Cross-Examined by MR IRVING, continued.

MR JUSTICE GRAY: Mr Irving, I think there is a suggestion that we might at some stage amalgamate the documents really relating to Professor Browning's evidence which at the moment are in two separate places.

MR IRVING: Miss Rogers has very kindly volunteered to do this task and I willingly accept that.

MR JUSTICE GRAY: I am just mentioning it to you in case you had any feelings on the topic, but I think it must be sensible. I wonder whether we might not keep the pagination? Otherwise the transcript will make very little sense. Can I leave that to you? Yes, Mr Irving?

MR IRVING: May it please the court, I have given your Lordship a little bundle of documents, on the basis of which I wish to cross-examine the witness this morning.

MR JUSTICE GRAY: Yes. Let us decide where we are going to put those.

MR IRVING: Whatever occurs under the new regime, I think.

MR JUSTICE GRAY: Temporarily it had better go into J or L, I do not mind which.

MS ROGERS: L.

MR IRVING: L. I think the simplest thing to do, Professor Browning, is if we just go through this heap in sequence. You will agree that the first few documents apparently

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come from the Himmler papers, is that correct?

A. They come from the administrative and economic main office of the SS which is under Himmler.

Q. Yes.

MR JUSTICE GRAY: Just pause a moment, Mr Irving, will you? Yes, Mr Irving.

MR IRVING: My Lord, I should explain the purpose of the following questions is to go to the quantum, the figures really. That is all I am looking at. It is Operation Reinhardt. These are documents from a file in Himmler's papers called Operation Reinhardt. (To the witness): Professor Browning, is it correct that these documents appear to come from the Hoover Library in California, if you look down the slash on the side?

A. Yes.

Q. And can you recognize the initials of Heinrich Himmler on the top copy?

A. Yes.

Q. So, in other words, this document is of high level, shall we say?

A. Yes.

MR JUSTICE GRAY: Where are Himmler's initials?

MR IRVING: The HH under the word "Hehler" about three inches from the top right-hand side of the document.

MR JUSTICE GRAY: Yes.

MR IRVING: I am purely interested in the very first line of

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the letter under the word "Reichsführer", where it says: No. 1. Then, when you translate the next sentence, this "Bis 30.4.1943 sind angeliefert"?

A. "Up until the 30th April 1943 had been delivered".

Q. "Had been delivered the following", right?

A. Yes.

Q. If you look then at the list that follows, it is a number of items, a rather sad list, I suppose, a tragic list, of wristwatches, is that right, for men and women?

A. Yes.

Q. Fountain pens?

A. Yes.

Q. Razor blades and other valuable items, is that right?

A. These are all the sort of things that would have been in one's toiletries or personal possessions, yes.

Q. Yes. Where had these items come from?

A. These were formerly Jewish possessions, but I see nothing so far that says which camps they came from.

Q. Yes. Can I draw your attention to the reference line at the top of the transcript, the Verwertung, the exploitation of -- then comes one of their stock phrases, is it not, "Jewish plundering loot", is that correct?

A. In fact, I have not seen that first phrase, but the "Diebesguts", the stolen goods, yes.

Q. This is the way that they sought to legitimate what they are doing, is that correct?

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A. Yes, their stance was all that Jewish property had been stolen by Jews originally, so they were repossessing they claimed what was properly German property.

Q. Yes, a very distorted, perverse, kind of thinking, right?

A. A rationale that appears.

MR JUSTICE GRAY: How does this help on numbers?

MR IRVING: It helps on numbers, my Lord, because we have numbers of items that had been collected from the victims by April 30th 1943.

MR JUSTICE GRAY: It does not say "from when".

MR IRVING: I am hoping that the witness will assist us on this.

MR JUSTICE GRAY: Let us ask.

MR IRVING: Where did these items come from, these valuables? Did they come from victims of Operation Reinhardt?

A. I see nothing in the document that says Operation Reinhardt.

Q. Very well. Can I take you, therefore, to page 4, the handwritten number at the bottom?

A. Yes.

Q. And you will notice in the third line of the letterhead the initials "Reinh." in the top left-hand corner?

A. "Reinh.", yes.

Q. Can I take you to page 10, and on the same letter head also we have Reinhardt?

A. Those two documents do have the "Reinh..".

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Q. Thank you. And on the page 12 -- I am sorry, it is the same document. So, if these items come from an SS folder which is called Operation Reinhardt and these particular documents have the initials "Reinh.." on them, and they appear to be items stolen from the Jews or from victims, Jewish victims in fact, depending on the subject line, on the face of it, this is a list provided to Himmler of items that have been stolen from the Jews up to April 30th 1943. Is that a reasonable interpretation?

A. In terms of the inventory in the first document where we do not have the reference to Reinhardt, it is at least conceivable this was property taken from German Jews about to be deported, and could easily have been stuck in the same folder. I do not see anything there that would necessarily lead us to conclude that the first inventory came from camps in Poland. It could well be that this was possessed Jewish property taken while Jews were being in the process of being deported from Germany, but stuck in the same folder because it always was relating to Jewish property.

Q. Do you know what happened to these valuables that were collected in Operation Reinhardt? Where did they go initially?

A. I have seen documents that show a wide variety of distribution.

Q. Where they overhauled, were they recycled in some way

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before they were parcelled out?

A. Once collected at the three camps in Poland they are taken to Lublin where you have several camps, the old airport camp, for instance, where some sorting and reconditioning was done. Some of the properties were distributed there to ethnic Germans and any German unit that needs something can come and ask to be given something.

Q. Can I take you to document 10?

A. Yes.

Q. Does this say that they have a number of, 20,000, pocket watches and various other valuables at present at Oranienburg, and does the next paragraph say that the watches and fountain pens have been overhauled and are ready to be dispatched?

A. The topic of the document is watch distribution to members of the SS.

Q. Yes.

A. And then below they give you the different kinds. Would you allow me a moment to read the document?

Q. Would you read the paragraph beginning with the word "Insgesamt"?

A. Yes. At the moment in Office D there are for repair 100,000 hand wristwatches, 39,000 pocket watches, 7,500 alarm clocks, 37,000 pens and so forth.

Q. There is no indication of any other stocks of valuables of this nature being processed by this central processing and

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overhauling department?

MR JUSTICE GRAY: Do we have all the files, all the documents in the files? I take the point you are making.

MR IRVING: This was all the documents in this file. I picked them in California about five or six weeks ago.

MR JUSTICE GRAY: Is the file complete? Is it intact?

MR IRVING: I have no way of knowing, of course, my Lord.

MR JUSTICE GRAY: That is the problem. I see what are you getting at. Professor Browning, can you help on that? Is this likely to be a complete record? We have only looked at three documents.

A. Since so much was destroyed I think we presume a lot of them are not complete records. I have seen fragmentary records from the archive in Lublin where less valuable materials is distributed there. I think very valuable things like watches and whatever do have to be sent in but, if somebody wants furniture or wants clothing, they can requisition that in Lublin from these camps and they are never sent back to Berlin. Small volume high value items would be sent back. It would be something that would be worth shipping back, such as these particular items.

MR IRVING: Do you agree that this document on page 10, which is dated November 29th 1944, and has the heading or subheading Operation Reinhardt in its address list, says that altogether at present there are at Amtsgruppe D at

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present being repaired 100,000 wristwatches, presumably a rounded off number and various other valuables?

A. Yes.

Q. That gives an order of magnitude. It does not indicate there are any other treasure troves of such valuables anywhere else in the SS system, does it?

A. It says these are the ones that are available for distribution. We have no idea if there are lots of other kinds of valuables that have been sent elsewhere, but at least that much has been taken out for purposes of distribution to the SS.

Q. Can I take you back to page 1 again, which is about 18 month earlier, is it not, 13th May 1943?

A. Yes.

Q. That says that by April 30th 1943 we have received, effectively there have been delivered to us, 94,000 men's watches?

A. Yes.

Q. Is it likely that these were taken from the victims in the camps?

A. Again, it may well be that these were taken in Germany. It could be possible they were taken from the camp. In both, at least in the second case, I would presume that there was a selection of the best ones that they were sending back for repair for the Waffen SS. Cheaper goods in general would not have been worth doing that.

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MR JUSTICE GRAY: Does page 10, Professor, relate entirely to Oranienburg?

MR IRVING: Oranienburg, my Lord, was the headquarters was it not? Witness, was not Pohl actually based at Oranienburg, the head of this particular section?

A. The part of the administrative and economic main office that dealt with concentration camps is in Oranienburg, so Amt D, which is here, is stationed in Oranienburg, or at least part of it. It says by the Office D in Oranienburg so we know at least they have one office there.

Q. All the wealthy Holocaust victims, either at the time they were dispatched from their places of residence or upon their arrival in the camps, were systematically robbed of their valuables by Operation Reinhardt, or as part of Operation Reinhardt? Is that correct?

A. Operation Reinhardt, in a sense, is the last stage of a long process of dispossession because the Jews in Germany were disposed of much of their property for that. When they were put on the trains the last things like rings and valuables and jewellery are taken. These are the small personal possessions they would still have been allowed. Again in Poland Jews are dispossessed of their property and moved into ghettos and, when they are taken to the camps, the last remaining possessions are taken by Operation Reinhardt. Operation Reinhardt, in a sense, is the last cleaning up of whatever property had not been

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taken already.

Q. Not many more questions on this matter, Professor. Would you be able to make any kind of global estimates on these kind of data and say, well, therefore, the number of victims was not less than a certain figure and it was probably not more than a certain figure, on the basis that of course not everybody had valuable wristwatches or valuable fountain pens, but on the other hand not many people wear two wristwatches, shall we say, so it was probably not less than 100,000 people? Can you say that?

A. I would say that this would help us with a minimum figure but it would be nowhere close to a maximum figure because they are presumably skimming the cream and taking the very best things. Most Jews would have traded their wristwatches for food and whatever else long before this if they were in desperate straits, which they were. So it does not give us anything approaching a maximum figure.

MR RAMPTON: Can I intervene to say that I just have done some arithmetic? It is not obviously an exhaustive figure for whatever reason, but the total under A on this page is 200,000 items.

MR JUSTICE GRAY: Which page are you?

MR RAMPTON: Page 10, my Lord, at A. Many of these items may of course come from the same person, one does not know.

MR JUSTICE GRAY: That is what I was wondering. You can have a fountain pen and a watch.

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MR RAMPTON: Of course you can.

MR JUSTICE GRAY: What was the number?

MR RAMPTON: 200,000 precisely.

MR IRVING: Exactly, but it is giving orders of magnitude, in my opinion, my Lord. We are really clutching at straws and trying to arrive at figures. Is it not right, Professor, that our statistical database for arriving at any kind of conclusions for the numbers of people who have been killed in the Holocaust by whatever means, we are really floundering around in the dark, are we not? Is that correct?

A. No. I would not express it that way. I would say we have a very accurate list of the deportation trains from Germany. In many cases we have the entire roster name by name and we are not floundering. We can tell you, as we have seen in the intercepts, 974 on one train.

Q. But I interrupt you there and you say in many cases, but, of course, had we got a complete list of all the ----

A. Can I finish my answer.

Q. --- trains, then ----

A. May I finish my answer?

MR JUSTICE GRAY: Let him finish. You have been very good, Mr Irving, but let him finish this answer.

A. In terms again of France, the Netherlands, the countries from which there were deportations from Western Europe, we can do a very close approximation by trains, the number of

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people per train. In the area of Poland, there were at least statistics in terms of ghetto populations and these ghettos were liquidated completely, so we can come to a fairly good rough figure of Polish Jews. We also have a fairly reliable pre-war census and post-war calculations so that one can do a subtraction. So, in terms of Holocaust victims from Poland westward, we are not floundering. We are coming fairly close approximation. Where historians differ and where you get this figure of between 5 and 6 is because we do not have those figures for the Soviet Union.

MR IRVING: Can I halt you at this point ----

A. There is where we are -- that the numbers vary greatly.

Q. But can I halt you at that point and say the fact that a train load of Jews sets out from Amsterdam or from France does not, of course, necessarily mean that they end up being gassed or killed in some other way, does it?

A. If they are sent to camps like Treblinka or Sobibor or Chelmno or Belzec, yes, they are virtually all exterminated.

Q. On the basis of eyewitness evidence?

A. On the basis of, yes, what I have presented here. We know that ----

Q. Which we are coming to later on?

A. Yes, and they do not come back.

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Q. Yes.

A. They disappear.

Q. Well, the Nazis did not want them to come back, but would you accept that large numbers were also the subject of, shall we say, population movements, particularly in the 1939/1940 period. You talked about the Jews in Poland?

A. Yes, this is a move from one area of German control to another. So Jews that are moved from the Warthegau into the General Government are then included in the ghetto population statistics of the various towns in the General Government and those ghettos are then liquidated and they count as part of the disappearance ----

Q. When you mean "the ghetto is liquidated", you mean the ghetto is just wound up?

A. The ghetto is empty. People are put on trains.

Q. Emptied, but the word "liquidated" is rather suggestive that something else is happening?

A. Well, that was the German term. "Ghetto Liquidierung" is their word, and that these liquidation, ghetto liquidations, also we know the mode in which they were carried out with extraordinary brutality and ----

Q. Yes, but come back to Poland for a minute. You talk about the fact that we had the pre-war population census and the post-war census. We are having a major problem with Poland because the whole of Poland was shifted westwards as a result of the agreements, so what do you mean by Poland?

