Holocaust Controveries: alleged March 15, 1940 Himmler speech about extermination of Poles is most probably a forgery

[Lamprecht]

Interestingly, the Holocaust believers at Holocaust Controversies have admitted that a alleged speech made by Himmler on March 15, 1940 is a "forgery"


http://holocaustcontroversies.blogspot. ... mmler.html

A short excerpt of the article:

Correction Corner #8: the alleged Himmler speech about extermination of Poles is most probably a forgery.
Author: Sergey Romanov

1. Introduction.

In the Eastern Bloc literature as well as in the modern Polish studies on the Nazi policies an alleged speech made by Himmler on March 15, 1940 before the concentration camp commandants in the occupied Poland is quoted quite often. Himmler is reported to have said:

All skilled workers of Polish origin are to be utilized in our war industry; then all Poles will disappear from this world.
In fulfilling this very responsible task, you must destroy Polishness* quickly in prescribed stages. I give all the camp commanders my full authorization...
[...]
The hour is drawing closer when every German will have to stand the test. It is therefore necessary that the great German nation sees its main task in exterminating all Poles...
...

The document in question, dated 24.08.1943, was first introduced by the Soviet prosecution during the first Nuremberg trial on 02.08.1946 and received the designation USSR-522
...
Let's sum up:
- this document has failed the factual test (its key claim is that Himmler made a speech on 15.03.1940 in occupied Poland, whereas Himmler was in Berlin that whole day);
- this document has failed the linguistic test (it is unlikely to have been written by a native speaker);
- the document contradicts the actual known Nazi policies (and Himmler's proposals) towards Poles;
- the style and the content of this document are more compatible with it being a propagandistic forgery rather than a real instruction to a confidential informant.

Conclusion: these points, taken together, show that this document is most probably a forgery.

Only liars need to resort to forgeries. Will they ever admit the Posen speeches are forgeries? Don't hold your breath, because Jews are the ones targeted in that fake, rather than Poles


Another fraudulent document to add to the long list of Soviet forgeries:

The Soviet Union's documented use of document forgeries, Active Measures
viewtopic.php?t=12297

[Hektor]

Seems the chess-players over there at "Holocaust Controversies are sacrificing a pawn:

Sergey Romanov said...
Contrast this likely fake with the unimpeachably authentic Himmler speeches in which he rants about the extermination of Jews, like the Posen speeches or the Sonthofen speech:

https;//phdn.org/archives/holocaust-history.org/himmler-poznan/

Monday, April 01, 2019 6:01:00 pm

... so they can salvage another dubious trinket of more importance to them.

[borjastick]

Seems the chess-players over there at "Holocaust Controversies are sacrificing a pawn:

Sergey Romanov said...
Contrast this likely fake with the unimpeachably authentic Himmler speeches in which he rants about the extermination of Jews, like the Posen speeches or the Sonthofen speech:

https;//phdn.org/archives/holocaust-history.org/himmler-poznan/

Monday, April 01, 2019 6:01:00 pm

... so they can salvage another dubious trinket of more importance to them.

Correct. Romanov is negotiating with the ill informed without their knowledge. he allows a small gift and then pushes like hell on the Himmler speech that he claims proves intent to kill all jews, while completely forgetting the obvious, that there are no dead jews to be found in any number in any 'death camp'. Oops!

[Werd]

Sorry but there is NOTHING authentic about the Posen speeches. This was proven years ago but everyone ignored it. The reasons will become apparent. Especially the shellac versus tape issues.

It was completely feasible to edit sound recordings after Germany was defeated in 1945, since magnetic recording tape, which unlike wire recording or phonograph record is easily cut and spliced, had already been invented (by a German) in 1928. According to the U.S. National Archives (cited by The Holocaust History Project) the most common method of recording speeches in the Third Reich was direct recording to phonograph disc. Echos in this recording however indicate that the speech was stored for years on tape.** This means that ample opportunity to edit the recording existed.

Editing a sound-recording to make it seem more incriminating would not be the most outrageous thing that the Allies did in their propaganda during and after the war. (Cf. the U.S. Army’s Why We Fight series, featuring undeniably fake Hitler quotes that could have been exposed by anybody who bothered to check, and deliberately misrepresented documentary footage from China.)

It makes perfect sense to suppose that some similar shenanigans were committed in this case, because the content of Himmler’s Posen speech of 4 October 1943, as it has been presented to us in this recording, makes no sense, even in relation to itself.

https://whitenationalistnews.wordpress. ... on-speech/

Check this out as well

Posen Speech Revisited
viewtopic.php?f=2&t=10278

Plus there are a few posts from the David Icke forum that really opened my eyes a few weeks ago.

The following quotes are from Himmler's Posen Speech
https://forum.davidicke.com/showthread.php?t=238927

In the holocaust texts by Landau, Niewyk and Nicosia, Longerich, Ehrenfreund, Friedlander and Bloxham discussion of the speech is limited. Some do not mention it, some do not quote it and some give it very little analysis. The key thing here is that none of these authors present it as having any key importance to the holocaust debate, which is very surprising given its implications if genuine.

if they has exterminated all German Jews, why did Rigg write the book Hitler's Jewish Soilders chronicling the 150,000 Jews in the wehrmacht and SS?

The manuscript of the speech, which bears no signature or other endorsement.

This talk was allegedly secret, though we are told a recording was made which then fell into the hands of Rosenberg who kept a copy that was then discovered by Allied investigators.

The document, in accompanying material, was said to have been found in Rosenberg's files. However, Rosenberg was never questioned regarding it, which we may suggest, if kosher, should have happened. Additionally, Rosenberg was asked about another document to which he denied was ever in his possession. (IMT, vol. 11, 561.)

The so-called Posen speech of RFSS Heinrich Himmler from Oct. 4, 1943, is often regarded as a forgery by revisionist. I may add a technical aspect to this discussion not mentioned so far, which I would like to present for further discussion.

The speech played back to the audience at the Nuremberg Tribunal had been recorded with the so-called needle technology on a so-called shellac disc. Records made of PVC were introduced to the market only around 1950. A shellac disk had not more than 15 minutes of recording time. It appears that there was only one disk, which could, of course, only hold a small part of the entire speech.
During the years 1939-1940, the German electrical company AEG had perfected the magnet audio technique for market introduction, that is, a technology allowing the recording of spoken words or music on a plastic tape coated with ferro-magnetic particles. The decisive step was the invention of high frequency pre-magnetization by Braunmühl and Weber in 1940. This new method allowed a sound quality many dimensions superior to that of all prior methods. At the same time, the recording device was more robust, easier to handle and less sensitive. The new technology spread quickly. By the end of 1940 all German radio stations were equipped with it, and 70% to 80% of all German radio transmissions may well have been played back from such tapes. This figure rose to 90% around 1950. These high-value AEG tape recorders were also used as a supporting device to prepare verbal protocols during highly important conferences.
Nothing comparable existed during the war in England and the US. British radio stations had introduced the tape recording method by Blattner and Stille, which was vastly inferior to the AEG system. I do not know what was used during those years in the US. Perhaps another reader can help to find out.
Can one imagine in such a situation that a German sound technician in Posen, at that time a major German city, records a speech of an important National Socialist personality, after all the second most powerful man in the nation, with a technology that must have appeared prehistoric in his eyes? I cannot believe this.
The victorious powers, however, who played back Himmler’s alleged speech from a shellac disk, had no other choice. They could not handle the German tape technology yet; it was of course impossible to play an English sound tape. Thus, the shellac disk was the only option for them, since at that time it was still a mass product in Germany, because the consumers still had the playing devices for them. That the sound quality of the shellac disk was much inferior to the AEG tape, was very much welcome by the forgers. A voice imitator can simulate any person; only when it comes to the details, to the side frequencies, a forgery can be discovered. And these side frequencies can be established only from a high quality sound tape.
By the way: Despite its high sound quality, this AEG tape was not allowed as evidence in German courts of these days. Yet for the Nuremberg tribunal, the much inferior shellac disk sufficed.

B.

I suggest people also check this out regarding the disk problem.

https://forum.davidicke.com/showpost.php?s=fe819c44a879af9ca7281d1f01d06ecb&p=1061370934&postcount=4
https://forum.davidicke.com/showpost.php?s=fe819c44a879af9ca7281d1f01d06ecb&p=1061372357&postcount=16

First link:

Do the recording methods of the Posen speech raise questions as to it's authenticity?

An individual writes into the CODOH:

The so-called Posen speech of RFSS Heinrich Himmler from Oct. 4, 1943, is often regarded as a forgery by revisionist. I may add a technical aspect to this discussion not mentioned so far, which I would like to present for further discussion.

