Closing Speech
by David Irving
Part II
My writings and reputation as an
historian I have not hesitated to stand in the witness box
here, and to answer questions. Mr Rampton rose to
the occasion, and he - or indeed I - may yet regret
it. Your Lordship will recall that when I brought a
somewhat reluctant and even curmudgeonly Professor
Donald Cameron Watt, doyen of the diplomatic
historians, into the witness stand, he used these
words: "I must say, I hope that I am never subjected to
the kind of examination that Mr Irving's books have
been suggested to by the Defence witnesses. I have
a very strong feeling that there are other senior
historical figures, including some to whom I owed a
great deal of my own career, whose work would not
stand up, or not all of whose work would stand up,
to this kind of examination ..." When I invited him to mention some names, of
course he declined. What he was saying was that
whatever mistakes, or whatever unconventional
interpretations of mine, the Defendants have
revealed with their multi-million dollar research,
this does not invalidate me as an historian, or my
historical methods and conclusions. Your Lordship will find that Professor Watt
continued by suggesting that simply by facing the
challenge of the views that I had put forward, "and
basing them on historical research, rather than
ideological conviction," this had directly resulted
in other historians devoting an "enormous burst of
research" to the Nazi massacres of the Jews, an
area which can in consequence now support journals
and conferences. "This, I think, is a direct result
of the challenge which Mr Irving's work
[posed] and the consistency and the effort
which he has put into maintaining it in public."9
In other words, Watt stated that, far from being a
"Holocaust denier" my work has directly increased
historical research into, and understanding of, the
"Holocaust". Professor Eberhard Jäckel made the same
controversial point in his essay in the book
published by the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum,
namely that before my book Hitler's War was
published in 1977, there had been virtually no
meaningful research into the tragedy at all.10
Professor Hans Mommsen, Professor Raul Hilberg,
Professor Gordon C Craig - all have more or less
supported my claim to be regard as a serious
historian. The outcome of my research, my books,
and my speaking is therefore that people in general
are more, not less, aware of the horrors of the
Holocaust, and they are certainly better
informed. One of the most damaging accusations is that the Plaintiff, driven by his obsession with
Hitler, distorts, manipulates, and falsifies
history in order to put Hitler in a more favourable
light, thereby demonstrating a lack of the
detachment, rationality and judgment necessary for
an historian.11 I submit that in assessing whether I am an
historian who "distorts, manipulates and
falsifies," Your Lordship should give most weight
to my avowedly historical written works. I suggest
my speeches and the very occasional lapses of taste
in them (Mr Rampton has identified and mentioned,
repeatedly, I think, three) are relevant purely as
background material. Of those written historical
works, I submit that your Lordship give most weight
to my flagship work HITLER'S WAR. I ask that Your
Lordship read (again, if Your Lordship has already
done so) the Introduction to the 1991 edition: this
was published well after the year when the
Defendants (wrongly) assert that I "flipped over"
to become what they call a Holocaust denier. I have always differed from colleagues in my
profession in insisting on using original
documents, including where possible the authors'
drafts of books or memoirs rather than the heavily
edited West German editions, later rewritings, or
posthumous adaptations. I also make use of many
more unpublished original documents than my
historian colleagues. In the 1960s and 1970s this
was more difficult than today. I differ too from others, in making copies of
the original documents which I unearth freely
available to others as soon as my own works are
complete, and often before (as the panne with
Professor Harold Deutsch's book showed).12 As page
14 of Hitler's War shows, I donate these records
regularly to publicly accessible archives and I
also make them available on microfilm. There are
nearly 200 such microfilms, containing nearly half
