HOW THE BRITISH OBTAINED THE CONFESSIONS OF RUDOLF HOESS

Rudolf Hoess was the first of three successive commandants of the Auschwitz concentration camp. He is often called "THE Commandant of Auschwitz," and the general public knows of him from a book published under the title _Commandant in Auschwitz_. He appeared before the International Military Tribunal as a witness on 15 April 1946, where his deposition caused a sensation. To the amazement of the defendants and in the presence of journalists from around the world, he confessed to the most frightful crimes that history had ever known. He said that he had personally received an order from Himmler to exterminate the Jews. He estimated that at Auschwitz 3,000,000 people had been exterminated, 2,500,000 of them by means of gas chambers. His confessions were false. They had been extorted from Hoess by torture, but it took until 1983 to learn the identity of the torturers and the nature of the tortures they inflicted upon him.

The confessions of Rudolf Hoess supply the keystone to the theory which maintains that the systematic extermination of the Jews, especially by means of homicidal gas chambers, was a historical reality. These confessions consist essentially of four documents which, in chronological order, are the following:

1. A written deposition signed on 14 March (or 15 March?) 1946 at 2:30 in the morning; it is an 8-page typed text written in German; I do not think, under normal circumstances, a court in any democracy would agree to take into consideration those pages, lacking as they did any heading and any printed administrative reference; and crawling with various corrections, whether typed or handwritten, uninitialled and without a notation at the end of the total number of words corrected or deleted. Hoess signed it for the first time after having written: "14.3.46 2:30." He signed again after two lines which are supposed to have been handwritten but which were typed, and which say:

The names and the signatures of the two witnesses, British sargeants, follow. One did not note the date, while the other indicated 15 March. The last signature is that of a captain of the 92nd Field Security Section, who certifies that the two sargeants were present throughout the entire proceedings, during which the prisoner Rudolf Hoess made his statement voluntarily. The date indicated is 14 March 1946. Nothing indicates the place!

The Allies numbered this document NO-1210.

2. An affidavit signed 22 days later on 5 APril 1946. It is a typed text, 2 1/4 pages long, written in English. That is surprising: thereby Hoess signed a declaration under oath, not in his own language but in that of his guards. His signature appeared three times: at the bottom of the first two pages, then on the third and last page, after a text of four lines, still in English, still typed, which reads:

There follows the signature of Lieutenant-Colonel Smith W. Brookhart after the statement: "Subscribed and sworn before me this 5th day of April, 1946, at Nurnberg, Germany."

In its form, this text is, if possible, even less acceptable than the preceding one. In particular, entire lines have been added in capital letters in the English style, while others are crossed out with a stroke of the pen. There is no initialling in the margin next to these corrections, and no summary at the end of the document of the number of words struck out. The Allies assigned this document the number PS-3868.

In order to hide the fact that Hoess had signed an affidavit that was in English when it ought to have been in his own language, German, and in order to make the crossed-out words and the additions and corrections disappear, the following trick was used at Nuremberg: the original text was recast and presented as a "Translation," meaning from German into English! But the person responsible for this deception did his work too quickly. He thought that a handwritten addition to paragraph 10 (done in an English handwriting style) was an addition to the end of paragraph 9. The result of that misunderstanding is that the end of paragraph 9 is rendered totally incomprehensible. There are, therefore, two different documents that bear the same file number, PS-3868: the document signed by Hoess and the "remake." It is the "remake," really a glaring forgery, that was used before the Nuremberg tribunal. One historical work that claimed to reproduce document PS-3868 by Hoess in fact reproduced the "remake" but omitted (without saying so) the end of paragraph 9 as well as all of paragraph 10: see Henri Monneray, _La Persecution des Juifs dan les pays de l'Est presentee a Nuremberg_, Paris, Center for Contemporary Jewish Documentation, 1949, pp. 159-162.

