 Deborah
Lipstadt's Defence (continued) All
hyperlinks are added by this Website and are not
part of the original document | Meaning (i)-(iii)(v):
"Hitler's War"
(unattributed page references are to "Hitler's
War") (16) In 1977, the English edition of the
Plaintiff's book, "Hitler's War" was published. The
purpose of Hitler's War, informing its massive
documentary presentation, was to present a revised
picture of Hitler by transferring both the
political and military errors and the crimes
ascribed to him to others: the errors to his
generals, the crimes to his political
associates.  (17) As in the case of the death of Sikorski
(see (49) below), the Plaintiff had one vital
document, which he declared (p.xiv) was
"incontrovertible evidence" that Hitler was not
responsible for the extermination of the Jews -
indeed knew nothing about it (until October 1943)
it was carried out behind his back by Himmler. This
"incontrovertible evidence" is an entry in
Himmler's telephone log-book recording a call on 20
November 1941 made by Himmler, then at the
Führer's Headquarters in East Prussia, to his
deputy, Reinhard Heydrich, head of the Reich
Security Main Office, then in
Prague. (18) The Plaintiff claimed (at p.xiv): "Many people, particularly in Germany
and Austria, had an interest in propagating the
accepted version that the order of one madman
[Hitler] originated the entire massacre
[of the Jews]. Precisely when the order
was given and in what form has, admittedly,
never been established. In 1939? - but the
secret extermination camps did not begin
operating until December 1941. At the January
1942 "Wannsee Conference"? - but the
incontrovertible evidence is that Hitler ordered
on November 30, 1941, that there was to be "no
liquidation" of the Jews (without much
difficulty I found in Himmler's private files
his own handwritten note on
this)." | (19) This claimed the Plaintiff, (e.g at pp.332,
393 and 504) proved that Hitler positively forbade
the murder of the Jews (of which somewhat
inconsistently, he was declared by the Plaintiff to
be unaware). Thus, the Plaintiff could conclude,
the Final Solution, and extermination of Jews in
the Gas Chambers were the unauthorised policy of
Himmler alone. (20) In fact, the said note proved no such
thing. The Himmler note actually read (in
translation): "Transport of Jews from Berlin. No
liquidation". It is quite clear that the order (even if it was
Hitler's) applied (as the Plaintiff must have been
aware, since he read it) to a particular transport
(i.e. train load) of Jews only: it was an
exception. A particular liquidation would not have
been forbidden unless it would otherwise have
happened. (21) Further, the said document, like any
document, has to be seen in its context, from which
the Plaintiff detached it. Although the full diary
page entry was reproduced in facsimile in a plate
in the book, the plate was not transcribed apart
from the two sentences set out in (20) above. The
lay reader would not have been able to understand
Himmler's handwriting (in German) from the plate or
the significance of the rest of the diary entry.
Additionally, the transportation of Jews from
Berlin and their semi-public murder in Riga was
causing unrest both in Berlin and among the
occupying troops in Riga; and so the order was
given that this train-load was not to be liquidated
(although in fact it was liquidated since the
particular exception arrived too
late). (22) The Plaintiff, in the context to add
credibility to his argument that Hitler (unlike
Himmler and Goebbels) did not know of the Final
Solution, manipulated and distorted the effect of
an entry in Goebbels' diary on 27 March 1942; and
further, then placed a remark on Hitler out of
context and out of chronological order: (i) The Plaintiff wrote:"The ghastly secrets of Treblinka and
Auschwitz were well kept [from Hitler].
Goebbels wrote a frank summary of them in his
diary on March 27, 1942, but evidently held his
tongue when he met Hitler two days later, for he
quotes only Hitler's remark: "The Jews must get
out of Europe. If need be, we must resort to the
most brutal methods ..." (p.392) (ii) In fact Goebbels did not meet Hitler "2
days later". The remark the Plaintiff attributes
to Hitler was actually made 20 March 1942; (iii) The relevant part of Goebbels' diary
entry on 27 March 1942 read as follows: "Beginning with Lublin, the Jews under the
General Government are now being evacuated
eastward. The procedure is pretty barbaric and
is not to be described here more definitely. Not
much will remain of the Jews. About 60 per cent
of them will have to be liquidated; only about
40 per cent of them can be used for forced
labour. The former Gauleiter of Vienna
[Globocnik] who is to carry out this
measure, is doing it with considerable
circumspection and in a way that does not
attract too much attention. Though the judgment
now being visited upon the Jews is barbaric,
they fully deserve it. The prophecy which the
Führer made about them for having brought
on a new world war, is beginning to come true in
a most terrible manner. One must not be
sentimental in these matters. If we did not
fight the Jews, they would destroy us. It's a
life-death struggle between the Aryan race and
the Jewish bacillus. No other government and no
other regime would have the strength for such a
global solution as this. Here, once again, the
Führer is the undismayed champion of a
radical solution, which is made necessary by
existing conditions and is therefore inexorable.
