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Real History: things the Court overlooked The David Irving v Penguin Ltd and Prof Deborah Lipstadt ON THE DAY of closing statements, March 15, 2000, Mr Justice Gray invited the Defendants to submit a supplementary note on certain matters of history (see transcript, Day 32 ). Mr Richard Rampton QC (right) submitted this unusual note, two days after the closing speeches had been made. [Answered by: Mr Irving’s Final Submission

on March 21 to Judge Gray ] Supplementary Note by the Defendants: 17 March 2000 Prepared in accordance with the request of the Honourable Mr Justice Gray made on 15 March 2000.

THE purpose of this note is to demonstrate, by reference to key documents and events already referred to in the two chronologies contained m section 5(i)(e)(A) and 5(ii) (principally the latter) of the D[efendant’]s main submission, that the proposition that Hitler did not know about or authorise the genesis and implementation of the mass extermination of the Jews by gassing is unsustainable. 2.

Following Hitler’s statement of 18 August 1941 that his prophecy of 30 January 1939 was coming true, on. 24 August 1941 Hitler called a halt to the euthanasia programme which he had initiated in October 1939. The gassing specialists of the euthanasia programme were then transferred to the East. In September 1941 an experimental gassing of Soviet POW’s and others took place in Auschwitz (see page 1 of 5(ii)). 3.

During October 1941 Hitler twice more referred to the importance of exterminating (‘ausrotten’) the Jewish plague (6 and 21 October 1941). 4. On 23 October 1941 Jewish emigration from the German sphere of influence was forbidden. 5. On 25 October 1941 Himmler met Globocnik in Mogilev, where an extermination camp was about to be built, to receive a report of a meeting between Globocnik and Frank, the General Governor.

On the same day, Wetzel of the Ostministerium in Berlin met Brack of the Führer’s Chancellery, who had been involved in the euthanasia programme; and then Eichmann, Heydrich’s special adviser on Jewish policy, Wetzel then drafted a letter to be sent by his boss, Rosenberg, the Reichsminister for the Occupied Eastern Territories, to Lohse, the Reichskommissar for the Ostland.

According to this letter, Brack was ready to help construct gassing apparatuses in Riga and there were no objections if Jews not fit for work were “removed” by these apparatuses. Then, on the evening of the same day, Himmler and Heydrich met Hitler. 6.

At this meeting Hitler is recorded as having made yet further reference to the extermination (‘ausrotten’) of the Jews; which, of course, had already been under way, by means of shooting, for some time and was about to start by means of systematic, large-scale gassing. 7. In the early part of November 1941, there was the first testing of a gas van in Sachsenhausen, in which 30 prisoners were killed by exhaust fumes; and the construction of the extermination camp at Belzec commenced. 8.

On the evening of 16 November 1941, at the Wolfsschanze, Himmler and Rosenberg met Hitler. Earlier that day, Goebbels’ article in ‘Das Reich’ had appeared, in which he made reference