3. The spectacular oral deposition, which I have already mentioned, made before the IMT on 15 April 1946, ten days after the writing of document PS-3868. Paradoxically, it was a lawyer for the defense, Kurt Kauffmann, Ernst Kaltenbrunner's attorney, who had asked for Hoess's appearance. His obvious intention was to show that the person responsible for the presumed extermination was Himmler and not Kaltenbrunner. When it came time for the representative of the prosecution (at that point the American assistant prosecutor, Col. Harlan Amen) to question Hoess, he seemed to be reading from the affidavit signed by the latter but, in fact, he was reading excerpts from the "remake." Col. Amen gave an excuse for not reading paragraph 9 (and, at the same time, paragraph 8). Stopping after reading each excerpt, he asked Hoess if that was in fact what he had stated. He received the following responses: "Jawohl," "Jawohl," "Jawohl," "Ja, es stimmt," a two sentence response (containing an obvious error about the Hungarian Jews supposedly having been killed at Auschwitz as early as 1943 even though the first convoy of them did not arrive at Auschwitz until May 2 of 1944), "Jawohl," "Jawohl," "Jawohl," a one-sentence response, "Jawohl," and "Jawohl." [IMG, XI, pp. 457-461].*

*Hoess is quoted according to the text of the German-language edition of the IMT series.

In a normal murder case there would have been a hundred questions to ask about the extermination and the gas chambers (that is to say about the crime and an instrument of the crime which were without precedent in history), but no one asked those questions. In particular, Colonel Amen did not ask for a single detail nor for any additional information about the frightening text which he had read in the presence of journalists whose stories would make the headlines in newspapers around the world the next day.

4. The texts generally collected under the title _Commandant in Auschwitz_. Hoess is alleged to have written these texts in pencil under the watchful eye of his Polish-Communist jailers, while in a prison at Cracow awaiting his trial. He was condemned to death on 2 April 1947 and hanged at the Auschwitz concentration camp fourteen days later. The world had to wait 11 years, until 1958, for the publication in German of his alleged memoirs. They were edited by the German historian Martin Broszat without regard for scholarly method. Broszat went so far as to suppress several fragments which would have too clearly made it appear that Hoess (or his Polish jailers) had offered outrageous statments which would have called into question the reliability of his writings IN TOTO.

The four documents that I have just enumerated are closely connected in their origin. Looking at them more closely, there are contradictions among their respective contents, but, for the most part, they are internally consistent. The eight pages of NO-1210 are in a sense summed up in the 2 1/4 pages of PS-3868; that latter document served as the central document in the oral testimony before the IMT; and, finally, the memoirs written at Cracow crown the whole. The base and the matrix are thus document NO-1210. It was in the Cracow memoirs, written under the supervision of Polish examining magistrate Jan Sehn, that Hoess was to give particulars about how the British had obtained that very first confession.

HOESS'S REVELATIONS ABOUT HIS FIRST CONFESSION
(Document NO-1210 of 14 or 15 March 1946)

The war ended in Germany on 8 May 1945. Hoess fell into the hands of the British, who imprisoned him in a camp for SS men. As a trained agronomist, he obtained an early release. His guards were unaware of the importance of their prey. A work office found him employment as an agricultural worker at a farm near Flensburg, not far from the Danish border. He remained there for eight months. The military police looked for him. His family, with whom he succeeded in making contact, was closely watched and subjected to frequent searches.

In his memoirs Hoess recounts the circumstances of his arrest and what followed. The treatment that he underwent was particularly brutal. At first sight it is surprising that the Poles allowed Hoess to make the revelations he did about the British military police. On reflection, we discover that they might have done so out of one or more of the following motives:

Here are the words Hoess uses to describe, in succession, his arrest by the British; his signing of the document that would become NO-1210; his transfer to Minden-on-the-Weser, where the treatment he underwent was worse yet; his stay at the Nuremberg tribunal's prison; and, finally, his extradition to Poland.

I was arrested on 11 March 1946 [at 11 pm].

My phial of poison had been broken two days before.

When I was aroused from sleep, I thought at first I was being attacked by robbers, for many robberies were tkaing place at that time. That was how they managed to arrest me. I was maltreated by the Field Security Police.

I was taken to Heide where I was put in those very barracks from which I had been released by the British eight months earlier.

