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 was "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 Wochenzietung (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 (compromising thirty separate installations and divided by the main Vienna-Cracow railway line) was nothing but a vast war production center, which, while admittedly employing the compulsory labor 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 center 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 organization 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 2732600, and that after emigration and flight to the Soviet Union, no more than 1100000 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 400000 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 labor, part of the system of general concentration for labor 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 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 labor and the prevention of unrest. In the first place, Himmler discovered on a suprise visit to Warsaw in January 1943 that 24000 Jews registered as armaments workers were in fact working illegally as tailors and furriers (Manvell and 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 60000 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--Polish 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 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 armored cars on 19th April, he immediately came under fire and lost twelve men; German and Polish casualties in the battle, which lasted four weeks, totaled 101 men killed and wounded. Stubborn resistance by the Jewish Combat Organization in the face of impossible odds led to an estimated 12000 Jewish casualties, the majority by remaining in burning buildings and dug-outs. A total, however, of 56065 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 Organization, 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 labor camps such as Auschwitz, has led to the most colorful 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 80000 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 150000 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 Yearbook 1948-1949 it was placed at 390000, quite an advance on the original 80000. We may expect further revisions 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 were 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 so much "evidence" regarding the Six Million stems from Communist sources; this included the major documents such as the Wisliceny statement and the Hoess "memoirs", which are undoubted 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 16000 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 supposedly to have "confessed" to a total of three million people exterminated at Auschwitz, though at his own trial in Warsaw the prosecution reduced the number to 1135000. 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 program". 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 of 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 Communist 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 Ofice. 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, 1060), 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 are made to be as horribly incriminating as possible without stretching too far into the realms of 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 the "memoirs" at precisely the right moment raises no doubt that their object was to present a pre-trial propaganda picture of the archetypical "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 as 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 was 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 it had been there for days." The account reaches the heights of absurdity when Stangl is alleged to have got out of his car and "stepped knee deep in money; I didn't know which way to turn, which way to go. I waded in papernotes, currency, precious stones, jewelry, and clothes. They were everywhere, strewn all over the square." The scene is completed by "whores from Warsaw weaving drunk, dancing, singing, playing music," who were on the other side of the barbed wire fences. To literally believe this account of sinking "kneedeep" in Jewish banknotes 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 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 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 Dairy 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 through 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 bout 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 shown it to have been impossible as a 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 $50000 to be paid by the father of Anne Frank as an honorarium for Levin's work on the Anne Frank Diary.

"Mr. Frank, in Switzerland, and promised to pay to his race kin, Meyer Levin, not less than $50000 because he had used the dialogue of Author Levin just as it was and "implanted" it in the dairy 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 attorney for Meyer Levin in his action against Otto Frank, and others. It is true that a jury awarded Mr. Levin $50000 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 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 fraud perpetrated in support of the "Holocaust" [Holohoax] 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 "rumors" allegedly circulating about the extermination of the Jews in Poland, appeared exactly under the same Communist auspices as the so-called Hoess memoirs. McGraw-Hill, the publishers of the American edition, admit 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 [Holohoax] issuing from Communist sources of this kind are worthless as historical documents.

ACCUMULATING MYTHS

Since the war, there has been an abundant growth of sensational concentration camp literature, the majority of it Jewish, each book piling horror upon horror, blending fragments of truth with the most grotesque of fantasies and impostures, relentlessly creating an edifice of mythology in which any relation to historical fact has long since disappeared. We have referred to the type already--Olga Lengyel's absurd Five Chimneys ("24000 corpses handles every day"), Doctor at Auschwitz by Milkos Nyiszli, apparently a mythical and invented person, This was Auschwitz: The Story of a Murder Camp by Phillip Friedman, and so on ad nauseam. The latest in this vein is For Those I love by Martin Gray (Bodley Head, 1973), which purports to be an account of his experiences at Treblinka camp in Poland. Gray specialized 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 the 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 at Treblinka in the course of a year. 18000 were fed into the gas chambers every day." It is a pity that so many people read and accept this kind of nonsense without exercising their minds. If 18000 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 10 remaining months of the year a total blank. 18000 every day would in fact mean a total of 6480000 "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 has scored a resounding success and become internationally accepted, any number of impossible permutations can be made and no one would even think to criticize 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 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, 1959) 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 Ravensbruck, 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 Ravensbruck to be clean, civilized 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 Ravensbruck 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 we shall examine later. Another account which is at total variance with popular propaganda is Die Gestapo Lasst Bitten (The Gestapo Invites You) by Charlotte Bormann, a Communist political prisoner who was also interred at Ravensbruck. Undoubtedly its most important revelation is the author's statement that rumors of gas chambers 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 in the French occupation zone, the usual fate of those who denied the extermination legend.

