German says not "airtight door" in English, but "Luftschutztür" in German. Would you tell the court what "Luftschutztür" translates into in English?

MR JUSTICE GRAY: "Airtight door", I would have thought?

A. "Luftschutz" in general, "luft" means "air raid".

Q. Air protection.

.

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A. Luftschutz ----

Q. "Luftschutz", yes, I see.

MR IRVING: Is an air raid and air raid [German], my Lord?

Now, either inadvertently or deliberately, somebody and you say it is Burnstone has mistranslated that word from a totally harmless and, in fact, significant "air raid door" into the rather more sinister "airtight door"?

A. In the context of quite a sinister description, I would say.

MR JUSTICE GRAY: Mr Irving, look at the context.

MR IRVING: I beg your pardon?

MR JUSTICE GRAY: Look at the context. As I understand it, she actually said "like those of an airtight door", but this is in the context of gassings in 1941 and Zyklon-B being poured through holes in the roof.

MR IRVING: My Lord, there are any number of eyewitness statements like that which are in the report. I am just looking here at the quality of the translation which is frequently tilted against [me] or tilted in favour of the Holocaust definition. Your Lordship will remember that I have been trying to establish the case that these sinister doors scattered around the camps at Auschwitz and Birkenau were, in fact, provisions for the coming air raids and the Germans anticipated there were going to be gas attacks as well, as, indeed, did we, British, with our air raid shelters.

.

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MR JUSTICE GRAY: I understand the suggestion, but what you cannot possibly say, Mr Irving, is that Hans Stark is describing an air raid shelter on the basis of this passage, can you?

MR IRVING: I am concentrating here only on the door, my Lord.

I have no other means of attacking the integrity of Hans Stark as a witness. I am looking here at the rather slipshod use of the word "airtight door" when the original is quite clearly referred to as looking just like an air raid shelter door of which we will be producing photographs to the court later on.

This is of significance because the Defence rely on a number of photographs of doors found scattered around the compound of Auschwitz and Birkenau, and we will show that these are standard German air raid shelter doors complete with peep holes.

I think this is the time I would ask your Lordship to look at the little bundle of five pages of documents I produced this morning.

MR JUSTICE GRAY: Yes, certainly.

MR IRVING: I have not yet handed it to your Lordship. It is here.

MR JUSTICE GRAY: Where are we going to put this? Shall we put it in ----

MR IRVING: J, I think, my Lord.

MR JUSTICE GRAY: --- J?

.

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MR IRVING: I have started a new numbering system which will go all the way through with consistent consecutive numbers from now on.

MR JUSTICE GRAY: I gathered that was being done. That is very helpful. We got as far, I think, as about 14 maybe.

MR IRVING: We started with 00, unfortunately.

MR JUSTICE GRAY: I am only up to 11, so something has gone wrong.

MR IRVING: The 0 now comes after the 11. The one I have given you should come after 11, my Lord.

MR JUSTICE GRAY: I am going to put it for the time being -- actually it is 12. Yes?

MR IRVING (To the witness): These are three or four Germans documents. They are significant because they refer to trips made from Auschwitz to Dessau to pick up Zyklon-B, truck loads of Zyklon-B. Are you familiar with this kind of signal or radio message?

A. Well, I am not familiar with this particular one.

Q. Not with this particular one?

A. I have seen -- I absolutely do not doubt, I do not doubt the -- you know, the integrity of the thing.

Q. If you will look at page 1 rather than the first one, page 0, if you look at page 1 as numbered at the bottom, you will see the signal at the bottom looks rather sinister, does it not? I have translated it on page 2. It is a message from Berlin to the Commandant of Auschwitz, .

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effectively, giving driving permission. Every time they made a journey by truck because of the shortage of fuel, they had to have permission from Berlin. "Permission herewith given for one five tonne truck with trailer to Dessau and back for the purpose of fetching materials for the Jew resettlement. This permit is to be handed to the driver to take with him". It is signed Liebehenschel who is at Berlin still at that time. What interpretation would you put on that message, October 2nd, 1942?

A. That a truck, a five tonne truck, is sent to Dessau to collect material for the Jews' settlement. Dessau, as we know from other telegrams and as we know also from the rest of the record, was the location where the Zyklon-B was being produced in one of the factories. So, the context of what we know also of the other messages shows that this is most likely a permission to collect in a five tonne truck Zyklon-B from the original manufacturer.

Q. In fact, more than five tonnes because they are taking a trailer as well, are they not?

A. With a trailer, yes.

Q. So they are collecting over five tonnes -- it would be a reasonable assumption, based on this document, that they are collecting over five tonnes of some material which is probably Zyklon-B cyanide pellets?

A. Yes. I mean, I do not know exactly the weight, but I think that in the document I have written (of which you .

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have a copy) on your suggestion more or less that I have dealt with this matter about how much the truck would have, most likely would have carried.

