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Did Six Million Really Die?
Truth at Last - Exposed:
 
 
This
pamphlet has been republished around the world
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Foreword to the
new edition
“Zündel’s Story.”
You have before you the most expensive little publication printed in the
English language in modern times.
Millions of words have been spoken and written about this publication as a
result of the two Zündel Trials.
Many hours of television news reports were broadcast about the content of this
publication and the surrounding controversy and trial.
The Canadian government, its various branches like the police, the Attorney
General’s office, the Canadian Department of Immigration, the courts with
staff, clerks, stenographers, court reporters and security personnel spent
millions of dollars for research, staff and courtroom space.
Ernst Zündel, the man at the centre of this controversy, did not write this
booklet. He merely supplied the four words on the original cover, stating
“Truth at last exposed.” He supplied the photos and news clippings on the
inside cover of the publication, plus one sentence under his youthful photo on
page two. He wrote and supplied the text on page three headed: “To all
Canadian Lawyers and Media representatives” and signed it himself. That was
his foreword to the publication.
Nothing whatsoever has been changed—not a single word of the text which was
written by an Englishman called Richard Harwood who, Zündel thought until his
trial, was teaching at the University of London. During the trial, the witness
Mark Weber revealed the real name of the author as the former honours student of
the University of London, Richard Verrall—alias Richard Harwood. Ernst Zündel
did not know this at the time of publication.
The original English publishers did not permit Ernst Zündel to change a single
line or sentence in the Canadian “publication,” which is what you now have
in your hands. The Court records reveal that Ernst Zündel reluctantly agreed to
this, adding only an order coupon on page 30, and two pages of an afterword (or
some closing remarks). This came as a response to the article reproduced on the
top right of page 31, which, at the time, appeared in many Canadian newspapers
from coast to coast. Ernst Zündel merely reprinted Did Six Million Really
Die? by a photo-offset method—an exact duplicate, plus the already
mentioned additions. In Court, he said he felt safe doing that because the
publication had already been translated into 12 languages, and was being sold
without any legal problems in 18 countries. The only exception was South Africa,
where the publication was forbidden at the instigation of the Jewish lobby. A
booklet entitled Six Million Did Die was also published in South Africa;
this booklet figured prominently in the Zündel trial in 1988.
Ernst Zündel became a household word in Canada, beginning with his 1985 trial,
which lasted seven weeks, and his marathon 1988 trial which lasted for almost
four months. The booklet made Ernst Zündel and his revisionist viewpoint famous
across the globe.
The Zündel case is now, for the second time in 10 years, before the Supreme
Court of Canada, because the defence feels that the False News section of the
Criminal Code in Canada, under which Ernst Zündel was charged and convicted
twice, is unconstitutional, in that it offends against Canada’s “Charter of
Rights and Freedoms” (a watered-down version of the American Bill of Rights).
Ernst Zündel now awaits the verdict of the highest court in the land—will it
be freedom, exoneration or jail?
You can be Judge and Jury! Read the booklet, and then ask yourself: Should a man
be beaten, spat upon, terrorized, beset upon by frenzied mobs, bombed and
charged with a criminal offence, dragged through lengthy court cases and
terribly expensive legal costs, because of the few errors, made by a writer ten
years previous? What do you think? Was this persecution of Ernst Zündel,
through prosecution by the state, just to punish him for his beliefs? “Persons
who would spread hate in this community in order to foster right-wing beliefs
which attack the delicate balance of racial and social harmony in our community
must be punished” (Judge Thomas’ very own words on the day he sentenced
Ernst Zündel, Transcript 10575)
What do you think?
Did this German resident of Canada not do the natural thing by attempting to
answer all of the nasty accusations and smears about his own people (in the
media, on television, in school books, etc.) by using an Englishman’s writings
to rebut these often outrageous claims and charges?
If somebody said similar things about your own ethnic group, would you not want
to respond?
You be the judge. Read this and pass it on.
TO ALL CANADIAN LAWYERS AND MEDIA
REPRESENTATIVES:
This booklet is the type of material that the Attorney General
of British Columbia considers ‘racist.’ The Attorney General of Ontario, at
the behest of his B.C. colleague, is purportedly conducting an investigation of
Samisdat Publishers preparatory to the laying of a criminal charge of
“promoting hatred against an identifiable group.”
Samisdat intends to use this opportunity, however unwelcome, to test the
definition and hence, the validity of the so-called ‘Hate Law’ section of
the Canadian Criminal Code. What is now becoming clear to all of us, even to
those who enacted the so-called ‘Hate Law,’ is that we enacted not so much
an instrument against hate as an instrument against truth.
Canada was a civilised country before the passage of the ‘Hate Law.’ We
already had laws against the incitement to riot, to murder, to arson, to the
commission of assault and bodily harm. Our laws protected and still protect
every citizen from libel, slander and defamation. But the outlawing of
‘hate’ does not thereby abolish feelings of hate, as we all know. To
prohibit expressions of hatred may even cause such feelings to go unvented until
they become explosive and take the form of violence. Prior to the ‘Hate
Law,’ we Canadians behaved with mature composure when encountering hateful
expressions. We simply shunned the haters and left them to spew out their ire,
unsupported and alone. In most cases, a cold dose of healthy public ridicule
would quench the more volcanic vituperators and reason would be restored. But
something happened to us, for as we have grown older as a country, we have
become less mature and less secure. Our passage of the ‘Hate Law’ was a
grave reflection upon ourselves. It revealed a sudden loss of confidence in our
own wisdom and judgement and in the wisdom and judgement of the great majority
of Canadian voters and citizens. Suddenly, we had to be protected from ourselves
and just as suddenly, we became refugees from freedom. No democracy that so
distrusts the majority can long remain a democracy; it becomes a police state in
the worst tradition of police states.
Unfortunately, only a few clear-sighted and courageous individuals protested the
enactment of the ‘Hate Law’. So thick were the clouds of hysteria and
half-truths over the matter that only these few perceived the dangers inherent
in a statute which could be used at the discretion of a public official to
suppress the freedom of enquiry and discussion in regard to relevant public
issues. Among these few protesters, I proudly number myself, for I spoke out
then and I speak out now, on behalf of our basic freedom to act as thinking
human beings.
As we stumble along the road to the 1984 of George Orwell, we sometimes
receive a taste of his dismal future-fantasy well ahead of schedule. Pernicious
‘thought-crime’ legislation like the ‘Hate Law’ has brought us 1984
already. It has not outlawed hate, but it has outlawed truth on behalf of those
predatory vested interests whose arch enemy is truth!
This booklet has been sent to you free of charge as a public service. After
reading it, you are perfectly free to agree or to disagree with its content. You
may even ignore it and leave it unread. Truth has no need of coercion. Those who
choose to ignore the truth are not punished by law—they punish themselves. We
of Samisdat Publishers do not believe that you should be forced to read
something, any more than you should be forced not to read something.
Obviously, we have much more faith in your soundness of mind and good judgement
than do the enactors and enforcers of the ‘Hate Law’! Whether you agree or
disagree with the facts presented in this booklet, we invite you to assist us in
reclaiming and safeguarding the freedoms we have all so long enjoyed, until now,
in Canada.
Help us remove this shameful stain of tyranny from our otherwise bright and
shining land. Help us strike the terrible sword of censorship from the hands of
those who would slay truth in pursuit of their dubious aims. Without freedom of
enquiry and freedom of access to information, we cannot have freedom of thought
and without freedom of thought, we cannot be a free people. The matter is
urgent. Can you help us restore and protect the freedom of all Canadians?
You can help decisively by sending your contribution to the Samisdat Defense
Fund. Legal fees are costly in the extreme. We anticipate daily expenditures of
$1,000.00 in attorneys’ fees and in the reimbursement of witnesses who must be
flown in from Australia, Israel, Europe and from both American continents.
Whatever help you can provide will make 1984 a much better year for your
children and grandchildren—a year in which freedom of thought will not be a
memory, but a beautiful reality!
[Signature]
Ernst Zundel, Publisher
SAMISDAT PUBLISHERS, LTD.
INTRODUCTION
Of course, atrocity propaganda is nothing new. It has accompanied every conflict
of the 20th century and doubtless will continue to do so. During the First World
War, the Germans were actually accused of eating Belgian babies, as well as
delighting to throw them in the air and transfix them on bayonets. The British
also alleged that the German forces were operating a “Corpse Factory”, in
which they boiled down the bodies of their own dead in order to obtain glycerin
and other commodities, a calculated insult to the honour of an Imperial army.
After the war, however, came the retractions; indeed, a public statement was
made by the Foreign Secretary in the House of Commons apologizing for the
insults to German honour, which were admitted to be war-time propaganda.
No such statements have been made after the Second World War. In fact, rather
than diminish with the passage of years, the atrocity propaganda concerning the
German occupation, and in particular their treatment of the Jews, has done
nothing but increase its virulence, and elaborate its catalogue of horrors.
Gruesome paperback books with lurid covers continue to roll from the presses,
adding continuously to a growing mythology of the concentration camps and
especially to the story that no less than Six Million Jews were exterminated in
them. The ensuing pages will reveal this claim to be the most colossal piece of
fiction and the most successful of deceptions; but here an attempt may be made
to answer an important question: What has rendered the atrocity stories of the
Second World War so uniquely different from those of the First? Why were the
latter retracted while the former are reiterated louder than ever? Is it
possible that the story of the Six Million Jews is serving a political purpose,
even that it is a form of political blackmail?
So far as the Jewish people themselves are concerned, the deception has been an
incalculable benefit. Every conceivable race and nationality had its share of
suffering in the Second World War, but none has so successfully elaborated it
and turned it to such great advantage. The alleged extent of their persecution
quickly aroused sympathy for the Jewish national homeland they had sought for so
long; after the War the British Government did little to prevent Jewish
emigration to Palestine which they had declared illegal, and it was not long
afterwards that the Zionists wrested from the Government the land of Palestine
and created their haven from persecution, the State of Israel. Indeed, it is a
remarkable fact that the Jewish people emerged from the Second World War as
nothing less than a triumphant minority. Dr. Max Nussbaum, the former chief
rabbi of the Jewish community in Berlin, stated on April 11, 1953: “The
position the Jewish people occupy today in the world—despite the enormous
losses—is ten times stronger than what it was twenty years ago.” It should
be added, if one is to be honest, that this strength has been much consolidated
financially by the supposed massacre of the Six Million, undoubtedly the most
profitable atrocity allegation of all time. To date, the staggering figure of
six thousand million pounds has been paid out in compensation by the Federal
Government of West Germany, mostly to the State of Israel (which did not even
exist during the Second World War), as well as to individual Jewish claimants.
DISCOURAGEMENT OF NATIONALISM
In terms of political blackmail, however, the allegation that Six Million Jews
died during the Second World War has much more far-reaching implications for the
people of Britain and Europe than simply the advantages it has gained for the
Jewish nation. And here one comes to the crux of the question: Why the Big Lie?
What is its purpose? In the first place, it has been used quite unscrupulously
to discourage any form of nationalism. Should the people of Britain or any other
European country attempt to assert their patriotism and preserve their national
integrity in an age when the very existence of nation-states is threatened, they
are immediately branded as “neo-Nazis”. Because, of course, Nazism was
nationalism, and we all know what happened then—Six Million Jews were
exterminated! So long as the myth is perpetuated, peoples everywhere will remain
in bondage to it; the need for international tolerance and understanding will be
hammered home by the United Nations until nationhood itself, the very guarantee
of freedom, is abolished.
A classic example of the use of the ‘Six Million’ as an anti-national weapon
appears in Manvell and Frankl’s book, The Incomparable Crime (London,
1967), which deals with ‘Genocide in the Twentieth Century’. Anyone with a
pride in being British will be somewhat surprised by the vicious attack made on
the British Empire in this book. The authors quote Pandit Nehru, who wrote the
following while in a British prison in India: “Since Hitler emerged from
obscurity and became the Führer of Germany, we have heard a great deal about
racialism and the Nazi theory of the ‘Herrenvolk’... But we in India have
known racialism in all its forms ever since the commencement of British rule.
The whole ideology of this rule was that of the ‘Herrenvolk’ and the master
race... India as a nation and Indians as individuals were subjected to insult,
humiliation and contemptuous treatment. The English were an imperial race, we
were told, with the God-given right to govern us and keep us in subjection; if
we protested we were reminded of the ‘tiger qualities of an imperial
race’.” The authors Manvell and Frankl then go on to make the point
perfectly clear for us: “The white races of Europe and America,” they write,
“have become used during centuries to regarding themselves as a ‘Herrenvolk’.
The twentieth century, the century of Auschwitz, has also achieved the first
stage in the recognition of multi-racial partnership” (ibid., p. 14).
THE RACE PROBLEM SUPPRESSED
One could scarcely miss the object of this diatribe, with its insidious hint
about “multi-racial partnership”. Thus the accusation of the Six Million is
not only used to undermine the principle of nationhood and national pride, but
it threatens the survival of the Race itself. It is wielded over the heads of
the populace, rather as the threat of hellfire and damnation was in the Middle
Ages. Many countries of the Anglo-Saxon world, notably Britain and America, are
today facing the gravest danger in their history, the danger posed by the alien
races in their midst. Unless something is done in Britain to halt the
immigration and assimilation of Africans and Asians into our country, we are
faced in the near future, quite apart from the bloodshed of racial conflict,
with the biological alteration and destruction of the British people as they
have existed here since the coming of the Saxons. In short, we are threatened
with the irrecoverable loss of our European culture and racial heritage. But
what happens if a man dares to speak of the race problem, of its biological and
political implications? He is branded as that most heinous of creatures, a
“racialist”. And what is racialism, of course, but the very hallmark of the
Nazi! They (so everyone is told, anyway) murdered Six Million Jews because of
racialism, so it must be a very evil thing indeed. When Enoch Powell drew
attention to the dangers posed by coloured immigration into Britain in one of
his early speeches, a certain prominent Socialist raised the spectre of Dachau
and Auschwitz to silence his presumption.
Thus any rational discussion of the problems of Race and the effort to preserve
racial integrity is effectively discouraged. No one could have anything but
admiration for the way in which the Jews have sought to preserve their race
through so many centuries, and continue to do so today. In this effort they have
frankly been assisted by the story of the Six Million, which, almost like a
religious myth, has stressed the need for greater Jewish racial solidarity.
Unfortunately, it has worked in quite the opposite way for all other peoples,
rendering them impotent in the struggle for self-preservation.
The aim in the following pages is quite simply to tell the Truth. The
distinguished American historian Harry Elmer Barnes once wrote that “An
attempt to make a competent, objective and truthful investigation of the
extermination question... is surely the most precarious venture that an
historian or demographer could undertake today.” In attempting this precarious
task, it is hoped to make some contribution, not only to historical truth, but
towards lifting the burden of a lie from our own shoulders, so that we may
freely confront the dangers which threaten us all.
— Richard E. Harwood
1. GERMAN POLICY TOWARDS THE JEWS PRIOR TO THE WAR
Rightly or wrongly, the Germany of Adolf Hitler considered the Jews to be a
disloyal and avaricious element within the national community, as well as a
force of decadence in Germany’s cultural life. This was held to be
particularly unhealthy since, during the Weimar period, the Jews had risen to a
position of remarkable strength and influence in the nation, particularly in
law, finance and the mass media, even though they constituted only 5 per cent of
the population. The fact that Karl Marx was a Jew and that Jews such as Rosa
Luxembourg and Karl Liebknecht were disproportionately prominent in the
leadership of revolutionary movements in Germany, also tended to convince the
Nazis of the powerful internationalist and Communist tendencies of the Jewish
people themselves.
It is no part of the discussion here to argue whether the German attitude to the
Jews was right or not, or to judge whether its legislative measures against them
were just or unjust. Our concern is simply with the fact that, believing of the
Jews as they did, the Nazis’ solution to the problem was to deprive them of
their influence within the nation by various legislative acts, and most
important of all, to encourage their emigration from the country altogether. By
1939, the great majority of German Jews had emigrated, all of them with a
sizeable proportion of their assets. Never at any time had the Nazi leadership
even contemplated a policy of genocide towards them.
JEWS CALLED EMIGRATION ‘EXTERMINATION’
It is very significant, however, that certain Jews were quick to interpret these
policies of internal discrimination as equivalent to extermination itself. A
1936 anti-German propaganda book by Leon Feuchtwanger and others entitled Der
Gelbe Fleck: Die Austrotung von 500,000 deutschen Juden (The Yellow Spot:
The Extermination of 500,000 German Jews, Paris, 1936), presents a typical
example. Despite its baselessness in fact, the annihilation of the Jews is
discussed from the first pages—straightforward emigration being regarded as
the physical “extermination” of German Jewry. The Nazi concentration camps
for political prisoners are also seen as potential instruments of genocide, and
special reference is made to the 100 Jews still detained in Dachau in 1936, of
whom 60 had been there since 1933. A further example was the sensational book by
the German-Jewish Communist, Hans Beimler, called Four Weeks in the Hands of
Hitler’s Hell-Hounds: The Nazi Murder Camp of Dachau, which was published
in New York as early as 1933. Detained for his Marxist affiliations, he claimed
that Dachau was a death camp, though by his own admission he was released after
only a month there. The present regime in East Germany now issues a Hans Beimler
Award for services to Communism.
The fact that anti-Nazi genocide propaganda was being disseminated at this
impossibly early date, therefore, by people biased on racial or political
grounds, should suggest extreme caution to the independent-minded observer when
approaching similar stories of the war period.
The encouragement of Jewish emigration should not be confused with the purpose
of concentration camps in pre-war Germany. These were used for the detention of
political opponents and subversives—principally liberals, Social Democrats and
Communists of all kinds, of whom a proportion were Jews such as Hans Beimler.
Unlike the millions enslaved in the Soviet Union, the German concentration camp
population was always small; Reitinger admits that between 1934 and 1938 it
seldom exceeded 20,000 throughout the whole of Germany, and the number of Jews
was never more than 3,000. (The S.S.: Alibi of a Nation, London, 1956, p. 253).
ZIONIST POLICY STUDIED
The Nazi view of Jewish emigration was not limited to a negative policy of
simple expulsion, but was formulated along the lines of modern Zionism. The
founder of political Zionism in the 19th century, Theodore Herzl, in his work The
Jewish State, had originally conceived of Madagascar as a national homeland
for the Jews, and this possibility was seriously studied by the Nazis. It had
been a main plank of the National Socialist party platform before 1933 and was
published by the party in pamphlet form. This stated that the revival of Israel
as a Jewish state was much less acceptable since it would result in perpetual
war and disruption in the Arab world, which has indeed been the case. The
Germans were not original in proposing Jewish emigration to Madagascar; the
Polish Government had already considered the scheme in respect of their own
Jewish population, and in 1937 they sent the Michael Lepecki expedition to
Madagascar, accompanied by Jewish representatives, to investigate the problems
involved.
The first Nazi proposals for a Madagascar solution were made in association with
the Schacht Plan of 1938. On the advice of Goering, Hitler agreed to send the
President of the Reichsbank, Dr. Hjaimar Schacht, to London for discussions
with Jewish representatives Lord Bearsted and Mr. Rublee of New York (cf.
Reitlinger, The Final Solution, London, 1953, p. 20). The plan was that
German Jewish assets would be frozen as security for an international loan to
finance Jewish emigration to Palestine, and Schacht reported on these
negotiations to Hitler at Berchtesgaden on January 2, 1939. The plan, which
failed due to British refusal to accept the financial terms, was first put
forward on November 12, 1938 at a conference convened by Goering, who
revealed that Hitler was already considering the emigration of Jews to a
settlement in Madagascar (ibid., p. 21). Later, in December, Ribbentrop
was told by M. Georges Bonnet, the French Foreign Secretary, that the
French Government itself was planning the evacuation of 10,000 Jews to
Madagascar.
Prior to the Schacht Palestine proposals of 1938, which were essentially a
protraction of discussions that had begun as early as 1935, numerous attempts
had been made to secure Jewish emigration to other European nations, and these
efforts culminated in the Evian Conference of July, 1938. However, by 1939 the
scheme of Jewish emigration to Madagascar had gained the most favour in German
circles. It is true that in London Helmuth Wohltat of the German Foreign Office
discussed limited Jewish emigration to Rhodesia and British Guiana as late as
April, 1939; but by January 24th, when Goering wrote to Interior Minister
Frick ordering the creation of a Central Emigration Office for Jews, and
commissioned Heydrich of the Reich Security Head Office to solve the Jewish
problem “by means of emigration and evacuation”, the Madagascar Plan was
being studied in earnest.
By 1939, the consistent efforts of the German Government to secure the departure
of Jews from the Reich had resulted in the emigration of 400,000 German Jews
from a total population of about 600,000, and an additional 480,000 emigrants
from Austria and Czechoslovakia, which constituted almost their entire Jewish
populations. This was accomplished through Offices of Jewish Emigration in
Berlin, Vienna and Prague established by Adolf Eichmann, the head of the Jewish
Investigation Office of the Gestapo. So eager were the Germans to secure this
emigration, that Eichmann even established a training centre in Austria, where
young Jews could learn farming in anticipation of being smuggled illegally to
Palestine (Manvell & Frankl, S.S. and Gestapo, p. 60). Had Hitler
cherished any intention of exterminating the Jews, it is inconceivable that he
would have allowed more than 800,000 to leave Reich territory with the bulk of
their wealth, much less considered plans for their mass emigration to Palestine
or Madagascar. What is more, we shall see that the policy of emigration from
Europe was still under consideration well into the war period, notably the
Madagascar Plan, which Eichmann discussed in 1940 with French Colonial Office
experts after the defeat of France had made the surrender of the colony a
practical proposition.
2. GERMAN POLICY TOWARD THE JEWS AFTER
THE OUTBREAK OF WAR With the
coming of the war, the situation regarding the Jews altered drastically. It is
not widely known that world Jewry declared itself to be a belligerent party in
the Second World War, and there was therefore ample basis under international
law for the Germans to intern the Jewish population as a hostile force. On
September 5, 1939, Chaim Weizmann, the principle Zionist leader, had
declared war against Germany on behalf of the world’s Jews, stating that
“the Jews stand by Great Britain and will fight on the side of the
democracies... The Jewish Agency is ready to enter into immediate arrangements
for utilizing Jewish manpower, technical ability, resources etc... ” (Jewish
Chronicle, September 8, 1939).
DETENTION OF ENEMY ALIENS All
Jews had thus been declared agents willing to prosecute a war against the German
Reich, and as a consequence, Himmler and Heydrich were eventually to begin the
policy of internment. It is worth noting that the United States and Canada had
already interned all Japanese aliens and citizens of Japanese descent in
detention camps before the Germans applied the same security measures against
the Jews of Europe. Moreover, there had been no such evidence or declaration of
disloyalty by these Japanese Americans as had been given by Weizmann. The
British, too, during the Boer War, interned all the women and children of the
population, and thousands had died as a result, yet in no sense could the
British be charged with wanting to exterminate the Boers. The detention of Jews
in the occupied territories of Europe served two essential purposes from the
German viewpoint. The first was to prevent unrest and subversion; Himmler had
informed Mussolini on October 11th, 1942, that German policy towards the
Jews had altered during wartime entirely for reasons of military security. He
complained that thousands of Jews in the occupied regions were conducting
partisan warfare, sabotage and espionage, a view confirmed by official Soviet
information given to Raymond Arthur Davis that no less than 35,000 European Jews
were waging partisan war under Tito in Yugoslavia. As a result, Jews were to be
transported to restricted areas and detention camps, both in Germany, and
especially after March, 1942, in the Government-General of Poland. As the war
proceeded, the policy developed of using Jewish detainees for labour in the
war-effort. The question of labour is fundamental when considering the alleged
plan of genocide against the Jews, for on grounds of logic alone the latter
would entail the most senseless waste of manpower, time and energy while
prosecuting a war of survival on two fronts. Certainly after the attack on
Russia, the idea of compulsory labour had taken precedence over German plans for
Jewish emigation. The protocol of a conversation between Hitler and the
Hungarian regent Horthy on April 17th, 1943, reveals that the German leader
personally requested Horthy to release 100,000 Hungarian Jews for work in the
“pursuit-plane programme” of the Luftwaffe at a time when the aerial
bombardment of Germany was increasing (Reitlinger, Die Endlösung,
Berlin, 1956, p. 478). This took place at a time when, supposedly, the
Germans were already seeking to exterminate the Jews, but Hitler’s request
clearly demonstrates the priority aim of expanding his labour force. In harmony
with this programme, concentration camps became, in fact, industrial complexes.
