Archive/File: people/i/irving.david/libel.suit/transcripts/day023.16
Last-Modified: 2000/07/24

Q.   We were discussing this morning, where Ribbentrop says,
         "if you are not prepared to lock them up in concentration
          camps the way we are demanding, then your only alternative
         is going to be to shoot them".  Right?

    A.   No, he did not quite say that.

    Q.   That is what it boils down to, is it not?

    A.   No, it is not.

    Q.   Ribbentrop is saying, either you do what we say or the
         only other thing you could do is liquidate them, meaning
         there is no choice.

                                 .          150


     A.   We had better look up exactly what he said.

     Q.   Is that not the sense of what he is saying?

     A.   I do not accept your version of it.  I think we need to be
          exact here.

     Q.   Is the whole burden of what Hitler and Ribbentrop have
          been saying to Horthy, you have a security problem, we are
          worried that you are going to break out of the alliance?

     A.   Back to Horthy, no.

     Q.   The Jews are the biggest problem?

    A.   No, I do not think they said anything about a security
         problem unless you can point me to it.

    Q.   I am going to produce those documents to the court when we
         go back to the transcript.  But is it not true?

    A.   The Reichs Foreign Minister replied that the Jews must
         either be annihilated or taken to concentration camps.
         There was no other way.

    Q.   That is right.

    MR JUSTICE GRAY:  Can you give the reference for that?

     A.   Page 441, my Lord, of my report.

    MR IRVING:  Is Ribbentrop in effect saying you have to lock
         them up as we demand because the only other thing you
         could do is with them is to kill them?

    A.   No, he is not.

    Q.   What is the difference?

    A.   He is not saying, lock them up or we will kill them.  He
         is saying they must either be annihilated or taken to

                                 .          151


          concentration camps.

     Q.   Tell me the difference between those two statements.

     A.   The first one, lock them up or we will kill them, says it
          is putting primacy, the emphasis on locking them up.  The
          second one gives them two equal statuses and does not say
          anything about what is happen to them in the concentration
          camps.  The words "lock them up" does not occur there.

     Q.   Is it not possible, lock them away, put them in

          concentration camps?

    A.   No, it does not occur, not in what he says.

    Q.   Is this not a perfectly feasible and reasonable
         explanation of the force that was applied to Horthy on
         that day, saying in blunt terms: You are going to have
         lock them away because, look, the only other thing you
         could do is kill them?

    A.   Not at all.  We are back on Horthy, all right.  It is not
         at all what he says.  Let us go through this all over
         again.  Pages 441 to 442 of my report.

     MR JUSTICE GRAY:  Just a second.

    MR IRVING:  I do not think we need to go through it all again.

    A.   Horthy says, "what should he with the Jews after he had
         pretty well taken all means of living from them - he
         surely couldn't beat them to death - The Reich Foreign
         Minister replied that the Jews must either be annihilated
         or taken to concentration camps.  There was no other way."

                   Hitler then says yes, "Where the Jews are left

                                 .          152


          to themselves, as for example in Poland, gruesome poverty
          and degeneracy had ruled.  They were just pure parasites.
          One had fundamentally cleared up this state of affairs in
          Poland.  If the Jews there did not want to work, they were
          shot.  If they could not work, they had to perish.  They
          had to be treated like tuberculosis bacilli, from which a
          healthy body could be infected.  That was not cruel",
          Hitler goes on, "if one remembered that even innocent
          natural creatures like hares and deer had to be killed so
         that no harm was caused.  Why should one spare the beasts
         who wanted to bring us Bolshevism any more?  Nations who
         did not rid themselves of Jews perished".

                   That seems to be extremely open about what is to
         happen to the Jews whom Hitler and Ribbentrop want Horthy
         to deliver from Hungary over to their tender mercies.

    Q.   I must protest against this wasting of the time of the
         court reading out time after time after time paragraphs
         that we have already heard.

     MR JUSTICE GRAY:  Mr Irving, that is simply not fair, is it?
         We were on Ribbentrop's knowledge and you suggested that
         the first he knew was ----

    MR IRVING:  A perfectly reasonable explanation.

    MR JUSTICE GRAY:  -- in 1944 when Maidonek surfaced, to which
         the witness, as I recall, replied no, it was obvious to
         Ribbentrop what was going on back in 1942 and he cited
         Horthy.  That was why it all arose.


