Day 16 Transcript: Holocaust Denial on Trial
Part I: Initial Proceedings (1.1 to 2.17)
1 IN THE HIGH COURT OF JUSTICE
1996 I. No. 113
QUEEN’S BENCH DIVISION
2 Royal Courts of Justice
3 Strand, London
4 Monday, 7th February 2000
5
6 Before:
7 MR JUSTICE GRAY
8
9 B E T W E E N: DAVID JOHN CAWDELL IRVING
10 Claimant -and-
11 (1) PENGUIN BOOKS LIMITED
12 (2) DEBORAH E. LIPSTADT
13 Defendants
14 The Claimant appeared in person
15 MR RICHARD RAMPTON Q.C. (instructed by Messrs Davenport Lyons and Mishcon de Reya) appeared on behalf of the First and
16 Second Defendants
17 MISS HEATHER ROGERS (instructed by Davenport Lyons) appeared on behalf of the First Defendant Penguin Books Limited
18 MR ANTHONY JULIUS (of Mishcon de Reya) appeared on behalf of
19 the Second Defendant Deborah Lipstadt
20
21 (Transcribed from the stenographic notes of Harry Counsell
&Company, Clifford’s Inn, Fetter Lane, London EC4
22 Telephone: 020-7242-9346)
23 (This transcript is not to be reproduced without the written permission of Harry Counsell &Company)
24
25 PROCEEDINGS – DAY SIXTEEN
26
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1 Day 16 Monday, 7th February 2000.
2 (10.30 a.m.)
3 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Mr Irving and Mr Rampton, I have received a
4 letter from I think it is a German lawyer called Gunter
5 Murmann, the significance of which is not immediately
6 obvious to me, but I thought I had better hand it down to
7 you to make what you will of it. I know you have been
8 receiving a lot of similar documents. Have a look at it
9 when you have a convenient moment. Yes, Mr Irving?
10 MR IRVING: May it please the court. I have here this morning
11 a witness on summons, Sir John Keegan. I also have a
12 number of points that I wish to submit to your Lordship.
13 I think, out of fairness to Sir John Keegan, we ought to
14 hear his evidence first, and then I will put to your
15 Lordship the various procedural points which I wish to.
16 MR JUSTICE GRAY: That sounds perfectly sensible. Let us have
17 him straightaway.
Part II: Sir John Keegan’s Cross-Examination by David Irving (2.18-13.24)
18 MR IRVING: I call Sir John Keegan.
19 < SIR JOHN KEEGAN, sworn.
20 < Examined by MR IRVING.
21 Q. [Mr Irving]: My Lord, Sir John’s evidence will go entirely to
22 reputation and no other matter in this court. Sir John,
23 first of all, to make it perfectly plain to the court, you
24 are here pursuant to a witness summons, in other words,
25 what used to be called a subpoena. Is that correct?
26 A. [Sir John Keegan]: I was subpoenaed by you. I would also like to say that
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1 until this moment I have never met you, never spoken to
2 you and never corresponded with you.
3 Q. [Mr Irving]: That is precisely what I was going to ask next. In other
4 words, I have not rehearsed with you in any way what
5 I might or might not ask you by way of questions?
6 A. [Sir John Keegan]: I would not have agreed to that in any case.
7 Q. [Mr Irving]: Yes, of course.
8 A. [Sir John Keegan]: Sir John, you are now Defence Correspondent for Telegraph
9 Newspapers Limited?
10 A. [Sir John Keegan]: Defence Editor.
11 Q. [Mr Irving]: Defence Editor of Telegraph Newspapers Limited. How long
12 have you held that post, please?
13 A. [Sir John Keegan]: I was Defence Correspondent to begin with in 1986 and
14 became Defence Editor about 1990.
15 Q. [Mr Irving]: You have, it is fair to say, a very high reputation in
16 England as what I might call an establishment historian?
17 A. [Sir John Keegan]: Well, I was knighted for services to military history
18 Q. [Mr Irving]: My congratulations and the congratulations of the court go
19 to you for that very recent honour. It was in the New
20 Year’s Honours list?
21 A. [Sir John Keegan]: Yes.
22 Q. [Mr Irving]: I do not wish to detain you at all long, Sir John, here
23 this morning. I am grateful to you for coming in spite of
24 your disability. I just want to take you through a number
25 of papers which I have handed to you a few minutes ago
26 going back to 1980. I believe your Lordship also has that
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1 small clip of them?
2 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Yes, I do. Thank you very much.
3 MR IRVING: Do you remember writing an article for The Times
4 Literary Supplement in about April 1980?
5 A. [Sir John Keegan]: Yes, I do not, because I review a great deal, but I am
6 quite sure that I did write what is quoted here.
7 Q. [Mr Irving]: Is it right that in that review you wrote — this is a
8 review of another book, not a book by myself?
9 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Well, both, is it not?.
10 A. [Sir John Keegan]: I am sorry, I did not understand the question.
11 MR IRVING: This was not reviewing a book by me, was it? It
12 was reviewing some other book.
13 A. [Sir John Keegan]: If you say so.
14 Q. [Mr Irving]: Is it right that you wrote the following words: “Two
15 books in English stand out from the vast literature of the
16 Second World War, Chester Wilmott, ‘Struggle for Europe’
17 published in 1952 and David Irving’s ‘Hitler’s War’ which
18 appeared three years ago”?
19 A. [Sir John Keegan]: Yes, and that is my general opinion. I think that, taken
20 together, they are — if I were to recommend to a starter
21 two books which would explain the Second World War from
22 Hitler’s side and from the Allies’ side, those are the two
23 books I would choose.
24 Q. [Mr Irving]: This does not, of course, mean that you endorse or accept
25 all the views that I might be held to propagate in them or
26 not, or otherwise?
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1 A. [Sir John Keegan]: Indeed not, because later on in the papers you have given
2 me I reprove you for your lack of a moral point of view in
3 your discussion of Hitler and of his status relative to
4 Churchill and Roosevelt.
5 Q. [Mr Irving]: Is it right to say that this opinion which you expressed
6 in that review was not only publicly held but also
7 privately held by yourself?
8 A. [Sir John Keegan]: Yes. I often say you have to read Hitler’s War.
9 Q. [Mr Irving]: Can I draw your attention to letter No. 2 in the bundle?
10 This is a letter from a man called Mr Alan Williams?
11 A. [Sir John Keegan]: Yes, he used to be my editor at the Viking Press, my
12 American publishers.
13 Q. [Mr Irving]: Yes. The late Alan Williams was also my editor, of
14 course, so he knew us both. Is it true that sometime
15 early in 1980 you had a conversation with our mutual
16 friend, Alan Williams, in which you commented on the same
17 book ‘Hitler’s War’? Will you read, please, the middle
18 sentences of the second paragraph? Does he state —-
19 A. [Sir John Keegan]: “John Keegan is, as you may know, writing a book for us on
20 the D-day invasion. While we were talking about it, he
21 said that there were two general survey books that really
22 stood head and shoulders above all the rest, one of them
23 the Chester Wilmott and the other ‘Hitler’s War'”.
24 Q. [Mr Irving]: He did not know —-
25 A. [Sir John Keegan]: “He did not know I had any involvement with the latter
26 volume when he said this”.
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1 Q. [Mr Irving]: Thank you very much. Were you expressing your true
2 opinion in that conversation with Mr Wilmott?
3 A. [Sir John Keegan]: Of course.
4 Q. [Mr Irving]: Has he accurately reflected in this letter what your
5 opinion was at that time?
6 A. [Sir John Keegan]: Yes. Alan Williams and I were great friends.
7 Q. [Mr Irving]: Yes, he was a man of insight and perception. In fact,
8 I gave him a silver tray from Harrods inscribed for his
9 bravery in publishing my book. He had it displayed in his
10 office. Would you turn to page 5, Sir John?
11 A. [Sir John Keegan]: Yes.
12 Q. [Mr Irving]: Is this a panel from the Sunday Telegraph of August last
13 year?
14 A. [Sir John Keegan]: Yes.
15 Q. [Mr Irving]: Is it headed “Book of the Century”?
16 A. [Sir John Keegan]: Yes.
17 Q. [Mr Irving]: Do you there make your choice of which book you considered
18 to be the book of the last century?
19 A. [Sir John Keegan]: Yes.
20 Q. [Mr Irving]: Can you remember what book that was?
21 A. [Sir John Keegan]: Of course, it is a ‘Struggle for Europe’. I regard it as
22 a slightly odd choice, and I do not expect many people to
23 support me, but it happens to have been an enormously
24 informative influence on me.
25 Q. [Mr Irving]: I also read it. I agree with you, for what it is worth.
26 It is a very fine book indeed. So your opinion on the
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1 Chester Wilmott book had not at that time changed?
2 A. [Sir John Keegan]: No.
3 Q. [Mr Irving]: You still rank it among the highest. Finally, would you
4 turn to pages 6 and 7 which, I am afraid, is the only copy
5 I have of a two page extract from your recent book ‘The
6 Battle for History’.
7 A. [Sir John Keegan]: Yes.
8 Q. [Mr Irving]: Will you agree that in that you repeat once again, 16
9 years after the first time you expressed this opinion —-
10 A. [Sir John Keegan]: Yes, I do.
11 Q. [Mr Irving]: — that Hitler’s War was a valuable book?
12 A. [Sir John Keegan]: Indeed, you are honest enough to include a message on the
13 Internet which points out that you omitted —-
14 Q. [Mr Irving]: One sentence, yes, in the bundle. Would you read out that
15 sentence too perhaps, for the record? This is somebody
16 writing an e-mail to me, chiding me.
17 A. [Sir John Keegan]: Could I quote the whole thing?
18 MR JUSTICE GRAY: It would help me if you did because I am not
19 sure which sentence has been omitted from what.
20 MR IRVING: I am not sure if it is in your Lordship’s bundle.
21 It would be page 10 if it is in your Lordship’s bundle.
22 Do you have page 10?
23 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Yes, I do.
24 MR IRVING: Would you read out that brief message on page 10
25 from a correspondent?
26 A. [Sir John Keegan]: It is a message from somebody called Graham Broad on a web
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1 site, dated 28th December 1999: “If Mr Irving is going to
2 quote John Keegan when Keegan supports him, he might as
3 well have the integrity to quote him when Keegan does
4 not. He cites at length from Keegan’s’The Battle for
5 History’, but does not, to my knowledge, anywhere on this
6 web site quote Keegan’s remark on page 10 of that book.
7 Some controversies are entirely bogus, like David Irving’s
8 contention that Hitler’s subordinates kept from the fact
9 of the Final Solution”.
10 Q. [Mr Irving]: That is, of course, still your opinion, is it not?
11 A. [Sir John Keegan]: I am sorry?
12 Q. [Mr Irving]: That is, of course, still your opinion, is it not, that
13 I am wrong on the Holocaust, or that my opinion on that is
14 flawed?
15 MR JUSTICE GRAY: That Hitler did not know.
16 A. [Sir John Keegan]: Well, I read Hitler’s War, the appropriate passages, very
17 carefully over the weekend, and I continue to think it
18 perverse of you to propose that Hitler could not have
19 known until as late as October 1943 what was going on to
20 the Jewish population of Europe, and indeed many other
21 minority groups as well, not only minority groups.
22 Q. [Mr Irving]: I do not accept your word “perverse”, of course. We have
23 spent many weeks here in this very room, examining how
24 perverse or otherwise it is to put forward that
25 proposition. Would you accept that, to somebody who has
26 not had complete access to all the records that are now
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1 correctly available, it may still seem an unusual opinion?
2 MR JUSTICE GRAY: That is almost by definition an impossible
3 question for him to answer.
4 MR IRVING: It became rather tortuous in the utterance, I am
5 afraid.
6 MR JUSTICE GRAY: I think, bringing yourself up to date with
7 historical knowledge as it has been emerging, do you still
8 retain the view that it is perverse to say that Hitler did
9 not know about the Final Solution?
10 A. [Sir John Keegan]: I think, my Lord, that it defies common sense.
11 MR IRVING: It does indeed defy common sense, and this is what
12 makes it such a fascinating subject to investigate. Would
13 you agree with that? If it turned out to be against all
14 common sense and yet not demonstrable, would it be worth
15 investigating?
16 A. [Sir John Keegan]: It would be so extraordinary that it would defy reason.
17 Q. [Mr Irving]: I agree, “extraordinary” is possibly a better description
18 of this conclusion than “perverse”. Perverse, would you
19 agree, implies a wilfulness, a deliberate tendentiousness
20 in the way one looks at the documentation?
21 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Well, wrong headed, I think is the meaning.
22 MR IRVING: Wrong headed, yes. Can I ask you finally to turn
23 to pages 8 and 9? My Lord, the only reason this is
24 included is this is one way of putting this before your
25 Lordship.
26 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Yes.
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1 MR IRVING: Are you familiar with the United States Holocaust
2 Memorial Museum?
3 A. [Sir John Keegan]: Well, I have passed it. I have not been in.
4 Q. [Mr Irving]: Would you accept that this is an official history
5 published by the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum
6 by its former director, Michael Berenbaum?
7 A. [Sir John Keegan]: Yes.
8 Q. [Mr Irving]: I am sure I will be corrected by Mr Rampton if that is
9 wrong. Would you turn to page 9?
10 A. [Sir John Keegan]: Yes.
11 Q. [Mr Irving]: Would you accept that Professor Aberhard Jackel is a
12 leading German historian?
13 A. [Sir John Keegan]: I am never heard of him, but then I am a military
14 historian of a rather technical sort and it is not
15 necessary that I should have heard of him.
16 Q. [Mr Irving]: Could I ask you briefly to read the paragraph number 5,
17 beginning with the words “rehearsal for destruction” and
18 I will ask you a question about it. Just read it to
19 yourself.
20 A. [Sir John Keegan]: (Pause for reading) Yes.
21 Q. [Mr Irving]: Would you agree that the tenor of that passage is that
22 this German Professor is stating that, until my biography
23 of Hitler was published in 1977, there had been no worth
24 while research on the Holocaust, and that the publication
25 of my book provoked the historians of the world into
26 finally doing the research on that subject?
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1 A. [Sir John Keegan]: I do not think I can agree with that. As an under
2 graduate I think I read what I still think is a remarkable
3 book called the Final Solution by Gerald Reitlinger, and
4 I felt that I have learned from Gerald Reitlinger
5 everything substantial that I know about the Holocaust.
6 Q. [Mr Irving]: Of course.
7 A. [Sir John Keegan]: And that not much has been added to that since.
8 Q. [Mr Irving]: There has been a book by Raul Hilberg in the interim as
9 well, ‘The Destruction of European Jewry’?
10 A. [Sir John Keegan]: There have been an enormous number of books on the
11 Holocaust.
12 Q. [Mr Irving]: Not before 1977.
13 A. [Sir John Keegan]: I am sorry, it is not my subject. I do not know the
14 unrolling of the historiography of the subject in that
15 detail.
16 Q. [Mr Irving]: My question to you, Sir John, was, would you agree that
17 the tenor of this paragraph is to suggest that, in the
18 eyes of this leading German historian, that, until my book
19 on Hitler was published, there was no worth while research
20 into the Holocaust, and that triggered, with this
21 outrageous hypothesis, as he puts it, the entire research
22 which has developed since then?
23 A. [Sir John Keegan]: I do not know. I could not endorse that. I do not know
24 enough.
25 Q. [Mr Irving]: You appreciate my question? I am not asking your opinion,
26 I am asking whether this—-
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1 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Let us cut this short. It obviously says
2 what you have just indicated it says, but Sir John is not
3 able to agree with it from what he knows.
4 MR IRVING: Very well. Sir John, finally I had to coerce you
5 into the witness box, although in the 1980s and 1990s you
6 wrote very favourable things about my writings. Can you
7 in a very brief sentence explain why you were unwilling to
8 come voluntarily?
9 A. [Sir John Keegan]: Yes. Briefly, perhaps not. Just because I admire
10 Hitler’s War, which I do, I admired it again when I was
11 reading it last night, it does not mean to say that
12 I endorse your opinions beyond what you have to say, about
13 what I am interested in in Hitler’s War, which is your
14 picture of how Hitler conducted military operations. As a
15 military historian, that is the sort of history in which
16 I am interested and I think you do it extremely well in
17 Hitler’s War. That does that not mean to say that I can
18 go further in following you. It seemed to me this was to
19 be a very contentious case, and one is easily
20 misunderstood, I think, in discussion of this dreadful
21 episode, this terrible period in European history, easily
22 misunderstood. I did not wish to put myself in a position
23 where I might be misunderstood.
24 Q. [Mr Irving]: Would be it fair to say that you were apprehensive about
25 the repercussions of giving evidence on my behalf?
26 A. [Sir John Keegan]: Naturally. I am not giving on your behalf.
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1 Q. [Mr Irving]: Giving evidence as a witness for the claimant?
2 A. [Sir John Keegan]: Under subpoena.
3 Q. [Mr Irving]: Yes. No. The question was —-
4 MR JUSTICE GRAY: This is a slightly meaningless debate. Sir
5 John is right. He is here compulsoriy, not voluntarily.
6 He has no choice but to answer your questions, which he
7 has done very clearly.
8 MR IRVING: The evidence I was trying to produce here was
9 evidence of the fact that this is an exposed position that
10 one takes, and that there are professional repercussions
11 which can be expected by those who take this position in
12 view of the very unfortunate nature this debate has
13 adopted. It is very difficult for me to produce evidence
14 on that matter, particularly as a lot of the witnesses are
15 not going to be called.
16 MR JUSTICE GRAY: If I may say so, it is a point that does not
17 really need evidence. I am not blind to the realities of
18 the position and I understand the point you are putting.
19 MR IRVING: I am indebted to your Lordship and in that case I
20 have no further questions.
21 MR RAMPTON: I have no questions.
22 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Sir John, that finishes your time in the
23 witness box. Thank you very much. You are free to go.
24 < (The witness stood down)
Part III: Court Proceedings (13.25-29.10)
25 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Mr Irving, I think you have some procedural
26 points to make?
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1 MR IRVING: Yes.
2 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Before you do that, can I just ask you where,
3 if anywhere, you are suggesting I put the clip you have
4 just handed in?
5 MR IRVING: Miss Rogers has generated a catalogue of these
6 stray items and no doubt the catalogue will grow longer.
7 MR JUSTICE GRAY: I think they might say they are their stray
8 items. Shall we put this into one of the C bundles,
9 perhaps C4?
10 MR RAMPTON: Back of J2 is suggested.
11 MR JUSTICE GRAY: That is really your documents, is it not?
12 MR RAMPTON: No. Ours are L.
13 MR JUSTICE GRAY: You probably claim J, too, do you not?
14 I will put it wherever you suggest.
15 MR RAMPTON: I do not have one, so I cannot really help.
16 MR JUSTICE GRAY: I do not have one either. J2?
17 MR RAMPTON: Yes, something called J2.
18 MR RAMPTON: It is Claimants Bundle E, Global, which apparently
19 is in J2. Why, I do not know.
20 MR JUSTICE GRAY: If there is a J2, which I doubt, I would like
21 one. Yes, Mr Irving?
22 MR IRVING: My Lord, your Lordship will see that I have
23 provided to you once again a number of newspaper articles.
24 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Yes.
25 MR IRVING: I do not know how far I am testing your Lordship’s
26 patience on this matter, but I am a litigant in person and
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1 I certainly need education on this matter and possibly
2 members of the press also need education as to what is
3 permissible and what is not in a non-jury action.
4 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Well, show me.
5 MR IRVING: I am not familiar with any ruling which says in a
6 non-jury action it is open season on one or other of the
7 parties in an action.
8 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Certainly that is right. It is not. On the
9 other hand, it is presumed — you may or may not agree
10 with it — that judges are more able to ignore what is
11 written outside court and more able to focus on the
12 evidence. I hope I am doing that, which I have slightly
13 discouraged you in the past when you have raised various
14 newspaper articles. I cannot obviously tell the press
15 what they should and should not say, but show me what you
16 are objecting to because, if you have a point—-
17 MR IRVING: I will provide your Lordship with three articles
18 which I certainly do not expect you to read in an
19 instant. Two are, in fact, from newspapers produced by
20 Guardian Newspapers. One is the Guardian which was
21 published on Saturday, a major article by a man called
22 Jonathan Friedland, who is a very well-known and very
23 responsible journalist. The other one is an article
24 published in The Observer yesterday. The one published in
25 The Observer yesterday by Mr Neil Acheson seems to equate
26 David Irving, Jorg Haider and Adolf Hitler in a rather
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1 unbecoming manner. “If Irving wins and Heider wins, then
2 what?” I have also highlighted “Niematz Wieder never again
3 and Den Anfenge, stop it at the start”, what used to be
4 called in Latin I believe principe obstat. The repugnance
5 of those articles is that of course the Guardian Newspaper
6 are Defendants in a second action I am bringing of a very
7 similar nature, which they maintain is of a similar
8 nature, and they have a clear and vested interest, in
9 fact, in trying to see me knocked out in this action.
10 Then, slightly more sinister and more difficult to
11 control, I appreciate, by your Lordship are the articles
12 being written by London journalists for the foreign press
13 which then come bouncing back to us through Cyber space.
14 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Probably not bouncing back to all that many
15 people, would they be? National Post?. I have never
16 heard it.
17 MR IRVING: It is a major Toronto newspaper published by Conrad
18 Black in conjunction with the Daily Telegraph. Article
19 called “David Irving versus The Dead”, written by a man
20 called Geoffrey Wheatcroft, who is a British, London based
21 journalist.
22 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Which bit in this?
23 MR IRVING: Well, the whole article is sinister in as much as
24 it also incorporates a number of items that have so far
25 not been produced in court, including privileged items,
26 and this morning in today’s Ottawa Sun, I believe, there
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1 were also quotations from Professor Richard Evans’ report,
2 which is a highly libelous and defamatory document and it
3 is privileged only when used in connection with a report
4 in the case.
5 MR RAMPTON: My Lord, this discussion is becoming unwieldy for
6 two reasons. One is that I am excluded from it because
7 I do not have what Mr Irving is referring to. The other
8 is that the reason why people have access to Professor
9 Evans’ report is that Mr Irving put it on his web site.
10 MR IRVING: With a severe health warning, warning people that
11 the entire contents of the report are considered to be
12 libelous.
13 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Are the entire contents of the report on your
14 web site?
15 MR IRVING: They are accessible with a password. There is a
16 health warning that flaps down so that anybody who looks
17 at it is warned in advance that the contents are deemed to
18 be defamatory and untrue, and will be established when we
19 have Evans in the box.
20 MR JUSTICE GRAY: I have not read these obviously because you
21 have just presented me with them. All I would say,
22 subject to anything Mr Rampton wants to say afterwards, is
23 that it is not open season and, in particular, if
24 journalists who are based here choose to write in foreign
25 publications articles which perhaps do create a risk of
26 prejudice, then they must realize that they may be
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1 amenable to this court’s jurisdiction, albeit that the
2 publication in question occurred abroad. But beyond that
3 I am slightly reluctant to get into this because it is a
4 bit of a diversion. I can certainly understand you get
5 fed up with it. It is not going to affect my mind, that
6 is the point.
7 MR IRVING: I am faced here by extremely powerful and wealthy
8 litigants who have expended a lot of effort in posting a
9 defence to this case, and more than that I will not say,
10 my Lord.
11 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Yes.
12 MR IRVING: In that case I do not ask your Lordship to read the
13 articles. I think that has now dealt with that.
14 MR JUSTICE GRAY: I will glance at them or, if you rather,
15 I will not, whichever.
16 MR IRVING: By uttering your warning that it is not open season
17 —-
18 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Mr Rampton may disagree with that as a matter
19 of law.
20 MR RAMPTON: It is open season. I believe, there being no
21 jury, it is open season except in one respect. It would
22 not be right and would be a contempt of court to put
23 direct or indirect pressure on the litigant or any of his
24 witnesses.
25 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Yes.
26 MR RAMPTON: It is also of course if they were saying terrible
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1 thing about your Lordship. That could theoretically
2 become contempt, but I do not believe that is what we are
3 talking about. Otherwise not.
4 MR JUSTICE GRAY: I am not so sure about that. If you write
5 here for publication in a journal which you know is going
6 to come back, it seems to me that that could amount to a
7 contempt. This is a very gentle warning shot over the
8 bows.
9 MR RAMPTON: It would depend on the content.
10 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Of course.
11 MR RAMPTON: That which is merely, what shall we say,
12 tendentious in its reporting?
13 MR JUSTICE GRAY: It has to establish a substantial risk of
14 serious prejudice.
15 MR RAMPTON: It would have to be such material that Mr Irving
16 said in honesty to your Lordship, “I really do not think I
17 can continue under this kind of fusillage”.
18 MR JUSTICE GRAY: It may not have to go quite as far as that.
19 MR IRVING: I can give one example of the kind of pressure that
20 we come under by virtue of the press reporting now. The
21 principal of the school attended by my little girl, the
22 ballet school, well, enough.
23 MR JUSTICE GRAY: That sort of thing must be personally
24 upsetting for you but it cannot possibility affect my mind
25 because I do not know anything about it.
26 MR IRVING: If ordinary citizens are affected in this way by
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1 this abusive press coverage even at this stage in the
2 case, then eventually this will mean that the entire
3 public gallery of this court will be affected by it, and
4 waves of hostility will be felt by the members of this
5 courtroom.
6 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Mr Irving, all I would say is that, as long
7 as you can carry on, which you are doing, despite what you
8 are having to put up with, then I hope you will find me
9 approaching the evidence unaffected by anything that may
10 be published in newspapers.
11 MR RAMPTON: Can I add this? If the public’s mind is affected
12 adversely to Mr Irving by a fair and accurate report of
13 the proceedings in court, then only Mr Irving has himself
14 to blame.
15 MR JUSTICE GRAY: That of course is true, but I think his
16 complaint is that these are things that are said or
17 published which really do not reflect in any way the
18 proceedings in court. That I think is his complaint.
19 MR RAMPTON: The only one of those things that I have read is
20 the Guardian article and, so far as that is concerned,
21 I would not agree.
22 MR JUSTICE GRAY: I have not read it.
23 MR IRVING: My Lord, a number of newspapers are prejudging the
24 issue and, as your Lordship is aware, we are just at the
25 watershed, so to speak. We are now beginning to hear the
26 defence witnesses in detail.
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1 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Yes. They do not have the last word, though,
2 do they?
3 MR IRVING: My Lord, I now turn to the question of these very
4 witnesses, once again the non-appearing experts, the
5 witnesses whom we are informed on Thursday would not now
6 be being called. Once again, I am asking for your
7 Lordship’s tutelage as to in what manner I can address the
8 matters that they have raised in their expert reports,
9 using the abundance of material that we have developed.
10 These witnesses have in some part relied on witness
11 statements put in lower down the hierarchy, so to speak,
12 which I also impugn. There is one famous case of one of
13 the witnesses who accused me of having the skin heads at
14 one of my meetings, who himself turned out to police
15 records as a skinhead gang leader. There is no way that
16 I can put that kind of material before your Lordship
17 because these witnesses are not now going to be called.
18 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Well, the way I would suggest, I am not
19 saying this would necessarily, as it were, work but these
20 are things you would have wanted to put to Eatwell and
21 Levin, I suppose?
22 MR IRVING: Eatwell and Levin, for example, yes.
23 MR JUSTICE GRAY: You probably can put — I do not know what
24 you are talking about — some of the things you were going
25 to put to them to one of the other experts.
26 MR IRVING: That is what I hope to do, but your Lordship will
. P-21
1 appreciate it is going to be difficult, for example, now
2 that we know that the Russian witnesses are not going to
3 be coming, we had an abundance of questions that I
4 intended to put to them, for example, about the legality
5 or the legitimacy of their holdings of these papers under
6 The Hague rules, materials like that, and the conditions
7 which rule in the Russian archives, how accessible they
8 are to other historians, things that would have assisted
9 your Lordship in forming an opinion and I am just —-
10 MR JUSTICE GRAY: You can give that evidence yourself. You
11 have been there.
12 MR IRVING: Yes. Well, some of that evidence, yes, my Lord,
13 but it is difficult because I have the last word in this
14 case, my closing speech, it would be improper, indeed
15 unfair, for me to adduce or lead that kind of evidence in
16 a closing speech without having tested it in any way.
17 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Yes, no, you could not do it in your — you
18 would have to give evidence, as it were, from the witness
19 box first. Try putting the material to whichever you
20 think is the most appropriate expert who is being called.
21 Mr Rampton has been, I think, fairly liberal in the sense
22 he has not objected when he might otherwise have done
23 because this is such a curious case, it is all experts.
24 So try to do it that way. I think you will find that you
25 will get your point over.
26 MR IRVING: This is a little bit of red flag waving so that
. P-22
1 your Lordship understands why sometimes I am putting
2 material to witnesses when you think to yourself, “Well,
3 this is not covered by this witness’s statement”.
4 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Yes. You have put things to Sir John Keegan
5 which you would not in an ordinary case have had the right
6 to put to him, but nobody objected and the points got
7 other to me.
8 MR IRVING: I am indebted.
9 The third point, my Lord, concerns the snatch of
10 remarks by me from the Errol Morris film which your
11 Lordship may remember, the film ‘Mr Death’. It was put to
12 your Lordship as a transcript of fragments of remarks by
13 me on the question of what generates anti-Semitism, where
14 does anti-Semitism come from?
15 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Is this the National Alliance?
16 MR IRVING: No, it was the other little thing that they put in
17 afterwards. I think Miss Rogers is probably looking for
18 it. It was, I think, highly prejudicial. There is one
19 sentence in there which actually reads, “I am a racist”
20 and taken, of course, out of context that sentence can be
21 flung at me around the world and, no doubt, will be.
