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TO ALL CANADIAN LAWYERS AND MEDIA REPRESENTATIVES:
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This booklet is the type of material that the Attorney General of
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British Columbia considers 'racist'. The Attorney General of Ontario, at
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the behest of his B. C. colleague, is purportedly conducting an
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investigation of Samisdat Publishers preparatory to the laying of a
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criminal charge of "promoting hatred against an identifiable group. "
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Samisdat intends to use this opportunity, however, unwelcome, to test
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the definition and hence, the validity of the so-called 'Hate Law'
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section of the Canadian Criminal Code. What is now becoming clear to all
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of us, even to those who enacted the so-called 'Hate Law', is that we
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enacted not so much an instrument against hate as an instrument against
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truth.
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Canada was a civilised country before the passage of the 'Hate Law'.
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We already had laws against the incitement to riot, to murder, to arson,
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to the commission of assault and bodily harm. Our laws protected and
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still protect every citizen from libel, slander and defamation. But the
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outlawing of 'hate' does not thereby abolish feelings of hate, as we all
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know. To prohibit expressions of hatred may even cause such feelings to
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go unvented until they become explosive and take the form of violence.
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Prior to the 'Hate Law', we Canadians behaved with mature composure when
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encountering hateful expressions. We simply shunned the haters and left
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them to spew out their ire, unsupported and alone. In most cases, a
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cold dose of healthy public ridicule would quench the more volcanic
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vituperators and reason would be restored. But something happened to us,
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for as we have grown older as a country, we have become less mature and
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less secure. Our passage of the 'Hate Law' was a grave reflection upon
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ourselves. It revealed a sudden lose of confidence in our own wisdom
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and judgement and in the wisdom and judgement of the great majority of
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Canadian voters and citizens. Suddenly, we had to be protected from
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ourselves and just as suddenly, we became refugees from freedom. No
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democracy that so distrusts the majority can long remain a democracy; it
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becomes a police state in the worst tradition of police states.
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Unfortunately, only a few clearsighted and courageous individuals
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protested the enactment of the 'Hate Law'. So thick were the clouds of
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hysteria and half-truth over the matter that only these few perceived
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the dangers inherent in a statute which could be used at the discretion
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of a public official to suppress the freedom of enquiry and discussion
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in regard to relevant public issues. Among these few protesters, I
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proudly number myself, for I spoke out then and I speak out now, on
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behalf of our basic freedom to act as thinking human beings.
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As we stumble along the road to the 1984 of George Orwell, we sometimes
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receive a taste of his dismal future-fantasy well ahead of schedule.
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Pernicious 'thought-crime' legislation like the 'Hate Law' has brought
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us 1984 already. It has not outlawed hate, but it has outlawed truth on
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behalf of those predatory vested interests whose archenemy is truth!
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This booklet has been sent to you free of charge as a public
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service. After reading it, you are perfectly free to agree or to
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disagree with its content. You may even ignore it and leave it unread.
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Truth has no need of coercion. Those who choose to ignore the truth are
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not punished by law--they punish themselves. We of Samisdat Publishers
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do not believe that you should be forced to read something, any more
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than we believe that you should be forced to read something, any more
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than we believe that you should be forced not to read something.
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Obviously, we have much more faith in your soundness of mind and good
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judgement than do the enactors and enforcers of the 'Hate Law'! Whether
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you agree or disagree with the facts presented in this booklet, we
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invite you to assist us in reclaiming and safeguarding the freedoms we
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have all so long enjoyed, until now, in Canada.
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Help us remove this shameful stain of tyranny from our otherwise
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bright and shining land. Help us strike the terrible sword of censorship
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from the hands of those who would slay truth in pursuit of their dubious
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aims. Without freedom of enquiry and freedom of access to information we
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cannot have freedom of thought and without freedom of thought, we cannot
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be a free people. The matter is urgent. Can you help us restore and
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protect the freedom of all Canadians?
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You can help decisively by sending your contribution to the
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Samisdat Defense Fund. Legal fees are costly in the extreme. We
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anticipate daily expenditures of $1,000. 00 in attorneys' fees and in the
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reimbursement of witnesses who must be flown in from Australia, Israel,
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Europe and from both American continents. Whatever help you can provide
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will make 1984 a much better year for your children and grandchildren-a
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year in which freedom of thought will not be a memory, but a beautiful
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reality!
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(Signature) Ernst Zundel, Publisher SAMISDAT PUBLISHERS LTD.
