GERMAN ARMY engineer-colonel Walter Bruns was stationed near Riga in November 1941, when he witnessed a mass shooting of Jews, including a thousand just arrived from Berlin.

In British captivity in April 1945, Bruns, by then a Major-General, was overheard by hidden microphones [the verbatim transcripts are accessible from our Index at right] whispering to fellow prisoners what he had seen.

There is no question whatever about the authenticity of these files, which ("Holocaust denier") David Irving was the first to find and use them in his works on Hitler (1977, 1991), Goering (1987), Goebbels (1996), and the Nuremberg Trial (1997). He has also read them out to scores of audiences around the world and drawn the attention of Holocaust historians like Gerald Fleming to them.

From the general's description of the dimension of the pits, they could have held perhaps one to two thousand victims each. This gives a dimension to this particular atrocity.

What is interesting is Hitler's distant role in this. Bruns talks vaguely of a "Führer order," but does not describe it. In fact when his superiors complained about the atrocity to Hitler's headquarters (see final paragraphs) the order came from there to halt such mass executions immediately.

The documents can be found in the Public Record Office, London, as file number WO.208/4169.

What General Walter Bruns said in 1945 (when he thought we weren't listening):

• April 25, 1945: original text, in German

• April 25, 1945: original text, translated into English

• What David Irving wrote about this episode in Goebbels. Mastermind of the Third Reich (London, 1996)
• Memorial to be erected at site of Riga shootings witnessed by Colonel Walter Bruns

Our opinion

Revisionists must not make the mistake of claiming, crudely speaking, that no bodily harm whatever came to the Jews during the Third Reich. But nor should their opponents allege that Germans alone were the perpetrators. Or (as the Israelis claimed in June 1987) that the Bruns document "proves" Hitler's direct involvement.

We shall reproduce here over the next weeks several documents indicative of atrocities which did occur (and we draw attention to the British intercepts, already posted, of SS unit code messages from the Eastern Front). What seems important is an assessment of the scale of the atrocities, and the degree to which they were ad hoc (like My Lai) or institutionalised massacres (like Hiroshima, Dresden, Lidice).