22 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Well…
23 MR IRVING: What I am asking your Lordship is that I should
24 either see the film or have a much longer transcript of
25 those remarks in —-
26 MR JUSTICE GRAY: That sounds to me entirely fair.
. P-23
1 MR IRVING: — continuous form because the problem was in that
2 particular fragment of conversation, Errol Morris, the
3 producer, asked me to role play, so to speak. “Imagine
4 yourself in that position and state what your motives
5 would be”.
6 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Sorry, I have already said whenever you feel
7 that the context puts a different spin on the part that
8 the Defendants are relying on, you are perfectly entitled
9 to draw my attention to the context.
10 MR IRVING: It was not actually a piece used in the film. It
11 was a piece that they picked up, the Defendants picked up,
12 off the cutting room floor, so to speak, and then
13 wiped off and produced for your Lordship’s delectation.
14 MR JUSTICE GRAY: I cannot at the moment claim to remember
15 which bit it is.
16 MR RAMPTON: I will tell your Lordship where to find it. It
17 has been in the files since goodness knows. It was a late
18 arrival in the sense that it was not in the original
19 file. It is at tab 9 of the bundle K4, and a complete
20 transcript of the whole untransmitted or pretransmission
21 interview is in that tab transcribed by the court
22 transcribers. Mr Irving has had the tape as well.
23 MR IRVING: Do we not have the film of it?
24 MR JUSTICE GRAY: What is the film going to add which is not in
25 the transcript, Mr Irving?
26 MR IRVING: Unfortunately, this tape is, I believe I am right
. P-24
1 in saying, very fragmentary. It jumps and stops and
2 starts in the way that things do that are taken off a
3 cutting room floor.
4 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Well, it looks to me like a complete
5 transcript.
6 MR RAMPTON: I am told it is a complete transcript.
7 MR JUSTICE GRAY: There we are. You have it there. You can
8 ask the Defendants if they will provide you with the tape
9 or you can read it into the transcript, Mr Irving, but
10 I do not think I can do anything about it, can I?
11 MR IRVING: Reverting to the witness statement of Professor van
12 Pelt, my Lord, again a general question: we covered parts
13 of that in the cross-examination and I think your Lordship
14 welcomed the fact that I did not intend to go through it
15 paragraph by paragraph. How much attention is your
16 Lordship going to pay to the paragraphs that we did not
17 test under cross-examination?
18 MR JUSTICE GRAY: I am a little troubled by this, but the way
19 I think it is right to deal with the parts that you were
20 not cross-examined on, that is to say, those parts of
21 Professor van Pelt’s expert report which did not form any
22 part of Mr Rampton’s cross-examination of you, I am
23 treating as not being part of the Defence of
24 Justification, unless and until they crop up in the
25 evidence of other witnesses —-
26 MR IRVING: For example —-
. P-25
1 MR JUSTICE GRAY: — as a result of their being cross-examined
2 by you.
3 MR IRVING: — the testimony of the Commandant of Auschwitz,
4 Rudolf Hoess, was hardly tested, I believe — and
5 Mr Rampton?
6 MR JUSTICE GRAY: No, we have had enough on Rudolf Hoess to
7 make him part of the Defence of Justification. He is —
8 you have been cross-examined about this — one of the camp
9 officials, or the camp official, on whom the Defendants
10 place really most reliance, I think it is fair to say.
11 MR RAMPTON: My Lord, the position at Auschwitz is quite
12 different from the rest of the case. Van Pelt contains
13 the evidence that a responsible historian would have
14 looked at as a minimum. Mr Irving has made it perfectly
15 clear that until this case came along he has never looked
16 at it. It is the convergence of all the evidence in van
17 Pelt that makes the case that Mr Irving should have known
18 about before he jumped on the Leuchter bandwagon. So the
19 whole of that is before your Lordship. Evans is quite
20 different. If I do not cross-examine on parts of Evans,
21 your Lordship can probably assume that I do not pursue
22 them, but not so with van Pelt.
23 MR JUSTICE GRAY: I think that in a way that is a correction of
24 what I have just said. I think you will find that already
25 reflected on the transcript is the proposition that the
26 Defendants do not have to go through each individual
. P-26
1 eyewitness, for example, or each individual document
2 relating to the construction of Auschwitz, although we
3 have had quite a lot of it, because they say that is the
4 totality of the evidence you ought to have looked at.
5 The distinction Mr Rampton draws is between
6 that, on the one hand, and, on the other hand, criticisms
7 of you for perverting the historical record, mostly in
8 ‘Hitler’s War’, which they are only entitled to rely on
9 if they put it to you fair and square in
10 cross-examination, and that is a fair correction —-
11 MR IRVING: I am startled by this distinction between the two
12 reports.
13 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Well, it relates really to the nature of the
14 criticism that is made. In relation to perversion of the
15 historical record, a positive case is made against you,
16 you have deliberately done this, you have deliberately
17 manipulated the data, and Mr Rampton has put that, he has
18 not put the whole of Evans’ report, but he has put a lot
19 of it. So that is the kind criticism made there.
20 But in relation to Auschwitz, as I understand
21 it, it is really a rather different criticism. It is that
22 you have taken a perverse view which ignores and flies in
23 the face of the totality of evidence that there was
24 gassing at Auschwitz. So do you follow why it is a
25 different kind of case?
26 MR IRVING: I appreciate what Mr Rampton and your Lordship are
. P-27
1 trying to say, but your Lordship will remember quite
2 clearly that on more than one occasion I asked the
3 witness, “Are these the eyewitnesses that you are relying
4 on? Are there any more?” We had dealt, I think, by that
5 time with five and he quite clearly said, no, there are no
6 more that he was relying on at that point.
7 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Not quite.
8 MR IRVING: And I think it is perverse now for Mr Rampton to
9 say, yes, but what about Hoess or what about Aumeier or
10 what about the others who are in the written report, but
11 who the witness was inviting me not to cross-examine him
12 on, shall I put it that way?
13 MR JUSTICE GRAY: I think, I hope, I accurately reflect
14 Professor van Pelt’s evidence when I say this, that in
15 relation to inmates’ eyewitness evidence, he was inclined
16 to rely only on the very early reports, because he
17 accepted the possibility of cross-pollination and
18 contamination, or whatever you would like to call it, with
19 the later ones. But in relation to camp officials, I do
20 not think he ever said that he was discarding any of them,
21 as it were, as some support for the proposition that there
22 was gassing there. That is my broad recollection of his
23 evidence.
24 MR IRVING: Well, in my closing speech I may have to remind
25 your Lordship of the actual words. Your Lordship will
26 probably remember that I also said to him, “How many
. P-28
1 survivors were there?” and we came to several thousand.
2 I said, “Why have you always then picked on just those
3 five? Why haven’t you ever questioned any of the other
4 10,000?”
5 MR JUSTICE GRAY: That is a point you are perfectly entitled to
6 make.
7 MR IRVING: My Lord, that is all I wish now to…
8 MR JUSTICE GRAY: It is not a bad thing to have those points
9 ventilated. Now I think it is Professor Browning?
10 MR RAMPTON: He is here, my Lord. Yes.
Part IV: Professor Christopher Robert Browning examined by Mr. Rampton and Cross-Examined by David Irving (29.11-112.19)
Section 29.11-45.9
11 < PROFESSOR CHRISTOPHER ROBERT BROWNING, sworn.
12 < Examined by MR RAMPTON QC.
13 MR RAMPTON: Professor Browning, what are your full names?
14 A. [Professor Christopher Robert Browning]: Christopher Robert Browning.
15 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Have you made an expert witness report for the purposes of
16 this case?
17 A. [Professor Christopher Robert Browning]: Yes, I have.
18 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Do you have it with you?
19 A. [Professor Christopher Robert Browning]: I have my own report. I do not have the pagination of the
20 court’s.
21 Q. [Mr Rampton]: We must make —-
22 A. [Professor Christopher Robert Browning]: The reformatting of it.
23 Q. [Mr Rampton]: — sure you have the same version as we do. I ask you
24 only this, in so far as that report contains statements of
25 fact, are you satisfied so far as you can be that they are
26 accurate?
. P-29
1 A. [Professor Christopher Robert Browning]: There are some things that I have become aware since the
2 report that I would have added if I had known of them as
3 of mid July 1999, but it only affirms what I have already
4 written, except it changes some dates but, in general,
5 I would say, yes, that the report still stands.
6 Q. [Mr Rampton]: In so far as it contains expressions of opinion, are you
7 satisfied in your own mind that those opinions are fair?
8 A. [Professor Christopher Robert Browning]: Yes.
9 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Will you please remain there to be cross-examined by
10 Mr Irving?
11 < Cross-Examined by MR IRVING.
12 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Mr Irving?
13 MR IRVING: Good morning, Professor Browning.
14 A. [Professor Christopher Robert Browning]: Good morning.
15 Q. [Mr Irving]: You say you have made a number of fresh determinations on
16 dates and things recently, since July 1999, that you would
17 have written certain dates differently?
18 A. [Professor Christopher Robert Browning]: Yes, particularly the dates as to when certain special of
19 Operation Reinhardt appeared.
20 Q. [Mr Irving]: Which spellings?
21 A. [Professor Christopher Robert Browning]: I would say now that we have not two but three different
22 spellings, one with a T, one with a DT and one with a D,
23 and that those all appear as of 1942 when earlier the
24 first DT spelling I had found had been of 1943.
25 Q. [Mr Irving]: What is the significance of 1942, in your opinion?
26 A. [Professor Christopher Robert Browning]: The significance of this would be if there are three
. P-30
1 different spellings, that it was made in honour of any
2 particular individual because one would know how the
3 spelling was. Well, obviously, this was phonetic and they
4 spelled it in any way that it occurred to them, and, of
5 course, in 1942 is the height of the clearing of the
6 gettoes and the killing of the Jews in Poland.
7 Q. [Mr Irving]: Yes. We were going to come later on to the Aktion or
8 Operation Reinhard. Am I correct in saying that there has
9 been one school of thought, the thought that the Operation
10 Reinhardt had been named after the late lamented or
11 unlamented chief of the security police, Reinhard
12 Heydrich?
13 A. [Professor Christopher Robert Browning]: That is one suggestion made because the files on personnel
14 in Berlin spell it with just a D which is the way he spelt
15 his name, so that was one suggestion that has been made
16 which I do not endorse.
17 Q. [Mr Irving]: While we are on the matter, because we are going to have a
18 joint journey of discovery and exploration over the next
19 day or two, I think, have documents come to your attention
20 that have the initials AR in them instead of a security
21 classification?
22 A. [Professor Christopher Robert Browning]: I only saw reference to that from the transcript here.
23 Q. [Mr Irving]: Yes?
24 A. [Professor Christopher Robert Browning]: But I had not noticed that myself.
25 Q. [Mr Irving]: It is an interesting discovery, would you agree?
26 A. [Professor Christopher Robert Browning]: I would like to look at the documents to see how it was
. P-31
1 written, but I had not noticed that before.
2 Q. [Mr Irving]: Yes. You are familiar with the correspondence between
3 Wolff and Gunsen Muller?
4 A. [Professor Christopher Robert Browning]: Yes.
5 Q. [Mr Irving]: In July 1942?
6 A. [Professor Christopher Robert Browning]: Yes.
7 Q. [Mr Irving]: Where Wolff — can you remember what Wolff wrote to Gunsen
8 Muller?
9 A. [Professor Christopher Robert Browning]: Yes, he wanted trains and Gunsen Muller replied that, yes,
10 he had trains and told him how many would be going each
11 day.
12 Q. [Mr Irving]: It is correct that Wolff replied that he was glad to hear
13 that 5,000 of a chosen race were going to be sent to —-
14 A. [Professor Christopher Robert Browning]: That is my memory of the document, yes.
15 Q. [Mr Irving]: And is there any significance you would attach to the fact
16 that that had the initials AR on it?
17 A. [Professor Christopher Robert Browning]: It could indicate that a copy of this was to be filed in
18 some file called Aktion Reinhardt.
19 Q. [Mr Irving]: So we are constantly discovering new things, is this
20 correct?
21 A. [Professor Christopher Robert Browning]: Yes.
22 Q. [Mr Irving]: So that the last chapter on the Holocaust really still has
23 to be written?
24 A. [Professor Christopher Robert Browning]: We are still discovering things about the Roman Empire.
25 There is no last chapter in history.
26 Q. [Mr Irving]: It is quite an adventure, though, is it not, as fresh
. P-32
1 archives around the world open up, would you agree?
2 A. [Professor Christopher Robert Browning]: Yes.
3 Q. [Mr Irving]: Have you worked in — I suppose you have worked in the
4 German archives, have you not?
5 A. [Professor Christopher Robert Browning]: Yes.
6 Q. [Mr Irving]: Have you worked in the archives in Munich?
7 A. [Professor Christopher Robert Browning]: Yes.
8 Q. [Mr Irving]: Have you had the opportunity to work in the Moscow
9 archives yet?
10 A. [Professor Christopher Robert Browning]: No, I have not.
11 Q. [Mr Irving]: What other major holdings are there of records on the
12 Holocaust — for example, in the United States?
13 A. [Professor Christopher Robert Browning]: There would be the National Archives collection of
14 captured German documents and the microfilms at the United
15 States Holocaust Museum from various East European
16 archives and the Berlin Document Centre of Microfilms now
17 also in the National Archives.
18 Q. [Mr Irving]: Have those microfilms also been placed in the German
19 Federal Archives now?
20 A. [Professor Christopher Robert Browning]: The German Federal Archives took over the originals of the
21 Berlin Document Centre, so I presume they have both the
22 microfilm and the originals in their possession.
23 Q. [Mr Irving]: Shooting off on one brief side excursion, have you found
24 German archives sometimes rather secretive about recently
25 acquired collections?
26 A. [Professor Christopher Robert Browning]: The area where I have had difficulty is getting court
. P-33
1 access to see pretrial interrogations because of the
2 increased emphasis on privacy law in Germany. That is,
3 I would say, the greatest difficulty that I have
4 encountered.
5 Q. [Mr Irving]: I am surprised by this. In other words, what you are
6 saying is the pretrial interrogations of suspected war
7 criminals or of witnesses conducted in the 1940s and
8 1950s?
9 A. [Professor Christopher Robert Browning]: Mostly 1960s and ’70s.
10 Q. [Mr Irving]: Have now been closed again, have they?
11 A. [Professor Christopher Robert Browning]: Not closed, but there simply is more paper work to get
12 them. In the 1970s I could ask to see them and I would be
13 granted immediate access by the local person. Now it has
14 to go to somebody higher up to approve it.
15 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Does it make any difference if they are dead?
16 A. [Professor Christopher Robert Browning]: No, generally it applies to whether you can see the
17 records of this particular case, and they make no
18 distinction as to whether people there are living or dead
19 because the family members, children, would still be
20 living too. I believe that there was concern, or at least
21 that is what is cited, the family is still sensitive to
22 the issues.
23 MR IRVING: Would it be right to say that if an historian went
24 to Moscow and came back with the Goebbels diaries and gave
25 them to German archives, they would then vanish for
26 several years?
. P-34
1 A. [Professor Christopher Robert Browning]: It is a possibility that they would say, “We need to
2 classify these” and do whatever else and it would
3 temporarily not be available.
4 Q. [Mr Irving]: Are you familiar with the Goebbels diaries in any respect?
5 A. [Professor Christopher Robert Browning]: Only in the publications of the various — the Frohich
6 publication from Munich and previous publications. I have
7 not worked in an original Goebbels.
8 Q. [Mr Irving]: Have you any sense of how long the period elapses between
9 the arrival of the original diaries in the hands of those,
10 shall we say, processors and the publication in generally
11 accessible form? Is it a matter of months or weeks or
12 years?
13 A. [Professor Christopher Robert Browning]: I do not know.
14 Q. [Mr Irving]: Professor Browning, do you have any particular problems as
15 a non-Jewish historian writing about the Holocaust?
16 A. [Professor Christopher Robert Browning]: Could you tell me a little more — can you give me a
17 little more direction as to what you are looking at? In
18 terms of do I have a psychological problem or personal
19 problem? Have I encountered —-
20 Q. [Mr Irving]: Professional problems?
21 A. [Professor Christopher Robert Browning]: — professional problems? Occasionally, one might say
22 that it has been — I can say in one or two cases I think
23 it affected the opinions of some people concerning my
24 publications.
25 Q. [Mr Irving]: I do not want to explore this in any great depth, but
26 would I be right in suggesting that the Jewish historians
. P-35
1 regard the Holocaust as their patch?
2 A. [Professor Christopher Robert Browning]: No, I would not. I think, in fact, many of them were very
3 accepting of my coming into the field because it, in fact,
4 indicated that this was not their patch, if I can use
5 your phrase, but something that was not just important to
6 Jewish history but important to world history, and that
7 the fact that a non-Jewish historian would look at this
8 would be seen as a validation of the universal importance
9 of the topic, not just that it was a parochial ethnic
10 history of a particular people and that no one else, this
11 was not important to anyone else.
12 So I would say I have had for more
13 re-affirmation of supports from Jewish historians than the
14 very few cases in which I felt my work would have been
15 seen in a negative way because I was not Jewish.
16 Q. [Mr Irving]: So you have not been disadvantaged in any way by being a
17 non-Jewish historian?
18 A. [Professor Christopher Robert Browning]: There are one or two instances where that may have been
19 the case, but far more prominent — far more often that
20 has not been the case.
21 Q. [Mr Irving]: You used to be Professor of History at Pacific State
22 Luther University?
23 A. [Professor Christopher Robert Browning]: Pacific Luther University.
24 Q. [Mr Irving]: In Tacoma in Washington State?
25 A. [Professor Christopher Robert Browning]: Tacoma, Washington.
26 Q. [Mr Irving]: You are now currently a Professor of History at?
. P-36
1 A. [Professor Christopher Robert Browning]: University of North California at Chapel Hill.
2 Q. [Mr Irving]: At Chapel Hill. One of the most prestigious universities
3 to have held tenure at would have been Harvard, would it
4 not?
5 A. [Professor Christopher Robert Browning]: Harvard would be a very prestigious university.
6 Q. [Mr Irving]: So if a chair in Holocaust studies had been appointed in
7 Harvard, it is a position you would have applied for or
8 hoped to obtain?
9 A. [Professor Christopher Robert Browning]: I was considered for a position there.
10 Q. [Mr Irving]: What militated against you, do you think?
11 A. [Professor Christopher Robert Browning]: No one received the position, Jewish or non-Jewish
12 historians. At least one person on the Search Committee
13 made a statement to the press that they felt that only
14 someone deeply grounded in Jewish culture should be
15 eligible.
16 Q. [Mr Irving]: What did he mean by that, do you think?
17 A. [Professor Christopher Robert Browning]: Well, in fact it was a she and the statement was applied
18 to me and the other candidates because they were mainly
19 working in German history, not in Jewish history, and
20 I think this was meant that she did not like any of the
21 candidates.
22 MR JUSTICE GRAY: No. So no one was appointed, is that what
23 you say?
24 A. [Professor Christopher Robert Browning]: No one was appointed.
25 MR IRVING: In fact, the man who had put up money for this new
26 chair then starting raising obstacles, is this not right?
. P-37
1 A. [Professor Christopher Robert Browning]: I believe when they did try to make an appointment for a
2 semester per year, rather than a full-time, he refused to
3 release his money to support the appointment on that
4 basis.
5 Q. [Mr Irving]: Yes. Is it right that the New York Times in July 1997
6 quoted you as saying that you felt that you had been ruled
7 out because, and I am quoting, “I am not Jewish. I come
8 from a small college”?
9 A. [Professor Christopher Robert Browning]: That was a quote that was taken entirely out of context.
10 In the letter to the editor published the following
11 Friday, I explain what the full quote had been, and that
12 is she had asked me why I had not, why did I think I had
13 not been appointed, and I had said, “Well, I do not know.
14 I am not on the committee, but I can read in the press
15 what several people have said themselves”, one of which is
16 the one I gave you earlier, and having quoted this person
17 on the Search Committee to the effect that someone only
18 deeply grounded in the Jewish culture should get it,
19 I then commented, “That would make me doubly ineligible
20 because I do not work in Jewish history and I am not
21 Jewish”. She quoted the last four words and left out all
22 of the context and totally distorted the meaning of the
23 statement that I gave and that was explained in a letter
24 to the editor at the end of the week.
25 Q. [Mr Irving]: Are you as deeply shocked as I am to hear that the press
26 takes things out of context?
. P-38
1 A. [Professor Christopher Robert Browning]: Not a surprise, no. It does happen.
2 Q. [Mr Irving]: Professor Browning, just one more question on this
3 particular avenue: if you were to apply for a position of
4 Director of the US Holocaust Memorial Museum, do you think
5 you would be in the running there or would there be an
6 obstacle there too?
7 A. [Professor Christopher Robert Browning]: My guess is in this generation it would be considered not
8 likely to happen, but that within another generation this
9 would be very different.
10 Q. [Mr Irving]: Changing the theme somewhat now, how long has there been
11 talk of Holocaust, not necessarily that word, but just of
12 this particular — it appears to come to the fore again in
13 the 1970s, the campaign, would you agree?
14 A. [Professor Christopher Robert Browning]: When I started work in the early ’70s, very, very few
15 people were working on it. By the end of the ’70s there
16 were academic conferences on it. So that was the decade
17 in which I think there was a shift to a greater
18 consciousness of the Holocaust as an important historical
19 topic.
20 Q. [Mr Irving]: Were you here in the courtroom earlier when we examined a
21 book published by the Memorial Museum, a passage written
22 by Aberhard Jackel?
23 A. [Professor Christopher Robert Browning]: I was here, and yes.
24 Q. [Mr Irving]: Aberhard Jackel, would you agree in that passage, or as it
25 was rendered here in the court, suggested that until my
26 book ‘Hitler’s War’ was published, there had been no real
. P-39
1 investigation of the Holocaust apart from the Reitlinger
2 and the Hilberg books?
3 A. [Professor Christopher Robert Browning]: Yes, I think I would not agree with that statement.
4 I would say that there had been substantial study of the
5 Holocaust; the Trunk book, in terms of the Jewish
6 Council’s, Hilberg in terms of the apparatus, Schloenus in
7 terms of the preHolocaust bureaucratic process. What had
8 not been studied before you published was a particular
9 focus on decision-making process and Hitler’s role. That
10 is one part and, in so far as we can confine ourselves to
11 that, indeed, your publication of ‘Hitler’s War’ was the
12 impetus for the research in that area.
13 Q. [Mr Irving]: What was the reason for this 20 year, 22 year, lack of
14 interest in examining whether the decision had been given
15 or how the decision had been given for the Holocaust?
16 A. [Professor Christopher Robert Browning]: I think probably several things. One, the person who had
17 focused mainly in the German documents, Raul Hilberg, was
18 very interested in the bureaucratic structure, but not
19 terribly interested in dating decisions. This happened to
20 be his focus.
21 Q. [Mr Irving]: Have you discussed this matter personally with Raul
22 Hilberg?
23 A. [Professor Christopher Robert Browning]: Yes and he is more interested in bureaucratic structure
24 than he is in linear or chronological decision-making
25 process. I am more interested in chronological process
26 than bureaucratic structure.
. P-40
1 Q. [Mr Irving]: Do you know what his opinion is on whether Adolf Hitler
2 actually issued an order or not?
3 A. [Professor Christopher Robert Browning]: I think his feeling is if you are looking for an order in
4 a formal sense, that such a thing probably was not given.
5 If you are looking at it in the way that you described
6 earlier, calling it the Richard Nixon complex, that Hitler
7 made very clear to Himmler and Heydrich what he expected
8 and they understood what was expected of them, that he —
9 I cannot speak for him, but I believe he would not have
10 been uncomfortable with that formulation.
11 Q. [Mr Irving]: The kind of “don’t let me find out what you are up to”?
12 A. [Professor Christopher Robert Browning]: Well, but also, “this is what I want but don’t let me find
13 — don’t bother me the with details”. He often said to
14 several people on record, “Take care of this. In 10 years
15 report back that it was done and I will not ask you how it
16 was accomplished”.
17 Q. [Mr Irving]: In connection with what topics would that kind of decision
18 have been made, not in connection with the Holocaust?
19 A. [Professor Christopher Robert Browning]: I think in terms of the ethnic cleansing from the annexed
20 territories from Poland, he used that expression, to the
21 Gauleiter along with Warthegau and Schlesier and
22 whatever —-
23 Q. [Mr Irving]: Gauleiter Dreiser or someone like that?
24 A. [Professor Christopher Robert Browning]: Yes.
25 Q. [Mr Irving]: He say he did not want to have interim reports, “Just tell
26 me when it has been done”?
. P-41
1 A. [Professor Christopher Robert Browning]: That he indicated he did not want to be bothered with the
2 details. He wanted it accomplished —-
3 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Are we still — I am so sorry — talking
4 about Raul Hilberg’s view or are we sliding into your own
5 view?
6 MR IRVING: No. We are now talking about his own expertise.
7 MR JUSTICE GRAY: It is quite important to know whose opinions
8 I am hearing.
9 MR IRVING: I believe this is Professor Browning’s opinion. (To
10 the witness): Am I right?
11 A. [Professor Christopher Robert Browning]: Well, we started talking about what Hilberg and
12 I explained what I thought he would be comfortable with,
13 and then I believe we kind of shifted into how we would
14 understand this kind of decision making process would be
15 done that was not attributed to Raul Hilberg specifically
16 but a general discussion.
17 Q. [Mr Irving]: My Lord, it may be helpful —-
18 MR JUSTICE GRAY: What I want to have clear is what you have
19 just said, which was very clear, if I may say so. Was
20 that your view, namely, he effectively made clear what he
21 wanted done and then said, “You get on with it and I do
22 not want to know the details”? Is that your view?
23 A. [Professor Christopher Robert Browning]: Yes. We have documented cases where, in terms of ethnic
24 cleansing, he made that statement, and so I would say this
25 is a way in which Hitler conveys or makes decisions or
26 gives orders that we would not consider a formal order in
. P-42
1 the sense of a signed document, and I would say that is my
2 opinion, not attributed to Raul Hilberg.
3 MR IRVING: My Lord, I should also have given you a kind of
4 topic paragraph of what I intend doing today.
5 MR JUSTICE GRAY: I have made that clear before; it does help
6 me.
7 MR IRVING: Yes. I intend having this general discussion to
8 start with and then we will revert to his report, and I
9 hope that we will cover the first 25 pages of the report
10 during the day which is covering very much ground level
11 operations of the Einsatzgruppen on the Eastern Front.
12 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Yes. At the moment it is a sort of bird’s
13 eye view which is very helpful to start off with.
14 MR IRVING: Indeed, my Lord. This kind of discussion is
15 helpful because I do not know Professor Browning, we have
16 never met, and we have never had the pleasure and I am,
17 frankly, interested in finding out what he knows.
18 MR RAMPTON: I have something to say, if I may since, we have
19 now been told what the plan is. (A) I am not interested,
20 I mean as an advocate appearing for clients, in having
21 this court used as what one might call an historical forum
22 an I dare say your Lordship is not either unless it goes
23 to an issue in the action.
24 I heard with some alarm Mr Irving threatening to
25 spend the rest of the day cross-examining about the
26 Einsatzgruppen shootings in the East. Your Lordship may
. P-43
1 recall that Mr Irving has made a very clear concession
2 that those shootings happened on a massive scale, that
3 they were systematic and that Hitler authorized them. So
4 where —-
5 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Yes, but, well, I do not know what the
6 questions are going to be yet, but this is your — I am
7 just going to say something to Mr Rampton — expert. He
8 is saying what he says. He is making various historical
9 assertions. Obviously, Mr Irving cannot resile from what
10 he has already conceded, but he is entitled to go through
11 it. I do not know exactly what he is going to ask.
12 MR RAMPTON: I do not know either. If there is some area of
13 Professor Browning’s report which Mr Irving disputes which
14 is still relevant to the case, then, of course, and it may
15 be that there are other areas of the report which he can,
16 as it were, try to use to undermine Professor Browning’s
17 credibility. That I cannot object to either. What he
18 cannot do in cross-examination — I am only putting down a
19 marker — now is to try, as it were, to go back behind the
20 concession that he has made.
21 MR JUSTICE GRAY: I think it is helpful to be reminded of the
22 concession. I do not suppose Mr Irving will
23 but I certainly do not see any reason why he should not
24 follow the path.
25 MR IRVING: I do not think that was a helpful interruption at
26 all from Mr Rampton. Normally Mr Rampton’s interruptions
. P-44
1 are welcome and very helpful but, if he had only waited, I
2 have written in large letters here on my notes, “We do not
3 contest the shootings”.
4 MR JUSTICE GRAY: I think so far, if I may say so, you have
5 been perfectly consistent in the way you have put your
6 case, but Mr Rampton was putting down what may turn out to
7 be an unnecessary marker.
8 MR RAMPTON: It may well do.
9 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Let us press on.
Section 45.10-58.7
10 MR IRVING: You were talking about the ethnic cleansing of
11 these Polish regions. What would have been meant by that?
12 If Hitler had said, carry out the ethnic cleansing but do
13 not tell me for the next ten years, just come back in ten
14 years to tell me it has been done, would the ethnic
15 cleansing have actually involved the mass extermination of
16 any category of people?
17 A. [Professor Christopher Robert Browning]: That involved the mass expulsion of Jews, gypsies and what
18 they said was other undesirable people, in these areas to
19 be repopulated with ethnic Germans brought back from the
20 regions of Eastern European conceded to Stalin in the non
21 aggression pact.
22 Q. [Mr Irving]: We have a bit of a problem, do we not, with the fact that
23 parts of Eastern Europe had been conceded to Stalin? Do
24 we have any clear figures as to how many thousands or
25 hundreds of thousands of Jews had been dumped across the
26 demarcation line by the Nazis into the Soviet controlled
. P-45
1 areas?
