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Shofar FTP Archive File: people/i/irving.david/libel.suit/transcripts/day021.18


Archive/File: people/i/irving.david/libel.suit/transcripts/day021.18
Last-Modified: 2000/07/24

   MR IRVING:  The chain of documents, the chain of evidence.  It
        is complete, apart from the Schlegelberger document, which
        is bundle D.  Witness, just so you know what the purpose
        of the remaining cross-examination is about, as you are
        aware and his Lordship is aware, I have maintained that
        there is a chain of documents of high integrity which
        indicate Adolf Hitler intervening, on a greater or smaller
        scale, on behalf of the Jews rather than against them.
   A.   "The best friend the Jews ever had in the Third Reich" is
        your phrase, I think.
   MR JUSTICE GRAY:  Where shall I put this, just so that I know
        where its home is going to be?  Miss Rogers always answers
        this question.
   MS ROGERS:  The J files.  There should be a J2.  I am afraid
        I do not know which tab we are up to.
   MR JUSTICE GRAY:  Probably 10, I think.
   MR IRVING:  Now, Professor Evans, if you wish to challenge the
        provenance of any of these documents, please do not
        hesitate to say so and indicate if you think it is not a
        genuine document, or that it has in some way been tampered
        with or distorted or manipulated.  Is the first document
        dated August 20th 1935?  I am going to go through these as

.          P-164

        rapidly as I can, my Lord.
   A.   Yes.
   Q.   If you just run your eye over it very rapidly, does this
        indicate that Hitler has ordered that individual actions
        against Jews are on no account to take place and will be
        severely punished?
   A.   That is right, yes.  Individual actions or isolated
        actions against Jews.
   Q.   Committed by members of the Nazi party?
   A.   Or other organizations and so on, or anybody provokes them
        or whatever is going to be treated very severely, that is
        right.  This is August 1935, that is right.
   Q.   This is actually issued by the Reichsminister of the
        Interior.
   A.   This is a very interesting example of how Hitler did
        indeed sometimes step in to try and regain control over
        anti-Semitic actions when he thought that they were
        occurring in a way that was piecemeal and not actually
        steered from the centre.  Of course, this is part of the
        lead up to the infamous Nuremberg laws a few weeks later,
        which then, in a very characteristic way of the way the
        Third Reich operated, introduced a legal means, an ordered
        means of disadvantaging and persecuting the Jews in place
        of these individual and rather violent actions.  It is an
        exact parallel, well, not exact but a certain parallel
        there with the relationship between the pogrom of the 9th

.          P-165

        and 10th November and with the legal measures introduced
        on the 12th.
   Q.   Can we continue by looking at the document and say, does
        it continue by saying that anybody who does take part in
        individual actions against Jews or instigates them will
        have to be in the future treated as a provocator, a rebel
        and an enemy of the state?
   A.   That is right.
   Q.   "I please request you from now on ruthlessly to take
        action against any such operations or means to keep law
        and order and security and so on"?
   A.   Yes.  It is a well known document.
   Q.   It is a well known document, is it?
   A.   Yes.
   Q.   So I do not really need to waste the court's time with it?
   A.   No, absolutely.
   MR JUSTICE GRAY:  Do not assume that I have ever seen it before?
   A.   You made your point, Mr Irving.
   Q.   I have made my point?
   A.   Yes.  I accept that this is a document.  You need not go
        on about it.
   Q.   Can we turn to 5th February 1936:  On account of the
        murder of the Swiss party chief or representative Wilhelm
        Gustlov, what happened to Gustlov?  He was assassinated,
        was he not, by a deranged assassin?  Is that correct?

