Archive/File: people/i/irving.david/libel.suit/transcripts/day008.28 Last-Modified: 2000/07/20 MR RAMPTON: This is what Dr Roth said when he was interviewed for that programme, last year or something like that. He said this: "I do not think that the Leuchter results have any meaning. There is nothing in any of our data that says those services were exposed or not. Hindsight being 20/20, the test was not the correct one to have been used for the analysis. Leuchter presented us with rock samples anywhere from the side view of thumb up to half the size of your fist. He broke them up with a hammer so that we could get a subsample, placed it in a flask, add concentrated sulphuric acid and undergoes a reaction that produces a red coloured solution. It is the intensity of this red colour that we can relate with cyanide concentration. You have to look at what happens to cyanide when it reacts with a wall. Where does it go, how far goes it go? Cyanide is a surface reaction. It is probably not going to penetrate more than 10 microns. A human hair is 100 microns in diameter. Crush this sample up. I have just diluted that sample 10,000, 100,000 times. If you are going to look for it, you are going to look on the surface face only. There is no reason to go deep because it is not going to be there. Which was the . P-60 exposed surface? I did not have any idea. That is like analysing paint on a wall by analysing the timber that is behind it." Now Mr Irving, that is the man that did the analysis? A. Yes. Can I add that he also said on a part that is not in the film, "Had I known that these samples came from Auschwitz, I would have come up with completely different figures". MR JUSTICE GRAY: What is the significance, you say, of that? A. I suggest that he is not entirely subjective not. Q. You mean objective? A. Not entirely objective. MR RAMPTON: Maybe. Mr Irving, what this suggests is, to use one of your words, it is absolutely shattering, is it not? Despite the absolutely hopeless methodology that Fred Leuchter used to obtain his samples, the fact is that the sample from the Leichenkeller in crematorium 3 still produced traces of hydrogen cyanide, did it not? MR JUSTICE GRAY: Which samples is he talking about here? MR RAMPTON: He is talking about the ruins of Auschwitz which Fred Leuchter surreptitiously removed on his visit and brought back to be analysed in America. MR JUSTICE GRAY: From the gas chambers or the delousing chamber or both? MR RAMPTON: Both, as far as I know. He did the whole lot and . P-61 that is the where the figures in the Leuchter report come from, my Lord. It is from Dr Roth's analysis. A. Dr Roth says that it is less than one tenth the thickness of a human hair that the cyanide will penetrate into the brickwork. Q. Exactly. If you are going to do the test scientifically, you need carefully to scratch or scrape the surface and put it in a plastic bag, take it back and have it analysed. What Fred Leuchter did was to hack great lumps out of the fabric, did he not? A. Mr Rampton, I am not just going to go annihilate evidence from Dr Roth, I am going to exterminate it when the time comes, when we produce the photographs. MR JUSTICE GRAY: Make a start now. A. My Lord, we have photographs taken of the outside of some of these buildings, I emphasise the word "outside", and the blue stain from the cyanide has gone right through the brickwork, inch after inch after inch. You can see the outside of the building is stained blue with a stain that turns out to be Prussian blue from the cyanide that has come right through the brickwork. Q. That is the delousing chamber, is it? A. The delousing chamber, my Lord, yes and also a gas chamber at Stutthorf outside Dansig. MR RAMPTON: How long, Mr Irving, does it take to delouse a set, I call it a set, of clothing of, let us say, 1500 . P-62 people in a delousing chamber using Zyklon B? A. That is neither here nor there. Dr Roth had not spoken about the length of time. He says it goes less than one tenth of the thickness of a human hair into the brickwork. Q. How long does it take to disinfect, using Zyklon B, delouse the clothing of 1500 people? A. I do not know. MR JUSTICE GRAY: I think Mr Rampton is right, that the way it is put here, and it is not perhaps the most satisfactory way to present Dr Roth's views, if this is a television interview, is that cyanide is only ever a surface reaction. MR RAMPTON: Yes indeed. A. My Lord, these photographs will be in evidence later on this week. MR JUSTICE GRAY: It is really a chemistry point, not a photograph point. A. An image is worth a thousand words, perhaps. MR JUSTICE GRAY: Maybe. MR RAMPTON: It depends. The camera never lies, of course, does it, Mr Irving? Have the outside surfaces of that building which you say has the blue staining on it been tested? A. Yes, by Mr Gelman Rudolf. He has carried out very intensive tests on them. Q. Mr Irving, these criticisms by Mr Beer were cogent, were . P-63 they not? A. They were, yes, of course. I did not ignore them at all. I immediately contacted all relevant parties as the correspondence under flag 8 or 9 shows, and said we have to take these on board. Q. What about the general public? A. Well, you must realize, by this time you also have the other collateral evidence. Q. By what time? When did your so-called collateral evidence come to light? A. Oh, it was coming in the whole time. As soon as the Leuchter report was published, people starting contacting us and telling us about other such things. Q. What do you mean by collateral evidence? A. For example, we know that both of a forensic nature, somebody sent us a copy of the Krakow report by the Jansen Institute which the Auschwitz state museum immediately commissioned after the Leuchter report was published, and they did not like the findings, and so they pigeonholed it. They put it in a safe and locked it away, because it basically substantiated what Mr Leuchter had said. Then the original Jansen report was also supplied to us, the 1945 report. Q. Us? Who is "us"? A. Us? Q. You said "supplied us"? . P-64 A. A copy was supplied to me, a copy was supplied to the Institute of Historical Review in California, and in fact it was supplied to us surreptitiously. Somebody in the Auschwitz archives