2 A. [Professor Christopher Robert Browning]: We do not have exact figures on either those that were
3 dumped or those that fled, but the estimate that I have
4 seen ranged between 200 and 300 thousand that escaped from
5 the German occupied side of Poland to the Soviet occupied
6 side. But those are estimates because obviously no one is
7 keeping track in any systematic way.
8 Q. [Mr Irving]: Yes. To recapitulate, for the first 20 years after World
9 War II there was no real investigation into the decision
10 making process by which this appalling crime had been set
11 in motion?
12 A. [Professor Christopher Robert Browning]: There were not studies focused on that, but they focused
13 on a great deal about the Holocaust. One could not say
14 the Holocaust had not been subjected to careful study.
15 The decision making process in the 1930s was subjected to
16 very careful study by Karl Schleunes and Adam and Adam
17 also did venture into the field up to 1941 and came up
18 with a very late date by those times. He said Hitler did
19 not decide until the fall of 41, which to historians at
20 that point seemed to be shockingly late. It is now a
21 figure that many of us would agree with but at that point
22 it was quite a revolutionary proposal.
23 Q. [Mr Irving]: To cut straight to the bottom line, nobody has ever found
24 a single document indicating a Hitler decision or a Hitler
25 will in this direction. We have had to do a lot of
26 extrapolating and reading between the lines. Is that
. P-46
1 correct?
2 A. [Professor Christopher Robert Browning]: A lot of it comes from a collection of documents from
3 which one draws inferences, from which one looks at
4 circumstantial evidence and how one construes the Nazi
5 system of work. But we do not have what we would call the
6 smoking pistol document; your thousand pounds is still
7 safe in your bank account in that regard. We do not have
8 a signed order by Adolf Hitler or a document that
9 explicitly refers to him taking the decision in that kind
10 of way.
11 Q. [Mr Irving]: Are you surprised at that?
12 A. [Professor Christopher Robert Browning]: No, because we have — one area in which we have a record
13 of how a decision was made was when Himmler goes to Hitler
14 in late May of 1940, when he wants to revalidate the
15 ethnic programme that Frank and Goering had more or less
16 slowed down in the spring 1940 on the grounds of priority
17 of military concerns, and then, when it seemed clear that
18 victory in France as very near, Himmler goes back,
19 presents his memorandum to Hitler.
20 Q. [Mr Irving]: May 25 1940, is that right?
21 A. [Professor Christopher Robert Browning]: Yes. What Himmler then records is that Hitler read the
22 memorandum, found it very good and correct, and said to
23 Himmler, “You may show this to the others and tell them it
24 is in my line of thinking”.
25 Q. [Mr Irving]: How do we know that?
26 A. [Professor Christopher Robert Browning]: That is because we have a second memorandum by Himmler
. P-47
1 recording the conversation.
2 Q. [Mr Irving]: Yes, but he does not actually quote those words, does he?
3 You have rather embroidered them.
4 A. [Professor Christopher Robert Browning]: This is how Himmler records the conversation. He does not
5 have a quote, Hitler said, quotation mark.
6 Q. [Mr Irving]: Do you remember one particular phrase in that Himmler
7 memorandum of May 1940 in which Himmler says something
8 like, “There can of course be no question of the wholesale
9 extermination of the Jews”?
10 A. [Professor Christopher Robert Browning]: At that point he considers what he calls a Bolshevic
11 solution as unGerman and impossible. Yes, I have quoted
12 that many times.
13 Q. [Mr Irving]: How would you interpret that particular phrase?
14 A. [Professor Christopher Robert Browning]: I would interpret that, that Himmler is not the one who
15 would propose such things, that if he eventually did that
16 it could have to have come from someone with greater
17 authority than him.
18 Q. [Mr Irving]: Let us take it in stages.
19 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Mr Irving, do you mind me interrupting you?
20 Are we now on the general perspective? Are you going to
21 come back to these individual documents?
22 MR IRVING: You will notice that when I start referring to page
23 numbers of his report, my Lord. If I could take that
24 piece by piece, if Himmler wrote in his May 25th 1940
25 memorandum that sentence saying “There can be no question
26 of a Bolshevic solution of the Jewish problem”, in other
. P-48
1 words, just liquidating them —-
2 A. [Professor Christopher Robert Browning]: Liquidating a whole people.
3 Q. [Mr Irving]: There is no indication of course, either on that document
4 which Himmler actually marked in his own handwriting, or
5 in the subsequent memorandum that he wrote, that Hitler
6 had overruled him and said, “Oh, on the contrary”, is
7 there?
8 A. [Professor Christopher Robert Browning]: What Himmler wanted to get from Hitler was backing for his
9 renewed ethnic cleansing, and that Himmler comes away with
10 the affirmation that he can cite Hitler’s backing if Frank
11 and Goring and others try to block him again.
12 Q. [Mr Irving]: Of course, you would agree that there had been a lot of
13 killing of the Jews in the Polish campaign and afterwards
14 had there not? .
15 A. [Professor Christopher Robert Browning]: The greater focus I believe, was on killing of Polish
16 intelligentsia but certainly, given the Jews are about 10
17 per cent of the population I think that the percentage of
18 fatalities percentage wise is greater among the Jewish
19 population than the Polish.
20 Q. [Mr Irving]: In the conferences conducted by Heydrich in the autumn
21 1939 and over that winter, of which we have the records,
22 the Jews are also mentioned as being a category to be
23 exterminated, are they not?
24 A. [Professor Christopher Robert Browning]: There is a series of different quotes. I do not think
25 there is a global reference to killing all Jews. There is
26 one to killing Polish intelligentsia.
. P-49
1 Q. [Mr Irving]: The Jews, the clergy?
2 A. [Professor Christopher Robert Browning]: They list this as a category of people. It is not a
3 global killing of all Jews but Jews are among the groups
4 that can be killed. No one is going to get into trouble
5 killing Jews.
6 Q. [Mr Irving]: Were they to be killed because they were potential
7 leadership material, or potential trouble makers, or
8 what? Was there a reason giving for the killing given on
9 that occasion?
10 A. [Professor Christopher Robert Browning]: No.
11 Q. [Mr Irving]: Or was it purely ideological?
12 A. [Professor Christopher Robert Browning]: I do not remember the exact document in its entirety so
13 I would hesitate to say something.
14 Q. [Mr Irving]: There is a string of documents September and October
15 1939.
16 A. [Professor Christopher Robert Browning]: There is a collection of references. Sometimes these
17 references refer to different categories. They are not
18 the same categories each time. Sometimes Jews appear
19 among that category. I do not recall that they give a
20 detailed justification of why each of those categories is
21 mentioned at this time.
22 Q. [Mr Irving]: I do not know if you familiar with my book Hitler’s War at
23 all?
24 A. [Professor Christopher Robert Browning]: Not very familiar.
25 Q. [Mr Irving]: Will you accept that — and I can be proved wrong by
26 Mr Rampton — I refer in great deal to these particular
. P-50
1 September and October 1939 conferences at which the Jews
2 were to be killed and the orders were given?
3 A. [Professor Christopher Robert Browning]: I cannot answer that because I have not read that
4 section.
5 Q. [Mr Irving]: Very well. Have not the Jewish people throughout this
6 century, in fact long before World War II and since World
7 War I, constantly proclaimed that they were in danger of
8 being exterminated, or indeed that they were already being
9 exterminated?
10 A. [Professor Christopher Robert Browning]: I could not say yes to that.
11 Q. [Mr Irving]: It has been a kind of an ongoing story, has it not?
12 A. [Professor Christopher Robert Browning]: No. When you say “the Jews have said”, I am afraid that
13 is the kind of formulation that it is impossible to
14 answer. You may find one Jew or another, but that does
15 not mean “the Jews” have constantly said that.
16 Q. [Mr Irving]: Can I hand you this book to have a look at? Can you read
17 the title on the jacket of that book?
18 A. [Professor Christopher Robert Browning]: “The Yellow Spot, the Extermination of the Jews in
19 Germany”.
20 Q. [Mr Irving]: Can you see who has published it?
21 A. [Professor Christopher Robert Browning]: With an introduction by the Bishop of Durham.
22 Q. [Mr Irving]: If you look on the back of the spine, you will see the
23 initials VG, Victor Gollantz.
24 A. [Professor Christopher Robert Browning]: I see the Gollantz written at the bottom.
25 Q. [Mr Irving]: So the book has been published by a reputable English
26 publisher. Can you rapidly flutter inside and see what
. P-51
1 year that book called “The Extermination of the Jews” was
2 published?
3 A. [Professor Christopher Robert Browning]: In 1936.
4 Q. [Mr Irving]: Three years before World War II we are already hearing
5 books on this subject.
6 A. [Professor Christopher Robert Browning]: If one looks right below the title page, it says “The
7 Yellow Spot, the outlawing of half a million human
8 beings”. It does not say the murder of them, but it does
9 say “the outlawing”.
10 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Is it confined to 33 to 36?
11 A. [Professor Christopher Robert Browning]: It is published in 36.
12 Q. [Mr Justice Gray]: I wonder what the events are it describes. It may be it
13 is only the last three years?
14 MR IRVING: It is a very good history, actually, of the Nazi
15 persecution of the Jews up to that time.
16 MR JUSTICE GRAY: You mentioned the first world war. It does
17 not go that far back?
18 MR IRVING: I could have gone back to similar publications back
19 at the First World War but it is a rather arcane
20 exercise. It is an odd thing that the word
21 “extermination” at that time can be taken to mean
22 something which means something totally different to the
23 way we understand it now, is it not?
24 A. [Professor Christopher Robert Browning]: It seems a fairly hyperbolic title.
25 Q. [Mr Irving]: Do we have the same problems with word in German? Words
26 like umsiedlung and ausrotung?
. P-52
1 A. [Professor Christopher Robert Browning]: The conventional use is turned into a specialised use.
2 Language changes that way all the time. Before 1971
3 “destabilization” meant one thing. After Kissinger uses
4 it, it takes on a second meaning because of historical
5 context.
6 Q. [Mr Irving]: Of course, “pot” and “grass” and things like that change
7 their meaning, do they not? Is there any indication that
8 words used even at the same time in the Third Reich can
9 have totally different meanings depending who is using
10 them, who they are speaking to? For example, an
11 apparently innocent word like umsiedlung, which means
12 resettlement, can take on a totally different sinister
13 meaning when uttered by Heinreich Himmler?
14 A. [Professor Christopher Robert Browning]: Yes. If you are referring to ethnic Germans, it generally
15 means that you are removing them from one place to
16 another. In documents referring to Jews after 1942 it
17 usually means sending them to a camp.
18 Q. [Mr Irving]: Without wishing to pre-empt the logical flow of this
19 examination in a way, can I direct your attention to one
20 document in the bundle which is probably next to you,
21 H3(i)? Footnote 54 is the one I am after.
22 A. [Professor Christopher Robert Browning]: Where do I turn?
23 MR IRVING: If you look at the bottom there is FN 54 in black
24 felt pen.
25 A. [Professor Christopher Robert Browning]: Which tab? FN 54.
26 Q. [Mr Irving]: You will remember the episode because it is the umsiedlung
. P-53
1 of 20,000 Jews at —-
2 A. [Professor Christopher Robert Browning]: Yes, and then two pages later it becomes a different word.
3 Q. [Mr Irving]: You have got it. You are absolutely right. Two pages
4 later they are quite plain that they were shot?
5 A. [Professor Christopher Robert Browning]: Yes.
6 Q. [Mr Irving]: So in this document umsiedlung refers to killing?
7 A. [Professor Christopher Robert Browning]: Correct.
8 Q. [Mr Irving]: And you can see the word umsiedlung. My Lord, you will see
9 it in line 7 of the first paragraph. Does your Lordship
10 have the document?
11 MR JUSTICE GRAY: I am still making my way there.
12 MR IRVING: In 54 (i), document November 8th, 1942. Actually,
13 there is no dispute about this. The Nazis killed 20,000
14 Jews in two days in the middle of October 1942. We are
15 just looking at words.
16 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Where is umsiedlung?
17 MR IRVING: Seven lines down my Lord “Umsiedlung der Juden”.
18 Then in the following line you have umgesiedelt. So quite
19 clearly it means killing, does it not?
20 A. [Professor Christopher Robert Browning]: Yes.
21 Q. [Mr Irving]: So in this man’s mouth at this time, in this document,
22 umsiedlung and umgesiedelt means killing?
23 A. [Professor Christopher Robert Browning]: Yes.
24 Q. [Mr Irving]: Now would you look at the last line of that paragraph,
25 Professor? This is the only trap I have got prepared for
26 you today. Would you translate into English the last
. P-54
1 sentence please?
2 A. [Professor Christopher Robert Browning]: Let me read the whole first.
3 Q. [Mr Irving]: The sentence beginning with the words “Die helfter…
4 A. [Professor Christopher Robert Browning]: Yes. They are referring to village which had had contact
5 with the partisans and they say half the inhabitants were
6 shot and the other half umgesiedelt to a neighbouring
7 village.
8 Q. [Mr Irving]: So there you have in the same paragraph two totally
9 different meaning of the word umsiedlung?
10 A. [Professor Christopher Robert Browning]: And the context making it fairly clear.
11 Q. [Mr Irving]: Otherwise it would have been no use to us, but it is an
12 illustration, is it not, of the pitfalls we have and how
13 easy it is to adopt what Mr Rampton might call a
14 translation of a word, purely because we do not have the
15 context, the surrounding country side, to tell us what
16 this particular word means?
17 A. [Professor Christopher Robert Browning]: There are different meanings to the same word, yes.
18 Q. [Mr Irving]: So, in fact, if somebody accused you of using the word
19 wrongly and perversely and doing it deliberately, and you
20 did not have the surrounding country side to help you,
21 that would be a bit unfair, would it?
22 A. [Professor Christopher Robert Browning]: It would depend upon the broader context of the
23 accusation.
24 Q. [Mr Irving]: Would you now please take your expert report? You say
25 your pagination is different from ours?
26 A. [Professor Christopher Robert Browning]: I believe they have my court formatted one here as well.
. P-55
1 Q. [Mr Irving]: Go to page 5.
2 A. [Professor Christopher Robert Browning]: Yes.
3 Q. [Mr Irving]: First of all, I would ask you to look at your main title,
4 The Evidence For the Implementation of the Final
5 Solution.
6 A. [Professor Christopher Robert Browning]: Yes.
7 Q. [Mr Irving]: What do you understand by the phrase “Final Solution”?
8 A. [Professor Christopher Robert Browning]: I understand that is a programme to kill the Jews within
9 the Nazi sphere of influence in Europe.
10 Q. [Mr Irving]: Is that not a perverse translation of that phrase
11 Endlosung?
12 A. [Professor Christopher Robert Browning]: No. I think it is a translation that becomes very clear,
13 in terms of that stage. The word Endlosung does appear
14 with a less lethal meaning earlier, but I think certainly
15 it comes into this meaning and a number of documents have
16 —-
17 Q. [Mr Irving]: A less lethal meaning in earlier documents. In other
18 words, that does not necessarily mean killing? It can
19 also mean other final solutions?
20 A. [Professor Christopher Robert Browning]: They speak in different ways of an engilticus losung or a
21 total or gazumpt losung. There is a different series of
22 words. By 42 when you get folders, for instance, it will
23 then say this becomes in a sense the accepted word, and
24 I think at that time it also becomes the word that applies
25 to a particular programme, not a general statement that
26 has lots of different meanings.
. P-56
1 Q. [Mr Irving]: Professor Browning, would you accept that in the archives
2 of the German Foreign Office the file title “Endlosung der
3 Judenfrage” goes back to 1936, certainly to 1938?
4 A. [Professor Christopher Robert Browning]: There are certainly documents that predate, but the file
5 that I think is actually called that, I would have check
6 and see what the earliest documents on that are. I do not
7 recall at the moment.
8 MR JUSTICE GRAY: It is true, is it not, that Endlosung is used
9 at a time when deportation rather than extermination was
10 policy?
11 A. [Professor Christopher Robert Browning]: Yes, at the earlier period there will be a series of
12 words. Sometimes it will be losung, sometimes it will be
13 gazumpt losung, and sometimes total losung and sometimes
14 endlosung. When we get to the period of the Wannsee
15 conference on, it usually is expressed as Endlosung and
16 you do not get nearly the same mix. That is just my
17 impression. I have not done an actual count of how often
18 that occurs, but my impression is that at that point, when
19 it is referring to a specific programme, that is the word
20 that is used almost consistently.
21 MR IRVING: In other words, you should really have called the
22 report, this is no real criticism, not evidence for the
23 implementation of the final solution, but evidence for
24 implementation of a killing programme, or a systematic
25 killing programme? Final Solution could have meant
26 something else?
. P-57
1 A. [Professor Christopher Robert Browning]: I think I define what I mean by it in the report, so
2 I would say that it is perfectly fine to use the term that
3 I used.
4 Q. [Mr Irving]: We are not denying the fact that Final Solution does come
5 to mean killing, but it did not always mean that, did it?
6 A. [Professor Christopher Robert Browning]: It will appear in earlier documents when it does not mean
7 killings, yes.
Section 58.8-75.13
8 Q. [Mr Irving]: You are familiar with the event reports, are you not?
9 A. [Professor Christopher Robert Browning]: Yes.
10 Q. [Mr Irving]: You did not quote in your report the passage on the Jewish
11 question from the event report No. 81 dated September 12th
12 1941. I am just going to quote to you three and a half
13 lines from it. It is the operations of Einsatzkommando 6,
14 and the quotation is as follows. It may be familiar to
15 you. “The gratuitous evacuation of hundreds of thousands
16 of Jews”, what would “evacuation” there be?
17 A. [Professor Christopher Robert Browning]: I have not seen the written —-
18 Q. [Mr Irving]: “The gratuitous evacuation of hundreds of thousands of
19 Jews may be considered to be an indirect success of the
20 work of the security police. As we hear mostly from the
21 other side of the Urals, the Ural mountains, this is a
22 considerable contribution to the solution of the Jewish
23 question in Europe”. This is September 1941 and in your
24 opinion are they are referring there to a geographical
25 evacuation, or something more sinister?
26 A. [Professor Christopher Robert Browning]: Not seeing the wider context, I think he is probably
. P-58
1 referring to the escape of Jews to the Soviet side, and
2 that these were Jews that were no longer within German
3 control.
4 Q. [Mr Irving]: “The gratuitous evacuation of hundreds of thousands of
5 Jews may be considered to be an indirect success of the
6 work of the security police”, in other words they had
7 fled?
8 MR JUSTICE GRAY: They did not want to get shot?
9 A. [Professor Christopher Robert Browning]: They are Jews that do not have to be shot because they
10 have left German custody.
11 MR IRVING: So at this time there was no plan to catch all the
12 Jews you could and kill them?
13 A. [Professor Christopher Robert Browning]: What the reports note as they go further East, there are
14 fewer and fewer Jews in the areas the Germans get because
15 so many have fled, and this is in a sense of a way of
16 saying why his body count has not been maintained, that so
17 many of these are have fled beyond the Soviet lines. We
18 can consider this an indirect success. If the programme
19 then was still expulsion, this would not be an indirect
20 success, it would be a direct success. If it is an
21 indirect success, that implies that it is something other
22 than what the direct process is.
23 Q. [Mr Irving]: You said something rather interesting there, the fact that
24 his body count had not been maintained. What did you
25 imply by that?
26 A. [Professor Christopher Robert Browning]: Some of the Einsatzgruppen or Einsatzkommandos have a much
. P-59
1 lower count than some of the others?
2 Q. [Mr Irving]: Did this reflect badly on them, do you think?
3 A. [Professor Christopher Robert Browning]: In the sense that sometimes the commander says, well, the
4 Jews have fled from this area in the sense he is
5 explaining up the line why there is a discrepancy, or why
6 there is an uneven pattern and some of his officers will
7 not be reporting the same numbers as others. He does not
8 go into detail but I would infer from that that he fears
9 that they may be viewed as not zealous enough in the sense
10 he is covering for them and giving an explanation to
11 Berlin as to why some kommandos have much larger numbers
12 than others.
13 Q. [Mr Irving]: You appreciate what I am getting at here, do you not? The
14 fact that there may have been a tendency to bloat reports
15 or to exaggerate figures, a temptation?
16 A. [Professor Christopher Robert Browning]: There certainly is the possibility of that, but at the
17 same time of course that means they know that Berlin wants
18 big numbers, which would indicate that they perfectly
19 realize they are part of that programme, the purpose of
20 which is to get big numbers, that they report exact
21 numbers when everything we know about how the killings
22 were carried out, no one was sitting with a clicker giving
23 a precise body count. So we would not take these as
24 precise numbers, but they are ball park numbers.
25 Q. [Mr Irving]: So, when somebody reports from the front to Himmler or to
26 Berlin that 360,000 Jews have been killed in a three month
. P-60
1 period — you are familiar with the report I am referring
2 to?
3 A. [Professor Christopher Robert Browning]: Yes.
4 Q. [Mr Irving]: And It is a very precise figure, accurate down to the last
5 digit, we should not expect that to be genuinely accurate
6 down to the last digit?
7 A. [Professor Christopher Robert Browning]: No, because it is based on reports like Pressertoft, which
8 is a round figure of 20,000. So that is a false precision
9 in the report; that it is a ball park figure of the
10 general area, I think is also the case.
11 Q. [Mr Irving]: They are mind boggling figures, are they not?
12 A. [Professor Christopher Robert Browning]: Indeed.
13 Q. [Mr Irving]: When you consider — I do not know what your equivalent
14 stadium in North California is, but Wembley Stadium here,
15 for example, and you imagine shooting all that number of
16 people in that space of two days, it is quite a daunting
17 task.
18 A. [Professor Christopher Robert Browning]: It is a very large figure.
19 Q. [Mr Irving]: How large were the units that carried out these shooting
20 operations? How big was an Einsatzgruppe?
21 A. [Professor Christopher Robert Browning]: Einsatzgruppen total about 3,000.
22 Q. [Mr Irving]: Yes. But in each one were they all the same size?
23 A. [Professor Christopher Robert Browning]: No, this is all four together. Einsatzgruppen A was
24 I think the largest at 900, Einsatzgruppen B was probably
25 the smallest at 600.
26 Q. [Mr Irving]: Their tasks were not just killing people, were they? They
. P-61
1 had tasks?
2 A. [Professor Christopher Robert Browning]: Yes.
3 Q. [Mr Irving]: Can you specify to the court what the other tasks of the
4 Einsatzgruppen were, apart from killing people?
5 A. [Professor Christopher Robert Browning]: They were to, well, kill others than Jews. They were to
6 capture Soviet function areas, communist party members and
7 they were to be killed, they were to secure left behind
8 documentation, particularly trying to get NKPD documents
9 or communist government documents, so they were to take
10 likewise what was called all preventative measures against
11 potential enemies.
12 Q. [Mr Irving]: Rather like CIC after the Second World War?
13 A. [Professor Christopher Robert Browning]: Well to uncover if agents had been left behind the
14 retreating armies.
15 Q. [Mr Irving]: Rather like the CIC, the Counter Intelligence Corps of the
16 American Army after the Second World War, except for the
17 killing operations, of course?
18 A. [Professor Christopher Robert Browning]: I do not know what the CIC was exactly.
19 Q. [Mr Irving]: Are you familiar with the Sonderkommando Kunsberg, for
20 example, the operations they carried out raiding Foreign
21 Ministry buildings after the fall of Prague and Belgrade
22 and so on, capturing documents?
23 A. [Professor Christopher Robert Browning]: Securing documents was one function.
24 Q. [Mr Irving]: Quite an important function, was it not, of the
25 Einsatzgruppen? They had an intelligence gathering
26 function?
. P-62
1 A. [Professor Christopher Robert Browning]: They do not refer too often in the documentation. This
2 does not seem to have been a priority, but it was
3 something, when they did it, they boasted about it.
4 Q. [Mr Irving]: Professor, I disagree with you on that. If you were to
5 read the event reports of the Einsatzgruppen, you will
6 surely find that their killing operations are only one
7 paragraph, and that they have other paragraphs detailing
8 in some detail, describing in some detail, the
9 intelligence gathering operations in which they were
10 involved and other routine police rear area operations?
11 A. [Professor Christopher Robert Browning]: The reports are very long and the killing of Jews is
12 usually one section within that much longer report.
13 Q. [Mr Irving]: Dealt with in a very callous manner, just 20,000 Jews were
14 shot.
15 A. [Professor Christopher Robert Browning]: It is usually done fairly briefly.
16 Q. [Mr Irving]: Have you ever tried to do a back of the envelope
17 calculation on the feasibility of these killing
18 operations, given the limited number of personnel who
19 would have been available and the limited number of trucks
20 that they had and the primitive nature of their trucks?
21 Do you remember reading in any of these reports about how
22 their horse drawn carts had broken an axle and that kind
23 of thing?
24 A. [Professor Christopher Robert Browning]: I do not remember a report on a broken axle, but I do
25 remember reports where they deal with manpower problems,
26 so that by late July they have gotten permission to raise
. P-63
1 auxiliary units in the area, that they often refer to the
2 co-operation of the Army in providing people for cordons,
3 that according to the preinvasion agreement between the
4 Army and the SS, the Army was to provide logistical
5 support so, when they needed extra trucks and this kind of
6 thing, the Army was expected to provide them. So that
7 when we say that an Einsatzgruppen operation involved a
8 kommando, that is not the only manpower that is involved.
9 What we have found from the newer documentation from the
10 Soviet Union is the degree to which the Einsatzkommando
11 has since wanted to hog all the credit. Now that we see
12 more documents, we can see that others were involved too.
13 Q. [Mr Irving]: The Soviet archives have been very important, have they
14 not, the former Soviet archives?
15 A. [Professor Christopher Robert Browning]: They have been important in fleshing out what happened in
16 the Soviet Union. I do not think they have transformed
17 our understanding of what happened elsewhere in Europe a
18 great deal.
19 Q. [Mr Irving]: I have read your report with enormous interest, because of
20 course I am not a Holocaust expert, but I have shown
21 particular attention to the sources that have been used,
22 the archives in Minsk you refer to?
23 A. [Professor Christopher Robert Browning]: Minsk, Riga, Moscow.
24 Q. [Mr Irving]: How long have these archives been available to the average
25 run of the mill incorrigible revisionist historian who
26 wants to go and do research in them, do you think? Ten
. P-64
1 twenty, thirty years or quite recently?
2 A. [Professor Christopher Robert Browning]: I have not worked in them. Gerald Fleming, I believe, got
3 into the Riga archives very early on, and he has kindly
4 provided me with my first documents out of these areas.
5 So that it was possible to get into some of them. It was
6 also possible in the Zentralstellar in Germany to look at
7 copies of documents that they had gotten from the Soviet
8 Union much earlier.
9 Q. [Mr Irving]: In Potzdam?
10 A. [Professor Christopher Robert Browning]: No Ludwigsberg outside Stuttgart.
11 Q. [Mr Irving]: West Germany?
12 A. [Professor Christopher Robert Browning]: Yes. They had gotten what we now see, in a sense the
13 cream of the crop. They had in fact seen many of these
14 documents and brought photocopies back to Ludwigsberg. We
15 had seen a number of the documents that then we found out
16 were either in the secret archives or somewhere else.
17 Historians could now see the whole pack. What you had was
18 the selection in Ludwigsberg of selected documents.
19 Q. [Mr Irving]: Let me try to zero in what you just said.
20 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Before you do that, Mr Irving, I am so sorry
21 to interrupt because I am trying not to. It is difficult
22 being interrupted, but I just want to see where we are
23 getting with this. We know that you accept that the
24 Einsatzgruppen killed probably hundreds of thousands.
25 MR IRVING: We are looking at numbers, now, my Lord.
26 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Let me make sure I am understanding where we
. P-65
1 are going — killed hundreds of thousands of Jews. It may
2 well be that what you are suggesting at the moment is that
3 those reports were exaggerated. But surely, for the
4 purposes of this case, what really matters is that going
5 back to Berlin were reports giving the numbers that they
6 gave, because at this stage in the case we are really on
7 how high the knowledge went, and was there a systematic
8 programme in place.
9 MR IRVING: I am very familiar with what Mr Rampton is trying
10 to get out of this case, my Lord.
11 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Do not worry about what he is trying to get
12 out of the case. I want to make sure that I know where we
13 going with the cross-examination.
14 MR IRVING: I will put my cards face up on the table then,
15 which I was hoping not to have to do as early as this in
16 the cross-examination.
17 MR JUSTICE GRAY: You must in order to answer my question and I
18 am sorry to interrupt.
19 MR IRVING: We are looking at the August 1 1941 document. That
20 is at the bottom of this particular alley, the document
21 with which your Lordship is familiar.
22 MR JUSTICE GRAY: That is rather my point. I am sorry to
23 interrupt you. All right, maybe a lot of the Jews were
24 fleeing over the Urals and they were being shot by the
25 Soviets.
26 MR IRVING: That is not that document. The fleeing Jews and the
. P-66
1 question of the killing capacities, the manpower, the
2 personnel, the trucks base and so on, goes purely to the
3 matter that Richard Evans has raised. Your Lordship will
4 be familiar with the fact that Richard Evans has suggested
5 four criteria for what a Holocaust denier is. A Holocaust
6 denier is somebody who says Hitler did not know; a
7 Holocaust denier is somebody who says the figures were
8 less, and that is what this is about, that particular
9 matter. I am entitled to suggest that the figures have
10 been exaggerated and now unfortunately the Professor knows
11 precisely what I am after.
12 MR JUSTICE GRAY: All right. If you concede as much as you do
13 concede, I wonder whether there is a great deal of scope
14 for debate on this particular topic.
