Archive/File: people/i/irving.david/libel.suit/transcripts/day003.17 Last-Modified: 2000/07/29 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Do not let us let it descend into... A. Mr Rampton -- my Lord, I am not sure if I can say this, . P-149 but Mr Rampton rather left the innuendo in the air -- I am not sure if you are returning to this -- but I had this diary passage in front of me and ignored it when I wrote the book. MR RAMPTON: Indeed. A. Are you going to state that? Q. I was going to ask you. You can be personal about it if you like, I do not mind, but I am going to ask you whether you knew about this at the time you wrote these books. A. Thank you very much indeed. The answer is no. Q. Why? A. I did not have it. Q. You did not have it? A. No. This was part of the diaries that were in Moscow. A Goebbels', typical Goebbels' diary entry would run to 70 or 50 or 100 pages. One Goebbels' diary entry in September 1943 is 143 pages of typescript for one day. In Moscow, we were extremely limited for our time, the days we were allowed to view these pages. I did, by chance, look at these pages around the German declaration of war on the United States as it was a matter of interest. My commission from The Sunday Times was to obtain the material relating to Germany's declaration of war on the United States, obviously for commercial reasons. I read those passages, those pages, copied them down. MR JUSTICE GRAY: Mr Irving, I just want to make sure I am . P-150 understanding what the question is directed to. Are you saying that you did not have the passage quoted ---- A. By Longerich. Q. --- in Longerich ---- A. That is correct. Q. --- at page 61, 62, when you wrote Goebbels? A. Indeed, my Lord, yes. I did not have it. It has only recently been published by the Institute of History in Munich. They obtained the diaries in 1992, shortly after I obtained take them, and it has taken them six or seven years to make them available to the general public. I still have not received the volumes that I ordered from the publishers. MR RAMPTON: I am not sure what you did have. MR JUSTICE GRAY: Can I just pursue this? I am still a little bit puzzled. You do make reference though in Goebbels to the speech that Hitler made to the Gauleiter? A. Purely because we know that there was a speech from Martin Bormann's diary. MR RAMPTON: You quote from it? A. And because Goebbels being a typical diarist, he kept on rambling back and forth as he dictated the diary to his Private Secretary, and he kept on coming back to the previous day's speech, but not the passage there. MR JUSTICE GRAY: So what are you saying -- just bear with me -- I am trying to follow. . P-151 MR RAMPTON: I am sorry, my Lord. I will shut up! MR JUSTICE GRAY: If I can just speak for a minute? Are you saying that what you say about Hitler's speech to the Gauleiters in your book, Goebbels, comes from Bormann's diary? A. No, my Lord. It comes from a previous passages of the Goebbels' diary. Had I read all 100 pages, I would have stumbled across this paragraph too; but I can make it very easy for your Lordship and for the Defendants by drawing their attention to the fact that in my discovery were the entire Goebbels' diaries that I obtained from Moscow. They could have come to court producing the pages which they had found in my discovery, proving that I had had them at the time I wrote both Goebbels and Hitler, and saying, "Here, he had them here, and yet he ignored them when he wrote that", and the answer is they have not done so because those pages are not in my documents because I did not get them. Q. I am still puzzled. What exactly did you base what you write in Goebbels about the Gauleiters speech upon? A. I read the Goebbels' diary for December 13th 1941, just a few pages. On each page there would be about 200 pages in a big typeface. I read all the pages relating to the German declaration of war on the United States which had just been made that day; and then Goebbels mentions the fact that the previous day Hitler had delivered a speech . P-152 to the Gauleiters, and he mentions it in the terms that I have quoted in full -- believe me, I quoted everything that I had in my hands when I came back from Moscow because it was interesting material. Had I read on another 30 or 40 pages in the diary for that day, I would probably have come across the full length description, the report of the Gauleiters' speech on which Longerich is relying. But I have not seen it from the Moscow day in 1992 to about the middle of last year when it was finally made available and quoted by Christian Gerlach in his book and elsewhere. I am still not very impressed by it, but I do wish to make the point in case it was going to be inferred that I had had the material and not made use of it. MR JUSTICE GRAY: I think I understand. A. It would have been in my discovery and it was not. MR RAMPTON: How long are these daily entries in Goebbels' diary? I have not understood it. A. They vary in length depending on what is happening. Q. How long is this entry for 13th December? It reports the previous day's events. How long is the entry for the speech of Hitler? A. I have no idea. I have not seen it. Q. Well, you quoted from it. A. The previous entry? Q. No, you quoted from it on page 383 of Goebbels. This is . P-153 what I find baffling. A. Yes, but, you see, he kept on coming back to it, something like that he would keep on coming back to as things occurred to him. He is sitting in the room with his Private Secretary, Dr Richard Otte, his chief stenographer, dictating the following morning the events of the previous day and he would keep coming back to something. The diaries were not really intended for publication in that form; they would have been edited. I came across an earlier reference to it in the diaries which I then have used here; but to this day I