The speech played back to the audience at the Nuremberg Tribunal had been recorded with the so-called needle technology on a so-called shellac disc. Records made of PVC were introduced to the market only around 1950. A shellac disk had not more than 15 minutes of recording time. It appears that there was only one disk, which could, of course, only hold a small part of the entire speech.
During the years 1939-1940, the German electrical company AEG had perfected the magnet audio technique for market introduction, that is, a technology allowing the recording of spoken words or music on a plastic tape coated with ferro-magnetic particles. The decisive step was the invention of high frequency pre-magnetization by Braunmühl and Weber in 1940. This new method allowed a sound quality many dimensions superior to that of all prior methods. At the same time, the recording device was more robust, easier to handle and less sensitive. The new technology spread quickly. By the end of 1940 all German radio stations were equipped with it, and 70% to 80% of all German radio transmissions may well have been played back from such tapes. This figure rose to 90% around 1950. These high-value AEG tape recorders were also used as a supporting device to prepare verbal protocols during highly important conferences.
Nothing comparable existed during the war in England and the US. British radio stations had introduced the tape recording method by Blattner and Stille, which was vastly inferior to the AEG system. I do not know what was used during those years in the US. Perhaps another reader can help to find out.
Can one imagine in such a situation that a German sound technician in Posen, at that time a major German city, records a speech of an important National Socialist personality, after all the second most powerful man in the nation, with a technology that must have appeared prehistoric in his eyes? I cannot believe this.
The victorious powers, however, who played back Himmler’s alleged speech from a shellac disk, had no other choice. They could not handle the German tape technology yet; it was of course impossible to play an English sound tape. Thus, the shellac disk was the only option for them, since at that time it was still a mass product in Germany, because the consumers still had the playing devices for them. That the sound quality of the shellac disk was much inferior to the AEG tape, was very much welcome by the forgers. A voice imitator can simulate any person; only when it comes to the details, to the side frequencies, a forgery can be discovered. And these side frequencies can be established only from a high quality sound tape.
By the way: Despite its high sound quality, this AEG tape was not allowed as evidence in German courts of these days. Yet for the Nuremberg tribunal, the much inferior shellac disk sufficed.

A quick internet search shows that he may be correct.

For those unaware a shellac disc is one of those hard and easily breakable records that your grandmother may have owned. Think the HMV gramophone.

At this time, shellac discs were surpassed and not the standard for sound recording in Germany. AEG tapes recorded on a Magnetophon were (). This makes it highly unlikely that if the recording of the speech was authentic it would have been recorded onto a shellac disc. Additionally, a shellac disc has – at most – a recording time of five minutes to each side (http://www.lyricsvault.net/history/HistoryOfShellacDisk.html). As stated earlier, Himmler's speech was a long one. The transcript runs to 24,000 words. This is evidenced by Case 11 of the trial reporting that

“the Rosenberg files were rescreened and 44 records were discovered to be a phonographic recording of Himmler’s Poznan speech of October 4, 1943.” (NMT, vol. 13, 318.)

Just think about this for a moment. If the speech filled the length of 44 records the individual recording the conference would have been required to change discs 44 times and turn discs at least 87 times during. This must have been an absolute nightmare for him to make! This and the practicalities of the endeavour suggest that it is unlikely the German's, if recording, would have used the format presented at the trial.

This leaves us with the suggestion that the recording may potentially be an Allied fake. Wikipedia suggests that this may be correct

"American audio engineer Jack Mullin acquired two Magnetophon recorders and fifty reels of magnetic tape from a German radio station at Bad Nauheim near Frankfurt in 1945. The allied forces were traveling through Germany during WWII when they first discovered the device."

What it suggested here is that the Allies had no knowledge or experience with this format until they invaded and this, if the recording of the speech is a forgery, may explain why American standard shellac disc's were entered as evidence rather than the German standard AEG tape.

Lastly let me point out that Breitman in The Architect of Genocite claims that tapes were entered (pg. 242.) However, the trial documents contradict him. (NMT, vol. 13, 318.)

Second link:

Originally Posted by johnfb View Post
Boots, my man, you are like a big old firewall taking on viruses as they come along.....well done again.

!!!

If I didn't find this so very funny I would surely drop down dead. We're in the Twilight Zone people!

You have celebrated a man who makes assertions without providing supplementary evidence, copy and pastes wholesale from wikipedia, where the vast majority of the citations are sourced from the same book (Smith, Peterson: Heinrich Himmler – which he will not have read), and addresses little of what is found in my posts.

However as I am a reasonable man who always enjoys having his perceptions shattered I will do some more reading, try to find the above book online and look into the second speech.

Boots, please address these topics:

1. “The Pozen speech is authentic and has been crossed checked with other recorded speeches given by Himmler.” Would you be kind enough to provide any and all analysis that you have discovered?

2. What is your take on the inconsistencies within the text? i.e. a. The willingness to treat Eastern Europeans as “human animals,” which is seemingly contradicted by the behaviour of National Socialists during the occupation of France. b. Why the Germans would be nervous or tense about Austria or the Sudetenland? What is the four year plan? c. Why would the famous extermination lines be found in a section subtitled Judenevacuierung? Why would the Allies withdraw the subtitle within the document presented to the court? d. The discussion of communists within the Reich that may contradict the argument that an extermination policy was in place. d. The text presenting Himmler as suggesting all Jewish peoples within Germany have been dealt with when Jews were to be found in the National Socialist armed forces and lived within the Reich as private citizens.

3. What is your take on the physical errors found within the document? i.e. a. The misnumbering of pages. b. No official signature or stamp to be found.

4. What is your take on the problems of the trial? i.e. a. We being told that the documents were found in Rosenberg's possession even though he was not questioned regarding them. b. Berger's doubt that the voice was Himmler's and his claim that what is found within the document was not what was presented at the speech. c. Judge Powers' claim that “there is no evidence, however, that it was delivered at Poznan or any other particular place” and the lack of analysis of the document. d. Why was only a short portion of the speech presented at the trial?


Also, I cannot see why you bring up Irving all the time unless you're working from a script. Irving is not a holocaust scholar, primarily, and he has little credibility in the revisionist community. I for one disagree with many of his assertions. You’d be better off getting your people to cough up the cash and damage the credibility of Robert Faurisson.

The shellac or wax master plates wasn't surpassed they were still in use, it's true radio station were using magnetic tapes but that doesn't mean the use of shellck wasn't used.

True, though wikipedia has “many speeches ... were recorded.” Of course, wiki isn't the best source (though don't use that after how you post) but we could assume that if not National Socialist speeches then whose? Especially given how renowned they were for embracing new technology. To add, “Magnetophon recorders were widely used in German radio broadcasts during World War II, although they were a closely guarded secret at the time.” The National Socialists controlled the radio industry during this period and this may show that it is highly likely that AEG tapes would have been used over shellac discs. The "guarded secret" line suggests only National Socialists would be privy to the format. Where do you take the argument from here?

How do you not know there weren't a team of people recording the speech?

We do not, but it doesn't seem likely. Take, for instance, the problem of changing the disc 44 times during a live speech. Either Himmler stopped and started during every change or it is reasonable to assume they would have skipped at least part of the talk. The potential for human error is high when dealing with 44 changes.

Also, on the subject of fakery in the recording; no one can make a conclusive claim until the recording has been released and analysed using modern methods. However, keep in mind that the Allies have been exposed for presenting shoddy documents at the trial (soap!) and editing recordings. Most famously, Churchill’s Hun speech. You can hear the differing versions here: http://winstonsmithministryoftruth.blogspot.co.uk/2013/01/churchills-famous-hun-joke-in-congress.html

[Werd]

One more.
https://forum.davidicke.com/showpost.php?p=1061373189&postcount=18

At the end of September 1943, the party chancellery invited all Reichsleiters and Gauleiters, the head of the Hitler Youth Artur Axmann and Reich ministers Albert Speer and Alfred Rosenberg to a conference. It began on 6 October at 9 o'clock in the morning with Speer's reports, his speakers, and four big industries for armament production. Talks from Karl Dönitz and Erhard Milch followed. Himmler held his speech from 17:30 to 19:00.[19]

This comes from a German translation of Sereny's Albert Speer: His Battle with Truth

As I cannot find a copy of this, I dug out my copy of Inside the Third Reich: The Memoirs of” Albert Speer to try and confirm any details. Of note to this thread, I cannot find a single passage in the English translation that deals with Himmler's October 6 speech, let alone the time of it. Additionally, there is nothing relating to Himmler's extermination plans or the holocaust.

While I think Speer would have made the choice of omitting all mention of the above to present himself favourably – it is interesting. One would think he would have something to say about such a significant speech. Of course, he maintains he was never there, but this has been debunked by all and Sundry. (He also initiated Pogroms.)

Himmler Quotes:

[The first one cannot be discussed as wikipedia does not provide a date.]

On 16 December 1943

26 January 1944

On May 5, 1944

May 24, 1944

On June 21, 1944:

“It was the most terrible task and the most terrible order which could have been given to an organisation: the order to solve the Jewish question. In this circle, I may say it frankly with a few sentences. It is good that we had the severity to exterminate the Jews in our domain.”

Firstly, let me begin by saying that (besides copying from wikipedia) it is very poor form to post quotes that come from just a single book to advance a case. (Smith, Peterson: Heinrich Himmler.) As shown in my first post, the same text or quote can be handled a myriad ways by differing authors, even if their end goal is the same.

Luckily, I have a copy of Himmler by Longerich to fill in the pieces that will hopefully provide a source for the quotes.

Longerich presents the June 21, 1944 speech as being an innocent one to generals and suggests no mention of such incriminating lines. (NS 19/4014 Bundesarchiv Berlin.) However, digging further shows wikipedia has got the date wrong. The date of a potentially incriminating speech was made the year before. (June 21, 1943.) However, nothing like what wikipedia claims actually was said is noted. While Longerich does not provide a transcript or reference of there being one, he does give us an order that came from from what was discussed:

“Those ‘members of the Jewish ghetto not required’ were to be ‘evacuated to the east’, in other words, to be murdered” (Longerich, 667.)