15 MR IRVING: The figures are important, my Lord, I do suggest,
16 because there was undoubtedly an appalling massacre on the
17 Eastern Front. I do not deny it. No sensible historian
18 does deny it, rather. I am not going to be shot down by
19 Mr Rampton for suggesting the figures are not as large as
20 they have been made out to be and there is room to suggest
21 that, whatever one has conceded, I rather dispute the word
22 conceded, it is a position I have always adopted, the
23 figures are smaller than have been commonly suggested. I
24 will not pursue this much further.
25 MR JUSTICE GRAY: No. It is really just to clarify my thinking
26 but thank you for that answer. I appreciate that
. P-67
1 dimension.
2 MR IRVING: Interesting though all this is, and nothing would
3 please me more than to have a long conversation with
4 Professor Browning, this is the court’s time and I am
5 acutely aware of that.
6 MR JUSTICE GRAY: That is what I am conscious of, too.
7 MR IRVING: Where was I?
8 MR JUSTICE GRAY: I am sorry, I interrupted your flow.
9 A. [Professor Christopher Robert Browning]: I believe we were talking about documents that an
10 historian would have had access to in the 1980s as opposed
11 to after 1989.
12 MR IRVING: Yes. In other words, it should not really be held
13 against a historian if he has not gone and worked in Minsk
14 and Riga and these other places in your view?
15 A. [Professor Christopher Robert Browning]: A number of those key documents in fact were by the 1970s,
16 and in the Zentralsteller some copies were in the
17 Institute in Munich. They are cited in books and at
18 various conferences, and then we find that they were part
19 of a larger file. But many of the key documents were
20 available before 1989.
21 Q. [Mr Irving]: I understood you to say that the German official or
22 semi-official historical institutes had privileged
23 access to Russian collections which are not immediately
24 made available to other historians?
25 A. [Professor Christopher Robert Browning]: No, not the historical institutes, the German judiciary in
26 the process of trying Germans, most of which took place in
. P-68
1 the 60s and 70s, did have access, and that they in turn at
2 Ludwigsberg allowed historians to come and see their
3 documents.
4 Q. [Mr Irving]: Like Goldhagen, for example?
5 A. [Professor Christopher Robert Browning]: I worked there a great deal. They have a collection which
6 is a USSR folder which has lots of materials, copies from
7 Ludwigsberg. So I have seen some of these documents
8 sitting in Jerusalem, that once they were out, the Xerox
9 machines worked and copies were now accessible in a number
10 of places.
11 Q. [Mr Irving]: Can I ask you to look on paragraph 5 or the report
12 paragraph 3.2?
13 A. [Professor Christopher Robert Browning]: 3.2 yes.
14 Q. [Mr Irving]: You say that the Nazis sought to destroy all the
15 documentary evidence and that is why we are so hard up.
16 A. [Professor Christopher Robert Browning]: Yes, I mean, they certainly — for instance, we have none
17 of the internal papers of Eichmann’s bureau. We have his
18 correspondence in which copies ended up with the Foreign
19 Office and elsewhere, but he seems to done a very good in
20 destroying virtually all of his papers, as an example.
21 There are pockets of Himmler documents that have
22 survived, as you and I both know, but certainly some that
23 did not. And that we have seen orders, for instance, from
24 Heydrich to people that destroyed documents.
25 Q. [Mr Irving]: What disturbs me is your suggestion in paragraph 3.2, not
26 so much a suggestion as a lament, that we have any amount
. P-69
1 of evidence relating to the shootings, but virtually
2 nothing at all relating to gassings?
3 A. [Professor Christopher Robert Browning]: The number of written documents relating to shootings is
4 far more extensive than the number of documents relating
5 to gassings in Operation Reinhardt. I was not dealing
6 with gassings elsewhere.
7 Q. [Mr Irving]: You used the useful concept of it not being symmetrical.
8 It is rather lopsided.
9 A. [Professor Christopher Robert Browning]: Yes.
10 Q. [Mr Irving]: Is there any methodological reason for that in your
11 opinion?
12 A. [Professor Christopher Robert Browning]: Well, I think if we read Globocnik’s —-
13 Q. [Mr Irving]: I mean, assuming the gassings took place on this kind of
14 scale that is now alleged, is there any reason why the
15 documents should not be available on the same scale?
16 A. [Professor Christopher Robert Browning]: Two reasons, I think. First is it seems that there were
17 much more reporting back to Berlin concerning the
18 shootings, that is, we have the structure of these daily
19 reports and then Heydrich formulated them into bi-monthly
20 and monthly reports, and circulating them among up to 100
21 people on the Verteile, the distribution sheet.
22 In terms of Operation Reinhardt, we have no
23 evidence of regular reports back of this nature. We do
24 have Globocnik’s letter to Himmler in early 1944: “I have
25 destroyed all the documents except those relating to
26 finances. Can we get the audit done so I can destroy
. P-70
1 those too?”
2 Q. [Mr Irving]: Yes, I am familiar with that document. Can you suggest
3 any logical reason why they would have destroyed one
4 category of documents but not the others? After all, they
5 were in the killing business, you tell us, and Jews are
6 the victims, so why should they have been more methodical
7 in their destruction of the gassing documents than the
8 shooting documents?
9 A. [Professor Christopher Robert Browning]: I think they probably produced many fewer documents
10 relating to the three camps that were centralised under
11 Globocnik in Lublin, while the shooting we have in a sense
12 both the reports that go back to Berlin and things like
13 the Brest-litovsk document, individual police reports that
14 have survived in pockets, but certainly nothing
15 comprehensive like the Einsatzgruppen reports.
16 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Professor Browning, I am not sure you have
17 quite answered Mr Irving’s question.
18 A. [Professor Christopher Robert Browning]: So that more shooting documents will survive because
19 shooting took place in a decentralized way, and so you
20 will have pockets of documents that survive in this area
21 or that area. But given that the Operation Reinhardt
22 activities were centralized, there would not be local
23 documents about them at this police station or that police
24 station, some of which would have slipped through and not
25 been destroyed. So I think you have a much more
26 centralised document base which was then systematically
. P-71
1 destroyed and you do not have as many strays that managed
2 to survive by inadvertence.
3 MR IRVING: I am not sure that it is helpful that you refer to
4 Operation Reinhardt, or perhaps you ought to define what
5 you mean by Operation Reinhardt at this stage?
6 A. [Professor Christopher Robert Browning]: I would take Globocnik’s own definition which was that it
7 was the camps, the deportation from the gettoes to the
8 camps and the collection and use of the materials
9 collected and the use of Jewish labour. I believe there
10 those are four functions, if my memory serves me right.
11 Q. [Mr Irving]: But, of course, there is a function that you have not
12 mentioned, in other words, the killing was not specified
13 as a function of Operation Reinhardt.
14 A. [Professor Christopher Robert Browning]: Well, he talks about the camps, and it is my opinion, as
15 you clearly know, that those camps were created to kill
16 Jews.
17 Q. [Mr Irving]: Yes, but these camps were operating on a loose rain, shall
18 we say? They did not need the paperwork?
19 A. [Professor Christopher Robert Browning]: I do not think — I do not know but I do not suspect once
20 that they were a routine and they were stationery, unlike
21 the police that are reporting back, “We are going from
22 here to here” and have multiple duties of which they
23 report about. Here they have one primary function. They
24 were not moving. You do not report every day, “We are
25 still in Sobibor. We have not moved to somewhere else”.
26 Q. [Mr Irving]: Yes, but you are familiar with the fact that the
. P-72
1 concentration camp commandants made regular reports back
2 to Berlin?
3 A. [Professor Christopher Robert Browning]: But Operation Reinhardt is not under the concentration
4 camp system in Berlin and the economic administrative
5 office. They are under Globocnik and are not part of that
6 chain of command and report.
7 Q. [Mr Irving]: Whom did Globocnik come under?
8 A. [Professor Christopher Robert Browning]: Globocnik technically comes under Kruger who — Globocnik
9 is the SS and police leader for Lublin. He is under
10 Kruger who is the higher SS and police leader for the
11 general government —-
12 Q. [Mr Irving]: That is Friedrich Wilhelm Kruger?
13 A. [Professor Christopher Robert Browning]: Yes, and higher SS and police leaders were appointed
14 personally by Himmler, sent out as his emissaries. In
15 this case we know —-
16 Q. [Mr Irving]: In parallel to Hans Frank. Hans Frank had a lot of
17 friction with Kruger?
18 A. [Professor Christopher Robert Browning]: No, I mean, Hans Frank is not within the SS or under
19 Himmler. He is appointed by Hitler as the Colonial
20 Governor of the General Government.
21 Q. [Mr Irving]: So there are two parallel systems operating here; there
22 is the SS police system and there is the colonial
23 government of Hans Frank?
24 A. [Professor Christopher Robert Browning]: There is a civil administration and an SS police
25 structure, yes.
26 Q. [Mr Irving]: What happened after Kruger was killed in, what, February
. P-73
1 1943 or whenever?
2 A. [Professor Christopher Robert Browning]: I did not believe he was killed. I thought he was
3 replaced.
4 Q. [Mr Irving]: He was replaced?
5 A. [Professor Christopher Robert Browning]: I do not recollect his fate but I certainly —-
6 Q. [Mr Irving]: Who replaced him?
7 A. [Professor Christopher Robert Browning]: I would have to look at that. I do not know.
8 Q. [Mr Irving]: So this killing system, or this camp system, in other
9 words, came under Globocnik, who came Kruger, who came
10 under Himmler direct.
11 A. [Professor Christopher Robert Browning]: Yes, but we do know that Globocnik often was in direct
12 contact with Himmler and got special tasks from Himmler.
13 So it may well have been that there is only a link from
14 Globocnik directly to Himmler. Kruger may know what is
15 going on, but may not be getting — this is speculation on
16 my part because we do not have any of that kind of
17 communication.
18 Q. [Mr Irving]: Yes. What was Globocnik’s fate during the war? Did he
19 fall into disfavour?
20 A. [Professor Christopher Robert Browning]: He had been, earlier before the war, the Gauleichter in
21 Vienna, I believe, had been caught up in the financial
22 scandal. He was then used by Himmler in Lublin until the
23 fall of ’43. After this was done, he, like many of the
24 others, were sent to fight partisans in Yugoslavia and he
25 is replaced.
26 Q. [Mr Irving]: Yes. But was he not replaced as part of a financial
. P-74
1 scandal?
2 A. [Professor Christopher Robert Browning]: No, I do not believe that we have definitive evidence on
3 that at all.
4 Q. [Mr Irving]: To what extent did the loot play an important part in the
5 considerations of the SS, if I can put it like that, their
6 decision to kill thousands, hundreds of thousands, of
7 Jews, that they were eager to get their hands on their
8 property?
9 A. [Professor Christopher Robert Browning]: I do not believe that is a major factor at all, but it is
10 a concern to get the loot as a by-product of the killing,
11 you will — that is, I believe they got to the loot
12 because they had killed the Jews. They did not kill the
13 Jews in order to get to the loot.
Section 75.14-90.2
14 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Can I go back to a question asked by
15 Mr Irving earlier on and ask it in a slightly different
16 form? If Berlin was interested in getting reports of the
17 shootings, the numbers of the various categories killed,
18 why (and I think this is really the thrust of his
19 question) should they not have been interested in similar
20 statistics in relation to gassing at the various camps?
21 A. [Professor Christopher Robert Browning]: I cannot give you an exact answer to that because it is
22 not discussed in the documentation. Heydrich is the one
23 that gets the reports from the police units. Himmler is
24 the one that is getting reports from Globocnik. It may
25 only be they had different ways of operation. I cannot
26 say exactly an answer to your question because I
. P-75
1 simply have not seen documentation that will explain it.
2 MR IRVING: Can I just hand you this document, Professor, and a
3 copy for his Lordship as well? There is no need to read
4 it. Just look at the general character of it. Are you
5 familiar with these documents in the British archives?
6 A. [Professor Christopher Robert Browning]: I have seen copies of some of them. I have not actually
7 worked in the decrypts in the PRO, no.
8 Q. [Mr Irving]: Have you had any contact with Professor Richard Brightman?
9 A. [Professor Christopher Robert Browning]: Yes.
10 Q. [Mr Irving]: Or with his English researcher, a Dr John Fox?
11 A. [Professor Christopher Robert Browning]: I have had no recent contact with John Fox. The last time
12 I saw him was 1992.
13 Q. [Mr Irving]: Are you familiar with the fact that there are in the
14 British archives now many tens of thousands of these
15 intercepts of German SS and police messages?
16 A. [Professor Christopher Robert Browning]: I do not know the number, but I know there are a large
17 number.
18 Q. [Mr Irving]: Yes. Well, will you accept that that particular page
19 comes from a file of over thousand such pages, just one
20 file, and I do not know how many reports are on that one
21 page, there are about 15 items on that one page, so?
22 A. [Professor Christopher Robert Browning]: Seven.
23 Q. [Mr Irving]: Would it surprise you to hear that in the British archives
24 we have, I suppose, several hundred thousand intercepted
25 SS and police messages?
26 A. [Professor Christopher Robert Browning]: I would not challenge the figure.
. P-76
1 Q. [Mr Irving]: Do you know from the works of Richard Brightman, like this
2 book here, ‘Official Secrets’, that we, British, and the
3 Americans also through us, were familiar with the killing
4 operations being conducted by the SS on the Eastern Front?
5 A. [Professor Christopher Robert Browning]: We — as I understand Brightman’s book, we were getting
6 the Police battalion reports which were in a lower code
7 between late July and early September or mid September,
8 which Daluege instructed them to send things by courier
9 and not by radio.
10 Q. [Mr Irving]: 1941 you are talking about?
11 A. [Professor Christopher Robert Browning]: 1941.
12 Q. [Mr Irving]: Yes. Is it known to you that the reason why Daluege
13 ordered the code change is because Winston Churchill
14 actually made a speech in 1941 relying on the intercepts,
15 talking for the first time about these appalling
16 atrocities being conducted by the SS?
17 A. [Professor Christopher Robert Browning]: I have no single document that establishes a causal
18 connection but there is a chronological meeting —
19 chronologically, it is a possible interpretation.
20 Q. [Mr Irving]: Have you seen intercepted messages passed, intercepted by
21 the British, intercepts by the British of messages passed
22 by Himmler to the Einsatzgruppen chiefs, like Jeckeln or
23 Stahlecker?
24 A. [Professor Christopher Robert Browning]: There is the August 1st telegramme, I think it is — I do
25 not believe it is a radio message — in which he instructs
26 them to kill the men and chase the women into the swamps.
. P-77
1 Q. [Mr Irving]: There is that one, but I am still concentrating on just
2 these British intercepts, these tens of thousands of
3 intercepted Nazi SS and police messages. You suggest this
4 was just at police battalion level?
5 A. [Professor Christopher Robert Browning]: The reports on the killings that I read in Brightman were
6 police battalion reports back to Daleuge. Now, whether
7 these — and he first saw them in the United States which
8 may have gotten part of, I do not know to what percentage
9 of the British intercepts were available to him in the
10 United States and how much he may have included of London
11 records, since I just do not know what he has looked.
12 Q. [Mr Irving]: But if these tens of thousands of messages contained,
13 shall we say, a random selection of intercepts, there was
14 no methodological reason why it should only be intercepts
15 relating to shootings rather than to anything else, would
16 it surprise you to hear that there are only references in
17 these tens of thousands of messages to shootings and no
18 references whatsoever to gassings?
19 A. [Professor Christopher Robert Browning]: It would not surprise me because we have no intercepts
20 that I know of between Himmler and Globocnik, that this
21 was not the way in which they communicated to the Soviet
22 Union.
23 Q. [Mr Irving]: Are you familiar with the fact that the British official
24 historians, Sir Frank Hinsley, summarized these and
25 similar messages in the British Official History, this was
26 the first clue that we had that these existed?
. P-78
1 A. [Professor Christopher Robert Browning]: I believe he said he looked at a few of them, that he did
2 not study that issue in detail, but that he did write
3 books that were on the British intelligence and referred
4 to these, yes.
5 Q. [Mr Irving]: Do you know that he read the reports, the daily reports,
6 from the Kommandants of the seven principal concentration
7 camps, Auschwitz, Dachau, Buchenwald, and so on, back to
8 Berlin for a number of months over the winter of 1942 to
9 1943?
10 A. [Professor Christopher Robert Browning]: I did not know that, but again I would say that Operation
11 Reinhardt was not part of the concentration camp system
12 and would not have been in the same chain of command.
13 Q. [Mr Irving]: What archeological investigations have been conducted in
14 recent years at any of the camp sites that you are
15 alluding to, like Treblinka, Maidonek, Sobibor and Belzec?
16 A. [Professor Christopher Robert Browning]: At the moment, I understand that they are doing
17 archeological excavations in Belzec, that I do not believe
18 at the moment they are doing them in Sobibor or
19 Treblinka. They have made memorials there. Chelmo, they
20 have created again in the forest where the graves were a
21 series of memorials that represent where the trenches
22 were. Whether that was based on somebody that knew or
23 whether that was just placed there, I just do not know.
24 Q. [Mr Irving]: So there has been no systematic effort to try to quantify
25 the scale of killing that went on in these camps?
26 A. [Professor Christopher Robert Browning]: Belzec, I believe it is the first time at which they are
. P-79
1 doing, which was the most — the one that does not have a
2 developed memorial is the one which they are doing at the
3 moment archeological excavation.
4 Q. [Mr Irving]: Just finally on your paragraph 3.2, you said there that as
5 far as the shootings go, we have a lot of documentary
6 evidence, but for gassings we have to rely on eyewitness
7 and circumstantial evidence.
8 A. [Professor Christopher Robert Browning]: For the three camps of Operation Reinhardt. We do have
9 some documentary evidence concerning Zemblin(?) and the
10 gas vans working with the Einsatzgruppen and documents, a
11 few documents, relating to Chelmo. The documents relating
12 to Operation Reinhardt, I have argued, presents the case
13 that lots of people went here and were never seen again,
14 but the written documents do not specify why they were
15 never seen again. They do not specify a method of
16 killing.
17 Q. [Mr Irving]: Do the documents specify that they were killed or do we
18 have to conclude that?
19 A. [Professor Christopher Robert Browning]: Well, if 20 miles or 20 kilometres from Treblinka the
20 Kommandant complains that the Jews are not buried well
21 enough and that they have got a pestilential smell 20
22 kilometres away, it would indicate a large number of Jews
23 had been killed.
24 Q. [Mr Irving]: Do you find that credible, plausible eyewitness evidence,
25 that people can smell something 20 kilometres away?
26 A. [Professor Christopher Robert Browning]: If the wind was blowing the right way from Treblinka, I
. P-80
1 would think that was very credible.
2 Q. [Mr Irving]: Do you have no problem with any of the eyewitnesses, with
3 accepting the evidence that they have given, the various
4 eyewitnesses, whether evidence given in court procedures
5 or afterwards, more recently, do you not suspect that they
6 may have been subjected to some kind of duress or bribery
7 or promises of better conditions or promises of an
8 alleviated sentence if they would just sign the document?
9 A. [Professor Christopher Robert Browning]: I think one has to assume there is potential problems with
10 all eyewitnesses, but this is one of the materials we
11 have. It is a kind of source the historians have always
12 used and must be used with care, but I would argue that
13 one does not write it off categorically because it has
14 potential problems.
15 Q. [Mr Irving]: So, as an historian, it is your duty to weigh evidence
16 then?
17 A. [Professor Christopher Robert Browning]: Yes.
18 Q. [Mr Irving]: To look at it and say, “This one I accept and that one
19 seems implausible”?
20 A. [Professor Christopher Robert Browning]: Or accept parts of this because he was in a position to
21 have seen this himself. The second part of it may be
22 hearsay and, therefore, it is no more reliable than what
23 somebody else told him. So you can have parts of
24 testimony that have greater evidentiary weight — I would
25 give them greater evidentiary weight than other parts.
26 Q. [Mr Irving]: You have to rely on your own integrity and your own
. P-81
1 judgment in deciding what to select and what to omit?
2 A. [Professor Christopher Robert Browning]: Historians are always making decisions about selection of
3 documents. We are in a constant process of selection.
4 Q. [Mr Irving]: And, obviously, in a constant process of compression too
5 because you start off with an immense shelf of documents
6 you have to compress into a reasonable length of
7 manuscript?
8 A. [Professor Christopher Robert Browning]: Yes. We always have to make decisions about what is more
9 important than something else.
10 Q. [Mr Irving]: Yes, and you would be indignant if somebody called you
11 perverse or manipulative or if you were accused of
12 distorting because you left out a paragraph that just
13 repeated what the paragraph above had said?
14 A. [Professor Christopher Robert Browning]: It would depend entirely on the context. If I had made a
15 very egregious mistake and was caught out, I guess I would
16 not have a right to be indignant.
17 Q. [Mr Irving]: Have you ever made mistakes?
18 A. [Professor Christopher Robert Browning]: Of course historians make mistakes, yes.
19 Q. [Mr Irving]: Indeed. But nobody has accused you of wilfully distorting
20 or manipulating because you have made a mistake?
21 A. [Professor Christopher Robert Browning]: I have been accused of wilfully distorting.
22 Q. [Mr Irving]: Have you misread words in handwriting sometimes, in German
23 handwriting?
24 A. [Professor Christopher Robert Browning]: I may have. I do not know that anyone has called it to my
25 attention but I certainly have been accused by someone who
26 wished me no good will of manipulating evidence.
. P-82
1 Q. [Mr Irving]: Have you ever read the book by, I think it is, Mr Paget QC
2 who was the Defence counsel of Manstein?
3 A. [Professor Christopher Robert Browning]: No, I have not read that book.
4 Q. [Mr Irving]: Manstein, of course, was put on trial for war crimes?
5 A. [Professor Christopher Robert Browning]: By the British, yes.
6 Q. [Mr Irving]: By the British, yes. I cannot ask you about what it
7 contains. The Jager document, the Jager report now — I
8 am now on page 7, paragraph 4.4, my Lord — is this a
9 document from the Moscow archives, was it a Nuremberg
10 document?
11 A. [Professor Christopher Robert Browning]: I believe it is a Riga document, the Jager report.
12 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Are you on 4.5?
13 MR IRVING: 4.4, my Lord. We are looking at the Jaeger
14 document which is item 1944. You seem to prefer to
15 work —-
16 A. [Professor Christopher Robert Browning]: I am sorry, it is a Moscow document.
17 Q. [Mr Irving]: You seem to prefer to work from printed volumes of
18 documents?
19 A. [Professor Christopher Robert Browning]: That will depend. If I am doing a detailed study of
20 something like the Vehrmacht role in the shootings in
21 Yugoslavia or the Police 101, I work in the original
22 sources.
23 Q. [Mr Irving]: Original records?
24 A. [Professor Christopher Robert Browning]: In terms of a broader project, I will often avail myself
25 of printed documents because one covers much more
26 territory. For instance, the Goebbels diaries I would use
. P-83
1 in their printed form, and at some point the Frank diaries
2 I have used in printed form, but when they referred in
3 there to things they did not include, and it is important
4 to me, then I go to the microfilms and look at the section
5 that they have omitted. Again, an historian makes
6 judgments about how best to spend the time.
7 Q. [Mr Irving]: Hold it there for a minute. You refer to the diaries of
8 Hans Frank. Hans Frank, of course, at a conference in
9 Cracau in December 1941, I think it was —-
10 A. [Professor Christopher Robert Browning]: December 16th.
11 Q. [Mr Irving]: — December 16th, he makes a pretty lurid statement
12 about, “What do the people in Berlin think we are doing?
13 We say liquidate them yourselves”. Do you remember that
14 passage roughly?
15 A. [Professor Christopher Robert Browning]: I certainly remember that passage.
16 Q. [Mr Irving]: Yes. Was there something left out of that passage? There
17 was three dots in the middle of that passage. There is no
18 need to look it up. You say things were left out of the
19 printed texts?
20 A. [Professor Christopher Robert Browning]: No, in the published —-
21 Q. [Mr Irving]: Published version?
22 A. [Professor Christopher Robert Browning]: — published version, they take blocks of things and then
23 they will have in brackets, they will say, “At this
24 meeting to discuss these topics” or something of that
25 sort.
26 Q. [Mr Irving]: Yes. Did they leave things out in a tendentious way, do
. P-84
1 you think?
2 A. [Professor Christopher Robert Browning]: Usually, they leave out topics they think were not of
3 general importance. For instance, when I was looking at
4 the issue of the public health officials in the general
5 government and the editors, apparently, made a decision
6 that was not a topic of general interest, it was a
7 particular interest of mine, so then I went to the
8 microfilms and read a section in the original because it
9 was a topic —-
10 Q. [Mr Irving]: We are at the mercy —-
11 A. [Professor Christopher Robert Browning]: — that was important to me.
12 Q. [Mr Irving]: — of our editors, are we not?
13 A. [Professor Christopher Robert Browning]: No. No editor has told me I could not include something.
14 Q. [Mr Irving]: But, I mean, in a volume like that of printed documents,
15 the editor has to have very comprehensive knowledge to be
16 able to make the right choices of what to leave in and
17 what to take out?
18 A. [Professor Christopher Robert Browning]: A bad editor would certainly render a collection of
19 documents much less worthwhile than a good editor.
20 Q. [Mr Irving]: Yes. Can we now turn to paragraph 4.5? This brings us to
21 the interesting document, my Lord, of August 1st 1941?
22 MR JUSTICE GRAY: I think we ought to look at that document, if
23 I may suggest it?
24 MR RAMPTON: Your Lordship has got —-
25 MR JUSTICE GRAY: I know where it is. I have just been
26 looking. It is the back of L, is it not?
. P-85
1 MR RAMPTON: There is a file.
2 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Has Mr Irving got the clip that you are
3 referring to?
4 MR IRVING: I have footnote 6 here which is the printed version
5 of it.
6 MR RAMPTON: We have taken the original out of Dr Longerich
7 documents and put it in here. It is 19A in this file at
8 page —-
9 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Yes, I have it.
10 MR RAMPTON: — 19A.
11 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Mr Irving, have you got this? It is probably
12 quite useful to use this.
13 MR IRVING: I am looking to see how original it is. I have
14 sent a fax to Germany last night to ask for the original
15 facsimile, but I do not think they are going to co-operate
16 with me.
17 MR JUSTICE GRAY: This is as good as we have got at the
18 moment. It is Abschrift but we have not got anything
19 else, have we?.
20 MR RAMPTON: The printed one is 19, my Lord.
21 MR IRVING: This is a pretty important document. We have all
22 agreed in this courtroom, I think. This is August 1st
23 1941, Muller to the Einsatzgruppen?
24 A. [Professor Christopher Robert Browning]: Yes.
25 Q. [Mr Irving]: A, B, C and D. (To the witness): Can you translate the
26 line “betrifft”?
. P-86
1 A. [Professor Christopher Robert Browning]: Concerning or subject?
2 Q. [Mr Irving]: Yes. Just translate that line, please.
3 A. [Professor Christopher Robert Browning]: “The procuring of visual materials”.
4 Q. [Mr Irving]: “The procuring of visual materials”. I will translate the
5 rest of the paragraph and interrupt me if you
6 disagree. “The Fuhrer is to be provided with or to be,
7 there are to be submitted to the Fuhrer from here on a
8 current basis reports on the work of the Einsatzgruppen in
9 the East. For this purpose, particularly interesting
10 visual materials like photographs, placards, leaflets and
11 other documents are needed. In so far as such material
12 falls into your hands or can be obtained, I ask it to be
13 transferred to here as rapidly as possible.”
14 Would you read that as referring specifically to
15 the killing operations of the Einsatzgruppen?
16 A. [Professor Christopher Robert Browning]: I would say the first sentence refers to the current
17 reports on the work of the Einsatzgruppen, and I think the
18 likeliest, most plausible, interpretation is that is
19 referring to the Einsatzgruppen reports, and then for the
20 purpose, in a sense, of adding something to that, it would
21 be especially interesting to get visual material.
22 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Of people being shot?
23 A. [Professor Christopher Robert Browning]: Nothing — pardon?
24 Q. [Mr Justice Gray]: Of people being shot?
25 A. [Professor Christopher Robert Browning]: No. No, it says —-
26 Q. [Mr Justice Gray]: Then what?
. P-87
1 A. [Professor Christopher Robert Browning]: It says want photos, placards.
2 Q. [Mr Justice Gray]: Of what though?
3 MR IRVING: Other documents?
4 A. [Professor Christopher Robert Browning]: Yes, they want documents, they want leaflets, they want
5 placards. They do not say pictures of what, pictures
6 relating to what the Einsatzgruppen are doing, presumably,
7 or captured Soviet pictures. We do not know.
8 Q. [Mr Irving]: But the reference of this document, the subject matter, is
9 visual materials
10 A. [Professor Christopher Robert Browning]: But “in connection”, that is for the purpose of keeping of
11 the regular reports going to the Fuhrer, they would like
12 — in a sense, it implies already there is an ongoing
13 process of the Fuhrer receiving reports and now they want,
14 to sweeten that, they want visual aids to be added. My
15 feeling is this implies a process already underway to
16 which they now wish to add visual materials as well.
17 MR JUSTICE GRAY: But the first time it says —-
18 A. [Professor Christopher Robert Browning]: It does not say, “You shall begin to send reports to the
19 Fuhrer”. It says, “The Fuhrer is”, you know —-
20 Q. [Mr Irving]: “Von hier”, though, does that not rather suggest it is
21 something that is starting up afresh?
22 A. [Professor Christopher Robert Browning]: Well, from Berlin, it says the “Fuhrer von hier” which
23 means, of course, Berlin.
24 Q. [Mr Irving]: It means “physical place”. I thought it meant “from here
25 on”?
26 A. [Professor Christopher Robert Browning]: No, it is not “from here on”. It is “out from here”,
. P-88
1 meaning Heydrich’s office in Berlin.
2 MR JUSTICE GRAY: No, I am with you, I follow.
3 MR IRVING: My contention is (and correct me if I am wrong)
4 that earlier today we established that the Einsatzgruppen
5 had several tasks of which killing was one, as indicated
6 in their reports?