                                 .          153


     MR IRVING:  I agree, and I put to him, not realising we were
          letting ourselves in for another torrent of quotations
          from his own report, page after page after page.

     A.   It is a quotation from Hitler, Mr Irving.  I know you do
          not want to hear Hitler saying the Jews have to be
          killed.  That is why you want to shut me up, is it not?

     MR IRVING:  A perfectly reasonable interpretation on the words
          that were used by Hitler and Ribbentrop to Horthy, which
          is to say, we are demanding you lock up all your Jews
         because of the security threat, which I shall establish to
         the court with the documents, and the only other thing you
         could do is kill them. In other words, you have no choice
         but to lock them up.

    A.   I think that is a  perverted and distorted interpretation
         which you are putting on this document in a completely
         illegitimate way in order to try and bolster up your
         totally untenable view that Hitler did not want the Jews
         killed and did not know about it.

     MR JUSTICE GRAY:  Let us move on.

    MR IRVING:  Professor Evans, we are thoroughly familiar with
         the fact that you do not like me but there is no need to
         keep on expressing it again and again and again.

    A.   I have no personal feelings towards you one way or the
         other, Mr Irving.

    MR JUSTICE GRAY:  Can we all perhaps calm it a little bit and
         move on to the next topic.  We have dealt with the


                                 .          154


          Adjutants.  What are you wanting to ask about now?

     MR IRVING:  We are dealing just with two tail end questions on
          the Horthy business.  At page 441, footnote 7, you say
          that Paul Schmidt self serving memoirs are unreliable.
          Are memoirs sometimes unreliable when you so choose?

     A.   No, I am not using them.  It is just a little note.

     MR JUSTICE GRAY:  The answer to that question must be yes.
          What is the next question?

     A.   Yes.

    MR IRVING:  Thank you very much, my Lord.

    A.   It is not an important note.

    MR IRVING:  Is a historian who researches, unlike yourself,
         both in the German but also in the Hungarian state files,
         and who finds in Hungarian state files no explicit
         reference to any discussion of killing at this Hitler
         Horthy meeting entitled therefore to assume that this did
         not bulk very large on that horizon?

    A.   No.

     Q.   At page 451 you talk in paragraph 14 about the effect of
         the bombing raids, in view of the fact that he had
         dismissed them as unimportant, it is highly unlikely that
         these bombing raids roused Hitler to an unprecedented
         anti-Semitic fury.  Are you an expert on the bombing war
         as well then?

    A.   Mr Irving, I have already said that I have a general level
         of expertise on the Third Reich and the Second World War,

                                 .          155


          Nazism, and historiography.  I am not a specific expert on
          Auschwitz.  I am not a specific expert on the bombing
          war.  You could have many different levels of expertise.
          You could have someone who spends his whole life studying
          the history of a single village in 20th century Germany.
          If you want to know about the method of operation of gas
          chambers in Auschwitz, you ask an expert on that.  My
          level of expertise is at a fairly general level.  I have
          made that quite clear.

    Q.   So the answer is no?

    A.   I am not the world's greatest expert on every issue which
         is discussed in these documents.  I do not pretend to be.

    Q.   The short answer is no.  I do not mean that in any
         derogatory sense.

    A.   I am sure you do mean it in a derogatory sense, Mr Irving.

    MR JUSTICE GRAY:  Come on.

    MR IRVING:  When did the battle of the Ruhr start as it is
         referred to----

     A.   Let me just try and get across the point of what I am saying.

    Q.   If you do not know, just say so.

    A.   Mr Irving, this is not "Who wants to be a millionaire".
         I am not going to stand here and be quizzed by you on
         names, facts and dates.

    MR JUSTICE GRAY:  Professor Evans, come on.

    A.   I want to try and explain what I put in my report.


                                 .          156


     MR JUSTICE GRAY:  If I may say so, just confine yourself to a
          brief answer to the specific point.

     MR IRVING:  Would you agree that the battle of the Ruhr started
          around March 5th 1943, with a series of very heavy violent
          air raids on the Ruhr, coupled with air raids on
          Nuremberg, which is a city that the Nazis felt very fond
          of, and that this battering of the German cities continued
          throughout March and April 1943?

     A.   Yes.

    Q.   This may very well have formed the back drop to the
         conversation between Hitler and Horthy?  You should not
         therefore dismiss it in the way you do in paragraph 14.