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INTRODUCTION
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Of course, atrocity propaganda is nothing new. It has accompanied every
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conflict of the 20th century and doubtless will continue to do so.
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During the First World War, the Germans were actually accused of eating
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Belgian babies, as well as delighting to throw them in the air and
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transfix them on bayonets. The British also alleged that the German
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forces were operating a "Corpse Factory", in which they boiled down the
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bodies of their own dead in order to obtain glycerine and other
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commodities, a calculated insult to the honour of an Imperial army.
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After the war, however, came the retractions; indeed, a public statement
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was made by the Foreign Secretary in the House of Commons apologising
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for the insults to German honour, which were admitted to be war-time
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propaganda.
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No such statements have been made after the Second World War. In
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fact, rather than diminish with the passage of years, the atrocity
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propaganda concerning the German occupation, and in particular their
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treatment of the Jews, has done nothing but increase its virulence, and
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elaborate its catalogue of horrors. Gruesome paperback books with lurid
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covers continue to roll from the presses, adding continuously to a
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growing mythology of the concentration camps and especially to the story
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that no less than Six Million Jews were exterminated in them. The
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ensuing pages will reveal this claim to be the most colossal piece of
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fiction and the most successful of deceptions; but here an attempt may
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be made to answer an important question: What has rendered the atrocity
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stories of the Second World War so uniquely different from those of the
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First? Why were the latter retracted while the former are reiterated
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louder than ever? Is it possible that the story of the Six Million Jews
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is serving a political purpose, even that it is a form of political
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blackmail?
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So far as the Jewish people themselves are concerned, the deception
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has been an incalculable benefit. Every conceivable race and nationality
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had its share of suffering in the Second World War, but none has so
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successfully elaborated it and turned it to such great advantage. The
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alleged extent of their persecution quickly aroused sympathy for the
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Jewish national homeland they had sought for so long; after the War the
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British Government did little to prevent Jewish emigration to Palestine
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which they had declared illegal, and it was not long afterwards that the
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Zionists wrested ftom the Government the land of Palestine and created
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their haven from persecution, the State of Israel. Indeed, it is a
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remarkable fact that the Jewish people emerged from the Second World War
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as nothing less than a triumphant minority. Dr. Max Nussbaum, the former
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chief rabbi of the Jewish community in Berlin, stated on April 11, 1953:
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"The position the Jewish people occupy today in the world - despite the
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enormous losses - is ten times stronger than what it was twenty years
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ago. " It should be added, if one is to be honest, that this strength has
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been much consolidated financially by the supposed massacre of the Six
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Million, undoubtedly the most profitable atrocity allegation of all
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time. To date, the staggering figure of six thousand million pounds has
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been paid out in compensation by the Federal Government of West Germany,
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mostly to the State of Israel (which did not even exist during the
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Second World War), as well as to individual Jewish claimants.
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DISCOURAGEMENT OF NATIONALISM
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In terms of political blackmail, however, the allegation that Six
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Million Jews died during the Second World War has much more far-reaching
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implications for the people of Britain and Europe than simply the
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advantages it has gained for the Jewish nation. And here one comes to
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the crux of the question: Why the Big Lie? What is its purpose? In the
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first place, it has been used quite unscrupulously to discourage any
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form of nationalism. Should the people of Britain or any other European
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country attempt to assert their patriotism and preserve their national
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integrity in an age when the very existence of nation-states is
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threatened, they are immediately branded as "neo-Nazis". Because, of
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course, Nazism was nationalism, and we all know what happened then - Six
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Million Jews were exterminated! So long as the myth is perpetuated,
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peoples everywhere will remain in bondage to it; the need for
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international tolerance and understanding will be hammered home by the
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United Nations until nationhood itself, the very guarantee of freedom,
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is abolished.
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A classic example of the use of the 'Six Million' as an anti-national
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weapon appears in Manvell and Frankl's book, The Incomparable Crime
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(London, 1967), which deals with 'Genocide in the Twentieth Century'.
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Anyone with a pride in being British will be somewhat surprised by the
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vicious attack made on the British Empire in this book. The authors
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quote Pandit Nehru, who wrote the following while in a British prison in
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India: "Since Hitler emerged from obscurity and became the F hrer of
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Germany, we have heard a great deal about racialism and the Nazi theory
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of the "Herrenvolk" . . . But we in India have known racialism in all
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its forms ever since the commencement of British rule. The whole
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ideology of this rule was that of the "Herrenvolk" and the master race .