At every camp where Jews and other nationalities were detained, there were.
large industrial plants and factories supplying material for the German
war-effort—the Buna rubber factory at Bergen-Belsen, for example, Buna and I. G. Farben
Industrie at Auschwitz and the electrical firm of Siemens at Ravensbruck. In
many cases, special concentration camp money notes were issued as payment for
labour, enabling prisoners to buy extra rations from camp shops. The Germans
were determined to obtain the maximum economic return from the concentration
camp system, an object wholly at variance with any plan to exterminate millions
of people in them. It was the function of the S.S. Economy and Administration
Office, headed by Oswald Pohl, to see that the concentration camps became major
industrial producers.
EMIGRATION STILL FAVOURED It
is a remarkable fact, however, that well into the war period, the Germans
continued to implement the policy of Jewish emigration. The fall of France in
1940 enabled the German Government to open serious negotiations with the French
for the transfer of European Jews to Madagascar. A memorandum of August, 1942
from Luther, Secretary-of-State in the German Foreign Office, reveals that he
had conducted these negotiations between July and December, 1940, when they were
terminated by the French. A circular from Luther’s department dated August 15th,
1940 shows that the details of the German plan had been worked out by Eichmann,
for it is signed by his assistant, Dannecker. Eichmann had in fact been
commissioned in August to draw up a detailed Madagascar Plan, and Dannecker was
employed in research on Madagascar at the French Colonial Office (Reitlinger, The
Final Solution, p. 77). The proposals of August 15th were that an
inter-European bank was to finance the emigration of four million Jews
throughout a phased programme. Luther’s 1942 memorandum shows that Heydrich
had obtained Himmler’s approval of this plan before the end of August and had
also submitted it to Goering. It certainly met with Hitler’s approval, for as
early as June 17th, his interpreter, Schmidt, recalls Hitler observing to
Mussolini that “One could found a State of Israel in Madagascar” (Schmidt, Hitler’s
Interpreter, London, 1951, p. 178). Although the French terminated the
Madagascar negotiations in December, 1940, Poliakov, the director of the Centre
of Jewish Documentation in Paris, admits that the Germans nevertheless pursued
the scheme, and that Eichmann was still busy with it throughout 1941.
Eventually, however, it was rendered impractical by the progress of the war, in
particular by the situation after the invasion of Russia, and on February 10th,
1942, the Foreign Office was informed that the plan had been temporarily
shelved. This ruling, sent to the Foreign Office by Luther’s assistant,
Rademacher, is of great importance, because it demonstrates conclusively that
the term “Final Solution” meant only the emigration of Jews, and also that
transportation to the eastern ghettos and concentration camps such as Auschwitz
constituted nothing but an alternative plan of evacuation. The directive reads:
“The war with the Soviet Union has in the mean time created the possibility of
disposing of other territories for the Final Solution. In consequence the Führer
has decided that the Jews should be evacuated not to Madagascar but to the East.
Madagascar need no longer therefore be considered in connection with the Final
Solution” (Reitlinger, ibid. p. 79). The details of this
evacuation had been discussed a month earlier at the Wannsee Conference in
Berlin, which we shall examine below. Reitlinger and Poliakov both make the
entirely unfounded supposition that because the Madagascar Plan had been
shelved, the Germans must necessarily have been thinking of “extermination”.
Only a month later, however, on March 7th, 1942, Goebbels wrote a
memorandum in favour of the Madagascar Plan as a “final solution” of the
Jewish question (Manvell & Frankl, Dr. Goebbels, London, 1960,
p. 165). In the mean time he approved of the Jews being “concentrated in
the East”. Later Goebbels memoranda also stressed deportation to the East
(i.e., the Government-General of Poland) and lay emphasis on the need for
compulsory labour there; once the policy of evacuation to the East had been
inaugurated, the use of Jewish labour became a fundamental part of the
operation. It is perfectly clear from the foregoing that the term “Final
Solution” was applied both to Madagascar and to the Eastern territories, and
that therefore it meant only the deportation of the Jews. Even as late as May,
1944, the Germans were prepared to allow the emigration of one million European
Jews from Europe. An account of this proposal is given by Alexander Weissberg, a
prominent Soviet Jewish scientist deported during the Stalin purges, in his book
Die Geschichte von Joel Brand (Cologne, 1956). Weissberg, who spent the
war in Cracow though he expected the Germans to intern him in a concentration
camp, explains that on the personal authorisation of Himmler, Eichmann had sent
the Budapest Jewish leader Joel Brand to Istanbul with an offer to the Allies to
permit the transfer of one million European Jews in the midst of the war. (If
the ‘extermination’ writers are to be believed, there were scarcely one
million Jews left by May, 1944). The Gestapo admitted that the transportation
involved would greatly inconvenience the German war-effort, but were prepared to
allow it in exchange for 10,000 trucks to be used exclusively on the Russian
front. Unfortunately, the plan came to nothing; the British concluded that Brand
must be a dangerous Nazi agent and immediately imprisoned him in Cairo, while
the Press denounced the offer as a Nazi trick. Winston Churchill, though orating
to the effect that the treatment of the Hungarian Jews was probably “the
biggest and most horrible crime ever committed in the whole history of the
world”, nevertheless told Chaim Weizmann that acceptance of the Brand offer
was impossible, since it would be a betrayal of his Russian Allies. Although the
plan was fruitless, it well illustrates that no one allegedly carrying out
“thorough” extermination would permit the emigration of a million Jews, and
it demonstrates, too, the prime importance placed by the Germans on the
war-effort.
3. POPULATION AND EMIGRATION
Statistics
relating to Jewish populations are not everywhere known in precise detail,
approximations for various countries differing widely, and it is also unknown
exactly how many Jews were deported and interned at any one time between the
years 1939–1945. In general, however, what reliable statistics there are,
especially those relating to emigration, are sufficient to show that not a
fraction of six million Jews could have been exterminated. In the first place,
this claim cannot remotely be upheld on examination of the European Jewish
population figures. According to Chambers Encyclopaedia the total number of Jews
living in pre-war Europe was 6,500,000. Quite clearly, this would mean that
almost the entire number were exterminated. But the Baseler Nachrichten, a
neutral Swiss publication employing available Jewish statistical data,
establishes that between 1933 and 1945, 1,500,000 Jews emigrated to Britain,
Sweden, Spain, Portugal, Australia, China, India, Palestine and the United
States. This is confirmed by the Jewish journalist Bruno Blau, who cites the
same figure in the New York Jewish paper Aufbau, August 13th, 1948.
Of these emigrants, approximately 400,000 came from Germany before September
1939. This is acknowledged by the World Jewish Congress in its publication Unity
in Dispersion (p. 377), which states that: “The majority of the
German Jews succeeded in leaving Germany before the war broke out.” In
addition to the German Jews, 220,000 of the total 280,000 Austrian Jews had
emigrated by September, 1939, while from March 1939 onwards the Institute for
Jewish Emigration in Prague had secured the emigration of 260,000 Jews from
former Czechoslovakia. In all, only 360,000 Jews remained in Germany, Austria
and Czechoslovakia after September, 1939. From Poland, an estimated 500,000 had
emigrated prior to the outbreak of war. These figures mean that the number of
Jewish emigrants from other European countries (France, the Netherlands, Italy,
the countries of eastern Europe, etc.) was approximately 120,000. This exodus of
Jews before and during hostilities, therefore, reduces the number of Jews in
Europe to approximately 5,000,000. In addition to these emigrants, we must also
include the number of Jews who fled to the Soviet Union after 1939, and who were
later evacuated beyond reach of the German invaders. It will be shown below that
the majority of these, about 1,250,000, were migrants from Poland. But apart
from Poland, Reitlinger admits that 300,000 other European Jews slipped into
Soviet territory between 1939 and 1941. This brings the total of Jewish
emigrants to the Soviet Union to about 1,550,000. In Colliers magazine, June 9th,
1945, Freiling Foster, writing of the Jews in Russia, explained that
“2,200,000 have migrated to the Soviet Union since 1939 to escape from the
Nazis,” but our lower estimate is probably more accurate. Jewish migration to
the Soviet Union, therefore, reduces the number of Jews within the sphere of
German occupation to around 3–1/2 million, approximately 3,450,000. From these
should be deducted those Jews living in neutral European countries who escaped
the consequences of the war. According to the 1942 World Almanac (p. 594).
the number of Jews living in Gibraltar, Britain, Portugal, Spain, Sweden,
Switzerland, Ireland and Turkey was 413,128.
THREE MILLION JEWS IN EUROPE A
figure, consequently, of around 3 million Jews in German-occupied Europe is as
accurate as the available emigration statistics will allow. Approximately the
same number, however, can be deduced in another way if we examine statistics for
the Jewish populations remaining in countries occupied by the Reich. More than
half of those Jews who migrated to the Soviet Union after 1939 came from Poland.
It is frequently claimed that the war with Poland added some 3 million Jews to
the German sphere of influence and that almost the whole of this Polish Jewish
population was “exterminated”. This is a major factual error. The 1931
Jewish population census for Poland put the number of Jews at 2,732,600 (Reitlinger,
Die Endlösung, p. 36). Reitlinger states that at least 1,170,000 of
these were in the Russian zone occupied in the autumn of 1939, about a million
of whom were evacuated to the Urals and south Siberia after the German invasion
of June, 1941 (ibid. p. 50). As described above, an estimated
500,000 Jews had emigrated from Poland prior to the war. Moreover, the
journalist Raymond Arthur Davis, who spent the war in the Soviet Union, observed
that approximately 250,000 had already fled from German-occupied Poland to
Russia between 1939 and 1941 and were to be encountered in every Soviet province
(Odyssey through Hell, N.Y., 1946). Subtracting these figures from the
population of 2,732,600, therefore, and allowing for the normal population
increase, no more than 1,100,000 Polish Jews could have been under German rule
at the end of 1939. (Gutachen des Instituts für Zeitgeschichte, Munich,
1956, p. 80). To this number we may add the 360,000 Jews remaining in
Germany, Austria and former Czechoslovakia (Bohemia-Moravia and Slovakia) after
the extensive emigration from those countries prior to the war described above.
Of the 320,000 French Jews, the Public Prosecutor representing that part of the
indictment relating to France at the Nuremberg Trials, stated that 120,000 Jews
were deported, though. Reitlinger estimates only about 50,000. Thus the total
number of Jews under Nazi rule remains below two million. Deportations from the
Scandinavian countries were few, and from Bulgaria none at all. When the Jewish
populations of Holland (140,000), Belgium (40,000), Italy (50,000), Yugoslavia
(55,000), Hungary (380,000) and Roumania (725,000) are included, the figure does
not much exceed 3 million. This excess is due to the fact that the latter
figures are pre-war estimates unaffected by emigration, which from these
countries accounted for about 120,000 (see above). This cross-checking,
therefore, confirms the estimate of approximately 3 million European Jews under
German occupation.
RUSSIAN JEWS EVACUATED The
precise figures concerning Russian Jews are unknown, and have therefore been the
subject of extreme exaggeration. The Jewish statistician Jacob Leszczynski
states that in 1939 there were 2,100,000 Jews living in future German-occupied
Russia, i.e., western Russia. In addition, some 260,000 lived in the Baltic
states of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania. According to Louis Levine, President of
the American Jewish Council for Russian Relief, who made a post-war tour of the
Soviet Union and submitted a report on the status of Jews there, the majority of
these numbers were evacuated east after the German armies launched their
invasion. In Chicago, on October 30th, 1946, he declared that: “At the outset
of the war, Jews were amongst the first evacuated from the western regions
threatened by the Hitlerite invaders, and shipped to safety east of the Urals.
Two million Jews were thus saved.” This high number is confirmed by the Jewish
journalist David Bergelson, who wrote in the Moscow Yiddish paper Ainikeit,
December 5th, 1942, that “Thanks to the evacuation, the majority (80%) of
the Jews in the Ukraine, White Russia, Lithuania and Latvia before the arrival
of the Germans were rescued.” Reitlinger agrees with the Jewish authority
Joseph Schechtmann, who admits that huge numbers were evacuated, though he
estimates a slightly higher number of Russian and Baltic Jews left under German
occupation, between 650,000 and 850,000 (Reitlinger, The Final Solution,
p. 499). In respect of these Soviet Jews remaining in German territory, it
will be proved later that in the war in Russia no more than one hundred thousand
persons were killed by the German Action Groups as partisans and Bolshevik
commissars, not all of whom were Jews. By contrast, the partisans themselves
claimed to have murdered five times that number of German troops.
‘SIX MILLION’ UNTRUE ACCORDING TO NEUTRAL SWISS It
is clear, therefore, that the Germans could not possibly have gained control
over or exterminated anything like six million Jews. Excluding the Soviet Union,
the number of Jews in Nazi-occupied Europe after emigration was scarcely more
than 3 million, by no means all of whom were interned. To approach the
extermination of even half of six milion would have meant the liquidation of
every Jew living in Europe. And yet it is known that large numbers of Jews were
alive in Europe after 1945. Philip Friedmann in Their Brother’s Keepers
(N.Y., 1957, p. 13), states that “at least a million Jews survived in the
very crucible of the Nazi hell,” while the official figure of the Jewish Joint
Distribution Committee is 1,559,600. Thus, even if one accepts the latter
estimate, the number of possible wartime Jewish deaths could not have exceeded a
limit of one and a half million. Precisely this conclusion was reached by the
reputable journal Baseler Nachrichten of neutral Switzerland. In an article
entitled “Wie hoch ist die Zahl der jüdischen Opfer?” (“How high
is the number of Jewish victims?”, June 13th, 1946), it explained that
purely on the basis of the population and emigration figures described above, a
maximum of only one and a half million Jews could be numbered as casualties.
Later on, however, it will be demonstrated conclusively that the number was
actually far less, for the Baseler Nachrichten accepted the Joint Distribution
Committee’s figure of 1,559,600 survivors after the war, but we shall show
that the number of claims for compensation by Jewish survivors is more than
double that figure. This information was not available to the Swiss in 1946.
IMPOSSIBLE BIRTH RATE Indisputable
evidence is also provided by the post-war world Jewish population statistics.
The World Almanac of 1938 gives the number of Jews in the world as 16,588,259.
But after the war, the New York Times, February 22nd, 1948 placed the
number of Jews in the world at a minimum of 15,600,000 and a maximum of
18,700,000. Quite obviously, these figures make it impossible for the number of
Jewish war-time casualties to be measured in anything but thousands. 15–1/2
million in 1938 minus the alleged six million leaves nine million; the New York
Times figures would mean, therefore, that the world’s Jews produced seven
million births, almost doubling their numbers, in the space of ten years. This
is patently ridiculous. It would appear, therefore, that the great majority of
the missing “six million” were in fact emigrants—emigrants to European
countries, to the Soviet Union and the United States before, during and after
the war. And emigrants also, in vast numbers to Palestine during and especially
at the end of the war. After 1945, boat-loads of these Jewish survivors entered
Palestine illegally from Europe, causing considerable embarrassment to the
British Government of the time; indeed, so great were the numbers that the H. M.
Stationery Office publication No. 190 (November 5th, 1946) described
them as “almost amounting to a second Exodus.” It was these emigrants to all
parts of the world who had swollen the world Jewish population to between 15 and
18 millions by 1948, and probably the greatest part of them were emigrants to
the United States who entered in violation of the quota laws. On August 16th,
1963 David Ben Gurion, President of Israel, stated that although the official
Jewish population of America was said to be 5,600,000, “the total number would
not be estimated too high at 9,000,000” (Deutsche Wochenzeitung,
November 23rd, 1963). The reason for this high figure is underlined by
Albert Maisal in his article “Our Newest Americans” (Readers Digest,
January, 1957), for he reveals that “Soon after World War II, by Presidential
decree, 90 per cent of all quota visas for central and eastern Europe were
issued to the uprooted.” Reprinted on this page is just one extract from
hundreds that regularly appear in the obituary columns of Aufbau, the
Jewish American weekly published in New York (June 16th, 1972). It shows
how Jewish emigrants to the United States subsequently changed their names;
their former names when in Europe appear in brackets. For example, as below:
Arthur Kingsley (formerly Dr. Königsberger of Frankfurt). Could it be that
some or all of these people whose names are ‘deceased’ were included in the
missing six million of Europe?
4. THE SIX MILLION: DOCUMENTARY EVIDENCE
From
the foregoing it would seem certain that the figure of six million murdered Jews
amounts to nothing more than a vague compromise between several quite baseless
estimates; there is not a shred of documentary evidence for it that is
trustworthy. Occasionally, writers narrow it down to give a disarming appearance
of authenticity. Lord Russell of Liverpool, for example, in his The Scourge
of the Swastika (London, 1954) claimed that “not less than five million”
Jews died in German concentration camps, having satisfied himself that he was
somewhere between those who estimated 6 million and those who preferred 4
million. But, he admitted, “the real number will never be known.” If so, it
is difficult to know how he could have asserted “not less than five
million.” The Joint Distribution Committee favours 5,012,000, but the Jewish
“expert” Reitlinger suggests a novel figure of 4,192,200 “missing Jews”
of whom an estimated one third died of natural causes. This would reduce the
number deliberately “exterminated” to 2,796,000. However, Dr. M. Perlzweig,
the New York delegate to a World Jewish Congress press conference held at Geneva
in 1948 stated: “The price of the downfall of National Socialism and Fascism
is the fact that seven million Jews lost their lives thanks to cruel
Anti-Semitism.” In the Press and elsewhere, the figure is often casually
lifted to eight million or sometimes even nine million. As we have proved in the
previous chapter, none of these figures are in the remotest degree plausible,
indeed, they are ridiculous.
FANTASTIC EXAGGERATIONS So
far as is known, the first accusation against the Germans of the mass murder of
Jews in war-time Europe was made by the Polish Jew Rafael Lemkin in his book
Axis Rule in Occupied Europe, published in New York in 1943. Somewhat
coincidentally, Lemkin was later to draw up the U.N. Genocide Convention, which
seeks to outlaw “racialism”. His book claimed that the Nazis had destroyed
millions of Jews, perhaps as many as six millions. This, by 1943, would have
been remarkable indeed, since the action was allegedly started only in the
summer of 1942. At such a rate, the entire world Jewish population would have
been exterminated by 1945. After the war, propaganda estimates spiralled to
heights even more fantastic. Kurt Gerstein, an anti-Nazi who claimed to have
infiltrated the S.S., told the French interrogator Raymond Cartier that he knew
that no less than forty million concentration camp internees had been gassed. In
his first signed memorandum of April 26th, 1945, he reduced the figure to
25 million, but even this was too bizarre for French Intelligence and in his
second memorandum, signed at Rottweil on May 4th, 1945, he brought the
figure closer to the six million preferred at the Nuremberg Trials. Gerstein’s
sister was congenitally insane and died by euthanasia, which may well suggest a
streak of mental instability in Gerstein himself. He had, in fact, been
convicted in 1936 of sending eccentric mail through the post. After his two
“confessions” he hanged himself at Cherche Midi prison in Paris. Gerstein
alleged that during the war he passed on information concerning the murder of
Jews to the Swedish Government through a German baron but for some inexplicable
reason his report was “filed away and forgotten”. He also claimed that in
August, 1942 he informed the Papal nuncio in Berlin about the whole
“extermination programme”, but the reverend person merely told him to “Get
out.” The Gerstein statements abound with claims to have witnessed the most
gigantic mass executions (twelve thousand in a single day at Belzec), while the
second memorandum describes a visit by Hitler to a concentration camp in Poland
on June 6th, 1942 which is known never to have taken place. Gerstein’s
fantastic exaggerations have done little but discredit the whole notion of mass
extermination. Indeed, Evangelical Bishop Wilhelm Dibelius of Berlin denounced
his memoranda as “Untrustworthy” (H. Rothfels, “Augenzeugenbericht
zu den Massenvergasungen” in Vierteljahrshefte für Zeitgeschichte,
April, 1953). It is an incredible fact, however, that in spite of this
denunciation, the German Government in 1955 issued an edition of the second
Gerstein memorandum for distribution in German schools (Dokumentation zur
Massenvergasung, Bonn, 1955). In it they stated that Dibelius placed his
special confidence in Gerstein and that the memoranda were “valid beyond any
doubt.” This is a striking example of the way in which the baseless charge of
genocide by the Nazis is perpetuated in Germany, and directed especially to the
youth.
The story of six million Jews exterminated during the war was
given final authority at the Nuremberg Trials by the statement of Dr. Wilhelm
Hoettl. He had been an assistant of Eichmann’s, but was in fact a rather
strange person in the service of American Intelligence who had written several
books under the pseudonym of Walter Hagen. Hoettl also worked for Soviet
espionage, collaborating with two Jewish emigrants from Vienna, Perger and
Verber, who acted as U.S. officers during the preliminary inquiries of the
Nuremberg Trials. It is remarkable that the testimony of this highly dubious
person Hoettl is said to constitute the only “proof” regarding the murder of
six million Jews. In his affidavit of November 26th, 1945 he stated, not
that he knew but that Eichmann had “told him” in August 1944 in Budapest
that a total of 6 million Jews had been exterminated. Needless to say,
Eichmann never corroborated this claim at his trial. Hoettl was working as an
American spy during the whole of the latter period of the war, and it is
therefore very odd indeed that he never gave the slightest hint to the Americans
of a policy to murder Jews, even though he worked directly under Heydrich and
Eichmann.
ABSENCE OF EVIDENCE It
should be emphasised straight away that there is not a single document in
existence which proves that the Germans intended to, or carried out, the
deliberate murder of Jews. In Poliakov and Wulf’s Das Dritte Reich und die
Juden: Dokumente und Aufsätze (Berlin, 1955), the most that they can
assemble are statements extracted after the war from people like Hoettl,
Ohlendorf and Wisliceny, the latter under torture in a Soviet prison. In the
absence of any evidence, therefore, Poliakov is forced to write: “The three or
four people chiefly involved in drawing up the plan for total extermination are
dead, and no documents survive.” This seems very convenient. Quite obviously,
both the plan and the “three or four” people are nothing but nebulous
assumptions on the part of the writer, and are entirely unprovable. The
documents which do survive, of course, make no mention at all of extermination,
so that writers like Poliakov and Reitlinger again make the convenient
assumption that such orders were generally “verbal”. Though lacking any
documentary proof, they assume that a plan to murder Jews must have originated
in 1941, coinciding with the attack on Russia. Phase one of the plan is alleged
to have involved the massacre of Soviet Jews, a claim we shall disprove later.
The rest of the programme is supposed to have begun in March 1942, with the
deportation and concentration of European Jews in the eastern camps of the
Polish Government-General, such as the giant industrial complex at Auschwitz
near Cracow. The fantastic and quite groundless assumption throughout is that
transportation to the East, supervised by Eichmann’s department, actually
meant immediate extermination in ovens on arrival. According to Manvell and
Frankl (Heinrich Himmler, London, 1965), the policy of genocide “seems
to have been arrived at” after “secret discussions” between Hitler and
Himmler (p. 118), though they fail to prove it. Reitlinger and Poliakov
guess along similar “verbal” lines, adding that no one else was allowed to
be present at these discussions, and no records were ever kept of them. This is
the purest invention, for there is not a shred of evidence that even suggests
such outlandish meetings took place. William Shirer, in his generally wild and
irresponsible book The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, is similarly
muted on the subject of documentary proof. He states weakly that Hitler’s
supposed order for the murder of Jews “apparently was never committed to
paper—at least no copy of it has yet been unearthed. It was probably given
verbally to Goering, Himmler and Heydrich, who passed it down...” (p. 1148).
A typical example of the kind of “proof” quoted in support of the
extermination legend is given by Manvell and Frankl. They cite a memorandum of
31st July, 1941 sent by Goering to Heydrich, who headed the Reich Security
Head Office and was Himmler’s deputy. Significantly, the memorandum begins:
“Supplementing the task that was assigned to you on 24th January, 1939,
to solve the Jewish problem by means of emigration and evacuation in the best
possible way according to present conditions…” The supplementary task
assigned in the memorandum is a “total solution (Gesamtlösung) of the
Jewish question within the area of German influence in Europe,” which the
authors admit means concentration in the East, and it requests preparations for
the “organisational, financial and material matters” involved. The
memorandum then requests a future plan for the “desired final solution” (Endlösung),
which clearly refers to the ideal and ultimate scheme of emigration and
evacuation mentioned at the beginning of the directive. No mention whatever is
made of murdering people, but Manvell and Frankl assure us that this is what the
memorandum is really about. Again, of course, the “true nature” of the final
as distinct from the total solution “was made known to Heydrich by Goering
verbally” (ibid., p. 118). The convenience of these “verbal”
directives issuing back and forth is obvious.