At my first interrogation, evidence was obtained by beating me. I do not know what is in the record, although I signed it. Alcohol and the whip were too much for me. The whip was my own, which by chance had got into my wife's luggage. It had hardly ever touched my horse, far less the prisoners. Nevertheless, one of my interrogators was convinced that I had perpetually used it for flogging the prisoners.

After some days I was taken to Minden-on-the-Weser, the main interrogation centre in the British Zone. There I received further rough treatment at the hands of the English public prosecutor, a major.

The conditions in the prison accorded with this behaviour.

After three weeks, to my surprised, I was shaved and had my hair cut and I was allowed to wash. My handcuffs had not previously been removed since my arrest.

On the next day I was taken by lorry to Nuremberg, together with a prisoner of war who had been brought over from London as a witness in Fritzsche's defence. My imprisonment by the International Military Tribunal was a rest-cure compared to what I had been through before. I was accommodated in the same building as the principal accused, and every day we were visited by representatives for all the Allied nations. I was always pointed out as an especially interesting animal.

I was in Nuremberg because Kaltenbrunner's counsel had demanded me as a witness for his defence. I have never been able to grasp, and it is still not clear to me, how I of all people could have helped to exonerate Kaltenbrunner. Although the conditions in prison were, in every respect, good -- I read whenever I had the time, and there was a well stocked library available -- the interrogations were extremely unpleasant, not so much physically, but far more because of their strong psychological effect. I cannot really blame the interrogators -- they were all Jews.

Psychologically I was almost cut in pieces. They wanted to know all about everything, and this was also done by Jews. They left me in no doubt whatever as to the fate that was in store for me.

On 25 May, my wedding anniversary as it happened, I was driven with von Burgsdorff and Buhler to the aerodrome and there handed over to Polish officers. We flew in an American plane via Berlin to Warsaw. Although we were treated very politely during our journey, I feared the worst when I remembered my experiences in the British Zone and the tales I had heard about the way people were being treated in the East. (_Commandant in Auschwitz_, Introduction by Lord Russell of Liverpool, English translation, Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1959, p. 173-175.)

The Revisionists proved a long time ago that the various confessions of Rudolf Hoess contained so many gross errors, nonsensical elements, and impossibilities of all kinds, that it is no longer possible to believe them, as did the judges at Nuremberg and Cracow, as well as certain self-styled historians, without any prior analysis of their content and of the circumstances in which they were obtained.

It was suspected that, in all likelihood, Hoess was tortured by the British soldiers of the 92nd Field Security Section, but a confirmation of that hypothesis was necessary. Confirmation has come with the publication in England of a book containing the name of the principal torturer (a British sargeant of Jewish origin) and a description of the circumstances of Hoess's arrest, as well as his third-degree interrogation.

The book is by Rupert Butler. It was published in 1983 (Hamlyn Paperbacks). Butler is the author of three other works: _The Black Angels_, _Hand of Steel_ and _Gestapo_, all published by Hamlyn. The book that interests us is entitled _Legions of Death_. Its inspiration is anti-Nazi. Butler says that he researched this book at the Imperial War Museum in London, the Institute for Contemporary History and Wiener Library, and other such prestigious institutions. At the beginning of his book, he expresses his gratitude to these institutions and, among others, to two persons, one of whom is Bernard Clarke ("who captured Auschwitz Commandant Rudolf Hoess"). The author quotes several fragments of what are either written or recorded statements by Clarke.

Bernard Clarke shows no remorse. On the contrary, he exhibits a certain pride in having tortured a "Nazi." Rupert Butler, likewise, finds nothing to criticize in that. Neither of them understands the importance of their revelations. They say that Hoess was arrested on 11 March, 1946, and that it took three days of torture to obtain "a coherent statement." They do not realize that the alleged "coherent statement" is nothing other than the lunatic confession, signed by their quivering victim on the 14th or 15th of March 1946, at 2:30 in the morning, which was to seal Hoess's fate definitely, a confession which would also give definitive shape to the myth. The confession would also shape decisively the myth of Auschwitz, the supposed high-point of the extermination of the Jews, above all due to the alleged use of homicidal gas chambers.