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This is the first problem. Is that not right?

A. Well, you are talking about territory, but the Polish population in terms of number of Jews left at the end really is not changed or altered by a shifting of borders because there were no Jews in either the German or the Polish territory.

Q. They also have a problem caused by the fact that the Soviet Union arbitrarily declared that everybody who was in the Soviet occupied part of certain parts of Poland became Soviet citizens. After they had entered, I believe, on September 19th or September 17th 1939, did they not arbitrarily declare after that that large number, the citizens who had previously been Polish were now Soviet citizens?

A. Yes, but those areas ten fall back under the Germans and they are part of the statistics -- I mean, the pre-war census we have is pre1939.

Q. Are you saying that the Jews who were in the Soviet part of occupied Poland in 1939 stayed there until the Germans invaded two years later?

A. I think most did. Some did manage to get -- those that were saved, for the most part, were the ones that Stalin sent on to Siberia.

Q. Is it right the figure of those who left and were sent on to Siberia was of the order of 300,000?

A. The total number of Polish Jews in Siberia I do not think

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is even close to that. We know that the estimated number of Jews that fled or were deported from the German zone to the Soviet zone in 1939/1940 was in the magnitude of 200 to 300,000. How many for 1941 are, in a sense, caught in the German advance which in these areas, of course, is the very first territories they overcome, that you do not have any indication that very large numbers escaped at all.

Q. But there is an area of uncertainty, is there not?

A. The point at which the German documents start saying "The Jewish populations have managed to flee" is when you get much deeper into the Soviet Union where it took longer for the Russian armies to get to and there was more warning. The German documents indicate only then are they beginning to find that the Jews had managed to flee before they arrived. So, while there is certainly a degree of uncertainty, to suggest that significant vast numbers of Jews escaped from these very border territories the very first days occupied by the German Army, I do not think is -- it is not one that I can accept.

Q. But is not the evidence, in fact, that the Soviet Union had evacuated large parts of their forward territories in preparation for their attack on Germany, and that when the Germans advanced into these areas in Operation Barbarossa in June 1941 they found the population relatively thin because of these evacuations?

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A. No, I do not think so.

MR JUSTICE GRAY: Can we ----

A. There were deportations of what they -- there were deportations of what they considered political enemies.

MR IRVING: So, in other words, I am not right in suggesting there is any area of uncertainty about the figures, in your view?

A. No. What I said is the area of greatest uncertainty is the areas of the Soviet Union and that from that boundary westward we come to a fairly close proximation. After that it varies, estimates vary greatly.

MR JUSTICE GRAY: Can I just interrupt because I want to go back to Operation Reinhardt which is where we started and we have rather sort of spread out from there. Can you -- Mr Irving, you are probably going to ask this at some stage anyway -- put an estimate on the number of people you would say were killed by gassing at the smaller death camps like Treblinka, Sobibor and Chelmno?

A. The numbers that the German courts came to in their investigations in which they emphasised that they were using the minimum estimate so that this would not be a controversy between the defence and the prosecution, in the first Treblinka trial, I believe it was 700 or 750,000. By the second Treblinka trial, they had upped that figure to 9 or 950,000. Belzec is estimated at about 550,000. Sobibor, I believe they estimated 200,000, and

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Chelmno, as a minimum, I think they said 150,000, but they thought it was more likely in the 250,000 area.

MR IRVING: When were these estimates made?

A. These were in the various judgements of the 1960s in German courts.

Q. 1960s and 1970s or 1960s?

A. These particular trials, I believe, all -- and I think the last one was in 1968/69, so I think all of those concluded before 1970.

Q. You say these figures were reached at by agreement between the parties?

A. These were the figures that were put into the judgment and what the prosecution said -- I mean, let me see if I can phrase this right, I want to be very careful on this -- that this was the figure that in a sense was in the realm where they had sufficient documentation that it was not contested. Then you have the estimate, possible additional that they did not want to put into the judgment or the indictment because they did not want that to be an obscuring issue or become a detracting issue, "Well, we did not kill 250,000, we killed only 200,000".

Q. I was going to ask, to put it in common language, was it any skin off anybody's nose if people added 100,000 more or less? I mean, was anybody going to get a shorter sentence because the numbers were lower or a longer sentence because the numbers were higher? What I am

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getting at is were the figures properly tested in court?

A. The figures were reached in general by historical expert witnesses that submitted these to the court and they were open to cross-examination by the Defence.

Q. And these witnesses were German or?

A. The most, the most active witness was Wolfgang Schäfler who was a German historian.

Q. A German historian?

A. Yes.

Q. Is that the very reputable German historian too.

A. A very reputable German historian, who, in fact, looked at ----

MR JUSTICE GRAY: Mr Irving, if you challenge these figures, I think now is the time to do so. I do not know whether you do or you do not.

MR IRVING: My Lord, I am not in a position to challenge them on a numerical basis, but I do wish to plant or implant doubts in your Lordship's mind as to the rigour with which the figures have been arrived at, shall I put it like that? All I have to establish, if I have understood it correctly, in your Lordship's mind is the position that I am entitled, as a writer myself, not to be called a Holocaust denier because I question figures. I can put it as simply as that. Your Lordship has a different take on that, I ought to be told it now perhaps in order that I can ----

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MR JUSTICE GRAY: I am sure about "ought", but I understand the way you use this evidence.

MR IRVING: I mean, this is not a court of law, criminal law, where they are trying somebody for murder. We are just trying to establish a matter of Holocaust denial really which is a different standard of proof, I think.

MR JUSTICE GRAY: Yes.

A. Would it be helpful if I said a little bit about how Schäfler arrived at his figures?

MR JUSTICE GRAY: I think it might be in the sense that Mr Irving is really saying, "Well, I question the figures" and I think he must by implication be saying, "and I have good grounds for questioning the figures". So I think if you wanted to add something about the way in which the figures were arrived at, I think that would be helpful.

A. Yes, the figures for each of the camps he did by trying to trace the ghetto liquidations at the different periods into which camps they were sent. So we have a very accurate reduction of the Lodz population, which trains went to Chelmno, when, and we can come very accurately to the number of people deported from Lodz to Chelmno, then one is on a little bit less secure grounds for the various other surrounding towns where we do not have a day by day deduction or a train by train calculation, but we do have statistics of what the populations were there before the whole operation began.

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So with some rough estimate of how many would have been selected for labour, he came to a figure for Lodz as a minimum figure and then a more probable but not putting forward as necessarily a somewhat higher figure. He did the same calculations for the other camps. We know how many Dutch transports went to Sobibor. We know which regions were cleared that were directed to Sobibor. We had the figures of the Jewish populations in those ghettos before the liquidation and the number of workers that were shifted to some of the work camps, and it was on the calculation, on that basis that he arrived at his figures.

MR JUSTICE GRAY: That is very helpful.

MR IRVING: Yes.

MR JUSTICE GRAY: Do ask anything you want, Mr Irving.

MR IRVING: I think this is probably an appropriate point to ask the witness about the atmosphere in Germany for historians. Is it possible for an historian in Germany now, whether reputable or disreputable historian, to advance opposing hypotheses in any degree of safety?

A. Oh, absolutely. For instance, in this court earlier I saw in the transcript you said that no one could refer to the Himmler guidelines without risking that -- the intercept of the Himmler guidelines, and, of course, Christian Gerlach has published that in Germany, and has suffered absolutely no repercussions and there is no question that

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he would, that there is a very vigorous discussion among German historians on the Holocaust.

Q. But would I be right in saying this discussion is skewed or distorted by the fact that anybody who goes to the other end of the spectrum, shall we say, and starts saying, "I think the figures are much lower because, for example, it was not a systematic liquidation" or anything like that, anybody who accidentally says one of the taboo phrases in Germany is going to end up in trouble, in prison, and that this must certainly cast apprehensions in the mind of somebody about which side of the debate he takes?

A. I think that is nonsense. For instance, Hans Mommsen shares your view that Hitler did not give an order.

Q. Would you tell the court who Hans Mommsen is?

A. Hans Mommsen is a very notable historian at the University of Bochum, now retired boss tonne.

Q. He is not a Holocaust denier, is he?

A. You asked me with taboos and one of the things that has generally been seen that you have been identified with is the argument that Hitler did not make the decision. Hans Mommsen and Martin Broszat have accepted or have argued that Hitler did not give an order or a decision----

Q. Can I just halt you there? It would be useful if you would----

A. I am still talking.

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MR JUSTICE GRAY: You are interrupting a little bit, Mr Irving. Try and restrain yourself until the end of the answer.

MR IRVING: Your Lordship will know why I want to interrupt there.

A. Far from being thrown in jail or fearing, Hans Mommsen currently is the Shapiro Visiting Scholar at the United States Holocaust Museum. There is a wide of range of debate covering a wide spectrum of opinion. There is in Germany a law that outlaws Holocaust denial, but I know of no German historian that I have come across that has lost a night's sleep worrying that this prevents him from arguing from documents and from carrying out a full academic discussion.

Q. Have you heard of Dr Reinhard Zitelmann?

A. I have heard of Dr Reinhard Zitelmann. I know him.

Q. Are you familiar with the course of his career after he made certain statements? Was he originally a historian at the free university in Berlin?

MR JUSTICE GRAY: Mr Irving, I think this is a digression really.

MR IRVING: Very well. Would you explain to the court then who Professor Martin Broszat was? Was he an eminent German historian?

A. Yes. He was the head of the Institute for Contemporary History in Munich.

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Q. His opinion on my hypothesis that Hitler did not issue an order or that there is no Hitler order, are you familiar with that?

A. He takes your view that Hitler did not know of this, or that it was kept secret from him, or he would not have authorised it. That it was done by others behind his back he does not accept. He does not think that Hitler gave an order for or made a decision for the Final Solution, but that rather he ----

Q. It just happened?

A. He encouraged it, he instigated it in the sense that he made known his feelings and that others clamoured, or strove to gain Brownie points to get credit by realising the programme that Hitler hinted that he wanted to see done.

Q. Are you familiar with the word Verlegenheitslösung, a way out of an awkward solution, a way out of an awkward problem?

A. He used the phrase that it was a way out of a Sackgasse, out of a dead end.

Q. He picked up this word from the introduction to my book and said this was probably correct. Are you familiar with that?

A. I do not know if he picked that expression up from your book, but he did. In so far as the issue of the Hitler order, Mommsen and Broszat have argued for a long time, as

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you have, they do not think that Hitler gave an explicit or formal order.

Q. It would be a grave injustice to call either of those two professors Holocaust deniers, would it not?

A. Yes. The argument over whether Hitler gave an order or not is not commonly part of the issue of Holocaust denial.

Q. Thank you very much for saying that. Hans Mommsen, would you identify him? Is he a Professor at the Royal university in Bochum?

A. Yes, he was. He is retired.

Q. A very eminent historian, is that correct?

A. Yes.

Q. Very well. I hope your Lordship pardons me for having made that little excursion?

MR JUSTICE GRAY: Yes. You picked up the answer that Professor Browning gave about whether denying Hitler's having given an order was an aspect of Holocaust denial, but I do not think the Defendants really say that it is.

MR RAMPTON: We do not.

MR JUSTICE GRAY: I was checking your summary of case.

MR RAMPTON: The Hitler exculpation, exoneration, apology part of the case has nothing to do with Holocaust denial at all. They may have a similar motive at the end of the day but that is completely different. We have focused on Hitler's exoneration to prove what we call distorted history.

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MR JUSTICE GRAY: Yes. I think what you do say is that it is part of Holocaust denial to deny that there was a systematic programme.

MR RAMPTON: Yes.

MR JUSTICE GRAY: That is not the same as denying that it was Hitler who instigated that programme.

MR RAMPTON: That is right. It is number 3, no systematic programme of exterminating Europe's Jews, whether on the part of Hitler or the Nazi leadership.

A. I think that Professors Mommsen and Broszat would say that Hitler instigated it in various ways. They would simply say there was no formal order or decision in the sense that we understand that is the way ----

MR JUSTICE GRAY: You say that yourself.

A. Yes.

MR IRVING: Is this the debate between the intentionalists and the functionalists?

A. It is one aspect of that debate.

Q. By instigating it, would you say that Hitler instigated it by raising the climate of anti-Semitism in Germany, or was it more specific than that?

A. I think that was the beginning of it, but it gets also more specific than that when one continually indicates that you want this whole problem to disappear, that you want a settlement to this. You prophesy a disappearance of the Jews, which is in a sense to set the climate in

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which people are to come forward to you with proposals which you then can approve or not. We know the pattern that Himmler comes to Hitler in mid September with the proposals for the ethnic cleansing of western Poland.

Q. September 1939?

A. He comes to Hitler. They bring the Madagascar plan to Hitler. They bring proposals about marking and deportation to Hitler. In terms of concrete proposals Hitler is not the micromanager, but the proposals are a response to the signals that he gives of what he wants and wants done, and this is what I would say we would call instigation.

Q. You refer to his prophesy, that was the speech of January 30th 1939?

A. That is one example.

Q. That was January 30th 1939. Did the killings start immediately?

A. No. That is a prophesy that could be realised in a number of ways.

Q. Nothing really happened for about three years, did it?

A. No. I would not interpret that as understood yet as total destruction. But when this does not work and there still needs to be -- that is, expulsion, ethnic cleansing, does not work, the reservation plans prove to be impractical, then the demand that something be done is still there, and then one brings more extreme points.