THE WANNSEE CONFERENCE The
final details of the plan to exterminate Jews were supposed to have been made at
a conference at Gross Wannsee in Berlin on 20th January, 1942, presided
over by Heydrich (Poliakov, Das Dritte Reich und die Juden, p. 120 ff;
Reitlinger, The Final Solution, p. 95 ff). Officials of all
German Ministries were present, and Müller and Eichmann represented Gestapo
Head Office. Reitlinger and Manvell and Frankl consider the minutes of this
conference to be their trump card improving the existence of a genocide plan,
but the truth is that no such plan was even mentioned, and what is more, they
freely admit this. Manvell and Frankl explain it away rather lamely by saying
that “The minutes are shrouded in the form of officialdom that cloaks the real
significance of the words and terminology that are used” (The Incomparable
Crime, London, 1967, p. 46), which really means that they intend to
interpret them in their own way. What Heydrich actually said was that, as in the
memorandum quoted above, he had been commissioned by Goering to arrange a
solution to the Jewish problem. He reviewed the history of Jewish emigration,
stated that the war had rendered the Madagascar project impractical, and
continued: “The emigration programme has been replaced now by the evacuation
of Jews to the east as a further possible solution, in accordance with the
previous authorisation of the Führer.” Here, he explained, their labour was
to be utilised. All this is supposed to be deeply sinister, and pregnant with
the hidden meaning that the Jews were to be exterminated, though Prof. Paul
Rassinier, a Frenchman interned at Buchenwald who has done sterling work in
refuting the myth of the Six Million, explains that it means precisely what it
says, i.e., the concentration of the Jews for labour in the immense eastern
ghetto of the Polish Government-General. “There they were to wait until the
end of the war, for the re-opening of international discussions which would
decide their future. This decision was finally reached at the interministerial
Berlin-Wannsee conference…” (Rassinier, Le Véritable Proces Eichmann,
p. 20). Manvell and Frankl, however, remain undaunted by the complete lack
of reference to extermination. At the Wannsee conference, they write, “Direct
references to killing were avoided, Heydrich favouring the term Arbeitseinsatz
im Osten (labour assignment in the East)” (Heinrich Himmler, p. 209).
Why we should not accept labour assignment in the East to mean labour
assignment in the East is not explained. According to Reitlinger and others,
innumerable directives actually specifying extermination then passed between
Himmler, Heydrich, Eichmann and commandant Hoess in the subsequent months of
1942, but of course, “none have survived”.
TWISTED WORDS AND GROUNDLESS ASSUMPTIONS The
complete lack of documentary evidence to support the existence of an
extermination plan has led to the habit of re-interpreting the documents that do
survive. For example, it is held that a document concerning deportation is not
about deportation at all, but a cunning way of talking about extermination.
Manvell and Frankl state that “various terms were used to camouflage genocide.
These included Aussiedlung (desettlement) and Abbeförderung
(removal)” (ibid., p. 265). Thus, as we have seen already, words
are no longer assumed to mean what they say if they prove too inconvenient. This
kind of thing is taken to the most incredible extremes, such as their
interpretation of Heydrich’s directive for labour assignment in the East.
Another example is a reference to Himmler’s order for sending deportees to the
East, “that is, having them killed” (ibid., p. 251). Reitlinger,
equally at a loss for evidence, does exactly the same, declaring that from the
“circumlocutionary” words of the Wannsee conference it is obvious that
“the slow murder of an entire race was intended” (ibid., p. 98).
A review of the documentary situation is important, because it reveals the
edifice of guesswork and baseless assumptions upon which the extermination
legend is built. The Germans had an extraordinary propensity for recording
everything on paper in the most careful detail, yet among the thousands of
captured documents of the S.D. and Gestapo, the records of the Reich Security
Head Office, the files of Himmler’s headquarters and Hitler’s own war
directives there is not a single order for the extermination of Jews or anyone
else. It will be seen later that this has, in fact, been admitted by the World
Centre of Contemporary Jewish Documentation at Tel-Aviv. Attempts to find
“veiled allusions” to genocide in speeches like that of Himmler’s to his
S.S. Obergruppenführers at Posen in 1943 are likewise quite hopeless. Nuremberg
statements extracted after the war, invariably under duress, are examined in the
following chapter.
5. THE NUREMBERG TRIALS
The
story of the Six Million was given judicial authority at the Nuremberg Trials of
German leaders between 1945 and 1949, proceedings which proved to be the most
disgraceful legal farce in history. For a far more detailed study of the
iniquities of these trials, which as Field Marshal Montgomery said, made it a
crime to lose a war, the reader is referred to the works cited below, and
particularly to the outstanding book Advance to Barbarism (Nelson, 1953),
by the distinguished English jurist, F. J. P. Veale. From the
very outset, the Nuremberg Trials proceeded on the basis of gross statistical
errors. In his speech of indictment on November 20th, 1945, Mr. Sidney
Alderman declared that there had been 9,600,000 Jews living in German occupied
Europe. Our earlier study has shown this figure to be wildly inaccurate. It is
arrived at (a) by completely ignoring all Jewish emigration between 1933
and 1945, and (b) by adding all the Jews of Russia, including the two
million or more who were never in German-occupied territory. The same inflated
figure, slightly enlarged to 9,800,000, was produced again at the Eichmann Trial
in Israel by Prof. Shalom Baron. The alleged Six Million victims first
appeared as the foundation for the prosecution at Nuremberg, and after some
dalliance with ten million or more by the Press at the time, it eventually
gained international popularity and acceptance. It is very significant, however,
that, although this outlandish figure was able to win credence in the reckless
atmosphere of recrimination in 1945, it had become no longer tenable by 1961, at
the Eichmann Trial. The Jerusalem court studiously avoided mentioning the figure
of Six Million, and the charge drawn up by Mr. Gideon Haussner simply said
“some” millions.
LEGAL PRINCIPLES IGNORED Should
anyone be misled into believing that the extermination of the Jews was
“proved” at Nuremberg by “evidence”, he should consider the nature of
the Trials themselves, based as they were on a total disregard of sound legal
principles of any kind. The accusers acted as prosecutors, judges and
executioners; “guilt” was assumed from the outset. (Among the judges, of
course, were the Russians, whose numberless crimes included the massacre of
15,000 Polish officers, a proportion of whose bodies were discovered by the
Germans at Katyn Forest, near Smolensk. The Soviet Prosecutor attempted to blame
this slaughter on the German defendants). At Nuremberg, ex post facto
legislation was created, whereby men were tried for “crimes” which were only
declared crimes after they had been allegedly committed. Hitherto it had been
the most basic legal principle that a person could only be convicted for
infringing a law that was in force at the time of the infringement. “Nulla
Poena Sine Lege.” The Rules of Evidence, developed by British
jurisprudence over the centuries in order to arrive at the truth of a charge
with as much certainty as possible, were entirely disregarded at Nuremberg. It
was decreed that “the Tribunal should not be bound by technical rules of
evidence” but could admit “any evidence which it deemed to have probative
value,” that is, would support a conviction. In practise, this meant the
admittance of hearsay evidence and documents, which in a normal judicial trial
are always rejected as untrustworthy. That such evidence was allowed is of
profound significance, because it was one of the principal methods by which the
extermination legend was fabricated through fraudulent “written affidavits”.
Although only 240 witnesses were called in the course of the Trials, no less
than 300,000 of these “written affidavits” were accepted by the Court as
supporting the charges, without this evidence being heard under oath. Under
these circumstances, any Jewish deportee or camp inmate could make any
revengeful allegation that he pleased. Most incredible of all, perhaps, was the
fact that defence lawyers at Nuremberg were not permitted to cross-examine
prosecution witnesses. A somewhat similar situation prevailed at the trial of
Adolf Eichmann, when it was announced that Eichmann’s defence lawyer could be
cancelled at any time “if an intolerable situation should arise,” which
presumably meant if his lawyer started to prove his innocence. The real
background of the Nuremberg Trials was exposed by the American judge, Justice
Wenersturm, President of one of Tribunals. He was so disgusted by the
proceedings that he resigned his appointment and flew home to America, leaving
behind a statement to the Chicago Tribune which enumerated point by point his
objections to the Trials (cf. Mark Lautern, Das Letzte Wort über
Nürnberg, p. 56). Points 3–8 are as follows: 3. The members of
the department of the Public Prosecutor, instead of trying to formulate and
reach a new guiding legal principle, were moved only by personal ambition and
revenge. 4. The prosecution did its utmost in every way possible to prevent
the defence preparing its case and to make it impossible for it to furnish
evidence. 5. The prosecution, led by General Taylor, did everything in its
power to prevent the unanimous decision of the Military Court being carried out,
i.e., to ask Washington to furnish and make available to the court further
documentary evidence in the possession of the American Government. 6. Ninety
per cent of the Nuremberg Court consisted of biased persons who, either on
political or racial grounds, furthered the prosecution’s case. 7. The
prosecution obviously knew how to fill all the administrative posts of the
Military Court with “Americans” whose naturalisation certificates were very
new indeed, and who, whether in the administrative service or by their
translations, etc., created an atmosphere hostile to the accused persons. 8. The
real aim of the Nuremberg Trials was to show the Germans the crimes of their Führer,
and this aim was at the same time the pretext on which the trials were
ordered… Had I known seven months earlier what was happening at Nuremberg, I
would never have gone there. Concerning Point 6, that ninety per cent of the
Nuremberg Court consisted of people biased on racial or political grounds, this
was a fact confirmed by others present. According to Earl Carrol, an American
lawyer, sixty percent of the staff of the Public Prosecutor’s Office were
German Jews who had left Germany after the promulgation of Hitler’s Race Laws.
He observed that not even ten per cent of the Americans employed at the
Nuremberg courts were actually Americans by birth. The chief of the Public
Prosecutor’s Office, who worked behind General Taylor, was Robert M. Kempner,
a German-Jewish emigrant. He was assisted by Morris Amchan. Mark Lautern, who
observed the Trials, writes in his book: “They have all arrived: the Solomons,
the Schlossbergers and the Rabinovitches, members of the Public Prosecutor’s
staff…” (ibid., p. 68). It is obvious from these facts that the
fundamental legal principle: that no man can sit in judgement on his own case,
was abandoned altogether. Moreover, the majority of witnesses were also Jews.
According to Prof. Maurice Bardeche, who was also an observer at the
Trials, the only concern of these witnesses was not to show their hatred too
openly, and to try and give an impression of objectivity (Nuremberg ou la
Terre Promise, Paris, 1948, p. 149).
‘CONFESSIONS’ UNDER TORTURE Altogether
more disturbing, however, were the methods employed to extract statements and
“confessions” at Nuremberg, particularly those from S.S. officers which were
used to support the extermination charge. The American Senator, Joseph McCarthy,
in a statement given to the American Press on May 20th, 1949, drew attention to
the following cases of torture to secure such confessions. In the prison of the
Swabisch Hall, he stated, officers of the S.S. Leibstandarte Adolf Hitler were
flogged until they were soaked in blood, after which their sexual organs were
trampled on as they lay prostrate on the ground. As in the notorious Malmedy
Trials of private soldiers, the prisoners were hoisted in the air and beaten
until they signed the confessions demanded of them. On the basis of such
“confessions” extorted from S.S. Generals Sepp Dietrich and Joachim Paiper,
the Leibstandarte was convicted as a “guilty organisation”. S.S. General
Oswald Pohl, the economic administrator of the concentration camp system, had
his face smeared with faeces and was subsequently beaten until he supplied his
confession. In dealing with these cases, Senator McCarthy told the Press: “I
have heard evidence and read documentary proofs to the effect that the accused
persons were beaten up, maltreated and physically tortured by methods which
could only be conceived in sick brains. They were subjected to mock trials and
pretended executions, they were told their families would be deprived of their
ration cards. All these things were carried out with the approval of the Public
Prosecutor in order to secure the psychological atmosphere necessary for the
extortion of the required confessions. If the United States lets such acts
committed by a few people go unpunished, then the whole world can rightly
criticise us severely and forever doubt the correctness of our motives and our
moral integrity.” The methods of intimidation described were repeated during
trials at Frankfurt-am-Mein and at Dachau, and large numbers of Germans were
convicted for atrocities on the basis of their admissions. The American Judge
Edward L. van Roden, one of the three members of the Simpson Army
Commission which was subsequently appointed to investigate the methods of
justice at the Dachau trials, revealed the methods by which these admissions
were secured in the Washington Daily News, January 9th, 1949. His account
also appeared in the British newspaper, the Sunday Pictorial, January 23rd,
1949. The methods he described were: “Posturing as priests to hear confessions
and give absolution; torture with burning matches driven under the prisoners
fingernails; knocking out of teeth and breaking jaws; solitary confinement and
near starvation rations.” Van Roden explained: “The statements which were
admitted as evidence were obtained from men who had first been kept in solitary
confinement for three, four and five months… The investigators would put a
black hood over the accused’s head and then punch him in the face with brass
knuckles, kick him and beat him with rubber hoses… All but two of the Germans,
in the 139 cases we investigated, had been kicked in the testicles beyond
repair. This was standard operating procedure with our American
investigators.” The “American” investigators responsible (and who later
functioned as the prosecution in the trials) were: Lt.-Col. Burton F. Ellis
(chief of the War Crimes Committee) and his assistants, Capt. Raphael Shumacker,
Lt. Robert E. Byrne, Lt. William R. Perl, Mr. Morris Ellowitz,
Mr. Harry Thon, and Mr. Kirschbaum. The legal adviser of the court was
Col. A. H. Rosenfeld. The reader will immediately appreciate from
their names that the majority of these people were “biased on racial
grounds” in the words of Justice Wenersturm—that is, were Jewish, and
therefore should never have been involved in any such investigation. Despite the
fact that “confessions” pertaining to the extermination of the Jews were
extracted under these conditions, Nuremberg statements are still regarded as
conclusive evidence for the Six Million by writers like Reitlinger and others,
and the illusion is maintained that the Trials were both impartial and
impeccably fair. When General Taylor, the Chief Public Prosecutor, was asked
where he had obtained the figure of the Six Million, he replied that it was
based on the confession of S.S. General Otto Ohlendorf. He, too, was tortured
and his case is examined below. But as far as such “confessions” in general
are concerned, we can do no better than quote the British Sunday Pictorial when
reviewing the report of Judge van Roden: “Strong men were reduced to broken
wrecks ready to mumble any admission demanded by their prosecutors.”
THE WISLICENY STATEMENT At
this point, let us turn to some of the Nuremberg documents themselves. The
document quoted most frequently in support of the legend of the Six Million, and
which figures largely in Poliakov and Wulf’s Das Dritte Reich und die Juden:
Dokumente und Aufsätze, is the statement of S.S. Captain Dieter Wisliceny,
an assistant in Adolf Eichmann’s office and later the Gestapo chief in
Slovakia. It was obtained under conditions even more extreme than those
described above, for Wisliceny fell into the hands of Czech Communists and was
“interrogated” at the Soviet-controlled Bratislava Prison in November, 1946.
Subjected to torture, Wisliceny was reduced to a nervous wreck and became
addicted to uncontrollable fits of sobbing for hours on end prior to his
execution. Although the conditions under which his statement was obtained empty
it entirely of all plausibility, Poliakov prefers to ignore this and merely
writes: “In prison he wrote several memoirs that contain information of great
interest” (Harvest of Hate, p. 3). These memoirs include some
genuine statements of fact to provide authenticity, such as that Himmler was an
enthusiastic advocate of Jewish emigration and that the emigration of Jews from
Europe continued throughout the war, but in general they are typical of the
Communist-style “confession” produced at Soviet show-trials. Frequent
reference is made to exterminating Jews and a flagrant attempt is made to
implicate as many S.S. leaders as possible. Factual errors are also common,
notably the statement that the war with Poland added more than 3 million Jews to
the German-occupied territory, which we have disproved above.
THE CASE OF THE EINSATZGRUPPEN The
Wisliceny statement deals at some length with the activities of the
Einsatzgruppen or Action Groups used in the Russian campaign. These must merit a
detailed consideration in a survey of Nuremberg because the picture presented of
them at the Trials represents a kind of “Six Million” in miniature, i.e.,
has been proved since to be the most enormous exaggeration and falsification.
The Einsatzgruppen were four special units drawn from the Gestapo and the S.D.
(S.S. Security Service) whose task was to wipe out partisans and Communist
commissars in the wake of the advancing German armies in Russia. As early as
1939, there had been 34,000 of these political commissars attached to the Red
Army. The activities of the Einsatzgruppen were the particular concern of the
Soviet Prosecutor Rudenko at the Nuremberg Trials. The 1947 indictment of the
four groups alleged that in the course of their operations they had killed not
less than one million Jews in Russia merely because they were Jews. These
allegations have since been elaborated; it is now claimed that the murder of
Soviet Jews by the Einsatzgruppen constituted Phase One in the plan to
exterminate the Jews, Phase Two being the transportation of European Jews to
Poland. Reitlinger admits that the original term “final solution” referred
to emigration and had nothing to do with the liquidation of Jews, but he then
claims that an extermination policy began at the time of the invasion of Russia
in 1941. He considers Hitler’s order of July 1941 for the liquidation of the
Communist commissars, and he concludes that this was accompanied by a verbal
order from Hitler for the Einsatzgruppen to liquidate all Soviet Jews (Die
Endlösung, p. 91). If this assumption is based on anything at all, it
is probably the worthless Wisliceny statement, which alleges that the
Einsatzgruppen were soon receiving orders to extend their task of crushing
Communists and partisans to a “general massacre” of Russian Jews. It is very
significant that, once again, it is a “verbal order” for exterminating Jews
that is supposed to have accompanied Hitler’s genuine, written order—yet
another nebulous and unprovable assumption on the part of Reitlinger. An earlier
order from Hitler, dated March 1941 and signed by Field Marshal Keitel, makes it
quite clear what the real tasks of the future Einsatzgruppen would be. It states
that in the Russian campaign, the Reichsfüher S.S. (Himmler) is to be entrusted
with “tasks for the political administration, tasks which result from the
struggle which has to be carried out between two opposing political systems” (Manvell
& Frankl, ibid., p. 115). This plainly refers to eliminating
Communism, especially the political commissars whose specific task was Communist
indoctrination.
THE OHLENDORF TRIAL The
most revealing trial in the “Einsatzgruppen Case” at Nuremberg was that of
S.S. General Otto Ohlendorf, the chief of the S.D. who commanded Einsatzgruppe D
in the Ukraine, attached to Field Marshal von Manstein’s Eleventh Army. During
the last phase of the war he was employed as a foreign trade expert in the
Ministry of Economics. Ohlendorf was one of those subjected to the torture
described earlier, and in his affidavit of November 5th, 1945 he was
“persuaded” to confess that 90,000 Jews had been killed under his command
alone. Ohlendorf did not come to trial until 1948, long after the main Nuremberg
Trial, and by that time he was insisting that his earlier statement had been
extracted from him under torture. In his main speech before the Tribunal,
Ohlendorf took the opportunity to denounce Philip Auerbach, the Jewish
attorney-general of the Bavarian State Office for Restitution, who at that time
was claiming compensation for “eleven million Jews” who had suffered in
German concentration camps. Ohlendorf dismissed this ridiculous claim, stating
that “not the minutest part” of the people for whom Auerbach was demanding
compensation had even seen a concentration camp. Ohlendorf lived long enough to
see Auerbach convicted for embezzlement and fraud (forging documents purporting
to show huge payments of compensation to non-existent people) before his own
execution finally took place in 1951. Ohlendorf explained to the Tribunal that
his units often had to prevent massacres of Jews organised by anti-Semitic
Ukrainians behind the German front, and he denied that the Einsatzgruppen as a
whole had inflicted even one quarter of the casualties claimed by the
prosecution. He insisted that the illegal partisan warfare in Russia, which he
had to combat, had taken a far higher toll of lives from the regular German
army—an assertion confirmed by the Soviet Government, which boasted of 500,000
German troops killed by partisans. In fact, Franz Stahlecker, commander of
Einsatzgruppe A in the Baltic region and White Russia, was himself killed
by partisans in 1942. The English jurist F. J. P. Veale, in
dealing with the Action Groups, explains that in the fighting on the Russian
front no distinction could be properly drawn between partisans and the civilian
population, because any Russian civilian who maintained his civilian status
instead of acting as a terrorist was liable to be executed by his countrymen as
a traitor. Veale says of the Action Groups: “There is no question that their
orders were to combat terror by terror”, and he finds it strange that
atrocities committed by the partisans in the struggle were regarded as blameless
simply because they turned out to be on the winning side (ibid., p. 223).
Ohlendorf took the same view, and in a bitter appeal written before his
execution, he accused the Allies of hypocrisy in holding the Germans to account
by conventional laws of warfare while fighting a savage Soviet enemy who did not
respect those laws.
ACTION GROUP EXECUTIONS DISTORTED The
Soviet charge that the Action Groups had wantonly exterminated a million Jews
during their operations has been shown subsequently to be a massive
falsification. In fact, there had never been the slightest statistical basis for
the figure. In this connection, Poliakov and Wulf cite the statement of Wilhelm
Hoettl, the dubious American spy, double agent and former assistant of Eichmann.
Hoettl, it will be remembered, claimed that Eichmann had “told him” that six
million Jews had been exterminated—and he added that two million of these had
been killed by the Einsatzgruppen. This absurd figure went beyond even the
wildest estimates of Soviet Prosecutor Rudenko, and it was not given any
credence by the American Tribunal which tried and condemned Ohlendorf. The real
number of casualties for which the Action Groups were responsible has since been
revealed in the scholarly work Manstein, his Campaigns and his Trial
(London, 1951), by the able English lawyer R. T. Paget. Ohlendorf had
been under Manstein’s nominal command. Paget’s conclusion is that the
Nuremberg Court, in accepting the figures of the Soviet prosecution, exaggerated
the number of casualties by more than 1,000 per cent and that they distorted
even more the situations in which these casualties were inflicted. (These
horrific distortions are the subject of six pages of William Shirer’s The
Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, pp. 1140–46). Here, then, is the
legendary 6 million in miniature; not one million deaths, but one hundred
thousand. Of course, only a small proportion of these could have been Jewish
partisans and Communist functionaries. It is worth repeating that these
casualties were inflicted during savage partisan warfare on the Eastern front,
and that Soviet terrorists claim to have killed five times that number of German
troops. It has nevertheless remained a popular myth that the extermination of
the Jews began with the actions of the Einsatzgruppen in Russia. In conclusion,
we may briefly survey the Manstein trial itself, typical in so many ways of
Nuremberg proceedings. Principally because Action Group D was attached to
Manstein’s command (though it was responsible solely to Himmler), the
sixty-two year old, invalid Field Marshal, considered by most authorities to be
the most brilliant German general of the war, was subjected to the shameful
indignity of a “war-crimes” trial. Of the 17 charges, 15 were brought by the
Communist Russian Government and two by the Communist Polish Government. Only
one witness was called to give evidence at this trial, and he proved so
unsatisfactory that the prosecution withdrew his evidence. Reliance was placed
instead on 800 hearsay documents which were accepted by the court without any
proof of their authenticity or authorship. The prosecution introduced written
affidavits by Ohlendorf and other S.S. Leaders, but since these men were still
alive, Manstein’s defence lawyer Reginald Paget K.C. demanded their appearance
in the witness-box. This was refused by the American authorities, and Paget
declared that this refusal was due to fear lest the condemned men revealed what
methods had been used to induce them to sign their affidavits. Manstein was
eventually acquitted on eight of the charges, including the two Polish ones
which, as Paget said, “were so flagrantly bogus that one was left wondering
why they had been presented at all.”
THE OSWALD POHL TRIAL The
case of the Action Groups is a revealing insight into the methods of the
Nuremberg Trials and the fabrication of the Myth of the Six Million. Another is
the trial of Oswald Pohl in 1948, which is of great importance as it bears
directly on the administration of the concentration camp system. Pohl had been
the chief disbursing officer of the German Navy until 1934, when Himmler
requested his transfer to the S.S. For eleven years he was the principal
administrative chief of the entire S.S. in his position as head of the S.S.