This comes from a document numbered NO 2403. This is entirely different from what your source claims. Here Longerich makes implicit his beliefs that this means the murder of Jews, which tells an unthinking reader to treat it as such; but, as always, we have to consult the document for confirmation. The results may shock anyone new to the holocaust debate:

Reichsfuehrer SS
Secret
To:
1. The Higher SS and Police Leader[ (Hoherer SS- und Polizeifuehrer) Ostland
2. Chief of the SS Economic and Administrative Main Office (Chef des SS-Wirtschafts-Verwaltungshauptamtes)

1) I order that all Jews still remaining in ghettos in the Ostland area be collected in concentration camps.
2) I prohibit the withdrawal of Jews from concentration camps for [outside] work from August 1, 1943.
3) A concentration camp is to be built near Riga to which will be transferred the entire manufacture of clothing and equipment now operated by the Wehrmacht outside. All private firms will be eliminated. The workshops are to be solely concentration camp workshops. The Chief of the SS Economic and Administrative Main Office is requested to see to it that there will be no shortfall in the production required by the Wehrmacht as the result of this reorganization.
4) Inmates of the Jewish ghettos who are not required are to be evacuated to the East.
5) As many male Jews as possible are to be taken to the concentration camp in the oil-shale area for the mining of oil-shale.
6) The date set for the reorganization of the concentration camps is August 1, 1943.

signed H. Himmler.

http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/Holocaust/Ostland.html

Firstly, we can see Longerich COMPLETELY misrepresents the document to provide evidence of Himmler (let alone what your quote claims) as sending these poor men off to their deaths. If you read the above, it is very easy to see that the full text details they have a labour shortage and are confining Jews into concentration camps to solve this problem. This is clearly a huge problem at the time as Himmler is no longer outsourcing manufacture to private firms as a cost measure, instead passing production over to Jewish (effectively) slave labour. We can also see that Longerich is making a huge leap by suggesting “evacuated to the East” as meaning murdered. The document clearly states that they are being relocated to mine oil. It should also be noted that logical thinking would suggest that in a time of labour shortage the last thing Himmler would was to consider is liquidating anyone.

In short, Longerich has subverted Himmler's order to fit an extermination agenda. This, however, is all too common in holocaust literature. What is especially frightening about this is Longerich isn't a nobody - this book would have sold tens of thousands and he works for the University of London!

Boots, I was going to address all of your quotes, but doing so would be not worth anyone's time. Peterson Smith, your source, is error prone and manipulates/invents text - more so than most. In trying to confirm the accuracy of your source I looked to a well respected source and found that he too shamefully lies regarding sources. Unless you can provide transcripts of these speeches with the text you have posted I would recommend not continuing to promote them.

Also, please provide an English transcript of the second Posen speech. As far as I am aware one has never been made available to the public.

Lastly, please provide a source for the full recording of the first Posen speech. As far as I am aware only the five minute version that was played at the Nuremberg trial is in existence. Working with what we've got at the moment, five minutes of a speech would be manageable to fake outright. A lengthier recording would pose more problems for potential manipulators.

If anyone wants to have a listen to the five minute Posen extract or have a go at studying it technically they can find it here: http://www.holocaust-history.org/himmler-poznan/

Edit: Here is a speech of Himmler addressing a university for comparison:


Who would have thought the weedy geezer would have a gravely, Alpha-male voice? Not me.

So what have we learned here? That the story about the origin of these so called authentic speeches doesn't really make sense when you consider the available technology at the time the recordings were alleged to have been made.

Another Jew on youtube tries and fails.

Ernst Zundel caught lying again

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DNRGhIowG9g

Here's what you didn't know about that video. They tried to trap Zundel and make him look bad but he said I will only interview you if you allow ME to bring along a recorder and tape this WHOLE INTERVIEW for my personal records. At first they refused. Why? Because they didn't want him to be able to save his image one day if he had to. Eventually they relented because Zundel was going to go public about how a supposedly bulletproof theory of history and perfect journalists APPARENTLY were afraid to let an alleged lunatic document his own lunacy. Which makes little sense of course. And yet that's what happened. So clearly they were scared of Zundel. Now in Michael Hoffman's book THE GREAT HOLOCAUST TRIAL, he talks about this a little.

In seeking to ingratiate himself with the higher ups, Mike Wallace cut a deal with the Anti Defamation League to definitively smear revisionists on Sixty Minutes. The ADL admitted that: "The League worked closely with the staff of CBS's Sixty Minutes in the preparation of a recent segment exposing the fallacies of holocaust denial."

Out of a one hundred minute conversation with Mike Wallace, and jewish producer Barry Landau (who was firing question prompts to Wallace off camera), Sixty Minutes chose to use four minutes of Zundel's remarks, mostly centered around Himmler's Posen speech. Wallace led Zundel to believe he was making a reference to intercepted radio transcripts of the speech but immediatly after Ernst made a comment about Posen the camera cut to a scene of original German documents in a Washington archives, as if to show that Zundel didn't know what he was talking about.

It was indeed a hatchet job but Zundel did preserve a single ace up his well worn sleeve. Before agreeing to be interviewed he insisted, as a prerequisite of his appearance that he be allowed to have the complete interview taped by a friend who possessed professional audio equipment. In desperation Sixty Minutes agreed.

It is a most edifying and entertaining one hundred minutes. Zundel - though always courteous - competely dominates Mike Wallace. He reels off dates, he invokes personalities, he cites reports and when Wallace is particularly scornful or sneering, he jokes with a killer wit which disarms the sanctimony in which acolytes of the holy hoax, attire their glittering generalities and asinine axioms.

If any extended segment of that interview had been broadcast on Sixty Minutes, Zundel would have made thousands of new allies on the spot. As it was, in the four minutes allotted to him he managed to convey an image of a gentleman and a stalwartly defiant revisionist. So in spite of Barry Landau and the ADL, Zundel made some new friends anyway.

[Lamprecht]

Nice info Werd. More on the Posen Speeches

David Irving testified at Ernst Zundel's Holocaust trials in 1988:

"In October 1943, Heinrich Himmler, the chief of the SS, delivered two speeches, one to the SS generals and one to the Gauleiters - the Nazi party district chiefs, the governors of the districts." Irving had examined the transcripts of the speech and other archival materials [...] I arrived at the very strange discovery when I looked at the transcript of both those speeches that those two pages had been retyped at some other date. I can't say whether it was retyped before or after the bulk of the speech, but they had been typed by a different secretary on a different typewriter using different carbon paper. Obviously you only discover this if you look at the original documents which the average historian is not patient enough to do. They had been retyped and they had been repaginated in pencil at that point and I have to say to preempt your question, I have no explanation why. It just raises the fact that a document -- if a document has been retyped at a key point, then I hold that document to be suspect."

From: http://www.ihr.org/books/kulaszka/35irving.html

Irving has also claimed:

"I made the discovery at the time when I was writing my book on Field-Marshal Milch that some sound recording[s] of the Nuremberg trials, for example, were also not of integrity. They had been tampered with. [...] I'm familiar with the fact that certain other recordings in the same archives are not of 100 percent integrity."

Irving also testified that:

"Himmler saying: "The hard decision had to be taken to make this race disappear from earth." [...] the remarkable fact that precisely at this point the typescript changes, a page appears to have been inserted by a different typist, the numeration of the pages changes from a typewritten page number at the top to a pencilled page number at the top, and there are various other indications about that speech that make me queasy. [...] Irving pointed out that what was contained in these pages "changes very much the essence of the speech, depending on whether it is an authentic transcript of the speech or whether that has been tampered with for some reason...I don't think we need to know the motives of people tampering with speeches. It is sufficient for historians to look at a document and say 'This document has been tampered with'; for him then to say, 'In that case, I must set it aside.' [...] at that point in the script, the page relating that very damaging and incriminating sentence has quite clearly been retyped by a different typist on a different typewriter using different carbon paper, and that page has been numbered by pencil and inserted at that point [...] he doesn't make this statement anywhere else when he's delivering almost identical speeches to...similar audiences [...] this isn't just any page...I suppose it is probably the most important page of the most important speech in the whole of the Holocaust history, and this page, of all pages, when we look at it, turned out to have been tampered with."

Irving, from his trial with Lipstadt, one of the Posen speeches is brought up and he points out that the incriminating page was retyped, it "has been typed by a different typist": http://www.fpp.co.uk/Legal/Penguin/tran ... day006.htm
or https://archive.is/oM5jo

Code: Select all

Q. My googlies are I think a little bit more subtle than you sometimes think, Mr Irving. Can you turn on just for reference in this bundle to the next document which is after page 49 of Himmler's Posen speech. My Lord, it is footnote 187.

A. My Lord, would be it be helpful if I pointed out that after making this speech Himmler had everybody who was present sign a list to agree that they had hear the speech, or if they had not heard it to agree that they had read it subsequently. All the SS Generals who were present were required -- I have never seen that on any of Himmler's other speeches.

MR JUSTICE GRAY: What do you say is the significance of that?

A. It is very interesting to speculate, my Lord. I think he was making them into accomplices in his own mind. He was saying: "There you are, now I have told you. Now we are all in it together." It is a very interesting historical document. I have never seen that on any of Himmler's other speeches, that he listed all SS Generals present and made them sign that they had been present and heard the speech or if they not been present that they had read it subsequently.

MR RAMPTON: Mr Irving, Heinrich Himmler kept copies of these speeches, did he not?

A. In various versions. There was the original raw

P-96

transcript and then a corrected transcript.

Q. I know, I happen to have for the 5th May which we are coming to in a minute, I happen to have both versions.

A. Yes. There are also his handwritten notes on the basis of which he spoke.

Q. Yes, Mr Irving, your knowledge is extensive. I want to know why you think it is that Himmler kept copies of his speeches?

