Archive/File: people/i/irving.david/libel.suit/transcripts/day022.12 Last-Modified: 2000/07/24 Q.So, winding up this chapter on page 362, once again you have allowed yourself to dip into the dictionary of insult. You say that I am totally discredited a few months earlier; the document proved to be too useful to be discard altogether; a more egregious institute, manufactured manipulated, doctored, untenable, all the words come out? A.Yes. Q.Are you prepared to withdraw any of those on the basis of what you have been saying this morning? A.Absolutely not, Mr Irving. The point is you acknowledge, as I say on pages 360 to 361, concerning the -- what it is about is your persistent claim that Hitler told Himmler to make the phone call to Heydrich attempting to stop the killing of the transport of Jews from Berlin to Riga, and you produced on your website on 17th May 1998 a document which is now in the Himmler appointments diary edition, . P-104 showing that Himmler only met Hitler after he phoned Heydrich; and therefore that what you then call your original theory, which in fact was presented as a matter of incontrovertible fact that Hitler had told Himmler to tell Heydrich to get the shootings stopped, was wrong. Yet, even though you have done that in May 1998, it is too nice a document for you really to let go of, so you post another document on the website on 31st August 1998 in which you argue that on 30th November Hitler had, "demonstrably ordered that the Berlin Jews were not to be killed", whereas you knew that to be wrong. That, to my mind, is an egregious instance of a completely unscrupulous use of a manipulated source. Q.Are you prepared to accept that historians or scholars or writers sometimes have differing opinions on the interpretation of the identical sets of documents, and that one scholar or historian will have one interpretation because of his own particular mind set, and the other historian will have perhaps better sources, he will be familiar with the CSDIC reports which you yourself have admittedly totally unfamiliar with; he will have worked for many weeks months in the police decodes with which you are also totally unfamiliar, and that this entitles to him to reach conclusions on the quality of evidence which you are not entitled to reach? MR JUSTICE GRAY: I think you are missing the thrust of the . P-105 criticism that Professor Evans is making there. The criticism he is making is that at one point you are actually admitting that you got the Himmler phone log wrong, but having admitted that you later went on to assert again your original interpretation of the log as showing had Hitler had demonstrably ordered that the Berlin Jews were not to be killed. That is the point. MR IRVING: My Lord, I do not want to pick up his particular words here ---- A.I am sure you do not. MR JUSTICE GRAY: I am just trying to point out to you that your rather long question missed the point of the question. MR IRVING: I am just about to take this point up. I do not particularly, I repeat, wish to fall into the trap of using the words used by the witness here, which is that I knew it to be wrong. The fact that the Himmler agenda indicates that there was a meeting between Hitler and Himmler after the telephone call to Heydrich, does not exclude the possibility that they met before the telephone call. The fact that he had an appointment with Hitler at a certain time, to say in the words, and your Lordship will find it in the transcript, that he only met Hitler afterwards, there is no proof of that, that he only met Hitler afterwards. What we do know is that they were very close, that they repeatedly went in and out of each . P-106 other's rooms and offices; that the appointment was at a certain time; that upon arriving at Hitler's headquarters for some reason Heydrich had to make this extraordinary phone call ordering a total reversal of this operation going on in Riga, and any common sense historian is going to come to the conclusion that A is in some way connected with B. But we are dealing here with Professor Evans who is not able to join the dots in this particular case and says there is no link. A.You join too many dots, Mr Irving, that is the problem. Q.That is where we differ. A.To answer your ---- Q.And to say that this is perverse or obtuse or a manipulation or a distortion is, in my view, a perverse use of the witness box, because you are privileged to make these remarks. You know you can make these remarks without fear of any kind of consequences, because this is a court of law. MR JUSTICE GRAY: Would you like to leave that sort of thing to me. If I thought Professor Evans were doing that, then I would not let him do it but I do not, and it is not for you to say that. MR IRVING: The reason why I will say to your Lordship that I have felt it perfectly proper to continue to rely upon these documents in the manner I have, is that I have perfectly properly, just as your Lordship will remember in . P-107 the case of the Dresden documents, drawn it to the attention of other historians that there may be a flaw in this chain of argument. However, I have the right to remain by my original position on the basis of my entire knowledge which has been assembled, after all, over thirty-nine years of working in the archives. A.I am beginning to wonder who is in the witness box, you or me, Mr Irving. MR JUSTICE GRAY: Yes, but, Professor Evans. A.I am not sure if there were any questions all involved in those series of lengthy speeches. MR JUSTICE GRAY: There was not, so you do not need to answer. Wait for the next question. MR IRVING: My Lord, I am going to ask if we can -- I would normally at this point have asked for a five-minute interruption, but in view of the fact