Economy and Administration Office, which after 1941 was concerned with the
industrial productivity of the concentration camp system. A peak point of
hypocrisy was reached at the trial when. the prosecution said to Pohl that
“had Germany rested content with the exclusion of Jews from her own territory,
with denying them German citizenship, with excluding them from public office, or
any like domestic regulation, no other nation could have been heard to
complain.” The truth is that Germany was bombarded with insults and economic
sanctions for doing precisely these things, and her internal measures against
the Jews were certainly a major cause of the declaration of war against Germany
by the democracies. Oswald Pohl was an extremely sensitive and intellectual
individual who was reduced to a broken man in the course of his trial. As
Senator McCarthy pointed out, Pohl had signed some incriminating statements
after being subjected to severe torture, including a bogus admission that he had
seen a gas chamber at Auschwitz in the summer of 1944. The prosecution
strenuously pressed this charge, but Pohl successfully repudiated it. The aim of
the prosecution was to depict this dejected man as a veritable fiend in human
shape, an impression hopelessly at variance with the testimony of those who knew
him. Such testimony was given by Heinrich Hoepker, an anti-Nazi friend of
Pohl’s wife who came into frequent contact with him during the period
1942–45. Hoepker noted that Pohl was essentially a serene and mild-mannered
person. During a visit to Pohl in the spring of 1944, Hoepker was brought into
contact with concentration camp inmates who were working on a local project
outside the camp area. He noted that the prisoners worked in a leisurely manner
and relaxed atmosphere without any pressure from their guards. Hoepker declared
that Pohl did not hold an emotional attitude to the Jews, and did not object to
his wife entertaining her Jewish friend Annemarie Jacques at their home. By the
beginning of 1945, Hoepker was fully convinced that the administrator of the
concentration camps was a humane, conscientious and dedicated servant of his
task, and he was astonished when he heard later in 1945 of the accusations being
made against Pohl and his colleagues. Frau Pohl noted that her husband retained
his serenity in the face of adversity until March 1945, when he visited the camp
at Bergen-Belsen at the time of the typhus epidemic there. Hitherto the camp had
been a model of cleanliness and order, but the chaotic conditions at the close
of the war had reduced it to a state of extreme hardship. Pohl, who was unable
to alleviate conditions there because of the desperate pass which the war had
reached by that time, was deeply affected by the experience and, according to
his wife, never regained his former state of composure. Dr. Alfred Seidl, the
highly respected lawyer who acted as principal defence counsel at the Nuremberg
Trials, went to work passionately to secure the acquittal of Pohl. Seidl had
been a personal friend of the accused for many years, and was thoroughly
convinced of his innocence with respect to the fraudulent charge of planned
genocide against the Jews. The Allied judgement which condemned Pohl did not
prompt Seidl to change his opinion in the slightest. He declared that the
prosecution had failed to produce a single piece of valid evidence against him.
One of the most eloquent defences of Oswald Pohl was made by S.S. Lieutenant
Colonel Kurt Schmidt-Klevenow, a legal officer in the S.S. Economy and
Administration Office, in his affidavit of August 8th, 1947. This affidavit has
been deliberately omitted from the published documents known as Trials of the
War Criminals before the Nuremberg Military Tribunals 1946–1949. Schmidt-Klevenow
pointed out that Pohl had given his fullest support to Judge Konrad Morgen of
the Reich Criminal Police Office, whose job was to investigate irregularities at
the concentration camps. Later on we shall refer to a case in which Pohl was in
favour of the death penalty for camp commandant Koch, who was accused by an S.S.
court of misconduct. Schmidt-Klevenow explained that Pohl was instrumental in
arranging for local police chiefs to share in the jurisdiction of concentration
camps, and took personal initiative in securing strict discipline on the part of
camp personnel. In short, the evidence given at the Pohl trial shows that the
proceedings involved nothing less than the deliberate defamation of a man’s
character in order to support the propaganda legend of genocide against the Jews
in the concentration camps he administered.
FALSIFIED EVIDENCE AND FRAUDULENT AFFIDAVITS Spurious
testimony at Nuremberg which included extravagant statements in support of the
myth of the Six Million was invariably given by former German officers because
of pressure, either severe torture as in the cases cited previously, or the
assurance of leniency for themselves if they supplied the required statements.
An example of the latter was the testimony of S.S. General Erich von dem Bach-Zelewski.
He was threatened with execution himself because of his suppression of the
revolt by Polish partisans at Warsaw in August 1944, which he carried out with
his S.S. brigade of White Russians. He was therefore prepared to be
“co-operative”. The evidence of Bach-Zelewski constituted the basis of the
testimony against the Reichsführer of the S.S. Heinrich Himmler at the main
Nuremberg Trial (Trial of the Major War Criminals, Vol. IV, pp, 29,
36). In March 1941, on the eve of the invasion of Russia, Himmler invited the
Higher S.S. Leaders to his Castle at Wewelsburg for a conference, including
Bach-Zelewski who was an expert on partisan warfare. In his Nuremberg evidence,
he depicted Himmler speaking in grandiose terms at this conference about the
liquidation of peoples in Eastern Europe, but Goering, in the courtroom,
denounced Bach-Zelewski to his face for the falsity of this testimony. An
especially outrageous allegation concerned a supposed declaration by Himmler
that one of the aims of the Russian campaign was to “decimate the Slav
population by thirty millions.” What Himmler really said is given by his Chief
of Staff, Wolff—that war in Russia was certain to result in millions of dead (Manvell
& Frankl, ibid., p. 117). Another brazen falsehood was Bach-Zelewski’s
accusation that on August 31st, 1942 Himmler personally witnessed the execution
of one hundred Jews by an Einsatz detachment at Minsk, causing him to nearly
faint. It is known, however, that on this date Himmler was in conference at his
field headquarters at Zhitomir in the Ukraine (cf. K. Vowinckel,
Die Wehrmacht im Kampf, vol. 4, p. 275). Much is made of Bach-Zelewski’s
evidence in all the books on Himmler, especially Willi Frischauer’s Himmler:
Evil Genius of the Third Reich (London, 1953, p. 148 ff). However,
in April 1959, Bach-Zelewski publicly repudiated his Nuremberg testimony before
a West German court. He admitted that his earlier statements had not the
slightest foundation in fact, and that he had made them for the sake of
expediency and his own survival. The German court, after careful deliberation,
accepted his retraction. Needless to say, what Veale calls the “Iron Curtain
of Discreet Silence” descended immediately over these events. They have had no
influence whatever on the books which propagate the myth of the Six Million, and
Bach-Zelewski’s testimony on Himmler is still taken at its face value. The
truth concerning Himmler is provided ironically by an anti-Nazi—Felix Kersten,
his physician and masseur. Because Kersten was opposed to the regime, he tends
to support the legend that the internment of Jews meant their extermination. But
from his close personal knowledge of Himmler he cannot help but tell the truth
concerning him, and in his Memoirs 1940–1945 (London, 1956, p. 119 ff)
he is emphatic in stating that Heinrich Himmler did not advocate liquidating the
Jews but favoured their emigration overseas. Neither does Kersten implicate
Hitler. However, the credibility of his anti-Nazi narrative is completely
shattered when, in search of an alternative villain, he declares that Dr.
Goebbels was the real advocate of “extermination”. This nonsensical
allegation is amply disproved by the fact that Goebbels was still concerned with
the Madagascar project even after it had been temporarily shelved by the German
Foreign Office, as we showed earlier. So much for false evidence at Nuremberg.
Reference has also been made to the thousands of fraudulent “written
affidavits” which were accepted by the Nuremberg Court without any attempt to
ascertain the authenticity of their contents or even their authorship. These
hearsay documents, often of the most bizarre kind, were introduced as
“evidence” so long as they bore the required signature. A typical
prosecution affidavit contested by the defence in the Concentration Camp Trial
of 1947 was that of Alois Hoellriegel, a member of the camp personnel at
Mauthausen in Austria. This affidavit, which the defence proved was fabricated
during Hoellriegel’s torture, had already been used to secure the conviction
of S.S. General Ernst Kaltenbrunner in 1946. It claimed that a mass gassing
operation had taken place at Mauthausen and that Hoellriegel had witnessed
Kaltenbrunner (the highest S.S. Leader in the Reich excepting Himmler) actually
taking part in it. By the time of the Concentration Camp Trial (Pohl’s trial)
a year later, it had become impossible to sustain this piece of nonsense when it
was produced in court again. The defence not only demonstrated that the
affidavit was falsified, but showed that all deaths at Mauthausen were
systematically checked by the local police authorities. They were also entered
on a camp register, and particular embarrassment was caused to the prosecution
when the Mauthausen register, one of the few that survived, was produced in
evidence. The defence also obtained numerous affidavits from former inmates of
Mauthausen (a prison camp chiefly for criminals) testifying to humane and
orderly conditions there.
ALLIED ACCUSATIONS DISBELIEVED There
is no more eloquent testimony to the tragedy and tyranny of Nuremberg than the
pathetic astonishment or outraged disbelief of the accused persons themselves at
the grotesque charges made against them. Such is reflected in the affidavit of
S.S. Major-General Heinz Fanslau, who visited most of the German concentration
camps during the last years of the war. Although a front line soldier of the
Waffen S.S., Fanslau had taken a great interest in concentration camp
conditions, and he was selected as a prime target by the Allies for the charge
of conspiracy to annihilate the Jews. It was argued, on the basis of his many
contacts, that he must have been fully involved. When it was first rumoured that
he would be tried and convicted, hundreds of affidavits were produced on his
behalf by camp inmates he had visited. When he read the full scope of the
indictment against the concentration camp personnel in supplementary Nuremberg
Trial No. 4 on May 6th, 1947, Fanslau declared in disbelief: “This
cannot be possible, because I, too, would have had to know something about
it.” It should be emphasised that throughout the Nuremberg proceedings, the
German leaders on trial never believed for a moment the allegations of the
Allied prosecution. Hermann Goering, who was exposed to the full brunt of the
Nuremberg atrocity propaganda, failed to be convinced by it. Hans Fritzsche, on
trial as the highest functionary of Goebbels’ Ministry, relates that Goering,
even after hearing the Ohlendorf affidavit on the Einsatzgruppen and the Hoess
testimony on Auschwitz, remained convinced that the extermination of Jews was
entirely propaganda fiction (The Sword in the Scales, London, 1953, p. 145).
At one point during the trial, Goering declared rather cogently that the first
time he had heard of it “was right here in Nuremberg” (Shirer, ibid.,
p. 1147). The Jewish writers Poliakov, Reitlinger and Manvell and Frankl
all attempt to implicate Goering in this supposed extermination, but Charles
Bewley in his work Hermann Goering (Goettingen, 1956) shows that not the
slightest evidence was found at Nuremberg to substantiate this charge. Hans
Fritzsche pondered on the whole question during the trials, and he concluded
that there had certainly been no thorough investigation of these monstrous
charges. Fritzsche, who was acquitted, was an associate of Goebbels and a
skilled propagandist. He recognised that the alleged massacre of the Jews was
the main point of the indictment against all defendants. Kaltenbrunner, who
succeeded Heydrich as chief of the Reich Security Head Office and was the main
defendant for the S.S. due to the death of Himmler, was no more convinced of the
genocide charges than was Goering. He confided to Fritzsche that the prosecution
was scoring apparent successes because of their technique of coercing witnesses
and suppressing evidence, which was precisely the accusation of Judges
Wenersturm and van Roden.
6. AUSCHWITZ AND POLISH JEWRY
The
concentration camp at Auschwitz near Cracow in Poland has remained at the centre
of the alleged extermination of millions of Jews. Later we shall see how, when
it was discovered by honest observers in the British and American zones after
the war that no “gas chambers” existed in the German camps such as Dachau
and Bergen-Belsen, attention was shifted to the eastern camps, particularly
Auschwitz. Ovens definitely existed here, it was claimed. Unfortunately, the
eastern camps were in the Russian zone of occupation, so that no one could
verify whether these allegations were true or not. The Russians refused to allow
anyone to see Auschwitz until about ten years after the war, by which time they
were able to alter its appearance and give some plausibility to the claim that
millions of people had been exterminated there. If anyone doubts that the
Russians are capable of such deception, they should remember the monuments
erected at sites where thousands of people were murdered in Russia by Stalin’s
secret police—but where the monuments proclaim them to be victims of German
troops in World War Two. The truth about Auschwitz is that it was the largest
and most important industrial concentration camp, producing all kinds of
material for the war industry. The camp consisted of synthetic coal and rubber
plants built by I.G. Farben Industrie, for whom the prisoners supplied
labour. Auschwitz also comprised an agricultural research station, with
laboratories, plant nurseries and facilities for stock breeding, as well as
Krupps armament works. We have already remarked that this kind of activity was
the prime function of the camps; all major firms had subsidiaries in them and
the S.S. even opened their own factories. Accounts of visits by Himmler to the
camps show that his main purpose was to inspect and assess their industrial
efficiency. When he visited Auschwitz in March, 1941 accompanied by high
executives of I.G. Farben, he showed no interest in the problems of the
camp as a facility for prisoners, but merely ordered that the camp be enlarged
to take 100,000 detainees to supply labour for I.G. Farben. This hardly
accords with a policy of exterminating prisoners by the million.
MORE AND MORE MILLIONS It
was nevertheless at this single camp that about half of the six million Jews
were supposed to have been exterminated, indeed, some writers claim 4 or even 5
million. Four million was the sensational figure announced by the Soviet
Government after the Communists had “investigated” the camp, at the same
time as they were attempting to blame the Katyn massacre on the Germans.
Reitlinger admits that information regarding Auschwitz and other eastern camps
comes from the post-war Communist regimes of Eastern Europe: “The evidence
concerning the Polish death camps was mainly taken after the war by Polish State
commissions or by the Central Jewish Historical Commission of Poland” (The
Final Solution, p. 631). However, no living, authentic eye-witness of
these “gassings” has ever been produced and validated. Benedikt Kautsky, who
spent seven years in concentration camps, including three in Auschwitz, alleged
in his book Teufel und Verdammte (Devil and Damned, Zurich, 1946) that
“not less than 3,500,000 Jews” had been killed there. This was certainly a
remarkable statement, because by his own admission he had never seen a gas
chamber. He confessed: “I was in the big German concentration camps. However,
I must establish the truth that in no camp at any time did I come across such an
installation as a gas chamber” (p. 272–273). The only execution he
actually witnessed was when two Polish inmates were executed for killing two
Jewish inmates. Kautsky, who was sent from Buchenwald in October, 1942 to work
at Auschwitz-Buna, stresses in his book that the use of prisoners in war
industry was a major feature of concentration camp policy until the end of the
war. He fails to reconcile this with an alleged policy of massacring Jews. The
exterminations at Auschwitz are alleged to have occurred between March 1942 and
October 1944; the figure of half of six million, therefore, would mean the
extermination and disposal of about 94,000 people per month for thirty two
months—approximately 3,350 people everyday, day and night, for over two and a
half years. This kind of thing is so ludicrous that it scarcely needs refuting.
And yet Reitlinger claims quite seriously that Auschwitz could dispose of no
less than 6,000 people a day. Although Reitlinger’s 6,000 a day would mean a
total by October 1944 of over 5 million, all such estimates pale before the wild
fantasies of Olga Lengyel in her book Five Chimneys (London, 1959).
Claiming to be a former inmate of Auschwitz, she asserts that the camp cremated
no less than “720 per hour, or 17,280 corpses per twenty-four hour shift.”
She also alleges that, in addition, 8,000 people were burned every day in the
“death-pits”, and that therefore “In round numbers, about 24,000 corpses
were handled every day” (p. 80–81). This, of course, would mean a
yearly rate of over 8–1/2 million. Thus between March 1942 and October 1944
Auschwitz would finally have disposed of over 21 million people, six million
more than the entire world Jewish population. Comment is superfluous. Although
several millions, were supposed to have died at Auschwitz alone, Reitlinger has
to admit that only 363,000 inmates were registered at the camp for the whole of
the period between January, 1940 and February, 1945 (The S.S. Alibi of a
Nation, p. 268 ff), and by no means all of them were Jews. It is
frequently claimed that many prisoners were never registered, but no one has
offered any proof of this. Even if there were as many unregistered as there were
registered, it would mean only a total of 750,000 prisoners—hardly enough for
the elimination of 3 or 4 million. Moreover, large numbers of the camp
population were released or transported elsewhere during the war, and at the end
80,000 were evacuated westward in January 1945 before the Russian advance. One
example will suffice of the statistical frauds relating to casualties at
Auschwitz. Shirer claims that in the summer of 1944, no less than 300,000
Hungarian Jews were done to death in a mere forty-six days (ibid., p. 1156).
This would have been almost the entire Hungarian Jewish population, which
numbered some 380,000. But according to the Central Statistical Office of
Budapest, there were 260,000 Jews in Hungary in 1945 (which roughly conforms
with the Joint Distribution Committee figure of 220,000), so that only 120,000
were classed as no longer resident. Of these, 35,000 were emigrants from the new
Communist regime, and a further 25,000 were still being held in Russia after
having worked in German labour battalions there. This leaves only 60,000
Hungarian Jews unaccounted for, but M. E. Namenyi estimates that
60,000 Jews returned to Hungary from deportation in Germany, though Reitlinger
says this figure is too high (The Final Solution, p. 497). Possibly
it is, but bearing in mind the substantial emigration of Hungarian Jews during
the war (cf., Report of the ICRC, Vol. I, p. 649), the number
of Hungarian Jewish casualties must have been very low indeed.
AUSCHWITZ: AN EYE-WITNESS ACCOUNT Some
new facts about Auschwitz are at last beginning to make a tentative appearance.
They are contained in a recent work called Die Auschwitz-Lüge: Ein
Erlebnisbericht von Theis Christopherson (The Auschwitz Legends: An Account
of his Experiences by Thies Christopherson, Kritik Verlag/Mohrkirch, 1973).
Published by the German lawyer Dr. Manfred Roeder in the periodical
Deutsche Bürger–Initiative, it is an eye-witness account of Auschwitz by
Thies Christopherson, who was sent to the Bunawerk plant laboratories at
Auschwitz to research into the production of synthetic rubber for the Kaiser
Wilhelm Institute. In May 1973, not long after the appearance of this account,
the veteran Jewish “Nazi-hunter” Simon Wiesenthal wrote to the Frankfurt
Chamber of Lawyers, demanding that the publisher and author of the Forward,
Dr. Roeder, a member of the Chamber, should be brought before its
disciplinary commission. Sure enough, proceedings began in July, but not without
harsh criticism even from the Press, who asked “Is Simon Wiesenthal the new
Gauleiter of Germany?” (Deutsche Wochenzeitung, July 27th, 1973).
Christopherson’s account is certainly one of the most important documents for
a re-appraisal of Auschwitz. He spent the whole of 1944 there, during which time
he visited all of the separate camps comprising the large Auschwitz complex,
including Auschwitz-Birkenau where it is alleged that wholesale massacres of
Jews took place. Christopherson, however, is in no doubt that this is totally
untrue. He writes: “I was in Auschwitz from January, 1944 until December,
1944. After the war I heard about the mass murders which were supposedly
perpetrated by the S.S. against the Jewish prisoners, and I was perfectly
astonished. Despite all the evidence of witnesses, all the newspaper reports and
radio broadcasts I still do not believe today in these horrible deeds. I have
said this many times and in many places, but to no purpose. One is never
believed” (p. 16). Space forbids a detailed summary here of the
author’s experiences at Auschwitz, which include facts about camp routine and
the daily life of prisoners totally at variance with the allegations of
propaganda (pp. 22–7). More important are his revelations about the
supposed existence of an extermination camp. “During the whole of my time at
Auschwitz, l never observed the slightest evidence of mass gassings. Moreover,
the odour of burning flesh that is often said to have hung over the camp is a
downright falsehood. In the vicinity of the main camp (Auschwitz I) was a large
farrier’s works, from which the smell of molten iron was naturally not
pleasant” (p. 33–4). Reitlinger confirms that there were five blast
furnaces and five collieries at Auschwitz, which together with the Bunawerk
factories comprised Auschwitz III (ibid., p. 452). The author agrees
that a crematorium would certainly have existed at Auschwitz, “since 200,000
people lived there, and in every city with 200,000 inhabitants there would be a
crematorium. Naturally people died there—but not only prisoners. In fact the
wife of Obersturmbannführer A. (Christopherson’s superior) also died there”
(p. 33). The author explains: “There were no secrets at Auschwitz. In
September 1944 a commission of the International Red Cross came to the camp for
an inspection. They were particularly interested in the camp at Birkenau, though
we also had many inspections at Raisko” (Bunawerk Section, p. 35).
Christopherson points out that the constant visits to Auschwitz by outsiders
cannot be reconciled with allegations of mass extermination. When describing the
visit of his wife to the camp in May, he observes: “The fact that it was
possible to receive visits from our relatives at any time demonstrates the
openness of the camp administration. Had Auschwitz been a great extermination
camp, we would certainly not have been able to receive such visits”
(p. 27). After the war, Christopherson came to hear of the alleged
existence of a building with gigantic chimneys in the vicinity of the main camp.
“This was supposed to be the crematorium. However, I must record the fact that
when I left the camp at Auschwitz in December 1944, I had not seen this building
there” (p. 37). Does this mysterious building exist today? Apparently
not; Reitlinger claims it was demolished and “completely burnt out in full
view of the camp” in October, though Christopherson never saw this public
demolition. Although it is said to have taken place “in full view of the
camp”, it was allegedly seen by only one Jewish witness, a certain Dr. Bendel,
and his is the only testimony to the occurrence (Reitlinger, ibid.,
p. 457). This situation is generally typical. When it comes down to hard
evidence, it is strangely elusive; the building was “demolished”, the
document is “lost”, the order was “verbal”. At Auschwitz today, visitors
are shown a small furnace and here they are told that millions of people were
exterminated. The Soviet State Commission which “investigated” the camp
announced on May 12th, 1945 that “Using rectified coefficients... the
technical expert commission has ascertained that during the time that the
Auschwitz camp existed, the German butchers exterminated in this camp not less
than four million citizens...” Reitlinger’s surprisingly frank comment on
this is perfectly adequate: “The world has grown mistrustful of ‘rectified
coefficients’ and the figure of four millions has become ridiculous” (ibid,
p. 460). Finally, the account of Mr. Christopherson draws attention to a
very curious circumstance. The only defendant who did not appear at the
Frankfurt Auschwitz Trial in 1963 was Richard Baer, the successor of Rudolf
Hoess as commandant of Auschwitz. Though in perfect health, he died suddenly in
prison before the trial had begun, “in a highly mysterious way” according to
the newspaper; Deutsche Wochenzeitung (July 27th, 1973). Baer’s
sudden demise before giving evidence is especially strange, since the Paris
newspaper Rivarol recorded his insistence that “during the whole time in which
he governed Auschwitz, he never saw any gas chambers nor believed that such
things existed,” and from this statement nothing would dissuade him. In short,
the Christopherson account adds to a mounting collection of evidence
demonstrating that the giant industrial complex of Auschwitz (comprising thirty
separate installations and divided by the main Vienna–Cracow railway line) was
nothing but a vast war production centre, which, while admittedly employing the
compulsory labour of detainees, was certainly not a place of “mass
extermination”.