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Q. How realistic was the Madagascar plan to which you just referred?

A. Do I think they took it seriously? Yes, I do think they took it seriously. It is fantastic but of course Auschwitz is fantastic, too.

Q. In what way is Madagascar a fantastic plan?

A. Fantastic in the sense that one is bizarre, the notion that you could take 4 million Jews and put them on ships and send them to Madagascar, and that anything other than the vast bulk of them would die under the conditions of being dumped into the jungle of Madagascar. Even that a plan that clearly in its implications involved vast decimation, they still talked in these words of resettlement.

Q. Is this not exactly what happened with the state of Israel? Millions of these people were taken and dumped in Israel, so to speak, although they did it voluntarily? It was an uprooting and a geographical resettlement.

A. The number of people coming into Israel of course came in gradually and there was a structure and an organisation to arrange for and assist their reception.

Q. Have you seen in the German files references to the planning for the Madagascar settlement? In other words, the necessary retraining, the agricultural specialists and everything being set up by the Foreign Ministry and by the German Navy, the Naval staff?

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A. No. I did not see some setting up retraining. I saw them planning to take all the property and who would be in charge of gathering the Jews, and that it would be an SS state at the other end, but I certainly did not see, as part of the files on Madagascar, retraining. There was some toleration of Zionist groups in Germany setting up agricultural camps in the pre-war period when they were trying to encourage the emigration of Jews, be it to Palestine or anywhere else.

Q. Adolf Hitler repeatedly referred to the Madagascar solution, did he not, from 1938 in the Goebbels diaries right through until July 24th 1942 in the table talk?

A. The Madagascar plan is a concrete plan, in which people are actually working on it. It is the period of June to September 1940, but there are references to Madagascar earlier and later. It is an idea that had floated in a number of anti-Semitic pamphlets and the Jewish expert of the German Foreign Office in fact, who sort of arrived at this on his own, claimed that he got the idea from reading one of these pamphlets, so it was an idea in the air. This was one of the sort of anti-Semitic fantasies that this problem would disappear if all of these Jews could be sent to the most distant island they could conceive of.

Q. Out of mind, out of sight. Would you agree that it was Hitler's pipe dream?

A. I would not call it pipe dream, because I think, if

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England had surrendered, they would have tried to do it. They would have tried to implement it just as they tried to implement the Lublin reservation plan and just as they tried and succeeded in implementing the death camp plans.

Q. Have you seen indications in the negotiations with France over the peace settlement with France, the armistice negotiations, that there was an attempt by the Germans to secure permission for the Madagascar plan because Madagascar was a French territory?

MR JUSTICE GRAY: I thought it was British.

A. No, French.

MR IRVING: Madagascar was French but it became British after May 26th 1942, my Lord, or thereabouts, when we did the usual thing.

A. They sent people to the French colonial ministry to get information on Madagascar. They certainly did not need French permission, and I am not sure how much this was a topic in armistice negotiations that were going on after the armistice, I do not know how much that was a topic between them.

Q. You think it was a totally impracticable proposition, the idea of sending 6 million Jews, or whatever it was, to an island the size of Madagascar?

A. I think they would have attempted it, and I think the results would have been disastrous.

Q. Why would they have been disastrous?

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A. Because I think a large percentage of the people sent there would have perished.

Q. I think that the Jews are a very sturdy people. They have shown that by their forthrightness in Palestine, have they not?

A. I think the conditions under which they arrived there, an island which the documents said clearly was to be an SS state, would not have been anything remotely similar to the conditions of an attempted and organised reception of refugees in Palestine after 1945.

Q. The population of Madagascar at that time was about 1 million?

A. I could not say.

Q. The population of Madagascar now is over 13 million?

A. I could not say.

Q. So it could have housed that number of people quite easily? It is a country the size of Germany, is that correct?

A. It would depend on the circumstances and indeed bringing Jews in, and all of their property taken, and under SS custody, I do not think one could say that they would have been housed easily. I think it would have been lethal.

Q. If Hitler's intention was to exterminate all the Jews systematically, then why would he have had a pipe dream of sending the Jews to a country like Madagascar where they would have survived?

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A. This is where we get to the interpretational issues of the intentionalist and functionalist. I do not believe at that point that he intended to destroy the Jews systematically. He wanted a problem to disappear.

Q. When did the intention then develop? This is important I think.

MR JUSTICE GRAY: Yes. Let us get on to that.

A. As I say in my report, my feeling is that there were two separate phases of decision making. Both of them stretch out over a period of time.

MR IRVING: With particular reference to Hitler, please?

A. It is an incremental decision making process. We have in the Spring of 1941, in preparation for Barbarossa, a number of his statements about what kind of war this is going to be, a war of destruction, a killing of what he calls Judao- Bolshevik intelligentsia and this kind of thing. This results in proposals coming to him, one of which is the creation of the Einsatzgruppen in its arrangement with the army or logistical support, the Commissar order, and that in the opening weeks of the war this led to the selective killing of adult male Jews in the regions that the Einsatzgruppen enter.

Q. Can I halt you there for a moment and say, when he talks about the Judao-Bolshevik enemy, which half of that adjective weighs strongest in his mind, the Bolshevik or Judao?

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A. I think for him it is a package deal, but in terms of what is wrong with Bolshevism is that it is the latest manifestation of the Jewish threat, so the Jewish issue is the prime one and the Bolshevik is the current manifestation of this Jewish threat as he understands it, because he has seen previous manifestations are the French revolution and the liberals. Christianity is the first Jewish threat.

Q. There have been more recent manifestations, have there not, for example in the Spanish Civil War?

MR JUSTICE GRAY: Mr Irving, this is getting a bit discursive. Can we just pin it down a little bit?

MR IRVING: I am trying to pin it down.

MR JUSTICE GRAY: Professor Browning, I know we are interrupting an answer and I want you to resume it, but can we just anchor it to particular dates? The date that is in my mind, and I would be interested to see the document if possible, is the 25th May, and I think it was 1940 rather than 41.

A. The May 25th document is the Himmler guidelines for the treatment of the peoples of Eastern Europe, in which he wants to reauthorise the ethnic cleansing from the western territories, which Frank and Goring had managed to whittle down.

MR JUSTICE GRAY: Is that not, in a sense, the start of it all?

A. No, that is still in the ethnic cleansing phase. That is

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the document in which Himmler is still referring to a total extermination as un-German and impossible.

MR IRVING: I was going point that out, yes.

A. It is the following year, 1941 in the spring, when Hitler begins to talk about this war of destruction in the East, the destruction of the Judao-Bolshevik intelligentsia, that leads to the selective killing of adult male Jews in the opening five or six weeks of Barbarossa.

MR IRVING: Can I halt you there and say which documents? Are you referring to the Kommissar order then?

MR JUSTICE GRAY: Can we look at some of these documents?

A. We are referring to a collection of documents, the agreement between the military and the Einsatzgruppen in which the Einsatzgruppen will get its instructions from the SS but its logistic support from the military.

Q. Is it not possible to argue that these are purely military measures at this time?

MR JUSTICE GRAY: Can we look at the document? I really do want to look at this document, the Kommissar order.

MR RAMPTON: Your Lordship will excuse me for interrupting. You will find three relevant documents cited, or rather utterances by Hitler in a military or a semi-military context on pages 55 and 56 of Dr Longerich's first report. They are all three of them in March 1941 before Barbarossa starts. Perhaps Professor Browning might be given that, so that he can see it.

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MR JUSTICE GRAY: I think it is quite important because, if this is too broad brush, it is perhaps not as helpful as it could be.

MR IRVING: I agree, my Lord, because I shall want to draw attention to the military nature of these orders.

MR JUSTICE GRAY: Do so please, but let us do it by reference to the documents.

MR IRVING: They are criminal, there is no question, and they are Draconian, but they are military.

MR JUSTICE GRAY: I understand that. So 55 and 56 of the first part of Longerich, Mr Rampton?

MR RAMPTON: Yes, my Lord.

MR JUSTICE GRAY: Thank you.

A. Yes. I think, if we look at the very first one, in fact he makes clear that his campaign has both a military and an ideological side. As he says, the coming campaign is more than just a struggle of arms. It will also lead to a confrontation of two world views. Then he goes on, it is does not suffice to defeat the enemy army, Jewish and Bolshevik intelligentsia must be eliminated. So this campaign from the very beginning is to be conceived as more than a conventional war between armies. It has a strong ideological element and that ideological element relates to race, and particularly to Jews, and that tenor I think is very strong in his spring of 1941 declarations. As I say, when we then look at what was the

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result of that, if one looks at the Einsatzgruppen reports, the overwhelming bulk of the victims who were shot in the first five or six weeks are ----

Q. Described as Jews?

A. --- as male Jews. They kept some communist functionaries. They regret, in a sense, most of the communist functionaries seem to have disappeared, the Jews have not, and that these then are the main target group.

Q. If this document refers to the Judao-Bolshevik intelligentsia, this does not explain why large numbers of thousands of ordinary Jews are being taken off trains or taken out of the towns and taken out of the country side and machine gunned into pits They are not the intelligentsia in any way. This document covers the intelligentsia.

A. No one is saying that this is a hands on micromanaged order. This is a speech by Hitler in which he is declaring a set of expectations, and then there are various preparations made and proposals brought forward that, in a sense, cast his vision of a war of destruction into concrete terms.

Q. If I could rephrase that document, if this was going the other way and the Russians were saying, we are going to invade Washington and we are going to destroy the capitalist intelligentsia, and subsequently very large atrocities took place and millions of ordinary Americans

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being machine gunned into pits, you would not link those two facts, would you?

A. I think one could, in the sense that one would say ----

Q. Just Americans with bank accounts or otherwise fitted?

A. Well, one, it sets a mood in which destruction of civilian populations, killing will not be limited to armed soldiers.

Q. Would I be right in suggesting that this order effectively created a killing field, and that anybody else who fitted the title of Jew who came within that killing field was therefore at risk, put it that way?

A. This certainly creates an atmosphere in which clearly there will be lots of killing and it will not be restricted to military combat, that there will be killing of those that are seen to be an ideological and racial enemy, as well as military. I think, when we look at, in a sense, the kinds of proposals that are brought forward, very revealing are not only the Kommissar order and the agreement between the military and the Einsatzgruppen, but the economic plans that come forward, such as the May 2nd meeting of the State secretaries, in which they say, for Germany to be blockade proof, we must take lots of material out of the Soviet Union, and we must be very clear that, when we do this, umpteen million Russians are going to starve to death. So we have an atmosphere of a war of destruction in which civilian life is going to be

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totally cheap.

Q. He does not say, as a result of our taking economic goods out of the country, millions of people, preferably Jews, are going to die. That is just any Russians?

A. This is that lots of Russians will die, lots of civilians will die. Then, of course, if we cast that, as an historian, to put it into the wider context, you would not disagree with that, I think.

Q. Yes.

A. The wider context basically is where people have been shot, Jews have been shot in larger percentages than others, where people have starved, the Jews have starved first. So, if you have a programme of shooting and starving, one can begin with the fact that there is going to be a large loss of Jewish life, that this would be clear to anyone in the context of Nazi Germany in the spring of 41. That is not yet. That is not yet an explicit order for the killing of Soviet Jewry. It is a creation of, we might say, a hunting licence. No one will get into trouble killing Jews. One will get credits rather than anything against them.

Q. I agree entirely, but the focus is at this stage on this document strictly, shall we say, the upper 10,000? It is the Judao-Bolshevik intelligentsia and their hierarchy, all the way down to the Kommissars, is that right?

A. The focus is selective killing and indiscriminate

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starvation.

Q. The emphasis is on this as a measure of war? This is the kind of war we are going to be fighting?

A. No. The emphasis is on measure of a war that is understood to be both military and ideological and racial.

Q. A war to the death, yes.

MR JUSTICE GRAY: Professor Browning, where do you get indiscriminate starving from?

A. That is a document I believe is not one that I cited. It is a protocol of a meeting of the State secretaries on May 2nd 1941. It is a Nuremberg document, in which the protocol is that we all agree that, when we take out of the Soviet Union what is necessary to make Germany blockade proof, we must be perfectly clear that this will mean the mass starvation of umpteen million Russians. So it is a document that speaks to what was clear to everybody involved in the planning process, that this war of destruction was going to mean a vast loss of life. Given what had happened in Poland, I would argue, everyone understood that, in a vast loss of life, Jewish life was even cheaper than other life. That is what I would call the beginning of this first phase of the decision making process. It sets up a genocidal atmosphere, it does not yet set up a systematic plan for total liquidation.

MR IRVING: Can I leap forward ----

MR JUSTICE GRAY: Mr Irving, I am going to highlight that.

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I am also going to suggest -- the questions have been fast and furious this morning. That is not a criticism. I suspect you would quite welcome a break and I am sure the transcriber would. It has been actually quite intensive this morning.

MR IRVING: Can I have one short question? On that point we shall round it off and let us say that this kind genocidal order, is it not almost identical to the Morgenthau decision of September 1944, where the Americans said, let us do this to the Germans, we do not care how many starve?

A. I would have to look at that document before I could say whether it was similar or not. What we do know of course is that that document never was implemented.

Q. It was signed by both Roosevelt and Churchill, was it not?

A. I would have to see such a document.

MR IRVING: Thank you.