A. I keep copies of me speeches.

Q. But you do not talk about having given the order for the extermination of millions of Jews, do you, in your speeches?

A. I have not exterminated millions of Jews, Mr Rampton.

Q. Mr Irving, maybe it is late in the morning or something. Heinrich Himmler's speech is not just this one. We had the one earlier, the 4th October at Posen. We have this one here. We have two more in May 1944, which are quite explicit, at any rate about his role in the extermination of the whole Jewish race?

A. Letting them vanish from the face of the earth, brutally explicit.

Q. Yes, by killing them?

A. Brutally explicit, yes. As he says, by murdering, and not just the men but the women and children too.

Q. Yes, I know that. Why would he keep those admissions of guilt, particularly in 1943 and 1944 by which time he must

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have known that the German world was probably going to come to an end?

A. Why would he have kept it to himself?

Q. Yes. Why did he commit these things to writing and then keep them after he had uttered them to his Generals or his Reichsleiters or whatever they are?

A. I think the problem is we are so often on exactly the same side, Mr Rampton. Have I not frequently allowed in all my books that from this point on Hitler had no reason not to know?

Q. Hitler did know, come on.

A. On precisely this point I have said Hitler had no justification for pleading ignorance, because everybody else immediately around him had been informed, but also you have to set this kind of speech in the context. This is 5th October, 4th and 6th October 1943 rather, at the height of the bombing campaign. There is a reason why Himmler is making a speech like this to the disgruntled SS Generals. Morale is at a low ebb and he is saying, "Hey, we are hitting back, we're doing this to them".

MR JUSTICE GRAY: I am really puzzled. Can I explain why, Mr Irving. When Mr Rampton was putting that passage from the October 1943 speech, 4th October 1943 speech, you were at pains to point out that Himmler was saying that it was he who would have taken the decision, but if you are accepting, as you have throughout, that by October 1943

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Hitler knew about the extermination policy ----

A. I say "from this point on", my Lord, because on the following day ----

Q. But what is the significance of emphasising that it was Himmler's decision if you accept Hitler was in on it?

A. Because Himmler is accepting the responsibility for the job which has now been completed. Himmler is kind of reporting ----

Q. I see, ex post facto.

A. Yes, saying, "We've done it all, the job has been done, I had to take the decision, it was a difficult job for us, but we done it, and I am proud of you, my SS men, for having carried out such a difficult task."

Q. So the knowledge you say Hitler had from October 1943 did not include knowledge of what had been going on in 1942, is that what you are saying?

A. I am saying it is quite likely that he will have ex post facto have learned about all these things, particularly the Gauleiters who went to see him the next day and the SS Generals who went to see him. The same audience went effectively to see Hitler where he lectured them, and it would be stretching the bounds of probability too far to say that not one of them went up to Hitler, one of the old veterans, and said, "Mein Führer, we heard something yesterday which rather disturbed me", but I do not think it did disturb them. I think they rather liked

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it. The eyewitness accounts we have of one of these speeches says that there were roars of applause.

MR RAMPTON: It was ----

A. The Germans were like that.

Q. If you are right, it is something of which Himmler was very proud, is it not?

A. He was proud of his men for having carried out those extremely distasteful tasks.

Q. But he was pleased, if your interpretation is right, and I am going to suggest it is not, but he was pleased to announce to this august gathering that he personally had made the decision to carry out this difficult task?

A. Would it not have been wonderful for him if he had said: "The Führer gave us this task and look how well we have performed his duties for him.

Q. Of course he did.

A. The great temptation would have been there, but he does not say this.

Q. He does not?

A. He says specifically: "I was the one who took the decision".

Q. So that being so you would not expect that in May 1944 he would reveal that he done what he did in consequence of an order, and the only person of course who could have given an order is Hitler?

A. Mr Rampton, shall we get to that document when we get to

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it and look at the precise wording?

Q. Very well. Let us doing that now. I have it open.

MR JUSTICE GRAY: It is page 187.

MR RAMPTON: Page 187.

A. There are of course about ten such speeches and you have just picked out two of them. In none of the others does he make any suggestion that there is a Führer order. So it is not just one speech where there is no reference. It is many speeches.

Q. He makes another such reference later the same month, about three weeks later. We will come to that probably after the adjournment.

A. Are we also going to look at Adolf Hitler's speech of I think it was June 26th 1944?

Q. Yes, indeed I certainly am. Let us start with 5th May 1944. On page 18, tell me who this speech is made to, if you will?

A. I think it is the military leader, the leadership, the top brass, shall we say.

Q. The top brass.

A. I know the names of a number of people who were present. General Stumpff was Air Force; General Reinecke was Germany Army.

MR JUSTICE GRAY: Generals of the Wehrmacht.

MR RAMPTON: These are not SS creatures. These are proper soldiers; these are Generals of the Wehrmacht, are they

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not?

A. Yes, the top brass of the German armed forces.

Q. On page 28 it has been altered. One can see how these pages evolve sometimes. Page 28. My Lord, it looks like an 18, so one has to look at page 27 at the top, page 5 of the file.

A. This is one of the most interesting pages I have ever looked at.

Q. You can tell us everything you know about this page in just a moment when I have referred you to the relevant passage, which I think begins in the middle of the page: The Jewish question has been solved within Germany itself and in general within the countries occupied by Germany". Is that roughly right?

A. Yes.

Q. I am going to read on in the English from Dr Longerich's version. "It was solved in an uncompromising fashion in accordance with the life and death struggle of our nation in which the existence of our blood is at stake." Yes?

A. Yes.

Q. Then ellipse, if you do not mind. Have you got that?

A. Yes.

Q. "You can understand how difficult it was for me"?

A. "You can feel with me how difficult it was" yes.

Q. "To carry out this soldatischen Befehl". What is that?

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A. Soldierly order or military order.

Q. "And which I carried out and went through with a sense of obedience", which word is that? Translate the last part of the sentence for me?

A. "Which I obeyed and carried out from obedience and from a sense of complete conviction".

Q. Obedience to whom, Mr Irving, Hitler or his own sense of what was necessary for the sake of the thousand year Reich?

A. I think the sense of what is coming out of that paragraph is a sense of duty.

Q. So it is the sense of duty, is it, that gives him the soldatischen Befehl?

A. Yes.

Q. A very odd choice of words, is it not, this soldierly order?

A. Yes.

Q. The only person who can give Mr Himmler a soldierly order is Mr Hitler?

A. Absolutely right.

Q. Pardon?

A. Yes.

Q. He is saying: "I did what I did because Hitler told me to"?

A. Yes. I refer to this of course in my Hitler biographies. I quoted this with the ----

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Q. Let me put to you the sort of expression you might use. How do you get yourself out of that one then, Mr Irving?

A. By counting.

Q. By what?

A. Counting.

Q. Counting what?

A. Can I ask you to look at the previous page?

Q. Yes.

A. Can you see the number of the page at the top of the page?

Q. Yes.

A. 27.

Q. Yes.

A. It is typed.

Q. The next one is an altered type. I already drew attention to that.

A. All the following pages have been written in in handwriting.

Q. So what?

A. And so what? Can you continue to count, please? Will you count down on page 27 nine lines to the beginning of the new paragraph.

Q. "In Deutschland"?

A. Yes.

Q. Yes.

A. How many spaces is that paragraph indented by?

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Q. I have absolutely no idea. I am not a typist, Mr Irving.

A. I will count for you. Five spaces indented.

Q. You stop interrogating ----

A. Tap, tap, tap, tap, tap.

Q. You stop interrogating me, if you will, Mr Irving and give me your explanation why, as I now apprehend, you are saying we cannot trust the page we have been looking at?

A. Because it has been typed -- I have looked at the original of this document, Mr Rampton, you are looking at a photocopy. I have looked at the original in the archives. It is typed on different, here onwards it is typed on a different typewriter, this page, the page 28.

Q. Where was it found?

A. What do you mean "where was it found"?

Q. Where was this speech found, Mr Irving?

A. Can I just complete what I am saying?

MR JUSTICE GRAY: Yes, I would like you to because I want to know exactly what you say about ----

A. It is very important, my Lord. It has been typed by a different typist.

Q. Page 28.

A. And this frequently happened. I spotted many diaries that had been fumbled with subsequently or pages of documents. This had been typed by a different typist. They use different ways of typing. You will notice that there is more space after the first line on page 28, after the

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"Reichsführer SS", it has a double space after that instead of a single space on the previous page. She has indented by five spaces at the beginning of each paragraph. I am assuming it is a she.

Q. So what do you infer from that?

A. We do not, my Lord. All we can say is that for some reason this page was retyped at a different date. We do not whether it was retyped during the war, which is the likelihood. We do not know what has been inserted or taken out. On this occasion we do not have the other transcripts of that speech. So that is a page that I am unhappy about pinning a capital issue on. You do not often find a document that has been so clearly tampered with as that.

MR RAMPTON: Oh, yes, there is, for example, at least two versions of the next speech we are coming to.

A. We are looking at this speech though are we not, the fact that change just occurs on this page.

Q. I wish you would sometimes let me ask you a question.

A. I have not really finished what I was speaking abut.

MR JUSTICE GRAY: Let us pause. Finish your answer and then the next question.

A. About the falsification of this particular page, the fact that this particular page has been clearly retyped at a different date and that this is the one page that contains, as I quite agree, a pivotal sentence, makes me

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very unhappy about just relying on this version of that sentence. I am not saying it is a post-war forgery. I think it is unlikely. I think it is the kind of fumbling that goes on during the war, when people have spotted they have said something wrong and so they have put something else in instead. For example, just for one minute I would say I found exactly the same in the private diary of Henry Stimson, who was the American Secretary of War who retyped the pages just before Pearl Harbour to cut out incriminating material, and as he said later said to Henry Morgan: "I have gone through my diaries cutting out everything that incriminates President Roosevelt", you can spot that if you look at the originals, as I always prefer to, rather than looking at printed versions on in this case microcopies.