THE WARSAW GHETTO In
terms of numbers, Polish Jewry is supposed to have suffered most of all from
extermination, not only at Auschwitz, but at an endless list of newly-discovered
“death camps” such as Treblinka, Sobibor, Belzec, Maidanek, Chelmno and at
many more obscure places which seem suddenly to have gained prominence. At the
centre of the alleged extermination of the Polish Jews is the dramatic uprising
in April, 1943 of the Warsaw Ghetto. This is often represented as a revolt
against being deported to gas ovens; presumably the alleged subject of Hitler
and Himmler’s “secret discussions” had leaked out and gained wide
publicity in Warsaw. The case of the Warsaw Ghetto is an instructive insight
into the creation of the extermination legend itself. Indeed, its evacuation by
the Germans in 1943 is often referred to as the “extermination of the Polish
Jews” although it was nothing of the kind, and layers of mythology have tended
to surround it after the publication of sensational novels like John Hersey’s The
Wall and Leon Uris’ Exodus. When the Germans first occupied Poland,
they confined the Jews, not in detention camps but in ghettos for reasons of
security. The interior administration of the ghettos was in the hands of Jewish
Councils elected by themselves, and they were policed by an independent Jewish
police force. Special currency notes were introduced into the ghettos to prevent
speculation. Whether this system was right or wrong, it was understandable in
time of war, and although the ghetto is perhaps an unpleasant social
establishment, it is by no means barbaric. And it is certainly not an
organisation for the destruction of a race. But, of course, it is frequently
said that this is what the ghettos were really for. A recent publication on the
Warsaw Ghetto made the brazen assertion that concentration camps “were a
substitute for the practice of cramming the Jews into overcrowded ghettos and
starving them to death.” It seems that whatever security system the Germans
used, and to whatever lengths they went to preserve a semblance of community for
the Jews, they can never escape the charge of “extermination”. It has been
established already that the 1931 Jewish population census for Poland placed the
number of Jews at 2,732,600, and that after emigration and flight to the Soviet
Union, no more than 1,100,000 were under German control. These incontrovertible
facts, however, do not prevent Manvell and Frankl asserting that “there had
been over three million Jews in Poland when Germany began the invasion” and
that in 1942 “some two million still awaited death” (ibid.,
p. 140). In reality, of the million or so Jews in Poland, almost half,
about 400,000 were eventually concentrated in the ghetto of Warsaw, an area of
about two and a half square miles around the old mediaeval ghetto. The remainder
had already been moved to the Polish Government-General by September 1940. In
the summer of 1942, Himmler ordered the resettlement of all Polish Jews in
detention camps in order to obtain their labour, part of the system of general
concentration for labour assignment in the Government-General. Thus between July
and October 1942, over three quarters of the Warsaw Ghetto’s inhabitants were
peacefully evacuated and transported, supervised by the Jewish police
themselves. As we have seen, transportation to camps is alleged to have ended in
“extermination”, but there is absolutely no doubt from the evidence
available that it involved only the effective procurement of labour and the
prevention of unrest. In the first place, Himmler discovered on a surprise visit
to Warsaw in January 1943 that 24,000 Jews registered as armaments workers were
in fact working illegally as tailors and furriers (Manvell & Frankl, ibid.,
p. 140); the Ghetto was also being used as a base for subversive forays
into the main area of Warsaw. After six months of peaceful evacuation, when only
about 60,000 Jews remained in the residential ghetto, the Germans met with an
armed rebellion on 18th January, 1943. Manvell and Frankl admit that “The Jews
involved in planned resistance had for a long time been engaged in smuggling
arms from the outside world, and combat groups fired on and killed S.S. men and
militia in charge of a column of deportees.” The terrorists in the Ghetto
uprising were also assisted by the Polish Home Army and the PPR—Polska Partia
Robotnicza, the Communist Polish Workers Party. It was under these circumstances
of a revolt aided by partisans and communists that the occupying forces, as any
army would in a similar situation, moved in to suppress the terrorists, if
necessary by destroying the residential area itself. It should be remembered
that the whole process of evacuation would have continued peacefully had not
extremists among the inhabitants planned an armed rebellion which in the end was
bound to fail. When S.S. Lieutenant-General Stroop entered the Ghetto with
armoured cars on 19th April, he immediately came under fire and lost twelve men;
German and Polish casualties in the battle, which lasted four weeks, totalled
101 men killed and wounded. Stubborn resistance by the Jewish Combat
Organisation in the face of impossible odds led to an estimated 12,000 Jewish
casualties, the majority by remaining in burning buildings and dug-outs. A
total, however, of 56,065 inhabitants were captured and peacefully resettled in
the area of the Government-General. Many Jews within the Ghetto had resented the
terror imposed on them by the Combat Organisation, and had attempted to inform
on their headquarters to the German authorities.
SUDDEN SURVIVORS The
circumstances surrounding the Warsaw Ghetto revolt, as well as the deportations
to eastern labour camps such as Auschwitz, has led to the most colourful tales
concerning the fate of Polish Jews, the largest bloc of Jewry in Europe. The
Jewish Joint Distribution Committee, in figures prepared by them for the
Nuremberg Trials, stated that in 1945 there were only 80,000 Jews remaining in
Poland. They also alleged that there were no Polish-Jewish displaced persons
left in Germany or Austria, a claim that was at some variance with the number of
Polish Jews arrested by the British and Americans for black market activities.
However, the new Communist regime in Poland was unable to prevent a major
anti-Jewish pogrom at Kielce on July 4th, 1946 and more than 150,000 Polish Jews
suddenly fled into Western Germany. Their appearance was somewhat embarrassing,
and their emigration to Palestine and the United States was carried out in
record time. Subsequently, the number of Polish Jewish survivors underwent
considerable revision; in the American-Jewish Year Book 1948–1949 it was
placed at 390,000 quite an advance on the original 80,000. We may expect further
revisions upwards in the future.
7. SOME CONCENTRATION CAMP MEMOIRS
The
most influential agency in the propagation of the extermination legend has been
the paper-back book and magazine industry, and it is through their sensational
publications, produced for commercial gain, that the average person is made
acquainted with a myth of an entirely political character and purpose. The
hey-day of these hate-Germany books was in the 1950’s, when virulent
Germanophobia found a ready market, but the industry continues to flourish and
is experiencing another boom today. The industry’s products consist generally
of so-called “memoirs”, and these fall into two basic categories: those
which are supposedly by former S.S. men, camp commandants and the like, and
those bloodcurdling reminiscences allegedly by former concentration camp
inmates.
COMMUNIST ORIGINS Of
the first kind, the most outstanding example is Commandant of Auschwitz
by Rudolf Hoess (London, 1960), which was originally published in the Polish
language as Wspomnienia by the Communist Government. Hoess, a young man
who took over at Auschwitz in 1940, was first arrested by the British and
detained at Flensburg, but he was soon handed over to the Polish Communist
authorities who condemned him to death in 1947 and executed him almost
immediately. The so-called Hoess memoirs are undoubtedly a forgery produced
under Communist auspices, as we shall demonstrate, though the Communists
themselves claim that Hoess was “ordered to write the story of his life” and
a hand-written original supposedly exists, but no one has ever seen it. Hoess
was subjected to torture and brain-washing techniques by the Communists during
the period of his arrest, and his testimony at Nuremberg was delivered in a
mindless monotone as he stared blankly into space. Even Reitlinger rejects this
testimony as hopelessly untrustworthy. It is indeed remarkable how much of the
“evidence” regarding the Six Million stems from Communist sources; this
includes the major documents such as the Wisliceny statement and the Hoess
“memoirs”, which are undoubtedly the two most quoted items in extermination
literature, as well as all the information on the so-called “death camps”
such as Auschwitz. This information comes from the Jewish Historical Commission
of Poland; the Central Commission for the Investigation of War Crimes, Warsaw;
and the Russian State War Crimes Commission, Moscow. Reitlinger acknowledges
that the Hoess testimony at Nuremberg was a catalogue of wild exaggerations,
such as that Auschwitz was disposing of 16,000 people a day, which would mean a
total at the end of the war of over 13 million. Instead of exposing such
estimates for the Soviet-inspired frauds they obviously are, Reitlinger and
others prefer to think that such ridiculous exaggerations were due to
“pride” in doing a professional job. Ironically, this is completely
irreconcilable with the supposedly authentic Hoess memoirs, which make a clever
attempt at plausibility by suggesting the opposite picture of distaste for the
job. Hoess is supposed to have “confessed” to a total of 3 million
people exterminated at Auschwitz, though at his own trial in Warsaw the
prosecution reduced the number to 1,135,000. However, we have already noted that
the Soviet Government announced an official figure of 4 million after their
“investigation” of the camp in 1945. This kind of casual juggling with
millions of people does not appear to worry the writers of extermination
literature. A review of the Hoess “memoirs” in all their horrid detail would
be tedious. We may confine ourselves to those aspects of the extermination
legend which are designed with the obvious purpose of forestalling any proof of
its falsity. Such, for example, is the manner in which the alleged extermination
of Jews is described. This was supposed to have been carried out by a “special
detachment” of Jewish prisoners. They took charge of the newly arrived
contingents at the camp, led them into the enormous “gas-chambers” and
disposed of the bodies afterwards. The S.S., therefore, did very little, so that
most of the S.S. personnel at the camp could be left in complete ignorance of
the “extermination programme”. Of course, no Jew would ever be found who
claimed to have been a member of this gruesome “special detachment”, so that
the whole issue is left conveniently unprovable. It is worth repeating that no
living, authentic eye-witness to these events has ever been produced. Conclusive
evidence that the Hoess memoirs are a forgery lies in an incredible slip by the
Communist editors. Hoess is supposed to say that the Jehovah’s Witnesses at
Auschwitz approved of murdering the Jews because the Jews were the enemies of
Christ. It is well known that in Soviet Russia today and in all her satellite
countries of eastern Europe, the Communists conduct a bitter campaign of
suppression against the Jehovah’s Witnesses whom they regard as the religious
sect most dangerous to Communist beliefs. That this sect is deliberately and
grossly defamed in the Hoess memoirs proves the document’s Communist origins
beyond any doubt.
INCRIMINATING REMINISCENCES Certainly
the most bogus “memoirs” yet published are those of Adolf Eichmann. Before
his illegal kidnapping by the Israelis in May, 1960 and the attendant blaze of
international publicity, few people had ever heard of him. He was indeed a
relatively unimportant person, the head of Office A4b in Department IV (the
Gestapo) of the Reich Security Head Office. His office supervised the
transportation to detention camps of a particular section of enemy aliens, the
Jews. A positive flood of unadulterated rubbish about Eichmann showered the
world in 1960, of which we may cite as an example Comer Clarke’s Eichmann:
The Savage Truth. (“The orgies often went on until six in the morning, a
few hours before consigning the next batch of victims to death,” says Clarke
in his chapter “Streamlined Death and Wild Sex Orgies,” p . 124). Strangely
enough, the alleged “memoirs” of Adolf Eichmann suddenly appeared at the
time of his abduction to Israel. They were uncritically published by the
American Life magazine (November 28th, December 5th, 1960), and were supposed to
have been given by Eichmann to a journalist in the Argentine shortly before his
capture—an amazing coincidence. Other sources, however, gave an entirely
different account of their origin, claiming that they were a record based on
Eichmann’s comments to an “associate” in 1955, though no one even bothered
to identify this person. By an equally extraordinary coincidence, war crimes
investigators claimed shortly afterwards to have just “found” in the
archives of the U.S. Library of Congress, more than fifteen years after the war,
the “complete file” of Eichmann’s department. So far as the “memoirs”
themselves are concerned, they were made to be as horribly incriminating as
possible without straying too far into the realms of the purest fantasy, and
depict Eichmann speaking with enormous relish about “the physical annihilation
of the Jews.” Their fraudulence is also attested to by various factual errors,
such as that Himmler was already in command of the Reserve Army by April of
1944, instead of after the July plot against Hitler’s life, a fact which
Eichmann would certainly have known. The appearance of these “memoirs” at
precisely the right moment raises no doubt that their object was to present a
pre-trial propaganda picture of the archetypal “unregenerate Nazi” and fiend
in human shape. The circumstances of the Eichmann trial in Israel do not concern
us here; the documents of Soviet origin which were used in evidence, such as the
Wisliceny statement, have been examined already, and for an account of the
third-degree methods used on Eichmann during his captivity to render him
“co-operative” the reader is referred to the London Jewish Chronicle,
September 2nd, 1960. More relevant to the literature of the extermination legend
are the contents of a letter which Eichmann is supposed to have written
voluntarily and handed over to his captors in Buenos Aries. It need hardly be
added that its Israeli authorship is transparently obvious. Nothing in it
stretches human credulity further than the phrase “I am submitting this
declaration of my own free will”; but the most hollow and revealing statement
of all is his alleged willingness to appear before a court in Israel, “so that
a true picture may be transmitted to future generations.”
TREBLINKA FABRICATIONS The
latest reminiscences to appear in print are those of Franz Stangl, the former
commandant of the camp at Treblinka in Poland who was sentenced to life
imprisonment in December 1970. These were published in an article by the London
Daily Telegraph Magazine, October 8th, 1971, and were supposed to derive from a
series of interviews with Stangl in prison. He died a few days after the
interviews were concluded. These alleged reminiscences are certainly the goriest
and most bizarre yet published, though one is grateful for a few admissions by
the writer of the article, such as that “the evidence presented in the course
of his trial did not prove Stangl himself to have committed specific acts of
murder” and that the account of Stangl’s beginnings in Poland “was in part
fabrication.” A typical example of this fabrication was the description of
Stangl’s first visit to Treblinka. As he drew into the railway station there,
he is supposed to have seen “thousands of bodies” just strewn around next to
the tracks, “hundreds, no, thousands of bodies everywhere, putrefying,
decomposing.” And “in the station was a train full of Jews, some dead, some
still alive... it looked as if it had been there for days.” The account
reaches the heights of absurdity when Stangl is alleged to have got out of his
car and “stepped knee deep into money: I didn’t know which way to turn,
which way to go. I waded in paper notes, currency, precious stones, jewelry and
clothes. They were everywhere, strewn all over the square.” The scene is
completed by “whores from Warsaw weaving drunk, dancing, singing, playing
music”, who were on the other side of the barbed wire fences. To literally
believe this account of sinking “knee deep” in Jewish bank-notes and
precious stones amid thousands of putrefying corpses and lurching, singing
prostitutes would require the most phenomenal degree of gullibility, and in any
circumstances other than the Six Million legend it would be dismissed as the
most outrageous nonsense. The statement which certainly robs the Stangl memoirs
of any vestige of authenticity is his alleged reply when asked why he thought
the Jews were being exterminated: “They wanted the Jew’s money,” is the
answer. “That racial business was just secondary.” The series of interviews
are supposed to have ended on a highly dubious note indeed. When asked whether
he thought there had been “any conceivable sense in this horror,” the former
Nazi commandant supposedly replied with enthusiasm: “Yes, I am sure there was.
Perhaps the Jews were meant to have this enormous jolt to pull them together; to
create a people; to identify themselves with each other.” One could scarcely
imagine a more perfect answer had it been invented.
BEST-SELLER A HOAX Of
the other variety of memoirs, those which present a picture of frail Jewry
caught in the vice of Nazism, the most celebrated is undoubtedly The Diary of
Anne Frank, and the truth concerning this book is only one appalling insight
into the fabrication of a propaganda legend . First published in 1952, The Diary
of Anne Frank became an immediate best-seller; since then it has been
republished in paper-back, going through 40 impressions, and was made into a
successful Hollywood film. In royalties alone, Otto Frank, the girl’s father,
has made a fortune from the sale of the book, which purports to represent the
real-life tragedy of his daughter. With its direct appeal to the emotions, the
book and the film have influenced literally millions of people, certainly more
throughout the world than any other story of its kind. And yet only seven years
after its initial publication, a New York Supreme Court case established that
the book was a hoax. The Diary of Anne Frank has been sold to the public
as the actual diary of a young Jewish girl from Amsterdam, which she wrote at
the age of 12 while her family and four other Jews were hiding in the back room
of a house during the German occupation. Eventually, they were arrested and
detained in a concentration camp, where Anne Frank supposedly died when she was
14. When Otto Frank was liberated from the camp at the end of the war, he
returned to the Amsterdam house and “found” his daughter’s diary concealed
in the rafters. The truth about the Anne Frank Diary was first revealed
in 1959 by the Swedish journal Fria Ord. It established that the Jewish novelist
Meyer Levin had written the dialogue of the “diary” and was demanding
payment for his work in a court action against Otto Frank. A condensation of the
Swedish articles appeared in the American Economic Council Letter, April 15th,
1959, as follows: “History has many examples of myths that live a longer and
richer life than truth, and may become more effective than truth. The Western
World has for some years been made aware of a Jewish girl through the medium of
what purports to be her personally written story, Anne Frank’s Diary.
Any informed literary inspection of this book would have shown it to have been
impossible as the work of a teenager.” A noteworthy decision of the New York
Supreme Court confirms this point of view, in that the well known American
Jewish writer, Meyer Levin, has been awarded $50,000 to be paid him by the
father of Anne Frank as an honorarium for Levin’s work on The Anne Frank
Diary. “Mr. Frank, in Switzerland, has promised to pay to his race kin,
Meyer Levin, not less than $50,0OO because he had used the dialogue of Author
Levin just as it was and ‘implanted’ it in the diary as being his
daughter’s intellectual work.” Further inquiries brought a reply on May 7th,
1962 from a firm of New York lawyers, which stated: “I was the attorney for
Meyer Levin in his action against Otto Frank, and others. It is true that a jury
awarded Mr. Levin $50,000 in damages, as indicated in your letter. That award
was later set aside by the trial justice, Hon. Samuel C. Coleman, on
the ground that the damages had not been proved in the manner required by law.
The action was subsequently settled while an appeal from Judge Coleman’s
decision was pending. I am afraid that the case itself is not officially
reported, so far as the trial itself, or even Judge Coleman’s decision, is
concerned. Certain procedural matters were reported in 141 New York Supplement,
Second Series 170, and in 5 Second Series 181. The correct file number in the
New York County Clerk’s office is 2241–1956 and the file is probably a large
and full one...” Here, then, is just one more fraud in a whole series of
frauds perpetrated in support of the “Holocaust” legend and the saga of the
Six Million. Of course, the court case bearing directly on the authenticity of The
Anne Frank Diary was “not officially reported”. A brief reference may
also be made to another “diary”, published not long after that of Anne Frank
and entitled: Notes from the Warsaw Ghetto: the Journal of Emmanuel
Ringelblum (New York, 1958). Ringelblum had been a leader in the campaign of
sabotage against the Germans in Poland, as well as the revolt of the Warsaw
Ghetto in 1943, before he was eventually arrested and executed in 1944. The
Ringelblum journal, which speaks of the usual “rumours” allegedly
circulating about the extermination of the Jews in Poland, appeared under
exactly the same Communist auspices as the so-called Hoess memoirs. McGraw-Hill,
the publishers of the American edition, admit that they were denied access to
the uncensored original manuscript in Warsaw, and instead faithfully followed
the expurgated volume published by the Communist Government in Warsaw in 1952.
All the “proofs” of the Holocaust issuing from Communist sources of this
kind are worthless as historical documents.
ACCUMULATING MYTHS Since
the war, there has been an abundant growth of sensational concentration camp
literature, the majority of it Jewish, each book piling horror upon horror,
blending fragments of truth with the most grotesque of fantasies and impostures,
relentlessly creating an edifice of mythology in which any relation to
historical fact has long since disappeared. We have referred to the type
already—Olga Lengyel’s absurd Five Chimneys (“24,000 corpses
handled every day”), Doctor at Auschwitz by Miklos Nyiszli, apparently
a mythical and invented person, This was Auschwitz: The Story of a Murder
Camp by Philip Friedman, and soon ad nauseam. The latest in this vein
is For Those I Loved by Martin Gray (Bodley Head, 1973), which purports
to be an account of his experiences at Treblinka camp in Poland. Gray
specialised in selling fake antiques to America before turning to concentration
camp memoirs. The circumstances surrounding the publication of his book,
however, have been unique, because for the first time with works of this kind,
serious doubt was cast on the authenticity of its contents. Even Jews, alarmed
at the damage it might cause, denounced his book as fraudulent and questioned
whether he had ever been at Treblinka at all, while B.B.C. radio pressed him as
to why he had waited 28 years before writing of his experiences. It was
interesting to observe that the “Personal Opinion” column of the London
Jewish Chronicle, March 30th, 1973, although it roundly condemned Gray’s book,
nevertheless made grandiose additions to the myth of the Six Million. It stated
that: “Nearly a million people were murdered in Treblinka in the course of a
year. 18,000 were fed into the gas chambers every day.” It is a pity indeed
that so many people read and accept this kind of nonsense without exercising
their minds. If 18,000 were murdered every day, the figure of one million would
be reached in a mere 56 days, not “in the course of a year.” This gigantic
achievement would leave the remaining ten months of the year a total blank.
18,000 every day would in fact mean a total of 6,480,000 “in the course of a
year.” Does this mean that the Six Million died in twelve months at Treblinka?
What about the alleged three or four million at Auschwitz? This kind of thing
simply shows that, once the preposterous compromise figure of Six Million had
scored a resounding success and become internationally accepted, any number of
impossible permutations can be made and no one would even think to criticise
them. In its review of Gray’s book, the Jewish Chronicle column also provides
a revealing insight into the fraudulent allegations concerning gas-chambers:
“Gray recalls that the floors of the gas chambers sloped, whereas another
survivor who helped to build them maintains that they were at a level...”
Occasionally, books by former concentration camp inmates appear which present a
totally different picture of the conditions prevailing in them. Such is Under
Two Dictators (London, 1950) by Margarete Buber. She was a German-Jewish woman
who had experienced several years in the brutal and primitive conditions of a
Russian prison camp before being sent to Ravensbrück, the German camp for women
detainees, in August 1940. She noted that she was the only Jewish person in her
contingent of deportees from Russia who was not straight away released by the
Gestapo. Her book presents a striking contrast between the camps of Soviet
Russia and Germany; compared to the squalor, disorder and starvation of the
Russian camp, she found Ravensbrück to be clean, civilised and
well-administered. Regular baths and clean linen seemed a luxury after her
earlier experiences, and her first meal of white bread, sausage, sweet porridge
and dried fruit prompted her to inquire of another camp inmate whether August
3rd, 1940 was some sort of holiday or special occasion. She observed, too, that
the barracks at Ravensbrück were remarkably spacious compared to the crowded
mud hut of the Soviet camp. In the final months of 1945, she experienced the
progressive decline of camp conditions, the causes of which we shall examine
later. Another account which is at total variance with popular propaganda is Die
Gestapo Lässt Bitten (The Gestapo Invites You) by Charlotte Bormann, a
Communist political prisoner who was also interned at Ravensbrück. Undoubtedly
its most important revelation is the author’s statement that rumours of gas
executions were deliberate and malicious inventions circulated among the
prisoners by the Communists. This latter group did not accept Margarete Buber
because of her imprisonment in Soviet Russia. A further shocking reflection on
the post-war trials is the fact that Charlotte Bormann was not permitted to
testify at the Rastadt trial of Ravensbrück camp personnel in the French
occupation zone, the usual fate of those who denied the extermination legend.
8. THE NATURE & CONDITION OF WAR-TIME CONCENTRATION
CAMPS
In his recent book Adolf
Hitler (London, 1973), Colin Cross, who brings more intelligence than is
usual to many problems of this period, observes astutely that “The shuffling
of millions of Jews around Europe and murdering them, in a time of desperate war
emergency, was useless from any rational point of view” (p. 307). Quite
so, and at this point we may well question the likelihood of this irrationalism,
and whether it was even possible. Is it likely, that at the height of the war,
when the Germans were fighting a desperate battle for survival on two fronts,
they would have conveyed millions of Jews for miles to supposedly elaborate and
costly slaughter houses? To have conveyed three or four million Jews to
Auschwitz alone (even supposing that such an inflated number existed in Europe,
which it did not), would have placed an insuperable burden upon German
transportation facilities which were strained to the limit in supporting the far
flung Russian front. To have transported the mythical six million Jews and
countless numbers of other nationalities to internment camps, and to have
housed, clothed and fed them there, would simply have paralysed their military
operations. There is no reason to suppose that the efficient Germans would have
put their military fortunes at such risk. On the other hand, the transportation
of a reasonable 363,000 prisoners to Auschwitz in the course of the war (the
number we know to have been registered there) at least makes sense in terms of
the compulsory labour they supplied. In fact, of the 3 million Jews living
in Europe, it is certain that no more than two million were ever interned at one
time, and it is probable that the number was much closer to 1,500,000. We shall
see later, in the Report of the Red Cross, that whole Jewish populations such as
that of Slovakia avoided detention in camps, while others were placed in
community ghettos like Theresienstadt. Moreover, from western Europe
deportations were far fewer. The estimate of Reitlinger that only about 50,000
French Jews from a total population of 320,000 were deported and interned has
been noted already. The question must also be asked as to whether it could have
been physically possible to destroy the millions of Jews that are alleged. Had
the Germans enough time for it? Is it likely that they would have cremated
people by the million when they were so short of manpower and required all
prisoners of war for purposes of war production? Would it have been possible to
destroy and remove all trace of a million people in six months? Could such
enormous gatherings of Jews and executions on such a vast scale have been kept
secret? These are the kind of questions that the critical, thinking person
should ask. And he will soon discover that not only the statistical and
documentary evidence given here, but simple logistics combine to discredit the
legend of the six million. Although it was impossible for millions to have been
murdered in them, the nature and conditions of Germany’s concentration camps
have been vastly exaggerated to make the claim plausible. William Shirer, in a
typically reckless passage, states that “All of the thirty odd principal Nazi
concentration camps were death camps” (ibid., p. 115O). This is
totally untrue, and is not even accepted now by the principal propagators of the
extermination legend. Shirer also quotes Eugen Kogon’s The Theory and
Practice of Hell (N.Y. 1950, p. 227) which puts the total number of
deaths in all of them at the ridiculous figure of 7,125,000, though Shirer
admits in a footnote that this is “undoubtedly too high.”