a million pages. I also devote time to
corresponding with and assisting other historians
and researchers. If, therefore, some of my
interpretations are controversial, I also do all
that is possible to let other people judge for
themselves. This speaks strongly against the
accusation that I distort, manipulate and falsify
history. On Hitler and the holocaust I wrote these words
- after the time when I had supposedly become a
Holocaust denier obsessed with Hitler and with
exonerating him: At page 2: My conclusions . . . startled even
me. Hitler was a far less omnipotent Führer
than had been believed., his methods and tactics
were profoundly opportunistic. At page 4: . . . the more hermetically Hitler
locked himself away behind the barbed wire and mine
fields of his remote military headquarters, the
more his Germany became a Führer-Staat without
a Führer. Domestic policy was controlled by
whoever was most powerful in each sector - by
Hermann Göring . . . Hans Lammers . . . Martin
Bormann . . . Heinrich Himmler. . . At page 17: If this biography were simply a
history of the rise and fall of Hitler's Reich it
would be legitimate to conclude: "Hitler killed the
Jews." He after all had created the atmosphere of
hatred with his speeches in the 1930s; he and
Himmler had created the SS; his speeches, though
never explicit, left the clear impression that
"liquidate" was what he meant. At pages 17-18: For a full-length war biography
of Hitler, I felt that a more analytical approach
to the key questions of initiative, complicity and
execution would be necessary. Remarkably, I found
that Hitler's own role in the "Final Solution" -
whatever that was - had never been examined. At page 38: Every document actually linking
Hitler with the treatment of the Jews invariably
takes the form of an embargo. This is the famous "chain of documents", and
notwithstanding everything we have heard in Court I
still adhere to this position. At page 19: It is plausible to impute to him
that not uncommon characteristic of heads of state:
a conscious desire "not to know". But the proof of
this is beyond the powers of a historian. At page 21: . . .dictatorships are fundamentally
weak. . . . I concluded , the burden of guilt for
the bloody and mindless massacres of the Jews rests
on a large number of Germans (and non-Germans),
many of them alive today and not just on one "mad
dictator", whose order had to be obeyed without
question. The similarity with the thesis propagated by Dr
Daniel Goldhagen in his world-wide best-seller book
HITLER'S WILLING EXECUTIONERS will surely strike
everybody in this Court. Allow me to rub this point
in: What I actually wrote and printed and published
in my "flagship study" HITLER'S WAR was that Hitler
was clearly responsible for the Holocaust both by
being head of state, and by having done so much by
his speeches and organisation to start it off. Where I differed from many historians was in
denying that there was any documentary proof of
detailed direction and initiation of the mass
murders by Hitler. The view was considered to be
heretical at the time. But this lack of wartime
documentary evidence for Hitler's involvement is
now widely accepted. Indeed, on the narrower matter
of the lack of wartime documentary evidence on "gas
chambers", Your Lordship was already good enough to
grant as follows, in an exchange with Professor
Evans: IRVING: If his Lordship is led to believe by a
careless statement of the witnesses that there is a
vast body of wartime documents, this would be
unfair, would it not, because you are not referring
to wartime documents? You are referring to post-war
documents? EVANS: I am referring to all kinds of
documents. IRVING: You are not referring to wartime
documents? EVANS: I am referring to documents including
wartime documents, the totality of the written
evidence for the Holocaust which you deny. IRVING: Are you saying there is a vast quantity
of wartime documents? EVANS: What I am saying is that there is a vast
quantity of documents and material for all aspects
of the Holocaust. MR JUSTICE GRAY: I expect you would accept,
Professor Evans, just to move on, the number of
overtly incriminating documents, wartime documents,
as regards gas chambers is actually pretty few and
far between?13 To summarise, in Hitler's War I differed from
other historians in suggesting that the actual mass
murders were not all or mainly initiated by Hitler.