.          P-166

   A.   I think so, yes.
   Q.   There were dangers of anti-Semitic outbursts in Germany,
        and has Hitler ordered in this document there to be no
        kind of excesses?
   A.   That is right, yes.  1936 was a year in which the Nazis
        were particularly concerned about their international
        reputation because of the Olympic games coming up Berlin,
        and the winter Olympics as well.
   Q.   You mention the Olympic Games of course.  Are you aware of
        the fact that Hitler specifically ordered that Jews and
        blacks were to be allowed to take part and they were not
        to be subjected to any kind of indignities?
   A.   Yes.  I am not aware of Jewish athletes running for the Germans.
   Q.   But it was not just the Germans taking part, were they?
   A.   No, that is right.  As I said, he was concerned about the
        international reputation of Germany.
   MR JUSTICE GRAY:  Do you mean black people from African countries.
   MR IRVING:  I beg your pardon.
   MR RAMPTON:  No, they would be people like Jesse Owens.
   A.   Jesse Owens, my Lord, the black American runner, Hitler's
        demonstrably leftie.
   MR JUSTICE GRAY:  The point you are making is that Hitler did
        not just make it an all white Olympics?
   MR IRVING:  He ordered they were not to be subjected to any

.          P-167

        kind of indignities or any of the things that one might
        have expected, and there is such a document in the file.
        The last paragraph of that document is possibly worth
        looking at.  Does it say, "It remains reserved to the
        Fuhrer now as ever, to decide what policy is going to be
        adopted from case to case"?
   A.   Exactly the point, yes.  No individual party comrade may
        pursue a policy on his own initiative.  That is exactly
        the point.  That is what this is all about.
   Q.   The next document is 28th July 1937.
   A.   Yes.
   Q.   That Hitler as Fuhrer Reichschancellor has from time to
        time himself bent the rules a bit to allow people whose
        blood was not pure Aryan to remain within the party and
        remain in full office.  As I say, these documents are
        sometimes of great magnitude and sometimes of minor
        importance, but they are documents and they all tend in
        the same direction.  Is that roughly the burden of that?
   A.   Yes.  It is all about Hitler's ability to sort of rule who
        is Aryan or not, really, or to make exceptions from the
        Aryan paragraphs of the party in the case of individual
        party members.
   Q.   Yes.
   A.   Whatever exactly that means.
   Q.   Are you familiar with the case of Field Marshal Milsch?
   A.   Yes.

.          P-168

   Q.   Was he half Jewish?
   A.   I think that is right.
   Q.   His father was Anton Milsch, who was a Jewish apothecary
        and he rose to the rank of Field Marshal.
   A.   Yes.  The Nazis never really decided exactly what to do
        with half Jews, or so-called Jews of mixed blood.  It was
        a constant problem for them, as you might expect in such
        an absurd racist ideology, where you draw the line.  It is
        impossible to draw lines.
   Q.   If you now turn the page, we now come to a page which does
        not really belong in this file but it is there.  This is
        in fact the page of extracts copied from the original
        unpublished memoirs of von Below, is that right?
   A.   Yes.
   Q.   On which I based my own description, as opposed to the
        1980 book.  These are the 1947 handwritten memoirs of von Below.
   A.   Well, I will accept that.
   Q.   Yes.  There is the reference there.  I could not find it
        previously and there it is.
   A.   Yes.
   MR JUSTICE GRAY:  Did you type this up yourself, Mr Irving?
   MR IRVING:  Back in 1964, yes, my Lord.
   A.   You typed this up yourself?
   MR IRVING:  I sat in his home in Dusseldorf and typed it up, yes.