MR JUSTICE GRAY: I think five minutes is enough just to have a breathing space. (Short Adjournment).

MR JUSTICE GRAY: Mr Irving, can we just identify the Kommissar document you refer to? I am not sure I know where that is.

MR IRVING: The Kommissar order is in May 1941, I believe, about May 7th or May 5th. These March 1941 documents, I believe I am right in saying, are the kind of working

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level papers, are they not? I do not know exactly what is before the witness. I do not have copies of these documents.

MR JUSTICE GRAY: I only mention it and perhaps we can locate it in due course.

MR IRVING: The Kommissar order is important because it was dictated by Hitler to General Jodl, I think, so it very clearly represents Hitler's thoughts. That would be useful if I do obtain a copy and bring it into court tomorrow.

MR JUSTICE GRAY: If we can at some stage, yes.

MR IRVING: May I ask what this particular document was that you were quoting from?

A. The State secretary's meeting.

Q. No, the actual one with the references to the Judao-Bolshevik intelligentsia?

A. This is footnote 137 from page 55 from the opinion by Peter Longerich.

Q. And there are two more documents that Mr Rampton wished you to consider, I believe?

MR RAMPTON: Yes. They are just summarised on pages 55 and 56. There in fact may be four, paragraphs 15.1, 15.2, two documents, and 15.3 on page 56, all in March of 1941.

MR JUSTICE GRAY: Yes, thank you very much. Professor Browning, looking at those further documents, they do not, as it were, perhaps add anything, but they maybe confirm

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what you have already said in relation to the 3rd March document. Is that fair?.

A. Yes. What I think they confirm is that Hitler does not see this, and does not want his generals and others to see it, as a conventional war, but that it has a very strong ideological dimension to it, and that the enemy to be destroyed is not just the Soviet army and its power to resist, but what he considers to be Judao-Bolshevism, communism, he uses different phrases.

MR IRVING: Would it be right to say that at this time Hitler had knowledge of the manner in which the Soviet Union fought its wars, both its colonial wars as in Spain, for example, and also in the Finnish winter war of 1939 to 1940?

A. What picture the German intelligence portrayed of the Soviet Union in all of this, is an area that others have studied, it is not an area that I think I could speak with authority.

Q. Would he be familiar with the activities of the Russian Kommissars within the Red Army hierarchy?

A. It is very likely he would have been given even a more lurid description than maybe would have been historically accepted but that is just speculation on my part. As I say, I cannot think of any documents at the moment that I could speak from with authority.

Q. The Soviet Commissar system was a political agitator, am

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I correct, within each Army unit to make sure that they pointed their guns in the right direction, roughly?

A. It was to establish, in a sense, a dual control of military units, someone who would be there with military expertise and someone with political, what they called reliability.

Q. Did these Commissars have an NKVD rank?

A. That I do not know.

Q. Can you estimate for the court approximately what percentage of these Commissars were, in fact, Jewish?

A. I have absolutely no idea.

Q. No idea. Very well. But if a substantial percentage were either Jewish or were perceived by the Nazis to be Jewish, would that justify the kind of language that Hitler used in these military plannings for the coming Russian campaign?

A. No, I do not see that Jews who were part of the NKVD, in a sense, often were totally secular Jews separate from the Jewish religious communities in these towns, that they had given up, in a sense, their Jewish identity. They were often all part of the Jewish communities that were going to face the onslaught of the genocide. So if you ask me is there a justification, my answer would be absolutely not.

Q. Are you aware that, in fact, the Jewish community formed the backbone of the Red Army and of the NKVD?

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A. I am certainly not aware of that and I doubt that that is the case.

Q. Are you aware of the fact that 300 heroes of the Soviet Union of General's rank were Jewish?

A. I do not know the number, but I do not know that it is relevant.

Q. Welt, I am just trying to establish the fact there may have been a military reason for Hitler to have used this kind of language in preparing his Generals for the very ugly war that was to come.

MR JUSTICE GRAY: If that were so, I just wonder, Professor Browning, whether the word "intelligentsia" would have been used? It is an odd word if one is talking in terms of talking military combat, is it not? Is that right or wrong?

A. Well, I think for Hitler he equates Bolshevism and the Communists with Jews, and in a sense he is talking about -- he sometimes used "leadership", sometimes he uses "intelligentsia" and in his mind these are intertwined.

Q. The point I was really putting to you is if one is talking about military extermination, if that is a fair way of putting it, one would expect to find a reference to not "intelligentsia" but "senior military personnel" or something of that kind?

A. Yes, I mean, and that I think is there as well, but the fact that he adds these others would again reinforce the

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point I am making that there is a strictly ideological racial dimension as well as a military dimension.

Q. More than a struggle of arms?

A. Yes.

MR IRVING: Is it not right, however, also to say that in defeating the Soviet Union, he would not only have to defeat the Red Army, he would also have to defeat the Soviet hierarchy, the bureaucracy; he would have to eradicate that as well in order to implement the German colonial rule on those regions?

A. Have to eradicate what?

Q. The bureaucracy, the entire Bolshevik hierarchy?

A. That certainly was his goal, yes.

Q. And the Nazis frequently used the phrase "Jewish Bolshevik"; it had become a bit of a slogan, had it not?

A. It was more than a slogan. It was a reflection of their mentality.

Q. My Lord, I think we have taken that question as far as we can go, unless your Lordship has further questions on those particular documents?

MR JUSTICE GRAY: No, not at all.

MR RAMPTON: May I just add this? It may save time later on. Your Lordship was asking about the guidelines ----

MR JUSTICE GRAY: Yes.

MR RAMPTON: --- for Barbarossa, conduct of troops. The date is 19th May 1941 and the relevant part is summarised in

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and translated on page 5 of part 2 of Longerich.

MR IRVING: Yes. This is not a Commissar order, but it is very much a parallel document.

MR JUSTICE GRAY: Right. That is very helpful.

MR IRVING: It effectively says that ordinary court procedures will not apply and this kind of thing.

MR JUSTICE GRAY: Thank you very much, Mr Rampton. I was not aware of that at all.

MR IRVING (To the witness): Are you familiar with those guidelines of May 19th 1941? Can you answer questions about it, roughly, were they specifically anti-Jewish in nature?

A. There are, I would say, three key orders, one is the Commissar order, one is the order concerning military jurisdiction and then there is the troop, guidelines for the troops, in which "Jews", simply the term "Jews", is put in the same line with saboteurs, guerrillas, so that, in effect, Jews are created as a class that can be equated on the basis of who they are with other targets who are defined by what they do. This, of course, is the essence of a racial genocide.

Q. Are you familiar with the origins of these three documents you have mentioned?

MR JUSTICE GRAY: I think you mention them in your own report actually, do you not?

A. I am not sure if I mention the three documents.

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MR IRVING: I have not come across them in this witness report.

MR JUSTICE GRAY: Paragraph 4.2.1, I thought it was.

A. I may have mentioned them briefly.

MR IRVING: I would have remembered them if -- I think they must be in the Longerich report, my Lord.

MR RAMPTON: It is in Longerich.

MR JUSTICE GRAY: It is certainly there, but this is another guideline, is it not, at 4.21?

A. 4.2.1, the Heydrich order of July 2nd, which we discussed yesterday, is his summary to the higher SS and police leaders of his oral instructions to the Einsatzgruppen leaders on June 17th, five days before the invasion. This is when he includes among those to be shot will be Jews in state and party positions.

MR IRVING: This is the document your Lordship wanted translated yesterday.

MR JUSTICE GRAY: These are guidelines at that stage?

A. Yes. This is the guidelines of early July -- in fact, the guidelines of late June, prior to the invasion, because he is summarising what was already given to the Einsatzgruppen on the eve of the invasion.

MR IRVING: This is Heydrich, of course, who is two or three rungs down the hierarchy, is he not?

A. Very close to Himmler.

Q. Yes. The question, witness, which I asked you just before that little discursive, are you familiar with the military

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planning documents or working papers that led to these three documents we were just talking about, the guidelines, not these ones, but the May 19th guidelines?

A. I have, I think, briefly seen in the Hans Adolf Jacobsen study his account of the emergence of the Commissar order and the Krausnick article on the emergence of the military jurisdiction order. I have not worked on those in the archives, but I have seen other historians' studies of those two particular cases.

Q. Are you familiar with the private diary of General Franz Halder, the Chief of the German Army General Staff?

A. Yes, I have read parts of that.

Q. Would you agree that in that private diary, which was written by him in shorthand (so it was of a very confidential nature) it emerges that the German Army were the source of the inspiration for those documents, in other words, it did not come from Hitler down to the Army; it went from the German Army effectively up to Hitler or up to the German High Command, they wanted ----

A. I cannot say that that was my impression from Halder, but I would have to disagree in the sense that we have Hitler/Jodl conversation in early March, in which Jodl then comes back to the Generals and says, "Hitler wants us to do something in terms of the" ----

Q. The Commissars?

A. --- "Commissars" and the negotiations over the shaping of

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the military jurisdiction order comes I think from a similar instigation from above, that the Army is not to be involved in disciplining the behaviour of troops against the civilian population which previously would have been primed under martial law.

Q. Would you identify Jodl to the court, please?

A. Jodl is, if I get it right, the Chief of Staff of the High Command.

Q. Was he Chief of the Operations Staff at the German High Command.

A. High Command, not the Army, the Arm Forces High Command, the global one.

Q. And if Hitler, as Supreme Commander, was having this discussion with the Chief of Staff of the German High Command, then it must have been a discussion of a military nature rather than ideological nature?

A. Not if he wants the Army to take part in and not to be a problem concerning this war of destruction. If the military is to take part in a wider kind of war, not to conceive of this war is a war like they fought against the French, and that they are to remove themselves from or to give to their own officers a new understanding that certain kinds of behaviour, the troops will no longer be subject to the jurisdiction of military court martial and will not be criminalised. Now, this has to go to the Army. But that certainly cannot be said to be ----

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Q. But this is the military discipline?

A. Yes, but it is an issue of military discipline that is completely related to the notion of this wider war of destruction. It is not compartmentalised to military operations but to the ideological war.

Q. Is it not likely, in fact, that Hitler would have these discussions with the German High Command on the military side of the problem and he would have similar discussions with Himmler on the ideological side of the problem, and these documents only refer, therefore, to the military side of the problem.

A. I disagree totally. That certainly is the post-war plea of the German Generals of self-exculpation, but I think the documents we see is that he makes very clear to the Generals that this a multi-dimensional war, and that he does not compartmentalise. He wants the Army to revise its multiple court martial code. He wants the Army to take part in the finding of the Commissars and either shooting them or turning them over to the SS, that he does not compartmentalise this war.

Q. We so far have not mentioned one very important conference that took place around this time after Barbarossa, which is the conference of July 16th 1941. You are familiar with this?

MR JUSTICE GRAY: If there is a document, can we go -- I am quite keen to pick up these points and not deal with

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them ----

MR IRVING: It certainly be referenced by Longerich. It is not referenced by this witness in his report, but it is one with which he is quite familiar, my Lord.

MR JUSTICE GRAY: It does not make it any easier, but if we can identify and locate these documents.

MR IRVING: I was going to ask one question on this conference really which is -- are you familiar with the conference to which I am referring?

MR JUSTICE GRAY: This is for my benefit rather than yours or Professor Browning's.

MR IRVING: Are you familiar with the conference to which I am referring?

A. This is July 16th conference?

Q. July 16th. Hitler, Rosenberg, Martin Bormann wrote a memorandum on it?

A. Lammers, I believe, was present.

Q. Lammers was present, Himmler was present?

A. No, Himmler is not present. Himmler met with Hitler on 15th and left for Lublin.

MR JUSTICE GRAY: I am sorry, I am going to ask you to pause. I think I really must have the document, if only a reference to it.

A. It is a Nuremberg document. I think it is L...

MR RAMPTON: I can help. Page 57. Longerich 1, paragraph 15.7.

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MR JUSTICE GRAY: I am sorry to interrupt you, Mr Irving, but I have to try to digest all this and it is easier.

MR IRVING: Problem is, my Lord, that both the witness and I have all this in our heads.

MR JUSTICE GRAY: Yes, but it is quite important that you get it into my head too.

MR IRVING: It is not an easy task.

MR JUSTICE GRAY: I am sorry to hear you say that.

MR RAMPTON: If your Lordship wants to see the German?

MR IRVING: My Lord, the reason I said this is because it has taken me 35 years to get it into my head, the whole history

MR JUSTICE GRAY: Yes.

MR RAMPTON: It has only taken me nine months! It is 4.2, if your Lordship would like to see another splodgy German document.

MR JUSTICE GRAY: It may be that now you have given me the reference here, I can follow it up. Is it paragraph 15?

MR RAMPTON: Paragraph 15.7.

MR JUSTICE GRAY: Then it is in the transcript at least so I can go back to it. Yes, Mr Irving, follow that up if you want to.

MR IRVING: All that I want to say is, I mean, I have no idea where this question and answer is now going to lead. It may harm, it may help me. This was a very important, top level conference deciding areas of responsibility in the

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Eastern territories; is that right?

A. Immediately after that conference, the next, they issued the Führer decrees delineating the responsibilities of Himmler and Rosenberg, the SS and the civil administration for the occupied territories, Soviet territories.

Q. And this, effectively, gave Himmler absolutely police control over all these regions, is that correct, the executive control?