‘DEATH CAMPS’ BEHIND THE IRON CURTAIN It
is true that in 1945, Allied propaganda did claim that all the concentration
camps, particularly those in Germany itself, were “death camps”, but not for
long. On this question, the eminent American historian Harry Elmer Barnes wrote:
“These camps were first presented as those in Germany, such as Dachau, Belsen,
Buchenwald, Sachsenhausen and Dora, but it was soon demonstrated that there had
been no systematic extermination in those camps. Attention was then moved to
Auschwitz, Treblinka, Belzec, Chelmno, Jonowska, Tarnow, Ravensbrück,
Mauthausen, Brezeznia and Birkenau, which does not exhaust the list that appears
to have been extended as needed” (Rampart Journal, Summer 1967). What had
happened was that certain honest observers among the British and American
occupation forces in Germany, while admitting that many inmates had died of
disease and starvation in the final months of the war, had found no evidence
after all of “gas chambers”. As a result, eastern camps in the Russian zone
of occupation such as Auschwitz and Treblinka gradually came to the fore as
horrific centres of extermination (though no one was permitted to see them), and
this tendency has lasted to the present day. Here in these camps it was all
supposed to have happened, but with the Iron Curtain brought down firmly over
them, no one has ever been able to verify such charges. The Communists claimed
that four million people died at Auschwitz in gigantic gas chambers
accommodating 2,000 people—and no one could argue to the contrary. What is the
truth about so-called “gas chambers”? Stephen F. Pinter, who served as
a lawyer for the United States War Department in the occupation forces in
Germany and Austria for six years after the war, made the following statement in
the widely read Catholic magazine Our Sunday Visitor, June 14th, 1959: “I
was in Dachau for 17 months after the war, as a U.S. Department Attorney, and
can state that there was no gas chamber at Dachau. What was shown to visitors
and sightseers there and erroneously described as a gas chamber was a crematory.
Nor was there a gas chamber in any of the other concentration camps in Germany.
We were told that there was a gas chamber at Auschwitz, but since that was in
the Russian zone of occupation, we were not permitted to investigate since the
Russians would not allow it. From what I was able to determine during six
postwar years in Germany and Austria, there were a number of Jews killed, but
the figure of a million was certainly never reached. I interviewed thousands of
Jews, former immates of concentration camps in Germany and Austria, and consider
myself as well qualified as any man on this subject.” This tells a very
different story from the customary propaganda. Pinter, of course, is very astute
on the question of the crematory being represented as a gas chamber. This is a
frequent ploy because no such thing as a gas chamber has ever been shown to
exist in these camps, hence the deliberately misleading term a “gas oven”,
aimed at confusing a gas chamber with a crematorium. The latter, usually a
single furnace and similar to the kind of thing employed today, were used quite
simply for the cremation of those persons who had died from various natural
causes within the camp, particularly infectious diseases. This fact was
conclusively proved by the German archbishop, Cardinal Faulhaber of Munich. He
informed the Americans that during the Allied air raids on Munich in September
1944, 30,000 people were killed. The archbishop requested the authorities at the
time to cremate the bodies of the victims in the crematorium at Dachau. But he
was told that, unfortunately, this plan could not be carried out; the
crematorium, having only one furnace, was not able to cope with the bodies of
the air raid victims. Clearly, therefore, it could not have coped with the
238,000 Jewish bodies which were allegedly cremated there. In order to do so,
the crematorium would have to be kept going for 326 years without stopping and
530 tons of ashes would have been recovered.
CASUALTY FIGURES REDUCED The
figures of Dachau casualties are typical of the kind of exaggerations that have
since had to be drastically revised. In 1946, a memorial plaque was unveiled at
Dachau by Philip Auerbach, the Jewish State-Secretary in the Bavarian Government
who was convicted for embezzling money which he claimed as compensation for
non-existent Jews. The plaque read: “This area is being retained as a shrine
to the 238,000 individuals who were cremated here.” Since then, the official
casualty figures have had to be steadily revised downwards, and now stand at
only 20,600 the majority from typhus and starvation only at the end of the war.
This deflation, to ten per cent of the original figure, will doubtless continue,
and one day will be applied to the legendary figure of six million as a whole.
Another example of drastic revision is the present estimate of Auschwitz
casualties. The absurd allegations of three or four million deaths there are no
longer plausible even to Reitlinger. He now puts the number of casualties at
only 600,000; and although this figure is still exaggerated in the extreme, it
is a significant reduction on four million and further progress is to be
expected. Shirer himself quotes Reitlinger’s latest estimate, but he fails to
reconcile this with his earlier statement that half of that figure, about
300,000 Hungarian Jews were supposedly “done to death in forty-six days”—a
supreme example of the kind of irresponsible nonsense that is written on this
subject.
HUMANE CONDITIONS That
several thousand camp inmates did die in the chaotic final months of the war
brings us to the question of their war-time conditions. These have been
deliberately falsified in innumerable books of an extremely lurid and unpleasant
kind. The Red Cross Report, examined below, demonstrates conclusively that
throughout the war the camps were well administered. The working inmates
received a daily ration even throughout 1943 and 1944 of not less than 2,750
calories, which was more than double the average civilian ration in occupied
Germany in the years after 1945. The internees were under regular medical care,
and those who became seriously ill were transferred to hospital. All internees,
unlike those in Soviet camps, could receive parcels of food, clothing and
pharmaceutical supplies from the Special Relief Division of the Red Cross. The
Office of the Public Prosecutor conducted thorough investigations into each case
of criminal arrest, and those found innocent were released; those found guilty,
as well as those deportees convicted of major crimes within the camp, were
sentenced by military courts and executed. In the Federal Archives of Koblenz
there is a directive of January, 1943 from Himmler regarding such executions,
stressing that “no brutality is to be allowed” (Manvell & Frankl), ibid.,
p. 312). Occasionally there was brutality, but such cases were immediately
scrutinised by S.S. Judge Dr. Konrad Morgen of the Reich Criminal Police
Office, whose job was to investigate irregularities at the various camps. Morgen
himself prosecuted commander Koch of Buchenwald in 1943 for excesses at his
camp, a trial to which the German public were invited. It is significant that
Oswald Pohl, the administrator of the concentration camp system who was dealt
with so harshly at Nuremberg, was in favour of the death penalty for Koch. In
fact, the S.S. court did sentence Koch to death, but he was given the option of
serving on the Russian front. Before he could do this, however, Prince Waldeck,
the leader of the S.S. in the district, carried out his execution. This case is
ample proof of the seriousness with which the S.S. regarded unnecessary
brutality. Several S.S. court actions of this kind were conducted in the camps
during the war to prevent excesses, and more than 800 cases were investigated
before 1945. Morgen testified at Nuremberg that he discussed confidentially with
hundreds of inmates the prevailing conditions in the camps. He found few that
were undernourished except in the hospitals, and noted that the pace and
achievement in compulsory labour by inmates was far lower than among German
civilian workers. The evidence of Pinter and Cardinal Faulhaber has been shown
to disprove the claims of extermination at Dachau, and we have seen how the
casualty figures of that camp have been continuously revised downwards. The camp
at Dachau near Munich, in fact, may be taken as fairly typical of these places
of internment. Compulsory labour in the factories and plants was the order of
the day, but the Communist leader Ernst Ruff testified in his Nuremberg
affidavit of April 18th, 1947 that the treatment of prisoners on the work
details and in the camp of Dachau remained humane. The Polish underground
leader, Jan Piechowiak, who was at Dachau from May 22nd, 1940 until
April 29th, 1945 also testified on March 21st, 1946 that prisoners
there received good treatment, and that the S.S. personnel at the camp were
“well disciplined”. Berta Schirotschin, who worked in the food service at
Dachau throughout the war, testified that the working inmates, until the
beginning of 1945 and despite increasing privation in Germany, received their
customary second breakfast at 10 a.m. every morning. In general, hundreds
of affidavits from Nuremberg testify to the humane conditions prevailing in
concentration camps; but emphasis was invariably laid on those which reflected
badly on the German administration and could be used for propaganda purposes. A
study of the documents also reveals that Jewish witnesses who resented their
deportation and internment in prison camps tended to greatly exaggerate the
rigours of their condition, whereas other nationals interned for political
reasons, such as those cited above, generally presented a more balanced picture.
In many cases, prisoners such as Charlotte Bormann, whose experiences did not
accord with the picture presented at Nuremberg, were not permitted to testify.
UNAVOIDABLE CHAOS The
orderly situation prevailing in the German concentration camps slowly broke down
in the last fearful months of 1945. The Red Cross Report of 1948 explains that
the saturation bombing by the Allies paralysed the transport and communications
system of the Reich, no food reached the camps and starvation claimed an
increasing number of victims, both in prison camps and among the civilian
population of Germany. This terrible situation was compounded in the camps both
by great overcrowding and the consequent outbreak of typhus epidemics.
Overcrowding occurred as a result of prisoners from the eastern camps such as
Auschwitz being evacuated westward before the Russian advance; columns of such
exhausted people arrived at several German camps such as Belsen and Buchenwald
which had themselves reached a state of great hardship. Belsen camp near Bremen
was in an especially chaotic condition in these months and Himmler’s
physician, Felix Kersten, an anti-Nazi, explains that its unfortunate reputation
as a “death camp” was due solely to the ferocity of the typhus epidemic
which broke out there in March, 1945 (Memoirs 1940–1945, London, 1956).
Undoubtedly these fearful conditions cost several thousand lives, and it is
these conditions that are represented in the photographs of emaciated human
beings and heaps of corpses which the propagandists delight in showing,
claiming, that they are victims of “extermination”. A surprisingly honest
appraisal of the situation at Belsen in 1945 appeared in Purnell’s History
of the Second World War (Vol. 7, No. 15) by Dr. Russell Barton, now
superintendent and consultant psychiatrist at Severalls Hospital, Essex, who
spent one month at the camp as a medical student after the war. His account
vividly illustrates the true causes of the mortality that occurred in such camps
towards the war’s end, and how such extreme conditions came to prevail there.
Dr. Barton explains that Brigadier Glyn Hughes, the British Medical Officer who
took command of Belsen in 1945, “did not think there had been any atrocities
in the camp” despite discipline and hard work. “Most people,” writes
Dr. Barton, “attributed the conditions of the inmates to deliberate
intention on the part of the Germans... Inmates were eager to cite examples of
brutality and neglect, and visiting journalists from different countries
interpreted the situation according to the needs of propaganda at home.”
However, Dr. Barton makes it quite clear that the conditions of starvation and
disease were unavoidable in the circumstances and that they occurred only during
the months of 1945. “From discussions with prisoners it seemed that conditions
in the camp were not too bad until late 1944. The huts were set among pine trees
and each was provided with lavatories, wash basins, showers and stoves for
heating.” The cause of food shortage is also explained. “German medical
officers told me that it had been increasingly difficult to transport food to
the camp for some months. Anything that moved on the autobahns was likely to be
bombed... I was surprised to find records, going back for two or three years, of
large quantities of food cooked daily for distribution. At that time I became
convinced, contrary to popular opinion, that there had never been a policy of
deliberate starvation. This was confirmed by the large numbers of well-fed
inmates. Why then were so many people suffering from malnutrition? ... The major
reasons for the state of Belsen were disease, gross overcrowding by central
authority, lack of law and order within the huts, and inadequate supplies of
food, water and drugs.” The lack of order, which led to riots over food
distribution, was quelled by British machine-gun fire and a display of force
when British tanks and armoured cars toured the camp. Apart from the unavoidable
deaths in these circumstances, Glyn Hughes estimated that about “1,000 were
killed through the kindness of English soldiers giving them their own rations
and chocolates.” As a man who was at Belsen, Dr. Barton is obviously very
much alive to the falsehoods of concentration camp mythology, and he concludes:
“In trying to assess the causes of the conditions found in Belsen one must be
alerted to the tremendous visual display, ripe for purposes of propaganda, that
masses of starved corpses presented.” To discuss such conditions “naively in
terms of ‘goodness’ and ‘badness’ is to ignore the constituent
factors...”
FAKE PHOTOGRAPHS Not
only were situations such as those at Belsen unscrupulously exploited for
propaganda purposes, but this propaganda has also made use of entirely fake
atrocity photographs and films. The extreme conditions at Belsen applied to very
few camps indeed; the great majority escaped the worst difficulties and all
their inmates survived in good health. As a result, outright forgeries were used
to exaggerate conditions of horror. A startling case of such forgery was
revealed in the British Catholic Herald of October 29th, 1948. It reported that
in Cassel, where every adult German was compelled to see a film representing the
“horrors” of Buchenwald, a doctor from Goettingen saw himself on the screen
looking after the victims. But he had never been to Buchenwald. After an
interval of bewilderment he realised that what he had seen was part of a film
taken after the terrible air raid on Dresden by the Allies on 13th February,
1945 where the doctor had been working. The film in question was shown in Cassel
on 19th October, 1948. After the air raid on Dresden, which killed a record
135,000 people, mostly refugee women and children, the bodies of the victims
were piled and burned in heaps of 400 and 500 for several weeks. These were the
scenes, purporting to be from Buchenwald, which the doctor had recognised. The
forgery of war-time atrocity photographs is not new. For further information the
reader is referred to Arthur Ponsonby’s book Falsehood in Wartime
(London, 1928), which exposes the faked photographs of German atrocities in the
First World War. Ponsonby cites such fabrications as “The Corpse Factory”
and “The Belgian Baby without Hands”, which are strikingly reminiscent of
the propaganda relating to Nazi “atrocities”. F. J. P. Veale
explains in his book that the bogus “jar of human soap” solemnly introduced
by the Soviet prosecution at Nuremberg was a deliberate jibe at the famous
British “Corpse Factory” myth, in which the ghoulish Germans were supposed
to have obtained various commodities from processing corpses (Veale, ibid.,
p. 192). This accusation was one for which the British Government
apologised after 1918. It received new life after 1945 in the tale of lamp
shades of human skin, which was certainly as fraudulent as the Soviet “human
soap”. In fact, from Manvell and Frankl we have the grudging admission that
the lamp shade evidence at Buchenwald Trial “later appeared to be dubious” (The
Incomparable Crime, p. 84). It was given by a certain Andreas
Pfiffenberger in a “written affidavit” of the kind discussed earlier, but in
1948 General Lucius Clay admitted that the affidavits used in the trial appeared
after more thorough investigation to have been mostly ‘hearsay’. An
excellent work on the fake atrocity photographs pertaining to the Myth of the
Six Million is Dr. Udo Walendy’s Bild ‘Dokumente’ für die
Geschichtsschreibung? (Vlotho/Weser, 1973), and from the numerous examples
cited we illustrate one on this page. The origin of the first photograph is
unknown, but the second is a photo montage. Close examination reveals
immediately that the standing figures have been taken from the first photograph,
and a heap of corpses super-imposed in front of them. The fence has been
removed, and an entirely new horror “photograph” created. This blatant
forgery appears on page 341 of R. Schnabel’s book on the S.S., Machtohne
Moral: eine Dokumentation über die SS (Frankfurt, 1957), with the caption
“Mauthausen”. (Walendy cites eighteen other examples of forgery in
Schnabel’s book). The same photograph appeared in the Proceedings of the
International Military Tribunal, Vol. XXX, p. 421, likewise purporting to
illustrate Mauthausen camp. It is also illustrated without a caption in Eugene
Aroneanu’s Konzentrationlager Document F.321 for the International
Court at Nuremberg; Heinz Kühnrich’s Der KZ-Staat (Berlin, 1960, p.
81); Vaclav Berdych’s Mauthausen (Prague, 1959); and Robert Neumann’s Hitler–Aufstieg
und Untergang des Dritten Reiches (Munich, 1961).
9. THE JEWS AND THE CONCENTRATION CAMPS: A FACTUAL
APPRAISAL BY THE RED CROSS
There
is one survey of the Jewish question in Europe during World War Two and the
conditions of Germany’s concentration camps which is almost unique in its
honesty and objectivity, the three-volume Report of the International
Committee of the Red Cross on its Activities during the Second World War,
Geneva, 1948. This comprehensive account from an entirely neutral source
incorporated and expanded the findings of two previous works: Documents sur
I’activité du CICR en faveur des civils detenus dans les camps de
concentration en Allemagne 1939–1945 (Geneva, 1946), and Inter Arma
Caritas: the Work of the ICRC during the Second World War (Geneva, 1947).
The team of authors, headed by Frédéric Siordet, explained in the opening
pages of the Report that their object, in the tradition of the Red Cross, had
been strict political neutrality, and herein lies its great value. The ICRC
successfully applied the 1929 Geneva military convention in order to gain access
to civilian internees held in Central and Western Europe by the German
authorities. By contrast, the ICRC was unable to gain any access to the Soviet
Union, which had failed to ratify the Convention. The millions of civilian and
military internees held in the USSR, whose conditions were known to be by far
the worst, were completely cut off from any international contact or
supervision. The Red Cross Report is of value in that it first clarifies the
legitimate circumstances under which Jews were detained in concentration camps,
i.e. as enemy aliens. In describing the two categories. of civilian internees,
the Report distinguishes the second type as “Civilians deported on
administrative grounds (in German, Schutzhäftlinge, who were arrested
for political or racial motives because their presence was considered a danger
to the State or the occupation forces” (Vol. III, p. 73). These persons,
it continues, “were placed on the same footing as persons arrested or
imprisoned under common law for security reasons.” (p. 74). The Report
admits that the Germans were at first reluctant to permit supervision by the Red
Cross of people detained on grounds relating to security, but by the latter part
of 1942, the ICRC obtained important concessions from Germany. They were
permitted to distribute food parcels to major concentration camps in Germany
from August 1942, and “from February 1943 onwards this concession was extended
to all other camps and prisons” (Vol. III, p. 78). The ICRC soon
established contact with camp commandants and launched a food relief programme
which continued to function until the last months of 1945, letters of thanks for
which came pouring in from Jewish internees.
RED CROSS RECIPIENTS WERE JEWS The
Report states that “As many as 9,000 parcels were packed daily. From the
autumn of 1943 until May 1945, about 1,112,000 parcels with a total weight of
4,500 tons were sent off to the concentration camps” (Vol. III,
p. 80). In addition to food, these contained clothing and pharmaceutical
supplies. “Parcels were sent to Dachau, Buchenwald, Sangerhausen,
Sachsenhausen, Oranienburg, Flossenburg, Landsberg-am-Lech, Flöha, Ravensbrück,
Hamburg-Neuengamme, Mauthausen, Theresienstadt, Auschwitz, Bergen-Belsen, to
camps near Vienna and in Central and Southern Germany. The principal recipients
were Belgians, Dutch, French, Greeks, Italians, Norwegians, Poles and stateless
Jews” (Vol. III, p. 83). In the course of the war, “The Committee
was in a position to transfer and distribute in the form of relief supplies over
twenty million Swiss francs collected by Jewish welfare organisations throughout
the world, in particular by the American Joint Distribution Committee of New
York” (Vol. I, p. 644). This latter organisation was permitted by
the German Government to maintain offices in Berlin until the American entry
into the war. The ICRC complained that obstruction of their vast relief
operation for Jewish internees came not from the Germans but from the tight
Allied blockade of Europe. Most of their purchases of relief food were made in
Roumania, Hungary and Slovakia. The ICRC had special praise for the liberal
conditions which prevailed at Theresienstadt up to the time of their last visits
there in April, 1945. This camp, “where there were about 40,000 Jews deported
from various countries was a relatively privileged ghetto” (Vol. III,
p. 75). According to the Report, “The Committee’s delegates were able
to visit the camp at Theresienstadt (Terezin) which was used exclusively for
Jews and was governed by special conditions. From information gathered by the
Committee, this camp had been started as an experiment by certain leaders of the
Reich... These men wished to give the Jews the means of setting up a communal
life in a town under their own administration and possessing almost complete
autonomy... two delegates were able to visit the camp on April 6th, 1945. They
confirmed the favourable impression gained on the first visit” (Vol. I,
p. 642). The ICRC also had praise for the regime of Ion Antonescu of
Fascist Rumania where the Committee was able to extend special relief to 183,000
Rumanian Jews until the time of the Soviet occupation. The aid then ceased, and
the ICRC complained bitterly that it never succeeded “in sending anything
whatsoever to Russia” (Vol. II, p. 62). The same situation applied
to many of the German camps after their “liberation” by the Russians. The
ICRC received a voluminous flow of mail from Auschwitz until the period of the
Soviet occupation, when many of the internees were evacuated westward. But the
efforts of the Red Cross to send relief to internees remaining at Auschwitz
under Soviet control were futile. However, food parcels continued to be sent to
former Auschwitz inmates transferred west to such camps as Buchenwald and
Oranienburg.
NO EVIDENCE OF GENOCIDE One
of the most important aspects of the Red Cross Report is that it clarifies the
true cause of those deaths that undoubtedly occurred in the camps towards the
end of the war. Says the Report: “In the chaotic condition of Germany after
the invasion during the final months of the war, the camps received no food
supplies at all and starvation claimed an increasing number of victims. Itself
alarmed by this situation, the German Government at last informed the ICRC on
February 1st, 1945. In March, 1945, discussions between the President of the
ICRC and General of the S.S. Kaltenbrunner gave even more decisive results.
Relief could henceforth be distributed by the ICRC, and one delegate was
authorised to stay in each camp...” (Vol. III, p. 83). Clearly, the
German authorities were at pains to relieve the dire situation as far as they
were able. The Red Cross are quite explicit in stating that food supplies ceased
at this time due to the Allied bombing of German transportation, and in the
interests of interned Jews they had protested on March 15th, 1944 against
“the barbarous aerial warfare of the Allies” (Inter Arma Caritas,
p. 78). By October 2nd, 1944, the ICRC warned the German Foreign Office of
the impending collapse of the German transportation system, declaring that
starvation conditions for people throughout Germany were becoming inevitable. In
dealing with this comprehensive, three-volume report, it is important to stress
that the delegates of the International Red Cross found no evidence whatever at
the camps in Axis-occupied Europe of a deliberate policy to exterminate the
Jews. In all its 1,600 pages the report does not even mention such a thing as a
gas chamber. It admits that Jews, like many other wartime nationalities,
suffered rigours and privations, but its complete silence on the subject of
planned extermination is ample refutation of the Six Million legend. Like the
Vatican representatives with whom they worked, the Red Cross found itself unable
to indulge in the irresponsible charges of genocide which had become the order
of the day. So far as the genuine mortality rate is concerned, the Report points
out that most of the Jewish doctors from the camps were being used to combat
typhus on the eastern front, so that they were unavailable when the typhus
epidemics of 1945 broke out in the camps (Vol. I, p. 204 ff).
Incidentally, it is frequently claimed that mass executions were carried out in
gas chambers cunningly disguised as shower facilities. Again the Report makes
nonsense of this allegation. “Not only the washing places, but installations
for baths, showers and laundry were inspected by the delegates. They had often
to take action to have fixtures made less primitive, and to get them repaired or
enlarged” (Vol. III, p. 594).