have not seen any full length description of the Gauleiters' speech. MR JUSTICE GRAY: How do you know it is 30 or 40 pages further on? A. Well, presumably it was because, anyway, it was not on the glass plate that I had, my Lord. The glass plate would have had 45 pages on it. The glass plate was either five times five or six times eight, depending on when it was made, pages per glass plate, and they were in complete disarray. So I would have had the plate which contained the bits I used, but not the bits which contained the speech on it. I had no commission from The Sunday Times to look into this kind of thing. MR RAMPTON: My Lord, may I take some instructions because I have just been given a rather important document? . P-154 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Do you want to have five minutes? MR RAMPTON: Yes, I think I need five minutes actually because it is not a document I am not aware of. MR JUSTICE GRAY: I think, bearing in mind the transcribers' task, but shall we say quarter past? (Short Adjournment) MR RAMPTON: I am grateful to your Lordship. Can I say this? I will say it to Mr Irving, if I may? Mr Irving, I say two things now and I undertake to come back to it on Monday, not more this afternoon because I am not clued up enough yet, but I will be. First, I do not accept that the failure to use a subjunctive is necessarily a bar to the written material being a report of what somebody else says in German. You do not have to comment on this. I tell you this so that you will know what is coming. Second, that the Goebbels' diary entry which you quoted in the book is not as long as you said that it was. All right? A. I am sorry. I do not understand the second part of that, the Goebbels' diary entry which I quoted? The original entry you mean? Q. Yes. A. The original entry from which I quoted. Q. I do not know because I have not looked at your discovery. That is one of the things I want to do, is how long is the entry from which you quoted. I also want to . P-155 find out for certain what proportion of that bears to the whole of the entry? A. Can I suggest, therefore, that when we resume on Monday I bring the entire December 1941 Goebbels' Diary that I brought back from Moscow with me and can see what I had and what I did not because it was in the discovery and you must have seen. Q. I have not seen it, but I am sure we must have it. A. Well, if you did not see it, it is not my fault. It was in your discovery and it was available. Q. I am not criticising you, Mr Irving. I am quite happy to take blame for negligence, idleness, whatever you like. Mr Irving, I want, therefore, to pass away from that, if I may, and, if his Lordship will allow me, to come back to it on Monday when I have done my homework and ask you about something else, which, as you said, it is probable that Hans Frank as one of the Reichleiters? A. He was ---- Q. He was General ---- A. --- he was a Reichleiter and he would have been of the rank to attend that meeting. Q. Surely he would; he was General Governor, was he not? A. Yes. In fact, he went to Berlin for the meeting, so there is no reason to dispute he was there. Q. The odious (and it is not really meant to be a pun) Globocnik was one of his subordinates? . P-156 A. Of Hans Frank? At this time he was the Police Chief in Lublin, I believe. Q. Yes. A. Yes -- no, this is not true. The SS was -- they conducted an independent existence in the Government General. Q. Right, OK. It does not matter. It is not important. A. Do you wish me to expand on that? Q. No, not now. A. No? There was no hierarchy bringing the two together. The name is Globocnik -- G-L-O-B-O-C-N-I-K. MR RAMPTON: Odilo Globocnik. MR JUSTICE GRAY: I think the surname will suffice. MR RAMPTON: Otherwise known as "Globos". May Mr Irving please be provided please with Professor Browning's report? A. Have we finished with Dr Goebbels? Q. I have finished with that for the moment. As I say, I am coming back to that later on. I am trying to keep some semblance of chronological order. I am still in December 1941. Have you got Dr Browning there? A. Page 30 and 31? Q. 30 and 31, correct. Dr Browning also quotes the speech of Hitler, but in abbreviated form, in other words, he does not quote as much of the Goebbels' diary entry as does Dr Longerich. A. Yes. Q. Do you see that? . P-157 A. Yes. Q. He goes down as far as saying (which you agree is a correct translation, well, I do not know if you do), that was no figure of speech, top of 31, "The World War is here. The Vernichtung", whether it is destruction, extermination, annihilation or whatever, "of the Jews must be the inevitable consequence". A. Well, that is again a contentious and tendentious translation. MR JUSTICE GRAY: Well, we have been through that I think sufficiently. MR RAMPTON: We have been through that. That is why I used the word "vernichtung"? A. Well, but it is the word "Jews" also that we have to look at there, is it not? Destruction of the Jews. But this is ---- MR JUSTICE GRAY: That is quite plain because he refers to "des Judens", so there really cannot be any argument about that, can there? A. No. "[German].. Judentums", no. Q. There is not reference to "Judentums". A. It is the fifth line, so he has allowed himself a lot of poetic licence in his translation. My Lord, I have to be careful about what I accept here I cannot be heard to accept something that is not ... Q. You are quite right. I think I was wrong. You are quite . P-158 right? MR RAMPTON: You were in that respect, my Lord, but not, in fact, in the earlier part of which forms the context. "Zeeda ... [German] ... Vuren" and "ihre" there is "their" which is the Jews' is it not? MR JUSTICE GRAY: But in connection with "Vernichtung", it is "Judentum". MR RAMPTON: Both have "vernichtung" attached to them.
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