A. It put the SS in a very dominant position.

Q. In the rear areas?

A. Actually, I think it gave him powers -- at least Einsatzgruppen already had powers to operate all the way up to the front, and this established in a sense that that would become permanent as the SS positions are changed from mobile units to a permanent police structure on occupied territory.

Q. I think that, Professor, you once mentioned that the Jewish problem was mentioned in this conference, but that is not correct, is it?

A. I do not think he does mention that. He does talk about "shooting anyone who looks askance at us and isn't it good that Stalin has called for a guerrilla war because it gives us the pretext", I believe is the word, "to shoot anyone that we want?". I do not believe that I have said that ----

Q. That is a very interesting phrase. What was the phrase he

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used? "It gives us the pretext to shoot"----

A. "To shoot anyone who so much as looks askance at us" I believe is the ...

Q. "Schief schaut"

MR JUSTICE GRAY: The German is there on page 57 if you want to look at the footnote.

MR IRVING: Effectively, "Anybody who stands in our way or looks like he might stand in our way"?

A. Well, it does not even say "stand in our way", "looks askance at us", I believe, is a much wider shooting licence than "stands in our way".

MR JUSTICE GRAY: What does "nur schief schaut" mean?

MR IRVING: "Looks askance", literally.

A. "Gives us a twisted look" or "looks askance at us".

MR IRVING: Anybody whose face does not fit would be another way of saying it? It is a pretty broad kind of directive.

A. It is an open shooting licence.

Q. Yes, but there is no reference to the Jewish problem at all?

A. Not a specific reference, no.

Q. Yes. Just that Himmler has now given, effectively, carte blanche?

A. Yes.

Q. We will deal with that, I think, in more detail, my Lord, when we come to Longerich?

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A. You were still asking me my view of the decision-making process. Do you wish me to continue?

MR JUSTICE GRAY: Yes.

MR IRVING: If you have had after thoughts, yes. My view (and I would wish you to correct it) is that the German Army provided the impetus for these orders, and that this is evidenced in the papers of the German High Command where the position papers are, effectively, written by German Army officers and also from the diary of General Franz Halder. In other words, that the initiative did not come from Hitler?

A. I would disagree. I would say that the open invitation for these proposals comes from Hitler and, in terms of guidelines and policies, it is the response of the SS and the military and the economic planners to turn into reality this vague vision of a war of destruction in an ideological crusade against the Soviet Union.

Q. When you say you disagree, is this just a gut feeling or do you have any specific document you want to reference?

A. I think we have both the Jodl/Hitler meeting and Jodl's response, and we have the meeting of March 30th with the Generals in which he again makes clear to them his desire to have a war of destruction, a war that is not fought by the ground rules of a conventional war.

Q. The latter meeting is, of course, recorded in detail in the diary of General Halder, is it not?

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A. Yes.

MR JUSTICE GRAY: Again it would help me, rather than just having this ----

MR IRVING: Interesting discussion.

MR JUSTICE GRAY: --- debate between the two of you if ----

A. That would be 15.3, page 56, of Longerich, again where he emphasises the dual nature of the war, the struggle of two world views against one another.

MR JUSTICE GRAY: The Jodl/Hitler meeting, can you pinpoint that for me?

A. March 3rd.

MR JUSTICE GRAY: I mean, in terms of where I find a reference.

A. 15.1.

MR RAMPTON: Page 55, my Lord.

MR IRVING: Would it be correct to describe these features as pep talks by Hitler to his Generals to fire them up for the coming campaign?

A. I would say they are more than pep talks. I would say they are a setting of expectations and, as you know, I have tried to develop this model of Hitler eliciting, setting a level of what he expects and that that brings responses and proposals that are brought to him. I think this is a very good example of that dialectic.

Q. Yes. But he does not say, "We are going to invade the Soviet Union so that we can destroy Jews"?

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A. No.

Q. Nothing as crude as that?

A. No.

Q. What he is saying is, "We are confronted by a Judao-Bolshevik enemy, and that we will destroy the Judao-Bolshevik intelligentsia and the leadership class and whatever, and that is what he is effectively in all these documents he is saying, he is just mapping out who the enemy is going to be?

A. This is not yet an explicit instruction to systematically kill all the Jewish population on Soviet territory.

Q. Even in this important meeting of July 16th 1941, there is still no such instruction at any rate recorded in the memorandum by Martin Bormann?

A. Yes, in this case we have no smoking pistol document -- I have declared that often -- that we are working from inference, and the inference we draw is very similar to what you did about the November 30th meeting. Himmler and Hitler meet, Himmler gives an order. As you put it, it would be perverse not to assume a connection between them.

Q. Except that we now unfortunately ----

A. Find out the meeting came after rather than before.

Q. The meeting came after the telephone call, yes.

A. In this case the meeting, I say, comes before. We know that Himmler meets with Hitler and then leaves for Lublin on 15th, that the others meet with Hitler on 16th, and

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what follows thereafter is very quickly that Himmler vastly increases the number of people behind the Front in terms of putting the police battalions under the command of the higher SS and police leaders, of throwing in two of his brigades of his own and authorising the raising of the auxiliaries and that within a very short period after that we begin to be able to document the systematic killing.

Q. Yes.

A. And then it is an inference, but I think it is one that circumstantial evidence supports, that there is a connection in that period of July 16th to ----

Q. Is not the likely inference that Himmler had received from Hitler the carte blanche that he had sought and Himmler strutted into occupied Russia and told his often teenage thugs who were wearing SS uniform, "I have carte blanche. Go ahead and deal with these people and pacify the rear areas"?

A. In fact, that is not what we know of how Himmler does it. Himmler says, "This terrible burden has been laid on my shoulders by the Führer. This is the hardest thing I have ever been given to do." He does not strut; he shares crocodile tears ----

Q. 1944 he says that, does he not?

A. Yes, but in '43 too. We are talking about -- what we know about Himmler and how he speaks to others about this task, he does strut in and say, "Boy, aren't I lucky? I can now

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kill them". He comes and says: "The Führer has laid this burden on my shoulders. This is a terrible thing we have to do, but we must fight this battle now so other generations do not".

Q. He says this just once, am I right?

A. We have the Posen speech where I think he says it on ----

Q. October 1943.

A. --- both occasions. But this is, I think, an accurate reflection of how Himmler speaks to others about this. So your portrayal that Himmler is the eager go-getter is not supported by how he talks when we can document it to the other SS leaders about his role and responsibility.

Q. The documents are very thin, though, are they not? We do not have a whole sheaf of documents to draw these inferences from; there are a lot of gaps?

A. There are gaps, but this is a very strong document. Here he is talking to all of the SS leaders and this is the stance that he takes to them.

MR JUSTICE GRAY: I think, Mr Irving, just so that you know -- you may know this from the transcript -- draws the distinction between after October 1943 and before. I think he accepts that Hitler knew and, indeed, authorised, I think.

A. But this is a different question, my Lord. The question here is how did Himmler act towards his SS Generals?

MR JUSTICE GRAY: Yes. As I understand the way you put it,

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what he was saying in October 1943 and later is consistent with the interpretation you put on the slightly thin documentation of 41/42. Is that a fair summary?

MR RAMPTON: It may be relevant to point out ----

MR JUSTICE GRAY: Can I have an answer first? Is that right?

A. Yes, I am saying that in so far as we want to know how Himmler talked to others about this, it was not that "Hitler has given me carte blanche", it is that "Hitler has laid a duty on me, it is a hard duty". It is not one that he portrayed himself as eager to do, but one that he felt obligated to do. That was an answer to the scenario that Mr Irving gave of an eager Himmler running with the ball with very little authorisation from Hitler.

MR IRVING: Is it not also right to say that on one occasion Himmler specifically says to I think Berger, "The Führer has ordered these territories to be made free of Jews. This serious grave order that Führer has placed on my shoulders nobody can take off me"?

A. That comes end of July of 1942.

Q. 1942, which is closer to the time we are talking about?

MR JUSTICE GRAY: Is that what you are going raise?

MR RAMPTON: Yes, because the date came out wrong first of all. It is 28th July 1942.

MR IRVING: Yes, and that when Himmler is, therefore, talking about the order, he is talking about the blanket order to get the Jews out of here, and the way that Himmler then

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interpreted that is where you and I begin to differ.

A. We differ a great deal on how one interprets that, yes.

Q. But, Professor, I remind you that yesterday I showed you one coloured page photocopy of an intercept, did I not, and I suggested to you that we have hundreds of thousands of such intercepts in the British archives now, and I suggested that neither my expert, Dr John Fox or Richard Breitman or any of the experts who have waded through these hundreds of thousands of intercepts of top level and medium level and low level messages, is this correct, has found even one inference, one document, which supports the inference that Hitler was behind this?

A. I have not read through them, but no one has said that these intercepts, the place that we have found such a thing, and we have not found the smoking pistol document.

Q. So the more documents that do come our way, whether from Minsk or Riga or Moscow or from Bletchley Park or wherever, and yet we still fail to find even a lukewarm gun, let alone a smoking gun, indicates that possibly I may be right and my opponents may be incorrect, or, at any rate, I am justified in suspecting, would you agree?

A. No, because I do not think one would ever expect to find such a thing in a radio intercept. These are, from what I have seen of them, very specific things. They are not general points at which, for instance, Hitler has ordered Barbarossa or decisions of that level.

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Q. You refer -- I am now coming on to Adolf Eichmann, unless, my Lord, you wish to ask further questions?

MR JUSTICE GRAY: No. Take your own course.

MR IRVING: I now come on to Adolf Eichmann. What reliance can be placed on his writings, do you think?

A. I have used him as a very important source because we have ----

Q. Yes, understandably.

A. --- a collection of documents from him that stretch over a period of time and were given under different conditions before his arrest in Argentina under arrest by the Israelis, the private notes that are part of his attorney's Nachlass that is in Koblenz, that subject to the confidentiality that were only between him and his attorney and were not in the possession of the Israelis.

Q. There is a lot of paper then?

A. There is a lot of -- and now, apparently, we have learned there is about 1300 or more pages of notes that we have never seen yet.

Q. When you were in Koblenz, did you have the opportunity to look at the 600 pages that I gave to the German government which I found in Argentina?

A. No. I have not seen those. I do not know what the overlap is between those and ----

Q. They are similar to Sassen material. Would you characterise for the court what kind of witness Adolf

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Eichmann was in all these stages? What kind of person -- was he robust, was he servile, just characterise him.

A. I would say that there are elements of both, that he is very robust and contentious in protesting against certain aspects of what he is being accused. He has no problem saying Höss is lying about him, that he did not be involved there; that he engages in a vigorous denial of certain parts of the documentation the Israeli interrogators at court show him. On the other hand, he comes and says things that there is no documentation for, admits to things that they would never have known otherwise, except that they are repeated consistently in all of his stories, and it is a story he sticks to from beginning to end for which we would not know other than that he consistently told that story.

Q. Yes. There are plausible elements and there are implausible elements, is that right?

A. In any eyewitness testimony, there will be elements that are more plausible than others. I think a fair amount of the Eichmann testimony is plausible. Again, it would depend on when he is reacting to particular documents they present, sometimes he takes a very defensive position, and in other areas he is very self-incriminating and very forthcoming.

Q. Hannah Ahrendt in her book "The Banality of Evil" I think

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refers to him as being almost complacent and compliant and anxious to please?

A. I do not agree with her characterisation there.

Q. You do not agree with that?

A. No. He is quite vigorous in defending himself in many areas.

Q. I had the dubious fortune some time ago of coming into possession of his personal copy of Rudolf Höss' memoirs. I will pass to you, if I may?

MR RAMPTON: May I enquire whether this is, I do not know, this is an entirely open enquiry, whether this is part of Mr Irving's discovery?

MR IRVING: It was in my box called "Judenfrage" but if you wish ----

MR JUSTICE GRAY: This is the original you are handing up, is it?

MR IRVING: This is a photocopy of it which I have retained, my Lord.

MR JUSTICE GRAY: A photocopy of the version you discovered or were given?

MR IRVING: That is correct, my Lord. It is only interesting in one very minor respect.

MR JUSTICE GRAY: Yes, that is what I thought.

MR IRVING: Pages 13 and 14 of your Lordship's little bundle which I gave your Lordship this morning. This is, of course, the published edition of Höss' memoirs which you

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are probably familiar with?

A. Yes.

Q. Yes. The handwriting on that has been identified as the handwriting of Adolf Eichmann, as is evident also from the internal evidence of the comments that he makes. The original is in the possession of a friend of mine in Germany. He bought it in a store.

A. OK. I am, of course, not an handwriting expert.

MR JUSTICE GRAY: Mr Rampton, you are happy with this, are you?

A. And so I cannot confirm or deny.

MR RAMPTON: I have never seen it before. I do not have a translation.

MR IRVING: I just wish to refer to page 14.

MR RAMPTON: But what is puzzling me about this is if this is a selective use of the document, it may be that there are a considerable number of other comments by Eichmann of which Mr Irving is aware on these memoirs which we ought to see because they are relevant.

MR IRVING: I would be very happy to make available a copy to the Defence and I will leave this copy with them overnight and they can make a copy if they wish.

MR JUSTICE GRAY: That is fair. I think Mr Rampton is happy you should make the point that you make on these two pages.

MR IRVING: I just wish to put this to the witness. I just draw your attention, witness, to page handwritten 14

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which is page 122 of the book.

A. 122.

MR JUSTICE GRAY: Can you give us the context, Mr Irving?

