(32)*
(i)
The Defendants falsely aver that on December
14, 1941 Alfred Rosenberg
[picture]
noted after a conversation with
Hitler, 'Ich stand auf dem Standpunkt von der
Ausrottung des Judentums nicht zu
sprechen', which the Defendants falsely and
speciously paraphrase as being Rosenberg
recommending that nothing be said (in a
forthcoming speech) about the extermination
of the Jews.(ii) The Defendants correctly state that
the Plaintiff confined a summary of this
conversation to a footnote at page 356, and
translated the German sentence as: 'I said I
took the view that I shouldn't mention the
stamping out of Judaism.'
(iii) The Defendants point out that when
the German noun Ausrottung is used in
connection with the extermination of the Jews
but not attributed to Hitler the Plaintiff
translated it as 'extermination' (e.g. in
HITLER'S WAR at pages
867 and the footnote at pages 575-76).
At page 867 of HITLER'S
WAR the Plaintiff indeed quoted a news
reports forwarded by Himmler's adjutant to Ernst
Kaltenbrunner's office: 'On the instructions of
the Reichsführer SS I am transmitting
herewith to you a press dispatch on the
accelerated extermination (Ausrottung) of the
Jews in Occupied Europe.' The Plaintiff clearly
inserted the German word in brackets because he
was hesitant about using that translation of the
word and wanted expert readers to know the
German original.
In the note in HITLER'S
WAR at page 576, there was no doubt as to
the proper translation being 'extermination', as
Himmler had himself defined what he meant by the
word Ausrottung -- 'I did not consider
myself justified in exterminating the menfolk --
that is to kill them or have them killed --
[...]' This passage indicates
incidentally how ambiguous the word could be at
that time: speaking to the Nazi gauleiters on
October 4, 1943, even Himmler had to explain
what he meant by ausrotten. (The whole passage
has been promoted to the main text of the new
edition, at page 590).
The plaintiff allows that there is probably
no argument about what the word Ausrottung
has come to mean in modern 1990s German
usage. What it meant in Hitler's hands in the
1930s and 1940s is however what is germane to
this issue. According to the standard
Langenscheidt 1967 German dictionary, which
suggests translations in descending order of
likelihood, Judentum is translated only
as: '(n.) Judaism,' while Ausrottung has
the entry '(f.) uprooting; extirpation,
eradication; extermination, pol. a. genocide.'
Precisely because the verb ausrotten and
the noun Ausrottung have so many
different meanings, the plaintiff was careful
not to translate it with only one given meaning,
namely a meaning specifically preloaded with the
meaning needed to support a special
hypothesis.
When used by Hitler -- the subject of the
book -- there is not one example known to the
plaintiff where the word ausrotten has
exclusively the meaning submitted by the
Defendants, namely of liquidate.
On the contrary, when used by Hitler
ausrotten has on several occasions
demonstrably a meaning that can not be
liquidate. Three examples:-
(a) In August 1936 he dictated to
his young secretary Christa Schroeder the
text of the famous memorandum on the Four
Year Plan (printed with commentary by
Professor Wilhelm Treue in
Vierteljahrshefte für
Zeitgeschichte, 1955, at pages 184 et
seq.; quoted by the plaintiff in
THE WAR PATH, at page
50). In this Hitler stated that Germany must
be rendered capable of waging war against the
Soviet Union because 'a victory by Bolshevism
would lead not to a new Versailles treaty but
to the final annihilation, indeed the
Ausrottung, of the German nation'.
Clearly Hitler is not saying that the
Bolsheviks would liquidate one hundred
million Germans: but that they would subsume
the nation, take it over, emasculate it --
the Germans would cease to exist as a
sovereign world power.(b) On November 10, 1938, addressing Nazi
editors, he said: 'I have, I must add, often
just one misgiving and that is the following:
whenever I have a look at these intellectual
classes of ours -- sadly, we need them;
otherwise one might one day, uh, I dunno,
ausrotten them or something' (German
Federal Archives file NS.11/28, pages 30-46;
and Dr Hildegard von Kotze and Professor
Helmut Krausnick (ed.), Es Spricht der
Führer, Gütersloh, 1966, at
page 281; see too Vierteljahrshefte
für Zeitgeschichte, 1958, at page
188). Here too, the plaintiff submits, the
sense of the verb ausrotten is 'turf
them out' because at that time the Nazi blood
purges had not begun, apart from Hitler's one
murderous fling against the Brownshirts in
1934.
