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david irving Secretly Overheard:
subsequently the German prosecutors who took over from them,
had little interest in attaining even-handedness before the stare of
history. No crime was too vile to be attributed to the Nazis; indeed,
it became a criminal offence in Germany, France, and other countries,
punishable by steep fines, imprisonment, and even deportation,
to question the truth of crucial aspects of the »crimes against
humanity« as defined by the Nuremberg trials.
For fifty years independent-minded historians, both in Germany
and abroad, have agonized about the truth of these allegations.
Other, subsidiary questions arose: if the allegations were true
– that Hitler’s soldiers had kidnapped, tortured, and killed on an
unimaginable scale – what can possibly have gone on in the minds
of the killers and those who gave them their orders? What about
the hundreds, if not thousands, of Mitwisser in uniform, who saw
the crimes and yet did little or nothing to impede them? What is
the truth about the legends of the »gas chambers« and »factories of
death«?
The C.S.D.I.C. reports provide disturbing evidence to answer
these questions. In short, the witnesses and murderers alike are often
revealed as intelligent men, who display however an extraordinary
degree of inertia, callousness, and brutality when inflicting or
describing the suffering and deaths of people who, but for their religion
or nationality, could well have been their own parents, wives,
or children.
There can be no doubt as to the veracity of the appalling description
rendered in a conversation overheard at the No. 6824 Detailed
Interrogation Centre in Germany on April 25, 1945 between
the 54 jährigen Generalmajor Walter Bruns (»a mild-mannered,
bureaucratic officer who is anti-Nazi«) and a number of other senior-officer
prisoners, whose voices, the transcript tells us, »could
not be identified.« Bruns describes with convincing verisimilitude
SRGG.1158(C) (PRO: WO.208�4169); Bruns was in 1941 an Oberst der Pioniere,
Leiter des »Brückenstabs Bruns« bei Riga. According to report 6824
DIC (MIS)�CI—24, dated April 29, 1945, Bruns »later heard . . . that a total
of 42,000 Jewish women and children were killed in Skirotawa within three
successive days« (NA: RG.332, box 93).
this is a copyright manuscript © david irving 2007