MR IRVING: The killing of the Russian prisoners in 1941 I think he is talking about. This is by Rudolf Höss.

MR JUSTICE GRAY: And he had been ordered to carry it out, is that right? He, Höss, had ----

MR IRVING: "It was ordered that I had to carry it out", writes Höss, "but I have to say openly that this gassing had a calming effect on me, as in the near future we had to begin with the mass destruction of the Jews too, and neither Eichmann nor I was clear about how we were to deal with these masses", is that roughly the sense of that final sentence on page ----

A. Roughly, yes.

Q. And underneath it in his appalling handwriting Adolf Eichmann has written -- can you read the words: "Ich war gar nicht zuständig"?

A. Yes.

Q. What does that mean?

A. I was not at all competent, this was not at all my jurisdiction.

Q. And in the margin next to the footnote he was written just one word "falsch"?

A. Correct.

Q. In other words, Eichmann, who ought to have known, if

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I can use one of the phrases Mr Rampton likes, disputes the version given by Rudolf Höss. In private, he does not know that David Irving is going to come into possession of that years later, so can we assume therefore that there is some conflict in the evidence that Höss writes?

A. Yes. This is the major case where Eichmann contests vigorously the evidence the Israelis bring to him and present this before him. For instance, in the handwritten notes to his attorney, he says: "Höss is the arch liar. I have nothing to do with Höss, with his death camp or his gas chambers". That is in Eichmann's handwriting and Servatius's' notes. He disputes having anything to do with Höss's gas chambers. He does not deny the existence of gas chambers but confirms Auschwitz, but he says that was not my thing.

MR JUSTICE GRAY: The falsehood is his own involvement, Eichmann's own involvement.

A. Yes. He is saying that Höss is laying responsibility on him for playing a part in the selection of the gas chamber site, and the selection of the type of gas at Auschwitz, and in this regard I think Eichmann is correct and that Höss is utterly wrong.

MR JUSTICE GRAY: That is the means, not the end, in other words.

MR IRVING: You use the interesting phrase, of course, "Höss's

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gas chambers" and that Eichmann ----

A. This is Eichmann's phrase; what I quoted to you from memory is what Eichmann wrote to Servatius's in the Servatius's papers.

Q. Servatius's was his lawyer in Israel?

A. Yes.

Q. Is there any hint there, therefore, that people like Höss and the other concentration camp commandants were loose canons, and that they were doing things their own way without -- ?

A. I do not think that there is a hint of that at all. The hint is that Höss is trying to shift blame elsewhere and that Höss has a very bad memory.

Q. Or a conveniently bad memory perhaps?

A. Well, Höss has many self-incriminating things. Where Höss's testimony is particularly unreliable is anything related to dating.

Q. Dating and numbers?

A. Numbers as well, and to, in this issue certainly, Eichmann's role in all of this.

Q. Is it not correct that Höss, in fact, fluctuates between 2.8 million and 1 million, and then back to 2.7 million, as late as March 1947? Before his execution, he is back to 2.7 million again killed in Auschwitz.

A. I do not remember the exact figures but I believe he does give fluctuating figures.

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Q. Can any kind of credence be attached to figures like that when they vary by such enormous amounts?

A. This would be a case where you would look at the testimony and say that, when Höss is talking about dates and figures, one would not use it as reliable. When he is talking about experiences that he recalls with great vividness, one would say this is more likely to be something that one at least must look at, can we corroborate this? It would not mean that everything Höss says is wrong, but it would mean that, in the areas of dating and where he is trying to share responsibilities with others, one must use it with great caution.

MR JUSTICE GRAY: You do not know this, Professor Browning. We looked at the 2.8 million figure in some detail and it is quite clear that that is actually not his own account but it is what he has been told by others.

MR IRVING: It did actually creep up again, the 2.8 just before he was hanged. He appeared to be readily flexible and this is what I am getting at; I suppose "suggestible" is what I am aiming at, the word that these witnesses -- you yourself have said that you had to pick and choose what they wrote, effectively?

A. You had to make judgements about it. "Pick and choose" sounds as if one was picking and choosing for my convenience rather than my ability to explain in terms of ----

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Q. We will come to that in a minute, Professor Browning, when we come to Gerstein.

A. We will get there but, in terms of ability to bring reasons as to why you think parts of it are more reliable than others.

Q. Yes. Is there any reason why, when somebody is in captivity on trial for one's life, one might write things, either deliberately or inadvertently, that were not true, do you think?

A. This is a possibility but, again, one looks at it and judges. If one is already sentenced to be hanged and there is, in a sense, nothing further they can threaten you with, then wonders one why would one go through the business of writing out a long handwritten document.

Q. Have you not read large numbers of interrogations and pre-trial interrogations yourself, where you have marvelled at some of the statements that these people have made?

A. Can you give me a context?

Q. For example, self-incriminating statements which, as you said in the case of Eichmann, nobody knew what he was admitting there. Have you never wondered why people would make these statements?

A. I think in cases I have used he is telling the truth. I think he is relating----

Q. Obviously. Otherwise you would not have used them. But does it not occur to you that sometimes people make

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astonishing statements, self-incriminatory statements? The most extraordinary examples are, for example, in the Soviet show trials. It is a psychological problem. I am just trying to assail the credibility of eyewitness evidence basically. That is what I am getting at.

A. Certainly in Soviet trials where part of the protocol, in a sense, is to have a signed statement at the end. I would not put great weight on something collected in 1937 and 38 in which a witness said, "Oh yes, I was part of the Trotskyite conspiracy", or whatever.

Q. Or American agent. Do not the same kind of duresses prevail when you are in a cell in a bleak prison in Nuremberg and the Americans come to you and say, "Well, we can guarantee you will not get the death sentence if you sign this affidavit which we have taken from your testimony?"

A. I would not accept that Americans came and said, "Sign this or we are going to kill you".

Q. Are you familiar with the case of Dr Friedrich Gauss, who was Ribbentrop's legal adviser?

A. No, I am not.

Q. Are you familiar with Dr Robert Kempner, who said, "If you do not sign this we are going to turn you over to the Russians"?

A. No, I am not familiar with that.

Q. Obviously I cannot develop that particular line. If you

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are not familiar with that case I cannot develop it. In later trials in Germany we have another problem, do we not, and this is the passage of years? 20 or 30 years pass. You have referenced in your own very interesting expert report a number of German war crimes trials conducted quite properly by the German government in the 1960s and even in the 1970s?

A. Yes.

Q. How reliable is that kind of evidence being given by Germans who have been taken out of their little bedsits somewhere in Ingoldstadt or somewhere and they find themselves on trial, they are going to be locked away for 20 years, and they are being asked to remember something that happened 30 years before?

A. I think that much of it is very reliable. They did not have to give testimony. They had counsel, they did not have to, under German law, give self-incriminating testimony. They could remained silent.

Q. how many did remain silent?

A. Virtually none. A few. The document that we see in the Chelmno gas vans, the villager who signs that refused to talk and nothing happened to him. He is one who did not get brought to trial.

Q. So the man who signed the famous memorandum about the 97,000 killed, is this the document you are referring to?

A. This is the document and this is the case where someone

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refusing to talk ----

Q. Nothing happened to him?

A. They said, we have not enough evidence to contest that he contributed in a causal way to the killing, even if he knew of it, and therefore we have no grounds. In fact, there was a case where the one who did not talk did much better than his colleagues in the motor pool who did talk, incriminated themselves and were tried.

MR JUSTICE GRAY: Mr Irving, I do not want to interrupt you unduly. I am not finding this terribly helpful because we all know that eyewitness evidence has to be looked at very carefully. Everyone agrees on that.

MR IRVING: If you think I have laboured the point too strongly then I shall not bring it up again.

MR JUSTICE GRAY: It is not really that, but illusive references which are not really followed up do not help me very much, besides which it appears to me we are straying perhaps a little bit from what I think is the intended structure of your cross-examination, which really goes to the case for saying that Hitler knew about the extermination. I am not keeping you to any tramlines.

MR IRVING: I was trying to undermine the quality of his sources by referring to the fact that a very large number of the sources which he refers to in his report in the footnotes appear to be ----

MR JUSTICE GRAY: Not in relation to Hitler's knowledge. I do

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not think eyewitnesses come into that at all, do they?

MR IRVING: It is certainly in connection with the numbers and I was just about to get on to the 97,000 figure again, when your Lordship intervened.

MR JUSTICE GRAY: Yes. Develop that, but can you help me by giving me a little bit more information about which figure you are talking about, given by whom, in what context?

MR IRVING: This is one of two letters. One is the Greiser letter of May 1st 1942, Greiser to Himmler. Are you familiar with that document?

A. Yes.

MR RAMPTON: Page 38 of Professor Browning's report, my Lord.

MR JUSTICE GRAY: Thank you.

MR IRVING: In that letter Greiser says that we shall have within, I believe, two to three months killed 100,000 effectively. That is what he is saying, is he not?

A. Yes.

Q. Has he already started by then?

A. Yes. Chelmno has opened in early December 1941.

Q. Does he actually refer to Chelmno in that document?

A. He does not refer to Chelmno in that document.

Q. We do not know whether he is actually referring to the document or actually to Chelmno, and whether even one of those 100,000 has died at that time or not.

A. He does not say explicitly but Chelmno is the operating death camp in the region to which he is referring, the

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Warthegau.

Q. There is a reasonable inference?

A. Yes.

MR JUSTICE GRAY: Do not assume too much. You have been, as you say, for 34 years on this topic.

MR IRVING: Not on the Holocaust.

MR JUSTICE GRAY: I appreciate that, but you know what I mean. I have had rather less long. So can you just help me who Greiser was?

A. Greiser is the head of----

MR IRVING: The Gauleiter of the Warthegau.

A. Gauleiter of the Warthegau. Lodz and Chelmno are located in the Warthegau.

MR JUSTICE GRAY: Thank you.

MR IRVING: The second document is the one -- you must help me on this -- with the 97,000 figure in it?

A. I believe it is June 6th 1942.

MR RAMPTON: June 5th?

A. June 5th.

MR IRVING: 1942, correct.

MR RAMPTON: Perhaps in this case we should maybe get the document.

MR IRVING: I agree. There are two rather odd features about the document I want to draw your Lordship's attention to.

MR RAMPTON: It is in the second volume.

MR JUSTICE GRAY: I hope it is in J or L.

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MR RAMPTON: I think it is in the main bundle now.

MR JUSTICE GRAY: If Greiser's letter is there too, then I would quite like a reference to that at the same time.

MR IRVING: Do you have the actual document in front of you?

MR JUSTICE GRAY: Just a moment. Let us catch up..

A. No, I do not.

MR RAMPTON: One starts at page 92 of the new Browning file which is Greiser's letter.

MR JUSTICE GRAY: You tell me about a new Browning file. I feel I am the last to know about it.

MR RAMPTON: Tab 7, I am sorry.

MR IRVING: My Lord, meanwhile I can tell you what I am aiming at here.

MR JUSTICE GRAY: Let us pause a little, Mr Irving. You have to be patient with us.

MR RAMPTON: Then the motor pool letter, the 97,000, is on the following page, I hope, 93 to 97.

MR JUSTICE GRAY: I think I may have misunderstood. Are we in tab 7 of L1.

MR RAMPTON: Tab 7 of L1.

MR JUSTICE GRAY: Page 97.

MR RAMPTON: Starting at page 92, that is Greiser to Himmler of 1st May in a printed form. We have not got a copy of the original.

MR JUSTICE GRAY: Yes. And the other one, Mr Rampton?

MR RAMPTON: Then the very next page, 93, is the 97,000 letter

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of 5th June 1942.

MR JUSTICE GRAY: Thank you.

MR IRVING: I am just going to wave one little flag about the document's oddities. This is the document containing the 97,000 figure, correct?

A. Correct.

Q. Do you see at the top it says "Einzigste Ausfertigung" in German?

A. Yes.

Q. Have you ever seen that designation on a document anywhere else in your entire archival experience?

A. I do not recall seeing it.

Q. Yes. "Einzigste Ausfertigung" which means the "onlyest" copy.

A. Yes, the motor pool sergeants were not terribly literate.

Q. I take that point. Can you see that the document begins with the sentence: "Beispielsweise...", for example? The very first sentence in the document.

A. Yes, it says, "... seit December", yes.

MR JUSTICE GRAY: I am sorry, I have not got that. Where are you?

MR IRVING: In the very first sentence of the document, my Lord.

MR JUSTICE GRAY: "Seit December".

MR IRVING: The one with 97,000 figure in it.

MR JUSTICE GRAY: Since December.

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MR IRVING: No. The word I am looking at is "Beispielsweise". It is a letter beginning with the phrase, for example, "Beispielsweise", it is just lifted out of the middle of nowhere. Have you ever received a letter from somebody beginning with the word "Beispielsweise", Professor Browning?

A. No.

Q. Or "for example"?

A. But I think to have to realise Mr Schuss was not a college graduate, that these are people who are working in the motor pool in Berlin, and that the tone, as I see it, is someone who is trying to emulate what he thinks is proper bureaucratic German and he in fact is someone is not a bureaucrat, he is a mechanic.

Q. He was not stupid because, as you say, he was the only one who was not punished in this entire horrible affair.

A. You have to remember that "Beispielweise" comes after the subject, which is they are talking about technical changes.

Q. Yes.

A. I presume that this is a result of a conversation people have had, there has been a meeting.

Q. Yes.

A. And someone has said, write it up.

Q. OK.

A. We get a very ----

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Q. Can you do a rough calculation of how many people were being killed per van per day?

