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… of the damned, it is what I
saw here in Toronto in April.

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And it has given me an open mind.

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It's made me go back to redo the
research that I should have done

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all these years and re-look at the files,

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so that now, as in Syracuse the last
couple of days, where I've been

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working in the files of the American
attorney general, his private papers,

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Judge Francis Biddle, one of the judges at
Nuremberg, you find his private diaries,

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and you find all the documents and
materials related to the, the conduct

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of the, those infamous trials at Nuremberg,
and you find out that when he himself,

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sitting on that lofty bench in Nuremberg,
heard the witnesses giving their evidence

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ostensibly coming from Auschwitz and
ostensibly coming from Majdanek and the other

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horror camps, and this American judge,
who's been through it all before, he sat

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on countless benches in his career, he
writes down in his private diaries...

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I've got the quotations here
with me if you're interested.

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He writes down after listening to one
French woman who claimed to have been

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in Auschwitz and claimed to have experienced
all these unimaginable tortures and

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atrocities, he writes in brackets in his
private diaries, "I don't believe a word

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of this."

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[Laughter]

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"I don't believe a word of this."

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[Applause]

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This woman describes how, well, you know
the stories that they told, the un-

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uh, the, the bestial atrocities that were
conducted on them, the smoking chimneys,

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the crematoria, the bodies, the unloadings,
the standing naked in the cold, and then

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incidentally, one or two little
bits and pieces that give the sense

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of verisimilitude which stick in your memory
because she says, "We were made to take

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off all our clothes so they could be
disinfected in the special chambers."

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Ah. But of course, Judge Biddle at that
time, he doesn't associate that with what

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was then subsequently found and the,
and the, the receipts and the documents

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for the Zyklon B and so on.

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But he's a suspicious man, and he
continues writing as she's describing how

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the women are sterilized, and
the men were castrated often.

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[Audience laughter]

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I would've thought that being
castrated once was enough.

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But these are the words
in her, in her testimony.

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And so it goes on. The evidence
is there in the files.

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And over the week before, I'd been
working in Hyde Park, not Hyde Park,

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London, but Hyde Park, New York,
where the Roosevelt archives are.

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Now, the uninitiated historian might imagine
from the Roosevelt archives you're just

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going to find President
Roosevelt's papers, but no.

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You'll find there the
papers of a lot of bodies …