Fortunately a whole series of possibilities
presents itself to us in wartime which would be
denied us in peace. We shall have to profit by
this. The ghettos that will be emptied in the
cities of the General Government will now be
refilled with Jews thrown out of the Reich
..." Return
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| Plaintiff's
Claim | (iv) By not quoting this most
significant diary entry, and thereby avoiding
the explicit and significant reference to the
Führer in that entry, the Plaintiff could
(and did) misuse the part of the entry in which
Goebbels wrote a "frank summary" of the fate of
the Jews, in order to demonstrate that Goebbels
(whilst aware himself of what was happening) was
one of those who hid from Hitler that new acts
of murder had begun on the largest possible
scale. In fact, the entry showed the
opposite. (23) In support of his argument that Hitler was
not responsible and did not know of the
extermination of the Jews, the Plaintiff
misleadingly claimed (at p 327) that "Hitler's
surviving adjutants, secretaries and staff
stenographers have all uniformly testified that
never once was the extermination of either Russian
or European Jews mentioned - even confidentially -
at Hitler's headquarters." The said former members
of Hitler's circle all stated that whilst it was
true that Hitler never spoke in their presence of
the extermination of the Jews, they could not
imagine that Hitler had not known about
it. (24) The Plaintiff (in the context, to add
credibility to his argument that Hitler did not
know) claimed as fact that "Even SS General Karl
Woolf, Himmler's Chief of Staff and liaison officer
to Hitler, was at this time [summer 1942]
ignorant of the [extermination] programme
that now got under way" (p 327). The Plaintiff
omitted to inform his readers: (i) that Wolff's claim to that effect
in the Munich District Court in 1964, when
charged with complicity in the killings, was
rejected by the Court which "could not accept
the claim of the defendant [Wolff] since
it is not in accordance with the truth."; and(ii) that Wolff has received a letter dated
11 April 1942 from SS Gruppenführer Dr.
Herald Turner, the SS Military Administrator of
Serbia, which read: "Already months ago I had all Jews we could
catch in this country shot, and concentrated all
Jewish women and children in one camp. With the
help of the SD [security police] we have
obtained a "delousing-car" [gassing car]
thanks to which we will clear this camp within
14 days to four weeks. The moment is coming
however, when the Jewish officers now under the
protection of the Geneva Convention in prison
camps will discover, whether we like it or not,
that their families no longer exist, and this
could easily lead to complications when these
individuals are released. They like their
"racial mates", [Rassengenossen] will
not be around for long and thus this whole
matter will be finally
concluded". (25) The Plaintiff, whilst uncritically
accepting statements which supported his
exculpation of Hitler (for example, by Wolff, and
Hitler's valet, Krause), ignored those which did
not (such as those of the former SD officer,
Wilhelm Höttl, and the commander of Auschwitz,
Rudolf Höss) or distorted such
statements. (26) The Plaintiff manipulated Hitler's
discussions at a conference at Klessheim in April
1943 with the Romanian head of state, Marshall
Antonescu and with the Hungarian Regent Admiral
Horthy, in order to obscure evidence of Hitler's
increased intervention in the Final Solution after
Stalingrad: (i) In April 1943, Hitler attempted to
persuade both heads of state to adopt similar
radical measures towards the Jews of their
countries to those adopted against the remaining
few thousand Jews of the Reich: in particular,
Hitler was dissatisfied that Hungary's 800,000
Jews could still move about the country with
relative freedom. On 16 April 1943, Horthy
answered the reproaches, and, clearly alluding
to reports known to him about the liquidation of
the Jews stated that he had done everything that
could be decently done against the Jews, but it
was after all impossible to murder them or
otherwise eliminate them. Hitler then declared
that ... there is no need for that; Hungary
could put the Jews into concentration camps just
as had been done in Slovakia ... When there was
talk of murdering the Jews, he [the
Führer] had to state that there was
only one murderer namely the Jew who had
provoked this war ... [see minutes of
Hitler's conference with Antonescu and Horthy
according to Hillgruber, Stattsmanner und
Diplomaten bei Hitler, Vol. II (1970)]; | (ii) On the following day, 17 April,
Hitler and Ribbentrop (the Foreign Minister)
brought the subject up again, and according to
the record (op.cit): "In reply to Horthy's
question, what should be done with the Jews
after he had already deprived them of almost any
means of existence - he after all could not beat
them to death - the Foreign Minister answered
that the Jews must either be annihilated or sent
to concentration camps - there is no other way."