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. . India as a nation and Indians as individuals were subjected to
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insult, humiliation and contemptuous treatment. The English were an
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imperial race, we were told, with the God-given right to govern us and
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keep us in subjection; if we protested we were reminded of the 'tiger
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qualities of an imperial race'. " The authors Manvell and Frankl then go
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on to make the point perfectly clear for us: "The white races of Europe
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and America," they write, "have become used during centuries to
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regarding themselves as a "Herrenvolk". The twentieth century, the
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century of Auschwitz, has also achieved the first stage in the
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recognition of multi-racial partnership" (ibid. , p . 14).
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THE RACE PROBLEM SUPPRESSED
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One could scarcely miss the object of this diatribe, with its
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insiduous hint about "multi-racial partnership". Thus the accusation of
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the Six Million is not only used to undermine the principle of
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nationhood and national pride, but it threatens the survival of the Race
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itself. It is wielded over the heads of the populace, rather as the
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threat of hellfire and damnation was in the Middle Ages. Many countries
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of the Anglo-Saxon world, notably Britain and America, are today facing
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the gravest danger in their history, the danger posed by the alien races
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in their midst. Unless something is done in Britain to halt the
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immigration and assimilation of Africans and Asians into our country, we
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are faced in the near future, quite apart from the bloodshed of racial
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conflict, with the biological alteration and destruction of the British
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people as they have existed here since the coming of the Saxons. In
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short, we are threatened with the irrecoverable loss of our European
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culture and racial heritage. But what happens if a man dares to speak of
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the race problem, of its biological and political implications? He is
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branded as that most heinous of creatures, a "racialist". And what is
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racialism:,of course, but the very hallmark of the Nazi! They (so
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everyone is told, anyway) murdered Six Million Jews because of
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racialism, so it must be a very evil thing indeed. When Enoch Powell
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drew attention to the dangers posed by coloured immigration into Britain
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in one of his early speeches, a certain prominent Socialist raised the
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spectre of Dachau and Auschwitz to silence his presumption.
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Thus any rational discussion of the problems of Race and the effort
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to preserve racial integrity is effectively discouraged. No one could
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have anything but admiration for the way in which the Jews have sought
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to preserve their race through so many centuries, and continue to do so
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today. In this effort they have frankly been assisted by the story of
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the Six . Million, which, almost like a religious myth, has stressed the
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need for greater Jewish racial solidarity. Unfortunately, it has worked
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in quite the opposite way for all other peoples, rendering them impotent
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in the struggle for self-preservation. The aim in the following pages is
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quite simply to tell the Truth. The distinguished American historian
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Harry Elmer Barnes once wrote that "An attempt to make a competent,
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objective and truthful investigation of the extermination question . . .
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is surely the most precarious venture that an historian or demographer
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could undertake today. " In attempting this precarious task, it is hoped
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to make some contribution, not only to historical truth, but towards
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lifting the burden of a lie from our own shoulders, so that we may
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freely confront the dangers which threaten us all. Richard E. Harwood
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1. GERMAN POLICY TOWARDS THE JEWS PRIOR TO THE WAR
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Rightly or wrongly, the Germany of Adolf Hitler considered the
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Jews to be a disloyal and avaricious element within the national
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community, as well as a force of decadence in Germany's cultural life.
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This was held to be particularly unhealthy since, during the Weimar
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period, the Jews had risen to a position of remarkable strength and
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influence in the nation, particularly in law, finance and the mass
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media, even though they constituted only 5 per cent of the population.
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The fact that Karl Marx was a Jew and that Jews such as Rosa Luxembourg
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and Karl Liebknecht were disproportionately prominent in the leadership
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of revolutionary movements in Germany, also tended to convince the Nazis
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of the powerful internationalist and Communist tendencies of the Jewish
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people themselves.
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It is no part of the discussion here to argue whether the German
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attitude to the Jews was right or not, or to judge whether its
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legislative measures against them were just or unjust. Our concern is
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simply with the fact that, believing of the Jews as they did, the Nazis'
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solution to the problem was to deprive them of their influence within
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the nation by various legislative acts, and most important of all, to
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encounge their emigration from the country altogether. By 1939, the
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great majority of German Jews had emigrated, all of them with a sizeable
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proportion of their assets. Never at any time had the Nazi leadership
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even contemplated a policy of genocide towards them.