On 11 March 1946, a Captain Cross, Bernard Clarke and four other intelligence specialists in British uniforms, most of them tall and menacing, entered the home of Frau Hoess and her children. The six men, we are told, were all "practiced in the more sophisticated techniques of sustained and merciless investigation" (p. 235). Clarke began to shout:

Frau Hoess broke down and revealed, says Clarke, the location of the farm where her husband was in hiding, as well as his assumed name: Franz Lang. And Bernard Clarke added:

The Jewish sargeant and the five other specialists in third degree interrogation then left to seek out Hoess, whom they surprised in the middle of the night, sleeping in an alcove of the room used to slaughter cattle on the farm.

So it is that Bernard Clarke reveals: "It took three days to get a coherent statement out of [Hoess]" (ibid.). This admission was corroborated by Mr. Ken Jones in an article in the _Wrexham Leader_ (October 17, 1986):

Clarke's statement, obtained under the conditions just described by bullies of British Military Security under the brutal inspiration of sargeant-interpreter Bernard Clarke, became Hoess's first confession, the original confession indexed under the number NO-1210. Once the tortured prisoner had begun to talk, according to Clarke, it was impossible to stop him. Clarke, no more conscious in 1982 or 1983 than in 1946 of the enormity of what he forced Hoess to confess, goes on to describe a series of fictitious horrors presented here as the truth: Hoess went on to tell how, after the bodies had been ignited, the fat oozing from them was poured over the other bodies(!). He estimated the number of dead during just the period when he was at Auschwitz at two million (!); the killings reached 10,000 victims per day(!).

It was Clarke's duty to censor the letters sent by Hoess to his wife and children. Every policeman knows that the power to grant or withhold permission to a prisoner to write to his family constitutes a psychological weapon. To make a prisoner "sing" it is sometimes sufficient to merely suspend or cancel that authorization. Clarke makes an interesting remark about the contents of Hoess's letters; he confides to us:

Rupert Butler ends his narrative by saying that Hoess sought neither to deny nor to escape his responsibilities. In effect, at the Nuremberg tribunal Hoess conducted himself with a "schizoid apathy." The expression is that of the American prison psychologist, G.M. Gilbert, who was in charge of the psychological surveillance of the prisoners and whose eavesdropping aided the American prosecution. We can certainly believe that Hoess was "split in two"! He had the appearance of a rag because they had turned him into a rag. "Apathetic," writes Gilbert on page 229 of his book; "apathetic," he repeats on the following page; "schizoid apathy," he writes on page 239 (_Nuremberg Diary_, 1947, Signet Book: 1961).

At the end of his trial at Cracow, Hoess greeted his death sentence with apparent indifference. Rupert Butler comments as follows:

One could not say it any better. It seems that Rudolf Hoess, like thousands of accused Germans turned over to the mercy of conquerors who were totally convinced of their own goodness, had quickly grasped that he had no other choice but to suffer the will of his judges, whether they came from the West or from the East.

Butler then quickly evokes the case of Hans Frank, the former Governor of Poland. With the same tone of moral satisfaction he recounts the circumstances of Frank's capture and subsequent treatment:

Rudolf Hoess and Hans Frank were not the only ones to undergo treatment of that kind. Among the most celebrated cases, we know of Julius Streicher, Hans Fritzsche, Oswald Pohl, Franz Ziereis, and Josef Kramer.

But the case of Rudolf Hoess is by far the most serious in its consequences. There is no document that proves that the Germans had a policy of exterminating the Jews. Leon Poliakov agreed with this in 1951:

In the absence of any document, historians A LA Poliakov have repeatedly returned, primarily, to doubtful confessions like those of Kurt Gerstein or of Rudolf Hoess, sometimes modifying the texts to suit their convenience.