7 A. [Professor Christopher Robert Browning]: Yes.
8 Q. [Mr Irving]: One paragraph was the killing and the other paragraphs
9 were the other tasks that they were involved in. Other
10 tasks included the collection of intelligence documents
11 and any material like that?
12 A. [Professor Christopher Robert Browning]: Yes.
13 Q. [Mr Irving]: And if this message from Muller to the Einsatzgruppen
14 commanders, A, B, C and D, simply says, “Concerning visual
15 materials, the Fuhrer is interested in the tasks of the
16 Einsatzgruppen, he wants to be kept up-to-date on them.
17 Please supply him with pictures, photographs, captured
18 documents and the rest”, am I not right in suggesting that
19 this is not referring solely to the killing or possibly
20 even to the killing at all?
21 A. [Professor Christopher Robert Browning]: It is referring to the work of the Ensatzgruppen and,
22 therefore, it does not exclude the killing, but it does
23 not imply the killing is the only thing that is being
24 reported.
25 Q. [Mr Irving]: Yes.
26 A. [Professor Christopher Robert Browning]: But, basically, it is inclusive if it says the work of the
. P-89
1 Einsatzgruppen and, therefore, killing would be among the
2 things that would be reported on a regular basis to him.
Section 90.3-102.25
3 Q. [Mr Irving]: Well, we have another clue, Professor. There is a lot of
4 documents in this bundle, and I am not going to ask you to
5 look through them all, but would you like to hazard a
6 guess on the basis of your expert knowledge at the
7 security classification of all the documents connected
8 with the Aktion Reinhardt or with the extermination
9 programmes? Would they be Verteilisch (Confidential) or
10 Geheim (Secret) or Geheim Rasara(?) (Top State Secret)?
11 A. [Professor Christopher Robert Browning]: I think some are Geheim — are GOS, but there are, they
12 vary and I think there are documents that do not have
13 classification as well.
14 Q. [Mr Irving]: Would you look at the classification on this document and
15 tell us what classification it is?
16 A. [Professor Christopher Robert Browning]: “Geheim”.
17 Q. [Mr Irving]: In other words, a very modest security rating?
18 A. [Professor Christopher Robert Browning]: Yes.
19 Q. [Mr Irving]: Not a security rating you would associate with a document
20 concerned with the Final Solution?
21 A. [Professor Christopher Robert Browning]: Well, given that the contents going out, that there is
22 nothing in here that stipulates, as you say, “Give us the
23 reports and the photos of killings”, there is nothing in
24 the document that would require, as far as I can see, even
25 a “secret”.
26 Q. [Mr Irving]: Except that even intelligence matters would normally rate
. P-90
1 a security rating of secret anyway, would they not, like
2 collecting documents and things like that, am I right?
3 A. [Professor Christopher Robert Browning]: If there is a tendency to overclassify, someone could
4 possibly stamp that on even though, as far as I can see,
5 looking at this, there is no reason to classify the
6 document at all.
7 Q. [Mr Irving]: In other words, it is a document of janitorial level.
8 A. [Professor Christopher Robert Browning]: No. It is a document that does not reveal anything that
9 if it were seen by others would pose any problem.
10 MR JUSTICE GRAY: The Germans worked like that, did they, or
11 the Nazis worked like that? If the ultimate topic was
12 going to be secret, they did not introduce the higher
13 security classification from day 1? Do you follow the
14 question I am putting because I suspect maybe here we
15 might operate differently, I do not know.
16 A. [Professor Christopher Robert Browning]: I simply do not know whether individual documents in the
17 same file will —-
18 Q. [Mr Justice Gray]: That is my point.
19 A. [Professor Christopher Robert Browning]: — have different, will have varying ones and, of course,
20 we do not…
21 MR IRVING: Professor, can I ask you to look at the letter
22 register number or the file number just under the word
23 “Eichzigereichts auf Kampt” —-
24 A. [Professor Christopher Robert Browning]: Yes.
25 Q. [Mr Irving]: And after the letter at the end of that line is a letter
26 G?
. P-91
1 A. [Professor Christopher Robert Browning]: Yes.
2 Q. [Mr Irving]: That indicates the file only has a secret rating?
3 A. [Professor Christopher Robert Browning]: It would certainly indicate that this particular number
4 has a secret rating.
5 Q. [Mr Irving]: Just above his signature at the bottom of the document,
6 again —-
7 A. [Professor Christopher Robert Browning]: We have the same file number, yes.
8 Q. [Mr Irving]: We have a similar file number, again with just the letter
9 G. So the whole thing they are talking and writing about
10 is only G Geheim?
11 A. [Professor Christopher Robert Browning]: Yes.
12 Q. [Mr Irving]: Would you be adventurous enough to hang a hypothesis on a
13 document like that, or would you want to couch your
14 hypothesis in the most guarded language and say this might
15 quite possibly refer to the killing operations, on the
16 other hand the document contains no specific reference?
17 Would that be the way you would write it as a cautious
18 historian?
19 A. [Professor Christopher Robert Browning]: I would say that it has a reference to the work of the
20 Einsatzgruppen, and that we should interpret this as
21 referring to all of the activities of the Einsatzgruppen.
22 Because we have seen the reports, we know that includes
23 killing, but someone looking at this letter from the
24 outside would not know that.
25 Q. [Mr Irving]: Yes. Have you any reason to believe that Hitler was shown
26 photographs of the killing operations?
. P-92
1 A. [Professor Christopher Robert Browning]: I do not know.
2 Q. [Mr Irving]: Were there placards connected with the killing operations
3 saying, you are to assemble at such and such a place?
4 A. [Professor Christopher Robert Browning]: There were such placards put up, yes.
5 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Can you give me an idea? It is really the
6 scale of the thing. These Einsatzgruppen at this time,
7 because we are talking about August 41, you may not be
8 able to answer this, what proportion of their duties did
9 shooting people occupy?
10 A. [Professor Christopher Robert Browning]: As of August 1 they would be just going into the
11 transition of killing adult male Jews of particularly
12 potential leadership classes, towards a policy of
13 systematic extermination. So at this point, if I can use
14 that unfortunate phrase, the body count would still be
15 lower than the documents that come from the fall of 1941.
16 The Jager, report for instance, shows August 15 as the
17 astronomical jump from selected killing to massive killing
18 of women and children. We have another letter from
19 Lithuania, it is not part of this file, that says at
20 August 7th they are shooting all Jews. So this is
21 preceding that point by just a few days.
22 MR JUSTICE GRAY: So, in a way, that is equivocal. It could
23 mean from the date of this letter the information is
24 necessarily going to include details of the numbers shot
25 because the extermination programme is being accelerated?
26 A. [Professor Christopher Robert Browning]: That would be an interpretation we placed on it, based on
. P-93
1 our inferences from the point of time, the chronology, a
2 possible interpretation.
3 Q. [Mr Justice Gray]: Yes. The opposite contention would be they have not
4 actually been spending a huge amount of time doing these
5 awful shootings?
6 A. [Professor Christopher Robert Browning]: Most of the shootings are reported in the hundreds at this
7 point as opposed to the thousands and hundreds of
8 thousands.
9 Q. [Mr Justice Gray]: So it is equivocal?
10 MR IRVING: Not only that. I think that Professor Browning is
11 right. I believe the first intercepts were mid August
12 onwards, were they not, when they began reporting 30,000
13 shot?
14 MR JUSTICE GRAY: That is what he said.
15 MR IRVING: I draw Professor Browning’s attention once more to
16 the subject line of that document. The document is only
17 concerning provision of visual materials?
18 A. [Professor Christopher Robert Browning]: Yes, but the reason for the procurement of visual
19 materials is to supplement the fact that the Fuhrer is
20 receiving regular reports. So we learn from a particular
21 document about the procurement of visual materials, an
22 existing policy of Hitler receiving current reports.
23 Q. [Mr Irving]: Can you — I am not an expert on the
24 Reichssicherheitshauptamt and I am not sure how much are
25 you, but can you draw any conclusions from the desk
26 number, shall we say, it is (iv), that was the Gestapo?
. P-94
1 A. [Professor Christopher Robert Browning]: Yes.
2 Q. [Mr Irving]: Then we have A1. Now, Eichmann was A something was he
3 not?
4 A. [Professor Christopher Robert Browning]: It changes over time. At one point I think it is 4B4,
5 that is the most common designation.
6 Q. [Mr Irving]: That is right. Eichmann was 4B4. So what would 4A1 be?
7 Have you any idea?
8 A. [Professor Christopher Robert Browning]: My guess is that it is the secretary, the administrative
9 centre. This would be his own personal office. I do not
10 have an office plan. One could find that out with an
11 office plan.
12 Q. [Mr Irving]: A logical question arises from this document. Have you
13 anywhere in any of the archives in which you have worked
14 seen any documents generated by this request, either
15 incoming to Muller from the Eastern Front or going from
16 Berlin to Hitler in consequence of this?
17 A. [Professor Christopher Robert Browning]: I have not seen any collections of photos that are marked
18 as in reference to our order of August 1, these should be
19 sent to the Fuhrer. I have not seen such a thing.
20 Q. [Mr Irving]: Are there any collections of documents or placards or
21 things relating to shootings on the Eastern Front that
22 were sent to Hitler?
23 A. [Professor Christopher Robert Browning]: I do not —-
24 Q. [Mr Irving]: Either demonstrably or otherwise in connection with this
25 order?
26 A. [Professor Christopher Robert Browning]: I do not know of any evidence of particular photos or
. P-95
1 placards that were sent.
2 Q. [Mr Irving]: How many such reports on the work of the Einsatzgruppen
3 were actually sent to Hitler that we know of?
4 A. [Professor Christopher Robert Browning]: We do not know.
5 Q. [Mr Irving]: Have we seen any at all in the archives?
6 A. [Professor Christopher Robert Browning]: We have seen various ones that are sent to different
7 places but none of them are marked as a copy that was sent
8 to the Fuhrer’s headquarters or whatever, no.
9 Q. [Mr Irving]: Apart from the famous Meldung number 51?
10 A. [Professor Christopher Robert Browning]: Yes.
11 Q. [Mr Irving]: Of December 1942?
12 A. [Professor Christopher Robert Browning]: Yes.
13 Q. [Mr Irving]: Which we will come to in chronological sequence. My Lord,
14 do you have any further questions on that August 1st
15 document? It is quite important.
16 MR JUSTICE GRAY: No. I think you have dealt with it very
17 thoroughly.
18 A. [Professor Christopher Robert Browning]: Can I add something?
19 MR RAMPTON: Yes of course.
20 A. [Professor Christopher Robert Browning]: This is an example of a document that was available in the
21 West fairly early. Gerald Fleming quotes it in his book
22 which was published I guess in 1982. It is found in the
23 Zentralstelle. This is when they got there. They sent
24 the copy to the Institute. The copy he cites here is the
25 copy in the Bundeschei. So there are at least three
26 copies of this in Germany.
. P-96
1 MR IRVING: Professor, would you agree that it is difficult to
2 form an opinion just on a loose sheet of paper like this?
3 You want to see the file it is in, is that correct?
4 A. [Professor Christopher Robert Browning]: We would always prefer to see the whole file. I do not
5 turn my back on an individual document because it is not
6 everything that I would wish.
7 Q. [Mr Irving]: Would you also agree that, when you see a document like
8 that, you should not jump up and down and say, Eureka,
9 this is the philosopher’s stone I have been looking for.
10 A. [Professor Christopher Robert Browning]: I would be cautious not to yell Eureka, yes.
11 Q. [Mr Irving]: So historians in this respect are somewhat different from
12 leading counsel, would you suspect?
13 MR JUSTICE GRAY: No, Mr Irving. Next question.
14 MR IRVING: On the question of the body count figures, because
15 of course I am very concerned about the totals that are
16 contained in these documents, is there any paper trail
17 leading to the figures, or are these figures — which
18 figures are credible because we have seen the supporting
19 paperwork that went into them?
20 A. [Professor Christopher Robert Browning]: We have, for instance, the Jager report that goes in a
21 sense from one Einsatzkommando to Stahlecker and then we
22 have Stahlecker’s reports, so we do have the building
23 block there. We do not have a lot of what we would call
24 the lower level papers from the Einsatzkommandos. We have
25 some of the documents from the Gendarme Marie, such as the
26 Brestotoft document that we have looked at.
. P-97
1 Q. [Mr Irving]: How confident can we be that every time one of these
2 reports refers to so many thousand Jews being killed they
3 are actually Jews who are being killed?
4 A. [Professor Christopher Robert Browning]: We have enough cases in which I think other evidence can
5 corroborate that I am fairly confident. That is not in
6 exact numbers but that there was a policy to carry out
7 large executions, and that these are not numbers that are
8 wildly off, or that they are being faked, in the sense of
9 they are not being real executions being under way.
10 Q. [Mr Irving]: Was there not a tendency among the Nazis just to lump all
11 the people that are killed together as Jews, knowing that
12 this kind of report would be particularly welcomed by the
13 authorities in Berlin?
14 A. [Professor Christopher Robert Browning]: The Jager report shows that he was very careful in fact to
15 identify Jewish men, Jewish women and children, and then
16 other categories. A number of the Einsatzgruppen reports
17 at different times, not in the global figures but for,
18 say, summarizing the past two weeks, we will break down,
19 so many saboteurs, so many communist functionaries, so
20 many mentally ill and so many Jews. The tendency seems to
21 be, at least on some occasions, to indicate that they are
22 being fairly careful about separating and keeping track of
23 their victims by category.
24 Q. [Mr Irving]: I am going to put to you a passage from the British
25 intelligence summary on these decodes which I have given
26 you just a sample page of. These police decodes were
. P-98
1 analysed very thoroughly during the war years on a current
2 by skilled British operatives. I will read you five lines
3 from the British intelligence summary dated September 12th
4 1941, which is also referenced by Richard Brightman in his
5 book on page 96 and 219. That is the book on official
6 secrets. The wartime British summary says:
7 “The execution of ‘Jews’ is so recurrent a
8 feature of these reports, namely the intercepts, that the
9 figures have been omitted from the situation reports and
10 brought under one heading 3D. Whether all those executed
11 as Jews are indeed such is of course doubtful. The
12 figures are no less conclusive as evidence of a policy of
13 savage intimidation, if not of ultimate extermination”.
14 Would you accept that the wartime British operators who
15 were reading these reports on a daily basis concluded
16 therefore that probably a lot of the people described as
17 Jews were not Jews?
18 A. [Professor Christopher Robert Browning]: They concluded that. I think they concluded that quite
19 erroneously. I think that they had a tendency
20 consistently to underestimate the degree to which this was
21 a priority of the Nazi regime, and that that is a theme in
22 a sense that runs through the whole British response. For
23 instance, they have earlier, in terms of Jewish refugees
24 fleeing, they say we must help the political refugees but
25 the Jews are “mere racial refugees”, and therefore the
26 implication not in danger. The British had a fairly
. P-99
1 consistent record of underestimating the degree of hatred
2 and the degree of priority the Nazis regime had towards
3 the Jews.
4 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Do you mean deliberately or because they
5 simply did not know what was going on?
6 A. [Professor Christopher Robert Browning]: They simply could not understand that it was a priority
7 for Hitler, but it was so foreign to their own way of
8 thinking that it made no sense. Why would you spend time
9 killing Jewish women and children when you are trying to
10 fight a war? It was outside their realm, the way they
11 understood the world.
12 MR IRVING: If we go to page 8 in your paragraph 4.1, we are
13 looking at the scale of the killings again, are all the
14 Jews who are being killed, shall we say, native Jews, or
15 do they include German Jews at this time?
16 A. [Professor Christopher Robert Browning]: The cases in which they would include German Jews would be
17 Einsatzgruppen 3, reporting the five transports to Kovno
18 by November 25. That may not be in there yet because that
19 happens on the 25th and 29th. So that one would not
20 include it. Einsatzkommando 2, whether that would include
21 German Jews, I do not know. The others, there would not
22 have been any deportation of German Jews to those areas at
23 that point.
24 Q. [Mr Irving]: Was there a distinction made at that time in the treatment
25 between the German Jews and the non-German Jews? In other
26 words, the new arrivals and the locals?
. P-100
1 A. [Professor Christopher Robert Browning]: Yes, there was. For instance, in Minsk they murdered a
2 group of Russian Jews in order to make room for creation
3 of a ghetto for German Jews, and the transports of German
4 Jews to Minsk, unlike what happened at Kovno, they were
5 not shot upon arrival.
6 Q. [Mr Irving]: Does this not seem to indicate that there was no
7 systematic plan to murder all the Jews that they could get
8 their hands on?
9 A. [Professor Christopher Robert Browning]: I think what it indicates is that they were not yet ready
10 to do that. The references for instance in Himmler’s
11 letter to Greiser is that we want to send them to Lodsch
12 and they will be sent on next spring.
13 Q. [Mr Irving]: Pretty haphazard, would you say, this lack of system in
14 what they were doing?
15 A. [Professor Christopher Robert Browning]: I do not think it is haphazard. I think that they were
16 engaged in the first stage. Different historians have
17 interpreted it differently. My own feeling is that, by
18 the fall of 1941, Himmler, Hitler and Heydrich have a
19 fairly clear idea of where they are going now, which is to
20 kill all Jews, but how that will be done, what exemptions
21 will be given to Jews who are still important to the
22 economy, in what order will various countries be
23 approached, what special care must we deal with German
24 Jews because of the possibly domestic repercussions, these
25 issues are still not decided. They are decided over a
26 period of time.
. P-101
1 Q. [Mr Irving]: You slipped in something under the door there. You said
2 this was Hitler, Himmler and Heydrich. Where does “Hitler
3 and” come from? Is this just your own personal belief?
4 A. [Professor Christopher Robert Browning]: Given that they cannot have the Madagascar plan until it
5 goes to there, they cannot march Jews until it goes to
6 Hitler, they cannot deport Jews until it goes to Hitler,
7 they cannot let Jews out of the Netherlands for money
8 until it goes to Hitler. My inference is that this would
9 go to Hitler too. I do not see how —-
10 Q. [Mr Irving]: There is a difference between the geographical solutions
11 that Hitler was constantly proposing and what was actually
12 happening when the Jews arrived at their terminus, shall
13 we say. Would it be fair to say that?
14 A. [Professor Christopher Robert Browning]: I would say there are two phases. That is, starting in
15 the summer of 1941, you have the move in early August to
16 killing of all Jews, men, women and children, and that the
17 implementation of systematic killing of Jews other than
18 that really begins in the spring of 1942 with several
19 exceptions. You have the Chelmno gassing beginning in
20 December of 41, and you have the shooting of the six
21 transports of German Jews five at Kovno and one at Riga.
22 Q. [Mr Irving]: On November 30th, 1941?
23 A. [Professor Christopher Robert Browning]: The last one is the 30th, the other two are 25th and 29th.
24 Q. [Mr Irving]: In Kovno?
25 A. [Professor Christopher Robert Browning]: In Kovno.
Section 102.26-112.19
26 Q. [Mr Irving]: Since we are with those shootings, on what basis did those
. P-102
1 shootings occur? Was that on orders from Berlin, or from
2 Hitler, or was it just random actions by the local
3 commander?
4 A. [Professor Christopher Robert Browning]: This is an area that we have no documents that illuminate
5 it, and so one then looks at the overall. Jager reports
6 it in his Einsatzgruppen report. He clearly thinks
7 that — my inference from that would be that Jager is
8 reporting something that he thought he was expected to
9 do. We have, as you know, the Himmler intercept of
10 December 4th, saying what happens to the Eastern Jews is
11 on my guidelines, there are repercussions for Jackeln and
12 there are none for under Jager. I would suggest that that
13 would indicate that Jager was following orders.
14 Q. [Mr Irving]: I will try putting this to you like this, and his Lordship
15 may intervene because I do not have the file in front of
16 me. My Lord, this is the bundle of intercepts that we
17 dealt with about ten days ago, November 30th 1941.
18 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Yes. That got into E as well.
19 MR IRVING: Your Lordship has the advantage on me because I do
20 not have the bundle with me. I have searched for it and
21 I am in chaos.
22 MR JUSTICE GRAY: That is really why I have been trying to
23 insist all along that we identify where documents are
24 going. If anybody on the Defendants side can help,
25 I would be grateful. I think it is in E but it may not
26 be. 173, J?
. P-103
1 MR IRVING: We landed on this topic before I intended but,
2 since we are at it, we might as well take it on the fly.
3 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Take your own course.
4 MR IRVING: If I were to show you an intercept of a message
5 from the — can you find an intercepted message in there
6 from Bremen to Riga?
7 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Can you help me? Did you say J 173?
8 MR IRVING: What is called on the top right hand corner?
9 MS ROGERS: Tab 3.
10 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Thank you. What are you looking for,
11 Mr Irving?
12 MR IRVING: There is an intercepted message from Bremen to
13 Riga.
14 A. [Professor Christopher Robert Browning]: This would be November 17th.
15 Q. [Mr Irving]: Does this describe a train load of Jews being sent to
16 Riga?
17 A. [Professor Christopher Robert Browning]: Yes.
18 Q. [Mr Irving]: Has that train load apparently been well provisioned with
19 food?
20 A. [Professor Christopher Robert Browning]: Yes. The guidelines for the deportations in the fall,
21 which would have been true of all the transports, not just
22 the ones to Kovno but to Lodsch and Minsk, where Jews were
23 not immediately killed, they were allowed take a fair
24 amount with them. In fact, the Jewish councils were
25 encouraged to provide them, so that this would not be just
26 this train, this would have been standard procedures.
. P-104
1 Q. [Mr Irving]: Would one be correct in assuming, if one finds one or two
2 messages like that in this kind of random sample that the
3 British code breakers got by their method, so there are
4 probably quite a lot of such messages?
5 A. [Professor Christopher Robert Browning]: I do not know about how many messages there were, but we
6 do know that the trains were basically sent out under the
7 same guidelines and the guidelines permitted at that
8 point, unlike in the spring, taking quite a large amount
9 of material with them.
10 MR JUSTICE GRAY: The Jews provided —-
11 A. [Professor Christopher Robert Browning]: This would have been provided by the Jewish councils to
12 the deportation train.
13 MR IRVING: And have you in front of there also a message in
14 which there is reference in German to the train being
15 provided not only with Verpflegung but also with Gerat.
16 It is a similar message on 17th or the 19th or the 24th
17 perhaps of November 1941.
18 A. [Professor Christopher Robert Browning]: I am afraid I do not find the file.
19 MR JUSTICE GRAY: It is page 5.
20 MR IRVING: Page 5 of that bundle.
21 MR JUSTICE GRAY: I am not sure we have the German in the file.
22 MR IRVING: The German text will be there in facsimile.
23 A. [Professor Christopher Robert Browning]: We have a series in English and I am not sure where the
24 German is.
25 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Gerat is there. It is really a translation
26 question.
. P-105
1 MR IRVING: The question is, if the train is not only taking
2 Verpflegung (food) which is set out, how many tonnes of
3 bread and so on, but they are also taking Gerat with
4 them. What would you understand by that word? What are
5 they taking?
6 A. [Professor Christopher Robert Browning]: Utensils and cooking pots and that sort of thing.
7 Q. [Mr Irving]: Things for a new life?
8 A. [Professor Christopher Robert Browning]: That they would need to use when they got there.
9 Q. [Mr Irving]: To use when they got there. So the people who are at the
10 sending end are unaware of what is likely to happen to
11 this train load of Jews at the other end if they are all
12 going to be killed? They think they are going to a new
13 life, in other words not to their death?
14 MR JUSTICE GRAY: I think you think you got an answer that you
15 did not get. It is important sometimes to make sure that
16 there is no misunderstanding. The translation that was
17 given by Professor Browning was utensils and cooking
18 pots. You then things for a new life, and I am not that
19 that is something that the Professor has agreed with yet,
20 but perhaps he does agree with that.
21 A. [Professor Christopher Robert Browning]: I believe they were allowed to bring tools as well. I am
22 recalling from memory what the Eichmann guidelines to the
23 various police stations creating the transports, that the
24 fall guidelines are remarkably different than the spring
25 ones in terms of how much people were allowed.
26 MR IRVING: Spring 1942?
. P-106
1 A. [Professor Christopher Robert Browning]: Yes. In the fall of 41 which begins with them going to
2 Lodsch and begin with them going to Minsk.
3 Q. [Mr Irving]: I am indebted to you. You are certainly adding to the
4 court’s knowledge and this is helping to flesh out the
5 picture immensely.
6 A. [Professor Christopher Robert Browning]: Were allowed bring a fair amount of luggage.
7 Q. [Mr Irving]: So these early transports of Jews going to the Eastern
8 Front, they were going effectively to a new life, wretched
9 though it would be?
10 A. [Professor Christopher Robert Browning]: They were going to a temporary stay from which, as Himmler
11 put it, they would be moved on further East the next
12 spring.
13 Q. [Mr Irving]: Booted on somewhere else?
14 A. [Professor Christopher Robert Browning]: Well, we do not know. He does not say what “further East”
15 means, but he was telling Greiser, do not worry, they will
16 not be there for more than a few months.
17 Q. [Mr Irving]: So, when the word came back to Hitler’s headquarters that
18 the first train load or several train loads had been shot,
19 why would therefore Himmler have had to send a message to
20 Jackeln, saying you have exceeded the guidelines?
21 A. [Professor Christopher Robert Browning]: Since nothing happens to Jager, my interpretation, because
22 the documentation is incomplete, but my interpretation was
23 that Himmler, after sending Jews to Lodsch and to Minsk,
24 was sending them to Kovno, and he tried an experiment, we
25 will shoot those when they arrive.
26 Q. [Mr Irving]: Who is this?
. P-107
1 A. [Professor Christopher Robert Browning]: We do not know, Jager. They are not shot immediately.
2 Jager reports this. In the Einsatzgruppen reports he says
3 very explicitly, “We shot these five transports”. He is
4 not trying to hide anything. My guess, and again this is
5 just construing the documents, they found out that this
6 caused more of a sensation than killing Russian Jews, and
7 that, when the six transports left, Himmler says, back
8 off, we will not do this any more, tells Jackeln do not,
9 that message does not arrive in time, the six transport is
10 liquidated. Then Jackeln is brought back and there are no
11 more liquidations until the next spring.
12 Q. [Mr Irving]: So we know what happened to Jackeln because the messages
13 are there.
14 A. [Professor Christopher Robert Browning]: Yes.
15 Q. [Mr Irving]: But we do not know what happened to Jager, if anything,
16 because there are no messages to inform us?
17 A. [Professor Christopher Robert Browning]: We have no messages to inform us, but we do know that he
18 reported it quite openly and clearly did not think he was
19 doing something that he should not boast of.
20 Q. [Mr Irving]: It tells us something ugly about the Nazi mentality, is
21 that correct?
22 A. [Professor Christopher Robert Browning]: No. I think it shows that he thought he was carrying out
23 orders and was doing this according to what he had been
24 told to do, and he was reporting that he had carried out
25 policy.
26 Q. [Mr Irving]: He then learned that in fact he had upset people?
. P-108
1 A. [Professor Christopher Robert Browning]: I do not think Jager learned he had upset people because I
2 think he was doing what he had been told to do. Jackeln
3 caught the flak because the message did not reach him in
4 time, that Himmler decided we were not going to start
5 liquidating German Jews yet. Then, when he calls Jackeln
6 back, Jackeln’s memory of the conversation, in the
7 testimony he gave after the war in the Soviet Union, was
8 that he and Himmler discussed it and Himmler said, “I am
9 trying to decide how we will get rid of the German Jews”,
10 and he uses this phrase that occasionally pops up, “shall
11 we send them into the swamps or shall we shoot them”? So
12 he is still uncertain how this can be carried out.
13 Q. [Mr Irving]: This Jackeln conversation you refer to is in Soviet
14 custody?
15 A. [Professor Christopher Robert Browning]: Yes.
16 Q. [Mr Irving]: Would he have been under any kind of duress there, do you
17 think? What happened?
18 A. [Professor Christopher Robert Browning]: He may be under duress for certain things. I do not know
19 why someone would want to coerce a statement to the effect
20 that Himmler had not yet made up his mind as to how he was
21 going to get rid of German Jews.
22 Q. [Mr Irving]: What happened to Jackeln? Did he meet his just desserts?
23 A. [Professor Christopher Robert Browning]: Jackeln was executed.
24 MR JUSTICE GRAY: If you had to say in a single phrase what it
25 was that upset people about the Riga shootings, what was
26 it?
. P-109
1 A. [Professor Christopher Robert Browning]: I think that word spread very quickly. It was a sensation
2 when German Jews were being killed. We know, for
3 instance, that, when Lohse in the Ministry of the Interior
4 hears, he goes to his superior and says, I cannot do this
5 any more, I want another job. We know, for instance, on
6 the day of the 30th, Himmler meets with Dobtell, who has
7 had to travel through the East, and immediately thereafter
8 he sends out to Jackeln, do not liquidate this transport.
9 My feeling is that they were discovering that they had a
10 PR problem, that one had to be more careful. Thereafter,
11 for instance, they decide Theresienstadt will be a ghetto
12 for the elderly Jews and the medal wearing Jews, that they
13 will be more careful about how they deal with German Jews
14 as opposed to non-German Jews.
15 Q. [Mr Justice Gray]: It is the fact that they are German Jews?
16 A. [Professor Christopher Robert Browning]: Yes.
17 MR IRVING: Who is making these decisions then?
18 A. [Professor Christopher Robert Browning]: In this case I think it is Himmler because Himmler, again
19 it is just a guess, is going to see Hitler in two hours
20 and that he wants to be able to say, we have taken care of
21 it, it is settled, we are not going to have problems with
22 this.
23 Q. [Mr Irving]: He expects to take some kind of flak now from Hitler for
24 what happened?