I pointed out that my sources were consistent with
another explanation: A conscious desire "not to
know" (I referred to a Richard Nixon kind of
complex).14 I submit that I have not distorted, manipulated,
and falsified. I have put all the cards on the
table; I made the documents available to all
comers, on microfilm and in the archives, and I and
have pointed to various possible
interpretations. I further submit that, while certainly "selling"
my view, I have been much less manipulative than
those historians, including some whom you have
heard in Court, whose argument has in important
part been simply this - that I ought not to be
heard, because my views are too outlandish or
extreme. Disgracefully, these scholars have cheered
from the sidelines as I have been outlawed,
arrested, harassed, and all but vernichtet as a
professional historian; and they have put pressure
on British publishers to destroy my works. To assist Your Lordship in deciding how
outlandish and extreme these views of mine are, I
allow myself to quote from A J P Taylor's THE WAR
LORDS, published by Penguin - the First Defendants
in this action - in London in 1978. Of Adolf Hitler
. . . . . . it was at this time that he became really
a recluse, settling down in an underground bunker,
running the war far from the front. (At pages
55-57) He was a solitary man, though he sometimes
accepted, of course, advice from others, sometimes
decisions [my emphasis]. It is, I think,
true, for instance, that the terrible massacre of
the Jews was inspired more by Himmler than by
Hitler, though Hitler took it up. (At pages
68-70) These quotations are from the foreword of A J P
Taylor's own flagship work, THE ORIGINS OF THE
SECOND WORLD WAR, published in 1963: Little can be discovered so long as we go on
attributing everything that happened to Hitler. He
supplied a powerful dynamic element, but it was
fuel to an existing machine. . . He would have
counted for nothing without the support and
co-operation of the German people. It seems to be
believed nowadays that Hitler did everything
himself, even driving the trains and filling the
gas chambers unaided. This was not so. Hitler was a
sounding-board for the German nation. Thousands,
many hundred thousand, Germans carried out his evil
orders without qualm or question. What I wrote, with less felicity of style than
Professor Taylor, was a reasonable interpretation
of the information available to me at the time. I
might add that my words are often accepted, quoted,
and echoed by other historians far more eminent
than I (including the government's Official
Historians like Professor Sir Frank Hinsley, in his
volumes on British Intelligence). Some may regard
my interpretations as not the most probable. But
they are never perverse. For the Defendants to
describe me as one who manipulates, distorts, and
falsifies it would be necessary for them to satisfy
Your Lordship that I wilfully adopted perverse and
ridiculous interpretations. I have not. The Defendants' historiographical criticisms I now turn to some of the particular matters
which exercised Your Lordship, in the list of
points at issue. I trust that Your Lordship will bear in mind
that the task facing a historian of my type - what
I refer to as a "shirtsleeve historian", working in
the field, from original records - is very
different from the task facing the scholar or
academic who sits in his book-lined study, plucking
handy works of reference, printed in large type,
translated into English, provided with easy indices
and often with nice illustrations too, off the
shelves of a university library within arm's
reach. Your Lordship will recall that while researching
the Goebbels Diaries in Moscow for the first week
in June 1992 I had to read those wartime Nazi glass
microfiches through a magnifier the size of a
nailclipper, with a lens smaller than a pea.15 The
Court will appreciate that reading even post-war
microfilm of often poorly reproduced original
documents on a mechanical reader is a tedious, time
consuming, and unrewarding business. Notes have to
be taken in handwriting, as there are no "pages" to
be xeroxed. In the 1960s xerox copies were nothing
like as good as they are now, as Your Lordship will
have noticed from the blue-bound volumes brought in
here from my own document archives. Mistakes
undoubtedly occur: the mis-transcription of
difficult German words pencilled in Gothic or
Sütterlin-style script, a script which most
modern German scholars find unreadable anyway;
mistakes of copying; mistakes of omission (i.e., a
passage is not transcribed because at the time it
appears of no moment). These are innocent mistakes,
and with a book of the size of HITLER'S WAR,
currently running to 393,000 words, they are not
surprising. Your Lordship may recall one exchange I had with
Professor Evans: IRVING: Professor Evans, when your researchers
were researching in my files at the Institute of
History in Munich, did they come across a thick
file there which was about 1,000 pages long,
consisting of the original annotated footnotes of
HITLER'S WAR which were referenced by number to
every single sentence in that book? EVANS: No. Irving: It was not part of the published corpus,
it was part of the original manuscript, but it was
chopped out because of the length. EVANS: No, we did not see that. IRVING: Have you seen isolated pages of that in
my Discovery in so far as it related to episodes
which were of interest, like the
Reichskristallnacht? EVANS: I do not, to be honest, recall, but that
does not mean to say that we have not seen
them. IRVING: You said that my footnotes are opaque
because they do not always give the page reference.