MR RAMPTON: Mr Irving, we will see when we get to the next speech similar things have happened?

A. Yes.

Q. I am not the least bit resistant to the idea that that particular page, like others of no particular significance, was retyped.

A. Yes.

Q. How many versions of a speech or of pages of a speech do you think you go through before you reach the final version if you type them out or draft them beforehand?

A. Well, I have looked at very many of the original Himmler

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speeches. As I said, I have must have looked at about ten of these kinds of transcripts, and there are transcripts, there is a whole published volume of Himmler speeches, so you end up with a large number of transcripts to look at. This speech I think is the only one where I found a discrepancy of this magnitude which has not been remarked on by the historians. I am very uneasy that it is this page of all the pages that shows the signs of I would wartime tampering.

Q. Not wartime tampering. Can I suggest a natural human process for the production of one amongst several pages that look different? For example, if you look at page 7, the next page, the number at the top of the page has not been typed; it has been handwritten.

A. From thereon they are handwritten, yes, in the entire speech.

Q. Yes, but what is baffling me, Mr Irving, is why you will not actually use your knowledge of the world to advance the most likely explanation of this phenomenon, is that somebody types version one, Himmler looks at it and he says, "Oh, I don't think like that very much", and in those days of course you do not have word processors, so it has to be retyped on a different typewriter, perhaps the same day, perhaps on another day, it matters not. This is Himmler's words in Himmler's speech in Himmler's own private file.

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A. This is the man who also wrote on another occasion: "Let us do this for camouflage purposes. I like the new version, it's going to the Führer. Excellent for camouflage purposes." We cannot trust him, unfortunately. When we find a speech has been tampered with in this way, then frankly I mention it, in fact I think in Hitler's War I drew attention to the discrepancy in the numbering and the typeface and the paragraph indent and so on.

Q. You did, and in such a way as to suggest that there is clear evidence of an order from Hitler to Himmler to carry out the extermination programme could not be relied upon.

A. Is this a hanging document?

Q. Oh, yes.

A. Would you hang somebody on this?

Q. I would not hang anybody for anything, as it happens, Mr Irving, not even Adolf Hitler if he were here, though some people in this room might. This is not a prosecution of Adolf Hitler. This is in your mind, should be, not setting out to prove something, seeing what the evidence suggests.

A. Yes, but this is precisely the same situation, to my mind, as where a court is shown a so-called confession and then when you look at the original you find out that one page of the confession has been rewritten and inserted at a later date. The court would then throw out the whole confession, frankly.

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Q. This has been put in by the Allies to incriminate Hitler, has it?

A. No. You are putting it in to make your point.

MR JUSTICE GRAY: Mr Rampton, I think we probably ought to pause. You have not finished with this and it may be it would be worth looking perhaps after the adjournment at how this is dealt with in whichever of Mr Irving's books it is dealt within.

A. Yes, I did try to find it, my Lord.

MR RAMPTON: Yes.

MR JUSTICE GRAY: Shall we say 5 past 2? (Luncheon Adjournment) MR DAVID IRVING, continued. Cross-Examined by MR RAMPTON, QC, continued.

MR RAMPTON: Now, Mr Irving, will you please tell us slowly and carefully why it matters, in your view, if it be right, that this page of this speech by Himmler has been retyped?

A. Well, I have had the advantage, of course, that I have refreshed my memory from reading my own book.

Q. Yes.

A. So I will give the same explanation or speculation now as I did in my book.

Q. Yes.

A. First of all, I have had the advantage that I have seen the original and I work from the original paper of this transcript. From the original paper, it is evident that

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the original in the archives is a carbon copy, which means that the ribbon copy went somewhere else. It is reasonable to suppose, as this is typed on the large typeface, that the ribbon copy went to Adolf Hitler. All we can say, however, is that at some time, somebody considered it necessary to retype page 28 which contains the pregnant sentence about the order. I speculate in my book that it is reasonable to assume that the version that went to Adolf Hitler did not have this retyped page in. It went in with some different formulation.

Q. There is the leap into space which, I am afraid, I do not follow.

A. Well, the alternative -- I would be interested to hear what your alternative explanation would be.

Q. No. I do not see anything in the evidence before my eyes. Assuming you are right it was retyped, certainly the page numbering has been changed.

A. And the indenting is different.

Q. There does not seem to be anything in what I see before my eyes to tell me that it was done after or before the other pages. There is nothing which I see in this document which leads me to think that if it was altered, it was altered for any other reason than that Himmler had changed his mind about precisely what he wanted to say.

A. He did not read from this. This is a transcript of what

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he said -- if you appreciate the difference? This is not a script that he read from. This is the typed version of what he said taken from a shorthand note.

Q. Well, can you look at this document? My Lord, this is another version of the same page which I am told comes from the archives. It was obtained for me yesterday because I thought we might get to this today. There is one for his Lordship and one for Mr Irving. We have in front of us a typescript, not in Führer's size type, have we not, Mr Irving?

A. Yes.

Q. With a lot of manuscript alterations on it?

A. Editing, yes.

Q. In the top right-hand corner the typewritten No. 17 which has not been changed.

A. Yes.

Q. If you look at about nine lines down, you see the same passage beginning that we were discussing before the adjournment, do we not, "Die Judenfrage" at the end of the line?

A. Yes.

Q. It still has seven lines below that or eight, six to seven: "Dieses mir gegebenen soldatischen Befehls war"?

A. Yes.

Q. I should read the whole thing, "Wie schwer •• [German -

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document not provided] -- mir gegebenen soldatischen Befehls war". That is the same phrase as appears in the other version?

A. That is absolutely correct. Exactly the same, no editing on that passage at all.

Q. But we can, can we not, infer from the page number that the speech was at that stage a good deal shorter because in our other version the page number finally winds up as being 28, I think, does it not? That may be a function of the different size.

A. Different size typeface.

Q. But I ask you to notice that the top right-hand corner of the one we have got in the bundle ----

A. Yes.

Q. --- appears to have been changed from a number in its teens, does it not?

A. Hard to say on the basis of that copy.

Q. In manuscript.

A. I can only say it is hard to say on the basis of that copy.

Q. It is hard to say, but the first of those digits looks a bit like a 1, does it not?

A. I can only say it is hard to say.

Q. You see, I do not make these observations in order to lead to a particular conclusion. All I say is you do not find in these different versions and different numberings of a page containing the same words, do you, any suggestion

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that this page was added at a later date, after some sanitised version had been given to Hitler?

A. That is not the suggestion that I made.

Q. Well, what is it?

A. I am perfectly content with the suggestion and, in fact, with the clear proof that Himmler actually used these words when speaking to this audience of military gentlemen who were accustomed to accepting orders from above. What I am suggesting is that in the version that he then sent to Hitler he retyped that page and replaced it by another page that is not before us.

Q. But why do you say that?

A. Because something has happened to this page. Quite clearly something has happened to this page.

Q. But people make alterations to their drafts all the time. Look, do you agree that this smaller typeface probably represents an earlier generation of the same ----

A. Quite clearly. It is almost certainly the original shorthand version.

Q. So what leads you to suppose then that the speech was made in these terms, let us suppose this is an earlier draft?

A. Yes.

Q. With the manuscript alteration, that is not Himmler's writing, an earlier draft, the speech is not made in those terms, it is recorded in these terms as they were recorded, were they not?

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A. Sometimes they are recorded.

Q. Yes. Then comes a transcript or a version anyway?

A. Yes.

Q. To be put before the Führer?

A. Yes.

Q. And for some reason or another the page which we have here and which is in the draft is removed?

A. Yes.

Q. And replaced by something else?

A. Yes.

Q. What is the evidence for that?

A. The fact that this page has clearly been retyped at some stage.

Q. So what?

A. And renumbered from there on.

Q. Perhaps it was badly typed in the first place.

A. That is another, third possible alternative, but it is the funniest thing, is it not, that this is the one page that it happens on. The one page that contains the pregnant sentence has clearly been retyped at a different date by a different hand on different paper.

Q. Why do you say a different date?

A. Well, because it is on different paper. It is not taken from the same wad of paper that the rest of the speech is typed on.

Q. But suppose the secretaries do a shift job or something

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later in the same day, perhaps the evening, I do not know what time of the day the speech is made, nor do we know what dates these were drafts were on, do we?

A. No, we do not.
...

In the trial, Irving's theory regarding the motivation for the retyping was Himmler concealing the Holocaust from Hitler. This theory was criticized, but the retyping itself was not denied by the prosecution.

[Otium]

Irving, from his trial with Lipstadt, one of the Posen speeches is brought up and he points out that the incriminating page was retyped, it "has been typed by a different typist": http://www.fpp.co.uk/Legal/Penguin/tran ... day006.htm
or https://archive.is/oM5jo

Code: Select all

Q. My googlies are I think a little bit more subtle than you sometimes think, Mr Irving. Can you turn on just for reference in this bundle to the next document which is after page 49 of Himmler's Posen speech. My Lord, it is footnote 187.

A. My Lord, would be it be helpful if I pointed out that after making this speech Himmler had everybody who was present sign a list to agree that they had hear the speech, or if they had not heard it to agree that they had read it subsequently. All the SS Generals who were present were required -- I have never seen that on any of Himmler's other speeches.