25 A. [Professor Christopher Robert Browning]: I do not think he is going to take flak. I think he is
26 going to assure Hitler that the PR problem is solved, at
. P-110
1 this delicate part of the war there will not be reports
2 spreading around Germany of killing German Jews.
3 Q. [Mr Irving]: You are familiar with the telephone call that went from
4 Himmler to Heydrich on November 30th at 1.30 pm?
5 A. [Professor Christopher Robert Browning]: Yes.
6 Q. [Mr Irving]: To Heydrich, transport of Jews from Berlin, kindly
7 liquidieren?
8 A. [Professor Christopher Robert Browning]: Yes.
9 Q. [Mr Irving]: What is the spin that you would put on that particular
10 message, do you think? How would you interpret that?
11 What happened?
12 A. [Professor Christopher Robert Browning]: My interpretation, and again because we do not have the
13 full documentation, it is an interpretation.
14 Q. [Mr Irving]: Tantalising, is it not?
15 A. [Professor Christopher Robert Browning]: Yes. If one has to send a message, do not liquidate,
16 that, beginning with the Kovno shootings, Himmler in fact
17 had said, we will begin shooting these transports. The
18 Kovno operation backfired. He therefore, before he sees
19 Hitler, takes measures that they will temporarily hold
20 that in abeyance and sends that message out. You do not
21 send it out unless you think you have to countermand
22 something, so Jackeln, having had Jager kill five
23 transports in Kovno, was prepared and ready to do the same
24 thing with the incoming transport to Riga.
25 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Mr Irving, I am going to interrupt you. I
26 think this is a document that one needs to take a bit
. P-111
1 slowly, and I am going to suggest we do it at 2 o’clock.
2 MR IRVING: Can I just enquire whether Jager was a subordinate
3 of Jackeln?
4 A. [Professor Christopher Robert Browning]: Jager is the head of Einsatzkommando 3, which is under
5 Stahlecker of Einsatzgruppen A, but all SS units in the
6 north would have been under Jackeln, who is the man to
7 co-ordinate the operations of the different SS formations
8 Einsatzgruppen Gendarmerie police battalions.
9 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Shall we look at the document—-
10 MR IRVING: My Lord, am I doing this right, do you think? Am
11 I asking the right questions or would you prefer me to be
12 terser?
13 MR JUSTICE GRAY: If I may say so, it is cross-examination
14 being conducted absolutely appropriately, but I would like
15 to look at that document because I think it is an
16 important one.
17 MR IRVING: We will have it out, thank you.
18 MR JUSTICE GRAY: 2 o’clock.
19 (Luncheon adjournment).
Part V: Professor Christopher Robert Browning Cross-Examined by David Irving, continued, Afternoon Session (112.20-176.26)
Section 112.20-137.26
20 (2.00 p.m.)
21 PROFESSOR BROWNING, recalled.
22 Cross-Examined by MR IRVING, continued.
23 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Yes, Mr Irving?
24 MR IRVING: My Lord, the document is in bundle J1.
25 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Yes.
26 MR IRVING: At tab 3, pages 11 and 12.
. P-112
1 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Thank you very much.
2 MR IRVING: This is the page from Himmler’s telephone log
3 November 30th 1941. Do you recognize that page? Have you
4 ever looked at that either that page or the handwritten
5 page?
6 A. [Professor Christopher Robert Browning]: I have seen the handwritten page. This is the first time
7 I have seen the English one.
8 Q. [Mr Irving]: Yes. Right, does it appear to be a page in Himmler’s
9 handwriting?
10 A. [Professor Christopher Robert Browning]: It is consistent with the other writing in the log. I am
11 not sure that I can recognize Himmler’s handwriting.
12 Q. [Mr Irving]: It is very difficult handwriting, is it not? Would you
13 agree? Have you had difficulty reading Himmler’s
14 handwriting yourself?
15 A. [Professor Christopher Robert Browning]: I have difficulty with all German handwriting.
16 Q. [Mr Irving]: If you had made a mistake in reading handwriting like a
17 letter E or an A, would you consider this to be wilful?
18 MR JUSTICE GRAY: I am not really sure that that is a question
19 he can answer.
20 MR IRVING: Very well.
21 MR JUSTICE GRAY: I think that is a matter of argument and
22 comment, but not for this witness.
23 MR IRVING: You see that the first indication is that he is
24 making telephone calls “aus dem Zug”, from the train, is
25 that correct?
26 A. [Professor Christopher Robert Browning]: At the top, yes.
. P-113
1 Q. [Mr Irving]: And that he is going to the Wolfsschanze. Can you tell
2 the court what the Wolfsschanze was?
3 A. [Professor Christopher Robert Browning]: That would be Hitler’s headquarters.
4 Q. [Mr Irving]: The Wolf’s Lair, is that correct?
5 A. [Professor Christopher Robert Browning]: Yes.
6 Q. [Mr Irving]: At 1.30 p.m. he is apparently in the bunker because he is
7 making a telephone call “aus dem Bunker”?
8 A. [Professor Christopher Robert Browning]: Yes.
9 Q. [Mr Irving]: What does “aus dem bunker” mean?
10 A. [Professor Christopher Robert Browning]: “From the bunker”.
11 Q. [Mr Irving]: “From the bunker”, and he telephones on the left at 13.30
12 — who does he telephone?
13 A. [Professor Christopher Robert Browning]: To Heydrich.
14 Q. [Mr Irving]: Heydrich?
15 A. [Professor Christopher Robert Browning]: His deputy in Prague.
16 Q. [Mr Irving]: His deputy in Prague. What function did Heydrich have at
17 that time apart from his function in Prague?
18 A. [Professor Christopher Robert Browning]: He was the head of the Reichs security main office which
19 included the security police and the criminal police in
20 the security service.
21 Q. [Mr Irving]: So that was the executive arm of the SS, was it,
22 I suppose?
23 A. [Professor Christopher Robert Browning]: It was one of the two police arms, the ordinary police
24 under Daleuge, the political and basic secret police, we
25 would call it, under Heydrich.
26 Q. [Mr Irving]: The ordinary police under Daleuge?
. P-114
1 A. [Professor Christopher Robert Browning]: Yes.
2 Q. [Mr Irving]: He telephones Heydrich and the content of the telephone
3 conversation are the four lines on the right column?
4 A. [Professor Christopher Robert Browning]: Yes.
5 Q. [Mr Irving]: And the first one is Verhaftung Dr Jekelius.
6 A. [Professor Christopher Robert Browning]: Yes.
7 Q. [Mr Irving]: So far as we can read it. The second one is
8 “Angebl[icher] Sohn Molotow”, “apparent son of Molotow”,
9 is that correct?
10 A. [Professor Christopher Robert Browning]: Or “alleged son of Molotow”.
11 Q. [Mr Irving]: “Alleged son of Molotow”. Then can you read the next two
12 lines, please?
13 A. [Professor Christopher Robert Browning]: “Judentransport aus Berlin. Keine Liquidierung”.
14 Q. [Mr Irving]: You are reading the handwriting?
15 A. [Professor Christopher Robert Browning]: Yes, I am looking at the handwriting right here.
16 Q. [Mr Irving]: Do we know with a reasonable degree of probability what
17 transport of Jews from Berlin was concerned, where it was
18 going?
19 A. [Professor Christopher Robert Browning]: This was going to Riga. The first transport to Riga.
20 Q. [Mr Irving]: Reference to a train load of Jews?
21 A. [Professor Christopher Robert Browning]: Yes.
22 Q. [Mr Irving]: Stopping you there for a moment, Professor: if you knew
23 nothing of the surrounding countryside of documentation at
24 all, would any other interpretation of that line or those
25 lines be possible without our 20:20 hindsight?
26 A. [Professor Christopher Robert Browning]: It would be an instruction not to, well, as I look at it,
. P-115
1 it would be an instruction not to liquidate that transport
2 from Berlin.
3 Q. [Mr Irving]: Is there any other way which —-
4 A. [Professor Christopher Robert Browning]: Which I would also then say strongly indicates there is a
5 prior policy that this has to —-
6 Q. [Mr Irving]: That liquidation is in the air, so to speak?
7 A. [Professor Christopher Robert Browning]: Well, that, in fact, it had been ordered and now it has to
8 be countermanded is a possible — I would say — that one,
9 I would say, is the likely interpretation.
10 Q. [Mr Irving]: That liquidation of Jews or German Jews or that
11 liquidation of transports of Jews was in the air or that
12 liquidation of Jews at the other end was in the air? We
13 cannot say or can we?
14 A. [Professor Christopher Robert Browning]: Well, if it is “Judentransport aus Berlin Keine
15 Liquidierung”, it would imply that previous transports
16 were being liquidated. In this case we know that five to
17 Kovno were from documents that were also available at the
18 time, the Einsatzgruppen report in which it is reported
19 that those five transports had been liquidated in Kovno.
20 Q. [Mr Irving]: I appreciate it is difficult to answer these questions
21 from memory, but do you recall if there had bee transports
22 from Berlin to the East before this one? Was this the
23 first or?
24 A. [Professor Christopher Robert Browning]: No, there is a group of transports first that goes to
25 Louche(?) and then there is a group of transports that
26 goes to Minsk. Neither of those were liquidated. Then
. P-116
1 the third set of transports goes to Kovno. Those five are
2 liquidated. This is the first train of the fourth batch,
3 the one that is going to Riga.
4 Q. [Mr Irving]: The ones that went to Kovno, what date were they?
5 A. [Professor Christopher Robert Browning]: I believe they were the 25th and 29th.
6 Q. [Mr Irving]: 25th and 29th?
7 A. [Professor Christopher Robert Browning]: That is my memory.
8 Q. [Mr Irving]: Was that the date they departed or the date they arrived?
9 A. [Professor Christopher Robert Browning]: I believe that is when the Einsatzgruppen reports them
10 having been liquidated. Those would be arrival date.
11 Q. [Mr Irving]: Would that fact have been known in Berlin at that time, do
12 you think? First of all, in Berlin, would that fact of
13 the liquidation have been known in Berlin?
14 A. [Professor Christopher Robert Browning]: My guess is it was ordered in Berlin, that it would not
15 have happened without instruction from Berlin, so, yes, it
16 would have been known in Berlin.
17 Q. [Mr Irving]: Notwithstanding that the trains had been properly provided
18 with all the provisions for starting a new life?
19 A. [Professor Christopher Robert Browning]: Yes, because it was standard operating procedure for all
20 the four transports, that if one at a certain point
21 switched what was going to happen at the other end, the
22 process of preparing the transports would not necessarily
23 have been immediately changed. So that you would have had
24 a situation where the people preparing the transports (and
25 this had to be done days, if not weeks, in advance) would
26 have been proceeding by the normal guidelines while the
. P-117
1 order to do something at the other end could have been
2 given almost instantaneously.
3 Q. [Mr Irving]: By the people on the spot?
4 A. [Professor Christopher Robert Browning]: No, by Berlin, not necessarily from on the spot.
5 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Were the Kovno, the Jews shot in Kovno German
6 Jews?
7 A. [Professor Christopher Robert Browning]: Those were German Jews, yes. Five transports of German
8 Jews.
9 MR IRVING: You mentioned it was standard operating procedure.
10 How do we know that? Are there any documentations or is
11 this presumption on your part?
12 A. [Professor Christopher Robert Browning]: It is inference from two facts. One is that it is
13 reported openly in the Einsatzgruppen report, so that it
14 certainly is no indication that it was done against orders
15 or that he had any inclination that reporting this might
16 get him in trouble; and from this the fact that the six
17 transports, keine liquidierung, would indicate that he
18 would not have said this if he had no idea what had
19 happened in Kovno if there was no standing policy at that
20 time to be killing Jews, and that this would indicate that
21 he was reversing a policy, and I would infer that that
22 policy began with Kovno after Louche and Minsk had sent
23 without killing.
24 Q. [Mr Irving]: Would the policy be described in German as “Richtlinien”
25 guidelines?
26 A. [Professor Christopher Robert Browning]: That is possible.
. P-118
1 Q. [Mr Irving]: So when Himmler sends a message to Jeckeln on December 1st
2 (as we know he did now from the intercepts) saying, “Your
3 action in Riga has overstepped the guidelines”, then in
4 what way had that overstepped the guidelines if the
5 guidelines were, as you have just presumed, that they were
6 going to be liquidated when they arrived? Surely,
7 exactly the opposite is the inference to be drawn from
8 Himmler’s messages?
9 A. [Professor Christopher Robert Browning]: No. If, in fact, you were not to be doing — if you were
10 supposed to be taking your guidelines from Berlin and he
11 has sent a message “Keine Liquidierung”, and it was
12 liquidated, he is saying, “In principle, that what happens
13 in the East happens under my guidelines”. If there is not
14 to be local decisions about who is killed or is not
15 killed —-
16 Q. [Mr Irving]: Is not a more reasonable assumption the following, that
17 when Berlin or when Hitler’s headquarters learned that the
18 earlier train loads of Jews to Kovno had been liquidated,
19 an urgent message was sent when the fifth train went on
20 30th November, saying, “Not to be liquidated” because it
21 was realized at headquarters that things were going too
22 far. Is that not an equally reasonable presumption on the
23 balance of probabilities?
24 A. [Professor Christopher Robert Browning]: Not an equally reasonable presumption because otherwise,
25 if that were the case, Jager would not have reported it in
26 the way he did in Einsatzgruppen reports, making it clear
. P-119
1 that he thought he had been following what was expected.
2 Q. [Mr Irving]: But then, of course, the message came “not to be
3 liquidated”, so Jager had obviously got it wrong?
4 A. [Professor Christopher Robert Browning]: No, not Jager. Jeckeln — the policy of killing the Kovno
5 Jews, I think, was approved from Berlin; that they then
6 decided to reverse that with the situation, the sensation
7 of killing German Jews was more delicate than they had
8 anticipated and, therefore, they temporarily backed off,
9 and then we have the Jeckeln/Himmler conversation, “I have
10 not yet decided how we shall kill them”, but this was,
11 I would say it was a trial balloon and it turned out to be
12 too sensitive an issue at that point.
13 Q. [Mr Irving]: A trial balloon floated by the people on the Eastern
14 Front?
15 A. [Professor Christopher Robert Browning]: No, by Himmler.
16 Q. [Mr Irving]: Floated by Himmler?
17 A. [Professor Christopher Robert Browning]: Yes.
18 Q. [Mr Irving]: Just to remind the court of the hierarchy. Jager is, so
19 far as we are concerned, on the bottom rung. Above him
20 comes Stahlecker, as far as the killing operations goes,
21 and although in a different headquarters, Jeckeln is the
22 one who calls the shots?
23 A. [Professor Christopher Robert Browning]: Of course, everything is not quite that neat in Nazi
24 Germany in the sense that Stahlecker could report directly
25 to Heydrich because the Einsatzgruppen had been sent out
26 by him. Jackeln would report directly to Himmler because
. P-120
1 the SS and police leaders had been sent out by him. You
2 get sometimes straight lines and sometimes crossed lines
3 in terms of this, but Jeckeln is of a higher rank than
4 Stahlecker.
5 Q. [Mr Irving]: But, fortunately, for the purposes of this action, we are
6 only really concerned with what happens from Himmler
7 downwards. So although it is a terrible tangle of
8 guidelines and crossed lines below Himmler and below
9 Jeckeln, above Himmler it becomes relatively plain because
10 above Himmler there is just Hitler?
11 A. [Professor Christopher Robert Browning]: Yes.
12 Q. [Mr Irving]: Am I right in presuming that we have nothing to indicate
13 any kind of systematic link between Hitler and Himmler
14 apart from inferences?
15 A. [Professor Christopher Robert Browning]: That is where there is no documentation and one acts from
16 inferences and circumstantial evidence.
17 Q. [Mr Irving]: Thank you very much. Does your Lordship wish to ask any
18 more questions on that?
19 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Yes, just on that last answer. When you say
20 there is no documentation, are you excluding from
21 consideration (and it may be it is not relevant) the notes
22 that Himmler made on the—-
23 MR RAMPTON: December 18th.
24 MR JUSTICE GRAY: — agendas? Yes.
25 MR IRVING: Shall we take December 18th?
26 A. [Professor Christopher Robert Browning]: Yes. No documentation would be too strong. We do not
. P-121
1 have regular documentation, but we have the diary now that
2 shows the December 18th meeting that they discussed this.
3 MR JUSTICE GRAY: That is what puzzled me about your answer.
4 A. [Professor Christopher Robert Browning]: I am sorry. I would stand corrected on that. You are
5 perfectly right.
6 MR IRVING: Professor, believe me, I do not want to stampede
7 you into giving an ill-considered answer because it does
8 not help the court one bit. So let us now move on to the
9 middle of December, shall we say? You are familiar with
10 the entry in the Goebbels diary of, I believe, December
11 13th relating to a speech that Hitler had made to the
12 Gauleiters?
13 A. [Professor Christopher Robert Browning]: Yes.
14 Q. [Mr Irving]: Was this speech by Hitler to the Gauleiters which was, in
15 fact, made the previous day, December 12th 1941, in any
16 way different from the old familiar Adolf Hitler
17 gramophone record (as I always call it) in which he harked
18 back to his prewar speech?
19 A. [Professor Christopher Robert Browning]: It does seem to be more than just I had predicted this in
20 the sense that —-
21 Q. [Mr Irving]: And now it is happening?
22 A. [Professor Christopher Robert Browning]: Now it is happening now. There is a greater
23 presentationist element in it, I think — I would have
24 look at the text to point out.
25 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Can we find it? I have lost it because
26 everything is in such a scattered —-
. P-122
1 MR IRVING: It would be in Professor Evans’ report, I think, my
2 Lord.
3 MR RAMPTON: My Lord, it is in the file, this new file, at 60
4 to 67.
5 MR JUSTICE GRAY: When you say “this new file”?
6 MR RAMPTON: Well, the Browning file.
7 MR IRVING: Page 67?
8 A. [Professor Christopher Robert Browning]: The Browning file is L1?
9 MR RAMPTON: Yes, amongst other things.
10 A. [Professor Christopher Robert Browning]: And which is the page?
11 MR RAMPTON: 60 onwards, 60 to 67.
12 A. [Professor Christopher Robert Browning]: Yes.
13 MR IRVING: Page 64 that we are interested in.
14 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Thank you very much.
15 MR IRVING: In the afternoon the Fuhrer speaks to the
16 Gauleiters.
17 A. [Professor Christopher Robert Browning]: Yes, I have it now.
18 Q. [Mr Irving]: That is where the reference to Hitler’s speech begins,
19 I believe?
20 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Do we have this in English or not?
21 MR RAMPTON: It is —-
22 MR IRVING: Then on page 66 is the passage that the Defence
23 relies on, I believe.
24 MR RAMPTON: Yes, but it is in English, my Lord, I think a
25 large part of it is in Evans’ report, but as I do not have
26 that here, I cannot tell your Lordship exactly where to
. P-123
1 find it.
2 MR IRVING: Do you have that passage Professor? Page 66 or 498
3 of the printed text? It is the final paragraph: “With
4 reference to the Jewish problem, the Fuhrer has decided to
5 make tabula rasa” or a clean table. “He prophesized to
6 the Jews that if they would bring about World War once
7 more, then they would experience their own destruction and
8 this was not just an empty phrase”. That is probably all
9 we need to read of that.
10 A. [Professor Christopher Robert Browning]: Yes. If one compares it, say, to Goebbels in August and
11 they talk about the Fuhrer had prophesized, “The Russian
12 Jews are paying now, the others, they will pay later”
13 there is still a prophecy element. Here it is no longer
14 what will happen in the future, but it is cast as if, when
15 they said, “The Fuhrer has decided”, it is cast as if
16 things have already been decided, not as if there is a
17 process of decision going on.
18 So, in that sense, it is not the same gramophone
19 record because the August still has a future looking
20 element. This one, everything is orientated towards or at
21 least has the tone that all decisions have been made.
22 MR JUSTICE GRAY: I am so sorry. The documents in the shape
23 they are in, I do not know, there are pages of German and
24 there is no indication that I can see of what this is.
25 MR IRVING: My Lord, it is page 498 —-
26 MR JUSTICE GRAY: No, I have the page, but is this from?
. P-124
1 MR IRVING: It is the final paragraph on that page.
2 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Yes, I know, but what is the whole of the
3 page and, indeed, what are the whole of the preceding six
4 pages?
5 MR IRVING: It is the Goebbels diary of December 13th 1941.
6 MR JUSTICE GRAY: It is Goebbels diary. I see.
7 A. [Professor Christopher Robert Browning]: Yes, and the question was, did I find this a repetition of
8 the same kind of speech Hitler had made before referring
9 to his prophecy, and I was recalling a document we do not
10 have before us which was a Goebbels entry from August in
11 which I pointed out there was still “and someone will pay
12 in the future”, well, here it is, it has been decided. So
13 I was disagreeing with Mr Irving that it was the same old
14 gramophone record.
15 MR IRVING: Our problem is that the August Goebbels entry is
16 not before the court and has not been submitted to the
17 court either in the bundles or in the experts’ reports, so
18 we cannot really rely upon that.
19 MR RAMPTON: If your Lordship would like a translation, it is
20 to be found on page 337 at paragraph 8 of the Evans’
21 report.
22 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Thank you very much.
23 MR IRVING: I am not going to ask you about the Hans Frank
24 speech —-
25 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Do you mind pausing a second just whilst
26 I catch up?
. P-125
1 MR RAMPTON: The German is set out in note 46 at the bottom of
2 the page.
3 MR JUSTICE GRAY: I have the German all right, yes. You
4 interpret that, Professor, as being a reference to a
5 decision which has been taken and it is a decision
6 systematically to exterminate?
7 A. [Professor Christopher Robert Browning]: The question that Mr Irving had asked was, did I find this
8 a repetition of the frequent references to his prophecy
9 and “Was it the same old gramophone record?” was his
10 phrase. I said, no, I did not think so because between a
11 previous Goebbels entry describing a Hitler reference to
12 the prophecy and this one, I have said there is a change
13 of tone and a change of vocabulary. So I disagreed.
14 I said this does not, this is not the same kind of
15 reference to something in the future. And so I happen to
16 think that it is the point at which Hitler makes clear
17 that even though the war will now go on longer, that,
18 nonetheless, they will proceed with the extermination. Up
19 until that point they used two phrases “after the war” and
20 “next spring”. After Pearl Harbour, one has to clarify
21 which of those two it will be and, in my opinion, this is
22 the point at which Hitler says it will be next spring even
23 though it will no longer be after the war.
24 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Thank you very much.
25 MR IRVING: Professor, I will now have to bore you by asking
26 you to look at the actual German used. Is this German
. P-126
1 passage in the subjunctive in German, indicating reported
2 speech or could it be Goebbels himself writing his own
3 words here, so to speak?
4 A. [Professor Christopher Robert Browning]: It is not in subjunctive, but I do not know that that
5 would exclude that he is writing an easier —-
6 Q. [Mr Irving]: Let me put it this way around: if in the second line he
7 had written “Er hat den Juden prophezeit” but “er habe den
8 Juden prophezeit”, then it would be beyond doubt, would it
9 not, that he was quoting Hitler?
10 A. [Professor Christopher Robert Browning]: That would indicate that he was paraphrasing very closely,
11 but this would not exclude the possibility, and indeed
12 I think that is what it is, is a, you know, writing down
13 what Hitler had said.
14 Q. [Mr Irving]: Are you familiar with reading the Goebbels diaries in
15 English or in German as a source? Not scientifically
16 familiar, but have you used them quite a lot.
17 A. [Professor Christopher Robert Browning]: I have used them, but I have not read through all of
18 them. I do not know the entire corpus but I have used
19 them.
20 Q. [Mr Irving]: Would you agree that it is sometimes difficult to
21 distinguish when Goebbels is referring to what somebody
22 has told him and when his only little benevolent mind
23 takes over?
24 A. [Professor Christopher Robert Browning]: I do not think I could answer that.
25 MR RAMPTON: My Lord, may I interrupt? This might be a
26 convenient moment. Mr Irving said just now that the
. P-127
1 earlier entry of 19th August 1941 is not in the
2 documents. It is twice in the Evans’ report. It is at
3 page 410 at paragraph 7.
4 MR JUSTICE GRAY: But not in this J1?
5 MR RAMPTON: No.
6 MR IRVING: I am indebted to you.
7 MR RAMPTON: Perhaps I should read it out.
8 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Hang on. If we are going to have to find
9 it —-
10 MR RAMPTON: Yes, page 410 of Evans, my Lord. The witness’s
11 memory is, fortunately, very accurate, but it is perhaps
12 worth just looking at. This is Evans’ translation on 19th
13 August 1941: “We speak about the Jewish problem. The
14 Fuhrer is convinced that his former prophecy in the
15 Reichstag, that, if Jewry succeeded once more in provoking
16 a world war, it would end with the annihilation of the
17 Jews, is being confirmed. It is being rendered true in
18 these weeks and months with a certainty that seems almost
19 uncanny. In the East the Jews have to pay the price; in
20 Germany they have paid it already in part and in future
21 they will have to pay yet more. Their last refuge remains
22 North America; and there they will also to pay some time,
23 sooner or later”.
24 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Yes.
25 MR RAMPTON: I am sorry that Professor Browning has not got
26 that in front of him.
. P-128
1 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Thank you very much.
2 MR IRVING: The passage is, in fact, also in the Goebbels
3 biography. Unless your Lordship feels it necessary,
4 I would prefer not to deal with the Hans Frank meeting at
5 this point.
6 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Take your own course.
7 MR IRVING: Yes. We dealt with it pretty exhaustively I think
8 already in my cross-examination, and I am not sure that
9 unless the witness has specific points he wishes to make
10 about it, the Cabinet meeting in Cracau, you will
11 remember, on December 16th where Hans Frank referred to,
12 “What does Berlin imagine? Do they imagine we are
13 housing the Jews in housing estates on the Eastern
14 provinces?”
15 A. [Professor Christopher Robert Browning]: I would only add on that, that earlier in the entry before
16 he gets to that speech, he refers to his visit with
17 Hitler.
18 Q. [Mr Irving]: Yes.
19 A. [Professor Christopher Robert Browning]: And whether that refers to the Gauleiter meeting or the
20 possibility that he had a separate private talk with
21 Hitler, we do not know, but “besuch bei”, you know, “von
22 Fuhrer” would indicate a strong possibility that he met
23 with Hitler privately, as he usually did when he came back
24 to Berlin, in which case then he went off and gave this
25 speech, it was not just listening to the Gauleiter but
26 after a conference, possibly after a conference, with
. P-129
1 Hitler as well.
2 Q. [Mr Irving]: Yes. But, as you are familiar, you say with the Hans
3 Frank diary, both in the printed version and on the
4 microfilm, will you agree that there is no diary entry
5 relating to a separate meeting with Hitler in December
6 1941?
7 A. [Professor Christopher Robert Browning]: No. He reports on the 16th that he had a visit with the
8 Fuhrer.
9 Q. [Mr Irving]: So his subsequent remarks may or may not have been an
10 allusion to what he learned from Hitler’s private
11 meeting? Is this the point you are trying to make?
12 A. [Professor Christopher Robert Browning]: I am saying there is the possibility that, in addition to
13 witnessing the talk that Goebbels records in his diary,
14 that he also had a private meeting with Hitler.
15 Q. [Mr Irving]: Yes.
16 A. [Professor Christopher Robert Browning]: But we cannot prove that definitively.
17 Q. [Mr Irving]: Yes. Will you turn to page 77 of this little bundle,
18 please?
19 A. [Professor Christopher Robert Browning]: This is?
20 MR JUSTICE GRAY: I think we are back on J1.
21 MR IRVING: Back on J1.
22 MR JUSTICE GRAY: It is another untranslated German document.
23 MR IRVING: Well, my Lord —-
24 A. [Professor Christopher Robert Browning]: I have three here. I am not sure which one we are dealing
25 with.
26 MR IRVING: In my little bundle, which is the one with the
. P-130
1 intercepts in, your Lordship will probably find it
2 translated.
3 A. [Professor Christopher Robert Browning]: J1?
4 MR JUSTICE GRAY: L1. It could scarcely be more
5 unsatisfactory.
6 A. [Professor Christopher Robert Browning]: Yes, I have 77.
7 MR IRVING: Do you have the text?
8 MR JUSTICE GRAY: I am afraid I have not yet. Sorry.
9 A. [Professor Christopher Robert Browning]: I have the German. I do not have the…
10 MR IRVING: The English translation.
11 A. [Professor Christopher Robert Browning]: Yes, but that is all right.
12 Q. [Mr Irving]: But you have the transcript?
13 MR JUSTICE GRAY: I am sorry, where have we put your documents,
14 Mr Irving? Do you know? Was it E?
15 MR IRVING: E.
16 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Does anybody on the Defence side know?
17 Frankly, this is so inconvenient and time consuming.
18 MR RAMPTON: Yes, I quite agree. I do not know what is even
19 being referred to actually.
20 MR IRVING: The little clip of documents on decodes. I think
21 it was called “Himmler”.
22 MR RAMPTON: I do not have a J file, as you know perfectly
23 well. J1, tab 3, page 23, my Lord. There is no English.
24 It is some Himmler writing, my Lord. It is the entry of
25 the 18th December 1941 where Himmler writes under
26 “Fuhrer”: “Als partisanen auszurotten.”
. P-131
1 MR IRVING: Have you found it in German?
2 A. [Professor Christopher Robert Browning]: Yes.
3 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Sorry.
4 MR IRVING: Can you read the words either in the —-
5 MR RAMPTON: Mr Irving, I think you had better wait until the
6 Judge finds it.
7 MR JUSTICE GRAY: I fear what may have happened is that, unless
8 I have put it back in the wrong place, my J1 is — J1, tab
9 3, page, sorry, Mr Irving?
10 MR RAMPTON: My Lord, page 23.
11 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Yes.