MR JUSTICE GRAY: Just pause, Mr Irving. If I may say so, you must just let me absorb the points you are making.

MR IRVING: I am just planting suspicion.

MR JUSTICE GRAY: You are casting doubt on this, partly because it has "Einzigste Ausfertigung" on the top and I understand that, but I am not sure I am really following your point on "Beispielsweise".

MR IRVING: It is an unusual turn of phrase to start a letter with, my Lord.

MR JUSTICE GRAY: Why is it unusual? He is picking three trucks, is he not, to give an example of the sort of numbers that are being processed if that is the right word, in the special trucks.

MR IRVING: I agree, my Lord, but you would normally expect that in the second paragraph of a letter. In the first paragraph he says, well, we are going to have troubles doing this, that and the other, troubles with the trucks, the exhaust hoses are getting corroded and all the rest of it, for example, but in fact his letter begins with the word "for example". This is the oddity about it. But I can do no more than ----

MR JUSTICE GRAY: You rely on that as an indication that this is not an authentic document?

MR IRVING: I am trying to plant a seed of suspicion in your

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Lordship's mind, that is all.

MR JUSTICE GRAY: You are not succeeding at the moment because I would have thought, if you are trying to create a document that is going to deceive anybody, you would not do what you say is something obviously inappropriate, which is to refer to an example in the first paragraph.

MR IRVING: It would be improper for me to do anything else. Mr Rampton will object if I do anything else because I have already stated that I fully accept that this document refers to the homicide of large numbers of human beings in gas vans.

MR JUSTICE GRAY: Where are we going?

MR IRVING: We are going to look at the number, my Lord, the 97,000.

MR JUSTICE GRAY: So you accept this is an authentic document?

MR IRVING: For the purposes of this morning, yes.

MR RAMPTON: I do have to know sooner or later, and so does your Lordship, whether Mr Irving accepts for the purposes of this trial that this is an authentic document. If it is a forgery, we need to know why he says it is a forgery.

MR JUSTICE GRAY: You do not say it is a forgery?

MR IRVING: No.

MR JUSTICE GRAY: Then we can forget about Beispielsweise, can we not?

MR IRVING: But it also helps to address the court's attention to the fact whether this witness had competently

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questioned the integrity of the documents we are confronted with.

MR JUSTICE GRAY: It is not a valid criticism of him if you do not question it.

MR IRVING: I personally would question it but not for the purposes of this morning's hearing. Shall we just proceed to the number?

MR JUSTICE GRAY: Let us do the numbers. 97,000 -- what is wrong with that?

MR IRVING: I am sorry about that detour. 97,000 people killed in three vans in what space of time?

A. From December to June, this would be six months, by my calculation.

Q. Six months?

A. Yes.

Q. Are these regular German army diesel trucks, five ton trucks or something?

A. They refer to two and then a third, and I think they had -- we do not know the capacity of two of them because they were not either the Opal or the Saurer trucks. They were apparently converted Renault. Then they brought in a Saurer truck, which is the biggest model and could carry I think 50 to 80 people. The Opal was 30 to 50. We do not know the capacity of the actual two trucks that were----

Q. From the descriptions we have, it did not actually do it

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on the spot. They were loaded aboard, the victims, and they were driven off into the country side for a couple of hours and then they were gassed on the way?

A. No. As best we can tell they loaded them, gassed them there, or for a while ran the engines, and then drove them off.

Q. Yes.

A. So it was not a long way from Chelmno to the forest. I think it is two kilometres or 3 kilometres.

Q. I have read 20 kilometres.

A. That is not correct at all. I have driven it myself. It is not far, and one would have to do a considerable amount of the time needed to kill the people, one would have to remain in the courtyard unless you wanted to run the engines for a prolonged period after you arrived in the forest camp.

Q. Have you ever calculated the quantities of gasoline or petrol that would be needed for these kind of trips?

A. Not knowing the fuel consumption of the various truck models, no, I have not made a calculation.

Q. Does it strike you as being a very economical way of killing people?

A. I think this camp was probably very inexpensive to run in comparison to what they were taking in, property and getting in labour from the Jews in Lodz. My guess is that this was an infinitesimally small part of their budget.

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Q. If they had just the three trucks and this length of time to do it in, and they had the problem of persuading the people to get into the truck, and loading them up, driving off, waiting for the gas to have its effect, then unloading them at the other end and cleaning up the mess so that the next cargo did not have any suspicions, there must have been quite a substantial turn around time?

A. The trucks made return trips each day. In fact, we know with just one truck at the Semlin camp, it took about two months, with just one trip a day and occasionally two, to gas the 7,000 people there. So, with three trucks operating on a shorter run, they did not have to drive all the way through Belgrade to the far side, which is what happened in Semlin. I did the calculations for Semlin.

Q. You have done the calculations?

A. Yes. I have not done them for this.

Q. Does the 97,000 not strike you as being wrong by a factor of two or three?

A. Absolutely not. It does not strike me as wrong at all.

Q. It depends strictly on what the capacity of the trucks would have been, what the turn around time was, whether they were really efficient, whether they worked 24 hours a day and whether the trucks had any down time.

A. From the witness reports the trucks made numerous trips each day, the drivers traded off so that they in fact operated continually during the day.

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Q. Around the clock 24 hours a day?

A. Not 24 hours, through the day.

Q. Yes.

MR JUSTICE GRAY: It is pretty distasteful, but may I ask this question? How many people were there in a gas van when they were being gassed? How many people could be accommodated?

A. We do not know for Chelmno because it is a different truck. There is a Saurer truck, one Saurer truck was at Chelmno. That is the one that exploded. Then they had two converted Renault French military trucks that they turned into gas vans, so we do not have a knowledge there. The small truck that they produced, the Opal Blitz, was the smallest. The Saurer could carry 50 to 80 people, the Opal Blitz was 30 to 50. So, even if the Renault was smaller than the Opal, which probably as a military truck it was larger, would be in between the two.

Q. That is the order of magnitude?

A. Yes.

MR IRVING: Were there more than three of these ominous trucks of death going around the Eastern Front do you think? Did they go from location to location?

A. Some of them were distributed to each of the Einsatzgruppen so there were some operating in Riga, some in Minsk and south, so that they were a few. We know, for instance, that Minsk, I do not have the document, but

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I think they had 3 or 4 trucks and they asked for more. So we know that they had small fleets of these trucks with different Einsatzgruppen.

Q. Was this the principal means of killing at that time?

A. No. It was a very minor part of the Einsatzgruppen. The vast bulk of the killing in the East was by shooting. The gas vans attached to the Einsatzgruppen were a very minor part of their killing operations.

Q. Can you draw any conclusions from the fact that they used different methods of killing people, a lack of system?

A. I think we can find a kind of chronological sequence. They start with shooting. The next thing implemented is the gas vans starting at Chelmno and Semlin. Then they move to the fairly primitive gas chambers, which is the gas chambers that Operation Reinhardt and the converted peasant bunkers at Auschwitz. Then they move to the design construction. Once they have experience one can go back and say, how would you do this if you were creating something modern? So I do not find anything haphazard and confusing. I find it quite a logical sequence in which they add new methods of killing at the same time as the old methods continue.

Q. Would you not agree that the lack of preparedness at the time Barbarossa began on June 22nd 1941 is in itself an indication that they did not go into Russia with the intention of carrying out systematic liquidations on a

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large scale?

A. That has been my argument. We get evidence of preparations at the death camps coming in the fall of 41, which is when I have argued, partly because of that, that one then concludes that they have now reached the point where they want a systematic killing of the Jews of Europe.

Q. Yes. My Lord, I wanted to take this witness briefly on to the table talk document which your Lordship may remember, October 25th 1941.

MR JUSTICE GRAY: I am sure I will when you tell me what it is. Is that the Himmler Hitler meeting?

MR IRVING: It is the ugly rumours one, good thing that the rumour goes ahead of us.

MR JUSTICE GRAY: Let us dig it out.

MR IRVING: I put in my clip, my Lord, of documents I gave to you.

MR JUSTICE GRAY: If it is somewhere else perhaps we will go to where it is already.

MR RAMPTON: It is in part 1 of Longerich.

MR JUSTICE GRAY: I was wondering about the actual document.

MR IRVING: We will find it most neatly on page 25 of the clip I gave you, my Lord, in the actual original Martin Bormann version.

A. The problem is that I do not have the document.

MR IRVING: It is the clip that I gave you this morning,

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Professor.

MR JUSTICE GRAY: Page 25.

MR RAMPTON: Page 59 of Longerich 1, paragraph 16.4. It is translated and the relevant part of the German is given at the footnote 149.

MR IRVING: Professor, do you have the document in front of you?

MR JUSTICE GRAY: Just pause a moment, Mr Irving.

MR IRVING: Page 25.

A. Yes.

MR JUSTICE GRAY: Yes.

MR IRVING: Professor, in your absence, before you arrived in the United Kingdom, I was taking stick for having wrongly translated two or three words in the second paragraph of that document.

A. Yes.

Q. The translation which I relied upon was the Weidenfeld edition of Hitler's table talk.

A. Yes.

Q. I will read out most of the paragraph. They are talking about the Jews. They are going to have to disappear from Europe. The Weidenfeld translation continues: "That race of criminals has on its conscience the 2 million dead of the First World War -- this is Adolf Hitler allegedly speaking -- and now already hundreds of thousands more. Let nobody tell me that all the same we cannot park them

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in the marshy parts of Russia. Who is worrying about our troops? It is not a bad idea by the way that public rumour attributes to us a plan to exterminate the Jews." I will stop there. That is the translation of the phrase "Es ist gut, wenn uns der Schrecken vorangeht".

A. Yes.

Q. I would ask you how would you translate the phrase, "it is good if wenn uns der Schrecken vorangeht"?

A. It is good if the terror precedes us that we are exterminating the Jews.

Q. The terror?

A. The Schrecken, the fear of the terror. I certainly would not have translated it as "rumours".

Q. You would not translate it as "public rumours"? So they have it wrong and I was wrong, criminally wrong, perversely wrong to have adopted the Weidenfeld----

MR JUSTICE GRAY: That is for me, not for the witness.

MR IRVING: Professor, are you familiar with a historian by the name of Philip Burrin?

A. Philip Burrin, yes.

Q. Yes. Is he a notable historian? He is not an extremist in some way, is he? Is he a dependable historian? His works are published?

A. He is an historian of accepted reputation.

Q. Are you familiar with a book that this historian wrote

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called "Hitler and the Jews, the genesis of the Holocaust".

A. Yes.

Q. Please turn to page 17 of your bundle of documents that I gave you and look at page 145? Would you say that in the second half of that paragraph this historian has done his own translation of the original German? Perhaps I ought to draw your attention, first of all, to the end note 47, which you will find on page 18 of my bundle.

MR JUSTICE GRAY: How do you know he did his own translation?

MR IRVING: That is what I am just referring to.

MR JUSTICE GRAY: How does that prove that?.

A. He wrote the book in French and someone else translated it. Burrin's original book is in French. He is a French speaking Swiss historian.

MR IRVING: He has not used the Weidenfeld translation from what you can see.

MR JUSTICE GRAY: That is obvious.

A. He has not listed his Monologe.

MR IRVING: Is that the title of the German edition of the book, Hitler's table talk, Monologe im Führer...

A. Yes, but what it looks to me is that his translator got lazy and, instead of translating Monologe, in fact grabbed the Weidenfeld and borrowed an English translation from an earlier edition and goofed it entirely. Burrin has been betrayed by his translator. That is how I would look at

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this.

Q. Will you take it from me that this Weidenfeld edition, sad to say, only went through one edition and there were no other editions than this? If he had had this edition before him, he would have used use phrase "public rumour".

A. I am in possession of a paper back that presumably was sold in great quantities that has exactly the Weidenfeld translation, so it is not a scarce book to get.

Q. They did not change this wording then? They did not use the word ominous reputation, which is the wording that has been used by Philip Burrin?

A. I am afraid I am not following you right now.

MR JUSTICE GRAY: I think this is such an open question that it is not going to get you anywhere really. There is no point in my not saying that. I see the point you are driving at but it is too speculative.

MR IRVING: My point, my Lord, is quite clearly that, if this historian uses the phrase "ominous reputation", which is arguably very close to the translation which is adopted both by myself and Weidenfeld translation, then it would be perverse to call me perverse for having adopted a perverse ----

MR JUSTICE GRAY: No. I think the criticism is more focused really, that you saw the German text, saw the word "Schrecken", but were nevertheless content to use the

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word "rumour" because it was in Weidenfeld when "Schrecken" does not mean "rumour". That I think is the point.

MR IRVING: So, my Lord, does this translator.

MR JUSTICE GRAY: Yes, I follow that. In a sense, this is beside the point.

A. One have would it to ----

MR JUSTICE GRAY: That is my feeling. I have the point you seek to make. I have told you what I think about it.

MR IRVING: The point I am seeking to make is that he is not a Holocaust denier. He is not perverse. Others also use a milder version of it than the outright terror, which is possible translation of "Schrecken" but not the only one.

A. One way to deal with it is to get the Burrin original and see what he says in French, because this is what would reflect what he was thinking, and then we could decide whether Burrin, as a historian or a historically ignorant translator, using a different version to save himself the time from a responsible translation, is at fault here.