.          P-169

   A.   At least you have three dots there.  I find this a very
        dubious document.
   Q.   You find it a dubious document?
   A.   Yes.  I do not necessarily -- we have already been through
        von Below, Mr Irving.
   Q.   If you are going to say you find it a dubious document,
        you ought to say why.
   MR JUSTICE GRAY:  That is a fair point.
   MR IRVING:  I beg your pardon?
   MR JUSTICE GRAY:  The point you have just made is a fair point.
   A.   It is not the original document.
   Q.   You said it is a dubious document.  Why?
   A.   Because it is not the original.  It is Mr Irving's notes
        on it, I think, or Mr Irving's account of it, with gaps.
        That is the first thing.  Secondly, of course, I do not
        believe von Below.  He had very good reason to lie.  We
        have been through that before.
   MR IRVING:  There is quite a lot of people today whom you do
        not believe, are there not?
   A.   Not nearly as many people as you do not believe,
        Mr Irving.  You said that you do not believe any of the
        survivors of the Holocaust, they are all suffering from
        mass delusion.
   Q.   We do not believe the survivors of the Holocaust who made
        quite obvious mistakes, but there are tens of thousands of
        others whom we have not heard a word from.

.          P-170

   A.   I have not seen you give credence to one single Holocaust
        survivor in all your writings, Mr Irving.  All you do is
        pour scorn on them.
   Q.   Can we proceed now to the transcript of the reception of
        Chvalkovsky?
   A.   Page number?
   Q.   We are skipping the two that we have already looked at.
        This is January 21st 1939.
   A.   They are not numbered pages.  Yes.
   Q.   This is a printed document, a record taken by Walter
        Haevel, who was a Foreign Ministry official.  Is it right
        that Hitler begins by saying, "in January 1939 the Juden
        Viorden Biunst Vernichtert".  What does he mean by that?
   A.   I have to read.  This is in reported speech, is it not?
   Q.   Yes.
   A.   It is the subjunctive.
   Q.   Yes.
   A.   He is saying the Jews ----
   Q.   Would be ----
   A.   I guess, are, I am trying to find what he would have said
        in the original.
   MR JUSTICE GRAY:  I am sorry, I am slightly lost.
   MR IRVING:  It is the very first sentence.
   MR JUSTICE GRAY:  Chvalkovsky, who is he?
   MR IRVING:  Czech foreign minister, my Lord.
   A.   Yes.  At that time there was still a Czecho and a Slovakio

.          P-171

        with a hyphen between them.  Correct me if I am wrong.
        I think he saying the Jews are being destroyed, literally
        are being annihilated, in Germany effectively with us.
        "On 9th November 1918, the Jews had not done the 9th
        November 1918 for nothing, this day would be avenged but
        in Czechoslovakia the Jews were still poisoning the people
        today".  That is the first sentence there.
   Q.   I am sure his Lordship appreciates why, just look at that
        very first sentence.
   A.   Do you want to go on, vernichtert?
   Q.   I do not really want to look at the rest of the document.
   MR JUSTICE GRAY:  Let us stick with the questioning at the
        moment.  What is the question?
   MR IRVING:  The first sentence is, Juden viorden biunst
        vernichtert, that is the Fuhrer speaking in the
        subjunctive, the Jews are being or were being destroyed,
        our Jews are being destroyed.  He uses the word
        vernichtert?
   A.   Annihilated.
   Q.   What does he mean by that?
   A.   I think he probably -- what date is this?  21st January
        1939.  I think there he means economically.
   Q.   Economically?
   A.   Yes.
   Q.   So the word vernichtert does not necessarily mean murdered
        or exterminated then? It can mean something else?

.          P-172

   A.   No.  You have to look at the context and the time.  At
        this time in the 1930s I do not think it means that
        necessarily.
   MR JUSTICE GRAY:  How does this go to show that Hitler was
        pro-semitic, if I can use that term?
   MR IRVING:   My Lord, going through these 2,000 documents last
        night I came across these and I thought it proper to put
        them into this bundle and bring them to your Lordship's
        attention in this manner.
   A.   But he does say in the next sentence, which is really why
        I quoted him, Mr Irving, by way of explanation that Hitler
        blamed the Jews in his sort of paranoid ideology for the
        defeat of Germany and the revolution of 9th November 1918,
        and as he says here that this day would be avenged.  So in
        the future he is saying it would be avenged.  So it is not
        exactly a pro-semitic document, is it?

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