NOT ALL WERE INTERNED Volume
III of the Red Cross Report, Chapter 3 (I. Jewish Civilian Population)
deals with the “aid given to the Jewish section of the free population,” and
this chapter makes it quite plain that by no means all of the European Jews were
placed in internment camps, but remained, subject to certain restrictions, as
part of the free civilian population. This conflicts directly with the
“thoroughness” of the supposed “extermination programme”, and with the
claim in the forged Hoess memoirs that Eichmann was obsessed with seizing
“every single Jew he could lay his hands on.” In Slovakia, for example,
where Eichmann’s assistant Dieter Wisliceny was in charge, the Report states
that “A large proportion of the Jewish minority had permission to stay in the
country, and at certain periods Slovakia was looked upon as a comparative haven
of refuge for Jews, especially for those coming from Poland. Those who remained
in Slovakia seem to have been in comparative safety until the end of August
1944, when a rising against the German forces took place. While it is true that
the law of May 15th, 1942 had brought about the internment of several thousand
Jews, these people were held in camps where the conditions of food and lodging
were tolerable, and where the internees were allowed to do paid work on terms
almost equal to those of the free labour market” (Vol. I, p. 646).
Not only did large numbers of the three million or so European Jews avoid
internment altogether, but the emigration of Jews continued throughout the war,
generally by way of Hungary, Rumania and Turkey. Ironically, post-war Jewish
emigration from German-occupied territories was also facilitated by the Reich,
as in the case of the Polish Jews who had escaped to France before its
occupation. “The Jews from Poland who, whilst in France, had obtained entrance
permits to the United States were held to be American citizens by the German
occupying authorities, who further agreed to recognize the validity of about
three thousand passports issued to Jews by the consulates of South American
countries” (Vol. I, p. 645). As future U.S. citizens, these Jews
were held at the Vittel camp in southern France for American aliens. The
emigration of European Jews from Hungary in particular proceeded during the war
unhindered by the German authorities. “Until March 1944, ”says the Red Cross
Report, “Jews who had the privilege of visas for Palestine were free to leave
Hungary” (Vol. I, p. 648). Even after the replacement of the Horthy
Government in 1944 (following its attempted armistice with the Soviet Union)
with a government more dependent on German authority, the emigration of Jews
continued. The Committee secured the pledges of both Britain and the United
States “to give support by every means to the emigration of Jews from
Hungary,” and from the U.S. Government the ICRC received a message stating
that “The Government of the United States... now specifically repeats its
assurance that arrangements will be made by it for the care of all Jews who in
the present circumstances are allowed to leave” (Vol. I, p. 649).
10. THE TRUTH AT LAST: THE WORK OF PAUL RASSINIER
Without
doubt the most important contribution to a truthful study of the extermination
question has been the work of the French historian, Professor Paul Rassinier.
The pre-eminent value of this work lies firstly in the fact that Rassinier
actually experienced life in the German concentration camps, and also that, as a
Socialist intellectual and anti-Nazi, nobody could be less inclined to defend
Hitler and National Socialism. Yet, for the sake of justice and historical
truth, Rassinier spent the remainder of his post-war years until his death in
1966 pursuing research which utterly refuted the Myth of the Six Million and the
legend of Nazi diabolism. From 1933 until 1943, Rassinier was a professor of
history in the College d’enseignement général at Belfort, Academie de
Besancon. During the war he engaged in resistance activity until he was arrested
by the Gestapo on October 30th, 1943, and as a result was confined in the German
concentration camps at Buchenwald and Dora until 1945. At Buchenwald, towards
the end of the war, he contracted typhus, which so damaged his health that he
could not resume his teaching. After the war, Rassinier was awarded the Medaille
de la Résistance and the Reconnaisance Francaise, and was elected to
the French Chamber of Deputies, from which he was ousted by the Communists in
November, 1946. Rassinier then embarked on his great work, a systematic analysis
of alleged German war atrocities, in particular the supposed “extermination”
of the Jews. Not surprisingly, his writings are little known; they have rarely
been translated from the French and none at all have appeared in English. His
most important works were: Le Mensonge d’Ulysse (The Lies of Odysseus,
Paris, 1949), an investigation of concentration camp conditions based on his own
experiences of them; and Ulysse trahi par les Siens (1960), a sequel
which further refuted the impostures of propagandists concerning German
concentration camps. His monumental task was completed with two final volumes,
Le Véritable Proces Eichmann (1962) and Le Drame des Juifs européen
(1964), in which Rassinier exposes the dishonest and reckless distortions
concerning the fate of the Jews by a careful statistical analysis. The last work
also examines the political and financial significance of the extermination
legend and its exploitation by Israel and the Communist powers. One of the many
merits of Rassinier’s work is exploding the myth of unique German
“wickedness”; and he reveals with devastating force how historical truth has
been obliterated in an impenetrable fog of partisan propaganda. His researches
demonstrate conclusively that the fate of the Jews during World War Two, once
freed from distortion and reduced to proper proportions, loses its much vaunted
“enormity” and is seen to be only one act in a greater and much wider
tragedy. In an extensive lecture tour in West Germany in the spring of 1960,
Professor Rassinier emphasised to his German audiences that it was high time for
a rebirth of the truth regarding the extermination legend, and that the Germans
themselves should begin it since the allegation remained a wholly unjustifiable
blot on Germany in the eyes of the world.
THE IMPOSTURE OF ‘GAS CHAMBERS’ Rassinier
entitled his first book The Lies of Odysseus in commemoration of the fact
that travellers always return bearing tall stories, and until his death he
investigated all the stories of extermination literature and attempted to trace
their authors. He made short work of the extravagant claims about gas chambers
at Buchenwald in David Rousset’s The Other Kingdom (New York, 1947);
himself an inmate of Buchenwald, Rassinier proved that no such things ever
existed there (Le Mensonge d’Ulysse, p. 209 ff) Rassinier
also traced Abbe Jean-Paul Renard, and asked him how he could possibly have
testified in his book Chaines et Lumieres that gas chambers were in
operation at Buchenwald. Renard replied that others had told him of their
existence, and hence he had been willing to pose as a witness of things that he
had never seen (ibid., p. 209 ff). Rassinier also investigated
Denise Dufournier’s Ravensbrück.—The Women’s Camp of Death
(London, 1948) and again found that the authoress had no other evidence for gas
chambers there than the vague “rumours” which Charlotte Bormann stated were
deliberately spread by communist political prisoners. Similar investigations
were made of such books as Philip Friedman’s This was Auschwitz: The Story
of a Murder Camp (N.Y., 1946) and Eugen Kogon’s The Theory and Practice
of Hell (N.Y., 1950), and he found that none of these authors could produce
an authentic eye-witness of a gas chamber at Auschwitz, nor had they themselves
actually seen one. Rassinier mentions Kogon’s claim that a deceased former
inmate, Janda Weiss, had said to Kogon alone that she had witnessed gas chambers
at Auschwitz, but of course, since this person was apparently dead, Rassinier
was unable to investigate the claim. He was able to interview Benedikt Kautsky,
author of Teufel und Verdammte who had alleged that millions of Jews were
exterminated at Auschwitz. However, Kautsky only confirmed to Rassinier the
confession in his book, namely that never at any time had he seen a gas chamber,
and that he based his information on what others had “told him”. The palm
for extermination literature is awarded by Rassinier to Miklos Nyizli’s Doctor
at Auschwitz, in which the falsification of facts, the evident
contradictions and shameless lies show that the author is speaking of places
which it is obvious he has never seen (Le Drame des Juifs européen, p.
52). According to this “doctor of Auschwitz”, 25,000 victims were
exterminated every day for four and a half years, which is a grandiose advance
on Olga Lengyel’s 24,000 a day for two and a half years. It would mean a total
of forty-one million victims at Auschwitz by 1945, two and a half times the
total pre-war Jewish population of the world. When Rassinier attempted to
discover the identity of this strange “witness”, he was told that “he had
died some time before the publication of the book.” Rassinier is convinced
that he was never anything but a mythical figure. Since the war, Rassinier has,
in fact, toured Europe in search of somebody who was an actual eye-witness of
gas chamber exterminations in German concentration camps during World War Two,
but he has never found even one such person. He discovered that not one of the
authors of the many books charging that the Germans had exterminated millions of
Jews had even seen a gas chamber built for such purposes, much less seen one in
operation, nor could any of these authors produce a living authentic witness who
had done so. Invariably, former prisoners such as Renard, Kautsky and Kogon
based their statements not upon what they had actually seen, but upon what they
“heard”, always from “reliable” sources, who by some chance are almost
always dead and thus not in a position to confirm or deny their statements.
Certainly the most important fact to emerge from Rassinier’s studies, and of
which there is now no doubt at all, is the utter imposture of “gas
chambers”. Serious investigations carried out in the sites themselves have
revealed with irrefutable proof that, contrary to the declarations of the
surviving “witnesses” examined above, no gas chambers whatever existed in
the German camps at Buchenwald, Bergen-Belsen, Ravensbrück, Dachau and Dora, or
Mauthausen in Austria. This fact, which we noted earlier was attested to by
Stephen Pinter of the U.S. War Office, has now been recognised and admitted
officially by the Institute of Contemporary History at Munich. However,
Rassinier points out that in spite of this, “witnesses” again declared at
the Eichmann trial that they had seen prisoners at Bergen-Belsen setting out for
the gas chambers. So far as the eastern camps of Poland are concerned, Rassinier
shows that the sole evidence attesting to the existence of gas chambers at
Treblinka, Chelmno, Belzec, Maidanek and Sobibor are the discredited memoranda
of Kurt Gerstein referred to above. His original claim, it will be recalled was
that an absurd 40 million people had been exterminated during the war, while in
his first signed memorandum he reduced the number to 25 million. Further
reductions were made in his second memorandum. These documents were considered
of such dubious authenticity that they were not even admitted by the Nuremberg
Court, though they continue to circulate in three different versions, one in
German (distributed in schools) and two in French, none of which agree with each
other. The German version featured as “evidence” at the Eichmann Trial in
l961. Finally, Professor Rassinier draws attention to an important admission by
Dr. Kubovy, director of the World Centre of Contemporary Jewish Documentation at
Tel-Aviv, made in La Terre Retrouvée, December 15th, 1960. Dr. Kubovy
recognised that not a single order for extermination exists from Hitler,
Himmler, Heydrich or Goering (Le Drame des Juifs européen,p. 31,
39).
‘SIX MILLION’ FALSEHOOD REJECTED
As for the fearful propaganda figure of the Six Million, Professor Rassinier
rejects it on the basis of an extremely detailed statistical analysis. He shows
that the number has been falsely established, on the one hand through inflation
of the pre-war Jewish population by ignoring all emigration and evacuation, and
on the other by a corresponding deflation of the number of survivors after 1945.
This was the method used by the World Jewish Congress. Rassinier also rejects
any written or oral testimony to the Six Million given by the kind of
“witnesses” cited above, since they are full of contradictions,
exaggerations and falsehoods. He gives the example of Dachau casualties, noting
that in 1946, Pastor Niemöller reiterated Auerbach’s fraudulent “238,000”
deaths there, while in 1962 Bishop Neuhäusseler of Munich stated in a speech at
Dachau that only 30,000 people died “of the 200,000 persons from thirty-eight
nations who were interned there” (Le Drame des Juifs européen, p. 12).
Today, the estimate has been reduced by several more thousands, and so it goes
on. Rassinier concludes, too, that testimony in support of the Six Million given
by accused men such as Hoess, Hoettl, Wisliceny and Hoellriegel, who were faced
with the prospect of being condemned to death or with the hope of obtaining a
reprieve, and who were frequently tortured during their detention, is completely
untrustworthy. Rassinier finds it very significant that the figure of Six
Million was not mentioned in court during the Eichmann trial. “The prosecution
at the Jerusalem trial was considerably weakened by its central motif, the six
million European Jews alleged to have been exterminated in gas chambers. It was
an argument that easily won conviction the day after the war ended, amidst the
general state of spiritual and material chaos. Today, many documents have been
published which were not available at the time of the Nuremberg trials, and
which tend to prove that if the Jewish nationals were wronged and persecuted by
the Hitler regime, there could not possibly have been six millions victims” (ibid.,
p. 125). With the help of one hundred pages of cross-checked statistics,
Professor Rassinier concludes in Le Drame des Juifs européen that the number of
Jewish casualties during the Second World War could not have exceeded 1,200,000,
and he notes that this has finally been accepted as valid by the World Centre of
Contemporary Jewish Documentation at Paris. However, he regards such a figure as
a maximum limit, and refers to the lower estimate of 896,892 casualties in a
study of the same problem by the Jewish statistician Raul Hilberg. Rassinier
points out that the State of Israel nevertheless continues to claim compensation
for six million dead, each one representing an indemnity of 5,000 marks.
EMIGRATION: THE FINAL SOLUTION
Prof. Rassinier is emphatic in stating that the German Government never
had any policy other than the emigration of Jews overseas. He shows that after
the promulgation of the Nuremberg Race Laws in September, 1935, the Germans
negotiated with the British for the transfer of German Jews to Palestine on the
basis of the Balfour Declaration. When this failed, they asked other countries
to take charge of them, but these refused (ibid., p. 20). The
Palestine project was revived in 1938, but broke down because Germany could not
negotiate their departure on the basis of 3,000,000 marks, as demanded by
Britain, without some agreement for compensation. Despite these difficulties,
Germany did manage to secure the emigration of the majority of their Jews,
mostly to the United States. Rassinier also refers to the French refusal of
Germany’s Madagascar plan at the end of 1940. “In a report of the 21st
August, 1942, the Secretary of State for the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the
Third Reich, Luther, decided that it would be possible to negotiate with France
in this direction and described conversations which had taken place between July
and December, 1940, and which were brought to a halt following the interview
with Montoire on 13th December 1940 by Pierre-Etienne Flandin, Laval’s
successor. During the whole of 1941 the Germans hoped that they would be able to
re-open these negotiations and bring them to a happy conclusion” (ibid.,
p. 108). After the outbreak of war, the Jews, who, as Rassinier reminds us,
had declared economic and financial war on Germany as early as 1933, were
interned in concentration camps, “which is the way countries all over the
world treat enemy aliens in time of war... It was decided to regroup them and
put them to work in one immense ghetto which, after the successful invasion of
Russia, was situated towards the end of 1941 in the so-called Eastern
territories near the former frontier between Russia and Poland: at Auschwitz,
Chelmno, Belzec, Maidanek, Treblinka etc. There they were to wait until the end
of the war for the re-opening of international discussions which would decide
their future” (Le Véritable Proces Eichmann, p. 20). The order
for this concentration in the eastern ghetto was given by Goering to Heydrich,
as noted earlier, and it was regarded as a prelude to “the desired final
solution,” their emigration overseas after the war had ended.
ENORMOUS FRAUD
Of great concern to Professor Rassinieris the way in which the extermination
legend is deliberately exploited for political and financial advantage, and in
this he finds Israel and the Soviet Union to be in concert. He notes how, after
1950, an avalanche of fabricated extermination literature appeared under the
stamp of two organisations, so remarkably synchronised in their activities that
one might well believe them to have been contrived in partnership. One was the
“Committee for the Investigation of War Crimes and Criminals” established
under Communist auspices at Warsaw, and the other, the “World Centre of
Contemporary Jewish Documentation” at Paris and Tel-Aviv. Their publications
seem to appear at favourable moments in the political climate, and for the
Soviet Union their purpose is simply to maintain the threat of Nazism as a
manoeuvre to divert attention from their own activities. As for Israel,
Rassinier sees the myth of the Six Million as inspired by a purely material
problem. In Le Drame des Juifs européen (p. 31, 39). he writes:
“... It is simply a question of justifying by a proportionate number of
corpses the enormous subsidies which Germany has been paying annually since the
end of the war to the State of Israel by way of reparation for injuries which
moreover she cannot be held to have caused her either morally or legally, since
there was no State of Israel at the time the alleged deeds took place; thus it
is a purely and contemptibly material problem. Perhaps I may be allowed to
recall here that the State of Israel was only founded in May 1948 and that the
Jews were nationals of all states with the exception of Israel, in order to
underline the dimensions of a fraud which defies description in any language; on
the one hand Germany pays to Israel sums which are calculated on six million
dead, and on the other, since at least four-fifths of these six million were
decidedly alive at the end of the war, she is paying substantial sums by way of
reparation to the victims of Hitler’s Germany to those who are still alive in
countries all over the world other than Israel and to the rightful claimants of
those who have since deceased, which means that for the former (i.e., the six
million), or in other words, for the vast majority, she is paying twice.”
CONCLUSION
Here we may briefly summarize the data on Jewish war-time casualties.
Contrary to the figure of over 9 million Jews in German-occupied territory
put forward at the Nuremberg and Eichmann trials, it has already been
established that after extensive emigration, approximately 3 million were
living in Europe, excluding the Soviet Union. Even when the Jews of
German-occupied Russia are included (the majority of Russian Jews were evacuated
beyond German control), the overall number probably does not exceed four
million. Himmler’s statistician, Dr. Richard Korherr and the World Centre of
Contemporary Jewish Documentation put the number respectively at 5,550,000 and
5,294,000 when German-occupied territory was at its widest, but both these
figures include the two million Jews of the Baltic and western Russia without
paying any attention to the large number of these who were evacuated. However,
it is at least an admission from the latter organisation that there were not
even six million Jews in Europe and western Russia combined. Nothing better
illustrates the declining plausibility of the Six Million legend than the fact
that the prosecution at the Eichmann trial deliberately avoided mentioning the
figure. Moreover, official Jewish estimates of the casualties are being quietly
revised downwards. Our analysis of the population and emigration statistics, as
well as the studies by the Swiss Baseler Nachrichten and Professor Rassinier,
demonstrate that it would have been simply impossible for the number of Jewish
casualties to have exceeded a limit of one and a half million. It is very
significant, therefore, that the World Centre of Contemporary Jewish
Documentation in Paris now states that only 1,485,292 Jews died from all causes
during the Second World War, and although this figure is certainly too high, at
least it bears no resemblance at all to the legendary Six Million. As has been
noted earlier, the Jewish statistician Raul Hilberg estimates an even lower
figure of 896,892. This is beginning to approach a realistic figure, and the
process of revision is certain to continue. Doubtless, several thousand Jewish
persons did die in the course of the Second World War, but this must be seen in
the context of a war that cost many millions of innocent victims on all sides.
To put the matter in perspective, for example, we may point out that 700,000
Russian civilians died during the siege of Leningrad, and a total of 2,050,000
German civilians were killed in Allied air raids and forced repatriation after
the war. In 1955, another neutral Swiss source, Die Tat of Zurich
(January 19th, 1955), in a survey of all Second World War casualties based on
figures of the International Red Cross, put the “Loss of victims of
persecution because of politics, race or religion who died in prisons and
concentration camps between 1939 and 1945” at 300,000, not all of whom were
Jews, and this figure seems the most accurate assessment.
IMAGINARY SLAUGHTER The question most pertinent to the
extermination legend is, of course: how many of the 3 million European Jews
under German control survived after 1945? The Jewish Joint Distribution
Committee estimated the number of survivors in Europe to be only one and a half
million, but such a figure is now totally unacceptable. This is proved by the
growing number of Jews claiming compensation from the West German Government for
having allegedly suffered between 1939 and 1945. By 1965, the number of these
claimants registered with the West German Government had tripled in ten years
and reached 3,375,000 (Aufbau, June 30th, 1965). Nothing could be a
more devastating proof of the brazen fantasy of the Six Million. Most of these
claimants are Jews, so there can be no doubt that the majority of the 3 million
Jews who experienced the Nazi occupation of Europe are, in fact, very much
alive. It is a resounding confirmation of the fact that Jewish casualties during
the Second World War can only be estimated at a figure in thousands. Surely this
is enough grief for the Jewish people? Who has the right to compound it with
vast imaginary slaughter, marking with eternal shame a great European nation, as
well as wringing fraudulent monetary compensation from them?
Richard Harwood is a writer and specialist in political and
diplomatic aspects of the Second World War. At present he is with the University
of London. Mr. Harwood turned to the vexed subject of war crimes under the
influence of Professor Paul Rassineir, to whose monumental work this little
volume is greatly indebted. The author is now working on a sequel in this series
on the Main Nuremberg Trial, 1945–1946.
COMMENTS ABOUT DID SIX MILLION REALLY DIE?
Dr. Kuang Fann – Professor of Philosophy at York University
of Canada, formerly China: “The whole pamphlet... obviously should be
classified as a political opinion...”
Ditlieb Felderer – Historical Researcher, Writer, Sweden:
“... the booklet has proven to be more true as the years have gone by, and it
is exterminationists who are coming now to start arguing like Harwood did when
the booklet was first published, so the exterminationists are moving... toward
the booklet more and more.”
Dr. Robert Faurisson – Expert of Ancient Texts and Documents,
Lyon University: “The thesis of the book is that it’s not true that six
million Jews died, and it is not true that there was an extermination plan, and
it is not true that there were gas chambers. What I find right is, first, the
title. The title is good. Did Six Million Really Die? That’s really the
problem... This man, Richard Harwood, brought plenty of information for the
layman in ’74. He said in ’74 that there were no order(s) from Hitler to
exterminate the Jews. Three years after, when David Irving said it, it was an
uproar, so it was really new and true. We know it now in 1988... this... was so
important that when it was published in France, the man who distributed (it was)
murdered... Francoise Duprat. We don’t know who exactly did that, but the
interesting point is, first, that it has been done by people very clever in
those kind of bomb handling, and what was published in the journal Le Monde
after was interesting. This murder was re-vindicated by a so-called ‘Memory of
Auschwitz’ organization. It was justified by a man called Patrick Chairoff—saying
that Francoise Duprat, in distributing this kind of pamphlet, had taken a
responsibility which kills.“
David Irving – British Historian, author of over 30 books on
WW II and its aftermath: “... I read it with great interest and I must say
that I was surprised by the quality of the arguments that it represented. It has
obvious flaws. It uses sources that I personally would not use. In fact, the
entire body of sources is different. This is based entirely on secondary
literature, books by other people, including some experts, whereas I use no
books. I use just the archives. But independently, the author of this came to
conclusions and asked questions of a logical nature which I had arrived at by an
entirely different route, so to speak ... And if I was to ask what is the value
of a brochure like this, I think it is that it provokes people to ask questions,
rather as my book on Hitler’s War provoked the historians... This is
the kind of value which I found this brochure to have. It was asking proper
questions on the basis of an entirely different set of sources.”
Mark Weber – American Historian, Author: “I believe that
the thesis of the booklet is accurate ... that there was no German policy or
program to exterminate the Jews during the Second World War... The booklet is a
journalistic or a polemic account that is designed to convince people, and it
does not purport to be a work that can be held up to the same standards of rigid
scrutiny that a scholarly work and a detailed work by someone who is a historian
normally would be ... its main value lies in encouraging further discussion and
thought and debate on the subject it raises.”
Colin Wilson – Well-known British author: “... I received
in the post a pamphlet... entitled Did Six Million Really Die? I must
admit that it has left me thoroughly bewildered. What Harwood says, briefly, is
that Hitler had no reason to murder Jews when he needed them for forced labour...
It is worth asking the question: Did the Nazis really exterminate six million
Jews? Or is this another sign of the emotional historical distortion that makes
nearly all the books on Hitler so far almost worthless? ... Is there, then, any
reason why we should be afraid to dig down until we get at the truth?”
WHAT’S WRONG WITH Did Six Million Really Die? After 10
years of wrangling, what follows is the essence of what was found wrong with the
pamphlet by the prosecution witnesses. In italics are the primary parts of the
pamphlet disputed by the prosecution followed by evidence given by expert
witnesses on both sides.
1. By 1939, the great majority of German Jews had emigrated, all of them with a
sizeable proportion of their assets. Never at any time had the Nazi leadership
even contemplated a policy of genocide towards them... Had Hitler cherished any
intention of exterminating the Jews, it is inconceivable that he would have
allowed more than 800,000 to leave Reich territory with the bulk of their
wealth. (p. 5, 6)
Prosecution historian Christopher Browning’s opinion was that
slightly over half of German Jews emigrated by 1939. Browning testified that
the figure 800,000 was an exaggeration; by 1941, the total of Jews who had
left Germany, Austria and the Protectorates was 530,000. Because of measures
taken against them, it was false to say they left with a “sizeable
proportion” of their assets. Browning admitted under cross-examination,
however, that he was not a demographer nor a statisticion and that any
population statistics concerning Jews could only be estimates. He also
admitted that he could not give a precise percentage or even proportion of
their assets Jews left with. He only knew that considerable efforts were made
to prevent property getting out.
2. The founder of political Zionism in the 19th century, Theodore Herzl, in
his work The Jewish State, had originally conceived of Madagascar as a national
homeland for the Jews, and this possibility was seriously studied by the Nazis.
