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2023-02-20 12:59:23 -05:00
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 lose 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 clearsighted and courageous individuals
protested the enactment of the 'Hate Law'. So thick were the clouds of
hysteria and half-truth 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 archenemy 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 we believe that you should be forced to read something, any more
than we believe that 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 glycerine 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 apologising
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 ftom 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 F hrer 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
insiduous 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
encounge 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 eady 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 presentregime 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 Iimited 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 TOWARDS 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 diat 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 Jewisb
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
Endl_sung, 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
lnterpreter, 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 meantime created the possibility of disposing of
other territories for the Final Solution. In consequence the F hrer 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 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. It is perfecdy 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", never- theless 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
Sutes. 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.
3 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 Endl_sung, 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 f r
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
mfilion 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
j dischen 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 nunibers 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. K_nigsberger 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 euthenasia, 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 f r 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 chools (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 Aufs_tze (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 (Gesamtl_sung) 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" (Endl_sung), 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 verbafly" (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 M ller and Eichmann
represented Gestapo Head Office. Reitlinger and Manvell and Frankl
consider tile minutes of this conference to be their trump card in
proving 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 terminolgoy 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
F hrer. " 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 V-ritable 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
"Abbef_rderung" (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.
Obergruppenf hrers 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 particulary 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 ennumerated point by
point his objections to the Trials (cf Mark Lautern, Das Letzte Wort
ber N rnberg, 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 atmposhere hostile to the accused persons.
8. The real aim of the Nuremberg Trials was to show the Germans the
crimes of their F hrer, 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 per cent 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 finger-nails; 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 extemination 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 Aufs_tze, 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 pIausibility, 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
Endl_sung, 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 Reichsf her 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 bythe 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
1000 per cent and that they distorted even more the situations in which
these casualties were infiicted. (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 Reichsf hrer 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. AIthough 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 eastem 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 wasthe 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 Eastem 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- 3). 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
every day, 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,O00 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. 80-1). 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 retumed 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-L ge: 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 B rger-Iniative, 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 Obersturmbannf hrer
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 Auschwtiz, 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 kneedeep into
money: I didn't know which way to turn, which way to go. I waded in
papernotes, currency, precious stones, jewellery 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 "kneedeep" 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 Jews' 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, relentessly 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
so on 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. 18,0OO 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 Ravensbr ck, 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 Ravensbr ck 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 Ravensbr ck 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 L_sst Bitten (The Gestapo Invites You) by Charlotte Bormann,
a Communist political prisoner who was also interned at Ravensbr ck.
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
Ravensbr ck 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 farflung 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. 195O, 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, Ravensbr ck, 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 mal-nutrition? . . . 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
Iife 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
Pfaffenberger 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 mosdy
'hearsay'.
An excellent work on the fake atrocity photographs pertaining to the
Myth of the Six Million is Dr. Udo Walendy's Bild 'Dokumente' f r 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 photomontage. 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. , Macht ohne Moral: eine Dokumentation ber
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 K hnrich'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'activit- 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 Fr-d-ric
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 Germany 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,
"Schutzh_ftlinge"), who were arrested for political or racial motives
because their presence was considered a danger to the State or the
occupation forces" (Vol. 111, 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. 111, 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, Fl_ha, Ravensbr ck, 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 Rumania, 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 examle, 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 govenment 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. Govermnent 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 g-n-ral 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 R-sistance 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 V-ritable
Proces Eichmann (1962) and Le Drame des Juifs europ-en (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 Ravensbr ck. - 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 europ-en, 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, Ravensbr ck, 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 Retrouv-e, December 15th,
1960. Dr. Kubovy recognised that not a single order for extermination
exists from Hitler, Himmler, Heydrich or Goering (Le Drame des Juifs
europ-en, 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 Niem_ller reiterated Auerbach's fraudulent
"238,000" deaths there, while in 1962 Bishop Neuh_usseler 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 europ-en, 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 europ-en 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 V-ritable 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 Rassinier is 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 europ-en (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 summarise 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 estabhshed 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 civiliansdied during the siege of Leningrad, and a total of
2,05O,OOO 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 lnternational 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.
Foreword to the new edition, published in _____entitled:"Z ndel'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 Z ndel 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 Z ndel, 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 representaives"
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, Z ndel
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 Z ndel did not know this
at the time of publication. The original English publishers did not
permit Ernst Z ndel 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 Z ndel 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 Z ndel 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 Z ndel trial in 1988. Ernst Z ndel
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 Z ndel and his revisionist
viewpoint famous across the globe. The Z ndel 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 Z ndel 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 Z ndel 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
Z ndel, 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 Z ndel, 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.
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
revindicated 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 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
statistition 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 Burgd_rfer 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
ont he 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 Endl_sung, 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 euthenasia,
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 euthenasia 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 Z ndel 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 Z ndel
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. Obergruppenf hrers 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 homcidal 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 zoneof 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 Retrouv-e, December
15th, 1960. Dr. Kubovy recognised that not a single order for
extermination exists from Hitler, Himmler, Heydrich or Goering (Le Drame
des Juifs europ-en, 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
Attorney Generals of Canada, all members of Federal and Provincial
Parliaments, all media representatives, all clergymen and to some 8000
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 newsmedia
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 Z ndel. 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, a German-Jewish author and former inmate of several German
concentration camps;
Dr. Bernhard Katusky, the noted Austrian-Jewish man of letters;
Dr. W. St_glich, retired judge and author of several books on the
subject. Dr. St_glich 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 of the U. S. , a well-known 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;
Felderer of Sweden who personally visited postwar Auschwitz in order to
prove that "gas chambers" had been constructed by the Communists after
the war;
Attorney Bennett of Australia 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 outstandign 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 at firsthand the
Zionsit 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 constructed 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 Z ndel 206 Carlton Street Toronto, Ontario M5A 2L1
Tel. (416) 922-9850/HELP WITH DONATIONS TO THE SAMISDAT LEGAL DEFENSE FUND