Do you agree that, on a page which we are going to
come across in the course of this morning, of your
own expert report, you put a footnote in just
saying "See Van Pelt's report", see expert report
by Robert van Pelt, and that expert report is about
769 pages long, is it not?16 From this exchange it is plain that I was not
just a conjurer producing quotations and documents
out of a hat; I made my sources and references
available in their totality to historians, even
when they were not printed in the book. The allegation that the mistakes are deliberate
- that they are manipulations, or distortions, - is
a foul one to make, and easily disposed of by
general considerations. If I intended deliberately
to mistranscribe a handwritten word or text, I
would hardly have furnished copies of the original
texts to my critics, or published the text of the
handwritten document as a facsimile in the same
work (e.g., the famous November 30, 1941 note,
which is illustrated as a facsimile in all editions
of HITLER'S WAR); or placed the entire collection
of such documents without restriction in archives
commonly frequented my critics. And if I intended to mistranslate a document,
would I have encouraged the publication of the
resulting book, with the correct original
quotation, in the German language, where my
perversion of the text would easily be discovered?
Yet like all my others works, both HITLER and
GOEBBELS have appeared in German language editions
with a full and correct transcription of the
controversial texts. Is this is the action of a
deliberate mistranslator? As for the general allegation that the errors or
exaggerations or distortions that were made were
"all" of a common alignment, designed to exonerate
Adolf Hitler, the test which Your Lordship must
apply should surely be this: if the sentence that
is complained of be removed from the surrounding
paragraph or text (and in each book there are only
one or two such sentences of which this wounding
claim is made) does this in any way alter the
book's general thrust, or the weight of the
argument that is made? An example of this test is the wrong weight
which I gave to the contents of the 1:20 A.M.
telegram issued by SS-Gruppenführer Reinhard
Heydrich on Kristallnacht. It is a famous telegram,
printed in the Nuremberg volumes. Would such an
error have been committed wilfully, given the risk
that it would inevitably be exposed? Is it not far
more likely that in the process of writing and
rewriting, and of cutting and condensing, the
GOEBBELS manuscript, the author gradually, over the
eight years, lost sight of the full content and
thrust of the original document? Your Lordship
should know that that book went through five
successive drafts and retypes over eight years,
filling four archive boxes, a total of about eight
cubic feet, all of which I disclosed to the
Defendants by way of Discovery. St Martin's Press,
my U.S. publishers, particularly asked that these
early chapters of the book should be trimmed in
length. These general considerations dispose too of the
defence arguments on the "Policeman Hoffmann"
evidence rendered at the 1924 Hitler Trial. For the
limited purposes of writing a biography of Hermann
Göring - not of Hitler - I relied on the
thousands of typescript microfilmed pages of the
transcript of this trial. So far as I know, nobody
had ever used them before me. The handy, printed,
bound, indexed, cross-referenced edition on which
Professor Evans drew had not appeared. It appeared
in 1998, eleven years after my GÖRING
biography was published by Macmillan Ltd.17 I
extracted with difficulty from the microfilmed
pages the material I needed relating to Hitler and
Göring, and I was not otherwise interested in
Hoffmann at all. I do not consider that the printed
volume on the trial which is now available shows
that I made meaningful errors, and they were
certainly not deliberate. The Kristallnacht of November 1938 is a more
difficult episode in every way. As said, I clearly
made an error over the content (and reference
number) of the 1:20 A.M. telegram. It was an
innocent error. It was a glitch of the kind that
occurs in the process of redrafting a manuscript
several times over the years. The Court must not
overlook that by the time the book was completed,
in 1994/5, and as described in the Introduction to
GOEBBELS. MASTERMIND OF THE THIRD REICH, I had been
forcefully severed both from my own collections of
documents in German institutions and from the
German federal archives in Koblenz. On July 1,
1993, when I attended the latter archives
explicitly for the purpose of tidying up loose ends
on the GOEBBELS manuscript, I was formally banned
from the building for ever on orders of the
minister of the interior - one of the gravest blows
struck at me by the international endeavour to
which I shall later refer. The allegation of the Defendants is that in
order to "exonerate Hitler" I effectively
concocted, or invented, a false version of events
on Kristallnacht, namely that he intervened between
1 and 2 a.m. to halt the madness. I submit that
their refusal to accept this version is ingrained
in their own political attitudes. There is evidence
both in the archives, in reliable contemporary
records like the Ulrich von Hassell, Alfred
Rosenberg, and Hellmuth Groscurth diaries, and in
the independent testimonies of those participants
whom I myself carefully questioned, or whose
private papers I obtained - Nicolaus von Below,
Julius Schaub, Karl Wolff and others - and which
the Court has seen, to justify the version which I
rendered. It was therefore not an invented story.