(c) On July 4, 1942 he described over
dinner a conversation he had had with the
Czech president Emil Hácha about his
threat to expel the Czechs from the occupied
territories of Bohemia and Moravia. 'The
Czech gentlemen had understood this so well,'
he said, 'that they had thereafter attuned
their future policies explicitly to the
principle that all pro-Soviet Benes intrigues
and Benes people had to be
ausgerottet, and that in the struggle
for the preservation of the Czech national
characteristics there could no longer be any
neutrals, but those who blew neither hot nor
cold were also to be spat out.' (Text in
Henry Picker, Hitlers Tischgespräche im
Führerhauptquartier 1941-42 Stuttgart,
1963, at page 435). The context shows that
ausgerottet is used by Hitler to
denote physical removal and expulsion.
(d) Even Himmler used the word
ausrotten on occasions to mean
something other than murder. For example
replying
on February 21, 1944 to a report from Bormann
on abuses in the Lublin concentration camp,
Himmler wrote: 'The guilty commandant,
SS-Sturmbannführer Florstedt, has been
under arrest for two months already. The
deplorable conditions are being severely
ausgerottet and redressed in rigorous
court-proceedings' (National Archives
microfilm T-175, roll 53, at page 7290).
Return if
wished to para.27  |
|
(33)*
The Defendants aver that the plaintiff failed to
draw attention to one of Himm-ler's minutes
(which they dated October 7, 1942) which
contained the word 'Globus' as a subject for
discussion with Hitler on that day.
It is admitted that the plaintiff did not
draw attention to this minute, but it is denied
that this is relevant. The plaintiff was the
first to transcribe these hand-written agenda
notes of Himmler. The name 'Globus' appears on
National Archives mi-crofilm T-175, roll 94, at
page 615,170, which is dated either September 17
or 22, 1942 (not October 7, 1942). The
translated hand-written agenda page written in
ink by Himmler (the 3 is green crayon) reads in
full:
'iv. Nationality and Settlement1. Emigration of Jews
how is to be further proceeded?
[checkmark in
green]
2. Settlement Lublin -- 'Conditions in
Government-General' [i.e. occupied
Poland]
- Lorrainers
- Germans from Bosnia
'Globus'
- Bessarabia
3. Settlement of the Crimea
a.) climate and health
b.) Germanics and Gothics not yet suited
for this, nor South Tyroleans
either[.]'
The Defendants have failed to inform us of
the minute's 'obvious significance', which
escapes the Plaintiff, other than that 'Globus'
was the pet name for SS-Brigadeführer
and Generalmajor der Polizei Odilo
Globocnik, the SS- and Polizeiführer
of the Lublin district. Himmler's jotted
agenda for his meetings with Hitler are crowded
with names, pet and otherwise, and in the
absence of collateral evidence it is imprudent
in the extreme to spin fanciful theories around
them.
MEANING:
GOEBBELS. MASTERMIND OF THE THIRD
REICH
(34)*
The Plaintiff submits that the Goebbels Diaries
are evidence in law against Goebbels, but denies
that they are in all circumstances evidence
against Hitler. While an historian or writer
need not necessarily apply such stringent tests,
it is a useful guide to bear in mind.
(35) The book in question is
a biography of Dr Joseph Goebbels, not of Adolf
Hitler.
Although the Defendants are careful not to
identify the '1919' paper on which they rely, it
is well known to the Plaintiff, an Intelligence
report on the Jews written by Hitler on
September 16, 1919 for the Bavarian army
authorities. In this he wrote in German: 'And
the upshot is this: Antisemitism for purely
emotional reasons will find its ultimate
expression in the form of pogroms. But a
rational antisemitism must lead to a properly
planned legislative attack on and elimination of
the privileges which the Jews, as distinct from
other aliens living amongst us, possess (the
Aliens Legislation). Its ultimate goal must
however be steadfast, the removal
[Entfernung] of the Jews
altogether. Only a government of national
strength is capable of doing both, and never a
government of national weakness.'(Werner Maser,
Dokumente, at pages 223-226). The root of the
word Entfernung is -fern meaning
distance.