Hitler then stated:"They [the Jews] are just parasites.
This state of affairs had not been tolerated in
Poland; if the Jews there refused to work, they
were shot. Those who could not work just wasted
away, they had to be treated as tuberculosis
bacilli which could infect a healthy organism.
This was by no means cruel when one considered
that even innocent creatures like deer and hares
had to be put down to prevent damage. Why should
the beasts that had brought Bolshevism down on
us, command more pity." (iii) The Plaintiff, when dealing with
Hitler's said statements (at p.509) attempted to
modify their obvious significance by the
following means: Ribbentrop's aforesaid statement in
the presence of Hitler (that the Jews must
either be annihilated or sent to
concentration camps) was consigned to a
footnote to the appendix to "Hitler's War";Hitler's remarks (only part of which were
quoted) were introduced by the Plaintiff with
a reference to the warsaw Ghetto Revolt
(which had not even been mentioned in the
conference with Horthy), thus falsely making
them appear to refer only to an action that
was limited in scope and carried out for a
specific reason; after quoting part of what Hitler said on
17 April (see (ii) above), the Plaintiff
presented the discussion between Horthy and
Hitler as terminating with Horthy's question
and Hitler's remark of the previous day,
namely when in reply to Horthy's direct
question if he should murder the Jews, Hitler
said "there is no need for that"; thus
grossly distorting the significance of what
Hitler had said on 17 April. (27) The Plaintiff claimed (at page 12) that "it
is harder to establish a documentary link between
him [Hitler] and the murderous activities
of SS "task forces"." The Plaintiff omitted to draw
the reader's attention to a document of 9 September
1939 in which Admiral Canaris tells Field Marshall
Keitel that his understanding was that there was an
order from Hitler for "grosse Füsillierungen"
(large shootings) in Poland. (28) The Plaintiff relied on the absence of any
written order for the extermination of the Jews
bearing Hitler's signature, ignoring a basic
feature of Hitler's dictatorship, namely his
frequent preference for oral instructions, over
written directives, especially in secret
matters. (29) At p.331, in order to suggest that (at the
material time) Hitler did not know of or favour a
massacre of the Jews, and was not pursuing any
active policy against them, the Plaintiff falsified
and took out of context remarks recorded as having
been made by Hitler on 25 October 1941 (in Hitler's
table talk). The Plaintiff was thereby able to draw
a false analogy between Hitler's attitude to the
Jews, on the one hand, and his attitude to Bishop
Galen (an opponent of the Euthanasia Programme) and
the Vatican on the other: (i) The Plaintiff wrote: Return
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| Plaintiff's
Claim | "No documentary evidence exists that
Hitler was aware that the Jews were being
massacred upon their arrival. His remarks, noted
by Bormann's adjutant Heinrich Heim late on
October 25 1941, indicate that he did not favour
it: "... By the way - it is not a bad thing that
public rumour attributes to us a plan to
exterminate the Jews. Terror is a salutary
thing." Hitler added that just as he was
sidestepping an open clash with the Vatican by
postponing the final reckoning with Bishop von
Galen until later, "with the Jews too I have
found myself remaining inactive. There's no
point in adding to one's difficulties at a time
like this."" (p.331)(ii) In respect of two of Hitler's sentences
used by the Plaintiff as set out above, Henrich
Heim in fact recorded Hitler's words as
follows: "It is a good thing (is useful) if we (our
arrival is) are preceded by terror-reports that
we are exterminating Jewry ... About the Jews
too, I had to remain inactive for a long
time." (iii) The Plaintiff by changing the tense of
the sentence, "About the Jews too ...", falsely
made it appear that Hitler was not at that time,
pursuing an active policy against the Jews, when
the sentence, as properly translated made it
clear that the contrary was true; (iv) Further, by adding the words "plan" and
"public rumour", the Plaintiff completely
distorted the meaning of the sentence "It is a
good thing (is useful) if our actions are
preceded by terror-reports that we are
exterminating Jewry". Hitler did not say that
the extermination was a rumour, let alone an
incorrect rumour as the Plaintiff implied; nor