Bernard Clarke is "today a successful businessman working in the south of England" (_Legions of Death_, 1983, p. 235). One can in fact say that it is HIS voice that was heard at Nuremberg on 15 April 1946, when Assistant Prosecutor Amen read, piece by piece, to an astonished and overwhelmed audience, the supposed confession of Rudolf Hoess. On that day was launched a lie of world-wide dimensions: the lie of Auschwitz. At the origins of that prodigious media event: several Jewish sargeants of British Military Security, including Bernard Clarke, "today a successful businessman working in the south of England."

During the war, Moritz von Schirmeister had been the personal press attache of Joseph Goebbels. On 29 June 1946, he was interrogated before the IMT as a defense witness for Hans Fritzsche. His deposition was particularly interesting regarding the actual personality of Dr. Goebbels and the attitude of the official German news services toward the flood of atrocity stories about the concentration camps spread during the war by the Allies.

At the end of the war, Moritz von Schirmeister had been arrested by the British and interned in a camp in England, where he was given the task of politically "re-educating" his fellow prisoners. Before testifying at Nuremberg, he was transferred by plane from London to Germany. At first he was kept at Minden-on-the-Weser, which was the principal interrogation center for the British Military Police. From there he was taken by car (31 March - 1 April 1946) to the prison at Nuremberg. In the same car rode Rudolf Hoess. Moritz von Schirmeister is precisely that "prisoner of war who had been brought over from London as a witness in Fritzsche's defence" about whom Hoess speaks in his "memoirs" (see above, p. 393). Thanks to a document that I obtained from American researcher Mark Weber, who gave me a copy of it in Washington in September of 1983 (a document whose exact source I am not yet authorized to indicate), we know that the two Germans were able to talk freely in the car that took them to Nuremberg. In that document, slightly more than two pages long, Moritz von Schirmeister reports, as regarding the charges hanging over Hoess, that Hoess confided to him:

"Certainly, I signed a statement that I killed two and a half million Jews. But I could just as well have said that it was five million Jews. There are certain methods by which any confession cam be obtained, whether it is true or not."

The British torturers of Rudolf Hoess had no reason to exercise any restraint. After making him sign document NO-1210 at 2:30 in the morning of the 14th or 15th of March 1946, they obtained a new signature from him on March 16, this time at the bottom of a text in English, written in an English handwriting style, with a blank in the space where the name of the place ought to have been given. His guards made him sign a simple note written in English: 

          Statement made voluntarily at _________ Gaol by Rudolf Hoess,
     former Commandant of Auschwitz Concentration Camp on 16th day of
     March 1946.
                       ___________________________

          I personally arranged on orders received from Himmler in May
     1941 the gassing of two million persons between June/July 1941 and
     the end of 1943 during which time I was commandant of Auschwitz.

                                    signed.
                                    Rudolf Hoess,
                                    SS-Stubhr.
                                    Eh. (?) Kdt. v. Auschwitz-Birkenau

     (even the word "signed" was written in an English hand).

We have known for some time that the Auschwitz myth is of an exclusively Jewish origin. Arthur R. Butz has related the facts in his book, _The Hoax of the Twentieth Century_, as has Wilhelm Staglich in _The Auschwitz Myth_. The principal authors of the creation and the peddling of the "rumor of Auschwitz" have been, successively, two Slovaks, Alfred Wetzler (or Weczler) and Rudolf Vrba (or Rosenberg or Rosenthal); then a Hungarian, Rabbi Michael Dov Ber Weissmandel (or Weissmandl); then, in Switzerland, representatives of the World Jewish Congress like Gerhard Riegner, who were in touch with London and Washington; and finally Americans like Harry Dexter White, Henry Morgenthau Jr. and Rabbi Steven Samuel Wise. Thus was born the famous World Refugee Board Report on Auschwitz and Birkenau, published in Washington in November 1944. Copies of this report were included in the files of the judges advocate general in charge of prosecuting the Germans involved in the Auschwitz camp. It constituted the official version of the story of the alleged gassing of the Jews in that camp. Most probably it was used as a reference work by the inquirers- interrogators-torturers of "THE Commandant of Auschwitz." All the names here mentioned are those of Jews. Moreover we now see that Bernard Clarke, the first British torturer, was a Jew. The second British torturer, Major Draper (?), may also have been a Jew. The same for the two Americans: psychologist G.M. (Gustave Mahler) Gilbert and Colonel Harlan Amen. Finally, in Poland, Hoess was faced with Polish Jews who treated him more or less the same way. When he wrote his "memoirs" it was under the supervision of instructing magistrate Jan Sehn, who was also probably a Jew.