It may well be that my critics were unfamiliar with
the sources that I used before they made their
criticisms. The dishonesty lies not with me, for
printing the "inside" story of Hitler's actions
that night, as far as we can reconstruct them using
these and other sources; but with those scholars
who have studiously ignored them, and in particular
the Rudolf Hess "stop arson" telegram of 2:56 A.M.,
issued "on orders from the highest level," which
the Defendants' scholars have testified is a
reference to Hitler. Your Lordship may well have marvelled to hear
the defendants' witnesses dismiss this message -
like the Schlegelberger Document, referred to later
- as being of no consequence. The Kristallnacht diaries of Dr Goebbels, which
I obtained in Moscow in 1992, some years after I
first drafted the episode, substantially bore out
my version of events - namely that he, and not
Hitler, was the prime instigator, and that Hitler
was largely unaware and displeased by what came
about. Your Lordship will recall that Professor
Philippe Burrin, a Swiss Holocaust historian for
whom all the witnesses expressed respect, comes to
the same conclusion independently of me.18 Now, he
is manifestly not a "Holocaust denier" either. The
Court will also recall that the Witness Evans
admitted that, unlike myself, he had not read all
through the available Goebbels diaries. He had not
had the time, he said; and we must confess a
certain sympathy with that position for an
academic, time is certainly at a premium. Reading
all of the available Goebbels diaries is however
necessary, in order to establish and recognise the
subterfuges that this Nazi minister used through
his career as a diarist, in order to conceal when
he was creating what I call alibis for his own
wayward and evil behaviour. I drew attention to this historiographical
conundrum several times in the book. I discussed
both in my scientific annotated German-language
edition of the 1938 diaries, and in my full
Goebbels biography, which Your Lordship has read, a
characteristic example from this same year, 1938:
although the one episode which most deeply
unsettled him that year was his affair with the
Czech actress Lida Baarova, which drove him to the
brink of resignation, divorce, and even suicide,
neither her name nor any of those events figures
explicitly in the diary or at all, unless the pages
are read particularly closely, when certain clues
can be seen. The Goebbels diary is sometimes a deceitful
document; it must be recognised as such and treated
very gingerly indeed. The fact that it was
evidently written up not one, but two and even
three days after, during the Kristallnacht episode,
calls for additional caution in relying on it for
chronology and content. There is no need to discuss here in detail my
various narratives of the Nazis' shooting of Jews
in the East. There is little dispute between the
parties on what actually happened in my view, and
Your Lordship is aware that I have given these
atrocities due and proper attention in the various
biographies I have written; I would however add the
one caveat, that they are not intended to be
reference works on the Holocaust, but orthodox
biographies. I believe I was the first historian to discover
and make use of the CSDIC reports relating further
details of these killings, particularly the Bruns
Report, and I made them available to many other
historians. (These are the eavesdropping reports on
prisoners, using hidden microphones). It took many
days to read them; there are thousands of pages in
these files. Over the last twenty years I read
these horrifying narratives out repeatedly to
public audiences, including "right-wing" audiences.