    A.   No, I do not dismiss it.  It is Hitler who dismisses it.
         He says the attacks themselves have been irritating but
         wholly trivial:  "Die Angriffe selbst seien zwar storend,
         abere ganzlich belanglos".

    Q.   If he refers in paragraph 17 to the effect of this bombing
         war, we know what the effects are because we have seen the
          photograph on women and children, then no doubt, although
         he is trying to act to his foreign visitors there to say
         this too we can take on the chin, in fact it is deeply
         upsetting and grieving him?

    A.   I cannot see that it is, when he describes them as
         irritating but wholly trivial.

    MR JUSTICE GRAY:  Mr Irving, if I am meant to be following
         this, I am afraid you have lost me completely.

                                 .          157


     MR IRVING:  Paragraph 17, my Lord, page 452.

     A.   I do not see any mention there.

     MR JUSTICE GRAY:  What is the suggestion?  That because of the
          allied bombing raids Hitler was adopting a particular
          policy towards the Hungarian Jews?  That is an enquiry,
          Mr Irving.  I do not know what you are suggesting.

     MR IRVING:  For some reason the witness has put in his
          paragraph 14 on page 451, he has dismissed the importance
          of the bombing raids and Hitler's particular feelings
         during the discussion with Horthy.

    A.   Well, my Lord, this is a comment on the 1991 edition of
         Hitler's War.  In the 1977 edition Mr Irving tries to make
         the Warsaw uprising as the trigger for Hitler's outburst
         to Admiral Horthy, even though the uprising started after
         they met.  So he has withdrawn that in 1991.  In 1991 he
         says, "in Hitler's warning to Horthy that the "Jewish
         Bolsheviks" would liquidate all Europe's intelligentsia,
         we can identify the Katyn episode.  That is a massacre of
          Polish officers by Russians.  A propaganda windfall about
         which Goebbels had just telephoned him.  Hitler warmly
         approved Goebbels' suggestion that Katyn should be linked
         in the public's mind with the Jewish question.  But the
         most persuasive argument used to reconcile Hitler with the
         harsher treatment of the Jews was the bombing war from
         documents and target maps found in crashed bombers he knew
         that the British air crews were instructed to aim only at

                                 .          158


          the residential areas, only one race murdered, he lectured
          to quailing Horthy, and that was the Jews.  It was they
          who had provoked this war and given it its present
          character against civilians, women and children." These
          are wholly bogus claims by Mr Irving.  The word Katyn is
          not mentioned at all in the Horthy Ribbentrop Hitler
          conversations.

     MR IRVING:  Would Hitler ----

     A.   "The source says that it is not that the British air crews
         are instructed to aim only at the residential areas, but
         to aim at them as well.  Hitler describes these in the
         conversations with Horthy, when he is describing these air
         raids on Frankfurt, where the British bombers are
         instructed to destroy residential areas as well as
         industrial targets, Hitler says the attacks themselves
         have been irritating but wholly trivial".  Now, if Hitler
         says that they are irritating but wholly trivial, it is
         very unlikely that he is so worked up into a passion about
          this that he indulges in an unusual outburst of
         anti-Semitism.  That is all.

    Q.   Do you think Hitler was not worked up by the air raids
         on the Ruhr, on Nuremberg and elsewhere?  Have you ever
         read Heiber's War Conferences, the verbatim stenographic records?

    A.   The attacks themselves had been irritating but wholly trivial.


                                 .          159


     MR JUSTICE GRAY:  Can I get a word in edgeways?  You have just
          had quoted to you, Mr Irving, what Hitler himself appears
          to have said at the time so do you want really to pursue
          this any further?

     MR IRVING:  They are trivial, yes.

     MR JUSTICE GRAY:  Do you want to pursue this any further?

     MR IRVING:  At the risk of being lectured for repetition the
          fact that Adolf Hitler tells of visiting foreign
          dignitaries, effectively these British air raids are
         trivial, does not mean to say that he regarded them as
         trivial.  Any more than if Winston Churchill had said in
         1940 to Roosevelt, these air raids on London are trivial
         and Britain can take it.

    MR JUSTICE GRAY:  Your suggestion is that Hitler was wanting to
         take reprisals on the Hungarian Jews because he was
         alarmed at the effect the allied bombing raids on Germany
         were having?

    MR IRVING:  My Lord, it is not as simple as that.

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