The Plaintiff deals more than adequately with
the history of Hitler's rabid antisemitism at
pages xi to xiii of his pre-1933 volume of the
Hitler biography, the 1978 book
THE WAR PATH. In addition
he published a most unusual new document dating
back to December 21, 1922, a conversation
between Hitler and a Bavarian financier, in his
newsletter Focal Point on May 31, 1983, pages
5-6 (which can most usefully now be inspected in
the book Roger Griffin (ed.), Fascism
(Oxford University Press, 1995, pages 338-9 );
in this Hitler's animus toward the Jews is quite
evident. Mein Kampf is a less certain
source, since it is known to have had more than
one author (Hitler and Rudolf Hess were among
those who contributed); a better source is
Hitler's Zweites Buch, Hitler's Second
Book (Stuttgart, 1961), which he is known to
have drafted alone. The Plaintiff's contention
has always been that Hitler used his
antisemitism as a political platform from which
to seize power in 1933, but that after that he
lost interest in it except for occasional
flights of public oratory; while Dr Goebbels and
other lesser Nazis continued to ride that horse
to the hounds, to the mounting irritation of
their Führer Adolf Hitler, who no longer
needed antisemitism.
(36)
We now turn to the 'Kristallnacht', the Night of
Broken Glass (November 9-10, 1938). Here the
Plaintiff has not contorted and manipulated
anything, as is falsely alleged by the
Defendants, but applied himself to unravelling
the various accounts of those days and nights
with the degree of scrupulous diligence for
which he had already earned a justifiable
reputation. At a late stage in the writing of
the book, namely after these chapters had
already been written, the Goebbels Diary became
available in Moscow, which to the Plaintiff's
pleasure broadly confirmed (a) the sequence of
events; (b) the central role played by Goebbels'
speech in Munich on the night of November 9-10,
1938; (c) his subsequent discomfiture on
learning that Hitler was anything but pleased by
what he had done. The complete original text can
be most readily examined in the Goebbels 1938
diary which the Plaintiff transcribed from the
handwritten originals for Arnoldo Mondadori
Editore, (see Joseph Goebbels Diario 1938, Milan
1993), and which were first published in German
under the Plaintiff's own imprint as Der
unbekannte Dr Goebbels, Die geheimen
Tagebücher 1938, London, 1995, at pages
408-411.
(i) The serious rioting and outrages
against the Jews had in fact already begun
before Goebbels made his speech, e.g. in the
province of Hessen, in Kassel and in Dessau.(ii) It is admitted that it was Goebbels'
usual practice to record the events of each
day on the following morning, introducing
such entries invariably with the word
'gestern:' ('yesterday:') There were
occasions -- on which the Plaintiff remarked
in the biography -- when he abandoned this
practice because of the pressure of events
(e.g. on July 22, 1944); then he would write
up two or three days at a time in one
retrospective entry. The unusual lack of the
word gestern to introduce the entry
for November 9, 1938 indicates, the Plaintiff
submits, that he wrote up this day's entry
one or two days later, which introduced a
risk of error for which the researcher must
properly be on guard. Thus the November 9
entry refers to 'the Führer's speech at
Weimar', which was on November 6, at the gau
convention of the Thüringian Nazi party;
the text was printed in the
Völkischer Beobachter (VB) the next
day, November 7. Goebbels diary (still
'November 9') continues: 'Churchill gives a
wholly stupid and unsubstantiated reply.'
That however was on November 7, when
Churchill replied in the House of Commons.
Then comes (still 'November 9'), 'In Paris a
Polish Jew Grynspan has shot at the German
diplomat vom Rath in the embassy and
seriously injured him.' This shooting was
also on November 7. In the same paragraph
Goebbels continues, 'But now the entire
German press makes itself heard. And now
we're using plain talk. Major antisemitic
demonstrations in Hesse. The synagogues are
burned down.'
Only two paragraphs later does Goebbels
begin clearly referring to events of November
8 (still in his entry of 'November 9'):
'Midday continued dealing for long time with
my people, and worked [. . .] In the
evening, at the Bürgerbräu
[beerhall]. The old ceremonial.