This fact alone entitles me to express my contempt
at those who would term me a "Holocaust
denier." We have seen the Defendants scrabbling around at
the end of the Bruns Report for its third-hand
references by the SS murderer and braggart in Riga,
Altemeyer. to an "order" he claimed to have
received to carry out such mass shootings more
circumspectly in future. But we know from the late
1941 police decodes - a much firmer source-document
than a snatch of conversation remembered years
later, in April 1945 - precisely what orders had
gone from Hitler's headquarters, radioed by Himmler
himself, to the mass murderer SS
Obergruppenführer Friedrich Jeckeln, stating
explicitly that these killings exceeded the
authority that had been given by himself, Himmler,
and by the Reichssicherheitshauptamt (RSHA). We
know that the killings of all German Jews stopped
at once, for many months. When I first translated
the word Judentransport (which can mean
"transportation of Jews") as "transports of Jews",
in the plural, in the 1970s - being unaware of the
surrounding context of data which helps narrow the
purport down to the one Riga-bound trainload from
Berlin - I was thus inadvertently coming closer to
the truth, not further from it: because the
liquidation of all the trainloads from Germany was
halted the next day, December 1, 1941, by the order
radioed from Hitler's headquarters (whether
initiated by Himmler or Hitler seems hair-splitting
in this context). As I stated under cross-examination, I did not
see the Schulz-Dubois document when I wrote my
books, and I have not seen it since; having now
read what Gerald Fleming tells us about it, I
confess that I would be unlikely to attach the same
importance as does learned counsel for the
Defendants, to what the famously anti-Nazi Abwehr
chief Wilhelm Canaris allegedly told Lieutenant
Schulz-Dubois of Hitler's reaction. The British
decodes of the SS signals, to which I introduced
the Court, and the subsequent events (the actual
cessation for many months of the liquidation of
German Jews) speak louder. Your Lordship asks for my comment on Hitler's
table talk of October 25, 1941. Your Lordship is
familiar with the Defendants' argument, and with
mine. My extract from this document was based on
the original Weidenfeld translation, as is known.
In disagreement with the Defendants' experts, I
still maintain, and others have followed me in this
(notably Professor Philippe Burrin, who translated
Schrecken as "the ominous reputation") that the
appropriate translation here for the word Schrecken
is indeed "rumour" and not "terror", a word which
makes for a wooden and uncouth translation
anyway.19 A relevant passage from the SS Event
Report from activities in the rear of the eastern
front, dated September 11, 1941 (provided by the
Defendants), shows that this is precisely what was
meant: "The rumour that all Jews are being shot by
the Germans had a salutary effect." The Jews were
now fleeing before the Germans arrived.20 The
rumour! To accuse me of wilful mistranslation and
distortion, when (a) I used the official Weidenfeld
translation, not at that time having received the
original German from Switzerland, and (b) the word
"rumour" gives the precisely correct nuance that
the surrounding history shows the word was meant to
have, seems to be an excessively harsh judgement on
my expertise. Next in line is the Goebbels diary entry for
November 22, 1941: This diary entry includes a fair
example of how dishonest the reporting by Goebbels
was, when it comes to his meetings with Hitler. He
records the "exceptional praise" of Hitler for the
weekly newsreel produced by his ministry; in fact
Hitler was forever criticising this very product of
the Goebbels ministry, as the diary of Rosenberg
shows. Goebbels then continues, "With regard to the
Jewish problem too the Führer agrees
completely with my views. He wants an energetic
policy against the Jews, but one however that does
not cause us needless difficulties." Goebbels'
diary entry continues: "The evacuation of the Jews
is to be done city by city. So it is still not
fixed when Berlin's turn comes; but when it does,
the evacuation should be carried out as fast as
possible." Hitler then expressed the need for "a
somewhat reserved approach" in the question of
mixed marriages - the marriages would die out
anyway by and by, and they shouldn't go grey
worrying about it.21 I have suggested that on the balance of