Establishment historians dispute that Hoess had been tortured and had confessed under duress. Since the publication of Rupert Butler's book in 1983, however, it is no longer possible for them to contest that. The Revisionists were right.

Since 1985 it is even less possible. In January-March 1985, the trial of Ernst Zundel, who was accused by a Jewish association and by the Crown of spreading Revisionist literature, took place in Toronto (Canada). Rudolf Vrba testified as a Crown witness. (He lives now in British Columbia). Affirmative and self-assured as long as he answered the questions of the Crown, he suffered a spectacular rout when cross-examined by Ernst Zundel's lawyer, Doug Christie. For the first time since 1945 a Jewish witness to the alleged gassings in Auschwitz was asked to explain his affirmations and his figures. The result was so terrible for R. Vrba that finally the Crown itself gave a kind of coup de grace to its key witness. That unexpected event and some others (like the leading specialist of the Holocaust, Raul Hilberg, being caught red-handed in his lies) really made of the "Toronto Trial" the "Trial of the Nuremberg Trial."

The unintentional revelations of Rupert Butler in 1983 and the unexpected revelations of the "Toronto Trial" in 1985 have succeeded at last in showing entirely and clearly how the Auschwitz myth was fabricated from 1944 to 1947, to be exact from April 1944, when Rudolf Vrba and Alfred Wetzler are supposed to have escaped from Auschwitz to tell their story to the world up until April 1947, when Rudolf Hoess was hanged after having supposedly told the same world his own story about Auschwitz.

It is remarkable that from beginning to end that story comes from essentially or perhaps even exclusively Jewish sources. Two Jewish liars (Vrba and Wetzler) from Slovakia convinced or seem to have convinced other Jews from Hungary, Switzerland, the United States, Great Britain, and Poland. This is not a conspiracy or a plot; it is the story of the birth of a religious belief: the myth of Auschwitz, center of the religion of the Holocaust.

[Photograph captioned, "This photograph was published after p. 161 of Lord Russell of Liverpool's _Geissel der Menschheit_, Berlin, Verlag Volk und Welt, 1960. The title of the original book in English is _The Scourge of the Swastika_. The caption of the photo says: 'The Confession of Rudolf Hoess.' It is not NO-1210 or PS-3868 but only a very short text of 16 March 1946. You will note the difference between the handwriting of the text of the confession and Hoess's own handwriting. In his introduction to the English edition of _Commandant in Auschwitz_ Lord Russell claims to furnish some informaiton on the conditions in which Hoess had to sign that note, but, since he commits errors in the chronology of the events in that regard, his information is to be received with reservations. (See _Commandant in Auschwitz_, p. 18.)"]

[Photograph captioned, "The second photo was pubished as photo #22 in Tom Bower, _Blind Eye to Murder_ (Britain, America and the Purging of Nazi Germany -- A Pledge Betrayed), Granada: London, Toronto, Sydney, New York, 1981. The caption of the photo says: 'Colonel Gerald Draper of the British War Crimes Group photographed as he finally secured the confession of Rudolf Hoess, the commandant of Auschwitz, to the murder of three million people.' As one remembers, Hoess said in his 'memoirs': 'I received further rough treatment at the hands of the English public prosecutor, a major' (_Commandant in Auschwitz_, p. 174). Did this major become a colonel and was his name 'Draper'?"]

[Reprinted by permission from _The Journal of Historical Review_, P.O. Box 1306, Torrance, CA 90505, USA. Subscription rate: $40 per year, domestic. $50 per year, foreign.]

From _The Journal of Historical Review_, Vol. 7, Number 4 (Winter 1986-87):