Christian Weber speaks [. . . etc.]
The Führer speaks.' This was Hitler's
major annual speech, held on November 8,
1938; printed on November 10 in the VB.
(iii) Most of the diary entry for November
10 clearly refers to events on November 9,
and only from the phrase 'in the early
morning hours come the first reports'
['morgen früh kommen die ersten
Berichte'] onward does it refer to
the morning of November 10, 1938, as the
Defendants aver. The diary entry dated
November 10 begins with the word
gestern, 'yesterday', which was
missing from the previous day's entry.
It is denied that there is any token of
'with approval', as the Defendants wrongly
allege. Goebbels merely registers in his
Diary, 'Major anti Jewish demonstrations in
Kassel and Dessau, synagogues set on fire and
shops demolished. In the afternoon the death
of the German diplomat vom Rath is
reported.' ['In Kassel und Dessau
große Demonstration gegen die Juden,
Synagogen in Brand gesteckt und
Geschäfte demoliert. Nachmittags wird
der Tod des deutschen Diplomaten vom Rath
gemeldet.'] Vom Rath died on November
9 at 4:30 p.m. (French time); the official
press agency released the news at five
p.m.
There then follows Goebbels' description
of the events in the Old Town Hall, which was
again on the evening of November 9.
(iv)*
The Defendants correctly state that Goebbels
Diary continues on November 10, 1938, while
still referring to the evening of November 9
however. It reads here, 'Ich trage dem
Führer die Angelegenheit vor. Er
bestimmt: Demonstrationen weiterlaufen
lassen. Polizei zurückziehen. Die Juden
sollen einmal den Volkszorn zu verspüren
bekommen. Das ist richtig.' The
Defendants translate this passage as, 'I
brief the Führer on the affair. He
determines: demonstrations to continue.
Withdraw the police. The Jews must for once
be made to feel the fury of the people.'
(v) The Plaintiff translated this diary
entry in GOEBBELS. MASTERMIND
OF THE THIRD REICH at page 274
(virtually identically) as: 'I brief the
Führer on the affair. He decides: Allow
the demonstrations to continue. Hold back the
police. The Jews must be given a taste of the
public anger for a change.' It is denied that
this is a wilful mistranslation by the
Plaintiff.
It is further denied that the Plaintiff
placed the mistranslated diary entry out of
context in his book, namely immediately after
stating that as Hitler and Goebbels set out
to attend this reception at the Old City
Hall, they learned that the police were
intervening against anti-Jewish demonstrators
in Munich. The Plaintiff gives the source for
this statement (source note 23, at page 612)
correctly as, not the Diary, but the
testimony of SS Obergruppenführer Max
Jüttner, in the files of the IfZ.
In the Diary's proper context, 'the
affair' on which Goebbels briefs Hitler is
clearly not the demonstrations either in
Munich or elsewhere, but the death of Vom
Rath. This news upset Hitler (he had flown
his own personal surgeon to Paris in a vain
attempt to save the diplomat's life). The two
immediately preceding sentences in the Diary,
not mentioned by the Defendants are, 'In the
afternoon the death of the German diplomat
vom Rath is reported. Enough is enough.'
(vi) It is denied that the proper context
of the passage from the Diary entry quoted
(from November 10) was what the Defendants
without offering evidence call the 'pogroms'
in Kassel and Dessau, and not the
demonstrations in Munich, which only began
much later that night of November 9 (and of
which there was no mention). As set out
above, the Plaintiff relied on collateral
evidence besides the Diary.
(vii) In the premises, it is denied that
there was 'manipulation' by the Plaintiff, as
is falsely averred by the Defendants.
(viii) to (x) The Defendants again
overlook that the Plaintiff already had
collected substantial collateral evidence
relating to the events of that night from
other sources, including British consular
reports, those staff members directly at
Hitler's side, etc., all of which indicate
Hitler's fury as the news of the rioting and
arson in Munich reached him and the steps
which he personally undertook to intervene.
Hesse, Kassel, and Dessau were not mentioned.
He then sent for Dr Goebbels, and tore strips
off him. This collateral evidence made quite
plain how the self-serving Diary entries by
Goebbels were to be interpreted correctly.