Q. It is specified clearly in this report, in this telegram, that it is for the Jew resettlement, for the Judenumsiedlung?

A. For the Judenumsiedlung, yes.

Q. That makes it even more sinister, does it not?

A. Given the fact what the word "Judenumsiedlung" had come to mean in 1942, yes, this would be quite a sinister document.

Q. Will you now turn over the page to page 3 which you can take it is a translation of the upper telegram on page 1?

A. I am sorry?

Q. Page 3 at the foot of -- you have no page 3?

A. I have page 3, but I look at No. 1.

Q. Yes.

A. At No. 1, the upper telegram.

Q. It is a translation of the upper telegram No. 1?

A. Yes, OK.

Q. This is from Glücks. Who is Glücks?

A. Glücks is the Chief of the Inspectorate for concentration camps.

Q. He has the rank of something like a Brigadier General, does he not?

A. Yes.

.

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Q. This again is a driving permit sent to Auschwitz concentration camp.

A. Yes.

Q. Answering a request: "Permission herewith given for one automobile", a car, "to go from Auschwitz to Litzmannstadt and back on September 16th 1942 for the purpose of inspecting the experimental station for field kitchens for Operation Reinhard. This permit is to be handed to the driver to take with him"?

A. I think your translation is wrong there, Mr Irving.

Q. Yes. Tell ----

A. The "Feldöfen" in this case are "field ovens", and we know there is quite a documentation, not only eyewitness testimony, but quite an extensive documentation on this particular trip which was made by Kommandant Höss and which also Mr Dejaco and Mr Hössler, all were included and they were inspecting actually, they were going to Litzmannstadt to see the extermination site there, to actually look at the incineration grid, the incineration installation created by Standartenführer Blöbel as part of Action 1005, to create a way to get rid of corpses which had been buried as a result of the killings in Chelmno. So this has nothing to do with kitchens, these Feldöfen, but with incineration ovens to burn, to incinerate, corpse.

Q. "Field kitchens" would be "Feldküchen", would it not?

.

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A. That is more likely, yes.

Q. So your submission is that this is a reference to going there to visit some kind of improvised grating, fire grating, of some kind ----

A. Yes.

Q. --- on a large scale?

A. They are actually -- we have Mr Dejaco, the chief of design in the Zentrale Bau, he actually made a sketch also of this incineration installation. It had been developed by Blöbel who was an architect in order to empty the mass graves which had been created in Chelmno as a result of the gassings there.

Q. Blöbel had the very distasteful task of emptying out the mass graves and cremating the ----

A. Yes, he had the -- it was called Action 1005. He was going around sites where mass graves had been reacted in order to take out the corpses and to incinerate them so they were going to be no traces.

Q. Why would it include the words an "experimental station" for the ----

A. Because they were just developing the technology to do this.

Q. Does it take much technology to make a fire in the open on a grating?

A. The Germans had not done this before yet. Blöbel was the person who developed the technology. Until then, the .

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Germans had not yet emptied mass graves and incinerated corpses of people who had been buried for some time. We know that afterwards this, indeed, is going to happen in Auschwitz within weeks, the same procedure start to be applied in Auschwitz to all the people who are buried in the field of ashes next to bunkers 1 and -- bunker 2 in this case.

Q. When I see the word "Versuchsstation", in my knowledge of German documents, I usually think of a place like Peenemünde or Pasadena. I do not think of somebody mucking around with fire grates in a field?

A. I do not follow you, Mr Irving.

Q. The word "Versuchsstation" does not tend to convey what you suggest in your evidence. That is all that we can usefully derive from that.

A. I think that maybe even if I have these documents on the trip to Chelmno. It is very well documented. Apart from that, Dejaco was questioned on that in detail during his trial, and he confirmed what you probably would call the very sinister interpretation of all these documents, that, indeed, yes, he was there present with Blöbel at the incineration site.

Q. And yet he was, of course, acquitted, as we have heard yesterday.

A. He was acquitted of the murder of one inmate who he was alleged to have drowned at a building site near .

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crematorium II.

Q. And not charged with any further crimes after that, not recharged on any other crime?

A. No, he was not, but then we have discussed already the nature of ---- MR JUSTICE GRAY: Mr Irving, may I just ask you, whilst it occurs to me, who translated "-öfen" as "kitchens"?

MR IRVING: I did, my Lord. Normally, "field kitchens" is the only interpretation of [German - document not provided].

I am willing to be lectured by Mr Van Pelt on this alternative meaning. He claims he has these documents which bear out his meaning, translation, of the word, and, of course, I put the original German to him so that he can correct it if we are wrong.

If I can just finally carry on on that point, if Dejaco was present on this trip and no consequences flowed from it in the law courts afterwards, can we draw any conclusions as to the nature of these pits that were being excavated or not, these mass graves, what the victims had died of or had been killed by? I am in your hands here