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JEWS CALLED EMIGRATION 'EXTERMINATION'
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It is very significant, however, that certain Jews were quick to
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interpret these policies of internal discrimination as equivalent to
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extermination itself. A 1936 anti-German propaganda book by Leon
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Feuchtwanger and others entitled Der Gelbe Fleck: Die Austrotung von
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500,000 deutschen Juden (The Yellow Spot: The Extermination of 500,000
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German Jews, Paris, 1936), presents a typical example. Despite its
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baselessness in fact, the annihilation of the Jews is discussed from the
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first pages - straightforward emigration being regarded as the physical
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"extermination" of German Jewry. The Nazi concentration camps for
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political prisoners are also seen as potential instruments of genocide,
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and special reference is made to the 100 Jews still detained in Dachau
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in 1936, of whom 60 had been there since 1933. A further example was the
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sensational book by the German-Jewish Communist, Hans Beimler, called
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Four Weeks in the Hands of Hitler's Hell-Hounds: The Nazi Murder Camp of
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Dachau, which was published in New York as eady as 1933. Detained for
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his Marxist affiliations, he claimed that Dachau was a death camp,
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though by his own admission he was released after only a month there.
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The presentregime in East Germany now issues a Hans Beimler Award for
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services to Communism.
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The fact that anti-Nazi genocide propaganda was being disseminated at
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this impossibly early date, therefore, by people biased on racial or
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political grounds, should suggest extreme caution to the
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independent-minded observer when approaching similar stories of the war
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period.
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The encouragement of Jewish emigration should not be confused with
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the purpose of concentration camps in pre-war Germany. These were used
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for the detention of political opponents and subversives - principally
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liberals, Social Democrats and Communists of all kinds, of whom a
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proportion were Jews such as Hans Beimler. Unlike the millions enslaved
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in the Soviet Union, the German concentration camp population was always
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small; Reitinger admits that between 1934 and 1938 it seldom exceeded
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20,000 throughout the whole of Germany, and the number of Jews was never
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more than 3,000. (The S. S. : Alibi of a Nation, London, 1956, p. 253).
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ZIONIST POLICY STUDIED
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The Nazi view of Jewish emigration was not Iimited to a negative
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policy of simple expulsion, but was formulated along the lines of modern
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Zionism. The founder of political Zionism in the 19th century, Theodore
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Herzl, in his work The Jewish State, had originally conceived of
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Madagascar as a national homeland for the Jews, and this possibility was
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seriously studied by the Nazis. It had been a main plank of the National
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Socialist party platform before 1933 and was published by the party in
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pamphlet form. This stated that the revival of Israel as a Jewish state
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was much less acceptable since it would result in perpetual war and
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disruption in the Arab world, which has indeed been the case. The
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Germans were not original in proposing Jewish emigration to Madagascar;
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the Polish Government had already considered the scheme in respect of
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their own Jewish population, and in 1937 they sent the Michael Lepecki
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expedition to Madagascar, accompanied by Jewish representatives, to
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investigate the problems involved.
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The first Nazi proposals for a Madagascar solution were made in
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association with the Schacht Plan of 1938. On the advice of Goering,
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Hitler agreed to send the President of the Reichsbank, Dr. Hjaimar
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Schacht, to London for discussions with Jewish representatives Lord
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Bearsted and Mr. Rublee of New York (cf. Reitlinger, The Final Solution,
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London, 1953, p. 20). The plan was that German Jewish assets would be
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frozen as security for an international loan to finance Jewish
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emigration to Palestine, and Schacht reported on these negotiations to
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Hitler at Berchtesgaden on January 2, 1939. The plan, which failed due
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to British refusal to accept the financial terms, was first put forward
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on November 12, 1938 at a conference convened by Goering, who revealed
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that Hitler was already considering the emigration of Jews to a
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settlement in Madagascar (ibid. , p. 21). Later, in December, Ribbentrop
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was told by M. Georges Bonnet, the French Foreign Secretary, that the
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French Government itself was planning the evacuation of 10,000 Jews to
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Madagascar.
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Prior to the Schacht Palestine proposals of 1938, which were
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essentially a protraction of discussions that had begun as early as
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1935, numerous attempts had been made to secure Jewish emigration to
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other European nations, and these efforts culminated in the Evian
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Conference of July, 1938. However, by 1939 the scheme of Jewish
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emigration to Madagascar had gained the most favour in German circles.
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It is true that in London Helmuth Wohltat of the German Foreign Office
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discussed limited Jewish emigration to Rhodesia and British Guiana as
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late as April 1939; but by January 24th, when Goering wrote to Interior
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Minister Frick ordering the creation of a Central Emigration Office for
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Jews, and commissioned Heydrich of the Reich Security Head Office to
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solve the Jewish problem "by means of emigration and evacuation", the
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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
|