The Plaintiff's tape recordings and
transcripts of these interviews will be
available at the trial of this action.
[For the sake of clarity, the
evidently wrongly numbered paras. (v) to
(viii) on pages 32-3 of the Defence are
addressed hereinbelow as (x) to
(xiii)]
(x) In confidential unpublished typescript
memoirs which Major Nicholas von Below,
Hitler's Luftwaffe adjutant, wrote shortly
after the war and which he made exclusively
available to the Plaintiff in 1967, he
described at page 83 that he was with Hitler
that night in the latter's private residence
in Munich. A phone call from the Four Seasons
Hotel came in to Hitler's residence, to the
effect that the adjacent synagogue was on
fire; a further call from a private person
spoke of window-smashing in a Jewish
department store. These messages were
reported to Hitler. 'He immediately had a
call put through to the Police Chief [SS
Obergruppenführer Freiherr] von
Eberstein, and ordered that this madness, as
he termed it, was to cease forthwith. [.
. .] When meanwhile the same reports came
from Berlin, Hitler gave Himmler and Goebbels
the order to stop the destruction of Jewish
businesses and synagogues immediately.' In a
taperecorded interview with the late Nicholas
von Below on May 18, 1968 he confirmed this
to the Plaintiff.
(xi) The closing lines of the Diary entry
dated November 10, 1938 (concerning the
moments before Goebbels sat down to write his
diary that morning): read in German, 'Den
ganzen Morgen regnet es neue Meldungen. Ich
überlege mit dem Führer unsere
nunmehrige Maßnahmen. Weiterschlagen
lassen oder abstoppen? Das ist nun die
Frage.' The Defendants offer their
translation as, 'All morning new reports rain
in. I ponder with the Führer our next
moves. Shall we let them go on beating them
[the Jews] up or stop it. That is now
the question. . ..' (The ellipsis is the
Defendants' insertion).
The Plaintiff submits that since this is a
key passage it deserves the most meticulous
translation. For this we have a useful tool,
because it is clear from the next day's entry
('November 11') covering the same meeting
with Hitler, in the Osteria restaurant, that
Goebbels went there having already prepared
the Verordnung
(ordinance) that Hitler had ordered him to
draft during the night, halting the violence.
Hitler approved this with minor corrections.
That is Goebbels' second version of the same
meeting. His first version, quoted above, has
been inadequately translated by the
Defendants in one respect: Ich
überlege mit dem Führer unsere
nunmehrige Maßnahmen is translated
by the Defendants as 'I ponder with the
Führer our next moves' Their
translation, 'next' (which would have been in
German nächste), misses the
flavour of the actual adjective used,
nunmehrige, based on nunmehr
which is the word now with added
emphasis, as in 'What now?' The Plaintiff
sought to capture this with the paraphrase,
'what to do next,' and added the -- clearly
speculative -- rider about the apprehension
in that phrase.
(xi) to (xiii) From the collateral sources
which were available to the Plaintiff but not
evidently to the Defendants, but to which the
Plaintiff explicitly referred in his works on
Hitler and Goebbels, it is plain that Hitler
was totally unaware of what had been done,
namely orders which Goebbels had orally and
by telex issued which resulted in the
widespread destruction of property and lives.
Early on the morning of November 10, 1938,
Rudolf Hess, the Deputy Führer, who was
with Hitler, issued an order
reading in translation: 'To all Gau
headquarters for immediate action. Directive
No. 174/38. (Repeating Telex of November 10,
1938). On the express order of the highest
level of all, arson attacks on Jewish
businesses or suchlike are not to occur at
any event and under no circumstances
whatsoever.'
(37)*
The Plaintiff draws attention to his earlier
remarks about the Goebbels diary entry of March
27, 1942 (para. 22 [iii] above.) As
stated therein, the Goebbels Diaries contain a
total of some fourteen million words from 1923
to 1945. Clearly the Plaintiff could not always
give 'complete diary entries'. It is submitted
that the omission of the reference to
'government' and 'regime' is of no significance
given the gravity of the passages already
quoted. The interpolation was by no means an
irrelevance: the Plaintiff determined that it
was very necessary to remind the reader that
this startling text was not furtively scribbled
by Goebbels in a handwritten diary kept under
lock and key, but dictated to a male
stenographer, Dr Richard Otte, who then had the
pages typed in triplicate and handed them to
other staff members for indexing and
microfilming.