8. THE NATURE AND 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. It is likely, that at the height of the war, when the Germans were fighting a desperate battle for survival on two fronts, they would have conveyed millions of Jews for miles to supposedly elaborate and costly slaughter houses? To have conveyed three or four million Jews to Auschwitz alone (even supposing that such an inflated number existed in Europe, which it did not), would have placed an insuperable burden upon German transportation facilities which were strained to the limit in supporting the far flung Russian front. To have transported the mythical six million Jews and countless numbers of other nationalities to internment camps, and to have housed, clothed and fed them there, would simply have paralyzed 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 363000 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 labor 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 1500000. We shall see later, in the Report of the Red Cross, that whole Jewish populations such as that of Slovakia avoided detention camps, while others were placed in community ghettos like Theresienstadt. Moreover, from western Europe deportations were far fewer. The estimate of Reitlinger that only 50000 French Jews from a total population of 320000 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? It is 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. 1150). 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 (New York, 1950, p. 227) which puts the total number of deaths in all of them at the ridiculous figure of 7125000, though Shirer admits in a footnote that this "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, Ravensbruck, 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 American and British 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 centers 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 2000 people--and no one could argue to the contrary. What is the truth about the so-called "gas chambers"? Stephen F. Pinter, who served as a lawyer for the United States War Department in the occupation force 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. War Department Attorney, and can state that there was no gas chamber at Dachau. What was shown to visitors and sightseer there and erroneously describes 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 this 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 inmates 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, 30000 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 238000 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 Barvarian Government who was convicted for embezzling money which he claimed as compensation for nonexistent Jews. The plaque read; "This area is being retained as a shrine to the 238000 individuals who were cremated here." Since then, the official casualty figures have had to be steadily revised downwards, and now stand at only 20600, 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 600000; 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 300000 Hungarian Jews were supposedly "done to death in fourty-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 2750 calories, which was more than double the average citizen 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 the hospital. All internees, unlike those in the 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, 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 and Frankl, ibid, p. 312). Occasionally there was brutality, but such cases were immediately scrutinized 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 favor 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 that few that were undernourished except in the hospitals, and noted that the pace and achievement in compulsory labor 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 labor 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 affidavit 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 tended to greatly exaggerate the rigors of their condition, whereas other national 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 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 paralyzed the transport and communications system of the Reich, no food reached the camps and starvation claimed an increasing number of victims, both in the prison camps and among the civilian population of Germany. This terrible situation was compounded in the camps both by the 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 re represented in the photographs of emaciated human beings and heaps of corpses which the propagandists delight in showing, claiming 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 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 in 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 daily for two or three years, of large quantities of food cooked daily for distribution. At that time I became convinced, contrary to popular opinion that there had never been a policy of deliberate starvation. This was confirmed by the large numbers of well-fed inmates. Why then were so many people suffering from malnutrition?....The major reasons for the state of Belsen were disease, gross overcrowding by central authority, lack of law and order within the huts, and inadequate supplies of food, water and drugs." The lack of order, which led to riots over food distribution, was quelled by British machine-gun fire and a display of force when British tanks and armored cars toured the camp. Apart from the unavoidable deaths in these circumstances, Glyn Hughes estimated that about "1000 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 at Belsen one must be alerted to the tremendous visual display, ripe for the purposes of propaganda, that masses of starved corpses presented." To discuss such