Q. While you have the bundle in front of you, we can now dispose of the bundle in a few minutes, page 32 of the bundle, my Lord, I am just using this witness in order to introduce a document.

MR JUSTICE GRAY: You are doing it in exactly an appropriate way, as I say.

MR IRVING: Page 32 and page 33: Are you familiar with the

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Harvard University? Of course you are.

A. Yes.

Q. Are you familiar with the fact that their library at Harvard University is called the Widener library?

A. Yes.

Q. Does this appear to be a list of books which the library has in its card file by an author called David Irving?

A. Yes.

Q. And do there appear to be 47 books by that author in the Harvard University library?

A. 47 entries. Some of them are duplicate.

Q. Yes. In other words, 47 copies of my books are in Harvard University Library?

A. Yes.

Q. Is that a commendable total, would you say?

A. It is a large number.

Q. How many books by Professor Browning are there in the Harvard University Library? Have you any estimate?

A. I do not know if they have any of mine!

MR JUSTICE GRAY: Mr Irving, joking apart, what I get out of this is that you are thought by Harvard University or the Wagner Library to be the sort of author of whose many books they have a large number in stock. I think that is a fair point for you to make.

MR IRVING: Taken in conjunction with one of the earlier paragraphs of Professor Evans' expert report, my Lord --

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I am sure your Lordship will remember it -- Professor Evans went to the British Library and found that my book "Hitler's War" was kept on the pornographic and restricted list. Apparently, it is not the case in respected institutions in the United States.

MR JUSTICE GRAY: If Professor Evans makes points like that, you are entitled to make this sort of point in reply.

A. I would just add that Harvard University tries to have a complete list so they will buy everything. It does not reflect an endorsement of the authors by virtue of the fact they have them available in the library.

MR JUSTICE GRAY: No, of course.

MR IRVING: Would you turn to page 34 of that bundle? These are just odds and ends and this is the appropriate way to use them, I think. It is the last page. My Lord, this is the German original and also I have translated it into English for your Lordship.

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

MR IRVING: It is German police decodes. It is Traffic of November 13th 1941, is that correct? Intercepted and decoded a month later roughly. There are two radio messages here, is that correct?

A. Item 10 and item 32, yes.

Q. Item 10 and 32. Would you agree that item 10 appears to be a radio message sent from the SS Chief Medical Officer in Riga to the firm of Tesch and Stabenow in Hamburg?

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A. I do not see the Riga. I see radio message of the SS at Hamburg.

Q. The last line says: "Signed, Senior Medical Officer"?

A. I was looking at the top.

Q. Would you agree this is from the Senior Medical Officer attached to the Chief SS Officer in Riga and it is going to the firm of Tesch and Stabenow in Hamburg?

A. Via the Hamburg SS, yes.

MR JUSTICE GRAY: Mr Irving, sorry, can I just ask you this? It is called a decode. Is this is an intercept?

MR IRVING: This is a British intercept.

MR JUSTICE GRAY: A Bletchley intercept?

MR IRVING: From Bletchley Park. One of this myriad of hundreds of thousands of messages, but it is typical of the kind of information that is there waiting to be fished out of the Public Record Office. Would you agree that this shows a request for information on which Zyklon was dispatched for the use of a man called Dr Tesch?

A. Yes.

Q. Do you know who Tesch and Stabenow were?

A. They are people involved -- no, I do not know for sure. I will not say. I mean, I have heard their names.

Q. Is it right to say that they are the firm in Hamburg which had the monopoly of supplies of Zyklon and other fumigation agents east of the River Elbe?

A. I remember the names in connection with the production of

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Zyklon-B. I could not testify that they were in Hamburg or had a monopoly.

Q. And that this message is referring to dispatch, not only of Zyklon, but also substances referred to as T-Gas, Ethyl, Triton?

A. They are referring to three other products. Whether they are gas or not, we do not know.

Q. Well, we do.

A. I do not know.

Q. Would you accept they are other fumigation products?

A. I will accept that they are referring to three products. I do not see anything that says what their purpose is.

Q. Yes, and the message also shows that Dr Tesch who is doing something in Riga connected with training?

A. Obviously, they did not get the complete message, but they do have the word "training" in Riga, at least as part of a garbled part of the intercept.

Q. So that the inference to be drawn from that telegram is that people were being trained in the use of fumigation agents, both lethal and non-lethal?

A. Since I do not know what T-Gas, Athylo-D and Trito are, I can only say that there are three products in addition to Zyklon being dispatched.

Q. Will you accept that T-Gas is a substance which is nine parts of ethylene oxide to one part of carbon dioxide? It is one of the proprietary fumigation agents that the

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German Army used?

A. Well, I have no ground to accept or dispute. If you want to present that to the court or whatever, I cannot comment on that because I simply do not know.

Q. And the other items were, in fact, proprietary fumigation agents?

MR JUSTICE GRAY: Professor Browning, does this decode tell you anything about whether it was a lethal or a non-lethal use of these gases, assuming they were gasses or fumigation agents?

A. They say nothing to that regard and I do not know of any lethal gassings in Riga, except for the gas vans which gassed with carbon monoxide.

MR IRVING: I just need one further piece of evidence. Have you read the Tesch trial at all, the trial of Dr Bruno Tesch by the British?

A. No.

Q. You have not read that?

A. No.

Q. But the word "training" indicates the people were being trained in the use of fumigation agents or could be both?

A. They were engaged in the training of something.

Q. Yes. I am going to go through the remaining pages of your report. We have started at I think round about page 24.

MR JUSTICE GRAY: Before you go further, Mr Irving, shall we just decide what should be the home for this? I will be

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guided by the Defendants, Mr Rampton.

MR RAMPTON: I am so sorry.

MR JUSTICE GRAY: Do you have any suggestions about where this clip should go?

MR RAMPTON: My Lord ----

MR IRVING: L, I think.

MR RAMPTON: --- what we will do, if your Lordship will just put it all at the back of L for the moment, we will take out the ones which are chronological.

MR JUSTICE GRAY: Yes. Thank you very much.

MR IRVING: My Lord, so you have an overview, I have now finished the general part and what may seem to your Lordship rather vague and eccentric (as the opposite of concentric) questioning. We are now focusing just on the report. I think I will be finishing this half way through the afternoon.

MR JUSTICE GRAY: Do not hurry at all. My problem was simply you were assuming too much knowledge on my part.

MR IRVING: I was hoping to hit a few nails in while this witness was here.

MR JUSTICE GRAY: Of course. You are perfectly entitled to do that.

MR IRVING: And we will do the same with Professor Longerich when he comes. (To the witness): Paragraph 4.4.1, which is on page 24 of your report, Professor?

A. Yes.

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Q. Once again, simply stated, I do not deny that these shootings occurred and these killings occurred. All I am looking at here are two specific matters. First of all, the scale, and, secondly, the quality of the evidence that is available to us. That is what these questions are all going to. You say: "The commanders in the field were explicitly told to report extensively" -- this is your middle sentence -- "as both Hitler and Himmler were to be kept well informed." Now, did you have a specific reason for including Hitler in that sentence, or what I am asking for is what is the proof that Hitler had asked to be kept well informed?

A. The document that we cited of August 1st 1941, I do not say Hitler asked, I said the document there said Hitler was to receive, you know, a regular supply of reports, the current reports.

Q. But this paragraph refers only to the systematic mass murder, does it not? It does not refer to the Einsatzgruppen's other operations?

A. If you want to know the work of the Einsatzgruppen and one major piece of the work of the Einsatzgruppen was the killings.

Q. But I do not want to repeat the discussion we had about that document yesterday, but we concluded that the document was looking for visual materials?

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A. To supplement, it was following on the already existing policy of handing on these reports and they wanted to fatten them.

Q. I guess what I am asking really is that the only document you rely on when you say that both Hitler and Himmler were to be kept informed?

A. That is the one for Hitler, I am not ----

Q. I am not interested in Himmler. We have accepted that Himmler needed to be kept informed.

MR JUSTICE GRAY: So solely based on the 1st August 1941?

A. That is the documentary evidence we have, yes.

MR IRVING: Thank you.

A. In terms of a wider thing, of course, Heydrich then summarised these, and that we have the monthly summaries that are spread out and copied as many as 100 for report, that are distributed to various Ministries, and the Foreign Office report will be seen by 30 or 40 people. So there does seem to be a great eagerness to get the word out. This is not something within the government that these reports are terribly shielded.

Q. You are familiar with Hitler's order on secrecy, are you not, of January 1940, the need-to-know order, that Hitler issued the order saying that only those were to be told of secret operations or events ----

A. I have seen reference to it. I do not believe I have read it myself, but I have seen reference to it.

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Q. So that would have tended to keep information compartmentalised, would it not?

A. These always listed who was to receive, so there was -- it was not circulated on the street corner. They had a list of who was authorised to receive it.

Q. But you say now in paragraph 4.4.2, the next paragraph: "Such a thorough documentation does not exist concerning the fate of the Jews from the rest of Europe". In other words, we are reliant on post-war materials, eyewitness accounts, inferences, are we?

A. We are reliant on that systematic documentation in the sense we do not have a complete run of reports like we have of Einsatzgruppen. We have some documents that have survive here, some there. We are reliant on less complete documentation, though some pockets of documentation that are very suggestive and, in addition, post-war testimony as well. Documentation, for instance, concerning the deportation operations is fairly rich in some countries.

Q. But you are referring to the railroad information?

A. Well, I say "concerning the fate of the Jews from the rest of Europe", we have a mixed bag of documentation, rather than a fairly rich and steady run. I mean, Einsatzgruppen reports, to have a complete series, it is fairly rare for an historian.

Q. I appreciate that.

A. We do not have that rich ----

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Q. But if you take one specific matter, for example, the deportation of the Jews from France, is it right to say that there is a broad measure of disagreement on what the total number involved was, ranging from 25,000 at one end of the scale (which I think Pierre Vidal Naquet supports) right up to the high 200,000s?

A. Of how many in France or how many deported?

Q. How many Jews were deported from France?

A. I think most historians accept the figure of around 75,000. I have not been aware of a huge difference because we have references to most of the trains and when they left, and we can add up the trains. So I did not, I do not think -- it is not my -- I am not aware that there is a vast discrepancy of interpretation concerning the number of Jews deported from France.

Q. Why would Himmler have discussed with Hitler the deportation of 200,000 or 300,000 Jews from France when that figure was not in France at that time?

A. In mainland France there is roughly about 300,000 Jews.

Q. Yes.

A. The number in North Africa, I have no idea, but it is ----

Q. This is a discussion on 10th December 1942. Do you remember what happened one month before that?

A. Well, the Germans were pouring troops into Tunisia.

Q. And we had seized control of most of French North West Africa, had we not, so that the Germans could not have

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done anything with the Jews in that part of the world, so those figures could not have been included, could they?

A. Not in the 2 or 300,000, but if you are working -- the question is why -- let me back up so we do not get totally lost. There is a figure in the Wannsee conference protocol that has mystified historians because it is listed I think 600,000. It is a number well beyond what any historian believes of Jews in France. Puzzling, some people have speculated, purely speculated, that this may include the Jews of French North Africa too.

Q. But on December 10th 1942 that can no longer have pertained?

A. No, but we do not get that figure. We get the 2 to 300,000 that is ----

Q. Still wrong?

A. No. That is still approximately right. If you started with 300,000 and 40,000 were deported in 1942, you would be at 260,000.

Q. But there were not two or 300,000 Jews in mainland France on December 10th 1942, were there?

A. Oh, there were. 300,000 is the figure that I have seen for the population in all of France and, of course, Germany occupies the southern part of France and thus would have the Jews of all of France in December 1942.

Q. Where have you seen these figures?

A. This would come from Michael Merris and Paxton's book on

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the Vichy France and the Jews.

Q. Would you turn to page 25 please? I am looking at paragraph 5.1.1 which I suppose is your topic paragraph. You are setting out what you are going to be saying. You say, the final sentence in that paragraph, you are referring to the fact that there are disagreements over historical interpretation?

A. Absolutely.

Q. They are not at all unusual, you say?

A. We have seen several of these, the questions of interpretation from circumstantial evidence about what date decisions were made ----

Q. You do not have to have a Professor's title to be entitled to have a different opinion, do you, or to be Lord somebody or Sir John somebody, do you? You are entitled to have a different opinion?

A. There is a range of opinion and one does not have to have a PhD to hold an opinion.

Q. Yes. You do not have to be rocket scientist, as they say now. You say: "On the contrary, it is quite a normal occurrence" to have different opinions about how the programme for murder of the Jews came about?

A. Yes.

Q. You finish that paragraph by saying: "What follows is my interpretation concerning the emergence" of what you call "the Final Solution" by which you are referring to the

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murder of the Jews, are you not?

A. Correct.

Q. "It is not shared in every aspect by other able and learned historians of the Holocaust".

A. Correct.

Q. But it would be wrong to call them Holocaust deniers, would it not, just because they disagree with the established view?

A. As I have said, there is a large body of interpretation on a number of issues, including the issue of whether Hitler gave an order or not, that is within the historical debate.

Q. What is permissible, in your view, and his Lordship may interrupt this discussion, to debate and what is impermissible to debate? Where is the line drawn?

A. Where we draw the line? I would say ----

MR JUSTICE GRAY: In relation to these death camps, do you mean