that we are so close to the lunch adjournment can I suggest we make the adjournment now? I have come to the end of this particular part. MR JUSTICE GRAY: Yes, I am perfectly happy with that, but if it does not cause any inconvenience I think we will resume in an hour's time at 10 to 2. (Luncheon Adjournment) (1.50 p.m.) MR JUSTICE GRAY: Yes, Mr Irving. MR IRVING: My Lord, thank you very much for allowing me an . P-108 earlier adjournment. That was a useful hiatus. We will now proceed to the Schlegelberger memorandum, unless it is not worth discussing. I think myself we ought to. MR JUSTICE GRAY: I certainly would not think it was not worth discussing, no. MR IRVING: This is page 363 of the expert report. MR JUSTICE GRAY: Thank you. MR IRVING: Professor Evans, just so that we can be certain what we are talking about by the Schlegelberger memorandum, do you have a little bundle of documents in front of you? A.Yes. Q.Would you turn page 9 of that little bundle? A.I have been overwhelmed with material here. Q.We are only going to need the little bundle and your report? A.This is bundle D, is it in J1? Q.Page 9 of that little bundle. This is the only bundle I will be referring to myself. MR JUSTICE GRAY: J1 we are in, are we? MS ROGERS: Tab 7. MR JUSTICE GRAY: Thank you. MR IRVING: These are the only documents I shall be referring to in my cross-examination, apart from the expert report. Is document No. 9 in that bundle what we are going to call the Schlegelberger memorandum for the sake of simplicity? . P-109 A.Yes, it is in here. Q.In the top left hand corner it has the number 01/111 crossed out? A.Yes, I have it. Q.Have you seen correspondence in the discovery that I have made in this action which indicates that I was aware of the existence of this memorandum in about 1970? A.No. Q.Have you seen correspondence indicating that in 1972 I dealt with the US National Archives in an attempt to locate this missing memorandum? Can I take you straight, please, to page 22 of the bundle? A.Yes. Q.Do you know who Robert Wolfe is? A.You tell me. Q.He is the head, or he was for about 30 years the head, of the Foreign Document section of the US National Archives. He may have retired by now. Having read that letter, does it look as though I have asked the National Archives to provide me with photocopies of documents in a Nuremberg document identified at that time as PS-4025? A.Yes. Q.Where they found everything except one item? A.Yes. Q.That letter to me is dated May 5th 1972? A.Yes. . P-110 Q.So can you conclude from that that I had been searching for some time for that document, specifically identifying it by content? A.No. Just that you are asking them for it. Q.Yes. A.A document, an alleged note on Hitler's intentions. Q.He writes, "With the exception of the alleged note on Hitler's intention to postpone the solution of the Jewish problem", he is supplying me with photocopies of the six documents. A.Yes. Q.My Lord, the purpose of the next few questions for about four or five minutes will be purely to establish where these documents came from. MR JUSTICE GRAY: Which documents? MR IRVING: The Schlegelberger memorandum and the surrounding documents, the other five documents, or the other six documents. MR JUSTICE GRAY: Yes. Just for my benefit, was the one that they were not able to find the original of the Schlegelberger memorandum? MR IRVING: Yes, absolutely. MR JUSTICE GRAY: That was not entirely clear. Thank you. MR IRVING: Would you go to pages 18 and 19 of the little bundle? This is a Staff Evidence Analysis sheet prepared by the American prosecuting staff at Nuremberg. . P-111 A.Yes. Q.Is that right? About a year after the war was over? A.Yes. Q.Does that describe a list of five documents that they have found, and they give a brief summary of what each document is? A.Yes. Q.The title and nature is correspondence between the Reich Chancellery and the Reich ministry of Justice on matters concerning the treatment of the Jews? A.Yes. Q.They put the date as March to April 1942? A.Yes. Q.The fourth item on this list is simply stated as being a note stating that Hitler intended to postpone solution of the Jewish problem until after the war? A.Yes. Q.Can you understand why I was interested in seeing the content of that note? A.Yes. Indeed I can. Q.Yes. So I will tell you, Professor, that this Staff Evidence Analysis sheet was provided to me by the Institute of History in 1970 by a colleague working for me, as I can identify by the red rubber stamp at the bottom left hand corner "indexed", which was my rubber stamp. . P-112 A.Yes. Q.I first was tipped off that this document had existed in 1970. I am still looking for it in 1972 and it is thanks to the efforts of a German historian, Professor Eberhard Jaeckel, that we finally obtained the actual document. Is that correct? A.Yes. Q.In about 1978? A.Yes. Q.So, when you write on page 364, line 2, indeed it was Jaeckel who first informed Irving of the document's existence, this is not correct, is that right? It was the other way round? A.Well, I should have said perhaps whereabouts. That is strictly true, I suppose, in the sense that it seems to have been lost beforehand and nobody could actually confirm its actual existence. Q.Yes. A.That is true, that statement there. Q.I am not going make anything of it, just a little bit of flag waving. A.You can wave your flag as much as you like, Mr Irving. The point is there was no evidence before that that it actually existed. Q.No evidence that it actually existed? A.No. It seemed to have been lost. It might have been . P-113 destroyed but it turns out that it did and does exist, and it was Eberhard Jaeckel who informed you of that fact.
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