It had been a main plank of the National Socialist party platform before 1933
and was published by the party in pamphlet form. (p. 5)
Browning testified it was not a plank of the Nazi Party platform
before 1933 that the Jews go to Madagascar as a national homeland. The first
time a Nazi leader mentioned Madagascar was 1938. The first time there was a
plan for Madagascar was 1940.
3. The fall of France in 1940 enabled the German Government to open serious
negotiations with the French for the transfer of European Jews to Madagascar. A
memorandum of August, 1942 from Luther, Secretary-of-State in the German Foreign
Office, reveals that he had conducted these negotiations between July and
December, 1940, when they were terminated by the French. (p. 7)
Browning testified that there were no such negotiations with the
French. The Madagascar Plan failed because of continuing British control of
the high seas.
4. Reitlinger and Poliakov both make the entirely unfounded supposition that
because the Madagascar Plan had been shelved, the Germans must necessarily have
been thinking of “extermination”. Only a month later, however, on March 7th,
1942, Goebbels wrote a memorandum in favour of the Madagascar Plan as a “final
solution” of the Jewish question (Manvell & Frankl, Dr. Goebbels,
London, 1960, p. 165). In the meantime he approved of the Jews being
“concentrated in the East”. Later Goebbels memoranda also stress deportation
to the East (i.e. the Government-General of Poland) and lay emphasis on the need
for compulsory labour there; once the policy of evacuation to the East had been
inaugurated, the use of Jewish labour became a fundamental part of the
operation. (p. 7)
Browning said that Goebbels did not write a “memorandum”, he
wrote a “diary entry.” Goebbels did not lay emphasis on the need for
compulsory labour but said exactly the opposite; for example, on March 27,
1942, he wrote that 60% of the Jews will have to be liquidated and 40% used
for forced labour. Browning admitted he had never checked the authenticity of
the original Goebbels diaries but had accepted the commercial printed version.
Historian Weber testified there was great doubt about the authenticity of the
entire Goebbels diaries because they were typewritten. There was therefore no
way to verify their authenticity. The U.S. Government itself indicated that it
would take no responsibility for the accuracy of the diaries: the original
clothbound edition contained a U.S. Government statement that it “neither
warrants nor disclaims the authenticity of the manuscript”. Browning relied
on other documents such as the Seraphim report to show that the Germans did
not put priority on using Jews for labour. Historian Weber disagreed with this
opinion. In his view, the Jews were a valuable source of labour for the
Germans; Himmler himself ordered that concentration camp inmates be used as
extensively as possible in war production.
5. Statistics relating to Jewish populations are not everywhere known in
precise detail, approximations for various countries differing widely, and it is
also unknown exactly how many Jews were deported and interned at any one time
between the years 1939–1945. In general, however, what reliable statistics
there are, especially those relating to emigration, are sufficient to show that
not a fraction of six million Jews could have been exterminated. (p. 7)
Browning testified that contemporary German statistical studies
showed that there were enough Jews in Europe to exterminate 6 million of
them. These studies were: (a) the Burgdörfer Study (estimated that there were
about 10.72 million Jews in Europe); (b) Madagascar Plan (4 million Jews
under German control in 1940); (c) Wannsee conference protocol (11 million
Jews). In Browning’s opinion, even the German studies done at the time
showed in the area of 10 million Jews under German control in Europe.
Therefore, 6 million could have been exterminated. He admitted, again,
that he was not a demographer or a statistician and that the problem of
changing borders and the various definitions of “Jew” made any conclusions
in this area difficult to the point that they could only be estimates.
6. According to Chambers Encyclopaedia, the total number of Jews living in
pre-war Europe was 6,500,000. (p. 7)
Chambers Encyclopedia dealt only with the total number of Jews
living on the continent of Europe apart from Russia, not the total number
living in pre-war Europe as stated by the pamphlet.
7. In addition to the German Jews, 220,000 of the total 280,000 Austrian Jews
had emigrated by September, 1939, while from March 1939 onwards the Institute
for Jewish Emigration in Prague had secured the emigration of 260,000 Jews from
former Czechoslovakia. In all, only 360,000 Jews remained in Germany, Austria
and Czechoslovakia after September, 1939. (p. 7, 8)
These numbers did not accord with the German studies done at the
time, Browning testified. A comparison with the Wannsee Conference protocol
statistics showed that 360,000 Jews had emigrated from Germany; 147,000 had
emigrated from Austria; 30,000 had emigrated from the Protectorate. These
figures were all much lower than Harwood’s figures.
8. In addition to these emigrants, we must also include the number of Jews
who fled to the Soviet Union after 1939, and who were later evacuated beyond
reach of the German invaders. It will be shown below that the majority of these,
about 1,250,000, were migrants from Poland. But apart from Poland, Reitlinger
admits that 300,000 other European Jews slipped into Soviet territory between
1939 and 1941. This brings the total of Jewish emigrants to the Soviet Union to
about 1,550,000. (p. 8)
Browning testified that the reference to Reitlinger was a mis-cite;
Reitlinger said that 300,000 Polish Jews in total fled to the Soviet Union,
not “other European Jews” as stated by Harwood. The figure of 1,250,000
given by Harwood was therefore 5 times too high.
9. The 1931 Jewish population census for Poland put the number of Jews at
2,732,600 (Reitlinger, Die Endlösung, p. 36). (p. 8)
Hilberg testified that this was wrong; in fact, the figure of
2,732,600 came from a census taken in the 1920s.
10. When the Jewish populations of Holland (140,000), Belgium (40,000), Italy
(50,000), Yugoslavia (55,000), Hungary (380,000) and Roumania (725,000) are
included, the figure does not much exceed 3 million. (p. 8)
These statistics were not in accord with the Nazis’ own
statistics, said Browning. For example, the German statistics for 1942 listed
the Jewish population of Hungary at 743,800. German records of the
deportations from Hungary showed more Jews were deported than the number given
by Harwood as the Jewish population of Hungary.
11. So far as is known, the first accusation against the Germans of the mass
murder of Jews in war-time Europe was made by the Polish Jew Rafael Lemkin in
his book Axis Rule in Occupied Europe, published in New York in 1943. (p. 9)
The first accusation of mass murder of the Jews was made on
December 17, 1942 by the Allies in a Joint Declaration. Lemkin, as far as
Browning knew, never used the 6 million figure in his book. Weber pointed out
this mistake made no difference to the substance of the thesis of the
pamphlet.
12. Gerstein’s sister was congenitally insane and died by euthanasia, which
may well suggest a streak of mental instability in Gerstein himself.
Gerstein’s fantastic exaggerations have done little but discredit the whole
notion of mass extermination. Indeed, Evangelical Bishop Wilhelm Dibelius of
Berlin denounced his memoranda as “Untrustworthy” (p. 9)
It was not Gerstein’s sister, but his sister-in-law, who was
killed in the euthanasia program. Dibelius in fact stated that he was
convinced of the trustworthiness of Gerstein, the opposite of what Harwood had
written. However, Hilberg admitted that he would not characterize Gerstein as
being totally rational and that there was no question that he was capable of
adding imagination to fact. Browning acknowledged there were “problems”
with Gerstein’s testimony; his obvious exaggerations resulted because he was
“traumatized” by his experiences, said Browning.
13. It should be emphasised straight away that there is not a single document
in existence which proves that the Germans intended to, or carried out, the
deliberate murder of Jews. (p. 10)
In Browning’s opinion, there were such documents, including the
Hans Frank diary, the Wannsee Conference protocol, and the 1943 Posen speech
of Himmler. Historian Robert Faurisson pointed out that if these documents
“proved” the existence of a deliberate plan to murder the Jews, there
would be no debate between the “functionalists” and “intentionalists”
in the Holocaust academic circles. This debate in and of itself showed that no
proof of a deliberate plan existed. Hilberg had testified in the 1985 Zündel
trial that there were two oral orders from Hitler for the extermination of the
Jews. He denied that he had changed this view in his then forthcoming second
edition of his book The Destruction of the European Jews, which was to be
published shortly thereafter. In 1988, Hilberg refused to testify at the
second Zündel trial, citing in a confidential letter to the prosecutor that
he had “grave doubts” about testifying again; ‘the defence,’ he wrote,
“... would ... make every attempt to entrap me by pointing to any seeming
contradiction, however trivial the subject might be, between my earlier
testimony and an answer that I might give in 1988.” Browning admitted in his
testimony that Hilberg had made a “significant” change regarding the role
of Hitler in the decision-making process between his first edition and the
second edition, published in 1985. In an article entitled “The Revised
Hilberg”, Browning wrote that in his second edition, Hilberg had
“systematically excised” all references in the text to a Hitler decision
or a Hitler order for the “Final Solution”. In the new edition, wrote
Browning, “decisions were not made and orders were not given”.
14. Attempts to find “veiled allusions” to genocide in speeches like that
of Himmler’s to his S.S. Obergruppenführers at Posen in 1943 are likewise
quite hopeless. (p. 11)
Browning testified that the Posen speech contained explicit
references to exterminating the Jews. Historian David Irving testified,
however, that those portions of the original manuscript of the Posen speech
which dealt with “extermination” had been tampered with; they were written
in a different typescript using different carbon paper and were numbered in
pencil. Irving also pointed out that the Israelis had Himmler’s private
diary but refused to allow any historians to have access to it. If Himmler’s
diary supported the “Holocaust”, Irving said, the Israelis would be the
first to release it.
15. Most incredible of all, perhaps, was the fact that defence lawyers at
Nuremberg were not permitted to cross-examine prosecution witnesses.(p. 12)
Hilberg testified that defense lawyers were allowed to
cross-examine witnesses at Nuremberg. Weber testified that many affidavits
were entered into evidence, however, upon which no cross-examination was
possible.
16. The Soviet charge that the Action Groups had wantonly exterminated a
million Jews during their operations has been shown subsequently to be a massive
falsification. In fact, there had never been the slightest statistical basis for
the figure. (p. 14)
Browning testified that on the basis of the Einsatzgruppen reports
and the works of other historians that at least 1 million Jews were killed by
the Einsatztruppen. Historian Weber testified, however, that in the major work
on the Einsatztruppen, Die Truppe des Weltanschauungskrieges, the two authors
calculated that if all the figures in the Einsatztruppen reports were added
up, there would be a total of 2.2 million Jewish dead. The authors admitted
this was impossible and conceded that the Einsatztruppen report figures were
exaggerated. In Weber’s opinion, the figure of about 1 million was not
believable because it was known that the great majority of Jews fled or were
evacuated from the eastern territories before the German invasion in 1941.
17. Thus between July and October 1942, over three quarters of the Warsaw
Ghetto’s inhabitants were peacefully evacuated and transported, supervised by
the Jewish police themselves. . . A total, however, of 56,065 inhabitants were
captured and peacefully resettled in the area of the Government-General.(p. 19)
Browning stated that reports of the Warsaw Ghetto clearing
indicated it was done brutally and not “peacefully” as alleged by Harwood.
In Browning’s opinion, they were not resettled but taken to Treblinka and
Majdanek and either gassed or shot. Historian Mark Weber testified that the
record as to what happened to these Jews was still unclear. In Weber’s
opinion, Treblinka and Majdanek were simply concentration and/or transit
camps.
18. Of course, no Jew would ever be found who claimed to have been a member
of this gruesome “special detachment”, so that the whole issue is left
conveniently unprovable. It is worth repeating that no living, authentic
eye-witness to these events has ever been produced. (p. 20)
One of Browning’s main differences with the pamphlet was that it
denied the existence of the homicidal gas chambers for the purpose of killing
Jews. He testified Jews had come forward claiming to be members of the
Sonderkommando, such as Filip Mueller, whose accounts he found to be
“moving”. Browning admitted under cross-examination, however, that he had
never seen a technical plan that purported to be either a gas chamber or gas
van. He had never enquired about cremation processes or how much heat or how
long it took to cremate a human body. Browning had not looked at the aereal
photographs taken by the Allies of Auschwitz during the war except for one on
the wall of Yad Vashem. Neither Browning nor Hilberg knew of any autopsy
report showing that any camp inmate was killed by Zyklon B. Hilberg and
Browning visited the concentration camps only for the purpose of looking at
memorials or as members of Holocaust Commissions. Witnesses Leuchter and Roth
gave evidence which showed that samples taken from the walls and floor of the
alleged “gas chambers” at Auschwitz and Birkenau showed either no traces
or only minute traces of cyanide, while the walls of a known fumigation
chamber at Birkenau which had used Zyklon B had over 1000 times as much
traceable cyanide. In Leuchter’s opinion, as an expert in gas chamber
technology, the alleged homicidal gas chambers at Auschwitz, Birkenau and
Majdanek were incapable of being used as gas chambers for the killing of human
beings because of their structure, including such factors as lack of exhaust
systems, stacking and sealants. Ivan Lagace, a cremation expert, testified
that in modern crematories it took a minimum of 1 1/2 hours to cremate a human
body in one retort; he termed “ludicrous” the extermination claim that
over 4,400 bodies were cremated in 46 retorts at Birkenau per day. With
respect to the veracity of “eyewitness” testimony, Weber testified that
Yad Vashem had admitted that over half of the “survivor” accounts on
record there were unreliable as many had “let their imagination run away
with them.” Historian Faurisson quoted from the Jewish writer Michel de
Bouard, who admitted in 1986 that “the record is rotten to the core” with
obstinately repeated “fantasies” and inaccuracies.
19. Of course, no Jew would ever be found who claimed to have been a member
of this gruesome “special detachment”, so that the whole issue is left
conveniently unprovable. It is worth repeating that no living, authentic
eye-witness to these events has ever been produced. (p. 20)
Browning believed Eichmann to be the highest central figure in the
plan to exterminate the Jews who survived the war and testified. Eichmann
testified that Heydrich told him that Hitler had ordered the extermination of
the Jews of Europe. Browning admitted, however, that Eichmann had “more than
a little trouble” in sorting out events in his mind. In historian Irving’s
opinion Eichmann was on trial and under considerable physical and mental
coercion; such testimony did not advance historical knowledge but polluted it.
20. . . . only seven years after its initial publication, a New York Supreme
Court case established that the book was a hoax. . . It established that the
Jewish novelist Meyer Levin had written the dialogue of the “diary” and was
demanding payment for his work in a court action against Otto Frank.(p. 21)
This was not true; in fact Levin had sued for payment for writing a
play based on the diary itself. Faurisson and Irving testified that other
proof existed, however, that the diary’s authenticity was suspect. Expert
examinations of the original diary by graphologists and West German criminal
laboratories showed that one person had written the diary and part of it was
written in ball-point pen ink, which only came into use in the 1950s.
Faurisson believed the diary was written by Otto Frank, the father of Anne
Frank.
21. As a result, eastern camps in the Russian zone of occupation such as
Auschwitz and Treblinka gradually came to the fore as horrific centres of
extermination (though no one was permitted to see them), and this tendency has
lasted to the present day. (p. 23)
Browning testified that it was false to say no one was permitted to
see the camps in the Soviet zone. He cited a New York Times article by
journalist W. Lawrence of a tour of Majdanek given to journalists by the
Soviets in 1944. Browning admitted that the article had significant errors
regarding the numbers of people who allegedly died there and how Zyklon B
worked. Historian Weber testified that Western Allied investigators were not
allowed to investigate concentration camps in the Soviet zone of occupation
after the war. The visit to Majdanek by newspaper reporters was a guided tour
by the Soviets for propaganda purposes; it was not an investigation by any
specialized person.
22. Finally, Professor Rassinier draws attention to an important admission by
Dr. Kubovy, director of the World Centre of Contemporary Jewish Documentation at
Tel-Aviv, made in La Terre Retrouvée, December 15th, 1960. Dr. Kubovy
recognised that not a single order for extermination exists from Hitler,
Himmler, Heydrich or Goering (Le Drame des Juifs européen, p. 31,
39).(p. 29)
Browning had never heard of Kubovy or the World Centre of
Contemporary Jewish Documentation. But both Faurisson and Irving knew of
Kubovy and Irving had cited Kubovy’s quote from La Terre Retrouvee in his
book, Hitler’s War.
23. However, Rassinier regards such a figure as a maximum limit, and refers
to the lower estimate of 896,892 casualties in a study of the same problem by
the Jewish statistician Raul Hilberg. (p. 29)
Hilberg testified that he was not a statistician and had never
given an estimate of 896,892. His own calculation in fact was over 5 million.
Weber testified that Harwood had taken this information from Paul
Rassinier’s boos; the original mistake was therefore Rassinier’s and not
Harwood’s.
24. ... Professor Rassinier concludes . . . that the number of Jewish
casualties during the Second World War could not have exceeded 1,200,000, and he
notes that this has finally been accepted as valid by the World Centre of
Contemporary Jewish Documentation at Paris. (p. 29)
Hilberg testified he had never heard of this Centre or the figure
cited by Harwood.
25. RICHARD HARWOOD is a writer and specialist in political and diplomatic
aspects of the Second World War. At present he is with the University of London.
(p. 30)
Historian Weber testified that the author of the pamphlet was a man
named Richard Verrall, who had used the pseudonym “Richard Harwood”.
Verrall was a graduate of the University of London with High Honours; he was a
writer and had a specialized interest in political and diplomatic aspects of
the Second World War. Verrall relied upon secondary sources published in the
1950s and 1960s in writing the pamphlet, which was published in 1974. Most
errors made by the author were errors originally made by Paul Rassinier, the
pioneer revisionist historian, whose works Verrall had relied upon heavily.
(The text below consisted of the last two pages of the revised booklet and
read as follows:)
An Appeal to the
People in Canada
The above article which casts aspersions on my publishing firm of Samisdat
appeared in the Toronto Sun on November 22, 1979. Similar articles appeared in
other major daily newspapers across Canada. The article attributes statements
allegedly made by Mr. Garde Gardom, Attorney General of British Columbia, to the
effect that literature, pamphlets or other material was received from Samisdat
Publishers which promoted “hatred against an identifiable group.” The only
material which Mr. Gardom could have received from Samisdat was sent to all
Attorneys General of Canada, all members of Federal and Provincial Parliaments,
all media representatives, all clergymen and to some 8,000 Canadians in all
walks of life. The result of this mailing has been worthwhile in terms of
fruitful correspondence with numerous members of Parliament of the three major
parties as well as several news media interviews. If thousands of responsible
Canadian citizens, clergymen, media representatives and members of Parliament
have not objected to my materials, I would like to know what Mr. Gardom has
found to be so objectionable and “hateful” in the enclosed material. In the
interests of Freedom of Speech and Human Rights, I now ask you to evaluate this
information for yourself, before your right to be informed is denied you through
official action.
HAVE WE GERMANS NO RIGHT TO DEFEND OURSELVES?
My name is Ernst Zündel. I am a Toronto businessman of German descent and I
earn my living as a commercial artist. By avocation I write books and give
lectures on general topics of historical interest. In the political field I have
been involved with the issues of civil and human rights on behalf of
German-Canadians for over 20 years. In 1968, on this basis, I ran for the post
of Leader of the Liberal Party of Canada (which meant the post of Prime
Minister) as the youngest candidate and only immigrant ever to attempt such a
feat.
Since that time I have devoted increasing research, study and effort into
illuminating the events of German and world history, particularly in the
1933–45 period, with the view toward defending Germans and German-Canadians
against the hateful lies surrounding the alleged gassing of six million Jews by
the Nazi Government of Germany. In order to satisfy my own curiosity and to
resolve my own doubts on the subject, I have travelled throughout the world,
interviewed surviving inmates, guards, officials, etc., in the connection with
the “six million” story. I have studied the many relevant documents, books,
eyewitness accounts of both sides. My conclusion, after I had originally
believed the dogma of the “holocaust,” is that no such extermination
programme ever existed and that it is war time hate propaganda masquerading as
history. This viewpoint is shared by such notable experts, historians and
researchers from around the world as:
Prof. Faurisson – an expert historical analyst of ancient
documents and artifacts at Lyon University in France. His 4-year study at the
Jewish Documentation Centre in Paris drew him to conclude thusly;
J. G. Burg – German-Jewish author and former inmate of
several German concentration camps;
Dr. Bernhard Katusky – Noted Austrian-Jewish man of letters;
Dr. W. Stäglich – Retired judge and author of several books
on the subject. Dr. Stäglich is a German of Hamburg;
Mr. David Irving – English historian and author of many
well-known books about the 2nd World War. He offers a sizeable reward for any
document signed by Hitler which orders the extermination of the Jews;
Dr. David Hoggan – American professor of history and author
of several extensive volumes on World War II history;
Professor Arthur Butz – American researcher and author of the
controversial book, The Hoax of the 20th Century;
Prof. A. J. App – Well-known American writer and lecturer on
the topic of Hitler and the Jews;
Prof. Rassinier – Former inmate of several German
concentration camps and member of the French National Assembly, the author of
several books about the Jews in wartime Europe;
Prof. Udo Walendy – German political science lecturer and
historian;
Thies Christopersen – German poet and journalist who worked
at Auschwitz and who has written several books and articles about Auschwitz and
the gas chamber myth;
(Ditlib) Felderer – Swede who personally visited postwar
Auschwitz in order to prove that “gas chambers” had been constructed by the
Communists after the war;
Attorney Bennett – Australian whose research was prompted by
his work in the Civil Rights Section of the Australian Attorney General’s
Office.
There are hundreds of names of authorities on this topic, all of whom I have
met, interviewed, corresponded with or whose works I have read. Most of these
persons are willing to attend any trial or court proceedings on this subject in
the capacity of witnesses.
ZIONISTS DOMINATE MEDIA. GERMANS ARE DENIED EQUAL TIME.
As I see it, this matter is one of Freedom of Thought and Expression on the one
hand and the Suppression of Freedom and Enquiry on the other. To seek officially
to quell legitimate controversy through the use of smear-words like “hate”
and “racism” is neither just nor relevant to the issue. Zionism is a
political movement, not a racial movement. Zionists like Elizabeth Taylor, Sammy
Davis Jr., Pat Boone, Billy Graham and Attorney General of Ontario McMurthy are
not Jews nor Semites; therefore, any criticism of Zionist policy cannot be
“racism.” When Jews disagree as I do with the official Zionist version of
Auschwitz, are they accused of “racism” or “hate”?
Many Jews are totally opposed to political, that is worldly, Zionism and I am
proud to number such outstanding figures as these among my friends and
supporters: Rabbi Elmer Berger, former president of the American Council of
Judaism; Haviv Schieber, former mayor of Beer Scheeba and comrade-in-arms of
Menachem Begin and Moise Dayan who is now living as a refugee from Israeli
persecution in Washington, D.C., Benjamin Friedman, former secretary to Henry
Morgenthau Sr. who witnessed first hand the Zionist machinations of the First
and Second World Wars. In addition to these individual Jewish authorities, there
are the thousands of Hasidic Jews who protest against Zionism and the State of
Israel as being “the work of the Devil.” There are the Jews who demonstrated
against Menachem Begin as a leading proponent of Zionism. In brief, not all
Zionists are Jews and not all Jews are Zionists. Once again, how can any
criticism of Zionist tenets be construed as “racism”? Because no Zionist is
“a member of an identifiable group” under the criminal code, any more than
Liberals or Conservatives. Can such criticism constitute “hate” under the
Criminal Code?
I believe that Zionists and their sympathizers are using the letter of the law
to defy the spirit of the law; that they are using words like “hate” and
“racism” to conceal their very real attempt to suppress the truth. I do not
believe that the so-called “Hate Law” section of the Criminal Code was
intended to be an instrument for the suppression of free enquiry and discussion.
The “Hate Law” was adopted by the Canadian Parliament as a result of almost
exclusively Jewish-Zionist agitation. Now it appears that it is being invoked to
prevent the exposure of the biggest money-raising racket of all time, namely the
Holocaust lie. The real issues in this matter are not “anti-Semitism,”
“racism,” or “hate,” but Truth, Freedom of Speech and Press, Freedom of
Enquiry and, ultimately, Justice. Help us safeguard these precious freedoms now!
EXERCISE YOUR RIGHTS AND DUTIES AS FREE CITIZENS WHILE THERE IS STILL
TIME BY GIVING THIS ISSUE MAXIMUM ATTENTION AND PUBLICITY! CONTACT ME FOR
FURTHER INFORMATION, INTERVIEWS AND ARRANGEMENTS FOR PUBLIC SPEAKING
APPEARANCES.
Ernst Zündel
206 Carlton Street
Toronto, Ontario M5A 2L1
Tel. (416) 922-9850/
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