MR JUSTICE GRAY: What do you say is the significance of that?

A. It is very interesting to speculate, my Lord. I think he was making them into accomplices in his own mind. He was saying: "There you are, now I have told you. Now we are all in it together." It is a very interesting historical document. I have never seen that on any of Himmler's other speeches, that he listed all SS Generals present and made them sign that they had been present and heard the speech or if they not been present that they had read it subsequently.

MR RAMPTON: Mr Irving, Heinrich Himmler kept copies of these speeches, did he not?

A. In various versions. There was the original raw

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transcript and then a corrected transcript.

Q. I know, I happen to have for the 5th May which we are coming to in a minute, I happen to have both versions.

A. Yes. There are also his handwritten notes on the basis of which he spoke.

Q. Yes, Mr Irving, your knowledge is extensive. I want to know why you think it is that Himmler kept copies of his speeches?

A. I keep copies of me speeches.

Q. But you do not talk about having given the order for the extermination of millions of Jews, do you, in your speeches?

A. I have not exterminated millions of Jews, Mr Rampton.

Q. Mr Irving, maybe it is late in the morning or something. Heinrich Himmler's speech is not just this one. We had the one earlier, the 4th October at Posen. We have this one here. We have two more in May 1944, which are quite explicit, at any rate about his role in the extermination of the whole Jewish race?

A. Letting them vanish from the face of the earth, brutally explicit.

Q. Yes, by killing them?

A. Brutally explicit, yes. As he says, by murdering, and not just the men but the women and children too.

Q. Yes, I know that. Why would he keep those admissions of guilt, particularly in 1943 and 1944 by which time he must

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have known that the German world was probably going to come to an end?

A. Why would he have kept it to himself?

Q. Yes. Why did he commit these things to writing and then keep them after he had uttered them to his Generals or his Reichsleiters or whatever they are?

A. I think the problem is we are so often on exactly the same side, Mr Rampton. Have I not frequently allowed in all my books that from this point on Hitler had no reason not to know?

Q. Hitler did know, come on.

A. On precisely this point I have said Hitler had no justification for pleading ignorance, because everybody else immediately around him had been informed, but also you have to set this kind of speech in the context. This is 5th October, 4th and 6th October 1943 rather, at the height of the bombing campaign. There is a reason why Himmler is making a speech like this to the disgruntled SS Generals. Morale is at a low ebb and he is saying, "Hey, we are hitting back, we're doing this to them".

MR JUSTICE GRAY: I am really puzzled. Can I explain why, Mr Irving. When Mr Rampton was putting that passage from the October 1943 speech, 4th October 1943 speech, you were at pains to point out that Himmler was saying that it was he who would have taken the decision, but if you are accepting, as you have throughout, that by October 1943

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Hitler knew about the extermination policy ----

A. I say "from this point on", my Lord, because on the following day ----

Q. But what is the significance of emphasising that it was Himmler's decision if you accept Hitler was in on it?

A. Because Himmler is accepting the responsibility for the job which has now been completed. Himmler is kind of reporting ----

Q. I see, ex post facto.

A. Yes, saying, "We've done it all, the job has been done, I had to take the decision, it was a difficult job for us, but we done it, and I am proud of you, my SS men, for having carried out such a difficult task."

Q. So the knowledge you say Hitler had from October 1943 did not include knowledge of what had been going on in 1942, is that what you are saying?

A. I am saying it is quite likely that he will have ex post facto have learned about all these things, particularly the Gauleiters who went to see him the next day and the SS Generals who went to see him. The same audience went effectively to see Hitler where he lectured them, and it would be stretching the bounds of probability too far to say that not one of them went up to Hitler, one of the old veterans, and said, "Mein Führer, we heard something yesterday which rather disturbed me", but I do not think it did disturb them. I think they rather liked

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it. The eyewitness accounts we have of one of these speeches says that there were roars of applause.

MR RAMPTON: It was ----

A. The Germans were like that.

Q. If you are right, it is something of which Himmler was very proud, is it not?

A. He was proud of his men for having carried out those extremely distasteful tasks.

Q. But he was pleased, if your interpretation is right, and I am going to suggest it is not, but he was pleased to announce to this august gathering that he personally had made the decision to carry out this difficult task?

A. Would it not have been wonderful for him if he had said: "The Führer gave us this task and look how well we have performed his duties for him.

Q. Of course he did.

A. The great temptation would have been there, but he does not say this.

Q. He does not?

A. He says specifically: "I was the one who took the decision".

Q. So that being so you would not expect that in May 1944 he would reveal that he done what he did in consequence of an order, and the only person of course who could have given an order is Hitler?

A. Mr Rampton, shall we get to that document when we get to

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it and look at the precise wording?

Q. Very well. Let us doing that now. I have it open.

MR JUSTICE GRAY: It is page 187.

MR RAMPTON: Page 187.

A. There are of course about ten such speeches and you have just picked out two of them. In none of the others does he make any suggestion that there is a Führer order. So it is not just one speech where there is no reference. It is many speeches.

Q. He makes another such reference later the same month, about three weeks later. We will come to that probably after the adjournment.

A. Are we also going to look at Adolf Hitler's speech of I think it was June 26th 1944?

Q. Yes, indeed I certainly am. Let us start with 5th May 1944. On page 18, tell me who this speech is made to, if you will?

A. I think it is the military leader, the leadership, the top brass, shall we say.

Q. The top brass.

A. I know the names of a number of people who were present. General Stumpff was Air Force; General Reinecke was Germany Army.

MR JUSTICE GRAY: Generals of the Wehrmacht.

MR RAMPTON: These are not SS creatures. These are proper soldiers; these are Generals of the Wehrmacht, are they

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not?

A. Yes, the top brass of the German armed forces.

Q. On page 28 it has been altered. One can see how these pages evolve sometimes. Page 28. My Lord, it looks like an 18, so one has to look at page 27 at the top, page 5 of the file.

A. This is one of the most interesting pages I have ever looked at.

Q. You can tell us everything you know about this page in just a moment when I have referred you to the relevant passage, which I think begins in the middle of the page: The Jewish question has been solved within Germany itself and in general within the countries occupied by Germany". Is that roughly right?

A. Yes.

Q. I am going to read on in the English from Dr Longerich's version. "It was solved in an uncompromising fashion in accordance with the life and death struggle of our nation in which the existence of our blood is at stake." Yes?

A. Yes.

Q. Then ellipse, if you do not mind. Have you got that?

A. Yes.

Q. "You can understand how difficult it was for me"?

A. "You can feel with me how difficult it was" yes.

Q. "To carry out this soldatischen Befehl". What is that?

P-102

A. Soldierly order or military order.

Q. "And which I carried out and went through with a sense of obedience", which word is that? Translate the last part of the sentence for me?

A. "Which I obeyed and carried out from obedience and from a sense of complete conviction".

Q. Obedience to whom, Mr Irving, Hitler or his own sense of what was necessary for the sake of the thousand year Reich?

A. I think the sense of what is coming out of that paragraph is a sense of duty.

Q. So it is the sense of duty, is it, that gives him the soldatischen Befehl?

A. Yes.

Q. A very odd choice of words, is it not, this soldierly order?

A. Yes.

Q. The only person who can give Mr Himmler a soldierly order is Mr Hitler?

A. Absolutely right.

Q. Pardon?

A. Yes.

Q. He is saying: "I did what I did because Hitler told me to"?

A. Yes. I refer to this of course in my Hitler biographies. I quoted this with the ----

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Q. Let me put to you the sort of expression you might use. How do you get yourself out of that one then, Mr Irving?

A. By counting.

Q. By what?

A. Counting.

Q. Counting what?

A. Can I ask you to look at the previous page?

Q. Yes.

A. Can you see the number of the page at the top of the page?

Q. Yes.

A. 27.

Q. Yes.

A. It is typed.

Q. The next one is an altered type. I already drew attention to that.

A. All the following pages have been written in in handwriting.

Q. So what?

A. And so what? Can you continue to count, please? Will you count down on page 27 nine lines to the beginning of the new paragraph.

Q. "In Deutschland"?

A. Yes.

Q. Yes.

A. How many spaces is that paragraph indented by?

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Q. I have absolutely no idea. I am not a typist, Mr Irving.

A. I will count for you. Five spaces indented.

Q. You stop interrogating ----

A. Tap, tap, tap, tap, tap.

Q. You stop interrogating me, if you will, Mr Irving and give me your explanation why, as I now apprehend, you are saying we cannot trust the page we have been looking at?

A. Because it has been typed -- I have looked at the original of this document, Mr Rampton, you are looking at a photocopy. I have looked at the original in the archives. It is typed on different, here onwards it is typed on a different typewriter, this page, the page 28.

Q. Where was it found?

A. What do you mean "where was it found"?

Q. Where was this speech found, Mr Irving?

A. Can I just complete what I am saying?

MR JUSTICE GRAY: Yes, I would like you to because I want to know exactly what you say about ----

A. It is very important, my Lord. It has been typed by a different typist.

Q. Page 28.

A. And this frequently happened. I spotted many diaries that had been fumbled with subsequently or pages of documents. This had been typed by a different typist. They use different ways of typing. You will notice that there is more space after the first line on page 28, after the

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"Reichsführer SS", it has a double space after that instead of a single space on the previous page. She has indented by five spaces at the beginning of each paragraph. I am assuming it is a she.