(38)*
It is denied that the Plaintiff figured Albert
Speer on only twenty-two pages of the revised
(1991) edition of HITLER'S
WAR published by his imprint Focal Point.
In fact Speer figures,
sometimes several times, on pages 8, 9, 102,
108, 112, 113, 157, 158, 169, 173, 284, 295,
399, 435, 472, 476, 479, 483, 489, 518, 519,
520, 526, 540, 548, 557, 560, 573, 583, 584,
586, 599, 603, 604, 605, 622, 623, 640, 642,
650, 671, 672, 678, 685, 725, 748, 749, 756,
768, 769, 770, 773, 778, 789, 820, 836, 840.
The
Plaintiff recalls that in a newspaper interview
with The Daily Mail in 1977 Speer stated
that in his opinion Hitler was not ignorant of
the Final Solution. However since Speer went on
to state that he of course never discussed the
matter with Hitler, having known nothing of it
himself, logic alone destroys whatever
evidentiary value his first remark might have
held.
Professor Matthias Schmidt, the Berlin
historian who wrote in Albert Speer, The End
of a Myth (Berlin, 1982) the best analysis
of Speer's memoirs and his complicity in
sanitising his own diaries, wrote at page 21
(SMP edition, New York, 1984): 'Although the
deletions from the original Journal do not
expressly say that he knew about the
extermination of the Jews these passages do make
it clear that during his term of office as
Inspector General of Buildings for Berlin, he
was fully responsible for at least one aspect of
the treatment of the Jews.' If (para. 24) the
Plaintiff is excoriated for being, which is
denied, antisemitic because he stated truly both
the real and the alias-names of personalities,
it seems quixotic for the Defendants to aver
that a Nazi war criminal who admits expelling
75,000 Jews from 23,765 Jewish homes in Berlin
in deep mid-winter, with no regard for their
eventual fate, was not antisemitic.
(i) After Albert Speer was released
from Spandau he corresponded at length with
the Plaintiff and granted him interviews. As
is plain from the Matthias Schmidt book,
Albert Speer, The End of a Myth,
Speer's former associate Rudolf Wolters had
sanitised Speer's wartime ministerial Office
Chronik (official diaries) in 1964, removing
criminally-damaging evidence from their pages
before having them retyped. Although aware of
this falsification, Speer deposited the
sanitised texts in the German Federal
Archives in 1969. After the Cabinet Office
Historical Section in London gave the
Plaintiff access to its copy of the original
1943 Speer Chronik he asked Mr Speer whether
he knew the location of the other original
Chronik volumes. Speer untruthfully replied
that he did not. He however furnished to the
Plaintiff an unsolicited retyped set of his
wartime ministerial Office Chronik (diary).
The Plaintiff was the first to observe
discrepancies between the genuine 1943 volume
provided to him at the Cabinet Office
Historical Section and the sanitised text
furnished to him by Speer. The Plaintiff
therefore challenged him in a letter to
explain these discrepancies. Upon receiving
this letter from the Plaintiff, Speer wrote
secretly to Wolters on March 1, 1970: 'Now
we're in for it.' (Letter quoted by Matthias
at page 17).(ii) The Plaintiff sees no purpose in
quibbling about where the evicted Jews were
rehoused. The fact remains that it was the
Hauptamt Aussiedlung (Main
Resettlement Office) in Speer's department as
General Buildings Inspector for the Reich
Capital Berlin which evicted the Jews and
seized their homes to provide housing for
bombed-out Berliners and for working-class
Berliners dislodged by his slum-clearance
schemes; that Dr Goebbels' Diary shows that
Speer did this hand in hand with him as the
Nazi gauleiter of Berlin; and that these
trainloads of Jews -- some fifty thousand
people -- thus evicted and dislodged were
transported forthwith through Central
Europe's cruellest winter months mostly to
their deaths at Riga and Auschwitz.
(iii) In the premises the Plaintiff's
words 'cold-blooded, 'infamous' and 'booted'
seem rather understated.
write
to David Irving