12 MR IRVING: Can you read the first word?
13 A. [Professor Christopher Robert Browning]: It would be “Fuhrer Hauptquartier Wolfsschanze”, 18th day
14 of the 12th month of ’41 at 4 o’clock in the afternoon,
15 “Fuhrer, Judenfrage”.
16 Q. [Mr Irving]: Then on the left is “Judenfrage”.
17 A. [Professor Christopher Robert Browning]: “Als partisanen auszurotten”.
18 Q. [Mr Irving]: How would you translate those two things, first of all,
19 the “Judenfrage”?
20 A. [Professor Christopher Robert Browning]: “Judenfrage” I would translate as meaning a discussion on
21 the Jewish question. It would be one word as the topic of
22 the discussion and “als partisanen” and “auszurotten”
23 would be a note that he had made to remind him of what the
24 substance or conclusions of that talk had been.
25 Q. [Mr Irving]: Yes. The handwriting is different, is it not? I think we
26 are agreed on both sides that this is the conclusion, that
. P-132
1 they have come to the conclusion “als partisanen” and
2 “auszurotten”.
3 A. [Professor Christopher Robert Browning]: Yes.
4 Q. [Mr Irving]: How would you translate that?
5 A. [Professor Christopher Robert Browning]: “To be destroyed as partisans”, depending how we translate
6 “auszurotten” which has multiple meanings, but I would
7 say to exterminate or to destroy as partisans.
8 Q. [Mr Irving]: “As partisans” or “like partisans”? I hear groans from
9 the public gallery, but, in fact, this is an important
10 point.
11 A. [Professor Christopher Robert Browning]: Yes. No, it is a good point and I think, in fact, I have
12 translated it as partisans. In German it could be —-
13 Q. [Mr Irving]: In other words, it is an equity between “Juden” and
14 “partisanen” and not a comparison which would be “vie”,
15 not “als”. If it had said “vie partisanen auszurotten”,
16 that would be a different meaning, would it not?
17 A. [Professor Christopher Robert Browning]: “Vie” would be in the same way.
18 Q. [Mr Irving]: In the same way as?
19 A. [Professor Christopher Robert Browning]: Yes.
20 Q. [Mr Irving]: But it does not say that, does it?
21 A. [Professor Christopher Robert Browning]: It does not use vie.
22 Q. [Mr Irving]: It says “als partisanen”, so the Jews who are being
23 referred to here are to be liquidated as the partisans
24 they are?
25 A. [Professor Christopher Robert Browning]: No, I do not believe that is necessarily—-
26 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Mr Irving, I am extremely sorry to
. P-133
1 interrupt. I am still trying to find this. I have J1,
2 tab 3. There are two pages 23, neither of which appears
3 to be the document you are asking about.
4 MR RAMPTON: That is because the one on the bottom of the page,
5 which is Mr Irving’s page number, has become obliterated.
6 Try a little printed 293, can I suggest?
7 MR RAMPTON: It is the one after 22, which is legible.
8 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Which nobody has bothered to transcribe, is
9 that the problem?
10 MR RAMPTON: I do not know why.
11 MR IRVING: Transcribe or translate?
12 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Transcribe, or indeed translate.
13 MR IRVING: In my little clip it is transcribed, my Lord.
14 MR JUSTICE GRAY: I wonder why I do not have that advantage?
15 MR IRVING: That would be in the same one as my SS police
16 decodes, I think, my Lord.
17 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Is this translated anywhere or indeed
18 transcribed anywhere?
19 MR RAMPTON: Yes. I will find it in the bundle. Page 11 of
20 Professor Browning’s report, my Lord. It is also in
21 Longerich.
22 MR IRVING: Shall I wind back my argument a little bit?
23 MR JUSTICE GRAY: I am afraid you will have to. I am sorry you
24 are having to do it. It is increasingly frustrating,
25 having to deal with the documents.
26 MR IRVING: The only reason for doing this is because
. P-134
1 I apprehend that both the defence and also opposing
2 historians pin a lot of faith on this document.
3 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Yes. It is a very important document, which
4 is why one would like to have it in an easier form.
5 MR IRVING: We have only four words to go by, Judenfrager, als
6 Partisanen and auszurotten. I am not going to argue about
7 the meaning of the word auszurotten there. It is quite
8 plain. But I am going to argue about the significance of
9 the word als. Quite clearly the intention here is that
10 these Jews are to be liquidated as partisans and not like
11 partisans. If it was to be like partisans, the word would
12 be vie Partisanen auszurotten?
13 A. [Professor Christopher Robert Browning]: And as partisan is how I have interpreted it, that this is
14 a convention, or the way in which the killing will be
15 organised or justified or disguised.
16 Q. [Mr Irving]: Professor, this is a later stage of the argument. First of
17 all, I want to establish this stepping stone in my
18 argument. To make the point, to hammer home what I mean
19 by this rather subtle difference, I eat n orange like a
20 tangerine, you use the word vie. We now have Hitler as
21 Fuhrer, as is als. One is the equation. The other one is
22 a comparison?
23 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Yes, I have the point. It is a perfectly
24 comprehensible point. What is the answer?
25 MR IRVING: Yes. Your answer again, Professor?
26 A. [Professor Christopher Robert Browning]: As I said, it was agreed, the annihilation or
. P-135
1 extermination of the Jews would take place, they would be
2 annihilated as if they were partisans, as partisans, that
3 will be the conventional way in which they speak about it
4 or the guise under which it will be done.
5 Q. [Mr Irving]: But then the correct German would be vie and not als?
6 A. [Professor Christopher Robert Browning]: No. If you were going to kill them, the operation, we all
7 use the same operational methods against them, but they
8 did not because they killed women and children, partisans
9 they did not, so it is not we will do it in the same way,
10 but we will kill the one as if they were the other, as the
11 cover under which to kill the other.
12 MR JUSTICE GRAY: The point that is being put is that als does
13 not mean as if. There is another German expression for
14 that. Not just vie, there is another one as well, I
15 think.
16 A. [Professor Christopher Robert Browning]: I think vie would be, we will kill them in the same way as
17 we kill partisans. It applies to an identical method.
18 The als I would interpret as the justification for it or
19 the cause for it.
20 MR IRVING: Perhaps I could put in two different ways? This is
21 like when you have a dictionary which gives two or three
22 different meanings of the word in different orders of
23 likelihood, and the one that I give is the primary
24 meaning, but there is a possible secondary meaning which
25 is the one you are offering?
26 A. [Professor Christopher Robert Browning]: I do not know in which order they came in the dictionary
. P-136
1 so I cannot say which is first or second.
2 Q. [Mr Irving]: I know which order they come in the German language, and
3 this is that als means as direct equivalence, whereas vie
4 means like, which is not direct equivalence.
5 A. [Professor Christopher Robert Browning]: I have translated as. We will both agree we are using the
6 primary—-
7 Q. [Mr Irving]: You were using the correct translation and I am drawing
8 attention to the significance of that. They are to be
9 liquidated as the partisans that they are, and that is the
10 meaning?
11 A. [Professor Christopher Robert Browning]: That is adding a whole series of phrases that is the birth
12 of your imagination. There is nothing in here.
13 Q. [Mr Irving]: The burden of the word as or als, whether we like it or
14 not, and if we are going to make this a key document of
15 our argument, it is dangerous to try and suggest that,
16 well, the secondary meaning is probably the one I am
17 looking for because that is the one that fits in with my
18 theory.
19 A. [Professor Christopher Robert Browning]: I have used the primary word. It is you who are inventing
20 a whole series of words that do not exist on the page, and
21 that is the sheerest fantasy in which I do not share.
22 Q. [Mr Irving]: I do not want to labour the point, but als is definitely
23 an equivalence rather than a comparison, is it not?
24 A. [Professor Christopher Robert Browning]: I have translated it that way, but I did not add a whole
25 further series of words which you have chosen to add which
26 have no documentary basis.
. P-137
Section 138.1-160.21
1 Q. [Mr Irving]: Can we go now to page 11 of your report, which is the same
2 page that this document comes from, and look at paragraph
3 4.1.7?
4 A. [Professor Christopher Robert Browning]: Yes.
5 Q. [Mr Irving]: Page 11 of your report. Paragraph 4.1.7?
6 A. [Professor Christopher Robert Browning]: Correct. I have got it.
7 Q. [Mr Irving]: This brings us to the famous Meldung No. 51, the report
8 number 51 by Himmler to Hitler.
9 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Can we try to see if we can locate it unless
10 you think it is not necessary?
11 MR IRVING: I do not think it is necessary, my Lord, I am just
12 going to deal with the meaning of the word vorgelegt. As
13 you correctly point out in this paragraph, this report
14 was, as you say, submitted on 31st December 1942, and the
15 word submitted in the German document was vorgelegt. Is
16 that right?
17 A. [Professor Christopher Robert Browning]: That is how I translated it, yes.
18 Q. [Mr Irving]: That is correct, and the initial that went with it was
19 Hitler’s adjutant Pfeifer. Am I correct?
20 A. [Professor Christopher Robert Browning]: When it comes to Hitler’s Adjutants’ initials I would
21 defer to your recognition of that. I am not an expert in
22 the initials of his Adjutants.
23 Q. [Mr Irving]: I am not sure that Mr Rampton would be happy to have you
24 deferring to me in any matter of expertise?
25 MR JUSTICE GRAY: I would be happier to have the document in
26 front of me. Does anybody have any idea where it is?
. P-138
1 MR RAMPTON: It is here. I am just trying to find it. It is
2 L1, tab 7, page 140. In fact, I would recommend even
3 going back as far as page 138, where we see it in a prior
4 incarnation before it got reformed into the Hitler legible
5 large type on page 140.
6 MR IRVING: I am quite happy to do that. This is one of the
7 few examples, is it not, Professor, where we have a bit of
8 a paper trail, do we not?
9 A. [Professor Christopher Robert Browning]: Yes.
10 MR RAMPTON: I hope the Professor can find it.
11 MR IRVING: In the thick bundle. Have you found it?
12 A. [Professor Christopher Robert Browning]: Yes I have both.
13 Q. [Mr Irving]: Both the preceding document, as Mr Rampton has rightly
14 pointed out, containing the same figures, and the large
15 large typeface version on page 140. I am just
16 referring to this top line where it says Vorgelegt and
17 then the date and then the initial PH for Pfeiffer.
18 A. [Professor Christopher Robert Browning]: Yes.
19 Q. [Mr Irving]: I am not going to make anything about the initial. If you
20 had seen a preceding document, report No. 50, which is not
21 in this file, and if it had got the word Vorgelegt on it
22 twice, with two successive dates on it, Vorgelegt on 29th
23 December and Vorgelegt on 30th December, what would that
24 tell you?
25 A. [Professor Christopher Robert Browning]: That he had brought it back a second time.
26 Q. [Mr Irving]: Why had he had to bring it back twice?
. P-139
1 A. [Professor Christopher Robert Browning]: I have no idea.
2 Q. [Mr Irving]: What is the logical reason why he would have had to bring
3 it first one day and then put it on Hitler’s breakfast
4 tray again the following day?
5 A. [Professor Christopher Robert Browning]: It could be either that he had not read it or that he
6 wanted to see it again.
7 Q. [Mr Irving]: So the fact that word Vorgelegt is on a document does not
8 necessarily mean that it had been read?
9 A. [Professor Christopher Robert Browning]: It does not prove that it had been read, because there is
10 no Hitler initial that says “read by”, which you sometimes
11 see.
12 Q. [Mr Irving]: Have you seen any documents anywhere in the archives where
13 we can tell that Hitler has read a document? Would it
14 have a different notation on it?
15 A. [Professor Christopher Robert Browning]: I do not know.
16 Q. [Mr Irving]: Are you familiar with the notation Fuhrer hauptkentness,
17 or something like that? F hauptkentness?
18 A. [Professor Christopher Robert Browning]: Yes.
19 Q. [Mr Irving]: And there is no such reference on this particular
20 document?
21 A. [Professor Christopher Robert Browning]: No. That does not have such a reference.
22 Q. [Mr Irving]: would I be, on the balance of probabilities, right in
23 saying, although it is likely that the document was
24 submitted to Hitler, it is not proven that it was read by
25 Hitler, this particular document we are looking at?
26 A. [Professor Christopher Robert Browning]: One can say that we have very strong evidence that it was
. P-140
1 submitted, but we do not know for certain that he read it.
2 Q. [Mr Irving]: Do you know what else was happening at Hitler’s
3 headquarters around that time, what was happening to his
4 war?
5 A. [Professor Christopher Robert Browning]: Well, of course, he was worrying about Stalingrad.
6 Q. [Mr Irving]: He was worrying about Stalingrad, yes, thank you very
7 much. Moving on to page 12, paragraph 4.2.1, this is the
8 document from the Moscow archives, is it not, instructing
9 the local SS units to assist the local anti-Semites in
10 starting their own pogroms and keeping out of it
11 themselves?
12 A. [Professor Christopher Robert Browning]: To instigate the pogroms without leaving their own
13 footprints.
14 Q. [Mr Irving]: It is a remarkable document, is it not? Has this just
15 recently come into our possession, or has it been around
16 for many decades?
17 A. [Professor Christopher Robert Browning]: The earliest to which I saw reference was when Helmut
18 Krausnik refers to it in his big work on the
19 Einsatzgruppen which was published, I believe, in 1979 and
20 then it was subject to considerable debate between himself
21 and Alfred Streim at the conference in 1982. So it has
22 been a document that has been referred to among historians
23 for now 20 years.
24 Q. [Mr Irving]: Can you in three lines sketch for the court the nature of
25 the debate?
26 A. [Professor Christopher Robert Browning]: The nature of the debate was whether there had been an
. P-141
1 order to the Einsatzgruppen prior to the invasion of the
2 Soviet Union to kill all Jews, or whether that order came
3 later, and the question was, was gedrangtform or
4 compressed form a quick way of referring to a
5 comprehensive order which was what Helmut Krausnik argued,
6 or do we take the order more literally and, when Heydrich
7 says they will kill all Jews in state and party positions,
8 to see that as a beginning of the campaign to kill Jewish
9 leadership but not yet a comprehensive order to kill all
10 Jews, women and children included. That was the nature of
11 the debate.
12 Q. [Mr Irving]: If you were to give an overview of the killing programme
13 during 1941 on the Eastern Front, would be it correct to
14 say that initially the victims were Jewish males of an
15 able-bodied military age?
16 A. [Professor Christopher Robert Browning]: The first victims were Jews that were considered in
17 leadership positions, or Jewish males in general.
18 Sometimes they would be anyone from 16 and 55, sometimes
19 it would be they want the lawyers and the doctors, not the
20 doctors, they would usually be spared, bring us the
21 leadership of the town. So that it was a selective
22 killing and not a total killing, I argued, until August
23 41.
24 Q. [Mr Irving]: Were there military reasons for carrying out these
25 operations or purely ideological at that stage?
26 A. [Professor Christopher Robert Browning]: My feeling was that this was more ideological than
. P-142
1 military, that these people do not present a military
2 threat to the Germans of any significant kind, and that
3 this was part of Heydrich’s preventative war to take away
4 the leadership of the Jewish community, and that this was
5 a police purge, we might say, and not a strictly military
6 operation.
7 Q. [Mr Irving]: Are you saying that they presented no threat to the
8 Germans of any military kind?
9 A. [Professor Christopher Robert Browning]: No significant threat. I do not think the 50 year old
10 Rabbi represents a military threat to the Germans and he
11 would be the kind of person.
12 Q. [Mr Irving]: I am older than 50 and I would certainly be capable of
13 pointing a gun at someone.
14 A. [Professor Christopher Robert Browning]: If you had a gun, and they did not have guns. Capable of
15 it, but the fact is that there is very little record that
16 Jewish resistance was a cause of the German action, that
17 it should be out here very, very early. The orders given
18 — put it this way. The July 2nd document refers to the
19 verbal conversation Heydrich had with his Einsatzgruppen
20 leaders before the invasion, and then on July 2nd he sends
21 in compressed form a summary of that to the higher SS and
22 police leaders. So that the orders to kill Jews and state
23 and party positions precedes the invasion and is not the
24 result of any actions by Jewish communities that could be
25 construed as resistance justifying military repression.
26 It is a pre-emptive measure decided on prior to invasion.
. P-143
1 Q. [Mr Irving]: Is it not right to say that the event reports the
2 Erreichnichtsmelderung August 1941 onwards primarily
3 referred to the emergence of partisan activity which is
4 being led or supported by the Jews?
5 A. [Professor Christopher Robert Browning]: There are frequent references to Jews as if Jews and
6 Bolshevic Jews and partisans are the same thing. But, if
7 one goes down a lower level to people who are reporting on
8 partisans for the purpose of what counter measures one may
9 take, what I have seen of these is that it is not until
10 the summer of 42, and the reference is Jews are fleeing to
11 the forest and joining the partisans because of our ghetto
12 liquidation campaign. The Germans are creating a Jewish
13 partisan danger because these people are fleeing the death
14 that awaits them if they do not.
15 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Mr Irving, I am sorry, I am going to have to
16 interrupt you again. I am sorry to do so. We have had
17 quite a lot of evidence about a document which I have
18 eventually tracked down. There seem to be two versions of
19 it, both in German, and I do not know where, if anywhere,
20 I find an English version.
21 MR IRVING: Which document is this, my Lord?
22 MR JUSTICE GRAY: This is what he has just been talking about,
23 the July 2nd 1941 document.
24 MR RAMPTON: The key part of the document is on page 11 of
25 Professor Browning’s report.
26 MR JUSTICE GRAY: I do not think that is really enough. Is
. P-144
1 that it as far as a translation goes?
2 MR RAMPTON: The key part is in paragraphs 4.16 and 4.17. It is
3 also set out in full in Longerich and Evans.
4 MR JUSTICE GRAY: In full in Longerich?
5 MR RAMPTON: Longerich 2, page 67.
6 MR JUSTICE GRAY: What would help me, rather than just having
7 wodges of German text, is some sort of cross-reference.
8 There really is not time for me to plough my own way
9 through, with my inadequate German, to find the passages
10 that matter so, if I could be provided with a
11 cross-reference for where I find a translation, I would be
12 very grateful.
13 MR RAMPTON: Yes. With these documents it is fairly
14 straightforward because the footnote reference is at the
15 bottom right hand corner of the page. These are all
16 Browning documents. Therefore, if one uses the footnote
17 reference, one can go straight to the relevant passage in
18 Browning. It is more difficult with the Evans report but
19 this is quite straightforward. If one looks, one sees
20 that it is footnote 28 in this particular case, and one
21 finds it therefore. That is how I found it in Browning.
22 One finds it then on page 11.
23 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Longerich or Browning?
24 MR RAMPTON: No, Browning, my Lord. Footnote 28 follows this
25 sentence, “On a separate line for Jews executed is listed
26 3,663,211″, which is what the document says.
. P-145
1 A. [Professor Christopher Robert Browning]: If I am not mistaken.
2 MR JUSTICE GRAY: I must be being stupid. You have just
3 referred me to footnote 28 in Browning.
4 MR RAMPTON: Yes, which is on page 11.
5 MR JUSTICE GRAY: How does that help me get an English
6 translation?
7 MR RAMPTON: Because it is translated in part at the top of the
8 page, reports to the Fuhrer.
9 A. [Professor Christopher Robert Browning]: My Lord, I believe we have moved on to a new document,
10 which is the July 2nd.
11 MR JUSTICE GRAY: That is what I thought I was asking about.
12 MR RAMPTON: I am so sorry, I thought we were still in December
13 42.
14 MR JUSTICE GRAY: No. We have had quite a lot of evidence
15 about the July 2nd 1941 document, which is why I said I
16 really must see what is actually said.
17 MR RAMPTON: Browning, page 12.
18 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Page 12?
19 MR RAMPTON: Your Lordship will find a cross-reference index at
20 the front of this bundle of Browning documents. Every
21 single document that is referred to in the index has its
22 footnote number behind it.
23 MR JUSTICE GRAY: I follow that, but what I am looking for is
24 an English translation, and which I do not think is an
25 unreasonable request because this is a document that is
26 quite important.
. P-146
1 MR IRVING: My Lord, while they are looking, I hesitate to
2 indulge in one-upmanship, but I have translated the next
3 document I am going to give to your Lordship.
4 MR JUSTICE GRAY: That would be helpful. This does not apply
5 to all documents. I do not think I am being
6 unreasonable. Where it is quite important I think I ought
7 to be provided with an English text.
8 MR IRVING: I have also translated the Funfach letters for your
9 Lordship from the Dresden argument.
10 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Wait until we get to the next document
11 because I really do want to find out where, if anywhere, a
12 document which I think both sides attach importance to is
13 to be found. I am afraid I am not really understanding
14 the footnote cross-references. Am I going to be provided
15 with them or not? That was a question.
16 MR RAMPTON: I am so sorry, I did not hear it as a question.
17 MR JUSTICE GRAY: I will say again. I think that the document
18 of July 2nd 1941 is quite an important document. I have
19 seen extracts referred to in paragraph 421 of Browning and
20 I have seen a footnote in Browning but, as far as I have
21 been able to find out, there is only the German text and
22 I am suggesting that, if there is an English text, I would
23 like to see it.
24 MR RAMPTON: All that the experts feel is important about this
25 document is set out in their report.
26 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Well, I am not sure that can be entirely
. P-147
1 right because we have had a great deal of evidence from
2 the witness about it which is not contained in the
3 report. That is not a criticism of the witness at all,
4 but is this an important document?
5 MR RAMPTON: I am sorry. I agree it is an important document
6 but I have to say only in the respects which the
7 witnesses, both of them, Longerich and Browning, have
8 noticed in their reports, which to this effect, if I have
9 understood what this discussion is about, to this effect.
10 The hand of the SS was to be hidden in the instigation of
11 pogroms. It is there, if I am on the right document.
12 MR IRVING: My Lord I will prepare a translation of that
13 document overnight, the relevant parts.
14 MR JUSTICE GRAY: If you would. It does not appear that we are
15 going to get it from the Defendants.
16 MR RAMPTON: I will do it, my Lord. If it is a document that
17 it turns out we rely on for some purpose beyond that which
18 appears in the expert reports, of course, then we must
19 have it translated. But if, for our purposes, it is
20 sufficiently represented and translated in the expert
21 reports, then I do have to say we cannot go through these
22 bundles translating everything that anybody might want to
23 look at. For one thing, it takes too long and for another
24 it is very expensive.
25 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Why I am being provided with wodges of paper
26 consisting of pretty incomprehensible extracts, often not
. P-148
1 giving any indication where they come from? I just do not
2 follow the object of the exercise.
3 MR RAMPTON: When the expert reports were prepared, we asked
4 the experts, as one would expect, to prepare lists and
5 bundles of the sources for what they say.
6 MR JUSTICE GRAY: This is what we have all around the walls.
7 MR RAMPTON: That is what this is. Should there be some
8 important document which requires to be translated in full
9 as we have done in some cases, why then we shall do it.
10 But I do not see this as being such a document for my
11 part —-
12 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Thank you very much. We will move on in that
13 case.
14 MR IRVING: Witness, we were discussing the question of whether
15 the Nazis were just killing the able-bodied, military aged
16 Jews whom they captured or whether the killing was being
17 extended to include also the women and the children. We
18 talked about a 50 year-old Jew as an example. Can I ask
19 you to turn to — there is a document dated August 6th
20 1941, which is referred to on page 15 of your report. It
21 is footnote 42 is the document.
22 A. [Professor Christopher Robert Browning]: Footnote 42, yes.
23 Q. [Mr Irving]: Page 20 of the little bundle, apparently.
24 MR RAMPTON: Might I again, your Lordship, intervene here to
25 explain exactly what I mean — I do not mean to be
26 troublesome or difficult — in relation to this document.
. P-149
1 I know this document, something about it. It is
2 well-described in Professor Browning’s report, what it
3 is. The only bit which actually really matters is the
4 piece of manuscript right at the end of the document which
5 appears on the its third page.
6 MR IRVING: Mr Rampton, do you mind if I tell his Lordship what
7 matters about the document.
8 MR RAMPTON: Well, if you want to tell his Lordship —-
9 MR JUSTICE GRAY: No, to be fair to him, I have been being
10 critical and he is just trying to be helpful and show me
11 what —-
12 MR IRVING: On its way to your Lordship is a translation of the
13 entire document.
14 MR JUSTICE GRAY: I am going to put that into this tab of J.
15 Do you include the manuscript, Mr Irving?
16 MR IRVING: Yes, that is the final paragraph on the page.
17 MR RAMPTON: In that case, I think we should have a copy of the
18 translation.
19 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Have you not got one?
20 MR RAMPTON: No.
21 MR IRVING: It was done at a relatively early hour this morning
22 and I am afraid —
23 MR RAMPTON: That is not a criticism. I think we should have
24 it is all I am saying.
25 MR IRVING: Yes, but I will refer to the passages in the German
26 text and —-
. P-150
1 MR JUSTICE GRAY: I think I am going to keep this for the
2 moment.
3 MR RAMPTON: Yes.
4 MR JUSTICE GRAY: But we will read it out to you.
5 MR RAMPTON: Yes, of course.
6 MR IRVING: Do you recognize this document?
7 A. [Professor Christopher Robert Browning]: I want to make sure we are talking about the same one.
8 This is the Stahlecker to Jager of August 6th 1941.
9 Q. [Mr Irving]: August 6th 1941.
10 A. [Professor Christopher Robert Browning]: The [German – document not provided].
11 Q. [Mr Irving]: Yes.
12 A. [Professor Christopher Robert Browning]: Yes. This is a document that is Gerald Fleming sent me a
13 copy of that he had gotten in Riga.
14 Q. [Mr Irving]: In Riga.
15 MR RAMPTON: My Lord, that is page 15, paragraph 4.2.6 of
16 Professor Browning report.
17 MR IRVING: Are you familiar with an author Eser Guilis(?)
18 A. [Professor Christopher Robert Browning]: Yes, the man who writes on the Final Solution in Latvia,
19 Andrew Eser-Guilis.
20 Q. [Mr Irving]: This is his kind of area, is it not?
21 A. [Professor Christopher Robert Browning]: It is an area he has written a book on, yes.
22 Q. [Mr Irving]: In this document, if I may summarize in advance, is it
23 correct to say that quite clearly the people who are
24 writing this draft are planning for the Jews to survive in
25 gettoes, August 6th 1941?
26 A. [Professor Christopher Robert Browning]: The civil administration is preparing a set of guidelines
. P-151
1 that implies the ghettoization of Jews and that is to
2 which Stahlecker is objecting, that they should not be
3 dealt with here as in Poland, that here they are a greater
4 danger.
5 Q. [Mr Irving]: Yes, and if you can turn to page 2 of the document, the
6 second line of the second paragraph, I will translate it.
7 Roughly it says: “This draft evidently plans the steps
8 suggested under paragraph 5 for the umsiedlung of the
9 Jews, the resettlement of the Jews, not as an immediate
10 step, but is to be regarded as a later, gradual
11 development”?
12 A. [Professor Christopher Robert Browning]: That is the civil administration guidelines to which he is
13 objecting, yes.
14 Q. [Mr Irving]: And the idea is that they are going to keep the Jews, if
15 they fall into the Nazis hands, in separate camps, keeping
16 the sexes apart so they are not going to get — they are
17 not going to increase? They are going to keep them alive
18 but so that they will gradually die out, effectively, as a
19 race. This was the plan in that?
20 A. [Professor Christopher Robert Browning]: This is what he is referring to as the civil
21 administration guidelines that he is criticising, that
22 they envisage marking forced labour ghettoization and he
23 is telling Jager that these are not acceptable.
24 Q. [Mr Irving]: And if you turn to the final page, there are four
25 proposals listed there, one of which, the first one, is an
26 almost 100 per cent immediate cleansing of the entire
. P-152
1 Ostland of the Jews?
2 A. [Professor Christopher Robert Browning]: Yes.
3 Q. [Mr Irving]: The second proposal is preventing them from procreating,
4 from multiplying?
5 A. [Professor Christopher Robert Browning]: Correct.
6 Q. [Mr Irving]: The third proposal is the possibility of the intensive
7 exploitation of Jewish manpower which, of course, you
8 cannot do if you are killing them. And the fourth
9 one —-
10 A. [Professor Christopher Robert Browning]: You cannot do it by killing all, but you can do it if you
11 separate out skilled workers and kill most.
12 Q. [Mr Irving]: The fourth one is a considerable alleviation of the later
13 transporting away of the Jews into a Jewish reservation
14 somewhere outside of Europe?
15 A. [Professor Christopher Robert Browning]: Yes.
16 Q. [Mr Irving]: So all of these are a much more modest form of the Final
17 Solution, are they not, not involving killing, being
18 proposed here by the man who drafted the document?
19 A. [Professor Christopher Robert Browning]: He lists those as four possibilities. We know, of course,
20 from two things down below he says this all touches on
21 orders and Jager, within a week, is killing all women and
22 children and —-
23 Q. [Mr Irving]: You are —-
24 A. [Professor Christopher Robert Browning]: — Stahlecker’s own report later —-
25 Q. [Mr Irving]: You are rushing ahead.
26 MR JUSTICE GRAY: You are rushing ahead. Just pause a minute.
. P-153
1 MR IRVING: My Lord, I am only relying on this document purely
2 to show that whoever drafted the document (and the
3 Professor will tell us in a moment who it was) the draft,
4 the typescript draft, is making certain proposals of a
5 very general and non-lethal form for the treatment of the
6 Jewish problem in the occupied Russian areas.
7 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Yes.