Q. So what do you infer from that?

A. We do not, my Lord. All we can say is that for some reason this page was retyped at a different date. We do not whether it was retyped during the war, which is the likelihood. We do not know what has been inserted or taken out. On this occasion we do not have the other transcripts of that speech. So that is a page that I am unhappy about pinning a capital issue on. You do not often find a document that has been so clearly tampered with as that.

MR RAMPTON: Oh, yes, there is, for example, at least two versions of the next speech we are coming to.

A. We are looking at this speech though are we not, the fact that change just occurs on this page.

Q. I wish you would sometimes let me ask you a question.

A. I have not really finished what I was speaking abut.

MR JUSTICE GRAY: Let us pause. Finish your answer and then the next question.

A. About the falsification of this particular page, the fact that this particular page has been clearly retyped at a different date and that this is the one page that contains, as I quite agree, a pivotal sentence, makes me

P-106

very unhappy about just relying on this version of that sentence. I am not saying it is a post-war forgery. I think it is unlikely. I think it is the kind of fumbling that goes on during the war, when people have spotted they have said something wrong and so they have put something else in instead. For example, just for one minute I would say I found exactly the same in the private diary of Henry Stimson, who was the American Secretary of War who retyped the pages just before Pearl Harbour to cut out incriminating material, and as he said later said to Henry Morgan: "I have gone through my diaries cutting out everything that incriminates President Roosevelt", you can spot that if you look at the originals, as I always prefer to, rather than looking at printed versions on in this case microcopies.

MR RAMPTON: Mr Irving, we will see when we get to the next speech similar things have happened?

A. Yes.

Q. I am not the least bit resistant to the idea that that particular page, like others of no particular significance, was retyped.

A. Yes.

Q. How many versions of a speech or of pages of a speech do you think you go through before you reach the final version if you type them out or draft them beforehand?

A. Well, I have looked at very many of the original Himmler

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speeches. As I said, I have must have looked at about ten of these kinds of transcripts, and there are transcripts, there is a whole published volume of Himmler speeches, so you end up with a large number of transcripts to look at. This speech I think is the only one where I found a discrepancy of this magnitude which has not been remarked on by the historians. I am very uneasy that it is this page of all the pages that shows the signs of I would wartime tampering.

Q. Not wartime tampering. Can I suggest a natural human process for the production of one amongst several pages that look different? For example, if you look at page 7, the next page, the number at the top of the page has not been typed; it has been handwritten.

A. From thereon they are handwritten, yes, in the entire speech.

Q. Yes, but what is baffling me, Mr Irving, is why you will not actually use your knowledge of the world to advance the most likely explanation of this phenomenon, is that somebody types version one, Himmler looks at it and he says, "Oh, I don't think like that very much", and in those days of course you do not have word processors, so it has to be retyped on a different typewriter, perhaps the same day, perhaps on another day, it matters not. This is Himmler's words in Himmler's speech in Himmler's own private file.

P-108

A. This is the man who also wrote on another occasion: "Let us do this for camouflage purposes. I like the new version, it's going to the Führer. Excellent for camouflage purposes." We cannot trust him, unfortunately. When we find a speech has been tampered with in this way, then frankly I mention it, in fact I think in Hitler's War I drew attention to the discrepancy in the numbering and the typeface and the paragraph indent and so on.

Q. You did, and in such a way as to suggest that there is clear evidence of an order from Hitler to Himmler to carry out the extermination programme could not be relied upon.

A. Is this a hanging document?

Q. Oh, yes.

A. Would you hang somebody on this?

Q. I would not hang anybody for anything, as it happens, Mr Irving, not even Adolf Hitler if he were here, though some people in this room might. This is not a prosecution of Adolf Hitler. This is in your mind, should be, not setting out to prove something, seeing what the evidence suggests.

A. Yes, but this is precisely the same situation, to my mind, as where a court is shown a so-called confession and then when you look at the original you find out that one page of the confession has been rewritten and inserted at a later date. The court would then throw out the whole confession, frankly.

P-109

Q. This has been put in by the Allies to incriminate Hitler, has it?

A. No. You are putting it in to make your point.

MR JUSTICE GRAY: Mr Rampton, I think we probably ought to pause. You have not finished with this and it may be it would be worth looking perhaps after the adjournment at how this is dealt with in whichever of Mr Irving's books it is dealt within.

A. Yes, I did try to find it, my Lord.

MR RAMPTON: Yes.

MR JUSTICE GRAY: Shall we say 5 past 2? (Luncheon Adjournment) MR DAVID IRVING, continued. Cross-Examined by MR RAMPTON, QC, continued.

MR RAMPTON: Now, Mr Irving, will you please tell us slowly and carefully why it matters, in your view, if it be right, that this page of this speech by Himmler has been retyped?

A. Well, I have had the advantage, of course, that I have refreshed my memory from reading my own book.

Q. Yes.

A. So I will give the same explanation or speculation now as I did in my book.

Q. Yes.

A. First of all, I have had the advantage that I have seen the original and I work from the original paper of this transcript. From the original paper, it is evident that

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the original in the archives is a carbon copy, which means that the ribbon copy went somewhere else. It is reasonable to suppose, as this is typed on the large typeface, that the ribbon copy went to Adolf Hitler. All we can say, however, is that at some time, somebody considered it necessary to retype page 28 which contains the pregnant sentence about the order. I speculate in my book that it is reasonable to assume that the version that went to Adolf Hitler did not have this retyped page in. It went in with some different formulation.

Q. There is the leap into space which, I am afraid, I do not follow.

A. Well, the alternative -- I would be interested to hear what your alternative explanation would be.

Q. No. I do not see anything in the evidence before my eyes. Assuming you are right it was retyped, certainly the page numbering has been changed.

A. And the indenting is different.

Q. There does not seem to be anything in what I see before my eyes to tell me that it was done after or before the other pages. There is nothing which I see in this document which leads me to think that if it was altered, it was altered for any other reason than that Himmler had changed his mind about precisely what he wanted to say.

A. He did not read from this. This is a transcript of what

P-111

he said -- if you appreciate the difference? This is not a script that he read from. This is the typed version of what he said taken from a shorthand note.

Q. Well, can you look at this document? My Lord, this is another version of the same page which I am told comes from the archives. It was obtained for me yesterday because I thought we might get to this today. There is one for his Lordship and one for Mr Irving. We have in front of us a typescript, not in Führer's size type, have we not, Mr Irving?

A. Yes.

Q. With a lot of manuscript alterations on it?

A. Editing, yes.

Q. In the top right-hand corner the typewritten No. 17 which has not been changed.

A. Yes.

Q. If you look at about nine lines down, you see the same passage beginning that we were discussing before the adjournment, do we not, "Die Judenfrage" at the end of the line?

A. Yes.

Q. It still has seven lines below that or eight, six to seven: "Dieses mir gegebenen soldatischen Befehls war"?

A. Yes.

Q. I should read the whole thing, "Wie schwer •• [German -

P-112

document not provided] -- mir gegebenen soldatischen Befehls war". That is the same phrase as appears in the other version?

A. That is absolutely correct. Exactly the same, no editing on that passage at all.

Q. But we can, can we not, infer from the page number that the speech was at that stage a good deal shorter because in our other version the page number finally winds up as being 28, I think, does it not? That may be a function of the different size.

A. Different size typeface.

Q. But I ask you to notice that the top right-hand corner of the one we have got in the bundle ----

A. Yes.

Q. --- appears to have been changed from a number in its teens, does it not?

A. Hard to say on the basis of that copy.

Q. In manuscript.

A. I can only say it is hard to say on the basis of that copy.

Q. It is hard to say, but the first of those digits looks a bit like a 1, does it not?

A. I can only say it is hard to say.

Q. You see, I do not make these observations in order to lead to a particular conclusion. All I say is you do not find in these different versions and different numberings of a page containing the same words, do you, any suggestion

P-113

that this page was added at a later date, after some sanitised version had been given to Hitler?

A. That is not the suggestion that I made.

Q. Well, what is it?

A. I am perfectly content with the suggestion and, in fact, with the clear proof that Himmler actually used these words when speaking to this audience of military gentlemen who were accustomed to accepting orders from above. What I am suggesting is that in the version that he then sent to Hitler he retyped that page and replaced it by another page that is not before us.

Q. But why do you say that?

A. Because something has happened to this page. Quite clearly something has happened to this page.

Q. But people make alterations to their drafts all the time. Look, do you agree that this smaller typeface probably represents an earlier generation of the same ----

A. Quite clearly. It is almost certainly the original shorthand version.

Q. So what leads you to suppose then that the speech was made in these terms, let us suppose this is an earlier draft?

A. Yes.

Q. With the manuscript alteration, that is not Himmler's writing, an earlier draft, the speech is not made in those terms, it is recorded in these terms as they were recorded, were they not?

P-114

A. Sometimes they are recorded.

Q. Yes. Then comes a transcript or a version anyway?

A. Yes.

Q. To be put before the Führer?

A. Yes.

Q. And for some reason or another the page which we have here and which is in the draft is removed?

A. Yes.

Q. And replaced by something else?

A. Yes.

Q. What is the evidence for that?

A. The fact that this page has clearly been retyped at some stage.

Q. So what?

A. And renumbered from there on.

Q. Perhaps it was badly typed in the first place.

A. That is another, third possible alternative, but it is the funniest thing, is it not, that this is the one page that it happens on. The one page that contains the pregnant sentence has clearly been retyped at a different date by a different hand on different paper.

Q. Why do you say a different date?

A. Well, because it is on different paper. It is not taken from the same wad of paper that the rest of the speech is typed on.

Q. But suppose the secretaries do a shift job or something

P-115

later in the same day, perhaps the evening, I do not know what time of the day the speech is made, nor do we know what dates these were drafts were on, do we?