did Hitler speak of a plan, but of the fact that
Jews were being exterminated (by that time at
least half a million Jews had been shot and
buried in the Baltics and Byelorussia); (v) Moreover, the sentence, "There's no point
in adding to one's difficulties at a time like
this", in its context, plainly referred to
Hitler's decision to postpone his "settling of
accounts" with Bishop Galen and the Vatican, not
(as the Plaintiff falsely suggested), to any
postponement by Hitler of an active policy
against the Jews. (30) (i) As further evidence of Hitler's
innocence, the Plaintiff maintained (at p.851),
that Ribbentrop, writing about Hitler from his
cell in Nuremberg, exonerated Hitler of any
responsibility for the extermination of the
Jews. The Plaintiff quoted Ribbentrop as
follows: "How things came to the destruction of
the Jews, I just don't know ... But that he
[Hitler] ordered it, I refuse to
believe, because such an act would be wholly
incompatible with the picture I always had of
him".The Plaintiff however, omitted the second
part of Ribbentrop's text which read: "On the
other hand, judging from Hitler's last will, one
must suppose that he at least knew about it, if,
in his fanaticism against the Jews, he didn't
also order it." (ii) After the publication of "Hitler's War",
when challenged about that omission, the
Plaintiff said it was "irrelevant" to the logic
of his argument, and that he did not "want to
confuse the reader". | (31) The Plaintiff (to give weight to his
argument that the killing of the Jews was of an ad
hoc nature), gave a misleading account of the
Wannsee Conference of January 1942, on the Final
Solution to the Jewish Question. The Plaintiff
treated the Conference as a routine meeting in
which Heydrich briefed the leading government
officials in Berlin to the effect that "the
Führer had sanctioned the evacuation of all
Jews to the eastern territories .. where they would
build roads until they dropped" (p.391). In fact,
it was decided at that conference that, by
agreement with Hitler, the emigration of the Jews
would be replaced by "evacuation to the East", a
euphemism for liquidation, and that of the 11
million Jews eventually involved in this
"evacuation", the operation should begin with "the
2.5 million Jews of the General Government, the
majority of whom were unfit for
work". (32) (i) In order, again to exculpate Hitler
of responsibility for the fate of the European
Jews, the Plaintiff mistranslated and
misrepresented the meaning of Nazi terminology
used for their destruction. Alfred Rosenberg,
the Reich Minister for the Eastern Occupied
Territories, wrote a summary of a conversation
with Hitler on 14 December 1941. In that summary
Rosenberg noted that he had recommended that he
(Rosenberg) say nothing in a forthcoming speech
about the extermination of the Jews: "Ich stand
auf Standpunkt von der Austrottung des Judentums
nicht zu sprechen". The Führer, Rosenberg
noted, agreed;(ii) The Plaintiff (at p.356) confined the
summary of that conversation to a footnote, and
translated Rosenberg's note as follows: "I said
I took the view that I shouldn't mention the
stamping out of Judaism". (iii) However, when the verb "ausrotten", or
the noun "Ausrottung" was used in connection
with the extermination of the Jews but were not
attributed to, or used in the presence of
Hitler, the Plaintiff translated them as
"extermination" (for example at p.867 and
pp.575-76n). (33) (i) In "Hitler's War", the Plaintiff
failed to draw attention to one of Himmler's
minutes (dated 7 October 1942), and in the
Plaintiff's possession, which contained the word
"Globus" as a subject for discussion with Hitler
on that day. "Globus" was Himmler's pet name for
Odilo Globocnik, the head of the Einstaz
Reinhard (see (2)(vi) above and (22) above);(ii) After the publication of "Hitler's War",
when the Second Defendant drew the Plaintiff's
attention to that minute, and asked him what he
thought Himmler could have been discussing with
Hitler on 7 October 1942 in connection with
Glonocnik other than the murder of the Jews, the
Plaintiff refused to acknowledge the minute's
obvious significance (since it failed to accord
with his theory that Hitler did not then know of
the murder of the Jews); and said the Second
Defendant and her colleague would have to look
at Globocnik's personnel file in the Berlin
archives to see whether he got a promotion that
day. Return
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