probabilities Hitler was alluding to the public
unrest caused by the suicide, a few days earlier,
of the popular actor Joachim Gottschalk and his
family. Apart from needless becoming endless, an
irritating typo which hardly amounts to
"manipulation", this passage bears out what I have
always said of Hitler: While Goebbels was the
eternal agitator, as witness his anti-Semitic
leading article in Das Reich on November 16, 1941
Hitler was (even by Goebbels' own account) for a
reserved approach toward Jewish problems; and he
was doing so, even as the trainloads of Jews were
heading eastwards from Bremen and Berlin, for
instance, to the conquered Russian territories and
the Baltic states. Your Lordship will not need
reminding of the curious British decodes, which
revealed the provisioning of the deportation trains
with tons of food for the journey, stocks of many
weeks' food for after they arrived, and even the
deportees' "appliances" (Gerät). So evacuation
at this time evidently meant just that to very many
Reich officials, and no more. Mr Rampton went to some effort and expense to
suggest that I suppressed vital information from
the newly discovered Goebbels diary, December 13,
1941: in this day's entry, Goebbels reported on
Hitler's rhetoric to the gauleiters on December 12
in Berlin. Anybody who is as familiar as I am with
Hitler's speeches, and with Goebbels' diary entries
relating to them, will effortlessly recognise this
entire passage as being the usual Hitler gramophone
record about the famous 1939 "prophecy". It was
part of his stock repertoire when speaking to the
Party old guard - they had carried him into power
and expected to hear from him that he had not
abandoned the hallowed Party programme. I can
understand the temptation for the younger
generation of scholars, unfamiliar with Hitler's
rhetoric, to fall greedily upon such freshly
discovered morsels as though they were the answer
to the great Holocaust mystery: None of the
witnesses to whom this item was put by myself, or
by counsel for the Defendants, was able to identify
any part of this passage which was out of the
ordinary for Hitler. Even if I had read that far on that day's glass
plate in the Moscow archives, and even if I had
seen those lines of the diary entry, some twenty
pages after the page where I in fact stopped
reading for that day, - and I must emphasise again
that I did not, as it did not come within my remit
- I doubt that I would have attached any
significance to them, other than adding this entry
to the list of occasions on which Hitler harked
back, for whatever reason, to his famous "prophecy"
of 1939.22 I have read again the printed version of the
meeting of the Generalgouvernement authorities Hans
Frank on December 16, 1941. It is significant to
see the amount of space taken, even in this
abridged published version, by the typhus epidemic
sweeping through the region, the climax of which
was expected to come in April 1942 (pages "68 72").
Frank states that he has begun negotiations with
the purpose of deporting the Jews to the east, and
he mentions the big Heydrich conference set down
for January 1942 on this topic in Berlin (page
"73"). On page "74" comes the sentence which pulls
out the rug from beneath the Defendants' feet: "For
us, the Jews are exceptionally damaging mouths to
feed. We've got an estimated 2.5m in the
Generalgouvernement, perhaps 3.5m Jews now, what
with all their kinfolk and hangers-on. We can't
shoot these 3.5m Jews, we can't poison them, but
we'll be able to do something with them, which
somehow or other will have the result of destroying
them, in fact, in conjunction with the grander
measures still to be discussed at Reich level."
Clearly, only a geographical solution was at that
time on the cards, and anticipated at the Berlin
(i.e. Wannsee conference). The December 18, 1941 diary entry by Himmler
reads: Judenfrage | als Partisanen auszurotten.
Himmler had, as I pointed out to the Court,
repeatedly referred in earlier documents to the
phrase "Juden als Partisanen". This was nothing new
or sensational therefore, and the words he was
recording were not necessarily Hitler's but more
probably his own stereotype phrase. The correct,
pedantic translation, is in any case: "Jewish
Problem | to be wiped out as being partisans." Not
"like partisans", which would have been "wie
Partisanen." There can be no equivocating about
this translation of als. Wie is a comparison, als
is an equivalent.23 
|