A. No, we do not.
...

In the trial, Irving's theory regarding the motivation for the retyping was Himmler concealing the Holocaust from Hitler. This theory was criticized, but the retyping itself was not denied by the prosecution.

I find the transcript for this trial very interesting. I haven't read all of it, but I've read parts of it.

The admission from from what they don't say is always a good sign. If there was a time and place to deny what Irving claimed it would've been there. This pretty much confirms it. The typescript is fake and it's probably not a stretch to assume the recording is too. I think that more on this will come out when Irving releases his book on Himmler.

In the link Lamprecht the transcript isn't complete. But here's the section, you can CTRL F to search for the specific entries.

https://www.hdot.org/day06/#
https://web.archive.org/web/20190921115316/https://www.hdot.org/day06/
https://archive.fo/CQLoN

Although I must say Irvings answer doesn't sit well with me. Particualrly:

Q. [Mr Justice Gray]: So what do you infer from that?
6 A. [Mr Irving]: We do not, my Lord. All we can say is that for some
7 reason this page was retyped at a different date. We do
8 not whether it was retyped during the war, which is the
9 likelihood. We do not know what has been inserted or
10 taken out. On this occasion we do not have the other
11 transcripts of that speech. So that is a page that I am
12 unhappy about pinning a capital issue on. You do not
13 often find a document that has been so clearly tampered
14 with as that.
15 MR RAMPTON: Oh, yes, there is, for example, at least two
16 versions of the next speech we are coming to.
17 A. [Mr Irving]: We are looking at this speech though are we not, the fact
18 that change just occurs on this page.
19 Q. [Mr Rampton]: I wish you would sometimes let me ask you a question.
20 A. [Mr Irving]: I have not really finished what I was speaking abut.
21 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Let us pause. Finish your answer and then the
22 next question.
23 A. [Mr Irving]: About the falsification of this particular page, the fact
24 that this particular page has been clearly retyped at a
25 different date and that this is the one page that
26 contains, as I quite agree, a pivotal sentence, makes me

. P-106

1 very unhappy about just relying on this version of that
2 sentence. I am not saying it is a postwar forgery.
3 I think it is unlikely. I think it is the kind of
4 fumbling that goes on during the war, when people have
5 spotted they have said something wrong and so they have
6 put something else in instead. For example, just for one
7 minute I would say I found exactly the same in the private
8 diary of Henry Stimpson, who was the American Secretary of
9 War who retyped the pages just before Pearl Harbour to cut
10 out incriminating material, and as he said later said to
11 Henry Morgan: “I have gone through my diaries cutting out
12 everything that incriminates President Roosevelt”, you can
13 spot that if you look at the originals, as I always prefer
14 to, rather than looking at printed versions on in this
15 case microcopies.
16 MR RAMPTON: Mr Irving, we will see when we get to the next
17 speech similar things have happened?
18 A. [Mr Irving]: Yes.
19 Q. [Mr Rampton]: I am not the least bit resistant to the idea that that
20 particular page, like others of no particular
21 significance, was retyped.
22 A. [Mr Irving]: Yes.

Irving also makes the claim that it was redone during the war, not by the allies. At least he says it's likely. This confuses me for one reason, why bother explaining it was re-typed if it was by a German with no proof that anything specifically incriminated was added or removed? It doesn't entirely confuse me, because Irving as we know holds the belief the Holocaust has merit and Himmler was behind it. Earlier in this transcript which you've posted makes that much clear when he's talking about implicating the other SS men. The part I do find confusing is that Himmler, as stated by Rampton, say's he's working on orders, the obvious conclusion being orders from Hitler. Why would this part be changed? And why would Irving seemingly accept this document as being tampered by Germans themselves with minimal likelihood that these incriminating parts would be changed. And why would we accept it's more likely to have been re-typed by the Germans anyway? For what purpose? If they were going to remove incriminating information they surely did a poor job of it. This to me would indicate a post-war touch up not the other way around.

I don't buy the idea that Himmler saying he was working on orders presumably from Hitler to be convincing, it's always these ridiculous unverifiable accounts that we have to link Hitler to anything related to the alleged Holocaust claims. It could easily be said Himmler lied to gain the support of the SS men so they didn't think it was illegal what they were doing.

This answer also seems to differ from the one he gave during the Zundel trial, where he very clearly insinuates how suspicious it is that these incriminating phrases are only to be found on these re-typed pages. It's the smoking gun to many, and it couldn't be more suspicious.

And again, there's more I have problems with. Rampton doesn't deny that it's been fixed, he just pulls out of his ass a reason why the document is still applicable.

10 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Not wartime tampering. Can I suggest a natural human
11 process for the production of one amongst several pages
12 that look different? For example, if you look at page 7,
13 the next page, the number at the top of the page has not
14 been typed; it has been handwritten.
15 A. [Mr Irving]: From thereon they are handwritten, yes, in the entire
16 speech.
17 Q. [Mr Rampton]: Yes, but what is baffling me, Mr Irving, is why you will
18 not actually use your knowledge of the world to advance
19 the most likely explanation of this phenomenon, is that
20 somebody types version one, Himmler looks at it and he
21 says, “Oh, I don’t think like that very much”, and in
22 those days of course you do not have word processors, so
23 it has to be retyped on a different typewriter, perhaps
24 the same day, perhaps on another day, it matters not.
25 This is Himmler’s words in Himmler’s speech in Himmler’s
26 own private file.

. P-108

1 A. [Mr Irving]: This is the man who also wrote on another occasion: “Let
2 us do this for camouflage purposes. I like the new
3 version, it’s going to the Fuhrer. Excellent for
4 camouflage purposes.” We cannot trust him, unfortunately.
5 When we find a speech has been tampered with in this way,
6 then frankly I mention it, in fact I think in Hitler’s War
7 I drew attention to the discrepancy in the numbering and
8 the typeface and the paragraph indent and so on.

Like what....? Are we still talking about the same incriminating speech? How does this make sense? Why would Himmler show Hitler a speech transcript that incriminates him into the extermination of the Jews? Obviously Irving isn't claiming that was done with this specific speech, but that's the implication...So it begs the question. What on earth does it camouflage? Seemingly nothing at all! Am I missing something here?

Using common sense, I couldn't imagine why you'd have retyped such obvious incriminating passages about an act that was to be secret and kept among only a very very small group of people. I also think it's funny how Rampton just assumes a different typewriter would need to be used.

I'm imagining the very funny scenario of Himmler standing at the desk of a female typist as she fucks up the transcript, writing the incriminating details as she forgets to type in a line insinuating Himmler was working on orders. At that moment Himmler says 'no I don't like that' and so she comically knocks the typewriter to the floor and whips out a new one, with different paper and writes the line “Which I obeyed and carried out from obedience and from a sense of complete conviction”. Himmler looks at is, smiles and says 'perfect'.

Of course that's now how Rampton suggests it happened, instead, for whatever reason, the speech is typed and then retyped day(s) later to give the speech the desired effect after someone showing it to Himmler. Again the question is.....Why? For what purpose was the trouble gone to type the script and retype it?

The fact that as alleged by Irving and Rampton this was done is monumentally stupid on Himmler's part, neither of them appear to be applying 'real world knowledge' to come to the obvious conclusion that this speech was doctored to be used against the National Socialists. It doesn't square even with Himmler denying the holocaust.

In order to stop the epidemic, we were forced to cremate the bodies of the many people that died of the disease. That was the reason we had to build the crematoria, and now, because of this everybody wants to tighten the noose around our neck. - Heinrich Himmler

Source: https://archive.org/stream/NorbertMasurMyMeetingWithHeinrichHimmler/Norbert%20Masur%20My%20Meeting%20with%20Heinrich%20Himmler#page/n5/mode/2up

[Lamprecht]

I think maybe he just wanted to say it was tampered with, but didn't want to say "The Allies did it, probably the British!" which wouldn't sit well in court, I'd presume. Saying "It was tampered with, I don't know by whom, probably some other German..." etc

Rampton even said: "I am not the least bit resistant to the idea that that particular page, like others of no particular significance, was retyped."

So my guess is that his defense was that "The speech was tampered with, we cannot trust that page" and who exactly tampered with it is of not as much importance, and to suggest allied post-war forgery, without proof (not that there would usually be any), may have weakened his case in the eyes of the judge.

[Otium]

I think maybe he just wanted to say it was tampered with, but didn't want to say "The Allies did it, probably the British!" which wouldn't sit well in court, I'd presume. Saying "It was tampered with, I don't know by whom, probably some other German..." etc

Rampton even said: "I am not the least bit resistant to the idea that that particular page, like others of no particular significance, was retyped."

So my guess is that his defense was that "The speech was tampered with, we cannot trust that page" and who exactly tampered with it is of not as much importance, and to suggest allied post-war forgery, without proof (not that there would usually be any), may have weakened his case in the eyes of the judge.

That's all reasonable. And obviously the judge would never have been on Irvings side anyway. If Irving had been honest and less contradictory I think it would've hit harder and served a greater purpose. The admission by Rampton is good, but the key word is 'retyped' I would assume he would be resistant to the idea it was 'tampered with'.

It's frustrating to see Rampton completely pull out of his ass some alternative explanation when Irving cannot be allowed to do the same because it might've 'weakened his case'. The obvious fact the document is untrustworthy (which of course Irving says) invites the inevitable comment about the possibility of allied tampering. Not making that point would be irresponsible. Especially when you consider the content of the speech, who was there, how they went about using it in evidence etc.