8 MR IRVING: And that there is then a very important handwritten
9 comment by Stahlecker on which I rely. I will read out
10 the handwritten comment in German first. “Ich halte es
11 … (reading to the words in German – document not
12 provided)… Stahlecker”. Does Stahlecker in that rather
13 complicated final paragraph, that postscript by him, his
14 comment, does he refer to the fact that this conflicts
15 with oral orders —-
16 A. [Professor Christopher Robert Browning]: I think he is saying —-
17 Q. [Mr Irving]: — which have been given by a superior agency to him?
18 A. [Professor Christopher Robert Browning]: Yes, as I interpret it, he is saying the guidelines
19 prepared by the local civil administration —-
20 Q. [Mr Irving]: Which is the typed guidelines here?
21 A. [Professor Christopher Robert Browning]: No, no. This is his critique of the typed guidelines.
22 The typed guidelines are a different document. This is
23 his letter to Jager who is to talk to the people who have
24 drawn up the guidelines, and that this is his rejection of
25 those guidelines. He says there should not be any
26 guidelines until we have discussed this orally,
. P-154
1 particularly as they touch upon oral orders that from the,
2 you know, that cannot be put in writing.
3 Q. [Mr Irving]: All orders from a von hochster Stelle?
4 A. [Professor Christopher Robert Browning]: Yes, from above.
5 Q. [Mr Irving]: Not just from above.
6 A. [Professor Christopher Robert Browning]: Or from a higher —-
7 Q. [Mr Irving]: A higher plain. Have you ever heard Adolf Hitler referred
8 to as a higher plain in documents?
9 A. [Professor Christopher Robert Browning]: No, it would be highest.
10 Q. [Mr Irving]: I beg your pardon?
11 A. [Professor Christopher Robert Browning]: He would be highest.
12 Q. [Mr Irving]: Thank you very much. That is the answer I wanted. I know
13 it is not very helpful for the Defence, but the correct
14 answer is of course it would be von hochster Stelle, would
15 it not?
16 MR RAMPTON: I am sorry to intervene, I am not saying this is
17 disorderly cross-examination.
18 MR JUSTICE GRAY: It is far from being that. I think it is
19 extremely orderly.
20 MR RAMPTON: I agree, but it seems to be heading in what
21 I regard as a impermissible direction. On 17th January,
22 this is the fourth day of the trial, page 94, the
23 cross-examination went like this, line 8: “This is
24 evidence that Hitler gave authority” —-
25 MR JUSTICE GRAY: If you want me to follow, the page?
26 MR RAMPTON: Day 4, my Lord, page 94. This is why I intervene
. P-155
1 now, because I expressed a fear this morning that this is
2 what was going to happen.
3 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Yes. Page 94.
4 MR RAMPTON: Page 94, my Lord, lines 7 to 16. I will read it
5 out in case Mr Irving has not got his transcript here.
6 I will start at line 8, if I may: “This is evidence that
7 Hitler gave authority for the massacre at least2.
8 MR IRVING: Who is speaking?
9 MR JUSTICE GRAY: You.
10 MR RAMPTON: I. “This is evidence that Hitler gave authority
11 for the massacre at least”, interruption by Mr Irving, “of
12 Jews”. I finish the question because I meant to be
13 precise: “Of Jews in the East?” Answer: “Yes”.
14 Question: “Yes”. Then there is something about
15 Longerich. Mr Irving says: “I do not think there is any
16 dispute between the parties on this”.
17 MR JUSTICE GRAY: I am just wanting to see the document that is
18 being discussed.
19 MR RAMPTON: My Lord, that may not matter, may it, with
20 respect, in the light of what I have just said? Als
21 partisan als and auszurotten is what I was asking
22 questions about.
23 MR IRVING: Have we not moved on from that document?
24 MR RAMPTON: No. With respect, my question was this: “This is
25 evidence that Hitler gave authority for the massacre of
26 Jews in the East?” “Yes. I do not think there is any
. P-156
1 dispute between the parties on this.”
2 MR IRVING: That is absolutely right, but the question is, my
3 Lord, under what title the Jews were being killed, whether
4 they were being killed in this connection as Jews or as
5 partisans.
6 MR RAMPTON: “The massacre of the Jews in the East? Yes”.
7 MR IRVING: Yes.
8 MR RAMPTON: With Hitler’s authority.
9 MR IRVING: Both statements are obviously correct. I am very
10 sorry you interrupted me at the point where I was making
11 this very important point about con hochster Stelle, from
12 the highest level.
13 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Do not worry about that. If Mr Rampton is
14 right, and at the movement it appears to me that he may
15 well be, you would appear to have conceded quite generally
16 that Hitler did indeed give authority for the massacre of
17 Jews in the East. That, after all, is what you are
18 presently cross-examining Professor Browning about.
19 MR IRVING: I do hesitate to cavil about words, but whether he
20 gave authority for the massacre of Jews or of the Jews is
21 what would be the issue here.
22 MR JUSTICE GRAY: I am not going to hold you to what you said
23 in the course of cross-examination, but I think it is
24 right to observe that you are, I think, shifting your
25 ground because you did appear to concede without any
26 qualification that it was Hitler who gave the authority
. P-157
1 for the massacre of the Jews in the East quite generally.
2 MR IRVING: My Lord, I do not have the text in front of me.
3 MR JUSTICE GRAY: No.
4 MR IRVING: But from what was read out it appears that it was
5 an exchange rather than a considered statement.
6 MR JUSTICE GRAY: That is true.
7 MR IRVING: With interruptions and “yes” and “yes”.
8 MR JUSTICE GRAY: I am not going, as I say, to pin you down by
9 reference to an answer you gave in the course of an
10 exchange. So carry on, but I think it is fair to say
11 Mr Rampton’s intervention was well-founded.
12 MR IRVING: So I will just have to wind back about 30 seconds,
13 so to speak. We were looking at the handwritten footnote
14 by Stahlecker. He is referring to orders that have been
15 given from a higher level to the Security Police, which
16 are being affected by this new draft.
17 My question to you was, can von hochster Stelle
18 or from a higher level ever refer to an order from
19 Hitler? Your reply was, I think you said it would be from
20 the highest level if it was a reference to Hitler?
21 A. [Professor Christopher Robert Browning]: If he was getting a direct order, this is an order that
22 comes from higher authority.
23 Q. [Mr Irving]: At which point Mr Rampton decided to interrupt.
24 MR RAMPTON: Yes, and there was a very good reason for it, if
25 I may say so. I do not want to spend a lot of time in
26 this court at my clients’ expense listening to
. P-158
1 cross-examination that leads nowhere.
2 MR JUSTICE GRAY: I think the position, and you can correct me,
3 Mr Irving, if I am wrong about this, is that you have made
4 the concession, and I think that is the right word, that
5 Hitler gave authority for massacre of Jews in the East.
6 That does not prevent you from saying when you are
7 confronted with this document Stahlecker note that as far
8 as this document, Stahlecker’s note, that as far as that
9 document goes, that is talking about orders from an
10 authority other than Hitler.
11 MR IRVING: My Lord, it will come as no surprise to you, I am
12 sure, to realize by now that it is not going to be easy to
13 untangle the thicket of conflicting authorities and
14 responsibilities that led to this appalling crime on the
15 Eastern Front, and we are not going to find any simple
16 chain of command.
17 MR JUSTICE GRAY: No.
18 MR IRVING: Or any simple written order, and that there will be
19 apparent contradictions where people at one area are
20 acting in one way and there is someone else acting in
21 another way. We have to look for clues as to where
22 people’s intentions lie.
23 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Yes.
24 MR IRVING: So that is the only use I wish to make of that
25 particular document.
26 A. [Professor Christopher Robert Browning]: Can I add something to that?
. P-159
1 Q. [Mr Irving]: Sure.
2 A. [Professor Christopher Robert Browning]: If we look at Stahlecker’s report of October 15, 1941,
3 which is page 23, paragraph 4.3.10, of those four
4 solutions that he lists he clearly embraces the first and
5 claims, and I quote: “It was expected from the start that
6 the Jewish problem would not be solved solely through
7 pogroms. On the other hand, the goal of the Security
8 Police cleansing work according to basic orders was the
9 most complete removal possible of the Jews. Extensive
10 executions in the cities and flat lands were therefore
11 carried out through special units.” In that sense of these
12 four we have another document that shows Stahlecker purely
13 understood his task as to be the first of those four
14 options.
Section 160.22-176.26
15 Q. [Mr Irving]: Yes, but our problem is and our problem has been for some
16 weeks in this courtroom, Professor, to try to establish
17 the exact chain of command from the very highest level
18 downwards. We are all agreed at the complicity of Himmler
19 and Heydrich and Stahlecker and Jaeger and all the others,
20 but there is a final bridge that we cannot build yet and
21 it is a very difficult bridge to build.
22 I am going to ask you to go back to page 14 now,
23 if I may, to paragraph 4.2.4. This is another document
24 which I am sure you are very familiar with, August 12th,
25 1941, the order to drive the Jewish women into the swamps
26 apparently issued by Himmler. Driving people into the
. P-160
1 swamps, is that a familiar kind of phrase at this time?
2 A. [Professor Christopher Robert Browning]: I have seen it in three documents. This is the first one
3 and then there is the Hitler table talk, and then there is
4 the citation by Jackelm saying that Himmler used the
5 phrase with him after the early December meetings. So
6 I have come across that phrase now three times in this
7 stretch of five or six months.
8 Q. [Mr Irving]: Is it just a turn of phrase or do they mean it literally,
9 do you think?
10 A. [Professor Christopher Robert Browning]: Well, I think the indication here —-
11 Q. [Mr Irving]: Is it a dangerous turn of phrase?
12 A. [Professor Christopher Robert Browning]: It is used in ways I think that have a very, to use your
13 term, a lethal connotation, that it seems to have become
14 one of the slang words for making sure that Jews die. In
15 the first one we see clearly by the response that driving
16 Jews in the swamps meant that they were supposed to drown,
17 because the man replies back: “Driving women and children
18 into the swamps did not have the intended success because
19 the swamps were not so deep that a sinking under could
20 occur”. So at least to the recipient it was clear that
21 driving Jews into the swamps was a way in which they would
22 perish.
23 Q. [Mr Irving]: This is the Magill document?
24 A. [Professor Christopher Robert Browning]: This is the Magill document.
25 Q. [Mr Irving]: Footnote No. 40.
26 A. [Professor Christopher Robert Browning]: Yes.
. P-161
1 Q. [Mr Irving]: That document, of course, comes from a different archive,
2 does it not, somewhere in Czechoslovakia?
3 A. [Professor Christopher Robert Browning]: That I believe is the Prague military archive.
4 Q. [Mr Irving]: The Prague military archive?
5 A. [Professor Christopher Robert Browning]: Yes.
6 Q. [Mr Irving]: Do you have that document in front of you, please? It is
7 footnote 40.
8 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Page 23.
9 MR IRVING: Page 23. It is only a minor point I am going to
10 make on that. In the second paragraph of that it is
11 evident that the local Ukrainian and white Russian
12 population were helping the Nazi invaders by telling them
13 where the partisans were hiding. Is that correct?
14 Reporting that there was bandits around and helping them
15 to find them so that they could be shot?
16 A. [Professor Christopher Robert Browning]: Yes.
17 Q. [Mr Irving]: So this was partisan country?
18 A. [Professor Christopher Robert Browning]: Well, of course they use the term Banden and it may or may
19 not mean a real partisan unit at this stage of the war.
20 It most likely means strengthening Russian soldiers that
21 are, as they say, room driven, they are wandering around
22 the swamp because they have been cut off.
23 Q. [Mr Irving]: What period does this report cover?
24 A. [Professor Christopher Robert Browning]: This is early August 1941.
25 Q. [Mr Irving]: How many days?
26 A. [Professor Christopher Robert Browning]: Well, that would be less than two months into Barbarossa.
. P-162
1 Oh, I am sorry, it covers July 27th to 11th August 1941.
2 Q. [Mr Irving]: Two weeks then, is it not? How big was this
3 reitenabteilung, a mounted, what, brigade, mounted
4 detachment literally?
5 A. [Professor Christopher Robert Browning]: Yes.
6 Q. [Mr Irving]: How many men?
7 A. [Professor Christopher Robert Browning]: I believe this is one regiment within the brigade.
8 I think there were two cavalry regiments and this is the
9 second.
10 Q. [Mr Irving]: Well, it says that it is the mounted —-
11 A. [Professor Christopher Robert Browning]: Mounted police of the cavalry regiment two, you are
12 right. So this is a group, yes, a mounted group.
13 Q. [Mr Irving]: It is a brigade.
14 A. [Professor Christopher Robert Browning]: What the size of an abteilung is. I do not know.
15 Q. [Mr Irving]: It varies, does it not, from unit to unit?
16 A. [Professor Christopher Robert Browning]: Yes.
17 Q. [Mr Irving]: Would you turn to the final page, please, page 4, the
18 third paragraph from the end. Does it give a figure there
19 for the gesamtzahl, the overall total?
20 A. [Professor Christopher Robert Browning]: It says 6,526 of plunderers.
21 Q. [Mr Irving]: Plunderers have been shot by this unit?
22 A. [Professor Christopher Robert Browning]: Yes.
23 Q. [Mr Irving]: In that two-week period. Do you consider that to be a
24 plausible figure for a relatively small unit? I am just
25 enquiring.
26 A. [Professor Christopher Robert Browning]: Yes.
. P-163
1 Q. [Mr Irving]: Still on paragraph 4.2.5 —-
2 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Before we leave that document, which is four
3 pages of rather dense German text, is there anywhere,
4 presumably there is somewhere, a reference to all Jews
5 being shot, sorry, the intended result or the intended
6 success not having been achieved?
7 MR RAMPTON: The top of the last page, my Lord.
8 MR JUSTICE GRAY: The top of the last page.
9 A. [Professor Christopher Robert Browning]: That is the non-success.
10 MR RAMPTON: Failure.
11 A. [Professor Christopher Robert Browning]: Yes. Was your question, is there another document that
12 says what happened?
13 MR JUSTICE GRAY: No. I expressed it rather badly. I have
14 been told that there was somewhere in this document a
15 passage which says, “We did not have the success we had
16 hoped with driving the women into the swamp”, and
17 Mr Rampton has identified it. It is the top of page 26 of
18 this clip. Yes. Thank you.
19 MR IRVING: Which does appear to be a direct response to the
20 telegram, does it not, the order?
21 A. [Professor Christopher Robert Browning]: Yes.
22 Q. [Mr Irving]: A remarkable — it does not often happen in the archives,
23 does it, two archives?
24 A. [Professor Christopher Robert Browning]: That you will have a meeting of documents from two
25 different archives, yes.
26 Q. [Mr Irving]: If you would now go back to 4.2.5, please, the only reason
. P-164
1 to look at this is because on line 5 of that paragraph you
2 mention the higher SS and police leader von dem
3 Bach-Zelewski?
4 A. [Professor Christopher Robert Browning]: Yes.
5 Q. [Mr Irving]: Von dem Bach-Zelewski. He was one of the major war
6 criminals, am I right?
7 A. [Professor Christopher Robert Browning]: He is the counterpart of Jackelm in the North,
8 Bach-Zelewski in the middle, and he was certainly
9 considered by many to be a war criminal.
10 Q. [Mr Irving]: How many scalps did he have, do you think, by the time the
11 war ended, tens of thousands on his belt? I mean how many
12 lives did he have on his conscious, that man, when the war
13 ended as a mass murderer?
14 A. [Professor Christopher Robert Browning]: My guess is that it was quite a few.
15 Q. [Mr Irving]: Quite few tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands?
16 A. [Professor Christopher Robert Browning]: Yes.
17 Q. [Mr Irving]: What happened to him after the war? Was he executed?
18 A. [Professor Christopher Robert Browning]: No. He was tried in a court in Munich and as I —-
19 Q. [Mr Irving]: When?
20 A. [Professor Christopher Robert Browning]: In the 1960s I believe.
21 Q. [Mr Irving]: In the 1960s? So he survived 15 years in relative comfort
22 being used in any way by the Allies as a witness?
23 A. [Professor Christopher Robert Browning]: He appeared as a witness I believe in the Wolff trial.
24 I do not know what other trials he may have appeared as a
25 witness.
26 Q. [Mr Irving]: Is this not an extraordinary state of affairs, in your
. P-165
1 opinion?
2 A. [Professor Christopher Robert Browning]: It would not be the first miscarriage of justice in
3 Germany in which people should have been tried and were
4 not.
5 Q. [Mr Irving]: This is, in my view, or would you agree, a particular
6 egregious example of somebody who should have been hanged
7 relatively early on who somehow escaped the hangman’s
8 noose, would you agree?
9 A. [Professor Christopher Robert Browning]: I think he certainly should have been brought to trial
10 much earlier, and his verdict should have been much more
11 severe.
12 Q. [Mr Irving]: He made a number of witness statements on behalf of the
13 Americans and the British and the other Allies after the
14 war, did he?
15 A. [Professor Christopher Robert Browning]: I am not sure on that. I could not answer that.
16 Q. [Mr Irving]: Well, you say he testified at Nuremberg?
17 A. [Professor Christopher Robert Browning]: He testified at the Karl Wolff trial and also in Bavaria.
18 Q. [Mr Irving]: How much credence do you think you could attach to the
19 evidence of a witness like that?
20 A. [Professor Christopher Robert Browning]: It would depend upon looking at what he was saying and in
21 what context and what corroboration. I would not make a
22 blanket statement. Here again it would be a case where
23 there is a witness and you would want to look very
24 carefully at the particular testimony in question, but
25 this would be one to be approached with caution. He did
26 send apparently his doctored and sanitized diary to the
. P-166
1 Bundesarchiv all nicely typed up and all references to
2 things that you have referred to, that he probably has
3 many hundreds of thousands on his conscious nicely
4 deleted.
5 Q. [Mr Irving]: Does this kind of happen in the archives, that documents
6 turn up in the archives that have been sanitized in some
7 way?
8 A. [Professor Christopher Robert Browning]: If they are submitted by the private party himself, as in
9 this case, I suppose it is not necessarily uncommon.
10 I think there was a feeling that maybe Sper had done the
11 same thing.
12 Q. [Mr Irving]: I know Sper did the same thing. Would you not agree that
13 in a case of a man like Bach-Zelewski who you know and
14 I know and the world knew was a mass murderer who had
15 somehow managed to survive like Scheherezade by singing or
16 by telling tales, that is the kind of evidence that you
17 should drive a very wide circle around and not under any
18 circumstances use?
19 A. [Professor Christopher Robert Browning]: I would not say not to use under any circumstances. It
20 would depend upon what he was saying and whether it had
21 other kinds of corroboration. He might be saying
22 something that other witnesses would confirm.
23 Q. [Mr Irving]: I mention this just as a particularly gross example,
24 because are there any other names that would occur to you
25 of witnesses where you think, well, it is funny that he
26 got off so lightly? Are there any other names in
. P-167
1 connection with the Holocaust where witnesses have
2 been —-
3 A. [Professor Christopher Robert Browning]: I think Wolff got off fairly lightly.
4 Q. [Mr Irving]: Karl Wolff?
5 A. [Professor Christopher Robert Browning]: Yes.
6 Q. [Mr Irving]: Because he was an accomplice or he was — what would his
7 particular crime have been, to your knowledge?
8 A. [Professor Christopher Robert Browning]: Certainly in facilitating of the procuring of trains for
9 Operation Reinhard, that was one key document.
10 Q. [Mr Irving]: Yes. He survived, but are you familiar that in the case
11 of Karl Wolff — no, I cannot lead evidence on that
12 obviously. What about Wilheim Hoertel, Eichmann’s liaison
13 in the Balkans, shall we say?
14 A. [Professor Christopher Robert Browning]: I am not aware that Hoertel was involved in the
15 deportation the way Sedonika or someone else. I do not
16 know of any situation in which Hoertel knew Eichmann, but
17 I do not believe he worked for him or was instrumental in
18 the Final Solution.
19 Q. [Mr Irving]: I will put to you to two facts in connection with
20 Hoertel. Is he one of the sources for our overall figure
21 of the total on the Holocaust, the total number of
22 victims?
23 A. [Professor Christopher Robert Browning]: He is the person who gave such a figure. I do not think
24 that that is why historians come to the numbers that they
25 do.
26 Q. [Mr Irving]: Where did he get his figure from?
. P-168
1 A. [Professor Christopher Robert Browning]: He claimed he got it from Eichmann.
2 Q. [Mr Irving]: He claimed he got it from Eichmann. Was Hoertel
3 prosecuted at all in any way at the end of the war for his
4 role as a member of the Gestapo?
5 A. [Professor Christopher Robert Browning]: I do not know, but I have certainly not come across him as
6 having been involved in the Final Solution. But there are
7 many people —-
8 Q. [Mr Irving]: Did he give evidence in Nuremberg on behalf of the Allies?
9 A. [Professor Christopher Robert Browning]: That again I cannot say.
10 Q. [Mr Irving]: Will you go to page 16 of your report, please, paragraph
11 4.2.8? Can we have a look at the source document for that
12 one, please?
13 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Is it page 78?
14 MR IRVING: I beg your pardon?
15 MR JUSTICE GRAY: I am not sure it is, but it might be.
16 MR IRVING: Yes. Your Lordship is way ahead of us. Would you
17 go to page 2 of that transcript which again is
18 unfortunately in German, but I wanted to draw your
19 attention to the bottom three lines. Am I right in saying
20 it says that two categories of Jews are to be
21 distinguished from each other?
22 A. [Professor Christopher Robert Browning]: Yes. This is a document I believe that relates to Minsk
23 and the other heading a Russian Jewish ghetto and a German
24 Jewish ghetto, that they had a very strict separation in
25 Minsk.
26 Q. [Mr Irving]: Yes, and that these Jews, the Nazis had to distinguish
. P-169
1 between these two categories of Jews —-
2 A. [Professor Christopher Robert Browning]: In this case —-
3 Q. [Mr Irving]: — once they began the killings when the ground thawed?
4 A. [Professor Christopher Robert Browning]: I am not sure if I understand the question.
5 Q. [Mr Irving]: Well, the question is that they made once again a
6 distinction between killing Russian Jews and the treatment
7 of German Jews at this Minsk conference?
8 A. [Professor Christopher Robert Browning]: They made a distinction between them, but they are
9 virtually all killed within six months. So it is a
10 distinction that delayed the executions not a very great
11 time.
12 MR JUSTICE GRAY: What is the point of the distinction in that
13 case?
14 A. [Professor Christopher Robert Browning]: They are kept in different ghettoes at the moment is one
15 thing, and I believe, as you see from document, I think
16 they consider the work skills of the German Jews would be
17 viewed as higher and therefore would be kept longer. It
18 goes on to say that Russian Jews, the following paragraph,
19 after separation, it says: “Russian Jews are of a stubborn
20 nature and unwilling to work. The German Jews work with
21 much more vigour and they believe after victory that they
22 will return to the old Reich”. This is the result of
23 having sent these people with in the fall with all of
24 their Gerat, their utensils and suitcases and whatever
25 else.
26 Q. [Mr Irving]: You quote in your report a passage about a complete
. P-170
1 liquidation of the Jews not possible to due to the frost.
2 MR RAMPTON: It is the bottom of page 2, my Lord, above the
3 little letters (a) and (b).
4 MR JUSTICE GRAY: I see.
5 A. [Professor Christopher Robert Browning]: Yes, the quote I made ends, and then they say there are
6 two categories to distinguish German and Russian, and then
7 they explain that the German Jews are much better workers
8 than the Russian Jews, and that is a reason why there
9 would be differentiated treatment.
10 MR RAMPTON: My Lord, again this may be a document which it
11 would repay having rather more translated of.
12 MR JUSTICE GRAY: I think in view of the point Mr Irving has
13 just made, that would probably be right.
14 MR RAMPTON: I think that must be right.
15 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Thank you very much.
16 MR IRVING: We now come to a rather sensitive area which your
17 Lordship may feel is not relevant, and this is the
18 question to what extent did the local population
19 participate in or even instigate the killings of Jews on
20 the Eastern Front, the Russian front and in the Baltic
21 countries, and to what extent were they themselves
22 murderers? In other words, what percentage of the
23 killings were their responsibility and what percentage
24 went on to the Nazis?
25 A. [Professor Christopher Robert Browning]: That is the question you would like my affirmation on?
26 Q. [Mr Irving]: Yes.
. P-171
1 A. [Professor Christopher Robert Browning]: In terms of the pogroms that is something that was a brief
2 phenomenon in the very opening days of the war, sometimes
3 instigated by the Germans, sometimes starting
4 spontaneously.
5 Q. [Mr Irving]: Are we talking about the Eastern Front or the Baltic
6 countries?
7 A. [Professor Christopher Robert Browning]: Both. Baltic countries is part I would say of the Eastern
8 Front. More success, I guess more pogroms in some parts
9 of the Ukraine and Lithuania than — here I do not know
10 the detail of where the pogroms occurred, but clearly they
11 were supported and instigated by the Germans. How many
12 were spontaneous would take a research that I have not
13 gone into. What is more important is that by late July
14 Himmler has approved the formation of auxiliary police
15 units, that these police units reach about 30,000 by the
16 end of 1941, about 300,000 by the end of 1942, and
17 comprise one of the major manpower sources for why a small
18 number of Einsatzgruppen —-
19 Q. [Mr Irving]: And they were not all engaged killing though, were they?
20 A. [Professor Christopher Robert Browning]: No. Many are in police stations, but they are at one
21 point when it comes the day to kill the Jews in that
22 region, often it is the local police that would be part of
23 the liquidation process. They do not move about. Some
24 do. There are two concepts: The ones kept in police
25 stations and then there are the mobile battalions.
26 Q. [Mr Irving]: If I introduce the concept of the interregnum between the
. P-172
1 time that the Soviet troops pulled out of the Baltic
2 countries and the Nazi troops arrive, a period of, say,
3 one or two weeks?
4 A. [Professor Christopher Robert Browning]: I am not sure that it was that long in many places.
5 Q. [Mr Irving]: Was there much killing went on in that time?
6 A. [Professor Christopher Robert Browning]: That would have represented an infinitesimal fraction of
7 the total number of Soviet Jews killed.
8 Q. [Mr Irving]: You are not familiar with the private diary Otto
9 Reutigang?
10 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Mr Irving, before you go further, is this
11 your best point? If there really were 300,000 of these
12 people, Nazi —-
13 MR IRVING: Auxiliaries.
14 MR JUSTICE GRAY: — auxiliaries, how far are you going to get
15 with the idea that it was the local population that was
16 either participating or instigating.
17 MR IRVING: I appreciate your objection, my Lord. I will not
18 press that matter any further.
19 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Press on if you want, but it seems me it is
20 not perhaps a particularly good point.
21 MR IRVING: My Lord, I have come to the end of my preparations
22 for today’s cross-examination. With respect, I would ask
23 that, unless Mr Rampton has any further points to make, we
24 will adjourn now.
25 MR JUSTICE GRAY: I told you I will give you as much latitude
26 as you reasonably want. You have gone quite
. P-173
1 expeditiously. So, Mr Rampton, you do not object to
2 that?
3 MR RAMPTON: I am absolutely relaxed about that. I would like
4 to know because I have to get Professor Evans ready,
5 whether we will finish with Professor Browning tomorrow.
6 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Sensible timetabling.
7 MR IRVING: I think we will finish with Professor Browning
8 tomorrow.
9 MR RAMPTON: In that case, I will prepare to have Professor
10 Evans here for Thursday.
11 MR IRVING: I might want possibly one or two hours more on
12 Thursday, but it is certainly not to inconvenience
13 Professor Evans.
14 MR JUSTICE GRAY: One or two more hours more on Thursday with
15 Professor Browning?
16 MR IRVING: If I have not quite finished with him by then.
17 MR JUSTICE GRAY: I am just wondering whether he is not wanting
18 to go off somewhere else.
19 MR RAMPTON: He wants to go back home to America. So if he is
20 not finished tomorrow, which is Tuesday, I would ask that
21 he could be finished on Wednesday morning.
22 MR IRVING: I was thinking Wednesday morning, yes.
23 MR JUSTICE GRAY: What we will do, Mr Irving, is we will carry
24 on on Wednesday. Do not worry, you will get your day, but
25 it may be a split day, if you follow me, a day’s time for
26 preparing Evans.
. P-174
1 MR IRVING: It makes sense for me to prepare properly the way I
2 have for today.
3 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Of course. In the end it saves time which is
4 why I think it is perfectly sensible.
5 MR IRVING: Unless Mr Rampton wishes to cross-examine him now
6 on some of the points I have made.
7 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Re-examine.
8 MR RAMPTON: No, I would not dream of cross-examining, even if
9 I were allowed to.
10 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Well, I would let you, but I do not think it
11 is actually sensible.
12 MR RAMPTON: There is one little problem about Professor
13 Evans. It probably does not matter enormously because
14 I can use Friday with remaining cross-examination of
15 Mr Irving. Professor Evans has rearranged everything
16 because he thought we were not sitting on Friday. So he
17 has, as it were, pushed everything into that one day. So
18 even if he was started on Thursday I would ask him to be
19 released for the Friday. Friday will not be wasted.
20 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Mr Irving, do you have a view about that?
21 MR IRVING: No, my Lord. I am in your Lordship’s hands. I am
22 much more relaxed than I was last week.
23 MR JUSTICE GRAY: The overall progress has actually been quite
24 good.
25 MR RAMPTON: Very good. My hope is that we are actually going
26 to save about a month of the estimate, which means we
. P-175
1 might get a little time off to write our closing speeches.
2 MR JUSTICE GRAY: That may have been partly to due to a bit of
3 prereading. It did save a bit of time. Then we will have
4 Evans on Thursday and resume him on Monday.
5 MR IRVING: My Lord, you must not forget that I have one more
6 witness to call and that is Dr John Fox.
7 MR JUSTICE GRAY: You tell me when it is convenient for you to
8 call him.
9 MR IRVING: I will arrange with the Defence on a date for that.
10 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Yes, discuss it together. 10.30 tomorrow.
11 < (The witness stood down).
12 (The court adjourned until the following day)
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. P-176