photographed a copy and sent us a copy of what the Auschwitz archives were concealing from. Q. I still do not know who "us" is? A. Is it material? Q. Yes, I think it probably is, in the light of this correspondence which we are going to look at more in a moment. A. A copy was sent to me, a copy was sent to Mark Weber probably of the Institute of Historical Review. Q. And one no doubt to Ernst Zundel? A. I think I sent a copy to him, if my memory is correct. These things were shuffled back and forth. Sometimes I got them, sometimes the others got them and then we would collaborate. We put our heads together. Obviously there is no point rushing into print with some kind of conclusion this way and that. It would be looking like headless chickens if you come out with first one thing and then another thing. Q. You have never publicly acknowledged any of these reports, critiques and so on which cast doubt, sometimes 100 per cent doubt, on your utterances about the gas chambers at Auschwitz. A. I do not agree. I think that the central chemical . P-65 conclusions of the Leuchter report, although flawed, have now been substantially confirmed by a whole string of other reports in the meantime, both the one kept secret by the Auschwitz authorities and the earlier 1945 one, and the Gelmar Rudolf one, and other reports that have been conducted since then. Obviously the numbers do not exactly match, and you would not expect them to, but the broad trend is the same, very large quantities in the fumigation clambers, cyanide residues and not the quantities you would expect in the buildings where allegedly hundreds of thousands of people have been gassed to death with cyanide. Q. So you say. In order to set the scene, this has become a little bit disorderly, Mr Irving, because you keep referring to some documents we have and others that we do not. Leave that on one side for the moment. We are just going to do, if we may, a little bit of arithmetic. A. These documents have all been in my discovery. None of them have been concealed. Q. I am not suggesting you are hiding anything from this court, Mr Irving, in the way of documents. Can you please turn in the Leuchter report in the front of your bundle. You may be better to use the copied one unless that has all 12 appendices. Appendix 12 to the copy of the Leuchter report that I have, my Lord, in the bottom right hand corner should be page No. 49. . P-66 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Yes. MR RAMPTON: This is Mr Fruisson's name written on the top of it, if you turn it sideways, has it? It has Fruisson written beside Appendix 12. Please turn to page 51, bottom right hand corner, that is the internal page number of the report. This is a document produced by the firm of Degesch, do you agree, who are the manufacturers of Zyklon B? I am not suggesting this is a wartime document. A. They are not the manufacturers. The manufacturers were I G Farbon. Degesch were the people who controlled the supplies and Tesh were the company who allocated the supplies. Q. The distributors? A. Yes. Q. If you look at page 55, you can see a picture of some tins of Zyklon B. That is only just mentioned in passing, so one can see there are three different tin sizes. I do not know what the rates were. If you look at page 51, in the left-hand column under hydro cyanic acid, which is the active agent in these pellets, is it not? A. Yes. Q. At the very bottom of the column we see that one part per million of hydrogen cyanide, that is a concentration, is equivalent to .0012 grammes per cubic metre. A. Yes. Q. Now, if you turn backwards in this file to appendix 3, we . P-67 come to a translation of a wartime document. My Lord, it is page 23, which I think is a Nuremberg document, is it not? A. Yes, from the industrial case N I. Q. And we see that it is issued, I do not know the exact date, but it was issued presumably during the war, it must have been during the war, by the Health Institution of the Protectorate of Bohemia and Morevia in Prague. We find that on page 25. If you turn to the second page of this document, page 24, and look at IX towards the bottom of left hand column, we see there: "The strength of gas and the time required for it to take effect depends on the type of vermin, the temperature, the amount of furniture in the rooms, the imperviousness of building. With inside temperatures of more than 5 degrees centigrade it is customary to use 8 grammes of Prussic acid, that hydrogen cyanide, per cubic metre. Time needed to take effect 16 hours, unless there are special circumstances such as a closed in type of building which requires less time. If the weather is warm, it is possible to reduce this to a minimum of 6 hours. The period is to be extended to at least 32 hours if the temperature is below 5 degrees centigrade. The strength and time as above are to be applied in the case of bugs, lice, fleas, etc. with eggs, larvae..." If, Mr Irving, .0012 grammes per cubic metre . P-68 produces a concentration of one part per million, 8 grammes per cubic meter produces, I can tell you, a concentration of 6,666 parts per million. A. Wrong. Q. What? A. Wrong. Q. Why? A. You are talking about hydrogen cyanide. Q. Yes, that is what they are talking about. A. But we are talking about pellets, and pellets only contain a small quantity of hydrogen cyanide sucked into them. Q. Who is talking about pellets, Mr Irving? I am certainly not. A. OK, carry on. Q. Where does it say anything here about pellets? A. If later on you start talking about tins of Zyklon B. Q. No, I am reading from the wartime document. A. All right. As long as we are clear there is a distinction between the weight of cyanide and the weight of the pellets. Q. Degesch is talking in the other document we looked at about concentrations of cyanide parts per million of air. A. Yes. Q. So is this document. Customary to use 8 grammes of Prussic acid per cubic metre? A. Hydrogen cyanide supplied. . P-69 Q. Nothing about pellets. So I am right, am I not? A. I do accept the point that it takes less Zyklon B or hydrogen cyanide to kill the vermin in fumigation chambers at lower concentration than it does to kill human beings. I accept this point.
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